Antony Loewenstein

As one of Australia’s richest and most influential men, Frank Lowy deserves far more scrutiny than the political or media elites give him.

The Power Index profiles him and features some quotes from yours truly:

It’s no surprise Lowy is a passionate supporter of Israel, telling the NSW parliamentary inquiry into the Orange Grove affair in 2004 that, “the state of Israel, to which I am fully committed, is more important for me than to do a job.”

The shopping centre magnate was explaining to parliament why he had spent one of his two meetings with Bob Carr talking to the NSW premier about Middle East politics, and drawing his attention to a paper dealing with Israel, rather than talking about his business rivals.

Despite his passion for the Promised Land, few would accuse Lowy of being a rabid Zionist. He does not barrack for illegal Jewish West Bank settlers, as Joe Gutnick regularly does. And his Lowy Institute, which is run by a 12-person board that includes him and his three sons, is generally regarded as moderate. It also studies plenty of things apart from Middle East politics.

Nevertheless, Frank founded and still chairs Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, which, according to journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of My Israel Question, “produces research that pushes a hardline, Zionist line on the Israel/Palestine conflict”. 

According to Loewenstein, the INSS advocates “refusing to give up illegally-occupied territories in Palestine due to ‘security’ concerns,” and “warms to the idea of an Israeli military strike against Iran”.

The INSS, Lowy Institute and (Lowy-linked) Brookings Institution in Washington also support an American role in the Middle East and advocate close ties with Washington, Loewenstein tells The Power Index.

So has Lowy used his money and power to shape the political debate? Almost certainly, yes.

Naturally enough it takes two astute American academics, Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of The Israel Lobby, to explain in the Financial Times that Iran isn’t the real issue for Israel:

On Iran, Mr Netanyahu is convinced it wants nuclear weapons, and that this goal threatens Israel’s existence. He does not think diplomacy can stop Iran, and wants the US to destroy its nuclear facilities. If Mr Obama refuses to order an attack, the Israeli leader would like a green light to do so.

Mr Obama and his advisers – including the military – see things differently. They do not want Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, but they do not believe a nuclear-armed Iran would pose an existential threat to Israel. After all, Israel has its own nuclear arsenal, and could obliterate Iran if attacked. US intelligence is also confident Tehran has not yet decided to build nuclear weapons. Indeed, US leaders worry that, no matter who does it, an attack would convince Iran it needs its own nuclear deterrent. They are correct.

…

Interesting letter in yesterday’s London Independent:

Your report concerning the possible strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities by Israel (29 February) might have alluded also to Israel’s apparent attempt to obtain “second strike” facility.

Or not (seriously, is this emptiness what rusted-on Democrats need to hear to vote for The One in November this year?) And then this:

A supporter at fundraiser urged President Barack Obama to avoid a war with Iran over its disputed nuclear program. “Nobody has announced a war,” Obama cautioned. “You’re jumping the gun a little bit.”

Many mainstream journalists love conflict. Gives them the opportunity to hang with military types in war zones and feel important. Truth be damned. Repeating official talking points is par for the course.

History has shown that far too many blindly (wilfully?) spread propaganda. The next target is Iran. Why? Because Israel and Washington tell them so.

Here’s Medialens:

On Channel 4 News, the famed ‘pinko-liberal’ news presenter Jon ‘Six Pilgers’ Snow intoned ominously:

‘It is still not a nuclear weapon, but an upgrading of Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium ostensibly for its nuclear power plant.’ (C4 News headlines, February 15, 2012)

‘Still’ not a nuclear weapon – not yet? – but the primary focus is absolutely on an alleged military threat that does not actually exist. Foreign correspondent Jonathan Miller added:

‘This development does not bring Iran any closer to building a bomb… But if Tehran is trying to convince the world that its purpose is peaceful, no-one’s buying it…’ (C4 News, ‘Iran reveals its latest step in nuclear arms’, February 15, 2012)

That is not quite true, as we will see below. Miller added:

‘This may look like the set of a 70s Bond movie, but this is the Natanz reactor…’

The reference is telling – much media reporting does seem to be inspired by a Bond movie vision of the world. Token balance was provided:

‘There’s no evidence that Iran is intending to construct a nuclear weapon.’

This put Snow’s opening comment in perspective. A more accurate version would have been: ‘It is still not evidence that Iran has plans to build a nuclear weapon.’

Instead, the required propaganda pitch was clear. Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was defiantly sticking ‘two fingers up to the UN and a hostile world’. As ever, it is ‘us’ (the ‘world’) versus ‘them’. Miller continued:

‘The 74 million people of the Islamic republic are paying a high price for their leader’s defiance.’

As in Iraq, the Bad Guys, not the West, are responsible for any suffering caused. No question that Israel, the US and its allies bear any responsibility for the tension, or the lethal effects of sanctions. Miller added:

‘Their nation is isolated, they’re suffering from sanctions – prices are rising, credit tightening, currency plummeting. The Tehran regime thinks its brinkmanship gives it leverage – it has written to the EU offering to resume stalled nuclear talks.’

In media Newspeak, ‘isolated’ means ‘bad’. Likewise, ‘secretive’ and ‘hermit’. When North Korea is described as ‘the secretive, hermit state’ that is ‘increasingly isolated’, it means North Korea is Bad! Bad! Bad!

Meanwhile, on the BBC’s News at Ten, Huw Edwards presented the headlines:

‘The Iranians delight in the latest advances in their nuclear programme.’

Little wrong with that. But moments later, when the actual news report was introduced, ‘nuclear programme’ had mysteriously morphed into ‘nuclear weapons programme’. Edwards told the watching millions:

‘Iran has announced new developments in its nuclear weapons programme. State television reported that for the first time Iranian-made nuclear fuel rods have been loaded into a research reactor in Tehran. The event was attended by President Ahmadinejad.’

Behind a veneer of polite impartiality, the BBC – like Channel 4 News and the rest of the media – presents official enemies as Bond villains: grandiose, dangerous and absurd. Thus James Reynolds began his report:

‘Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a PhD in traffic management. But he often likes to play the part of nuclear physicist. This afternoon Iran’s president inspected new home-made fuel rods for a research reactor in Tehran, all made without any help from the West.’

Here’s FAIR:

Claims that Iran has a nuclear weapons program are allegations, not facts (Extra!, 1/12)—but are treated as established background material in the corporate media: “The president, as you know, has been trying to force Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program,” explainsCBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley (2/6/12). The Washington Post editorializes (1/11/12) that Iran’s “drive for nuclear weapons continues.”

At the end of January, another provocative claim emerged: Iran was ready to unleash terrorism against the United States.

ABC World News (1/31/12) featured a blatantly propagandistic report on the Iranian threat. “America’s top spy warns that Iran is willing to launch a terrorist strike inside the U.S.,” announced anchor Diane Sawyer at the top of the program. “We’ll tell you his evidence.”

The ABC report was actually very light on evidence, but heavy on incendiary allegations from government officials—without the skeptical scrutiny that should be journalism’s primary function. The report was pegged to that day’s Senate testimony by James Clapper, director of national intelligence, who told lawmakers that the U.S. intelligence community believes that Iran may be “now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime.”

Sawyer amplified Clapper’s allegation by setting up the report with the assertion that Iran is “more determined than ever to launch an attack on U.S. soil.” Correspondent Martha Raddatz, claiming that the “the saber-rattling coming from Iran has been constant,” told viewers that Clapper delivered “a new bracing warning…. Iran may be more ready than ever to launch terror attacks inside the United States.”

The British Guardian is a paper with a fine reporting record albeit with blind spots incorporated (including Wikileaks and war).

They’ve just released a startling new ad that aims to showcase its “open journalism” style:

Back in 1996, this is how the newspaper last promoted itself:

This never ceases to amaze me. While Israel’s occupation deepens every day and racism towards Arabs grows – see this “fury” over religious Zionist politicians demanding an Arab judge recite the Zionist national anthem – the mostly old and crusty Jewish spokespeople globally just want the world to better understand poor little Israel.

In today’s Murdoch Australian, we have the sorry sight of South African born Vic Alhadeff, loyal Zionist lobbyist, upset that Israeli Apartheid Week is upon us and he really knows what apartheid is. Not that he mentions the occupation of Palestine at all:

I went to boarding school in apartheid Rhodesia and edited newspapers and wrote books under the constraints of South Africa’s apartheid system. This week is the so-called “Israel Apartheid Week” on university campuses in Australia, so it bears reflecting on what apartheid really meant and why it is obscene that the apartheid descriptor has become the default position for the global delegitimisation campaign against Israel.

