Letter
TO THE EDITOR, “THE AUSTRALIAN”.
Congratulations to FM Mr. Downer and to The Australian ( Media, 31/8) for tackling head-on, this vexed question re possible propaganda hoaxes such as the “ambulance incident” in Lebanon,- to show-up Israel in a negative light.
With due respect to your ME correspondent Martin Churlow, he revisits the events of July 23, describing them vividly as a personal eyewitness account instead of as a raconteur from a third person. It makes good reading until you visit the detailed and pictorial analysis of the incident on the website (www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance)
Then we learn to look at the picture accompanying the article and lo and behold,- we see the tell-tale metal rim around the hole supposedly created smack-centre in the middle of the red cross on the roof of the ambulance by an Israeli missile no less., fired in the dead-quiet and darkness of night, - according to the driver’s testimony.
By the driver’s admission he heard nothing, saw nothing until he opened the back door and then there was a flash, etc. If it was indeed true, I am awed by the pinpoint accuracy from the supposed unmanned drone, with absolutely no collateral damage except some rusty holes on the roof and torn inside linings of the ambulance’s ceiling! As for the rust,- “the picture must have been taken much later”? When, how and by whom? They were published on certain dates straight after the incident in various media and are there for all to check.
ABC Radio National’s "Background Briefing program of 20th August (“A Narrative for a Long War” . http://abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing) quoted one British journalist, Kylie Morris of Ch.4 saying how in Lebanon “journalists unwittingly become part of the story”. She said:” certainly I think we’re being caught in a game here,- there’s certainly no doubt about that”.
My interpretation, to be kind to the eyewitnesses, is that unbeknown to them this ambulance (at first there were supposed to have been 2 destroyed, but only one on show) had its roof booby-trapped in its air-vent in the middle, to blow-up on opening the back-door. It was a mild explosion to cause shock and minor injuries only! The driver’s face and initial bandages gave way to completely healed features within a few days on his pictures afterwards (the ear even beforehand, while the loss of a foot,- who knows when and where that injury was caused! )
But what a propaganda scoop for Hezbollah and what a PR disaster for the “nasty Israelis” who contritely apologised before even verifying the facts!
This is what the journalists want to believe, Mr. Chulov. Mr Alexander Downer and his staff saw the much more convincing proof on the internet’s website. No wonder we see “journalism’s shaky future” as Mark Day notes on the same page of The Australian. .
MM.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Friday, August 25, 2006
Useful idiots: Islam's best soldiers.
Useful Idiots: Islam’s Best Soldiers
Amil Imani
Islam enjoys a large and influential ally among the non-Muslims: A new generation of “Useful Idiots,” that Lenin identified as those who lived in liberal democracies and furthered the work of communism. This new generation of Useful Idiots also lives in liberal democracies but serves the cause of Islamofascism—another virulent form of totalitarian ideology.
Useful Idiots are naïve, foolish, ignorant of facts, unrealistically idealistic, dreamers, willfully in denial or deceptive. They hail from the ranks of the chronically unhappy, the anarchists, the aspiring revolutionaries, the neurotics who are at war with life, the disaffected alienated from government, corporations, and just about any and all institutions of society. The Useful Idiot can be a billionaire, a movie star, an academe of renown, a politician, or from any other segment of the population.
Arguably, the most dangerous Useful Idiot is the “Politically Correct.” He is the master practitioner of euphemism, hedging, doubletalk, and outright deception.
The Useful Idiot derives satisfaction from being anti-establishment. He finds perverse gratification in aiding the forces that aim to dismantle an existing order, whatever it may be: an order he neither approves of nor he feels he belongs to.
The Useful Idiot is conflicted and dishonest. He fails to look inside himself and discover the causes of his own problems and unhappiness while he readily enlists himself in causes that validate his distorted perception.
Understandably, it is easier to blame others and the outside world than to examine oneself with an eye to self-discovery and self-improvement. Furthermore, criticizing and complaining—liberal practices of the Useful Idiot—require little talent and energy. The Useful Idiot is a great armchair philosopher and “Monday Morning Quarterback.”
The Useful Idiot is not the same as a person who honestly has a different point of view. A society without honest and open differences of views is a dead society. Critical, different and fresh ideas are the life blood of a living society—the very anathema of autocracies where the official position is sacrosanct.
Even the “normal” spends a great deal more energy aiming to fix things out there than working to overcome his own flaws and shortcomings, or contribute positively to the larger society. People don’t like to take stock of what they are doing or not doing that is responsible for the conditions they disapprove.
The Useful Idiot, among other things, is a master practitioner of scapegoating. He assigns blame to others while absolving himself of responsibility, has a long handy list of candidates for blaming anything and everything, and by living a distorted life, he contributes to the ills of society.
The Useful Idiot may even engage in willful misinformation and deception when it suits him. Terms such as “Political Islam,” or “Radical Islam,” for instance, are contributions of the Useful Idiot. These terms do not even exist in the native parlance of Islam, simply because they are redundant. Islam, by its very nature and according to its charter—the Quran—is a radical political movement. It is the Useful Idiot who sanitizes Islam and misguides the populace by saying that the “real Islam” constitutes the main body of the religion; and, that this main body is non-political and moderate.
Regrettably, a large segment of the population goes along with these nonsensical euphemisms depicting Islam because it prefers to believe them. It is less threatening to believe that only a hijacked small segment of Islam is radical or politically driven and that the main body of Islam is indeed moderate and non-political.
But Islam is political to the core. In Islam the mosque and state are one and the same—the mosque is the state. This arrangement goes back to the days of Muhammad himself. Islam is also radical to the extreme. Even the “moderate” Islam is radical in its beliefs as well as its deeds. Muslims believe that all non-Muslims, bar none, are hellfire bound and well-deserve being maltreated to the utmost.
No radical barbaric act of depravity is out of bounds for Muslims in dealing with others. They destroy precious statues of Buddha, level sacred monuments of other religions, and bulldoze the cemeteries of non-Muslims—a few examples of their utter extreme contempt toward others.
Muslims are radical even in their intrafaith dealings. Various sects and sub-sects pronounce other sects and sub-sects as heretics worthy of death; women are treated as chattel, deprived of many rights; hands are chopped for stealing even a loaf of bread; sexual violation is punished by stoning, and much much more. These are standard day-to-day ways of the mainstream “moderate” Muslims living under the stone-age laws of Shariah.
The “moderate” Islam has been outright genocidal from inception. Their own historians record that Ali, the first imam of the Shiite and the son-in-law of Muhammad, with the help of another man beheaded 700 Jewish men in the presence of the prophet himself. The prophet of Allah and his disciples took the murdered men’s women and children in slavery. Muslims have been, and continue to be, the most vicious and shameless practitioner of slavery. Slave trade, even today, is a thriving business in Islamic lands where wealthy, perverted sheikhs purchase children of the poor from traffickers for their sadistic gratification.
It is a well-established fact that a Jew’s word is his bond. The exact opposite is the case with Muslims. Muslims are taught deception and lying in the Quran itself—something that Muhammad practiced during his life whenever he found it expedient. Successive Islamic rulers and leaders have done the same. Khomeini, the founder of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, for instance, rallied the people under the banner of democracy. All along his support for democracy was not a commitment of an honest man, but a ruse of a true Muslim. As soon as he gathered the reign of power, Khomeini went after the Useful Idiots of his time with vengeance. These best children of Iran, having been thoroughly deceived and used by the crafty phony populist-religionist, had to flee the country to avoid the fate of tens of thousands who were imprisoned or executed by the double-crossing imam.
Almost three decades after the tragic Islamic Revolution of 1979, the suffocating rule of Islam casts its death-bearing pal over Iranians. A proud people with enviable heritage is being systematically purged of its sense of identity and forced to think and behave like the barbaric and intolerant Muslims. Iranians who had always treated women with equality, for instance, have seen them reduced by the stone-age clergy to sub-human status of Islamic teaching. Any attempt by the women of Iran to counter the misogynist rule of Muhammad’s mullahs is mercilessly suppressed. Women are beaten, imprisoned, raped and killed just as men are slaughtered without due process or mercy.
The lesson is clear. Beware of the Useful Idiots who live in liberal democracies. Knowingly or unknowingly, they serve as the greatest volunteer and effective soldiers of Islam. They pave the way for the advancement of Islam and they will assuredly be among the very first victims of Islam as soon as it assumes power.
Amil Imani
Islam enjoys a large and influential ally among the non-Muslims: A new generation of “Useful Idiots,” that Lenin identified as those who lived in liberal democracies and furthered the work of communism. This new generation of Useful Idiots also lives in liberal democracies but serves the cause of Islamofascism—another virulent form of totalitarian ideology.
Useful Idiots are naïve, foolish, ignorant of facts, unrealistically idealistic, dreamers, willfully in denial or deceptive. They hail from the ranks of the chronically unhappy, the anarchists, the aspiring revolutionaries, the neurotics who are at war with life, the disaffected alienated from government, corporations, and just about any and all institutions of society. The Useful Idiot can be a billionaire, a movie star, an academe of renown, a politician, or from any other segment of the population.
Arguably, the most dangerous Useful Idiot is the “Politically Correct.” He is the master practitioner of euphemism, hedging, doubletalk, and outright deception.
The Useful Idiot derives satisfaction from being anti-establishment. He finds perverse gratification in aiding the forces that aim to dismantle an existing order, whatever it may be: an order he neither approves of nor he feels he belongs to.
The Useful Idiot is conflicted and dishonest. He fails to look inside himself and discover the causes of his own problems and unhappiness while he readily enlists himself in causes that validate his distorted perception.
Understandably, it is easier to blame others and the outside world than to examine oneself with an eye to self-discovery and self-improvement. Furthermore, criticizing and complaining—liberal practices of the Useful Idiot—require little talent and energy. The Useful Idiot is a great armchair philosopher and “Monday Morning Quarterback.”
The Useful Idiot is not the same as a person who honestly has a different point of view. A society without honest and open differences of views is a dead society. Critical, different and fresh ideas are the life blood of a living society—the very anathema of autocracies where the official position is sacrosanct.
Even the “normal” spends a great deal more energy aiming to fix things out there than working to overcome his own flaws and shortcomings, or contribute positively to the larger society. People don’t like to take stock of what they are doing or not doing that is responsible for the conditions they disapprove.
The Useful Idiot, among other things, is a master practitioner of scapegoating. He assigns blame to others while absolving himself of responsibility, has a long handy list of candidates for blaming anything and everything, and by living a distorted life, he contributes to the ills of society.
The Useful Idiot may even engage in willful misinformation and deception when it suits him. Terms such as “Political Islam,” or “Radical Islam,” for instance, are contributions of the Useful Idiot. These terms do not even exist in the native parlance of Islam, simply because they are redundant. Islam, by its very nature and according to its charter—the Quran—is a radical political movement. It is the Useful Idiot who sanitizes Islam and misguides the populace by saying that the “real Islam” constitutes the main body of the religion; and, that this main body is non-political and moderate.
Regrettably, a large segment of the population goes along with these nonsensical euphemisms depicting Islam because it prefers to believe them. It is less threatening to believe that only a hijacked small segment of Islam is radical or politically driven and that the main body of Islam is indeed moderate and non-political.
But Islam is political to the core. In Islam the mosque and state are one and the same—the mosque is the state. This arrangement goes back to the days of Muhammad himself. Islam is also radical to the extreme. Even the “moderate” Islam is radical in its beliefs as well as its deeds. Muslims believe that all non-Muslims, bar none, are hellfire bound and well-deserve being maltreated to the utmost.
No radical barbaric act of depravity is out of bounds for Muslims in dealing with others. They destroy precious statues of Buddha, level sacred monuments of other religions, and bulldoze the cemeteries of non-Muslims—a few examples of their utter extreme contempt toward others.
Muslims are radical even in their intrafaith dealings. Various sects and sub-sects pronounce other sects and sub-sects as heretics worthy of death; women are treated as chattel, deprived of many rights; hands are chopped for stealing even a loaf of bread; sexual violation is punished by stoning, and much much more. These are standard day-to-day ways of the mainstream “moderate” Muslims living under the stone-age laws of Shariah.
The “moderate” Islam has been outright genocidal from inception. Their own historians record that Ali, the first imam of the Shiite and the son-in-law of Muhammad, with the help of another man beheaded 700 Jewish men in the presence of the prophet himself. The prophet of Allah and his disciples took the murdered men’s women and children in slavery. Muslims have been, and continue to be, the most vicious and shameless practitioner of slavery. Slave trade, even today, is a thriving business in Islamic lands where wealthy, perverted sheikhs purchase children of the poor from traffickers for their sadistic gratification.
It is a well-established fact that a Jew’s word is his bond. The exact opposite is the case with Muslims. Muslims are taught deception and lying in the Quran itself—something that Muhammad practiced during his life whenever he found it expedient. Successive Islamic rulers and leaders have done the same. Khomeini, the founder of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, for instance, rallied the people under the banner of democracy. All along his support for democracy was not a commitment of an honest man, but a ruse of a true Muslim. As soon as he gathered the reign of power, Khomeini went after the Useful Idiots of his time with vengeance. These best children of Iran, having been thoroughly deceived and used by the crafty phony populist-religionist, had to flee the country to avoid the fate of tens of thousands who were imprisoned or executed by the double-crossing imam.
Almost three decades after the tragic Islamic Revolution of 1979, the suffocating rule of Islam casts its death-bearing pal over Iranians. A proud people with enviable heritage is being systematically purged of its sense of identity and forced to think and behave like the barbaric and intolerant Muslims. Iranians who had always treated women with equality, for instance, have seen them reduced by the stone-age clergy to sub-human status of Islamic teaching. Any attempt by the women of Iran to counter the misogynist rule of Muhammad’s mullahs is mercilessly suppressed. Women are beaten, imprisoned, raped and killed just as men are slaughtered without due process or mercy.
The lesson is clear. Beware of the Useful Idiots who live in liberal democracies. Knowingly or unknowingly, they serve as the greatest volunteer and effective soldiers of Islam. They pave the way for the advancement of Islam and they will assuredly be among the very first victims of Islam as soon as it assumes power.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Muslim sisters need feminists' help. (Pamela Bone). "The Australian".
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20240784-7583,00.html
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Pamela Bone: Muslim sisters need our help
If she is dubbed right-wing for expressing solidarity with women in Islamic countries, the author doesn't mind wearing the label
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
25aug06
IN Tehran in June, several thousand people held a peaceful demonstration calling for legal changes that would give a woman's testimony in court equal value to a man's. The demonstrators, most of them women, were attacked with tear gas and beaten with batons by men and women from Iran's State Security Forces, according to Amnesty International.
Iranian women may not travel without their husband's permission but they are allowed to wield a truncheon against other women.
Do you think women in Western countries marched in solidarity with the Iranian women demonstrators? Of course not. Do you think there are posters and graffiti at universities condemning the Iranian President? Of course not. You know, without needing to go there, that any graffiti at universities will be condemning George W. Bush, not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (I concede Bush is easier to spell.)
You know, before you get there, that at the Melbourne Writers Festival starting this weekend the principal hate figures are going to be Bush and John Howard. You know there will be many sympathetic references to David Hicks but probably none to Ashraf Kolhari, an Iranian mother of four who has been in jail for five years for allegedly having sex outside marriage and, until last week, who was under sentence of death by stoning.
Thank goddess, as they used to say: a few Western feminists have begun to wonder why women who once marched for women's rights are marching alongside people who would take away even the most basic of those rights.
The latest is Sarah Baxter, a former Greenham Common protester, who in Britain's The Sunday Times had this to say about a recent demonstration in London calling for a ceasefire in Lebanon: "Women pushing their children in buggies bearing the familiar symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marched alongside banners proclaiming 'We are all Hezbollah now', and Muslim extremists chanting, 'Oh Jew, the army of Mohammed will return'.
"I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder to shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups whose views on women make Western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic."
Another old feminist, Phyllis Chesler (she is my age, so I may call her old), is the author of The Death of Feminism, published last year. In her book, Chesler, who lived in Afghanistan for a time before she managed to flee the country and her Afghan husband, wrote: "I fear that the 'peace and love' crowd in the West refuses to understand how Islamism endangers our values and our lives, beginning with our commitment to women's rights and human rights."
Feminism is not quite dead, however. The execution of Kolhari was stopped after a petition gathered thousands of signatures from human rights activists in Iran and across the world, including more than 5000 from the Feminist Majority Foundation in the US.
Yet in Canada it took an Iranian exile, Homa Arjomand, to lead the fight to stop sharia courts being established there; she did so with almost zero support from Anglo-Canadian feminists and academics. Named Canadian Humanist of the Year, she's now running a campaign to stop honour killings. In Canada? "In Canada we are not witnessing honour killing much simply because in Canada women and young girls who are not submissive are taken to their home countries such as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Nigeria, and there they are being murdered by the male member of the family or a hit man," Arjomand said in a speech earlier this year. "And the (Canadian) state is not obligated to protect the individual citizens who were forced to leave Canada by the head of the family."
The question is why so many Western feminists do not speak out about the cruelty that blights the lives of millions of women in Islamic countries and would do the same to women everywhere else should the Islamists succeed in their stated aim of creating a worldwide caliphate. "On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say," Baxter writes. Says Chesler: "Women's studies programs should have been the first to sound the alarm. They did not."
The reason, as writer Fay Weldon has said, is that these days racism is a much worse sin than sexism: a consequence, perhaps, of the success of the women's movement in the West. Women who would speak out don't because of a (justified) fear that they will be branded racists. Chesler has been ostracised by many of her old friends in the women's movement. It has been said she has become paranoid or gone mad or, worse, turned right-wing.
Well, maybe poor Sarah has turned right-wing, too. And Fay, and Homa, and me. We've all become paranoid and right-wing.
To say Bush is not the wise statesman the world needs is a large understatement. Of course women are entitled to oppose US foreign policy or to consider Israel's response to Hezbollah attacks disproportionate. Yes, the prolonged detention of Hicks without trial goes against standards of democracy. Yes, we must be vigilant, in fighting the war on terrorism, that we do not lose sight of the values we are supposedly protecting. Of course we must criticise our own.
But when we criticise only our own, when we talk only about the present and past crimes of Western societies, doesn't this give com-
fort and encouragement to the suicide bombers?
Neither US foreign policy nor colonialism or imperialism is to blame for a legal system that stipulates women guilty of adultery are to be buried up to their chests and stoned to death, as in Iran. It is their culture, or at least the culture as defined by the old men running the place, that is to blame. Hate Bush if you want, but please understand that your enemy's enemies are not necessarily your friends.
It seems inconceivable that we could lose this war against terrorism. But if we do, the consequences will be awful. And they will be worse for women, for the women in the generations that will follow us. We have to fight not against Muslims but against Islamic extremism. Don't expect left-wing men to help. They're full of "I'm not scared" bravado. Don't expect all Muslim women to want to be in the fight. There have always been women who oppose rights for women. (Remember the petition, from women, against Australian women getting the vote?) But the least we can do is let the brave Muslim women who are pushing for reforms know they have our support when they want it.
Most of us 1970s feminists are grandmothers now. Lifelong socialist and humanist that I am, if fighting to prevent the possibility that my granddaughters - our granddaughters - will one day be forced to wear a burka makes me right-wing, then right-wing is the label I'll have to wear.
Pamela Bone is author of Up We Grew (Melbourne University Publishing, 2005) and is writing a book on dealing with cancer.
privacy terms © The Australian
Mu
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pamela Bone: Muslim sisters need our help
If she is dubbed right-wing for expressing solidarity with women in Islamic countries, the author doesn't mind wearing the label
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
25aug06
IN Tehran in June, several thousand people held a peaceful demonstration calling for legal changes that would give a woman's testimony in court equal value to a man's. The demonstrators, most of them women, were attacked with tear gas and beaten with batons by men and women from Iran's State Security Forces, according to Amnesty International.
Iranian women may not travel without their husband's permission but they are allowed to wield a truncheon against other women.
Do you think women in Western countries marched in solidarity with the Iranian women demonstrators? Of course not. Do you think there are posters and graffiti at universities condemning the Iranian President? Of course not. You know, without needing to go there, that any graffiti at universities will be condemning George W. Bush, not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (I concede Bush is easier to spell.)
You know, before you get there, that at the Melbourne Writers Festival starting this weekend the principal hate figures are going to be Bush and John Howard. You know there will be many sympathetic references to David Hicks but probably none to Ashraf Kolhari, an Iranian mother of four who has been in jail for five years for allegedly having sex outside marriage and, until last week, who was under sentence of death by stoning.
Thank goddess, as they used to say: a few Western feminists have begun to wonder why women who once marched for women's rights are marching alongside people who would take away even the most basic of those rights.
