Last night Charlie Rose asked Fawaz Gerges about the new Arab public opinion and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He said:
Israel and the United States really are making a major strategic mistake, to underestimate, that deep down– yes the focus [of the Arab spring is] on domestic politics, but once the dust settles– the Palestinian conflict remains the most fundamental question, identity question for Arabs and Muslims
The point is underlined by a beautiful report by Kelly McEvers on NPR the other day about Bassel Shahade, a young filmmaker killed Monday in Homs– by Syrian government shells.
Bassel Shahade from Shaam News Network
Shahade had the best of the west. He was a Fulbright scholar at Syracuse University, studying film. But he left because he needed to see the Syrian liberation. McEvers:
friends say he just couldn’t deal with the guilt that nearly everyone he knew was back in Syria, fighting and sometimes dying for what they believed would be a better country. Shehadeh quit the program and made his way back home again.
Our NPR colleague, Rima Marrouch, met him around that time.
“And he told me, ‘I couldn’t be away when the revolution is happening. I needed to come back. You can always study later,’ ” Marrouch says.
Then McEvers ended her piece by talking about a film Shahade made, below.
Perhaps one of the most moving things Shahade ever made was a short poem of a film called Saturday Morning Gift.
It’s based on interviews he did with a boy who survived war between Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah in 2006.
The film is a dramatization of the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006. It pictures a young Lebanese boy who is afraid of airplanes– and whose home is struck by an Israeli shell. The soundtrack is Miles Davis.
Props to McEvers for highlighting Shahade’s work, and to NPR for running it. There is no contradiction between supporting human rights in Syria and in Palestine.
what a sad sad story. what an incredible film.
Q: … a young filmmaker killed Monday in Homs– by Syrian government shells.
R: I’m very sorry about the untimely loss of yet another young life. However, with so many players in this evil game I’d be very reluctant to blame one side or another without concrete proof. See result of google search about recent bombardments of Homs http://www.google.com/search?q=Syrian+amry+bombards+homs&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
or
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/spotlight/syria/
Killing and murder are despicable acts of violence, regardless who does it or where it’s done.
Where are the film makers that show just how normal life is in cities like Ramallah and Jenin and many others? Happy kids, learning at schools, playing sports and leaning to play an instrument. Not good for the propaganda I suppose?
Can’t speak for the provenance of this but it has the ring of truth:
First interview with an eyewitness of the Houla massacre
The following text is the translation of a blog entry of the ANNA News journalist Marat Musin, who was in the region of al-Houla (Houla/Hula – near the Syrian city of Homs) last week and who has own experiences how the horrible “Houla massacre” in Syria happened and who is behind the violent and horrible massacre near Homs.
http://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/first-interview-with-an-eyewitness-of-the-houla-massacre/15707
If only the U.S. were truly concerned about human rights in Syria. But anyone who knows the U.S.’s business in that part of the world knows that is not the truth.
People in that part of the world find it absurd that leaders in the U.S. responsible for thousands of deaths in Iraq based on a “pack of lies” which many people around the world consider a “massacre” or Israeli leaders or those in the I lobby are lecturing Syrian leaders about human rights etc. Why is it that these same U.S. leaders and MSM host, Israeli leaders, I lobby are calling what is happening in Syria a “massacre” yet either ignore the dead, injured and displaced in Iraq due to the U.S. invasion or refer to the dead in Iraq or from U.S. drones as “collateral damage” Or the innocent that Israel has “massacred” Why is it that as soon as innocent people in Syria have been brutally killed the images and numbers of dead immediately make it up on U.S. MSM outlets like MSNBC etc yet these same outlets never showed images of Iraqi dead or never ever report about the numbers killed in Iraq or by U.S. drones?