A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

The Middle East is the region where global empires lavishly exercise their chequebook. Since the Second World War, America has bribed, cajoled and backed autocratic regimes in the name of stability.
Israel, self-described as the only democracy in the area, has been insulated from the vagaries of democratic politics bysimply colluding with dictatorships across its various borders.
Zionism has thrived due to Arab leader corruption and silence in the face of occupation against Palestinian lands.
But the mass uprisings across Egypt are threatening these cosy arrangements.
The Israeli mainstream is fearful of what Arab democracy may mean, but for the majority in Egypt decades of repression may be coming to an end.
The resignation of President Hosni Mubarak is the first necessary step in restoring dignity to the Egyptian political process, though it is only the beginning.
The millions of demonstrators won’t tolerate a military coup simply replacing one tyrant with another.
We can marvel at the success of a peaceful protest movement and wonder which other western-backed thugs may be next.
Today, the Muslim world sees what is possible with weeks of determined protest; America and Israel no longer control the agenda of who rules the Arab street.
Tel Aviv is already fearful of what true democracy may mean for its position.
While there is no unified message of the protesters for the future, a few key demands are clear; free and fair elections, an orderly transition, an end to torture, better employment opportunities and an end to being manipulated by foreign powers.
Sadly and predictably, many neo-conservative and Jewish commentators in America are whipping up fear of an Islamist take-over of Egypt while the situation remains incredibly fluid.
Besides, the western world has consistently refused to accept to its own detriment the legitimate positions of many Muslims since 11 September 2001 who wants their religion integrated into a democratic system.
Turkey is a model here, an imperfect example of an Islamic democracy.
Former Egyptian President Mubarak, wholly supported by Washington and Tel Aviv for three decades and much of the US corporate press, has shaped a state that routinely tortured its own citizens as well as suspects in the American-led “war on terror.”
New Vice-President Omar Suleiman is implicated in a range of crimes committed since 9/11, including overseeing torturehimself against alleged terror suspects.
The New Yorker’s Jane Meyer wrote last week:
“Technically, U.S. law required the C.I.A. to seek “assurances” from Egypt that rendered suspects wouldn’t face torture. But under Suleiman’s reign at the intelligence service, such assurances were considered close to worthless.
As Michael Scheuer, a former C.I.A. officer who helped set up the practice of rendition, later testified before Congress, even if such “assurances” were written in indelible ink, “they weren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.””
In the last weeks, Egyptians authorities blocked Internet access and mobile phone services in an attempt to stop information getting out to the world.
It failed spectacularly but far too many western commentators were quick to jump to conclusions and claim this was a Facebook revolution or Twitter revolution.
But, despite Facebook playing a key role in initially organising outrage, the vast majority of Egyptians didn’t need a website to register their anger.
It was pleasing to read Google and Twitter joining forces to launch SpeaktoTweet, a service allowing Egyptians to call an international number and record a voice message that would then be tweeted from a Twitter account.
It is increasingly difficult to silence the masses in a globalised age, though we shouldn’t be seduced by the false belief that free Internet access automatically brings western-style democracy.
The western reaction to the Egyptian protests has been a mixture of awe and confusion.
The internal logic of many westerners is contradictory and hypocritical.
Backing the US-led invasion of Iraq, currently run as a Tehran-friendly police state, was seen as a noble gesture to liberate the oppressed masses but when the citizens agitate themselves without our help they’re lectured about remaining ‘moderate’.
Famed Slavoj Zizek wrote last week in the UK Guardian that the West so rarely sees a revolutionary spirit in its own countries that there is automatic suspicion when it occurs somewhere else, such as Egypt.
Ironically, post 9/11 paranoia about Islamic fundamentalism is due to its presence in nations the West has supposedly ‘liberated’, namely Iraq and Afghanistan.
Neither nation has a long history of religious extremism; foreign meddling has allowed these forces to incubate.
Dictatorships in the Arab world don’t just materialise, they are created and sustained over decades.
Washington funds Cairo to the tunes of billions annually (second only to Israel) and yet the results are clear to see;stagnation and political corruption on a vast scale.
This arrangement suits America, Israel and the West just fine; client states aren’t independent thinkers and that’s how their funders like it.
Take former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who told CNN that Mubarak had been ‘immensely courageous and a force for good’ in the Middle East over the Israel-Palestine ‘peace process’.
Blair was merely echoing the standard post 9/11 view of the region; political Islam must never be engaged, even if parties win legitimate elections (witness Hamas after its victory in Palestine in 2006).
But what comes after Mubarak? His infrastructure of terror must be dismantled but this can’t happen unless Western policy fundamentally reviews its attitude toward the Middle East.
Why should only Israeli Jews be allowed freedom in the region? Must Arabs be suppressed for the pleasure of the Zionist state?
Sixty years is more than enough of this paradigm. And Arab people-power has loudly announced that it won’t tolerate decades more living under autocracy.
Egypt provides salutary lessons for other nations, including India.
Mubarak created a highly centralised state of control allowing him to crush potential rivals. But the voice of the people has been bubbling beneath the surface for years – I witnessed it during various visits there, from bloggers, union members and dissidents.
Cairo, however, refused to listen, believing brute force would allow the status-quo to survive.
Responsive, democratic governments work best when the interests of the people, especially minorities, aren’t ignored but acted upon.
Blocking the Internet in a large country is almost impossible in the 21st century due to the economy’s reliance on it but Egypt joins an increasingly long list of nations attempting to shut out modernity (including Myanmar and North Korea).
Although the central government in New Delhi is unlikely to administer such a draconian plan, leaders should be open to robust debate on the most controversial subjects, including Kashmir and the Naxalites.
Mature democracies are ones that welcome disagreement and don’t threaten prosecution for those who dare challenge the mainstream view.
There are disturbing signs in many western nations of overzealous officials wanting to regulate the openness of the Internet in the fight against ‘terrorism’.
This must be resisted.
Likewise in India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would be well advised to listen to dissent due to the decentralised nature of his country; ignoring such difficult questions is not the sign of a leader who consults but a man who relies on harsh counter-terrorism techniques to quash dissent.
Hosni Mubarak could inform him of the dangers of this path.
Australian journalist and author Antony Loewenstein, 36, has published a best-selling book on the Israel/Palestine conflict, My Israel Question, and has spent time working and travelling across the Middle East and beyond. His book, The Blogging Revolution, examines the role of the internet in repressive regimes, including Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China. He has written for publications such as the Guardian, Haaretz and the BBC World and regularly appears in the local and global media discussing human rights and politics.

