Antony Loewenstein

With news circulating about the death of Big Media – the only loss will be the lack of decent and necessary investigative reporting – this should concern us all:

The shutdown of a newspaper has an immediate and measurable impact on local political engagement, according to a new study by economists at Princeton University.

Assessing the consequences of the closing of the Cincinnati Post at the end of 2007, the researchers found that fewer people voted in subsequent elections, fewer candidates ran in opposition to the incumbents and that, as a result, the incumbents had a better chance of being returned to office.

The “most moral army in the world” exposed:

During Operation Cast Lead, Israeli forces killed Palestinian civilians under permissive rules of engagement and intentionally destroyed their property, say soldiers who fought in the offensive.

“I don’t think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to … I don’t know how to describe it …. The lives of Palestinians, let’s say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way,” he said.

Rami G. Khouri, writing in Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper, wonders why so many Western journalists refuse to call Israeli actions by their proper name: apartheid:

If rhetoric is the first step toward action, then one of the rhetorical trends of our time indicating a giant step backward toward inaction is the American and European tendency to describe Israel’s aggressive and illegal actions in the occupied Palestinian territories in increasingly soft and imprecise terms.

For years, US administrations called Israeli settlements “illegal” and an “obstacle to peace,” but in recent years those terms have been replaced by a mere “unhelpful.” On her first official trip to the region earlier this month, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton referred to the Israeli demolition of Palestinian Arab homes in East Jerusalem as “unhelpful.” Earlier this week, the European Union presidency said that Israel’s demolition of homes in the Silwan neighborhood of Jerusalem “threatens the viability of a comprehensive, just and lasting settlement, in conformity with international law.”

If I were the Israeli government, I would be laughing all the way to my next colonial adventure in destroying Palestinian homes and infrastructure, uprooting Palestinian Arabs and replacing them with imported settlers from Israel, or Brooklyn, or Russia, or from wherever the world’s longest running modern colonization venture gets its human ammunition and reinforcements.

Incompetence (and criminality?), according to Lawrence B. Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, was the order of the day in the beginning of the “war on terror”:

There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus, of which the American people are almost completely unaware. For that matter, few within the government who were not directly involved are aware either.

The first of these is the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there. Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.

This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, of the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and of the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to “just get the bastards to the interrogators”.

It did not help that poor U.S. policies such as bounty-hunting, a weak understanding of cultural tendencies, and an utter disregard for the fundamentals of jurisprudence prevailed as well (no blame in the latter realm should accrue to combat soldiers as this it not their bailiwick anyway).

The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.

But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.

The global campaign against Israeli aggression in Palestine continues. An inspiring example of French resistance.

The following letter appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Robert Magid’s letter (March 18) justifying his decision to suppress an ad for Professor Jeff Halper’s speaking tour in The Australian Jewish News is a classic of smearing by association. He brings up all the bogymen calculated to upset his target audience and therefore make his decision seem reasonable. Terrorists, swastikas, Bali bombing: Professor Halper, who supports none of these things, barely rates a mention. Anyone interested in intelligent discussion of issues such as the Israeli Defence Force’s demolition of Palestinian homes should steer clear of such groupthink.

Andrew Worssam Bondi

Israel deliberately flooded Lebanese farmlands with excess rainwater from an Israeli orchard, located off the southern town of Mais al-Jabal early Tuesday, ruining crops and properties, the state-run national news agency said.

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, the group started by visiting activist Jeff Halper, is running the following campaign tomorrow:

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions cordially invites you to to visit the Municipality of Jerusalem on Thursday. The City Council will be holding it’s monthly meeting at 6pm and we will great the arriving council members with the remains of a recently demolished house and press conference, to be followed by a rally at Kikar Safra against demolitions and the Occupation. The demolition of Palestinian homes has recently garnered a great deal of political and media attention and a large turnout will help raise further the profile of the issue and increase pressure upon the city. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently called East Jerusalem demolitions “unhelpful”. Let’s show them how unhelpful the policy is.

Israel’s new Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman – given the appropriate expression, “racist”, by Robert Fisk – is causing some concern with Israel’s Diaspora. New York writer Anne Roiphe:

We here in America are waiting as of this writing for a government to emerge in Jerusalem and most of us keep on hoping that its shape will not preclude the peace process, will not doom a two-state solution, will not destroy the hope that our new President brings to the table. As American Jews without a vote in Israel, we can’t do more than point out what many Israelis understand: Solve this problem or the Jewish state will disappear in a tsunami of Palestinian births; or it will become a theocracy, a thugocracy, an apartheid, anti-democratic state that will then disappear in a wave of world anger.

There is nothing normal about a state that cannot tolerate a minority within its borders and treat them as it would have wished its people to have been treated in the centuries of Diaspora life. I would call it pathological that Israel is listening to leaders who don’t understand that the entire West Bank cannot belong to Israel without making it a pariah nation, without violating the spirit of the Torah, and the scared memory of the Jewish people.

And throughout it all, the mainstream Jewish community prefers to accuse anti-Zionists of anti-Semitism.

The world is starting to wake up to Israeli apartheid and they may soon not take it any more.

An example of collaborative journalism, courtesy of the US-based Center for Investigative Reporting, that the mainstream media is simply failing to do:

Baghdad|Los Angeles, a four-month collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at USC and the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, explores the impact of the Iraq war in Southern California. Stories include: a profile of the Junior ROTC program at Hollywood High School, “A Helping Hand for the Cadets of Hollywood High”; the tale of an undocumented Mexican, in the U.S. since the age of three, who wants nothing more than to serve in the U.S. military, but can’t; stories of Iraqi exiles with roots in Southern California who’ve returned to help rebuild their country; a “biography of a fighter jet,” from Southern California assembly line to payload delivery in Iraq; an analysis of the U.S. Army’s advertising strategy in light of an unpopular war; and a first person essay, “Daughter of the Antelope Valley,” by a reporter whose father’s secret defense-industry work has its own ties to Iraq.

We salute you:

Index on Censorship today announces the shortlist for the 2009 Freedom of Expression Awards.

This year’s shortlist includes Sri Lanka’s Sunday Leader newspaper, Ma Jian’s novel Beijing Coma, and Steve McQueen’s film, Hunger.