Antony Loewenstein

A fascinating and revealing story about how Zionist propaganda is spread online:

The position of BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] in Australia remains highly relevant. Debating Israeli apartheid in Palestine is necessary. This case starts today:

On May 1, 19 Melbourne activists will be put on trial for their political activity. In a precedent-setting case, these pro-Palestine activists will be fighting a variety of charges designed to criminalize dissent in Premier Ted Baillieu’s state of Victoria and to intimidate supporters of Palestine in Australia.

On July 1, 2011, Victoria police attacked a peaceful demonstration in Melbourne’s central business district. In one of the largest political arrests in a decade, 19 activists were detained during a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) action against the Max Brenner store. The chocolate shop is owned by Israeli conglomerate, the Strauss Group, a company that provides “care rations” for the Israeli military, including the Golani and the Givati brigades.

These were two of the key Israeli military brigades involved in Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza in December 2008/January 2009 that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians. In more recent times, the Golani brigade has been noted for its enforcement of Israeli colonization of Palestinian Hebron in the West Bank.

After a series of peaceful demonstrations against Max Brenner, the July 1 action was kettled by police, and then activists were individually targeted in an unprovoked attack. The police used pressure point tactics on some of the demonstrators; others reported bruising and rough treatment. One woman had her shoulder dislocated.

I was asked by some of the key activists involved in the case to record a message of solidarity:

Now this is interesting. Forward is granted an “unprecedented” five hour interview with Mousa Abu Marzook, Hamas’s second-highest-ranking official. Here’s one explanation from an Israeli journalist:

What [Abu Marzook] really wants is for Jewish Americans to convince the Israelis that Hamas is not like an animal.

Perhaps, but the content is revealing. This is not, despite the mountains of Western and Zionist propaganda over the years, an irrational terrorist organisation. There are goals, whether we agree with them or not, and legitimate resistance to Israeli occupation. Some highlights:

“Let’s establish a relationship between the two states in the historic Palestinian land as a hudna between both sides,” he said. “It’s better than war and better than the continuous resistance against the occupation. And better than Israel occupying the West Bank and Gaza, making all these difficulties and problems on both sides.”

Pressed regarding concerns that Hamas’s goal during a hudna would remain the destruction of Israel as a state, and that a truce would give Hamas time to build up its arms toward that end, Abu Marzook said: “It’s very difficult to say after 10 years what will be on both sides. Maybe my answer right now [about recognizing Israel] is completely different to my answer after 10 years.”

But asked if, offered guarantees for his physical security, he would be prepared to go to Jerusalem to negotiate with Israel for exactly the kind of hudna he seeks, Abu Marzook replied bluntly, “No.”

Hamas has rejected negotiating with Israel directly. Abu Marzook said that under a previous understanding with Fatah, the faction controlling the P.A. in the West Bank, Hamas allows the P.A. to negotiate with Israel, despite its objections to the process. But Abu Marzook repeated his organization’s demand that any result must be approved in a referendum that includes all Palestinian refugees, not just those in the West Bank and Gaza. “All of the Palestinians should vote about this,” he said.

Ilan Pappe writes in the Electronic Intifada about irrational hysteria that envelops today’s Israel:

Being part visitor and part inmate in the ward [Israel] I found solace in three books, each one of which tells us how best to keep our wits even when the most armed and aggressive state in the region has replaced diplomacy and national strategy with hysterical brinkmanship that could easily transform into real war and greater bloodshed.

The first is an old classic, George Orwell’s 1984. In despotic Oceania, the leadership, the Inner Party, depends on a constant war with the other two global powers. The leaders manufacture hysteria to keep it going, but begin to believe in it themselves:

“It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink.”

The second book is Miko Peled’s The General’s Son. Peled’s research in the Israeli military archives exposed how the generals of Israel on the eve of the June 1967 war manufactured mass hysteria in Israel and spun a tale of an imminent second Holocaust — as did David Ben-Gurion in 1948 — knowing very well, in both historical instances, they were facing a weak, disarrayed opponent more willing to compromise than to fight.

The third is Jay Feldman’s Manufacturing Hysteria, a compact history of how the leadership in the US manufactures collective hysteria whenever faced with real or imagined crises that had the potential to cost them their seat of power. Going to unnecessary wars, scapegoating minorities in the United States, oppressing other peoples around the world and the poor at home, are only some of the unavoidable outcomes of such hysteria (I dedicate this brief reading list to Wall Street Occupiers whose library was brutally destroyed and to whom I promised to recommend a reading list for a new future library, which I never managed to do).

Unlike in the Jack Nicholson movie, the hysteria is not kept within the ward, and it is not the inmates who are the problem but those who run the prison-hospital and want to intern even more people in their zone of hysteria, control and violence.

There really isn’t much to be added to this short but incisive post by Phil Weiss on Mondoweiss except to agree with his sentiments; the lack of guts by so many mainstream American intellectuals to comment on Zionism and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, as it’s seen as negatively affecting the career. Grow a pair, already:

Good career move. One of the great moments in intellectual spinelessness. Look at the last paragraph here, the justification of intellectual irresponsibility by Dave Eggers. If Gunter Grass stands for anything now, it is the responsibility of prominent intellectuals to speak out on important questions when world peace is threatened. Reported in the Turkish Press, from AFP:

“US writer Dave Eggers will not travel to Germany to receive a prize Friday from the Gunter Grass Foundation due to the controversy over the Nobel laureate’s recent poem on Israel, his agency said.

“Eggers, 42, best known for his memoir “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” and Hollywood screenplays, was to pick up the foundation’s Albatross award for his book “Zeitoun” about a Syrian-American businessman accused of terrorist links during Hurricane Katrina.

“The New York-based Wylie Agency said in a statement released by his German publisher that Eggers would not attend the event in the northern city of Bremen because he did not wish to be drawn into the uproar over Grass’s poem.

“”Eggers won’t be coming for the ceremony because in light of the recent debate, he would be forced into commenting, endlessly and needlessly, on Grass and Israel and Iran, when the purpose of his visit was supposed to be about discussing his book Zeitoun, and the plight of Americans during and after Hurricane Katrina,” it said.”

This moment demonstrates something else. Eggers isn’t in the Israel lobby; I don’t think he’s said a word about the question. But the lobby has what Daniel Bell would describe as cultural hegemony (in the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism). Any criticism of Israel is still the third rail in American public life. Writers who take a stand endanger their hardwon status– their reviews, their assignments, their publishing futures. John Mearsheimer used to be published on the Times Op-Ed page all the time. He hasn’t been on there since the Iraq war. Brave guy. Or Naomi Klein– she is simply too independent a thinker to care about mainstream status. So she takes a brave stance on Gaza.

Tariq Ali nails it:

The German writer Gunter Grass (The Tin Drum) had already predicted the response to his poem in SdZ. There is no reason to be surprised, but there is every reason to be disgusted. Within Germany both the elite and a layer of the population by their words and actions appear to have accepted the disgraceful Goldhagen thesis whereby all German were guilty for the crimes of the Third Reich. This thesis has now been developed further: all Germans are guilty for eternity for the crimes of the Third Reich.

Behind this thinking is the Zionist and Zionophile argument that the crime against the Jews of Europe was unique in the annals of history. This was true as far as the method of extermination was concerned, but not in any other way. The Belgians massacred the Congolese in greater numbers: over 10 million according to the historian Adam Hochschild. The killing of Armenians during the First World War was systematic and we could go on and discuss the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but comparing one massacre or genocide to another is a futile exercise. Raul Hilberg the most authoritative historian of the Judeocide was angered by the uses that were being made of that crime today.

Some members of the extreme-right government and Lieberman in particular, that rules Israel today have used proto-fascist language against the Palestinian Arabs. Are we not allowed to point that out? That the Israeli government pushed the Bush administration to make war on Iraq is hardly a secret. Nor is the statement of the Israeli Ambassador to the US the day after the fall of Baghdad: “Don’t stop. Move on to Damascus and Teheran.’ Are we not allowed to rebuke him? The targeting and killing of young Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere is fine, is it?

Gunter Grass was very mild in his criticisms. He concentrated on Israeli warmongering in relation to Iran. He could have said a lot more. The fact that it needs political courage to say even what he did in Germany or France is a sad reflection on the political culture of both these countries. As for the attacks on Grass for his wartime activities, these are beneath contempt. The Israelis were delighted when the former Italian minister, Gianfranco Fini, whose party is in lineal descent from Mussolini, went to Israel and praised the Wall. He was forgiven his party’s past. So the past only matters if a person is critical of Israel. The former Nazis in various positions in the postwar Federal republic who pushed through reparations and backed Israel, they were never criticized either.

German citizens should ponder the following: it was not the Palestinians who were responsible for the murder of millions of Jews during the Second World War. Yet they, the Palestinians, have become the indirect victims of the Judeocide. Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return to others. So why no sympathy for the Palestinians?

I gave the following talk at the University of Sydney on 15 March:

With the delusion of maintaining a Jewish, democratic state – a concept that never existed post 1948 and even less so today with the occupation of millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and discrimination against Arabs in Israel proper – the Israeli leader sounds like any number of liberal Zionists desperate to maintain Jewish supremacy (at the expense of true democracy for all):

Israel’s prime minister said Tuesday that he still hopes to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians, because the alternative would be absorbing them into Israel and destroying the Jewish character of the state.

“I want to solve the conflict with the Palestinians because I don’t want a binational state,” Netanyahu told a rare news conference. “For as long as it depends on me, we will ensure the Jewish and democratic character of Israel.”

The statement was notable because it in effect concedes a key argument made by Netanyahu’s ideological opponents on Israel’s Zionist left: A pullout from territories the Palestinian claim for a state is not just a concession that could be made in exchange for peace — but also an imperative for an Israel that wants to remain a Jewish state that is also democratic.

Jews make up roughly 80 percent of Israel’s almost 8 million people. However, if Israel is combined with the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem — the lands it occupied in the 1967 Middle East war — then the Arab population nears parity, and in the view of some demographers is likely to become a majority soon.

Indeed, as the prospect of peace seems to grow more remote, increasingly there are voices on the Palestinian side predicting — as a threatened default rather than a desired outcome — a “one-state solution” in which Jews and Arabs have equal status.

The so-called “demographic argument” for a pullout has become more critical to the dovish Israeli opposition in recent years, especially since the Palestinian uprising of 2000-2005, punctuated by grisly suicide bombings that killed hundreds, left many in Israel distrustful of Palestinian intentions and despairing of ever reaching peace on agreed terms.

Here’s a book review I wrote a while ago published here exclusively:

The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work

Belen Fernandez

Verso, $22.95

Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil?

Derrick O’Keefe

Verso, $22.95

Antony Loewenstein

Back in May 2003, two months after the start of the American-led war in Iraq, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman appeared on the Charlie Rose TV talk show. The conflict was “unquestionably” worth doing, said the self-described liberal. He went on:

“What (Iraqis) needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.”

Friedman, a former Middle East correspondent for the Times, has cemented himself as a key foreign affairs commentator in America and is regularly re-printed in publications across the world, including Australia.

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Friedman has supported American or Israeli wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, the Palestinian West Bank, Lebanon, Gaza and covert American operations endorsed by both the Bush and Obama administrations. In the words of Belen Fernandez, author of this compelling book on Friedman – published in a new Counterblasts series by British publisher Verso – the Times writer “discredits himself as a journalist by championing the killing of civilians.”

Fernandez forensically dissects the career of Friedman and challenges the very basis of his currency. “Friedman’s accumulation of influence is a direct result of his service as mouthpiece for empire and capital”, she writes. “I.e. as a result apologist for US military excess and punishing economic policies.”

Friedman has championing the supposed glories of US-led globalisation – “Is this a great country or what?” and the Iraq war – “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the US has ever launched”. He celebrated the financial insights of Goldman Sachs until finally in 2010 Friedman acknowledged the firm as “the poster boy for banks behaving for ‘situational values’ – exploiting whatever the situation…allowed”.

The Times journalist is passionate about reducing America’s reliance on oil and yet, as Fernandez pithily comments, “Friedman has managed to greenwash the institution that holds the distinction of being the top polluter in the world…The US military’s overwhelming reliance on fuel means that its presence in Iraq is not at all reconcilable with Friedman’s insistence that dependence on foreign oil reserves is one of the greatest threats to US security.”

The Imperial Messenger isn’t just arguing that Friedman is an indulgent Times spokesman and faux liberal who dresses up his desire for the US to shed foreign blood as “humanitarian”, but a broader point against the Times itself as the centre of supposedly quality journalism.

Dishonest myth-making is the key reason the paper should not be taken as gospel, argues Fernandez, and not least due to its constant defence of Israeli crimes. Witness Friedman in 1989 writing about his Zionist dreams: “I’ll always want [Israel] to be the country I imagined in my youth. But what the hell, she’s mine and for a forty-year old, she ain’t too shabby.” This was expressed during the First Intifada, a time when Israel was torturing and killing unarmed Palestinian civilians.

But Friedman isn’t the only “liberal” needing to be fought. Canadian human rights activist, writer and politician Michael Ignatieff is the subject of The Lesser Evil by journalist Derrick O’Keefe. Like Friedman, Ignatieff frames his concern for humanity by loving the smell of American fire-power in the morning.

Incendiary British historian Tony Judt opined in 2006 about “Bush’s Liberal Idiots”, and included Ignatieff in a stinging rebuke. He stated that, “intellectual supporters of the Iraq War…have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ‘preventive war’ a bad name.”

O’Keefe uncovers a litany of comments from Ignatieff since September 11 that place him in the inglorious tradition of countless “liberals” desperate to unleash Washington’s war machine on “apocalyptic nihilism.” Unlike Christopher Hitchens, who continues to champion the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and encourages a military strike against Iran, Ignatieff has at least had a few moments of doubt.

The vital importance of both these small titles is to highlight that some of the worst offenders, and least accountable, in the “war on terror” decade has been the warrior-scholar-journalist desperate to prove toughness. This desired projection of F-18s and drone strikes was encapsulated by a typically callous comment by Ignatieff in 2003:

“If the consequence of intervention of a rights-respecting Iraq in a decade or so, who cares whether the intentions that led to it were mixed at best?”

The death of innocent Iraqis was clearly an irrelevance (the numbers of dead in that country now number likely over one million).

At a time of American economic, political and moral decline – and fear that the Chinese economic model may supersede the unequal and fundamentalist capitalist model pursued by Washington since World War II – it’s grimly amusing to note an infamous Friedman thought:

“Many big bad things happen in the world without America, but not a lot of big good things.”

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist writing a book on disaster capitalism

Does anybody serious believe American officials when they talk about supporting human rights?

Hillary Clinton recently said this at a UN Secretary Council debate on the Arab Spring:

… we reject any equivalence between premeditated murders by a government’s military machine and the actions of civilians under siege driven to self-defense.

Such a statement requires a response and leading Australian academic Scott Burchill gives one:

The most telling aspect of this speech is that the US Secretary of State could make such a statement (about Syria) with the full confidence that no-one in the media would even ask whether this principle also applied elsewhere in the region (say to the Israel-Palestine conflict?). It could be safely assumed that no-one would point out that only a few hundred kilometres away, the United States is actually supplying a “government’s military machine” with the means to commit “premeditated murders” against “civilians under siege driven to self-defence” (in Gaza as she was actually speaking). The right to self-defence does not extend to official enemies, who can be brutally crushed with our moral and material support.

The US and its allies never intend to kill anyone, of course, when they target B-52 raids on villages in densely populated areas (Vietnam), or something equally horrific with drones (Pakistan) or helicopter gunships (Gaza). Civilians, especially children, should know to keep away from their homes. If they don’t get out of the way and subsequently die or a seriously injured, it is their own fault.

Last night I spoke at Sydney University for Israeli Apartheid Week 2012. There was a good turn-out, a smattering of Zionist lobbyists and Arab and Muslim haters but overall a large crowd keen to hear about the reality of Palestine.

