Antony Loewenstein

Who really benefits from this Sunday New York Times lead story (all from anonymous sources, of course)?

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.

Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, came in the midst of an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course.

Officials familiar with the memo’s contents would describe only portions dealing with strategy and policy, and not sections that apparently dealt with secret operations against Iran, or how to deal with Persian Gulf allies.

One senior official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the memo, described the document as “a wake-up call.” But White House officials dispute that view, insisting that for 15 months they had been conducting detailed planning for many possible outcomes regarding Iran’s nuclear program.

Welcome to Australia, a Federal government that wants to be “tough” on asylum seekers, clearly makes policy on the run and is increasingly reminiscent of the previous Howard regime. Brutes.

The only major party in Australia that makes humane sense is the Greens and people remember (look at the UK, where Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg is the most popular leader since Winston Churchill, not least because he appears to be a man of principle, though time will tell, of course):

The Greens have accused the federal government of a discredited Howard-like approach to asylum seekers by deciding to reopen a West Australian detention facility.

On Sunday, Immigration Minister Chris Evans announced the government would reopen the centre at Curtin Air Base in a bid to ease overcrowding and potential conflicts at Christmas Island.

The decision came just a week after a freeze was put on Afghan and Sri Lankan refugee applications as a deterrent to new arrivals.

Senator Evans said Curtin would be readied immediately to hold 200-300 Sri Lankan and Afghan asylum seekers whose refugee applications had been suspended.

“Previously it’s been used for this purpose and initially we’ll be upgrading the facility to accommodate that cohort of persons who have had their asylum claims suspended,” Senator Evans told reporters in Perth.

“We need to find an appropriate secure facility to deal with these asylum seekers.”

Greens immigration and human rights spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young slammed the move, saying it was another example of “policy-on-the-run” from the government.

“The immigration policy, the refugee response from the government, is a dog’s breakfast – it’s one announcement after another without the real follow-through of any type of practical long-term or humane approach, from the Australian government,” she told reporters in Adelaide.

Senator Hanson-Young said Curtin – 40km southeast of Derby in Western Australia’s far north – had in the past been described as “a living hell hole”.

She said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was trying to win votes, but warned “the Australian public are smarter than that”.

“Everything he’s announced over the last couple of weeks harks straight back to the days which were discredited under the Howard government, where we detained vulnerable people in the middle of the desert, where we detained children behind barbed wire,” she said.

“This is a government who said they would work to dismantle that regime and now we see them implementing it themselves.”

Senator Evans said the first group of single-male asylum seekers – who are subject to a three-month freeze for Sri Lankans and a six-month freeze for Afghans – would be moved from Christmas Island to Curtin as soon as upgrades were finished.

In addition, 60 single-male detainees would immediately be moved to the Darwin detention centre, and a group of about 70 unaccompanied minors moved to Port Augusta, in South Australia.

While that move was planned for Sunday, it was delayed until at least Monday, after a charter plane suffered mechanical difficulties.

Senator Evans said “a couple of hundred or so” people would be moved off Christmas Island “in the next week or two” to ease overcrowding.

Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said the new policy was “another example of failure by the federal government”.

“We’ve seen now people being transferred to Darwin, which the government said it would do once Christmas Island was overflowing, and we now see a complete end to offshore processing in this country,” he said.

Mr Morrison said the costs of dealing with asylum seekers in Australia were spiralling out of control.

“How much is it costing them in midnight flights, these charter flights, all around the country as Christmas Island spills over?,” he said.

“How much is it costing to put in place all these new centres and facilities being reopened at Curtin?

“The cost is mounting and the government’s failure continues to increase.”

Senator Evans said he did not know the final cost of expanding Curtin, but the government would “invest considerably” in the centre.

Refugee Council of Australia CEO Paul Power said the use of the Curtin facility to house asylum seekers was completely inappropriate.

“It is one of the most remote places in Australia and facilities would have to be built,” Mr Power said.

“This population of asylum seekers will include torture and trauma survivors, and services for them will be nigh on impossible to deliver.

“It is hard to think of any good policy reason to pick this remote location instead of locations closer to available services.

Tony Karon in The National on Jewish impatience with Israel:

The Zionist dream had always been that Israel would be not only the spiritual, but also the political and physical home of the world’s Jews. That dream has faded, largely because it is not shared by a majority of the world’s Jews, who have chosen not to live in Israel, and are unlikely to move there in the near future.

Israelis can certainly count on support from America when their physical safety is threatened by suicide bombers or rockets. But much of that support evaporates when the issue is whether the Israelis can expand settlements in East Jerusalem in the name of biblical fulfilment.

Having integrated themselves into a wider society in which they enjoy the same rights and responsibilities before the law as any other citizen, many Jewish Americans appear to be losing patience with Israel’s insistence on defying international norms.

Priceless and absurd. For Sri Lanka to call for the end to Israel’s occupation, how about examining its own brutal occupation of Tamil areas in the country’s north and east?

Nobody said international relations aren’t based on hypocrisy:

This weekend Australia’s Tamil community voted on establishing an independent Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka. The vote – also occuring in other nations around the world – has no real political power but may prove the strength and determination of the Tamils to continue their struggle for independence:

We have been warned:

Noam Chomsky, the leading leftwing intellectual, warned last week that fascism may be coming to the United States.

“I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio,” he said, “and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering” here at home.

Chomsky was speaking to more than 1,000 people at the Orpheum Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, where he received the University of Wisconsin’s A.E. Havens Center’s award for lifetime contribution to critical scholarship.

“The level of anger and fear is like nothing I can compare in my lifetime,” he said.

He cited a statistic from a recent poll showing that half the unaffiliated voters say the average tea party member is closer to them than anyone else.

“Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error,” Chomsky said.

Their attitudes “are understandable,” he said. “For over 30 years, real incomes have stagnated or declined. This is in large part the consequence of the decision in the 1970s to financialize the economy.”

There is class resentment, he noted. “The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis, are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels,” he said.

And Obama is linked to the bankers, Chomsky explained.

“The financial industry preferred Obama to McCain,” he said. “They expected to be rewarded and they were. Then Obama began to criticize greedy bankers and proposed measures to regulate them. And the punishment for this was very swift: They were going to shift their money to the Republicans. So Obama said bankers are “fine guys” and assured the business world: ‘I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system.’

People see that and are not happy about it.”

He said “the colossal toll of the institutional crimes of state capitalism” is what is fueling “the indignation and rage of those cast aside.”

“People want some answers,” Chomsky said. “They are hearing answers from only one place: Fox, talk radio, and Sarah Palin.”

Chomsky invoked Germany during the Weimar Republic, and drew a parallel between it and the United States. “The Weimar Republic was the peak of Western civilization and was regarded as a model of democracy,” he said.

And he stressed how quickly things deteriorated there.

“In 1928 the Nazis had less than 2 percent of the vote,” he said. “Two years later, millions supported them. The public got tired of the incessant wrangling, and the service to the powerful, and the failure of those in power to deal with their grievances.”

He said the German people were susceptible to appeals about “the greatness of the nation, and defending it against threats, and carrying out the will of eternal providence.”

When farmers, the petit bourgeoisie, and Christian organizations joined forces with the Nazis, “the center very quickly collapsed,” Chomsky said.

No analogy is perfect, he said, but the echoes of fascism are “reverberating” today, he said.

“These are lessons to keep in mind.”

Here’s something to inspire us on the first day of a new week:

Who says the increasingly vocal campaign to highlight Israel’s “normalisation” efforts isn’t gathering steam?

When well-organized hecklers disrupted a recent London performance by the Jerusalem Quartet, the protest resonated far beyond Wigmore Hall, the city’s famous and much loved lunchtime place of pilgrimage for music lovers seeking a break from the hubbub of central London.

