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Who wants to love Israel more? Hands up?

Posted: 12 Aug 2010

The shallow nature of debate over Israel/Palestine in Australia: 

Labor has hit out at claims that the Coalition will always back Israel in sensitive votes at the United Nations.

Seizing on reports that Liberal deputy leader Julie Bishop told a Jewish community forum in Melbourne last month an Abbott government would always vote against UN resolutions critical of Israel, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said she had shown an ”an immense lack of judgment”.

Such a change could see Australia voting against resolutions put to the General Assembly each year calling on Israel to respect the Geneva conventions governing the rules of war in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The Howard government switched Australia’s vote to abstain in 2004 after Australia had previously backed the resolution over decades. But Australia has never before voted against the resolution.

“Julie Bishop clearly doesn’t understand the serious implications of what she has committed a Coalition government to do,” Mr Smith said yesterday.

But Ms Bishop has denied the Coalition intends to take a blanket approach to voting on UN resolutions should it win office.

”I said we would return to the voting pattern of the Howard government,” she told The Age yesterday.

”I make no apology for my strong support of Israel. I think the Rudd-Gillard government weakened Australia’s stance at the United Nations as they pursued votes for their campaign for the Security Council.”

Ms Bishop said the Coalition would oppose what are seen as one-sided resolutions against Israel but her comments at the Jewish forum had been mis-reported. ”Maybe that’s what they wanted me to say, but I didn’t. I’m very careful about these things,” she said. ”Of course I’d never say I’d never ever abstain, there could be all sorts of circumstances that arise in the future. I don’t know, Israel could do anything.”

She challenged Labor to state how it intended to vote on future UN resolutions involving Israel.

Debate over Australia’s ties with Israel is likely to be prominent when Mr Smith and Ms Bishop face off today in a foreign policy election debate at the National Press Club.

The Coalition criticised the government’s response to an Israeli raid on a flotilla of protest ships that killed nine activists.

”Of course the Israeli government does, from time to time, make mistakes,” Liberal leader Tony Abbott said last month. ”What government doesn’t, from time to time, make mistakes?”

He said the Coalition had an unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security. ”I want to assure you that a Coalition government would never support a one-sided UN resolution against Israel to curry favour with an anti-Israel majority.”

Labor changed Australia’s UN vote in 2008 after winning office to again support the Geneva conventions resolution. Mr Smith said UN votes were an important diplomatic tool that required judgment on a case-by-case basis.

Has God died in the mother country?

Posted: 12 Aug 2010

“Britain is now the most irreligious country on earth.”

Discuss.

Floating towards war with Iran, via Israel and Zionists

Posted: 12 Aug 2010

I constantly write about Iran because I both fear what Israel and/or America may do to the nation and the profound human rights abuses occurring inside the country.

But these days the threat of military action against the Islamic Republic is growing. Many of the same figures who pushed for war against Iraq have now turned their sights on Tehran. There seems to be little faith in the futile sanctions program and a leading opposition figure today says they only help strengthen the regime:

“These sanctions have given an excuse to the Iranian government to suppress the opposition by blaming them for the unstable situation of the country,” Mehdi Karroubi said in email responses to the Guardian.

So what are the Western powers aiming to do? Tightening sanctions. Iran is being bullied and the world wonders why it lashes out. Frankly, from its perspective, like with North Korea, building a nuclear weapon would be a wise insurance policy (though there is no evidence to prove any nuclear weapon’s program).

Now we have Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic with a long essay on the increasing chances of an Israeli strike against Iran. It’s a piece infused with emotional blackmail, with stenographer Goldberg giving space to countless Israeli leaders and officials warning that their country may well attack soon. The message to America? You should do the job for us, or else.

Over to hyperbolic Goldberg:

It is possible that at some point in the next 12 months, the imposition of devastating economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran will persuade its leaders to cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons.

It is also possible that Iran’s reform-minded Green Movement will somehow replace the mullah-led regime, or at least discover the means to temper the regime’s ideological extremism. It is possible, as well, that “foiling operations” conducted by the intelligence agencies of Israel, the United States, Great Britain, and other Western powers—programs designed to subvert the Iranian nuclear effort through sabotage and, on occasion, the carefully engineered disappearances of nuclear scientists—will have hindered Iran’s progress in some significant way. It is also possible that President Obama, who has said on more than a few occasions that he finds the prospect of a nuclear Iran “unacceptable,” will order a military strike against the country’s main weapons and uranium-enrichment facilities.

