Antony Loewenstein

Fox News thinks blogs are biased (pot kettle black delusion of the day):

Yet more free speech troubles, this time at Oxford:

The head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission asked Oxford University’s debating society on Sunday to review its decision to invite holocaust denier David Irving to speak at a free speech forum.

Historian Irving will be a speaker at Monday’s event, which has been organised by the Oxford Union’s inner debating chamber, as will National Party leader Nick Griffin.

“People have died for freedom of speech,” the EHRC’s head Trevor Phillips, told the BBC on Sunday. “They didn’t fight and die for it so it could be used as a silly parlour game.”

“Nobody needs to invite these people to deny the holocaust. The issues are too serious. I would say to the Oxford Union — think again. If this goes ahead I hope the Oxford students will turn their backs on this shabby exhibition.”

Irving is undoubtedly a repugnant figure and is probably best ignored. Giving him airtime only increases his sense of importance. But who decides the limits of free speech? Should denying the Holocaust be a crime? I don’t think so. Should it be discussed at Oxford? Overall, I don’t see the harm. Foul views exist – and Irving’s co-speaker, Nick Griffin, leads a racist but increasingly popular political movement – and pretending they do not is both intellectually lazy and dangerous.

Gideon Levy, Haaretz, November 25:

The public discourse in Israel has momentarily awoken from its slumber. “To give or not to give,” that is the Shakespearean question – “to make concessions” or “not to make concessions.” It is good that initial signs of life in the Israeli public have emerged. It was worth going to Annapolis if only for this reason – but this discourse is baseless and distorted. Israel is not being asked “to give” anything to the Palestinians; it is only being asked to return – to return their stolen land and restore their trampled self-respect, along with their fundamental human rights and humanity. This is the primary core issue, the only one worthy of the title, and no one talks about it anymore.

Good riddance to John Howard.

Salon’s essential Glenn Greenwald explains why.

Free speech has its limits, especially in Germany:

An interview with one of Germany’s most notorious neo-Nazis has landed Vanity Fair magazine in a heap of trouble.

Arno Lustiger, a Jewish historian and Holocaust survivor, has started proceedings to sue the magazine’s German edition for publishing an interview with Horst Mahler, the former left-wing extremist who transformed into one of Germany’s most rabid neo-Nazi public figures. The interview appeared in the Nov. 1 print and online editions.

Filed Nov. 7 and released to the public on Nov. 21, the suit notes that Mahler denied and belittled the Holocaust, which is illegal in Germany.

Attorney Uwe Lehmann-Brauns told the JTA on Nov. 21 that he was awaiting confirmation from Berlin’s state prosecutor that the suit had been formally entered. Vanity Fair as yet has offered no response.

In the interview, conducted by journalist and former vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Michel Friedman, Mahler said that “Hitler was the liberator of the German people. He is demonized as the liberator of Satan.”

The publisher had said he ran the interview to make Germans aware of the poisonous ideas in their midst, but Lustiger’s attorneys said the motivation was immaterial.

Just remember: don’t be a German Jew and speak to a neo-Nazi about his views on the Fuhrer.

Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, November 23:

At best, Annapolis and the year that follows is going to be more process, but certainly no peace. U.S. power in the region has continued ebb, sharply, and the basis for believing that a bilateral process between Israel and the PA can achieve a two-state solution today appears hopelessly naive — the balance of power between them, and within each side’s electorate, essentially precludes it. The only basis for achieving a two-state solution now, if one is still possible (which I wouldn’t bet on), is for such a solution to be enforced by the international community. Essentially, it would require the United Nations to give the force of international law for a framework that defined the borders and other final status issues between the two, and pressed both sides to accept that framework — it may be easier for politicians on both sides to be presented with an offer they can’t refuse, rather than to have them face their electorates on the basis of negotiating compromises that their political bases would deem impermissible. After all, Israel came into being on the basis of the international community telling the inhabitants of British mandate Palestine that it would have to be partitioned. It’s not like there’s no precedent. But somehow, I think you’ll agree, that’s extremely unlikely to happen.

The John Howard era of Australian politics is over.

Kevin Rudd is the new Australian Prime Minister (though after last night’s acceptance speech, it’s hard to get too inspired by our “dentist” leader.)

After nearly 12 years in office, Howard’s reign has been characterised by a desire to drive a wedge through Australian society, between the “elites” and others and a slavish devotion to Washington (and Bush has already welcomed Rudd into the club).

Get ready for a change in Australian society, though who really knows how different it will be. I’m not overly optimistic, but glad the Australian people have finally rejected a man who personifies the worst aspects of gutter politics.

Guy Rundle, Arena Issue 91:

Australian intellectual life changed when Murdoch — Rupe or Lachlan (remember Lachlan?) — sacked Paul Kelly as editor of the eponymous national broadsheet, and moved him sideways to be editor-at-large. Under Kelly’s editorship, the one-time left-liberal publication had moved to a position on the Centre-Right — hardly strident, but committed to framing issues in a certain way, and prioritising certain debates. It was pretty scrupulous in its attitude to the factuality of its news stories, hands off with regard to book reviews, and possessed of a sombre and considered opinion section featuring a series of regular columnists. It was also monumentally boring, a policy wonks newspaper, the op-ed pages featuring huge slabs of Alan Wood, Judith Sloan and their ilk, overwhelmingly focused on the topics that would form the substance of Kelly’s book, The End of Certainty.

The subsequent appointment of Chris Mitchell, notorious as Courier Mail editor for an obsessive and unbalanced campaign against the memory of Manning Clark, was a sign of what the paper was about to become — one which imported an American notion of the ‘culture wars’ to Australian life and attempted to reshape debate in that fashion. Murdoch’s tabloids had already begun that process, but in those there was limited scope for anything more than passing swipes. The Australian offered the opportunity to frame the debate more explicitly. Prior to this, during the brief Downer follies leadership of the Liberal Party in 1994, John Howard had carefully laid out his comeback strategy by working up the then relatively new theme of political correctness, drawing in a section of Labor’s socially conservative working-class voters irritated by Paul Keating’s combination of historical revision — such as the Redfern speech — and unashamed celebration of excellence in the arts (and implicitly critical notion of an Australian complacency about cultural achievement). Howard took the PC theme all the way to the 1996 election, portraying it not as the enemy itself, but as the sort of thing that was wrong with the Keating Government. By the time he was joined by The Australian, and by columnists such as the Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt, who were more willing to draw ideas into their columns; political correctness had acquired a class base — the ‘elites’.

How the Zionist lobby controls vast areas of American political and media life.

An explanation.

Iran is constantly in the news for all the wrong reasons. As a welcome change, the following music video is from underground band, Kiosk. Filmed in Tehran, it gives viewers a taste of daily life in the Iranian capital (and sounds like Dire Straits, massively popular there):

Americans are regularly accused of living in a ghetto and rarely caring what happens in the outside world. This is a gross exaggeration, of course, but rings true for many. So what about China? Danwei’s founder Jeremy Goldkorn explains:

There has been some discussion on several China blogs recently about a statistic that only six percent of the hyperlinks on the Chinese Internet are to websites outside of China. You can follow the discussion on BlogNation, Shanghaiist and chez Thomas Crampton, and also chez Rebecca MacKinnon, and Tobias Escher.

The question that immediately sprang to your correspondent’s mind however was this: what percentage of the American Internet links to websites hosted in foreign countries or written in foreign languages. I have not been able to track down any numbers about this, but Deb Fallows of the Pew Internet and American Life Project sent me the results of a survey done in November 2005.

A random digit dial telephone survey of 1,931 Americans asked about where respondents got their online news from.

Only 12% of them said that they had ever got news from “the website of an international news organization, such as the BBC or Aljazeera”. Only 3% said they had used such a source “yesterday”. To put it in context, only 46% of respondents said that they got their news from “the website of a national TV news organization, like CNN.com or MSNBC.com.

Nonetheless, it seems that America’s Internet users are in as much of ghetto as their Chinese peers.

Of course, some in the Chinese media, like The Beijing News, prefer to focus on the big issues.

The Australian federal election is tomorrow. I’ve deliberately not commented greatly about it – aside from this piece about the possibility of a Labor government supporting a US-strike on Iran and the occasional article about the major parties’ slavish attention to Israel – so a few words are in order.

The nearly 12 years of the Howard government has caused the country to lose its moral compass – a position I share with former Prime Minister Paul Keating, though it’s sickening to read a man who cozied up to former Indonesian dictator Suharto talk about ethics – through the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the treatment of refugees as cannon fodder, gross exaggeration of the terror threat to ram through draconian legislation and blind support for the rogue, Jewish state. Some of these issues resonate with voters, and many do not. These are my personal feelings.

It’s hard to be inspired with the likely win of Kevin Rudd when he talks about being tough against boat people. Rudd seems to me to be a dull technocrat who acts like a robot when appearing in public. No passion or true conviction, though he surely has both. Robert Manne, a leading critic of the Howard years, is right when he argues today that the current government has been a master at wedge politics, causing fear in the community and highlighting divisions along racial lines. This should be reason alone to change government.

For much of the last decade, I’ve regularly been ashamed to call myself an Australian, especially when travelling the world and being asked why our government has walked so closely with the Bush administration on a host of issues, from war to climate change. Sadly, Australian leaders have rarely been able to say “no” when Washington comes knocking.

As a fierce critic of Howard for many years, I’ve rarely been inspired by the Labor opposition. On many issues, they are little different to the Liberals, though with perhaps softer edges on some issues, like industrial relations. In terms of foreign affairs, I fear that Rudd would be as pathetically in thrall to America and its priorities. As a middle-ranking power, joining illegal wars for the “sake of the alliance” is a bogus reason and fundamentally short-sighted. Iraq was such a war. Iran could be.

Many of my friends support the Labor party and believe it will bring change in the social fabric of the country. Perhaps, but I doubt it. They see a party how they wish it was, rather than how it truly is.

I desperately want a change of government tomorrow, and I guess that therefore means a Rudd win. I will not be voting for him, however. I will, as I have done now for many years, support the Greens, a party not without its faults, but one that generally believes in principle over pragmatism. Morality does matter in public life, especially when we see how it can be so corrupted. Much of the mainstream media is supporting a Rudd government, but I can’t help but think this is more about wanting to back a winner, rather than truly believing Labor has a better team. The Murdoch broadsheet especially regularly talks about ideology but this is always a cover for maintaining power at any cost. Hence its endorsement of Rudd today.

The role of journalists should be to challenge and counter establishment power, not endorse it. There are notable exceptions. It is for this reason that we can only hope that a change of government, if it happens, brings a modicum of decency back to Australian political life.

The media elite are probably too far gone for true reform.