Antony Loewenstein

Via the New York Times comes a story that burns with resentment towards those ungrateful Iraqis. I mean, Washington “liberated” you and now you aren’t grateful every day for causing chaos in the country?

Less than two months after American troops left, the State Department is preparing to slash by as much as half the enormous diplomatic presence it had planned for Iraq, a sharp sign of declining American influence in the country.

Officials in Baghdad and Washington said that Ambassador James F. Jeffrey and other senior State Department officials were reconsidering the size and scope of the embassy, where the staff has swelled to nearly 16,000 people, mostly contractors.

The expansive diplomatic operation and the $750 million embassy building, the largest of its kind in the world, were billed as necessary to nurture a postwar Iraq on its shaky path to democracy and establish normal relations between two countries linked by blood and mutual suspicion. But the Americans have been frustrated by what they see as Iraqi obstructionism and are now largely confined to the embassy because of security concerns, unable to interact enough with ordinary Iraqis to justify the $6 billion annual price tag.

The swift realization among some top officials that the diplomatic buildup may have been ill advised represents a remarkable pivot for the State Department, in that officials spent more than a year planning the expansion and that many of the thousands of additional personnel have only recently arrived.

Michael W. McClellan, the embassy spokesman, said in a statement, “Over the last year and continuing this year the Department of State and the Embassy in Baghdad have been considering ways to appropriately reduce the size of the U.S. mission in Iraq, primarily by decreasing the number of contractors needed to support the embassy’s operations.”

Mr. McClellan said the number of diplomats — currently about 2,000 — was also “subject to adjustment as appropriate.”

To make the cuts, he said the embassy was “hiring Iraqi staff and sourcing more goods and services to the local economy.”

After the American troops departed in December, life became more difficult for the thousands of diplomats and contractors left behind. Convoys of food that had been escorted by the United States military from Kuwait were delayed at border crossings as Iraqis demanded documentation that the Americans were unaccustomed to providing.

Within days, the salad bar at the embassy dining hall ran low. Sometimes there was no sugar or Splenda for coffee. On chicken-wing night, wings were rationed at six per person. Over the holidays, housing units were stocked with Meals Ready to Eat, the prepared food for soldiers in the field.

At every turn, the Americans say, the Iraqi government has interfered with the activities of the diplomatic mission, one they grant that the Iraqis never asked for or agreed upon. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s office — and sometimes even the prime minister himself — now must approve visas for all Americans, resulting in lengthy delays. American diplomats have had trouble setting up meetings with Iraqi officials.

For their part, the Iraqis say they are simply enforcing their laws and protecting their sovereignty in the absence of a working agreement with the Americans on the embassy.

“The main issue between Iraqis and the U.S. Embassy is that we have not seen, and do not know anything about, an agreement between the Iraqi government and the U.S.,” said Nahida al-Dayni, a lawmaker and member of Iraqiya, a largely Sunni bloc in Parliament.

Mainstream support for Wikileaks is often far removed from the daily news cycle. Many journalists seem to feel uncomfortable backing Wikileaks (and Julian Assange) because of his ongoing legal issues, forgetting the key miracle behind the site; the profound challenges to the established information order and exposing the sycophancy between journalists and corporate power.

I was asked, alongside a number of other people including John Pilger, Noam Chomsky and Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, to speak about what Wikileaks means for me, as part of a global series called Did You Have Any Idea?

DID YOU HAVE ANY IDEA? – with Antony LOEWNSTEIN (Part 2) from CaTV on Vimeo.

This is typical corporate media reporting on “our” wars. Ideologically embedded New York Times reporters in Washington DC are handed information from the White House and essentially write a press release for the Obama administration. Any mention of the huge role of private contractors in Afghanistan, a group that will continue to grow, like in Iraq, as US forces draw down? Of course not:

The United States’ plan to wind down its combat role in Afghanistan a year earlier than expected relies on shifting responsibility to Special Operations forces that hunt insurgent leaders and train local troops, according to senior Pentagon officials and military officers. These forces could remain in the country well after theNATO mission ends in late 2014.

The plan, if approved by President Obama, would amount to the most significant evolution in the military campaign since Mr. Obama sent in 32,000 more troops to wage an intensive and costly counterinsurgency effort.

Under the emerging plan, American conventional forces, focused on policing large parts of Afghanistan, will be the first to leave, while thousands of American Special Operations forces remain, making up an increasing percentage of the troops on the ground; their number may even grow.

The evolving strategy is far different from the withdrawal plan for Iraq, where almost all American forces, conventional or otherwise, have left. Iraq has devolved into sectarian violence ever since the withdrawal in December, which threatens to undo the political and security gains there.

