Antony Loewenstein

The Australian Centre for Independent Journalism and the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Sydney University present a seminar on:

” Media Complicity? -Reporting Gaza and Sri Lanka 2009″

What happens when the journalists are shut out? What affect does this have on reporting? How should we be reporting Sri Lanka and Gaza from now on? When does journalism become propaganda?

When: Wednesday 27 May 2009
Time: 6 to 8pm
Where: UTS Building 10, Level 7, Room 114 (10.7.114). Building 10 is accessible from Jones Street or Wattle Street, University of Technology, Sydney.
Cost: Free

Speakers:

- Associate Professor Jake Lynch, Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, former presenter and reporter BBC World Television News and former Sydney correspondent of the Independent. Most recent book is ‘Debates in Peace Journalism’ (Sydney University Press).
- Antony Loewenstein, journalist, blogger and author of ‘My Israel Question’ and ‘The Blogging Revolution’.
- Peter Cave – Executive Producer of ABC’s World Today, who has won five Walkley awards and reported from 50 countries.
Chair: Director of the ACIJ, Professor Wendy Bacon

For further information please contact:
Jan McClelland on 9514 2295 or acijmanager@uts.edu.au

Jews who want to discuss Jews and Israel in a critical way.

The debate grows:

On Monday, a discussion organized by the Jewish Community Centre for London entitled “Can We Talk about Israel?” illustrates just how much the Diaspora debate on Israel has changed. All the panellists were of the left, all opposed the occupation, all were horrified by Avigdor Lieberman and all agreed that it was important to talk about Israel critically rather than give it unqualified support.

Who says the illegal occupation of West Bank settlements is an impediment to peace?

Not the neo-con Zionist Right.

Like I report in my book, The Blogging Revolution, the Islamic Republic is a truly repressive web nation:

Authorities in Iran have banned popular social-networking site Facebook until after the Islamic Republic’s presidential election in mid-June.

Iranian media has reported that the ban comes as a result of the success President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad opponent Mir-Hossein Mousavi has had using the site to advance his campaign, according to a report on Army Radio.

Perhaps somebody should remind Israel that killing leaders is actually illegal:

Israel is planning to assassinate the head of the southern Lebanon-based Shi’ite militia Hezbollah, a development which would “set the region ablaze,” one of the group’s deputies told an Arab language newspaper on Friday.

Imagine the outcry if a story emerged that the head of Hizbollah was planning the murder of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Pakistan’s finest journalist on militancy, Syed Saleem Shahzad, on the region’s dark future:

The militants plan to establish a new regional alliance. In this regard, Iranian Jundullah (Army of God) leader Abdul Malik Rigi is due to meet an al-Qaeda emissary in the near future near a Pakistani Balochistan coastal town to lay the foundation for joint regional operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and India.

I’ll be appearing tomorrow at the Sydney Writer’s Festival.

The first one, at 10am, is described thus:

James Maskalyk’s and Christian Lander’s books found their genesis in the new and powerful form of journalism, the blogosphere. Antony Loewenstein’s The Blogging Revolution is about the global tribe of bloggers who live and write under repressive regimes. They traverse this terrain and consider its power with newmatilda.com’s Ben Pobjie.

The second one, at 3.30pm, is:

If bloggers are all wannabe journalists and journalists are all complacent hacks, why do so few manage to cross over? Rachel Hills talks to four blogger/journalists who’ve excelled in both fields: Erica Bartle, Tim Blair, Margo Kingston and Antony Loewenstein.

Come on down!

A few months ago I spoke in Ubud, Bali about the Middle East crisis and Jewish responsibility for the chaos. I’ll be returning in October as a guest of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. Here’s the latest news about the wonderfully diverse guest list, a unique opportunity to share stories and be inspired:

The literary goddess of Ubud has announced a tentative line-up of some 70 writers, poets and artists from all corners of the world for 2009, including Adelaide-based Booker Prize-winner and Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace, Life & Times of Michael K); Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka (You Must Set Forth at Dawn), the first African to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature; Uwem Akpan (Say You’re One of Them); Vikas Swarup (Slumdog Millionaire, Six Suspects); Mexican author Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate); Hari Kunzru (My Revolutions, Transmission, The Impressionist); Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes); Ed Husain (The Islamist); Kate Grenville (The Lieutenant, The Secret River, The Idea of Perfection, Dark Places); Lloyd Jones (Mister Pip, Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance); Wena Poon (Lions in Winter); Alice Pung (Unpolished Gem); Mo Zhi Hong (The Year of the Shanghai Shark); Antony Loewenstein (My Israel Question, The Blogging Revolution); literary agent extraordinaire David Godwin; Tash Aw (The Harmony Silk Factory, Map of the Invisible World); Rana Dasgupta (Tokyo Cancelled, Solo); Sonya Hartnett (Butterfly, Surrender, Thursday’s Child); Julia Leigh (The Disquiet, The Hunter); Alison Lester (Clive Eats Alligators, Tessa Snaps Snakes, Rosie Sips Spiders); and Tara June Winch (Swallow the Air).

Also appearing are Seno Gumira Ajidarma, Usha Akella, Asitha Ameresekere, Nigel Barley, Fatima Bhutto, Michelle Cahill, Tom Cho, Diana Darling, N.H. Dini, Gamal Al Ghitany, Riaz Hassan, Dany Laferriere, Lee Su Kim, Bejan Matur, James McBride, Ng Yi-Sheng, John O’Sullivan, Omar Musa, W.S. Rendra, Thando Sibanda, Thant Myint-U, Jeet Thayil, Abdourahman Waberi, and others.

Now in its sixth year, the festival will run from October 7-11, 2009, with the theme Suka Duka: Compassion & Solidarity, an Indonesian philosophy that defines the essence of shared support that communities in Indonesia offer in times of joy and sorrow.

Glenn Greenwald has his eyes open to the reality of the American empire:

In other words, there’s no such thing as an American President who is not a “war President.”  We never go more than a few years without some kind of a direct war, and are always waging covert and indirect ones.

Well, there goes the neighbourhood:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Thursday that all of Jerusalem would always remain under Israeli sovereignty, in comments likely to spark consternation among Palestinians who hope to make the city the capital of a future state.

“United Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours. It will never again be partitioned and divided,” Netanyahu said at a state ceremony to mark Jerusalem Day.

Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, U.S. security coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, recently explained his role as training Palestinians to essentially manage the Zionist occupation.

This is clearly the “vision” Barack Obama imagines for a supposedly independent Palestinian state.

Now a profile in Israel’s largest newspaper worries that Dayton thinks very differently to the Israelis:

For three years now, Dayton has been hanging around here, and for the last two, since the summer of 2007, he has been intensively overseeing the formation of the Palestinian army in the West Bank. Israel prefers to keep its eyes wide shut and to call it an “upgraded national defense force.” Like an organized police force, something along the lines of an enhanced Border Police, a kind of force for riot dispersion destined to serve the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah in matters of public order and to supply it with more security from within: security from Hamas.

The Americans and the Palestinians – each in its own way – have completely different visions of this force. The Palestinians see it as yet another symbol, another step on the way to statehood. The Americans also see it as an internal security mechanism which is presently being developed in order to serve an independent Palestinian state one day.

Not autonomy and not anything resembling it. Statehood. We, on the other hand, prefer to play the ostrich’s role with our heads in the sand. That is how we operate. Even the statesmen, in the end, see everything through the lens of daily security, through the daily patrol in Nablus’s casbah. So Dayton’s three battalions have arrested 600 opposition members, mostly Hamas, since the beginning of the year? Fine. As far as we are concerned that makes 600 less terrorists. Dayton plans on establishing ten additional battalions? Great, we applaud this. This way the arrests will double.

Palestinians should be not trained to manage their own population.

That’s called colonialism.