you obviously have

      TOO MUCH TIME







Right now I'm...

Listening to :
Nick Cave : Murder Ballads

Reading :
Defying Hitler

Occupation :
CEO

Weirdest Dream lately :
I dreamed I was on the "other side" when my Dad was passing. I spoke to him and made sure he was okay. Then I woke, and knew he was gone. 30 minutes later, we got the call from the hospital saying that his blood pressure had crashed in the last 30 minutes.

Currently working on :
A BTVS related story called "Long Goodbye" which deals with a member of the Watchers Council being vamped as part of an experiment.
Also completing my nanowrimo effort.

::Menu::

Blogs

o Holz
o HazzardX
o Mike
o Wil
o Neil

Entertainment

o BuffyBB
o PVP
o TV Sans Pity
o Sexylosers
o Slashdot
o Mils Page
o Dilbert
o The Onion
o Savage Love

News

o Information Clearing House
o Greg Palast
o Noam Chomsky Archive
o Zmag
o Want to Know
o What Really Happened
o Guerrillanews
o Spin Sanity
o Media Whores On Line
o TV News Lies

Of interest

o James Randi
o Sceptics dictionary
o Urban legends debunked
o JunkScience
o Numberwatch
o Museum of Hoaxes
o Free Encyclopedia
o Superstring Theory
o Steal This Book

Quality Smut

o Miss Tracys
o Kirstin Archives


::Archives::
Jan 2003
Feb 2003
Mar 2003
Apr 2003
May 2003
Jun 2003
Jul 2003
Aug 2003
Sep 2003
Oct 2003
Nov 2003
Dec 2003
Jan 2004
Feb 2004
Mar 2004
Apr 2004
May 2004
Jun 2004
Jul 2004
Aug 2004
Sep 2004
Oct 2004
Nov 2004
Dec 2004
Jan 2005
Feb 2005
Mar 2005
Apr 2005
May 2005
Jun 2005

A blog for that outspoken and aggressive member of the Buffy Bulletin Board.
This page is powered by Blogger.
   Monday, June 06, 2005

Israelis stunned by TV indictment from within

When a Jewish person states the facts, can you still call him an anti-semite?
A documentary series by a respected newsreader delivers a damning assault on the settler movement.

A new documentary series stunned Israeli television viewers this week, not only by its unprecedented and searing indictment of Jewish settlement in the Palestinian territories, but also because of its unexpected source.

Often described as Israel's Walter Cronkite, 72-year-old Haim Yavin has fronted state television's evening news bulletins since 1968, cultivating a neutral image that put him, for most Israelis, at the symbolic heart of the national consensus.

All that changed on Tuesday with the broadcast of the first of five episodes of Land of the Settlers, the result of two-and-a-half years spent wandering the West Bank and Gaza with a miniature video camera.

Yavin's study of ultra right-wing Jewish settlers, the Israeli soldiers who guard them, the native Palestinians whose lives they dominate and the small number of Israeli rights activists, lawyers and journalists campaigning against them, has caused him to be denounced as representing the far left of Israeli sensibility.

"I cannot really do anything to relieve this misery, other than to document it, so that neither I nor those like me will be able to say that we saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing," he says in the film. "I did not move left. The country moved right."

The documentary dwells on the machinery of occupation - the roadblocks, fences, walls, settler roads and curfews - set up to support and defend the settlements.

In Hebron, where the army has helped a few hundred fundamentalist settlers seize the heart of a Palestinian city, a soldier tells Yavin that settlers are inciting him to shoot and kill Palestinian children.

A leader of the Hebron settlers tells him that Palestinians should be told to leave the country immediately or be bombed from the air.

He films graffiti on a wall, "Arabs to the crematoriums".

A Russian-born Israeli border policeman assures Yavin that "I am only following orders". Another soldier confides: "We have set up a slave camp here. We are committing crimes here."

Reviewing the first episode in the mass daily Yedioth Ahronoth, journalist Raanan Shaked wrote: "Every caring Israeli, every humane Israeli, should get up next Saturday, go to the settlement nearest to his place of residence and drag its inhabitants, kicking and screaming, across the road to the side of sanity."

The documentary has been less warmly received by right-wing Israelis and by the fundamentalist settler movement, which this week accused Yavin of anti-Semitism and hate speech.

The religious Zionists of the settler movement believe that God covenanted the Jews with an exclusive right and religious duty to inhabit all the territories between the Nile in Egypt and the Euphrates in Iraq.

Denouncing Yavin in the pro-settler newspaper Hatzofe, Hagai Huberman wrote: "Of course there is no such thing as the holiness of the Land of Israel for him. He has never heard of this term."

Secular Israeli governments of both the left and right have encouraged, funded and armed settlers to move into the occupied territories, arguing that it is Jewish destiny to control them and that they are vital to Israel's security.

But tensions between the 250,000 settlers and Israel's secular majority have escalated sharply in recent months. This followed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's decision to reverse his lifelong support of settlements and withdraw from the Gaza Strip and four isolated settlements in the West Bank.

Faced with a storm of condemnation and calls for his dismissal, Yavin's defenders say that he sought to balance his series by including coverage of atrocities committed by Palestinians. His superiors said that he has done nothing to breach his contract. In fact, the program is not being broadcast on his own channel, which declined to show it, but on a smaller commercial channel, Telad.

Cynical commentators noted this week that Telad is about to lose its broadcast franchise and may feel it has nothing to lose by presenting such provocative fare to audiences who generally show little interest in what happens in the West Bank and Gaza.



Comments: Post a Comment