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Palestine – Features

World must deny legitimacy to Isarael

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The world worked together to help bring apartheid to an end, writes Kader Asmal. So why allow it to live on in Israel/Palestine?

(source: Mail & Guardian Online, Friday,25/06/2010)

In 1980, I served on a commission of enquiry into reported violations of international law by Israel following its invasion of Lebanon. We spent 22 days in Lebanon, Israel and the surrounding areas. The devastation in Lebanon was quite overwhelming. Bombings were carried on while we were there; whole new blocks of flats in Beirut were destroyed simply because they were there. The noise, the dust and the sound of bullets were ceaseless.

And then, after our preliminary work had been done, there were the Sabra and Shatila massacres of hundreds of defenceless refugees, shot dead by the Israeli surrogates, the Phalange. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) had been expelled from Lebanon. Golda Meir had said coldly that there was no such thing as a Palestinian. Now the visible signs of such people had to be destroyed, as with the famous Palestine Library in Beirut and the hospital records in the West Bank.

Israel Shahack, head of an Israeli civil-liberties body, drew my attention to the similarities between Israel and apartheid South Africa: "You see," he said, "the West Bank and Gaza are our bantustans, reserves of labour for Israel but no freedom of labour."

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Press release mrn fact finding mission to sudan

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The Media Review Network will be embarking on a fact finding mission to Sudan next week. Researcher Ibrahim Vawda will investigate conditions in Darfur as well as the situation regarding the forth coming referendum in southern Sudan and the oil rich area of Abbey.

He will be accompanied by leading journalists from media houses including Talk Radio 702, e News and City Press.

Mr Vawda will be available for interviews as from Tuesday, 23 November2010, via his email or his Sudan mobile number. Details of which may be obtained by contacting the Media Review Network office: 

Bibi Ayesha Laher

Tel: 012 374 1635

Email: info@mediareviewnet.com
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7 deceptions about bin ladens killing pushed by the Obama administration

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By Joshua Holland

(source: www.alternet.org)

The Obama administration deftly shaped the media coverage of its prized kill by detailing a picture-perfect, morally unambiguous special forces operation, which culminated in the death of Osama bin Laden. Most of the details of that narrative have now unravelled, but the conventional wisdom that the tale established remains. As Glenn Greenwald put it, that’s par for the course: “the narrative is set forever by first-day government falsehoods uncritically amplified by establishment media outlets, which endure no matter how definitively they are disproven in subsequent days.”

In his address to the American people, and in subsequent media briefings by senior officials, we were told that a small force of as many as 25 Navy Seals stormed the compound with orders to take bin Laden alive, if possible. White House spokesman Jay Carney said that once inside the compound, they came under heavy fire and “were engaged in a firefight throughout the operation.” The SEALs killed Osama bin Laden’s son when he lunged for them on a staircase, and finally encountered their quarry in a bedroom, where, after taking a woman believed to be his wife as a human shield, bin Laden died in a vicious fire-fight. The operation, Obama said, was carried out “with extraordinary courage and capability.”

As the week wore on, all of these details were “revised,” and the administration claims that the initial, improbably clean account of what happened was merely a product of the “fog of war.” And, as Salon’s Justin Elliott notes, “despite the major misstatements by the administration on perhaps the biggest story of the year, the media has largely taken a deferential stance” to that position.

Let’s look at what has changed since that first draft of history was written by the administration.

1. No Firefight

John Brennan, White House security adviser, initially told reporters that bin Laden “was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in.” But on Wednesday, unnamed “administration officials” told NBC that only one person fired on U.S. troops from an adjacent guest house, and once they entered the main residence the “resistance” we were told they faced “never materialized.”

The compound was cleared quickly, said the officials, and rather than a 40-minute firefight, the commandoes spent most of their time there gathering computer hard drives and other potential sources of intelligence.

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