Australian clothing brand Saxony recently invited American photographer… Teru Kuwayama to Australia. He’s spent much of the last decade documenting life and war in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kashmir: I spent time with Kuwayama in Sydney and he is a humane man who has seen the reality of catastrophic Western policies in countries that need more than…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
How the Australian Zionist lobby corrupts political process (and politicians and reporters join in)
It’s nearly Christmas and that must mean yet another year of the Australia-Israel-UK Leadership Forum. The Australian media has virtually ignored the whole thing because they’re a) lazy b) not curious and c) clueless how to write about the shamelessness of witnessing so many politicians pall around with pro-occupation Israeli figures. These are the same…
Murdoch’s way of defending Israel is publishing Netanyahu’s crib notes
Yesterday the ABC published as its lead opinion story my piece about the reasons why an academic boycott should be imposed on Israel. The hundreds of comments below are a fascinating if mostly despairing insight into the mindset of people who want to label any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism. Oh well. Today’s Rupert Murdoch’s…
This is not the Syria your mainstream media outlet is selling you
The intrepid Patrick Cockburn, one of the finest reporters around, travels to Syria and offers an alternative view in The Independent: It is one of the most horrifying videos of the war in Syria. It shows two men being beheaded by Syrian rebels, one of them by a child. He hacks with a machete at…
Why boycotting Israeli academia is necessary and principled
My following piece appears today in ABC’s… The Drum: An academic boycott of Israeli universities isn’t an attack on freedom of speech. The evidence tells us these institutions are key battlegrounds for breaches of international law towards the Palestinians, argues Antony Loewenstein. New Zealand’s $20 billion national pension fund… announced this month… that it was divesting from three…
How the Nakba has never ended
Typically great piece by Ben White in Al-Jazeera (another fine piece of his, on racism and maintaining a Jewish majority in Jerusalem, is here): While it is common knowledge that a majority of the population of the Gaza Strip are refugees, it is less well understood where they came from. The shocking reality is that…
What unaccountable US torture looks like
Stunning post by Darryl Li at the Middle East Research and Information Project: Two of today’s headlines together provide a good example of the work of imperial forgetting. On the front page of theNew York Times, a… story… about the depiction of torture in the forthcoming national revenge flick… Zero Dark Thirty… shows how little debates have advanced over…
Voice of academic reason; why I boycott Israeli universities
Following the avalanche of media coverage in the last 10 days of Sydney University’s Dr Jake Lynch about his brave stand to oppose any institutional links with Israeli universities, he’s written two pieces in New Matilda that outline some of the issues. One: Journalist Christian Kerr recently filed a series of critical articles in The…
How Australia actively blocks legitimate refugees globally who need our protection
Australia’s largely secret role in actively blocking persecuted people from escaping life-threatening situations should be exposed more often. Canberra seems happy colluding with authoritarian figures in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and beyond to “stop the boats”. Here’s Aubrey Belford in The Global Mail: Australian authorities have increasingly turned to a strategy some find disturbing: they are…
Anybody else like to speak out against a courageous academic challenging Israeli apartheid?
There’s been so much media coverage of Dr Jake Lynch at Sydney University taking a principled stance against an Israeli academic that it’s vital to just have all the stories on the record. I’ve been publishing all the information I can find about it on a daily basis (here’s the piece from yesterday). The Australian:…