Antony Loewenstein

Ruth R. Wisse, Harvard University professor, explains how proud Israel makes her feel:

Israelis have shown incredible courage, patience, and decency. The Nobel Prize for Peace belongs almost annually to the IDF, perhaps (if facts become known) never more so than in 2007. Israelis certainly did not choose to be the fighting front line of the democratic world and would do almost anything to escape the role in which they have been cast. But no more than Jews of past generations have they been given the choice by their enemies. Israelis should expect Jews and good people everywhere to help them shoulder the responsibility of resisting Arab aggression in deed and word. 

Henry Kissinger also scored a Nobel Peace Prize, so war criminals are clearly welcome.

A US attack on Iran is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many of us fear that military action is becoming more likely by the day, despite the UN recently voting to delay any further action on sanctions. An attack against the Islamic Republic would be madness on an unprecedented scale, illegal, immoral, counter-productive and devastating on the Iranian people themselves.

Recent reports suggest it is in fact the US military that is preventing the bombing of Iran. Is the army and air-force revolting? Or are there enough senior generals and officers brave enough to resist the war calls by Vice President Dick Cheney?

Now the Iranians have done this:

Iran’s parliament voted Saturday to designate the CIA and the U.S. Army as “terrorist organizations,” a largely symbolic response to a U.S. Senate resolution seeking a similar designation for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

The parliament said the Army and the CIA were terrorists because of the atomic bombing of Japan; the use of depleted uranium munitions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq; support of the killings of Palestinians by Israel; the bombing and killing Iraqi civilians and the torture of imprisoned terror suspects.

Every allegation they cite against the CIA is true, of course, but it’s probably a needless provocation. What, in the end, can stop a military strike against Iran?

The Hamas coup against Fatah in Gaza earlier in the year has often been portrayed as a vicious assault on democracy. In fact, the opposite is probably true. More evidence has now emerged that seems to prove the real agenda behind the event:

For those who peddle the view that the Hamas coup in Gaza was unprovoked, this is embarrassing. As Ma’ariv explains “Abu Mazen instructed his general: ‘Slaughter them.’”

Amit Cohen reports: “The clip apparently shows a meeting in Abu-Mazen’s office in Gaza in which members of the preventive security force identified with Muhammad Dahlan participated. Upon meeting the older gentleman dressed in black uniform, Abu Mazen asks him : “Are you the head of the preventive security force?” When the answer is in the affirmative Abu-Mazen says one word: “Slaughter [them].”

Cohen does not have a problem in guessing who the target was – Hamas.

Gideon Levy, Haaretz, September 28:

It was a pretty quiet year, relatively speaking. Only 457 Palestinians and 10 Israelis were killed, according to the B’Tselem human rights organization, including the victims of Qassam rockets. Fewer casualties than in many previous years. However, it was still a terrible year: 92 Palestinian children were killed (fortunately, not a single Israeli child was killed by Palestinians, despite the Qassams). One-fifth of the Palestinians killed were children and teens – a disproportionate, almost unprecedented number. The Jewish year of 5767. Almost 100 children, who were alive and playing last New Year, didn’t survive to see this one.

We set out each week in the footsteps of the fighters, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, trying to document the deeds of Israel Defense Forces soldiers, Border Police officers, Shin Bet security service investigators and Civil Administration personnel – the mighty occupation army that leaves behind in its wake horrific killing and destruction, this year as every year, for four decades.

Burmese bloggers are struggling to let the world know what is happening to their country.

In the face of overwhelming odds, we salute them.

The UK-based group Jews for Justice for Palestinians published the following full-page ad in yesterday’s Times newspaper, directed at Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Over 300 signatures were attached:

Dear David

In your address to the UN today, we urge you to oppose Israel’s sanctions against the people of Gaza. Amnesty International, Israeli organisations and distinguished Israeli writers have all condemned this move, announced on September 19th, to extend sanctions.

As British Jews and voters, we call on the UK government to stand against this collective punishment, a direct violation of international law.

The Israeli Deputy Prime Minister described the proposal as cutting off ‘infrastructural oxygen’. In fact, the threat is to the real water and real electricity supplies to the entrapped population of Gaza. Euphemisms cannot disguise the genuine danger to health and lives.

Indiscriminate punishment of Palestinian civilians does not protect the people of Sderot but rather, as the Israeli Peace Bloc Gush Shalom says, it unites all Palestinians ‘in bitterness and hatred’ against Israelis ‘who will bear the price eventually’. As you said in your speech to the Labour Party Conference, there may be military victories, but there is no military solution.

The UK Foreign Affairs Select Committee (August 2007) has called the decision not to speak to Hamas ‘counterproductive’. This week a petition from Israeli writers including David Grossman, Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua says: ‘In the past Israel has negotiated with its worst enemies, and now the correct course of action is to negotiate with Hamas… to prevent further suffering on both sides.’ (Jerusalem Post 23.9.2007)

We urge you to heed these words.

