UK Indymedia | ISM-related book on independent radio station

I'll be on Interference FM, 101.4, on Thursday afternoon to talk about my book on the ISm and the occupation in general.

Hey all,

I'll be on the radio on 101.4FM on Thursday afternoon, 4pm, more details of
the book and it's launch are pasted below - if you don't have these already,
by any chance. I think that the station is called 'Interference'. I'll see
yiz there!

Regards, Ted.

Sorry folks…

First the venue double-booked us, then it was a bit short notice for Jeremy,
so finally we’ve had to re-schedule for Sunday, August 31st,
8pm-midnight.All other details remain the same, the book is in print and
going well, and by the end of August there ought to be another print run.
Sooo…

Spare Change Publishing presents: an evening of spoken word railing against,
among other things, the occupation of Palestine and the US-sponsored ethnic
cleansing of the Holy Land.

With...

Ted Curtis

Jeremy Hardy

Ben Watson

Jason Pegler

and Hugh Mulhall

...and with occasional piped pop music in-between turns to placate those
addicted to amateur dancing and other anti-social nonsense.

The price: 3 pounds regardless of your social standing...

The place: upstairs at The Garage, Highbury & Islington tube, Holloway Road,
London N1...

The date & time... Sunday August 31st 2003, 8pm til midnight.

The book...

A FIRST-HAND ACCOUNT OF THE OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE, WRITTEN BY A BRITISH
PEACE ACTIVIST.

In December 2001 Ted Curtis travelled to Beit Sahour, a small town near
Bethlehem in the West Bank, to participate in Non-Violent Direct Action
against the occupation of Palestine, then in its 35th year. From there he
travelled all over the West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement
in little more than a week; joining in demonstrations, helping to dismantle
illegal IDF roadblocks, and listening to stories of terror from the
occupation. Initially a history buff, he was moved to read around the
subject following this experience and he returned to Bethlehem just in time
for the mendaciously-named "Operation Defensive Shield". This is some of his
story.

ISBN 0-9525744-3-8

10 pounds ONO

Comments

Hide the following 5 comments

'Theft and murder' refers to the arabs, I presume?

16.07.2003 09:21

Extract from article by Fiamma Nirenstein

As a journalist, I must mention the significant contribution of the mass media to this new anti-Semitism. Since the beginning of the Intifada, freedom fighter journalists, grown in the Guevara and Fedayeen campus, have given the Israeli-Palestinian conflict one of the most biased coverage in the history of journalism. Here are the main problems that lead to distorted reporting of the Intifada:

1) Lack of historic depth in attributing responsibility for its outbreak. In other words, failure to repeat the story of the Israeli offer of a Palestinian state and of Arafat's refusal which, in essence, is a refusal to accept Israel as a Jewish state, and which continues the almost 70 year old Arab rejection of partition of the land of Israel between Arabs and Jews as recommended by the British in 1936, decided by the UN in 1947 and always accepted by the Jewish representatives.

2) Failure, right from the very first clashes at the check points, to assign responsibility for the first deaths to the fact that, unlike in the first Intifada, in the second the IDF faced armed fighters hiding in the midst of the unarmed crowd.

3) Failure to recognize the enormous influence of the cultural pressure on the Palestinians from the systematic education in Palestinian schools and mass media, vilifying Jews and Israelis and idealizing terrorist acts of murder and mayhem.

4) Describing the death of Palestinian children without identifying the circumstances in which they occurred. The equating of civilian losses of Israelis with those of the Palestinian, as if terrorism and war against it were the same thing, and as if intentional killing was the same as a deplored consequence of a difficult and new type fight.

5) Using Palestinian sources to certify events, as if Palestinian sources were the most reliable. I am thinking of Jenin, of the unconfirmed reports that passed to printed pages or TV screens as absolute truth. In contrast, Israeli sources, which are very often reliable, are seen as subservient, prejudiced and unworthy of attention, despite the country's aggressive free and open journalism, and the equally determined criticism of government policies by opposition parties, conscience objectors, commentators and journalists.

6) Manipulation of the order in which the news are given and of the news itself. The headlines give the number of Palestinians killed or wounded in most articles, at least in Europe, before describing the gunfights and their causes, and linger on the age and family stories of the terrorists. The purposes of the IDF actions, such as capturing terrorists, destroying arms factories or hiding places and bases for attacks against Israel, are rarely mentioned. On the contrary, Israel's operations are often described as completely uncalled for, bizarre, wicked and useless.

7) Manipulation of language, taking advantage of the great confusion about the definition of "terrorism" and "terrorist". This too is an old issue, connected to the concept of freedom fighter, so dear to my generation.

A few days ago, at a checkpoint, I was doing some interviews. It soon became clear to me that the use of the word "terrorist" sounded to each one of my Palestinian interlocutors a capital political and semantic sin. The press has learned this very well: the occupation is the cause of everything, terrorism is called resistance and does not exist per se. Terrorists who kill women and children are called militants, or fighters. An act of terrorism is often "a fire clash", even when only babies and old men are shot inside their cars on a highway. It is also interesting to note that a young shahid is a cause of deep pride for the Palestinian struggle, but if you ask how a child of twelve can be sent to die and why young children are indoctrinated to do such acts, the answer is: "come on, a child can't be a terrorist. How can you call a 12 year old boy a terrorist?"

This is perhaps the most crucial point: Given the fact that there is a ferocious debate on the definition of terrorism, it is widely accepted that terrorism is a way of fighting. This is a semantic and even substantial gift of the new anti-Semitism, where it is natural for a Jew to be dead. Namely, intentionally targeting civilians to cause fear and disrupt the morale of Israel is not a moral sin. It doesn't raise world indignation, and if it does, it hides in its folds some or much sympathy for the terrorist aggressor. What the European press fails to or doesn't want to understand is that Terror is a condemnable and forbidden way of fighting, regardless of the specific political goal it tries to achieve.

8) The media have promoted the extravagant concept that the settlers, including women and children are not real human beings.

They present settlers as pawns in a dangerous game they choose to play. Their deaths are almost natural and logical events. In a way, they asked for it.

On the other hand, when a Hamas commander is killed, even though, he obviously "asked for it", an ethical, philosophical debate arises, on the perfidy of extra-judicial death sentences.

This would certainly be a licit debate, were it not for the grotesque double standard on which worldwide press bases it.

9) Not to go overlooked is that censorship and corruption within the PA and the physical elimination of its political enemies is hardly ever covered.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0703/nirenstein_2003_07_10.php3

I feel pity for people like Ted Curtis, so cankered by hatred and self-loathing they can stand by while the arabs murder child after child, and then deny Israel's right to self defence.

AYC

Hokum

16.07.2003 16:20

Is 'hokum' a Hebrew word? It ought to be. Were you to read the book, you might find that I was present in the occupied West Bank during the re-invasions of March/April 2002, during which time the IDF were 'murdering child after child' with impunity. And so on (and on) up to this day. This they do not out of any sense of brutalised desperation, but from some arrogant sense of false superiority, and from sheer adolescent conscripted boredom. As for 'theft and murder referring to the arabs', this is so much the usual racist drivel and as such hardly merits comment. And you're a journalist? Really? Is that what you go around telling people? I suppose that I might be called anti-Semitic inasmuch as I speak neither Arabic, Hebrew, nor even Aramaic very fluently. Incidentally, here is Ehud Barak's 'offer of a Palestinian state'. Hokum.

Ted
mail e-mail: tedcurtis@hotmail.com

Whoops!

16.07.2003 16:37

As I'm not a journalist, I don't have a graphic designer to tell me the difference between a tif and a jpeg!

Ted
mail e-mail: tedcurtis@hotmail.com

Aaarghh!!

16.07.2003 17:00

Aaaargh!! This is clearly a conspiracy by the nazis who run Indymedia to supress my map! I give up.

Teddy

you need ...

16.07.2003 17:16

... to inport the jpeg image into a graphics program, choose resize canvass/image and reduce it down to about 250 - 400 pixels square.

Then please try again - it looks interesting!

jackslucid
mail e-mail: jackslucid@hotmail.com

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