A leading settler group The Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip on the Netanyahu government’s decision to “freeze” settlements:
“We see the cabinet resolution as illegitimate, discriminatory and anti-Zionist,” said Dani Dayan, who chairs the Council.
Who else knew that a famous Israeli landed in Australia this week? Fairfax reports:
Adding to the madness, visiting former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert swept by suddenly, on his way to visit Australian MPs.
Olmert looked startled at the unexpected reception, as did his security detail.
When a regime is frightened of its own people, it’s a sure sign of decline and fear:
Recently, the Islamic Republic of Iran Intelligence Ministry announced that in order to counter Internet activism in Iran, senior officers will be trained.
The minister of the intelligence counted internet activism as a new challenge for the regime. The minister urged that, as a result of existing contacts and collaboration between the opposition inside and outside the country, Iran’s national security equation should be reconstructed in response to new threats.
The minister believes that there are some core activists who are mobilising the people against the Islamic regime and it is important for the government to find and stop them. He argued that, those activists try to damage Islamic values and regime’s ideologies by misguiding the people.
The minister mentioned that, the oppositions, with the support of foreign nations, are using the internet to organize people by creating chaos in the society to pave the path for a regime change.
This story in the Washington Post is revealing. America is essentially saying it has no issue with Israel bombing Iran and it can’t stop her, anyway. Who the hell runs the show over there?
Two weeks before President Obama visited China, two senior White House officials traveled to Beijing on a “special mission” to try to persuade China to pressure Iran to give up its alleged nuclear weapons program.
If Beijing did not help the United States on this issue, the consequences could be severe, the visitors, Dennis Ross and Jeffrey Bader, both senior officials in the National Security Council, informed the Chinese.
The Chinese were told that Israel regards Iran’s nuclear program as an “existential issue and that countries that have an existential issue don’t listen to other countries,” according to a senior administration official. The implication was clear: Israel could bomb Iran, leading to a crisis in the Persian Gulf region and almost inevitably problems over the very oil China needs to fuel its economic juggernaut, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The world’s media is talking about Israel’s “settlement freeze” in the West Bank. It’s all a sham, of course, designed to convince the US-backed Palestinian Authority to return to the table and endlessly discuss negotiations and please Washington. And the occupation will only deepen.
This little grab in Haaretz really speaks for itself:
Attorney General Menachem Mazuz told the security cabinet Wednesday ahead of a vote on the decision that there is no real way to enforce the freeze due to a lack of manpower. The implementation of Israel’s decision to freeze settlement construction in the West Bank for 10 months is seen as an especially major challenge for Israel.
“In the whole of Judea and Samaria [West Bank], there are just 14 building inspectors,” Mazuz told the cabinet. “If this doesn’t change it will be difficult for the inspectors to implement the decision.”
Leading American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, an enemy of sedentary reporters and lying governments, speaks to the New Statesman:
Is it always a journalist’s duty to report the truth, even if it may damage innocents?
I’m a total First Amendment Jeffersonian. It’s their job to keep it secret and my job to find it out and make it public. But once one gets some information, one doesn’t run pell-mell into it. You know, maybe six or seven times in 40 years I’ve had a story and the president has called up and said: “If you write this story, American security will be damaged.” In every case except one, we wrote the story. And son of a bitch, the Russians didn’t launch paratroopers into the foothills of San Francisco the next day.Do you ever worry that your phone is bugged?
Some people I only talk to in their home or their office, but I arrange the calls here. To bug me legally they’d have to get a warrant; once you have something illegally you can’t use it very much. If the 9/11 attacks taught us one thing, it’s that the agencies collect lots of wonderful stuff they don’t share with anybody.How have you managed to remain an outsider for so long?
There’s no way they would deal with me. The Obama White House can’t abide me. Within a month, they were going behind my back to my editor: “What’s your man Hersh doing?”On Iran, are we repeating the mistakes that were made on Iraq?
Some of the things are very disturbing. We are getting new leadership at the International Atomic Energy Agency. The next wave there is not going to be as rational. It’s amazing to me, as someone who went to the Vietnam war and Iraq war, and now the Afghan war. There’s simply no learning curve.Post-Bush, do you think there’s still a risk of a military strike on Iran by Israel or the US?
