Documentary maker and writer Max Blumenthal – I saw him tonight in New York and he’s an intriguing man who will be working on more projects related to apartheid Israel in the coming months and years – made this short film about Holocaust denier David Irving in 2008. The world needs more people like Blumenthal: Jewish, savvy, critical and funny:
Daily Archive for July 4th, 2009
Israel’s new Ambassador to the US Michael Oren reminds the world that Holocaust exploitation is alive and well in the Zionist mind:
They [Iran] could accomplish in a matter of seconds what they deny Hitler did, and kill six million Jews, literally.
Israeli Arab media personality Lucy Aharish on the growing outspokenness of 20 percent of the country’s population:
There is a new generation of Arabs who don’t give a hoot what anyone thinks and will do everything they can to get into high positions. We have other things to get over besides the occupation and discrimination. We are fighters and don’t give in. If you don’t open the door for me, I will come in through the window, and if it is closed, down the chimney. We were too polite, but we learned Israeli chutzpah. It’s easy to humiliate an Arab who kowtows, but when that person says ‘Listen, pal, tone it down, don’t talk to me like that,’ you arrive at a dialogue.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s communications chief, Ron Dermer, tells the Melbourne Age that his country has a PR problem. Why can’t the world just love us (and our hatred of Arabs)?
It is not enough for Israel to say that it wants peace. You must also say that you are not a thief. We did not steal another people’s land. That is the core of this conflict.
Naomi Klein, a hero for backing a global boycott against Israel, said in Ramallah last week:
There is a debate among Jews – I’m a Jew by the way. The debate boils down to the question: “Never again to everyone, or never again to us?… [Some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free card…There is another strain in the Jewish tradition that say, ‘Never again to anyone.
The reality of the Iranian uprisings is still being written but this piece in the Nation is pretty good.
What ordinary Iranians suffered is painfully recounted by an 18 year old man:
“I was kept in a van till evening that day and then transferred to a solitary cell where I was kept for two days,” he said. “Then I was repeatedly interrogated, beaten and hung from a ceiling. They call it chicken kebab. They tie your hands and feet together and hang you from the ceiling, turning you around and beating you with cables.
“They gave us warm water to drink and one meal a day. Repeated smacking was a regular punishment. In interrogations, they kept on asking if I was instructed from abroad. I believed I was going to be sent from the detention centre to prison. But they sent me to where they called Roughnecks’ Room. There were some other youths of my age in there. I asked a guard why I am not sent to prison and the reply was: ‘You have to be our guest for a while.’
“I refused to confess during interrogations. They said: ‘Ask your friends what we’ll do to you if you don’t co-operate.’ Others in the room were also arrested on 15 June. I was tempted to confess at this point but I didn’t. On the third and fourth day, they beat me up again. They insisted we were instructed from abroad. I kept on saying we were only protesting for our votes.
“It was on Saturday or Sunday that they raped me for the first time. There were three or four huge guys we had not seen before. They came to me and tore my clothes. I tried to resist but two of them laid me on the floor and the third did it. It was done in front of four other detainees.
“My cell mates, especially the older one, tried to console me. They said nobody loses his dignity through such an act. They did it to two other cell mates in the next days. Then it became a routine. We were so weak and beaten up that could not do anything.
“Then the interrogations started again. They said: ‘If you don’t come to your senses we will send you to Adel Abad [another prison in Shiraz] to the pederasts’ section so that you receive such treatment every day.’ I was so weak I did not know what to say. Then they asked for my contacts. I told them I had no contacts and I was informed about the demonstrations through the internet.
“The same routine was continued till this morning when I was released. In the last week, there was no interrogation, no beating. Only rape and solitary confinement.”
I mentioned last week the case of imprisoned Greek journalist Iason Athanasiadis, currently being held in an Iranian jail on spurious grounds.
Salon has published a feature about this fine man:
Iason’s detention is especially ironic, given his love of Iran and his understanding of its people and culture. His on-the-ground reporting in the aftermath of the elections, for the Washington Times, GlobalPost and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, was built on his earlier documentation of Iranian society for Der Spiegel, the South China Morning Post, Athens News, the National of Abu Dhabi, and numerous other publications in the U.S. and Europe.
His images concentrate on Iran as a “land of paradox,” where respect for tradition both contrasts and overlaps with contemporary yearnings. It is here, as much as anywhere in his work, that Iason’s appreciation of Iranian society comes through. In museum and gallery exhibitions, including at Harvard, Stanford and the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, the narrative of youth is depicted alongside images of religious rites, village and nomadic life, traditional fishing communities, women snowboarders, men on horseback, soccer matches, religious theater, and gridlock in contemporary Tehran.
Nowhere is Iason’s witness more penetrating than in his images of what he called the “clandestine life of the next generation.” Yet in documenting their aspirations, Iason also underscores that the young people of Iran seek change within Iran, not outside intervention; clear in their hearts is a wish to avoid the bloodshed that has plagued their nation for generations.
Iason has done as much as any foreign journalist to depict the nuances of contemporary Iran, and thus to humanize its people at a time when foreign powers were threatening another war. Indeed, we all could have used more of Iason’s brand of incisive and empathetic journalism in the days leading up to the Iraq war.
Yesterday I met here in New York with the Mondoweiss boys. Plans are being hatched, but in the meantime, Iran came up:
Surprise. Max Boot at Commentary wants Israel to bomb Iran now. So does John Bolton, speaking from the fever ward, the Washington Post op-ed page. The former ambassador says the Tehran revolt has upped the urgency for regime change.
Significantly, the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian people. This was always true, but it has become even more important to make this case emphatically, when the gulf between the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the citizens of Iran has never been clearer or wider. Military action against Iran’s nuclear program and the ultimate goal of regime change can be worked together consistently.
I spoke to Antony Loewenstein today, who says that the Bolton piece lends credibility to the theory that the U.S. had some (even mild) involvement with the Tehran spring. If you look at all the color revolutions and “democratic” insurgencies in Europe and Asia, from Ukraine to Belarus to Moldova to Georgia, he says, there has been a U.S. role. Why and to what end? Mohammad of Vancouver suggested as much in a post on this site a few weeks back. Huh.
The other day I wrote that now that non-Zionists are finally gaining a voice in the discourse on Israel/Palestine, we have to bring our bat and ball– positive ideas about how to solve things in the Middle East, not just a litany of Palestinian suffering. I’m planning to have a rolling roundtable on this question. Especially as Obama and Netanyahu conduct a smoldering conflict over an issue– a settlements freeze– that for all its appeal on the American lib-left does little to alter the lineaments of Israeli colonization. Here is Antony Loewenstein’s response to my challenge:
Proposing ‘positive’ ideas is essential to move the debate forward. It’s not surprising, however, that all of us in various ways want to document the daily abuses that occur in Israel proper and the territories. They are numerous and largely unreported by the mainstream media. The blogosphere is therefore a necessary reckoning and chronicler of life in or around a ‘Jewish state’.
In my own work, in Australia and beyond, I’m often asked to say what I think should happen now and into the future and it’s something I’ve extensively discussed in a forthcoming edition of my book (My Israel Question), namely the many reasons a one-state solution is the most just outcome. It’s vital not to preach to either side, however, but provide space for varying narratives to be heard. Yet not all sides are equal (witness the LA Times on the weekend publishing a piece in defense of the West Bank settlements).
Most of us (I think I can presume this?) question the viability and morality of the two-state equation. Reaching one-state is currently highly unlikely but I believe an important conversation. So, how about proponents of this being given air-time and counter positions published, too? A conversation is the only way to tease out the future. Not preaching, engagement.
Journalists don’t have to provide answers; I’ve always thought this. We can suggest, cajole and encourage, but reporting and activism is a strange beast, something I constantly struggle how to manage. I can’t sit on the sidelines and not complain about what goes on in the Mid-East. One has a moral responsibility to provide possible solutions. And be willing to have those ideas pulled apart.
We could issue occasional statements with ideals, gathering signatures. We could more forcefully challenge the J Street line about ‘preserving a Jewish state.’ Criticism of the status-quo isn’t illegitimate, it’s essential. We have to know what we’re against before we know what we’re for. And frankly, we don’t have to all agree. How terribly boring if we do. Justice for all sides and peace with justice for historical wrongs.
We can be a sounding-board for ideas, some positive, some not. There doesn’t need to be a party line, and I would urge us to avoid it. My experience tells me that those who still strongly back a two-state solution remain uncomfortable with being too close to Arab life and culture. An unspoken racism, perhaps? Naivete about co-existence?
One of the more important things we could do is challenge the supposed necessity of maintaining a Jewish state. Being opposed to religious states – including in, say, Iran, where many young Iranians I met there in 2007, during research for my book, The Blogging Revolution, urged a more secular future – is a humanitarian position. It’s not just against Zionism, it’s a far wider ideology…