publishedmedium:the ny times

  • Does Being ’Zionist Feminist’ Mean Betraying Women for Israel? - Tikun Olam תיקון עולם
    https://www.richardsilverstein.com/2017/03/16/zionist-feminist-mean-betraying-women-israel


    Rasmea Odeh participates in Detroit Black Lives Matter rally

    March 16, 2017 by Richard Silverstein Leave a Comment

    Yesterday, I wrote a critique of Emily Shire’s diatribe against the Women’s Strike Day USA protest. She especially singled out platform statements supporting Palestinian rights. Shire, a professed Zionist feminist, dismissed the criticisms of Israeli Occupation contained in the event platform as irrelevant to the issue of women’s rights. Then she launched into an attack on one of the conveners of the Strike Day, Rasmea Odeh. Shire alleges that Odeh is a convicted terrorist and former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a U.S. designated terror group.

    A comment Deir Yassin published yesterday here got me to thinking further about this issue. I researched Rasmea’s case and the torture she endured. My view is this is precisely the sort of case and individual any women’s movement should embrace. Here is a summary of the facts of the case. In 1969, a cell of the PFLP planted bombs at a Jerusalem Super-Sol. They exploded, killing two Hebrew University students.
    shin bet torture

    Afterward, security forces arrested Odeh and jailed her without charges or access to counsel. She was tortured, by her account, for 45 days. Here is how she described her treatment in testimony to a UN commission on torture in Geneva:

    …”They beat me with sticks, plastic sticks, and with a metal bar. They beat me on the head and I fainted as a result of these beatings. They woke me up several times by throwing cold water in my face and then started all over again.”

    In addition to this physical torture, Odeh also faced sexual torture. Her father, a U.S. citizen, was also arrested and beaten, “and once they brought in my father and tried to force him under blows to take off his clothes and have sexual relations with me.” Later, interrogators “tore my clothes off me while my hands were still tied behind my back. They threw me to the ground completely naked and the room was full of a dozen or so interrogators and soldiers who looked at me and laughed sarcastically as if they were looking at a comedy or a film. Obviously they started touching my body.” In her father’s presence, interrogators threatened to “violate me” and “tried to introduce a stick to break my maidenhead [hymen].” Shackled naked from the ceiling, interrogators “tied my legs, which were spread-eagled, and they started to beat me with their hands and also with cudgels.”

    Every method described in her account is known from previous descriptions of the treatment of Arab terror suspects. We know, for example, that Doron Zahavi, an IDF AMAN officer, raped Mustafa Dirani in Prison 504. The beatings and positions she describes are also previously described in testimony by the Public Committee to Prevent Torture in Israel. Therefore, it’s not just conceivable that Rasmea endured the treatment she claims, it’s almost a certainty. Especially given that two Israelis were killed in the bombing.

    In summary, the Shin Bet tried to force her father to rape her. The interrogators themselves raped her and further degraded her sexually. And her father was tortured as a means of compelling her to confess. If this isn’t a perfect portrait of a cause that all feminists should embrace, I don’t know what is. So when Shire claims that Palestine is the farthest thing from what Women’s Strike Day’s mission should be, she’s engaging in willful blindness to the plight of another woman. A woman who happens to be Palestinian.

    Rasmea was tried and convicted in an Israeli military court, which features military judges and prosecutors using rules that favor the prosecution and shackle the hands of the defense. It can rule any evidence secret and so prevent the defense from seeing it, let alone rebutting it. Such a conviction could never withstand scrutiny under U.S. criminal procedures or even Israeli civilian courts.

    Further, Shire justifies her denunciation of Odeh by noting that Israel denies torturing Rasmea. So you have an Israeli security apparatus which is well-known for lying when evidence against it is damning. And you have Rasmea’s testimony, supported by scores of accounts by other security prisoners as to their treatment under similar circumstances. It reminds me of the story of the husband who returns home to find his wife in bed with another man. The man jumps out of bed and says: “Hey, this isn’t what this looks like. Nothing happened. I swear it. Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lyin’ eyes?” Emily Shire prefers to believe the agency that lies to her with a straight face. In doing so, she shows that she is a Zionist first and foremost; and a feminist second, if at all.

