A small victory

An acquaintance of mine who is active in the struggle for justice in Palestine was recently called, in a widely circulated document, a "one of Canada's worst anti-semites, and an idiotic spammer."

He launched a libel suit, and produced reams of letters from Jewish academics attesting to the fact that he was neither of those.

Today, the plaintiff announced that he has secured a retraction from the defendant.

I met Ed Corrigan for the first time at what is deemed as a Settlement Conference in Small Claims Court. Ed and I chatted, and among other things he assured me that he was in no way anti semitic,often took part in Jewish holidays, and was very respectful of Jewish traditions. Ed explained his work for Palestinians seeking refugee status in Canada, and certainly gives it 100% in fighting for his clients in this regard. In doing so, he has no problem in his criticism of the Israeli government. Ed often uses references to what other Jews think when they agree with his view, and I suggested to Ed that Jews, like everyone else, do not think alike. All in all, while I do not agree with Ed's assessment of life in Israel, and his constant attack on its majority, Ed pointed out that he has in fact written more than once on the better points of Israeli society. It is important to keep open the debate on human rights issues in Canada, Israel, and all countries in the Middle East. So, I am prepared to, and do retract my comment that Ed is one of Canada's worst anti semites, and an idiotic spammer. I was wrong to have alleged that. Ed has agreed to end his libel action, and we have agreed to disagree whenever we choose to do so, but in a respectful way.

Will Hechter
President
Clear Lake Historical Productions
willhechter@clearlakeproductions.com

Amira Hass on Negotiations

The only Israel journalist who actually lives in the territory that it is her job to report on:

Palestinians must say no to negotiations with Israel

The Palestinians' application for membership in the United Nations was welcomed, even by critics of the Palestinian Authority, because it was understood as the close, albeit belated, of an overly long chapter. This was the chapter in which the Palestinian leadership, in exchange for dubious guarantees and slivers of privilege for a small group, took part in a charade of negotiations, while in reality, the area intended for the realization of the Palestinians' right to self-determination kept being reduced and fragmented. This chapter exposed the fact that the parties in Israel's various coalition governments disagree on only one thing: the number and size of the Palestinian Bantustans in Israel's master plan.

6 words Israel should say if it is serious about peace

We

Will

Stop

Taking

Your

Land

The fact that Netanyahu refuses to say it betrays his intentions.

Attacks of some kind

I don't agree with Akiva Eldar's perspective on Israeli-Palestinian peace, but he is right about one thing: Netanyahu will use the attacks to justify even harsher treatment of the Palestinians, and the blood of those victims will then be used to pull the Palestinians back towards a maximalist position, since every other strategy seems to end in failure.

"The attacks in the south should remind us that in the Israeli-Palestinian military arena there is no knockout victory. Whoever didn't want the Palestina Liberation Organization got Hamas. Whoever didn't want Hamas is getting Al-Qaida."

The myth of Israel's Goliath image has been slain
From Ha'aretz

Akiva Eldar

The planning, time, place and methodology of the attacks in the south indicate that the intention was not just to kill Israelis, avenge Palestinian deaths, or speed up the end of occupation. Whoever sent the terrorists is no friend of President Mahmoud Abbas and his people, who are scurrying around trying to lobby support for a UN General Assembly vote for a Palestinian state next month.. . .

Read the rest.

Shorter Danny Danon (Likud)

Hat tip to an associate of mine stranded in the US of A, who found this gem in the NYT:

Making the Land of Israel whole

The Palestinians had better not declare independence, or else we're gonna occupy them.

Bibi, I've figured it out!

Look, it's totally not apartheid. . .

They support equality, but please, no Arabs . . .

The secretary of the settlement of Elazar, Yossi Kaufman, told Haaretz: "[Residents of] Elazar have approached the regional council and requested that the settlement's buses not have an Arab driver. If army directives require a guard for an Arab entering the community, there can't be an Arab school-bus driver. If someone wants to earn a living, be my guest. In fact, Arabs built the houses in Elazar. When it comes to children, that's an issue of safety. We were notified that the driver is not Arab and that was the end of the story."

The wisdom of old men

From Ha'aretz:

Leading Haredi Rabbi refuses to endorse letter forbidding the rental of homes to Arabs

Rabbi Steinman, 96

. . . A source that was present at the scene said, "As soon as Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu introduced himself, Rabbi Steinman, who knew why he was being approached, said 'I won't sign,' and immediately left the room.". . .

One of Steinman's confidants related the rabbi's words to Haaretz: "They are making a fierce nationalistic statement. We will not irritate others, that is not the Haredi way. There are things that should not be done; what if there would be a similar call in Berlin against renting properties to Jews? Where is the public conscience? What will this do to Jews around the world? We must act responsibly.". . .

Emphasis mine.

Here is the real road to peace

From Ha'aretz:

Author questioned for allegedly smuggling Palestinians into Israel for a day of fun

. . . Avoiding the security forces at West Bank checkpoints, they took the women out to eat in a restaurant in Jaffa, swimming in the Mediterranean, and took them home via Jerusalem where they could see the Old City walls from afar. . . Most of the Palestinians had never seen the sea or visited certain holy places. None of them had permits to enter Israel. . .

They had grown up less than an hour away, but they had never seen the sea.

The outrage of Zionism is that it proposes that a Jew who cannot trace a single ancestor to anywhere near Palestine should have a greater right - a "birthright" - to live and travel in that land than an Arab whose family has lived and worked there for generations. That is why those of us who have no other ill-feeling towards Jews or Judaism find the Zionist project to be so morally nauseating.

Peace will not come from the hollow theatrics on now display in Washington and New York. Peace will come when ordinary people resolve, as Ilana Hammerman did, to disregard the racist laws that maintain the status quo. Ordinary people have to act first, and only then will the leaders be dragged, kicking and screaming.

Slow, methodical, cruel

From Ha'aretz:

Gestures to the Palestinians

Israel declares huge amounts of private Palestinian land as firing zones and expels the residents under the false and self-righteous guise of concern for their welfare, lest they be harmed by the military training; but these firing zones are always to be found solely on Palestinian land, and never on settlement land. Have you ever heard of any settlers being expelled from their homes because their settlement was declared part of a firing zone? But against these wretched shepherds in the Jordan Valley, anything goes. This is Israeli justice, this is equality as practiced by the Israel Defense Forces.

4 undisputed facts about the Gaza situation

Unless you've been completely out of contact with any form of news media in the past twelve days, you've probably heard a great deal about an Israeli commando raid on a Turkish aid flotilla bound for the Gaza strip that left 9 civilians dead.

Since the raid occured, two competing narratives have emerged, one supporting the point of view of the aid workers who were trying to bring humanitarian supplies into Gaza, and one supporting the Israeli government position.

Regardless of the arguments and evidence presented by the protagonists for either side, there are (at least) 4 facts that remain undisputed by any party.

1. A civilian ship was raided by Israeli commandos. An Israeli craft was not raided by a civilian ship

2. The raid was conducted at night, from a helicopter.

3. The raid took place in international waters

4. The siege of Gaza was a response to the victory of Hamas in Palestinian legislative elections.

One may draw different conclusions from these facts, but I have yet to see any source, representing any point of view, that disputes that they are facts.

My conclusions are as follows:

The first is important because it is mostly forgotten by spokespeople of various zionist organizations who want to blame the activists for being raided. "They had pipes and knives!" they say, "clearly this was a premeditated attack on Israel." Clearly, if Israel's enemies have been reduced to attacking its soldiers with pipes and kitchen knives, the threats to the country are greatly overstated.

#2 is important because it the timing of events was completely under Israeli control. If they had wanted to intercept the ship in broad daylight and tow it to another destination, they could have - they have done this with previous flotillas that have tried to run the Gaza blockade. If we make the charitable assumption that Israeli planners did not mean for violence to occur, the fact that its plans may have gone awry cannot be blamed on anyone but them.

#3 is not of relevance to what occured during the raid, but tells us something about the international reaction. This was an act of piracy. The Turkish reaction is, therefore, justifiable - Turks were killed on the high seas by a foreign power while not themselves violating any international statute. The American lack of reaction is equally unjustifable, given that an American citizen was also killed.

#4 needs to be pointed out because the justification for the siege - and therefore the excuse for the humanitarian crisis that the Israeli government has created - is often made out to be Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli cities. The Hamas campaign of firing homemade rockets into Israel, however, really only picked up in response to the siege. At the time that the siege was implemented, the rationale was to weaken a democratically-elected Palestinian government by punishing the population from which it drew its greatest support.

The claim, therefore, that the siege is necessary to keep weapons out of Gaza is, therefore, a post facto justification, dredged up to justify a policy that failed in its original goals.

The hasbara machine, however, has a conveniently short memory.

Why the Konservatives hate UNRWA

Canada's New Government (TM) has ordered CIDA to stop giving money to the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN agency formed to provide humanitarian relief for Palestinians displaced by the creation of Israel.

According to Embassy Magazine, the move has been puzzling for agency officials, Canadian public servants, and regional diplomats:

Jordan's ambassador to Ottawa says the Canadian government still hasn't explained exactly why it stopped providing direct budgetary support to the UN agency responsible for helping Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, 1.9 million of which live in his country.

A representative for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, says the organization is similarly mystified, but that Canadian budgetary support is essential as the agency struggles with a $90-million shortfall this year.

What has become clear, however, is that despite allegations made by pro-Israel groups—and alluded to by some Cabinet ministers—CIDA staff were extremely confident that there was "minimal" risk of Canadian funding to UNRWA being directed to terrorist groups. Rather, internal CIDA documents say the agency was "quite strong in its relevance to Canadian priorities" and financial management.

If you are one of those souls who are mystified by this move, then please, allow me to explain:

The Palestinian refugee problem exists for 2 reasons.

a) Zionist militias drove Palestinians from their lands in 1948 (a second wave fled their homes during the Six-Day-War as the IDF advanced).

b) Arab countries where most of them currently reside won't give them citizenship, and those living in the West Bank are living under IDF occupation.

The existence of UNRWA facilitates b). By providing Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt with food and shelter, UNRWA takes pressure off the Palestinians to scatter in search of sustenance (which the pro-Israel camp hopes would be the end of the Palestinian nation), and takes the pressure off Arab governments to either accomodate or eliminate by force a restive and hungry refugee population. Accomodating the Palestinians sounds attractive, until you realize that most Egyptians and Lebanese people are not that well off, and would not take kindly to their governments doling out food and housing to people who are already very explicit in their own desire to live elsewhere, i.e. home.

Harper and his cabinet don't see any problem with a). In their eyes, a Jew from Toronto has more of a right to live in Jerusalem than an Arab who was born there, because, in a nutshell, God said so. Consequently, impoverishing UNRWA and thereby starving the Palestinians of the means to stay alive suits their goals.

If all this sounds a little far-fetched, it isn't just my theory. The abolition of UNRWA has been on the wishlist of radical zionist groups for decades. While individual websites offer detailed explanations of how this would benefit the zionist cause, a simple Google search for "abolish UNRWA" drives the point home well enough.

The Konservatives deeply sympathise.

Are you sure it's not apartheid?

The comparison just got harder to ignore. From the Guardian:

Barak: make peace with Palestinians or face apartheid

'If this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state' – Ehud Barak Photograph: JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images

Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, last night delivered an unusually blunt ­warning to his country that a failure to make peace with the Palestinians would leave either a state with no Jewish ­majority or an "apartheid" regime.

His stark language and the South African analogy might have been unthinkable for a senior Israeli figure only a few years ago and is a rare admission of the gravity of the deadlocked peace process.

There have been no formal negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in more than a year, but Barak was speaking at a rare joint event with the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, as part of an annual national security conference in the Israeli city of Herzliya. The pair shook hands and both were warmly applauded.

Barak, a former general and Israel's most decorated soldier, sought to appeal to Israelis on both right and left by saying a peace agreement with the Palestinians was the only way to secure Israel's future as a "Zionist, Jewish, democratic state".

"As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic," Barak said. "If this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."

He described Israel and the Palestinian territories as the historic "land of Israel" to which Israelis had a right.

"We have to demarcate a border within the land of Israel," he said.

"We have a linkage, we have a right, but the reality of standing on the stage of history in realistic terms requires us to pay attention to ­international constraints." Barak is in a delicate political position. He leads the Labour party, supposedly a centre-left movement, but accepted a position in a rightwing coalition under Binyamin Netanyahu, a decision that split his party.

Though Barak articulates a willingness for peace talks, he represents a government that has defied US and Palestinian calls for a full settlement freeze as a prelude to any negotiations. He was also defence minister during last year's Gaza war in which nearly 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.

The Herzliya conference has echoed Israeli concerns about growing ­international criticism, particularly in the year since Gaza. Barak himself alluded to the danger that Israel might lose ­legitimacy if no peace deal was forthcoming. "The pendulum of legitimacy is going to move gradually towards the other pole," he said.

He acknowledged that Washington was pushing the two sides towards "proximity talks" but said this was "only an initial stage" before any return to full negotiations.

