A Question of Perspective: Arab response to Gaza

I've found a few articles treating the topic of Arab political response to Gaza, and wanted to explore the regional politics that factor into how Arab leaders are reacting to the conflict. This article from Reuters reported that demonstrators across the Middle East protested the lackluster answer offered by Arab leaders. In addition to civilian protests, some Muslim nations (particularly Libya) have criticized Arab leaders and how they have handled the situation.

The third article I found from Haaretz gave more insight into regional politics and their influence in the conflict. The second half of the article discusses Syria, which historically has ties to Hamas. Syria and Israel have been meeting in the hopes of negotiating a peace deal between the two, and while the talks have been suspended as a result of the incursion, the article implies that Bashar Al-Assad still wishes to keep that diplomatic avenue open. These kinds of conflicting interests may be driving how Arab nations respond to violent conflicts between Israel and Palestine.

This Al-Jazeera article took a different viewpoint by characterizing Syria as highly critical of Israel at a recent Arab summit. Given these different accounts, I had a difficult time coming to a conclusion about the Arab reaction to the conflict. While some depict Syria as a hard-line critic of Israel's incursion, the Haaretz article sees a more nuanced political situation that has prevented a stronger response to Israel. What do you think? Are there any other sources that can give clues to Arab geopolitics and how they influence Arab responses to Gaza? What about the history of Arab involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Hamas using children as human shield

This post is in response to Alyson's post, but I couldn't add a video in my comment so I just am writing this as a separate post. I thought Alyson's post was an great perspective on the different uses of human shields in conflict. I found the BBC article the most interesting perhaps, since it acknowledged that both Israel and Gaza overtake civilian homes, thus reducing them to human targets. I had never considered that the use of a home transformed into a military target would fall into the same category as the type of human shields I have heard of/seen. I began searching for clips of human shields in the Middle East and I came across these two YouTube videos, which both show Hamas’ use of children as human shields. The first, is a 17 second clip, the second contains the exact same clip beginning around 2:15, but includes other human shield images and a larger message of Hamas’ abuse on children.




I think the second video falls in line with a sort of sensationalist media, it uses the abuse of children as another negative perspective on Hamas. It induces pity for these children, but the video is without background--for example the final image is of a young child crying with a fake rifle around his neck.

Pro-Israel Response and "Human Shields" in International Media

Laura's post on Arab representations of the Gaza conflict spurred me to research representations in political cartoons produced by pro-Israel sources. These are a few comics I found on Mideasttruth, a pro-Israel media site that has articles and editorials as well as comics. I don't know how blogger will scale the images, but if the text is too small to read you can just click on the image to link to a full-sized version.

The first image, by an Austrian cartoonist, as well the second, by an American, reiterate claims that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as "human shields" during military operations. While the first cartoon suggests that the human shields are used just to physically protect Palestinian militants, I felt that the second cartoon links the use of human shields ("Body Armor") to a larger agenda that uses civilian casualties to strengthen the humanitarian case against Israel ("Public Relations").

I also found an article on BBC that discusses the use of human shields from a very different perspective. BBC reports that Amnesty International is accusing both Israeli and Palestinian forces of using Gazans as shields during the conflict. The article discusses in more depth the tactics both sides allegedly employ with regard to human shields.

Finally, the last comic in the post brings in yet another perspective on civilian casualties in armed conflict, and in a sense it responds to the "Public Relations" agenda implied in the second cartoon. I feel it criticizes the way that popular media can over-exaggerate or sensationalize civilian casualties, and as a result perhaps what some see as a "Palestinian PR agenda" can be attributed to the willingness of sensationalist media to feature civilian casualties in its coverage of the conflict.

So my initial research on pro-Israel cartoons led me to a larger discourse on human shields and how media represents this kind of violence. I think it's interesting that each of the sources I found came to very different conclusions about who is at fault and what the motivations are for using human shields.

Secretary Clinton in Haaretz/Middle East Online

I thought this letter to Clinton was interesting. You might too.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1068057.html

particularly when compared to

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=30715

Each of these sources has a definite perspective on the issue, what I find most interesting is the commonalities.

Arab Press Responds to Gaza Violence with Holocaust Analogies and Anti-Semitism

This article is about a set of political cartoons from various Arab newspapers around the Middle East and this blog post includes both the Jerusalem Post’s and the Anti-Defamation League’s reaction to these images.

The cartoons carry a Holocaust theme, with images of swastikas and Jewish stereotypes and are in response to Israel’s defensive military action against Gaza. The two accompanying articles are from the ADL “the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism” and the Jerusalem Post.

Both news sources discuss the vilification of Israel’s defensive reaction, but what I found most surprising from ADL’s reaction was the response that "We have always said that it is OK to criticize Israel. But these images clearly cross the line." ADL does not, however, respond to why this backlash occurred, which was explained a bit more through Jerusalem Posts’ article:
“Last week, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna'i sparked an uproar after warning the Palestinians in a radio interview that they faced a bigger ‘shoah’ if they increased rocket attacks from Gaza. Vilna'i's spokesman later clarified that the deputy defense minister had used the Hebrew word - which is primarily used in Israel to refer to the Holocaust - only to mean ‘disaster, ruin or destruction.’ However, this did not stop Palestinians from seizing upon the original statement, which was widely reported around the world, to compare Israel's attacks in the Gaza Strip with that of Nazi Germany.”
The ADL article criticizes the cartoons for not representing both sides of the story, that they ignore “Palestinian terrorists” and only demonize the Jewish response to Gaza’s attacks.

I found it interesting that some cartons were included that didn’t fit with the Holocaust theme that was represented throughout most of the images. It is undeniable that many Jewish stereotypes were portrayed in these images, but I found the last cartoon (on the website, the first on this blog) a representation of the difference of power between the forces, but unconnected to the Holocaust. Both sides were stereotypical caricatures and I feel that political cartoons are always biased.

What if ... (if Qassam-Rockets would bombard Berlin Paris and London)

This posted video has a long backstory behind it, but I realized that it’s important to trace the steps I took to find this short clip. I first began searching for materials for this blog by doing a general “gaza video” search through Google and following different media sources and sites.

One of the first links I found connected me to a PBS story called How Social Media War was Waged in Gaza-Israeli Conflict, which discussed both pro-Israeli and pro-Gaza perspective websites. The first highlighted group was Help Us Win, and one of its reporters was quoted as saying: “‘We are fighting against the mainstream media who prefer to ignore certain bits of information about Israel,’ Berger told me in an interview, ‘and social media is an effective way of providing the right information passively.’” The name sounded incredibly familiar, so I clicked on the Help Us Win site to keep exploring. As I read about their site, an online pro-Israeli database, I remembered where I had heard of the group during the actual conflict. Help Us Win is a group determined to distribute information in new and untraditional ways, such as through Twitter as well as Facebook. They are most well known, as some of you may remember, for the Qassam Counter. This was a feature on Facebook where users could “donate their status” to this cause and it would automatically link to an update the number of Qassam rockets that had fallen on Israel. The status would appear like this: “QassamCount: One or more rockets hit Israeli civilian areas today. Click here for more details: http://qassamcount.com/today.” I remember reading this status on many of my friends’ pages, and I always wondered where the counter/pro-Palestinian status was. At first I thought this was a Facebook-sponsored status donation (like they did for the presidential elections) and I was angered that I couldn’t find a counter-status donation since it focused on attacks on civilian areas, which were happening on both sides.

As we’re now starting this blog project, I began examining more deeply what these counters and this website mean. I was searching around the Help Us Win site and I found this short cartoon video, showing Qassam rockets hitting Berlin, London, and Paris. This clip plays on European stereotypes, showing important city landmarks being bombed and caricatures of French, German, and British people. The video ends with a message on the screen: “How do YOU like it? In Sderot, Israel, people have been living like this for the last 8 years.” I thought this video was an interesting start to examine the victimization of both sides in this conflict. The counter, along with the video, constructs Israel as a target, as the injured party in this larger fight.

I thought this video was especially important in our new world of social media, how do we examine the role of unabashedly pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian sites? Social media does not require unbiased viewpoints, and how do we balance what we consider to be objective news stories with these subjective accounts and opinions? The Help Us Win site self description is “A site where you can ensure that the international coverage of the Campaign Against Hamas is balanced.” But what media sources are actually balanced, and how can we create a full picture of this conflict?

I’m sorry for the long post! I know its a sort of silly short video, but I felt like the connections between each step were the important part to trace: from a more objective media source, to an opinionated site, to Facebook, to an individual’s YouTube clip, each source represents the disparate ways in which we get our information.

West Bank Story test video

here is the video (finally when you weren't looking I got the movie clip to copy--from google video--http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8860670051621711477)