The debate on the Zionist lobby that we need to have. Oh to have been in New York a few nights ago…
UPDATE: More on the event here.
Monthly Archive for September, 2006
Here is some rare testimony of abuse by the Iraqi National Guard allegedly overseen by US soldiers.
After all, we now know that the US government openly and shamelessly tortures people for “evidence” against terrorism. Furthermore, many conservatives and moral pygmies support it. I look forward to them shrieking the loudest when an ingenious “enemy” subjects US soldiers to the same treatment.
When this kind of behaviour is condoned, we are no better than “them.”
My following article appeared in yesterday’s Crikey newsletter:
During Wednesday’s Sydney launch of Patricia Edgar’s book Bloodbath – a tale of her years in TV, including being founding director of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation – ABC broadcaster Phillip Adams remarked that “nothing prepares you for the savagery of TV” in both the commercial world and ABC.
The event at Gleebooks attracted a small but loyal older crowd of people who were treated to an informal conversation between old friends.
Edgar’s book (extracted here) traverses the birth of independent Australian television. She said that even as recently as the 1980s, women behind the camera were objects of ridicule.
Edgar grew up believing through movies that everything in the US was great, but soon realised that Australia had to tell its own stories. Adams reminded the audience that only four local original plays were produced in the country during the entire 1960s. Many actors never played Australian roles and the ABC was “mock BBC”.
Adams said that when he was trying to build the film industry – and admitted children’s content was an embarrassing early omission – the greatest opposition came not from Sir Frank Packer but the ABC, so keen were they to maintain an entertainment monopoly.
Edgar remained highly critical of an industry that she said failed to provide suitable and stimulating programming for children. She gave context through the story of how the ABC initially rejected Sesame Street as unsuitable for kids and she writes in her book that, “today children spend more time with machines than with their parents. From infancy they are branded from head to toe as walking advertisements for global corporations.”
Perhaps the funniest anecdote of the evening was when Adams told of being with ALP figure Barry Jones in Prague in 1971 and meeting a UCLA professor who showed them a pilot of Sesame Street. It was a revelation, and they wondered when it would appear in Australia. There was much local resistance to come.
Edgar’s gloomy conclusions aren’t matched by others in the popular culture arena and at times she seems to dangerously veer towards romanticising the past. Academic Catharine Lumby wrote in the Good Weekend in June that although children are indeed bombarded with unprecedented levels of popular culture, there was no evidence that literacy was falling. “Research showing that TV can be good for kids if used wisely…doesn’t make for good headlines”, she wrote.
As the Iraq conflict worsens – and a majority of the American people now consider the war-torn country to be in civil war – the major US newspapers are providing less coverage of the carnage.
The mainstream media is failing.
I’m an irregular contributor to the Washington Post’s Post Global site (my first piece, on the US/Australia alliance, is here). My second article is now published and it discusses “Australia’s meddling in East Timor“:
During Indonesia’s brutal, 24-year occupation of East Timor, the Western world remained complicit in the oppression. Current President Xanana Gusmao handed the UN a report in January that detailed gross human rights abuses over those years. It alleged that Jakarta’s deliberate policy of starvation and murder cost the lives of between 84,000 and 183,000 people between 1975 and 1999. Furthermore, the Indonesian military used Western-supplied napalm bombs during their reign of terror.
None of the leading Western nations involved – Australia, the US and Britain – have accepted responsibility for their actions nor offered compensation. A further insult has been the lack of international pressure to bring former Western-backed dictator General Suharto to trial for war crimes in Timor and elsewhere in Indonesia.
Although Australian assistance helped end Timor’s occupation in 1999, the world’s newest nation has suffered great instability in the last seven years.
Within Australia, a mythology has developed: Australia is seen as the white knight that arrived to save Timor’s soul. In reality – as pointed out by Australian historian Clinton Fernandes in his incendiary 2004 book, Reluctant Saviour – “Australian diplomacy functioned in support of the Indonesian strategy [of holding onto Timor]. It functioned as an obstacle to East Timor’s independence. When the [John] Howard government was eventually forced to send in a peacekeeping force, it did so under the pressure of a tidal wave of public outrage.”
The relationship between Canberra and Dili has always been complex but the ongoing struggle over the Timor Gap – vast oil and gas reserves in the seabed off East Timor – has caused Australia to be accused of exploiting Timor’s future economic prosperity. The country’s former Prime Minster, Mari Alkatiri, was a strong defender of these natural resources, but his popularity within Timor had waned, eventually forcing him to resign.
The recent unrest in Timor resulted in violent clashes between disgruntled soldiers and the ruling Fretelin party. Tens of thousands of Timorese were forced to flee their homes into refugee camps. And Australia, once again, sent troops to quell the troubles, though the exact details of the unrest remain unclear.
The country’s new Prime Minister, Jose Ramos Horta, has thanked Australia for its assistance and already criticised its role in the struggling nation. Australia’s Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, recently told the East Timorese that, “they have to learn to find solutions to their own problems, not just expect the international community indefinitely to solve all those problems for them“. It was a typically arrogant statement from a government that enjoys maintaining control over a number of nations in the region.
There are many unsubstantiated allegations that the Australian government instigated the latest unrest in East Timor and wanted regime change. What is clear, however, is that East Timor should be allowed to prosper into a truly independent nation, and heal from years of Western-backed misery.
When Israel bombed Gaza’s power plant in June, the Jewish state committed a war crime.
The world’s silence is deafening.
Michael Kinsley is the former op-ed editor at the LA Times. He therefore writes with some authority on the future of newspapers. He paints a grim picture, a position I happily share:
It seems hopeless. How can the newspaper industry survive the Internet? On the one hand, newspapers are expected to supply their content free on the Web. On the other hand, their most profitable advertising – classifieds – is being lost to sites like Craigslist. And display advertising is close behind. Meanwhile, there is the blog terror: people are getting their understanding of the world from random lunatics riffing in their underwear, rather than professional journalists with standards and passports.
He doesn’t provide any answers, mainly because they aren’t any quick solutions. Some of his conclusions are glib, however. He still seems to believe that an article or investigation in the mainstream media should be trusted simply because it appears in a major news organ. Corporate news propaganda is clearly a concept he is yet to learn.
But at least the debate is moving along (and my next book, on the Western media, will tackle some of these issues.)
The Iraqi people have spoken:
A new WPO poll of the Iraqi public finds that seven in ten Iraqis want US-led forces to commit to withdraw within a year. An overwhelming majority believes that the US military presence in Iraq is provoking more conflict than it is preventing and there is growing confidence in the Iraqi army. If the US made a commitment to withdraw, a majority believes that this would strengthen the Iraqi government. Support for attacks on US-led forces has grown to a majority position—now six in ten. Support appears to be related to a widespread perception, held by all ethnic groups, that the US government plans to have permanent military bases in Iraq.
So will Bush, Blair and Howard listen? Of course not, they’ll simply blame all attacks on the occupation as terrorism. This is where the real focus lies:
A public relations company known for its role in a controversial U.S. military program that paid Iraqi newspapers for stories favourable to coalition forces has been awarded another multi-million dollar media contract with American forces in Iraq.
Washington-based Lincoln Group won a two-year contract to monitor a number of English and Arabic media outlets and produce public relations-type products such as talking points or speeches for U.S. forces in Iraq, officials said Tuesday.
My following article appears in today’s Crikey newsletter:
We live in an age where political insecurity is projected through the “values” debate. When politicians want to instil calm in the electorate, they preach about shared ideas, Australian mateship, tolerance, a fair go, religious freedom and freedom of speech. These are all noble ideals in a democracy but who truly decides what values should be sacrosanct in Australia?
During my recent trip to Queensland, I noticed an article on this subject by the Noosa News Editor Frank Wilkie. “Looks like the shiny bums have gone ga-ga and fallen A over T in love with Aussie values”, he wrote. “The pollies have been busier than one-armed bricklayers in Baghdad trying to outdo each other on who’s the most fair dinkum.”
Wilkie was clearly cynical about the real purpose behind the “values” debate. “This stoush about values may be a deadest barbie-stopping dud-dropper”, he scoffed, “but vows to obey and police the law may be all we need.” His commentary was more sensible than the vast majority of pontificators in the broadsheet press.
Suspicion towards the political elite – the individuals, after all, defining “values” for us all – is experienced by voters across the Western world.
Sir Alistair Graham is the UK’s Commissioner on Standards in Public Life, a position he took on in 2004. He wrote in Britain’s conservative Daily Mail in mid-September that the political system was in danger of being further eroded because sleaze and scandals were overwhelming public debate:
Why don’t we trust our politicians? And what can be done to restore that trust? These are pressing questions for all involved in public life.
The results of a national survey by the Commission on Standards in Public Life two years ago showed that less than a quarter of people generally trusted Government ministers to tell the truth.
They were 15th in the pecking order of professions, just above estate agents.
Today our second survey confirms this low level of trust. In fact, Government ministers now hover just below estate agents.
Graham’s report is highly relevant in Australia. When the British people believe that politicians are out of touch with the general public and rarely explain the real reasons behind their actions, our media and political elite should take notice.
During the current debate over “values”, it may be wise to question the real motives behind the politician’s sudden interest in shared values. Rest assured it’s not about keeping intolerance out.
This intriguing event in the Philippines – an online political press conference – shows what can be achieved by fully utilising new technology to engage citizens in the electoral process.
In Australia, politicians barely understand how to use the web, let alone write their own blog to keep in touch with constituents.
A healthy democracy features a robust and diverse media. Australia is not that country, with close to 70% of newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch.
John Howard’s proposed “reforms” to foreign media ownership and regulation are, despite rhetoric suggesting otherwise, destined to lead to even further consolidation of the major players.
Independent e-newsletter Crikey explains the inherent dangers:
Removing or weakening the cross-media rules is based on a myth about the current state of the media. The government’s main rationale for introducing the new laws is that “new media” is rapidly assuming dominance over “old media”, thus making cross-media regulation redundant. We would argue strongly that this is not the case. Firstly, the old media still totally dominate the flow of serious information in Australia. The arrival of websites and blogs may have added more numeric voices to the debate, but they are minute blips on the information radar compared to the societal and political influence that is wielded by newspapers or talk radio. Moreover, as a statement of fact, the biggest news and current affairs sites on the internet are overwhelmingly owned by the old media companies.
Removing or weakening the cross-media rules will result in fewer journalists and diminished journalism. The new laws are constructed for industry consolidation, which is likely to result in acquisitions by existing media owners of existing Australian media assets. Based on previous experience in the media industry, this is likely to be a highly competitive process, resulting in high prices being paid for perhaps the last opportunity to acquire valuable strategic assets. To justify the prices paid, buyers are likely to be forced to cut costs and, inevitably, journalism will be impacted by such a cost reduction process. Which raises a crucial question: is journalism simply another product in the marketplace, or does it have a direct connection to the quality of the public debate? And if it does, how can a government justify laws which treat it just like any other consumer commodity? If good journalism is vital for a functioning democracy, and there are identifiable threats to the viability of quality journalism in Australia at its current levels, is it the role of the federal government to introduce laws that are likely to accelerate that trend?
Suffice to say, most of the mainstream media have remained mute during this vital debate.
Need evidence that US rabbis are obsessed with Israel during this holiday period, at the expense of more important issues?
The Jewish apartheid state reveals its true side (and unsurprisingly, Israeli-only roads are the subject):
The masses of Israelis who regularly travel to Jerusalem via Modi’in are familiar with the large cement cubes near the signs that indicate the approach roads to the Palestinian villages on either side of the main road known as Highway 443. Anyone who bothers to look to the sides will be able to see, beyond the cubes, at the side of the ride, cars bearing Palestinian Authority license plates. Those who have sharp eyes will be able to descry the passengers climbing up and down the hills.
