Monthly Archive for April, 2007

Reasons not to buy American

Published on 30 April 2007 in General. 7 Comments

In spite of the astronomical amounts of money being spent on Iraq’s reconstruction (i.e. to rebuild what the Americans blew up in the first place) it seems that when it comes to US government contracts, you don’t always get what you pay for

While in previous cases, the administration admitted that certain projects had been abandoned due to various security and maintenance issues, this marks the first instance in which projects that had formerly been deemed successful were no longer functioning.

And in case you’re wondering if this is due to user error:

In all seven cases, the project had previously been inspected and approved as functioning properly, with some of the inspections occurring as recently as six months ago. “Curiously, most of the problems seemed unrelated to sabotage stemming from Iraq’s parlous security situation,” the Times notes, “but instead were the product of poor initial construction, petty looting, a lack of any maintenance and simple neglect.”

What a great endorsement for no bid contracts and capitalism at its zenith? Is it any wonder that Toyota has just surpassed GM as the world’s top car manufacturer?

Is Israel testing new weapons on Palestinians?

Published on 30 April 2007 in Israel. 25 Comments

The strangest paradox of Israel has been the contradiction between its obsession with military superiority while still maintaining a canard of vulnerability and victimhood.

Reports of Israel using unconventional and chemical weapons in the occupied territories are nothing new, but new reports suggest a far more sinister class of weapon being tested by Israel on their favorite targets.

Habas Al-Wahid, head of the emergency centre at the Shuhada Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza city told the journalists that the legs of the injured were sliced from their bodies “as if a saw was used to cut through the bone.” But there was no evidence of ordinary metal shrapnel in or near the wounds.

At Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Juma Saka said that on examination of the wounds, the doctors had found a powder on the victim’s bodies and in their internal organs. Afterwards they removed the microscopic particles which turned out to be carbon and tungsten.

“The powder was like microscopic shrapnel, and this is likely what caused the injuries,” Saka said. Complicating the issue was the death of many patients several days afterwards, although they appeared to recover initially. Accusations that Israel is using Gaza and its inhabitants as a laboratory to test new military weapons, have been made from several quarters.

It defies credibility when Israel’s apologists repeatedly justify Israel’s actions on the grounds of preventing café’s and pizza bars being targeted by suicide bombers, yet condone the use of such macabre and insidious weapons.

Yet, after Olmert’s recent suggestions that 1000 well directed Tomahawk cruise missiles might halt Iran’s non existent nuclear weapons program, you can’t help but wonder if Israel’s leadership is most comfortable when discussing war and oppression.

What the walls really mean

Published on 29 April 2007 in General and Israel. 3 Comments

It is no coincidence why large concrete walls are being erected in both the occupied territories and Baghdad.  Both are unmistakable monuments to failed societies.

Whether for protection and security or to contain and imprison, walls are a symbol of failure – a failure to revel in freedom and embrace our common humanity: that is reason enough to bring them down.

In Israel, the wall is justified on the grounds of security, while being exploited to grab even more land for Israel.

Scott Ritter put’s the implications of the walls in Baghdad very eloquently:

Walls, ideological or physical, on the ground or in space, do not, as Reagan noted, facilitate the cause of liberty and freedom.  They restrict it.  By walling in the Iraqi citizens of Baghdad, by walling out the immigrants who seek solace within our borders and by partitioning off Europe from Iran and Russia, the Bush administration has become that which America once renounced.  All freedom-loving Americans who embrace the cause of liberty and justice for all must rally around the ideals put forward by Reagan when standing next to the Berlin Wall, and declare to the usurper currently sitting in the White House: 

The occupations of the US in Iraq and Israel in the occupied territories have failed miserably and are mirrored in societies in their last throes.

Postponing the inevitable

Published on 29 April 2007 in General. 0 Comments

It’s hard to imagine how things could possibly be worse for the Bush Administration’s ambitions for a successful outcome in Iraq.

On the trail of George Tenet’s revelations that there was no serious consideration of anything other than war in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, Senator Durbin, who sat on the Intelligence Committee, revealed this week that the members of the Committee who had witnessed the intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq war, knew that lies were being fed to the public, but were bound by secrecy laws from revealing this to the media.

These testimonies put a death knell into the argument that the Bush Administration made an honest mistake and that the intelligence community failed were derelict in their duty.

 The information we had in the intelligence committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn’t believe it,” Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, said Wednesday when talking on the Senate floor about the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002.“I was angry about it. [But] frankly, I couldn’t do much about it because, in the intelligence committee, we are sworn to secrecy. We can’t walk outside the door and say the statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that is being given to this Congress.”
 

Sen. Durbin (D-IL) said that he and Sen. Rockefeller KNEW that Bush was lying because of briefings to the Intelligence Committee but could not tell because they were “sworn to silence”.  Sen. Rockefeller put a memo for the record in his file to try to cover his ass.  He said that this was an “ethical problem”.  If the president is LYING that’s the ethical problem.  The Senators had a moral responsibility to uncover this falsehood and save us 3,00 lives, the Iraqis 600,000 lives and a trillion dollars.  They are in my mind accomplises to this tragedy.

This week, the Great White Hope of the Surge, General Patreaus, gave a grim assessment in Washington, admitting that not only was the situation in Iraq more complicated than even he had imagined, but also gave the grim warning that the situation will get worse before it gets easier and that it runs the risk of higher U.S. and Iraqi casualties.

Retired General William Odom added more gloom to the prediction:

“…for  the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq’s grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war

“Thus, he lets the United States fly further and further into trouble, squandering its influence, money, and blood, facilitating the gains of our enemies. The Congress is the only mechanism we have to fill this vacuum in command judgment.

“To put this in a simple army metaphor, the Commander-in-Chief seems to have gone AWOL, that is ‘absent without leave.’ He neither acts nor talks as though he is in charge. Rather, he engages in tit-for-tat games.

It’s little wonder therefore that the Bush administration is not only scaling back it’s expectations for Iraq, but intends to postpone the prognosis of the surge till as late as possible.

“The Bush administration will not try to assess whether the troop increase in Iraq is producing signs of political progress or greater security until September, and many of Mr. Bush’s top advisers now anticipate that any gains by then will be limited,” an article in Saturday’s New York Times reports.

Stay tuned for the right wing war lovers to blame this FUBAR on the liberal media.

Those best laid plans (hatched in utopia)

Published on 29 April 2007 in General. 0 Comments

Why did Bush realy invade Iraq? According to former CIA director George Tenet’s new book, it was:

“the administration’s largely unarticulated view that the democratic transformation of the Middle East through regime change in Iraq would be worth the price.”

Oops. Well, at least the Americans have rallied support around Iran and caused unprecedented levels of hatred towards the world’s only superpower. I’d say that’s a jolly good effort in only seven years. This is what happens when you have academics and office-bound journalists rallying for war.

It’s a shame the Americans didn’t focus more on reforming the Jewish state, a nation that is beyond politically and morally dysfunctional. Now we learn that Prime Minister Olmert will not resign after the release of the 2006 Lebanon war investigation. Perhaps allegedly committing rape is the only firing offence.

What will changes bring?

Published on 29 April 2007 in General. 0 Comments

Fidel Castro’s apparent return to a leadership role here in Cuba is the subject of much debate in the international press (usually from individuals who are keen for the old man to die, in the vain hope that a period of disaster-style capitalism would follow.)

In fact, Cubans I’ve met are worried about a post-Castro era, as many have only known his rule. While there are serious issues about freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of the press, economic health is hardly guaranteed by totally opening up one’s country to the international community (think of Argentina in the 1990s, when World Bank “assistance” caused societal melt-down.)

It seems more likely that change will be gradual, and necessarily so. The form of these adjustments should be decided by Cubans and those in the region, not office-bound bureaucrats in Washington or London (or execs in the US who want to place Starbucks on every Havana street-corner.)

Encouraging war is good for one’s career

Published on 29 April 2007 in General. 0 Comments

The mainstream media did a sterling job of selling the war in Iraq to a frightened public. Very few journalists questioned government lies and military dishonesty. After all, if reporters don’t regard both these institutions as organs of disinformation, then perhaps they should work in North Korea (or the New York Times, the conservative blogosphere or the Republican Party. Oh wait, many of them do.)

A new documentary, Buying the War, looks like essential viewing. As FAIR explains:

In one revealing response, NBC anchor Tim Russert explains his reason for not raising sufficient doubts about what Dick Cheney and others were saying on his program: the skeptics weren’t calling him. “To this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them,” he told Moyers. Do major media figures like Russert really think they’ve done their job if they just wait around for critical sources to come to them? And the idea that NBC’s Washington bureau chief didn’t have “access” to prominent skeptics like Scott Ritter and Daniel Ellsberg is just laughable.

Those poor little journalists, waiting for the call that never came. Russert’s lame excuse would undoubtedly be repeated across the Western world, including in Australia. And many of these same “commentators” and “experts” are still working, still making a living from discussing world affairs and the war in Iraq. With blood on their hands, at the very least, they deserve little better than a permanent holiday from their offices.

Making the case for attacking Iran

Published on 27 April 2007 in Israel. 0 Comments

In spite of the fact that every rationale being drummed up for attacking Iran continues to fall flat on its face, it seems nothing will stop them from continuing to lie.

For many countries, the threat of nuclear annihilation is a theoretical issue. For Israel, the threat of nuclear attack is real, palpable, a true possibility. Of all the countries plotting the demise of the Jewish State, the country that is planning to use nuclear power as the weapon of choice is, of course, Iran. Which leads to an all-important, non-theoretical, set of questions.

Will Israel strike Iran?

Though there is no evidence whatsoever that Iran has any program to develop nuclear weapons, such fanatics will continue to insist otherwise. The CIA, IAEA and even the head of the Mossad have said that Iran is a decade way from developing nuclear weapons. As former UNSCOM weapons inspector, Scott Ritter points out, nuclear weapons programs are typically 5-10 years long. In other words, what the CIA, IAEA and Mossad are saying, is that the Iranians haven’t even started.

Why is the US trying to break Somalia?

Published on 27 April 2007 in General. 2 Comments

Somalia was actually on a road to peace, when the US decided to  introduce their own brand of chaos to the region.  They backed Ethiopian warlords to attack the country, and presto, 300,000 refugees were produced overnight.

US and Ethiopian military intervention in Somalia has hampered international efforts to bring peace to the war-torn country, an independent British report said Wednesday.

“Genuine multilateral concern to support the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Somalia has been hijacked by unilateral actions of other international actors — especially Ethiopia and the United States — following their own foreign policy agendas,” the report from the Chatham House foreign affairs think-tank said.

The Islamic Courts that had assumed control of the country enjoyed overwhelming support from the population, but when US interests are concerned, the wishes of the people are of no consequence.

Indeed, while warlords and secular governments have come and gone, the Islamic Courts have enjoyed relatively consistent support for over a decade.

Indeed, while warlords and secular governments have come and gone, the Islamic Courts have enjoyed relatively consistent support for over a decade.

What else could this be but another attack on an Islamic country that was not threat to the US or its neighbors?

Kafkaesque case of Jose Padilla continues

Published on 27 April 2007 in General. 0 Comments

The past five years of Jose Padilla’s life have epitomized a living hell. To say that his life has been ruined is an understatement.

The Bush administration has leapt from one absurd accusation to the next completely undisturbed by the glaring inconsistencies of their case. The prosecution’s objective is the same now as it was 5 years ago when the Chicago gang-banger was first arrested at O’ Hare Airport as an alleged “dirty bomber”, that is, keep Padilla behind bars for the rest of his life.

As with the detainment of David Hicks, the government has no case to present, but for some absurd reason, refuses to allow this man to go free. Perhaps because he has become to mentally ill that unlike Hicks, he cannot even manage to negotiate a plea bargain.

One has to ask themselves, what kind of sick mind and sick system does this to someone?

Padilla has been in solitary confinement for the last 5 years. During that time he was drugged, humiliated, and tortured—all of the practices which have become commonplace under Bush. For the first 4 years he was deprived of habeas corpus and legal counsel. During that period, he was never charged with a crime. He was simply declared an “enemy combatant” and stripped of his rights. His arrest has been used to establish the precedent that Bush can arbitrarily imprison American citizens without filing charges. It is the very definition of tyranny.

The government has no case against Padilla and they know it. He’s merely a lab-rat in their experiment to expand presidential powers. The Washington Post even admitted this in an article earlier this week, “Few Specifics Evident as Padilla Trial Nears” 4-23-07. Padilla had no nuclear material, no plan to attack apartment buildings, and no part in any terrorist conspiracy. It’s all baloney. In 5 years, the government hasn’t produced a shred of evidence that Padilla is guilty of anything.

Padilla has become the sacrificial lamb for the Bush Administration propaganda machine. To let him go would mean to admit they have made a mistake, and given the attention this man has received, they can ill afford such an admission.

Occupation keeping 2 sets of books

Published on 27 April 2007 in General. 0 Comments

Not only is the surge going badly, it’s worse than we thought. So called reports of reduced deaths as a result of the “surge” are actually a result of sleazy accounting on the part of the occupation force:

U.S. officials who say there has been a dramatic drop in sectarian violence in Iraq since President Bush began sending more American troops into Baghdad aren’t counting one of the main killers of Iraqi civilians.

