Weaponising human rights against the city and mainland China only becomes more farcical when the US and its close allies are busy violating them. Another day, another official report from the US government criticising and threatening to punish China for interfering with the affairs of Hong Kong, a Chinese city. This is getting farcical. The Continue reading »
Human Rights
Hamas’ Oct 7 attack on Israeli citizens was horrific. There are 2 things to bear in mind – firstly it didn’t happen in a vacuum and secondly the scale of the retaliations, the punishment, far outweighs the crime. Firstly the history of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people is well documented. Below are a few Continue reading »
Everyone’s talking points have in bold type – ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’. This simplistic American militarist jargon is treated as if there was an untrammelled right. International law hasn’t emerged to facilitate war, but to constrain it. The rich body of international law is the product of several centuries of reflection and Continue reading »
Invoking a “shared humanity”, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese called for a rehumanisation discourse in the Israel/Palestine conflict, in which ending Jewish Israel’s domination would be a re-humanising act for Jewish Israelis as well. On Saturday last, UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories, and Italian lawyer, Francesca Albanese delivered Continue reading »
Joe Biden’s response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 was to fuse the wars in Israel and Ukraine into a single struggle. Immediately after he returned from his visit to Tel Aviv, where he had both literally and figuratively embraced Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden addressed the US public from the Oval Office. “You know,” he […]
The post Biden’s Selective Outrage appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
"We have failed you. This is the awful guilt we carry. We tried. But we did not try hard enough." -- Chris Hedges
The post Chris Hedges: Letter to the Children of Gaza appeared first on MintPress News.
Is the Albanese government aiding and abetting the Israeli military and intelligence services in actions in Gaza which are serious violations of international human rights laws? Successive Australian Defence ministers have assured us that any weapons or other military hardware that is exported cannot be used to enable the commission of war crimes and other Continue reading »
Israel’s strategic choices, as Israelis see it, are rather like those sometimes argued for Australia. It wants powerful friends but cannot take them for granted. Ultimately it must depend on itself, if needs be alone. Surrounded by deadly enemies, it must make the cost of conquest so high, and so uncertain, that invaders are deterred. Continue reading »
If war is supposed to be the continuation of politics by other means, Israel’s assault on Gaza seems to be the continuation by other means of the absence of politics. It does not seem that Israel understands what its endgame is. Without a clear sense of an ending, there can be no answer to the […]
The post No Endgame in Gaza appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
The world is appalled that the US has backed a war of vengeance by Israel on the captive Palestinian population. A US-led global peace process is critical to ending decades of violence in the Israel-Gaza conflict. It is hard to know what else to say about the awful conflict that is playing out in the Middle East. Continue reading »