in media - Search Results

By: Adrian Blomfield / 15th November 2011 / / Members of the Kadima, the principal opposition party, waved black flags to mourn the "death of democracy" after Israel's parliament, the Knesset, passed two bills that will tilt the balance of the country's Supreme Court sharply to the right. / / The legislators involved in the protest had their flags confiscated before being expelled from the Knesset's chamber at the orders of the speaker. / / The passage of the bills has prompted outrage among many Israeli politicians who see them as an assault on the independence..

  / To paraphrase a piece of Greek mythology, it was the government that stopped a dozen or so ships. / / Greece dispatched coast guard sailors and successfully stalled Flotilla 2.0 from leaving port, an action that all but ensures that there will be no round two for the Free Gaza organizers who intended to break the Israeli blockade on the Hamas-ruled fiefdom again, a strip roughly the size of Detroit. Last year, Turkey was the host of the first aid flotilla, which after an encounter with the Israeli navy in international waters left nine activists onboard killed, including a 19-year-old..

Israel's Jewish identity / The state we're in / Mar 17th 2011, 9:07 by D.L. | JERUSALEM /   /   / PERHAPS because herring was a respected staple in the Eastern European Jewish shtetl, there is no literal translation in Yiddish of the English phrase, "red herring". Instead, Yiddish-speaking Jews use the expression "climbing up the smooth walls" to accuse someone of coming up with superfluous and irrelevant arguments in order to cloud the issue. /   / That expression, which has made its way into Hebrew, comes to mind whenever you hear—as you..

Ehud Barak has left a political corpse. But he wasn't the one who killed Israel's Labor party. Who did?

  / In Israel, the Noble vs. The Ugly / / Nicholas Kristoff / / / / Israel goes out of its way to display its ugliest side to the world by tearing down Palestinian homes or allowing rapacious settlers to steal Palestinian land. / / / Yet there’s also another Israel as well, one that I mightily admire. This is the democracy that tolerates a far greater range of opinions than America. It’s a citadel of civil society. And, crazily, it’s the place where some of the most courageous and effective voices on behalf of oppressed Palestinians belong to Israeli rabbis..

/ / / / / / Normal / 0 / 21 / / / / / /   / The Daily Beast / Kai Bird / Published March 22nd 2010 / / As a young boy in the autumn of 1956, I was forced to leave our house in Sheikh Jarrah—the neighborhood that today has become the latest battleground over the building of settlements in East Jerusalem. My father was then an American diplomat stationed in East Jerusalem. But when Israel, Britain, and France launched a surprise invasion of Egypt on October 29, 1956, my mother, sister, and I were evacuated to Beirut, leaving father behind to tend to the business of the..

/ The media in modern democracy is the channel between the state and the individual, and therefore has immense power. Common to all descriptions of the relationship between the media and political institutions is an implicit understanding that a deep, evolving, and uneasy relationship exists between the two. The real questions then, are the degree of influence each exerts, on whom and to what extent; as well as the present and future allocation of power in the relationship. I believe that the two institutions are so deeply intertwined that the relationship can best be described as symbiotic,..

The New York Times again reveals its long-held prejudice that Arabs are the world's perennially helpless victims.

Author: Gideon Levy / Date of Pub: 29/11/2009 / / Those types have always been seen on big-city streets, talking to themselves, asking and answering, shouting, speaking in a low voice, deliberating and pontificating. As children, we were afraid of them. They were "crazy." That's exactly what Israeli public discourse is like. We are talking to ourselves, inventing bogus axioms and sticking with them as if they were decreed from on high, convinced that the whole world accepts them. But we are only talking to ourselves. No one else accepts them. The Israeli collective is not only..

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, filmmaker, novelist, and essayist offers a controversial look at anti-Semitism in modern life, examining the potentially destructive ways in which Jews themselves look for meaning and truth anywhere--in politics, other religions, and in mindless entertainment--but knee jerk never in Judaism itself. Mamet goes on to analyze what happens when Jews abandon loyalty to their religion and tradition in order, as he sees it, to find acceptance in Israel-bashing liberal society. Unlike more familiar defenses of Israel that are full of facts, Mamet locks onto what..