Antony Loewenstein

Seriously, this is the BBC (via Electronic Intifada):

This week, the BBC issued its final ruling on a controversy which has been raging for nearly a year after the words “Free Palestine” were censored from a freestyle rap played on Radio 1Xtra.

Appearing on the popular Charlie Sloth Hip Hop M1X last February, the artist Mic Righteous performed a rap which included the lyrics: “I can scream Free Palestine for my pride/still pray for peace.”

BBC producers replaced the word ‘Palestine’ with the sound of breaking glass and this is the version that was aired and which can be seen on a video on the BBC website(the censorship occurs at 2:59).

The edited performance was repeated in April on the same show.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has spent the last eight months trying to find out why the decision to censor an artist who raised the issue of Palestine was made.

During the course of a long correspondence, the BBC’s head of editorial standards for audio and music, Paul Smith, wrote that the show’s producer “did not edit out the word ‘Palestine’ because it was offensive — referencing Palestine is fine, but implying that it is not free is the contentious issue.”

In that single sentence, a senior BBC executive revealed the BBC’s complete disdain for the Palestinians and their suffering, and its shameful disregard for international law when it is being broken by Israel.

Last last year I was invited to chair a panel at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas called, “Anyone Can Make A Revolution”. It was an attempt to understand the reality of the Arab revolutions and the influence (or not) of the internet:

In Egypt and Tunisia we have seen ordinary people come together to claim democracy and human rights in the face of oppressive regimes, with twitter and Facebook the other heroes of the revolution. Are social media and Al Jazeera instrumental in what happened, or are they just the latest communication tools? Can anyone with a mobile phone foment revolution or do the punitive regimes in Syria, Bahrain and Libya show that it takes a whole lot more?

Join our panel: Mona Eltahawy, columnist; Simon Sheikh, international public speaker and national director of the community advocacy group GetUp!; and Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

Salil Shetty appears with the support of Amnesty International.

Chaired by Antony Loewenstein

Just a short note to say that postings will remain very light until the 3rd week of February. I’m currently travelling overseas researching a forthcoming book (out 2013) on disaster capitalism. Let’s just say I’m learning much about mining, human rights, local communities being shafted and Western multinationals colluding to stir the pot. Welcome to the 21st century.

Thanks to the many readers who have emailed and asked if I was still alive due to website silence.

Rest assured, I’m very much alive and kicking (even if barely surviving on slower than dial-up internet).

Michael Hastings, author of the stunning new book The Operators, talks to Harpers:

4. Your book pays at least as much attention to the Pentagon press corps and its relationship with power as it does to Stanley McChrystal and his team, and you write that after your article ran, you found that you had few problems dealing with military and political figures, but your relations with many of your fellow journalists had been poisoned. Why?

The original article contained an implicit criticism of a few of my colleagues, so I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised by the backlash. They would have ignored the implicit criticisms if they could have, but the story garnered too much attention. All of a sudden Jon Stewart is on the Daily Show saying,“Hey, you other guys suck.” I think that embarrassed a number of folks who weren’t used to being embarrassed. They are accustomed to being the unquestioned journalistic authorities of these wars. And, as a general rule, war correspondents are a competitive and catty breed. Put ten war reporters at a dinner table and one of them leaves the room, seven others at the table will tell you the guy is a dick, she misbehaves with sources, he’s a sketchy womanizer, he can’t be trusted, he makes stuff up, she doesn’t deserve this or that. Usually—it’s such a small, tight-knit community—that kind of dirty laundry is kept secret among the “luckless tribe,” as one reporter once described us. That’s the micro level.

On the macro level, there was something much larger than myself, or Rolling Stone, or McChrystal. It had to do with how the media, as a whole, had been covering these wars. And despite the best efforts of a number of excellent journalists, on stories from WMDs to the escalation in Afghanistan, we’ve done a pretty spotty job, I think. I also came to consider the Pentagon press corps not as a watchdog of the Pentagon, but an extension of the Pentagon. This was a critical insight for me.

Max Ajl wonders the same thing in Monthly Review:

One state or two?  Boycott of Israeli goods or goods from the settlements?  Is the lobby the genesis of American wrongdoing in Palestine or is it imperialism?  The questions — regarding vision, strategy, and analysis — produce sharp cleavages on the Left.  Indeed, generally ones much deeper than they need to be.  And they remain stubbornly unsettled.

They also congeal in the person of Norman Finkelstein, who has taken some unpopular positions — his insistent call for a two-state solution, his references to “cultish” aspects of BDS — as well as more popular ones, like blaming the occupation solely on the Israel lobby.  For that reason he has become a lightning rod, attracting furious bolts of criticism and support.  The core issues, however, remain obscured amidst a charged atmosphere of extravagant denunciations (catcalls of Zionism and worse) from one side and fierce defenses from the other.

