Antony Loewenstein

Looking for a job to spread the “message and themes” of the US Defence Department?

So much noble work, so little time.

What part of this shocking news makes Zionists proud of their state?

Investigation conducted by Israeli Bar finds prison wardens regularly subject inmates to inhumane conditions including unleashing of dogs, debasement. Prisoners also complain of delay in medical treatment to point of death.

The investigation, summed up in a report by attorneys Amnon Zikhroni and Michael Atiya, probed the conditions afforded by the felony and security wards at Hadarim, where most of the Palestinian organization’s leaders are held in Israel, as well as the conditions in the juvenile and women’s wards in Hasharon Prison.

And what a surprise that Palestinians are subjected to the worst kinds of abuse. That’s what happens with a racially discriminatory state.

The co-editor of Global Voices, Ethan Zuckerman, is interviewed about his thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of the internet (clue: we have a long way to go to truly integrate a worldwide population into the technology):

I think one of the things that’s most exciting about the Internet revolution is this idea that we might be connected to people all over the world. And that we might expand to include the one billion people who are online now, the two billion people who’ll be online in about five years and eventually the 6+ billion people all over the world. The truth is that it’s much harder than that; and that actually we haven’t done very well at connecting. The fact that we have digital networks that tie us all together doesn’t mean that we actually pay attention to one another and it doesn’t mean that we actually have dialogue with one another. And the truth is, I think if you look at the last 10 – 15 years of development of the commercial Internet, we’ve actually done a very very poor job of finding people who come from very different backgrounds than we do. I think in many ways, what the Internet has helped us is to find people who you have got a great deal of common ground with. The Internet has been very very powerful for people who have esoteric interests, specialized interests, who find friends in other parts of the world who have that common ground with them. Where we’ve had much less success is using the Internet as a place of dialogue between people who are coming from very very different background and who might have very different opinions.

Two different speakers at this week’s Edinburgh International Television Conference revealed the paucity of imagination and guts in so much of the mainstream media’s coverage of the “war on terror”.

Al-Jazeera director general Wadah Khanfar:

Less and less field work is being done. More official sources are being taken as uncollaborated fact. Less and less resources are being spent as is time talking to the margins of society. Protect your institutions from commercialisation,” he said. “Let us protect our newsrooms and encourage more and more journalists to become experts in the areas they are reporting from and give them more time to understand the cultures they are reporting from.

BBC World News presenter and correspondent Lyse Doucet:

What’s lacking in the coverage of the Afghans is the sense of the humanity of the Afghans. You knew that the bombs were dropping in that direction and the guns pointing in that direction but you never got a sense of how Afghans are as a people. Some of them [the Taliban] would like to talk to the British Government. Some of them don’t want to be fighting British troops. Some of them would. This is the ideological Taliban. We never have the ability or sometimes the desire to present this in a different way, so that people would be interested … it’s a regret.

Asked what was missing in British coverage, she added: “It may sound odd but the humanity of the Taliban, because the Taliban are a wide, very diverse group of people.”

Wall-E is the wonderful new film from Pixar Studios. Tonight I was lucky enough in Sydney to see a sneak preview with the director and voice of the main characters. It tells the story of two robots who fall in love in a world far into the future. If this sounds like an unlikely premise for a profoundly moving experience, then rest assured I was equally surprised. The New Yorker wrote in late July:

“WALL-E” blends two kinds of science fiction—the post-apocalyptic disaster scenario and the dystopian fantasy derived from Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” in which people are controlled not by coercion but by pleasure. Apparently, the movie has caused annoyance in some quarters because it criticizes the American way of life. This it does, and with suavity and supreme good humor. “WALL-E” is a classic, but it will never appeal to people who are happy with art only when it has as little bite as possible.

The majority of the film is without dialogue, but has a vision of humanity, love and the future that, despite the protestations of director Andrew Stanton during tonight’s Q&A, is clearly a deeply humanitarian message about looking after the planet from degradation and pollution (something viciously slammed by right-wing attack dogs in the US).

For me the film isn’t simply a beautifully constructed work of art, but an expansive hymn to what human beings can create and destroy. After eight years of the Bush administration, that’s a message that the vast majority of the “liberated” globe can understand.

The Baha’i faith is mercilessly persecuted in Iran. Since the 1979 Revolution, the mullahs have attempted to destroy the religion, without success (I recently met a Baha’i woman here in Sydney who had just returned from a pilgrimage from Haifa, Israel, the true home of their religion.)

The following is taken from the acclaimed film, Persepolis:

More on the religion’s troubles here.

The tale of a Russian cyberwarrior who wanted to know how much damage he could create on the Georgian side.

Is there really any other way to treat Fox News?

To understand the true signifinance of Israel’s loss to Hezbollah in the 2006 Lebanon war, this recent speech by the group’s leader Sayyid Hassan Nassrallah is essential reading:

A lesson has to be internalized from the fact that a 33-day war launched by the most aggressive army in the world and backed by international support was incapable of shaking the resistance, its men, its supporters and its weapons, Moreover, it served to empowered it. The paradox is that here is the vastly more powerful enemy complaining about Hezbollah’s ever growing power. So, a number of annoyed and angry speeches will not change a thing. I say to my angry brothers and to those who make speeches while they are angry, that these noises are useless, both in Lebanon and in the region. The resistance is a deeply-rooted, aware, and rational project that is based on strong and tough fundamentals as well as very deep intellectual, cultural, political, national, psychological and civilized structures. Therefore, such a simple movement will not change the trend of the resistance.

This is the only kind of solidarity against web censorship that can pressure governments to re-consider their authoritarian ways:

Turkish bloggers are closing their websites to protest against courts banning dozens of mainstream sites for carrying content deemed “immoral” or insulting to Turkey’s founding father.

A grassroots “censuring the censors” movement has formed over the past week, with about 450 websites voluntarily replacing their content with a message mocking the official court order barring access to a website.

A law passed in 2007 gave judges the power to ban websites for inciting suicide, drug use, paedophilia, immorality, illegal prostitution or insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the architect of modern Turkey.

This Turkish newspaper claims that around 500 sites closed down to protest the government’s continual attacks on sites such as YouTube.

Joseph Biden is Barack Obama’s Vice-Presidential pick. Hold the excitement. Biden will supposedly provide foreign policy “experience” and gravitas to Obama’s youthful exuberance (or so the mainstream media likes to call it, in typically meaningless bluster.)

Counterpunch’s Alexander Cockburn tells it like it is:

His [Biden's] “experience” in foreign affairs consists in absolute fidelity to the conventions of cold war liberalism, the efficient elder brother of raffish  “neo-conservatism”. Here again the ticket is well balanced, since Senator Obama has, within a very brief time-frame,  exhibited great fidelity to the same creed…

And Obama picked Biden for the same reason Michael Dukakis chose Senator Lloyd Bentsen in 1988: the marriage of youth and experience, so reassuring to uncertain voters but most of all to the elites, that nothing dangerous or unusual will discommode business as usual.

Biden supported the Iraq war, too.

Egypt, women’s rights and male responsibility.

Why is this still even an issue?