Talk on Palestine in America, and latest stats...

Cam and I attended an interesting talk at AUB (American University in Beirut) this week. The speaker was a UCLA professor, and while the topic was “Palestine in America” the talk was mainly about the remarkably well established infrastructure of Israeli lobby groups in the US. I had no idea! There are countless groups on American university campuses, offering to fly in speakers and even free tickets to Israel to experience life on a kibbutz. Numerous information sites offer biased information under misleadingly trustworthy names (something like Mideast information service), and hundreds of paid employees watch newspaper editorials nation-wide and submit lengthy rebuttals to every anti-Israel piece they publish, forcing papers to run corrections and making them wary of running any provocative piece in future. Example: after the speaker wrote an article for the LA Times that said the wall Israel had built along the West Bank was three times the height of the Berlin Wall, CAMERA, the well-funded “Committee for Accuracy in Mideast Reporting in America”, wrote a 10 page rebuttal analyzing every word. The only factual error that stuck was that the wall separating Palestinians from Israelis is actually only twice the height of the Berlin Wall, forcing the paper to run a correction and to think twice before running another piece by the author again.

And Arab information groups are almost totally absent in that world. There is no well-financed, well organized group countering this information blitz. However the speaker closed the talk by saying that the American public is starting to doubt all it is fed by “spin doctors”, following the Iraq debacle, and that people are starting to question the US’ boundless support of Israel.

Cam adds Aside from the history of Palestine and the Israeli occupation, think of this: Israel has a right of return policy to every person of Jewish decent world wide, yet the people whose land it was only 60 years ago are stuck in refugee camps with no chance of returning, while the few of them left in Israel are stuck in apartheid-style townships lacking proper medical care and a constant supply of food.
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Toll to date in the 22 day siege: 1,140 Palestinians killed, 360 of them children, and 5,150 wounded. At least 600 homes and most infrastructure detroyed. There are 13 Israeli casualties, including 3 from friendly fire, and only 3 civilians. A hospital and a UN food warehouse were bombed this week, and ambulances have come under fire.