Netanyahu says strike on Iran would be good for Arabs
30 October, 2012 – By NIcholas Vinocur – Reuters

PARIS: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought on Tuesday to convince Arab states that an Israeli military strike on Iran would benefit them, removing a potential threat and easing tensions across the Middle East.

Netanyahu has made a number of veiled threats to attack Iran’s nuclear programme and has appealed to the United States and the United Nations to set a limit for Tehran on its further development.

In an interview published on Tuesday with French magazine Paris Match, Netanyahu said such a strike would not worsen regional tensions, as many critics have warned.

“Five minutes after, contrary to what the sceptics say, I think a feeling of relief would spread across the region,” he said.

“Iran is not popular in the Arab world, far from it, and some governments in the region, as well as their citizens, have understood that a nuclear armed Iran would be dangerous for them, not just for Israel,” he said.

Israel, widely believed to be the Middle East’s only nuclear power, believes Tehran intends to build atomic weapons and has consistently urged the West to increase up sanctions. Iran says it is enriching uranium for peaceful energy purposes only.

The United States and other Western countries have rejected Netanyahu’s demand to set a limit for Iran and have urged him to refrain from military action to give diplomacy and sanctions a chance to work.

Netanyahu, who is running for re-election in January at the head of the right-wing Likud party, told the United Nations last month that a strike could wait until spring or summer when he said Tehran might be on the brink of building an atomic bomb.

During his two-day visit to France, Netanyahu will travel to the southern city of Toulouse with President Francois Hollande for a ceremony of remembrance for the victims of an Islamist gunman who killed seven people there in March, including three Jewish children.
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The Last Presidential Debate
By As’ad AbuKhalil – 29 October, 2012 – Angry Corner – Al Akhbar

How do you watch presidential debates in the US, as an Arab or as an American who cares about Palestinians? Not an easy task for sure. It has become ritualistic and formulaic. Basically, candidates sit (or stand) and compete in the art of catering to the Israeli lobby. It knows no bounds and it recognizes no limits of logic or reason. It is an exercise in which informed men and women have to surrender their brains at the door. It is a ritual that we have to endure once every four years, if you don’t count the routine Senate races.

Obama came to the debate prepared to defend his record on Israel. He extended additional aid to Israel as soon as Romney landed there for the campaign stop that all presidential candidates have to undertake. He also ordered the largest ever joint military exercise between Israel and the US. Every US president has to prove that he is far more pro-Israel than his predecessor, and all are (probably with the exception of George H.W. Bush). Obama and Romney invoked the name of Israel and they barely mentioned the names of traditional US allies like France and UK. Israel is now the foreign policy of the US in an election year. A writer in Le Monde said what no US journalist could say: that the invocation of Israel and China in the presidential campaign is about domestic policy and not foreign policy, that Israel stands for Florida while China stands for Ohio.

Sadly, there are Arabs who have already begun their naïve analysis about the next four years. Some are rooting for Obama on the assumption that a president in his second term is capable of challenging the Israeli lobby. For some inexplicable reason, every American administration is capable of fooling Arabs with this notion. Of course, no American president ever stood up to the Israeli lobby in his second term. There are those in the Arab world who insist that Nixon was planning on confronting Israel in his second term and that the Israeli lobby instigated the Watergate scandal to avoid an impending disaster.

But the debate between Obama and Romney was illustrative: there is a political malady in American political life. There is a pretension that passes itself off as sincere concern. This obsession with Israel just can’t be real. How could anyone believe that the president of the US is really more concerned about Israel than about any other ally of the US around the world? To be sure, Israel has become a domestic American political factor and the US Congress acts pretty much as an extension of the Israeli embassy, but there is something to be said about this theater of the absurd: about two adult men pretending that all that they care about in world affairs is Israel. Israel wants the US to act like every threat to its aggression and occupation is a threat to the US, and American politician have to feign agreement with Israel. …more

Why didn’t CNN’s international arm air its own documentary on Bahrain’s Arab Spring repression?

The Bahraini minority regime spent $32 million dollars on bribes to stop CNN from airing the documentary on its international network where it can be viewed by people in Arab countries, including Bahrain. CNN’s total cost for the hour-long documentary titled “iRevolution” was $100,000. According to the deal, CNN chopped down the documentary into a 13 minutes segment and aired it only on its US networks, but not on the international network. CNN later “laid off” the award winning reporter Amber Lyon in order to please the Arab monarchy in Bahrain that paid CNN million of dollars. Don’t you love the “Freedom of the Press” in Western countries? Watch a short video: Dictators Sponsor CNN, Interview with Amber Lyon
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A former CNN correspondent defies threats from her former employer to speak out about self-censorship at the network

October 30, 2012 (The Guardian) — In late March 2011, as the Arab Spring was spreading, CNN sent a four-person crew to Bahrain to produce a one-hour documentary on the use of internet technologies and social media by democracy activists in the region. Featuring on-air investigative correspondent Amber Lyon, the CNN team had a very eventful eight-day stay in that small, US-backed kingdom.

By the time the CNN crew arrived, many of the sources who had agreed to speak to them were either in hiding or had disappeared. Regime opponents whom they interviewed suffered recriminations, as did ordinary citizens who worked with them as fixers. Leading human rights activist Nabeel Rajab was charged with crimes shortly after speaking to the CNN team. A doctor who gave the crew a tour of his village and arranged meetings with government opponents, Saeed Ayyad, had his house burned to the ground shortly after. Their local fixer was fired ten days after working with them.

The CNN crew itself was violently detained by regime agents in front of Rajab’s house. As they described it after returning to the US, “20 heavily-armed men”, whose faces were “covered with black ski masks”, “jumped from military vehicles”, and then “pointed machine guns at” the journalists, forcing them to the ground. The regime’s security forces seized their cameras and deleted their photos and video footage, and then detained and interrogated them for the next six hours.

Lyon’s experience both shocked and emboldened her. The morning after her detention, newspapers in Bahrain prominently featured articles about the incident containing what she said were “outright fabrications” from the government. “It made clear just how willing the regime is to lie,” she told me in a phone interview last week.

But she also resolved to expose just how abusive and thuggish the regime had become in attempting to snuff out the burgeoning democracy movement, along with any negative coverage of the government.

“I realized there was a correlation between the amount of media attention activists receive and the regime’s ability to harm them, so I felt an obligation to show the world what our sources, who risked their lives to talk to us, were facing.”

CNN’s total cost for the documentary, ultimately titled “iRevolution: Online Warriors of the Arab Spring”, was in excess of $100,000, an unusually high amount for a one-hour program of this type. The portion Lyon and her team produced on Bahrain ended up as a 13-minute segment in the documentary. That segment, which as of now is available on YouTube, is a hard-hitting and unflinching piece of reporting that depicts the regime in a very negative light.

In the segment, Lyon interviewed activists as they explicitly described their torture at the hands of government forces, while family members recounted their relatives’ abrupt disappearances. She spoke with government officials justifying the imprisonment of activists. And the segment featured harrowing video footage of regime forces shooting unarmed demonstrators, along with the mass arrests of peaceful protesters. In sum, the early 2011 CNN segment on Bahrain presented one of the starkest reports to date of the brutal repression embraced by the US-backed regime.

On 19 June 2011 at 8pm, CNN’s domestic outlet in the US aired “iRevolution” for the first and only time. The program received prestigious journalism awards, including a 2012 Gold Medal from New York Festival’s Best TV and Films. Lyon, along with her segment producer Taryn Fixel, were named as finalists for the 2011 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists. A Facebook page created by Bahraini activists, entitled “Thank you Amber Lyon, CNN reporter | From people of Bahrain”, received more than 8,000 “likes”.

Despite these accolades, and despite the dangers their own journalists and their sources endured to produce it, CNN International (CNNi) never broadcast the documentary. Even in the face of numerous inquiries and complaints from their own employees inside CNN, it continued to refuse to broadcast the program or even provide any explanation for the decision. To date, this documentary has never aired on CNNi.
CNNi’s refusal to broadcast ‘iRevolution’

It is CNN International that is, by far, the most-watched English-speaking news outlet in the Middle East. By refusing to broadcast “iRevolution”, the network’s executives ensured it was never seen on television by Bahrainis or anyone else in the region.

CNNi’s decision not to broadcast “iRevolution” was extremely unusual. Both CNN and CNNi have had severe budget constraints imposed on them over the last several years. One long-time CNN employee (to whom I have granted anonymity to avoid repercussions for negative statements about CNN’s management) described “iRevolution” as an “expensive, highly produced international story about the Arab Spring”. Because the documentary was already paid for by CNN, it would have been “free programming” for CNNi to broadcast, making it “highly unusual not to air it”. The documentary “was made with an international audience as our target”, said Lyon. None of it was produced on US soil. And its subject matter was squarely within the crux of CNN International’s brand.

CNNi’s refusal to broadcast “iRevolution” soon took on the status of a mini-scandal among its producers and reporters, who began pushing Lyon to speak up about this decision. In June 2011, one long-time CNN news executive emailed Lyon:

“Why would CNNi not run a documentary on the Arab Spring, arguably the the biggest story of the decade? Strange, no?”

Motivated by the concerns expressed by long-time CNN journalists, Lyon requested a meeting with CNNi’s president, Tony Maddox, to discuss the refusal to broadcast the documentary. On 24 June 2011, she met with Maddox, who vowed to find out and advise her of the reasons for its non-airing. He never did.

In a second meeting with Maddox, which she had requested in early December to follow up on her unanswered inquiry, Lyon was still given no answers. Instead, at that meeting, Maddox, according to Lyon, went on the offense, sternly warning her not to speak publicly about this matter. Several times, Maddox questioned her about this 18 November 2011 tweet by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, demanding to know what prompted it. …source

REFILE-Bahrain says bans rallies to prevent violence
30 October, 2012 – Reuters

Oct 30 (Reuters) – Bahrain has banned all rallies and gatherings to ensure public safety and prevent violence, the state news agency reported, following more than a year of protests by opposition demonstrators.

The Sunni-ruled island kingdom, where the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet is based, has seen repeated protests since an uprising led by its Shi’ite majority for political reforms that began in February 2011 was crushed with help from Saudi troops last year.

“It has been decided to stop all gatherings and marches and not to allow any activity before being reassured about security and achieving the required stability in order to preserve national unity,” state news agency BNA quoted Interior Minister Sheikh Rashed bin Abdullah al-Khalifa as saying late on Monday.

“Any marches or gatherings will be dealt with as unlicensed and legal procedures will be taken against those calling for or participating in them,” he added.

Sheikh Rashed said the violence that had accompanied marches and gatherings in the kingdom had disrupted traffic, affected trade and the economy and damaged private property.

He said march organisers, including the leading opposition party Wefaq, had failed to control protesters in the past.

The Gulf Arab state has banned a series of protests organised by Wefaq in past months. A senior official said in July that the government had no plans to ban rallies outright, but wanted to ensure they did not turn violent.

The opposition described the bans on Wefaq marches as an attempt to silence them. Amnesty International also criticised the bans as a violation of fundamental rights.

Since April the authorities have stepped up efforts to crack down on unrest. Activists cite an increased use of shotgun pellets, whose use authorities have declined to confirm or deny.

Activists have been sentenced to jail in past months for organising or taking part in unlicensed anti-government protests. …source