Simon Block on why he chose to write about Thomas Hurndall, the British student shot by the IDF.

8 October 2008
The Guardian

By Carel Moiseiwitsch and Gordon Murray
7 October 2008

In June 2007, the Palestine Media Collective produced a newspaper parody of The Vancouver Sun that satirized the anti-Palestinian bias of CanWest, the largest media conglomerate in Canada. One example was an article entitled "Study Shows Truth Biased Against Israel" by Cyn Sorsheep. Six months later, CanWest launched a lawsuit against those who "conspired" to produce and distribute the parody.

By Atef Alshaer
6 October 2008
Electronic Intifada

It is inspirational to find Palestine richly meditated in poetry. Two new poetry collections provide a robust testament to that and to the eternal durability of poetry as a synthetic medium of expression and a concise reservoir of evocative communication, harboring meaning, signification, resonance and music. One collection is by the Palestinian-American poet Sharif S. Elmusa, Flawed Landscape, and the other is made of selected works by various poets edited by Remi Kanazi, Poets for Palestine. When poetry is concerned with such a historically and culturally grounded issue as Palestine, one expects unusual richness, for the context of that issue entails a range of elements that provides the poet with substantial materials for substantial meditation. Indeed, this is what one encounters in these two collections: richness of vision and an engaging style.

By Gabriel Ash, a core member of the Inrternational Jewish Anti-Zionist Network.

3 October 2008

With Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert forced to concentrate on his corruption charges, Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister, won the ruling party Kadima's primaries and is hoping to form a new government. Livni, like Olmert, is a scion of the right-wing Revisionist movement, the Likud party's ideological antecedent (the name refers to their demand to revise the terms of the British Mandate so that what is now Jordan would be included in the future Jewish state). Her father, Eitan Livni, was operations officer of the revisionist terrorist group Etzel. Last spring, Livni expressed her honest arrogance by demanding that Palestinians erase the word "Nakba" (the Arabic term for the Palestinians' forced dispossession of their homeland) from their lexicon if there was to be any chance of a "Palestinian state" and "peace" - hardly the statements of a "dove."

Yet, both inside Israel and in the world media, that is precisely the reputation Livni has cultivated.

By Rami Khouri, Arab Media Watch adviser, director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

1 October 2008

I was not surprised, during a working visit to Egypt for a few days, to read the results of the latest BBC World Service global poll showing that in 22 out of 23 countries surveyed most people feel the US-led 'global war on terror' has not weakened Al-Qaeda. On average, the poll showed, only 22% of respondents feel that Al-Qaeda has been weakened, while three in five believe that the war on terror has had no effect (29%) or made Al-Qaeda stronger (30%).

By Rami Khouri, Arab Media Watch adviser, director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

29 September 2008

One of the great hopes and subsequent disappointments in modern Middle Eastern diplomacy has been the "Quartet" of four major international players that was supposed to monitor, shepherd and promote Palestinian-Israeli peace-making during the past five years. The group - comprised of Russia, the United States, the European Union and the United Nations - has not only failed to advance the peace process since its establishment in 2002; astoundingly, it has also whittled away the political credibility and impact of two of those parties - the EU and UN.

Sami al-Haj, an Al Jazeera cameraman, was beaten, abused and humiliated in the name of the war on terror. He tells correspondent Robert Fisk about his struggle to rebuild a shattered life.

25 September 2008
The Independent

By Jonathan Randal
18 September 2008
The Guardian

Françoise Demulder, a prizewinning member of the talented cohort of French female war photographers who first made their mark in Vietnam, has died of a heart attack in Paris at the age of 61. In 1977 she became the first woman to win the coveted World Press Photo of the Year award for a black-and-white picture shot during the expulsion in 1976 of Palestinians from the Karantina district of Christian East Beirut by Christian Phalangist militiamen in the Lebanese civil war.