National Security Legislation Amendment Bill 2010

Anti-terrorism laws have now been altered in Australia with some expansions of police powers and conditions that limit free speech. There has been little attention paid to these changes within the Australian media – the equal rights for gay marriage parliamentary debate has taken precedence.

“The National Security Legislation Amendment Bill 2010 seeks to achieve an appropriate balance between the Government’s responsibility to protect Australia, its people and its interests and instilling confidence that our national security and counter-terrorism laws will be exercised in a just and accountable way,” Mr McClelland said.

The legislation has been the subject of extensive public consultation and contains significant amendments, including:

* new powers for police to enter a premises without a warrant in emergency circumstances relating to a terrorism offence where there is material that may pose a risk to the health or safety of the public;
* extending the time available for police to re-enter a premises under a search warrant from one hour to 12 hours in emergency circumstances;
* establishing a maximum seven day limit on the detention period that may be disregarded when a person has been arrested for a terrorism offence;
* including a specific right of appeal for both the prosecution and the defendant against a bail decision relating to terrorism and serious national security offences;
* expanding the ‘urging violence’ offence so that it applies to individuals as well as groups who incite violence on the basis of race, religion, nationality, national or ethnic origin or political opinion;
* extending the expiration period of regulations proscribing a terrorist organisation from two to three years;
* amending the National Security Information (Criminal and Civil Proceedings) Act 2004 so that national security and counter-terrorism court proceedings may be expedited;
* establishing a Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement to extend parliamentary oversight to both the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Crime Commission; and
* extending the role of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security (IGIS) to inquire into an intelligence or security matter relating to any Commonwealth Department or agency.

There is still no independent National Security Monitor established.

The Australian Council for Civil Liberties president, Terry O’Gorman, says Australia should have followed Britain’s lead five years ago in appointing someone to oversee the application of counter-terrorism laws.

What is the alternative to peace talks to nowhere?

A very watchable lecture in 13 parts that Ali Abunimah gave at Stanford on Nov 3, 2010, sponsored by Students Confronting Apartheid by Israel (SCAI).

Also well worth reading is a well-written piece in Ma’an News Agency, where Ali Abunimah responds with logic and vision to Hanan Ashrawi while she clings to a broken two state dream.

“Ms. Ashrawi ought to know better than anyone else that it is the totally fraudulent ‘peace process,’ starting with the Oslo Agreement which should never have been signed, which bought time for the occupation to deepen its tentacles in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and to impose — with the complicity of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah — the blockade on Gaza.”

Abunimah said that when Ashrawi argues Palestinians cannot not assemble a global coalition for the one-state solution “she displays a total lack of faith in the Palestinian people and their cause. Palestinian rights and demands are not a gift of ‘global partners,’ but a birthright. When the ANC demanded democracy in South Africa, they set the terms of the agenda, they did not wait for the permission of the US State Department before asking for their rights.

“The one-state solution is the only just, moral and practical solution which restores the rights of all Palestinians — the refugees and the diaspora, the Palestinians within the 1948 territories, and those in the West Bank.”

Abunimah also noted the significance of Ashrawi having to reckon with the one-state solution: “While skeptics and critics of the single state always dismissed it as a marginal idea, they now find it gaining ground to their dismay, and having to defend a so-called two-state solution that everyone knows will never lead to the restoration of Palestinian rights.”

Enough Pizza for All

MiddleEastPizzaTalks from GazaFreedomMarch on Vimeo.

As a proponent for one state with equal rights for all, Ali Abunimah is being targeted by the noxious zionist lobby for censorship. He challenges the absurd anti-democratic methodology used against him:

Typically, they throw in everything to try to defame and tar me: Hamas, Hizbullah, anti-Semitism, making Jewish students feel uncomfortable — all the usual defamatory silencing tactics to try to suppress debate and discussion about Israel’s apartheid and the alternatives that respect everyone. As they surely know, I have been an unflagging advocate of full equality and human rights for all Palestinians and Israeli Jews and others living in historic Palestine, and am guided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Why do they not want students at the University of New Mexico to hear this message?

As Ali has said, memorably: “Zionists tend to regard equal rights for all citizens in a nonracial nonsectarian state roughly the way Dracula views garlic.”

For political zionists, there is not enough pizza for all, nor should the cooks and kitchen staff sit at the same table with them. Like all racist ideologies, zionism can’t survive in the light of day – with the institution of full equal rights.

Further, political zionism is a form of fascism, with censorship of opposing ideas just one symptom of a larger nauseating recipesuper-nationalism, Blut und Boden, syncretised mythologies of past and future glory, nation and race/ethnicity placed above all else, promotion of a cult of unity, strength and purity, atomisation of the working class, belligerent expansionism for lebensraum, sexism, corporatism, perpetual warfare, militarism, violence, dominance of the petty bourgeois class, social darwinism, authoritarianism, rejection of cultural pluralism and multiculturalism, indoctrination, propaganda, newspeak, unegalitarian regulation of private property primarily for the benefit of the community not individuals, selective populism, unegalitarian social welfare, attack of intellectuals, disagreement is treason, racist loyalty oaths, strategic victimhood and sense of besiegement, scapegoating, contempt for the weak, contradictory narratives of weakness and strength, xenophobia, and a cult of heroism. All these are expressed in Israel’s political zionism, projected externally by the ubiquitous, bullying Israel lobby, and pandered to by other invasive settler colonial and imperialist miscreants for whom questioning and censuring the zionist entity would bring into focus their own brutal crimes against Indigenous people. Israel perpetrates the crimes of settler colonialism and apartheid, propelled by the fascist ideology of political zionism.

Each form of fascism as it arises takes aspects of existing culture and grows a unique poisonous plant.

Relevant Links

Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt (Umberto Eco) (.pdf)
Italian Fascism between Ideology and Spectacle (Federico Caprotti)
Marxists on Fascism
The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology (Roger Griffin) [.pdf]
The 14 Characteristics of Fascism (Lawrence Britt)
It’s Barak’s fault
A Spectre is Haunting Israel
Israel embraces fascism and where is the Zionist Diaspora?
The eugenicist racism of religious zionism: ‘Gentile sperm leads to barbaric offspring’
Between moral outrage and historical analysis
The Boycott Law is Fascism: it is a categorically anti-democratic law whose goal is to annul any possibility of legitimate protest.
Mob defending the territory of the tribe : Jewish Women as scapegoats and targets for sexism [Google tr] [Heb]

Everywhere it seems extreme racist, nationalist and religious radicalization merger also appears.

Etan Bloom, Arthur Ruppin and the Production of the Modern Hebrew Culture, PhD. dissertation, Tel Aviv University, 2008 [.pdf]

What is Fascism?
Studying the U.S. Political Right
Conspiracism
What are the Different Sectors of the Right?
A vile logic to Anders Breivik’s choice of target : Slavoj Zizek deconstructs Breivik’s fascist ideology, with particular reference to the anti-semitism implicit in zionism and Breivik’s own anti-semitism.

Ilan Pappe “Israel, the Holocaust and the Nakba”:

‘The Israelis went the other way in two directions that complemented each other. On the one hand, they felt secure from any Western pressure and continued the dispossession of the Palestinians – until today. The limits to their actions in the past, and quite probably in the future, were well defined by the late Israeli journalist Aryeh Caspi: as long as the Israelis do not do to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews, they are within the legitimate and moral boundaries of civilised behaviour. The repertoire of actions within those limits was, and still is, quite horrendous, as the latest Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip testify. The other direction was to Nazify the Palestinians so as to justify further the actions against them. ‘

General definitions of fascism of Robert Paxton:

“Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.”

“a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Excerpts from the book “Anatomy of Fascism” (Robert O. Paxton)

Would there be a State of Israel without Hitler?

Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age. From New Consensus to New Wave?

Imperialism and Settler Colonialism in West Asia: Israel and the Arab Palestinian Struggle – useful class analysis of zionism a dictatorship of the petty bourgeoisie from Europe

Nutanyahoo seizes dictatorial powers :

Seeing as the PM controls the cabinet’s agenda, he will be able to run his proposals repeatedly until they are approved or conversely “bury” decisions made by ministers, pending further discussion.

The Prime Minister’s Office’s legal advisor Attorney Shlomit Barnea Fargo expressed reservations over the clause which she said enables the PM to undermine the decisions of government-appointed committees.

She also raised concerns over the uncertainty created by the fact that no time limit was given to the option of scheduling additional discussions on ministerial committee decisions.

Syncretism of language:

Secular Jewish thinkers articulated pragmatic strategies for harnessing memory and tradition in the pursuit of a national project of self-redemption: “Zionism was a bold revolution with one foot leaping backwards.” Borrowing a coinage from the philosopher Walter Benjamin, Chowers writes that many Zionists “saw themselves as creating a new nowtime, a new constellation in which the ancient Hebraic times and their own epoch become profoundly attached and transform each other.”

Israel: The Logic of a Settler State

A single Palestine on the basis of secularism, democracy, and socialism would be transformed from a cornerstone of the capitalist-imperialist world order into a cornerstone of an emancipatory one. The prerequisite for this possibility is the defeat of Israel as a Zionist entity, the defeat of its inherent settler logic (and Zionism is historically just one example of settlerist ideology), and thereby the dissolution of its current social formation into one that is not irredeemably anti-emancipatory. There can be no ‘Zionist left’, no ‘liberal Zionism’, and so forth, for such propositions are incompatible with the practical logic of the settler state. The concept of Israel must die so that a Palestine may live for Jews and Arabs, Druze and Bedouin alike.

On the fascist role of the Histadrut:

Being “general to its core,” the Histadrut has effectively become the central force of the Jewish community in its many aspects. It organized the Zionist armed forces, sometimes in collusion with the British occupation, and sometimes secretly against British wishes; it created a system of social security, the only one in existence in Israel, which has become an important weapon in the domination of the Jewish masses and the organization of the workers under the authority of the Histadrut; it has opened recruitment offices everywhere, thus reinforcing its domination, while at the same time regulating tihe right to work; it possesses its own school network, its own promotion societies and its own production and service co-operatives; as an organization it completely dominates the kibbutzim and collective farms of the whole country. It is not for nothing that the Histadrut was considered the central pillar of the Zionist enterprise from its beginning, or as the Zionists say, “the state in embryo.”

On the contradictory narratives of weakness and strength:

“‘Shahar Burla, a political scientist at the University of New South Wales, argues in “Political Imaginations in the Diaspora” (Resling, 2013) that Israel presents a two-faced image to Diaspora Jews to maximize the “ultimate goal” – extracting as much financial support as possible from Jews living overseas.

On the one hand, he says, Israel portrays itself to Diaspora Jews as a strong homeland in order to elicit financial support as an “insurance policy” against another Holocaust.

But on the other hand, he says, Israel casts itself as weak, especially in the face of the Iranian nuclear threat and Islamist terror, also to trigger financial support. Burla argues that these two seemingly contradictory narratives, both underpinned by the premise of anti-Semitism, have helped ensure Diaspora Jews continue to donate vast sums via the United Israel Appeal, the Jewish National Fund and other Zionist organizations. ‘”

Israel: The Logic of a Settler State

‘It is no coincidence that as Israel has become stronger and its logic has expressed itself more fully, it has become ever more fascist and less concerned even with formal equality and democracy – as shown most recently by the restrictive laws forbidding even the commemoration of the Naqba (the original ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians), the exclusion of anti-Zionist groups from parliamentary representation, and the unification between Likud and the fascist organization of Avigdor Lieberman. As I have argued, this trend of the capital-state relation to move away from formal liberalism and into a fascist siege mentality is characteristic of a settler state frustrated in its normalization process. For settler states, this normalization process can only occur on the basis of the destruction of the social formation of its rivals, of the original inhabitants; the US and Australia only even considered reforming the racial ladder system after their physical-demographic security as a settler state and their destruction of all rival social formations was complete. So it is with Israel also, and therefore Israel as a state does not and cannot want peace, whatever individuals within it may fervently hope.’

The Great Israeli Body Parts Scandal Revisited

Max Blumenthal reports on the suit which Rachel Corrie’s family is pursuing against the Israeli government. Oblivious to the Geneva Conventions, Israel colonel, Yossi, attests under oath that “There are no civilians during wartime”. Blumenthal notes that there are no Israeli reporters present in the courtroom, that ‘the case has been virtually ignored inside Israel’.

The Corrie family have been hampered in their search for justice for their courageous daughter, Rachel, by Israeli authorities, the US congress and executive courtesy of the malevolent control the Israel lobby has over them.

A 2003 bill introduced in the House International Relations Committee calling for a thorough Israeli investigation in Corrie’s killing and for American efforts to prevent such killings from happening again garnered 78 signatures in support (Rahm Emanuel was the only Jewish signer). However, Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, one of the Israel lobby’s closest allies in Congress, prevented the bill from getting out of the committee. President George W. Bush could have pressed for a full floor vote on the bill but he did nothing. The bill died as a result.

Having been obstructed by the Israelis’ opaque investigation and betrayed by their own government (with notable exceptions like former Rep. Brian Baird), the Corries have been forced to take matters into their own hands.

Blumenthal details another aspect of the case pursuant to Rachel’s murder – the abuse of her body. After obstructions by the Israeli regime in transporting her body to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute in Tel Aviv where all bodies of victims meeting uncertain fates are sent for autopsy, against her parents’ wishes, Rachel’s corpse was autopsied by the notorious Dr. Yehuda Hiss.

Who is Dr. Hiss? The chief pathologist of Israel for a decade and a half, Hiss was implicated by a 2001 investigation by the Israeli Health Ministry of stealing body parts ranging from legs to testicles to ovaries from bodies without permission from family members then selling them to research institutes. Bodies plundered by Hiss included those of Palestinians and Israeli soldiers. He was finally removed from his post in 2004 when the body of a teenage boy killed in a traffic accident was discovered to have been thoroughly gnawed on by a rat in Hiss’s laboratory. In an interview with researcher Nancy Schepper-Hughes, Hiss admitted that he harvested organs if he was confident relatives would not discover that they were missing. He added that he often used glue to close eyelids to hide missing corneas.

When Craig and Cindy Corrie learned that Hiss would perform an autopsy on their daughter, they stipulated that they would only allow the doctor to go forward if an official from the American consulate was present throughout the entire procedure. An Israeli military police report stated that an American official did indeed witness the autopsy. However, when the Corries asked American diplomatic officials including former US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzner if the report was true, they were informed that no American was present at all. The Israelis had lied to them, and apparently fixed their own report to deceive the American government.

On March 14, during the first round of hearings in the Corries’ civil suit, Hiss admitted under oath that he had lied about the presence of an American official during the autopsy of Rachel Corrie. He also conceded to taking “samples” from Corrie’s body for “histological testing” without informing her family. Just which parts of Corrie’s body Hiss took remains unclear; despite Hiss’s claim that he “buried” the samples, her family has not confirmed the whereabouts of her missing body parts.

The Corrie family deserve the truth from the duplicitous, prevaricative Israeli regime and the support of their own government. What is the use of government if it is unwilling to protect its citizens from murder, when it chooses to protect the murderer with which it is already complicit through bounteous guaranteed military aid and an extraordinary special relationship? Supporting the Geneva Conventions and human rights law would naturally highlight America’s multiple abuses against its own civilians domestically, along with civilians in foreign nations where it has exercised its vile preemptive doctrine and impunity, travesties shared with and practised by its warmongering, human rights abusing settler colonial cronies and imperial consorts.

UPDATE 27/4/13

Why doesn’t Wikipedia mention Yehuda Hiss or the Abu Kabir Institute or Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ definitive investigations on its page on her?

The organ harvesting story in the Israeli media

The Guardian sanitised version of the above Israeli media article

The first successful dock protest against Israeli apartheid ever at Oakland

The boycotts, divestments and sanctions movement in the US just took a gigantic leap forward with a successful solidarity action between activists and longshoremen at Oakland, CA to prevent an Israeli ship from unloading its cargo.

In Oakland, California an Israeli ship was blocked by protesters for the first time in history. 700-1000 protesters blocked three different gates at 5:30 A.M. keeping dockworkers from unloading the Israeli cargo.

ILWU members refused to cross picketline – citing “health & safety” provisions of their contract. Management demanded “instant arbitration.” The arbitrator took a look at the picketlines at each gate to the SSA Terminal and ruled that ILWU members were justified in refusing to cross.

All dockworkers were sent home with FULL PAY.

This vid features the Brass Liberation Orchestra.