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…
New press freedom group launches to support vital work of Wikileaks
Via the New York Times: A group advocating a more transparent government has formed a nonprofit organization called the Freedom of the Press Foundation to serve as a conduit for donations to organizations like WikiLeaks. The goal is to insulate those groups’ fund-raising efforts from political and business pressures. In December 2010, Visa, MasterCard and…
Chomsky supports BDS against Israeli illegality
Following 10 days of daily coverage in The Australian of Dr Jake Lynch from Sydney University supporting a boycott against Israeli universities, the last two days have seen more letters published. Friday: On what basis does the University of Sydney lend institutional support to a group with a guiding objective of boycotting Jewish business and…