Kiwis for Balanced Reporting on the Middle East
Just as we all need to see things with both eyes open to see in depth, we need more than one perspective to see the news in anything more than the flat, literally one-eyed, view of the Middle East which is presented by the mainstream news media in New Zealand.
This page will not necessarily present material for or against either side in the conflict; they will, however, present points of view which are systematically ignored or so thoroughly distorted that they become meaningless. It is up to the readers to weigh the evidence and perhaps do some more searching on their own, before making up their minds.
Jerusalem Post The Palestinian perspective is well-covered in the NZ media. For an opportunity to read balanced articles which the media does not normally provide.
February, 2012
Israel Healing African Terror Victim
‘Pastor Umar Mulinde was viciously attacked in his home country of Uganda in response to his work as a preacher. Friends from Israel's JerusalemOnlineU.com jumped in to help, bringing him to Israel for treatment in Tel HaShomer Sheba hospital's burn unit.’
U-Tube Video
February, 2012
Author Douglas Murray Rails against those
who Refuse to deal with Iran
‘British conservative author Douglas Murray recently gave a speech in front of both colleagues and opponents about why the threat of Iran is real and must be dealt with. It’s a good one from start to finish:’ Click HERE for Video
ANALYSIS — Is Israel a ‘Good’ Democracy?
January 31, 2012
By Amichai Magen
Israel is a democracy. It has been so consistently, without a single episode of slippage into authoritarianism, at least since its modern national independence in 1948 and in some respects earlier —with the formation of the Yishuv's egalitarian and accountable pre-state institutions. Israel is an electoral, parliamentary democracy in that its political authorities are sovereign; it maintains universal adult suffrage; recurring, free, competitive, and fair elections; a multitude (some would say over abundance) of political parties; and alternative sources of public information.
As a 64-year-old democracy Israel is . . . . Read More
When will the West act against persecution of Christians in the Middle East?
February 1, 2012
By Benjamin Weinthal and Giulio Meotti
Published January 30, 2012 — FoxNews.com
The case of the Iranian pastor sentenced to death for his faith has attached a human face to the horrible situation of Christians in the Middle East. Read more
Lanzmann documentary on Holocaust
to have its premiere on Turkish state TV
January 17, 2012
Turkish TV station TRT will become the first state broadcaster in the Muslim world to air French director Claude Lanzmann's ten-hour-long documentary ‘Shoah’. The film on the extermination of European Jews has been subtitled for the first time in Turkish, Arabic and Persian. CLICK HERE
The Aladdin Project has books freely available for download: CLICK HERE
UNESCO stops funding Palestinian magazine
following PMW exposure of Hitler glorification
‘UNESCO strongly deplores and condemns the reproduction of such inflammatory statements’
by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
Following Palestinian Media Watch's exposure of the Palestinian Authority funded Zayzafuna magazine's presenting Hitler as a role model for youth, and the Wiesenthal Center's protest to UNESCO, UNESCO has announced it is no longer funding the magazine:
- Letter from the office of UNESCO's Director-General:
- "UNESCO is shocked and dismayed by the content of the February issue, and has requested more detailed information and clarification from the editors of the magazine and to Palestinian Authority. UNESCO strongly deplores and condemns the reproduction of such inflammatory statements in a magazine associated with UNESCO's name and mission and will not provide any further support to the publication in question."
When it comes to Israel, why is the world silent?
Sun Dec 11 2011
By Ron Prosor
Silence. Just silence from the U.N. Silence from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. And silence from major media outlets throughout the world.
Imagine for just a moment if this were happening to cities in, say, Texas. Imagine that the citizens of El Paso, Laredo and San Antonio have to stay inside their homes. Schools are closed, businesses are shut and people have to suspend their lives. Not because of some natural disaster or a nuclear or chemical accident, because groups in Mexico have purchased and are firing thousands of deadly missiles at Texans across the border. Sometimes a school is hit, sometimes a grocery store, and every so often someone is killed.
Imagine a similar occurrence in Seattle, Detroit or Cleveland - with rockets raining in from Canada.
Your reaction to this imagined scenario is, no doubt, incredulity. The very thought of terrorists in another country attacking Americans at random is ludicrous. You know the president would immediately order the U.S. military to respond, root out the terrorists and make sure that the Canadian or Mexican governments clearly understood that this behavior would not be tolerated. The United Nations Security Council would immediately condemn this infringement on a country's sovereignty and the safety of its citizens. The U.N. charter makes a country's self-defense as legal as it is logical. This is universally understood.
So if it is natural to be outraged and support the defense against terrorists who attack Texas, or England or Russia or China, why is it not natural to support the same for Israel? Since the beginning of October, more than 70 rockets and missiles have rained down on southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, which remains under the control of the Hamas terrorist organization. Last week, Israel's densely populated northern towns were hit by rockets fired from Lebanon.
Hamas deliberately fires rockets into the heart of Israel's major cities, which have exploded on playgrounds, near kindergarten classrooms and homes. Last month, a man was killed when a rocket struck his car on his evening commute home. Many more people have been injured. In the last month alone, more than a million Israelis had to stay home from work and more than 200,000 students were unable to attend school. You don't read about this because if it's covered at all, it's buried in the back pages of newspapers.
Although these horrific attacks should appall good people everywhere, not one word of condemnation has come from the Security Council in the United Nations. Peace activists that regularly criticize my country are silent on this one as well.
Underlying the violence that continues to emanate from Gaza is a deeply rooted culture of incitement. Last month, would-be Palestinian suicide bomber Wafa al-Biss was released from prison as part of an exchange for kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit. Al-Biss offered a breathtaking challenge to cheering schoolchildren at her Hamas welcome-home rally. She said, “I hope you will walk the same path that we took and God willing, we will see some of you as martyrs.” Her crime? She tried to kill doctors, nurses and patients by blowing herself up in an Israeli hospital. Luckily, she failed to detonate.
These are the poisonous values that are being fed to the next generation of children in Gaza. When Israel looks at children, it sees the future. When Hamas looks at children, it sees suicide bombers and human shields. If only incitement were confined to Gaza. It also pervades the official institutions of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank - and many other corners of our region. In schools, mosques and media, generation after generation of children across the Middle East have been taught to hate, vilify and dehumanize Israelis and Jews.
The intolerance all too common in the Middle East finds its way around the world, even entering the halls of the U.N. Today the U.N. is home to a triple standard: one standard for democracies, a different standard for dictatorships and a special, unobtainable standard for Israel. So I pose this ethical question, not from a philosophy course at a great university but based very much in the real world: If it is not OK to fire deadly rockets at the citizens of any of the other 193 member states that make up the United Nations, why is the world silent when the victims are Israelis? Ron Prosor is Israel's permanent representative to the United Nations.
November 30, 2011
Media Psychology 101 — Framing Israel:
Is Fair Coverage Possible?
…. “This is the first part of a guest post by Cherryl Smith, PhD, a Professor of English in Rhetoric and Composition at California State University, Sacramento. She is currently writing a book on media framing of Israel. …. ” Read On
Goldstone rejects 'apartheid' slander of Israel - New York Times
November 8, 2011
Israel and the Apartheid Slander Published: October 31, 2011 CLICK HERE
“…. In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute: “Inhumane acts ... committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Israeli Arabs — 20 percent of Israel’s population — vote, have political parties and representatives in the Knesset and occupy positions of acclaim, including on its Supreme Court. Arab patients lie alongside Jewish patients in Israeli hospitals, receiving identical treatment. ….
September 27, 2011
'The Australian' has an article by Greg Sheridan,CLICK HERE to read.
Anti-Semitism the real issue that dare not speak its name
September 25, 2011
Truth and lies at the theatre of the absurd
By Melanie Phillips
Some 1941 years ago, the Romans conquered the ancient Jewish kingdom of Judea by force and attempted to expunge all memory of the Jews’ claim to the land by renaming the area Palestine. Two days ago, Mahmoud Abbas attempted to do the same thing by diplomatic force at the UN.
The whole thing was of course a grotesque charade, outdone in its surrealism only by the reaction of the western world. For the UK and US governments and others said that such a unilateral declaration of independence was a setback for peace and a Palestinian state, which could only be achieved through negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel.
Not so. Negotiations do not have to be re-started in order to achieve this. If Abbas really wanted a state of Palestine to live in peace alongside Israel, he could have said a handful of words in New York which would have ended the conflict there and then and brought such a state into actual being.
For all that is needed is for Abbas to say, in Arabic as well as English, that he accepts the right of Israel to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people, and that his own people will no longer wage war against it. If he were to say that, and to match those words by deeds to show he meant them – for example, by ending the incitement in the educational materials and media under his command to hatred and murder of Jews and Israelis – there would be peace and a state of Palestine.
But this will never happen. For the dominant assumption in the west, the assumption that underpins virtually every political utterance on the subject and every interview on the BBC and the reporting even in notionally pro-Israel papers such as the Times or Telegraph that a state of Palestine would end the Middle East conflict, is not only wholly mistaken but is to mis-state that conflict.
For peace to be achieved, the belligerent has to stop making war. The Arabs have made war on the Jews in their ancient homeland since Israel became a state and indeed for three decades before that. For a solution to be arrived at, it’s necessary correctly to state the problem. The problem is not the absence of a state of Palestine. The problem is that the Arabs want to get rid of Israel.
For anyone paying attention to the actual words used, the evidence was there in Abbas’s own speech. His people, he declared, had been suffering for 63 years. What happened 63 years ago? The state of Israel came into being. So what Abbas was saying was not that the absence of a state of Palestine was the problem. The problem for him was the very existence of the state of Israel.
He also said:
‘...we agreed to establish the State of Palestine on only 22 per cent of the territory of historical Palestine – on all the Palestinian Territory occupied by Israel in 1967.'
But the West Bank and Gaza were not 22 per cent of historical; Palestine; they were far, far less. It was Israel that was established on a fraction of ‘historical Palestine’, having settled for that fraction as better than nothing at all. And if the Palestinians truly had accepted a state merely in the West Bank and Gaza, why then did they refuse the offer of precisely such a state on more than 90 per cent of that territory which was made to them in 2000 and 2008? Why does the very Palestinian logo on their flags and insignia show a map of this state of Palestine to which they aspire as having swallowed up Israel altogether?
In Ramallah on September 16, Abbas made his position even plainer. 'The Palestinian people', he stated, 'have been abused for 63 years, generation after generation, under occupation'.
No, it is not the settlements but the existence of Israel itself that is the problem which Abbas believes UN recognition of a state of Palestine would help resolve. It is Israel itself that Abbas wants to subsume into Palestine. In other words, as he himself has previously said, declaring UDI at the UN was a way of internationalising the conflict with Israel. UN recognition of a state of Palestine is therefore not a move towards peace but a signal for genocidal war.
The truly incredible bone-headedness (or worse) of the western response was encapsulated by a BBC Today programme interview on Friday morning with the UK’s former ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock. Sir Jeremy declared that a state of Palestine was ‘not a threat to Israel’, and that the Palestinians were ‘desperate’ to end the ‘injustice’ done to them and to restart negotiations. Eh? What ‘injustice’? The Palestinians are the ones waging war on Israel, not the other way round. What desperation, when they have repeatedly turned down the offer of a state? What keenness to re-start negotiations, when Israel repeatedly offers them negotiations and they repeatedly refuse?
Even worse, Sir Jeremy also said that what was much more important for Israel than a state of Palestine was not to imperil any further its relationship with other countries in the region such as Egypt, Turkey or Iran. What?? Doesn’t Sir Jeremy realise that the Palestinians are despised by every country in the region? Hasn’t Sir Jeremy noticed that Turkey is now pursuing an Islamist agenda, with appalling implications not just for Israel but for the interests of the UK and the west, and that Egypt may well fall to the Islamists too? And as for Israel not upsetting Iran by its attitude to the Palestinians, hasn’t Sir Jeremy Greenstock understood that Iran is threatening Israel with nuclear extinction because it is a Jewish state? On what planet is Sir Jeremy Greenstock living?
