Zenpolitics

The Guardian and 'fig-leaf' journalism: Seumas Milne and Jonathan Cook comment

2012-01-31T23:47:00.000-08:00

Further to the previous posting, a reply from Seumas Milne, my response and, to follow, a very valuable set of comments/insights from Jonathan Cook on these issues, as elicited at the Media Lens message board by regular poster Rhisiart Gwilym:

Dear Seumas,

I trust you're keeping well.

The latest Media Lens Alert poses some crucial questions about your output at the Guardian - much of it valued - and the extent to which you are able or willing to discuss your own role there as a senior writer.

You make the proud claim that the Guardian has an exceptional record in permitting stories and opinion shunned by other media, a most questionable assertion and one that certainly doesn't extend to any critique from journalists working within the paper itself.

One can well understand the reticence of any employee to 'bite the hand that feeds'. That's not a crude jibe. It refers to the multiple ways in which people are naturally averse to taking unnecessary risks. Yet, consider how that circumvention serves to insulate influential media like the Guardian from serious scrutiny.

Given the sobering charge sheet produced by ML, listing the Guardian's serial failings/complicities on climate change, Iraq, Blair, Afghanistan, Libya and now Iran, don't you think it vital that the paper's record on such matters and your own interpretation of them be urgently and openly debated?

I do hope you will make time to address the issues raised by Media Lens in their patient and informed correspondence.

Kind regards

John Hilley

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Dear John - yes, I am prepared to respond about what I've written and the role that I played as the Guardian's comment editor between 2001 and 2007 (the subject of their original questions - and of what you call my "proud claim"). I've been slow to respond to Media Lens mainly because (as they say) I've been ill and am still not working full time.

As to your wider points, there are obviously many things the Guardian publishes or argues editorially I disagree with (as do many other Guardian journalists) and of course its coverage should be subject to scrutiny. It can be and is contested through editorial processes, there is strong union organisation at the paper and its output is continually debated internally. And no, I don't see any problem with the paper's record being challenged or "openly debated" - if it's done in an informed way, it can be helpful to the internal debate.

Best wishes,

Seumas Milne

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Dear Seumas

Many thanks for responding. Most appreciated. And I do hope your health is improving.

I assume from your initial comment that you are about to engage with Media Lens over the issues raised in their Alert. I look forward to reading that.

As to your other points about disagreeing with certain editorial lines, the occurrence of 'internal debate', union presence and acceptance of the need for scrutiny - none of this really gets to the heart of what ML and many of its contributors are saying about the Guardian's service to power and the ways in which even dissenting journalists, like yourself, can't, or won't, seriously criticise it from within.

Yes, we may find variations of opinion and some excellent comment. But that's all within the permissible, managed bounds of discussion. To repeat the essential question: would the Guardian ever permit a critical, direct dissection of its own editorial line over Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya, it's protection of warmongers like Blair or its corporate-serving greenwash?

Beyond Alan Rusbridger's routine snubbing of ML and its adherents, it was interesting, at least, to see this latest Alert piece get some 'attention' within the Guardian, notably from Michael White.

Yet, consider the smoothly-barbed nature of White's response: a crafted piece of demonisation rather than any attempt to deal with the substantive questions raised by ML.

Would you care to offer a critical comment on White's article, or Rusbridger's, obvious, disregard for ML, or George Monbiot's relentless smearing of its editors?

Why, likewise, does the Guardian routinely vilify people like Assange and Chavez - any thoughts on Rory Carroll's awful dispatches on Venezuela (as constantly highlighted by ML contributor Joe Emersberger http://www.zcommunications.org/the-guardians-venezuela-coverage-by-joe-emersberger)?

I'm sure you can list other more 'radical' copy. But it remains token inclusion against the much more cumulative impact of the Guardian's notables - think, for example, Freedland and Tisdall - in taming liberal-left sensibilities and rationalising imperialist 'interventions'.

On which note, do you believe the Guardian bears any responsibility for the current escalation of war threats against Iran?

Again, thanks for replying.

As usual with such correspondence, I'll post our exchange at the ML board.

Kind regards

John

------------------

Rhisiart Gwilym to Jonathan Cook:

Hello Jonathan,

I'm a regular reader of the ML output, and a regular volunteer contributor to its Message Board.

There's a continuing debate going on there about whether or not the small handful of what are often called token-radical writers within the mass-circulation corporate media are actually doing any net good, or whether, on the contrary, they actually serve as fig-leaf legitimisers of a fundamentally malign, destructive propaganda/consent-manufacturing machine. (I tend pretty strongly towards that latter view myself)

I'm interested to ask whether you've been able to notice any difference in the degree of wide public exposure that your work gets since you pulled your own ejector handle from the corporate media, and went independent? Are you now more on the fringe than you were, do you think?

I follow your input to Medialens with great interest, as I think that what you're doing is a vital path-finding job for other honourable journalists within the corporate media machine who are suffering crises of conscience. But do you still get the same degree of public exposure as you used to get? If so, that would be a pretty decisive argument for others to follow your example, I think.

Thanks for any time/energy that you may be able to spare to answer this. Unless you wish to request otherwise, I'd like to copy this correspondence to discussions going on on the MLMB.

Keep sluggin' bro! Hwyl fawr, RhG

----------------

Hi Rhisiart.

I follow the debates on the board on these particular questions with interest.

On the question of whether Milne and Monbiot are fig leaves, I think there can be little doubt that they are. The proof, in my mind, is less to be found in Monbiot's writings, despite his variable performance, particularly of late (either brilliant or off-beam), than Milne. Milne is a writer I greatly admire and always read. I would struggle to find anything I disagree with in his output. But he did almost nothing to change the tenor of the comment pages during his tenure. The transition from David Leigh, his predecessor and a much more problematic figure, to Milne was seamless. And let's remember that the comment pages are *the* part of the paper where we should expect an editor of Milne's politics and character to be able to bring in new, more progressive voices. If he couldn't do it there, where could he do it? Milne's failure as comment editor (in terms he should have set for himself) tells us everything about the limits of the thinkable imposed even by the liberal corporate media.

On the question of how easy is it to break out of the fig-leaf role, I'm afraid I can offer less succour. It's fearsomely hard to make a living as a dissident freelance writer. The very best, like Chris Hedges and Glenn Greenwald, may make a viable living from it (though they may not – it may be that they have other sources of income, such as an inheritance, book-earnings, a well-paid spouse, etc.). This is something I think a great deal about: I have a young family and I constantly need to wrestle with issues of how to support them and what I am prepared to do. I guess that is no different from most people who understand the real nature of our corporate-governed societies.

The best solution I have found is what might be termed the "Assange option", after his deal with RT. Work for the opposition. When I write for the Arabic media in English, I am fully aware that their coverage is no better, and often worse, in propaganda terms than the British media's when dealing with their home countries. But they do offer pretty free platforms for writing about other countries, including Israel and the West. That's probably for two reasons: the West just does so much bad stuff, most of it unknown by its own citizens, that one doesn't need to exaggerate to write shocking things; and the relatively powerless, and that includes most Arab countries in terms of global power politics, have much less need to indulge in propaganda about their opponents than the hegemons. The powerless are more likely to make their case through appeals to justice; the powerful are more likely to conceal their oppressive policies through deception.

In fact, my experience of the Arabic media in English has been the precise opposite. They tend to get nervous if one is too critical of the West and Israel. Some of this is down to the fact that the editors are often Western themselves, or Western-trained, and come with a lot of the prejudices they absorbed at the BBC or the Telegraph. But, without wishing to sound too conspiracy-minded, I fear it's also down to occasional bouts of pressure from the CIA. This seems to be cyclical in relation to coverage of Israel and occurs whenever there is a lull in the peace process. Certainly I am finding it very hard right now to get any work, even in the Arabic media. This happened to me before, in the mid-2000s, and I hope I'll be able to sit it out again.

The other option is to turn to online media. But there's not much good news there either. First and most obviously, they almost never pay. And second, I have had disputes with most of the progressive sites at different points, often over ridiculous issues. I remember a few years back one well-known progressive site refusing a story because I referred simply in passing to the growth of the BDS movement, even though I didn't actually advocate on its behalf in the article. I was told the site did not allow any mention of BDS. I've had many other similar experiences.

I also doubt one gets the same general exposure on the alternative sites that one does in the mainstream media. What I get is more freedom to say what I really think and of course that draws a following. If you're a Hedges or Greenwald, and assuming they can make a reasonable living, that trade-off is unarguably worth it: they get a huge and loyal readership for their important insights and have absolute freedom to write as they see fit. Milne and Monbiot would almost certainly fit into this category. It may not be true for lesser mortals, however.

Instead Monbiot and Milne have made a compromise. They tell 90 per cent of the truth as they themselves understand it, but in return are relatively well paid and have a platform with international reach and credibility, as well as a huge following (and an even larger number of detractors).

Is it a good idea to expose this pact they've made with the devil, or to encourage them to leave? Here the picture, I think, is mixed.

First, we should maintain a degree of humility. Most of us have to make such pacts, to some degree. They have at least decided, unlike many of their colleagues, not to lie even if they also can't tell the whole truth. (I know some at ML will disagree with this reading of Monbiot, but however much I dislike some of his positions I think he holds them honestly.)

There may be a downside - a view I think I've expressed to the two Davids before. For one thing, it is likely to put off those ML sympathisers who are not fully persuaded of the propaganda model and who identify with these writers. There are lots of Milne and Monbiot groupies who also happen to be potential ML recruits. They will (wrongly but almost certainly) see such public challenges as unjustified humiliation of their favourite writers. Also, within the papers' themselves, it is sure to provoke a circling of the wagons – the "Michael White effect".

On the other hand, newspapers may be corporations but they are also small communities staffed by individuals with a variety of motives and ideological inclinations. The Guardian has some genuinely progressive people in it, including M & M, who, as the system gets ever more vicious in defending itself, will find it ever harder to maintain their role of obedience. Just as societies have revolutions, it may be that in the future we will see something similar happening inside our liberal papers.

The question is: how soon and will it be soon enough? Such challenges may help those struggling inside the machine to understand their role a little faster.

I love ML precisely because the Eds and the forum members appreciate how high the stakes are.

All best, Jonathan

PS. And please feel free to post on the board

Media Lens taking on the Guardian again

2012-01-27T09:27:00.000-08:00

The latest Media Lens Alert (with a wonderful title) takes yet another timely, courteous and thoughtful swipe at the Guardian and its prized writers:

Silence Of The Lambs: Seumas Milne, George Monbiot & ‘Media Analysis’ In The Guardian Wonderland

There's been no reply, as yet, from Seumas Milne or George Monbiot - the latter, with no apparent sense of irony or shame, busy just now damning Julian Assange.

Meanwhile, a kindly note to Milne:

Dear Seumas,

I trust you're keeping well.

The latest Media Lens Alert poses some crucial questions about your output at the Guardian - much of it valued - and the extent to which you are able or willing to discuss your own role there as a senior writer.

You make the proud claim that the Guardian has an exceptional record in permitting stories and opinion shunned by other media, a most questionable assertion and one that certainly doesn't extend to any critique from journalists working within the paper itself.

One can well understand the reticence of any employee to 'bite the hand that feeds'. That's not a crude jibe. It refers to the multiple ways in which people are naturally averse to taking unnecessary risks. Yet, consider how that circumvention serves to insulate influential media like the Guardian from serious scrutiny.

Given the sobering charge sheet produced by ML, listing the Guardian's serial failings/complicities on climate change, Iraq, Blair, Afghanistan, Libya and now Iran, don't you think it vital that the paper's record on such matters and your own interpretation of them be urgently and openly debated?

I do hope you will make time to address the issues raised by Media Lens in their patient and informed correspondence.

Kind regards

John Hilley

-----------

Update:

Michael White of the Guardian responds to Media Lens Alert.

In reply, the independent journalist Jonathan Cook, who once wrote for the Guardian, offered these observations at the ML message board:

"Yes, of course Michael just stumbled across your piece on Milne and Monbiot during a bored moment outside the National Gallery. It's only because I lack a "worldy" head on my shoulders that I can't stop doubting the truth of that claim. What to do when an "irritant" unsettles you? Unleash the ad hominems - lots of references to how "childish" you are – while trying to shore up his and the Guardian's credentials as worldly and self-deprecating. It's a master-class in how to belittle an argument and avoid dealing with it entirely. As for the "they may grow out of it", doesn't that cut both ways? I was one of the lentil-eating Guardianistas in my early 20s and a devoted Michael White wannabee in my 30s, when I was working there. I'm now 46, seen a bit of the world, and sense I may be nearly all grown-up. And my verdict: they're starting to run scared. Keep up the good work. All best, Jonathan"

Savvy, worldly comments from Jonathan.

We can but speculate on the actual 'chat' within the senior Guardian cabal about Media Lens and their latest Alert, how the White piece emerged and why it was White who, seemingly, 'undertook the task'.

Perhaps White and his associates really do believe that the defence/protection of Milne, Monbiot and the Guardian at large is best effected through such admonitions from the Guardian's 'grown ups'. Step forward White himself, the most 'grown up' of all the paper's notables, someone who has been around 'real' press politics and 'grown up' politicians. Delusions of grandeur can be a powerfully motivating force.

Again, we may never know the truth of such things - unless Milne himself one day 'does a Cook' and helps reveal more about the Guardian's inner circle and their increasing fear of the Media Lens 'irritant'.

Well done to the ML Eds.

John

BBC: travelling in the West Bank

2012-01-23T10:17:00.000-08:00

"John McCarthy looks at travelling in East Jerusalem and the West Bank." http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qjds

A rare and welcome discussion of life in the West Bank from Radio 4's Excess Baggage. It doesn't deal in a direct political sense with Israel's brutalities, but there's a lot of great insights, very sympathetically hosted by McCarthy, looking at the rich and welcoming nature of the society and the daily problems for Palestinians under occupation - notably in Hebron.

Expect a flood of complaints from irate Zionists.

Thanks to Hugh Humphries at Scottish Friends of Palestine for flagging this.

Hugh also notes:

"The one aspect of travel in the West Bank not explored by the programme, is access to the West Bank. If recent experience is anything to go by, a traveller boldly stating that he/she intends to travel to Palestine has a greater chance of being refused than given the right of free passage. Consider taking up this point with the BBC and the programme's editor."

John

Media Lens and Pilger: Western distortion and the fiction of 'democracy'

2012-01-19T17:17:00.000-08:00

As another Iranian scientist is murdered by Israel, in flagrant violation of every international law on such matters, the latest excellent Media Lens alert charts the West's selective outrage and denunciations.

In a further timely piece, John Pilger delivers a landmark review of the West's relentless attack on democracy, including a reminder, in this presidential election year, of Obama's warmongering, corporate-serving record.

These lines from Pilger's piece brilliantly encapsulate the vast lie at the heart of our 'democracy', the economic injustice underlying it and the sham propaganda needed to reinforce the myth that we have serious 'political choices':

"America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a “market” extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will “feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy”. This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none."

Pilger and Media Lens, ever-inspiring.

John

Tom Harris in the bunker

2012-01-19T09:47:00.000-08:00

Glasgow South MP Tom Harris has been forced to resign as Labour's adviser on new social media after parodying Alex Salmond as Hitler in the film Downfall.

Sparking much media debate over the permissable bounds of 'Nazi humour', anxious party chiefs were quick to distance themselves from Harris's latest blog indulgences.

Another mission statement, we must assume, of 'pristine' Miliband's New Improved Labour.

Yet, this is a petty offence, and paradoxical fall, when set against Harris's other defence of war criminals and reactionary outpourings.

The send-up is not particularly offensive. The subtitled dialogue in this fine movie has been changed by many pranksters, some to comic, if now cliched, effect.

There's no endorsement of the Nazis in Harris's spoof, no trivialising of the Holocaust. Nor, despite protests from some Jewish organisations, could its use be remotely construed as anti-Semitic. There's only the infantile depiction of Salmond and the SNP, hardly a crime, political or otherwise. Some of the lines are actually quite funny.

I suspect Harris is having a quiet chuckle and enjoying the limelight, despite having to make the mandatory mea culpa and relinquish his position.

The use of a war theme by a noted warmonger to castigate a noted anti-war politician is darkly ironic, serving, in a perverse way, to mask Harris's own complicities.

It's much less likely that 'Bomber Harris' will ever apologise over his promotional part in the catastrophic downfall of Iraq or his resilient support of Tony Blair.

There's also Harris's shameless record of defending Israel. From the murderous bombing of Gaza to the piracy killings of convoy peace activists, this 'constituent' has never been able to obtain any statement from Harris, a Labour Friend of Israel, condemning Israeli actions or advocating for Palestinian rights.

Factor in his rabid castigation of asylum seekers and other 'social flotsam' and we find a politician with little moral right to use any such smear devices.

Remarkably, amid this little 'fuhrer furore', none of the mainstream media has seen fit to mention these much darker aspects of Harris's CV - not even in the Guardian's Comment page. How telling.

Harris's fall from grace over this affair, rather than the aforementioned higher crimes, is symptomatic of what the liberal media and parliamentary class rank as 'offensive'.

His own mini 'downfall' may elicit some satisfaction, a certain schadenfreude. But it goes nowhere near exposing Harris's much more serious bunker politics.

On which useful word-associational note, Jonathan Cook has just written an excellent piece on Israel, Welcome to the World's First Bunker State.

With a little extra time now on his hands, perhaps Mr Harris might want a look at the darkening apartheid policies of the Netanyahu regime.

John

Happy New Year from the IDF - Palestinians excepted

2012-01-02T14:57:00.000-08:00

As preparations continue for another murderous assault on Gaza, the IDF's own in-house propaganda unit issues its customary New Year Greetings, assuring everyone that it will go on defending Israel with love and care.

Which, of course, means another very unhappy year for occupied Palestinians.

Viewers may prefer an alternative version of the video, featuring more accurate takes on what that 'defence' really entails, including disturbing examples of how the IDF really act when "lending a helping hand".

John

Samoa day - or just loving all the time we have

2011-12-31T19:37:00.000-08:00

A little whimsical suggestion for 2012.

When things seem just too much, when the thought of tomorrow brings feelings of dread or apprehension, why not simply skip it and take a 'Samoan day out'?

Well, if a country can just jump across the international dateline and lose a day from its existence, why not do the same?

Or maybe not. Better valuing every day, every minute of one's life, good times and bad.

A peaceful and precious New Year to one and all.

John

North Korea and the BBC myth factory

2011-12-29T01:07:00.001-08:00

Kim Jong-il dies, North Koreans weep and the Western media deride it all as contrived hysteria and crude propaganda, warning of a dangerous new threat to international security.

The BBC seek to establish the authenticity of the mass wailing. But its constant focus on the public emotion helps reinforce the image of a brainwashed people led by a mad and unpredictable regime.

In a typical exchange (News at One, 29 December), BBC newsreader Matthew Amroliwala presses senior correspondent John Simpson on the problems now for "the international community grappling with this rogue nation."

Simpson responds to this open bias with another rambling 'analysis' of the 'unstable, unknown intentions' of the regime. We learn little, other than 'we have to wait and see' and the implicit message that 'they are not to be trusted'.

In other reports, we hear of the Pyongyang regime's responsibility for mass starvation and see impoverished people eat grass to survive in a country isolated from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, many go hungry, poverty-stricken and without hope here in one of the richest nations on earth. Which economic system is worse?

A nuclear-laden North Korean military sucks the country dry as it guards itself, with some fair reason, against surrounding enemies. With no obvious Cold War or other 'external threat', an already nuclear-burdened Britain orders new multi-billion pound replacements while schools and hospitals are forced to close. Which military expenditure is worse?

North Korea issues token threats and tests an occasional conventional missile. Britain, in contrast, leads in mass wars of aggression, leaving over a million victims in its wake, in order to plunder countries' resources and maintain a perpetual arms economy. Which war-ready state is worse?

A youthful heir, Kim Jong-un, assumes the political leadership, with no notion of a democratic mandate, issuing the same autocratic edicts as before. Meanwhile, we in the West are offered a succession of youngish clone-type leaders, all smart suits, all beholden to the same corporate powers, all ready to hand-down brutal austerity measures that nobody wants, all leading us into more bloody wars we never voted for. Which political deceit is worse?

Kim Jong-il's eccentricities and indulgences are derided as unaccountable indifference to his 'adoring', suffering people. Yet, an 'accountable' Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and the rest of the 'we're-all-in-this-together coalition' have helped elite bankers continue their luxurious lifestyles, while people lose their homes and jobs in record numbers. Which hypocrisy is worse?

Writing from Seoul, BBC correspondent Lucy Williamson said of the North Korean state media:

"It is a myth-making factory that, for most of its audience, is their only source of news."

That can also be seriously said of the BBC, an institution so astute at preserving the myth of 'benign/sane us, menacing/disturbed them' that its audience see it as, if not the only source of news, the only source of 'impartial' news. Which media is worse?

Of North Korea's successor, Williamson asserts:

"Untried and untested, he will perhaps depend even more on the power of his lineage, and the personality cult created by his country's unique cultural machine."

Think, alternatively, of how the unique cultural machine that's the BBC has helped popularise the elite Oxbridge lineage of Cameron and Osborne. Think, also, how that cultural machine has given establishment cover to the "untried and untested" version of 'coalition politics' being used to impose the most brutal assault on the poor since the 1920s.

But this is not just about comparing/contrasting systems, societies and leaders. It's about the ways in which hegemonic legitimacy here is asserted through media vilification and derision of the 'strange and volatile' other.

While eager in its parody of North Korea's personality cult and state propaganda, liberal correspondents have very little to say about the illusions we live and internalise as a 'free and democratic West' - and certainly nothing about their own central part in that vital mythology.

Just try to imagine Amroliwala and Simpson on the BBC news labelling Britain a "rogue state" for the mass crimes it has committed around the world. The possibility is even more far-fetched than the odd claims of regime-supporting 'natural phenomena' coming out of North Korea these past days.

North Korea's myth-making factory may be in full-scale creative production right now, but it can't compete with the BBC's smarter range of state-approved Orwellian lines. That many would consider the comparison facile rests, of course, on the BBC's own mythical branding of itself as a free and neutral product. Crucially, while Pyongyang depend on industrial-scale output of its reinforcing myths, the BBC need only keep turning out that simple and more effective conceit.

John

From Nablus to Jerusalem

2011-12-22T00:27:00.000-08:00

In appreciation of old trains, a lovely little piece on a people's 'derailed journey'.

John

Military Wives, selective lives

2011-12-21T12:07:00.000-08:00

'Tis the season to be wary.

Wary, that is, of festive militarism.

As if crass commercialism of the season wasn't enough, the naked media promotion of the Military Wives single this Christmas shows just how effective cultural propaganda can be in sanitising 'our' warmongering abroad.

The militarisation of Christmas is not new, but it's intensifying as entertainment shows fall into uniform line in support of the 'war effort'.

Besides the craven promotion of their song by BBC reporters and assorted celebrities, Military Wives have had multiple media outings, including  an appearance on Strictly Come Dancing.

In similar vein, ITV's Michael Buble Christmas show featured a wounded serviceman returned from Afghanistan, with a gushing Buble praising 'our selfless soldiers' and dedicating a song to him and his partner.

Just try to imagine the BBC or ITV openly promoting an anti-war Christmas song.

Who would deny the personal difficulties faced by these women and their partners? But did they or their media sponsors ever stop to think of the suffering experienced by invaded Iraqis or Afghans? As ever, it seems that only 'our' pain and separation is to be chorused.

Jonathan Freedland has tried to rationalise his support for the song by comparing it favourably to the formulaic X Factor output that usually makes Number 1. He also regards it as an uplifting statement of good in our stricken, austere times.  If only Freedland were to shine a little comparative compassion on the victims and families at the receiving end of Britain's foreign endeavours.

Indeed, it's a sign of the times that the apparent choice is between contrived commercial product or contrived militarist product.

Ah, well.

It'll all be over by Christmas.

Joyeux Noël

John

Inside Job, outside job

2011-12-19T23:57:00.000-08:00

There's a neat moment in the film Inside Job where, confronted about his interchangeable roles as select assistant to the US government and multiple consultancies to elite financial institutions, Glenn Hubbard, Chief Economic Adviser and Bush Administration Dean of Columbia Business School, turns irritable and angry, giving his interviewer sharp notice that the exchange is about to be terminated.

It's a seminal scene in Charles Ferguson's highly-revealing film, showing just how grandiose and reactive such people can be when their coveted world is challenged.

As part of his 'academic' services, Hubbard had co-authored a paper with Goldman Sachs' chief economic adviser, praising credit derivatives and other volatile instruments that led to the banking meltdown of 2008 - being handsomely rewarded for his efforts.

Another Harvard neoliberal guru, economics professor Martin Feldstein - adviser to Ronald Reagan and key architect of US financial deregulation - simply blanks the questions of financial impropriety with sly smiles and dismissals.

Yet another, Chairman of Harvard Economics Department, John Campbell, looks similarly sheepish, calling all such evident conflicts of interest "basically irrelevant."

How awkward and irascible even the most confident 'intellects' can seem when their claims to 'academic integrity' have been rumbled.

As Peter Bradshaw notes in his review of the film:

"Perhaps the most sensational aspect of this film is Ferguson's contention that the crash corrupted the discipline of economics itself. Distinguished economists from America's Ivy League universities were drafted in by banks to compose reports sycophantically supporting reckless deregulation. They were massively paid for these consultancies. The banks bought the prestige of the academics, and their universities' prestige, too. Ferguson speaks to many of these economists, who clearly thought they were going to be interviewed as wry, dispassionate observers. It is really something to see the expression of shock, outrage and fear on their faces as they realise they're in the dock."

Indeed.

However, contrary to Bradshaw, there's nothing actually "sensational" at all about the discipline's 'compromises' - how very Guardian to think so. The truth is that America's academic system, alongside its political system, was already long-corrupted - as one of the film's contributor's puts it - by America's "Wall Street government".

Still, how telling of market life that so many well-educated professors have discarded academia for trading floor consultancies, with mathematician 'wizards' creating mind-boggling instruments even they don't understand. As the resultant collapses show, speculation in these Frankenstein products isn't genius science or 'wealth-creating' enterprise, it's parasitical selfishness, creating nothing for society at large.

It's a study in itself to observe these groomed figures squirm in discomfort as Ferguson lists, in meticulous detail, their revolving-door positions as key political advisers and directorships in profit-obsessed banks.

As his penetrating movie suggests, the capacity of elites to swindle and lie is as vast and excessive as the astronomical figures involved. In the immediate aftermath, the US Treasury approved more than $700 billion in lifelines, most of it now spirited away by the same crooks.

Despite the collapse of giants like Lehman Brothers, the exposure of serial malpractice within iconic banks like Goldman Sachs and the complicity of super-trusted rating agents such as Moody's, guilty directors have all exited with vast payoffs, bonuses and other untaxed remunerations, while those evicted from their sub-prime homes are cast aside to live on the street.

The scale of America's banking heist, the corporate villainy and the ensuing protection of those responsible is simply staggering. And so is the consistency of the financial cabal's defence against any regulatory adjustments. As the film notes, Wall Street is more consolidated and, through intensified lobbying, politically stronger than ever.

Inside Job is not, however, without its more analytical flaws, among them the honorary assessments of 'philanthropist financier' George Soros as an advocate for 'fair reform' of a promiscuous system he himself has played a considerable part in creating.

More centrally, it has nothing at all to say about the corporate-run media which plays such a crucial role in legitimising the overall system of profit and greed. Where's the critique of the business press in all of this discussion, in particular the liberal business media? It's a vital omission.

The Wall Street Journal and its stable-mates may revel in exposing this or that instance of financial corruption. But is this not part of the bigger deceitful prop of a 'decent-but-flawed' system?

The elite financial towers don't stand apart from the rest of the corporate jungle, of which the corporate media is a central structure.

Whether ultra-conservative or reformist liberal, daily appraisal, dissection and approval of the business world keeps the 'integrity' of the business culture intact. Alas, perhaps betraying his own liberal constraints, Ferguson offers no investigation of this key ideological cover or the propaganda role of the financial commentariat.

Thankfully, the film spares us any romantic narrative on Obama the 'saviour president'. As we see, all the same guilty people have been retained as advisers, the promised prosecutions never happened, the gigantic sums Obama oversaw in his part of the bailout will never be returned.

All of which has been a great new learning curve for the American and wider global public. The belated mass disillusion over Mr Hopey Changey has generated a more acute understanding that all the political class are in the expansive pocket of big business.

The ensuing Occupy Wall Street movement has also drawn-in new inside reformist elements such as the Alternative Banking Group, comprising many already working in high finance.

Yet, as Occupy Wall Street, like Occupy LSX, seek to engage 'repentant' bankers, such notions of reform carries with it the risk of believing that the system is fundamentally sound, merely in need of adjustment and better regulation.

The 'far-reaching reforms' of the UK banking sector, just announced, is evidence of the elite's latest attempt to protect and maintain; another damage limitation exercise to sweeten the toxic austerity pill.

Again, our corporate-liberal media indulge this charade with dutiful gravitas, the cited objections to Vickers confined to possible 'adverse impacts' on small business and token concerns from the public. Nowhere is there the merest mention of capitalism in crisis or the case for radical alternatives.

The stark, bottom-dollar truth is that the entire structure is beyond redemption. Wall Street and its satellite bastions don't need reforming. They need dismantling. And, while films like Inside Job partly educate us on the deep, challenging nature of the problem, that task will only progress, however slowly, as part of an outside job of mass, non-incorporated resistance.

John

Guardian again in its true colours

2011-12-05T11:27:00.000-08:00

Whatever its boast as a 'radical space', however celebrated its 'dissident' writers, the Guardian's truest function remains its chameleon-like support for state power.

Consider this Guardian 'interview' with Lieutenant General James Bucknall, Britain's most senior commander in Afghanistan.

One might have expected our 'leading critical' daily to place Bucknall under serious journalistic inspection over this country's occupation of another, its subservience to the US in that illegal invasion and the catastrophic loss of life it has helped cause.

Instead, much like BBC copy, the General is quoted extensively without question or challenge from Nick Hopkins and permitted to propagandise the war agenda.

A sample:

"The Taliban had been reduced to a terrorist group, adopting terrorist tactics, said Bucknall.

'I have not seen any insurgents who have assassinated their way to power. One hundred and forty [Afghans] have been assassinated this year. In the press that is painted as the government cannot survive this. But we are taking out 130-140 mid-level Taliban leaders every month. Sometimes it is worth turning the egg-timer on its head. They have been driven to this much vaunted tactic of assassinations.'

He said that the idea the Taliban would sit and wait until western forces had left suited Nato well because it would allow Afghan police and army more time to get up to strength."

Nothing from Hopkins on the terrible suffering and blood of the Afghan people. Nothing, in the way of balance, on how the Taliban view the occupation and development of the war.

Hopkins's article is further evidence of the Guardian's vital fig-leaf role. But the myth still prevails, particularly amongst much of the liberal left, that it functions as a champion arena for independent thought - with the now-added task of exposing and weeding-out a 'bad tabloid media'.

The dual pretence is eagerly crafted by Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger in his now-regular deliberations on how we might best 'clean-up' the industry.

Likewise, in his recent evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, leading Guardian investigative reporter Nick Davies spoke in detail about the ethical intricacies of Guardian reporting/sourcing, contrasting it to "the culture of bullying" within Fleet Street.

Admirers of Davies's impressive exposures would have little reason to think about the culture of editorial expectation he himself adheres to at the Guardian.

The Guardian's "internal culture", Davies insisted in his testimony, is different from the more corporate-competing press due to its Trust-based status. The Guardian, he argues, has a relatively higher reliance on advertising revenue than the tabloids, which, he claims, depends more on high-volume sale of papers. Hence, Davies concludes, the Guardian is "less intense in its commercial pressure" and, effectively, more independent in its reportage.

The distinction is in itself spurious. All press media, tabloid and broadsheet, rely extensively on advertising profit. Moreover, carefully avoiding note of its 'green credentials', Davies failed to mention the fossil fuel-related advertising carried by the Guardian and how, despite its Trust 'independence', it bows unashamedly to big corporate demands.

This is the real "internal culture" at the Guardian, a culture of unspoken compliance.

It's also a culture with a wide co-optive net.

Caught-up in its persuasive mesh, some activists appear to believe that 'Occupying' the Guardian's Comment is Free site helps galvanise their cause. How mistaken. Again, it merely reinforces the system-serving myth of the Guardian is a radical-facilitating space.

Consider the stark absence at Occupy CiF of any critical charges against the Guardian itself. Where are all the Occupy questions about the Guardian's own corporate leanings, Rusbridger's own corporate-scale salary or, more disgracefully, the Guardian's protection of war criminals like Blair?

The Guardian's complicit pretentiousness here can be likened to that of Blair propagandist Alastair Campbell who disguises himself within the same liberal media, even appearing 'dutifully' at Leveson to excoriate the 'wicked redtops'.

Anyone doubting the true establishment credentials of Rusbridger et al should recall how the Guardian kept its editorial faith with Blair and Campbell. Note also how Rusbridger, Davies and other Guardian notables have now turned on and vilified Julian Assange while its editors keep safe distance from stories on how Fox, Gould and Werritty plotted to undermine Iran. As Craig Murray reminds us:

"It should not be forgotten that the Guardian never stopped supporting Blair and New Labour, even when he was presiding over illegal wars and the massive widening of the gap between rich and poor. My point about Assange is that he has done a great deal to undermine the neo-con war agenda – and the Guardian is subjecting him to a campaign of denigration. On the other hand Gould/Fox/Werritty were pushing a neo-con project for war – and the Guardian is actively complicit in the cover-up of their activities.

The Guardian. Whom does it serve?"

John

Political and media vultures circling Iran

2011-11-25T14:37:00.000-08:00

Think the charge of Iran's 'nuclear weaponisation' is now beyond doubt? Think the latest IAEA report is untainted? Think the BBC is telling the whole story? Think again.

As Israel, the US and their Western accomplices extend the propaganda offensive, here's the latest Media Lens Alert, 'They Found Nothing. Nothing', revealing just how complicit our media are in demonising Iran in preparation for another murderous 'intervention'.

Also, for the record, my letter on the ML article to the BBC's Iran correspondent James Reynolds:

Dear James Reynolds

In their current Alert, the Media Lens Editors have drawn your attention to crucial objections from notable figures on claims that Iran is actively constructing a nuclear weapon.

They also offer definitive evidence showing that "Yukiya Amano, the IAEA director general, is ‘solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision’."

This is key information and context that any average viewer would reasonably wish to know about.

Given all the criminal distortions peddled over Iraq and the disastrous conflagration likely to ensue from any attack on Iran, one might think that more 'vigilant' journalists would want to be much more certain about the authenticity of Iran's 'weaponisation' programme.

One would also think that 'specialist' correspondents like yourself would be only too aware of informed people like Robert Kelley warning of flawed intelligence and the politicised nature of the current IAEA report.

At the very least, any serious and balanced coverage would include such voices in their output.

Instead, when fairly questioned by Media Lens on these gross omissions, we have these replies:

"thanks for your message. I appreciate your comments and insight."

"I received your message - thanks. I shall reflect on the points you raise. It is always important for me to hear from licence-fee payers - the lifeblood of the BBC."

"points noted."

Such evasion could be safely considered patronising and dismissive - the standard replies received by many other courteous, critical enquirers. But there also lurks the more distinct possibility that you know your 'journalism' has been blatantly exposed.

In failing to offer even the merest explanation or argument, one can only conclude that you fear risking even greater exposure of your journalistic shallowness, your safe BBC compliance, or both.

If not, why don't you simply answer the Editors' questions as well as "appreciate" and "reflect" on them?

Kind regards
John Hilley

Observers of the gathering plot to 'pick-off' Iran should also be keeping tabs on damning new evidence exposing the dark activities of recently-appointed UK ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould, ex-Defence Minister Liam Fox and his adviser in subterfuge Adam Werritty.

Undisclosed meetings with Mossad, liaisons with neo-con forces, 'unofficial' UK briefings in preparing to attack Iran: read and learn of the British state's deep pro-Israel agenda and its part in plotting more appalling misery in the Middle East.

John

Culling the poor

2011-11-10T09:47:00.000-08:00

Here's the true, brutal face of Cameron's caring capitalism.

Helen and Mark Mullins took their lives after trying to get by on charity handouts and living in a single room of their house because they couldn't pay for fuel.

In the video, filmed shortly before their deaths, Mark explains the distressing problems Helen had faced in trying to have her benefits established and negotiating the unsparing appeals process.

They had been walking twelve miles to get emergency food from a Salvation Army kitchen.

Two desperate souls who, punished and ignored by the benefits system, decided, in the end, that they literally couldn't afford to live.

While bankers enjoy billions in state welfare and dreamy bonuses, lost and abandoned people are simply giving up.

This is the fear society, a society of chronic insecurity and mercenary market rules, a society of poverty and want while Sainsbury's, Tescos and the other grocers of greed make astronomical profits.

Tragedies due to benefit insecurity and stress are becoming increasingly widespread.

Some more examples of suicide and death prompted by government cuts and the punitive benefits system:

Depressed 'Jobseeker' commits suicide - http://www.thisishampshire.net...

Cuts Kill: the story of a sister driven to suicide - http://www.dpac.uk.net/2011/05...

Man dies of kidney cancer after being told fit for work - http://www.guardian.co.uk/poli...

Woman's depressed brother commits suicide after benefits being stopped , at 3;40 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Two die while waiting for appeals to be heard - http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/...

Man dies of heart attack after being told by Atos 'fit for work' - http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/inve...

Author's suicide 'due to slash in benefits' july 2010 - http://www.scotsman.com/news/a...

3 die in West Dunbartonshire after being told fit for work, area also has one of the highest unemployment rates with 40 people chasing every vacancy - http://intensiveactivity.wordp...

Devastated Salford mum killed herself over redundancy blow - http://menmedia.co.uk/salforda...

Southfields dad committed suicide after housing benefit cut - http://labourinwandsworth.word...

Body found in River Wear is Leanne Chambers - http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk...

Christelle and her baby died at the hands of a callous state - http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm...

Woman who drowned in drain was upset about health check – http://www.thisishullandeastri...

Pregnant Mum leaps to Death after her benefits are stopped – http://www.thefreelibrary.com/...

Stress of Tory benefits tests killed our dad, family claims – http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/t...

John

Palestine's UNESCO admission

2011-11-02T08:37:00.000-07:00

In an act of calculated spite, the US has withdrawn $60 million in contributory payments to UNESCO following the vote to admit Palestine as a full member to the body.

Israel has wielded its own punishment by announcing the building of 2000 more settler homes in East Jerusalem and freezing Palestinian tax funds.

107 countries voted for Palestinian admission, 52 abstained (including the UK) and 14 opposed the motion (including the US, Israel, Australia, Canada, Sweden and Germany).

Washington later mounted a paltry defence of its action, claiming that the vote was a "rejection of the international community", while repeating the default-line excuse that any UN recognition of Palestine creates a hostile atmosphere for the 'peace process'.

In resisting US/Israeli pressure, the mass of countries supporting Palestine's candidacy seem to have been motivated by three more elementary truths: the US is, as far as it's concerned, the 'international community'; the US backs Israel unconditionally; there is no peace process.

The extent of UN member state support for Palestine and resistance to US intimidation confirms the now-gathering diplomatic crisis for Israel.

Whatever resilient comfort Netanyahu may take from Obama's loyalty - always remembering, of course, what Israel gives America in return - he knows that the vote is yet another significant blow to Israel's standing.

Evidence of that concern can be gleaned in a recent Wikileaks cable detailing Israel's rearguard efforts to offset its increasing international isolation by pitching - unsuccessfully - for a top placement within UNESCO.

Meanwhile, news of the Palestinian admission to UNESCO barely rated a mention on the main BBC news.

As Craig Murray noted in a scathing indictment:

"BBC journalism hit a new low today. The BBC News channel devoted only a single sentence to Palestine’s diplomatic coup in gaining full membership of Unesco. It used that single sentence once at 18.23 and once during the following hour. And this is that single sentence: “Israel says that Unesco’s decision to admit Palestine to full membership will damage the prospects for peace in the Middle East.”

No other view was given, We did not hear what Palestine says, or what Unesco says, or what any of the huge majority of 107 countries which voted for Palestine say. The only view we were given was the Israeli view, and there was no questioning or discussion of that view.

“Israel says” – what an astonishing opening two words to a report on a great day for Palestinian diplomacy. Everyone connected with BBC News should be utterly ashamed. Why don’t we just save the license fee and let Netanyahu’s office broadcast the news instead?"

Indeed.

Between US financial blackmail and loaded/curtailed reportage, Israel can still take some comfort in having its crimes funded and sanitised.

John

Media Lens: Killing Gaddafi

2011-10-28T12:07:00.000-07:00

Anyone feeling squeamish or uncomfortable over the reporting of recent events in Libya might find solace in the latest Media Lens Alert, Killing Gaddafi, a most welcome antidote to the toxic inhumanity that passes for mainstream 'liberal' media comment on this gruesome execution.

The ML editors also lay bare the considerable evidence of Western lies and disinformation that allowed Nato and the National Transitional Council to ignore every possibility of productive negotiations with Gaddafi, resulting - despite Nato's 'mandate to protect' - in the much greater killing of Libyan civilians and ruthless destruction of cities like Sirte.

As with previous plaudits for Blair, the Alert shows just how far the BBC and other herd media have gone in praising Cameron as a leader 'vindicated' in his 'first war'.

The last section of the article sees ML at their most eloquent and humane, a rare oasis of compassion amid this desert of propaganda.

Where, the authors ask, is the basic concern for suffering others, whatever crimes they've committed? In particular, to those 'liberal humanists' who diminish Gaddafi's murder against the 'higher moral imperative' of Nato action, this searching question:

"Does anyone doubt that a Jesus or a Buddha would not merely have harboured sympathy for Gaddafi but would have intervened to save his life? And who would dare claim that doing so would make them ‘apologists’ for tyranny?"

Recognising the systemic conditioning that inhibits honest, independent journalism, ML offer their own compassionate thoughts on what drives even our most 'caring' media towards such hateful output:

"We suspect that most journalists are not actually unfeeling brutes. They are conformists wary of the high price they can be made to pay for even the suspicion that they might be 'apologists' for an official enemy."

Thus does the conformity multiply as further media endorsement of newly-appointed enemies and the case for more 'noble intervention'.

Among their many fine articles, this ML offering deserves particular praise for highlighting not just Libya's true human suffering and media complicity in that avoidable tragedy, but the more pernicious language of cruelty and spite so-readily adopted in denouncing 'our' foreign 'foes'.

In exposing such media apologetics for war and destruction, it advances, by another promising increment, the urgent construction of a truly moral, compassionate and radical journalism.

John

Resilience of Occupy Oakland

2011-10-27T11:27:00.000-07:00

Some heroic actions from the 99 Percenters of the Occupy Oakland movement in California as they resist police stun bombs, tear gas, rubber bullets and other brutal efforts to break-up their protest encampment.

Street demonstrations in Syria are commended by Washington. Opposition forces in Libya can be lauded and backed by Nato bombers when it suits American political, military and business interests. But any peaceful dissent at home must be ruthlessly crushed.

As with the state's violent oppressions on Wall Street, it's another illustration of just how much the US regime fear and suppress real democracy.

Expect more such brutality from the anxious 1 percent and their state enforcers. As Chris Floyd says: "You can smell the fear in the boardrooms."

John

Occupying liberal street

2011-10-23T19:07:00.000-07:00

As a radical new surge of people power sweeps around the globe, politicians and the mainstream media seem worryingly perplexed about how to respond.

Stuck in the safe world of machine politics and parliamentary-type reporting, their comprehension of the current unrest still speaks of 'errant' political/financial behaviour and 'misapplied' capitalist democracy.

Such was the intonation when Jeremy Paxman asked Michael Moore what he hoped Occupy Wall Street could achieve.

Did Moore want to change capitalism or end it, Paxman enquired? "End it", came the unequivocal response.

Capitalism is an "evil", inequitable system, Moore asserted, adding, as importantly, that the very function of standard politics has been to protect the rich and help maintain that very system of power.

For Moore, that's why people are now on the street, rejecting both the life-sucking power of greedy bankers and what's been handed-down to them as 'political partcipation'.

While Paxman seemed to acknowledge the frustration behind such action, he struggled to see how its aims could be advanced outwith the 'political process', the assumption being that OWS is not, in Paxman's BBC world, 'political'.

Thus, does Paxman (BBC annual salary, circa £750,000), like so many comfortable liberal media careerists, maintain a homogenised notion of what constitutes 'political life'.

Nor does the spectre of global occupation and rejection of corporate existence easily register in the liberal mindset as 'political crisis'.

That term denotes, more-readily, perceived 'emergencies' in party and governmental life: corruption/expenses scandals and the like.

Witness the liberal buzz as the BBC, Guardian and other 'vanguard' media recover the scandalous detail on fallen Defence Secretary Liam Fox.

Of course, Fox's demise is newsworthy, the media copy serving to reveal a little more of the cosy relations between our political and business elites. But it also helps cement the notion of a 'liberal protectorate' acting to 'insure' us against those 'shocking abuses' of the system.

It speaks, implicitly, of Fox as some aberration within an otherwise functional, if still imperfect, system. In the process, we're encouraged to believe that the liberal media, like liberal politicians, are doing 'their job' in working to expose and weed-out the offenders. Rarely, if ever, does this come with any more damning indictment of the system itself.

But liberals also need to be 'on the street', to be seen as present, aware, 'involved'.

And so liberal politicians and journalists 'shadow' the new direct-action politics - as with the radical blogosphere - like 'awkward oldies' fascinated by an edgy young trend, wanting to get in with the 'subculture', the people, 'the kids', the 'zeitgeist'; a hovering, anxious force afraid of being shut-out.

Thus do the dynamics behind Occupy Wall Street make for instructive observation on liberal sensitivity and its identity crisis.

Chris Hedges, a prolific chronicler of the OWS and wider protests, sees this nascent rejection of corporate life as a key threat to capitalist and liberal interests, alike:

"Tinkering with the corporate state will not work. We will either be plunged into neo-feudalism and environmental catastrophe or we will wrest power from corporate hands. This radical message, one that demands a reversal of the corporate coup, is one the power elite, including the liberal class, is desperately trying to thwart.

For Hedges, the space for liberal response is becoming acutely narrowed:

"But the liberal class has no credibility left. It collaborated with corporate lobbyists to neglect the rights of tens of millions of Americans, as well as the innocents in our imperial wars. The best that liberals can do is sheepishly pretend this is what they wanted all along."

And with this has come a heightened resistance to liberal co-optation:

"The Occupy Wall Street movement, like all radical movements, has obliterated the narrow political parameters. It proposes something new. It will not make concessions with corrupt systems of corporate power. It holds fast to moral imperatives regardless of the cost. It confronts authority out of a sense of responsibility. It is not interested in formal positions of power. It is not seeking office. It is not trying to get people to vote. It has no resources. It can’t carry suitcases of money to congressional offices or run millions of dollars of advertisements. All it can do is ask us to use our bodies and voices, often at personal risk, to fight back. It has no other way of defying the corporate state. This rebellion creates a real community instead of a managed or virtual one. It affirms our dignity. It permits us to become free and independent human beings."

As the resistance of OWS to any friendly endorsements from Obama or advances from his Democrats shows, the movement, worldwide, appears particularly vigilant to party takeovers.

With the protest movement exercising new strategies of real political action, the potential displacement of standard liberal politics is of gathering concern both to party and media liberals as well as the system of corporate power they serve.

Here's to the intensification of their common crises.

John

Gaddafi's execution - the killing of empathy

2011-10-21T12:27:00.000-07:00

Hillary Clinton's laughing pronouncement on the execution of Muammar Gaddafi gives disturbing insight into the callous minds of those who control today's main imperialist empire:

"We came, we saw, he died."

Extolling the Nato ‘mission', Obama, Clinton, Cameron and their peers have been busy denouncing the 'Mad Dog' and rejoicing his removal.

And, in ever-subservient tune, our media offer barely a word on Nato's aggression or the hypocritical gloating of such leaders.

Whatever Gaddafi's own crimes, how telling that the BBC and other leading Western media have offered only nominal space to the illegality of this gruesome lynching, selecting to accentuate the 'necessary cost' of Libya's 'assisted liberation'.

Amnesty has already called for investigations into a prima facie war crime.

There's seems little doubt that Gaddafi could have been taken alive. Nor is there the slightest credibility in National Transitional Council claims that he was killed after his ambulance was "caught in crossfire". It's reasonably obvious that Gaddafi's capture and murder constitutes a gross violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Meanwhile, the 'liberal' Guardian's Ian Black dispensed with the merest humanitarian formality over Gaddafi's brutal termination in declaring: "good riddance".

Even for our most 'humane' media, the elimination of 'them' merits little compassionate regard.

Could we ever imagine people like Black writing such lines after the deaths of Bush, Rumsfeld or Blair?

Noting more of Clinton's ugly utterances, the Independent's Peter Popham offers a more familiar line in liberal excuses:

" "OOOMGOOOMG I just saw Gaddafi's body video," she wrote. "My heart won't stop racing... I can't believe this day has come. My whole life I've waited, prayed, wished, this is it no words."

For us, the footage of Muammar Gaddafi's body – dead or alive, who knows – being dragged off a truck by a crowd of screaming men, who then hauled it about and kicked it like a football, was deeply disturbing: the lynch mob at its 'most primeval. But who are we to judge? We never lived under the man's all-powerful terror."

But we, the wider world, do know about the all-powerful terror of American and Nato aggression. Where's the damning judgement here on that merciless force?

Gaddafi's execution by Libyan 'rebels' is, of course, the most convenient outcome for the West, shielding Nato's own vital role in his killing, while sending to the grave more key evidence of the West's - notably Tony Blair's - dealings with their former associate.

The Guardian's Simon Tisdall also notes the 'good result for the West' line, but without a word on Nato's vast, aggressive input:

"And after all the waiting, the killing and the tears, the wheel of history turned inexorably, and all who watched knew it would never turn back. The Arab spring had claimed another infamous scalp. The risky western intervention had worked. And Libya was liberated at last."

Yes, as ever, that "risky intervention".

The BBC, in truest Orwell-speak, sought to excuse Nato to the very last:

"Nato, which has been running a bombing campaign in Libya for months, said it had carried out an air strike earlier on Thursday that hit two pro-Gaddafi vehicles near Sirte. It was unclear whether the strikes were connected with Col Gaddafi's death."

As if Nato's overall actions could somehow, even at this last brutal stage of its murderous campaign, be isolated from Gaddafi's actual death.

Newsnight's Gavin Esler could offer no more searching effort in questioning arch neo-con John McCain.

Jubilant over Gaddafi's demise, McCain promised that other world dictators, such as Assad, Putin and the Chinese leadership, would now be more worried over potential protest against their regimes. Esler let the comment pass without even a cursory reminder of the historic happenings on Wall Street and gathering mood of dissent across America.

Another report from Tim Whewell asked if Blair had made "a mistake" in dealing with Gaddafi and whether 'we' should be engaging other tyrants, the core assumption being that ‘our’warmongers are morally fit to make such judgements.

Clinton's "we came, we saw..." jibe, a crass allusion to conquests past, reveals an inhuman lack of empathy for suffering others, whatever their enemy status.

How can supposedly civilized senators and leaders speak in such ways? And how is such open cruelty being reflected in the wider society?

As Craig Murray fittingly puts it, "we seem to have become as dehumanised as ancient Rome."

That dark truth is all the more ironic given America’s own home crisis and the declining legitimacy of its political-corporate elite.

Perhaps a case of ‘Rome burns while Clinton giggles’.

John

Occupy LSX

2011-10-15T11:17:00.000-07:00

Party politics is dead. Real politics is finding its voice on the street, confronting anonymous elites directly in the high places of financial power.

From Washington, New York and across the US, home of corporate power, new and confident assemblies are making their mark against the ravaging, savaging effects of capitalist existence.

Taking its cue from the Arab Spring, the inspiring expression of people politics, the "99%" movement, that's resolved to Occupy Wall Street has given impetus to a whole new global moment.

Across the world today, 800 protests will help spread that resistance against the banking leviathans who control, manipulate and destroy human lives, with occupation of the London Stock Exchange a notable element of this growing civil awareness.

Follow Occupy London LSX with constant updates here.

John

Abunimah: Blair and Quartet need to be removed

2011-10-05T12:17:00.000-07:00

While the US reaffirms its intention to veto any bid for Palestinian statehood, the Middle East Quartet plays its own appointed role in protecting and advancing Israel's vital interests.

At the same time, Tony Blair has used his position as Quartet 'peace envoy' to advocate unashamedly for Israel while enriching himself in the process.

With criticism of Blair also now coming from inside Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority, the complicit role of the Quartet - as well as the PA itself - is increasingly apparent.

In a searing indictment, Ali Abunimah argues that Blair's blatant profiteering and deception raises larger questions about the Quartet's own status, purpose and funding.

Noting the recent Dispatches exposure of Blair's lucrative dealings with dictatorships across the Middle East, Abunimah discusses how the Quartet has facilitated that patronage while locking the Palestinians into a spurious 'peace agenda'.

The time has come, he says, not just to remove Blair but to dismantle the Quartet.

John

Abbas's glory moment may be just that

2011-09-27T10:07:00.000-07:00

If you want to avoid any engagement of the possible, keep insisting that your adversary recognise the impossible.

Benjamin Netanyahu is the Israeli exponent, par excellence, of that duplicitous tactic. And Barack Obama is always reliably on-hand to ensure that the deceit is efficiently stage-managed.

No negotiations can take place, Netanyahu insists, without Palestinian endorsement of Israel as a Jewish state.

Palestinian acceptance of such a state would, of course, mean not only the abandonment of UN Resolution 194, the right of return, it would also be a ratification of Israeli apartheid, signing-away any claim to equal, democratic rights of the 20 per cent Arab Palestinians currently inside Israel.

As the Palestine Papers show, Abbas and his Palestinian Authority have already revealed their willingness to 'do the impossible' in giving away such Palestinian rights.

Yet, even he sees the dire fallout for the PA on the Arab Street from recognising Israel as a Jewish state.

Just think for a moment about this staggering demand. Imagine, say, an emerging independent Scotland asking other countries to recognise it as a Protestant, Catholic or otherwise Christian state.

Yet, as the Middle East and its Arab Spring press for real democratic constitutions, Israel wants to push further down the theocratic road, denying non-Jews the same democratic and civil rights as Jews.

Even if the Palestinians did recognise such a state, Israel would still find some other precondition to stall and dissemble. The greatest 'fact on the ground' is that Israel has no intention of ceding an inch of the West Bank or Jerusalem. And no amount of diplomatic window dressing can disguise that truth.

Although Mahmoud Abbas surely sees the ways in which Israel and the US are using the standard call for a 'negotiated settlement' - with that 'Jewish state' demand - to bluster and delay, he still shows a subservient willingness to engage in a fixed and dominated game.

As Frank Barat comments:

"While it is easy to understand the PA’s motivations in making a move at the UN — taking matters for the first time in a long time into their own hands, not succumbing to pressure, making a statement — it has unfortunately very little chance to make any real difference on the ground. By going to the UN, the PA continues to accept the rules of its master/oppressor."

While Abbas may have returned triumphantly from the UN, his statehood bid has, conveniently, been kicked into the diplomatic long grass, with the US now threatening disinvestment against the West Bank unless he gets back to the same posturing negotiations.

This is where the politics of dependency, old party survival and international stagecraft all combine to 'create' more of the same stasis, nothing of substance, serving the hegemonic fiction of Washington and the rest of the Quartet as determined 'solution seekers' and 'honest brokers'.

For Jonathan Cook, this latest key shaming of Washington as the ever-ready protector of Israel may have provided a moment of glory for Abbas, but, as reality bites, it also signals the gathering demise of the "old guard" Palestinian Authority which, as a product of the Oslo process, will now become its inevitable "casualty".

And from this dialectic an emerging new-blood is now rising above the old, tired politics, refusing to engage those controlling entities. As Cook puts it:

"Instead we are entering a new phase of the conflict in which the US, Europe, and the UN will have only a marginal part to play. The Palestinian old guard are about to be challenged by a new generation that is tired of the formal structures of diplomacy that pander to Israel’s interests only.

The young new Palestinian leaders are familiar with social media, are better equipped to organise a popular mass movement, and refuse to be bound by the borders that encaged their parents and grandparents. Their assessment is that the PA – and even the Palestinians’ unrepresentative supra-body, the PLO – are part of the problem, not the solution.

Till now they have remained largely deferential to their elders, but that trust is fast waning. Educated and alienated, they are looking for new answers to an old problem.

They will not be seeking them from the countries and institutions that have repeatedly confirmed their complicity in sustaining the Palestinian people’s misery. The new leaders will appeal over the heads of the gatekeepers, turning to the court of global public opinion. Polls show that in Europe and the US, ordinary people are far more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than their governments.

The first shoots of this revolution in Palestinian politics were evident in the youth movement that earlier this year frightened Abbas’ Fatah party and Hamas into creating a semblance of unity. These youngsters, now shorn of the distracting illusion of Palestinian statehood, will redirect their energies into an anti-apartheid struggle, using the tools of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience. Their rallying cry will be one person-one vote in the single state Israel rules over."

Obama, in his default-line defence of Israel, told the UN that there can be "no shortcut" to statehood for the Palestinians. When all the raised expectations of Abbas's statehood bid subside, a more useful reality will surface: that there can be no shortcut to ending the occupation and delivering a true state of peace, democracy and equal human rights.

John

Palestinian 'statehood' bid - what really changes?

2011-09-20T17:07:00.000-07:00

As the day nears for attempts to establish a Palestinian state at the UN, key Palestinian figures and civil society groups have raised significant objections to the plan.

While the bid seems popular with many Palestinians and may garner welcome publicity for their cause, it also creates many more detrimental possibilities, all to Israel's advantage.

The bid for statehood is, first and foremost, a survival strategy for Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority (PA). And, in that vital context, it elevates the PA's own political agenda above that of any true liberation agenda.

Omar Barghouti argues, convincingly, that the Abbas administration has neither the political authority to present such a motion nor any intention of defending the wider rights of Palestinians, as entrenched, most notably, in UN resolution 194:

"Without any sense of irony, Palestinian officials who have time and again colluded in eroding official international support for UNGA 194, as the Palestine Papers have amply shown, are now appropriating that very number and using it in a bid that runs the risk of surrendering the right of return associated with it for more than six decades. This is merely a symbol of the far more substantive moral, political and legal bind that this Initiative may potentially place the Palestinians and their supporters in.

The “September Initiative” is at best vague and confusing and at worst damaging to the interests of the Palestinian people. Regardless, it is entirely divorced from the will of the Palestinian people, and those advocating it have no democratic mandate from the people to employ it in any way that jeopardises our UN-sanctioned rights."

Barghouti also cites strategic Zionist thinking on the bid, noting, in particular, the dangers of any transfer of authority from the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) - the officially-recognised voice of all Palestinians, occupied or exiled - to the effective hand of a PA-led state, a scenario that would only diminish Palestinian rights and entrench Israeli claims to a Jewish state. Thus:

"The spokesman of the Israeli delegation, notable writer Sefi Rachlevski, was quoted in Yedioth Ahronoth on September 5 saying, “We are a group that fully supports [Israel’s] declaration of independence and the Zionist dream of establishing the State of Israel, and we see the Palestinian initiative a definite continuation of that.”"

With the US pledging to veto the bid if it gains the necessary nine SC votes, even the likely endorsement of the General Assembly will mean only an attenuated version of UN membership (note that only states can recognise other states, the UN can only consider membership of states).

All of which begs the question: why is Netanyahu so vehemently opposed to the UN statehood bid.

The answer lies, mainly, in Israeli fears of further international isolation. Any US veto, should the bid first be referred, as promised by Abbas, to the Security Council, would also place Obama in a more embarrassing situation, having openly-declared US support for a two-state solution.

Avi Schlaim, seeing the symbolic merit of the UN bid, elaborates the point:

"Why are Israel and the US so hysterical about the UN bid if it doesn’t make a difference? They are hysterical about it because until now, for the last 20 years, they have everything their way. There was the American-sponsored peace process, which was leading nowhere slowly, and Israel was carrying on with its expansionist agenda and pretending to be involved in a peace process. Now this has ended. There is no pretending."

More fundamentally, Netanyahu, like all previous Israeli leaders, lives by the expansionist dictum that no settlements can ever be sacrificed, no serious concessions ever granted to already occupied and dispossessed Palestinians.

While Israel has always pitched for Abbas as the preferred 'negotiating' party - with all the useful stalling props and collaboration that entails - the apparent problem for Netanyahu now lies in the prospect of having to recognise, or at least deal with, a Palestinian state, rather than a territory, notably one that includes illegal Israeli settlements.

And yet, what would statehood effectively change in this regard? The occupation would still be in place. The settlements would still be present. Jerusalem would still be annexed. Would Israel, now intensively arming the settlers, suddenly be more inclined to vacate the West Bank? Would it end the siege of Gaza? After six decades of calculated oppression, would this declaration make Israel rush in genuine haste to the negotiating table?

The biggest risk for Palestinians, on the other hand, in terms of international support, is that any realisation of statehood could be widely interpreted as the issue having been 'resolved': Palestine, many might say, now has its state, so does Israel, and the 'facts on the ground' suggest that the settlements are there, long-established, and, therefore, a realistic fact of life.

Not only would the settlements remain in perpetuity, but the claims of diaspora Palestinians would be rendered an increasingly abstract issue. Jerusalem would still be under Israeli control and the wall would still be in place protecting stolen land beyond the 1967 line.

Adherents of the plan also argue that statehood would allow Palestine a more effective means of challenging the occupation through the UN and its legalistic bodies. This all sounds convincing in theory.

Yet, consider that Lebanon and Syria, both holding such state 'rights', have been unable to use those procedures to halt Israeli violations of their borders.

Joseph Massad's analysis suggests that whatever of the two possible outcomes comes to pass, Israel will be the main beneficiary.

Any failure of the bid would see Israel carrying on as determined occupier, with the US and Israel able to impose even more stringent, punishing conditions on a disobedient PA.

Alternatively, should a state be declared, it would mean effective relegation of the PLO and sacrificing the right of return, with Israel also likely declaring, once and for all, the limits of Palestinian 'sovereignty': namely, the minuscule pockets of West Bank territory they already 'control'.

In addition, notes Massad, the establishment of any such state would firm-up the reality of Israel as a Jewish state alongside it, with Israel now better able to set punitive preconditions for recognising a Palestinian state, including the relinquishing of its recent pact with Hamas.

Whatever happens on the political stage after the bid is presented, the reality on the ground will be one of ongoing occupation, siege and apartheid policies.

Abbas has created a heightened sense of expectation in the West Bank - less so in Gaza - and the likely frustration that will be created after the full bid fails - or gets committee-delayed at the Security Council - may be expressed as either raised street reaction or weary resignation. None of these scenarios augurs well for Abbas's own survival.

Netanyahu's late 'appeal for direct talks' can be easily read as yet another stalling move, intended to show Israel as a 'willing negotiator'.

Whether Abbas succumbs to more last-minute Israeli-US platitudes remains to be seen.  In an effort to offset its increasing pariah status and prevent the US from having to use its veto, Israel may offer token 'assurances' that something could still be 'on the table'.

If Abbas resists another such charade, and the bid proceeds, some useful publicity might be earned from the exercise. But it will still leave the core problem unresolved and Palestine stuck as a limbo-land 'state' with no effective authority.

When all the dust settles on this 'diplomatic offensive', the reality of Israeli power will still be grossly apparent.

True Palestinian liberation will only come about through sustained popular resistance to the occupation itself - using the Arab Spring and BDS as tactical opportunities - not via any superficial claims to statehood or upgraded UN status.

John

Censoring Gaza's kids

2011-09-14T21:27:00.000-07:00

An art exhibition by Gazan children depicting the trauma of being bombed and besieged by Israel has been censored by a US gallery.

The decision to pull the show, set to open in Oakland, California, was taken after intense pressure from pro-Israeli organisations.

Board directors at the Museum of Children’s Art (MOCHA) cancelled the show, A Child's View of Gaza, citing the “inappropriate nature” of the work.

It's yet another illustration of the power wielded by a massively-funded Israeli lobby in the US.

It might also be the first time ever that pictorial experiences of traumatised children have been deemed inadmissable by a gallery, particularly one that's already hosted other childhood victims of warfare.

Fortunately, the adverse publicity generated by this shameful decision only helps highlight the artwork and its laudable, moving message.

If every picture tells a story, every effort to subvert the truest one exposes a more worried and mendacious hand at work.

John

Britain's dark trade with Gaddafi in arms, oil and torture

2011-09-04T17:47:00.001-07:00

New and damning evidence now confirms Britain's dark trade and torture arrangements with the Gaddafi regime.

In a treasure-trove of documents recovered by Human Rights Watch from the disused office of ex-Gaddafi intelligence chief Moussa Koussa - openly welcomed as a defector to the UK - we now have written proof that MI6 were sending 'terrorist suspects' to Libya for rendition torturing.

A whole flow of similar communications reveal how Britain was briefing Libyan intelligence about opponents of the regime in Libya and abroad.

Many other papers disclose the cosy, cordial ties between Libyan and British intelligence in promoting Tony Blair's visits to Libya and how UK officials even helped write a speech for Gaddafi to assist his rehabilitation:

"The papers illustrate the intimate relations Mr Koussa and some of his colleagues seemingly enjoyed with British intelligence. Letters and faxes flowed to him headed 'Greetings from MI6' 'Greetings from SIS', handwritten Christmas greetings, on one occasion, from ' Your friend', followed by the name of a senior British intelligence official, and regrets over missed lunches. There were also regular exchanges of gifts: on one occasion a Libyan agent arrived in London laden with figs and oranges. "

Meanwhile, Alex Thomson of Channel 4 News has recovered further evidence of Britain's dark weapons trade with the Gaddafi regime.

His report reveals the $165 million deal secured by military supplier General Dynamics UK, all facilitated by ex-UK Ambassador to Libya Sir Vincent Fean, following on from Blair's 'deal in the desert' with the regime.

The Cameron government has also been found operating a secretive Whitehall cell serving to undermine Gaddafi by seeking to manipulate and control the Libyan oil sector. International Development secretary Alan Duncan has been closely involved in the operation, liaising with giant oil company Vitol, a firm he was previously employed by.

In a standard rebuttal of this highly embarrassing evidence, Downing Street has denied any conflict of interest, claiming that Duncan was essential to helping officials on the ground 'understand the intricacies' of the oil market.

One can but imagine the political and media furore if, say, a Libyan or Iranian cell had been involved in plotting similar destabilisations inside the UK or any other Western country.

It all goes with the imperialist territory. When America, Europe and Nato - what Bill Blum calls "The Holy Triumvarate" - want a state 'called-in', questions of international law, recognition of sovereignty or just plain democratic conduct has no bearing:

"If The Holy Triumvirate decides that it doesn't want to overthrow the government in Syria or in Egypt or Tunisia or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia or Yemen or Jordan, no matter how cruel, oppressive, or religiously intolerant those governments are with their people, no matter how much they impoverish and torture their people, no matter how many protesters they shoot dead in their Freedom Square, the Triumvirate will simply not overthrow them.

If the Triumvirate decides that it wants to overthrow the government of Libya, though that government is secular and has used its oil wealth for the benefit of the people of Libya and Africa perhaps more than any government in all of Africa and the Middle East, but keeps insisting over the years on challenging the Triumvirate's imperial ambitions in Africa and raising its demands on the Triumvirate's oil companies, then the Triumvirate will simply overthrow the government of Libya.

If the Triumvirate wants to punish Gaddafi and his sons it will arrange with the Triumvirate's friends at the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for them.

If the Triumvirate doesn't want to punish the leaders of Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Jordan it will simply not ask the ICC to issue arrest warrants for them."

As Libya's new order and the 'international community' decry Gaddafi's atrocities, it's worth reflecting on the crucial part that Britain and America have played in torture arrangements, oil deals and arms to that regime.

If Gaddafi ever does end up at the International Criminal Court, more of that evidence might well emerge, a troubling thought no doubt exercising Nato minds as they deploy every available resource to eliminate their former friend.

John

Ode to Palestine

2011-09-04T17:47:00.000-07:00

Fine, harmonious work by the Beethovians for Boycotting Israel (BBI) who managed to disrupt a BBC Proms performance by the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra.

There's a bogus argument, predictably expressed by outright adherents of Israel, that cultural events like this should be exempt from protest actions.

Tell that to the bombed and imprisoned people of Gaza and the West Bank, while such 'artistic ambassadors' go around the world fabricating a clean image for Israel.

Amid all the blustering outrage, such as that from Stephen Pollard in the Telegraph, declaring the protest 'anti-semitic', it's also good to note the prominent involvement of conscientious Jews and Jewish-Palestine-supporting groups.

As noted in an article from the New York Times:

"The possibility of disruption had already been well flagged. Earlier in the week, a letter signed by 23 professional musicians, including Ms. Fink, a music teacher who has been active in Jewish groups opposing the Israeli occupation of pre-1967 Palestinian territory, was published in a newspaper, The Independent, castigating the BBC for inviting the Israeli orchestra.

“Israel deliberately uses the arts to promote a misleading image of Israel,” the signers said. “Through this campaign, officially called ‘Brand Israel,’ denials of human rights and violations of international law are hidden behind a cultural smokescreen.”"

A press release for BBI noted:

A new vocal ensemble, Beethovians for Boycotting Israel (BBI), gave its debut performance at a Prom concert at the Royal Albert Hall yesterday evening.
Their first piece was intricately interwoven with Webern's Passacaglia, played by guest artists the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO).

"We thought we'd liven up the Webern a bit" said Deborah Fink (soprano). "The
performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony at the previous night's Prom was so exciting that we decided to treat the audience to our own version of the Ode to Joy".

The lyrics of the BBI's "Ode to Boycott" have an unmistakeably Beethovian ring:

Israel, end your occupation:
There's no peace on stolen land.
We'll sing out for liberation
'till you hear and understand

Ethnic cleansing and apartheid
Should belong to history.
Human rights cannot be silenced:
Palestine will soon be free.

Uplifting sentiments.

A standing ovation for this imaginative chorus of dissent.

John

Libya's 'deliverance'

2011-08-31T21:17:00.000-07:00

What price the 'liberation' of Libya?

Unknown thousands of deaths, mostly civilians? A country's infrastructure decimated, including hospitals, electricity stations and oxygen plants? The spectre of a growing humanitarian catastrophe?

One is reminded here of Madeleine Albright's now infamous comment on the over half a million deaths from Western-imposed sanctions on Iraq: "the price is worth it."

And so it is for Western leaders and their media apologists over the 'necessary sacrifice' of so many Libyans and their society.

Many atrocities have been carried out by both pro and anti-Gaddafi forces. Alex Thomson of Channel 4 News has witnessed the horror scenes at Abu Salim hospital, finding stomach-churning evidence of patients murdered and left to die. One lucky survivor was a small boy, the son of Gaddafi supporters, shot in the back and saved only through the intervention of the Red Cross. Admirably, coming across another terrifying situation, Thomson and his crew managed to talk 'rebel' forces out of killing nine Nigerian men falsely assumed to be Gaddafi-hired mercenaries.

Rare moments of journalistic honesty and compassion amid so much carnage and propaganda.

Yet, where, elsewhere, is the big headline reportage on the West's own principal part in all this murder and despair?

One cannot presume to claim here that many deaths and much suffering would not have arisen from the war of opposition on Gaddafi.

But we can reasonably suggest that most of the deaths and terror would much more likely not have occurred had Nato and the West kept its militarist, profit-driven nose out of the conflict.

As one can see from every BBC report, to date, we have the predictable highlighting of Gaddafi killings, while rebel atrocities go either unreported or treated as war-situation 'reprisals'.

But even that discrepancy is secondary in scale to the more blatant omission of Nato atrocities, or the fact that Western bombing is in itself a gross war crime.

Craig Murray notes the core truth of Nato's violated mandate:

"It is worth reminding everyone something never mentioned, that UNSCR 1973 which established the no fly zone and mandate to protect civilians had “the aim of facilitating dialogue to lead to the political reforms necessary to find a peaceful and sustainable solution”.

Was that "aim" ever remotely part of the West's agenda? Has Nato's real strategy - to bomb Gaddafi into submission in order to implement a newer, better Western-serving regime - ever been on our 'critical' media's radar? How was such a duplicitous distortion of the term 'humanitarian intervention' ever allowed to go unheeded?

Here's just a small sample of liberal editorials rationalising Nato's murderous actions.

From the Independent

"Nato was right to take limited action to avert a bloodbath five months ago, and we are duty bound to help the Libyans rebuild their country now. Liberal intervention is not perfect but, as we said when the uprising began, it is, on balance, better than doing nothing."

From the Scottish Sunday Herald

"Although the fighting is now almost over, challenges lie ahead and the NTC will need huge international support to overcome them. There will still be setbacks and disappointments but one important point has emerged. Unlike the West’s interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, which exacerbated existing problems this Nato-led operation in Libya was handled with a light touch and perhaps it will provide a blueprint for the future eradication of dictators like Gaddafi."

From the Guardian

"But it can now reasonably be said that in narrow military terms it worked, and that politically there was some retrospective justification for its advocates as the crowds poured into the streets of Tripoli to welcome the rebel convoys earlier this week."

From the Sunday Observer

"The motives of Cameron and Sarkozy, as they first ordered their planes into action, seemed more humanitarian and emotional than cynically calculated. There was no urgent reason in realpolitik to oust Gaddafi as winter passed. His last 10 years in power had been quieter than his first berserk three decades. Labour home secretaries spooned his soup and drank his wine. Tony Blair embraced him. Libya's oil contracts were not at issue (just as they aren't today). The survival of Gaddafi's regime may have been a moral affront, but it was one among many. No: what sent British jets across the Mediterranean was a perceived need to save lives."

Again, not a solitary word in any of these missives about Nato's actual crimes, their indiscriminate killing of civilians or their true, expedient motives to secure Libya as a regional prize.

Besides the spurious case for 'humanitarian intervention' by 'pragmatic leftists' like Juan Cole, some on the more activist left have also engaged in a seemingly misguided calculus on how the 'new regime' will, despite heavy Western imperialist involvement, be 'moderately better' than the old one.

Richard Seymour, aka of Lenin's blog, has written, thus:

"The government that now follows will be less oppressive and more democratic than the one it ousted, and it will probably be less sectional than the Qadhafi regime. It would be hard for the coming government to do worse than Qadhafi."

One wonders. While denouncing Nato, Seymour's 'no tears for Gaddafi' argument is based on a realpolitik-type analysis of how the National Transitional Council (NTC) will now work with its Western sponsors to cultivate populist legitimacy. On the surface, it's a sober assessment of how Gaddafi's ouster, albeit effected and overseen by the West, provides encouraging opportunities for a more proto-democratic order.

The situaton in Libya is, of course, still highly fluid and subject to genuine demands for revolutionary outcomes. Yet, are we really to assume that, 'humanitarian mission achieved', this Western-rebel assembly will now courteously stand aside, leaving ordinary Libyans to build any kind of progressive constitution, resource-owning economy or socialistic society?

Without holding any brief for Gaddafi, the incoming NTC - led by ex-CIA-linked and royalist figures, installed by Nato's warmongers and instructed by the usual coterie of neoliberal/IMF carpetbaggers - promises no serious improvement for most Libyans.

The West's key positioning in Libya, now entrenched in NTC understandings of how it should govern, not only provides a bulwark to the promises of a spreading Arab Spring, it locks Libya, politically, economically and militarily into a stranglehold dependency on the West. It's a de facto occupation.

And, again, that occupation has come at a terrible human price.

With Nato now pledging an unflinching turkey-shoot finale against the city of Sirte, we see how Western 'interventionists', from hawk right to an assorted liberal left, seem either indifferent to, or only remotely concerned by, the actual, bloody loss of lives involved.

Such is the cold, rational message of how the 'dictators we abhor' must be removed, even if that results in regrettable numbers of dead, injured and traumatised people.

In response to Richard Seymour, this Media Lens (message board) comment returns us to that key issue:

You wrote: 'It would be hard for the coming government to do worse than Qadhafi.'

"Our point is that the actions of the forces that are trying to create the 'coming government' have surely resulted in many more deaths than would have occured without the Western attack. The death toll from violence is surely in the thousands - the death toll from all causes as a result of the war will of course be even higher...We hold no candle for Gaddafi's dictatorship. Our point is that it is hard 'to do worse' than war, especially one imposed by foreign powers driven by greed."

Like Iraq, like Afghanistan, Libya and its 'liberated' people have already paid the highest of all prices for their 'deliverance' from Gaddafi. Now, as a broken, indentured, client state, beholden to their political-military-corporate masters, they are about to feel the harsh effects of what our media dutifully call 'Western-led reconstruction'.

As with all the other neutralised language of Western aggression and exploitation, such jargon hides a multitude of 'liberal interventionist' sins. Which, as ever, proves the vital role of our default-line media, particularly its liberal variant, in conditioning the public for more 'necessary' wars and 'humanitarian' regime change.

John

Guardian in its true war-rationalising colours

2011-08-25T12:27:00.000-07:00

Another Western-inflicted regime change against another Arab or Muslim nation, another Guardian editorial serving, in its usual tortuous liberal way, to rationalise another corporate-rewarding aggression.

As the Guardian leader, Foreign policy: intervention after Libya, puts it:

"But it can now reasonably be said that in narrow military terms it worked..."

It's never delivered in Daily Mail or Sun-gloating style, but the Guardian's approval for Nato's annihilation of Libya is no less potent in its effect.

Citing Tony Blair as the defining figure of 'liberal interventionism', the Guardian explains that:

"this was the idea that stronger states could and should use the means at their disposal, including, as a last resort, their military means, to protect the populations of failing, weak, or oppressive states."

The actual process, of course, isn't liberal intervention at all, but military-corporate intervention, legitimised by this kind of liberal-Guardian assent.

The very term 'liberal interventionism' serves a key agenda-defining purpose in setting the debate about whether and how 'we', the 'obvious good guys', should flex our 'our moral muscle'.

With that narrative comes all the liberal agonising necessary to help reach the end conclusion that, while murky issues remain, the bombing and overthrow of states 'we' dislike can be justified:

"That does not mean that there will not be a case for intervention in the future, nor that we should stop trying to think these ideas through. Liberal intervention is neither discredited nor fully validated. Too many very different things were bundled together under its rubric. They need sorting out and Libya may help us to do so."

Yes, just like 'the lessons we learned' from Iraq; the idea that, with 'a little tweaking here and there', a little reflection on 'our mistakes', 'we' can get this invasion thing right. And, of course, Libya is just there to help us along in that noble task.

All of which helps pave the way for the next round of Western-directed bloodshed.

This piece should be preserved and cited as a precious example of liberal-Guardian apologetics.

Thankfully, beyond its hand-wringing editorial line, we find, from the Guardian's Seumas Milne, this more central truth about the West's real motives in Libya:

"If stopping the killing had been the real aim, Nato states would have backed a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement, rather than repeatedly vetoing both. Instead, after having lost serious strategic ground in the Arab revolutions, the Libyan war offered the US, Britain and France a chance to put themselves at the heart of the process while bringing to heel an unreliable state with the largest oil reserves in Africa."

John

Shocking conviction of Paul Donnachie

2011-08-25T11:37:00.000-07:00

A truly disturbing guilty verdict has just been handed down in a Scottish court to a student whose only 'crime' was to mock an Israeli flag and vent his opposition to the state of Israel.

Paul Donnachie now awaits sentence for 'racially aggravated conduct'.

A statement condemning Sheriff MacNair's findings has been issued alongside a call to support Donnachie's appeal which is now underway.

John

Megrahi's evidence - awkward potential

2011-08-23T00:27:00.000-07:00

With the current volatile situation in Libya, speculation is mounting over the future of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

On Monday night (22 August 2011), Newsnight Scotland (which breaks off from the main Newsnight at around 11pm) included an interesting interview with John Ashton who has been engaged in co-authoring a book with Megrahi called You are my Jury.

Ashton was asked if he'd spoken recently with Megrahi and answered that, no, he hadn't made contact for about a year. Noting his anxiety over what may happen to him, Ashton said that Megrahi is still adamant that all the facts around the case should come out.

Ashton says that Megrahi remains determined to have the truth made public given the sacrifice he had to make in dropping his right to appeal. Ashton is firmly of the view that neither Megrahi or Libya had anything to do with the Lockerbie bombing. He promises that all Megrahi's evidence and "an awful lot more" will come out in the forthcoming book.

All of which suggests very awkward questions for some elites and intelligence agencies in the West. Watch this space.

John

* Email to Jeremy Paxman and Newsnight on their coverage of Libya.

Poor people getting high

2011-08-19T14:37:00.000-07:00

The four-year jail sentences handed-down to two teenagers convicted of trying to 'incite' a riot via their Facebook pages has been denounced by worried lawyers and human rights groups as a deeply disturbing turn to effective summary justice.

With that kind of growing concern, one might expect a strong liberal defence of commensurate sentencing from the Guardian's chief political editor Michael White. Instead, he blogs:

"[F]our years in prison for trying to organise a riot in Northwich or Warrington (no one turned up) is a bit excessive. You normally have to kidnap someone or run them over while drunk to attract that sort of attention. Yet I'm not sorry at the thought that Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan (we must blame the parents for that name, but a non-custodial sentence is appropriate) and Jordan Blackshaw woke up in the slammer on Thursday remembering that, no, it's not all a bad dream. It could be like this for the next 18 months, lads. And what if that big bloke on the next floor takes a shine to you?
Mean? No. People write all sorts of really ugly and stupid things on Facebook, Twitter, email and other anti-social media platforms (including this one), and it's time they realised that they matter."

The "Facebook generation", as the condemning judge lumps them, may, indeed, have an inclination towards posting irresponsible content - and do beware, social networkers, what loose talk and hazardous sites one can stumble into on those pages.

Yet, here's White, supposedly more aware of those hazards, and the need for 'temperate Guardian language', apparently revelling in these draconian sentences while noting the prospect of illicit jail-place advances.

We should, perhaps, offer the same compassionate concern for White over such utterings. It appears, from his response to the substantial criticism over these remarks, that he wasn't actually advocating prison "rape", just sounding-off a little on a serious point - a bit like those on Facebook might resort to. So, a little understanding towards White, even if his dark musings reveal a more punitive 'departure' from the 'liberal balance' we might 'expect' from such quarters.

Much more importantly, it would never occur to Michael White that the countless rationalising columns he and his fellow Guardanista have produced in defence of warmongering politicians like Blair and Cameron has, in contrast to the 'Facebook 2', had an actual, complicit effect in promoting murder and mayhem.

To his credit, Channel 4's Jon Snow, writing in his blog - witness, again, the less-guarded keyboard at work - sees the more obvious crass-class discrepancies in the sentencing agenda:

"There is a sense in Britain too of a widening gap in both wealth and law – that there is one law for the elite and one for the poor. Take the MPs’ and Peers’ expenses scandal. A tiny handful of the expenses abusers have gone to jail. The vast majority have been allowed to pay stuff back or retreat to the political undergrowth. How many of the looters will be allowed to bring their plasma screens and running shoes back in return for their freedom? And yet it is the very unpunished abuse of the state by its elected and unelected elite which many argue is part of the landscape that the recent riots played out across...No British banker is in jail for what happened in 2008. And as financial upheaval cascades before us all over again, almost no serious measures have been taken to stop the same people from doing it to the people all over again."

Well said. If only Jon was able or willing to speak the fuller truth of these vast imbalances and their causes, including media responsibility for such, much more specifically on Channel 4 News.

Reflecting on the daily grind for many in Britain's bleak inner-city pockets, John Pilger puts it, as ever, in perfectly clearer context:

"For the young at the bottom of the pyramid of wealth and patronage and poverty that is modern Britain - mostly the black, the marginalised and resentful, the envious and hopeless - there is never surprise. Their relationship with authority is integral to their obsolescence as young adults. Half of all black British youth between the ages of 18 and 24 are unemployed, the result of deliberate policies since Margaret Thatcher oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in British history. Forget plasma TVs; this was panoramic looting.

Such is the truth of David Cameron's "sick society", notably its sickest, most criminal, most feral "pocket": the square mile of the City of London where, with political approval, the banks and the super-rich have trashed the British economy and the lives of millions....

This is not in any way to excuse the violence of the rioters, many of whom were opportunistic, mean, cruel, nihilistic and often vicious in their glee: an authentic reflection of a system of greed and self-interest to which scores of parasitic money-movers, "entrepreneurs", Murdochites, corrupt MPs and bent coppers have devoted themselves."

From a visceral media to draconian courts, from sanctimonious politicians to a vengeful public, we're now witnessing levels of outright hatred against the poorest sections of our society.

And it's not just a reaction to the riots. It comes as part of a deeper, encouraged animosity against the 'feckless' poor, the parodying of their 'Shameless-style' existence, their 'greedy-grasping' desire for things in shops that they 'won't do anything to earn', their 'workshyness', their 'plasma-screen culture', their 'refusal to better themselves', their 'frivolous' inability to manage the 'generous welfare' the state gives them.

Inflamed by Daily Mail diatribe and liberal 'firmness' alike - as in Michael White's outpourings - this shrill, small-minded denunciation is lacking in the most basic compassion or understanding of the real criminality happening in the high worlds of finance and warmongering politics.

It should be an automatically-known fact for such 'informed' commentators, that areas with the highest levels of unemployment and deprivation are also those with the highest risk of violence.

That's just one of the core conclusions in multiple studies of poverty highlighted by Epidemiology Professor Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level - a text which David Cameron once cited in his election 'appeals' for a 'fairer society', but which now, like any other 'concern' for the actual causes of societal breakdown, has been conveniently buried.

But there's something more basic, perhaps more prosaic, to say here about the motivations behind the riots and wider issues of poverty.

Besides all the well-documented links between unemployment, deprivation, alienation and violence, people in general, and poor people in particular, struggling under this insatiably-competitive, irrational system, will always try, just for that brief moment, to seize an illicit opportunity, to grab something, something they feel might bring a sense of attainment, even a modicum of happiness. It's a desire for momentary gratification, unbound elation, social escape, anarchic hedonism, the 'live to be high' flight from mundane reality.

It's also, more generally, why people in poverty, like poor mothers, go and splash-out on their kids, running up unrepayable credit, busting the family 'budget', behaving 'irresponsibly', living 'beyond their means'. And when they turn up at 'the social' asking for help, or plead hardship to those more comfortably-off, they're usually chastised for their 'indolence' and 'stupidity'.

How easily we turn on the poorest. How readily the 'upwardly-mobile', usually from once-poorer homes themselves, cast righteous judgement on those who 'won't pull themselves up'. How selectively we dispense our compassion.

Meanwhile, when elite bankers turn up at their version of 'the social', namely, The Treasury - having lined their pockets with vast bonuses, engaged in 'irresponsible' spending, speculated with greedy abandonment and taken entire economies down in the process - we shrug, maybe mount a little protest and go on with our insecure lives while dutiful politicians bail them out again.

Unlike the warped sentences now being handed-down to the opportunistic poor, few from that select estate will ever do community service, never mind go to jail. And, again, in a cruel reminder of how efficiently the propaganda of blame works, the greatest call for public retribution is directed at the poorest end of the spectrum rather than those guilty of the highest crimes.

With all the current evidence of more financial looting by the wealthy, is it any wonder the poor and scapegoated are now turning, as Pilger puts it, to social "insurrection"?

Perhaps I better end it there, in case this lowly blogger gets hauled-off for instigating feelings of compassion, empathy, solidarity or other kinds of thought crime.

John

Imprison, evict, impoverish - Victorian punishments for the looters

2011-08-15T21:37:00.000-07:00

First the disorder, now the purge.

Those caught rioting and looting face not just punitive jail sentences but the prospect of withdrawn benefits and house eviction of their entire families.

The message: you will pay the heaviest possible price for violations against commercial property.

Depressingly, a large majority of the public strongly support such retributive actions.

Which all goes to prove the power of political rhetoric and media propaganda in serving to hide the real causes and culprits. There's nothing quite like a reactionary assault on the 'underclass' and 'feral youth' to help disguise the elite's own crimes and responsibilities.

The tough sentencing includes five months imprisonment for a 24-year-old mother who slept through the riots, but was jailed for accepting a set of stolen shorts from a friend.

Now comes the assault on looters' benefits, a move defended by ConDem minister Iain Duncan Smith as a reasonable sanction against those 'who have shown no regard' for their community or society. Much of the public applaud, seeing no apparent contradiction in such messages from a government that's ravaged communities with spending cuts.

The plans to remove benefits also comes with all the rational agonising one might expect of Liberal Democrats and their 'intellectual' associates.

As the Financial Times reports:

"Ministers are drawing up controversial plans to remove benefits from those convicted of taking part in the riots that engulfed England last week, in a move Liberal Democrats and independent experts have condemned as counter-productive and overly expensive."

So very Lib Dem. So very liberal think tank. One might wish to commend such concerns as a check on Tory excesses. Yet, there's not a single syllable of compassion in their 'cost-effective', utilitarian calculus.

A more enlightened version of that concern might have read:

"... in a move Liberal Democrats and independent experts have condemned as hateful vengeance against the poorest and proof of the government's cost-priority protection of the wealthy."

Meanwhile, various English councils have initiated eviction orders against the families of those involved. In one such case, a mother is to be removed from her home after her 12-year-old son was arrested and charged with looting:

"A spokesman for Wandsworth Council said it wanted to "get the ball rolling" rather than wait to see if the tenant would be convicted."

No need for due process of the law, then, or consideration of the destructive effect on that family. (It's the kind of collective punishment meted out by the Israeli state when they demolish a family's home in reprisal for attacks made by just one of the family members.)

The councils concerned are taking political cover from Cameron's great "social fighback". As reported by the Independent:

"The Prime Minister, David Cameron, gave his backing yesterday to councils seeking to evict tenants over the violence, saying that people who "loot and pillage their own community should be shown the door". Mr Cameron said he thought evictions were a way of "enforcing responsibility in our society". He told the BBC that people who could face difficulties as a result of their eviction "should have thought of that before they started burgling"."

Again, it's all fine for Cameron and his banking friends to loot and pillage communities - whether ours or those in Afghanistan and Libya. If he ever comes to "face [the] difficulties" of "responsibility" for those crimes might we be entitled to say, well, "he should have thought of that before he started cutting and bombing"?

Another key feature of the Victorian-mood punishment is the government's own e-petition process, a mock consultation that, alongside all the standard media encouragements to hateful resentment, has now seen 200,000 signatures calling for severe action against the looters.

If only we heard the same political, media and public calls for elite robber bankers and war-rioting politicians to have their homes and other proceeds of crime repossessed. Again, it's proof-positive that the propaganda system works.

As previously stated, nothing useful ever comes from violence and destruction. The riots and looting have left families bereaved and communities fearful.  But the punitive, vindictive purge we're now seeing against the poorest and weakest parts of society help reveal the deeper poverty of justice, compassion and caring intervention at the heart of our economically cruel and morally bankrupt system.

John

Britain's riots - looting the truth

2011-08-11T11:27:00.000-07:00

The spectre of riots, theft and burning buildings across English cities is the latest indication of what happens when large sections of the population are abandoned to the profit-driven imperatives of capitalist society.

As England's streets erupt in violence, the language of condemnation has its own destructive intent, a looting of the truth by politicians and an accomplice media.

They’re all just “criminal thugs”, cry government ministers, “feral rats”, says one angry London shop owner. And many will readily agree watching the pictures of rampaging mobs seemingly intent on nothing but wanton destruction and personal gain.

Yet, in a society where accomplishment gets measured by consumer acquisition, is it any wonder that such people, impoverished or not, seize the opportunity to smash and grab?

David Cameron points to "pockets of our society that are not just broken but, frankly, sick." There needs to be "personal responsibility" he and others claim. But where is the political responsibility for the breakdown of that society? Is it just coincidence that the riots happened in mainly poor areas where unemployment is highest and black people suffer the greatest harassment from police?

And what of the many additional millions, mass sections of society, who suffer more passively from the effects of austerity and poverty while the rich become ever-richer. How did all that breakdown occur? Did it happen independently of decades-old neoliberal policies and political subservience to them? Many people in our society are, indeed, sick, suffering from the daily pressures and effects of a sick, profit-driven system.

Public denunciation of the rioters is understandable. People are living in fear of escalating violence. Besides the fallout from the police killing of Mark Duggan in London, the further tragic deaths of three men in Birmingham has raised the prospect of new inter-ethnic conflict, while pumped-up vigilantes and assorted forces of the right seek to exploit the situation on the streets.

Responding to standard media cues, people reach for easy explanations, dismissing, like the Daily Mail, the 'heresy' of blaming any part of the violence on cuts, raging unemployment or other social deprivation. It's the same old abrogating calls for the “greedy, criminal thugs” to be locked up.

Try offering an alternative view to that in mainstream company. Try saying that while you don’t condone the violence (any violence) you also have some understanding of why it’s happening.

Try airing that kind of measured analysis on the BBC and you may, like the noted black community figure Darcus Howe, get castigated and insulted as a criminal accessory to the violence.

BBC 'balance', it seems, doesn't like people saying that the riots were both expected and the consequence of more malign forces.

And don’t expect any media analogies either on the financial looting of the public purse, or similar condemnation of the feral bankers who, in business suits rather than hoodies, have caused such economic crisis and social dislocation.

Much is being made by media liberals of the seemingly ‘non-political’ nature of the riots – they’re motivated, it's claimed, by plain “greed” rather than, as in the Middle East and Europe, the desire for democracy and economic justice.

Yet, isn’t the very prevalence of that “greed” an indictment of the corporate-seducing system in itself, a system which idealises fast-track consumer gratification and ultra-competitiveness?

Why is that core issue – and the media’s own key part in it - almost never up for discussion?

Newsnight may permit ‘earnest liberals’ space to speculate on the motivations of rioting youth. Yet, rarely are we allowed similar exchanges on the destructive motivations of our political leaders and their corporate friends who conspire in mass bank bailouts and continued executive bonuses while millions live in fear of redundancy, eviction and apprehension over how to feed their kids.

That’s the real greed; the insatiable greed of an elite few, rather than the opportunistic grabbing of a laptop or trainers from a high street store.

The psychology of market resentment is also apparent here. Look, many onlookers say, how easy it is for them just to walk into looted shops and take a plasma TV while we struggle to pay for such things. Again, it’s an illustration of the consumer ‘values’ and competitive priorities we’re encouraged to internalise.

The related political-media buzz-word is “lawlessness”, a much-repeated synonym, again with selective applications. Thus, while a whole assembly of young people, whether aggrieved at police provocation or just street opportunists, are lumped and demonised as 'outlaws', the lawless action of high financiers and political warmongers is treated as ‘errant’ behaviour.

Again, this is not to condone the violence and destruction. (It’s somehow symptomatic of the dominant media narrative that one feels further compelled to make that caveat.) Many pictures do tell a disturbing story of by-standing victims and despair, such as the dramatic image of a woman leaping from her fire-engulfed flat and the young, injured Malaysian student apparently being assisted by rioting youths while others ransack his backpack.

Yet, can the responsibility for such social chaos and lack of compassion be simply attributed to a relatively small number of rioters? Shouldn’t these pictures invite serious examination in our media about why young people resort to such actions.

Why are those particular images constantly highlighted and replayed by the media? Most simply, because it helps stamp the big headline label "criminality" on such actions, permitting avoidance of any political responsibility.

Again, Cameron condemns the "disgusting sight" of the robbed student, warning that "things...are badly wrong in our society." Many will agree. Yet, no media outlet seems willing to link Cameron with the disgusting sights that he's helped create, both in the home society or abroad.

Masking the lines of criminality between the rioters and our corporate-political vandals serves a double propaganda function in hiding the elite’s own culpable actions while encouraging the public to turn ruthlessly on the ‘feral’ youth. It’s a classic example of how the blame narrative works as a default line media reaction.

Mass social exclusion, another jobless generation and, most particularly, an encouraged culture of rampant greed has brought even greater levels of hopelessness, alienation, resentment, dislocation and the inevitable turn to violence.

Might there, at some rare, searching moment, come a real questioning of the actual greed society, its corporate sponsors, its political protectors and its media managers?

John

Monbiot's smears - and a small appeal

2011-08-05T12:17:00.000-07:00

This latest piece from Media Lens alerts us to the false claims and castigations being made by writer and Guardian columnist George Monbiot:

A 'Malign Intellectual Subculture' - George Monbiot Smears Chomsky, Herman, Peterson, Pilger And Media Lens.

A small appeal to reason and 'mind-balance':

Dear George

I've been thinking about the detrimental effects that acrimonious exchanges can have on one's inner well being.

Personally, I often find such engagement pretty dispiriting. There's the initial rush to prove a point, to defend one's corner, to 'win the argument' - all valid endeavours, particularly when there's a high-octane issue at stake, such as the move to war, climate change or Palestine-Israel.

But it should always be followed by some semblance of critical self-reflection and careful reappraisal of one's position.

Sometimes, in the extreme heat of an argument, we may also lapse into less reverential language. All of which is both understandable and regrettable.

Other language, however, carries much more serious weight.

You have charged Chomsky, Herman, Peterson, Pilger and Media Lens with being 'genocide deniers/belittlers/apologists'.

For what it's worth, I think you've made a profound intellectual mistake here and what may prove to be a disastrous error of judgement.

In continuing to smear people so far removed from the possibility of ever denying, belittling or apologising for genocide, you've placed the rearguard defence of your own status above that of rational evidence.

Is the pursuit, at all costs, of that indefensible position really more important than the need for intellectual accuracy and honest admission?

Kind regards

John Hilley

Come dine with me - politicians, police and the media

2011-07-29T14:07:00.000-07:00

Senator Geary: "I despise the way you pose yourself. You and your whole f****** family."

Michael Corleone: "We're both part of the same hypocrisy, senator, but never think it applies to my family." (Godfather 2)

After Rupert Murdoch's admission to the recent parliamentary committee of special ties to successive political leaders comes the now acrimonious fallouts from their mutually-sustaining relationships.

From Thatcher to Blair, Brown to Cameron, Rupert Murdoch, his family and select executives like Rebekah Brooks have been feted and courted by prime ministers and party leaders like no other part of the media.

The hospitality has been duly returned. Only weeks before the Milly Dowler hacking revelation and crisis exposures for Murdoch, every major political name, from David Cameron to Ed Miliband, was still being wined and dined by News International.

But the 'come dine with me' intimacy extended even further, with revelations that now-resigned Metropolitan Police head Sir Paul Stephenson hosted a dinner at Scotland Yard with Ed Llewellyn, Cameron's chief of staff , and Neil Wallis, ex-News of the World deputy editor turned Met media advisor, in attendance.

Stephenson may claim that it was 'only a dinner', but this and multiple other instances of cosy patronage between the Met, Downing Street and News International illustrates the 'three course menu' of power, corruption and lies at the heart of the establishment.

In his evidence to the committee, Sir Paul made an earnest plea for his critics to understand that he had to be intimate with News International in order to promote the best public image possible for the police. In effect, the country's highest-ranking policeman claims he was compelled to attend all those expensive dinners and spa-hotel vacations to win favour with Murdoch's executives.

Assistant Metropolitan Commissioner, John Yates, also now resigned, told the committee that having self-sacrificed his position, so should "others" - meaning News International elites - now do likewise.

Unsurprisingly, the recriminations have only intensified the rush to more self-indulgent evasion of the truth.

And none in more sanctimonious voice than Gordon Brown, a man who, as Ian Bell notes, was still able to eat dinner at Rebekah Brooks's wedding all the while knowing that the Sun had invaded his family life. For Bell:

"What’s baffling is that Gordon Brown, once a Chancellor who could certainly have given the Murdoch empire’s tax returns a second look, has only now realised that he was supping with the devil."

But who is the biggest devil here? John Pilger sees little difference between Murdoch, Brown and all the other eager diners who sit at the News Corp table:

"Murdoch may be more extreme in his methods, but he is no different in kind from many of those now lining up to condemn him who are his beneficiaries, mimics, collaborators, apologists. As former prime minister Gordon Brown turns on his former master, accusing him of running a “criminal-media nexus”, watch the palpable discomfort in the new, cosy parliamentary-media consensus. “We must not be backward-looking,” said one Labour MP. Those parliamentarians caught last year with both hands in the Westminster till, who did nothing to stop the killing of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and stood and cheered the war criminal responsible, are now “united” behind the “calm” figure of opposition leader Ed Miliband. There is an acrid smell of business as usual."

Meanwhile, the BBC, Guardian and other 'mind-food media' seek to occupy the high moral table, effecting a safe distance from the 'fast-food' Murdoch outlets. It's a smug posture, saying nothing about the biggest crimes of the day or the failure of liberal journalists and editors to self-examine their own part in the distortion. Pilger again:

"The truth is, Britain’s system of elite monopoly control of the media rests not on Murdoch’s News International alone, but on the Mail and the Guardian and the BBC, perhaps the most influential of all. All share a corporate monoculture that sets the agenda of the “news”, defines acceptable politics as maintaining the fiction of distinctive parties, normalises unpopular wars and guards the limits of “free speech”. This will only be strengthened by the allusion that a “bad apple” has been “rooted out”."

If only the Guardian and BBC would permit serious reflection on that kind of media consumption.

As the latest Media Lens Alert notes, much of the 'interrogation' of Murdoch and his lieutenants concerns illegality around phone hacking and other such subterfuge. But where have we seen any parliamentary examination, or criticism from people like Brown, of Murdoch's crucial role as a propagandist for Britain's and the West's wars? Where, indeed, among the Guardian exposures, has this - "Murdoch's other moral crimes" - featured as an issue?

The absence of such within our media and parliamentary village should come as little surprise. After all, it was Brown and his accomplices who helped organise the mass killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the BBC, Guardian and other liberal outlets serve to rationalise those very same war policies.

Such are the ways in which the establishment manages its 'mistakes' and internal crises. It's a complicity that involves not just Rupert Murdoch but all corners of politics, the police and the media.

The above-noted quote from Corleone might, more aptly, be Murdoch himself saying:

"We're both part of the same hypocrisy, Prime Minister, but never think it applies just to my family."

John

Rusbridger's alert to Cameron - Guardian whispers 'truth' to power

2011-07-12T15:27:00.000-07:00

As the Guardian proudly proclaims its investigative lead on the News of the World scandal, other 'industry' reporters have been busy commending its writers - most notably, Nick Davies - for drawing-out the micro-evidence of tabloid hacking, payments to corrupt policemen and political connections to Murdoch's organisation.

It's a 'model case', some, like the Sunday Herald's Paul Hutcheon, say, of 'good practice' journalism serving to expose 'bad practice hacks', disproving, he asserts, spurious claims of a generalised malaise within a differentiated media:

"The truth is that there is no ethics crisis in the press, far less "the media". Any problem that exists relates to the News of the World (now deceased) and a small number of reporters on other papers who peddle the toxic brew of commercial prurience and mawkishness that poses as journalism." ('Not all journalists are hacks', Sunday Herald, 10 July 2011.)

Noting the actual "mundane and tedious" reality of his own working day, Hutcheon also urges caution over the political blackening of the press as a whole:

"...don't believe the spin from Westminster that the phone-hacking scandal is a black day for the press, when in fact the reverse is true. It was not politicians, civil servants or police officers who exposed the News of the World's criminality, but investigative journalists at the Guardian."

It's an informative and sincere statement of self-belief in 'the profession' of journalism. But one that, in its very adherence to that 'professional ethic', finds itself unable to countenance, or possibly even comprehend, the more systematic function of our media, particularly its liberal outlets, in maintaining the key structures of power.

'We are, in our daily efforts to expose the powerful', say such journalists, 'proving that we are a free and guardian media'.

Such is the power of this most cherished media message within the media itself. Indeed, beyond, or beside, their devious methods, many tabloid hacks will also proclaim, quite proudly, the same 'ethical' beliefs.

Yet, while non-hacking 'good guys' like Davies and Hutcheon may claim as their only daily duty the exposure of malpracticing elites and public-deceiving institutions, the real journalistic test is how-readily they would scrutinise their own host employers and editorial actions.

Here's a useful case in point.

On Newsnight, the Guardian's Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger told Kirsty Wark that he had helped warn David Cameron about employing Andy Coulson as his Head of Communications. Rusbridger added that he had also informed Nick Clegg about Coulson.

As noted at the Daily Mail:

"A national newspaper editor has disclosed how he warned David Cameron not to take former News of the World editor Andy Coulson with him into Downing Street.

The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said that before last year's general election - when Mr Coulson was the Conservatives' director of communications - he passed a message to Mr Cameron through one of his aides urging him to 'beware'.

'We knew that there was this big murder trial coming which involved one of the investigators that Coulson had used, who had been in jail for seven years,' he told BBC2's Newsnight. 'It seemed reasonable to try and warn Cameron, before he took Coulson into 10 Downing Street, he should just ask some inquiries about this. I know I am not the only figure Fleet Street who got this warning through to Cameron to say 'beware'.'

His comments last night appeared to refer to the case of private detective Jonathan Rees, who earlier this year was cleared with two other men of murdering his business partner Daniel Morgan, who was found with an axe in his head. Scotland Yard admitted that the first inquiry into the 1987 killing in Sydenham, South London, had been hampered by police corruption."

All very intriguing. Yet, precisely why did it "[seem] reasonable to try and warn Cameron, before he took Coulson into 10 Downing Street"?

Is it the role of this country's 'leading liberal' newspaper to act as a 'vetting agent' for top politicians?

Shouldn't it have been a basic priority of the Guardian and its editor to publicly expose Cameron over his association with Coulson, rather than offer him private alerts?

So, while Wark was laying-into Ed Miliband for cosying-up to Murdoch, she had nothing to say to Rusbridger about his intimacy with Cameron. Nor has any other BBC presenter. Nor has Davies or anyone else at the Guardian. Nor have 'straight' reporters like Hutcheon. Nor has the Daily Mail, who seemingly wrote the above copy in order to question Cameron's judgement and castigate Coulson, but not, it seems, to challenge Rusbridger in offering cover to Cameron.

The media may appear ever-ready to dish-the-dirt on errant politicians. Yet, from the tabloids to the 'quality' press, mutual 'understandings' beween editors and leaders help contain the systematic impact of such exposures.

While the Guardian may, to many in the media industry, be a heroic check on political malfeasance and tabloid excess, its own propaganda function as a 'sensible liberal guardian' is vital in maintaining the fiction that 'our leaders', while often 'mistaken', are, essentially, decent and true.

Rusbridger's view of Cameron is, thus, basically that of 'decent successor' to Blair, a continuation of the Guardian's war apologetics and the dutiful protection its editor always reserved for Blair and New Labour.

Thus, can the Guardian's latest editorial on the case (made by Human Rights Watch) for indicting Bush, Cheney and other US leaders for war crimes conveniently omit any call for similar action against 'our' war criminal politicians, past and present.

As Britain continues its sanctimonious warmongering in Libya, Rusbridger's open protection of David Cameron is actually more questionable than Cameron's awkward defence of Rebekah Brooks.

Among the ranks of dutiful Guardian columnists berating Murdoch, you'll read nothing on Rusbridger's own relationships to power - or any examination of the power liberal-establishment people like Rusbridger hold as 'moral watchdog' for the system.

For example, Guardian favourite George Monbiot's sweeping denunciation of an 'infected' media - from the grubby tabloids to the BBC's now-slavish devotion to big business (wasn't it always so?) - contains not a syllable criticising the Guardian or its editor's genuflection to corporate and political power.

Monbiot calls in his article for a 'Hippocratic oath' for journalists. The word 'hypocritic' comes more immediately to mind. What better place for him to include, at least, a mention of the Guardian's myriad culpabilities on war, carbon-promoting adverts and other corporate-driven priorities?

Monbiot might also have found a line to mention the paper's various efforts to smear Chomsky, or, in even braver form, his own apparent supplication to the Guardian editor in falsely castigating Media Lens. Alas, nothing.

Further 'high-ground' Guardian comment from Peter Preston laments the prospect of more press regulation, while Roy Greenslade records a tearless obituary on Murdoch's deceased tabloid. But, again, like Monbiot, neither have any apparent space for discussion of their own in-house faults or hypocrisies.

As Jonathan Cook concludes (in emailed comments to the Media Lens message board):

"[These articles] really should blow the illusion that the Guardian represents any kind of interests separate from those of Murdoch and the Mail."

There's a broadly-accepted belief amongst most mainstream journalists that, despite its flaws and corruptions, we still have a mostly-free-and-moral media striving to expose corporate rogues, make politicians accountable and uphold 'democratic order'.

The current 'exorcising' of the 'blatantly bad' media by the 'liberal good' gives enormous legitimacy to that system-sustaining myth.

It also means that friend-in-need editors like Alan Rusbridger can, with seeming impunity, send protective whispers to culpable politicians like David Cameron, a telling illustration of how liberal communications and accommodations to power escape the critical radar of all those 'investigative' journalists.

John

*Update: more here from Media Lens on these issues.

News of the World scandal disguises 'ethical' media others

2011-07-07T13:57:00.000-07:00

The 'horror dungeons' at the News of the World are now giving-up their darkest secrets, despicable revelations that threaten not only to break Murdoch's ugly tabloid but to expose a much more systematic level of corrupt practices and criminal relationships.

But the hacking scandal now engulfing Murdoch's empire is also allowing false reverence for the BBC and other 'respectable' media as it preens itself on upholding 'journalistic morality'.

Hacking the victims

Now-available records confirm that NotW spook-investigator Glenn Mulcaire listened-in on murder victim Milly Dowler's phone as a criminal investigation was under way into her abduction. He also deleted messages on her phone to free-up space, giving the Dowler family false cause to believe she may have still been alive. Many other notable victims are now coming to light.

However, it's increasingly clear that Mulcaire was not acting as a lone rogue. Phone hacking and other such invasions are widespread across the tabloid media. Ex-NotW reporter Paul McMullen has also confirmed that his paper paid large sums of money on a regular basis to police officers in exchange for confidential information.

Awareness of such actions goes right to the top of the Murdoch organisation. It reaches higher even than then NotW editor-in-chief and present News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, who, as a Channel 4 News investigation has now shown, was acutely aware of such subterfuge, having also been party to a meeting with the Metropolitan Police over the NotW's surveillance of a detective investigating the case of a murdered journalist.

Only now are the really uncomfortable questions being asked. Why didn't Brooks declare her knowledge of all this hacking and surveillance? Why didn't the police themselves mention the meeting they'd had with Brooks? Why has there been no police investigation or, indeed, serious media examination, before now into the cash payments made to police officers by NotW?

The NotW is now facing a serious backlash, with public boycott sentiment and companies like Ford and Sainsbury pulling their advertising from the paper, a reaction threatening to ruin one of Murdoch's most lucrative Wapping brands.

All of which puts key politicians in the spotlight over their own carefully-cultivated relationships with the Murdoch empire, not least David Cameron who has close links with Brooks and employed her successor at NotW, Andy Coulson, as his communications chief.

Coulson now faces a potential perjury charge for testifying during the recent Tommy Sheridan perjury trial that he didn't know about NotW hacking and payments to corrupt police officers.

In the admirable course of unlocking NotW/police deceptions, Labour MP Tom Watson has now openly declared the Sheridan verdict "unsound" as a consequence of Coulson's allegedly false statements. The gathering revelations of Murdoch-police accommodations also throws a confirming light on why the Crown Office decided to pursue a criminal prosecution against Sheridan in the first place.

Meanwhile, Cameron has issued all the customary words denouncing NotW and promising an independent inquiry, a likely whitewash and stalling exercise while he tries to smooth-manage the Murdoch relationship and BSkyB deal. Labour leader Ed Miliband has, in turn, sought to maximise Cameron's embarrassment, carefully neglecting his own party's prostitution to Murdoch.

Liberal media's 'shock'

But the hypocrisy doesn't end at Downing Street or Parliament. It has also been 'righteous-judgement' time among the wider media as more 'respectable' journalists savage the NotW and Murdoch's mercenary practices.

Some have expressed their deepest shock over NotW methods, such as ITN's Daisy McAndrew who tweeted:

"There are v few stories I remember that elicited genuine shock &amp [sic]; disgust around the newsroom. Milly Dowler's phone being hacked is one."

The BBC's big-act business editor Robert Peston has also given his standard drama delivery on News International's gathering problems, exorting on how the political pressure could impact on parent company News Corp's BSkyB bid.

Yet, while people will rightly boycott the NotW and condemn Murdoch, Brooks, Mulcaire and their ghoulish operations, the public outrage also encourages false notions of corporate and media angels.

Just as 'good businesses' like Ford see the expedient need to distance themseves from 'bad business apples' like NotW, so do many journalists revel in setting themselves apart from Murdoch's 'bad apple' papers.

The sanctimonious tendency of an establishment-liberal media to seek ethical 'status' in such cases has never been so prominent.

Thus, could Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman ask a NotW feature writer if he was in any way "ashamed" to be associated with Murdoch's paper.

It wouldn't, of course, occur to Paxman or his BBC colleagues to reflect on their own shame in being part of an organisation which has done so much to defend and rationalise Britain's aggressive war policies or failed to report Israel's oppression of occupied Palestinians.

While legitimate to decry the deep distress Mulcaire and NotW have caused their unwitting victims, why can't such journalists and editors apply relevant and proportionate language to much higher state crimes?

What, in particular, could they, should they, be saying about the calculating politicians who have inflicted mass death and suffering in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere?

More self-critically, what could they, should they, be saying about the failure of their own 'vanguard' media to expose and pursue the executive directors of such slaughter?

Thus, BBC, Guardian and other liberal journalists can castigate Mulcaire et al as evil pariahs while treating high-ranking war criminals like Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and Geoff Hoon as respectable figures of authority.

So, while Mulcaire has gone to ground, Campbell enjoys multiple media invites to plug his memoirs and appear as a role-model figure on Jamie Oliver's show about education.

Here's Campbell himself blogging on NotW illegality and media morality:

"The central issue – illegal activity by the media – has not changed. But the public and political reaction almost certainly has. I have argued for some time that this is an issue that just won’t go away."

Indeed, it won't. Nor will the truth of Campbell's own infamous media manipulations and complicity in mass murder.

With still-murkier truths to emerge from the NotW issue - spawning, no doubt, another 'national debate' on 'media standards' and calls for a 'better-regulated' press - we can be reasonably sure that no critical spotlight will fall on the BBC or its liberal accomplices over their shameful failure to challenge and expose powerful politicians, corporate tyrants and criminal warmongers.

Running with public feeling over the NotW scandal, liberal media animosity towards Murdoch and his voracious empire may have found new and confident expression. Now may, indeed, be an optimum moment to strike the wounded beast. But that won't deal with the deeper corporate priorities and institutional propaganda that drives the wider media, not just Murdoch's sizeable chunk of it.

From the scabrous tabloid red-tops to the liberal-stylish pretensions of the Guardian, the same problems of media conformity to power remain, with little evidence that those journalists 'appalled' by the NotW can remotely see their own functional part in the much bigger deception.

John

Update at 17.27:
James Murdoch has just caved-in and announced the closure this weekend of the NotW. It's a tactical, damage-limitation exercise, of course, with an eye on keeping the BSkyB bid safe, but indicates, still, the potential effect of people power to challenge even Murdoch's 'untouchable' empire.

To Tom Harris, MP, on UK detention of Sheikh Raed Salah

2011-07-05T12:17:00.000-07:00

5 July 2011

Dear Tom Harris

As one of your constituents, I'd like to have your views on the recent arrest and detention of Sheikh Raed Salah and for you to forward my concerns to the Home Office for reply.

A deeply-respected advocate for the Arab-Palestinian community inside Israel, Sheikh Raed Salah - often called the "Gandhi of Palestine" - has committed no crime in denouncing Israel's illegal occupation and apartheid practices or in coming to the UK to speak about such oppressions.

It's a disturbing irony that this peaceful man is facing deportation while the UK authorities - seemingly influenced by an active Israeli lobby and hatemongering tabloid media - protect and fail to arrest incoming Israeli politicians/military figures deeply implicated in war crimes, notably in Gaza.

Deep concern over Sheikh Raed Salah's arrest has been expressed by many human rights groups, academics and others, including this statement from Noam Chomsky in a letter to the Guardian:

Double standards over Salah's arrest
Monday 4 July 2011

I was deeply disturbed to learn Sheikh Raed Salah is under threat of deportation on grounds that this action would be "conducive to the public good" (Inquiry after banned Palestinian enters UK, 30 June). On the contrary, it would be very harmful to the public good, at least if the public good is construed as encouraging free and open discussion of issues of great significance. Sheikh Salah, former mayor of the most important Arab town in Israel, Umm al Fahm, has played a very important role as a representative of the Arab community, domestically and internationally. He has been a respected voice advocating rights and justice, a voice that most definitely should be heard in the west. I trust that this decision of the government will be rescinded, that he will be released from detention without delay, and that he will be able to continue with his talks and discussions in Britain.

Noam Chomsky
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Please also see this sober and illuminating account from Jonathan Cook on the campaign of vilification against Sheikh Raed Salah.

As an uncomfortable voice for truth and justice, one can see Israel's dark rationale for spreading malicious lies about Sheikh Raed Salah. But the Home Office's own prohibitive actions also, in effect, constitute incitement to hatred.

Is the continued detention and smearing of this man legal and legitimate in your view?

I look forward to your response.

Kind regards

John Hilley

M74 opens: the big steel and other roadside blues

2011-06-28T00:27:00.000-07:00

It's finally here. Today, as previously outlined. In all its nightmarish reality.

The M74-M8 extension through the heart of Glasgow's southside will open to the roar and pollution of mass, booming traffic, oblivious to all the carefully-presented studies and warnings of environmental, social and aesthetic vandalism.

Fittingly, the ribbon will be cut by the Duke of Gloucester, an archaic statement of royal patronage to match the backward prerogatives of Scotland's and Glasgow's transport policy barons.

Costing an astonishing £692 million - £2,000 an inch - the six-lane, five-mile section has been hailed by ministers, councillors and business leaders alike as a 'regeneration saviour', their ill-founded claims still driving roughshod over more studious and mounting evidence of 'road-solution' folly:

"The opening of the new M74 northern extension will increase vehicle trips in a city that is already gridlocked at rush hour. Any benefit through the displacement of traffic from other routes, such as the M8, will be short-term and quickly undone through the new traffic generated by the extra road capacity.

The massive amounts of money spent on the completion of this new road could and should have been better invested in improving Glasgow’s creaking public transport services, such as local buses or cross-Glasgow rail services, particularly given that more than half of all households in Glasgow don’t even have access to a car. The new road does little or nothing for these households, which are largely in the poorer or less well-connected parts of the city.

The new road will increase air pollution levels in a city that is currently breaching European Union safe levels of nitrogen dioxide air pollution and which has been declared one of the UK's worst pollution hot-spots. Nitrogen Dioxide causes respiratory illnesses that result in 9000 hospital admissions every year, and Glasgow provides more than its fair share of these."

As also reported in the Scotsman:

The extension was approved by ministers despite being rejected by an independent public inquiry.

The Scottish Government has trumpeted the £445m construction contract - which excluded the cost of decontamination and land purchasing - as being completed early and under budget, but the overall cost of the project has rocketed and the road's completion is in fact years late.

It should have been finished three years ago, and when initially given the green light in 2001 was estimated to cost £245m.

Glasgow Green MSP Patrick Harvie, the past convener of Holyrood's transport committee, said: "The evidence is clear - building new motorway capacity, like the M74 extension, just creates more congestion, not more jobs.

"In the longer term, Glasgow can expect slower journeys, worsening air quality and more cost to the local economy."

Stephen Joseph, chief executive of the Campaign for Better Transport, said: "The promoters of the M74 have never been prepared to take seriously the idea that the road will suffer from the 'M25 effect', where it generates so much traffic that jams get worse rather than better.

"This effect is now well recognised worldwide, but the danger is that instead of learning from it, the Scottish roads authorities will simply come back for more and try to build even more roads across Glasgow."

Meanwhile, as bus fares continue to rise, the transport 'options' for Glasgow's citizens seem no less limiting.

On a website more inclined to the weighty issues of Palestine and Libya, Japan's nuclear catastrophe and other human-created suffering, this question may seem like a descent into parochial bathos. Yet, how can First Buses, Glasgow, justify the highway robbery sum of £1.80 to travel more than five stops?

First recently replaced its £1.45 and £1.65 fares with a 90p 'short hop' (up to five stops) and the £1.80 ticket for anything beyond. Though a discounted 'two-journey' can be obtained for £3, the £1.80 will, for many, still be the relevant tariff into the city-centre, while an 'all-day' ticket has been 'rounded-up' from £3.75 to £4.

The same return (after 9 am) train journey from Glasgow's southside into town is around £2. Compared to travelling on often-littered, irregular, expensive buses and the hassle of congested roads, the comfortable, usually-on-time and less-expensive train option is a no-brainer.

Not long ago, I had the pleasure of sitting on a smart single-decker as it hugged the gorgeous coastal road between Nice and Monte Carlo (curious to see its showy affluence - wasn't my kind of place), a substantial journey which cost just 1 euro. Taking a First bus a few short miles into Glasgow city-centre costs double that. How did we get to such a crazy policy destination?

Even allowing for the relentless hikes in fuel costs - always passed on, and more, to the paying public, never in cuts to executive salaries - what would induce a commuter or a city-centre shopper to sacrifice their four wheels for a Glasgow bus? Where's the encouragement for families to relinquish the private comfort of their precious car? More particularly, how are low-income families with kids meant to cope with such soaring costs for basic travel?

It's the usual free-market imperatives. Prices go up. Profits are protected. No one is consulted. Public concerns are simply dismissed.

Other cities around the world are trying to effect imaginative transport policies. Here, proclamations of green, sustainable transport are simply that - lofty words and political pontifications.

The airline industry enjoys zero-VAT and other assistance on aviation fuel. Why should car-reducing public buses not receive similar or greater subsidies? Why, more boldly, not make public transport free?

And now, alongside some of the country's highest bus fares, Glasgow has the monstrous M74 extension, encouraging even more cars and greater pollution.

With it's giant blue steel bridges now striding defiantly atop the little homes on Devon Sreet, the M74 offers a whole new 'urban vista' from the top-deck of your all-expensive bus into town.

It's not just the profit-driven greed and eco-toxicity of market life, it's the aesthetic mediocrity it imposes on our daily outlook.

John

Young American Jew beaten and arrested in Jerusalem

2011-06-16T11:27:00.000-07:00

Here's what happens to courageous, peaceful people who dare raise their conscientious voices for Palestinian rights on the streets of Jerusalem.

Nineteen-year-old Lucas Koerner, an American Jew, was violently arrested during 'Jerusalem Day' for speaking his mind about Israel's illegal occupation and the key complicit role of his own government in maintaining Palestinian suffering.

Following his release from custody, Lucas gave an insightful interview relating some of the visceral abuse he received and the discriminatory conditions he witnessed in jail:

"Throughout the whole affair, the only thing audible coming from the policemen was a constant stream of curses words, ‘mother####er,’ ‘piece of shit,’ etc., which was to me a ringing confirmation of how infuriated and threatened they were by a 19-year-old wearing a kippah and a keffiyeh standing with the Palestinians.

"What struck me most about my time in prison is that it is a reflection of the rest of Israeli society in that it’s completely segregated. I was placed against my will in the Jewish cell. I asked to be put in the Arab cell. The Jewish cell conditions weren’t bad at all; it was still jail, but it was bearable. I did see the Arab cell or at least one of the Arab cells and the conditions there were absolutely abominable. … We had furniture, we had beds of some sort, we had a clean bathroom. They had nothing. Just a bench and an open toilet. The conditions were horrible. That’s what struck me most."

It's a graphic picture of truth for all the world to see. The state of Israel - that 'great democracy' - in all its intolerant and colours.

But it's also a statement of common humanity and hope, with Jews of good conscience speaking up for the occupied and oppressed, saying clearly: not in our name.

Great credit to this brave and moral young man.

John

Media Lens, Hari and the 'liberal wager'

2011-06-10T16:27:00.000-07:00

An excellent, pushing-the-boundaries Alert has just been published by Media Lens, asking probing questions of those who continue to serve and defend the liberal media.

In particular, some objections to the piece have been raised in defence of Johann Hari of the Independent, who ML cite as one of those liberal journalists still unwilling to challenge the corporate media which employs them.

Why, some ask, single-out Hari, who has shown impressive humility in recanting his support for the Iraq war, opposes Western 'intervention' in Libya and now cites Chomsky in favourable reference?

All relevant points. But where precisely do we see Hari, Monbiot, Fisk, Milne and other liberal 'dissidents' take-on and criticise the very organs of liberal propaganda that serve to rationalise corporate-military-planet-destroying greed?

It's as if all the great evils in the world can be safely described and condemned from the pages of the Guardian/Indy while remaining blind to the same media that runs on similar corporate, profit-determined lines.

Where, in short, is their critical realisation of that great big elephant in the room?

The key point, as ML suggest, is to start having more penetrating discussions about how token 'dissident' journalists see their place within corporate-driven organisations and how their presence is used to reinforce the corporate-sustaining myth of a 'free and democratic vanguard media'.

Nor does the standard 'would you rather there were no Milne, Monbiot, Hari or Fisk left inside such media?' take us much further in that discussion.

So many liberal leftists seem stuck on this 'dilemma', treating it like a kind of 'Pascal's Wager' - perhaps agnostic over Guardian-type output or inclined to accept that it may be fig-leaf journalism, yet still uncertain and fearing the 'consequences' of its non-existence.

Thus, so many err on the side of 'rational-cautionary belief': it's better to have such journalists and accept the liberal media's 'positive' existence rather than not have it and live with a 'radical void'.

The ML Alert is, essentially, asking such journalists and their advocates to consider a much more radical set of questions beyond the 'liberal wager': how and why are you being told and sold this message, and what are you prepared to say and do about it within and beyond the media that you serve?

The day such writers step outside that self-protecting wager to become part of a true independent media - a cooperative unconstrained by corporate imperatives, ready to dissect the power-sustaining role and pretensions of the Guardian/Independent - will be the day they start to become real dissident journalists.

John

BBC and the murder of Golan protesters

2011-06-06T14:37:00.000-07:00

More brutal Israeli executions of unarmed civilians. No condemnation or serious action from complicit governments. Another shameless inversion of the truth from the BBC.

The latest ruthless murder of defenceless Palestinian-Syrian demonstrators, this time on Naksa Day (5 June), indicates Israel's deepening concern over Arab Spring ferment and the power of peaceful Palestinian protest.

If this was peaceful, popular dissent in, say, Iran or any other official enemy of the West, we can be sure that BBC correspondents like John Simpson and Kevin Connolly would be on the ground castigating the regime and talking-up the protesters' democratic aims. Not so when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians.

What we get, instead, is not only token, second-hand reportage of the killings, but a loaded narrative implying that Israel was merely 'responding to provocation', with the demonstrators bringing about their own killing.

A letter to the BBC's Middle East online editor Tarik Kafala.

Dear Tarik Kafala

The BBC's coverage of unarmed Palestinian-Syrian protesters being shot dead by Israeli soldiers was as oblivious to balanced, impartial reportage as the disregard those soldiers seemingly showed their victims.

The wording and omissions in this article coupled with brazenly-biased references to Israeli sources tells us all we need to know about 'BBC neutrality'.

The opening line - always important in getting the essence of the story across - states that:

"Israeli troops have fired on pro-Palestinian protesters".

Why not, at the very least:

'Israeli troops have killed unarmed pro-Palestinian protesters'?

The words 'killed' and 'unarmed' should not only be part of this line, they should be the headline and basis of the story.

Indeed, why isn't such killing referred to as a "massacre" - as in South Africa's Sharpeville massacre? Or does the BBC think it anything less than open state murder for troops to wilfully gun down unarmed civilians?

Moreover, why is there no questions in the report about Israel's failure to wait and try to arrest the protesters? Or, like Israel, do the BBC consider the life of Arab 'others' so cheap as to negate that line of enquiry?

The report goes on to say that the "protesters defied razor-wire fences", while "Israel had vowed to prevent a repeat of a similar march last month, in which hundreds of people breached the fence."

All very 'factual', you will, no doubt, claim. But the impression conveyed is that this 'defiance' was met with legitimate, fore-warned force. Where in this line, or anywhere else in the piece, does the BBC consider the disproportionality of Israel's 'response'?

It goes on:

"The US state department said it was "troubled" by the "loss of life". "We call for all sides to exercise restraint," it said. "Provocative actions like this should be avoided." "

Isn't this statement worthy of even a little deconstruction? Isn't its classic understatement on calculated murder and the 'provocative invitation' to being shot not worthy of critical or alternative comment?

It seems not, with the piece moving seamlessly into the first direct Israeli-sided statement:

"Israel's military said its soldiers shouted warnings in Arabic and fired warning shots in the air, before aiming at the legs of those who had reached the fence."

Again, why is there no counter-statement here on the disproportionality of Israeli actions? Are we even to believe that they fired at the protesters' legs? Isn't this also unlawful use of force?

Instead of noting such points, the piece offers this loaded take on what Israeli troops seemed 'forced' to do:

"After live gunfire failed to disperse the crowds, Israeli troops fired volleys of tear gas over the border. Many people fled while others lay on the ground."

This is the BBC tacitly accepting that Israel acted 'reluctantly' in only firing after they had 'failed' to disperse the crowd. The dispersal of the crowd is, in itself, implied to be the imperative issue and objective rather than the lives or safety of civilians. The tenor of this wording implies, as stated by Israel, that the crowd were 'threatening', and, thus, 'responsible' for their own killing.

The report's token attempt at 'balance' is no less effective in casting doubt over the level of deaths and injuries. It begins, lazily, with this set of other media-sourced claims:

"Syrian TV said more than 300 protesters had been wounded. An Israeli military spokeswoman told The Jerusalem Post newspaper they were only aware of 12 injuries."

But then, immediately, in the report's second direct Israeli statement, Mark Regev is allowed to dismiss the Syrian view:

"Israeli spokesman Mark Regev told the BBC that the Syrian figures could not be trusted."

Rather than include any counter-view here to Regev, the piece goes on to cite, in substantive detail, Netanyahu's own 'pre-warning':

"Ahead of Sunday's march, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would not allow "extremists" to breach Israel's borders." "I have instructed our security forces to act with determination and restraint in order to protect our sovereignty our borders," he said at the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem."

One might expect, even by now, some sort of Palestinian voice. Instead, here's what we get:

"Another Israeli military spokeswoman, Avital Leibovich, told reporters: "This is an attempt by the Syrian regime to divert the world's attention from the Syrian bloodshed that has been taking place in recent weeks." She added that Israeli forces were better able to stop border protests now than they were last month as they had since prepared "for a variety of operation scenarios"."

In what the BBC will cite as definitive 'balance', Regev - again - and Fatah official Hossam Zomlot get to air their views in small pieces to camera. But the Palestinian account seems massively outweighed here by the text, exclusions and comments afforded to Israel.

The report ends with no other oppositional statements, permitting only some basic background words on Israel's 'seizure' of the Golan in 1967. The "Naksa" is 'explained' as a "known in Arabic" term, allowing it only some kind of marginal significance.

The meaning of "Nakba" is, likewise, defined here in the course of noting the outcome of its recent anniversary:

"At least 12 people died during the 15 May demonstrations, which at one point saw hundreds manage to cross into the Golan Heights."

Again, people - innocent, unarmed civilians - somehow "died" in the demonstration. They weren't shot, or killed, or murdered or massacred. They just "died".

All this, the BBC will say, is consistent with applying its codes of 'impartiality' and 'straight reporting'.

Yet, the use of anodyne language like "died", where people have been calculatingly executed, is the most effective way of disguising and mitigating the truth of such atrocities.

Exclude words like "unarmed" or "defenceless", while introducing words like "defied", and we have the impression of a threatening mob bringing-on their own misfortune.

Add to that loaded mix a blanket range of Israeli statements and Washington apologetics and we're left with a report utterly devoid of balance and truthful information.

As with regime reactions to Arab Spring protest, Israeli violence is becoming more brutal, desperate and apparent to the world. Yet, the BBC's own output is still serving to mask that criminality.

As with the BBC's reporting of Libya, viewers might expect to see a more regime-critical journalism and accurate use of words to describe Israeli actions. In making such charges against the BBC, we're more likely to get Regev-type defence and denial from their spokespersons.

BBC state media will, of course, deny any such bias or service to power. Increasingly, viewers are coming to see through both Regev's and the BBC's parallel distortions.

Kind regards

John Hilley

BBC go muckraking Media Lens

2011-05-30T17:07:00.000-07:00

The BBC Empire - or, at least, one of its outposts - it seems, is striking back, and in rather cheap and desperate form judging by the responses of BBC Middle East Bureau Chief Paul Danahar.

Following Bad News From the BBC, Part 1, a Media Lens charge sheet of BBC imbalance and distortion, Part 2 of the Alert featured a most revealing exchange with Danahar in which he refused to countenance the accumulated evidence of More Bad News From Israel, an updated text from Glasgow University Media Group authors Greg Philo and Mike Berry, or the damning testimony of ex-BBC journalist Tim Llewellyn.

Instead, Danahar resorted to a spurious and diversionary attack on ML co-editor David Cromwell, dragging-up a job held long-ago at Shell. With no moral obligation to do so, Media Lens subsequently offered this comment:

"The BBC’s Middle East Bureau Chief, Paul Danahar, shares senior editorial responsibility for ensuring balanced and impartial BBC News coverage from Israel and Palestine. Rather than provide substantive answers to the serious questions raised in our latest media alert, he apparently first requires a ‘mea culpa’ from David Cromwell making clear that DC ‘deeply regrets his actions, or lack of them’ in working for Shell in the Netherlands between 1989-1993. What could possibly justify such a slippery response from a senior BBC editor?

There's a lot that could be said about this. But the issue of supposed hypocrisy is a red herring based on a fundamental misunderstanding of our argument. Most of us work for corporations, most of us buy their products and services, and most of us pay taxes that feed the war machine. We all began life as infant narcissists. We are all still prone to the self-interested, greedy, egotistic, angry thoughts that are entrenched in our destructive society. We could all be doing more to make the world a better place. None of us is beyond blame. But then blame has never been the issue for us. The issue is that we should all be challenging each other - challenging, listening and changing - in order to make the world a saner, less destructive place. We have to because the world is rapidly going to hell in a handcart.

We are not pretending that we are paragons of virtue and we are not saying that Paul Danahar is a 'bad man' for working at the BBC. We are saying that we believe that BBC News offers a biased version of events favouring the powerful on Israel-Palestine and many other key issues. And we're offering solid and ample evidence, arguments and sources in support of our claims. We're asking Paul Danahar and the BBC to respond rationally to our arguments so that people can make up their own minds on who is making most sense. Then it's up to the public, and indeed BBC journalists, how they want to respond. We don't ask the BBC or readers to respond on the basis that we are teetering on the edge of Enlightenment. We ask them to respond if they think our arguments are reasonable and important. Frankly, we could be complete moral reprobates. But if our arguments make sense, and if people think the oppression of Palestinians matters, then they should still think about how things might be improved to relieve suffering. It is the arguments that matter, and the suffering, not whether DC is a virtuous individual."

As ever, the ML Editors getting to the very heart of the matter.

I'd like to add this. Whatever our past circumstances, the most important things are what we learn from those experiences and what we actually, if possible, do about the injustices we see and feel therein.

Cromwell's experiences helped him see from the inside just how brutal the corporate monolith can be in its rapacious pursuit of profit. It provided the impetus for writing Private Planet, a book outlining radical, green alternatives to the corporate plunder of the world and its resources. Ten years ago, Cromwell had gone on to co-found Media Lens with David Edwards, both giving much of their lives to exposing corporate-establishment power by helping to advance a new, unconstrained and humanitarian media.

Danahar, by contrast, continues to work for an organisation which protects the establishment line and, in his particular role as Middle East bureau head, approves an output that, in its consistent falsifications and denials, actually contributes to the suffering of occupied and brutalised Palestinians.

Danahar's refusal to engage the serious questions put by Media Lens prompted many letters. Here's my own:

Dear Paul

How regrettable to see you engage in this petty point-scoring diatribe against David Cromwell when all he's done is ask some civil questions about your organisation's reporting.

Don't you have some public duty to consider the weight of these issues, not least for those suffering in the conflict? You are the BBC Middle East Bureau Chief, after all.

Nor is it remotely relevant to claim that the issues precede your own tenure - or that those not having visited the region can hold no informed view.

Are you seriously claiming that there's no substance at all to the mass of documented evidence now showing BBC bias by language, omission and institutional constraints?

It's not just the bombing and siege of Gaza or the murder of those aboard the Mavi Marmara. It's the daily oppression of Palestinians across the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem that never gets any mention.

That's right, Jerusalem, same city, different part, where your bureau sits, its editors and journalists seemingly oblivious to the persecution and apartheid going on all around.

Not long ago, returning from the West Bank/East Jerusalem, I wrote to the BBC asking why they had failed to report the plight of a Palestinian family being evicted from their home in Sheik Jarrah, while noting the multiple other brutalities against Palestinians that go unreported by the BBC.

http://www.medialens.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2845

It went, tortuously, up to the BBC Trust for further consideration before being, predictably, dismissed. Most complaints never even get a response.

Tim Llewellyn has just outlined that labyrinthine process alongside key examples of loaded BBC coverage and institutional placation of Israel, receiving a terse little smear on his good character for doing so.

Like your responses to Media Lens, it's a sign of the BBC on the back foot, in blatant denial, stooping to cheap riposte rather than answering the serious charges levelled against it.

As documented by Philo and Berry, by Media Lens and many others, the evidence of BBC bias and fear of Israel is obvious to anyone who cares to see. It certainly should be to you.

You've expressed your opposition to past apartheid injustices. Why don't you permit the same open, ethical examination in this case?

Kind regards
John Hilley

No answer has come. As ML say, Paul Danahar is not a 'bad' person in working for the BBC. Nor are my own points to him meant as personal or moralising. It's about trying to show how such people come to defend indefensible bias when their careers and ego depend on it.

On which note, readers here at Zenpolitics might also be interested in this latest sample (30 May 2011) of BBC distortion from Radio 4 Today presenter Kevin Connolly (as cited by the ML Editors) eliciting another of my responses:

Dear Mr Connolly

I heard your piece today discussing the apparent anxieties Israel feels towards its neighbours Egypt and Jordan, while considering the Arab Spring as a catalyst for Palestinian action.

I'd be very interested to learn who was involved in writing such a loaded report, with its 'democratic Israel surrounded by hostile Arab forces' theme.

Did it ever occur to you or your fellow producers that Israel is the most dangerous, militarist state in the region, the one deliberately preventing peace through its expansionist occupation and inhuman siege?

Did you for a moment think to question Israel's own claims to being a democratic state given the (UN-documented) apartheid treatment of its Arab 'others'?

Did your conclusion, Israel "always cautious in these matters, will simply become more cautious still", never strike you as a resort to BBC caution in itself, ensuring, as with the rest of this grossly unbalanced report, that Israel is not presented as a calculating aggressor?

The production of such output, alas, reveals nothing about Israel's nuclear militarism, its anti-democratic fear of a democratic region or its wilfully-crafted repressions. But it surely does say much about your own cautious appeasement and BBC-trained mindset.

I (incautiously) await any response.

Kind regards

John Hilley

Can the BBC ever be redeemed? Is it worth sending these letters? Do such criticisms make a difference? I'd say the answers to these questions are, no, yes and yes.

The greater, long-term aim is the diminishment, rather than redemption, of 'statemouth' news services like the BBC. The point of sending emails is to help expose the distortion and propaganda. And the difference all this can make is two-fold: it helps victimised people in immediate ways by serving to inform and build public support for their cause, while suggesting model alternatives for a truly independent citizen media to come.

All very large undertakings and aims, perhaps, but why think small when the consequences of corporate power and establishment lies are so dismally and dangerously big.

John

Obama: media adulation and the 1967 border

2011-05-26T10:47:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama's current European tour has been accompanied by levels of media idolatry that would make a movie star blush.

One has little faith in what purports to be serious 'analysis' in most of the mainstream media. But it has been remarkable, by any such standards, to watch so many journalists, correspondents and news anchors gush over Obama's 'starlit' presence and 'benign' words, particularly concerning Israel-Palestine.

The propaganda effect on a celebrity-primed public is a study in how our 'critical' media have served to conceal, circumvent and prettify Obama's true warmongering colours.

As the first leg of the tour commenced in Ireland, the BBC's Mark Mardell was in typical 'romantic' flow:

"President Obama's trip to Europe will be a melange of pageantry and policy, and the political equivalent of both poetry and prose."

The fawning continued in more personalised form during Andrew Marr's studio 'questioning' of the President, which, alongside his previous 'engagement' of Tony Blair, might serve as a definitive model of the deference-to-power BBC interview.

By the time of Obama's speech to Parliament, the BBC's political correspondent Nick Robinson was swooning for the nation: "There was never any doubt that Britain was in love with Obama" - a declaration, observed Media Lens in a letter to Robinson, which had raised the adulation from love-in to "hagiography".

The Guardian's Patrick Wintour was also on-side with a glowing endorsement of Obama's US-Europe 'compact' for a free Middle East:

"Barack Obama has put America and Europe unambiguously on the side of those fighting for freedom across the Middle East, saying the west can remain "the catalysts for global action", ending a decade of war, terrorism and terrible recession."

Much of the same media devotion has been given to Obama's latest Middle East speech, billed as the second big 'appeal to the region' after his Cairo address in 2008.

In particular, the 'analysis' failed to record the truth behind Washington's supposed 'support' for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal based on the 1967 border.

This was taken in spoon-fed form by the BBC and other liberal outlets as Obama's 'historic endorsement' of a two state settlement. Yet, few seemed willing to question or deconstruct what Obama had actually intimated to Netanyahu.

Wintour at the Guardian could only muster this lame comment on Obama's meaning:

"He also seemed to tack to the Israelis, following his speech calling for a settlement based on 1967 borders, by arguing that it would be difficult currently for Israel to talk to the Palestinians."

Helpfully, other observers like Lamis Andoni have been more forthcoming in helping to expain that "tack":

"Obama's lip service to Palestinian "self-determination" is nothing more than vacuous rhetoric - as he clearly implied that Israeli interests, especially its security, remain the top priority for American foreign policy in the region.

He mechanically repeated his commitment to the vision of a two-state solution - establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. However, as expected, he left the borders and terms of the creation of such state subject to Israel's "security interests".

His reference to resuming peace negotiations on the basis of the 1967 borders (also known as the Green Line) means neither a complete Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories nor the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state on all of the land within the Green Line, including East Jerusalem.

There is a significant difference in negotiations "lingo" and even legal language between saying that the establishment of a Palestinian state "will be based on" 1967 borders as opposed to saying it "will be established on" the 1967 borders.

The first leaves ample room for Israel to continue occupying and even annexing vast settlement blocs (and perhaps even all of the illegal, Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem) for "security reasons".

For Andoni, Obama's evasions are a clear green signal to Israel that it's still permissible to take whatever it can from any 'two-state settlement':

"Just in case his pro-Israel support base misunderstood the thinly veiled statements from his Middle East speech last Friday, Obama made sure to clarify to his definitively pro-Israeli view that there is no going back to the true 1967 borders:

"[The statement] means that the parties themselves - Israelis and Palestinians - will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 196... It allows the parties themselves to account for the changes that have taken place over the last forty-four years, including the new demographic reality."

In clearer words, the president is effectively, although not explicitly, equating the presence of Palestinians on their own land with the illegal presence of Israeli settlers living on land confiscated forty-four years ago from the Palestinians."

Ilan Pappe, another ever-reliable conduit for truth, could also see the real intimations behind Obama's lofty words:

"[Obama]said there will be “no return to the borders of June 4, 1967” and the thousands who attended the AIPAC convention cheered wildly. Annexation of Israeli settlement blocs built illegally in the occupied West Bank and the creation of a small Palestinian bantustan in the spaces in between was the essence of Obama’s real vision for peace."

Which leaves Pappe, like this present writer, in no doubt about the necessary direction of any Palestinian - or other - liberation process:

"A relentless struggle against the ethnic cleansing of Palestine will continue outside the realm of the western corridors of power. What we learned from Egypt and Tunisia, even if we are not sure what would be the endgame there, is that struggles outside corridors of power do not wait for leaders, well-oiled organizations and people who speak in other people’s names."

We wait in vain for Mark Mardell committing those fundamental words to poetic prose.

John

Essential add-on: Pilger on the "violent world of Mr Hopey Changey".

Arrival of the Palestinian-Arab Spring

2011-05-17T13:07:00.000-07:00

The remarkable footage of Syrians and Palestinians pouring across the Golan's wired fences last weekend shows that the Arab Spring has now decisively reached Palestine-Israel.

As Real News also reports (if only the BBC could offer such honest and qualitative output) it formed part of a coordinated set of Nakba protests, all met with brutal responses, across the West Bank - notably Qalandiya - Gaza, East Jerusalem and on the Lebanon-Israel border. Pro-Palestine protesters even gathered in Tel Aviv.

Jonathan Cook's fine analysis of the Nakba anniversary protests suggests a growing mood of optimism as the September date for a declaration of Palestinian statehood approaches.

It also offers some sombre reading for Israel's political and military advisers who see with increasing clarity that brute force will not be enough to stem the gathering, unified demand for Palestinian liberation.

As Cook notes:

"Although the protests are not yet a third intifada, they hint at what may be coming. Or, as one senior Israeli commander warned, they looked ominously like a "warm-up" for September, when the newly unified Palestinian leadership is threatening to defy Israel and the United States and seek recognition at the United Nations of Palestinian statehood inside the 1967 borders." "There are several lessons, none of them comfortable, for Israel to draw from the weekend's clashes. The first is that the Arab Spring cannot be dealt with simply by battening down the hatches. The upheavals facing Israel's Arab neighbours mean these regimes no longer have the legitimacy to decide their own Palestinian populations' fates according to narrow self-interest."

It's an ominous set of developments for Netanyahu who must now consider the combined threat of a new Palestinian political accord - the Hamas-Fatah rapprochement - and the spectacle of a newly-released Arab street determined to exercise not only its domestic grievances but also its solidarity with the Palestinians.

The spectacle of so many Palestinians and fellow Arabs marching in peaceful protest is yet another crucial rebuke to Israeli fearmongering and claims of a new 'terrorist' insurgency, further raising the Palestinians' moral case around the world.

Netanyahu has responded with the same standard combinations of defiance and an 'acceptance' that Israel may have to "cede parts of our homeland" for peace.

Yet, alongside the exit of Obama's envoy George Mitchell, Netanyahu's rhetoric and empty 'concessions' only confirms the vacuousness of any 'peace process' and, without that reliant prop, the increasingly worried assessments that must be taking place inside the Israeli power circle.

As September at the UN draws nearer, Israel will, inevitably, turn to America for political cover. But with Washington under increasing pressure to declare its support for all democratic claims in the region, it will be more difficult than ever to exclude equal Palestinian demands for statehood and democratic participation.

The decisive dynamics of the Arab uprisings, all driven by populist internet campaigns, has created not only the crucial Fatah-Hamas realignment but also a crisis of hegemony for Israel and the US power bloc that keeps it protected.

Already, much of Europe has signalled its support for a 'pre-1967' Palestinian state, giving advance notice that any further US veto at the UN - following Washington's rejection of the Security Council vote on Israeli settlements - will leave Obama even further exposed.

As ever, Netanyahu's upcoming visit to Washington is being scrutinised for its possible manoeuvrings and signals on Israel's difficult relations with Obama. It's a media gaze with diminishing relevance.

Rather, it's what's happening on-the-ground in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, across the region, along Israel's borders, in the streets of Cairo and Damascus, that really matters.

Inspired by their mutual aims and achievents, Palestinians and their Arab supporters are no longer waiting around for America's 'benign' interventions or insistence on a 'negotiated settlement'. The Arab Spring itself appears to be the determining factor in how that process will evolve.

Much of that has some way to go - as the Egyptian navy's collaboration with Israel in attacking and preventing passage of the latest Gaza aid ship suggests.

Yet, for all the regime-transformation still to take place in the region, Israel realises that it is now confronting a newly-invigorated Arab movement, a set of popular forces able to enliven the Palestinian cause and multiply the political pressures for change.

John

The implications of resistance

2011-05-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

Today, 15 May 2011, marks another historic milestone in the journey of Palestinian resistance.

Buoyed by mass marches and support from fellow Arabs, Palestinians will take, once again, to the streets of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and various parts of Israel to mark the Nakba anniversary and demand an end to their suffering. Following a mass internet campaign, many have called for this day to be the launch of a new intifada.

But, while we may express our own support for a putative Third Intifada, it’s also imperative to remember the consequences of such actions, the human costs.

Put most simply, people, principally Palestinians, die in intifadas. People get locked-up and brutalised in intifadas, losing their liberty for years. Families lose their loved ones in intifadas, fathers and sons murdered and incarcerated, causing lifetimes of human misery. People, Palestinians, also get spiritually broken, the intended purpose of crushing intifadas, in an effort to deter them from taking-up further intifadas.

And yet, despite all those years of state killing, detention and family sorrow, Palestinians are still out on the street demanding their most basic human rights.

On Friday 13 May 2011, Milad Said Ayyash, 17, was shot in the stomach by Israeli forces during a demonstration in Silwan, East Jerusalem. He died next day from his injuries. As the resistance mounts, Milad is unlikely to be the last Palestinian to lose his life.

Which makes it all the more important to appreciate the driving spirit of such uprisings. It's not a call to violence, it's a cry against violence, the ruthless and prolonged violence of the Israeli state. It’s a reaction to deep oppression, an outpouring of despair, a plaintive desire for justice. And it's in the resisting of that violence that we show our solidarity with the victimised.

While we may declare ourselves “all Palestinians now”, we should also acknowledge the very human sacrifice that actual Palestinians will make, and have made, in pursuit of their human rights.

Many activists and supporters have joined Palestinians in those endeavours, losing their own lives, feeling the brutality of a bullet, a tear gas canister, a merciless beating and other intimidations.

But for others who support the cause with words and actions from further afield, there’s the added requirement to think-through the human consequences of uprising and resistance.

One can, and should, say that violence, violence in any form, only contributes to the larger mass of human suffering. We can also say that, longer term, violence, any violence, resolves very little. But alongside those moral imperatives must sit an understanding of how and why such violence occurs.

When we’ve measured and contemplated the costs, the misery, the legacy of such resistance, we should still be able to come to the same moral conclusion: that people, Palestinians enduring grotesque daily oppression, are absolutely entitled to be on those streets.

The current actions are being marked by mass additional Arab support in the region, particularly from Egypt which has shown the way in its heroic efforts to overthrow tyranny and reject Western ‘solutions’ to their social and political imprisonment.

Palestinians have the same right to liberation, to see an end to their persecution and the apartheid system that blights their everyday lives.

We might wish for a supportive response from the ‘international commuity’. But we know it won’t be forthcoming. Obama and the West have shown their selective self-interest in choosing which tyrants and regimes in the region to condemn. There’s no prospect, we can be completely sure, of including Netanyahu and Israel in that field.

Which makes it all the more a people’s resistance supported by conscientious citizens the world over, a globally-endorsed one that doesn’t depend on, or expect, Western-style ‘interventionist responses' – which, as we’ve seen in the tragedy of Libya, only involves Cruise missiles and more death.

Blair and the West were very able to do their 'deal in the desert' with Gaddafi, yet can't somehow find the impetus to muster a diplomatic peace. Why? Because, it simply doesn’t suit their strategic political, economic and military interests to do so.

And so it is with Israel. Obama, Cameron and their associates offer sanctimonious wishes for peace and a two state solution. But there’s not the slightest thought of imposing the necessary sanctions and pressures on Israel to see those claims and ‘aims’ realised.

It was ever thus. As one key whistleblower has just documented, there never was a 'peace process' for Israel and its US backers, only the "deceptive farce" which has kept the Palestinians even further removed from a just realisation of their rights.

And so, failed and abandoned, Palestinians take to the streets in another amazing effort to overcome their catastrophe, their sixty-three year Nakba, a suffering that Israel and its Western sponsors encourage no one to recognise or understand.

If, as seems likely, more Palestinians are killed and wounded in the course of such actions, we should reflect on the complete barbarity of state-directed violence. We should also recognise the ultimate uselessness of all killing and violence. But we can still come to the rational conclusion that, when faced with the scale and intensity of Israel's violence, Palestinians, like all other people, have a fundamental right to resist it.

John

Obama's Vengeance - the director's cut

2011-05-05T10:47:00.000-07:00

It's being hailed as the iconic picture: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and their political-military entourage in the White House Situation Room (purportedly) watching Osama bin Laden's 'real time' murder.

Obama sits low, looking pensive, Clinton anxiously covers her mouth, others stare intently at the 'grisly action'.

Whatever they saw, we've still to learn. No photographic "trophy" evidence will be released, says Obama. Doubts have arisen as to whether they witnessed the actual killing. It's only that photo which we've been given as 'proof' of Obama's 'defining moment'.

It could make the perfect movie still for 'Obama's Vengeance', in which an all-action Navy SEAL hero will cry "Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo, God Bless America!" as Washington's finest savour the final take-down of Bin Laden, the 'embodiment of evil'.

As with the the BBC's reverential to Obama ("Watch the chin", gushes Matt Frei), the slaying of Osama will soon, no doubt, receive the best Hollywood treatment, every celluloid salutation: dutiful revenge, military honour, the defence of Western freedom.

It won't, we can be sure, depict a set of warmongering elites gazing gratuitously at the detail of their extrajudicial killing.

Beyond the intended photo-op, the picture of Obama's private 'snuff movie' reveals something deeply disturbing about the ways in which power internalises state killing on a personal level, offering a rare glimpse into the pornography of official violence.

Nor can the media-led celebrations and chants of "USA" remove the darker truth that this was the illegal murder of a still un-arrested suspect, even one very deeply suspected and widely reviled.

Consider the media treatment of a similar photo/film showing, say, the Iranian authorities eliminating a sworn enemy in some Western state.

Why, many suffering and bereaved Iraqis and Afghans will now ask, shouldn't George W Bush be considered a legitimate target on home soil for his multiple, untried crimes in their lands?

Bin Laden has, we're told, been killed, his body removed and buried at sea. Where's the photographic corroboration? Assurances have been made about his 'resistance to capture', the 'necessity' of shooting him and the observation of Islamic burial protocols. Yet, beyond the far-out conspiracy theories, where's the standard proof of all this having happened, or having happened according to the Washington narrative? The director is in charge of the final cut.

Nor should we be misled by the West's smokescreen vilification of Pakistan in, allegedly, harbouring Bin Laden, all serving to mask America's own illicit actions inside another country. We've been told that the CIA didn't trust Pakistan intelligence (ISI), keeping them in the dark about the operation. But the dirty dealings, long-standing, between Washington and Islamabad suggest a more nuanced version still to unfold; that this was, more likely, the result of a quieter quid pro quo and 'opportune moment' for the 'sacrifice' of Bin Laden.

Whatever official 'evidence' might eventually surface on these matters, the essential purpose of the operation has been achieved. There will be no fair trial, no inconvenient testimony, no public education of the background politics to Al Qaida, the Twin Tower attacks or the illegal invasion of Afghanistan.

As Robert Fisk notes:

"a court would have worried more people than Bin Laden. After all, he might have talked about his contacts with the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, or about his cosy meetings in Islamabad with Prince Turki, Saudi Arabia's head of intelligence. Just as Saddam – who was tried for the murder of a mere 153 people rather than thousands of gassed Kurds – was hanged before he had the chance to tell us about the gas components that came from America, his friendship with Donald Rumsfeld, the US military assistance he received when he invaded Iran in 1980."

'Justice is done', Obama and Western others proclaim, including the ever shameless Tony Blair. No need for accountability or recourse to international law when pursuing a 'miltary foe', fighting the 'war on terror'.

It's an interpretation convincingly rejected by many notable legal figures:

"The prominent defence lawyer Michael Mansfield QC expressed similar doubts about whether sufficient efforts had been made to capture Bin Laden. "The serious risk is that in the absence of an authoritative narrative of events played out in Abbottabad, vengeance will become synonymised with justice, and that revenge will supplant 'due process'.

"Assuming the mission was … intended to detain and not to assassinate, it is therefore imperative that a properly documented and verifiable narrative of exactly what happened is made public. Whatever feelings of elation and relief may dominate the airwaves," he said, "they must not be allowed to submerge core questions about the legality of the exercise, nor to permit vengeance or summary execution to become substitutes for justice."

The human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC argued that the killing risked undermining the rule of law. "The security council could have set up an ad hoc tribunal in The Hague, with international judges (including Muslim jurists), to provide a fair trial and a reasoned verdict...This would have been the best way of demystifying this man, debunking his cause and de-brainwashing his followers."

That ever-useful task - the effort to persuade individuals and states against the use of violence, murder and the abrogation of law - will not be advanced in any way by Bin Laden's death. Whether it's murder committed by 'outlaw' extremists or 'our-law' extremists, the taking of life, any person's life, achieves nothing of any moral or practical worth.

America and its shrill media are in an ecstatic froth about this 'final avenging' of 9/11. But there's no talk of the millions of lost Afghan, Iraqi and other lives that came about as 'responses' to that act.

All that has now, according to the Guardian, become "Obama's War":

"In the end, it all now comes down to one man, Barack Obama. On 11 September 2001 he was an obscure senator who reacted to the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre by talking of the need to raise the hopes of embittered children across the globe. Almost a decade further on, the softest touch, in Dick Cheney's insulting view, has become the man who succeeded in hunting his quarry down. The irony will not be lost on Republicans who claim that America is now less safe under a Democrat president. There will undoubtedly be an al-Qaida response to their leader's death, and there is no shortage of evidence that plots are in the pipeline. A terrible life that brought misery to thousands is now over. Ending the legacy of that conflict will require all of Mr Obama's earliest and truest instincts. He now has the authority to carry them out."

How touchingly liberal of the Guardian to invest in Obama this 'legacy of responsibility', this 'mantle of redemption'.

The non-Guardian truth is that it's not just Obama's war, but America's 'law' that counts.

As the facile-named "Geronimo" action shows, Obama and his fellow sheriffs don't adhere to the law, they're above the law; America is the law, a self-proclaimed authority still imposing its Wild West version of patrol, capture and retribution on a long-suffering East.

Much is being made of Al Qaida's collapsing project against the current Middle East/North African revolutions, with popular demands for true participatory democracy rather than Islamic theocracy.

But - as with 'Nobel Obama's' extension of the war in Afghanistan and further violations into Pakistan - America's Cruise missile 'solution' for Libya and support for ruthless Saudi, Bahraini and other Gulf autocrats will, assuredly, not prevent or discourage even more Al Qaida-type responses.

Bin Laden may be gone, his killing officially witnessed (or not), his demise lauded on American streets. But the greater risk, by far, to peace and human security lies with Obama, his posse of military 'avengers' and the media acolytes who iconise their gory executions.

John

SAS recruitment 'crisis' and BBC militarism

2011-04-25T14:37:00.000-07:00

The BBC is reporting a deepening 'crisis' in SAS recruitment.

Various Ministry of Defence and political figures have been quoted by the BBC, offering explanations for the fall in applicant numbers, including the possibility that the SAS doesn't carry the same appeal of 'exclusivity' and 'danger' anymore:

"[Brigadier Richard] Dennis said the SAS was also losing its unique status among the services because "interesting operations are no longer seen as the preserve of special forces". In the letter to the head of the Army, Gen Sir Peter Wall, he said he had deep concerns over the "challenge of fully manning the SAS" and urgent action was needed to improve the "depth and quality" of potential recruits."

The article also offers this anti-war comment and counterview:

"Perhaps the decline in SAS recruitment is a good thing, indicating a receding inclination, even amongst the more 'daring' applicants, to join in useless, destructive wars.

"Hopefully, potential recruits are coming to realise that the 'allure' and 'excitement' of such operations usually involves illegal and covert interventions in lands where Britain and its allies, under the guise of 'humanitarian assistance', are seeking to appropriate natural resources and secure corporate interests.

"But even if the fall in SAS recruitment can be linked to more prudent factors such as increased fear of being killed or disillusion over the unit's 'elite' status, why is such reticence towards militarist activity portrayed by politicians and the media as a matter of 'national concern'?

"Isn't the 'crisis' in military recruitment, more generally, a moderately encouraging sign that people are thinking twice about going off to kill foreign civilians in the service of western realpolitik and big business - however 'intoxicating' the experience?"

Of course, the article doesn't actually include these lines, because, despite its proclamations of 'balance', the BBC is only concerned with presenting one side, the militarist view.

As with current 'anxieties' over the availability of parts for Britain's Typhoon bomber planes, it's the same culture of militarism that pervades BBC news.

Thus, MoD officials, parliamentary committees and BBC journalists speak in bland technicalities about the Typhoon's 'delivery deficits', expressing their collective worries over whether we can keep the bombs raining down on Libya:

"The committee said that the MoD relied on a "small group of key industrial suppliers who have the technical and design capability to build, upgrade and support" the jets.
"Problems with the availability of spare parts have meant that Typhoons are not flying as many hours as the department requires," it added. "The Typhoon supply chain is complex and stretches across Europe. However, the department admitted that it had not been managed well enough or delivered all the required parts when needed."

No mention of the appalling suffering of others at the receiving end of this 'awesome' technology.

As with SAS recruitment, what's readily perceived as a 'problem' - failure to deliver the means of killing and violence - could, more reasonably, be regarded as positive, life-saving developments. Fewer killers, fewer killed. Less bombs, less bombed.

Yet, pacifist perspectives or anti-war comment to that effect have no serious place in such output. It's part of the special treatment reserved for 'our' armed forces and the wars they're engaged in. The arms industry, the economy of death, is treated with due deference. Like BBC coverage of the royals, militarism is 'just there', a 'benign' 'fact of life', something we should identify with as an unstated and assumed part of the 'national interest'.

Nor are we likely to see any BBC journalists deviate from the standard script. It's all about keeping to the establishment consensus. Say nothing that questions the integrity of 'our' wars and military culture - who dares, sins.

John

Hate crime and the BNP

2011-04-17T22:27:00.000-07:00

As noted in the Sunday Herald, the British National Party has been reported to the Electoral Commission over race hate claims in its literature for the forthcoming Scottish elections.

It's an encouraging intervention, one that will, hopefully, see the BNP pursued through the courts.

The BNP election leaflet includes this malicious and fatuous statement:

"No more mosques! There are already more Muslims in Britain than Scottish people."

Besides the facile 'logic' of such claims - as though there aren't any Muslim Scots - this looks like a clear incitement to religious and racial hatred.

There's a belief among some left-liberals that, however odious the message, the BNP should still be permitted to express their views and stand for election. This is the basic 'freedom of speech' line, insisting that the banning of even such loathsome views is fundamentally illiberal and a slippery slope to further curtailments of civil freedom.

Another, I believe, much stronger, argument against a ban speaks of the reluctance to single-out the BNP when one compares their hateful words with the actual mass war crimes and violence committed by the 'respectable' mainstream parties.

After all, Nick Griffin may be a fascist, but his offences are of the 'petty/juvenile' type when set against the actual part played by Tony Blair and his friends in the murder of over a million Iraqis.

Yet, however valid, this argument still shouldn't preclude legal efforts to expose and prosecute the BNP's hate speech.

If it's morally appropriate to invoke international law in pursuing Blair and his fellow warmongers, it's also, by the same moral token, right to apply available domestic laws against the BNP.

Preventing publication of such language, banning far-right parties and arresting their leaders will never, of course, eradicate the politics of hate. That goes much deeper than the BNP. The same kind of racist messages are being brazenly repeated in the Daily Mail, while 'humanitarian' politicians like David Cameron continue to speak of immigrants as some kind of sub-human problem.

Yet, without public resistance, including legal challenges, to such naked incitement, that kind of hate can only fester and spread.

John

Goldstone co-authors hold the line on report

2011-04-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

The three co-authors of the Goldstone Report have written a devastating defence of their investigations, rounding on Richard Goldstone and reaffirming, unreservedly, their findings, conclusions and recommendations.

Their statement includes a complete rejection of Israel's claims to be conducting serious inquiries into cases arising from the report.

While noting the pressure and personal abuse they have endured in writing and upholding the report, the three co-authors also insist that the main charge of pre-planning the attacks on Gaza has never been addressed by Israel. Citing a further UN committee finding on the progress of the report, they note:

"In addition, with regard to the issue of the policies guiding Operation Cast Lead, the committee states that there is "no indication that Israel has opened investigations into the actions of those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw Operation Cast Lead". In other words, one of the most serious allegations about the conduct of Israel's military operations remains completely unaddressed."

This statement will come as a catastrophic blow to Israel and its lobby's efforts to have the report fully retracted at the UN. It also leaves Goldstone himself badly exposed.

Perhaps the Goldstone document should now become the Jilani, Chinkin and Travers report.

John

Goldstone's 'retractions' - caving-in to Israel's menace

2011-04-05T14:27:00.000-07:00

Judge Richard Goldstone's apparent 'retractions' over his landmark report into the bombing of Gaza shows very clearly the powerful and mendacious impact of Israel and its lobby in pursuing, intimidating and punishing its 'errant own'.

Honourable figures like Norman Finkelstein have shown a remarkable ability to resist, suffering a lifetime of opprobrium for doing so, but others seem unable to hold the moral line.

Ilan Pappe has felt and withstood the same terrible pressures:

"Readers might ask "so what?" and "why could Goldstone not withstand the heat?" Good questions, but alas the Zionization of Jewish communities and the false identification of Jewishness with Zionism is still a powerful disincentive that prevents liberal Jews from boldly facing Israel and its crimes.

Every now and again many liberal Jews seem to liberate themselves and allow their conscience, rather than their fear, to lead them. However, many seem unable [to] stick to their more universalist inclinations for too long where Israel is concerned. The risk of being defined as a "self-hating Jew" with all the ramifications of such an accusation is a real and frightening prospect for them.

You have to be in this position to understand the power of this terror."

Pressure on Goldstone has been particularly intense in his homeland South Africa. Following the report's publication, Avram Krengel, chairman of the South African Zionist Federation, led a relentless campaign to get Goldstone to recant. It seems to have worked. As noted by Israel's Ynet News:

"He [Krengel] said the Jewish lobby in South Africa had a part in Goldstone's surprising confession. "We met him about a year ago, and during the meeting he insisted on his stance. We, on the other hand, told him why we were angry with him.

"We asked where were the investigation committees against all those countries which are undoubtedly committing war crimes and where was the UN on their matter, and why did he only come out against Israel, which was defending itself. He said Israel was the first among many, but that didn't happen of course."

Krengel added that "Goldstone was very quiet months after that. Perhaps he self-examined himself and realized that what we said was true – that there was a bias against Israel and not a bias to probe the truth – and then he started talking and expressing reservations."

Or perhaps he simply just gave in to the psychological pressure exerted by an openly hostile Jewish community:

"It has been like watching an innocent man whipped at the stake,” said Goldstone’s friend Letty Cottin Pogrebin, founder of Ms. magazine. “His dedication to Israel is so strong and rooted. He suffered at the thought that his work was being used to delegitimize Israel. It truly wounded and pained him.”

“His family is taking terrible strain,” reported a close South African friend who would speak only on condition of anonymity. “He told us, ‘If I had known what it would do to my family, I wouldn’t have done it.’”

Fearing protests and abuse, Goldstone even, initially, felt unable to attend his grandson's bar mitzvah.

However, despite his apparent 'regrets', Goldstone's 'atonement' remains incomplete:

"According to Krengel, as far as South Africa's Jews are concerned, there is a long way to forgiveness. "He has a long road to take. The damage he has caused Israel and the Jews is very heavy. He has a lot to say and do in order to atone what he did."

Looking back, Krengel give South Africa's Jews credit for the battle against Goldstone. "He suffered greatly, especially in the city he comes from. We took sides against him, and it encourages us to know that our way had an effect against the international pressure and made him admit and regret his remarks."

The obvious pride Krengel takes in saying that Goldstone "suffered greatly" resonates darkly with Pappe's own warnings about Israel's ongoing purges:

"Just weeks ago, Israeli military intelligence announced it had created a special unit to monitor, confront, and possibly hunt down, individuals and bodies suspected of "delegitimizing" Israel abroad. In light of this, perhaps quite a few of the faint-hearted felt standing up to Israel was not worth it."

Despite Israeli proclamations of a victorious reversal, the specifics of the Goldstone report still hold, and will continue to shape international opinion - legal, political and civil - on Israel's occupation and siege of Gaza. As Jonathan Cook notes:

"Israel would certainly like observers to interpret Goldstone's latest comments as an exoneration. In reality, however, he offered far less consolation to Israel than its supporters claim.

The report's original accusation that Israeli soldiers committed war crimes still stands, as does criticism of Israel's use of unconventional weapons such as white phosphorus, the destruction of property on a massive scale, and the taking of civilians as human shields. "

The report's findings were, despite its denunciations of Israel, always a conservative indictment. On-the-ground human rights groups had gone much further than Goldstone in cataloguing and denouncing Israel's war crimes. None are likely to follow Goldstone in reversing their findings. Nor are the UN or any of the senior investigators who sat on Goldstone's panel.

Goldstone might win some 'rehab' points from Israel in the short-term, but his 'reversals' are likely to be seen as cowardly or fearful capitulation in the longer run.

Again, one can recognise the context of fear and menace in which those retractions were made. Yet, it's still, as Ilan Pappe says, a shameful u-turn for a man initially hailed and respected for putting duties of juridical truth before personal and emotional attachment to Israel.

John

Additional: LA Times editorial casts doubt on Goldstone's retractions and asks him to provide real evidence for his 'new doubts' about Israeli criminality.

