Jean’s Pick of the Week: As the host of Here on Earth, I relish every opportunity to bring great breakthrough stories in world news to the airwaves, so Tuesday’s program about the women of Liberia and their extraordinary success in ending a particularly brutal civil war and bringing Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to power was a joy for me. That having been said, I also greatly enjoyed Wednesday’s program with British psychologist Adam Philips talking about the forgotten pleasures of kindness. It brought out so many wonderful responses from callers.
NB: Get ready on Tuesday for Ramadan: The Fast and The Feast, another program in our ongoing series Inside Islam.
Monday: Elle Es el Matador: Just when bullfighting per se is going out of fashion, along comes this POV documentary about Female matadors. In Elle Es el Matador (She is the Matador) Spanish filmmakers Gemma Cubero and Celeste Carrasco discover a long and surprising history of women with a passion for this theatrical and bloody ritual.
Tuesday: *Inside Islam: Ramadan: The Fast and the Feast: Why is fasting common to almost all faiths? Why do Muslims the world over look forward with joy to a month of fasting? What are the special challenges that American Muslims face? And what are the Ramadan specials that Arab Muslims are watching on satellite tv? Guests: Naeem Randhawa, director of American Ramadan; Souheila Al-Jadda, producer of Ramadan Primetime. Don’t miss this fascinating and fun show.
Wednesday: Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories: In 2003 Anna Baltzer visited the West Bank to discover for herself the realities of everyday life for Palestinians living under the Israeli occupation. Apart from details about checkpoints, land settlements, etc. what’s new here is accounts of non-violent resistance that remain largely ignored by mainstream Western media.
Thursday: Permaculture Made Real: Mark Sheperd’s New Forest Farm: We talked with one of the gurus of permaculture in the Midwest during our broadcast from the Energy Fair earlier this summer. In this follow-up program we explore with Mark Sheperd what it’s like to be a permaculture farmer. Mark Shepard’s New Forest Farm in southwestern Wisconsin was one of the very first examples of permaculture farming in the United States. Can you design a farm to be as self-sufficient as a forest?
Friday: To be announced.
What’s YOUR pick of the week? We’d love to know. Please write to us at hereonearth@wpr.org or leave a message on our hotline: 1-877-GLOBE07. And thanks for listening.
Jean
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3 comments:
For many centuries Jewish people were falsely accused of ritual murder of non-Jewish children. This is known as blood libel. Many Jews died because of these false accusation.
Anna Baltzer - the guest on your program on Wednesday - has actively participated in creating a modern day blood libel against Jewish people.
It started with another so-called "peace activist" Barbara Lubin, who reported that she met a Palestinian mother who told her that she was approached by Israeli soldiers during the recent operation in Gaza. The soldiers asked the woman to give a "gift to Israel" in form of a death of her five children. When mother refused and screamed in horror, the soldiers just killed five of her children. Lubin published this "eyewitness" account in her blog mecaforpeace.blogspot.com January 22, 2009.
Baltzer had copied Lubin's report on January 24, 2009. She vouched for Lubin's credibility and gave it a title - "Sophie's Choice" (http://annainpalestine.blogspot.com/2009/01/sophies-choice.html). This was a clear reference a tale of a Jewish mother forced by a German Nazi officer to choose between her son or daughter and an obvious attempt to equate Israel with Nazi Germany.
Lubin's report was an obvious fake, many people started to question it (http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2009/02/palestinian-sophies-choice-story-looks-to-be-wildly-inaccurate.html) and the pair started to print "corrections." Baltzer printed a new version of the story on February 8 http://annainpalestine.blogspot.com/2009/02/follow-up-to-previous-two-posts.html.
As everyone knows, Israel took unprecedented steps in trying to avoid civilian casualties. As one of such efforts, IDF was calling people in Gaza to warn of coming military actions in their area and asking them to leave. The new story created by Lubin and Baltzer completely twisted these IDF's efforts.
The new story claims that IDF called the woman and told her that her children are targeted and will be killed. Consequently, the story goes, the woman and her children are killed. (Lubin changed her blog entry, which said that she met the woman to say that she heard about her. Baltzer's blog still claims that Lubin met the woman. I have a snapshot of both Lubin's and Baltzer's blog of 1/29/2009 and can provide it for comparison.)
In either case, the new story is as, if not more, libelous that the old one. It shifts the libel from an individual to an entire organization. The witness is "conveniently" dead, and her account cannot be verified.
Baltzer actively promotes the idea that Israelis are targeting civilians. She reposted the story in her June 30 blog entry, although no credible - or even not-so-credible - news agency wants to touch it.
I have provided these links - the posts and comments to them speak for themselves.
In conclusion:
Obviously, spreading such heinous libel does not promote peace and understanding among people.
It must also be noted that this was not an innocent mistake. Baltzer's other comments and "eyewitness accounts" are full of lies, half-truths and anti-Israeli propaganda. She is a wolf in sheep's clothing, a hatemonger and a liar. She has to be confronted, exposed and marginalized.
As just one example of Anna Baltzer's misleading anti-Israel propaganda I would like to respond to the youtube video, linked to which is posted on Here On Earth website - http://www.wpr.org/hereonearth/archive_090902k.cfm.
In this video Baltzer claims that she uncovered evidence that Israel's War of Independence was planned in advance as the way to to expel Arabs population.
First she quotes David Ben-Gurion from the letter to his son in 1937 - "[We] must expel Arabs and take their places". This is a known misquote - see href=http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/David_Ben-Gurion. In reality Ben-Gurion wrote - "We do not wish, we do not need to expel the Arabs and take their place. All our aspirations are built upon the assumption — proven throughout all our activity in the Land — that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs."
Baltzer further "quotes" Ben-Gurion - "we have forces at our disposal." This is ten years BEFORE creation of Israel (?!). Ben-Gurion was not delusional...
The second quote Baltzer is using is from 1923 "Iron Wall" by Zeev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky - "All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the will of the native population." There is nothing in the quote, or the version she is using, about expelling the Arabs. Jabotinsky was referring to Arab violence against Jews in the early 1920', he is credited with organizing Jewish defense in the response. Jabotinsky was also telling European Jews that they were living on the volcano and was urging them to come to Palestine.
The third quote is by Ben-Gurion discussing the issue of transfer. This time the quote is correct, but is taken out of context. The idea of transfer came from Palestine Royal Commission report, that studied how to divide Palestine between Jews and Arabs, and Ben Gurion and others had a discussion about it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peel_Commission, Google Books.
Thus, Baltzer uses a fake quote, an unrelated quote, and a quote taken out of context in order to advance her position. This and the rest of her statements do not withstand the lightest scrutiny.
BTW, all this information, as well as information about Israel's War of Independence, is readily available on the Internet. Obviously, it was known to Baltzer and to the publisher of her book. Yet, she goes on campuses spreading her poison among students.
Hopefully, WPR will not allow Anna Baltzer to continue to promote her vicious lies unopposed, and "Radio Without Borders" will not become "Hate Without Borders."
Unfortunately, Here On Earth decided not to expose Anna Baltzer's lies, and she was given the opportunity to do it again.
It is useless to comment on every misleading statement she made, so here is my comment about future peace in the Middle East.
The simple truth is that elites don't make peace - it is people that make peace.
Oslo accord specifically required "education for peace." Israel did just that - changed school curriculum, acknowledged some mistreatment of Arabs in the past, etc. Palestinians and the rest of Arab world just continued their incitement and demonization of Israel, and teaching their young to hate Jews. This continues, as Baltzer's efforts show.
Until the Arab side acknowledges its responsibility toward creation of the refugee crises and aggression toward Israel, there will be no peace in the Middle East.
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