Gaza flotilla video mashup Internet Killed Israeli PR from Matthew Doye on Vimeo.

via Ali Abunimah

By Chris Hedges / TruthDig

Chris Hedges made these remarks Thursday night in New York City at a fundraiser for sponsoring a U.S. boat to break the blockade of Gaza. More information can be found at www.ustogaza.org.

When I lived in Jerusalem I had a friend who confided in me that as a college student in the United States she attended events like these, wrote up reports and submitted them to the Israel consulate for money. It would be naive to assume this Israeli practice has ended. So, I want first tonight to address that person, or those persons, who may have come to this event for the purpose of reporting on it to the Israeli government.

I would like to remind them that it is they who hide in darkness. It is we who stand in the light. It is they who deceive. It is we who openly proclaim our compassion and demand justice for those who suffer in Gaza. We are not afraid to name our names. We are not afraid to name our beliefs. And we know something you perhaps sense with a kind of dread. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice, and that arc is descending with a righteous fury that is thundering down upon the Israeli government.

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gazafriends
6 August 2010

David Rovics has written an evocative song called “All Aboard the Mavi Marmara.” The Free Gaza team has added images in tribute to the nine brave men on board who gave their lives in pursuit of justice for the Palestinians.

This is our tribute to the men. They had names and families and children. They dreamed their dreams just as the Palestinians do.

Israeli commandos took all of that away from them by murdering them… 31 shots, most through the head and the back. The world needs to remember them. The world needs to remember the Palestinians who Israel kills every day. “All Aboard the Mavi Marmara” will be a song you will sing in your head for days. The images, we hope, you will never forget.

We sail again in the fall. Help us make that happen.

Greta Berlin, Co-Founder, The Free Gaza movement
witnessgaza.com
www.freegaza.org
http://www.flickr.com/photos/freegaza

Printed from ABQjournal.com, a service of the Albuquerque Journal

Saturday, August 07, 2010
Israeli Consul Spins Attack on Flotilla
By Greta Berlin
Co-founder, Free Gaza Movement

Once again, Israel commits war crimes against a civilian population on board six ships in international waters then whines that it is the victim of a PR smear.

Journal Staff Writer Lloyd Jojola’s interview with Asher Yarden, consul general of Israel to the Southwest, proves they think they can spin the story of piracy at sea to sympathetic journalists who will ask no probing questions, but merely spout back what the apologists say.

So let’s look at the facts instead of Israel’s spin.

Continue reading →

The B u l l e t
Socialist Project • E-Bulletin No. 400
6 August 2010

The Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly
Herman Rosenfeld and Carlo Fanelli

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Left around the world is undergoing reformation. As the Great Recession has vividly demonstrated, more than three decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded many of the significant gains won in the immediate decades following World War II. From wage and benefit concessions to reductions in social services, in an openly anti-union political climate, it is now being demanded that the working class pay for a crisis which it did not create. With the impasse of the anti-globalization and other new social movements that burst onto the scene in the early 2000s, coupled with the inability of many historically progressive unions, trapped in erstwhile social democratic parties, to mobilize their membership base, the Left is in a period of experimentation.

There have been important developments: the emergence of explicitly anti-capitalist parties such as Die Linke (The Left) in Germany, the Left Bloc in Portugal, and the New Anti-capitalist Party in France; the re-emergence of working class discontent in the streets of Greece, Spain, and Italy; and a left tide throughout Latin America. What about North American developments, however? A June 2010 article by Robert McChesney and John Bellamy Foster discusses the weak state of progressive forces in the United States and their inability to translate significant support for their political positions into commensurate political influence. This article updates reports on attempts in Toronto to build an anti-capitalist political movement bringing together trade unions and working class communities, first published in the pages of Relay: A Socialist Project Review and Monthly Review.[1]

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