Antony Loewenstein

Evidence one:

As more than 100,000 protesters descended into the streets on Friday, women uniformly dressed in black flowing robes carried signs saying, “Revolution: The only solution.”

Three weeks of pro-democracy protests in this island nation have followed the pattern of those in Egypt and Tunisia, with cellphones and Facebook posts propelling the movement and a botched, deadly crackdown by security forces two weeks ago serving to embolden the demonstrators.

Yet those who lead and take part in the nearly daily demonstrations here say they fear at least one key difference: The United States may not be fully on their side.

“The U.S. is not acting like they did in other countries,” said Ali Najaf, who marched on Friday amid a sea of red-and-white Bahraini flags. “We thought they would support the people.”

Unlike in the case of Egypt, where President Obama promised to “stand up for democracy” and called for a change of power “now,” Washington has backed the royal family in Bahrain with statements supporting the country’s still-undefined proposal for dialogue with the opposition.

Obama administration officials say they believe the royal family has earned the right to try to navigate this period, after heeding the United States’s plea to call off the security forces who shot the protesters, killing seven of them. The president’s national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, has conferred with the country’s crown prince, Sheik Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, whom an administration official described as sensible.

On Sunday, Mr. Obama said he welcomed a “commitment to reform” by the king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa.

But opposition parties say they do not believe there is enough pressure to produce genuine change.

Evidence two:

After weeks of internal debate on how to respond to uprisings in the Arab world, the Obama administration is settling on a Middle East strategy: help keep longtime allies who are willing to reform in power, even if that means the full democratic demands of their newly emboldened citizens might have to wait.

Instead of pushing for immediate regime change—as it did to varying degrees in Egypt and now Libya—the U.S. is urging protesters from Bahrain to Morocco to work with existing rulers toward what some officials and diplomats are now calling “regime alteration.”

The approach has emerged amid furious lobbying of the administration by Arab governments, who were alarmed that President Barack Obama had abandoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and worried that, if the U.S. did the same to the beleaguered king of Bahrain, a chain of revolts could sweep them from power, too, and further upend the region’s stability.

Rest assured, dictators will always need Western whores to soften their brutality in political, media and corporate circles:

For years, they have been one of the most formidable lobbying forces in town: the elite band of former members of Congress, former diplomats and power brokers who have helped Middle Eastern nations navigate diplomatic waters here on delicate issues like arms deals, terrorism, oil and trade restrictions.

Just last year, three of the biggest names in the lobbying club — Tony Podesta, Robert L. Livingston and Toby Moffett — pulled off a coup for one of their clients, Egypt. They met with dozens of lawmakers and helped stall a Senate bill that called on Egypt to curtail human rights abuses. Ultimately, those abuses helped bring the government down.

Mr. Moffett, a former congressman from Connecticut, told his old colleagues that the bill “would be viewed as an insult” by an important ally. “We were just saying to them, ‘Don’t do this now to our friends in Egypt,’ ” he recounted.

Now the Washington lobbyists for Arab nations find themselves in a precarious spot, as they try to stay a step ahead of the fast-changing events without being seen as aiding despots and dictators. In Libya, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Egypt and other countries in the region, leaders have relied increasingly on Washington’s top lobbyists and lawyers, paying them tens of millions of dollars. Some consultants are tacking toward a more progressive stance in light of pro-democracy protests, while others are dropping their clients altogether because of the tumult.

In Tunisia, where the earliest revolts energized the regional upheaval in January, the Washington Media Group, a public relations and communications firm, ended its $420,000 image-building contract with Tunis on Jan. 6, soon after reports emerged of violent government crackdowns on demonstrators.

“We basically decided on principle that we couldn’t work for a country that was using snipers on rooftops to pick off its citizens,” said Gregory L. Vistica, the firm’s president, who first announced the decision on Facebook.

Others have stayed the course, at least for now. Mr. Moffett, Mr. Livingston and Mr. Podesta, who have a joint, multimillion-dollar contract with Egypt, have stepped up the pace of their meetings and phone conferences with Egyptian Embassy officials after the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. One of the chief aims, the lobbyists say, is to help the military officials now running the country move toward elections that will be regarded as free and fair outside Egypt.

“What we have done for them in the past is what we will continue to do for them in the future — everything in our power to build good relations between the Egypt of today and the United States,” said Mr. Livingston, a former Louisiana congressman who is one of Egypt’s lobbyists.

At the same time, Mr. Livingston acknowledged that he was closely watching the situation in the region. “Is there a danger that the whole area might become Islamist and radical and totally opposed to the interests of the United States?” he asked. “Certainly there’s that risk.”

