Antony Loewenstein

My following article appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Imagine a mainstream Australian politician saying that Aborigines should be banned from leading tourists around Uluru because they might “present anti-Australian positions” to visitors. The outcry would be furious.

But a bill is currently before the Israeli Knesset, led by a parliamentarian from the “moderate” Kadima party, that would bar Arab residents of East Jerusalem from working as tour guides in the city. Knesset member Gideon Ezra said it was essential tourist groups are “accompanied by a tour guide who is an Israeli citizen and has institutional loyalty to the [Jewish] state of Israel”.

It is just the latest sign in an ever-tightening noose around Arabs from the Zionist mainstream in the self-described Jewish nation.

Journalist Gideon Levy writes in the Israeli daily Haaretz that no politician “has even begun to think of Arabs as being equal to Jews”. The Israeli Jewish public increasingly shares these authoritarian views. In a study published in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, 36 per cent of Israeli Jews urged the revoking of Arab voting rights and restriction of free speech in “times of political difficulty”.

Israel is not a democracy for all its citizens but an insecure nation demanding obedience to an ideology that deliberately excludes the legitimate rights of its Arab population.

The occupation in the West Bank is deepening daily, after more than 43 years, with colonies expanding at the fastest rate in two years. The illegal siege on Gaza contributes to Palestinian children suffering debilitating malnutrition.

This is the Israel that Western politicians prefer to ignore. When I recently confronted Opposition Leader Tony Abbott over his blind backing for Israeli “democracy”, he muttered something about the Middle East not being “perfect.” But, I countered, what about Jewish-only settler roads in the West Bank? That was “bad”, he acknowledged, before looking away nervously.

Julia Gillard’s Labor Party shares these delusions. It is one of the reasons that the Independent Australian Jewish Voices group published newspaper advertisements nationally this month demanding the Australian government “exert pressure on Israel to conform to international law and humanitarian standards”.

The growing global concern over Israeli values has been crystallised by the Netanyahu cabinet voting to force non-Jews seeking citizenship to swear allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state”.

The decision was met with furious indignation from a vocal minority in Israel, not least Palestinians who were being asked to negate their historical rights. Leftist Jewish Israelis marched through Tel Aviv chanting, “Fascism and ethnic cleansing are standing proud”.

In the Diaspora there was virtual silence. Blind loyalty came before defending democratic values. The Achilles heel is its deference to Israeli government decisions, a Maoist-like devotion to a country increasingly delegitimised by its own occupying policies.

One of the main reasons the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign is thriving around the world – alongside the one-state solution idea – is that Israel ignores global demands to change its behaviour. Cultural and economic isolation worked against apartheid South Africa.

Just the latest example of a principled stance in reaction to the loyalty oath, was the refusal of the English filmmaker Mike Leigh to participate in a program at a Jerusalem film school. He also cited expanding West Bank settlements and the brutal attack on the Gaza flotilla.

Leigh was praised by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel for highlighting “the fact that collaborating with institutions of a state that practises occupation, colonisation and apartheid, as Israel does, cannot be regarded as a neutral act …”

No other Western state has tried to introduce anything like the loyalty oath. The oath is on an ever-growing list of anti-democratic proposals before the Knesset, including a one-year prison term for “incitement for the negation of the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state”.

Palestinians and leftist Jews are loathed fifth-columns to be smeared and isolated.

No obfuscation about the supposedly devilish plans of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran or al-Qaeda can distract from the reality of Israel’s inherent racism. The world should stop pumping in funds to perpetuate the infrastructure of oppression.

Antony Loewenstein is a freelance journalist and author of My Israel Question.

Pratap Chatterjee on Democracy Now! talks about the Wild West of military contracting in Iraq:

Custer Battles had a man whose job it was was to buy guns on the black market. And he explained to me how he would go outside, you know, dressed in local clothes, buy black market guns and supply them. We have now discovered that other companies, like Blackwater, have done the same thing. So there were no rules. There was—you bought guns from the militants. You paid them off. And then you used them against civilians. It was chaos, to say the least. And I think the Bush administration has to take a lot of responsibility for what it did. And I would hope that, like Nick Clegg, the Obama administration would start to investigate these clear violations of international law and Iraqi law and US law.

Britain’s Channel 4 Dispatches on the Wikileaks Iraq revelations. Real journalism, not tabloid fodder. Murders that we created. Watch the Najaf cemetery, the biggest in the world, and its heaving bodies:

The Philly BDS Coalition dances into action in a local grocery store chain to push them to deshelve Sabra and Tribe of Hummus; both brands support Israeli war crimes. This marks the launch of our campaign: www.phillybds.org

The idea of dumping nuclear waste material on Aboriginal land is being resisted, and rightly so.

