The following news is undoubtedly positive as a first step to holding the Sri Lankan government accountable for war crimes during its war against the Tamil people but is this really about payback against China for becoming too close to Colombo? The US government has passed a resolution calling upon Colombo, the international community and…
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Perth Writer’s Festival, here I come
This will be fun. I’m about to head across to Perth in Western Australia for the Perth Writer’s Festival. My events: Sat 5 Mar, 2.00PM The invasion of Gaza in 2008 provoked worldwide condemnation and questions aboutIsrael’s right to exist. Some asked why other nations acting unjustly don’t face debate about the validity of their…
Of course Sri Lanka should pay a price for murdering countless Tamils
These are encouraging noises from Washington but one can’t help but wonder if it’s because China has essentially bought off Colombo and locked out the US. Payback time? Sri Lanka could be hauled before a war crimes tribunal over the killing of ‘many thousands of civilians’ in the final months of its separatist war with…
Israel should be given the South African treatment
My following article is written with Australians for Palestine co-founder Moammar Mashni and published in Online Opinion: “I am a black South African, and if I were to change the names, the description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank would be a description of what is happening in South…
NSW Greens don’t see their job as solely defending brutish Israel
The decision of Sydney’s Marrickville council and the NSW Greens to back BDS against apartheid Israel continues to generate predictable hysteria from the Murdoch tabloids (and that’s to say nothing of the racist, anti-Muslim diatribes being circulated by many Jews and bigots across Australia): The Greens have threatened a trade boycott against the world’s second-largest…
The paranoia of unelected Chinese men
Although it remains unclear exactly how paranoid the Chinese authorities remain over possible Egyptian-inspired, democratic protests, this insider view would suggest that Beijing isn’t taking too many chances: On Saturday, February 12, the day after Hosni Mubarak resigned in Egypt, some of the members of the politburo of the Communist Party of China held a…
The democratic impulse burns in China
Yes: Chinese authorities cracked down on activists as a call circulated for people to gather in more than a dozen cities Sunday for a “Jasmine Revolution.” The source of the call was not known, but authorities moved to halt its spread online. Searches for the word “jasmine” were blocked Saturday on China’s largest Twitter-like microblog,…
Speaking about Egyptian revolution in Chinese media
During the recent Egyptian uprising, the Chinese regime blocked internet searches for the word “Egypt”, in case locals got any ideas about challenging the state. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to receive an interview request this week from Time Weekly, based in Guangzhou. During the interview a few days ago – when I was asked…
Beijing should be scared
Censoring content will never work in the long run: …The New Yorker‘s Evan Osnos points out. China’s 457 million Internet users (and 180 million bloggers) can no longer use the Chinese word for “Egypt” in microblogs or search engines. The government’s goal is to pre-empt any contagion effect that popular uprisings against autocracy in the…
No wonder China will one day rule the world
Wow: China’s online population rose to 457 million in 2010 as use of mobile phones to surf the Web spread rapidly, an industry group reported Wednesday. China’s population of Internet users – a group more than 50 per cent larger than the whole U.S. population – grew 19 per cent in 2010 over the previous…