Thursday, February 21, 2008

Free Speech is not Free! Support Palestine Chronicle

Urgent Appeal: Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help

Dear friends and supporters,
As you will be well aware, free speech is not free.

The alternative and independent media plays a huge role in getting out information that the corporate media consistently fails to provide.

Palestine Chronicle is one of the many independent media sources which has sought to provide consistent, up-to-date and much needed information, news and analysis of what is happening in Palestine and the Middle East. Palestine Chronicle needs your help to be able to keep doing this.

Please find below a fundraising appeal from Palestine Chronicle. Please consider subscribing to Palestine Chronicle and/or making a donation towards helping with its very important work.

in solidarity, Kim
www.livefromoccupiedpalestine.blogspot.com

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Urgent Appeal: Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help

Friends of Palestine Chronicle and alternative media everywhere:

Kindly read our urgent message below and/or visit the PalestineChronicle.com homepage to help. We urge you to take action: your support is the secret behind our survival all of these years. Please stand by us now. Read some of the testimonials below and take immediate action. Also please make this message available to your friends, fellow activists and various lists within the pro justice and peace, antiwar and progressive communities everywhere.

Visit www.PalestineChronicle.com or click/cut and paste the following link:

http://palestinechronicle.com/fund_raisers.php?id=11

The PalestineChronicle.com

“The Palestine Chronicle is proof positive that there is hope. Hope that alternative media can one day overpower the corporate mainstream. Hope that justice can prevail for all the exploited peoples of the Middle East; that we can overcome our inhumane tendencies.” – Joshua Frank, co-editor of DissidentVoice.org and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, and co-editor (with Jeffrey St Clair) of the forthcoming Red State Rebels (AK Press, March 2008).

“The Palestine Chronicle is an essential publication for keeping up with the big picture in the Middle East. Acute analysis and a principled defense of the democratic rights of the Palestinian people inform each and every issue.” – James Petras, Professor Emeritus, Binghamton University; author of many books; his latest: Rulers and Ruled: Bankers, Zionists and Militants (Clarity Press, Atlanta: 2007).

Dear readers, friends and supporters,

The Palestine Chronicle is once again calling for your urgent support to help us continue bringing free commentary on Palestine and Palestine-related issues to readers all over the world. It is only the voluntary subscriptions of readers that that have enabled us sustain this unique online newspaper since its inception in 1999. As events related to Palestine don’t cease to bring up urgent issues and debates rarely covered with any real credibility or impartiality by mainstream media sources, it is imperative that independent, intelligent viewpoints remain freely and widely available.

One of the most special features of the chronicle lies in the way it incorporates Palestine with wider issues and events, with the aim of making our struggle firmly ingrained and incorporated into other contemporary activist movements and dialogues, such as anti-globalization, anti-war and so on. Bringing together a specialist focus on Palestine and Middle East issues by leading international political intellectuals and journalists, the Palestine Chronicle remains the only such resource in existence at the moment.

Our writers and contributors are very well regarded and come from diverse backgrounds. These are but a few of the writers – academicians, journalists, human rights activists, artists, etc – that contributed articles to PalestineChronicle.com in recent months:

James Petras, Kevin Zeese, Stephen Lendman, Emily Spence, Nicola Nasser, Hasan Afif El-Hasan, Sam Hamod, Uri Avnery, Kathleen and Bill Christison, Jim Miles, Ahmed Yousef, Ron Forthofer, Kathy Kelly, Hussein Al-Alak, Aijaz Syed, William A. Cook, Sherri Muzher, Roger H. Lieberman, Joshua Frank, Sonja Karkar, Neve Gordon, John Whitbeck, Omar Barghouti, Franklin Lamb, Jamil Toubbeh, Agustin Velloso, Dan Lieberman, Randa Abu Naeem, Silvia Cattori, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Gilad Atzmon, Ben White, M. Shahid Alam, Elias Akleh, Vijay Rajiva, Kim Bullimore, J. A. Miller, Susan Abualhawa, Iqbal Jassat, Suzanne Baroud, Robert Jensen, Ramzy Baroud, Sam Bahour and many more.

To be able to provide independent commentary free from alliances to any particular ideology, individual or political party, the chronicle has never received grants or state funding. It is reliant entirely on the freely given time of volunteers and on voluntary financial subscriptions from our readers around the world. Our last fundraiser in the summer of 2007 showed us the extent to which people around the world wish to have access to – and indeed contribute to - such independent media ventures. It enabled us to continue our services to the present day, and to launch our new and much improved website with introduces many new features including exclusive photos, art, videos and audio, among others.

We need to make these appeals periodically to continue to survive and grow stronger, and we hope to do this until the issue of Palestine can no longer be ignored by any informed global citizen.

To offset the unavoidable expenses necessary to sustain this venture for the next six months, we need to raise 20,000 by the March 31, 2008. Any contribution, large or small, will help to keep us alive and growing.

Contributions --- will also receive a special gift in thanks for the solidarity.

We thank you in advance for your support and solidarity.

To make a contribution using your credit card or PayPal account, please visit www.PalestineChronicle.com homepage or click/cut and paste the following link:

http://palestinechronicle.com/fund_raisers.php?id=11

Or kindly send your contribution to:

Palestine Chronicle
PO Box 196
Mountlake Terrace
WA, 98043
USA

Monday, February 18, 2008

Live from Occupied Palestine Exhibition

@Centre for Latin American Solidarity and Studies,
North Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

The exhibition includes anti-occupation and political posters from Occupied Palestine, drawings by the children of Jenin refugee camp in the aftermath of Israel's 2002 "Defensive Shield" operation (Israel's biggest military assault on the OPT since 1967) and photographs by Kim Bullimore, who worked in Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2004 and 2007 as part of the International Women's Peace Service.

"Having been to Palestine twice in three years and spending almost a year there on my second visit, I was struck not only by the beauty of the region but also the determination of the Palestinian people. Despite overwhelming odds, the Palestinian people have remained 'sumoud' (steadfast) in the face of a brutal occupation and overwhelming odds, refusing to give up their struggle for freedom and justice. I hope with these photographs, drawings and posters that I have brought back from the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I can convey to other Australians what life is really like for the Palestinian people living under the illegal Israeli occupation".