Everyone here needs to read Riverbend's blog and her last three posts.

Scathing on the media and Occupation Day.

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

Saturday, April 09, 2005

The Cruel Month...
Thousands were demonstrating today all over the country. Many areas in Baghdad were cut off today for security reasons and to accomodate the demonstrators, I suppose. There were some Sunni demonstrations but the large majority of demonstrators were actually Shia and followers of Al Sadr. They came from all over Baghdad and met up in Firdaws Square- the supposed square of liberation. They were in the thousands. None of the news channels were actually covering it. Jazeera showed fragments of the protests in the afternoon but everyone else seemed to busy with some other news story. Thanks to E. for sending me this link. Check out the protest here. more at link above


Sunday, April 03, 2005

American Media...
You wake up in the morning. Brush your teeth. Splash the sleep out of your eyes and head for the kitchen for a cup of coffee or tea and whatever is available for breakfast.

You wander to the living room and search for the remote control. It is in its usual place- stuck inexplicably between the sofa cushions. You turn on the television and stand there flipping from one channel to the other, looking for a news brief or something that will sum up what happened during those six hours you slept. You finally settle on the pleasant face on the screen- the big hair, bright power suit, capped teeth and colorful talons- blandly reading the news. The anchoress is Julie Chan. The program is CBS’s The Early Show (Live from Fifth Avenue!).

Guess the nationality of the viewer above. Three guesses. American? No. Canadian? No. British? Japanese? Australian? No, no and no. The viewer is Iraqi… or Jordanian… or Lebanese… or Syrian… or Saudi… or Kuwaiti… or… but you get the picture.

Two years ago, the major part of the war in Iraq was all about bombarding us with smart bombs and high-tech missiles. Now there’s a different sort of war- or perhaps it’s just another phase of the same war. Now we’re being assailed with American media. It’s everywhere all at once.

Always be sure to check out the blog of her friend Raed and his mother Faiza's. Doing so provides you with tremendous insight. I hope to meet her and all her friends one day.
http://raedinthemiddle.blogspot.com/
http://afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com/

I check on her every day, even though she seldom writes on consecutive days.

I hope, when this is all over, that she publishes a collection of her postings, from the day she started it to the yet to come conclusion. I'd certainly buy it.

Faiza to do just that and right now, not later, but now! What a great idea!

Paging Will Pitt, Jackson Thoreau and RB. Get on it. Oh, heck, why not Palast or Sy or maybe even Fisk?

I'd love to see Riverbend put together, along with Raed and him mom, a collection of the truth about Fallujah along with all the rest of their rich diaries.

Let us please not forget Rahul Mahajan
http://www.empirenotes.org/

and Dahr Jamail
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/

along with Robert Jensen
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/freelance.htm

I read the familyinBaghdad blog for the first time (the very first part that was in English) and it seems like an Israeli psyops job. The "blogger" rants on end about Arab dithering and takes an extremely soft line toward Israel.

And the Baghdad Burning blog seems tame, almost mundane in the last few entries. Her point about the seismic shift in media hits home, though. Has anyone else noticed lately how many al Jazeera stories sound like they could have been written in CNNs Hq in Atlanta? Theyre written with the Bushco mindset of "bringing freedom to the region", more than giving details of the mess. I think that, with so many of their reporters hanging around the Western press pools everywhere, its beginning to rub off on them. I swear, sometimes they sound like Fox. This must be a big culture shock to the Iraqi viewers.

point. Welcome to DU, with extreme reservations.

and address my comments.

blogs and you might have a better perspective. Raed's mom, Faiza, in some of her posts has been beyond eloquent about humanity and Riverbend always makes me cry. Raed is angry.

Get to know them all.

No attack was intended, just a suggestion.

I've read with interest the Baghdad Burning periodically in the past. I have not bookmarked it, but its link pops up regularly in threads like yours. Maybe its an incorrect impression, but her material seemed to be more passionate and anti-war in the past than the last few entries. Thats not a criticism, but just an observation. Maybe the residents of that city are just settling in for the grind and are worn down, I dont know. But I empathized with her disgust with TV, knowing that she and other Iraqis are being bombarded with pro-Bushco media being framed in a manner disconnected from her reality.

But the other link was not what I was expecting. I didnt expect to go to a place that right out of the box extolled the highlights of Israeli political culture and dissed Arab politics so uniformily. I probably should have read more, but was disturbed by the tone of it from the start. Sometimes its just like that with a book or a movie - it loses me at the beginning.

Thanks, take no offense, again. I would be at my limits, would not you? I feel deeply for all of Iraq, I have many Muslim friends and the pain is deep.

www.dallaspeacecenter.org