From one perspective, it’s an odd contretemps.  Finkelstein has spent decades fighting for Palestinian dignity and a place for Palestinians to live free of the occupation’s suffocating violence and capricious indignities.  He is the maverick scholar who exposed the American intellectual community as a gaggle of hacks by dissecting Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, showing it to be a hoax intended to deny the Palestinians peoplehood by painting them as peripatetics who had fabricated a “Palestinian” identity to ride the wave of Israel’s successful nation-building project.  And his forensic dismantling of Israeli scholarly mythologies in Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict remains one of the very best primers on the prejudices that surround the conflict.

For all that time his fight has been for a two-state settlement: something that seemed reasonable in 1988 and in the early 1990s.  But what seemed possible twenty years ago — with the Israeli electorate temporarily shaken by the savage repression of the 1st intifada and Israeli capital needing to recover from the aftermath of the destabilizing military-industrial accumulation patterns of the 1970s and 1980s, break through the sectoral envelope of domestic accumulation, and globalize – seems less possible now, with militarized accumulation again on the rise in the Middle East and elsewhere.  In some ways, the argument for two states has become a relic when so much of the discourse (less so the organizing) of the radical pro-Palestinian Left in the West and the Palestinian Left in the Occupied Territories is oriented towards one single state.

Furthermore, the constituency for partition is far from a majority of the Israeli population.  Those accepting removal of all settlements totaled 18 percent of the population in 2006 and declined to 14 percent in 2007.  So, the Israeli state is in sync with the sentiments of the Israeli people.  Rejectionism is consensual, while disagreements are technical, niggling about how tight should be the noose around Palestinian society’s neck.  Thus a program for a forced withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders is a challenge to Israeli power.  Two states with a just resolution of the refugee question and UN SC 242 borders is rabidly rejected by not only Israel but also America.  It makes little sense to speak of “selling out” when the two-state solution is so stolidly rejected by those who must consent to its implementation for it to have meaning.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald provides direction:

The Rules of American Justice are quite clear:

(1) If you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward.

(2) If you are a low-ranking member of the military, you will receive relatively trivial punishments in order to protect higher-ranking officials and cast the appearance of accountability.

(3) If you are a victim of American war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any entitlement to see the inside of a courtroom.

(4) If you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espionage – and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you.

Robert Fisk explains (and mainstream journalists, including on ABC Radio’s AM this morning, who continually repeat White House and Tel Aviv propaganda against Tehran, should take note):

Turning round a story is one of the most difficult tasks in journalism – and rarely more so than in the case of Iran. Iran, the dark revolutionary Islamist menace. Shia Iran, protector and manipulator of World Terror, of Syria and Lebanon and Hamas and Hezbollah. Ahmadinejad, the Mad Caliph. And, of course, Nuclear Iran, preparing to destroy Israel in a mushroom cloud of anti-Semitic hatred, ready to close the Strait of Hormuz – the moment the West’s (or Israel’s) forces attack.

Apparently not, according to today’s Melbourne Age, though one has to wonder; our government can’t really support Zionist occupation more than it already does.

Well, I guess she could order an Australian military invasion of Iran; that may keep Tel Aviv happy for a few minutes:

Julia Gillard has moved to strengthen her already close relations with the Jewish community by giving her new business liaison adviser, Bruce Wolpe, the specific task of liaising with it.

Some caucus colleagues think treating the Jewish community in this special way is unwise, even weird. One called it ”a curious decision”. Another said: ”This is amateurish. Singling out the Jewish community when there are so many other components of Australian society is hard to comprehend.”

A third said that the level and quality of access for the Jewish community was already seen as superior to that of others and this could further that perception.

Critics accuse Ms Gillard of being too pro-Israel on Middle East issues, on which she has differed from Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd’s more even-handed position.

While Jewish leaders are publicly welcoming the Jewish liaison role, some sources in the community question why it is needed. One said it was peculiar and stupid – ”the Prime Minister has a very good relationship with the Jewish community. It doesn’t need to be channelled.”

A memo from the PM’s chief of staff, Ben Hubbard, to office colleagues, which is circulating among Jewish leaders, said Mr Wolpe, who is Jewish, ”will be responsible for liaison with the Australian business community and will also have a subsidiary role as liaison for the PM with the Jewish community”. Mr Wolpe’s latter role was not highlighted when his business appointment was announced recently.

At present Michael Cooney, a speechwriter and adviser in Ms Gillard’s office, liaises with various faith and ethnic communities.

Mr Wolpe, a former director of corporate affairs for Fairfax Media, owner of The Age, is senior adviser to US congressman Henry Waxman. He takes up his position with Ms Gillard in several weeks.

Philip Chester, president of the Zionist Federation of Australia, said while he personally had not dealt with Mr Wolpe ”my colleagues [in the Jewish community] are very positive about the relationship that can be built with him”. So far the dialogue with the Prime Minister had been very effective.

Ikebal Patel, president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, said there would not be a problem with Mr Wolpe’s appointment if there was similar liaison from Ms Gillard’s office with other faith communities.

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