After years in a top security British jail, Julian Assange has been freed provided he pleads guilty under an US Espionage Act to unlawfully obtaining and disseminating US defence information. That should be the last and long overdue chapter in a cruel, revengeful persecution of an Australian citizen, a whistleblower, journalist and publisher. (more…)
Stuart Rees
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‘I’m permanently pissed off’- just one feature of a Gaza malaise
In response to the question, ‘Do you despair over the slaughters in Gaza’, a close friend responded, ‘When I hear the news, I’m angry and permanently pissed off. I also recognise that anger can lead to despair.’ (more…)
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Open Letter to Anthony Albanese: ‘Why collusion with this grotesque Israeli government?’
We write in sadness and despair at your government’s failure to condemn openly and persistently the Israeli government’s determination to ethnically cleanse Palestine and to cause brutality, famine, death and destruction to a whole people and their country. (more…)
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Israel the grotesque, who supports that government?
Celebrations on Tel Aviv beaches followed news of the rescue of four Israeli hostages. As part of an alleged clinical, precise military exercise, as many as 300 Palestinians were killed and 700 injured, but in Israeli revellers’ eyes, this latest slaughter of Palestinians is of no consequence, even welcomed. (more…)
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To Israel’s ‘Tragic Mistakes’, the world’s response is pathetic
Israeli forces’ slaughters of Gazans, journalists, doctors, humanitarian aid workers are described by military spokespersons and by Prime minister Netanyahu as tragic mistakes. In retrospect, killings appear an intention conducted by an alleged accident, in which well rehearsed explanations are part of a familiar two faced process of speaking with double tongues. (more…)
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Israel and Hamas: no moral equivalence
When asked to compare life in apartheid South Africa with conditions in occupied Palestine, Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s judgement ran counter to prevailing orthodoxy. People make the comparison, said Tutu, but life in Palestine is far more brutal and repressive than in apartheid South Africa. (more…)
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Protesters for Palestine targeted by Group of 8 universities
Fuelled by well armed pro Israel groups and by university administrators’ decision to move police and riot squads to break up peaceful encampments, a terrible thuggery has invaded US universities. (more…)
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US campus protests, establishment’s automatic suppression
From Columbia University in New York to the University of Texas at Austin, from Emory University in Atlanta to the University of California at Berkeley, American students are protesting the genocide in Gaza. They are scorning the moral bankruptcy of governments which supply arms to Israel which simultaneously pretend support for humanitarian aid. (more…)
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The costs of living and the price of death: Spare a thought for Gaza and Sudan
In response to questions about starvation in Gaza and Sudan, a Federal Labor MP has explained, ‘In Australia, the cost of living is the issue. It’s voters’ major concern, and a political priority.’ (more…)
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Intervention to stop genocide: From investigative reporting to freedom flotillas
The leader of South Africa’s Palestine Solidarity Alliance insists that the ruling of the International Court of Justice ‘requires the whole world to play their part to stop genocide unfolding in Gaza.’ (more…)
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A Plea for Gaza: ‘Remember humanity & forget the rest.’
‘If you are not outraged by injustice, you lose touch with your own humanity.’ (more…)
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Moral cowardice hinders pleas for a Common Humanity in Gaza
Faced with war across Europe, nineteenth century poet William Wordsworth asked, ‘What a fair world were ours for verse to paint, if Power could live at ease with self-restraint?’ He was following sixteenth century John Donne’s recognition of human interdependence, ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…’ (more…)
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Israel: a terrorist state
Thursday February 29, starving Gazans try to obtain flour for their families. From the safety of their tanks, Israeli soldiers fire. One hundred and four people are killed, 750 injured. Israeli army spokespersons blame the crowd and insist that most fatalities occurred when Gazans were crushed by aid trucks. (more…)
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Death of a Giant for Peace: the Johann Galtung legacy
On Feb 17, aged 93, Norwegian Johann Galtung, polymath Professor of Peace Studies died. In a world riven with conflicts, whose leaders appear to know more about weaponry, destruction and murder than about peace making, Galtung‘s teaching offers a penicillin for peace, an antidote to the arms trade and to persistent violence. (more…)
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Time to occupy Israel
Amid end time destruction, we must liberate Gaza, march to the security wall, and Occupy Israel. (more…)
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Toxic effects of censorship on Gaza
Doctors, Teachers, Journalists, Academics are being disciplined, hauled before disciplinary bodies and even sacked for criticising the slaughter in Gaza and, most heinous sin of all, for mentioning genocide. Arrayed against those professionals is a lobby promoting the notion that criticism of Israeli government policies is anti-Semitic, hence the need to censor commentary about the massacres in Gaza. (more…)
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Cowardly refusal to support South Africa at the ICJ
In response to South Africa’s suit before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) charging Israel with genocide in Gaza, Australian politicians have refused to support a significant international means of ending this slaughter of Palestinians. Instead, party leaders search for words to disguise cowardice, to camouflage the lack of courage required to avoid offending Israel or the U.S. (more…)
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Sudanese catastrophe: male egos, women’s violation
Since April 2023, in a civil war in Sudan, an estimated 10,000 people have been killed, six million internally displaced, over one million are refugees in neighbouring countries, 18 million people are reported by the UN to be ‘food insecure’; and where fighting has reached the borders of neighbouring countries, food aid has been suspended. (more…)
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Hypocrisy as Australian Foreign Policy: oppose Russia, ignore Israel
In the International Court of Justice in The Hague, South Africa has filed suit against Israel for committing genocide in Gaza in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Charges of genocide by South Africa include documentation of Israel’s killing of thousands of women and children, destruction of homes, denial to a population of water, food, power and medical supplies, the expulsion and displacement of citizens of Gaza.
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Israel is ‘rotten to its core’
Israeli President Isaac Herzog, presumably the moral arbiter of his nation, was photographed signing a bomb as a gift for Gaza. (more…)
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Usman Khawaja for humanity, Australian MPs for Israel
In contrast to cricketer Usman Khawaja’s principled stand for human rights, the Liberal’s Simon Birmingham and Labor’s Josh Burns broadcast their judgements that the time is not right for a ceasefire. Commentary from these Australian MPs in response to slaughter in Gaza, both of whom are in Israel to show support for that country, shows their warped view of history and scant regard for humanity. (more…)
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Hypocritical US vetoes UN ceasefire resolution, cowardly UK abstains
As the bloodbath in Gaza moves towards 18,000 casualties, 70% of whom are women and children, as a humanitarian catastrophe affecting a whole people persists, the rich and powerful US vetoes a U.N. Resolution calling for a ceasefire. The rich and powerful UK ducks for cover and abstains. (more…)
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De-Mystifying Hamas: who are the Israeli terrorists?
Mainstream media outlets repeat, ‘Hamas, a terrorist organisation designated by the US and other western governments.’ Tagged to that description is a daily reminder of the brutality of Hamas’ attack on October 7 and the taking of over 200 hostages. Intimidated journalists and ill-informed politicians then promote the Israeli message that Hamas is a monster without precedent and must be destroyed. (more…)
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What happened to the UN’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’?
The world watches the destruction of Gaza as 13,000 thousand Palestinians are killed including 5,600 children. The world watches as Gazan hospitals are invaded, patients ordered to flee south where there is neither water, food nor safety. The world watches while Israeli spokespersons claim they never target civilians, and then comes the propagandist fig leaf to conceal all the cruelties. An Israeli spokesperson points to a hole in the ground beside a hospital as evidence of Hamas’ headquarters. (more…)
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‘The Australian’ weaponises anti-Semitism
The Israeli media has been interpreting the October 7 attack as ‘reaching Holocaust levels’, or as ‘an equivalent of the 9-11 attack in the US’: and in an atmosphere of fear and anger, Israeli citizens are said to perceive the Hamas slaughter as a threat to the country’s existence. In Australia, to defend Israel, to stifle critics of the bombing of Gaza, and to follow Prime Minister Netanyahu’s polarisation of choices between good and evil, between civilisation or barbarism, between a powerful law-abiding country or Hamas terrorists, charges of anti-Semitism are being weaponised. (more…)
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Expose and dismiss the dominating Israeli narrative
For decades, the western world has been fed Israeli/Zionist narratives about their country being exceptional, Palestinians not existing or being less than human. False Israeli accounts have been swallowed by a compliant media and by politicians scared of being accused of being even slightly anti-Semitic. (more…)
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In this conflict, context is everything
The truth of the matter is that Western Governments bear the primary responsibility for both the carnage in Israel and the genocide in Gaza. (more…)
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Voices of women, life and freedom battle sadism in Iran
In Australia, in the 25th year of the award of the Sydney Peace Prize, attention has at last been turned to a country, Iran, ruled by fear. The award-winning Iranian born British activist and actress Nazanin Boniadi will receive the 2023 Sydney Peace Prize ‘for drawing attention to human rights violations in Iran, for lending a powerful voice to support for Iranian women and girls in their Women, Life Freedom Movement.’ (more…)
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Netanyahu’s cries for revenge
Terrible violence and massive loss of life in this latest Palestine/Israel conflict is tragic and regrettable, but commentary from western politicians and their media backers is also tragic. The US rush to generate sympathy for Israel, and with scant regard for the traumatised citizens of Gaza, repeats years of thoughtless commentary that depicts the more powerful nation, Israel, as always, the victim and a people under siege as terrorists. (more…)
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The despotism of Mike Pezzullo
Journalists from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and Sixty Minutes have at last exposed the efforts by Mike Pezzullo, Secretary of Home Affairs, to influence government in favour of conservative politicians and by insisting that press freedom be stifled. (more…)