Antony Loewenstein

“When riots erupted in the outskirts of many French cities last autumn, media around the world struggled to find a way to tell the story of those suburban areas, known as the banlieues.

“A Swiss magazine took the opportunity to try a new approach to online journalism, in an effort to report the issue in a deeper and perhaps more helpful way.

“What is emerging from the experiment is an example of how ‘old’ media can revitalize themselves by incorporating the tools of the ‘new’ media while serving readers in a way that the printed press simply could not have managed before.”

The results are extremely interesting:

“At the height of the riots in early November, the Swiss weekly L’Hebdo decided that its initial articles had not gone far enough in helping readers understand what was happening in France. So the editors chose the town of Bondy, in the suburbs of Paris, and started sending reporters there on rotations of seven to 10 days.

“Working from a tiny room they called the ‘Bondy microbureau,’ which they borrowed from the local soccer club, the reporters have been doing a lot more than filing their typical weekly stories for the magazine, which is based in Lausanne and has a circulation of 44,000.

“They have been posting short and long reports several times a day, as well as photographs, on what has become known as the Bondy Blog, blogs.hebdo.ch.”

The reporting is often personal and rough and a world away from the polished, and sometimes detached, style of traditional journalistic narratives. Journalists say they’ve discovered a relationship with their readers that simply didn’t exist before. Perhaps most importantly, the publication wants to give something back to the community:

“‘L’Hebdo plans to announce in this week’s issue that it is going to gather a group of young people from Bondy, bring them to Lausanne for journalism training and a ‘blog school’ and then hand them the digital keys to the Bondy Blog, while continuing to support them technically and editorially.

“‘We came from outside, and tried to cover their reality as best as we could,’ Michel, the world-affairs editor, said.

“We want now to help them do it by themselves, using the tools of journalism and of blogging to become actors in their own social space.”

“Closing the loop, the project will be financed in very ‘old media’ way: A major French publisher will turn the Bondy Blog into a book, and the proceeds will go toward supporting blogging in the banlieue.”

“Mr Wainggai, the leader of the 43 asylum-seekers who arrived in Australia two weeks ago, said ongoing abuses by the Indonesian military, often in cahoots with militias, were terrifying the indigenous community.

“‘It’s the same as with East Timor,’ he told the Herald yesterday from Christmas Island, where the asylum-seekers are being processed by immigration officials. ‘They have created militias and jihadis in West Papua. The people, and especially activists for independence, are very scared.’”

For more information on the “Free West Papua” movement, see here.

Check out their platform.

I particularly like their ideas for the Middle East:

“The only possible long-term solution to the Middle East problem, consistent with principles of honesty, compassion, freedom and justice, is a unitary secular state in which all people have equal rights. This will perhaps require a degree of compromise that most Jews will find painful to accept. To allay Jewish fears that a specific homeland is required for their security, the Secular Party proposes that a coalition of countries be formed that will guarantee their asylum in the event of their persecution. In the proposed unitary secular state, no religion should be presumed authentic and no rights or privileges should be granted on the basis of claimed ethnicity or religious belief.

“The primary obstacles in achieving this solution are Judaic beliefs that presume exclusive territorial entitlement, and irreconcilable Islamic beliefs that also necessitate superior claims to territory. The key to dissipating this irreconcilability is simply to put forward the proposition, which is impeccably based in reason, that the beliefs on which the conflict is based are false, unnecessary, undesirable, harmful, and based on nothing more than ancient mythology. Astoundingly, it seems that perhaps no political leader anywhere has ever put forward this proposition.”

The event is organised by the Socialist Worker.

Speakers:
- Antony Loewenstein (freelance journalist & author, currently writing book on the Israel/Palestine conflict)
- Jarvis Ryan (ISO)

“The demise of Ariel Sharon led to outpourings of praise from governments and media worldwide. They presented an image of a man who made the transition from soldier to ‘man of peace’. His withdrawal of settlers from Gaza and founding of the political party Kadima are said to show his commitment to putting the peace process back on track. But Sharon opposed every genuine attempt to deliver peace with the Palestinians. This forum will critically examine the motivations behind the Gaza pullout, and look at the prospects for peace and justice in the Middle East in the post-Sharon era.

“All welcome.”

This is the first of many public talks I will be conducting in the coming months.

- Cindy Sheehan is thinking of entering politics on an anti-war platform.

- Simon Jenkins writes in the London Times how Britain - and by extension, Australia - is “being set up by the Americans in Afghanistan.”

