A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Today’s Murdoch hackery; accusing Israel critics of anti-Semitism

Posted: 14 Aug 2011

Melbourne’s Herald Sun Alan Howe just doesn’t like Arabs too much. All those free trips to Israel thanks to the Zionist lobby have worked a treat. The Jewish community must be so proud that one of the strongest advocates for Israel in the Australian media also really hates Palestinians. Well done!
His latest piece, in today’s paper, attacks Federal Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon for, well, being alive but especially her backing of BDS, that evil plan to ethically cleanse all Jews from Palestine. Oh wait.
Here’s Howe:

Rhiannon also supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) group that targets Jewish companies doing business with Israel. The idea is to economically cripple the only democracy in the Middle East and the one country in which the region’s Arabs are guaranteed safety.
Rhiannon has boasted that South African cleric Desmond Tutu had written to support the boycotts.
Crikey, Tutu must have some time on his hands. You’d reckon the famed campaigner for freedom and democracy, and opponent of homophobia, would have been busy sorting out Zimbabwe, right next door.
Robert Mugabe has destroyed that country, kills his opponents and persecutes gays, who are described by their president as repugnant and repulsive – “I don’t believe they have any rights at all”. They are “lower than pigs and dogs”, he adds, fearful deputies nodding in agreement.
Tutu has criticised Mugabe in the past, but it’s more bark than bite.
Those Jewish dogs are different, though. Tutu and Rhiannon will sort them out.
Last month, as part of the campaign against Israel in those violent protests outside the Max Brenner chocolate shop in Melbourne, 19 demonstrators and three police were injured.
Some prominent Australians met to drink hot chocolate outside the Brenner shop some days later in a counter protest against the violence.
Smarter than Rhiannon, they know about the 1930s and where violent protests against Jewish traders may end. It was a colourful time of brownshirts, blackshirts, and yellow Stars of David. The streets ran red. The Green Senator should read up on it.

Breivik hated Muslims but loved Israel; discuss

Posted: 14 Aug 2011

Typically brilliant Slavoj Žižek from last week in the London Guardian:

Breivik is antisemitic but pro-Israel, as the state of Israel is the first line of defence against the Muslim expansion – he even wants to see the Jerusalem temple rebuilt. His view is that Jews are OK as long as there aren’t too many of them – or, as he wrote in his manifesto: “There is no Jewish problem in western Europe (with the exception of the UK and France) as we only have 1 million in western Europe, whereas 800,000 out of these 1 million live in France and the UK. The US, on the other hand, with more than 6 million Jews (600% more than Europe) actually has a considerable Jewish problem.” He realises the ultimate paradox of a Zionist Nazi – how is this possible?
A key is provided by the reactions of the European right to Breivik’s attack: its mantra was that in condemning his murderous act, we should not forget that he addressed “legitimate concerns about genuine problems” – mainstream politics is failing to address the corrosion of Europe by Islamicisation and multiculturalism, or, to quote the Jerusalem Post, we should use the Oslo tragedy “as an opportunity to seriously re-evaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere”. The newspaper has since apologised for this editorial. (Incidentally, we are yet to hear a similar interpretation of the Palestinian acts of terror, something like “these acts of terror should serve as an opportunity to re-evaluate Israeli politics”.)
A reference to Israel is, of course, implicit in this evaluation: a “multicultural” Israel has no chance to survive; apartheid is the only realistic option. The price for this properly perverse Zionist-rightist pact is that, in order to justify the claim to Palestine, one has to acknowledge retroactively the line of argumentation which was previously, in earlier European history, used against the Jews: the implicit deal is “we are ready to acknowledge your intolerance towards other cultures in your midst if you acknowledge our right not to tolerate Palestinians in our midst”.
…
The standard Zionist argument against the critics of the policies of the state of Israel is that, of course, like every other state, Israel can and should be judged and eventually criticised, but that the critics of Israel misuse the justified critique of Israeli policy for antisemitic purposes. When the Christian fundamentalist supporters of the Israeli politics reject leftist critiques of Israeli policies, their implicit line of argument is illustrated by a wonderful cartoon published in July 2008 in the Viennese daily Die Presse: it shows two stocky, Nazi-looking Austrians, one of them holding in his hands a newspaper and commenting to his friend: “Here you can see again how a totally justified antisemitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!” These are today’s allies of the state of Israel.

Why only corporate fools treat anything Tony Blair says seriously

Posted: 14 Aug 2011

The shameful legacy of Iraq should never be forgotten (via the Daily Mail):

The exhausted secret intelligence officer was heading home after a heavy session analysing reports from Iraq. As he stepped out through the high-security air-lock exit from MI6’s grand headquarters beside the Thames in London, a newspaper-seller’s placard caught his eye — ‘45 minutes from attack,’ it proclaimed.
Alarm bells rang in his head. It was September 2002, and Prime Minister Tony Blair had that day unveiled with great fanfare the government’s dossier detailing Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, as a justification for going to war.
He knew, in a way the public did not, the precise background to that headline. His first thought was that this was not what the original intelligence report had said. ‘If this goes wrong, we’re all screwed,’ he muttered to himself.
It did go wrong, spectacularly so, as a new history of MI6 by the BBC’s well-informed security correspondent Gordon Corera recounts. It’s a disturbing story of how tiny sparks of dubious information picked up in the backstreets of Baghdad and elsewhere were fanned into giant flames.
The result was a firecracker of a dossier which was pivotal in the run-up to the deeply divisive British and American invasion of Iraq. For many people, the scary information it disclosed — that Saddam was so advanced with his chemical and biological weapons that he could fire them with a mere 45 minutes notice — was a tipping point.
…
The ending of the Cold War and MI6’s legendary cat-and-mouse tussles with the KGB seemed to herald that redundancy. Then the post-9/11 era offered a new mission.
Out to prove it still had a vital use in the modern world, MI6 set to work.
Early drafts were begun of a dossier on Saddam’s weapons programmes.

Some MI6 officers were unhappy with the idea of working to so precise an agenda. ‘All our training, all our culture, bias, is against such a thing,’ one complained.
But there was no stopping what quickly became a juggernaut as Britain’s two most senior spies — Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, and John Scarlett, chairman of the government’s Joint Intelligence Committee, whose job was to sift and assess MI6’s information — became central to the build-up to war.
Dearlove in particular became one of the Prime Minister’s closest advisers and, according to officials, enjoyed a ‘privileged relationship’. Blair was open about his reliance on him to provide the central plank of the argument for intervening in Iraq. At one point he turned to his spy chief and said: ‘Richard, my fate is in your hands.’
Meanwhile, Scarlett was working closely with Downing Street, to the extent that Alastair Campbell, Blair’s all-powerful media director, would talk of him as a ‘mate’ and ‘a very good bloke’.
The JIC’s brief was to make its dossier suitable for publication to the public, in itself an unprecedented step in the publicity-shy world of spies. Campbell called for it to be ‘revelatory’. As the drafting process continued, Scarlett attended meetings chaired by Campbell to look at the presentation.
Intelligence was being sucked closer to policy than it had ever been before in MI6’s history.
Scarlett disputes this, maintaining that he was just putting information in the public domain not taking sides. Subordinates disagree.
‘We knew the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war,’ one senior military intelligence officer later complained. ‘Every fact was managed to make it as strong as possible.’
Direction and pressure were being applied on the JIC and its drafters, he maintained. A line had been crossed. Intelligence was being used as a tool for political persuasion.

Racist, Israeli education leads Zionists to demonise Palestinians

Posted: 13 Aug 2011

 
More here on the new research by Israeli academic Nurit Peled-Elhanan

“The United States is not qualified to intervene on behalf of democracy in the region [Middle East]“

Posted: 13 Aug 2011