A must see 45 min youtube BBC doc. on Gaza

Thanks Adam for the link and reminder. Powerful indeed…......

adam; thanks for that reminder because i remember this piece, and i remember tom, and rachel well too. there was a time when we were able to work in gaza and internationals were able to be there too. i had produced this work around the same time that tom was killed and rachel corrie a few weeks earlier.

http://zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/rafiqui/index.html‘

it is unimaginable, but gaza is a larger hell today then back then when i thought it was intolerable and inhuman.

asim

Asim, very powerful and thoughtful work, there are a couple of spectacularily composed photos (like the one with the soot from the cieling among others) thanks for calling my attention to it. How awful that the situation is worse, I was truly ignorant of the extent of the violence in Gaza, I had no idea that it was so consistent, for some reason I had the impresion it was relatively sporadic.

adam, that is not so unusual i.e. not knowing what all has been taking place in gaza. there is a fabulous website called rafah today, see it at http://www.rafahtoday.org/ organized by a palestinian journalist-photographer. his work is straight forward, unadorned, honest and unpretentious. i have admired his work for its clarity and lack of ‘great photojournalist’ pretentions. whereas i appreciate your generous comments about my images, i think that you will find mohammad’s work more powerful, more immediate, and a true long term documentation of the hell that places like rafah have been turned into.

Asim, I tried the rafahtoday.org link but it doesn’t seem to work. Any idea why? Shookran!

Karl it works with me, maybe try it again.

my god!

....and now I wait to hear accusations of fabrication and fauxtography.

What must they think will become of these children with this in their nightmares, with this corrupting their dreams? They do not think of the future.

Jesus, Asim, or rather Allah. Those are searing images. Very upsetting. That is too much concentrated grief for one viewing. I think you did a fantastic job, very honest, unpretentious, direct, gripping. I will check out Rafah’s site after i have had a chance to calm down.

Just saw this horrific documentary…jeezus! What I didnt see was Palestinian jets, attack helicopters, tanks, bulldozers,sniper outposts, etc.etc. etc.. Why? because they dont have any! This was a view of a major world power literally shooting fish in a barrel. Obscene to the extreme!
G.

Thank you, Adam for posting this.

And Asim! A great job you have done to tell these people’s story. I will look at every one of your images and read every caption written. Thank you very much for sharing this with us.

The documentary is beyond belief. The whole thing is surreal. I kept thinking, this reminds me of those scenes from The Terminator where the cyborg machines are killing all the humans in this concrete rubble wasteland. Every time the people walk outside in Rafah some ridiculous tank-like creature comes whizzing at them firing off tear gas and bullets. The doctor walks outside the front door of his house, and the front yard is The Apocalypse. What a freaking nightmare.

I am glad people are watching this, pass the link on, more of us should be aware of how outrageous the situation has become. Asim, I hope this post will also lead to lots of traffic to your work as well as rafahtoday. One gets so engrosed in ones own backyard especially now with Oacaca etc, every now and again you have to remind yourself to look over the fence.

Occupation 101

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM_o_lsmrPM

oi….................

have (this morning) finished reading Antonio Lobo Antune’s grief-strick spit-tear-gape fever-nightmare-song novel about Portugese involvement in Angola “South of Nowhere”.....

and now Asim’s story…...

and then this documentary…...

.................

how we have corrupted ourselves, our world, divested ourselves past the parsimony of grief, that we carve our children up, spit them back out after we’ve dined on them, body-bone-back brittled and unhung, cast like sulfer stones, the women who’ve griev’d for longer than we, homoerectus, have learned to walk upright, the fathers and sons and mothers and daughters and uncles and aunsts and greif welps and we walp as we wasp them others ourselves gone…....

i cannot understand, ever, my son safe and asleep, my wife wearied and asleep, these faces shattered against my pacific, empty fulcrum’d life…...why, we who are bombarded with image, have yet not arrested the reasons for the images….

its grief and i forever do not know how to rememdy this: with my camera, my life’s work with my family and friends and students, my action as a hope it will enlarge the world and it does not….

grief, grief, grief, shadow’d manible of grief…....

we have betrayed our children, i know how much i too betray and i want to unrest wrestle this away….

thank you for the film and for asim’s story….

that i, may someday, turn my words or pictures toward a place that will arrest this kind of madness, desist’d, surcease…..

o, fucking grief, we’ve left, all around, most of the world behind…..

passing, swelling grief…..