Because we need to put a serious check on out of control executive and corporate power (via the New York Times):

This much is known: In its hunt for information about three people it believes to be associated with the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks, the Justice Department has sought to extract details about them and their communications on Twitter. What is not yet known is where else the Justice Department went looking.

On Friday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked a federal court in Virginia to reveal the names of the other Internet companies from whom the Justice Department solicited information about the three people: Jacob Appelbaum, an American citizen; Birgitta Jonsdottir of Iceland; and Rop Gonggrijp of the Netherlands.

Their case has become a testing ground for online privacy and speech, in part because the Justice Department sought the information without a search warrant in 2010. Instead, it relied on a 1994 law called the Stored Communications Act, and asked Twitter to release information about the three Twitter users. It sought, among other things, their Internet Protocol addresses, which identify and can give the location of a computer used to log onto the Internet. Twitter responded by informing the three about the government’s request – and they, in turn, went to court.

Amazing and revealing (via JTA):

 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s two greatest enemies are The New York Times and Haaretz, the editor of The Jerusalem Post said in a speech.

Steve Linde, addressing a conference in Tel Aviv of the Women’s International Zionist Organization, said Wednesday that Netanyahu made the remark to him about the newspapers at a private meeting “a couple of weeks ago” at the prime minister’s office in Tel Aviv.

“He said, ‘You know, Steve, we have two main enemies,’ ” Linde said, according to a recording of the WIZO speech provided to JTA. “And I thought he was going to talk about, you know, Iran, maybe Hamas. He said, ‘It’s The New York Times and Haaretz.’ He said, ‘They set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world. Journalists read them every morning and base their news stories … on what they read in The New York Times and Haaretz.’ ”

Linde said he and other participants at the meeting asked Netanyahu whether he really thought that the media had that strong a role in shaping world opinion on Israel, and the prime minister replied, “Absolutely.”

The Prime Minister’s Office could not be reached immediately for comment.

Being a truly independent nation, which Iraq clearly is not post US occupation, would mean that foreign security forces and private contractors would have strict rules of operation. Supporters of this ever-growing global movement might not like it, but this could well be the beginning of something important for the failed nation; exercising real autonomy (via the New York Times):

Iraqi authorities have detained a few hundred foreign contractors in recent weeks, industry officials say, including many Americans who work for the United States Embassy, in one of the first major signs of the Iraqi government’s asserting its sovereignty after the American troop withdrawal last month.

The detentions have occurred largely at the airport in Baghdad and at checkpoints around the capital after the Iraqi authorities raised questions about the contractors’ documents, including visas, weapons permits and authorizations to drive certain routes. Although no formal charges have been filed, the detentions have lasted from a few hours to nearly three weeks.

The crackdown comes amid other moves by the Iraqi government to take over functions that had been performed by the United States military and to claim areas of the country it had controlled. In the final weeks of the military withdrawal, the son of Iraq’s prime minister began evicting Western companies and contractors from the heavily fortified Green Zone, which had been the heart of the United States military operation for much of the war.

Just after the last American troops left in December, the Iraqis stopped issuing and renewing many weapons licenses and other authorizations. The restrictions created a sequence of events in which contractors were being detained for having expired documents that the government would not renew.

The Iraqi authorities have also imposed new limitations on visas. In some recent cases, contractors have been told they have 10 days to leave Iraq or face arrest in what some industry officials call a form of controlled harassment.

Latif Rashid, a senior adviser to the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, and a former minister of water, said in an interview that the Iraqis’ deep mistrust of security contractors had led the government to strictly monitor them. “We have to apply our own rules now,” he said.

This month, Iraqi authorities kept scores of contractors penned up at Baghdad’s international airport for nearly a week until their visa disputes were resolved. Industry officials said more than 100 foreigners were detained; American officials acknowledged the detainments but would not put a number on them.

Private contractors are integral to postwar Iraq’s economic development and security, foreign businessmen and American officials say, but they remain a powerful symbol of American might, with some Iraqis accusing them of running roughshod over the country.

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).

The New York Times foreign affairs columnist is rightly ridiculed for pontificating as if he sees himself the spokesperson for America itself. What’s good for the US often seems to be his priority.

He recently spoke in Cairo (in between interviewing Muslims he didn’t think the West should bomb, yet), and found some people less than impressed with getting lessons in civility from a man who rather loves backing US-led wars in the Arab world (via Ahram Online):

Prominent American author Thomas Friedman spoke at the American University of Cairo (AUC) on Monday, where he expressed his views on Islamist political ascendancy in the wake of Egypt’s first post-Mubarak parliamentary polls.

“This country is very heavy for any political parties to lift it on its own,” Friedman said during a panel discussion, hosted by former Egyptian ambassador to the US Nabil Fahmy. “We need collective action.”

…

During a question-and-answer session, Friedman faced the ire of Youssef El-Korma, a member of AUC’s student leftist movement. “You can’t come here with a smile and preach to us on democracy when you’ve been demeaning Arabs and supporting war crimes in Gaza and Iraq,” said El-Korma. “We don’t welcome you here.”

El-Korma’s assertions were met with applause by the audience but failed to draw a response from Friedman, who replied to another student critic earlier by saying that, “In the Middle East everybody wants to own you, and if they can’t, they will try to destroy you.”

Barak Ravid, Haaretz:

Every year, in almost every country, government reports detailing statistics and demographics of the country’s citizens are published during the last week of December. The reports detail how many babies were born that year and how many people died.

Some of those reports are turned into semi-comic articles on the back page of the newspaper, or discussed on current event radio programs, and sometimes they are simply thrown to the wastebasket.

Last week, the Palestinian Authority’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) published its report summarizing 2011. As one could expect, the conclusions of the report barely rose to Israeli consciousness, and the media almost completely ignored the findings. But a brief look over the report shows a worrying picture, which raises hopes that at least some of the government ministers were exposed to the statistics.

The report revealed that the number of Palestinians in the territories stands at about 4.2 million people: 2.6 million in the West Bank and 1.6 million in the Gaza Strip. Added to them are about 1.4 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens and about 5.6 million Palestinians that belong to the Arab countries and the rest of the world.

Three days after the Palestinian Authority’s statistics was published, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) released its own report summarizing 2011. According to that report, the number of Israelis stands at 7.8 million people: 5.9 Jews, 1.6 million Arabs and 325,000 defined as “others.”

A conclusion of the findings shows that the number of Jews and Palestinians between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea are almost even. According to the Palestinian Authority’s CBS there are about 300,000 more Jews than Palestinians, while according to the Israeli CBS that number stands at 100,000.

What is especially disconcerting is the bottom line of the Palestinian Authority’s report. “On the basis of the estimations presented by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics in 2010, and provided that natural growth remains unchanged, the number of Palestinians and Jews will become equal and stand at 6.3 million [each] by the end of 2015,” it said. “In addition, by 2020 the number of Palestinians living in historical Palestine will stand at 7.2 million people, while the number of Jews will stand at only 6.8 million.”

As the drumbeat for war against Iran grows louder by the day – cheered by the same neo-conservatives, extreme Zionists and hacks who led us into conflict with Iraq – it’s vital to hold to account the commentators who never take responsibility for their war-mongering. A fine piece in Jadaliyya:

This is not another article about Christopher Hitchens.

This may come as something of a relief, given the spilling of ink occasioned by Hitchens’ untimely death last week, with Neal Pollock’s fine parody hopefully bringing this outpouring to an end. After an initial set of hagiographies, it was encouraging to see a number of pieces reminding readers of Hitchens’ role in forcefully and bloodthirstily advocating for the war on Iraq, and for the “war on terror” more generally, as part of a deeply racist and Islamophobic current in his work over the past decade (or more).

What has struck me in the articles that have followed, both those that praise and those that condemn Hitchens’ work, is the recurring use of a phrase to describe Hitchens’ advocacy on behalf of the invasion and occupation of Iraq: he was, we are told by the most perceptive commentators on his work, “wrong on Iraq.” For Hitchens’ defenders, as Corey Robin notes, this was articulated as “Yes, he was wrong on Iraq, but…” For his detractors, there is no “but”: in Glenn Greenwald’s words, Hitchens was guilty of the crime of endorsing “the generation’s worst political crime, one for which he remained fully unrepentant and even proud.”

It seems likely that this focus on Hitchens’ support for the war would have been part of these pieces in any case, since it became one of the defining aspects of his writing over the past decade. But given that his death came in the same week as the much-reported withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, the connection was inevitable, even for Hitchens’ admirers. For those who accept the fantasy that the withdrawal of US forces marks the “end” of the war, the Iraq War, like the era of Hitchens, could now be given an end date; indeed, on the front page of its website today, the New York Times features a section entitled “Iraq War: 2003-2011.”