    As for the citizenship application infractions which the Justice Department is exploiting in order to expel her from the U.S.: she had been tortured once by Israel. Her decision to hide her previous conviction was surely founded on a fear that she might be deported once again back to Israel or Jordan (where Israel had sent her after her release from prison). The Jordanian security apparatus collaborates closely with Israeli intelligence. The former is quite handy with torture itself. Further, the U.S. judge in her first trial prohibited her attorney from raising torture as part of her defense. Her second trial will explicitly permit such testimony. Though I’m not privy to the defense strategy, I hope it will demand that a Shabak officer who participated in her interrogation testify at trial. And if his testimony diverges from the truth, I hope there is means to document this and hold him accountable. It would be one of the first times such an agent would be held accountable legally either inside or outside Israel.

    In the attacks against Rasmea, it’s certainly reasonable to bring up her participation in an act of terrorism: as long as you also examine the entire case against her. She admitted participation in the attack. But she denied placing the bomb in the supermarket. Despite her denial, this was the crime for which she was convicted. Further, Rasmea was released after serving ten years as part of a prisoner exchange. If Israel saw fit to release her, what is the point of using her alleged past crime against her today?

    As for her membership in a terror organization, she has long since left the militant movement. Her civic activism is solely non-violent these days. Further, virtually every leader of Israel for the first few decades of its existence either participated directly in, or ordered acts of terror against either British or Palestinian targets. Why do we grant to Israel what we deny to Palestinians?

    It may be no accident that two days before Shire’s broadside against the U.S. feminist movement (and Rasmea) in the NY Times, the Chicago Tribune published another hit-piece against her. The latter was credited to a retired Chicago professor. Her bio neglected to mention that she is also a Breitbart contributor who is the local coördinator for StandWithUs. This sin of omission attests either to editorial slacking or a deliberate attempt to conceal relevant biographical details which would permit readers to judge the content of the op-ed in proper context.

    The Tribune op-ed denounces Jewish Voice for Peace’s invitation to Rasmea to address its annual conference in Chicago later this month. As I wrote in last night’s post, what truly irks the Israel Lobby is the growing sense of solidarity among feminist, Jewish, Palestinian, Black and LGBT human rights organizations. Its response is to divide by sowing fear, doubt and lies in the media. The two op-eds in the Times and Tribute are stellar examples of the genre and indicate a coordinated campaign against what they deride as intersectionality.

    #Palestine #femmes #résistance #zionisme

  • The Digital Storytelling Tool

    „Digital Storytelling“ is a modern way of presenting multimedia stories on a web-based platform. Since 2012, more and more stories have been told in this way. The most well-known examples are “Snow Fall” from the NY Times and “Firestorm” by The Guardian. The stories show us what is possible in a new age of media coverage, where various aspects of a story can be presented through a combination of words, audios, images and videos.

    Inspired by these multimedia pioneers, Codevise and WDR developed their own tool for digital storytelling: Pageflow. In contrast to its predecessors, Pageflow can be used again and again, no matter what story is being told. Journalists can therefore focus on the content and no longer have to deal with the technical side of things. Pageflow operates like a micro content management system (CMS), which is specially developed to present a story in full screen and integrate audios, videos, text and pictures into a flowing narrative.

    #open_source #storytelling #web

  • 12月6日のツイート
    http://twilog.org/ChikuwaQ/date-151206

    My Tweeted Times tweetedtimes.com/ChikuwaQ?s=rgp - top stories by @chrislockwd posted at 12:00:03

    Papier is out! paper.li/ChikuwaQ/13277… Stories via @vajramrita @inthemoodfortw @chasse_spleen1 posted at 09:14:13

    Top story: Erick Erickson on Twitter: "I shot holes in the NY Times editorial -… twitter.com/ewerickson/sta…, see more tweetedtimes.com/ChikuwaQ?s=tnp posted at 08:31:23

  • The NY Times’ #Incorrections
    http://blog.thejerusalemfund.org/2014/01/the-ny-times-incorrections.html

    Recently the #New_York_Times published an article about Mohamad Assaf, the young Palestinian star from Gaza who’s vocal talents were recognized throughout the Arab world after winning Arab Idol. In the original text published on December 19th, the following was included:

    And the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, included in a message to Secretary of State John Kerry a YouTube video of Mr. Assaf singing longingly about cities in Israel that were once Palestinian. Mr. Netanyahu wrote, “Incitement and peace cannot coexist.”
    And....

    Mr. Assaf grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, an area that often has shortages of water, gas and electricity because of restrictions imposed by Israel.

    Well, on Dec. 31st, the New York Times ran a long correction:

    An article on Dec. 19 about Mohammed Assaf, a Palestinian singer from Gaza who has become a star in the Arab world after winning the “Arab Idol” competition, referred incorrectly to cities in Israel Mr. Assaf sings about. While they had largely Arab populations before Israel became a state in 1948, they were not “Palestinian” in the sense of being part of a Palestinian political entity. The article also referred incorrectly to shortages of water, gas and electricity in Gaza. While Israel places restrictions on some goods coming into Gaza, and many Palestinians blame Israel for shortages, they were worsened by Egypt’s closing of smuggling tunnels and by a tax dispute between the militant Hamas faction, which governs Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority. The article also referred incorrectly to Mr. Assaf’s travels to Cairo for “Arab Idol” auditions. The Sinai Desert is part of Egypt; he rode for hours through the Sinai from the border with Egypt, not to the border.

    Corrections are supposed to happen in newspapers when they print factually incorrect information or perhaps because of failures in copy editing like typos, misspellings and so on. What seems to have happened here is that someone complained that the New York Times would refer to cities in Palestine as Palestinian. So by making this correction what the New York Times is saying is that prior to Israel, there was no “Palestinian political entity” that these cities were a part of and thus referring to the cities as Palestinian is wrong.

    Well, that sure seems like news to the New York Times of yesteryear. Calling cities in Palestine “Palestinian cities” wasn’t a problem for the New York Times 1927 or in 1929 for example. Nor was it odd for the paper that today says those cities were not part of a “Palestinian political entity” to refer regularly to a “Palestine Government.”

    It is true that the native population of Palestine during that time did not have self-determination (also, they still don’t today) but does that mean there was no political entity there in Palestine? Yes, Palestine was under a British Mandate then, but does that make Palestine’s cities British? Syria was under French Mandate in the 1920s, does that mean Damascus was a French city? Was it not a Syrian city? Of course these were Syrian cities, and the New York Times reported such at the time.

    So why the correction when it comes to Palestinian cities? Its clear here that the editors chose to appease what was likely a disgruntled pro-Israel reader who was displeased at the very notion that the New York Times might mention a historical reality they reported on at the time today when a Zionist narrative has made significant strides in altering the discourse.

    As far as the correction regarding the siege on Gaza goes, yes, Egypt is playing a role, but to even put it remotely on par with the role Israel is playing in the siege is dishonest. Israel controls all entry and exit ports for commerce in Gaza. They control the ability of Palestinians in Gaza to enter the West Bank. They enforce a naval blockade. Egypt does none of this. It is Israel of course, not Egypt, which confirmed to US officials on “multiple occasions” that “as part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza...they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge” and that “they intend to keep the Gazan economy functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.”

    In the updated version of the Assaf story, the line about the siege has been edited to the following:

    Mr. Assaf grew up in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, an area that often has shortages of water, gas and electricity.

    No mention of Israel’s role in creating these shortages exists anymore.

    Corrections are meant to get a story that was factually wrong right. In this case, the New York Times’ correction only managed to succeed at obfuscation, distortion and probably at appeasing pro-Israel readers at the cost of the truth.

  • A Documentary Guide to [Israel] #Pinkwashing — PrettyQueer.com
    http://www.prettyqueer.com/2011/11/29/a-documentary-guide-to-pinkwashing-sarah-schulman-new-york-times-oped

    On Wednesday, November 23, 2011 I published an op-ed in the NY Times (Israel and ‘Pinkwashing’). This 900 word piece attempted to contextualize Pinkwashing. Here is a more detailed documentary history of #Brand_Israel, Israel’s campaign to re-brand itself in the minds of the world, as well as the development of pinkwashing as a funded, explicit and deliberate marketing project within Brand Israel.