My recent book, For God’s Sake, tackles religion, faith and politics. Last Sunday all the contributors were interviewed by ABC Radio’s… Sunday Night: Sunday Nights takes on the world’s biggest religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam and, what some refer to as a kind of religion, Atheism. A recent book, For God’s Sake, features representatives from each of…
Showing all posts in June 2019
Assange, Greenwald, Coombs, O'Brien, Manne and Keane on mass surveillance
Last night at the Sydney Opera House I witnessed a truly unique event. 1.5 hour discussion with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, indy reporter and key documenter of the Chelsea Manning trial Alexa O’Brien (with whom I did an event tonight… on Manning and dissent), Manning lawyer David Coombs, academic Robert Manne and moderator…
The eternal paradox at the heart of Zionism
The always insightful Israeli historian Ilan Pappe … (who endorsed my first book, My Israel Question) on where to from here for Israel and Palestine: The recent attempt to revive the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians is not likely to produce more meaningful results than that of any of the previous attempts. It comes…
ABCTV News 24's The Drum on asylum seekers and Indonesia
I appeared last Friday on ABCTV News 24’s The Drum (video here) talking principally about the reality of asylum seekers and why Australia’s policy towards them is based on cruelty and not compassion. In summary, I’ve long argued that Australia, as a rich nation, is making a choice to punish refugees in remote detention camps…
America happy to share raw intel with fellow occupier Israel
A killer story (and yet more evidence that the revelations from Edward Snowden are undeniably in the public interest). This is by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill in The Guardian: The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data withIsrael… without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens,… a top-secret document provided to…
Where to now for the Australian Left?
My following column appears in the Guardian today: Treating voters with contempt is the perfect way for the left to guarantee itself permanent exile from the political scene. On election night, Melbourne writer Catherine Deveny… tweeted: “This is win for racists, morons, homophobes, fuckheads, jumped up bogans, misogynists, billionaires, haters, comedians.” Such sentiments might momentarily make…
Chomsky reminds Obama that US brings instability
On the anniversary of America’s 9/11 (let’s not forget Chile in 1973), Noam Chomsky tells Democracy Now! that US President Barack Obama wilfully lies about the real role of empire: The other things that he said were not unusual, but nevertheless kind of shocking to anyone not familiar with U.S. political discourse, at least. So…
Inside the mind of a Chinese internet censor
A key theme of my book The Blogging Revolution is China’s extensive web censorship regime. Fast forward to 2013 and this story, via Reuters, offers unique details about the pathological desire to exercise control over citizens: In a modern office building on the outskirts of the Chinese city of Tianjin, rows of censors stare at…
Naomi Klein damns big greens groups as aiding and abetting climate change
One of the finest journalists in the world, and somebody who inspired my new book Profits of Doom, is Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine. She continually challenges mainstream thinking on war, politics and environment. She’s currently working on a film and book about climate change and was interviewed by Earth Island Journal recently:…