Antony Loewenstein

While SBS Television censors a “controversial” episode of South Park, the Justice Minister is supposedly defending the use of torture. Today’s Crikey reports:

Federal Justice Minister Chris Ellison dropped a proverbial bomb at the Law Summer School in Perth yesterday during a debate on the lofty topic of the juxtaposition of anti-terrorism laws and the rule of law.

The rather stunned audience was then told that Amrosi and some of the other Bali bombers were convicted on evidence obtained by the Indonesian police using torture, but the AFP abided by Australian law in the investigation.

If true, makes me proud to be an Australian.

Iraqi blogger Treasure of Baghdad reflects on the latest violent outrage:

And now, I am sad to see a country suffered from tyranny will suffer from a civil war. I am afraid that we’ll have the same fate of Lebanon. I don’t know if this civil strife will stop or continue. Even under dictatorship and tyranny, we have not gone through such a day. It is hard to see this beautiful and ancient country destroyed. It seems what the Americans have done was not enough. Iraqis should suffer, be killed, watch themselves humiliated, and kill each other just because America wants to remove Saddam from its way to make the world safer. Or let’s say to make America safer and hell be with the non-Americans as some of them say. Let the whole world be happy and “safe” now because Iraq’s “liberation” made it safe for them, but unfortunately made it a hell for Iraqis. 

Zaki Chehab is a London-based journalist and author – his latest is Iraq Ablaze – and one of the finest Arab reporters in the Middle East. A Lebanese Palestinian born in a refugee camp, he is now political editor of al-Hayat and of the Arabic TV channel LBC. He has worked for the BBC, Guardian and UK’s Channel 4. He is also the first journalist to broadcast interviews with the Iraqi resistance in 2003. He is currently in Australia on a speaking tour. He has received little mainstream media coverage (the broadsheets have ignored him) though ABC have provided a platform to his views (Lateline, Late Night Live and The World Today.)

Speaking last night in Sydney – in the wake of the bombing of the gold-domed Shia mosque in Samarra – Chehab painted a picture of modern Iraq far removed from the Western media’s gaze. He is a war correspondent, and although he has reported on conflicts in Palestine and Lebanon, he said Iraq is unlike any other battlefield he has experienced.

The country is in turmoil and a majority of citizens want the Americans to leave. But, he said, they are also fearful of what will follow. Infrastructure is a shambles and basic services are at levels below what Saddam offered. The insurgency is constantly shifting, a combination of foreign fighters, Iraqi nationalists, former Baathists, Saddam loyalists and al-Qaeda. He believed civil war was unlikely because of the high levels of intermarriage between Shia and Sunni, although he acknowledged the US – every other country was irrelevant in the struggle, he said – had grossly mismanaged the occupation.

Chehab has spent much time with the insurgents and said they laughed at the suggestion that the capture of Saddam in late 2003 would end the fight. In fact, it only strengthened their resolve. The security situation was so dangerous now, he reminded the audience, that even Arab journalists are struggling to move around freely. Iraqi journalists are being routinely murdered, but the Western media ignores it. He was damning of Western media reports on the conflict, saying most are little more than mere ciphers for the US authorities. It is this reason that Western readers have little understanding of the situation or the daily hardship of average Iraqis. Iraqis with enough money had all left, he said, because the security was so bad. During question time, Chehab was hassled by a few people because he didn’t unequivocally advocate an American withdrawal immediately. I support “Coalition” withdrawal but Chehab underscored the necessity for a plan once Western troops have gone.

If there have been any positives in the last years, the rise of Arab media in the Western consciousness is one of them. Embedded reporting, the mainstay of hacks in Washington, Canberra, London or Baghdad, is increasingly regarded as inaccurate and dishonest. Alternatives are being sourced. Chehab represents the kind of brave reporting all too often left to stringers.

While the issue of some US ports being run by companies from UAE continues to simmer – and Gulf News highlights one possible cause: Islamophobia – an Armenian blogger concludes the story is tragic for another reason:

On October 18th, 2005, I had a meeting with someone who worked for the Department of State in front of the Armenia Hotel and I asked this person about what was going on with the sanctions against the U.A.E. for being placed on Tier 3, which is the black list of countries who are found to be the biggest violators of trafficking humans?

The Department of State worker told me that unfortunately their recommendations fell on deaf ears and Bush decided to lift sanctions for reasons they didn’t agree with.

So the big question I have for Washington and all those that support the recent proposed arrangement with the turnover of six major seaports is why?

UPDATE: Inter Press Service provides more information:

The United Arab Emirates (UAE), the center of a growing controversy over its proposed management of U.S. port terminals, is one of the world’s most prolific arms buyers and a multi-billion-dollar military market both for the United States and Western Europe.

David Hirst, The Guardian, February 23:

If the Hamas assumption of power is truly a watershed, it will be an Arab and Muslim, not just Palestinian, one. It has long been said that in so far as Arabs and Palestinians ever formally accommodated themselves to Israel it was Arab despotism, not democracy, that made it possible. To be sure, Arab public opinion might have been moving away, if only in the weariness of repeated defeat, from the all-pervading “rejectionism” of the conflict’s earlier stages, but never far enough for those rulers who did make peace with Israel to do so with anything seriously resembling a popular mandate. “Israel,” said Aluf Benn in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, “could always do business with Arab dictators, a barrier protecting it from the rage of the ‘Arab street’. That was the basis of the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, Yasser Arafat and his heirs and the rules vis-a-vis Syria and Lebanon. But those days are over. Henceforth Israel will have to factor into its foreign policy something it has always ignored – Arab public opinion.” 

- Noam Chomsky reminds a US audience that the Venezuelan government, “by sending gas for heating to poor, homeless people for free and at very low prices for those who can pay…is giving a great example of cooperation and solidarity with the people of the United States.” Furthermore, the intriguing case of Posada Carriles, ex-CIA agent is worth noting.

- Australian writer David Williamson tackles conservative rhetoric and discovers a hollow and insecure core.

- A useful summary of the recent US congressional hearings on the internet and press censorship in China.

- Prince Charles, dissenter.

- A CBS reporter admits that he killed a story on Iraq after Pentagon pressure.

While Middle Eastern countries resist US and Israeli suggestions to isolate and punish the Palestinian people and Iran offers a hand of friendship to Hamas, Israel has acquired some new friends:

A new group in the United States, Christians United for Israel, will serve as an umbrella organization for Christian congregations that support Israel, and will lobby for Israel.

Some 400 Christian community leaders met in San Antonio, Texas, two weeks ago to establish the group, which Christians United officials said represents about 30 million Americans.

The organization’s main goal is to create a rapid-response network “targeted to reach every senator and congressman” in the United States. It is led by evangelical leaders Dr. John C. Hagee and George Morrison; fundamentalist Baptist minister Jerry Falwell; and Gary Bauer, president of the American Values organization aimed at protecting marriage, family and faith.

This relationship is a dangerous one, though the Israeli Ambassador to the US doesn’t seem to understand. “We see Christians in the United States as true friends and important supporters on the basis of shared values, and we welcome their efforts to strengthen the ties between Israel and the U.S”, he says. “Shared values”? Perhaps he didn’t read the fine print. One of the group’s key aims is to express a “debt of gratitude to the Jewish people for their contribution to Christianity.”

Rachard Itani, Counterpunch, February 20:

I was startled to hear Prime Minister John Howard of Australia exclaim in a BBC interview last night that he could not understand why pictures of starving Jewish interns of Bergen Belsen, Dachau, and Auschwitz had been aired, yet again, by an Australian TV station a few days ago. “I don’t understand what news value there is any longer in showing more pictures of starving Jews, tortured in these prison camps.” He added that the airing at this time was all the more disturbing that “people involved in abusing the Jewish concentration camp interns had been prosecuted and some had even gone to jail” and wondered who benefited from the re-airing of photos that had shocked the civilized world. Mr. Howard was also shocked, but shocked that the photos had been published “unnecessarily”, not revolted at the humiliating, disgraceful, vile acts that they depicted.

So much for Israel’s “security” fence being about security:

The main consideration behind the route for “numerous segments” of the separation fence was settlement expansion, according to a report published Tuesday by the human rights groups B’Tselem and Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights. 

The report also concludes that in most of the cases in which the fence route was pushed eastward from the Green Line, this was done to include settlements within the fence and not out of security considerations – the main reason the state gives for the route of the fence in most areas and the main reason accepted by the courts. 

Meanwhile, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offers the best comment of the week about Iran’s leader:

“Ahmadinejad is an anti-Semite, a racist, and an Israel-hater, but there’s no point in holding a competition of inflammatory statements with him.”

Take it away, Arianna Huffington: “Is Sean Hannity addicted to Coulter crack?”

While Amira Hass rightly says the Palestinians are being robbed by Israel, Haaretz offers some perspective on the Jewish state’s current stance:

It is not realistic to think about separating Hamas rule from the Palestinian people, or about starving government institutions while sending humanitarian assistance directly to the population. The Palestinians chose their leadership democratically, and any such separation is arrogant and has no chance.

The unsuccessful comments by Dov Weissglas – whose position and source of authority in the present government is difficult to understand – regarding the need to put the Palestinian nation on a diet, but not to starve it, symbolizes more than anything the humiliating way in which Israel relates to the Palestinians, which was one of the factors in Hamas’ rise to power. It is unnecessary and degrading to recommend a diet to a hungry and unemployed nation, in addition to which Israel is still responsible for preventing hunger in all parts of the West Bank that it controls as an occupying power.

And the paper offers this statement:

At this stage Hamas is acting more responsibly than the Israeli government. Its representatives speak of a new era, of a transition from terror to politics, of continued opposition to occupation via other means, and of aspirations to a long-term hudna (cease-fire).

Meanwhile, back on planet paranoia, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations says a new “terror axis” could form between Iran, Hamas and Syria and start “the first world war of the 21st century.”