Peace, Propaganda & The Promised Land

A friend sent me this documentary, whose opinion of the American news media coverage of the whole situation is critical. He said, "People are people; and people killing people to this egregious degree on this sort of conspicuous scale should bother us immensely, regardless of our perspectives on the matter." And I couldn't agree more... The more I read about the history and current situation in the middle east, the more I feel ashamed of, embarrassed by, and enraged at my country, its leaders, and its foreign policies. It is austounding to me that the number one opposition to peace in this conflict is indeed America herself. America funds, condones, advises, and aggressively defends the continued aggression at the expence of peace and the lives and liberties of Israel and her neighbors. For what? If America is trying to obtain military advantage in the Middle East and the control of Oil-related politics, it seems the solution is not to appeal to zionists back home, but to ally with the arab world (and yes that means the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian world too). Notwithstanding, the situation now is of humanitarian interest, not political. An interesting perspective by Richard Cohen from the Washington Post in his Op-ed "Hunder Down with History" The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself. About the documentary: Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This pivotal documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites--oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others--work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported. Through the voices of scholars, media critics, peace activists, religious figures, and Middle East experts, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land carefully analyzes and explains how--through the use of language, framing and context--the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media, and Israeli colonization of the occupied terrorities appears to be a defensive move rather than an offensive one. The documentary also explores the ways that U.S. journalists, for reasons ranging from intimidation to a lack of thorough investigation, have become complicit in carrying out Israel's PR campaign. At its core, the documentary raises questions about the ethics and role of journalism, and the relationship between media and politics.