Our online tolerance for brutality in war

Barely a day passes when another horrific video doesn’t emerge from Syria, showing either the “rebels” or government forces engaged in some act of terrorism/death/flesh eating. The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson: I first heard about the Syrian rebel who was supposed to have eaten a heart on Monday, when a friend who lives in…

Murdoch and Netanyahu make love so please don’t interrupt

Care to imagine what an editorial meeting is like at Rupert Murdoch’s… Australian? No, me neither – “look, over there, a Muslim country the West hasn’t bombed, let’s fix that immediately!” – but there’s a weird obsession over supporting the Israeli government. There’s a direct line from the Israeli PR department to the writers at the…

The naked love affair between the CIA and #ZeroDarkThirty

The pro-torture, pro-US and pro-war on terror film… is given deeper meaning with the release, via Gawker, of a document that confirms what many of us suspected; the CIA wanted a propaganda film and the film-makers were apparently happy to comply: Kathryn Bigelow’s Osama bin Laden revenge-porn flick Zero Dark Thirty was the biggest publicity coup…

Why standing up for human rights, against the tide, matters

Salman Rushdie writes in the New York Times on 27 April: We… find it easier, in these confused times, to admire physical bravery than moral courage — the courage of the life of the mind, or of public figures. A man in a cowboy hat vaults a fence to help Boston bomb victims while others flee…

We kill, drone and bomb Muslims and we wonder why some hate us?

Powerful column in the UK Independent by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: First, read this unconditional acceptance of facts that cannot be denied nor excused. Islamicist terrorism has inflicted atrocities and diffused panic and amorphous, long-term anxiety from east to west, south to north. Citizens of Nairobi and Baghdad, Madrid and London, Bamako and Dar es Salaam, New…

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