I started off in community media being a coffee runner for Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now! I’d never taken a journalism class, I begged my way into a job with Goodman and learned journalism as a trade, like you’d learn to be a carpenter or plumber rather than a course of academic study or viewing it as a career. I don’t view journalism as my job, it’s my life. It’s a way of life I believe in independent media to the core of my being. When I’m at an event and a young person comes up to me and asks how do I get involved, I’ll always stop and encourage them to get involved because we need fiercely independent people serving as reporters around the world. Part of my bigger mission in life is to built independent media. I’m not interested in going to a bigger publication because it will bring fame or a bigger pay cheque. I stick with an independent publisher when I write a book, I work with independent media outlets because I believe in building them up. I support independent media that has truth and justice at its core. We’re all trying to figure out how to sustain independent media with the economic situation in the world with the consolidation of corporate media outlets, infotainment media culture, pictures of cute cats, we need to create a culture where citizen journalists, the ones you see on Twitter doing a fantastic job, often better than corporate journalists, how do you take the energy of citizen journalist movement and combine it with the necessary components of good journalism; fact-checking, peer review, editing, old school muckraking techniques, document diving.

How do we merge the energy of new, creative media folks with the proven old school tactics? To fund it, unless you want to sell out to click bait with cute cat pics, we have to look at alternative ways to funding our media. My advice to young journalists, if you don’t have obligations or have to look after a sick parent, is to find a job that doesn’t drain your brain, like picking apples or working the night shift somewhere, and spend 6 or 8 months saving up money, with the goal of trying to go somewhere for 3 months that you’re interested in reporting on, whether it’s Palestine, Egypt or somewhere in Africa. And even if  you don’t have an employer and nobody is sending you there, act like you do have an assignment and develop a discipline. Even if all you’re doing is starting a newsletter to send back to your friends or your community, you treat yourself like you are working for a real media outlet and you get that experience. The best journalists I’ve met in the world almost never have degrees in journalism. They’re united in one thing, a passion for the truth. We need to mainstream that kind of program, where we develop apprenticeships for young people. Journalism isn’t rocket science. It should be a working class course of work where you are getting your hands dirty and not the [New York Times’] Thomas Friedmans of the world about what taxi drivers he’s met. If I hear about one more taxi driver or concierge he’s met I want to shave off his mustache.

I was able meet Jeremy at his talk in Los Angeles a few weeks back while he was on his Dirty Wars book tour. He signed my book. Cool guy.

How do you make a terrorist? You just label him a terrorist. You move your attention away from the things that actually matter in your life, and you focus it on The Terror. You participate in becoming terrorized. You allow a small sliver of violent people to warp your entire society’s perspective on reality. And you eventually arrive at a place where it seems perfectly reasonable to forget about children being shot at a Mother’s Day party, because our leaders and our media and our minds are still occupied with Muslims with pressure cookers.

There will be more terrorism, because terrorism works. The American imagination can’t seem to get enough of it.

I’ve been dealing with Yemen long enough to know that anything drone related will eventually prove to be a lightening rod for attention, so I guess its not surprising. But looking at some of the discussion of this small excerpt of the report, the question remains: what, if anything, does page 32 of the latest YPC report tell us about the perceptions of US drone strikes in Yemen.

On a superficial level, the result could be used to suggest that Yemenis don’t really care about the strikes; only .8% listed drones as the greatest threat to their personal security. It may be worth noting that, ironically, that is a greater percentage than those who answered the same question with “Al Qaeda;” still, it isn’t difficult to imagine how some would seize upon such an interpretation to legitimize certain policies or cast aspersions on certain assertions…

In the end Yemeni perceptions of drone strikes are a complicated issue that can’t be covered in a single question—especially a question in a report that’s devoted to a completely different topic.  The YPC has put out a useful report on an important subject. The temptation to use said report to attempt to derive answers to a question it wasn’t asking is probably one that’s best avoided.

The B’Tselem based its findings on Operation Pillar of Defense on statements issued by the Israel Defense Forces, the Shin Bet security service, and on an internal investigation.

The IDF killed 167 Palestinians during the operation, at least 87 of them non-combatants, according to the data presented in the B’Tselem report.

Thirty-one of these non-combatant civilians, or 35 percent, were minors. Of these minors, 20 were under the age of 12, according to B’Tselem…

The report explicitly states that Hamas and other militant organizations in the Gaza Strip have violated this prohibition by, inter alia, firing directly at Israeli civilians and locales, firing from within civilian Palestinian neighborhoods whilst endangering the inhabitants, and hiding inside civilian buildings.

The B’Tselem report indicates that the IDF also operated in violation of international law at times, in at least some of the cases in which “non-participant” Palestinians were killed.

Reflexive response by the IDF:

Military Advocate for Operational Matters Lt. Col. Ronen Hirsch told B’Tselem in response to its inquiry that the IDF prosecutor’s office sees no criminal act or substantiated suspicion of a violation of the rules of war in four of the incidents in question, and therefore closed the cases.

People forget that it was, in part, an idealistic sense of mission that helped draw us into [the Vietnam War]—the same well of idealism that helped us fight World War II and that motivated our interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s…

Nixon and Kissinger encouraged a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, during which thousands of innocent people were killed. Their cold moral logic was that a right-wing regime of any kind would ultimately be better for Chile and for Latin America than a leftist regime [sic] of any kind—and would also be in the best interests of the United States. They were right…

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Shadi Hamdi asks a good question: Why Is There a ‘Red Line’ on Chemical Weapons but Not on 70,000 Deaths? Here is he heart of the argument:

Because halting the slaughter — by targeting the Syrian military assets doing the actual killing — is something that the United States and its allies could do, if they wanted to (former senior U.S. official Fred Hof outlines how here). It might not be enough to bring down the regime, at least not anytime soon, but it would be enough to protect and save at least some of the Syrian civilians who find themselves in the regime’s crosshairs.

In the short term, I think that is likely. But in addition to this, I think there needs to be a high degree of certainty that taking sides in the civil war and bombing the more powerful Assad regime’s military assets will, in the long-term, improve the humanitarian situation for Syrians. And if we can’t be reasonably sure, the default should always be to not get involved in war.

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Steve Coll write up a good review of Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars and NYT’s Mark Mazetti’s The Way of the Knife.

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Foreign Policy has a post about a recent study (which I mentioned a while back) which examines the relationship between American and Chinese arms sales and the democratic nature of the countries purchasing their weapons.

Soysa looked at U.S. and Chinese arms transfers to Africa from 1989 to 2006, using data collected by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. They found no statistical correlation between China and the types of regimes it supplied with weapons, while U.S. arms shipments were slightly negatively correlated with democracy. In plain English, China actually turned out to be less likely to sell weapons to dictators than America was.

Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists. Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government.

Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of…

Among the most extreme groups is the notorious Al Nusra Front, the Qaeda-aligned force declared a terrorist organization by the United States, but other groups share aspects of its Islamist ideology in varying degrees…

The Islamist character of the opposition reflects the main constituency of the rebellion, which has been led since its start by Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, mostly in conservative, marginalized areas. The descent into brutal civil war has hardened sectarian differences, and the failure of more mainstream rebel groups to secure regular arms supplies has allowed Islamists to fill the void and win supporters…

When the armed rebellion began, defectors from the government’s staunchly secular army formed the vanguard. The rebel movement has since grown to include fighters with a wide range of views, including Qaeda-aligned jihadis seeking to establish an Islamic emirate, political Islamists inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood and others who want an Islamic-influenced legal code like that found in many Arab states.

“My sense is that there are no seculars,” said Elizabeth O’Bagy, of the Institute for the Study of War, who has made numerous trips to Syria in recent months to interview rebel commanders.

Among the six people testifying was a young activist/writer from Yemen, Farea Al-Muslimi.

Incredibly, just days before he was set to testify, the US launched a drone attack in his own village.

Here is his powerful testimony:

Both the US and Israeli government’s have refused to acknowledge the first holocaust of the century, the Armenian Holocaust. Today is its 98th anniversary. Current Israeli President Shimon Peres once said, “Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred,” that these were “allegations” and it was “not a genocide.”

As Jesus once said, “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” – Matthew 7:3

Incidentally (or not so incidentally), while I think it is crucial for the US, Israel, and Turkey to recognize the genocide for moral reasons and for progress to be made in the region, I don’t think Armenians should be lobbying for other governments to change their policy. The primary responsibility for a government’s actions and policies rests on its citizens, not another’s. Thus, Americans (including those of Armenian or Turkish descent) should call on their government to recognize the genocide, and Turkish and Israeli citizens should focus on their governments’ culpability in perpetuating this injustice.

Armenians in the Republic of Armenia, however, will not be able to affect the policies of the US or Turkey. It’s entirely appropriate and necessary to mark the anniversary and remember the unimaginable crime done against their people, but any protests that focus on other governments are an exercise in futility, and can often have negative consequences. They stir up jingoistic emotions and create an irrational hatred for the people currently residing in Turkey, whom they’ve never met and who might not actually personally deny the genocide (I’ve met a few of these Turks). Moreover, it becomes a useful tool with which the Armenian oligarchy can divert attention away from its own crime and corruption, which is not insignificant.

Unfortunately, because of the (understandably) strong emotional reaction felt in Armenians against the Turkish government’s unwillingness to recognize the genocide; because of the many, many years of having this event ingrained into the deepest part of Armenian identity through the media, intelligentsia, government institutions, literature and the cultural elite, I fear that the Armenian people would rather maintain the closed border and frozen relations with Turkey, despite the fact that is only harms them materially.

They would rather suffer economically, with all the hardship this puts on the population, than have their national pride hurt.

What’s really troubling is that the people who perhaps protested the most vocally against the Armenian president who tried to reestablish relations with Turkey were the those in the diaspora – those who suffer least from the effects of having a closed border with Turkey. They are in fact the group that is at the helm of  the international lobbying campaign. Protesting your own government’s policy toward the genocide is one thing, but demanding policy changes from the president of country in which you are not even a citizen is another.

Of course, for Turkey, keeping the border closed doesn’t bother them too much. That’s why Armenia really has no leverage on the issue. The status quo only harms Armenians.

The U.S. State Department in its latest human rights report elevated its criticism of Israel’s treatment of African refugees.

The report for 2012, issued April 19, said “the treatment of refugees, asylum seekers, and irregular migrants” was a “most significant” human rights problem. That was added to the three areas singled out by the department in the 2011 report: terrorist attacks against civilians, which the reports blame principally on Hamas forces in the Gaza Strip; Israel’s discrimination against its Arab citizens; and discrimination against women…

Regarding discrimination against women, the report noted that “sexual harassment is illegal, but remains widespread” as well as discrimination against women in religious courts, singling out the problem of “agunot,” Jewish women unable to obtain a religious divorce.

Arab citizens faced institutional and societal discrimination,” the report said, as it had the year previous, noting physical attacks on individual Arabs and discrimination in funding schools and allocating land and resources.

Note that this report is coming from the one country that has unconditionally supported Israel for decades.