Essential new journalism by McClatchy Newspapers – it should be remembered that the same news service were one of the few before the 2003 Iraq invasion questioning WMD lies – on the reality on the ground for Barack Obama’s massively expanded drone campaign: Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior…
Showing all posts in June 2019
Australian Zionist lobby media complaint rejected as a pest
Earlier in the year, after the ABC broke a massive story about an Australian man Ben Zygier spying for Mossad and dying in an Israeli jail, there was a great deal of media coverage that questioned the ways in which some Jews saw their relationship with the Israeli state. I was interviewed on ABC Radio…
Inside the devastating war for Syria
The conflict has now been going for more than two years and many in the mainstream media have given up reporting. There are notable exceptions. This remarkable footage (shot by Olly Lambert and screened by PBS Frontline) must be seen. Lambert writes movingly… about the realities of war journalism in ways that happen far too rarely:…
Memo to British Zionists; being anti-Zionist as human as oxygen
Witness the debacle within the British Zionist establishment, via Haaretz, and the increasingly desperate ways that so-called leaders there will do anything to defend Israeli policies without for a minute actually considering what the Jewish state has become; a brutish occupier: LONDON… −… It was only one private citizen suing Britain’s largest academic union, but it seemed…
Wikileaks, by publishing 1.7 million documents, proves ongoing relevance
A huge day for journalists, archivists and citizens (via the Guardian): WikiLeaks… has published more than 1.7m US records covering diplomatic or intelligence reports on every country in the world. The data, which has not been leaked, comprises diplomatic records from the beginning of 1973 to the end of 1976, covering a variety of diplomatic traffic…
Australia’s future must not be all about digging up minerals
Australia has a long history of romanticising the individuals who make a fortune selling our natural resources, regardless of the cost to the environment. Gina Reinhart, profiled in this stunning New Yorker piece, is part of this tradition, pushing tax-free, economic zones and advocating low wages so she makes a killing. It’s vulture capitalism on…
Novelist Iain Banks backs cultural boycott of Israel
In the Guardian: I support… the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign… because, especially in our instantly connected world, an… injustice committed against one, or against one group of people, is an injustice against all,… against every one of us; a… collective injury. My particular reason for participating in the cultural boycott of… Israel… is that, first of all, I can; I’m…
Keeping Bradley Manning and Wikileaks alive in America
Last night in New York the following event was held with… Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir,… Alexa O’Brien, FireDogLake’s Kevin Gosztola, FAIR media critic Peter Hart, moderated by Sam Seder:
Jean-Luc Godard teaches #ZeroDarkThirty 200 things about torture
The recently released US film about the capture and killing Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, was rightly condemned, including by me, as a fanciful examination of the “war on terror” with a dodgy moral centre. Richard Brody, writing in the… New Yorker, responds: In 1960, France was embroiled in the Algerian war, in which some…
Endorsing “My Isl@m” book
Last year I was asked by New York publisher St. Martin’s Press to read and endorse a book, about to now be released, by Amir Ahmad Nasr called My Isl@m. It’s an interesting read about Muslims, rejecting fundamentalism in all ways and being open to a more inclusive religious belief. Here’s the book’s website and…