A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Tony Karon in Time.com shows what happens when you brutally occupy another people for decades; the world gets sick of it:

Israel’s fallout with long-time ally Turkey is no isolated spat that will be repaired any time soon; it’s a dramatic illustration that no amount of U.S. backing can prevent the growing international isolation resulting from Israel’s handling of the Palestinian issue. Indeed, the unconditional nature of Washington’s backing may, in fact, have become dysfunctional to Israel’s diplomatic standing: A U.S. domestic political climate in which challenging Israel on anything is about as wise as threatening to cut medicare payments leaves Washington unable to restrain the most right-wing government in Israeli history from its most self-destructive urges, while economic changes and the radical policies adopted by the United States in the decade since 9/11 have left Washington’s influence in the Middle East at its weakest since World War II.

The trigger for Turkey expelling Israel’s ambassador, cutting defense ties and vowing to wage a diplomatic campaignagainst the blockade of Gaza and in support of the Palestinian move for recognition of statehood at the United Nations was the Netanyahu government’s refusal to apologize for the killing of nine Turkish citizens and a Turkish American in last year’s raid on the Gaza flotilla. The Obama Administration had tried to broker a rapprochement involving some form of Israeli apology, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had reportedly been inclined to accept but his ultranationalist foreign minister and key coalition partner (as well as rival) Avidgor Lieberman refused to countenance it.

The breakdown, however, is about a lot more than an apology: The flotilla itself, after all, had sailed in direct challenge to the Gaza blockade, with the support of the Turkish government — an expression of the fact that Ankara was no longer willing to follow its NATO allies, under U.S. leadership, in turning a blind eye to the plight of the beleaguered Palestinians. Israeli leaders and their most enthusiastic boosters in Washington like to paint this as a sign that Turkey had “gone over” to the region’s Iranian-led “resistance” camp, but despite the ruling AK Party’s roots in moderate political Islam and its insistence on a political solution to the nuclear standoff with Iran, Turkey is in fact a regional rival for influence with Tehran. Ankara’s stance on the Palestinians, like its refusal to support or enable the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq and its stance on the Iran nuclear issue or its break with the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, is based on its own reading of what’s good for the region — which is quite different from Washington’s — and on Turkish public opinion. And, as if to underscore the fact that its break with Israel doesn’t threaten its commitment to NATO, Turkey announced last week that it had agreed to host radar installations for a NATO missile defense system targeting Iran.

Turkey’s actions also reflect a growing international impatience with and loss of faith in Washington’s handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel is worried, with good reason, that Egypt — whose foreign policy has been made more responsive to public opinion by the overthrow of the Israel-friendly U.S.-backed President Hosni Mubarak last February — may follow the Turkish example.

And the fact that a Palestinian leadership that has essentially mortgaged its political fate to the U.S. for the past two decades is now proceeding, over Washington’s objections, to seek U.N. recognition of a state based on the 1967 — and will likely win the backing of the overwhelming majority of member states — is testimony to the collapse of a tacit acceptance by U.S. allies since the Oslo Accords that the Israeli-Palestinian file would remain Washington’s exclusivepreserve.

The anniversary of 9/11 is a good time to reflect on one of the growing alliances in modern times; the far-right in Europe and beyond and hardline Zionism. Its most extreme form was expressed by the Norway killer Anders Breivik. He “loved” Israel because the Zionist state is constantly fighting, killing and demeaning Arabs and Muslims.

Jeff Sparrow writes that fascist groups are increasingly hitching on the anti-BDS bandwagon, expressing devotion to Israel and hatred of Muslims. Where is the Jewish establishment, political mainstream and Zionist community? Perhaps being a “friend of Israel” trumps all else:

As Michael Brull noted here a few weeks ago, the anti-Max Brenner protesters have been widely denounced as Nazis.

Paul Howes, Michael Danby, Andrew Bolt, Gerard Henderson: have all joined in a very public campaign that draws a line between the Brenner protests and Fascist anti-semitism.

It’s certainly true that, throughout Australia, fascists are increasingly taking an interest in the Max Brenner rallies. But here’s the thing: they’re not supporting the protests.

They’re supporting the stores.

The newest face of what’s euphemistically-called the ‘nationalist community’ is an outfit called the Australian Protectionist Party. The APP was formed by Mark Wilson, a former organiser of the fascist British National Party, who emigrated to Australia in the 1980s. One of the APP’s most active members is Nicholas Hunter-Folkes. He was formerly the administrator of a charming Facebook group called ‘F**k off, we’re full’. More recently, however, he launched a new Facebook event entitled ‘Protest Against the Mad Marxists’: essentially, a counter-rally in support of the Sydney Max Brenner shop.

“The hardline left, radical Muslim and student groups have been campaigning for the closure of any business with links to Israel,” he explains, “[…] The left totally ignore the aggression and agenda of the Islamists in the Middle East and also in Australia.”

Another prominent APP leader is Darrin Hodges, a long-time racist activist. Joe Hildebrand once identified Hodges as the semi-anonymous poster on the Nazi Stormfront site explaining that: “I’m more interested in the purer form of fascism… and while I don’t subscribe to the whole ‘worship Hitler’ thing, his comments on multiculturalism and politics in general are still just as relevant today as they were 70-odd years ago.”

Not so long ago, Hodges distinguished himself on the ABC’s Q&A show complaining about Camden being invaded by Muslims.

On Stormfront, the poster identified by Hildebrand as Hodges argued that Hitler’s writings “still have much relevance …” Now, Hodges too, has created a Facebook event urging protests in support of Max Brenner counter protests.

Hodges’s page is in the name of the Australian Defence League. The ADL is another far-right grouplet that, like the APP, draws its inspiration from Britain. Over there, the English Defence League, a group with well-documented fascist connections, has become notorious for sending shaven-headed boot boys into areas with large Muslim populations, while, a few days ago, photos leaked of EDL members posing, military-style, with all kinds of weapons.

In Melbourne, the ADL has tried holding EDL-style marches but fortunately without much success.

Now, it has also made support for Max Brenner a priority.

…

The right in Israel might have its own reasons for welcoming fundamentalist Christian Zionists and German racial populists and the rest of the crackpot crew who have decided that they can surf the Islamophobic wave into respectability. But it’s a hop, skip and a jump from the tropes of the new Islamophobic bigotry to those of old-style anti-Semitism, and what’s good for Israel might very well have disastrous consequences elsewhere.

Amira Hass from Haaretz writes in the New Statesman with typical power on the 10th anniversary of 9/11:

It was 4pm in Palestine and Israel when the Hollywood-style scene of the falling towers for ever invaded our imagery and vocabulary. I was at home, in Ramallah, and I have no recollection what I was writing for Haaretz when human disaster gained such immediate global visibility.

It was almost a year since the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising. My routine reporting laboured to remind the Israeli readers about our repressive military domination, and make visible the spiralling number of Palestinian civilian casualties, killed by the Israeli army. A doomed attempt. The Israeli vocabulary had space for Israeli pain and bereavement only. It made no causal link between supremacy and revolt, repression and revenge.

Did I betray my profession when I never wrote what one young Palestinian journalist had told me? She did not rejoice over the dead but was proud to see the symbols of empire attacked. Whether she represented the general mood among Palestinians, I cannot tell. But I could not quote her candid words while the cloud of smoke and dust still hovered above Manhattan. The trenchant comment would have been misinterpreted as an endorsement.

You would think Israel is about to be attacked tomorrow by aliens coming to suck the Zionism away. If only.

In reality, today sees yet more craven politicians – including some Greens, who clearly have been pressured by the Zionist lobby and their Dear Leader in Canberra (aka Bob Brown) and just want BDS to go away, which it won’t – and unionists who have no understanding about Palestine.

