Antony Loewenstein

I spent today at Sydney’s Villawood detention centre for refugees and met men from Iraq, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. Stories of pain and trauma. All refugees can’t understand why the Australian government keeps them in limbo for months and years deciding on their fate. They fear being returned to Iraq, Afghanistan or Sri Lanka and yet the government says these countries are safe? They’re on crack. Australia should find a humane and fair refugee policy, processing people fast. It really isn’t that hard and maybe the Greens will help.

This is what war does to the occupier:

The growing mood in Israel for citizens to pledge a “loyalty oath” – why should Arabs be forced to accept a Jewish state, a nation deliberately designed to exclude them? – is gaining traction. Max Blumenthal and Joseph Dana explore the issues and gain insights on the streets of Jerusalem. The ugly heart of Zionism:

Sami ben Gharbia, the advocacy director for Global Voices, asks that Washington cease its largely counter-productive campaign to assist dissidents around the world. Image problem, anybody?

Many people outside of the U.S, not only in the Arab world, have a strong feeling that the Internet Freedom mantra emitting from Washington DC is just a cover for strategic geopolitical agendas. This Internet freedom policy won’t be applied in a vacuum. At first, it will build upon broader U.S and Western foreign policy and their strategic goals and interests; in other words, it will continue projecting the same Western priorities. Having the U.S and other Western government as major actors in the Internet freedom field could present a real threat to activists who accept their support and funding. A hyper-politicization of the digital activism movement and an appropriation of its “success” to achieve geopolitical goals or please the Washington bubble are now considered by many as the “kiss of death”. In a worst-case scenario, Western funding, hyper-politicization and support could also lead to a brutal alteration of the existing digital activism field and the emergence of a “parallel digital activism” in total disregard to the local Arab context.

Remember this next time when Barack Obama talks passionately about human rights in Iran but conveniently ignores profound problems in, say, Saudi Arabia, that bastion of democracy. Hypocrisy, my name is America.

Jews, your troubles are solved:

Not so fast!

Jews throughout Williamsburg snapped up caffeine suppositories today, hours before the start of the Yom Kippur fast that would deprive them of the jolt — and hunger suppression — that coffee typically provides.

The day-long fast is the centerpiece of the holiest day on the Jewish calendar — but some religious Jews see a Talmudic loophole that allows them to ingest their daily dose of caffeine, albeit through a different orafice.

“It helps — you know, it’s hard to concentrate when you’re fasting and also addicted to caffeine,” said Baruch Herzfeld, an Orthodox Jew who owns a bike store in Williamsburg. “Some take it before sundown, but most take it throughout their fasting. These guys love a good loophole.”

These huge, rectally inserted pills are popular. Pharmacists at Rafieh — one of many distributors in south Williamsburg on Lee Avenue — sold nearly 150 suppositories today.

“We have caffeine suppositories!” the store’s handwritten sign heralded. “Be ready!”

But is it kosher?

There’s some controversy over whether Jews observing the Biblical fast should be taking an easy out (or, more accurately, in).

Some Jewish leaders said that consuming anything — through the body’s traditional entrance or its exit — is against the spirit of the ritualistic fast.

“We’re supposed to do it the old fashioned way — I wouldn’t advise [suppositories],” said Rabbi Simcha Weinstein, a Hasidic leader. “We wanna keep Jews in the synagogue and not in the bathroom.”

This is a wonderful essay in the New York Review of Books about Dubai, a city continually built by imported slaves, and includes these fascinating insights about the role of the Jewish state in this Arab land ruled by a corrupt royal elite:

One alleged arms buyer was Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a fifty-year-old Hamas operative based in Damascus who arrived in Dubai on January 19, allegedly seeking to buy weapons from Iranian dealers. Whatever his mission, Mabhouh checked into the five-star Al Bustan Rotana Dubai Hotel near the airport. Twenty-four hours later, he was discovered dead in his room by members of the hotel staff.

A murder investigation, ordered by Dubai’s veteran police chief, Dahi Khalfan al-Tamim, revealed an elaborate plot. Al-Tamim’s team culled thousands of hours of footage from Dubai’s security cameras, tracing an assassination squad as it followed al-Mabhouh to his hotel, put on clumsy disguises, murdered him (by suffocation, forensic tests revealed), then slipped back out of the country. Using face recognition software, al-Tamim was able to identify twenty-seven men and women who had participated in the plot and name them, or at least name the Europeans whose passports had been stolen—in Israel—and duplicated in a sophisticated case of identity theft. Al-Tamim left little doubt that the murder was the work of Mossad, Israeli’s counterterrorism and intelligence agency.

Al-Tamim is known as a crack investigator. Last year, he arrested the killers of another well-known political figure, Sulim Yamadayev, a Chechen exile and a former close aide to Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, who was gunned down in the parking lot of the luxury Jumeirah Beach Residence on March 30, 2009. “The security services here, despite lots of attempts to discredit them and turn them into Keystone Kops, are damned good,” I was told by a British correspondent who has lived for nine years in Dubai.

Al-Tamim is also an Arab nationalist and a foe of Israel. But Dubai has always been quietly open to doing business with Israel (as has Abu Dhabi), allowing many Israeli entrepreneurs to set up shop here. These include a diamond import-export firm, run by the Israeli jewelry magnate Lev Leviev, that distributes gems to many nations in the Middle East. In fact, Israeli companies have also struck major deals with the UAE to strengthen their security facilities. One such firm is Asia Global Technologies, with offices in Zurich and Abu Dhabi. Founded by Mati Kochavi, a US-based Israeli who made a fortune in real estate before diversifying into security after September 11, the company also has a management team made up of retired Israeli generals and Mossad agents, according to a recent article in Le Figaro. AGT has built a series of “smart” security walls—equipped with sensors, facial recognition software, and other advanced technology—to protect fifteen oil installations in the UAE and the Emirates’ border with Oman. The reported price tag: $3 billion. Abu Dhabi also acquired, according to Le Figaro, two surveillance aircraft from Radom Aviation Systems in Petah Tikva, a suburb of Tel Aviv, apparently to allow it to eavesdrop on communications on three islands seized by Iran in the Persian Gulf.

Al-Mabhouh’s murder threatened to unravel a delicate and mutually bene- ficial relationship with Israel. After two weeks of daily press conferences—during which he called for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest—al-Tamim was apparently told by higher-ups to stop talking.

For anybody who writes about web censorship and finding ways around it, the lesson in this story is that skepticism towards new-found tools is vital. We’ve all been guilty of celebrating prematurely a piece of software that may help a dissident in Iran or China. Beware:

A piece of software called Haystack, which claimed to be an “anti-censorship” system to let people in Iran use the internet anonymously, has been withdrawn by its author after experts raised serious questions about its security.

The author, Austin Heap, a 26-year-old programmer from San Francisco, has been roundly criticised by professionals who complain that he has never allowed them access to the program’s code – which they say is a necessity with security software to check whether it can do what it claims.

After having obtained access by other means, the experts now say that instead of making users anonymous, it could reveal key information about them to the Iranian authorities.

In a post on his blog on Monday, Heap says that in the “vigorous debate” about Haystack’s security “many of the points made were valid” and that users have been asked to stop using it.

Daniel Colascione, who worked with Heap and says he came up with the “Haystack” name, tweeted on Tuesday that the Censorship Research Center (CRC) that he co-created with Heap to host Haystack is now being wound down. But he also maintained that the software that has been criticised was not intended for widespread use, and was only a test version.

In March the US government granted Haystack an export licence, required for “sensitive” cryptographic software, following a fast-track approval process which does not seem to have included independent verification of its security.

Haystack, and Heap, won plaudits from a number of organisations after the software’s release last year. Its genesis followed the Iranian protests at the presidential election there in 2009, which was widely felt to have been rigged. Many people there tried to use mobile phones and services such as Twitter to organise protests, but there were also fears they could be traced by the authorities, using software in mobile transmission systems sold by western companies such as Nokia.

The idea of Haystack was to make communications by its users look like innocent – rather than sensitive – information. Heap developed it so that Iranian users could use email and web services such as Twitter without the Iranian authorities being able to trace them.

However suspicions about the software’s robustness for anonymous use began to grow after people inside Iran started testing it. They reported that it could not get through the content-filtering firewall put up by the government there.

Wonderful New York profile of Jon Stewart and the Daily Show, a program that becomes even more essential as America’s two-party system crumbles before our very eyes (but don’t tell them; they don’t need to realise):

After September 11, Stewart began to employ his newfound anger, becoming a voice of comic sanity in the whirlwind of real and manufactured fear. Segments like “America Freaks Out” and “Mess O’Potamia” punctured the false-patriotic sanctimony being peddled by the Bush administration. Yet as appalled as Stewart was by the politicians, his greater scorn was increasingly aimed at the acquiescent and co-opted news media. “I assume there are bad actors in society,” Stewart says. “It’s inherent in politicians to be disingenuous. And a mining company wants to own the company store—as it is in SpongeBob. Mr. Krabs just wants to make more money. He’s not concerned with SpongeBob’s working conditions—although SpongeBob is putting in hours that are not humane, even for an invertebrate. I assume monkeys are gonna throw shit. I get angrier at the people who don’t go ‘Bad monkey!’ or who create distraction that allows it to continue unabated. The thing that shocked me the most when I first met reporters was the people who would step aside and say, ‘Boy, I wish I could say what you’re saying.’ You have a show! You are a network anchor! Whaddya mean you can’t say it?” Stewart says. “It’s one reason I admire Fox. They’re great broadcasters. Everything is pointed, purposeful. You follow story lines, you fall in love with characters: ‘Oh, that’s the woman who’s very afraid of Black Panthers! I can’t wait to see what happens next. Oh, look, it’s the ex-alcoholic man who believes that Woodrow Wilson continues to wreak havoc on this country! This is exciting!’ Even the Fox morning show, the way they’re able to present propaganda as though it’s merely innocent thoughts occurring to them: ‘What is this “czar”? I’m Googling, and you know what’s interesting about a czar? It’s a Russian oligarch! Don’t you think it’s weird that Obama has Russian oligarchs, and he’s a socialist?’ Whereas MSNBC will trace the word and say, ‘If you don’t understand that, you’re an idiot!’ The mistake they make is that somehow facts are more important than feelings.”

A step by step guide:

More here.

Futility and criminality yet no accountability:

British soldiers in Iraq were “dying for no strategic benefit” because Tony Blair’s government did not appreciate what it was taking on when it planned the invasion, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the chief of defence staff, has told MPs.

There was a “failure of strategic thinking” in southern Iraq, he told the Commons public administration committee. Stirrup, who retires next month, was asked if the politicians appreciated what they were taking on when British forces went into southern Iraq. He replied: “No.”

“We had people sitting in locations in Basra city unable to execute an aggressive military function but being shelled, resupply convoys on a daily basis being attacked, people dying for no strategic benefit, and no prospect of strategic benefit down this track,” Stirrup said.

He added: “The proposition was that freeing Iraq from Saddam Hussein and establishing proper democratic government would be a beacon for other countries throughout the region … It didn’t work. It was wrong. But that was the strategy.”

This is a first world country and the leading super-power?

The downturn that some have dubbed the “Great Recession” has trimmed the typical household’s income significantly, new Census data show, following years of stagnant wage growth that made the past decade the worst for American families in at least half a century.

The bureau’s annual snapshot of American living standards also found that the fraction of Americans living in poverty rose sharply to 14.3% from 13.2% in 2008—the highest since 1994. Some 43.6 million Americans were living below the official poverty threshold, but the measure doesn’t fully capture the panoply of government antipoverty measures.

The inflation-adjusted income of the median household—smack in the middle of the populace—fell 4.8% between 2000 and 2009, even worse than the 1970s, when median income rose 1.9% despite high unemployment and inflation. Between 2007 and 2009, incomes fell 4.2%.

Just remind me. We’re staying in Afghanistan to save the women from awful oppression at the hands of the Taliban.

This rather challenges that bogus narrative:

Often characterised as valiant crusaders defying Afghanistan’s chauvinistic culture, many female candidates standing in tomorrow’s parliamentary elections may in fact be just the opposite: proxies doing a warlord’s bidding. Women’s rights campaigners in Kabul claim that the majority of a record number of female candidates in the vote – a contest widely expected to be marred by bloodshed and fraud – have little interest in advancing their own political agendas or promoting women’s and human rights.

Instead, activists say, many candidates are pawns in a game of patronage, with the victors expected first and foremost to protect the interests of whichever strongman, powerbroker or mafioso has bankrolled their campaign.

It is just one of the problems surrounding a vote that will almost certainly be beset by violence and a low turn-out. The Taliban have left letters outside hundreds of mosques, warning locals not to go to the polls, and threatened violence against anyone taking part.