Rising up

The Iranian revolution continues: Iranian women’s rights activists are initiating a wide campaign demanding an end to legal discrimination against women in Iranian law. The Campaign, “One Million Signatures Demanding Changes to Discriminatory Laws,” which aims to collect one million signatures to demand changes to discriminatory laws against women, is a follow-up effort to the…

Something must save us

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claims critics of the Bush administration are appeasing fascism. Add Hitler, Nazism, Churchill and Bush and stir. Fear politics is a useful tool in the hands of fools.

Disaster central

Naomi Klein, Common Dreams, August 28: The Red Cross has just announced a new disaster-response partnership with Wal-Mart. When the next hurricane hits, it will be a co-production of Big Aid and Big Box. This, apparently, is the lesson learned from the government’s calamitous response to Hurricane Katrina: Businesses do disaster better. “It’s all going…

The old canard recycled. Again.

The Jewish establishment is clearly unprepared or unwilling to engage honestly with the Zionist cause and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. After last Sunday’s sold-out debate at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival – and the Australian Jewish News’ blatantly dishonest interpretation of the same event – today’s Melbourne Age features a letter from one of the…

It exists

And still some supposed Middle East commentators deny the influence of the Zionist lobby in the US. In this worldview, merely raising the issue implies anti-Semitism. Let them live with their delusions.

Death costs

The one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is justly receiving a great deal of media coverage. Corpwatch provides a welcome perspective: Disaster profiteers make millions while local companies and laborers in New Orleans and the rest of the Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast region are systematically getting the short end of the stick, according to a major new…

Their time is up

Citizen journalism, already changing the face of South Korea, arrives in Japan. When the mainstream media shamefully exaggerates the “terrorist threat” – thankfully critiqued by the Australian public broadcaster – it’s more than time to realise that corporate journalists should be strongly challenged by the general public.

New and welcome directions

A Lebanese blogger profiles his friend, a “terrorist” in Western terms. Meanwhile, the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper reminds the world where responsibility lies for the country’s future (and note the irrelevance of the US.)

Define this

Daniel Benjamin, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, examines the term “Islamo-fascism“: “There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term,” he said. “This is an epithet, a way of arousing strong emotion and tarnishing one’s opponent,…

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