Archive for August, 2006
The Iranian revolution continues:
Iranian women’s rights activists are initiating a wide campaign demanding an end to legal discrimination against women in Iranian law. The Campaign, “One Million Signatures Demanding Changes to Discriminatory Laws,” which aims to collect one million signatures to demand changes to discriminatory laws against women, is a follow-up effort to the peaceful protest of the same aim, which took place on June 12, 2006 in Haft-e Tir Square in Tehran. Preparation activities in support of this campaign commenced in June of 2006 and the campaign will be officially launched on August 27, during a seminar entitled: “The Impact of Laws on Women’s Lives.”
But the authorities do not let them to hold their seminar & claimed that they should get permission from the ministry. According to the current law of Iran, holding seminars & peaceful demonstrations do not need any legal permission.
More here.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claims critics of the Bush administration are appeasing fascism.
Add Hitler, Nazism, Churchill and Bush and stir.
Fear politics is a useful tool in the hands of fools.
Naomi Klein, Common Dreams, August 28:
The Red Cross has just announced a new disaster-response partnership with Wal-Mart. When the next hurricane hits, it will be a co-production of Big Aid and Big Box.
This, apparently, is the lesson learned from the government’s calamitous response to Hurricane Katrina: Businesses do disaster better.
“It’s all going to be private enterprise before it’s over,” Billy Wagner, emergency management chief for the Florida Keys, currently under hurricane watch for Tropical Storm Ernesto, said in April. “They’ve got the expertise. They’ve got the resources.”
But before this new consensus goes any further, perhaps it’s time to take a look at where the privatization of disaster began, and where it will inevitably lead.
The first step was the government’s abdication of its core responsibility to protect the population from disasters. Under the Bush administration, whole sectors of the government, most notably the Department of Homeland Security, have been turned into glorified temp agencies, with essential functions contracted out to private companies. The theory is that entrepreneurs, driven by the profit motive, are always more efficient (please suspend hysterical laughter).
We saw the results in New Orleans one year ago: Washington was frighteningly weak and inept, in part because its emergency management experts had fled to the private sector and its technology and infrastructure had become positively retro. At least by comparison, the private sector looked modern and competent (a New York Times columnist even suggested handing FEMA over to Wal-Mart).
The Jewish establishment is clearly unprepared or unwilling to engage honestly with the Zionist cause and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. After last Sunday’s sold-out debate at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival - and the Australian Jewish News’ blatantly dishonest interpretation of the same event - today’s Melbourne Age features a letter from one of the usual suspects:
Robert Richter, Antony Loewenstein and Julian Burnside advise the Jewish community to promote freedom of thought and speech, find its collective voice, and be prepared to criticise Israel if it disagreed with its policies ( The Age, 28/8). However, their advice is gratuitous, unfounded and based on a nonsensical premise.
The Jewish community is about as democratic as it’s possible for a religious-ethnic community to be. The Jewish Community Council of Victoria consists of representatives of more than 50 organisations, encompassing a wide range of religious outlooks and political opinions.
The principal reason why there are no loud voices against Israel is that the community sympathises with Israel and understands the nature of the threat against it. If Loewenstein, or anyone else in the Jewish community, doesn’t share those sympathies and considers the threat not worth worrying about, they are free to hold and express those opinions.
As for the premise that Israeli policies and actions are responsible for promoting anti-Semitism, this is ludicrous. Actually, anti-Semitism is caused by anti-Semites. Tough Israeli policies — sometimes necessary in Israel’s fight for survival — merely provide an excuse for anti-Semites to feel free to spout their hatred.
Paul Gardner, executive member, Jewish Community Council of Victoria
Let me get this straight. People are anti-Semitic simply for no reason, a sickness borne out of a malignant hatred of Jews. Israeli actions are totally unrelated. To believe this is as deluded as believing that anti-Americanism is unrelated to US foreign policy in the Middle East. Furthermore, the wide variety of viewpoints in the Jewish community leadership is remarkably well hidden. When it comes to Israel, the default setting is switched on 100% of the time. Such intellectual laziness is dangerous for both Israel and the Jews.
As for Israel’s “tough policies”, I suppose the illegal occupation of Palestine and deliberate targeting of civilians is something the world just has to get used to. Thankfully, Gardner knows the global community is slowing turning against a nation that somehow believes Jewish history insulates it from criticism or censure.
And still some supposed Middle East commentators deny the influence of the Zionist lobby in the US.
In this worldview, merely raising the issue implies anti-Semitism. Let them live with their delusions.
The one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is justly receiving a great deal of media coverage. Corpwatch provides a welcome perspective:
Disaster profiteers make millions while local companies and laborers in New Orleans and the rest of the Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast region are systematically getting the short end of the stick, according to a major new report from the nonprofit CorpWatch.
A CorpWatch analysis of FEMA’s records shows that “fully 90 percent of the first wave of (the post-Katrina reconstruction) contracts awarded - including some of the biggest no-bid contracts to date — went to companies from outside the three worst-affected states. As of July 2006, after months of controversy and Congressional hearings, companies from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama had increased their share of the total contracts to a combined 16.6 percent.” The CorpWatch analysis shows that more federal reconstruction contracts have gone to Virginia and Indiana - usually large, politically connected corporations - than to any of the three Katrina-devastated states.
The CorpWatch report also exposes abusive “contracting charge pyramids” where the companies doing the actual reconstruction work often get only a tiny (and insufficient) fraction of the taxpayer money awarded for projects and widespread non-payment of local companies and laborers, including what has been alleged to be the deliberate and systematic exploitation of immigrant workers, including undocumented individuals.
“One year after disaster struck, the slow-motion rebuilding of the Gulf Coast region looks identical to what has happened to date in Afghanistan and Iraq. We see a pattern of profiteering, waste and failure - due to the same flawed contracting system and even many of the same players” says CorpWatch Director Pratap Chatterjee. “The process of getting Katrina-stricken areas back on their feet is needlessly behind schedule, in part, due to the shunning of local business people in favor of politically connected corporations from elsewhere in the U.S. that have used their clout to win lucrative no-bid contracts with little or no accountability and who have done little or no work while ripping off the taxpayer.”
The US government is very experienced at outsourcing war work.
Citizen journalism, already changing the face of South Korea, arrives in Japan.
When the mainstream media shamefully exaggerates the “terrorist threat” - thankfully critiqued by the Australian public broadcaster - it’s more than time to realise that corporate journalists should be strongly challenged by the general public.
A Lebanese blogger profiles his friend, a “terrorist” in Western terms.
Meanwhile, the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper reminds the world where responsibility lies for the country’s future (and note the irrelevance of the US.)
Daniel Benjamin, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, examines the term “Islamo-fascism“:
“There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term,” he said.
“This is an epithet, a way of arousing strong emotion and tarnishing one’s opponent, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the content of their beliefs.
“The people who are trying to kill us, Sunni jihadist terrorists, are a very, very different breed.”
A legal legend speaks his mind:
A chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg has said George W. Bush should be tried for war crimes along with Saddam Hussein. Benjamin Ferencz, who secured convictions for 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating the death squads that killed more than 1 million people, told OneWorld both Bush and Saddam should be tried for starting “aggressive” wars - Saddam for his 1990 attack on Kuwait and Bush for his 2003 invasion of Iraq.
After the Iraqi war fraud, we are being set up again, this time over Iran.
The Committee to Protect Bloggers is still alive and kicking.
I’m currently in Melbourne for the writer’s festival. I’m speaking on a variety of subjects, including terrorism and the Middle East. Yesterday’s forum, Australia’s Israel Question, drew over 500 people into one of the largest venues of the festival. The sold-out event heard from Federal Court Judge Alan Goldberg, former Australian ambassador to Israel and author Peter Rodgers, human rights lawyer Julian Burnside and leading criminal lawyer Robert Richter. The Melbourne Age reports:
Prominent Melbourne barrister Robert Richter, QC, has called on the Jewish community to speak out when Israeli Government policies adversely affect the Jewish diaspora.
Mr Richter, speaking at a session of the Age Melbourne Writers’ Festival yesterday, said author and commentator Antony Loewenstein, whose controversial book My Israel Question was the subject of the forum, had been, in a sense, a “truer and closer friend” to Israel than those who believed they “had the ear” of Israel’s Government.
“Diaspora Jews need to take a stand,” he said. “It’s not good enough that they have a private audience with the Israeli leader. They ought to be saying some pretty loud things and not just murmuring approval.”
In his book, Loewenstein canvasses an assertion that there is an unspoken understanding in the Jewish diaspora to avoid criticism of Israel and its policies.
Mr Richter, who lived in Israel until he was 13, said there was no longer a question of whether Israel had a right to exist. But when some of the country’s actions meant anti-Semitic sentiment was directed towards those living outside the Jewish state, the diaspora community had the right to criticise, he said.
Loewenstein also writes that the Jewish lobby in Australia works to stifle debate around Israel and particularly its actions in the occupied territories.
To this, barrister and human rights activist Julian Burnside, QC, said: “One of the most important elements in any community . . . is the genuine possibility of freedom of thought and freedom of speech. There are no ideas that are off limits and no questions that are illegal.”
There is clearly a groundswell of interest in debating this subject. The Zionist lobby and its supporters rightly fear an examination of their tactics and motives and prefer to simply smear any opponents. Luckily, this tactic is failing miserably. My Israel Question is now a best-seller and causing Jews and non-Jews alike to discuss the role of Israel in the Middle East and the West’s relationship with the Jewish state.
The conversation has begun.
(My speech during yesterday’s event is here: Melbourne Writer’s Festival discussion paper)
Gideon Levy, Haaretz, August 27:
“The candle kids” grew up and became the “protest movement” of this war. The confused youth who sat crying with their guitars and candles in the city square in Tel Aviv after Rabin’s assassination are now sitting in the Rose Garden opposite the Prime Minister’s Office, no less confused, and seemingly protesting against the war - of course only after it ended.
Just as it was impossible to know what the candle kids wanted, it is difficult to understand what the reservists and the bereaved families want. Most of their complaints should be directed at themselves: Where were you until now? If it is only the demand that some officials go home, it’s a waste of their time and ours. Clones of those who are deposed will replace them very quickly and nothing will change. Olmert, Peretz and Halutz will go home, and Netanyahu, Mofaz and Barak will come to power.
For the first time after many terrible years in which we killed and were killed for no reason, there are question marks hanging over the public discourse. That change should be welcomed. But those who examine the content of the new protest should not hold out great hopes. The arguments of the protesters come down to two main issues, both of them as narrow as the world of the reservist: the IDF wasn’t prepared for the war, and the war was cut short.
An Iranian exhibition displays virulent anti-Semitism:
The title of the show is “Holocaust International Cartoon Contest,” or “Holocust,” as the show’s organizers spell the word in promotional material. But the content has little to do with the events of World War II and Nazi Germany.
There is instead a drawing of a Jew with a very large nose, a nose so large it obscures his entire head. Across his chest is the word Holocaust. Another drawing shows a vampire wearing a big Star of David drinking the blood of Palestinians. A third shows Ariel Sharon dressed in a Nazi uniform, emblazoned not with swastikas but with the Star of David.
Such examples of Jew-hatred are cause for real concern, though are sadly familiar in many Arab nations.
One of the world’s finest filmmakers takes a notable stand against Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.
The tide is turning.
Robert Fisk, The Independent, August 24:
Hizbollah has trumped both the UN army and the Lebanese government by pouring hundreds of millions of dollars - most of it almost certainly from Iran - into the wreckage of southern Lebanon and Beirut’s destroyed southern suburbs. Its massive new reconstruction effort - free of charge to all those Lebanese whose homes were destroyed or damaged in Israel’s ferocious five-week assault on the country - has won the loyalty of even the most disaffected members of the Shia community in Lebanon.
Hizbollah has made it clear that it has no intention of disarming under the UN Security Council’s 1701 ceasefire resolution and yesterday afternoon, Major-General Alain Pellegrini, the commander of the UN Interim Force in southern Lebanon - which the Americans and British are relying upon to seize the guerrilla army’s weapons - personally confirmed to me at his headquarters in Naqoura that “the Israelis can’t ask us to disarm Hizbollah”. Describing the ceasefire as “very fragile” and “very dangerous”, he stated that disarming Hizbollah “is not written in the mandate”.
But for now - and in the total absence of the 8,000-strong foreign military force that is intended to join Unifil with a supposedly “robust” mandate - Hizbollah has already won the war for “hearts and minds”. Most householders in the south have received - or are receiving - a minimum initial compensation payment of $12,000 (£6,300), either for new furniture or to cover their family’s rent while Hizbollah construction gangs rebuild their homes. The money is being paid in cash - almost all in crisp new $100 bills - to up to 15,000 families across Lebanon whose property was blitzed by the Israelis, a bill of $180m which is going to rise far higher when reconstruction and other compensation is paid.
While Israel talks tough against Iran (praying, hoping and knowing that the Bush administration is as demented and militarily clueless as themselves), former Australian ambassador to Israel, Ross Burns, demands a new approach to Middle East affairs. Speaking to the University of Western Australia’s Centre for Muslim States and Societies, he simply argues that one-sided support for Israel is resulting in ever-growing hatred of the West and the Jewish state.
Israel and its blind supporters (and the Howard government is part of the problem) seem to believe that the strength of the US superpower will sustain Israel indefinitely. They’re wrong. Israel’s future lies with closer ties to the Arab world. The numbers game ensures that.
Suffice to say, Australia’s Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has responded to Burns in his typical petulant way (well, it’s Murdoch’s Australian, but it’s hard to tell the difference these days.)
And speaking of Zionist irrelevance, look no further than here.