Days after Facebook and Twitter added fuel to a revolt in Egypt, the Obama administration plans to announce a new policy on Internet freedom, designed to help people get around barriers in cyberspace while making it harder for autocratic governments to use the same technology to repress dissent.
The State Department’s policy, a year in the making, has been bogged down by fierce debates over which projects it should support, and even more basically, whether to view the Internet primarily as a weapon to topple repressive regimes or as a tool that autocrats can use to root out and crush dissent.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will lay out the policy in a speech on Tuesday, acknowledged the Internet’s dual role in an address a year ago, and administration officials said she would touch on that theme again, noting how social networks were used by both protesters and governments in the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries.
The State Department plans to finance programs like circumvention services, which enable users to evade Internet firewalls, and training for human rights workers on how to secure their e-mail from surveillance or wipe incriminating data from cellphones if they are detained by the police.
Though the policy has been on the drawing board for months, it has new urgency in light of the turmoil in the Arab world, because it will be part of a larger debate over how the United States weighs its alliances with entrenched leaders against the young people inspired by the events in Tunisia and Egypt.
Administration officials say that the emphasis on a broad array of projects — hotly disputed by some technology experts and human rights activists — reflects their view that technology can be a force that leads to democratic change, but is not a “magic bullet” that brings down repressive regimes.
“People are so enamored of the technology,” said Michael H. Posner, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. “People have a view that technology will make us free. No, people will make us free.”

Of course in reality Washington is highly selective in backing real transparency, as its continued attack on Wikileaks shows:

The Obama administration is stepping up its drive to promote Internet freedom, hoping that countries like Iran could be swept up by the same kind of Web-driven public demonstrations and political tumult that brought the regime in Egypt to its knees in a matter of weeks.

However, critics say that as the United States calls for unfettered and uncensored access to the Internet around the globe, the Obama administration is stepping on its own message by aggressively pursuing a criminal investigation into the activities of online publisher WikiLeaks and how it obtained hundreds of thousands of classified American government reports.
In an awkward bit of timing, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is to deliver a major speech on Internet freedom in Washington on Tuesday just hours after Justice Department lawyers are scheduled to be in federal court a few miles away in the first public courtroom showdown over the probe into WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Prosecutors are expected to urge a federal magistrate in Alexandria, Va., to uphold a court order requiring Twitter to turn over confidential information about the use of its services by three WikiLeaks supporters.
“This is an outrageous attack by the Obama administration on the privacy and free speech rights of Twitter’s customers – many of them American citizens,” Assange complained in a statement Monday. “More shocking, at this time, is that it amounts to an attack on the right to freedom of association, a freedom that the people of Tunisia and Egypt, for example, spurred on by the information released by Wikileaks, have found so valuable.”
“It’s a typical example of it’s right for thee but not for me,” said Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who recently signed on to advise Assange’s legal team.
“They’re perfectly happy to see all of Iran’s secrets disclosed, but they draw the line at their own. They’re perfectly happy to see open media in every other part of the world, but here they’re trying to close down media that has challenged them. It’s a clear double standard at work, and we’re going to expose that double standard.”
Obama administration officials insist there’s no conflict between promoting Web freedom abroad and enforcing U.S. laws regarding handling of confidential government data, like diplomatic cables and military reports.
“WikiLeaks is not about Internet freedom,” a senior State Department official told POLITICO Monday. “It’s not even an Internet issue. It’s about U.S. government property being stolen which is under investigation by the Justice Department. … The fact that the Internet was used to conduct the crime does not make it about Internet freedom.”
“WikiLeaks is about the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. It is not an exercise in Internet freedom,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said last month in a speech to students at the Washington Center . “It is about the legitimate investigation of a crime. It is about the need to continue to protect sensitive information while enabling the free flow of public information.”
Crowley, who has publicly blasted Assange as an “anarchist,” said those claiming hypocrisy are misunderstanding the kind of openness the United States is advocating.
“Transparency does not mean there are no secrets. Whether you are a government or a business, there is proprietary information that is vital to your day-to-day function. Coca-Cola has its secret formula. Google has its search algorithm. Their success is based on these secrets. As a government, we are no different,” Crowley said.
Washington Middle East and democracy experts have generally welcomed the U.S. call for uninterrupted access to Facebook, Twitter and the Internet. But they’ve also noted that talking about Web freedom is a lot simpler than untangling conflicted U.S. interests toward the current instability in the Middle East, that threatens both adversaries such as Iran, as well as strong allies as Yemen’s President Saleh, who has backed the fight against Al Qaeda.

“It’s a little bit easier to make democracy-promotion about letting everyone have access to Facebook than it is to confront directly the core elements of an allied police state,” Human Rights Watch’s Tom Malinowski said. “It’s a good thing to be promoting access to Facebook – but it’s also a little easier to do than the other thing.”

The gist of the Israeli narrative is simple: this is an Iranian-like revolution helped by Al Jazeera and stupidly allowed by US President Barack Obama, who is a new Jimmy Carter, and a stupefied world. Spearheading the Israeli interpretation are the former Israeli ambassadors to Egypt. All their frustration from being locked in an apartment in a Cairean high-rise is now erupting like an unstoppable volcano. Their tirade can be summarized in the words of one of them, Zvi Mazael who told Israeli television’s Channel One on 28 January, “this is bad for the Jews; very bad.”
In Israel of course when you say “bad for the Jews,” you mean the Israelis — but you also mean that whatever is bad for Israel is bad for the Jews all around the world (despite the evidence to the contrary since the foundation of the state). 
But what is really bad for Israel is the comparison. Regardless of how all this would end, it exposes the fallacies and pretense of Israel like never before. Egypt is experiencing a peaceful Intifada with the deadly violence coming from the side of the regime. The army did not shoot at the demonstrators; and even before the departure of Mubarak, already seven days into the protests, the minister of interior who directed his thugs to violently crash the demonstrations had been sacked and will probably be brought to justice. 
Yes, this was done in order to win time and try to persuade the demonstrators to go home. But even this scene, by now forgotten, can never happen in Israel. Israel is a place where all the generals who ordered the shootings of Palestinian and Jewish anti-occupation demonstrators now compete for the highest post of Chief of the General Staff.

