A.Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Our diplomatic corps today is comprised primarily of spineless propagandists void of values or a conscience. Certainly there are some diplomats among them who identify with the current government’s policies, and perhaps even the scandalous behavior of its foreign minister. But the truth is apparently more sordid: A large portion of them oppose the conduct of the state they represent. They are nothing more than puppets in an ugly show window, backup singers for Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
Probably better than any other Israelis, the diplomats know what the world thinks of Israel, and why. They know that under Lieberman’s watch the Foreign Ministry has become a vessel of rage toward the entire world. They know that no ambassador is sufficiently adroit to explain the brutality of Operation Cast Lead, or the pointless killing on the Mavi Marmara ship. They know that no country on the planet actually accepts the occupation, the settlements or the indications of Israeli apartheid. They know that no diplomat out there can persuade anyone that Israel is truly aimed toward achieving peace. They know that there is a new world alignment out there – one with no patience for tyranny of the kind enforced by Israel’s occupation.

The Barnett Government is secretly planning to privatise a slab of the State’s judicial system in a move critics believe marks the takeover of justice by multinational corporations.
A leaked copy of a draft Bill reveals the Government wants to allow private companies to take over the management of prisoners who have been released from jail on parole or are awaiting trial.
Private contractors would enforce parole conditions, such as drug testing, attending rehabilitation programs and finding accommodation and work.
Part six of the Corrective Services Bill 2011 would allow companies such as Serco, which runs Acacia Prison and is bidding for the right to provide other Government services, to become major players in the State’s justice system.
The laws, which are outlined in a section of the Bill entitled Contracts for Community Services, have been condemned by the Community and Public Sector Union. Union secretary Toni Walkington said the move would compromise public safety as profit-driven companies would be put in charge of sometimes unstable criminals.
“We are alarmed that community corrections in any way, shape or form could be contracted out,” she said.
Shadow minister for corrective services Fran Logan said the Government was selling off “core” public services.
“These contracts are based on key performance indicators and making sure the right boxes are ticked,” he said. “It is not about rehabilitation of people who have been through the justice system.
“What are we going to have? Are we going to have Dog the Bounty Hunter here in WA, tracking people down who have skipped their parole?”
The British Government last year scrapped a contract with company Clearsprings after a 24-year-old man on bail for assault was beaten to death by two other inmates at one of the company’s properties.
Corrective Services Minister Terry Redman said the previous Labor government had begun work on the Bill.
“DCS have been working on this for years and the department has not flagged it as an immediate priority,” he said.
“I expect to be briefed on it in the coming months. Should the Bill be approved by myself and my colleagues, it will then be subject to robust debates and processes.”

In February 2007 Harvard professor Joseph Nye Jr., who developed the concept of “soft power,” visited Libya and sipped tea for three hours with Muammar Qaddafi. Months later, he penned an elegant description of the chat for The New Republic, reporting that Qaddafi had been interested in discussing “direct democracy.” Nye noted that “there is no doubt that” the Libyan autocrat “acts differently on the world stage today than he did in decades past. And the fact that he took so much time to discuss ideas—including soft power—with a visiting professor suggests that he is actively seeking a new strategy.” The article struck a hopeful tone: that there was a new Qaddafi. It also noted that Nye had gone to Libya “at the invitation of the Monitor Group, a consulting company that is helping Libya open itself to the global economy.”
Nye did not disclose all. He had actually traveled to Tripoli as a paid consultant of the Monitor Group (a relationship he disclosed in an email to Mother Jones), and the firm was working under a $3 million-per-year contract with Libya. Monitor, a Boston-based consulting firm with ties to the Harvard Business School, had been retained, according to internal documents obtained by a Libyan dissident group, not to promote economic development, but “to enhance the profile of Libya and Muammar Qadhafi.” So The New Republic published an article sympathetic to Qaddafi that had been written by a prominent American intellectual paid by a firm that was being compensated by Libya to burnish the dictator’s image.
Presumably, Nye was sharing his independently derived view of Qaddafi. Yet a source familiar with the Harvard professor’s original submission to the magazine notes, “It took considerable prodding from editors to get him to reluctantly acknowledge the regime’s very well-known dark side.” And Franklin Foer, then the editor of the magazine, says, “If we had known that he was consulting for a firm paid by the government, we wouldn’t have run the piece.” (After an inquiry by Mother Jones, The New Republic added a disclaimer to the Nye story acknowledging the details of Nye’s relationship with Monitor.)
The Nye article was but one PR coup the Monitor Group delivered for Qaddafi. But the firm also succeeded on other fronts. The two chief goals of the project, according to an internal document describing Monitor’s Libya operations, were to produce a makeover for Libya and to introduce Qaddafi “as a thinker and intellectual, independent of his more widely-known and very public persona as the Leader of the Revolution in Libya.” In a July 3, 2006, letter to its contact in the Libyan government, Mark Fuller, the CEO of Monitor, and Rajeev Singh-Molares, a director of the firm, wrote,
“Libya has suffered from a deficit of positive public relations and adequate contact with a wide range of opnion-leaders and contemporary thinkers. This program aims to redress the balance in Libya’s favor.”
The key strategy for achieving these aims, the operation summary said, “involves introducing to Libya important international figures that will influence other nations’ policies towards the country.” Also on the table, according to a Monitor document, was a book that Monitor would produce on “Qadhafi, the Man and His Ideas,” based in part on interviews between the Libyan dictator and these visiting international influentials. The book supposedly would “enable the international intellectual and policy-making elite to understand Qadhafi as an individual thinker rather than leader of a state.” (Monitor’s fee for this particular task: $1.65 million.) This volume never materialized. But one primary outcome of Monitor’s pro-Qaddafi endeavors, the operation summary said, was an increase in media coverage “broadly positive and increasingly sensitive to the Libyan point of view.”
It worked: Several thought-leaders were brought to Libya by Monitor to chat with the Leader—including neoconservative Richard Perle (who then briefed Vice President Dick Cheney on his visits), political economist Francis Fukuyama, and conservative scholar Bernard Lewis (who briefed the US embassy in Israel on his trip)—and a few of the “visitors,” as Monitor referred to them, did write mostly positive articles, without revealing they had been part of the Monitor Group’s endeavor to clean up Qaddafi. Some might not have even known they had been recruited for an image rehabilitation reffort.

Israel is dominated by the settlers, who resemble in spirit the Crusaders of the 12th century. Fundamentalist religious parties, not much different from their Iranian counterparts, play a major role in our state. The political and economic elite is steeped in corruption. Our democracy, in which we took so much pride, is in mortal danger.
Some people argue that all this is happening because “Netanyahu has no policy”. Nonsense. He has a clear policy: to maintain Israel as a garrison state, to enlarge the settlements, to prevent the foundation of a real Palestinian state, and to go on without peace, in a state of eternal conflict.
Just now it was been leaked that Netanyahu is going to give a historic speech – another one – very soon. Not in the Knesset, whose importance is approaching nil, but in the really important forum: AIPAC, the Jewish lobby in Washington.
There he will unfold his Peace Plan, whose details have also been leaked. A wonderful plan, with only one minor defect: it has nothing to do with peace.
It proposes setting up a Palestinian state with “provisional borders”. (With us, nothing is more permanent than the “provisional”). It will consist of about half the West Bank. (The other half, including East Jerusalem, will presumably be covered with settlements.) There will be a timetable for the discussion of the core issues – borders, Jerusalem, refugees etc. (In Oslo, a timetable of five years was fixed. It expired in 1999, by which time negotiation had not even started.) Negotiations will not start at all until the Palestinians recognize Israel as the State of the Jewish People and accept its “security requirements”. (Meaning: never.)
If the Palestinians accept such a plan, they need (in the words of the US Secretary of Defense in another context) “to have their heads examined”. But of course Netanyahu is not addressing the Palestinians at all. His plan is a primitive attempt at marketing. (After all, in the past he was a marketing agent for furniture). The aim is to stop the international campaign of “delegitimatsia”.
Ehud Barak, too, had something to say this week. In a long TV interview, almost entirely consisting of political gibberish, he made one important remark: the Arab uprisings provide Israel with new opportunities. What opportunities? You guessed it: to get increased quantities of American arms. Arms and America über alles.