An inside look at the Palestinian West Bank

On February 17, 2009, Pamela Olson gave a riveting talk on the details of daily life in the Palestinian West Bank. She gave her talk at a recent session of "TechTalks," a series of talks sponsored by Google. Olson graduated from Stanford in 2002 with a major in physics. She lived in Ramallah, West Bank, for a year and a half beginning in the summer of 2004 and worked as a journalist for the Palestine Monitor. What is startling about this video are the many gorgeous scenes from the West Bank accompanying Olson's introduction to day-to-day life in the West Bank, something which Americans rarely learn of from the American media. The happiness and charm of the West Bank is covered in the first half of Olson's talk. But there is more to the West Bank, of course. Behind all of the charm:

looms the conflict, the occupation, and violence. Since September 2000, more than 5,500 Palestinians and 1,100 Israelis have been killed. A series of walls, fences, roadblocks, checkpoints, army bases, and settlements keep the Palestinians in the West Bank under an almost constant state of siege and strangle the economy of many towns and villages, including Bethlehem. Gaza has been turned into an open-air prison whose desperate inmates can only get vital supplies through smuggling tunnels -- which also transport weapons that Palestinian militants use to target Israeli civilians.

[Her story is] a fascinating world of beauty and terror, of hospitality and homicide, of the absurd and the sublime constantly together -- a microcosmic view of a little-understood human story with global implications.

Olson talks in detail about the numerous checkpoints, the wall and the Israeli settlements. She plainly explains that the occupation, the checkpoints, the wall and the settlements are indisputably illegal pursuant to international law. The wall now runs 70 km., cutting Palestinians off from each other. The wall is a "huge scar on the landscape." It keeps Palestinians from each other, keeps them from farming, keeps them from their own hospitals and keeps their children from getting to school. Even Palestinian politicians are prevented from having free access to their own people. Entire neighborhoods are being destroyed, to make way for more illegal Israeli settlements. The Palestinians are essentially being herded into an ever-smaller prison. Olson backs up her statements with extensive photography. Olson's vivid photos and her calm commentary makes the violence by Palestinians much more understandable. Watching this talk gave me more information than watching dozens of the simplistic stories told by the American Media. Perhaps this unrelenting stream of simplistic media stories is a major cause of America's unflinching support of Israeli's harsh policies toward the Palestinians. Sadly, it is a common Palestinian saying that "The silence of the West is worse than the bullets of the Israelis." Here is Olson's talk, which lasts 80 minutes: For more information on Pamela Olson, you can visit www.pamolson.org

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Powerful images from the White House

Sometimes, when I see videos of President Barack Obama, I think of how important it might be for Americans to see photos and videos of highly-accomplished African-American role models. For decades, television has too often portrayed African-Americans as dysfunctional, lazy or violent criminals. The onslaught of these abnormal images has been terrible and relentless. I assume that these media caricatures have damaged and even destroyed some lives by encouraging young African-Americans to think that they are worth less because their physical appearance is different than those TV characters who are more often portrayed to be capable or admirable. There was a time in my life when I didn't believe that media images could be so powerful. It's not that my attitude completely changed on one particular day, but I do recall one especially memorable day. In 2001, my wife (Anne) and I traveled to China to adopt our second daughter (our first daughter is also Chinese). While we were staying in a hotel in Changsha, Hunan Province, I decided to carry my new 9-month old daughter to a nearby department store to get some baby supplies. At that department store, I was surprised to see so many Caucasian mannequins. I took a photo of one of these displays. Back at the hotel, I asked two English-speaking Chinese tour guides why there were so many Caucasian mannequins, rather than Chinese mannequins. They both told me, without hesitation, that Chinese women think that Anglo women are more beautiful. I was incredulous when I heard this. But after it sunk in, it became a sad idea, indeed. I had just adopted my second daughter from China. She was a startlingly beautiful little baby. Back in Changsha, hoped that it would never occur to my daughter that she was not "pretty" because she was not Anglo.

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It’s supposedly illegal to take photographs in public spaces

I've previously read accounts of photographers being harassed. This smart guy turned on his camera's video function and recorded the outrageous conversation with a security guard. She was pleasant, but instructed him about a "policy" that is utterly bizarre (because this policy, to my knowledge, doesn't really exist in the law). Keep in mind that, according to this security guard, it's illegal for a tourist to snap any photos of the historic buildings in Washington D.C. without special clearance. I'd like to reserve this post as a place for anyone else to post comments if they or someone they know has been warned to not take photos in public spaces, prevented from taking such photos or had their camera(s) confiscated.

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Defense Department to review policy banning photos of flag-draped coffins

From DemocracyNow:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered a review of the Pentagon policy banning media from taking pictures of flag-draped coffins of military dead. The military has said the policy is meant to protect the privacy of the families of the dead soldiers, but critics say barring photographers is a political maneuver meant to sanitize the war.

Related post: What would happen if we freely published the images from Iraq for one week?

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You too can be part of the Web 2.0 (if you’re willing to invest time and money on technology).

I was born in 1956, when ordinary people had far fewer opportunities to communicate their ideas to mass markets. For most of my adult life, there were only a few choices to get the word out. You could send out mass mailings or you could hit the telephones, dialing number after number. You could hang paper flyers on telephone poles and fences. You could knock on doors and talk to the folks house by house. Or you could stand on a soapbox and shout your ideas. These traditional “techniques” are still available and they are still sometimes quite effective, at least to those with hordes of volunteers at their service. The Internet, however, has opened up many additional possibilities for spreading your ideas far and wide. With that great power, however, comes serious responsibility to spend the time to obtain a working knowledge of the underlying technology. How many bloggers are out there now? At least 100 million. Being a proficient user of a word processor is only the first step. Putting your written work on your own website also requires you to understand at least the basic tools of blogging software. With those two steps, you might already be on a big slippery slope. Many people are perfectly happy blogging on a free site such as LiveJournal MSN's Spaces or Google's Blogger, or one of the many sites with low fees as long as your traffic is modest (e.g., Typepad). Choosing to place your blog with one of these simple on-line sites keeps things really easy. You needn't ever load any software or maintain the "backend" of your blog. In 2006, I suspected that I would want to take advantage of many modern day multi-media tools. That's why I chose to base my blog on WordPress. Going with WordPress allowed me to take advantage of numerous constantly evolving add-ons. I chose it because it kept my site flexible for using multimedia technology that, in return for its flexibility, can require a substantial investment in time. If you’re like me, you will thus develop a love/hate relationship to the flexible do-it-yourself blogging software and the many multi-media tools that allow you to feed your blog in sophisticated ways. You’ll become enthralled with the power these things give you to package your ideas. But you might also become frustrated when you see how much time it takes to learn to make proficient use of these tools. Here's an ironic twist: Since 2006, the free online sites now allow you to easily incorporate many kinds of images, sounds and video on blogs. Therefore, if you aren't exceedingly greedy for technology or traffic, you can now have it all. Yet you'll still need to decide how much multi-media to incorporate into your blog, even if it's free and simple. Therefore, much of this post applies to all of us who have decided to jump into the world of blogging.

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