The stark contrast in media coverage of the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine reveals a troubling pattern of bias that shapes public perception and policy in profound ways. (more…)
Category: Israel Palestine
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UNRWA must not be criminalised by the Israeli Parliament
The conflict in Gaza has created both a humanitarian crisis and a public health emergency. Both are still worsening. Yet despite this, Israel is moving to declare UNRWA (United Nations Relief Work Agency) a terrorist organisation. This would massively reduce the ability of UNRWA to deliver (already totally inadequate) food, health care and shelter to the starving people of Gaza. (more…)
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Pro-Israel lobby smells blood in coordinated lawfare against media critics
In my view, some parts of Mary Kostakidis’ Twitter feed displays a particular and disturbing orientation. Despite that criticism, there should be no doubt that the pro-Israel lobby is engaged in a form of coordinated lawfare against critics of Israel on several fronts. Win or lose, the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) will attempt to use the case against Kostakidis to discredit those who support Palestine in general as antisemites. This attack is part of a general assault on media critics. (more…)
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Israel lobby’s attack on Kostakidis threatens everyone’s right to free speech
Mary Kostakidis is one of Australia’s finest journalists, but more than that, she also resolutely stands against oppression and injustice.
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Israel legislatively and militarily seeks to destroy UNRWA
As the Israeli military obliterates Gaza, massacres refugees living in tents in so called “safe zones” and slaughters 39,000 people including at least 16,000 children, its government works to “finish off” UNRWA.
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Albo’s envoys will entrench religious and political divisions for generations
Albanese’s advisers must have been smoking something when they decided that Australia should have envoys against antisemitism and Islamophobia. (more…)
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Israeli hasbara wants to silence Mary Kostakidis
Regarding recent social media posts by journalist, former SBS newsreader Mary Kostakidis, the CEO of the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) has lodged a complaint with the Australia Human Rights Commission. Under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, Mr. Alon Cassuto, a dual Australian Israeli citizen, claims that by sharing a speech by Hassan Nasrullah, the leader of Lebanese based Hezbollah, Mary has been ‘sharing extreme propaganda and hateful material.’
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Envoy Envy: “Sorry Mohammed”
Becoming the latest recruit in a well-organised global program, Australia has joined the 24 nations which have appointed envoys to combat anti-Semitism. We still await an envoy for resisting Islamophobia. (more…)
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Australia’s Palestine problem
Labor’s insistence that Australia will only recognise a Palestinian state as part of a “peace process” leading to a two-state solution wilfully dodges one very basic question – how can you negotiate a two-state solution, or any solution for that matter, without the participation of two states? (more…)
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Defending dissent in the Jewish community
The recent report by the Community Security Group (CSG) detailing 91 Jewish community incidents on university campuses until May 31, 2024, warrants a closer examination, particularly considering its implications and the nuances it omits. (more…)
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Failure of the International Courts: when will we hear their determinations?
Readers of P&I may recall my earlier papers on the International Criminal Court of Justice (ICJ), and the International Criminal Court (ICC), and their recent forays into the Middle East quagmire. Some may have thought that this is a positive development, perhaps humanity is enlisting international law which will finally bring some common sense to the issue. Some might now be querying whether this optimism was misplaced, and asking, “When am I going to hear something of the Courts’ determinations?”. (more…)
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The two envoys
The Prime Minister says he has appointed an antisemitic envoy and will soon appoint an islamophobia envoy, because the population does not understand the complexity and seriousness apparent in a perceived threat to Australia’s social cohesion. But the boot is on the other foot. He and his government have shown an abysmal lack of understanding or perhaps wilful blindness to the causes of misplaced anger with racist overtones. Defacing war memorials and attacking the offices of members of parliament, which I do not condone, are protests against our government for not sanctioning Israel for its gross violations of international law. (more…)
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“No ceasefire” in Israel’s Gaza genocide, says ‘Anti-Semitism’ envoy
The appointment of Jillian Segal, immediate past president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s new ‘Anti-Semitism Envoy‘ is a response to the demands of a powerful lobby, designed to conceal Australia’s collusion with the beyond belief cruelties imposed by Israel on the Palestinian people. “There can be no ceasefire until every hostage has been released,” Segal stated in November; joining with the Zionist Federation of Australia to criticise the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, for saying “we all want to take the next steps towards a ceasefire” in Gaza. (more…)
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Owing truth to the dead: Israel’s desecration of war graves
When does it stop? Australia’s close ties with Israel continue to hold despite the incessant slaughter taking place in the Gaza strip, with the connivance of any number of allies and arms manufacturers who have priorities that are somewhat different from the aim of preserving life. (more…)
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After the inhuman destruction of Gaza’s health system, looks like bombing hospitals is bad again
A missile struck a children’s hospital in Kyiv on Monday during the heaviest Russian bombardment on Ukraine in months, which stretched across five regions and reportedly killed some forty people. (more…)
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A win is a win, but clear lessons on Gaza from the UK election
The British Labour Party (BLP) won 32% of the vote but with First Past the Post voting it won 62% of the seats. That was the biggest gap on record between votes won and the number of seats. (more…)
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The Age hits a low pursuing discredited narratives about Oct. 7 attack
Melbourne tabloid The Age has done its already sagging reputation no favours by running, as an exclusive, an article that claims to detail what it calls the “denial and disinformation facing October 7 survivors” – Israelis who were attacked by Hamas – with the centrepiece of the article being an interview with an Israeli reservist – who was interviewed twice in 2023. (more…)
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‘The Night Won’t End’: Biden’s war on Gaza
From air strikes to field executions, Fault Lines investigates the killings of civilians by the Israeli military in Gaza and the role of the United States in the war. (more…)
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Payman becomes symbol for discontent with Labor
The strategic and tactical geniuses inside the prime minister’s office and the man they serve may take time to appreciate how comprehensively they have mismanaged popular discontent about Labor’s passive support for Israel during the war against the Palestinians of the past eight months. Instead, they are deluding themselves about being politically outplayed by a novice Labor Senator, who, allegedly, always had it in mind to betray the Labor Party. (more…)
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Israel, born illegitimate, seizes more illegal land in the West Bank
The birth of Israel on 14 May 1948 is said to be based on three related claims. Some people regard these claims as questionable. They form the basis for why Israel’s birth is said to be illegitimate. (more…)
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Nine months of slaughter: my analysis of Gaza and just war principles
Reflecting on some relevant aspects of just war thinking that I mentioned in my recent contribution to Pearls and Irritations on “Why Israel’s war violates just war principles” I decided it would be worth addressing some of those issues further and also broaching some important ones that I then did not discuss. I do so partly in response to comments I’ve since received from a number of people about my earlier presentation. (more…)
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Labor’s fall: fast forward to disaster
The black and white banners unfurled from the battlements of Parliament House on 4 July made us remember 2003 when ‘No War’ appeared in red paint on the top sail of the Opera House. They lifted the spirits of all who then opposed Australia joining the war in Iraq and all who now want action from Australia to end the war against the Palestinians. (more…)
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Palestine is an issue of justice not religion
At the coming elections, many of us will vote on the basis of a party’s or a candidate’s stance on the issue of Palestine. It will be a vote to reject the occupation, apartheid, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, and a myriad of other unspeakable horrors. And it will be an appeal to our common humanity to stop the genocide in Gaza and to help Palestinians get peace with justice. I sincerely hope it will not be a religion-based vote.
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Payman shatters the shackles of political amorality
The essential difference between Senator Fatima Payman and the rest of the federal Labor caucus – and the Coalition caucus as well – is that she opposes genocide and wants the federal parliament to take effective action against it. She is a minority of one in the federal Labor-Coalition political class. (more…)
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Australia supplies Israel with weapons of genocide, breaches law
The Australian Government has at last grudgingly admitted that Australian-based companies are supplying parts and components to Israel for its F-35 Lightning jets which are systematically destroying human life and buildings in Gaza. But it has not yet admitted that the supply of such components contravenes the Arms Trade Treaty of 2014, which Australia has ratified. (more…)
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Senator Payman, Palestine, and caucus solidarity
In the wake of Labor Senator Fatima Payman’s shock decision to cross the floor and vote with the Greens against her party I was bemused, to say the least, to see social media light up with valiant attempts to press Gough Whitlam into service as the arbiter of what the ‘correct’ labor response should be. ‘Whitlam would never have suspended her’ was a popular view, and a completely incorrect one. As our most reforming Prime Minister and an avowed moderniser of the Labor party and its policies, Whitlam’s attitude to Labor’s policy platform was nonetheless an ‘uncomplicated’ one: ‘Where I disagreed with it, I sought to change it; where I agreed with it, I sought to implement it’. (more…)
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There are no valid ethical arguments in support of attacks on health facilities in Gaza
The conflict in Gaza has generated vigorous discussion about the assumed ethical prohibition against attacks on health facilities in times of war and the circumstances in which this prohibition might be validly circumvented. (more…)
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When is terrorism justified?
When does politically-motivated violence, or terrorism if you prefer the bastardised term, become legitimate resistance to oppression, occupation and savagery? (more…)
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The luxury of death
Do Gazans truly die when their body is not whole or cannot be found and when they cannot be properly grieved? (more…)
