Following my essay in the latest edition of literary journal Overland on cultural boycotts, politics, Palestine and Sri Lanka, the magazine interviewed me on various matters: Passionate and outspoken about Israel/Palestine, among other things, Antony Loewenstein is a freelance independent journalist based in Sydney. Author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution, he is…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
How much has really changed since Mubarak left?
Australian independent journalist Austin Mackell argues on RT that the military government still holds thousands of political prisoners:
On literary boycotts, Palestine, Sri Lanka and the politics of dissent
My following essay appears in the latest edition of literary journal Overland (a shorter version is published on ABC online): ”˜For thirty years the country [Sri Lanka] went through a kind of hell and endured untold economic and cultural deprivation. Now, with things looking up, we need all the friendly input we can get from…
Sri Lanka is a heart of darkness where murder is encouraged
Today’s Guardian editorial is a powerful indictment against any government, journalist or official who views Colombo as a model when fighting “terrorism”. The UN is also complicit. The take-away message is that murdering civilians during wars (something many nations are very good at, including the US, Israel, Congo and a host of others) must be…
What privatised war does to ethics; render them irrelevant
Evidence for the prosecution: In December 2008, South Asian workers, two thousand miles or more from their homes, staged a protest on the outskirts of Baghdad. The reason: Up to 1,000 of them had been confined in a windowless warehouse and other dismal living quarters without money or work for as long as three months.…
We buy oil from Saudi regime and they hate women
Our addiction to the black gold has made us morally complicit in horrific discrimination. Farzaneh Milani writes in the New York Times: The Arab Spring is inching its way into Saudi Arabia — in the cars of fully veiled drivers. On the surface, when a group of Saudi women used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to…
How Canberra imprisons children with rapists
Welcome to Australia, human rights abuser: Three boys snatched from an impoverished Indonesian village by people smugglers have been held for months in an Australian jail with paedophiles, rapists and murderers. Federal police have ignored Immigration Department assessments and extracts of birth certificates showing the boys are under 18, contravening federal government policy to return…
May Saudi stand-up comedy bring down the nation’s brutes
Amazing New York Times feature on the US backed dictatorship of Saudi Arabia and the brave souls challenging one of the most bigoted and oppressive regimes on earth: You know you are attending a Saudi Arabian comedy night when the sprawling performance tent is pitched 50 miles out into the desert to avoid the morals…
Of course Wikileaks is a force for good in the world
Stuart Rees, head of the Sydney Peace Foundation and presenter to Julian Assange of the Sydney Peace Medal recently, writes in today’s Sydney Morning Herald why Wikileaks matters: The WikiLeaks revelations are a watershed in decades of struggles to unmask what really occurs in the conduct of powerful people and institutions, in governments, corporations and…
