My following book review appeared in last Sunday’s Sydney Sun Herald newspaper: The Grey Man John Curtis (Macmillan, $34.99) Al-Jazeera reported in 2008 that the child sex trade in Cambodia was rampant, fuelled by local interest and Western tourism. In 2007, Cambodian authorities arrested only 21 people for sex crimes with children and many brothels…
Here’s how much the Zionist occupation of Palestine is costing
From The Daily Beast: ESTIMATING THE COSTS Because Israel has never released all the necessary data, we’ve taken the numbers available from various Israeli research studies, extrapolated them, and adjusted the results for interest and inflation. In arriving at a very conservative estimate, we made sure to count only the extra costs of controlling the…
This is what American “reconstruction” looked like in Iraq
Former Foreign Service Officer at the US State Department, Peter Van Buren, has written a book about the disastrous Iraq invasion, of which he was a part. It’s an (almost) comical account of the gross ineptitude of the occupation and the massive amount of money wasted. Tax-payer money: Very few people outside the agricultural world…
British government happy to redraft law to protect Israeli war criminals
Electronic Intifada reports: Legal mechanisms developed after the end of the Second World War to more easily prosecute war criminals are now being taken off the books to preserve Israeli impunity from… accountability. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes an outraged international community demanded justice — a demand that resulted in the…
What legitimate civil disobedience against a war criminal looks like
Bravo: On Monday 26 September, three members of Veterans For Peace and a member of Code Pink confronted Donald Rumsfeld at a Boston stop of his book tour. I attempted to make a citizen’s arrest. Police hustled all four of us out, while a hostile rightwing crowd shouted and jeered. To get in, we had…
The Left shouldn’t celebrate legal victory against Murdoch’s Andrew Bolt
As I wrote last week, it makes me extremely uncomfortable that the law can tell us, as writers, journalists or citizens, what may be offensive. Should we not have the right to offend and be offended? It’s a point well raised by Dr Tad on the essential Left Flank site today: Andrew Bolt is just…