So long and thanks for all the fish. She claims the Shalit family was holding her story hostage for four years, and she deserves royalties. As Shalit was exchanged for prisoners, she should also figure into the exchange process. The transactional value of suffering.But, since the alleged offender was a minor at the time- eleven years old- are there copyright laws that extend down to that age group?
Norman Finkelstein: An Israeli author is suing the family of a soldier being held by Islamic militants in the Gaza Strip, claiming he plagiarised one of her books. Shelly Elkayam is seeking royalties earned from the sales of When the Shark and the Fish First Met, a story written by Israeli Cpl Gilad Shalit when he was 11 years old and published after his capture four years ago.
“The story that Shalit wrote was written by me,” Ms Elkayam told Israeli army radio. “I have been a literary hostage of the Shalit family for four years.”…
---The figure of the smiling Prime Minister has turned into a kind of “Forrest Gump,” that has been cut from the image and pasted into photographs of key moments in Israel's history. These include Maccabi Tel Aviv’s 1977 European Cup win, the signing of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948 and the signing of the peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. ---Read More:http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/netanyahu-becomes-israel-s-forrest-gump-on-the-internet-1.390865
His schoolteacher unearthed Cpl Shalit’s childhood story after his capture, and it has since been printed in 17 editions and several different languages. Cpl Shalit’s family have acknowledged that the story was inspired by Elkayam, but claim there are key differences in the text.Elkayam, however, claims there were only “superficial changes” from her own book When the Snake and the Mouse First Met.
“They continue to steal my book rights, which was a best-seller from the time it was published up until they published Gilad’s book,” Ms Elkayam said. “Just like it’s his right to be free, it’s my right that my rights will be protected.”
---Haver:Third, in other words, violence is the constitutive relation. Which means that violence is the first relation, and that violence constitutes relationality as such. Relation is violence. There is no outside of violence. That being said, however, I would emphasize that it is possible nevertheless to substitute a caress for a murder. When Genet was asked why he had never committed murder, he replied, "»probably because I wrote my books«" (Genet 1991a, 160). In any case, if we cannot think the ontologically constitutive nature of violence, we cannot possibly think the desperation of those for whom, by force of historical, existential circumstance, relation can only be expressed in what is called terror. Such desperation is not, or at least not merely, a psychological condition. Read More:http://them.polylog.org/5/fhw-en.htm
Cpl Shalit’s father, Noam Shalit, said that the family was aware of the allegations but was not personally involved in the publication of the book, Israel’s News1 website reported. In Cpl Shalit’s 350-word-long story, a fish and a shark become friendly over a game of hide and seek, but are warned by their parents to stay away from each other. Nevertheless, they overcome their natural enmity to become friends and live in peace….
---A member of an elite Israel Police unit has been charged with selling explosive devices to criminal elements, a gag order lifted by the Tel Aviv District Court indicated on Wendesday. ...According to the charges revealed on Wednesday, police investigators were able to track down the rogue officer after finding his DNA on an explosive device detonated in a suspected
gland assassination attempt. ...Image:http://mubi.com/films/the-policeman
…Cpl Shalit’s parents, tireless campaigners for his release, have used the story to keep Shalit’s plight alive among the Israeli public, and all the proceeds are directed into the campaign for his release.Read More:http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/biggest-zionist-cover-up-since-911/
ADDENDUM:
Hannah Arendt: (1969) To be sure, the recent emphasis on violence is still mostly a matter of theory and rhetoric, but it is precisely this rhetoric, shot through with all kinds of Marxist leftovers, that is so baffling. Who could possibly call an ideology Marxist that has put its faith, to quote Fanon, in “the classless idlers,” believes that “in the lumpen-proletariat the rebellion will find its urban spearhead,” and trusts that the “gangsters light the way for the people”? Sartre in his great felicity with words has given expression to the new faith. “Violence,” he now believes, on the strength of Fanon’s book, “like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted.” If this were true, revenge would be the cure-all for most of our ills. This myth is more abstract, further removed from reality than Sorel’s myth of a general strike ever was. It is on a par with Fanon’s worst rhetorical excesses, such as, “Hunger with dignity is preferable to bread eaten in slavery.” No history and no theory are needed to refute this statement; the most superficial observer of the processes in the human body knows its untruth. But had he said that bread eaten with dignity is preferable to cake eaten in slavery, the rhetorical point would have been lost….
---Yann Martel, the Canadian author and winner of this year's Booker prize has become entangled in a row over the plagiarism of fictional ideas after freely admitting the inspiration for his prize-winning novel came from another writer's work. In the Life of Pi, Martel, 39, tells the story of a shipwrecked Indian teenager who ends up in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger after the ship taking him and his family to Canada sinks. It is this similarity to a story by one of Brazil's most respected authors, Moacyr Scliar, which has started the row over how much of the idea Martel "borrowed" from Scliar's Max and the Cats, in which a teenage Jewish boy is adrift in a boat with a panther after a shipwreck. Although Martel readily credits the story by Scliar, a doctor, as the inspiration for his novel, he says he only read a review of the book. ---Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/nov/08/bookerprize2002.awardsandprizes image:http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/rousseau_henri.html
…If one reads these irresponsible and grandiose statements of these intellectuals—and those I quoted are fairly representative, except that Fanon still manages to stay closer to reality than most of them—and if one looks at them in the perspective of what we know about the history of rebellions and revolutions, it is tempting to deny their significance, to ascribe them to a passing mood, or to the ignorance and nobility of sentiment of those who are exposed to unprecedented events without any means to handle them mentally, and who therefore have revived thoughts and emotions which Marx had hoped to have buried forever. For it is certainly nothing new that those who are being violated dream of violence, that those who are oppressed “dream at least once a day of setting” themselves up in the oppressor’s place, that those who are poor dream of the possessions of the rich, that the persecuted dream of exchanging “the role of the quarry for that of the hunter,” and the last of the kingdom where “the last shall be first, and the first last.” Read More:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1969/feb/27/a-special-supplement-reflections-on-violence/?page=2
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