This is what privatisation does; forces corporations to manage situations without accountability or care to the human beings in the situation: Dozens of foreign workers have been shipped to Australia to work at immigration detention centres. Serco has imported 58 staff members, most from England, to staff detention centres it charges hundreds of millions of…
Palestine rises while Israel lobby grumbles into its beer
While the Australian Zionist lobby continues to attack anybody who dares challenge the Israeli government (or settlements, or the siege on Gaza or Zionism in general) – AIJAC slams me for my recent appearances at the Sydney Writer’s Festival; yes, I dared talk about not believing in a racially discriminatory Jewish state – the Economist…
Palestine’s Gandhi: Omar Barghouti, BDS and international law
My following article is published today in Overland journal and was co-written with John Docker and Ned Curthoys: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. – Mahatma Gandhi Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside world, the welfare of…
Our post-legal and unaccountable society in the WOT
Barack Obama made a conscious choice when taking office to Look Forward and Not Back after eight years of illegal torture committed by the Bush administration. Tom Engelhardt unpacks this legacy: To put it another way, every CIA torturer, all those involved in acts of rendition, and all the officials who okayed such acts, as…
Gaza flotilla 2 set to sail and Australians are involved
The following statement was released yesterday: On the eve of first anniversary of the deadly Israeli attack on the 2010 international Flotilla to break the siege of Gaza, Australian participants reiterated their determination to join the second Flotilla, which will set sail for Gaza at the end of June. “We welcome Egyptian moves to partially…
Don’t allow any country to sever web connections to our planet
The Arab Spring hasn’t been kind to countless Middle East dictatorships. Internet censorship has been a key plank of trying to maintain order in the face of a massive popular uprising. At least in Egypt we’ve now seen former Mubarak ministers and the former President himself being fined for daring to cut internet connections and…
Feeling hatred in Israel and the world looks away
One month ago, David Sheen, an Israeli journalist with Haaretz, filmed an anti-immigrant rally in Tel Aviv and found widespread hatred against anybody who didn’t look white. Racism, pure and simple. Now Sheen has returned to the same place to see what’s changed, if anything: