Sara Roy, a Jewish political economist from Harvard University, is in Australia over the next weeks (more here.) Here’s a recent interview where she explains the ongoing Zionist occupation of Gaza:
Author Archive for Antony Loewenstein
Daniel Flitton, The Age, October 7:
The Federal Government is yet to convincingly explain why it opposed an open-ended war in Iraq but is willing to back a seemingly endless commitment in Afghanistan. The two conflicts are linked, at least in heated argument. Along with many opponents of the Iraq venture, Labor argues that the invasion was a strategic distraction, soaking up military resources and allowing the situation in Afghanistan to worsen.
But even if the United States had not toppled Saddam Hussein, would Afghanistan be in a better position now?
When will the Western powers realise that we should never have invaded Afghanistan, our presence there is only making the situation worse and we should retreat immediately?
If anything may make governments think twice again before embarking on an ill-conceived mission, a solid thumping would certainly help.
We have no business being in Afghanistan and we aren’t making the lives of people there better.
Just another day in a life of humiliation for the Palestinians in the West Bank at the hands of the IDF.
Israel as a land of occupation, fascism and discrimination? Think again:
By the end of this year, Israel will have a new international image, if the Foreign Ministry’s rebranding project is successful. The British firm Acanchi, which the ministry hired to craft the new image, is now in the final stages of preparing to launch the new brand.
Fiona Gilmore, Acanchi’s founder and a leading expert in rebranding countries and cities, toured the country last week and met with a wide range of Israelis - public figures, businessmen, academics and activists in various causes. Her mission is to create a brand disconnected from the Arab-Israeli conflict that focuses instead on Israel’s scientific and cultural achievements.
“The conclusion is that it is more important for Israel to be attractive than to be right”, says the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Being “attractive” presumably means white-washing the ever-growing number of Jewish settlers who believe in killing Arabs.
No, much more important to highlight the Jewish state’s wine industry.
The massive popularity of YouTube has resulted in the thinktank Demos suggesting that “creating video blogs and online diaries should be part of the school curriculum, used by schools in the same way that they organise museum trips or extra art classes.”
Philip Meyer, author of the influential book, “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age“, tries to predict a media future:
A smaller, less frequently published version packed with analysis and investigative reporting and aimed at well-educated news junkies that may well be a smart survival strategy for the beleaguered old print product.
What this does for the less educated and less media-savvy in society is anybody’s guess. Should only the elite get access to vital information? The future of public broadcasting must be strong.
China has the most sophisticated web censorship in the world (something I examine in detail in my book, The Blogging Revolution.)
Is Hong Kong soon to follow its master’s filtering path?
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on a nation we’re supposed to respect:
…In the Land of the Free: if you’re an adult who produces a film using other consenting adults, for the entertainment of still other consenting adults, which merely depicts fictional acts of humiliation and degradation, the DOJ [Department of Justice] will prosecute you and send you to prison for years. The claim that no real pain was inflicted will be rejected; mere humiliation is enough to make you a criminal. But if government officials actually subject helpless detainees in their custody to extreme mental abuse, degradation, humiliation and even mock executions long considered “torture” in the entire civilized world, the DOJ will argue that they have acted with perfect legality and, just to be sure, Congress will hand them retroactive immunity for their conduct. That’s how we prioritize criminality and arrange our value system.
Are blogs good for democracy?
A recent Yale university political union debated the issue.
The Independent’s Robert Fisk, in his regular Saturday column, highlights the unspoken reality of last week’s Vice Presidential debate:
Palestinians ceased to exist in the United States on Thursday night. Both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin managed to avoid the use of that poisonous word. “Palestine” and “Palestinians” - that most cancerous, slippery, dangerous concept - simply did not exist in the vice-presidential debate. The phrase “Israeli occupation” was mercifully left unused. Neither the words “Jewish colony” nor “Jewish settlement” - not even that cowardly old get-out clause of American journalism, “Jewish neighbourhood” - got a look-in. Nope.
Those bold contenders of the US vice-presidency, so keen to prove their mettle when it comes to “defence”, hid like rabbits from the epicentre of the Middle East earthquake: the existence of a Palestinian people. Sure, there was talk of a “two-state” solution, but it would have mystified anyone who didn’t understand the region.
What Fisk doesn’t mention is how the power of the Zionist lobby in the US and Jewish money grease the corridors of power. Even if a politician wants to criticise something about Israel’s behaviour - though both Palin and Biden “love” Israel like it’s somebody they want to make love to - the lobby would slander that person to high heaven.
What is currently happening inside Syria, a notorious police state?
What kind of China exists beyond what most Westerners ever see?
As a co-founder of Independent Australian Jewish Voices, the following email was just sent out to our list:
Dear friends,
Since we were last in touch, we’ve been making efforts with other groups to organise visiting speakers along the lines we had indicated. We would like to inform you of our plans.
Jeff Halper, a leading Israeli/American academic and peace activist, was scheduled to visit Australia in September but due to his involvement in the successful attempt to break the siege of Gaza by boat, he was unable to come. However, we are currently co-operating with the organisation of his tour in early 2009 and more details will soon be forthcoming.
We are pleased to announce that Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, will be in Australia to present the annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture this month. She is one of the world’s authorities on the West Bank and Gaza and will be speaking on the realities of the occupation for both Israelis and Palestinians. Details of her Sydney and Melbourne talks can be found on our website. The highlights include:
Melbourne, October 8: University of Melbourne, 6.30pm
Adelaide, October 11: The University of Adelaide, 5pm
Sydney, October 14: Seymour Centre Theatre, 6.30pm
Sydney, October 16: UNSW, Civil Engineering Room G1, 1pm
Our website continues to feature up-to-date news and analysis about the Israel/Palestine conflict.
We look forward to keeping in touch and to your ongoing support for widening the debate on the Middle East in Australia.
Best wishes,
Peter Slezak
James Levy
Antony Loewenstein
There is money to be made from blogging:
Blogs with 100,000 or more unique visitors a month earn an average of $75,000 annually—though that figure is skewed by the small percentage of blogs that make more than $200,000 a year. The estimates from a 2007 Business Week article are older but juicier: The LOLcat empire rakes in $5,600 per month; Overheard in New York gets $8,100 per month; and Perez Hilton, gossip king, scoops up $111,000 per month.
Leading Israeli journalist Amira Hass on the dual Palestinian societies: the West Bank and Gaza.
Mahmoud Darwish was one of the greatest Palestinian poets. He died in August.
Last night in Sydney a celebration of his life took place and hundreds of Palestinians, Arabs (and a few Jews) gathered to remember a man who wrote beautifully about exile, occupation and love (a collection of photos of the event are here.)
I must admit to not knowing a massive amount about Darwish but the last months have allowed a crash-course in his work. “We have on earth what makes life worth living”, he once wrote.
Discover his brilliance and resistance:
What happened when the founder of Wikipedia met a leading Chinese internet censorship official?
Vibewire is one of Australia’s finest online youth portals (I used to write a regular column for them years ago.)
I was recently interviewed by one of their writers, Jacqui Dent, about my book, The Blogging Revolution:
Blogging is being used increasingly to speak out against oppression in authoritarian regimes and speak up amidst mainstream media bias in the west. But are we listening? JACQUI DENT talks with author Antony Loewenstein to find out.
“I’m not saying Kevin Rudd should have a blog [but] why doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he want to engage with people? I understand that he’s a busy guy…”
It sounds like he’s having a joke but writer, blogger and journalist Antony Loewenstein is not being completely facetious. We’re chatting about his latest book The Blogging Revolution and the question that has prompted this statement is about his interview with Mohammad Ali Abtahi, the former vice-president of Iran. Just one of dozens of politicians, bloggers and journalists Loewenstein met whilst researching his book, what’s interesting about Abtahi is that he maintained a blog throughout his term and still has one today.
Unlike most of the bloggers Loewenstein met, Abtahi wrote from a position of power yet his motives matched those of many dissidents. He wrote out of frustration with the mainstream media. It’s a frustration Loewenstein shares, citing the events of 9/11 and the Iraq war as the wake-up call that for him flagged astonishing media bias in much of the west. Five years and over one million Iraqi casualties after the war in Iraq, the media still refuses to offer Iraqi voices. “Western journalists go to Iraq and they interview Iraqis: one or two lines, that’s it.”
“It’s clearly a belief that unless we report it and see it and explain it in our own words [you haven’t got legitimacy],” says Loewenstein. “If you go to much of the non-western world it’s that kind of bias…that pisses people off.”
Yet with the advent of the internet and blogging, for the first time those people are being given a way to speak up. We all remember the story of Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger who emerged during the Iraq war. “He showed up most of the western media because he had far more access and information and insight because he was Iraqi.” Blogging offers a chance for those who were previously unheard to bypass the mainstream media and offer their own perspective on events in their own countries and overseas, and increasingly we are hearing through the web the voices of those living under authoritarian regimes. And some of it is having an effect.
Loewenstein gives the example of a disturbing tendency for torture activists in Egypt to be arrested and raped by police officers. The horrendous acts were routinely filmed by the police and then distributed in order to frighten and intimidate other activists. In the past couple of years bloggers and dissidents have been able to disseminate the videos on YouTube and elsewhere, ultimately causing the jailing of two guilty police officers. However, Loewenstein is careful not to overestimate the effects of this new medium. “I’m not saying police torture has stopped,” he says. But the story is a good example of, “a relatively small online community… put[tting] on the agenda an issue that was only really whispered about rather than talked about.”
Yet the risks bloggers face for bringing these issues onto the public agenda in some countries can be extreme. Since 2003 sixty-four bloggers worldwide have been arrested and gaoled and many of those Loewenstein met felt they might be endangered simply by speaking to a western journalist. Such examples are not as isolated as you may think. Loewenstein mentions one situation a few years ago when an Iranian blogger was interviewed for a Foreign Correspondent documentary. The blogger “ended up being arrested after that show was aired and was gaoled,” Loewenstein says.
Dissident bloggers in countries like Iran and China also have to contend with increasing internet censorship by the government, blocking websites dealing with undesirable content and excluding certain key words from search engines like Google. Yet it’s the complacency Loewenstein discovered that seems particularly frightening. Loewenstein says most of the people he spoke to were unbothered by the censorship, or unaware of just how many sites were being blocked. Whilst in the meantime the practise of censorship is speading.
It sounds like the kind of thing that would only happen overseas but internet censorship is already being suggested both here in Australia and in other western nations. Multinational corporations such as Google and Yahoo, who collaborate with the Chinese and other authoritarian governments to enforce censorship laws already have the skills and means to import internet filtering into western countries.
“I do not see,” says Loewenstein, with feeling, “how it’s unlikely that …[censorship] could be used in western states.” The Rudd government is already talking about blocking child pornography websites and whilst Loewenstein stresses he does not support child pornography, the question must be asked: once you introduce censorship, where will it end?
“Do we get into a situation where the government says ‘we’re going to start blocking sites that support terrorism’?” The problem with this is that, as we’ve learned from cases such as that of Dr Haneef, ‘supporting terrorism’ is not such a straightforward thing to define. Loewenstein gives the example of Hamas, the elected government in Palestine: “it’s regarded as a terrorist organization by much of the western world, in my view mistakenly. So are we going to have a situation where the Australian government or the US government says ‘well, if you’re accessing the Hamas website you’re breaking the law’.”
It is in such environments that the voices of bloggers become so important. But how to go about finding these voices? Loewenstein seems slightly weary of the question. “People often ask me how do you know which blogs to look at…there’s no simple answer, over time you discover which sites you like, which sites you trust.” After some probing however, Loewenstein does recommend Global Voices Online, a website which provides commentary and translations on various political blogs of many nationalities. A full list of Loewenstein’s recommended blogs can be found at the back of his book, The Blogging Revolution.
Loewenstein also recommends alternative media sites like Crikey!, Salon.com and Slate Magazine for those to wish to read what people not part of what Loewenstein refers to as the ‘old men with beards’ have to say about world events. Loewenstein now has a beard himself, he is quick to point out, but he also has good things to say about Vibewire, which the 33-year-old used to write for, so we won’t hold it against him. “I like what [Vibewire] stands for…getting people who are deemed by the mainstream media to not be interested in the world of politics…to actually engage with issues.”
Of course, it’s easy to take Loewenstein’s views on blogging as a prediction of the future of the media, yet Loewenstein does not intend for blogging to overtake mainstream journalism. “If we’re looking for good investigative journalism, the vast majority of it is still, with exceptions…being done by print media… I’m not going to sit here and say that blogging is about to replace that.” But the point is that with the advent of the web and the opportunities it brings, the media is no longer the only source of information.
It was the writer Douglas Adams who once said that the internet is like being in a room where every door is one of those science fiction devices that transports you to any place in the world. If those doors were blogs, they’d plonk you down into the living room of any man or woman on the planet with an internet connection and something to say. It’s the first time in human history that communication of this sort has been so readily available. We’ve been using it to talk, but now some of us are starting to recognise that we can also use it to listen.
The unwritten corporate media rule is that you can say what you like about the powerless - they can be treated with contempt, smeared and slandered without limit. But when the powerless attempt to challenge the powerful, a different rule applies.
