Produced by Human Rights Watch and posted to YouTube October 3, 2012.
Posted variously, it seems, since 2009, if not earlier.
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YouTube Juxtaposition
16 Friday Nov 2012
Category Archives: Regions
Gaza 2012 – Light Background
15 Thursday Nov 2012
Coming home from work?
The diner dinner?
Catch up.
Every conflict — and now every battle — is a little different. About an hour ago, a CNN clip shows a conversation between two citizen-reporter residents, one in Gaza, the other in Israel, both in the combat area and both reporting and addressing the conflict: “Let’s agree on one thing. Let’s get this game of who is the victim and victimizer out of the way, so we can talk about more substantial issues,” says Mohammed Sulaiman, a resident of Gaza.
http://cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2012/11/15/nr-life-in-gaza-strip-seshay-intv.cnn.html.
Also watched shortly before publishing this post: http://cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2012/11/15/brooke-israel-vs-hamas.cnn.html
Also, much in reference comes from bookmarks, not today’s news, much less “breaking news”; however, being so, it too tells a story within today’s story. Incidental rocket fire from Gaza never stopped after “Cast Lead” (2009); the Hamas government itself has been in the proverbial doghouse with the human rights groups for some time (and reports of “confessions” obtained through torture seem common); the use of civilian centers for arms caches and even children’s playgrounds for launch sites seems to have been and to have remained a part of Hamas doctrine, essentially calling in return fire on, across, or through innocents.
Reference
Akram, Fares. “Rights Group Criticizes Hamas-Run Justice System in Gaza.” The New York Times, October 3, 2012: “Hamas should stop the kinds of abuses that Egyptians, Syrians and others in the region have risked their lives to bring to an end.” / A number of Hamas officials disrupted the news conference, challenging Human Rights Watch’s work and barely allowing journalists time to ask questions.”
CBN News. “Palestinians Escalate Rocket Attacks on Israel.” November 12, 2012: “JERUSALEM, Israel — Palestinians in the Gaza Strip bombarded southern Israel with more than 75 rockets and mortar shells in a 24-hour period. At least eight of them were longer-range missiles . . . The latest escalation came after terrorists fired an anti-tank missile at an Israeli army jeep patrolling near the Karni border crossing early Saturday evening, injuring four soldiers, two seriously and two moderately.”
CNN. “Blasts Interrupt Interview in Gaza.” November 15, 2012.
Human Rights Watch. “Gaza: Arbitrary Arrests, Torture, Unfair Trials.” October 3, 2012. Report download page: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/10/03/abusive-system-0
IDF Blog. “Would You Raise Your Child in This Neighborhood?” November 15, 2012. “. . . Imagine raising your children in a neighborhood where terrorists shoot rockets from the local playground.”
Khazan, Olga. “Israeli army drops warning leaflets on Gaza.” November 15, 2012.
Mughrabi, Nidal-al. “Rockets hit near Tel Aviv as Gaza death toll rises.” Reuters, November 15, 2012.
Ostrovsky, Arsen. “My Country is Under Attack. Do You Care?” The Huffington Post, October 24, 2012.
Sterling, Joe. “Hamas justice system ‘reeks of injustice,’ rights groups says.” CNN, October 3, 2012.
Tobin, Jonathan S. “No Alternative to Israeli Self-Defense.” Commentary, November 15, 2012: Lead — “To its credit, yesterday the State Department rightly declared that Hamas was responsible for the latest round of violence along the Gaza border and that Israel had the right to defend itself. Even the New York Times editorial page affirmed that Israel had that right this morning. But the Times, speaking as it does for liberal conventional wisdom, claimed that Israel’s government was wrong to exercise that right.” Tobin will go on to debunk that notion.
Israel – Gaza 2012 Footage Via YouTube
15 Thursday Nov 2012
“There were at least 70 strikes by warplanes and ships Wednesday, officials from Palestinian militant groups said. As night fell, more airstrikes could be heard, and Hamas security officials said four more attacks hit empty swaths of farmland in Gaza late Wednesday. The IDF said at least 128 rockets had been fired from Gaza since Saturday.”
– The deliberate launching of rocket from populated areas
– The deliberate use of civilian homes to shield Hamas arms and explosives manufacturing facilities
– The deliberate use of civilians as human shields against anticipated airstrikes”
Nothing has changed in the past four years since the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs published its observations, verifiable, on the illegal rules-of-war in place, de facto, in Gaza.
A recent entry on the IDF blog, which may be overwhelmed by taffic — I couldn’t reach it a few minutes ago — covers the same theme: Hamas launches and stores weapons and materiel in the most unconscionable locations available, knowing “their world” (which truly has become more a world of their own than anything remotely shared by any modern society) will be able to “brag” high civilian casualties when Israel responds to Hamas and affiliate rocket launches against its sovereign land.
Wikipedia. “List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2012”. “As of October 2012, over 800 rockets had been launched at Israel from Gaza since January 2012.”
Old Talk – Still New: Muneeb Tahir’s Satire Along the Edge of the Arab Expansion in Pakistan
06 Tuesday Nov 2012
Posted in Islamic Small Wars, Pakistan
Tags
Arab, author, cultural annihilation, culture, dimming, freedom, imperialism, invasion, Muneeb Tahir, Pakistan, Pakistani, satire, suffocation
Pakistan encountered by way of an English-speaking liberal in Lahore differs quite from the Pakistan encountered by way of the network news. Here from September 11, 2011 comes a reference-worthy excerpt from a satire about, perhaps, the deliberate deflection and quiet destruction of inherent landborne Pakistani character and culture out along the Wahabbi Front.
* * *
I was feeling a little murky after watching a TV program in which a televangelist and a lady with a “bindi” had quite a tussle. The bell rang and my friend was there with his “noorani chehra”, as luminous as ever, standing at the door. I invited him to come in. After a little chit chat he asked me whether I watched the TV program in which Sir Zaid (something) bashed an infidel Indian. I was shocked at first but gathered some courage to respectfully make corrections to the questions placed before me.
“Yaar, wasn’t she a Pakistani Hindu?” I said.
“What nonsense? Don’t you know Pakistan is an Islamic Caliphate with camels, oil wells and Palm trees? We don’t have monkeys and elephants in Pakistan, we have camels. She had a bindi. What does that imply?”
* * *
Read More from “Wherever My Camel Leads Me,” Minto Park, September 11, 2011.
Muneeb Tahir, the author, and I chat now and then via Skype, and I have found the experience so far enlightening, heartening, and hopeful.
Taking Muneeb’s advice, I’ve been reading Alice Albinia’s Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River.
If he takes my advice, he may be reading (soon, I don’t know) Vine Deloria Jr.’s God is Red.
Embedded in both would seem the observation of cultural attachment and rightness with distinct landscapes and large regions. We “Yankees” have come to love not only our moccasin slippers (and Pendleton whatnot, for example) but to have constructed a cultural and ecology sensitive environmental and social movement unprecedented by way of its ambitions and scale. Most of us foreigners — well, comparatively few of us North American Native Americans — have our roots and wires tuned to our surrounding oceans, bays, rivers, fields, hills, and mountains.
We breath with the land on which we have established ourselves.
Should Pakistanis feel otherwise about the natural treasures bequeathed to them by God in the form of a varied landscape hosting many indigenous cultures — genuinely so — and evolving languages?
Muneeb has a great command of his cultural surrounds and the history of the land. One may expect some wonderful observations to come by way of his experience and voice — and he’s just getting started.
Ziauddin Yousafzai, Malala’s Father, Speaks to the Press
26 Friday Oct 2012
” . . . and I’ll say that, of course, an attacker, who could be called the agent of Satan, he attacked, but after that I found angels on all my side, everywhere, all around me to this time and this place.”
I’m not editing videos (yet), but here I’m also not entertaining so much.
Malala’s story has had a profound impact on Pakistan’s perspective on itself and attitude toward its extremists. If by itself the tragedy proves less than pivotal, it will nonetheless feed into the weighing of justice and choices in commitments to values in whatever happens next.
FNS – “Not By Religion Alone” — Pakistan, Reference Ghazi Salahuddin
21 Sunday Oct 2012
Tags
Secularism is deemed to be a dirty word in Pakistan. But it is an idea whose time has come. In fact, it may already be too late. We now stand effectively disconnected from the freedom movement that was led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his associates.
Article: http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-9-138736-Not-by-religion-alone
FNS – ” . . . A State of Moral Conflict”
19 Friday Oct 2012
Posted in Fast News Share, Islamic Small Wars, Pakistan
“Here lies the dilemma: Pakistan’s material culture is modernising and non-material culture is Islamising. The result is that the values and norms that we espouse, offer little guidance for the behaviours necessitated by our material and urban ways of living. We are in a state of moral conflict.”
“The conflict between Pakistan’s lived and imagined culture.” Dawn, October 19, 2012. Mohammad A. Qadeer | 7 hours ago : http://dawn.com/2012/10/19/the-conflict-between-pakistans-lived-and-imagined-culture/
FNS – On “The Men Behind Schoolgirl Malala” — Christian Science Monitor
19 Friday Oct 2012
The men behind schoolgirl Malala
It’s important to remember Pakistani men who support their daughters as Malala’s father does. Zia Yousafzai is a champion of his daughter’s education and activism. My father moved our family from Pakistan to England to help support my schooling. It’s the Muslim thing to do.
By Qanta A. Ahmed / October 18, 2012
Reference URL: http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2012/1018/The-men-behind-schoolgirl-Malala
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