Antony Loewenstein

A very strong new video by Tamil MIA, Born Free, shocks the senses. And rightly so:

If singer/rapper M.I.A.’s purpose was to get people talking about her new single “Born Free,” she succeeded.

The Sri Lankan-born artist debuted the graphic video on Monday. Immediately, fans took to social media to debate its scenes of military force, violence and brutality.

“M.I.A. is a provocateur and someone who tries to rile people up in a variety of ways,” said Saul Austerlitz, author of “Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes.”

“I think one of the main routes that she takes to that end is the political, and this video has a lot of political resonances, things like Guantanamo, the Iraqi insurgency and the Taliban all sort of jumbled together and rebranded.”

The almost nine-minute video for the song from her upcoming album includes nudity as well as scenes of brutality. Directed by filmmaker Romain Gavras, the video revolves around the rounding up of red-headed young men by a group of military commandos.

At one point, a boy is shot point-blank in the head and another young man is blown to pieces. YouTube reportedly yanked the video in light of its content.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

A democracy in name only and a growing tendency towards fascism. Zionism grows uglier by the day:

More than half of Jewish Israelis think human rights organizations that expose immoral behavior by Israel should not be allowed to operate freely, and think there is too much freedom of expression here, a recent survey found.

The survey, commissioned by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at Tel Aviv University, will be presented Wednesday at a conference on the limits of freedom of expression.

The pollsters surveyed 500 Jewish Israelis who can be considered a representative sample of the adult Jewish population.

They found that 57.6 percent of the respondents agreed that human rights organizations that expose immoral conduct by Israel should not be allowed to operate freely.

Slightly more than half agreed that “there is too much freedom of expression” in Israel.

The poll also found that most of the respondents favor punishing Israeli citizens who support sanctioning or boycotting the country, and support punishing journalists who report news that reflects badly on the actions of the defense establishment.

Another 82 percent of respondents said they back stiff penalties for people who leak illegally obtained information exposing immoral conduct by the defense establishment.

“Israelis have a distorted perception of democracy,” said Daniel Bar-Tal, a professor at the university’s school of education, and one of the conference’s organizers. “The public recognizes the importance of democratic values, but when they need to be applied, it turns out most people are almost anti-democratic.”

Another conference participant, Ben-Gurion University’s David Newman, called the polling results “very worrying,” adding that there has been an assault on freedom of expression in recent years.

“We say Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, but in Europe they are beginning to think of us otherwise,” he said.

Virtually all the respondents, 98 percent, said freedom of expression was important, but the picture changed when the questions got into the details.

Regarding human rights groups’ rights to operate freely, responses varied based upon the respondents’ reported political views. Of those who said they were right-wing, 76 percent said human rights groups should not have the right to freely publicize immoral conduct on Israel’s part.

The political differences were not as apparent in response to some other questions.

The poll showed 65 percent of all of those questioned think the Israeli media should be barred from publishing news that defense officials think could endanger state security, even if the news was reported abroad.

Another 43 percent said the media should not report information confirmed by Palestinian sources that could reflect poorly on the Israeli army. Fifty-eight percent of respondents opposed harsh criticism of the country, an increase of 10 percentage points from 2003.

“Faith in democratic values was not measured abstractly, but rather was put to the test regarding specific cases. Then, it turns out the Israeli public is not tolerant or pluralistic,” Bar-Tal said. “The education system teaches students about government authorities and election procedures, but there is no in-depth discussion about democratic values and [how to] instill them. The whole subject of values is perceived as something left-wing.”

The American Islamic Congress reveals details of the utterly absurd situation in Iran. It would be almost funny except we’re talking about people lives and freedom:

Surveillance cameras? Check. Transparent glass? Check. Segregated seating? Check. If you want to open an Internet cafe in Mashhad – the hometown of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei – you had better keep up with the new regulations. The CRIME Report’s Iran correspondents point to the bizarre new requirements governing Mashhadi Net cafes:

• The manager must be at least 30 years old – and married.
• Surveillance cameras must be installed throughout the store.
• The store must be at street-level.
• The store must not be near any female educational facilities.
• The exterior of the store must be made from the un-tinted, completely transparent (literally, “aquarium-like”) glass.
• Installing any blinds or posters that hinder visibility of interior from outside is illegal.
• People from the opposite sex are banned from sitting next to one another (even if they are “mahram,” i.e., close relatives).
• Giving the cafe a foreign name is illegal. Owners are advised to consult with the local authorities for choosing a suitable name.
• Owners must thoroughly record the ID of every customer.
• These records should be kept at least for 6 months. Video recording should be kept for at least two months.

Our correspondents note: “The requirements for opening a Net cafe are not much different in other Iranian cities. Their main function is to act as constraints to the undesirable growth of the new technology in the country. Laying the grounds for arbitrary crackdowns on the existing IT businesses is another goal they intend to pursue. So you see, these requirements are not as stupid as they seem.”

A useful guide to assisting governments in censoring content on the internet:

Naomi Klein on an event that received virtually no Western media coverage (except Democracy Now!):

Cochabamba, Bolivia

It was 11 am and Evo Morales had turned a football stadium into a giant classroom, marshaling an array of props: paper plates, plastic cups, disposable raincoats, handcrafted gourds, wooden plates and multicolored ponchos. All came into play to make his main point: to fight climate change, “we need to recover the values of the indigenous people.”

Yet wealthy countries have little interest in learning these lessons and are instead pushing through a plan that at its best would raise average global temperatures 2 degrees Celsius. “That would mean the melting of the Andean and Himalayan glaciers,” Morales told the thousands gathered in the stadium, part of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. What he didn’t have to say is that the Bolivian people, no matter how sustainably they choose to live, have no power to save their glaciers.

Bolivia’s climate summit has had moments of joy, levity and absurdity. Yet underneath it all, you can feel the emotion that provoked this gathering: rage against helplessness.

It’s little wonder. Bolivia is in the midst of a dramatic political transformation, one that has nationalized key industries and elevated the voices of indigenous peoples as never before. But when it comes to Bolivia’s most pressing, existential crisis–the fact that its glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, threatening the water supply in two major cities–Bolivians are powerless to do anything to change their fate on their own.

That’s because the actions causing the melting are taking place not in Bolivia but on the highways and in the industrial zones of heavily industrialized countries. In Copenhagen, leaders of endangered nations like Bolivia and Tuvalu argued passionately for the kind of deep emissions cuts that could avert catastrophe. They were politely told that the political will in the North just wasn’t there. More than that, the United States made clear that it didn’t need small countries like Bolivia to be part of a climate solution. It would negotiate a deal with other heavy emitters behind closed doors, and the rest of the world would be informed of the results and invited to sign on, which is precisely what happened with the Copenhagen Accord. When Bolivia and Ecuador refused to rubber-stamp the accord, the US government cut their climate aid by $3 million and $2.5 million, respectively. “It’s not a free-rider process,” explained US climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing. (Anyone wondering why activists from the global South reject the idea of “climate aid” and are instead demanding repayment of “climate debts” has their answer here.) Pershing’s message was chilling: if you are poor, you don’t have the right to prioritize your own survival.

The issue of “incitement” is often a convenient distraction in the Middle East. Israel accuses the Palestinians of brain-washing their children to hate Jews and Israelis. Of course, and far less discussed, is the mainstream Zionist hatred of Palestinians and their civil and human rights. Palestinians are expected to accept Israel as a Jewish state and have no issue with Zionist signs and names across the country.

Bitterlemons hosts an interesting discussion.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting on another corporate media moment of ignorance and bias:

The headline of this Washington Post piece today (4/26/10) is certainly not promising:

“Sharing a West Bank Highway Proves a Tall Order for Israel, Palestinians”

The highway in question was built by the Israeli government on occupied Palestinian territory. Since 2000, Israeli authorities have barred Palestinians from using the road. They are now offering to open just two on-ramps for use by Palestinians, who would be searched upon entering the road. And the highway would still not provide access to the crucial Palestinian city of Ramallah.

So what would justify the notion that Palestinians, like Israelis, aren’t doing their part to “share”? Nothing. This is the only explanation of any sort that the Post‘s  Janine Zacharia offers:

“The debate over Highway 443 illustrates a fundamental rub in the West Bank: If the Israelis and Palestinians can’t agree over how to share nine miles of pavement, how will they ever resolve the far more complex issues that divide them?

“From an Israeli viewpoint, allowing Palestinians on the road increases the risk of violence and adds traffic. To Palestinians, the road is another example of Israel’s reluctance to make life easier for them in occupied areas.”

Perhaps segregationists in the United States lodged similar complaints about overcrowding too.

Miguel D’Escoto, former president of the United Nations General Assembly and former foreign minister of Nicaragua, tells Democracy Now!:

Palestine has not been given statehood. And when the split of Palestine for a Jewish state and an Arab state, when that was decided upon—not really decided upon, when that decision was imposed, with all kinds of arm-twisting and the threats and the intimidations that the United States calls “negotiations”—you have to change your lexicon. When they say “democracy,” it usually means somebody who is very obedient to whatever they say. Then they give you the good housekeeping of approval, and they put “democracy.” If they don’t like you, then they say you are radical, and then they escalate the term to show—so it’s very difficult.

The United States claims that it has the right to rule the world, because it did so much to save the world from—in the Second World War. I don’t know how many Americans died in that war, but I imagine it’s infinitely, infinitely less than the 20 million people of the Soviet Union who died, more than 20 million. But regardless of that, the war was a great economic boom for the United States. The New Deal did not pull the United States out of its economic crisis; it was the war. And war has been, on many occasions, a business. They are very much into the business of death.

And that’s why, one time, when you talked to me over the phone many years ago, and President Reagan had died, and I never will forget that you said to me, “What do you think?” Well, you know, President Reagan is a human being. He’s got his wife, and he’s got his people who love him. And I feel sorry when people die, no matter who they are. And I pray to God that he receives them, in spite of the fact, I said, that he was the butcher of my people, a pathological killer. But in the United States, they are accustomed not to recognize their killers.

Whenever any repressive regime tries to censor online content, rest assured somebody somewhere will find a way around it (Western governments also take note):

While the Iranian government has intensified its aggressive efforts to expand Internet filters, Austin Heap, a young programmer in the U.S., says he has developed software that would enable Iranians to evade their censors.

In response to the widespread crackdown following Iran’s June 2009 presidential elections, the San Francisco-based Censorship Research Centre (CRC) developed a programme that provides unfiltered, anonymous Internet access.

Called Haystack, it uses a sophisticated mathematical formula to hide the user’s real Internet identity while allowing access to widely-used networking websites blocked by Iran’s government, such as YouTube, Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter.

“Now we can launch our efforts to help those in Iran access the Internet as if there were no Iranian government filters,” Austin Heap, CRC’s executive director, told IPS.

We’re seen the future and it’s militarised space:

The Pentagon’s test launch of two unmanned space vehicles this week have highlighted the efforts being made by the United States to develop a new generation of high-altitude weapon systems.

The United States Air Force (USAF) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) test launched a space plane – the Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2), known as the Falcon, at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

One part of the program aims to develop a reusable, rapid-strike Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle (HCV), and the other is for the development of a launch system capable of accelerating a HCV to cruise speeds, as well as launching small satellites into Earth orbit.

Defense analysts believe that the Falcon is part of the Pentagon’s effort to develop the capability to strike anywhere in the world with a conventional warhead in less than an hour – known as Conventional Prompt Global Strike.

Meanwhile, the USAF’s secretive X-37B robotic space plane took off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for a mystery mission that is expected to take months testing new spacecraft
technologies.

The X-37 is an unpiloted demonstration spaceplane built by Boeing Phantom Works that is intended to test future launch technologies while in orbit and during atmospheric re-entry.

“The X-37B has been in development for more than 10 years and had a tumultuous history. So, it’s great to see the X37 finally get to the launchpad and get into space,” The Washington Times quoted Gary Payton, U.S. Air Force Deputy Under Secretary for Space Programs, as saying.

The spacecraft will be placed into low Earth orbit for testing, following which it will be de-orbited for landing.

Day in and day out the sight of armed Israeli soldiers in the West Bank protecting settlers and destroying Palestinian land, all illegal under international law, continues. Most of the world’s media refuses to show these images. Poor, little Israel must be protected.

Joseph Dana, an American Jew living in Israel, continues to blog about these activities (and we worked together in Israel and Palestine last year). I salute him.

Here’s a video he posted a few days ago:

Non violent resistance to the occupation is beginning to spread to villages across the West Bank. In addition to the regular weekly protests in Nilin and Bilin this weekend, Nabi Salih, Walage and Beit Umar held non violent protests against the Wall and the crippling occupation. Below is a video shot by Israel Putermam from Walage. Be sure to note the violent arrest of an Israeli protester at the end of the Walage video:

Heard about the Orthodox boxing champ Yuri Foreman, studying to be a Rabbi, soon to fight in Yankee Stadium?