Late last year Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newsletter ran a campaign against the head of Sydney University’s Centre of Peace and Conflict Studies, Jake Lynch, for bravely rejecting institutional links with occupation-supporting Israeli universities. Today former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd appears in the same paper with quotes implying that boycotts are anti-Semitic and concerned people should…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
Obama dislikes Netanyahu and sees Israel’s growing isolation?
According to American Zionist journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, a man close to the White House, Barack Obama is pissed with Israel and his anger is only growing. Time will tell but we’re a long way from Washington sanctioning the Jewish state for its daily violations of international law: Shortly after the… United Nations General Assembly… voted in late…
The Western war to assist brutality against the Shia
With the current Western war in Mali (in simple terms, blowback from our intervention in Libya), who and what exactly is the West supporting in the Muslim world? Patrick Cockburn writes in Counterpunch that hypocrisy is name of the game: It is a ferocious war waged by assassination, massacre, imprisonment and persecution that has killed…
Toxic mix of American “justice” and war on drugs
I’m currently writing the introduction of my disaster capitalism book (the vast bulk of the manuscript is written and being edited by my publisher) and looking into the role of privatised prisons in the US and how the “war on drugs” has deformed the society. This short film is deeply powerful:
Documenting the unaccountable war on terror
Laura Poitras is a remarkable American film-maker who has faced constant harassment by US officials for simply doing her job of documenting the countless abuses against innocents since 9/11. Here are two short films, made for the New York Times, that are beautiful, moving and rage-inducing. This is the true face of America in the…
Former Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks details US torture post 9/11
Moving testimony on the 11th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo Bay, a gulag that remains open to this day. Justice is yet to be done:
What blind Zionism looks like; Palestinians invisible on Birthright
Great The Real News story by Max Blumenthal and Lia Tarachansky:
ABCTV News24’s The Drum on sexism, Syria and divestment
I appeared tonight on ABCTV News24’s The Drum (video here), alongside Rowan Dean and Jacqueline Maley, talking about a range of political issues. I argued that it was legitimate for pension funds to divest from organisations or companies that go against people’s morality such as big tobacco, the thuggish Murdoch empire or fossil fuels (quoting…
Fighting the Obama administration’s war on whistle-blowers
The failure of many journalists to challenge the great war against individuals who speak out against illegality is startling and revealing of the mindset that most mainstream hacks have towards establishment power; they’d much rather embrace it than oppose it: