From the New York Times yesterday, explaining the White House position:
…if a country cannot deal with a terrorism problem on its own, the United States reserves the right to act unilaterally.
If any state acts without boundaries or ignores international law, it should be treated as a rogue player.
At what point will neo-con Jews, who support torture, be regarded as the pariahs that they truly are?
What is life like for Palestinians in the occupied territories?
One of the finest chroniclers of the conflict, Jonathan Cook, explains.
My following book review appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on November 29:
My Story: The Tale Of A Terrorist Who Wasn’t
By Mamdouh Habib; with Julia Collingwood;
Scribe, 272 pp, $32.95
Before tortured Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib was released in 2005, then prime minister John Howard said his government didn’t “have any apology to offer” and refused to consider compensation. Greens leader Bob Brown described Habib’s treatment as “one of the most shameful episodes in Australian political history”.
This book supports that statement. Habib writes that his “belief in Islam has guided me all my life … I’ve tried to be as straight and honest as possible, and help people whenever I could – sometimes to my own detriment.” Habib’s support for the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman (the Blind Sheik), is disconcerting yet his life, not unlike that of David Hicks, is one of searching for meaning.
The work begins in Egypt, the country of Habib’s birth, and he paints a moving picture of growing up in Alexandria and his experiences with various manual jobs and the army. The nation, he laments, “was all about who you knew, and bribing the right people”.
It wasn’t until 2001 – he was living in Sydney with his wife, Maha, and children – that he finally felt “optimistic” about the future after years of struggling with failed businesses. Alas, this sentiment didn’t last long as he was visited in Dubai by ASIO officials and asked to spy for them, reporting on any contact with suspected terrorists such as Jack Thomas and Rabiyah Hutchinson.
Habib endows this encounter with a beautiful, Monty Pythonesque quality. The authorities appeared to be amateurs, mimicking foreign accents and playing the “good cop, bad cop” routine.
It was reminiscent of the interview with innocent “terror” suspect Mohamed Haneef in 2007 and the gross ignorance of the Federal Police of even the simplest tenets of Islam. These are the people, after all, who are supposed to protect us.
The powerful passages of the book describe Habib’s capture in Pakistan in 2001 and more than three years of incarceration in Egypt and Guantanamo Bay with, he claims convincingly, the full knowledge of the Australian Government. He was tortured through sleep deprivation, the application of electric shocks “everywhere on my body” and multiple, unidentified drugs.
He alleges that Americans consistently beat him up in Cuba and mocked his hunger strikes. Reading these sections it’s hard to ignore evidence, revealed in The New Yorker journalist Jane Meyer’s book, The Dark Side, that the Bush Administration shunned warnings from the CIA six years ago that up to a third of the people held at Guantanamo Bay were imprisoned in error. Habib tells countless stories of fellow prisoners who were humiliated and broken in the care of the Americans.
It reads in parts too much like a casual conversation – and a more skeptical perspective would have been helpful when Habib discusses the role of al-Qaeda members – but this is an important contribution to the literature on the “war on terror”. Years after the establishment of a parallel legal and ethical framework, we barely know anything about its implementation.
War crimes were committed in our name.
What can we really expect from the Obama administration and its policies towards Israel/Palestine?
Why are the Iranians seemingly pleased with the passage of the Security Agreement between Iraq and the US by the Iraqi parliament?
On the day before Islamic terrorists launched their latest attack on Mumbai, Sydney writer Antony Loewenstein delivered a speech at Harvard University in the US.
Readers, it’s time to admit something (already picked up by this crafty Murdoch hack in Sydney.)
My words at Harvard this week actually triggered a sleeper cell in India. Blame me. In fact, blame me for all the terrorism against the West in the last years (especially the legitimate targeting of Israelis in the occupied territories and Americans and Australians in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
The Right’s anti-intellectualism continues on its merry way.
UPDATE: Anybody notice the irony of a Murdoch pundit challenging my writing abilities while his column online is titled, “Antony Loewenstein and delisions of grandeur”?
Twitter comes of age – the Mumbai coverage was way ahead of traditional media.
Settler Nazis continue to cause chaos (and the global Jewish Diaspora remains silent):
Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian ambulances in the West Bank village of Dier Esteyah on Wednesday, according to witnesses.
Red Crescent ambulances were parked in the northern West Bank city of Nablus on Wednesday when settlers wrote provocative slogans, such as “Death to Arabs” and others, according to the Red Crescent.
The Iraqi parliament voted by an overwhelming show of hands yesterday to end US military control of their country – a crucial turning point in the Iraq conflict. The security agreement, the outcome of lengthy and rancorous negotiations, requires US forces to leave Iraqi cities, towns and villages by 30 June next year. American troops must withdraw from all Iraqi territory by 31 December 2011.
Until then, US forces will come under Iraqi supervision for the first time. Currently the US military can do what they like. In future, they will have to consult Iraqi officers before every operation and obtain Iraqi arrest warrants.
Just what exactly is the massive US embassy in Baghdad exactly for?
Amira Hass, Haaretz, November 27:
If it’s not the power getting cut, leaving entire neighborhoods in darkness, then it’s the water not reaching the top floors or the cooking gas running out. If you have an electric generator, some small part of it is bound to be broken and unfixable, because even before the hermetic three-week siege, Israel prohibited bringing in any spare parts for cars, machines and household electric appliances.
And if you somehow manage to find the money for a generator that was smuggled through the tunnels (its price has doubled or tripled since last month), it’s at the expense of buying a heater (not electric, of course), English lessons, clothes for the children and visits to the doctor.
This is Gaza in November 2008.
How the internet is finally changing the face of Italian society (and we can thank Prime Minister Silvio Berluscon).
(While the vast majority of Egyptian web users allegedly support the idea of government net censorship.)
Following my talk yesterday at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre on The Blogging Revolution, a live-blog featured some of the more interesting elements of the discussion, such as this:
Q: I was born in Poland and saw the Solidarity movement go from tiny to 1/3 of the population supporting it, in just a couple of months. It was so successful not because the NY Times supported it (which it did). I haven’t seen similar movements come about through the Net or cell phones. Why is it that even though we have all of this beautiful technology, we haven’t seen anything like Solidarity happening?
A: Blogging communities generally don’t have massive mainstream support. Many of the bloggers are not dissidents. E.g., Iranian bloggers are frequently pro-regime. Blogging plays one role among many. Bloggers on their own won’t bring down a regime. Frequently the reforms are old school. It’s not easier to get people on the streets to protest. No one I spoke to is looking for a violent revolution.
UPDATE: What the Berkman blog wrote about my event.
Am I am threat to Jews/Muslims/terrorists/insurgents/US soliders in Iraq/all of the above?
The Saudi Arabian based Arab News – not always known for its nuanced understanding of the Middle East – gets it right in a recent editorial:
The five Palestinians convicted Monday of channeling $12 million to Hamas via the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation are indeed guilty under US law. The reason is that since 1995 the US has designated Hamas a terrorist organization.
But this does not mean the law is right. Significantly, US prosecutors did not seek to prove the money raised by the men was used to finance terrorism, merely that the humanitarian aid, which they accepted that it did indeed fund, was used to promote Hamas and allowed it to divert other funds to militant activities.
The five now face jail sentences ranging up to 55 years. Yet a jury last year failed to reach a verdict in this case, almost certainly because some members could not accept that raising humanitarian aid for the Israeli-besieged Gaza ghetto was really a crime. The Bush White House was not, however, having any of that. The Justice Department declared a mistrial and sent the case to trial again. In the wake of this week’s verdict, a senior US law officer hailed the finding as an important milestone in American action against “financiers of terrorism.”
In an altogether more measured response, defense lawyers, saying they would appeal, added that while they respected the jury’s finding, they believed the verdict was unjust and un-American. “The criminalization of legitimate charitable giving is not an attack just on the American Muslim community; it is an attack on every American who believes in the moral duty to feed the hungry, clothe the poor and heal the sick.”
This verdict once again demonstrates America’s inability to understand any perspective but its own. Hamas grew from links with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood at a time when the PLO leadership was in exile in Tunis and the Fatah administration in the occupied territories had become a byword for corruption and passivity. Unlike Islamic Jihad, whose aim was nothing but militancy, Hamas began as a humanitarian organization, operating schools, hospitals and welfare programs. The Israelis thought it would become a useful counter to the sway of the PLO. Yet keeping people alive, healthy and educated during the Israeli occupation was in itself a form of resistance. Militant resistance came later and so too did a political presence. The US administration insists on ignoring that in January 2006, Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Parliament in the sort of free and fair democratic elections that Bush said he wanted for all the Middle East.
Blinkered by the 1995 proscription of Hamas, Americans cannot see it as a legitimate organization and internationally, not just in the Muslim world, Hamas is recognized as such. In its politics, its charity and to some outsiders, its dogged militant resistance to superior Israeli forces, Hamas presents itself not as part of the problem, but as a part of the solution. The Holy Land Foundation prosecutions, however technically correct, represent a dying US administration’s continued conflict with reality. By denying the facts and insisting on his own ill-informed worldview, Bush never had a chance of contributing to a Palestinian settlement.
Sean Penn on Hugo Chavez and Venezuela and the American painting of a “dictator”:
More here.
Clearly it’s racist to challenge Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine:
Leeds University Union agreed last week, by a vote of 12 to 11, to send a motion to referendum which will label anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism and silence pro-Palestinian groups on campus.
The Zionist lobby stoops even further to silence legitimate criticism of the Jewish state.
A stunning visual representation of the power of the blogosphere in the Islamic Republic of Iran:
Iran: A nation of bloggers from Mr.Aaron on Vimeo.
