Antony Loewenstein

Web users, the US government is watching you:

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

The disappointments mount. J Street believes in dissent, just not dissent that may upset conservative, hardline Zionists:

Five days ahead of the leftist pro-Israeli lobby J Street’s first National Conference in Washington, D.C., the controversies continue to mount. The Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren refuses to attend the conference, despite the open letter issued by the organization’s Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami; but over the weekend the lobby took one more step to appease critics.

The poetry session, featuring three artists – Kevin Coval, Tracy Soren and Josh Healey, scheduled as part of the “Culture as a Tool for Change” track, was canceled. Apparently, the event was nixed following a reminder by a conservative blogger that Healey, a Jewish activist and poet, compared Guantanamo prison to Auschwitz.

Healey told Haaretz:

And my solidarity is with the people of Israel – but also with the people of Palestine. And I believe in two state solution and peace and justice for all people. And if J-Street are not willing to have debate with people who believe in solidarity and humanity, I don’t know what legitimacy they want, because it’s not a moral legitimacy. I love my people, the Jewish people, and that’s why I’m critical – because it’s my people, my family that are silencing people the same way we were silenced and suppressed for centuries.

The upcoming J Street conference in Washington DC (which I’ll be attending) will be a fascinating bringing together of Middle East realists, two-staters, one-staters, bloggers, activists and God knows who else.

Bernard Avishai is optimistic about its chances:

The key to AIPAC’s emergence was a Manichean view from America; the fight against the Evil Empire, or since 9/11, the clash of civilizations. In this drama, Israel became cast as America’s biggest regional aircraft carrier. AIPAC has succeeded by staying close to American hardliners, arguing against pressuring Israel (to give up territory, to stop settlements, etc.) for the same reason a basketball coach will not foolishly demoralize his slightly brazen power-forward. At the center of the argument was a way of thinking about American hegemony in a dangerous world.

…

Indeed, what J Street really represents–what progressives argue for–is not just support for Israel as such, but for a globalist strategy in which Middle East peace is a key pillar; a strategy of collective security agreements, regional alliances, and international peace-keeping; of patient engagement over the unilateral use of force; of recognition that offering access to economic development and cultural freedom over time is hard power (I hate the term “soft power”); indeed, of the power to attract, not only the power to deter. It means diplomatic containment, not foreign invasion and counter-insurgency. It means what, say, Chuck Hagel calls “realism.”

Founder of Conflicts Forum Alastair Crooke on the real challenge Iran poses to the world order:

It was pure drama: The leaders of the United States, Britain, and France stepped onto the stage at the Pittsburgh Group of 20 meeting recently to unveil Western intelligence that showed that Iran had a second nuclear fuel enrichment facility under construction, which Iran had declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency the preceding Monday.

The Western leaders gathered in Pittsburgh implied that their revelation was just as devastating for Iran as a credible player.

US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates subsequently pronounced Iran to be “boxed in” and “in a very bad spot now.” But anyone who listened to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s interview with Time magazine’s correspondent on the day of the presentation, and to subsequent Iranian statements, can gather that Iran, at least, does not see itself as boxed in.

Far from it. Mr Ahmadinejad exuded confidence and non aggressively counseled President Obama not to go down this route.

It might seem counterintuitive to most Americans and Europeans, but Ahmadinejad’s advice might be worth pondering.

The Pittsburgh dramatics, in a sense, signal the culmination of three pivotal events that took place in the Middle East some 20 years ago. The first was the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1989, the second was the 1991 Gulf War, and the third was Yitzak Rabin’s victory in the 1992 Israeli elections. The consequences from these momentous events are coming to a head for the US only now. Mr Obama’s course of action may determine whether this region is about to enter a new phase of bitter conflict or enter a new era of strategic change.

The first two events hobbled Iran’s traditional foes on its frontiers. Neither the imploded USSR nor Sunni Iraq, at war with a Western coalition led by the US, was in a position any longer to contain an emergent Iran. As a consequence, Iran’s place as a preeminent – if not the pre-eminent power – in the Middle East was guaranteed.

The arrival of a Labor government in Israel was pivotal to Iran becoming “the nuclear threat.” In a dramatic change of policy in 2002, Israel abandoned the Ben Gurion doctrine of allying Israel with the regional periphery (Turkey, Ethiopia, and Iran), an Israeli policy that persisted beyond the Iranian Revolution, and began to engage with its Arab “vicinity.”

To manage such a radical shift of talking peace to the former Arab “enemy,” a U-turn that bitterly split the Israeli electorate and alienated Israel’s supporters in the US, the Labor government in Israel began, from 1993 on, to identify Iran to its supporters in the US as the new existential “threat” – in place of the former threat of the “never-changing Arab inability to reconcile” with Israel. Subsequently the West would absorb the Iranian threat as its own, for very different reasons.

Israeli pressure on Palestinians in East Jerusalem has largely fallen off the media radar.

Here’s the latest:

Most days, Sharihan Hannoun and her family sit along the sidewalk on dusty white plastic chairs watching the East Jerusalem home from which they were forcibly evicted, watching as the strangers who took it over come and go.

“Today we stay in the street 65 days,” said Hannoun, on October 8. “The first few nights, we slept here,” recalled the 20-year-old who was a psychology student at Birzeit University, which is located in the town of Birzeit on the west side of Ramallah, inside the West Bank. That was before August 2 early morning police raids left 37 members of her extended family homeless.

Hannoun, wearing black slacks, a long-sleeved white turtleneck sweater and matching white head covering worn by Muslim women, recalled being awakened at 5 a.m. when Israeli police broke down the front door of the home owned by her parents since 1956.

“I told them we have ownership papers. They said they didn’t want to see them. They said, ‘it’s not your house, it’s our house.’ They put a gun to my brother’s back and said for him to leave the house. He is just 10 years old,” she said.

“They broke everything in the house, the television, everything,” she recalled. “They went to the refrigerator and ate the food. They took my brother’s football and started playing with it in the yard. They said, you are Palestinians and we can do what we want with you.”

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

The small sign in my bare hotel room in Banda Aceh was clear. “It is forbidden to bring a woman/man who are not husband or wife into the hotel.” I saw similar messages in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Gaza.

I was in Aceh [Indonesia] as a guest of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival and conducted a number of satellite events with the local community. My translators were primarily girls in the final year of school, their proficiency of English and popular culture an example of the inherent contradictions between Muslim devotion and youthful curiosity.

This Indonesian province takes its Islam very seriously. The provincial parliament of Aceh recently passed a criminal bylaw that supported the death penalty, stoning and flogging for homosexual acts and adultery. They are draconian moves in a devoutly religious area.

But this is largely the only side of Aceh captured by the Western press when it considers mentioning the territory at all. After the devastating 2004 tsunami that killed over 220,000 Indonesians, Aceh was the worst affected area. It was year zero. Entire families were wiped out.

Writer Azhari – whose new book of translated poetry, Nutmeg Woman, is released this month – now lives in a shared apartment, with no living relatives to speak of. “I’m alone”, he told me, chain-smoking, “but my writing sustains me.”

Azhari’s work covers the period before the 2005 peace deal between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Indonesian government. The majority of Acehnese I met said they would rather independence than integration – “we are really nine separate countries with distinct ethnic groups”, an editor at the local newspaper Harian Aceh argued – but peace always came with a price. The West Papuan struggle was warmly embraced. East Timorese freedom was praised. I sometimes sensed jealously at their relatively newfound independence. Indonesian nationalism in Aceh was hard to detect.

How to remember the tsunami is a hot subject of debate and most people I saw believed that a living memorial was essential.

“The Acehnese people are still grieving”, a journalist said, when I asked about the importance of Palestine in the province. “We care deeply about our brothers and sisters in Gaza” – one young man, under 20, said he wanted to fly to fight against the Israelis during their bombardment of the Strip in December and January and his views were not unique – but Palestine is a rallying cry, almost an abstract manifestation of the perceived injustices handed out by the West.

The Middle East is a key unifier across the Muslim world.

I was the first Jew most Acehnese had ever met or engaged. Nindy Silvie, a savvy 18-year-old in her final year of school who read Noam Chomsky, Christopher Hitchens and loved South Park, texted me a few days ago: “People here could love Jews now because of you.”

During a radio interview with a Muslim talkback show, one girl called in to ask whether the Koran was correct when it allegedly said that, “Israel and Jews are the most cruel on the planet.” For many Muslims there, Jews are little more than occupiers and brutes in Palestine. The concept of anti-Zionism never entered their thinking or media.

Aside from countless political discussions, the landscape revealed a harsh reality. A number of large ships lie marooned in the middle of neighbourhoods, having been ruthlessly plucked from the ocean and unceremoniously dumped far from shore. They have become tourist attractions and memorials – for the handful of visitors to the island, aside from aid workers and international NGOs – and climbing them offered an expansive view of Banda Aceh and its surroundings. Misty mountains framed the skyline.

Poverty is ubiquitous, the only modern buildings and infrastructure provided by foreign donors, including the mosque-like airport, and religion has long been a central facet of life. But it’s a complex relationship. Women on the streets were mostly veiled but Britney Spears appeared on the front page of the daily newspaper with an uncovered head. Alcohol is only available underground. Men and women can’t embrace in public and often sat separately at public events, voluntarily, “because they do it every day”, a young woman said.

The legacy of occupation lingers. Wounds are not healed from decades of insurrection and Indonesia, like many powerful states, seems reluctant to investigate its brutal past. The East Timorese know what this means.

Sydney Morning Herald’s Gerard Henderson loves tough terrorism laws. He feels protected from terrorists. Governments would never exaggerate that threat. God, no. Their primary aim is to protect citizens from harm. They believe in the rule of law (except, of course, if America breaks that law and then Australia clearly has no choice but to follow.)

This almost comical lack of scepticism is again on display today. Am I only known as “a high-profile critic of Israel”?

Here’s the thinking: governments tell us that terrorism is a threat and therefore it is. I’m under no illusions about the hatred displayed by some Muslims towards the West (unlike Henderson, I’ve actually spoken to many people in the Middle East who believe this, sometimes for obvious reasons, such as occupation), but simply accepting Western government spin, to keep the populace scared, is both foolhardy and counter-productive.

Israeli incursions into Lebanon show, for the umpteenth time, that Israel is a rogue state unafraid to breach international law.

Eldad Yaniv in Haaretz:

In the early 1990s, when Judge Richard Goldstone headed a commission of inquiry on the rising violence in South Africa toward the end of apartheid, he garnered the same kind of compliments from the Afrikaners as he has been getting from Israel over the last few weeks. But the “Jew boy” wasn’t the problem then, and he isn’t the problem now. And PR isn’t the solution. Take a look in the mirror; it’s not Goldstone, it’s us. We’re the problem as well as the solution.

Israel is being pushed to the side of the world stage and will yet find itself in the same position South Africa was during the final years of the right-wing “crocodile,” P.W. Botha, a conservative ideologue. The Goldstone report is a cruel but accurate image of Israel the leper as seen by the “anti-Semitic” Goldstone and Israel’s good friends around the world, who are having a hard time continuing to defend the country.

Everyone knows the greatest threat isn’t Israel but women bearing their dangerous hair, wrists and feet!

It began with a rash of unusually assertive police patrols. Armed Hamas officers stopped men from sitting shirtless on the beach, broke up groups of unmarried men and women, and ordered shopkeepers not to display lingerie on mannequins in their windows.

Then came an effort to force female lawyers to abide by a more conservative dress code, and intense pressure on parents to dress their daughters more conservatively for the new school term. Last week police began enforcing a new decree banning women from riding on motorbikes.

For the first time since Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections nearly four years ago, the group is trying to Islamise Gazan society. In public, Hamas leaders say they are merely encouraging a social moral code, and insist they are not trying to imitate the religious police who operate in some other rigid Islamic countries. But to many it feels like a new wave of enforcement in what is already a devoutly Muslim society.

Asmaa al-Ghoul, a writer and former journalist, was one of the first to run up against the new campaign. She spent an evening with a mixed group of friends in a beachside cafe in late June. After dark, she and another female friend went swimming wearing long trousers and T-shirts. Moments after leaving the water they found themselves confronted by a group of increasingly aggressive Hamas police officers. “Where is your father? Your husband?” one officer asked her. Ghoul, 27, was told her behaviour had not been respectable. Five of her male friends were beaten and detained for several hours.

“I believe our society is secular, but some Islamic parties want to change the idea of this society to make it religious,” she said. She does not wear a headscarf, a choice that is increasingly rare for women in Gaza and generally confined only to those living in the wealthier areas of Gaza City. She routinely suffers taunts from other Palestinians as she walks from her home to her favourite coffee shops. “We’re just afraid to be ourselves in the street,” she said. “Hamas uses Islam in the mosque to try and control people’s hearts.”

Here’s the message from Israel. Other nations kill civilians, why can’t we? This is what Israel has become:

Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz on Sunday accused the United Nations Human Rights Council of anti-Semitism, after the UN body endorsed a damning report on Israel’s winter Gaza offensive. “This is an anti-Semitic attempt to decide that what is allowed for the United States in Afghanistan, Russia in Chechnya and Turkey in north Iraq isn’t allowed for Israel, a state that is trying to defend itself from the Gaza Strip,” he told Army Radio.

A fascinating insight into the realities in Gaza in the London Review of Books. Deprivation, corruption, desperation, an Israeli siege and Egyptian bad behaviour:

According to World Bank officials, 80 per cent of Gaza’s imports currently come through the tunnels. Once black-market smuggling had turned into Gaza’s formal trade, Hamas inspectors began to impose controls and licensing fees. Some tunnel merchants now operate a telephone order service and send out catalogues: office equipment ordered by phone arrives in 48 hours. ‘Goods move faster now than when Rafah terminal was open,’ a businessman told me. With the rise in trade, prices have fallen. Egyptian goods cost less than Israel’s, sometimes even after Hamas and the smugglers have taken their cut. Petrol is half its pre-siege price.

There are precious few macroeconomic data on the effect all this is having. ‘For us Gaza’s a bit of a black hole,’ a World Bank economist reliant on Ramallah’s figures admits. Even so, he says, unemployment rates in May dropped 3 per cent from a high of 32 per cent. ‘My tiler’s gone underground,’ a UN civil servant complained to me: he couldn’t compete with the tunnel smugglers, who pay four times the £12 daily wage he was offering.

More tangible signs of recovery can be seen among Gaza’s numerous money-changers, who help smugglers launder their earnings. The weight of a million dollars in hundred dollar bills to the nearest decimal point trips off their tongues. In June, the Gaza-based Bank of Palestine doubled the size of its trading rooms, which are linked electronically to Nablus, Cairo and Dubai stock markets, and installed rows of plasma screens. With investors keen to park their profits, share-trading volumes doubled in a year, and this summer the Bank of Palestine share price reached an all-time high. Traders who used to go home at lunchtime now stay till four.