Showing all posts in June 2019

“In their fight against the “rotten” Israeli democracy, the settlers have adopted the Holocaust symbols. They are ostentatiously wearing the Yellow Star that was imposed by the Nazis on the Jews before their extermination, only substituting orange for yellow. They inscribe their forearm with their identity number, like the numbers the Nazis tattooed on the…

Writer, journalist and academic Mark Danner correspondents with Los Angeles Times editorial and opinion editor Michael Kinsley. It’s a most informative discussion about the role of the mainstream media in our age, Iraq and the Downing Street Memo. Kinsley calls the memo “fairly worthless” and “will not persuade anyone who is not already persuaded” about…

Surjan Stevens’ Illinoise. Beautiful, spooky, melodic, poetic and downright brilliant.

ABC TV’s Australian Story tonight features an exclusive interview with top intelligence analyst Lieutenant Colonel Lance Collins. Aside from detailing the power and influence of the pro-Jakarta lobby within the Australian establishment during the late 90s – contributing to a denial of vital intelligence during Australia’s 1999 operation and placing troops in danger – the…

Bill Leak is one of Australia’s finest cartoonists and publishes regularly in the Australian. A new collection of his work, Moments of Truth, is released in early August through Scribe. I love Leak’s description of John Howard: “eyebrows that look like two of Hitler’s moustaches in full arousal.”

Powerful and effective political theatre is a rarity in the 21st century. Ironic really, considering the tumultuous times in which we live. David Hare’s Stuff Happens changes all that. Recently opened in Sydney (with Melbourne to come), I saw the play with my partner last week. Hare constructs the political machinations behind the Iraq war,…

The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn has spent “half my time living in Iraq since the invasion.” On a return from another tour of duty, one of the world’s great journalists explains that present day Iraq is far worse than our Western media is letting on. He portrays a devastated country with random violence, virtually no reconstruction…

“Police gunned down innocent man“, states the Sydney Morning Herald. One day the Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes, was a potential terrorist and the next an innocent in the wrong place at the wrong time (Stockwell station in London, to be precise, a few minutes walk from my former home.) The London police are…

“More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it is difficult to see what real benefits have accrued to the United States from the Iraq war, though a handful of corporations have benefited marginally. In contrast, Iran is the big winner. The Shiites of Iraq increasingly realize they need Iranian backing to defeat…

A fascinating report with photos about life in a Liberian refugee camp. Yet another conflict the world prefers to ignore.