Political Media Review

Big Noise Films continues its tradition of blistering journalism in volume six of its Dispatches series, the latest of which features some of the best reporting of the DVD releases.

The film begins with a dark and serious tone of each episode that sets the stage for a thrilling account of political power. The narrator begins each episode reciting “Instead of giving us dreams, politicians promise to keep us safe from nightmares”.

Several media outlets offer an array of facts and stories about the on-going current events between the Israelis & Palestinians but what is usually ignored is the true nature of this conflict.

Haymarket Books’ 2009 release, The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Dahr Jamail, is the most important nonfiction book published this year. In Will, Jamail captures the lives of our men and women in uniform, in their own uncensored words, as they relate the true situation of the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Victoria Fontan offers a fascinating perspective on the Iraq War and War on Terror, arguing that humiliation plays a key role in both. She starts with the premise that humiliation was instrumental in the shift from liberation to counterinsurgency in Iraq and, more generally, serves as the central rallying cry for fundamentalist terrorism across the globe.

Andy Worthington’s hard-hitting new book shines a stark light into the black hole that is Guantanamo Bay prison, describing the process and consequences of a US intelligence project which is at the same time both ruthless and cackhanded; all the while failing to achieve its intentions.

The War of 33 tells the story of the 33-day Israeli attack on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 through a series of blog letters written by Beirut journalist Hanady Salman, an editor with the Beirut paper As-Safir. Hanady knew the worst images of that war would not be shown by the Western media or television. So she decided to dispatch regular email updates to a group of friends and colleagues, relaying her personal accounts and many very graphic photographs from around Lebanon.