Cool project and crap press

My friend Kolya just sent me a very cool project - a Gazan recipe book being put together by Madrid-based translator Maggie Schmitt and Gazan writer Laila el-Haddad, of Gazamom fame. They're currently in Gaza and the initial posts about the research they're doing look absolutely mouthwatering...
The book is also interesting because it's using Kickstarter to help fund the research - a donations website which allows people to put money into one-off projects they want to support.
The crap press part of the heading is a reference to the common practice of reporting the exciting/shocking/dramatic bit of an event, and failing to report the more mundane downside. This is a widespread phenomenon - I remember reading some research years ago about how newspapers were much more inclined to print the titillating (to a distressingly large number of revolting men) details of rape trials, but then rarely followed up with boring details like, y'know, verdicts and sentences. The main culprits, shock horror, were various tabloids and the vile Torygraph. Posh blokes getting their rocks off at the idea of women being assaulted? Shurely shome mishtake.
But an example I came across today via the blog of an American blogging from Sanaa rather shows up the political agenda behind a lot of our media.
You may remember news agency stories last month of an audacious gun attack on the British Embassy in Yemen, rapidly attributed to al-Qaeda (obviously). What you may not recall are any follow-up reports of the fact that the attack never happened. What actually took place was a squabble between two security guards who were meant to be defending said Embassy, but who got in a row and opened up on one another, and then were too embarrassed to 'fess up to the origins of the gunfire. Read all about it here.
Genius.

The Daily Mail Song

'Local press rubbish on climate change' shocker

Nice little analysis by Manchester Climate Fortnightly of a fairly bobbins editorial from Crains Manchester Business. Having been on the receiving end of some of their 'reporting' I've also been quite surprised how amateurish the fact-checking and quoting was, since I presume they're selling themselves along those FT-style 'accurate information for the decision-makers' lines.

Weird barmy people

I know that on one level I'm scared that the right wing in its many guises is so powerful. But on another, it's a source of eternal mystification and amusement that some of them are so plain barking.
Take 'Eddie,' author of an article called 'Destructive Environmentalists' on Bloggerbase, yet another we'll-make-your-rantings-world-famous writing platform. Now, I know that the Daily Mail article OA & I were interviewed for a good couple of years ago bore about as much relation to reality as Katie Price's mammaries, but at least it managed to get right which of us has been... err... snipped. But good ol' boy Eddie (who cites 'conservatives' who think the Sierra Club is 'extremist'... jeez... and then perpetrates the usual tedious-but-unfortunately-widely-believed climate denialist waffle) apparently can't scan a tabloid article and even come out with its version of events. To whit, this: "Sarah Irving, from Ethical Consumer magazine, who sterilised herself..."
Wow. I sterilised myself? Without noticing? Cool. Wonder how I pulled that one off. DIY pain-free operations - I must patent this invention. Could be worth gazillions. And poor OA, not getting credit for HIS snip.
Second version of this is even more odd. Now I, despite obviously being a terrorist sympathising dangerous unwomanly unnatural extremist etc etc, can grasp why a lot of people around the world are less than chuffed with one Leila Khaled, even if I find her interesting enough to write a book about. I also know that there are a lot of misconceptions and exaggerations about her dotted about the web. But this article on the Northeast Intelligence (ahem) Network's (NIN) website is a real odd 'un. It states: "Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled, who murdered 24 year-old US Navy diver Robert Stethem in an airplane hijacking in Beirut in 1970."
Now, I spotted this and started to worry that maybe there was some big chunk of LK's life story I'd missed out on completely, which would be mildly embarrassing. But no, it's Douglas J. Hagmann, Director of NIN, who needs to be hiding his blushes.
An organisation which claims to be 'INVESTIGATING THREATS TO OUR HOMELAND' would, you think, at least get its martyrs straight. Because "24 year-old US Navy diver Robert Stethem" was actually on vac from his US Navy underwater construction team in 1985 (yep, 15 years after Leila Khaled's hijackings) when he was on a plane hijacked by Hizbollah (no, not Khaled's PFLP) and killed and dumped on the tarmac at Beirut airport when the hijackers' demands for the release of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in Israel was not met.
As usual, Hagmann's article also conflates Islamism and parts of the Palestinian resistance which 25 years ago American rightists would have been squealing about as part of a global Communist threat rather than a religious one. 25 years ago, of course, the US authorities were busy bankrolling Islamic militants like one Osama Bin Laden, as well as supporting Israel in its tolerance of Palestinian Islamic groups like Hamas (because in the late 80s Israel preferred the likes of Hamas to the likes of the PFLP, and the US broadly agreed).
Hagmann also goes on to make various truly bizarre claims about shadowy, dangerous links between completely above-ground organisations - for instance claiming that Al-Awda (an organisation which campaigns and educates on the right to return for Palestinian refugees) "is one part of a larger network known as the International Solidarity Movement." Errr, that would be the International Solidarity Movement that is a human rights observation and intervention organisation in the West Bank (plus some supporters overseas)? They may over the years have crossovers of personnel, be related in their aims, have similar viewpoints on many issues - but they have very different focuses and activities, and one is certainly not "part of" another. NIN claims to be "veteran, licensed professional investigators, analysts, military affairs specialists and researchers," which is really quite funny if they're happy to put this level of 'research' into the public domain. And this loon Hagmann also manages to drag in Obama, Kucinich and the revolting George Galloway as part of a giant anti-Zionist conspiracy. If only.

