En Passant

All of these government changes to the dole, as well as demonising the victims of capitalism and deflecting attention away from the system that creates unemployment by putting profit before people, are also aimed at driving wages down.

Nick Dyrenfurth in the Fairfax Daily (The Age, The Canberra Times, and I assume the Sydney Morning Herald) the other day wrote his usual unthinking rant in defence of Zionism and Israel, in effect a defence of the long slow genocide that Israel has been carrying out against Palestinians since 1948. The current massacre in Gaza is but the next step in that genocide.

Dyrenfurth pretends that he sees the suffering of Palestinians but does not understand that it is the very Zionism he embraces which is the cause of their suffering.

In commemorating the Great War, which broke out 100 years ago next month, we recall one of history’s greatest crimes writes Tom O’Lincoln in Red Flag. Sixteen million dead and 20 million wounded. Such a grubby mix of murder and profit-hunger confronts us. Dividends rise and workers fall.

Ask your local and federal Parliamentarians to sign this statement from Australian MPs in support of Gaza.

On his page, the blog from Nazareth, Jonathan Cook summarises the case Norman Finkelstein and Chris Hedges make for Hamas firing rockets into Israel. He also has the links to their full article.

Israel’s propaganda machine, however, insists that these Palestinians wanted to die (“culture of martyrdom”), staged their own death (“telegenically dead”) or were the tragic victims of Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes (“human shielding”). In all instances, the military power is blaming the victims for their own deaths, accusing them of devaluing life and attributing this disregard to cultural bankruptcy. In effect, Israel—along with uncritical mainstream media that unquestionably accept this discourse—dehumanizes Palestinians, deprives them even of their victimhood and legitimizes egregious human rights and legal violations.

What courage, what humanity the Warsaw Ghetto Jews showed in resisting the monolith of Nazism. There is a universal message here. It was right then to fight back against the Nazi occupiers. It is right now, even in the face of overwhelming force, to resist your oppressors, their invasions and occupation.

General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.

This is a link to me going head to head with David Oldfield on radio station 2UE 2 and a half years ago in defence of flag burning. It was prompted by a young Aboriginal girl burning the Australian flag on the stairs of Old Parliament House on Invasion Day in 2012. It is the […]