Antony Loewenstein

Rupert Murdoch’s Australian website, news.com.au, conducts an “investigative report” into “the hidden war on Australia” - the stories are titled “online jihad” - and discovers these startling facts:

A special investigation by NEWS.com.au infiltrating these global networks has identified jihadi references to the “embarrassing collapse” of the Howard government and cites Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Iraq withdrawal as a “victory”.

The stories are embarrassing in their fear-mongering. One section is titled “laughing at us”, suggesting that Islamists, some of whom are unpleasant figures, mocked former Prime Minister John Howard’s defeat in last year’s election. I think you would have found millions of Australians having similar thoughts on November 24.

There is no doubt that Islamic extremism is a problem for Western societies, but this kind of “investigative” report is little more than trawling through some forums and chat-rooms and finding comments that celebrate the defeat of Western forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The clear implication appears to be that withdrawing troops from Iraq is being cheered by jihadis and perhaps Australia should reconsider doing so.

The fact that the war is both illegal and immoral is apparently irrelevant.

The internet is filled with material from across the political spectrum and much of it may be objectionable, but that’s hardly cause to parade flimsy stories on Murdoch’s leading local news-site suggesting that Islamists are “laughing at us” and therefore determined to kill Australians wherever and whenever they can. We seem to forget that occupation forces in a country like Iraq and Afghanistan are legitimate targets for resistance, however unpalatable that may be for Westerners to accept.

Share This

Keep a blogger locked up at home long enough with nothing but Chinese state TV and an internet connection to keep them occupied and they’re bound to subvert something eventually.

The case of imprisoned Chinese blogger Hu Jia is symtematic of the Chinese government’s fear of the online medium. After all:

Chinese President Hu Jintao has told officials to breathe new life into propaganda efforts, putting renewed emphasis on a key pillar of Communist rule ahead of this summer’s Beijing Olympic Games.

Share This

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan explaining why it is a positive development that the country’s ban on women wearing headscarves at universities has been lifted:

“What do they say — only citizens without head scarves can be secular? They are making a mistake falling into such segregation. This is a society of those, with and without head scarves, who support a democratic, secular social law state.”

Share This

Yet another example of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad taking his country in the wrong direction:

Iran’s most important women’s magazine, Zanan, (Women) has been forced to close after 16 years of publication, after being accused of painting a “dark picture” of Iran.

The magazine has also used very subtle and creative language in order to avoid being shut down.

Share This

George Bush, in his annual state of the union address, highlighted so-called Iranian-backed extremism in the Middle East.

The reality in Iran, however, is rarely examined by the mainstream media. Noted Iranian writer Nasrin Alavi, now based in London, argues that Ahmadinejad’s regime is decreasing in popularity due to its economic failures and overblown rhetoric:

The disillusion with the United States among many Iranians has meant that the hopes and energies for change are increasingly grounded in the domestic troubles of the regime. The people’s frustrations with the government’s economic mismanagement are rising at a moment when an important electoral test - elections to the 290-seat majlis (parliament) on 14 March 2008 - is approaching.  

In routine circumstances, the leadership of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters would at such a time seek to heighten the confrontational rhetoric against the US, mobilising nationalist sentiment against revolutionary Iran’s number-one enemy. On this occasion, the tactic may be less effective, for two reasons.

First, the US’s national intelligence estimate (NIE) published on 3 December 2007 controverted the White House’s portrayal of the alleged Iranian nuclear peril, thus going a little way to defuse tension and undermine the portrayal by Iranian authorities (and in particular by Ahmadinejad himself) of an immediate threat from the US (see “Iran: the uses of intelligence“, 6 December 2007). Second, most Iranian citizens are so hard-pressed by their daily circumstances that their concern is not with foreign policy or how their country’s nuclear-energy programme is perceived, but with their economic condition and how to improve it.

This is bad news for the president. Ahmadinejad had campaigned for the presidency in June 2005 on an economic platform, and won power by tapping into the vein of popular anger against corruption and cronyism and promising to create jobs and security for Iran’s poor and deprived. In the middle of his third year in office, the hopes he raised have largely dissipated: the government has introduced petrol rationing, and there has been disruption in gas supplies and more than sixty deaths amid a spell of severely cold weather - all this in the country that is the fourth-largest oil producer in the world, and has the second-largest natural-gas resources.

None of this suggests that a greater reformist period is coming, Alavi writes, but rather a new governing order.

Share This

Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating describes Indonesia’s deceased dictator Soeharto, one of the most brutal of the last century, after his funeral yesterday:

Personally, he was a friend…It took a while to get him to come out of his shell, but when he did, he was utterly decisive. He was able to take quick decisions…

What’s a few million murdered Indonesians between friends?

Share This

Indonesian dictator Soeharto died yesterday. He was one of the 20th centuries most brutal dictators, killing over one million people in the name of strengthening his rule.

The Australian newspaper, however, decides to praise the man and primarily discusses his economic “reforms”. Of course, if Cambodia’s Pol Pot had left his country in better financial shape, the Murdoch press would have undoubtedly praised him, too. These newspaper figures praise “stability”, “pro-Western” governments and “economic reform”. Human rights are largely irrelevant.

The paper’s editorial today proves this point:

Despite his many failings, Australia has reason to be thankful for the steadying hand former Indonesian president Suharto brought to the world’s most populous Muslim nation, immediately to our north.

Hitler improved Germany’s economy, too and the trains ran on time.

Once a friend of Western elite power - unless you’re somebody like Saddam Hussein who turned on his original Western backers - always a friend of the Western business and media elite.

UPDATE: The CIA has described the effects of Soeharto’s takeover of Indonesia as “the worst mass murders of the second half of the 20th century.”

Share This

Wikileaks continues to reveal the issues ignored by the mainstream media:

Following an announcement this week that the infamous Japanese Monju fast-breeder nuclear reactor would be reopened, activists in Japan have leaked suppressed video footage of the disaster that lead to its closure in 1995.

The infamous sodium spill, an accident that long ago earned itself a place in the history of nuclear power in Japan, has returned one more time to haunt government and industry officials with images they had hoped they would never see again.

Named after the Buddhist divinity of wisdom, Monju, located in Japan’s Fukui prefecture, is Japan’s only fast-breeder reactor. Unlike conventional reactors, fast-breeder reactors, which “breed” plutonium, use sodium rather than water as a coolant. This type of coolant creates a potentially hazardous situation as sodium is highly corrosive and reacts violently with both water and air.

On December 8th, 1995, 700 kg of molten sodium leaked from the secondary cooling circuit of the Monju reactor, resulting in a fire that made headlines across the country. Although the accident itself did not result in a radiation leak, many argue that the sodium spill itself came very close to detonating Monju, a catastrophe which would have spilled plutonium into the environment.

Following the fire, officials at the government-owned Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC), operators of Monju, first played down the extent of damage at the reactor and denied the existence of a videotape showing the sodium spill.

Share This

The case of the Afghani journalist sentenced to death for allegedly downloading a suspect article online is far more complex than we are being told, writes Afghan blogger Sanjar:

This is a power game, Karzai government has been critical of media for awhile, this incident allowed the religious scholar to rampage a journalist. In big picture it shows where power lies and where Karzai can rely. Parviz is a victim of the politics game. Media has a voice in the Afghan society, media feeds values into the power system. This game is about whose voices are heard and whose voices are marginalised. Media has made a lot of noise after the Taliban, far more than mullahs and Karzai government don’t want the power to go out of the classical circles into the hands of ordinary people. Mullahs and religion is a good tool to sanction unwanted groups which are perceived banal and dangerous. 

Share This

James K Galbraith, Guardian Comment is Free, January 25:

Five former Nato generals, including the former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shalikashvili, have written a “radical manifesto” which states that “the West must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the ‘imminent’ spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.”

In other words, the generals argue that “the west” - meaning the nuclear powers including the United States, France and Britain - should prepare to use nuclear weapons, not to deter a nuclear attack, not to retaliate following such an attack, and not even to pre-empt an imminent nuclear attack. Rather, they should use them to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a non-nuclear state. And not only that, they should use them to prevent the acquisition of biological or chemical weapons by such a state.

Under this doctrine, the US could have used nuclear weapons in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to destroy that country’s presumed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons - stockpiles that did not in fact exist. Under it, the US could have used nuclear weapons against North Korea in 2006. The doctrine would also have justified a nuclear attack on Pakistan at any time prior to that country’s nuclear tests in 1998. Or on India, at any time prior to 1974.

Share This