This article is adapted from a speech given by photojournalist Molly Bingham at Western Kentucky University.

Bingham was detained in 2003 by Iraqi security forces and held in Abu Ghraib prison from March 25 to April 2, 2003. Eighteen days after her release, she returned to Iraq to pursue stories for The New York Times, The Guardian and others.

Taking a short break during the summer of 2003, Bingham had the idea of working on a story to explore who was involved in the nascent resistance that was becoming apparent throughout Iraq. She scanned the papers that summer, looking for an article that would show some journalist had reported the story, had gone deeper to find out the source of the new violence. No one had. So in August 2003, Bingham returned with British journalist Steve Connors and spent the next 10 months reporting the story of the Iraqi resistance. Her account was published in Vanity Fair magazine in July 2004; Connors shot a documentary film on the subject.

This speech was a challenge to journalists, and Americans, to speak up and be sure their comments, questions and thoughts are heard, and that the First Amendment is celebrated in all its strengths.

On May 3, Arab Media Watch advisor Chris Leadbeater got a letter on anti-Semitism published in Israel's Haaretz newspaper.

On May 4, AMW advisors Sami Ramadani and Tahrir Numan, and member Sabah Jawad, were among 5 Iraqis who got a letter published in the Guardian. On May 5, they got the same letter published in the Independent. Tahrir also got a letter published in the May 4 edition of the Evening Standard.

AMW member Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh's book "Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Struggle" is reviewed in the latest issue of Holy Land Studies. In the same issue, he reviews the book "Sabra and Shatila: September 1982".

On May 8 Safa Sawi, AMW member and head of the Arab Club of Britain, was interviewed on Egypt's Nile TV about AMW.

AMW correspondent Yasser Abu Moailek has finished working as a translator and local producer for a documentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will be shown on Channel 4 in August.

On May 9, AMW chairman Sharif Hikmat Nashashibi and Tim Llewellyn, patron and former BBC Middle East correspondent, are interviewed as part of an Australian documentary entitled Global Haywire, which deals with the East-West divide. Director and writer Bruce Petty's film Leisure won the Oscar for Best Animation.

Signal Books plans to re-publish in paperback Publish It Not: The Middle East Cover-Up by the late Sir Christopher Mayhew and Michael Adams, which was first published in 1975 by Longman.

Although the publisher and editor of Signal Books shares the views expressed in this important book, it recognises that there may be a business risk in undertaking its publication and invites expressions of intention to purchase the book at £5 (a 50% discount from the retail price of £9.95). As soon as subscriptions for 500 copies have been received, it will proceed with publication.

Arab Media Watch, in conjunction with the Council for Arab-British Understanding, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Al-Awda (the Palestine Right to Return Coalition), urges people to help achieve this book's re-publication.

AMW patron and former BBC Middle East correspondent Tim Llewellyn has agreed to write a foreword describing interim developments since 1975 and comparing the issues that Mayhew and Adams addressed with those existing now.

By Arab Media Watch correspondent Yasser Abu Moailek.

Over a crowded table at one of the many coffee shops that line the main street in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, a number of Palestinians – young and old – were preoccupied in heated discussions about the "topic of the hour", as they call it.

Half-empty tea and coffee cups teemed up on the tables, as the space above "Abu Sultan's" coffee shop turned into a murky mixture of cigarette, hubbly-bubbly and car smoke, which increased as the deadline for opening the ballots of the city's municipal elections approached.

Everyone was giving their own forecast of who was going to win, but all admitted that the results would not fall short of surprises, due to the fierce competition between the 68 candidates for the 15 seats of Rafah's municipality.

Rafah is one of 84 Palestinian population centres included in the second stage of the local elections, in which 2,519 candidates will compete for 906 seats, hoping to win some of the expected 400,000 votes in the elections on May 5.

By Ray Hanania, Arab Media Watch member, former national president of the Palestinian American Congress, an award-winning syndicated columnist and author, and managing editor of TheArabStreet.com.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has taken significant steps to distinguish himself from his predecessor, the late Yasser Arafat who was reviled by Israel's rightwing government and by President Bush as an obstacle to peace.

Just over 100 days in office, Abbas has responded mainly to the concerns of the Bush administration, gaining some praise and empowering the US to take tougher stands against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government on issues of land confiscation and settlements.

But the steps Abbas has taken are not enough and lack the one thing that more than anything undermined the movement for peace that began in 1988 when Arafat initiated contact with Israel and declared the Palestinian willingness to recognise Israel's right to exist within the pre-1967 borders.