A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

Neo-con bigot joins Palestinian neo-con to expose those pesky Arabs

Posted: 20 Sep 2011

Yesterday I received the following email from Daniel Pipes:

Please join me on a visit to Israel on March 7-15, 2012. Heritage Study Programs, a leading tour company, has asked me to lead a one -time only informative, enjoyable, and inexpensive week.

Our focus will be on my special interest – the nearly 20 percent of Israel’s population who are Muslim, often called Israeli Arabs. The trip will offer special insight into current problems: Are Israeli Arabs integrating or isolating themselves? Are they Palestinians? What is the role of Arab immigration to Israel? How does this growing population affect the long-term welfare and survival of the Jewish state?

Shin Bet calls the Israeli Arab population a “genuine long-range danger to the Jewish character and very existence of the State of Israel.” Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman questions its citizenship. I have called it Israel’s “existential danger.”

With current attention on other matters (Middle Eastern upheavals, Palestinian statehood, Turkish bellicosity, the Iranian nuclear buildup), this topic tends to get brushed aside. But when the other problems have been resolved, Israel must deal with its Muslim community.

Khaled Abu Toameh, the Jerusalem Post’s distinguished West Bank and Gaza correspondent, will co-lead with me an unprecedented first-hand exploration of this and related subjects.

The trip will include travels to key locations, informative meetings, and lively discussions. You will meet with Israeli-Arab leaders, academics and researchers, with intelligence, police, military officers, high government officials, policy makers and counterterrorism experts. We will participate in a conference at the Menachem Begin Heritage Centeron Muslim attitudes toward Jerusalem.

I hope you will come with me to Tel Aviv, Haifa, the Galilee, and Jerusalem. You will visit some of Israel’s most renowned sites, including the Golan Heights, the Sea of Galilee, the Western Wall, and areas around the Temple Mount.

Neither tour nor mission, this intimate fact-finding expedition will challenge and change your understanding of Israel.

Let’s be clear. Here we have a fusion between a Zionist fundamentalist, Pipes, and a Palestinian journalist with the pro-settlerJerusalem Post, Abu Toameh, helping to “expose” the supposedly existential threat of Arabs inside Israel.

Abu Toameh was recently in Australia as a guest of the Zionist lobby.

Get in line, blood suckers; much money to be made in Afghanistan

Posted: 20 Sep 2011

War! Money! Capitalism! Exploitation!

Yes, as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald writes, privatisation is bringing goodness to the peaceful land of Afghanistan:

As the Obama administration announced plans for hundreds of billions of dollars more in domestic budget cuts, it late last week solicited bids for the construction of a massive new prison in Bagram, Afghanistan.  Posted on the aptly named FedBizOps.Gov website which it uses to announce new privatized spending projects, the administration unveiled plans for “the construction of Detention Facility in Parwan (DFIP), Bagram, Afghanistan” which includes “detainee housing capability for approximately 2000 detainees.”  It will also feature “guard towers, administrative facility and Vehicle/Personnel Access Control Gates, security surveillance and restricted access systems.”  The announcement provided: ”the estimated cost of the project is between $25,000,000 to $100,000,000.”

Hugh Grant explains what should happen to media bastardry in Britain

Posted: 20 Sep 2011

Roll up to find your deadly weapon of choice

Posted: 20 Sep 2011

The arms industry is a massive global market of Western nations, willing dictatorships and heaps of money.

New Statesman reports on the world’s largest arms fair recently held in London:

The two main exhibition halls have previously hosted concerts by Roxy Music, Alice Cooper and UB40. But today they are crammed with around 1300 exhibits, selling guns, bombs and the latest in security technology. A handful of stalls are devoted to life-saving equipment. Most of the space, however, is reserved for displays featuring 100lb hellfire missiles, AK47 rifles, stealth tanks and even gold-plated handguns.

The quiet dissipates and is replaced by the sound of chatter. Business cards change hands, and multi-million pound contracts are being negotiated. At a large stand run by the defence arm of SAAB, a Swedish company more renowned for its cars, Håkan Kappelin is showing off a laser-guided missile system to delegates from India. It has a range of 8km and can travel at speeds of up to 680 metres per second.

