How Israel Wages War on Palestinian History

When the Palestinian actor Mohammed Bakri made a documentary about Jenin in 2002 – filming immediately after the Israeli army had completed rampaging through the West Bank city, leaving death and destruction in its wake – he chose an unusual narrator for the opening scene: a mute Palestinian youth.

Jenin had been sealed off from the world for nearly three weeks as the Israeli army razed the neighbouring refugee camp and terrorised its population.

Bakri’s film Jenin, Jenin shows the young man hurrying silently between wrecked buildings, using his nervous body to illustrate where Israeli soldiers shot Palestinians and where bulldozers collapsed homes, sometimes on their inhabitants.

It was not hard to infer Bakri’s larger meaning: when it comes to their own story, Palestinians are denied a voice. They are silent witnesses to their own and their people’s

— source counterpunch.org | Jonathan Cook | Aug 21, 2020

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How Syria’s blasted landmarks are starting to rise from the ruins

The centre of Aleppo was a marvel. It was a demonstration of the multiplicity of both humanity and stone. It was an embodiment of the material and cultural wealth that once made Syria one of the luckiest and most civilised places on Earth – a California of the Middle East, blessed by climate, fertile land, physical beauty and its position between the Mediterranean and the Silk Road to the east. “My beautiful province,” as the seventh-century Byzantine emperor Heraclius called Syria, while retreating from Muslim conquerors, “what a paradise you will be for the enemy!”

In Aleppo there was, and mostly still is, the citadel, a mound growing upwards into improbably massive walls, a dream of castle-ness realised with crushing weight. Then there were the souks, a huge web of covered alleys and streets, spaces made of produce and transactions as much as of masonry, in which gems of architecture – a polychrome portal or a serene dome – would make themselves known amid the action and clutter, their arabesque decorations indecorously garlanded with electrical conduits and air-conditioning units.

Then there was the Umayyad mosque, built on the site of a Hellenistic agora, called after the dynasty that founded it in the eighth century but its surviving fabric coming from

— source theguardian.com | Rowan Moore | 4 Jun 2021

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Writing on War

As this century began, I was writing War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, my reflections on two decades as a war correspondent, 15 of them with the New York Times, in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, and Kosovo. I worked in a small, sparsely furnished studio apartment on First Avenue in New York City. The room had a desk, chair, futon, and a couple of bookshelves — not enough to accommodate my extensive library, leaving piles of books stacked against the wall. The single window overlooked a back alley.

The super, who lived in the first-floor apartment, smoked prodigious amounts of weed, leaving the grimy lobby stinking of pot. When he found out I was writing a book, he suggested I chronicle his moment of glory during the six days of clashes known as the Stonewall Riots, triggered by a 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay club in Greenwich Village. He claimed he had thrown a trash can through the front window of a police cruiser.

It was a solitary life, broken by periodic visits to a small antique bookstore in the neighborhood that had a copy of the 1910-1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the last edition published for scholars. I couldn’t afford it, but the owner generously let me read entries from those 29 volumes written by the likes of Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Muir,

— source tomdispatch.com | Chris Hedges | Oct 25, 2022

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Reading Proust in War

During the war in Bosnia, I worked my way through the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” The novel, populated with 400 characters, was not an escape from the war. The specter of death and the expiring world of La Belle Époque haunts Proust’s work. He wrote it as he was dying; in fact, Proust was making corrections to the manuscript the night before his death in his hermetically sealed, cork-lined bedroom in Paris.

The novel was a lens that allowed me to reflect on the disintegration, delusions and mortality around me. Proust gave me the words to describe aspects of the human condition I knew instinctively, but had trouble articulating. He elucidates the conflicting ways we perceive reality, exacerbated in war, and how each of us comes to our own peculiar and self-serving truths. He explores the fragility of human goodness, the seduction and hollowness of power and social status, the inconstancy of the human heart and racism, especially antisemitism.

Those who see in his work a retreat from the world are poor readers of Proust. His power is his Freudian understanding of the subterranean forces that shape human existence. The

— source chrishedges.substack.com | Chris Hedges | Nov 20, 2022

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Writing on War And Living in a World from Hell

As this century began, I was writing War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, my reflections on two decades as a war correspondent, 15 of them with the New York Times, in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, Bosnia, and Kosovo. I worked in a small, sparsely furnished studio apartment on First Avenue in New York City. The room had a desk, chair, futon, and a couple of bookshelves — not enough to accommodate my extensive library, leaving piles of books stacked against the wall. The single window overlooked a back alley.

The super, who lived in the first-floor apartment, smoked prodigious amounts of weed, leaving the grimy lobby stinking of pot. When he found out I was writing a book, he suggested I chronicle his moment of glory during the six days of clashes known as the Stonewall Riots, triggered by a 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay club in Greenwich Village. He claimed he had thrown a trash can through the front window of a police cruiser.

It was a solitary life, broken by periodic visits to a small antique bookstore in the neighborhood that had a copy of the 1910-1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the last edition published for scholars. I couldn’t afford it, but the owner generously let me read entries from those 29 volumes written by the likes of Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Muir,

— source chrishedges.substack.com | Chris Hedges | Nov 15, 2002

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Britain’s covert war in Yemen

The UK’s current war in Yemen is not the first time Britain has contributed to devastating the country. Sixty years ago, a coup in North Yemen prompted UK officials to begin a secret war that also led to tens of thousands of deaths – and, as now, no British minister was ever held to account.

The brutal war in Yemen, which has raged since 2015, is the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. A delicate truce since April has reduced some of the horror, but that deal seems to be breaking down.

It should be time to reflect about who, on all sides of the conflict, including in Britain, might be indicted for war crimes. Nearly 9,000 civilians have been killed in over 25,000 mainly Saudi air strikes which have been facilitated by Britain’s Royal Air Force. Many more tens of thousands have been killed in the conflict.

The UN has repeatedly alleged the commission of war crimes but no Saudi, Briton or Yemeni has been held to account, nor is likely to be. Tragically, it is history repeating itself, and the price once again is being paid by ordinary Yemenis.

Sixty years ago, in September 1962, the King and Imam of North Yemen, Muhammad al-Badr, was overthrown in a popular coup. Al-Badr had been in power for only a week having

— source markcurtis.info | Mark Curtis | 5 Oct 2022

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Why U.S. Must Negotiate with Russia

To begin with, suggest considerable measure of caution with the way things are being reported in the United States. To take one quite significant case, there’s been a large amount of, you can say, euphoria over the claim that major countries in the world or very important countries in the Global South, of course, claim that Modi, prime minister of India, censured Putin at a meeting in Samarkand, where he told Putin that India does not support the Russian position. If you look — I took the trouble of looking this up on the Indian government official website. What happened is quite different. The Western propaganda has seized upon half a dozen words in which Modi said war is not the answer, and that was taken to be a break with Russia. If you read the rest of the text, practically a love letter to Putin about how wonderful our relations are and how they’ll get even better and how supportive we are of you and so on, that part was left out of — which is practically the whole message, was left out of the Western reporting or the U.S. reporting. So you have to be — it’s one example of many of considerable care that has to be taken.

Fact is that, internationally at least, the United States and Britain are pretty isolated on this. Europe is sort of going along, but the population is not supportive of that position. As I mentioned, over — the most important country, Germany, over three-quarters is in favor of moving to negotiations right away. Same in Slovakia. President Macron of France, who’s been the most dedicated to seeking to find a negotiated settlement, has recently reiterated his belief that though the prospects diminish as the war continues, there are still openings. The United States is — and Britain, its lackey at this point, are pretty much isolated in their commitment to continuing the war, whatever the

— source democracynow.org | Oct 03, 2022

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Good American don’t form their own opinions

George Carlin

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Newsweek reporter quits after editors block coverage of OPCW Syria scandal

Journalist Tareq Haddad explains his decision to resign from Newsweek over its refusal to cover the OPCW’s unfolding Syria scandal.

Read Tareq Haddad’s article: “Lies, Newsweek And Control Of The Media Narrative: First-Hand Account.”
https://tareqhaddad.com/2019/12/14/lies-newsweek-and-control-of-the-media-narrative-first-hand-account/

— source thegrayzone.com | 2019/12/19

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Zelensky and NATO plan to transform post-war Ukraine into ‘a big Israel’

Just forty days after Russia’s military campaign began inside Ukraine, Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky told reporters that in the future, his country would be like “a big Israel.” The following day, one of Israel’s top promoters in the Democratic Party published an op-ed in NATO’s official think tank exploring how that could be executed.

Zelensky made his prediction while speaking to reporters on April 5, rejecting the idea that Kiev would remain neutral in future conflicts between NATO, the European Union, and Russia. According to Zelensky, his country would never be like Switzerland (which coincidentally abandoned its Napoleon-era tradition of nonalignment by sanctioning Russia in response to its February invasion).

“We cannot talk about ‘Switzerland of the future,’” the president informed reporters. “But we will definitely become a ‘big Israel’ with its own face.”

For those wondering what a “big Israel” would actually look like, Zelensky quickly elaborated on his disturbing prophecy.

— source thegrayzone.com | Alexander Rubinstein | Sep 17, 2022

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