NB: The victims of the death camps whom most of us don’t know or talk about. DS Ian Hancock Di zelbike zun vos farvayst di layvnt,farshvartst oykh’m Tsigayner. – “The same sun that whitens the linen also turns the Gypsy black.” – Yiddish proverb “One exhibit [at the Holocaust Museum at Buchenwald] quotes SS chief Heinrich Himmler… Read More The Roots of Antigypsyism. To the Holocaust and After
‘Polluter elite’ are plundering the planet to point of destruction, says Oxfam after comprehensive study of climate inequality The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%, with dire consequences for vulnerable communities and global efforts to tackle the climate emergency, a report says. The most comprehensive study of… Read More Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%, report says
Carolina Landsmann This column isn’t about Hamas. It doesn’t address the question of what Hamas wants and doesn’t try to put the events of October 7 into their historical context, much less into their moral context. What’s theirs is theirs. This column also isn’t about the more general question of what the Palestinians want and… Read More Israel’s Million-dollar Question: What to Do With the West Bank and Gaza Strip
Paul Daley Given humankind’s recent showcasing of its infinite capacity to inflict misery upon itself, joy sometimes seems so elusive as to be borderline extinct. It sometimes feels near impossible to find moments of beauty, let alone a line of them, in such a distressing world. And, so, given that beauty may now be a… Read More In a distressing world, moments of beauty seem elusive. I found one in a Sydney theatre
Julianne Schultz It is little wonder that people are turning off the news in record numbers. The images are often unwatchable, the descriptions beyond imagining, the scale incomprehensible. Everywhere you look the cruelty of the human spirit is on display. Newsreaders have adjusted their scripts. They used to say, “Some viewers might find the next… Read More The news has become intolerable and inhumane. Democracy’s vital feedback mechanism is broken
“[H]e brought into his government, when he came back to power late last year, the most extreme, I mean, this is beyond fascism, the most extreme parties in Israel. The religious Zionists and the Jewish power. I mean, these people are terrorists and some of them actually have been on the State Department terrorism watch… Read More Juan Cole: Palestine’s Obituary
We have both been reporting on and protesting against U.S. war crimes for many years, and against identical crimes committed by U.S. allies and proxies like Israel and Saudi Arabia: illegal uses of military force to try to remove enemy governments or “regimes”; hostile military occupations; disproportionate military violence justified by claims of “terrorism”; the… Read More Decades of U.S. war crimes led to what Israel is doing in Gaza
Joe Biden was the Democratic Party’s duct-tape solution to a national emergency, the compromise candidate who was almost everyone’s second (or third) choice. Given that, the duct tape held surprisingly well for a while, in increasingly precarious circumstances. Until it didn’t. It would be foolish in the extreme to predict the outcome of an election… Read More Joe Biden at history’s crossroads: Is backing Bibi’s Gaza war a fatal mistake?
We can tell the world is changing when tens of thousands of Texans rally in the capital of America’s most important red state to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and freedom for Palestine. No longer can the Israeli government enforce its deadly calculus of 10 (or 50? or 100?) Palestinian lives for each Israeli killed… Read More Time’s Up for Netanyahu and Biden
Jonathan Freedland Recall how counter-terrorist strategists had to rethink all that they knew when first confronted with suicide bombers. It’s hard to deter a terrorist who does not fear death. That’s true writ large for an organisation that has explicitly said it is “proud to sacrifice martyrs”. Not its own leaders, mind, many of whom live in… Read More Too many taking sides in this conflict miss the true nature of Hamas – and Netanyahu
After the truth-shower 