Showing all posts in June 2019

FICTION The Age’s Tory, Tony Parkinson, on what Tony Blair can teach our ALP: “This week, as Latham raged bitterly against party colleagues, the media, and “the system”, Blair was delivering to his party conference a speech rated as among the best of his prime ministership: bold, resolute, challenging, uplifting. “For a man written off…

George W. Bush on Iraq: “”We can expect they’ll [the insurgency] do everything in their power to try to stop the march of freedom. And our troops are ready for it.” It seems the Australian media have largely decided that Iraq is in such a dire state that honest and brave reporting is simply too…

The following advertisement by Israeli peace group Gush Shalom appeared in Haaretz on September 30: “Few of us will mourn the defeat of Binyamin Netanyahu. “But Ariel Sharon is not a man of peace, either. With the enthusiastic support of the Labor Party ministers, he exploits every opportunity to escalate the attack on the Palestinians.…

Reuters writes: “By limiting the ability of the media to fully and independently cover the events in Iraq, the U.S. forces are unduly preventing U.S. citizens from receiving information…and undermining the very freedoms the U.S. says it is seeking to foster every day that it commits U.S. lives and U.S. dollars.” This is yet another…

(AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov) From Yahoo News: “Israeli bride Reut Unger poses for a wedding photographer next to an Israeli army mobile artillery piece at a staging area near Kibbutz Nahal Oz, just outside the northern Gaza Strip, Wednesday Sept. 28, 2005. “

“It would be interesting to do a word count for mentions of the word “hero” in American public life, as compared with Britain, France or Germany. A hundred years ago, conservative nationalist Germans used to characterise the “true” Germans as heroes and the Jews as wheeler-dealers: Helden against Handler. Today, we have a different stereotype:…

I appeared on LA radio this afternoon to discuss the Israel/Palestine conflict and the Zionist lobby. “Middle East in Focus” is a weekly show on KPFK. The show started in 1980 during the Iranian hostage crisis and is currently hosted by Don Bustany. KPFK is owned by the Pacifica Foundation. They are listener sponsored and…

From the UK Observer, November 2001: “A keynote research paper showing that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians are genetically almost identical has been pulled from a leading journal. “The paper, ‘The Origin of Palestinians and their Genetic Relatedness with other Mediterranean Populations’, involved studying genetic variations in immune system genes among people in the Middle…

It seems some British Muslims are upset that Holocaust Memorial Day solely represents the victims of the Jewish Holocaust and ignores victims of other genocides. Dr Daud Abdullah, Assistant Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain, spoke to ABC Radio’s Religion Report: “…Other peoples have suffered grave injustices. Our argument is let us recall and…

Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating tackles the proposed changes to the country’s media laws: “The Government’s apparent decision to close down any option for new free-to-air television outlets or multiple channels while removing the existing cross-media laws and foreign ownership restrictions is a recipe for massive media concentration and further abuses of power by…