Yes.Where do you place yourself on the political spectrum?
I’m your standard left liberal, but I vote for Republicans, I’ve given money to them. I’m not a pacifist. I would have been tough on Osama Bin Laden after 9/11. But I’d have done it legally.Are you disappointed Obama didn’t release those “torture pictures”?
His position is that, at a time when we have 130,000 Americans in Afghanistan, putting the pictures out would just inflame people to take action against them. The New York Times has been editorialising against him, but when it had a reporter captured, it thought it was perfectly appropriate not to talk about it publicly for seven months, on the grounds that the paper was trying to protect his life.Are we doomed?
The trouble is that hope sprang anew in America last November. And I think the dashing of that hope is going to be much more lethal than even the cynicism under Bush and Cheney. If that hope is dashed, we’ll really be in trouble around the world.
The following feature by Desy Nurhayati appears in yesterday’s Jakarta Post:
His recent visit to Aceh made Antony Loewenstein the first Jew that most people in the country’s devoutly Muslim province had ever met or engaged with.
Some Acehnese he met were surprised to learn that the Jewish-Australian journalist, author of the controversial and best-selling book My Israel Question, was a harsh critic of Israel’s policy on Palestine, and was in fact a supporter of the latter.
“Are there many of you?” asked a man from a group that had pledged to travel to Gaza to fight the Israeli army during its conflict with Hamas.
Another said, “We don’t hate Jews, but we oppose Israel’s occupation of Palestine.”
A Sydney-based writer and blogger, Loewenstein spent two weeks in Indonesia last month as a guest at the major literary event the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, in Bali, as well as visiting the ancient Buddhist monument of Borobudur (also part of the festival) and going to Aceh to take part in discussion forums.
On his speaking tours elsewhere, he says, the most common reactions he gets are: “You’re Jewish and you don’t like Israel? What do you mean? That’s impossible.”
And he guessed Indonesians would have a similar view.
“In a Muslim-majority country like Indonesia, it might come as a surprise to learn that Jews are critical of Israel,” Loewenstein tells The Jakarta Post.
“It’s a perception in the Arab world as well that all Jews support Israel.”
As he said at a recent event in Australia, “In Aceh, Jews are seen as little more than occupiers and brutes in Palestine. The concept of anti-Zionism never enters their thinking or media.”
He also expresses surprise that more and more Jews are now in opposition to Israel and in support of the Palestinian people, and that is something he is trying to tell the Muslim world about.
“I’m trying to challenge people’s perceptions that I’m Jewish, and I’m proud to be Jewish, but I’m pro-Palestine,” he says.
“Israel is still occupying Palestine, and it’s my moral responsibility to fight against it in my own ways.”
On a visit last July to the devastated Gaza Strip, he found the occupation had never been worse.
He met many of the 1.5 million Palestinians desperate for a normal life, something denied to them for decades due to Israel’s occupation and frequent bombings.
“The war continues, settlements expand, nothing’s changed. The change is only in Obama’s rhetoric. What he said is obviously different from Bush, but it doesn’t solve problems,” Loewenstein says.
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama last month was premature, he adds.
“I think the award was more about what Obama is expected to do rather than what he has actually done,” he points out.
“Israel keeps arguing that it is a democratic state fighting terrorism for all of us. It becomes much easier to make that argument, but it is wrong.
“I think Israel’s behavior is outrageous, and it will not change unless the funding it receives from the United States is reduced.
“The Western powers, including the US, the UK and Australia, back Israel’s battle and share its belief that the destruction of the Islamist group benefits their interests.”
Israel should be treated like any other country calling itself a democracy, and not be excused especially given its bellicose tactics in the global arena, he goes on.
“In a Muslim-majority country like Indonesia, it might come as a surprise to learn that Jews are critical of Israel.”
“There are a growing number of Jewish groups joining this call. They are not afraid of being labeled anti-Semitic or self-hating, and simply believe in justice,” Loewenstein says.
He believes that in the Muslim world, there is a need for people to hear more about Jews taking a critical stance against Israel. He even speaks up against his own government for supporting Israel. He has also cofounded an initiative, Independent Australian Jewish Voices, which works with Palestinians on their shared concerns.
His time in Aceh was spent discussing a broad range of issues with journalists, local writers and high school students: the Middle East conflict – comparing his perspective as a Jew and that of the devout Muslim Acehnese, posttsunami development as well as freedom of expression.
Loewenstein also admits he was surprised to find four Jewish tombstones, with Hebrew epitaphs, near the Aceh tsunami memorial museum.
The four Jews, he recounts from what he was told, died in the 1800s and 1900s, and have since lain in peace in the heart of a devoutly Islamic society.
“A writer, Fozan Santa, told me that many Acehnese know about it, yet there was no hatred toward these monuments,” Loewenstein says.
“Generations of Acehnese protected them. Holland sends funds to maintain the cemetery.
“This was not something I expected in a province ruled under sharia law. Although Jews are almost solely defined through brutal Israeli actions, I found no outright hatred of Judaism.”
He also found that people there liked Obama’s rhetoric and his apparent change in US policy toward the Muslim world.
“But their patience has a limit. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Palestine continue and show no signs of closure,” he says.
Despite growing support for Palestinians, even among Jews, Loewenstein doubts the situation will change anytime soon.
“I’m not very optimistic because I don’t see much movement on the ground by the international community,” he says.
“There needs to be a drastic action, where civil society gets together in a targeted boycott campaign to convince Israel that it can’t behave this way.”
He adds public support for Palestine and dissatisfaction of the US continue to grow, “But how we take that opinion and translate it into political action, that’s the question.”
As a Muslim-majority country and emerging democracy, he says, Indonesia should take a stronger lead in this issue.
“I know Yudhoyono said Indonesia would be more involved in the process. I would like him and other leaders to put pressure on different parties to stop Israel’s unacceptable behavior,” he says.
Loewenstein also criticizes Obama, who pledged to create better relations with the Muslim world but continued to support Israel’s occupation of Palestine and did nothing to address this major grievance to Muslims.
The author of The Blogging Revolution also encouraged other writers the world over to be more provocative and less afraid to be critical of the issue.
Several days after Loewenstein left Aceh, an 18-year-old Acehnese girl – one of his translators during the public events – sent him a message, saying, “People here can love Jews now because of you.”
A country that knows far too well about racial discrimination tells it like it is:
The South African government has issued an unusually harsh statement condemning Israel for approving 900 new housing units in Gilo and evicting Palestinians from their East Jerusalem homes, comparing Israel’s actions to the “forced removals” of the apartheid era.
“We condemn the fact that Israeli settlement expansion in East Jerusalem is coupled with Israel’s campaign to evict and displace the original Palestinian residents from the City,” the statement said. “South Africa is deeply concerned that these activities by Israel will only serve only to deepen the cycle of violence in the region.”
The liberal, Jewish magazine and website Tikkun publishes a startling piece on the shifting sands of Jewish opinion towards the Middle East. Dreamers, get on board:
…If a two-state solution is impossible,as seems increasingly clear, then the only alternative, however improbable, is a one-state solution.
John Pilger on Australia’s secret shame:
…The rate of incarceration of black Australians is five times that of South Africa during the last years of apartheid. The state of Western Australia imprisons Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure, an Aussie world record.
…
There is currently a liberal clarion call in Australia for a Bill of Rights, and the republican movement is stirring again. These debates are meaningless until white Australia summons the moral and political imagination to offer its first people a genuine treaty, as well as universal land rights and a proper share of the country’s resources. And respect. Only then will this fortunate society earn the respect it so often craves by other means.
Time magazine issues a feature called, “The ’00s: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade From Hell“, but gives readers hope for the coming years ahead:
We still have the world’s strongest military, which means we can and must lead in maintaining order and crafting peace.
I’m sure the people of Palestine, Iraq, Afganistan and Pakistan believe that the US army is this benevolent.
Yesterday I wrote about Jeremy Scahill’s explosive revelations that Blackwater are operating covertly in Pakistan and a reliable journalist contact who spends considerable time in the country passed this on:
You know there’s a heavily guarded pub in Peshawar called the American Club where these Blackwater dudes hang out. No one else goes there, they’re too scared shitless. Mind you the pub is like heavily fortified, I mean it’s like crazy over the top fortified. Nevertheless, the paranoid mercenaries keep their cars running while they’re having a beer in case they need to bail out in an emergency. Very American.
