Antony Loewenstein

The case of journalist Roxana Saberi is shocking:

US-Iranian reporter Roxana Saberi, who faces an eight-year jail sentence on charges of espionage, will continue her hunger strike until she is released, her father told AFP on Sunday.

“We just had a 15-minute talk with her, and she has lost nearly 10 pounds (4.5 kilos). She is only having water and sugared water,” Reza Saberi added on the telephone.

Roxana Saberi, who celebrated her 32 birthday on Sunday, has refused food for six days in protest at her conviction by an Iranian revolutionary court in a closed-door trial of spying for the United States.

She has been held in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison since late January, when she was initially reported to have been arrested for buying alcohol, an illegal act in the Islamic republic.

“We tried to convince her to give up her hunger strike but she is persistent telling us ‘I will be either freed or I will die here’,” Reza Saberi added.

He said his daughter is determined to continue her hunger strike until she is released.

A website has been set up to campaign for Saberi’s release.

Civil disobedience is central to any democratic society, though it’s not unusual for authorities to crack down hard on non-violent protests for daring to challenge the rule of the state.

For example:

Six suspects, one of them a 70-year old woman, were detained for questioning and released Sunday on suspicion that they preached in favor of dodging the IDF’s draft. Police say more suspects have been located and will be detained.

Police have been following the activities of two websites called Target 21 and New Profile, which encourage youths to dodge the mandatory draft. Officers used IP addresses to locate computers outputting information to the sites and arrived at the owners’ homes Sunday morning to search the premises.

Plus:

“Declaring chronic back or head aches can lower your medical profile, and marking the wrong answers on the psychometric exam certainly decreases the candidate’s value for security service, even leading to an automatic discharge from the IDF,” a website encouraging draft-dodging informs its readers.

The website is one of many offering tips on how to evade army service, published by organizations that allegedly encourage draft-dodging in Israel. On Monday Attorney General Menachem Mazuz ordered an investigation be launched against these organizations on suspicion of incitement against the army.

New Profile have released a statement:

New Profile Movement: Harsh Police Attack on Freedom of Expression

The New Profile Movement noted today: “These recent acts confirm what we have been contending for many years: the militarism of society in Israel harms the sacred principles of democracy, freedom of expression and freedom of political association. One who believed that until now criminal files were conjured up “only” for Arab citizens of Israel saw this morning that none of us can be certain that s/he can freely express an opinion concerning the failures of society and rule in Israel.”

One of Israel’s leading historians, Benny Morris – a fine scholar who now represents the bigoted underbelly of Israeli society – knows how to solve the Middle East conflict:

Morris concludes that a majority of Jews during the Mandate and Israelis in the years since have come to accept the notion of two states for two peoples. However, the Arabs have not. The historian takes the reader through the various covenants and declarations of the PLO, Fatah and Hamas and illustrates that even when claims of moderation are made, they do not reflect reality. There is no “secular democratic Palestine” in the making.

Morris argues that all the solutions are almost a “practical nightmare and well nigh unthinkable” or “not realistic.” So he argues for a return to an idea from the 1970s of a union between the West Bank and Jordan, with Gaza attached to this “confederation.” This perplexing creation must be created over the opposition of the Jordanian monarchy, which has jettisoned the Palestinians since the Jordanian civil war, and the Palestinians themselves who already lived under such a scheme from 1948 to 1967. Morris’s failure to provide a real answer, however, lies not in any fault of his own, but the hardship of “resolving” the conflict.

His solution is anything but. A never-ending occupation that will guarantee never-ending resistance.

Perhaps that’s what he needs to justify fortress Israel.

The latest Middle East delusion:

There is no end to the list of new words and phrases invented for the diplomatic dictionary. The latest gimmick is called “regional peace.” It is based on the following formula: Israel and the Arab states have a common enemy called Iran. In order to neutralize the Iranian threat, Israel will ultimately have to adopt the Arab peace initiative, and then something wondrous will happen – a bloc of states will rally and face down the Iranian nuclear threat.

The campaign against corporations that benefit from the Israeli occupation is only growing (including favoured Palestinians close to colluding President Mahmoud Abbas).

The latest from suburban Melbourne:

A small band of residents in the West urged commuters at the Footscray train station last Thursday to “dump Connex” as the State Government reviews shortlisted contenders for a new contract.

“Connex’s contract to build and operate the Israeli light rail project confirms that they will do anything to make a dollar – including profiting from apartheid.”

A few words about torture from somebody who would know. Major Matthew Alexander personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq:

The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa’ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology. It plays into the hands of al-Qa’ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights. People will only tell you the minimum to make the pain stop. They might tell you the location of a house used by insurgents but not that it is booby-trapped.

A key point:

It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa’ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.

But the fundamentalist Right just wants to keep on defending the indefensible (and calling for Dick Cheney to run for President in 2012!)

This story in today’s Sunday Independent caught my eye:

David Cameron accepted an all-expenses paid trip to apartheid South Africa while Nelson Mandela was still in prison, an updated biography of the Tory leader reveals today.

The trip by Mr Cameron in 1989, when he was a rising star of the Conservative Research Department, was a chance for him to “see for himself” and was funded by a firm that lobbied against the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime.

With the recent local media stories about countless politicians and journalists visiting apartheid Israel, how long before public figures have to apologise for taking free trips to the “Jewish” state? When will the general public expect such people to have spoken out strongly against brutal human rights abuses in Palestine?

The article continues:

Peter Hain, the former Cabinet minister and prominent anti-apartheid campaigner, said last night: “David Cameron asks us to judge a leader’s character – well, Gordon Brown at this time was active in the anti-apartheid movement, while Cameron was enjoying a sanctions-busting jolly. That is a measure of character.

“This just exposes his hypocrisy because he has tried to present himself as a progressive Conservative, but just on the eve of the apartheid downfall, and Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, when negotiations were taking place about a transfer of power, here he was being wined and dined on a sanctions-busting visit.

“This is the real Conservative Party, shown by the fact that his colleagues who used to wear ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ badges at university are now sitting on the benches around him. Their leader at the time Margaret Thatcher described Mandela as a terrorist.”

Which side of history are people on today? Times can change terribly quickly.

During last week’s Durban II conference, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a speech that some in the West regarded as outrageous and others as merely representing public opinion in much of the world (personally speaking, I think it harmed the Palestinian cause no end).

This clip from the BBC is startling for its honest questioning and would never be seen in the US or Australia:

BBC reporter for Newsnight, Jeremy Paxman grills the UK Ambassador at the UN in Geneva:

Peter Gooderham:…a Jewish homeland, in the er…in what is now Israel and racism is something else. I mean racism is, I think we all know it when we see it and it’s not, it’s not that, and we have fought long and hard at the United Nations to keep that, to maintain that distinction.

A new film, Defamation, according to Mondoweiss, “is about the consecration of anti-Semitism as the central mode of Jewish identity and the raison-d’etre of Jewish nationalism–it sustains Israel.”

Just the kind of reason why so many Jews are able to defend the most horrific Israeli policies because anything, literally anything, can be justified as self-defense. The mantra “Never Again” has come to mean “Never Again to us, but anything goes for them”:

It is worth quoting in full the following statement by Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, at the end of the Durban II conference in Geneva:

It was very difficult. I had to face a widespread, and highly organized campaign of disinformation. Many people, including Ministers with whom I spoke, told me that the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, which as you know was agreed by 189 states at the original World Conference Against Racism in 2001 was anti-Semitic, and it was clear that either they had not bothered to read what it actually said, or they were putting a cast on it that was, to say the least, decidely exaggerated.

Many others have labelled the entire Durban process as a “hate fest.” We have had some rough moments in the process, but a “hate fest?” I’m sorry, this is hyperbole. It is a gross exaggeration. But it is everywhere on the Internet. And I’m sorry to say many mainline newspapers who incidentally declined many op-eds that I sent up to them. Because I kept urging States to take part, one of the most vociferous opponents of the conference called me the “dangerous High Commissioner for Human Rights.” So if you see a special look about me, that’s the danger. Another called me the “ludicrous High Commissioner for Human Rights.” That look I have dropped since. I expect these types of personal attacks to continue for the rest of my tenure. But I can live with them because I see this conference as a success and I know that you will judge this process in a valid and fair way.

If people actually read the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, they would have realized that it includes a paragraph which says that “the Holocaust should never be forgotten”. It includes two paragraphs that denounce “anti-Semitism and Islamophobia”, and one paragraph which mentions the suffering of the Palestinians, their right of self-determination and the security of all States, including Israel, and two paragraphs calling for peace. That’s all there is on the Middle East. And I could not get these corrections published in some important newspapers, particularly in the US, who used the word hate fest without checking these paragraphs.

The final document of this conference – the Conference product, if you like – also says the Holocaust must never be forgotten and deplores anti-Semitism along with Islamophobia and all forms of racism, xenophobia, racial discrimination and related intolerance. But already the propaganda machine is starting to wind up to term this conference a failure, a “hate fest and all the rest of it.” This is extraordinary. Yet no one has really written up the true story of this Conference – a strange rough and tumble affair full of smoke and mirrors, I must admit, yet very definitely a success story, with plenty of good will as well as plenty of bad will of the type I have described just now.

I want to say at this point particularly to you that the Geneva press corps has been terrific during the later stages of this process. You have seen through the propaganda, you have read the DDPA and the Review Conference’s outcome document, and you have reported accurately, fairly and professionally. So on behalf of my entire office, I would like to extend you a very warm thank you for that. I believe you have played an exceptionally important role. I know that some of you have had to argue with editors who, like so many others, have succumbed to the mythology.

But because of this campaign that was so determined to kill the conference, some countries decided to boycott it, although a few days earlier, they had actually agreed on what is now the final text. I consider this bizarre. You agree the text on Friday evening, and walk out on Sunday. I think, it was unfortunate that a few states disengaged from the process. Although almost all of them had agreed this text, they are not part of the consensus that adopted it. I do hope they will come back into the process now. They can still add their names to the list of 182 states that have adopted the outcome document. And by the way, Iran is part of that consensus. When the final call came, Iran did not oppose the text.

Inside the establishment mind of Mark Urban, the Diplomatic Editor of the BBC’s Newsnight programme.