Electronic Lebanon - Crisis Appeal

The moment news broke of Israel's massive assault targeting Lebanon's civilians and destroying its painstakingly rebuilt infrastructure on July 12, The Electronic Intifada team moved into high gear. Within hours we launched a dedicated site, at http://electronicLebanon.net, providing eyewitness accounts, commentary and multimedia coverage of the ongoing tragedy.

Our team, working 24 hours a day on four continents has uploaded 185 articles, an average of over 20 articles a day. Electronic Lebanon has quickly become one of the key sources of comprehensive and independent coverage and analysis at a time when the mainstream media appear to be producing more biased, ill-informed and dehumanizing coverage than ever.

At the same time, we maintain our focus on Israel's continued destruction of the lives of Palestinians under occupation through our main site, at http://electronicIntifada.net and the catastrophe in Iraq at http://electronicIraq.net

We have had more than 376,000 visits and over 1,538,000 page views since the start of Israel's invasion of Gaza on June 27th, including 206,000 visits, and 891,000 page views since Israel's war against Lebanon on July 12th.

Passion and energy drive our team, but unfortunately that is not always enough; we also need funds to run our servers, support the best possible web design and functionality, communications and equipment. Our current annual fundraising of about $50,000 per year covers only about a sixth of the true costs of producing sites of the quality that we insist on. We have set a goal of doubling our fundraising this year to bring our budget more into line with our real needs.

If you value high quality, up-to-date and cutting edge independent analysis of the crises in the region, we urge you to consider supporting us with a contribution today.

We were able to launch Electronic Lebanon quickly because we planned ahead — we bought the domain three years ago and own dormant domain names for all the countries in the Middle East. We pray we will never need to use them, as we hoped we would never have to launch Electronic Lebanon. But as long as there is misinformation, injustice and war we will be there — with your generous support.

Ali Abunimah, Arjan El Fassed, Laurie King, Nigel Parry
Cofounders, The Electronic Intifada

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5162.shtml