‘Israel is West’s first line of defense’
June 20th, 2009 § 3 Comments
Geert Wilders
The Dutch crypto-fascist MP Geert Wilders, who has been recently banned from the UK with the Home Office viewing his presence as a “threat to one of the fundamental interests of society“, says that the sequel to his first movie Fitna will focus on “how the forces of Islamization are specifically targeting Israel in a fight against all free societies.” In an interview with Haaretz, he not only commended Avigdor Liberman for his electoral succes and said he is “proud” of the similarities between his own Party for Freedom and Yisrael Beiteinu but calls the “two-state solution is an internal Israeli matter“. His “personal belief is that there is a two state solution for the Palestinians. One of those states is called Jordan.” Whilst such statements are nothing new from Wilders, the fact that he seized 15% (2nd place) of the vote in the Dutch European Parliament elections means that he’s becoming a political force to be reckoned with.
Israel will be a major part of Geert Wilders’ next film on Islam, the rightist Dutch legislator said last week in an interview for Haaretz. He praised Avigdor Lieberman, observing “similarities” between Yisrael Beiteinu and the Party for Freedom – a small movement which has grown to become Holland’s second most popular.
Wilders, a controversial anti-immigration politician, rose to international fame last year when he released a 14-minute film entitled Fitna, which attempts to portray what he considers as Islam’s “violent nature.” The film, which has been viewed by millions online, provoked mass protests throughout the Muslim world.
Maximum Land with Minimum Palestinians
June 19th, 2009 § 1 Comment
The Har Homa settlement in the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu defied calls for a halt to settlement expansion in his speech on Monday. (ActiveStills)
Hasan Abu Nimah and Ali Abunimah on Netanyahu’s “brilliant” peace plan.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a peace plan so ingenious it is a wonder that for six decades of bloodshed no one thought of it. Some people might have missed the true brilliance of his ideas presented in a speech at Bar Ilan University on 14 June, so we are pleased to offer this analysis.
First, Netanyahu wants Palestinians to become committed Zionists. They can prove this by declaring, “We recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in this land.” As he pointed out, it is only the failure of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular to commit themselves to the Zionist dream that has caused conflict, but once “they say those words to our people and to their people, then a path will be opened to resolving all the problems between our peoples.” It is of course perfectly natural that Netanyahu would be “yearning for that moment.”
Patrick Doherty on the Iranian Elections
June 19th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Patrick Doherty
Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio interviews Patrick Doherty of the New America Foundation on the Iranian election.
MP3 here. (17:52)
Patrick Doherty, Deputy Director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, discusses the Iranian government crackdown that reinforces the perception of electoral fraud, the popular Iranian discontent with autocracy, the dearth of legitimate polling in Iran that increases uncertainty and how Ahmedinejad’s tough negotiating with the U.S. is seen by some as the Persian equivalent of Nixon going to China.
Striking the Right Balance – BBC Style
June 19th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Just heard this extract from BBC Radio 4′s World this Weekend aired on Sunday via a listeners complaint read out on the Feedback programme today.
Shaun Ley: The World This Weekend, this is Shaun Ley. Hello. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has used a news conference this lunchtime to describe his re-election as President of Iran as an epic moment. There have been more protest by opposition supporters and criticisms from Iran’s neighbours.
Daniel Ayalon, Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel: It is now high time for the international community to stop immediately the very dangerous and relentless campaign of Iran to achieve nuclear capabilities.
That’s the view from Israel. We’ll be hearing a US perspective and the son of the former Shah joins me live.
Its a good example of how the selection of expertise on the BBC frames its news and current affairs output. As the listener pointed out in his complaint, none of Iran’s actual neighbours were in fact consulted by the programme. Only Israel, the US and the son of its former puppet.
A Voice of Reason? Riz Khan Interviews 2 Iranian Scholars
June 19th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
In a very informative show Riz Khan of Al Jazeera interviews 2 Iranian-American academics with opposing views on the question of whether or not the Iranian Presidential election was rigged. Watch Parts 1 and 2 below. (Thanks Ali)
More from Palfest
June 18th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Palfest writer Deborah Moggach negotiates a checkpoint
Jeremy Harding writes of the crossing into Palestine that I wrote about here. Then Rachel Holmes describes her impressions of the Palfest week, and is reminded of South Africa in the 70s. Jeremy first:
After the defeat of the Arabs in June 1967, many Palestinians who’d been driven east over the Jordan River by the fighting tried desperately to return to their homes by slipping back across. The bridges, including the Allenby Bridge, had been damaged, but the patched-up remains were serviceable. The Allenby Bridge crossing was closely guarded, however, and used by the soldiers on Israel’s newest frontier to put people out, rather than allow them in. Palestinian refugees trying to get home from Jordan, as well as groups of fedayeen, preferred to ford the shallow river at dead of night, although 50 IDF ambush parties were stationed along the west bank, instructed to fire on shadows in the water. By September, more than a hundred people had been shot dead trying to return and a thousand had been deported back to Jordan.
On the Jordanian side of the river journalists were counting up to 80,000 refugees in tents, with more being driven in from the west bank as Israeli soldiers fired over their heads to hurry them along. To avoid what was clearly an international scandal in the making, the Israeli government decided to stage a televised return of several thousand Palestinians. There was disagreement among the ministries about how to select the fortunate few. A Foreign Ministry official argued that the key point was demographic: children and women of childbearing age should be kept to a minimum; but in the prevailing view, the older refugees of 1948 were far more undesirable.
‘Enough is Enough’, say Ken Loach and Ilan Pappe
June 18th, 2009 § 6 Comments
PULSE Exclusive
The Independent has survived until now because it was wise enough to retain Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn. But with the sad decline of Fisk’s journalism, the reasons for continuing to purchase it have diminished by half. A short while back we published Ken Loach’s response to an Israeli film maker’s smears in the Times for his intervention in support of the cultural boycott of Israel to pressure the Edinburgh International Film Festival to return money received from the Israeli embassy. The Murdoch rag has been recently joined by the Independent in welcoming a scurrilous attack on Loach by a Jewish film maker in its pages, and as Loach describes below, the paper subsequently refused to run the response by Ilan Pappe, which we are publishing below.
First, here is Loach: (thanks Frank)
Film legend Ken Loach
A few weeks ago I was contacted by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign. They said that the Edinburgh Film Festival had accepted money from the Israeli Embassy to fund travel for a participant. Palestinian artists, academics, trade unionists and many others have called for a cultural boycott of Israel. The reasons are obvious: the continuing oppression of Palestinians by Israel, illegal in many respects, which makes academic or cultural freedom a distant dream.
I support the boycott. I spoke to Hannah McGill, director of the Edinburgh Film Festival, and urged her to reconsider the festival’s position, saying that while I did not have a film at Edinburgh this year I would urge other film makers to think twice before attending. It was a respectful and reasoned conversation. I later learned that the festival would fund the travel from other sources.
These are the birth pangs of Obama’s new regional order
June 18th, 2009 § 6 Comments
Supporters listen to Ahmadinejad's speech
Seumas Milne sums up well the reasons why some caution is necessary. ‘The turmoil in Tehran reflects a refusal to accept Amadinejad is popular and confusion about how to respond to the US’, he writes.
Also, it appears Robert Fisk can’t decide from one day to another where he stands. On his first day he had declared Ahmadinejad a winner because someone told him so. Now he is claiming, based on the photocopy of a forged letter being distributed at an opposition rally, that not only did Ahmadinejad lose, he lost by a margin of 4-to-1. Imagine that! And why would a veteran journalist suspend his skepticism to clutch at such an obviously bogus piece of propaganda? (which among other things also claims that Mehdi Karroubi — a man that independent polls showed receiving 2 percent, as opposed to AN’s 34 percent — won more than twice as many votes as Ahmadinejad). Look at the reasoning of this doyen of British journalism:
In a highly sophisticated society like Iran, forgery is as efficient as anywhere in the West and there are reasons for both distrusting and believing this document. But it divides the final vote between Mr Mousavi and Mr Karroubi in such a way that it would have forced a second run-off vote – scarcely something Mousavi’s camp would have wanted.
So Fisk first asserts that the reasons for believing a document with such outlandish claims inconsistent with any known independent polls and the dubious manner in which it was acquired are just as good as the reasons for doubting it. He then nudges the reader toward his implicit conclusion, that the document can’t be a forgery, since it does not give Mousavi outright victory. Who could argue with such impeccable deductive reasoning? This is not journalism, this is propaganda.
Here’s Milne’s corrective:
‘They have elected a Labour government,” a Savoy diner famously declared on the night of Britain’s election landslide in 1945. “The country will never stand for it.” From the evidence so far coming out of Iran, something similar seems to be happening on the streets of Tehran – and in the western capitals just as desperate to see the back of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Of course the movement behind opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi spreads far beyond the capital’s elite, as did the supporters of Winston Churchill against Clement Attlee. In Iran, it includes large sections of the middle class, students and the secular. But a similar misreading of their own social circles for the country at large appears to have convinced the opposition’s supporters that it can only have lost last Friday’s election through fraud.
Rigged or not, vote fractures Iran
June 18th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Mussavi supporters in the street
Hamid Dabashi is one of our truly valued friends, a man of integrity, courage and extraordinary genius. I consider him the true heir to Edward Said’s indefatigable spirit. Like us, he is clearly inspired by the determination of those protesting in Iran’s streets. However, unlike us, he appears somewhat cavalier in his dismissal of the preferences of the part of the population which voted for Ahmadinejad, even though he concedes that they may indeed be the majority. (See by comparison Seumas Milne’s comments on this subject).
(CNN) — In a recent article published both in the Washington Post and the Guardian, Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty reported that according to their “nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote … Ahmadinejad [was] leading by a more than 2-to-1 margin — greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday’s election.”
That may or may not be the case, but the abiding wisdom of Aesop’s fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” or its Persian version, “The Lying Shepherd,” has now made any such Monday-morning quarterbacking an academic exercise in futility.
The assumption that the government has rigged the election has become a “social fact” that millions of Iranians believe. On the basis of that belief, they have put their lives on the line, with reported casualties of dozens injured and at least one, perhaps up to nine, people killed.
The Green Still Resists
June 17th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
In one of the most contentious sections of his thoroughly contentious Cairo speech, Obama declared:
Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.
It’s difficult to know where to start with this. Perhaps by registering just how insulting it is for the representative of the imperial killing machine – responsible directly and indirectly for millions of deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia – to lecture the dispossessed and massacred Palestinians on their occasional attempts to strike back. We can be sure that the sleeping children Obama is concerned with here are the Israeli children who live on the stolen land of Palestine, not the unsleeping, traumatised children of Gaza, several hundred of whom were burnt and dismembered six months ago. Then it’s worth remarking how the erudition and intelligence shown in Obama’s pre-presidential book ‘Dreams from my Father’ have been immediately crushed on his assumption of the presidency. How otherwise could his historical vision be so partial and simplistic? There was certainly a key non-violent aspect to the struggle for civil rights in the United States, but pretending that violence played no role in the process makes it necessary to ignore the American Civil War (half a million dead), Nat Turner, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and rioting Chicago. Violence, or the threat of violence, was important in South Africa and India too, and certainly in Obama’s ancestral Kenya, and was the dominant anti-imperial strategy in Vietnam and Algeria.
