My following lead essay appears in the Australian literary journal Kill Your Darlings: I first discovered the importance of the Israel/Palestine conflict in my early teens, in Melbourne. I remember sitting around the Sabbath table with my parents and cousins, discussing the events of the week as we consumed schnitzels, soggy vegetables and chicken soup.…
Showing all posts tagged Afghanistan
Platitudes over Afghanistan were already irrelevant in 2001 post 9/11
What happens when a compliant corporate journalist simply reprints what a military man tells him? Welcome the Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher, repeating pro Afghan war propaganda with no contrary views. This is what embedding “journalism” is all about: The Australian officer in charge of the Afghanistan deployment has told Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott…
Outsourcing detention centres open to mental and physical abuse
The following article is in this week’s Green Left Weekly newspaper: During recent protests in Villawood Detention Centre that followed the September 20 suicide of detained Fijian exile Josefa Rauluni, detainees who tried to help rooftop protesters with water and blankets were stopped by security. One man was bashed. Hunger strikers were kept quiet in…
How to source more drones for killing is a full time job
What’s the best way the US can worsen its image in the Muslim world, kill more civilians and utterly condemn itself to further defeats against a rag-tag army of Taliban fighters? More murder from the air: The U.S. military is secretly diverting aerial drones and weaponry from the Afghan battlefront to significantly expand the CIA’s…
Afghans, your nation is paradise so please bugger off home
This is truly criminal. The Australian government is seriously claiming that Afghanistan is safe for its citizens but I’ll allow you to read their choice of words: Refugee groups fear a “flawed” government assessment of Afghanistan will unfairly taint asylum-seekers’ applications to stay in Australia. The assessment by the Australian embassy in Kabul, dated February…
Australia may have followed Julian Assange into the toilet
Exposing state crimes in the “war on terror” comes with a price. And don’t expect governments to protect you: Australian spy agencies may have monitored the WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange, and the Attorney-General would welcome prosecution of the group’s members if offences could be proved. The new claims come less than three weeks before the…
Hello my name is Barack and please don’t hate me for begging Israel on a daily basis
So, two years into the Obama administration and America is again rightly viewed as hopelessly compromised in the Middle East and a backer of Israeli apartheid, repression across the region, occupations etc etc: Approval of U.S. leadership is now similar or lower than what it was in 2008 in several of the Middle East and…
Disaster capitalism envelops us all
My following article appears in the Sydney Morning Herald today: Last year’s cessation of hostilities between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers, after up to 40,000 Tamil civilians were murdered in the last months of the conflict, has heralded a Beijing-led invasion of the island. The authoritarian Rajapaksa regime was assisted by Chinese…
Pentagon watches books go up in flames
Land of the free? The Pentagon burned 9,500 copies of a book it deemed a threat to national security. The US government paid the publisher nearly $50,000 dollars in printing costs, had the books pulled and destroyed. A government approved censored version of US Army Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer’s “Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special…
Let our Diggers kill at will beause we say they’re noble
So Australian troops in Afghanistan kill civilians and are now facing charges. It’s called accountability, something sorely lacking in Western societies at war for decades. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, a top quality Murdoch quality that regularly writes about refugees stealing our jobs, women and sand, thinks it’s bloody outrageous in an editorial today: In the early…