Antony Loewenstein

How many foreign, private mercenary companies will be affected if Afghanistan actually kicks out the unaccountable men who roam the country?

What a blast. Here’s how a Taiwanese news service viewed the Australian election. If only more news was like this:

Frank Rich in the New York Times:

How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

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In the five months after The Times’s initial account there were no newspaper articles on the project at all. It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Murdoch axis of demagoguery revved up, jettisoning Ingraham’s benign take for a New York Post jihad. The paper’s inspiration was a rabidly anti-Islam blogger best known for claiming that Obama was Malcolm X’s illegitimate son. Soon the rest of the Murdoch empire and its political allies piled on, promoting the incendiary libel that the “radical Islamists” behind the “ground zero mosque” were tantamount either to neo-Nazis in Skokie (according to a Wall Street Journal columnist) or actual Nazis (per Newt Gingrich).

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At the Islamophobia command center, Murdoch’s News Corporation, the hypocrisy is, if anything, thicker. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial darkly cited unspecified “reports” that Park51 has “money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas.” As Jon Stewart observed, this brand of innuendo could also be applied to News Corp., whose second largest shareholder after the Murdoch family is a member of the Saudi royal family. Perhaps last week’s revelation that News Corp. has poured $1 million into G.O.P. campaign coffers was a fiendishly clever smokescreen to deflect anyone from following the far greater sum of Saudi money (a $3 billion stake) that has flowed into Murdoch enterprises, or the News Corp. money (at least $70 million) recently invested in a Saudi media company.

Wonderful piece of reportage by Max Blumenthal and Joseph Dana from a Tel Aviv meeting of Zionist right-wing group Im Tirtzu.

The growing numbers of Jews demanding loyalty to a hardline, racist, unthinking brand of Zionism is both worrying and amusing.

How desperate is the Obama administration for an historic handshake on the White House lawn between Israel, the Palestinians and the Americans to seal a “two-state solution”?

This is a sham designed to ignore the multiple elephants in the room. It will be opposed by many, including me, until the right of return, shared Jerusalem, truly ending the occupation and incorporating Gaza and Hamas are accepted.

Tony Judt, the true definition of an independent and critical intellectual, free of political constraints and party politics.

We need far more of them.

Rest assured the Obama administration is looking for some way to prosecute and silence Wikileaks despite growing evidence that the Pentagon is refusing to assist the group with hiding the identities of possible informers in Afghanistan.

Smell a rat of state power in the grip of fear and irrationality:

It is a case bound to excite the world’s conspiracy theorists. First the secretive computer hacker behind the leak of thousands of intelligence documents about the Afghan war was sought yesterday by police who accused him of rape.

Then just hours later the charge against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was mysteriously dropped – and his supporters claimed he had been the victim of an attempt to smear his name.

A WikiLeaks activist said: ‘We were warned to expect dirty tricks. Now we have the first one.’

Authorities in Sweden had issued a warrant for the arrest of Mr Assange, 39, after two women accused him of sexual assault.

Police said he was wanted for raping a woman in Stockholm last weekend and then sexually assaulting another woman in the town of Enkoping, 40 miles from the capital, three days later.

After they said he was under arrest in his absence, Assange responded  on a Twitter account claiming the charges were baseless.

Then last night police admitted they were dropping the charge of rape and withdrawing the warrant for his arrest.

But they said they were still deciding whether to question him about the sex assault allegation.

Got it in one:

Result is devastating for Gillard and coup makers

Yesterday’s election in Australia remains unresolved, a hung parliament and massively high Green vote.

More here, here, here, here and here.

Truly progressive politics did very well but the uncertainty means that Australians don’t yet know if the right-wing Labor Party or more right-wing Liberal Party are in charge.

For regular updates during the day of Australia Votes 2010, these twitter feeds are useful (here and here).