Antony Loewenstein

ABC Radio National discussion on public intellectuals with Loewenstein and writer Christos Tsiolkas

The Podcast Network on Gaza

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Steve Coll last year published a fascinating book on the Bin Laden family and I interviewed him about it for New Matilda.

His latest comments in the New Yorker are about another topic altogether; the ailing mainstream media:

In the foreseeable future, it seems, there will be two kinds of nonprofit newspapers—those which are deliberately so and those which are reluctantly so. Ever since I left the Washington Post, in 2005—after twenty years there that included a stint in management—and particularly since I joined the nonprofit world at the New America Foundation and started learning about the management and fund-raising issues at tax-exempt organizations, I have been mulling over this idea: that only by turning the Post into a nonprofit trust and raising a university-size endowment to support the newsroom could the paper retain the vitality it requires to serve as a successful watchdog over our constitutional system.

Ari Shavit, Haaretz, January 29:

At its core, the Israeli majority is what it was before: realistic and pragmatic. It recognizes that the occupation is futile, but is looking for a safe way to end it. It recognizes that the Greater Israel vision is finished, but fears having a Hamas state on the outskirts of Kfar Sava.

It is true that the Gaza campaign evokes jingoistic bluster. Dark emotions burst forth from the lowest recesses of consciousness. But these emotions, which appear among all nations in wartime, did not change the Israeli voter’s fundamental attitude. That attitude was, and remains, a centrist moderate-hard one that holds that we must leave the territories and not trust the Palestinians.

President Barack Obama is clearly moving in dangerous territory:

During the current Davos economic forum, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had enough of Israeli President Peres’ lies and walked off the stage saying he will never come back. Peres tried to claim the people in Gaza were not living under humanitarian stress. There is only way to deal with such people; shun them:

And the tide is turning: for the first time, U.S. professors are calling for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel.

One of the many events I’m doing in Sydney and elsewhere on alternative Jewish voices and organising opposition to the dominant Zionist narrative in our political and media elite:

Jewish settlements and outposts in the West Bank expanded more rapidly in 2008 than the previous year, Peace now reported on Wednesday. The timing of the report is no coincidence, and it was released on the day US Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell was scheduled to arrive in Israel.

At least 1,257 new structures were built in existing settlements, including 748 permanent buildings and 509 caravans compared to 800 structures in 2007 – a 60% rise. In addition the ground was prepared for the construction of 63 new structures.

Israel can commit war crimes because it’s Israel.

That’s essentially the message from Harvard Law Professor and Zionist fanatic Alan Dershowitz.

His upcoming book is titled, “The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand In The Way of Peace.”

Try not to laugh, though I know it’s hard.

Former US President Jimmy Carter – currently articlating a sober message on the Middle East, such as engaging Hamas – is the “extremist”.

Dershowitz should spend more time advocating the use of torture.

The Australian Jewish News features the following photo on its homepage (no, there wasn’t just a war in Gaza that devastated the area):

Yuval Rotem, Israel’s ambassador to Australia, was one of the first in the world to cast a vote in Israeli elections. Thursday (January 29) was the first day for absentee voting with staff at Canberra’s Israeli embassy among the first to vote. Elections for the 18th Knesset will take place on February 10.

This essential piece of “news” is similar to the paper’s “exclusive” in 2008:

Israeli Ambassador Yuval Rotem and his family visited Dreamworld and WhiteWater World on the Gold Coast this week for some holiday thrills.

Rotem tried out the newest ride at Dreamworld, the Mick Doohan Motorcoaster, which features life-size replicas of 500cc racing bikes which zoom to 720km/hour in three seconds.

His family also tackled the Cyclone rollercoaster, Nickelodeon Central and visited Tiger Island before strolling next door to WhiteWater World for more rides…

Dressed in fashionable boardshorts, a cap and comfortable Crocs, the ambassador couldn’t help but praise the blue Queensland skies and the balmy 25-degree heat.

“I sometimes wish Canberra had this weather. It’s lovely and warm, and feels great to be alive,” he said.

Time magazine reporter Tim McGirk writes for the magazine’s website with startling honesty about his experiences in Gaza:

There’s something about phosphorus, the way it smoulders and burns for days, that makes it looks as though the Devil had walked by, leaving fiery footprints in the earth. I saw phosphorus today in a bombed out ice cream factory (did the Israeli gunners think Hamas had paused for a Magnum bar?). A fire was still flickering in the smoky gloom two weeks after the shell had smashed through the ice cream factory roof.

And I saw phosphorus again yesterday in the charred rooms of a house in north Gaza that belongs to the Abu Halima family. You could possibly blame the Abu Halimas for their own misfortune. You could say that they read the leaflets, which the Israelis dropped ordering everyone in the neighborhood to flee, and they chose to ignore the warnings. “The Israeli soldiers had been through here many times,” say Mahmoud. “They didn’t bother us, and we didn’t bother them.”

…

Fourteen days passed before it was safe enough for Mahoud and other survivors of the Abu Halima family to venture out to the pick-up with the four corpses. The pick-up had been turned over and smashed, by an Israeli bulldozer, according to witnesses, probably to get rid of the stench of the bodies and protect them from being devoured by stray dogs. It was a decent thought, but the Israelis underestimated the tenacity of Gaza’s canines.

Next, Mahmoud went back to the charred house, which had since been occupied by an Israeli sniper. He knocked out the toilet so he could get a better shot out of the bathroom window. And, the snipers could write Arabic. Maybe he was a Druze. In lipstick snatched from a bedside table, the soldier had drawn a Star of David on the wall and scrawled: “You have pretty underwear.” Then, at some point during the sniper’s long vigil at the window he experienced a flash of remorse. On the wall, in black, smudgy mascara, he wrote: “From the Israeli army, we are sorry.”

It will be a long time –generations, maybe– before the Abu Halima family, and plenty of other Gazans, can even begin to think about accepting an apology.

Wikileaks shames the vast majority of mainstream journalists once again by releasing thousands of pages of active insurgency and counterinsurgency doctrine from the US, UK and Indian military.

The conclusions? When “we” commit terrorism, it’s self-defence. When “they” do it, it’s terrorism.

As usual, most corporate journalists simply republish whatever the Pentagon gives them. They should be more questioning, but then, they wouldn’t be corporate journalists:

The Wikileaks release provides a partial antitote to the shaping of public attitudes by US Gen. Petraeus and others which journalists have uncritically relayed the last two years. Journalists should remember that documents designed to be public, such as the so-called “Petraeus doctrine” published by Chicago University Press in 2007, and publicly promoted by the Pentagon, are sanitized and should be preferentially ignored least journalists find themselves pushing propaganda onto an unsuspecting public.

Example quotes from the Wikileaks material (in this case US Special Forces doctrines).

“[T]he psychological effectiveness of the CSDF [paramilitary] concept starts by reversing the insurgent strategy of making the government the repressor. It forces the insurgents to cross a critical threshold-that of attacking and killing the very class of people they are supposed to be liberating.”

“The United States reserves the right to engage in nonconsensual [extra-territorial] abductions for three specific reasons…”