What is the effect of Washington’s recent decision to allow web companies such as Google and Yahoo to operate in closed societies, such as Cuba and Iran?
Tag Archive for 'China'
My following article appears in the Huffington Post:
The arrival of the new American Ambassador to Australia was breathlessly welcomed by the Australia media pack in late 2009. Jeffrey Bleich, an American lawyer from California, assumed his position in Canberra and was introduced to the country through an interview on the public broadcaster ABC.
After the reporter Leigh Sales congratulated Bleich on his appointment, he was treated to softball questions and allowed to outline, unchallenged, the Obama administration’s agenda.
Sales and Bleich joked over the ambassador’s Elvis obsession but substantive questions were almost absent (or follow-ups probing Bleich’s non-answers). No comments about Obama’s continuation of Bush administration policies towards indefinite detention of terror suspects and warrantless wiretapping.
On the eve of Obama’s first visit to Australia in late March, the Sydney Morning Herald’s political editor Peter Hartcher informed his readers that, “the remark by the US ambassador to Australia that his kids are brushing up on their Wii skills is a marker of the rejuvenation of the alliance.”
Hartcher wrote:
“By bringing his family, Obama will give a new generation of Australians a sense of connection with their country’s chief ally… Where the relationship between [former Australian Prime Minister John] Howard and [George W.] Bush was forged in the fire of September 11 terrorism and the Afghan and Iraq invasions that followed, [Australian Prime Minister Kevin] Rudd and Obama have developed a post-crisis partnership.”
Both leaders would be able to “share satisfaction in the early progress of the new strategy in Afghanistan.”
The American/Australian alliance has always been built on supporting Washington’s wars, despite public opinion often opposing these engagements (such as the current Afghan deployment).
After the humanitarian and military disaster in Iraq, the only reason to maintain Australian troops in Afghanistan is to try and regain Washington’s credibility; a difficult task when civilians continue being killed. Australia’s objective has therefore nothing to do with bringing freedom and democracy to Afghanistan.
Furthermore, Australians troops are suspected of committing war crimes in the country and military lawyers are inadequately trained to assess possible breaches of humanitarian law in the field.
A senior Australian Army media adviser who served in Afghanistan and Iraq accused the Australian government of a culture of excessive spin and unnecessary secrecy, lying about local engagement with the civilian populations and obscuring the mission’s purpose.
There is little discussion in the corporate media over what Australian troops are actually doing in Afghanistan. Instead, the public are mostly treated to articles advocating military escalation. Take this recent piece by Rupert Murdoch columnist, Greg Sheridan, arguing that, “a serious ally would take the lead in a province, as we did in Vietnam.” Public opinion, or morality, is damned.
America has consistently thanked Australia for its reliability. George W. Bush awarded John Howard the Presidential Medal of Freedom in early 2009. Bush said that, “He [Howard] never wavered in his support for liberty, and free institutions, and the rule of law as the true and hopeful alternatives to ideologies of violence and repression. That’s why I called him a man of steel.”
Howard was a full backer of Bush’s “war on terror”, including Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition.
Britain’s Tony Blair and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe were also awarded at the White House ceremony.
Managing the alliance between America and Australia takes little work or imagination from Washington. They have a country desperate to keep on its good side, able to offer its own thoughts but likely to fall into line, no matter what. Washington rightly believes that Australia watches over the Pacific, influencing and pressuring small nations heavily reliant on foreign aid.
Some mainstream commentators have suggested that Obama’s upcoming trip should allow serious discussion about China and energy co-operation.
But Obama’s fortunes are dwindling in America and key policies, on health and climate change, are stalled with little positive resolution expected any time soon. Although a senior Australian minister claimed last week that Obama’s visit would “generate a great deal of interest from the Australian public“, I know of a number of anti-war groups who will peacefully protest America’s ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and support for Israel.
Australian backing for America isn’t automatic and requires constant massaging by embedded journalists. The Australian-American Leadership Dialogue is a regular and private gathering of the political elites from both countries. Senior journalists, most of whom never disclose their participation, regularly return from meetings praising American initiatives.
As far as I know, there has never been a comprehensive article in the mainstream press that debunks the agenda of the Dialogue or the opinion-shapers involved. Instead, we are treated to occasional references without context.
Australia has long suffered from an inferiority complex towards its super-power boss. Disagreements aren’t unknown between Washington and Canberra – Kevin Rudd refused to help re-settle released Uighur detainees from Guantanamo Bay despite a request from the Obama administration – but Australia is far more comfortable seeing America as an irreplaceable friend who supposedly shares the same values. China is only a vitally important trading partner.
There is no doubt that Obama himself remains popular in Australia – his allegedly charming demeanour is still profiled in gossip magazines – but the mainstream media reports the torturous progress of the Democrat’s health care bill and the political effectiveness of the Tea Party movement.
Obama’s upcoming visit will be primarily an opportunity for Kevin Rudd in an election year to bask in the glow of a President whose popularity is diving in America but remains buoyant globally.
At a time when America’s ability to shape events in vast swathes of the world are in decline, including throughout South America and the Middle East, Obama will be pleased to visit an unquestioning ally.
If you’re a country that enjoys war crimes, rest assured either China or America will come to your aid:
China is to lend Sri Lanka about $200m (£133m) to build a second international airport in the south of the island.
Another $100m from Beijing will help boost the island’s railway network, Sri Lanka’s foreign ministry said.
The new airport will be near a vast sea port which is being largely funded with Chinese money.
China is financing a growing number of such projects in Sri Lanka, which some see as an attempt to undermine Indian influence in the region.
The two countries are vying for contracts in Sri Lanka following the end of more than 20 years of civil war.
My latest article for New Matilda is an interview with leading American reporter Mark Danner:
Leading US journalist Mark Danner calls a spade a spade and examines the political value of violence in this exclusive interview with Antony Loewenstein
Mark Danner has some unusual characteristics for a mainstream US journalist.
He has published in some of America’s finest literary journals and is an irregular contributor to the New Yorker and New York Review of Books. Yet despite his impeccable media establishment credentials he remains entirely capable of critiquing its failures.
In an exclusive interview with newmatilda.com last week, Danner covered a lot of ground. He is haunted by his country’s use, abuse and boasting of torture on “enemy combatants” and the inability or unwillingness of Obama to challenge the criminality of the Bush years.
I raised with him the roughly 700 military bases or outposts across the world that Washington acknowledges it operates, according to American historian Chalmers Johnson. When I asked Danner what the US needs them for, he spoke with a frankness unusual in a mainstream journalist about the way the media avoids using words “empire” and “imperialism” to describe America’s role in the world.
“People don’t want to use that kind of terminology because they’ll get placed on the Left. It is viewed as an inherent denunciation of American policy. To talk about empire, you’re automatically Noam Chomsky, you’re making a point about hegemony but I don’t see it like that. The United States has imperial visions and responsibilities and that’s just a fact. It obviously works differently to the Roman Empire or the British Empire.
“But the US worldwide has interests and it controls the sea-lanes. The American navy is absolutely unparalleled in the world and nobody rivals this power. There is no other worldwide navy, though the Soviets tried to build one and failed. That’s what empires do — they keep the sea-lanes clear. China is building a blue-water navy but it’s generally thought that Beijing wants to construct a ‘string of pearls’ — military bases from China to Africa because at this stage their foreign policy is primarily focused on securing resources.”
Danner was in town last week to give a talk at Sydney University, and to promote his most recent book, Stripping Bare the Body. During his talk Danner challenged the core beliefs of the American-led battle against terrorism by outlining the wide gulf between reality and rhetoric. He cited President Barack Obama’s “eloquent address” in Cairo last June that articulated the importance of reframing the relationship between the West and the Muslim world.
But Washington seemed to ignore the contradictions of an African-American president talking about democracy and human rights while still wholeheartedly backing dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. Both Saudi Arabia and Egypt are key targets for al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. Danner observes that while such inconsistencies might escape the mainstream Western voter, they are at the very centre of the way people in non-Western countries see US behaviour. Obama’s seeming endorsement of the policies of client states such as these — or at least no public moves to condemn their brutality — plays directly into the hands of those who point to America as the great hypocrite.
In that context, Danner argued that the Muslim Brotherhood gaining influence in Egypt through democratic elections should be cautiously welcomed and a “salutary” lesson for a super-power long used to backing anti-democratic forces.
He argued that after one year in office, Obama would get a failing grade on the project of completely ending torture and closing Guantanamo Bay. More ominously, lamented Danner, many polls find a majority of Americans now believe that torture is necessary to keep the homeland safe from terrorist attack. “Fear is now a permanent feature of American life”, Danner said.
He reminded the audience that the filibuster technique, ruthlessly used by the Republicans in the last 12 months to block Democrat-led initiatives in Congress, had an ironic history. “It used to be something Democrats used to block civil rights legislation to allow African-Americans to vote”, Danner explained, “and today the same tool is being used by the Republicans against a African-American President.” He wasn’t optimistic that this political gridlock would be broken anytime soon.
Far from being a beltway analyst, commenting on events from the safety of the US, much of Danner’s fame stems from his influential first-hand coverage of conflicts outside the US and of the effects of his country’s foreign policy. As well, his work has dealt frequently with the seeming inability of the corporate press to report honestly on conflicts and trauma both near and far from America. “The verdict since 9/11 is quite mixed”, he told me. “What the press did in the run-up to the Iraq war was a terrible job. One of the mitigating reasons for that was that the Bush administration chose to make its case [over Iraq] on intelligence grounds and put journalists in the position of being seals, wanting fish. The ones who clapped most agreeably, such as Judith Miller at the New York Times, got the biggest fish. Intelligence stories depend on leaks. Secondly, the political elites essentially closed ranks over the invasion.”
Danner argues that the Iraq invasion potentially hurt the Democrats more than the Republicans, as the so-called “Left” didn’t want to be seen as being on the wrong side of history. “Anybody on the Democratic side who thought they might be President in 2004, such as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, all supported the war; it was the smart vote, in part because of what happened after the earlier Iraq conflict in 1991 when Democrats opposed a very popular war.”
Violence as a catalyst for action is something that Danner looks at in a variety of ways in his book. As he says, “for leaders in a democracy, charged with crafting a foreign policy that can attract consensus or at least acquiescence, the instinctual power exerted by the spectacle of violence is a reality to be managed and sometimes feared.”
