Antony Loewenstein

Jordan’s King Abdullah isn’t exactly the finest example of a human rights defender – yes, it’s yet another US-backed dictatorship – but these comments in Washington about Israel are spot-on:

“Israel now has to make its choice,” the king said in a speech in Washington.

The Jewish state can “integrate into the region … or to remain fortress Israel, isolated, holding itself and the entire region hostage to continued confrontation.”

For decades it’s made the clear decision to continue conflict with the Palestinians.

Will it truly change?

“Israel strives to re-brand image“, we’re told. Yet again.

Get ready for more failure.

“It doesn’t matter how many times we convince ourselves and our staunch allies that we are not war criminals, and that those who try to portray us as such are incorrigible Jew-haters,” wrote Anshel Pfeffer in the liberal daily Haaretz. Israel’s public relations machine is “fighting a losing battle,” Pfeffer wrote. “Perhaps it would be best to finally change tactics and admit that occupation of another nation has made it so much harder for us to claim we are still the heirs of the victims, and not the perpetrators.”

Another rogue state, Sri Lanka, currently fighting its own futile “war on terror” – and causing massive carnage in the process – is also trying to improve its shocking image. Not by changing behaviour, of course, merely employing PR hacks:

Washington lobbyists are making out quite well from the war. In January, the firm of Patton Boggs was retained by the Embassy of Sri Lanka, with “a fixed fee of $35,000 per month, payable quarterly in advance,” according to the contract. Democratic lobbyist Tommy Boggs is helping run the account, which calls on Patton Boggs to “provide guidance and counsel to the Embassy of Sri Lanka regarding its relations with the Executive and Legislative Branches of the U.S. Government.” In other words, to sanitize the government’s conduct of the war and make it look good with the Obama administration.

After producing a “white paper” on Sri Lanka and the ongoing civil war, Patton Boggs organized a series of official meetings for its client. In late-March, the Sri Lankan ambassador to the U.S., Jaliya Wickramasuriya, met separately with Senator Richard Lugar. He briefed him on the conflict, stressing “the care taken to protect displaced civilians,” according to an Embassy press release.

Despite Patton Boggs’ best efforts, the government’s PR offensive has fallen flat. “I think that the Sri Lankan government knows that the entire world is very disappointed that in its efforts to end what it sees as 25 years of conflict, it is causing such untold suffering,” Secretary of State Clinton said Wednesday.

When torture is but an after-thought:

Who says that becoming a compliant colonial administrator isn’t good for business?

Running a power plant in Gaza might sound like a losing venture but, thanks to payments from the cash-strapped Palestinian government, its owners are making profits and promise another year of “unstoppable growth”.

While Gaza’s 1.5 million residents, blockaded by Israel, face electricity shortages, the Palestine Electric Co.’s (PEC) profits were $6.3 million in 2008, up from $4.4 million in 2007. Profits are largely distributed in tax-free dividends.

The gains came even though the plant has been operating at less than half capacity due to the embargo that chokes fuel and spare parts, and past bombings by Israel.

Critics decry what they call a lopsided deal that guarantees the PEC a fixed annual fee from the Palestinian Authority, which is bankrolled with aid from Western governments.

Just the latest reason that the Palestinian Authority has become increasingly unpopular due to corruption, collusion with the West and achieving nothing in return.

The occupation continues to grow.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has given his first interview to an Israeli newspaper. After telling a Russian paper earlier this week that, “Believe me, America accepts all our decisions“, his latest thoughts are equally likely to get the vast majority of the world off-side:

The international community has to “stop speaking in slogans” if it really wants to help the new Israeli government work toward a solution to the Palestinian conflict and help bring stability to the Middle East, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, in his first interview with an Israeli newspaper since taking the job.

“Over the last two weeks I’ve had many conversations with my colleagues around the world,” he said. “Just today, I saw the political adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Chinese foreign minister and the Czech prime minister. And everybody, you know, speaks with you like you’re in a campaign: Occupation, settlements, settlers…”

Slogans like these, and others Lieberman cited, such as “land for peace” and “two-state solution,” were both overly simplistic and ignored the root causes of the ongoing conflict, he said.

The fact was, said the Israel Beiteinu leader, that the Palestinian issue was “deadlocked” despite the best efforts of a series of dovish Israeli governments. “Israel has proved its good intentions, our desire for peace,” he said.

Yes, all those good intentions.

Tension with Obama seems guaranteed, BUT, will the US actually demand the Jewish state end the occupation (though, of course, Netanyahu regards these illegal colonies as merely “disputed”).

Here’s yet another case of the Zionist lobby in the US causing trouble for an academic who dared criticise Israel:

Toward the end of February 2009, University of California-Santa Barbara Sociology and Global Studies Professor William Robinson received notice from the Academic Senate’s Charges Committee that two of his students had filed charges against him.  The students alleged that an email forward he’d circulated to his class, criticizing Israel’s then-ongoing siege on Gaza, comprised anti-Semitism.

Seumas Milne, The Guardian, April 23:

What do the US, Canada, ­Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Italy and Israel have in common? They are all either European or European-settler states. And they all decided to boycott this week’s UN ­conference against racism in Geneva – even before Monday’s incendiary speech by the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which triggered a further white-flight walkout by representatives of another 23 European states…

Ahmadinejad’s grandstanding played straight into that agenda. The most poisonous phrases in the printed version of his speech circulated by embassy officials referred to the Nazi genocide as “ambiguous and dubious” and claimed Zionist “penetration” of western society was so deep that “nothing can be done against their will”. That a head of state of a country of nearly 70 million people is still toying with Holocaust denial and European antisemitic tropes straight out of the Tsarist antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is not only morally repugnant and factually absurd. It’s also damaging to the Palestinian cause by association, weakens the international support Iran needs to avert the threat of attack over its nuclear programme, and bolsters Israel’s claims that it faces an existential threat.

