Tomorrow's Times has an interesting article from Rabbi Michael Lerner as well as this report on the alleged use of white phosporous shells, and Gordon Brown breaking ranks with the US in calling for an immediate ceasefire.
One recurring theme during this conflict is just how much both sides are convinced the media is entirely biased against them and is presenting a distorted pro-Israeli/ pro-Palestinian line. For example, I - and presumably all other MPs - have been getting regular, almost daily emails from an organisation called The Israel Project, whose purported mission is to provide accurate information to the media. See for example its Fiction-v-Fact in Gaza. (Not, I should hasten to add, an endorsement... it doesn't reflect what the FCO and DFID believe to be the situation on the ground, nor what I have been told in updates from organisations like Save the Children.)
6 comments:
How do you know the reports from Save The Children are accurate and without spin? Are such organisations beyond reproach? STC are fundamentally an anti-war organisation who have a vested interest in spinning in that direction. That doesn't mean they're lying. But it does mean one should recognise that they aren't objective. People spin naturally towards their preferred perspective.
I think that's a very cynical view.
Kerry, Happy New Year to you.
I must say on STC I too get cynical towards them, and to be blunt and most other agencies that play the "for the kids card." I have read that the Palestinians deliberately have a high birth rate as a demographic weapon. This maybe untrue but the net growth rate 3.422% (population will double in less than 30 years) and average number of children size of 5.91 in the Gaza Strip it is not too hard to see why we need to "Save The Children."
Of course in Gaza with the Israeli's in control, the war and that there are few economic activities that could provide them a living, but this proves my point. The reason the children are suffering is because the Palestinians have too many children and not the economic means to pay for them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Palestinian_territories
Dave, that is wrong on so many fronts I don't know where to start!
I appear to be right in that it is a deliberate policy of the Palestinians. The woman quoted below has 13 kids and earns $37 a week as a cleaner in a Gaza hospital. My feeling is that the Palestinian cause is righteous, but the Palestinians do little to show they are worthy of statehood.
"'Weapon of mass population'
"I want to have many boys, so we have more people and can get the Jews out."
Also found this:
"Population Council Press Release: Fertility as a Political Weapon
For Immediate Release: October 27, 2000
For More Information: Christina Horzepa, The Population Council, chorzepa@popcouncil.org, (212) 339-0520
Sponsor Organization: Population Council
"...born in Europe and among Christian Arab Israelis (2.13 and 2.10 respectively in 1992-96), to the highest level recorded in today's world among Palestinians of the Gaza Strip (7.73 in 1991-95)," Fargues says. These extreme contrasts of fertility are a corollary of the long-lasting state of belligerence between Arab Palestinians and Jews that began in the wake of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, when Great Britain supported the goal of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. From then until the present, population has been central in the struggle: for one side, settling the highest possible proportion of world Jewry in Israel; for the other side, maintaining the status quo or regaining a status quo ante."
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/09/21/Worldandnation/Weapon_of_mass_popula.shtml
http://www.planetwire.org/details/1019
Well if the Israelis didn't cause power cuts all the time...
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