A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Democracy Now! FreedomWaves journalist speaks out about Gaza flotilla

Posted: 08 Nov 2011 02:50 PM PST

How a glitch today on CNN.com provided most accurate portrait of journalism in 21st century

Posted: 08 Nov 2011

Yes.

Don’t be surprised that Islamophobes see Zionism as friend

Posted: 08 Nov 2011

The mainstream normalisation of anti-Muslim hatred is finding friends in the most predictable of places; Israel. This is something discussed in the new e-book On Utoya.

This piece in Israeli paper Haaretz offers a worrying new development:

Marine Le Pen hit the jackpot. She invited about 100 diplomats to a luncheon last week during a visit to UN Headquarters in New York. Four accepted: There were the envoys from Trinidad and Tobago, Armenia and Uruguay, who obviously are of no concern to her at all. But the entrance of the fourth guest, Israeli UN Ambassador Ron Prosor, made the event a sensation and worth her whole trip.

No official American representative agreed to meet with France’s extreme-right leader. Neither did any leader of the Jewish community. She failed in her attempt to stage a photo op at the Holocaust Museum, and skipped the visit. The French ambassador to the UN sent a sharp message that she is persona non grata in the United Nations building. But the Israeli envoy? He shook her hand and spoke of the importance that must be accorded to a wide variety of opinions.

“We flourish on the diversity of ideas,” Prosor said. “We talked about Europe, about other issues and I enjoyed the conversation very much,” Prosor was quoted as saying. Even before he went into the hall where the luncheon was being held, he told shocked reporters that he was a “free man.”

The Foreign Ministry now claims there was a misunderstanding; the ambassador “thought he was attending an event hosted by the French UN delegation. When he realized his error, he skipped the meal and left.” User comments on leading French news websites over the weekend were derisive, including all the French equivalents of LOL and ROFL in response to the explanation.

No one believes it was a coincidence. Prosor is a proven professional. He would certainly want to forget the fact that he became the first representative of the Jewish state to meet with a leader of the National Front. He would probably be happy to smash the camera that documented the smiling encounter. But his mistake did not happen in a vacuum. It has the odor of a symptom. The odor of a very unholy alliance being formed between members of the Israeli right-wing and a number of the most nationalistic and anti-Semitic figures in Europe. Over the past year, among visitors to Israel were the populist Dutch leader Geert Wilders, the Belgian racist Filip Dewinter and the Austrian successor to Jorg Haider, Heinz-Christian Strache.

These politicians, like Le Pen, have exchanged the Jewish demon-enemy for the criminal-immigrant Muslim. But they have not really discarded their ideological DNA. The Israeli seal of approval they seek to get is intended to bring them closer to power. Le Pen herself has decided to leave behind the anti-Semitic scandals of her father, Jean-Marie. She wants to make the National Front a popular and legitimate party.

She is already popular (19 percent in the polls). Legitimate? In two interviews she gave to Haaretz in the past, she attacked President Jacques Chirac for his historic 1995 declaration in which he took, in the name of France, responsibility for Vichy war crimes. She adamantly refused to denounce French fascist crimes and showed that she cannot really disengage from her father, his heritage and her party’s Vichy and anti-Semitic hard core.

It is easy to guess what would happen to an Israeli ambassador if he found himself at an event hosted by the “disgraced” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas – or, perish the thought, at a Hamas or Hezbollah event. The earth would tremble. Even tar and feathers would not be enough under such circumstances. But Le Pen is blonde and she has blue eyes. Oh, and she hates Muslims.

The complicated Wikileaks web (and why they must survive)

Posted: 08 Nov 2011

In typically idiosyncratic style, David Carr writes in the New York Times – hardly a paper with much respect for Wikileaks for most of this year – outlines the myriad of issues faced by Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Regardless, we must defend transparency in government and challenge the inherent secrecy of “democracies”:

Let’s concede that WikiLeaks, whatever its excesses, represented a genuinely new paradigm for transparency and accountability. It became a fundamentally different and powerful whistle, one that could be blown anonymously — or not, as it turned out — to very remarkable effect. Whistle-blowers in possession of valuable and perhaps incriminating corporate and government information now had a global dead drop on the Web. Traditional news organizations watched, first out of curiosity and then with competitive avidity, as WikiLeaks began to reveal classified government information that in some instances brought the lie to the official story.

But while WikiLeaks reduced the friction in leaking secret documents, it did not reduce the peril to those who might choose to do so. Part of the promise of WikiLeaks was that it would eliminate digital fingerprints. While those efforts seemed to work, military prosecutors were nonetheless able to tag Pfc. Bradley E. Manning as a suspect using traditional investigative measures.  Private Manning, who is accused of leaking many of the more important WikiLeaks documents, is being held in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., accused of “aiding the enemy.” His presence there is a stark reminder that despite campaign promises about openness and transparency in governing, the Obama administration has a very hard-line approach when it comes to state secrets, one that has not only affirmed the Bush administration’s approach, but has done so with renewed focus. Just 17 months into his administration, President Obama had already prosecuted more alleged leakers than any of his predecessors.

All of this is a reminder that when it comes to leaking, it is not whistles that are in short supply, but whistleblowers. WikiLeaks represented a major technological advance in the art and mechanism of the leak, and it eliminated the need to spend many secret hours at the copy machine, as Daniel Ellsberg did with the Pentagon Papers. But easing the modality of transmission does not obviate the legal and social strictures against making the private public.

After WikiLeaks began revealing confidential documents, news organizations including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal set up their own versions of digital dead drops, but no significant stories have emerged from those efforts. The technological muscle required to maintain a robust site, as evidenced by WikiLeaks’s on-and-off again operational status, is significant and hard to come by.

And Mr. Assange, who came on the global stage in spectral fashion, seeming to ride on a digital carpet above the laws of various jurisdictions, has proved extremely vulnerable. He became the face of a new kind of asymmetric informational warfare, and his high profile, along with what may have been some poor personal choices, have brought him back to earth with a thud.

Israel has a fund-raising problem (funny what endless occupation does to the image)

Posted: 08 Nov 2011

Hello Zionist lobby, any thoughts on why anybody with honesty would want to blindly support a state that proudly demonises the Palestinian people?

Haaretz reports:

It is getting increasingly difficult to persuade donors, especially younger ones, to give money for Israel – this was the main conclusion one could draw from a series of “round tables” held this morning at the GA in Denver.

“If you’re over 50 you talk about the Six Day War, the creation of Israel and the saving of Ethiopian Jews, but if you’re under 50 – you have no idea what we’re talking about,” said a representative of a Midwest community federation.

The round tables were held during a discussion of the JFNA’s “Global Planning Table”, a new JFNA blueprint for consultation about the allocation of contributions to the Federations, but as I’m not convinced that the participants were aware that a journalist was listening in, I will refrain fro naming them. But their description of the growing distance between the younger generation of Jewish donors – and we’re talking here of people that are connected to the Federation, not disaffected Jews who have no connection to the community – was almost unanimous.

There is a general unease about giving to Israel, because it’s hard to tell what its needs are these days, said one. The younger donors don’t understand why we need to be giving to Israel, which has its own rich people and which is described, after all, as having one of the healthiest economies in the world, said another. Political disagreements, said yet a third, are increasingly influencing people’s choices on where to direct their money.

Yet more evidence that Colombo enjoys torturing Tamils

Posted: 07 Nov 2011

Britain’s Channel 4 continues its vital and campaigning work documenting the rogue and torturing state of Sri Lanka:

Australian Zionist lobby wants you to embrace apartheid as natural order of the world

Posted: 07 Nov 2011