But none of these things—least of all the notion that Barack Obama, for whom initiating new wars in the Middle East is not a foreign-policy goal, will soon order the American military into action against Iran—seems, at this moment, terribly likely. What is more likely, then, is that one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran—possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft. (It’s so crowded, in fact, that the United States Central Command, whose area of responsibility is the greater Middle East, has already asked the Pentagon what to do should Israeli aircraft invade its airspace. According to multiple sources, the answer came back: do not shoot them down.)

In these conversations, which will be fraught, the Israelis will tell their American counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.

When the Israelis begin to bomb the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the formerly secret enrichment site at Qom, the nuclear-research center at Esfahan, and possibly even the Bushehr reactor, along with the other main sites of the Iranian nuclear program, a short while after they depart en masse from their bases across Israel—regardless of whether they succeed in destroying Iran’s centrifuges and warhead and missile plants, or whether they fail miserably to even make a dent in Iran’s nuclear program—they stand a good chance of changing the Middle East forever; of sparking lethal reprisals, and even a full-blown regional war that could lead to the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Iranians, and possibly Arabs and Americans as well; of creating a crisis for Barack Obama that will dwarf Afghanistan in significance and complexity; of rupturing relations between Jerusalem and Washington, which is Israel’s only meaningful ally; of inadvertently solidifying the somewhat tenuous rule of the mullahs in Tehran; of causing the price of oil to spike to cataclysmic highs, launching the world economy into a period of turbulence not experienced since the autumn of 2008, or possibly since the oil shock of 1973; of placing communities across the Jewish diaspora in mortal danger, by making them targets of Iranian-sponsored terror attacks, as they have been in the past, in a limited though already lethal way; and of accelerating Israel’s conversion from a once-admired refuge for a persecuted people into a leper among nations.

If a strike does succeed in crippling the Iranian nuclear program, however, Israel, in addition to possibly generating some combination of the various catastrophes outlined above, will have removed from its list of existential worries the immediate specter of nuclear-weaponized, theologically driven, eliminationist anti-Semitism; it may derive for itself the secret thanks (though the public condemnation) of the Middle East’s moderate Arab regimes, all of which fear an Iranian bomb with an intensity that in some instances matches Israel’s; and it will have succeeded in countering, in militant fashion, the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, which is, not irrelevantly, a prime goal of the enthusiastic counter-proliferator who currently occupies the White House.

Read the whole piece. It’s shameless propaganda dressed up as journalism. Also known as: how to start another war by speaking to people who want wars and don’t question official lies. Just like Iraq. And to think Goldberg is seen as a serious, Jewish journalist by the corporate press. Please.

In fact, Iranian society is evolving and cracks are reportedly appearing.

This recent feature in the New Yorker by Jon Lee Anderson paints a more nuanced picture. It certainly doesn’t ignore the government’s increasingly brutal crackdown on dissent but it features cries for change from those in the elite. Perhaps this is the most revealing part:

In private, supporters of the [Green] movement spend a lot of time thinking over the events of last year. They are often dispirited, even rueful. “People miscalculated,” one of my Iranian friends said. “They thought everyone in the country was like themselves, and that the rest of the country was like Tehran.” The demonstrations, in his view, had as much to do with social class as they did with politics. Mousavi’s and Karroubi’s voters in the Green Movement were largely middle or upper class.

The soldiers and the Basij who attacked them were for the most part Ahmadinejad voters, drawn, like the President himself, from the less privileged majority of the city’s population, based predominately in the south of the city. The Green Movement’s ability to put significant numbers of protesters—estimates range from hundreds of thousands to three million—onto Tehran’s streets sometimes created the impression that they represented a majority in the country. “They were wrong,” my friend said. “And their leaders misunderestimated—to paraphrase your former President Bush—just how savage the regime could be.” Adopting a mocking tone of voice, he added, “ ‘What, you thought that with your vote you’d get change?

That you actually had a choice?’ ” A friend of his had been detained and released after agreeing to sign a statement of repentance. “His interrogator told him, ‘This time you have no choice. You either submit or I’ll ram this stick up your ass. That’s your choice.’ ”

Lying to Australians about asylum seekers

Posted: 12 Aug 2010

The issue of refugees is central to the Australian election campaign. Usually most politicians are finding ways to demonise asylum seekers. It’s not a pretty sight.

Today, new revelations that deserve wide coverage:

Asylum seekers from the Oceanic Viking stand-off claim a “deal” to resettle all the people on board has been broken.

Twenty-five asylum seekers remain in limbo in detention centres on Christmas Island, the Philippines and in Romania with no prospect of re-settlement in another country.

The Oceanic Viking, an Australian Customs vessel, picked up the 78 Tamil asylum seekers in October last year in international waters and brought them to the port of Bintan in Indonesia where they refused to alight.

