Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – a believer in “democracy” – talks about the crisis in Iran:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Yes, Israel cares deeply about Iranian democracy.
Israel’s beating heart emerges:
A new vegan bar opened last week in Tel Aviv that bans Israel Defense Forces soldiers in uniform and boycotts products made in West Bank settlements.
The Rogatka – “slingshot” – bar was opened by an “anarchist collective” who once ran the Salon Mazal bar; it is located on Yitzhak Sadeh street in central Tel Aviv.
Murder and mayhem on the streets of Tehran:
A wonderfully moving report from the New York Times‘ Roger Cohen on the ground and Robert Fisk.
The Islamic Republic appears to be in serious trouble.
The Israeli political and media elite are war-hungry fools, writes Bernard Avishai:
As I write, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of mainly young Iranians are deciding whether or not to risk going out into the streets. There is little someone like myself can add regarding the poignancy of their decision. Yet one thing seems obvious: a generation of Iranians has been changed by these rallies–changed in roughly the opposite way they would have been had Israeli military intelligence got its way, and won American and IDF agreement to an aerial strike on Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this year.
Even in the face of mass protest, not only did Mossad chief Meir Dagan refuse to admit the obvious–that an attack would have caused widespread carnage, put Iran on a war footing, and preempted its twittering liberalism–but he’s had the audacity to predict to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee what nobody could possibly know at this point, that the protests will peter out; that, anyway, a Mousavi government would be worse than Ahmadinejad‘s regime, for it would give Iran’s nuclear program a prettier face. (“To hell with those students; the PowerPoint is done.”)
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in New York on Friday:
The settlements are not an obstacle to advancing peace. In the 19 years before 1967, there were no settlements but there was terror. During the disengagement, Israel evacuated 24 settlements and in response got Hamas rule in Gaza and rockets on Sderot. It’s very clear that … the settlements … [are] an excuse for those that tried to avoid any peace talks.
A visit to the West Bank two days after the prime minister’s Bar-Ilan speech leads one to conclude that the ideological about-face implicit in Benjamin Netanyahu’s consent to a Palestinian state has not upset the people living where this state is supposed to arise. The settlers listened to Netanyahu, but were more interested in his promise to enable them to have “a normal life.” Furthermore, they wondered if this would translate into Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s signature on delayed building permits. They were also interested in Netanyahu’s decision to add MK Uri Ariel (National Union), a Beit El resident, to the committee for selecting judges. Perhaps herein lay a chance to gradually alter the approach of the Supreme Court, an institution much despised by the settlers?
Following my letter in last weekend’s Melbourne Sunday Age about the blog The Sensible Jew and parochial and bigoted Zionists, this letter is published today in response:
Antony Lowenstein subjects us to his usual wild and vicious diatribe against Israel and adds a call for a “campaign to boycott Israel” (Letters, 14/6). Sadly, one is no longer shocked by such anti-Israel statements. Anti-Zionism has become so widespread and “politically correct” and it is so extreme and so divorced from political and historic reality that one suspects that it masks even more dangerous and more ancient hatreds.
The call for a boycott of Israel is an indictment not only of Lowenstein’s political judgement — Israel is, after all, the only true democracy in the Middle East — but also of his commitment to democracy. Whatever happened to the idea that open and free debate, argument and counter-argument, are central and crucial to democratic discourse? Why would anyone call for a boycott of Israel when examples of regimes that really are awful abound? Does Lowenstein favour a boycott of China, Burma, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Iran, Sudan, Russia, North Korea?
Lowenstein would claim to be a progressive and clearly sees himself as the voice of progress. If his views do indeed represent progress and thus the future, I fear that there are dark days ahead for us all.
BILL ANDERSON, Surrey Hills
New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, who has spent this year writing extensively about Iran and Israel/Palestine, sends his latest dispatch from the streets of Tehran:
When I was here earlier this year, I argued that Iran was an unfree and repressive society but also a nation offering significant margins of liberty, at least by regional standards, with which Obama’s America must engage. After Iraq, I was deeply concerned that facile stereotyping of a society of “mad Mullahs” bent on nuclear Armageddon could once again set America in lockstep to war.
I underestimated how brutal the regime could be. But my critics underestimated how strong and broad the Iran of civic courage and democratic impulse is, and they misread how important this election was, dismissing it as the meaningless exercise of a clerical dictatorship.
I still believe there is no alternative to engagement. But it is not the time for Obama to talk about talks. He should be talking about his outrage at the violence.
This is the city of whispers. Its people crave to know that their hushed voices are being heard. Obama, lover of words, is the message man. “Message received” is what he must convey.
There are currently fierce battles on the streets. Twitter feeds explain more.
Meanwhile, Jewish neo-con Daniel Pipes continues to not care about anything or anybody. He’ll no doubt be invited to Australian Jewish events within the month.
“We do not believe that Israel will embark on the development of nuclear weapons with the aim of actually starting a nuclear war,” reads the declassified 48-year-old CIA Special National Intelligence Estimate.
