Great recent piece in the Washington Post on a key source of maintaining the brutal Egyptian dictatorship for so long; the US tax-payer: Beginning two decades ago, the United States government bankrolled an Egyptian think tank dedicated to economic reform. A different outcome is only now becoming visible in the fallout from Egypt’s Arab Spring.…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
Strange bedfellows: new nexus between Israel and far Right
My following essay appears in today’s Crikey: Amid the acres of commentary on the exchange of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit and more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, one comment stands out: “Let the WORLD know about Israel’s humanity and the terrorists’ inhumanity”‰—”‰SHARE this one with EVERYONE you know, friends!” What makes it noteworthy is that…
This is what BDS should look like; not staying quiet while Israel and Australia continue the romance
How dare anybody raise objections to an Australian university normalising relations with Israeli academia, despite the vast bulk of Palestinians under occupation in Palestine actively opposing Western intellectuals providing cover for Zionist crimes? Today’s Murdoch Australian has an article, with the charming headline “University forum with Israeli academics ‘offends Muslims’”, that highlights one of the…
Australian Zionist lobby playbook part 98733
Take some clueless politicians. Show them an Israel that supports colonisation and racism against Arabs as mainstream. Allow them to speak to Israeli-approved Palestinians for a few minutes. Offer propaganda and receive lashings of lies in return. Mix, conduct such “tours” regularly and guarantee continued pro-Israel sentiment in the Australian parliament: Five Labor members of…
Welcome to the Zionist Taliban
Israeli “democracy” 2011: About 100 female soldiers left the main celebration sponsored by the Israel Defense Forces marking the end of the Simhat Torah holiday on Thursday after they were asked to move to a separate women’s section. The traditional “Hakafot Shniyot” event, which comes after the holiday’s formal conclusion and includes dancing with the…
Another day and more Serco violence in Australia
ABC reports: Three people have been treated in hospital after a riot involving more than 100 people at the Scherger Immigration Detention Centre at Weipa on the Cape York Peninsula. The violence broke out yesterday afternoon, causing property damage at the facility. The Immigration Department says two detainees and an officer were injured and taken…
One-state solution for Middle East growing by default
Nobody serious believes a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians will ever emerge (here’s just the latest reason why). Tragically, we’ll still have suffer years of delusions about the how and why but the one-state equation is growing (via the Forward): It’s an ideology with few followers among Israeli Jews, but activists for the…
Clinton on Qaddafi: “We Came, We Saw, He Died”
Lest we forget that the Americans loved Gaddafi very recently. When he was useful. Now, of course, Libyan oil is the prize, already being divided by the Western powers.
Who really needs a transparent legal system anyway?
Welcome to Britain: Secret justice looks set to be a regular feature of British courts and tribunals when the intelligence services want to protect their sources of information. Civil courts, immigration panels and even coroner’s inquests would go into secret session if the Government rules that hearing evidence in public could be a threat to…
The Wire on Gilad Shalit release and Israeli kidnapping of Palestinians
There’s so much blather in the mainstream press about the Gilad Shalit deal this week. Mostly written by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. I was invited onto current affairs show The Wire yesterday to offer a different perspective and argue that the press humanises one man, Shalit, while Arabs are largely invisible and faceless: