20 November, 2009 — Aljazeera.net – URUK Net
Shooting the Messenger, Al Jazeera’s documentary on the deliberate killing and intimidation of journalists in conflict zones, has been nominated for a prestigious Emmy award.
In the past, members of the media were considered to be neutral in time of war. They were much like paramedics in the sense that their main concern was not victory, but saving lives. Continue reading
28 November, 2009 — Global Research
Ms. Steegmuller won The Director Award for Superpower at the August Sun Film & TV Film Festival where Superpower was also nominated for Best Feature Documentary and The Grand Peace Award. Superpower also received Honorable Mention in the Route 66 Film Festival, Best Feature Documentary from Moving Pictures Film & TV Contest, and was nominated for the Best North American Feature Documentary in the El Sawy, Egypt Film Festival.
A comprehensive film that asks tough questions and goes behind the scenes of America’s national security apparatus and military actions.
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The heart of Superpower lies in the analysis produced from a re-examination of history through a series of interviews with historians, documentarians, and academians such as Bill Blum, Chalmers Johnson, Michel Chossudovsky, and Noam Chomsky, and others with expertise in this subject such as the Executive Producer of The Unit, Command Sergeant (Ret.) Eric Haney; former Chief Economist for the US Department of Labor, Morgan Reynolds; three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Kathy Kelly; and Lt. Col. (Ret) Karen Kwiatkowski. Examining key moments in America’s history elicits a more consistent and plausible set of motives for US foreign policy actions guided by global expansion and military dominance, rather than the hyperbolic calls for democracy and totalitarian regime change that we have become so accustomed to hearing.
Should citizens trust that their government will keep them safe, a government that keeps secrets, and lies, in the name of national security? Does the simple act of withholding information lead to a world of eroding civil liberties and corruption? Superpower presents a view of US foreign policy, which lies in stark contrast to that depicted by corporate media, popular pundits, and US heads of state. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the US has emerged as the preeminent superpower of the world. Superpower illustrates how the United States has chosen to leverage that position to pursue a grand strategy which will ensure itself unilateral world domination through absolute economic and military superiority. It shows a consistent pattern of government deception.
The United States emerged from World War II with its industrial base still intact and the only nation with the atomic bomb. It was without question the most powerful country on earth. What was done with this unprecedented power, the effects it’s had on our Republic and the rest of the world is the story of Superpower.
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21 November, 2009 — bureauofcounterpropaganda.blogspot.com/
You may have come across a new ‘poll’ ‘Transfer’ Tops Solutions to Arab-Israeli Problem’ that’s doing the rounds.
According to Yaniv Reich, reproduced at Information Clearing House, ‘53% of Israelis think ethnic cleansing is the solution to the conflict’.
The actual question was ‘What’s the best solution for the Arab-Israeli conflict?’, and the response options were:
Two states for two peoples 30.8%
Transfer of Palestinians to another Arab country 53.2%
Maintain status quo 1.3%
Give Palestinians Jordanian citizenship 14.5%
As I’ve often pointed out before, if the response options don’t exhaust all the possibilities, if only by offering an ‘other’ option, it inevitably distorts the results. In most cases, as in this one, failure to include other possibilities, like extending Israeli citizenship to everyone in the area Israel currently controls, or federation with neighbouring countries, for example, means that the poll is actually more an exercise in propaganda than research —an attempt to form rather than to measure respondents’ views.
But in this case, that hardly matters. To his credit, Reich disclaims of Israel National News (Arutz 7) ‘its a right-wing rag’. As far as I’m aware, its principal audience is settlers, presumably, hard core English speaking olim. So the population ‘sampled’ is already heavily skewed to the extreme right.
At the same time, apparently picking up on Arutz 7’s claim of ‘more than 6,400 people surveyed’, he gives Arutz Sheva too much credit in describing the number of votes as ‘sample size “more than 6,400?’. In reality, the poll was not a survey as usually understood, where respondents are selected at random from identified ‘strata’ of a population to ensure that the sample reflects demographic characteristics of the whole population, like sex, age, location, etc. The ‘sample’ was entirely self selecting. We have no way of knowing whether respondents corresponded in any way even with the population of Arutz Sheva readers, much less with Israeli Jews, much less with Israelis in general.
Based on this thoroughly bogus online vote, it is not possible to say, as Reich does, that ‘53.2% of surveyed Israelis say the “solution” to the conflict was the ethnic cleansing (”transfer”) of Palestinians out of occupied Palestine and into other neighboring Arab countries’. Because there was no proper sampling, we can’t calculate the ‘margin of error — for all we know, it’s 90%, or 3%.
As for the other results, Arutz Sheva is actually more honest than Reich in claiming, ‘The “two-states for two peoples” solution being pushed by the United States and the international community received 30.8 percent support’, where Reich writes, ‘only 30.8% of Israelis support the “two-states for two peoples” framework for peace’. It’s not 30.8% of Israelis — it’s just 30.8% of those who voted in the poll, since they don’t represent anyone else. Bear in mind that this was an online poll, so anyone at all can vote, Israeli or not, Jewish or not.
According to Tel Aviv University’s October War and Peace Index, however, which does purport to be based on a genuine sample of 514, with a margin of error of 4.5%,
…the distribution of views among the Jewish public is quite clear : the majority, about two-thirds (64%), favor the principle [of “two states for two peoples”] compared to a third who oppose it.
So it’s highly probable that the proportion of Israeli Jews who support ‘two states for two peoples’ is actually more than double what this poll claims.
It’s worth reiterating that for Israeli Jews, ‘two states for two peoples’ does not necessarily mean The International Consensus. As I pointed out in July, 60% of Israeli Jews say withdrawal to the Green Line is ‘unacceptable’, and 53% consider evacuation of the settlements unacceptable, while 45% insist that it’s ‘essential’ for all of Jerusalem with its expanded boundaries, to remain annexed to Israel, etc. October’s War and Peace Index found that 54% of the two state supporters ‘thinks continued construction in the settlements will not ultimately detract from the realization of the two-state solution’.
Real opinion polls, for all their legion faults, provide us with at least a gross indication of the level of unabashed and unalloyed racism among Israeli Jews, whether they support establishing a Palestinian bantustan, and what form they want it to take, among other things. And we can use that information in countering the perennial hasbara onslaught about ‘Israel’s quest for peace’, but wherever you may read about it, this Arutz Sheva poll tells us squat and it is self defeating to pretend that it does.
In solidarity,
Harry
http://bureauofcounterpropaganda.blogspot.com
The New Dark Age 