“It could be deployed inside a city like London. And you can engage any type of target,” he says. “Not like when you use an infra-red system, where you have problems with houses in the background. Just reload in five seconds and engage the next target.”

The delegates nod approvingly. “680 metres per second,” one repeats to another.

Upstairs, in a briefing room, Defence Secretary Liam Fox delivers a speech. Anti-arms campaigners have levelled criticism against the government for doing deals with Bahrain and Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of crackdowns on protesters across the Arab world. Fox is dismissive. “I am proud that the UK is the second biggest defence exporter in the world,” he says. “This is fundamental part of the coalition government’s agenda for economic growth, but it is also part of our strategy of enlightened international engagement.”

UN Palestine vote does nothing for Palestinian rights

Posted: 20 Sep 2011

As the UN vote on Palestine nears, opinion in much of the Western media is to support the bid. A sense of ‘about time’ and ‘Palestine deserves to be a state’ permeates the coverage. Predictably, Murdoch’s Australian shows its ingrained hatred of Arabs in today’s editorial (with no mention of the occupation, which for the paper is merely a few houses scattered on empty land).

Palestinian Ali Abunimah writes in Foreign Affairs that in fact the two-state solution is so dead and buried that the world supporting the UN vote don’t even acknowledge they are signing its death warrant:

More fundamentally, though, the entire discussion of statehood ignores the facts on the ground. For starters, the PA fails the traditional criteria for statehood laid out in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States: it controls neither territory nor external borders (except for the tiny enclaves it polices under the supervision of Israeli occupation forces). It is prohibited under the 1993 Oslo Accords from freely entering into relations with other states. As for possessing a permanent population, the majority of the Palestinian people are prohibited by Israel from entering the area on which the PA purports to claim statehood solely because they are not Jews (under Israel’s discriminatory Law of Return, Jews from anywhere in the world can settle virtually anywhere in Israel or the occupied territories, while native-born Palestinian refugees and their children are excluded). The PA cannot issue passports or identity documents; Israeli authorities control the population registry. No matter how the UN votes, Israel will continue to build settlements in the West Bank and maintain its siege of Gaza. As all this suggests, any discussion of real sovereignty is a fantasy.

Nor is the strategy likely to produce even formal UN membership or recognition. That would require approval by the Security Council, which the Obama administration has vowed to veto. The alternative is some sort of symbolic resolution in the UN General Assembly upgrading the status of the existing Palestinian UN observer mission — a decision with little practical effect. Such an outcome will hardly be worth all the energy and fuss, especially when there are other measures that the UN could take that would have much greater impact. For example, Palestinians would be better off asking for strict enforcement of existing but long ignored Security Council resolutions, such as Resolution 465, which was passed in 1980 and calls on Israel to “dismantle the existing settlements” in the occupied territories and determines that all Israel’s measures “to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity” and are flagrant violations of international law.

Ultimately, any successful strategy should focus not on statehood but on rights. In its statement on the UN bid, the BNC emphasized that regardless of what happens in September, the global solidarity struggle must continue until Israel respects Palestinian rights and obeys international law in three specific ways: ending the occupation of Arab lands that began in 1967 and dismantling the West Bank wall that was ruled illegal in 2004 by the International Court of Justice; removing all forms of legal and social discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel and guaranteeing full equal rights; and offering full respect for Palestinian refugee rights, including the right of return. Palestinians and Israelis are not in a situation of equals negotiating an end to a dispute but are, respectively, colonized and colonizer, much as blacks and whites were in South Africa. This truth must be recognized, and pushing for such recognition would resonate far more with the Palestinian public than empty statehood talk.

Future for good journalism is interactivity (or death)

Posted: 19 Sep 2011

Following last weekend’s first investigative journalism conference in Australia, Pacific Media Watch have highlighted some of the key points discussed by yours truly:

Freelance journalist and author Antony Loewenstein, speaking about Wikileaks, said Julian Assange’s efforts were miles ahead of the mainstream media, as he was not concerned about corporate pressures, and delivered maximum information to the public.

“The power the mainstream media has is to choose the agenda,” he said. “[Wikileaks] shows the public the stories we aren’t seeing. It threatens the power that has lasted so long.”

He said journalists needed to give up that power of having the information they were privy to, and to be open to more interaction with citizens on their websites.