Western Australia human rights group Project Safecom released a statement yesterday that captured the hypocrisy at the heart of Australia’s foreign policy. We care about human rights until we don’t. In other words, human rights is far less important than keeping rogue states on side for trade or diplomatic benefits. Maybe the government should just…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
A Tamil uprising in Sri Lanka was only a matter of time
When a government uses overwhelming military force and simply ignores the wishes of the people being murdered, expect an insurgency that will change its face but remain determined to achieve set goals. Sri Lanka, you have been warned: A Marxist group of Tamil militants with connections to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Cuba is preparing…
How to create Palestinian identity from the outside and inside
Palestinian film-maker Elia Suleiman: But ambivalence is a good place to stand regarding the term ”˜resistance’ because it may have lost its meaning from overuse. Resistance isn’t what it was in the 1960s ”¦ If we are just going to use the term for a nationalist cause, then I think we’re just [resurrecting] ’60s cliches.…
This is how the IDF fights
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel released the following statement this week: The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) released today [2 December 2009] a new report which exposes the shifts in Israel’s combat doctrine as evidenced in the prosecution of operation “Cast Lead” and from numerous public oral and written statements made…
Chomsky on challenging our daily propaganda
Noam Chomsky, Language & Politics, quoted in Rai, p. 158: There are a vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent. The propaganda that inundates them is effective when unchallenged, but much of it goes only skin deep. If they can be brought to raise questions and apply their decent…
Holding any criminal state to account, no matter how influential
This is truly fascinating and potentially important news. I have not read this in any mainstream news source: In an unprecedented decision, a Spanish judge has indicted five high-ranking Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials for their role in crimes of torture and genocide committed against Falun Gong practitioners. Among the defendants is former CCP head…
Mob justice in the West Bank
A shocking video circulating around the Arab world. Shots of an Israeli settler driving over a Palestinian: When a Palestinian man from Hebron entered an Israeli settlement gas station with a knife, the Israeli settlers on the scene took things into their own hands. After beating the man and shooting him multiple times, one of…
How to resist every day of our lives
Resist is a project devised by Marc Silver, a global attempt to document ways in which people challenge the established power structure. Here’s the trailer thus far: Having received hundreds of stories of resistance from all over the world, we’ve spent the last few months focusing on the Wall that is being built along the…
Rudd helps the Middle East story remain one sided
My following story appears in today’s Crikey: Last weekend the Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan interviewed former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and provided a platform for him to defend the 2006 Lebanon war, 2008/09 Gaza war and reveal the “most extensive concessions any Israeli leader has ever brought to the table in the search…
The calm logic of the BDS movement
This website regularly discusses the importance of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. A recent debate took place at Columbia University between George Fletcher, Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia Law School and author of Rethinking Criminal Law, and Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights activist and founding member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic…