Fair and Balanced

Just for fun I did a Google news search of “Israel”. These are the top results, not including blog posts and videos. I also excluded three Haaretz articles, which could have easily been for or against Israel, because Haaretz only has teaser articles and wants you to pay for a subscription to read the rest. I think that is stupid.

After Failed Peace Talks, Pushing to Label Israel as Occupier of Palestine
New York Times

This is about the Palestinian Authority plan to join the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Most of the article tows the Palestinian line that if they were part of the court then Israel would be punished for crimes against humanity for building settlements. The article only hints at what might happen to the leaders of Palestine if they were members of a court that investigates genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture and any number of crimes the Palestinian Authority practice on a regular basis.

If you read this article and knew nothing about Palestine’s crimes then you might assume that PA leaders never do anything bad.

Israel, Kerry is one of your best friends
CNN

This article tells us that “no U.S. leader has done more to help Israel gain acceptance in the international community and ensure its long-term peace and security” than Secretary of State John Kerry. I am not sure how that is at all true. But like most articles it repeats the mantra that Judea and Samaria are occupied territory without acknowledging why it was taken from Jordan, why they had it in the first place and who had it before they invaded.

Assi Dayan, a Celebrated Actor and Filmmaker in Israel, Dies at 68
New York Times

This is about the death of the actor and is neither for nor against Israel.

Candidates with impressive backgrounds to face off in Israel presidential race
New York Daily News

This is about the upcoming presidential election and Shimon Peres’ retirement. This could be seen as favouring Israel but it is mostly neutral.

Pink Floyd to Rolling Stones: Boycott Israel
The Washington Post

This is mostly about Roger Waters being Roger Waters. He has a lot of emotional opinions that have little to do with reason. And his indignation always seems to come at the most fashionable times. I do not remember him speaking out against the Chinese government before Tiananmen Square or about Wall Street during all that occupy business.

Since he has been very pro-Arab for a long time you would think he would support Israel since it is the only country in the vicinity that gives Arabs basic human rights. But he jumped on that whole boycott Israel bandwagon, probably without realising just how much he would really have to boycott.

Despite the title, David Gilmour is not involved. Though I suppose that means little to Roger Waters.

Israel's drone dealers
Al Jazeera

Nobody expects Al Jazeera to be unbiased but this article blames Israel for American drone attacks in Pakistan. The reasoning is that since Israel created the UAV technology it is responsible for how everybody uses it. Does that make Arab states responsible when anybody straps on a suicide vest? The article does not say.

Israeli PM Netanyahu: No peace talks if Abbas is backed by Hamas
CNN

This begins as an article about Netanyahu rejecting the terrorists in charge of Hamas but it quickly goes into a revisionist history of Gaza. According to the article Fatah and Hamas had a coalition before a falling out led them to go their separate ways. There is no mention of the bloodbath in Gaza when Hamas took control.

If you read this article and knew nothing about Hamas’ crimes then you might assume that Hamas leaders never do anything bad.

An interesting point about CNN is that every article about Arab states that have nothing to do with Israel are about Arabs killing Arabs. If Arabs kill Arabs in the name of killing Jews then it is Israel’s fault. But when Arabs kill Arabs in the name of whichever sect they favour then it is an unfortunate frailty of man. According to CNN.

Abbas, Hamas chief to hold first talks since unity deal
AFP

This article goes further than most, telling readers that “Hamas forcibly took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, ousting forces loyal to the president”. But there is no mention that more than a few people were tortured or murdered, including many of those who were “ousted”.

Israeli settlers launch enclave in Palestinian business hub
Reuters

This is about how evil Jews are for living in Jerusalem. It reminds us that Israel captured Jerusalem “in a 1967 war” and “most of the world views Israeli enclaves there as illegal settlements”. There is no mention of why it was taken from Jordan, why Jordan had it in the first place and who had it before Jordan invaded.

Israel approved record 14,000 settlements during peace talks with Palestine – report
Reuters

Another article about “illegal” houses on “occupied” land without any mention of who occupied the land before Israel took it back and how absolutely nobody did anything to make it a country while it was “free”.

Israeli troops destroy mosque in Palestinian village
AP

This is my favourite article of the lot. It is about how the evil Jews tore down a few houses and a mosque. That sure sounds evil. After all, no Muslims would ever damage a synagogue.

It tries to sound like an entire village was demolished, “leaving up to 30 people homeless” but fails to mention that three houses were torn down. That is not so great for those three families but hardly an act of genocide.

But a fairly important point that the article completely ignores is that these houses were built on an active live fire military test range. Imagine what would happen if the houses were not torn down and the people living in them were injured or killed the next time weapons were tested on the range. Would the International Community say that those people should not have built houses there? Would anybody point out that building your house on a military test range is probably not a great idea? For some reason I doubt it.

Why it is hypocritical to boycott Israel
The Telegraph

This is an unusual article in that it favours Israel and actually makes some pretty good points. The writer went on a bit much about British crimes but he is British and writing to a British audience.

He asks why he should have to explain a trip to Israel when he never has to explain trips to China, Saudi Arabia or the United States. I know the answer to that, and the writer probably does as well, but it is still a good question.

Of these 12 articles, 1 favours Israel and 2 are neutral. The other 9 are very much against Israel and leave out pertinent information that might otherwise cause the reader to question the author’s position. The one pro-Israel article mentions negatives against Israel in an effort to appear fair and balanced. None of the anti-Israel articles do the same in reverse.

I have never questioned why people who live in Arab dictatorships blindly follow what they are told. They have little choice. I used to always question why people in democracies with free information blindly follow what they are told. But the more people only see one narrative the more they accept it as absolute.

What Media Bias?

“The prisoner issue is an emotional one for Palestinians after decades of conflict with Israel. Palestinians generally view them as heroes, regardless of the reason for their imprisonment. Israelis mostly view them as terrorists.” The Guardian.

This “regardless of the reason for their imprisonment” is the closest I have seen from the international media admitting that these “heroes” are murderers who targeted schools and hospitals.

“The Palestinians have now abandoned an undertaking to refrain from applying for membership of various international organisations; a step which displeases Israel and the Americans.” BBC.

The BBC often go to great pains to avoid saying that any Palestinian dictator ever did anything wrong. “Abandoned an undertaking to refrain from applying” rather than simply saying they did what they agreed not to do. “A step which displeases Israel and the Americans”. It is not a massive violation of an agreement with Israel and the United States; the only countries on this planet that are keeping Palestine alive. It is merely displeasing.

“There is an identical twin of this plane. It has been sitting in a hangar in Tel Aviv, Israel, for the past couple of months. There was a shell-game played with this aircraft. It was in the south of France, and then they moved it down to Israel. Speculation is that there was some sort of false-flag plan afoot, perhaps another planes-into-buildings deception like 9/11.” Press TV.

This is about how Israel made that Malaysia Airlines flight go missing. It is easy to dismiss stories like this as the rantings of crazy people. But the more the crazies rant the more people listen. The narrative used to be that all terrorists were bad. Now some are bad and some are good. Depending on whom they murder. Someday “terrorist” will be a positive designation.

“Palestinians want an independent state in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem - lands captured by Israel in a 1967 war.” Reuters.

This is my favourite. I see this all the time. Israel took this land away from poor innocent Jordan. The international media always ignore a few key points. What prompted Israel to “capture” this land from Jordan in 1967? Why was it under Jordan’s control? Was it considered an ancient Palestinian homeland whilst under Jordan’s control? What country was it part of before Jordan captured it? Anybody who cannot answer these basic questions, which are not at all subjective, is not in the least bit qualified to discuss this issue.

I live in a world where terrorists from repressive dictatorships are given equal standing from the international media as the democratically elected representatives from a progressive liberal democracy. This same international media would never label al Qaeda and the United States as equals. Or Tamil Tigers and Sri Lanka, PLA and India, Taliban and Afghanistan, FARC and Colombia, Shining Path and Peru, DHKP and Turkey. All of those countries are the good guys whilst the terrorists who blow people up are the bad guys. Most people will agree that strapping on a bomb and blowing people up makes you the bad guy. Unless you blow up Jews. Then you are an oppressed minority, despite being part of the overwhelming majority ethnic group in the region.

As we all know, minority groups are the good guys and majority groups are the bad guys. Yet all of the terrorist examples above are minority groups in their countries and they are the bad guys compared to that country’s majority. Israel, the bad guy, is the minority surrounded by a rather hostile majority of good guys. Maybe, just maybe, being in the minority or majority does not automatically make one right or wrong.

American liberals support homosexual rights, women’s rights, minority rights, abortion rights, gun control, high taxes, science, education, oppose capital punishment, religious law, and rabidly defend liberal political candidates who say and do crazy things whilst rabidly attacking conservative candidates who say and do crazy things. The same is true in other “western” countries. Although the terms “liberal” and “conservative” do not necessarily apply.

Arab dictatorships and terrorists generally want to kill or at least arrest homosexuals, kill or subjugate women, kill or at least subjugate minority groups, kill anybody who has an abortion or any doctor who performs one. They love guns, have little to no taxes, frown upon science and education, especially if girls want to get involved, absolutely love capital punishment and religious laws, and rabidly oppose any open dissent in countries where free speech is blasphemy. Liberals would not be very happy living in the average Arab state.

Israeli homosexuals, women, minorities have all the same rights as everybody else. Abortion is legal, guns are very hard to get, taxes are very high. Israel is one of the world’s leaders in medical research and technology, and environmental science. Education is open to anybody and everybody. There is no capital punishment or religious laws. The state does not demand that anybody keep kosher and does not give a rat’s ass if you honour Shabbat or not. I would argue that there is more freedom of speech in Israel than in the United States. Liberals flourish in Israel.

Yet American liberals, and often their equivalents in other “western” countries, support Arab terrorists and oppose Israel.

Aaron Sorkin has compared American conservatives with the Taliban. That is fairly extreme. But American conservatives actually agree with Arab dictatorship positions more than they agree with Israeli positions, albeit in a far more moderate form. Michele Bachmann says some crazy shit but the fact that she is allowed to speak in public shows that American conservatives are not the Taliban. And I would doubt that she has ever advocated throwing acid on a girl’s face. Yet American conservatives support Israel over these terrorists.

How does this make any sense? Has the international media mantra of Israel bad, terrorists good actually conditioned Americans to hate Jews in order to love Arabs? This would be odd when you consider that most Americans completely ignore the international media when it comes to any criticism of American actions. Also, and this might only be a minor point, the typical Arab terrorist would gladly sacrifice his own life to kill as many Americans as possible. The typical Israeli would not sacrifice so much as a bagel to kill an American. Israeli citizens and Arab terrorists might be equals in the eyes of the international media but there is a pretty big difference when it comes to our definitions of right and wrong.

I was very much on Palestine’s side before I came to Israel. Then I lived here and saw what it was really like as opposed to what the international media told me it was like. The more I saw people rationalising the murder of Jews and open support for terrorists the more I started to support Israel. Pretty soon terrorists will be like pirates. Everybody will love them and their madcap adventures. But pirates were murderers, rapists, kidnappers, thieves. In pirate movies the British Navy are the bad guys and the pirates are brave heroes who sing and dance.

