My weekly Guardian column: The Australian government recently… successfully blocked the release… of sensitive documents that would have revealed the complicity of Indonesian forces in massive abuses during their… occupation of East Timor. Canberra directed the National Archives to refuse the request of University of NSW associate professor Clinton Fernandes to see internal Australian files on Indonesian military…
Making a killing from climate change
My following book review appeared in the Melbourne Age/Sydney Morning Herald last weekend: Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming… MCKENZIE FUNK… PENGUIN PRESS, $29.99 Who says global warming is bad for the world? The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found widespread and consequential effects on food systems and ecosystems, with detrimental ramifications…
Why the Pulitzer for the Snowden stories is a no-brainer
Yes, to all of this, by Amy Davidson in The New Yorker: Awarding the Pulitzer for public service to the… Guardian… and the Washington… Post… should go down as about the easiest call the prize committee has ever had to make. It would have been a scandal, this year, if there had been… no… Pulitzer related to the documents that Edward…
Why Wall Street thugs get away with stealing billions
One of the best investigative journalists around, Matt Taibbi, has a new book out, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.… He explains the how and why of successive US administrations turning a blind eye to Wall Street criminality. It’s vulture capitalism on a massive scale. Here’s Taibbi’s interview with Democracy Now!:
The real significance of Bob Carr's comments on Israel lobby
Much of the media has dismissed former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr’s diaries as being obsessed with irrelevance, diets and exercise. In fact, the diaries are fascinating and focus on a range of international events (see my Guardian column this week on the Zionist lobby sections). I saw Carr last night at Sydney University and…
Why we need to discuss unhealthy power of Zionist lobby part 44225
My weekly Guardian column: To have a prominent political figure challenging the power and message of the Israel lobby is almost unheard of in most western nations – which is precisely what makes the… just released diaries… of former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr all the more remarkable. Across 500 pages, Carr catalogues his intense exercise regime,…
The Australian review of "Prisoner X"
My following review appears in yesterday’s Weekend Australian newspaper: Understanding the insular and tribal Melbourne Jewish community has fascinated sociologists for decades. With one of the largest concentrations of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel, proudly Zionist and with strong Jewish day schools, it’s a world that created Ben Zygier, the Australian Mossad agent who committed…
"After Zionism" review surfaces
Back in 2012 I co-edited a book, After Zionism, with Ahmed Moor (it was released in an updated edition in 2013). Now the magazine at the University of Technology Sydney has published a review (yes, just a little late and on page 17): Israel is a stark anomaly. There are few… states in the world that…
Personally supporting BDS against Israel
Last night in Sydney there was a successful event to highlight the growing global movement of BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) against Israel and the legal case against proponent and Sydney University academic Dr Jake Lynch. Around 140 people came to hear various speakers detailing the many reasons BDS is one just way to apply…
FBI Radio interview feature on privatised immigration detention
The issue of privatised immigration detention in Australia and globally is one subject of my book Profits of Doom. Sydney’s FBI Radio Backchat program produced a strong feature on the issue last weekend and interviewed me about it: