A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

• Blair “miscalculated” and he shrugs his shoulders
• The never-ending struggle of the Corrie family
• What BDS says; don’t expect Holocaust guilt to get you through
• Our communications are never private
• Protecting workers isn’t seen as priority
• Israel’s next generation of defenders
• Zionists spying inside their favourite country

Blair “miscalculated” and he shrugs his shoulders 05 Sep 2010 A softball ABC interview with Tony Blair where he essentially acknowledges he was wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet we’re still supposed to take him seriously about Middle East “peace”?

The never-ending struggle of the Corrie family 05 Sep 2010 Who knew that Israel continues to lie over its killing of Rachel Corrie?

What BDS says; don’t expect Holocaust guilt to get you through 05 Sep 2010 To those who doubt the viability and effect of the growing BDS movement, this piece in Haaretz should be mandatory reading: The entire week was marked by boycotts. It began with a few dozen theater people boycotting the new culture center in Ariel, and continued with a group of authors and artists publishing a statement of support on behalf of those theater people. Then a group of 150 lecturers from various universities announced they would not teach at Ariel College or take part in any cultural events in the territories. Naturally, all that spurred a flurry of responses, including threats of counter-sanctions. That was all at the local level. There’s another boycott, an international one, that’s gaining momentum – an economic boycott. Last week the Chilean parliament decided to adopt the boycott of Israeli products made in the settlements, at the behest of the Palestinian Authority, which imposed a boycott on such products several months ago. In September 2009, Norway’s finance minister announced that a major government pension fund was selling its shares in Elbit Systems because of that company’s role in building the separation fence. In March, a major Swedish investment fund said it would eschew Elbit Systems shares on the same grounds. Last month the Norwegian pension fund announced that it was selling its holdings in Africa Israel and in its subsidiary Danya Cebus because of their involvement in constructing settlements in the occupied territories. The sums involved are not large, but their international significance is huge. Boycotts by governments gives a boost to boycotts by non-government bodies around the world. Until now boycott organizers had been on the far left. They have a new ally: Islamic organizations that have strengthened greatly throughout Europe in the past two decades. The upshot is a red and green alliance with a significant power base. The red side has a name for championing human rights, while the green side has money. Their union is what led to the success of the Turkish flotilla. They note that boycott is an especially effective weapon against Israel because Israel is a small country, dependent on exports and imports. They also point to the success of the economic boycott against the apartheid regime in South Africa. The anti-Israel tide rose right after Operation Cast Lead, as the world watched Israel pound Gaza with bombs on live television. No public-relations machine in the world could explain the deaths of hundreds of children, the destruction of neighborhoods and the grinding poverty afflicting a people under curfew for years. They weren’t even allowed to bring in screws to build school desks. Then came the flotilla, complete with prominent peace activists, which ended in nine deaths, adding fuel to the fire. But underlying the anger against Israel lies disappointment. Since the establishment of the state, and before, we demanded special terms of the world. We played on their feelings of guilt, for standing idle while six million Jews were murdered. David Ben-Gurion called us a light unto the nations and we stood tall and said, we, little David, would stand strong and righteous against the great evil Goliath. The world appreciated that message and even, according to the foreign press, enabled us to develop the atom bomb in order to prevent a second Holocaust. But then came the occupation, which turned us into the evil Goliath, the cruel oppressor, a darkness on the nations. And now we are paying the price of presenting ourselves as righteous and causing disappointment: boycott.

Our communications are never private 05 Sep 2010 Leading investigative journalist Nicky Hager, a New Zealander, regularly breaks tough stories that nobody else does, especially on intelligence matters. Take this piece from January 2010: Go to the heart of one of Telecom or Vodafone’s mobile phone exchanges and you’ll find the whole system – covering a quarter of the country – is run by a single computer, no bigger than a small freezer. Cables lead off to all the company’s cellphone towers and other parts of the network. A main cable, connecting all those phone users to the world, comes out the top of the computer and passes directly into a unit in the rack above. One cable goes into the unit but two come out: one continuing out to the world, the other coiling off to secret equipment marked “LI” on the system diagrams. “LI” stands for “lawful interception”. Not long ago, police and Security Intelligence Service (SIS) interception meant tapping your landline phone or bugging your kitchen. Now, under a new surveillance regime ushered in by the 2004 Telecommunications (Interception Capability) Act, a basic interception warrant also allows them access to all your emails, internet browsing, online shopping or dating, calls, texts and location for mobile phones, and much more – all delivered almost instantaneously to the surveillance agencies. To catch other sorts of communications, including people using overseas-based email or other services, all the local communications networks are wired up as well, to monitor messages en route overseas. Interception equipment built permanently into every segment of the country’s communications architecture will provide the sort of pervasive spying capability we normally associate with police states. These developments have been introduced quietly. Neither the government nor the phone and internet companies are keen to advertise their Big Brotherish activities. This doesn’t sound like New Zealand and in fact it was largely pushed on New Zealand from overseas. The origins of New Zealand’s new system can be traced back 10 years to when British researchers uncovered European Union police documents planning exactly the same sort of surveillance system in Europe. The secret plan, known as Enfopol 98, and reported on by the Weekly Telegraph in 1999, aimed to create “a seamless web of telecommunications surveillance” across Europe, and involved EU nations adopting “International User Requirements for Interception”, to standardise surveillance capabilities. The researchers found that the moves followed “a five-year lobbying exercise by American agencies such as the FBI”. “When completed, the system will provide a global regime,” it said. New Zealand had been in dialogue with US and European authorities on joining the scheme as early as 1995. Civil liberties council spokesman Michael Bott says the new capabilities are part of a step-by-step erosion of civil rights in New Zealand. He said people need places to be themselves, talk about their secrets or sound off about politics, without having to wonder who’s listening. “The fear is that citizens become accustomed to living in a surveillance society and, over time, freedoms of speech and belief are chilled and diminished.”

Protecting workers isn’t seen as priority 04 Sep 2010 Here’s a report ignored by most of the mainstream media. Wonder why? (hint; too many corporate journalists and owners are close to these organisations): Many European companies that publicly embrace workers’ rights under global labor standards nevertheless undermine workers’ rights in their US operations, Human Rights Watch said in a report issued today. The 128-page report, “A Strange Case: Violations of Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States by European Multinational Corporations,” details ways in which some European multinational firms have carried out aggressive campaigns to keep workers in the United States from organizing and bargaining, violating international standards and, often, US labor laws. Companies cited include Germany-based Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile USA and Deutsche Post’s DHL, UK-based Tesco’s Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Markets and G4S Wackenhut security, France-based Sodexo food services and Saint-Gobain industrial equipment, Norway-based Kongsberg Automotive, and the Dutch firm Gamma Holding. “The behavior of these companies casts serious doubt on the value of voluntary commitments to human rights,” said Arvind Ganesan, director of the Business and Human Rights Program at Human Rights Watch. “Companies need to be held accountable, to their own stated commitments and to strong legal standards.”

Israel’s next generation of defenders 04 Sep 2010 After Orthodox Jew Peter Beinart recently wrote in the New York Review of Books that growing numbers of young American Jews are turning away from Israel – oncoming fascism doesn’t help – a number of Zionist sociologists have rejected his thesis. Young Jews? They still love Israel, what a wonderful democracy, wholesome and fun.

Zionists spying inside their favourite country 04 Sep 2010 That’s what friends are for: The CIA took an internal poll not long ago about friendly foreign intelligence agencies. The question, mostly directed to employees of the clandestine service branch, was: Which are the best allies among friendly spy services, in terms of liaison with the CIA, and which are the worst? In other words, who acts like, well, friends? “Israel came in dead last,” a recently retired CIA official told me the other day. Not only that, he added, throwing up his hands and rising from his chair, “the Israelis are number three, with China number one and Russia number two,” in terms of how aggressive they are in their operations on U.S. soil.