I recently attended and filmed the premiere screening of “American Radical: the trials of Norman Finkelstein” in Sydney. A fantastic documentary about an amazing individual.

The event was hosted by Independent Australian Jewish Voices and the Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine.

After the screening of the film the floor was open for discussion during a Q & A session with a panel of guest speakers who included:

Antony Loewenstein - Independent Journalist, author of “My Israel Question” among others, political commentator and Blogger.

Peter Manning - Former Executive Producer of the landmark ABC current affairs program ‘Four Corners’. Adjunct Professor of Journalism at Sydney’s University of Technology and author of “Us and Them: Media, Muslims and the Middle East.”

Dr Peter Slezak - “Senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of New South Wales and occasional public commentator on science, philosophy, religion and politics.”

The following is a short mini doco I put together of the event, published online at Antony Loewenstein’s website:

My following article regarding the live export trade from Australia to the Middle East was published today at the Window Dressers Arms - it was also re-published at The Daily Bludge, where it made headlines on the front page.

Australian sheep being carried to the boot of a waiting car in Dubai

Live export is not only cruelly exporting Australian animals; it is crippling local industry and exporting our jobs. Writes Reuben Brand

After conducting numerous investigations at livestock markets and abattoirs throughout the Middle East, I returned to Australia with hours of footage and hundreds of photographs that document the inhumane treatment these animals endure at the receiving end of the live export trade.

These investigations were launched by Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore during a forum at Parliament House in Sydney, where I spoke alongside representatives from the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) and the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union (AMIEU).

Since my return I have been working closely with local meat processors and Australian meat workers who are now doing it tough due to the fact that there is simply not enough livestock to support local industry because they are all being shipped offshore.

The myths about why live export is important are many; the most common are as follows:

Myth: “Many people do not have the luxury of home refrigeration, and supermarkets are often inaccessible and unaffordable to those living in regional villages.”

Fact: Australia predominately exports to the Gulf region which, despite industry claims, is a very prosperous region for obvious reasons. Oil. The idea of “a lack of refrigeration” is not only an extremely ignorant and un-researched claim, but it is highly culturally offensive. People in the Middle East are not Bedouins living in tents, during my time living in the region I saw more luxury vehicles and high-rises than I see in Sydney or any other “developed” country. Supermarkets are very plentiful and very accessible, all of which stock a huge variety of chilled meat – with Australian chilled meat as the cheapest and most sort after of all.

Did I mention that Dubai has air-conditioned public bus stops and indoor ski slopes? But apparently no one has a fridge. Go figure.

Myth: “The supply of live animals is also important for religious and cultural reasons.”

Fact: Yes, there are religious celebrations that require live animals – only two times a year. Eid al Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan and Eid al Adha, that marks the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca. Only twice a year – but we continue to send live animals 365 days a year.

I spoke to one of the young migrant workers at a livestock market in the region who told me he does not get paid by the local livestock company for his services. Rather, they give him a small amount of food and let him sleep in the holding pens with the animals. He has a Diploma of Associate Engineering and this is what he gets. This kind of cheap labour comes at a very high price and is all the more reason for Australia put an end to a trade that treats both humans and animals so appallingly.

The solid fact of the matter is that the live export trade is exporting Australian jobs (to countries that in some cases don’t even pay their employees) and is crippling our meat processing industry.

During a recent trip to Townsville and Dinmore in Queensland, I interviewed meat workers who are now either unemployed or have had their shifts cut right back and are trying to survive on government handouts.

In Townsville I watched as truck after truck, loaded with cattle, drove straight past the local abattoir. One local meat worker, who is now unemployed, told me that the export vessel docked in the harbour was not only exporting cattle, it was exporting the jobs of approximately 250 people who had just been stood down.

“Nobody is working today and yet there is a boat with thousands of cattle leaving. Thousands! You know, that’s a whole months’ worth of work for us,” she said.

According to Grant Courtney, President of the AMIEU, 40,000 people have lost their jobs and 150 processing plants have been shut down due to the live export trade – over 700 of these job losses have happened in the past six months alone.

“I can’t understand why the Government is sticking its head in the sand when thousands of Australian jobs are being lost due to this trade,” he said.

Another man I spoke to who lost his job at the local abattoir is now struggling just to keep his family afloat. His fiancé, who is also pregnant, has now had to go back into the workforce to try to support their growing family.

With no money for food or bills, no fuel in the car, debt collectors breathing down his neck and relying on donations to survive, life is becoming increasingly tough he bravely told me.

“Lately it’s been getting pretty bad… we’ve even had to go down to the local community centre and grab food vouchers… You start to appreciate things like that when people donate food and money vouchers so you can live.”

