Blog For Palestine

I have avoided posting for the past couple of weeks. The primary reason is that I don’t like what I’ve been writing. Recently the blog inched past the 1000 total visitors mark and that prompted me to take a look back at my previous posts. What I read did not at all impress me.

First off I am a bad writer. I’m not being hard on myself here; it’s not like I aspire to be Norman Mailer and I just realized that I haven’t reached my goal. My ambitions are limited to having the writing competence of a high school graduate that didn’t spend his four years smoking massive amounts of pot; which is I think where I am today. For example I really don’t know what the hell the semicolon is for and I just use it whereever I think it might look cute. Proper word usage and sentence construction are black magic as far as I’m concerned and writing is therefore reduced to throwing words together and hoping that I don’t break too many rules of grammar along the way. I’m a grammatical and spelling disaster and this is no way for a grown man to be. The last thing I want to do is to look like an incompetent buffoon while supposedly advocating for the Palestinian cause. I hate incompetence; especially when I’m the incompetent one. So I’ve crafted a little plan to allow me to become a writing ninja. I’ve gotten some books - On Writing Well, Grammatically Correct, and The Elements of Style. I’m going to read and apply their wisdom in the hopes that the garbage that I’m spew out into the world is going to stink a little less.

The second problem is focus, or the complete lack of it. I still, after more than two months of doing this have no idea what I’m trying to accomplish and who I’m trying to reach. One of the biggest problems that stopped me from starting the blog was trying to figure out what the goal was. Then I decided to start writing and maybe the blog will reveal its purpose to me. Well it didn’t. But maybe there is no real objective beyond just being out here on the web, consuming bandwidth and mindshare that might otherwise be occupied by voices that support the racist and cruel policies of Israel. Moving forward I’m just going to drop all the pretentious crap about doing something spectacular and simplify the mission to this - give Tineen some space to express his thoughts about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I will leave you now with the promise that my coming posts will become incrementally better.  So prepare yourselves for Tineen the next generation.

-Tineen

Jonathan Cook looks at the murder of Palestinian civilians in a bus in Israel by an Israeli soldier and the fallout. He does a great job exposing the hypocrisy of Israeli society and government as well as the racism that lies at the root of the hypocrisy. Here is a snippet of the article talking about how Zada the Israeli purportrator of the attacks was ignored by the authorities despite his extremist views.

There was no investigation of why Zada, well-known for his extremist
views, had been allowed to go AWOL for weeks from his unit without
attempts to trace him. Or how his family’s repeated warnings that he
had threatened to do something “terrible” to stop the disengagement had
been ignored by the authorities. No one questioned why, a few days
before his attack, the police had sent Zada away after he tried to hand
in his gun.
Even more disturbing, no one discussed why Zada, who openly belonged to
a racist and outlawed movement, Kach, which demands the expulsion, if
not eradication, of Arabs from the Holy Land, had been allowed to serve
in the army. How had he and thousands of other Kach supporters been
left in peace to promote their obscene ideas? Why were these Kach
activists, mostly young Israelis, demonstrating openly against the Gaza
disengagement, assaulting policemen and soldiers, when the group was
supposedly underground?

I’m not exactly sure how contorted the Israeli psyche needs to be for them to believe that all this racism, hatred, and injustice is normal and acceptable. I’m looking at a book right now which I think I’m going to pick up that discusses the Israeli psyche, it should be an interesting read.

-Tineen

The internal tension between Hamas and Fatah is growing and it seems to be taking a serious turn for the worse. Fatah has created a 2,000 man militia in the West Bank in what looks like a response to the 3,000 man militia Hamas created in Gaza. In the past I have totally avoided talking about this issue, primarily because it pains me to see this happening. It is disheartening to see the Palestinians turning on each other at such a critical time.

So why am I talking about his now? It’s because I’m worried. I’m worried that my despite my daily mantra of “A Palestinian civil war is impossible”, that it might get that bad. And even if it doesn’t get to the point of a civil war, it might still be a drawn out and damaging struggle for power. Besides my obvious concern for all the Palestinians people and what something like this will do their already miserable lives, I am also concerned about more difficult questions to answer. What are the reprecrussions of what is happening today in terms of the Palestinian struggle for justice? How do we in on the outside contribute positively as we look into a pollitical and social landscape griped by chaos?

I’ve yet to find an real analysis of what the impact of the current problems will be. I’m looking for discussions of ‘what if’ scenarios. What ff the hostilities between Palestinian factions continue, get worse, or turn into a full fledged civil war, what will that mean? What are we to do? Do we need to redirect our activism in anyway? I’m going to be hunting for some answers. My mind is already crippled by these questions, so I’m going to have to sit down and talk to some people with more brain capacity that mine. What do you guys think? Do you have any opinions to share on this topic? Drop me a comment.

After being completely unsatisfied with yesterday’s post about the electronic intifada website and realizing that I didn’t do the website justice with my little post, I’ve made a decision to fix it. I’ve come up with a standard format by which I will review ei.net and all future websites. This will enable me to provide consistent coverage for all the websites and even more importantly it will allow for comparison between websites.

• Mission and Objectives: Outline the mission and objectives of the website and how well its doing in acheiving those objectives.
• Orientation: If the site has a political position we’ll analyze it and judge it harshly, and if they happen to have a lame position then we’ll skewer them.
• Presentation: How appealing is the website visually? Do they do a good job with colors, organization and asthetics?
• Content: Is the content of high quality? Is it original? Does the content have depth? breadth?
• Usability: Is the website easy to navigate? Is there a way to search the whole site? Can you get to the most commonly used content easily? We’ll look at these questions and judge how well the site is doing in these areas.
• Technology: Using the internet is an opportunity at using new and exciting technologies to communicate and advocate. We’ll assess which technologies are being used and look at some other ones that might be useful.

This weekend I’m going to redo the review for ei.net using this format. I’m going to extend this concept to apply to reviews of books, organizations, advocacy efforts, etc… Each one gets a unique form for use. Hopefully this will make the content a lot more useful.

So why am I doing this? Well I can tell you my initial goal was to start a blog and use it to develop a cult of followers that worship me and give me all their money. Then I heard that Tom Cruise was planning to eat his baby’s placenta and I decided that I don’t want to be responsible for the creation of any more crazy people. So if it isn’t fame and wealth then what’s the goal of this blog?

Well to put it simply I want to end the injustice that the Palestinian people suffer from. This is of great importance to me and should be of great importance to anyone with a single moral fiber in their body. But I realize that I am no great activist. I’m not particularly talented at organizing protests, delivering lectures, lobbying congress, or engaging the media. Moreover, I feel that I am not nearly educated enough about the issue to be a good contributor. So I decided that I need to do three things: First, improve my skills in the realm of basic activism. Second, start learning everything out there about the issue. Third, figure out different options for activism that can better leverage my skill set.

So where does the blogging come in? Well I figured that I’m probably not alone out here and that the vast majority of people believe in justice for the Palestinians. I’m also guessing that most of them want to do something to contribute to achieving this common goal. So I thought that if I can share my learning and my experiences in a blog, and others read it, it just might make it easier for everyone to pitch in and start making a bigger difference.

On a related note I’m making a real effort to make this site as accessible as possible. I’ve just added a subscribe by email option as well as more syndication choices. If you need more info on this you’ll find it here.