Antony Loewenstein

Iran is burning. Not to worry, the Jewish Forward reports:

“Already, in Washington policy circles, the Israelis’ mantra, let’s bomb them, has gone off the table,” said Marshall Breger, a former Reagan and Bush senior White House aide and Orthodox Jew who has been engaged in interfaith dialogue with senior Iranian clerics. “It’s not considered serious”…

The real problem for Israel, he explained, was not the prospect of Iran dropping a nuclear bomb on it — a prospect he viewed as unlikely because of Israel’s own nuclear deterrent — but that “an Iran with nuclear capability, even with no weapons, will constrain Israel’s freedom of action. Israel’s first military principle has always been, they must have total regional military hegemony, or as has been more politely stated, a qualitative military edge.”

“Solutions [to the nuclear issue] that can satisfy the U.S. security needs might not satisfy Israel’s sense of security,” Breger said.

Former Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak:

If you ask a Jew whether he supports equality with the Arabs, he will say: ‘Certainly’, and if you ask if he supports kicking all the Arabs out of here, he will say: ‘Certainly’. He sees no contradiction between the two.

The country’s Supreme Court is facing unprecedented challenges from the settler movement.

A column in the Gulf News, that mentions my recent essay in Haaretz, argues that Arab-Americans must be more involved in US political and media life to affect government policies towards the Middle East:

Their presence in the media and on Capitol Hill is still small, however, and many more are needed. But what would be equally effective is if the growing community of Arab-American academicians could be encouraged to write op-eds in newspapers or participate in TV or radio talk shows. Admittedly, this is not an easy task, as many who have taken part would readily confess, particularly if their opinion is a little offline. But once one manages to penetrate this wall, one is in for good – as has been proven by the case of several Arab-Americans or others who write on Middle Eastern issues, contrary to the views of the pro-Israel lobby, neoconservative pundits and even former administration officials.

It’s encouraging that the neo-conservatives, who still embrace torture, have not totally infected the American public:

Six in 10 Americans approve of having an international convention saying that “governments should never use physical torture” as a means of trying to get information, while 39 percent say such a ban is too restrictive, according to a new WorldPublicOpinion.org/Knowledge Networks poll.

A majority also opposes nearly all methods for coercing detainees to give information, even when it might be critical to stopping a terrorist attack against the US. Respondents were presented a scenario in which a detainee is being held who is likely to have “information about a possible terrorist attack on the US that may prove critical to stopping the attack.” They were then presented a series of methods for coercing the respondent to reveal the information.

Majorities opposed forcing the detainee to take stressful positions (56%), using threatening dogs (64%), exposing the detainee to extreme heat and cold (66%), making the detainee go naked (71%), holding the detainee’s head under water (78%), punching or kicking the detainee (80%), and applying electric shocks (81%).

One method–sleep deprivation–received modest majority support (52%). Views were divided on putting a hood over a detainee’s head for a long period of time, and bombarding the detainee with loud music. A very large majority (79%) favored offering detainees positive incentives for providing information.

Why is the global Jewish Diaspora remaining largely silent as Israel’s far-right gains in strength and puts forward racist policies?

Is it because they agree?

This is the latest weekly ad by Israeli peace group Gush Shalom:

Those who oppress

- in Iran.

My following article appears in today’s edition of Crikey:

Antony Loewenstein writes from New York:

The glittering New York Times building in Manhattan is a striking, architectural wonder, exuding success and power. Unfortunately, the reality of the paper’s financial decline is far less glamorous.

The world’s most famous newspaper is struggling like most media companies. What better way to humanise and sex-up the aging organisation than to allow public engagement with Times executive editor Bill Keller and managing editor Jill Abramson at an event called “Behind the Scenes at The New York Times”?. It was also a way to make some much-needed cash at $20 a head.

On a rainy Monday evening, the mostly grey-haired brigade filed into the lavish TimesCentre to hear two senior hacks talk principally about the past, a supposedly golden age of journalism.

Keller, just back from Iran and his first page one stories in 14 years, had a laconic charm. Abramson, central in the Times publishing consistently bogus information on Iraq’s non-existent WMDs before the 2003 war, had a nervous energy with a slow and deliberate New York drawl. The audience clapped and laughed at the appropriate moments.

Their journalistic insights were far and few between — both talked about reading the Times first in the morning, followed closely by the Wall Street Journal and the internet was largely praised not damned as an innovator — but both subjects have had a varied media career.

Keller has been based in Moscow and South Africa — met and interviewed Nelson Mandela and wrote a book about him — and Abramson was the hard-nosed type, who “never believes in access journalism” and not going to establishment parties. She grew up believing that “what the Times wrote was the truth.” She wasn’t opposed to speaking warmly of the famed Gridiron Club, Washington’s oldest and most exclusive journalistic club.

When the issue of web reporting finally emerged, Abramson said that she believed it was important to “resist the temptation to file constantly online. Take a step back.” It’s good advice, though not one always considered by her colleagues. A friend here in New York works on the Times online desk – wisely integrated with the print reporters – and she’s always writing stories with little hard information. Print journalists then take the story up later in the day and finish the job.

Keller offered little indication that his paper knew how to manage the web onslaught. “We’re exploring any way we can to make money from web journalism”, he said. He rightly praised the Times blog, The Lede, as an invaluable aggregator of Iran-related material.

Keller did reveal some interesting news about the abduction and recent escape of Times reporter David Rohde, kidnapped in November last year in Afghanistan along with a driver and local reporter. The vast majority of the mainstream media remained silent about the ordeal after requests from the paper itself.

Keller said that he had spoken to Rohde that morning and felt vindicated by the decision:

“I was relieved this morning when I talked to David and he said, ‘By the way, thank you for not making a public event out of this. We heard the people who kidnapped me were obsessed with my value in the marketplace. If there were a lot of news stories, they would have held me much tighter.”

During the question and answer sessions, the first woman asked why the paper “wanted to portray Israel as a Goliath, an occupier, settlement builders and unforgiving” (maybe because the country is an occupier that continually builds illegal settlements?)

Another, a religious looking, bearded Jew, demanded to know why the paper “does not acknowledge the Palestinian refusal to accept the Jewish state.” Keller simply said that, “our goal is not to construct good and evil and readers should make their own judgement. Our job isn’t to say who the villain in the Middle East is.”

I asked whether the Times felt any responsibility for publishing so many bogus reports on Saddam Hussein and whether they believed in accountability in journalism when some of their senior journalists were complicit in running Bush administration spin? Keller acknowledged that “we did a lot wrong, there was too much incredulous writing, but we didn’t have access to classified information. There is an urban myth that the Times took the country to war; the Bush administration took the country to war.”

Antony Loewenstein is a journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution

Hamid Dabashi, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, on what’s happening in Iran:

This, in my judgment, is a post-ideological generation. My generation was divided into third world socialists, anti-colonial nationalists and militant Islamists. These are the three dominant ideologies with which we grew up. But if you look at the composition of Iranian society today, 70 percent of it is under the age of thirty—namely, born after the Islamic Revolution. They no longer are divided along those ideological lines.

And if you read their newspapers, if you watch their movies, if you listen to the lyrics of their underground music, to their contemporary arts, etc., which we have been doing over the past thirty years, this, to me, is a civil rights movement. They are operating within the Constitution of the Islamic Republic. They don’t want to topple the regime. If you look—come outside, from the right of the right, in the US Senate to the left, is waiting for yet another revolution to happen. I don’t think this is another revolution. This is a civil rights movement. They’re demanding their civil rights that are being denied, even within the Constitution of the Islamic Republic. From their chants that they are doing in the streets to their newspapers, to their magazines, to their websites, to their Facebook, to their Twitters, everywhere that you look, this is a demand for civil liberties…

Meanwhile, this story in CQ is intriguing:

He may yet turn out to be the avatar of Iranian democracy, but three decades ago Mir-Hossein Mousavi was waging a terrorist war on the United States that included bloody attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.

I’ve just discovered that a journalist colleague with whom I’ve corresponded over the years, Greek reporter Iason Athanasiadis, was arrested a few days ago in Tehran and remains imprisoned.

We call for his unconditional release.

Israeli writer Bernard Avishai writes in the Nation on why his country is moving further and further to the right:

The problem is not some spontaneous drift “to the right” in Israel owing to, say, Hamas’s missiles or Ahmadinejad’s threats. Israel, after all, has been integrating these territories for forty years; Hamas did not even exist during the first twenty. Of course Israelis distrust Arab intentions, and vice versa…Polls have shown for many years that a slight majority of Israelis would want to do a deal anyway–actually, a large majority of globalist professional and entrepreneurial elites in greater Tel-Aviv. Assume peace with Palestine, and the lives of Israelis on the coastal plain will change, if at all, for the better. The problem is that the Israeli population of greater Tel-Aviv is a decreasing majority relative to Jewish settlers and Orthodox residents of Jerusalem–call them “Judeans”–and the less well-educated Mizrahi and ultranationalist Russian immigrants who tend to support them. The Israeli right does not oppose a deal the way residents of New Hampshire oppose an income tax. For them, Greater Israel and a policy of deterrence is a way of life, inextricably bound up with sustaining a “Jewish” state–not only against Palestine but in spite of Israel’s Arab minority, a fifth of its citizens.

There exists on an almost daily basis a profound disconnect between reality and rhetoric in the Middle East.

On the one hand, Israel wants to find a way, any way, to continue building illegal settlements in the West Bank. Jewish fundamentalists in the area are routinely allowed to cause destruction against Palestinians and the state does virtually nothing to stop it. They’re just being good Jews, right?

Instead, we read in the essential Haaretz about the following stories:

Israel’s security services came under fire on Wednesday for its methods of restraining Palestinian prisoners during questioning, which a new report claims are tantamount to torture.

The report, which is based on interviews and investigations into 574 arrests and interrogations over the last year, argues that Israeli organizations, in particular the IDF and the Shin Bet, habitually bind detainees in a painful and humiliating manner, often constituting torture.

And:

In protest over the complaint the United States dared to lodge against Israel over the plight of Gaza Strip residents, the Defense Ministry declared there is no humanitarian crisis there, nor did one ever exist.

According to the ministry’s criteria for humanitarian cases, our American friends got a little carried away. For example, is the case of a 7-year-old Gazan who lost his mother and wants to rejoin his father, who lives in Hebron, to be considered a humanitarian case by the Defense Ministry? That’s not a sure thing.

The only real way to deal with this criminality and arrogance is a boycott campaign to isolate a state that enjoys persecuting Palestinians. Only then will they maybe realise that apartheid is no longer acceptable in the modern age.

The difficulties of reporting from inside Gaza are revealed by this story told by Palestinian journalist Rami Almeghari:

For the past three years I have been a correspondent for the US-based Free Speech Radio News (FSRN). Until recently, I had been using a minidisc recorder that was sent to me from a friend in the West Bank before the total closure of Gaza began in 2007.

In late 2008, I needed to replace my old recording equipment that had poor sound quality and purchase a new audio recorder. Unfortunately, with the ongoing Israeli siege, this simple task of obtaining a new recorder was nearly impossible.