A man of principle who dares to take a stand when saying and doing nothing (and getting a free trip) is so much easier: Bafta-winning film-maker Mike Leigh has pulled out of a teaching trip to Israel due to his concern over the country’s proposed loyalty oath bill. Leigh said he was not prepared to…
Colombo needs a legal slap-down
From today’s Australian newspaper: Governments around the world are studying the “Sri Lanka method” for dealing with internal conflicts, but the prospect should fill us with alarm. Respected independent observers including the US State Department and the International Crisis Group have drawn attention to credible allegations of war crimes against both the Tamil Tiger rebels…
It’s not hard to be accused of hatred by Zionist haters
This is priceless. Zionist fundamentalists hold conferences about the “delegitimisation” of Israel globally while finding nothing to fault in Israeli policies except bad PR. Occupation? What occupation? Apartheid? Just an anti-Semitic allegation by Jimmy Carter. Feel the desperation: Many perpetrators from very diverse backgrounds are heavily involved in the ongoing de-legitimization of Israel, without any…
This is what our asylum seeker policy looks like
While Australia releases some families from immigration detention into the community yet builds more facilities to imprison refugees, a foreign journalist visits the country and finds a privatised and largely unaccountable system away from the prying eyes of average citizens. Just as the government wants it to be.
Hungry for a kinder regime
My following book review appeared in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald: THREE FAMINES Tom Keneally Knopf, 324pp, $49.95 History is littered with catastrophic examples of government-induced disasters. A new book by the University of Hong Kong’s Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine, claims that 45 million people were killed between 1958 and 1962. Mao achieved this by…
Musharraf and the Zionists, sitting in a London tree
Oh my. A former, US-backed dictator looking to make a comeback and some Israeli hacks wanting to get in on the action: Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf is stated to have shared a lunch with a couple of members of Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, at a Chinese restaurant in Kensington area of central London a…
Jewish settlements are keeping the Zionist “dream” alive
Looks like Zionist colonies will never end, then. If nobody seriously pressures Israel to cease settlement building, the Jewish state will soon find itself an even more isolated, pariah state. This is brain-dead and dead-end Zionism: Israel will only stop its disputed settlement building when the Palestinians make a peace agreement, its UN ambassador said…
Washington agrees that Wikileaks harmed nobody but US war-making
So after all the huffing and puffing and accusations, Wikileaks is only “guilty” of harming US interests? Surely questioning the rationale behind criminal American foreign policy is highly praise-worthy: No U.S. intelligence sources or practices were compromised by the posting of secret Afghan war logs by the WikiLeaks website, the Pentagon has concluded, but the…
Resistance vs terrorism is a complex beast; enter the Tamil Tigers
Post 9/11, finding nuance in the state view towards “terrorism” was rare, indeed. But here is a challenging example, questioning the idea that every form of resistance is somehow connected to al-Qaeda: More than three years after federal agents locked up a Sri Lankan immigrant they say was the top U.S. representative of the Tamil…