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Ed Webb

BBC News - World media offer divergent views on Ukraine crisis - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...blogs-echochambers-26441892

Ukraine media

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Speaking of Syria, comparisons between its civil war and the situation in Ukraine dominate commentary throughout the Middle East. "At a time when the drums of war are beating in Ukraine and the Crimea Peninsula, the Russians should note that they should not vote for the death of diplomacy because they won the Syrian crisis with the same trump card," writes Jalal Barzegar in Iran's conservative daily Iran. "If diplomacy backs down in the face of militarism, or in fact be forced to retreat, its consequences will not be limited to Ukraine; it will rather affect the international atmosphere." He argues: "Russia's insistence on going down the same road could have unpredictable consequences for Crimea, other areas in Ukraine and even other parts of the world such as Syria." Yosef Mowlai in the reformist Iranian daily Sharq also draws comparisons to Iraq and Afghanistan, predicting that things aren't going to end well for the Russians. "The main concern of Russian officials is not international law; rather it is their country's security in its own backyard which comes at the expense of ignoring the independence and sovereignty of other nations," he writes. "It seems that the Russian Federation has not learned enough from its costly defeat in Afghanistan and has not learned from America's struggle in Afghanistan and Iraq's quagmire. Russia has made another serious mistake and got involved in a dangerous game again."
  • Could Syria and Ukraine be horse-traded in some sort of geopolitical diplomatic deal? Urayb al-Rintawi in Jordan's Al-Dustur doesn't think so. "Some people think there is a chance of trading Syria for Ukraine if the Kremlin were to abandon Al-Assad in return for Washington and Brussels's abandonment of their allies in Kiev and vice versa," he writes. However, such a trade-off is not possible because in America's strategic calculations, Syria is relegated to bottom position compared to Ukraine."
  • Khamis al-Tubi in Oman's Al-Watan detects what he sees as an anti-Russian "Zionist" conspiracy.
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  • Meanwhile, the Syrian government's daily Al-Thawrah sees the situation as chickens coming home to roost for US President Barack Obama's foreign policy. "Perhaps it has not crossed America's mind that the terrorism it manufactures and exports to the rest of the world, including to Syria as is the case today, will in the end bounce back. But lately, this fact started to rob Obama's administration's sleep," they write. "Amid the feverish US -Western race to target Syria, developments in Ukraine have started to steal attention as the eyes of the world turn to the Russian Caesar and wait for his final decision on the issue."
  • In Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News, Verda Ozer notes comparisons between the Ukrainian uprising and her nation's Gezi protests, but she contends that there are "many differences". She calls Ukraine an "authoritarian democracy" without Turkey's record of recent stability. Turkey's government, she writes, has been in an ongoing dialogue with protesters, which has prevented the sort of escalation that happened in Kiev.
Ed Webb

Turkish police 'seize Islamic State coin-makers' | Middle East Eye - 0 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...c-state-coin-makers-1871252304

ISIS Turkey Syria sovereignty currency currencies crime

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Turkish police have arrested six foreign nationals and seized material allegedly used by Islamic State (IS) militants to produce coins for the group
  • the coins produced are used as currency in IS-controlled areas
  • IS announced last year that it would start producing its own currency in an effort to "emancipate itself from the satanic global economic system".
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  • based on the original dinar coins used during the Caliphate of Uthman in 634 CE, was set to include seven minted coins: two gold, three silver and two copper. One gold dinar would be worth about $139
Ed Webb

The Media Line - 0 views

www.themedialine.org/...news_detail.asp

hamas gaza telephones

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Dec 09 - Cached
  • accused
  • The project is reportedly an emulation of the independent telephone network Hezbollah set up in South Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut in 2007. The alternative phone system was dubbed illegal by Lebanon’s government and a violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty. Revelation of the network sparked street riots as many Lebanese saw it as evidence of Hezbollah creating a ‘state within a state.’
  • “Anything Hamas does now is illegal,”
Ed Webb