And that’s a dynamic that has certainly applied to the rapacious relationship between the US and a place in which Danner did some of his most powerful early journalism: Haiti. In the aftermath of the recent earthquake, Danner wrote in the New York Times that the country needed a serious and long-term commitment from Washington to build a “new Haiti”, but not of the militaristic kind: “Haitians have grown up in a certain kind of struggle for individuality and for power, and the country has proved itself able to absorb the ardent attentions of outsiders who, as often as not, remain blissfully unaware of their own contributions to what Haiti is. Like the ruined bridges strewn across the countryside — one of the few traces of the Marines and their occupation nearly a century ago — these attentions tend to begin in evangelical zeal and to leave little lasting behind.”
Events have brought Haiti back to attention in the most unfortunate way. But it is hard to see a lot of hope for the US altering the way it goes about its business there or elsewhere. In one of the most telling passages in Stripping Bare the Body, Danner describes another US intervention in Haiti, this time during Clinon pesidency: “The Americans, exerting their overwhelming power to reshape the politics of a tiny immiserated land, failed disastrously in Haiti. They underestimated the nationalist response that would accompany their every move, blundering about like a watchmaker blinded by his own shadow.”
And to anyone who has watched the US in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, that’s a description that sounds tragically familiar.
Reporters Without Borders firmly condemns the Chinese government latest attempt to tighten its grip on the Internet. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced today that anyone wanting to operate a website would have to meet with regulators in person and bring identity documents.
Who said Chinese bloggers are happy with the country’s insanely tight web censorship?
Famous amateur film-maker, Hu Ge, has recently made a new satirical piece on the Internet censorship in China. The 7-minute piece, ‘Animal World: the Home-living Animal’ is styled as an animal-planet type of documentary and has attracted hundreds of thousands of views in a matter of a few days. The piece presents to the audience the so-called ‘home-living animals’, who are in fact China’s tens of millions of netizens.
Australian, Jewish Zionist MP Michael Danby loves to talk about human rights in many countries around the world, except of course Palestine. It’s the usual program; issue directives without political risk but support the most reactionary elements of the Israeli political elite.
And bombing Iran. Take his piece in the Wall Street Journal that argues – seriously, does this guy get his talking points from the Israeli Foreign Ministry? Actually, don’t answer – that the bombing of Iran (by Israel?) will be the fault of…China:
President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is determined to build nuclear weapons and has threatened Israel with destruction many times. He may be bluffing, but this is not a risk Israel can afford to take. If the international community cannot restrain Iran, the government of Israel will face great pressure to take pre-emptive steps to protect the country against attack.
Thus, China’s greed for secure oil imports and its willingness to deal with outlaw regimes to get these imports is causing a breakdown in the world’s only system for disciplining countries that endanger peace. If the U.N. sanctions break down in Iran, this opens up a serious danger of war—and China will bear a heavy share of the blame.
It’s such a hackneyed article (though fits the Journal perfectly) that you wonder why he bothers.
If Israel bombs Iran, Israel will be to blame. As will Washington (and probably Canberra). And Israel will pay a very high price for this criminality.
Yet another intellectually bankrupt example of modern Zionism.
Are any prominent Zionists capable of defending anything other than war these days?
It’s hard not to read this story from yesterday’s New York Times and conclude that the journalist and paper are internally petrified that the place of America in the world is decreasing, its influence waning:
China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even further this year.
China has also leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. And the country is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants.
These efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates seems a little too keen to keep the Chinese authorities as friends by grossly ignoring the Communist state’s sophisticated censorship program:
You’ve got to decide: do you want to obey the laws of the countries you’re in or not? If not, you may not end up doing business there. Chinese efforts to censor the internet have been very limited. It’s easy to go around it, so I think keeping the internet thriving there is very important.
A new book about China set in 2013, mirroring George Orwell’s 1984, imagines a set of national strategies:
1. Democratic dictatorship under one-party rule;
2. Rule-of-law with stability as top priority;
3. An authoritarian government which rules for the people;
4. A state-controlled market economy;
5. Fair competition dominated by state-owned enterprises;
6. Scientific development with Chinese characteristics;
7. A self-centered harmonious foreign diplomacy;
8. A single-ethnicity sovereignty with multiple ethnicities;
9. Post-western and post-universal values;
10. Renaissance of the matchless Chinese culture
The sad reality, confirmed in media reports recently, is that China is now moving towards banning any SMS messages deemed “vulgar”.
The role of the Chinese regime in hacking sensitive information just became even creepier:
Reporters Without Borders is deeply disturbed and outraged by cyber-attacks on the Google E-mail accounts of several Beijing-based foreign journalists. The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) sent its members a note today alerting them that at least two foreign news bureaux in Beijing have been the target of attacks by hackers.
The warning follows Google’s revelation that the Gmail accounts of several dozen Chinese human rights activists were the target of sophisticated attacks in December.
“The hackers who targeted foreign journalists based in Beijing were probably trying to get contact details and information about the human rights activists who talk to the international press,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Compromising these reporters’ communication methods endangers and intimidates their sources and constitutes a serious violation of their privacy, their professional work and their freedom to provide news and information.”
The press freedom organisation added: “We firmly condemn these attacks and we call on the ministry of industry and information technology to provide an explanation.”