The latest is Sarah Baxter, a former Greenham Common protester, who in Britain's The Sunday Times had this to say about a recent demonstration in London calling for a ceasefire in Lebanon: "Women pushing their children in buggies bearing the familiar symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marched alongside banners proclaiming 'We are all Hezbollah now', and Muslim extremists chanting, 'Oh Jew, the army of Mohammed will return'.
"I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder to shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups whose views on women make Western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic."
Another old feminist, Phyllis Chesler (she is my age, so I may call her old), is the author of The Death of Feminism, published last year. In her book, Chesler, who lived in Afghanistan for a time before she managed to flee the country and her Afghan husband, wrote: "I fear that the 'peace and love' crowd in the West refuses to understand how Islamism endangers our values and our lives, beginning with our commitment to women's rights and human rights."
Feminism is not quite dead, however. The execution of Kolhari was stopped after a petition gathered thousands of signatures from human rights activists in Iran and across the world, including more than 5000 from the Feminist Majority Foundation in the US.
Yet in Canada it took an Iranian exile, Homa Arjomand, to lead the fight to stop sharia courts being established there; she did so with almost zero support from Anglo-Canadian feminists and academics. Named Canadian Humanist of the Year, she's now running a campaign to stop honour killings. In Canada? "In Canada we are not witnessing honour killing much simply because in Canada women and young girls who are not submissive are taken to their home countries such as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Nigeria, and there they are being murdered by the male member of the family or a hit man," Arjomand said in a speech earlier this year. "And the (Canadian) state is not obligated to protect the individual citizens who were forced to leave Canada by the head of the family."
The question is why so many Western feminists do not speak out about the cruelty that blights the lives of millions of women in Islamic countries and would do the same to women everywhere else should the Islamists succeed in their stated aim of creating a worldwide caliphate. "On the defining issue of our times, the rise of Islamic extremism, what is left of the sisterhood has almost nothing to say," Baxter writes. Says Chesler: "Women's studies programs should have been the first to sound the alarm. They did not."
The reason, as writer Fay Weldon has said, is that these days racism is a much worse sin than sexism: a consequence, perhaps, of the success of the women's movement in the West. Women who would speak out don't because of a (justified) fear that they will be branded racists. Chesler has been ostracised by many of her old friends in the women's movement. It has been said she has become paranoid or gone mad or, worse, turned right-wing.
Well, maybe poor Sarah has turned right-wing, too. And Fay, and Homa, and me. We've all become paranoid and right-wing.
To say Bush is not the wise statesman the world needs is a large understatement. Of course women are entitled to oppose US foreign policy or to consider Israel's response to Hezbollah attacks disproportionate. Yes, the prolonged detention of Hicks without trial goes against standards of democracy. Yes, we must be vigilant, in fighting the war on terrorism, that we do not lose sight of the values we are supposedly protecting. Of course we must criticise our own.
But when we criticise only our own, when we talk only about the present and past crimes of Western societies, doesn't this give com-
fort and encouragement to the suicide bombers?
Neither US foreign policy nor colonialism or imperialism is to blame for a legal system that stipulates women guilty of adultery are to be buried up to their chests and stoned to death, as in Iran. It is their culture, or at least the culture as defined by the old men running the place, that is to blame. Hate Bush if you want, but please understand that your enemy's enemies are not necessarily your friends.
It seems inconceivable that we could lose this war against terrorism. But if we do, the consequences will be awful. And they will be worse for women, for the women in the generations that will follow us. We have to fight not against Muslims but against Islamic extremism. Don't expect left-wing men to help. They're full of "I'm not scared" bravado. Don't expect all Muslim women to want to be in the fight. There have always been women who oppose rights for women. (Remember the petition, from women, against Australian women getting the vote?) But the least we can do is let the brave Muslim women who are pushing for reforms know they have our support when they want it.
Most of us 1970s feminists are grandmothers now. Lifelong socialist and humanist that I am, if fighting to prevent the possibility that my granddaughters - our granddaughters - will one day be forced to wear a burka makes me right-wing, then right-wing is the label I'll have to wear.
Pamela Bone is author of Up We Grew (Melbourne University Publishing, 2005) and is writing a book on dealing with cancer.
privacy terms © The Australian
Mu
Support for Israel no local liability. EDITORIAL. "The Australian".
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20242721-7583,00.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Print this page
Editorial: Support for Israel no local liability
25aug06
Sixty-eight years after Munich, appeasers are again seeking concord with anti-Semitic fascists who would rule the world
FOR those who love peace, appeasement can be an appealing concept: give the bad guys what they want, and they'll leave you alone. The only trouble is, as history repeatedly demonstrates, whatever peace it purchases is impermanent at best. Such was the case when Europe offered up Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in 1938, hoping to quell Hitler's ambitions. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. Yet individuals like former Australian ambassador to Israel Ross Burns on Wednesday night's 7:30 Report still fall for appeasement's deadly siren song. Following up a speech he gave the previous night in which he called the Australian Government a "stalking horse" for Israel, Mr Burns claimed our close relations with Jerusalem were hurting Australia's standing with neighbouring countries, specifically Indonesia. Instead, suggested Mr Burns, Australia should revisit its relations with liberal-democratic Israel to win Jakarta's respect. This is nonsense. Although he once wrote a well-received travel book about Syria, Mr Burns's undistinguished diplomatic career suggests the former ambassador is not yet ready to sit at the grown-ups' table. With one posting to Canberra's embassy in Israel under his belt and no experience in Southeast Asia the ego-tripping Mr Burns is hardly in a position to judge how neighbouring countries feel about Australia's relations with Israel. The fact is Australia's support for Israel hardly rates as a concern for Indonesia, Malaysia, or any of our other neighbours with whom John Howard has built strong relations over the past decade. Topics such as Papuan asylum-seekers, terrorism, drug trafficking and Asian security and development drive our relationship with Indonesia; Israel has never been a feature of bilateral talks between us. And in any case one does not abandon principles for convenience. Indonesia is a democracy with as much to lose from Islamic fundamentalism as Australia or Israel. Much the same can be said for Malaysia as well. Nor would abandoning Israel help the cause of peace. For ultimately Mr Burns is suggesting Australia turn its back on a Kadima government that was created and elected on the promise of land for peace and the handing back of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. Israel's hawks, including Ariel Sharon, had all accepted the need for peace with the Palestinians. It is Israel's foes who regularly derail the prospect of peace, most recently with the separate kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah and Hamas that sparked the most recent conflict.
Mr Burns's ill-informed comments fall against the broader background of a Middle East where, for the moment at least, Iran and its Hezbollah proxies are holding increasing sway in the region and look ever closer to acquiring nuclear arms to cement this position. The UN has proved toothless in its dealings with Tehran, which has just announced that it is happy to talk with the Security Council but that its nuclear program is not up for negotiation. What would be discussed at any such talks is then irrelevant, especially given the Iranian regime's nature which is totalitarian and fascistic at home and expansionist and anti-Semitic abroad. Iran has also issued an unprecedented refusal of UN demands to allow inspectors to visit its uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz. Even if Iran is five years or more away from fabricating a nuclear weapon, enriched uranium could easily be fashioned into a so-called dirty bomb. Although it would be a complicated strike involving relatively long distances and multiple targets, Israel would be well-placed to take out Iran's burgeoning nuclear capability - as it did to Iraq when it bombed Saddam Hussein's Osirak reactor in 1981. And given Arab governments' refusal to weigh in against Israel in its recent fight with Hezbollah, such a move could likely be accomplished without unacceptable military or diplomatic backlash. Were the Israelis to demur, the job of taking out Iran's nuclear facilities would fall to the US, where George W. Bush is thought to be eyeing such a move before the end of his presidency.
What is most remarkable in all this is the way anti-Semitism has re-emerged as a driving force in geopolitics. Like Adolf Hitler before them, radical Islamists have resurrected ancient suspicions and hatreds of Judaism as a way to distract the world from their own fascist ends. Just as many Europeans, Americans and others were reluctant to see the rise of Nazi Germany as a personal threat in the 1930s, today the postmodern Left has welcomed the rise of Hezbollah, which has convinced them that it is the Jews - in the form of Israel - who are the real problem and obstacle to peace. This is ironic given that Hezbollah is an organisation which, given half a chance, would use brute force to do away with every liberty and freedom valued by those same progressives who march in world capitals bearing signs declaring their support for the group. Just as it was the Nazis who wanted to take over Europe and beyond, today it is fascists in the form of the Iranians and their Hezbollah proxies who want to win sway over the Middle East and beyond. The manner in which Hezbollah infiltrated Lebanon, and the way unassimilated and radicalised Muslims sympathetic to the so-called Party of God are becoming ever more separatist in Europe, suggests ambitions beyond the Middle East. Yet many Westerners still see Tehran's hoped-for nuclear capability as a good thing. If Israel can have a nuclear weapon, they say, why not Iran - despite Mr Ahmadinejad's stated intentions. Iran's President has said he not only wants to wipe Israel off the map but called for an ingathering of Jews to make his hoped-for holocaust all the more successful, suggesting that being anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic are not as mutually exclusive as Israel's critics might claim. Compare this to the 1930s when elite wisdom in Europe held that having been hard done by at Versailles, Germany should be allowed to re-arm - despite Hitler's stated feelings about the Jews and easily discerned desire for global conquest. Even old and discredited Nazi propaganda, which held that Jews were a secret and malign influence controlling banking and politics, has been resurrected (although more subtly) by those who claim that Israeli lobby groups have too much power to influence policy and stifle debate.
The lesson of history may not be, in the short to medium term, a happy one. But human nature has not changed in the past seven decades. Just as would-be fascists who with crazy agendas will always be with us, so to will the voices of appeasement be always at the ready to offer an easy way out, trading a few more years of peace and ease to put off an increasingly awful inevitable. Winston Churchill described an appeaser as "one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last". Those who believe offering up Israel to the likes of Hezbollah will buy peace are only fooling themselves and should consider what they are next willing to lose.
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Editorial: Support for Israel no local liability
25aug06
Sixty-eight years after Munich, appeasers are again seeking concord with anti-Semitic fascists who would rule the world
FOR those who love peace, appeasement can be an appealing concept: give the bad guys what they want, and they'll leave you alone. The only trouble is, as history repeatedly demonstrates, whatever peace it purchases is impermanent at best. Such was the case when Europe offered up Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in 1938, hoping to quell Hitler's ambitions. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. Yet individuals like former Australian ambassador to Israel Ross Burns on Wednesday night's 7:30 Report still fall for appeasement's deadly siren song. Following up a speech he gave the previous night in which he called the Australian Government a "stalking horse" for Israel, Mr Burns claimed our close relations with Jerusalem were hurting Australia's standing with neighbouring countries, specifically Indonesia. Instead, suggested Mr Burns, Australia should revisit its relations with liberal-democratic Israel to win Jakarta's respect. This is nonsense. Although he once wrote a well-received travel book about Syria, Mr Burns's undistinguished diplomatic career suggests the former ambassador is not yet ready to sit at the grown-ups' table. With one posting to Canberra's embassy in Israel under his belt and no experience in Southeast Asia the ego-tripping Mr Burns is hardly in a position to judge how neighbouring countries feel about Australia's relations with Israel. The fact is Australia's support for Israel hardly rates as a concern for Indonesia, Malaysia, or any of our other neighbours with whom John Howard has built strong relations over the past decade. Topics such as Papuan asylum-seekers, terrorism, drug trafficking and Asian security and development drive our relationship with Indonesia; Israel has never been a feature of bilateral talks between us. And in any case one does not abandon principles for convenience. Indonesia is a democracy with as much to lose from Islamic fundamentalism as Australia or Israel. Much the same can be said for Malaysia as well. Nor would abandoning Israel help the cause of peace. For ultimately Mr Burns is suggesting Australia turn its back on a Kadima government that was created and elected on the promise of land for peace and the handing back of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. Israel's hawks, including Ariel Sharon, had all accepted the need for peace with the Palestinians. It is Israel's foes who regularly derail the prospect of peace, most recently with the separate kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah and Hamas that sparked the most recent conflict.
Mr Burns's ill-informed comments fall against the broader background of a Middle East where, for the moment at least, Iran and its Hezbollah proxies are holding increasing sway in the region and look ever closer to acquiring nuclear arms to cement this position. The UN has proved toothless in its dealings with Tehran, which has just announced that it is happy to talk with the Security Council but that its nuclear program is not up for negotiation. What would be discussed at any such talks is then irrelevant, especially given the Iranian regime's nature which is totalitarian and fascistic at home and expansionist and anti-Semitic abroad. Iran has also issued an unprecedented refusal of UN demands to allow inspectors to visit its uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz. Even if Iran is five years or more away from fabricating a nuclear weapon, enriched uranium could easily be fashioned into a so-called dirty bomb. Although it would be a complicated strike involving relatively long distances and multiple targets, Israel would be well-placed to take out Iran's burgeoning nuclear capability - as it did to Iraq when it bombed Saddam Hussein's Osirak reactor in 1981. And given Arab governments' refusal to weigh in against Israel in its recent fight with Hezbollah, such a move could likely be accomplished without unacceptable military or diplomatic backlash. Were the Israelis to demur, the job of taking out Iran's nuclear facilities would fall to the US, where George W. Bush is thought to be eyeing such a move before the end of his presidency.
What is most remarkable in all this is the way anti-Semitism has re-emerged as a driving force in geopolitics. Like Adolf Hitler before them, radical Islamists have resurrected ancient suspicions and hatreds of Judaism as a way to distract the world from their own fascist ends. Just as many Europeans, Americans and others were reluctant to see the rise of Nazi Germany as a personal threat in the 1930s, today the postmodern Left has welcomed the rise of Hezbollah, which has convinced them that it is the Jews - in the form of Israel - who are the real problem and obstacle to peace. This is ironic given that Hezbollah is an organisation which, given half a chance, would use brute force to do away with every liberty and freedom valued by those same progressives who march in world capitals bearing signs declaring their support for the group. Just as it was the Nazis who wanted to take over Europe and beyond, today it is fascists in the form of the Iranians and their Hezbollah proxies who want to win sway over the Middle East and beyond. The manner in which Hezbollah infiltrated Lebanon, and the way unassimilated and radicalised Muslims sympathetic to the so-called Party of God are becoming ever more separatist in Europe, suggests ambitions beyond the Middle East. Yet many Westerners still see Tehran's hoped-for nuclear capability as a good thing. If Israel can have a nuclear weapon, they say, why not Iran - despite Mr Ahmadinejad's stated intentions. Iran's President has said he not only wants to wipe Israel off the map but called for an ingathering of Jews to make his hoped-for holocaust all the more successful, suggesting that being anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic are not as mutually exclusive as Israel's critics might claim. Compare this to the 1930s when elite wisdom in Europe held that having been hard done by at Versailles, Germany should be allowed to re-arm - despite Hitler's stated feelings about the Jews and easily discerned desire for global conquest. Even old and discredited Nazi propaganda, which held that Jews were a secret and malign influence controlling banking and politics, has been resurrected (although more subtly) by those who claim that Israeli lobby groups have too much power to influence policy and stifle debate.
The lesson of history may not be, in the short to medium term, a happy one. But human nature has not changed in the past seven decades. Just as would-be fascists who with crazy agendas will always be with us, so to will the voices of appeasement be always at the ready to offer an easy way out, trading a few more years of peace and ease to put off an increasingly awful inevitable. Winston Churchill described an appeaser as "one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last". Those who believe offering up Israel to the likes of Hezbollah will buy peace are only fooling themselves and should consider what they are next willing to lose.
privacy terms © The Australian
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Women overlooked in the stem-cell research debate in Australia.
For years I have been crying about the fact that women are being overlooked in the stem-cell and cloning debate. Finally, someone is pointing this out in the pages of THE AUSTRALIAN, below, because there is a push for amending the Australian legislation to allow research into embryonic cloning.
Somehow, the debate has cocentrated over the years on the moral and ethical issues of the actual procedures involved, once an ovum has been fertilised,- either by a sperm or by nuclear transfer from an adult cell.
The fate of the produced embryo in the test-tube, is one thing,- but from where is the initial ovum supposed to come? How is it going to be extracted, from whom and how many will be needed by whom? No one mentions this in their discussions.
Ova extractions from females is like any organ removed for transplant. There are safeguards and laws in place for the procedures to remove organs from live or dead patients. Removing female ova should be protected in the same way. Katrina George argues that the hazards involved should be taken into account in the biotech debate.
I agree with her arguments below entirely!
MM
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Katrina George: Women overlooked in biotech debate.
Researchers also need ova and there are hazards involved
http://theaustralian.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,20152285%255E7583,00.html
17aug06
THE debate about stem cells and cloning is coming to a head, with Prime Minister John Howard saying he will allow a conscience vote should legislation be introduced to allow the technology.We've heard a lot about promised cures for everything from spinal cord injury to Alzheimer's. We've been alerted to a brain drain of scientists unless parliament gives the nod to the technology. Premiers Peter Beattie and Steve Bracks warn that Australia will go socially and economically backwards unless we jump on the biotechnology bandwagon.
Amid all the hype, there has been silence about the interests of one stakeholder: women. Cloning embryos for their stem cells depends on a continuous - and large - supply of ova. This requires high doses of ovulation-stimulating drugs, with side effects such as hot flushes, bloating, moodiness, headaches, weight gain and tiredness.
There is increasing evidence that the super-ovulation process is associated with more serious health risks. Up to 10 per cent of egg donors experience ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome, which can lead to hospitalisation, renal failure, future infertility and even death. Just last week a healthy 37-year-old woman in Britain died after her eggs were obtained for in-vitro fertilisation. Nita Solanki appears to have succumbed to internal bleeding and renal failure. This follows the death of a 33-year-old woman after IVF treatment in Britain last year.
The International Society for Stem Cell Research has issued draft guidelines for egg donation, insisting on informed consent. However, an editorial in the journal Nature is sceptical about the efficacy of informed consent, pointing out what reproductive specialists and women's health advocates have long argued: that the long-term health effects of these drugs on women are unknown.
Some studies suggest the drugs may be linked to certain cancers that may not appear until women are in their 50s or 60s. Researchers say that we need longitudinal studies. But as Nature journalist Helen Pearson says, "It's unclear who will drive the effort: private fertility clinics may have little interest in finding out the potential risks of the drugs they use."
Cloning always amounts to the commodification of women's bodies. Even if egg donors are motivated by altruism, the biotechnology companies are profit-making ventures. In one 2002 study some egg donors used farm-animal metaphors to describe the experience. "I just got the feeling ... you were second class ... I'm just the produce stand ... like the cow at the market," remarked Chris. Melanie likened the experience to prostitution: "I definitely wasn't in charge there ... You've rented your body out ... It was like you were some kind of prized heifer or something."
No wonder scientists find it so difficult to obtain enough ova for experiments. Recent efforts blur the line between consent and coercion. Extensive publicity campaigns in Britain have failed to recruit egg donors without commercial payment. So one clinic has turned to desperate infertile couples, offering them cut-price IVF in return for harvesting extra eggs for research. The South Korean cloning scandal involved more than 2200 ova obtained by paying and pressuring women, some of them in subordinate positions within the research lab.
There is evidence that the high payments for ova in a commercial market induce disadvantaged women to assume the health risks of ova extraction. Last month, Britain's Daily Mail exposed the exploitation of east European women by fertility clinics. Some had been rendered infertile by egg donation.
Will this be the brave new world for Australian women?
The response of the Lockhart review to these concerns was to recommend the use of animal ova for cloning with human cells. But it's doubtful whether the public is ready for the truly Frankenstein scenario of animal-human hybrids. Scientists will look to women for their raw material.
Ironically, senator Natasha Stott Despoja, a long-time defender of women's rights, is among those at the vanguard of cloning advocacy: she has suggested she will introduce a private member's bill supporting the research.
We need to make women's health a focus of this debate. Community standards demand that women are protected from exploitation and harm in the application of science. Politicians and scientists must not use women as guinea pigs in a technology that has no proven benefits.
Katrina George is a lecturer in law at the University of Western Sydney and a director of Women's Forum Australia, an independent think tank that conducts research, education and public policy development on women's issues.
=
Somehow, the debate has cocentrated over the years on the moral and ethical issues of the actual procedures involved, once an ovum has been fertilised,- either by a sperm or by nuclear transfer from an adult cell.
The fate of the produced embryo in the test-tube, is one thing,- but from where is the initial ovum supposed to come? How is it going to be extracted, from whom and how many will be needed by whom? No one mentions this in their discussions.
Ova extractions from females is like any organ removed for transplant. There are safeguards and laws in place for the procedures to remove organs from live or dead patients. Removing female ova should be protected in the same way. Katrina George argues that the hazards involved should be taken into account in the biotech debate.
I agree with her arguments below entirely!
MM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Katrina George: Women overlooked in biotech debate.
Researchers also need ova and there are hazards involved
http://theaustralian.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,20152285%255E7583,00.html
17aug06
THE debate about stem cells and cloning is coming to a head, with Prime Minister John Howard saying he will allow a conscience vote should legislation be introduced to allow the technology.We've heard a lot about promised cures for everything from spinal cord injury to Alzheimer's. We've been alerted to a brain drain of scientists unless parliament gives the nod to the technology. Premiers Peter Beattie and Steve Bracks warn that Australia will go socially and economically backwards unless we jump on the biotechnology bandwagon.
Amid all the hype, there has been silence about the interests of one stakeholder: women. Cloning embryos for their stem cells depends on a continuous - and large - supply of ova. This requires high doses of ovulation-stimulating drugs, with side effects such as hot flushes, bloating, moodiness, headaches, weight gain and tiredness.
There is increasing evidence that the super-ovulation process is associated with more serious health risks. Up to 10 per cent of egg donors experience ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome, which can lead to hospitalisation, renal failure, future infertility and even death. Just last week a healthy 37-year-old woman in Britain died after her eggs were obtained for in-vitro fertilisation. Nita Solanki appears to have succumbed to internal bleeding and renal failure. This follows the death of a 33-year-old woman after IVF treatment in Britain last year.
The International Society for Stem Cell Research has issued draft guidelines for egg donation, insisting on informed consent. However, an editorial in the journal Nature is sceptical about the efficacy of informed consent, pointing out what reproductive specialists and women's health advocates have long argued: that the long-term health effects of these drugs on women are unknown.
Some studies suggest the drugs may be linked to certain cancers that may not appear until women are in their 50s or 60s. Researchers say that we need longitudinal studies. But as Nature journalist Helen Pearson says, "It's unclear who will drive the effort: private fertility clinics may have little interest in finding out the potential risks of the drugs they use."
Cloning always amounts to the commodification of women's bodies. Even if egg donors are motivated by altruism, the biotechnology companies are profit-making ventures. In one 2002 study some egg donors used farm-animal metaphors to describe the experience. "I just got the feeling ... you were second class ... I'm just the produce stand ... like the cow at the market," remarked Chris. Melanie likened the experience to prostitution: "I definitely wasn't in charge there ... You've rented your body out ... It was like you were some kind of prized heifer or something."
No wonder scientists find it so difficult to obtain enough ova for experiments. Recent efforts blur the line between consent and coercion. Extensive publicity campaigns in Britain have failed to recruit egg donors without commercial payment. So one clinic has turned to desperate infertile couples, offering them cut-price IVF in return for harvesting extra eggs for research. The South Korean cloning scandal involved more than 2200 ova obtained by paying and pressuring women, some of them in subordinate positions within the research lab.
There is evidence that the high payments for ova in a commercial market induce disadvantaged women to assume the health risks of ova extraction. Last month, Britain's Daily Mail exposed the exploitation of east European women by fertility clinics. Some had been rendered infertile by egg donation.
Will this be the brave new world for Australian women?
The response of the Lockhart review to these concerns was to recommend the use of animal ova for cloning with human cells. But it's doubtful whether the public is ready for the truly Frankenstein scenario of animal-human hybrids. Scientists will look to women for their raw material.
Ironically, senator Natasha Stott Despoja, a long-time defender of women's rights, is among those at the vanguard of cloning advocacy: she has suggested she will introduce a private member's bill supporting the research.
We need to make women's health a focus of this debate. Community standards demand that women are protected from exploitation and harm in the application of science. Politicians and scientists must not use women as guinea pigs in a technology that has no proven benefits.
Katrina George is a lecturer in law at the University of Western Sydney and a director of Women's Forum Australia, an independent think tank that conducts research, education and public policy development on women's issues.
=
Friday, August 18, 2006
ISRAEL stronger despite defeat. (Tim Hames.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE AUSTRALIAN
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Israel stronger despite 'defeat'
Hezbollah should not get too carried away with its so-called victory, writes Tim Hames
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
15aug06
IF only Israel were as effective at public relations as at military operations, the results of the conflict on and around its border with Lebanon would be so much starker.
As it is, however, the real meaning of the UN resolution that came into force yesterday is being misrepresented.
Hezbollah is hailing a victory of sorts, albeit one of a presentational character. In a bizarre situation, Israeli politicians on both the hard Left and the hard Right appear to agree with the terrorists. All are profoundly mistaken.
What, after all, does this Hezbollah claim consist of? The organisation considers it a triumph that it has not been "destroyed" after just four weeks of fighting. It contrasts this with the dismal record of several Arab armies combined in 1967.
It has not yet been disarmed and may not be formally neutralised in the near future. Nor has it been discredited on the Arab street, where it has enhanced its popularity. Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, thus proclaims himself a "new Nasser", referring to the Arab nationalist and longtime Egyptian leader.
As victories rank, not being destroyed, disarmed or discredited is not that impressive. It is hardly Henry V at Agincourt. The idea that the Six-Day War represents the military standard for the Arab world is a somewhat humiliating notion. Allowing for the feeble record of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Israelis should not be too disturbed by the prospect of another incarnation.
The facts now evident on the ground suggest an entirely different assessment.
First, the damage inflicted by the Israeli Defence Forces on Hezbollah's infrastructure and resources is far, far greater than the equivalent harm that it has suffered. A sizeable proportion of Hezbollah rocket launchers and fighters have been eliminated, while the Israeli army has lost no more than a few tanks and about 100 soldiers. For a body that is used to incessant combat, this is not a spectacular setback.
Second, Hezbollah has deployed a huge percentage of its missile arsenal to very little advantage. Only in the Alice in Wonderland world of the Middle East could it be seen as a "triumph" for a terrorist organisation simply to launch Katyusha missiles in the direction of Israel and roughly 95 per cent of them to hit nothing of any value. It took Hezbollah six years to accumulate a stockpile that, fundamentally, it has wasted.
Third, the administration in Lebanon, which had ostentatiously refused to send its soldiers to the south of that country for the past six years, has been obliged to pledge to the UN that it will now do so.
It will, furthermore, be under the de facto control of a much larger international force than has been assembled in that region before - one that will be judged by the extent to which it keeps the place quiet.
The wider strategic consequences of these recent events are yet more significant.
Hezbollah was, until July 11, a problem exclusively for Israel. That dilemma has been internationalised. It is now of paramount importance to the Lebanese Government and the UN Security Council. If Lebanon's troops cannot pacify Hezbollah, then ministers there well know that Israel's air force will be back over Beirut.
This is an important breakthrough for Israel. If Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had been told six weeks ago that Hezbollah would cease to be the principal militia in southern Lebanon by the start of September, he wouldn't have believed it possible.
Further, Israel's security has been improved more than has been acknowledged.
Less than three years ago, Israel's northern border was exposed to Hezbollah; its eastern boundary with the West Bank was so porous that suicide bombers regularly broke through it; and its military was engaged in a bitter and often futile attempt to contain Hamas in Gaza.
As of now, it can be confident of pushing Hezbollah back beyond the Litani River in Lebanon; the barrier it erected around the West Bank has reduced the number of suicide blast atrocities to the level of an unfortunate irritation; and Hamas, whose military command was decapitated by Israel in a series of strikes in 2004, is more likely to engage in a civil war with the rival Fatah movement than it is to seriously inconvenience Olmert.
The final dimension to this saga may nevertheless prove the most compelling. The past few weeks have exposed Iran's role as the political patron of terrorism as well as the extent of its ambitions to shape Islam in its image.
None of this has taken Israel by surprise. It has, however, been a severe blow to Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Jews constitute no threat to mainstream Sunni Islam. But the Shia challenge is another matter.
Once the crocodile tears for Lebanon have dried up (which will take a month at most) and the mood on the Arab street has moved on (which will not take much longer), it will become obvious to Sunni regimes that Israel is an ally against Iran. The rhetoric directed against Israel will not abate, but it will be increasingly irrelevant.
In the end, Israel's survival does not depend on Arab "hearts and minds" or opinions expressed by television viewers. It relies instead on winning battles.
If this is a defeat, then Israel can afford many such outcomes.
The Times
privacy terms © The Australian
THE AUSTRALIAN
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Israel stronger despite 'defeat'
Hezbollah should not get too carried away with its so-called victory, writes Tim Hames
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
15aug06
IF only Israel were as effective at public relations as at military operations, the results of the conflict on and around its border with Lebanon would be so much starker.
As it is, however, the real meaning of the UN resolution that came into force yesterday is being misrepresented.
Hezbollah is hailing a victory of sorts, albeit one of a presentational character. In a bizarre situation, Israeli politicians on both the hard Left and the hard Right appear to agree with the terrorists. All are profoundly mistaken.
What, after all, does this Hezbollah claim consist of? The organisation considers it a triumph that it has not been "destroyed" after just four weeks of fighting. It contrasts this with the dismal record of several Arab armies combined in 1967.
It has not yet been disarmed and may not be formally neutralised in the near future. Nor has it been discredited on the Arab street, where it has enhanced its popularity. Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, thus proclaims himself a "new Nasser", referring to the Arab nationalist and longtime Egyptian leader.
As victories rank, not being destroyed, disarmed or discredited is not that impressive. It is hardly Henry V at Agincourt. The idea that the Six-Day War represents the military standard for the Arab world is a somewhat humiliating notion. Allowing for the feeble record of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Israelis should not be too disturbed by the prospect of another incarnation.
The facts now evident on the ground suggest an entirely different assessment.
First, the damage inflicted by the Israeli Defence Forces on Hezbollah's infrastructure and resources is far, far greater than the equivalent harm that it has suffered. A sizeable proportion of Hezbollah rocket launchers and fighters have been eliminated, while the Israeli army has lost no more than a few tanks and about 100 soldiers. For a body that is used to incessant combat, this is not a spectacular setback.
Second, Hezbollah has deployed a huge percentage of its missile arsenal to very little advantage. Only in the Alice in Wonderland world of the Middle East could it be seen as a "triumph" for a terrorist organisation simply to launch Katyusha missiles in the direction of Israel and roughly 95 per cent of them to hit nothing of any value. It took Hezbollah six years to accumulate a stockpile that, fundamentally, it has wasted.
Third, the administration in Lebanon, which had ostentatiously refused to send its soldiers to the south of that country for the past six years, has been obliged to pledge to the UN that it will now do so.
It will, furthermore, be under the de facto control of a much larger international force than has been assembled in that region before - one that will be judged by the extent to which it keeps the place quiet.
The wider strategic consequences of these recent events are yet more significant.
Hezbollah was, until July 11, a problem exclusively for Israel. That dilemma has been internationalised. It is now of paramount importance to the Lebanese Government and the UN Security Council. If Lebanon's troops cannot pacify Hezbollah, then ministers there well know that Israel's air force will be back over Beirut.
This is an important breakthrough for Israel. If Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had been told six weeks ago that Hezbollah would cease to be the principal militia in southern Lebanon by the start of September, he wouldn't have believed it possible.
Further, Israel's security has been improved more than has been acknowledged.
Less than three years ago, Israel's northern border was exposed to Hezbollah; its eastern boundary with the West Bank was so porous that suicide bombers regularly broke through it; and its military was engaged in a bitter and often futile attempt to contain Hamas in Gaza.
As of now, it can be confident of pushing Hezbollah back beyond the Litani River in Lebanon; the barrier it erected around the West Bank has reduced the number of suicide blast atrocities to the level of an unfortunate irritation; and Hamas, whose military command was decapitated by Israel in a series of strikes in 2004, is more likely to engage in a civil war with the rival Fatah movement than it is to seriously inconvenience Olmert.
The final dimension to this saga may nevertheless prove the most compelling. The past few weeks have exposed Iran's role as the political patron of terrorism as well as the extent of its ambitions to shape Islam in its image.
None of this has taken Israel by surprise. It has, however, been a severe blow to Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Jews constitute no threat to mainstream Sunni Islam. But the Shia challenge is another matter.
Once the crocodile tears for Lebanon have dried up (which will take a month at most) and the mood on the Arab street has moved on (which will not take much longer), it will become obvious to Sunni regimes that Israel is an ally against Iran. The rhetoric directed against Israel will not abate, but it will be increasingly irrelevant.
In the end, Israel's survival does not depend on Arab "hearts and minds" or opinions expressed by television viewers. It relies instead on winning battles.
If this is a defeat, then Israel can afford many such outcomes.
The Times
privacy terms © The Australian
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
WAR! It is just jealousy by the Arabs of the israelis!
This week in review.16th August 2006.
My desktop is out of order and my laptop doesn't have all the information I need to do my blogging.
Hence my apologies for not keeping you up to date.
The good news of the week is that the hot -war between I srael and the hezbollah terrorists of Lebanon is (temporarily?) over and the population in the North of Israel can go back home.
Similarly, the Shia Lebanese population of the South is returning in droves, no doubt at the behest of their leaders,- in spite of the Israelis telling them not to go back, because it is not yet safe to do so.
On the one hand, Israel's army is still there, - on the other, it will be much harder for them to fight the harrassing mililitias with the civilians around them!
Let us hope that these devious terrorists don't try too hard just so that they will get a propaganda advantage about the ''evil Israelis'' who are ''targeting'' the (stupid!) Lebanese civilians.
Nasralla is apparently infiltrating all his fighters from the North back into the South, on Israe'sl border. A Lebanese army force is supposeddly getting ready to move to the border to "replace"the hezbollah, but no one can really see that they are any different from each other. The wily French and others of the UN forces to be deployed there,- will they be different from the previous ineffectual, intimidated UNIFILs?
The propaganda war in Iran, Syria and Lebanon is getting hotter and hotter. They are claiming "victory"! Their Hezbollah countryside and Beirut headquarters lie in ruins, hundreds of human-shield victims are dead, the country's transport systems are wrecked,- but they have a victory of sorts,- because the kidnapped soldiers are not returned,- neither from Gaza nor from Lebanon. And they still seem to have plenty of those katyusha rockets left to fire indiscriminately towards Israel.
Looking at the panning video-images of the countryside on the border, one could not help noticing the stark contrast between the two countries. One is lush and green, forrested, houses and streets like any Western European city say,- while on the other side of the border, it is stark, barren hillsides, with just bushy undergrowth and simple villages.
On one side of the border, the civilian population had to hide in their underground shelters, prepared for them over long periods of threatening forces arraigned against them. But their soldiers were protecting them above ground!
On the other side,- the bunkers were prepared deep underground for the fighters of the terrorist army,- while their civilian population was held to ransom above ground!Aren't they the stupid ones to put up with this?
Then the media wonders why there were 10 times as many civilian deaths in Lebanon as in Israel!
MM.
My desktop is out of order and my laptop doesn't have all the information I need to do my blogging.
Hence my apologies for not keeping you up to date.
The good news of the week is that the hot -war between I srael and the hezbollah terrorists of Lebanon is (temporarily?) over and the population in the North of Israel can go back home.
Similarly, the Shia Lebanese population of the South is returning in droves, no doubt at the behest of their leaders,- in spite of the Israelis telling them not to go back, because it is not yet safe to do so.
On the one hand, Israel's army is still there, - on the other, it will be much harder for them to fight the harrassing mililitias with the civilians around them!
Let us hope that these devious terrorists don't try too hard just so that they will get a propaganda advantage about the ''evil Israelis'' who are ''targeting'' the (stupid!) Lebanese civilians.
Nasralla is apparently infiltrating all his fighters from the North back into the South, on Israe'sl border. A Lebanese army force is supposeddly getting ready to move to the border to "replace"the hezbollah, but no one can really see that they are any different from each other. The wily French and others of the UN forces to be deployed there,- will they be different from the previous ineffectual, intimidated UNIFILs?
The propaganda war in Iran, Syria and Lebanon is getting hotter and hotter. They are claiming "victory"! Their Hezbollah countryside and Beirut headquarters lie in ruins, hundreds of human-shield victims are dead, the country's transport systems are wrecked,- but they have a victory of sorts,- because the kidnapped soldiers are not returned,- neither from Gaza nor from Lebanon. And they still seem to have plenty of those katyusha rockets left to fire indiscriminately towards Israel.
Looking at the panning video-images of the countryside on the border, one could not help noticing the stark contrast between the two countries. One is lush and green, forrested, houses and streets like any Western European city say,- while on the other side of the border, it is stark, barren hillsides, with just bushy undergrowth and simple villages.
On one side of the border, the civilian population had to hide in their underground shelters, prepared for them over long periods of threatening forces arraigned against them. But their soldiers were protecting them above ground!
On the other side,- the bunkers were prepared deep underground for the fighters of the terrorist army,- while their civilian population was held to ransom above ground!Aren't they the stupid ones to put up with this?
Then the media wonders why there were 10 times as many civilian deaths in Lebanon as in Israel!
MM.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Lebanese refugee finds more than a home in Israel.
Lebanese refugee finds more than a home in Israel
http://www.israel21c.org/bin/en.jsp?enPage=HomePage
By Karin Kloosterman
August 06, 2006"
Should I take my math books with me?" were the lastwords that 24-year-old Sharbel Salameh remembersasking his mother the day his father called and toldthe family they had to leave the south Lebanesevillage of Klayaa.It was the only home Salameh, then 18, ever knew. Hewas in the middle of studying for university entranceexams when the news came.The Israeli army had withdrawn their protective linefrom the South Lebanese border the night before. OnMay 23, 2000 Salameh's father, an officer in the SouthLebanese Army (SLA) - and an ally to Israelpeacekeeping forces - knew the family would be soonimprisoned by renegade Hizbullah forces they had beentrying to disarm.With nothing more than a couple of pictures and asmall bundle of clothes in his hand, Salameh and hisMaronite Catholic family quickly said goodbye to theirfriends. Neighbors were crying, he recalls. Theyjoined over 7000 Lebanese refugees and allies toIsrael - among them Catholics, Christians, Druze andMuslims - who eventually fled to Israel for safetyfrom Hizbullah.
Today, Salameh and his family comprise a unique tribe in Israel: they are among some 2,500 Lebanese refugees who no longer have a home in Lebanon because they stood up against Hizbullah and fought for democracy and a free Lebanon.However, being a stranger in a strange land, didn't deter Salameh from making his dreams come true. Six years after adopting Israel as his home, Salameh has earned a first degree in biology.He owes thanks to Tel Aviv University (TAU) and backing from a selection committee member - ProfessorMichael Ovadia - who accepted Salameh's plea to learn despite not having the right grades - or any grades at all - to show for his academic performance.
"They took a chance on me and I didn't disappoint them," Salameh told ISRAEL21c in fluent Hebrew, the language in which he studied.TAU granted Salameh a full scholarship - ThePresident's Scholarship - at the discretion of university President Itamar Rabinovich. The worthy students chosen receive full tuition and additional financial backing throughout their undergraduatestudies. Selection is based on socio-economicbackground; preference goes to those with difficultand complicated life circumstances.Joining about 70 students in the Scholarship program,and after four years of study, Salameh is on the wayto becoming a medical researcher. This fall, he startsa second degree at the famed Weizmann Institute inRehovot where he will study molecular genetics.With the shining support of the TAU, neighbors andfriends, Salameh has become a model Israeli citizen,despite the fact that he is still waiting for Israelicitizenship papers to come through."In Israel, I am in the best place in the world nowwith studies at the Weizmann Institute. I thankeveryone for that and also for the fact that I got tolearn at the best university in the world," Salamehsaid in a phone call from his Hadera home, where helives with his parents.Salameh's appreciation for Israel hasn't wavered."Israel gave us a big chance. In the beginning it washard. I didn't come here as a young kid. I had tolearn a new language, find new friends, adopt a newmentality."
Salameh describes life in Hadera among Israelis as a normal, supportive environment. He doesn't even mention news reports of the Katyusha rockets sent tothe Hadera region.Salameh's success in Israel likely comes from fact that he is a big giver to his community. For the past three years he has worked as a guide for autistic and mentally challenged children in the nearby town ofPardes Hanna. There, he rides bikes with kids, goes swimming; takes them on trips - for nominal pay.Still in contact by email with about 100 ChristianLebanese friends in Lebanon and abroad, Salameh says that people are suffering from lack of infrastructure in Lebanon. Yet, none of his friends support whatHizbullah is doing to their country."I don't want Israel to stop the war against Hizbullah," says Salameh when asked if there should bea cease-fire. "We need to knock out [them] once andfor all. Israel has definitely sent a powerful blow to the morale of Hizbullah. They are less strong and less sure of themselves now."
