Category: Human Rights

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Some Israelis protest the suffering of Palestinians caused by Israel

Max Blumenthal, journalist and maker of the above video reports:

“You see how few we are,” said a demonstrator holding a sign reading “Obama, Yes-U-Can.” “This is about all the Israelis who really oppose the Occupation — it’s very small. Most of the Israelis don’t care about the Occupation and what goes on in the Occupied Territories and about the suffering of the Palestinians. I think it must come from the — the pressure must come from the outside… From here, there’s not enough.”

This video report is the sequel to my hotly debated, heavily trafficked “Feeling the Hate.” Many bloggers who focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict urged me to make a video that showed the “other side” of Israel, the culturally progressive element that believes in peace and international cooperation. Well, here they are. There are very, very few of them, they are marginalized, even persecuted, and in desperate need of American support.

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Possible Australian ACMA banned sites list published

Wikileaks, the international purveyor of information governments would rather keep privy from their citizens, has published what is claimed to be the Australian ACMA blacklist in their section on Australia.

The leak was revealed by @ashermoses in an exclusive in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Wikileaks has previously published the blacklists for Thailand, Denmark and Norway.

University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt said the leaked list “constitutes a condensed encyclopedia of depravity and potentially very dangerous material”.

He said the leaked list would become “the concerned parent’s worst nightmare” as curious children would inevitably seek it out.

But about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.

The subject matter of banned content may shed a unique light on national societal tabus and mores – for example, the distaste of the Thai government for internet content which criticises their sacrosanct monarchy. Apparently online poker is an Australian tabu – is this because our government collects taxes from local betting in TABs, casinos and pokie machines than have precious revenue dispersed to overseas gambling dens?

ACMA clarifies:

The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (the IGA) makes it an offence to provide, or advertise, certain interactive gambling services. ACMA is responsible for investigating formal complaints made under the IGA in relation to prohibited internet gambling content.

Prohibited internet gambling content is content that can be accessed, or is available for access, by customers of a prohibited internet gambling service.

A prohibited internet gambling service is a gambling service provided in the course of carrying on a business to customers using an internet carriage service, and an individual physically present in Australia is capable of becoming a customer of the service.

If ACMA receives a complaint about prohibited internet gambling content that is hosted in Australia, ACMA will refer the matter to the Australian Federal Police.

If prohibited internet gambling content is hosted outside Australia, ACMA will notify the content to makers of the approved Family Friendly Filters listed in Schedule 1 to the Interactive Gambling Act Industry code.

Other legal adult sites also feature on the list.

Although AbbyWinters is hosted overseas and accessible now, it would be blocked to all Australian Internet users if mandatory ISP filtering is introduced.

Perhaps certain sectors of our government may have serious religious and/or personal issues with sex and a prurient interest in what consenting adults choose to do in the privacy of their own homes on the net with legal adult material.

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, dug up the blacklist after ACMA added several Wikileaks pages to the list following the site’s publication of the Danish blacklist.

He said secret censorship systems were “invariably corrupted”, pointing to the Thailand censorship list, which was originally billed as a mechanism to prevent child pornography but contained more than 1200 sites classified as criticising the royal family.

“In January the Thai system was used to censor Australia reportage about the imprisoned Australian writer Harry Nicolaides,” he said.

“The Australian democracy must not be permitted to sleep with this loaded gun. This week saw Australia joining China and the United Arab Emirates as the only countries censoring Wikileaks.”

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The leaked list, understood to have been obtained from an internet filtering software maker, contains 2395 sites. ACMA said its blacklist, as at November last year, contained 1370 sites.

Assange said the disparity in the reported figure is most likely due to the fact that the list contains several duplicates and variations of the same URL that stem from a single complaint. Alternatively, some sites may have been added to the list by the filter software maker.

That the list has been so readily leaked attests to the counter-productivity and uselessness of maintaining such a list at all, let alone attempting to censor its entries at ISP level, which can be easily circumvented using VPNs, proxies etc.

Warning – “ACMA said Australians caught distributing the list or accessing child pornography sites on the list could face criminal charges and up to 10 years in prison.”

Controversy is raging in the twitterverse as to whether direct linking to the relevant Wikileaks page may lead to criminal prosecution – and at present there is no shortage of folks willing to defend their tweets in court. Relevant ACMA legislation is here.

Asher Moses has now interviewed some legitimate businesses and sites who’ve ended up on the ACMA blacklist – legal claims against the government may be relevant?

The Queensland dentist included on the Australian communications regulator’s blacklist of prohibited websites has demanded that the list be cleaned up, as he is now being associated with child porn peddlers and sexual violence sites.

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Other Australian sites on the list are canteens.com.au (“Tuckshop and Canteen Management Consultants”) and animal carers MaroochyBoardingKennels.com.au.

The dentist, Dr John Golbrani, was furious when contacted to inform him that his site, dentaldistinction.com.au, appeared on the blacklist.

“A Russian company broke into our website a couple of years back and they were putting pornographic listings on there … [but] we changed across to a different web provider and we haven’t had that problem since,” Golbrani said in a phone interview.

He said the fact that he hadn’t been removed from the list was “criminal” and he was scared potential customers may avoid him.

“The government needs to get in and clean it up,” said Golbrani.

UPDATE

Conroy says the list on Wikileaks is not the ACMA blacklist.

“I am aware of reports that a list of URLs has been placed on a website. This is not the ACMA blacklist,” Conroy said in a statement.

“The published list purports to be current at 6 August 2008 and apparently contains approximately 2,400 URLs whereas the ACMA blacklist for the same date contained 1,061 URLs,” he said

He admitted the list contained some common URLS, but said that other URLs on the list had never been the subject of a complaint or ACMA investigation.

“ACMA is investigating this matter and is considering a range of possible actions it may take including referral to the Australian Federal Police. Any Australian involved in making this content publicly available would be at serious risk of criminal prosecution,” Conroy said.

How odd – Conroy says that the Wikileaks banned list is not the ACMA list, then decrees that one can be at risk of prosecution for making it publicly available?

Conroy’s statement should be reviewed in the light of ACMA’s press release today:

ACMA has previously investigated and taken action on material—including child pornography and child sexual abuse images—at some of the sites on this list of 2300 URLs. However, the list provided to ACMA differs markedly in length and format to the ACMA blacklist. The ACMA blacklist has at no stage been 2300 URLs in length and at August 2008 consisted of 1061 URLs. It is therefore completely inaccurate to say that the list of 2300 URLs constitutes an ACMA blacklist.

It also appears that many of the 2300 URLs provided on the list are no longer active. However, some of the URLs that remain active appear to relate to online depictions of child sexual abuse. Possessing, distributing or accessing such material may amount to an offence under the Commonwealth Criminal Code and relevant State laws.

ACMA provides the ACMA blacklist to the fourteen providers of filter software which have been tested and accredited by the Internet Industry Association (IIA), as part of IIA’s Family Friendly Filter scheme. ACMA is discussing with the IIA what if any action it may need to take to help ensure that ACMA’s list remain secure.

ACMA considers that any publication of the ACMA blacklist would have a substantial adverse effect on the effective administration of the regulatory scheme which aims to prevent access to harmful and offensive online material. Such publication would undermine the public interest outcomes which the current legislation aims to achieve.

ACMA does not mention any penalties for linking to the current Wikileaks page.

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The Perfidity of the British – the Balfour Declaration

balfour_declaration_unmarkedAs Arthur Koestler wrote “Here was one nation promising another nation the land of a third nation.”

The Balfour Declaration, a shonky deal prepared through British and Zionist intrigue, fuelled by British anti-semitism and sniffy elitist disdain for Arabs, states that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

@cameronreilly has drawn our attention to Antoine Capet’s review of a new book examining the historical charade behind the manufacture of the Balfour Declaration. James Renton in “Zionist Masquerade: The Birth of the Anglo-Zionist Alliance 1914-1918” demonstrates that

the Anglo-Zionist alliance was built on spurious foundations, with false pretences and hidden agendas present at all stages in its inception and early development. His supporting evidence comes from the usual repositories in Britain, notably the National Archives (ex-PRO) and the Imperial War Museum, but also from Israel (Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem) and the United States (most prominently the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio). Renton uses American Jewish Archives, because it is one of the central premises of his undertaking that the initial moves on the part of the British governing elite were primarily designed to woo American Jewry.

Ironically, the author suggests, the Anglo-Zionist alliance was born of the deeply ingrained anti-Semitism of the British upper political establishment.

…

This fundamental distrust and rejection of the Jews on the part of the British promoters of the Anglo-Zionist alliance is the first element in the “masquerade.”

The second element is best made explicit by a quotation from the introduction: “The decision to issue the Balfour Declaration was not therefore driven by British strategic interests in the Ottoman Empire.

…

Renton very convincingly points to the third misapprehension by arguing that there was no real demand for a “Jewish home” among world Jewry, if only because there was no such thing as world Jewry.

The construction of Zionism as an artificial tradition, ideological motivator and propaganda is dissected.

Simultaneously, a parallel “invention of tradition” was taking place to counter the dominant position of the anti-Zionist Anglo-Jewish Association and Alliance israélite universelle, which clung to English and French as the language of instruction in their schools in Jerusalem. “One of the quintessential elements of the Zionist project was the invention of Hebrew culture,” which was given a tremendous boost by British authorities after their conquest of Jerusalem in December 1917, “essentially a propaganda measure” (pp. 106, 91). The Ministry of Information staged a “theatrical” reception for the official Zionist Commission headed by Weizmann in order “to create specific messages for Jewry,” especially the Jews of America, as the Bolshevik Revolution had greatly reduced communication with Russian Jews (p. 112). Here again, therefore, a two-way make-believe process was at work, with the British government using the Zionists for its own agenda and the Zionists using the British government for theirs. But, of course, at such games, one player always turns out to be cleverer than the other, and Renton has no doubt which it was: “the Zionists were undoubtedly used by the Government. They were not, however, unwitting pawns, duped by the British. It was in fact the Zionists themselves who established the rationale for using Zionism as a propaganda weapon, and consistently showed the Government how and why this should be done” (p. 7).

Avi Schlaim points out that it was the British who approached the Zionists – some analysts consider territorial strategic interest primarily dictated British actions.

On further reflection, however, the British felt that control over Palestine was necessary in order to keep France and Russia from the approaches to Egypt and the Suez Canal. In Vereté’s account, it was the desire to exclude France from Palestine, rather than sympathy for the Zionist cause, that prompted Britain to sponsor a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

Schlaim highlights the basic injustice represented by the document –

The greatest contradiction lay in supporting, however vaguely, a right to national self-determination of a minority of the inhabitants of Palestine, while implicitly denying it to the majority. At the time that the proposed statement was under discussion in the War Cabinet, the population of Palestine was in the neighborhood of 670,000. Of these, the Jews numbered some 60,000. The Arabs thus constituted roughly 91 per cent of the population, while the Jews accounted for 9 per cent. The proviso that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” implied that, in British eyes, the Arab majority had no political rights.

Part of the explanation for this peculiar phraseology is that the majority of the ministers did not recognize the Palestinians as a people with legitimate national aspirations, but viewed them as a backward, Oriental, inert mass. Arthur Balfour was typical of the Gentile Zionists in this respect. “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad,” he wrote in 1922, is “of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”[20] The most charitable explanation that may be offered for this curious claim is that in an age of colonialism everyone was in some sense implicated in its ideology. Balfour may appear today like an extreme example of the colonial mentality, but he was not untypical of his era.

The treacherous British owe Palestinian people their right to self-determination – yet, ironically, it is no longer primarily in their power to deliver.