The rise of privatised detention centres and prisons globally is an issue that receives far too little scrutiny in the media (yesterday’s Al Jazeera’s The Stream was a notable exception). The profit motive inevitably skews priorities. Here’s a great piece from this week’s New York Times by Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen that asks the necessary questions: Immigration… control…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
How one-state solution is inevitable now
Gideon Levy in Haaretz on how the two-state solution in Israel/Palestine is long dead – thank you America, settlers, the Israeli government and the Zionist Diaspora – and there’s only one outcome now: Even a dead body can sometimes twitch reflexively. Here we go again: The settlers have occupied another building. Their lawyer isn’t ashamed…
What hardline Zionists don’t want young American Jews to think
The American Jewish community is slowly but surely becoming more willing to critically debate Israel’s brutal policies towards Palestinians. Norman Finkelstein, here interviewed by Haaretz, says occupying Israel has a problem on its hands: “Nobody really defends Israel anymore,” he said in an interview. “If you go on college campuses, there are some Hillel faithfuls…
What’s the next capitalist car? Hamas?
Fascinating example of the corporate world trying to appropriate a political position (via Foreign Policy): In 2003, Volkswagen launched its first ever SUV, the Touareg. ”˜”Touareg” literally means “free folk” and is the name of a nomadic tribe from the Sahara,’”… they wrote… in a press release, explaining their decision to borrow the name of the nomadic…
My lecture at Sydney’s Israeli Apartheid Week 2012
I gave the following talk at the University of Sydney on 15 March:
Netanyahu sounding like liberal Zionists
With the delusion of maintaining a Jewish, democratic state – a concept that never existed post 1948 and even less so today with the occupation of millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and discrimination against Arabs in Israel proper – the Israeli leader sounds like any number of liberal Zionists desperate to…
The lying liar behind Iraq war says he lied
No kidding: A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow. “Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles…
Challenging MSM approved imperial enforcers
Here’s a book review I wrote a while ago published here exclusively: The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work Belen Fernandez Verso, $22.95 Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil? Derrick O’Keefe Verso, $22.95 Antony Loewenstein Back in May 2003, two months after the start of the American-led war in Iraq, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman…
North Korean horrors make us realise true meaning of depravity
Sometimes I read something that puts the notion of human rights into perspective. This story about a man who escaped from a North Korean gulag is shocking beyond belief. It sounds like hell on earth: His first memory is an execution. He walked with his mother to a wheat field, where guards had rounded up…