Salameh has adopted his father's view that Hizbullah are terrorists taking advantage of poor innocent people in Lebanon. "My dad was fighting against them.For me they are terrorists."One has to remember, explains Salameh, that back in1982 when Israel entered Beirut to help dismantleYasser Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Forces,Christian and Muslim Lebanese were overjoyed. They sang songs and showered Israeli soldiers with flowers.Recalling the traumatic events of six years ago which uprooted Salemeh and his family from their village, he speaks like it happened yesterday."I didn't believe it was happening. It was like someone telling me I'd be dropped in a strange place -like in the middle of California - and I'd have to manage."After an endless night in Tiberias, where the family slept in a park near the Sea of Galilee, they were then shuttled by the army to a hotel in Netanya, unti lan apartment could be arranged.Looking back on the last six years, Salameh is morethan pleased on what he has accomplished."I think that I've gotten it together beautifully."___._,_.___ =========================================================================ZNN - Zionism News Network - is for distribution of information about Zionism, Israel, Israeli and Zionist history, Israel advocacy and anti-Semitism and telling people about your Web site or activist issues. Please do circulate posts from this list by email with all list information and URLs to publicize ZNN and Zionist Web sites. Your submissions are most welcome and will be posted in accordance with list guidelines. To join send an email to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Contents are the responsibility of the posters.We invite you to discuss issues at these Web forums: http://www.zionism-israel.com/cgi/yabb/YaBB.cgi http://www.zionismontheweb.org/boardsVisit these Web sites: http://www.zionism-israel.com http://www.zionismontheweb.org http://www.zionism.netfirms.com=========================================================================
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http://www.israel21c.org/bin/en.jsp?enPage=HomePage
By Karin Kloosterman
August 06, 2006"
Should I take my math books with me?" were the lastwords that 24-year-old Sharbel Salameh remembersasking his mother the day his father called and toldthe family they had to leave the south Lebanesevillage of Klayaa.It was the only home Salameh, then 18, ever knew. Hewas in the middle of studying for university entranceexams when the news came.The Israeli army had withdrawn their protective linefrom the South Lebanese border the night before. OnMay 23, 2000 Salameh's father, an officer in the SouthLebanese Army (SLA) - and an ally to Israelpeacekeeping forces - knew the family would be soonimprisoned by renegade Hizbullah forces they had beentrying to disarm.With nothing more than a couple of pictures and asmall bundle of clothes in his hand, Salameh and hisMaronite Catholic family quickly said goodbye to theirfriends. Neighbors were crying, he recalls. Theyjoined over 7000 Lebanese refugees and allies toIsrael - among them Catholics, Christians, Druze andMuslims - who eventually fled to Israel for safetyfrom Hizbullah.
Today, Salameh and his family comprise a unique tribe in Israel: they are among some 2,500 Lebanese refugees who no longer have a home in Lebanon because they stood up against Hizbullah and fought for democracy and a free Lebanon.However, being a stranger in a strange land, didn't deter Salameh from making his dreams come true. Six years after adopting Israel as his home, Salameh has earned a first degree in biology.He owes thanks to Tel Aviv University (TAU) and backing from a selection committee member - ProfessorMichael Ovadia - who accepted Salameh's plea to learn despite not having the right grades - or any grades at all - to show for his academic performance.
"They took a chance on me and I didn't disappoint them," Salameh told ISRAEL21c in fluent Hebrew, the language in which he studied.TAU granted Salameh a full scholarship - ThePresident's Scholarship - at the discretion of university President Itamar Rabinovich. The worthy students chosen receive full tuition and additional financial backing throughout their undergraduatestudies. Selection is based on socio-economicbackground; preference goes to those with difficultand complicated life circumstances.Joining about 70 students in the Scholarship program,and after four years of study, Salameh is on the wayto becoming a medical researcher. This fall, he startsa second degree at the famed Weizmann Institute inRehovot where he will study molecular genetics.With the shining support of the TAU, neighbors andfriends, Salameh has become a model Israeli citizen,despite the fact that he is still waiting for Israelicitizenship papers to come through."In Israel, I am in the best place in the world nowwith studies at the Weizmann Institute. I thankeveryone for that and also for the fact that I got tolearn at the best university in the world," Salamehsaid in a phone call from his Hadera home, where helives with his parents.Salameh's appreciation for Israel hasn't wavered."Israel gave us a big chance. In the beginning it washard. I didn't come here as a young kid. I had tolearn a new language, find new friends, adopt a newmentality."
Salameh describes life in Hadera among Israelis as a normal, supportive environment. He doesn't even mention news reports of the Katyusha rockets sent tothe Hadera region.Salameh's success in Israel likely comes from fact that he is a big giver to his community. For the past three years he has worked as a guide for autistic and mentally challenged children in the nearby town ofPardes Hanna. There, he rides bikes with kids, goes swimming; takes them on trips - for nominal pay.Still in contact by email with about 100 ChristianLebanese friends in Lebanon and abroad, Salameh says that people are suffering from lack of infrastructure in Lebanon. Yet, none of his friends support whatHizbullah is doing to their country."I don't want Israel to stop the war against Hizbullah," says Salameh when asked if there should bea cease-fire. "We need to knock out [them] once andfor all. Israel has definitely sent a powerful blow to the morale of Hizbullah. They are less strong and less sure of themselves now."
Salameh has adopted his father's view that Hizbullah are terrorists taking advantage of poor innocent people in Lebanon. "My dad was fighting against them.For me they are terrorists."One has to remember, explains Salameh, that back in1982 when Israel entered Beirut to help dismantleYasser Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Forces,Christian and Muslim Lebanese were overjoyed. They sang songs and showered Israeli soldiers with flowers.Recalling the traumatic events of six years ago which uprooted Salemeh and his family from their village, he speaks like it happened yesterday."I didn't believe it was happening. It was like someone telling me I'd be dropped in a strange place -like in the middle of California - and I'd have to manage."After an endless night in Tiberias, where the family slept in a park near the Sea of Galilee, they were then shuttled by the army to a hotel in Netanya, unti lan apartment could be arranged.Looking back on the last six years, Salameh is morethan pleased on what he has accomplished."I think that I've gotten it together beautifully."___._,_.___ =========================================================================ZNN - Zionism News Network - is for distribution of information about Zionism, Israel, Israeli and Zionist history, Israel advocacy and anti-Semitism and telling people about your Web site or activist issues. Please do circulate posts from this list by email with all list information and URLs to publicize ZNN and Zionist Web sites. Your submissions are most welcome and will be posted in accordance with list guidelines. To join send an email to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Contents are the responsibility of the posters.We invite you to discuss issues at these Web forums: http://www.zionism-israel.com/cgi/yabb/YaBB.cgi http://www.zionismontheweb.org/boardsVisit these Web sites: http://www.zionism-israel.com http://www.zionismontheweb.org http://www.zionism.netfirms.com=========================================================================
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Zionism
Middle east
Sunday, August 06, 2006
End the occupation of Arab lands? Who is kidding whom?
Since 1949, Arabs who fled Palestine had nowhere to go? Nowhere to resettle? No one to care for them? Rather let them live in camps on UNWRRA handouts to fester in hatred than give them their human rights amongst their own brethren?
They know what's good for them,- only the Jews have a land of milk and honey,- but they would rather destroy than embrace it.
The areas in dispute are not even 1% of the total Arab lands surrounding Israel. Their populations are about 50times larger than the Jewish ones,- and they are the ones complaining about a few hundred thousand displaced persons whom they refuse to accommodate and resettle?
ISRAEL AND JERUSALEM FACTS
1. ISRAEL BECAME A STATE IN 1312 B.C., TWO MILLENNIA BEFORE ISLAM;
2. ARAB REFUGEES FROM ISRAEL BEGAN CALLING THEMSELVES "PALESTINIANS" IN 1967, TWO DECADES AFTER (MODERN) ISRAELI STATEHOOD;
3. AFTER CONQUERING THE LAND IN 1272 B.C., JEWS RULED IT FOR A THOUSAND YEARS AND MAINTAINED A CONTINUOUS PRESENCE THERE FOR 3,300 YEARS;
4. FOR OVER 3,300 YEARS, JERUSALEM WAS THE JEWISH CAPITAL. IT WAS NEVER THE CAPITAL OF ANY ARAB OR MUSLIM ENTITY. EVEN UNDER JORDANIAN RULE, (EAST) JERUSALEM WAS NOT MADE THE CAPITAL, AND NO ARAB LEADER CAME TO VISIT IT;
5. JERUSALEM IS MENTIONED OVER 700 TIMES IN THE BIBLE, BUT NOT ONCE IS IT MENTIONED IN THE QUR'AN;
6. KING DAVID FOUNDED JERUSALEM; MOHAMMED NEVER SET FOOT IN IT;
7. JEWS PRAY FACING JERUSALEM; MUSLIMS FACE MECCA. IF THEY ARE BETWEEN THE TWO CITIES, MUSLIMS PRAY FACING MECCA, WITH THEIR BACKS TO JERUSALEM;
8. IN 1948, ARAB LEADERS URGED THEIR PEOPLE TO LEAVE, PROMISING TO CLEANSE THE LAND OF JEWISH PRESENCE. 68% OF THEM FLED WITHOUT EVER SETTING EYES ON AN ISRAELI SOLDIER;
9. VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE JEWISH POPULATION OF MUSLIM COUNTRIES HAD TO FLEE AS THE RESULT OF VIOLENCE AND POGROMS;
10. SOME 630,000 ARABS LEFT ISRAEL IN 1948, WHILE CLOSE TO A MILLION JEWS WERE FORCED TO LEAVE THE MUSLIM COUNTR IES;
11. IN SPITE OF THE VAST TERRITORIES AT THEIR DISPOSAL, ARAB REFUGESS WERE DELIBERATELY PREVENTED FROM ASSIMILATING INTO THEIR HOST COUNTRIES. OF 100 MILLION REFUGEES FOLLOWING WORLD WAR 2, THEY ARE THE ONLY GROUP TO HAVE NEVER INTEGRATED WITH THEIR CORELIGIONISTS. MOST OF THE JEWISH REFUGEES FROM EUROPE AND ARAB LANDS WERE SETTL ED IN ISRAEL, A COUNTRY NO LARGER THAN NEW JERSEY;
12. THERE ARE 22 ARAB COUNTRIES, NOT COUNTING PALESTINE. THERE IS ONLY ONE JEWISH STATE. ARABS STARTED ALL FIVE WARS AGAINST ISRAEL, AND LOST EVERY ONE OF THEM;
13. FATAH AND HAMAS CONSTITUTIONS STILL CALL FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL. ISRAEL CEDED MOST OF THE WEST BANK AND ALL OF GAZA TO THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY, AND EVEN PROVIDED IT WITH ARMS;
14. DURING THE JORDANIAN OCCUPATION, JEWISH HOLY SITES WERE VANDALIZED AND WERE OFF LIMITS TO JEWS. UNDER ISRAELI RULE, ALL MUSLIM AND CHRISTIAN HOLY SITES ARE ACCESSIBLE TO ALL FAITHS;
15. OUT OF 175 UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTIONS UP TO 1990, 97 WERE AGAINST ISRAEL; OUT OF 690 GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTIONS, 429 WERE AGAINST ISRAEL;
16. THE U.N. WAS SILENT WHEN THE JORDANIANS DESTROYED 58 SYNAGOGUES IN THE OLD CITY OF JERUSALEM. IT REMAINED SILENT WHILE JORDAN SYSTEMATICALLY DESECRATED THE ANCIENT JEWISH CEMETERY ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, AND IT REMAINED SILENT WHEN JORDAN ENFORCED APARTHEID LAWS PREVENTING JEWS FROM ACCESSING THE TEMPLE MOUNT AND WESTERN WALL.
THESE ARE TRYING TIMES. WE MUST ASK OURSELVES WHAT WE SHOULD BE DOING, AND WHAT WE WILL TELL OUR GRANDCHILDREN ABOUT OUR ACTIONS DURING THIS CRISIS, WHEN WE HAD THE CHANCE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
TRUTH AND PEACE ARE VALUES COMMON TO ALL OF US. EVERYONE MUST KNOW!
They know what's good for them,- only the Jews have a land of milk and honey,- but they would rather destroy than embrace it.
The areas in dispute are not even 1% of the total Arab lands surrounding Israel. Their populations are about 50times larger than the Jewish ones,- and they are the ones complaining about a few hundred thousand displaced persons whom they refuse to accommodate and resettle?
ISRAEL AND JERUSALEM FACTS
1. ISRAEL BECAME A STATE IN 1312 B.C., TWO MILLENNIA BEFORE ISLAM;
2. ARAB REFUGEES FROM ISRAEL BEGAN CALLING THEMSELVES "PALESTINIANS" IN 1967, TWO DECADES AFTER (MODERN) ISRAELI STATEHOOD;
3. AFTER CONQUERING THE LAND IN 1272 B.C., JEWS RULED IT FOR A THOUSAND YEARS AND MAINTAINED A CONTINUOUS PRESENCE THERE FOR 3,300 YEARS;
4. FOR OVER 3,300 YEARS, JERUSALEM WAS THE JEWISH CAPITAL. IT WAS NEVER THE CAPITAL OF ANY ARAB OR MUSLIM ENTITY. EVEN UNDER JORDANIAN RULE, (EAST) JERUSALEM WAS NOT MADE THE CAPITAL, AND NO ARAB LEADER CAME TO VISIT IT;
5. JERUSALEM IS MENTIONED OVER 700 TIMES IN THE BIBLE, BUT NOT ONCE IS IT MENTIONED IN THE QUR'AN;
6. KING DAVID FOUNDED JERUSALEM; MOHAMMED NEVER SET FOOT IN IT;
7. JEWS PRAY FACING JERUSALEM; MUSLIMS FACE MECCA. IF THEY ARE BETWEEN THE TWO CITIES, MUSLIMS PRAY FACING MECCA, WITH THEIR BACKS TO JERUSALEM;
8. IN 1948, ARAB LEADERS URGED THEIR PEOPLE TO LEAVE, PROMISING TO CLEANSE THE LAND OF JEWISH PRESENCE. 68% OF THEM FLED WITHOUT EVER SETTING EYES ON AN ISRAELI SOLDIER;
9. VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE JEWISH POPULATION OF MUSLIM COUNTRIES HAD TO FLEE AS THE RESULT OF VIOLENCE AND POGROMS;
10. SOME 630,000 ARABS LEFT ISRAEL IN 1948, WHILE CLOSE TO A MILLION JEWS WERE FORCED TO LEAVE THE MUSLIM COUNTR IES;
11. IN SPITE OF THE VAST TERRITORIES AT THEIR DISPOSAL, ARAB REFUGESS WERE DELIBERATELY PREVENTED FROM ASSIMILATING INTO THEIR HOST COUNTRIES. OF 100 MILLION REFUGEES FOLLOWING WORLD WAR 2, THEY ARE THE ONLY GROUP TO HAVE NEVER INTEGRATED WITH THEIR CORELIGIONISTS. MOST OF THE JEWISH REFUGEES FROM EUROPE AND ARAB LANDS WERE SETTL ED IN ISRAEL, A COUNTRY NO LARGER THAN NEW JERSEY;
12. THERE ARE 22 ARAB COUNTRIES, NOT COUNTING PALESTINE. THERE IS ONLY ONE JEWISH STATE. ARABS STARTED ALL FIVE WARS AGAINST ISRAEL, AND LOST EVERY ONE OF THEM;
13. FATAH AND HAMAS CONSTITUTIONS STILL CALL FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL. ISRAEL CEDED MOST OF THE WEST BANK AND ALL OF GAZA TO THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY, AND EVEN PROVIDED IT WITH ARMS;
14. DURING THE JORDANIAN OCCUPATION, JEWISH HOLY SITES WERE VANDALIZED AND WERE OFF LIMITS TO JEWS. UNDER ISRAELI RULE, ALL MUSLIM AND CHRISTIAN HOLY SITES ARE ACCESSIBLE TO ALL FAITHS;
15. OUT OF 175 UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTIONS UP TO 1990, 97 WERE AGAINST ISRAEL; OUT OF 690 GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTIONS, 429 WERE AGAINST ISRAEL;
16. THE U.N. WAS SILENT WHEN THE JORDANIANS DESTROYED 58 SYNAGOGUES IN THE OLD CITY OF JERUSALEM. IT REMAINED SILENT WHILE JORDAN SYSTEMATICALLY DESECRATED THE ANCIENT JEWISH CEMETERY ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, AND IT REMAINED SILENT WHEN JORDAN ENFORCED APARTHEID LAWS PREVENTING JEWS FROM ACCESSING THE TEMPLE MOUNT AND WESTERN WALL.
THESE ARE TRYING TIMES. WE MUST ASK OURSELVES WHAT WE SHOULD BE DOING, AND WHAT WE WILL TELL OUR GRANDCHILDREN ABOUT OUR ACTIONS DURING THIS CRISIS, WHEN WE HAD THE CHANCE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
TRUTH AND PEACE ARE VALUES COMMON TO ALL OF US. EVERYONE MUST KNOW!
HRW: Rocket attacks on Israeli civilians are war crimes.
