Antony Loewenstein

A typical case of Israeli leaders playing the role of victim, yet again:

Israeli leaders continue are still wanted in Europe, but not in a positive way: Knesset members visiting Poland for ceremonies marking International Holocaust Day were surprised to see ads against Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Opposition Chairwoman Tzipi Livni in the city of Krakow on Tuesday evening.

Posters hung not far from the Israeli lawmakers’ hotel read in English, “Wanted for war crimes,” offering the public an award of 10,000 euro in exchange for information on Barak or Livni’s expected arrival in Europe. The ads included a website address for people interested in providing information on the Israeli officials.

…

“After 65 years, we once again realize that being right is not enough,” said MK Hasson. “We must remember this ahead of the next challenges, like Holocaust deniers, Holocaust cursers and different kinds of anti-Semites.”

Is that clear? Anybody who wants to hold Israeli leaders accountable is an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier.

If true, how a local and global campaign against Israeli apartheid achieved results in the West Bank: non-violent, Palestinian resistance that scares the Israelis because it cannot be broken by force:

Two-and-a-half years after a Supreme Court order, Israel’s army is preparing to adjust the route of the long security barrier it has constructed on the West Bank at a key flashpoint where a fence cuts off Palestinian villagers from their own land.

For five years, the villagers of Bil’in have staged weekly protests against the barrier’s route through their land, together with Israeli and international supporters. The Friday protests against what the residents regard as a land grab by Israel under the guise of shoring up security for Israelis typically attract some 200 to 300 participants — most nonviolent, although some hurl rocks and other projectiles at Israeli soldiers.

The question of New York Times Jerusalem chief Ethan Bronner and whether his son is in the IDF is thrashed out by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting:

The decisions of Bronner’s son, however, are not the issue. What the Times needs to ask itself is whether it expects that its bureau chief has the normal human feelings about matters of life or death concerning one’s child.

Might he feel hostility, for example, when interviewing members of organizations who were trying to kill his son? When the IDF goes into battle, might he be rooting for the side for which his son is risking his life? Certainly such issues would be taken very seriously if a Times reporter had a child who belonged to a military force that was engaged in hostilities with the IDF; indeed, there’s little doubt that a reporter in that position would not be allowed to continue to cover the Mideast conflict.

Having a conflict of interest, it should be stressed, is not the same thing as producing slanted journalism; rather, it means that a journalist has outside motivations that are strongly at odds with his or her journalistic responsibilities. That a journalist has been “scrupulously fair” in the past does not excuse an ongoing conflict of interest; journalists should not be placed in a position where they have to ignore the well-being of their family in order to do their job, nor should readers be expected to trust that they can do so.

I reported last week on the death of three Palestinians in Nablus at the hands of the IDF.

B’Tselem has released a report that questions the legality of the deaths:

In the pre-dawn hours of 26 December 2009, soldiers shot to death Ghassan Abu Sharakh, Nader a-Sarkaji, and ‘Anan Subuh, while each of them was at home in the Old City of Nablus. The first two were with their families at the time they were shot. State officials, among them the IDF Spokesperson, stated that the three had been involved in the shooting attack that killed Rabbi Meir Chai on 24 December 2009. They further stated that the soldiers went to the houses to arrest them, but the three refused to surrender, and the soldiers shot them when they felt their lives were in danger.

B’Tselem’s investigation of the event, which included interviews with nine relatives of the men who were killed and examination of the findings at the scene and of medical reports, revealed a different version. The investigation raises a grave suspicion that the soldiers acted unlawfully and, at least in the cases of Ghassan Abu Sharakh and Nader a-Sarkaji, made no attempt to arrest them before shooting them to death.

The use and abuse of the Haiti disaster for Israeli PR has been getting a fair bit of press recently.

Here’s a humourous and revealing Israeli skit from the country’s biggest comedy show, accurately ridiculing the absurd Israeli coverage of needing to tell themselves how humane and wonderful they are:

On this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, I liked Bernard Avishai’s moving re-telling of his recent visit to Auschwitz (as opposed to Israeli politicians who abuse the memory of the Holocaust to shamefully push the Zionist cause and smear any critics of the occupation):

For the overwhelming first impression I had in Auschwitz-Birkenau, which I still fear bringing to consciousness, was the terrible beauty of the place. And this, of all things, has stuck. I don’t mean the beauty of the meadow and forest, about which much has been written: the pathos of the birdsong, the mocking of the seasons. I have enough imagination to assume that the sounds of captivity and stench of murder would put the idyll of any countryside into a dark eclipse. I mean the perfect symmetry and elegant architectural touches of the camp itself: the deco curves in the pylons holding the electrified wires, the broad-shouldered grandeur of the masonry walls, the angular roof-lines over the receiving gates. Now, 60 years later, it looked to me like a flattened, transplanted Brooklyn Bridge gone to seed.

All of which put another thought in my head: what I am seeing now in my mind’s eye is very nearly how the camp must have looked to the architect, one Lothar Hartjenstein, before any structure actually went up. I can see him fussing over his blue-prints at 3 AM, perhaps tamping out his last cigarette, finally putting down his pencil. “Ya…,” I can hear him whispering to himself, the goose-flesh rising on his arms. It dawned on me that, perhaps, the most devilish Nazis after all were the Speers and the Hartjensteins, the purveyors of perfect symmetry. How magnificent was the world they dreamed up, which so many young Germans could only fall in love with; a world as beautiful as an F-16 in flight or a Victoria Secret model after Photoshop.

Here’s a definition of fundamentalist Jewish settler violence.

Americans now want a lack of neutrality in their news (not that objectivity or balance is ever achieved in the corporate press):

Americans do not trust the major tv news operations in the country- except for Fox News.

Our newest survey looking at perceptions of ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News finds Fox as the only one that more people say they trust than distrust. 49% say they trust it to 37% who do not.

This is a wonderful article (kindly passed along by a reader). Writing in the Guardian, German writer Alan Posener documents the growing voices that are begging the Jewish community to stop “wailing” about the Holocaust, use the catastrophe as a crutch and insulate themselves from criticism of Israel. Time to grow up:

Even today, there is a residual feeling among many Germans, and by no means only on the extreme right, that enough is enough, that too much self-examination and breast-beating somehow damages the German psyche, that it is time for a new self-confidence, that the nation needs to see the Nazi crimes in perspective. The horrors of Stalinism, after all, and the murderous antisemitism of Islamists such as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would seem to indicate that Germany’s place in history is by no means singular.

This kind of revisionism is only to be expected. Debates on the issue sweep the country regularly. This year, however, something new has happened. Jewish authors have joined the fray on the side of the revisionists. In the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, the Berlin-based New Yorker Benjamin Weinthal writes that “Shoah remembrance has come to resemble a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder” in Germany. And in Berlin’s “Tagesspiegel”, Henryk M Broder mounted a vicious attack on “wailing Jews (Jammerjuden), who use every talk show to tell people how many relatives they lost in the Holocaust and how afraid they are of the NPD” (the German Nazi party). Broder’s attack is all the more shocking for Jews in Germany, as he himself has made a career out of attacking what he perceives as Germany’s “eternal” antisemitism, a career that includes, of course, hundreds of talk show appearances.

Connected to these thoughts is a recent talk by British Jew Tony Klug titled, “Are Israeli policies entrenching antisemitism worldwide?”

Who is imprisoned in the American prison at Bagram in Afghanistan?

This is an email from Alison Thompson sent to her parents in Sutherland Shire (Sydney) on 24 January 2010.

Alison, a Cronulla aid worker, has received an Order of Australia (OAM) this year on the Australia Day honours list.

Email Subject: Hell in Haiti

Hi mum and dad –

I won’t be around when they announce my award on January 26th.   I am with Sean Penn, diana jenkins, Oscar and 15 doctors embedded in the 82 airbourne ( USA)   Dante would describe it as hell here.  There is no food and wAter and hundreds dying daily. The aid is all bottlenecked and not reaching here . The other day i assisted with amputation ( holding them down) while they used a saw to cut a young boys leg off with no pain killers. Today I went with a strike force and army patrol in hummers into the streets and walked 5 miles through the camps set up on every street corner ..sewage and bodies stench is everywhere. As i attend to a patient 30 people crowd around me and it’s hard to breath.  I nearly fainted today as the sewage smell went straight down my throat. I went white and dizzy but couldn’t sit down as sewage is running through the streets. There is much infection and it feels like the job is too big. No antibiotics anywhere.

Good news, today our new york doctors evacuated 18 patients with spinal injuries out to miami and we’re all so excited. Our mash unit is in the 82 air base overlooking a refugee camp of over 50000 people. The refugees start singing Christian songs at 4 am and line up for food until the army hands it out at 8 am ( thats if there is any food)

On the first night I was in the nearby jungle camping under the stars with my team and woke up to the beautiful music drawing me to them. I thought it was a church and we went to find it and came across the 82 airbourne camp and the refugee camp.( that’s how we ended up here) as it wasn’t safe to stay where we were even though we had our own security force. We are totally self suffient with food gas and medicines and have a private donor (Diana Jenkins who was a refugee in camps in Bosnia as a child – her family died of starvation in the camps. ) Sean Penn is here purely as a volunteer and is cutting through bureaucracy to get aid moving and food water and medicines to the people. There is no agenda but to save lives. Helicopters fly over head and it feels like vietnam. That night 50,000 people sung me to sleep and they sing every night for the world to save them. There is always hope but she’s not here right now.

Alison xxx

My writing is a mess as it’s on iPhone and keeps changing my words and the generator is on for a few hours but I know it’s important to tell the world.

Please send to any press who may call or family and friends.

Sri Lanka’s election is now over – the winner is current President Mahinda Rajapaksa – but the country is likely to continue to descend further into an authoritarian state. More on the election here.

How many Zionists are still claiming that Sri Lanka is the model for fighting Israel’s war on the Palestinians?

Too many.