Monthly Archive for November, 2007

The price of reporting

Published on 30 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Elite media concerns:

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, tonight issued a stark warning that the supply of reliable news reporting is dwindling despite the internet-driven worldwide information explosion.

Delivering this year’s Hugo Young memorial lecture to an audience at Chatham House in London, Keller said that the gravest danger to the future of newspapers was not political pressure, nor the “acid rain” of criticism from the blogosphere or new technology upending the business model.

“It is a loss of faith, a failure of resolve on the part of the people who make newspapers.”

Keller said bloggers, internet search engines and satirical talk shows had blossomed across the world but could never replace reporting.

The price of real reporting:

At least 171 journalists and other news media staff have died as a result of their work around the world so far this year, making 2007 the bloodiest year on record for the industry.

With more than a month still to go before the end of the year, the all-time high of 168 deaths recorded in 2006 was exceeded on Tuesday when at least three editorial staff were killed in Sri Lanka during a military air strike on a radio station.

Getting comfortable with occupation

Published on 30 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Juan Cole offers some advice to Republican presidential nominee John McCain:

McCain also repeated his standard lie that Iraqis would attack the United States if US troops were withdrawn from that country. He contrasted the Vietnamese Communists, who, he said, just wanted to build their workers’ utopia in Vietnam once the US left, with Iraqis, who he continues to confuse with Usamah Bin Laden (a Saudi living far from Iraq who never had anything to do with Iraq).

Of course, back in the early 1970s, if you had asked McCain, he would have said we have to fight the Vietnamese because of the Domino effect, and if we lost there then International Communism would be in our living rooms. Now, he says the Vietnamese Communists weren’t expansionist at all, and just wanted socialism in one country.

So then, John, if that was true and there was never any danger of a domino effect, why did we sacrifice 58,000 US lives and kill a million to two million Vietnamese peasants? You just admitted we weren’t in any danger from them, even if they defeated us.

It’s now tragically clear that the Americans will remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future (as was the plan all along.)

We like to remain blind

Published on 30 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , .

The US State Department releases a weekly report on “progress” in Iraq.

Their primary sources of information?

The mainstream media.

A little too late

Published on 30 November 2007 in Israel. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Guess who allegedly said this?

“I know what its like to hear that you can’t use a certain road, or pass through a checkpoint because you are a Palestinian. I know what it is like to feel discriminated against and powerless.”

Real solutions (avoided)

Published on 30 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Naomi Klein, The Nation, December 17:

Anyone tired of lousy news from the markets should talk to Douglas Lloyd, director of Venture Business Research, a company that tracks trends in venture capitalism. “I expect investment activity in this sector to remain buoyant,” he said recently. His bouncy mood was inspired by the money gushing into private security and defense companies. He added, “I also see this as a more attractive sector, as many do, than clean energy.”

Got that? If you are looking for a sure bet in a new growth market, sell solar, buy surveillance; forget wind, buy weapons.

This observation–coming from an executive trusted by such clients as Goldman Sachs and Marsh & McLennan–deserves particular attention in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali at the beginning of December. There, world environment ministers are supposed to come up with the global pact that will replace Kyoto.

The Bush Administration, still roadblocking firm caps on emissions, wants to let the market solve the crisis. “We’re on the threshold of dramatic technological breakthroughs,” Bush assured the world last January, adding, “We’ll leave it to the market to decide the mix of fuels that most effectively and efficiently meet this goal.”

The idea that capitalism can save us from climate catastrophe has powerful appeal. It gives politicians an excuse to subsidize corporations rather than regulate them, and it neatly avoids a discussion about how the core market logic of endless growth landed us here in the first place.

Jews wanting to only talk to other Jews

Published on 29 November 2007 in Israel. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Zionist organisations aren’t too fond of open debate. Indeed, dissent is shunned, especially on issues related to Israel/Palestine. So this latest, local news is both tragic (and utterly predictable):

Making the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) the pre-eminent voice of the Jewish community is Robert Goot’s main aim, the new president told delegates at the governing body’s annual conference.

Addressing the Melbourne conference, ahead of the ECAJ’s rotation to Sydney, Goot said measures, such as a chief executive officer and a permanent office in Canberra, would also place the Jewish umbrella organisation on a more professional footing.

Goot proposed “a four-way accommodation” between the ECAJ, the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) and the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) over responsibilities in communication and advocacy to the wider Australian community.

He said AIJAC, the ADC and ZFA “without reference to the ECAJ have made representations to government, the media and organisations outside the Jewish community on matters of policy that concern the whole of Australian Jewry … mixed messages are being conveyed … there is confusion inside and outside the Jewish community”.

Goot said he was not trying to exclude organisations from making statements, but called for cooperation between the four bodies.

