A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

• The global media’s sad obsession with the US
• The Israeli left revives itself, barely
• Somebody in Spain understands why Wikileaks is so damn important
• If You Love This Planet (with Dr Helen Caldicott) on Wikileaks
• What do we want in 2011?

The global media’s sad obsession with the US Posted: 02 Jan 2011 05:58 AM PST What were the biggest news stories of 2010 across 160 countries and one billion items?

The Israeli left revives itself, barely Posted: 02 Jan 2011 05:08 AM PST Example one. Example two. But it may be far too late to save the Zionist state from an addiction to occupation and humiliation of Arabs.

Somebody in Spain understands why Wikileaks is so damn important Posted: 02 Jan 2011 05:04 AM PST Here’s an inspiring reason why the mainstream media can, if it wants to, matter. Spain’s El Pais editor, Javier Moreno, on why his paper participated in Wikileaks cablegate: Cynics will argue that none of what we have learned from WikiLeaks differs from the usual way in which high-level international politics is conducted, and that without diplomatic secrets, the world would be even less manageable and more dangerous for everyone. Political classes on both sides of the Atlantic convey a simple message that is tailored to their advantage: trust us, don’t try to reveal our secrets; in exchange, we offer you security. But just how much security do they really offer in exchange for this moral blackmail? Little or none, since we face the sad paradox that this is the same political elite that was incapable of properly supervising the international financial system, whose implosion triggered the biggest crisis since 1929, ruining entire countries and condemning millions of workers to unemployment and poverty. These are the same people responsible for the deteriorating quality of life of their populations, the uncertain future of the euro, the lack of a viable European project and the global governance crisis that has gripped the world in recent years, and which elites in Washington and Brussels are not oblivious to. I doubt that keeping embassy secrets under wraps is any kind of guarantee of better diplomacy or that such an approach offers us better answers to the problems we face. The incompetence of Western governments, and their inability to deal with the economic crisis, climate change, corruption, or the illegal war in Iraq and other countries has been eloquently exposed in recent years. Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, we also know that our leaders are all too aware of their shameful fallibility, and that it is only thanks to the inertia of the machinery of power that they have been able to fulfill their democratic responsibility and answer to the electorate. The powerful machinery of state is designed to suppress the flow of truth and to keep secrets secret. We have seen in recent weeks how that machine has been put into action to try to limit the damage caused by the WikiLeaks revelations. Given the damage they have suffered at the hands of WikiLeaks, it is not hard to see why the United States and other Western governments have been unable to resist the temptation of focusing attention on Julian Assange. He seems an easy enough target, and so they have sought to question his motivation and the way that WikiLeaks works. They have also sought to question why five major news organizations with prestigious international reputations agreed to collaborate with Assange and his organization. These are reasonable questions, and they have all been answered satisfactorily over the last four weeks, despite the pressure put on us by government, and worse still, by many of our colleagues in the media.

If You Love This Planet (with Dr Helen Caldicott) on Wikileaks Posted: 01 Jan 2011 11:25 PM PST The myriad of issues surroundings Wikileaks continues. I was interviewed in late December by Dr Helen Caldicott on her globally syndicated radio program If You Love This Planet to discuss the long-term ramifications of this new form of journalism. My previous appearance on the program from 2009 is here.   This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

What do we want in 2011? Posted: 01 Jan 2011 04:20 PM PST Jewish American blogger and writer Max Ajl is currently in Gaza and wrote this moving post about his wish list for 2011: A friend of mine here said that what we need are not “new year’s resolutions but new year’s revolutions.” So what do I hope for in this New Year? I hope for revolutions. I hope the labor movements in Egypt overthrow their thug government, that the Palestinians in the Bantustan archipelago rid themselves of their mukhabarat, that the Arab monarchies collapse, that the Mizrahi Jews of Israel under the pressure of a burgeoning BDS campaign find themselves a leadership able to express their discontent in a way other than racism at those a little lower on the ladder than they are, that the Tunisian revolt explodes the Ben Ali regime, that the British student movement lights a radical fire under the feet of its neoliberal governments, that Russ Feingold runs for president and begins to rip apart the imperial arch in the Middle East, along with its keystone, Israel, that Palestine erupts in another Intifada, more like the first than the second; I hope that the third world unites in another Bandung around the issue of climate debt, that the Via Campesina destabilizes a few neoliberal governments in the global South, that there’s a global wave of land grabbing by peasants, and that the atomized US working class engages in a strike wave. And I hope that these aren’t just hopes, and that we turn them into the future. To that end, I hope that the left and the Palestine solidarity movement move closer and closer, as they did at the United States Social Forum, at Detroit, and earlier this year in Albany, New York. So that’s my resolution: to do that little infinitesimal bit to make that revolution, to keep hitting the flint against the steel and to hope it hits dry tinder and to see that tinder erupt in flame. So finally I hope too today that Jawaher Abu Rahma has not died in vain, and that the children being born today under Gaza’s grey sky can breathe free air before they have children, that my friends my age don’t live the rest of their youth amidst the psychic suffocation of siege, that my older friends, the revolutionary generations, Saber, Haidar, Mona, and the rest, can grow old to the joyous sound of shattering shackles and not to the soul-crushing clatter of them being forged. The New Year is not so happy here in Gaza’s gloom, but like every day, it is full of hope—we can fill it with hope. Mahmoud Darwish, in an interview several years before he died, said that the Palestinian “national will is stronger in reaction to the challenge. They do not have another option but to continue to carry the hope that they are going to have a normal life. The Palestinian people feel that they are living the hours before dawn.” So I hope we can hasten dawn.