My following interview appears in the Guardian: During an event at the Sydney writer’s festival last month, Israeli writer and author Ari Shavit told a packed auditorium that his country was “an oasis in the Middle East”. He explained to the audience, who largely appreciated his words despite some grumblings when he condemned the occupation…
Articles in The Guardian
How to reconcile black and white relations in Australia
My weekly Guardian column: The humidity in Darwin slows everything down. Although it’s currently dry season, the temperature is still in the mid 30s and warm breezes linger late into the night. The city, which sits at the top end of Australia, is troubled by… excessive… violence and alcohol abuse. The Northern Territory has one of thehighest…
How to consider identity, pride and country
My weekly Guardian column: I rarely feel proud to be Australian. Perhaps it’s a personal distaste for any form of nationalism, or my long-held belief that human rights abuses increasingly define our nation as brutal, petty and racist. It’s hard to feel pride when we… lock up children in Pacific detention camps… and incarcerate indigenous men at… record…
Why there are growing corporate attacks on public broadcasting
My weekly Guardian column: The war on public broadcasters by corporate media is currently enjoying a resurgence. Britain’s Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre has long loathed the BBC, accusing it of supporting “cultural marxism”. In a… 2007 lecture, he said the organisation attempted to undermine “the values of conservatism, with a small ”˜c’, which, I would…
Little scrutiny of mining companies in Greenland
My weekly Guardian column: This is a story about an Australian company you’ve never heard of, operating in a nation that rarely enters the global media: Greenland. It’s a story about the intense search for energy sources in a world that’s… moving away… from the dirtiest fossil fuels. Aleqa Hammond, the prime minister of Greenland, is the…
Fighting the far-right is a duty for us all
My weekly Guardian column: It was a pitiful sight. In Brisbane last Friday, the far-right Australia First party… announced… that it would rally on the streets in solidarity with Greece’s neo-Nazi aligned political organisation, Golden Dawn.… In the end, less than 10 supporters arrived and faced off with around 200 unionists and members of the Antifa group shouting…
We know too little about US drone attacks
My weekly Guardian column: The news that the US had killed two Australian “militants” in a drone strike was… announced… in mid-April.… Christopher Havard… and “Muslim bin John”, who… also held… New Zealand citizenship, were allegedly killed by a CIA-led airstrike in eastern Yemen in November last year. Readers were given little concrete information, apart from a “counter-terrorism source” who claimed…
Remembering historical and present war wrongs
My weekly Guardian column: The Australian government recently… successfully blocked the release… of sensitive documents that would have revealed the complicity of Indonesian forces in massive abuses during their… occupation of East Timor. Canberra directed the National Archives to refuse the request of University of NSW associate professor Clinton Fernandes to see internal Australian files on Indonesian military…
Why we need to discuss unhealthy power of Zionist lobby part 44225
My weekly Guardian column: To have a prominent political figure challenging the power and message of the Israel lobby is almost unheard of in most western nations – which is precisely what makes the… just released diaries… of former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr all the more remarkable. Across 500 pages, Carr catalogues his intense exercise regime,…
On racism, how to tackle it and why the state often worsens it
My weekly Guardian column: As an atheist Jew, I find it distinctly uncomfortable to defend the free speech rights of Holocaust deniers. I utterly oppose the inaccuracy, hatred and intolerance that goes with refuting the reality of Nazi crimes against Jews, gay people, Gypsies and many others. But a truly free society is one that…