- US officials in Iraq are dealing, thoroughly unsurprisingly, with insurgents (or in Bush-speak, “terrorists.”)

- Prime Minister John Howard has memory loss, defends his government’s reputation and spins furiously to avoid further embarrassment over the oil-for-food scandal. Just another day in paradise.

- According to the Mail on Sunday, Tony Blair and George Bush worked together to deceive the UN and the world over their intentions to invade Iraq. I like this line especially:

“And it alleges the British Government boasted that disgraced newspaper tycoon Conrad Black was being used by Mr Bush’s allies in America as a channel for pro-war propaganda in the UK via his Daily Telegraph newspaper.”

The director says this about himself and his motivations:

“I made this picture as a committed Jew, a pro-Israeli Jew and yet a human Jew. I made this movie out of love for both of my countries, USA and Israel.

“Some political critics would like to see these people [Palestinians] dehumanised because when you take away someone’s humanity you can do anything to them, you’re not committing a crime because they’re not human. This film clearly states that the Black September of the Munich murders were terrorists. These were unforgivable actions but until we begin to ask questions about who these terrorists are and why terrorism happens, we’re never going to get to the truth of why 9/11 happened, for instance.”

The film tells the story - “inspired by real events” - of the Mossad-led retaliation team directed by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to hunt down and kill the organisers of the massacre. Eric Bana plays Avner, the leader of the squad. In the beginning, the team finds its targets with vigour but soon doubts start creeping in. Avner becomes the moral compass of the film, left defending a homeland he no longer recognises, loves or respects. In the end, he turns his back on the Jewish state entirely and settles in Brooklyn.

It is clear why the film has generated such animosity in the Jewish community. Writing in the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer could barely believe that Spielberg had dared humanise Palestinians at all:

“Spielberg makes the Holocaust the engine of Zionism and its justification. Which, of course, is the Palestinian narrative. Indeed, it is the classic narrative for anti-Zionists, most recently the president of Iran, who says that Israel should be wiped off the map. And why not? If Israel is nothing more than Europe’s guilt trip for the Holocaust, then why should Muslims have to suffer a Jewish state in their midst?”

Spielberg is no better than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Krauthammer’s Zionist paranoia. Does he not realise that such delusional words only make him look like an extremist? Perhaps he doesn’t care, such is his desperation to prove Israel’s moral case.

Harvard Law Professor and Israel apologist Alan Dershowitz was equally concerned and Mark Baker, a course lecturer in terrorism at the University of Melbourne (writing in the Australian Jewish News on January 27) was incensed that Spielberg had “created a flattened universe where there is no moral compass of right and wrong”:

“Munich, the byword since 1938 for political appeasement against evil, is exactly that: a film that appeases the evil of terrorism by equating the blood of victims with the blood of perpetrators. I never expected to be sitting through another Exodus, in which the certainties of Zionism ignore that Palestinians could just as easily be singing ‘this land is mine’. Yet Steven Spielberg’s new film tries to make up for the stupidity of Hollywood’s cowboy-and-Indian polarities by creating a flattened universe where there is no moral compass of right and wrong.

“The moral confusion is there from the outset, with the juxtaposition of the reactions of an Israeli and a Palestinian family to news of the loss of their sons - one a victim of terror; the other a murderer. The film is obsessed with these kinds of narrative symmetries: there are 11 terrorists in Spielberg’s list to match the 11 murdered Israeli Olympians, signalling that counter-terrorist strategies could only be invented by Jews who live by the vengeful ethos of an eye for an eye.”

The paper’s editorial thankfully took a more measured, and revealing, line:

“Much has changed since the pioneering days of Exodus and Cast a Giant Shadow, when Hollywood was a source of comfort and sustenance for Israelis and Jews, as witnessed in the once-unthinkable Golden Globe Award given last week to the Palestinian movie Paradise Now. It is a change that some of us, understandably, find hard getting used to.”

The Zionist Organisation of America called for a boycott of the film and in perhaps the most hysterical analysis, Jack Engelhard, author of the novel “Indecent Proposal”, wrote that Spielberg is “no friend of Israel“:

“In Hollywood today, where David is Goliath and Goliath is David, you never want to be labelled a conservative or a fan of Israel. Hollywood is all about being trendy and Israel is not the trend. You won’t get invited to the right parties and you won’t win any Oscars if your heart bleeds for a nation that is always on the verge of being wiped off the map.