Antony Loewenstein

This is what “liberation” looks like in Afghanistan:

The Afghan Association Blog Writers (Afghan Penlog), a community established by a group of Afghan activist bloggers, has expressed deep concern for a young journalist Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh who was condemned to death by a local court.

He has been a reporter for Jahan-e Naw (New World) weekly and a student of journalism at Balkh University.

According to Afghan Penlog and international media, Parwez Kambakhsh was detained by the authorities on October 27, 2007 for downloading and distributing an article that he found on an Iranian weblog to friends. It spoke of women’s rights, the Quran and the Prophet Mohammed. A local court in northern Afghanistan in Mazar-e Sharif has convicted him to death for the alleged blasphemy.

More on the case here.

Fox News is a channel truly sponsored by the White House (its latest show is below, need one say more?):

John Pilger, January 23:

Barack Obama is a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan. Hillary Clinton, another bomber, is anti-feminist. John McCain’s one distinction is that he has personally bombed a country. They all believe the US is not subject to the rules of human behaviour, because it is “a city upon a hill”, regardless that most of humanity sees it as a monumental bully which, since 1945, has overthrown 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed 30 nations, destroying millions of lives.

Al Jazeera English on the extraordinary exodus of Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt:

Viva Palestinian resistance:

Hamas operatives had been sawing away the foundations of the wall between Egyptian and Palestinian Rafah for a few months to make it easier to blow it up when the time came, a source close to the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) in Rafah told Haaretz Wednesday.

In any case, Hamas has for months been discussing the need to take the initiative in ending the siege of Gaza. Apparently, after four days of hermetic closure, following months of siege, the planners believed the political and social conditions were ripe to bring down the iron wall that Israel had put up. 

According to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center, there were 210 million internet users by the end of 2007, an increase of 48 million in the previous six months.

Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, January 23:

The hole blown by Hamas in the Gaza-Egypt border fence has finally punctured the bubble of delusion surrounding the U.S.-Israeli Middle East policy. In a moment reminiscent of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, through the breach surged some 350,000 Palestinians — fully one fifth of Gaza’s total population, as my friend and colleague Tim McGirk observed at the scene. And what did they do on the other side? They went shopping for the essentials of daily life, denied them by an Israeli siege imposed with the Wehrmacht logic of collective punishment…The hole in the wall in Gaza is an eloquent tombstone to President Bush’s Middle East policy.

Gazans are desperately streaming into Egypt to source goods during Israel’s criminal siege. Hamas has been strengthened. Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama proves that running for the highest office in the land means you must defend Israel and vilify the Palestinian population. And yet Israel never learns from history and its current moves against Gaza will fail miserably, as Amira Hass explains:

The security establishment was quick on Monday to boast of the success of its tactic of escalation against Gaza: Look, the number of Qassams declined. By the time these lines are published, the security establishment may spin another logical axiom: Since we renewed the supply of diesel fuel on a one-time basis, the Palestinians have gone back to firing Qassams. The conclusion: Continue the escalation. The logic of escalation is the middle name of the current defense minister, Ehud Barak, and many Israelis are adopting it.

Barak was prime minister in September 2000, when the Israel Defense Forces responded with escalation to popular demonstrations against the Israeli occupier and to the throwing of stones: lethal fire against civilians, among them many children. Not surprisingly, the Palestinians did not understand the lesson and turned to escalation tactics of their own. That is how we reached the point where we are now – homemade rockets of all kinds, which become even developed, the more Israel escalates its punishment measures in response to them.

Books, articles and one or two films have have already discussed, albeit tardily, the foolishness of the tactic of escalation. But that does not matter to those who support the application of more and more pressure on the 1.5 million residents of the Strip. This shows that they – like their defense minister and the rest of the political leadership – are suffering from four failings: amnesia, shortsightedness, disorientation and learning disabilities.

Like clockwork, the world’s mainstream Jewish communities stand behind Israel, crying like the victims that they aren’t.

The Bush administration made at least 935 false statements in the two years after 9/11 to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Human rights preservation, Washington-style:

Out of the dozens upon dozens of reports of abuses by private contractors as part of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only one prosecution of a contractor has taken place.

This, says a new report from Human Rights First, epitomises the woefully insufficient response by the U.S. government to hold private contactors accountable for abuses against local nationals.

The Bush administration is also fond of torturing “terror” suspects on home soil.

The outrage in Gaza in the words of Israeli and Palestinian activists and civilians.

Shamefully, the UN Security Council won’t condemn Israeli actions due to American pressure.

Washington is truly Israel’s worst friend in the world.

Iraq is rarely on the front pages anymore. It should be.

Two recent pieces of writing, from opposite sides of the globe, highlight the profound disconnect between much of the Western media and reality on the ground.

First, an extract from The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele’s new book, Defeat: Why We Lost Iraq:

That phrase – “We had no idea we weren’t wanted” – could be the epitaph for the whole occupation. The Americans and British never took on board how mistrusted and unpopular they were. The Iraqis they met in any context other than one of confrontation were mainly their own employees or other people who stood to benefit financially from the occupation – civil society activists seeking grants for projects, or ministers and officials who wanted funds for public service budgets as well as their own salaries. These were not the sort of Iraqis who would tell the Americans and British to go home.

And a Baghdad blogger, Mohammed, discusses with friends why the violence has recently dropped around the country:

Then I asked them” but don’t you think the awakening is good, at least people are feeling safe, and life is getting back to the neighborhood?” and O answered me” if you think of it like this then sure it’s a good thing, but don’t forget that the awakening ended the true resistance, the awakening is a very smart plan by the Americans, now the Americans are walking in Adhamiya without any fear, now we can’t resist the occupation, it’s a sad thing that some good men in the resistant became dogs for the Americans, if we want to attack the Americans we must attack the awakening members first and that’s something I will not do, I’ll not kill an Iraqi….so you see, awakening is a tool for Americans to keep them safe….look in all Adhamiya do you see any writing that says anything about the occupation? No , it’s all “Die AlQaeda or die Awakening……no one mentions the occupation anymore…..and that’s what the Americans wants, they want us to fight each other and forget about the true goal which is getting the occupation out of our country”.

Remember this the next time we read yet another pro-war armchair general claiming that the war was worth it, despite the massive loss of life, and shows tyrants that they shouldn’t mess with the West.

It’s a shame that most Iraqis don’t want the Americans to be there. This is something that the supporters of the war simply refuse to accept. How could those poor Arabs not want the soothing help of a raping American soldier?