Tag: maps

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Innoculate : New Hasbaroid Epidemic Imminent

Prepare the disinfectant and scrubbing brush. Richard Silverstein alerts us to the impending arrival of a new wave of hasbaroids, targeting major news sites, and emanating from Hasbara Central at the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

Silverstein’s friend responded to an email solicitation and

received this official communique from the ministry with talking points about Operation Cast Lead which s/he was to use in her/his propaganda efforts. Among the links was a Peter Beaumont Cif piece. The following were identified as “target sites”: the Times, the Guardian, Sky News, BBC, Yahoo!News, Huffington Post, and the Dutch Telegraaf. Also targeted were other media sites in Dutch, Spanish, German and French considered critical of the invasion.

The Israeli marketing strategy is to blindside the world with glowing information. This is in line with current theory about positive messaging, exemplified in this Economist article – ‘Denial is useless. Spread happy truths instead.’

How to counteract this pernicious propaganda? spread the truth and expose the perfidy of the hasbara strategy itself. Refer to this latest infamy and plans at Israel’s strategic hasbara stinktank, the Reut Institute. Ensure your facts are presented in complete and unassailable terms – accounts which support human rights, freedom and justice are far more happy truths than tendentious sickly icing on a poisonous cake of Israel manifest destiny, technological superiority, privilege and oppression.

Related Resources to Use to Combat Israeli Propaganda

Read the Palestine Papers which show Israel has never been serious about peace.
Download the Veritas Handbook, an excellent resource for activists for Palestine.
Download the Goldstone Report and familiarise yourself with it.
Read the UNHRC investigation into Israel’s murderous attack on the Gaza Flotilla.
Search the Electronic Intifada site to find other information to support your arguments and follow @intifada on Twitter
Read Ilan Pappe’s “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”.
Read Ali Abunimah’s One Country, A Bold Proposal To End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and follow @avinunu on Twitter
Read the main sources which define Israeli apartheid.
Familiarise yourself with the latest statistics about Palestinians’ real wishes. Also see here.
Participate in the Palestinian boycott of Israel – the cure for apartheid is BDS, BDS and more BDS
The anti-semitism inherent in the anti-boycott movement.
Join Facebook groups which support Palestinian rights and the boycott of apartheid Israel.

Israeli land theft in the West BankUse Maps to Explain the Outrageous Extent of Israeli Land Theft

Peace Now West Bank map January 2011 – PDF full size map

Also note the graph on the left which shows clearly that colonization peaked during the so-called “Oslo Peace Process,” and again during the Camp David Peace charade hosted by US president Bill Clinton.

This provides a fresh evidence, if it were needed, that as far as Israel is concerned the negotiations were an exercise in deception and fraud.

Adalah interactive map and database, with histories of the various settlements.
Peace Now map
Pictorial representation.
Jordan Valley Access and Closure Map (OCHA)
ATLAS OF THE CONFLICT : Israel – Palestine
Map and Grab: The Foreign Quest for Palestinian Land Dr.Salman Abu Sitta Palestine, Britain and Empire c. 1841-1948

Please feel free to add counter-strategy suggestions in the comments of this post.

Palestine / Israel Links

Palestinian elections: Recent polls show mixed signals
Peter Beinart says what we all know
The zio-dominated Knesset is poised to pass laws criminalising boycotts against apartheid Israel, ironically likely to implode on all Israeli citizens.
Friedman the imperialist: White House disgusted with Israel
Israelis call on int’l artists to boycott Eilat festival
Gaza celebrates fall of Mubarak
Palestinians to wind up peace talks unit after leaks
Silwan’s Captive Children
Israel closes embassies over terror fears
Action Alert for the Children of Palestine | Continuous Updates of News About Violations of Children
A Palestinian boy’s Kafkaesque trial in Israel’s military court
Stop the Irvine 11 Prosecutions

Egypt Links

Striving for political and economic freedom
Helen Thomas: Egyptians Understand Their Power
Egypt asks U.S. to freeze officials’ assets: U.S. official – No mention of Mubarak’s Rodeo Drive and Manhattan properties
Mubarak and Co assets – please add verifiable information
A Warning for Egyptian Revolutionaries: Courtesy of People-Power in the Philippines
Dangerous Victims: Egyptian Revolution in Israeli Eyes
Arab democratization and the future of ‘the only democracy’

Wikileaks Links

Spy games: Inside the convoluted plot to bring down WikiLeaks
And in today’s bizarro world : Wikileaks Hires Alan Dershowitz
WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE Mon Feb 14 18:28:37 2011 GMT

Mr Assange will not himself be intervening in the action against Twitter because as an Australian who has committed no criminal act on US territory, he claims that the American courts have no jurisdiction over him. The head of his UK legal team, Geoffrey Robertson QC, has brought in Alan Dershowitz, the distinguished Harvard Law Professor, as part of the team to advise on the US Attorney General’s actions.

THE DERSHOWITZ HOAX
Alan Dershowitz joins Julian Assange defense team

“Assange is a journalist. He’s a new kind of journalist. He represents the newest wave of journalism,” Dershowitz said. “I’m currently in this case because I believe that to protect the First Amendment we need to protect new electronic media vigorously.”

WikiLeaks cables: The Middle East fallout could be grave – Dershowitz:

But secretary of state Hillary Clinton is surely correct when she warns that WikiLeaks poses a danger not only to the US but to international diplomacy, while at the same time trying to minimize the actual harm done by these particular disclosures.

Alan Dershowitz: Should we fight terror with torture?
I’m sure that a torture supporter will do a lot to legitimate Wikileaks…not.
Dershowitz: Torture could be justified
Dershowitz Joins Legal Team for Wikileaks
@DjinninOz: @Wikileaks yep Wiki wont be getting anymore $ from me while there’s a chance of ANY of it ending up in that racist shits pocket #
@hemara: @wikileaks I can no longer support wikileaks as long as Dershowitz is on board: he’s a liar, racist and bigot – & most troubling of all.. #
@hemara: @wikileaks ..is pro-torture & justifies killing of civilians by radically expanding definition of “combatants”. In short, an apologist.. #
@hemara: @wikileaks ..for the worst excesses of American empire. This association will fatally damage your credibility. #
@hemara: Why I declare #wikileaks can go to hell: RT @wikileaks: Dershowitz Joins Legal Team for WL http://bit.ly/fSXoXs || #Palestine #

Other Links

Clinton argues for internet freedom but fails to mention the latest French moves.
More facts emerge about the leaked smear campaigns : Glenn Greenwald
Iranian protesters persist in streets of major cities
The Un-Victim : Amitava Kumar interviews Arundhati Roy
PKB of the day : US State Secretary Clinton calls Iranian regime ‘hypocritical,’ backs anti-government protests
“Austerity” Comes to America
Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war : Curveball comes out

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5000 Years of History in the Middle East

This is an excellent animation which illustrates the fallacy of Zionist claims to Israel’s current terrortory.

There’s a new book out challenging the fallacious Zionist narrative of Israel.

What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under the heel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the very same “children of Israel” described in the Old Testament?

And what if most modern Israelis aren’t descended from the ancient Israelites at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africans and others who didn’t “return” to the scrap of land we now call Israel and establish a new state following the attempt to exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia?

What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora — the story recounted at Passover tables by Jews around the world every year detailing the ancient Jews’ exile from Judea, the years spent wandering through the desert, their escape from the Pharaoh’s clutches — is all wrong?

That’s the explosive thesis of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, a book by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) that sent shockwaves across Israeli society when it was published last year. After 19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is being translated into a dozen languages and will be published in the United States this year by Verso.

….

Zand’s central argument is that the Romans didn’t expel whole nations from their territories. Zand estimates that perhaps 10,000 ancient Judeans were vanquished during the Roman wars, and the remaining inhabitants of ancient Judea remained, converting to Islam and assimilating with their conquerors when Arabs subjugated the area. They became the progenitors of today’s Palestinian Arabs, many of whom now live as refugees who were exiled from their homeland during the 20th century.

…

This narrative has huge significance in terms of Israel’s national identity. If Judaism is a religion, rather than “a people” descended from a dispersed nation, then it brings into question the central justification for the state of Israel remaining a “Jewish state.”

And that brings us to Zand’s second assertion. He argues that the story of the Jewish nation — the transformation of the Jewish people from a group with a shared cultural identity and religious faith into a vanquished “people” — was a relatively recent invention, hatched in the 19th century by Zionist scholars and advanced by the Israeli academic establishment. It was, argues Zand, an intellectual conspiracy of sorts. Segev says, “It’s all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel.”

The book has very important ramifications for the development of a future one state solution.

But the idea of a single, binational state has more recently been marginalized — dismissed as an attempt to destroy Israel literally and physically, rather than as an ethnic and religious-based political entity with a population of second-class Arab citizens and the legacy of responsibility for world’s longest-standing refugee population.

A logical conclusion of Zand’s work exposing Israel’s founding mythology may be the restoration of the idea of a one-state solution to a legitimate place in the debate over this contentious region. After all, while it muddies the waters in one sense — raising ancient, biblical questions about just who the “children of Israel” really are — in another sense, it hints at the commonalities that exist between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Both groups lay claim to the same crust of earth, both have faced historic repression and displacement and both hold dear the idea that they should have a “right of return.”

And if both groups in fact share common biblical ties, then it begs the question of why the entirety of what was Palestine under the British mandate should remain a refuge for people of one religion instead of being a country in which Jews and Arabs are guaranteed equal protection — equal protection under the laws of a state whose legitimacy would never again be open to question.