My weekly Guardian column: Freedom is difficult to resuscitate once extinguished. Australian attorney-general George Brandis recently chastised journalists for criticising his government’s new laws aimed at preventing reporting about “special intelligence operations”. Because he’s a culture warrior brawler, Brandis damned the “usual suspects of the paranoid, fantasist left” but also “reputable conservative commentators” for questioning…
Showing all posts tagged Murdoch
How Australia is importing Tea Party style politics
My weekly Guardian column: It’s the swaggering and unthinking bravado that hits you. Australian prime minister Tony Abbott threatens to “shirtfront” Russian leader Vladimir Putin when he arrives in Australia for the G20. Moscow responds via Pravda by comparing Abbott to Pol Pot and Hitler. Australian senator Jacqui Lambie then praises Putin as a “strong…
Political scandal in New Zealand offer lessons for the world
My weekly Guardian column: It’s extremely rare to have the genesis of a political smear campaign uncovered for all to see, just like it is uncommon to read the correspondence between senior government officials and media backers to attack opponents and critics. And yet, that’s exactly what is unfolding in New Zealand. New Zealanders are…
Inside the mind of ISIS
I’m currently in America, investigating disaster capitalism in privatised immigration detention for my 2015 Verso book. I’ve been watching a lot of cable TV (lord knows why but I’m a masochist) and it’s been ISIS day and night (apart from mostly awful coverage of the killing of Michael Brown and white blindness on racism). Fox…
Public talk on From Iraq to Gaza: The Politics of Fear
Last Friday I gave the following speech at Sydney’s… Lebanese Muslim Association forum on terrorism, Gaza, ISIS and Western governments spreading fear and anger towards the Islamic faith. Labor MP Tony Burke and Liberal MP Craig Laundy both pledged to bring harmony to the community and yet both their parties have flamed bigotry. Government surveillance is…
News flash; debating Israel and Islam is healthy sign of democracy
This Friday the Lebanese Muslim Association has organised an event titled, “From Iraq to Gaza: The Politics of Fear”. I’ll be speaking alongside many others. Daring to be critical of the dominant narrative over Palestine or terrorism has upset Rupert Murdoch’s resident race-baiter Andrew Bolt. There’s also a “story” in today’s Murdoch Australian that features…
The Daily Show on Bowe Bergdahl and Fox News
Nothing short of genius tinged with necessary slap-downs of race-baiting Fox News:
Three problems with the Fourth Estate
The blandness of the mainstream media, including public broadcasters, is all about the narrow level of “debate” allowed on issues of the day. Australian intellectual and academic Scott Burchill has written the following short essay on the problem and possible solutions: In what is misleadingly called the ”˜age of culture wars’ there are three aspects…
We know too little about US drone attacks
My weekly Guardian column: The news that the US had killed two Australian “militants” in a drone strike was… announced… in mid-April.… Christopher Havard… and “Muslim bin John”, who… also held… New Zealand citizenship, were allegedly killed by a CIA-led airstrike in eastern Yemen in November last year. Readers were given little concrete information, apart from a “counter-terrorism source” who claimed…
On racism, how to tackle it and why the state often worsens it
My weekly Guardian column: As an atheist Jew, I find it distinctly uncomfortable to defend the free speech rights of Holocaust deniers. I utterly oppose the inaccuracy, hatred and intolerance that goes with refuting the reality of Nazi crimes against Jews, gay people, Gypsies and many others. But a truly free society is one that…