Halifax Chronicle Herald shoots the messengers, convicts the Cuban Five all over again

By TONY SEED

Dr. Aleida Guevara March in Halifax

HALIFAX (October 25, 2003) – AN INFORMATION BLOCKADE on Cuba parallels the American economic, political and cultural blockade. Despite pretensions about its “independent line” on Cuba, the monopoly media in Canada also kowtows to the U.S. dictate and is caught in its own veneer of “objective reporting.” The media’s response to the recent national tour of Dr. Aleida Guevara March and Irma González speaking about the situation of the Cuban Five is a case in point.

Dr. Guevara March – referring to media disinformation on the five men who have been imprisoned by US authorities for exposing terrorism against Cuba organized from U.S. soil  – said that the most important aim for their tour was for the government and people of Canada to acquire correct information about the case.

The fishermen of Palestine: AI report indicts Israel

By TONY SEED

Part Two of a two-part series. For Part One please visit here.

HALIFAX (10 October 2003) – ON 8 SEPTEMBER 2003 the Anglo-American human rights organization Amnesty International (AI), not known for its criticism of Israel over the past thirty years, issued a detailed report entitled “Israel and the Occupied Territories Surviving under siege: The impact of movement restrictions on the right to work.” The 69-page report provides extensive documentation of the deepening of the severe economic and social crisis affecting every sphere of life. Unemployment has soared to over 50 per cent. More than half of the Palestinian population is now living below the poverty line. (1)

Israel’s DFO and the fishermen of Palestine: confiscating the forbidden sea

• Fishermen fired at by Israeli Navy and detained

• Boats, nets and equipment vandalized or seized without cause

• False accusations of “fishing in a restricted area”

• Livelihoods of hundreds ruined

• Essential food denied to the people

• A unique but familiar story to the fishers of Canada and the Third World who live under siege

By TONY SEED

Introducing excerpts from an Amnesty International Report. Part One of a two-part series. For Part Two please visit here.

HALIFAX (10 October 2003) – THIS IS A STORY about what is happening to the unseen Palestinian fishermen of the Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean Sea. Fishermen whose families have been fishing the azure waters of the Mediterranean for millenia – for sardines, tuna and Sultan Ibrahim fish. Fishermen who along with mastering the perils of the sea must now face cold-blooded, land-based monsters mutated by imperialism. Fishermen who face brutal restrictions, seizures and closures, strangling an already devastated sector of the traumatised economy of Occupied Palestine.