Guest contribution by Deanna Othman
On May 1, Foreign Policy magazine published a piece by Yair Shamir with the headline “Our Shared Islamist Enemy: From Boston to Israel, radicals are attempting to destroy Western culture.”
Shamir’s piece endeavors to draw baseless parallels between the Boston Marathon bombings and the resistance of Palestinians against the Israeli occupation, what he inaccurately portrays as an “aggressive and offensive jihad, unconnected to any particular conflict or borders, which conjoins Islamist terror groups around the world.” His unabashedly Zionist agenda rears its head through this opportunistic attempt to play into the media circus surrounding the Boston bombings.
His ludicrous argument essentially states that the problem is not Hamas or Al Qaeda, the problem is not Osama Bin Laden or Dzokhar Tsarnaev: the problem is Islam.
Unfortunately, the Boston bombings have given virulent propagandists and Islamophobes a field day. While various pundits and media personalities jumped to the Tsarnaev brothers’ religious identities as the singular motive for their alleged acts of violence, they focused on them as individuals, and how their thought processes could have been perverted by purported religious radicalization. What makes Shamir’s contention particularly disturbing is his sweeping generalization that all groups and individuals affiliated with Islam, from Hamas to the Muslim Brotherhood, to the Tsarnaevs and Sayyid Qutb, all had a particular end in mind—the obliteration of Western culture. [Read more...]
To Israel, one man’s journalist is another man’s terrorist
Guest contribution by Deanna Othman
As Palestinians prepare to mark the 65th anniversary of al-Nakba on May 15, the date that symbolizes the beginning of the methodical dispossession and oppression of Palestinians, they have been greeted with a slap in the face by Washington, DC’s Newseum in another attempt to delegitimize and stifle their struggle.
The Newseum, which features exhibits both on news history and contemporary media technology, announced the names of 82 journalists who died covering the news in 2012, and added them to the Newseum’s Journalists Memorial in a ceremony held May 13 in the Journalists Memorial Gallery. Among the honored were Marie Colvin and Anthony Shadid, who both died in Syria.
Absent from the list of 82 journalists were an additional two names originally slated to be included — Hussam Salama and Mahmoud Al-Kumi, who were doing camera work for Al-Aqsa TV when they were killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in November 2012.
The Newseum announced Monday that the museum will “re-evaluate their inclusion as journalists on our memorial wall pending further investigation.”
Although many held out the hope that the Newseum would stand by its decision, it is a grave disappointment, but not a complete surprise, that yet another institution that purports to celebrate diversity of voices has caved under Zionist pressure. [Read more...]