/may

Israel’s PR victory shames news broadcasters | Greg Philo | Comment is free | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/31/israel-pr-victory-images-war

The propaganda battle over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has reached a new level of intensity. In 2004 the Glasgow University Media Group published a major study on TV coverage of the Second Intifada and its impact on public understanding. We analysed about 200 programmes and questioned more than 800 people. Our conclusion: reporting was dominated by Israeli accounts. Since then we have been contacted by many journalists, especially from the BBC, and told of the intense pressures they are under that limit criticism of Israel. They asked us to raise the issue in public because they can’t. They speak of “waiting in fear for the phone call from the Israelis” (meaning the embassy or higher), of the BBC’s Jerusalem bureau having been “leant on by the Americans”, of being “guilty of self-censorship” and of “urgently needing an external arbiter”. Yet the public response of the BBC is to avoid reporting our latest findings. Those in control have the power to say what is not going to be the news.

Tiens donc.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the game only one side plays | Virginie #Despentes | Comment is free | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/23/game-only-one-side-plays-strauss-kahn

Finally, he lets one of the women, a political journalist, speak. And only then we finally hear how “heavy flirting” is current practice in political circles. Yet she chooses her words oh so carefully, because the last thing she would want is for people to think she resents men. But, nevertheless, she says the words: “It can make us feel very uncomfortable.”

#dsk

Nakba day: we waited 63 years for this | Karma Nabulsi | Comment is free | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/19/nakba-day-palestinian-summer

Slowly, and in spite of the shouted warnings from the villagers from Majdal Shams about the lethal landmines installed by the Israeli military right up to the fence, these remarkable ordinary young people – Palestinian refugees – began to both climb and push at the fence. We were going home.

It was a profoundly revolutionary moment, for these hundreds of young people entering Majdal Shams last Sunday made public the private heart of every Palestinian citizen, who has lived each day since 1948 in the emergency crisis of a catastrophe. Waiting, and struggling, and organising for only two things: liberation and return.

#palestine

Anxiety keeps the super-rich safe from middle-class rage | Peter Wilby | Comment is free | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/18/super-rich-middle-class-rage

That is the most important point about what has happened to incomes in Britain and America during the neoliberal era: the very rich are soaring ahead, leaving behind not only manual workers – now a diminishing minority – but also the middle-class masses, including doctors, teachers, academics, solicitors, architects, Whitehall civil servants and, indeed, many CEOs who don

L’utilisation du terme « régime » dans les médias permet systématiquement d’introduire un jugement de valeur négatif, sans avoir à apporter ni preuves ni explications. Quand un gouvernement est qualifié de « régime », généralement, il ne tarde pas à « narguer » la communuauté internationale... vous voyez, ce genre de choses que font les « régimes ».

Un journaliste ne doit donc jamais, mais alors jamais, qualifier Israël de « régime ». Il faut être Ahmanidejad ou Nasrallah pour faire un truc aussi dingue.

Ou bien... ce journaliste qui publie une tribune dans le Guardian. Et là, il n’arrête pas : « régime israélien » par-ci, « régime israélien » par-là.

Palestinians in Lebanon, at the lonely end of the Arab uprisings | Matthew Cassel
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/16/palestinian-refugees-lebanon-right-to-return

The Israeli regime not only keeps under occupation more than 4 million people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and limits the rights of more than a million Palestinian citizens of Israel, it also denies more than 5 million refugees the fundamental right of return to the place they were forced to flee.

Une analogie malpolie :

Israel is showing itself to be no different to the infamous despotic Arab regimes in its willingness to use brutal force against people demanding their rights.

Et finalement, l’analogie et le « régime israélien » dans le même paragraphe :

Often the fate of the Israeli regime is raised when considering the rights of Palestinian refugees. Yet when Egyptians, Libyans and others took to the streets in the Arab world, it wasn’t a concern for the justice-supporting international community what became of the regimes they battled against. In many cases, internationals have even joined in calls for their ousting.

Si ça continue, la semaine prochaine, le Guardian publiera une tribune de Matthew Cassel expliquant que le régime israélien est destiné à disparaître des pages de l’histoire. Ou pas.

Being a slut, to my mind, was mostly fun – wearing and doing what you liked | Suzanne Moore | Comment is free | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/14/slutwalk-female-dress-no-ones-business

To be a slut was, to my mind, mostly fun, and to do with wearing and doing what you liked. My mum told me that when she had wanted pierced ears and my grandma said that was sluttish, she walked into the hall, stood in front of the mirror and pierced her own ears with a hat pin. She also wore an anklet that the neighbours said was a sign of being a prostitute. So I soon acquired one of those.

#féminisme

Reinventing the Palestinian struggle | Khaled Diab | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/12/palestinian-struggle-arab-spring

Inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt, and following the date-based example of counterparts elsewhere in the Arab world, a new youth movement dubbed by some as the #March_15 movement has emerged in #Palestine.

The date refers to the day when organisers employing social media, text messaging and word of mouth managed to draw thousands of protesters on to the streets of Ramallah and other parts of the West Bank, as well as Gaza City.

However, in contrast to other popular uprisings in the region, their demands were not wholesale regime change, despite the undoubted failings of both Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, and the absence of a democratic mandate for both parties.

#Karl_Marx, part 5 : The problem of power | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/02/karl-marx-power-dictatorship-proletariat

There are basically three camps: first, paradoxically, an alliance of the Stalinist diehards and anti-communists who posit a direct and logical connection between Marx and Stalin, for better or for worse; second, those who see a distinct break between Lenin and Stalin (largely Trotskyists) and third; those who see a break between Marx and Lenin and who admire the former for his analytical skills but oppose the latter’s dictatorial measures. We might call this third group the platonic Bolshevists who would like to live in a different world, but are not quite sure that they like the measures taken to get there.