The other side of the Gaza blockade

[IndianaGreen]

The other side of the Gaza blockade

Taysir Al Burai is severely disabled. He requires round-the-clock medical care. If he were allowed to leave Gaza, he could make a full recovery. But Israel won't let him

By Catrina Stewart in Gaza City

Saturday, 5 June 2010

Ramzi al Burai knows better than most what it means to be imprisoned. This week's botched commando raid on the flotilla of pro-Palestinian aid activists trying to reach Gaza has swung the global spotlight on the Israeli-imposed blockade as never before, but the Al Burai family have been living that reality for the past three years.

Their severely disabled son, Taysir, requires round-the-clock care. Neither Ramzi nor his wife can leave the five-year-old for longer than an hour. Part-asphyxiated during delivery, the boy suffers from an acute neurological disorder. He is unable to talk properly, suffers spasms and anti-convulsant medication has left him partially paralysed.

If his parents could only get him to Germany, or even just across the border to Israel, he would be able to get the specialist medical care that doctors say could lead to a full recovery. Ramzi has repeatedly appealed to the Israeli authorities to allow his son out of the tiny coastal enclave, but has been refused each time.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-other-side-of-the-gaza-blockade-1992076.html

[mrdmk]

1. An opinion piece from Robert Fisk, which has more facts in it than our MSN reports

Warning, for those of you that are prone to involuntary reflux, do not read the following!

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-truth-behind-the-israeli-propaganda-1991803.html

From the middle of the piece in accordance with the four paragraph rule:

But whoops! At least the Israelis have not demanded ransom. They just want to get journalists to win the propaganda war for them. Scarcely had the week begun when Israel's warrior "commandos" stormed a Turkish boat bringing aid to Gaza and shot nine of the passengers dead. Yet by week's end, the protesters had become "armed peace activists", vicious anti-Semites "professing pacifism, seething with hate, pounding away at another human being with a metal pole". I liked the last bit. The fact that the person being beaten was apparently shooting another human being with a rifle didn't quite get into this weird version of reality.

Turkish family protests that their sons wanted to be martyrs – something which most Turkish family members might say if their relatives had been shot by the Israelis – had been transformed into confirmation that they had been jihadis. "On that aid ship," a Sri Lankan texted me this week, "I had my niece, nephew and his wife on board. Unfortunately Ahmed (20-year-old nephew) got shot in the leg and now treated (sic) under military custody. I will keep you posted." He did indeed. Within hours, the press was at his family's home in Australia, demanding to know if Ahmed was a jihadi – or even a potential suicide bomber. Propaganda works, you see. We haven't seen a frame of film from the protesters because the Israelis have stolen the lot. No one has told us – if the Turkish ship was carrying such ruthless men – how their terrible plots to help the "terrorists" of Gaza were not uncovered in the long voyage from Turkey, even when it called at other ports. But Professor Gil Troy of McGill University in Montreal – in the rabid Canadian National Post, of course – was able to spout all that gunk about "armed peace activists" on Thursday.

I wasn't personally at all surprised at the killings on the Turkish ship. In Lebanon, I've seen this indisciplined rabble of an army – as "elite" as the average rabble of Arab armies – shooting at civilians. I saw them watching the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians on the morning of 18 September (the last day of the slaughter) by their vicious Lebanese militia allies. I was present at the Qana massacre by Israeli gunners in 1996 – "Arabushim" (the equivalent of the abusive term "Ayrab" in English), one of the gunners called the 106 dead civilians, more than half of them children, in the Israeli press. Then the Israeli government of Nobel laureate Shimon Peres said there were terrorists among the dead civilians – totally untrue, but who cares? – and then came the second Qana massacre in 2006 and then the 2008-09 Gaza slaughter of 1,300 Palestinians, most of them children, and then...

Well, then came the Goldstone report, which found that Israeli troops (as well as Hamas) committed war crimes in Gaza, but this was condemned as anti-Semitic – poor old honourable Goldstone, himself a prominent Jewish jurist from South Africa, slandered as "an evil man" by the raving Al Dershowitz of Harvard – and was called "controversial" by the brave Obama administration. "Controversial", by the way, basically means "fuck you".


The emphasis on the last paragraph is mine.

If someone wants multiple points of views on the events in the Middle East, here in U.S.A. one needs to seek the facts out with a major investment in time and skepticism. Very few people are able to determine a problem with an onslaught of propaganda that is received on daily basis in this country. The problems in the Middle East will not be solved with this approach to informing the population that is considered a world leader.