Few are aware that for six years now, ever since the outbreak of the intifada, the highway has been serving Israelis only. Palestinians are forbidden to travel even along the segment that is nine and a half kilometers long and passes through West Bank territory, including lands that have been confiscated and where trees have been cut down “for public needs.” Israel Defense Forces soldiers ensure that only lucky people who have been granted a temporary permit can enjoy the shortcut.
Now it emerges that there is no order that can give legal validity to discrimination among travels according to nationality. In reply to a question from Haaretz, the IDF Spokesman has confirmed that “in light of the many security risks and threats to traffic on Highway 443 in recent years, it was decided in the Israel Defense Forces Central Command to close several approach roads that connect directly from the village expanse to the highway.” At the same time, the spokesman stresses that “no order has been issued that prohibits travel on the highway,” and in any case, “there is no prohibition on the part of the IDF regarding Palestinian traffic on the segment of the highway located in the territories of the Judea and Samaria [West Bank] area.” Nevertheless, in the same statement in which it is claimed that “there is no prohibition regarding Palestinian traffic on the Palestinian segment of the road,” it is also stated that because of the security risks, some of the approach roads that link the villages to the highway are closed “permanently.”
And when did Jews become so resistant to open debate on the main issues of the day? Parochialism and faux insecurity are the new buzz words for Zionists the world over. Of course, many Jews would comfortably defend Israeli-only roads as a necessary security measure. I look forward to their justification for anti-Jewish discrimination in the Arab world in the name of racial purity.
Read this story (and wonder why our “war on terror” journalists failed to pick it up.)
John Kampfner, New Statesman, August 7:
At a Downing Street reception not long ago, a guest had the temerity to ask Tony Blair: “How do you sleep at night, knowing that you’ve been responsible for the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis?” The Prime Minister is said to have retorted: “I think you’ll find it’s closer to 50,000.”
No British leader since Winston Churchill has dealt in war with such alacrity as the present one. Back then, it was in the cause of saving the nation from Nazism. Now, it is in the cause of putting into practice the foreign policy of the simpleton. During his nine years in power, Blair – and in this government it is he, and he alone – has managed to ensure that the UK has become both reviled and stripped of influence across vast stretches of the world. In so doing, he has increased the danger of terrorism to Britain itself.
(Hat tip: Lawrence of Cyberia.)
What does John Howard think of former Labor leader Mark Latham?
(The Australian media love to hate Latham, but this Age editorial is strange, to say the least. If the “traditional” Aussie bloke is disappearing, then the sooner the better.)
The situation in Darfur is worsening by the day and yet the world community seems incapable or unwilling to act. First-hand accounts are truly shocking.
But what of responsibility by the Bush administration? Their inaction is best explained by political expediency and oil exploration.
After all, who really cares that black people are dying?
Former US President Bill Clinton has boasted to Fox News that he “got closer to killing him [Bin Laden] than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president, we’d have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him.”
Such a shame, therefore, that his words are largely irrelevant, hypocritical and many years too late.
A salient lesson for Clinton; never think you’ll be lifelong friends with Rupert Murdoch.
An important lesson in how the Associated Press (AP) underplays insurgent violence directed at US troops in Iraq. Dahr Jamail explains:
It is important to note that the board of directors of AP is composed of 22 newspaper and media executives that include the CEOs and presidents of ABC, McClatchy, Hearst, Tribune and the Washington Post. Two of the directors are members of very conservative policy councils that include the Hoover Institute. The Hoover Institute is a Republican policy research center that has been referred to as “Bush’s brain trust.” Its fellows include Condoleezza Rice and Newt Gingrich, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow, along with George Shultz.
Douglas McCorkindale, also on the board of directors at AP, is on the board of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contract company. One does not require crystals to see that the board of AP displays a clear tilt toward right-wing conservative views, and comprises representatives of a huge corporate media network of the largest publishers in the US.
It is not difficult to demolish the myth of the liberal media and its prominent arms like AP.