A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

Is this a case of a preemptive buckle on the part of the ABC or something else entirely? You decide:

The distributor of an Australian documentary sympathetic to the Palestinian cause was told it would not screen on the ABC until a program taking an opposing position was available for broadcast.
The ruling has outraged the film’s distributors and the Friends of the ABC, which has accused the broadcaster of a distorted interpretation of its commitment to impartiality.
The ABC wrote to Ronin Films, the distributor of Hope in a Slingshot, to inform them of the ABC’s concern over screening the documentary, which tells the story of Palestinians living under what it terms ”military occupation” by Israel.
”The documentary clearly meets the requirement of having a particular point of view, and relating to a matter of contention and public debate,” the ABC’s director of television, Kim Dalton, wrote to the managing director of Ronin Films, Andrew Pike, in a letter seen by the Herald. ”However under the editorial policies ABC TV is also required to meet an impartiality requirement.”
He cited the ABC’s editorial policy that required it to demonstrate impartiality in coverage by ”providing content of a similar type and weight and in an appropriate timeframe”.
”The ABC has not been able to access content which would put an alternative view and therefore we would be unable to meet the impartiality requirement.”
Dr Pike says the film makes a strong pro-peace statement on the Middle East conflict by interviewing human rights activists, both Israeli and Palestinian. The documentary is narrated by the filmmaker, Australian Inka Stafrace, who talks about her experience in the conflict zone.
”The call for balance defies logic and contradicts the ABC’s own routine programming decisions,” Dr Pike said.
A Friends of the ABC spokeswoman, Glenys Stradijot, said the decision took the commitment to bias avoidance to an absurd extreme.
She said it was important for the ABC to stand up to the pressure on contentious issues such as the Middle East. ”If the ABC’s bowing to that sort of pressure that’s not a good thing for an independent broadcaster.”
The executive director of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, Colin Rubenstein, said he was unaware of the film.

Oh Israel, you make it so hard to like you.
The Gaza Flotilla is on its way towards the Strip but Zionist propaganda is in full swing. Here’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman:

The aid convoy is violent propaganda against Israel, and Israel will not allow its sovereignty to be threatened in any way, in any place – land, air or sea. There is no humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Despite Hamas’ war crimes against Israeli citizens and the thousands of rockets fired at Israeli towns, Israel continues to respond in the most humane way possible.

What generous souls.
In reality, Israel is attempting to deceive the world by suggesting Gazans are coping just fine under siege.
Here’s how real journalism debunks Zionist spin (courtesy of Al-Jazeera):

The only, real way a man can show his show for Sarah Palin.

The recent speech by the new Israeli ambassador to New Zealand – a position that has been vigorously protested by locals over the last months – at the opening of the new embassy in Wellington:

The reopening of this Mission reflects the importance that Israel attaches to its relations with New Zealand. The primary aim of the new Embassy is to advance ties between our two nations, in all fields. In spite of the enormous geographical distance between our two small countries, we share common values – an enterprising spirit, a love for our land, a strong belief in freedom and democracy, and the desire for a peaceful world, based on tolerance and mutual respect. Israel and New Zealand share expertise in a number of fields, including science and technology, agriculture, fisheries, medicine, trade and water management.

It must be hard to sell an occupying nation that gladly imprisons millions of Palestinians.

My following article appears in today’s Canberra Times newspaper:

The headline in the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz this week was striking: ”Who says Jews and racism don’t go together?” Columnist Akiva Eldar discussed the revelations in a new book by a senior editor at Foreign Policy magazine that details the extensive relationship between apartheid South Africa and Israel. The work by Sasha Polakow Suransky, The Unspoken Alliance, has already triggered front-page headlines across the globe, especially the allegation that Israel was on the verge of selling nuclear technology to Pretoria in the 1970s, a charge vigorously denied by Israel’s current President Shimon Peres, then defence minister.
Suransky recounts how in 1974 Peres, sitting in Yitzhak Rabin’s first government, returned from a secret visit to South Africa and wrote to his gracious hosts that, ”this cooperation is based not only on common interests and on the determination to resist equally our enemies, but also on the unshakeable foundations of our common hatred of injustice and refusal to submit to it.” Less than two years later, Israel welcomed South African prime minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem and he was given full diplomatic status throughout his stay.
Vorster was an unapologetic backer of National Socialism in Germany and regularly compared his country to the supposed achievements under Nazi Germany. In 1976, Israel was still searching the world for former Nazis but realpolitik took centre stage. The relationship between the nations was initially economic but soon developed into a deeper ideological commitment to racial supremacy.
Suransky writes in his prologue that by the end of the 1970s, ”many members of the [ruling] Likud Party shared with South Africa’s leaders an ideology of minority survivalism that presented the two countries as threatened outposts of European civilisation defending their existence against barbarians at the gates.”
The African National Congress and Palestinian Liberation Organisation were common enemies that allegedly threatened the established order so a brutal war against ”terrorism” had to be waged. Israel provided arms, uranium and military training to Pretoria when global sanctions were in place and even while the Jewish state publicly chastised the government’s extremism.
One of the few countries willing to provide secret support for South Africa’s racial policies until the fall of apartheid in 1994 was Israel. Suransky has uncovered mountains of documents that detail the close ties between the military establishments of both countries. For example, in 1977 South African General Constand Viljoen visited the occupied Palestinian territories and was astonished with the level of efficiency of the Israeli checkpoint system (hundreds of which are still in operation across the West Bank today). He wrote a report to his country’s defence minister that, ”the thoroughness with which Israel conducts this examination is astonishing. At the quickest, it takes individual Arabs that come through there about one-and-a-half hours. When the traffic is heavy, it takes from four to five hours.”
The Israeli policy of separation remains in effect today. US magazine The Nation recently uncovered a segregated road network throughout the West Bank, built by the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, that facilitates the Israeli goal of annexing vast sections of the West Bank, making a Palestinian state impossible.
In another sign of South African-inspired policy, Route 443 is a road that runs through the West Bank and has long been inaccessible to Palestinians; only Israelis have been allowed to use it. Although the Israeli High Court ruled recently that the road be open to all, this week the Israeli military announced that they would introduce new checkpoints along the route, further isolating the indigenous population in the area.
The justifications for such moves are remarkably consistent with the South African model. ”Security” and ”fighting terrorism” are buzzwords used by the Zionist state to discriminate along racial lines. The announcement last week by musician Elvis Costello to not play in Israel due to his concerns over treatment of Palestinians is just the latest example of a growing global movement to isolate Israel until it conforms to international, humanitarian law. Similar tactics were used successfully against apartheid South Africa.
Recent months have even seen ongoing attacks against South African judge Richard Goldstone who documented for the United Nations war crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas during the January 2009 invasion. He has been accused of being an ”apartheid judge” sentencing blacks to their deaths during the dark days of the regime but critics conveniently ignore, as Suransky notes in Foreign Policy, that, ”Israel’s government did far more to aid the apartheid regime than Goldstone ever did.”
Israel’s relationship with apartheid South Africa remains relevant today because one regime recognised the errors of its way and reformed while the other merely accelerates the colonisation process.
The Unspoken Alliance may be recent history, but its message resonates into the 21st century, highlighting the moral degradation of discriminating, harassing and isolating one people at the barrel of a gun.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and the author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution

Debate over the recent Peter Beinart article on Zionism and American Jewry in the New York Review of Books continues.
Here’s Beinart, the sensible Zionist liberal debating neo-con Eli Lake, almost comically defending the democratic credentials of the Jewish state despite the mass evidence against it: