Australian clothing brand Saxony recently invited American photographer… Teru Kuwayama to Australia. He’s spent much of the last decade documenting life and war in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kashmir: I spent time with Kuwayama in Sydney and he is a humane man who has seen the reality of catastrophic Western policies in countries that need more than…
Showing all posts in June 2019
How the Australian Zionist lobby corrupts political process (and politicians and reporters join in)
It’s nearly Christmas and that must mean yet another year of the Australia-Israel-UK Leadership Forum. The Australian media has virtually ignored the whole thing because they’re a) lazy b) not curious and c) clueless how to write about the shamelessness of witnessing so many politicians pall around with pro-occupation Israeli figures. These are the same…
Murdoch’s way of defending Israel is publishing Netanyahu’s crib notes
Yesterday the ABC published as its lead opinion story my piece about the reasons why an academic boycott should be imposed on Israel. The hundreds of comments below are a fascinating if mostly despairing insight into the mindset of people who want to label any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism. Oh well. Today’s Rupert Murdoch’s…
This is not the Syria your mainstream media outlet is selling you
The intrepid Patrick Cockburn, one of the finest reporters around, travels to Syria and offers an alternative view in The Independent: It is one of the most horrifying videos of the war in Syria. It shows two men being beheaded by Syrian rebels, one of them by a child. He hacks with a machete at…
Why boycotting Israeli academia is necessary and principled
My following piece appears today in ABC’s… The Drum: An academic boycott of Israeli universities isn’t an attack on freedom of speech. The evidence tells us these institutions are key battlegrounds for breaches of international law towards the Palestinians, argues Antony Loewenstein. New Zealand’s $20 billion national pension fund… announced this month… that it was divesting from three…
The new totalitarianism in India
The always eloquent Arundhati Roy on disaster capitalism in the world’s biggest quasi-democracy: I don’t know how far back in history to begin, so I’ll lay the milestone down in the recent past. I’ll start in the early 1990s, not long after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan.…
How the Nakba has never ended
Typically great piece by Ben White in Al-Jazeera (another fine piece of his, on racism and maintaining a Jewish majority in Jerusalem, is here): While it is common knowledge that a majority of the population of the Gaza Strip are refugees, it is less well understood where they came from. The shocking reality is that…