Supping With the Devil

Hello, Kafka. The following quotations speak for themselves:-

"Discussions of Israel's military trade usually focus on the flow of weapons into the country - US-made Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in the West Bank, and Britain supplying parts for F-16s. Overlooked is Israel's huge and expanding export business. Israel now sends $1.2bn in 'defence' products to the US - up dramatically from $270m in 1999. In 2006, Israel exported $3.4bn in defence products - well over a billion more than it received in American military aid. That makes Israel the fourth largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain." (How war was turned into a brand: Political chaos means Israel is booming like it's 1999 - and the boom is in defence exports field-tested on Palestinians, Naomi Klein, The Guardian, 16/6/07)

"[Senator Helen Coonan] also pointed to potential long-term collaboration between [Australia & Israel], saying 'there are some synergies between Australia and Israel in the security sector'. And a number of Israeli ICT companies are already active investors in these areas in Australia, she added." (Despite threats, Israel is a 'land of innovation' - Coonan, The Australian Jewish News, 17/11/06)

"Another troubled defence project, a $145m unmanned aerial vehicle contract with the army has been placed on a 'projects of concern' list. The contract was signed in... 2005 by then defence minister Robert Hill and provides for the supply of 8 Israeli-made 1-View tactical UAVs. But 2 years behind schedule it now joins a list of 9 delayed defence projects worth billions of dollars... 'We're very worried about this', Defence Procurement Secretary Greg Combet said yesterday. 'It's important we get these UAV capabilities out in the field where they're being utilised in Afghanistan'." (Spy plane joins list of troubled projects, The Australian, 17/5/08)

"Each targeted assassination is a large-scale operation that integrates hundreds of specialists from different military branches and security apparatuses. Beyond its reliance on background intelligence, targeted assassination depends on sharing real-time information between various agents, commanders, operators and different military planes, and their ability to act upon it. After a Palestinian is put on the death list he is followed, sometimes for weeks, by a 'swarm' of various unmanned aircraft. Often, different swarms would follow different people simultaneously in different areas of the Gaza Strip. In this way, the security services establish the targeted person's daily routines and habits, and maintain continuous visual contact with him until his killing. As well as being cheaper to operate, unmanned drones have the advantage over manned planes or helicopters in that they can remain in the air around the clock, some for as long as 30 hours, and because their formations circulate in relatively small areas while providing a multiplicity of angles of vision. Moreover, drones are quiet and barely visible to the human eye. This is the reason why, from 2004, the Air Force started to shoot its missiles from drones rather than from its more visible attack helicopters or jets. A swarm of various types of drones, each circulating at a different altitude, up to 30,000 feet, is navigated by a GPS system and woven by radio communication into a single synergetic reconnaissance and killing instrument that conducts the entire assassination operation. Some drones are designed to view the terrain vertically downwards in order to establish the digital coordinates of a targeted person, while others look diagonally, in order to distinguish facial features or identify a vehicle's licence plates. Some drones are designed to intercept radio signals and mobile phones, others can carry and shoot missiles. With the development and proliferation of drone technology, there remains, as Shimon Naveh put it, 'very few Israeli soldiers in the airspace over Gaza... the air is mainly filled with Golems... an army without soldiers'. Although until 2004, military jets and helicopters carried out the assassinations, they are now largely used to divert attention from the real area of operations by flying over other parts of the Gaza Strip when the assassinations take place." (Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation, Eyal Weizman, p 241-242)

Some Zhengyou are More Equal Than Other Zhengyou

"Unfazed by the growing diplomatic unrest, [Australian Prime Minister] Kevin Rudd has told the Chinese in their own language there are 'significant human rights problems in Tibet'... Mr Rudd told the university students he came as a 'true friend' - zhengyou - not a critic..." (I'm saying it in plain Mandarin: fix Tibet, Phillip Coorey, SMH, 10/4/08

Judging by letters to the establishment press, Rudd's stocks as a statesman and supposed speaker of 'truth to power' have soared. There were, however, a handful of dissenters:-

"How dare Kevin Rudd tell the Chinese that there have been human rights violations in Tibet. Would he do the same and tell the Israelis that there are gross human rights violations in Palestine? On the contrary, at a recent dinner organised by an Australian Jewish organization, he went to great lengths to say that Australians and Israelis are the same type of people." Letter, Simon Chan, The Age, 11/4/08

"If Kevin Rudd thinks that his manufactured 'dispute' with China will convince Australians that he is anything other than a pro-Chinese apologist, then he should think again. To describe the events in Tibet as 'human rights problems' is a gross insult to the Tibetan people. Equally, why didn't he once mention democracy or freedom of speech in China? The silence was equally deafening about Hu Jia and Yang Chunlin, two dissidents recently jailed for 3 and 5 years respectively. Their 'crimes' were to criticise the Communist Party of China and 'incite subversion of state power'. It's obvious that the Prime minister's statements in China are designed for a domestic audience, not to actually effect change..." Letter, Jeremy C Browne, The Age, 11/4/08

"Kevin Rudd does not need to learn Hebrew to call on Israel to end its gross violations of Palestinian human rights. He can say it in plain English." Letter, Ali Kazak, The Australian, 12/4/08

Among the pundits, veteran SMH journalist Alan Ramsey, who only last month had castigated Rudd for kowtowing to the Israelis in federal parliament (See my posts, The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 1 & 5), was having second thoughts about the man: "To publicly stand up to the Chinese, in their own capital, in their own language, on an issue so sensitive to the planet's last great totalitarian state - and, since May last year, Australia's biggest (in dollars) trading partner - is something no visiting head of government, of any kind, has ever done, let alone one from this country. To say it took courage and no little risk only parrots the obvious. What it took was leadership of the most dramatic kind. In recent years, we have been force-fed national leadership, wrapped in the flag, that gloried in sticking its head up the backside of Washington and its dependent satellite in the Middle East. To have an Australian prime minister behave as Rudd has done in Beijing is to think that maybe he is different after all and not just another political control freak with a brain as big as his smile. The bloke is worth watching." (12/4/08)

Ramsey's otherwise polar opposite over at The Australian, Foreign Editor Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, was even more impressed, gushing : "...Kevin Rudd this week has produced his own cultural revolution... For Rudd has shown the world that it is possible to be a good friend of China and still speak to the Chinese leadership frankly and in public about its appalling human rights practices. This is a profound revolution.... it is a radical departure from the practice of John Howard, who preferred to concentrate on what he and the Chinese had in common... No Western leader, with the partial exception of US presidents, does what Rudd did this week: criticise the Chinese over human rights abuses in Tibet before he arrives, in fact in a joint press conference with US President George W Bush. Repeat the criticism in London. Absorb furious official Chinese protests in Beijing and Canberra, then go to China and repeat the offence in public, in front of a Chinese audience." (12/4/08)

Our pundits, it seems, are easily pleased - the dissenting letters are closer to the mark. If our supposedly fearless Australian Helmsman is really concerned about the human rights of downtrodden people, how is one to explain why, as a zhengyou of both China and Israel, he can say boo to the former about Tibetan human rights, but remain mum about Palestinian rights? And, not only not say boo, but host a parliamentary party for the buggers to boot! A partial answer must surely lie in the fact that the parliamentary wing of the Labor Party has not only not been captured by the China lobby, but that the latter, in so far as it even exists, has nowhere near the clout of the Israel lobby.

Author and Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation Michael Lind's comparison of ethnic lobbies in the US may perhaps have some relevance here: "Most ethnic lobbies...have based their power on votes, not money... The influence of these lobbies has usually been confined to the cities and states in which particular ethnic groups have been concentrated... The Israel lobby, however, is not primarily a traditional ethnic voter machine; it is an ethnic donor machine. Unique among ethno-political machines in the US, the Israel lobby has emulated the techniques of national lobbies based on economic interests (both industry groups and unions) or social issues (the National Rifle Association, pro- and anti-abortion groups) . The lobby uses nationwide campaign donations, often funnelled through local 'astroturf' (phony grassroots) organizations... to influence members of Congress in areas where there are few Jewish voters. Stephen Steinlight [former director of national affairs at the American Jewish Committee], in an essay for the Center for Immigration Studies, describes how the Israel lobby uses donations to influence elected officials: 'Unless and until the triumph of campaign finance reform is complete...the great material wealth of the Jewish community will continue to give it significant advantages. We will continue to court and be courted by key figures in Congress. That power is exerted within the political system from the local to national levels through soft money, and especially the provision of out-of-state funds to candidates sympathetic to Israel'. Steinlight adds: 'For perhaps another generation... the Jewish community is thus in a position to divide and conquer and enter into selective coalitions that support our agendas'." Distorting US Foreign Policy: The Israel Lobby & American Power, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 5/02

For Rudd to really be a zhengyou to the wretched of the earth, he'd need to be equally critical of China and the US (throw in Russia and a host of other international bovver boys here), with an understanding that both, in their own way, have essentially embraced the worldview of the Israeli right - what US author/activist Naomi Klein calls the Likud doctrine: "Common wisdom has it that after 9/11 a new era of geopolitics was ushered in, defined by what is usually called the Bush doctrine: pre-emptive wars, attacks on terrorist infrastructure (read: entire countries), an insistence that all the enemy understands is force. In fact, it would be more accurate to call this rigid worldview the Likud doctrine. What happened on September 11, 2001, is that the Likud doctrine, previously targeted against Palestinians, was picked up by the most powerful country on earth and applied on a global scale. Call it the Likudisation of the world: the real legacy of 9/11. On September 11 George Bush went looking for a political philosophy to guide him in his role as 'war president'. He found that philosophy in the Likud doctrine, handed to him ready-made by the ardent Likudniks ensconced in the White House. In the 3 years since [now 7], the Bush White House has applied this logic with chilling consistency to its global war on terror - complete with the pathologising of the 'Muslim mind'. It was the guiding philosophy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and may well extend to Iran and Syria. Bush has cast the US in the same role in which Israel casts itself, facing the same threat. In this narrative the US is fighting a never-ending battle for its survival against irrational forces that seek its total extermination."(Beware the Likud doctrine, Guardian, 10/9/04)

It is the Likud doctrine, which allows every manifestation of resistance by the oppressed to be labelled terrorism by their oppressors, that has provided the rhetoric for China's crackdown on the Tibetans: "Far from heeding international calls for dialogue with the Dalai Lama, China has accused Tibet's exiled god-king of colluding with Muslim terrorists to destabilise the country before the Olympic Games... The People's Daily said that the Dalai Lama had never abandoned violence after fleeing China in 1959 after a failed revolt against Beijing. 'The Dalai Lama is scheming to take the Beijing Olympics hostage to force the Chinese Government to make concessions to Tibetan independence'. It also accused Tibet's spiritual leader of planning attacks with the aid of violent Uighur separatist groups seeking an independent East Turkestan for their largely Muslim people in the northwestern Xinjiang region of China. It said: 'The Dalai clique has also strengthened collusion with East Turkestan terror organizations and planned terror activities in Tibet'. " (China accuses Dalai Lama of being a terrorist, The Times, 24/3/08)

This talk of collusion with China's equally colonized, oppressed (and conveniently) Muslim Uighur population to the north of Tibet in East Turkestan (Xinjiang), is hardly coincidental, the whole point being that, post 9/11, once discreet movements of national resistance to colonial oppression, can now be lumped together and smeared, Israeli fashion, as generic Islamist terrorists bent on an irrational course of Dalek-like extermination of all we (and supposedly 'the Middle East's only democracy') hold dear. Simply slap on the convenient and durable Made-in-Israel 'War on Terror' label and all is forgiven, whether in the occupied Palestinian territories, Tibet, East Turkestan, Afghanistan, Iraq or Chechnya.

In being "passionately pro-Israel;"* in describing the US as an "overwhelming force for good in the world;"** and in swallowing the Likud doctrine all the way to Afghanistan and Iraq, Rudd is actually doing his bit to bury the hopes and aspirations of millions of Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, Uighers and Tibetans.

* Rudd outlines foreign policy vision, AM, Radio National, http://www.abc.net.au/, 27/3/08
** Kevin Rudd on the ALP and Israel, The Religion Report, Radio National, 3/11/04

From Howardistas to Horowistas

"All dictatorships and would-be dictators strategically target key individuals. Job loss or career setbacks are the first kinds of pressure these people are likely to face...The National Socialist German Students' League was set up in 1926. It sought to get independent professors fired and to direct the universities' resources toward Nazi goals rather than toward pure research. By 1933, propaganda Minister Goebbels set in motion one of these purges. 'By the beginning of the academic year 1933-34, 313 full professors had been dismissed...By 1934, some 1600 out of 5000 university teachers had been forced out of their jobs...Very quickly, newly Nazified Education Mininstries made political criteria central not only for appointments but also for teaching and research'. On May 10, 1933, pro-Nazi students also orchestrated a series of book burnings - events designed to look 'spontaneous' but actually directed behind the scenes by Goebbels." The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot - A Citizen's Call to Action, Naomi Klein, 2007

A campaign to enlist university and high school students to spy on their teachers for evidence of alleged left-wing bias was launched last month by the Young Liberals. Endorsed by the federal Liberal Party and operating under the slogan 'Education Not Indoctrination', the Young Liberals claim that students holding what they call 'mainstream views' are not only being subjected to 'leftist propaganda' but even penalised for their 'mainstream views' by their teachers. The Baby Howardistas, therefore, have announced that it is their mission to collect examples of such 'bias' (or worse!) for a proposed Senate inquiry into same.

An idea of where this was all coming from came in a report (Young Libs campaign to out biased dons) in The Australian on 12/3/08: "The National Tertiary Education Union rejected the notion of any widespread systemic bias in Australian universities and said the Young Liberals' campaign had been borrowed from a similar movement in the US, led by conservative intellectual David Horowitz."

David Horowitz is a neocon agitator who started out as a leftist radical in the 60s but later morphed into a Reagan Republican. He specialises in pro-war campus advertising campaigns, and (like the rest of his neocon tribe) has used 9/11 and the Bush/Cheney 'war' on terror as a cover to advance a reactionary, authoritarian agenda through such front groups as the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Students for Academic Freedom and FrontPage Mag.com.

Horowitz has, for example, branded Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against giving Bush a blank check for his 'war' on terror, a "communist [who] actively collaborated with [America's enemies] in their war against America," and campaigned against "the so-called Peace Movement," claiming that "campus leftists hate America more than the terrorists."

More recently he has campaigned around the issue of 'academic freedom', asserting that students need protection from having their religious and political views questioned (or in his own words, "subjected to a 'hostile environment' ") and from discussion of anything he deems "controversial." In other words, under the banner of academic freedom, Horowitz would have students free of free speech.

Last year he organized an 'Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week' (October 22-26) aimed at what he called the two "Big lies of the political left: that George Bush created the war on terror and that Global Warming is a greater danger to Americans than the terrorist threat." Its themes were "the Oppression of Women in Islam and the threat posed by the Islamic crusade against the West." In addition to teach-ins, sit-ins and protests, pamphlets with titles such as 'The Islamic Mein Kampf', 'Why Israel is the Victim', 'Jimmy Carter's War Against the Jews', and 'What Every American Needs to Know About Jihad' were distributed on campuses across the US.

Horowitz's rants posted (3/08) on FrontPageMag.com reveal a Zionist ultra, red in tooth and claw: Palestinians are "genocidal/Jew-killers"; "Hamas has to be smashed, defeated, pulverized, driven out of existence"; the "western 'progressive' left' [are] the fifth column allies, abettors and fellow-travellers of Islamic jihad"; "Hamas has turned the entire population of Gaza into a suicide bomb."

A taste of the kind of 'evidence' we can expect to see submitted to the hoped-for Senate inquiry by our very own Howardistas turned Horowistas may be found in a FrontPageMag.com post on 23/10/06, hyperbolically called Hamas High. Its author, one Eric Danis, writes that: "I moved from Andover, Massachusetts to Israel over 5 years ago, so the day-to-day happenings in my hometown are largely off my radar screen. However, Andover High School physics teacher Ron Francis, a former teacher of mine, first caught my attention when I saw an article he wrote in February of 2006. The article was entitled 'Media Bias Against Hamas', and was written in an attempt to support the Palestinian terror group Hamas and to demonize Israel. Francis never once condemned Hamas' terror tactics or its anti-Semitic ideology, and he even discussed the 'silver lining' of Hamas' [electoral] victory. Francis challenged Israel's right to exist in the article by complaining that 'the question of the validity of a Jewish-privilege state is never raised'."

That Francis' tenure at Andover High was not terminated, despite Danis' letters of protest from Israel (mentioned in his 'essay'), is obviously a very sore point for the young Horowista. He petulantly concludes with a shake of the head: "It seems that most people in apathetic Andover do not care...I expect more than silence in the face of hatred from my hometown."

Poor Eric. He should count his blessings. How fortunate for him that, by virtue of the discriminatory and racist Israeli Law of Return, he is at one and the same time a) able to live out his Zionist fantasies in Israel/Palestine; b) as a dedicated Horowista, scorn the indigenous population of same, besieged and starving in the Gaza Ghetto, as perpetrators of genocide; c) smear his former teacher, clearly a man of conscience and courage, for exercising his First Amendment right to free speech, with a view to depriving him of his livelihood as a teacher; and d) retain the luxury of a "hometown" in the US to which he can repair as the whim takes him, quite unlike the Palestinian "Jew-killers" who can only travel if they first dynamite their prison walls and risk getting tortured in an Egyptian dungeon.

The Horowistas... Coming to a school near you?