The UK Independent investigates: Heathrow airport, September 2005. An Israeli general accused of war crimes flies in. Waiting for him is a team of Met police officers. Would they dare to arrest him and risk provoking an international incident?
Showing all posts in June 2019
The hardest word
My following essay appeared on February 19 in the Israeli publication, Haaretz: Newly-elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized last week to tens of thousands of Aboriginals known as the ‘stolen generation’, who as children were forcibly removed from their families by the government until as recently as the early 1970s. The apology was…
The Orwellian censorship of Wikileaks
The following article appears in today’s edition of Crikey: Internet censorship is something we normally associate with countries such as Iran or China, but increasingly Western governmental and legal authorities are aggressively restricting the ability of users to view information unimpeded. Such is the story with Wikileaks, one of the most essential websites launched in…
The (thankful) passing of an era
The retirement of Cuba’s long-time dictator Fidel Castro is welcome news. He’s been in power for decades too long, never understanding that authoritarianism is the enemy of stability and peace. The US embargo has been nothing short of futile. Changes may be afoot. It should signal a change in policy from Washington, though probably not…
Blogging the differences away
Away from the politicians and commentators, an Israeli and a Palestinian talk online: They used to meet in Sderot. It seems like ages ago. They were a group of Palestinians from Gaza and Israelis, most of whom were from Sderot. A siren could go off at any moment, but they continued to try to understand…
Monitoring all those “terrorists”
Welcome to the Jewish state, friend of surveillance: The number of wiretaps performed by the police rose 22 percent last year, from 1,128 in 2006 to 1,375, despite Knesset members’ complaints that this tactic is overused. Over the last five years, the number of court-approved wiretaps has risen 42 percent. By comparison, only 1,839 wiretaps…
Blogging to (partial) freedom
Ethan Zuckerman discusses the tranformative power of the internet in Kenya: There’s a strong overlap between the emerging middle class in the developing world and the world of citizen media. Bloggers in Africa are highly educated, and generally are wealthier than the average African. (It’s not cheap, in African terms, to afford the amount of…
The price of disclosure
Essential website Wikileaks runs into some trouble (but soldiers on): The website WikiLeaks.org has been taken off line in many parts of the world. Wikileaks is a website dedicated to leaking documents that are “anonymous, untraceable, uncensorable.” Several factors have taken the site off line including DDoS attacks, which was followed by a fire which…