Antony Loewenstein

Fox News style TV brought to you by billionaires. That’s real “democracy” (and the inspiration is that glorious lover of free debate, Rupert Murdoch):

Last night I appeared on ABCTV’s The Drum (video here) alongside Joe Stella and The Punch editor Tory Maguire.

We talked about the faltering global economy – why oh why is the IMF treated with such respect after years of failed forecasts and neo-liberal “reforms” that have only caused misery for millions globally? – and the proposed preamble for the Australian constitution that recognises the First Australians. Despite the fact that both major sides of politics support the racist Northern Territory Intervention (under the guise of “helping Aborigines”) the preamble should be backed as one small step towards equality before the law.

The question of racism in Australia is a live one and I argued that deep-seated mistrust of Muslims and minorities was rampant. Any more than other countries globally? Hard to say but it’s foolish to deny that media players and politicians regularly play the race card to draw votes. The Murdoch press are some of the worst offenders in this area, routinely demonising the poor and disadvantaged.

The main discussion was around Iran and its alleged nuclear weapon’s program (of which there is no evidence). I stated that most of the mainstream media, the Zionist lobby, Israel-firsters, many politicians and commentators are now leading us to yet another Middle East conflict. Few questions are being asked and White House and Zionist spin (both with a history of lies) are taken at face value. The regime in Tehran is a dictatorial outrage but military strikes against the country would be illegal, immoral, counter-productive and have nothing to do with nuclear weapons but to ensure the American/Israeli/Gulf state hegemony in the Middle East.

You meet the Israeli Prime Minister. You can ask him anything. Do you want to mention the occupation? Of course not. Much easier, as per Greg Sheridan in the Australian, to get Netanyahu to recall those glorious days in the Australian sun. Yes, this is Murdoch “journalism”:

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, has very strong feelings about Australia, as he does about many things.

On Australia, however, his feelings are wildly positive.

“I love Australia,” he tells me during a long interview in the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem.

He appreciates Australia’s support for Israel, but he has much more personal feelings, and experiences, especially a vacation here more than a decade ago.

“I was happily unemployed and I received an invitation to go to Australia,” he says.

“It was the second visit I had to Australia. I went there first as United Nations ambassador (in the mid-1980s).

“I came there with my wife and my two boys and we had a wonderful time. I climbed Ayers Rock, again, barefoot, with my boy. He was young, 10 years old, he climbed it with me and nearly fell off the cliff.

“It was absolutely spectacular. Then we had a vacation in Hayman Island. We saw some whales and giant turtles in a nearby island. I don’t think you can beat that.

“I swam and sunbaked and didn’t do anything connected with politics for a couple of weeks. I’d say that’s pretty good. I can tell you I enjoyed it mightily. When I think of Australia, I think good thoughts.”

More seriously, I ask Netanyahu whether Australian support for Israel has been important.

Again, the response is pretty unequivocal: “Yes, very much so. It has been consistent, by and large. You can have here and there a difference. There’s also a sense of warmth and identification, which reflects the position of successive governments.

“But also there’s a sense of warmth of the people, which we don’t always enjoy elsewhere.

“In a world where Israel is vilified, castigated, where a beleaguered democracy is defending its very life against radical Islamist forces, we don’t always get credit. We don’t always get fair play. We feel that happens more often than not with Australia.”

A year ago, Australia’s Foreign Minister, Kevin Rudd, on a visit to Jerusalem invited Netanyahu to visit Australia as Prime Minister.

Would he like to do that?

“Absolutely.”

The role of real journalists is to question so-called established truths and make officials uncomfortable. Being too close to power is the role of court reporters. Sadly, the vast bulk of corporate hacks are dead keen to rub shoulders with the rich and powerful and remain unwilling to seriously challenge, for example, the rush to war (hello Murdoch’s Australian today, essentially demanding military action against Iran).

I’m writing a chapter in a forthcoming collection I’m co-editing on the incestuous relationship between the military and the media, an issue that has interested me for years (here’s an essay of mine in 2004 detailing the New York Times helping the Bush administration sell its bogus war against Iraq).

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald skewers in his latest column the disease that will never die:

The New York Times‘ Public Editor Arthur Brisbane unwittingly sparked an intense and likely enduring controversy yesterday when he pondered — as though it were some agonizing, complex dilemma — whether news reporters “should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” That’s basically the equivalent of pondering in a medical journal whether doctors should treat diseases, or asking in a law review article whether lawyers should defend the legal interests of their clients, etc.: reporting facts that conflict with public claims (what Brisbane tellingly demeaned as being “truth vigilantes”) is one of the defining functions of journalism, at least in theory. Subsequent attempts to explain what he meant, along with a response from theNYT‘s Executive Editor, Jill Abramson, will only add fuel to the fire.

Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky both have excellent analyses of the Brisbane controversy — which, as they point out, sparked such intense reaction because it captured and inflamed long-standing anger toward media outlets for mindlessly amplifying statements without examining whether they’re true. As Stephen Colbert put it in his still-extraordinary 2006 speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ‘em through a spell check and go home.” While reporters typically react with fury over the suggestion that they are stenographers, Brisbane was essentially posting that this is all they are, and then earnestly wondering aloud whether they should be anything more than that, as though it was some sort of exotic or edgy suggestion.

That most reporters faithfully follow the stenographer model — uncritically writing down what people say and then leaving it at that — is so obvious that it’s hardly worth the effort to demonstrate it. There are important exceptions to this practice even at the most establishment media outlets, where diligent andintrepid investigative journalism exposes the secret corruption of the most powerful. But by and large, most establishment news coverage consists of announcing that someone or other has made some claim, then (at most) adding that someone else has made a conflicting claim, and then walking away. This isn’t merely the practice of journalists; rather, as Rosen points out, it’s virtually their religion. They simply do not believe that reporting facts is what they should be doing. Recall David Gregory’s impassioned defense of the media’s behavior in the lead-up to the Iraq War, when he rejected complaints that journalists failed to document falsehoods from Bush officials because “it’s not our role“ and then sneered that only an ideologue would want them to do so (shortly thereafter, NBC named Gregory the new host of Meet the Press).

Literally every day, one finds major news stories that consist of little more than the uncritical conveying of official claims, often protected by journalists not only from critical scrutiny but — thanks to the shield of anonymity they subserviently extend — from all forms of accountability. Just to take one highly illustrative example from last week, the NYT published an article by Eric Schmitt based almost entirely on the assertions of anonymous officials, announcing that “a nearly two-month lull in American drone strikes in Pakistan has helped embolden Al Qaeda and several Pakistani militant factions to regroup, increase attacks against Pakistani security forces and threaten intensified strikes against allied forces in Afghanistan.” No criticisms of drone attacks were included. Three days later, the U.S. resumed drone attacks, after which the same Eric Schmitt immediately ran to inform us, citing Reuters, that the drone strike killed “at least three militants” (as always, “militant” in American media discourse means: any person who dies when an American missile shot from a drone detonates).

If true, this would be yet another example of the culture created by Rupert Murdoch. His legacy is some fine journalism and a whole heap of trash and bigotry. The International Herald Tribune reports:

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, relatives of some of the victims began suspecting that someone was eavesdropping on their telephones.

Some heard mysterious clicking sounds on their home and mobile phones. The fiancée of one man who died at the World Trade Center remembers listening to snippets of someone else’s conversation on her line. A husband of another victim recalls hearing somebody remotely accessing his home answering machine, which still held the final, reassuring message left by his wife shortly before the crash of Flight 93. Others say they are baffled as to how details about their loved ones appeared in British tabloids within days of the attacks.

Ten years later, their long-held suspicions aroused by The News of the World phone-hacking scandal in London, dozens of relatives of victims contacted the Justice Department. On Aug. 24, eight of them met with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and asked him to determine whether their privacy had been violated. As a first step, they asked him to see whether Scotland Yard had a record of their names or phone numbers among the material seized from a private investigator who hacked cellphone messages for the tabloid.

Four months later, they are still waiting to hear back and are frustrated by the Justice Department’s silence.

“It’s not that hard to find out — it’s quite a simple thing, really, isn’t it?” said Patricia Bingley, a British citizen whose son, Kevin Dennis, a 43-year-old trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, worked on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower.

Ms. Bingley said she was stunned to see, in the Sept. 18, 2001, issue of The Sun, a photograph of her son reading a bedtime story to his two sons, which she did not give to the paper. The story also contained details about her son that she said no one from her family had provided to The Sun. “It never made sense to me,” she said, adding that she suspects hacking or worse by the paper. “I’d like very much for the government to tell us whether this happened or not. Celebrities seem to have no trouble finding out.”

In July, as revelations about widespread phone hacking by the tabloid were spilling out, another British newspaper, The Daily Mirror, reported that a private investigator said that News of the World reporters had offered to pay him to retrieve phone records of Sept. 11 victims. After the report, which was not confirmed by other news organizations, the Justice Department opened an investigation. To date, no evidence has emerged publicly that Sept. 11 victims were hacking targets.

Jodi Westbrook Flowers, a lawyer at a South Carolina firm that represents more than 6,700 relatives of Sept. 11 victims, said she and her colleagues had scoured the British tabloids and found scores of details about the victims. Relatives were not certain how the tabloids found out so much so quickly after the attacks.

One of the relatives, whom she declined to identify, said that five days after Sept. 11, The Sun published the words from a voice mail message left on his cellphone by his son, who was aboard one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center. (British authorities are also investigating whether hacking occurred at The Sun, which, like The News of the World, is owned by News Corporation.)

Interesting, if true (via the Independent):

Police investigating computer hacking by private investigators commissioned by national newspapers have uncovered evidence that emails sent and received by Gordon Brown during his time as Chancellor were illegally accessed.

The level of “conservative” debate in Murdoch’s Australian yesterday, in a piece by Hal G.P. Colebatch. I’m sure he’s seen heaps of Muslims on the TV and knows many of them intimately:

Middle Eastern migrants, except in exceptional circumstances, appear to be making little attempt to assimilate and are bringing in polygamy, honour killings and general religious intolerance.

2011 has been a Fox News year with a Muslim American President, socialism in the class room, terrorists in the White House and:

Elie Wiesel, Mr Murdoch, is a Holocaust survivor but he has used his fame to care about all kinds of causes (including, according to Norman Finkelstein, exploiting groups and firms involved in the genocide) and caring little about the Palestinians.

His supposed love and affection for humanity has its limits.

An open and frank debate about BDS against Israel in Australia is long overdue. Crikey blog This Blog Harms invited five people to write 1000 words on the issue. This is my contribution:

The logic of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) didn’t appear to me immediately. When my first book, My Israel Question, was released in 2006, the issue was barely raised, despite Palestinian civil society launching its call in 2005 “against Israel until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights.”

The vast majority of Israeli Jews claimed to be in constant fear of Palestinian terrorism despite living relatively free lives in a society that increasingly made Palestinians invisible. Palestinians under occupation were disillusioned with their leaders and after more than a decade of fruitless negotiations with Israel, the Oslo period, longed to be free.

But now, with Israel a state that even more brazenly boasts a fundamentalist Jewish minority as representing true Zionism, BDS is an essential tool to harm Israel’s economic and moral fibre. In the words of American Jewish dissident Philip Weiss, founder of the website Mondoweiss, “Israel isn’t good for the Jews anymore.” Most importantly, Palestinians under occupation are making this call, not a Diaspora attempting to impose a distorted vision onto them.

BDS is a key weapon to de-normalise the relationship between both the globalised economy and Israel and the constructed emotional ties that allegedly bond Israel and the West. Witness Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard recently tell an event sponsored by National Australia Bank that, “We are two countries separated by distance, but united by values. Liberal democracies that seek freedom and peace.”

An ever-expanding 44-year-old occupation is a strange way to crave freedom and peace.

It is the only the New South Wales Greens who are brave enough, despite a year of intense Murdoch media bullying and Jewish community pressure, to maintain in principle support for BDS and examine ways to “actively support the [Federal] Australian Greens position, including that the Australian government halt military cooperation and military trade with Israel.” This is a proudly BDS position, wherever the Greens call it this or not.

Israel/Palestine is not a balanced conflict, with two equal sides fighting over land, rights and dignity. It is, writes leading Israeli publisher of Haaretz, Amos Schocken, “a strategy of territorial seizure and apartheid. It ignores judicial aspects of territorial ownership and shuns human rights and the guarantees of equality enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.”

Although he doesn’t mention BDS, it is impossible to undermine daily, creeping oppression with yet more “negotiations” between Israel and the Palestinians while Washington remains Israel’s lawyer.

BDS is the non-violent weapon wielded to show Israel and its global backers that business as usual is unacceptable.

BDS makes many Jews distinctly uncomfortable, with wild claims that this is exactly the same tactics used by Nazis in Germany in the 1930s against Jewish businesses. It is nothing of the sort. Jews are not being targeted but businesses that directly support the Zionist state or receive funding from it. Israeli chocolate shop Max Brenner is a legitimate target because it proudly supports the IDF, an army complicit in daily human rights abuses.

Zionist cheapening of anti-Semitism has become endemic from seeing Nazis in inner Sydney protesting outside Max Brenner to American critics of neo-conservative plans to bomb Iran.

Despite these smears, BDS is growing globally because Israeli actions against Palestinians inside Israel proper and the occupied territories is becoming more repressive and outwardly racist. The litany of exclusionary legislation before the Israeli Knesset, some of which are being pushed by so-called “moderates”, rises weekly. BDS sends a message to these Israelis and Diaspora supporters who either remain silent or simply mouth platitudes about a two-state solution. It is designed to make blind backers uncomfortable and defensive.

It’s being grimly amusing to watch liberal Zionists in Australia and beyond express displeasure with BDS, arguing it is too inflammatory and extreme and ostracises potential allies inside Israel (namely Jews, as Palestinian allies are less important in their worldview). In fact, the opposite is true and BDS forces two-state advocates and fence-sitters to explain how their sclerotic process will do anything to advance peace in the Middle East.

BDS is the enemy of the status-quo and liberal Zionists in Australia, including Monash University’s Mark Baker and Philip Mendes, are paralysed in wishfully thinking the Israeli government will suddenly believe the Palestinians are worthy of being given a state. They recoil at BDS because they despise one part of an outcome that aims to bring true democracy for all citizens inside Israel and Palestine – the one-state solution – something a two-state result can never achieve. If not BDS to tell Israel that its Western-backed racism and occupation is illegal under international law, then what tactic? They have no answers, and desperately cling to an emotional claim as post-Holocaust children. This is no way to ensure rights in the 21^st century, if it ever was.

BDS isn’t the answer to all the Palestinian needs. It is one part of a bigger struggle currently underway inside Palestine itself and the Palestinian Diaspora; a worldwide campaign that doesn’t rely on leaders to beg Israel for scraps or a state or rights. Popular, non-violent resistance, BDS and readdress for Palestinian refugees are key initiatives that must be supported to liberate both Palestinians and Israelis.

BDS is causing economic and sociological harm to the Zionist state, and this is something to celebrate. Were enlightened citizens of the world during South African apartheid asked to feel sorry for whites that ruled the blacks with an iron fist? Of course not, and BDS doesn’t aim to comfort the jarred nerves of Israelis or Diaspora Zionists.

It is about addressing a decades-old matrix of control that has only survived because of Diaspora Jewry funding and morally arming the Zionist state.

Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney-based independent journalist and author who has written for The Guardian, Haaretz, The Nation, Sydney Morning Herald and many others. His two best-selling books are My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution. He is currently working on many projects, including a book about vulture capitalism, a book on the Left in contemporary politics and another title on Israel/Palestine.

My following book review appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

An investigative journalist finds altered weather patterns are already having a significant impact.

We are constantly bombarded with evidence of apocalyptic climate change – uncontrollable weather patterns that will irreversibly destroy sustainable life on planet Earth. Deniers argue such warnings are exaggerated.

The Republican US presidential candidate, Rick Perry, recently said scientists were manipulating data ”so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects”.

News Limited’s Andrew Bolt, writing from his office in Melbourne, equally claims that a religious-type fundamentalism exists around global warming and we should simply remain relaxed and comfortable about occasional changes in climate.

This is an interesting story in yesterday’s Murdoch Australian that reveals the role of multinationals such as Halliburton in Australia:

Former coal-seam gas mechanical technician Roy Michie, who spent eight years working fracking wells across Australia, claims the industry is dominated by “cowboys” who are subject to substandard regulation.

Mr Michie, who worked for US energy giant Halliburton’s CSG operations, said he had spent an earlier decade working for traditional mining companies and the cultures between the two activities were worlds apart.

“From a WA underground mining perspective you knew what the rules were and weren’t, and what was supposed to happen,” Mr Michie said.

“Oil and gas just doesn’t seem to have any rules, it just depends on who is running the show on the day as to what you will do and how you will do it.”

Those claims are vigorously contested by the CSG industry which says it abides by rigorous protocols, with extraction approvals regularly containing hundreds of conditions and requirements to protect the environment and worker safety.

Mr Michie’s comments come as a Senate committee last week called for a moratorium for all future CSG projects until further research was carried out into issues such as the disposal of salt by-product.

Mr Michie, who worked for the fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, arm of Halliburton in the Cooper Basin in South Australia and the Surat Basin in Queensland, said he quit working in the sector earlier this year over concerns about poor leadership and controls.

He said while working on CSG wells for Halliburton, which contracts to major CSG extractors, he had been unable to obtain basic information such as how close to a well head a naked flame was permitted.

Halliburton spokeswoman Zelma Branch denied the company had weak controls or practices. “Halliburton is committed to protecting public health and the environment in all of its business activities,” Ms Branch said.

Mr Michie said suggestions by the industry that the chemicals used in fracking were harmless were not true. “Some chemicals we use, like castor oil, are harmless but there are also some very nasty chemicals as well.”