Antony Loewenstein

Who started the Iranian badge story? The art of black propaganda appears to be alive and well.

It’s encouraging to see the US supporting a government run by narco-warlords:

American defence officials have secretly requested a “prodigious quantity” of ammunition from Russia to supply the Afghan army in case a Democrat president takes over in Washington and pulls out US troops.

The Daily Telegraph can disclose that Pentagon chiefs have asked arms suppliers for a quote on a vast amount of ordnance, including more than 78 million rounds of AK47 ammunition, 100,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 12,000 tank shells – equivalent to about 15 times the British Army’s annual requirements.

The Bush administration is said to want the deal because of worries that the next president could be a Democrat, possibly Hillary Clinton, who may abandon Afghanistan.

At least the conservative Telegraph newspaper has a sense of humour:

Some observers pointed to the irony of the deal, because when the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan the Americans sold Stinger surface-to- air missiles to the Mujahideen to enable them to shoot down Moscow’s aircraft.

UPDATE: Russia has denied the claims.

Michael Massing, New York Review of Books, June 8:

The political landscape in Israel is rapidly changing, and along with it the challenges facing the Israel lobby. The rise of Kadima and the shift away from the Likud have reinvigorated the three main groups that represent America’s pro-Israel doves: Americans for Peace Now, Brit Tzedek, and the Israel Policy Forum (IPF). Politically, these groups more faithfully represent the views of American Jews than AIPAC does, but they have much less influence, in part because they don’t raise money. In the past, the IPF’s annual dinners have been sedate affairs compared to AIPAC’s, but at its last one, in June, Ehud Olmert appeared, and he joked about how odd it was for an old Likudnik like himself to be there. He talked of new “policies” that would bring “peace and security to ourselves and to the Palestinians,” who “will live alongside the State of Israel in an independent state of their own.”

In spite of such statements, some liberal commentators in Israel and the US believe that Israel has no intention of ceding to the Palestinians enough territory and authority for a workable state. But if Israel did manage to withdraw behind a security fence and allowed such a state to emerge, what would AIPAC have left to do? Plenty. While pursuing its traditional concerns about Israel, the lobby in recent years has been steadily expanding its mission, becoming a strong force in the extended network of national security groups and leaders who have used September 11, the war on terror, and Israel as a basis for seeking a more aggressive US stance in the world.

UPDATE: Daniel Pipes is worried about Israel’s future, too, citing America’s rising Muslim population and political clout. A refreshing change is in the air.

John Howard and George Bush talk the language of love:

Seymour Hersh examines the National Security Agency and its tendency to spy on American citizens:

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was clear that the intelligence community needed to get more aggressive and improve its performance. The Administration, deciding on a quick fix, returned to the tactic that got intelligence agencies in trouble thirty years ago: intercepting large numbers of electronic communications made by Americans. The N.S.A.’s carefully constructed rules were set aside.

Last December, the Times reported that the N.S.A. was listening in on calls between people in the United States and people in other countries, and a few weeks ago USA Today reported that the agency was collecting information on millions of private domestic calls. A security consultant working with a major telecommunications carrier told me that his client set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer centre. This link provided direct access to the carrier’s network core—the critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. “What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records,” the consultant said. “They’re providing total access to all the data.” 

- Is Oliver Stone set to make a film about the failed, US-led coup against Hugo Chavez?

-  The Syrian government is cracking down on dissenters and critics and Middle East stability is in question.

- The Financial Times examines the most influential media commentators.

- Iran’s Jews discuss life in an autocracy.

- Turkish/Iranian relations are debated by a variety of regional experts.

- Yet more evidence that the US used napalm in Iraq.

During John Howard’s recent trip to Washington, he gushed over America’s key role in the world:

The world will need America just as much in the future as the world has needed America in the past, and as the world needs America at the present. Those foolish enough to suggest that America should have a lesser role in the affairs of the world should pause and think whether they really mean what they say, because a world without a dedicated, involved America will be a lesser world, a less safe world, a more precarious world. 

Perhaps our Prime Minister would like to reflect on these American “values”:

Prisons and jails added more than 1,000 inmates each week for a year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars by last summer.

Of particular note was the gain of 33,539 inmates in jails, the largest increase since 1997, researcher Allen J. Beck said. That was a 4.7 percent growth rate, compared with a 1.6 percent increase in people held in state and federal prisons. 

Tommy Franks, the man who directed the Iraq invasion, once said, “we don’t do body counts.” He was referring to Iraqi deaths. After all, only American lives matter to the US establishment. Now, Franks says that death is a small price to pay for “security”:

Those who count the increasing number of American soldiers killed in Iraq are missing the bigger picture, retired Gen. Tommy Franks said Saturday night.

“What we’re talking about is neither 2,400, 24,000 or 240,000 lives,” Franks said at the National Rifle Association’s annual banquet. “Terrorism is a thing that threatens our way of life. It doesn’t have anything to do with politics.”

Franks praised Donald Rumsfeld as “an American patriot.” A man who advocates and supports the use of torture is clearly somebody to be respected. No wonder Australian Prime Minister John Howard feels so at home in Washington.

Mustafa Barghouti, Al-Ahram, May 11-17:

Even if Mother Theresa were brought back to life and made president of the Palestinian people Israel would still refuse to recognise a Palestinian negotiating partner. Such recognition would mean that Israel would have to negotiate, which is the last thing it wants as long as there exists the possibility to impose the realities it wants unilaterally. Meanwhile, the regrettable internal conflict between Hamas and Fatah is only one of any number of excuses the occupation throws out as a smokescreen as it forges ahead with its plans. Indeed, if anything Israel is working to fuel the conflict so that it flares into full-fledged civil war. To Israel, that would perfectly cap its current intensification of incursions, arrests and bombardments in what amounts to nothing less than the final phases of the Zionist project, now modified to grabbing the largest amount of land possible and forcing the Palestinians into prisons and cantons.

Not content taking gullible Australian journalists to Israel, Zionist lobby AIJAC are now targeting Christian “people of promise”:

One of the more bizarre and intriguing events in Australian Christian Jewish relations took place last month when the Australian, Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) took a group of church leaders on an all expenses tour of Israel. The group included the senior staff of the National Council of Churches, the councils of churches in Queensland, South Australia and Victoria, as well as the Dean of St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral in Melbourne. In the words of the AIJAC leader of the group, they were chosen because they were “all people of promise”!

While there are many organisations within the Jewish community that work co-operatively with churches on issues of interfaith dialogue, AIJAC is not one of them. It is better known as an aggressive, no holds barred, privately funded, political lobby group. It is variously described as “the only effective organisation that lobbies for Israel”, a “Melbourne based pro-Zionist think-tank”, “Zionist propagandists”, “contentious”, but not a body, according to the President of the New South Wales Board of Deputies, “that is in any elected or democratic sense representative of the community”. In fact, its relations with churches have generally been antagonistic and vitriolic. 

It appears the recent delegation was content experiencing Israeli propaganda, and did little to discover the Palestinian church and its problems. Furthermore, according to Alan Matheson:

AIJAC has every right to organise all expenses paid tours with whom ever they want and to provide them with any itinerary they choose. In the case of the church leaders, these were “people of promise” and worth the time and effort of AIJAC just in case there was a move in Australia to begin to respond to the WCC campaign [against the Israeli occupation.]

For leaders of the church its a different issue. Their naivety and insensitivity and ignorance is breathtaking. No questions were asked about who or what or where AIJAC was coming from. No attempts were made to consult with the council of churches in Palestine and no meetings took place with Palestinian theologians. Both the councils of churches and the Anglican Church have significant aid programs in the Occupied Territories, but no attempt was made to visit them. And equally disturbing, none of the councils of churches or the Cathedral appear to have policies about accepting funding from partisan lobby groups. 

AIJAC is fighting a PR battle with Israel’s critics it can never win. Rather than trying to end the occupation or improve the security of both Israelis and Palestinians, the lobby thinks it can simply shield influential players from facts on the ground. This will inevitably fail.

Rabbi Bruce Warshal is my kind of Rabbi:

400 rabbis, including myself, signed a letter sponsored by Brit Tzedek v’Shalom that appeared in the Forward this past month. It was a mildly liberal statement that proclaimed that “we are deeply troubled by the recent victory of Hamas,” but went on to urge “indirect assistance to the Palestinian people via NGO’s, with the appropriate conditions to ensure that it does not reach the hands of terrorists.” Pretty mild stuff. Yet pulpit rabbis across this country who signed the letter have reported a concerted effort to silence them. The letter has been branded a “piece of back-stabbing abandonment of the Jews of Israel.” Synagogue boards have been pressured to silence their rabbis by that loose coalition called the “Israel Lobby.”

Just another example of the Jewish establishment stifling any discussion of Israel that does not conform to the neo-conservative tenets of AIPAC and its cohorts. Beware of these self-appointed guardians of Israel and Jewish values. In the end they will destroy everything that makes Judaism a compassionate religion, and if in their zeal they do not destroy Israel, they certainly will not make it more secure. 

The usual suspects will not listen, confident of endless US support for the Jewish state. This is false confidence, however, as the Muslim population gathers political strength in the US.

Beware the godless:

American’s increasing acceptance of religious diversity does not extend to those who don’t believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology. The study will appear in the April issue of the American Sociological Review.

Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. “Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher. 

It’s clearly much better to trust – at least initially – a President who believes that God told him to lead America. Perhaps a higher power will instruct him to resign.