Antony Loewenstein

A sad day for the long-suffering Sudanese people:

Sudan’s president, vowing to never allow U.N. peacekeepers into Darfur, blamed Jewish organizations for pushing for their deployment.

President Omar al-Bashir made the assertion Tuesday while a joint United Nations and African Union team was in Sudan to plan for a large U.N. force to take over peacekeeping in Darfur from the AU’s poorly equipped 7,000 troops who have been unable to halt more than three years of violence.

Many Jewish groups have campaigned strongly against the genocide in Sudan and should be congratulated for doing so, but Forward explained an ulterior motive in January:

Some Jewish officials acknowledged privately that the idea of pressuring Sudan’s radical Islamic regime motivated some Jewish groups to join the action. They said, however, that the fact that Jews are mobilizing to end Muslim-on-Muslim violence in Darfur sends a positive message to the Muslim world.

This “positive message to the Muslim world” becomes irrelevant when Israel continues to murder Palestinian civilians in Palestine.

Iraq and Chechnya, a comparison.

New Under the Sun is a collection of Jewish Australians writing about religion, politics and culture (naturally enough, the Australian Jewish News thinks the book is vitally important.) While some chapters are worthwhile, it suffers from a classic case of avoiding the elephant in the room. Israel is barely mentioned. The Jewish state is discussed, analysed and profiled, and yet virtually no discussion appears about the occupation. But then, why would it? Most Jews prefer to avoid it, too. Israel should not be the central focus of Jewry – and the book’s contents prove this – but if a serious publication wants to truly understand the nature of Australian Jewry, robust and various perspectives on Israel must be offered. The editors and publisher clearly didn’t want this. Much easier to write about the Holocaust, migration and adult education, topics bound to cause no offence to anybody.

Comedian John Safran contributes a chapter and features a fictional interview with Federal Labor MP Michael Danby – a Zionist fond of bullying – and yours truly. It’s mildly amusing, aiming to parody the overly sensitive nature of Zionists like Danby and Jews such as myself who believe that the Israeli occupation has corrupted the Jewish soul. It’s also bleedingly obvious.

Unfortunately, New Under the Sun is a failed attempt at in-depth analysis. At a time when Diaspora Jewry overseas is starting to wake from years of blindly supporting the Jewish state, Australian Jews, it seems, are happy to continue the fiction. They’ll be rudely roused soon enough.

A revealing tale of John Bolton’s adventures at Oxford.

Students don’t suffer fools.

A leading Venezuelan revolutionary is on her way to Australia. Stay tuned.

Perhaps she’ll discuss the tendency of Latin America’s media elite to avoid debating poverty and inequality.

When debate turns to Israel, Zionists often resort to bullying. It’s a tactic produced by an insecure, nervous yet aggressive lobby that simply refuses to accept alternative points of view. During the recent controversy surrounding the British academic boycott of Israeli institutions, similar tactics were employed. The result, unsurprisingly, was counterproductive and generated deep resentment:

The pickle is trying to determine whether the campaigns against such boycotts are actually motivated by concerns for academic freedom, or whether they are using the universalist ideal to stifle critical discussion of Israel.

We have found much more evidence of the latter. Through discussions with anti-boycott campaigners and a trace of the most common emails (not necessarily abusive) sent to the union and handed over by Natfhe, we found the vast majority of the tens of thousands of emails originated not with groups fighting for academic freedom, but with lobby groups and thinktanks that regularly work to delegitimise criticisms of Israel. We spoke to a number of these groups about their aims and the extent of their campaigns against the boycott. 

On a more positive note, Max Hastings highlights the fact that Israel can no longer rely on European Jewry:

Whatever the outcome of the current Palestinian chaos, meaningful negotiations with Israel seem unlikely. The most plausible scenario is that Ehud Olmert will proceed unilaterally to draw new boundaries for his country, which will absorb significant Palestinian land, and institutionalise such dominance of the West Bank as to make a Palestinian state unworkable.

There is also evidence of growing disenchantment with Israel in the Jewish diaspora. Feelings have changed since 1948 and the days when Jews around the world thought it a duty to support “their” nation in the promised land right or wrong, in good times or bad. 

It’s a rare sign of hope in the current conflict. The US will undoubtedly continue to blindly support Israeli ambitions, but even this won’t last forever. What will it take for greater numbers of Jews to speak out against Israeli occupation and oppression? Unless, of course, they believe Arabs and Palestinians deserve little else. It may be hard to imagine now, but Israel’s current incarnation is simply unsustainable in the long-term.

Will Libby be pardoned?

The stench of corruption grows stronger by the day.

We live in an age of empire. While rarely acknowledged as such, the term is making a comeback (John Pilger’s latest work discusses this subject in detail). Rhetoric surrounding the Iraq war reflected the growing sense that the Iraqis needed the civilising and liberating West to be free, when in reality the occupation has brought death and destruction on a grand scale.

Australian conservatives are equally fond of romanticising the past. Not content with minimising Aboriginal deaths due to colonialism, some prefer highlighting the positive aspects of the White Australia policy. After all, surely Australians didn’t want too much cultural diversity?

A similar debate is currently occurring in the UK. The Independent columnist Johann Hari recently slammed court historians for defending and supporting the most brutal aspects of the British Empire. He was met with predictable scorn. Perhaps the most perverse came from author Lawrence James:

The rulers of India were humane men and, although hampered by inadequate administrative machinery and limited resources, they made a determined effort to feed the hungry.

For many embedded in the establishment, there is a pathological inability to acknowledge or understand the crimes of their ancestors. As Andrew Murray explains:

His [Hari's] central theme, that those who defend the British Empire are defending some of the worst crimes against humanity, is a vital argument, which he makes well.

As the age of the US empire comes to a close and the Bush administration and its sycophantic supporters proudly stand for invasion and occupation, 21st century empire is getting a radical face-lift. High-minded rhetoric may attempt to defend the indefensible as noble and benign, but the reality remains the same.

The war in Congo is the most deadly since the Nazi genocide, yet it is barely reported in the Western media. This news is therefore even more distressing:

United Nations peacekeepers in the Congo are contributing to the systematic destruction of civilian-occupied villages during combined operations with government forces.

But as mortars fell, figures could be seen running in all directions. For days after Kazana’s destruction we tracked down traumatised survivors from this and more than a dozen other destroyed villages. Monuc is mandated to provide relief to the victims of conflict, but we saw many terrified women, children and elderly people without food or shelter. They told of rape, torture and other ghastly treatment at the hands of government troops. 

The FBI claims there is “no hard evidence linking Osama bin Laden to 9/11.”

Discuss.

From war criminal to rank opportunist:

Stunning military victories made Israel’s Gen. Moshe Dayan an iconic figure on the international stage, but his reputation for looting antiquities is little known outside the country where his myth was born.

Across three decades until his death in 1981, Dayan, of the trademark eye patch, established a vast collection of antiquities acquired through illicit excavations. He also traded in archaeological finds in Israel and abroad, antiquities experts say.

“Moshe Dayan didn’t deal in archaeology. He dealt in antiquities plundering,” said Uzi Dahari, deputy director of the Israel Antiquities Authority. “He was a criminal. He knew he was breaking the law.”

The Washington Post obtains a revealing document:

Hours before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees. This cable, marked “sensitive” and obtained by The Washington Post, outlines in spare prose the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees’ constant fears that their neighbours will discover they work for the U.S. government.

Meanwhile, “liberated” Afghanistan is now a nation run by warlords, drug runners and murderers, partly funded by the British taxpayer. The country is little different to the Taliban days, a damning indictment of “humanitarian intervention.”

Australian troops should not be in Afghanistan. Their mission is ill-founded and destined to contribute to further instability. A recent report by SBS Dateline proved that Australia is unwelcome; they have no right to be there.