Antony Loewenstein

Bob Geldof writes a love letter to George W. Bush.

(Yes, it’s as undignified and delusional as you’d expect):

On Air Force One, Jendayi Frazer, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Bobby Pittman, the National Security Council adviser for Africa, and I stayed awake as the pitch night engulfed us, only punctuated by the giant orange gas flares on the Gulf of Guinea. We ate our popcorn, drank our Cokes and watched Batman Begins as the airspace was cleared for miles around us. America was flying through the warm African night and I was hitching a ride on her.

America’s “war on terror” in Iraq:

The FBI now keeps a list of over 900,000 names belonging to known or suspected terrorists, the American Civil Liberties Union said today.

A Haaretz editorial like no other:

Last night, the investigative television program “Fact” broadcast pictures of our own Abu Ghraib affair. It is doubtful whether a country that has grown used to 40 years of occupation, and the stories that accompany it, will be shocked. We have become accustomed to treating the Palestinians as inferior people. Generations come and go, and new soldiers abuse the residents of occupied Hebron in almost the same manner. Stories similar to those broadcast last night were exposed by the Breaking the Silence group three years ago. The saying “occupation corrupts” has become a slogan of the left instead of a warning signal to everyone.

This time, it was regular soldiers in the Kfir Brigade. They exposed their backsides and sexual organs to Palestinians, pressed an electric heater to the face of a young boy, beat young boys senseless, recorded everything on their mobile phones and sent it to their friends. One of their “mischievous acts” was to test how long a Palestinian who was being choked could survive without breathing. When he passed out, the experiment was stopped. The soldiers described activities to “break the routine” that consisted entirely of abuse. It was enough for a boy “to look at us the wrong way” for him to be beaten.

Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, February 27:

The problem with Obama, for the Zionist establishment, is that he may not muster the degree of racist contempt for the Palestinians that they can safely expect from Hillary Clinton. The deeper problem for the Zionist establishment, of course, is that Jewish Americans are flocking to Obama despite their coded warnings.

I think Karon is overly optimistic about Obama – and it’s never healthy to wish for a new and probably false Messiah – but there are a few encouraging signs about the Democratic front-runner.

Of course, compared to every US President of the last decades, who always seemed so desperate to prove their hatred of the Palestinians, Obama may be a breadth of fresh air. Maybe.

Zogby International polling reveals that the American public aren’t too fond of the mainstream media:

Two thirds of Americans – 67% – believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news, a new We Media/Zogby Interactive poll shows.

Meanwhile, the online survey documented the shift away from traditional sources of news, such as newspapers and TV, to the Internet – most dramatically among so-called digital natives – people under 30 years old.

Exhibit A for their dissatisfaction.

A majority of Israelis want to negotiate with Hamas.

While Amira Hass discusses the Gaza breakout that never happened, Prof. Abdelwahed from the Department of English in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Al-Azhar University of Gaza reveals life via email in the Israeli-controlled strip:

1- We have been without electric power supply for almost two days.

4- People fear that tonight they will witness massive Israeli air strikes. Several have already occurred today. 

Malaysians go to the polls on March 8. Much of the country’s mainstream media is seemingly content to publish propaganda masquerading as journalism.

All is not well in the country’s democracy:

A Malaysian government minister has accused bloggers, who have been writing avidly on upcoming elections, of being cowards and warned they are being monitored, a report said Friday. Youth and Sports Minister Azalina Othman said opposition parties were using blogs to get their message out because they believed the Home Affairs Ministry was busy monitoring reports in the mainstream media, the Star daily said.

“They think they can get away with it but it is not the case as they too are being monitored,” she reportedly said, adding that bloggers were cowards and a nuisance to the ruling party. Opposition parties have resorted to blogs, SMS messaging and YouTube in their campaign for the March 8 polls, to dodge a virtual blackout on mainstream media.

Major newspapers and television stations — many partly owned by parties in the ruling coalition — have given blanket coverage to the government and its achievements since the election was called. The opposition parties rate barely a mention, but thanks to the Internet they have begun campaigning feverishly in cyberspace with the aim of reaching young,
urban, educated voters.

Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranks Malaysia 124 out of 169 on its worldwide press freedom index, and says the main media are “often compelled to ignore or to play down the many events organised by the opposition”. The government has previously threatened that bloggers could be punished under draconian internal security laws which provide for detention without trial. 

But in better news, one of Malaysia’s most successful bloggers, Jeff Ooi, is running. His blog tag says it is all: “Thinking allowed. Thinking aloud.”

The Russians discover Google’s Gmail, the old-fashioned way:

Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts, February:

Not very long ago, as you all recall, it was taken for granted that the Iraq war would be the central issue in the 2008 election, as it was in the midterm election two years ago. However, it’s virtually disappeared off the radar screen, which has solicited some puzzlement among the punditry.

Actually, the reason is not very obscure. It was cogently explained forty years ago, when the US invasion of South Vietnam was in its fourth year and the surge of that day was about to add another 100,000 troops to the 175,000 already there, while South Vietnam was being bombed to shreds at triple the level of the bombing of the north and the war was expanding to the rest of Indochina. However, the war was not going very well, so the former hawks were shifting towards doubts, among them the distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger, maybe the most distinguished historian of his generation, a Kennedy adviser, who—when he and Kennedy, other Kennedy liberals were beginning to—reluctantly beginning to shift from a dedication to victory to a more dovish position.

And Schlesinger explained the reasons. He explained that—I’ll quote him now—“Of course, we all pray that the hawks are right in thinking that the surge of that day will work. And if it does, we may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government in winning a victory in a land that we have turned,” he said, “to wreck and ruin. But the surge probably won’t work, at an acceptable cost to us, so perhaps strategy should be rethought.”

Well, the reasoning and the underlying attitudes carry over with almost no change to the critical commentary on the US invasion of Iraq today. And it is a land of wreck and ruin.

Barack Obama discovers his Indian roots: