A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

Zionist fanatics embrace Glenn Beck, Mr. 1939 is here (again)

Posted: 22 Nov 2011

What has happened to my people? One of America’s most prominent Jewish groups – they embrace settlements, racism inside Israel and Palestine, no criticism of Zionism and never-ending occupation – brazenly invites former Murdoch favourite hack, Glenn Beck, to rally the troops and talk about preparing for the apocalypse.

Zionism 2011 (via JTA):

The Zionist Organization of America’s annual dinner is a place where conventional thinking about the liberal proclivities of American Jews goes to die. But never quite like Sunday night — when Tea Party darling and Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachman served as the opening act and Glenn Beck was swarmed like a rock star.

Beck, who was on hand to receive the ZOA’s Defender of Israel Award, made his way into the VIP reception at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan shortly after 5 p.m. and almost instantly was beset by a crush of admirers. He found himself wedged into a corner as a crowd of well-wishers surged forward to have their photographs taken with him. Bachmann and her fellow Republican congresswoman, Florida’s Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, were there, too — but it was clear who the star was.

“Love, love, love, love, love,” Ros-Lehtinen said, extending her hand to Beck, who responded by clasping hers in both of his. All around her, an expanding mass of people pressed in closer, seemingly eager to express the same sentiment.

“I need everyone to back up please,” a photographer practically yelled as he tried to create a cordon around the VIPs to set up his shot. But despite help from Beck’s two bodyguards, an assistant, and assorted publicists and ZOA personnel, the crowd kept pushing ahead.

Crowd control proved to be a recurring problem at the dinner. After the appetizer was served, seemingly half the room converged on Beck and his wife, Tania, tying up the traffic flow in the center of the ballroom and rendering the area impassable. A succession of ZOA officials implored the crowd to sit down so servers could get dinner on the table, but with little effect.

Grabbing the microphone, ZOA President Morton Klein, raised his voice — the first of several times he would do that over the course of the evening — and commanded those standing around to “sit down — NOW!”

…

“Glenn Beck got in touch with me, thanked me for writing this because no one else in the organized Jewish world was defending him, and he asked if we could get together,” Klein told JTA. “We got together, I asked him if he’d be our honoree, he began to almost cry. Tears welled up in his eyes.”

Asked about the discomfort some feel with Beck’s repeated use of Holocaust analogies, Klein, a child of survivors who was born in a German displaced persons camp, claimed ignorance, saying he didn’t watch Beck’s show often enough to have an opinion.

“I just don’t know,” he said.

That Beck, an unabashed crier, became misty at Klein’s offer is eminently believable. Beck appeared to choke back tears at least four times during his hourlong speech — and that was during his less emotional moments.

When he wasn’t battling the urge to cry, he was issuing a battle cry. With arms flailing wildly and face turning the color of the red caviar served in the VIP room, Beck portrayed the challenges facing Israel and the Jewish people in apocalyptic terms — as the ultimate showdown between good and evil. Beck was the only speaker at the dinner whose voice reached a pitch more feverish than Klein’s.

Beck said he came to the ZOA as a brother. “It’s personal,” he said repeatedly.

And clearly he has not been chastened by the urgings of some Jewish groups to tread lightly with the Holocaust analogies. Again and again he invoked them, saying the world stood on a precipice like the one it faced in 1939 — only this time it’s worse, as not only is the world ignoring rising evil, he said, it is actively helping it along.

“America is not a collective,” Beck thundered. “America is built on the individual. I am a man and I demand to be counted so others are not numbered again.”

The crowd went wild.

Fox News endorses state violence against peaceful students

Posted: 22 Nov 2011

Sy Hersh on MSM lies over Iranian nuclear “threat”

Posted: 22 Nov 2011

Will we ever learn?

Serco, we have a problem

Posted: 22 Nov 2011

Yet more evidence that the British multinational Serco, running Australia’s detention centres, simply aren’t up to the task. But don’t expect the government to do anything about it any time soon. They need somebody, anybody, to take the blame for its dysfunctional refugee policies (via The Age):

The multinational company that runs Australia’s immigration detention network has been fined $15 million for failing in its duty of care to asylum seekers and underperformance .

The immigration department has told a federal parliamentary inquiry it had docked $14.8 million from monthly payments to SERCO between March 2010 and June 2011 because of poor management of the detention centres, and docked another $215,000 from SERCO’s contract to run immigration housing centres.

SERCO was paid $375 million to run immigration centres last year, and $101 million in the three months to October 2011.

The secretive contract the federal government signed with SERCO withholds payment for audited ”abatements” each month. Escapes, failure to secure perimeter fences, not providing activities or reporting major incidents, not giving access to visitors, interpreters or legal representatives, poor building conditions and food safety can trigger fee reductions.

The penalty is limited by the contract to 5 per cent of SERCO’s monthly fee. The $15 million fine, revealed in written submissions to the inquiry, is therefore near the upper limit of what the Immigration Department would have been contractually able to penalise SERCO in a period plagued by riots, fires, suicides and escalating detainee self harm.