Although it’s often shocking to hear the hatred directed at Palestinians, and defence or ignoring of Israeli occupation, it was heartening to see many new faces who talked about wanting to isolate Israel until it adhered to international law. More, please.

Of course, now and then the Zionist mask falls away and some hard truths are acknowledged. Like this:

Noam Schalit, father of former kidnapped soldier Gilad Schalit, said Wednesday that if he were Palestinian he would try to kidnap IDF soldiers.

In an interview with Channel 10, Schalit, who is running for a Knesset seat with the Labor Party, paraphrased former Labor leader Ehud Barak, who shocked many people when he told anti-Israel activist Gideon Levy in a 1998 interview that if he was Palestinian, he would have joined a terrorist organization.

“We also kidnapped British soldiers when we were fighting for our freedom,” Schalit said, referring to pre-state Zionist paramilitary organizations during the British mandate.

Asked if he would be in favor of negotiating with Hamas, he said, “I am in favor of speaking to anyone who wants to talk to us.”

When interviewer Amnon Levy asked whether Schalit’s answer still applied if Hamas was headed by his son’s kidnapper, Schalit said “If they change their ways and are willing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, yes, I would shake his hand.”

In the interview, Schalit was unprepared to reveal his opinion on key issues like whether Israel should attack Iran. But he did say that following his son’s kidnapping, Israel should have stopped transferring tax payments and gas to Gaza.

Newly released documents from Wikileaks suggest that the internet giant has an agenda rather different to just a very fast search engine (via Al Akhbar):

Top Google execs, including the company’s CEO and one of Barack Obama’s major presidential campaign donors Eric Schmidt, informed the intelligence agency Stratfor about Google’s activities and internal communication regarding “regime change” in the Middle East, according to Stratfor emails released by WikiLeaks and obtained by Al-Akhbar. The other source cited was Google’s director for security and safety Marty Lev.

The briefings mainly focused on the movements of Jared Cohen, currently the director of Google Ideas, a “think/do-tank” billed as a vehicle for spreading American-style liberal democracy. Cohen was also a former member of US Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and former advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

Email exchanges, starting February 2011, suggest that Google execs were suspicious that Cohen was coordinating his moves with the White House and cut Cohen’s mission short at times for fear he was taking too many risks. Stratfor’s vice-president of counter-terrorism Fred Burton, who seemed opposed to Google’s alleged covert role in “foaming” uprisings, describes Cohen as a “loose Cannon” whose killing or kidnapping “might be the best thing to happen” to expose Google.

The Cohen Conspiracy

Stratfor’s spotlight on Cohen began on 9 February 2012 after Burton forwarded to the secure email list a Foreign Policy article discussing Cohen’s move from the State Department to Google Ideas. With this article, Burton noted that Cohen had dinner in Cairo with Wael Ghonim on January 27, 2011 just hours before the Egyptian Google Executive was famously picked up by Egypt’s State Security. (doc-id 1122191)

On the same day, Stratfor’s staff make reference to a Huffington Post article which highlighted Cohen’s role in “delaying the scheduled maintenance on Twitter so the Iranian revolution could keep going” and a Foreign Policy article that noted that Cohen “was a Rhodes scholar, spent time in Iran, [and] hung out in Iraq during the war…”. These casual discovers further perked Stratfor’s curiosity about Cohen. (doc-id 1629270)

The following day, Burton forwarded a message to the secure email list from “a very good Google source” who claimed that Cohen “[was] off to Gaza next week”. Burton added, “Cohen, a Jew, is bound to get himself whacked….Google is not clear if Cohen is operating [with a] State Dept [or] WH [White House] license, or [is] a hippie activist.”

Korena Zucha, another senior analyst on the list, queried, “Why hasn’t Google cut ties to Cohen yet? Or is Cohen’s activity being endorsed by those higher up in the [company] than your contact?”

In turn, Burton replied, “Cohen’s rabbi is Eric Schmidt and Obama lackey. My source is trying to find out if the billionaire owners are backing Cohen’s efforts for regime change.” (doc-id 1111729)