My following article appears in Crikey: In 2003, Palestinian politician and human rights activist Hanan Ashrawi won the Sydney Peace Prize. The Zionist establishment reacted with outrage, accused her of extremism and pressured then New South Wales Premier Bob Carr to not present the award. The campaign was a disaster and convinced large swathes of…
Showing all posts tagged Hizbollah
Anti-Zionism as a contribution to world peace
The following letter appears in this week’s Australian Jewish News: Dr Colin Rubenstein and others, who made a fuss about Hanan Ashrawi receiving the [Sydney Peace Prize] honour several years ago, have been truly vindicated [John Pilger won this year.] Maybe next year they will give the prize to Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, or maybe…
Iran (may not be the) centre of terror
Here’s what the global media has reported over the last days: Argentina expressed outrage Friday over Iran’s nomination of a man wanted in connection to a 1994 Buenos Aires bombing that killed 85 people as the next defense minister. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tapping Ahmad Vahidi for the post is “an affront to Argentine justice…
The chances of Washington seeing sense (hint: very low)
Joseph Bahout, professor at Sciences-Po Paris and researcher at Academie Diplomatique Internationale, writes in Bitterlemons: Obama’s Middle-East sherpas would be well advised to get quickly rid of three illusions regarding a Lebanese-Israeli process. Any serious authority in today’s Lebanon is one that will not ignore Syria’s own progress in talks. Any talks that ignore Hizballah…
Lower expectations, don’t buy the spin
Jennifer Loewenstein (no relation) writes in Counterpunch that we shouldn’t expect too much from Obama when it comes to the Middle East: Obama’s brilliance in embracing the self-same rejectionist stance of his predecessors, by employing the language of the two-state solution, is equaled only by Netanyahu’s honesty in rejecting any such reality. For Obama, the…
If they renounce violence, when will you?
Interesting analysis from the MEC Analytical Group about Britain, Hamas and Hizbollah: There are indications of some flexibility in British policy towards Hamas and Hizbullah. On 21 May the Foreign Secretary David Miliband made a speech at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (text here) in which he called for “a coalition of consent” between…
What the hell happened to the Jewish mind?
Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan on the Israeli government’s seeming descent into madness: Haaretz’s Aluf Benn today reinforces the case I made earlier for Obama to keep Netanyahu on a tight leash concerning Iran. First, he reports, Netanyahu continues to talk up a frenzy of public expectation in Israel that leads only to military action.…
We can do it because we’re good
Perhaps somebody should remind Israel that killing leaders is actually illegal: Israel is planning to assassinate the head of the southern Lebanon-based Shi’ite militia Hezbollah, a development which would “set the region ablaze,” one of the group’s deputies told an Arab language newspaper on Friday. Imagine the outcry if a story emerged that the head…
A day in the life of a conversation with an active Zionist
Earlier today I posted a comment about Israel/Palestine from Dan Diker, the foreign policy analyst at the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs. He stressed that any kind of Middle East peace deal was impossible as long as Iran, Hamas, Hizbollah, terrorism and polluted water (!) was in the way (he may not have mentioned the…
Please let us bomb Iran for the world’s sake
Dan Diker, the foreign policy analyst at the neo-conservative Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, outlines his perspective on the upcoming meeting between Barack Obama and Benyamin Netanyahu: One of the difficult differences between Netanyahu and Obama concerns their fundamentally different views over the linkage of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process to the containment of Iran’s nuclear…