Antony Loewenstein

Who said that being a multimillionaire defence contractor doesn’t make good business sense? David H. Brooks’ daughter had her bat-mitzvah last weekend in the US, so naturally enough daddy wanted to show how much he cared – while ignoring the misery his job actually creates – and hired a plethora of A-list musicians to entertain the audience/kid’s party.

A worthwhile lesson in how dirty money can be used for good…instead of evil.

Steve Wasserman, Truthdig.org, November 28:

“Why continue to read newspapers? After all, newspapers are losing circulation at precipitous rates, giving rise to fears that they may not survive long enough to write their own obituaries. Cutbacks, buyouts and layoffs are widespread, affecting many of America’s most prestigious newspapers, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, where it was recently announced that the paper faced an 8% reduction in its editorial staff. Morale plummets, anxiety mounts.

“The growing maturity of the Internet and the explosion of the blogosphere suggest that newspapers’ demise is inexorable. A perfect storm of technological advances appears to make newspapers fit for the study less of schools of journalism than departments of anthropology. The virtual world is incontestably more nimble and democratic. It permits a chorus of diverse voices that newspapers can’t hope to replicate, if only for reasons of space. Why remain loyal to a medium that every day seems increasingly anachronistic?”

Piers Akerman, Murdoch’s dutiful columnist, fails to understand the outcry over convicted Australian drug smuggler Nguyen Tuong Van, due to be hanged in Singapore this Friday. Indeed, he seems to believe that the death penalty is a sign of a country’s maturity. Akerman, always portraying himself as a man of the people, is actually little more than a useful stirrer of bigotry and malice:

“Nguyen, according to friends, seems to have come to terms with his crime and his punishment in a far more graceful manner than those shrilly hectoring the Singapore Government over its well-publicised drug laws.

“Despite facing the ultimate penalty, he has not succumbed to the madness that seems to have affected many in the media and political worlds, indeed, there seems in his writings to be a sense of relief that he will soon be spared their incessant irrelevant chattering.

“Though he has no choice in the matter, it does seem unfortunate in the extreme that death will provide Nguyen with his only release from their nonsensical posturing.

“We now wait for the same vacuous fools to mount another meaningless assault against capital punishment – and call for the cancellation of sporting events – when the smiling [Bali] assassin Amrozi is given the date for his execution.

“Let’s hope that more than sports fixtures are scheduled for the same day, the event of his death should be marked with parties.”

Islamophobic Daniel Pipes thinks Muhammad Ali is a fundamentalist traitor to the American cause:

“Awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Muhammad Ali gratuitously celebrated a man profoundly opposed to Mr. Bush’s own, his party’s, and the country’s principles. It represents, I submit, the nadir of his presidency.”

Pipes wants to create an America where militant patriotism is taught in kindergarten.

Underwater hockey is the hottest sport in the world right now. Well, perhaps in Slovenia.

“…The president of the United States is all-powerful, that as commander in chief the president of the United States can do anything he damn well pleases.”

Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Associated Press, November 28

Israeli historian and dissenter Ilan Pappe explains the inherent pro-Israel bias at the BBC:

“The decision to maintain the disciplinary procedures against [BBC journalist] Barbara Platt and even to go as far as to establish a commission of inquiry into the way the BBC covers the Palestine question (BBC bias complaint upheld, November 26) is one of many manifestations of the grotesque phase we have all reached in this troublesome part of the world.

“Had it not been for Ms Platt’s balanced and informative reports, it would have been difficult to distinguish between the BBC coverage of the occupied territories and that of the Israeli Broadcasting Authority. Ms Platt admirably tried for many months to “balance” a simple imbalanced reality: of Israeli occupation and Palestinian victimisation. The atrocities on the ground – the killing of children and women and the blowing up of houses – warranted an emotional response as it is, and it was only natural that once, and only once, this would show in her reports (as many BBC reporters allowed themselves a show of emotion when reporting the deaths of George Best or Princess Diana). Only outside pressure could have produced such an ill-thought procedure and action.

“As for the inquiry commission, one can save taxpayers’ money. The cable companies in Israel come now and then under official pressure for allowing free access to international TV news stations. They would like to remove CNN and al-Jazeera. There are no complaints in Israel about Fox news (representing the US neoconservative point of view) and the BBC. The BBC is indeed a pro-Israeli news agency and is going to remain so if its directors silence the professional reporting of Barbara Platt.”

Ilan Pappe
Tivon, Israel

Indeed, every major news organisation in the Western world shares a similar bias.

Australia will soon enter the dark ages with draconian legislation to fight “terror.” The political imperative will allow Australia’s tradition of (relative) legal fairness to be superseded and forgotten. Caution is being urged but the Howard government knows the power of being seen to be doing something against the terror threat. As ever, foreign affairs are totally absent from the political and media debate.

How these new laws will actually assist law enforcement agencies remains a mystery. Furthermore, Liberal backbenchers – the ones not totally in awe of Howard – are seriously challenging the government’s intentions.

Stay tuned.

Washington’s “war on terror” is a violent fantasy wrapped in a veneer of respectability. Ethiopia has some experience receiving US support for its fight on “terror.”

Ethiopundit tells us that the West is knowingly aiding a tyrannical regime in the name of “stability”:

“This year the Ethiopian regime put on an election show for the benefit of Western donors who were to give their applause in the form of extra billions of dollars in aid. The ruling party’s show failed with bad reviews when all voting districts with observers present voted for the opposition.

“Subsequently a massive effort to rig the results was only matched by mass repression of which we only know a fraction of the resulting suffering and bloodshed in urban areas. All the illusory human rights have ended and tens of thousands are subject to disappearance, imprisonment, torture and further destitution for their refusal to accept the eternal rule of the politburo.

“The opposition has resorted to only peaceful means of defiance. Western nations seeing a general interest in the status quo have pressured the opposition to ‘obey the constitution’ and to pray for better next time when all will likely be far worse.

“While the opposition would have been killed in its entirety years before without Western interest, the response of the West this time has been one of espousing an infamous moral equivalence between a bloody dictatorship and a victorious democratic opposition.”

The Independent reports on yet more grim news for the Palestinians:

“Millions of pounds donated by British and other European charities to help the Palestinian poor were unwittingly diverted to fund terror and support the families of suicide bombers, Israeli prosecutors claimed yesterday.”

Resistance is one thing but outright deception is another.

America’s finest reporter, Seymour Hersh, examines the future of the Iraq conflict and further Bush administration delusions. Hersh paints George Bush as a man led by religious conviction, removed from reality and ignoring the wishes of his military commanders:

“A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.”

Once again, America has learnt nothing from Vietnam. The insurgency will grow and the US will, in time, exit in defeat.