SlowTV | The greening of politics. Bob Brown | The Monthly

SlowTV | The greening of politics. Bob Brown | The Monthly

Addressing the Green New Deal conference, political leader Bob Brown speaks about the rise of green politics over the past few decades. The major parties, he says, have ceased to govern in a manner that will deliver long-term prosperity, and only a radical shift in how we conceive of the relationship between business, economics and the broader society and environment will ensure a sustainable or viable future. Green New Deal conference, presented by the Green Institute, Melbourne, October 2009

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SlowTV | Climate change denialism and the challenges ahead. Kevin Rudd | The Monthly

SlowTV | Climate change denialism and the challenges ahead. Kevin Rudd | The Monthly

"It is time to remove any polite veneer from this debate... The overwhelming need for Australia to tackle the great challenge of our generation is being frustrated by the do-nothing climate change sceptics".

In his major speech to the Lowy Institute, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd takes aim at the goals and methods of climate change denialists and sceptics in Australia and around the world. He outlines a typography of the different schools opposing action on climate change then attacks the arguments that each employ to avoid taking substantial action; then he names those individuals and parties he believes are most responsible for preventing the actions necessitated by global scientific, economic and environmental realities. Lowy Institute, November 2009

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Breaking The Great Australian Silence

Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It's an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and "uttering unlawful oaths". In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a "courting day" - a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.

Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother's eight siblings used the word "stock" a great deal. You either came from "good stock" or "bad stock". It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock - that we had what was called "the stain".

One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. "Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!" she said. And we did - until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our "bad stock". There was outrage. "Your son," my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, "is no better than a damn communist". She promised never to speak to us again.

The Australian silence has unique features.

Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sandhills and look at people who were said to have died off. I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless. At high school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: "We are civilized today and they are not." "They", of course, were the Aboriginal people.

My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. We had to smash down the gate to get in.

The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence.

Tonight, I would like to talk about this silence: about how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war - against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else's country.

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: "It's important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause."

There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard's lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That's the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name.

The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn't give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: "Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It's a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name." That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name.

During the first world war, the British prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: "If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and they can't know."

What has changed? Quite a lot actually. As people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated.

One of the founders of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays, an American who believed that people in free societies could be lied to and regimented without them realising. He invented a euphemism for propaganda -- "public relations", or PR. "What matters," he said, "is the illusion." Like Kevin Rudd's stage-managed press conferences outside his church, what matters is the illusion. The symbols of Anzac are constantly manipulated in this way. Marches. Medals. Flags. The pain of a fallen soldier's family. Serving in the military, says the prime minister, is Australia's highest calling. The squalor of war, the killing of civilians has no reference. What matters is the illusion.

The aim is to ensure our silent complicity in a war of terror and in a massive increase in Australia's military arsenal. Long range cruise missiles are to be targeted at our neighbours. The Rudd government and the Pentagon have launched a competition to build military robots which, it is said, will do the "army's dirty work" in "urban combat zones". What urban combat zones? What dirty work?

Silence.

"I confess," wrote Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, over a century ago, "that countries are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world." We Australians have been in the service of the Great Game for a very long time. Do the young people who wrap themselves in the flag at Gallipoli every April understand that only the lies have changed - that sanctifying blood sacrifice in colonial invasions is meant to prepare us for the next one?

When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a 'training team', requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External affairs wrote this secret truth: "Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States government."

Two versions. One for us, one for them.

Menzies spoke incessantly about "the downward thrust of Chinese communism". What has changed? Outside the church, Kevin Rudd said we were in Afghanistan to stop another downward thrust. Both were lies.

During the Vietnam war, the Department of Foreign Affairs made a rare complaint to Washington. They complained that the British knew more about America's objectives than its committed Australian ally. An assistant secretary of state replied. "We have to inform the British to keep them on side," he said. "You are with us, come what may."

How many more wars are we to be suckered into before we break our silence?

How many more distractions must we, as a people, endure before we begin the job of righting the wrongs in our own country?

"It's time we sang from the world's rooftops," said Kevin Rudd in opposition, "[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world [and] I look forward to working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom...".

Since the second world war, the arsenal of freedom has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements. Millions of people all over the world have been driven out of their homes and subjected to crippling embargos. Bombing is as American as apple pie.

In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter asked this question: "Why is the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought of Stalinist Russia well known in the West while American criminal actions never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

In Australia, we are trained to respect this censorship by omission. An invasion is not an invasion if "we" do it. Terror is not terror if "we" do it. A crime is not a crime if "we" commit it. It didn't happen. Even while it was happening it didn't happen. It didn't matter. It was of no interest.

In the arsenal of freedom we have two categories of victims. The innocent people killed in the Twin Towers were worthy victims. The innocent people killed by Nato bombers in Afghanistan are unworthy victims. Israelis are worthy. Palestinians are unworthy. It gets complicated. Kurds who rose against Saddam Hussein were worthy. But Kurds who rise against the Turkish regime are unworthy. Turkey is a member of Nato. They're in the arsenal of freedom.

The Rudd government justifies its proposals to spend billions on weapons by referring to what the Pentagon calls an "arc of instability" that stretches across the world. Our enemies are apparently everywhere -- from China to the Horn of Africa. In fact, an arc of instability does indeed stretch across the world and is maintained by the United States. The US Air Force calls this "full spectrum dominance". More than 800 American bases are ready for war.

These bases protect a system that allows one per cent of humanity to control 40 per cent of wealth: a system that bails out just one bank with $180 billion - that's enough to eliminate malnutrition in the world, and provide education for every child, and water and sanitation for all, and to reverse the spread of malaria. On September 11th, 2001, the United Nations reported that on that day 36,615 children had died from poverty. But that was not news.

Journalists and politicians like to say the world changed as a result of the September 11th attacks. In fact, for those countries under attack by the arsenal of freedom, nothing has changed. What has changed is not news.

According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup has taken place in the United States, with the Pentagon now ascendant in every aspect of foreign policy.

It doesn't matter who is president - George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush's wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to "annihilate". Iran's crime is its independence. Having thrown out America's favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn't occupy anyone else's land and hasn't attacked any country -- unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America's behalf.

In Australia, we are not told this. It's taboo. Instead, we dutifully celebrate the illusion of Obama, the global celebrity, the marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein, brand Obama offers the thrill of a new image attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he bombs.

This is modern propaganda in action, using a kind of reverse racism - the same way it deploys gender and class as seductive tools. In Barack Obama's case, what matters is not his race or his fine words, but the power he serves.

In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: "The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst... We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum."

Compare that with Rudd's words the other day. "I make absolutely no apology whatsoever," he said, "for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia ... a tough line on asylum seekers."

Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term "illegal immigrants" is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear - they are legal. And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.

The people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire. But that's not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, "turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe".

Why isn't this spelt out? Why have weasel words like "border protection" become the currency of a media crusade against fellow human beings we are told to fear, mostly Muslim people? Why have journalists, whose job is to keep the record straight, become complicit in this campaign?

After all, Australia has had some of the most outspoken and courageous newspapers in the world. Their editors were agents of people, not power. The Sydney Monitor under Edward Smith Hall exposed the dictatorial rule of Governor Darling and helped bring freedom of speech to the colony. Today, most of the Australian media speaks for power, not people. Turn the pages of the major newspapers; look at the news on TV. Like border protection, we have mind protection. There's a consensus on what we read, see and hear: on how we should define our politics and view the rest of the world. Invisible boundaries keep out facts and opinion that are unacceptable.

This is actually a brilliant system, requiring no instructions, no self-censorship. Journalists know not what to do. Of course, now and then the censorship is direct and crude. SBS has banned its journalists from using the phrase "Palestinian land" to describe illegally occupied Palestine. They must describe these territories as "the subject of negotiation". That is the equivalent of somebody taking over your home at the point of a gun and the SBS newsreader describing it as "the subject of negotiation".

In no other democratic country is public discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as in Australia. Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty-nine members of one family - babies, grannies - are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed. Read the United Nations report, written by an eminent Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone.

Those who speak for the arsenal of freedom are working hard to bury the UN report. For only one nation, Israel, has a "right to exist" in the Middle East: only one nation has a right to attack others. Only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister ofb Australia fawning over its leaders.

In Australia, any diversion from this unspoken impunity attracts a campaign of craven personal abuse and intimidation usually associated with dictatorships. But we are not a dictatorship. We are a democracy.

Are we? Or are we a murdochracy.

Rupert Murdoch set the media war agenda shortly before the invasion of Iraq when he said, "There's going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better get it done now."

More than a million people have been killed in Iraq as a result of that invasion - "an episode", according to one study, "more deadly than the Rwandan genocide". In our name. Are we aware of this in Australia?

I once walked along Mutanabi Street in Baghdad. The atmosphere was wonderful. People sat in cafes, reading. Musicians played. Poets recited. Painters painted. This was the cultural heart of Mesopotania, the great civilisation to which we in the West owe a great deal, including the written word. The people I spoke to were both Sunni and Shia, but they called themselves Iraqis. They were cultured and proud.

Today, they are fled or dead. Mutanabi Street has been blown to bits. In Baghdad, the great museums and libraries are looted. The universities are sacked. And people who once took coffee with each other, and married each other, have been turned into enemies. "Building democracy", said Howard and Bush and Blair.

One of my favourite Harold Pinter plays is Party Time. It's set in an apartment in a city like Sydney. A party is in progress. People are drinking good wine and eating canapés. They seem happy. They are chatting and affirming and smiling. They are stylish and very self aware.

But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive and unjust, for which the people at the party share responsibility.

There's a fleeting sense of discomfort, a silence, before the chatting and laughing resumes.

How many of us live in that apartment?

Let me put it another way. I know a very fine Israeli journalist called Amira Hass. She went to live in and report from Gaza. I asked her why she did that. She explained how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen when she saw a group of German women looking at the prisoners, just looking, saying nothing, silent. Her mother never forgot what she called this despicable "looking from the side".

I believe that if we apply justice and courage to human affairs, we begin to make sense of our world. Then, and only then, can we make progress.

However, if we apply justice in Australia, it's tricky, isn't it? Because we are then obliged to break our greatest silence - to no longer "look from the side" in our own country.

In the 1960s, when I first went to South Africa to report apartheid, I was welcomed by decent, liberal people whose complicit silence was the underpinning of that tyranny. They told me that Australians and white South Africans had much in common, and they were right. The good people of Johannesburg could live within a few kilometres of a community called Alexandra, which lacked the most basic services, the children stricken with disease. But they looked from the side and did nothing.

In Australia, our indifference is different. We have become highly competent at divide and rule: at promoting those black Australians who tell us what we want to hear. At professional conferences their keynote speeches are applauded, especially when they blame their own people and provide the excuses we need. We create boards and commissions on which sit nice, decent liberal people like the prime minister's wife. And nothing changes.

We certainly don't like comparisons with apartheid South Africa. That breaks the Australian silence.

Near the end of apartheid, black South Africans were being jailed at the rate of 851 per 100,000 of population. Today, black Australians are being jailed at a national rate that is more than five times higher. Western Australia jails Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure.

In 1983, Eddie Murray was killed in a police cell in Wee Waa in New South Wales by "a person or persons unknown". That's how the coroner described it. Eddie was a rising rugby league star. But he was black and had to be cut down to size. Eddie's parents, Arthur and Leila Murray, launched one of the most tenacious and courageous campaigns for justice I've known anywhere. They stood up to authority. They showed grace and patience and knowledge. And they never gave in.

When Leila died in 2003, I wrote a tribute for her funeral. I described her as an Australian hero. Arthur is still fighting for justice. He's in his sixties. He's a respected elder, a hero. A few months ago, the police in Narrabri offered Arthur a lift home and instead took him for a violent ride in their bullwagon. He ended up in hospital, bruised and battered. That is how Australian heroes are treated.

In the same week the police did this - as they do to black Australians, almost every day - Kevin Rudd said that his government, and I quote, "doesn't have a clear idea of what's happening on the ground" in Aboriginal Australia.

How much information does the prime minister need? How many ideas? How many reports? How many royal commissions? How many inquests? How many funerals? Is he not aware that Australia appears on an international "shame list" for having failed to eradicate trachoma, a preventable disease of poverty that blinds Aboriginal children?

In August this year, the United Nations once again distinguished Australia with the kind of shaming once associated with South Africa. We discriminate on the basis of race. That's it in a nutshell. This time the UN blew a whistle on the so-called "intervention", which began with the Howard government smearing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory with allegations of sex slavery and paedophile rings in "unthinkable numbers", according to the minister for indigenous affairs.

In May last year, official figures were released and barely reported.

Out of 7433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of four possible cases were identified. So much for the "unthinkable numbers". Of course, child abuse does exist, in black Australia and white Australia. The difference is that no soldiers invaded the North Shore; no white parents were swept aside; no white welfare has been "quarantined". What the doctors found they already knew: that Aboriginal children are at risk - from the effects of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world's richest countries.

Billions of dollars have been spent - not on paving roads and building houses, but on a war of legal attrition waged against black communities. I interviewed an Aboriginal leader called Puggy Hunter. He carried a bulging brief case and he sat in the West Australian heat with his head in his hands.

I said, "You're exhausted."

He replied, "Look, I spend most of my life in meetings, fighting lawyers, pleading for our birthright. I'm just tired to death, mate." He died soon afterwards, in his forties.

Kevin Rudd has made a formal apology to the First Australians. He spoke fine words. For many Aboriginal people, who value healing, the apology was very important. However, the Sydney Morning Herald published a remarkably honest editorial. It described the apology as "a piece of political wreckage" that "the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away... in a way that responds to some of its supporters' emotional needs".

Since the apology, Aboriginal poverty has got worse. The promised housing programme is a grim joke. No gap has even begun to be bridged. Instead, the federal government has threatened communities in the Northern Territory that if they don't hand over their precious freehold leases, they will be denied the basic services that we, in white Australia, take for granted.

In the 1970s, Aboriginal communities were granted comprehensive land rights in the Northern Territory, and John Howard set about clawing back these rights with bribery and bullying. The Labour government is doing the same. You see, there are deals to be done. The Territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, especially uranium. And Aboriginal land is wanted as a radioactive waste dump. This is very big business, and foreign companies want a piece of the action.

It is a continuation of the darkest side of our colonial history: a land grab.

Where are the influential voices raised against this? Where are the peak legal bodies? Where are those in the media who tell us endlessly how fair-minded we are? Silence.

But let us not listen to their silence. Let us pay tribute to those Australians who are not silent, who don't look from the side - those like Barbara Shaw and Larissa Behrendt, and the Mutitjulu community leaders and their tenacious lawyer George Newhouse, and Chris Graham, the fearless editor of the National Indigenous Times. And Michael Mansell, Lyle Munro, Gary Foley, Vince Forrester and Pat Dodson, and Arthur Murray.

And let us celebrate Australia's historian of courage and truth, Henry Reynolds, who stood against white supremacists posing as academics and journalists. And the young people who closed down Woomera detention camp, then stood up to the political thugs who took over Sydney during Apec two years ago. And good for Ian Thorpe, the great swimmer, whose voice raised against the intervention has yet to find an echo among the pampered sporting heroes in a country where the gap between white and black sporting facilities and opportunity has closed hardly at all.

Silences can be broken, if we will it. In one of the greatest poems of the English language, Percy Shelley wrote this:

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep has fallen on you

Ye are many - they are few

But we need to make haste. An historic shift is taking place. The major western democracies are moving towards a corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor - and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war.

This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

How do we change this? We start by looking beyond the stereotypes and clichés that are fed to us as news. Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge, we should storm what he called the Bastille of words. Tom Paine did not have the internet, but the internet on its own is not enough.

We need an Australian glasnost, the Russian word from the Gorbachev era, which broadly means awakening, transparency, diversity, justice, disobedience. It was Edmund Burke who spoke of the press as a Fourth Estate. I propose a people's Fifth Estate that monitors, deconstructs and counters the official news. In every news room, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal.

The public are not the problem. It's true some people don't give a damn - but millions do, as I know from the responses to my own films. What people want is to be engaged - a sense that things matter, that nothing is immutable, that unemployment among the young and poverty among the old are both uncivilised and wrong. What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness.

This is already happening in countries in Latin America where ordinary people have discovered a confidence in themselves they did not know existed. We should join them before our own freedom of speech is quietly withdrawn and real dissent is outlawed as the powers of the police are expanded.

"The struggle of people against power, "wrote Milan Kundera, "is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

In Australia, we have much to be proud of - if only we knew about it and celebrated it. Since Francis McCarty and Mary Palmer landed here, we've progressed only because people have spoken out, only because the suffragettes stood up, only because the miners of Broken Hill won the world's first 35-hour week, only because pensions and a basic wage and child endowment were pioneered in New South Wales.

In my lifetime, we have become one of the most culturally diverse places on earth, and it has happened peacefully, by and large. That is a remarkable achievement - until we look for those whose Australian civilisation has seldom been acknowledged, whose genius for survival and generosity and forgiving have rarely been a source of pride. And yet, they remain, as Henry Reynolds wrote, the whispering in our hearts. For they are what is unique about us.

I believe the key to our self respect - and our legacy to the next generation - is the inclusion and reparation of the First Australians. In other words, justice. There is no mystery about what has to be done. The first step is a treaty that guarantees universal land rights and a proper share of the resources of this country.

Only then can we solve, together, issues of health, poverty, housing, education, employment. Only then can we feel a pride that comes not from flags and war. Only then can we become a truly independent nation able to speak out for sanity and justice in the world, and be heard.

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UN affirms Goldstone report

A 575-page blistering report by Justice Richard Goldstone detailing war crimes in Gaza last December is refusing to die despite an aggressive Israeli smear campaign to kill it.

The report, which was favorably voted by the 47-member Human Rights Council in Geneva last month, received overwhelming support Thursday in the 192-member General Assembly.

The vote was 114 in favor and 18 against, with 44 abstentions.

The 18 countries that voted against the resolution included the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Israel.

Ambassador Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations, singled out Ireland, one of the few Western nations to vote for the resolution, for “supporting” it.

He also noted that a “sizeable number of European nations” abstained on the resolution.

Among the abstentions were Britain, France, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Denmark and Greece.

“The General Assembly sent a powerful message,” he told reporters, adding that if Israelis do not comply, “We will go after them.”

The Assembly requested Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to report within three months on the implementation of the resolution.

Among other things, the resolution calls upon both the Israelis and the Palestinians to undertake independent investigations of their own on the serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights laws during the 22-day conflict in Gaza in December.

Still, Mansour said he rejects any equation of the “occupying power's aggression and crimes with actions committed in response by the Palestinian side”.

“We wish to clearly reaffirm that there is absolutely no symmetry or proportionality between the occupier and the occupied,” he added.

U. S. Ambassador Alejandro Wolff rejected the Goldstone report as “deeply flawed” and “unbalanced”.

He said the United States was fully committed to a two-state solution - Israel and Palestine - and will do nothing to hinder it.

Last month, the 15-member Security Council debated the report but refused to take a vote primarily because of the opposition by the United States, a veto-wielding member of the Council.

In Geneva, the Human Rights Council endorsed the report last month by a vote of 25 in favour, six against, 11 abstentions and five no-shows.

The report was also the subject of a vote Tuesday by the U. S. House of Representatives, traditionally sympathetic towards Israel. That vote, condemning the report, was 344 in favour and 36 against.

Nadia Hijab, senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Palestine Studies, told IPS the importance of the Goldstone Report is evident given the amount of effort Israel, the United States and their allies are investing in trying to bury it.

She said irrespective of the strength or weakness of the General Assembly resolution, the report is important because of its very existence.

Not only does it provide an authoritative basis for Palestinians seeking reparations and accountability, but it also puts the world on notice that international law must be upheld and impunity must end, she said.

“It's simply not going to go away,” said Hijab.

The report, authored by a four-member international fact-finding mission headed by Justice Richard Goldstone, details war crimes charges against both Israel and the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

The mission, and specifically Goldstone, has been politically crucified by pro-Israeli groups in the United States.

The UN mission recommended that the Security Council require Israel to report to it, within the next six months, on investigations and prosecutions it should carry out with regard to the violations cited in the report.

During the ruthless military operation, codenamed 'Operation Cast Lead,' the Israelis destroyed houses, factories, wells, schools, hospitals, police stations and other public buildings.

The number of Palestinian killed during the conflict is estimated at between 1,387 and 1,417, mostly civilians, compared with four Israeli fatal casualties in southern Israel and nine soldiers killed during fighting, four of whom died as a result of friendly fire.

The report also recommended that the Security Council set up its own body of independent experts to report to it on the progress of the Israeli investigations and prosecutions.

“If the expert's reports do not indicate within six months that good faith, independent proceedings are taking place, the Security Council should refer the situation in Gaza to the Prosecutor in the International Criminal Court (ICC),” the report recommended.

Hijab told IPS the Goldstone Report has already had an impact on the Israeli-Palestinian scene.

“It will ensure that henceforth the Israeli state as well as Palestinian armed groups are more careful about the use of force,” she said.

In addition, she said, the initial misguided attempt by the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) to “postpone” consideration has strengthened the hand of political parties and civil society in setting limits on how far the PA/PLO can go in their alliance with the U. S. and its erosion of Palestinian human rights.

In short, the Goldstone Report has had a significant before it even reached the General Assembly, and it continues to be discussed the world over, Hijab declared.

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Background Briefing - Internet piracy

Listen Now - 01112009 |Download Audio - 01112009

Copyright began 300 years ago, but now laws can't cope with the anarchy of new technologies. There's a battle between the law and the 'mashers', from the White House to the Australian Federal Court.

Anti-Piracy Advertisement: The pirates are out to get you. Don't let them brand you with their mark. Piracy funds organised crime.

Oscar McLaren: Messages like these have appeared at the start of DVDs, videos and cinema sessions for years.

Anti-Piracy Advertisement: Piracy costs jobs, and will destroy our music and publishing industry.

Piracy funds terrorism, and will destroy our development and your future enjoyment. Don't touch the hot stuff. Cool is copyright.

Oscar McLaren: The film and music studios argue that piracy is destroying the billion dollar entertainment industries. Here is an Australian version.

Anti-Piracy Advertisement: Burning, buying or downloading pirated films may seem harmless, but what you're really burning is the future of Australian films.

Oscar McLaren: The copyright industries say their enemies are everywhere, from multi-billion dollar internet companies to the millions of people around the world who pirate films and music on the net.

But also in the cross-hairs is a growing band of mash-up and remix artists and everyday computer users for whom the internet has sparked a wave of creativity.

Around the world, some say the copyright industry's war is already lost. At a conference in Canberra earlier this year, here's Harvard University's Professor Lawrence Lessig.

Lawrence Lessig: We have to recognise we can't kill this form of creativity, we're only going to criminalise it. There's no way we can stop our kids from engaging in this form of creativity, we can only drive their creativity underground. We can't make them passive, the way at least I was growing up, we can only make them pirates. And the question we have to ask is, Is that any good?

Oscar McLaren: Today, Background Briefing explores this question. Hello, I'm Oscar McLaren on ABC Radio National.

The battle is really about how copyright law should adapt in an age when everyone can be a pirate.

Should it crack down on every download of a film or song? Should it stop every unauthorised remix? Should it stand aside? Or should it find another way of regulating intellectual property.

There are enormous corporate interests involved on all sides, and the laws are complex. But at their most basic level they're meant to encourage creative people to produce work and release it to the public.

Here's how the ABC's children's news program Behind the News tried to explain copyright in 2006.

Presenter: Micky is making a video of herself miming to her favourite song. Now if she was to upload it to YouTube or other similar sites, she'd be committing an offence. Huh? She'd be breaking the copyright rules. What is copyright? As soon as music or a play is put down in a material form, such as on paper, recorded on tape, or stored on a computer disk, copyright rules automatically protect the creator. By using some copyrighted work without the owner's permission for your own use, you are committing piracy. It's got nothing to do with the high seas.

Oscar McLaren: The big fights so far have been over music, and film, though there are already tussles over electronic books as well.

There are two main ways that copyright is being breached. There's outright piracy, that is, people downloading full films and albums over the net; and there's also the trend of people at home remixing popular culture, making video clips using commercial music, or mixing other copyright material together.

We'll deal with this so-called remix culture first.

Music Sample: OK, are we all ready now? Good.

Oscar McLaren: In 2005 the British musician known as Strictly Kev teamed up with the music journalist Paul Morley to produce an hour-long history of the remix movement. And they told a story of how the internet has allowed people from around the world to fiddle with the media, from the comfort of their own home.

Paul Morley: It's from the home, which is nowhere in sight, unless it's your own, that the art of the bootleg mix appears, whereby anonymous raiders of the 20th century, or bastards, armed with a decent hard drive, a lust for life, a love of music that borders on the diseased, and a warped sense of humour, mash up tracks taken off the internet. Twist genres across themselves, and rewrite musical history in a way musicians would never think of. Access on the internet to a capella vocals and instrumental backing tracks, means that home bodies who are all in the mind, can ignore legalities and logic, and all manner of niceties, and splice together any music that takes their fancy. Destiny's Child's horny 'Bootilicious' is mashed in with Nirvana's holy 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' to create 'Smells Like Booty'.

Oscar McLaren: As Strictly Kev and Paul Morley pointed out, the idea of mixing other peoples' artworks together is nothing new. Visual artists have borrowed ideas for centuries, and in the words of the poet TS Eliot:

Reader: Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they they've taken and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

Oscar McLaren: In the internet age more and more people have become involved, using freely available film and music and basic computer programs.

There has been a host of films made about remix culture, including one we'll be quoting from today, called Good Copy Bad Copy. It was released for free on the net and has been translated into dozens of languages.

But amidst all the freewheeling cultural exchange, there are some pretty big legal problems. They came to a head in a celebrated case in 2004.

According to the US magazine Entertainment Weekly the Album of the Year in 2004 was The Grey Album.

MUSIC: Can I get an encore, do you want more ...

Oscar McLaren: It was the work of Brian Burton, who goes by the stage name of DJ Danger Mouse. He mixed sounds from The Beatles' White Album, with the vocal tracks from a more recent release, The Black Album by the Rapper Jay-Z. He gave it out for free, and it was wildly successful, spreading fast across the internet.

Brian Burton spoke about the album in the documentary about copyright law and culture called Good Copy Bad Copy. He said the idea was pretty simple.

Brian Burton: You know, you have a very white thing and a very black thing apparently, and then you know, they can make beautiful music together, it's very corny, very cheesy you know, and calling it the Grey Album, all that stuff you know, but that's what I'm trying to do is change people's perceptions about music and what you can do and things like that. So hopefully I'm getting there. It's a start.

Oscar McLaren: But there was one fairly big problem: Brian Burton didn't have permission to use the bits from The Beatles' White Album.

When its copyright owners, the record company , EMI, came across the new remix, they didn't like what they heard. They sent letters to Brian Burton, demanding that he stop distributing the album. He agreed, though he reminded them that he wasn't selling the Grey Album.

Brian Burton: I'm one of the few people I think that has a tonne of fans, that don't have any product of mine, you know what I mean, and that's great because it's not like it's dependent on that.

MUSIC: THE GREY ALBUM: 'Now look what you made me do, look what I made for you ...'

Oscar McLaren: But that wasn't the end of it. News of EMI's actions spread almost as quickly as the album had, and there were howls of protest.

A group called Downhill Battle who describe themselves as music activists, organised an online protest which they called Grey Tuesday.

Reader: Tuesday, February 24, will be a day of co-ordinated civil disobedience: websites will post Danger Mouse's Grey Album on their site for 24 hours in protest of EMI's attempts to censor this work.

Oscar McLaren: The idea was that people could register their protest by simply downloading the album, and according to the organisers, more than 100,000 people did on that one day.

Even today The Grey Album can be easily downloaded from peer-to-peer filesharing networks.

Background Briefing wasn't able to get comment on The Grey Album from EMI. There is no mention of their position on this issue on their website, but you can find a link to EMI's site on the Background Briefing web page.

The anarchy of the internet which allowed The Grey Album to spread so quickly and stay available for so long has really beaten the copyright industries so far.

It's not like they haven't tried, they've sued the operators of filesharing networks as well as some individual downloaders in the United States. They won many of those cases, but filesharing has continued unabated. Now the copyright industries are upping the ante.

Mark Colvin: The Federal Court has begun hearing a case which could determine how far internet companies have to go to stop their customers illegally downloading films and TV shows.

A group of 33 entertainment companies is suing the internet service provider, Iinet.

Oscar McLaren: The film industry now wants to see illegal filesharers kicked off the internet altogether.

The film and television industry's lobby group AFACT is in the Federal Court arguing that the internet service provider Iinet should be punished for not stopping piracy amongst its customers.

Iinet is defending the claim and says it can't be held responsible for its customers' actions.

Adrianne Pecotic has been the public voice of the studio's legal action. She's AFACT's Executive Director.

Adrianne Pecotic: We think this case is based on very clear legal principles. It's really about what an organisation like Iinet should do to prevent the infringement by its customers over its network of copyright material. The copyright law is very clear about authorisation principles, and also provides a safe harbour for ISPs who do act expeditiously to prevent copyright infringement on their networks.

Oscar McLaren: For many years, the copyright industries have argued that piracy is leading them to financial ruin.

Adrianne Pecotic: Well when last assessed in Australia, the industry was found to lose approximately $230-million, that's the Australian film industry. And broadband penetration has gone up about 70% since then, so we certainly fear that the losses have increased.

Oscar McLaren: That $230-million figure comes from a study that was commissioned by the US film industry in 2005. None of the raw data was released so it's hard to know how the dollar figure was reached.

There's no doubt that there's an enormous amount of illegal downloading going on. But the effect of this is less clear.

Amidst the talk about losses, you may be surprised to hear that last DVD sales were in fact at record levels. Combined revenue from VHS and DVD sales has grown steadily for the past decade.

So why all the talk about the industry facing ruin?

From AFACT, Adrianne Pecotic.

Adrianne Pecotic: The fact that there is a level of illegitimate consumption of film and television is something that detracts from the revenue that could go back into the industry and could go back into supporting local video stores, local cinemas and online distribution. Theft is not justified because someone is being successful, and that's a really important point in this debate.

Oscar McLaren: But it does seem strange that I mean, we're told in quite apocalyptic terms often that the video industry and the film industry is really starting to hurt. I don't imagine many people would actually be aware that the revenues are in fact going up quite steadily and have been for the past decade or so.

Adrianne Pecotic: I think the important thing about the losses that are being suffered by the film industry through piracy, is that individual investors in individual films rely on that investment in that particular film, for that film maker, or that investor as their entire revenue. If you're looking at the analysis across the board of the whole industry and whether it is going up or whether more people are consuming films or less people are consuming films, you're not asking the question of whether a particular film has had the opportunity to recoup its proper revenue.

Oscar McLaren: For the record, box office sales were also at all-time high levels last year, reaching nearly $1-billion.

The very nature of what copyright law is, why it is there and how it should be set, is the subject of heated debate.

The copyright industries say that downloading a film is the same as stealing a DVD from a shop, or stealing a car.

Adrianne Pecotic, from AFACT.

Adrianne Pecotic: I think we're certainly in a digital transition, and people who very clearly understand and respect that they would not go into a DVD store and steal a DVD, some of those people are yet to understand the distinction between being online and dealing with what is actually the valuable thing on that DVD, which is the film or the television program that the investors and the film maker have created. So if you think about the internet, there really is no property on the internet other than intellectual property, so it's incredibly important for the public to go through this digital transition and understand and respect copyright as property on the internet.

Oscar McLaren: But many lawyers in the debate argue that stealing a physical object is very different to breaching intellectual property laws.

On the phone from the University of Michigan Law School is the author of the book Digital Copyright, Professor Jessica Litman.

Jessica LitMan: The difference between a song and a cookie is if I eat a cookie, then you can't have it because I've eaten it, it's gone. But if I listen to a song, you can listen to a song, your friend can listen to a song, anyone can listen to a song, and because intellectual property is capable of being enjoyed by many people at the same time, it's subject to somewhat different rules than cookies. Or houses, or other kinds of property.

Oscar McLaren: Unlike other much older property laws, the idea of copyright has only been around for 300 years. To understand where it came from, we have to travel back to the City of London.

In 1709, a horse and cart was still the quickest way to get around London. The city was still almost 150 years away from getting a sewerage system, and 100 years away from banning the official slave trade. But it wasn't too early to be talking about copyright.

English novels were just starting to be established as a form of writing, and according to the Australian Copyright Council's Ian McDonald, all was not well in the world of publishing.

Ian McDonald: In particular, Daniel Defoe and other writers were finding that yes, they were creating works, they were publishing, or their publishers were putting material out, only immediately to find that the material was pirated by others. And so really it was that question; look, if they're putting the time and the effort and the resources into putting it out there into society to begin with, then they should have rights over that to the exclusion of others.

Oscar McLaren: And so in 1709 the world's first copyright law was enacted in England. It was called the Statute of Anne.

Reader: For the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books, may it please Your Majesty, that it may be enacted.

Oscar McLaren: The idea was pretty simple: if authors were granted a monopoly right to print their own books, they would get the full benefit of the books, and cheap copiers wouldn't be able to come in and undercut them with knock-off editions.

This was meant to give authors the support they needed to continue writing, and the confidence to release that writing to the public.

As with any political decision there was emotive language at play when the Statute of Anne was written. It clearly identified the plight of authors who were having their books pirated.

Reader: ... to their very great detriment, and too often to the ruin of them and their families.

Oscar McLaren: But Ben Atkinson from the Queensland University of Technology, and author of a history of copyright law in Australia says the law was more than just a policy to help starving authors.

There were other people who stood to make money out of original books; chief among them were the established booksellers who were having to compete against a growing pirate trade.

Ben Atkinson.

Ben Atkinson: Yes, there was a real, a big issue about piracy from pretty much the beginning of the 18th century, it was a real concern. But what these booksellers wanted to do essentially was to kind of corner a market, so any kind of threat to their trade was seen as very dangerous, and in a way it's rather similar to today. They wouldn't contemplate kind of ordinary profits, they wanted to optimise their returns, and it's around this period that we start to see the legend of the ruthless, crocodile-like publisher start to become apparent at large.

Oscar McLaren: Ben Atkinson argues that the idea of the struggling author was little more than a lobbying device.

Ben Atkinson: And what the publishers did was to persuade parliament to pass the Statute of Anne, the first copyright statute, and what they did very cleverly was to put forward a kind of ruse, which was the 'author', the concept of the author. Parliament conferred certain printing and publishing benefits on the author for a monopoly for a maximum term of 28 years, but it was in fact the publishers who stood behind the author, who benefited from this new legislation.

Oscar McLaren: I guess you do have to give full public relations marks to the booksellers of 1709 though - it's an idea that's been with us for a good 300 years.

Ben Atkinson: Yes, I give 20 out of 10 to the copyright industries for the way they have advanced their interest, and they have been very intelligent in the way they have done that, and they have extracted from the legislature exceptional privileges, and that is through the intelligence, through their planning and the intelligence of their lobbying.

Oscar McLaren: You can still see the idea of the struggling artist today.

The musician, actor and comedian, Jack Black, created an internet classic when he gave his take on the argument in an ad for his film Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny.

Jack Black: I don't know how they do it, but these pirates can bust into our entertainers' homes, make us walk the plank, steal our rocking tunes, and leave us broke. And you know what that means. No cash, no inspiration. No inspiration, no rocket sauce. No rocket sauce, no kick-ass rock and roll or movies. Is that what you want, Mr Long John Silver? What's your parrot going to listen to when you go toe-to-toe against the English Armada? Jazz? I don't think so. Don't be a douche. Stop piracy. This is Jack Black.

Oscar McLaren: And the archetype of the greedy industry is also still around. There has been a big backlash in the United States against music studios suing individual filesharers. And some artists are pleasing crowds by putting the boot into the industry.

This is how the lead singer of the band The Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor, put it during a concert in Sydney.

Trent Reznor: I remember last time I was here I was doing a lot of complaining about the ridiculous prices of CDs down here. (CHEERS) And that story got picked up and got carried all around the world, and now my record label all around the world hates me, because I yelled at them, and called them out for being greedy assholes. (CHEERS)

Oscar McLaren: There's no denying that the majority of musicians, film makers and other artists don't live like rock stars. Most struggle to make a living from their work.

The question today is whether copyright law properly deals with that problem.

It's a question that's been debated on and off ever since the Statute of Anne was enacted and the debates are usually sparked by technological change.

Jessica Litman from the University of Michigan Law School.

Jessica LitMan: It's always put in apocalyptic terms. When the piano roll was invented in the 19th century, John Phillip Souza for one talked about how it would mean the end of music. Similarly, the recording industry, radio, television, is always greeted by entrenched media as something that poses a threat to their very existence. A lot of that is just rhetoric.

Oscar McLaren: Jessica Litman says the result, after centuries of rhetoric, is a law which is complicated and doesn't do what it's supposed to.

Jessica LitMan: Right now, an ordinary person look at the copyright law in your country, in my country, would say gee whiz, this doesn't seem like a very sensible law to me. Many of them would say, well I'd be willing to pay for every time I listen to this song, if I were sure that the artists who made the song were getting the money, but I don't see any sign that that's true.

Oscar McLaren: There are some signs that new business models are emerging.

Legitimate online downloads nearly tripled last year, and some commercial sites are starting to allow free streaming of music. Some bands are giving away their music, and simply asking for donations. And there are still other musicians who say that illegal filesharing is really just advertising for live concerts.

Whatever business models do get used, there's the view amongst many in the copyright debate that the copyright system needs to make sense to the general public.

From the University of Queensland Law School, Kimberlee Weatherall.

Kimberlee Weatherall: The funny thing about copyright is that because it is so easy to copy, the whole functioning of the copyright system kind of depends on people believing in it and obeying it. You know, it depends on good faith on the part of users, to refrain from doing some of the things that they can easily do, particularly given current technologies. By making copyright look in some respects, evil at times, and perhaps dominated by certain corporate interests, I think some of the events of the last 10 years have chipped away at what goodwill there might have been.

Oscar McLaren: But Kimberlee Weatherall also points out it's not just a case of money-hungry copyright industries.

Kimberlee Weatherall: In the current round of copyright wars, there's probably greed on both sides. There's greed on the part of corporate owners wanting more expansive rights, ever longer rights, you know, give me another 20 years, give me another 20 years so that I can continue to exploit this creative work. And on the other hand, perhaps amongst those who are the most enthusiastic peer-to-peer filesharers, there's a bit of greed there too, it's like we don't want to pay. We want to get all of the music we could ever possibly want in the world and not pay for it, and not recognise that someone else invested in that creation.

MUSIC: KIDS ROCK BY LOO & PLACIDO

Oscar McLaren: You're listening to Background Briefing on ABC Radio National.

The role of children and young people in this debate is critical, as they'll be the ones observing or breaking copyright law in the future.

The American demi-god of the copyright reform movement, Lawrence Lessig was in Canberra earlier this year as a guest of Brisbane's ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.

When he addressed a conference on the future of copyright law, children were on the agenda.

Lawrence Lessig: This war is a war of prohibition, and this war of prohibition, like most wars of prohibition, has not worked, if by worked you mean reduced the 'bad' behaviour. The one thing we recently learned is that kids who share files on peer-to-peer filesharing networks apparently don't read Supreme Court opinions, at least of the United States, I don't know about here in Australia.

Oscar McLaren: Lawrence Lessig displayed a graph showing the amount of illegal filesharing taking place online.

Lawrence Lessig: ... this line right here represents the moment where the Supreme Court clearly declared this behaviour illegal, but we see no drop off in the behaviour of peer-to-peer filesharing. Instead of reducing the bad behaviour, all this war has done, is render a generation criminal.

Oscar McLaren: At the conference, Background Briefing asked how the current copyright debate shapes up historically.

Lawrence Lessig.

Lawrence Lessig: I don't think we've ever seen the radical change in the reach of copyright law that we've seen in the last 10 years. What's happened with digital technologies is all of a sudden a whole class of people never imagined in the Copyright Act to be subject to the regulations in the Copyright Act have to become copyright experts, namely everybody who uses a computer, and obviously a law that was written as copyright law was written, for lawyers and publishing houses or major film studios, is not well suited to be applied to everybody who has access to a computer. So there's a fundamental need to update the law to make it make sense in a world where it purports to regulate everybody who turns on their machine.

Oscar McLaren: The Australian Copyright Council agree that the law is complex, but they argue, the complexity is hard to avoid.

Ian McDonald.

Ian McDonald: What contributes to that complexity is the fact that copyright is also trying to balance up the needs of society, not just to have material produced which is useful, but in certain circumstances to get access to that material, so you find in the copyright legislation both here and in other countries, quite complex provisions in many cases where they're balancing the needs of society to have creators and investors and the needs of society to get access to that material.

Oscar McLaren: And, Ian McDonald says, children do understand the basic ideas.

Ian McDonald: I think what's interesting is the number of basic principles which kids do get, that if they create something themselves, that they do feel a sense of possession towards that, and therefore certainly a number of the education programs which I've looked at, seem to enable the students to themselves see well, actually there's a sense to what is theirs, having some sort of control over it. What is somebody else's, having certain obligations towards it.

Oscar McLaren: But, as we heard earlier, the ABC's children's news program, Behind The News, had its work cut out for it when it tried to go through the details of copyright law for its audience of primary school students.

Presenter: You'll soon be allowed to tape your favourite TV program to watch at another time, but you're not allowed to give the recording to a friend. They can come over and watch the program with you, but they can't take it home. With MP3s, you can copy your music collection from CDs and other formats, to MP3 players. You can even make a compilation of all your favourite songs from CDs you own, as long as you put them on a different format like MP3. But you're not allowed to share your compilation with a friend, although they can listen to it with you. The laws are designed to crack down on people who make profit from piracy.

Oscar McLaren: The copyright industries run their own education campaigns. They recently sent two stars from the soap opera, Neighbours out into the streets to take copyright's pulse.

Child: It's not right, but we do do it.

Man: Do you think it matters if people pirate DVDs?

Child: It matters because a lot of people are losing money, but no, people just do it without even thinking about it. Things like cinemas, transport industries are also suffering because of DVD and video piracy, because they're not getting the amount of business that they usually would if this problem didn't occur.

Man: Is piracy of DVDs and CDs common among your mates?

Child: Oh yeah, lots of kids I know do it, they take it to school. It's not, yes, I don't do it myself, but many kids do, so ...

Man: Well there you go, the voice of youth speaks.

Oscar McLaren: The copyright industries also hold education days where classes of high school students are brought along to learn about copyright law.

There was recently one in Sydney, called the 'Nothing beats the real thing youth challenge'.

Man: ... and what's the day about? Nothing beats the real thing. What does that mean? No plagiarism, well done. Anybody else think of something? Nothing's better than the original. OK. Very good. I wonder what we're talking about. Of course, it's film piracy, but it's a civics and citizenship day here ...

Oscar McLaren: The industry website says on the day the students agreed the best way to deal with piracy is to quote 'Just say No.'

MUSIC: DOUBLE DEE & STEINSKI, 'IT'S UP TO YOU'.

Oscar McLaren: It's not just children who can get bemused by copyright law. Sites like YouTube with enormous legal teams say it's often impossible for them to judge whether video clips breach copyright or not.

There are two big areas of confusion.

First, it's often hard to know exactly who holds copyright. In pieces of recorded music, for instance, there are lots of copyright holders. The performers of the music, the people who wrote the music and the people who recorded it, all have some rights.

Some record labels don't even know exactly what they do and don't own.

The other confusion comes from so-called fair-dealing provisions. In Australia, you're allowed to reproduce copyright material if you're reviewing it or making a parody or satire. And there are a few other exceptions as well. In the US, there's a much broader exception called Fair Use.

But in both Australia and the US, the boundaries of what's allowed under exceptions are far from clear.

In the United States, the complexity reared its head during the 2008 presidential election campaign, especially for John McCain, who found himself caught up in a law he'd helped put in place 10 years earlier.

John McCain: The last eight years haven't worked very well have they? I'll make the next four better.

Oscar McLaren: Both John McCain and Barack Obama flooded the YouTube site with ads during the presidential campaigns. Some of the ads used news footage to illustrate their points.