This brief re-entry of Iraq into public discourse in the United States—a re-entry that is intended only to clear the way for a final dismissal, since the war is now, according to this narrative of events, “over”—reminds us of the extent to which Iraq has fallen out of the collective consciousness in the US. It must not be allowed to do so, and the notion that the withdrawal of US troops (leaving behind the largest US embassy in the world in Baghdad and consulates in Basra, Erbil, and Kirkuk, along with at least 16,000 Americans employed by the US government—a large percentage of them “security contractors,” that is, armed mercenaries of the sort that have caused so much carnage in Iraq) should be understood as meaning the “end” of the Iraq War must not be allowed to stand unchallenged. It is an opportune moment, in other words, for some remembering, and, if we can make it happen, some accountability.

…

To have been “wrong” on Iraq, if one was a member of the political and/or military establishment that helped to perpetrate the war and occupation, is, simply put, to be a war criminal. If this is not how such figures are currently viewed, this speaks most clearly to the blighted state of international law and institutions, and their inability to hold the perpetrators of the planet’s most horrific acts of violence accountable for their actions.

To have been “wrong” on Iraq, if one was or is a member of the media or the intellectual establishment that argued for, and thus helped to lay the groundwork for, the war, is to be deeply complicit in these war crimes. Again, there has been no attempt to hold any of these individuals accountable for such complicity, although there is a precedent that dates back at least to the Nuremberg Tribunal that would allow for identifying and acting against such media and intellectual complicity in war crimes.

My following essay appears in Lebanon’s Al Akhbar English:

Radical Jewish colonists in the occupied Palestinian West Bank have been attacking Arabs for decades. In the past these incidents barely rated a mention in the Israeli press, let alone the global corporate media.

It was only this month after a small group of Zionists rioted at an Israeli army base that the Israeli government expressed outrage over their behaviour. The violence “shocked” Israel, wrote the New York Times, while the torching of mosques has now become a regular event.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed his military to apply administrative detention orders to Jewish extremists, as is routinely done with Palestinians in the territories. Aside from the fact that such a change in policy highlighted the apartheid nature of Israel’s matrix of control in the West Bank – different laws apply to Jews and Arabs – even the Israeli army claimed it would make little difference.

Successive Israeli leaders since 1967, across the political spectrum, have indulged, funded, supported, defended and armed hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers in the West Bank (and Gaza until 2005). The effect of this mass colonization project, condoned by Western powers, has been the impossibility of a viable two-state solution and growth in ultra-nationalism. Acceptance in a post Arab Spring Middle East is a remote dream.

On countless occasions I’ve seen young Israeli soldiers standing idly by while settlers hit Arabs in the West Bank and destroy their fields. The main job of the army in the territories is to maintain and enlarge the Zionist hold on valuable land.

The Israeli government and the vast bulk of the Zionist Diaspora have remained silent for years when colonists attack Palestinians in “price tag” missions. Indeed, public fund-raising events in America, including those held by the Hebron Fund, openly collect tax-exempt donations for the very people the Israeli government now claims to be against.

In Australia similar fund-raisers are held for the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization directly complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian properties. A JNF board member in America quit this month after the organization launched eviction proceedings against a Palestinian home in East Jerusalem.

The rot has well and truly set into the Israeli political establishment. A columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, Yossi Sarid, argued that all the settlements were illegal and damned the horror currently felt by the Israeli army (no mention of the Arabs, of course, with violence against them seemingly less important than harming Israeli soldiers):

“So there is no need to be overly impressed by the orchestrated shouting about the Frankenstein that has gotten out of hand, because the denouncers are the ones who created him. They were warned a thousand times about creating a state within a state, an army within an army, but they didn’t want to listen. They were too scared of the settlers and their rabbis. We see them in their disgrace, dancing in front of Zionism’s coffin, and despise them.”

The depth of the problem was revealed by right-wing Zionist publication, The Jewish Voice, who proudly published tips for settlers keen to sabotage army equipment. One read:

“The engines of vehicles, especially armoured vehicles, are highly sensitive to sand or sugar. The same is even more true about the vehicles’ oil and gas tanks. Carelessness about that could do serious damage to the unit’s ability to carry out destruction, just because of a little inattention, wouldn’t it be a pity?”

It would be a mistake to presume Israel’s democratic deficit simply occurs in the occupied territories. The current Knesset has revealed the dark authoritarianism that beats inside the Jewish state.

I recently spoke to a leading independent American journalist Joseph Dana, currently living in Ramallah, who told me that it was impossible to find more than a select few Israelis who understood the depth of the problem and what was required to force an ideological change on the population.

Liberal Zionism is in crisis, pushed into silence by its cherished two-state dream disappearing and far happier to demonise boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) than propose any serious alternatives to Knesset-backed fascism. Importantly, few Israelis chose to enter the West Bank and witness the creeping apartheid against Palestinians living there; the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem bubbles are far more comforting. The vast bulk of the Israeli media class see no evil and remain on the establishment drip feed.

An increasing number of pieces of legislation aim to disenfranchise Arabs, liberal Jews, secular Jews, Palestinians and the Jewish Diaspora without which the nation would not survive.

The Financial Times, in a scathing essay in early December, highlighted the myriad issues. Hagai El-Ad, the director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, repeated the mantra that I hear amongst the real activist Left in Israel. “This is not just about anti-democratic bills, this is about anti-democratic society,” he said. “It is about the idea that human rights are somehow synonymous with treason, and about creating an atmosphere of suspicion.”

These trends caused Philip Weiss, founder of the influential American website Mondoweiss, to write, “Israel isn’t good for the Jews anymore.” He railed against mainstream Israeli opposition to multiculturalism, pluralism and tolerance.

It is something growing numbers of liberal Jews worldwide are rejecting. Even former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in his Atlantic blog, “I think we’re only a few years away, at most, from a total South-Africanization of this issue.” The one-state solution is happening by default, whether those bleating about maintaining a Jewish majority like it or not.

Israel has always relied on unlimited Western largesse to fund its racism. When arguably America’s most influential columnist, New York Times’ Thomas Friedman – a man with a long history of defending Israeli extremism, explains a new book by Belén Fernández – starts denouncing the “Israel lobby” for buying the US Congress and blindly acquiescing with discriminatory policies towards Palestinians, the mood is shifting:

“If the 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians are not a real people entitled to their own state, that must mean Israel is entitled to permanently occupy the West Bank and that must mean — as far as Newt is concerned — that Israel’s choices are: 1) to permanently deprive the West Bank Palestinians of Israeli citizenship and put Israel on the road to apartheid; 2) to evict the West Bank Palestinians through ethnic cleansing and put Israel on the road to the International Criminal Court in the Hague; or 3) to treat the Palestinians in the West Bank as citizens, just like Israeli Arabs, and lay the foundation for Israel to become a binational state. And this is called being “pro-Israel”?”

None of these attitudes concern the pro-settler Jerusalem Post who this week editorialised in favour of a Republican front-runner, Newt Gingrich, who didn’t even acknowledge the existence of Palestinians as a legitimate people. Other measures to delegitimize any opposition to Zionism include this recent essay published by the neo-conservative haven American Enterprise Institute that argues, “How Israel’s defence industry can help save America.”

The Western liberal love for Israel ended many years ago. What remains less accepted, however, is what has been taking place instead of the myth. Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken enlightened his readers that the ideology of [settler movement] Gush Emunim has dominated Israel for decades. It is irreversible. It is Israel:

“This is a strategy of territorial seizure and apartheid,” he despaired. “It ignores judicial aspects of territorial ownership and shuns human rights and the guarantees of equality enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.”

The wilful ghettoization of communities is now endemic.Take the example of a religious school in the town of Afula that recently discovered that their children had seen a Muslim wedding during class. They were so appalled – under the influence of an NGO that aims to prevent any Arab and Jewish mingling – that a Rabbi had to be called to “purify” the facilities before they could return.

Such racism is not reserved for a few extreme communities on the fringes of society. They are views shared and enacted by leading members of the Israeli government.

It is the natural outcome of over 60 years of global Zionist indulgence.

Antony Loewenstein (http://antonyloewenstein.com/) is an Australian journalist, author of My Israel Question and co-editor of the forthcoming title After Zionism.

After America withdraws most of its troops, the New York Times, a key paper that backed the invasion in 2003, editorialised yesterday and sounded contrite (a little, though no mention of the mainstream media’s drum-boat towards the conflict):

America’s reputation has yet to fully recover from the horrors of Abu Ghraib. The country is still paying a huge price for President George W. Bush’s decision to shortchange the war in Afghanistan. American policy makers, for generations to come, must study these mistakes carefully and ensure that they are not repeated.

…President Obama, who first ran for office campaigning against the war, has never wavered on his promise to bring the troops home. The last few thousand will be out of Iraq by year’s end. We celebrate their return. But this country must never forget the intolerable costs of a war started on arrogance and lies.

As importantly, America is leaving around 16,000 private contractors in the country, a fact missed by most of the corporate press, happy to simply rehash White House press releases. MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan was a rare exception:

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