Antony Loewenstein

Major Australian Zionist lobbyist Albert Dadon likes to move in the halls of power, romancing the political and media elite. It’s not hard to impress when junkets are arranged to enjoy the wonders of occupying Israel.

And now this:

The Palestinians are saying one thing in English while contradicting themselves in Arabic, according to Palestinian Media Watch director Itamar Marcus.

Speaking to a small gathering hosted by Albert Dadon, founder of the Australia-Israel Leadership Forum on Tuesday, the Israel-based activist broadcast numerous media clips, which he said showed the Palestinian people are not ready for peace.

While the US Government and the Middle East Quartet (the UN, US, EU and Russia) have made recognition of the Jewish State a prerequisite for peace talks, state-sanctioned Palestinian television stations continue to ignore the Jewish State.

Marcus showed footage from a recent documentary, which speaks of the Palestinian state spreading along the Mediterranean from Gaza and Ashkelon to Haifa. He also displayed pages from schoolbooks with the Palestinian flag covering all the State of Israel and the Palestinian territories.

“There is a constant message to see a world in which Israel does not exist,” Marcus explained. “This is a basic problem of recognition. There is no message to perceive a world where Israel is a reality.”

Just last month, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told the world he believes an Israeli state and a Palestinian state can live side-by-side. However, the message from Fatah-run TV is very different.

“There is no comparison to what is being said in English, it is a whole other category,” Marcus explained, saying he had addressed the issue with the US and Israeli Administrations, which are both taking it very seriously.

A second major concern, according to the Palestinian Media Watch founder, is that glorification of  violence continues in the territories.

Unfortunately for Dadon, there is something called the internet. Itamar Marcus is connected with the most radical and violent of West Bank settlers. Here’s Hanan Ashrawi writing about him recently:

At a press conference [in the US] last week, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon appeared alongside Itamar Marcus, a right-wing settler and director of an Israeli NGO called Palestinian Media Watch, to receive a report produced by PMW. Later in the week, Marcus appeared on Capitol Hill to present his report to Congress. In the U.S., PMW has been running ads on major television networks of late echoing the accusations of incitement against President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad.

What Ayalon and Marcus failed to mention is that PMW is closely connected to the New York-based Central Fund of Israel, which gives money to some of the most extreme elements in Israel’s settler movement, including a yeshiva in a West Bank settlement that is home to Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, who published a book last year justifying the killing of gentile babies on the grounds they might grow up to pose a threat to the state.

Ironically, if PMW’s television ads were produced by Palestinians and aimed at Israelis, they would no doubt constitute incitement according Israel’s definition. Indeed, that definition seems to include any action or statement critical of Israeli policy. Thus, the encouragement of non-violent protest against Israel’s 43-year-old military occupation, the banning of goods produced in settlements by the PA, and attempts to make Israel respect Palestinian rights at international forums like the United Nations all qualify.

Nice friends Dadon is making here and somebody that people should now about. He is introducing Zionist purveyors of hate to talk about Palestinian violence?

The reach of private company Serco is global and its human rights record remains abysmal. Yet it continues receiving lucrative contracts. That should stop:

Prison campaigners last night called for a review of a North-East secure unit after revelations that 21 children had suffered injuries while being restrained.

The injuries were sustained by children at the privatelyrun Hassockfield Secure Training Centre, near Consett, County Durham, between June last year and May.

Officials defended the centre’s record last night, insisting the use of force was a last resort.

The unit has been at the centre of controversy since a 14-year-old died in its custody six years ago.

Adam Rickwood, from Burnley, Lancashire, hanged himself hours after being restrained by staff who used a controversial technique that involved striking him in the face. The “nose distraction”

method was authorised at the time but has since been banned.

Youth Justice Board statistics show that between April 2008 and March last year restraint was used 543 times on children in Hassockfield – an average of 45 times a month.

The Howard League for Penal Reform last night accused the educational watchdog Ofsted, which oversees secure training centres, of failing children in Hassockfield’s care.

In a letter, it said: “Children held in Hassockfield Secure Training Centre (STC) have been subject to violence, danger, fear and, possibly, abuse, yet Ofsted has failed to acknowledge this and prevent it.

“The inspection regime for STCs has failed to provide assurance that children in these institutions are being cared for safely.

“Two children have died while being held in an STC and, in both instances, restraint was a key factor.”

The group has a long standing opposition to privatelyrun prisons for children.

Director Frances Crook said: “It is time that we ended the obscene experiment with locking up children… and closed down these prisons.”

It has written to North-West Durham MP Pat Glass, calling for an overhaul of those responsible for the inspection of Hassockfield and similar units for children.

Mrs Glass said she would be seeking a meeting with staff to discuss their resources and training.

The MP, who has a background in the education of people with behavioural and special needs, said: “This is about the level of training and resources that staff are receiving.”

An Ofsted spokesman said: “The Howard League has a long-established view that secure training centres should be closed. Ofsted respects this.

“Our responsibility is to inspect and report on the evidence.

“The use of restraint is something that we scrutinise rigorously. We extensively review records of restraint, including the viewing of CCTV footage.

“We meet with both the Youth Justice Board and the local authority who are responsible for monitoring the use of restraint, and the advocates who visit the young people weekly. Most importantly, we talk to young people themselves, without staff present.”

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “Restraint is only ever used as a last resort when young people’s behaviour puts themselves or others at serious risk.

“In response to recommendations made in 2007, the National Offender Management Service has developed conflict resolution training designed to provide staff with measures reducing the need for force.

“Staff will apply restraint techniques as a last resort when all other options have been exhausted.

“Even where a young person is restrained, the emphasis will continue to be on using de-escalation techniques to minimise the use of force.”

The Government awarded a 15-year contract for running Hassockfield to private operator Serco in 1999.

The unit houses up to 58 young people aged 12 to 17, who are described by Serco as “some of the most damaged and difficult young people in the country”.

A spokesman said: “Our staff operate to a high standard of professionalism. Physical control is only used as a last resort. They do a good job, often in difficult circumstances, working with a demanding and challenging group of young people.”

Danny Schechter adds some intriguing details behind the Wikileaks story:

The Pentagon had been bracing for the release for months. Fearing more compromises of national security and more embarrassment for practices they wanted hidden, they had set up a WikiLeaks war room staffed with 120 operatives in anticipation.

A special intelligence unit called the Red Cell was involved. The task has been to prod the American spy networks to operate in a cleverer and more intelligent manner. (Ironically, WikiLeaks had leaked some of their internal reports earlier.)

One report dealt with perceptions abroad that the US supported terrorists. Another was oriented toward how to sell support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Western Europe, counseling that “counting on apathy is not enough.”

I can testify to their savvy. I met members of the unit at a University of Westminister conference on war and terrorism in London in September.  There were three of them. Two stood out because of their crew cuts and military demeanor. A third was a Muslim woman. They were clearly on a reconnaissance mission probably linked to WikiLeaks detection since it had been reported that English students were helping the covert citizen agency target covert government activities.

I spoke at some length with their leader, an active-duty army major, who told me that his unit in Iraq handled high-value prisoners, including Saddam Hussein. (They escorted him to the hangman, he revealed.) He was very friendly and made no secret of his affiliation but clearly was not at a leftist academic conference to collect footnotes.

As we know now, the Pentagon was unable to stop the release, but may have pressured WikiLeaks not to name names. We may never know what happened until WikiLeaks finds some document about their anti-WikiLeaks operations.

So after all the bluster and threats against Wikileaks, the group’s greatest crime was revealing the sordid nature of the Afghan quagmire:

A defence taskforce has concluded that leaked US military documents on Afghanistan said nothing about Australian forces that hadn’t already been disclosed.

The investigation, launched in July after the whistleblower organisation Wikileaks released some 77,000 US military documents on the Afghanistan conflict, found there had been no direct significant adverse impact on Australia’s national interests.

Defence said operational areas of the department had confirmed that necessary measures were taken to mitigate against risks to operational security. 

As well, no local sources were clearly identified and steps had been taken to mitigate the risk of that occurring.

“The taskforce found that significant operational issues relating to Australia referred to in the leaked materials had already been publicly reported by Defence and, in most cases, reported in greater detail than in the leaked materials,” it said in a statement.

The documents leaked were predominantly US military field and intelligence reports, which featured occasional mentions of coalition nations.

Welcome to the world of Rupert Murdoch, a man of principle who runs a global organisation of the highest ethical code:

Leading the attack on whistleblower web site WikiLeaks, Fox News editorialist and former Bush-era US State Department official Christian Whiton said on Monday that the US should classify the proprietors of WikiLeaks as “enemy combatants,” opening up the possibility of “non-judicial actions” against them.

Hold the laughter. Washington is super serious about Iraq lives. America would never allow prisoners to be abused and tortured. Thankfully nobody actually believes a word the US says about the Iraq war; Wikileaks documents a world of chaos, torture, murder and violence.

The US has defended its record of probing civilian deaths and abuse in Iraq after graphic revelations in leaked secret documents triggered worldwide condemnation.

The whistle-blower WikiLeaks website on Friday released nearly 400,000 classified files on the Iraq war, the biggest leak of its kind in US military history, detailing the deaths of 15,000 more Iraqi civilians than the Pentagon had reported.

Colonel Dave Lapan, Pentagon spokesman, said on Monday the US military never claimed to have an exact count of the number of civilians killed in Iraq.

He noted that estimates made by private organisations of civilian deaths in Iraq also varied.

“Over the years, it has been impossible for the various organisations … to come to agreement on a specific figure,” Lapan said.

But Lapan said WikiLeaks and the Pentagon were working from the same database to collect civilian death toll figures and was sceptical that the group had made any new discovery.

US forces went into morgues to count bodies, said General George Casey, the army chief of staff, who served as the top US military commander in Iraq from 2004-2007.

“I don’t recall downplaying civilian casualties,” Casey told reporters.

Still, the US military routinely gave lower casualty figures during the war than Iraqi police or hospital
officials.

Some of the documents released on Friday contain accounts of Iraqi forces abusing Iraqi prisoners and the US military not investigating those instances.

But US officials on Monday said the military had not systematically ignored cases of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Iraqi forces.

“That’s just not the case,” Casey told reporters. “Our policy all along was that where American soldiers encountered prisoner abuse (they were) to stop it and then report it immediately up the US chain of command and the Iraqi chain of command.”

Thousands of Iraqi officials have been removed from Iraq’s interior ministry after revelations that mainly Sunni prisoners were being held in secret prisons near the 2006-2007 height of the sectarian conflict pitting Iraq’s majority Shia Muslims against minority Sunni Muslims.

The US military, having drawn international condemnation in 2004 over the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail outside Baghdad, lost the right to detain Iraqis under a bilateral security pact that went into effect in 2009.

Barack Obama, the US president, who opposed the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq launched by his predecessor President George W Bush, formally ended the US combat mission in Iraq in August and has promised to withdraw the last 48,000 US troops from Iraq by the end of next year.

Obama signed three executive orders shortly after taking office, vowing to return America to the “moral high ground” in the so-called war on terrorism.

The implication was that the United States would do more to make sure terror suspects were not tortured or abused – either at the hands of US forces or by governing authorities to whom the detainees were handed over for detention or interrogation.

Yet, in one leaked document from a US military intelligence report filed February 9, 2009 – just weeks after Obama ordered US personnel to comply with the Geneva Conventions – an Iraqi said he was detained by coalition forces at his Baghdad home and was told he would be sent to the Iraqi army if he did not co-operate.

According to the document, the detainee was then handed over to Iraqis where he said he was beaten and given electric shocks.

US interrogators also cleared detainees for questioning, despite signs that they had suffered abuse from Iraqi security forces, the documents show.

One report by a US interrogation detention team based in Baghdad on April 2, 2009, summarises claims made by a prisoner who said he was hog-tied and beaten with a shovel as part of days-long torture ordeal at the hands of the Iraqi army.

The report noted he had a catalogue of “minor injuries,” including “rope burns on the back of his legs and a possible busted ear drum.”

“We have not turned a blind eye,” PJ Crowley, the US state department spokesman, said on Monday, noting that one of the reasons why US troops were still in Iraq was to carry out human rights training with Iraqi security forces.

“Our troops were obligated to report abuses to appropriate authorities and to follow up, and they did so in Iraq,” Crowley said. “If there needs to be an accounting, first and foremost there needs to be an accounting by the Iraqi government itself, and how it has treated its own citizens.”

Daniel Ellsberg, who is credited for leaking the 1971 Pentagon Papers that exposed secrets about the
Vietnam War, said he was not sure the recently leaked documents would have much of an impact – either in Iraq or in the United States.

“This is official evidence that there was a cover-up of crimes, either by turning suspects over or torturing them directly,” Ellsberg told The Associated Press on Monday night.

“I don’t have confidence that even a massive change of public opinion will have an effect, but even if there is a small chance it could change policy, it is worth it.”

The effect of Australia’s immigration detention centres on human lives is often ignored. Villawood in outer Sydney has seen years of privatised prison time. Here are two moving stories:

The Stories Project: Villawood Mums from CuriousWorks on Vimeo.

The proposed arms sale by the US to Saudi Arabia of $60 billion worth of death is a huge story that hasn’t received the attention it deserves. I was interviewed on the weekend by Sydney’s 2SER Radio about it:

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What kind of democratic state would do this? That’s right, Israel isn’t a democracy for Arabs, so this kind of blatant racism is just another day at the office:

In the three years since Hamas took control of Gaza, Israeli officials have employed mathematical formulas to monitor foodstuffs and other basic goods entering the Strip to ensure that the amount of supplies entering was neither less nor more than the amount Israel permitted, according to documents released last week.

The documents – released Thursday in response to a Freedom of Information Act petition by the non-profit group Gisha – were drafted while Amos Gilad served as interim coordinator of government activities in the territories, heading the body that checked the goods.

Wow. The kind of column that most Western newspapers would never run. But here’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in yesterday’s Independent on the justified and burning rage caused by Wikileaks:

Bad boy Julian Assange, the pretty, blondish founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks was hugely admired when he uncovered oppressors and political chicanery in places like China and Kenya, but now he takes on Western duplicity and crimes. Can’t have that. This spawn of Beelzebub, say our masters, a traitor whose insolence is a crime against the secretive states of the US and UK. Disregard the pique and dyspepsia of officialdom. It is a distraction, smoke from fires deliberately started to stop us seeing what lies before us.

The audacious website first released confidential and candid material on the hellish war in Afghanistan and now opens up a new front, more than 400,000 classified US files documenting the previously untold horrors of the Iraq war. Revealed are countless atrocities and the deaths of 66,000 Iraqi civilians at the hands of US and British soldiers and Iraqi personnel who had joined the allies. Men were burnt, some had parts removed, others were killed slowly; women were shot, children too, killed before they grew. Anything goes, it seems, during a military conflict and no questions are asked. As an Israeli army trainer said, when asked about the death of Rachel Corrie, the young, pro-Palestinian activist mown down by an Israeli tank: “During war there are no civilians”.

The authorities in Iraq did not investigate reports of abuse and killings. An Iraqi friend tells me the rape of girls, women, boys and men was widespread, a tool used both to intimidate and punish. Apparently, there are images from Abu Ghraib prison of these sadistic “punishments”; they were never released because of the feelings they could arouse in Muslim countries. So morally deformed are these men of war that they care more about inconvenient outrage than they do about crimes against the people they supposedly went to save. They should have heeded the words of Martin Van Creveld, an erudite Israeli war historian who compared the disastrous American Vietnam War with the Iraq adventure: “He who fights the weak – and the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed – and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins, also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel.” By this reasoning, to fight the weak who are not in any sense your enemy is extreme brutishness and totally self-defeating.

Key figures in the British Army and Government must have been privy to this information. They held their tongues and presumably sidestepped any ethical niggles. The Americans were in command and you don’t get to lick the arse of the world’s only superpower and then turn round and kick it. That, you understand, is the pact, the unbreakable deal behind our special relationship.

Manfred Novak, the UN special rapporteur on torture, says Obama’s administration must investigate and come clean – after all, this President vowed to change the image and behaviour of the US which, for too long, has co-operated with tyrants and violated human rights across the world, including in Guantanamo Bay, which is still open and where captured, lost boys became broken men.

Fewer and fewer global citizens now believe the rapturous anthems and sombre panegyrics of God’s own America. After this week, the number will have tumbled further, which, in some ways, is a pity. There is much to praise about the US, its history of perpetual resistance to unacceptable state power, its energy, creativity, business, intellectual and cultural buzz. When such a great nation does great wrong, its mirror is shattered and even if the shards are stuck back together again, the cracks will always remain. And when the custodian of the free world behaves so appallingly, how do we liberal Muslims promote democratic values across the Muslim world?

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (sounding like a clone of Condi Rice) slammed the Wikileaks exposé and warned that lives of US civilians and forces and their allies were now in serious danger. At one level, I fear she is right. The internet traffic over the past two days has been so fast, furious and volatile, it could indeed fuel terrorism, recruitment into jihadi cells, even more violence in unstable Iraq, suicide bombers in Afghanistan and ugly attitudes towards the West, home to millions of Muslims. But keeping the stories hidden was always wrong. Innocent Iraqi people should never have been made to suffer by the allies and even the guilty should have faced due process to prove commitment to justice and decent values. When there was evidence of liberators behaving monstrously, action should have been taken and in the public eye. Clinton must know this, as a lawyer. It is a primary principle of her profession.

I wonder if some staunch supporters of the Iraq war will now think again about the purpose and execution of that illegal and vainglorious expedition. The sanctions and war killed, maimed and destroyed more civilians than Saddam did, even during the most diabolical periods of his rule. Blair, Bush and their armies have never had to face proper, international judicial interrogations. Now imagine good Muslims worldwide, who know all about universal rights, but can see that there is no universal accountability, that Third World despots are made to pay while others earn millions writing autobiographies and lecturing the world on good leadership and governance. Hundreds of savvy, smart, keenly aware young people email me from various Muslim states asking: “What’s the point? They say one thing and do the opposite. They say they want to help us and kill our people. Why should we trust the British and Americans?”

What do our army commanders and American leaders advise me to tell these disenchanted Muslims? And Mr Blair, I wonder if he has some wise thoughts? He is, they tell me, still one of the greatest prime ministers this country has had. And his wife, the hot human rights lawyer, does she think these abuses her husband just might have known about should be investigated? No answers will be forthcoming. Those who took us into this war are not obliged to explain themselves, not liable. In that they are worse than the dictator they toppled. Not comfortable that thought, but true.

This is quite an achievement. A story on ABC radio today about Israeli electric car company Better Place that completely ignores any mention of its operations in the occupied, Palestinian territories and involvement of former members of the IDF suspected of war crimes.

I spent time last week here in Sydney with visiting American Jewish writer and activist Anna Baltzer, a passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause; quiet, determined and strongly calling for BDS and a one-state solution.

She was interviewed tonight on ABC PM Radio:

MARK COLVIN: It’s only weeks since the launch of the latest round of talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but they already seem stalled. Israel’s decision to resume full-fledged settlement building in the West Bank brought them to a near halt.

Now the Palestinians have said they’re considering sidestepping Israel by seeking UN Security Council recognition of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.

Anna Baltzer is a Jewish American who argues for the Palestinian side of the debate. She’s touring Australia at the moment, speaking at the ANU this evening and addressing Federal MPs tomorrow.

I asked her first whether Israel would ever be able to negotiate with people and states that don’t recognise its right to exist.

ANNA BALTZER: The question about recognising Israel’s right to exist is a very interesting one and one that is oftentimes not given too much context. So, like I said, Israel is not the state of the people who have lived there for generations but very exclusively of the Jewish people, including even me, even if I never go there. But not of Palestinians, most of whom have been removed from the area.

So when you ask a Palestinian person, do you recognise the right for there to be a state on your historic homeland that explicitly excludes you and your children and your people for eternity simply because of your ethnic and religious background? You know if they say I don’t think there’s a right for that, that’s not anti-Semitism.

You know, did the Aboriginals recognise the right for there to be a state that should exclude them? You know they recognised that there was a state created and it should include them, rightfully so, and this question as to Palestinians is really pushing them into a corner and asking them to, not only, you know, see that Israel is discriminating against them but that they’re supposed to recognise Israel’s right to do it.

MARK COLVIN: Israelis believe that the wall has prevented the endless cycle of suicide bombs. Has the wall actually been a positive force?

ANNA BALTZER: I would argue no. It is true that there are fewer suicide bombs now than they were prior to the wall’s construction but that has to do a lot with other factors and one of those main factors is that the construction of the wall correlated with a decision on the part of Hamas, a strategic one, they were transforming from a paramilitary organisation to a political one to prepare for elections and eventually went back to violence.

With the removal of settlers from the Gaza strip, Israel was able to actually seal up the Gaza strip and that is actually where the majority of suicide bombs originated. And so what we’ve seen today is that violent resistance has simply transformed. Now from the Gaza strip instead of suicide bombs, they’re rocket attacks.

The wall around Gaza precisely proves the point that when you sort of choke people more and more and tighten that noose it does not end violence. You really have to look at the roots of the violence to move forward. The wall is a very short-sighted type of institution and it’s very porous. You can get from one end to another.

One anecdote people find interesting is a friend of mine who lives in a refugee camp near Bethlehem and every morning she wakes up at 3.30 in the morning. She goes to the first road block, has to get out of the car, walk around, take a taxi to the next one, walk around, take a settler bus into west Jerusalem where she works a full day as a nurse in a hospital. Does the same thing on the way home.

So she gets through easily. You know she has to change her headscarf from looking like a Muslim to looking like a settler. But if you want to get through, you can get through. It doesn’t prevent the most determined people. It’s simply prevents daily life from being able to go on as usual: people getting to school, hospitals, jobs.

MARK COLVIN: Some people say that if the Palestinian resistance transferred itself into a completely non-violent mode then things would change really radically. What do you think?

ANNA BALTZER: First of all the vast majority of Palestinian resistance is non-violent and it’s good that people are increasingly aware of it and historically speaking has been as well. There’s, you know, civil rights marches, people marching to the wall bearing witness, protesting, carrying freedom signs. It’s actually quite extraordinary to see.

MARK COLVIN: But every time a bunch of teenagers on one of those marches picks up stones and starts throwing them at troops that non-violent image is undermined, isn’t it?

ANNA BALTZER: Absolutely. And of course there is still violence on the part of Palestinians but it is not true, I think, to say that absent that violence you would see something different. Hamas, for example, held to the ceasefire until Israel refused to renew it and that led up to the Operation Cast Lead in late 2008.

There have been multiple chances that Israel has had but those have not been taken advantage of because frankly given my government’s unconditional support of Israel and as well as by the way Australia’s support of Israel. We see, for example, in the newspaper today discussion about Australian parliamentarians being funded in trips to Israel, that sort of allegiance that leaves no room really for the Palestinian narrative and Palestinian human rights.

As long as that happens we’re not going to see the real, really addressing the roots of the violence there today.

MARK COLVIN: So looking forward for the next few years you’re not very hopeful?

ANNA BALTZER: Actually I am hopeful. I am just not hopeful that it will come through the current negotiations where, you know, it’s like a prisoner negotiating with a prison guard, is what we see today. I don’t think that’s going to bear much fruition of peace.

However, if we look at historic models and what’s happening today with the segregated roads in the West Bank and all of different kinds of segregation is that we see a real link to apartheid South Africa and what happened there.

And likewise the struggle against it where people around the world said, you know, if our governments are not going to take a strong stand on this issue and stop the, pouring money into what’s happening, we as citizens of the world are not going to profit off of this anymore as individuals and institutions.

And thus began a campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions which has grown rapidly today, but towards apartheid Israel, to say that until Israel complies with international law we’re not going to treat it like a normal country anymore.

MARK COLVIN: The American-Israeli Palestinian activist, Anna Baltzer, speaking from Canberra.