My following article appears in the Amnesty International Australia’s Uncensor campaign about human rights in China: One-party rule is here to stay, but cracks are starting to appear, writes Antony Loewenstein. For anybody thinking of attending the Beijing Games, China this week announced, in Chinese, the rules of the game. Religious or political banners are…
Showing all posts tagged internet
Names do matter
In recent years, Iranians have launched a relatively successful digital campaign against the renaming of the Persian Gulf as the Arabic Gulf. Iranian online activism is alive.
Let the bile run free
Should a mainstream news organisation be providing a platform for these views? Richard Barnbrook, the British National party’s London Assembly member, has used a blog on the Daily Telegraph’s website to blame immigrants and their sons for knife and gun crime among young people in the capital after a spate of murders. Under the headline…
Trouble in the Communist “paradise”
My following article appears in the Amnesty International Australia’s Uncensor campaign about human rights in China: The suffering of earthquake victims should not mask the authoritarian tendencies of the ruling elite, writes Antony Loewenstein. The ongoing humanitarian catastrophe after the Sichuan earthquake has revealed a side of China that is rarely glimpsed. After months of…
(Virtually) nothing is hidden
Using the internet to highlight a repressive regime. Tunisia, you’re being watched:
How to speak to journalists for dummies
After the recent revelations of a Pentagon-led plan to twist US media coverage of the “war on terror”, Wikileaks uncovers a 2006 document titled, “Media is the Battlefield: Tactics, Techniques and Procedures“. Produced for those in the US military, typical statements include: You do not have to regurgitate the Secretary of Defense’s responses, but you…
The Left should oppose repression
I’ve spent most of my professional life skewering the unhinged tendencies of the Right (not least debunking its support for Israeli violence). Sadly, some on the Left are equally ideological and blind to their own propaganda. Western support for Cuba remains fairly strong on the Left, despite the vast evidence that Fidel Castro ran a…
How not to find the bad guys
The Australian Federal Police today announced that they have spent $8.2 million on the fruitless investigation into “terror” suspect Mohamed Haneef. Yet another debacle in the never-ending “war on terror.” Not unlike this alarming case in the UK: A masters student researching terrorist tactics who was arrested and detained for six days after his university…