A fascinating, new documentary by Clayton Swisher for Al Jazeera English, Killing Arafat, that examines the murky circumstances around his death. It focuses principally on the Palestinian Authority (rather than the obvious other suspect, Israel) and portrays the US-backed institution as corrupt and utterly untrustworthy. Swisher explains more about this in a recent piece in the Guardian:
This is a remarkable film that clearly details the range of crimes committed by the Sri Lankan military and government during the civil war that ended in 2009 and continues to this day. The regime in Colombo is desperate to discredit it but this is miserably failing. The Commonwealth meeting begins in Sri Lanka this week and a range of countries, including Australia, are more than happy to dine with thugs. Others, such as Canada, are not. I praise Australian Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon who visited the country on a fact-finding mission recently and was thrown out of the country for daring to be critical.
I’m proud to be on the advisory council of the UK-based Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice. Our aim is to bring accountability for the Tamil civilians and victims of the war. No Fire Zone’s director, Callum Macrae, is a determined and brave man who knows he’s doing something right because the Sri Lankan government continues to attack him and his work.
Watch, be appalled and take action:
Today the Guardian hosts a discussion about the proposed changes to Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act. Writer and academic Alana Lentin argues the laws should remain while I state they need reform:
Alana Lentin
The right to offend is often held up by liberals everywhere as more important than the right to be offended. But posing the problem of protection from racial discrimination in this way suggests that “taking offence” is a choice of the same order as being deliberately offensive.
When Aboriginal people, asylum seekers and other racialised groups are told that those who vilify them in the press – often touting stereotypes and outright lies – are merely voicing their opinions in a free society, their experience tells them that a truly free society would not look like today’s Australia. Democracy exists in name, but systemic inequality makes a mockery of it.
When Andrew Bolt and his political supporters speak of rights, they know as well as any critical legal theorist that rights are far from universal, despite the rhetoric. The message sent to those victimised is “why can’t you just be free like me? Why can’t you get beyond the identity, the difference, that calls for it to be pointed out and ridiculed?” For example, those in favour of publishing the infamous 2004 “Muhammad cartoons” claimed that for Muslims to take offence was ridiculous, as to follow Islam is a choice that could just as easily be renounced. Tell that to any man or woman next time they are suspected of being a Muslim terrorist just because they’re not white.
By repealing the so-called “Bolt laws”, Brandis is not only telling racialised minorities in Australia that the right to vilify them is more important than their right to be protected from racist insults, he is going a step further. At the very least, this ends the duplicitousness of the “antiracist racist state.” However, political point scoring is not a good reason for lauding the repeal.
Some on the (white) left who support Brandis argue that curbing media freedom opens the door to Zionist groups using racial discrimination law to sanction those calling for a boycott of Israel. As a Jew, an Israeli citizen and a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) supporter, I reject this. We must be able to protect those who face the worst racism in our society from the spread of hatred, while at the same time exposing the nonsensical equation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
In matters of race, freedom of speech only protects the right of some to offend; and the right of those in power to be offended has, and always will continue to be protected anyway.
Antony Loewenstein
The proposed changes by Australian Attorney General George Brandis to the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) – removing a section that makes it illegal to insult and offend people because of their race – have nothing to do with freedom of speech. Ignore the true believers who say they are.
It displays a selective concern about dissenting views. Sydney University’s Jake Lynch is being taken to the federal court after allegedly breaching the RDA over his support for BDS against Israel, and yet Brandis has said nothing. I would hazard that these ideologues support “free speech” that empowers their worldview, not oppressed minorities. It’s an unsurprising first legislative move by a new government which will do nothing to widen the range of views in the public square.
In spite of this, I believe Brandis’ proposed changes should be welcomed – albeit with clear caveats. I agree with Sarah Joseph, director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, who points out that “there is no human right not to be offended or insulted“. The Centre welcomes the amendments, pointing out they’re consistent with international law, but calls to retain a restriction of intimidation and humiliation over race. The Human Rights Law Centre has also called for reform and not repeal of the RDA.
Section 18c of the RDA, which is set to be amended, was used in the successful prosecution of Herald Sun commentator Andrew Bolt in 2011after he attacked the credibility of Aboriginal Australians. His popular and far from silenced newspaper responded with the front page headline This is a Sad Day for Freedom of Speech. Bolt and his colleagues have suffered no loss or lack of voice ever since.
But the principle is nonetheless important – and section 18c isn’t keeping the racist hordes at the door. Fighting intolerance and discrimination isn’t the job of an ever more powerful state. It must be fought in the public domain while never forgetting the profound power disparity between different individuals or groups. Bolt has the right to express his odious views, but I have an equal responsibility to challenge them vigorously.
In the meantime, if Tony Abbott’s government was serious about strengthen Australia’s democracy, it would improve FOI laws, release basic information about asylum seekers, and reform onerous defamation laws that protect the rich and powerful.
America and its allies never intended to bring “democracy” or “freedom” to Afghanistan. The reality has been covert missions tasked to root out “terrorism”. When the vast bulk of foreign forces leave the country post 2014, this CIA-led killing machine will continue. Welcome to US nation building.
This is a stunning investigation by Matthieu Aikins in Rolling Stone about the murder of 10 Afghan villagers and the likely (US military) responsible:
In the fall of 2012, a team of American Special Forces arrived in Nerkh, a district of Wardak province, Afghanistan, which lies just west of Kabul and straddles a vital highway. The members installed themselves in the spacious quarters of Combat Outpost Nerkh, which overlooked the farming valley and had been vacated by more than 100 soldiers belonging to the regular infantry. They were U.S. Army Green Berets, trained to wage unconventional warfare, and their arrival was typical of what was happening all over Afghanistan; the big Army units, installed during the surge, were leaving, and in their place came small groups of quiet, bearded Americans, the elite operators who would stay behind to hunt the enemy and stiffen the resolve of government forces long after America’s 13-year war in Afghanistan officially comes to an end.
But six months after its arrival, the team would be forced out of Nerkh by the Afghan government, amid allegations of torture and murder against the local populace. If true, these accusations would amount to some of the gravest war crimes perpetrated by American forces since 2001. By February 2013, the locals claimed 10 civilians had been taken by U.S. Special Forces and had subsequently disappeared, while another eight had been killed by the team during their operations.
After years of smears and lies told about Australian citizen David Hicks (along with the legal, physical and moral abuses), former Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks speaks to the Sunrise program and explains why he needs and deserves justice for years of assault:
My weekly Guardian column is published today:
The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, a thriving Palestinian-led initiative that attacks institutional links to Israel’s illegal settlements, has been gaining in popularity. In Australia, the movement has been slowly growing as Israel continues to defy international law – and it now faces one of its greatest opportunities in the court of public opinion.
Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center is an Israel-based organisation that claims to be a civil group “fighting for rights of hundreds of terror victims”. It is currently taking Jake Lynch, head of Sydney University’sCentre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPACS), to the Australian federal court. They assert that Lynch has allegedly breached the 1975 racial discrimination act by refusing to sponsor a fellowship application by Israeli academic Dan Avnon. Lynch and CPACS support BDS, and since Avnon works at Hebrew University – a key intellectual hub which is targeted by boycotters for allegedly being complicit in the establishment of illegal settlements – Lynch declined to be named as a reference.
The story has been largely ignored. Fairfax Media has not touched it, and ABC TV’s 7.30 only briefly addressed it last week. Instead, it is Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian which has been driving the debate on the issue, publishing countless stories that deliberately conflates antisemitism and support for the BDS movement.
Just last week, after the horrific bashing of Jewish men in Sydney, the paper featured a Holocaust survivor on its front page condemning the attack. Within the article was the rhetorical device of inserting comment about BDS – as if physically assaulting Jewish people was on the same spectrum as a peaceful, non-violent attempt to force Israel to abide by international law. Bizarrely, an op-ed published by Newscorp’s The Telegraph also said that the best response to the assaults was to support Max Brenner – the chocolate shop whose parent company, the Strauss Group, has been a target of BDS protestors for supporting the Israeli Defence Force.
Countless letters have since been published in The Australian reinforcing a correlation between antisemitism and the boycott – following this logic, Lynch and his backers are a threat to public order. This also ignores the nearly 2,000 signatories of a public petition backing Lynch (which a number of academics, including the co-founder of Independent Australian Jewish Voices, Peter Slezak, signed).
Last week, The Australian ran an editorial which implied that Lynch blocked Avnon’s academic credentials simply because he was an Israeli. Another front page story in the paper last week claimed that Hebrew University is a bastion of Jewish and Arab co-operation, yet ignored an example of the institution repressing Palestinian rights through its connections to the arms industry.
