Antony Loewenstein

Back in 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled against Israel’s separation barrier, a position ignored by the Zionist state.

Now, in another potentially important case, the ICJ is soon to rule on an issue with deep relevance to the currently non-existent Palestinian state:

The International Court of Justice will soon issue an opinion on the legality of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, which was unilaterally declared in February 2008 and has been recognized by 65 of the U.N.’s 192 members. A decision to recognize Kosovo’s independence will likely have a significant influence on separatist movements around the world, and on the future of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Serbia’s Foreign Minister, Vuk Jeremic, recently told an interviewer, “Kosovo is our Jerusalem.” The question for Israel is whether Jerusalem will soon become its Kosovo.

A new book about China set in 2013, mirroring George Orwell’s 1984, imagines a set of national strategies:

1. Democratic dictatorship under one-party rule;
2. Rule-of-law with stability as top priority;
3. An authoritarian government which rules for the people;
4. A state-controlled market economy;
5. Fair competition dominated by state-owned enterprises;
6. Scientific development with Chinese characteristics;
7. A self-centered harmonious foreign diplomacy;
8. A single-ethnicity sovereignty with multiple ethnicities;
9. Post-western and post-universal values;
10. Renaissance of the matchless Chinese culture

The sad reality, confirmed in media reports recently, is that China is now moving towards banning any SMS messages deemed “vulgar”.

Canada’s conservative government unveils a policy to largely back the Western-backed (and corrupt, ineffective etc) Palestinian Authority:

Last week, the government of Canada quietly announced it would discontinue its long-standing financial contributions to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and redirect the monies to strengthen the judicial system of the Palestinian Authority and other food assistance programs. The news came out as UNRWA launched a special fundraising campaign to collect millions of dollars needed to support programs in the occupied Palestinian territories.

UNRWA provides assistance to 4.67 million Palestinian refugees scattered throughout the Middle East and administers programs in the areas of education, health and other social services in 59 Palestinian refugee camps. The agency operates solely through donations from various organizations and governments. It is currently under severe financial duress due to the increasing number of Palestinian refugees, the deterioration of their socio-economic level, unemployment and food insecurity.

“Canada’s decision to cut funds to UNRWA and its essential programs is very worrying and could have important consequences for Palestinian refugees,” stated Thomas Woodley, President of CJPME. “Reducing the capacity of UNRWA will terribly undermine the quality of life for these people. Canadians must respond to this announcement and protest against this radical break from traditional Canadian values of compassion and humanitarian concerns,” added Woodley.

The Jerusalem Post explains why the growing public protests over Sheikh Jarrah have been helped greatly by the web (and ironically, the failure of the Western press to adequately report an issue a few kilometres from their offices):

Social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, along with a slew of blogs, are playing an increasing role in the growing participation of young Israelis in protest rallies in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, activists and journalists familiar with the situation there told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

Activists and journalists both described a situation in which protesters were relying on the Internet to try and affect change on the ground and raise awareness of the arrests made during demonstrations in the neighborhood.

“It’s all Facebook, e-mails and Twitter,” said Didi Remez, a human rights activist, who has become noticeably involved in the Sheikh Jarrah protests as of late. Remez was arrested during a protest there last Friday.

Remez also said that distant audiences, like American Jews, who might be deprived of Sheikh Jarrah coverage due to the mainstream media’s lack of interest, were instead staying abreast of the situation via social networking sites.

“The American media is for some reason refusing to cover this,” he said. “Even though it’s becoming a major issue in Israel. And still, despite that, there’s a lot of awareness [of this issue] among Jewish Americans, the reason being that they are increasingly connected through Facebook, Twitter, blogs and so on.”

“They’re getting information on this without The New York Times,” Remez continued. “So, something that hasn’t been covered at all by the [American] mainstream media, is still getting coverage through new media, and I think that’s a statement about the decline of the mainstream media and maybe a larger comment on the shift away from it.”

Muslims are the new Jews:

Close to half of Americans admit to harboring prejudice against Muslims and negative feelings about Islam, a new study from the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies shows.

The level of anti-Muslim prejudice — 43 percent of Americans admitted feeling at least “a little” — is more than twice as high as Americans’ reported feelings toward Buddhists, Christians and Jews.

In July 2009 I spoke to New York Times Jerusalem correspondent Ethan Bronner who told me, when asked, that he did not have any children serving in the IDF.

According to Electronic Intifada, this may have changed:

The New York Times has all but confirmed to The Electronic Intifada (EI) that the son of its Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner was recently inducted into the Israeli army.

Over the weekend, EI received a tip suggesting this had been the case and wrote to Bronner to ask him to confirm or deny the information and to seek his opinion on whether, if true, he thought it would be a conflict of interest.