Fayyad, who has a limited political following among Palestinians, called on Israel to stop settlement building in the occupied territories and to halt military incursions in Palestinian cities as a sign of seriousness about negotiations.

"Things have to begin to happen in order to give the suggestion that this occupation is going to end," he said. "That Palestinian state is supposed to emerge precisely where settlements are expanding." Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has refused to start fresh negotiations with Israel unless settlement construction stops, in line with the 2003 US road map. Nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers live in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, even though settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law.

"How confident can we all be that once relaunched that political process is going to be able to deliver that which needs to be delivered, the permanent status issues and the key question of ending the ­occupation?" Fayyad asked.

Vanity Projects

It's been a while since I posted a Robert Fisk article, but I'm going through his hefty tome on his travails in Lebanon from 1976 onwards, and have been struck by the sheer volume of field experience that the man has. This recent Independent article is worth a read. I'm seriously considering a subscription to the print edition.

-----------------------

The stakes get higher as Arab princes try to outdo each other

Do the Saudis not have the slightest idea of what is going on around them?

Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia is quite a man.

He says he doesn't want to be the prime minister of Lebanon – everyone who wants to be the prime minister of Lebanon says that – but he is immensely wealthy. True, his bank balance has sunk from $23.7bn to a mere $13.3bn since 2005 (thus sayeth Forbes magazine). But he's just announced that he wants to construct the world's tallest building – a 1km-high goliath which will dwarf his neighbour emir in Dubai who last month opened the paltry 25,000ft Burj Khalifa amid the sand dunes of his bankrupt creditors. The nephew of King Abdullah, al-Waleed understandably calls his company Kingdom Holdings. He also happens to be a major shareholder in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp – which is why you won't be reading these words in The Times. Long live Kingdom Holdings, I suppose.

Because yesterday morning, I was taking an al-Jazeera television crew around the repulsive, obscene, outrageous, filthy, stinking slums of the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps not far from my home in Beirut, a place of such squalor that the gorge rises that human beings even live there. Sabra and Chatila – yes, the site of that infamous massacre in 1982 when Lebanese Christian militiamen allied to Israel slaughtered up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians while the Israeli army surrounded the camps, watched the killings – and did nothing. They were the survivors of the great exodus or ethnic cleansing of 1948 – or their sons or grandsons – who fled Galilee for the "temporary" safety of Lebanon and, like the visa applicants of the movie Casablanca, wait and wait – and wait – to go home. Which they will never do. "I am very positive," Prince al-Waleed said when he announced his new priapic tower, to be constructed in the Red Sea port of Jeddah. "We are always looking for new investments."

Now I know that there are a lot of fine philanthropists in the Gulf, Prince al-Waleed among them, but what is one to make of all this? Afghanistan is collapsing in blood; Iraq remains a state of semi-civil war; the Israelis continue to thieve land for Jews and Jews only from the Arabs who hold the title deeds to that property – and Prince al-Waled wants to build a tower reaching a kilometre into the sky. Do the Saudis – who gave so much largesse to the Taliban (we have to forget this, of course, along with the fact that the Saudis provided most of the murderers of 9/11, which is why we bombed Kabul rather than Riyadh) – not have the slightest idea of what is going on around them?

For example, we all know that the Americans maintain stocks of weapons among their allies. They keep munitions in South Korea and, indeed, in the Arab Gulf (aka Saudi Arabia). But very quietly this week, they agreed to double their munitions supplies in Israel from $400m of weapons to $800m. Of course, Washington's gift of $9bn to Israel up to 2012 – never, of course, to be spent on those illegal colonies which are built against international law on Arab land but which Barack Obama now pusillanimously ignores – has nothing to do with this. But don't imagine that – in the event of a new "preventive" war – Israel cannot draw on these supplies for its own army and air force. After all, it was a missile taken to Saudi Arabia by the US marines for use against Iraq in 1991 that ended up in the hands of the Israeli air force as part of a quid pro quo for not joining in the war against Baghad - and which was subsequently used to kill civilians in a Lebanese ambulance in 1996.

But these days, Arab compliance reaches new heights every day. Now, for example, we have the Egyptian government – and its ever popular president (see the American-approved presidential election results which are way above 90 per cent) – building a wall around Rafah, part of the vast mass of poverty which constitutes Gaza, thus preventing food, gasoline (and, no doubt, weapons) from reaching the trapped Palestinians of this prison camp. A camp, one has to add, which meets with the full approval of Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, whose honourable involvement in the invasion of Iraq has now been outdone by is extraordinary success as peace envoy to the Middle East.

Egypt's intelligence boss (a certain Mr Sulieman who might be the next president of Egypt were it not for his pattern of heart attacks) approves of this wall, which is a very definite assistance to Israel and which will yet further impoverish the Palestinians of Gaza to the point at which the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila might actually feel themselves lucky they don't live in "Palestine".

In Israel itself, the deputy foreign minister humiliates the Turkish ambassador – while complaining about an anti-Semitic series on Turkish television – by forcing the diplomat to sit on a low sofa, refusing to shake hands and addressing him, with two colleagues, from higher chairs. The foreign minister himself, our dear friend Mr Lieberman, has now acquired the habit – every time poor old (and I mean old) US envoy George Mitchell raises the question of Jerusalem – of walking out of the room. That's what Obama's point man is worth. Israel's crazies – Netanyahu is a moderate chap by comparison – now prove that Israel can be just as much a banana Raj as the rest of the Middle East.

But fear not. The princes and the emirs and the caliphs and the presidents will be able to outbid each other in towers and hotels. I have a bigger painting set than yours. I have a sharper pencil, more crayons, a larger train set (Qatar, please note), a bigger bear than yours. And the world will watch this tragedy and marvel at the toy boxes now being opened in the Middle East. And, by the way, how many crayons do the children of Sabra and Chatila have?

Wishing all my Christian friends a Merry Christmas. . .

. . .and reminding them of the plight of the people of Bethlehem today:

Amira Hass: The one thing worse than denying the Gaza report

Now that international jurist and affirmed zionist John Goldstone has suggested in his UN report that the IDF committed war crimes in Gaza, the denial machine amongst zionists worldwide has swung into overdrive.

The brilliant Israeli journalist Amira Hass explains the horror of this well in her latest piece for Ha'aretz:

. . .

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 thing worse than denial - the admission that the IDF indeed acted as has been described, but that these actions are both normal and appropriate.

The Toronto International Film Festival . . .

. . . has become an unwitting tool for zionists in Canada, as they seek to dampen the growing movement for boycott and divestment from the world's last formally colonial state.

Naomi Klein, Jewish Canadian author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine , lays it all out in a commendable article for the Globe and Mail:

We don't feel like celebrating with Israel this year:

. . .For more than a year, Israeli diplomats have been talking openly about their new strategy to counter growing global anger at Israel's defiance of international law. It's no longer enough, they argue, just to invoke Sderot every time someone raises Gaza. The task is also to change the subject to more pleasant areas: film, arts, gay rights – things that underline commonalities between Israel and places such as Paris and New York. After the Gaza attack, this strategy went into high gear. “We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theatre companies, exhibits,” Arye Mekel, deputy director-general for cultural affairs for Israel's Foreign Ministry, told The New York Times. “This way, you show Israel's prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.”


Toronto got an early taste of all this. A year ago, Amir Gissin, Israeli consul-general in Toronto, explained that a new “Brand Israel” campaign would include, according to a report in the Canadian Jewish News, “a major Israeli presence at next year's Toronto International Film Festival, with numerous Israeli, Hollywood and Canadian entertainment luminaries on hand.” Mr. Gissin pledged that, “I'm confident everything we plan to do will happen.” Indeed it has. . . .

Dr. Abdel-Rahman Lawendy is a resident in Orthopaedic Surgery and Trauma at the London Health Sciences Centre in London, Ontario, who visited Gaza during the bombardment. His talk here is informative on an intellectual and emotional level. A spirited discussion follows in the Q&A, also available on YouTube.

Heroism at Sea

From Al-Jazeera's English service:

It should be noted that the siege of Gaza was imposed not as a response to rocket attacks, which it pre-dated, but as a response to the 2006 Palestinian elections, in which Hamas won a democratic majority over the notoriously corrupt and ineffectual leadership of Fatah.

One of the few Israeli journalists of conscience, Gideon Levy, puts it well:

The Israel Defense Forces has once again used its power to overcome the weak; the navy has once again acted like pirates. The Arion was abducted in the framework of protecting Israel's security for all eternity, blah, blah, blah. . .

. . . This then is the great progress of the "people's army" to train women to kill, while their comrades, soldiers and Border Police, are routinely sent to shoot live fire at unarmed demonstrators at Bil'in and Na'alin. This, for the most part, is the IDF's balance sheet. This is what largely preoccupies the best, most moral army in the world. Pilots who have never fought in an air battle and soldiers with no army against them now spend most of their time maintaining the occupation in a kind of pathetic combat, and they are our protective shield. When the day of reckoning comes, we will remember this.

Shorter Moshe Arens

Article: So what's your solution?

Israel can't give the Palestinians a state until they agree to stop resisting the occupation and admit that Jews should have more rights than they do.

Protesters killed in Antananarivo, death toll nears 100.

If you don't know where Antananarivo is, I guarantee that you are not alone. I only know because sometime in elementary school I did a project on the country in which it is situated. The facts that have remained with me:

- It is the capital of Madagascar
- It is located in the northern half of the island, which itself is east of Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Madagascar has a lot of unique wildlife
- Whatever the local language is, it employs a large number of "a" sounds.
- In the south of the island there is at least one inactive volcano that is surrounded by extremely sharp rocks called "tsingy"s and the crater of which is now a lush, but threatened jungle that for most of the country's history was inaccessible to large-scale exploitation.

Actually, I'm not sure about that last one, but I know there are tsingys in Madagascar for sure.


They sure look pointy! I also remember that they are called "tsingy" because of the noise they make when you throw a rock against them. A little bit of local onomatopoeia.

At any rate, there has been a lot of turmoil in Madagascar, but you wouldn't know it if you lived in a Western country and watched the news or read the regular press. The president was recently sent into exile by the deposed mayor of the capital, himself a former DJ and talk show host, after the latter somehow took control of the army.

The astute amongst you (or those of you with a lot of time to kill) will have noticed that all of the sources above, are Western sources. It isn't that they aren't reporting the news from the island - it's that nobody really cares. Very few people in North America or Europe (or Egypt or Pakistan, for that matter), wake up in the morning unable to contain their desire to learn about the latest developments in Madagascar, and those that do probably have some sort of connection to the island.

We do, however, seem to take an awfully strong interest in other places. If an Israeli soldier is killed in battle, it isn't long before the whole world knows about it. Gilad Shalit (may God help him), is probably the most famous PoW in history - millions, if not billions, of people now know his name, and lots of people who've never been within 1000km of Gaza have an opinion about what to do about him. In that, I obviously include myself. Lots of middle-class North Americans now run around posing as experts on Pakistan's FATA region, and every time a Muslim detonates a bomb somewhere in the world, you can bet it will make the evening news. If it goes off in a Western country, it will be on page 1 of the paper and all day long on FOX.

And if 100 Chinese miners die in some sort of work-related accident, we'll probably all hear about that too.

It seems like there is a hierarchy, which, after you adjust for things like shared citizenship and same-city habitation, goes something like "North Americas & Western Europeans > Israelis > Australians > Arabs = South Asians > East Asians (except Japanese) = Eastern Europeans = South & Central Amercans > Everybody in Africa who lives south of the Sahara and isn't white.

Obviously, we could make some rearrangements there (who, if anybody, did the killing is also important) , but I think the point is clear enough - we care a whole lot more about people who a) look like us or b) we're scared will hurt us than we do about people who have nothing to do with us.

Why do we talk incessantly about Palestine but not about Sudan? Both the Western press and the Muslim community are guilty of this, even though the death toll in the latter in any given year is clearly higher.

Consensus is probably one contributing factor. Human beings are attracted to conflict - it is entertaining, after all, and news is, for many people, entertainment. Besides a few Arab nationalists, we can all more or less agree that the government of Sudan is not ideal, and that the peoples of southern and western Sudan have legitimate grievances that are being ignored or created by Khatoum. What we do about it is up for debate, but it's clear that almost nobody can take El-Bashir's side and be taken seriously.

Not so with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Especially in the United States, there is a large population of die-hard Zionists who would be able to justify almost anything that served the purposes of their ideology. It is, therefore, the combination of the outrageousness of the injustices, coupled with the volume of propaganda that defends it, that makes the debate heated.

An acquaintance of mine had another explanation - that Jews and Arabs share not an inconsiderable amount of history with Western Europeans, and that, for a variety of reasons, we have a material interest in the conflict. That's obvious enough, and a decent explanation, but it isn't a very good justification.

A fundamental precept of Islam is that all human beings a created equal, and that their moral worth is determined not by their place of birth or their race, but by their actions. "An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor does a non-Arab have any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over a black, nor does a black have any superiority over a white except by piety and good action."

Those were the words of the Prophet from his last sermon. It was revolutionary thinking at the time. Reading this blog, and looking at the world in which it exists, I think it still is.