Lynch tells me that Shurat HaDin have deliberately skewed his BDS stance. He denies, despite what the group’s Australian lawyer Andrew Hamilton said on ABC TV last week, having “admitted” that he boycotted Avnon because he was Israeli. He told me:
“I have made it abundantly clear from the start that the policy is aimed at institutional links. If the Hebrew University is anything like the University of Sydney, then it probably employs academics from various backgrounds in terms of religious affiliation and country of origin. It would not make any difference to my or the CPACS’ policy if the applicant was originally from Belgium, Botswana or Bolivia – I believe the University of Sydney should revoke its part in the Sir Zelman Cowen and Technion fellowship schemes, and I reserve my right not to collaborate with them. Andrew Hamilton has clearly not paid serious attention to our policy, or to what I have actually done in pursuit of it.”
It’s worth noting that Avnon, endlessly praised in the Australian media as a humanist who believes in co-operation between Israelis and Palestinians, sits on Israeli group Metzilah’s General Assembly. This is a group that put out a report explicitly rejecting the Palestinian right of return to lands stolen by Israel, and claims that a Jewish state discriminating against equal rights for Palestinians is not problematic. It is worth noting that the Palestinian right of return is a requirement in international law.
Largely missing from the ferocious media coverage has been any information about the real agenda of Shurat HaDin. The organisation, according to Wikileaks documents, has strong links to Israeli intelligence and Mossad, just one of the many groups that now prosecutes Israel’s argument for the Jewish state. The law firm tried to sue Twitter for daring to host Hizbollah tweets, former US President Jimmy Carter for criticising Israel and Stephen Hawking for damning the Israeli occupation. Even the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, a leading Zionist lobby, refuses to endorse Shurat HaDin’s case against Lynch, pointing out that attempts to suppress the campaign through litigation are inappropriate.
Also absent from the debate is the reason BDS exists. It is growing due to a complete lack of faith in US-led peace talks. American journalist Max Blumenthal recently published a book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, which shows in forensic detail the reality of the Israeli mainstream’s embrace of blatant racism against Arabs and Africans. This isn’t what the Israel Shurat HaDin and its fellow travellers want the world to see. Indeed, Australian Israel lobby AIJAC responded to the latest BDS case against Lynch by completely ignoring illegal settlements altogether. This week Dean Sherr, a young lobbyist, wrote an entire column in The Australian about BDS without mentioning their existence.
The fear of BDS is reflected in the massive amount of money and resources Israel is spending to stop it. Instead of moving towards a democratic state for all its citizens, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to demolish Palestinian homes and build illegal colonies on Palestinian land.
Shurat HaDin’s Australian lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, told Haaretz last week that BDS “does nothing to help Palestinians and indeed harms them. It is merely an excuse for the vilest public antisemitic campaign the western world has seen since the Holocaust.” With such a statement, which essentially compares Jake Lynch to a Nazi, it’s no wonder Zionist advocates are losing the public relations battle globally.
For some of us on the left, using the racial discrimination act as a tool to silence views we find distasteful is deeply worrying – I write this as somebody who opposed the legal case against News Limited columnist Andrew Bolt in 2011. A real democracy is a place where any individual has the right to vehemently oppose colluding with an overseas university institution that disputes equal rights for Jews and Arabs.
I look forward to Australia’s leading public backers of free speech, such as Bolt, Miranda Devine and the Institute of Public Affairs, loudly backing Lynch. Somehow I think I’ll be waiting a while for these brave advocates to find their voice.
I was in Perth, Western Australia last week for a Profits of Doom book tour.
There was a large public event at Perth’s state library. I spoke alongside Greens Senator Scott Ludlam about my book, left politics, the Greens and how to effect positive change (I was interviewed on Perth Indymedia radio on similar issues).
Here’s the video from the fascinating evening:
Australia’s official attitude towards asylum seekers is based on cruelty and punishment. We too rarely hear from refugees themselves, the privatised system deliberately obscures their stories and faces.
The Global Mail has produced a stunning piece of multi-media, video journalism that details the reasons Hazara man like Hussein must leave Pakistan, due to threats on their life, and find safe haven somewhere. He films the journey from Pakistan to Australia.
Moving, revealing and telling work.
What could possibly go wrong (and since when is Saudi Arabia, that US-backed apartheid state in the Middle East, a believer in democracy?). Foreign Policy reports:
Saudi Arabia, having largely abandoned hope that the United States will spearhead international efforts to topple the Assad regime, is embarking on a major new effort to train Syrian rebel forces. And according to three sources with knowledge of the program, Riyadh has enlisted the help of Pakistani instructors to do it.
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, along with the CIA, also supported the Afghan rebels against the Soviet-backed government during the 1980s. That collaboration contains a cautionary note for the current day: The fractured Afghan rebels were unable to govern after the old regime fell, paving the way for chaos and the rise of the Taliban. Some of the insurgents, meanwhile, transformed into al Qaeda and eventually turned their weapons against their former patrons.
While the risk of blowback has been discussed in Riyadh, Saudis with knowledge of the training program describe it as an antidote to extremism, not a potential cause of it. They have described the kingdom’s effort as having two goals — toppling the Assad regime, and weakening al Qaeda-linked groups in the country. Prince Turki, the former Saudi intelligence chief and envoy to Washington, said in a recent interview that the mainstream opposition must be strengthened so that it could protect itself “these extremists who are coming from all over the place” to impose their own ideologies on Syria.
The ramped up Saudi effort has been spurred by the kingdom’s disillusionment with the United States. A Saudi insider with knowledge of the program described how Riyadh had determined to move ahead with its plans after coming to the conclusion that President Barack Obama was simply not prepared to move aggressively to oust Assad. “We didn’t know if the Americans would give [support] or not, but nothing ever came through,” the source said. “Now we know the president just didn’t want it.”
Pakistan’s role is so far relatively small, though another source with knowledge of Saudi thinking said that a plan was currently being debated to give Pakistan responsibility for training two rebel brigades, or around 5,000 to 10,000 fighters. Carnegie Middle East Center fellow Yezid Sayigh first noted the use of Pakistani instructors, writing that the Saudis were planning to build a Syrian rebel army of roughly 40,000 to 50,000 soldiers.
“The only way Assad will think about giving up power is if he’s faced with the threat of a credible, armed force,” said the Saudi insider.
A new film on US drones by the Pakistani-American journalist Madiha Tahir:
So much for being the land of opportunity. Time to change the PR campaign, Washington.
During a discussion at the University of Michigan in 2010, the billionaire vice-chairman of Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway firm, Charles Munger, was asked whether the government should have bailed out homeowners rather than banks. “You’ve got it exactly wrong,” he said.“There’s danger in just shovelling out money to people who say, ‘My life is a little harder than it used to be.’ At a certain place you’ve got to say to the people, ‘Suck it in and cope, buddy. Suck it in and cope.’”
But banks, he insisted, need our help. It turns out that moral hazard – the notion that those who know the costs of their failure will be borne by others will become increasingly reckless – only really applies to the working poor.
“You should thank God” for bank bailouts, Munger told his audience. “Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else, there comes a place where if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies.”
In the five years since the financial crisis took hold, people have been sucking it in by the lungful and discovering how pitiful a coping strategy that is. In Michigan, the state where Munger spoke, black male life expectancy is lower than male life expectancy in Uzbekistan; in Detroit, the closest big city, black infant mortality is on a par with Syria (before the war).
As such, the crisis accelerated an already heinous trend of growing inequalities. Over a period of 18 years, America’s white working class – particularly women – have started dying younger. “Absent a war, genocide, pandemic, or massive governmental collapse, drops in life expectancy are rare,” wrote Monica Potts in the American Prospect last month. But this was a war on the poor. “Lack of access to education, medical care, good wages and healthy food isn’t just leaving the worst-off Americans behind. It’s killing them.”
This particular crisis, however, has also accentuated the contradictions between the claims long made for neoliberalism and the system’s ability to deliver on them. The “culture” of capitalism, to which Munger referred, did not die but thrived precisely because it was not forced to adapt, while working people – who kept it afloat through their taxes and now through cuts in public spending – struggle to survive. Given the broad framing of economic struggles in the west exacerbated by the crisis, this reality is neither new nor specific to the US. “Over the past 30 years the workers’ take from the pie has shrunk across the globe,” explains an editorial in the latest Economist. “The scale and breadth of this squeeze are striking … When growth is sluggish … workers are getting a smaller morsel of a smaller slice of a slow-growing pie.”
During my Profits of Doom book tour last week in Western Australia, I was interviewed by one of the major commercial stations, 6PR, and its morning host Paul Murray. It was pleasing to hear robust criticisms of the British multinational Serco: