Fascinating example of the corporate world trying to appropriate a political position (via Foreign Policy): In 2003, Volkswagen launched its first ever SUV, the Touareg. ”˜”Touareg” literally means “free folk” and is the name of a nomadic tribe from the Sahara,’”… they wrote… in a press release, explaining their decision to borrow the name of the nomadic…
My lecture at Sydney’s Israeli Apartheid Week 2012
I gave the following talk at the University of Sydney on 15 March:
Netanyahu sounding like liberal Zionists
With the delusion of maintaining a Jewish, democratic state – a concept that never existed post 1948 and even less so today with the occupation of millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and discrimination against Arabs in Israel proper – the Israeli leader sounds like any number of liberal Zionists desperate to…
Zionists are Israeli brand managers, no more
Perceptive comments by Bernard Avishai on American Jews (or Jews anywhere, really) who can’t/won’t tolerate criticism of Israel: American Jews who proclaimed their friendship to Israel most noisily could not readily imagine… what… it might be like to live there. So the ways democratic norms fostered tolerance for religious dissent, or contributed to resolving tensions between Arabs…
The lying liar behind Iraq war says he lied
No kidding: A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow. “Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles…
Since when did Australia protect its future through mining interests?
My following book review appeared in last weekend’s Melbourne’s Sunday Age and Sydney’s Sun Herald: The news late last year that Australia’s richest man, Andrew ”Twiggy” Forrest, had not paid any corporate tax for seven years was unsurprising. Fortescue Metals’s tax manager, Marcus Hughes, conceded to a parliamentary committee in December: ”We have not cut…
Big Brother isn’t in the future, it’s here today
Via the New York Times: Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show. The practice has become big business…
What has Israel really done to Jewish culture post WWII?
The continuing expanding colonies in the West Bank are a key reason that Israel has a grim future as a Jewish state (rightly pointed out by Andrew Sullivan). But what of the argument, made by many Jews and others, that Israel is a refuge for the Jewish people and has the right to exist on…