The Adass Israel synagogue in Ripponlea, Melbourne was firebombed this week in a horrific attack. When this synagogue was set ablaze, the incident also took a match and gasoline to our news cycle. The debate around antisemitism was already primed to blow. Only a week before the Executive Council of Australian Jewry had published a Continue reading »
International Relations
Australia and the United States believe China is hegemonic. China uses a different approach to international engagement, and that means Australia fails to understand China’s appeal to the region and the global south. Increased tariffs on China and 100% tariffs on any country that backs any other currency to replace the US dollar. The Trump Continue reading »
There should be a Christmas truce/ceasefire (Orthodox Christmas or western doesn’t matter) in the war between Russia and Ukraine. Last Western AND Orthodox Christmas, there was discussion of the possibility of a truce or ceasefire over one of the Christmases. The precedent quoted was of course, the spontaneous ceasefire that took place over December 1914, Continue reading »
Almost certainly not, but someone really ought to try while it’s still possible. Geography isn’t everything in international relations, but it does explain a lot. You can’t choose the neighbours. Having a border with Russia understandably leads to well-founded paranoia or shameless, self-serving attempts at ingratiation these days. The leaders of Canada and Mexico are Continue reading »
I have a friend Julian King, who Duncan Graham reports has been subjected to a stun grenade as our Australian Federal Police burst through his door to seize his PhD research, phone and computers. Reportedly, the AFP are concerned about OPM (Organisasi Papua Merdeka _Free Papua Organisation), the indigenous independence movement in West Papua. I Continue reading »
The dramatic ‘rebel’ advance into Aleppo dominates the headlines. In history rather than headlines, however, the importance of current events shrinks into relativity, as the ‘West’ and its regional allies have been tearing apart, or trying to tear apart, Syria for more than a century. This is what the journalist and historian Patrick Seale called Continue reading »
Viktor Orbán’s obsequious letter to Benjamin Netanyahu offering him sanctuary from the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Hungary is not a surprise. It is another red flag in the Islamophobic world of the transnational Right. The mass and prolonged slaughter of Palestinian Muslims (and Christians) cannot be seen as a crime committed against other humans Continue reading »
Australia has willingly become the “epicentre of the projection of US power in the Indo-Pacific”. It does not make Australia safer. It makes Australia the epicentre for any retaliation to that projection of power. The government justifies this vulnerable position on the basis of our “shared values and democracy” and our shared commitment to uphold Continue reading »
When recently sacked by Netanyahu, Gallant, in an emotional speech said: “Israel has fallen into moral darkness”. This is what Zionism has internally inflicted on Judaism – moral decay. The security threat suffered by good Jewish people globally is what Zionism has inflicted externally. Despite Gallant prosecuting Israel’s war in a savage manner as minister Continue reading »
If Australia is to have any influence at all in resolving the horrendous carnage now taking place in the Middle East it needs to demonstrate that it acts independently of American pressure. The politicians who lament the fraying of our ties with Israel seem totally unconcerned about the impact of our position on countries far Continue reading »