Any thinking Jew (and/or human being) has major issues with the ways in which Israel occupies the Palestinians. It’s something I’ve written about and struggled with for years. Al-Jazeera journalist Matthew Cassel (a visitor to Australia in 2011 and we shared a stage talking about the Arab revolutions) has produced a moving, telling, revealing and…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
What robust journalism should look like in 2014
My weekly Guardian column is published today: 2013 was the year of Edward Snowden. The former NSA contractor, voted the Guardian’s… person of the year… (after Chelsea Manning the year before), unleashed a vital global debate on the extent of mass surveillance in the modern age. “Among the casualties”,… writes one reporter, “is the assumption that some of…
Listen to cartoonists, sages of our age
The great American, Jewish cartoonist Eli Valley appears on MSNBC to discuss politics, Israel, Jewry and challenging conservative Zionism:
Seeing the less than "perfect" just like everybody else
Pro Infirmis, a European advocacy organisation for the disabled, recently released this startling and moving film. Marvel at what the visual medium can achieve:
Voices in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, oppose dirty mining
My weekly Guardian column is published today: The mine. Photograph: Antony Loewenstein The mine lies like a scar across a bloody face. Guava village sits in a remote area in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea (PNG), above a copper mine which closed 25 years ago. Resistance to the Rio Tinto-owned pit… exploded in the late 1980s… and during…
Nelson Mandela speaks in 1990 about Palestine and human rights
A fascinating town hall meeting filmed in New York that covers Israel/Palestine, Cuba, Libya, foreign policy and morality:
Slowly but surely US intellectuals challenge Israeli violence
As Israel continues its strangulation of the West Bank and Gaza, the Jewish state is starting to realise such actions come with a price (like South Africa during apartheid). This news is big and important (and ignore the typical and utterly tiresome accusations of anti-Semitism) and signals a growing shift to tackle Israel where it…
Palestinian culture of resistance grows due to Israeli oppression
Amira Hass in Haaretz: At a West Bank University, in a class on the writings of Michel Foucault, one student said that every time she goes through checkpoints, she presents her identity card to the soldiers upside down. She makes use of the little space she can to make the sovereign decision not to be…
Beware the saviours of the new atheists
Here’s my weekly Guardian column (from last week): There’s nothing like an internal critic taking on the most powerful force in his religion. Roy Bourgeois is an American Catholic priest. He’s the founder of… School of the Americas Watch, a group dedicated to closing the US Army School of the Americas – a… military training centre for…
What Mandela teaches Israel (but she isn't listening)
The great Gideon Levy in Haaretz (and one of the finest columns on the death of the great South African, though Jonathan Cook’s dissenting view is vital): South African President Nelson Mandela, in his address for International Solidarity Day with the Palestinian People on December 4, 1997, said: “We know too well that our freedom…