Feel the hysteria? It’ll only get worse as Israel continues to descend into its own occupying ways and these cretins will be remembered as being on the wrong side of history.

Sydney Morning Herald:

The NSW Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham has spoken out against the targeting of Max Brenner chocolate stores as part of an anti-Israel boycott, deepening the split within the Greens over the issue.

Mr Buckingham argued that the campaign was ”counter-productive to the cause of peace and human rights in the Middle East”. He has also joined the Parliamentary Friends of Israel, as well as the equivalent Palestinian friendship group.

The boycott of the Israeli-owned Max Brenner stores has been a controversial part of the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign in support of Palestinian rights.

The store’s parent company, the Strauss Group, supports the Israel Defence Forces.

Mr Buckingham’s criticism is likely to deepen the split within the Greens over support for the campaign, which derailed the party’s bid to take the seat of Marrickville at March’s state election.

The Greens senator Lee Rhiannon has publicly supported the Max Brenner boycott and the campaign in comments that are at odds with the federal Greens Leader, Bob Brown.

”There are a variety of ways to express concern about the abuse of Palestinian human rights and to push for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” Mr Buckingham said yesterday.

”I am concerned that the tone and the public perception of the Max Brenner protests may be counter-productive to the cause of peace and human rights in the Middle East”.

Max Phillips, a Greens councillor on Mr Buckingham’s staff, helped overturn Marrickville council’s support for the Israel boycott earlier this year.

Cr Phillips was one of two Greens on the council who changed their vote and sided with Labor and independents against the mayor, Fiona Byrne, to scrap the policy. The NSW Greens are reviewing their support for the international campaign.

The anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign has been dismissed by one of Victoria’s most senior unionists as potentially racist, ludicrous and a recipe for a civil war in the Middle East.

In a scathing critique of the campaign, Victorian Trades Hall Council assistant secretary David Cragg warned the union leadership of the flaws in the logic and integrity of the BDS strategy.

Mr Cragg also reminded his colleagues of the “totally repugnant history” of boycotting Jewish businesses, and questioned the comparison of Israel with apartheid South Africa.

“If the strategic goal of BDS is not just to end the settlements in the West Bank but to change the demographic composition of Israel, it is clearly a racist and frankly ludicrous enterprise at odds with the global consensus, which has always recognised Israel’s right to exist specifically as the state of the Jewish people legitimately created under international law and the UN Charter,” he said.

Ms Cragg said the slogan Boycott Israel should be rejected.

“Israel, as it is currently, would no longer exist if BDS achieves its goals,” he said.

Mr Cragg’s comments appear in a briefing paper to Trades Hall’s executive council and formed part of a report late last year on the BDS conference in Melbourne, which effectively launched the national campaign.

The comments represent what many believe is the majority union and Labor Party perspective. There is deep and growing embarrassment among many Labor supporters about outspoken unionists backing the BDS campaign, which is also advocated by Greens senator Lee Rhiannon.

The Australian has been approached by several senior Labor figures alarmed that the perception is being created that many in the party are backing the Palestinian-based BDS strategy.

There is limited backing for BDS among state MPs, and several prominent federal Labor MPs — including Michael Danby, Stephen Conroy and David Feeney — have voiced concerns.

However, the state Coalition has accused Labor of failing to denounce what it says is union support for BDS.

Mr Cragg, a respected Labor moderate with decades of party and union service, formed his views after observing a Melbourne BDS conference last November. “Some of the assertions that were made were clearly wrong and I have included in places a critical evaluation of what was said,” he wrote.

He also questioned the assertion by BDS supporters that Israel “stands out beyond all other human rights abuse in the world” because of its distinctive nature.

Mr Cragg countered: “The total number of people killed in the course of the Arab-Israeli and Israel-Palestinian conflicts over the last 90 years including seven wars and two intifadas is minuscule compared to the ongoing genocides in the Congo, Sudan, Nigeria, Western Sahara and Tibet, to count just a few global horror stories.”

The BDS campaign in Australia is set to intensify this month with further protests planned against the Israeli-owned Max Brenner chocolate shops.

Media diversity in the age of the internet offers even less excuses for the corporate press to ignore the depth and complexity of the world. And yet…

Evidence one (via the Columbia Journalism Review):

For the first time in history, mankind is developing a universal language: video. People now communicate with video on two billion computers and more than one and a half billion television sets, and by 2013 you can add another one billion video-capable people regularly accessing the web from their cellphones. The most popular spoken and written language is English, with 1.8 billion users. Looks like video already wins.

No wonder. Video is the distillation of the four ways people exchange information—speech, print, sound, and pictures. Video can convey more information more powerfully to more people in more places—and more quickly—than TV, radio, print, or the voice of the evangelist. And since, historically speaking, this age of video is relatively new, people are still getting better at acquiring and distributing their information via video.

Good news for the future of television news, right? “Luckily,” says Alex Wallace, an NBC News senior vice president, “we’re TV; we’re also based on pictures.”

Yes. Logically, the video revolution and television news should thrive together. But just as the rest of the world is alive with video information about a bullet-train crash in China or revolutions in Bahrain or Syria, America’s television screens, especially on cable news, are tuning out the world. When YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter show so much video of real life, why do ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox show us so little?

Data from long-term monitoring of American television news by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, as well as observations from our own much shorter-term sampling of American TV news outlets and a handful of foreign news channels, reveal several things:

• CNN has made a sharp turn away from video reporting. Fox News Channel now shows more video than CNN, while MSNBC, after some excellent reporting of the Arab Spring, rarely uses any video. Most of what it does broadcast is sound bites from the campaign trail, talking-heads-coal to talking-heads-Newcastle.

• At the networks, the loss is not in airtime but in authenticity, as “new ways to cover the news” increasingly substitute for journalists actually reporting from the scene.

• Worse, and displacing far more airtime from reporting, is the amount of talk. Interviews, panels, conversations among anchors, pundits, scholars, and “experts” which, at best, produce intelligent but evergreen generalizations by people who haven’t “been there” for a while, are preempting the current and specific observations available only from those who are there.

Evidence two (via the Nieman Journalism Lab):

The diminished capacity of American TV news networks to cover international news became sharply evident during the recent uprisings in the Middle East, most notably Egypt. Into that void stepped Al Jazeera English (AJE). With headquarters in Qatar and staff already stationed in Egypt, the global news media outlet quickly mobilized an on-the-ground newsgathering presence.

But most Americans couldn’t just turn on their televisions to watch AJE’s coverage. The network is largely absent from cable and the main satellite providers’ offerings despite being available in 250 million homes globally. As Ph.Dcandidates in communication studies at the University of Michigan, we were interested in the role that Americans’ perception of the channel might have in its difficulties getting cable carriage — and how online distribution might serve as a fruitful workaround. That led us to an experimental study that looked at how Al Jazeera branding might influence public perception of a piece of journalism.

…

We conducted an experimental study (pdf) on how potential viewer attitudes toward AJE change with exposure to the channel’s news content. Carried out online in late February to early March, our study involved 177 American participants, drawn from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk pool.

The participants were randomly assigned to three groups. Two of them watched an AJE-produced news clip about the Taliban’s position towards peace talks, which included minimal reference to America. The first group watched the original clip with AJE’s branding.

The second group saw the same news piece re-edited to carry CNN International’s (CNNI) logo.

The third group, the control, viewed no clip. We then asked participants in each group to rate, in general, how biased they thought AJE and CNNI were.

Watching the AJE clip — branded as AJE — did not seem to have an impact on perceptions of bias; bias ratings were equal between those in the AJE-clip-watching group and the control group.

But in the group that had just watched the clip with fake CNNI branding, participants rated CNNI as less biased than those in the control group.