War 2.0

2012-02-08T01:25:00.001-08:00

A F O R U M F O R G L O B A L W A T E R I S S U E S WATER FRONT
No. 4, December 2011
china
Water needs curtail coal
gasification for fuel
WORLD WATER WeeK
Puts food to thought
south africa
The Durban experience
Special issue on the
water and
ener gy ne xus
In this issue of
the Stockholm
Water Front we
explore one important
aspect
intertwining
with food and
water in a broader nexus: energy. The socalled
“nexus” integrating those three aspects
of human and planetary development and
well-being has become an integral part of
the global water agenda in the discussions
leading to the upcoming UN Conference on
Sustainable Development (Rio+20). The idea
behind the nexus is to find ways to manage
the growing food, energy and water supply
and demand with a holistic approach that
takes into consideration the need to build
environmentally sustainable economies. This
comes especially as we approach the limits
of Earth’s non-renewable resources, and
our increasing vulnerability due to climate
change. This issue of the Stockholm Water
Front revisits the rationale behind the next
World Water Week’s theme, and goes on
to reflect on the 2011 Water-Energy-Food
Security Nexus summit in Bonn in preparation
for Rio+20. Furthermore, it reports
on important developments in the world’s
largest coal-driven economy, China – which
produces more than 45 percent of the total
global coal production. Is the Chinese government
missing out on an opportunity to
save water as it turns to produce coal-toliquid
fuel? Essentially, other aspects of the
nexus are tapped into as this issue tackles the
“Durban Experience” where innovative ways
to produce hydro-energy are developed and
applied in the South African municipality.
A book review by the UN Secretary General
Special Advisor on Water, Margaret Catley-
Carlson, looks into why it is important to
learn about “virtual water” as she reviews
a book of the same title by the highly-esteemed
Stockholm Water Prize Laureate,
Prof. Tony Allan of King’s College, London.
As I extend to all readers SIWI’s warmest
seasonal greetings, I hope you find this issue
of the Stockholm Water Front relevant and
interesting,
Anders Berntell
Executive Director
Stockholm International Water Institute
A F O R U M F O R G L O B A L W A T E R I S S U E S WATER FRONT
No. 4, December 2011
CHINA
Water needs curtail coal
gasifi cation for fuel
WORLD WATER WEEK
Puts food to thought
SOUTH AFRICA
e Durban experience
Special issue on the
WATER AND
ENERGY NEXUS
new s & note s
Latest news from SIWI
WORLD
WATER WeeK
Puts food to thought
water and
ener gy ne xus
Will Growth in Energy Demand
Compete for Scarce Water Resources?
So uth africa
The Durban Experience
china
Water Needs Curtail Coal
Gasification for Fuel
book re view
Virtual Water: Tackling the
Threat to Our Planet’s Most
Precious Resource
water front
Refle ction s
Issue 4, DECEMBER 2011
Photo: Thomas Henrikson
INDEX
Stockholm Water Front
– A Forum for Global
Water Issues
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Publisher
Anders Berntell
Executive Director, SIWI
Editorial Board
Prof. Malin Falkenmark
Senior Scientific Advisor
Prof. Jan Lundqvist
Senior Scientific Advisor
Jens Berggren
Director, World Water Week
Anton Earle
Director, Capacity Building
Editorial Staff
Britt-Louise Andersson
Editor
Rami Abdelrahman
Managing Editor
Josh Weinberg
Writer
Elin Ingblom
Design
Cover Photo
Circle of Blue
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Towards a nexus of innovative ideas
3
news & notes
Water integrity training for
Sub-Saharan Africa to be launched
In many developing countries, unethical practices can drain budgets
within the water sector of up to 30 percent annually. The Global
Corruption Report on Water (2008) estimates that insufficient transparency
and accountability systems increase the cost of meeting
the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on water supply and
sanitation with close to USD 50 billion. In the long run it reduces
economic growth, discourages investments, violates human rights,
increases health risks and deprives poor people of their livelihoods
and access to water.
In response to the need and demand from Sub-Saharan Africa,
the UNDP Water Governance Facility at SIWI (WGF) together with
its partners WaterNet, Cap-Net and WIN recieved USD 2.4 million
from the Swedish Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) for a
period of three years to implement a Regional Capacity Building
Programme promoting and developing water integrity.
The programme will be implemented in East Africa, West
Africa and South African Development Community (SADC) region.
Through partnership with ECOWAS, Volta Basin Authority,
EAC-Lake Victoria Basin Commission
and SADC, the training targets
different water sector stakeholders at
regional, basin and national level with
roles and responsibilities in regulation,
controlling, planning, policy
development and decision-making. It
also targets stakeholders less directly
involved in water management, but
with a key role in strengthening or
demanding accountability, such as
media, water users associations and
advocacy organisations.
The three year programme includes, for example, assessing and
mitigating corruption risks and application of available tools on
how to improve accountability and transparency. WGF is working
on translating the Water Integrity Training Manual into different
languages, and will launch soon in Spanish and Arabic. Meanwhile,
the manual will continue to be available in French and English for
free download and use.
. For more information, please contact James Leten at
james.leten@siwi.org
SIWI joined the
Arab Countries
Water Utilities Association
(ACWUA)
and GIZ and the
Arab Water Council
in organising a twoday
capacity building
workshop at the
Arab Water Forum,
to help mid-career
professionals from
governmental and
non-governmental
entities to deepen
their understanding
of the factors to
consider when developing
water governance
frameworks
at the basin level
in the MENA region. The workshop
was held back to back with the forum
which was organised by the council in
Cairo, Egypt, November 22-25, 2011.
The workshop included presentations
by participants engaged in work at the
basin level whether in planning,
management, regulations or arbitration,
from across the MENA region, and
included presentations by SIWI experts
in the areas of communication and
capacity development. One result that
was drawn from the workshop is that
the region has the potential to become
a centre of excellence for groundwater
related governance, given that professional
and institutional capacities are
developed to meet that aspiration.
. For more information, please
visit www.arabwatercouncil.org
SIWI helps build capacities at the Arab Water Forum
Participants at the Water Governance at the Basin Level workshop.
Photo: ACWUA
4
world water week
2012 World Water Week puts
thought to food
More than one in three people today either suffer from malnourishment,
or face health risks from overeating and unbalanced diets. At the 2012 World
Water Week, thought-leaders and policy makers will gather to innovate
policy and practical solutions to ensure that every person can eat well and
drink clean water in the struggling global economy.
By Josh Weinberg
Communications Officer, SIWI
Farmers working on a rice farm in northern Nigeria.
5
With over 70 percent of water used in agriculture,
food production is as always entirely
dependent on water. Feeding the world’s
population of seven billion will have a larger
impact on how and where water flows
throughout societies
and human activities.
Within the next
two decades, demand
for water will
exceed today’s available
supply by 40
percent, and much
of this demand will come from the growing
food and fuel markets.
Global food production today is more
than enough to feed the world’s population.
Yet, a billion are undernourished, around
two billion are overeating, and at the same
time, up to half of all food grown is either
lost or wasted.
Hunger and thirst are direct results of
poverty and inequitable access to resources;
they are not symptoms of scarcity. There
is significantly more food produced
per capita today than there was
30 years ago. But there is also
more hunger, more inequity, more waste
and more overeating than before. While
there will be a growing need to produce
more food to feed the hungry one seventh
of the global population and the additional
two billion people that will be born in the
coming decades, a primary task is to ensure
that the food produced is available and affordable
to all people in all regions.
The enormous opportunities for managing
food and water resources more efficiently,
both in the field and throughout
the supply chain, which will be explored
during the 2012 World Water Week in
Stockholm. Recent research suggests it
is possible to sustainably double agricultural
production and improve ecosystem
health with available water and land resources.
Together with attainable reductions
of losses in the supply chain, water
wiser food trade policies, and smarter
benefit sharing arrangements, this will
allow more people to enjoy good lives
while leaving more water for ecosystems
and human activities.
Beyond the thematic focus of water and
food security, the week’s dynamic and diverse
programme will cover water challenges
as they relate to climate change, economy,
social impacts and human rights, sanitation
and health, urbanisation,
ecosystems, conflict resolution,
transboundary waters,
resource efficiency and governance
issues.
The 2012 World Water
Week will be a platform to
transform visions of possibility
into inspired policies, partnerships,
practice and global initiatives to solve the
challenges faced. We hope you join this
year to offer your thoughts for a food and
water wise world.
Call for abstracts
Abstracts for workshop and poster
presentations for the 2012 World
Water Week are welcome in the
following topics:
• Best use of blue water resources
for food security
• Rainfed production under growing
rain variability: closing the yield gap
• Safeguarding global food security
and life supporting ecosystems
• Health and food security
• Securing water and food in an
urbanising world
• Towards a green economy –
the water-food-energy nexus
• Trade and food security
• Governance for water and food
security.
Full instructions are available at
www.worldwaterweek.org/
workshops
Event proposals
we lcome
Proposals are welcome from
organisations who wish to host
a seminar or a side event at the
2012 World Water Week.
Full instructions are available at
www.worldwaterweek.org/
convenors
. The deadline for event
proposals and abstract
submissions is February 15, 2012.
“There are enormous opportunities for
managing food and water resources
more efficiently”
Photo: Jide Adeniyi-Jones/USAID
6
Estimates suggest that about 1.6 billion
people lack access to modern electricity
for cooking, lighting and heating. In the
area of water, we are familiar with similar
gaps related to access to water supply and
sanitation. Over the past 20 years there has
been substantial progress in many aspects of
human development and more people today
are healthier, live longer, are better educated
and have better access to goods and services
than ever before. In spite of this progress in
human development there is a persistent
“bottom billion” of poor people that are
water, energy and also food insecure. To
meet the current service gaps for the bottom
billion and future demands from growing
populations due to economic transformation
of societies, global energy consumption
is projected to grow by close to 49 percent
by 2035. Much of this growth in energy
demand will be in non-OECD countries.
Most future energy demand scenarios
have a high dependence on fossil fuels, especially
coal, in spite of an increasing share of
renewable energy in the energy mix. Today
only about 13 percent of the primary energy
demand is met by renewable energy which
in this context refers to hydro, bio, wind,
solar, and ocean power. Hydropower stands
for 86 percent of the global renewable electric
power production with significant potential
especially in developing and emerging
economies. Future regional, national
and global policy and market signals, in part
as a response to climate change, will fluctuate
renewable energy’s share in the mix.
In determining the policies towards decarbonising
the energy supply chain, where
fossil fuels will still be a key component,
a central question will be if this will have
an impact on an already constrained water
resources? To explore this issue we need to
better understand the role of water in energy
production.
Water is required to produce energy
for fuel production and power generation,
and energy is needed to move and clean
water through distribution and treatment
systems. This link is usually referred to as
the “water and energy nexus”. As freshwater
water and energy nexus
Will Growth in Energy
Demand Compete for Scarce
Water Resources?
With the world’s eyes closing in on sustainable development as we approach Rio+20, a conference was arranged by the
German Federal Government in Bonn in November to discuss solutions for a green economy that linked water, energy and
food security. Jakob Granit,provided SIWI’s input to the background paper for this meeting entitled “Understanding the Nexus”.
In this article, Granit reflects on some of the ideas that were brought up at the conference.
Photo: Federal Government of Germany
Jakob Granit addresses the Bonn conference 2011: The Water, Energy and Food Security Nexus
By Jakob Granit
Director Knowledge Services, SIWI
7
resources become scarce at the local, national
and regional levels, water will have to be
transferred, pumped long distances, or be
produced through alternative means, such
as energy intensive desalination processes
and recycling to meet different demands.
In this nexus the information on water use
in the energy production chain at the local
and regional scale is incomplete. In most fuel
extraction, refinement and power production
processes, water use is not accounted for
systematically and results vary depending
on the methodology used.
The large number of technologies in the
energy production chain provides a wide
range of water withdrawal and consumption
patterns. In general, the production
of biofuels is substantially more water intensive
than liquid fossil fuels. However,
non-conventional fossil fuels such as tar
sands, shale gas and hydraulic fracturing
are more water intensive than conventional
fossil fuels. In the thermal electric power
production process most of the water is
used for cooling purposes and abstraction
and consumption values vary depending on
cooling technique used. Hydropower is the
most efficient method of large-scale electric
power generation and has a key role to meet
peak demand in power systems thereby allowing
for the deployment of other renewable
energy technologies. Depending on
the location of reservoirs, hydropower can
consume very small or large amounts of
water in terms of evaporation. Water consumption
also varies for different types of
solar power technology, while wind power
consumes negligible amounts of water.
It should be noted that in the thermal
power production process the actual water
consumption is less than the water withdrawn.
In general about five percent of the
water used in power production for cooling
is lost through evaporation and the rest is
returned to the recipient. However, water
returned has normally higher temperature
and altered quality which can have negative
environmental consequences. Even if
the actual consumption of water in power
production is fairly low, water supply needs
to be ensured to avoid disruptions to power
production processes.
To further explore the question wether
water can constrain energy production we
need to improve our understanding of the
role of water in our economies. In the water
sector it is usually claimed that about 70
percent of the annual freshwater withdrawals
is used for agriculture, 20 percent for
industry and 10 percent for municipalities.
Depending on the geography of a region and
the structure of the economy there are large
variations in water withdrawals and use for
different sectors. In the European Union
and the United States of America about 40
percent of the water withdrawn is used for
energy production with growing demands
from industry and for domestic use and
decreasing numbers for agriculture. In the
Middle East and Central Asia large amounts
of water (80-90 percent) are used for agriculture
with considerable local variations.
These regional examples demonstrate
that water use patterns are different and they
are changing because of socio-economic
transformation and climate change. It therefore
comes as no surprise that the political
and economic context behind the allocation
of scarce water resources for different purposes,
such as vital ecosystem functions, is
beginning to shape public policy in various
settings. In a context of growing demand
for water the challenge of governing and
managing water resources across political,
social, cultural and economic barriers raises
several dilemmas of how to prioritise different
users. In addition, water does not
conform to borders and there are over 260
river basins globally that are shared by two
or more countries, not to mention boundaries
within countries. Some of the most contested
river systems in the world are found
in dry regions such as the Middle East and
Africa where international cooperation is
weak and civil strife and tensions prevent
cooperation on shared assets.
To respond to the question if water can
be a constraint to energy production there
is a need to increase the understanding of
the relationship between water availability
and water for productive uses identifying
challenges and opportunities. The analysis
needs to be undertaken at the appropriate
geographic scale taking production, supply
chains and consumption patterns into
account. Such a systematic and holistic
“nexus” approach was explored in the Bonn
2011 Conference: The Water, Energy, and
Food Security Nexus that took place 16-18
November, 2011 as a step in the preparation
for the Rio+20 conference in June 2012.
The conference concluded that a framework
to better understand the linkages between
water use in society, energy and food production
and ecosystem services, should be
promoted to avoid future supply bottlenecks
and to provide all people with access to these
services. If the nexus is treated holistically
and linkages across boundaries are established,
single sector policies that undermine
the delivery of services in multiple sectors
would be avoided and welfare would be improved.
Such analysis needs to be undertaken
by the appropriate regional institutions,
their member states and at the country level.
Innovation in integrated analytical tools
and governance at the national and regional
levels will be necessary.
About the author
Mr Jakob Granit is a Programme Director
at the Stockholm International Water Institute
(SIWI). He manages SIWI’s applied research
and advisory services work streams.
He currently leads SIWI’s Regional Water
Intelligence Team that provides clients
with specific advice and intelligence on
the political economy of water in regional
development. He has specific thematic responsibility
for SIWI’s engagement in transboundary
waters, water flows from source
to sea and the water and energy nexus.
Further reading
Considering the energy, water, and food
nexus: towards an integrated modelling
approach. Energy Policy. Bazilian M., Rogner
H., Howells M., Hermann S., Arent D., Gielen
D., Steduto. P., Mueller A., Komor P., Tol, R.S.J.
and Yumkella K.K. (2011): doi: 10.1016/
jenpoll.2011.09.039.
Constraints and Opportunities in Meeting
the Increasing Use of Water for Energy Production.
In Proceedings of the ESF Strategic
Workshop on Accounting for water scarcity
and pollution in the rules of International
trade. Amsterdam 25-26 November 2010.
Granit. J. and Lindström. A. (2011). (Ed.
Hoeckstra, A.Y., Aldaya, M.M. and Avril. B.)
Value of Water Research Report Series No.
54. (UNESCO-IHE).
Understanding the Nexus. Background
paper for the Bonn 2011 Conference: The
Water, Energy, Food Security Nexus. Hoff,
J. (2011). Stockholm Environment Institute,
Stockholm.
World Development Report 2011. Conflict,
Security, and Development, Overview. World
Bank (2011). The International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development/The World
Bank.
Water Security – The Water-Food-Energy-Climate
Nexus. World Economic Forum (2011):
World Economic Forum Water Initiative.
Island Press. Washington/Covelo/London.
Nomination deadline
February 15, 2012
The Stockholm Industry Water Award recognises
the business sector’s contribution to sustainable
water management by minimising water consumption
and environmental impact.
Visit www.siwi.org/siwa
and submit your
nomination today!
Recognising Excellence in the Busin ess Communi ty
The Stockholm Industry Water Award was established in 2000 in collaboration with the Royal Swedish Academy
of Engineering Sciences and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
Nominations for the Stockholm Industry Water Award can be submitted
at www.siwi.org/siwa
PREVI OUS WINNERS
2011 | Nestlé, Switzerland
www.nestle.com
2010 | Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority
(PPWSA), Cambodia
www.adb.org/water/actions/cam
PPWSA.asp
2009 | Trojan Technologies, Canada
www.trojanuv.com
2008 | The Orange County Water District
and the Orange County Sanitation
District, USA
www.ocsd.com
2007 | PUB, Singapore
www.pub.gov.sg
2006 | The Sydney Water Corporation
of Sydney, Australia
www.sydneywater.com.au
2005 | The Procter & Gamble Company,
USA
www.pg.com/en_US
2004 | Staple Fibre Division of Grasim
Industries Ltd, India
www.yarnsandfibers.com
2003 | Zenon Environmental Inc., Canada
www.ecomagination.com/
technologies/
zeeweed-membrane-technology/
2002 | Kaldnes Miljøteknologi AS, Norway
www.kaldnes.com
2001 | The General Motors de Mexico Ramos
Arizpe Complex, Mexico
www.gm.com
2000 | Northumbrian Water Limited, UK
www.nwl.co.uk
9
south africa
South Africa has high levels of poverty and
unemployment is estimated to be between
25 percent and 35 percent depending on how
it is measured. Durban reflects this reality
with approximately 40 percent of the city's
population earning less than USD 2 per
person per day.
These circumstances present opportunities
to develop the links that exist between
water, sewage, public health, energy and
agriculture.
In 2000 Durban had a population of
three million people. One million had access
to high quality water and sanitation services,
one million had access to poorly maintained
and often intermittent services and one million
did not have access to municipal water
and sanitation services at all. The latter relied
on streams and wells for water and pit toilets
for sanitation. These people were located in
dense urban shack settlements and remote
rural areas. The challenge was to provide
services to those with unacceptable levels of
access in ways that maximised job creation
and provided opportunities to improve the
quality of life of the poor.
Sanitation and agriculture
Since 2000 more than one million people
living in Durban have received access to
a piped water supply and urine diverting
toilets have been constructed at approximately
80,000 homes. Usage of these toilets
presently stands at 80 percent. At the eThekwini
Water and Waste Water Department,
we realised that there was a need for an
incentive to increase acceptance and usage
of these toilets – most unserved people
prefer flush toilets but can't afford them.
Being able to recover the nutrients from
urine and process toilet sludge into safe
fertiliser from more than 100,000 families
would create many work opportunities and
support urban agriculture and improve the
food security of poor families.
eThekwini has successfully commissioned
the pelletiser and the first plant is
able to process 12 tonnes of sludge a day
into pathogen free fertiliser pellets. Pelleting
is a process to create small particles by
compressing the original material. The Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation is funding
research to develop reactors to recover plant
nutrients from urine and design a logistics
platform that will make it possible to collect
urine and process it. Collection trials
have started and that step alone increased
collected urine production per family by
80 percent. The real potential now exists
to sustainably collect urine as well as the
sludge in both Urine Division (UD) toilets
The Durban Experience
By Neil Macloud
Head of the eThekwini Water and
Waste Water Department
Photo: eThekwini Water and Wastewater
South Africa is a water scarce country, ranked as the 30th driest country in the world
in terms of water availability. Surface water resources are almost fully exploited.
Electricity generation in the country is largely dependent on coal fired power
stations and the demand for electricity exceeds the available supply at times.
10
south africa
and Ventilated Improved Pit (VIP) toilets to
process them into usable plant food.
In shack settlements, UD and VIP type
toilets are not practical because of the density
of development. eThekwini used a private
market research company to find out what
relationship poor people living in dense settlements
have with their toilet. It was found
that the toilet is seen as a place of refuge
where people go to escape from their partner
or children, to meditate or pray, to read or
just be on their own. The preferred toilet is
therefore one than is clean, free from odours
and that is well lit and is safe to use.
This led to the building of communal
toilet blocks, in shack settlements, that are
looked after by an attendant who keeps the
facility clean and stocked with toilet paper.
To date, about 260 of these facilities have
been completed and acceptance has increased.
The level of vandalism and abuse
of these facilities is pleasingly low.
Water and energy
eThekwini has found that most transfer
mains and water networks are designed
with a degree of conservatism and so there
is excess pressure at various points in the
water distribution system in Durban. This
provided an opportunity to use this excess
pressure to generate electricity using inline
hydropower plants. The flows in these
systems have a similar daily trend to the
demand for electricity and so it is possible
to generate power at a rate that varies in line
with the demand.
eThekwini have appointed transaction
advisors to prepare a bid document to install
two turbines in a 1,600mm diameter
transfer pipeline, to generate about 6Mw.
This tender will be advertised in 2012. We
recently received bids for pico-hydropower
installations at six reservoir inlets where
there is excess water pressure that is presently
dissipated through the inlet control
valve. The cost of these installations was
higher than expected and results in a power
cost of approximately EUR 0,13 per Kwh
which is marginally viable at current South
African electricity prices.
The link between water and energy is
not limited to potable water distribution
systems, but there are possibilities in making
use of sewage effluent as well. Currently we
Photo: eThekwini Water and Wastewater
11
have constructed a prototype algae raceway
at Kingsburg wastewater treatment works
to produce algae at scale. The nutrients to
support algae growth are contained in the
treated sewage effluent that is fed into the
raceway. A small trial plant demonstrated
the feasibility of such a concept at a laboratory
scale, resulting in the production of
biofuel and biomass. The full scale plant is
expected to be in full production within six
months. Durban already extracts methane
gas from our landfill sites to generate electricity
and a project is presently underway
to harvest gas from digestors and our sewage
treatment works that is presently flared, and
use the gas to generate electricity and thereby
reduce our dependence on power from the
national grid.
Conclusion
These projects demonstrate the ability to
benefit from the linkages that exist between
water, sanitation, energy and agriculture to
the benefit of both communities and the
environment, in a developing country city.
“The link between water and energy is not limited to potable
water distribution systems, but there are possibilities in making
use of sewage effluent as well”
Photo: eThekwini Water and Wastewater
12
china
Water Needs Curtail Coal
Gasification For Fuel
Ordos, China – all silvery pipes and steel
pressure vessels, the Shenhua Group’s
breakthrough new refinery, stretched
across a kilometre of Inner Mongolia’s
sand and scrub, has attracted global
attention as a curious feat of technology
and as an imposing challenge to China’s
environment and modernisation.
Developed, in part, with the help of researchers
at West Virginia University and
opened three years ago in the desert region
east of this city of 1.5 million residents,
the refinery annually converts 4.1 million
tonnes of coal into 1.1 million tonnes (6.9
million barrels) of diesel fuel for China’s
growing fleet of heavy vehicles. At roughly
USD 50 a barrel to produce, the Shenhua
refinery is making good money in the current
USD 112-per-barrel global oil market.
When it was approved in 2003 by the
National Development and Reform Commission
(NDRC), China’s powerful economic
oversight agency, the USD 4 billion
refinery was seen as the vanguard of the
world’s largest programme for converting
coal to new products such as chemicals,
fertilisers, and fuel.
Shenhua’s engineers had cracked an
old industrial code – managing to turn
100-year-old chemistry on its head – and
produced what looked to be a big national
payoff.
By pulverising coal to dust, mixing it
with water, and heating it to form a gas in
state-of-the-art industrial plants, Shenhua
and China’s other big, state-owned energy
companies had the possibility to use the
nation’s mammoth coal reserves to produce
diesel fuel. That, in turn, could slow
China’s expanding demand for petroleum,
which last year reached 3.6 billion barrels
– 52 percent of it imported – nearly double
the 2005 demand.
China’s central government energy and
economic development agencies were so enthused
they approved plans to build 22 more
coal-to-liquid fuel plants, most of them to
be constructed close to the largest reserves
of coal in the country’s dry northern and
western provinces.
Water savings code not cracked
But Shenhua’s engineers weren’t able to
crack the other part of the code; the part
that deals with water use.
It takes 10 to 12 cubic metres of water to
produce a tonne of fuel. Shenhua’s Ordos
plant consumes 10 million cubic metres of
water annually in a dry region where competition
is already fierce between agriculture,
the coal sector, and northern China’s
growing cities. Dedicating that much water
to turn coal into diesel fuel made even the
powerful economic development chiefs in
Beijing nervous.
In September 2008, three months before
the Shenhua plant opened, the NDRC
announced it was suspending the coal-toliquids
construction programme. Shenhua
pressed ahead to operate its plant as
planned.
Three other plants that were under construction
were allowed to be completed,
though they are all much smaller demonstration
facilities that produce around 1
million barrels of fuel a year, said Qingyun
Sun, associate director of the US-China
Energy Center at West Virginia University.
In almost every way conceivable, China’s
decision to curtail its coal-to-liquid fuel programme
illustrates the country’s tightening
and economically dangerous choke point
between fast rising energy demand and declining
water reserves.
Stripped to its essence, China’s globally
significant choke point is caused by three
converging trends:
• Production of coal has tripled since 2000
to 3.15 billion tonnes a year. Government
analysts project that China’s energy companies
will need to produce an additional
billion tonnes of coal annually by 2020,
representing a 30 percent increase. Freshwater
needed for mining, processing, and
consuming coal accounts for the largest
share of industrial water use in China, or
roughly 120 billion cubic metres a year, a
fifth of all the water consumed nationally.
• Though national conservation policies
have helped to limit increases, water
consumption nevertheless has climbed
to a record 599 billion cubic metres annually,
which is 50 billion cubic metres
more than in 2000. Over the next decade,
according to government projections,
China’s water consumption, driven in
large part by increasing coal-fired power
production, may reach 670 billion cubic
metres annually – 71 billion cubic metres
a year more than today.
Photos: A Jaffe/Circle of Blue
By Keith Schneider
Senior Editor
Circle of Blue
13
• China’s total water resource, according
to the National Bureau of Statistics, has
dropped 13 percent since the start of the
century. In other words, China’s water
supply is 350 billion cubic metres less
than it was in 2000. That’s as much water
lost to China each year as flows through
the mouth of the Mississippi River in
nine months. Chinese climatologists and
hydrologists attribute much of the drop
to climate change, which is disrupting
patterns of rain and snowfall.
“It’s just impossible, if you haven’t lived
it or experienced it, to understand change in
China over the past 25 years, and especially
since 1992,” said Kang Wu, a senior fellow
and China energy scholar at East-West
Center in Hawaii. “The worry in China
and in the rest of the world is: can they sustain
it? They want to double the size of the
economy again in 10 years. How can they
do that? It’s a paradox from an economic
point of view. They need a resource balance
to meet demand, short-term and long-term.
If you look out 10, 20, 30 years, it just looks
like it’s not possible.”
Chinese authorities did, indeed, look
hard at the coal-to-liquid fuels programme
and decided it was too big of a risk.
Every step of the coal mining, processing,
shipping, combustion, and gasification
requires huge amounts of water, and
produces the world’s largest emissions of
climate changing gases. Xiangkun Ren –
who led the Shenhua team that designed
the Ordos plant and is probably the most
accomplished chemical engineer in China
– is matter of fact about the government’s
change in direction.
In an interview with Circle of Blue in
Beijing, Xiangkun sipped coffee and described
the essential resource conflict that
overwhelmed the coal-to-liquids programme.
“Water is a problem,” the 48-year-old engineer
said, shrugging. “Water consumption
is high. It’s difficult to put a new plant in
that area. There will be no more plants until
we understand more about water supply. If
we build another one, we’ll have to think
harder about where the water is located and
how much we can use.”
This feature is published as part of Circle of
Blue’s “Choke Point: China” project.
About the au thor
Keith Schneider is Senior Editor
of Circle of Blue and a prominent
environmental and urban affairs
journalist in the United States. He is
the author of What’s Done, What’s
Next: A Civic Pact (civicpact.org),
and a special correspondent for The
New York Times, where he has contributed
for 30 years, including ten
as a national correspondent based in
Washington, D.C.
Circle of Blue is an online independent
news organisation, based
in Traverse City, Michigan, that joins
front-line reporting, science, design,
and convening to cover and help
solve the global freshwater crisis.
Its “Choke Point: China” project,
developed and edited by Schneider,
is one of the most comprehensive
reports ever published on the confrontation
between rising energy
demand and declining freshwater
reserves in the world’s largest country.
Among its other achievements,
the report’s findings alerted Chinese
authorities to the fast-approaching
and economically ruinous contest
between energy, water, and agriculture
in the Yellow River basin of
China’s dry n north, the source of 70
percent of the country’s coal production
and 20 percent of its grain.
“It’s just impossible, if you haven’t lived it or experienced
it, to understand change in China over the past 25 years,
and especially since 1992”
14
book review
Prof. Tony Allan is uniquely qualified to
guide both the informed reader and the
recent initiate through the vexations of
water management. A long time author,
researcher, educator, counsellor and advisor
to many, he won the 2008 Stockholm Water
Prize for his pioneering work on Virtual
Water.
Once we understand this virtual water
concept we can start to understand how
much water we each actually use each day,
each week, each month. This is hidden water;
this is the indispensable ingredient in
the food, clothing, energy and consumer
goods that fill our lives. If we want to reduce
our personal water consumption and
impact, Tony Allan tells us to “stop eating
ourselves into a corner”. Changes in food
behaviour by industrialised country folk
and global elites could save up to 40 percent
of the water-for-food bill. We eat too much
high-water-cost meat and too much food is
thrown out. This we could change.
But the story gets truly interesting and
the plot becomes both complex and more
than a little foreboding as Prof. Allan ups
the ante and takes us to the national level.
What happens when a population’s need
for food is more than their water can produce?
Trade, of course. Virtual water moves
across the world encased in coffee beans,
wheat kernels, and microchips. Spain used
tourist revenue and high value agricultural
goods to pay its virtual water food bill. But
what if there is a water-related limit to this
solution? If the country cannot produce
enough tradable goods and service to buy
the food it needs (and many need more
water to do so,) and that water is decreasing
because of increasing population, higher demand
levels and climate change, what then?
At the regional level, the feeling of impending
doom and difficulties increase –
the shared management of transboundary
waters – the 270+ rivers, lakes, groundwater
is already very difficult and is about to move
to new stress levels.
He writes thoughtfully about the difficulty
of managing – or even getting attention
to a whole set of ‘invisibles’ – the
invisible water in soil, the invisible virtual
water encompassed in all of the goods we
use and eat, the day to day invisibility of
demographic growth, and others. Getting
to tough decisions managing invisibles is
in itself tough since “money and water flow
nearly always in the same direction”, and
“politicians stay in power by avoiding political
costs”
There are solutions, of course. Many
companies are doing good things with
value chain analysis. China though strict
population programmes averted the need
to find the food (and water to grow it) for
a population increase of 300 million people,
enough to populate USA and Canada. Tony
Allan strongly believes that solutions revolve
around the farmer – if we will understand
them, and help them, they will engineer the
change processes necessary.
The book is a good read and a good ride
– to India, Brazil, Vietnam, the Americas,
China, the Middle East and North Africa
– with a long felucca ride up and down the
Nile. His insight and humour travel with us,
globally, and back and forth in history. “Our
ancestors probably ate vegetables because
they didn’t run away or bite them back”.
Tony Allan is wise, infinitely knowledgeable
in his field, witty, informative, persuasive
– and right! Buy this book – buy 6
of them for Christmas/Chanuka/Kwanze/
Divali or Eid presents – especially for your
water over-using friends and anyone in a
position to bring about change – by the
way – that is all of us. Buy it. Read it. Do it!
Virtual Water: Tackling the Threat to Our
Planet’s Most Precious Resource
Author: Tony Allan
This is a small book with a huge story. It is a book of a simple language in which complex and important thoughts are made
clear. It is a very serious book which uses both wit and humour throughout. It is above all a book drawn from research
and scientific discovery – and yet the insights are always accessible, intelligible and except for the lively annexes, largely
devoid of graphs and formulas. Tony Allan makes water issues understandable: “Think of one cubic metre of water as three
bathtubs “ (he doesn’t say if these are the nice big English tubs…..).
Book reviewed by Margaret Catley-Carlson
UN Secreteray General Advisor
on Water and Sanitation
. To read more about the book or order it, please visit www.virtual-water.co.uk
15
News from Collaborators
New Ragn-Sells research
on contaminated soil
Ragn-Sells has initiated a research
project to test the effective treatment
of complex contaminated
soils, together with Luleå University
of Technology, National Geotechnical
Institute (SGI) and Stab Suecia.
The project runs until 2014 and is
funded equally by Ragn-Sells, the
State Research Council, and SGI.
The research will be lead by Jurate
Kumpiene and her research team
at the Department of Earth Sciences
and Environmental Engineering
at Luleå University. The project
aims to research industry-relevant
treatment of contaminated soil,
she says. Contaminated soil affects
the quality of both ground
and surface water, and vice versa.
. www.ragnsells.se
ITT Water and Waste Water
is now rebranded as Xylem
Xylem is the tissue in plants that
brings water upward from the
roots, but has now also become
the name of one of the leading
global water technology companies,
known previously as ITT
Water and Waste Water. On 31
October 2011, Xylem announced
that it has completed its spinoff
from ITT Corporation, and begun
operations as a standalone global
water technology company. They
are currently in the process of moving
to thier new home on the Web.
. www.ittww.com
Läckby Water’s Environmental
Engineering builds
the first of its kind municipal
water treatment plant
in Scandinavia
Environmental engineering company
Purac in Lund has signed
a contract to an order of about
40 million SEK to build the first
full-scale municipal waste water
treatment plant that uses membrane
bio-reactor technology in
Scandinavia. The plant will be
built in the Lyngby-Taarbæk municipality
in Denmark by summer
2012. Membrane Bio-Reactor
(MBR) technology breaks down
the micro-organic pollutants present
in the water, which is then
mechanically filtered through the
membranes. The method does not
need a final sedimentation, which
means that the plant requires significantly
less space. The quality
of the treated water will also be
significantly better than with conventional
technology. Primarily, it
is a technique used in countries
where water resources are more
limited than in the Nordic countries.
This project is a collaboration
between Purac with GE Water, a
leading manufacturer of UF membranes
for wastewater treatment.
Since 2003, Purac has been a part
of the Läckby Water Group.
. www.lackebywater.se
Scholarships available in
International Water Law
The Global Water Partnership together
with IHP-HELP Centre for
Water Law, Policy and Science, under
the auspices of UNESCO, at the
University of Dundee, is looking to
build on their successful 2011 International
Water Law Programme
(www.dundee.ac.uk/water/workshop),
and offer scholarships
for 30 participants to undertake
a module in International Water
Law, in Dundee 11-29 June 2012.
Scholarship recipients are responsible
for all travel (to/from
Dundee) and subsistence (food/
accommodation) costs. GWP is
aiming at providing funding for
travel and subsistence for a limited
number of successful Scholarship
applicants. Even though final funding
is pending, GWP and the University
of Dundee now invite applications
from suitable candidates.
Applications will be accepted
24 November 2011-3 February
2012. Successful candidates
will be notified at the beginning
of March 2012 to allow as much
time as possible to obtain visas,
additional funding, etc.
The module is aimed at persons
working in water resources who
wish to acquire specialist knowledge
of international water law,
especially as it relates to transboundary
water challenges in the
GWP regions.
Applicants to the joint GWPUniversity
of Dundee IWL Programme
should be from GWP
Partner organisations and are required
to be proficient in English,
either as native speakers, or to a
standard of an IELTS score of 6.5.
A university degree is required in
Hydrology, Environmental Science,
Law, Agriculture or related field.
. Read more and apply
at www.gwp.org/GWPDundee-
2012
SIWI has taken an active
part in the climate change
negotiations at COP17 in
Durban, November 28-
December 5, advocating for
a clearer focus on the links
between climate change,
water and development.
The Water and Climate
Coalition, for which SIWI
hosts the secretariat, together
with a number of prominent
policy actors organised the
following events:
Water, Climate and
Development Day
The full day seminar focused
on practical solutions to
place water at the centre of
development and to ensure
water takes a central place
in UNFCCC negotiations.
International experts and
senior policy makers in
development, water, finance
and climate discussed and
generated perspectives on:
Global policy solutions for
adaptation and mitigation;
Infrastructure, technical and
ecosystem solutions; Climate
change information for water
resources; and Financial
and institutional solutions.
SIWI also took part in the
High Level Panel 1: Reflections
and Perspectives for
Integrating Water into the
Climate Regime.
High Level Dialogue 2
Here the outcomes from the
Water, Climate and Development
Day were presented
and discussed in the High
Level Panel 2: How to integrate
Water in the climate
regime and economic development.
About the Water and
Climate Coalition
The Water and Climate
Coalition is a collaboration
between 17 international
organisations and research
centres, that together seek
to place water resources
management at the heart of
international policy responses
to climate change.
It brings together stakeholders
from across the global
water and climate community,
carries out advocacy
on a global level, develops
policy recommendations,
statements and interventions,
and organises events,
seminars and workshops.
The secretariat of the coalition
is hosted at Stockholm
International Water Institute
and the Stakeholder Forum.
SIWI advocates water focus at COP17
. For more information, please visit www.waterclimatecoalition.org
International Water Resource
Economics Consortium
10th Annual Meeting
The programme for the two day meeting
will contain a Chief Economists’ Panel,
a Keynote Speaker and paper presentations
on the following themes:
• Economics of irrigated and rainfed
agriculture,
• Economics of institutional design to
manage hydrologicalv ariability,
• Economics of transboundary water
management and
• Economics of water resources at large.
For more information on IWREC, please contact Mr. John Joyce at john.joyce@siwi.org
Paper submission deadline
February 15, 2012
28-29 August, 2012 in Stockholm
The call for papers for the IWREC 10th Annual Meeting can be found at www.worldwaterweek.org/iwrec. A number of publications,
in journal and book format will be compiled from the papers submitted for presentation. The deadline for submitting a paper is February
15, 2012. Only full papers will be considered for evaluation.
Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) and the Water Supply and Sanitation
Collaborative Council (WSSCC) welcome entries for the fourth edition of the
WASH Media Awards. This competition is open to journalists who publish or
broadcast original investigative stories and reports on water supply, sanitation or
hygiene (WASH) related issues and their impact on individual and country development.
The WASH Media Awards recognise and support the crucial role of media in
raising awareness of the importance of water, sanitation, and hygiene services. It aims
to promote coverage of WASH issues in the local, national and international media
to have a positive influence on decision-makers, the private sector, the civil society
as well as individuals and households.
To be eligible, entries must be published or broadcasted in English, French or
Hindi, between April 1, 2011 and April 1, 2012.
Journalists may submit one piece of work in the following formats: print and
online, TV, Radio, cartoons and photos.
For more information please visit www.siwi.org/washmediaaward
Are you a water journalist? Your work could be eligible for an award!

2009-09-20T13:08:00.000-07:00

Haaretz article on "army of bloggers"

2009-01-22T10:34:00.001-08:00

Last update - 07:14 19/01/2009
Israel recruits 'army of bloggers' to combat anti-Zionist Web sites
By Cnaan Liphshiz
Tags: Israel, anti-Semitism, blog

The Immigrant Absorption Ministry announced on Sunday it was setting up an "army of bloggers," to be made up of Israelis who speak a second language, to represent Israel in "anti-Zionist blogs" in English, French, Spanish and German.

The program's first volunteer was Sandrine Pitousi, 31, from Kfar Maimon, situated five kilometers from Gaza. "I heard about the project over the radio and decided to join because I'm living in the middle of the conflict," she said.

Before hanging up the phone prematurely following a Color Red rocket alert, Pitousi, who immigrated to Israel from France in 1993, said she had some experience with public relations from managing a production company.

"During the war, we looked for a way to contribute to the effort," the ministry's director general, Erez Halfon, told Haaretz. "We turned to this enormous reservoir of more than a million people with a second mother tongue." Other languages in which bloggers are sought include Russian and Portuguese.

Halfon said volunteers who send the Absorption Ministry their contact details by e-mail, at media@moia.gov.il, will be registered according to language, and then passed on to the Foreign Ministry's media department, whose personnel will direct the volunteers to Web sites deemed "problematic."

Within 30 minutes of announcing the program, which was approved by the Foreign Ministry on Sunday, five volunteers were already in touch, Halfon said.

Related articles:
# Yad Vashem launches Arabic Web site to combat Holocaust denial
# Beautiful green-eyed soldiers wage PR battle for IDF
# 'Rapping rabbi' makes finals in world's largest blog competition

China too...

2009-01-19T19:04:00.000-08:00

... not surprising.

A war of words and images

2009-01-19T02:11:00.000-08:00

Jan 15th 2009 | CAIRO AND JERUSALEM
From The Economist print edition

Despite devoting unparalleled attention to the media, Israel is losing the propaganda war

AFTER their last controversial war, against Lebanon in 2006, Israelis commonly blamed the press for sapping morale by covering the carnage too closely. Israel is now better prepared. The tactics it deploys on the media front are as cunning and punchy as those its army has been wielding against Hamas in Gaza.

Back in November, few outside the region noticed when Israel suddenly blocked foreign reporters’ access to the crowded Strip. But the information prong of Israel’s Gaza offensive involves far more than the tight control of press access. Israel has fully utilised its expertise at hasbara, a Hebrew word meaning literally “explanation”, but referring more broadly to image promotion. Platoons of on-message spokesmen are available to foreign reporters in Israel at all hours of the night and day. Israel’s army has also launched a website featuring selected videos that is dedicated, it says, to documenting the “humane action and operational success” of Israeli forces. Israel’s foreign ministry, assisted by scores of pro-Israel groups worldwide, has enlisted thousands of volunteers, supplying them with regularly updated talking points to nudge editors, journalists and commentators to see the news from Israel’s perspective.

Gaza itself has been subjected to an intense “psy-ops” campaign. As well as air-dropped leaflets, propaganda that blames Hamas for the violence is beamed out via hijacked Palestinian radio broadcasts, text messages and direct calls to mobile phones. Some Gazans report receiving calls from apparently sympathetic fellow Arabs, who then turn out to want suspiciously specific information about Hamas operatives in their area. Meanwhile, the destruction of Gaza’s electricity grid makes it hard for those trapped inside the territory to communicate with each other or the outside world.

Israel’s campaign has succeeded on the home front, with its own Jewish citizens remaining broadly enthusiastic about a war mostly portrayed in admiring terms. It has conquered the American House of Representatives, too, which voted on January 9th by 390-5 for a bill declaring “unwavering commitment” to Israel. And it has even won over Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, an American everyman who won brief celebrity in the presidential campaign for his forthright views as “Joe the Plumber”. Dispatched by Pajamas TV to report from Israel, he declared that its ban on war coverage was a good thing.

Yet wider support among the American public for Israel in this conflict appears to be less robust than usual. A Rasmussen poll taken on December 31st showed that while 44% of Americans were still for Israel, 41% were against it, a relatively high figure. And that was before the bloody attack on a UN school and other such incidents. Global public opinion has also probably shifted against the Jewish state. Even inside Israel, human-rights groups, concerned that much of the normally outspoken local press has turned largely jingoistic, have launched a website to expose the mounting tragedy inside Gaza.

They suffer no lack of heart-rending material. Here, denying access to Gaza to all Western correspondents might have backfired on Israel. The result has been that it is Gazans themselves, including some 300 local journalists, who have kept the world focused on their plight. More significantly, the most watched Arab television news channels are all in Gaza, giving saturation coverage to the conflict, even three weeks after its start.

The English-language sister channel of al-Jazeera, with two reporters in Gaza, has flourished in the absence of Western competitors, such as CNN. Its coverage has been graphic but sombre in tone. This contrasts with the hyperbole on many Arabic-language networks, where charges of Israeli “genocide”, mixed with unsubstantiated reports of Hamas’s military successes, have been frequent, accompanied by dramatic music and filler material looping pictures of dead children.

Hamas has been largely sidelined from this effort, although its television still beams feebly, airing martial pomp and pre-recorded speeches. The group has even tried its hand at phoning threatening messages to Israelis and posting propaganda on the internet. But what has really turned the tide is the ceaseless stream of appalling imagery that fills the Arab satellite channels. Their passion is certainly not always professional, but the gore, distress and misery they portray are all too real.

The Guardian : Hasbara spam alert

2009-01-18T13:12:00.000-08:00

With Israel's foreign ministry organising volunteers to flood news websites with pro-Israeli comments, Propaganda 2.0 is here

- Richard Silverstein
- guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 January 2009 11.05 GMT

The hasbara brigade strikes again! You always hear about Israeli attempts at media manipulation. Everyone knows it's going on but usually the process happens through cyber insurgents like those involved with Giyus (and its media monitoring software, Megaphone). Now, we know that the Israeli foreign ministry itself is orchestrating propaganda efforts designed to flood news websites with pro-Israel arguments and information.

A reader of my blog has received the following email which documents both the efforts and the agency that originated them. The solicitation to become a pro-Israel "media volunteer" also includes a list of media links which the ministry would like addressed by pro-Israel comments:

Dear friends,
We hold the [sic] military supremacy, yet fail the battle over the international media. We need to buy time for the IDF to succeed, and the least we can do is spare some (additional) minutes on the net. The ministry of foreign affairs is putting great efforts in balancing the media, but we all know it's a battle of numbers. The more we post, blog, talkback, vote – the more likely we gain positive sentiment.
I was asked by the ministry of foreign affairs to arrange a network of volunteers, who are willing to contribute to this effort. If you're up to it you will receive a daily messages & media package as well as targets.
If you wish to participate, please respond to this email.

My friend did so and received this official communique from the ministry with talking points about Operation Cast Lead which s/he was to use in her/his propaganda efforts. Among the links was was a Peter Beaumont Cif piece. The following were identified as "target sites": the Times, the Guardian, Sky News, BBC, Yahoo!News, Huffington Post, and the Dutch Telegraaf. Also targeted were other media sites in Dutch, Spanish, German and French considered critical of the invasion.

Locally, here in Seattle, peace activists held a rally at our federal building attended by 500 protesters. In the foreign ministry communique issued the next day, activists were directed to comment in the Seattle Post Intelligencer's article about the demonstration. The comment thread for the article is riddled with clear hasbara "plants" who distort the balance and tone of the discussion with their programmed arguments, making it much more favorable than it otherwise would be.

Here the foreign ministry's coordinator describes a meeting he attended at the government's offical office:

Hi all,
I had a meeting in the ministry of foreign affairs today, and was very happy to hear that their metrics show that Israel's position in the internet is getting better every day. It means that you're doing a good job! MFA are concerned with the biased public opinion in Europe. So please focus your efforts on European media.
What can you do to help?
- Identify internet battle-grounds in different languages, and let me know
- Comment/post/vote in the listed links and others; you can use the material attached below
- Write letters to authors and editors. Identify yourself as a local resident
- Have your friends join this activity

This message was meant to encourage the pro-Israel activists in their work:

World governments are still patient with Israel's justified operation in Gaza. The [sic] public opinion, on the other hand, is impatient, to say the least. This gap will soon close – it always does.
It is our goal to shift the public opinion, as conveyed in the internet; avoiding, or at least minimising, sanctions by world leaders. We need to buy the IDF enough time to achieve its goals.

Besides the talking points provided by the foreign ministry to the pro-Israel web activists, they are offered online pro-Israel material to link to in their comments such as these:
Bicom.org.uk/

Aish HaTorah's What Really Happened in the Middle East

YouTube video: Amid Gaza violence, Israeli and Palestinian doctors save baby's life -

CNN's Amanpour interviews Tzipi Livni

Military incursion should be seen as part of War on Terror

Blog from Southern Israel, Morit Rozen

Remember when the defence department was paying public relations companies and Iraqi newspapers to insert articles praising the Iraq war? The companies also attempted to plant coverage favorable to the US military in US newspapers. There rightly was a media uproar about the manipulation. We'll see whether the same happens over this.

The foreign ministry shouldn't get a pass on this one. It may view such hasbara as maximising its efforts to "explain" Israel's position in the world media. I view it as a cynical attempt to flood the web and news media with favorable flackery in a vain attempt to tilt public opinion toward Israel. Not only does it do Israel a disservice, it stains every legitimate effort that the ministry might make to explain Israel to the world, since no one will believe a word it says knowing it engages in such outright propaganda.

Not to mention that this is such cheap pennyante stuff. What do they gain by this? How effective can it be and how many can be convinced? By the way, I've even noticed the hasbaraniks in my own blog. You can see them a mile away because they've never published a comment before yet write something like: "I've enjoyed your blog for a long time, but anyone with a brain in their head knows that Hamas is out to destroy Israel blah, blah blah." Pretty formulaic stuff. Also, you can Google a few phrases of the comment and if you find it appears elsewhere on the web you know you either have a hasbaranik or someone who has repetition compulsion.

In some instances, western media may intentionally or unintentionally fall victim to manipulation. Tony Karon points out that pro-Israel journalist-historian Michael Oren has published several stories since the Gaza incursion began in US media outlets like the New Republic and Los Angeles Times. He is also on active duty with the IDF in Gaza serving as a public affairs officer liasing with foreign media. You will find nothing noting this in the Los Angeles Times op ed. In effect, the media is allowing advocates like Oren to pass themselves off as disinterested experts when they are anything but. It behooves editors to do some due diligence when they publish any piece that advocates for one side or the other to determine whether there may be conflicts of interest or other unacknowledged factors influencing a commentator's judgment.

It seems we are now well and truly in the world of Propaganda 2.0.

Ceasefire??

2009-01-16T21:20:00.001-08:00

Hopefully!

The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Why So Global?

2009-01-16T09:11:00.000-08:00

Jared Cohen

Author and US State Department Adviser

Posted January 14, 2009 | 05:22 PM (EST)

What is it about the Arab-Israeli conflict that makes it evoke emotion on such a global scale across such a diverse set of populations? I don't dispute that for Muslims, Jews and concerned citizens of the world, the Arab-Israeli conflict genuinely induces powerful reactions. But I often wonder about the magnitude and scope of this global outcry and why it seems to dominate other more local grievances like unemployment, restrictions on civil liberties, and corruption.

We all know the arguments. On one side of the spectrum, we hear about the fear and horror of daily rocket bombardments on Israeli cities and villages. We hear the traumatic stories from families who have lost love ones and live in fear of belligerent rocket fire and threats of suicide bomb attacks. On the other side of the spectrum, we are reminded of a stateless people who are living under difficult economic and social conditions. There are no shortage of heart-wrenching stories about the challenges Palestinians face in both the West Bank and Gaza. With the outbreak of the recent violence in such a densely populated area, Palestinian civilians have been caught in cross-fire. And, of course, there are those who blame both sides, arguing that the Palestinian and Israeli leaderships are responsible for perpetuating conflict that has claimed the lives of innocent civilians.

The diversity of views that exist is acceptable to me, but there are aspects of the global reaction I find perplexing. At times, I have remarked to friends that the further one goes from the epicenter of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the angrier people seem to be about it. Why do young people in Algeria, unemployed and living in poverty, tell me that their primary grievance in life is the fact that the Palestinians do not have a state? What makes 10,000 Indonesians march against violence in Gaza, but not Indonesian casualties at the hands of Jamaa Islamiyya or Al-Qaeda? I don't understand why thousands of Syrians take to the streets to support "freedom" for the Palestinians, yet not a single protest in Damascus pushing the regime for their own civil liberties? In Lebanon, the Al-Qaeda group Fatah al-Islam waged a deadly campaign inside of the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian camp, yet despite it taking place on Lebanese soil, I don't recall floods of protests into downtown Beirut. In Pakistan, thousands will amass in front of the U.S. consulate in Karachi with bricks and slogans against violence between Israel and Hamas, but not the almost weekly Al-Qaeda assaults inside their own borders. Why are Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrants living in the UK angrier about the Arab-Israeli conflict than events in their home countries or the integration and inclusion challenges that more directly affect them? And why are tens of thousands of Persian Shiites in Iran filling out surveys and registering to wage a jihad in the predominantly Sunni Arab Gaza?

How does one account for the double standards, inconsistencies, and lack of similar activism around local issues that are illustrated by these questions? There is no single answer, but perhaps certain trends and contexts that help explain the phenomenon. The media is an obvious starting point. Al-Jazeera, Al-Manar, and other Arab media outlets are flooding the airwaves throughout Muslim communities with images from Gaza and the West Bank. The media plays on identity presenting these images to touch the hearts and minds of Muslims and non-Muslims throughout the world. Most of the people seeing these images do not live in the heart of the conflict and thus have a certain luxury to protest and demonstrate. For Muslim communities in Europe, this is particularly the case. Far away from home and poorly integrated into mainstream society, immigrant populations in Western Europe often struggle with the issue of identity. This challenge has led to a metaphorical feeling of statelessness that many immigrants experience. The imagery they see in newspapers, online, and on the television screen offer a visual connection between them and other Muslim communities. The outrage we witness via media is a convenient way for grievances to manifest themselves. This is not exclusive to immigrant communities in Europe; the same can be said for Muslim populations in Venezuela, which may explain why thousands marched in Caracas against Israel last week.

The barrage of images in the media, particularly during a period of fighting, ensures that the Arab-Israeli conflict is at the forefront of people's minds. There is no shortage of entities that seek to exploit this. Governments like Syria and Iran face serious economic, political, and social challenges at home. Fearing that any of these vulnerabilities could catalyze rebellion, insurrection, or protest, these regimes employ corrupt, autocratic, and repressive tactics to deprive their populations of rights and opportunities to mount any serious challenge, including a viciously controlled media. It is not surprising that these regimes view the Arab-Israeli conflict as an opportune issue that can divert attention away from their domestic shortcomings. The repressive leadership of these countries actively distract from their domestic deficiencies by pushing their population to focus anger, frustration and rage externally. I am sure Bashar al-Assad in Syria prefers the sound of "Oh Mubarak, listen, listen, the Arab people will not kneel down" to open critiques of his own regime. The Arab-Israeli conflict casts a convenient shadow of cover over their dubious activities.

This conflict is not a hard sell to the people of our world as the images seen on television are impactful and Muslims around the world identify with the plight of the Palestinians just as the Jewish people around the world have a similar reaction to images and news of rocket attacks and suicide bombings. Of equal importance is the fact that populations in repressive countries--normally restricted on freedom of assembly and speech--are permitted to speak out about this issue. In this sense, the conflict takes on a double meaning as the state often encourages such mobilization against Israel. In Syria, for example, the Assad regime does not permit freedom of assembly or speech, yet in the wake of the Israel/Gaza conflict, the regime relaxed these restrictions to create room for the population to speak out against Israel.

Where States do not stoke the organically felt sentiments in Muslim communities, non-state entities play the role of flame-thrower, agitator, and mobilizer on what they view as a winning issue. In places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, groups like Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Jamaa Islamiyya use the global outcry in ungoverned spaces, urban slums, and impoverished rural areas to piggy-back on the emotion and recruit new members. They care not for the Palestinian people, nor do they advocate a peaceful solution; their sole interest is in seizing an opportunity for exploitative recruitment.

An amplified global outcry has led to a misperception that all the world's problems will be solved if the Arab-Israeli conflict is resolved. While this would be a tremendous achievement that would allow the world to move forward beyond a conflict that has perpetuated for decades, it is not the silver bullet solution. A Palestinian state will not create jobs in North Africa, it will not reduce poverty in South Asia, and it will not help Muslims in Europe integrate. By making the Arab-Israeli conflict a lynchpin for all the world's problems, we only fuel an inclination to use Israel and Palestine as the scapegoat for unrelated and local challenges across the developing world.

Original post.

Wedeman: Defiance amid destruction in Gaza - CNN.com

2009-01-16T07:45:00.001-08:00

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Wedeman: Defiance amid destruction in Gaza - CNN.com*


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The Guardians guide to the conflict....

2009-01-16T06:42:00.000-08:00

...... can be found here.

Interesting links

2009-01-16T04:20:00.000-08:00

Nicolette from IN wrote:

Yes, it's not just here but all over.

Facebook becoming an Israeli-Palestinian Battleground
http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/74779-Clicking-is-caring/

http://www.theparentscircle.com/

Some locals anyone can support who are crying for a cease fire and peace
http://www.theparentscircle.com/NewsMain.asp?id=295

UN and Media buildings on fire

2009-01-15T05:43:00.001-08:00

Israel explains Gaza media restrictions

2009-01-15T04:45:00.000-08:00

GAZA-ISRAEL BORDER (CNN) -- From a distance, smoke rises over Gaza. It is about as close as most reporters can get to the battle zone.

Israel's media restrictions have prevented dozens of international journalists from entering Gaza, where the Jewish state is waging an operation against militant targets.

International news media are forced to report on the more than two-week-old conflict from a hill near the Gaza-Israel border. CNN relies on a local journalist in Gaza, but cannot send other reporters into the Palestinian territory. In addition, Egypt is also not allowing journalists to cross its border into Gaza.

"It's really frustrating, you can't be there, see there and feel it," said CNN's Nic Robertson. "And you see these pictures from the hospital, but what's happening behind the hospital? What's Hamas doing?"

Israel has accused Hamas militants of exploiting the deaths of civilians to garner international sympathy through the media. Robertson pointed out that allowing reporters into Gaza would give the world a more thorough picture of Israel's military operation.

"The questions we would ask that go beyond the immediacy of the civilian casualties that you want to know about, but the other stuff that really informs you," he said.

It is a very different strategy from Israel's position during its 2006 war against Hezbollah militants in Lebanon. Then, reporters were allowed to broadcast from Israeli artillery positions.

