Antony Loewenstein

I’m soon to visit New Zealand for the Auckland Writer’s Festival and a nationwide tour to various cities to speak about the Middle East.

For any New Zealand readers, here’s another major event:

Crazy rightist Jews burn effigies of Barack Obama in the West Bank.

The interview between a reporter and a settler is instructive:

Rino Tzror: Hello to Guy Varon, our correspondent in the territories. So they started to distribute effigies and pictures of Obama?

Guy Varon: After we have seen right-wing activists burning pictures of Saddam, Nasrallah and Arafat in recent years on Lag B’Omer, this year there is a new star, US Pres. Barack Obama.

Rino Tzror: Did you see an effigy of Obama?Guy Varon: We saw the effigies and the pictures. I also want to add that we say Barack Obama. These right wing people really like to say Hussein Obama.

Rino Tzror: Right.

Guy Varon: Pictures and effigies of the superpower leader will be distributed this year ahead of Lag B’Omer by rightwing activists. They explained that as far as they are concerned he is an enemy of Israel. His behavior harms Israel more than anything. For them the message is that Obama is bad for the Jews.

Rino Tzror: And they’re going to burn him on bonfires, like they used to burn pictures of Hitler, of all kinds of enemies of Israel. Is that the way Obama is going to be treated this Lag B’Omer?

Guy Varon: That is definitely the intention of the people who are giving out the pictures and the effigies.

Rino Tzror: Stay with us. Now we are going to talk to Bentzy Gopstein. Good morning.

Bentzy Gopstein: Good morning Rino.

Rino Tzror: You are a follower of Kahane, right?

Bentzy Gopstein: Right.

Rino Tzror: Who started this project of Obama effigies?

Bentzy Gopstein: There are a few friends together. They decided that today the enemy of Israel, even though he does not pretend to be an enemy of Israel, is Barack Hussein Obama. Just like you said that you used to burn pictures of Israel’s enemies. That is how I remember that I too used to burn pictures of Arafat, Sheikh Yassin, Hussein. Today our enemy is Obama.

Rino Tzror: No, I never burned Hussein. We used to burn Hitler. We used to go for the real villains, not the ones who maybe were and maybe weren’t.

Bentzy Gopstein: I don’t think maybe he is and maybe he isn’t. I think that Hussein Obama who wants to freeze construction in Jerusalem every minute, he would even like to just freeze Israel over. He pretends to be a friend but actually he loves Islam. He is an anti-Semite, nothing less.

Rino Tzror: So who is responsible for the actual industry, who produces them, how many, do you have any idea?

Bentzy Gopstein: There are printing presses that print it and then stick it on.

Rino Tzror: What picture of Obama did you choose?

Bentzy Gopstein: A nice one.

Rino Tzror: A nice one. With or without a keffiyeh? Did you add one? Did you touch it up?

Bentzy Gopstein: No keffiyeh. A real picture of him conveys a keffiyeh, even if you don’t put one on him.

Rino Tzror: It conveys it to you. How many effigies did you make?

Bentzy Gopstein: A few hundreds. We are in production now. Some have been made. We distribute through Facebook. We opened the group “Hussein Obama comes to the bonfire.” That is where people will join and receive the effigies.

Rino Tzror: And who are the people who take the effigies or the pictures that they want to burn?

Bentzy Gopstein: A lot of people. We have inquiries from children all over the country.

Rino Tzror: Children. That’s the problem. Maybe you are ruining them.

Bentzy Gopstein: We want to educate children while they are small. When you burn it, when you have a Lag B’Omer bonfire with children, education begins with children. We want to teach them that we have to trust God, not Obama.

Rino Tzror: Thank you, Bentzy Gopstein.

Bentzy Gopstein: You’re welcome.

And not a word from the Zionist Diaspora in condemnation.

Just a day in the occupied Gaza Strip.

Jewish blogger Max Ajl is currently living and working in Gaza and writing about a world most people never see (like this).

Here’s a recent post about Israel’s ever-increasing destruction of Palestinian farm-land:

What are you seeing here? After an hour’s time to correctly set up this horrible act, Israeli military bulldozers and tanks entered Palestinian land and churned up winter wheat, rye, and lentils, because they could, because that’s how they punish the Palestinians living in Abasan Kabeer, Farraheen, and because Israeli strategy is to shrink the Gaza prison and force the people living there to rely solely on a feeding tube called UNRWA for survival.

A warning to any international lawyers who try and address history’s wrongs. You will pay a price, usually by those most closely associated with the original sin:

The crowd gathered outside Madrid’s national court was loud and angry. “The world has been turned upside down,” they cried. “The fascists are judging the judge!” Some carried photographs of long-dead relatives, killed by rightwing death squads in Spain‘s brutal civil war in the 1930s. Others bore placards bearing the name of the hero they wanted to save, the controversial “superjudge” Baltasar Garzón.

Pedro Romero de Castilla carried a picture of his grandfather, Wenceslao – a former stationmaster taken away from his home in the western city of Mérida and shot by a death squad at the service of Generalísimo Francisco Franco‘s rightwing military rebels 74 years ago. The family have never found his body.

Garzón, he explained, had dared to investigate the atrocities of 36 years of Franco’s dictatorship and now, as a result, he faces trial for allegedly abusing his powers. “My grandfather’s case is one that Garzón wanted to investigate,” he said. “He’s a brave and intelligent judge, but now the right are out to get him.”

Police tried to herd Romero and his fellow protesters away, but 400 of them marched to nearby Calle de Génova and brought traffic to a standstill. It was a taste of the anger being expressed daily across Spain, with tens of thousands of people due to march in the country last night.

Garzón still works at the national court, stepping out of his bomb-proof car every morning and climbing the courthouse steps to deal with cases involving terrorism, political corruption, international drug-trafficking and human rights cases. Soon, however, the hyperactive investigating magistrate who shot to global fame by ordering the 1998 arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London will have his cases taken away from him.

Just a hundred yards across a square, stern-faced judges at the supreme court plan to suspend Garzón next month. The temporary suspension will last while they decide whether he deliberately ran roughshod over Spain’s laws by opening an investigation into the deaths of 113,000 Spaniards executed by Franco’s men during and after the civil war. If they find him guilty – and there are signs that they intend to – his career will be over.

Who is really fighting the war in Afghanistan?

The message, very often, is sent with bloodshed.

There was the suicide bombing last week on a fortified Kandahar guesthouse shared by Western contracting companies, killing four Afghans and injuring several Americans. There was the Afghan engineer, shot dead in March as he helped inspect a school not far from the Pakistan border. Or the Afghan woman, an employee for a U.S.-based consulting firm, shot by motorbike-riding gunmen as she returned home from work in this southern city.

As the United States presses ahead with an Afghan counterinsurgency strategy that depends on speeding up development of one of the world’s poorest countries, the U.S. contractors, construction companies and aid organizations needed to rebuild Afghanistan have faced a surge in attacks that puts the plan in jeopardy.

Overall figures for contractor attacks remain elusive, since the employees come from dozens of nations and work for hundreds of different organizations.

But the death toll has jumped precipitously in the months since President Barack Obama launched a massive troop surge last December.

Of the 289 civilians working for U.S. contractors killed between the start of the Afghanistan war in late 2001 and the end of last year, 100 died in just the last six months of 2009, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband, in an interview with the Guardian, doesn’t seem to get it. Voters are angry with the major parties because of years of arrogance. And comments like these simply add insult to injury:

I met some guy in Soho yesterday, when we were launching the Labour lesbian and gay manifesto. And I said to him, ‘Look, you’ve punished us enough about Iraq, all right? So don’t start punishing yourself.’

Sri Lanka has launched a global campaign to attract tourism. The war is over, we are told, and peace has broken out.

If only this was true. Here’s the reality; a police state that murders and imprisons its opponents.

Alas, like many in the corporate media, the Sydney Morning Herald today ignores any human rights abuses on the island and launches into a massive feature (PR job) on the country:

With verdant rainforests and idyllic white-sand beaches, cloistered temples, ancient ruins, blustery mountains teeming with endangered wildlife, mist-wreathed tea gardens, grand colonial architecture, a vibrant culture, lip-smacking cuisine and warm, generous people, at a glance you might think Sri Lanka has it all.

Shame on them.

Here’s how Colombo views accountability:

At a UN reception thrown by Israel on April 20, Ban Ki Moon told Sri Lanka’s UN Ambassador Palitha Kohona “I am not against your government,” according to sources standing next to the two. Kohona has predicted that no panel will ever be named, quipping that the UN should instead investigate the Vatican for pedophilia.

Doron Isaacs, a Jewish South African, tells Al-Jazeera English in response to Richard Goldstone being barred from attending his grandson’s Bar-Mitzvah:

There is a belief amongst right-wing Zionist organisations that defaming and humiliating Jewish critics of Israeli policy will set an example that would intimidate others into silence.

The Daily Show has a few things to say to a Muslim group that threatened the creators of South Park with death if they displayed the prophet Mohammed:

Israel, what have you created?

One source told the International Crisis Group that ‘in a few years, religious soldiers will make up the majority of brigade commanders in all areas — from F-16 fighter jets to submarines.’

It’s easy to forget that human rights groups often provide far more investigatory muscle than most mainstream news services. Over to you, Global Witness:

The Dutch Supreme Court has overturned a 2008 ruling by the Court of Appeal which cleared businessman Guus Kouwenhoven of charges of involvement in illegal arms deals and war crimes during the civil war in Liberia between 2000 and 2003. The Court of Appeal will now have to re-examine the case and bring a new judgment.

Global Witness, which first documented the involvement of Kouwenhoven in illegal logging and arms trafficking in its 2001 report, Taylor Made, welcomed the court’s decision.

The 2008 ruling by the Court of Appeal had overturned an 8 year prison sentence for arms trafficking handed down by the Court of First Instance in 2006. Global Witness testified on both occasions, after securing a groundbreaking right to keep their sources confidential. Evidence from Global Witness investigations and reports was used by the Dutch prosecutors.

Kouwenhoven was head of the Oriental Timber Corporation (OTC) during the regime of President Charles Taylor, who waged a brutal war against the people of Liberia and Sierra Leone, funded largely through the sale of diamonds and illegal logging.

OTC, also known also as ‘Old Taylor’s Children’ or ‘Only Taylor Chops’, was the most notorious logging company in the country and dominated the Liberian timber industry with 1.6 million hectares of concessions.

UN experts and eyewitnesses interviewed by Global Witness reported that it was active in organising weapons shipments, and that its own security personnel blurred with Taylor’s armed forces and took part in military activities for the Liberian government.  OTC money facilitated arms purchases.

In April 2003, President Taylor’s spokesperson, Vaani Paasewe, confirmed this in a media interview: “It is true that, as Global Witness has said in its report, revenues from Liberia’s logging industry had been used to import weapons recently despite the UN arms embargo…”

A 2000 UN Expert Panel Report on Sierra Leone referred to Kouwenhoven as a “…member of President [Charles] Taylor’s inner circle” and “responsible for the logistical aspects of many of the arms deals [with the RUF].” In 2001 the UN Expert Panel Report on Liberia referred to him as “…one of the most influential businessmen in Liberia”.

Kouwenhoven was placed on UN travel ban list in 2001 and in July 2003 sanctions on timber were put in place, on the grounds that timber was being traded by rebel and government forces in exchange for arms.

Patrick Alley, Director of Global Witness, said: “Charles Taylor’s regime depended on revenues from the timber industry. OTC’s operations in Liberia were illegal and under Kouwenhoven they paid large sums both directly to a known arms dealer and into Charles Taylor’s personal bank account, thereby supporting his brutal regime. The war in Liberia cost over 250,000 lives. No one who played a role in perpetuating this conflict should go unpunished.”