THE HEALTH CARE ISSUE: VOLUME 100, ISSUE 122
PUBLIC OPTION
by Malik Isasis




Due to being in production on a documentary film, I haven't been writing as frequently, but I was moved when I discovered a friend of mine from Seattle had a brain tumor, and recently had an operation to have it removed.

Naomi Ishisaka is a journalist, and editor for Colors Magazine. I met Naomi at a film festival four years ago, for which Colors, her magazine, sponsored. In a strange twist, I discovered that her father was one of my favorite professors in my undergraduate studies at the University of Washington.

In Naomi's blog, Naomi's Noggin she writes eloquently about her emotional journey and recovery from the pheno-orbital meningioma (brain tumor) operation, from September 2009--not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills.

Who have we become? What kind of people are we in America?

Corporatism and right-wing politics has transformed the American citizenry into full-time consumers, born into debt. In one generation, corporate operatives have nearly killed off unions, giving us Debt Bondage by credit card companies and banks, whereby the masses are working, only to pay back a Sisyphean loop of debt, with impossible interest rates that will never be paid off. Where I'm from this is called slavery.

So scared are the masses that they won't protest anything that threatens their financial security for fear of losing their jobs. But there is no such thing as security, and as Helen Keller once stated, security does not exist in nature nor do children of men experience it.


The Media Industrial Complex has insured the lack of critical thinking with infotainment programming (think Fox News) to keep us in a slumber. Meanwhile, the Healthcare Industrial Complex lets us die, and those with the means, have the means to live, and those who do not, die.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The Political Sickness of those who Call themselves Democrats

Now Senator Joseph Lieberman, former Democrat, now "Independent-Democrat" from Connecticut has decided to step into the healthcare debate and make it all about him (again). Three ears ago in 2006 Lieberman lost the primary race to Democratic contender Ned Lamont, unable to accept defeat, and encouraged by Republicans, he ran as an Independent and won his seat. During the 2008 Presidential Campaign, he supported Republican John McCain, and even spoke badly about Candidate Obama saying something to the effect of Obama not being safe for America.

He was still allowed in the Democratic Caucus and even given a leadership position in January of this year. Now he has come out against the Public Option in the healthcare bill, threatening to support the Republican goal of stopping a vote on the bill by filibustering.

With his straw-man-argument in tow, he stated on October 27, 2009:

"I think that a lot of people may think that the public option is free. It's not," Lieberman said. "It's going to cost the taxpayers and people that have health insurance now, and if it doesn't, it's going to add terribly to our national debt."

Yet, Lieberman supports a never-ending war, which costs billions a month to fight, and to illegally occupy two countries--surely at a cost, which adds to the National Debt. Its all a rouse.

Lieberman like many political leaders are cowards. Lieberman make political gains in the media by marketing himself as a moderate, just like John McCain markets himself as a Maverick—all sugar, no nutritional value.

Senator Joseph Lieberman is part of the sickness of our political system, where incumbent politicians feel a sense of entitlement to their office and to power. Lieberman waxes eloquently about values, and integrity but he’s a political whore, willing to sell off his services to the highest bidder (healthcare companies). Lieberman has made losing about him, rather than about the people he represents. When it becomes about the politicians, it’s not about the constituents. It is personal gain over political responsibility.

His political DNA reads neocon, and the Republican Party is where he should be. Hey Joe, on the way out, don't let the door hit 'ya where the good Lord split 'ya.

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THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 99, ISSUE 121
8 Reasons Fox Is Not a News Organization
by Adele Stan, Altnet



PR for the GOP? Yes. Platform for right-wing hatemongers? Definitely. But a news organization? Definitely not.

Even before Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, Rupert Murdoch had declared war on him via the personalities of Fox News Channel, a subsidiary of Murdoch's media conglomerate, News Corp.

Since Obama's election, the cable channel's hosts and paid analysts have launched a full frontal assault on the president, smearing his nominees, calling him a racist and suggesting that his administration was trying to persuade disabled veterans to off themselves.

Now the fearmongers at Fox are crying foul since the president and his aides declared Fox not to be a news organization. Earlier this month, White House Communications Director Anita Dunn called Fox an "arm" of the Republican Party. Obama went even further, suggesting this week that Fox "is operating basically as a talk-radio format," and we know what that means: A format in which the most provocative opinions dominate the discourse and facts are optional.

et that's just the tip of the iceberg. Setting Fox apart from the two other cable news networks is its ownership by a corporation whose CEO and major shareholder is a mogul with an ideological agenda -- who operates his News Channel as a propaganda machine for his anti-government cause.

He even has his own community organizer, a fellow named Glenn Beck, who can turn out a mob on a dime at your local town-hall meeting. His big ratings-getter, Bill O'Reilly, is a professional bully, handsomely paid to physically intimidate progressive commentators -- on video -- and to vilify others.

Murdoch's agenda is simple: He's against regulation of any kind. Famous for smashing the unions at his U.K. properties, Murdoch also has a pronounced disdain for labor.

In essence, Murdoch's agenda tracks closely with that of the current GOP, that far-right rump of a party that once claimed to embrace a range of views under the canvas of a big tent. So he uses the Fox airwaves to raise funds for Republican political action committees.

We've seen the Fox News-branded hosts and pundits -- such as Michelle Malkin and John Stossel -- sent out gin up the fearful folk gathered by astroturfing groups funded by corporations that seek to derail government intervention of any kind, whether in the nation's dysfunctional health care system or in its increasingly compromised environment.

Murdoch saves money by farming out the investigative-journalism functions of his alleged news enterprise to Republican Party entities, whose error-laden press releases are passed off as original Fox News research.

When you watch Fox News Channel, what you see is the advancement of that agenda through a media organ that seeks to turn regular people against their own interests -- the better to enrich the coffers of Murdoch and his heirs -- and that actively organizes those whose paranoia it has fed with lurid and untrue tales.

How else would you turn their fear of a bitter economy and an unstable world into rage against a president who ran for office on an economic platform geared toward the needs of everyday people?

Here we list a few of the reasons why Fox News Channel is anything but a news operation in the hope of shedding light on what it actually is: a massive media campaign for the consolidation of wealth through unfettered markets.

Why Fox News is not a news operation:

1. Glenn Beck, the community organizer -- No other news operation in memory has ever hired its own community organizer, at least not one tasked with the mission of organizing paranoid people to march through the streets of the nation's capital with signs depicting the president of the United States as a mass murderer.

Through his 9-12 Project, which he promotes on his Fox News Channel program, that's exactly what Beck did, organizing with other right-wing organizations the 9-12/Tea Party march on Washington -- AlterNet reported marchers sported signs comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin.

Beck was also instrumental in turning out angry mobs to disrupt this summer's town hall meetings, where members of Congress attempted to discuss health care reform with their constituents. After participants in a scuffle at a Tampa, Fla., town hall named their local 9-12 Project site as their inspiration, the national 9-12 Project site stopped accepting comments.

Despite the loss of some 80 advertisers from The Glenn Beck Show, thanks to a campaign by Color of Change, which targeted the show's sponsors after Beck claimed the president had "a deep-seated hatred for white people and white culture," Beck remains on the air at Fox. Could that be because he's more valuable to his boss-daddy as an organizer than as a conduit for advertising dollars?

CONTINUE

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THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 98, ISSUE 121
Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh Are Crazy -- Yet Corporate Media Legitimize Them
by Jamison Foser, Media Matters



When Limbaugh, Beck and Fox news are treated like legitimate players, it causes the rest of the media to run to the right.

It's no coincidence that when members of the media talk about the media these days, they tend to talk about two things: the supposed importance of right-wing media like Fox News, and claims that the rest of the media lean to the left. The two concepts are fundamentally intertwined and mutually reinforcing -- and deeply flawed.

It may seem odd that much of the news media would simultaneously pronounce itself guilty of liberal bias and spend the year after a presidential election won convincingly by the more progressive candidate talking about the importance and influence of a conservative cable channel whose viewership consists of about 1 percent of the nation. But both of those somewhat inconsistent media memes can be explained by journalists' frequent inability to see where the center of the country really is. That inability makes journalists think they are further left of center than they actually are (even assuming they are at all to the left of center). And it makes them inflate the importance of right-wing operatives masquerading as media figures -- people who would have far less influence if actual reporters stopped buying their nonsense.

Their hateful views and adversarial relationship with the truth place the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the far-right fringe of a party and movement that have lost the popular vote in four of the past five presidential elections and that holds only 40 percent of the seats in Congress. They are on the far-right edge of a party that is far to the right of the rest of the country.

And, it must be said, they do not tell the truth. They lie about things large and small. They lie to smear their adversaries, and they lie for no real reason at all. Their lies should disqualify them from ever being taken seriously. But instead, the media have decided that if anything they say turns out to contain a sliver of truth, everything they say must be paid immediate attention.

That's what happened when, after years of making absurd claims about ACORN -- remember the lie that ACORN was going to get billions of stimulus dollars? -- some conservative activists induced a statistically insignificant number of the organization's low-level employees to behave badly. The rest of the media rushed to cover the "scandal" -- and to beat themselves up for not having taken their cues from Beck & Co. sooner. The ombudsmen for the The Washington Post and The New York Times, for example, scolded their papers for being too slow to report on Beck-generated controversies and gave credence to conservative claims that the delay was the result of liberal bias.

What few journalists seem to understand is that once you accept someone like Glenn Beck as a legitimate media figure, it skews your view of the rest of the media. This is not a new phenomenon -- not by any means. More than two years ago, I argued that once you accept Ann Coulter, who calls John Edwards a "faggot," as a legitimate guest on shows like NBC's Today, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd -- who merely calls Edwards a "girl" -- seems positively reasonable. Thus the entire media discourse is shoved in the direction of its least legitimate participants.

That's how reporters -- and not just those on Rupert Murdoch's payroll -- come to see the non-Beck, non-Hannity "reporters" at Fox News as fair and balanced. The "news" division at Fox spreads falsehoods and right-wing nonsense round the clock, but many journalists have bought into the idea that while Fox's "opinion" hosts may be conservatives, the rest of the channel plays it down the middle. After all, compared to a crazy liar like Glenn Beck, Fox's "news" programs seem perfectly legitimate and impartial. But judged by any
reasonable standard, they are nothing of the kind.

And, of course, if you believe that the rest of Fox News is, as Washington Post reporter Ed O'Keefe put it this week, "straight news shows," that affects how you view other news organizations. Just as America's Newsroom on Fox appears to play things down the middle in comparison to a dishonest demagogue like Glenn Beck, other news organizations appear liberal in comparison with America's Newsroom.

And that's how MSNBC -- which gives three hours of airtime each day to conservative former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough and another hour to Clinton-hating, liberal-bashing misogynist Chris Matthews, employs Pat Buchanan, whose very name has been synonymous with bigotry for decades, and regularly traffics in conservative misinformation and right-wing framing -- comes to be described as "liberal": simply because it also employs the only overtly left-of-center hosts in all of television news.

And that's how you end up with the perverse situation in which newspapers like The Washington Post are described by reporters at the Post and elsewhere as "liberal" despite hounding the Clintons for years over a phony real estate "scandal," harassing Al Gore for lies he didn't tell, handing the 2000 election to George W. Bush on a platter, and trading in their press passes for pom-poms during Bush's march to war with a nation that didn't attack us.

And that's how you end up with the perverse situation in which newspapers like The Washington Post are described by reporters at the Post and elsewhere as "liberal" despite hounding the Clintons for years over a phony real estate "scandal," harassing Al Gore for lies he didn't tell, handing the 2000 election to George W. Bush on a platter, and trading in their press passes for pom-poms during Bush's march to war with a nation that didn't attack us.

And so we have a poisonous media environment in which the "conservative media" consist of lying conspiracy theorists who are out to destroy President Obama and any other liberal they come across, and the "mainstream press" is considered "liberal" even as it "leans over so far backward to avoid the charge of left bias that it ends up either neutered or leaning to the right."

That's some range, isn't it? From right-wing liars who purposefully traffic in conservative misinformation all the way across the spectrum to frightened liberals who accidentally traffic in conservative misinformation.

That's the real problem with Glenn Beck and Fox News. It isn't that they misinform the 1 percent of Americans who watch their nonsense (the vast majority of whom already agree with them). It's that the rest of the media run to the right in response to Fox -- even while becoming more and more convinced that they are guilty of liberal bias.

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THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 97, ISSUE 121
Why Conservatives Are Really Afraid of a Black President
by Jonathan L. Walton, Religion Dispatches




The president reminds Glenn Beck, and those who identify with his white neo-nationalism, of the lie of their own professed superiority.

... in Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, "Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on," and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white. Newsweek magazine told us this. We know that white students are destroying civility on buses, white students destroying civility in classrooms all over America, white congressmen destroying civility in the House of Representatives. -- Rush Limbaugh,
Sept. 15, 2009

Ever the statesman, and often candid to a political fault, former President Jimmy Carter said recently that much of the animosity directed toward President Barack Obama is "based on the fact that he is a black man."

A lifelong Southerner, Carter acknowledged that the inclination of racism still exists, and that "it has bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African Americans are not qualified to lead this great country."

Though courageous, the former president's pronouncement will surely be considered controversial to many Republicans and Democrats alike. Some will view Carter's comments as politically inexpedient.

The topic of race in general, and charges of racism in particular, is political dynamite that typically explodes in the hands of the accuser -- just ask [Harvard] Professor Skip Gates, [New York] Gov. David Paterson, or Obama (whom I will return to momentarily).

Unless someone is wearing a Klan hood while yelling, "Nigger, Go Back to Africa," the charge of racism seems to offend the accused these days more than the actual victims.

This is true, in part, due to the most prevalent view of the problem of race and racism in this country. In the eyes of many, the responsibility of moving beyond racial conflict in America is placed at the feet of minority communities of color, as opposed to the dominant society.

We've all heard it. America will move beyond race to a colorblind society only when minority groups cease dwelling on difference. Such a view permeates the melting pot ideal of American folklore, the myth of meritocracy and even the "post-racial" dimension of electoral politics.

Thus, for Carter to call out this segment of the white community, he is disrupting the conspiracy of silence concerning racial injustice that demands the allegiance of politicians on the national scene.

Think about it. Is this not the racial bargain that Obama accepted to become the nation's first African American president? Matters pertaining to race have been avoided unless absolutely necessary (cough, cough, the Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright).

And in terms of policy, obstacles faced by any particular group, like disproportionate unemployment among communities of color, for example, are obfuscated by anemic and ineffectual broad-based prescriptions. Rising tides lift all boats, right?

Yet Obama's enormous success in life, whether as a highly educated community organizer or as America's commander in chief, exposes the paradox this sort of faux post-racialism presents.

It's a one-sided deal for people of color; as "post-racial" in effect means post-black, post-brown, post-red and post-yellow, while leaving the normative racial framework of whiteness intact. Race is the challenge people of color must confront and, dare I say, "get over."

But a post-racial America does not demand the same of those who identify with, and claim the social construction of, whiteness and perceived privileges and cultural superiority therein.

This is why, it would seem, Obama's body standing behind the American presidential seal has a critical segment of America losing its hold on reality -- a reality, I would argue, few have ever been forced to acknowledge up to this point.

Whether it's the birthers, tea-baggers, deathers, indoctrinators, or "You lie!"-ers, they have neither veiled their racial animus nor cloaked their white nationalism. The prevalence of racist images of Obama brandished by protesters juxtaposed with calls of "taking our country back" are reminiscent of D.W. Griffith's fictional America as depicted in the film Birth of a Nation.

And the pride with which this segment of society has rallied the troops around its shared sense of whiteness reveals that their skin color is the one true object of pledged allegiance and determinant of professed patriotism. [See "Unregulated Capitalism and Christian Fervor: Report from the 9/12 Rally at the Capitol" from Sept. 17.]

Herein lies Carter's perceptive point. Obama can't win with these folks, because they are blinded not just by his race but also by an uncritical devotion to their own. His pigmentation rather than his policies cut against the grain of what these persons wrongly consider "natural" or "American."

More specifically, his very being is a haunting rejoinder to such white Americans of what they are not -- indeed what they have never been. This African American man with an Arabic name has dared to usurp all of the cultural and cognitive tropes that white supremacy has historically claimed for itself. He is calm in the face of their unrestrained emotion. The more illogical they act, the more rational he comes across. And, of course, the more eloquent and erudite he presents himself, the more he provokes the Joe Wilsons of the world to mindlessly blurt out, "You lie!"

In the process, Obama has transformed such opponents into the racial other, an uneducated and uncultured blob of white (and largely Southern) backwardness that is beyond the pale of social redemption or acculturation. Wilson and the remaining Sons of Confederate Veterans have, in effect, become this "black man's burden."

Maybe this helps explain Glenn Beck's ridiculous yet probably heartfelt assertion that the president has a "deep-seated hatred for white people."

The president reminds Beck, along with those who identify with Beck's form of white neo-nationalism, of the lie of their own professed superiority -- a place of comfort and privilege in America that was neither deserved nor ever attained, yet still claimed based on the pinkness of their skin and straightness of hair. Obama's apparent success only further dismantles this lie and pours salt in socially insecure wounds.

