George Habash (1926-2008)

For many people, Al-Hakeem embodied the Palestinian struggle. If you’d like to know more:
As'ad AbuKhalil provides the best informed and rather personal remembrance.
Lamis Andoni on aljazeera.net and David Hirst for the Guardian provide reasonable ‘standard’ English language obituaries.
It is also worth looking at this article in Le Monde.

"La lutte palestinienne a besoin, pour triompher, d'un Hanoï arabe"

Newspapers and their Blogs...update 1

Damian Thompson of the Telegraph has posted a retraction of sorts. His previous post on Muslims laying siege to a Sydney hospital was, he admits, “counterknowledge”, an “urban legend”. I am reminded of the Pentagon’s retraction (see these Washington Post and New York Times articles) of their earlier and much publicised claim of small Iranian speedboats threatening three U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf. In both cases, grave concerns about the ongoing threat were expressed alongside the (rather muted) retractions.

Newspapers and their Blogs

A recent blog article on a newspaper website reminded me of a comment often made by Americans visiting or settled in Britain: that the British press is, politically, much more varied than the press back home. Whether that is true or not (I suspect it might be, comments?), it is certainly true that the British press displays a wide range of Right and Left wing agendas, which, however, are often hidden from the casual reader. The advent of newspaper-associated blogs may well be making these agendas clearer.

The blog article in question has just been published on the website of the Telegraph group of newspapers (the Daily Telegraph is one of the best-selling non-tabloid newspapers in Britain) by the leader writer Damian Thompson. “Muslims Lay Siege to Australian Hospital” he claims, and goes on to quote, verbatim, a ‘news’ report on how 150 Muslims recently threatened to over-run the Liverpool Hospital in Sydney, and how the authorities 'capitulated'. Thompson does not cite any primary sources for this report, and some quick googling reveals that report of this incident can only be found on right-wing blogs in Britain and Australia. There is no mention of it in any other mainstream news channel – indeed the Telegraph is probably the most mainstream outing this particular event has garnered. Coupled with a picture implying the effects of Shariah law, Thompson’s assertion that “if the report is true, then this is another example of a global campaign by fundamentalist Muslims to replace civil law by Sharia”, and the slew of vitriolic readers comments which follow, this blog reveals much about an extremely popular British newspaper and its readership. This report could not, ofcourse, have ever been published in the paper edition of the Telegraph; its publication in an associated blog suggests that such blogs allow newspapers to pursue their agendas more explicitly than they would have been able to otherwise. They also allow readers a greater insight into the politics of their nation's greatest news rags.

For Telegraph blog see: muslimslaysiege