It took the Planning Committee of the Jerusalem City Council less than fifteen minutes to approve plans for the next wave of evictions in Sheikh Jarrah. We knew it was coming. Six large Palestinian families—some fifty souls– are to be expelled from their homes, the houses will be demolished, and thirteen apartment units will then be built for Israeli settlers. We know the families, we know the neighborhood, and we know the meaning and intention of this move, a further step in the ethnic cleansing the government is intent on carrying through in Sheikh Jarrah. They probably feel that this moment, with all eyes focused on Egypt, is a good time to act. Some 90,000 housing units for Jews have been built in Jerusalem on private Palestinian land, taken over for this purpose. More are coming.
A small group of activists stood in protest outside the City Council office during the meeting on Monday. The police arrested four of them and, as is their wont, asked the court to prohibit them from participating in demonstrations for 180 days. In the eyes of the Jerusalem police, non-violent civil protest is a disease to be extirpated. The judge threw out the request and scolded the police for the illegal arrests. Here is a small vignette that tells you all you really need to know about the state of civil liberties in Israel today. We are slipping rapidly into a form of “light” Fascism, entirely palatable to the bulk of the Jewish population; democratic institutions such as the courts are still functioning and sometimes act to protect basic rights, but they have little or no power in the face of the anti-democratic laws the Knesset is enacting or of the administrative decisions, of a racist and fanatically nationalist character, that government bodies, such as the Jerusalem municipality, routinely put into effect. “Light” Fascism has a way of turning into its heavier counterpart. We are losing ground day by day.
So here we are at the 65^th Friday demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah, and Mahmud Sau, whose home is slated for demolition, is addressing the two or three hundred Israeli protesters who have come today, braving the cold rain. “We have been here for over sixty years,” he says. “We are refugees from 1948, and now they will make us refugees a second time. When we moved here, my mother used to bring water, in pots she carried on her head, from a well near where the gas station is today [on Nablus Road]. We built these homes. All we want is to live in peace with everyone. When they destroy my house, they will at the same time cut off access from the street to our neighbors’ homes; how are they supposed to live there? Where will we go?” He thanks us for coming to stand with him. A Palestinian grandmother or great-grandmother, small and bent, ten thousand wrinkles on her face, stands at the gate of her home, scrutinizing the crowd. She must be wondering if we’re capable of doing anything substantial to help. So am I.

Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz has joined the legal defense team for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
The announcement–which came via a Tweeted press release Monday afternoon–took place a day ahead of the first showdown over Wikileaks in a U.S. courtroom: a hearing set for Tuesday in Alexandria, Va. on a request the Justice Department made for information about Twitter accounts maintained by three Wikileaks supporters.
“I’m serving as the legal consultant to them on American aspects of the issue, which at the moment is limited to the efforts to get this material,” Dershowitz told me.
Asked why he got involved in the matter, Dershowitz said he sees important freedoms at stake in the battle and he rejects claims by government official that Assange shouldn’t be considered a journalist.
“Assange is a journalist. He’s a new kind of journalist. He represents the newest wave of journalism,” Dershowitz said. “I’m currently in this case because I believe that to protect the First Amendment we need to protect new electronic media vigorously.”
Records about acounts maintained by Assange and Wikileaks itself were requested in the same court order directed to Twitter, but Assange is not fighting those requests, according to the Wikileaks press statement.
“Mr Assange will not himself be intervening in the action against Twitter because as an Australian who has committed no criminal act on US territory, he claims that the American courts have no jurisdiction over him,” the release said. “The head of his UK legal team, Geoffrey Robertson QC, has brought in Alan Dershowitz, the distinguished Harvard Law Professor, as part of the team to advise on the US Attorney General’s actions.”
Legal analysts said that the decision by Assange not to join in the legal challenge to the Twitter order was likely to preserve Assange’s claims to a lack of jurisdiction, if the U.S. does bring criminal charges in the future.