John McCain: I'm John McCain and I approve this message.

Oscar McLaren: But news organisations said these ads breached copyright law because they used the news footage, and the broadcaster CBS, complained to YouTube.

Under a US law voted for by Senator McCain sites can be held liable for copyright infringement if they refuse to take down videos which are alleged to breach copyright.

YouTube took the campaign videos down as soon as it received the complaints.

But John McCain's campaign insisted they should have stayed up, and that the use of news footage was 'fair use'.

YouTube replied:

Reader: Lawyers and judges constantly disagree about what does and does not constitute fair use.

Oscar McLaren: And YouTube continued:

Reader: We hope that as a content uploader, you have gained a sense of some of the challenges we face every day in operating YouTube.

Oscar McLaren: In this case, YouTube was simply managing its legal risk; there was nothing stopping John McCain from putting his videos up on other sites, or his own website.

But for many websites which host videos and music, the number of copyright complaints rolling in every day is so huge, and the task of checking them so complicated, that the vast bulk of videos which attract complaints are simply removed without any questions.

Paul Morley: In a room, much like the room you're in, using their heads and a sense of where music connects and disconnects, Pro Tooled-up laptop artists make their contribution to the way music is splitting up into a billion different available bits of sound and feeling. Fragmenting into the dust of eternity. Spiralling into infinity. Crazy swiftly tamed, and turned into a commercial promotional add-on. But for a while, the mating of one song with entirely another, for reasons of sound, seriousness and silliness, creates the true sound of the 21st century.

Oscar McLaren: If fair use exceptions are already complicated and fraught, they're being stretched to bursting point by a generation of young remix artists.

Paul Morley: Pop has been everything for 50 years.

Oscar McLaren: Look around the net, and you'll see literally millions of remix videos, music and other art on media-sharing sites. They're usually made by young people, and as far as the copyright industries are concerned, they're illegal.

Earlier we heard about DJ Danger Mouse. Today, a leading light of the genre goes by the name of Girl Talk, and he's become a symbol in the copyright wars.

MUSIC: GIRL TALK 'PLAY YOUR PART'

Oscar McLaren: His latest album, called Feed the Animals, crams more than 300 wildly different samples into 53 minutes of music.

He doesn't have permission for any of the samples, and the whole thing is really a legal fiasco. The New York Times has described it as a lawsuit waiting to happen but it's also highly acclaimed. It was named at Number 4 on Time magazine's top albums of last year.

Girl Talk, whose real name is Gregg Gillis, claims that his album falls under the fair use exception to copyright law.

When we appeared in a film about copyright law and culture, called Good Copy, Bad Copy, he made some interesting points.

Girl Talk: Everyone is bombarded with media now, that I think we've almost been forced to kind of take upon ourselves and use it as an artform. It's like anything, you know, if people were passing out paints on the street for free every day, I'm sure there'd be a lot more painters out there, right now, you know what I mean? That's exactly what's happening right now with kind of remix culture on the internet, and you know, I think the current laws are in a lot of ways just inhibiting the flow of culture and music.

Oscar McLaren: And Gregg Gillis told the makers of the film, Good Copy, Bad Copy that he uses so many samples, doing things by the book would be impossible.

Girl Talk: I don't know about anyone else, I'd be happy paying royalties for every sample on the record, but that's not what it'd be. You know, to actually licence a sample would cost millions of dollars which I can't afford. Sampling would be this form of music that you just can't make music off of, because you have to give all your money away. That would still be cool, it would still be this new way to make music. I think that would be wonderful. But in a theoretical world, if I could clear every sample on there and I had a millions to do it, it will take me probably you know, 50 years to go through the legal hassle of figuring all of that out, and that's just absurd.

Oscar McLaren: Girl Talk has an unlikely fan in his Republican Congressional representative, Mike Doyle, who took up the case at a house Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in 2007.

Mike Doyle: Mr Chairman, I want to tell you a little story of a local guy done good. By day he's a biomedical engineer in Pittsburgh. At night, he DJs under the name Girl Talk. His schtick, as The Chicago Tribune wrote about him is 'based on the notion that some sampling of copyrighted material, especially when manipulated and recontextualised into a new art form, is legit and deserves to be heard.'

Oscar McLaren: But the support of a Congressional Republican hasn't helped Girl Talk's legal status. His albums are released on a record label called 'Illegal Art'.

For the moment, he hasn't faced a lawsuit, and hasn't been forced to stop. In fact, he's quite a star now. He regularly tours and has quit his biomedical engineering job.

But the Australian Copyright Council doesn't have much sympathy for his position.

Ian McDonald.

Ian McDonald: Let's for example, look at what record companies now do if they are putting out mash-ups and so on, in most cases they'll just clear the licensing. It's all just done as an administrative process.

Oscar McLaren: Artists like Girl Talk, who uses 400 samples in an album, many of which are probably orphan works, there's no way and he's explained on numerous occasions there's simply no way that he could go through the bureaucracy of doing that. I mean surely that's going to have a chilling effect on his expression at least?

Ian McDonald: Well I rather doubt it. I don't see why he can't just get permissions.

Oscar McLaren: Some artists have tried to get permission. The musician who goes by the name of Steinski wanted to make an audio montage about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

MUSIC: STEINSKI, 'THE MOTORCADE SPED ON'

Oscar McLaren: Steinski, aka Steven Stein, asked the broadcaster CBS for the rights to use parts of Walter Cronkite's broadcast of the events. He told the makers of a remix radio program called Some Assembly Required, how it went.

Steven Stein: I called up one or two people at CBS and I announced, you know I sort of delineated the project for them. And they out of hand, they just said good luck, buddy, you'll never get that kind of permission from us. And so I thought, oh, the hell with it, so I'll just do it.

Jon Nelson: So you approached them beforehand or in the middle of it?

Steven Stein: Yes, oh, sure, no, beforehand.

Jon Nelson: And they just laughed at you, it sounds like?

Steven Stein: Well, yes. Well I would too, if I was them.

Jon Nelson: Would you?

Steven Stein: Oh, of course. I mean the things, you know, of something of such national sanctity with one of CBS' biggest names?

Jon Nelson: Well yes, but isn't it arguable that given the media's involvement in making that occurrence such a public one, that we should be allowed to use the media to express our own personal experiences of the event?

Steven Stein: Nope.

Jon Nelson: You don't think so?

Steven Stein: I don't buy it. Hell, no, man. I mean if I owned the copyright to Walter Cronkite, that's mine, period, forget it.

Jon Nelson: You respect copyright?

Steven Stein: Well I respect it in theory, I obviously don't respect it in fact.

Jon Nelson: How do you justify that then?

Steven Stein: I don't.

Oscar McLaren: There may be more than a few problems of logic in the copyright debate. But as Steinski told the radio program, Some Assembly Required, the law is getting in the way of what he sees as an important art form.

Steven Stein: Basically almost all my stuff's horribly illegal which is why you can't buy it, not over the counter anyway, and you know, I mean that's it. My basic feeling about this is I'm sorry that it's illegal to do what I'm doing, but I would hate to see the art form wither and die simply because of a bunch of lawyers. Besides, I have too much fun doing it.

Oscar McLaren: Interestingly, some sections of the music industry are starting to agree that copyright holders need to give up some control, especially when amateur home users want to use material.

APRA/AMCOS looks after copyright for musicians in Australia, and it often sides with the industry on questions of piracy and rights. But now, there's an important shift under way in how APRA/AMCOS views the copyright debate.

The organisation's CEO is Brett Cottle.

Brett Cottle: There are a lot of artists who are keen on the remix culture, and that's fine. My view would be if that's done for purely non-commercial private purposes, then frankly, I think it ought to be allowed, because to do otherwise is to create a legal regime that is entirely artificial, and more honoured in the breach than in compliance. But I think that once that remixing crosses over into a commercial environment, I think permission ought to be obtained, and a licence ought to be obtained.

Oscar McLaren: The question of where to draw that line between what is commercial and what is non-commercial, is a difficult one.

APRA point out that there is often a lot of money involved even in apparently non-commercial use .

The broadband internet industry for instance has flourished in the age of film and video downloads. It's worth billions and is growing by the day.

APRA says it's only fair that artists get a share of some of these spoils.

Brett Cottle.

Brett Cottle: Look, I think that's really true. I think there's a huge amount of money behind users. A lot of it is transparent money, and a lot of it is hidden money, and that became clear in some of the earlier litigation about file-trading. The amount of money that was being generated behind the scenes in peer-to-peer networks is absolutely enormous. And I think the other thing is, that people are too ready to adopt this ideological stance of copyright equals big Hollywood studio, or big record label. In fact in most instances, copyright equals songwriter, or writer, or film maker or musician.

Oscar McLaren: Some internet service providers and online sites are already doing deals with content owners. With revenues increasing steadily, the music industry is now optimistic about the future.

But APRA says the days are gone when copyright owners can dictate when and how their material is used.

Brett Cottle.

Brett Cottle: It's not an issue of control or permission, it's an issue of fair payment for use. That's really where the debate is. And I think really, coming back to the starting point of this discussion, it would really help the debate if some sectors in the communications area would acknowledge the fact that they actually make profits based on the use of this material by other people. And the people who have profited most, frankly, have been the telcos and the ISPs from the internet, not copyright owners. And it is time to redress that balance a little bit, I think.

Oscar McLaren: Brett Cottle is one of the more liberal voices on the copyright side of this debate. Many sections of the copyright industries want to retain full control of their content in the digital age.

Professor Lawrence Lessig from Harvard University, fears that if this control continues, or even expands, it will hold back forms of expression which have been around for thousands of years.

Lawrence Lessig: Think about folk music, which no longer exists in any rich sense, because the very act of engaging in folk music authorship invokes copyright law today in a way that it never did in the 19th and 18th century. Well no classical musician today could afford to take the ballads of Bob Dylan and incorporate them into classical form because of the copyright issues that are involved. So the point is to recognise we have this tradition which has respected earlier authors and built upon them in creating new work, and somehow we got lost in the 20th century from recognising its significance, and as we come into this century, I'm trying to show how there's a link between the form of expression we think of in the modern sense of hip hop or remix today, and the form of expression that has been with us since the beginning of culture in human society.

MUSIC: CHRISTIAN MARCLAY; MORE ENCORES, JOHANN STRAUSS

Oscar McLaren: You may be one of the many people who like your music straight, and would be quite happy if the likes of Girl Talk, Steinski, DJ Danger Mouse, and their millions of fellow travellers didn't make their music.

Many fans of the original music which is mixed and cut up, believe that the originals should be left as they are. And if you don't like what remixers do to The Beatles and others, you'll absolutely loathe what Christian Marclay did to Johann Strauss.

MUSIC: CHRISTIAN MARCLAY; MORE ENCORES, JOHANN STRAUSS

Oscar McLaren: But to the Professor of Law at Harvard University, Lawrence Lessig, taking legal action simply isn't the right way to approach differences like these.

Lawrence Lessig: Well you know, in some sense I would say suck it up. I write books, and my books are misinterpreted and misapplied by people all over the world, and the idea that I would have the right to go into a court and get a court to punish somebody because of the way that they have not respected my work is to me crazy, even though at the very same time, I recognise that the people who misinterpret my work should be criticised for misinterpreting my work. And that's the distinction that I think we need to introduce into the moral rights debate. It's not that people should be free to insult without criticism, but we need to limit the place in which we try to regulate culture through legal action, by being able to sue or punish people in court for their misinterpretation. Let's leave that space of cultural negotiation to just the ordinary space of culture, and not involve lawyers in the mix.

Oscar McLaren: Background Briefing's Co-ordinating Producer is Linda McGinness. Research by Anna Whitfeld. Technical production by Phil McKellar, and the Executive Producer is Kirsten Garrett.

Musical thanks to Girl Talk, DJ Danger Mouse, Christian Marclay, Sweden, Some Assembly Required, DJ Food, Strictly Kev, Paul Morley, the crew of Good Copy Bad Copy, Loo & Placido, Cropstar, Steinski and of course their musical forebears too numerous to mention.

There'll be links to many of the artists and commentators in the story on the Background Briefing website.

I'm Oscar McLaren and you're listening to ABC Radio National.

Further Information

Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft

ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation

Australian Copyright Council

APRA/AMCOS

Steinski

Some Assembly Required

Girl Talk

Lawrence Lessig

Good Copy Bad Copy

Loo & Placido

EMI

DJ Food / Strictly Kev

Ben Atkinson's Book

Intellectual property law blog

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Israeli Activists Criticize US House for Considering Resolution Condemning Goldstone Report on Israeli War Crimes in Gaza

The House is expected to overwhelmingly vote today to condemn a UN inquiry that found Israel committed scores of war crimes in its three-week assault on the Gaza Strip. Headed by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone, the inquiry also accused Hamas of war crimes and said both sides should investigate the allegations or face international prosecution. Over 1,300 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli attack, a majority of them civilians. Nine Israelis were killed by Palestinians and another four by so-called friendly fire. The bipartisan, non-binding House measure calls the Goldstone inquiry “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.” The vote comes one day before the United Nations General Assembly is expected to take up the inquiry’s findings.

Guests:

Jeff Halper, Israeli peace activist and scholar. He is coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions

Micha Kurz, Co-founder of the group Breaking the Silence, an organization of veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces that collects testimonies from Israeli soldiers speaking out about their conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories. He is now a coordinator at Grassroots Jerusalem, an organization mapping grassroots activities in and around Jerusalem.

AMY GOODMAN: The House is expected to overwhelmingly vote today to condemn a UN inquiry that found Israel committed scores of war crimes in its three-week assault on the Gaza Strip. The report, headed by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone, also accused Hamas of war crimes and said both sides should investigate the allegations or face international prosecution. Over 1,300 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli attack, a majority of them civilians. Nine Israelis were killed, three by so-called friendly fire.

The bipartisan, non-binding House measure calls the Goldstone inquiry, quote, “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.” The vote comes one day before the United Nations General Assembly is expected to take up the inquiry’s findings.

The vote also comes as the Obama administration is under criticism for backing off its previous demands that Israel halt settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank. Israel is refusing to halt construction of about 3,000 West Bank houses or any construction in occupied East Jerusalem.

On Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the reversal after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

HILLARY CLINTON: What the Prime Minister is saying is historically accurate. There has never been a precondition. It’s always been an issue within the negotiations. What the Prime Minister has offered, in specifics of a restraint on the policy of settlements, which he has just described—no new starts, for example—is unprecedented, in the context of prior to negotiations.

AMY GOODMAN: Clinton’s comments drew criticism from Palestinian and other Arab leaders. Speaking in Morocco Monday, Clinton tried to address those concerns, now adding that Israeli pledges to “restrain” settlement growth are, quote, “not enough.”

HILLARY CLINTON: They will build no new settlements, expropriate no land, allow no new construction or approvals. And let me just say, this offer falls far short of what we would characterize as our position or what our preference would be, but if it is acted upon, it will be an unprecedented restriction on settlements and would have a significant and meaningful effect on restraining their growth.


And let me just take a step back, because I want to put this into the broader context. I will offer positive reinforcement to the parties when I believe they are taking steps that support the objective of reaching a two-state solution. I will also push them, as I have in public and in private, to do even more.

AMY GOODMAN: As Israel continues to build new homes for settlers, it’s also defying US demands to halt the destruction of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem. Around thirty Palestinians were displaced in home demolitions last week. According to the UN, as many as 60,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem are at risk of forced evictions, demolitions and displacement.

We’re joined right now by two guests. Here in the firehouse, Micha Kurz is the co-founder of the group Breaking the Silence, an organization of veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces that collects testimonies from Israeli soldiers speaking out about their conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories. Now he’s coordinator of Grassroots Jerusalem, an organization mapping grassroots activities in and around Jerusalem. And on the phone with us from Israel is Jeff Halper, an Israeli peace activist and scholar, coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

I want to begin with you, Jeff, in Israel. Talk about this non-binding resolution that’s expected to pass in the House, condemning the Goldstone report. You just came from the United States.

JEFF HALPER: Yeah, I just came from the United States, and I just came from a week of meeting with members of Congress and the administration in Washington.

You know, it’s very—it’s very distressing, of course, because in the entire world, Israel relies on the United States as really its only—only firm supporter. The United States is the patron of Israel. But it’s not really the administration—it’s Congress—that’s Israel’s trump card. That is, Israel says it can circumvent the President; it can circumvent the administration by going directly to Congress. And Netanyahu works the phones all the time with Congress. So, in a sense, it’s a kind of divide and rule.

And when I was in Congress, I was telling members of Congress, “You have to understand that you’re being used by Israel as a kind of a—as a trump card against your own administration, preventing the American government from presenting a coherent policy speaking in one voice.” And I think that you really see that, that, in a way, it’s under—I would consider that a gross violation of the internal—you know, a gross, you know, intervention in the internal affairs of the United States, which would seem to me should get all members of Congress upset, no matter what their stand is.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at a Human Rights Watch statement on this, saying, “Members of the [US] House of Representatives should oppose a resolution that calls for the Obama administration to reject scrutiny of Israel and Hamas,” this House Resolution 867, calling on the US President and Secretary of State to "oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.‘”

Jeff Halper, how has it been received in Israel? I mean, Judge Goldstone, well-known jurist from South Africa, also a Zionist. His daughter was talking on Israeli radio and talking about his significance and his Zionism.

JEFF HALPER: Right. Well, I think it’s been—it’s been received here very hard, because it’s really the first time that Israel has—maybe except the International Court of Justice decision on the wall, that Israel has been held accountable for its actions.

And, of course, Israel always presents itself as being the victim, and Israel is defending itself against terrorism and all of that. So the fact that an important figure like Goldstone, through the UN, says no, that Israel is the attacker, Israel is the aggressor, Israel used a disproportionate amount of force, and that was the violation, that’s what made it a war crime, the attack on Gaza, is something that really is much more important than simply Israel going before the International Criminal Court. It means that Israel’s entire image as this little democratic Jewish victim of the conflict is being called into question, and Israel is being held accountable as the strong party for its actions. And that, I would say, is the greatest threat to Israel, because once it could be held accountable by Goldstone, then the dam has burst, and Israel will have trouble defending any of its policies anywhere.

AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of this resolution, if passed in the United States, for the rest of the world, for Israel and the rest of the world?

JEFF HALPER: Right. Well, what I say—you know, what I told members of Congress that I met, I don’t think they understand, that I don’t think the American people understand how much human rights means to the rest of the world. This is the hope of peoples all over the world to get out of oppression, to get some kind of parity, to be included in the world. Human rights really means something. And it’s something that’s meant to protect powerless people against governments, and corporations, as well, actually, so that it means a lot.

So when the United States stands against clear violations of human rights by Israel, I think this isolates the United States in a much broader sense from the world. It isn’t only Israel and the US alone in the UN voting against everybody else, but it really, I think, completely compromises any American credibility in the world as trying to foster democracy or trying even to be a part of the world. It really shows how disconnected the United States is from the concerns of people everywhere, including Europe.

So I think this—I don’t think the Americans understand what it means to go against human rights. I think they feel human rights are anti-American, they somehow trump American exceptionalism. But I think the United States really has to reevaluate its stand, in general, in terms of enforcement of human rights all over the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Halper, speaking to us from Israel, there an Israeli peace activist, coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

Micha Kurz, you’re traveling here in this country. You’re a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces. You co-founded the group Breaking the Silence, Israeli soldiers talking about what they did in Gaza during this assault. Explain what you found.

MICHA KURZ: Breaking the Silence was founded close after the Second Intifada in 2004. We were talking about mostly what it means for soldiers, not as much what it means for Palestinians, but what it means to send eighteen-, nineteen-year-olds into occupied territories, controlling other human beings and making that a routine reality for us, for everyone who goes to the army. And in Israel, everyone goes to the army. Women go in for two years; men go in for three. And all of it’s when we’re eighteen.

What we were doing back then hasn’t—didn’t have anything to do with the Goldstone report. It was a self-check on what’s going on in Israeli mainstream morality: What’s the price we’re paying for these—for occupying these territories and controlling these people?

AMY GOODMAN: Share some of the testimony. Talk about your own experience. When did you serve?

MICHA KURZ: I served during the Second Intifada, a lot of time in Hebron. And a lot of what we were doing in Hebron, it turned out, was as protecting the settlers. We would hear, for example—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain the populations, the size of the settlers and the Palestinian community.

MICHA KURZ: Hebron is a settlement of around 600 to 700 settlers in the middle of a Palestinian town of about 160,000 Palestinians. It’s at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a holy spot for anyone—everyone involved.

And it was actually some of my first times in the Occupied Territories. I came to the army fairly patriotic and enthusiastic about serving my country. And what I ended up doing, it turned out, was protecting Palestinians from the settlers more than vice versa.

We would wake up in the middle of the night hearing banging from down in the settlement, and it turned out that there were settlers that were knocking down walls into Palestinian shops during curfew, and slowly doing this. We’d send a patrol to stop them, and we’d have to leave, and they’d keep working on this hole in the shop until it was wide enough to walk in, lock the doors from the inside, and take all the merchandise out and move a new—expand the settlements that way. This was slowly happening all the time in Hebron, especially back in 2004, when curfews would last forty days, and shopkeepers wouldn’t—weren’t able to go and fix it up.

And this is something we’re seeing today in Jerusalem, in East Jerusalem all the time. Silwan is slowly being taken over by settlements under the guise of archaeological NGOs slowly digging underneath other Palestinian homes and evicting family, one at a time. It’s a gradual process.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the process of your transformation? Do you remember the moment—was it a moment, or it was a period of time, where you felt maybe what we’re doing here is wrong?

MICHA KURZ: I don’t think there was one moment. I think over the course of the Intifada and watching what was going on with friends and the process that happens at a checkpoint. When you put a nineteen-year-old in a checkpoint to control a civilian population, what that looks like on the ground is that I get the power and the responsibility over everyone on the street.

And so, if 400 people come by that day through my checkpoint, and my order is that there is a curfew, then I have to tell 400 people that they have to go home right now. And the first hundred people, I tell them fairly politely, if I’m nice and I’m in a good mood in the morning. And the second hundred people, I’ll be a little more impatient. By the fourth hundred person that shows up at my checkpoint that day, I’m going to be pissed off, and I’m going to say, “What don’t you understand when there’s a curfew here?” And this is over a course of one shift in a day.

Over three years, this is what we watched our friends and myself go through. We would—if someone would break curfew at some point, we’d be—easily we’d handcuff and blindfold someone and sit them down as a punishment for six hours. So they learned, don’t—you don’t break curfew this way. And this became daily reality.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you say you were in the minority or in the majority of Israeli soldiers who were questioning what you were doing?

MICHA KURZ: I’d say right now it might be a minority still, but I think people are slowly waking up. This is what’s going on.

AMY GOODMAN: Micha Kurz, I want to play an excerpt from one of the video testimonies from the Breaking the Silence website. This is First Sergeant Amir, a reservist from the Armored Corps who served in Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, as they call that, the Israeli assault on Gaza earlier this year. He’s describing the briefings his unit received during the training for the assault.

FIRST SGT. AMIR: [translated] At any obstacle, any problem, we open fire and don’t ask questions, even if it’s firing in the dark, aimed at an unknown target. Fire when we don’t see, deterrent fire? No problem with that, etc. A vehicle that’s in the way? Crush it. A building in the way? Shell it. This was the spirit of things that was repeated throughout the training.


INTERVIEWER: Meaning that in briefings no one even mentions the issue of innocents?


FIRST SGT. AMIR: It is not mentioned. And if it is mentioned, it is only to say that there are no innocents, everyone there is enemy. That’s a phrase we kept hearing from that brigade commander, too, that wherever we would be, if there is anyone there, they must be the enemy.

INTERVIEWER: You had briefings before entering that included rules of engagement?


FIRST SGT. AMIR: Not that I recall. There were no rules of engagement. The rules of engagement were to shoot. Those were the rules of engagement. You see anything suspect? Shoot.

AMY GOODMAN: “The rules of engagement were [to] shoot.” So said Amir, the Israeli soldier in Gaza, collected on the Breaking the Silence website. The significance of these soldiers speaking out after this last assault? How many were there? And the effect in Israel?

MICHA KURZ: So far, there are over forty soldiers from different units around Jerusalem that have spoken up, and they’ve been in different parts of Gaza through those couple of weeks.

And I think the significance in Israel is the shift that we’ve seen, a very clear moral standard shift. Israel talks about being the most moral army in the world. The West Bank had some standard we would—no matter what was going on, what assignment we’d get, there was a briefing, a very clear briefing, whether it was Defensive Shield in Ramallah in 2004 or during the Intifada. There was a—the difference with Gaza this time was, after Israel sent out the fliers and the warnings to Gaza, we were—Israeli soldiers were allowed to do whatever they want. The briefings were not clear anymore. This is a—that was a first, as far as Israeli standards. It’s as if the IDF had shifted gears for the first time. And Gaza—Gaza is a—it was appalling. It’s shocking. But most of all, I think I’m mostly saddened by—

AMY GOODMAN: And the resolution that’s being introduced now, expected to pass in the House, that condemns the Goldstone report?

MICHA KURZ: Well, I can speak as Micha, not as Breaking the Silence, on that. And as far as I know, Goldstone, a self-proclaimed Zionst on the board of directors of Hebrew University and all the high school education program, a daughter living in Israel, well respected internationally, is well qualified. Israel had not let him into Israeli territories in [inaudible] to actually conduct a well-balanced report. And it seemed in Israeli media and through Israeli politicians that they actually hadn’t read the report—it was just a reaction. I’m saddened by it. I don’t understand it.

AMY GOODMAN: Micha Kurz, I want to thank you very much for being with us, a co-founder of the group Breaking the Silence, now coordinator of Grassroots Jerusalem, an organization mapping grassroots activities in and around Jerusalem. And on that point, the grassroots actions that are taking place in Jerusalem? Very quickly, you’ve got thirty seconds to lay out the groups and the actions.

MICHA KURZ: I’d like people to know that there are Israelis and Palestinians and internationals spread out all over Jerusalem and all over the West Bank finding innovative solutions, sustainable solutions, to the problems that the policymakers are—

AMY GOODMAN: And the groups that are doing this work?

MICHA KURZ: There is ICAHD, where Jeff is from. There’s Rabbis for Human Rights, the Holy Land Trust in Bethlehem, Bustan Qaraaqa and Beit Sahour. They take care of—this summer Beit Sahour has had their water shut off for forty days. They build water catchment systems and cisterns. This is an amazing thing. If anyone in the States needs to support something, wants to support something, support the grassroots organizations on the ground.

AMY GOODMAN: Thanks very much, Micha Kurz.

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