Yesterday the ABC published as its lead opinion story my piece about the reasons why an academic boycott should be imposed on Israel. The hundreds of comments below are a fascinating if mostly despairing insight into the mindset of people who want to label any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism. Oh well. Today’s Rupert Murdoch’s…
Showing all posts tagged Zionism
Why boycotting Israeli academia is necessary and principled
My following piece appears today in ABC’s… The Drum: An academic boycott of Israeli universities isn’t an attack on freedom of speech. The evidence tells us these institutions are key battlegrounds for breaches of international law towards the Palestinians, argues Antony Loewenstein. New Zealand’s $20 billion national pension fund… announced this month… that it was divesting from three…
The new totalitarianism in India
The always eloquent Arundhati Roy on disaster capitalism in the world’s biggest quasi-democracy: I don’t know how far back in history to begin, so I’ll lay the milestone down in the recent past. I’ll start in the early 1990s, not long after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan.…
How the Nakba has never ended
Typically great piece by Ben White in Al-Jazeera (another fine piece of his, on racism and maintaining a Jewish majority in Jerusalem, is here): While it is common knowledge that a majority of the population of the Gaza Strip are refugees, it is less well understood where they came from. The shocking reality is that…
Chomsky supports BDS against Israeli illegality
Following 10 days of daily coverage in The Australian of Dr Jake Lynch from Sydney University supporting a boycott against Israeli universities, the last two days have seen more letters published. Friday: On what basis does the University of Sydney lend institutional support to a group with a guiding objective of boycotting Jewish business and…
UK Israel lobby is most powerful in the country
The power of the Zionist lobby in Britain is far too rarely discussed in the mainstream media. And yet its presence is one of the key reasons London is so blindly supportive of Israel. Here’s a rare perspective, written by Peter Obourne in the UK Telegraph.… Note the fear that the two-state solution is dead/dying/on life…
Voice of academic reason; why I boycott Israeli universities
Following the avalanche of media coverage in the last 10 days of Sydney University’s Dr Jake Lynch about his brave stand to oppose any institutional links with Israeli universities, he’s written two pieces in New Matilda that outline some of the issues. One: Journalist Christian Kerr recently filed a series of critical articles in The…
Anybody else like to speak out against a courageous academic challenging Israeli apartheid?
There’s been so much media coverage of Dr Jake Lynch at Sydney University taking a principled stance against an Israeli academic that it’s vital to just have all the stories on the record. I’ve been publishing all the information I can find about it on a daily basis (here’s the piece from yesterday). The Australian:…
New Zealand Super Fund takes stand against Israeli illegality
Very interesting development and the sign of thing to come globally (via the New Zealand Herald): The $20 billion New Zealand Superannuation Fund has excluded three Israeli companies from its portfolio on ethical grounds because of their involvement in illegal settlements and the security wall. The fund’s investments in the firms were insubstantial. Some $9,744…