Reporting on Conflict | Media Watch Blog

• News source:
• 17 November 2010
• Open Democracy
• By Cynthia Boaz

In the fall of 2007, by the first week of October, as Burmese students, monks and citizens still hoping for an end to decades of austerity and repression continued to take to the streets in what is now known as the ‘Saffron Revolution,’ even in the face of violence threatened by the regime, much of the international media had nevertheless appraised the uprising as a failure…

• News source:
• 17 November 2010
• Huffington Post
• Here is a thought experiment whose answer would tell us something fundamental about the United States: what if Afghans adopted a strategy of nonviolent resistance against the night raids? Could they be stopped?
• By Robert Naiman, Policy Director, Just Foreign Policy

Many Afghans see …[night raids (NYT)] as a flagrant, even humiliating symbol of American power, especially when women and children are rousted in the middle of the night. And protests have increased this year as the tempo has increased.

It is a striking symptom of the moral depravity of the US war in Afghanistan that the policy of night raids, which press reports have suggested is one of the most hated aspects of the U.S. military occupation among the Afghan population, has been the subject of almost no public debate in the United States. Newspaper columnists aren’t inveighing against the night raids. Members of Congress aren’t demanding that the night raids stop.

The only thing that has occasioned any public debate about them in the U.S. at all is that President Karzai denounced them in an interview with the Washington Post ahead of the NATO summit…

• News source:
• 16 November 2010
• Globe and Mail
• Book review
• By HARVEY SCHACHTER

Conversations for Change
By Shawn Kent Hayashi
McGraw-Hill, 235 pages, $19.95

How many conversations did you hold in the workplace yesterday? How many this week?

Work is a conversation – more accurately, a series of conversations – in which we engage with others in pursuit of common goals. Shawn Kent Hayashi, a communications consultant in Philadelphia, says we actually hold 12 forms of conversations and we must be reasonably proficient at each. In some cases they are sequential (when we meet someone new, for example, we begin with a conversation for connection, and then often move on to a conversation for creating new possibilities), so we must be alert to how the 12 forms interconnect.

“When one or some of these conversations are missing from our dialogues with others, we will not create the success we are looking for. Missing conversations trip us and others up,” she writes in Conversations for Change….

• News source:
• Jewish in St. Louis

The vague lingo that we hear regarding political struggles in the Middle East keeps us disconnected from what is actually happening on the ground. Terms and phrases such as “one-state/two-state,” “settlement freeze,” “separation barrier,” “terrorism,” “Peace Process,” etc, that we frequently hear in the media are not enough to describe the policies, the zoning laws, and the oppression today in the region.

The truth is that the complexities of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict — for which Jerusalem often serves as the high-profile, high-stakes nucleus — are being addressed by hundreds of individuals and organizations on both sides of the Green Line. Unfortunately, mainstream media rarely cover civil society and grassroots-level organizing that’s taking place across the Palestinian/Israeli divide as a means of creating innovative solutions to the urgent issues that policymakers create or simply ignore.