Now I am not only protecting my family from people who would willingly kill their own families to kill people they hate. Now I am protecting my children from people who would willingly kill their own children to kill people they hate. I am not even a mother yet but I cannot imagine any circumstance where I would want to kill my own child just because I hate somebody’s religion or culture. I cannot imagine that it would ever be possible for me to hate any race or religion that much. I realise that racism is all the rage right now but how can hating others ever take precedence over protecting your own children?

Not only do these people hate Jews so much that they think all of this is reasonable, and they are willing to rationalise any horrors that terrorists commit against Jews, but they even take their hate a step further and complain that “the Jews” control the international media. If The Jews control the international media then I can only wonder what our devious master plan must be.

You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato

I simply do not understand the international media. Just now they are rubbing themselves raw over the announcement that Fatah and Hamas are going to be best friends. Either they have forgotten every other previous announcement and how short that friendship lasted or, more likely, they actually expect this one to take hold. Time will tell. But my money is on the no way in hell option.

The fact that members of Hamas’ Central Council have rejected the proposal should tell you something. Even if some part of Fatah joins up with some part of Hamas there will still be large chunks of both groups that do not recognise each other. They might form other organisations and call themselves something else, so technically Fatah and Hamas will be one, but realistically they will still be divided. Years of civil war tend to cause rifts between people whether they want to kill all the Jews or not.

Not at all surprisingly, the international media have decided that Israel is to blame for everything since Netanyahu backed out of “peace talks”. Ignoring that peace talks have always meant that Israel sets Arab murderers free and gives away more land just to get the Palestinian side to the table, and that the Palestinian side has so far never given anything in return. Ignoring that the only thing Israel wants from the Palestinian side is for them to stop trying to kill Israelis, and that asking somebody to stop killing you is not considered a painful concession in any other part of the world. The international media predictably lay all the blame on Israel on the rare occasion that Israel pulls out of “peace talks” but never blames Palestine for the hundreds of times that they have pulled out. When Israel backs out it is Israel’s fault. When Palestine backs out it is Israel’s fault.

The international media want nothing more than to place the legally elected representatives of a liberal democracy on the same level as totalitarian dictators who murder their own people but they can never seem to report anything that happens on anything close to an even level. The more they report that everything is always Israel’s fault the more Palestinian leaders complain that the international media are biased toward Israel and the more the international media report that everything is always Israel’s fault. One thing the media experts in Israel and Palestine can agree on is their amazement that the international media are so gullible.

Bibi has said that he and Israel do not and will not negotiate with terrorists. Somehow this is “proof” that Israel does not want peace. What country in the world is required to negotiate with terrorists? And these particular terrorists do not simply bomb embassies on the other side of the world. They fire rockets into Israel on a regular basis. They have vowed to kill every last Arab in the Levant if that is what it takes to kill Israel. Imagine if some separatists in Texas fired rockets into New Orleans. Who would ever tell the United States that not only do they have to negotiate with terrorists but that they are equal. Would the United States give them Texas and hope for fewer attacks? Or would the United States bomb the hell out of these terrorists with the international media’s full support?

But Texas and Palestine are not analogous. That is true. Texas was taken by force from Mexico and eventually became part of the United States. Judea and Samaria were part of Israel for thousands of years before being taken by force from Jordan.

Another difference, and this might be important, is that both Texas and the United States are democracies where all men are created equal. More or less. Israel is also such a democracy. Palestine is a brutal dictatorship where being Jewish, homosexual, and/or female is illegal. The United States and Israel are not interested in having a country of one race and one religion. What Palestine wants is nothing short of ethnic cleansing. But you will never hear that from the UN.

Much is being made of Mahmoud Abbas’ announcement that his dictatorship will renounce violence against Israel. All is well according to the international media. Just as it was every other time Abbas renounced violence against Israel. What the international media always ignore is the fact that Abbas has done absolutely nothing to stop the terrorist organisation that he controls and the terrorist organisations that support him from carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel. Saying that you will stop blowing people up is nice but means precious little if you do absolutely nothing to stop blowing people up.

Unless you are the international media. Then the next time Abbas’ terrorists blow somebody up it will be Israel’s fault.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

The only thing we love to do more than put celebrities up on pedestals is tear them down. When a celebrity is accused of anything, they are automatically guilty. Sometimes their careers can survive. Richard Gere never suffered professionally from all those gerbil rumours that some people still believe. If the accusation is especially bad then they are probably finished. You can ask Fatty Arbuckle all about that.

Actually, this applies to the rest of us as well. The court of public opinion never renders an acquittal. And now with the internet we can all express our completely uninformed opinions on all the evil things that other people do whilst making ourselves feel superior. The world wide web is the greatest ego inflater ever invented.

In 1992 Mia Farrow found out about Woody Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn. She was upset by all accounts. Mia and Woody had dated off and on for about 12 years. I can call them Mia and Woody because I have seen their movies and read about them, therefore I know them intimately enough to be on such a familiar level. Right?

Mia Farrow immediately sought sole custody of their three children, Satchel, Moses and Dylan. Andre Previn has always been the father of her older children. Woody refused to annul his adoption of Moses and Dylan. Then things got ugly.

According to Mia Farrow, Woody visited the Farrow summer home in the middle of this bitter custody battle, took 7-year-old Dylan up to the attic and molested her. Mia then videotaped an interview with Dylan over the course of two or three days and then alerted the authorities.