But, perhaps as a result of an appeal by the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, Ahmadinejad dropped those provocations at the last minute. What in fact triggered the walkout of European Union ambassadors was his reference to Israel as a “totally racist regime”, established by the western powers who had made an “entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering” and “in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe”.

The rhetoric was certainly crude and inflammatory. Britain’s foreign secretary David Miliband called it “hate-filled”. But the truth is that throughout the Arab, Muslim and wider developing worlds, the idea that Israel is a racist state is largely uncontroversial. The day after Ahmadinejad’s appearance, the Palestinian Authority foreign minister, Riyad al-Maliki, echoed the charge in the conference hall, describing Israeli occupation as “the ugliest face of racism”. It’s really not good enough for Britain’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Peter Gooderham – who led the Ahmadinejad walkout – to say of the charge of Israel’s racism, “we all know it when we see it and it’s not that”.

This is a state, after all, created by European colonists, built on the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population, whose founding legal principles guarantee the right of citizenship to any Jewish migrant from anywhere in the world, while denying that same right to Palestinians born there along with their descendants. Of course, Israel is much else besides, and the Jewish cultural and historical link with Palestine is a ­profound one.

Is the Obama administration showing any willingness to finesse its ban on dealing with Hamas?

Maybe.

I’ll leave Jewish American blogger Richard Silverstein to explain why the Israeli political elite live in a world where Rome burns and they blame anti-Semitism and mistaken PR:

I kid you not. This is a real story from Haaretz. Hard to believe that [former Australian] Mark Regev is such an obtuse idiot along with the rest of Israel’s hasbara apparatus, but there you go.

Before I cite the story, I should preface it by mentioning that Israel’s ironically named Gaza invasion, Operation Cast Lead, derives from (of all things) a children’s Hanukah poem by Chaim Nachman Bialik:

Teacher bought a big top for me,
Solid lead, the finest known.
In whose honor, for whose glory?
For Hanukkah alone.

Here is what I wrote on this subject at the beginning of the war:

It is just like modern Israel and Zionism to appropriate Jewish history, holiday and tradition to justify its own agenda. Quite macabre also to think that the IDF has defiled a delightful children’s poem by Bialik in order to convey the power of its onslaught against Hamas (”solid lead”).

Here is shmendrik Regev’s commentary on this subject:

Naming Israel’s incursion into Gaza Operation Cast Lead was a public relations faux pas, a top government spokesman said on Wednesday.

“I didn’t like the name,” Mark Regev, the prime minister’s spokesman for international media, told a crowd of some 150 listeners in English. “From a public relations point of view, it was a mistake.”

“…The Israel Defense Forces chooses its names by some computer or by some system which I don’t understand. And the truth is that the Hebrew name Oferet Yetzuka [referring to Hanukkah dreidels] sounds lovely. It’s the translation into English which sounds inappropriate.

Regev, 49, added that whenever he spoke to international media, he “never once said ‘Cast Lead’ because it has connotations in English that are problematic…”

“The English translation wasn’t the most effective way to get our message out and it’s an important point because if you can control the terminology of the debate, you can win the debate,” he said.

Hmmm, calling it “cast lead” was quite problematic, eh? They could’ve done worse. They could’ve called it Operation Drop Dead or Vast Dread.  That would’ve really conveyed Israel’s intentions. As it was, I thought “Cast Lead” perfectly conveyed Israel’s intent to drill Gaza full of lead (as they indeed did).

It seems grisly to call this humorous, but it really is if you look at it in a M.A.S.H.-Catch 22 sort of way. The IDF always seems to provide dark comedy in spite of itself.

Indeed. As if changing the name of the damn war would have made any difference to how the world viewed it. These Zionists truly have no clue.

According to conservative fanatic Michelle Malkin, it’s “left-wing extremism” to “wail about torture and indulge in Cheney Derangement Syndrome.”

Yes, calling for accountability against torture is “extremism”:

A few choice words by Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff on the future, or lack thereof, of the MSM:

The NYT [New York Times] will not be owned by the same company 18 months from now. I stand by that.

Following the invitation of Hamas leader Khalid Meshal to address some British MPs, his words are worth considering:

Hamas’ politburo Chief Khaled Mashaal made statements in an address to British lawmakers via satellite on Wednesday. “Resistance is means to an end and not the objective itself,” said Mashaal, “and if we find another way to end the occupation – we will use it.”

According to Mashaal, the only way to promote peace in the Middle East is by pressuring Israel. Ignoring the Palestinian problem and leaving it unsolved would lead to “an explosion in the region,” he warned the Parliament members.

Mashaal stressed that any settlement with the Palestinians will have to include Israel’s’ withdrawal to the 1967 borders and the right of return.

In his speech Mashaal accused Israel of leaving every peace initiative empty, and said that the road to peace and stability in the region runs through ending the occupation. “The Palestinian people must be able to exercise their right for self determination, have sovereignty and be allowed to have a state like every other nations in the world,” he stressed.

Mashaal defined Hamas as “a national resistance movement that seeks to get rid of the occupation and allow the Palestinian people to have freedom and very other legitimate right. “Israel is stronger than us, but force alone cannot decide the campaign – Israel has failed to do so time and again,” he stated.