Antony Loewenstein

Last week I was invited down to Canberra to give the keynote speech at the Independent Scholars Association of Australia 2011 Conference. It was held at the National Library to an appreciative audience. The following are my notes:

-       Quote from Julian Assange, The UnAuthorised Autobiography, p. 119/120 + 168

-        What is modern journalism if not mostly collection of sanctioned leaks from the powerful to lazy media? Take the MSM media on any day, ABC, Fairfax or News Ltd, and see how much so-called news are rehashed press releases.

-       Personal favourite lead ABC news radio story early in 2011: “Abbott says Gillard lying over carbon tax.”

-       If this is the crisis in MSM, then hard to shed any tears.

-       Wikileaks offers an alternative, a prospect for a different, more collaborative kind of media.

-       Wikileaks; more leaks in 5 years than all corporate press combined over last 30 years.

-       Brief history of Wikileaks from 2006.

-       Response of Western governments to Wikileaks; criticism, defensive, hurt, aggressive, leading US politicians calling for Assange execution.

-       PM Julia Gillard, late 2010 after Cablegate release, said Assange/Wikileaks had broken Australian laws but subsequent investigation found no laws had been broken.

-       Real threat is embarrassment and insight into how our governments are a) craven towards Washington and b) increasingly finding new ways to restrict freedoms in the name of providing “security”.

-       Wikileaks challenges insider culture/journalism and asks; why didn’t you get these stories?

-       MSM narrative, pushed by Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove, was that Wikileaks released nothing new, this is how power works and it needs to be secret and important. International affairs framed as complicated. In reality, as Noam Chomsky says, it rarely rises above child’s play.

-       Some Wikileaks revelations:- US spying on the UN;

• Israel/Egypt relationship over Gaza;
• US/Australia scuttling cluster bomb treaty;
• US firms colluding with repressive states to benefit US businesses such as Shell in Nigeria;
• Ongoing US efforts to undermine democratically elected Chavez in Venezuela; and
• Extreme closeness between the ALP and America

-       Wikileaks provides opportunity for power to be more democratic. Lessening/removing unnecessary secrets in the public domain. We the public have responsibility to demand transparency. Can’t rely on mainstream media.

-       Wikileaks-style spin-offs, such as Greenleaks.

-       MSM either adapts or faces irrelevance. Secure drop-boxes of information essential but not the WSJ/Murdoch version (full of holes).

-       MSM fearful of losing power and influence, enjoys being gate-keeper.

-       Robert Fisk concern of Wikileaks (journalists will simply wait for stories to fall in their lap via the computer).

-       What about politicians and bureaucracy? Wikileaks shows over-classification is rife.

-       Rise of national security state, close to one million Americans have top-secret clearance. Wikileaks can and must challenge this.

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.

My following analysis appears on ABC Unleashed/The Drum today:

An Egyptian blogger displayed characteristic humour when news broke overnight that president Hosni Mubarak would not be stepping down:

Mubarak (n.): a psychotic ex-girlfriend who fails 2 understand it’s over.

If Mubarak and his new deputy Omar Suleiman thought their speeches would placate the protesters, they were sorely mistaken. Local bloggers and activists reacted with anger and determination.

Indeed, one wonders, with recent WikiLeaks revelations about the close relationship between Israel, America and Suleiman if their announcements weren’t coordinated with Washington.

The Obama administration is seemingly incapable of categorically siding with the protestors because America’s matrix of repression across the Middle East requires dictatorships to remain in place. Arab democracy has been a contradiction in terms for the US and Zionism for decades.

Tel Aviv and Washington have long seen Suleiman as a steady pair of hands, a brute all-too-keen to allegedly keep the Islamist beast at bay, suppress Hamas, manage the border with Gaza and maintain the siege and torture “terror” suspects brought from America, Europe or the Middle East.

Indeed, Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib, who spoke exclusively to me last night, knows this reality well.

While in Egypt in 2001 he was personally visited by Suleiman, threatened and physically abused. Habib’s book, My Story, goes into detail about the kinds of psychological and physical pressure applied to him. The Australian Government recently implicitly acknowledged the validity of his claims by paying him an undisclosed amount of compensation.

Habib told me that he wanted the Australian government to assist bringing Suleiman to trial in an international court.

The Egyptian people will not go back to the past, something even acknowledged by president Obama’s latest statement. And yet a democratic façade, with Mubarak and/or Suleiman leading the country, is no change at all.

Sober analysis therefore brings only one conclusion; the Arab street is expendable so long as Israel and its Zionist backers are satisfied. Inside the US itself, there is little diplomatic pressure on Washington to encourage democratic change in Egypt but there is massive paranoia from Tel Aviv that freedom would challenges its “Middle East’s Only Democracy” tag.

This comment in last week’s New York Times, by former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy, is symptomatic of the problem:

The Israelis are saying, après Mubarak, le deluge…It really can be distilled down to one thing, and that’s Israel.

Mubarak may have been inspired by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s snubbing of America when calling for a settlement freeze in the West Bank. The tactics were clear. Rally American domestic support against the move. Claim that relinquishing land would bring chaos, instability and a rise in Islamist terror. Talk about a belief in the peace process. Deepen and harden your position. Watch America never threaten the billions of dollars in annual aid. Remain a trusted client state.

Netanyahu and Mubarak are both playing America very skilfully though the Obama administration is well aware of the game.

Many in the Western press are suddenly fascinated with the Muslim Brotherhood, asking simplistic questions about inspiration from the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Tragically, 10 years after September 11, 2001, Islamist politics are routinely misunderstood in the West, often wilfully so. For many pundits, Islamism means Al Qaeda or Wahabi fanaticism. In reality, there are millions of Islamists across the Middle East who don’t loathe the West for its values; they often just want freedom from our meddling.

In fact, as Noam Chomsky correctly states, Western elites aren’t worried about Islamism; independence from the Western axis is the real threat:

A common refrain among pundits is that fear of radical Islam requires (reluctant) opposition to democracy on pragmatic grounds. While not without some merit, the formulation is misleading. The general threat has always been independence. The US and its allies have regularly supported radical Islamists, sometimes to prevent the threat of secular nationalism.

Talking about a truly independent Middle East requires an imagination solely lacking in establishment political circles.

Latin America in the last 10 years is analogous as far as seeing how the US reacts when countries chose to reject the Washington consensus. WikiLeaks has shown the tactics by which successive American administrations tried to tackle Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, a task ably assisted by many in the US media. Human rights concerns were an irrelevance; nationalising key resources was the perceived problem.

The protesters being beaten and tortured in Egypt are unlikely to receive tangible solidarity from Western governments. Instead, anybody across the world can provide solidarity and backing for the disparate masses longing for the kind of freedoms that we can take for granted. Without the huge uprisings in the last weeks across the Arab world, Canberra, London and Washington would have been very happy to continue business as usual.

That tells us all we need to know about who are the real democrats in the 21st century.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and the author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution.

The Wikileaks stories keep on coming.

One:

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.

In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be hard to tell the politicians from the traffickers, and where drug rings are themselves mini-states whose wealth and violence permit them to run roughshod over struggling governments.

Diplomats recorded unforgettable vignettes from the largely unseen war on drugs:

¶In Panama, an urgent BlackBerry message from the president to the American ambassador demanded that the D.E.A. go after his political enemies: “I need help with tapping phones.”

¶In Sierra Leone, a major cocaine-trafficking prosecution was almost upended by the attorney general’s attempt to solicit $2.5 million in bribes.

¶In Guinea, the country’s biggest narcotics kingpin turned out to be the president’s son, and diplomats discovered that before the police destroyed a huge narcotics seizure, the drugs had been replaced by flour.

¶Leaders of Mexico’s beleaguered military issued private pleas for closer collaboration with the drug agency, confessing that they had little faith in their own country’s police forces.

¶Cables from Myanmar, the target of strict United States sanctions, describe the drug agency informants’ reporting both on how the military junta enriches itself with drug money and on the political activities of the junta’s opponents.

Officials of the D.E.A. and the State Department declined to discuss what they said was information that should never have been made public.

Like many of the cables made public in recent weeks, those describing the drug war do not offer large disclosures. Rather, it is the details that add up to a clearer picture of the corrupting influence of big traffickers, the tricky game of figuring out which foreign officials are actually controlled by drug lords, and the story of how an entrepreneurial agency operating in the shadows of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has become something more than a drug agency. The D.E.A. now has 87 offices in 63 countries and close partnerships with governments that keep the Central Intelligence Agency at arm’s length.

Because of the ubiquity of the drug scourge, today’s D.E.A. has access to foreign governments, including those, like Nicaragua’s and Venezuela’s, that have strained diplomatic relations with the United States. Many are eager to take advantage of the agency’s drug detection and wiretapping technologies.

In some countries, the collaboration appears to work well, with the drug agency providing intelligence that has helped bring down traffickers, and even entire cartels. But the victories can come at a high price, according to the cables, which describe scores of D.E.A. informants and a handful of agents who have been killed in Mexico and Afghanistan.

In Venezuela, the local intelligence service turned the tables on the D.E.A., infiltrating its operations, sabotaging equipment and hiring a computer hacker to intercept American Embassy e-mails, the cables report.

And as the drug agency has expanded its eavesdropping operations to keep up with cartels, it has faced repeated pressure to redirect its counternarcotics surveillance to local concerns, provoking tensions with some of Washington’s closest allies.

Two:

It was three months into Barack Obama’s presidency, and the administration — under pressure to do something about alleged abuses in Bush-era interrogation policies — turned to a Florida senator to deliver a sensitive message to Spain:

Don’t indict former President George W. Bush’s legal brain trust for alleged torture in the treatment of war on terror detainees, warned Mel Martinez on one of his frequent trips to Madrid. Doing so would chill U.S.-Spanish relations.

Rather than a resolution, though, a senior Spanish diplomat gave the former GOP chairman and housing secretary a lesson in Spain’s separation of powers. “The independence of the judiciary and the process must be respected,” then-acting Foreign Minister Angel Lossada replied on April 15, 2009. Then for emphasis, “Lossada reiterated to Martinez that the executive branch of government could not close any judicial investigation and urged that this case not affect the overall relationship.”

The case is still open, on the desk of a Spanish magistrate, awaiting a reply from the Obama administration on whether it will pursue a probe of its own.

But the episode, revealed in a raft of WikiLeaks cables, was part of a secret concerted U.S. effort to stop a crusading Spanish judge from investigating a torture complaint against former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five other senior Bush lawyers.

…

The cause for alarm at the U.S. Embassy was what a U.S. diplomat called a “well documented” 12-inch-tall dossier compiled by a Spanish human rights group. In the name of five Guantánamo captives with ties to Spain, it accused the Bush legal insiders of laying the foundation for abuse of detainees in the months following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Of particular concern was that a swashbuckling Spanish magistrate, Baltasar Garzón, might get the probe under Spain’s system, which gave judges extraordinary investigative powers.

Garzón had earlier made headlines by swearing out arrest warrants for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet while he was getting medical attention in London, and Osama bin Laden. U.S. ambassador Eduardo Aguirre Jr. cast him as a publicity hound with an “anti-American streak” in one confidential cable.

If those efforts are any guide, a Spanish prosecution of the so-called Bush Six seems unlikely. Britain never turned Pinochet over to Spain for a war crimes trial, and bin Laden is still at large.

Rather, indictments would undermine U.S. diplomatic credibility on human rights and likely ground the six Bush lawyers in the United States, for fear of arrest overseas.

Another, April 1, 2009, cable shows the U.S. Embassy’s political officer and legal advisor discussing Garzón with his boss, chief prosecutor Javier Zaragoza, who expresses his displeasure with the case. Separately, a third U.S. diplomat told a senior Spanish Justice Ministry official “for international judicial cooperation” that the U.S. government considered the potential for a prosecution “a very serious matter.”

…

Civil rights attorney Michael Ratner, whose Center for Constitutional Rights has championed Guantánamo detainee rights, called the cables taken together “quite dramatic.”

“The U.S. prides itself on our own independent judiciary,” Ratner said. “But here you have the hypocrisy of the U.S. government trying to influence an independent judicial system to bend its laws and own rules.”

“And it’s the Obama administration doing it to protect Bush people,” he said.

The Christmas Day New York Times editorial takes a strong stand against any moves to silence publications that may reveal embarrassing or critical information about major financial institutions:

The whistle-blowing Web site WikiLeaks has not been convicted of a crime. The Justice Department has not even pressed charges over its disclosure of confidential State Department communications. Nonetheless, the financial industry is trying to shut it down.

Visa, MasterCard and PayPal announced in the past few weeks that they would not process any transaction intended for WikiLeaks. Earlier this month, Bank of America decided to join the group, arguing that WikiLeaks may be doing things that are “inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.”

The Federal Reserve, the banking regulator, allows this. Like other companies, banks can choose whom they do business with. Refusing to open an account for some undesirable entity is seen as reasonable risk management. The government even requires banks to keep an eye out for some shady businesses — like drug dealing and money laundering — and refuse to do business with those who engage in them.

But a bank’s ability to block payments to a legal entity raises a troubling prospect. A handful of big banks could potentially bar any organization they disliked from the payments system, essentially cutting them off from the world economy.

The fact of the matter is that banks are not like any other business. They run the payments system. That is one of the main reasons that governments protect them from failure with explicit and implicit guarantees. This makes them look not too unlike other public utilities. A telecommunications company, for example, may not refuse phone or broadband service to an organization it dislikes, arguing that it amounts to risky business.

Our concern is not specifically about payments to WikiLeaks. This isn’t the first time a bank shunned a business on similar risk-management grounds. Banks in Colorado, for instance, have refused to open bank accounts for legal dispensaries of medical marijuana.

Still, there are troubling questions. The decisions to bar the organization came after its founder, Julian Assange, said that next year it will release data revealing corruption in the financial industry. In 2009, Mr. Assange said that WikiLeaks had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive.

What would happen if a clutch of big banks decided that a particularly irksome blogger or other organization was “too risky”? What if they decided — one by one — to shut down financial access to a newspaper that was about to reveal irksome truths about their operations? This decision should not be left solely up to business-as-usual among the banks.

While Hugo Chavez shamefully embraces Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and utterly ignores Tehran’s horrific human rights record, Nasrin Alavi highlights the struggles inside Iran that deserve global support:

The Iranian state has to come to terms with the reality that, a generation after the revolution, no hardline Islamic student group is (or has been) able to gain control of any Iranian campus through free elections.

In the same week that Ahmadinejad was hailed as a hero of resistance in Lebanon, fellow inmates of the imprisoned human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, told of her nightly interrogation sessions and the screams that could be heard from her cell. We have also heard from the father of student Hamed Rouhinejad, who has related his desperate efforts to get guards at the same prison to take delivery of his son’s medication for multiple sclerosis, “begging them to keep it refrigerated so it doesn’t go off.”

When a loopy preacher in Florida threatened to burn the Koran, there were violent protests across the Arab world, but when pro-Ahmadinejad militia attacked the offices of Grand Ayatollah Saanei last June, leaving his books and tattered copies of the Koran in their wake, a deafening silence was heard from Iran’s neighbours. Had these events taken place in the occupied territories, I suspect the response would not have been so mute. Is this not the same gross hypocrisy and double standard that we in the region often accuse the west of?

Today Iranians who are standing up for their rights deserve to be acknowledged by their Arab neighbours. Their struggle is part of a long walk to freedom that began with the creation of the first elected parliament in the region in 1906. By 1911 authoritarian rule was implemented as Britain and imperial Russia strangled the early aspirations of Iranians for democratic change. A generation later, the democratically elected government of Mossadegh was finished off in a coup backed by Britain and the US.

Whether in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia or Iran, we are all familiar with pitiful old men who sit blaming and cursing the ghosts of a colonial past. These men are forever warning us of the enemies in the shadows who will conspire and thwart our every move.

But Iran is a country of the young, where two out of every three people you see on the streets are likely to be under 30. It is also the only country in the middle east where people can’t blame corruption, tyranny or even their daily hardship on their American-backed leaders.

We buried our colonial parents during the 1979 revolution. Today, the children of that revolution are banishing the ghosts that debilitated their forefathers by demanding that we hold ourselves accountable—both for our failures and for our successes.

An important editorial in today’s Sydney Morning Herald that undermines its argument by continuing the Western corporate press obsession with the supposed dictatorship of Hugo Chavez. Human rights abuses obviously occur in Venezuela but the nation isn’t a police state and attempts to paint it otherwise, or compare it to the brutal regime in Colombo, are absurd:

On first running for president of Sri Lanka in 2005, Mahinda Rajapaksa pledged to abolish the ”executive presidency” because of the excessive powers that had grown around the position to a dangerous degree since the island nation replaced its British-model constitution nearly 40 years ago.

That was then. Since taking office, Rajapaksa has grown to like wielding those powers. Now, buoyed by last year’s bloody victory against the separatist Tamil Tigers and a landslide re-election in January – partly achieved by widespread abuse of those powers, according to impartial observers – the President is taking ever more discretion unto himself.

Last week, after securing the support of a few loose backbenchers to build a two-thirds majority in parliament, Rajapaksa’s government passed an amendment to the constitution removing the article that limits a president to two six-year terms. A second amendment reduces, perhaps removes effectively, a previous limit on the powers of the president to appoint and dismiss members of the supposedly independent commissions that supervise elections, the police, the central bank and the public service and inquire into human rights abuses and corruption. The aim, says the Sri Lankan foreign minister, is not to politicise these institutions but to ”ensure better governance, that effective people are appointed”. But of course!

The whole process of constitutional amendment took only two weeks from the government securing the necessary majority and tabling the legislation. The main opposition parties either boycotted the vote or opposed the amendments. Jehan Perera, the respected head of Sri Lanka’s National Peace Council, contrasted this rush with ”countries with stable and successful political systems [that] have engaged in mass education and public consultations for a considerable period of time prior to changing the constitution”.

Rajapaksa joins Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez as the most recent example of incumbent presidents removing constitutional restrictions against running indefinitely. Both are demagogic politicians with a high degree of current popularity. Yet the sad precedent is that as popularity ebbs, such presidents become increasingly authoritarian and corrupt as they enjoy power and fear to step down.

Already Rajapaksa has gone a long way down that path. The end of the war against the Tamils has not led to the lifting of emergency powers. Death squads still do their work around Colombo against critical journalists and human rights activists. A government minister led protests against the UN investigation of abuses. Three of the president’s brothers occupy powerful government positions. We can expect more desperate Tamils fleeing by boat, and more political refugees of all ethnicities coming by regular transport.

The importance of independent journalism in a bought and sold world has never been more important. Being on the payroll of a government department – I was recently discussing with a prominent old-time reporter about the number of corporate journalists providing information to intelligence services – means that transparency is lacking.

Example:

US State Department documents declassified under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) evidence more than $4 million USD in funding to journalists and private media in Venezuela during the last three years. This funding is part of the more than $40 million USD international agencies are investing annually in anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela in an attempt to provoke regime change.

