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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 30 juli 2016

Kritisch of anti-semitisch?

Als u zondagavond niet naar zomergast Dyab Abou Jahjah wil kijken, is dat uw goed recht. U heeft bijvoorbeeld bezwaar tegen deze gast omdat hij grote kritiek heeft op Israël.
      Omdat hij een anti-zionist is en dus een anti-semiet. Ik ken dat, want in 1979 maakten Roel van Broekhoven en ik een paar programma's over de positie van Palestijnen in Israël, in de bezette gebieden, in Libanon en in Jordanië. Wij lieten ondermeer Palestijnen aan het woord, die gemarteld waren in gevangenissen. Wij lieten mensen aan het woord die verbannen waren van hun geboortegrond en wij lieten familileden van gevangenen aan het woord, wier huizen vernield waren.
      Tijdens de tweede uitzending drongen drie leden van de Joodse beweging Nooit Meer de studio binnen en vernielden de uitzendband.
Bij de VPRO volgde een bommelding, alle gebouwen moesten ontruimd worden en programmmakers waaronder ikzelf werden bedreigd. Wij hadden kritiek op Israël, waren dus anti-Israël, dus anti-zionist, dus anti-semiet. Een volgende uitzending kwam vanuit een geheime zwaar bewaakte plaats. Een rechtstreeks T.V.debat daarna ging eruit onder de titel ''Kritisch of anti-semitisch". Daar deed ik namens de VPRO aan mee net als de wijze Anton Constandse, die toen ook al grote kritiek op Israël had. 
      Ik ben daarna nog een aantal malen in Israël geweest. En in Gaza, op de Westbank, de Golan, De Sinai.  Steeds vaker kwam ik met zeer gemengde gevoelens terug.
      De situatie werd steeds erger. In 1979 woonde ik in Israël een enorme demonstratie bij van de Vrede-Nu beweging. Spreker was ondermeer Amos Oz. Er waren 100.000 mensen die schreeuwden om een twee-staten oplossing. Dit soort bewegingen lijken in rook te zijn opgegaan.
      Misschien is het goed, dat de groepen die aangifte hebben gedaan tegen de VPRO, die advertenties zetten en eisen dat de uitzending niet doorgaat, nog eens onderstaand rapport erbij nemen. Niet geschreven door een anti-semitisch journalist, maar door een eerbiedwaardig instituut als Amnesty International. 
 

 Amnesty

‘Trigger-happy’ Israeli army and police use reckless force in the West Bank

Israeli forces have displayed a callous disregard for human life by killing dozens of Palestinian civilians, including children, in the occupied West Bank over the past three years with near total impunity, said Amnesty International in a report published today.

The report, Trigger-happy: Israel’s use of excessive force in the West Bank, describes mounting bloodshed and human rights abuses in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) as a result of the Israeli forces’ use of unnecessary, arbitrary and brutal force against Palestinians since January 2011.

In all cases examined by Amnesty International, Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers did not appear to be posing a direct and immediate threat to life. In some, there is evidence that they were victims of wilful killings, which would amount to war crimes.

“The report presents a body of evidence that shows a harrowing pattern of unlawful killings and unwarranted injuries of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces in the West Bank,” said Philip Luther, Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International.

“The frequency and persistence of arbitrary and abusive force against peaceful protesters in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and police officers – and the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators – suggests that it is carried out as a matter of policy.”

Doorprikken

Jahjah groeide op in het zuiden van Libanon. Daar was het heel lang oorlog met Israël. Bovendien was er een burgeroorlog.
      Iemand die daar opgroeit ontwikkelt radicale ideeën. Hij heeft zelf verklaard een veelzijdig en genuanceerd verhaal te willen vertellen.
Ik wil daar wel kennis van nemen en aan presentator Erdbrink de taak om voze, verwerpelijke of weerzinwekkende praatjes door te prikken. 

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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 24 juli 2016

How Hillary Wins

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

All through the election season so far, Donald Trump has been a political Houdini.  The moments his campaign could have gone off the rails are innumerable, from his characterization of Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers, his willingness to deport eleven million undocumented immigrants, his insulting Senator John McCain as well as each of his rivals, his referring to the size of his penis during a debate and his calling for a ban of all Muslims entering the US, to this week’s convention, where his wife was caught plagiarizing Michelle Obama (of all people), and a collection of juiced up demagogues that included Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie got the crowd so excited that after four days the only remaining question was if Hillary Clinton should just be locked up or summarily executed.  Trump ended the convention with a speech full of doom and gloom that only played to the fears of his audience and didn’t contain any hopeful message other than ‘elect me, and I’ll solve all your problems.’  In spite of the lack of even a hint of a policy detailing how Trump will save the US he rose in the polls to draw even with Hillary.
      It is Trump’s teflon quality that makes people like Michael Moore and Gavin Newsom say that Trump will win the general election, partly as an exercise in reverse psychology, but there is one way in which Hillary can win in November, and that is by directly attacking Trump’s main weakness, his personality.  As mentioned before in this blog, Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is defined by the Mayo Clinic as ‘a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others.  But behind this mask of ultra-confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism.’ Trump combines NPD with megalomania, defined as ‘feelings of personal omnipotence and grandeur,’ and it would be very easy to visualize each of those symptoms with a host of images from Trump’s public appearances.  The important thing here is to not just show Trump’s madness, which viewers have become accustomed to during the last twelve months, but also to explicitly identify his demeanor as the product of a mental disorder, and to call it by name.
      Hillary Clinton’s campaign could put together a series of commercials in which prominent mental health experts describe the symptoms of NPD and megalomania, and subsequently analyze relevant fragments of Trump’s speeches and interactions with the press.  Psychiatrists could be asked to assess the risks of having someone in Trump’s condition in the White House. As a result, Trump would become the source of doom and gloom, the problem instead of the solution.
      Trump cannot defend himself against an attack like that and escape its consequences.  Someone who tries to prove that he’s not crazy is automatically perceived as crazy, and an aggressive response would only accentuate his fragile self-esteem.  He would be in the position of someone who has to answer the question: Is it true that you’re not hitting your wife anymore?
      Mental disorders don’t play well in US presidential elections, as the case of the late Thomas Eagleton illustrates.  Some people would consider it immoral to attack Trump this way, but the stakes are too high to leave any means unused.  This is about the US surviving as a democracy.

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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 18 juli 2016

Wazzup with Chris?

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

Donald Trump announced the choice of his running mate, Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, at an event that was as bizarre as it was vintage Trump.  The Donald gave a speech in which he barely mentioned Pence, but instead rambled about his victories in the primaries, his hotels and his business acumen.  It was obvious that he had been given a sheet of paper with bullet points about Pence and instructions to mention them all, but every time he looked at the sheet he only said ’back to Mike Pence,’ to subsequently derail into the parallel universe created by his pathological narcissism, where he is a perfect human being and everything he says and does is brilliant respectively magnificent.  By all outward signs Pence was not Trump’s first choice but forced on him by his oldest children and Paul Manafort, because Pence is an anti-abortion, anti-gay evangelical lunatic who appeals to a segment of the GOP electorate that supported Ted Cruz in the primaries and hasn’t warmed up to the Donald yet.  Trump’s heart was in New Jersey, where his favorite, Chris Christie, languishes as Governor, but the kids took away the car keys.
      In the meantime Christie was probably at Drumthwacket, the New Jersey Governor’s mansion, wondering what had gone wrong.  He had been the first of the primary candidates to endorse Trump, risking the wrath of the Republican establishment, and stood by his candidate ever since, willing to do any job the Donald asked him to do, from chairing the transition team to carrying Trump’s golf clubs.  He had really wanted to be the VP candidate and made that clear to his new master on multiple occasions.  Christie, who is only slightly less delusional than Trump, didn’t realize that his abysmal record as Governor and the legal problems that await him in the short run make him even unelectable as dog catcher.  Less than thirty percent of New Jersey voters want him to return as the state’s chief administrator, and two of his former closest associates are about to go on trial for the Bridgegate scandal, where a third former associate will spill the beans and assert that Christie knew everything about the closing of the world’s busiest bridge, which was ordered out of spite because the mayor of a small town had failed to endorse him.
      Rumor has it that Christie is livid about not being chosen as VP candidate, but he should consider himself lucky that his mentor, the former New Jersey Attorney General and Chairman of the Port Authority David Samson, just pleaded guilty to a felony and won’t go to trial.  Samson used to siphon Port Authority money to construction projects in New Jersey in which clients of his law firm were involved, after Christie had strongarmed the local politicians.
      Strategically Pence may have been the right pick for Trump, because the ticket now appeals to the low-educated, gun toting racists who like Trump and the intolerant zealots that Pence attracts, but there may be very little chemistry between Trump and Pence, and that will affect especially Trump’s performance.  After all, at heart he is a vulgar buffoon who cannot fall back on Christ.
      Christie in the meantime should not remain livid too long.  He can still position himself to become Trump’s Chief of Staff, and if he succeeds he would have more influence than Pence.  And if Trump and Pence lose the election he doesn’t have anything, but neither does Pence.

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Categorie: Media (502)

Gepubliceerd: 11 juli 2016

Civil War

(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)

It was the heading on the front page of the most vulgar local tabloid, the New York Post.  With a more sensitive approach, the New York Times published the pictures of nine scenes where during the last two years seven black men, one black woman, and a twelve year old black boy were the deadly victims of police brutality, four of them during traffic stops.  In some cases the images came from police bodycams, but if it wasn’t for the availability of smartphone videos most of these cases would not have been recorded.  The paper could have included Eric Garner, who died almost two years ago on Staten Island after an NYPD officer took him in a chokehold that had been outlawed by the department.  That officer was acquitted by a grand jury, and of the officers involved in the other killings only a few were indicted, and so far none of them has been convicted.  Only one of the officers resigned, and one was fired.  In light of these facts it appears as inevitable as it is inexcusable that someone snapped and started killing white policemen, in this case a deranged black veteran in Dallas with easy access to an AR-15 weapon.
      Soon after the carnage in Dallas the usual lunatics took to their preferred media to blame the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, which took off nationwide after Eric Garner’s death.  On Facebook Sarah Palin called Black Lives Matter ‘a farce,’ in his radio show Rush Limbaugh called it ‘a terrorist group,’ and on his TV show Bill O’Reilly called it ‘a hate America group.’  Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick chimed in with a similar message, and some other Republicans who put their two cents in included President Obama in the blame game.  Among them were US Congressman William, whose district includes Dallas, Mike Huckabee, and William Johnson, the Executive Director of the National Association of Police Organizations, who went as far as stating that ‘Obama appeases criminals.’  Curious how widespread these sentiments were I posted the following tweet: “The people who blame Black Lives Matter or Obama for the shooting in Dallas are fucking racist assholes, end of story.” I figured that from responses to this deliberately provocative statement I would get some idea of the general opinion among Twitter users.
      Immediately after I posted the tweet my iPhone started signaling that responses were coming in.  Fearing the worst, based on earlier exchanges with the rabid right, I decided to give it an hour and then check my Twitter feed.  After a while the number of responses dwindled, and when I finally checked I found to my amazement that my statement had been re-tweeted more than fifty times, while there was only one critical response, saying ‘Explain this then’ with a YouTube link.
      The video showed a small group of demonstrators in New York City, yelling ‘what do we want’ followed by ‘dead cops.’ I remembered those images as the first reaction to Eric Garner’s murder, and pointed out to the sender that this was before Black Lives Matter was even formed and in no way representative for the movement.  He responded that he wasn’t a racist, just very concerned.
        While this was happening Donald Trump tried to cash in on the misery by asking the NYPD if he could speak to the department’s brass during afternoon rollcall.  Commissioner Bratton made clear that the department does not provide photo-ops, forcing Trump to grudgingly record his own YouTube message.

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