An APTN journalist whose account was hacked told Reporters Without Borders told Reporters Without Borders that her emails were being forwarded to another, unknown account. “I have the feeling that my privacy has been violated,” she told Reporters Without Borders on condition of anonymity. “And so many people have been put in danger by these leaks, it’s terrible.”
A key reason behind Google’s announcement this week that it will probably leave China was allegedly due to human rights concerns:
Google moved quickly to announce that it would stop censoring its Chinese service after realising dissidents were at risk from attempts to use the company’s technology for political surveillance, according to a source with direct knowledge of the internet giant’s most senior management.
As the US intervened in Google’s challenge to Beijing, the source told the Guardian the company’s decision was largely influenced by the experiences of Sergey Brin’s Russian refugee background.
The Google co-founder “felt this very personally”, the source said. “The notion that somebody would try to turn Google’s tools into tools of political surveillance was something he found deeply offensive.”
The New York Times remains unsure whether Google departing China will mainly affect the Chinese people themselves:
“In the 20 years I’ve been doing this work, I can’t think of anything comparable,” said John Kamm, the founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, which has enjoyed remarkable success in encouraging China to release dissidents. Mr. Kamm, a former business leader himself, argues that Western companies could do far more to project their values.
My following article appears today on ABC Unleashed/The Drum:
Google has threatened to withdraw entirely from China in protest at the authoritarian regime’s oppressive online censorship and continuing attempts by Chinese hackers to gain sensitive information of local human rights workers.
Perhaps most significantly, Google’s Chinse search engine, Google.cn, now allows once banned material to be displayed, such as images of the brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square. A few people even placed flowers outside the company’s offices in Beijing as a sign of respect and perhaps admiration for the company’s position.
It is a highly unusual move by a multinational with roughly 30 percent market share in an internet market of over 350 million people, the largest in the world. Furthermore, it recognises the increasing pressure placed on the company by Communist officials, including the banning of YouTube, attempts to illegally gain corporate information and persistent efforts by hackers to discover the private details of dissenters on Gmail.
Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at the Open Space Institute and an expert on the Chinese Internet, told the New York Times that, “Unless they turn themselves into a Chinese company, Google could not win. The company has clearly put its foot down and said enough is enough.”
A Google spokesman wrote in a blog posting on 12 January:
“These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered – combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web – have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”
News reports indicate that the Obama administration has been in negotiations with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco, companies with a long history of assisting Beijing in its censorship program, to implement a far-reaching initiative to help citizens in repressive regimes access banned online information. China is only the worst culprit of this growing trend; Iran is not far behind, especially since last year’s disputed election.
Despite Google’s seemingly brave move, already praised by human rights groups around the world, questions remain whether other large web firms will join them. It should be remembered that the country’s largest search engines, such as Baidu, are Chinese-owned and remain close to the regime. They are unlikely to follow Google’s lead.
The last months have seen cyber wars within China and from the outside heat up considerably. Chinese netizens have pledged to help their Iranian colleagues while government-backed activists from Iran moved to disable Chinese websites.
Chinese writer and blogger Alice Xin Liu argued earlier this month that the banning of increasing numbers of websites by paranoid authorities was both impossible to predict and avoid. She shared the news that officials are threatening to release a “white-list” of approved websites, with foreign websites forced to register before they launched or allowed to continue online.
Although some technology writers are cynical over Google’s latest stance (“More about business than thwarting evil”, says one), the company’s relationship with the Communist regime has never been especially close. It was slammed internationally for agreeing to censorship its search engine in the first place. Google’s global standing plummeted since 2006: “On a business level, that decision to censor…was a net negative,” co-founder Sergey Brin told the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2007.
When I visited China in 2007 during research for my book, The Blogging Revolution, I found widespread mistrust of the company. Although Gmail was regarded as far safer option than Hotmail or Yahoo!, the search engine was regarded as a pale imitation of Chinese equivalents.
The Great Firewall (GFW) is an ingenious system that doesn’t actually block all banned content. Instead, explains leading internet censorship expert Nart Villeneuve, “the GFW doesn’t have to be 100% technically effective, it just has to serve as a reminder to those in China about what content is acceptable and that which should be avoided. The objective is to influence behaviour toward self-censorship, so that most will not actively seek out banned information or the means to bypass controls and access it.”
My own research in China found a remarkable amount of material still existed that could be deemed controversial. Sexual content, political writings and corruption discussions remained available. The last decade has seen an explosion of once-forbidden issues now analysed, challenged and framed in the Chinese blogosphere. Crusading journalism is still possible in today’s China. This is not to deny the pervasive censorship regime but to highlight a more nuanced view of Beijing’s attitude towards its citizens.
The wider context for this story is the economic rise of China; the elephant in the room between Washington and Beijing. America fears a business and political rival and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded this week that China explains its ongoing cyber-attacks against Google and other firms. It was yet another warning from the super-power to the competitor snapping at its heels.
Veteran China watcher James Fallows argues that the significance of Google’s decision is the challenge to China’s “Bush-Cheney era”. China “is on a path at the moment that courts resistance around the world” but is not a threat to American hegemony.
The real agenda behind Google’s decision may never be known but it is unlikely to change in the short-term the Communist Party’s stranglehold on information. If the move forces Western companies to more closely examine their motives and practices in the dictatorship and the collusion that inevitably comes with this process, Google will have recovered a modicum of respect.
With news that Google is threatening to leave China over its oppressive censorship and hacking systems, this news (which is impossible to verify) is either scare-mongering on a massive scale or signs of a brave new world:
A classified FBI report indicates that China has secretly developed an army of 180,000 cyberspies that “poses the largest single threat to the United States for cyberterrorism and has the potential to destroy vital infrastructure, interrupt banking and commerce, and compromise sensitive military and defense databases.”
These spies are already launching 90,000 attacks a year just against U.S. Defense Department computers, according to a senior FBI analyst familiar with the contents of the report, making news Tuesday that the Chinese government may have hacked the email accountings of human-rights activists, prompting Google to consider withdrawing from that country, seem like child’s play.
When Israel and its blind supporters accuse any critics of anti-Semitism – the latest shameful example, this time in Canada, is reported here – it’s easy to claim that Zionists are the masters of crying wolf.
Then a story like this appears and it’s hard to know what to think, other than Israel’s enemies are often helped by the country’s criminal and inept behaviour:
Israel has admitted that pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians, and others without the consent of their families – a practice that it said ended in the 1990s, it emerged at the weekend.
The admission, by the former head of the country’s forensic institute, followed a furious row prompted by a Swedish newspaper reporting that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to use their organs – a charge that Israel denied and called “antisemitic”.
The revelation, in a television documentary, is likely to generate anger in the Arab and Muslim world and reinforce sinister stereotypes of Israel and its attitude to Palestinians. Iran’s state-run Press TV tonight reported the story, illustrated with photographs of dead or badly injured Palestinians.
Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab MP, said the report incriminated the Israeli army.
The story emerged in an interview with Dr Yehuda Hiss, former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic who released it because of the row between Israel and Sweden over a report in the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet.
Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.
The Israeli military confirmed to the programme that the practice took place, but added: “This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer.”
Hiss said: “We started to harvest corneas … whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.”
An important letter sent by Reporters Without Borders:
The Hon Kevin Michael Rudd Prime Minister Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600 Australia
Paris, 18 December 2009
Dear Prime Minister,
Reporters Without Borders, an organisation that defends free expression worldwide, would like to share with you its concern about your government’s plan to introduce a mandatory Internet filtering system. While it is essential to combat child sex abuse, pursuing this draconian filtering project is not the solution. If Australia were to introduce systematic online content filtering, with a relatively broad definition of the content targeted, it would be joining an Internet censors club that includes such countries as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Communications minister Stephen Conroy announced on 15 December that, after a year of testing in partnership with Australian Internet service providers (ISPs), your government intended to introduce legislation imposing mandatory filtering of websites with pornographic, paedophile or particularly violent content.
Reporters Without Borders would like to draw your attention to the risks that this plan entails for freedom of expression.
Firstly, the decision to block access to an “inappropriate” website would be taken not by a judge but by a government agency, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Such a procedure, without a court decision, does not satisfy the requirements of the rule of law. The ACMA classifies content secretly, compiling a website blacklist by means of unilateral and arbitrary administrative decision-making. Other procedures are being considered but none of them would involve a judge.
Secondly, the criteria that the proposed law would use are too vague. Filtering would be applied to all content considered “inappropriate,” a very slippery term that could be interpreted very differently by different people. In all probability, filtering would target “refused classification” (RC) sites, a category that is extremely controversial as it is being applied to content that is completely unrelated to efforts to combat child sex abuse and sexual violence, representing a dangerous censorship option. Subjects such as abortion, anorexia, aborigines and legislation on the sale of marijuana would all risk being filtered, as would media reports on these subjects.
The choice of filtering techniques has not been clearly defined. Would it be filtering by key-words, URL text or something else? And what about the ISPs that are supposed to carry out the filtering at the government’s request? Will they be blamed, will they be accused of complicity in child sex abuse if the filtering proves to be ineffective, as it almost certainly will?
Your government claims that the filtering will be 100 per cent effective but this is clearly impossible. Experts all over the world agree that no filtering system is effective at combating this kind of content. On the one hand, such a system filters sites that should not be affected (such as sites about the psychology of child sexuality or paedophile crime news). And on the other, it fails to filter targeted sites because their URLs contain key-words that are completely unrelated to their content, or because their content (photo and text) is registered under completely neutral terms. Furthermore, people who are determined to visit such sites will know how to avoid the filtering by, for example, using proxy servers or censorship circumvention software or both.
The Wikileaks website highlighted the limitations of such as system when it revealed that the ACMA blacklist of already banned websites contained many with nothing reprehensible in their content. According to Wikileaks, the blacklist included the Abortion TV website, some of the pages of Wikileaks itself, online poker sites, gay networks, sites dealing with euthanasia, Christian sites, a tour operator’s site and even a Queensland dentist’s site.
The US company Google has also voiced strong reservations. Google Australia’s head of policy, Iarla Flynn, said yesterday: “Moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information.”
As regards paedophilia, the most dangerous places on the Internet are websites offering chat and email services. So if this project were taken to its logical conclusion, access to sites such as Gmail, Yahoo and Skype would also have to be blocked, which would of course be impossible.