Moss Witch

I keep saying I've reached the end of my tether with the BBC - particularly with its repulsive and growing tendency to report the views of scum like Migration Watch and the Taxpayers' Alliance as if these loons are purveyors of reliable research data - but then Auntie keeps doing something to vaguely redeem itself. This time it's support for the National Short Story Awards, which I probably wouldn't have taken an awful lot of notice of if it wasn't for the presence of the marvellous Sara Maitland on the shortlist. And her story, Moss Witch, which touches on some very pertinent tensions between maintaining wild places vs studying them, can be downloaded here (beware, it's nearly half an hour long and the file is 26mb). Sara's three decades of writing seem to manage to touch on many of the Big Questions - gender, sex, nature, religion - with humour and breathtaking lightness and sadness. Personal favourites - novels Virgin Territory and Brittle Joys, and one of my current reads, A Book of Silence. There's something terrifically, terrifyingly wise about much of her writing, especially the last-named book, although it also makes me want to up sticks and become a hermit in the Sinai (if such a thing is possible. I suppose it is in the desert proper, albeit that's still peppered with landmines, but last time I was on Mount Sinai itself the experience was somewhat marred by a Belgian evangelical Christian accordionist who insisted on playing in the dawn with deeply unspiritual wheezings and blarings, despite the other people on the mountain trying to appreciate the heartbreaking wonder of the sun rising over the desert mountains.)

Jan Moir's career to die of perfectly natural causes

Just a quick little post to share an amusing bit of biteback to the vile Jan Moir column on the death of Stephen Gately, from Newsarse, which is funny without falling into the otherwise marvellous Onion's trap of going on FAR too long.
And here is a less frothy but more pertinent piece on why Moir might have been made by her bosses at the Hate Mail to do some grovelling... the power of advertising.

Signs o' the times

It was very odd the other morning to witness the Mail and the Express using the word Bigot in big headline letters to describe the execrable Nick Griffin of the BNP in the wake of his BBC TV debut. Mainly because the gap between the views on immigrants and women regularly espoused by said papers is usually pretty damn close to those of Mr Griffin. But I supposed they prefer their reactionary racism to be spouted by people at least one remove from out-and-out fascism, so they need to put some clear blue water between him and themselves. Weird to watch though.
On the subject of clear blue water - and, indeed, borderline fascism - a lurking cold, brain fatigue (the Leila Khaled book is due in in a week) and the NHS's ongoing slowness in offering any solution to my knackered hip have driven me once again into the arms of NCIS. A truly appalling show, but my goodness Mark Harmon is some quality eye candy. Hence the gratuitous pic. Just look at those lovely twinkly eyes.
Brian Candeland of Manchester Green Party has some good points to make about the decline of the local press here, as well as also pointing out the fallacy of assuming that because it's a less tangible Thing, the internet doesn't have a whopping environmental impact. To add to his info, I'll point out that the average server has similar climate change emissions to that bugbear of environmentalists, the SUV.
I suspect that Candeland and other Manchester G/greens will have their work cut out on coming months opposing Tesco's plans for one of its biggest grounds in the UK, being plotted in collusion with the corporate whores at Lancashire Cricket Club. There's a new campaign website here and I suspect that if Trafford council are stupid enough to let the proposals through the planning stage, this will turn into a big campaign - as one south Manchester environmentalist, a veteran of the Newbury and Manchester Second Runway direct action campaigns and now aspiring to a quiet life and parenthood (if those two are remotely compatible), said a while back, "Oh God, I hope it doesn't go through, or I'll have to go and sit on diggers and down tunnels again, won't I?" Well, there was an opening demo last week, and probably loads more to come. I'll be with you, guys, just as soon as I get that new hip...

How the hell did I get here?

I spent a very strange Monday evening this week burning up my phone bill on a call to a Syrian mobile phone number.
On the other end of the line with Khalil Maqdesi, head of the English language section of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
I was interviewing Mr Maqdesi for a number of purposes. Partly for the biography of aeroplane hijacker Leila Khaled which I'm writing for Pluto Press and which – heh heh heh – is due finished in about 8 weeks. And partly for some prospective articles for Electronic Intifada on the Palestinian Left and where exactly it's at nowadays...
Once upon a time, it wasn't Hamas that made people in the West think of Palestinian terrorism, it was the PFLP and Fatah. Israel and the USA – as with the mujahideen in Afghanistan – tolerated, even encouraged, the growth of the Islamic movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad because they thought they would break the strength of the Left, which in the Cold War days they feared immeasurably more.
The PFLP is still firmly on the EU's list of Banned Terror Organisations. But its strength in this post-Soviet era is massively diminished, and like left-wing parties and organisations the world over it's looking for ways to be seen as relevant, especially by younger generations. I'm sure there are people who will see my biog of Leila as part of that attempt. I think she's really interesting, so I'll risk it.
I have to admit, despite a lurking fear of the potential repercussions (beyond the financial) of spending an hour and a quarter chatting away to a PFLP official, to having rather enjoyed it. There's something about a voice which drops in 'yanni' when it can't find a word, and punctuates statements with the sound of a cigarette being lit and drawn heavily on, that takes me right back to the West Bank, and I love and miss it. He was a quick, knowledgeable interviewee (it's his job, after all) and he had a cracking sense of humour. The political content of the interview I'll save for the articles and book, at this point I'm just musing on it.
I recently finished re-reading for the umpteenth time one of my Sara Paretsky VI Warshawski novels. It would be wrong to call them candyfloss for the brain – more the sort of chocolate you tell yourself is Good Quality and Probably Has Antioxidants In It – detective novels with some decent feminist leftie politics to make the car chases seem less dumb.
In this one (Fire Sale, also with lots of political undercurrents about the exploitation of unauthorised immigrants in the USA) the feisty female journo, veteran of warzones, is a gorgeous Prada-wearing shagmonster who nearly gets herself killed (again) in the passionate search for The Story and the thrills.
Now I'm a female journo (of sorts) and I've done a certain amount of warzoning, but let's face it – I'd look ever so silly in Prada, am tediously monogamous, have very little in the way of physical courage and have never properly had my moral courage tested, that I can really think of. While I can muster a certain amount of enthusiasm for fine wine or good whisky I'm generally much happier with A Nice Cup of Tea. As the lovely David Mitchell said on the radio the other week, I may have been born with tweed on the inside... I went to uni to study archaeology, for heaven's sake, and for reasons more to do with labelling mediaeval potsherds and correct use of a theodolite than Indiana Jones. I suppose I have a vague attachment to the journalistic pursuit of The Truth but I think most of the time I'm just kind of curious about stuff...
Which, to bring me back to my original subject, makes me wonder how the hell I ended up happily chatting to PFLP guy, wondering what little notes might be accumulating on some governmental computer somewhere, on Monday evening?

Observer Woman

Makes me spit...
This is actually the title of a very funny blog which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have been updated since 2007. It catalogues some of the particularly nauseating drivel perpetrated by that smug, vacuous waste of ink, the Observer Woman supplement.
Even my mum, who can still tolerate the Guardian, thinks Observer Woman is terrible.
And then today (hence a blog post about blogs which haven't been live for 2 years), OA sent me a link to another highly entertaining piece taking apart a particularly dreadful sounding Observer Woman article, in which some especially self-satisfied Londonista hack manages, with no apparent irony, to include herself in an article about Beautiful People. Hannah Betts. You can't fucking believe some people.
My personal brush with Observer Woman was pitching an interview piece about a fairly major woman writer to them. I was expecting to get knocked back, but this was in the days when I thought I wanted to be published in a broadsheet and hadn't realised that they pay late, pay badly, and despite the kudos are just as much tomorrow's litter tray liner as any other publication. What I wasn't expecting was that their response to the idea - the interviewee in question wasn't just a fairly significant player in late 60s/early 70s feminism and a reasonbly big name in various literary genres, but also had interesting things to say about issues like Jewish perspective on Palestine and Israel - was 'we've got a piece on feminism coming out in a couple of months.'
So, the position of the women's supplement for what purports to be Britain's main centre-left Sunday paper is that 'feminism' - defined as anyone vaguely feminist, or just not about clothes, makeup, cooking or, of course 'beautiful people' - is something to be covered, oooh, about twice a year. I knew there was a reason I can't even bear to read the Observer, let alone hand over cold hard cash for it.

Reporting 'reality'

I have an interesting contrast in my head at the moment, between the attitudes of two women, both brave in their own way, to what kind of information it's important to report about world events.
On the one hand, we have the Kate Adie autobiography I'm reading. I have a certain amount of respect for Adie, for some of the places she's been risks she's taken and professional strides she's made in a pretty male-dominated environment. She's got some fairly odd views, particularly on feminism, but it's an account of an incident during her time reporting for the BBC in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s that interests me right now:

“I went into the hall and looked through into the front room. A small boy, seven or eight perhaps, was standing by the fireplace. 'Me Daddy,' he said to me immediately, 'me Daddy won't get up.' Under the Christmas tree was a man's body, awkwardly splayed.
...
You wonder what good reporting does, being at these events, a spectator, unable even to extend a reassuring arm because you feel such as intruder.
You go back to the office, with some pictures of a terraced house with a tiny hole in the front-room window made by a motorbike passenger's bullet, and type out a little list of facts: the only Protestant family who'd chosen to remain, the wife out working her nurse's night-shift, the name of the dead man.
You omit the Christmas tree and the little boy's words.”
[The Kindness of Strangers, Kate Adie, Hodder Headline 2002]

In complete contrast to this, at the moment I have the privilege of helping to edit my friend Sharyn's book for Pluto press, based on her writings from Gaza during the Israeli airstrikes and invasion of December and January just past and the months afterwards.
Working on her stuff is on one level a bloody nightmare, because it's so powerfully written and so desperately upsetting and trying to edit on-screen when your eyes keep tearing up is a right pain, and on another uplifting because of the strength and uprightness of spirit that just shines through from the people she writes about.
It rather makes me feel sorry for Kate Adie; she firmly asserts a good old-fashioned solid positivist idea of journalism, that there is A Truth somewhere which just presenting The Facts will somehow reveal. And as the incident with the little boy in Belfast seems to me to show, that reduces the news she devotedly puts (put) out on the BBC to list of numbers and the doings of the People Who Matter.
Adie also, at another point in the book, debates the extent to which journalists can and should allow what they feel about a situation to come through into what they report, and claims that when a journalist - at least a TV one - allows some sentiment to show, it's because they've been specifically given 'permission' to do so, because it suits the situation. The increasing number of such moments is, you feel, not something she sees as a positive development.
Obviously, if you are reporting news then there has to be some effort at fairness - at representing different sides of a story or versions of an event. But I've given up believing that it is possible for anyone to report anything truly 'neutrally.' The moment you decide what aspects of a story are or are not worth reporting, or whose quotes are or are not more reliable, you've taken a position. I'm not taking a completely relativist position, that anyone's views carry equal weight or are equally reliable, there will always be those with more knowledge or experience of a given situation, but once you start choosing between those who have any decently reportable level of information or opinion, you've taken a stance.
And I can't help thinking that 99% of the supposedly important news from those People Who Matter actually matters rather little – that another defunct peace plan or another empty set of climate change commitments that everyone involved knows will never by implemented or acted on – is actually pretty meaningless against something which actually impacts profoundly on the lives of a group of people – not just in terms of the depth of their immediate grief, but also of the decisions they will make in the future.
Those agreements and treaties made by governments and so on may provide the framework within which other events may occur, but if it wasn't for the pain and rage, or the dignity and mercy and compassion, of the ordinary people under the boot-heels of the Matterers then those agreement and treaties would mean nothing. You can't understand the pieces of paper without the blood and shrapnel and tears, and you can't implement it, whatever it says, without fear or hate or loyalty or belief that makes people kill and be killed. In the end, a string of mouldering official documents in some archive (as reported by Kate Adie) will mean very little if someone (like Sharyn) hasn't recorded the grief and anger of the little boy – in Belfast, or in Gaza City – that will drive the next turn of the wheel.

