Peace and Justice Post

A screen shot of a web browser displaying the WikiLeaks website with a picture of its founder Julian Assange in Bern December 4, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Pascal Lauener

LONDON (Reuters) – Revelations on the WikiLeaks website which have enraged governments around the world should force the traditional media to rely less on official sources, award-winning journalist John Pilger said.

In an interview to discuss his film “The War You Don’t See,” the veteran Australian reporter told Reuters the Internet, and more specifically WikiLeaks, would bring about a “revolution” in journalism which too often failed to do its job properly.

One reason the media did not challenge the U.S. and British governments’ justification for going to war in Iraq in 2003, later shown to be misplaced, was their eagerness to believe the official version of events, Pilger argued.

He said the same was true of television coverage of the Israeli attack on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, when British broadcasters appeared willing only to use Israeli video rather than trawling the Internet for alternative footage.

“That mindset that only authority can really determine the ‘truth’ on the news, that’s a form of embedding that really now has to change,” said Pilger, who has covered conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia, written books and made several acclaimed documentaries.

“There’s no question about the pressure on it to change coming from the Internet and coming from WikiLeaks — it will change,” he added in the interview ahead of Tuesday evening’s broadcast of his new film.

“That is the canker in all of this, it’s the compulsion to quote, not necessarily believing the authority source. But then once you quote it and you put it out on the wires or you broadcast it, it takes on a sort of mantle of fact and that’s where the whole teaching of journalism is wrong.

“Authority has its place, but the skepticism about authority must be ingrained in people.”

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by Cesar Chelala, CommonDreams.org, Dec 15, 2010

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is among the strongest armies in the world. According to Israeli Defense Minister Ehuda Barak, it is also one the most moral ones. One wouldn’t know that for its treatment of Palestinian children. On December 13, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) stated that the Israeli military and police were violating Israeli law by detaining Palestinian children, some as young as seven years old, and interrogating them. This last denunciation follows an equally serious one of Palestinian children being sexually abused by Israeli police officers.

“They [the police] hit me and dragged along the floor. They handcuffed me with these plastic handcuffs which are very tight. I was very scared. Only when my father came they stopped,” Muslim Odeh, an 11-year-old Palestinian, told the BBC. His charges were strongly denied by the Israeli police.

According to the Geneva-based Defence for Children International (DCI) they have 100 sworn affidavits from Palestinian children who said that they were mistreated by their Israeli captors. Fourteen among them say that they were sexually abused or threatened with sexual assault to pressure them into confession.

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by Patrick Seale,  Agence Global,  Dec 14, 2010

The defeat of US President Barack Obama by Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu on the question of West Bank settlements has delivered a shock to the international system.

Netanyahu was able to brush aside Obama’s repeated requests to freeze settlement expansion largely because of the influence of Israel’s friends inside the American political system — an influence which has now been enhanced by the gains of right-wing, pro-Israel Republicans at last month’s US Congressional elections.

In the world outside the United States, this has caused widespread amazement and alarm. The setback to America’s Middle East diplomacy — and to Obama personally — has led to a rethinking of what can realistically be expected from Washington in the coming year in resolving the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The tendency in the European Union and in Russia is now to challenge America’s monopoly of the Arab-Israeli peace-process, which has proved ineffective, and to demand firm joint action.

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By our reporters, wsws.org, 15 December 2010

Some of the protesters at the demonstration at Westminster Magistrates Court

The World Socialist Web Site spoke to a number of those protesting outside Westminster Magistrates Court to demand the release and freedom of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Sam said, “I don’t really go out on the streets to protest, but this case really scares me because of the way the media and the people are being controlled by the politicians and bankers. The reaction of these governments is to clamp down on WikiLeaks.

“They are suppressing transparency and transparency is essential for a functioning democracy and it’s also essential for peace. In the past, if we had the transparency that we now have with WikiLeaks there would have been fewer wars.

Sam

“What they are trying to do is deny people a balanced understanding, about what politicians are really doing in the world. We need transparency so that people can understand each other in different countries.

“The leaks speak for themselves. Where I think attention needs to be raised is the reaction of the regimes in the Western countries, to clamp down on freedom of speech. This is exactly what they criticise many Eastern countries for. And here we see it in our own countries in the West. It is complete hypocrisy and double standards.

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by Jay Knott, Dissident Voice,  December 14th, 2010

Canada is mostly a diluted version of the USA. But Canadians are justly proud of their country’s resistance to the abrasive style of American politics. In one respect, though, it is more extreme than the United States – it is the only country with a more fanatical Israel Lobby.

When the University of Toronto recently accepted a Master’s thesis critical of Jewish privilege, the Lobby, the media, and politicians, immediately condemned it as ‘hate’. Some of these legislators declared the University should not have awarded the M.A. to Sociology and Equity Studies student Jennifer Peto, an unprecedented interference of the government in academic freedom.

When a Jewish anti-Zionist like Peto is physically threatened by Zionists and denounced by politicians, the first thing is obviously to defend her and her freedom of speech. But there is a danger in giving extra credit to her argument because it has come under such vicious attack from the Lobby.

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The Case of Aasia Bibi

By LIAQUAT ALI KHAN and JASMINE ABOU-KASSEM, Counterpunch, Dec 14, 2010

Aasia Bibi, a 45-year old Pakistani Christian woman, and mother of five, has been sentenced to death, under Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code, for allegedly “defiling” the Prophet Muhammad. Section 295 with various provisions is the blasphemy statute that enjoys popular support in Muslim Pakistan. Though Bibi is the first woman to be convicted for blasphemy, Christians, Hindus, and hundreds of Muslims have been charged under the statute. Section 295 is a convenient legal tool to settle petty personal scores, intimidate rival families, and practice ill-informed versions of Islam, particularly in small towns and villages, like the one where Bibi lived. Local judges come under pressure to convict persons charged under the statute with the strident approval of local elders. Over the years, attempts to repeal the statute have provoked stiff opposition from Muslim jurists and invited threats of violence from militant groups. Even Pervez Musharraf, a secular military dictator, could not, for fear of imminent and severe reprisals, repeal the statute. For the same reasons, major political parties are disinclined to correct the overbite of the blasphemy statute.

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Written by CP Editor, Caged Prisoners,  Sunday, 12 December 2010

When we arrived in Peshawar I was taken to a lavishly-fitted office. A Pakistani flag stood on the desk, and a picture of Mohammad Ali Jinnah hung at the back of the room. A Pashtun man was sitting behind the desk. He got up, introduced himself and welcomed me. His head was shaved—seemingly his only feature of note—and he was of an average size and weight. He walked over to me and said that he was the head of the bureau. I was in the devil’s workshop, the regional head office of the ISI.

By Badri Raina, Dec 13, 2010

Julian Assange, Aussie, we arraign you

for taking our First Amendment to heart:

“Congress shall make no law. . .abridging

the freedom of speech” we have writ;

but that was when we were the “land of the free

and the home of the brave.”

That starry-eyed time is long past;

since then, as befits an imperial power,

we set ourselves the goal to enslave

regions and regimes that would not

play the part that would befit

vassals to our military-christian destiny.

You thought that since we laud

your over-zealous counterparts

in a China or a Mynamar,

jailed by authoritarian juntas,

and facilitate for them the Nobel prize,

you could do the same in democratic disguise,

allowing no room for hypocrisy,

and, playing god,

use our hidden truths to tar

our resplendent  diplomacy.

More fool you; our posse

will pursue and hunt you down.

Hide where you will, you clown,

we will get you still.

Free is free till you play our tune;

step out of line, and you will soon

find we are the same

as those in Beijing or Rangoon.

And if the Russians want the Nobel

for you, as we did for the other two,

we will raise a merry hell

far more fatal

than anything they could do.

You mistake much when you think

that our Constitutional forefathers

would shamefacedly blink

at our procedures.

Look up the Philadelphia papers

and you will know that from the first

our professions were wisely studded with capers.

We allowed to ourselves as Protestant whites

privileges that puissant kites

alone have from Nature

over every  lesser, crawling creature.

Such is meant to be the presiding feature

of our place on the hill;

those that pull us down we kill.

Eric Margolis, Information Clearing House, Dec 13, 2010

In 1956, Britain, France and Israel colluded to invade Egypt to overthrow its hugely popular nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Israel provoked border clashes and quickly captured the Sinai Peninsula. The British and French landed at Suez.

US President Dwight Eisenhower deemed the tripartite Suez aggression immoral and damaging to American interests in the Muslim world.   “Ike” angrily ordered the British, French and Israelis to get out of Egypt at once – or else. They got out.

Fast forward to 2010. President Barack Obama has been demanding Israel stop building illegal Jewish settlements around Jerusalem and on the West Bank.

Obama rightly concluded the ongoing agony of Palestine has turned the Muslim world against the United States. It is also  the primary cause of what Washington calls “terrorism.” I write about this extensively in my latest book, “American Raj.”

After the Suez invasion, Israel’s American partisans set about building an influence network that would ensure no American president could ever force Israel to do anything against its will. Over the next half century, the Israel lobby became the most powerful and feared lobby in America, dominating both the US Congress and media.

The lobby’s brilliant success was again confirmed last week as Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of Israel’s rightist coalition, literally spit in Obama’s face, sneeringly rejecting the president’s pleas to create a viable Palestinian state. Vice President Joseph Biden was earlier humiliated on a trip to Israel to plead with Israel to stop building Jewish settlements.

The US Congress and rightwing media actually applauded the public humiliation of their president and vice president.

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