Antony Loewenstein

The rise of privatised detention centres and prisons globally is an issue that receives far too little scrutiny in the media (yesterday’s Al Jazeera’s The Stream was a notable exception). The profit motive inevitably skews priorities.

Here’s a great piece from this week’s New York Times by Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen that asks the necessary questions:

Immigration control has traditionally been viewed as an inalienable sovereign function of the state. But today migration management has increasingly been taken over by private contractors. Proponents of privatization have been keen to argue that the use of contractors does not mean that governments lose control. Yet, privatization introduces a corporate veil that blurs both public oversight and legal accountability.

Despite efforts to introduce outside supervisors, performance reports and other monitoring mechanisms, the private nature of these companies breaks the ordinary administrative chain of command, placing both governments and the public at a disadvantage in terms of ensuring transparency.

Private companies seldom have an interest in securing public oversight, as any criticism may entail negative economic consequences. Australasian Correctional Management, which ran detention centers in Australia from 1998 to 2004, was known to require medical staff members or teachers entering its facilities to sign confidentiality agreements preventing them from disclosing any information regarding detainees or the administration of the centers. Being foreigners, migrants and refugees have always had a hard time gaining access to outside complaint mechanisms and advocacy institutions. As an employee in charge of reviewing disciplinary cases at a Corrections Corporation of America facility in Houston once told a reporter from this paper, “I’m the Supreme Court.”

The corporate veil also distorts lines of legal responsibility. Human rights law is largely designed on the presumption that it is states and not private companies that exercise sovereign powers like detention or border control. Legally holding governments accountable for human rights violations by contractors requires an additional step showing that it is the state and not just the corporation or individual employee that is responsible for the misconduct.

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As the world’s largest security company with more than 650,000 employees, G4S is involved in a plethora of migration functions all over the world, from operating immigration detention centers in Britain to carrying out passenger screening at airports in Europe, Canada and the Middle East. In America, G4S operates a fleet of custom-built fortified buses that serve as deportation transports for illegal migrants caught along the United States-Mexico border. Just last month, the U.K. Border Agency signed a new contract with G4S worth up to $337 million to house asylum seekers.

G4S’s success in this market shows that deportation, detention and border control have become big business. Boeing’s current contract to set up and operate a high-tech border surveillance system along the United States-Mexico border is worth $1.3 billion and involves nearly 100 subcontractors. The Florida-based Geo Group — one of G4S’s main competitors — manages 7,000 detention beds in the United States and, until recently, at the Guantánamo Bay detention center, where migrants intercepted in the Caribbean are transferred. N.G.O.s and international organizations profit, too. In 2010, the International Organization for Migration was paid $265 million to assist governments in returning migrants to their home countries, among other activities.

The migration control industry covers not only detention and deportations but also border control. Many airlines today employ former immigration officers or themselves contract security companies to perform the document, forgery and profiling checks required by destination states. In Israel, the West Bank checkpoints are gradually being transferred to private security companies.

The American Jewish community is slowly but surely becoming more willing to critically debate Israel’s brutal policies towards Palestinians. Norman Finkelstein, here interviewed by Haaretz, says occupying Israel has a problem on its hands:

“Nobody really defends Israel anymore,” he said in an interview. “If you go on college campuses, there are some Hillel faithfuls who are bringing an IDF soldier to try to explain that not all IDF soldiers are war criminals. And among the 60 to 100 people in the audience, there are Palestinian supporters who come with tape over their mouth, and when the soldier starts to speak, many people stand up and walk out.

“They’ve lost the battle for public opinion,” he says. “They claim it’s because American Jews know too little – I claim it’s because they know too much about the conflict, and young liberal Jews have difficulty defending the use of cluster bombs in Lebanon or supporting the Israeli settlements. I was bashing Israel in the past because nobody else was exposing its true record. Many people are doing it now, so I switched hats from a critic of Israel to a diplomat who wants to resolve the conflict. I have not changed, but I think the spectrum has moved.”

Finkelstein’s book is suprisingly optimistic about the chances of settling the confict, and about changing the debate, even among American Jewry. The tide of public opinion is turning against Israel, he says, and once support for Israeli policy becomes widely unacceptable in the United States, the “self-designated voices for Israel,” as he calls them, will quickly drop out. Meanwhile, American Jewish college students are having their eyes opened.

“The academic research on Israel is no longer the footnoted “Exodus,” and younger Jews, when they go to college, are walking away with very different picture of Israel,” he said. “And the American Jewish community that for a long time was a huge obstacle to resolving the conflict is breaking up. If you put forth a reasonable and principled goal, I think a resolution is possible. We might be entering the endgame, but one that might take a long time.”

Last night, Al-Jazeera’s The Stream (great show, by the way, that allows new voices to be heard in the international arena) tackled the American Jewish community and its young people not simply blinding defending Zionism:

If true, yet more disturbing signs that Al-Jazeera is more than happy to see itself as endorsing regime change in the Arab world and often backing Western military support to do so (via AlAkhbar):

Emails said to reveal dismay among Al-Jazeera staff over its “biased and unprofessional” coverage of Syria have been leaked by pro-Assad hackers.

Damascus – On Wednesday, the entire staff of the Al Jazeera network allegedly received an email instructing them to change their computer and email passwords.

Earlier in the week, the network’s server had been hacked by the self-styled Syrian Electronic Army, and some of its secrets were released to the media.

The major find to be made public was an email exchange between anchorwoman Rula Ibrahim and Beirut-based reporter Ali Hashem. The emails seemed to indicate widespread disaffection within the channel, especially over its coverage of the crisis in Syria.

Ibrahim wrote to her colleague saying that she had “turned against the revolution” in Syria after realizing that the protests would “destroy the country and lead to a civil war.” She went on to deride the opposition Free Syrian Army, which she described as “a branch of al-Qaeda.”

Ibrahim also complained about the attitudes of various colleagues at the channel’s Doha headquarters, saying some of them “have refused to greet me ever since the outbreak of events in Syria because they hold a grudge against my sect.”

Hashem responded sympathetically, saying he had opted to sit on the fence after sending the channel footage of armed men clashing with the army which he had witnessed while reporting from northeastern Lebanon. He said that after he submitted the video, he was told to return to Beirut on the grounds that he was exhausted.
In her response, Ibrahim once again protested that she had “been utterly humiliated. They wiped the floor with me because I embarrassed Zuheir Salem, spokesperson for Syria’s Muslim Brothers. As a result, I was prevented from doing any Syrian interviews, and threatened with [a] transfer to the night shift on the pretext that I was making the channel imbalanced.”

Ibrahim also spoke of how Syrian activists invited onto Al Jazeera use terms of sectarian incitement on air, “which Syrians understand very well.”

Hashem wondered in response where the channel’s head of news, Ibrahim Hilal, stood in all this. Ibrahim answered that he was “stuck between a rock and a hard place: the agenda and professionalism…”

My friend Yaara Bou-Melhem on Al-Jazeera tells the story of Asian migrant workers:

Last last year I was invited to chair a panel at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas called, “Anyone Can Make A Revolution”. It was an attempt to understand the reality of the Arab revolutions and the influence (or not) of the internet:

In Egypt and Tunisia we have seen ordinary people come together to claim democracy and human rights in the face of oppressive regimes, with twitter and Facebook the other heroes of the revolution. Are social media and Al Jazeera instrumental in what happened, or are they just the latest communication tools? Can anyone with a mobile phone foment revolution or do the punitive regimes in Syria, Bahrain and Libya show that it takes a whole lot more?

Join our panel: Mona Eltahawy, columnist; Simon Sheikh, international public speaker and national director of the community advocacy group GetUp!; and Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

Salil Shetty appears with the support of Amnesty International.

Chaired by Antony Loewenstein

The recent murder of an Iranian nuclear scientist by (probably) Israel or America was a huge international story but most of the Western media coverage refused to call the killing by its rightful name, murder.

I was asked by Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post to comment about this press issue (my comment appears around 8:53):

More here.

The rise and rise of Jewish extremists in Israel – funded, backed, endorsed and often armed by the Zionist state – brings the issue of a Jewish Hizbollah upon us. Mark Perry writes in Foreign Policy:

“I don’t want to exaggerate, but it’s time to call this what it is,” a veteran IDF officer noted in a recent telephone conversation on the Nablus incident. “It might be news in America, but it’s no secret in Israel. This is a very real crisis. What we have here is the birth of a state within a state. The birth of a kind of Jewish Hezbollah.” This former officer went on to speculate that “what is emerging in the West Bank” is “a three-state solution: Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and, standing between them, a radical settler state.” Yehuda Shaul, an organizer of Breaking The Silence — a group of IDF soldiers committed to publicizing the reality of being an Israeli soldier in the West Bank — is unwilling to go that far, though he confirms that the series of escalations between settlers and the IDF has roiled the Israeli military. “The IDF is in the West Bank to control tens of thousands of Palestinians,” he notes, “but they’re having the most trouble controlling the settlers. It’s quite an irony.”

Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer tells Al-Jazeera that a genocidal-minded, minority groups of Jews have the potential to cause havoc:

There’s nothing like hating Muslims to get the juices flowing of the nationalist Right and some Zionist organisations. Islam is the enemy and must be obliterated (that’s their view, not mine).

It’s an issue covered in the book On Utoya in which I contributed this year and deserves far more scrutiny. This kind of alliance should concern us all (especially since fascism rises in Israel itself). Not long after the Holocaust, the idea that some Jews feel comfortable working alongside white supremacists in the fight against Muslims is a devastating critique of the disastrous effects of Zionism. Al Jazeera reports:

Right-wing movements previously associated with anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi ideologies are increasingly opting for a surprising tactic to garner legitimacy within mainstream politics: Forging alliances with extremist Jewish organisations under the banner of fighting “Islamisation”.

“Far-right parties are professing a new found love of Israel as a way of escaping their past anti-Semitism and racism, and to justify their prejudice towards European Muslims as not being racist,” Toby Archer, a researcher who studies far-right parties and the “counter-jihad blogosphere”, explained to Al Jazeera. “Parties like the British National Party (BNP) in the UK, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, and the National Front in France are all coming out from a neo-fascist past.”

These parties have stopped using anti-Semitic rhetoric, Archer said, which had prevented them from attracting support. It is important to distinguish between the traditional far-right, who are historically anti-Semitic, and the populist new-right, who have emerged in the last two decades and partake in an anti-Muslim discourse, he said.

The English Defence League (EDL) closely linked to the BNP, is a right-wing anti-Islamic extremist group based in the UK. The EDL has gained notoriety for its aggression against British Muslims and its links with neo-Nazi groups. Last year, it moved to garner support within the Jewish community by officially opening a Jewish Division open to “represent the Jews who are fighting against Islamisation,” according to a statement.

Tommy Robinson, a spokesperson for the EDL, said one of the group’s fundamental beliefs was that as a “shining star of democracy”, Israel has the right to defend itself. 

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Signs of lingering anti-Semitism within the UK’s far-right have not stopped the Jewish Defence League (JDL), a group the US Federal Bureau of Investigation considers a “violent extremist organisation”, from eagerly accepting a partnership with the EDL.

In January 2011, JDL Canada organised a rally in support of the EDL. Meir Weinstein, national director of the JDL in Canada, defended its stance, saying the EDL is “taking issue with radical Islam” and supports Israel. Shortly after the rally, mainstream Jewish organisations in Canada publicly distanced themselves from the EDL.

James Clark, an activist with Stop the War Coalition in Canada, has faced the JDL at several rallies. He believes that Jewish groups are shifting towards far-right nationalists, rather than the other way around.

“The JDL has tried to move their politics to the right,” he told Al Jazeera. “They are quite a fringe organisation, but made a bit more respectable by more mainstream Zionist organisations that give them a platform; organisations who support them, but don’t feel safe saying the same thing in public.”

He added that the JDL is obsessed with Muslims and the Muslim community, and preys on the irrational fear that Canada might soon be run by Sharia Law.

The JDL also purports to have significant influence over the Canadian government, who Clark describes as “far and above the US government as Israel’s best friend”.

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