Middle East

Stephen Colbert, who parodies rightwing t.v. pundits, debates himself on the Israeli assault on the Gaza aid flotilla and tells the Israeli ambassador to the US that ‘the Palestinians should go back where they came from.’ The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Formidable Opponent – Michael Oren www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes […]

Update: Paul Woodward has discovered an earlier video posted to the Web from which the following was apparently culled, via what he calls ‘creative editing.’ Obviously, raw footage is preferable, but it isn’t clear if the effect of the editing was actually any falsification of the sordid reality of what occurred. Original posting: The Israeli […]

Kenneth O’Keefe, a victim of the brutal Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara on Memorial Day that killed one American citizen and 8 others, at least, speaks of how he grabbed Israeli commandos’ weapons after they went on a shooting rampage, and then saved the commandos. And here is O’Keefe’s interview in which he ridicules […]

Now a German Jewish organization, Jewish Voice for Peace in the Middle East, is planning an aid flotilla to Gaza! Please send them money. There are over 250,000 Jews in contemporary Germany, and more Jews immigrated to Germany in 2005 than to Israel. Four-fifths of them are Russian Jews who prefer Berlin to Beersheva. And, […]

Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, is often wrongly thought to have been writing science fiction in his seminal novel, 1984. In fact, he was simply warning about certain tendencies in governmental practice as actually observed not only in the mass authoritarian regimes but often in his own Britain. Thus, newspeak, whereby the government calls things […]

Waves of protests and governmental denunciations against Israel’s attack on the Mavi Marmara relief vessel last Monday washed over the world, even as Israel raided and captured another aid vessel, the Rachel Corrie. The demonstrations, while widespread, did not typically involve more than a few thousand persons in each city. The firmness and frankness of […]

In what N. Irish Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness described as a “raid,” the Israeli Navy again commandeered an unarmed, peaceful ship in international waters, the Rachel Corrie, in a bid to prevent wheel chairs from reaching the blockaded people of Gaza, an Occupied Territory of which Israel controls the borders, air and sea. The […]

Wire services reported early Saturday morning that the Rachel Corrie had been intercepted by Israeli war ships and that its communications had been jammed by the Israelis. The ship, which had set off from Ireland, was intended to land at Gaza with humanitarian supplies. International bodies estimate that only 25% of needed supplies are getting […]

Oh, oh. Part Deux. The Rachel Corrie Gaza aid ship is now steaming toward the Gaza coast, and its communications may have been already jammed. It is flagged as an Irish vessel, and the far right Israeli government of Binyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman have vowed that it will not be allowed to reach Gaza. […]