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MERIP corrects
In this post I noted that Lara Deeb’s account of how the Israel/Lebanon conflict started was simply inaccurate. A reader has pointed out the following correction issued by MERIP: CORRECTION: Due to an editor’s error, the initial version of this article misleadingly implied that Hizballah did not fire any rockets at Israel in July 2006 prior to the Israeli bombardment
Music amid the bombs
A correspondent just forwarded me this: During an Israeli bombing raid on Beirut, a Lebanese trumpeter grabbed his instrument and pressed record. From his apartment, 2 miles from a target site, Mazen Kerbaj could hear and see bombs exploding in the distance. Mazen afraid for his life was inspired to make a statement using the explosion of the bombs and
A world gone mad
There have been incidents of anti-Jewish vandalism in Rome, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. Vandals painted the word “Hizbollah” in large letters outside the gate of Glasgow’s Garnethill Synagogue. The Holocaust memorial in Brussels has been defaced with condoms and excrement. See Norm for more; watch the Engage weblog for updates. Andrew O’Hagan’s Daily Telegraph editorial on the Mel Gibson
Castro
The timing of Jon Lee Anderson’s article in last week’s New Yorker was uncanny. The focus of Anderson’s piece is the Castro regime’s succession strategy, a campaign it calls the Battle of Ideas (hint: it’s a battle against ideas). It will be interesting to see if the repression can be maintained without the Old Man. I support full democratic freedoms
Medved responds
The film critic, outspoken Jewish neoconservative and former Mel Gibson flack Michael Medved (was he paid too?) weighs in on Gibsongate. Get ready to cringe: At a time when Israel finds herself isolated as never before, imagine the impact of Gibson announcing a supportive trip to Jerusalem in the company of selected Jewish leaders — with a reverent, remorseful stop
Gibson paid Lapin
During the Mel Gibson “Passion” controversy, the right-wing rabbi and family values campaigner Daniel Lapin argued that Gibson “has made it ‘cool’ to be religious.” Lapin has now released a statement. Andrew Sullivan draws our attention to a very important disclosure. Lapin says: It is all too easy to join the circling hyenas and denounce [Mel] Gibson while he is
Pilger weighs in
In June I took a fond look back at veteran radical journalist John Pilger’s “we cannot afford to be choosy” remark, in regard to the so-called Iraqi resistance. That was 2004, it is now 2006, Iraq is in civil war and Pilger is still spouting the same sentimental clichés, this time in a recent piece on the Guardian’s Comment Is
Deeb’s dishonesty
Lara Deeb, a cultural anthropologist at UC Irvine, has penned a primer on Hezbollah for the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). She complains of misleading reports about Hezbollah in the mainstream media. But her own analysis, which is quite detailed, makes no mention whatsoever of Hezbollah’s judeophobic worldview or the antisemitic statements of senior Hezbollah leaders, including Hassan