How the ALP tries to keep any pro-Palestinian thoughts well hidden

Yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald examined Labor Party head-kicker Mark Arbib and his supposedly magical powers within the ALP. Lucky him. Then there was this paragraph: He kept a tight rein on the state’s MPs. Julia Irwin, then the Member for Fowler, says he responded to a speech she gave on the rights of Palestinians by…

How the Melbourne Film Festival embraces apartheid Israel

Back in 2009, film-maker Ken Loach withdrew his film Looking for Eric from the Melbourne International Film Festival after it was revealed that the Israeli government offered financial support for the event. This year there was supposedly no controversy despite the festival again taking funds from the Israeli government (the director, Richard Moore, is a…

Many truths within Wikileaks, if you care to look

The faux outrage over the Wikileaks revelations related to Pakistan’s closeness to the Taliban should be dismissed as propaganda (a point reinforced by Tariq Ali in the Guardian yesterday). Wikileaks has announced that more “secrets” will be forthcoming, despite the group’s testy relationship with corporate media. Here’s founder Julian Assange’s modus operandi: We have clearly…

Revolutionary Guards pulling strings in Iran

A new blog by a colleague who knows Iran inside out. Iran Dispatch is essential reading. Like this post that discusses where real power today lies in the Islamic Republic: Iran’s opposition leader, Mehdi Karroubi says Iran Revolutionary Guards has been behind the election fraud and now controls the whole economy of the country. In…

Obama’s Bush mannerisms

The ACLU on Obama’s morphing into George W. Bush: In the eighteen months since the issuance of those executive orders, the administration’s record on issues related to civil liberties and national security has been, at best, mixed. Indeed, on a range of issues including accountability for torture, detention of terrorism suspects, and use of lethal…

BDS backers are basically terrorists in disguise (in hasbara minds)

This is almost funny. Palestinian activists and writers, such as Ali Abunimah and Diana Buttu, backing BDS are, according to this Zionist propaganda video, “anti-Israel” because they don’t accept the two-state solution, a pipe-dream that is both impractical and immoral. Seriously, this is what Zionism is left with; smearing Palestinians who demand full rights instead…

A few easy steps to buy products from West Bank colonies

This is the face of modern Zionism. A Rabbi looking to help those poor souls in Israel. Help! One of Brooklyn Heights’s most-influential Jewish leaders fought back against an anti-Israel rally last Friday by doing what influential rabbis do in such situations: he bought cosmetics. Rabbi Aaron Raskin of Congregation B’nai Avraham picked up some…

The futility and vindictiveness of destroying Bedouin homes

Heartbreaking and enraging. Footage this week of Israel demolishing the homes of a Bedouin village in the Negev desert. 300 people are now homeless: The Bedouin of the Negev (Naqab in Arabic) are full Israeli… citizens, but some 76,000 of them live in “unrecognized villages” that… receive virtually no government services including… water, electricity, and sanitation.

Google and CIA work together

Just what the world needs: The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to…

Anything to protect the privatised asylum seekers

Following my article in yesterday’s Crikey about the out of control privatisation agenda in Australia, two heavy hitters respond today in the publication in predictably shallow ways. Spin, spin and more spin: Department of Immigration and Citizenship spokesman Sandi Logan writes: Let me assure Crikey readers the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC)”‰—”‰and its detention…

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