Now and then, voices appear in the mainstream media that challenge the overly comfortable blabber that passes for news. This morning on Channel 7’s Weekend Sunrise US army veteran Vince Emanuele spoke on Iraq, Afghanistan, drones, the war on terror and Australian gutlessness towards Washington:
Showing all posts tagged Australia
Why truth about Sri Lankan brutality scares the perpetrators
The powerful documentary, No Fire Zone, tells the harrowing story of the final days of the Sri Lankan civil war in 2009, where war crimes were committed by all sides. But the Colombo government refuses to take any responsibility for the murder of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians. The film-maker, Callum Macrae, recently visited…
ABCTV News24’s The Drum on asylum seekers, Wikileaks and Edward Snowden
I appeared on ABCTV News24’s The Drum on Friday night (video here). We discussed the foul use of vulnerable asylum seekers as a political tool in Australia, claiming those coming from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Sri Lanka or elsewhere are just economic refugees. The facts are the complete opposite. I strongly defended the importance of NSA…
Tony Abbott’s foreign policy would be as clueless as George W. Bush
My following article appears today in the Guardian: In April 2010, as the war in Afghanistan was raging and US president Barack Obama… “surged” 30,000 more troops… into the country, Australian opposition leader Tony Abbott suggested that under his leadership, a Coalition government would have considered increasing involvement. “The government should explain why it’s apparently right that…
Introductory passages in For God’s Sake
Following great media coverage over the last week for my new book, For God’s Sake, with Jane Caro, Simon Smart and Rachel Woodlock, here’s an extract by me from the introduction. Please buy the book! Birth is a beginning And death a destination. Rabbi Alvin Fine This poem has remained with me since childhood, when…
Standing up to Murdoch bullies over Palestine
Short and sharp letter in today’s Australian refuting the almost daily barrage against anybody who dares challenge Israel (some background to Jake Lynch here and here): Your campaign to equate the call for an academic boycott of Israel with anti-Semitism is an attempt, as sinister as it is absurd, to stifle an important debate. There…
What Ed Snowden’s revelations say about our so-called democracy
It’s the kind of story that necessarily interests the general public. Surveillance, leaking, US power and Wikileaks (note, for the record, in today’s New York Times yet another clear indication that the US wants to destroy/punish the vitally important website). Last week I wrote for the Guardian about the PRISM revelations by Edward Snowden and…
Keynote speech at Queensland History Teacher’s Association on Middle East
I spent the weekend in Brisbane, Queensland giving the keynote address at the annual… Queensland History Teacher’s Association conference. I was honoured to be asked to deliver an address on the Middle East and speaking honestly about Israel/Palestine. Over 220 teachers came from across Queensland, young and old, males but mostly females. I was warmly welcomed.…
Murdoch’s Aussie organ just happens to think Nazism = BDS
This is almost a weekly obsession. As Israel’s behaviour worsens – just this week the UN released a report finding that the Jewish state tortures Palestinian children and uses them as human shields – Zionist fanatics will do everything they can to distract people from facts on the ground in Palestine and slam critics as…
Rare Australian voice backing whistle-blowers/Wikileaks/transparency
There’s really nobody in the Australian Parliament quite like Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, a constant voice against excessive government surveillance and the national-security state. His speech this week is a cracker, covering Michael Hastings, Bradley Manning, Wikileaks and Edward Snowden. If only more politicians saw their role like Ludlam, questioning the ever-increasing role of the…