Antony Loewenstein

A man of principle who dares to take a stand when saying and doing nothing (and getting a free trip) is so much easier:

Bafta-winning film-maker Mike Leigh has pulled out of a teaching trip to Israel due to his concern over the country’s proposed loyalty oath bill.

Leigh said he was not prepared to take part in the “great masters” programme at the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School in Jerusalem. In a letter to school director Renen Schorr, he cited several of Israel’s policies, including the oath, which would require non-Jews seeking Israeli citizenship to pledge allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state”.

“As you know, I have always had serious misgivings about coming, but I allowed myself to be persuaded by your sincerity and your commitment,” Leigh wrote. “And it is because of those special qualities of yours that I am especially sorry to have to let you down. But I have absolutely no choice. I cannot come, I do not want to come, and I am not coming.

“Eight weeks after our lunch, the Israeli attack on the flotilla took place. As I watched the world very properly condemn this atrocity, I almost cancelled. I now wish I had, and blame my cowardice for not having done so.

“Since then, your government has gone from bad to worse. I need not itemise all that has taken place … I still had not faced up to the prospect of pulling out until a few weeks ago, but the resumption of the illegal building on the West Bank made me start to consider it seriously. And now we have the Loyalty Oath.

“This is the last straw – quite apart from the ongoing criminal blockade of Gaza, not to mention the endless shooting of innocent people there, including juveniles …”

From today’s Australian newspaper:

Governments around the world are studying the “Sri Lanka method” for dealing with internal conflicts, but the prospect should fill us with alarm.

Respected independent observers including the US State Department and the International Crisis Group have drawn attention to credible allegations of war crimes against both the Tamil Tiger rebels and the government, leading to thousands of civilian deaths. If Colombo can get away with it — by beguiling western media, for example, into focusing elsewhere — then it sets a dangerous precedent.

An independent investigation, as called for by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, remains the only way to resolve these matters with any degree of satisfaction.

Jake Lynch, Associate Professor and Director, Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney

This is priceless. Zionist fundamentalists hold conferences about the “delegitimisation” of Israel globally while finding nothing to fault in Israeli policies except bad PR. Occupation? What occupation? Apartheid? Just an anti-Semitic allegation by Jimmy Carter. Feel the desperation:

Many perpetrators from very diverse backgrounds are heavily involved in the ongoing de-legitimization of Israel, without any one being dominant. This is different from the build up of extreme anti-Semitism before the Holocaust. Then most of the overwhelming demonization of the Jews came from a single source: Hitler and his followers and allies. They built on an infrastructure laid over many centuries, mainly by the Catholic Church and certain factions of Protestantism.

On Sunday and Monday of the past week Boston-based CAMERA – which combats media distortion of information about Israel – held a conference on Israel’s de-legitimization. The lecturers were experts who have studied various sources of demonization. This gave an audience of about 1,000 people an overview of this frightening phenomenon. Many had come from other parts of the United States and Canada.

The purveyors of anti-Israel hatred include large parts of the Muslim world. At the conference Daniel Pipes said that Jews should focus their efforts on combating adherents of radical Islam. His view however may be too narrow an approach as much of the de-legitimization of Israel comes from the mainstream of Muslim societies. Former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler showed how several categories of law, including human rights law, have been corrupted by the United Nations. The same subject was dealt with in more detail by Professor Anne Bayefsky of the Hudson Institute.

Andrea Levin, who heads CAMERA, gave a number of examples of how the New York Times corrupts information about Israel. The academic Tammy Benjamin illustrated how anti-Israel hatred is promoted on the campuses of the University of California, the largest State university system in the United States. The forces of de-legitimization are on the one hand university teachers who use their courses for propaganda. On the other hand Muslim and leftist students spew hatred against Israel and try to frighten pro-Israeli Jews. Even if this contradicts university rules often administrations hardly react to complaints.Professor Alvin Rosenfeld of the University of Indiana focused on Jews and Israelis who are in the forefront of those causing damage to Israel. He mentioned that after the Gaza flotilla incident more than 1,000 US rabbis, rabbinical students and academics instituted a fast to pray that Israel will become a more moral state and be nicer to the inhabitants of Gaza. Professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University, who heads NGO Monitor claimed, that NGOs are often at the origin of anti-Israel news in the media.

Other hate promoters are various Christian groups, mainly liberal Protestants. Yet another source of hatred is trade unions. One cannot neglect right-wing sources of anti-Israel hate promotion, but one overwhelming message of the Boston conference was that the greatest threat to Israel comes from various groups in the Muslim world, assisted to a large extent by many extreme left-wing forces, but also by more moderate mainstream forces from social democracy.

While Australia releases some families from immigration detention into the community yet builds more facilities to imprison refugees, a foreign journalist visits the country and finds a privatised and largely unaccountable system away from the prying eyes of average citizens.

Just as the government wants it to be.

My following book review appeared in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald:

THREE FAMINES
Tom Keneally
Knopf, 324pp, $49.95

History is littered with catastrophic examples of government-induced disasters. A new book by the University of Hong Kong’s Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine, claims that 45 million people were killed between 1958 and 1962. Mao achieved this by “collectivising everybody” and forcing “famished people” to work as slave labour.
Today, according to the United Nations, roughly 25,000 people die daily of hunger or hunger-related causes. The recent meeting in New York to assess the Millennium Development Goals found global poverty had reduced but nearly a billion people still were experiencing extreme poverty.

Tom Keneally’s latest work is a detailed examination of how societies should not function. He explains why millions died in Ireland, Bengal and Ethiopia and how “mindsets of governments, racial preconceptions and administrative incompetence were more lethal than the initiating blights, the loss of potatoes or rice or livestock or of the grain named teff”.

The book opens with a graphic description of the effect of hunger on the body – swelling stomachs, the “self-devouring state”, heart damage and profound depression – that is largely unseen in the West. Keneally chastises “disaster tourism” and wonders what it will take to force Westerners to see the issue as a phenomenon of the present, not just the past. His well-crafted historical narrative echoes with modern relevance, as there are famines today in various parts of Africa and beyond, mostly away from journalists and bloggers.

In the disasters covered by Three Famines we learn about the necessity of families to economise on the amount eaten daily and the inevitable reduction in healthy food for the body, bringing immune systems to collapse. People in Ethiopia and Bengal were forced to sell bicycles, radios, pots, pans, furniture, jewellery and anything else that would buy needed grain.

Keneally documents the social breakdown in countries where living communally was the only way. For example, the role of landlords in feudal states caused families to be both heavily indebted to men of influence and desperate to find ways to get money when they no longer had land as an insurance policy.

Tragically, religious beliefs often meant life or death. In Bengal, Muslims were unable to eat pigs and turtles and Hindus could not consume cattle: “Many Brahmin women, the members of the intellectual and priestly caste, rather than lower themselves to hunt for food, wasted to death in their homes because they could not bring themselves to eat gruel prepared by either lower-caste or Muslim hands.”

Fear, greed and delusion drove the politics that ultimately sealed the fate of millions. In Ireland, between 1845 and 1852, about a million people died not only from disease but also from government incompetence and an unquestioning belief in the magic of the market to rectify the issues. Lower, middle and upper class resistance was inevitable and Keneally praises a “brave speech” by the leader of Young Ireland, William Smith O’Brien, for going on strike and being imprisoned due to his belief that only mass uprising could solve the nation’s problems. If only revolution had occurred years earlier.

In Bengal in the early 1940s, about 3 million died due to malnutrition and Keneally wonders about the culpability of Winston Churchill; the British prime minister doesn’t escape blame. Readers of a new book by Richard Toye, Churchill’s Empire, will be under no illusion about Churchill’s profound racism towards the subcontinent.
“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion,” he said. He blamed the Bengalis for “breeding like rabbits” and didn’t offer any aid for months as hundreds of thousands perished. Bengal suffered as Britain focused on saving white men from Nazi aggression.

Ethiopia also resonates with colonial pain. Keneally details the brutal civil war under the rule of Mengistu Haile Mariam, a Cold War warrior whose army operated with virtual impunity, destroying lives. An Ethiopian refugee explains there was no hunger before the military went on constant rampages. The Live Aid movement was born at this time and publicly claimed to save millions of starving people. But according to a BBC investigation this year, untold amounts of money were spent on buying weapons and not food for the huddled masses. Hundreds of thousands of people died in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s.

Three Famines is a brave attempt at humanising a complex problem that can so easily drown in overwhelming numbers. Keneally warns of new challenges, not least AIDS and climate change. He rightly argues that more Western aid, while not always the panacea, remains essential. The colonial legacy in Africa has barely been acknowledged in the West and famine is its bastard child.

Oh my. A former, US-backed dictator looking to make a comeback and some Israeli hacks wanting to get in on the action:

Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf is stated to have shared a lunch with a couple of members of Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, at a Chinese restaurant in Kensington area of central London a few days ago.

The Israeli parliamentarians included Silvan Sahalom and Brigadier General (retired) Ephraim Sneh, also the chairman of the subcommittee on Defence Human Resources, The nation reported.

Some colleagues of Musharraf also attended the lunch, which comprised of fish, some duck dishes and expensive wine, the paper said.

The lunch lasted more than 90 minutes, it said, adding that the following day, the former president left for a visit to the United States.

According to diplomatic sources, one of the Israeli parliamentarians had also called on Musharraf when he was on an official visit to Turkey.

Looks like Zionist colonies will never end, then. If nobody seriously pressures Israel to cease settlement building, the Jewish state will soon find itself an even more isolated, pariah state. This is brain-dead and dead-end Zionism:

Israel will only stop its disputed settlement building when the Palestinians make a peace agreement, its UN ambassador said ahead of new Security Council talks Monday on the Middle East conflict.

But Israel would be concerned if Arab nations pressed ahead with a campaign to get United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state before any accord, the envoy, Meron Reuben, told AFP in an interview.

Reuben will face new international pressure when he appears before a UN Security Council meeting on Israeli-Palestinian hostilities. The United States and most world powers have backed Palestinian demands that Israel renew a freeze on settlement building in the occupied territories.

“People understand,” Reuben declared. “I don’t think they agree with the way we are going, but they definitely understand the fact that settlements are not a burden on the peace process and not something that will stop the peace process.”

So after all the huffing and puffing and accusations, Wikileaks is only “guilty” of harming US interests? Surely questioning the rationale behind criminal American foreign policy is highly praise-worthy:

No U.S. intelligence sources or practices were compromised by the posting of secret Afghan war logs by the WikiLeaks website, the Pentagon has concluded, but the military thinks the leaks could still cause significant damage to U.S. security interests.

The assessment, outlined in a letter obtained Friday by The Associated Press, suggests that some of the Obama administration’s worst fears about the July disclosure of almost 77,000 secret U.S. war reports have so far failed to materialize.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates reported these conclusions in an Aug. 16 letter to Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who had requested a Pentagon assessment.

WikiLeaks, a self-described whistle-blower website, is believed to be preparing to release an even larger set of classified Pentagon documents on the Iraq war as early as Sunday.

U.S. officials warned of dire consequences in the days following the July leak. In his letter to Levin, Gates struck a more measured tone in describing the impact.

“Our initial review indicates most of the information contained in these documents relates to tactical military operations,” Gates wrote, suggesting the materials did not include the most sensitive kinds of information.

“The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security; however, the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure,” he added.

Post 9/11, finding nuance in the state view towards “terrorism” was rare, indeed. But here is a challenging example, questioning the idea that every form of resistance is somehow connected to al-Qaeda:

More than three years after federal agents locked up a Sri Lankan immigrant they say was the top U.S. representative of the Tamil Tigers, his fate may hinge on a complex question: Was the rebel group a terrorist threat to Americans?

Federal prosecutors who charged Karunakaran Kandasamy with supporting terrorism say the answer is yes. And they say he should get a stiff sentence approaching 20 years for raising money for the separatist group, which fought a 25-year war with the Sri Lankan government.

But a judge recently expressed his doubts.

The case against the jailed Kandasamy doesn’t neatly fit the definition of “a more obvious or garden variety terrorism case, where … our security interests are compromised and the safety of our citizenry is in jeopardy,” U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie said earlier this month at Kandasamy’s scheduled sentencing, which was postponed.

“Do we simply wave the red flag of terrorism and impose the maximum sentence?”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Knox argued the Tamil Tigers had earned a State Department designation as a terrorist organization in part by putting U.S. citizens living in Sri Lanka in harm’s way. He also said the group’s supporters in the United States extorted cash from Sri Lankan immigrants.

The Tamil Tigers pioneered and perfected technology for suicide bombings, Knox said. That technology “was borrowed and copied and sold on some occasions to other terrorist organizations — organizations like al-Qaida, that directly target the United States, organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah and others in the region,” he said.

Internal documents show the Tamil Tigers considered other terror groups as fellow freedom fighters, and had a policy of “sharing black market arms shipments and explosive shipments, the financial system, bank accounts,” he said.

The judge put off sentencing after Kandasamy — who has battled a spinal problem and other serious ailments since his arrest — asked for mercy.

“I love this country and its soil,” the 54-year-old former cab driver said through an interpreter. “I’m sick and I’m afraid I’ll never live to be free with my family again.”

Zionist propaganda on the Birthright trip is almost pathological. Arabs are ignored but loathed. Everybody is an enemy. It’s militarism run riot. The occupation is excused and defended (the soldiers manning the checkpoints have families, the young Jews are told, as if this excuses illegally brutalising an entire people). This is sad:

After attending a Sydney event last night with Liberal Opposition leader Tony Abbott and writer Bob Ellis (with actor Rhys Muldoon in my photo above), today’s ABC Radio AM reported on proceedings:

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Politics throws up some unlikely friendships.

Indeed it’s hard to imagine a more unusual friendship than the one between the Labor Party stalwart and speech writer, Bob Ellis, and the man who sued him for a million dollars – the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott.

But friends they are and last night they got together to help promote Bob Ellis’s latest book.

It was enemy territory for Tony Abbott in inner-city Sydney but he braved the hostile crowd for a wide-ranging public discussion.

Our reporter David Mark was there.

DAVID MARK: Friday night.

Gleebooks in Sydney – the place is packed.

This is a Labor crowd.

And there reading from the pulpit is a man steeped in the Labor Party, the author and speechwriter for many a premier and prime minister, Bob Ellis.

And the subject, the other man on the stage, conservative warrior and Liberal leader, Tony Abbott.

BOB ELLIS (reading from book): Coffee with Quentin Dempster and a chat about things in Parliament House this afternoon. I put the case that our problem with Abbott is he’s so good looking…

(Laughter)

He has no bad angles and like Hawke he’ll win over women with his handsome, husky looks and cheeky male manner.

“Good looking?” says Quentin “he’s as ugly as a hatful of arseholes”.

(Laughter)

DAVID MARK: And does Tony Abbott smile? Not quite.

The crowd loves the joke at Tony Abbott’s expense. They’re not here to give him an easy time.

He’s heckled repeatedly.

TONY ABBOTT: This is almost as bad as Parliament, Bob. We’ve got cheeky interjections. Where’s the Speaker to send someone out at the appropriate time?

DAVID MARK: Tony Abbott may not have won over the crowd, but at least he got to show himself in a new light as he and Bob Ellis discussed issues ranging from Afghanistan and asylum seekers to abortion and his religious beliefs.

TONY ABBOTT: Plainly, there are a lot of people in this audience who don’t share my views but the dialogue is incredibly important. I mean, we are a civilised polity because we can talk about things and argue about things, rather than simply fight about them and ultimately shoot people over them.

DAVID MARK: And by the end there was at least some respect from audience members like Antony Loewenstein.

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN: Abbott has a degree of nuance and I admire that, even though I disagree with everything he says.

DAVID MARK: As for his host, Labor stalwart Bob Ellis, as unlikely as it seems, there’s warm affection for the Opposition leader.

BOB ELLIS: Yes, I met him first about 15 years ago. I’ve more or less liked him since, although he sued my publisher for a million dollars and got it.

DAVID MARK: So what are the qualities, what are his qualities that you enjoy?

BOB ELLIS: Um, a lack of arrogance, a willingness to listen, a capacity to struggle with his own beliefs.

DAVID MARK: How would you, then, compare the leaders of the two major parties in Australian politics at the moment? Tony Abbott, who you admire, and Julia Gillard.

BOB ELLIS: Gillard makes a mistake every three days and will not last – has five or 15 months in her. Nobody is speaking of the Gillard era. She should be there for 20 years logically, but she will not. She has a kind of political tone deafness whereas Tony has a political acuteness. He hears, he listens; she doesn’t.

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Author, speech writer and, believe it or not, all-round Labor Party figure, Bob Ellis, ending that report from David Mark.