Spawn of the Devil

Hahaha. Sometimes I really like the Daily Mirror, when it's not doing tabloid-celeb bollox, and the link I've just been sent sparks one of those times... with this rant against that vile travesty of the human race that is Jeremy Clarkson. Clarkson's evangelical approach to macho, dangerous driving styles and general climate-change-inducing, animal-squishing, cyclist-damaging, community-dividing, health-wrecking, planet-raping behaviour is annoying enough, but when he turns himself into the wounded Messiah of a band of whinging half-wits who complain about 'attacks' on the put-upon 'British motorist' then it's hard to decide whether the correct response is to throw up or go out and strangle the first motorist who floors it to rush (dangerously through the bike lane) into the next traffic jam space.

Auntie slides a bit further down the drain...

So, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's Middle East editor, has come in from some stick from the BBC Trust, the structure which took over from the Governors in the wake of various little spats with the Blair government.
Now, I'm fairly weary of saying that I don't believe that there is some global Zionist conspiracy to control the media, and that I think that Palestine solidarity activists who do subscribe to this view are generally being lazy, anti-semitic, or both. But what Zionist organisers are good at doing (and we're not, although we're probably getting better at it, and don't forget they've had more practice), is mobilising large numbers of people to contact organisations like the BBC and moan whenever Israel, its state and its activities aren't painted in the purest and most glorious of colours.
So Jeremy Bowen's reporting on Har Homa settlement (just outside Bethlehem, and a key part of Israel's expansion of what it classifies as 'Jerusalem' out into Palestinian West Bank land) and the anniversary of the 1967 war has been censured by the Trust in the wake of just such organised lobbying.
Har Homa is a particularly interesting case in the war of terminology and myth which Zionists are so good at. 'Official' accounts of the genesis of Har Homa settlement paint it as an unoccupied hill south of Jerusalem which was a logical building site for overspill Israeli population from the city. Anyone who's ever actually been there will know that it is very much part of the circle of hills within which Bethlehem and Beit Sahour sit. Jebel abu Ghnaim, the local name for the site, was, my Beit Sahour friends tell me, a favourite picnic site for Palestinian families on weekends, and a place where probably hundreds or thousands of local kids (including my friend S) have, over the centuries, roamed and explored.
And one of the reasons it was so free of habitation when that renowned peacemaker Shimon Peres signed the order to build 6,500 Israeli homes on it? It had been designated a 'green area' by the Israeli state, to be preserved for local ecological balance and biodiversity. But only, apparently, until the Israeli state wanted to move a population of 30-40,000 people onto it. And Bowen's crime in the eyes of the BBC Trust was, apparently, to point out that a number of governments and major international institutions consider such settlements to be illegal under international law.
I'm going to admit an interest here. I like Jeremy Bowen. In 2002, when we were under curfew and attack in Bethlehem during Israel's Operation Defensive Shield invasion of much of the West Bank, Bowen was one of many international journalists who rocked up a week or so in to report on the situation, particularly the siege in the Church of the Nativity. But he was also one of the most humane and inquisitive amongst them, genuinely interested in finding out what was going on around him rather than churning out the story and then heading for the bar. Most of the press were fairly sneery about the gangs of idealistic ISMers trying to do things like get food into the areas around the Church and Bethlehem city centre which were under 24/7 curfew for something like 6 weeks, without a break. But on one of the food runs we did, carrying UN food aid bags into the city from the warehouse where they'd been left, Bowen not only came with us (along with Jon Snow from Ch4 and some stray cameramen hoping to get a shot of some activist chicks getting shot at) but he even carried a big box of milk powder. We were bloody grateful, because all that food is pretty heavy and we had a longish walk through the backstreets, asking 'Jesh? Fi Jesh' of every bemused local resident who stuck their head out of a window to see what was going on. At a crossroads where we started to see the cars the Israeli army had been systematically blowing up Bowen finally handed me his case of milk powder, saying he's come far enough and apologising for not bringing it further - despite the fact that he was the only press person who brought anything at all.
So it pisses me off when the BBC Trust criticises his work, apparently for having the temerity to diverge from the BBC's usual newsgathering policy on Palestine and Israel, which is simply to interview Mark Regev, the smooth-talking and wholly evil Israeli government spokesman. Yes, there have been times when Bowen's coverage has irritated me for being a bit too 'balanced,' but largely I take this as a good sign, that he is actually being properly balanced and correcting my tendency towards a bias towards the human tragedy going on in Palestine. And these rulings from the corrupt little elitist cabal that is the BBC Trust just serve to demonstrate still further how far down the drain our national broadcaster is going.