To anyone with a scintilla of knowledge of the nine-decade Arab and Islamic war against the Jews in the Middle East, Abbas’s speech at the UN consisted of lie after lie after lie. He claimed that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were illegal and in breach of international law (untrue); he claimed that the settlements were in breach of the terms of negotiation (untrue; it is Abbas’s own unilateral declaration which tears up successive bilateral treaties); he claimed that Israel was targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza (untrue; Israeli attacks, which carefully avoid hitting civilians wherever possible, are only in defence of its civilians against Hamas attacks --with which Abbas has now publicly lined himself up, not least by hailing as ‘martyrs’ those in Gaza who murder Israelis).
As for his claim that the settlements were the reason there was no peace, this was demonstrably ridiculous. As Netanyahu said in his own fine speech at the UN:
‘President Abbas ... said that the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the settlements. Well, that's odd. Our conflict has been raging for -- was raging for nearly half a century before there was a single Israeli settlement in the West Bank. So if what President Abbas is saying was true, then the -- I guess that the settlements he's talking about are Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jaffa, Be'er Sheva. Maybe that's what he meant the other day when he said that Israel has been occupying Palestinian land for 63 years. He didn't say from 1967; he said from 1948. I hope somebody will bother to ask him this question because it illustrates a simple truth: The core of the conflict is not the settlements. The settlements are a result of the conflict.’
History records that, from the 1930s onwards, the Jews have never stood in the way of a Palestinian state if that would end the war of annihilation the Arabs have continuously waged against them. A Palestine state has been on repeated offer. The Arab response has always been to refuse and instead to attempt to destroy the Jews’ presence in their own ancient homeland. As certain Palestinian spokesmen themselves have acknowledged, Palestinian identity was itself constructed purely to destroy Israel. The reason for the objection to a state of Palestine is that it would be used to bring about the final destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, an aspiration which Abbas never ceases to proclaim.
As Netanyahu said in his speech:
‘We believe that the Palestinians should be neither the citizens of Israel nor its subjects. They should live in a free state of their own. But they should be ready, like us, for compromise. And we will know that they’re ready for compromise and for peace when they start taking Israel’s security requirements seriously and when they stop denying our historical connection to our ancient homeland.
I often hear them accuse Israel of Judaizing Jerusalem. That’s like accusing America of Americanizing Washington, or the British of Anglicizing London. You know why we’re called “Jews”? Because we come from Judea.”’
What Israel should be stating explicitly and repeatedly is that it is the Jews who are the indigenous people of what are now Israel and the West Bank – and indeed beyond. Commentators often refer to Judea and Samaria as ‘Biblical’ names as if they can therefore be disregarded today. Not so. Judea and Samara were the true historical names for Israel and the West Bank, used in international treaties and official documents of the Palestine Mandate period, and throughout which land the Jews were given the legal right to settle. Only now as the west mimics the Arab attempt to airbrush the Jews out of their own history have these names become synonymous with Jewish extremism.
What really illustrates the west’s moral bankruptcy over Israel and the Palestinians is that the day before the Abbas charade, the very same UN gave the stage to Iran’s Ahmadinejad from where he spouted his murderous lies and hatred of the west, including his implication that 9/11 was a US conspiracy. This is the leader of a regime which executes teenagers for homosexuality and which is developing nuclear weapons to commit genocide against Israel and hold the western world hostage. Yet far from expressing outrage at this use of the UN by such a man, far from drawing attention indeed to the utter suicidal madness of having the UN as a global policeman when its own Security Council is now chaired by Lebanon, a country in thrall to Iran through Hezbollah, the appearance of Ahmadinejad elicited barely a shrug by western media which instead worked themselves into a frenzy over Abbas and the ‘plight’ of the Palestinians.
Netanyahu again called it right. He said the world was menaced by a malignancy.
‘That malignancy is militant Islam. It cloaks itself in the mantle of a great faith, yet it murders Jews, Christians and Muslims alike with unforgiving impartiality. On September 11th it killed thousands of Americans, and it left the twin towers in smouldering ruins. Last night I laid a wreath on the 9/11 memorial. It was deeply moving. But as I was going there, one thing echoed in my mind: the outrageous words of the president of Iran on this podium yesterday. He implied that 9/11 was an American conspiracy. Some of you left this hall. All of you should have.'
