One is from an article with Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé
(On the Future of Israel and Palestine - An Interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky - By Frank Barat) and in it he said that in his last visit to Israel he found a new mood there. People in Israel are terrified of boycotts and divestment.
Barat: During my recent trip to Israel/Palestine it became obvious (talking to people, reading newspapers, watching the news) that something scared Israel a lot: a Boycott. Are you in favour of this type of actions and do you think that they could bare fruit?
Ilan Pappé: Yes I am and I do think it has a chance of triggering processes of change on the ground. Link.
The other piece of information comes from a lecture given by Norman Finkelstein, actually from the questions and answers after the lecture about the media. He answered a question about the media not being truthful and with the people and being owned by just a few corporations.
His answer surprised me and I think will surprise many others.
He said that in the Vietnam era, the media were the last to come onto the side of the antiwar demonstrations and before there were thousands on the streets the media followed the government line praising the war and the hope of winning it, just like today.
The point is that we cannot rely on the media, as many bloggers advocate, waking up the people, lamenting the fact that the media is biased and doesn’t tell the truth. In fact the media is downright complicit with the Bush/Cheney agenda – look how long it took the New York Times to publish the illegal wire tapping story – a whole year late.
Finally I want to quote Norman Finkelstein’s closing remarks in that video I watched yesterday. For me, at least, it give me great hope and courage that we should press on with our task of getting the message to as many people as possible.
“I’ve grown older, a little bit jaded, a little bit bitter, but I have never, and I wont ever, let go of my belief in those weapons of truth and justice. They are formidable weapons, if, and this is the crucial caveat, if you learn how to weald them. And that takes practice and a lot of hard work. You have to master that record, you have to first learn that it even exists, and then you have to study it. And then you have to show a little bit of backbone, a little bit of spine, a small part of courage. It’s not a six year old in Gaza, facing a tank with a stone. You are not going to suffer terribly in our society. You may have trouble here and there getting a job, but, you are going to healthy, you are going to be doing a lot better than ninety nine percent of humanity, however rigorous the trails you go through. So if you learn how to master those weapons, those formidable weapons of truth and justice and I remain as confident now as I did when I was the age of most of you in this room. That however much power they have, and they have a lot of power, and however ruthless they are, and they are very ruthless, and however much money they have, and they have lots of money. Despite that, notwithstanding, nonetheless, I still remain utterly, completely, absolutely confident that if we learn how to master those weapons of truth and justice, we can yet win. Thank you.”
Norman Finkelstein: A Question of Justice. Part 1 of 12.
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