A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

• Hamas is building a society of sorts in Gaza
• Haiti is the lost ongoing nightmare
• Since when was a Colombo-friendly source reliable?
• Indict Bush and Cheney, says Fox contributor
• Please don’t sanction Israel, we’re charming people really
• Where’s the outrage over Sri Lanka?

Hamas is building a society of sorts in Gaza 14 Jul 2010 There are increasing numbers of reports from inside Gaza, including this piece today in the New York Times that rightly says, “Gaza, on almost every level, is stuck”. Journalist David Rose offers a slightly different view, claiming that while life in Gaza is undoubtedly tough, many people are simply getting on with life and the situation is complex: Reporting from Gaza usually consists of two well worn tropes, and conveys little of the realities of life there. Liberals tend to focus on the story of Israel’s blockade, and the economic hardship it continues to engender, despite its partial easing. Running such coverage a close second come ritual denunciations of Hamas, whose relationship with facts observable on the ground sometimes seems shaky. Hamas, one is invited to believe, is close to creating an authoritarian Islamic emirate that will require all women to wear burqas and govern through Sharia law. After spending a week in Gaza City and other parts of the Strip, however, all I can say is that I found little evidence for such a project. The blockade has made Gaza a global symbol of hardship. To be sure, it has reduced much of its economy to ruins: with exports to the outside world impossible, the factories and workshops are closed, and unemployment is perhaps as high as 80 percent. Moreover, it is only 18 months since the end of Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli attack conducted to stop a rain of Gazan rockets, which reduced thousands of buildings to rubble and killed close to 1,500 civilians. Yet tough as most Gazans’ lives are, they are getting on with them. And the often unspoken truth is that while the blockade has imposed a comprehensive block to Gazan productivity, it has become completely ineffective as a means of preventing imports. Moreover, not everyone is on welfare. The Palestinian Authority continues to pay the salaries of some 55,000 workers. There are NGOs, and the UN. In the teeming refugee camps, there is poverty and deprivation, but the blockade’s worst consequence is the frustration of potential and productive energy. One hears a great deal about how the Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is trying to ‘build institutions’ fit for statehood on the West Bank. It seemed evident to me that Hamas is trying to do exactly the same thing in Gaza. ‘There was nothing wrong with the laws we inherited from the Palestinian Authority,’ Fathih Hamad, the Hamas interior minister, told me. ‘But they weren’t being enforced. Now they are.’ The International Committee of the Red Cross regularly visits Gaza’s prisons.

Haiti is the lost ongoing nightmare 14 Jul 2010 Remember Haiti? Democracy Now! again visited the devastated country and found little has changed (though a long interview with actor Sean Penn discovers one Hollywood star who isn’t content to just make flying “humanitarian” visits): The teeming city of Port-au-Prince looks like a war zone. Rubble and debris is everywhere and has become a part of the landscape. There is little food, clean water or sanitation. Only two percent of promised reconstruction aid has been delivered. More than 1,350 tent camps fill the streets, with makeshift tarps and sheets providing little shelter. Other tent camps set up by the Haitian government are in remote areas, far from the capital and set up on barren landscape. The contribution of the US has been pretty minimal.

Since when was a Colombo-friendly source reliable? 14 Jul 2010 Rupert Murdoch’s Australian continues its jolly regular reliance on “official” sources when reporting “terrorism”. Greg Barns explains: So some asylum seekers are terrorists are they? Well yes, according to The Australian today. But for a host of reasons we should be very cautious in accepting the veracity of those who make claims that people fleeing conflict are in fact zealous members of terrorist organizations. According to Sally Neighbour, who writes on terrorism issues for The Australian, “Sri Lankan officials” have told a Defence analyst Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe that “between 25 and 50 per cent of Tamils fleeing to Australia have connections to the defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).” “DeSilva-Ranasinghe said that during a recent visit to Sri Lanka, two government ministers and several other officials, including Catholic Church staff with deep ties in the Tamil community, told him 25 per cent was at the lower end of their estimates. The people I spoke to constantly said 50 per cent,” he told The Australian,” Neighbour writes in her front page splash. Mr. DeSilva-Ranasinghe’s views should not necessarily be accepted as gospel. After all he made the extraordinary claim in the same paper on 7 April this year that “there is strong evidence that since the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in May 2009 Sri Lanka has moved towards stability and inter-ethnic reconciliation, rather than widespread or institutionalised persecution of its Tamil population.” This is certainly not what the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says in its latest country assessment of Sri Lanka, issued on July 5. While noting that steps are being taken to normalize the country the report also notes that detention without trial, torture of suspects, rape and other forms of sexual abuse of women and children is happening and that there is “severe overcrowding and lack of adequate sanitation, food, water and medical treatment” in prisons. Hardly a rosy picture!

Indict Bush and Cheney, says Fox contributor  14 Jul 2010 If America was a nation that believed in applying law equally to all: This weekend Fox Business host (and frequent Fox News contributor) Judge Andrew Napolitano sat down with Ralph Nader to discuss, among other things, allegations that, under the Bush Administration detainees civil rights were violated. In the interview that aired on C-Span, Napolitano said of former President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that they “should have been indicted” for torture. When asked if the same policies exist under President Obama, Napolitano claimed that, as far as he knew, they did.

Please don’t sanction Israel, we’re charming people really  13 Jul 2010 The cultural boycott against Israel is growing and many Israeli citizens are feeling saddened: Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar, whose 2007 movie “Beaufort” received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, told JTA that the refusal of artists to perform in Israel is a kind of collective punishment of the culture-loving public — often the very public that is “extra critical of Israeli policies.” Cedar said that while he believes a boycott is “a legitimate way for an artist to express his political views,” they should be political views the artist has consistently and publicly held.

Where’s the outrage over Sri Lanka? 13 Jul 2010 The media silence on Sri Lanka’s descent into a brutal dictatorship is shameful. Edward Mortimer, a board member on UK-based Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice (alongside me and many others), writes in the Guardian: It is now over a year since the president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, claimed victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). But war is still being waged on the “paradise island” – by the government, against the country’s journalists. Last week alone saw one media outlet receive a threatening letter and the head of another charged with fraud by the supreme court after publishing stories critical of the government. And two international NGO workers involved in protecting journalists had their visas revoked. The situation has been deteriorating for some time. According to Amnesty International at least 14 media workers have been killed in the country since 2006 and more than 20 are thought to have fled – more per capita than have left Iran. Arbitrary arrests, abductions and assassinations have been documented for over three decades. No one has ever been prosecuted for these attacks on the media. In January last year, as the Sri Lankan army closed in on the last remaining pockets of resistance held by the LTTE, the government imposed a media blackout on the war zone. (It also denied humanitarian access to civilians trapped by the fighting and, like the rebels, displayed callous contempt for civilian life.) Away from the killing fields, the local media suffered a sharp spike in attacks. Just days after independent broadcaster MTV was raided by gunmen, Lasantha Wickrematunge – editor of the Sunday Leader and prominent government critic – was assassinated in broad daylight in a high-security zone regularly patrolled by the army. The end of the war has changed nothing. Phones are tapped. Emails hacked. Media outlets harassed and journalists threatened. One – Prageeth Eknaligoda – has been missing since January’s presidential election. Small wonder that so many journalists say they now resort to self-censorship. This global silence plays into the hands of the Sri Lankan government’s apologists, both those who delude themselves and say, as one did in a meeting at London’s Frontline Club last week, that missing journalists have merely run off with mistresses, and those who are paid to delude others. The government has spent lavishly on public relations firms such as Bell Pottinger – which counts General Pinochet and Trafigura among its past clients – and its US subcontractor Qorvis, which also represents Equatorial Guinea’s unsavoury dictator. The pardoning on World Press Freedom Day of JS Tissainayagam, a journalist previously sentenced to 20 years’ hard labour, is part of this PR strategy.