Reports from the Ground…

If anyone was shocked by the horrific attacks in Fallujah recently, I would recommend Tim Wise’s blog as well as the UTS blog for some context. What I want to present, though, are some other reports…

here is a site I run in Toronto, with others, that I would like to serve as a kind of regional ZNet — helping organizations with similar politics link up with each other, give people opportunities to share information and analysis, and so on. The other thing we want to do at this site is some critique of Canadian media, and Canadian foreign policy. The last thing we want to do is present translations and reports from the ground, from places like Colombia, Palestine, Iraq. It’s ambitious, yes, but I’d like to call your attention to it. The site is called En Camino. That means ‘on the way’, in Spanish (I didn’t come up with the name, of course — I never come up with names or titles). ?A donde, one might ask? I’ll leave that one for now.

The things I wanted to present in this entry are two such types of reports, which we’ve arranged at En Camino in the form of — you guessed it — blogs. They are not as technologically advanced as these blogs here, lacking the brilliance of a Brian, but perhaps they will be, in time, and meanwhile they do have the graphical grace of Tyson — who will be helping me with a graphic for this blog. The one you see to the right is a photo I took in the zone of total destruction in Jenin in 2002.

So the first blog is by an activist named Misha Laban, who’s from Toronto, and who has been doing some very nice blogging from the Occupied Territories (As I said, please forgive the ‘retro’ format — I promise to improve it when I get a minute away from my shiny new blog). The last entry is a couple of weeks old, but there is more on the way.

The second blog is by an activist named Andrea Schmidt, who I know as a tireless organizer and radio journalist based in Montreal, but who is now in Iraq with the Iraq Solidarity Project. Her reports are here.

Author: Justin Podur

Author of Siegebreakers. Ecology. Environmental Science. Political Science. Anti-imperialism. Political fiction. Teach at York U's FES. Author. Writer at ZNet, TeleSUR, AlterNet, Ricochet, and the Independent Media Institute.