Shift cut backs and job losses at the processing plant in Dinmore now have workers pondering the future of the Australian meat processing industry. As one woman told me, if the Dinmore plant is suffering, which is one of the biggest in Australia, then she can’t see hope for the survival of any of the smaller ones.

“Every boat of cattle that leave this county, leave the Australian worker and I know what it feels like without work…it’s no good saying that the live cattle export doesn’t contribute, it certainly does. Because it’s just got worse and worse,” she said.

With a daughter who has a terminal illness and needs a surgery that could save her life, this woman courageously sat and gave a first-hand account of how the live export trade is affecting her life and many others who are now in the same boat.

Andrew Martell, a sheep farmer from central Western NSW, attended the live export forum at Parliament House last month and made some points during Q and A time – he also told the room that he receives the same amount of money for his sheep regardless whether he sells them to exporters or local industry.

So why on Earth would you want to send sheep offshore to be slaughtered and transported inhumanely when you could have it all done here and create much needed jobs in the process?

It is an absurd idea to think that all people in the Middle East buy their daily meat from a wet market – can you imagine how long it would take just to buy a single steak? Local supermarkets and butcher shops operate on a cuts and carcass trade where the outcome for the consumer would remain the same with a chilled meat trade.

Independent research, conducted by ACIL Tasman, shows that a sheep processed domestically is worth 20 per cent more to the Australian economy than one exported live.

According to the Australian live export industry this trade contributes $1.8 billion to the economy, so by using their own figures, if we phase out the live export trade and implement a chilled meat trade for export we could have an industry that injects $2.16 billion into our economy. Not to mention the huge impact it will have on Australian jobs.

A chilled meat trade is not only a sustainable alternative but is also extremely lucrative for all involved, be it farmer, processor or meat worker.

To view a video of Reuben’s investigation in the Middle East please click here

To view interviews of meat workers please click here

Kuwait abattoir

Below is my second installment in a small series of thoughts on the world around us - Published this week at The Window Dressers Arms:

"Playtime activities at an Israeli pre-school"

Brilliant analysis by Norman Finkelstein on Israel’s callous act of piracy on the Gaza flotilla:

A fantastic article outlining Israel’s savage media beat up of Judge Richard Goldstone and their long serving relationship with Apartheid South Africa - written by Max Blumenthal and published in The Nation:

The Banquo’s Ghost of Israeli Foreign Policy

Max Blumenthal
May 14, 2010

A May 6 “expose” from the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot gave Israeli government officials and their hardline American proxies the ammunition they had been seeking against Judge Richard Goldstone. After Goldstone, a Jewish former South African judge who describes himself as a proud Zionist, charged Israel with crimes against humanity for its assault on the Gaza Strip in late 2008 and 2009, the Israeli government sought to destroy him. Now, thanks to Yediot’s report, which documented Goldstone’s career as a judge in South Africa’s apartheid system and ignored his heroic role in guiding the country’s democratic transition, Israel and its allies have renewed their assault.

According to an editorial by Alan Dershowitz, Goldstone “helped legitimate one of the most racist regimes in the world… he had climbed the judicial ladder on whipped backs and hanged bodies.” Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Magazine followed up, calling Goldstone, “a man without a moral compass.” The attack spread throughout the neocon blogosphere, including to Tablet, where Marc Tracy accused Goldstone of publishing his report about the assault on Gaza to alleviate his “severe case of guilt.” Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon piled on, characterizing the judge’s explanation for working inside the apartheid system as “the same explanation we heard in Nazi Germany after World War II.”

However, by assailing Goldstone’s reputation to protect Israel from the meticulously documented facts and modest recommendations contained in his report about the assault on Gaza, Israel’s right-wing government and its American allies unwittingly summoned the Banquo’s Ghost of Israeli foreign policy: the country’s longtime military alliance with South Africa’s apartheid regime.

In the wake of the 1973 war, Israel initiated a close relationship with apartheid South Africa, exchanging intelligence, nuclear technology, arms and military strategy with the white supremacist government. Though figures from Israel’s Labor Party initiated the connection with purely cynical motives, the Likudniks who now dominate Israeli politics consolidated the alliance along the lines of ideological affinity, nurturing cozy personal relationships with the architects of apartheid. Israel was apartheid South Africa’s most dependable ally, sustaining its racist system even after the rest of the world recoiled in disgust, and perhaps learning a thing or two along the way.

This sordid and under-examined relationship comes to life on the pages of The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, a meticulously researched book that reads like a spy thriller. The author, Foreign Affairs senior editor Sasha Polakow-Suransky, spent seven years on his project, conducting interviews with key players from Israel and South Africa, mining South Africa’s apartheid-era archive and resurrecting documents and articles that the Israeli Foreign Ministry would prefer remain forgotten. Rich with intrigue and shocking details but written without a trace of stridency, The Unspoken Alliance is the most authoritative account to date of Israel’s scandalous dealings with the apartheid regime of South Africa.

Readers of the book will learn that while serving as Israeli defense minister, Shimon Peres nurtured his country’s diplomatic relationship with South Africa even while publicly condemning apartheid. After a secret trip to Pretoria in 1974, when Peres first proposed the alliance, he assured his South African hosts that “this relationship is based not only on common interests and on the determination to resist equally our enemies, but also on the unshakeable foundations of our common hatred of injustice and our refusal to submit to it.” The following year, Peres signed a secret security pact with South African defense minister P.W. Botha that led immediately to $200 million in arms deals.

Peres and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin welcomed South African Prime Minister B.J. Vorster to Israel in 1976, taking him on a tour of the Western Wall and the requisite stop at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. It did not seem to matter to Peres or Rabin that Vorster had been an outspoken supporter of Nazi Germany during World War II, or that he devised the policy of torture and repression against his country’s black opposition. Though Vorster’s disturbing past was well known, he encountered few organized protests while gallivanting around Jerusalem.. The Israeli media almost unanimously avoided harsh criticism of the visit, while the Jerusalem Post fawned over the apartheid leader for “recharting his country’s racial and foreign policy.” Back in South Africa, a leading daily called the visit “one of the most successful diplomatic coups in [Vorster's] ten years in office.”

When Menachem Begin led the right-wing Likud Party into power in 1977, ties between Israel and South Africa’s military brass deepened. Appointed as Defense Minister in 1981, Ariel Sharon became a key link to the apartheid regime; along with Army chief of staff Raful Eitan, he became fast friends with South African military commander Magnus Malan. Days after Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 (”not to allow these crazy Arabs to possess nuclear weapons,” as Eitan wrote), earning harsh condemnations from governments around the world, Malan relayed his sympathy to Eitan, “It is comforting to know that South Africa does not stand alone in facing criticism from the international community,” Malan wrote to his counterpart. “Our respective countries will have to withstand this in many manifestations.” Then, when Sharon resigned after his role in the grisly Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut came to light, Malan wrote to thank his disgraced counterpart for the “friendly and understanding way in which you have conducted matters of mutual interest between ourselves and our respective Defense Forces.”

But South Africa and Israel were bound together in their respective battles against the ANC and PLO by much more than a shared anti-communist agenda. In their private correspondences, as Polakow-Suransky documents, leaders from the two countries discussed their alliance in terms of a holy war against the dark-skinned hordes. As Israel’s former ambassador to apartheid South Africa, a Likudnik named Eliahu Lankin, wrote to his South African allies in 1987, “What the ANC is demanding today is nothing less than ‘one man, one vote’… If the whites were to agree to this in present circumstances, they would be committing suicide, not only politically but physically as well.” Eitan made no secret of his fears about empowering the demographic majority, warning before an audience at Tel Aviv University that blacks “want to gain control over the white majority just like the Arabs here want to gain control over us. And we, too, like the white minority in South Africa, must act to prevent them from taking us over.”

During the mid-1980’s, while Western governments gradually divested from South Africa, the Laborites Rabin and Peres maintained practical imperatives for continuing the alliance. When the idealistic young Foreign Ministry director-general Yossi Beilin lobbied Peres to support sanctions against South Africa, Peres angrily summoned Mossad chief Nahum Admoni to berate Beilin, insisting to him at Peres’ behest that the white minority government would not give up power for another thirty years no matter what the international community did. For his part, Rabin justified opposing sanctions on the grounds that they would “mean the firing of tens of thousands of workers” in Israel’s defense industry. Israeli labor unions echoed Rabin’s argument. In 1988, one year after Israel finally imposed sanctions on South Africa, its arms sales to the apartheid government totaled over $1.5 billion.

“Israel was probably our only avenue in the 1980’s,” South Africa’s former Air Force chief Jan van Loggerenberg told Polakow-Suransky.

By the mid-1980’s, international opinion had turned solidly against South Africa’s government. In the United States, the anti-apartheid movement had broken into the mainstream, gathering celebrity support and powerful allies in the Congressional Black Caucus. Seeking to reverse the tide, South African intelligence agents found an eager accomplice in the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a New York-based Jewish outfit supposedly dedicated to combating bigotry.

Under the leadership of Irwin Suall, a former communist who came to see the American left as a threat to Israel’s existence, the ADL deployed a spy named Roy Bullock to the mission, dispatching him to infiltrate US-based anti-apartheid groups and monitor the movements of visitors like Archbishop Desmond Tutu. While the ADL concealed Bullock’s salary by paying him through a shadowy Los Angeles law firm, Bullock collected a paycheck from South Africa’s intelligence service, which also benefited from his “findings.” The ADL supplemented its skullduggery with a propaganda campaign against the ANC. In a 1986 article, ADL national director Nathan Perlmutter called Nelson Mandela and the ANC “totalitarian, anti-humane, anti-democratic, anti-Israel and anti-American.”

The apartheid regime’s former allies in the ADL now readily concede that the state of Israel is engaged in a legitimacy battle remarkably similar to the one South Africa faced. Together with Dershowitz and the usual “pro-Israel” voices, the ADL assails any public figure who dares use the term “apartheid” in the context of Israel’s policies in the occupied West Bank, tainting them with accusations of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has personally authorized a campaign of political warfare against Judge Goldstone and the human rights NGOs who contributed data to his report on the Gaza assault, accusing them of waging “lawfare” against the Jewish State.

Netanyahu appears in The Unspoken Alliance in a remarkable cameo. As one of the Likud Party’s rising stars, Netanyahu was deployed before the UN General Assembly in 1986 to rebut charges that Israel was assisting South Africa’s apartheid regime. Larded with diversions and outright deceptions about Israel’s trade ties with South Africa, Netanyahu’s speech was immediately discredited. At the same time, his bravado performance helped pave his path to the prime minister’s office.

Netanyahu ended his speech with a stentorian denunciation of the apartheid system. “The battle against apartheid has reached an historic junction,” he boomed from the podium. “It can either surge forward on a straight path to the total abolition of this hateful system. Or it can sink into the mud of falsehood and vindictiveness.” His words grow more ironic by the day.

The following is my latest piece regarding the live export trade - it was published today on the Humane Chain website:

Mayor of Fremantle calls to end live export – Uganda bans it completely

By Reuben Brand

Pressure is mounting for Australia to make a stand and put an end to live animal export as the Government of Uganda takes the lead and announces a total ban of the trade.

As the Mayor of Fremantle in WA calls for the live export trade to be phased out over the next five years, the Government of Uganda leads the charge and will soon implement a total ban on live animal export. The shift in policy is a direct need to create more jobs and stimulate the Ugandan economy by value adding the animals locally.

During a press conference, Bright Rwamirama, Uganda’s Minister of State for Animal Industry, announced the decision and gave the following statement.

“We will very soon ban the exportation of live animals in a move to promote value addition and other animal bi-products in the country. By doing that we will also create employment opportunities.”

Rwamirama also announced the construction of a new abattoir and meat processing facility in the central region to ensure all meat products meet export standards.

On average Uganda exports 500 head of cattle, 400 sheep and 600 goats every day to neighbouring countries and to the Middle East. This shift in policy will see a boom in local industry and the creation of much needed jobs.

Australia needs to follow Uganda’s example when it comes to live export, as every boat load of livestock that leaves this country takes with it Australian jobs.

The Mayor of Fremantle, Brad Pettitt, is not too far behind and has called for live export to be completely phased out over the next five years. Mr Pettitt said live animal exports are cruel and Fremantle council needs to take the lead on this issue.

“Despite the best intentions and the best efforts from the industry, it’s clear that animal welfare is often compromised.”

“In the 21st century, the live sheep trade is something that I think we need to be phasing away from. The idea that we just see this trade continuing indefinitely is not acceptable,” he said.

A resolution accepted by Fremantle council’s strategic and general services committee called for live animal exports to be completely phased out and replaced with a chilled meat trade.

The Australian Government stubbornly continues to support the archaic live export trade – how long will it take the rest of our politicians to stand up for what is right? And how many other countries need to lead the way before Australia finally follows suit?

When the going gets tough, the “tough” get going - Netanyahu makes a run for it when a journalist asks him a very pertinent question:

Hamas recently sent US President Barack Obama a letter outlining the need for America to change it’s policy and “double standards” concerning it’s involvement in the Palestinian cause.

Taher An-Nunu, a Hamas Spokesman, said in a press release that the letters include “a request for Obama to change his policy towards the Palestinian people and their rights.” An-Nunu also said the letters did not deviate from official government policy, which imparts upon Hamas the right to resist Israel, armed or otherwise, until Israel withdraws from areas occupied after the Six-Day War in 1967.

Below is my latest illustrated thought in a small series of silly musings on the world around us - published today in the Window Dressers Arms:

"Ahmed the exchange student"

WSPA and The Body Shop teamed up and initiated a campaign aimed at raising awareness and putting an end to the inherently cruel live export trade. During the month long campaign (March 15 to April 11) staff at every Body Shop store throughout Australia informed customers about the cruelty these animals endure on a daily basis and dispelled some of the myths about live export.

The campaign created an incredible response, with 63,000 people signing up to The Humane Chain to show their support to end this trade.

Below are some photos I took that are now being put to good use - the photos were taken during my investigations in the Middle East regarding the live export trade from Australia and were on display at all Body Shop stores: