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Dec
31
Carnival of Ohio Politics, End of the Line 2008 Edition
Filed Under Blogging, Carnivals, Ohio, Politics, Writing | Comments Off
Many thanks to Lisa Renee Ward of Glass City Jungle for compiling and editing the Carnival of Ohio Politics, Last Carnival of 2008! edition. It’s crazy that it’s nearly two years from when I saw Barack Obama at Tri-C just after he announced that he’d be running (2/07) and now it’s less than three weeks to inauguration. Wow.
Sigh. I ate too many brownies and there are still 90 minutes before 2009. Should I just finish off the whole damn container?
Have a great new year, everyone – and stay safe, please.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 11:30 pm December 31st, 2008 in Blogging, Carnivals, Ohio, Politics, Writing | Comments Off
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Dec
31
Well, here’s a response to anyone who thinks that all my time on the computer, in social media, connecting, talking about and going to events and talking about social media and connecting detracts from my parenting:
The youngest member of my family (age still in single digits) followed the instructions detailed in this Huff Po piece about the evil Time Warner and Viacom, trying to deny kids the right to watch Nickelodeon’s new years rockin’ eve.
Talk about bah humbug!
The trick now will be to see how many parents make the calls or just tell the kids that they made the calls…
FYI – I tried to extract info from my child to help me determine who was sponsoring the ads telling kids to tell adults to contact Time Warner. According to the Huff Po piece, it’s Viacom – they want to raise rates on Time Warner by 22-36% and TW says that that wil increase customer rates. And so it goes.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 4:49 pm December 31st, 2008 in activism, Business, Media, Youth | Comments Off
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Dec
31
Gaza Israel, II
Filed Under Gaza, Israel, Media | 13 Comments
I can’t link to everything I’ve been reading but here’s a partial list that includes some link-bundling of interest:
Editing in belatedly: Poynter Institute’s coverage, “Gaza Battles on Twitter, Blogs.”
Random Thoughts, Fourth round-up – has links to round ups 1, 2, 3, 3.5 also
Feministing has a good round-up of feminist voices on the violence and the hoped for peace
For all the folks who love to push the criticism that Americans who love Israel will never and never do speak out against its government, read Will Obama, lawmakers listen to liberal pro-Israel groups’ criticism of the operation in Gaza? Sure, sometimes it’s like being the mayor of Whoville shouting, We are here! We are here! We are here! But people like Glenn Greenwald puffing themselves up by saying no one but him denounces Israel while still supporting it don’t help matters.
Daled Amos on a conference call held yesterday and “…sponsored by America’s Voices In Israel, in conjunction with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Israeli Consulate of New York.”
Responses from the Israel Consulate to questions asked during a two-hour Twitter press conference can be found here, here, here and here.
Twitter hashtags to follow (go here to insert as a search term) include #gaza and #askisrael but also #gazawarofwords for media bias.
Twitterers I’m following include (and are all across the spectrum):
AJGaza which is Al Jazeera’s special Twitter feed for this conflict
A column by Alan Dershowitz that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor today called “Israel, Hamas and moral idiocy.”
Finally, Kim Pearson tweeted links to video from Gaza and video from the IDF and I’ve updated the links in her tweet:
The Gaza conflict as seen on YouTube. IDF video of attacks: http://www.youtube.com/user/idfnadesk vs. Al Jazeera reports: http://www.youtube.com/aljazeeraenglish
If you want to add a link to a resource you’re following, feel free to add them to the comments.
In addition to the local blogs to which I’ve already linked, here’s what a search on BlogNetNews/Ohio on “gaza” and on “israel” turns up (they are not all the same).
One trend I see as the conflict goes on longer and Westerners in particular explore its causes is the unmasking of the belief held, and hidden, by some people that Israel does not in fact have a right to exist. This trend looks like this: a focus on the horrors inflicted on the residents of Gaza, deflection of blame directed toward Hamas or the Arab League for that matter, and talk about how it is the decades through which the Palestinians have been living in Gaza and the West Bank that is the root of their problems.
And it stops there. I’ve yet to read any one of those writers actually write that they believe Israel should in fact cease to exist, cede their land to the Palestinians and be done with it.
If this is what a person believes, then why not just say it? If you’re willing to ignore the duress under which Israelis – Jews, Muslims and Christians – live under, why ignore what your arguments imply? Do you want a two-state or a one-state solution?
Then, of course, you’ll need to explain how and why it is that Israel would become the only country to have fought and won a war, but not actually have a right to that which it won. That is, no one who writes about the decades of suffering in Gaza and the West Bank go back to writing about how those areas came to exist in the first place, or the Egyptians outright refusal to invite Palestinians into their land – the Sinai now included, since 1985. Isn’t the Sinai Holy Land too? Why is that not a piece of property in which Palestinians could make a state?
Anyway, this group of people should get together with the group that says that there are no American Jews who will write about their love for Israel but their dislike and disagreement with the government and military’s actions and see what else they can come up with.
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what it is that Hamas actually wants. Or the Gazans. What do they want?
By Jill Miller Zimon at 3:14 pm December 31st, 2008 in Gaza, Israel, Media | 13 Comments
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Dec
31
[graphic] Gaza-Israel rocket range map in English & Hebrew
Filed Under Gaza, Israel, middle east, Military | 4 Comments
Many thanks again to Jameel at the Muqata (a must-follow live-blog from Israel of what is going on, including Hebrew-source only items like the attack of a tourist from Chicago in Nazareth yesterday). Here’s my post yesterday about this map.
Also, extremely poignant for me, a commenter at this post with the graphic says that Beit Shemesh, where I lived and worked, is now in range, even though it’s not marked on the map. I believe it is east of a place listed on the map as Yad Binyamin, in the last, outer-most stripe. Bet Shemesh is a bustling suburb of Jerusalem now, but when I lived there in 1984-85, it was a poor development town with extremely high unemployment and a not particularly welcoming community (I had rocks thrown at me for being there as an American volunteer). This year, during my visit, I learned that it couldn’t be more different. Our tour’s bus driver lives there and it was wonderful hearing all the stories of growth. I didn’t get to go there during the trip but did see it from the highway once or twice as well as the areas that have developed around it.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 1:34 pm December 31st, 2008 in Gaza, Israel, middle east, Military | 4 Comments
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