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
Israel/Lebanon: Hezbollah Must End Attacks on Civilians
Rocket Attacks on Civilians in Israel Are War Crimes
(New York, August 5, 2006) – Hezbollah must immediately stop firing rockets into civilian areas in Israel, Human Rights Watch said today. Entering the fourth week of attacks, such rockets have claimed 30 civilian lives, including six children, and wounded hundreds more. “Lobbing rockets blindly into civilian areas is without doubt a war crime,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. ”Nothing can justify this assault on the most fundamental standards for sparing civilians the hazards of war.” Hezbollah claims that some of its attacks are aimed at military bases inside Israel, which are legitimate targets. But most of the attacks appear to have been directed at civilian areas and have hit pedestrians, hospitals, schools, homes and businesses. Since July 12, when Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight, Human Rights Watch researchers have been documenting the war’s impact on civilians in Israel and Lebanon, interviewing the witnesses and survivors of attacks, as well as doctors, emergency workers, police, military and government officials. As of August 4, Hezbollah had launched a reported 2,500 rockets into predominantly civilian areas in northern Israel. Some longer-range rockets landed as far south as the city of Hadera, some 85 km from the border. Hezbollah announced that it had attacked Hadera on August 4 in retaliation for an Israeli air raid in Lebanon earlier that day that reportedly killed more than 20 farm workers. Yesterday, Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, offered to stop bombing Israel’s “northern settlements” if the Israeli military stopped bombing Lebanon’s “cities and civilians.” He also warned that an Israeli attack on Beirut would result in Hezbollah bombing Tel Aviv. In a report issued on August 3, “Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon,” Human Rights Watch documented a systematic failure by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to distinguish between combatants and civilians. In some cases, the timing and intensity of the attack, the absence of a military target, as well as subsequent strikes on rescuers, suggest that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians. Yesterday, Israeli bombing reportedly killed at least 40 civilians in Lebanon. “Human Rights Watch has documented the Israeli military’s persistent use of indiscriminate force, which has killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians,” Roth said. “But war crimes by one side in a conflict never justify war crimes by another. Hezbollah must stop using the excuse of Israeli misconduct to justify its own.” Northern Israel, an area populated by about one 1 million people, has come to a virtual standstill because of Hezbollah’s rockets, which are exacting an enormous human and economic toll. Authorities believe that up to half the population has left the area, while the rest are living in constant fear of the air raid sirens that warn of attacks. Human Rights Watch said many of those who remain in northern Israel are unable to leave because they don’t have relatives elsewhere in the country or the resources to pay for alternative accommodation. Some stay behind to care for relatives who are disabled or infirm, or because they work as emergency and medical personnel. “Who is left here in Kiryat Shmona; the weakest part of the population,” Shimon Kamari, the deputy mayor of Kiryat Shmona, only a few kilometers from the northern border, told Human Rights Watch. “The elderly and those who can’t afford hotels, because to stay for such a long time is very expensive.” Hezbollah has fired three different types of weapons at Israel so far. The vast majority are 122mm Katyusha rockets, while 220mm Fajr rockets have landed in the cities of Haifa and Nazareth. Hezbollah has also fired several 302mm Khaiber-1 rockets; the first of these landed on July 28 in empty areas near Afula, 50 km south of the border, and another wave hit near Hadera on August 4. In addition, Hezbollah said it had fired Khaiber-1 rockets at Beit Shean on August 2. Some of the rockets, such as those that killed eight rail workers in Haifa on July 16 and two young brothers in Nazareth on July 19, have warheads packed with thousands of metal ball bearings that spray out from the blast. Launched on civilian areas, the ball bearings are intended to inflict maximum harm. Under international humanitarian law – also known as the laws of war – parties to an armed conflict must not make the civilian population the object of attack, or fire indiscriminately into civilian areas. Nor can they launch attacks that they know will cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects that exceeds the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. Such attacks constitute war crimes. Latest Victims In attacks on August 4, Hezbollah reportedly fired more than 200 rockets, killing three people. According to media reports, two men, aged 24 and 32, died and several were wounded when a rocket hit a restaurant in the Druze village of Majdal Krum. In another strike, a 27-year-old mother of two, Manal Azem, died around 2:15 p.m. when a rocket struck in the Druze village of Mrar. One and a half weeks ago, a 15-year-old girl, Daa Abbas, also died in Mrar when a rocket hit her home. On August 3, eight people died in two rocket attacks. In one attack in Acre, five people died: Shimon Zaribi, 44; his 15-year-old daughter Mazal; Albert Ben-Abu, 41; Ariyeh Tamam, 50; and Ariyeh’s brother Tiran, 39. Human Rights Watch interviewed Ariyeh Tamam’s wife, Tzvia, who was wounded in the attack. She told Human Rights Watch how the rocket killed her husband and brother-in-law, and wounded her sister-in-law, Simcha, and her eight-year-old daughter, Noa:
It destroyed our entire family. My husband is dead; his brother is dead; their sister is in a lot of pain. My disabled mother-in-law is devastated – Simcha also used to be her main caregiver. The kids are traumatized forever. We don’t have a bomb shelter in our building, so when the sirens started, we went to the shelter in my aunt’s building on Ben Shushan Street. After the first rocket fell, and the siren stopped, we went out of the shelter to have a look. My daughter was standing near me, at the entrance, but Ariyeh went closer to the street. Suddenly, there was another loud boom and pieces of metal flew everywhere. I didn’t realize what had happened to me, but I rushed to the place where my husband was standing – all five people who were standing near the fence there were killed. There was blood everywhere; I tried to drag him away, and was screaming, ‘Don’t die; please don’t die!’ My son threw himself over his body, and was also screaming, ‘Daddy, daddy, don’t die!’ Then the police and the ambulances came, and took us all to the hospital. In another attack that day, three Palestinian-Arab Israeli youths from the village of Tarshiha lost their lives: Shnati Shnati, 21; Amir Naeem, 18; and Muhammad Faour, 17. During the attack, another rocket hit a house in the nearby village of Meila. A woman, Maha Morani, whose 2-year-old daughter Nura was wounded in the attack, told Human Rights Watch:
It was around 3.30 pm yesterday. It was the first time the rocket fell on our village. We live on the third floor in a three-floor apartment building. We left kids at home and went out just for a few minutes to buy some food. My daughter was sleeping in her room in a cradle, and our son was in the living room. Suddenly, the siren went off, and my husband – I don’t know how he felt it – tore at full speed to the house, and just flew up the stairs to the room where Nura was sleeping. He grabbed her and rushed down, and just a minute after they left the house, the rocket hit straight into the room where Nura had been sleeping. She was injured in the eye by pieces of concrete that flew all around. Thank God, our son was in another room, so he was not injured physically, but he was in shock. Since the attack he has not talked at all, not a single word. Hits on Hospitals Several medical and educational institutes have sustained damage from Katyusha attacks. Human Rights Watch researchers visited hospitals in Nahariya and Safed after they were hit. At Nahariya Hospital, rockets had been landing near the hospital since July 12, the hospital spokesperson said. On July 28, a rocket landed directly on the fourth floor, where the ophthalmology department is located, leaving a gaping hole in the wall and destroying eight rooms with beds and medical equipment. According to the spokesperson, the department usually held 20 to 30 patients, but officials had moved patients from the top floors to basement rooms since the start of the conflict. “Otherwise it’s hard to believe anyone would have survived the attack,” the spokesperson said. He estimated the damage to the hospital at about $200,000. “There are no military bases around here; nothing military at all,” he said. “I believe they know perfectly well they are firing at a hospital.” On July 17, around 11 p.m., a rocket landed just outside the Safed Hospital. According to the hospital’s head of security, the impact of the blast shattered windows in more than 50 rooms on the hospital’s north side and destroyed the external water and gas pipes. A patient in the hospital at the time, Roni Peri, 37, told Human Rights Watch what happened when the rocket hit:
Several of us had just gone out to the balcony on our floor. We heard a siren and tried to get back in, but it came too fast. The rocket hit the wall below, and I saw a huge yellow flash and glass flying. I could see, hear and feel the explosion. I was thrown by the explosion to the other side of the balcony and both my legs and arms were cut from the glass. There was a boy in a wheelchair who was in the hospital because he was injured in a previous rocket strike. We had taken him outside with us to try and cheer him up, and he was badly hurt in the head by glass. He hasn’t spoken since it happened. In the absence of troops or military assets inside, hospitals must never be attacked, Human Rights Watch said. Deliberately attacking them is a war crime. Hits on Homes Rockets have hit homes in many northern towns, although in most cases witnesses or security officials told Human Rights Watch that the inhabitants were not home at the time. In Nahariya, Moshe Zamir, 56, witnessed a rocket strike on his neighbor’s house on July 18. “Around 6 p.m., I went outside to sit on my front porch,” he said. “All of a sudden, I heard a huge boom, and I quickly crouched down on the ground. I saw debris flying all over the place and I ran back inside my house.” The missile hit the house of the Akuka family, Zamir’s neighbors, who had already left town, he said. Malka Karasanti, 70, was injured when a rocket destroyed the top two floors of her three-story apartment building in Haifa on July 17. She told Human Rights Watch:
I was taking a nap in my apartment on the second floor when, around 2:30 p.m., I heard a siren go off. I went to the bathroom, which I use as my safe room since there is no shelter in the building. There was a loud boom, and then everything began to collapse around me. … I was injured in my right shoulder bone, I broke a left rib, and I have a tear in my eardrum so I don’t hear well now. Hits on Businesses Hezbollah rockets have hit a number of workplaces directly and have taken a heavy economic toll on agriculture, tourism, industry and small businesses in northern Israel. Many businesses in the north have either dramatically scaled back their work or have closed entirely due to ongoing attacks. The most serious attack took place on July 16, when a rocket slammed into a train depot in Haifa, killing eight workers and wounding 12. Human Rights Watch interviewed four railway workers at Haifa’s Rambam Hospital who were wounded by ball bearings from the lethal blast. “There were three loud booms, and I started running out of the depot,” said Alek Vensbaum, 61, a worker at the Israel Train Authority. “One of the guys, Nissim, who was later killed, yelled at everyone to run to the shelter. The fourth boom got me when I was nearly at the door, and I was hit by shrapnel. ... I was hit by ball bearing-like pieces of metal in my neck, hand, stomach and foot.” Sami Raz, 39, a railway electrician, said a ball bearing pierced his lung and lodged near his heart. “I had terrible difficulty breathing after I was hit,” he said. On July 23, a Hezbollah rocket hit a carpentry shop in Kiryat Ata owned by David Siboni, killing one worker named Habib Awad. Siboni, 60, told Human Rights Watch:
I've had this business for 30 years. Despite the situation, I decided to keep my shop open, just for fewer hours and with fewer workers. This morning I was in my office upstairs when I heard the siren go off. There were eight other workers in the shop and I yelled at them to run to the safe room. I didn't think I had time to get downstairs, so I stayed up in my office and suddenly the rocket hit us directly. Habib had apparently just peeked out the door of the safe room to make sure everyone was in, and the blast got him. I think all the injuries were internal, you couldn't see any damage from the outside. On July 19, a rocket hit a car garage in Nazareth owned for the past 35 years by Ased Abu Naja Ased. The direct hit destroyed the garage, the office with computers, diagnostic machines, several cars being serviced in the shop and three new cars for sale that had arrived that day. Abu Naja said that the attack thankfully took place on Wednesday, the one day of the week when the garage closed early. Otherwise, at least 20 workers would have been in the garage. Shelters Human Rights Watch researchers visited six bomb shelters in Haifa and Nahariya where many local residents have spent days and nights since the conflict began. Most of the shelters were stifling hot and overcrowded with insufficient facilities for the number of people they are meant to serve. Sitting in a shelter in Nahariya, Rosa Guttmann, 52, told Human Rights Watch how difficult it was for older residents. “The access for the elderly is hard with all the stairs,” she said. “It is very difficult for them to quickly climb down into the shelter and later to get back out. The shelters are cramped and there isn’t enough room for everyone.” Anther woman in the same shelter told Human Rights Watch:
We are in the shelter all the time, since the day things started. We only leave when the emergency services announce on the loudspeaker that we can go out. Sometimes we stay at the shelter during the day and go home to sleep at night. Yesterday we went home at around midnight to sleep but around 2 a.m. rockets started falling and at 5 a.m. we’d had enough, and returned to the shelter. We need more mattresses for everyone to sleep here. It is especially hard for the children. They are bored and they are scared. On July 18, a Hezbollah rocket killed Andrei Zlanski, 37, just outside a bomb shelter in Nahariya. Human Rights Watch researchers arrived on the scene just after the attack and spoke with Eliav Sian, 34, a witness to the attack:
The guy put his wife and child into the bomb shelter and then went out, I’m not sure why. There was no siren at the time, just a general warning to enter and stay in the shelters. I was standing near the entrance of the shelter and the guy was just a few meters away. All of a sudden I heard a whistling sound, and quickly ran back inside. The guy didn’t make it and was killed instantly by the missile. Zlanski, Human Rights Watch later learned, had stepped out of the shelter to get a blanket for his daughter. “There used to be about 70 people in the shelter but after he was killed many people left town, especially those with kids,” said Yoav Zalgan, 35, a single man who remained in the shelter. “And now 30 people are usually here.” To see a list of civilians killed by Hezbollah Rockets in Israel , July 12-August 4, 2006.
Related Material
Questions and Answers on Hostilities Between Israel and HezbollahBackground Briefing, August 2, 2006
More of Human Rights Watch's work on the Israel-Lebanon ConflictSpecial Focus
From: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/08/05/lebano13921.htm
© Copyright 2003, Human Rights Watch 350 Fifth Avenue, 34th Floor New York, NY 10118-3299 USA
Israel/Lebanon: Hezbollah Must End Attacks on Civilians
Rocket Attacks on Civilians in Israel Are War Crimes
(New York, August 5, 2006) – Hezbollah must immediately stop firing rockets into civilian areas in Israel, Human Rights Watch said today. Entering the fourth week of attacks, such rockets have claimed 30 civilian lives, including six children, and wounded hundreds more. “Lobbing rockets blindly into civilian areas is without doubt a war crime,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. ”Nothing can justify this assault on the most fundamental standards for sparing civilians the hazards of war.” Hezbollah claims that some of its attacks are aimed at military bases inside Israel, which are legitimate targets. But most of the attacks appear to have been directed at civilian areas and have hit pedestrians, hospitals, schools, homes and businesses. Since July 12, when Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight, Human Rights Watch researchers have been documenting the war’s impact on civilians in Israel and Lebanon, interviewing the witnesses and survivors of attacks, as well as doctors, emergency workers, police, military and government officials. As of August 4, Hezbollah had launched a reported 2,500 rockets into predominantly civilian areas in northern Israel. Some longer-range rockets landed as far south as the city of Hadera, some 85 km from the border. Hezbollah announced that it had attacked Hadera on August 4 in retaliation for an Israeli air raid in Lebanon earlier that day that reportedly killed more than 20 farm workers. Yesterday, Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, offered to stop bombing Israel’s “northern settlements” if the Israeli military stopped bombing Lebanon’s “cities and civilians.” He also warned that an Israeli attack on Beirut would result in Hezbollah bombing Tel Aviv. In a report issued on August 3, “Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon,” Human Rights Watch documented a systematic failure by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to distinguish between combatants and civilians. In some cases, the timing and intensity of the attack, the absence of a military target, as well as subsequent strikes on rescuers, suggest that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians. Yesterday, Israeli bombing reportedly killed at least 40 civilians in Lebanon. “Human Rights Watch has documented the Israeli military’s persistent use of indiscriminate force, which has killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians,” Roth said. “But war crimes by one side in a conflict never justify war crimes by another. Hezbollah must stop using the excuse of Israeli misconduct to justify its own.” Northern Israel, an area populated by about one 1 million people, has come to a virtual standstill because of Hezbollah’s rockets, which are exacting an enormous human and economic toll. Authorities believe that up to half the population has left the area, while the rest are living in constant fear of the air raid sirens that warn of attacks. Human Rights Watch said many of those who remain in northern Israel are unable to leave because they don’t have relatives elsewhere in the country or the resources to pay for alternative accommodation. Some stay behind to care for relatives who are disabled or infirm, or because they work as emergency and medical personnel. “Who is left here in Kiryat Shmona; the weakest part of the population,” Shimon Kamari, the deputy mayor of Kiryat Shmona, only a few kilometers from the northern border, told Human Rights Watch. “The elderly and those who can’t afford hotels, because to stay for such a long time is very expensive.” Hezbollah has fired three different types of weapons at Israel so far. The vast majority are 122mm Katyusha rockets, while 220mm Fajr rockets have landed in the cities of Haifa and Nazareth. Hezbollah has also fired several 302mm Khaiber-1 rockets; the first of these landed on July 28 in empty areas near Afula, 50 km south of the border, and another wave hit near Hadera on August 4. In addition, Hezbollah said it had fired Khaiber-1 rockets at Beit Shean on August 2. Some of the rockets, such as those that killed eight rail workers in Haifa on July 16 and two young brothers in Nazareth on July 19, have warheads packed with thousands of metal ball bearings that spray out from the blast. Launched on civilian areas, the ball bearings are intended to inflict maximum harm. Under international humanitarian law – also known as the laws of war – parties to an armed conflict must not make the civilian population the object of attack, or fire indiscriminately into civilian areas. Nor can they launch attacks that they know will cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects that exceeds the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. Such attacks constitute war crimes. Latest Victims In attacks on August 4, Hezbollah reportedly fired more than 200 rockets, killing three people. According to media reports, two men, aged 24 and 32, died and several were wounded when a rocket hit a restaurant in the Druze village of Majdal Krum. In another strike, a 27-year-old mother of two, Manal Azem, died around 2:15 p.m. when a rocket struck in the Druze village of Mrar. One and a half weeks ago, a 15-year-old girl, Daa Abbas, also died in Mrar when a rocket hit her home. On August 3, eight people died in two rocket attacks. In one attack in Acre, five people died: Shimon Zaribi, 44; his 15-year-old daughter Mazal; Albert Ben-Abu, 41; Ariyeh Tamam, 50; and Ariyeh’s brother Tiran, 39. Human Rights Watch interviewed Ariyeh Tamam’s wife, Tzvia, who was wounded in the attack. She told Human Rights Watch how the rocket killed her husband and brother-in-law, and wounded her sister-in-law, Simcha, and her eight-year-old daughter, Noa:
It destroyed our entire family. My husband is dead; his brother is dead; their sister is in a lot of pain. My disabled mother-in-law is devastated – Simcha also used to be her main caregiver. The kids are traumatized forever. We don’t have a bomb shelter in our building, so when the sirens started, we went to the shelter in my aunt’s building on Ben Shushan Street. After the first rocket fell, and the siren stopped, we went out of the shelter to have a look. My daughter was standing near me, at the entrance, but Ariyeh went closer to the street. Suddenly, there was another loud boom and pieces of metal flew everywhere. I didn’t realize what had happened to me, but I rushed to the place where my husband was standing – all five people who were standing near the fence there were killed. There was blood everywhere; I tried to drag him away, and was screaming, ‘Don’t die; please don’t die!’ My son threw himself over his body, and was also screaming, ‘Daddy, daddy, don’t die!’ Then the police and the ambulances came, and took us all to the hospital. In another attack that day, three Palestinian-Arab Israeli youths from the village of Tarshiha lost their lives: Shnati Shnati, 21; Amir Naeem, 18; and Muhammad Faour, 17. During the attack, another rocket hit a house in the nearby village of Meila. A woman, Maha Morani, whose 2-year-old daughter Nura was wounded in the attack, told Human Rights Watch:
It was around 3.30 pm yesterday. It was the first time the rocket fell on our village. We live on the third floor in a three-floor apartment building. We left kids at home and went out just for a few minutes to buy some food. My daughter was sleeping in her room in a cradle, and our son was in the living room. Suddenly, the siren went off, and my husband – I don’t know how he felt it – tore at full speed to the house, and just flew up the stairs to the room where Nura was sleeping. He grabbed her and rushed down, and just a minute after they left the house, the rocket hit straight into the room where Nura had been sleeping. She was injured in the eye by pieces of concrete that flew all around. Thank God, our son was in another room, so he was not injured physically, but he was in shock. Since the attack he has not talked at all, not a single word. Hits on Hospitals Several medical and educational institutes have sustained damage from Katyusha attacks. Human Rights Watch researchers visited hospitals in Nahariya and Safed after they were hit. At Nahariya Hospital, rockets had been landing near the hospital since July 12, the hospital spokesperson said. On July 28, a rocket landed directly on the fourth floor, where the ophthalmology department is located, leaving a gaping hole in the wall and destroying eight rooms with beds and medical equipment. According to the spokesperson, the department usually held 20 to 30 patients, but officials had moved patients from the top floors to basement rooms since the start of the conflict. “Otherwise it’s hard to believe anyone would have survived the attack,” the spokesperson said. He estimated the damage to the hospital at about $200,000. “There are no military bases around here; nothing military at all,” he said. “I believe they know perfectly well they are firing at a hospital.” On July 17, around 11 p.m., a rocket landed just outside the Safed Hospital. According to the hospital’s head of security, the impact of the blast shattered windows in more than 50 rooms on the hospital’s north side and destroyed the external water and gas pipes. A patient in the hospital at the time, Roni Peri, 37, told Human Rights Watch what happened when the rocket hit:
Several of us had just gone out to the balcony on our floor. We heard a siren and tried to get back in, but it came too fast. The rocket hit the wall below, and I saw a huge yellow flash and glass flying. I could see, hear and feel the explosion. I was thrown by the explosion to the other side of the balcony and both my legs and arms were cut from the glass. There was a boy in a wheelchair who was in the hospital because he was injured in a previous rocket strike. We had taken him outside with us to try and cheer him up, and he was badly hurt in the head by glass. He hasn’t spoken since it happened. In the absence of troops or military assets inside, hospitals must never be attacked, Human Rights Watch said. Deliberately attacking them is a war crime. Hits on Homes Rockets have hit homes in many northern towns, although in most cases witnesses or security officials told Human Rights Watch that the inhabitants were not home at the time. In Nahariya, Moshe Zamir, 56, witnessed a rocket strike on his neighbor’s house on July 18. “Around 6 p.m., I went outside to sit on my front porch,” he said. “All of a sudden, I heard a huge boom, and I quickly crouched down on the ground. I saw debris flying all over the place and I ran back inside my house.” The missile hit the house of the Akuka family, Zamir’s neighbors, who had already left town, he said. Malka Karasanti, 70, was injured when a rocket destroyed the top two floors of her three-story apartment building in Haifa on July 17. She told Human Rights Watch:
I was taking a nap in my apartment on the second floor when, around 2:30 p.m., I heard a siren go off. I went to the bathroom, which I use as my safe room since there is no shelter in the building. There was a loud boom, and then everything began to collapse around me. … I was injured in my right shoulder bone, I broke a left rib, and I have a tear in my eardrum so I don’t hear well now. Hits on Businesses Hezbollah rockets have hit a number of workplaces directly and have taken a heavy economic toll on agriculture, tourism, industry and small businesses in northern Israel. Many businesses in the north have either dramatically scaled back their work or have closed entirely due to ongoing attacks. The most serious attack took place on July 16, when a rocket slammed into a train depot in Haifa, killing eight workers and wounding 12. Human Rights Watch interviewed four railway workers at Haifa’s Rambam Hospital who were wounded by ball bearings from the lethal blast. “There were three loud booms, and I started running out of the depot,” said Alek Vensbaum, 61, a worker at the Israel Train Authority. “One of the guys, Nissim, who was later killed, yelled at everyone to run to the shelter. The fourth boom got me when I was nearly at the door, and I was hit by shrapnel. ... I was hit by ball bearing-like pieces of metal in my neck, hand, stomach and foot.” Sami Raz, 39, a railway electrician, said a ball bearing pierced his lung and lodged near his heart. “I had terrible difficulty breathing after I was hit,” he said. On July 23, a Hezbollah rocket hit a carpentry shop in Kiryat Ata owned by David Siboni, killing one worker named Habib Awad. Siboni, 60, told Human Rights Watch:
I've had this business for 30 years. Despite the situation, I decided to keep my shop open, just for fewer hours and with fewer workers. This morning I was in my office upstairs when I heard the siren go off. There were eight other workers in the shop and I yelled at them to run to the safe room. I didn't think I had time to get downstairs, so I stayed up in my office and suddenly the rocket hit us directly. Habib had apparently just peeked out the door of the safe room to make sure everyone was in, and the blast got him. I think all the injuries were internal, you couldn't see any damage from the outside. On July 19, a rocket hit a car garage in Nazareth owned for the past 35 years by Ased Abu Naja Ased. The direct hit destroyed the garage, the office with computers, diagnostic machines, several cars being serviced in the shop and three new cars for sale that had arrived that day. Abu Naja said that the attack thankfully took place on Wednesday, the one day of the week when the garage closed early. Otherwise, at least 20 workers would have been in the garage. Shelters Human Rights Watch researchers visited six bomb shelters in Haifa and Nahariya where many local residents have spent days and nights since the conflict began. Most of the shelters were stifling hot and overcrowded with insufficient facilities for the number of people they are meant to serve. Sitting in a shelter in Nahariya, Rosa Guttmann, 52, told Human Rights Watch how difficult it was for older residents. “The access for the elderly is hard with all the stairs,” she said. “It is very difficult for them to quickly climb down into the shelter and later to get back out. The shelters are cramped and there isn’t enough room for everyone.” Anther woman in the same shelter told Human Rights Watch:
We are in the shelter all the time, since the day things started. We only leave when the emergency services announce on the loudspeaker that we can go out. Sometimes we stay at the shelter during the day and go home to sleep at night. Yesterday we went home at around midnight to sleep but around 2 a.m. rockets started falling and at 5 a.m. we’d had enough, and returned to the shelter. We need more mattresses for everyone to sleep here. It is especially hard for the children. They are bored and they are scared. On July 18, a Hezbollah rocket killed Andrei Zlanski, 37, just outside a bomb shelter in Nahariya. Human Rights Watch researchers arrived on the scene just after the attack and spoke with Eliav Sian, 34, a witness to the attack:
The guy put his wife and child into the bomb shelter and then went out, I’m not sure why. There was no siren at the time, just a general warning to enter and stay in the shelters. I was standing near the entrance of the shelter and the guy was just a few meters away. All of a sudden I heard a whistling sound, and quickly ran back inside. The guy didn’t make it and was killed instantly by the missile. Zlanski, Human Rights Watch later learned, had stepped out of the shelter to get a blanket for his daughter. “There used to be about 70 people in the shelter but after he was killed many people left town, especially those with kids,” said Yoav Zalgan, 35, a single man who remained in the shelter. “And now 30 people are usually here.” To see a list of civilians killed by Hezbollah Rockets in Israel , July 12-August 4, 2006.
Related Material
Questions and Answers on Hostilities Between Israel and HezbollahBackground Briefing, August 2, 2006
More of Human Rights Watch's work on the Israel-Lebanon ConflictSpecial Focus
From: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/08/05/lebano13921.htm
© Copyright 2003, Human Rights Watch 350 Fifth Avenue, 34th Floor New York, NY 10118-3299 USA
Friday, August 04, 2006
Propaganda: Israel's lose-lose proposition.
From: hoppy8600@sbcglobal.net [mailto:hoppy8600@sbcglobal.net]
Sent: Friday, 4 August 2006 12:57 PM
To: hoppy8600@sbcglobal.net
Subject: Israel's lose-lose proposition
This story was sent to you by: hope melnick
...
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Israel's lose-lose proposition
--------------------
By Jonah Goldberg
Tribune Media Services
August 3, 2006
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Check the footage on this website if anyone has any doubts about Arab modus-operandi.
web: http://www.standwithus.com ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you took Western news outlets at face value, you'd think that every Arab hamlet, no matter how humble, must have at least one thriving American and Israeli flag merchant. For whenever the Big or Little Satan sneezes, it seems all anyone has to do is run down to Achmed's Flag Emporium to set one on fire for the cameras.
The point here, alas, is that Westerners are suckers. Or, put another way, terrorists aren't stupid. They understand that images are more important than armies. Heck, that's why they're terrorists in the first place. Nowhere is this more evident than in the global war against Israel. Its enemies understand that they cannot defeat Israel militarily. Instead, they must fight a war against Israel's resolve. This requires fighting on several fronts. One of them is terrorism. We know how that works: Blow up children. Tear apart buses. Shred wedding parties. Etc.
Another tactic in this "asymmetric" war is to make the Israelis the bad guys for resisting terrorism. Jews have a well-cultivated sense of guilt (take my word for it). And, for obvious reasons, no insult could hurt more than depicting Jews as Nazis. Hence, the nigh-on global campaign to depict Israelis as the heirs to Hitler. Of course, ad hitlerum argumentation is just the tip of the propaganda spear. "Aggression," "apartheid," "racist": No insult is barred from the anti-Israel script. Terrorize your enemy and make them feel like villains in the process--that's a powerful strategy.
This strategy depends on the willing support of what Lenin called "useful idiots." These are the accommodating Westerners--many of them intellectuals--all too willing to take the word of totalitarians and even more eager to believe that the champions of democracy are in the wrong. Some social scientists call these people "French," but that is too limiting. There are plenty of them in America too. All they require is a steady stream of useful "facts." For example, in 2002, a Palestinian camera crew was videotaping a staged funeral at which the "corpse" accidentally spilled out of the stretcher and was miraculously reborn.
Sometimes the facts don't require such sorcery; they just need to be gussied up a bit. In June, a Palestinian family was tragically killed by artillery while visiting a beach in Gaza. At first it seemed plausible that Israel was responsible. Which is why Hamas immediately swept the beach for evidence and collected all the shrapnel from the bodies to prevent that impression from changing. The Israelis initially apologized for the deaths--that's what Israelis do when they kill civilians--and only later revised their apology when an investigation revealed that the deaths were probably caused by ordnance buried under the beach.
That didn't stop the usual chorus from calling the deaths a deliberate massacre. Here's the thing. Even if Israel did accidentally bomb the beach--as the Hamas government still claims--those deaths would still be tragic, but they wouldn't be Israel's fault. Hamas was allowing rockets to be fired at Israel a few football fields' distance from a recreational beach, hiding behind day-tripping picnickers. What, exactly, was Israel supposed to do?
Just days ago, Israeli jets bombed a building in the Lebanese village of Qana--a building Israelis believed to be evacuated--and it later collapsed. More than 50 people, many of them children, died. Newspapers, politicians and a host of useful idiots condemned another Israeli massacre. Israel immediately apologized.
The script is even more familiar. The Qana "massacre" was very convenient for Hezbollah politically. It stymied Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to Beirut, forestalled talk of disarming Hezbollah, and rallied international opinion around the terrorist group. Aspects of the Qana story don't jibe, starting with the timeline. The building collapsed seven hours after the bombing. Some of the victims didn't look like they were killed in a building collapse, and refrigerated trucks were reportedly brought in before the media could visit the site, perhaps delivering corpses. An elaborate 30-foot banner condemning a bloody-lipped Rice for the attack was improbably at the ready for a protest that morning. Bloggers around the globe are steadily picking apart other details, to the dismay of many who like their anti-Israel story lines tidy (see confederateyankee.mu.nu for a summary).
But again, even if the deaths were the byproduct of Israel's bombing (which remains the most likely explanation for now), that hardly makes it an intentional massacre, and it hardly makes Israel the villain. Hezbollah deliberately places its weapons caches beneath schools and homes, in violation of the Geneva Conventions. It shoots its rockets from civilian population centers. If the rockets slaughter Israelis, Hezbollah wins. If Israel responds and kills civilians, Israel loses. And either way, you can be sure some sucker will blame Israel for the whole thing.
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Jonah Goldberg is editor at large of National Review Online. E-mail: JonahsColumn@aol.com
Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune
Sent: Friday, 4 August 2006 12:57 PM
To: hoppy8600@sbcglobal.net
Subject: Israel's lose-lose proposition
This story was sent to you by: hope melnick
...
--------------------
Israel's lose-lose proposition
--------------------
By Jonah Goldberg
Tribune Media Services
August 3, 2006
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Check the footage on this website if anyone has any doubts about Arab modus-operandi.
web: http://www.standwithus.com ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you took Western news outlets at face value, you'd think that every Arab hamlet, no matter how humble, must have at least one thriving American and Israeli flag merchant. For whenever the Big or Little Satan sneezes, it seems all anyone has to do is run down to Achmed's Flag Emporium to set one on fire for the cameras.
The point here, alas, is that Westerners are suckers. Or, put another way, terrorists aren't stupid. They understand that images are more important than armies. Heck, that's why they're terrorists in the first place. Nowhere is this more evident than in the global war against Israel. Its enemies understand that they cannot defeat Israel militarily. Instead, they must fight a war against Israel's resolve. This requires fighting on several fronts. One of them is terrorism. We know how that works: Blow up children. Tear apart buses. Shred wedding parties. Etc.
Another tactic in this "asymmetric" war is to make the Israelis the bad guys for resisting terrorism. Jews have a well-cultivated sense of guilt (take my word for it). And, for obvious reasons, no insult could hurt more than depicting Jews as Nazis. Hence, the nigh-on global campaign to depict Israelis as the heirs to Hitler. Of course, ad hitlerum argumentation is just the tip of the propaganda spear. "Aggression," "apartheid," "racist": No insult is barred from the anti-Israel script. Terrorize your enemy and make them feel like villains in the process--that's a powerful strategy.
This strategy depends on the willing support of what Lenin called "useful idiots." These are the accommodating Westerners--many of them intellectuals--all too willing to take the word of totalitarians and even more eager to believe that the champions of democracy are in the wrong. Some social scientists call these people "French," but that is too limiting. There are plenty of them in America too. All they require is a steady stream of useful "facts." For example, in 2002, a Palestinian camera crew was videotaping a staged funeral at which the "corpse" accidentally spilled out of the stretcher and was miraculously reborn.
Sometimes the facts don't require such sorcery; they just need to be gussied up a bit. In June, a Palestinian family was tragically killed by artillery while visiting a beach in Gaza. At first it seemed plausible that Israel was responsible. Which is why Hamas immediately swept the beach for evidence and collected all the shrapnel from the bodies to prevent that impression from changing. The Israelis initially apologized for the deaths--that's what Israelis do when they kill civilians--and only later revised their apology when an investigation revealed that the deaths were probably caused by ordnance buried under the beach.
That didn't stop the usual chorus from calling the deaths a deliberate massacre. Here's the thing. Even if Israel did accidentally bomb the beach--as the Hamas government still claims--those deaths would still be tragic, but they wouldn't be Israel's fault. Hamas was allowing rockets to be fired at Israel a few football fields' distance from a recreational beach, hiding behind day-tripping picnickers. What, exactly, was Israel supposed to do?
Just days ago, Israeli jets bombed a building in the Lebanese village of Qana--a building Israelis believed to be evacuated--and it later collapsed. More than 50 people, many of them children, died. Newspapers, politicians and a host of useful idiots condemned another Israeli massacre. Israel immediately apologized.
The script is even more familiar. The Qana "massacre" was very convenient for Hezbollah politically. It stymied Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to Beirut, forestalled talk of disarming Hezbollah, and rallied international opinion around the terrorist group. Aspects of the Qana story don't jibe, starting with the timeline. The building collapsed seven hours after the bombing. Some of the victims didn't look like they were killed in a building collapse, and refrigerated trucks were reportedly brought in before the media could visit the site, perhaps delivering corpses. An elaborate 30-foot banner condemning a bloody-lipped Rice for the attack was improbably at the ready for a protest that morning. Bloggers around the globe are steadily picking apart other details, to the dismay of many who like their anti-Israel story lines tidy (see confederateyankee.mu.nu for a summary).
But again, even if the deaths were the byproduct of Israel's bombing (which remains the most likely explanation for now), that hardly makes it an intentional massacre, and it hardly makes Israel the villain. Hezbollah deliberately places its weapons caches beneath schools and homes, in violation of the Geneva Conventions. It shoots its rockets from civilian population centers. If the rockets slaughter Israelis, Hezbollah wins. If Israel responds and kills civilians, Israel loses. And either way, you can be sure some sucker will blame Israel for the whole thing.
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Jonah Goldberg is editor at large of National Review Online. E-mail: JonahsColumn@aol.com
Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Truth & Representation: The Impact of media Bias on the Democracy. (Senator Santoro speech)
B'na i B'rith Lecture 2006
From: Senator Santoro.
I was honoured recently to be asked to address the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission in Melbourne, as part of the Commission’s 2006 lecture series. This was an appointment I had agreed to last year, but one that proved to be particularly timely in terms of the sad and terrible conflict in the Middle East.
The subject of my speech was Truth and Representation: The Impact of Media Bias on the Democracy. In it, I examined at some length examples of anti-Semitic language and pro-Palestinian language in the Australian media, particularly the public broadcasters. I also demonstrated examples of the media’s sympathetic approach to terrorist organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas. I spoke about the danger of moral relativism,that views the indiscriminate murder of innocents as merely a form of political expression, rather than labelling it as it should be labelled – as terrorism.
The greatest threat, I believe, from this kind of reporting is not only in the way it distorts Australians’ collective view of the world, but how that distortion then creates the conditions in which terrorism and its fellow travellers can thrive.
I, and my political colleagues, will continue to speak out against reporting that treats sovereign states and terrorist organisations as equally legitimate players in the global community. I urge you to do the same.
I have enclosed a copy of the speech for your information. I trust you will find it of interest.
With my kind regards and best wishes,
Truth and Representation: The Impact of Media Bias on the Democracy
Speech to the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission
2006 Lecture Series
Melbourne,
July 23, 2006
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you here tonight. It is a unique privilege for me, and one I hope to justify through my comments this evening.
May I acknowledge Anton Block, the President of the Jewish Council of Victoria, Dr Paul Gardner, chairman of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission, Associate Professor Douglas Kirsner, chair of the ADC public affairs committee, Lesley Gaspar, coordinator of the ADC lecture series, and Mrs Robyne Schwarz, president of Jewish Care.
I have chosen as my topic, "Truth and Representation: media bias and the threat to democracy". Such a topic is fraught with peril, because the relationship between the concepts and practices of truth and democracy has not always been an easy one.
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper noted that ever since Plato used his theory of truth and representation, set out in the famous parable of the cave, to justify totalitarian rule by philosopher-kings, tyrants have relied on claims to know the truth to justify their tyranny. History has provided us with countless gruesome examples of how truth-claims can be used to deny human rights and to thwart democracy, from Burma to Yugoslavia to Cambodia to Nazi Germany.
A free press is vital to democracy, as it can be used to expose truths that governments would rather keep hidden. But the role of the mass media in mediating the relationship between truth and democracy has not always been successful. The Nazis would not have had the success they had in persecuting the Jewish people had not the ground, in which their hatred grew, been well-prepared by many, many years of anti-Semitic prejudice in the German press.
If the fourth estate loses sight of its role as protector of truth, or fails to understand what that role really means, then it runs the risk of either becoming little more than a servant of state or corporate power at one extreme, or at the other, a victim of hubris whereby it comes to believe its role is simply to oppose the democratically elected government.
I believe that it is the latter risk that is more prevalent today in Australia today. The problem with the media assuming this attitude is that it can easily slide into an elitist disdain for the voting public and for democracy itself. Moreover, it can undermine, rather than advance, the search for truth, as it seeks to impose on the public what are no more than the prejudices of those who hold the pen.
Tonight I wish to provide some evidence for my belief that an important section of our mass media is at grave risk of sliding into this elitist and anti-democratic frame of mind, if it has not done so already. Many – and not least those who are the worst offenders – will dismiss this as me simply riding my usual hobby-horse about the ABC, but it is not. It is an important element of a wider, more important effort in the service of our culture and our values and our democracy.
More specifically, we must rescue the concept of moral truth from the dustbin of history into which post-modern moral relativism seeks to discard it. If we want to protect basic and fundamental universal human rights, and in so doing inoculate our democracy from the possibility of repeating the horrors of the Holocaust, or the Gulags, or Pol Pot's Year Zero, we must remember that human rights rest on a foundation of moral absolutes. If our culture continues to undermine the concept of moral truth, it will not long be able to stave off a descent into forms of barbarism that are still fresh in our collective memory.
The central role of the media in this effort cannot be over-estimated, and that is why I have been so focused on it in the Federal Parliament since entering the Senate in 2002. I have taken as my motto here the words: "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom."
That motto is especially timely today. Recent weeks have seen terrorists yet again unleash their work of destruction. In Mumbai, as in London a year ago, indiscriminate slaughter has proven the terrorists’ weapon of choice. And in the Middle East, Hezbollah and Hamas – evil twins born of, and sustained by, the same evil parents – have provoked violence, knowing full well the cost their naked aggression would impose not only on innocent Israelis but also on many tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians and Lebanese alike.
Faced with these outrages, it is not enough for us to shake our heads and hope that the world will set itself right.
Rather, we must protect and assert the values that underpin our Australian society: values in which there can be no place for terrorism’s supporters and fellow-travellers.
To that end, we must affirm our commitment to those throughout the world who are on the front line of the fight against terrorism – a commitment which is not merely intellectual and emotional, but also practical: that is, we must contribute as fully as we can, to ensure that terrorism, and the vile threat it poses, is defeated and ultimately destroyed.
The Howard Government’s commitment to fighting terrorism has been and remains steadfast. Absolutely steadfast.
We have provided, and continue to provide, assistance to countries such as Indonesia to fight terrorism.
We have important troop commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in our immediate region.
And we have asserted, and continue to assert, our enduring friendship with Israel, as it faces enemies committed to its destruction.
Ordinary Australians understand the importance of facing off the terrorists. They know that if we stand back, the bombs that killed so many young Australians in Bali and so many poor, hardworking people in Mumbai, and that now cause so much death and destruction in northern Israel, will soon enough kill us and our children.
But the struggle ahead will not be over quickly – and if we are to sustain it, we must rely not only on the good sense and decency of ordinary Australians, but also on an informed and factual understanding of the world we are in and the responsibilities it places upon us.
The role of the Media
In an open, democratic society such as Australia’s, the media plays a central role in shaping our understanding of the world. It is mainly through the media that we are informed; and it is from the media that we get many of the images and analyses that help determine the way we see the world.
It is because the media is so important that we provide large-scale financial support to the ABC and SBS – so that the community will have access to the impartial information it needs and deserves. It is a clear indication of the on-going government support for the ABC that public broadcasting received a substantial funding increase in this year’s triennial budget allocation.
I want to state clearly here tonight my belief that both the ABC and SBS in so many ways provide a valuable service to Australian public life. Australia would be a poorer place without so many aspects of the services provided by the ABC and SBS.
However, the public broadcasters lets themselves down regularly by failing to apply the same rigour to the task of self-critique that they would claim to apply to the task of representing the truth to their audience. The ABC, for example, has a charter requirement to cater to all Australians. But if it was truly capable of honest self-assessment, the ABC would be more willing to recognise, acknowledge and correct the deep-seated and institutionalised bias that is manifested in its recent reportage of both domestic and international affairs.
Some very recent examples I can quote here tonight are staggering.
Merely a week ago, Fran Kelly, the presenter of ABC Radio National’s Breakfast program, chose to interview Robert Fisk on the events in the Middle East. Mr Fisk, she said, is a much praised and award winning journalist. And indeed he is – for he has received praise from no less a judge of character than Osama bin Laden himself, who, in a videotaped message on the eve of the 2004 presidential election in the U.S., commended Fisk by name for his incisive and “neutral” reporting. Did Ms Kelly disclose any of this? Obviously not.
As an aside at this point, I would like to quote the same Mr Fisk from an opinion column in The Canberra Times last week. In it, he quotes – without challenge or question – terrorist leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah claiming that in its rocket attacks on Israel “Hezbollah originally wished to confine all casualties to the military”. Fisk then goes on to criticise the – quote – “cruelty of Israel’s response” – unquote – to those unprovoked and deadly attacks. It’s no wonder that he attracts rave reviews from Osama bin Laden!
To take another example, let’s consider for a minute SBS’s coverage of the conflict in the Middle East on its flagship 6-30 PM news for Sunday July 16th. Israel’s military actions in Lebanon were described as variously “murderous”, “illegal” and “contrary to the laws of war”. As for what Hezbollah had done, and its disastrous consequences for the people of Lebanon, the report SBS chose to air – and I emphasize the word chose – cutely said this: that Hezbollah “had some little explaining to do”.
The Prime Minister John Howard decisively attempted to stop the rot on the AM program on July 14th when he was asked, and I quote: “Has Israel gone too far?” Mr Howard asked the reporter why the question must always be couched in terms of what Israel has done wrong and whether it should be condemned. He was, of course, appalled by the loss of life on both sides of the conflict. But – and to quote again – the Prime Minister said “the assumption that it was started by Israel in this particular instance is wrong”.
That the Prime Minister should feel the need to highlight to a reporter the skewed nature of the question he was being asked is indicative of a deeply-ingrained culture – a reflex anti-Semitism – in parts of the media. Such questions betray a belief that Israel is always at fault and has no right to defend itself in any way against attacks from terrorists such as Hezbollah.
To say that this is outrageous, and a disgrace, is an understatement.
What makes bias so dangerous, and also so difficult to control, is that it is not only what is said, but rather what is not said, that can be profoundly misleading.
Take the reporting – again on the ABC’s AM program – of the statement by Mr Chirac that Israel’s response to the invasion of its territory and the kidnapping of its soldiers was “disproportionate”. Now, how often did you hear Tony Eastely note that this was the same Mr Chirac who merely a few months earlier, had said that were France subjected to a terrorist attack, he would not rule out retaliating through a nuclear attack? The simple answer: not once.
Nor did Mr Eastely make the same point when Mr Putin criticised Israel’s response to the kidnapping of its soldiers as “disproportionate” and called on Israel to negotiate with terrorists. Surely, one might have expected our national broadcaster to ask how consistent this was with Russia’s own behaviour in Chechnya – but no, yet again, the ABC chose the convenient course of silence.
Equally, how often have you heard the terms “indiscriminate”, “illegal”, “contrary to international law” and “disproportionate” applied by the ABC and SBS not to Israel, but to Hezbollah’s and Hamas’ practice of shelling civilian towns in Israel? The answer: not once!
And when the ABC and SBS interviewed Lebanese Government Ministers, who merely washed their hands of Hezbollah’s actions, did you hear the interviewer ask how Hezbollah has been allowed to build up its arsenal in Southern Lebanon? No, of course you didn’t – because they wouldn’t even have thought to put the question, much less to fearlessly pursue the point.
Similarly, how balanced is it for the SBS to selectively run commentary from the BBC – commentary which is systematically and aggressively hostile to Israel – rather than say, also running the stories aired on US channels?
Another form of bias is sympathetic language. To give just one example, the ABC refers to Kassam Rockets fired at Israel by Palestinian terrorists as “home made rockets.” This has the effect of makings the Palestinians seem like the underdogs, battling away against the might of the Israeli military with home made weapons. In truth – as you all know – Israel is a small country with a small population, virtually surrounded by hostile and in some cases increasingly fanatical countries. The terrorists it faces are well-organised, aggressive and persistently violent. They are financed and armed by Syria and Iran, which are countries far larger than Israel. They cynically exploit the Western media’s desire to convey graphic images of casualties by locating themselves in civilian areas, ensuring that women and children will be among the worst victims of the conflicts they ignite and promote. They are hardly the home-made Dad’s Army the media language would suggest and would want us all here in Australia to believe.
The decisions to portray events in this way smack of deliberate, thought through, deception.
They are what biased journalists do when they want to hide from claims of bias, while still slanting the way the news is presented. A few token interviews, ritualistically presented, with Israeli spokesmen or commentators, or others more sympathetic to Israel’s predicament, only make this deceitful purpose all the clearer.
Blatant bias about Israel is nothing new. But the scope of the problems is far broader. When terrorists targeted the London underground, time and again our public broadcasters’ reports linked the terrorists’ murderous actions to the Britain’s participation in the Iraq war – suggesting, if not stating, that the ultimate fault lay not with the murderers but with the Blair government. The further, important, inference was that – just as Blair had brought the wrath of the terrorists onto London – so the Howard Government was exposing Australians to unacceptable risks: risks that, according to many ABC commentators, had already eventuated in the Bali bombings.
Given that, one might have expected the ABC and SBS to at least comment on the fact that India could hardly be claimed to have any role in Iraq – a war it had actively opposed. Rather, here was further proof, if more proof was needed, of terrorism’s indiscriminate character. But far from it: no such thought was expressed.
It would not be fair to say that issues of media bias are limited to the public broadcasters, for they are not.
I’ll give you a recent, telling example. On July 10, this year, Paul Sheehan wrote a commentary piece in the Sydney Morning Herald about the much unlamented Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, headed: “A petty crim who took on the world.”
I thought that was a rather promising title. And in fact Sheehan did note that al-Zarqawi was really just a petty street thug, with 37 criminal charges and convictions, including for sexual assault, who simply took the opportunity to recast his personal brand of petty vandalism and mayhem as a form of Jihad. And we all know the rest of that history.
But then Sheehan tells us that “it is important to note that while he was a Jordanian by passport, he was a Palestinian by blood …” Why is that important?
Well, it’s apparently important, because it makes the story easier, and allows us to find a root cause for psychotic and undirected violence. It allows the journalist three paragraphs later to write: “Israel, preoccupied by the battle for its own survival, is hurling fire accelerants into the passions of millions of young Muslims …”
In other words, the pervert and murderer al-Zarqawi is the creation of Israel, not of his own twisted desires and opportunism.
Sheehan, finally, passes this judgement: “The moral legacy of the holocaust has now passed into history”.
Sheehan is by no means the worst commentator we have. In fact, he is generally among the better ones. But there are deeply troubling similarities between the approach he adopts in the article I have cited, and that persistently and explicitly adopted by our public broadcasters.
Those similarities rest on a common core of moral relativism. That relativism has become ever more deeply pernicious – because it not only refuses to make judgements based on the values on which Australian society rests, but also, and increasingly, serves to obfuscate the facts, with the purpose or effect of conferring legitimacy on what is plainly illegitimate. It allows those who would manipulate truth so as to present a biased point of view to do so while claiming that all they are doing is providing a balanced, impartial account.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the old left-wing adage that: “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”. That adage has been cited by the ABC and SBS as the reason they refuse to call terrorists terrorists. Instead, they use terms such as ‘rebels’ and ‘militants’, which apply an air of legitimacy to those activities. But there is no moral equivalence between dissent and murder.
I believe a media which fails to distinguish between good and evil, and which equates ‘balance’ with studied relativism, fails its constituency: if we are not willing to call terrorism evil, then we have lost any sense of truth.
If some journalists on the ABC and SBS are frankly sympathetic to Hamas and Hezbollah, or even on balance believe they have the stronger case, why don’t they have the courage to say so, rather than hiding behind a pretence of moral relativism? The cause of truth is not well served when those who have so much power to shape perceptions refuse to disclose, and be held accountable for, the perspective they take.
I noted earlier that the public broadcasters are not alone in adopting this attitude: those of you who are readers of The Age will doubtless know what I mean.
But there is a fact that distinguishes the public broadcasters from their privately owned counterparts: they are tax-payer funded. You and I have a choice about whether or not to buy The Age; we do not have a choice about whether to pay for the ABC and SBS.
There may be good reasons for this. But tax-payer funding must bring with it added responsibilities. Among those responsibilities is a commitment to values of truth, honesty and editorial balance that are not well-served in the examples I have cited tonight.
The Senate Estimates Process
Holding the public broadcasters to account for the manner in which they undertake their activities is an essential function of Parliament.
In three years as a Senator for Queensland in the national Parliament prior to becoming a Minister, I developed something of a reputation for my questioning of ABC and SBS management at Budget Estimates Committees. And while I have been frequently criticised for my activities, I firmly believe media bias is an issue of concern to many Australians.
The findings of a Morgan Poll on the subject published 18 months ago were alarming – or at the very least should have been alarming – for members of the media.
Two thirds of Australians surveyed said they believed Australian newspapers were biased. 86 percent of Australians believe that newspaper journalists are biased, 75 percent of Australians held the same view about talk back hosts, and 73 percent about TV reporters.
Fewer than 40 percent of Australians believed that radio news reporting was accurate and fair.
Only 18 percent of Australians believed radio announcers were honest and ethical.
And a separate poll of Australian journalists found that 40 percent believed News Limited was the most biased media organisation, followed by 25 percent who thought the ABC was the most biased.
And of even greater concern for media organisations, was a finding that Australians’ regard for the ethics and honesty of journalists had fallen since December 2003.
These are very large numbers and must concern the profession of journalism. And they more than justify the interest in the work of our public broadcasters at Senate Estimates hearings – an interest, I am pleased to say, that has been vigorously continued by my Liberal Party colleagues Senator Ronaldson and Senator Fierravanti-Wells since my elevation to the Ministry.
The work we have done has been a hard slog. But we have had some success. In fact, three years of forensic questioning by all three of us at Senate Estimates Hearings paid off in May this year, with an admission of the ABC’s double standard on terrorism, to which I referred earlier. Some of you may be familiar with this outcome, but for the sake of everyone else, please permit me to provide you with some brief background.
The ABC adopted a policy around 2001, that when it came to referring to groups as “terrorist organisations”, they would be guided by the United Nations. It meant nothing to them that the Australian government had proscribed groups as terrorists. They would worship at the altar of the UN.
In 2002, then head of international operations at ABC News, John Tulloh, issued a memo to journalists and I quote. “Do not refer to Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad as terrorist organisations. There have rightly been complaints about this usage. Those groups are not on the UN list of terrorist organisations and must not be referred to as such.”
So there is a very stark indication from the ABC that they bowed to pressure.
Over the course of the next three years, I found dozens of examples where ABC journalists had referred to some 20 different groups as terrorist organisations, even though they weren’t on the UN list. While ABC management had been quick to act when it involved protecting Palestinian terrorist groups, there is no evidence that the ABC took any action when it came to those other terrorist groups. They could be described as terrorists – but the Palestinian groups could not.
The ABC was asked to explain this apparent double standard at Estimates hearings. What was their policy and how was it applied? They could not give a coherent answer. They muttered things like “appropriate circumstances”, “blatant acts of terrorism” and “demonstrably a terror group”.
The ABC was asked why its journalists had referred to Jemaah Islamiah as a terrorist organisation after the first Bali bombings, even though JI – at that point – wasn’t on the UN list.
They said it was because of the links between J-I and Al-Qaeda. I asked what evidence of those links journalists had when they referred to J-I as a terror group. Again, they failed to answer my question.
I then gave them numerous examples of evidence of links between Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda, and asked if they would therefore call Hezbollah terrorists for the same reason.
True to form, they failed to answer that question as well.
But we persevered. I asked then managing Director of the ABC Russel Balding this question:
What is the difference between terrorists in southern Russia killing children in a school and terrorists in Jerusalem killing school children on a bus?
Incredibly, he couldn’t even provide an answer to that question.
But we were not deterred by the ABC’s obfuscation. We persevered, until the ABC news chief John Cameron painted himself into a corner, where he could no longer say that while there had been a blatant terrorist attack in Israel, and the bomber was demonstrably a terrorist, the group that sent the bomber was not a terrorist group.
The ABC tried desperately to wriggle out of the issue by saying that they would describe them as a terrorist organisation in the context of an individual act of terrorism.
In other words, they are a terrorist organisation one day, but not the next.
Mr Cameron, the news boss, then issued an internal memo to journalists explaining the ABC position. Or, I should say, attempting to explain it.
Allow me to quote from the memo – which has been leaked by concerned whistleblowers.
“That is not to say that we label an entire organisation as a terrorist organisation in perpetuity on the basis of acts of terror committed by its members.”
So the ABC is suggesting that some sort of statute of limitations or moratorium should apply to terrorist groups. If Islamic Jihad doesn’t send in a suicide bomber for, what, six months, it should no longer be referred to as a terrorist organisation.
And notice how they attempt to put some distance between individual terrorists and terrorist organisations. It really is as farcical as that.
Another small win at Estimates came in the revelation that Mr Cameron had banned journalists from using the expression “our troops in Iraq.” The ABC tried to justify this by claiming that, as they are not the ABC’s troops, then strictly speaking their journalists shouldn’t say “our troops in Iraq”.
The fallaciousness of this argument was revealed when Senator Fierravanti-Wells and I produced no fewer than 670 subsequent braches of the “our” rule, including our diggers and our Anzacs. But the only time the ABC did anything about it was when it concerned Australian military involvement in Iraq.
The ABC acted, in other words, to vigilantly ensure its journalists did not refer to our servicemen and women, who are serving our country in Iraq, as “our troops”: this even though the “policy” – and I say “policy” in quotes, because it so plainly lacks any rationale -- on which that prohibition was based was being flagrantly disregarded in many other areas.
The double standard this involves is obvious; the slant and bias that underpins it, is deeply troubling.
The danger to democracy
I’ve given you a lot of examples tonight to validate my thesis, and I hope that you have not regarded their use as tedious. It is necessary when you mount an argument that you provide genuine and recent examples of the kinds of behaviour you are criticising. Some people – including my critics who will pick over this speech – may claim that these examples are isolated or trivial. In response I would say that the examples and the evidence are far from isolated, though time has forced me to discard dozens of further persuasive instances of bias and distortion of truth and fact. Moreover, the pattern I have pointed to is anything but transient, especially when it is repeated hour after hour, day after day.
Rather, the trend is deeply disturbing because it points strongly to a pattern of behaviour in the media which seeks to justify, or at least excuse, the actions of terrorists, and to downplay the role of western governments and – I’m prepared to say it – “our troops” in combating terrorism in its various forms. What I have talked about tonight is evidence of the moral relativism which I outlined at the beginning of my remarks, and of that relativism being used to slant the news in ways that bear no relationship to the search for truth.
This bias is all the more serious because it makes the fight against terrorism harder. To win this fight, we must be united in our abhorrence and condemnation of the actions of terrorists. There is no room for moral equivocation, and the justification it provides for the senseless slaughter of innocents.
When the public is conditioned to abide, and even accept, terrorism as a legitimate form of political expression, the terrorists are heartened and gain strength. When that conditioning weakens the resolve of the electorate to reject evil in all its forms – be it terrorism, dictatorship or genocide - our democratic institutions become vulnerable.
This is the real danger of bias in the media – not just because it subtly changes the collective attitude of the nation, but because such a shaping of collective attitude can then corrode the pillars of our democracy and our way of life. In the short term, it undermines our determination to pursue the fight against terrorism in all of its forms; in the longer run, it displaces and even replaces a commitment to fundamental values with a moral relativism that is inconsistent with a sound democracy and a healthy society.
The Way Forward
So what is to be done here? From a political perspective, we will hold the line. We will continue to speak out in support of truth and good, and we will continue to criticise the excesses of the media, particularly that part of it which is publicly funded.
We need more people to do this, and I am encouraged that there is an increasing willingness in the mainstream press to give space to the Andrew Bolts and the Mark Steyns and people like them.
One of my colleagues outside the Parliament recently asked me why, if the Government feels a need to fund program production, it restricts this to the public broadcaster. Why not, I am asked, rely on a fully independent Board to fund program production not only at the public sector broadcasters but also at commercial channels? Wouldn’t such a fully contestable arrangement provide the competitive disciplines our public sector broadcasters now seem to lack?
Now I’m the Minister for Ageing, and not the Minister for Communications, but let me communicate my strong belief that we need to explore those ideas and others in an open and constructive debate.
As many of you know, I am, in my role as a Senator, most concerned about the protection of core values. I am proud that these days we acknowledge the heritage of these values, and in this area as in others, I am committed to ensuring that we stand up for what it is that has made and continues to make Australia the great country it is.
I know that you too, are deeply committed to this nation – a nation to which the Jewish community has made such an outstanding contribution.
Today, with the threats that bear on us, it is more important than ever that that community speaks with one strong and clear voice in support of the Government’s stand against international terrorism and its fellow-travellers.
It should not be the role of the national broadcasters to misrepresent that threat, to downplay it, or to somehow represent Israel and the United States as the cause, simply because of the left-wing prejudices of a large number of strategically-placed journalists and producers.
I would urge all of you who care about this issue to be ever vigilant when it comes to bias in the media.
It is through that vigilance that our public broadcasters must learn that it is not acceptable for them to have one language for talking about the murder by terrorists of innocent children in Southern Russia and another language for talking about the murder by terrorists of innocent children in Haifa, Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem.
The fact is that the death of children is tragic and abhorrent, regardless of nationality, race or creed. But those who fire from behind the backs of children, knowing full well the carnage they will cause, should not be rewarded with precisely the media attention that they seek; rather, they should be forced by the media to take moral responsibility for the atrocities they commit.
It is this willingness to confront the issue of moral responsibility that is lacking and that we must set right.
We must rescue the concept of truth from the moral relativism that would reduce it to nothing more than a slogan to support one political ideology over another. We must assert universal human values that are grounded in our human nature as creatures imbued with an innate dignity that must be respected, protected and nourished by our social institutions and laws.
It is a recipe for social suicide if we allow arguably the most influential and important social institution of democratic communities, namely a free press, to slip into an uncritical acceptance of the illogical post-modern doctrine that there is no such as thing as capital T truth, and that what I call true and good might be diametrically opposed to what you call true and good, yet somehow both are equally true and good.
Yielding ground on this core point would make our commitment to a free media a suicide pact – one of whose victims would surely be the very freedom of expression that is so important to our Australian democracy.
I, and I am sure, you, are not willing to be parties to any such pact. It is for this reason that we must not merely continue, but redouble, our efforts to make the media accountable.
Thank you for the invitation to speak with you tonight. Thank you for supporting what is true and good. And thank you for your friendship.
Santo Santoro
Senator for Queensland
Minister for Ageing
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From: Senator Santoro.
I was honoured recently to be asked to address the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission in Melbourne, as part of the Commission’s 2006 lecture series. This was an appointment I had agreed to last year, but one that proved to be particularly timely in terms of the sad and terrible conflict in the Middle East.
The subject of my speech was Truth and Representation: The Impact of Media Bias on the Democracy. In it, I examined at some length examples of anti-Semitic language and pro-Palestinian language in the Australian media, particularly the public broadcasters. I also demonstrated examples of the media’s sympathetic approach to terrorist organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas. I spoke about the danger of moral relativism,that views the indiscriminate murder of innocents as merely a form of political expression, rather than labelling it as it should be labelled – as terrorism.
The greatest threat, I believe, from this kind of reporting is not only in the way it distorts Australians’ collective view of the world, but how that distortion then creates the conditions in which terrorism and its fellow travellers can thrive.
I, and my political colleagues, will continue to speak out against reporting that treats sovereign states and terrorist organisations as equally legitimate players in the global community. I urge you to do the same.
I have enclosed a copy of the speech for your information. I trust you will find it of interest.
With my kind regards and best wishes,
Truth and Representation: The Impact of Media Bias on the Democracy
Speech to the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission
2006 Lecture Series
Melbourne,
July 23, 2006
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you here tonight. It is a unique privilege for me, and one I hope to justify through my comments this evening.
May I acknowledge Anton Block, the President of the Jewish Council of Victoria, Dr Paul Gardner, chairman of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission, Associate Professor Douglas Kirsner, chair of the ADC public affairs committee, Lesley Gaspar, coordinator of the ADC lecture series, and Mrs Robyne Schwarz, president of Jewish Care.
I have chosen as my topic, "Truth and Representation: media bias and the threat to democracy". Such a topic is fraught with peril, because the relationship between the concepts and practices of truth and democracy has not always been an easy one.
In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper noted that ever since Plato used his theory of truth and representation, set out in the famous parable of the cave, to justify totalitarian rule by philosopher-kings, tyrants have relied on claims to know the truth to justify their tyranny. History has provided us with countless gruesome examples of how truth-claims can be used to deny human rights and to thwart democracy, from Burma to Yugoslavia to Cambodia to Nazi Germany.
A free press is vital to democracy, as it can be used to expose truths that governments would rather keep hidden. But the role of the mass media in mediating the relationship between truth and democracy has not always been successful. The Nazis would not have had the success they had in persecuting the Jewish people had not the ground, in which their hatred grew, been well-prepared by many, many years of anti-Semitic prejudice in the German press.
If the fourth estate loses sight of its role as protector of truth, or fails to understand what that role really means, then it runs the risk of either becoming little more than a servant of state or corporate power at one extreme, or at the other, a victim of hubris whereby it comes to believe its role is simply to oppose the democratically elected government.
I believe that it is the latter risk that is more prevalent today in Australia today. The problem with the media assuming this attitude is that it can easily slide into an elitist disdain for the voting public and for democracy itself. Moreover, it can undermine, rather than advance, the search for truth, as it seeks to impose on the public what are no more than the prejudices of those who hold the pen.
Tonight I wish to provide some evidence for my belief that an important section of our mass media is at grave risk of sliding into this elitist and anti-democratic frame of mind, if it has not done so already. Many – and not least those who are the worst offenders – will dismiss this as me simply riding my usual hobby-horse about the ABC, but it is not. It is an important element of a wider, more important effort in the service of our culture and our values and our democracy.
More specifically, we must rescue the concept of moral truth from the dustbin of history into which post-modern moral relativism seeks to discard it. If we want to protect basic and fundamental universal human rights, and in so doing inoculate our democracy from the possibility of repeating the horrors of the Holocaust, or the Gulags, or Pol Pot's Year Zero, we must remember that human rights rest on a foundation of moral absolutes. If our culture continues to undermine the concept of moral truth, it will not long be able to stave off a descent into forms of barbarism that are still fresh in our collective memory.
The central role of the media in this effort cannot be over-estimated, and that is why I have been so focused on it in the Federal Parliament since entering the Senate in 2002. I have taken as my motto here the words: "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom."
That motto is especially timely today. Recent weeks have seen terrorists yet again unleash their work of destruction. In Mumbai, as in London a year ago, indiscriminate slaughter has proven the terrorists’ weapon of choice. And in the Middle East, Hezbollah and Hamas – evil twins born of, and sustained by, the same evil parents – have provoked violence, knowing full well the cost their naked aggression would impose not only on innocent Israelis but also on many tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians and Lebanese alike.
Faced with these outrages, it is not enough for us to shake our heads and hope that the world will set itself right.
Rather, we must protect and assert the values that underpin our Australian society: values in which there can be no place for terrorism’s supporters and fellow-travellers.
To that end, we must affirm our commitment to those throughout the world who are on the front line of the fight against terrorism – a commitment which is not merely intellectual and emotional, but also practical: that is, we must contribute as fully as we can, to ensure that terrorism, and the vile threat it poses, is defeated and ultimately destroyed.
The Howard Government’s commitment to fighting terrorism has been and remains steadfast. Absolutely steadfast.
We have provided, and continue to provide, assistance to countries such as Indonesia to fight terrorism.
We have important troop commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in our immediate region.
And we have asserted, and continue to assert, our enduring friendship with Israel, as it faces enemies committed to its destruction.
Ordinary Australians understand the importance of facing off the terrorists. They know that if we stand back, the bombs that killed so many young Australians in Bali and so many poor, hardworking people in Mumbai, and that now cause so much death and destruction in northern Israel, will soon enough kill us and our children.
But the struggle ahead will not be over quickly – and if we are to sustain it, we must rely not only on the good sense and decency of ordinary Australians, but also on an informed and factual understanding of the world we are in and the responsibilities it places upon us.
The role of the Media
In an open, democratic society such as Australia’s, the media plays a central role in shaping our understanding of the world. It is mainly through the media that we are informed; and it is from the media that we get many of the images and analyses that help determine the way we see the world.
It is because the media is so important that we provide large-scale financial support to the ABC and SBS – so that the community will have access to the impartial information it needs and deserves. It is a clear indication of the on-going government support for the ABC that public broadcasting received a substantial funding increase in this year’s triennial budget allocation.
I want to state clearly here tonight my belief that both the ABC and SBS in so many ways provide a valuable service to Australian public life. Australia would be a poorer place without so many aspects of the services provided by the ABC and SBS.
However, the public broadcasters lets themselves down regularly by failing to apply the same rigour to the task of self-critique that they would claim to apply to the task of representing the truth to their audience. The ABC, for example, has a charter requirement to cater to all Australians. But if it was truly capable of honest self-assessment, the ABC would be more willing to recognise, acknowledge and correct the deep-seated and institutionalised bias that is manifested in its recent reportage of both domestic and international affairs.
Some very recent examples I can quote here tonight are staggering.
Merely a week ago, Fran Kelly, the presenter of ABC Radio National’s Breakfast program, chose to interview Robert Fisk on the events in the Middle East. Mr Fisk, she said, is a much praised and award winning journalist. And indeed he is – for he has received praise from no less a judge of character than Osama bin Laden himself, who, in a videotaped message on the eve of the 2004 presidential election in the U.S., commended Fisk by name for his incisive and “neutral” reporting. Did Ms Kelly disclose any of this? Obviously not.
As an aside at this point, I would like to quote the same Mr Fisk from an opinion column in The Canberra Times last week. In it, he quotes – without challenge or question – terrorist leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah claiming that in its rocket attacks on Israel “Hezbollah originally wished to confine all casualties to the military”. Fisk then goes on to criticise the – quote – “cruelty of Israel’s response” – unquote – to those unprovoked and deadly attacks. It’s no wonder that he attracts rave reviews from Osama bin Laden!
To take another example, let’s consider for a minute SBS’s coverage of the conflict in the Middle East on its flagship 6-30 PM news for Sunday July 16th. Israel’s military actions in Lebanon were described as variously “murderous”, “illegal” and “contrary to the laws of war”. As for what Hezbollah had done, and its disastrous consequences for the people of Lebanon, the report SBS chose to air – and I emphasize the word chose – cutely said this: that Hezbollah “had some little explaining to do”.
The Prime Minister John Howard decisively attempted to stop the rot on the AM program on July 14th when he was asked, and I quote: “Has Israel gone too far?” Mr Howard asked the reporter why the question must always be couched in terms of what Israel has done wrong and whether it should be condemned. He was, of course, appalled by the loss of life on both sides of the conflict. But – and to quote again – the Prime Minister said “the assumption that it was started by Israel in this particular instance is wrong”.
That the Prime Minister should feel the need to highlight to a reporter the skewed nature of the question he was being asked is indicative of a deeply-ingrained culture – a reflex anti-Semitism – in parts of the media. Such questions betray a belief that Israel is always at fault and has no right to defend itself in any way against attacks from terrorists such as Hezbollah.
To say that this is outrageous, and a disgrace, is an understatement.
What makes bias so dangerous, and also so difficult to control, is that it is not only what is said, but rather what is not said, that can be profoundly misleading.
Take the reporting – again on the ABC’s AM program – of the statement by Mr Chirac that Israel’s response to the invasion of its territory and the kidnapping of its soldiers was “disproportionate”. Now, how often did you hear Tony Eastely note that this was the same Mr Chirac who merely a few months earlier, had said that were France subjected to a terrorist attack, he would not rule out retaliating through a nuclear attack? The simple answer: not once.
Nor did Mr Eastely make the same point when Mr Putin criticised Israel’s response to the kidnapping of its soldiers as “disproportionate” and called on Israel to negotiate with terrorists. Surely, one might have expected our national broadcaster to ask how consistent this was with Russia’s own behaviour in Chechnya – but no, yet again, the ABC chose the convenient course of silence.
Equally, how often have you heard the terms “indiscriminate”, “illegal”, “contrary to international law” and “disproportionate” applied by the ABC and SBS not to Israel, but to Hezbollah’s and Hamas’ practice of shelling civilian towns in Israel? The answer: not once!
And when the ABC and SBS interviewed Lebanese Government Ministers, who merely washed their hands of Hezbollah’s actions, did you hear the interviewer ask how Hezbollah has been allowed to build up its arsenal in Southern Lebanon? No, of course you didn’t – because they wouldn’t even have thought to put the question, much less to fearlessly pursue the point.
Similarly, how balanced is it for the SBS to selectively run commentary from the BBC – commentary which is systematically and aggressively hostile to Israel – rather than say, also running the stories aired on US channels?
Another form of bias is sympathetic language. To give just one example, the ABC refers to Kassam Rockets fired at Israel by Palestinian terrorists as “home made rockets.” This has the effect of makings the Palestinians seem like the underdogs, battling away against the might of the Israeli military with home made weapons. In truth – as you all know – Israel is a small country with a small population, virtually surrounded by hostile and in some cases increasingly fanatical countries. The terrorists it faces are well-organised, aggressive and persistently violent. They are financed and armed by Syria and Iran, which are countries far larger than Israel. They cynically exploit the Western media’s desire to convey graphic images of casualties by locating themselves in civilian areas, ensuring that women and children will be among the worst victims of the conflicts they ignite and promote. They are hardly the home-made Dad’s Army the media language would suggest and would want us all here in Australia to believe.
The decisions to portray events in this way smack of deliberate, thought through, deception.
They are what biased journalists do when they want to hide from claims of bias, while still slanting the way the news is presented. A few token interviews, ritualistically presented, with Israeli spokesmen or commentators, or others more sympathetic to Israel’s predicament, only make this deceitful purpose all the clearer.
Blatant bias about Israel is nothing new. But the scope of the problems is far broader. When terrorists targeted the London underground, time and again our public broadcasters’ reports linked the terrorists’ murderous actions to the Britain’s participation in the Iraq war – suggesting, if not stating, that the ultimate fault lay not with the murderers but with the Blair government. The further, important, inference was that – just as Blair had brought the wrath of the terrorists onto London – so the Howard Government was exposing Australians to unacceptable risks: risks that, according to many ABC commentators, had already eventuated in the Bali bombings.
Given that, one might have expected the ABC and SBS to at least comment on the fact that India could hardly be claimed to have any role in Iraq – a war it had actively opposed. Rather, here was further proof, if more proof was needed, of terrorism’s indiscriminate character. But far from it: no such thought was expressed.
It would not be fair to say that issues of media bias are limited to the public broadcasters, for they are not.
I’ll give you a recent, telling example. On July 10, this year, Paul Sheehan wrote a commentary piece in the Sydney Morning Herald about the much unlamented Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, headed: “A petty crim who took on the world.”
I thought that was a rather promising title. And in fact Sheehan did note that al-Zarqawi was really just a petty street thug, with 37 criminal charges and convictions, including for sexual assault, who simply took the opportunity to recast his personal brand of petty vandalism and mayhem as a form of Jihad. And we all know the rest of that history.
But then Sheehan tells us that “it is important to note that while he was a Jordanian by passport, he was a Palestinian by blood …” Why is that important?
Well, it’s apparently important, because it makes the story easier, and allows us to find a root cause for psychotic and undirected violence. It allows the journalist three paragraphs later to write: “Israel, preoccupied by the battle for its own survival, is hurling fire accelerants into the passions of millions of young Muslims …”
In other words, the pervert and murderer al-Zarqawi is the creation of Israel, not of his own twisted desires and opportunism.
Sheehan, finally, passes this judgement: “The moral legacy of the holocaust has now passed into history”.
Sheehan is by no means the worst commentator we have. In fact, he is generally among the better ones. But there are deeply troubling similarities between the approach he adopts in the article I have cited, and that persistently and explicitly adopted by our public broadcasters.
Those similarities rest on a common core of moral relativism. That relativism has become ever more deeply pernicious – because it not only refuses to make judgements based on the values on which Australian society rests, but also, and increasingly, serves to obfuscate the facts, with the purpose or effect of conferring legitimacy on what is plainly illegitimate. It allows those who would manipulate truth so as to present a biased point of view to do so while claiming that all they are doing is providing a balanced, impartial account.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the old left-wing adage that: “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”. That adage has been cited by the ABC and SBS as the reason they refuse to call terrorists terrorists. Instead, they use terms such as ‘rebels’ and ‘militants’, which apply an air of legitimacy to those activities. But there is no moral equivalence between dissent and murder.
I believe a media which fails to distinguish between good and evil, and which equates ‘balance’ with studied relativism, fails its constituency: if we are not willing to call terrorism evil, then we have lost any sense of truth.
If some journalists on the ABC and SBS are frankly sympathetic to Hamas and Hezbollah, or even on balance believe they have the stronger case, why don’t they have the courage to say so, rather than hiding behind a pretence of moral relativism? The cause of truth is not well served when those who have so much power to shape perceptions refuse to disclose, and be held accountable for, the perspective they take.
I noted earlier that the public broadcasters are not alone in adopting this attitude: those of you who are readers of The Age will doubtless know what I mean.
But there is a fact that distinguishes the public broadcasters from their privately owned counterparts: they are tax-payer funded. You and I have a choice about whether or not to buy The Age; we do not have a choice about whether to pay for the ABC and SBS.
There may be good reasons for this. But tax-payer funding must bring with it added responsibilities. Among those responsibilities is a commitment to values of truth, honesty and editorial balance that are not well-served in the examples I have cited tonight.
The Senate Estimates Process
Holding the public broadcasters to account for the manner in which they undertake their activities is an essential function of Parliament.
In three years as a Senator for Queensland in the national Parliament prior to becoming a Minister, I developed something of a reputation for my questioning of ABC and SBS management at Budget Estimates Committees. And while I have been frequently criticised for my activities, I firmly believe media bias is an issue of concern to many Australians.
The findings of a Morgan Poll on the subject published 18 months ago were alarming – or at the very least should have been alarming – for members of the media.
Two thirds of Australians surveyed said they believed Australian newspapers were biased. 86 percent of Australians believe that newspaper journalists are biased, 75 percent of Australians held the same view about talk back hosts, and 73 percent about TV reporters.
Fewer than 40 percent of Australians believed that radio news reporting was accurate and fair.
Only 18 percent of Australians believed radio announcers were honest and ethical.
And a separate poll of Australian journalists found that 40 percent believed News Limited was the most biased media organisation, followed by 25 percent who thought the ABC was the most biased.
And of even greater concern for media organisations, was a finding that Australians’ regard for the ethics and honesty of journalists had fallen since December 2003.
These are very large numbers and must concern the profession of journalism. And they more than justify the interest in the work of our public broadcasters at Senate Estimates hearings – an interest, I am pleased to say, that has been vigorously continued by my Liberal Party colleagues Senator Ronaldson and Senator Fierravanti-Wells since my elevation to the Ministry.
The work we have done has been a hard slog. But we have had some success. In fact, three years of forensic questioning by all three of us at Senate Estimates Hearings paid off in May this year, with an admission of the ABC’s double standard on terrorism, to which I referred earlier. Some of you may be familiar with this outcome, but for the sake of everyone else, please permit me to provide you with some brief background.
The ABC adopted a policy around 2001, that when it came to referring to groups as “terrorist organisations”, they would be guided by the United Nations. It meant nothing to them that the Australian government had proscribed groups as terrorists. They would worship at the altar of the UN.
In 2002, then head of international operations at ABC News, John Tulloh, issued a memo to journalists and I quote. “Do not refer to Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad as terrorist organisations. There have rightly been complaints about this usage. Those groups are not on the UN list of terrorist organisations and must not be referred to as such.”
So there is a very stark indication from the ABC that they bowed to pressure.
Over the course of the next three years, I found dozens of examples where ABC journalists had referred to some 20 different groups as terrorist organisations, even though they weren’t on the UN list. While ABC management had been quick to act when it involved protecting Palestinian terrorist groups, there is no evidence that the ABC took any action when it came to those other terrorist groups. They could be described as terrorists – but the Palestinian groups could not.
The ABC was asked to explain this apparent double standard at Estimates hearings. What was their policy and how was it applied? They could not give a coherent answer. They muttered things like “appropriate circumstances”, “blatant acts of terrorism” and “demonstrably a terror group”.
The ABC was asked why its journalists had referred to Jemaah Islamiah as a terrorist organisation after the first Bali bombings, even though JI – at that point – wasn’t on the UN list.
They said it was because of the links between J-I and Al-Qaeda. I asked what evidence of those links journalists had when they referred to J-I as a terror group. Again, they failed to answer my question.
I then gave them numerous examples of evidence of links between Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda, and asked if they would therefore call Hezbollah terrorists for the same reason.
True to form, they failed to answer that question as well.
But we persevered. I asked then managing Director of the ABC Russel Balding this question:
What is the difference between terrorists in southern Russia killing children in a school and terrorists in Jerusalem killing school children on a bus?
Incredibly, he couldn’t even provide an answer to that question.
But we were not deterred by the ABC’s obfuscation. We persevered, until the ABC news chief John Cameron painted himself into a corner, where he could no longer say that while there had been a blatant terrorist attack in Israel, and the bomber was demonstrably a terrorist, the group that sent the bomber was not a terrorist group.
The ABC tried desperately to wriggle out of the issue by saying that they would describe them as a terrorist organisation in the context of an individual act of terrorism.
In other words, they are a terrorist organisation one day, but not the next.
Mr Cameron, the news boss, then issued an internal memo to journalists explaining the ABC position. Or, I should say, attempting to explain it.
Allow me to quote from the memo – which has been leaked by concerned whistleblowers.
“That is not to say that we label an entire organisation as a terrorist organisation in perpetuity on the basis of acts of terror committed by its members.”
So the ABC is suggesting that some sort of statute of limitations or moratorium should apply to terrorist groups. If Islamic Jihad doesn’t send in a suicide bomber for, what, six months, it should no longer be referred to as a terrorist organisation.
And notice how they attempt to put some distance between individual terrorists and terrorist organisations. It really is as farcical as that.
Another small win at Estimates came in the revelation that Mr Cameron had banned journalists from using the expression “our troops in Iraq.” The ABC tried to justify this by claiming that, as they are not the ABC’s troops, then strictly speaking their journalists shouldn’t say “our troops in Iraq”.
The fallaciousness of this argument was revealed when Senator Fierravanti-Wells and I produced no fewer than 670 subsequent braches of the “our” rule, including our diggers and our Anzacs. But the only time the ABC did anything about it was when it concerned Australian military involvement in Iraq.
The ABC acted, in other words, to vigilantly ensure its journalists did not refer to our servicemen and women, who are serving our country in Iraq, as “our troops”: this even though the “policy” – and I say “policy” in quotes, because it so plainly lacks any rationale -- on which that prohibition was based was being flagrantly disregarded in many other areas.
The double standard this involves is obvious; the slant and bias that underpins it, is deeply troubling.
The danger to democracy
I’ve given you a lot of examples tonight to validate my thesis, and I hope that you have not regarded their use as tedious. It is necessary when you mount an argument that you provide genuine and recent examples of the kinds of behaviour you are criticising. Some people – including my critics who will pick over this speech – may claim that these examples are isolated or trivial. In response I would say that the examples and the evidence are far from isolated, though time has forced me to discard dozens of further persuasive instances of bias and distortion of truth and fact. Moreover, the pattern I have pointed to is anything but transient, especially when it is repeated hour after hour, day after day.
Rather, the trend is deeply disturbing because it points strongly to a pattern of behaviour in the media which seeks to justify, or at least excuse, the actions of terrorists, and to downplay the role of western governments and – I’m prepared to say it – “our troops” in combating terrorism in its various forms. What I have talked about tonight is evidence of the moral relativism which I outlined at the beginning of my remarks, and of that relativism being used to slant the news in ways that bear no relationship to the search for truth.
This bias is all the more serious because it makes the fight against terrorism harder. To win this fight, we must be united in our abhorrence and condemnation of the actions of terrorists. There is no room for moral equivocation, and the justification it provides for the senseless slaughter of innocents.
When the public is conditioned to abide, and even accept, terrorism as a legitimate form of political expression, the terrorists are heartened and gain strength. When that conditioning weakens the resolve of the electorate to reject evil in all its forms – be it terrorism, dictatorship or genocide - our democratic institutions become vulnerable.
This is the real danger of bias in the media – not just because it subtly changes the collective attitude of the nation, but because such a shaping of collective attitude can then corrode the pillars of our democracy and our way of life. In the short term, it undermines our determination to pursue the fight against terrorism in all of its forms; in the longer run, it displaces and even replaces a commitment to fundamental values with a moral relativism that is inconsistent with a sound democracy and a healthy society.
The Way Forward
So what is to be done here? From a political perspective, we will hold the line. We will continue to speak out in support of truth and good, and we will continue to criticise the excesses of the media, particularly that part of it which is publicly funded.
We need more people to do this, and I am encouraged that there is an increasing willingness in the mainstream press to give space to the Andrew Bolts and the Mark Steyns and people like them.
One of my colleagues outside the Parliament recently asked me why, if the Government feels a need to fund program production, it restricts this to the public broadcaster. Why not, I am asked, rely on a fully independent Board to fund program production not only at the public sector broadcasters but also at commercial channels? Wouldn’t such a fully contestable arrangement provide the competitive disciplines our public sector broadcasters now seem to lack?
Now I’m the Minister for Ageing, and not the Minister for Communications, but let me communicate my strong belief that we need to explore those ideas and others in an open and constructive debate.
As many of you know, I am, in my role as a Senator, most concerned about the protection of core values. I am proud that these days we acknowledge the heritage of these values, and in this area as in others, I am committed to ensuring that we stand up for what it is that has made and continues to make Australia the great country it is.
I know that you too, are deeply committed to this nation – a nation to which the Jewish community has made such an outstanding contribution.
Today, with the threats that bear on us, it is more important than ever that that community speaks with one strong and clear voice in support of the Government’s stand against international terrorism and its fellow-travellers.
It should not be the role of the national broadcasters to misrepresent that threat, to downplay it, or to somehow represent Israel and the United States as the cause, simply because of the left-wing prejudices of a large number of strategically-placed journalists and producers.
I would urge all of you who care about this issue to be ever vigilant when it comes to bias in the media.
It is through that vigilance that our public broadcasters must learn that it is not acceptable for them to have one language for talking about the murder by terrorists of innocent children in Southern Russia and another language for talking about the murder by terrorists of innocent children in Haifa, Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem.
The fact is that the death of children is tragic and abhorrent, regardless of nationality, race or creed. But those who fire from behind the backs of children, knowing full well the carnage they will cause, should not be rewarded with precisely the media attention that they seek; rather, they should be forced by the media to take moral responsibility for the atrocities they commit.
It is this willingness to confront the issue of moral responsibility that is lacking and that we must set right.
We must rescue the concept of truth from the moral relativism that would reduce it to nothing more than a slogan to support one political ideology over another. We must assert universal human values that are grounded in our human nature as creatures imbued with an innate dignity that must be respected, protected and nourished by our social institutions and laws.
It is a recipe for social suicide if we allow arguably the most influential and important social institution of democratic communities, namely a free press, to slip into an uncritical acceptance of the illogical post-modern doctrine that there is no such as thing as capital T truth, and that what I call true and good might be diametrically opposed to what you call true and good, yet somehow both are equally true and good.
Yielding ground on this core point would make our commitment to a free media a suicide pact – one of whose victims would surely be the very freedom of expression that is so important to our Australian democracy.
I, and I am sure, you, are not willing to be parties to any such pact. It is for this reason that we must not merely continue, but redouble, our efforts to make the media accountable.
Thank you for the invitation to speak with you tonight. Thank you for supporting what is true and good. And thank you for your friendship.
Santo Santoro
Senator for Queensland
Minister for Ageing
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