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Via Electronic Intifada : Gazonto
"In his compelling new video Gazonto, Canadian filmmaker John Greyson reimagines Israel’s massive bombardment of the Israeli-occupied and besieged Gaza Strip as if it were an attack on his home city Toronto.
Greyson imagines specific attacks on Palestinian homes, schools, mosques, hospitals and other institutions that Israel perpetrated since 7 July as if they had occurred on real-life Toronto sites including a well-known café, CBC TV, the University of Toronto and the Scarborough Injury Rehab Centre.
The film uses the device of a simulated video game to show how the horrifying effects of Israeli violence against Palestinians are rendered distant or invisible while the violence itself is celebrated.".
17 comments:
How long are you going to keep this up? - this one-note campaign you've turned your previously interesting blog into.
Boring you, am I, Anon?
The ruling Conservative Party's caucus in my country regularly refers to Israel, by which they actually mean Likud, as "a light unto the world" - even as the Israeli government’s former national security advisor is currently proposing cutting off all food, water, electricity, and fuel to the Gazans living under their military occupation.
However our media has now moved on to other concerns, so to answer your question - yeah, I'm probably keeping this up till I have no readers left at all.
Well that was horrifying. And I was already horrified about what's going on in Gaza.
I read an article tonight that Turkey is sending a power plant ship to Gaza.
Also, I doubt that you will lose any readers, most especially not the ones with names.
As a nameless scumbag, I can say that I will check in with Alison's blog at daily intervals seen as how it's one of the best going in Canada. Especially with SixthEstate and Pogge gone there's only a handful worth reading these days, Creekside obviously being one of the most relevant. If anyone has a problem with that they can piss off and go turn on sun news to moisten up the potato thats growing in their brain.
Interesting article in The New Yorker about George W. Bush and Obama's struggles to implement any foreign policy or get voted into office any person not supported by AIPAC.
"The vote in the House came late on the night of Friday, August 1st—the last possible moment before the summer recess. The earlier resolutions that AIPAC had sponsored during the war had passed unanimously, with no record of individual votes, but on this vote the roll was called. (AIPAC sometimes asks congressional leaders to call the roll when a decisive victory seems likely.) “I think AIPAC thought this vote would be one hundred per cent,” Jim Moran, a Democrat from Virginia, said. It was close: out of four hundred and thirty-five members, only eight voted no."
Perhaps this also explains Harper's bizarre and distinctly unCanadian stance on Israel.
Personally, I like ALL your notes and especially this ONE.
To hell with Anon1's lurking-in-the-shadows-of-the-Internet comment. Perhaps a night or two spent by him/her in Gaza might change his/her mind . . . .
I'm with you Alison. Keep them coming!
Having missed gaming culture by many years, without regret, I can only guess if this is a well-devised condemnation of the destruction of habitable Gaza at the hands of Israel. In my view, it might have been better if the poignant ethnic targeting in Gaza had been paralleled in some analogous way in the film's Toronto target, which, unlike Gaza, is ethnically enclaved to a large degree.
Israel may be a military proxy for many other national strategic interests, and Gaza may be as much for Hamas, yet the starkest difference between gameboy's TO and The Strip is that war casualties suffered in Gaza are exclusively Palestinian. That fact could only be transliterated to Hog Town if an enclaved ethnic minority were targeted and attacked---and, in keeping with the super-tight geographical scale of this Levantine tragedy, attacked by some other, more powerful ethnic enclave in "bloody" York.
And then there's the children, who can only be condemned from a racist viewpoint. To parody by way of gaming, the purview of children, is to risk portraying children as both legitimate culprit and victim, which is not what we see in Gaza. Maybe I'm dating myself, but I find the device a bit trite at that level.
Still, we don't see Hamas missiles issuing from other Palestinian enclaves within Israeli-occupied territory like they do from The Strip; I guess Gazans are Gazans for all that. A fair critique would nevertheless have to wonder if collateral casualties suffering by the ostensible targeting of Hamas are presumed complicit: does the gaming device do justice to this central question? Otherwise I get the indiscrimination, in a Ka-Powwww!! kind of way.
Despite what others may say, I think you're posts on this sorry state---in which our own country is complicit---are well worth the read and much appreciated. Thanx for this and keep up the good work.
You bet Alison. It is going to take as much and long as it takes to expose that flaming fascist dictator Harper, for what he really is, a flaming monster.
Until Harper? Never would Canada refuse to treat war torn countries children, for their horrible war wounds. The dead Palestinian children are, merely collateral damage.
Harper and Israel are no better than Hitler. Do the people of Israel think, the little Jewish children with tattoos on their arms were, merely collateral damage too?
Six members of my family served in WW2. Quite frankly Harper and Israel are not worth, our young Canadian boys dying for.
There is a bus load of Veterans, motoring across Canada. To protest the terrible manner in which Harper is treating our old WW2 Vets and our recent Veterans of to-day. Please, everyone get out there and support them.
Thanks, all, for your support but now I'm feeling a bit like Tinkerbell who required a whole lotta clapping just to stay in the game ;-)
Obviously there are far better, more informed places to read about this conflict than here; I'm just trying to put the usually missing Canadian component back into it.
ie. Dear Canadian pro-media : Would it kill you to report on Canada having armed both sides of many Mideast conflicts? And the chemical weapons sold to 28 countries John Baird keeps bleating about getting into the wrong hands?
Scotty : I think Greyson's use of a video game device intends rather broader strokes than you are looking for here ...
1) bringing it home to Torontonians/Canadians in, as you say, a KaPowww!! kind of way because we are complicit as players/gamers in this conflict and because, as he writes in the vid, "It's getting kind of repetitive ... the b&w makes it seem so far away ... your mind starts to drift ... you're thinking about work tomorrow ... you're feeling kinda bored" and
2)showing how tiny a geographic area has sustained this amount of damage, regardless of ages or ethnics.
"A fair critique would nevertheless have to wonder if collateral casualties suffering by the ostensible targeting of Hamas are presumed complicit"
Could you clarify? I know various Israeli polis have recently said all Gazans are complicit in their slaughter because they voted for Hamas but what did you mean?
Anon@6:15 : John Baird made two pilgrimages to AIPAC last year.
Video here in February and again in March.
Would be surprising if he didn't really. More sunlight needed on this.
Anon@3:05 : If we're going to blame all of Israel for Netanyahu and co, we'd also have to blame all of Canada for the Harper government. Please please take care in conflating Jews, Israel, Likud. I know the various pro-Israel lobbies including members of our government do it on the one hand and the anti-Semites do it on the other, but those of us who are not warmongering racist bigots absolutely must not do it no matter how much we may get used to hearing it elsewhere. If I slip up and do it, I expect you to call me on it; if you do it, I'm deleting your comment. Deal? I'm trying to make a space to condemn as strongly as possible a slaughter our political parties have all but condoned and proactively abetted for years now, including prior to Harper, but without inciting any further hatred. Help me with this.
Re Your busload of veterans. Do you have a link for that I can post?
Meanwhile ... great takedown of Fantino here.
Anon@4:19 : Really really miss my betters, POGGE and Sixth Estate. And why are their blogs now offline altogether? Why is all that research now at worst gone forever or at best hidden? And was it their choice? I wish they or someone had explained.
About bloggers missing in action, at least the Gods and Monster site is still up but I miss postings by 900 ft Jesus. Emily of Pushed to the Left was missing for a long stretch due to illness but she is back at it and her excellent site never did go dark.
As for Creekside, always a daily stop. I've always been a Greyson fan and this short film of his is on target (pun wholly intended).
That website at the end didn't seem to work for me, it just takes me to this page I need to make an account and sign into. Anyone know about it?
BY : Always happy to see you here too.
Bloggers MIA. Blogging can make you kind of nuts - I guess depending on how resilient you are. There's also that thing either Toni Morrison or Alice Walker (I forget which) talked about -- that moral outrage is in itself an unhealthy self-perpetuating addiction.
Anon@5:26 It didn't work for me either. I'm guessing Greyson is Albino Squirrel mentioned at the end of vid because he had a guy in an albino squirrel costume narrate one of his earlier films. Probably you have to join Vimeo to get access to his endtheblockade site.
Alison: in reference to the obscure point I was trying to make: whatever---it appears to have worked!
(and yes, you identified it better).
Alison, Pogge died on July 6.
Yes, Pogge and Skdadl both.
No words.
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