Last night I appeared on ABCTV’s The Drum (video here) talking about a range of Australian issues, Afghanistan and Murdoch thuggery in Britain. Having just returned from Pakistan and Afghanistan, I talked about the reality of life in the latter under Western occupation and what’s likely to happen once most troops leave at the end…
Showing all posts in June 2019
Krugman on not writing about Israel/Palestine
Short but powerful piece by Paul Krugman on his New York Times blog: Something I’ve been meaning to do — and still don’t have the time to do properly — is say something about Peter Beinart’s brave book… The Crisis of Zionism. The truth is that like many liberal American Jews — and most American Jews…
MSM demand accountability but who is watching them?
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism wonders: News organisations cultivate a reputation for demanding transparency, whether by suing for access to government documents, dispatching camera crews to the doorsteps of recalcitrant politicians, or editorialising in favour of open government. But now many of the country’s biggest media companies — which own dozens of newspapers and TV…
The vast, unprecedented web of American surveillance
We are being watched and monitored on a scale never seen in human history. National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney spoke to Democracy Now! last week and said that he… estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion “transactions” — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans. This probably includes copies of almost…
60 Minutes unafraid to tackle Israeli apartheid first-hand
The role of mainstream media in the West to shield the public from the realities of Israeli occupation is legendary. Occasionally there is a breakthrough, such as this 2010 piece on American 60 Minutes on East Jerusalem. Yesterday the same program and the same reporter, Bob Simon, returned to the subject and covered Christians leaving…
We are America and civilised and that’s why we outsource everything
What does austerity mean in reality for Western democracies? Privatisation, privatisation and privatisation. Welcome to slave labour with a corporate smile (via TomDispatch): Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world.… Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work.… The… privatization…
Top leader of Hamas speaks to leading American Jewish newspaper
Now this is interesting. Forward is granted an “unprecedented” five hour interview with… Mousa Abu Marzook, Hamas’s second-highest-ranking official. Here’s one explanation from an Israeli journalist: What [Abu Marzook] really wants is for Jewish Americans to convince the Israelis that Hamas is not like an animal. Perhaps, but the content is revealing. This is not, despite…
Our education legacy in Afghanistan is mired in corruption and nothingness
Shameful: Hayatollah is supposed to be teaching history and geography for grades six to nine at the Kahrezak Secondary School, located 60 kilometres from Chaghcharan, the provincial centre of Ghor province in central Afghanistan . But when asked to identify Ahmad Shah Durrani, the first king of Afghanistan, the 22-year-old teacher replied with a smile…
This is what military contractors think of journalism in the US
A disturbing story that reveals the danger real journalism poses to the vulture capitalists in our “democracies”: A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites. Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created…