Tag: Wikipedia

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Israel

According to Wikipedia, Jewish geography is a popular “game” sometimes played when Jews meet each other for the first time and try to identify the people they know in common.

Depending on your definition, there are between 14 million and 20 million Jews worldwide. One-third in Israel, one-third in the United States and the remainder spread throughout the rest of the world. One third of the US Jewish population lives in New York.

David Friedman, the new US ambassador to Israel, is an orthodox Jew from New York, a bankruptcy lawyer and a business associate and personal friend of Donald Trump.

Friedman, who is a fluent Hebrew speaker, owns a home in Talbeyeh, a neighbourhood in Jerusalem from which Palestinians were expelled in 1948, and is known for his support of the more extreme elements of Israel’s settler movement.

Friedman was an active fundraiser for and donor to Ateret Cohanim, a far right Israeli group which settles Jews in key locations in East Jerusalem, and the president of the American Friends of Beit El, a settlement of religious extremists on unlawfully seized Palestinian land near Ramallah.

Friedman joined the Trump election campaign as an advisor on Israel. Fiercely opposed to a Palestinian state, he erased any mention of a two-state solution from the Republican platform.

Five former US ambassadors to Israel, two of whom were Jewish, wrote to the Senate committee urging them to block President Trump’s nomination of David Friedman because his “extreme views, divisive rhetoric and dangerous positions … would undermine our national security by further inflaming tensions in the region”.

Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, was born in Miami Beach where his father and brother were both mayors. Dermer, an orthodox Jew, moved to Israel in 1996 and gave up his American citizenship to become the Israeli economic envoy to the US before becoming Israel’s ambassador there in 2013.

Dermer is reputedly the closest senior advisor to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and played a key role in having Netanyahu address the US Congress on Iran – famously without President Barack Obama’s prior knowledge.

Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also an orthodox Jew, is a New York real-estate investor and developer. The designer of Trump’s online campaign, Kushner managed to assemble a presidential campaign on a shoestring budget which won the election for his father-in-law.

Kushner a long-time family friend of the Netanyahus, is reported to have negotiated directly with Lockheed-Martin (the world’s largest arms manufacturer) on behalf of the Saudis when they turned up at the White House this year (2017) with a shopping list for planes, ships and precision-guided bombs.

Speaking in Riyadh, President Trump described the common cause of the US and Saudi Arabia as fighting the “threat” posed by Iran. There was no mention by Trump of the economic reliance of the US and its “51st state” Israel on the arms trade.

In 2007, Israel handled 10 percent of the arms and security trade and 2014 was the world’s sixth largest arms exporter – not bad for a country with 0.1 percent of the world population.

After signing the biggest arms deal of all time in Saudi Arabia ($US110 billion) President Trump took the first direct flight between Saudi Arabia and Israel (the two countries do not have diplomatic relationships).

The Saudi arms deal was about providing work for the US military-industrial complex and would have had the blessing of Ron Dermer, David Friedman, Jared Kushner and Benjamin Netanyahu.

A few days earlier, 30 C-170 military aircraft arrived in Israel laden with vehicles and military equipment for Trump’s visit and 233 rooms in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel were occupied by Trump’s entourage. Trump’s suite was built to withstand virtually any threat, including building collapse.

The planes that took down the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001, were not hijacked by Iranians – they were flown into the Twin Towers by Saudi Arabians.

Iran being used here as a bogeyman by Trump and Netanyahu to justify the Saudi arms deal.

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Korea (ten millispheres)

Readers of this blog will know that I occasionally use the lens of the “millisphere” to examine the context of an international news story, a millisphere being a region with roughly 1000th of the world population.

An invaluable resource when writing a millisphere column is Wikipedia. The internet encyclopedia is the result of millions of contributions, subject to continuing editing by its online readers.

Up until now, spin and deliberate disinformation has been quickly edited out and corrected. As Wikipedia says: “With enough eyes all swamps are shallow”.

In recognition of the democratising power of reliable sources of information, I make an annual contribution to Wikipedia and I am watching with interest their recently signalled move into journalism with their venture, Wikitribune.

A small percentage of what passes for news these days actually includes primary research, whether it be an eyewitness account, an interview or digging up facts and figures that illustrate a news story.

The majority of news stories appear to be passed from one agency to another unaltered. This was highlighted for me when I did an internet search about the MOAB (mother of all bombs) that the United States dropped in Afghanistan on April 13, 2017.

Almost every international news agency carried the story word for word, based on an initial press release from the US Defense Department.

It was refreshing then to come across some left-field primary research by Murray Horton from Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) on the “militarisation” of Christchurch Airport.

Murray had asked the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade about the movements of US military aircraft passing through Christchurch NZ in the 2015-16 year.

Of the 26 flights – nearly all C-130s – five didn’t fly to and from Antartica. Their destinations included American Samoa, Hawaii and  the Richmond RAAF base near Sydney – en route to the American spy base in Pine Gap, Alice Springs.

Horton’s point was that because a MOAB was too heavy for a conventional bomber, and is transported by C-130s, there is no way the New Zealand government would know whether or not the MOAB passed through Christchurch on some circuitous route to attack Afghanistan. Personally I think the MOAD is most likely to have gone through Guam.

This week the American war machine is steaming towards the Korean peninsula.

The underlying philosophy of the millisphere is the notion that wars are primarily caused by competing empires.

The history of the conflict between North and South Korea goes back to World War II; at the end of the war, Japan, which had occupied the entire Korean peninsula since 1910, surrendered the north to the Soviet Union and the south to the Americans.

When North Korea attempted to occupy South Korea by force in 1950, the Soviets and the People’s republic of China supported the North and America and her allies supported the South, and we had the world’s first Cold War conflict.

After three years and over one million casualties, the two sides fought themselves to a standstill and a truce was called – although technically the two sides are still at war.

In recent times, the South Koreans have taken more responsibility for their own defense from their ally, America, and have initiated a peaceful dialogue with North Korea, but the North continues its warlike posturing towards South Korea and America, initiating the occasional skirmish.

One such “skirmish” was the reputed hacking of Sony’s Hollywood computers in retaliation for the movie The Interview – something the North Koreans have consistently denied.

Some say that the North Koreans didn’t have the technical ability and that it could have equally been the Russians or even a disgruntled former Sony employee.

Either way Sony got lots of publicity for what was a pretty ho-hum movie, which subsequently did better at the box office when it was finally released.

In this age of “false news”, the declining number of investigative journalists employed by the traditional print media, social-media echo-chambers and the endless propaganda from warring empires, it is hard to know what is real news and what is manufactured.

What the world doesn’t need though, is a unified Korean empire. Instead what the Korean peninsula needs is ten separate millispheres.