Radio National’s 360 Documentary program, which is broadcast this Saturday, reports that after the month-long stand-off, the asylum seekers departed the vessel when they received a letter from the Australian Government guaranteeing they would be resettled in Australia or another country if they were found to be refugees within 12 weeks of disembarking.

Of the asylum seekers who remain in detention, all have been declared by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to be genuine refugees. Four of the detained asylum seekers are children.

Of the refugees in Romania, five have been rejected by the United States and 11 have been rejected by Canada. Both nations cite security reasons for their rejection. But no other evidence has been provided as to what these security reasons are.

Six refugees on Christmas Island have been given an adverse security assessment by ASIO, which means they could not be granted a visa. One of the six had previously worked for a number of years as a translator for the UNHCR in Indonesia.

There is no route of appeal for an adverse security assessment, and the refugees cannot be sent back to Sri Lanka, which leaves them indefinitely in detention.

The 360 documentary report says the letter from the Australian Government makes no mention of security assessments or that resettlement is dependent on clearing these checks.

Refugees from the stand-off also claim that they were underfed to the point of starvation on board the Australian Customs vessel.

“In the beginning we coped with the food, for the first two, three days. Later we simply could not tolerate,” said another letter holder, known as Gobi, who has now been resettled in the US.

“So we would eat and then we would not stand and walk as this food was not enough. Therefore we would lie down and sleep as the food was not enough.”

He says that Customs officers told him: “Only if you get off the ship and go to Indonesia will we give you good food. You [must] get off the ship first.”

Another man, known as Ravi, who has now been resettled in Australia, says the reason he left the boat was not the deal offered by the Government, but because he was starving.

“We would pick rice and other food particles from the floor because we were starving,” he said.

The program has other revelations which I’ll get to in days to come.

Wikileaks isn’t protected in Australia

Posted: 11 Aug 2010

Let’s be clear: both major sides of Australian politics are seemingly willing to let the Wikileaks head out to dry if the order comes from Washington. We’re an obedient client state, after all:

Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith says he has not been asked by the United States to put Wikileaks founder Julian Assange under criminal investigation.

Last month the whistleblower organisation enraged the US by releasing more than 90,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan.

The Department of Defence has set up a taskforce to investigate the potential impact of the leaks on Australian troops based in Uruzgan province.

Speaking at a foreign affairs debate with his Coalition counterpart Julie Bishop, Mr Smith said there had been no request from the US to consider criminal charges or restrict his travel.

“But quite clearly we’re working closely with the US on these matters,” he said.

“These are very serious matters for concern.”

Ms Bishop says if the Coalition was in government it would consider restricting Mr Assange’s travel.

“If an Australian citizen has deliberately undertaken activity that could put at risk the lives of Australian forces in Afghanistan or undermine our operations in any way, then I would expect the government of Australia to do all it could… to identify the source, to take the appropriate action,” she said.

The files released by Wikileaks detailed more than 100 incidents in which Coalition forces killed civilians.

Mr Assange defended their release saying they reflected the true nature of the war.

Internet killed Israeli PR

Posted: 11 Aug 2010

Afghan war isn’t some noble exercise; it’s empire building

Posted: 11 Aug 2010

Afghanistan is essentially absent from the Australian election campaign. In fact, any foreign affairs are missing in action. Parochialism is the name of the game.

Today’s Australian features a mindless quote from Julia Gillard that the risk of further Australian deaths in Afghanistan is real. Very insightful.

A foreign affairs “expert”, Michael Fullilove, offers this gem:

Bipartisan agreement on such a difficult issue [Afghanistan] is welcome precisely because it was not inevitable.

The war is a disaster and the public against it but this “serious” man praises both major sides of politics for continuing into the quagmire. Genius.

Finally, and perhaps most tragically, here’s the former ABC journalist Chris Masters, just back from a boy’s own adventure in Afghanistan, writing in Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph why Australia should stay in the country. He displays the classic embedded mindset (and of course, Afghan voices are completely absent):

But Australians should know their soldiers don’t pack it in because it is hard. They see their efforts are worthwhile. To them, protecting military investment in Afghanistan is far more than just emotional. There is sweat as well as blood on that ground.

Civilians casualties in the country are soaring. Foreign troops are probably helping some Afghans to improve their lives but this doesn’t mean that occupation should continue indefinitely. The war is chaotic, confused, morally suspect (paying off former “terrorists” like in Iraq) and working with a Kabul government that represents nobody and pockets billions of dollars annually.

Stop the propaganda, already.

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