The public immediately went apeshit. And this was long before Twitter. Woody was now a monster. Never mind the fact that there had not been a trial or any form of investigation at this point. He was merely accused of doing something monstrous. That is enough.

This is when the public decided that Soon-Yi was Woody’s daughter, that Woody and Mia were married, that Soon-Yi was a child when she and Woody started dating. So it was rumoured and so it shall always be. What is wholly irrelevant is that Woody Allen has married three times in his life. His first marriage ended badly but provided a good deal of stand up comedy material. This was back when Woody was a stand up comedian. His marriage to Louise Lasser ended amicably and they worked together several times afterward. His third marriage was to Soon-Yi. They are still married.

Woody and Mia adopted two children together, Moses and Dylan. Soon-Yi was adopted by Mia and Andre Previn before Woody and Mia ever met each other. And Soon-Yi was born in either 1970 or 1972. She was young when she started dating Woody in 1992 but not a child.

The Connecticut police launched a full investigation into Mia Farrow’s accusations against Woody. Connecticut is one of those states that is not at all impressed by celebrity and will nail you to the wall if they think you are guilty. They get none of that California and New York movie money. Their investigation concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Woody and that Dylan’s story changed too many times to be credible. They also took into account the complete lack of medical evidence and the testimony of one of the nannies that Dylan was with her the entire time Woody was at the house. Another nanny said that she was pressured by Mia to say terrible things about Woody.

Less significant are the facts that everybody who has ever met Woody Allen can tell you that he would not do such a thing. Even his son Moses, who grew up in Mia’s anti-Woody house, has said that he did not do it. That is not evidence but people who know him obviously know him more than the rest of us. Woody has always famously been a breast man. Watch any of his early movies. Men who are attracted to full figured adult women are rarely inclined to molest 7-year-olds in a house full of people.

Woody and Soon-Yi went on to adopt two girls. There is a thorough investigation process to adopt children in the United States. Even more so when a man who has been accused of molesting a girl is trying to adopt a girl. The people who approved of both adoptions knew that they would be crucified if anything happened to either child. Both girls are now teenagers and their only complaint about their father is that he knows as much about Justin Bieber as they do about macroscopic quantum phenomena.

There is also the issue of Mia’s questionable moral choices but that does not prove guilt either.

Custody of all three children was given to Mia but Woody’s adoption was not annulled. Satchel changed his name to Ronan and Dylan became Malone. Moses remained Moses. The whole sordid affair died away, save for the rumours that Woody married his own daughter. That will live forever.

Then Ronan got a job on a TV programme. Suddenly Mia wanted to work tirelessly to warn people about how evil Woody is. Dylan, who had always publicly been unsure about what happened, declared that it was all true. Mia announced that Ronan is probably Frank Sinatra’s son and that she and Frank had never stopped knocking boots. Ronan became a household name just in time for his TV debut.

Call me a cynic but if I were Mia and I truly believed that my boyfriend molested my daughter I would never stop telling people about how horrible he is. I would not wait 20 years until my son had a new TV deal to start it all up again. I would also not Twitter about how horrible Woody is and then praise my good friend Roman Polanski on the same day. That is simply bad form.

For the record, I am a Woody Allen fan and not at all a Mia Farrow fan. Other than her work in Rosemary’s Baby, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Broadway Danny Rose, I think she is overrated. I was relieved when they broke up since it meant Woody would be working with other actors. Some of his movies with her, especially September, Another Woman, Alice, would have been better with a different lead.

I was also not present during the crime for which Woody was never charged. Neither was anybody else who is talking about it. The only person who truly knows what happened is Woody Allen. He probably never reads all the blog and Twitter posts about him. He probably does not know what a blog is.

Obviously I hope that this horrible rumour is untrue. I say obviously because it seems to me that no reasonable person would want any of this to be true. The damage to Dylan/Malone has already been done. She has been told for most of her life that something horrible happened to her. Whether she was molested or not makes little difference to her psyche at this point. But there is still time to save Woody. If he did it then he should be castrated. But if he did not then he should be allowed to live his life and make great movies. Being accused of something should not be enough to ruin somebody’s life.

It would be nice if people could be innocent until proved guilty. Too bad that never happens.

Weapons of Mass Distraction

What do people have against chemical weapons anyway? They are bad. They kill. They can cause a great deal of pain and suffering. How is this different from all the good weapons we have and use with impunity?

As an enlightened and civilised species we have banded together and told ourselves and each other that we shall no longer use chemical agents to kill each other. There was even a UN resolution against it. We all know how sacrosanct those resolutions are. Since we are not Godless animals, we should only kill each other with weapons of limited destruction and things that explode.

I do not favour chemical weapons. I think they are as bad as everybody who does not use them says. My concern is how much we legitimise more conventional weapons whenever we try to preach against those weapons of war we despise.

Sarin is horrible and does nothing good to the human body. The same can be said for bullets. They generally only kill one person at a time, unless you get in a very lucky shot, but they kill all the same. Death by bullet can be quick, but it can just as easily cause a very slow and painful death. A tiny bullet can take away parts of your body that you may have wanted to use later.

Bullets are also very unpredictable. A single shot can kill you, simply cause an irritating scratch, or do anything in between. Where you are hit often matters less than how you are hit. John Kennedy died quickly from a bullet to the head. James Brady is still alive 32 years later.

Bullets are perfectly acceptable because they are small and generally only kill one person at a time. Something like sarin can kill hundreds at a time. But how much sarin is there in the world compared to the number of bullets? I have never held any sarin in my hands, but I have handled more than a few bullets. I have some bullets in my house. My future husband has even more. Neither of us keep any sarin in the wardrobe. Not everybody has bullets in their home, but I can safely guarantee that there are more bullets in your community than there are chemical weapons.

We as a species also feel safe with much larger projectiles that can kill far more people at any given time. Rockets, missiles, grenades, bombs and all manner of explosive devices are considered perfectly acceptable ways to kill each other. Is being blown up better than being poisoned? I’ve yet to do either but I would prefer another option. There are many types of missiles that can kill far more people than any sarin attack. Is being set on fire from an explosion better than being gassed?

Some will say that guided missile systems are better precisely because they are guided. Chemicals tend to go wherever they want to go. A missile can be targeted to hit a very specific location. This is all nice in theory, but we have seen time and again how often these surgical strikes kill innocent civilians. It happens so often that somebody even came up with a cute little euphemism for all the children accidentally blown up; collateral damage. Which sounds more benign and abstract, “more dead children than anticipated” or “collateral damage”?

Then there are nuclear weapons. In what universe is a nuclear warhead less destructive than any chemical agent? How can the US, Russia, China, UK, India, Pakistan, France, North Korea, Iran very soon, Saudi Arabia soon, Israel maybe or maybe not, ever complain about anybody using chemical weapons when they are all or soon will be capable of launching the most destructive attack the world has ever seen. Even a French nuclear warhead of today is one thousand times more destructive than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. What happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is small by today’s nuclear standards yet each of those cities suffered more casualties than the world’s largest chemical attack. More people died in each city than in all of the chemical attacks of World War I combined.

The next nuclear warhead to hit a city will probably kill millions of people. In such an attack, nobody is collateral damage.

A Silver Model of a City on the Air

I was going to comment on Garry’s comment, but then I ended up writing a book about it, so I might as well make it a post.

Like Crimson Curtains Slowly Rising

Unless you can somehow take a story of Israel taking in refugees and turn it into a crime against humanity or racial profiling or sexism or whatever you want it to be. Israel takes in refugees and lets them become full members of society rather than houses them indefinitely in refugee camps or turns them away. I think that is a good thing. Israel is a very small country. There really is not all that much room. But we know why it is bad to turn away people who will probably be imprisoned and murdered in their homelands.

Never Has So Much Been Made of So Little

The list of his government abuses against the women he has raped and those who investigate his corruption is long and tedious. Now we can add to that his attempt to censor a work of art that most people would have never heard about had he not tried to censor it. Since he had to go through the courts to close down the gallery where the painting was on display and since the courts took too long to bow down to his will, he had some of his thugs go into the gallery and destroy the painting.

It used to look like this:

The Spear by Brett Murray

Destroying original works of art in the internet age does nothing to keep them out of millions of computers. Now that Zuma’s henchmen have destroyed the real thing, even more people will see digital copies.


http://www.da.org.za/newsroom.htm?action=view-news-item&id=10704

This Post is Illegal

2.16. Freedom of Expression

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, which includes
a. freedom of the press and other media;
b. freedom to receive or impart information or ideas;
c. freedom of artistic creativity; and
d. academic freedom and freedom of scientific research.

2.32. Access to Information

1. Everyone has the right of access to
a. any information held by the state; and
b. any information that is held by another person and that is required for the exercise or protection of any rights.

According to the 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa.

The ANC government under Jacob Zuma has decided that enough is enough. Zuma has been investigated for corruption, bribery, extortion, rape so often in the last 10 years that something must be done if he is to remain in office. He has sued more than a few news agencies for over R60 million but they keep printing stories about him anyway. He has appointed several government lawyers to investigate the media. When that failed to stop them he hired private “security” firms to dig up as much dirt on newspaper editors and TV producers as possible. That also failed to stop the media from reporting about a powerful political leader who seems to think that what he does with state money is nobody’s business.

2.36. Limitation of Rights

1. The rights in the Bill of Rights may be limited only in terms of law of general application to the extent that the limitation is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society based on human dignity, equality and freedom, taking into account all relevant factors, including
a. the nature of the right;
b. the importance of the purpose of the limitation;
c. the nature and extent of the limitation;
d. the relation between the limitation and its purpose; and
e. less restrictive means to achieve the purpose.

2. Except as provided in subsection (1) or in any other provision of the Constitution, no law may limit any right entrenched in the Bill of Rights.

Fair and Balanced

I have been conducting my own informal and highly unscientific research since Friday. From what I have noticed CNN has reported on the American hurricane at least once an hour every day, sometimes in depth. They even interviewed local shop owners and some child with a dog. I only saw a brief mention of the super typhoon in the Philippines during the weather report. There were no interviews and no dogs.

North to the Future

An interesting sequence was where Palin and the mother with eight children went to a firing range to practise shooting at bear targets. Just in case. As if their only line of defence was Sarah Palin and the mother with eight children.

The mother with eight children had never handled a firearm and made that fact perfectly clear. She genuinely seemed not to know what the instructor was talking about. But much has been made of Palin’s shooting at wolves from aircraft. Ignoring the fact that hunters generally consider this cowardly and point out that it is what poachers do, it takes a certain level of skill to hit a running animal from a moving aircraft. When Palin was at the firing range she could not hit the side of a bullet with a barn.

Worse than her aim was that she did not know the difference between a cartridge in the magazine or in the chamber. This is a very important safety distinction that everybody should know before they even touch a firearm. Every hunter in the world knows the difference. She also seemed overly concerned about recoil. This is something an experienced hunter would never worry about.

Shaking the Tree

Most countries give preference to educating boys over girls. Sons are far more likely to inherit money, property, titles, power than daughters. Men are the head of the household while women are in charge of cleaning it. Women are far more likely to be victims of domestic violence than men. Too many countries still allow ritual genital mutilation of girls where the clitoris and/or labia are cut out. I know of no country in the world where it is acceptable for boys to have their penises cut off.

Most sexual assaults are by men against women. Men can be raped but it is either very rare or rarely reported. Probably both. Most women who are raped will not report it either. We have a very strange sense of shame on this planet. I think the attacker should be the one who gets all the shame, regardless of his gender or the gender of whomever he attacked.

If you live in a country where something like International Women’s Day is obsolete, as I do, then you are lucky. Most of the women on this planet do not.

Another Decade Over and a New One Just Begun

2001
Zhang Xueliang (100), Anne Morrow Lindbergh (94), Balthus (92), Stanley Kramer (87). Laurent-Désiré Kabila (61), King Birendra of Nepal (55), Queen Aiswarya (51) were all assassinated. Prince Dipendra (29) killed himself after murdering his family. Sabiha Gökçen (88) and Douglas Adams (49) had heart attacks. Aaliyah (22) died in a plane crash.

Anthony Quinn (86), Harry Secombe (79), Jack Lemmon (76), Poul Anderson (74), Donald Woods (67), George Harrison (58), Joey Ramone (49) all died of cancer.

2002
Margaret Booth (104), Billy Wilder (95), Stanley Unwin (90). Spike Milligan (83) liver failure, George Roy Hill (81) Parkinson’s disease, Ian MacNaughton (76) car accident, John Frankenheimer (74) stroke, Dudley Moore (66) progressive supranuclear palsy, Linda Lovelace (53) car accident, Nozomi Momoi (24), stabbed and immolated. Chuck Jones (89), Antonio Margheriti (72), Lonnie Donegan (71), Erachaim ben Eliyahu (59), John Entwistle (57) all had heart attacks.

Milton Berle (93), Thor Heyerdahl (87), Rosemary Clooney (74), Richard Harris (72), Stephen Jay Gould (60) all died of cancer.

2003
Bob Hope (100), Katharine Hepburn (96), Elia Kazan (94), Wendy Hiller (91), Gregory Peck (87), Art Carney (85). Leon Uris (78) and Idi Amin (78) died of kidney failure, Noel Redding (57) liver failure, Maurice Gibb (53) bowel obstruction, Howie Epstein (47) drug overdose, Carlo Urbani, the doctor who discovered SARS (46) SARS, Elliott Smith (34) stabbed, Rachel Corrie (23) crushed by a bulldozer, Dolly (6) euthanized. John Schlesinger (77) and Michael Kamen (55) had heart attacks.

Leni Riefenstahl (101), Hume Cronyn (91), Conrad Hall (76), Alan Bates (69), Gregory Hines (57) all died of cancer.

Colonel Rick Husband (45), Commander William McCool (41), Lt Colonel Michael Anderson (43), Lt Ilan Ramon (48), Captain David Brown (46), Captain Laurel Clark (41), Kalpana Chawla (40) exploded on American space shuttle Columbia.

2004
Fay Wray (96), Donald Trumbull (95), Henri Cartier-Bresson (95), Ronald Reagan (93), Julia Child (91), Uta Hagen (84). Robert Lees (91) decapitated, William Manchester (82) stroke, Peter Ustinov (82) heart attack, Marlon Brando (80) heart attack from pulmonary fibrosis and cancer, Janet Leigh (77) vasculitis and peripheral neuropathy, Hans Gmür (77) surgical complications, Yasser Arafat (75) liver failure, Spalding Gray (62) suicide, Christopher Reeve (52) heart failure from septicemia, Neal Fredericks (35) drowned in plane crash while filming.

Elmer Bernstein (82), Jerry Goldsmith (75), Naomi Shemer (73), Ray Charles (73), Jerry Orbach (69), Johnny Ramone (55) all died of cancer.

2005
Simon Wiesenthal (96), Efraim Reuytenberg (91), Geraldine Fitzgerald (91), Saul Bellow (89), Ernest Lehman (89). Peter Malkin (77) stroke, Ismail Merchant (68) surgical complications, Hunter S Thompson (67) suicide. Robert Wise (91), Arthur Miller (89), Karol Wojtyła (John Paul II) (84), Dalene Matthee (67), Richard Pryor (65) all had heart attacks.

Anne Bancroft (73), Bob Denver (70), Cyril K Harris (68), Debra Hill (54) all died of cancer.

2006
Gerald Ford (93), Augusto Pinochet (91), Glenn Ford (90), Pieter Willem Botha (90), Richard Fleischer (89), Betty Friedan (85), Shoshana Damari (82). Maureen Stapleton (80) obstructive pulmonary disease, Saddam Hussein (69) hanged. Jeane Kirkpatrick (80), James Brown (73), Slobodan Milošević (64) all had heart attacks.

Robert Altman (81), Peter Boyle (71), Masumi Okada (70), Syd Barrett (60) all died of cancer.

2007
Michelangelo Antonioni (94), Avraham Shapira (93), Ingmar Bergman (89), Kurt Waldheim (88), Fernando Fernán Gómez (86), Norman Mailer (84), Marcel Marceau (84), László Kovács (74). Deborah Kerr (86) Parkinson’s disease, Kurt Vonnegut (84) brain injuries from a fall, Benazir Bhutto (54) assassinated.

Luciano Pavarotti (71), Michael Brecker (57), Dan Fogelberg (56) died of cancer.

2008
Richard Widmark (93), Kon Ichikawa (92), Jerry Wexler (91), Arthur C Clarke (90), Mel Ferrer (90), Edmund Hillary (88), Suharto (86), Cyd Charisse (86), Charlton Heston (84). Isaac Hayes (65) stroke, Bobby Fischer (64) kidney failure. Miriam Makeba (76) and George Carlin (71) had heart attacks.

Paul Newman (83), Harold Pinter (78), Sydney Pollack (73), Neil Aspinall (66), Michael Crichton (66), Dith Pran (65), Richard Wright (65), Stan Winston (62), Anthony Minghella (54), Jeff Healey (41) all died of cancer.

2009
Karl Malden (97), Jack Cardiff (94), Les Paul (94), Walter Cronkite (92), Helen Suzman (91). Allen Klein (77) Alzheimer's disease, Claude Berri (74) stroke, David Carradine (72) autoerotic asphyxiation, John Hughes (59) heart attack, Marilyn Chambers (56) cerebral hemorrhage, Michael Jackson (50) drug overdose, Natasha Richardson (45) skiing accident, Brittany Murphy (32) pneumonia and anaemia.

James Whitmore (87), Bea Arthur (86), Ted Kennedy (77), John Updike (76), Corazon Aquino (76), Dom DeLuise (75), Farrah Fawcett (62), Ron Silver (62), Patrick Swayze (57) all died of cancer.

2010
Hizkiah ben Nachum (93), Lena Horne (92), JD Salinger (91), Dino De Laurentiis (91), Éric Rohmer (89), Luis García Berlanga (89), Arthur Penn (88), Blake Edwards (88). Tony Curtis (85) heart attack, Claude Chabrol (80) anaemia, Qian Yunhui (53) crushed by a truck.

Patricia Neal (84), Jean Simmons (80), Dennis Hopper (74), Lynn Redgrave (67), Jamie Gillis (66) all died of cancer.

Mia’s Annual Christmas Message

Hanukkah has been around a lot longer and is observed by a lot more people but it is not nearly as important as Christmas. It is a minor festival. We light candles, say prayers, go about our business. There is no reason to artificially inflate its importance just because it is usually at around the same time as Christmas. Our most important days are usually around September or October. It is ok if you don’t know what they are. We do not need everybody to go crazy over them.

How to Build a Mediocre News Outlet

[Picture © Yoko Ono]

A woman who once interviewed John inflated her own importance. She also said that the interview took place just minutes before he died, which goes against everything we know about his last day. And they played a snippet of the interview where John said that he will be turning 40 soon and Sean will be 5, future tense. John and Sean were both born on 9 October. If the interview took place on 8 December then they would already be 40 and 5, present tense. John may not have been the most educated person in the world but he knew English well enough to properly use verb tenses. Either the interviewer is full of kak or CNN played the wrong interview.

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
John Lennon

How to Make a List

Kylie posted a list from the BBC of books they think everybody should read. They also claim that most people have only read 6. That seems a little pretentious to me but that’s the BBC for you. The list is also very anglocentric.

BBC List
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo



I prefer this list. It’s far more international and has more great literature than pop trends. They also don’t number it because only somebody with serious problems would put Da Vinci Code above Hamlet.

Norwegian Book Club’s 100 Best Books of All Time
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Fairy tales – Hans Christian Andersen
Epic of Gilgamesh – Anonymous
Book of Job – Anonymous
Mahabharata – Vyasa
Njal's Saga – Anonymous
One Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, a trilogy – Samuel Beckett
The Decameron – Giovanni Boccaccio
Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Poems – Paul Celan
Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
Stories – Anton Chekhov
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Jacques the Fatalist – Denis Diderot
Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Possessed – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Medea – Euripides
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Sentimental Education – Gustave Flaubert
Gypsy Ballads – Federico García Lorca
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
Goethe's Faust – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol
The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands – João Guimarães Rosa
Hunger – Knut Hamsun
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
Iliad – Homer
Odyssey – Homer
A Doll's House – Henrik Ibsen
Ulysses – James Joyce
Stories – Franz Kafka
The Trial – Franz Kafka
The Castle – Franz Kafka
Shakuntala – Kālidāsa
The Sound of the Mountain – Yasunari Kawabata
Zorba the Greek – Nikos Kazantzakis
Sons and Lovers – D. H. Lawrence
Independent People – Halldór Laxness
Poems – Giacomo Leopardi
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
Pippi Longstocking – Astrid Lindgren
A Madman's Diary – Lu Xun
Children of Gebelawi – Naguib Mahfouz
Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Essays – Michel de Montaigne
History – Elsa Morante
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Metamorphoses – Ovid
The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa
Tales – Edgar Allan Poe
Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel – François Rabelais
Pedro Páramo – Juan Rulfo
Masnavi – Rumi
Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
Bostan – Saadi
Season of Migration to the North – Tayeb Salih
Blindness – José Saramago
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
King Lear – William Shakespeare
Othello – William Shakespeare
Oedipus the King – Sophocles
The Red and the Black – Stendhal
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne
Confessions of Zeno – Italo Svevo
Gulliver's Travels – Jonathan Swift
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Ramayana – Valmiki
Aeneid – Virgil
Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Memoirs of Hadrian – Marguerite Yourcenar



Then there is this list. Very French but it has some great books that the BBC thinks are worse than the Da Vinci Code.

Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century
1 The Stranger – Albert Camus
2 Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
3 The Trial – Franz Kafka
4 The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
5 Man’s Fate – André Malraux
6 Journey to the End of the Night – Louis-Ferdinand Céline
7 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
8 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
9 Le Grand Meaulnes – Alain-Fournier
10 Froth on the Daydream – Boris Vian
11 The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir
12 Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
13 Being and Nothingness – Jean-Paul Sartre
14 The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
15 The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
16 Paroles – Jacques Prévert
17 Alcools – Guillaume Apollinaire
18 The Blue Lotus – Hergé
19 The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
20 Tristes Tropiques – Claude Lévi-Strauss
21 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
22 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
23 Asterix the Gaul – René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo
24 The Bald Soprano – Eugène Ionesco
25 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality – Sigmund Freud
26 The Abyss – Marguerite Yourcenar
27 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
28 Ulysses – James Joyce
29 The Tartar Steppe – Dino Buzzati
30 The Counterfeiters – André Gide
31 The Horseman on the Roof – Jean Giono
32 Belle du Seigneur – Albert Cohen
33 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
34 The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
35 Thérèse Desqueyroux – François Mauriac
36 Zazie in the Metro – Raymond Queneau
37 Confusion of Feelings – Stefan Zweig
38 Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
39 Lady Chatterley's Lover – D. H. Lawrence
40 The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
41 Bonjour Tristesse – Françoise Sagan
42 Le Silence de la mer – Vercors
43 Life: A User's Manual – Georges Perec
44 The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
45 Under the Sun of Satan – Georges Bernanos
46 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
47 The Joke – Milan Kundera
48 A Ghost at Noon – Alberto Moravia
49 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
50 Nadja – André Breton
51 Aurélien – Louis Aragon
52 The Satin Slipper – Paul Claudel
53 Six Characters in Search of an Author – Luigi Pirandello
54 The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui – Bertolt Brecht
55 Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique – Michel Tournier
56 The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
57 If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
58 The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
59 Les Vrilles de la vigne – Colette
60 Capitale de la douleur – Paul Éluard
61 Martin Eden – Jack London
62 Ballad of the Salt Sea – Hugo Pratt
63 Writing Degree Zero – Roland Barthes
64 The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
65 The Opposing Shore – Julien Gracq
66 The Order of Things – Michel Foucault
67 On the Road – Jack Kerouac
68 The Wonderful Adventures of Nils – Selma Lagerlöf
69 A Room of One's Own – Virginia Woolf
70 The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
71 The Ravishing of Lol Stein – Marguerite Duras
72 The Interrogation – J. M. G. Le Clézio
73 Tropisms – Nathalie Sarraute
74 Journal, 1887–1910 – Jules Renard
75 Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
76 Écrits – Jacques Lacan
77 The Theatre and its Double – Antonin Artaud
78 Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos
79 Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
80 Moravagine – Blaise Cendrars
81 The General of the Dead Army – Ismail Kadare
82 Sophie's Choice – William Styron
83 Gypsy Ballads – Federico García Lorca
84 The Strange Case of Peter the Lett – Georges Simenon
85 Our Lady of the Flowers – Jean Genet
86 The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
87 Fureur et mystère – René Char
88 The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
89 No Orchids For Miss Blandish – James Hadley Chase
90 Blake and Mortimer – Edgar P. Jacobs
91 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – Rainer Maria Rilke
92 Second Thoughts – Michel Butor
93 The Origins of Totalitarianism – Hannah Arendt
94 The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
95 The Rosy Crucifixion – Henry Miller
96 The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
97 Amers – Saint-John Perse
98 Gaston – André Franquin
99 Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
100 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie

What the World Should Know About Israel

The convoluted answer is that Israel is the big bad guy while Palestine is oppressed. If that is true then why don’t I ever see complaints against Jordan, Syria, Egypt and other countries that are oppressing Palestine? Why are there no protests against Egypt’s blockade against Gaza? Or even Palestine’s blockade against Gaza? If a blockade is a great humanitarian catastrophe, why is it not a catastrophe when other countries do it?

The International Community has complained many times that Israel has troops in Palestine but they have never complained that the Arab League will not let Palestine control itself. Iran and Syria have had troops in Lebanon and Palestine for decades. Why is that not on the BBC?

And even if the talking points were accurate it would not explain why Israel gets more coverage than China, Russia, Britain, Spain or other countries that oppress smaller neighbouring territories. In what parallel universe is Israel a bigger human rights violator than China?

Ngiyanemukela

I think it was in the United States once, even though Americans do not care much about football. They have a completely different game they call football. It is more like rugby. Americans may not care about football and their team has never won the World Cup but they have to host it because their people are more willing than Asians and Africans to spend money frivolously. And that is really what FIFA cares about. It has nothing to do with where the most fans are or who joined their club first. South Afrika was the first country outside of Europe to join and it only took 100 years to host.

But My TV Said So

If your TV is anything like mine it told you that crime rates in China are rising and it is almost impossible to really know what the figures are. But your TV probably never mentioned that Chinese schools are amongst the safest in the world. School shootings are unheard of. There are no gangs. Not in the schools at least. Chinese gangs are more interesting in controlling gambling than recruiting children. Teen pregnancy is not simply well hidden. It is really not an issue. Most teenagers stay away from sex to avoid family shame. That still means something to the Chinese. It is also very hard to find any privacy when you live with several generations in the same house.

As-Salamu Alaykum

Catholics have a pope. If he tells them all to wear blue shirts you will hear about it. You will probably even see a few people wearing blue shirts. Jews have not had any central leader since the temple was destroyed. There are community leaders all over the place and influential organisations. Israel's Chief Rabbinate is generally regarded as the highest governing body, though many people in other countries disagree. If they tell everybody to wear blue shirts you might hear about it. I'm not sure how many people would actually do it. Muslims have different leaders in different countries. Iran has their ayatollah but he is mostly a political leader. He does not hold much sway outside of Iran. If he told everybody to wear blue shirts you would probably never hear about it and it is even less likely you would see anybody do it.