Tel Aviv Pride: That Number Again...

From a quick search on Google News.

Numbers of participants on Pride events are usually hilariously over-inflated by organisers.

Then often obediently repeated without question.

Note here it's the gay media that have gone for this magic 180,000 number.

The figure is taken from this email sent out earlier by 'Tel Aviv-Yafo International Relations', an official Israeli government PR body, natch.

And who'd think there was any need to question anything they say, eh?

Update: And here's a cartoon video made by the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry and released to the US media Monday.

It's meant to satirise liberal Western journalists 'naivety' about Gaza and Hamas - and depicts a crazed Arab terrorist abducting and then shooting a gay man.

There is no evidence this actually happens in Gaza, but why let that stop you?

Tony Blair: We're All Going On A Summer Holiday

From the new Private Eye.

Deftly bringing together the two biggest news stories of our time.

PS Headline Of The Week included to lighten the mood.

Gaza: Gayza

Hello everyone!

My friend Chris is the editor of an excellent queer magazine called Polari (http://www.polarimagazine.com/).

They're running a week about hidden lives and he wants to include two pieces about being gay in Palestine and Israel.

Do you know anyone who would be interested to write? Chris can advize you on length etc.

Akkas

Dear Akkas,

I do understand that this might be coming from good intentions, but I doubt any Palestinian would be interested in participating in this issue of the magazine.

The story being proposed is not only inappropriate at this time, when our bodies, throughout occupied Palestine and especially in Gaza, are being targeted, destroyed and maimed, and disrupting our sexual struggle to become secondary to piecing together our lives under occupation and oppression, and therefore hierarchical (something we are in a constant struggle against). This strikes me as pandering to/consolidating Zionist and normalisation narratives. Anything that seeks to portray and equate the lives of Palestinians with those of Israelis, in any shape or form and draw parallels, especially at this time is a part of an on-going normalisation strategy, and in the case of sexuality, plain Pinkwashing. Should you be interested in our queer activism, of which a huge and integral part of is, resisting Zionist Colonial Occupation, then we can talk.

Why is this equation, and comparison of a secret life so important at this point? If you want to talk about sexuality during this war, maybe we could talk about how this war has affected our sexual and queer struggle and lives. Maybe we can talk about the new sexual and bodily realities that the thousands of Palestinians now have to face, considering the limbs they have lost, the mutilations, the trauma. Think about a person without hands, or without legs or without proper use of their faculties (of which there are thousands) and their sexual lives. What are the sexual prospects do these have? There are people in Gaza who have not changed their clothes for weeks fearing that any moment they would be shelled and do not want to be found dead undressed! Perhaps we should talk about the body in war and how we are being reduced to walking corpses clinging unto the last vestiges of dignity. On the matter of secrecy. Mabe we can consider how this has altogether been destroyed by war, even though before the war it was virtually impossible. When families are forced to live in extremely limited spaces, when strangers have share homes now due to the monstrous destruction? I doubt that any Israeli has to face these questions now, or has ever had to face any of these dilemmas since the establishment of the state 60 years ago.

Ghaith T. Hilal.

That told her.

Picture Of The Day: Gaza

In a photograph by Oliver Weiken, Palestinians search for survivors amid the debris of a house destroyed by an Israeli air strike in the Beach refugee camp, northern Gaza City.

The attack came minutes after a unilateral humanitarian ceasefire.

Joan Rivers: Oops!

Sayeeda Warsi: Morally Reprehensible

Whilst welcoming today's technically impossible resignation of the unelected life peer and made-up 'Minister for Faith and Communities', Baroness Warsi, as it draws attention to David Cameron and the Conservative Party's shameful quietude and acquiescence over Israel's recent acts of genocide and infanticide in Gaza - and whilst acknowledging that even a politician as spectacularly loathsome, odious and reprehensible as this attention-seeking self-delusional careerist loonbag may occasionally get something right, and, further, that we must resist gayist-thinking that tries to reduce everyone down to how they feel about The Gays (yet nor should we let someone being right about one thing let us overlook all their other crimes viz. Pinkwashing) - Fagburn hopes people will bear (bare?) in mind that this scary right-wing bigot has shown herself in the past to be literally incapable of acting on principle and so there's almost certainly something else behind this, like the fact she was pissed off about not being promoted in the last cabinet reshuffle, and then her being banned from cabinet meetings, and she was about to be sacked anyway.

Good day.

Adams' cartoon for the Telegraph, Wednesday.
Politician driven by ego shocker!
Thanks for pointing this out.

The Great War: Warnography

Needless to say, the centenary has been seized as a military propaganda opportunity. Last week David Cameron crudely compared Vladimir Putin in Ukraine to Germany under the Kaiser in 1914 (and under Hitler). This was neither true nor helpful. The prime minister added that Britain was “not about to launch a European war”. In which case why mention it at all, and why also send troops to train in eastern Europe? ...

The chief lesson of 1914 must be not recklessly to rattle sabres across the frontiers of Europe until all else is lost. The Germans have learned that. In Ukraine they are still counselling restraint. Britain is doing the opposite, as its leaders gently dust themselves in glory. When Cameron last year allotted £50m to “remembering the lessons” of 1914, he was also planning to go to war on Syria. I wonder what lesson taught him that.

1914: The Great War Has Become A Nightly Pornography Of Violence Simon Jenkins, The Guardian.

Meanwhile in Gaza...

Update: A blunt warning from Prince William, a century after war ravaged the continent: Ukraine crisis is a threat to all Europe Mail Online.

'In April, the Mail reported how Prince Charles told a Polish woman, who had lost many of her Jewish family in the Nazi Holocaust: ‘And now Putin is doing just about the same [in the Ukraine] as Hitler...’

Thankfully, our own dear Royal Family stand above politics, except when engaging in propaganda so crude, you'd have to be as stupid and inbred as them to fall for it.

Noam Chomsky: Nightmare In Gaza

Amid all the horrors unfolding in the latest Israeli offensive in Gaza, Israel's goal is simple: quiet-for-quiet, a return to the norm.

For the West Bank, the norm is that Israel continues its illegal construction of settlements and infrastructure so that it can integrate into Israel whatever might be of value, meanwhile consigning Palestinians to unviable cantons and subjecting them to repression and violence.

For Gaza, the norm is a miserable existence under a cruel and destructive siege that Israel administers to permit bare survival but nothing more.

The latest Israeli rampage was set off by the brutal murder of three Israeli boys from a settler community in the occupied West Bank. A month before, two Palestinian boys were shot dead in the West Bank city of Ramallah. That elicited little attention, which is understandable, since it is routine.

"The institutionalized disregard for Palestinian life in the West helps explain not only why Palestinians resort to violence," Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani reports, "but also Israel's latest assault on the Gaza Strip."

In an interview, human rights lawyer Raji Sourani, who has remained in Gaza through years of Israeli brutality and terror, said, "The most common sentence I heard when people began to talk about cease-fire: Everybody says it's better for all of us to die and not go back to the situation we used to have before this war. We don't want that again. We have no dignity, no pride; we are just soft targets, and we are very cheap. Either this situation really improves or it is better to just die. I am talking about intellectuals, academics, ordinary people: Everybody is saying that."

In January 2006, Palestinians committed a major crime: They voted the wrong way in a carefully monitored free election, handing control of Parliament to Hamas.

The media constantly intone that Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In reality, Hamas leaders have repeatedly made it clear that Hamas would accept a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus that has been blocked by the U.S. and Israel for 40 years.

In contrast, Israel is dedicated to the destruction of Palestine, apart from some occasional meaningless words, and is implementing that commitment...

Noam Chomsky, Truthout.

PS Chomsky On Israel-Palestine And BDS. Will boycotts work? Do they ever? Maybe they're more about making us feel good etc etc. [Emphasis Fagburn's own].

Thought For The Day: Alexei Sayle

'Israel is the Jimmy Savile of nation states.

'It clearly doesn't care about damaging the lives of children..

'[Israel] is endlessly indulged by its doting parents, the West, and has become a psychopath as a result.

'It thinks that everybody else is in the wrong and it is in the right.'

Alexei Sayle.

Current bodycount: Palestinians 200 - Israelis 1.

Noam Chomsky video, The Gaza Crisis, December 2008 (but sadly you hardly need to change a word).

The Onion: 8-Year-Old Palestinian Boy Pleasantly Surprised He Hasn't Been Killed Yet

GAZA CITY—As civilian casualties continue to mount amid the escalating conflict along the Gaza Strip, 8-year-old Palestinian boy Walid Suleiman expressed both joy and astonishment Monday that he has yet to be killed in an Israeli military attack. 
“Boy, I thought I’d be dead by this past Saturday for sure, but amazingly enough, here I am,” said Suleiman, adding that he is “pleased, but pretty shocked” not to be among the estimated 100 Palestinians left dead by widespread Israeli airstrikes in the region over the past six days. 
“I’d have bet you anything that by today they’d have already dug my corpse out from underneath a giant pile of rubble and buried me alongside the rest of my family. Guess I won the lottery, eh?” 
At press time, incoming Israeli aircraft could be heard swiftly approaching as Suleiman limped back to his home.

The Onion.

For those among you taking notes, I think the body count's now 100 to 3.
Hurrah for Zionism!

Chomsky: On Israel's War On Gaza

The incursion and bombardment of Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel, it is not about achieving peace.

The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase in a decades-long campaign to ethnically-cleanse Palestinians.

Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely-crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques, and slums to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command in control, no army… and calls it a war. It is not a war, it is murder.

When Israelis in the occupied territories now claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they are crushing. You can't defend yourself when you're militarily occupying someone else's land. That's not defense. Call it what you like, it's not defense.

Noam Chomsky.
   
• Who is doing the killing in Gaza? - Joint statement signed by Chomsky.
 Video interview with Amy Goodman about Chomsky's recent visit to the Gaza Strip.
“You’re cross-dressers! You’re the Gay Pride March, that’s what you are!” - Israeli war supporters attack Tel Aviv peace demo.
For more on Israel/Palestine and the current attack on Gaza see Znet.

But remember, if Israel launches a genocidal invasion of Gaza soon, they must be forgiven anything and everything because Tel Aviv has a really nice gay beach.

Jon Ronson: Finding Omer

In this first episode of Jon Ronson's new series, he looks at a YouTube video posted by a man who accuses a free Gaza organisation of homophobia. However, the film does not quite ring true and further investigation leads to a surprising discovery...

Update...

Jon Ronson's series Esc & Ctrl is coming to an end he's keen to tie up some loose ends. He tracks down Omer, a man who had appeared in a questionable YouTube video accusing a free Gaza organisation of not welcoming LGBT people on to a flotilla. Omar claims he did the video as a favour for an activist friend and that he 'didn't think too much about it'

Was Michael Lucas the unnamed American?