JAMAL DAJANI
Dajani is producer of the TV program “MOSAIC: World News from the Middle East,” which features dramatic recent footage of the conflict. He said today: “We try to provide in a half-hour program a comprehensive look at both the narrative and pictures from the TV networks in the Mideast. From the footage that we’re seeing, Israel isn’t doing much of anything to Hezbollah — they’re bombing civilians and the infrastructure in Lebanon.”
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JONATHAN COOK
A British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, Cook is writing regularly on events from there. A recent piece of his noted that just before the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was abducted on June 25, Israel had abducted two Palestinians. Cook wrote: “Few readers of a British newspaper would have noticed the story. In the Observer of 25 June, it merited a mere paragraph hidden in the ‘World in brief’ section, revealing that the previous day a team of Israeli commandos had entered the Gaza Strip to ‘detain’ two Palestinians Israel claims are members of Hamas. The significance of the mission was alluded to in a final phrase describing this as ‘the first arrest raid in the territory since Israel pulled out of the area a year ago.'” The original piece in the Observer is at their website.
Cook is author of the just-released book Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State.
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PHYLLIS BENNIS
Bennis is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of the book Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy U.S. Power. She recently issued talking points on the crisis.
She said today: “Yesterday’s U.S. veto makes a diplomatic solution even more difficult.” AP reported yesterday: “Eight of the last nine vetoes in the council have been cast by the United States. Of those, seven concerned the Israel-Palestinian conflict.”
Bennis wrote a backgrounder on the veto issue in 2003.
JOSH RUEBNER
Ruebner is grassroots advocacy coordinator of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. He said today: “Israel is using weapons supplied by the United States to target Palestinian and Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon in violation of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act and the Geneva Conventions.” A document from the group gives a breakdown of such attacks.
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
