Last blog on Palestine...

Hi all!
I had mentioned this to Katrinka, and she thought it a good idea for me to post it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7948494.stm

It's a BBC article about how Israel is being represented by an Israeli Jew AND an Israeli Arab at the Eurovision Song Contest 2009 (it is a European song contest, started in 1956, where each country chooses a song to represent it and they have a competition where they decide the "best song of Europe", and the winning country organises the contest next year... it's been happening for 53 years, now).
Anyway, the Arab singer has been getting a lot of backlash from the Palestinians for representing Israel in the contest and the article talks about those things and her reaction to it.

Btw, it's a big deal in Israel since Eurovision is the world's biggest non-sporting TV event in the world and it's important in many European counries - it's estimated that some 200-600 million people watch it world-wide every year; so one can understand why there would be a lot of discussion about it.

Ok.... that's all!
Cheers!

Palestinian PM Resigns

Article 1
Article 2
Article 3

Here are three articles from the Jerusalem Post about the Palestinian PM who just resigned a few days back so the PNA (Palestinian National Authority) could have some sort of unity going into the Fatah/Hamas talks coming up soon in Cairo. I found it interesting how from the searches I performed on LexisNexis and GoogleNews for "Fayad AND Fatah" and "Fayyad AND Fatah", the sources with the most articles on this were Israeli or Jewish. I found very few sources from the Middle East and an overall surprisingly lack of publicity from all sources. Is there a reason why it is on the Israeli and Jewish sites and not showing up at all on Palestinian and (most) Arab sites? Could this be that the Israelis and Jews are trying to show a division in the PNA and undermine the legitimacy of this organization? Are the Palestinians ignoring this so they appear to be more organized? I was able to find a short article on Al Jazeera English but surprisingly there were no comments like there oftentimes are for articles involving Israel/Palestine.

To bring a bit of humour to the issue...

I was searching youtube for videos about Palestine and Israel and I stumbled across this amazing website with 4 episodes of a cartoon about Ahmed and Salim. They are two brothers, wannabe terrorists, while their father is trying to get them to kill Jews and Americans or, the best thing - commit suicide by bombing themselves.

The authors are two young Israeli men (looks like they are students) but they claim not to make fun of Palestinian people or Muslims, but of terrorists. It is very, very, very funny (or at least I thought so) and I decided to put it up on the blog. I found it very interesting that they combined aspects American culture (i.e. songs, TV shows, game consoles, etc.) and that they had "re-created" Arabic from a bunch of other languages - English, Hebrew, Arabic (I hope...), Spanish, Italian, and I am sure a dozen more.

Anyhow, it shows terrorism from a very funny light and it does trivialise it, but I suppose that is the easiest way to go around it, if one does not want to face the real problems behind it.
Anyway, if the link above doesn't work, here it is again: http://www.ahmedandsalim.com/

Do you think that it is crossing the line here, especially since it is Israelis who are creating these videos?

Enjoy! :)

Issue of Recognition?

I've always wondered what it takes for a state to me formally recognised. Apparently, only the UN!
So, I've looked into the Israel-Palestine issue and how many countries recognise each.
In this case, Wikipedia was the closest to a good source that I could find, so please do not crucify me for using it!
Anyhow, there are 193 sovereign states in the world today, with UN recognition and 10 others without UN backing. Israel is one of the 193, while the "Palestinian Occupied Territories" are one of the 10 non-recognised.
Apparently, Israel has ties with 163 countries, and 36 countries without any sort of ties, as this map shows. You can also see the map on Wikipedia.

















From the countries that do not recognise Israel it is very obvious that almost all of them are Muslim, with a few notable exceptions - North Korea and Cuba, both Communist, and Venezuela and Bolivia which are leaning towards Socialism. I found that fact to be rather interesting...

Anyhow, Palestine on the other hand has not been internationally recognised by the UN (probably because of the possibility of a veto by the US), despite having PR China and the Russian Federation supporting Palestine. A total of 97 states recognise Palestine, so that represents 48% of the sovereign states of the world (or 47,8% of all the states - recognised and not recognised).






















Now my question is more about the way we decide what is a state and what isn't. Should the UN Security Council be responsible for these things, or should we have a majority vote decide. Either way, Palestine does not get independence, but that might change. I am sure some countries would change their points of view if the rule of "51% needed for declaration of sovereignty" was implemented, and they would recognise Palestine as well.
But in this case there is one problem - what do they recognise? What did those 97 countries recognise - Palestine as meaning the West Bank and Gaza, or Palestine as in the entire Mandate Palestine? Most of the countries that have recognised Palestine recognise Israel as well. How does that work?

If you look as to who recognised Palestine, it is interesting to notice that there is a division in Europe - the East recognises Palestine, while the West still does not. Almost all the countries of Africa and Asia recognise Palestine, while in the Americas it is only 3 countries with official recognition.

What are your thoughts on this? I think it is very interesting and that it is a very important issue that needs to be addressed.

Christian Action for Israel

The role of religion is very important in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The alleged foundations of the Israeli state were based on the Biblical ideas of the "Jewish homeland". My focus, though, won't be directly on religion in Israel or Palestine, but the role of religion in influencing the opinion of the American and Canadian public.
I stumbled across a very interesting site called "Christian Action for Israel", which deals with the state of Israel and its rights on the land. One of the articles there was called "Witness to the Nations" with the subtitle - "Occupation? Don't buy the misinformation!"
The authors' main argument is the Bible, as is usual with religious people. For example, when they speak about the "lack of biblical/historical knowledge and understanding" (see the irony there?), they say that "Arab/Muslim hatred of the Jews, and or, an ancient jealousy of them that burns deeply in the hearts of Israel's Arab kin..." This shows us the image that the Israeli's and/or Christians are superior to the Muslims, who supposedly feel an ancient jealousy towards the Christians and Jews. They do not put any sort of referencing or sources, and it is very obvious that it is the ideas of the "other" that are pervasive here.
They also ask "What does God, creator of the heavens and the earth have to say about this tiny tract of land called Israel in His Word - the Holy Bible", when actually, as every Christian ought to know, the Holy Bible is NOT the Word of God, unlike the K'uran, for example. That is just a theological fact, but is often ignored in cases like this.

Another interesting article was the Senate Floor Statement by the current Senator of Oklahoma, James M. Inhofe, on March 4th, 2002. I've put up the link from the Senator's web page, because the one on the Christian Action site had some mistakes (i.e. date of the Six-Day War).
Anyway, he talks about the history of the area (or at least, an interpretation of it) and gives a lot of ridiculous statements such as ""If this [peace] is something that Israel wants to do, it is their business to do it. But anyone who has tried to put the pressure on Israel to do this [peace] is wrong" or "Where was this great Palestinian nation [in 1867]? It did not exist. It was not there. Palestinians were not there" and "If we are not going to allow them a homeland in the Middle East, then where? What other nation on Earth is going to cede territory, is going to give up land?". The goal of his speech is to give the 7 reasons why Israel is entitled to the land, and his strongest argument is: "No. 7, I believe very strongly that we ought to support Israel; that it has a right to the land. This is the most important reason: Because God said so."
Obviously, he must be very popular with the people of Oklahoma, who are generally thought of as religious people, since he has been their Senator since 1994. His general platform about issues involving the U.S. such as social issues, not just foreign relations, are generally guided by religion. In an interview with the "General Council of the Assemblies of God" in June 2002, he talked about he brought religion to the Senate. Actually, the title of the interview is "Seving Christ in the Senate". Talking about key issues for Christians, he mentions the Middle East and the Scriptures, "I don’t believe there is a single issue we deal with in government that hasn’t been dealt with in the Scriptures." Basically, his entire political platform is based on religion, and so are his views of the Middle East and the solution to the problem of the conflict in Palestine. Just following the words of God.

I also found an interesting video on YouTube, which has been filmed at a conference called "Christians United for Israel". The video is from June 2008, but it shows how some fundamental Christians in the United States think about Israel and Palestine. The video itself is pretty ridiculous and, frankly, somewhat disturbing. One hears people say that the U.S. and Israel "have a common enemy, the Muslim people", and that Christians "are fighting what is behind the Muslim people, which is Satan" and ideas that if the U.S. does not support Israel, the Muslims will take over Israel and Iraq (?!) and then come to take the U.S. Unfortunately, in the U.S. religious people seem to have more power than in any other 'Western' country and they help keep the support for Israel high, on the basis of the Bible and their pre-conceptions of Jews and Arabs.

What do you think? Should we try to get "secular" in this issue? Do you think we can actually achieve piece without being secular? Any other thoughts?

Different media interpretation of the same thing

Hey all! It seems as if I am the first one to post on the blog.

First of all, let me apologise for this post being sooooo way too long. The next one will be MUCH shorter, I promise.

I wanted to talk about the way the media (mainly the Internet, which is becoming extremely important nowadays) is portraying protests against the violence in Gaza, that have been happening in January.
I went on www.flikr.com and typed in "Gaza" to see what will pop up. And as I was browsing through the countless images, one in particular intrigued me. It was a photo of a pro-Palestinian rally in Amsterdam (http://flickr.com/photos/viory/3165131324/) and it made me think, what the world would have held from this photo before the attack on Gaza, if there had been a pro-Palestinian rally. My initial reflex was to think that some media, being very sensationalist, would label it to be a "pro-terrorist" or anti-American, or anti-Israeli rally - essentially "ANTI" being the crucial word. From what I've experienced from the media before the latest attacks on Gaza, was that the Palestinians were pro-terrorist, so the Israelis have a right to interfere, for it is for the best of all of us.

That photo made me want to compare how different media looked at rallies, so I did that. On one of the many blogs online, I found a very interesting interpretation of a pro-Palestinian rally happening in Chicago, on January 19th. The photo below is one of the two photos that were on the blog.



The blog is on the following link: http://amerisrael.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/01/for-those-curious-as-to-who-constitutes-the-radical-religious-left-in-america-visit-this-link-and-scroll-down-to-see-the-va.html .

If you read the text in the blog, it states that that was a "pro-terrorist" rally and that it was made by the religious left in the U.S., which I found very interesting and amusing (amusing, in a sarcastic way).
The blog re-creates the images that have been put forward by the media for so many years now - that all Muslims are terrorists, that any pro-Palestinian rally would automatically mean that it is pro-terrorist and anti-Israeli (which it does not have to be, even if it is a pro-Palestinian rally!), etc. And this blog just contributed to these arguments. It went even further, it claimed tha the "religious left" had "allied itself with Islamofascism".
My intuition tells me that the author of this blog does not even speak Arabic, in order to understand what those flags are saying. The image of the "terrorist" has become anyone who has a scarf around their face. That is the typical, uninformed, narrow-minded approach that has kept peace away from reaching Palestine/Israel. I think that, to a large extent, the unwillingness of foreign powers, and their lack of knowledge about the problems, has lead to the problems lasting since 1948. It is one of the world's longest-standing political issues, and if the UN had implemented its resolutions in the 40's and 60's the situation would probably look different now.
Anyhow... I am going on another tangent here (sorry for that).

The way that other media described the even is completely different. I will cite only two sites that I read, which talked about the same protest in Chicago:
http://chicagoist.com/2009/01/10/photo_gallery_another_pro-palestine.php?gallery0Pic=2#gallery

http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/01/pro-palestinian-march-to-close-loop-streets.html
Both sites describe the rally as a "pro-Palestinian" rally and they state that there was another, pro-Israeli, rally that had happened a few days earlier.

What my point with this post is is that the media is very influential in the world with any issue, and so is with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For the first time, I was able to experience almost unanimous support for the people of Gaza/Palestine (well, with some rare exceptions, like the one mentioned above) that was not the case before. The perceptions of the Palestinians and Israelis are changing in the minds of people. Even in the U.S., which has been Israel's strongest ally, there are more and more voices raised against what Israel is doing. So, what I am trying to do is to comment on the positive change in the media. That is that here is, finally, both sides of the story presented. There were news about pro-Israeli rallies; they may not have gotten as much publicity as the pro-Palestinian ones, but they were still talked about. Finally, one can say that both rallies were "PRO" something, and not "ANTI" something, which used to be the case before. I, for one, was pleasantly surprised with the fact that the media is presenting both sides. Of course, it is taking sides as always, but the situation today is much better than it used to be.

Oh, and another thing - I found a really interesting video from the two rallies that left me thinking: What is the point of it? It was done by freedomfolks.com, whose motto is "fighting illegal immigration... one post at a time". It made me thing - what kind of authority do they have to post videos about pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian rallies? And if you watch the video on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSWaVgB579U) it seems as if the Israelis are the calm, nice people while the Palestinians are the wild, loud ones. The fact that they spoke to Israeli supporters and with no one from the pro-Palestinian rally, just gives more subtle indication that the makers of the video are pro-Israeli. I jus thought about the legitimacy of who is posting "news" online... the same thing is with that blog. Who made it? Why? Who would read it? I personally hope not many people, but well...

That's all from me. Sorry it turned out to be so long - wasn't supposed to be. Didn't structure the whole thing very well! :S