David Rose, New Statesman, September 27:

In 2004, the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, the only independent body with powers to call the agencies to account, announced that it planned to hold an inquiry into the relationship between the spooks and the fourth estate, suggesting it was time for a wide-ranging debate. In the event, few journalists offered to give evidence, and the committee’s conclusions, published in its 2005 annual report, were disappointingly bland: “The government is trying to balance the need to inform people about issues that affect them, such as the terrorist threat to the UK, whilst still protecting the agencies’ work. This is a difficult balance, which requires further thought.” Indeed, it does.

Twenty years ago, the Independent, led by its now much-missed political editor, the late Tony Bevins, began a campaign to reform the Westminster lobby by withdrawing from the twice-daily briefings to correspondents by the then prime minister’s spokesman, the doughty Bernard Ingham. Since then, political reporting has changed beyond recognition. When Labour came to power in 1997, Alastair Campbell’s comments on behalf of Tony Blair became attributable to “the prime minister’s spokesman” and, eventually, to him and his successors by name. But in 1987 the lobby rules were essentially the same as those that govern briefings from MI5 and MI6 today. Like them, lobby meetings were then not merely off the record, but deniable, and those who broke the rules risked expulsion from future sessions – so making it impossible, it was believed, for transgressors to do their jobs (though Bevins and his colleagues soon demonstrated otherwise).

The old system’s drawbacks had long seemed obvious, and were often canvassed, especially in magazines such as this. The lobby rules were a licence to manipulate coverage and a way of settling political scores, a game in which journalists and voters held few cards. “Lobbies of all kinds are a conspiracy against the customer, the reader,” says Peter Preston, who as editor of the Guardian also campaigned for reform. “They enable the reporter to say, ‘Look how clever I am. I’ve got this amazing source, but I’m not going to tell you who it is, so you’re just going to have to trust me.’ The trouble is, the in formation may well not be trustworthy at all – from either a prime ministerial spokesman or MI6.”

By definition, a reporter cannot publicly question information from a deniable briefing. They must swallow it whole, or not at all. As Andreas Whittam Smith, the Independent‘s editor when its campaign began, pointed out in an article he wrote looking back in 2002, the old lobby rules tended “to enforce a consensus”. This suited everyone: while the PM’s spokesman got his message out unmodified, “When a repor ter writes along the same lines as everybody else, he or she cannot be blamed if things turn out differently.” Unfortunately, he noted, “Reporters as a group are often completely wrong.” As spies can be…

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has invited Dubya to speak at a university in Tehran, returning the favour after his recent visit to Columbia University. Many Iranians were upset at the way in which their President was treated in New York. Iranian blogger Bozorg Sharafedin gets past the headlines:

Unlike what Bollinger said at his speech in Columbia University, Ahmadinejad has no “sign of a dictator”. To find the characteristics of a dictator in Iran’s president one should search deep inside him and read between the lines of his behavior.

It is quite strange that the new dictators of our age (except Putin) do not follow the clichés of dictatorship manner. On the paper, Ahmadinejad and Bush are both good people, highly religious, doing their best to save the world from injustice. Ahmadinejad dines with journalists, speaks for a half an hour about the relationship between man and God and defines the mission of human on earth as pursuit of love, kindness and dignity. We have heard the same lecture from Bush before the invasion of US to Iraq and after huge massacre of innocent Iraqi people.

According to this discourse, filtering of internet is a “moral” act to immune the community from the rotten world and execution of criminals in the public is a virtuous deed.

As always, there are many sides to this story.

After attending a public lecture at Case Western Reserve University by the authors of the Israel Lobby book, a student at John Carroll University changes their perspective:

“I thought that Israel was the victim before. After listening to the speech I realize that Israel plays a major role in provoking other nations.”

For anybody who needs to learn some basic English skills:

The issue of Iraqi partition has now become more urgent after the US Congress called for a plan that is against the wishes of the Iraqi people. But since when has this ever been relevant?

The essential Cat’s Dream blog posits an interesting theory. What if the idea of breaking down the Iraqi state is the most ideal way of furthering Zionist ideology in the Middle East? To quote Israel Shahak:

The idea that all the Arab states should be broken down, by Israel, into small units, occurs again and again in Israeli strategic thinking. For example, Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz (and probably the most knowledgeable in Israel, on this topic) writes about the “best” that can happen for Israeli interests in Iraq: “The dissolution of Iraq into a Shi’ite state, a Sunni state and the separation of the Kurdish part” (Ha’aretz 6/2/1982).

Of course, partition is all about the Iraqi people.

Forward editorial, September 26:

If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s fire-breathing buffoon of a president, had any doubts about the contempt and loathing he inspires in America and the West, his reception in New York this week should have cleared things up for him. Should have — but probably did not.

Instead, we put on a display of undisciplined rage, and the Iranian leader was given an opportunity to cloak himself in the mantle of victimhood.