Via the essential Australian blog, Middle East Reality Check: Paul Barratt is a former Australian Defense Department official. The following quote is from his post Passionate Supporters of Israel here: “The Israelis are very good at duchessing people. I had been Secretary to the Department of Defence for only a few weeks when I received…
Category Uncategorized
Compare and contrast the horrors
What’s the legal, moral and practical differences between apartheid South Africa and present-day Israel/Palestine?
Friends forever, no matter what
The US is really clashing with Israel over settlements? Don’t believe the hype: The US has renewed a program of massive loan guarantees to Israel in spite of an ongoing dispute about the construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank. According to Reuters, the program allows Israel to sell bonds and take out loans…
Not as simple as good v evil
My following letter appears in today’s Australian newspaper: Campaigning for universal human rights means condemning occupation and brutality wherever it occurs, whether in a US-backed client state such as Israel or a dictatorship like Iran. A moral blind spot won’t suffice. Greg Sheridan (“West’s hypocrites betray Iranians”, Opinion, 2/7) accuses me of ignoring gross abuses…
What punishment will they receive?
The Western-funded and armed rogue state: Amnesty International on Thursday accused Israeli forces of war crimes, saying they used children as human shields and conducted wanton attacks on civilians during their offensive in the Gaza Strip. The London-based human rights group also accused Hamas of war crimes, but said it found no evidence that the…
Don’t speak to Nokia
The role of Western multinationals assisting repressive regimes is now ubiquitous. Iran is just the latest. One American-based, Muslim group is resisting: Back in April The CRIME Report reported that Nokia had provided the Iranian regime with an advanced data monitoring center. The full implications of Nokia’s partnership did not become clear until a few…
A shame Obama didn’t condemn this kind of abuse
Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, who I profile in my book The Blogging Revolution, is facing the wrath of the US-backed dictatorship: Reporters Without Borders condemns well-known Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas’s arrest on “national security” grounds at Cairo airport on 29 June on his return from Sweden, where he openly criticised the Egyptian government at a…
A Zionist principle I reject
The Magnes Zionist blog on Israel’s inherently discriminatory Right of Return laws: The Law of Return inherently discriminates against a group of people – who happen to be citizens and natives — on the basis of ethnicity alone.
Every inch is against the law
Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, reminds the world of a few inconvenient facts: The debate over Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is often framed in terms of whether they should be “frozen” or allowed to grow “naturally.” But that is akin to asking whether a thief should be…
Young Tamils take up the fight
This site has reguarly discussed the massacres in Sri Lanka and the oppression of the Tamil people. For the global Tamil Diaspora, the war is far from over. Time magazine reports: Many Tamil youth living around the world became committed to raising awareness of Sri Lanka’s plight in the West after they visited their parents’…