A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

• What seven years of occupation does
• BDS goes more and more mainstream
• Hello merchant of death, can I please bribe you?
• A wonderfully convenient distraction for anti-Wikileaks forces
• Political bastardry is now clear for all to see
• Don’t question uncritical love for Israel, says Aussie Zionist paper
• Nobody in the Middle East believes that Iraq is no longer occupied
• Of course Afghans know what “liberation” feels like
• What on earth will the contractors do?

What seven years of occupation does  23 Aug 2010 The legacy: Iraq has between 25 and 50 percent unemployment, a dysfunctional parliament, rampant disease, an epidemic of mental illness, and sprawling slums. The killing of innocent people has become part of daily life. What a havoc the United States has wreaked in Iraq. UN-HABITAT, an agency of the United Nations, recently published a 218-page report entitled State of the World’s Cities, 2010-2011. The report is full of statistics on the status of cities around the world and their demographics. It defines slum dwellers as those living in urban centers without one of the following: durable structures to protect them from climate, sufficient living area, sufficient access to water, access to sanitation facilities, and freedom from eviction. Almost intentionally hidden in these statistics is one shocking fact about urban Iraqi populations. For the past few decades, prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the percentage of the urban population living in slums in Iraq hovered just below 20 percent. Today, that percentage has risen to 53 percent: 11 million of the 19 million total urban dwellers. In the past decade, most countries have made progress toward reducing slum dwellers. But Iraq has gone rapidly and dangerously in the opposite direction.

BDS goes more and more mainstream  23 Aug 2010 While the upcoming “talks” between Israel and the Palestinians are already destined for failure, the Boston Globe reports on a far more positive development that alleges the complete failure of American-led “peace” efforts: In May, rock legend Elvis Costello canceled his gig in Israel. Then, in June, a group of unionized dock workers in San Francisco refused to unload an Israeli ship. In August, a food co-op in Washington state removed Israeli products from its shelves. The so-called “boycott, divestment, and sanctions’’ movement aimed at pressuring Israel to withdraw from land claimed by Palestinians has long been considered a fringe effort inside the United States, with no hope of garnering mainstream support enjoyed by the anti-apartheid campaign against South Africa of the 1980s. But in recent months, particularly after an Israeli raid on a flotilla delivering supplies to Palestinians, organizers are pointing to evidence that the movement has picked up momentum, even as Israelis and Palestinians are moving toward a new round of peace talks. “Peace talks have been going on for decades and all they have resulted in are more dispossession,’’ said Nancy Kricorian, a New-York-based staff member for Code Pink, an antiwar group that launched a boycott of the cosmetic company Ahava because its products are manufactured in an Israeli settlement. Kricorian, who grew up in Watertown, said Code Pink experienced increased interest by groups wanting to endorse the boycott during the Israeli operation in Gaza last year, and again since a May 31 Israeli raid on a flotilla left nine pro-Palestinian activists dead. Ahava did not respond to an e-mail request for comment. Susanne Hoder, a member of a “divestment task force’’ set up by the Lawrence-based New England Conference of the United Methodist Church, said she believes activists will continue efforts until the Israeli military leaves the West Bank. “Slowly but surely people are starting to recognize that some action is needed,’’ she said. Her task force supports divestment from 29 companies it says are involved in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, including Motorola and Caterpillar, but not from Israel itself.

Hello merchant of death, can I please bribe you? 23 Aug 2010 Can we dream of a world where the arms industry simply doesn’t exist? The close ties between the upper echelons of the Ministry of Defence and BAE Systems, Britain’s biggest arms company, have come under the spotlight after new documents showed how the multinational firm has regularly wined and dined mandarins and senior military officers. BAE took top defence officials and military officers out to eat and drink 52 times over a three-year period, according to the documents. Nearly half of the hospitality was given to the head of the RAF, Air Chief Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy. The firm is billed as the most assiduous in courting the MoD by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a not-for-profit organisation based at City University, London. Using records disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, the bureau calculated that BAE took out the ministry’s top people nearly five times more than its commercial competitors, Thales and Boeing, between January 2007 and December 2009. The relationship between the ministry and BAE has frequently been criticised for being too cosy, allowing the corporate giant to wield influence over the government through its privileged access. It has been disclosed that the ministry has given security passes to many BAE employees, including its chief lobbyist, permitting them to go in and out of the department’s headquarters as they wish.

A wonderfully convenient distraction for anti-Wikileaks forces  23 Aug 2010 The saga around the alleged sexual assault against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange continues and almost descends into farce: The anonymous woman accusing Mr Assange of molestation – a term that covers a broad range of offences involving inappropriate physical contact under Swedish law, and can result in fines or up to one year in prison – denied that she was part of a conspiracy. “The charges against Assange are of course neither staged by the Pentagon nor someone else,” she said. “The responsibility for what happened to me and the other girl lies with a man who has a skewed perception of women and who has problems taking no for an answer.” Yet she seemed to contradict this by adding: “It is completely wrong to say that we would be afraid of Assange and therefore did not want to report him. He is not violent and I do not feel threatened by him.” The woman told Aftonbladet that both cases had involved mutually consensual sex which had escalated into assaults. “The other woman wanted to report rape,” she said. “I gave my story as testimony to her story and to support her. I immediately believed her story, since it was very similar to the experiences I had myself.”

Political bastardry is now clear for all to see  22 Aug 2010 Very incisive piece by Jeff Sparrow on ABC’s The Drum on the message from last weekend’s election result: While the result of Election 2010 remains uncertain, one message came through loud and clear. Quite simply, people loathe what parliamentary politics has become. That hatred manifested itself in the rate of informal voting, up to nearly six per cent nationally. In some seats, voters spoiled one in ten of their ballots; in Blaxland, the figure reached 14 per cent. No, Mark Latham was not to blame. The informal vote has long been the instinctive refuge of the cynical and disaffected – and we all knew through the course of the campaign that cynicism and disaffection had reached remarkable levels. The high rate of informal voting should not have been a surprise. This is an age of political withdrawal – if voting were not compulsory, many Australians would have stayed at home. But what made the 2010 election different was the scepticism about the two party system also found a positive outlet, in the breakthrough vote for the Australian Greens. The widespread disaffection that emerged during the campaign also manifested itself as disdain for the media – and it’s no wonder. It’s difficult to think of another democratic nation with a narrower political consensus in political reporting and commentary. Like an inept piano player, the Australian media, with a few honorable exceptions, improves endlessly on the same few notes, picking out a tune on the keyboard of neoliberal economics, the US alliance and ‘governing from the centre’. For that reason, the Greens will almost certainly come under a ferocious hammering in the weeks to come, as the pundits switch from ignoring them to ridiculing them.

Don’t question uncritical love for Israel, says Aussie Zionist paper  22 Aug 2010 A curious editorial in the Australian Jewish News that attempts to place boundaries on acceptable Zionist discussion in Australia. Any action that dares put pressure on Israel are clearly verging on anti-Semitism and don’t give the Jewish state the necessary warm hug. Because unquestioning love from the Diaspora has really worked so well. How’s that occupation coming along? Writing in last week’s AJN, chairman of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students Liam Getreu claimed, “Publicly supporting every Israeli action and policy isn’t good for Israel; it’s not good for our community; and most of all, it can be devastating to our own overarching moral principles.” Combined with a claim that we shouldn’t expect our political parties to back Israel at every turn – and that when they do automatically leap to the country’s defence it can be “detrimental” and “leave a bad taste in the mouth of the public” – inevitably caused something of a stir, to say the least. Hardly sentiments one would expect to be voiced so openly by someone at the forefront of the community and at the centre of the campaign against anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism on campus. In the face of overwhelming, widely unjustified and ill-informed condemnation of Israel, Getreu’s comments seem to question the united front we require from our leadership to defend the country against the weight of criticism stacked against it, to bring balance to the debate and to turn the tide against the global attempts to demonise the Jewish State. That said, within our small community, we know full well that there are divergent views on the best ways to achieve peace, and that while we may back Israel to the hilt in its right to exist and to defend itself, specific policies or actions of the Israeli Government may trouble us. Step forward the Australian Jewish Democratic Society (AJDS), a body that prides itself on its communal affiliation while epitomising the fact that our attitudes are not homogenous, rejecting the automatic public support highlighted by Getreu. It is one thing, though, to criticise and question, quite another to take action. Yet this is precisely what the AJDS has now done, resolving to support consumer and academic boycotts, as well as military divestment. Though it maintains such sanctions will be selective, “designed to bring about an end to the Israeli occupation, blockade and settlement on Palestinian lands lying outside of the June 1967 Israeli borders”, and not “aimed at the breadth of Israeli economic, cultural or intellectual activity”, the resolution will nonetheless be seen as lending credence to the wider Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign and those within it who seek to delegitimise Israel and portray it as an apartheid and pariah state. While the Establishment may be able to accommodate a broad spectrum of views, whether it can now accommodate those actions that are so anathema to its principles and so damaging to the Jewish State, at a time when it desperately needs our support, must surely be in doubt.

Nobody in the Middle East believes that Iraq is no longer occupied  22 Aug 2010 A typically informative Al-Jazeera program, this time on Iraq, featuring John Pilger in discussion on America’s “withdrawal” (where troops will stay well beyond 2011):

Of course Afghans know what “liberation” feels like 22 Aug 2010 We rarely hear the views of people under Western occupation, so it’s interesting to read that a majority of Afghans in a new survey believe that the recent Wikileaks documents accurately reflect the reality in their country.

What on earth will the contractors do?  22 Aug 2010 How many foreign, private mercenary companies will be affected if Afghanistan actually kicks out the unaccountable men who roam the country?