There are more effective ways to combat child pornography, including tracking cyber-criminals online (by means of cookies, IP address comparison, and so on), combined with police investigation into suspects and their online habits. Why did your government end the programme launched by the previous government, which made free filtering systems available to Australian families? This procedure had the merit of being adapted to individual needs and gave each home the possibility of shielding its children from porn.
A real national debate is needed on this subject but your communications minister, Stephen Conroy, made such a debate very difficult by branding his critics as supporters of child pornography. An opportunity was lost for stimulating a constructive exchange of ideas.
We also regret the lack of transparency displayed by your government as regards the tests carried out in recent months using procedures that have been kept secret. Your government paid some 300,000 Australian dollars to ISPs to finance the tests. Australian taxpayers have a right to be given detailed information about the results.
Finally, you must be aware that this initiative is a source of a concern for your compatriots. In a recent Fairfax Media poll of 20,000 people, 96 per cent were strongly opposed to such a mandatory Internet filtering system, while around 120,000 Australians have signed a petition against Internet censorship launched by the online activist group GetUp. The withdrawal of this proposal would therefore satisfy public opinion as well as prevent a democratic country from introducing a system that threatens freedom of expression.
I thank you in advance for the consideration you give to our recommendations.
Sincerely,
Jean-François Julliard
Secretary-General
If true (and it’s impossible to know with anonymously-sourced stories), Israel is like a wild child that nobody can seemingly control (despite the fact that Washington pays to keep the lights on):
U.S. President Barack Obama has warned his Chinese counterpart that the United States would not be able to keep Israel from attacking Iranian nuclear installations for much longer, senior officials in Jerusalem told Haaretz.
They said Obama warned President Hu Jintao during the American’s visit to Beijing a month ago as part of the U.S. attempt to convince the Chinese to support strict sanctions on Tehran if it does not accept Western proposals for its nuclear program.
My following article is published in US magazine The Nation:
Sri Lanka’s brutal war against the Tamils, a native ethnic group that has suffered legal, economic and political discrimination for more than half a century, has come at a huge domestic and global cost. Human rights in the Sinhalese-dominated nation are consistently violated, with journalists, activists and Tamils routinely murdered with impunity. In 2009 Sri Lanka’s position in the annual Transparency International Corruption Perception Index fell to ninety-seventh among 180 states, from ninety-second in 2008.
The country’s civil war, in which tens of thousands were killed, ended this year, in an outcome that emboldened the government in Colombo. But the resolution left the Tamils even further from self-determination and resulted in an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. The government placed around 300,000 Tamils against their will in concentration camps in the nation’s northeast, though the regime claimed recently it would soon release all captives.
This is the context for Australia’s latest asylum seeker drama, an issue generating negative coverage in the international press for Australia’s inability to manage refugees in an orderly manner that comports with international standards. A few thousand refugees, many of whom come from Sri Lanka, are attempting to reach the safety of Australia by leaky boats. It is a perilous journey that surely qualifies people with the kind of tenacity and initiative any country would want to embrace. But Australian authorities prefer to appear tough on “illegals” to appease right-wing claims of soft border-protection laws.
Largely absent from the debate is the fact that Australia annually allows countless thousands of wannabe refugees to land in the country by plane and overstay their visas. But the sight of (mostly) dark-skinned and desperate asylum seekers arriving by boat has created a toxic environment of demonization. Voices of reason, such as Tamil Australians explaining the profound discrimination in Sri Lanka, are heard too infrequently.
Australia is not alone. Italy under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi leads a country increasingly dismissive of refugee claims, with callous measures against those fleeing violence in faraway lands. In America, fury against “illegal aliens” continues unabated, fueled by rising unemployment and tough economic times.
The issue goes to the heart of refugee flows in the shadow of war and the ability of the political and media elites to drum up fear of a handful of people fleeing persecution in conflicts that are often backed, armed and fueled by Western states. Sri Lanka’s war was partially armed by Israel, China and India.
Australia, a largely uninhabited island, has long nursed fears of invasion by its northern neighbors. During the Second World War, Japan filled the predator role, but Indonesia has long remained a mystery to many Australians, despite Bali being a popular holiday destination. As a former outpost of the British Empire, it was perhaps once understandable that Australia saw Asia as a threat. The northern city of Darwin was bombed by Japan in 1942, and white man’s racial purity was a theory widely accepted until the White Australia policy was finally abandoned in the mid-1970s. Nonwhite immigration was barred because, in the words of its key architect Alfred Deakin, “alien races” may threaten the nation. Australia is a Western enclave in a region with vastly different values and concepts of justice to many authoritarian regimes nearby. Fear of the unknown has existed since the English landed in 1788. Though perhaps no more serious than in other Western states, an insular, island mentality sometimes rears its ugly head.
The mainstream Australian attitude to refugees fleeing Iraq, Afghanistan and other Middle East nations during the earlier part of this century was of exclusion and brutality. Asylum seekers, including young children, were locked behind razor wire in stifling desert conditions.
Paranoia of the foreigner is not unique to Australia–anti-immigration sentiment is growing in Britain, America and across Europe–even as the United Nations claimed in July that more than 42 million people are uprooted worldwide, including 16 million refugees. Asylum seekers are not everybody else’s problem, but the world’s.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has clumsily tried to involve neighboring Indonesia in his “solution” to hold and administer refugees he doesn’t want processed on local shores. Jakarta, not a signatory of the UN refugee convention, has been effectively bribed and cajoled into removing a feared populist backlash against Rudd. The previous government harnessed voter unease and tabloid outrage to demonize refugees from countries Australia was helping to “liberate,” such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is despite the country’s only broadsheet newspaper, Rupert Murdoch’s the Australian, acknowledging that, “many Tamils face a dire situation at sea, in refugee camps and in Sri Lanka. The Sydney Morning Herald published a feature that calmly analyzed the changing refugee climate since Sri Lanka declared victory in May against the Tamil Tigers, further indicating the desperate situation of the fleeing Tamils. Sympathy for the dispossessed was growing, and the rhetoric of the Rudd ministry was undoubtedly less threatening toward asylum seekers than heard during past years.
Conveniently forgotten by the more hysterical elements of the country is the fact that the vast majority of refugees arriving by boat are found to have genuine cases and are allowed to settle in Australia.
It’s at least encouraging that, unlike during the former prime ministership of John Howard, many Australian voters have greater concerns than a handful of refugees making a hazardous journey. Unfortunately, the country’s former opposition leader has been unable to resist engaging in the politics of refugee bashing. However, a mature debate about population growth and its environmental effects may be a little easier today than ten years ago.
But prejudice remains. Take this letter published in the Australian in early November:
“Australia must be getting a reputation for being a pathetically weak country, easy to manipulate if you want to enter it illegally. Border protection measures instigated by the government of John Howard have been abandoned and replaced by welcoming customs vessels which try to hand over the problem to another country. But the boatpeople learn that if you don’t want to do as you are told, just make your demands with accompanying threats and the government can be easily manipulated.”
The failure of the Rudd government to honestly assess and condemn the gross human rights abuses in the countries forcing citizens to leave in the first place–Sri Lanka and Iraq and Afghanistan under Western occupation–is indicative of a feeble elite petrified of offending key trading partners, such as Sri Lanka and China, and rampaging and campaigning tabloids.
The issue is no longer whether most asylum seekers are genuine and face credible threats to their lives–years of statistics conclusively prove that they are–but how a fractured world manages peoples rejected by their nation of birth. Refugee flows will inevitably increase because of climate concerns, resource wars, civil strife and Western-backed dictatorships. Attacking the marginalized is the easiest political and media route but most contemptible. It takes no imagination to ascribe ulterior motives to the voiceless.
Over the past few months, Australia has shown the world how not to manage asylum seekers. True leadership means not capitulating to populist fears, a point made by Amnesty International’s Secretary General Irene Khan during her visit to Australia in November. This century is guaranteed to bring an explosion of desperate people fleeing difficult circumstances; we have a moral responsibility to shun the invasion analogies and embrace practical solutions toward sustainable resettlement.
My following article is published on US website Mondoweiss:
It is easy to frame the conflict in Israel and Palestine as inherently unique. In many ways it is – decades-old occupation, US-supported racial discrimination and failure of Western journalism to hold the powerful to account – but other struggles have eerie similarities.
This year Sri Lanka militarily defeated the Tamil Tigers, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). It was a brutal war, killed close to 100,000 people over a three-decade period and resulted in a humanitarian crisis of around 300,000 displaced Tamils. Both sides committed war crimes but the regime in Colombo was accused of shelling hospitals and civilian areas in the closing months of the war. My partner’s father was under the bombs in the north-east of the country and he tells of aerial bombardment on make-shift medical centres. It was hell on earth. Up to 50,000 Tamils were murdered.
The Elders, including Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, condemned the atrocities and were predictably smeared by the government.
Sri Lanka was an early adopter of George W. Bush’s “war on terror” architecture and placed its struggle against the Tamil insurgency as a noble war against ruthless killers. Colombo received arms and backing from India, China, Israel and unleashed overwhelming miliary firepower against the LTTE. The result was unsurprising, though the EU and Washington condemned the brutal tactics employed.
But this feigned Western concern for Tamil human rights must be seen in the context of political influence. Analyst Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe writes in The Diplomat that the, “conflict also shed light on a bitter geopolitical struggle taking place against the backdrop of the declining influence of the West and the emerging influence of India and China”.
Enter Zionism.
In early December the Jerusalem Post published an article that advocated Israel follow the lead of Sri Lanka to eradicate its “terrorism” problem:
“The Tamil Tigers , sometimes referred to by its full name, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), resembled Middle East terror groups. Actually, it is more correct to say that Middle East terror groups resemble the Tamil Tigers, as the Tigers introduced many of the techniques subsequently used by Israel’s enemies. They invented the suicide belt and perfected the suicide bombing attack, turning it into a tactical device. They were the first to use women and children in these attacks. And they have been accused of using their own innocent civilians as human shields. They are a vicious crowd, and were implicated in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi of India in 1991. As we all know, the Palestinians have imitated these tactics with devastating brutality.
“The Sri Lankans had more or less lived with this horror since 1983. Then 9/11 happened and a new dynamic, promoted by president George W. Bush and the United States, gave the Sri Lankans a new outlook. With a new administration elected on the promise of stopping the LTTE permanently, the country embarked on a full-scale military assault. It sent its army, much stronger than the Tamil tigers, into Tamil-occupied territory and began to take back town by town, going street to street in some cases, and killing anyone who resisted.
“Jehan Perera of the Sri Lankan Peace Council said, ‘This government has taken the position that virtually any price is worth paying to rid the country of terrorism.’
“The price paid was indeed a heavy one. Many innocent people died. The Sri Lankan government deeply regrets the killing of innocent civilians, but most government officials believe they made a conscious choice to pay that price, and that the alternative status quo was simply no longer acceptable.”
The writer goes on to explain that Israel should cease “political correctness” and destroy the Palestinians once and for all:
“The time has come to admit that there might not be a solution to the Palestinian problem, but there is a way to end it. The next time terror forces Israel to take military action, this option should be considered. Israel must realize that there will be no peace with an intransigent enemy that refuses to act in good faith. Palestinian rejectionism and Iranian-backed Hizbullah threats to our existence will never be placated; they will not stop until Israel is destroyed. Once the population realizes this unfortunate reality, there is only one way to change it. Israel must take the Sri Lankan initiative and move into these areas one by one, cornering, enveloping and killing off all armed resistance.
“Bending over backward to make peace with the Palestinians has proven fruitless. It’s time to make the choice of a better life for all. More than 60 years of living with this is enough. When we have completely wiped out this enemy, a new dynamic will rise. Without the Muslim thugs holding their own people back, there will be nothing to stop them from negotiating genuine peace. There might be a Palestinian, a Lebanese, a Syrian, maybe even an Iranian peace partner which will transform the Middle East from a charnel house of hatred and bloodshed to a prosperous community of nations working together to make the daily lives of all their citizens better.”
This neo-conservative worldview dictates advocating genocide in the deluded hope that Arabs will feel so defeated that they simply accept Israeli rule. It’s a position also shared by Daniel Pipes:
“The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
A closer examination of Sri Lanka’s methods reveals a disregard for civilian casualties far greater than the IDF crimes during the 2008/2009 Gaza war. There are serious allegations of Tamil Tigers surrendering under a white flag and being mowed down by soldiers. A forthcoming “People’s Permanent Tribunal” meeting in Dublin will investigate a range of alleged crimes during the conflict and feature testimony from eyewitnesses, the UN and EU.
Colombo’s clear policy during the war was a masterful exercise in avoidance and remarkably similar to Israel’s tactics during the Gaza onslaught. Journalists, most human rights workers and independent observers were barred from the combat zone. Any criticism of Sri Lanka’s behaviour was labelled as supporting “terrorism.”
When the roughly 300,000 Tamils were interned in concentration camps after the war and held against their will – most were conditionally released last week though with restricted freedom of movement and ongoing monitoring of their lives – new friends Iran and China remained silent, while South Africa praised the Sri Lanka’s supposed commitment to human rights.
Even Washington, in a just released report, urges a more conciliatory approach. “US policy towards Sri Lanka cannot be dominated by a single agenda”, it reads. “It is not effective at delivering real reform, and it short-changes US geo-strategic interests in the region”.
Less than six months after the end of the conflict, the London Times reported this week that a re-branded insurgency is brewing (assuming, of course, this isn’t a black ops story planted by the government):
“A Marxist group of Tamil militants with connections to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Cuba is preparing to mount a new insurgency in Sri Lanka six months after the Government declared an end to the 26-year-old war there.
“The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was founded in eastern Sri Lanka four months ago and has vowed to launch attacks against government and military targets unless its demands for a separate Tamil homeland are met.
“’This war isn’t over yet,’ Commander Kones, head of the PLA’s Eastern District military command, told The Times during a night meeting in a safe house in the east of the country last week.
“’There has been no solution for Tamils since the destruction of the LTTE [Tamil Tigers] in May. So we have built and organised the PLA and are ready to act soon. Our aim is a democratic socialist liberation of the northeast for a Tamil Eelam [the desired Tamil state].’”
A disenfranchised people will continue to strive for independence and self-determination. The Tamils have been wishing for a homeland for decades due to the government’s ongoing discrimination against them. The Palestinians have also been denied natural justice since 1947.
Advocating the Sri Lanka model as an effective way of fighting terrorism is an attractive prospect for those who believe in obliterating the concepts of human rights and proportionality in international law. Israel is unwilling to negotiate in good faith with her opponents, guaranteeing ongoing resistance. The Tamils have fewer global friends but their struggle is just as necessary.
Sri Lanka, like Israel, should be shunned until it acknowledges the rights of its minority to equal rights before the law.
Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney based journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution. He is on the advisory council of the UK-based Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice.
This is truly fascinating and potentially important news. I have not read this in any mainstream news source:
In an unprecedented decision, a Spanish judge has indicted five high-ranking Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials for their role in crimes of torture and genocide committed against Falun Gong practitioners. Among the defendants is former CCP head Jiang Zemin, widely acknowledged as the chief instigator of the campaign to “eradicate” the spiritual practice.
Following a two-year investigation, Spanish National Court Judge Ismael Moreno last week notified attorney Carlos Iglesias of the Human Rights Law Foundation (HRLF) that the court had granted a petition to indict the defendants on charges of torture and genocide. According to the notice, for committing the crime of genocide, the defendants face imprisonment for up to 20 years and may be economically liable to the victims for damages.
Such a decision has international ramifications. How about equally important cases about crimes committed in Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan?