Antony Loewenstein

Israeli “democracy” 2011:

About 100 female soldiers left the main celebration sponsored by the Israel Defense Forces marking the end of the Simhat Torah holiday on Thursday after they were asked to move to a separate women’s section.

The traditional “Hakafot Shniyot” event, which comes after the holiday’s formal conclusion and includes dancing with the Torah, was held in the Eshkol regional council area in the south. The commanders of the women soldiers decided to have the women board buses and leave after some objected to their being directed to a separate area cut off from the main event.

The separate women’s section was set off by cloth sheeting, but according to one of those present “it was very hard to feel connected to the event there.” The event was attended by about 500 people, including a mix of civilians and soldiers, among them, about 100 women soldiers. Those in attendance said before the request was made for them to move, the women had been dancing at one side, separately from the men and also separated by a long table. The women soldiers were then ordered by an officer from the military rabbinate to go to a separate, closed area about 50 meters away, following complaints over the initial setup.

Orthodox Jewish religious authorities call for separation of men and women in certain circumstances. For many observant Jews in Israel, however, it is the custom for men and women at Hakafot Shniyot to dance separately but without the women being relegated to another designated area. The IDF’s chief rabbi, Rafi Peretz, as well as the commander for the IDF’s Gaza division, Yossi Bachar, were present but did not intervene in the matter. The rabbinate has been under pressure recently to adopt strict interpretations of halakha, Jewish religious law.

ABC reports:

Three people have been treated in hospital after a riot involving more than 100 people at the Scherger Immigration Detention Centre at Weipa on the Cape York Peninsula.

The violence broke out yesterday afternoon, causing property damage at the facility.

The Immigration Department says two detainees and an officer were injured and taken to hospital, but the Serco Australia officer has since been released.

Ian Rintoul from the Refugee Action Collective says he has been told a guard broke the nose and teeth of a Tamil man from Sri Lanka.

“Asylum seekers are not criminals and Serco guards are not prison officers and in any case there’s no place for that kind of behaviour,” he said.

“We want that Serco guard out of the compound while a thorough investigation takes place.”

A Department of Immigration spokesman says the cause is being investigated.

More details from Pamela Curr, Campaign Coordinator of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre:

Early this afternoon, a Sri Lankan man went to the computer room to get his 30 minutes online. A Serco guard punched him in the face. According to witnesses, ” The client just asked for his time, the guard punched him in the face, the client was bleeding and fell down, like unconscious”. Other detainees came to his help and surrounded the client so that he could not be dragged away. They are asking for the police to come urgently to investigate.

Some detainees became angry and distressed and broke a few windows.  The guard was withdrawn.

There are problems getting staff in Scherger. The bulk of workers are flyin/flyout, working 6 days a week, 12 hours a day, one week nights and one week days until their contract is up and then they go home for one weeks leave. They are paid $2,100 per week. The shifts are long but as most are untrained, unskilled people, this is the best money they have ever earned in their lives.

Local people  would rather work for COMALCO mining bauxite where conditions are much better. However SERCO has a deal with Centrelink to pick up the unemployed people in WEIPA.

Locals told me in July that WEIPA is a town with no to little unemployment becasue of the mine and need for services. Even the wives are working driving the trucks. Locals said that only the “unemployable in town work for SERCO and that many of those are people with drug and alcohol problems”. Locals also said that the SERCO guards start before the police checks are done because many have been to prison and so subsequently fail these checks after working for 6 to 12 weeks. Locals do not get the high wages as they are not flyin/ flyout so the incentive to work the impossible hours is low.

Right now the call is urgent for police intervention. Scherger is 40 minutes plus on a rough dirt road from Weipa and the nearest police station.

Guy Rundle explains in Melbourne’s Sunday Age:

For the right in the US and here, ”Europe” is more than a continent. It is a condition – one of failure and stagnation, a cautionary tale. With Greece in flames and Italy and Spain in serious difficulty, there has been plenty of scope to make that case in the US. Yet it is not these states that are the targets of their ire. Instead what they take to represent ”decadence” is northern Europe and France – the countries where state economic planning, collective benefits and a social welfare system have become entrenched.

This assessment, widespread in the US and Britain, is remarkable. Not only do those countries have a far from glittering record, but the assessment of Europe is the reverse of the truth. While the Anglosphere has spent three decades cultivating rising inequality and living costs, industrial decline, and an increasingly precarious existence, northern Europe has steadily reinvested in its own society and economic base.

While Britain swapped its manufacturing sector for financial ”services”, and the US swapped production for consumption, Germany, Sweden and others used manufacturing as a base to develop high-tech industry, value-added by free higher education.

The results are obvious – exports account for up to a third of national output for such countries, while Britain and the US run trade deficits that average 5 per cent of GDP.

Poverty rates in these parts of Europe range from 5 to 11 per cent, whereas they are north of 20 per cent in Britain and the US. Household savings rates are stable, at about 12 per cent, more than triple that of the Anglosphere, which is dependent on breakneck consumer spending to keep the wheels moving. Medical coverage is universal, affordable public housing is widespread, yet budgets are -balanced (save for Germany’s, whose deficit is nevertheless a fifth the size of the US).

When the neoliberal cheer-squad in the Anglosphere have no choice but to acknowledge these facts, they often claim that such conditions have negative effects. It’s often suggested that social democracies lack an appetite for risk. That’s usually suggested while the commentator is sitting at an IKEA desk, typing on a Linux-driven computer, having driven to the office in a Volvo.

A country is in ruins. Months of war.

Not to worry, business opportunities abound. Let a thousand disaster capitalist flowers bloom.

Libya, you are about to be mauled:

The starting pistol for British firms to pursue contracts in Libya has been fired by the new defence secretary, Philip Hammond, who urged companies to “pack their suitcases” and head there to secure reconstruction contracts.

As Nato announced that it plans to wind up operations in Libya, Hammond said that great care had been taken during the campaign to avoid destroying critical infrastructure.

“Libya is a relatively wealthy country with oil reserves, and I expect there will be opportunities for British and other companies to get involved in the reconstruction of Libya,” he told the BBC in an interview.

“I would expect British companies, even British sales directors, [to be] packing their suitcases and looking to get out to Libya and take part in the reconstruction of that country as soon as they can,” said Hammond, who replaced Liam Fox as defence secretary a week ago.

He added that after a “hugely successful” British mission in Libya, Britain now needed “to support the Libyans to turn the liberation of their country into a successful stabilisation so that Libya can be a beacon of prosperity and democracy in north Africa going forward.”

The National Transitional Council has already said that it intends to reward countries who showed support for its fight against the Gaddafi regime, with Britain and France likely to lead the way.

The success of British contractors in the country – which could see billions of pounds spent on reconstruction over the next decade – will be seen as a huge victory for prime minister David Cameron, who visited Tripoli and NTC members last month, along with Nicolas Sarkozy.

British gains in Libya include business and reconstruction contracts, as well as oil. As Libya’s £100bn in frozen assets around the world are released, it is a sizeable pot.

Lord Green, a trade minister, has already met with British firms to discuss potential opportunities in Libya, and oil company BP is believed to have already held talks with the NTC.

…

France has already begun its own campaign to secure business in the country. French foreign minister Alain Juppé has said it was only “fair and logical” for its companies to benefit.

Daniel Kawczynski, a Conservative backbencher and chair of the cross-party parliamentary group on Libya, said Britain should come first when it comes to awarding contracts, which would also pay back some of the cost of some £300m spent on military action.

“The question that remains is, who should ultimately bear this cost?” he said. “Should the burden fall on those who could be counted on? Or should, in time, Libya repay those who fought with her, and for her?”

He added: “In these difficult economic times, it should not be too much to ask a country with Libya’s wealth and resources to pay their share of the gold.”

Nobody serious believes a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians will ever emerge (here’s just the latest reason why). Tragically, we’ll still have suffer years of delusions about the how and why but the one-state equation is growing (via the Forward):

It’s an ideology with few followers among Israeli Jews, but activists for the one-state solution are reaching out to American visitors via tours of the Arab-Jewish town of Jaffa. And they are doing so with the help of Israel’s Reform movement.

Jaffa, now part of the municipality of Tel Aviv, was a town in which a Jewish minority lived for centuries with Arab Muslims and Christians before Israel was established in 1948. Now, its graceful Arab architecture provides a rich historical background for one-state advocates Yuval Tamari, a Jewish schoolteacher, and Wasim Bearumi, an Arab psychologist, to tell a story of the past that feeds their vision of the future.

“The two-state solution is said to be a practical solution, but it’s division,” Tamari told a recent tour group. “I want to be able to visit Nablus and other places from my history. And Arabs have a lot of history here in Jaffa.”

Recently, Jaffa, where Jews now make up about two-thirds of the population, has become a hotspot of sectarian attacks. In early October, unknown attackers desecrated Muslim and Christian graves — the third in a series of attacks on Arab sacred sites in Israel and the occupied territories. This was followed by someone throwing a firebomb onto a Jaffa synagogue roof. Still, Tamari and Bearumi, both of whom declined to comment on these recent events, are undeterred.

On a recent summer day, a group of 30 tourists from the Temple Israel Center, a Conservative synagogue in White Plains, N.Y., heard the message of the tour, which was that Jaffa should actually be seen as a model for coexistence. The Daniel Centers for Progressive Judaism, a large complex of Reform cultural and community centers in Jaffa, has been running the “Coexistence Tour” for four years, giving a platform for the activists to share their political vision with almost 500 Diaspora Jews yearly, mostly as part of communal Israel trips.

Lest we forget that the Americans loved Gaddafi very recently. When he was useful. Now, of course, Libyan oil is the prize, already being divided by the Western powers.

So what does this really mean? Private security firms, both local and foreign, will make increasingly high profits:

A fully fledged Afghan national security force, including army and police, will cost about $5 billion a year after international combat forces pull out in 2014, the Afghanistan defence minister told reporters on Tuesday.

The price tag estimated by Abdul Rahim Wardak was more than three times the Afghan government’s domestic revenue in 2010, and about a third of the country’s gross domestic product.

“At the present level of security environment we are facing, it will be about $5 billion a year,” Wardak told journalists at the heavily guarded ministry, where a display of the Afghan army’s foreign supplied weaponry and equipment, from socks to helicopters, was shown to journalists.

Afghanistan’s government has pinned its hopes of rebuilding the country’s economy, and of earning the money it needs for the army and police, on attracting investment in copper and iron ore resources, which it reckons could be worth up to $3 trillion.

Wardak said the government’s goal was to build a force that did not rely on foreign help, but he made it clear that a transition period was needed. During this period, he said, Afghanistan would require foreign money, mainly from the United States, to maintain the force.

Welcome to Britain:

Secret justice looks set to be a regular feature of British courts and tribunals when the intelligence services want to protect their sources of information.

Civil courts, immigration panels and even coroner’s inquests would go into secret session if the Government rules that hearing evidence in public could be a threat to national security.

The proposals, which run counter to a centuries-old British tradition of open justice, were introduced to a sparsely attended House of Commons yesterday by the Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke – and met almost no opposition. The planned changes to the British justice system follow lobbying of the Government by the CIA.

Civil rights groups warned a serious potential threat to individual liberty lurked behind the all-party consensus.

Mr Clarke is seeking to protect the Government from a repeat of a fiasco which has cost tens of millions of pounds and led to a breakdown in co-operation between British intelligence and an enraged CIA.

The best-known case involved Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was held in Guantanamo Bay for five years, and started a claim for damages from the UK Government, which he accused of complicity in torture.

The Court of Appeal released a summary of CIA intelligence which supported Mr Mohamed’s claim that British intelligence officers knew about the torture of suspected terrorists.

The CIA was furious and halted the flow of information from its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and other US agencies apart from in the most serious cases. MI6 and the Foreign Office also received complaints from a number of other allied states anxious that information provided on a confidential basis would leak into the public domain.

Faced with irate colleagues at Langley, the British Government paid out to 16 terrorist suspects, to prevent further damage to US-UK relations. Yesterday, Mr Clarke let slip that the cases had already cost around £20m. Another 30 are in prospect because, he told MPs, “it is becoming fashionable” to challenge the Government in court.

Officials have privately complained that they cannot defend these cases without compromising sensitive intelligence, which means suspected terrorists have been able to use the civil courts as a “cashpoint”.

The following press release was sent to all media today:

On Utøya: Anders Breivik, right terror, racism and Europe

Edited by Elizabeth Humphrys, Guy Rundle and Tad Tietze

with essays by Anindya Bhattacharyya, Antony Loewenstein, Lizzie O’Shea, Richard Seymour, Jeff Sparrow, and the editors.

LAUNCH: On Utøya will be launched by Senator Lee Rhiannon and Antony Loewenstein on 6.30pm, Wednesday October 26, at the Norfolk Hotel, Cleveland Street, Surry Hills, Sydney.

In a challenging new book, a range of Australian and UK writers respond to the terrorist attack by Anders Breivik in July 2011, and attempts by the Right to depoliticise it.

On July 22, Anders Breivik, a right-wing writer and activist, killed more than sixty young members of the Norwegian Labour Party on Utøya Island, having already set off a bomb in central Oslo to distract authorities. Captured alive, Breivik was more than willing to explain his actions as a ‘necessary atrocity’ designed to ‘wake up’ Europe to its betrayal by the left, and its impending destruction through immigration.

Breivik’s beliefs — expressed at length in a manifesto ’2083′ — were part of a huge volume of right-wing alarmism and xenophobia that had arisen in the last decade. Yet Breivik, we were told by the Right, was simply a madman — so mad, in fact, that he had actually believed what the Right said: that Europe was in imminent danger of destruction, and extreme action was required.

On Utøya is a response to this attempt to deny responsibility, and any connection of Breivik’s act to a rising cult of violence, racism, and apocalyptic language. The editors and authors shine a light on Breivik’s actions, and argue that they cannot be understood abstracted from the social and political conditions in which it emerged. The rise in far Right, racist and Islamophobic commentary, websites and organisations provide an essential context in which Breivik’s ideas developed and his actions were planned. It concludes with an examination of the manufacture of hate and fear in Australia, and considers what is needed in a Left strategy to deal with the growing threat of far Right organising.

Organised, written and produced within three months of the killings, On Utøya is a challenge to anyone who would seek to portray this event as anything other than it is — a violent mass assassination, directed against the left, to terrorise people into silence and submission to a far-right agenda. Published as an eBook, it takes advantage of the new world of online publishing to respond rapidly, forthrightly and comprehensively to current events. It is both an acute analysis of contemporary politics, and an act of solidarity with all those targeted by the violent political fantasies of the Right.

Interviews: Editors Elizabeth Humphrys and Tad Tietze, and contributors Antony Loewenstein, Lizzie O’Shea, Richard Seymour and Jeff Sparrow, are available for interview.

Publication date: 26 October 2011. Price $6.99. Publisher: Elguta

Inquiries: Elizabeth Humphrys Tel: +61 402 424 973, lizhumphrys@me.com

WEBSITE

CHAPTER OUTLINE

There’s so much blather in the mainstream press about the Gilad Shalit deal this week. Mostly written by the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

I was invited onto current affairs show The Wire yesterday to offer a different perspective and argue that the press humanises one man, Shalit, while Arabs are largely invisible and faceless:

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One:

The U.S. military has launched miniature kamikaze drones against Taliban targets and plans to deploy more next year for U.S. special operating forces, according to documents and an Army official.

The tube-launched “Switchblade” drone, made by Monrovia, California-based Aerovironment Inc. (AVAV), was secretly sent to Afghanistan for the first time last year. “Under a dozen” were fired, said Army Deputy Product Director William Nichols.

“It’s been used in Afghanistan by military personnel” and “shown to be effective,” Nichols said. The drone’s GPS guidance is made by Rockwell Collins Inc. (COL) and the warhead by Alliant Techsystems Inc. (ATK)

Disclosure of the Switchblade’s use in Afghanistan highlights the Pentagon’s expanding range of missions for remotely piloted aircraft. The fleet also includes broad-area surveillance aircraft such as the Northrop Grumman Corp. (NOC) Global Hawk, the missile-firing General Atomics Co. Predator and Reaper drones, and hand-launched short-range surveillance models, such as the Aerovironment Raven.

Nichols declined to detail the Switchblade’s targets. He said the drone’s “designed for open threats, something that’s on top of a building but you can’t hit it” with regular artillery or mortars for fear of collateral damage.

The drone is less than 24 inches long and weighs about six pounds.

“It’s a ‘flying shotgun,’” Nichols said, not a “hit-to- kill” weapon that explodes on impact.

Two:

It’s known as IBISS, the acronym for the Integrated Building Interior Surveillance System. Like its name suggests, it can see through the walls of buildings and sketch out images of what’s inside.

Until this year, IBISS was a classified system, a piece of high-tech wizardry the military used to fight the war on terrorism. The contractor that made the system, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), couldn’t talk about it in public, but that’s changing. IBISS is one of the new products SAIC is hoping to sell to local police stations and fire departments as the defense contractor explores what is known in the industry as “adjacent markets.”

Adjacent markets can mean anything from foreign militaries to the Department of Homeland Security for the industry that makes the computer systems, software, remote sensors, radar and ground stations that comprise Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) for the military.

For the first decade of the war on terrorism, the ISR industry thrived, and companies like SAIC, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin made big profits. Those days are coming to an end though.

On Monday at the annual industry trade conference known as GEOINT, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, broke the news to the assembled contractors: “We are all going to have to share in the pain.” Clapper said, as his office submitted billions of dollars in cuts to the Office of Management and Budget over the next 10 years. The overall annual intelligence budget is about $80 billion annually; most of the details of those budgets however are secret.