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.

World looks at Isarael as it looked at apartheid era south Africa

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

The world is not interested in Israel’s housing and bureaucratic problems, or in the achievements of its students in mathematics. The world is looking at how the only democracy in the Middle East conducts itself in the occupied territories.

By Niva Lanir

(source: Haaretz)

Whether or not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu uses “a supertanker against the bureaucracy,” as he calls it, to alleviate the housing shortage, a no-fly zone for supertankers already exists. It exists whether his idea crashes in the Knesset debates on housing reforms, or flies high above the railway line that’s supposed to be extended to Irbid in Jordan – in the East, where there are no procedures or bureaucracy.

Here is its description, from an article in these pages earlier this (“Gilad Farm has been sacrificed,” Karni Eldad, March 6 ): “At age 15, they expelled Elisaf Orbach from his home in Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip. He was paid a small amount of compensation and went to Samaria, to build a small, 90-square-meter house to meet his needs until he gets married and has children.” Despite the sad continuation – “With his hands bound, on the way to the police van, Orbach heard a tractor destroying his house, five years after his house in the Gaza Strip had been leveled” – I clicked “Like.”

The concepts and the division of labor did that to me: expulsion and settling. A small house and a comfortable future, and even a twist in the plot: The forces of evil (police, army, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak ) gang up on Elisaf and his friends and destroy all that good. And the Palestinians? In this story there are no Palestinians. Go see another movie.

Stealing land and illegal construction, evacuating a few buildings and rebuilding them, the state’s report to the High Court of Justice that by the end of the year it would evacuate all outposts built on private Palestinian land – all this is not new. These36repeat themselves like the periodic table. And yet, who would have believed that Netanyahu would get stuck in his second term in the construction business, of all things: freezing construction in the territories, the real-estate bubble, the housing shortage and the sky-rocketing prices. And who would have believed that the housing shortage, of all things, would threaten his coalition?

The so called guardians of free speech

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

By John Pilger

(source: AntiWar.com)

As the United States and Britain look for an excuse to invade another oil-rich Arab country, the hypocrisy is familiar. Colonel Gadhafi is “delusional” and “blood-drenched” while the authors of an invasion that killed a million Iraqis, who have kidnapped and tortured in our name, are entirely sane, never blood-drenched and once again the arbiters of “stability.”

But something has changed. Reality is no longer what the powerful say it is. Of all the spectacular revolts across the world, the most exciting is the insurrection of knowledge sparked by WikiLeaks. This is not a new idea. In 1792, the revolutionary Tom Paine warned his readers in England that their government believed that “people must be hoodwinked and held in superstitious ignorance by some bugbear or other.” Paine’s The Rights of Man was considered such a threat to elite control that a secret grand jury was ordered to charge him with “a dangerous and treasonable conspiracy.” Wisely, he sought refuge in France.

The ordeal and courage of Tom Paine is cited by the Sydney Peace Foundation in its award of Australia’s human rights Gold Medal to Julian Assange. Like Paine, Assange is a maverick who serves no system and is threatened by a secret grand jury, a malicious device long abandoned in England but not in the United States. If extradited to the US, he is likely to disappear into the Kafkaesque world that produced the Guantanamo Bay nightmare and now accuses Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ alleged whistleblower, of a capital crime.

Should Assange’s current British appeal fail against his extradition to Sweden, he will probably, once charged, be denied bail and held incommunicado until his trial in secret. The case against him had already been dismissed by a senior prosecutor in Stockholm and given new life only when a right-wing politician, Claes Borgstrom, intervened and made public statements about Assange’s “guilt.” Borgstrom, a lawyer, now represents the two women involved. His law partner is Thomas Bodstrom, who as Sweden’s minister for justice in 2001, was implicated in the handover of two innocent Egyptian refugees to a CIA kidnap squad at Stockholm airport. Sweden later awarded them damages for their torture.

The media cannot should not be complacent

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

By Sipho McDermott

(source: Mail & Guardian, Friday,11-03-2011)

Former Constitutional Court Judge Kate O’Regan opened the Regulations and Rights conference at the University of the Witwatersrand on Wednesday with a warning that the media need to be reflexive in applying their important role in keeping society democratic, and that the judicial landscape is working to ensure their freedom.

The conference, hosted by Wits Journalism and the South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef), is focused on interrogating the rights and responsibilities of African media.

“The press, like all institutions critical to democracy, needs to be reflexive,” she said. While warning that this powerful institution needs to wield its power carefully, she pointed to its importance for a healthy constitutional democracy: “Democracies are noisy places because of freedom of expression, whereas authoritarian societies are silent. What is slightly disconcerting about South Africa is we get worried by how noisy we are.”

Recent rulings internationally have made it clear that protection of privacy is of critical importance the closer one gets to the intimate life of an individual, but of decreasing importance the closer one moves to state institutions, she said. This freeing of reporting on the government is an “important constraint on the power of the state”.

In cases where people have brought libel and defamation cases against the media, O’Regan said there is an increasing legal trend towards accepting the importance of the professional codes of ethics that guide journalists’ work, with judgements’ primary criterion being if the journalist has worked with these codes. In such cases the journalist needs to prove that they did everything to ensure their information was correct and the story fair.

But in cases where the journalist does get it wrong, “The apology is a very important part of undoing damage,” she said

New reality of arab streets demands torment dictators their american backers

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

By Iqbal Jassat

Has the American dream of permanent supremacy in the oil-rich region of the world been shattered?

It’s a question that not only haunts influential institutions that function as pillars of power in America’s global hegemony; but also torments a wide array of rightwing think tanks masquerading as ‘impartial analysts’.

In addition, Israel, America’s foremost regional ally and partner in policing the Arab world is also in agony! The Zionist entity that for far too long had played roughshod over the lives of its victims is suddenly gripped with misery, distress and wretchedness.It’s a scenario that a few weeks ago would have been dismissed as unthinkable. Yet, as36unfold in dramatic and drastic ways across the entire Middle East and North Africa, it has become clear that politics governing the Arab street will not be the same ever again.

The ouster from power of Tunisia’s autocratic leader Ben Ali commenced the opening of a new chapter of popular revolts. And against all odds, the inspiring success of Egypt’s ‘intifada’ leading to the toppling of the region’s highly prized trophy Hosni Mubarak reinforced the fact that the face of geo-politics had changed.

As Bahrain and Yemen remain gripped with mounting pressure from street protests demanding fundamental human rights coupled with regime change, the Saudi kingdom’s long-suffering populace has now demonstrated that they too have overcome the threshold of fear and taken to the street to challenge the King’s police state!

While full-blown revolutions intensify against American-backed dictators and monarchs – many of whom are in power for decades without any accountability, Libya and its maverick ‘brother leader’ dominate the current concentration of news, analysis and policy debates.