If I wanted to increase antisemitism, I imagine I’d do a lot of really evil stuff under a Star of David flag while adamantly insisting that my actions are inseparable from the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. I’d kill children by the thousands and commit genocidal atrocities. (more…)
Category: Religion
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Pope Francis would find PNG refugee conditions an eye-opener
In December, an impressive young Papua New Guinean named Jason Siwat, the director of the refugee program for the Catholic Bishops Conference of PNG and the Solomon Islands, travelled to Canberra bearing two important documents. (more…)
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The materialisation of Chinese Christianity
As the Lunar New Year approaches, many Chinese families clean the front door of their home and hang poetry around it. This is a rich and age-old Chinese tradition, both cultural and religious. (more…)
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Why is Christian persecution often met with indifference?
It has never been more dangerous to be a Christian than today. According to the newly released 2024 World Watch List – an authoritative survey by Open Doors, an organisation that supports persecuted Christians – 365 million Christians, or one in seven, are at high or extreme risk of persecution every day because of their faith. (more…)
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The agony of Michael Gawenda
Michael Gawenda, former editor of The Age and Walkley award-winning journalist, published his memoir ‘My Life as a Jew’ last year. Actually, it’s only part memoir, since much of it is reserved for polemics against Jews and Gentiles who are critical of Israel. The rest traces his life journey from an anti-Zionist Bundist youth to his current “familial” love for Israel and the Jewish people. (more…)
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Division, terrible suffering, and learnings about peacebuilding
Amplified by the terrible sufferings in many places, and by the divided voices, especially as regards Israel/Gaza, we have some learnings about peacebuilding that it might be timely to reflect on. ‘Cease-fire,’ of course, is just a less vivid way of saying ‘we will stop killing people we don’t know.’ (more…)
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Efforts to suppress Palestinian history defeated
From the first days in their Jewish day schools and youth organisations, young Jews are drilled with the lie that Palestine was ‘a land without people for a people without a land’. From its inception, the Zionist movement has sought to suppress Palestinian history and narratives. Whenever there are exhibitions or events or publications featuring Palestinian artists, writers or speakers, there is a huge geschrei from the usual suspects in the Zionist propaganda machine, protesting at this example of ‘antisemitism’. (more…)
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The need for theological reform
In the mid-1980s when I was at Boston College, a Jesuit university, one of the lecturers commented that the Catholic Church hierarchy was fearful of a schism in the church. Too late, he remarked, it is already here, informally. He pointed out that the majority of students at that Catholic university no longer believed the traditional story of a heavenly deity who locked people out of heaven because of the first humans’ disobedience. He also observed that they no longer attended the Church’s liturgy because its imagery and language are steeped in that story. (more…)
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Blue Christmas
A Meditation for Those who are Grieving Loss during this Christmas Season, 2023 (more…)
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Suffer the little children to come unto me…
Well, not so if they are Palestinian children that Israelis keep killing time and time again. It is part of what Israelis calls ‘mowing the grass’. (more…)
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Losing my religion
Theology has long been used to justify war. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it’s happening again in the Middle East. (more…)
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The relational consequences of October 7
Overhead, suddenly, there was a noisy helicopter. I didn’t look up. Then I noticed that I hadn’t looked up. If I was in a place of terror from the sky, I would have looked up. (more…)
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The day after: Destroying Gaza will only yield future war
At the core of the cycle of violence in Israel and Palestine is “the studied blindness of two people to see the other, to accept that they have a legitimate place on the landscape”. Without such acceptance, this horrific war in Gaza will not be the last. (more…)
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Enemy twins: Israel and Hamas unite to massacre innocents
Hamas’s refusal to recognise Israel as a state is as absurd as Israel’s belief that the current massacre of Palestinians will destroy Hamas. If all this were mere stupidity it would be bad enough, but the consequent violence against innocent people is extreme and it is accelerating. (more…)
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Israel does not have the right to ‘defend itself’
Over the last few weeks we have been bombarded with a number of assertions,advanced firstly as mere mantra, but then appearing as axioms, or self-evident truths.Israel has a right to defend itself; and Israel has a right to exist. I wish to question whether these two statements are as axiomatic as our Prime Minister and our Foreign Minister apparently assume. (more…)
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Massacre of the Innocents
The UN is calling the Israel-Hamas war a ‘graveyard of children’…. an adult conflict, in which the young are suffering most. What we see on our TV screens every night is impossible to watch. Did Netanyahu see the young lad who had just carried the decapitated body of his friend from the rubble. If so, what did he think? He almost certainly thought the same as Natali Bennet the former Israeli prime minister who said to a reporter on Sky News: “Are you seriously asking me about Palestinian civilians? What is wrong with you? We’re fighting Nazis”. (more…)
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Hoping against hope: The Synodal process and prospects for equality for women in the church
The most pressing challenge for the Catholic Church remains addressing women’s inequality in its ranks. The current Synod on Synodality offers some hope, but there are huge roadblocks. The likelihood of equality for women in the Church requires a leap of faith, extremely long-term thinking, and hoping against hope. I cannot see it happening in my lifetime. (more…)
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Israel has “Form” and much of it is brutal
Albert Einstein once said that Palestinians (Jews, Christians and Muslims alike) lived in peace and worked together before the European Jews were sent to Palestine. He also said that if Jews could not co-exist peacefully with Arabs “then we have learnt nothing in 2000 years of civilisation”. (more…)
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Blindly supporting Israel, the West abandons the values it claims to stand for
Leaders of the US, Britain, Australia and Western countries, instead of learning from history, are failing to bear their responsibility for the creation of an Israeli colonial regime in Palestine at the expense of the Palestinian people. Despite the massacres, ethnic cleansing, aggression, wars, occupation and gross violations of international law committed by Israel since its inception, Western countries, especially the group of Anglo Saxon countries of the so-called “Five Eyes”, whom I call the Five Eyes plus Israel, continue with their policy of blind support to Israel, giving it a green light to continue its policy of illegal occupation with impunity. (more…)
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Genocide: Israel uses cover of Gaza crisis to Judaise “Area C”
An aside to what is happening in Gaza is events occurring in the West Bank, where there has been little focus. Reports in recent days have drawn attention to attempts by settlers – read the Israeli government – to “Judaise” Area C and to push Bedouins out of the West Bank. (more…)
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Israel will never be safe until Palestine is free
No attempt to “explain”, rationalise, find some counter-“equivalence” for, nor any attempt to see matters through the eyes and the experiences of the murderers rather than the immediate victims can justify or forgive the barbaric massacre of Israeli children, women and men by Hamas warriors after they broke out of Gaza. It does not forgive collective punishment, or the counter-massacre of Palestinians it inspired either. But one of the starting-off points for dealing with the latest upsurge of irrational violence must be the sheer enormity of what was done to southern Israelis. (more…)
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Gaza genocide exposes fundamental bias in the state-corporate news media
On BBC Newsnight, host Kirsty Wark listened to Husam Zomlot, head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, describe how six of his family members had been killed by Israeli air strikes. Wark reacted oddly: ‘I’m sorry for your own personal loss. I mean, can I just be clear, though, you cannot condone the killing of civilians in Israel, can you?’ This captures an essential element of western media coverage in the region. (more…)
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Israel’s culture of deceit
Israel, which always seeks to blame Palestinians for the atrocities it carries out, is the least trustworthy source about the bombing of the hospital in Gaza. (more…)
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Western reporters’ shameful cover-up of Israel’s hospital massacre: A postscript
As a postscript to Caitlin Johnstone’s piece in yesterday’s P&I, I wish to comment further on who is responsible for the attack on al-Ahli Arab Hospital on the 17th October. (more…)
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The Crumpled Heart and the role now of wounded healers
The scars from mean words and actions can last a long, long time. After the outcome of the Voice Referendum, and as the suffering in Israel and Gaza intensifies, can the choice to heal rather than to reciprocate harm take us out of a spiralling set of retaliations which just cause more suffering? Perhaps we can all learn from an exercise called the ‘Crumpled Heart’. (more…)
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Advocate of evil: Biden is complicit with Israel
As reported in the New York Times, US President Joe Biden has accepted the summons from his master and will be in Israel to physically manifest his full support for the further enhanced genocidal assault against the people of Gaza which Israel has publicly announced its intention to launch. (more…)
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To my brothers and cousins, the Jewish community of Australia
Your fear is our fear, your safety is our safety, your blood is our blood, our blood is your blood, make no mistake. When I see a Jewish mother crying for her loss, I feel with her. I want you to feel with the thousands of Palestinian mothers that have been crying for years and years; make no mistake. Your future is our future, your freedom is our freedom; make no mistake. Don’t let an Apartheid state speak in your name. If there was no ongoing occupation, there would be no violence (more…)
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“Extreme escalation”: Hospital destruction an unconscionable war crime
The Medical Association for Prevention of War renews its call of last week for the Australian government to express in the strongest possible terms that Australia supports the application of the rule of law impartially and in all circumstances, and explicitly condemns violations of it not only by Hamas but also by Israel in the horrific war unfolding in the Middle East. (more…)
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You reap what you sow in Israel
“Freedom is never given. It must be taken.” (Ursula Le Guin) . You cannot be well in a home you stole. (more…)
