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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.

New scandal rocks zionist federations support of Isarael

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By Iqbal Jassat – Chairman,Media Review Network

The latest scandal to hit a self-confessed pro-Israeli organization in South Africa, the SA Zionist Federation, [SAZF] is likely to invigorate the “Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions” [BDS] campaign against Israel and its affiliates. This remarkable turn of36involves a Johannesburg-based bag company manufacturing company, Saley’s Travel Goods, who refused to supply the SAZF with goods on the grounds that it did not want to “aid and abet” organizations responsible for “crimes against humanity”.

The SAZF, known for its links to apartheid Israel, has in the recent past been embroiled in a number of headline grabbing controversies surrounding its defense of Israeli war crimes. Most notable has been its failed attempt to prevent a leading South African jurist, Judge Richard Goldstone from attending his grandson’s barmitzvah. This move was interpreted by many Jewish critics of Israel as a form of punishing Goldstone for his report on Operation Cast Lead that established Israel’s guilt in Gaza.

More recently a Cape Town NGO known as Open Shuhada Street, whose members comprise of prominent human rights activists accused the SAZF of supporting occupation, settlement and oppression.

According to Open Shuhada Street, in response to it’s call to boycott the settlement-made products of Ahava, the SAZF launched a “vicious personal attack on us”.

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Uj focus on oman

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UJ Faculty of Humanities Presents:

“Focus on Oman”

Lecture, Presentation & Exhibition

When: Thurs, 28/10/2010

Time: 3:30pm

Where: Humanities Room,C Ring,319,

Auckland Park Campus
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The shaming of america

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By Robert Fisk

(source: The Independent UK)

As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims.

Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation against the Americans or British with some worthy general – the ghastly US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, come to mind – to ring-fence us with lies. Find a man who’d been tortured and you’d be told it was terrorist propaganda; discover a house full of children killed by an American air strike and that, too, would be terrorist propaganda, or “collateral damage”, or a simple phrase: “We have nothing on that.”

Of course, we all knew they always did have something. And yesterday’s ocean of military memos proves it yet again. Al-Jazeera has gone to extraordinary lengths to track down the actual Iraqi families whose men and women are recorded as being wasted at US checkpoints – I’ve identified one because I reported it in 2004, the bullet-smashed car, the two dead journalists, even the name of the local US captain – and it was The Independent on Sunday that first alerted the world to the hordes of indisciplined gunmen being flown to Baghdad to protect diplomats and generals. These mercenaries, who murdered their way around the cities of Iraq, abused me when I told them I was writing about them way back in 2003.

It’s always tempting to avoid a story by saying “nothing new”. The “old story” idea is used by governments to dampen journalistic interest as it can be used by us to cover journalistic idleness. And it’s true that reporters have seen some of this stuff before. The “evidence” of Iranian involvement in bomb-making in southern Iraq was farmed out to The New York Times’s Michael Gordon by the Pentagon in February 2007. The raw material, which we can now read, is far more doubtful than the Pentagon-peddled version. Iranian military material was still lying around all over Iraq from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and most of the attacks on Americans were at that stage carried out by Sunni insurgents. The reports suggesting that Syria allowed insurgents to pass through their territory, by the way, are correct. I have spoken to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers whose sons made their way to Iraq from Lebanon via the Lebanese village of Majdal Aanjar and then via the northern Syrian city of Aleppo to attack the Americans.

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Tutu urges opera group to boycott Isarael

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(source: SAPA / Independent Online) 

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has urged Cape Town Opera to postpone its trip to Israel to stage Porgy and Bess, in much the same way he had called on the international community to boycott apartheid South Africa.

In a letter to the group yesterday, Tutu said the trip to Israel would be wrong. During the struggle against apartheid it was inappropriate for international artists to perform in South Africa with its discriminatory laws and racial exclusivity. So, too, would it be wrong for Cape Town Opera to perform in Israel, said the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

“Cape Town Opera should postpone its proposed tour next month until both Israeli and Palestinian opera lovers of the region have equal opportunity and unfettered access to attend performances.

“Only the thickest-skinned South Africans would be comfortable performing before an audience that excluded residents living, for example, in an occupied West Bank village 30 minutes from Tel Aviv, who would not be allowed to travel to Tel Aviv, while including his Jewish neighbours from an illegal settlement on occupied Palestinian territory.

“The Tel Aviv Opera House is state sponsored. By luring international artists to perform there, it advances Israel’s fallacious claim to being a ‘civilised democracy’. Yet, every day, millions of citizens are denied the right to educational and cultural opportunities in Israel and the Palestinian territories it occupies.

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