Similar can be said of those who need the president to be Adolf Hitler. If Obama is Hitler, that means protestors can liken themselves unto the Jews; only this time it's a victimized-yet-devout group of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who want nothing more than to restore a nation that God, or more appropriately, Jefferson Davis, decreed as divinely their own.

The ability to make such ludicrous claims on conservative radio, Fox News, and on Capitol Hill, however, represents the kind of power that they unduly still possess. As tasteless as Wilson's heckling of the president was, it still takes an immense level of privilege to be a jerk on the floor of Congress.

My point here is simply that the problem of race in America has never been solely or predominantly a minority issue. It is first and foremost, as Carter said, a problem of whiteness.

Just as racial segregation in Wilson's fond memories of idyllic South Carolina was less about black people but a matter of white phobia, the lie of whiteness projects its fears upon minority bodies like the president's in hopes of maintaining its own unhealthy and unrealistic sense of being in charge.

This is why James Baldwin rightly suggested years ago that "the vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the 'Negro problem' is produced by the white man's profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white."

I believe this applies to our current president and his most vocal critics. If he is framed as the foreigner, incarnate evil and indoctrinating Nazi, many won't have to acknowledge that he may just be smart, sophisticated and a devout patriot. God forbid.

And if he is, what does that make them?

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THE MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 97, ISSUE 120
Iran, Israel, and the Muzzled US Press
by Faramarz Farbod, Common Dreams



"Iran must comply with United Nations resolutions," declared President Obama. Iran is "as defiant as ever" says a chorus of corporate employees otherwise known as mainstream journalists. Really! Is Iran defiant for testing missiles for its military? What military in the world fails to test missiles? Is Iran defiant for reporting the construction of a "secret underground" uranium enrichment plant at least a year in advance of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) obligations require it to?

Speaking of "defiance" in the neighborhood where Iran resides and failing to mention Israel requires levels of disingenuousness and obedience to state propaganda that baffle the mind. And all this at a time when arguably the most significant news item to come our way this month was the UN Human Rights Council's damning report (Goldstone Report) on Israeli crimes in the winter assault on Gaza. (Here is the Executive Summary of the report Can you imagine the deafening corporate media ruckus had the UN issued a 452-page report condemning Iran of war crimes and even possible crimes against humanity on a massive scale? Instead, what we get is near silence on the Goldstone Report and all the other facts on the ground, such as:

* Iran has signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) but Israel, Pakistan, and India have not;
* Israel just rejected the call by IAEA to join the NPT and open up its atomic sites to international inspection: the IAEA motion on September 18 expressing concern about "Israeli nuclear capabilities" was adopted by 49 votes to 45, with 16 abstentions; the US and the EU initially tried to block the vote, and then voted against it while Israel said it "will not co-operate in any matter with this resolution";
* Israel has had nuclear weapons for three decades, and not only refuses to sign the NPT, rejects international inspections, but also does not even acknowledge the existence of these weapons, and even has gone so far as to jail a nuclear scientist for years for exposing the fact;
* Israel in defiance of international law continues to threaten Iran with military attack;
* Israel stands in violation of international law on several other accounts regarding waging of brutal wars of aggression and invasions of Lebanon and Gaza and continuing its brutal policies of occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing of the hapless Palestinians.

Is it even imaginable that the corporate media should do the right thing and tell the obvious truth that such actions and threats against any people constitute violation of international laws -- let alone suggest that it is Israel that needs to be sanctioned by the international community?

Meanwhile Washington denounced Goldstone's Gaza Report for its "grossly disproportionate attention" to Israel and reportedly "gave Israel a document defining the Obama administration's own red lines on the report. . . . These include keeping the report from leaving the Human Rights Council, nixing any measures that would undermine Israel's right to defend itself against terrorism, and letting Israel's own law enforcement system conduct any criminal probes necessitated by the Gaza war." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, criticized the report for giving "total legitimacy to terrorists shooting at civilians." The report, he added, "will strike a fatal blow against the peace process, because Israel will not be able to take additional steps and take risks for the sake of peace if denied its right to self-defense" -- Orwellian Newspeak at its very finest. What "peace process?" Israel refuses to even freeze its colonizing ("settlement building") activities let alone end its brutal occupation. It has just announced that it won't accept a return to the 1967 borders. A few days ago, even Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni said: "For me, there is no right of return, not symbolic and not partial. I would not even accept the entrance to Israel of a single refugee, and the Palestinians and the Arab world know this." Israel has shown no indication that it is interested in resolving any of the core issues concerning Jerusalem, borders, settlements, refugees, and I would add her liberal use of state violence and terrorism. Too, what "right of self-defense?" In the West Bank territories Israel has zero right to self-defense. An occupying power does not have or cannot in good faith invoke such a right. To do so is absurd. I can't come into your home by force, take it for myself, use extreme violence to suppress your resistance to my takeover plan, and call it self-defense! True, Israel is no longer "occupying" Gaza (it unilaterally pulled out in 2005 though without relinquishing control), but Israel cannot invoke the right of self-defense for its winter assault on Gaza either because there existed a peaceful option to resolve differences.

The Goldstone Report recommends that both Israel and Hamas be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution unless they carry out adequate internal investigations within six months. The US and Israel oppose referral of the matter to the General Assembly, the Security Council, or the ICC. In fact, as reported by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Israel engaged in economic blackmail against the Palestinian Authority (PA) by insisting that the PA drops war crimes suit on the basis of the Goldstone Report at the ICC or Israel won't let a 2nd cellular phone provider operate in the West Bank. Some $300 million has been invested in licensing and infrastructure, and, if not approved by October 15, the PA must pay a $300 million penalty. Israel has warned that referral to the ICC would mean a fatal blow to the peace process and to democratic states' ability to fight terror. In fact, as I write these words, Haaretz is reporting that the PA has "decided to drop its draft resolution condemning Israel's conduct during the Gaza Strip offensive, in effect deferring its adoption of the Goldstone's Commission report," thanks to "pressure from the Obama administration." Now this is one more sign to those progressives who personalized politics of hope and change and reduced it to a single man at the helm of the ship of state; we must always struggle for the change we believe in.

The corporate media reached a feverish pitch playing up and pontificating on the recent UN appearances by Iran's Ahmadinejad, Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, President Obama's speech, and Israel's Netanyahu's spirited defense of the historicity of the holocaust, but failed predictably to even bring up the most significant UN news item, namely the subject of Israel's defiance of the UN and violation of international law as documented and condemned by the UN itself in the Goldstone report -- the failure that, of course, visibly delighted the Israelis.

Meanwhile, the Israeli media, unlike their counterpart in the US, tell of life and facts on the ground. Here is Haaretz reporting on Israel refusing to let up to a third of Gazans keep their medical appointments outside of Gaza this year:

Issa Hamdan, 58, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in March. Since then, surgery to remove the growth has been scheduled for seven different occasions, from April 27 to today, at an East Jerusalem hospital.

The April 27 surgery date was canceled due to a one-month suspension of trips by Gazans for medical care due to tension between the Ramallah and Gaza City Palestinian governments. The operation was postponed until June 28, but the Israeli authorities did not respond to Hamdan's request. Hamdan was given an August 1 surgery date, but was called in for a Shin Bet interview only on August 2. Hamdan's wife, Fadya, who is 50, says she brought him for the interview from their home in Rafah to Erez, where she had to push his wheelchair with difficulty before submitting their identity cards for inspection.
Then, apparently when the Israeli officials realized that Hamdan was too sick to be interviewed, they were told to leave.

The operation has been rescheduled three more times since then -- for August 3, September 13 and today -- but each time no permit has been forthcoming.

And the indefatigable Amira Hass in Haaretz discussing Israel's brutality during the three-week winter assault on Gaza and the morally indefensible and bankrupt official protestations in denial of the truth of the Goldstone report:

Israel struck a civilian population that remains under its control; it didn't fulfill its obligation to distinguish between civilians and militants and used military force disproportionate with the tangible threat to its own civilians. Air Force drones and helicopters fired deadly missiles at civilians, many of them children; the Tank Corps and Navy shelled civilian neighborhoods with weapons not designed for precision strikes; soldiers received orders to fire on rescue crews; others fired on civilians carrying white flags; and others killed people in or near their homes. Troops used Gazans as human shields, soldiers detained civilians in abusive conditions, the army used white phosphorus shells in dense civilian areas and, on the eve of withdrawing, destroyed wide residential, industrial and agricultural areas.

There is only one thing worse than denial -- the admission that the IDF indeed acted as has been described [by the Goldstone report], but that these actions are both normal and appropriate.

Can we ever look to a day when the US Amira Hasses can write truthfully and daringly about events of such crucial significance in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post?

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