Media Review Network – Page 1065 – Providing Context and Substance

Barack Obama should never have accepted this tainted prize

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

By Minette Marrin

(source: The Times Online)

How we laughed when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize. It was like giving a man a gong for helping to put out a fire that he himself had been stoking up.

It was almost as funny as the news in 2007 that Tony Blair had been appointed a special peace envoy to the Middle East — yes, the Middle East — on behalf not just of the United States and Russia but also of the United Nations and the European Union. For those who enjoy gallows humour, the regular appointment of mass murderers and kleptocrats to the UN’s human rights commission is also quite amusing.

Israeli conscientious objectors visit south Africa

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

By Sayed Dhansay

(source:The Palestine Telegraph)

South Africa, October 10, 2009, (Pal Telegraph)- The term Shministim translates to twelfth-graders in Hebrew, and refers to a small but growing movement of conscientious objectors – young Israeli school leavers who refuse to join their country’s armed forces. I met with three such Shministim during their visit to South Africa, and was pleasantly surprised by their strong conviction and political maturity.

It is easy to mistake Omer Goldman (20), Yuval Ophir-Auron (20) and Sahar Vardi (19) for ordinary teenagers. But their youth belies the long and hard personal journeys these young objectors have travelled. For they have done the unspeakable in Israel – refused to serve in the army. In a country where military conscription exists, time served in the IDF is a rite of passage for all young Israelis, and is accepted as a normal part of growing up and being inducted into society.

Textbook injustice in Gaza

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

Schoolchildren are stuck for basics as Israel blocks supplies

By Mohammad Omer

(source: TheRebel.org)

As the 456,000 schoolchildren in the Gaza Strip start their academic year, they face chronic shortages of everything from paper, textbooks and ink cartridges to school uniforms, school bags and computers, the result of the Israeli blockade. At the same time, severely overcrowded classrooms are having to accommodate students whose schools were destroyed or damaged in the last siege, early this year.
The only supplies on the market are smuggled in through tunnels from Egypt.

Yet even when materials are available, many cannot afford them: 80 per cent of Gaza’s 1.5 million people live below the poverty line. The ministry of education has instructed teachers not to expect pupils to have "too many textbooks", but Ahmed Abdelhameed, who has eight school-age children, says that "teachers still ask for the full quota of school supplies, as if we were living in Sweden".

"I can no longer understand why we need to suffer, why textbooks and pencils are not allowed," he says. "Does Israel see these as threatening weapons, too?"

Press release

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

Abbas’s Palestinian Authority Betrayal of Palestine

Mahmoud Abbas’ outrageous betrayal of the Palestinian course by deferring the United Nations Human Rights Council Goldstone Report is a vindication of MEDIA REVIEW NETWORK’S contention over the past few years that the Palestinian Authority, led by Abbas, Sa’ebErakat and Yasser Abed Rabbo and a handful of quislings, do not represent the aspiration of the Palestinian people.

The fact that Libya insisted on the Goldstone Report be debated at the UN Security Council and Abbas’ belated order to "investigate" the "mistake", cannot hide the PA’s complicity with Israel and USA to oppress its people.The threat to abort a massive Israeli-PA Watani cell-phone deal with Abbas’ son, was used to blackmail the PA if it did not do Israel’s bidding.