Israel/Palestine

It might be better to wait until I know more, but I wanted to say something about what occurred in Gaza on Monday, when a demonstration organized by Fatah to commemorate Arafat was fired upon by the Hamas-controlled police, with seven people killed including one child.

Khaled Mishal of Hamas in the foreground, and a Nazi swastika in the background. Click on the story and you won't see anything Nazi. That's because there's nothing to do with the Nazis, other than the desire by the BBC and so many others to link the travails of the starving, besieged, imprisoned, tortured, slaughtered Palestinians with the genocidal Nazi regime, the better to continue starving, besieging, imprisoning, and torturing them.

I received news that Tanya Reinhart died suddenly in New York. She was always one of my guides on Israel/Palestine. When I went there in 2002 she was very helpful to me, personally, and I only didn't get to visit her in person because I fell sick. It is far too soon for her to be gone - we all needed her for a lot more years.

Here's her university page

Her wikipedia page

It's true. In his talk, "Debunking the Myth of Israeli Democracy", Jamal Zahalka quoted Hannah Arendt. I think. He might or might not have quoted Hegel, I can't remember. He definitely quoted Hannah Arendt. He also quoted Spiro Agnew, which was weird. He definitely didn't quote Hitler though, which is apparently what they've started saying about him back in Israel.

One trick of writing on the internet: if you want feedback, leave your email at the bottom of the article, and if you don't, don't. Sometimes you forget, as I did with my open letter to Mitch Potter. His reply to me, you'll recall, was basically to remind me that he has a larger audience than I do ("Enjoy your chorus of one") thanks to his employer, Torstar, being somewhat larger than ZNet or killingtrain.com, and also to remind me of a further constraint on fair coverage ("those of us on print deadlines").

My reply to Mitch Potter's letter (see two blog posts ago) is published at ZNet.

I sent it to him, and he replied quickly, saying:

> You take months to compose what those of us on print deadlines do
> daily and you manage only to add "lazy" to my glossary of sins?
>
> Pathetic.
>
> Enjoy your chorus of one.
>
> Mitch Potter

I replied simply:

Good to read that you got it, even if you didn't read it.

Cheers Mitch.

-J.

He replied:

Read it. Wounded by it. Have no intention of engaging further as you seem only interested in selectively distorting the spirit of my work to inflict further pain.

You are off-base in branding me racist. If you knew me you would soon come to understand how wrong you are.

Mitch Potter

I replied to that, too, saying that I had set out to wound, out of frustration at not being able to do anything to change the imbalance of the situation and its misrepresentation. I also acknowledged that I didn't think he was a racist in the sense of hating a group of people and being a bigot against them, but that he, like I, participated in a system that leads to their suppression and ongoing destruction, and that we're going along with it, not doing enough to fight it. I also worried that I may have personalized it too much, such that the wider points about the bias in the coverage and the patterns and frames for the discussion of Israel/Palestine have may have gotten lost.

I suppose that is the end of my interaction with Mitch Potter.

My article is below.

In response to my blog post of July 28, 2006, in which I called him a "truly disgusting racist", Mitch Potter, the Middle East Bureau Chief of the Toronto Star, wrote the below to me on September 10, 2006 (last year).

I prepared a reply which I will post tomorrow, but I thought I would post his letter to me here first.

(I also watched the preview screening of Amu, which I'll try to get a review of up soon.)

Mitch Potter's letter to me:

Mr. Podur,

I read Uri Avnery's piece in Counterpunch on Israeli Apartheid, cautioning against the use of the Apartheid analogy. Stephen Friedman and Virginia Tilley replied, providing interesting facts from the record on South African Apartheid.

Back in the summer we at ZNet published a fine piece by a very intelligent teacher named Jason Kunin on how to talk about Israel/Palestine issues to unionists. In Canada, activists in unions are trying to push a boycott/divestment/sanctions (BDS) campaign to force Israel to stop its ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocidal policies against the Palestinians. Goes without saying that this is an uphill battle. This is, after all, the same jurisdiction where a children's book that talked about children in Israel and Palestine was banned.

Uphill, indeed. Kunin tried to pass a motion in his union on BDS. It seems that Kunin's school board took it upon themselves to suspend him and investigate his teaching. They have suspended him, the preliminary reports say, for bringing politics into the classroom. The irony of this seems to have escaped them.

The motion is copied below. If I hear more on how to support this case I will publish it here.

When will Palestinians learn that the Israeli military has no problem killing civilians and that the press will report those killings as the civilians' fault?