Car bombs and other explosive devices have killed thousands of Iraqis in the past three years, but the administration doesn’t include them in the casualty counts it has been citing as evidence that the surge of additional U.S. forces is beginning to defuse tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

Meanwhile Iraq continues to gather apace towards becoming a hell hole, which makes the warnings about the consequences of withdrawing from Iraq seem laughable.

Difference matters

Published on 27 April 2007 in Israel. 0 Comments

Following this week’s announcement of My Israel Question being short-listed for the 2007 NSW Premier’s Literary Award, the judge’s comments are as follows:

Antony Loewenstein quotes a commentator on contemporary Jewry who says that a diasporic Jew is, by definition, a neurotic. My Israel Question appraises that diagnosis by critically examining the media’s representation, in Australia , the United States and Britain , of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The ‘neurotic Jew’ is not so much an individual as an institutionalised cultural syndrome.

Starting with the 2003 debate about whether Hanan Ashrawi should be given the Sydney Peace Prize, Lowenstein takes aim, in particular, at Australian Jews whose loyalty to Israel disables, in his opinion, an open-minded debate about how to establish peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Portraying Australia ’s pro-Israel lobby as fiercely dogmatic and bullying, he points out that the lobby’s work is made easier by the highly professional media relations of the Israeli Defense Force, by the political ineptitude of the Palestinian leadership, and by a lack of empathy, widespread in the West, for the Arab point of view. Of particular interest is his account of the Labor tradition of indulgence towards Israel .

My Israel Question is, at times, a personalised work of political journalism. Loewenstein writes that he has had to overcome a collective sense of shame that would equate a critical view of Israel with disrespect towards the victims of the Holocaust. A Jew’s questioning of Israel is not without emotional cost.

The book is not primarily autobiographical, however. It is a researched guide to the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict and to the political and cultural processes that have assured the Israeli side of a sympathetic hearing in the Anglophone world. At a time when Australia Jewry is publicly fragmenting in its views on Middle Eastern affairs, My Israel Question is a cogent expression of Jewish dissidence.

It’s encouraging to note that a dissenting Jewish perspective on Zionism and the Israel/Palestine conflict is both appreciated and encouraged in the Australian community, far away from the rampant parochialism of the Jewish world. Until more Jews start to understand that there are multiple Jewish understandings of the Middle East, they’ll continue to convince themselves that Israel is hated simply because it’s Jewish (though a racially discriminatory policy hardly helps.)

Who is the real terrorist?

Published on 27 April 2007 in General. 0 Comments

Amy Goodman, Truthdig, April 25:

A terrorist lives in Miami. He is not in hiding, or part of some sleeper cell. He’s an escaped convict, wanted internationally for blowing up a jetliner. His name is Luis Posada Carriles. As the nation was focused on the Virginia Tech shooting, the Bush administration quietly allowed Posada’s release from a federal immigration detention center.

It was Oct. 6, 1976, a clear day in the Caribbean. Cubana Airlines Flight 455 departed from Barbados, bound for Cuba, with a stop in Trinidad. Posada then ran a private investigative firm in Venezuela. Two of his employees were on the flight, deplaned in Trinidad and left C-4 plastic explosive on board, disguised as a tube of toothpaste. Shortly after takeoff, the bomb exploded and the plane went down. All 73 people on board were killed.

Among them were six young Guyanese students on their way to Cuba to study medicine. Now an American citizen, Roseanne Nenninger, sister of Raymond Persaud, one of those students, was 11 years old when her brother was killed: “We had a huge farewell party for our brother and everyone came, the family members, everyone from the local community, all his friends, school friends, so it was a great day for all of us. And the next day, we all went to the airport. He was dressed in his brown suit that was made by a tailor especially for him getting on a plane. It was his first time on an airplane. We watched him walk on the tarmac and head onto the airplane. And it was a great moment for all of us.”

Within hours, he was dead. He was just one of the victims, one of 73. There was also the entire Cuban Olympic fencing team, young athletes. Each with a name, each with a story. The Cubana Airlines bombing remains to this day the only midair bombing of a civilian airliner in the Western Hemisphere. Posada was tried and convicted in Venezuela of organizing the bombing. He was imprisoned, then escaped in 1985.

Posada, who will be 80 next year, is a Cuban-born Venezuelan national. He has been a violent opponent of Fidel Castro since the early 1960s. Declassified CIA and FBI documents reveal the extent of Posada’s violent career. Through the decades he hopscotched around Latin America, smuggling arms, running drugs, plotting coups, working with Augusto Pinochet’s dreaded secret police, assisting with Oliver North’s illegal Contra war against Nicaragua—the list goes on. He was a paid CIA “asset,” and also served in the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of second lieutenant, at Fort Benning, Ga. He has been implicated in the bombing of hotels in Havana. He was caught and convicted of attempting to assassinate Castro in Panama.

Thanks to the Federation of American Scientists’ Government Secrecy Project and the private, nonprofit National Security Archive at George Washington University, the public can read for itself the declassified documents. These documents show what it means for U.S. intelligence agencies to work with “unsavory” characters. Endeavors like the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba of 1961 and the failed Iran-Contra program need operatives, and so the U.S. government hires violent criminals and overlooks their conduct, as long as the policy objectives are being pursued.

And so it is ironic that on the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, April 19, following the mass slaughter on the Virginia Tech campus, the U.S. government quietly released this convicted terrorist and mass murderer.

Persecution and stifling democracy

Published on 26 April 2007 in Israel. 17 Comments

The efforts of Azmi Bishara have drawn the fircsest of retaliations from the Israeli government. Sonja Karkar illustrates how Israel’s Jewish identity may come at the expense of democracy.

All of Israel’s one million plus Palestinian residents ­ the survivors and descendants of the 1948 Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine – have long felt discriminated against, despite Israel paying lip-service to their democratic rights. They also felt on the sidelines of what was being played out in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, that is until Azmi Bishara, the outspoken political leader of the National Democratic Assembly (NDA) or Balad in Israel and a Knesset member, began campaigning for the collective rights of Palestinians. His vision is not just for change inside Israel, but involves an all-inclusive civil rights struggle against political Zionism – the racist and colonialist policies that have dispossessed, marginalised and oppressed all Palestinians for almost 60 years. This is what Israel is at pains to put down by any means. It cannot afford to have someone like Azmi Bishara rallying people to his way of thinking. Now, after many attempts to muzzle him, Israel has finally succeeded in getting him to resign from the Knesset and to stay out of the country.

A list of unpublished charges were drawn up against Bishara whilst he was abroad – charges so serious that they would likely have landed him in jail on his return. While the charges themselves are not known, it is not difficult to guess at what they involve. Bishara has been previously charged with undermining the “Jewish nature of the state”, but the charges have always been dropped. This time it seems that Israel’s state security services may have formulated charges that not only label Bishara a national security threat, but accuse him of treason and espionage. The media is not allowed to discuss any of it and even Bishara himself is reticent on the matter, no doubt to protect himself from being further arraigned because he is adamant that he will eventually return to Israel.

The creation of a Jewish state was certainly justified on moral grounds, but is the purity of Israel’s Jewish indentity so important to Israel that it is willing to succumb to fascism? Surely if the case for Israel’s Jewish indentity were so solid, such draconian measures would not be necessary.

Surge backfiring

Published on 26 April 2007 in General. 1 Comment

The deadly attack that claimed the most US deaths since the invasion of Iraq hasn’t stopped the right wing blogosphere from spinning its wheels to convince their flock (or what remains of them) that the Surge Is Working:

I fully expect…that we’re going to see a sea change in coverage because “a majority of Iraq is under local control and relatively quiet” and all the MSM is going to realize that if they don’t get on the right side of this quickly, the deluge of broken credibility will very likely worsen and shorten their personal careers significantly.

I stretches the imagination to hear these people lecturing to their critics about broken credibility. Others are still faithfully clinging to the hope that they will get to have the last laugh, though the cowardly left wing media will under-report the victory. How’s this for wishful thinking?

By summer 2008, things will be have improved considerably in Iraq, but it will not be reported. The MSM will focus on the presidential election, and whoever is in favor of the Iraq engagement will be slammed by the MSM.

By spring 2009, the MSM will report that, yes, now everything is much better in Iraq. Whoever is president, especially if he/she is a democrat, will get the credit. Bush will still be blamed.

This guy sounds like a bad astrologer I once visited. Glenn Reynolds thinks it “Sounds plausible!”

As would be expected, they fail to mention the inconvenient developments taking place on the ground. Time asks if the surge is actually backfiring, in a report that paints an all too grim but familiar picture.

Even more significant, was yesterday’s admission that the cornerstone for the surge success, the training of Iraqi troops, is no longer the driving force of US policy

How will the US forces be able to stand down if the Iraq forces will never be able to stand up?

Don’t expect an explanation to be forthcoming from the likes of Instapundit.

Two faces, one reality

Published on 26 April 2007 in General. 0 Comments

Why do so many Jews insist, in Israel’s supposed best interests, that any potential US President believes in every position taken by the Israeli government?

Barack Obama, you’ve failed yet again.

Jewish paranoia is a most unattractive trait (especially when it’s totally unwarranted.)

Subservience to another country is hard to fathom here in Cuba. Sure, the Soviets used to support Castro, and now Chavez has unofficially replaced them, but it’s hardly the same thing. The longer I stay here, the more I note the growing fascination with Israel (I’ve spent time with Havana’s Jewish community, but more on this soon.)

In fact, although the regime is utterly opposed to the actions of Israel – mainly to be against the US and to show solidarity with the Palestinians – the country remains in fact close to the Jewish state, and always has been. One face for the public, and another for pragmatism.

The enemy within

Published on 25 April 2007 in Israel. 7 Comments

The most recent corruption scandal is symptomatic of something much deeper in Israel, according to Uri Avneri, Aharon Amir, and Haim Guri. These men believe that the greatest threat to Israel is not an existential one, but brought about through the loss of direction as envisaged by the founding fathers.

Israel’s independence is safe from outside threat, but great threats lie within”, said Avneri. “Corruption is almost everywhere. The country bears no resemblance to what we had in mind when it was founded. We have completely lost all sense of responsibility for one another, of mercy and of compassion.

To add further to this, the 2006 Lebanon war has left the country feeling vulnerable and leaderless.

The 34-day war in Lebanon, starting July 12 last year, was a disastrous turning point for Israel. Until the Eliyahu Winograd Commission, which Olmert set up in September 2006, delivers its interim report in late April – which will cover the first five days of the war only – and resolves these matters, we will not know precisely the orders sent to specific units or the timing of all of the actors, but there is already a consensus on far more important fundamentals. But the Israelis did not lose the war because of orders given or not given to various officers.

So what would the founding fathers have thought about the Israel of today, particularly the vast divide between rich and poor?

“Sixty years later, this isn’t where we thought we’d be”, added Guri. “Alongside all the wonderful things that happened here, we have the terrible things, revealing society’s wounds”.

As for the values of society in Israeli, it seems that the state has inherited more from the US than generous helpings of financial and military aid.

“Morality is a dirty word nowadays”, said Avnery when asked if our society, our norms, the illusive sense of moral, have all changed. “Back then solidarity and innocence were corner stones of the society. People barely made ends meet, but believed they were building the ideal society. Today they would be considered suckers”.

Indeed, given that the basis for Israel’s creation rested so heavily on the events surrounding WWII, it is a sad indictment on the state that the real victims who Israel has vowed to protect have been largely forgotten.

“…. 40% of survivors in Israel are living below the poverty line, Israel Radio has reported.”

It no surprise then that the three men share an obvious sentiment:

“This is not the Israel we dreamed of”

Words fail, again

Published on 25 April 2007 in General. 11 Comments

Sometimes the Australian Jewish community excels at providing priceless parody:

Prime Minister John Howard will be honoured with a Jewish National Fund (JNF) forest in his name at a gala dinner in Melbourne next month.

To be named the John Howard Negev Forest, the forest will be located in Israel’s Negev region, the focus of the JNF’s Negev Now campaign.

What next? A nuclear warhead, aimed at Tehran, called “The Delicious Dick Cheney”? Thank you AIPAC.

Meanwhile, back in Cuba, the media has a few thoughts on the recent US release of terrorist Luis Posada Carriles and ties grow between China and Cuba.

Being in Cuba still reminds me of a nation caught between yesterday’s victories and today’s restrictions.

NSW Premier’s Literary Award short-list

Published on 25 April 2007 in General. 18 Comments

My Israel Question has been short-listed for the 2007 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. It is an honour to be recognised in such a prestigious category (though I clearly have no idea if I will win, announced late May.)

I’ll comment more fully in the coming weeks and month, but I look forward to the accusations of anti-Semitism by the usual suspects towards the judging panel.

To the awards themselves, I thank them for the acknowledgement.

Falling like dominos

Published on 24 April 2007 in Israel. 4 Comments

Another Israeli politician is on the ropes.

The 66-year-old former labour leader is accused of involvement in the embezzlement of about 10 million shekels ($2.94 million) from a union he chaired and from an associated charity.

At this rate, it there won’t be anyone left to govern.  This corruption epidemic must be contagious.