Global

Australia’s Labor Party’s recognition of Palestine as a State on March 30 is a welcomed position, though it comes with many caveats.

Pro-Palestinian activists are justified to question the sincerity of the ALP’s stance and whether Australia’s Labor is genuinely prepared to fully adopt this position should they form a government following the 2022 elections.

When I met a seven-year-old girl named Guljumma at a refugee camp in Kabul a dozen years ago, she told me that bombs fell early one morning while she slept at home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. With a soft, matter-of-fact voice, Guljumma described what happened. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.

Troops on the ground didn’t kill Guljumma’s relatives and leave her to live with only one arm. The U.S. air war did.

There’s no good reason to assume the air war in Afghanistan will be over when -- according to President Biden’s announcement on Wednesday -- all U.S. forces will be withdrawn from that country.

The popular narrative of plucky little Israel prevailing over hordes of bloodthirsty Arabs has captured the Western imagination even though it is manifestly false in almost every detail. But Israel’s greatest accomplishment might well be something else, it’s ability to make things disappear. It plausibly all began in June 1967 when Israel attacked the USS Liberty, a lightly armed but well identified US naval vessel cruising in international waters under a large American flag. Fighter bombers and torpedo boats sought to sink the ship, destroying the lifeboats so no one would escape. In the engagement, 34 American military personnel were killed and a further 171 wounded, before a heroic defense by the crew managed to save the vessel. President Lyndon Johnson, who said he would rather see the ship sink than embarrass his friend Israel, started a cover-up which has lasted to this day. There has been no legitimate court of inquiry into the attack and when the ship’s captain received a Medal of Honor for his heroism, it was awarded secretly in the Washington Navy Yard rather than openly at the White House.

“Get out of the car! Get out of the car NOW!!”

The officer — the mad man with a badge — probably shouts those words 50 times at the driver, Second Lt. Caron Nazario, at a gas station in Windsor, Va., all the while holding a gun a foot from his face. Nazario, who is black and Latino, had just been pulled over for not having a rear license plate (he did have one but, you know, we all make mistakes) and . . . fasten your seatbelts! . . . driving with tinted windows. Of course the cops had their guns drawn.

The Israeli government’s position regarding an impending investigation by the International Criminal Court of alleged war crimes committed in occupied Palestine has been finally declared by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

“It will be made clear that Israel is a country with rule of law that knows how to investigate itself,” Netanyahu said in a statement on April 8. Subsequently, Israel “completely rejects” any accusations that it has committed war crimes. 

But it won’t be so easy for Tel Aviv this time around. True, Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute, according to which the ICC was established, but it can still be held accountable, because the State of Palestine is a member of the ICC. 

In a recent report, the United Nations Mission in Mali, known as MINUSMA, concluded that, on January 3, French warplanes had struck a crowd attending a wedding in the remote village of Bounti, killing 22 of the guests.

According to the findings, based on a thorough investigation and interviews with hundreds of eyewitnesses, 19 of the guests were unarmed civilians whose killing constitutes a war crime. 

Unlike other wars in the region, the French war in Mali receives little media coverage outside the limited scope of French-speaking media, which has successfully branded this war as one against Islamic militants. 

If imprisoned Palestinian leader, Marwan Barghouti, becomes the President of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the status quo will change substantially. For Israel, as well as for the current PA President, Mahmoud Abbas, such a scenario is more dangerous than another strong Hamas showing in the upcoming Palestinian parliamentary elections.

The long-delayed elections, now scheduled for May 22 and July 31 respectively, will not only represent a watershed moment for the fractured Palestinian body politic, but also for the Fatah Movement which has dominated the PA since its inception in 1994. The once revolutionary Movement has become a shell of its former self under the leadership of Abbas, whose only claim to legitimacy was a poorly contested election in January 2005, following the death of former Fatah leader and PA President, Yasser Arafat.

A new report, published on 14 March, 2021 in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' journal Ambio, points out that humanity is hurtling towards destruction unless we have the collective wisdom to change course quickly. Here is a link to the article:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-021-01544-8

The Ambio article was written as part of the preparation for a meeting of Nobel Prize winners to discuss the state of the planet. The virtual meeting will be held on April 26-28, 2021.

We must achieve a steady-state economic system

A steady-state economic system is necessary because neither population growth nor economic growth can continue indefinitely on a finite earth. No one can maintain that exponential industrial growth is sustainable in the long run except by refusing to look more than a short distance into the future.