MRN

The aspiration of the Media Review Network is to dispel the myths and stereotypes about Islam and Muslims and to foster bridges of understanding among the diverse people of our country. The Media Review Network believes that Muslim perspectives on issues impacting on South Africans are a prerequisite to a better appreciation of Islam.

Mosque hysteria

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

Is Mosque Hysteria Being Ginned Up to Bolster Support for the Disastrous Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?

By Phyllis Bennis

(source: Alternet)

At its core, the controversy surrounding the proposed Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan is not about religion. It’s about war.

For some years now the fear factor that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001 and fueled public support for the “global war on terror” (or the onomatopoetic “GWOT”) has been diminishing. Along with the long and intense work of the antiwar movement and the rising levels of casualties, fear reduction has played a key role in building opposition to the wars. Part of that process has been the growing normalization of the site of the 9/11 attacks in New York. “Ground zero,” the site of the destroyed World Trade Center, is now a busy construction venue in the midst of a hectic commercial district that includes all the usual hodgepodge of convenient and useless, businesslike and tawdry aspects of Manhattan street life: Office buildings and food vendor carts, coffee shops and strip joints. There’s nothing hallowed about it.

That normalization hasn’t yet made possible the kind of serious national debate this country so desperately needs. That debate is not about September 11, but about September 12 – the day George Bush launched a war our country was now going to wage anywhere he chose against whomever he designated for as long as he wanted without any restrictions. The whole world – though most especially the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as those of Yemen, Somalia, Palestine and Kenya, and so many more places – as well as those of us here in the U.S. continue to pay the price.

Mahmoud abbas double agent

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

The Washington Farce

By Jeffrey Blankfort

(source: Counterpunch.org)

This coming week we will witness the latest challenge for the man who is arguably the most extraordinary double agent in the Middle East. What is unusual about Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen, as he was known when his fellow Palestinians had yet to take his measure, is that most of what he does for his Israeli and US masters he does in plain sight.

To which of the two he is most beholden will be determined during his upcoming visit to Washington for the latest chapter in what has euphemistically been referred to as the “peace process” since it was launched in the aftermath of the Oslo Agreement. The odds are it will be Israel. In Oslo, it should be recalled, Abbas, as the chief Palestinian negotiator, played Neville Chamberlain for Tel Aviv, agreeing to surrender occupied Palestinian land with a view toward putting a permanent end to Palestinian resistance and, immediately, to the first Intifada.

If any reader still harbors the illusion that Oslo was anything but a sell-out by the Palestinian leadership, Abba’s negotiating counterpart, former Israeli military intelligence chief, Shlomo Gazit, put that notion to rest on the evening of November 17,1993. When challenged during a speaking engagement at Congregation Beth Shalom in San Francisco by an angry questioner who compared the agreement to that signed with Nazi Germany in Munich in 1938, Gazit calmly replied that while he was reluctant to make such comparisons, “if it’s another Munich, we’re the Germans and the Palestinians are the Czechs.”.

Appeal to media do not distort middle east talks

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

By Ibrahim Vawda

The Media Review Network notes that the Middle East talks, convened by Barack Obama, are being proclaimed in the media as “talks” between Israel and the “Palestinians”, symbolised by Mahmood Abbas. Mahmood Abbas is just another “Bantustan” leader, who lost his legitimacy when his term of office ended when his Party, Fatah, lost the elections in 2006. He is embarking on yet another odyssey of national betrayal.
Talks with a defeated leader of a political Party cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be projected as talks with Palestinians. It is precisely for this reason that the Media Review Network would like to appeal to the South African Media not to refer to these “talks” as between Israel and the "Palestinians". The “Bantustan regime” of Mahmood Abbas is illicit and is no more than a surrogate appendage of Israel and Washington. He is merely a pliant tool of the US dependent on US sponsorship and support to remain in power against an impatient and hostile Palestinian population.

A very well known Arab proverb says: “The Mountain went into labour, and then gave birth to a rat.” This likely scenario of the Middle East talks in Washington today, is more than mere speculation.

Israel and Palestine a true one state solution

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

By George Bisharat

(source: Washington Post)

"Where is the Palestinian Mandela?" pundits occasionally ask. But after these latest Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Washington fail — as they inevitably will — the more pressing question may be: "Where is the Israeli de Klerk?" Will an Israeli leader emerge with the former South African president’s moral courage and foresight to dismantle a discriminatory regime and foster democracy based on equal rights?

For decades, the international community has assumed that historic Palestine must be divided between Jews and Palestinians. Yet no satisfactory division of the land has been reached. Israel has aggravated the problem by settling roughly 500,000 Jews in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, eliminating the land base for a viable Palestinian state.

A de facto one-state reality has emerged, with Israel effectively ruling virtually all of the former Palestine. Yet only Jews enjoy full rights in this functionally unitary political system. In contrast, Palestinian citizens of Israel endure more than 35 laws that explicitly privilege Jews as well as policies that deliberately marginalize them. West Bank Palestinians cannot drive on roads built for Israeli settlers, while Palestinians in Gaza watch as their children’s intellectual and physical growth are stunted by an Israeli siege that has limited educational opportunities and deepened poverty to acute levels.