One of Israel’s finest journalists, Amira Hass, has won the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour described Hass as “one of the greatest truth-seekers of them all.” This is her acceptance speech: Allow me to start with a correction. “Ah, how impolite,” you’d rightly think. But anyway, we…
Showing all posts tagged Gaza
Palestinian education stunted by our backing
The Zionist, collective punishment of an entire people: Some 838 students formally offered places and/or enrolled at foreign universities are unable to leave Gaza, according to the Palestinian interior ministry and Gisha, an NGO campaigning for freedom of movement. Of the 1,983 Gazan students in this position, only 1,145 have been able to leave Gaza…
Kuwait has more freedoms than Israel?
Reporters Without Borders 2009 Freedom Index finds Israel in “free fall” over its rights and responsibilities towards journalists and the media: Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s military offensive against the Gaza Strip, had an impact on the press. As regards its internal situation, Israel sank 47 places in the index to 93rd position. This nose-dive means…
Israeli isolation causes the state to act with typical arrogance
We learn that Israel is determined to change the boundaries of international law to essentially allow states to bomb civilians if they’re “terrorists”: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed his government on Tuesday to draw up proposals to amend the international laws of war after a damning UN report on its war in Gaza. The…
Life in Aceh, Indonesia
My following article is published in the Huffington Post: In a collection of just released work by Acehnese writer Azhari, Nutmeg Woman, we are brought into a world before the devastating 2004 tsunami that killed over 220,000 Indonesians. Civil war wracked the province. Indonesian occupation was brutal and fought against the Free Aceh Movement (GAM).…
Introducing…Miss Aceh
My following article in New Matilda is about the Indonesian province of Aceh: Despite recently implementing sharia law — including the stoning of adulterers and homosexuals — Aceh does not fit the stereotype of an Islamic state, finds Antony Loewenstein Muslim extremists in Aceh were outraged when a young woman from the province, Qori Sandioriva,…
Aceh: the only Jew in the village
My following article appears in today’s edition of Crikey: The small sign in my bare hotel room in Banda Aceh was clear. “It is forbidden to bring a woman/man who are not husband or wife into the hotel.” I saw similar messages in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Gaza. I was in Aceh [Indonesia] as a…
Israel’s isolating glow over Goldstone
Eldad Yaniv in Haaretz: In the early 1990s, when Judge Richard Goldstone headed a commission of inquiry on the rising violence in South Africa toward the end of apartheid, he garnered the same kind of compliments from the Afrikaners as he has been getting from Israel over the last few weeks. But the “Jew boy”…
Hamas wants to move Gaza in the wrong direction
Everyone knows the greatest threat isn’t Israel but women bearing their dangerous hair, wrists and feet! It began with a rash of unusually assertive police patrols. Armed Hamas officers stopped men from sitting shirtless on the beach, broke up groups of unmarried men and women, and ordered shopkeepers not to display lingerie on mannequins in…
Israel wants to be special (and kill unarmed civilians)
Here’s the message from Israel. Other nations kill civilians, why can’t we? This is what Israel has become: Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz on Sunday accused the United Nations Human Rights Council of anti-Semitism, after the UN body endorsed a damning report on Israel’s winter Gaza offensive. “This is an anti-Semitic attempt to decide that what…