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 21st 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.
Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, by a leading American investigative journalist, Christian Parenti, visits many nations around the world and documents hard evidence of deepening social, economic and political unrest due to reduced amounts of rainwater.
Parenti defines the Tropic of Chaos as a ”belt of economically and politically battered post-colonial states girding the planet’s mid latitudes … The societies in this band are heavily dependent on agriculture and fishing, thus very vulnerable to shifts in weather patterns”.
Add to the toxic mix decades of Western-imposed neo-liberal policies dressed up as ”economic restructuring” and ”we find clustered [in these areas] most of the failed and semi-failed states of the developing world”.
A 2008 Swedish government study concluded 46 countries and 2.7 billion people were susceptible to these ”perfect storm” conditions.
We are thus far largely insulated in the West from these profound shifts but this illusion of calm won’t last long; the Pentagon is already planning for immigration pressures, conflict in Africa surrounding food security and humanitarian emergencies. In classic disaster-capitalism style, private companies are joining in a ”matrix of parasitic interests” to both fuel and arm the wars being fought while investing in methods to monitor, imprison and document the stated problems and people. Parenti correctly calls this ”militarised management of civilisation’s violent disintegration”.
Take Pakistan. Following the devastating floods both last year and more recently as well as a combination of an Islamist insurgency, a crime wave and religious intolerance have fused with climate-change disaster. As Parenti recently told the radio program Democracy Now! after returning from the nuclear-armed nation: ”I was surprised to see a lot of people who had been displaced by the floods were refusing to leave the refugee camps that they were in now, because they didn’t want to go to landlords … These peasants would say, ‘We’d rather stay in these aid camps’, even as they cut off aid. They were protesting for the right to stay. The cops would attack them because they didn’t want to go back to the countryside, where they would fall into debt to these landlords who have private prisons and treat them really as, you know, bonded servants. And this is an example of how climate change … exacerbates pre-existing problems.”
Climate change turbocharges issues that already exist in under-privileged states and creates new ones that poor governments have few resources to tackle.
Parenti concludes by wondering, as Marx and Engels would surely do today, if ”capitalism may be ultimately incapable of accommodating itself to the limits of the natural world”. But the anaemic debate in most of the West, such as whether to implement a largely symbolic carbon tax with little likelihood of reducing emissions to the necessary level, is revealed as insufficient.
Transforming the energy economy and challenging anthropogenic climate change is achievable, Parenti hopes, as long as Western governments alter their living habits. For example, the US government is the country’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter and could make shifts to more efficient services, vehicles and energy with little cost difference.
Activists have a responsibility not to use extreme language – comparing climate-change denial to Holocaust denial is inarguably unhelpful – but equally a responsibility, as Parenti does brilliantly, to reveal the realities of our broken planet and ways to fix it.
TROPIC OF CHAOS
Christian Parenti
Nation, 304pp, $29.95
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.”
After a year of unprecedented Zionist assaults on democracy in Palestine and Israel itself, the NSW Greens capitulate to intense Murdoch media pressure and internal conservatism to back down from fully supporting BDS. News flash to the party: apartheid in Palestine isn’t going anywhere and avoiding a key human rights issue only makes you look weak. Via the Sydney Morning Herald:
The NSW Greens have abandoned their official support for an international boycott of the state of Israel, a policy that drew unprecedented ire towards Marrickville Council this year and exposed broader rifts within the party.
At a State Council meeting yesterday, which was not open to the media, every local Greens group voted to support a revised motion which recognises the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign as a legitimate political tactic, but to abandon it as an official party position.
The policy provoked a huge backlash from Jewish groups and some sections of the media when it was adopted in-principle by Marrickville Council last December, with support from Greens, Labor and an independent.
Some Green party members, including Bob Brown and MLC Cate Faehrmann, blamed the policy for contributing to former mayor Fiona Byrne’s unsuccessful tilt at the seat of Marrickville in the March state election. Immediately after the election, the council abandoned the policy when two of the Greens on the council split and voted with others to overturn it at a dramatic meeting.
Greens MLC Jeremy Buckingham more recently criticised the targeting of Israeli-owned Max Brenner chocolate shops by BDS protestors.
In May, the party convened a working group of about 25 people to reconsider the divisive policy. Their report provided the basis for the revised position.
Ms Rhiannon, a strong proponent of the policy over the last year, denied the policy had exposed a rift within the party, and said a consensus view had now been reached.
“The resolution recognises the legitimacy of the BDS as a political tactic and also recognises that there is a diversity of views in the community and the Greens,” she said.
“While there have been a variety of views among Greens members on BDS there was strong and united commitment to continue our work for Palestinian human rights.
“The Review rejected and condemned false accusations of anti-Semitism.”
The BDS policy had drawn high profile support to the party and Marrickville Council too, with Bishop Desmond Tutu and human rights advocate Julian Burnside QC sending messages of support.
The motion adopted at yesterday’s conference reaffirmed their position that the Australian government should halt military cooperation and military trade with Israel and resolved that the party would also work to develop a broader ethical procurement policy.
It also recognised the right of individual Greens members to participate in BDS campaigns.
The News of the World’s former Deputy Features Editor Paul McMullan spoke last week at London’s Leveson Inquiry. Behold the kind of culture supported, indulged and paid by the Murdoch family:
Another week and another column by a Melbourne Herald Sun editor Alan Howe on just how dysfunctional is the Middle East, Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians, Islamists etc. The man has form.
Yes, this is what countless Zionist lobby trips to Israel do to a Murdoch man. Hatred Inc:
In Arab lands, like-minded, militant Islamists abound. Some are Sunni. Some are Shia. Some are just bonkers.
Democracy? It’s all Greek to them.
The wave of uprisings this year is being called the Arab Spring, a name derived from the so-called Prague Spring of 1968 in which Czechoslovakian leader Alexander Dubcek untied a few of the shackles of Moscow-enforced communism.
He was a man before his time. Within months the Warsaw pact nations invaded Czechoslovakia sending 200,000 troops and 2000 tanks to forcefully take control of the nation, Soviet boss Leonid Brezhnev installed a puppet leader and communism was quickly restored.
That back-to-the-future lesson is a powerful one for the Arab world.
At first blanch, the Arab uprisings of this year looked to be advances for people often trapped by clerics and tyrants who have used Islam to enslave, torture and kill their people so that they can live in opulent grandeur among some of the planet’s poorest populations.
Iran might appear to be the odd man out. For a start its people prefer to fashion themselves as Persians, but it has a significant Arab core. Its supreme leader seems to shun the indulgences that define the lifestyles of his neighbouring leaders, but he and his president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are still the two of the most dangerous men on earth.
Ahmadinejad is mad. Barking. And soon to be nuclear armed.
This year saw movements for freedom in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Morocco, Iran, Syria, Jordan and even Saudi Arabia.
The tyrannical states that enjoy Western support – Bahrain and Saudi Arabia – have largely survived, although Egypt fell quickly. Those who alienated the West, or threatened it, or attacked it, are gone. By the hand of their own people.
…
If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there’d be peace. If the Israelis put down their weapons, there’d be genocide.
British MP Tom Watson offers a lesson in media management:
Yesterday I wrote a column for the Express and Star. It was picked up by a Times journalist this morning. Here is the text exchange between Ben Webster and me, you may find it of interest and or amusing.
Ben Webster: Hi Tom, could you tell me what the allegations are against the Times and Sunday Times? Thanks, Ben Webster. You can email me at ***********
Me: Ask the editors.
Ben Webster: I’m following up what you wrote in the Express and Star. Please can you tell me what you were refering to?
Me: Oh don’t be silly. Walk into your editor’s office and ask him.
Ben Webster: I have done. But I would like to know what you were referring to. Why do you seem reluctant to say?
Me: And what did he say?
Ben Webster: You may be aware of allegations the editors are not aware of. That’s why I’m asking you.
Me: Please let me know what your editor said and I’ll confirm whether I concur. It’s a big moment for him to publicly admit for the first time, that the Times has been touched, albeit in a tiny way, by the hacking scandal. Has he done that yet?
Ben Webster: Is it that you are not confident enough of the allegation to say what it is?
Me: Actually, no. It’s because I don’t trust you, your editor or your company not to twist the story. Remember the Murdoch’s first testimony when I went to the toilet and you put a picture of the empty chair on page two? At the time you acknowledged it was a mistake. You said your editor was going to call to put the matter right. He didn’t. So, what did he say to you this morning when you put searching questions to him about the paper being touched, albeit in a tiny way, by the hacking scandal?
Ben Webster: Why don’t you trust me? You have referred to allegations about criminal acts against 2 national papers. I am not aware of those allegations. I’m simply asking you what they are.
Me: To repeat: what did your editor say?
Ben Webster: What story do you think I have twisted? I think it’s unfair to suggest that.
Me: There’s a certain amount of comic dancing around the handbags about this conversation, Ben. You ask why I don’t trust you. I don’t trust you because a; I don’t know you and to my knowledge have never met you b; I don’t read your work because I prefer the guardian for media stories and the telegraph for news and your paper hides behind a paywall c; you work for a company that has used private detectives to put me under covert surveillance on at least two occasions and the chief reporter of another paper in the stable told me of plans by the former chief executive to ‘smear’ me and d; I know and your editor knows exactly how the Times has been touched, albeit in a tiny way, by the hacking scandal and even he seemingly doesn’t trust you enough to give you a straight answer. Under the circumstances, I think most reasonable people would understand why I’m not going to help you more than I already have. Do have a good day, sir.
The following Press Council decision appears in today’s Murdoch Australian newspaper:
The Australian Press Council has considered complaints by Dale Mills and Vivienne Porzsolt about headlines on articles in The Australian on July 28, this year related to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign that is aimed at businesses associated with Israel. One complaint related to the headline on a print article and the other to the headline on the somewhat different online version.
The articles reported a public protest against BDS by a number of people several weeks after a BDS protest against an Israeli-owned chain of confectionery stores that is part of a broader food and beverage company that supplies the Israeli army. The print version was headed “Anti-Jew protest condemned” and the online version was headed “Prominent Australians fight anti-Semitism with hot chocolate”. The articles noted the BDS protest had been condemned as “violent” and “anti-Semitic” and the online version added a quote that it had been “anti-Jewish”.
Mr Mills claimed that by describing the BDS protest as “anti-Jew” and “anti-Semitic” the headlines were inaccurate, because it was actually a protest against Israeli government policies. He said these assertions involved matters of opinion being presented as facts. He also said the newspaper should have published the letter to the editor in which he sought to correct the inaccuracy.
The newspaper initially said the headlines were accurate because, if the BDS protest was simply anti-Israeli, it should have been targeted at agencies or representatives of the Israeli government. Mr Mills replied the organisers live in Melbourne and there are no Israeli government agencies in that city.
The newspaper added that concerns about the anti-Jewish nature of the protest, together with the accompanying violence, were at the heart of the story’s newsworthiness. It subsequently informed the council, however, that since these articles appeared it had clarified that the BDS campaign should not be described as “anti-Jew” and had advised its staff accordingly.
The council has concluded that the headline on the print version, “Anti-Jew protest condemned”, was a clear breach of the council’s standards of practice because it reported a matter of opinion as if a fact. It also failed reasonably to convey the tenor of the article itself, in which the original demonstration was described as “anti-Israel” but not as “anti-Jew”. Accordingly, the complaint against the headline is upheld on both these grounds.
The council has concluded that the headline on the online version, “Prominent Australians fight anti-Semitism with hot chocolate”, is reasonably capable of being read as a description of the prominent Australians’ opinions, rather than a statement of fact. This interpretation also means that the headline fairly reflects the tenor of the online version especially as, unlike the print version, it included a quote that the campaign was “not anti-Israel but anti-Jewish”. On balance, therefore, the complaint against the online headline is not upheld.
I appeared last night on ABCTV News24′s The Drum (video here).
I argued that chequebook journalism is only problematic when the public increasingly distrusts the media and presumes exploitation is taking place.
The mainstream media far too often simply accepts the allegedly unbiased reports released by think-tanks and interest groups. More skepticism required and independent analysis.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has just visited Afghanistan and talked about staying the course, holding fire and finishing the job. Add a few other cliches to the mix. Most Australians oppose the mission and understand that we are supporting a fundementally corrupt Kabul government.
Finally, the massive payment to the former Murdoch employee in the UK, Rebekah Brooks, proves that this organisation has little understanding about accountability and would, if it were an honest group, not reward a woman who is now under suspicion of being involved in phone-hacking in Britain.
