Antony Loewenstein

Of course, if you’re a self-described Leftist Zionist like Philip Mendes in Australia you write for Murdoch’s Australian and tell Palestinians to grow up and embrace their occupiers:

The international boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel is a by-product of the second Palestinian intifada and the collapse of the Oslo peace process. It is essentially war by other means – a non-violent, but nevertheless extremist strategy – allied with the practice of suicide bombings and rocket attacks, and intended to coerce Israel into surrendering to Palestinian demands.

The first major manifestations of the BDS occurred in April and May 2002 when academics in Europe and Australia urged a boycott of Israeli academics and academic institutions.

The campaign was formalised in July 2004 when 60 Palestinian academic and other non-government organisations called for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. It has three key aims: to end the Israeli occupation of lands occupied in the 1967 war, including East Jerusalem, and dismantle the security barrier; to achieve equality for the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel; and to support the rights of Palestinian refugees, including their demand for a right of return to Israel as implied by UN Resolution 194.

The leading Palestinian BDS advocate, Omar Barghouti, in his 2011 book BDS: the Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, opposes a bi-national state based on parity between the two national groups. He returns to the long-dated Palestine Liberation Organisation proposal for a secular democratic state that recognises Jews only as a religious, not national, community.

The BDS campaign has had limited success. Its major drawback is that it offers no strategy for promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace and reconciliation. Rather, it is a negative and one-sided campaign aimed at demonising Israeli Jews irrespective of their political views on the Palestinian question.

The obvious answer to the BDS is a two-state solution. The Israeli government says it wants to negotiate a two-state solution, and is waiting for a suitable Palestinian partner willing to accommodate Israeli security requirements.

Back in the real world, away from Melbourne academia where being loved by the Zionist community is your highest priority, Gideon Levy explains in Haaretz why BDS is vital:

I don’t buy merchandise that comes from the settlements and I never will. To my way of thinking, those are stolen goods and, like any other goods that have been stolen, I try not to buy them. Now perhaps the South Africans and the Danes also will not buy them; meanwhile their governments have merely requested that products from the settlements be marked so as not to deceive their customers. Just as there was no need in the past to label merchandise from the British colonies as British products, so there is no need to mark products from Israel’s colonies as Israeli. Anyone who wants to support the Israeli colonial enterprise can buy them; those who are opposed can boycott them. As simple as that, and as necessary.

Israel, which boycotts Turkey’s beaches and Hamas, should have been the first to understand that. Instead we have heard heart-rending cries and angry rebukes. Not yet to the Danes, who are nice, but to the South Africans, who are less nice in our eyes. The decision was labeled “a step with racist characteristics” by the Foreign Ministry spokesman, referring to the country that waged the most courageous war against racism in the history of mankind.

Yes, the new South Africa can teach Israel a lesson in the war against racism; and yes, Israel can teach the world a lesson in racism. It has once again been proven that Israel’s chutzpah knows no bounds: Israel, of all countries, accuses South Africa, of all countries, of being racist. Is there anything more ridiculous?

It was not by chance that the South African ambassador to Israel, Ismail Coovadia, seemed both amused and embarrassed at a reception for Cameroon’s independence day, when the foreign ministry launched a ridiculous search for him, according to reports, after he failed to respond to its summons for what was described in advance as a rebuke. It is not difficult to imagine how many such reprimands Israeli ambassadors in different parts of the world deserve to be summoned to, if labeling produce from the settlements is a reason for rebuke and accusations of racism on the part of the Israeli government, which is so purely non-racist.

Labeling products from the settlements should have been an obvious move a long time ago, as a guide to the intelligent and involved consumer. A boycott of settlement products should also have taken place a long time ago, as a compass for law-abiding citizens. We are not referring only to a political or moral position; this is a question of upholding international law. A product produced in the settlements is an illegal product, just like the settlements themselves. Just as there is a growing public of consumers in the world who will not buy products made in sweatshops in southeast Asia nor “blood diamonds” from Africa because of their source and the conditions under which they are produced, so it can be anticipated that there are consumers who will boycott products produced in occupied territory through the exploitation of cheap Palestinian manpower whose opportunities to work are in the settlements.

The self-righteous, sanctimonious protests of Israeli factory-owners and farmers in the occupied territories who say they care so much about their Palestinian workers, who claim a boycott could endanger their employees’ sources of income, are a cynical attempt to mislead people. Had the settlements and the occupying forces been removed, and the lands on which these enterprises arose been returned to their owners, they would have had much more dignified sources of income.

A boycott of goods from the settlements is a justified boycott, and there is no other way to define it. Labeling these products is the minimum demand that every government in the world should make, as a service to its citizens.

A feature in last week’s Murdoch Australian by Brendan Nicholson is typical of the kind of coverage about the war-torn nation. It reflects a reality of a reporter who has spent a lot of time with the military and little time with local Afghans. Note the main, patronising message; the West simply has to stay in the country indefinitely for its own good:

Anyone who thinks Australia’s involvement in the Afghan war is all but over is reading the wrong signals.

A tangle of confusing messages from the US, Australia, Afghanistan and, indeed, from across the world have created the wide impression that an unpopular war has been won and it’s time for troops from close to 50 nations to come home.

But it is clear that at the NATO summit on Afghanistan next week Australia will make a significant commitment to Afghanistan through a “strategic partnership” that will include an ongoing military presence, probably with special forces at the heart of it, and considerable financial support to help keep the Afghan forces in the field.

Some level of insurgency, or plain banditry, is likely to continue and, despite all the talk of American withdrawal, a large US-led force of coalition troops will remain for some years to help keep it under control.

…

In the fraught and dangerously unstable environment of Afghanistan, the army and police have to be able to protect themselves and defeat the insurgency on the ground, but these forces must also be imbued with a national ethos rather than a series of tribal ones and it must be disciplined enough to protect the population.

The sort of values held by Western armies for centuries have to be inculcated within a few years into the new Afghan forces, many members of which are illiterate. The consequences of failure will be rapid disintegration or civil war.

WL Central has the story:

On 16 May 2012 The Times published a piece claiming that information found in an embassy cable released by WikiLeaks directly led to the execution of Majid Jamli Fashi, an Iranian kickboxer. Within hours, media outlets around the world picked up the article and the story went viral.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Once the Times published, the Daily Mail picked it up, Rupert’s The Australian syndicated it, and then the Drudge got it, skyrocketing comments on Twitter.

The WikiLeaks twitter feed reacted swiftly and mercilessly. Spread over a succession of tweets:

“Murdoch’s Times tries to smear WikiLeaks for Iranian hanging. Media morons run with it without fact checking. The absolute contempt for the readers and the truth shows why there must be urgent reform. Let us consider the Iranian smear. We have: Wrong guy. This isn’t the guy in the cable. Wrong publication. Spiegel, not WL, selected the cable, but anyway, it was redacted. Wrong country. Israel isn’t even mentioned in the cable. In fact there’s no connection whatsoever with the story other than it mentions martial arts. And yet dozens of ‘press’ outlets are running with it. Idiots! Wrong timeline. The guy (that the cable, as far as can be determined, has nothing to do with) was sentenced last August.”

What seems to have happened is Rupert’s journalist Martin Fletcher decided to research the background to the Fashi case, found a transplanted Alabama professor in Birmingham (Scott Lucas) who’d been following it, read a few of his articles from last year on the subject, and contacted him. Rupert’s been keen to smear WikiLeaks for years, having failed at least twice before.

You have to laugh. Or you’ll cry.

Has Murdoch’s Australian gone mad? Has it dared speak honestly about Israeli repression in Palestine? The Zionist lobby is outraged. Er, well, Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan – a man who has enjoyed countless free Zionist lobby trips to Israel, all for research purposes, of course – is having none of it today:

Many readers were surprised, as I was, to read a headline in The Weekend Australian: Living under the cloud of Israel’s cruel apartheid. The headline did an injustice to the story, which only used the word apartheid in reporting the comments of one person who was interviewed. The editor of this august journal has confirmed to me that the headline was a mistake, the sort that creeps into newspapers where staff are always battling the pressure of deadlines. The Australian believes, and certainly I personally believe, the word apartheid has no application to Israel, which is a democracy in good standing, which extends basic rights to all its citizens, whatever their race or creed. Too often the misuse of such a word is designed to demonise Israel, wholly unjustly. In this case, it was just a mistake.

Business reporting often ignores the vast bulk of human beings and focuses solely on company profits. Take this lead story in today’s Murdoch Australian:

Papua New Guinea specialist Highlands Pacific has long been known as an asset-rich, share-price-poor type of stock. There is a feeling out there that this year could well see that change for the better, due to a couple of milestones that are to be clocked up.

The first is the commissioning of the $US1.5 billion ($1.47bn) Ramu nickel-cobalt project in PNG, 8.56 per cent-owned by Highlands and with the ability for it to go to an eventual 20.55 per cent stake.

China’s MCC is the major partner and operator of the project, which has cost more than originally planned and is two years behind schedule.

None of that really matters to Highlands as it has been carried in the development.

Assume a long-term nickel price of $US9 a pound (now $US8 a pound) and Highlands could receive $US3 million-$US5m a year up until about 2018, when project debt is assumed to be paid off. After that, Highlands’ stake increases to 11.3 per cent and its share of free cashflow could be $US15m-$US20m a year, with the option to go to a 20.55 per cent equity interest should it desire.

All that is not bad in itself for a company that yesterday was being valued by the market at $106m (15.5c a share).

Given Ramu’s development cost, it seems fair enough to suggest Highland’s market cap is covered by the Ramu interest alone.

But just like a late-night TV ad throwing in steak knives as part of the deal, there is more to Highlands, most notably its 18.8 per cent stake in the Xstrata-led Frieda River copper-gold project in PNG.

It is one of the world’s biggest undeveloped copper-gold deposits (12.9 million tonnes of copper and 20 million ounces of gold). Xstrata delayed a feasibility study into its development to December this year.

That raised concerns in some quarters that Xstrata had gone cold on the project. But the reality is that Xstrata delayed it to study power options for Frieda River in greater depth. The emerging availability of gas in that part of the world means that the original plan for an $US810m hydro-power project could be replaced with the cheaper option of gas-fired power.

Like Ramu before it, the delay at Frieda River is neither here nor there, given that when it is developed it is going to be around for decades.

Throw in Highlands’ exploration hunt near the almost exhausted Ok Tedi copper-gold mine in the Star Mountains in PNG, and it is easy to see why valuations of Highlands runs well ahead of its current share price. Euroz settled on a 40c share price target in a recent research note on the company after first having arrived at a 51c valuation.

Understand any of that? Of course you didn’t, you’re a real person who actually wonders what social and environmental impact such explorations may have on the poor people of PNG.

Here’s the Oxford Business Group highlighting calls for the PNG government to make sure these vast revenues don’t all leave the country:

A series of significant mineral finds in Papua New Guinea (PNG) have highlighted the role exports are set to play in the nation’s economic future. However, there have been calls from industry players and opposition officials asking the government to do more to ensure revenues stay in the country.

In mid-April, state-owned Petromin announced that it had found a 364-metre intersection of porphyry copper, molybdenum and gold mineralisation at its Ipi River prospect, located 50 km north of its Tolukuma gold mine in Central Province.

In the same month, Australia-based Indochine Mining announced that gold and silver finds at Mount Kare had underlined the “outstanding potential” of the project to become one of PNG’s next major mining operations. Officials also revealed that KULA Gold’s Woodlark Island project, which has estimated reserves of 700,000 ounces, was on track to start producing in 2014.

Last night I appeared on ABCTV’s The Drum (video here) talking about a range of Australian issues, Afghanistan and Murdoch thuggery in Britain.

Having just returned from Pakistan and Afghanistan, I talked about the reality of life in the latter under Western occupation and what’s likely to happen once most troops leave at the end of 2014. After more than a decade and tens of billions of aid (see this telling photo by my friend Benjamin Gilmour who just returned from Kabul and Herat) the nation is in a state of (mostly) chaos. Resistance to American and Australian forces have undoubtedly led to a Western defeat but what comes next? Many Afghans I met said they feared what would happen after the West leaves. This wasn’t because they wanted them to stay, although some did, but that Western aid and development should in some way assist the state. The time for war is long over.

I explained on the program that the West have empowered thuggish warlords; we’ve trained, armed and funded men with a horrific record in the name of “stability”. In reality, it’s created the opposite. I was researching the role of private militias and intelligence companies, both of which have corrupted the democratic process.

I heard over and over again how little America and its allies knew about Afghanistan despite spending more than 10 years fighting the Taliban and other forces.

In relation to the ongoing Murdoch saga in Britain, I argued that News International could rightly be called a mafia-like organisation and James Murdoch, who just gave testimony last night to the Leveson Inquiry, openly explained the intimacy between the Tories and his corporation (not that things were any better or different during the days of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown).

This stunning investigation in the Australian Financial Review is fascinating on a range of levels, not least Rupert Murdoch’s relationship with the Israeli military and intelligence elite. What does this say? There is a seamless and ethical-free zone inhabited by multinationals that naturally gravitates towards the Zionist state because of its self-described expertise in security:

A secret unit within Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation promoted a wave of high-tech piracy in Australia that damaged Austar, Optus and Foxtel at a time when News was moving to take control of the Australian pay TV industry.

The piracy cost the Australian pay TV companies up to $50 million a year and helped cripple the finances of Austar, which Foxtel is now in the process of acquiring.

A four-year investigation by The Australian Financial Reviewhas revealed a global trail of corporate dirty tricks directed against competitors by a secretive group of former policemen and intelligence officers within News Corp known as Operational Security.

Their actions devastated News’s competitors, and the resulting waves of high-tech piracy assisted News to bid for pay TV businesses at reduced prices – including DirecTV in the US, Telepiu in Italy and Austar. These targets each had other commercial weaknesses quite apart from piracy.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is still deliberating on final details before approving Foxtel’s $1.9 billion takeover bid for Austar, which will cement Foxtel’s position as the dominant pay TV provider in Australia.

News Corp has categorically denied any involvement in promoting piracy and points to a string of court actions by competitors making similar claims, from which it has emerged victorious. In the only case that went to court, in 2008, the plaintiff EchoStar was ordered to pay nearly $19 million in legal costs.

The issue is particularly sensitive because Operational Security, which is headed by Reuven Hasak, a former deputy director of the Israeli domestic secret service, Shin Bet, operates in an area which historically has had close supervision by the Office of the Chairman, Rupert Murdoch.

The security group was initially set up in a News Corp subsidiary, News Datacom Systems (later known as NDS), to battle internal fraud and to target piracy against its own pay TV companies. But documents uncovered by the Financial Reviewreveal that NDS encouraged and facilitated piracy by hackers not only of its competitors but also of companies, such as Foxtel, for whom NDS provided pay TV smart cards. The documents show NDS sabotaged business rivals, fabricated legal actions and obtained telephone records illegally.

Stunning report in the Guardian that details the ongoing relationship between Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation; a mutual belief in reducing public funding for education and reducing opportunities for the most disadvantaged:

On a freezing November day in 2010, the education secretary, Michael Gove, turned out in east London to inspect a desolate stretch of dockside ground near City airport, where Rupert Murdoch had offered to build an academy school.

The cabinet minister was accompanied by Rebekah Brooks, then News International chief executive, and an entourage of other top Murdoch staff, including James Harding and Will Lewis.

Despite the unprepossessing venue there was no mistaking the company’s enthusiasm for the project. Murdoch described himself in a speech as the saviour of British education, thanks to his company’s “adoption of new academies here in London”.

It was a high-water mark of the love-in between Gove, Murdoch and the Conservative government. Gove, a former Times journalist, had previously gone out of his way to flatter his own proprietor, writing that Murdoch “encourages … free-thinking”.

Shortly after the Docklands visit, the phone-hacking scandal disrupted these close relations. News International’s proposed academy was quietly abandoned. Newham council says nothing was subsequently done to fulfil Murdoch’s promises.

But Gove returned to his pro-Murdoch theme last week, publicly attacking the Leveson inquiry, set up in the wake of News International’s misdeeds, as a threat to press freedom. “Whenever anyone sets up a new newspaper – as Rupert Murdoch has with the Sun on Sunday – they should be applauded and not criticised,” he said.

It was a reminder of the extraordinarily close links that still exist between publishing tycoon and Tory politician. One of Murdoch’s long-term projects is what he calls a “revolutionary and profitable” move by his media companies into online education. Gove would be a key figure in any attempt to penetrate the British schools market.

The education secretary meets Murdoch frequently and is an enthusiastic backer of the ideas of Joel Klein, the head of Murdoch’s new education division. Within a week of his promotion in 2010, the minister was at dinner with Murdoch, according to officially released details of meetings.

How’s this for hysteria? Such hyperbole masks a deep insecurity. Israeli occupation of Palestine continues. Daily threats against Iran continues. Apartheid grows in the West Bank. But the real threat, people, is this damned BDS!

This story, in Murdoch’s Australian today, shows one thing; bullying is the only way the Zionist lobby and its political and media courtiers know how to play; and they are losing public opinion, finally:

Israel’ representative in Australia has abandoned normal diplomatic language to slam “vigilante local councils” in inner Sydney that have pursued boycotts against his country.

Ambassador Yuval Rotem, a former chief of staff to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told a gathering at NSW parliament on Tuesday evening that supporters of the boycotts, divestment and sanctions campaign held a “schoolchildren’s view of foreign conflict” and had suffered a “humiliating public defeat” at the state election last March.

However, Mr Rotem reserved his strongest words for Fiona Byrne, the former mayor of Marrickville in inner-western Sydney, whose position on the BDS was widely credited with costing her a seat in state parliament for the Greens. Marrickville Council adopted BDS as official policy under Ms Byrne, but abandoned it a few months later following public condemnation.

“The candidate for Marrickville, Fiona Byrne, tripped over herself in many public statements, confused that her Utopian vision of a world with a weakened Israel was poorly received outside the confines of her urban hamlet,” Mr Rotem said.

“BDS in Australia has since become a media byline, like the S11 and G20 protests before it, for another failed movement of radical activists which, shamefully, attached itself to a municipal council for a few months.”

Mr Rotem also hit out at Ms Byrne’s federal Greens colleague, Lee Rhiannon, a former prominent supporter of the Soviet Union who marched alongside controversial Islamic cleric Taj Din al-Hilali at an anti-Israel demonstration in Sydney in 2010. “Where Lee Rhiannon’s Greens looked likely to pick up a cluster of seats in the NSW election, they left demoralised, finishing behind Labor on primary votes in the only seat they ended up winning,” Mr Rotem said.

“When we hear about BDS now, it’s not coming from the mouths of prominent politicians and mayors or respected journals of record. It’s being shouted from poorly attended protests or from the back of police cars or from the former communists who stayed with Stalin even after the (Berlin) Wall fell. One year on, and the movement in NSW to economically undermine the Middle East’s only democracy is as dead as Fiona Byrne’s brief career in international diplomacy.

“The concern throughout NSW that arose during the BDS debates was expected: common sense does not comply with vigilante local councils wreaking self-imposed economic sanctions on one nation which is locked in a struggle for peace.”

Mr Rotem was speaking at the relaunch of Parliamentary Friends of Israel, a group including Labor and Coalition MPs, along with one Green, upper house MP Jeremy Buckingham.

Mr Buckingham has emerged as a leader of the “deep-green” or conservation-focused section of the party in NSW, which has pushed back at the hard-Left faction associated with Senator Rhiannon. He successfully led a push last December for the state party to abandon BDS.

In his speech, Mr Rotem said: “I thank those Greens MPs and candidates who stood tall and opposed BDS, citing their own values of principle and justice, for which some of their colleagues have no tolerance.”

Co-convener of the parliamentary group, Labor upper house MP Walt Secord, told The Australian: “The ambassador gave one of the toughest speeches I have ever heard from a diplomat in my more than 20 years observing and participating in Australian politics. Further, I agree 100 per cent with the ambassador’s observations on the Greens . . . Their tactics were schoolyard foreign affairs and almost borderline anti-Semitism.”

Ms Byrne would not comment.