A.Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Omar Barghouti on the internal logic of linking BDS to global justice

Posted: 12 Apr 2011

America’s “love” for Middle East democracy

Posted: 12 Apr 2011

Completely non-existent: 

“No leniency [1].” That was the warning from Bahrain’s crown prince last week as government forces continued cracking down on protesters, activists, journalists and doctors. It was issued alongside yet another promise of reform by the Bahraini government.
The warning was also met with silence from the United States. The U.S., which has long considered Bahrain a key ally[2] in the region, condemned [3] the violence in mid-March, and two weeks later noted that arresting bloggers “doesn’t help [3]” promote an inclusive national dialogue.
But so far this month—as reports of increasing intimidation, censorship and brutality emerge—the U.S. doesn’t seem [4] to have had a public response. In one of the State Department’s last statements, spokesman Mark Toner told reporters [5] on March 22,  “Our position towards Bahrain is crystal clear. We’re going to continue to work with the Bahraini Government.”
We called the State Department to ask why the violence in Bahrain hadn’t been broached in recent press briefings. “We respond to reporters’ questions,” a State Department spokesman told me, noting that “there’s a lot going on throughout the entire Middle East.”
Human rights groups have reported that at least 26 people [6] have been killed since the Bahraini government declared martial law [7] in mid-March. At least three activists have also died [8] in police custody. More than 400 have been detained and dozens are missing.

Massively cutting Australia’s military spending

Posted: 12 Apr 2011

Yes: 
 

How Wikileaks has opened our eyes to the world

Posted: 11 Apr 2011

My following review appeared in this week’s Sydney Sun Herald: 

Underground
Suelette Dreyfus and Julian Assange
(Random House, $24.95)
Inside Wikileaks
Daniel Domscheit-Berg
(Scribe, $29.95)
During a rare public appearance in March, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told a packed audience at Cambridge University that the internet is the “greatest spying machine the world has ever seen”.
Although he praised the ability of the web to inform and challenge the established order, he said to students that, “it is a technology that can be used to set up a totalitarian spying regime, the likes of which we have never seen.”
Assange’s message was clear: Wikileaks had provided invaluable information on a range of issues that society had not previously known but repressive states could equally use the same tools – YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and others – to track and arrest dissidents. We have seen this happen in the last months in Egypt, Libya and across the Arab world.
These two books – one written by a former confidante of Assange at Wikileaks and the other by a colleague who penned this definitive hacking tome in the late 1990s – offers insights into the ideology behind the whistle-blowing website and why it’s touched such a raw nerve in the halls of power.
During a recent interview on ABC TV’s Q&A, Prime Minister Julia Gillard dismissed Wikileaks, argued that there is no “moral purpose” behind the leaks and accused Assange of believing in an “anarchic, here it all is, just have it” ideology.
Gillard could not have been more mistaken. Reading Underground, an updated edition of the 1997 release, co-written with Dr Suelette Dreyfus, we are taken into a world of global hackers whose “youthful curiosity was more about adventure than serious crime.”
Assange has a very clear moral code, one that is much less fawning towards American power than displayed by Gillard.
We read about the Australian Federal Police attempting to understand the motivation of young men (and it was mostly men) who were determined to prove that corporations and universities should not chose what remains private from the public. These are classic David vs. Goliath tales, with the US military, NASA and law enforcement agencies realising that the internet revolution could not be so easily tracked like communication technology before it.
The context for the times is the end of the Cold War with the continuation of the “Secret State [as] the world’s most powerful western spy agencies were reinventing themselves to spy on their own citizens instead of Russian KGB agents”.
A decade after September 11, 2001, the levels of official snooping massively exceeds the relatively innocent period of the 1990s. Little accountability takes place. As Assange discussed at Cambridge university, governmental monitoring of social media is now ubiquitous.
It was revealed in March that the US military was working with a private company to covertly influence Facebook and Twitter and institute fake online personas to spread pro-Washington propaganda and allegedly stop terrorism.
Wikileaks would not believe a word of this program, questioning the reasons anybody should have the right to obtain information on potentially billions of global citizens.
Former Wikileaks collaborator Daniel Domscheit-Berg would surely share this scepticism. His book is a curious combination of personal attacks on Assange – “So imaginative. So energetic. So brilliant. So paranoid. So power-hungry. So megalomanic” – and a passionate defence of the need to provide transparency in democracies.
He was, in his own words, Assange’s best friend and they fell out terribly. His book is like a scorned lover explaining what went wrong (from his perspective).
Although it’s undeniably interesting to read a close account of Assange and his supposedly unhealthy ego, the validity of the analysis has been denied by the Wikileaks founder. Domscheit-Berg explains the ways in which the website developed into a multi-million dollar operation. He wanted it to be “the most aggressive press organisation in the world, public and visible’’. Assange supposedly preferred an “insurgent operation”, to avoid the ever-increasing number of enemies who wanted to shut the site down.
Domscheit-Berg writes that Assange said that living underground was the best way to avoid detection. His paranoia was arguably justified, considering the leaked documents from the UK and US governments that outline ways to destroy Wikileaks and crush its credibility.
The Wikileaks story has just begun.