Susan Chira, the foreign editor of The New York Times wrote in an email to The Electronic Intifada this morning:

“Ethan Bronner referred your query to me, the foreign editor. Here is my comment: Mr. Bronner’s son is a young adult who makes his own decisions. At The Times, we have found Mr. Bronner’s coverage to be scrupulously fair and we are confident that will continue to be the case.”

The Electronic Intifada also wrote to Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times, to confirm the information and ask for an opinion on whether this constituted a conflict of interest, but had yet to receive a response.

Bronner, as bureau chief, has primary responsibility for his paper’s reporting on all aspects of the Palestine/Israel conflict, and on the Israeli army, whose official name is the “Israel Defense Forces.”

On 23 January, Bronner published a lengthy article on Israel’s efforts to refute allegations contained in the UN-commissioned Goldstone report of war crimes and crimes against humanity during its attack on Gaza last winter (“Israel Poised to Challenge a UN Report on Gaza“).

As’ad AbuKhalil, a frequent critic of Bronner’s coverage, blogged in response that “The New York Times devoted more space to Israeli and Zionist criticisms of the Goldstone report than to the [content of the] report itself” (The Angry Arab News Service, “Ethan Bronner’s propaganda services, 25 January 2010)

Bronner’s pro-Israeli bias reporting on Israel’s attack on Gaza last year was also criticized by the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) (See “NYT and the Perils of Mideast ‘Balance’,” 4 February 2009).

The New York Times’ own “Company policy on Ethics in Journalism” acknowledges that the activities of a journalist’s family member may constitute a conflict of interest. It includes as an example, “A brother or a daughter in a high-profile job on Wall Street might produce the appearance of conflict for a business reporter or editor.” Such conflicts may on occasion require the staff member “to withdraw from certain coverage.”

After Israel’s invasion of Gaza last winter, Israeli military censors banned local media from printing the names of individual officers who participated in the attack for fear that this could assist international efforts to bring war crimes suspects to justice. This followed the publication of a number of soldiers’ personal testimonies in the Israeli press describing atrocities they had seen committed by the Israeli army in Gaza.

The Times’ treatment of Bronner sets an interesting precedent. Would the newspaper’s policy be the same if a reporter in its Jerusalem bureau had an immediate family member who faced Bronner’s son across the battlefield, as a member of a Palestinian or Lebanese resistance organization?

It would appear that despite the highly sensitive nature of Palestine/Israel coverage, and the very high personal stakes for Bronner and his son that could result from full and open coverage of the Israeli army’s abuses of Palestinians, The New York Times does not consider this situation to be a problematic case. It had not even disclosed the situation to its readers — until now.

In a Sunday New York Times magazine feature about the Little Green Footballs blog – a once virulently bigoted website that seemed to thrive on hating Arabs, Muslims and anybody who didn’t crave American bombing campaigns – founder Charles Johnson is shown to have tolerated the sadly common bile directed at Palestinians:

If the tone of Johnson’s writing on the blog sometimes bordered, as his detractors claimed, on hate speech, that of his mostly anonymous commenters was reliably worse. A popular blog like L.G.F. functions as a kind of cloud-sourced id. It is not uncommon for a simple, 200-word post to accrue upward of a thousand written responses from readers. The question of how responsible he is, or should be, for these expressions of uncensored reader sentiment is one that Johnson, like many bloggers, has struggled with; but in the middle years of the last decade, whether for free-speech reasons or simply because he enjoyed being the popular focal point of such strong nationalist feeling, he did very little to rein it in. Muslims were described as “vermin.” The posthumous nickname St. Pancake was coined for the young American pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie, in reference to the Israeli bulldozer that killed her. Discussion of U.S. foreign-policy options included terms like “targeted genocide.” As for Palestinians, “they don’t need statehood,” offered one commenter; “they need sterilization.” And on and on. A so-called stalker blog, called L.G.F. Watch, sprang up to document instances of what it considered hate speech on the part of Johnson and his followers. Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott compared Johnson’s site to a “disorganized Nuremberg Rally.”

Tomorrow sees Sri Lanka’s first election since the government’s defeat of the Tamil Tigers in May 2009.

Perhaps the most revealing comment of the campaign that I’ve read is from the US Ambassador to the country:

The US ambassador to Sri Lanka, Patricia Butenis, was moved to warn yesterday that election violence threatened to reverse the good image that Sri lanka had started to build up since the war’s end.

“The international image of Sri Lanka is just beginning to change from a land where it is all danger and conflict to one where it is a great country where maybe we can do business,” Butenis said.

“This election violence threatens that improvement. It is a step backward for Sri Lanka. And once the election is over I would urge everybody to focus on the hard work of good governance.”

In reality, the country remains utterly unwilling to investigate its horrendous human rights abuses. The battle is now between two men who have spent years proudly displaying their Sinhalese nationalism at the expense of the Tamil minority.

So writes a commentator in Haaretz:

Aid to disaster victims around the world portrays a different Israel than the one depicted in the media – the Israel that systematically oppresses nations and kills innocent civilians.

And leading Israeli daily Maariv:

At a time when our country is under media attack on the basis of harsh and anti-Semitic reports, and we are forced to contend with terrorists who have assumed the winning image of victims of war, one could say that the Haiti disaster is the best thing that could have happened to us.

Meanwhile, Israel publicly declares its intention to shun peace with the Palestinians:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that Israel must have a presence in the West Bank even after a peace agreement is achieved, the first time he has spelled out such a demand.

Israel’s seemingly never-ending removal of Palestinians from their homes in and around East Jerusalem is starting to gain global media coverage. It’s hard to think of a more palatable example of Zionist ethnic cleansing that reveals the dark heart at the centre of current Israeli thinking.

Israeli bloggers have started rallying to the cause. A new peace movement, of sorts, is growing around the campaign.

Here’s a report sent by Israeli peace group Gush Shalom:

Web report: Sheikh Jarakh 22.1.10

“Thieves Go Home – Sheikh Jarakh is Palestine!”

Every one of those who came took into account that he could be arrested and held in detention for at least a day. The more experienced brought with them a toothbrush. Still, at the appointed time, 3 p.m., hundreds were already waiting (a most unusual thing in Israel.)

This was the largest demonstration yet in Sheikh Jarakh, were for some time now a demo is taking place every Friday, much like the demos in Bil’in, Nilin and other places.

The Friday before, the police had brutally squashed the protest and arrested 11 demonstrators, among them the director of the Association for Human Rights. Contrary to their usual treatment of peace demonstrations, the media this time covered the event extensively. The behavior of the police upset many who generally do not take part in demonstrations. This time they felt they must take part.

So almost a thousand protesters gathered today (Friday, 22.1.10) in an empty plot opposite Sheikh Jarakh, a few dozen yards away from the houses from which Palestinian families had been thrown out in order to allow settlers to move in. Side by side with the old battle horses one could see people for whom this was the first time. Among those who came was former minister Yossi Sarid. Also present were the painter Uri Lifshitz and several professors from the Hebrew University, whose buildings could be seen on a nearby hill. More or less young people stood besides more or less old ones, with the young shouting slogans, whistling with whistles specially donated for this purpose, singing and drumming. Almost all were Jewish.

One protester brought flowers and tried to deliver them to the police commander, who froze and did not move a muscle in his face. She put the flowers at his feet, where they remained, until, in the end, one of the protesters claimed them as booty.

The police dictated the place and the time: across the road, until 4 p.m. “One minute after 4, I shall disperse the demonstration by force,” the commander announced. On the hill opposite, a large detachment of border police was waiting.

But the protesters were not in the mood for dictates. After demonstrating for some time at the appointed place, shouting slogans, singing and whistling, at ten minutes after 4 they moved forward, crossed the road and marched towards the disputed houses. They were, however, stopped by a chain of border police. At this stage, a number of protesters were already arrested, while their comrades shouted and whistled.

For two more hours, until darkness descended, there were several such incidents – the police arrested protesters, the demonstrators shouted slogans (“A brave policeman beats demonstrators”). One protester was thrown to the ground and then she was arrested and dragged to the police car like all the rest.

All though the demo, ultra-Orthodox Jews in their Shabbat attire with their children pushed their way through the crowd on their way to the nearby grave of the Righteous Rabbi Shimon. Nobody hurt them. From time to time they were greeted with loud shouts of “Thieves, go home!” because the grave is located in occupied territory. The story that was published, that demonstrators had attacked them, was a blatant lie.

“We are protesting against the injustice done to the Palestinian families that were evicted,” Uri Avnery told the many Israeli and foreign reporters on behalf of Gush Shalom, “The eviction is based on the argument that these houses were bought by Jews a hundred years ago, long before the 1948 war. If every Jerusalemite were to get back the house he owned before 1948, half the Jewish population of West Jerusalem would have to be evicted, since they live in houses from which the Arabs were expelled during the 1948 war.”

Avnery added that the declared aim of the settlers is to Judaize East Jerusalem, in order to make peace impossible forever. “Everybody knows that there will be no peace without a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

It may not be a strong movement yet, but American Jews are starting to speak out against Israeli crimes.

Here’s LA Jews for Peace and friends in front of the Federal building on the one year anniversary of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza: