Antony Loewenstein

Azadeh Moaveni, Washington Post, Janaury 25:

During a recent trip to Tehran, I noticed that the Benetton shop in my old neighborhood of Darrous was closed, its windows papered over. In the past, fundamentalists offended by the shop’s immodest displays had decried its immorality and spread rumors of “Zionist ownership.” This time, however, they set the place on fire — not to protest the mannequins, dressed in the latest fashions, sans veils, but rather to protest the carnage in the Gaza Strip. Though my visit happened to coincide with the Israeli offensive that killed an estimated 1,300 Palestinians over three weeks, I hadn’t expected the conflict to reverberate in my old neighborhood.

If anything, I’ve always found that my former neighbors — many deeply pious, but not known for any special antipathy toward Israel — are, like the majority of Iranians, resentful of Iran’s support for militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah…

The government cast the conflict in essentially Shiite Islamic terms — an outnumbered, “mazloom” (oppressed) people massacred by a more powerful, evil army. “The Israelis are truly loathsome,” a cousin said one evening, transfixed by the deftly edited images on the broadcast, though I could swear that he’d uttered the same words about Hamas in the past.

Israel’s latest war against the Palestinian people will resonate for years to come.

Here’s just two recent developments:

Oxford City Council endorses boycotting Israeli products and companies.

Montreal: call for academic boycott of Israel.

An Haaretz headline that speaks for itself:

How IDF legal experts legitimized strikes involving Gaza civilians.

Waltz with Bashir, the graphic novel.

How to become a good, obedient Zionist propagandist in a few easy steps.

The collusion of the Palestinian Authority with Israel’s war and occupation will only end in tears and violence:

Israel made a “big mistake” by ending Operation Cast Lead without overthrowing the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian Authority official in Ramallah said on Thursday.

His remarks came as the PA security forces intensified their crackdown on Hamas in the West Bank.

“It was a big mistake to end the war this way,” the official said. “The fact that Hamas is still in power is bad for all.”

Israel has fewer friends than ever, even in America.

The “rules” of the world, as told to Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law at the University of Illinois:

During the summer of 1982 I had the opportunity to visit the Nazi concentration camp just outside Dachau, Germany and then the little town itself. Given the proximity of the town to the camp, my immediate reaction was: “This town is so close to the camp that the citizens of Dachau must have known what was going on out there. Why did they not do anything about it?” I had the exact same reaction during the last two weeks of May 1986 as I traveled up and down the West Bank and Gaza Strip in order to investigate Israel’s atrocities and war crimes against the Palestinians.

When I then complained about these reprehensible practices to the appropriate high-level legal officials sequentially at the Israeli Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I was told that they were all required by and could be justified under the doctrine of “military necessity.” Rather than engaging in an extended debate over this point, I simply responded to all three of these lawyers that this was precisely the argument used by the Nazi war criminals before the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945 to justify their own incredible outrages upon humanity, including the Jewish people. After a bit more argumentation, these three lawyers basically conceded my Nuremberg analysis, but then each independently, uncannily, and matter-of-factly informed me: “We have public relations people in the United States who take care of these matters for us.”

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak:

As an army which is unsurpassed in its moral traditions, the IDF has done all that it can in order to adhere to international law, in order to avoid harming civilians who are not involved in fighting.

Human Rights Watch head Ken Roth:

Throughout the recent war in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) insisted that it took extraordinary care to spare civilians. But it then prevented journalists and human rights monitors from entering Gaza during the conflict to independently verify this claim.

Now that Human Rights Watch and other observers have been let in, it has become clear that hundreds of Palestinian civilians were not the only casualties of the fighting. So was the credibility of the IDF.

Part of the problem was the IDF’s expansive definition of a military target. It attacked a range of civilian facilities, from government offices to police stations, on the theory that they all provided at least indirect support to Hamas militants. But by that theory, Hamas would have been entitled to target virtually any government building in Israel on the ground that its office workers indirectly supported the IDF. That would make a mockery of the distinction between civilians and combatants that lies at the heart of the laws of war, which require direct support to military activity before civilians become legitimate military targets. Behind the unsupportable legal claim seemed to lie a determination to make Gazans suffer for the presence of Hamas–a prohibited purpose for using military force.

This article from today’s Australian newspaper, headlined “Taking the fight to the Taliban”, could have been written by the Australian government (ie. a press release dressed up as propaganda):

“Get to the wall, spread out, spread out.”

The words can be heard amid the clatter of automatic weapons fire. There is a brief pause, more sustained firing and another Australian voice: “We will stay here and we will cover their arse. We’ll maintain this wall.”

As bullets slam into mud-brick walls, the same voice is heard again: “Medic, go with (call sign) Bravo and carry Pepi’s pack.”

The exchange, captured on video and released yesterday by the Australian Defence Force, illustrates the dangers and daring on display as Diggers take the fight to the Taliban during the Afghan winter.

The war in Afghanistan is going woefully – yesterday’s Independent newspaper claimed that Obama was looking to side-line the corrupt President Hamid Karzai – and yet still some hacks haven’t received the latest news.

Terrorists, time to attack the US again. Her new President is clearly a very sick man:

The CIA program he is effectively shutting down is the reason why America has not been attacked again after 9/11. He has removed the tool that is singularly responsible for stopping al-Qaeda from flying planes into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, Heathrow Airport, and London’s Canary Warf, and blowing up apartment buildings in Chicago, among other plots. It’s not even the end of inauguration week, and Obama is already proving to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office.

A letter-writer in The Jewish Week can’t understand why militant Zionists aren’t regarded as “pro-peace”:

Why does your paper, as well as other Jewish and secular papers, continue to refer to organizations like the J Street Lobby, Americans for Peace Now, New Israel Fund and Israel Policy Forum as pro-peace? They are left-wing and extreme left-wing groups that believe that a piece of paper signed by the Palestinians and Arab governments will deliver peace to Israel. Zionist Organization of America and other groups believe in peace through strength, rather than through appeasement. Yet you don’t refer to them as pro-peace. You either refer to them by name or as a right-wing group. To be fair to all groups, refer to all only by name. Alternatively, those that support agreements and Israeli withdrawals should be labelled left wing and those on the other side should be called right wing. I would hope, that whichever side one is on, we are all pro-peace for Israel.

Silver Spring, Md.

Maybe it’s because hardline Zionist groups have no interest whatsoever in finding peace with the Palestinians.

It’s bad for business and is fundamentally against their core belief; namely, indefinitely oppressing Arabs.

A prominent “liberal” Jewish blogger disagrees.