Peace through falsehood
March 9, 2012 | Allon Lee
Context is king and without it the most outrageous slurs can be given legitimacy.
Unfortunately, some pro-Palestinian activists are prone to only offer facts in isolation to give their false allegations the air of authenticity and aid the ongoing campaign to delegitimise Israel.
The most recent example of this appeared on Tuesday in an op-ed hosted on the ABC “Unleashed” website from Professor Stuart Rees called “Palestine matters, not Gillard-Rudd soapies”…
Middle East Apartheid/ Negotiating with Iran
March 9, 2012
Today’s Update contains two pieces focussed around the reality behind claims about “Apartheid” often directed at Israel by radical opponents (they organise something called “Israel Apartheid Week” on some college campuses, including some in Australia, every March. A summary of the various organisations behind it is here.)
Joseph Kony’s Sudanese connection
March 8, 2012 | Daniel Meyerowitz-Katz
Stop Kony 2012, a video by US-based NGO ‘Invisible Children’, has become a viral sensation overnight and has seemingly coopted thousands if not millions to the cause of hunting-down Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. While the organisation behind the video is questionable, there is no doubt that Kony himself is deserving of the criticism that he is being given; his numerous war crimes, including kidnapping children and forcing them to serve him as child soldiers or sex slaves, have placed him at the top of the International Criminal Court’s wanted list.
While the world is now very aware of Kony’s crimes, what is less well known is…
Fraud suspected in Iranian election
March 8, 2012 | Sharyn Mittelman
Following yesterday’s blog post on the outcomes of the Iranian Parliamentary election, there is further speculation that the Iranian government’s claim of an election turnout of 65% is not accurate.
Also, check out the “bravest, craziest, most ironic vote in Iran’s election” – a young Iranian man who wore a T-shirt that stated “God Bless America” to a polling station.
British Prime Minister confirms Iranian nuclear threat as Obama warns Romney that it is no game
March 7, 2012 | Daniel Meyerowitz-Katz
The Guardian‘s Patrick Wintour and Julian Borger have reported that British Prime Minister David Cameron has explicitly stated that Iran is intending to develop nuclear weapons. This comes just months after the same newspaper revealed that the British military has begun putting in place preparations for a possible war with Iran. That said, Cameron still backs sanctions and is particularly concerned with China and India.
David Cameron has warned that Iran is seeking to build an “inter-continental nuclear weapon” that threatens the west, as he urged Israel to allow time for sanctions to force the Iranians to change their strategic stance…
Iran election 2012: Khamenei vs Ahmadinejad
March 7, 2012 | Sharyn Mittelman
Amid Iran’s nuclear standoff and reports of its human rights abuses, the Iranian Parliamentary elections on March 2 garnered suprisingly little outside interest.
This was because the whole event was simply a contest amongst various strains of extremists – with reformists largely excluded from taking part, or boycotting. It was essentially a battle between supporters of Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The election results are in and it seems Ahmadinejad lost the battle and now may be reduced to being a ‘lame duck’ President.
This blog post looks at the implications of the election.
Obama and Bibi and Iran
March 7, 2012
The past few days saw an intense period of discussion about the Iranian nuclear crisis in Washington involving both US President Obama, and visiting Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu. The three focal points of analysis were Obama’s Speech to the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Sunday (video here), the subsequent meeting between the two leaders on Monday and their public statement following the meeting, and Netanyahu’s Speech to AIPAC on Monday evening (video here). We recommend reading all three original texts, and provide analysis of the context of all three below.
Reactions to Obama’s AIPAC Speech
March 6, 2012 | Sharyn Mittelman
On March 4, US President Barack Obama delivered a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) annual policy conference. In his speech Obama emphasised his strong support for the State of Israel, and policy on Iran.
This blog post looks at a variety of resposes to the speech.
Arab commentators: Syria far worse than Israel, but treated more softly
March 5, 2012 | Ahron Shapiro
As official estimates of Syrian civilians killed in the Assad regime’s bloody crackdown climb steadily past the 7,500 mark, a couple of recent Op-Eds in the Arab media have compared the Arab world’s strong outrage to Israeli military actions in the West Bank, Gaza and southern Lebanon to their muted response to Syrian slaughter of their own people.
Putting aside the moral inequality of such a comparison (the pieces make no effort to differentiate the defensive nature of Israeli military campaigns from the cold-blooded ruthlessness of the Syrian dictatorial regime suppressing dissent from its own citizens) the pieces nevertheless mark a significant break from the traditional narrative in Arab media that the Palestinians are the region’s principal human rights victims…
Is Human Rights Watch abandoning Women’s Rights?
March 2, 2012 | Or Avi Guy
The last sentence in Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth’s introduction to the organisation’s 2012 annual report, titled “Time to Abandon the Autocrats and Embrace Rights,” reads: “It is a global responsibility to help see a positive conclusion to the Arab people’s brave efforts to demand their rights, and to ensure that the toppling of one autocratic regime does not lead to its replacement by another.” If one were to read the essay backwards, this could have been a very promising start. Unfortunately, reading the essay from beginning to end, it is hard to avoid a certain sense of cynicism and irony when reaching this concluding sentence. This is mainly because Roth’s piece should have been titled “Time to Abandon Autocrats and Embrace Political Islamism”.
