From two days ago, a piece by Greg Philo containing excerpts and summary from a book of the same name, Bad News from Israel, is just a must-read. The degree to which people are deliberately propagandized in the West on this issue is amazing, and this is the first book that systematically studies the process. Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle tears the arguments apart, and is equally indispensable, but the work of Philo et al. has a different program and does it very well. Read the essay, get the book.
What else in West Asia? It seems another Palestinian Prime Minister has bitten the dust, or wants to, anyway. It’s hard to know what a Palestinian PM can really do, hard not to understand why successive ones keep resigning. The only mystery is that they can still find people to take the job. Someone at IMEMC has taken the trouble to do a body count in one town in Gaza over the past two weeks: 13 dead, 82 wounded. I have a picture from the same town of the aftermath of Israel’s war against oranges in the region. There was also another assassination of a high-profile Palestinian leader in Jenin.
In the realm of speculation, there is a chilling line from Fisk’s latest article on ‘the war on learning’ in Iraq. The article begins:
“The Mongols stained the Tigris black with the ink of the Iraqi books they destroyed. Today’s Mongols prefer to destroy the Iraqi teachers of books.
“Since the Anglo-American invasion, they have murdered at least 13 academics at the University of Baghdad alone and countless others across Iraq. History professors, deans of college and Arabic tutors have all fallen victim to the war on learning. Only six weeks ago – virtually unreported, of course – the female dean of the college of law in Mosul was beheaded in her bed, along with her husband.”
Fisk recalls the strange and still unexplained looting of the museums in Baghdad. Here’s the really chilling part.
“Other university staff suspect that there is a campaign to strip Iraq of its academics, to complete the destruction of Iraq’s cultural identity which began with the destruction of the Baghdad Koranic library, the national archives and the looting of the archaeological museum when the American army entered Baghdad.
“Maybe the Kuwaitis want to take their revenge for what we did to them in 1991,” a lecturer said. “Maybe the Israelis are trying to make sure that we can never have an intellectual infrastructure here.”
