Antony Loewenstein

The crisis in Sri Lanka and the government’s role in causing mass carnage against the Tamils is now well known. Australia is not immune from the crisis.

This long Financial Times essay on the Tamil Diaspora in the UK heralds a new generation determined to continue the struggle for an independent Tamil homeland or at least meaningful autonomy. Many similar groups exist across the world, including Australia:

Bala Muhunthan has that high-class hip-hop look: Dolce & Gabbana jeans, tight polo shirt, chunky silver ID tags worn as pendants and an ever-present, ever-beeping BlackBerry. Privately educated in Denmark and the UK, the 22-year-old lives in London and attends a leading business school. Muhunthan spends his weekend nights at members’ bars or parties in Mayfair. Saturday afternoons, he plays golf or football with his friends. “I love London. I love the fast life,” he says.

But at the start of April, Muhunthan took a step outside the fast life: alongside thousands of ­fellow Sri Lankan Tamils, he stood in front of the Houses of Parliament, demanding a ceasefire in Buddhist Sri Lanka’s bloody offensive against Hindu Tamil separatists, which was reaching a violent climax after 25 years of on-off fighting. To Londoners accepting pamphlets from the protesters – whose actions were replicated over the following weeks in Paris and New York – it may have seemed a clear-cut case of might versus right. But the Tamil struggle for an independent state in Sri Lanka has been spearheaded by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – deemed by the west to be one of the world’s most sophisticated terrorist groups.

The small-mindedness of Cuba, part 6526.

One of four Jewish graves (note the Hebrew) in a Dutch-era cemetery in Banda Aceh
17 October

Two leading, Acehnese intellectuals and writers at a popular Banda Aceh cafe
17 October

Australian journalist Laurie Oakes on our government’s stance towards Tamil refugees. We learn nothing from history except that bashing aslyum seekers is allegedly popular with the electorate. The shame:

We’ve  heard Kevin Rudd promising tough action to stop asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat. We’ve heard him condemn people smugglers as vermin.

What we have not heard from the prime minister is any criticism of the Sri Lankan Government for creating a situation which drives ethnic Tamils into the arms of smugglers in the first place.

Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor has agreed to send Australian police to Sri Lanka to help the government there clamp down on the exodus of asylum seekers.

But there has been hardly a peep out of Rudd or any of his ministers about the appalling camps in which an estimated 300,000 Tamils are being held following the end of the Sri Lankan civil war.

“I understand something of the plight of people around the world,” Rudd said yesterday. Of course he does.

He knows exactly what is happening in Sri Lanka. He knows how the displaced Tamils are treated by the Sri Lankan Army. He knows the Sri Lankan Government denies international aid organisations access to the camps and shuts out the international media so conditions cannot be reported.

The UN Human Rights Council last week endorsed the Goldstone report over Gaza. Israel may soon have its own Pinochet moment.

Leading Jewish American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg is worried, however, and his reasoning is revealing:

Tactics deployed to hurt Israel inevitably cause collateral damage. It’s a good thing that the United States, and a handful of European countries, have opposed the referral of Israel to a war crimes tribunal, but they aren’t doing enough (and, of course, France and Great Britain absented themselves from the vote). They would do more, I think, if they understood that Israel represented a kind of test run for a uniquely nefarious idea. Israel may find itself in the docket soon, but the U.S., and Britain, and other Western democracies that are battling Islamist terror, may soon find themselves in similiar straits. Who could seriously argue that what happened in Gaza was unique? Talibs hide behind civilians in Afghanistan, and often those civilians get killed. It’s only a matter of time before David Petraeus, or Bob Gates, find themselves under attack from the same forces that want to punish Israel for trying to defend itself from a state-sponsored terror group seeking its elimination.

Where to begin with this victimhood? Goldberg is saying that Western states kill civilians and the world should simply accept it. Terrorists are terrorists and we’re the good guys so how dare you find us culpable or guilty?

Israel is finally realising that it isn’t above the law. About time.

A day will come, and soon, when Israel will also face these criticisms and pay a price for abusing human rights:

A European Union probe has found Sri Lanka in breach of international human rights laws, meaning the South Asian country is likely to lose concessions worth over $100 million for its top exports to Europe, EU sources said.

Brussels is expected to publish on Monday the findings of its investigation into Sri Lanka launched a year ago to probe allegations of human rights violations and torture, stemming from a 25-year war with Tamil Tiger rebels.

“The assessment report says Sri Lanka does not fulfil the requirements of GSP plus,” one EU source said on Friday in reference to the system of preferential tariffs for the world’s poorest countries.

“The evidence is very clear that Sri Lanka does not fulfil the basic human rights conditions of GSP plus,” the source said, citing the report.

The former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Col. Richard Kemp:

The IDF did more to safeguard the rights of civilians [during the Gaza war] in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Judith Miller is the infamous journalist who pushed bogus claims against Saddam Hussein before the Iraq war.

She’s filed a report from Gaza, littered with falsehoods, not least that the Western-backed Palestinian Authority is friendly to the West, unlike Hamas.

It’s called buying friends, Judith, you should know about all that.

The lives of Palestinian children held illegally by Israel.

My friend Mike Otterman, author and New York based human rights consultant, writes about the fallacy of “objectivity” when talking about war:

In my view, journalism cannot be purely objective in any area—education, healthcare, crime, education–so why should war be any different?

The fog of war exacerbates the inherent problems of objective journalism, i.e. presenting two “equally valid” viewpoints and splitting the difference between the two, as the actors involved push their own objectives to journalists. They, in turn, select strands from each based on their own ideology. Editors favoring bloodshed over human interest only distort the picture further. When it comes to understanding Mosul, the best place to start is with Iraqi voices.

Jewish lobby J Street, severely upsetting the Zionist establishment, is having its first annual conference at the end of October in Washington DC. I’ll be attending and working on a number of projects there.

According to the Forward, “it is still struggling to prove its pro-Israel credentials” (whatever that means.) Too critical of Israeli government policies? Hardly a bad thing for anybody who believes in human rights.

The Mondoweiss boys write in the Nation:

This year has seen a dramatic shift in American Jews’ attitudes toward Israel. In January many liberal Jews were shocked by the Gaza war, in which Israel used overwhelming force against a mostly defenseless civilian population unable to flee. Then came the rise to power of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose explicitly anti-Arab platform was at odds with an American Jewish electorate that had just voted 4 to 1 for a minority president. Throw in angry Israelis writing about the “rot in the Diaspora,” and it’s little wonder young American Jews feel increasingly indifferent about a country that has been at the center of Jewish identity for four decades.

These stirrings on the American Jewish street will come to a head in late October in Washington with the first national conference of J Street, the reformation Israel lobby. J Street has been around less than two years, but it is summoning liberal–and some not so liberal–Jews from all over the country to “rock the status quo,” code for AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee).

Sure sounds like a velvet revolution in the Jewish community, huh? Not so fast. The changes in attitudes are taking place at the grassroots; by and large, Jewish leaders are standing fast. And as for policymakers, the opening has been slight. There seems little likelihood the conference will bring us any closer to that holy grail of the reformers: the ability of a US president, not to mention Congress, to put real pressure on Israel.