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Viva Palestina Convoy Hits the Road Image: Therespectpaper the Viva Palestinia Convoy Has Captured February 14

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Viva Palestina Convoy Hits the Road Image: Therespectpaper the Viva Palestinia Convoy Has Captured February 14 Jerry Hicks putting workers’ interests Salma Yaqoob at the top of the agenda. argues we need to step George Galloway up the boycott on Israel. explains the purpose of the convoy to Gaza. Equality Peace Justice TheRespectPaper THE MONTHLY NEWSPAPER OF RESPECT ISSUE 10 FEBRUARY 2009 80p Gaza A lifeline from Britain to Viva Palestina convoy hits the road Image: TheRespectPaper Image: The campaign, involving Respect members and thousands more, February 14. They will travel has lifted o , and changed the face of solidarity through Europe and across campaigning on Palestine. The Viva Palestinia convoy has captured North Africa and will enter Gaza from Egypt. For more details on the convoy, the marches, the imagination of thousands of people The convoy has two purposes. First to contribute the student occupations and campaigning across who are determined to ght for justice to the aid e ort that the BBC among others is trying the country, see our coverage on pages 6,7,8 & 9. for the people of Palestine. All their to block. centre pages support, both material and political has Secondly, it is to smash the propaganda blockade Route of the convoy centre pages B BC Biased Broadcasting Instead the BBC obediently allowed Gaza Humanitarian disaster faming land, wells, water sources and I s r a e l What was their On November 4 Israel broke the Israelis the last word in almost The carnage wreaked by 22 days of greenhouses. objective? the truce in a raid that killed six The BBC decision in January not every radio and TV report, using the relentless Israeli assault on Gaza is Of the 1360 dead, Palestinian human Palestinians. to broadcast the appeal from the only short clips and quotes from the massive. rights groups calculate 80 percent of Media reports have retailed the The onslaught on Gaza had been route of the convoy Disasters Emergency Committee for news footage being produced by 15 per cent of all buildings in the Gaza the fatalities were civilians, half of them Israeli propaganda argument that the meticulously planned for many months humanitarian aid for Gaza triggered a independent journalists inside Gaza. Strip were destroyed or collapsed. children. devastation of Gaza was in response to before this. Learning from their huge public revulsion. They allowed themselves to be drawn Among these were Gaza’s only flour The massive number of civilians the breaking of the ceasefire by Hamas. previous embarrassment in Lebanon, a BBC bosses were more concerned into interviewing Israeli military officers, mill, its only cement works, and over killed, maimed, injured and The Guardian leader on December new ‘National Information Directorate’ been overwhelming. against Gaza. It is to raise the banner from London at incurring the anger of the Israeli and filming frightened Israelis fleeing 200 other factories. traumatised is no accident. Israelis 31 for example argued that Israel was was set up, to control media coverage WESTMINSTER propaganda machine than they are Palestinian rockets to create the Among the other targets destroyed used white phosphorous incendiary “targeting Hamas” to ensure “the and keep journalists out of Gaza, out about antagonising large numbers of impression of a war of two sides rather by Israeli bombs and shells were weapons, which cause deep burns: ending of rocket fire”. of sight of the slaughter. They only got OSTEND their listeners and license fee payers. hospitals, schools, mosques, and RAMSGATE than the massacre that was taking place. their use against civilian populations The reality is that Israel has the Israeli view in systematic briefings The blatant bias in favour of Israel The horror of the Gaza slaughter United Nations buildings, including is a war crime. They used “flachette deliberately targeted civilians to and press releases. It worked. had been a feature of BBC coverage has proved a turning point in public schools, designated civilian refuges, bombs” which spray small metal darts service its long-term purpose of The attack on Gaza was part of an throughout the assault on Gaza: while consciousness of the Israelis and their and the main UN headquarters in Gaza. to penetrate flesh and bone. repressing and dispossessing the offensive, aggressive policy designed Jon Snow and Channel 4 compiled a brutality towards the Palestinian Ambulances were attacked, along Israeli planes have targeted Palestinians, and steal their houses, to humiliate Hamas and further whole programme on ‘Hidden Gaza’, population: but it has also helped with aid volunteers and rescue workers: entire apartment blocks: tanks have water, and land. subjugate the Palestinian people. to Egypt of freedom for the Palestinian people. We GUERNICA no BBC journalist challenged or sought open people’s eyes on the bias and power plants, sewage works, roads and systematically fired shells at residential It was claimed there was a “war” Israel wanted to reinforce the more Passing through San Sebastian, to expose Israel’s brazen manipulation cowardice of the BBC’s reporting. Far bridges were also pulverised, leaving areas. On just one day, January 14, in Gaza – two military forces are pliable Palestinian leadership of People have donated what they can – money, the convoy will enter the Basque of the media, the exclusion of from upholding its reputation for a third of Gaza’s population with no Israeli soldiers killed 70 unarmed contending with each other. The former President Mahmoud Abbas, country, and pass within a few miles journalists from Gaza, or the fraudulent impartiality, the BBC has confirmed water for weeks on end, and huge civilians, including 18 children. There statistics show the massive imbalance based in the West Bank. His term of of Guernica which stood firm in arguments and assumptions itself to be part of the problem in the numbers without power. are instances of them bulldozing between the two “sides”. office ended on January 9, but he the 1930s against Franco’s fascist underlying the Israeli case. fight for Palestinian rights. The Israelis are also aiming to homes with civilians inside, and Israeli propaganda, handed out in has unilaterally extended it. Plans for army, and in April 1937 became the starve the Gaza population. Between shooting those waving white flags. press packs to docile reporters from the reconstruction of Gaza now flow first city to be targeted for aerial 35-60 per cent of Gaza’s once Whole villages and areas have been the BBC and elsewhere claim that through the unelected, corrupt regime bombing – by Germany’s Luftwaffe’s thriving agricultural industry has destroyed by tanks, planes and since 2001 when the rockets were of Abbas. Condor Legion. The attack left 1,654 been destroyed through attacks on bulldozers. first fired, 8,600 of them have hit To do this, Israel has deliberately want to create the permanent political pressure people dead and 889 wounded – “Southern Israel,” and 28 Israelis had targeted civilians and inflicted massive been killed. They do not point out damage to the infrastructure. This and was famously depicted in one of BORDEAUX materials and time. Warehouses have been lled Picasso’s most celebrated works that over the same time frame Israeli follows after the systematic 18-month strikes have slaughtered a staggering blockade on Gaza imposed by Israel 5,000 Palestinians: that figure has now after Hamas took control in June climbed to 6,360. 2007. The flow of goods in and out They ignore the fact that the towns of the Strip was reduced to a mere Israel and America welcome Peace and villages in “Southern Israel" – the trickle. The blockade was maintained to the Gaza ceasefire talks. only ones in range of these feeble, throughout the so-called “ceasefire”, EL JAZAIR (ALGIERS) home-made rockets – are all former bringing soaring food prices and crisis needed in Britain to shake the establishment from The Algerian capital is in the Palestinian towns and villages now conditions even before the fresh Israeli minds of many linked with Gillo occupied by Zionist settlers. Much of attacks. with supplies that are given with love to the Pontecorvo’s 1966 movie The Battle Gaza’s population is made up of refugees In other words the whole Israeli plan of Algiers. Shot in black and white, it driven out by waves of Israeli violence. relies upon attacking the people of is based on events during the 1954- Far from triggering the brutal air Palestine, in repeated and systematic 1962 Algerian War against French strikes, in fact the rocket fire from war crimes carried out with the rule. The film appears to show the Gaza had been reduced by 97 per cent connivance and material support of French forces “winning” the battle, during last year’s truce, while most of the US and British governments, which but makes it clear that winning this the rockets that were fired came from have stepped up arms supplies in the battle is very different from winning groups opposed to Hamas. last 12 months. its pro-Israel bias. MADRID the war against those demanding independence. people of Gaza as an act of practical solidarity. TRIPOLI Libya’s largest city, and capital, was founded by the Phoenicians around 700 BC and has had a ALEXANDRIA varied history since. In 1969 Colonel Gaddafi staged a bloodless coup. Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was born in Alexandria in 1918 and led Egypt RAFAH He followed Egyptian nationalist A Border Crossing divides Egyptian leader Nasser's pan-Arabism, and to independence in the 1950s. He is remembered for his ambitious and Palestinian-controlled Rafah, supported the PLO. In 1986 US built by the Israeli and Egyptian Respect MP George Galloway, who addressed President Reagan bombed Libya, attempt to modernize Egypt, maintain its independence from the governments in 1982.
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