A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

NOVANEWS

Let Vanunu free, finally
Posted: 23 May 2010

The nightmare of Israeli nuclear whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu continues. This saga has turned to farce. Vanunu wants to leave the Jewish state permanently and start a new life but he is being refused. These are not the actions of a democracy:

Nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, released in 2004 after 18 years in prison for leaking Israeli nuclear secrets, began serving an additional 3-month sentence on Sunday for refusing to carry out court-mandated community service.
“I survived 18 years – I could survive another six,” Vanunu called out outside the Jerusalem District Court. “Are you trying to discipline me? You cannot take my freedom of expression away”
“Freedom is freedom. You won’t get from me in three months what you didn’t get in 18 years,” he added.
He warned that the Shin Bet security service “controls the prisons” and that they will try to torture him psychologically, the same way they did the last time he was incarcerated.
“Shame on you Israel,” he continued. “The stupid Shin Bet and Mossad spies are putting me back in prison after 24 years of speaking nothing but the truth. Shame on you democracy, the Knesset, synagogues and the world media. Shame on you all the Arabs that are allowing me to be put back in prison.
Shame on you Senate, congress, and the chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency for not protecting my freedom. Shame on you all the world’s religions, the stupid spies, the Jews, Christians and Muslims.
“Everyone knows that Israel has nuclear weapons,” he went on to say, “but no one is talking about it… The world doesn’t want nuclear weapons – not in Israel, not in the Middle East and not anywhere in the world.”
A panel of High Court Judges returned the 56-year-old Moroccan-born Israeli to jail after he failed to fulfill a community service order, punishment for breaching his parole terms by contacting foreigners without authorization.
The former nuclear technician had asked to be assigned community duties in Arab-majority East Jerusalem after claiming he risked attack by angry Israelis, many of whom see him as a traitor, in the city’s Jewish-populated west.

Sipping that cocktail in Sri Lanka should wait til the blood is removed
Posted: 23 May 2010

Sri Lanka is desperate to lure tourists back to the country after decades of fighting (and most of the Western, corporate press seem oblivious to the gross human rights abuses still taking place in the north and east).
But anybody with an ounce of decency would seriously re-consider visiting a nation plagued with violence and corruption:

Britons are again flocking to Sri Lanka. Tourist arrivals surged 47% last month from a year earlier and sun-seekers from the UK form the largest single group. That’s an astounding turnaround for a country that for more than a quarter of a century had been a case study in ethnic warfare, terrorism and brutal repression.
This week the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, buoyed by recent wins in presidential and parliamentary elections, marks the first anniversary of its military victory over the separatist Tamil Tigers.
In the past few months Sri Lanka has been trying to burnish its image as an Indian Ocean paradise. And with some success. In January, the influential travel section of The New York Times slapped a picture of Colombo’s colonial-era Galle Face hotel on its front page and put Sri Lanka at the top of its 31 Places To Go in 2010 list.
And a western tourist sipping palm wine on a white sand beach or Ceylon tea in a plantation hill station might agree. The weather’s balmy, the people smile, and the price is oh-so right.
What visitors might not notice is that broad swaths of the mainly Tamil north and east of the country are still effectively closed military zones, and tens of thousands of Tamil civilians displaced by last year’s army onslaught are still held in camps. Visitors would have a hard time finding independent reporting on these stories in the Sri Lankan media. But not to worry. So would Sri Lankans.
Peace may be bringing a dividend for tourism and other business, but not for free speech. The Tamil press has long been intimidated and is extremely wary of being the first to break news critical of the government or the military. But now the Sinhala and English language press based in Colombo is also under fire.
The writing on the wall for those who report critically on Rajapaksa or his extended family, which occupies positions of power and influence throughout the island, came in January last year with the brutal beating to death in broad daylight of Lasantha Wickramatunga, editor in chief of the popular Sunday Leader newspaper.
That still unsolved murder sent a chill throughout the media. More attacks and harassment of reporters followed. Journalists, who already toned down or spiked critical stories, began to censor themselves even more. Several slipped out of the country fearing for their safety.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), in its latest report on Sri Lankan media, estimates that a total of 10 journalists have been killed for their work in the past decade, and that more than 25 have fled into exile. The authorities have not secured a single conviction in any of those 10 murders. This has earned Sri Lanka the dishonour of fourth place on the CPJ’s Global Impunity Index, which ranks countries that fail to bring the killers of journalists to justice.
Troublesome journalists sometimes just disappear. Once such is Prageeth Ekneligoda, a columnist and cartoonist whose wife and two sons have not seen him since he left to cover the presidential election campaign on 24 January. Police seem uninterested in investigating his disappearance. His editor at the online news site Lanka eNews, Sandaruwan Senadheera, has already fled the country.
Sri Lanka is used to having its poor human rights record under the spotlight. Western democracies have lost some of their leverage to effect change as the government in Colombo has turned to Asian countries for arms, aid and investment. China and Pakistan provided much of the weaponry for the final push against Tamil insurgents; Iran is financing the construction of a power station and supplying oil; and China is providing loans and labour for air, sea and rail transport projects.
But in addition to tourism, Sri Lanka still relies on Europe and the United States as export markets, particularly for apparel. Sri Lankan textiles entering the European Union enjoy low tariffs under the generalised system of preferences known as GSP+. Brussels has said it could suspend that privilege in August as part of a review of the island’s human rights performance. Colombo has sought to play down the importance of the GSP+ but the EU accounts for 35% of Sri Lanka textile exports. The loss of that market could jeopardise 200,000 jobs.
Those who care about freedom of expression and the safety of journalists in Sri Lanka have few opportunities to influence the new government in Sri Lanka. The prospect of suspending preferential tariffs gives the EU a powerful tool to extract human rights improvements from Sri Lanka. Brussels should use it.

Who now can truly deny the love between apartheid South Africa and Israel?
Posted: 23 May 2010

The closeness of Israel and apartheid South Africa revealed far more than simple realpolitik. It was about “values”, the belief of maintaining racial superiority over the indigenous population. And now this revelation:

Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state’s possession of nuclear weapons.
The “top secret” minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa’s defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them “in three sizes”. The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that “the very existence of this agreement” was to remain secret.
The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of “ambiguity” in neither confirming nor denying their existence.
The Israeli authorities tried to stop South Africa’s post-apartheid government declassifying the documents at Polakow-Suransky’s request and the revelations will be an embarrassment, particularly as this week’s nuclear non-proliferation talks in New York focus on the Middle East.
They will also undermine Israel’s attempts to suggest that, if it has nuclear weapons, it is a “responsible” power that would not misuse them, whereas countries such as Iran cannot be trusted.

The journalist who wrote this story, Chris McGreal, penned a penetrating series of articles about the increasing similarity between apartheid South Africa and Israel. Back in 2006.

Italian supermarkets reject products from Zionist colonies
Posted: 23 May 2010

This is a step by step campaign but watch how growing numbers of global citizens (and corporations) are taking a stand:

Following lobbying efforts by the Italian Coalition against Carmel-Agrexco, two major Italian supermarket chains, COOP and Nordiconad, announced the suspension of sales of products from Agrexco, the principal exporter of produce from Israel and the illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Nordiconad Director Mr. Covili announced that as of the end of April, Agrexco products will no longer be found in their supermarkets.
Nordiconad is a cooperative responsible for central purchasing and distribution operations for CONAD in northern Italy. COOP Italia, via quality assurance Director Mr. Zucchi, instead confirmed that there is a problem with traceability, namely that the consumer is unable to verify whether or not the product in question comes from the occupied territories. Therefore COOP Italia has decided to “suspend the supply of products from the occupied territories.”

Finkelstein vs Morris
Posted: 23 May 2010

Russia Today hosts a discussion on Israel/Palestine between American writer Norman Finkelstein and Israeli historian Benny Morris. One believes in seemingly endless war against the Arabs and the other understands the profound destruction of the Zionist state:

America, land of the cyber warrior
Posted: 23 May 2010

Who trusts Washington to keep the internet free?

The US military has appointed its first senior general to direct cyber warfare – despite fears that the move marks another stage in the militarisation of cyberspace.
The newly promoted four-star general, Keith Alexander, takes charge of the Pentagon’s ambitious and controversial new Cyber Command, designed to conduct virtual combat across the world’s computer networks. He was appointed on Friday afternoon in a low-key ceremony at Fort Meade, in Maryland.
The creation of America’s most senior cyber warrior comes just days after the US air force disclosed that some 30,000 of its troops had been re-assigned from technical support “to the frontlines of cyber warfare”.
The creation of Cyber Command is in response to increasing anxiety over the vulnerability of the US’s military and other networks to a cyber attack.
James Miller, the deputy under-secretary of defence for policy, has hinted that the US might consider a conventional military response to certain kinds of online attack.
While Alexander has tried to play down the offensive aspects of his command, the Pentagon has been more explicit, stating on Friday that Cyber Command will “direct the operations and defence of specified Department of Defense information networks [involving some 90,000 military personnel] and prepare to, when directed, conduct full-spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, [to] ensure US allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.”
The complex issues facing Cyber Command were thrown into relief earlier this year when the Washington Post revealed details of a so-called “dot-mil” operation by Fort Meade’s cyber warfare unit, backed by Alexander, to shut down a “honeytrap website” set up by the Saudis and the CIA to target Islamist extremists planning attacks in Saudi Arabia.
The Pentagon became convinced that the forum was being used to co-ordinate the entry of jihadi fighters into Iraq.
Despite the strong objections of the CIA, the site was attacked by the Fort Meade cyber warfare unit. As a result, some 300 other servers in the Saudi kingdom, Germany and Texas also were inadvertently shut down.