ABC Radio’s World Today on Australian Israel lobby blindness

I was interviewed this morning by ABC Radio’s World Today: ELEANOR HALL: Now to the latest from Israel on prisoner X. The Israeli parliament is planning to carry out what it calls an “intensive” inquiry into the death of the Australian-Israeli who was found dead in a secret prison near Tel Aviv in 2010. The…

The real Wikileaks and Julian Assange

Amidst all the (mostly) slamming coverage that occurs in the media against Julian Assange and Wikileaks, it’s a welcome relief to read this long interview of Assange by John Keane in The Conversation: Julian Assange could be described as the… Tom Paine… of the early 21st century. Drawing strength from distress, disgusted by the hypocrisy of governments,…

Australian Jews play victim card again over prisonerx case

The following story appears in Israel’s leading online news service, Ynet: Australian Jews express concern over Zygier affair; ‘this is our Pollard affair,’ says Jewish lawyer. Jewish activist Antony Loewenstein: This is a wake up call, Jews should reexamine stance on Israel, IDF service MELBOURNE – The “Prisoner X” affair has raised concerns in the…

Bush tortured and Obama drones; discuss

Jane Mayer in the New Yorker teases out the issues: There are some disturbing similarities between the Obama white paper and the Bush torture memos. Both use slippery legal language to parse dark government programs. Both have been deliberately hidden from public and even congressional oversight. And both involve the blurring of C.I.A. and military…

How being a “Jewish, democratic state” is a contradiction

Ben White, Al Jazeera English: Yet the ADL [Anti-Defamation League], and every other pro-Israel group in the West – including self-professed “liberals” – fail to see the inconsistency in calling a KKK member’s demand for America to “remain a white-dominated country” abhorrent, while Israel “remaining a Jewish country” is a “red line”, consensus issue.

Life today in blighted Iraq

Australian film-maker David Bradbury and Australian writer and activist Donna Mulhearn are currently in Iraq witnessing the devastation that the West has bought in the last decade. Here’s a message from Bradbury in the city of Fallujah: Met two very interesting women doctors today. Dr Samira is the doctor at the frontline of birth defects…

Don’t believe a word of Obama spin over Afghan war victory

Typically astute thoughts by the Afghanistan Analysts Network’s Kate Clark on the clusterfuck that the West is leaving in the country: Obama did indeed struggle to define victory in his state of the union address (read the text here). The US mission, he said, would achieve its mission by defeating ”˜the core al-Qaeda’ by the…

The normalisation of Israeli criminality

The latest developments in the case of Prisoner X continues to reverberate around the world (though as many Palestinians are rightly say, where’s the equal attention on the countless Palestinians held for years illegally in Israel’s administrative detention system?) Some of the latest on Prisoner X here, here and here. The New York Times: The…

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