Following the recent criticism of the local Zionist lobby sending journalists and politicians on free trips to Israel, today’s Canberra Times features an interesting piece by Joe Wakim, founder of the Australian Arabic Council and a former multicultural affairs commissioner: If we are going to blow the whistle on undeclared overseas junkets by our MPs,…
Showing all posts tagged Lebanon
The growth of the non-state actor
Hezbollah’s No. 2, cleric Naim Qassem, speaks to the Los Angeles Times: The more we clarify our image to the people of the West, the more pressure they will put on their governments to stop supporting Israel… In recent years, the Western perception of Hezbollah has changed. Even governments have started to look for reasons…
This is what the Jewish state faces forever?
Thomas Ricks writes the following on his Foreign Policy blog. Bleak beyond belief: Ariel Siegelman, an Israeli specialist in counterterrorism, offers the best explanation I’ve seen so far for what Israel was trying to do in the Gaza attack: For almost three years [after the 2006 Lebanon war], there were no illusions; we knew that…
When history should be remembered
An eminently sensible editorial from Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper this week: The drama that unfolded during the demolition of a Palestinian house in East Jerusalem on Tuesday aptly illustrates the futility of Israel’s renewed policy of destroying the family homes of Palestinian attackers. The Israeli supreme court had ordered police to tear down part of…
We’ve got to keep on talking
Lebanese Chess is a fascinating blog written by a Lebanese Australian. His recent post is titled, “A week of speeches“: Khatami, Halper and Loewenstein … three public speakers at Australia’s main political university, the Australian National University (ANU), in a week. I went to see them all, and nothing much out of the three surprised…
The war isn’t over
Israel deliberately flooded Lebanese farmlands with excess rainwater from an Israeli orchard, located off the southern town of Mais al-Jabal early Tuesday, ruining crops and properties, the state-run national news agency said.
What do the Palestinians think?
An alternative reading of the acclaimed Israeli film, Waltz with Bashir: To say that Palestinians are absent in Waltz with Bashir, to say that it is a film that deals not with Palestinians but with Israelis who served in Lebanon, only barely begins to describe the violence that this film commits against Palestinians. There is…
The ease with which they lie
Israeli officials are wonderful at lying, telling the world that black is white or that “there is no humanitarian crisis” in Gaza. This kind of deception has an infamous pedigree. The lobby group, Australian Committee for Truth in the Middle East, has just published its latest missive and included the following necessary history lesson: Let…