The question unanswered in the ABC Radio piece below is which local and foreign companies would financially benefit from this if it moves forward. I’m investigating:

TONY EASTLEY: Plans to build a national nuclear waste facility in a remote part of the Northern Territory have been further delayed.

A Commonwealth facility is needed to store waste from Sydney’s Lucas Heights nuclear reactor and discarded nuclear medicines used in hospitals around the country.

As well, the Federal Government is under pressure to build the facility in time to receive spent nuclear fuel rods sent from overseas.

But a Federal Court legal challenge by a group of traditional Aboriginal owners of Muckaty Station, north of Tennant Creek, has left the multi-million dollar project in limbo.

Michael Coggan reports from Darwin.

(Kylie Sambo rap starts)

“Let’s begin our story now. Don’t waste the Territory. This land means a lot to me. Been livin’ here for centuries. This place we call Mukaty”

MICHAEL COGGAN: Rap singer Kylie Sambo is part of a group of Aboriginal people from the Tennant Creek region fighting a campaign against the proposed construction of a national nuclear waste facility at Muckaty Station.

(Song continues)

“.. by the dealings. They been hurting my feelings. I’m a Gurramurra (phonetic), and I should have my say”

MICHAEL COGGAN: The campaigners are opposed to a Federal Government proposal to build the nuclear waste dump on a ten-hectare site on the Muckaty Land Trust.

The Land Trust is overseen by the Northern Land Council.

But a large group of Aboriginal traditional owners of the Land Trust say the NLC failed to consult them as part of the agreement to build the waste dump and they’ve launched a Federal Court challenge.

The court case was listed for a mention this week, but all parties have now agreed to go to mediation.

George Newhouse is the lawyer representing the challengers.

GEORGE NEWHOUSE: It looks as though the parties will be mediating and then the result of that mediation will come back to the Court before the 31st of January next year.

MICHAEL COGGAN: The NLC won’t comment on the mediation, but referred the ABC to their submission to the Senate inquiry into the Labor Government’s new Radioactive Waste Management Bill.

The submission said: The Land Council supported the Ngapa Clan traditional owners who overwhelmingly support the nomination of their country for the Commonwealth’s waste facility.

It also said during consultations in 2006 and 2007 the NLC established substantial support for the waste facility from neighbouring Aboriginal groups on Muckaty Station, with only a few individuals in other groups expressing concerns.

But George Newhouse says his clients have been encouraged by the move to mediation.

GEORGE NEWHOUSE: Well I’ve just come back from Tennant Creek and I can tell you that the clients that we spoke to in Tennant Creek were incredibly pleased that the NLC is mediating this matter with them.

Up until this point they had felt disenfranchised and dispossessed by the process and this is a positive step in their minds.

MICHAEL COGGAN: The Federal Government wants to build a facility before 2014 in time to receive spent nuclear fuel rods from Scotland and France containing Australian uranium.

The Federal Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson, didn’t want to comment on the case under mediation but in a statement he repeated a commitment to respect the Court’s decision on who the lawful traditional owners of the nominated site are.

Many in the mainstream media are defensive about their role in focusing on the personal life of Julian Assange of Wikileaks over the countless examples of abuses and crimes in the latest Iraq logs. Go for it, Assange, against Larry King:

With the recent news that Serco will be running a major public hospital in Western Australia, this website has been established to monitor the situation and campaign against it.

A story that only Gideon Levy in Haaretz would write. Piercing and spot-on:

The voice of joy, the voice of rejoicing is heard in Israel: The Americans and British have also committed for war crimes, not only us. WikiLeaks’ revelations have inflamed all our noisy propagandists: Where is Goldstone, they rejoiced, and what would he have said? They were relieved. If the Americans are allowed to do it, so are we.

Indeed, the Americans are not allowed, and neither are we. When the traffic police stop a driver for speeding, the argument that “others do it” will not help him. When Richard Goldstone exposes war crimes in Gaza, the claim that “everyone does it” will not help us. Not everyone does it, and when they do, they should be excoriated and penalized.

According to the logic of Israeli propagandists, some of whom are disguised as journalists, Israel should now proudly look at the rest of the world: They killed more people there. There is no need to improve prison conditions in Israel – in China the situation is much worse; there is no need to upgrade health services – in America 50 million people have no insurance; no need to reduce the gap between rich and poor – in Mexico it is greater; we can continue to assassinate without trial – the British also do it; human rights are protected here – the Iranians are much worse; Israel has no corruption – look what’s happening in Africa; the United States has the death penalty – let’s have it too; it is even permissible to kill dissident journalists – look at the Russians.

Yes, war is cruel, the world is full of crimes and injustice, but not one of them exonerates Israel, even if Israel’s sins seem pure as snow compared to those of the great United States. Now is the time to sharply censure America, not to forgive Israel.

It is the task of all patriots and people of conscience to express their fury over any such revelations, especially, of course, in their own country. Israelis must aspire to a more just and much more law-abiding country, without reference to what is going on in the world. True, we are not the worst; far from it. The number of civilians killed in Iraq, as was revealed, is a thousand times more horrific than the number killed in Gaza. So what? Even if the world holds us to a harsher standard, our hands do not become any cleaner. The world is more strict with us for various reasons, some justified, and at the same time treats us favorably and turns a blind eye to many other things. And in any case, the determining factor should be what we see in the mirror, if we look at it honestly.

Our rejoicing propagandists have changed their tactics now: no longer “the most moral army in the world,” a contention any reasonable person can see is ridiculous. Now they say: “We are terrible, like all the rest.” That claim does not hold water, especially because Israel is not judged only by one or another of its military operations, but by its decades-long occupation, with no end in sight. Such a lengthy occupation is unparalleled in the modern world and a disgrace to Israel, no matter what America is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks has proven that in the end the truth will out; it is hard to hide anything in this era. Goldstone also showed it, albeit much less dramatically. Some two years after Operation Cast Lead, even the Israel Defense Forces is still dealing with it here and there, investigating and trying officers and soldiers who did what the Goldstone report, which so infuriated Israel, said they did.

Israel should thank Goldstone, and America should thank Julian Assange. Their revelations prove the futility of war and its crimes. Imagine how much hatred America has sown in Iraq, with its thousands of mourning families, and how much hatred Israel has sown in Gaza, with its thousands of mourning families and its ruination.

How futile are all the assassinations and the torture, abuse and false arrests, with Iraq and Gaza looking as they do.

What are we brandishing? More than 100,000 dead in a terrible, useless war, the whim of a democratic leader? True, George W. Bush should now be sent to The Hague. But the fact that others are doing it, as Assange’s revelations show, is the consolation of fools, and theirs alone.

The stance of a brave human rights believer, writer and journalist:

For her talk on Kashmir, writer Arundhati Roy has come under the threat of “sedition” charges in India. These speeches are currently being analyzed by Delhi police. Her response to the threat is below and was issued from Srinagar:

I write this from Srinagar, Kashmir. This morning’s papers say that I may be arrested on charges of sedition for what I have said at recent public meetings on Kashmir. I said what millions of people here say every day. I said what I, as well as other commentators have written and said for years. Anybody who cares to read the transcripts of my speeches will see that they were fundamentally a call for justice. I spoke about justice for the people of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world; for Kashmiri Pandits who live out the tragedy of having been driven out of their homeland; for Dalit soldiers killed in Kashmir whose graves I visited on garbage heaps in their villages in Cuddalore; for the Indian poor who pay the price of this occupation in material ways and who are now learning to live in the terror of what is becoming a police state.

Yesterday I traveled to Shopian, the apple-town in South Kashmir which had remained closed for 47 days last year in protest against the brutal rape and murder of Asiya and Nilofer, the young women whose bodies were found in a shallow stream near their homes and whose murderers have still not been brought to justice. I met Shakeel, who is Nilofer’s husband and Asiya’s brother. We sat in a circle of people crazed with grief and anger who had lost hope that they would ever get ‘insaf’—justice—from India, and now believed that Azadi—freedom— was their only hope. I met young stone pelters who had been shot through their eyes. I traveled with a young man who told me how three of his friends, teenagers in Anantnag district, had been taken into custody and had their finger-nails pulled out as punishment for throwing stones.

In the papers some have accused me of giving ‘hate-speeches’, of wanting India to break up. On the contrary, what I say comes from love and pride. It comes from not wanting people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians. It comes from wanting to live in a society that is striving to be a just one. Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free.

Arundhati Roy
October 26 2010

So Israel is racist and corrupt, that’s quite a combination. Must make so many Zionists very proud:

Israel ranks among the most corrupt countries in the Western world, according to a study released by the International Transparency Organization on Tuesday.

Out of 178 countries – 1 being least corrupt – Israel was listed at number 30. But when compared to other member states of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Israel fared much worse.

The least corrupt countries were listed as Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore.

Israel received a score of 6.1 out of 10 in the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), which ranks countries according to the perception of corruption in the public sector.

That score positions Israel in the 22nd place out of 33 members of the OECD.

In May 2010, the OECD unanimously voted in favor of accepting Israel as a member of the group. However, Israel is the organization’s poorest member, with the widest social gaps.

Israel’s CPI score has not significantly improved since 2007. In 1997, Israel received a relatively high score of 7.9 ranking number 15 in the world, but has deteriorated considerably since then.

However, Transparency International identified Bhutan, Chile, Ecuador, Macedonia, Gambia, Haiti, Jamaica, Kuwait, and Qatar as states where improvement had been made over the past year.

“As opposed to Israel, other countries are improving, and that is a problem,” said Transparency International Israel CEO Galia Sagi on Tuesday.

The US corporate press has spent years suppressing the crimes and excesses of the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan – the Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief says that Wikileaks proves the US administration has been lying for years – and yet this Washington Post editorial says everybody should just calm down and move on. Dream on, suckers:

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange claimed at a news conference over the weekend that the release by his organization of 391,000 classified documents on the war in Iraq was intended to “correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war and which has continued after the war.” In fact the mass leak, like a dump of documents on Afghanistan in the summer, mainly demonstrates that the truth about Iraq already has been told.

The news organizations granted privileged access to the documents, including the New York Times and Britain’s Guardian, have focused on reports that Iraqi security forces abused and tortured prisoners; that private security contractors often acted recklessly and violated rules of engagement; and that U.S. soldiers sometimes killed Iraqi civilians at checkpoints. All these stories are troubling. But the incidents were extensively reported by Western journalists and by the U.S. military when they occurred.

One of the most interesting of the leaks appears to show that despite the Bush administration’s statements to the contrary, U.S. officials did keep a count of the number of Iraqis killed in the war. But the figure for deaths between 2003 and 2009, 109,032, is in the ballpark of counts compiled by independent organizations such as Iraq Body Count — which raised its estimate from 107,000 to 122,000 after seeing the leaked American data. The report confirms that the vast majority of Iraqi civilian deaths were caused by other Iraqis, not by coalition forces; claims such as those published by the British journal The Lancet that American forces slaughtered hundreds of thousands are the real “attack on truth.”

War opponents dismissed as propaganda the Bush administration’s assertions that Iran was behind much of the violence. But as the Times reported, “the field reports disclosed by Wikileaks, which were never intended to be made public, underscore the seriousness with which Iran’s role has been seen by the American military.” There is evidence that Iran supplied Iraqi militias with rockets, car bombs, surface to air missiles, and roadside explosives that killed or wounded hundreds of Americans.

Mr. Assange believes his leaks, like the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers, will radically change perceptions of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which he says he is trying to end. Instead he has offered abundant evidence that there is no secret history of Iraq or Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Wikileaks appears to have put the lives of courageous Afghans at risk, by identifying them as American sources. In Iraq, it has at least temporarily complicated negotiations to form a new government.

We are all for the disclosure of important government information; but Mr. Assange’s reckless and politically motivated approach, while causing tangible harm, has shed relatively little light.

Iran tortures people and makes them suffer in detention. We in the West are nice and pure, believing in the rule of law.

Oh, but wait a minute:

The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian has discovered.

Training materials drawn up secretly in recent years tell interrogators they should aim to provoke humiliation, insecurity, disorientation, exhaustion, anxiety and fear in the prisoners they are questioning, and suggest ways in which this can be achieved.

One PowerPoint training aid created in September 2005 tells trainee military interrogators that prisoners should be stripped before they are questioned. “Get them naked,” it says. “Keep them naked if they do not follow commands.” Another manual prepared around the same time advises the use of blindfolds to put prisoners under pressure.

A manual prepared in April 2008 suggests that “Cpers” – captured personnel – be kept in conditions of physical discomfort and intimidated. Sensory deprivation is lawful, it adds, if there are “valid operational reasons”. It also urges enforced nakedness.

More recent training material says blindfolds, earmuffs and plastic handcuffs are essential equipment for military interrogators, and says that while prisoners should be allowed to sleep or rest for eight hours in each 24, they need be permitted only four hours unbroken sleep. It also suggests that interrogators tell prisoners they will be held incommunicado unless they answer questions.

The 1949 Geneva conventions prohibit any “physical or moral coercion”, in particular any coercion employed to obtain information.