Libya's 'protectors' - liberal saviours and media cheerleaders

2011-03-25T10:07:00.000-07:00

The liberal interventionists, it seems, are out in offensive force again as Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and a cheerleading media drag us into another calamitous war.

Some avowed left/liberal 'anti-imperialists' have also succumbed to the Faustian acceptance of US/UK missiles bombarding Tripoli and Gaddafi's own bunkers, invoking the spurious trade-off that it's the only way of protecting Libyan rebel civilians.

The prospect of many thousands more civilians, pro and anti-Gaddafi, dying as an inevitable consequence of Western bombing, gets conveniently lost in the calculus.

Non-intervention, so the interventionist argument runs, means abandoning anti-Gaddafi forces to certain slaughter - a 'moral abrogation'.

It's a convenient emotional appeal to the public from a military-political assemblage that holds little regard for any Arab face. As the recent all-guns-blazing US attack on a rebel party gathering suggests, they are all, ultimately, expendable.

More bombing and murder will solve nothing. But it's the knee-jerk endorsement of Western military 'solutions' by supposedly thoughtful liberals and a default-line media which serves to marginalise the basic realities and possible alternatives for Libya.

As a group of academics otherwise declare:

"We strongly advocate creative strategies of solidarity with the Libyan people while underscoring that calls for coercive external intervention do not qualify. Indeed, it is possible that demands for Western support to the rebels may already have done more harm than good. In the end, we argue for humility in imagining the role we might play in the course of Libyans' struggle. The international community is neither entitled to take the reins today nor dictate the post-regime scenario tomorrow."

Thus, one can support the movement to oust Gaddafi without advocating another Western campaign of mass killing to 'achieve' it.

In the wake of Iraq, Afghanistan and other Western 'liberations', could we ever presume to bestow upon such forces the mantle of humanitarian protector?

Media Lens provide the relevant analogy:

"A serial killer with a long history of violent, greed-driven crimes might claim to be motivated by compassion in committing further violence. He might even act morally. But his actions could not possibly be based on any ‘moral right’. And the rest of the world would be entitled to argue that, given his record, he was the last person likely to achieve positive results."

As Ken O'Keefe also reminds us, any proclamation of liberal interventionism, particularly regarding the Middle East, should be treated with definitive derision.

Where are the calls for military intervention to protect the protesters in Bahrain and Yemen, or to isolate all those other Middle East dictators, notably Saudi Arabia, eager to see their fellow dictator Gaddafi fall?

Where was the Western demand for a no-fly-zone over Gaza when 1400 Palestinians were being slaughtered by Israeli jets? More Gazans, including children, have just been bombed and murdered. Where's the emergency Security Council resolutions calling for their protection?

With the expedient backing of the Arab League, dictators and tyrants all, the West has now secured its tactical boot in the Libyan door. And, as the showers of million dollar Cruise and Tomahawk missiles show, there will be no military end game short of mass civilian bloodshed and regime change favourable to Washington.

The only interests protected here will be the arms industry, oil companies and other venture investors eager to see the Blair-initiated 'deal in the desert' secured.

Media framing of Western involvement in Libya routinely pitches Gaddafi as the 'rogue tamed by good-guy Blair, but now needing to be punished for killing his own'. Cameron is, thus, just doing his 'ethical best' now, following on from Blair's 'fine-but-failed' efforts. Blair's role, and Cameron's support, in the genocide of Iraq, of course, forms no part of that 'ethical' narrative.

As with Britain's past arming of Saddam, George Galloway has, rightly, accused the BBC of going quietly along with the West in supporting Gaddafi this last decade, while he and many others on the left had been denouncing the Libyan dictator.

It's not a home truth the mainstream media appear keen on airing. Stop the War has been all but ignored over Libya. Pilger and notable anti-war others may be exposing the real hypocritical utterings and motives of Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy et al, but it's the language of 'necessary intervention' and 'our forces' that gets all the major media attention.

Even the Guardian's Seumas Milne, in denouncing Western hypocrisy, has precious little to say about the liberal media's own language-contorting role in rationalising the war.

From Colonel Bob Stewart to David Owen, the voice of 'sensible intervention' gives soothing reassurance to a public fearing another foreign military disaster.

Another current liberal media favourite performing this task is Rory Stewart, an ex-foreign office point man for the Middle East - the quintessence of the modern career Orientalist - and now Tory MP.

Stewart is eagerly paraded by liberal apologists as the deep and thoughtful voice of 'ethical interventionism'. Having dutifully considered the "national security arguments" and "moral" objections to the West's actions, Stewarts's conclusions amount to this:

"We need therefore to work out how best to use the no-fly zone, while recognising how insecure and reckless we can be tempted to be."

"Insecure and reckless"? "Tempted"? Such diplomatic angst typifies the tortuous liberal deliberations on whether this 'intervention' can be morally validated. For Stewart and his war-rationalising peers, the discussion may be laboured, but the outcome is predictably the same: the ultimate need for 'our best' military engagement.

Beyond all the soul-searching, reflective words on Britain's and the West's capacity for 'erroneous' foreign adventures, Stewart has nothing seriously damning to say about the UK's real political priorities and the relentless corporate imperatives that drive the conquest and control of such states in pursuit of oil, arms sales and other imperialist dividends.

Instead, we have to seek out other media commentary for credible understandings of Libya, assessments that don't take as their starting points presumptions of basic Western benevolence.

One can only hope for a relatively quick and peaceful end to this conflict and the possibility of a true democracy for Libya. It's, perhaps, a forlorn hope. But any argument, from right or 'left', that believes in the quick-fix, or even long-fix, of Western intervention is more hopelessly misguided than the Criuse missiles now being fired in 'protective support' of the Libyan people.

John

Link update: some of the forces assisting the Libyan rebels.
More here.

Japan's disasters, natural and human

2011-03-16T11:37:00.000-07:00

The astonishing natural tragedy of Japan's 9.0 magnitude earthquake and 30 foot tsunami has now been accompanied by another, much more human-constructed, terror as the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi continue to disintegrate and explode radioactive material.

The eventual scale of this nuclear disaster is, as yet, to be realised. But, with an increasingly worst-case-scenario of core meltdowns, extensive atmospheric exposure and mass evacuations, the sheer folly of nuclear energy is there for all to see.

It's usually only in hindsight, as with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, that the 'obvious case' against nuclear plants gets serious attention. And, as we're now seeing, elementary issues over the Japanese plants seem to have gone wantonly unaddressed.

How could the Japanese authorities ever have permitted the concentration of so many coastal-sited reactors knowing the perennial threat of regional quakes and tsunamis?

Where are so many nuclear refugees now expected to go as the exclusion zone extends further and further from the plant?

If the dangers of nuclear energy seem all-too-evident to an alarmed public, the argument for abandoning it has still not been accepted by some 'environmental realists' who see nuclear as the only viable option to the bigger calamity of carbon-inflicting climate change.

While recognising the extent of Japan's nuclear disaster, and what might yet be learned from it, notable green advocate Mark Lynas insists that any wholesale criticism of the nuclear industry "may not be entirely fair."

"The majority of the world’s nuclear plants are not situated in seismic areas which present a threat along the scale of that faced by earthquake-prone Japan. Those which may be affected by tsunamis are likely even fewer in number. Moreover, the Fukushima plant is 40 years old and was due to be mothballed in February – it was given an extended license, just as has happened in the UK, Germany and many other countries – because no-one could agree on newer, safer designs at the same time as power shortages loomed."

This argument over nuclear location may be partially valid. But it still doesn't make any other nuclear plant assuredly safe. Just remember Windscale. Nor does the age limit of Fukushima and the prevarications over its extended life, always based on economic expediency, provide much in the way of mitigation.

Lynas's associate, iconic activist George Monbiot, maintains a similar, if still qualified, defence of nuclear energy (just updated with an additional clause denouncing the siting of nuclear plants in such volatile places).

It's a position which Greenpeace and many others within the green movement convincingly reject - and regret, given the particular influence of Monbiot and Lynas as popular environmentalists.

What seems beyond doubt, even to these eco-veterans, is the potential catastrophe now unfolding and the glaring incapacity of humans to deal with nuclear emergencies.

And with this official desperation comes the official lies and subterfuge. Little wonder we're now seeing a global government effort, as in France and Germany, to offset public anxiety and distrust.

As Michael McCarthy notes in the Independent:

"The reason is an industry which from its inception, more than half a century ago, has taken secrecy to be its watchword; and once that happens, cover-ups and downright lies often follow close behind. The sense of crisis surrounding Japan's stricken nuclear reactors is exacerbated a hundredfold by the fact that, in an emergency, public trust in the promoters of atomic power is virtually non-existent. On too many occasions in Britain, in America, in Russia, in Japan – pick your country – people have not been told the truth (and have frequently been told nothing at all) about nuclear misadventures."

While the Japanese authorities may be doing all they can to stem this crisis, the nuclear industry in Japan have displayed:

"an identical culture of nuclear cover-up and lies. Of particular concern has been the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), Asia's biggest utility, which just happens to be the owner and operator of the stricken reactors at Fukushima.

Tepco has a truly rotten record in telling the truth. In 2002, its chairman and a group of senior executives had to resign after the Japanese government disclosed they had covered up a large series of cracks and other damage to reactors, and in 2006 the company admitted it had been falsifying data about coolant materials in its plants over a long period."

It's an endemic trait within the industry. As McCarthy neatly puts it: "Secrecy came with nuclear energy, like a birthmark".

Like the radioactive carcinogens now seeping from Fukushima, the detection of corporate greed around the nuclear business is increasingly evident.

In the US, a mercenary nuclear lobby has preyed on hyped public fears over energy supplies, utilising big-business-leaning legislators to help bend government regulators to its will:

"Add to that the ongoing concern about peak oil, energy costs related to foreign fuels and the environmental problems associated with petroleum/coal energy sources and the shameless lobbyists for nuclear power have never had an easier task getting their product online."

However:

"That may have changed in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. With the event at that plant, the world was once again graphically reminded of the dangers of nuclear power. The question is, can we the citizens of the planet, successfully mobilize against a corporate effort to impose this expensive, inefficient, dangerous and ultimately deadly form of power generation?"

Meanwhile, the people of a decimated and radioactive Japan are reliving past horrors, trying, in their amazingly quiet and dignified way, to contemplate the forces of natural catastrophe and the fallout from those built on misguided human design.

There are viable, alternative technologies. Perhaps the Japanese tragedy might stimulate radical new movements for an end to nuclear madness.

John

* Some more here on TEPCO's shocking record of negligence and secrecy.

Cameron in Egypt - an exchange with the BBC

2011-02-27T16:27:00.000-08:00

An exchange with the BBC over David Cameron's visit to Egypt and the issue of British hypocrisy.

(21 February 2011)
Dear Steve Herrmann and Helen Boaden,

The proclaimed watchword of the BBC is 'balance', as in providing within articles and reports an alternative view or interpretation, that which gives a contrary voice to what government and other officials say and claim to represent.

Please could you look at the BBC piece, 'David Cameron hails "opportunity" on Egypt visit', and tell me where the balancing opinion is.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12523572

James Landale is not only travelling with David Cameron, he's amplifying his every word and claim as if they were obvious truths.

He and you, I'm sure, must be aware that, while Cameron is calling for an end to Egypt's 30 year emergency laws, the British state, including his government, have faithfully supported Mubarak and his regime over that same period, a policy which has seen a continuous flow of US/UK arms supplies and a blind-eye to his torture/rendition agenda.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/08/uk-arms-exports-egypt?CMP=twt_fd

Where in any of the BBC's output do we see even the merest hint of British complicity in Egypt's repression?

Isn't there room for even a token challenge over Cameron's 'first Western leader' appearance and the suggestion of British hypocrisy?

Such output is a clear breach of the BBC's own notional guidelines.

I'm passing this on to the BBC Trust. In the meantime, perhaps you could reference someone like historian and author Mark Curtis who, I'm sure, would provide a rather different take on Cameron's visit and the nature of the British state 'concerns' in Egypt.

Just in the interests of balance.

Regards

John Hilley

----------------------------------
(25 February 2011)
From:

"NewsOnline Complaints"

Mr Hilley,

Thank you for your e-mail. There is a distinction between balance and historical context, and a straight news report is not always the best place for that. In fact, James Landale later provided a separate piece of analysis, including this paragraph:

"But why should Egypt, or any other country in the Gulf, listen to Britain's lessons in democracy? Until recently, the UK supported the nation's autocrats in the name of trade and security, turning a blind eye to the treatment of their people."

You can read his full report here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12532480

The following day, James Landale tackled Mr Cameron on the issue of arms sales to the new Egyptian democracy.

Http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12547010

Also, during Mr Cameron's visit to Kuwait ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12533520 ) we reported his view on past dealings with repressive regimes:

"Mr Cameron said Britain had been wrong to support some repressive regimes just to promote stability: 'I say that is a false choice. As recent events have confirmed, denying people their basic rights does not preserve stability, rather the reverse.'"

Elsewhere, Bridget Kendall has explored Britain's past relationship with Bahrain:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12513135

So we would disagree that such issues have been ignored but are grateful for your observations on our output.

Best wishes,

BBC News website

http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/handle.shtml

----------------------------
(27 February 2011)

Dear BBC

Thanks for writing back. Yes, indeed, some credit is due here to James Landale for questioning the Prime Minister.

Landale's point to David Cameron does contain a tacit charge of hypocrisy, as does the paragraph in the piece you note.

Both assertions came after the initial BBC report cited in my letter.

The BBC shouldn't, of course, be seeking some kind of pat on the back for raising what should be glaringly obvious. Nor should it be resting on its 'journalistic laurels', resisting the opportunity to say much more critical things about Britain's hypocritical postures in the Middle East.

How much more effective and truthful that challenge would have been if Landale had suggested to Cameron that Britain has been criminally supporting, aiding and funding a torture regime rather than just "turning a blind eye to the treatment of [the Egyptian] people.'"

And what of the UK's own capacity for mass killing in the region - notably, its part in the million souls lost in the illegal destruction of Iraq? It seems, for the BBC, that, whatever 'our' governments do, they are still in a position of ethical superiority to Mubarak, Gaddafi and the other Western clients now being discarded.

You make the term "historical context" sound like some past aside to Britain's involvement here, when, in fact, this country has played a decisive role in propping-up a known tyrant and a torture regime. That, in itself, should be the news story.

If the BBC is so dedicated to 'balance' in its reports and analyses, why doesn't it provide some actual comment and statistics from an authoritative counter-voice, like Campaign Against the Arms Trade?

Instead, we have reporters repeating Cameron's 'pleas for democracy' and his economic case for arms sales, with no illustration of the arms involved or detailed rebuttal of his claims.

Likewise, where does Landale or any other BBC reporter raise the issue of Britain's complicity in US-sponsored rendition involving Egypt? Or is this kind of question just too sensitive and off-limits for the BBC?

A different, more accurate and, yes, still balanced (for BBC purposes) headline here might have read:

"Cameron's 'democracy' visit to Egypt 'hypocritical' given Britain's long-standing support for Mubarak's torture regime."

Such presentation, supported by critical quotes, would offer a reasoned, factual and open line of enquiry for readers and viewers to follow. It would also go against the grain of the BBC's establishment-line reporting, ever-subjectively safe in its framing.

It's the subjective judgement of BBC editors in how headlines, comments and quotes are ordered. And, despite Landale's nominal rebuke to the PM over arms and democracy, it's pretty clear that the BBC would never countenance any content disputing this country's basic 'democratic values'. It's still the British Broacasting Corporation.

I'm not sure what point you are seeking to make in citing the BBC's coverage of Cameron in Kuwait, other than to repeat his same 'appeals for democracy' in the region. Indeed, this blanket 'Mr Cameron said' piece is even more disgraceful than the one initially complained about.

Again, why no serious counter-comment or consideration of Cameron's worries about the potential fall of such regimes and their replacement with real democracies hostile to arms-supplying Britain and the oil-demanding West?

It's the same with Bridget Kendall's article on Bahrain, 'analysis' which tells us precisely nothing about the UK's dirty dealings in that state, past and present. Yes, we read about Britain's and the West's "nervousness" over losing its strategic interests. That, again, is all rather obvious. But where's the critical discussion of its dark corporate-military actions in keeping such regimes in power? Kendall, like the others, knows the line that can't be crossed.

One can only hope that James Landale's useful mention of the eight arms contractors in Cameron's party emboldens him to probe a little deeper into the UK's murderous arms economy.

The nature, provenance and life-effects of such weaponry on our fellow humans is pretty clear: nasty, British and short.

Saying something more damning about that ugly industry and its unapologetic state sponsors would surely result in Landale's own 'journalistic rendition', but he might earn a little more public respect in the process.

Kind regards

John Hilley

'Moderates' for the Middle East

2011-02-16T14:47:00.000-08:00

Recent statements from the 'moderate forces for peace' in the Middle East have helped expose their mutual network, capacity for violence and blatant disregard for basic law.

Tzipi Livni has been held up by the West as the 'benign' face of the Israeli state. Yet, as then prime minister, she was a zealous exponent of the murderous assault on Gaza in 2008-9.

In the recently-released Palestine Papers - documenting Israeli refusal to countenance even giveaway offers by Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority (PA) - she is quoted as saying:

"I was the Minister of Justice. I am a lawyer… But I am against law - international law in particular. Law in general."

It's a revealing statement of contempt from this 'voice of reason', consistent with her dismissals of the Goldstone Report, UN findings on the Mavi Marmara attack and any other judicial conclusions critical of Israeli conduct.

The Palestine Papers also provide a solid indictment of the 'moderate' PA's part in the Gaza coup.

The resignation of PA chief negotiator Saeb Erekat over the leaks comes in the wake of rearguard PA efforts to defend the Mubarak regime, including purges against solidarity-with-Egypt gatherings in the West Bank. The simultaneous call from Abbas for fresh Palestinian elections, following Mubarak's ouster, can be seen as a last desperate attempt to maintain PA 'legitimacy', stifle dissent and placate Netanyahu.

Middle East 'peace envoy' Tony Blair has also been indulging Netanyahu in an effort to help 'moderate' his image and pre-empt 'criticism' of Israel by the Quartet.

Aware of Israel's outright dismissal of international law and the continued illegality of settlement building in East Jerusalem, Blair has counselled Netanyahu on the need for 'concessions' to the Palestinians on house permits. In reality, Netanyahu's 'acceptance' suggests nothing more than token assurances all intended to buy more time and allay international condemnation.

The Blair-Netanyahu relationship, however, may not be of the best-buddy type.

According to fellow master of spin, populist 'moderate' and prima facie war criminal, Alastair Campbell, Blair always felt Netanyahu to be "untrustworthy". The feeling was/is surely mutual. One can only speculate on the kind of suspicious, calculating 'friendship' that exists between such self-preserving figures.

Before the heroic result in Tahrir Square, Blair also defended his more confirmed friend Hosni Mubarak, describing him as "immensely courageous and a force for good". Again, we can but wonder about the sort of 'moderate' mind that would endorse a tyrant torturer against the mass voice of the democracy-demanding Egyptian people. But, of course, we need only think of Blair's own crimes in Iraq and dismissal of democratic opposition to understand the personal connection.

Likewise, Obama's, Netanyahu's and the PA's collective efforts to shore-up Omar Suleiman, the West's remaining point man on renditions and torture, tells us all we need to know about their true, repressive agenda.

As the domino-effect of popular protest spreads across the region, the self-declared 'peace-makers' in Washington, Tel Aviv and Ramallah must be deeply concerned about the prospects of real democracy.

The implications of the Egyptian revolution for Israel are already worryingly clear, with alarming potential fallouts for the Obama/Netanyahu-sponsored PA.

The immediate problem now for this 'moderate' alignment is how to suppress or, at least, moderate any further democratic threats to Abbas's client authority and Israel's apartheid order.

John

Egypt and our default-line media

2011-02-02T13:37:00.000-08:00

The current media presentation of Egypt is a textbook lesson on how to spin the message of a benevolent Western foreign policy while gradually dispensing with one of its foremost client dictators.

From Obama, Hillary Cinton and PJ Crowley to David Cameron and William Hague, the press-room spin of 'democratic development' and 'free political expression' has been repeated and amplified without question by a default-line media.

The average viewer, with little or no background knowledge of Egyptian affairs, would likely be astonished to learn of America's and the West's true and active complicity in suppressing democratic rights and reform in Egypt.

Washington's proclaimed rationale for supporting Mubarak is, so we're informed, to prevent the 'Islamic contagion', a fiction duly internalised and filtered by the media.

Thus, the US and its friends are issuing grave warnings about the vacuum now being created, leading to 'insecurity' and the 'dark prospect', so Joe Biden tells us, of 'Islamic extremists' taking control. Think, as you're encouraged to do by the media, of Iran 1979, Tehran's 'mad moolahs', Lebanon's Hezbollah and the upstart Hamas rulers in Gaza.

Not, of course, the royal-religio elite and torture-driven regime in Saudi Arabia, or any past US support for Islamic fighters like the Mujahadeen in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.

All that awkward aid and backing has to be blind-eyed, respectfully ignored, given, at best, token, sanitised mentions by senior correspondents.

The reporting of US/Western support for Mubarak's 30-year repression could be easily disseminated as essential context by the BBC and other mainstream media. The political positioning of Washington in support of a regime that has served American policy so centrally might, reasonably, be considered worthy of detailed consideration. Yet, power relationships that have shaped US hegemony in the region, Israel's nuclear dominance, its relentless occupation of Palestine and the spurious 'war on terror' all, seemingly, deserve no examination.

Evaded and glossed-over, the policy is, and has been, remarkably visible, so visible it simply can't be stated by most of the media in its raw, uncomfortable form:

"Successive US administrations, Republican and Democrat, have decided over the past three decades that their long-term interests are best served by maintaining Mubarak in power, even if he shows scant respect for civil liberties. Despite systematic violations of human rights, rigged elections and evidence of a persistent culture of torture, US aid has continued to flow. Under the banner of the 'war on terror', American policy has become even more intimately connected with the most repressive parts of Mubarak's regime, notably through Egypt's integration into a global network of subcontracted torturers run under the CIA's Extraordinary Rendition programme. This partnership builds on a long history of US-Egyptian intelligence cooperation, which has also provided valuable support for US military intervention elsewhere in the region, such as US operations in Afghanistan." (Anne Alexander, 'The international arena', in Rahab El-Mahdi and Philip Marfleet, eds, Egypt: The Moment of Change, (2009), Zed Books, p 146.)

Between 1977 and 2007, the US gave Egypt $62 billion in aid and arms. Egypt's take from Washington is second only to that of Israel. In 2008, Cairo's $1.3 billion payment from America's Economic Support Fund was more than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa combined (ibid, p 138).

In what passes for critical 'analysis', the BBC's John Simpson offers 'sage' statements of the obvious on Mubarak's precarious tenure and the word from Washington. From the more 'street-savvy' editors like Jeremy Bowen, we hear of the gathering social alignments and 'problematic' role the Muslim Brotherhood may play in the coming constitutional reforms. There's multi-additional caveats from the back streets of Cairo on demands for reform and how life will now change for many Egyptians. And, of course, there's reminders of Foreign Office advice to travellers, helping to soothe the unease of the lucrative tourist industry.

It's a neat media package of political upheaval, democratic demands, Western concerns, down-with-the-tyrant images, social hopes of the people and business-as-usual on the Red Sea.

What's completely absent is any serious discussion of America's and Britain's crucial, historic support for that dictator and the shameful role they've played in keeping Mubarak's torture-regime intact.

The implications for Palestine of a falling Egyptian client, particularly in how it affects the border with Gaza, as well as the Fatah-Hamas dynamic, is of critical significance here. Where's the applied media discussion of these vital factors?

There's also the question of how the media has helped mask Washington's past hostilities towards Egyptian reformist and former chief weapons inspector Mohamed ElBaradei. The looming possibility of an ElBaradei presidency and a less-compliant Egyptian position over Iran, is an alarming prospect for the US and Israel. Again, where's the coverage?

It's rather fitting that, in the wake of Obama's post-investiture Cairo speech - 'encouraging' regional 'democracy' and exerting a 'cordial hand' to the Arab world - that America should be contemplating this most uncomfortable of developments, this actual demand for real democratic change, in Egypt itself.

The paradox of that unravelling and Washington's failure to renounce Mubarak then, as now, will, as with all past US and Western protection of the regime, likely go ignored by a media in dutiful service to the White House line.

John