This is really just code for telling Jews who may disagree, even other Zionist organisations, that there should only be one major Jewish voice heard in the wider community. Doesn’t that show a great confidence in democracy?

Then this:

Goot wants the ECAJ to be on guard against rising antisemitism and “the ascendancy of anti-Israel views”, such as those seen in Europe, Canada and New Zealand.

It also needs to be concerned about “a small, but growing number of Australian Jews working in the media and academic institutions [who] have succumbed to intense peer group pressure and become mouthpieces for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiments”. Goot nominated Independent Australian Jewish Voices as an example.

As a co-founder of IAJV, a few words are required. If Goot or any other Zionist leader thinks that Jews who disagree with the fundamentalist, non-questioning line towards Israel are only doing so because of “intense peer group pressure”, then they need to get out more and away from their local synagogue. A growing number of Jews won’t be silenced or intimidated by calls for solidarity with the Jewish community. Some Jewish groups seem to also think that with better PR, Israel’s problems in the public domain will be solved. Maybe it’s worth looking at the Jewish state’s immoral actions?

In fact, many in IAJV have specifically told us that the organised Jewish community, with its complete obedience to the racist, Zionist agenda, is turning them away. They want debate. And they want to know why Israel has become an apartheid state, ruling over an occupied people for decades (even the Israeli Prime Minister realises that time is running out on the so-called two-state solution. In fact, the facts on the ground already make it an impossibility.)

IAJV has big plans for 2008. And keeping the Zionist hierarchy happy is at the bottom of our list.

Learning the rules of the game

Published on 29 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , .

A discussion of the role of an economic hit-man, from the source himself, author and activist John Perkins:

Vandals seek help

Published on 29 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Hands up who wants to pimp out their “independent” blog?

Executives at large oil companies often say that the U.S. public — unnerved by high gasoline prices — does not understand or appreciate how expensive it is to keep the nation’s engines running.

And now in a first, two big energy companies and the American Petroleum Institute (API), the U.S. oil industry’s main lobbying group, have reached out to a conservative band of bloggers to tell their story.

“We recognize here that there are many different channels of communications that exist today,” Jane Van Ryan, new media advisor at API, said. “We’ve been looking into the blogosphere for the last several months, and there were a few people who seemed to be a little more knowledgeable about oil and gas.”

Van Ryan noted that the bloggers chosen “have not been particularly critical of the industry.”

On two separate trips this month, API has paid for seven bloggers to travel to Houston, Corpus Christi and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico to learn about the industry and tour facilities operated by Chevron Corp and Royal Dutch Shell Plc.

No occupation here

Published on 29 November 2007 in Israel. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Jeff Halper, Counterpunch, November 28:

One may well think that the struggle inside the Jewish community of Israel is between those of the political right, who want to maintain the settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank so as to “redeem” the Greater Land of Israel as a Jewish country, and those of the left who seek a two-state solution with the Palestinians and are thus willing to relinquish enough of the “territories”, if not all, in order that a viable Palestinian state may emerge.

This is not really the case. Polls and the make-up of the Israeli government suggest that perhaps a quarter of Israeli Jews fall into the first group, the die-hards, while not more than 10 per cent support a full withdrawal from the occupied territories. (Virtually no Israeli Jews use the term “occupation,” which Israel denies it has.) The vast majority of Israeli Jews, stretching from the liberal Meretz party through Labour, Kadima and into the “liberal” wing of the Likud, excepting only the religious parties and the extreme right-wing led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the current minister of strategic affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, share a broad consensus: for both security reasons and because of Israel’s “facts on the ground”, the Arabs (as we [Israelis] call the Palestinians) will have to settle for a truncated mini-state on no more than 15-20 per cent of the country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

Banning “bad” thoughts

Published on 29 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The land of the free?

With overwhelming bipartisan support, Rep. Jane Harman’s “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” passed the House 404-6 late last month and now rests in Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Homeland Security Committee. Swift Senate passage appears certain.

Not since the “Patriot Act” of 2001 has any bill so threatened our constitutionally guaranteed rights.

Ms. Harman, a California Democrat, thinks it likely that the United States will face a native brand of terrorism in the immediate future and offers a plan to deal with ideologically based violence.

But her plan is a greater danger to us than the threats she fears. Her bill tramples constitutional rights by creating a commission with sweeping investigative power and a mandate to propose laws prohibiting whatever the commission labels “homegrown terrorism.”

Ms. Harman’s proposal includes an absurd attack on the Internet, criticizing it for providing Americans with “access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda,” and legalizes an insidious infiltration of targeted organizations. The misnamed “Center of Excellence,” which would function after the commission is disbanded in 18 months, gives the semblance of intellectual research to what is otherwise the suppression of dissent.

Such an affront to democracy should be thoroughly debated in the public domain. Instead, most mainstream journalists are little better than stenographers.

Google avoids torture

Published on 29 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Google’s YouTube has become an essential tool around the world in displaying unheralded truths.

But the group has now removed many videos featuring Egyptian policemen torturing victims.

The Egyptian blogsosphere has reacted with outrage.

“This is by far the biggest blow to the anti-torture movement in Egypt,” one said.

Neo-con Ledeen praises Howard as “arguably the greatest Western leader of the past decade”

Published on 28 November 2007 in General. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

My following article appears in today’s edition of Crikey:

Michael Ledeen is a key figure in the neo-con firmament, a man whose ideas about the Arab world have been thoroughly proven false time and time again. It therefore makes sense that Australia’s leading Zionist lobby, AIJAC, has invited him here on a speaking tour to discuss his latest book, The Iranian Time Bomb (about a country he admits to never having visited).

AIJAC wholeheartedly backed the Iraq invasion and occupation and now advocates a military option against the Islamic Republic, both in the name of protecting the Jewish state.

In 2002, Ledeen argued in National Review Online of the “desperately-needed and long overdue war against Saddam Hussein and the rest of the terror masters”. To support the invasion, Ledeen wrote “that Saddam is actively supporting al Qaeda, and Abu Nidal, and Hezbollah.” His wish? “One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today.”

Ledeen now regularly claims he never supported the invasion, an outright falsehood as easy to prove as using Google.

Ledeen – praising John Howard last weekend as the “arguably the greatest Western leader of the past decade” – spoke last night at the Sydney Institute and outlined, in his deceptively calm manner, why Iran is the “centre of world terrorism” and has backed al-Qaeda since the mid 1990s, supports Hizbollah which, he claims, has killed more people in its history than al-Qaeda and how internal dissent is always brutally punished (he must have conveniently missed the thriving online culture, including attacks against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the vibrant Islamist blogs.)

Iran is undoubtedly a repressive regime – something I discovered myself earlier in the year while researching a forthcoming book about the internet in non-democratic countries – but Ledeen’s suggestion that the “Iranian people want a revolution” to overthrow the Mullahs contradicts the vast evidence that American funding of pro-democracy groups actually hinders the cause of freedom.

Of course, Ledeen probably doesn’t hear these realities when speaking to American Enterprise Institute-funded, Iranian dissidents who want America or Israel to “liberate” the country. Every Iranian I met consistently said they didn’t want another revolution, especially one imported from Washington, but rather gradual reform.

For a man who was personally involved in Reagan’s Iran-Contra affair and allegedly played a role in spreading bogus intelligence before the Iraq war, Ledeen’s credentials as an authority on what Iranians want is negligible. (He even dared to suggest that “in Iraq, living is approaching normal in most of the country.”)

This deluded worldview argues that the Iranians are crazy and utterly incapable of compromise with the West, determined to destroy our way of life with nuclear weapons. In fact, the Mullahs generally act rationally and advocate their self-interest.

The Ledeen doctrine is expressed thus: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

Monkey business

Published on 28 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments

Unleash the monkey within:

Kevin Rudd, agent of change?

Published on 28 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

My following feature appears in US magazine The Nation and discusses the rise of Kevin Rudd to Prime Minister of Australia:

The political annihilation of Prime Minister John Howard in the November 24 election marks a milestone in Australian history. “From this day forth,” writes political columnist Glenn Milne, “no government can rely on the successful management of the economy to guarantee its re-election. The message from election 2007 is that long-serving governments must demonstrate the will to renew both their ideas and their leadership to survive in the modern electoral era.”

He is correct, but the election of Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd to the prime ministership may not necessarily represent a repudiation of the worst excesses of the past decade. An “It’s Time” factor became almost infectious as soon as Rudd assumed the Labor leadership in late 2006. Voters wanted change, a younger personality to replace the near 70-year-old Howard, and Rudd offered, in his cautious technocratic way, a sense of slight change without seriously challenging the fundamentals of relatively prosperous, conservative capitalism. No polls indicated intense dislike for Howard before the election, though he was accused, like so many global leaders before him, of not recognizing when it was time to retire. His Liberal Party is now out of power at every level of Australian government.

Booker Prize-winning author Thomas Keneally, a Sydney resident, wrote recently in the Sydney Sun-Herald that Howard belonged to a generation that has a “tendency to the dark prejudices of our childhood, to them-and-us thinking, to a narrowness and vengefulness…. He has a gift for spotting the opportunities to scapegoat to advantage. And his targets are…union bosses, asylum seekers and the Muslims to whom he extends one hand open and the other sheathed in [intelligence agency] ASIO’s steel mitt.”

Looking East

Published on 28 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The Chinese online population is soon to eclipse America’s and currently stands at well over 170 million. A new report indicates that the Chinese are far more politically aware than many Americans:

The report, “China and the U.S. in a Web 2.0 World,” also reveals that nearly half of all Chinese broadbanders ages 13 to 35 contribute something online in a typical month, compared to only about 15 percent of younger Americans. The Chinese are also more likely to publish a blog (40 percent to 13 percent), review a product (32 percent to 22 percent) and use chat rooms (45 percent to 16 percent).

Chinese youth also reported being more involved in community-based activities, and they are almost twice as likely as Americans to join communities built around content. Although more U.S. users still recommend things to family and friends (31 percent to 27 percent), the practice has declined 15 percent in the U.S. since 2006, when Netpop started its survey. According to Crandall, this reflects the dominance of younger, elite opinion-makers in the Chinese broadband market, versus more mainstream American users.

The future remains bleak

Published on 28 November 2007 in Israel. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The Annapolis “peace” conference has concluded with Israel and the Palestinian Authority pledging to reach some kind of agreement by the end of 2008. Talking is always a good thing, far preferable to war, but the reality on the ground and the deep splits in both sides make the chances of peace almost impossible. Leading Arab commentator Rami Khouri explains:

The Annapolis meeting is a diplomatic suicide squeeze. It is unlikely to succeed, because the conditions and/or motives of the principal players — the U.S., Israel and half the Palestinians represented by President Mahmoud Abbas — are not conducive to the sort of daring moves and substantive compromises that are needed to achieve a full and fair peace. The Americans seem motivated primarily by a desperate need to elicit Arab and Iranian support on Iraq. They are not playing the fair mediator’s role, but rather persisting in supporting Israeli positions more often than coming down in the middle of Israeli-Palestinian issues. America’s sudden, urgent exuberance for Arab-Israeli peace-making within a year, after six years of total neglect or blatant pro-Israeli bias, is neither convincing nor sincere. Trying to force through a peace accord on an American presidential timetable is likely to fail, as it did in 2000 when Bill Clinton tried the same thing, albeit with a bit more sincerity.

Noam Chomsky rightly argues that such “peace” conferences are a diplomatic charade, designed to convince the world that progress is being made when, in fact, Palestine is being comprehensively killed in front of our eyes. Resistance is essential. Desmond Tutu agrees.

Palestinian voices are rarely heard in this debate and two Palestinians here explain why apartheid is the current reality in the occupied territories.

Killing in the name of what?

Published on 28 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , .

A new documentary, Body of War, reveals the human cost of the Iraq war:

Our Mandarin-speaking leader

Published on 27 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

What do Chinese bloggers think of Australia’s new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd?

Expendable Iraqis

Published on 27 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Dahr Jamail, TomDispatch, November 26:

Name them. Maim them. Kill them.

From the beginning of the American occupation in Iraq, air strikes and attacks by the U.S. military have only killed “militants,” “criminals,” “suspected insurgents,” “IED [Improvised Explosive Device] emplacers,” “anti-American fighters,” “terrorists,” “military age males,” “armed men,” “extremists,” or “al-Qaeda.”

The pattern for reporting on such attacks has remained the same from the early years of the occupation to today. Take a helicopter attack on October 23rd of this year near the village of Djila, north of Samarra. The U.S. military claimed it had killed 11 among “a group of men planting a roadside bomb.” Only later did a military spokesperson acknowledge that at least six of the dead were civilians. Local residents claimed that those killed were farmers, that there were children among them, and that the number of dead was greater than 11.

Here is part of the statement released by U.S. military spokeswoman in northern Iraq, Major Peggy Kageleiry:

“A suspected insurgent and improvised explosive device cell member was identified among the killed in an engagement between Coalition Forces and suspected IED emplacers just north of Samarra…. During the engagement, insurgents used a nearby house as a safe haven to re-engage coalition aircraft. A known member of an IED cell was among the 11 killed during the multiple engagements. We send condolences to the families of those victims and we regret any loss of life.”

As usual, the version offered by locals was vastly different. Abdul al-Rahman Iyadeh, a relative of some of the victims, revealed that the “group of men” attacked were actually three farmers who had left their homes at 4:30 A.M. to irrigate their fields. Two were killed in the initial helicopter attack and the survivor ran back to his home where other residents gathered. The second air strike, he claimed, destroyed the house killing 14 people. Another witness told reporters that four separate houses were hit by the helicopter. A local Iraqi policeman, Captain Abdullah al-Isawi, put the death toll at 16 — seven men, six women, and three children, with another 14 wounded.

As often happens, the U.S. military, once challenged, declared that an “investigation” of the incident was under way.

They’re never leaving

Published on 27 November 2007 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Iraq and America have agreed on  “principles” for a permanent American presence.

The never-ending occupation (further evidenced by the grotesque US$600 million US embassy in Baghdad.)