The funding has been channeled directly by the State Department through three US agencies: Panamerican Development Foundation (PADF), Freedom House, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

In a blatant attempt to hide their activities, the State Department has censored the names of organizations and journalists receiving these multimillion-dollar funds. However, one document dated July 2008 mistakenly left unveiled the names of the principal Venezuelan groups receiving the funds: Espacio Publico (Public Space) and Instituto de Prensa y Sociedad (Institute for Press and Society “IPYS”).

Espacio Publico and IPYS are the entities charged with coordinating the distribution of the millions in State Department funds to private media outlets and Venezuelan journalists working to promote US agenda.

The documents evidence that PADF has implemented programs in Venezuela dedicated to “enhancing media freedom and democratic institutions” and training workshops for journalists in the development and use of “innovative media technologies”, due to the alleged “threats to freedom of expression” and “the climate of intimidation and self-censorship among journalists and the media”.

According to the documents, PADF’s objective is to “strengthen independent journalists by providing them with training, technical assistance, materials and greater access to innovative internet-based technologies that expand and diversify media coverage and increase their capacity to inform the public on a timely basis about the most critical policy issues impacting Venezuela”.

However, while on paper this may appear benign, in reality, Venezuela’s corporate media outlets and journalists, together with US agencies, actively manipulate and distort information in order to portray the Venezuelan government as a “communist dictatorship” that “violates basic human rights and freedoms”.

…

What these documents demonstrate is that Washington not only is funding Venezuelan media, in clear violation of laws that prohibit this type of “propaganda” and “foreign interference”, but also is influencing the way Venezuelan journalists perceive their profession and their political reality.

The State Department funding is not just used to create and aid media outlets that promote anti-Chavez propaganda, but also to capture Venezuelan journalists at the core – as students – in order to shape their vision of journalism and ensure their loyalty early on to US agenda.

Just in case we’d forgotten why Washington should never pressure Israel (today it’s Iran, yesterday it’s Iraq and perhaps in years to come…Venezuela?):

As more than a dozen lawmakers go on record to ask the Obama administration to end the diplomatic spat with Israel following Vice President Joe Biden‘s visit, some are now warning that a prolonged dispute could risk harming international efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear program.

“What are we doing playing hardball with an ally like this?” asked House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-VA, in an interview with The Cable. “What’s important here is for all of us to be focused on the nuclear threat from Iran … We’re dependent upon that ally to be with us to combat Iran’s nuclear program.”

Cantor phoned White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel last night to make clear his view that it’s time for the administration to get over its anger at Israel for announcing the approval of 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem last week. He said he fears the White House is trying to capitalize on the incident to pressure the Israelis to agree to things Washington would otherwise not be able to get.

“There was an incident and no one defends the government of Israel over that, whether it was intentional or not,” Cantor said. “For the White House to seize on that incident and seize on that opportunity, that says a lot about the thinking of this administration.”

Cantor suggested there could be some legislative way of documenting Congress’s sentiments on this issue, but no specific plans have yet surfaced.

Congressional concern over how the row will impact Iran diplomacy has been bipartisan. Democratic New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand echoed Cantor in a statement Tuesday morning.

“While the timing of the East Jerusalem housing announcement was regrettable, it must not cloud the most critical foreign policy issue facing both counties — Iran’s nuclear threat,” Gillibrand said.”As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I am focused on strengthening international pressure on Iran’s regime to derail its pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

Politico reports on a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from Reps. Mark Kirk, R-IL, and Chris Carney, D-PA, which said, “While the recent controversy is regrettable, it should not overshadow the importance of the US-Israel alliance. A zoning dispute over 143 acres of Jewish land in Israel’s capital city should not eclipse the growing threat we face from Iran… We urge your Administration to refrain from further public criticism of Israel and to focus on more pressing issues affecting this vital relationship, such as signing and enforcing the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act when it comes to your desk.”