…

As demonstrations were taking place in Egypt last month, Mr. Moffett said a friend suggested to him that his lobbying work for the Mubarak government put him “on the wrong side of the Egyptian thing.”

Mr. Moffett demurred. “I don’t feel that way at all,” he said. “We feel honored to be on the scene while all this is happening.”

During my recent appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival in India I was interviewed by TehelkaTV, one of the country’s leading current affairs magazines (my recent article with them about the Egyptian uprising is here).

We talked about the Middle East, why the Tunisian revolution would spread and the rise of dissenting Jewish voices:

The following article by Kate Ausburn appears in Green Left Weekly:

Popular uprisings in the Arab world have challenged a political landscape dominated by undemocratic regimes and fronted by dictators, a panel of academics and journalists said at a Sydney University forum on February 15.

Speakers discussed the regional and international ramifications of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt as part of the forum on people’s power and change in the Arab world.

During the uprising in Egypt the secular nature of the protests was noted and praised in much of the international coverage. Less acknowledged, but similarly noteworthy, was the role women played in the demonstrations.

Women are “not new in [Egypt's] political arena”, but the treatment of women taking part in demonstrations is certainly improving, said Dr Lucia Sorbera from the University of Sydney.

Dr Sorbera specifically pointed to last year’s International Women’s Day demonstrations in Cairo where many women were “beaten and harassed”. However, “today they feel safe, free to be there and they claim the right to feel safe in the public arena”.

“A lot of young women will tell you, for the first time they feel they are not objectified as sexual objects in this space, this is the first time in a very long time that women have been in the streets without any danger of harassment,” she said.

Tahrir Square in Cairo has become “synonymous with freedom, emancipation and liberty”, said Farid Farid from the University of Western Sydney.

Farid spoke about the response of the people of Egypt to living under the Mubarak dictatorship: “After 30 years of repression you develop a sense of humour, a sense of mockery — it’s the only form of resistance.”

This repression was supported by foreign governments who assisted in sustaining regimes like Muburak’s — now widely considered to be corrupt, said Farid.

“Agitation for democracy has always been tangled with the politics of empires.

“Remember the last leader to meet with Mubarak was Netanyahu, but before that it was Kevin Rudd — in terms of Australian politics and trade relations, they are heavily entangled.

“Let’s not discount Australia’s role.”

University of Sydney academic Tara Povey said: “This intimate relationship between Hosni Mubarak and the US has meant an active policy of demobilising and repressing movements for change in the Arab world.”

Independent journalist and author Antony Loewenstein similarly noted the financial complicity of foreign governments: “The US sends to Egypt $1.2 billion annually.”

Loewenstein also pointed out the role of multinationals in assisting regimes, particularly with media and communications censorship.

“The reality is that much of the infrastructure that these regimes are using to censor the internet is coming from the West,” he said.

“In Iran for example, it emerged very soon after the uprising in June 2009 that Nokia sold Tehran — six months before the uprising — a very sophisticated monitoring system to be able to determine phone calls, internet, text messages.

“In Egypt, Vodafone, who many of us use, were involved with the Egyptian regime in censoring mobile phone messages and setting up propaganda for the regime when the phone system came back on.”

Speaking on the Western media’s representation of the uprisings in the Arab world, and pointing to a number of areas given undue legitimacy outside of Egypt, Loewenstein pointed out: “One of the other things that comes up is the fear of political Islam.

“The idea that we shouldn’t engage with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Brotherhood etc … They represent a lot of people, and may not be a majority, say the Brotherhood, how much support it has in Egypt is unsure, 10%, 20%, whatever, that’s still 20%.

“It’s vital to understand the idea that political Islam is not by definition a threat. Not all political Islam is Bin Laden in a cave in Afghanistan.

Acknowledging laughter from the audience, he continued: “People laugh when I say that, but if you look at much of the American mainstream coverage in the last three weeks, that is exactly how it is framed.”

Loewenstein said too that the weight given by much Western media to the future of peace treaty negotiations with Israel, which he said was redundant, as “there actually is no peace process”.

“One of the things that also comes has been a mantra of many in the Western press over the last three weeks is what’s Cairo going to do with the peace treaty with Israel … as if that’s the main concern on the streets of Cairo,” he said.

“A peace process is a term that has been used and abused by many in the press, the political elite, to give the impression of negotiations, when in fact all that is happening is the colonisation of Palestinian land in the West Bank. The siege on Gaza continues.”

Loewenstein concluded: “What the West and Israel fear is not Islam, but independence.”

The forum offered an insight into the social forces and strategic political relationships at play in the Arab world as people continue to rise up against dictatorial regimes throughout the region.

They are calling for democracy and radically changing the face of the Middle East and North African social and political sphere.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri on challenging racist stereotypes of what popular revolt can achieve. No wonder so many “experts” are confused; “stability” in the Middle East has helped their careers:

One challenge facing observers of the uprisings spreading across north Africa and the Middle East is to read them as not so many repetitions of the past but as original experiments that open new political possibilities, relevant well beyond the region, for freedom and democracy. Indeed, our hope is that through this cycle of struggles the Arab world becomes for the next decade what Latin America was for the last – that is, a laboratory of political experimentation between powerful social movements and progressive governments from Argentina to Venezuela, and from Brazil to Bolivia.

These revolts have immediately performed a kind of ideological house-cleaning, sweeping away the racist conceptions of a clash of civilisations that consign Arab politics to the past. The multitudes in Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi shatter the political stereotypes that Arabs are constrained to the choice between secular dictatorships and fanatical theocracies, or that Muslims are somehow incapable of freedom and democracy. Even calling these struggles “revolutions” seems to mislead commentators who assume the progression of events must obey the logic of 1789 or 1917, or some other past European rebellion against kings and czars.

Another fascinating Al-Jazeera feature on Empire about the role of the internet in the Arab uprisings:

Carl Bernstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist; Amy Goodman, the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!; Professor Emily Bell, the director of digital journalism at Columbia University; Evgeny Morozov, the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom; Professor Clay Shirky, the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

Apart from the fact that it would have been important to have somebody with a deep connection to the Middle East, the ideas under discussion include the consistent failure of the mainstream media to normally give voice to the activists and non-state players in repressive regimes. Being too close to power happens in the US and beyond:

Hard to determine the real accuracy of such a poll but fascinating nonetheless:

Six out of ten Arabs believe that the world is better off with Wikileaks and nearly three quarters would like to see the whistle-blowing website publish more on the Arab world.

Support for Wikileaks and a demand for greater transparency emerged from a wide-ranging Doha Debate poll that surveyed the views of Arabs in 17 Gulf, North Africa and Levant countries, including Egypt and Tunisia. Fieldwork was conducted between the 1st and 6th of February 2011 and included over 1000 respondents.

The results closely mirror the results at a public forum in Qatar where 74 percent of the audience at the recent Doha Debate carried the motion ‘This House believes the world is better off with Wikileaks’.

In the aftermath of the fall of the Ben Ali regime Tunisia, nearly 60 percent of respondents believe Wikileaks played a part in the events in Tunisia and the demonstrations in other Arab countries.

More than 60 percent believe that Wikileaks will change the way governments behave.

55 percent of Arabs revealed in the poll that they believe little to nothing of what their governments tell them.

This figure is highest in North Africa where 65 percent of citizens believe little to nothing of government information.

Half of those surveyed want full access to information and transparency.

Despite the support for WikiLeaks, more than half of those interviewed believed the materials released are not 100 percent accurate and truthful. Additionally, an equal number were unsure of whether WikiLeaks has a political agenda or not.

“Mobarak, Zine [al-Abidine Ben] Ali and now it’s the turn of Seyd Ali [Khamenei]”

Here’s the interview on SBS Dateline just aired in Australia.

And here’s the gist of what Julian Assange said:

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange says the whistleblowing website’s influence on events in Tunisia was the “example” for the political upheaval in Egypt.

The material leaked by WikiLeaks which was then published through a Lebanese newspaper, Al Akhbar, was significantly influential to what happened in Tunisia, Mr Assange told SBS’s Dateline today.

“And then there’s no doubt that Tunisia was the example for Egypt and Yemen and Jordan, and all the protests that have happened there,” he said.

WikiLeaks released cables showing that then Tunisian president Ben Ali would not necessarily have the backing of the United States, instead indicating that the army would have the support of the US.

Mr Assange said it was his “suspicion” that this information gave the army and people around the army in Tunisia “the confidence that they needed to attack the ruling political elite.”

These cables also stopped surrounding country intelligence agencies and armies intervening to support Ben Ali, according to Mr Assange.

The Tunisian leader resigned and went into exile in Saudi Arabia in late January.

After more than two weeks of protests in Egyptian cities against the 30-year-old regime of president Hosni Mubarak, his government fell on Friday.

On a possible return home to Australia, Mr Assange said the federal government was more interested in keeping the United States happy than welcoming him back.

“The support from the Australian people is very strong. So in that sense Australia is a very good option,” he said.

“On the surface it will be all ‘give the Australian people what they demand’. Underneath it will be ‘give the United States everything it wants,” he added.

He said the ALP had been “co-opted in key positions by the United States since 1976″ and that he believed Australia would extradite him if there was an American request.

While he was not being investigated by the Australian Federal Police, the government had been assisting the US in in the case against WikiLeaks, he said.

“Gillard, McLelland, need to disclose all the assistance they have afforded foreign countries against Australians involved in WikiLeaks, and the Australian registration of WikiLeaks as an entity,” Mr Assange said.

He also elaborated on claims that London newspaper The Guardian had breached agreements they had made with WikiLeaks not to publish material the website had given them as a back-up copy.

Mr Assange said he had been aware the US intelligence sector was “pulling favours” from around the world and thought they would be able to prevent publication of this material.

Mr Assange gave a back-up copy to The Guardian to be used if WikiLeaks could no longer publish it.

A written contract between the Guardian and WikiLeaks allowed them to view the material but not to publish it or give it to anyone else.

However, Mr Assange said the UK paper went ahead and gave copies to the New York Times and published some of the material itself.

While he has expressed a desire to return to Australia, Mr Assange said it won’t stop him publishing more material on his home country that involved “a number of large companies and politics, international politics”.

Here’s some free advice to the US State Department; trying to keep Twitter or Facebook or other social networking sites alive inside dictatorships is a fine task but have you stopped for a minute and wondered what citizens think when your own government has backed these brutes?

The State Department has been working furiously and mostly behind the scenes to cajole and pressure Arab governments to halt their clampdowns on communications and social media. In Tunisia there seem to have been real results. In Egypt, it’s too soon to tell.

Ever since the State Department intervened during protests by the Iranian Green movement in June 2009, convincing Twitter to postpone maintenance so opposition protestors could communicate, the U.S. government has been ramping up its worldwide effort to set up a network of organizations that could circumvent crackdowns on Internet and cell phone technologies by foreign governments. That effort faced its first two major tests over the last few weeks and the State Department has been working with private companies, non-governmental organizations, and academic institutions to activate this network and put it to use in real time.

“Our mission is to provide a lifeline of protection when people get in trouble through a range of support for technology and then support for the activists and the people on the ground,” Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) Michael Posner said in an interview on Friday with The Cable. “I think there will be an increase in contacts on several levels in the coming days and weeks.”

Even before the unrest in Tunisia and Egypt, the State Department was working to drastically increase its activities with the internet freedom organizations, many of them using State Department funding provided through a grant program administered by DRL. This month, State announced it would spend another $30 million on this project.

For Posner, the drive to create an “open platform” for Internet communications is part of the overall drive to protect the universal rights the administration has been trumpeting in recent days and that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laid out in her speech on Internet Freedom.

“What we’re really talking about here is the ability of people to speak freely, to demonstrate peacefully, to associate and assemble in the public square. These are the human rights that are being restricted,” Posner said.

Wonder why the American public is largely ignorant about the world?

They’re fed content to make them obsessed with themselves:

America was founded upon the principle of liberty and freedom, but guess who was covering the quest for freedom in Tunisia extensively yesterday? Al Jazeera, not the American news TV Networks.

I am utterly disgusted by how American TV channels have abandoned an important historic event of our time. Tunisian people took to the streets and toppled a Saddam-like totalitarian regime, but their voices and images from their revolution did not make it to the American viewers.

CNN, FOX News and MSNBC were busy interviewing celebrities and discussing pet-related stories.

At work, I was able to follow Al Jazeera’s minute-by-minute coverage of the revolution through my iPhone. The Qatari network has an iPhone app that live broadcasts their news, in addition to its presence on Facebook, Twitter and Al Jazeera Blogs.

It was simply everywhere and for free!

Tech Crunch, a popular Web publication that offers technology news and analysis, summed it up in this article on how American news networks failed in covering the news. The article discussed how tweeps criticized American TV networks that were busy broadcasting news related to Marta Stewart’s dog and a guy who was arrested for drunk-driving a donkey in Texas on MSNBC, while CNN was busy interviewing the Jeopardy host about a robot contestant.

This is not journalism. What Al Jazeera did is!

And thanks to the social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook that brought the news to the American public, along with a few articles American newspapers published later in the afternoon yesterday.

Many know that Al Jazeera is unavailable in most American states, the thing that deprives millions of American viewers of watching breaking news with real, good reporting.

Making Al Jazeera, or at least BBC World (not the awful BBC America) available on air, cable or satellite will provide Americans with an alternate source to watch real news, not the heroic rescue attempt of a puppy who was stuck in a freezing river.