Woo hoo! Buff's found a hotel!
It was great to have a proper bed though water and power are still luxuries. There's also all sorts of fellow journo's and bloggers here.
Over coffee I got chatting with Clemmie who was from Code Pink and admitted I wasn't sure about Hamas from what I'd read in the papers.
She laughed. "Buff, you shouldn't believe all the MSM's nonsense. Our founder, Medea Benjamin, is an American Jew and she came to Gaza to meet Hamas and they treated her with respect. They said repeatedly it was Israel policies they had a problem with, not Jews."
I thought about that as I read what my Norwegian doctor chum (who I met at the hospital) Mads Gilbert (great name btw) had said.
He reminded people about the time that Norway had been occupied and how they hadn't like that either. Not that Israel has reached Nazi levels but that occupation makes people angry - like in France in the 40s or Kuwait when Iraq invaded so it will be the case while Israel occupies Palestine.
The CEO of Buff Enterprises is by no means a commie, but the presence of communists in the French Resistance was not a reason to support the Germans in their occupation. The French Resistance didn't "renounce violence" while France was occupied so why should they?
And Hamas have said many times they would accept a two state solution based upon the 1967 borders - unlike Israel - and seem to be better at keeping ceasefires:
Surely at least worth talking to?
But first Buff's going for another coffee....maybe Clemmie will still be there!
To be continued...
4 comments:
Are these statistics real? They go against everything the main media pushes our way, that is, Hamas always starts the trouble.
The MSM tends to leave out certain facts in any sequence. A typical one goes like this:
- A Palestinian farmer or fisherman is shot dead by Israelis while farming or fishing with Gaza's land or waters
- Shots are fired in reply
- Israeli bombs some Hamas members
- Hamas fires rockets in reply to those bombs
The first three steps are typically ignored by the MSM. The MSM also ignores when Israel fails to keep its promises, such as the 2012 ceasefire agreement that included commitments to open Gaza's borders.
There were examples of this in the recent war. Israel's line was that three settlers were kidnapped by Hamas - but it is now known that this is false and that Israel knew that they had been killed by murderers independent of Hamas. But Israel wanted to undermine the recently formed unity government between Fatah and Hamas so told untruths to justify an attack on Hamas in the West Bank - deliberately escalating tensions.
In fact blogs such as mondoweiss, +972 and journalists like Max Blumenthal discovered this very early on but it is only recently that some mainstream organisations like the BBC have caught up.
See:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n16/nathan-thrall/hamass-chances
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/deceptions-revealed-kidnapped.html
Max Blumenthal's report was over a month ago now but was brilliant journalism:
http://electronicintifada.net/content/netanyahu-government-knew-teens-were-dead-it-whipped-racist-frenzy/13533
A recent example here:
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=720052
More examples:
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/13515-israeli-forces-breach-the-truce-again
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