Baby, baby it's a weird world

I'm sure there's something in Alice in Wonderland about the number of odd things that can happen in a morning. But I can't be bothered to look it up properly.
But, firstly we have an very interesting article about Somali 'pirates' from Johann Hari. Now, I have vague recollections of Mr Hari doing something helpful for me once, can't remember if it was to do with Palestine or environmental stuff, but I did for a bit have some time for him. Then he went all Cruise Missile Left, and then flip-flopped back away from Blairite spin on Iraq when it became apparent that no-one, even the Aaronovitches of this world, let alone any sane and decent human being, could carry on swallowing that line. But Hari has been asking some sensible questions about what actually goes on in Somalia - as in, dumping of nuclear waste in its waters, theft of all its fish stocks by massive Western industrial fishing boats - and points out that going in mob-handed with a bunch of UK, US etc etc etc naval vessels may not be the most useful response.
Secondly, Manchester Confidential's Property section has gone all crusading. Despite the name, Manchester Confidential is rarely confidential about anything more exciting than the menus of the latest overpriced trendy city centre restaurant. But one of its writers has clocked that some of the beautiful big old Victorian houses on Seymour Grove are being left empty - in one case boarded up but in another open to the world, no doubt in the hope that it will become derelict enough to knock down, as has happened with so many landmark Manchester buildings from the Hacienda to the old Bank building on Stretford Road in Hulme and Sunnyside House just up the road from the properties in question. And Property Confidential is proposing to Ask Some Questions about what the hell is going on here, and whether legal measures can be taken to make sure the buildings aren't left to decay and then knocked down to build yet more bloody flats. Perhaps some of Manchester's squatters should also be taking a look at the more accessible of the two houses, in a public-spirited kind of way...
And thirdly, there is a story from the International Middle East Media Centre about a toddler born in Damascus of Syrian parents who live in the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967. The kid is confined to his home under total house arrest for being an enemy national and must remain so until he is at least 2 years old... but then nothing the Israeli authorities do to any Arab, Palestinian or otherwise, surprises me now.

Last few days, and back home

So, a final few days in Palestine and Israel after all the interviewing of Palestinian women workers from the settlements. Chaos, generally, as final few days tend to be.
A few little things that stand out:
- a stunningly repugnant front page of the Jerusalem Post (usually a pretty vile rag anyway), announcing that Israeli soldiers had worked hard to prevent civilian casualties in the overpopulated chaos that was Gaza during the invasion. Poor dears. I'm sure they bust blood vessels making that effort. The Israeli police spent all of about 2 seconds 'investigating' reports made by soldiers who served in Gaza of war crimes before declaring them 'hearsay';
- the truly appalling state of unrecognised Bedouin villages in the Naqab, shanty towns of ragged tents - a few of them the traditional camel and goat hair, but most of them made from plastic sheeting. And the horrid irony, pointed out by my friends L and U, who live down there, of Bedouin villages with no running water or electricity, sandwiched at just a few hundred yards' remove by a power station on one side and a water treatment plant on the other, both serving Israeli communities;
- the utter gutless half-witted rubbish being spouted by some god-awful journalist on the BBC World Service, trying to find ways to justify the British police apparently adding newspaper sellers on their way home to the list of people - Brazilian electricians, any black youth they fall over - who it's ok to murder. RIP Ian Tomlinson. The video which the Guardian managed to get hold of which reveals the extent of police lies - that they were pelted with missiles while trying to save him, when actually they basically killed him and then ignored him and impeded medical care - is here:



Yes, coming home has been less than cheerful (apart from being back with my wonderful husband, lovely friends and gorgeous cats), with police brutality and suppression of environmental and anti-capitalist protests topping the bill. But the amazing Marc Roberts has, as usual, managed to crank out a topical cartoon at light speed. For Arabic readers, some of his climate change work has also been translated for a Lebanese audience at al-Bia wal-Tanmia.

Journalistic bollocks

All very insignificant, this, but a good illustration of how inaccurate some journalists can be, and how a couple of poorly checked facts can replicate themselves...
Several years ago I interviewed a UNISON rep and psychiatric nurse called Karen Reissman about NHS privatisation, for the TogetherWorks magazine Enterprising. The article ended up as one of the excuses Karen's former employers used to sack her, since few employers are enlightened enough to want active, politicised union reps on their staff.
Unsurprisingly, this attracted a certain amount of press coverage, including from press industry publications like the Press Gazette. So when Karen settled her claim out of court during her employment tribunal, there was a certain amount of followup. This included this article by Dominic Ponsford, written using material from the PA Mediapoint agency added to by the Press Gazette. Now, this article is peppered with inaccuracies. The ones I can comment on are that he calls the magazine 'Inside Enterprise' and states that it is no longer running - when in fact there have been a number of issues of it since the Karen Reissman affair, and I'm putting together a new one at the moment. It also claims that the article was a feature on social enterprise, which is in fact the subject of the entire magazine.
A reply from the PA's Legal Editor emphasises that it was not their agency piece which included the mistakes - so I guess they were added by Dominic Ponsford at the Press Gazette.
Now, I'm not saying that these errors are particularly significant in themselves. But I am interested in what it says about poor standards of fact checking. Especially since agencies and industry publications like the Press Gazette are generally regarded as pretty reliable, which means that if anyone, for instance, ever decided to write a history of Karen's struggle, they would probably go first to these kind of sources, and get misled and sidetracked.
I'm also curious as to why the Press Gazette has removed my completely anodyne correcting comments to their web version of the article - aren't they prepared to admit they've printed an incorrect piece?

Pubs, politics and Palestine

With lots in the news at the moment about pubs closing due to the recession, I was extremely pleased this week to find a great pub which combines proper beer with genuine community spirit.
The Blue Bell, on Barlow Road in Levenshulme, doesn't look terrifically prepossessing from the outside. It's one of those big pub buildings which all too often nowadays have plastic signs proclaiming steak dinners for £3.99 or burgers for less - conjuring up images of hideous livestock conditions and inedible meat. Inside it's presentable but nothing special, with a certain amount of the kind of faux-traditional chintziness which dominates so much pub decor.
I'd been lured to the Blue Bell after having, in a rash moment of helpfulness, offered to answer questions about co-operatives and social enterprises at a public meeting of people wanting to form a co-op to save their local shop, the Village Stores. So I didn't even get as far as the bar before I was sitting down and fielding queries.
Then I noticed the beermats, which proclaimed that this was a Samuel Smith's pub. This, to me, is always a good thing, as even in the most hideous depths of central London it tends to herald good beer, reasonably priced. Sam Smith's, based in Tadcaster, is still an independent brewery and produces a full range of ales, milds and lagers, including an organic lager. And the plural of mild is advisedly used – rarely, it brews both a light and dark mild, and that is a rare and wonderful thing nowadays. The full range is Vegan Society approved and the company's tied pubs have stocked Fairtrade orange juice for some years – ie before it became a hugely successful marketing bandwagon.
But my reasons for being all excited about the Blue Bell don't stop with its beer. Licensees Mark and Mary Dunn seem to be genuinely committed to being part of and improving their local community. The room we used for the meeting for the putative co-op was provided free, as it is for a number of other organisations – from swimmers' groups to tenants' associations – during the rest of the week. Mark himself sat in on the meeting, and seemed keen to make sure that the street's excellent local shop was maintained somehow.
The descendant of market traders, Mark is bringing his interest in Manchester's history of local food production to bear on his community activities. He and other residents are planning a People's Orchard, planted with regional fruit tree varieties – and he is well able to list the kind of apples he wants to see promoted, varieties like Jonathan which have distinctive flavours and textures, instead of the bland offerings in British supermarkets.
The Blue Bell also has a wild patch out the back, where there are logs for hedgehogs to hibernate in and native flowers growing. And every year, the pub presents any children who want to enter its Garden Competition with a tub and some money to buy plants and seeds from Village Stores, and at the end of the summer the best mini-gardens win prizes. As Mark says, “it keeps them out of trouble and gives them a real sense of achievement.”

On other topics, the students occupying a building at Manchester University in solidarity with the people of Gaza are still there, a fantastic array of banners still adorning the front of the Simon Building and a great range of film showings, Dabke dance workshops and Fairtrade Palestinian olive oil launches taking place in the occupied space.
In Gaza, my friend Sharyn has moved from working with ambulances and medics to accompanying farmers into their fields where, it is hoped, the presence of internationals will allow them to harvest their crops – vital for the income of so many families and communities – without the worst excesses of Israeli military brutality. To date, results have been mixed, and despite the presence of ISMers several farmers harvesting parsley and other crops have been injured and killed by Israeli soldiers shooting at them.
On the climate change front, efforts to put together a 'Call to Real Action' in response to Manchester City Council's laughable 'Call to Action' effort continue apace, drawing in a wide range of people increasingly concerned about the lack of any real constructive activity on the subject.
And the interviews Marc and I gave to the Observer and the Mail on the subject of not having kids, which spawned a host of invitations to do more interviews, appear on the radio and feature in documentaries, has come back to haunt us yet again. Some freelancer called Britt has being trying to get in touch for an interview, pitching an article to the Guardian which – she rather misguidedly tried to reassure me – would also feature Teri 'I had an abortion for the planet' Vernelli, the other interviewee from the Mail article. The unusual thing about this Britt woman, who appears to work for IPC Media when she's not freelancing for the Grauniad, has been her persistence, sending me several emails, but more annoyingly harassing my former employers at Ethical Consumer and Togetherworks social enterprise network, where I'm a director, for my sins.

"It's just like closing your eyes.”

Despite the alleged ceasefire in Gaza - throughout which the Israeli army has continued to kill people, including civilians - my friend Sharyn has continued to post stories of some of the many people whose injuries she's helped treat or whose tales she's listened to in Gaza over the past week.
As well as her brilliantly written accounts of the horrors of the Israeli airstrikes and invasion, I'm reposting this account of Sharyn's because it illustrates some of the issues that journalists and viewers have to consider in situations like this.
The bastard Ch4 journalist demanding to know only about children is probably no more or less ignorant than many of the other correspondents sent in at short notice to get 'the story.' But his insistence on hearing only about dead children is indicative - we demand 'really' innocent victims - the adult women and civilian men also butchered and burned are apparently judged insufficiently blameless to warrant being reported.
The most intense period of time I spent in Palestine, during the invasion of the West Bank by the Israeli army in spring 2002, was less militarily intense than the weeks that Sharyn has just experienced, but was also the subject of major press interest. I have very mixed memories of that. On one hand, I remember Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's main Middle East correspondent, being a decent and humane individual. On one expedition, to try and take food into the area around the Church of the Nativity which was held under 24/7 curfew for 6 whole weeks, he came with us carrying a big box of powdered milk packets. At the corner of a street where we found burning cars and watched bit of other vehicles flying into the air on the next street over as Israeli soldiers blew them up, he handed me the box. "I've been doing this for 20 years," he said. "This is far enough for me." It was a good move - a few minutes later the soldiers realised we were there and started shooting and the walls above our heads, and I found myself trying to figure out what exactly had happened to make blood run down from the top of my scalp.
Jon Snow of Channel 4 also came on that walk into the curfew area. Half an hour before he'd been interviewing my friend Georgie, who at that time was living in Bethlehem, and despite having the same limited access to water as the rest of us was, as usual, managing to look fabulously dapper. They started filming the interview with Georgie looking cool in a pink Jermyn St shirt and designer jeans, and Snow bundled up in a flak jacket and military helmet. After about 30 seconds he ordered the cameras to stop, and started taking off his protective gear.
"The insurance people will go mad," he said, "but I can't do this with her dressed like that and me in this lot."
Set against these two basically decent guys, however, are examples like the French photographer, a macho scumbag dressed in excessive quantities of camouflage gear, who loudly declared one afternoon in the Star hotel, surrounded by Palestinians who had friends and relatives in the besieged Church of the Nativity, that the Israelis should just 'nuke the terrorists in the Church."
What's been really frustrating about much of the coverage from Gaza is the lack of interest that the mainstream press shows in anything not generated by themselves or their friends in the 'right' publicity departments. Information about phosphorus shells and massive civilian casualties had been coming out of Gaza for days, if not weeks, before BBC and other reports managed to transcend the IDF propaganda and engage with the idea that Israel might be using illegal munitions, or that the main target of the Israeli terror was not really a few militants but to try and crush the spirit out of an entire population. It reminds me why I rarely, and only under duress, describe myself as a journalist, and why that profession tends to rank amongst politicians and estate agents as the least trustworthy.

23rd January: Amer's story - they killed me three times

Ramatan TV, nine floors up and open 24 hours, was the last bastion of internet during the strikes. We knew the place because we got asked in for interviews, and then called a few press conferences there, for example announcing that internationals would be riding with ambulances. We began to hang around in the corners at other times, hoping no-one would mind us hitching a ride on the wifi.
Instead of complaining about random internationals cluttering up the place, Ramatan journalists wholeheartedly adopted us, brought us tea, gave us blankets if we needed to stay the night. Now most nights at about 9pm, you'll find some of us there being fed a small feast in the kitchen.

I forgot that I didn't like journalists much, because these guys are firstly Palestinian, and their reporting is compassionate. Now journalists are flooding in through Rafah (though I do like some of them) I was reminded. Two days ago a recently arrived Channel 4 guy came into Yousef's office on a deadline, wanting to know how many children died in the UNWRA schools. Yousef said “Two children at one school. Forty five people at another.”
“But how many of them were children?” Channel 4 guy insisted.
“Forty five people altogether,” Yousef said, thinking he'd misunderstood.
“No,” Mr Channel 4 said irritatedly, “I want to say the number of children.”
“Oh!” I said, and stomped off, remembering my former journalist feelings.

Yousef Al Helou has the end office in Ramatan. His TV speaks English sometimes, and he's always willing to pool information and help us figure out what is going on. Today he took me and E to Zaytoun to hear the story of his cousin's family. When we arrived, I realised we were only two houses from the first house we'd evacuated people from on the Red Cross evacuation I went on. I
would have walked past Amer and Shireen Al Helou's house that day. But by then it was empty and broken, because the day Amer told us about was January 4th.

Amer is 29. 14 people from his family were in the house that night, and they were all trying to sleep under their stairs as some sort of shelter. Even though the stairs were partly open to the back yard, the F16 attacks on the house made downstairs seem the safest place. The house now has holes from shell blasts and thousands of pock-marks from the three inch nails that the shells were filled with.

“We hadn't known how bad it would get,” said Amer. “Or we would have left our house and gone somewhere else. But we thought our area was a quiet area. And then that night we thought they would go past us at the front. But they came from the back.”

Amer didn't know it yet, but his brother Mohammed had already been killed elsewhere that day, struck by drone rockets.

The Israeli soldiers came to their house at about 5.30am, after the house had been shelled for 15 hours, and immediately opened fire on the family, killing Amer's father with three shots. Then they told the family to leave. Amer had called an ambulance (which had to turn back after being shot at) and was refusing to leave his father's body but the soldiers said they would shoot him if he stayed, so they fled 300 yards up the dirt track behind their house, at which point they were shot at again by another group of soldiers.

This time Amer's brother Abdullah was shot, Amer and Shireen's 6 year old daughter Saja was shot in the arm, and their 1 year old daughter Farah was shot in the stomach. They spent the next 14 hours sheltering behind a small hill of dirt, while the wounded bled, and were not allowed to access help though the soldiers were aware of the injuries. Having no other way to comfort her small daughter, whose intestines were falling out, Shireen breastfed Farah as the little girl slowly bled to death.

After 14 hours, at about 8 in the evening, the soldiers sent dogs to chase them out of their shelter and dropped phosphorous bombs near them, but due to the wounded family members and having bare feet in an area of broken glass and rubble, escape was difficult. The army took the three wounded and put them behind the tanks, and captured Amer, but the rest of the family managed to get away and call the Red Crescent. The ambulance that eventually reached the injured people 7 hours later (driven by my medic friend S) took an hour to find them, and by this time Farah was dead. (When I heard Amer's story I realised S had already told me about collecting 'a small shaheed' from this area.)

Amer was held for 5 days in army custody (the first 3 without access to food, water, or a bathroom), beaten and tortured, and questioned about resistance activity which he knew nothing about. When he was finally released on the border, the army sent two known collaborators to escort him, so it would look to the resistance fighters like he himself was a collaborator. But the fighters knew who he was and that he was not a collaborator. He tells us:

“I had my four children young, and they gave me the most happiness in my life. I took such good care of them. I didn't let them just play on the street, we had a big living room in our house with toys for them, we would invite all the neighbours' children to come play there with ours, so that we could be sure they were all safe. I always drove them to and from school, I didn't even let them walk. Whenever I was depressed, I would gather all my kids, pile them in the car, take them somewhere nice like the park or the beach, and then to see them happy and having fun would make me happy again.
“Now my remaining children will not go to sleep without their shoes on, because they think we will have to run for our lives again.”
“We love life as the Israelis do. Are they the only people allowed life? They killed me three times that day, first when they killed my brother, then when they killed my father, then when they killed my daughter. We looked for my father's body later; they had buried him under rubble, eventually we found his foot sticking out. Sometimes now I think we have to leave Gaza, to join my brother in South Africa. Sometimes I think, no - Gaza is worth fighting for, this is our home.”

Amongst their crumpled belongings, next to the spot Amer's father died, the family gives us tea. Shireen solicitously dusts the sand off my back. We ask them how it is they have not gone crazy from the pain of these events.
“It's not us, it's God who gives us peace and strength. Without this I would be dead too. What happened to my family was like a horror film” says Amer. He shows us photos of Farah (whose name means 'joy') and Saja on his phone. “I don't think I can have any more children. I am too broken inside.”

The family is not living in the house right now, they are split between different homes, and Abdullah is in hospital in Egypt. Amer is wearing Abdullah's jacket, complete with bullet holes. “It is hard to be here again in this house after what happened. But your presence has lifted my spirits” he tells us.

Back at Ramatan, I hear one of the journalists talking. “I couldn't protect my children - this is my responsibility, and I couldn't.” He says. “My daughter asked, what is it like to die? I told her, it's just like closing your eyes.”

Tea & Cake at the Airport

With the government apparently about to help send us all that little bit further down the planetary pan with the likely announcement of a new runway at Heathrow, and hundreds of climate change protesters trying to point out that this might be a fucking lousy idea, Marc Roberts again blesses us all with a neat summary of the quality of mainstream media reporting on the subject.
The mentality of most of the pondscum at the BBC (etc) is illustrated in a fairly benign way by a former BBC environment correspondent speaking at a Panos event. Anyone really wishing to grasp the extent of the BBC's ignorance and out-of-date stances on climate change only needs to listen to the Today Programme or You and Yours on R4. Having said that, the defence of Peter Sissons' laughable interview with the Green Party's Caroline Lucas that my beloved husband received in the post a week or two ago was particularly spectacular. I thought he'd blogged it, but I obviously need to do my wifely duty and nag him into getting it done.

Israeli tanks head into Gaza

Not a fun Saturday night. Between the news that Israeli tanks are heading into Gaza, Marc getting called in to do physio-y things to a very sick teenager and the residual desire to slowly and painfully break the arm of the gobshite who killed the lovely little plum tree on my allotment, my attitudes towards life, the universe and everything are currently a tad jaundiced.
My friend Sharyn is riding with ambulances in Gaza tonight. One Red Crescent station has already been damaged so working alongside medics is no guarantee of safety. Sharyn knows what the Israeli forces are capable of - she has a nice ring of shrapnel from a splinter bullet in her stomach to show it - and one of her latest blog posts, cited below, wondered what it was the Israelis didn't want the hundreds of international they let out through Erez the other day to see. I guess this is the answer.
I remember so well what it's like being aware that an incursion is on its way, watching the sun go down and wondering what will be revealed when the darkness lifts next day. The strange sensation of compression at the base of the throat that is the tension of not knowing.
The last 36 hours have seen hundreds of thousands of people - maybe millions - demonstrating around the world. Yesterday was mainly the Muslim countries, with crowds heading out onto the streets after prayers.
Today was Europe, Australia, the USA. 20,000 in Paris. The lily-livered lying scum at the BBC, whose coverage wasn't too bad at the start but which has degenerated into whinging apologias for the Israeli military, reported 12,000 in London today but I prefer to rely on my mum's description, which suggests that it's bollocks and should be comfortably doubled. Manchester was a good couple of thousand, which given that coaches went from hear to London wasn't too bad.
There are legitimate critiques of marches and their failure to build in participation and to build on their energy to keep working in the communities from which the marchers come. But I also know that the sight of people demonstrating around the world is a terrific boost to the morale of Palestinians when they come under attack, and however dispiriting another bloody chant-chant-slogan-slogan-slogan, SWP-dominated, patriarchal march can feel, they do have their uses. As emphasised by Sharyn's words below, and in a chat I had on the subject with Kevin Brown of the FBU, who was on a solidarity delegation to the West Bank last June.
My brilliant mum was commenting on a news piece she saw which showed an Israeli policeman holding the remains of one of the Hamas rockets we keep hearing so much about in the news - a glorified firework, maybe 2 feet long. And then it cut to an unexploded Israeli missile, the size, as she put it, of a room. A pity not all the fools bleating about Hamas violence haven't been made to view that news item. As I've said publicly and repeatedly, Hamas are largely a nasty, reactionary bunch and targeting civilians is inexcusable. But to talk as if the two had some parity is also offensively stupid, as well as tediously predictable.
Also not an enhancement to my love for my fellow (hu)man has been the process of editing for length an article by Naela Khalil, a journalist from the West Bank who was threatened with suspension for carrying out a piece of investigative work into the use of torture and illegal detention by Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, against each other's supporters. Naela won the Prix Samir Kassir for her article, which is a valuable contribution to revealing the truth about political conflict within Palestine. It's hardly a shock to find that members of the Palestinian security services are learning the tricks of the Israeli torturers who abused them and are turning them on their political rivals at home, but it's not an encouraging spectacle either. The piece is supposed to be running in Red Pepper, but I suspect they're going to bottle it.

Cantankerous Frank gets arrested as an eco-terrorist

Marc Roberts is a genius Manchester-based cartoonist with a a big heart, lots of common sense and a stunning capacity for bile and vitriol regarding the many ways various human systems and organisations are fucking up the Earth. He's also terrifyingly prolific, and this evening's cartoon is a particularly marvellous comment on the state of the planet.