Not only did the disturbance cause the BBC to pull the plug on its nationwide live broadcast of the lunchtime recital; it sparked a new round of increasingly heated debates about the legitimacy of political demonstrations targeting Israel’s “cultural ambassadors” abroad, by protesters seeking to publicize alleged war crimes and human rights violations by the Jewish state.

Since the March 29 Wigmore protest, moreover, a landmark legal ruling elsewhere in the United Kingdom — arising from a previous demonstration against the quartet two years ago — is likely to further embolden those behind such actions.

In an April 8 ruling, a court in Edinburgh, Scotland, cleared five pro-Palestinian activists of racism, dismissing charges that they were guilty of racially aggravated conduct against members of the quartet.

The case dates to an August 2008 concert at the Edinburgh International Festival that hecklers disrupted repeatedly in protest against Israel’s blockade of Gaza, occupation of the West Bank and the musicians’ alleged links to the Israeli military.

State prosecutors had claimed that using this venue to protest against Israel and Israelis showed “malice and ill will” toward the quartet because of the musicians’ membership in a racial group, rendering the protest racist.

But after hearing a full transcript of the incident from a BBC recording of the concert, the presiding legal official (known as a “Sheriff” in this branch of Scottish law) ruled that the charges were disproportionate and failed to meet the test of racial abuse. He ruled the prosecution was a clear breach of the right to protest.

That it was the Jerusalem Quartet’s luck to be the target of high-profile protests in both cases is no small irony: The group’s name and its members’ past national service as musicians in the Israel Defense Forces notwithstanding, only one of the four lives in Israel today. And two are members and section leaders of the West-Eastern Divan — the youth orchestra co-founded by Edward Said, the late anti-Zionist, Palestinian-American scholar and activist, and by Daniel Barenboim, the Argentine-Jewish pianist and conductor.

The orchestra, based in Spain, is composed of musicians from Israel and of Arabs from across the Middle East, along with others from the region, and is conceived, in Barenboim’s words, “as a project against ignorance [where] people get to know the other, to understand what the other thinks and feels, without necessarily agreeing with it… a platform where the two sides can disagree and not resort to knives.”

“I don’t really know how to respond to these people or the misinformation they have been spreading,” said Kyril Zlotnikov, the quartet’s cellist, of the protesters. The musician, who was born in Minsk, Belarus, and is now based in Portugal, added: “I am an ambassador for my country in the same way that any musician from Britain, for example, is an ambassador for their country. Britain is like other countries in the world that have done some terrible things, but also some amazing good things.”

But a statement that the group released right after the Wigmore incident appeared to be less than accurate. “We are Israeli citizens, but have no connection with or patronage by the Government,” the statement said. In fact, publicity for the group lists Israel’s Foreign Ministry as a sponsor or co-sponsor of numerous appearances by the quartet, including on a European tour from 2005 to 2006 and a tour of the United States from 2007 to 2008. The group’s 2009 Australian tour was supported, in part, by an $8,000 Israeli Foreign Ministry grant, according to The Age, an Australian daily.

In that same statement, the two members who play with the West-Eastern Divan added, “It is destructive of our attempts to foster Israel-Arab relations for us to be the subject of demonstrations of the kind we suffered the other day.”

“So what?” say supporters of the protest in the U.K., increasingly a European center for pro-Palestinian activism. Those involved in other manifestations of the same movement scored bigger publicity coups by securing arrest warrants from lower courts ahead of visits by Israeli military and political figures.

The Jerusalem Quartet should be boycotted, they say, for reasons such as their role as cultural ambassadors for Israel, the fact that their tours have been sponsored by the Israeli government and because they have enjoyed an official status in the military as distinguished IDF musicians.

“Their whole career has intertwined with the Israeli army and support for Zionist institutions. That is why they were targeted,” said Tony Greenstein, who was one of the Wigmore Hall protesters.

An important by Jonathan Cook in The National that reveals the depressing state of intellectual debate in Israel. If you aren’t for the state, get out of the country, so the thinking goes. Dissent is frowned upon, to put it mildly:

An Arab member of the Israeli parliament is demanding that a newspaper be allowed to publish an investigative report that was suppressed days before Israel attacked Gaza in winter 2008.

The investigation by Uri Blau, who has been in hiding since December to avoid arrest, concerned Israeli preparations for the impending assault on Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead.

In a highly unusual move, according to reports in the Israeli media, the army ordered the Haaretz newspaper to destroy all copies of an edition that included Mr Blau’s investigation after it had already gone to press and been passed by the military censor. The article was never republished.

Mr Blau has gone underground in London after the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, demanded he return to Israel to hand back hundreds of classified documents they claim are in his possession and to reveal his sources.

Haneen Zoubi, an MP who previously headed an Israeli media-monitoring organisation, said it was “outrageous” that the suppressed report was still secret so long after the Gaza attack. She is to table a parliamentary question to Ehud Barak, the defence minister, today demanding to know why the army suppressed the article and what is preventing its publication now. Mr Barak must respond within 21 days.

She said publication of the article was important both because Israel had been widely criticised for killing many hundreds of civilians in its three-week assault on Gaza, and because subsequent reports suggested that Israeli commanders sought legal advice months before the operation to manipulate the accepted definitions of international law to make it easier to target civilians.

“There must be at least a strong suspicion that Mr Blau’s article contains vital information, based on military documentation, warning of Israeli army intentions to commit war crimes,” she said in an interview.

“If so, then there is a public duty on Haaretz to publish the article. If not, then there is no reason for the minister to prevent publication after all this time.”

Ms Zoubi’s call yesterday followed mounting public criticism of Haaretz for supporting Mr Blau by advising him to stay in hiding and continuing to pay his salary. In chat forums and talkback columns, the reporter has been widely denounced as a traitor. Several MPs have called for Haaretz to be closed down or boycotted.

A Haaretz spokeswoman refused to comment, but a journalist there said a “fortress mentality” had developed at the newspaper. “We’ve all been told not to talk to anyone about the case,” he said. “There’s absolute paranoia that the paper is going to be made to suffer because of the Blau case.”

Amal Jamal, a professor at Tel Aviv University who teaches a media course to professional journalists, said he was concerned with the timing of the Shin Bet’s campaign against Mr Blau. He observed that they began interviewing the reporter about his sources and documents last summer as publication neared of the Goldstone report, commissioned by the United Nations and which embarrassed Israel by alleging it had perpetrated war crimes in Gaza.

“The goal in this case appears to be not only to intimidate journalists but also to delegitimise certain kinds of investigations concerning security issues, given the new climate of sensitivity in Israel following the Goldstone report.”

He added that Mr Blau, who had quickly acquired a reputation as Israel’s best investigative reporter, was “probably finished” as a journalist in Israel.

Shraga Elam, an award-winning Israeli reporter, said Mr Blau’s suppressed article might also have revealed the aims of a widely mentioned but unspecified “third phase” of the Gaza attack, following the initial air strikes and a limited ground invasion, that was not implemented.

On Monday, an MP with the centrist Kadima Party, Yulia Shamal-Berkovich, called for Haaretz to be closed down, backing a similar demand from fellow MP Michael Ben-Ari, of the right-wing National Union.

She accused Haaretz management of having “chosen to hide” over the case and blamed it for advising Mr Blau to remain abroad. She said the newspaper “must make sure the materials that are in his possession are returned. If Haaretz fails to do so, its newspaper licence should be revoked without delay.”

Another Kadima MP, Yisrael Hasson, a former deputy head of the Shin Bet, this week urged Haaretz readers to boycott the newspaper until Mr Blau was fired.

A petition calling on the Shin Bet to end its threat to charge Mr Blau with espionage has attracted the signatures of several prominent journalists in Israel.

“We believe the Blau case is unique and are concerned this unique case will create a dangerous precedent,” their letter states. “Until now, prosecution authorities have not sought to try reporters for the offence of holding classified information, an offence most of us are guilty of in one way or another.”

Media coverage of the case in Israel has been largely hostile to Mr Blau. Yuval Elbashan, a lawyer, wrote in Haaretz this week that most of his fellow military reporters and analysts had in the past few days abandoned their colleague and proven “their loyalty to the [security] system as the lowliest of its servants”.

One, Yossi Yehoshua, a military correspondent with the country’s largest-circulation newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, is due to testify next month against Anat Kamm, a former soldier revealed as one of Mr Blau’s sources and who is accused of espionage.

He published several additional reports for Haaretz in 2008 and 2009 that severely embarrassed senior military commanders by showing they had issued orders that intentionally violated court rulings, including to execute Palestinians who could be safely apprehended.

Throughout the current Anat Kamm case in Israel – where predictably Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick calls the paper behind the story, Haaretz, a friend of Israel’s enemies and “supporting treason” – Zionists in the West still cling onto the same old myths. Take the New York Forward:

There is a larger issue here: the efficacy of targeted assassinations, and whether the benefit of this practice outweighs the possibility it would, instead, spur on more acts of violence and revenge. This is the kind of issue that Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East, ought to debate fully and freely. Holding government accountable is the media’s primary responsibility, and in the end can strengthen the bond between citizens and their leaders, a bond that now seems ever more dangerously frayed.

It’s like a mantra. Israel is the region’s only democracy. For Jews. Despite years of human rights reports that finds systemic discrimination against Arabs and others in Israel proper (let along the occupation), it’s still beyond many Jews in the West to acknowledge that Israel isn’t a democracy, it’s an ethnocentric ghetto.

Joseph Massad in the Electronic Intifada on the fools who have hope in the US-backed and armed Palestinian Authority to bring “democracy” to Palestine:

The Palestinian Authority is pregnant! Indeed, it is the unelected and American-imposed Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who is pregnant. He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in a recent interview that “the time for this baby to be born will come … and we estimate it will come around 2011.” Unlike females of the human species but like female whales, the gestation period for male Palestinian collaborators with the Israeli occupation extends at least to two years. Fayyad, “the Palestinian Ben-Gurion,” as Israeli President Shimon Peres recently dubbed him, had declared his pregnancy in a document he issued on 25 August 2009 titled “Palestine: Ending the Occupation and Establishing the State,” and more recently to Haaretz: “the birth of a Palestinian state will be celebrated as a day of joy by the entire community of nations.”

We seem to already know the name, weight, ideological color and the physical make-up of this “baby;” nay we even know the political structure, and the foreign policy of the fruit of Fayyad’s womb: a tiny Palestinian “state” that recognizes Israel as a “biblical” Jewish state. The time of birth will be determined by Fayyad as both mother and midwife. While the last immaculate conception that took place in Palestine was in Nazareth, it remains unclear if what is unfolding in Ramallah is a second immaculate conception, as no paternity tests have been scheduled as of yet for this illegitimate baby.

Who is actually fighting the noble war in Afghanistan?

A recent Congressional Research Service analysis [1] obtained by ProPublica looked at the number of civilian contractors killed in Afghanistan in recent months. It’s not pretty.

Of the 289 civilians killed since the war began more than eight years ago, 100 have died in just the last six months. That’s a reflection of both growing violence and the importance of the civilians flooding into the country along with troops in response to President Obama’s decision to boost the American presence in Afghanistan.

The latest U.S. Department of Defense numbers show there are actually more civilian contractors on the ground in Afghanistan than there are soldiers. The Pentagon reported [2] 107,292 U.S.-hired civilian workers in Afghanistan as of February 2010, when there were about 78,000 soldiers. This is apparently the first time that contractors have exceeded soldiers by such a large margin.