#max_fisher

Seymour Hersh’s bizarre new conspiracy theory about the US and Syria, explained
▻http://www.vox.com/2015/12/21/10634002/seymour-hersh-syria-joint-chiefs

The fatal flaw at the heart of the story

Hersh alleges that the mastermind of this entire conspiracy was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey, whom Hersh says was horrified by Obama’s plan to arm Syrian rebels and sought to aid Assad. This claim is difficult to believe: While in office, Dempsey famously and publicly clashed with Obama over Syria because Dempsey wanted to do more to arm Syrian rebels. Contemporaneous accounts of arguments within the White House support this, with Dempsey arguing the US should more robustly arm Syrian rebels, and Obama arguing for less.

Yet Hersh claims, with no evidence, that Dempsey was so opposed to arming Syrian rebels that he would commit an apparent act of treason to subvert those plans. Hersh makes no effort to reconcile this seemingly fatal contradiction, and indeed it is not clear Hersh is even aware that Dempsey is known for supporting rather than opposing efforts to arm the Syrian rebels.

The Washington Post predicts a year full of #coups in Africa
▻http://africasacountry.com/the-washington-posts-foreign-policy-blogger-predicts-a-year-full-of

The Washington Post’s foreign affairs blogger #Max_Fisher (about whose infatuation with coloured maps we blogged before here and here) posted an entry earlier this week entitled: ’A worrying map of countries most likely to have a coup in 2014’. It is based on the work of political scientist #Jay_Ulfelder. The post includes a coloured map of the globe with countries coloured from light yellow to dark brown. And as you might guess, the darker the country, the more likely it will see a violent overthrow of the government some time this year.

#JOURNALISM #POLITICS #cartography #color-coded_maps #political_science

Teju Cole’s 9 questions about Britain you were too embarrassed to ask
►http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/09/03/teju-coles-9-questions-about-britain-you-were-too-embarrassed-to-ask

Teju Cole parodie #Max_Fisher, qui l’interviewe.

Erasing Palestine From the Map » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
►http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/20/erasing-palestine-from-the-map

A foreign affairs blogger [#Max_Fisher] for The Washington Post recently posted “40 Maps that explain the world.” Some of the maps are important (“Economic inequality around the world”), some are interesting (“Meet the world’s 26 remaining monarchies”), but others grossly distort the reality they purportedly represent. Chief among this latter category is “How far Hamas’s rockets can reach into Israel” .

http://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/dropzone/2013/08/WashPostMap.jpg

... a map showing where and with what deadly ramifications Israel’s responses have taken place, such as this one (1) produced by the Alliance for Justice in the Middle East at Harvard University and the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, didn’t make the Post’s list.

Any attempt to cartographically represent the context within which Hamas’s rockets and Israel’s “response” may have been launched, such as this UN map (2), is also entirely missing from the Post’s compilation.

In addition to nearly erasing the Palestinian West Bank altogether, the Post’s map reveals nothing about the multiple ways in which the territory is occupied by Israel. Maps of Israeli-only roads, checkpoints, the separation barrier, settlements, and the ethnically-based divisions of the West Bank (such as these from Btselem, the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (3), and The Applied Institute for Research – Jerusalem (4)) don’t, according to the Washington Post, help explain this part of the world as much as Gene’s map of Hamas’s rocket-firing potential.

The Washington Post’s map of choice sheds no light on the Palestinian villages within Israel that were ethnically cleansed and destroyed in 1948-1949. References to these maps from the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA) and Visualizing Palestine could have at least begun to cartographically resurrect these erased landscapes.

The Dangers of Distorted Cartography

In sum, The Washington Post’s map explains very little about this part of the world. But what the map does reveal is The Washington Post’s myopic view of Israel and Palestine. The ongoing colonization of Palestine by Israel is reduced and reversed, in this map’s representation, to a normal country that must fend off existential threats from its shadowy neighbors. The effects of this distorted cartography are dangerous—erasing the geographies of Palestine is yet another step in the ongoing occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

#Robert_Ross is an Assistant Professor of Global Cultural Studies at Point Park University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

(1)

http://gazasiege.org/images/gazasiege_map_jan2009.jpg

(2)
►http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_gaza_blockade_map_june_2012_english.pdf

(3)

http://www.icahd.org/sites/default/files/Map4_WB_Closures_2.jpg

(4) ▻http://www.arij.org/images/stories/pictures/maps/Geopolitical%20map%20of%20the%20west%20bank%202009.jpg

#Palestine #Israël #manipulation #inversion #cartographie