…

his week campuses in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and elsewhere will engage in activities under the banner of “Israel Apartheid Week”, which will include erecting simulated checkpoints at which role-playing students will be “shot” by “Israeli soldiers”.

These scenarios will be buttressed by speakers, posters, displays and movies depicting Israel as an apartheid state, with organisations such as Socialist Alternative, Students for Palestine and Action for Palestine actively involved.

It is axiomatic that Israeli society is a work in progress and that Arab Israelis suffer disadvantage in various spheres.

This issue is not only acknowledged by Israel’s government, but has been embraced by it through the appointment of a minister of minority affairs. The ministry existed in the first years of the fledgling state and was re-established in 1999 with the express purpose of tackling these inequities.

It is also a given that the condition of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is a serious issue, albeit inextricably bound up with the root cause of the conflict, which is the fundamental refusal to accept Israel’s existence.

Alhadeff’s pedigree makes his current position all the more offensive especially since many blacks who actually suffered under South African apartheid today say what is happening to Palestinians is worse than their plight.

This weekend sees Harvard’s One State Solution conference and apoplexy has set in. Call the authorities. Shut it down. Hitler is back. Or is it Bin Laden or Saddam or Arafat or Ahmadinejad? I always forget which bad guy Zionists like to quote.

Here’s Ruth Wisse in the Wall Street Journal:

In 1948, when the Arab League declared war on Israel, no one imagined that six decades later American universities would become its overseas agency. Yet campus incitement against Israel has been growing from California to the New York Island. A conference at Harvard next week called “Israel/Palestine and the One-State Solution” is but the latest aggression in an escalating campaign against the Jewish state.

The sequence is by now familiar: Arab student groups and self-styled progressives organize a conference or event like “Israeli Apartheid Week,” targeting Israel as the main problem of the Middle East. They frame the goals of these events in buzzwords of “expanding the range of academic debate.” But since the roster of speakers and subjects makes their hostile agenda indisputable, university spokespersons scramble to dissociate their institutions from the events they are sponsoring. Jewish students and alums debate whether to ignore or protest the aggression, and newspapers fueling the story give equal credence to Israel’s attackers and defenders.

 …

Students who are inculcated with hatred of Israel may want to express their national, religious or political identity by urging its annihilation. But universities that condone their efforts are triple offenders—against their mission, against the Jewish people, and perhaps most especially against the maligners themselves. Smoking is less fatal to smokers than anti-Jewish politics is to its users. Remember Hitler’s bunker.

Words fail:

Iran’s citizens should be starved in order to curb Tehran’s nuclear program, officials in Jerusalem said Wednesday ahead of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming trip to Washington.

“North Korea is halting its nuclear program in order to receive aid in food, and this is what should be done with Iran as well,” one unnamed official said.

“Suffocating sanctions could lead to a grave economic situation in Iran and to a shortage of food,” the source said. “This would force the regime to consider whether the nuclear adventure is worthwhile, while the Persian people have nothing to eat and may rise up as was the case in Syria, Tunisia and other Arab states.”

 ”The Western world led by the United States must implement stifling sanctions at this time already, rather than wait or hesitate,” the official said. “In order to suffocate Iran economically and diplomatically and lead the regime there to a hopeless situation, this must be done now, without delay.”

What a sad story. At a time when armed conflict between Iran and Israel is increasingly likely, the reality remains that neither people know much about the other. This article is a window into that (via Associated Press):

Israeli newspapers warn daily of the Iranian nuclear threat, but for the past week and a half, Israelis filmgoers have packed movie theaters to watch a drama set in Tehran.

“A Separation,” a domestic drama directed by Iranian Asghar Farhadi, bested an Israeli rival and three others on Sunday to win the award for best foreign film.

Israelis were rooting hard for their own Oscar contender, Joseph Cedar’s “Footnote,” a Talmudic scholar saga. But their interest in “A Separation” was piqued by the rare glimpse it offered into the living rooms of a country they regard as a threat to their very survival.

“It’s very well acted, exceptionally well written and very moving,” said Yair Raveh, film critic for Israel’s leading entertainment magazine, Pnai Plus. “Ultimately you don’t think about nuclear bombs or dictators threatening world peace. You see them driving cars and going to movies and they look exactly like us.”

…

Rina Brick, 70, said she was surprised by the humaneness of the Iranian bureaucrats portrayed in the film.

“Our image of how Iran works is less democratic than we see here,” she said. “The judge, the police, everyone behaves as if they are in a Western country.”

Rivka Cohen left Iran at age 15. Now 78, Cohen said she was struck by Tehran’s modernity, which jarred with the image of black-clad women and religious conservatism that has become iconic of Iran.

“I was surprised by the way people lived in their houses,” Cohen said. “Everyone had a fridge and a washing machine.”

Slow down there, eager journalists, hacks, politicians, Zionist lobby and think-tankers. An attack on Iran is clearly the war you’ve been dying for (since Iraq and Afghanistan worked out so well for you).

This piece in the New York Times, a paper with a long history of backing America’s imperial wars, offers necessary caution:

The United States has now endured what by some measures is the longest period of war in its history, with more than 6,300 American troops killed and 46,000 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ultimate costs estimated at $3 trillion. Both wars lasted far longer than predicted. The outcomes seem disappointing and uncertain.

So why is there already a new whiff of gunpowder in the air?

Talk of war over Iran’s nuclear program has reached a strident pitch in recent weeks, as Israel has escalated threats of a possible strike, the oratory of American politicians has become more bellicose and Iran has responded for the most part defiantly. With Israel and Iran exchanging accusations of assassination plots, some analysts see a danger of blundering into a war that would inevitably involve the United States.

Echoes of the period leading up to the Iraq war in 2003 are unmistakable, igniting a familiar debate over whether journalists are overstating Iran’s progress toward a bomb. Yet there is one significant difference: by contrast with 2003, when the Bush administration portrayed Iraq as an imminent threat, Obama administration officials and intelligence professionals seem eager to calm the feverish language.

…

Both the ombudsman of The Washington Post and the public editor of The New York Times in his online blog have scolded their newspapers since December for overstating the current evidence against Iran in particular headlines and stories. Amid the daily drumbeat about a possible war, the hazard of an assassination or a bombing setting off a conflict inadvertently worries some analysts. After a series of killings of Iranian scientists widely believed to be the work of Israel, Israeli diplomats in three countries were the targets last week of bombs suspected to have been planted by Iranians.

…

Peter Feaver of Duke University, who has long studied public opinion about war and worked in the administration of President George W. Bush, said the Obama administration’s policy was now “in the exact middle of American public opinion on Iran” — taking a hard line against a nuclear-armed Iran, yet opposing military action for now and escalating sanctions. But as the November election approaches, Mr. Feaver said, inflammatory oratory is likely to increase, even if it is unsuited to a problem as complicated as Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“This is the standard danger of talking about foreign policy crises in a campaign,” he said. “If you try to explain a complex position, you sound hopelessly vague.”

Another day and just so many challenges faced by the Zionist state. Should we bomb Iran tomorrow or Saturday? I mean, who knows what the Iranian mullahs will be thinking on the Sabbath.

Elsewhere, Israel Apartheid Week is nearly upon us so Tel Aviv must respond. What are they doing? Sending settlers (and others) around the world to make Israel’s case. Seriously (via the Jerusalem Post):

The Public Diplomacy Ministry plans to send 100 Israelis from different sectors in society abroad to represent and defend the state during Israel Apartheid Week.

The “Faces of Israel” mission, which leaves next weekend, includes settlers, Arabs, artists, experts in national security, gay people, and immigrants from Ethiopia. Actor Aki Avni will also join the group.

The participants in the project have undergone several weeks of training in the Public Diplomacy Ministry, and will visit dozens of college campuses to battle the “apartheid” label in New York, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Toronto, Montreal, Dublin, London, Madrid, Johannesburg and Cape Town.

The mission will be split into 20 groups that will participate in conferences and panels, as well as speak directly to college students.

“Most of those who hate Israel have the same disease: ignorance,” Public Diplomacy Minister Yuli Edelstein said. “We are sure that the answer to the attempts to de-legitimize Israel is not just to give facts and data, but to bring Israel to them.”

According to Edelstein, the groups plan to explain to students that they are all Israelis who come from different walks of life, yet choose to remain in Israel. The mission’s participants were chosen to show that Israel has a diverse society that values equality and human rights, he explained.

The minister said he hopes that students abroad who are meeting real Israelis for the first time will stop the “messages of incitement and hatred that, at the end of the day, could reach students that are the leaders of tomorrow.”

More here and here.