CNI study-tour blogging at FPFD

Just a reminder to all readers to check out my/our new blog, “Fair Policy, Fair Discussion”, which now has five or six posts that are quick takes on what we’ve been doing on our CNI study tour (“political pilgrimage”) around the Middle/Near East.
We’ve now had all the meetings and formal activities of the tour, and it’s been tremendous. We have a group of ten people, self included; and we’ve spent the past 16 days traveling to: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Palestine again (Gaza), and back to Egypt.
I’ve never been a tour director before. This one’s been a lot of hard work but also really rewarding.
Expect a lot more blogging about the tour, over there at FPFD, over the next couple of weeks. Thus far, I’ve had no opportunity to give justice to the immense richness of the experiences and personal encounters that we had.
We had with us a great young videographer, Dominic Musacchio, who’s taken many tens of hours of what looks like great footage. He’ll be making cuts of that over the coming days that we’ll post, or at least link to, on FPFD. We also have still photos that we’ll get up.
One of the focuses of the trip has been, of course, Gaza. Another has been Jerusalem, and the ever-explosive situation there. Another, that emerged over time and was sparked in particular by Dominic’s enthusiasm and the help of our last-minute Jerusalem volunteer Kate Gould, has been getting the views of young people. Dominic has what I think is some great footage from talking with and hanging out with young people in Jordan, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.
So anyway, head on over there as soon as you can…

9 thoughts on “CNI study-tour blogging at FPFD”

  1. Helena, keep writing on your distinguished blog ” Just worldnews”. It became a part of your militancy, please don’t neglect it.
    your faithful reader.
    Hafid

  2. You may or may not like this comparison, but your trip co-leading CNI reminds me of something the odious Dick Morris says about Hillary Clinton becoming SoS “It’s good she’s got a proper job to do”
    More power to you HC.

  3. Like Hafid, I regret the downgrading of JWN in favour of this kind of focus-group political tourism. I’ve expressed this point of view before on JWN as Helena may remember, so I won’t labour the point in relation to JWN in particular.
    All I would like to say is that the section of my “Favourites” that I called “Peace” and which included Helena, As’ad Abu Khalil, Tom Engelhardt, Justin Raimondo and others, has not grown at all for years now, and JWN was the last one that I used to open daily as a matter of course. That has now stopped.
    So the flowering of blog journalism that took place after the US bombing of Afghanistan and the current invasion of Iraq began, has died down.
    So be it. For the record, my favourite was the completely unmoderated phase of iraqwar.ru, in the days of Ramzaj, and for some time after.
    The colonial policy is also exhausted, dead on its feet, waiting to die. “Anti-war” sentiments are never tough enough to stop war, anyway. That takes revolutionaries, and actual revolution.
    “If you don’t hit it, it won’t fall”.

  4. “the work to build a new, free and united Iraq will begin. A peaceful, prosperous Iraq which will be run by and for the Iraqi people.”

    “we were generally unprepared for the increasing levels of violence that were directed at us. I do find it somewhat amusing that we give troops deploying to Northern Ireland a mandatory two-month training package,
    whereas for Telic ours consisted of a CD-Rom.”

  6. CONFESSIONS OF AN AIPAC VETERAN
    new dine and old dine similar to new coke and old coke. more sugar to fool; still rots teeth or, in his case, deceive to steal from and slaughter palestinians, slaughter iraqis, iranians, syrians, lebanese, others in the way of israel.

  7. “So the flowering of blog journalism that took place after the US bombing of Afghanistan and the current invasion of Iraq began, has died down.”
    Yes, this is what happens when the reactionaries have lost the battle and history moves on.
    Besides, the reactionary pseudo leftists have short attention spans.

  8. Helena,
    I am a long time reader of your blog and just want to make my first post by saying to keep soldiering on. You bring up issues ignored by the mainstream media and it’s people like you who will gradually get the real story out to the rest.
    Awesome job.

  9. (“political pilgrimage”
    So what next?
    What things you can change inside US policy makers?
    Are you confident you have all the weapons with your (“political pilgrimage” team to changes the US policy in ME?
    Let Waite 60 years more and then will talk again…
    No worries there will be no change but do enjoy your (“political pilgrimage”…

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