The estimate, publicly released June 5 by George Washington University’s National Security Archives, continues, “Possession of a nuclear weapon capability, or even the prospect of achieving it, would clearly give Israel a greater sense of security, self-confidence and assertiveness.”
“In any public announcement concerning their nuclear reactor program, the Israelis would almost certainly stress the peaceful nature of their efforts, but they would also, as time goes on, make plain that henceforth Israel is a power to be accorded more respect than either its friends or its enemies have hitherto given it,” reads the estimate
Middle East Reality Check blog makes a clear point about the ways in which the Australian Murdoch press views dead civilians:
In Murdoch fish wrapper, if Iranian forces murder 5 or more Iranian protestors, it’s a massacre. If Israeli forces murder 1300 or more Palestinians, it ain’t.
Toronto Globe and Mail reporter George McLeod in Tehran:
I’ve never reported in an environment as hostile as this, in terms of the authorities.
I wrote before about the dangers of over-playing the significance of the web in Iran. It’s hard not to moved, though, by this Iranian blogger:
I will take part in the rally tomorrow. It might become violent. Perhaps I may be one of the people who is meant to die. I am listening to all the beautiful songs that I’ve ever heard before…. I always wanted to thin out my eyebrows… I am looking through all my family photo albums from the start. I have to call my friends and say goodbye. I just have two bookshelves full of books to my name in this world; I have told my family who to give them to. I have two units to go before I get my degree, but the hell with that… I just wrote these scattered sentences so that the next generation knows that we weren’t irrational and emotional. So that they know we did what we could to make our lives better… but we refused to give in to oppression.
A number of leading American analysts are challenging the Twitter/Blogging Revolution thesis (including a reference to my book, The Blogging Revolution, in this Foreign Affairs blog).
One of the best writers on the subject, Ethan Zuckerman, concludes that the Western media should not be presuming the internet is causing revolution in the Islamic Republic:
- Social media is probably more important as a tool to share the protests with the rest of the world than it is as an organizing tool on the ground.
- Iranians have been accessing social networking sites and blogging platforms despite years of filtering – there’s a cadre of folks who understand how to get around these blocks and are probably teaching others.
- Because so many Iranians use social media tools – often to talk about topics other than politics – they’re a “latent community” that can come to life and have political influence when events on the ground dictate…
One of the reasons MSM outlets are so focused on social media is that they’re not able to deploy reporters to cover these protests. In some cases, the majority of reporting from the ground is coming from social media. It’s worth asking what the biases might be in amplifying those social media reports. Ahmedinejad’s supporters tend to be poorer, more rural, less educated and more likely to speak Farsi than Mousavi’s supporters – a picture of the protests via social media runs the danger of overstating Mousavi support or minimizing Ahmedinejad support.
This Christian Science Monitor piece contains a decent amount of skepticism (despite the headline).
Evgeny Morozov writes a fascinating post on Foreign Policy about the State Department’s relationship with Twitter during the supposed Green Revolution in Iran:
Let me be my usual cynical self and try to speculate on the real reasons behind the State Department’s request to Twitter to delay maintenance.
The widely-accepted narrative goes like this: the State Department officials realized the importance of Twitter to Iranian protests and at some point on Monday afternoon got in touch with Twitter’s executives and asked them to delay maintenance; the company complied and kept the Iranians, Americans, and everyone else with nothing else to do during this revolution tweeting. Bravo, American diplomats: you are all on the cutting-edge of innovation.
This unusual outreach from the State Department has now emerged as one of the arguments for why Twitter has been influential in Iran; if American diplomats think it’s important to keep Twitter alive, it must by all means be very important – even if few people can actually see or prove why.
I kid you not, what follows is a quote from a New York Times article: the delay in Twitter’s maintenance reveals “the recognition by the United States government that an Internet blogging service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change history in an ancient Islamic country”. If only life was that simple, my dear friends at the New York Times: blogging services do not change history, not even if the State Department asks them; people do. Moreover, I am increasingly skeptical of the State Department’s own ability to change history – or at least, to change it for the better, but let’s save it for another post.
I am just trying to second guess the logic of those who have reported on the State Department’s intervention have relied upon. Was it something like “well, we don’t know anything about Twitter’s real impact, but the State Department thinks it’s influentila, and it must certainly be so then; remember, we are journalists, we don’t have to dig any deeper”.
Does anyone else find it extremely fishy? Since when the decisions by the State Department – not exactly the hotbed of new media innovation – are representative of anything?
Believe in real freedom and democracy in Iran and not spurious Western journalism with little clue about how repressive regimes truly operate.
The Australian Jewish News conducts a vox-pop and asks, “What would you say to Jews who don’t believe Israel should exist?” The responses prove my point; blind and unthinking nationalism defines the mainstream Jewish community. Israel for them isn’t a reality, it’s some utopia (in other words, utterly removed from the brutality of an occupying power). It ain’t pretty:
