1. Is There a ‘Foxification’ Underway at Al Jazeera Television?
By Danny Schechter (Source: MediaChannel)

Sources inside Al Jazeera who are in a position to know what is going on now confirm to MediaChannel.org that there is an internal struggle underway that may dilute Al Jazeera’s independence and steer it in a more pro-western, pro-US direction.

“There is already a change of tone and focus in the news,” a veteran insider reveals. He blames the shift on a reorganization of the network’s governing structure a month ago that has put a former Ambassador from Qatar to the USA in a commanding position.
[...]
“You don’t need to bomb Al Jazeera to change its direction,” said my source. “There is a softer way to influence its direction by taking it over from within and it can happen quietly almost as if in slow motion. You ‘broaden’ some programs, announce new ‘guidelines,’ issue new edicts reinforcing top-down control, purge some professionals you don’t like, and then give more positive unchallenged airtime to backers of US foreign policy. Washington would not be open about any behind the scenes role it is playing in all this for fear of triggering a very negative public reaction.”

The irony here is that for many years Al Jazeera made a point of giving substantial airtime to US officials and their surrogates to show fairness. This even led some hardliners in the Arab World years ago to accuse of the station of being CIA-backed and even pro-Israel. But whatever exposure they got was never enough for a Pentagon that practices “Information Dominance” and seeks to exclude all contrary views. They expect the kind of uncritical coverage they received on American TV.

Ironically, a former US military briefer became so disgusted with US media manipulation that he joined Al Jazeera.

2. One Man, One Vote
by Charley Reese (Source: AntiWar)

Palestinians should give up the idea of a two-state solution. It is as plain as a hippopotamus at a tea party that the only kind of state the Israelis will give them, if at all, is a politically and economically unviable collection of tiny enclaves separated by Israeli territory.

Instead, Palestinians should demand a unified Palestine, with one-man, one-vote democratic government and equal rights for all.

Of course, the Israelis won’t agree to that, either. They know that while initially Palestinian Arabs would be a minority, in a few years they would become a majority because of a larger birthrate and a decline in Jewish immigrants.

Zionist ideology demands that Israel have a Jewish majority and Jewish control, which is why, to this day, the Israelis persist in various ways to try to ethnically cleanse the land of the original majority, which was Arabs.

3. Don’t Be Fooled by Propaganda
by Charley Reese (Source: LewRockwell.com)

The word “jihad,” which is so over-used these days, has, like a lot of words, more than one meaning. It means basically to struggle, but this can be personal or spiritual, or a peaceful political struggle. Only if Islam is attacked are Muslims required to defend it. As for that obnoxious propaganda term “Islamo-fascist,” just recall that fascism is a European invention by nominal Christians. To my knowledge, the only fascist governments ever to exist on this planet were all European and nominally Christian.

Another canard is that Islam promotes forced conversion. Not so. Even when the Arab empire was expanding, rarely were any of the conquered people forced to convert. The Quran even forbids it, as I recall. Naturally, once Muslims were in charge, a lot of people decided it was in their own self-interest to convert, but this is just one of the sleazy aspects of human nature…

It was Christian Europe that slaughtered the Jews, and nothing remotely resembling the Holocaust is to be found in the history of Islam. In fact, during the past, when Jews were being persecuted by Christian Europe, they frequently fled to and found sanctuary in the Muslim countries. Until Israel was established, practically every Muslim country had sizable Jewish populations dating back centuries. And there are still Jews and Christians in some Muslim countries.

A final suggestion is that when you hear some individual radical Muslim being quoted, just remember he is one of a billion people and speaks only for himself and his small following. And be wary of the quotations he uses, for they are often deliberately fabricated or distorted.

If Muslims really desired to conquer the world, don’t you think it’s strange that we’ve been living in peace with them for nearly a millennium and a half, except for those times when we attacked them (the Crusades, the European colonial movement and our invasion of Iraq)? Don’t forget either that some of the countries the Bush administration calls allies are themselves Muslim - Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc.

4. Congressional Time Warp
By MJ Rosenberg (The Director of Israel Policy Forum’s Washington Policy Center)

It is not news to readers of this column that I believe that in recent years the United States Congress has done very little to advance peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. And marking the end of the Six-Day War, without any mention of restarting the peace process, is another example of Congress sending the wrong signals and missing an opportunity to do something productive.

On the contrary, Congress has specialized in legislation making it more difficult to provide aid to any and all Palestinians in the name of keeping aid away from terrorists. No matter that our policies have weakened the moderates willing to live in peace with Israel and mightily strengthened Hamas and company.

Even now when international relief agencies report that Congressional restrictions make it near-impossible to deliver aid to non-Hamas Palestinians because the existing law is so harsh, Congress is looking at ways to tighten it. The name of the game is Arab-bashing which Congress views as a sure crowd - i.e. donor - pleaser.

5. Twilight Zone / Cry, the beloved country
By Gideon Levy (Source: Haaretz)

PRETORIA, South Africa - It was like being in the movies. Only there would you see an inert photo suddenly come to life. We were standing at the memorial museum in Soweto, next to a photo of a dead boy with other children around him, and our guide Antoinette was telling us about it. Antoinette said that the young girl in the picture was her.

The photo is at the entrance of the museum, built to commemorate the blacks’ struggle against apartheid, which began here. Across the way is Nelson Mandela’s tiny hut, nearby is the house of Desmond Tutu and down the street is the present home of Winnie Mandela.

The picture was stunningly familiar to us. We were four: MK Ran Cohen (Meretz); Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations; Diana Buttu, a former legal advisor to the PLO; and myself. We were all making the same associations: Hector is Mohammed al-Dura; the white soldiers shooting at children are us.

6. Throw a pebble at Goliath: don’t buy Israeli produce
By Yvonne Roberts (Source: Guardian)

The Israeli treatment of Palestinians shows a total disregard for human rights. Apartheid doesn’t seem to me to be too strong a word - and its consequence, as many have pointed out, is a recruitment drive for Islamic fundamentalists.

In this month’s New Internationalist, psychiatrist Samah Jabr, describes his work in Ramallah and Jericho and the “mental health emergency” under way. For a population of 3.8 million, there are 15 psychiatrists and disastrously too few nurses, psychologists and support staff. He points out that 53% of the population is under 17 - especially vulnerable to family deaths, absent fathers and constant warfare.

Add poverty, affecting 67% of the population, unemployment at 40%, 20% of the population are prisoners and ex-prisoners, many suffering the psychiatric after-effects of isolation, and the daily violence does the rest.

Palestinian factionalism and Israel’s brutal retaliation, plus its pre-emptive strikes and demolition of homes hits the Palestinian people with a savagery that destroys any semblance of normal living. (The ordinary Palestinians in the Lebanon are again paying the heaviest price.) Of course, ordinary Israelis are affected too - but their community remains robust, well cared-for, with needs met. Psychological trauma, for many Israelis, is at best held at bay and at worst given help. Hundreds of Israeli political prisoners are not rotting in Palestinian jails.

A boycott is neither self-indulgent gesture politics nor an indicator of powerlessness, as Hirsh suggests. It is an international protest against the way in which Israel behaves on a daily basis in an area that will, in all probability, never see peace.

June 9 sees the Global Day of Action on Palestine. Throw a pebble at Goliath - don’t spend your pennies on Israeli produce.

7. What Congress Really Approved: Benchmark No. 1: Privatizing Iraq’s Oil for US Companies
By Ann Wright (Source: t r u t h o u t)

This threat could not be clearer. If the Iraqi Parliament refuses to pass the privatization legislation, Congress will withhold US reconstruction funds that were promised to the Iraqis to rebuild what the United States has destroyed there. The privatization law, written by American oil company consultants hired by the Bush administration, would leave control with the Iraq National Oil Company for only 17 of the 80 known oil fields. The remainder (two-thirds) of known oil fields, and all yet undiscovered ones, would be up for grabs by the private oil companies of the world (but guess how many would go to United States firms - given to them by the compliant Iraqi government.)

No other nation in the Middle East has privatized its oil. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Iran give only limited usage contracts to international oil companies for one or two years. The $120 billion dollar “Support the Troops” legislation passed by Congress requires Iraq, in order to get reconstruction funds from the United States, to privatize its oil resources and put them up for long term (20- to 30-year) contracts.

What does this “Support the Troops” legislation mean for the United States military? Supporting our troops has nothing to do with this bill, other than keeping them there for another 30 years to protect US oil interests. It means that every military service member will need Arabic language training. It means that every soldier and Marine would spend most of his or her career in Iraq. It means that the fourteen permanent bases will get new Taco Bells and Burger Kings! Why? Because the US military will be protecting the US corporate oilfields leased to US companies by the compliant Iraqi government. Our troops will be the guardians of US corporate interests in Iraq for the life of the contracts - for the next thirty years.

With the Bush administration’s “Support the Troops” bill and its benchmarks, primarily Benchmark No. 1, we finally have the reason for the US invasion of Iraq: to get easily accessible, cheap, high-grade Iraq oil for US corporations.

8. My search for the West Bank’s ‘invisible’ town
By The Observer

“Sarah Helm set off by car to see Palestinians in Jenin but soon found that her road map was of no use. In the four decades after the Six-Day War, a labyrinth of walls, unmarked roads and checkpoints has arisen, hiding whole towns from Israeli eyes.”

‘Jenin? you want to go to Jenin?’, asked a Palestinian villager, standing near an unmanned Israeli roadblock somewhere in the northern West Bank. The villager scratched his head as if surprised to hear the city’s name, although we could not have been more than five miles away as the crow flies. ‘It’s a problem’, he said.

‘Where exactly is it? Which direction?’ I asked anxiously. Having circled the area for so long, I had lost my bearings. I was last in Jenin - due north of Jerusalem beyond the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Nablus - five years ago to write about a suicide bomber who killed himself and 15 Israelis, including a family of five, in a Jerusalem pizzeria. Back then Jenin was still on the map.

But now this city of nearly 36,000 Palestinians seemed to have disappeared. In fact, apart from my villager friend, I had hardly seen a Palestinian since entering the West Bank.
[...]
Not only can Israelis nowadays not ’see’ Palestinians any more, but to all intents and purposes whole Palestinian cities have disappeared. Journeying through the West Bank my own disorientation began from the moment I set out from Jerusalem. At first I tried to leave the city by one of my old routes, but just before the Arab suburb of Abu Dis I ran into the Wall. ‘Warsaw ghetto/Abu Dis ghetto’ was emblazoned on the wall at this point and my friends were quite unreachable on the other side.

9. Israel: Mythologizing a 20Th Century Accident
By Gabriel Kolko

Zionism was original but at the turn of the century it’s following was close to non-existent. An important exception was the interest of Lord Rothschild. Moreover, from its inception Zionism was symbiotic on Great Powers-principally Great Britain-that saw it as a way of spreading their colonial ambitions to the Middle East. As early as 1902 Herzl met with Joseph Chamberlain, then British Colonial Secretary, to further Zionist claims in the region bordering Egypt, and the following year he hired David Lloyd George-later to become prime minister-to handle the Zionist case.2

Herzl also unsuccessfully asked the sultan of the Ottoman Empire if he might obtain Palestine, after which he advocated establishing a state in Uganda-although his followers much preferred the Holy Land. Only the principle of a Jewish State, anywhere, appealed to him-but mainly for Jews in the Russian Empire. Herzl was only the first in the Zionist tradition of advocating a state for others; he was never in favor of all Jews moving there. Chaim Weizmann wrote Herzl in 1903 that the large majority of the young Jews in Russia were anti-Zionist because they were revolutionaries–which only reinforced Herzl’s convictions. In 1913 British Intelligence estimated that perhaps one percent of the Jews had Zionist affiliations, a figure that rose in the Russian Pale-which contained about six million Jews-as the war became longer.
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It is a Zionist myth that there were many Jews who wished to go to a primitive hot, dusty place and did so. They did not-and all of the available numbers prove this conclusively. After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 the Pale was abolished and a very large number of the Jews in it moved to Russia’s cities; many of them saw the Bolsheviks as liberators and filled the ranks of the revolution at every level.4 If they emigrated, and here the numbers are very important, it was not-if they had a choice–to Palestine.

From 1890 to 1924 about two million of the 20 million immigrants to the United States were Jews-overwhelmingly from East Europe. Other nations in the Western Hemisphere also attracted about a million Jews during this period, to which we must add Jewish migration to South Africa, Australia, West Europe, and the like. This does not mean that Jews were not “Zionists” but they had no intention whatsoever of embarking on Aliyah-of going to Palestine themselves. As Herzl believed, it was a project for others.
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What is certain is that Hitler’s importance must always be set in a larger context. Without him there never would have been a flow of Jews out of Germany, and very probably no state of Israel, but also crucial was the U.S. 1924 Immigration Act. Migrants went to Palestine out of necessity, in the vast majority of cases, not choice. Both of these factors were crucial, and to determine their relative importance is an abstract, futile enterprise. But without either the Zionist project of creating a Jewish state in Palestine would have remained another exotic Viennese concoction, never to be realized, because while the Jews in the Diaspora were in favor of a Jewish state, virtually none living in safe nations were ever to uproot themselves and embark on Aliyah-the return to the ancient homeland. They had no reason to do so.

There were many promised lands and Herzl’s exotic ruminations were scarcely the inspiration for the flow of Jews out of Europe. Israel’s existence was an unpredictable accident of history. The past century has been full of them, everywhere. That is why the world is in such a perilous condition.