AxisMundi Jerusalem
Inside Israel and the Palestinian Territories
‘Retarded and obsequious’
The Reuters news desk, along with many foreign journalists in Israel, received a peculiarly worded beeper message in English from the Israel Defence Forces Spokesman’s Office on Israel’s seizure of a ship carrying hundreds of tons of Iranian-supplied arms on Wednesday.
It read as follows (the strangely worded part is in bold letters):
IDF Spokesperson Update: ‘FRANCOP’, the weapons laden ship intercepted by the Israel navy, left the Ashdod naval port yesterday evening, after all of the arms and munitions had been unloaded. The ‘FRANCOP’ has continued on its way, sailing towards its original port of destination after the incidents of yesterday. Israel Navy personnel released the ship without complications and with best wishes for their continued safe journey. (This is a retarded sentence for foreign press, comes across as obsequious) the arms unloaded were transported overnight, under the supervision of sappers, to an IDF ammunition base in central Israel, where the weaponry will be properly and safely stored.
The spokesman’s office issued an apology in a subsequent beeper message. An officer in the spokesman’s office told Reuters the unusual commentary in the original message was the result of a mistake committed by a low-ranking soldier.
PHOTO: Israeli soldiers stand near munitions displayed at the port of Ashdod November 4, 2009, that according to the military was found on the Antigua-flagged Francop vessel, intercepted overnight in the Mediterranean Sea, 100 miles (160 km) from Israel. Israeli naval commandos have boarded the ship carrying Iranian-supplied rockets destined for Lebanon’s Hezbollah group and taken the vessel to an Israeli port, the government said on Wednesday. REUTERS/Amir Cohen
Because it’s there…
Despite living in a region steeped in so much history – history central to the beliefs of billions of people around the world – we at AxisMundi would like to think we have an eye on the future as well.
With that in mind – we opened a Twitter account today http://twitter.com/reuteraxismundi.
We are the first to acknowledge we’re not sure why we did this. We also admit that there’s something of the herd mentality here if the number of people we have seen announcing on Facebook “I finally broke down and opened a Twitter account” is anything to go by.
But we have already seen Twitter and other social networking platforms like Facebook or Second Life become ever more popular forums for people interested in our region to express their opinions or share information.
The Israeli Consulate in New York famously hosted a Twitter debate during Israel’s recent offensive in Gaza which gave rise to comments like this from the team of ‘tweeters’ at the consulate (pretty grammar it ain’t but isn’t that part of the point?):
repeating the link to David Schlesinger’s blog on Twittering:
Welcome to Jerusalem, centre of the world
Not so long ago, as war raged in Iraq, there was much talk about a suggestion that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians deserved less attention from the United States and other world powers than it had enjoyed over the past 60-odd years, that the intractable dispute was distracting policymakers and that the plight of the stateless Palestinians was much less central to the problems in relations between the Arab world and the West than had long been supposed. It is a debate that continues, though as journalists who have chosen to work in Jerusalem perhaps we may be forgiven for occasionally pointing out that many thinkers continue to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as central to the problems of the region and so to the world at large.
A survey last year by Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution, Does the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict Still Matter?, found that 86 percent of non-Palestinian Arabs, from Morocco to the Emirates, placed the fate of Palestinians among their top three concerns. That was an increase from 69 percent in 2005, when a larval sectarian civil war in Iraq seemed to be dragging Sunni and Shiite Muslims into a broader regional conflict. And it was still higher than the 73 percent who thought the Palestinian question mattered in 2002: “Despite the Iraq war and the increasing focus on a Sunni-Shiite divide, the Palestinian question remains a central prism through which Arabs view the world,” Telhami concluded.
At Reuters, we think it matters. We have more than 70 journalists working in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, covering the news and trends across a range of media, in text, in pictures and in video. You can view much of our work at the Reuters News and AlertNet sites linked to in the bar to the right. This blog site complements that work and, we hope, gives readers and chance to debate the topics that matter in the region and the world beyond. You will see an archive of material from recent months, including during the recent war in the Gaza Strip. With Israeli voters going to the polls this coming Tuesday and Egyptian mediators working against the clock to try and solidify the ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, now seemed like a good time to draw your attention to it and let you know that we plan to enrich the site with more material.
Why call it AxisMundi, the “axis of the world” in Latin? Well from our bureau in Jerusalem, we do sometimes feel we are at the centre of world news. It’s not just us of course. Jerusalem has at times and variously been seen as the Axis Mundi, the centre of the world (indeed sometimes “the world’s navel”), by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. All believe Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son to God on a rock at what is now Jerusalem, before God stayed his hand. That rock, seen as a point of contact between earth and heaven, is now covered by the golden dome in the picture above. It is where Jews built the Temple destroyed by Roman troops 2,000 years ago in a conflict that would end with the Jews’ exile from Jerusalem. It is where Muslims believe Mohammad rose to heaven and where the Dome of the Rock, built after Muslims captured the city from Christian rulers, now stands.
Shared religious ideas have not, of course, always brought dialogue and understanding between people of the related faiths. A mere visit by hawkish Israeli politician Ariel Sharon in 2000 to the area around the rock, known as al-Haram al-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary by Muslims and the Temple Mount by Jews, sparked violence that compounded a collapse in peace negotiations. Thousands of people have since been killed, including 1,300 during the 22-day Israeli offensive in Gaza that ended on Jan. 18. Both Jews and Arabs, as well as good number of Christians in the powerful states of the West, have a passionate interest in who controls Jerusalem and its holy sites. Thousands of years after the rock was first seen as sacred, Jerusalem remains at the centre of the world’s concerns and the conflict that surges for a couple of hundred kilometres around it, in the narrow confines of Israel and the Palestinian territories, defines the future for billions of people very much farther afield. Do please visit this site frequently to find out more and to share ideas on the news from centre of the world…
(PICTURE: The moon is seen during a total lunar eclipse from the Dome of the Rock on the compound known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, and to Jews as Temple Mount, in Jerusalem’s Old City February 21, 2008. REUTERS/Eliana Aponte)
I could Not agree with you more sidney, the three Abrahmic religions have a lot in common but the media only highlights the differences and too much emphasis is what we dont have in commmon. At least we can all agree on that humanity is above all but the reality is even children in UN building in Gaza are NOT safe from the Isralei war machine.
But it was NOT always like this when Saladin Ayubi great Muslim warrior who took over the city, he did run rivers of blood. Infact he washed the Jerusalem streets with rose petals to wash off what the crusaders did. In my eyes when the Muslims controled it all were allowed to worship in their holly places.
But yes I agree there should be body consisting members from all 3 religion who should look after Jeruslam.
from Global News Journal:
Twittering from the front-lines
Who remembers the Google Wars website that was doing the viral rounds a few years back – a mildly amusing, non-scientific snapshot of the search-driven, internet world we live in?
It lives on at www.googlebattle.com where you can enter two search terms, say ‘Lennon vs. McCartney’ or ‘Left vs. Right’, and let the internet pick a winner by the number of search hits each word gets.
As we reported here – the virtual world has become a real battleground in the ongoing Gaza conflict – with all sides deploying significant resources.
For Israel – where hasbara or PR has often been frowned upon as unnecessary pandering to international opinion that never turns in Israel’s favour anyway – the second Lebanon war underlined the need for a coherent media and PR strategy coordinated at the centre of government.
The post-mortem of the month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006 - known as the Winograd Commission - recommended a centralised approach to hasbara to avoid spokesmen from different ministries, the army or the police telling different or conflicting stories to a voracious local and international media.
Notwithstanding the fact that the head of the new National Information Directorate did not make it to a scheduled interview with our reporter on the story above – as my colleague Dan Williams reported here the strategy certainly seems to be working for domestic consumption.
Sources inside the Israeli government have said they are generally happy with the way the strategy has worked internationally as well despite growing international calls for a ceasefire and increasingly angry protests around the world.
Joe the plumber is right. Journalists are incapable of being unbiased always having some political bias. Apart from that, what soldier wants to rescue journalists who get themselves captured risking their own lives?
from Global News Journal:
Two weeks under fire in Gaza
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
Voices get loud and excited over the radio Reuters news crews use in Gaza to call in the latest information. Some people complain there are no "Western reporters" inside. But we all work for Reuters, a global agency that sets the international standard.
After two full weeks of bombardment we are all worried about our families but we work and work the story. We hope it will stop.
"They bombed a car in Beit Lahiyah," says one colleague working in northern Gaza.
"Three dead arrived in Shifa hospital," says another in Gaza's largest hospital.
"Several people were injured when Israeli planes bombed the tunnels," said a third from southern Gaza Strip near the border with Egypt.
I believe Israel is doing the right thing. Having put up with the weeks of rockets being fired at them, they continually stated that they would react if the Hamas did not stop. They are defending themselves. The fact that Hamas and others have placed their launch sites in crowded areas was on purpose. They placed them specifically by schools, making it difficult to take them out. I commend Israel for doing what is right, and doing the best they can to avoid civilian casualties while still accomplishing their goals of taking the rockets and Hamas fighters out.
what exactly was this blogger thinking? how dare you criticize israel in any way? this ship full of weapons bound for hezbullah are cupcake compared to the massive shipments of weapons that go from the U.S to israel. so this story is in reality irrelevant to anything.