But this time, Israel has changed its tactics and is preventing international reporters from being embedded with the military to avoid interference in military operations, an Israeli government spokesman said.

"There was too much exposure," Daniel Seaman said. "It had an effect on our ability to achieve strategic goals, so that's one of the lessons we learned from the war in Lebanon."

Some Israeli journalists are embedded with the military in Gaza but are not allowed to report from elsewhere.

The Tel Aviv-based Foreign Press Association -- of which CNN is a member -- is among several groups that have criticized the restrictions.

"The unprecedented denial of access to Gaza for the world's media amounts to a severe violation of press freedom and puts the state of Israel in the company of a handful of regimes around the world which regularly keep journalists from doing their jobs," the association said in a January 6 statement.

John Ging, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in Gaza, said the absence of journalists is preventing the truth from getting out.

Herve Deguine, a spokesman for the Paris, France-based Reporters Without Borders, said the dangers of the current conflict do not override the need for media coverage.

"Of course it's a dangerous place, of course journalists have to take the responsibilities and have to decide whether they want to go in or not and where they want to be," Deguine said.

"But banning the press to enter Gaza is just unacceptable."

Almost two weeks into the operation, Israel did allow a western camera crew across the border. But footage shot by the BBC crew was subject to clearance by Israeli military censors.

Images from inside Gaza did filter out to the world from journalists based inside Gaza who work for news agencies such as Ramattan and broadcasters like Al-Jazeera.

Inside Gaza, Hamas has controlled the images broadcast by the media, and pictures of suffering have been encouraged. But the outside world has seen very few images of Hamas fighters or their rockets being fired into Israel.

Both the Israeli military and Hamas have launched pages on the Web site, YouTube. Israel Defense Forces says the shared video is "documentation of the IDF's humane action and operational success in Operation Cast Lead."

Hamas' video shows graphic scenes from the fighting and also attacks its political rival, Fatah.

In times of war, the line between winning and losing can come down to the public relations battle as much as the military offensive itself.

But for journalists, it's about finding a balance in the story -- a difficult task when they are unable to cover all the angles.

Original article.

Jewish Internet Defence Forces

2009-01-14T05:42:00.001-08:00

http://www.thejidf.org/

War 2.0 trends

2009-01-14T05:11:00.000-08:00

Percentage of blogs covering the conflict out of all blogs

War 2.0 Activism

2009-01-14T04:55:00.000-08:00

http://avaaz.org/en/gaza_time_for_peace/

http://www.7iber.com/blog/2009/01/10/new-7iber-campaigns-how-to-help-gaza/

GVO: the tech war

2009-01-14T04:53:00.000-08:00

Bloggers are calling upon their readers to pick up the phone - and call the residents of Gaza to show them support. At the other end of the spectrum, Palestinian activists are urging their readers to call Israeli officials - and waste their time, as well as bombard their faxes with mail and their email inboxes with messages.

Jordanian Mohd Khawahja, who blogs at Shoot 4 The Moon, shares his idea as follows:

I'm sure that protesting is really a supportive action, in addition to in-kind and financial donations and other common means of support. But, I'm writing now to suggest another effective powerful way to support people in Gaza morally, and make feel them how much we do sympathize with them; it is basically to call them!?

Yes, you can really support people at Gaza by calling them and telling them how much we are proud of their persistence, braveness and resistance against this inhuman barbarian strike on Gaza. I've tried it and I can tell you how they would love to listen to us and find a listening ear from you as well.

His plan is really as simple as it sounds. He adds:

To call a random number in Gaza, all you need to do is to dial:

+970828 XXXXX (add a random number composed of 5 digits)
+970820 XXXXX
+970821 XXXXX

Khawaja also encourages readers to record and post their conversations with Gaza citizens online.

Arab American Batoul A, who identifies herself as a Muslim Circassian, picked up courage and the telephone and called a random number in Gaza. Batoul explains:

Today, I called Gaza. A random household, just pressed random numbers and listened for the line to be picked up… and it was. I was astonished. As if it was unexpected and I was in disbelief. My sentences became fragmented to the Palestinian lady on the other side of the line while I gathered my strength and voice back to its normal.

[…]

For a bit she spoke and I listened but I was slowly losing my strength to her words. I wanted to cry. I want to shelter her feelings somewhere dear in my heart and keep them safe. I wanted to give her warmth. Gosh, I wanted to be with her…. at least, I wouldn't be feeling so guilty so ashamed, so helpless!

Meanwhile, Palestinian blogger Haitham Sabbah is spearheading a blitz which aims at bombarding the phones, mobiles, faxes and emails of Israeli officials. He states the objectives of his campaign as follows:

1. Bombard their phone/mobile/fax lines with anti-war, anti-Zionist messages. This can be in the form of calls, faxes or even sms's;
2. Waste the time of these war criminals as much as possible. Some of them are doing nothing else but jumping on the TV screens to spread lies and hatred. They justify killing Palestinian children and civilians;
3. Directly delivering to them the message that we are disgusted by what they are doing and they should stop now;
4. Show them the magnitude of support that Palestinians have after the world witnessed their war crimes in Gaza.

Mystic's Muses lends her voice to the campaign, saying:

Dare to Join the Tech War?
Let us all jam/bombard/flood/block the landlines, mobiles, fax lines, and in-boxes of Israeli War Criminals with messages! Do not let these barbaric terrorists enjoy even a single second of the massacre they are perpetrating!

The blogger further cautions her readers to take precautions to secure their privacy.

Original post.

Haaretz: Jailing journalists

2009-01-14T04:21:00.000-08:00

By Yossi Melman

The Israel Defense Forces has learned from past wars. Take the Falklands War - in 1982 the British Navy sailed thousands of kilometers to liberate, 19th century-style, the remote and scarcely populated islands, which had been seized by the Argentine Army. British war correspondents were on board, plied with Defense Ministry briefings, on which they depended to write their reports. If those reports did not meet censorship criteria, they were simply tossed out. Journalists were turned into hostages.

The IDF has not gone so far in placing limitations on the media, nor has it had to. It was enough that during most of the of war it prevented journalists from entering Gaza. Instead of direct and independent reporting, the Israeli public is receiving partial coverage that has passed through the monitoring and filtration of the military censors and IDF press officers.

The IDF's "mouthpiece" policy comes in reaction to the Second Lebanon War. In that conflict, under the inspiration of then IDF spokeswoman Brig. Gen. Miri Regev, journalists were allowed to walk "between the legs" of senior commanders on the ground. The result was often embarrassing, even for stalwart defenders of freedom of speech - recall the incident in which a brigade commander mocked his division commander in front of the microphones and cameras of the international press.Regev's intentions were good. She wanted to open the IDF, while engaged in war, to the press, and through it to reach the public. However, the campaign was implemented poorly. The IDF Spokesman's Office and senior commanders lost control and the unbridled chatter that unintentionally helped Hezbollah's psychological warfare campaign. Despite the strategic and diplomatic achievements of that war (amid tactical failures on the level of force deployment and the function of some senior commanders), many correspondents and commentators peddled the mistaken impression that Israel had been defeated.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who at the war's start said he had been surprised by Israel's fierce reaction to the kidnapping of its soldiers, eagerly embraced Israeli media reports heralding his own victory. The lesson the IDF learned from the excessive openness of the Second Lebanon War manifested itself in its next extreme decision, to prevent Israeli and international media from doing their jobs.

In the Falklands War journalists were "jailed" in the living quarters of warships, and in the 2003 American invasion of Iraq they were confined to the cabins of armored personnel carriers, their field of vision narrowed to the width of a peephole.

In the Gaza War, journalists are being held in modest media facilities on the border of the coastal territory. Their positions have been filled, reporters and photographers alike, by troops of the IDF Spokesman's Office. The move is meant to present a sterile picture of war, to prevent Israeli media outlets from showing images of death, destruction and horror coming out of Gaza. But this is a shortsighted approach, one driven by the "ostrich policy" of planting our heads firmly in the sand.

In the age of the information superhighway, Israel and the world still see the same images and hear the same voices broadcast on most of the foreign television stations. The IDF's manipulations of the media, which willingly cooperates, may be good for the army, but it's very bad for Israeli democracy.

Time: Facebook Users Go to War over Gaza

2009-01-14T03:32:00.000-08:00

By Deena Guzder

Social-networking websites may have started out as online cliques where friends could swap opinions on music, pop culture and other bits of innocuous personal trivia. But as the conflict in Gaza has unfolded, it's becoming evident that sites like Facebook are increasingly being used to express political views, adding an acrimonious, even menacing undertone to what were once lighthearted online forums.

While Hamas rockets pummel southern Israel and Israeli bombs decimate Gaza, a parallel war is being fought in virtual communities. On Dec. 27, two hours after Israel began its military operation, Joel Leyden created a Facebook group called "I Support the Israel Defense Forces in Preventing Terror Attacks from Gaza." Leyden, an American who served with the Israeli military, says he has since received dozens of death threats via his Facebook inbox. "People were not just saying 'I hope you die!' but also asking, 'How do you want to die?' " says Leyden, who uses Facebook to alert people about potential attacks on synagogues. Meanwhile, Hamzeh Abu-Abed, who created a Facebook group titled "Let's Collect 500,000 Signatures to Support the Palestinians in Gaza," says he has received similar hate mail. "They said I am a terrorist who should die," says Abu-Abed, an accountant from Jordan. "We have been harassed by Zionists who hacked our group and called themselves the Jewish Internet Defense Force." (See pictures of chaos in the Middle East.)

Of course, Internet users have complained for years that the anonymity of electronic communication breeds incivility. But some say the Gaza conflict is a lightning rod for particularly vitriolic exchanges. For example, one contributor to a forum on Facebook wrote, "Israel = killers," which drew this response from another user: "Maybe I'll wrap a towel around my head and beat my wife for peace in the name of Allah." Rahel Aima, an undergraduate student at Columbia University who frequents several social-networking sites, says she has been "shocked by some of the hyper-distilled hatred and racism that I've seen in the past few days. I've only really seen such a flurry of polarizing sentiments with this current Gaza situation."

The online debate reflects real-world hostilities and passions. The Gaza conflict has sparked heated and sometimes violent demonstrations around the world. But for website operators, the war of words is raising fresh questions about free speech and censorship online. Facebook, which has 150 million active users, does not remove members or groups that speak out against countries, political entities or ideas. "Our goal is to strike a very delicate balance between giving Facebook users the freedom to express their opinions and beliefs, while also ensuring that individuals and groups of people do not feel threatened or endangered," says Facebook spokeswoman Elizabeth Linder. "We've taken action on groups promoting both sides of the current conflict, but do not typically provide details on such instances." (See the 50 best websites of 2008.)

Rita King, who studies online communities as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, says the heightened level of hostility since Israel began its military operation is troubling. "Learning how to navigate this potentially dangerous new twist in human interaction is complicated, particularly with regard to issues of security," King says. According to Lea Bishop Shaver, a lecturer at Yale Law School, threatening to kill someone through an online forum "can land you in jail for assault, even if you never touch the person." But she added that making empty threats over the Internet rarely results in prosecution. "To trigger criminal prosecution, the threat has to be a serious one," Shaver says.

In fact, because online forum participants rarely know one another and often live on different continents, threats are rarely serious. Partly for that reason, King maintains that online exchanges — even ugly ones — facilitate communication and understanding. "The Internet removes the threat of physical harm and thus offers an unprecedented opportunity for the development of new ideas for conflict mediation," she says.

Certainly governments see value in talking directly to the public through online communities. On Dec. 30, the Israeli consulate in New York hosted a press conference on Twitter, a social-messaging service, to respond to questions from the public about Gaza. For Facebook and other social networks, "the struggle ... is to find ways to create an environment that encourages truly meaningful dialogue," says Amy Bruckman, an associate professor at the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Until that happens, a cease-fire is not likely in the virtual world.

Israel PR Reaches Gaza Arabs Through Facebook, YouTube

2009-01-14T03:28:00.000-08:00

By Joel Leyden
Israel News Agency

Jerusalem --- January 9, 2009...... As in every war, the battle for hearts and minds is a critical one. Public opinion has a direct effect with lives on the ground. In the current defensive war in which Israel has been forced to defend herself from Hamas terrorists, rather than focusing on conventional print and broadcast media, both official and non official Israel spokespeople are using Web 2.0 social networking applications such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Hamas has been attacking Israel almost on a daily basis with a barrage of Qassam and Grad missiles which have struck civilian targets, murdering civilians in Sderot, Beer Sheva, Ashdod and Ashkelon, Israel. Unprovoked terror attacks as Israel left Gaza in a unilateral peace move three years ago.

Hamas states that they want their land back. But the issue is and was never land with Hamas. Hamas is an extremist religious Islamic organization which believes that if you are an "Infidel" a Jew or Christian, you are to be murdered or "slayed." Hamas, which is funded and backed by Iran and defined as a terror organization by the US, has declared that they are not interested in a peace agreement with Israel, but rather total destruction of the Jewish, democratic state.

The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs held the first ever citizens news conference on the Internet this week using Twitter, a real time application which notifies people where you are and what you are doing. David Saranga of the Israel Consulate in New York coordinated the creative effort with Amir Gissin in Toronto and Noam Katz in Jerusalem. The Israel Defense Forces have created their own channel on YouTube, where they have been able to provide video content illustrating the realities of what the IDF is facing.

Both the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the IDF suffer from a lack of professional manpower and budget. But by using the Internet, they have been able to reach people from London, New York and Tokyo to Toronto, Cairo and Tokyo in offices and their homes.

The third area of social networking to be addressed is Facebook. Facebook provides an interactive experience whereby surfers can view videos, photos and various Internet links. But of greatest importance, Facebook enables the world community to chat with one another in thousands of community and issue based forums. This is called "stickiness" or "glue" by Internet marketing experts - the rest of the world knows it as social networking on the new media.

The Israel News Agency in cooperation with IsraelPr.com was quick to get into action in getting Israel's PR message out. Within two hours of the first defensive air strikes in Gaza against the terror organization Hamas, these Israel PR and Internet marketing, SEO professionals created the Facebook group: I Support the Israel Defense Forces In Preventing Terror Attacks From Gaza.

What started out as a simple support group for Israel has now grown to become the largest pro Israel forum on the Net with over 66,000 members.

The Facebook groups states as its goal: "Responding to unprovoked terror rocket attacks from Hamas terrorists in Gaza against Israel civilian populations, the Israel Defense Forces has launched a massive counter attack. This Facebook forum supports the brave men and women in the Israel Defense Forces who by air, water and ground protect Israel's democracy and sovereign borders."

The missions of the Facebook group are to to act as a support group for Jews, Christians and Israelis, to disseminate honest and objective information and to create dialogue, tolerance and peaceful bridges between Israelis and moderate Arabs.

Israel Pr professionals see Facebook as the most powerful weapon in their arsenal. Facebook is ranked as the fifth largest Website with over 160 million users. It is the watering hole of the Internet. Once perceived as a forum for college and university students, Facebook is now used by multi national companies and governments. The I Support the Israel Defense Forces In Preventing Terror Attacks From Gaza forum practices free speech and illustrates democracy in Israel by doing such. But the Facebook group does have red lines. Anyone making racist remarks, personal attacks or death threats gets banned and reported to both Facebook and their local authorities.

Problem is that there are more Arabs than there are Jews on the Internet, on YouTube and on Facebook. As such they can make more noise than the Jews and create bias in both the media and various governments who cater to them for oil. So journalists need to be more objective and see through that Islamic noise. They need to check out facts and take quality over quantity. Most are doing this today. And Facebook gives them an edge.

Proportionality raises a challenge. Six hundred Palestinians dead versus nine Israelis. There's just no way to make that proportion look pretty. It appears like a David and Goliath - but this time Israel appears to be the Goliath. And Israel has no choice. To win a war one must adhere to the Powell Doctrine. The "Powell doctrine" holds that the no nation should only go to war as a last resort and then only with overwhelming force.

Lastly, Hamas, whose members hide behind the skirts of women and the children they use as human shields, know full well it is impossible for Israel to strike the terror chiefs without inflicting civilian casualties. Civilian casualties which, it has to be said, have provoked a heart-searching in Israel not reciprocated in Arab nations when it comes to Israeli children.

So, given that the IDF has declared Gaza a military zone and is preventing the media from taking war death photos that sensationalize their newspapers and increase sales at the expense of who is right and wrong, Israel must explain the situation in Gaza as clearly and as loudly as it can.

The question the foreign media really wants answered is invariably not "who's in the right?" but "how will this round of fighting improve the overall situation?"

And on that point, Israel never has had a convincing argument. Given the country's long history of engaging in wars that kill many more of its enemies than its own citizens but only buy a few months or years of calm, it's a tough call to explain how this latest escapade will change the strategic balance, bring peace and prevent the need for another such bloodbath further down the line. That Israel repeats in mantra form - Israel wants peace - is not enough.

The mistake that many have made on Facebook is arrogantly communicating in one language and expecting everyone to follow it. Those who act as administrators on I Support the Israel Defense Forces In Preventing Terror Attacks From Gaza have had to fend off a barrage of personal death threats and spam coming from a variety of Arabs states including in Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Iran.

The pro Israel and pro IDF group states that it attributes much of its success to one feature of Facebook. The Wall, an interactive discussion group. But that Facebook Wall has basically contained only one language - English. So when many Arabs come into this Facebook group, they see characters that they cannot read. Because of limited English language skills, all they are able to do is swear a few words in English and then find themselves banned. What the administrators in I Support the Israel Defense Forces In Preventing Terror Attacks From Gaza have done is introduced a few lines of Arabic for them saying that Israel wants peace for both Israel and the Palestinians and that our war is with Hamas - not them.

Since these few lines of Arabic have been injected into this Facebook group, personal attacks and spam is down by 80 percent. Most Arabs despise Hamas more than they hate Israel. Hamas brainwashes Palestinian children to believe that Israel and the Jews hate all Arabs. Many Palestinians and Arabs have never heard anything directly from Israelis. Perhaps one of the few places where Palestinians meet Israelis are at Israel security checkpoints, not one of the warmest places to sit down and have a chat.

So from practical experience, we here at the Israel News Agency are strongly suggesting that if you want to get across effective messaging - use a native Arab speaker or Google Translate.

Yes, Israel wants peace. But to say that in Arabic is to reach your target market. And that Arab market will then do the PR and messaging for Israel and other democratic nations in a more effective and powerful manner.

Everyone wants peace.
It's just a matter of communicating those words in languages that people understand.

Joel Leyden, a native of New York who has lived in Israel for over 20 years, has served in the IDF, has practiced international public relations, public affairs, crisis communications, journalism and Internet marketing for 30 years.
Leyden who co-created Israel's first commercial Website, Israel's first on-line news organization and provides Internet marketing SEO services with offices in Tel Aviv, London and New York, is the publisher of the Israel News Agency.

The above news content was edited and SEO optimized in Israel for the Internet by the Leyden Communications Internet Marketing SEO Group - Israel, London, New York.

Original Article.

Email exchange: ARTICLE 19 Condemns continuing media blackout of crisis in Gaza

2009-01-14T03:18:00.000-08:00

For Immediate Release – 9th January 2009

Ten days after the Israeli's Supreme Court ruling on 31 December which ordered the state to allow foreign reporters into the Gaza Strip, Israel continues to block foreign media access.

Each day international journalists have gone to the border crossing and have been turned away by military officials, normally on the premise that it is too dangerous and that the presence of journalists at the terminals could make them, a target for militants. Journalists have therefore not been able to talk to the Palestinians inside Gaza to gain their version of events. However, at the same time international reporters have been welcomed into Israel and have been free to interview Israeli officials on the crisis.

"The media blackout is a violation of the world's right to know what is happening in Gaza. In the absence of international media it is impossible to receive unbiased news on the situation. It is also an abuse of the right to freedom of expression for those living inside Gaza who are being prevented from telling their story to the world. Moreover, the presence of journalists on the ground can actually deter abuses of international human rights and international humanitarian law in a conflict situation. Freedom of expression and the right to access to information are necessary for building a situation of lasting peace and security for both Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East,” stated Agnes Callamard, Executive Director of ARTICLE 19

Preventing foreign media from reporting from inside Gaza represents a new low for press freedom in Israel. The State has historically allowed access to foreign reporters even at the height of previous conflicts. The Israeli State not only stands in violation of international human rights law but is also acting against the decision of its own highest court by which eight members of the media were to be allowed into Gaza when the Erez crossing was opened for humanitarian reasons.

It should be noted that the Supreme Court’s ruling represents somewhat of a compromise between international standards and the Israeli State in that it permits the authorities to place a limitation on the number of journalists allowed entry to Gaza and only says they must consider increasing numbers once security allows. Although security is an issue for all journalists in conflict situations and it is sometimes easier to ensure the safety of small numbers, access to journalists should not be limited numerically. Limiting the numbers of journalists given access places a restriction upon the number of reports and range of opinions coming out of a conflict zone. There are currently journalists from about 30 different countries, speaking at least 10 different languages waiting in Israel to access Gaza. Even if the Israeli government were to permit the entry of 8 individuals at a time, this would clearly not be enough to serve the world’s media and right to information effectively.

ARTICLE 19 calls upon the Israeli authorities to allow immediate and unrestricted foreign media access into the Gaza Strip in accordance with its international obligations on the right to freedom of expression and the right to access information, under Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel ratified on 3 October 1991.

________________________________________

Thanks for the latest, Rami.

As you have come to know me by now, I hope you will realize that there are some aspects of Israel that I am not too comfortable with.

However, I must differ with you on the issue of media coverage of the present conflict.

Israel is fighting a difficult war. It is a war on terrorism, a form of warfare it and the rest of the world needs to ajust to on almost a daily basis primarily because of its nature which is ever changing.

This was very well evidenced in the Mumbai terror attacks where the perpetrators used every modern means to monitor world medi and plan their next moves.

How Gadgets Helped Mumbai Attackers

By Noah Shachtman December 01, 2008 | 9:39:23 AM

The Mumbai terrorists used an array of commercial technologies -- from Blackberries to GPS navigators to anonymous e-mail accounts -- to pull off their heinous attacks.

For years, terrorists and insurgents around the world have used off-the-shelf hardware and software to stay ahead of bigger, better-funded authorities. In 2007, former U.S. Central Command chief Gen. John Abizaid complained that, with their Radio Shack stockpile of communications gear, "this enemy is better networked than we are." The strikes that killed at least 174 appears to be another example of how wired today's "global guerrillas" can be.

As they approached Mumbai by boat, the terrorists "steered the vessel using GPS equipment," according to the Daily Mail. A satellite phone was later found aboard.

Once the coordinated attacks began, the terrorists were on their cell phones constantly. They used BlackBerries "to monitor international reaction to the atrocities, and to check on the police response via the internet," the Courier Mail reports.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/12/the-gagdets-of.html

Israel is fighting a war for its survival. Can it afford to take chances?

Looking forward to better days

Kind regards

Batzi

_____________________________________________

Dear All,
Yet, I find it exceedingly annoying to constantly hear that "no Western news organisations are allowed into Gaza" from any number of organsiations when anyone who listens to anything can hear that Al Jazeera has crews in there. BBC has two producers in there. Yesterday I heard that there are AP and Reuters also have people in there. Come on people, there are journalists in there! There ARE people there and they ARE doing something! The reason being that they ALWAYS were there and didn't play the Parachute journalism game. So, to you lot who thought you could skimp on foreign correspondents. Blame yourselves!

Kristina

_____________________________________________

And to add to what Kristina is saying: Let us just also bring in the race card. Because it is there.

These guys in Gaza, whether employed by BBC or Al Jazeera English, do not really count since they are locals and thereby, unconsciously by most, consiously by some, are not deemed to be "real" journalists, or adequately professional.

I personally shut some people up last wednesday at SVT when Aktuellt decided to carry Al Jazeeras story from Gaza city. Some were worried the story was "thin" and of "little substance". When I pointed out that if it had been a Swede or even Norwegian who had filed the same story it would be leading all the news shows. The "doubters", realizing their "mistake", quickly changed footing and endorsed the story...

Aktuellt in the end saved the day by leading the Gaza package with two Gaza reporters. But the battle for respect and equality is a constant one.

http://svt.se/svt/play/video.jsp?a=329793

New York TImes and Washington Post also write their stories together with their people i Gaza. (Fixers are problably quickly upgraded to reporters by some of the newsorganisations... ;-) )

/Saam

_____________________________________________

I wrote an article about how the Israeli ministry of defense's barring of international correspondents from Gaza affects Israelis' perception of the military campaign.

You can read more on this subject at Index on Censorship; the article is written by an Israeli journalist.

It is certainly true that BBC, AJ and AJE, the NY Times and a few other newspapers have permanent local correspondents reporting out of Gaza right now - although the NY Times' Taghreed El Khodary is Egyptian and AJE's correspondent is an American; both were already inside Gaza when Erez Crossing was closed to journalists.

I cannot comment on the "race card" from my perch in Tel Aviv. But I can say that in Israel AJ is widely viewed as a propaganda outlet. Most of my friends think their stories are manufactured or stage-managed, even though they've never watched it and I cannot convince them to take a look and make up their own minds about its credibility.

That is why I oppose the barring foreign media from crossing Erez into Gaza: in the absence of a diversity of voices, reporting in different languages and taking into account their viewers' worldview, we are going to have an ongoing crediblity problem with reports coming out of the territory. That means that stories about the bombarding of the UNRWA school last week, or the use of white phosphorous on heavily populated areas, are insufficiently investigated, leaving doubts that can be twisted for propaganda purposes.

I'm not sure how many of you have seen this report by the Associated Press's correspondent in Gaza, Ibrahim Barzak, in which he matter-of-factly describes watching his home destroyed on the IDF's Youtube site. Quite a few Jewish and Israeli colleagues who worked with him in the past have described him as "the best reporter in Gaza."

Best,
Lisa

_____________________________________________

At the International department of the Swedish Radio, we have been contacting Swedish citizens living in Gaza to give a clearer image of what is going on on the ground. Now that most of them were allowed to leave, I guess we will stick to translating interviews with Gazans from Arabic to Swedish, however, as a producer I am tasked to balance such reports with the "Swedish perspective."

I have been in touch with Mohammed Omar, one of the key fixers / photographers in the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza, and I asked him to take some photos. However, he could not send any since there was no electricity, let alone internet.

However, some were more lucky. Some young students are using very simple equipment to report on some aspects that we never see in the mainstream media. Yes, citizen journalists like this one who went through the tunnels into Egypt with his camera. Meanwhile, war 2.0 taking place elsewhere on the net.

Sure, there are local reporters who have done a marvelous job in the last few days. But it really gets on my nerves when TV networks call their expert "reporters on the ground" sitting on a fancy balcony in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv or in a haven just outside Gaza and say "we cannot say what the situation is like, since we cannot go in." and all they can offer is the official narrative or descriptions of large clouds of smoke in the far distance.

All the best,
Rami

_____________________________________________

Al Jazeera English Beats Israel’s Ban on Reporters in Gaza

2009-01-14T03:13:00.000-08:00

Some may call it propaganda but I call it hardcore reporting. If you are not watching Al Jazeera English’s coverage of the War on Gaza, you are missing much, if not, most of the story.

Israel has invaded Gaza, divided it, and banned foreign journalists from entering — but Al Jazeera English was inside before the war began, and its reporting is as inexorable, though more precise, than Israel’s “surgical attacks.”

When Israel closed the border crossing into Gaza they successfully prevented most journalists and reporters from entering the strip.

But unlike Western media companies who generally have their correspondents based in Jerusalem, Al Jazeera’s Ayman Mohyeldin and Sherine Tadros were already in Gaza before Israel’s invasion, leaving them with the huge responsibility of providing virtually exclusive reporting — and they’ve delivered.

I could ramble on about their thorough and thought-provoking reporting of this controversial story or I could send you to Livestation where you can quickly download a program for free that will allow you to watch Al Jazeera English in high quality (as well as dozens of other international news channels) legally.

In case you are the type who insists on tasting ice cream before buying a cone, here is a sample of their reporting from Gaza before the ground invasion:

And here is a sample of a segment after Israel’s troops crossed the border:

If you are curious here is an example of a recent interview with Knesset Member Yuval Steinitz for the Israeli perspective.

Flipping to channel 52 on my tiny Japanese-made television here in Beirut, I get a first-hand account of what is happening in Gaza. The network shows live images that I unfortunately know most Americans will never see. Angle aside, the access they have and context provided is unparalleled in the coverage of this war and enough of a reason to scroll back up and click on the link. Their coverage has included shots of the remains of buildings in Gaza, footage of explosions and interviews with doctors at Al Shifa Hospital (the main one in Gaza), aid workers and civilians on the ground. Of course, like other news networks, they also feature hard-hitting interviews with top Israeli, Palestinian, and international leaders

When Al Jazeera English first launched in 2006 I was living in New York City and had to settle with watching the channel via YouTube.

When I traveled home to Austria (a country that, like most others, carries the channel) I was thrilled to get a chance to watch it in its entirety and judge for myself whether a budding news organization with big ambitions in a region of the world thought to have superficial news coverage would deliver on its promise of providing an alternative compelling, but fair perspective on international news stories.

The U.S. government has jailed an Al Jazeera reporter (accusing him of being a terrorist) and has dropped a 500-pound bomb on the Al Jazeera bureau in Kabul in the past, but this does not deny that it is a top notch news organization that despite some fair criticisms in its coverage of the West, provides a perspective often missing in international news coverage. And if you don’t believe me - give it a try.

If I flip the channel up one I’m watching CNN International — a channel I was addicted to while growing up and that first introduced me to the wonders and worries of the world. But despite CNN’s well-earned and undeniable impressive reputation and all of its bells and whistles, it has not matched Al Jazeera’s in-depth coverage this time around.

Israel not only used the cover of darkness on Saturday to launch its ground invasion into Gaza. But despite a Supreme Court decision that allows up to 12 foreign journalists to cross the border whenever the border crossings between Israel and Gaza open for humanitarian cases it has refused their entry in an effort to keep the international community in the dark. But Al Jazeera English has been pulling the covers off, offering insight as to why Israel may have conveniently closed the borders in the lead up to this invasion.

On Friday, when Israel opened the border and allowed those in Gaza carrying foreign passports to leave, they did not let journalists in.

A month ago a letter signed by AP Chief Executive Tom Curley, Reuters Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller and other executives from CNN, BBC and many international broadcasters was submitted to the Israeli government emphasizing their growing concern for an “unprecedented denial of access to the Gaza Strip for the international media.”

Israeli officials repeatedly claim it was coincidental and not their intention. But in the past foreign journalists have been allowed to enter Gaza, when Israeli journalists have not been, even during times of war.

Here is an ABC Australia report on the ban documenting an exchange with security.

As the recent global economic crisis and this latest crisis in Gaza show, our world is large but it is getting smaller. We are more interconnected than we have ever been and Al Jazeera English offers a comprehensive and ground-breaking global perspective, emphasizing news from the developing world and providing a context for it.

Sadly, major cable providers still refuse to carry Al Jazeera English, but perhaps, if Americans watch their coverage of this war, they will realize that while it is not an NBC comedy show, it is “Must See TV.”

– By Ahmed Shihab-Eldin

Huffington Post

Original Article.

Israel uses YouTube, Twitter to share its point of view

2009-01-14T03:10:00.000-08:00

By Samira J. Simone
CNN

(CNN) -- Israel has taken its barrage of airstrikes in Gaza to the Web, creating a YouTube channel this week to post footage of its air force dropping bombs on Hamas targets.

An initial message by the Israel Defense Forces posted on the channel, youtube.com/user/idfnadesk, said Israel wanted to use YouTube to "help us bring our message to the world" with "exclusive footage showing the IDF's operation success" in Gaza.

An IDF spokesman said YouTube was a way to get that message "to as many as we can," though he declined to comment further.

The YouTube channel is just one multimedia platform Israel is using to spread its message on the recent campaign in Gaza, which began Saturday.

The Israeli Consulate in New York also launched a Twitter feed Monday, which it has used to solicit questions from users for a virtual press conference.

The YouTube posts started Monday, with black-and-white aerial military video of Israeli aircraft striking "rockets in transit" and "terrorist smuggling tunnels." Another video in color showed what are identified as Israeli trucks transporting aid into Gaza.

The statement, still posted as of Tuesday night, said YouTube had taken down some of the IDF videos but, "due to blogger and viewer support, YouTube has returned some of the footage they removed."

The statement was removed sometime Wednesday, replaced with one that reads in part, "We thank you for visiting us and will continue to update this site with documentation of the IDF's humane action and operational success in operation 'Cast Lead.' "

By Wednesday afternoon, the channel had 5,600 subscribers and 16 videos posted. The most popular was a video titled "Israeli Air Force Strikes Hamas Government Complex," which shows a large compound with three structures methodically leveled in an air assault Tuesday. Another video shows a building identified as the office of Hamas leader Ismail Haniya in crosshairs before disappearing in a dark cloud of smoke.

According to its Web site, YouTube has a policy that prohibits "inappropriate content," including violent images. While YouTube wouldn't specifically address the IDF statement, a company official said the site relies on its subscribers to flag videos considered inappropriate.

"We review all flagged content quickly, and if we find that a video does violate the guidelines, we remove it, on average in under an hour," said Victoria Grand, YouTube's policy chief. "Occasionally, a video flagged by users is mistakenly taken down. When this is brought to our attention, we review the content and take appropriate action, which may include restoring videos that had been removed."

The New York Israeli Consulate's Twitter feed has picked up more than 2,600 followers since it launched Monday to share its point of view with a younger demographic, said David Saranga, consul for media and public affairs.

"We saw that there is a big debate, a very vivid debate about the situation in Gaza, and we wanted to bring our point of view, we wanted to share it with people on Twitter," Saranga said.

Using the abbreviated language of 140 characters, the feed takes in comments from users and answers their questions on a variety of issues, from the possibility of negotiations with Hamas -- "we R pro nego...we talk only w/ ppl who accept R rt 2 live" -- to how many rockets have hit Israel in the past six month -- "ovr 500," according to Saranga, who handles nearly all of the questions.

"We wanted to outreach to the young generation, who does not read the conventional media, but is still interested in events in the Middle East, so we thought this is a good way to be an official voice for the questions people are asking," he said.

Israeli airstrikes in the territory began Saturday, in what it calls an effort to halt the firing of rockets into southern Israel. More than 390 Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian medical sources, and 1,900 people have been wounded, including 400 women and children.

Israeli sources say four Israelis have been killed by Palestinian rocket fire.

Haniya, whose office in Gaza was struck overnight, said Israel needed to "stop attacking and killing our children, women and men."

The Israeli military says it is targeting only Hamas militants, which it says are responsible for the barrage of rocket fire into southern Israel. Each side blames the other for violating an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire, which formally expired December 19 but had been weakening for months.

CNN's Emanuella Grinberg contributed to this report.

Original report.

War 2.0, Propaganda 2.0 or Public Diplomacy 2.0: The Role of Internet and Mobile in Israels Gaza Strip Bombing

2009-01-14T02:28:00.000-08:00

War 2.0, Propaganda 2.0 or Public Diplomacy 2.0: The Role of Internet and Mobile in Israel’s Gaza Strip Bombing

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War on terrorism 2.0

2009-01-14T01:00:00.000-08:00

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An interesting study by the Hoover Institute.

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War 2.0*


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