Jewish Horror, Monotheism, and the Origins of Evil - Tablet Magazine - 0 views

www.tabletmag.com/...jewish-horror

film horror Israel Judaism analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Feb 19 - Cached
  • the new horror film The Golem, from directors Doron and Yoav Paz
  • The directors of The Golem, who are Israeli brothers
  • Reasons for the dearth of Jewish horror fiction are varied, ranging from producers possibly fearing that the ethnic particularism of these themes wouldn’t draw in as wide an audience, to the (incorrect) sense that Judaism doesn’t offer the same baroque supernatural possibilities that Christianity does.
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  • The theme of the golem, after all, has been explored several times before, from the silent film era of Paul Wegener’s expressionist Der Golem (1916) until today, including in The X-Files and The Simpsons’ annual “Tree House of Horror” Halloween episodes. There have also been a small number of horror films that explore Jewish folklore, such as Ole Bornedal’s The Possession (2012), which in lieu of The Exorcist’s Pazuzu features the malicious spirit of legend known as a dybbuk, an entity which also appears in David Goyer’s The Unborn (2009), and even in the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man (2009). Yet despite a preponderance of Jewish horror directors from Curt Siodmak, creator of The Wolf Man (1941) to Polanski, Hollywood has tended not to explore explicitly Jewish themes in horror.
  • the sense of the terrors of the real world is fundamental to monotheistic horror, for it asks what the ultimate origin of evil is.
  • The Franco-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre distinguished between what he called the “uncanny,” whereby the supernaturalism of a story can be ultimately explained by rational recourse, and the “marvelous” in what’s been depicted is to be understood as genuinely supernatural. For Todorov, that which is fantastic in literature exists in the ambiguity between the uncanny and the marvelous, where the characters in a story (and the reader) are unsure as to whether events witnessed are genuinely supernatural or not. Todorov writes: “The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.”
  • what I’ve termed “monotheistic horror” in contrast to “dualistic horror.” The latter is any work which posits supernatural evil as somehow separate in agency from God, while the former steadfastly holds to all things—even evil things—as having their origin in the Lord. I’d argue that Jewish horror fiction, for all of its diversity, must be resolutely defined by an overpowering sense of monotheism, and that it is that sense of the fundamental unity of reality that makes those works terrifying. Ghosts, goblins, and ghouls can exist in both types of horror, but in dualistic horror God is either configured as explicitly separate from those evil things, or mention of Him is passed over.
  • The Paz brothers’ film is an example of Jewish horror not because it takes place in a 17th-century shtetl, or because its story deals with that most Jewish of monsters, but rather because there is no sense that anything that happens doesn’t occur due to the power and sovereignty of God.
  • in The Golem the creature is fashioned in adherence to God’s reality. Hanna’s creation is not demonic, but rather divine—if still capable of malevolence.
  • Any fiction that presents the malevolence experienced in reality as integral to the unity of that very same reality is monotheistic horror. In this way, I’d argue that Franz Kafka is one of the greatest horror writers of the 20th century, with a dark perspective that rivals that of H.P. Lovecraft. The latter thought the world meaningless, but Kafka never fell into that error. The result is paradoxically a horror all the more disturbing for what it implies about evil’s derivation.
  • For Kafka the deep wisdom of reality is even darker than Lovecraft’s nihilism, for his horror is based on the type of irony that can only be born from the most radical of monotheisms. The author could tell his friend Max Brod that here is “Plenty of hope—for God—no end of hope—only not for us,” a succinct summation of the major themes of Jewish horror, where what is fully externalized is a theodicy that recognizes evil exists in the world while also acknowledging that God must be its author.
  • The ur-text of Jewish horror, and what I would argue is perhaps the most terrifying story every told, is the biblical Book of Job. Few narratives can match Job in the sheer awful implications of what’s been recounted, of the upstanding man of Uz who “was perfect and upright, and one that feared God,” but who nevertheless was struck down by the Lord with a deluge of afflictions. So many details of Job’s story, often associated with the fatalism of Greek tragedy to which it bears some similarity, have a gothic sensibility. There is Satan who talks of “roving about in the earth and … walking about in it,” and of Job cursing himself by asking, “Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb?” Then there is the pyrotechnic impressiveness of God himself, who “answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”
  • Monotheistic horror should not be interpreted as the logical culmination of monotheism itself, rather it should be seen as the dark undercurrent, the nagging anxiety, of what it means if there is only one Lord but we’re uncertain as to if He is always benevolent, for as Miles observes “all of God’s actions could actually have been the devil’s.” There is the upsetting ambiguity of monotheistic horror—not that God’s actions are the devil’s, but that they could be.
  • one of the most potent lessons of Jewish horror fiction: that there is a permeable membrane between civilization and anarchy, where those who claim to protect us one day can cast us aside the next. The “friends” of Job are among the most callous of monsters in the book. What makes Jewish horror so frightening is its entirely accurate understanding that all evil ultimately must have its origin not in devils, but in the two most frightening things in our sublime universe: God and his creations.
Ed Webb

US media talks a lot about Palestinians - just without Palestinians - +972 Magazine - 0 views

www.972mag.com/us-media-palestinians

US USA media newspapers Palestinians MEPP Rabin opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 31 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • many Americans’ memories of Rabin have long been colored by a relentless media narrative that deprived them of critical perspectives on his life and legacy. In fact, looking back at the Oslo years, the voices of Palestinians — the victims of Rabin’s decades-long career — rarely made it into the pages of influential U.S. publications. Had they been featured, many Americans may have had a more informed opinion about why Palestinians would oppose honoring Rabin.
  • I focused on opinion pieces for two reasons. First, scholarly analysis of major U.S. outlets has already demonstrated that their news coverage is heavily shaped by pro-Israel biases. Second, opinion pieces are playing a stronger role than ever in shaping our understanding of the news. As one newspaper editor explained, “In a 24/7 news environment, many readers already know what happened; opinion pieces help them decide how to think about it.”
  • I had expected to find relatively few opinion pieces by Palestinians, and I was correct. But what surprised me was how much Palestinians have been talked about in major U.S. media outlets over the decades. Editorial boards and columnists seem to have been quite consumed with talking about the Palestinians, often in condescending and even racist ways — yet they somehow did not feel the need to hear much from Palestinians themselves.
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  • In the New York Times, less than 2 percent of the nearly 2,500 opinion pieces that discussed Palestinians since 1970 were actually written by Palestinians. In the Washington Post, the average was just 1 percent.
  • While three of Said’s op-eds discussing Palestinians ran in the New York Times in the 1980s, from the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords until his death in 2003, the newspaper ran only a single letter to the editor authored by him in January 1997, in which Said criticized the Oslo framework. During that time, Said’s opinion pieces explaining Oslo’s fatal flaws appeared in The Guardian, al-Ahram Weekly, and even the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Yet readers of America’s “newspaper of record” were not able to hear from one of the country’s most eloquent and prescient Palestinian critics of the “peace process” narrative.
  • During the 1990s, Thomas Friedman wrote 33 columns discussing Palestinians; William Safire wrote 24, Anthony Lewis wrote 39, and A.M. Rosenthal penned 56. While they differed on various aspects of Oslo, none of them questioned the framing that “peace” was the ultimate goal, that Rabin was “a man of peace,” and that Palestinians who opposed Oslo were in fact opponents of peace.
  • It is unsurprising, then, that most readers of the mainstream U.S. press would not understand that Rabin only recognized the PLO as “the representative of the Palestinian people,” but did not recognize Palestinians’ right to establish a state along the 1967 lines. They would not know that illegal Israeli settlements continued to expand under Rabin’s watch.
  • a month before his assassination, Rabin reassured fellow Knesset members that the state Palestinians desired would be “an entity which is less than a state.” And they would not know that, in those same remarks, Rabin made clear that Israel’s borders would be “beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War,” along with a “united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev [West Bank settlements], as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty.” This is the Rabin that Palestinians know all too well.
  • in 1999, Said wrote that the Oslo process “required us to forget and renounce our history of loss, dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past.”
  • In 2020 so far, the New York Times has run 39 opinion pieces in its print and online platforms that discuss Palestinians; only three were actually penned by Palestinians
  • It is not just Palestinians: Black, Indigenous, Latin American, Asian American, and other people of color face ongoing racism in the newsroom, making it more difficult for alternative perspectives to make their way into these influential pages
  • Alternative news outlets (including +972 Magazine), along with many Palestinians on Twitter and other social media sites, are providing fresh perspectives that we can follow, engage with, and share. The avalanche of tweets and comments highlighting Rabin’s violent legacy is just one example of this. And as more Americans receive their news from social media (including politicians), those wanting Palestinian perspectives now have a much easier time getting them.
Ed Webb

Palestinian schools in Jerusalem strike over Israel-imposed books | Israel-Palestine co... - 1 views

www.aljazeera.com/...ike-over-israeli-imposed-books

Jerusalem Palestine Israel israelpalestine education textbooks politics protest strike

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Sep 22 - Cached
  • Palestinian schools in occupied East Jerusalem are observing a general strike in protest at attempts by Israel’s Jerusalem municipality to censor and edit Palestinian textbooks, as well as introduce an Israeli curriculum in classrooms.
  • “What is worrying the parents is that they are being cornered between distorted Palestinian curriculums and Israeli curriculums,”
  • “There is an Israelisation of Palestinian education going on,”
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  • “Now, they are adding their own content like ‘Yossi is Mohammad’s neighbour’, about settlements, about co-existence,” said al-Shamali. “They have played with textbooks for Arabic, religion, history and any national references”.
  • In July, Israeli authorities revoked the permanent licenses of six Palestinian schools in Jerusalem, claiming that their textbooks incited against the Israeli state and army. They were given permission to operate for a year if the curriculum was edited. The eastern half of Jerusalem was militarily occupied by Israel in 1967 and illegally annexed. Some 350,000 Palestinians currently live in occupied East Jerusalem, with 220,000 Israeli living in illegal settlements among them.
  • The annexation of East Jerusalem is not recognised by any country in the world, apart from the United States, as it violates international law that outlines that an occupying power does not have sovereignty in the territory it occupies.
  • In 2009, the Jerusalem municipality adopted a master plan intended “to guide and outline the city’s development in the next decades”. The vision, as stated in the plan, is to create a Jewish demographic majority, with Israeli Jews making up 70 percent of the city, and Palestinians only making up 30 percent. This was later amended to a 60:40 ratio.
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