Persiflage & Paroxysm

The Zionist tactic was to inflict fear and cause panic among the Arab population to send a stern and unequivocal message: ‘this is Jewish land, this is a Zionist led country, Arabs may submit or flea or die.’ Since the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Zionist groups had been emboldened to carry out further bombings with devastating effect to push the British to abandon their mandate early and pull out completely.   Italian bombing of Haifa in WWII   It was a Beautiful mid-winter’s day, a Saturday afternoon, January 12, a Jewish day of rest. Michel’s brother Kamel was taking his coffee as usual with friends at Café Edmond on Kingsway Street in the heart of down town Haifa, a well-known haunt for young up and coming middle class Palestinians.   Earlier that day a Zionist terrorist cell stole a 2.5 ton RAF truck and kidnapped its Arab driver. A little after five, a man drove that truck now laden with explosives into the Northern Palestine Police District...

An arbitrary day on a calendar, May 14, happy for one random group of people, a sad remembrance for another. Both groups destined to remain at odds, enemies to the last, each convinced the other is pure evil. Sounds simple enough, has the ring of familiar truth to it. If I was being objective I'd wax lyrical about how I wish we'd all just get along, live together in peace and harmony. Well, I'm not objective and I don't want to be, I belong to one of these groups, and I would be considered a terrorist sympathizer by the other group if they cared to even know of my existence, while I see them as the devil incarnate. Of course we are talking Palestinians and Israelis, and I take great pains to avoid the word Jew here. Leonie, my late maternal grandmother, she fled Jerusalem to Ramallah with her kids before arriving safely in Lebanon   May, its a month for beautiful blooms, a month for rebirth and hope, that's why the memory of the Nakba is doubly cruel. So many never ...

Civil war is the most dramatic and destructive expression of a nation hating itself almost to death. Why would they even make a movie called Civil War? you could well ask if you cared, but we don’t, we just enjoy the violence and the imagery on screen. Sitting in our less than comfortable cinema seat, alone, in a darkened almost empty theater, with no way to lower the volume of shot and shell, we feel smugly confident, safe, protected, after all, we think to ourselves, “this could never happen to us ” and with the next thought “but look how they are tearing their country apart!” Gleefully, we lap up the gratuitous violence as we watch the one-time armed-to-the-teeth bully/policeman of the world, America, reduced to the same fate it condemned so many smaller, weaker and less wealthy nations to over the long decades of the 20 th century. Civil War is a story told through the eyes of a group of journalists, a team of two, a photog (Kirsten Dunst) and a writer (Wagner Moura), who driv...