Robert Fisk – Beirut To Bosnia

Filmed in the 1990s, this series takes journalist Robert Fisk through Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt and Bosnia. He warns that the crimes of the West and Israel are breeding a culture of resistance, resentment and religious radicalism in the Middle East – a warning that the last decade has surely vindicated.

(3 episodes, 52 mins each. h/t Israel’s 60th Birthday)

1. The Martyr’s Smile

2. The Road To Palestine

3. To The Ends Of The Earth

The BNP Wives

BNP Wives is a documentary that demonstrates the fascists have learnt nothing from previous embarrassing encounters with the media.

(go to Google Video)

A more apt title for the programme would have been BNP Women as only one of them is married to a BNP member, and though a lot of it is old material in comedy terms (you think they’d be prepared for some of the questions and be a little more polite with members of the public!) it’s worth watching to compare what the women say with the glowing review on the BNP website, where the three are described as “fine ambassadors” for the party…

The Namibian Holocaust and the Second Reich

Decades before the rise of Hitler, the German elites’ quest for Lebensraum led them to a more aggressive colonisation of their newly-acquired African territories, in what we now call Namibia. This culminated in the systematic annihilation of two native peoples, through slave labour and concentration camps. (h/t Popper’s List)

(go to Google Video)

The African survivors’ descendants are still lobbying the German government for recognition and reparations for the genocide today, while many of the racial theories and demobbed soldiers went on to play important roles within the Freikorps and the Nazi movement. The genocide of the Armenians is now slowly gaining recognition, but the precursors to fascism in European imperialism remain a taboo subject.

Guns, Germs and Steel

Jared Diamond on how the West was won. (Thanks Dave)

1. Out of Eden

2. Conquest

3. Into the Tropics

The Iron Wall

We mark Palestine Solidarity Week with this excellent documentary (57 mins), looking at the network of settlements used by Israel to control – and to annex – vast sections of the West Bank, and the apartheid wall that consolidates them.

The maps shown in the video are a few years out of date now; continued settlement has further fragmented the West Bank and the proposed E-1 bloc threatens to definitively annexe East Jerusalem and split the West Bank in two.

For more information, see StopTheWall.org. Also, a small donation could go a long way towards replacing the Palestinian houses (Israeli Commitee Against House Demolitions) and trees (The Olive Cooperative) destroyed by the occupiers’ bulldozers.

Park With No Peace

The great Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has described the JNF as Israel’s main agency of ethnic cleansing. In UK, US, Canada and Australia on the other hand, this organization receives tax-deductible charity status. In the guise of a nature conservation agency, this quasi-governmental organization has long assisted the Israeli state in the expropriation of Palestinian land. Some of the villages ethnically cleansed by the Israeli military now have JNF parks built on top to cover the evidence. These parks usually carry the name of the country whose donors helped build them. Here is Canadian TV’s look from 1991 at the Canada Park which conceals the ruins of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages of Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba.

(click here to watch all four parts)

Occupation 101

A superb history of the Israeli conquest and occupation of Palestine.

(click here to watch the whole film)

Stealing A Nation

In this award-winning special report (56 mins), John Pilger tells the story of one of the British Empire’s most inhuman and cynical postwar crimes: the dispossession and deportation of two thousand of its citizens from their tropical island paradise, to make room for the largest American airbase outside the U.S., and the sustained conspiracy to whitewash them out of existence.

See also the UK Chagos Support Association and Wikipedia.

Uprooted – Adding Insult to Injury in Occupied Palestine

The slow destruction of Palestine is not just the work of bullets, but of bulldozers and barriers; not just against people, but against communities, homes and centuries-old trees. With a wealth of footage and interviews from within the OPT, this documentary by activist Donia Mili is a long (125 mins) but incredibly important one. (h/t to Khobbeizeh for putting it online).