How many times does a corporate reporter need to visit Israel to repeat its talking points?

Posted: 11 Apr 2011

Here we go again. 
A little game; how many Western “journalists” and politicians continually visit Israel on a propaganda tour?
Answer; most of them.
In 2009 I wrote about the Sydney Morning Herald’s international editor Peter Hartcher visiting the Zionist state and being more than happy to speak to a very select collection of people, all offering a very similar message; we are under threat, we fear the Iranians, nothing about the occupation and all about repeating Israeli talking points.
Now Hartcher is back.
His paper’s front page story today:

Israel is troubled by the perception the US is an “empire of the past” and wants a resurgent America to lead a decisive confrontation with Iran, a top official has said.
“America is tested” at a pivotal moment in the history of the Middle East, said Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, Dan Meridor, who is also the Minister for Intelligence and Nuclear Energy.
The Arab world was watching the US closely: “They look to America. If America does not seem to be able to contain the Iranian threat, will they go with Iran?”
“This is of world-order magnitude,” he told the Herald in an interview. Israel, which depends on the US as its security guarantor, itself appears to have new doubts about US judgment.
Mr Meridor said he was “surprised” at the Obama administration’s treatment of a longstanding US ally, Egypt’s former president: “Was it necessary to immediately empower the demonstrators against him and let [Hosni] Mubarak go? It’s seen by all the allies of America in the Arab world. I don’t know where the tide of history will go and I’m not sure they know.”
“The perception, that I hope is wrong, that America is weakening is not good, but I hope that America will find a way, and I believe they can, to restore itself as the leading country and not allow those impressions spread by the Iraq war that America is an empire of the past. All this is here on the table.
“America has started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Is it a success story or not? What happens in Pakistan? … It may be the use of power showed the limits of power.”
Mr Meridor, a senior member of the Likud party of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the confrontation with Iran was “a decisive conflict”.
“The end of it is very important.
If the end of it is that Iran has nuclear power, it will have grave effects on world order, on balance of power, and on the Middle East.
“It may spell the end of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty regime, not only because Iran will be nuclear, but because other countries say they will need to be nuclear, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and others may do it.
“No more the responsible adults tell the kids what to do. When everybody has the bomb you can’t contain or control or interfere as America could do.”

And the lead op-ed:

Israel’s Mossad enjoys a reputation as the world’s most fearsomely effective intelligence agency, but it didn’t see the Arab uprisings coming.
“The first lesson I draw [from the uprisings] is that we should all be very humble,” says Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister responsible for intelligence and nuclear energy, Dan Meridor.
“We didn’t know,” he told the Herald. “Had you asked me the day before it happened in Egypt, I would have told you ‘no way’. Or Tunisia for that matter . . . Nobody predicted this happening in any specific way.”
Israel’s President, Shimon Peres, the ceremonial head of state, puts an optimistic face on the tumult. During a visit to Washington last week he imagined that “the moment that the Arab world will become free and open and peaceful it will be a major change in the world experience and in the annals of the Middle East”.
Surely an Israel surrounded by democracies would be a much more secure nation? One of the most striking features of the Arab ferment to date has been the fact that Israel has been irrelevant.
As Meridor points out: “What we saw in Cairo that was quite heartwarming, hopeful, promising, was that the slogans we heard were not taken from the Muslim vocabulary, they were taken from the Western vocabulary.
“You didn’t see the usual – ‘Down with America, Kill the Jews, Allahhu Akhbar [God is great]‘ and all the rest. You heard words like liberty, freedom, equality, justice, an end to corruption.”
The people of the Arab world are more interested in improving their daily lives than demonising Israel, it seems.

Both pieces end with this:

Peter Hartcher is the international editor. He travelled to Israel as a guest of the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce.

Well, that’s alright then. It’s clearly too much to expect that a senior journalist from a major Australian paper would actually speak to people his guests haven’t arranged him to interview. Any Palestinians? Arabs? Gazans? Those under occupation? Discussion aboutIsrael’s growing racism problem?
This isn’t journalism; it’s akin to stenography.

Assange challenges Aussie journalist that Wikileaks has had no impact

Posted: 11 Apr 2011

Last night on ABC TV’s 7.30:

 

LEIGH SALES: Commentators have noted that in terms of what the cables revealed about American diplomacy, it didn’t show anything particularly scandalous, if anything it showed that there was quite a bit of consistency between America’s public positions and their private positions, although in private of course they are more frank. Do you agree with that assessment?
JULIAN ASSANGE: The statement that embarrassing information, information, internal information is revealed and it simply shows the US Government to be a good guy is something that is done by apologists. The cables across the board reveal a very nuanced position – everything from that state security apparatus using a diplomatic core to spy on NGOs and take their DNA all the way through to bona fide pushing of a human rights agenda in some countries. So we can see that the State Department and US embassies in their interactions with other governments are not the caricature that the White House presents, but neither are they the caricature that some leftists present.