Netanyahu called the UN a ‘theatre of the absurd’ and the ‘house of lies’. The western media mostly didn’t bother to report that, just as they didn’t bother to report much of his speech. What they are really waiting for is for the Palestinians to resume attacking Israelis as a sign of their ‘desperation’. They won’t report those attacks either. But they will report the Israelis’ response and call that ‘aggression’. That’s the prospect over which the western media, sensing a final kill, are now slavering.
September 5, 2011
Understanding UN Bias Against Israel — Invite to Durban 3 Protest, NYC, Sept 21
This UTube video was produced to advertise a demonstration being held in front of the UN building prior to Durban III. The facts contained in the video are critical to an understanding of the threat posed and why NZ should really not be participating in the Durban III conference.
September 5, 2011
Palmer Report: Israel Vindicated, Media Shrugs
Visit honestreporting.com
August 23, 2011
Do you wonder what is missing from recent newspaper reports on the events in Gaza and Israel? To read the human story behind the headlines and view the trauma caused by rockets being fired from Gaza at Israeli civilians. We can guarantee that you will not read or see this in any of your local newspapers.
Six Years, Until When? 1 million Israelis under missile fire
By: Noam Bedein
Director
Sderot Media Center
www.SderotMedia.org.il
MOUSEOVER (Don't click on them) PHOTOS FOR LARGER VIEW
The Synagogue that was hit
It took me 20 minutes to drive to Ashdod from Tel-Aviv on Sunday morning August 21st, 2 days after Ashdod, the fifth biggest city in Israel, was hit by seven Grad missiles fired from Hamas controlled Gaza. According the IDF Spokesperson’s Office, over 100 rockets and mortars were fired towards Israel since Friday August 19th.
As has been the routine in Sderot for the past five years, my car windows are rolled down, the radio volume is lowered, and I get ready to hear a siren that will give me and everyone else 45 seconds to find a safe place. On the bright side, 45 seconds to run for your life is an improvement over the 15 seconds you have in Sderot.
The local news on the car radio announces burial plans for Yossi Ben Sasson, age 38, who was killed from the Grad missile the night before in Beer Sheva when he was taking his wife, nine months pregnant, for a medical check up. And the news item that follows is about a young woman fighting for her life at the Soroka hospital, also in Beer Sheva.
I reach ‘Admor Me'gor’ street in Ashdod, where only a few days before — at 8:12 a.m. on Friday morning, August 19th, — a Grad missile exploded within range of 900 yeshiva students and high school kids who were beginning their school day.
Yakkov Bozaglo, 56, who was taking shelter from the Grad missile on Friday morning, described the huge explosion and the scene of three seriously injured men as they left their small synagogue; how they were treated for shrapnel wounds on the spot, while thanking G-d that the high school and elementary students were set to arrive 15 minutes after the explosion.
Driving onto the next scene where a missile penetrated three meters deep into the sand, burrowing into a ditch between two synagogues, causing damage, but leaving all the holy books and Ark with the Torah scroll unscathed.
Ariel Zeldman, age 26, who came to see his synagogue that morning, where he prayed during the attack, described how everyone ran outside, crossed the street to the 7th floor apartment building to take cover. Ariel described how he held the hand of an elderly man who only reached half of the distance and was also injured by debris, even though he had 45 seconds to find shelter.
Leaving Ashdod and driving south towards Sderot, ‘the bomb shelter capital of the world’, there was a sign post on Route 4, next to Nitzan's tent city encampment, with signs screaming: ‘6 years, until when?!’.
The tents and sign depict the plight of Jewish residents from Gush Katif in Gaza who have been living in refugee-type conditions in Nitzan since the IDF pulled all civilians and military personnel out of Gaza exactly six years ago, in August 2005.
Six years ago, these and other Gush Katif residents pleaded their case to the government and the media, warning that missiles will reach Ashdod if they and the IDF leave Gaza. Today, they point out that the 60 Kilometer range Iranian Grad missiles in Gaza can easily reach the other tent encampments on Sderot Rothschild in Tel-Aviv. The former Gaza residents are genuinely concerned about attacks on other Israeli communities, including those in Tel Aviv, even though the leaders of the Tel Aviv encampment probably favored the forced expulsion of Jewish families from Gaza.
As the Internet site News1 headlined on Saturday night, one million Israelis in a 40 Kilometer radius from Gaza are now under missile fire.
While Iron Dome batteries haves been erected near Beershava and Ashkelon, Ofakim and other Israeli communities can only dream of having an Iron dome battery to protect their town
MOUSEOVER (Don't click on them) PHOTOS FOR LARGER VIEW
The bathroom and where the missile crashed in
The Kitchen
The Bedroom after the explosion
The cement walls shattered in the kitchen
Ofakim, a development town located 20 Kilometers from Gaza with a population of 30,000 people, was hit Saturday night by a Grad missile which exploded directly into the Amoyal family’s home. The rocket left their family home completely destroyed, something I hadn’t seen in five years of living and documenting Qassam attacks on Sderot.
At the Amoyal home I saw brick walls up to 20 centimeters thick crashed and blown away into the kitchen, demolishing four rooms of the entire house, leaving Kfir Amoyal, age 25 , alone, shivering in his bedroom, suffering from shock and from light wounds.
Attacks from Gaza and Israeli targeted responses will continue for the foreseeable future. To our dismay, global media will continue focusing on Israel’s response to terrorism while ignoring or minimizing the terrorists' and their leaders' actions and constant declarations of their intention to wipe us off the map and out of existence.
In addition to our remarkable military capabilities, Israel needs a policy corollary to the Iron Dome when it comes to dealing with the driving force behind the Gaza terror regime and their counterparts in other parts of the country.
Israel must deal with the root of the problem and not waste time debating which town to protect or continue throwing money at complex and expensive technology that will, at best, only prevent a small percentage of rockets from reaching their targets.
Noam Bedein
Director
Sderot Media Center
www.SderotMedia.org.il
July 13, 2011
The Palestinian Authority is working hard to ensure that the next generation grows up to believe that the State of Israel is really Arab Palestine, an independent, different country entirely.
PA government-linked PA TV recently ran two programs – picked up and translated by the media watchdog organization Palestinian Media Watch — which underscored this point.
The first is the PA TV children's program, The Best Home, broadcast June 24 on the Fatah-linked network. The scene translated by PMW involved Arab boys in costume dancing a debka to a song, “My Country Palestine.”
The lyrics include towns and cities in Israel, such as Safed (Tzfat)) Tiberias, Acre (Akko)) Haifa, Nazareth, Beit Shean, Jaffa and Ramle (which is not the same as Ramallah) as all being part of an Arab Palestine.
A second song, a music video featuring a male vocalist originally broadcast on the Fatah-backed PA TV program on May 13, was rebroadcast on June 24.
The lyrics to this song also claim the Israeli cities of Ashkelon, Akko, Haifa, Jaffa (Yafo), Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Tiberias all are part of the Palestinian Authority, as follows:
Jaffa, Akko, Haifa and Nazareth are ours.
[I], Muhammad, sing about the Galilee and the Golan (Heights)
Jaffa, Akko, Haifa and Nazareth are ours.
[I], Kabha, sing about the Galilee and the Golan (Heights)
From Bethlehem to Jenin is Palestinian
Ramle, Lod and Sakhnin are Palestinian
Nowhere is more beautiful than Jerusalem
no matter how much we travel
From Tzfat to Al-Badhan (near Nablus) is Palestinian
Tiberias and Ashkelon are Palestinian.
In essence, the Ramallah-based PA government led by Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, seen as a moderate throughout the world, is working to educate its children, while reinforcing to the adults, that Israel simply does not exist. It accomplishes this task through a variety of methods, including constant conditioning through cultural media such as music, song and dance which are then broadcast to hundreds of thousands throughout the PA. Click on Related Organisations and choose Palestinian Media Watch to see more proof.
July 5, 2011
Ruth Dudley Edwards: Gaza-bound vessel really a ship of fools
Sunday June 26 2011
Whether they know it or not, anti-Semitism is driving these activists on a 'mercy mission', says Ruth Dudley Edwards
It was the Fifties and I was about seven when I pointed to the photograph of Hitler in my republican granny's lair and said: “What about the Jews, grandmother?” “British propaganda,” she replied. . . . read full article
June 29, 2011
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to visit Israel
American basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will visit Israel in July and meet with Rabbi Israel Meir Lau to discuss a film that he is making about World War II, the rabbi said recently.
The film is based on the book ‘Brothers in Arms’, which Abdul-Jabbar co-authored and deals with the American troops who liberated Nazi concentration camps in the end of World War II. Abdul-Jabbar's own father served on the 761st Tank Battalion, which liberated the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Germany.
Among the Jews rescued from the camp were two children: Rabbi Lau and his brother, Naftali Lavie. Abdul-Jabbar and Lau met for the first time 14 years ago, during the former's first visit to Israel.
‘The fact that such a famous basketball player, and a Muslim, is about to attach himself to the Holocaust issue is very exciting,’ Lau said. ‘I will certainly give my blessing to this initiative.’
The retired athlete will arrive early in July as a guest of the Foreign Ministry and the Israeli Consulate in New York, and will participate in the Jerusalem Film Festival, where he will present the basketball documentary that he produced, ‘On the Shoulders of Giants.’
Lau said that Abdul-Jabbar's father, Ferdinand L. Alcindor, had a dying wish: ‘That his son visit Israel, and meet the little boy that he rescued from Buchenwald and turned into a prominent rabbi.’
Lau said he clearly remembers how an African-American solider came up to him during the liberation, picked him up, and told the residents of the German city of Weimar: ‘Look at this sweet kid, he isn't even eight yet. This was your enemy, he threatened the Third Reich. He is the one against whom you waged war, and murdered millions like him.’
Decades later, Lau said, his rescuer's son found him.
‘I think that what he is about to do is a very significant contribution to human solidarity. It comes to say that there is no discrimination between white and black people,’ Lau said. ‘They were among the liberators as well, and they understand better what it is like to go from slavery to freedom.’
Abdul-Jabbar, who towers at 7' 2'' (2.18 m), was born in 1947 in New York as Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. He became known as one of the best basketball players of all time, and retired in 1989 after 20 seasons. In 1971 he converted to Islam and changed his name. After retiring from basketball he became a historian, writer, actor and producer.
Submitted to the Herald On Sunday on June 24, 2011
I refer to your ‘Strange but True’ article, ‘Rabbi's dog gets death sentence’, published on 19 June 2011 and sourced from AFP. [ http://www.nzherald.co.nz/strange-but-true ] It is still available to be read on your website, but as I did not buy a paper last Sunday I do not know if you published it in your print edition. I hope you did not.
This article is certainly strange, but it is also not true. Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv published the following apology for the story in its June 15 edition, after it was revealed that the only accurate detail was a dog running loose in a court building causing something of a commotion:
‘On the 3rd of June 2011 we published a story titled ‘Mea Shearim: Rabbinnical court orders the stoning of a dog’. The story reported a police complaint filed by the Association for Animal Rights (Tza'ar Ba'alei Chaim) against the Jerusalem Rabbinnical Court for Financial Affairs. The story also featured the total denial of the Chief Justice of the court, Yehoshua Levin, of the complaint. The Rabbi said, among other things: “There is no basis for the abuse of an animal, neither from the Halacha nor by common sense”. According to him, employees of the municipality have collected the dog from the court. The title of the story didn’t fully present the entire story, and we apologize for the anguish caused to the court and its members.’
This fabricated story casts scorn on Orthodox Jews and should not have been published anywhere. Why the story was considered to be newsworthy to New Zealanders, considering the tumultuous events in our own country and in the Middle East is a mystery to me, unless perhaps mocking and misrepresenting Orthodox Jews could be considered a ‘human interest’ story. If that is the case, it is appallingly misjudged.
Could you please ensure that this false story, which your newspaper (on-line and possibly print editions) chose to publish, is corrected in your newspaper.
June 23, 2011
One of our members wrote to TV One's Close Up feedback page after they ran the item on Harmet Sooden. The motive to join flotillas in the first place may be not so much about helping people as: “Fame, not freedom, is the goal of the latest flotilla bound for Gaza” Sooden was in World news when he was captured in Iraq in 2005.
Submitted to 'Close Up' TV One on June 20, 2011
I was disgusted with Mark's Close Up interview with the Israeli ambassador Shemi Tzur and the activist Harmeet Sooden. Twisted facts and selected video told a lie to what actually happened in the previous flotilla. Many "Peaceful Protesters" were found to be Militant mercenaries. Israel, a democracy like NZ, has 14 Arabs in Knesset (parliament). Arabs live as equals in Israel, unlike the neighboring Arab nations where the policy is Judenrein (no Jews). Ask yourself, where is the injustice and where are the uprisings occurring and why? The Islamic extremists and communists are out to destroy what we take for granted and our parents and grandparents fought and died for. Sooden is in effect supporting the militant extremist group Hamas and so was Close Up last night.
A discussion on Close Up's Facebook page is here: What happened to the harmeet sooden discussion?
June 21, 2011
Stuff reports on Nato airstrike in Libya
Stuff Web link It is good to see that the Libyan situation is being reported.
‘Libyan officials say a Nato strike had hit a civilian house in the capital, Tripoli, and killed several residents, . . . .’
However, Israel has been accused of killing civilians in the past the headline has been such that anyone reading it would have assumed that it was a fact that the Israeli Army had set out to kill the innocent.
June 21, 2011
Gaza's New Amusement Park
Gaza is commonly described in the media as a destitute place where people live in abject poverty and despair.
But another side of Gaza is revealed in a series of photographs showing local residents enjoying the opening of a new water amusement park. The park, which features massive water slides, rides for children and luscious green lawns is located in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, more often referred to as a ‘refugee camp.’
Nor is the Khan Younis park the only one of its kind in Gaza. The popular ‘Crazy Water Park’ in Gaza City last year became the target of Hamas militants intent on maintaining the image of Gaza as a place of squalor.
Last year, Gaza City became home to a new luxury shopping mall that rivals those elsewhere in the region.
A prominent Washington Post reporter recently noted that grocery stores in Gaza are ‘stocked wall-to-wall with everything from fresh Israeli yogurts and hummus to Coco Puffs smuggled in from Egypt. Pharmacies look as well-supplied as a typical Rite Aid in the United States.’
Arab journalists such as Egyptian Ashraf Al-Houl write that ‘the sight of merchandise and luxuries filling Gaza shops amazed me.’ Al-Houl went on to note that ‘a sense of absolute prosperity prevails, as manifested by the grand resorts along and near Gaza's coast.’
And last year, another Egyptian journalist reported on a ‘prosperous’ Gaza in which prices are low and luxury businesses are booming. He noted that Gaza’s markets are filled with a ‘plethora of goods.’ Israel allows Gaza to export to Europe products such as cherry tomatoes, strawberries, carnations, and peppers.
Nevertheless, Gaza continues to receive enormous amounts of humanitarian aid, enough to feed and care for almost the entire population for free.
June 20, 2011
Land Swaps and the 1967 Lines by Dore Gold
‘When President Barak Obama first made his controversial reference to the 1967 lines as the basis for future Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on May 19, 2011, he introduced one main caveat that stuck out: the idea that there would be “mutually agreed swaps” of land between the two sides. He added that both sides were entitled to “secure and recognized borders.” But the inclusion of land swaps also raised many questions.’ Read full article at The Weekly Standard
April 3, 2011
Goldstone Report discredited by own author
NZ newspapers were quick to publish the The Goldstone Report, published in September 2009 but the author South African judge Richard Goldstone has himself changed his view. In an opinion piece in the Washington Post on Friday, Mr Goldstone wrote that his conclusions about Israel appeared to have been wrong. New accounts indicated Israel had not deliberately targeted civilians. He said that if he had known what he knew now, ‘the Goldstone Report would have been a different document’. The NZ Herald published a news item on April 4th. Judge backtracks on Israel's conduct in Gaza
At the time the Goldstone report was published KBRM had to pay for an advert providing the missing truth concerning the Goldstone Report Ad # 9 UN REPORT ON GAZA: THE MISSING TRUTH and a member wrote to Foreign Minister Murray McCully — See New Zealand's Response to UN Report New Zealand's Response to UN Report.