Former Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller said that U.S.-Israel cooperation on Iran was crucial and should not be sacrificed over this dispute.

“You can’t create a situation where we have no leverage over them and they think they’re basically on their own.”

Hugo Chavez speaks to French newspaper Le Figaro:

The question is not whether the Israelis want to exterminate the Palestinians. They’re doing it openly.

The global Jewish Diaspora loves to criticise Venezuela under Hugo Chavez for its supposed anti-Semitic attitudes and growing intolerance of Jewry.

But this essay in the North American Congress on Latin America debunks many of the myths, highlighting the deliberate mis-information campaign run by Zionist groups in the US and the mainstream media. High-profile critics of Israeli politics, such as Chavez, must be made to pay a price:

In the early morning hours of January 31, vandals broke into Tiferet Israel, a Sephardic synagogue in Caracas. They strewed sacred scrolls on the floor and scribbled “Death to the Jews” and other anti-Semitic epithets on the walls, before making off with computer equipment and historical artifacts. Understandably, the incident frightened and upset many in the Venezuelan Jewish community. Right away, U.S. news outlets, including The New York Times and The Miami Herald, linked the incident to Venezuela’s increasingly strained relations with Israel, after the two countries suspended diplomatic relations two weeks earlier over Israel’s bombing of Gaza, then still under way.

A Herald editorial went so far as to describe an “official policy of anti-Semitism” in Venezuela and implied that Chávez’s foreign policy had unleashed a wave of anti-Semitic violence in the country, culminating in the assault on the synagogue. Some international NGOs were no more nuanced. Just hours after the break-in, the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was already implicitly comparing the Chávez government to the Nazis, calling the synagogue attack “a modern-day Kristallnacht.”

But the Caracas police investigation bore out a different story. Authorities quickly realized that the synagogue’s security fence had been cut from the inside, prompting detectives to investigate the break-in as an inside job. Within the week it became clear that the attack had in fact been a robbery disguised as anti-Semitic vandalism, carried out by the synagogue’s privately contracted security team. Eleven men were arrested for their role in the plot, and their statements to the police indicated that the graffiti and desecration were intended to throw off investigators.

Although the arrests helped ease the anxieties of Venezuela’s Jewish community, the international media pressed on with the storyline of a politically motivated attack. The very week that the Venezuelan Israelite Association issued a statement praising the swift and successful investigation, The Washington Post ran an editorial titled “Mr. Chavez vs. the Jews,” which again blamed the robbery on the government, or, more specifically, on an ugly comment left on a “pro-government Web site,” demanding “that citizens ‘publicly challenge every Jew that you find in the street, shopping center or park’ and called for a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, seizures of Jewish-owned property and a demonstration at Caracas’s largest synagogue.” The idea that the sacking of the Caracas synagogue was based purely on anti-Semitism has persisted, even showing up in a recent piece authored by two academics in the high-brow The editorial concluded that the synagogue was then “duly attacked.”Boston Review. The authors claim the attack is a sign of “state-directed anti-Semitism.”

Oliver Stone’s new documentary, South of the Border, is about Latin America’s Left turn:

This sounds like desperate spin by the Zionist state. Evidence, please:

Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying Iran with uranium for its nuclear program, according to a secret Israeli government report obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

The two South American countries are known to have close ties with Iran, but this is the first allegation that they are involved in the development of Iran’s nuclear program, considered a strategic threat by Israel.

“There are reports that Venezuela supplies Iran with uranium for its nuclear program,” the Foreign Ministry document states, referring to previous Israeli intelligence conclusions. It added, “Bolivia also supplies uranium to Iran.”

The report concludes that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is trying to undermine the United States by supporting Iran.

One can’t help but think that Israel is so keen to convince Washington that Iran is the world’s greatest threat, it’ll say or do whatever it takes to make the case.

It’s not as if Israel isn’t threatening Iran on a nearly daily basis.