radiofree.asia

Author: Binoy Kampmark

  • Commemorating Mummy: Reflections on Mother’s Day

    Commercial gimmicks are sometimes impossible to beat off. Their stench and pull follow, even as you look the other way. One occasion is most prominent in this regard.  Nostrils get clogged and eyes get fogged, and the message is this: Remember Mommy.

    Mothers’ Day is rarely more than the draw and pull of extracted business and mined guilt. This is the worshipped and leveraged, the human breeder elevated and remembered, if only for one day. It resembles, in some ways, the link between poverty and the church box of charity. Give a few coins and save the child. Your conscience can rest easy.

    The day itself denigrates the mother in false respect and guilts the family for ignorance of that fact. It sanctifies a family relation for reasons of commercial worth. Suddenly, Mummy escapes her metaphorical sarcophagus, the nursing home, the flat, and finds herself seated at the end of a table with regrets. The hideous spectacle follows. The grumbling, the sneers. Mummy wonders what she is doing there. Monument? Reminder? A disgusting reminder to die off? Thoughts turn to the will.

    It was not necessarily intended that way. In the aftermath of the American Civil War (1861-65), Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, proposed that women unite in common cause and promote peace. In time, it would become the Mother’s Day Proclamation. In 1908, the idea became more concrete with West Virginian Anna Marie Jarvis’s church memorial in honour of her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis.  Ann Jarvis had been a committed peace activist, aiding wounded soldiers during the Civil War.

    On May 9, 1914, US President Woodrow Wilson officially announced the establishment of Mother’s Day as a national observance to be held annually on the second Sunday of May. Such observance was to involve the display of the American flag on government buildings and private residences “as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.”

    Mother’s Day in Australia only took off with Sydney’s Janet Heyden, who insisted in 1924 on remembering the aging mothers at Newington State Hospital, many of whom had been widowed by the calamitous slaughter of the First World War.  As an activist, she encouraged local schools and businesses to furnish the ladies with donated gifts.  In its more modern iteration, it has evolved into a family affair.  As Australian historian Richard Waterhouse benignly describes it, “It’s not just about recognising the role of mothers, though that’s still there, but it’s really recognising Mother’s Day as a day in which families can get together.”

    As with other days of elected memory, Mother’s Day draws in the retail and restaurant dollars.  Guilty emotions are easy fodder for the capitalist impulse.  Unremarkably, it was the United States that propelled its commercialisation, beginning with card companies like Hallmark and enterprising florists keen to make a profit.  Jarvis, so instrumental in establishing the tradition, took to loathing it, attacking such marketing gimmicks as “Mother’s Day Salad”.  For years, she harangued politicians, organised protests, and sought audiences with presidents to arrest the trend towards commodification.  Such efforts eventually exhausted her, leading to a lonely, poor death in a sanatorium.

    Even as the Second World War raged, the scope of merchandise in anticipation of the day burgeoned.  An April 1941 issue of New York’s Women’s Wear Daily notes how “Mother’s Day as a gift event has continued to grow in importance, and is now second only to Christmas”.  In Dallas, one Margaret Evans, promotion manager of A. Harris & Co., enthused at the growing number of departments offering gift choices for the occasion.  These included bags, gloves, hosiery, handkerchiefs, toiletries, and jewellery.

    Eventually, women’s libbers cottoned on to the idea that a commemorative occasion supposedly emphasising the importance of mothers had been hijacked and shamelessly exploited.  In 1971, a pamphlet issued by the Adelaide women’s liberationists suggested that the woman remained invisible, a chained martyr to the home, a slave to domestic chores, and the cult of domesticity.  Mother’s Day was that one occasion of the year that a woman’s invaluable role in the home was acknowledged, and even then, only imperfectly.  Such a mother’s “basic needs”, including a degree of independence from their children, remained unmet.  But the pamphlet went further, arguing that women “renounce [their] martyrdom” and reenvisage themselves as human beings and “not just ‘mum’.”

    The nexus with children was also a point of comment in that decade.  Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution took solid aim at the distorting role played by parenting and mothering in the formation of children. Implicit in her argument was that both the mother and the child needed emancipation.  It remains a pertinent point, even as the swamp of commercialisation looks deeper than ever.

    The post Commemorating Mummy: Reflections on Mother’s Day first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • White Smoke and Speculation: The Election of Pope Leo XIV

    Photograph Source: Edgar Beltrán / The Pillar – CC BY-SA 4.0

    The occasion of electing another Pope was a spectacle in time and, in many ways, outside it.  It was the one rare occasion in the twenty-first century where ancient ceremony, the old boy network – many presumptive virgins – along with festive dressing up, were seen with admiration rather than suspicion.  Feminists were nowhere to be heard.  Women knew their place; the phallocrats were in charge.  Secret processes and factions, unscrutinised by media or any temporal body, could take place in secure, deliberative seclusion.  Reverential followers of unquestioning loyalty turned up to the square of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome awaiting the news of the election.  Then, the white smoke rises from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney, with gasps of excitement and elation.

    Taking a punt on who the new leader of the Catholic Church will be once the conclave of Cardinals concludes is a failing bet.  A mischievous remark was once made by an Australian commentator on Church matters that you would have better chances picking a winner at the Melbourne Cup horse race than the next pontiff.

    The choice of Leo XIV, formerly Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, Prefect of the Dicastery of Bishops, was suitably surprising.  Few had their cards on a pick from the United States, let alone a pick from Chicago, Illinois.  But ever politic, the church narrative was quick to point out his naturalised status as a Peruvian and his elevation to the position of Bishop of Chiclayo in September 2015.  He had been an Augustinian missionary.  Not only was he a Western hemispheric representative, but one who doubled up as truly American, comprising North and South. This was an identitarian jackpot, a treat for the advertising wing of the Vatican.

    Clues on what Leo’s reign will look like are few in number.  “We must seek together,” he urges, “how to be a missionary Church, a Church that builds bridges, dialogue, always open to receive like this square with its open arms, all, all who need our charity, our presence, dialogue and love.”  His choice of name suggests a lineage of diplomatic and doctrinal-minded figures.

    Much Fourth Estate commentary has been vague, laden with cryptic references and snatches of speculation.  In the absence of detail, obsession over minutiae becomes paramount.  He turned up in the garb of Benedict XVI, suggested one observer on the BBC World Service, but spoke like his immediate predecessor, Pope Francis I.  “We saw a balance of the aesthetics of the traditional church,” opined Charlie Gillespie of Sacred Heart University, “along with language that sounded like Pope Francis.”

    Any use of the term “moderate” is also bound to be meaningless, though Leo’s brother, John Prevost, has aired his own prediction: “I don’t think we’ll see any extremes either way.”  Such a figure is straitjacketed by doctrine and buttoned up by process.  One who is bound to follow ancient texts drafted by the superstitious, however modernised in interpretation, will be caged by them.  In 2012, for instance, Prevost was revealing on that very issue when commenting on church attitudes to homosexuality.  Certain Western values, he thought, proved sympathetic to views “at odds with the gospel”, one of them being the “homosexual lifestyle.”

    The same cannot be said about Leo’s attitudes to migrants and the poor.  A social media account bearing Prevost’s name did not shy away from attacking the immigration policy of the Trump administration via a number of reposted articles.  In February, for instance, an article from the National Catholic Reporter titled “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others” featured.  Suffice to say that his selection did not impress certain figures in the MAGA movement, most notably Steve Bannon.  Calling Leo the “worst pick for MAGA Catholics,” Bannon sniffed a conspiracy.  “This is an anti-Trump vote by the globalists that run the Curia – this is the pope Bergoglio [Francis I] and his clique wanted.”

    The orbit of other problems will also be impossible for the new pontiff to escape.  The stain of clerical sex abuse remains an immovable reminder of organisational defect and depravity.  Terrier like activists continue their sorties against the Church, demanding redress and publishing their findings on such outlets as ConclaveWatch.org.  Earlier this year, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), along with Nates Mission, another survivors’ organisation, named the then Cardinal Prevost as one of six figures seminal in covering up sexual abuse in the church.  These formed a dossier of complaints submitted to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state.  According to the campaigners, the dossier documenting claims of mismanagement and cover-ups marked “the first time multiple high-ranking cardinals have been targeted … by co-ordinated, survivor-led action.”

    An open letter published on May 8 by SNAP also proved sharp on the election.  “The sex offender in the collar commits two crimes: one against the body, and one against the voice.  The grand pageantry around your election reminds us: survivors do not carry the same weight in this world as you do.”  The organisation further stated that Prevost, when provincial of the Augustinians, permitted Father James Ray, a priest accused of child abuse with restricted ministry since 1991, to reside at the Augustinians’ St. John Stone Friary in 2000.  From the outset, the Pope’s ledger is already a heavy one.

    The post White Smoke and Speculation: The Election of Pope Leo XIV appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The Election of Pope Leo XIV

    The occasion of electing another Pope was a spectacle in time and, in many ways, outside it. It was the one rare occasion in the twenty-first century where ancient ceremony, the old boy network – many presumptive virgins – along with festive dressing up, were seen with admiration rather than suspicion. Feminists were nowhere to be heard. Women knew their place; the phallocrats were in charge. Secret processes and factions, unscrutinised by media or any temporal body, could take place in secure, deliberative seclusion. Reverential followers of unquestioning loyalty turned up to the square of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome awaiting the news of the election. Then, the white smoke rises from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney, with gasps of excitement and elation.

    Taking a punt on who the new leader of the Catholic Church will be once the conclave of Cardinals concludes is a failing bet. A mischievous remark was once made by an Australian commentator on Church matters that you would have better chances picking a winner at the Melbourne Cup horse race than the next pontiff.

    The choice of Leo XIV, formerly Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, Prefect of the Dicastery of Bishops, was suitably surprising. Few had their cards on a pick from the United States, let alone a pick from Chicago, Illinois. But ever politic, the church narrative was quick to point out his naturalised status as a Peruvian and his elevation to the position of Bishop of Chiclayo in September 2015. He had been an Augustinian missionary. Not only was he a Western hemispheric representative, but one who doubled up as truly American, comprising North and South. This was an identitarian jackpot, a treat for the advertising wing of the Vatican.

    Clues on what Leo’s reign will look like are few in number. “We must seek together,” he urges, “how to be a missionary Church, a Church that builds bridges, dialogue, always open to receive like this square with its open arms, all, all who need our charity, our presence, dialogue and love.” His choice of name suggests a lineage of diplomatic and doctrinal-minded figures.

    Much Fourth Estate commentary has been vague, laden with cryptic references and snatches of speculation. In the absence of detail, obsession over minutiae becomes paramount. He turned up in the garb of Benedict XVI, suggested one observer on the BBC World Service, but spoke like his immediate predecessor, Pope Francis I. “We saw a balance of the aesthetics of the traditional church,” opined Charlie Gillespie of Sacred Heart University, “along with language that sounded like Pope Francis.”

    Any use of the term “moderate” is also bound to be meaningless, though Leo’s brother, John Prevost, has aired his own prediction: “I don’t think we’ll see any extremes either way.” Such a figure is straitjacketed by doctrine and buttoned up by process. One who is bound to follow ancient texts drafted by the superstitious, however modernised in interpretation, will be caged by them. In 2012, for instance, Prevost was revealing on that very issue when commenting on church attitudes to homosexuality. Certain Western values, he thought, proved sympathetic to views “at odds with the gospel”, one of them being the “homosexual lifestyle.”

    The same cannot be said about Leo’s attitudes to migrants and the poor. A social media account bearing Prevost’s name did not shy away from attacking the immigration policy of the Trump administration via a number of reposted articles. In February, for instance, an article from the National Catholic Reporter titled “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others” featured. Suffice to say that his selection did not impress certain figures in the MAGA movement, most notably Steve Bannon. Calling Leo the “worst pick for MAGA Catholics,” Bannon sniffed a conspiracy. “This is an anti-Trump vote by the globalists that run the Curia – this is the pope Bergoglio [Francis I] and his clique wanted.”

    The orbit of other problems will also be impossible for the new pontiff to escape. The stain of clerical sex abuse remains an immovable reminder of organisational defect and depravity. Terrier like activists continue their sorties against the Church, demanding redress and publishing their findings on such outlets as ConclaveWatch.org. Earlier this year, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), along with Nates Mission, another survivors’ organisation, named the then Cardinal Prevost as one of six figures seminal in covering up sexual abuse in the church. These formed a dossier of complaints submitted to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state. According to the campaigners, the dossier documenting claims of mismanagement and cover-ups marked “the first time multiple high-ranking cardinals have been targeted … by co-ordinated, survivor-led action.”

    An open letter published on May 8 by SNAP also proved sharp on the election. “The sex offender in the collar commits two crimes: one against the body, and one against the voice. The grand pageantry around your election reminds us: survivors do not carry the same weight in this world as you do.” The organisation further stated that Prevost, when provincial of the Augustinians, permitted Father James Ray, a priest accused of child abuse with restricted ministry since 1991, to reside at the Augustinians’ St. John Stone Friary in 2000. From the outset, the Pope’s ledger is already a heavy one.

    The post The Election of Pope Leo XIV first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Expulsion and Occupation: Israel’s Proposed Gaza Plan

    Photograph Source: Jaber Jehad Badwan – CC BY-SA 4.0

    Killing civilians wholesale, starving them to convince those unaffected to change course, and shepherding whole populations like livestock into conditions of further misery would all qualify as heinous crimes in international law.  When it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza, this approach is seen as necessary politics, unalloyed by the restraints of humanitarianism.  When confronted with these harsh realities on the ground, unequivocal denials follow: This is not happening in Gaza; no one is starving. And if that were the case, blame those misguided savages in Hamas.

    As the conflict chugs along in pools of blood and bountiful gore, the confused shape of Israel’s intentions continues in all its glorious nebulousness.  Pretend moderation clouds murderous desire.  There is no sense that those unfortunate Israeli hostages captured by Hamas in its assault on October 7, 2023 matter anymore, being merely decorative for the imminent slaughter.  There is even less sense that Hamas will be cleansed and removed from the strip, however attractive this idea continues to be.

    Such evident limits have not discouraged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, who have decided that more force, that old province of the unimaginative, is the answer.  According to the PM, the cabinet had agreed on a “forceful operation” to eliminate Hamas and salvage what is left of the hostage situation.

    A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, Brigadier-General Effie Defrin, has explained on Israeli radio that the offensive will apparently ensure the return of the hostages.  What follows will be “the collapse of the Hamas regime, its defeat, its submission”.  Anywhere up to two million Palestinian civilians in Gaza will be herded into the ruins of the south.  Humanitarian aid will be arranged by the Israeli forces, to be possibly distributed through approved contractors.

    The IDF chief of staff, Lt. General Eyal Zamier, confirmed that the approved plan will involve “the capture of the Strip and holding the territories, moving the Gazan population south for its defence, denying Hamas and the ability to distribute humanitarian supplies, and powerful attacks against Hamas.”

    Within the Israeli cabinet, ethnocentric and religious fires burn with bright fanaticism.  The Israeli Finance Finister Bezalel Smotrich remains a figure who ignores floral subtlety in favour of the blood-stained sledgehammer.  He remains that coherent link between cruel lawmaking and baffling violence.  “Within a few months,” he boasts, “we will be able to declare that we have won.  Gaza will be totally destroyed.”  With pompous certitude, he also claimed that the next six months would see Hamas cease to exist.

    Such opinions, expressed at the “Settlements Conference” organised by the Makor Rishon newspaper in Ofra, a West Bank settlement, gives a sense of the flavour.  Palestinians are to be “concentrated” on land located between the Egyptian border and the arbitrarily designated Morag Corridor.  As with any potential abuser keen to violate his vulnerable charges while justifying it, Smotrich tried to impress with the idea that this was a “humanitarian” zone that would be free of “Hamas and terrorism”.

    The program here is clear in its chilling crudeness.  Expulsion, relocation, transfer.  These are the words famously used to move on populations of sizeable number in history, often at enormous cost.  That this should involve lawmakers of the Jewish state adds a stunning, if perverse poignancy to this.  They, the moved on in history, the expelled and the condemned wanderers, shall expel others and condemn them in turn.  Smotrich also points the finger to desperation and hopelessness, the biting incentives that propel migration.  The Palestinians will feel blessed in their banishment.  “They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

    Impossible to ignore in Smotrich’s steaming bile against the Palestinians is the broader view that no Palestinian state can arise, necessitating urgent, preventative poisoning.  In addition to the eventual depopulation of Gaza, plans to reconstitute the contours of the West Bank, ensuring that Israeli and Palestinian traffic are separated to enable building and construction for settlements as a prelude to annexation, are to be implemented.

    The issue of twisting and mangling humanitarian aid in favour of Israel’s territorial lust has raised some tart commentary.  A statement from the Humanitarian Country Team of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a forum led by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), does not shy away from the realities on the ground.  All supplies, including those vital to survival, have been blocked for nine weeks.  Bakeries and community kitchens have closed, while warehouses are empty.  Hunger, notably among children, is rampant.  Israel’s plan, as presented, “will mean that large parts of Gaza, including the less mobile and most vulnerable people, will continue to go without supplies.”

    The UN Secretary General and the Emergency Relief Coordinator have confirmed that they will not cooperate in the scheme, seeing that it “does not adhere to the global humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, independence and neutrality.”

    The same point has been made by the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, France and Germany.  Despite all being solid allies of Israel, they have warned that violations of international law are taking place.  “Humanitarian aid must never be used as a political tool and a Palestinian territory must not be reduced nor subjected to any demographic change”.

    To date, a promise lingers that the offensive will only commence once US President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar takes place.  But no ongoing savaging of Gaza with some crude effort at occupation will solve the historical vortex that continues to drag the Jewish state risk and oblivion.

    The post Expulsion and Occupation: Israel’s Proposed Gaza Plan appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Expulsion and Occupation: Israel’s Proposed Gaza Plan

    Killing civilians wholesale, starving them to convince those unaffected to change course, and shepherding whole populations like livestock into conditions of further misery would all qualify as heinous crimes in international law.  When it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza, this approach is seen as necessary politics, unalloyed by the restraints of humanitarianism.  When confronted with these harsh realities on the ground, unequivocal denials follow: This is not happening in Gaza; no one is starving. And if that were the case, blame those misguided savages in Hamas.

    As the conflict chugs along in pools of blood and bountiful gore, the confused shape of Israel’s intentions continues in all its glorious nebulousness.  Pretend moderation clouds murderous desire.  There is no sense that those unfortunate Israeli hostages captured by Hamas in its assault on October 7, 2023, matter anymore, being merely decorative for the imminent slaughter.  There is even less sense that Hamas will be cleansed and removed from the strip, however attractive this idea continues to be.

    Such evident limits have not discouraged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, who have decided that more force, that old province of the unimaginative, is the answer.  According to the PM, the cabinet had agreed on a “forceful operation” to eliminate Hamas and salvage what is left of the hostage situation.

    A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, Brigadier-General Effie Defrin, has explained on Israeli radio that the offensive will apparently ensure the return of the hostages.  What follows will be “the collapse of the Hamas regime, its defeat, its submission”.  Anywhere up to two million Palestinian civilians in Gaza will be herded into the ruins of the south.  Humanitarian aid will be arranged by the Israeli forces to be possibly distributed through approved contractors.

    The IDF chief of staff, Lt. General Eyal Zamir, confirmed that the approved plan will involve “the capture of the Strip and holding the territories, moving the Gazan population south for its defence, denying Hamas the ability to distribute humanitarian supplies, and powerful attacks against Hamas.”

    Within the Israeli cabinet, ethnocentric and religious fires burn with bright fanaticism.  The Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich remains a figure who ignores floral subtlety in favour of the blood-stained sledgehammer.  He remains that coherent link between cruel lawmaking and baffling violence.  “Within a few months,” he boasts, “we will be able to declare that we have won.  Gaza will be totally destroyed.”  With pompous certitude, he also claimed that the next six months would see Hamas cease to exist.

    Such opinions, expressed at the “Settlements Conference” organised by the Makor Rishon newspaper in Ofra, a West Bank settlement, give a sense of the flavour.  Palestinians are to be “concentrated” on land located between the Egyptian border and the arbitrarily designated Morag Corridor.  As with any potential abuser keen to violate his vulnerable charges while justifying it, Smotrich tried to impress with the idea that this was a “humanitarian” zone that would be free of “Hamas and terrorism”.

    The program here is clear in its chilling crudeness.  Expulsion, relocation, transfer.  These are the words famously used to move on populations of a sizeable number in history, often at enormous cost.  That this should involve lawmakers of the Jewish state adds a stunning, if perverse, poignancy to this.  They, the moved on in history, the expelled and the condemned wanderers, shall expel others and condemn them in turn.  Smotrich also points the finger at desperation and hopelessness, the biting incentives that propel migration.  The Palestinians will feel blessed in their banishment.  “They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

    Impossible to ignore in Smotrich’s steaming bile against the Palestinians is the broader view that no Palestinian state can arise, necessitating urgent, preventative poisoning.  In addition to the eventual depopulation of Gaza, plans to reconstitute the contours of the West Bank, ensuring that Israeli and Palestinian traffic are separated to enable building and construction for settlements as a prelude to annexation, are to be implemented.

    The issue of twisting and mangling humanitarian aid in favour of Israel’s territorial lust has raised some tart commentary.  A statement from the Humanitarian Country Team of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a forum led by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), does not shy away from the realities on the ground.  All supplies, including those vital to survival, have been blocked for nine weeks.  Bakeries and community kitchens have closed, while warehouses are empty.  Hunger, notably among children, is rampant.  Israel’s plan, as presented, “will mean that large parts of Gaza, including the less mobile and most vulnerable people, will continue to go without supplies.”

    The UN Secretary General and the Emergency Relief Coordinator have confirmed that they will not cooperate in the scheme, as it “does not adhere to the global humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, independence, and neutrality.”

    The foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany have made the same point.  Despite all being solid allies of Israel, they have warned that violations of international law are taking place.  “Humanitarian aid must never be used as a political tool and a Palestinian territory must not be reduced nor subjected to any demographic change”.

    To date, a promise lingers that the offensive will only commence once US President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar takes place.  But no ongoing savaging of Gaza with some crude effort at occupation will solve the historical vortex that continues to drag the Jewish state to risk and oblivion.

    The post Expulsion and Occupation: Israel’s Proposed Gaza Plan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Refashioned History: Liberal Catastrophes and Labor Triumphs

    Map template for the Australian House of Representatives divisions used in the 2025 federal election. Image Source: Erinthecute – CC BY-SA 4.0

    The dust had barely settled on the Australian federal election on May 3 before the hagiographers, mythmakers and revisionists got to work.  If history is seen as a set of agreed upon facts, there was a rapidly growing consensus that Labor’s imposing victory had been the result of a superb campaign, sparkling in its faultlessness.

    This did not quite match pre-election remarks and assessments.  The government of Anthony Albanese had been markedly unconvincing, marked by dithering, short sightedness and a lack of conviction.  It had, rather inexplicably, made the conservative Coalition led by that cruel, simian looking automaton Peter Dutton, look electable.

    Overall, the campaign on the part of both sides of politics was consistently dull and persistently mediocre.  Expansive, broad ideas were eschewed in favour of minutiae and objects of bribery: tax matters, cutting fuel excise, forgiving some student debt, improved Medicare services and child care assistance.  Issues such as the parlous reliance of Australia upon US security interests, not to mention the criminally daft obligations of the AUKUS security pact, or a detailed, coherent policy on addressing environmental and climate challenges, were kept in storage.

    What did become evident in the weeks leading up to the poll was that the Coalition policy palette, which never went beyond blotches of law and order (terrorism, criminal refugees, paedophilia forefront themes), mild bribes for “cost of living relief”; and illusory nuclear energy, failed to appeal.  Its campaign lacked the barely modest bite of Labor, largely because it had been eclipsed by such oxygen drawing events as US President Donald Trump’s tariff regime and the death of Pope Francis I.

    It had also misread the mood of the electorate in pushing policies with a tangy Trump flavour, notably the proposed removal of 41,000 jobs from the public sector and the establishment of something similar to the US Department of Government Efficiency .  (Country Liberal Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price unhelpfully promised to “make Australia great again.”)  The Coalition, Dutton admitted after being accused by Labor of being “DOGE-y Dutton”, had “made a mistake” and “got it wrong”.  The focus would be, instead, on natural attrition.  There were also scrappy sorties on the cultural war front, featuring lashings of undesirable press outlets, such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and The Guardian (“hate media”, according to Dutton), and the presence of “wokeism” in schools.

    Flimsy soothsayers could also be found, many endorsing a Liberal-Nationals victory.  “For the first time in my journalistic career,” beamed Sharri Markson of Sky News Australia on May 1, “I’m going to offer a pre-election editorial, endorsing one side of politics […] A Dutton prime ministership would give our great nation the fresh start we deserve.”  With vigorous drumbeating, Markson could only see “our values under threat – from enemies and abroad” – and retaining Anthony Albanese as prime minister was dangerous.  With the analytical skill of an unread, hungover undergraduate, the political astrologist found the PM a victim of “far-left ideology”, something “out of step with mainstream Australia.”

    With Labor’s victory assured, the fiscal conservatives at the Australian Financial Review proved sniffy, noting that Labor’s record on the economy did not warrant another term “but the Coalition has not made the case to change the government.”  More explicit, with hectoring relish, was Australia’s premier shock jock of the press stable, Andrew Bolt.  “No, the voters aren’t always right,” he wrote scoldingly in the News Corp yellow press.  “This time they were wrong, and this gutless and incoherent Coalition should be ashamed.”  Australians were set to “get more” of policies that had “left this country poorer, weaker, more divided and deeper in debt”.

    One is reminded of Henry Kissinger’s rebuke of Chilean democracy at the election of the socialist leader Salvador Allende.  As one of US foreign policy’s chief malefactors, he refused to accept the proposition that a country could “go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”  Democracy was only worthy if directed by the appropriate interests.

    Senator Price, evidently rattled by the result, returned to the Trumpian well, hoping to draw attention to claims of irregular voting in rural polling booths.  The Australian Electoral Commission, she told the ABC, “has been alerted to this over and over and does little with it.  I urge the ABC, as a taxpayer funded organisation, to go out and see what is occurring.”

    There are other evident patterns that emerged in the vote.  The old division between urban, metropolitan areas and rural and country communities has been coloured with sharpness.  The Liberal Party, which must win seats in urban Australia, finds itself marginalised before its allies, the Nationals, who have retained their complement in regional and country areas.  Party voices and strategists lament that not more was done after the 2022 defeat, with the Liberals refusing to address, among other things, the failure to appeal to female voters or the youth vote.

    Disappointing in such stonking majorities is the assumption that minority parties and independents can be ignored, if not with contempt, then with condescending politeness.  Labor may well be soaring with the greatest return of seats in its history, but attitudes of the electorate can harden quickly.  The move away from the major parties, as a trend, continues, and there is no room for complacency in a new Albanese government.

    The post Refashioned History: Liberal Catastrophes and Labor Triumphs appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Refashioned History: Liberal Catastrophes and Labor Triumphs

    Footnote content. The dust had barely settled on the Australian federal election on May 3 before the hagiographers, mythmakers and revisionists got to work. If history is seen as a set of agreed upon facts, there was a rapidly growing consensus that Labor’s imposing victory had been the result of a superb campaign, sparkling in its faultlessness.

    This did not quite match pre-election remarks and assessments. The government of Anthony Albanese had been markedly unconvincing, marked by dithering, short sightedness and a lack of conviction. It had, rather inexplicably, made the conservative Coalition led by that cruel, simian looking automaton Peter Dutton, look electable.

    Overall, the campaign on the part of both sides of politics was consistently dull and persistently mediocre. Expansive, broad ideas were eschewed in favour of minutiae and objects of bribery: tax matters, cutting fuel excise, forgiving some student debt, improved Medicare services and child care assistance. Issues such as the parlous reliance of Australia upon US security interests, not to mention the criminally daft obligations of the AUKUS security pact, or a detailed, coherent policy on addressing environmental and climate challenges, were kept in storage.

    What did become evident in the weeks leading up to the poll was that the Coalition policy palette, which never went beyond blotches of law and order (terrorism, criminal refugees, paedophilia forefront themes), mild bribes for “cost of living relief”; and illusory nuclear energy, failed to appeal. Its campaign lacked the barely modest bite of Labor, largely because it had been eclipsed by such oxygen drawing events as US President Donald Trump’s tariff regime and the death of Pope Francis I.

    It had also misread the mood of the electorate in pushing policies with a tangy Trump flavour, notably the proposed removal of 41,000 jobs from the public sector and the establishment of something similar to the US Department of Government Efficiency . (Country Liberal Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price unhelpfully promised to “make Australia great again.”) The Coalition, Dutton admitted after being accused by Labor of being “DOGE-y Dutton”, had “made a mistake” and “got it wrong”. The focus would be, instead, on natural attrition. There were also scrappy sorties on the cultural war front, featuring lashings of undesirable press outlets, such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and The Guardian (“hate media”, according to Dutton), and the presence of “wokeism” in schools.

    Flimsy soothsayers could also be found, many endorsing a Liberal-Nationals victory. “For the first time in my journalistic career,” beamed Sharri Markson of Sky News Australia on May 1, “I’m going to offer a pre-election editorial, endorsing one side of politics […] A Dutton prime ministership would give our great nation the fresh start we deserve.” With vigorous drumbeating, Markson could only see “our values under threat – from enemies and abroad” – and retaining Anthony Albanese as prime minister was dangerous. With the analytical skill of an unread, hungover undergraduate, the political astrologist found the PM a victim of “far-left ideology”, something “out of step with mainstream Australia.”

    With Labor’s victory assured, the fiscal conservatives at the Australian Financial Review proved sniffy, noting that Labor’s record on the economy did not warrant another term “but the Coalition has not made the case to change the government.” More explicit, with hectoring relish, was Australia’s premier shock jock of the press stable, Andrew Bolt. “No, the voters aren’t always right,” he wrote scoldingly in the News Corp yellow press. “This time they were wrong, and this gutless and incoherent Coalition should be ashamed.” Australians were set to “get more” of policies that had “left this country poorer, weaker, more divided and deeper in debt”.

    One is reminded of Henry Kissinger’s rebuke of Chilean democracy at the election of the socialist leader Salvador Allende. As one of US foreign policy’s chief malefactors, he refused to accept the proposition that a country could “go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” Democracy was only worthy if directed by the appropriate interests.

    Senator Price, evidently rattled by the result, returned to the Trumpian well, hoping to draw attention to claims of irregular voting in rural polling booths. The Australian Electoral Commission, she told the ABC, “has been alerted to this over and over and does little with it. I urge the ABC, as a taxpayer funded organisation, to go out and see what is occurring.”

    There are other evident patterns that emerged in the vote. The old division between urban, metropolitan areas and rural and country communities has been coloured with sharpness. The Liberal Party, which must win seats in urban Australia, finds itself marginalised before its allies, the Nationals, who have retained their complement in regional and country areas. Party voices and strategists lament that not more was done after the 2022 defeat, with the Liberals refusing to address, among other things, the failure to appeal to female voters or the youth vote.

    Disappointing in such stonking majorities is the assumption that minority parties and independents can be ignored, if not with contempt, then with condescending politeness. Labor may well be soaring with the greatest return of seats in its history, but attitudes of the electorate can harden quickly. The move away from the major parties, as a trend, continues, and there is no room for complacency in a new Albanese government.

    The post Refashioned History: Liberal Catastrophes and Labor Triumphs first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Historic election result sees Labor triumph over Liberal catastrophes

    Historic election result sees Labor triumph over Liberal catastrophes Despite a less-than-stellar performance, Labor won the 2025 Election in a landslide due to the Coalition's immense failure to appeal to voters. read now…

    This post was originally published on Independent Australia.

  • The US-Ukraine Minerals Deal

    The agreement between Washington and Kyiv to create an investment fund to search for rare earth minerals has been seen as something of a turn by the Trump administration.  From hectoring and mocking the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before the cameras on his visit to the US capital two months ago, President Donald Trump had apparently softened.  It was easy to forget that the minerals deal was already on the negotiating table and would have been reached but for Zelensky’s fateful and ill-tempered ambush.  Dreams of accessing Ukrainian reserves of such elements as graphite, titanium and lithium were never going to dissipate.

    Details remain somewhat sketchy, but the agreement supposedly sets out a sharing of revenues in a manner satisfactory to the parties while floating, if only tentatively, the prospect of renewed military assistance.  That assistance, however, would count as US investment in the fund.  According to the White House, the US Treasury Department and US International Development Finance Corporation will work with Kyiv “to finalize governance and advance this important partnership”, one that ensures the US “an economic stake in securing a free, peaceful, and sovereign future for Ukraine.”

    In its current form, the agreement supposedly leaves it to Ukraine to determine what to extract in terms of the minerals and where this extraction is to take place.  A statement from the US Treasury Department also declared that, “No state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.”

    Ukraine’s Minister of Economy, Yulia Svyrydenko, stated that the subsoil remained within the domain of Kyiv’s ownership, while the fund would be “structured” on an equal basis “jointly managed by Ukraine and the United States” and financed by “new licenses in the field of critical materials, oil and gas – generated after the Fund is created”.  Neither party would “hold a dominant vote – a reflection of equal partnership between our two nations.”

    The minister also revealed that privatisation processes and managing state-owned companies would not be altered by the arrangements.  “Companies such as Ukrnafta and Energoatom will stay in state ownership.”  There would also be no question of debt obligations owed by Kyiv to Washington.

    That this remains a “joint” venture is always bound to raise some suspicions, and nothing can conceal the predatory nature of an arrangement that permits US corporations and firms access to the critical resources of another country.  For his part, Trump fantasised in a phone call to a town hall on the NewsNation network that the latest venture would yield “much more in theory than the $350 billion” worth of aid he insists the Biden administration furnished Kyiv with.

    Svyrydenko chose to see the Reconstruction Investment Fund as one that would “attract global investment into our country” while still maintaining Ukrainian autonomy.  Representative Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the House of Foreign Affairs Committee, thought otherwise, calling it “Donald Trump’s extortion of Ukraine deal”.  Instead of focusing on the large, rather belligerent fly in the ointment – Russian President Vladimir Putin – the US president had “demonstrated nothing but weakness” towards Moscow.

    The war mongering wing of the Democrats were also in full throated voice.  To make such arrangements in the absence of assured military support to Kyiv made the measure vacuous.  “Right now,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said on MSNBC television, “all indications are that Donald Trump’s policy is to hand Ukraine to Vladimir Putin, and in that case, this agreement isn’t worth the paper that it’s written on.”

    On a certain level, Murphy has a point.  Trump’s firmness in holding to the bargain is often capricious.  In September 2017, he reached an agreement with the then Afghan president Ashraf Ghani to permit US companies to develop Afghanistan’s rare earth minerals.  Having spent 16 years in Afghanistan up to that point, ways of recouping some of the costs of Washington’s involvement were being considered.  It was agreed, went a White House statement sounding all too familiar, “that such initiatives would help American companies develop minerals critical to national security while growing Afghanistan’s economy and creating new jobs in both countries, therefore defraying some of the costs of United States assistance as Afghans become more reliant.”

    Ghani’s precarious puppet regime was ultimately sidelined in favour of direct negotiations with the Taliban that eventually culminated in their return to power, leaving the way open for US withdrawal and a termination of any grand plans for mineral extraction.

    A coterie of foreign policy analysts abounded with glowing statements at this supposedly impressive feat of Ukrainian diplomacy.  Shelby Magid, deputy director of the Atlantic Council think tank’s Eurasia Centre, thought it put Kyiv “in their strongest position yet with Washington since Trump took office”.  Ukraine had withstood “tremendous pressure” to accept poorer proposals, showing “that it is not just a junior partner that has to roll over and accept a bad deal”.

    Time and logistics remain significant obstacles to the realisation of the agreement.  As Ukraine’s former minister of economic development and current head of Kyiv school of economics Tymofiy Mylovanov told the BBC, “These resources aren’t in a port or warehouse; they must be developed.”  Svyrydenko had to also ruefully concede that vast resources of mineral deposits existed in territory occupied by Russian forces.  There are also issues with unexploded mines.  Any challenge to the global rare earth elements (REEs) market, currently dominated by China (60% share of production of raw materials; 85% share of global processing output; and 90% manufacturing share of rare earth magnets), will be long in coming.

    The post The US-Ukraine Minerals Deal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The ICJ, Israel and the Gaza Blockade

    The murder and starvation of populations in real time, subject to rolling coverage and commentary, is not usually the done thing.  These are the sorts of activities kept quiet and secluded in their vicious execution.  In the Gaza Strip, these actions are taking place with a confident, almost brazen assuredness.

    Israel has the means, the weapons and the sheer gumption to do so, and Palestinians in Gaza find themselves with few options for survival.  The strategic objectives of the Jewish state, involving, for instance, the elimination of Hamas, have been shown to be nonsensically irrelevant, given that they are unattainable.  Failed policies of de facto annexation and occupation are re-entering the national security argot.

    In yet another round of proceedings, this time initiated by a UN General Assembly resolution, the International Court of Justice is hearing from an array of nations and bodies (40 states and four international organisations) regarding Israel’s complete blockade of Gaza since March 2.  Also featuring prominently are Israel’s efforts to attack the United Nations itself, notably UNRWA, the relief agency charged with aiding Palestinians.

    As counsel for the Palestinians, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh outlined the central grievances.  The restrictions on “the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, [Israel’s] attacks on the United Nations and on UN officials, property and premises, its deliberate obstruction of the organisation’s work and its attempt to destroy an entire UN subsidiary organ” lacked precedent “in the history of the organisation”.  Being not only “antithetical to a peace-loving state”, such actions were “a fundamental repudiation by Israel of its charter obligations owed both to the organisation and to all UN members and of the international rule of law”.

    Israel had further closed all relevant crossings into the Strip and seemingly planned “to annex 75 square kilometres of Rafah, one-fifth of Gaza, to [its] so-called buffer zone, permanently.  This, together with Israel’s continuing maritime blockade, cuts Gaza and its people off from direct aid and assistance and from the rest of the world”.

    The submission by Ní Ghrálaigh went on to document the plight of Palestinian children, 15,600 of whom had perished, with tens of thousands more injured, missing or traumatised.  Gaza had become “home to the largest cohort of child amputees in the world, the largest orphan crisis in modern history, and a whole generation in danger of suffering from stunting, causing irreparable physical and cognitive impairments”.

    South Africa, which already has an application before the Court accusing Israel of violating the UN Genocide Convention, pointed to the international prohibition against “starvation as a method of warfare, including under siege or blockade”. Its representative Jaymion Hendricks insisted that Israel had “deployed the full range of techniques of hunger and starvation” against “the protected Palestinian population, which it holds under unlawful occupation.”  The decision to expel UNRWA and relevant UN agencies should be reversed, and access to food, medicine and humanitarian aid resumed.

    In a chilling submission to the Court, Zane Dangor, director general of South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation, detected a scheme in the cruelty.  “The humanitarian aid system is facing total collapse.  This collapse is by design.”

    Israel’s response, one increasingly rabid to the obligations of humanitarian and international law, was best stated by its Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa’ar.  In announcing that Israel would not participate in oral proceedings derided as a “circus”, he restated the long held position that UNRWA was “an organisation infiltrated beyond repair by terrorism.”  Courts were once again being abused “to try and force Israel to cooperate with an organisation that is infested with Hamas terrorists, and it won’t happen”.

    Then came an agitated flurry of accusations shamelessly evoking the message from Émile Zola’s “J’Accuse” note of 1898, penned during the convulsions of the Dreyfus Affair: “I accuse UNRWA. I accuse the UN.  I accuse the Secretary General, I accuse all those that weaponize international law and its institutions in order to deprive the most attacked country in the world, Israel, of its most basic right to defend itself.”

    The continuing blackening of UNRWA was also assured by Amir Weissbrod of Israel’s foreign ministry, who reiteratedthe claims that the organisation had employed 1,400 Palestinians with militant links.  Furthermore, some had taken part in Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel.  That such a small number had participated was itself striking and should have spared the organisation the savaging it received.  But Israel has longed for the expulsion of an entity that is an accusing reminder of an ongoing, profane policy of oppression and dispossession.

    In her moving address to the Court, Ní Ghrálaigh urged the justices to direct Israel to allow aid to enter Gaza and re-engage the offices of UNRWA.  Doing so might permit the re-mooring of international law, a ship increasingly put off course by the savage war in Gaza.  The cold, somewhat fanatical reaction to these proceedings in The Hague by Israel’s officials suggest that anchoring international obligations, notably concerning Palestinian civilians, is off the list.

    The post The ICJ, Israel and the Gaza Blockade appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The ICJ, Israel and the Gaza blockade

    The Jewish state’s strategic objectives, which involve the elimination of Hamas, have been shown to be unattainable. Binoy Kampmark reports.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • The ICJ, Israel, and the Gaza Blockade

    The murder and starvation of populations in real time, subject to rolling coverage and commentary, is not usually the done thing.  These are the sorts of activities kept quiet and secluded in their vicious execution.  In the Gaza Strip, these actions are taking place with a confident, almost brazen assuredness.

    Israel has the means, the weapons and the sheer gumption to do so, and Palestinians in Gaza find themselves with few options for survival.  The strategic objectives of the Jewish state, involving, for instance, the elimination of Hamas, have been shown to be nonsensically irrelevant, given that they are unattainable.  Failed policies of de facto annexation and occupation are re-entering the national security argot.

    In yet another round of proceedings, this time initiated by a UN General Assembly resolution, the International Court of Justice is hearing from an array of nations and bodies (40 states and four international organisations) regarding Israel’s complete blockade of Gaza since March 2.  Also featuring prominently are Israel’s efforts to attack the United Nations itself, notably UNRWA, the relief agency charged with aiding Palestinians.

    As counsel for the Palestinians, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh outlined the central grievances.  The restrictions on “the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, [Israel’s] attacks on the United Nations and on UN officials, property and premises, its deliberate obstruction of the organisation’s work and its attempt to destroy an entire UN subsidiary organ” lacked precedent “in the history of the organisation”.  Being not only “antithetical to a peace-loving state”, such actions were “a fundamental repudiation by Israel of its charter obligations owed both to the organisation and to all UN members and of the international rule of law”.

    Israel had further closed all relevant crossings into the Strip and seemingly planned “to annex 75 square kilometres of Rafah, one-fifth of Gaza, to [its] so-called buffer zone, permanently.  This, together with Israel’s continuing maritime blockade, cuts Gaza and its people off from direct aid and assistance and from the rest of the world”.

    The submission by Ní Ghrálaigh went on to document the plight of Palestinian children, 15,600 of whom had perished, with tens of thousands more injured, missing or traumatised.  Gaza had become “home to the largest cohort of child amputees in the world, the largest orphan crisis in modern history, and a whole generation in danger of suffering from stunting, causing irreparable physical and cognitive impairments”.

    South Africa, which already has an application before the Court accusing Israel of violating the UN Genocide Convention, pointed to the international prohibition against “starvation as a method of warfare, including under siege or blockade”. Its representative Jaymion Hendricks insisted that Israel had “deployed the full range of techniques of hunger and starvation” against “the protected Palestinian population, which it holds under unlawful occupation.”  The decision to expel UNRWA and relevant UN agencies should be reversed, and access to food, medicine and humanitarian aid resumed.

    In a chilling submission to the Court, Zane Dangor, director general of South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation, detected a scheme in the cruelty.  “The humanitarian aid system is facing total collapse.  This collapse is by design.”

    Israel’s response, one increasingly rabid to the obligations of humanitarian and international law, was best stated by its Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa’ar.  In announcing that Israel would not participate in oral proceedings derided as a “circus”, he restated the long held position that UNRWA was “an organisation infiltrated beyond repair by terrorism.”  Courts were once again being abused “to try and force Israel to cooperate with an organisation that is infested with Hamas terrorists, and it won’t happen”.

    Then came an agitated flurry of accusations shamelessly evoking the message from Émile Zola’s “J’Accuse” note of 1898, penned during the convulsions of the Dreyfus Affair: “I accuse UNRWA. I accuse the UN.  I accuse the Secretary General, I accuse all those that weaponize international law and its institutions in order to deprive the most attacked country in the world, Israel, of its most basic right to defend itself.”

    The continuing blackening of UNRWA was also assured by Amir Weissbrod of Israel’s foreign ministry, who reiterated the claims that the organisation had employed 1,400 Palestinians with militant links.  Furthermore, some had taken part in Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel.  That such a small number had participated was itself striking and should have spared the organisation the savaging it received.  But Israel has longed for the expulsion of an entity that is an accusing reminder of an ongoing, profane policy of oppression and dispossession.

    In her moving address to the Court, Ní Ghrálaigh urged the justices to direct Israel to allow aid to enter Gaza and re-engage the offices of UNRWA.  Doing so might permit the re-mooring of international law, a ship increasingly put off course by the savage war in Gaza.  The cold, somewhat fanatical reaction to these proceedings in The Hague by Israel’s officials suggest that anchoring international obligations, notably concerning Palestinian civilians, is off the list.

    The post The ICJ, Israel, and the Gaza Blockade first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Pope Francis haunted by 'dirty' past

    Pope Francis haunted by 'dirty' past Despite his reputation as a progressive pope and a hero of the oppressed, Pope Francis' involvement in Argentina's Dirty War haunted him. read now…

    This post was originally published on Independent Australia.

  • Yale, Ben-Gvir and Banning Palestinian Groups

    Photograph Source: שי קנדלר – CC BY-SA 4.0

    Universities are in a bind.  As institutions of learning and teaching, knowledge learnt and taught should, or at the very least could, be put into practice.  How unfortunate for rich ideas to linger in cold storage or exist as the mummified status of esoterica.  But universities in the United States have taken fright at pro-Palestinian protests since October 7, 2023, becoming battlegrounds for the propaganda emissaries of Israeli public relations and the pro-evangelical, Armageddon lobby that sees the end times taking place in the Holy Land.  Higher learning institutions are spooked by notions of Israeli brutality, and they are taking measures.

    These measures have tended to be heavy handed, taking issue with students and academic staff.  The policy has reached another level in efforts by amphibian university managers to ban various protest groups who are seen as creating an environment of intimidation for other members of the university tribe.  That these protesters merely wish to draw attention to the massacre of Palestinian civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, and the fact that the death toll, notably in the Gaza Strip, now towers at over 50,000, is a matter of inconvenient paperwork.

    Even worse, the same institutions are willing to tolerate individuals who have celebrated their own unalloyed bigotry, lauded their own racial and religious ideology, and deemed various races worthy of extinguishment or expulsion.  Such a man is Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who found himself permitted to visit Yale University at the behest of the Jewish society Shabtai, a body founded by Democratic senator and Yale alumnus Cory Booker, along with Rabbi Shmully Hecht.

    Shabtai is acknowledged as having no official affiliation with Yale, though it is stacked with Yale students and faculty members who participate at its weekly dinners. Its beating heart was Hecht, who arrived in New Haven after finishing rabbinical school in Australia in 1996.

    The members of Shabtai were hardly unanimous in approving Ben-Gvir’s invitation.  David Vincent Kimel, former coach of the Yale debate team, was one of two to send an email to a Shabtai listserv to express brooding disgruntlement.  “Shabtai was founded as a space for fearless, pluralistic Jewish discourse,” the email remarks.  “But this event jeopardizes Shabtai’s reputation and every future.”  In views expressed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Kimel elaborated: “I’m deeply concerned that we’re increasingly treating extreme rhetoric as just another viewpoint, rather than recognizing it as a distortion of constructive discourse.”  The headstone for constructive discourse was chiselled sometime ago, though Kimel’s hopes are charming.

    As a convinced, pro-settler fanatic, Ben-Gvir is a fabled-Torah basher who sees Palestinians as needless encumbrances on Israel’s righteous quest to acquire Gaza and the West Bank.  Far from being alone, Ben-Gvir is also the member of a government that has endorsed starvation and the deprivation of necessities as laudable tools of conflict, to add to an adventurous interpretation of the laws of war that tolerates the destruction of health and civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

    After a dinner at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort (the bad will be fed), Ben-Gvir was flushed with confidence.  He wrote on social media of how various lawmakers had “expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.”  By any other standard, this was an admission to encouraging the commission of a war crime.

    In July last year, Israel’s State Prosecutor Amit Aisman reportedly sought permission from Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to open a criminal investigation into Ben-Gvir for alleged incitement of violence against residents of Gaza.  The move was said to be a gesture to placate the International Court of Justice as it considers the genocide case filed by South Africa against Israel over the war in Gaza.  In a string of increasingly agitated interim orders, the ICJ has asked that Israel comply, as signatory member, with the obligations imposed by the United Nations Genocide Convention.  These include prohibitions against incitement to genocide.

    Incitement has become something of a nervous tic for the minister.  In November 2023, for instance, Ben-Gvir remarked that “When we say Hamas should be destroyed, it also means those who celebrate, those who support, and those who hand out candy – they’re all terrorists, and they should also be destroyed.”  Seeing himself as essentially immune to any form of prosecution, Ben-Gvir gave the State Prosecutor a sound verbal thrashing, claiming that it was “trying to make an Israeli minister stand trial for ‘incitement’ against citizens of an enemy state that danced on the blood our soldiers on the streets of Gaza on October 7.”

    In a statement responding to protests against Ben-Gvir’s visit, Yale stated that the student encampments set up on April 22 on Beinecke Plaza were in violation of the university’s policies on the use of outdoor spaces.  Students already on notice for previous protests along similar lines would face “immediate disciplinary action”.  With dulling predictability, the university revealed that it was looking into “concerns … about disturbing anti-Semitic conduct at the gathering”.

    University officialdom had also focused on the activities of Yalies4Palestine, a student organisation whose club status was revoked for “sending calls over social media for others to join the event”.  The statement makes the claim that the group “flagrantly violated the rules to which the Yale College Dean’s Office holds all registered student organizations”. Consequently, the body cannot receive funding from Yale sources, use the university name, participate in relevant student activities, or book spaces on the campus.

    This profaning of protest in a university setting is a convenient trick, using the popular weasel words of “offensive” and “unsafe” while deploying, more generically, the pitiful policy inventory that makes freedom of expression an impossibility.  Mobilised accordingly, they can eliminate any debate, any discussion and any idea from the campus for merely being stingingly contrarian or causing twinges of intellectual discomfort.  The moment the brain aches in debate, the offended howl and the administrators suppress.  Play nice, dear university staff and students, or don’t play at all.  Besides, Ben-Gvir, by Yale standards, is a half-decent fellow.

    The post Yale, Ben-Gvir and Banning Palestinian Groups appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Yale, Ben-Gvir, and Banning Palestinian Groups

    Universities are in a bind. As institutions of learning and teaching, knowledge learnt and taught should, or at the very least could, be put into practice. How unfortunate for rich ideas to linger in cold storage or exist as the mummified status of esoterica. But universities in the United States have taken fright at pro-Palestinian protests since October 7, 2023, becoming battlegrounds for the propaganda emissaries of Israeli public relations and the pro-evangelical, Armageddon lobby that sees the end times taking place in the Holy Land. Higher learning institutions are spooked by notions of Israeli brutality, and they are taking measures.

    These measures have tended to be heavy handed, taking issue with students and academic staff. The policy has reached another level in efforts by amphibian university managers to ban various protest groups who are seen as creating an environment of intimidation for other members of the university tribe. That these protesters merely wish to draw attention to the massacre of Palestinian civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, and the fact that the death toll, notably in the Gaza Strip, now towers at over 50,000, is a matter of inconvenient paperwork.

    Even worse, the same institutions are willing to tolerate individuals who have celebrated their own unalloyed bigotry, lauded their own racial and religious ideology, and deemed various races worthy of extinguishment or expulsion. Such a man is Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who found himself permitted to visit Yale University at the behest of the Jewish society Shabtai, a body founded by Democratic senator and Yale alumnus Cory Booker, along with Rabbi Shmully Hecht.

    Shabtai is acknowledged as having no official affiliation with Yale, though it is stacked with Yale students and faculty members who participate at its weekly dinners. Its beating heart was Hecht, who arrived in New Haven after finishing rabbinical school in Australia in 1996.

    The members of Shabtai were hardly unanimous in approving Ben-Gvir’s invitation. David Vincent Kimel, former coach of the Yale debate team, was one of two to send an email to a Shabtai listserv to express brooding disgruntlement. “Shabtai was founded as a space for fearless, pluralistic Jewish discourse,” the email remarks. “But this event jeopardizes Shabtai’s reputation and every future.” In views expressed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Kimel elaborated: “I’m deeply concerned that we’re increasingly treating extreme rhetoric as just another viewpoint, rather than recognizing it as a distortion of constructive discourse.” The headstone for constructive discourse was chiselled sometime ago, though Kimel’s hopes are charming.

    As a convinced, pro-settler fanatic, Ben-Gvir is a fabled-Torah basher who sees Palestinians as needless encumbrances on Israel’s righteous quest to acquire Gaza and the West Bank. Far from being alone, Ben-Gvir is also the member of a government that has endorsed starvation and the deprivation of necessities as laudable tools of conflict, to add to an adventurous interpretation of the laws of war that tolerates the destruction of health and civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

    After a dinner at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort (the bad will be fed), Ben-Gvir was flushed with confidence. He wrote on social media of how various lawmakers had “expressed support for my very clear position on how to act in Gaza and that the food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure to bring our hostages home safely.” By any other standard, this was an admission to encouraging the commission of a war crime.

    In July last year, Israel’s State Prosecutor Amit Aisman reportedly sought permission from Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara to open a criminal investigation into Ben-Gvir for alleged incitement of violence against residents of Gaza. The move was said to be a gesture to placate the International Court of Justice as it considers the genocide case filed by South Africa against Israel over the war in Gaza. In a string of increasingly agitated interim orders, the ICJ has asked that Israel comply, as signatory member, with the obligations imposed by the United Nations Genocide Convention. These include prohibitions against incitement to genocide.

    Incitement has become something of a nervous tic for the minister. In November 2023, for instance, Ben-Gvir remarked that “When we say Hamas should be destroyed, it also means those who celebrate, those who support, and those who hand out candy – they’re all terrorists, and they should also be destroyed.” Seeing himself as essentially immune to any form of prosecution, Ben-Gvir gave the State Prosecutor a sound verbal thrashing, claiming that it was “trying to make an Israeli minister stand trial for ‘incitement’ against citizens of an enemy state that danced on the blood our soldiers on the streets of Gaza on October 7.”

    In a statement responding to protests against Ben-Gvir’s visit, Yale stated that the student encampments set up on April 22 on Beinecke Plaza were in violation of the university’s policies on the use of outdoor spaces. Students already on notice for previous protests along similar lines would face “immediate disciplinary action”. With dulling predictability, the university revealed that it was looking into “concerns … about disturbing anti-Semitic conduct at the gathering”.

    University officialdom had also focused on the activities of Yalies4Palestine, a student organisation whose club status was revoked for “sending calls over social media for others to join the event”. The statement makes the claim that the group “flagrantly violated the rules to which the Yale College Dean’s Office holds all registered student organizations”. Consequently, the body cannot receive funding from Yale sources, use the university name, participate in relevant student activities, or book spaces on the campus.

    This profaning of protest in a university setting is a convenient trick, using the popular weasel words of “offensive” and “unsafe” while deploying, more generically, the pitiful policy inventory that makes freedom of expression an impossibility. Mobilised accordingly, they can eliminate any debate, any discussion and any idea from the campus for merely being stingingly contrarian or causing twinges of intellectual discomfort. The moment the brain aches in debate, the offended howl and the administrators suppress. Play nice, dear university staff and students, or don’t play at all. Besides, Ben-Gvir, by Yale standards, is a half-decent fellow.

    The post Yale, Ben-Gvir, and Banning Palestinian Groups first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Fallibility, Dirty Wars, and Pope Francis I

    The very idea of infallibility sets one up for the mighty fall. But the Pope, temporal head of all Catholics, is one such character, the papacy one such institution, arrogantly paraded before religion, faith and principle, as an individual and office hovering between humankind and God. Unfortunately for the papal record, infallibility in any spiritual sense is no guard against spotty records and stains. It certainly does not erase what came before, though good efforts are often made to reinvent it.

    Pope Francis I, eulogised as the pontiff of the periphery and the oppressed, was not averse in his pre-papal iteration to courting the powerful and the authoritarian when a US-backed military dictatorship seized power in his native Argentina in 1976. That dictatorship, responsible for the forced disappearance of 30,000 people, came to be known as the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (National Reorganization Process). In 1978, on a visit to Buenos Aires to attend the football World Cup as dictator Jorge Videla’s guest, former US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was filled with praise for the murderous methods of the Proceso in its efforts to combat “terrorism”.

    On their seizure of power, the junta were also keen to grease palms and cultivate ties with the Catholic Church. Archbishop Adolfo Tortolo obligated, urging Argentinians “to cooperate in a positive way with the new government.” Argentina’s bishops also issued a statement declaring that the security services could hardly act “with the chemical purity” expected of them in times of peace. Some freedom had to be shorn. Church figures who did not play along, such as Enrique Angelelli, the bishop of the Andean diocese of La Rioja, were murdered. In a 2012 interview, Videla expressed satisfaction at Church-state relations during his rule. “My relationship with the church was excellent. It was very cordial, frank and open.”

    To say, for one thing, that Francis had that progressive rainbow in soul and practice is to ignore the same figure who encouraged Jesuit priests under his charge to focus on religion rather than matters of social deprivation. As Jose Mario Bergoglio, Provincial of the Jesuits, he removed teachers of the more progressive stripe and replaced them with steelier, austere types. He shunned the liberation theologians, clinging on to the 1969 Declaration of San Miguel that gave the cold shoulder to Marxism in favour of a rather vague theology of the masses. Paul Vallely writes that the late Francis “seemed unaware of any of the teachings of Vatican II. It was all St. Thomas Aquinas and the old Church Fathers. We didn’t study a single book by Gutiérrez, Boff or Paulo Freire”. (Those three figures were very much front and centre of liberation theology.)

    The disavowal of priestly work in the slums of Buenos Aires as Provincial of the Jesuits had its consequences. Orlando Yorio, a Jesuit priest doing just such work, was conveyed in 1976 to the dark offices of the military junta by then Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s seeming refusal to back, endorse or acknowledge the labours that the military regime despised. The same fate befell Franz Jalics. In the first trial of the junta leadership in 1985, Yorio was convinced “that he himself [Bergoglio] gave over the list with our names to the Navy.” Jalics, however, stated in March 2013 that Bergoglio had never “denounced” either himself or Yorio. Both priests had been kidnapped for connections to a catechist who “later joined the guerillas.”

    At the time of his election in 2013, the Vatican made a point of stating that, in the words of spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi, there had “never been any credible, concrete accusation against him.”

    In other instances during that most dirty of wars, Fr Bergoglio does not seem to acquit himself well. Estela de la Cuadra, who shared little in the way of enthusiasm for Cardinal Bergoglio’s elevation to pontiff, suggests that he knew far more about what was taking place in the 1970s than what he subsequently testified to. In a trial in 2010, the then Cardinal was asked to attend a trial on the infamous “stolen babies” cases, a spectacularly unsavoury matter involving the handing over of infants from murdered mothers to military families. Unconvincingly, he claimed to only know of the practice once Argentina moved into the calmer, less murderous waters of democracy after 1983.

    De la Cuadra is all rebuttal, claiming that her father had been advised by the then Fr Bergoglio to meet a bishop who might advise him on the fate of the disappearance of his pregnant daughter Elena. The bishop was, at best, callously helpful, informing him that “his granddaughter was ‘now with a good family’.”

    The ventures to investigate and tease out Bergoglio’s legacy during the Proceso remain a matter of record. Investigations by scribblers in 1986 and 2003, carried out respectively by Emilio Mignone and Horacio Verbitsky, attest to that. (Verbitsky’s account is further spiced by llegations that he was himself on the junta’s payroll, working as ghost writer for Brigadier Omar Domingo Rubens Graffigna.)

    Bergoglio’s disputed dance with the junta continues that extensive tradition perfected by the Catholic Church. A power, however ruthless in the secular realm, should still be accommodated by the spiritual leaders of the church if the adherents of said power are sympathetic followers of Rome. “Never in the years he headed the Catholic Church in Argentina did he acknowledge its complicity in the dictatorship, much less ask for forgiveness,” blazed Gabriel Pasquini, editor of El Puercoespín, in 2015.

    The argument for the defence has tended to be framed along the lines of internal church politics, misunderstanding, and indignant claims of slander. There were Jesuits who took issue with him, for instance, for selling the Universidad del Salvador to the Iron Guard, a right wing order characterised by an unflappable ascetic. And when Bergoglio met with such bloodthirsty thugs as Videla and Emilio Massera, this was only to intercede on behalf of the detained clerics and others to seek their release. “He was very critical of the dictatorship,” asserts former Argentine judge and acquaintance, Alicia Oliveira. He really meant well. It is precisely in that meaning that questions have been and should be asked. To what extent should the powerful be pleased by the supposedly spiritual?

    The post Fallibility, Dirty Wars, and Pope Francis I first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Euphemistic Practices:  The IDF, Killing Aid Workers and Self-Investigation

    Photograph Source: https://www.flickr.com/people/45644610@N03 – CC BY-SA 3.0

    Few armed forces have managed to make murder and executions the stuff of procedural aberration rather than intentional practice.   Killing civilians and unarmed personnel is the stuff of misreading and misunderstandings, albeit arrived at with good conscience.  And so it was that the killing of 15 aid and emergency workers in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces on March 23 could be put down to “professional failures, breaches or orders and a failure to fully report the incident”, a finding identified by an investigation conducted by the same organisation into its own personnel.

    In marking its own report card, and giving it a credible pass, the IDF found, using the dulling terms that make murder an afterthought, that the deaths were of minor if regretful consequence.  While not explicitly libelling the dead workers, the official press release teeters on excuse and general exculpation, making it clear that, on March 23, “the troops were conducting a vital mission aimed at targeting terrorists.”  The killings took place “in a hostile and dangerous combat zone, under a widespread threat to the operating troops.”  The armed forces were presented with the dilemma of protecting medical and facilities (something the IDF has conspicuously failed to do), with the use by Hamas “of such infrastructure for terrorism, including ambulances to transport terrorists and weapons.”

    The thick insinuation that the aid workers were more or less asking for it by being there in the first place emerges with unadorned rawness.  And to suggest claims of execution or the bounding of any of the murdered before or after shooting were “blood libels and false accusations against IDF soldiers.”

    The IDF press release leaves an impression of forced thoroughness.  There had been “extensive data collection from operational systems, the forces on the ground, and along the entire chain of command.”  This had also included “relevant operational orders and directives, footage from various surveillance systems active during the event, radio recordings.”  There was even a reconstruction of the events, the personnel involved questioned.

    The inquiry identified three shooting incidents: the first involving troops firing on an alleged Hamas vehicle; the second, involving firing on a fire truck and ambulances close to the area where the troops were operating after the deputy battalion commander identified the vehicles as “employed by Hamas forces, who arrived to assist the first vehicle’s passengers”; and the third involving an attack by the IDF on a Palestinian UN vehicle “due to operational errors in breach of regulation.”

    The inquiry did little to consider the damning evidence arising from a video of one of the slain workers, Red Crescent paramedic Rifaat Radwan, which prompted the IDF to change its initially fabricated story: that the vehicles had stealthily approached them without lights or markings in the menacing dark.  It is hard to imagine, for instance, that “the deputy commander did not initially recognize the vehicles as ambulances” given “poor night visibility”.  The vehicles were illuminated, the markings palpably visible.  But no matter: of the fifteen Palestinians butchered that night, six were Hamas terrorists.  None were armed, but that hardly mattered.

    As for the subsequent gruesome treatment of the bodies, the inquiry also finds little fault.  The battalion’s covering of the aid workers in shallow graves was intended “to prevent further harm” (well, they were dead, the harm well and truly done) while clearing the vehicles to allow “civilian evacuation”, another euphemism used by the public relations arm of the IDF to justify expulsions and displacement.  Removing the bodies was deemed “reasonable”; the crushing of the vehicles, suggesting the workings of guilty minds, was not.  There had been no intention to “to conceal the event, which was discussed with international organizations and the UN, including coordination for the removal of the bodies.”

    In watering down the murderous significance of the killings, the matter of failings, breach of orders and inadequate reporting are eclipsed by the continued commitment to battle Hamas “while upholding IDF values, operational discipline and orders.”  The Golani Reconnaissance Battalion had acquitted itself well, “operating with great distinction for a year and a half.”  Troops had opened fire on “suspects […] after perceiving an immediate and tangible threat.”  This is what happens when students grade their own papers, without invigilation and supervision by an independent authority.

    The consequence of the inquiry will be mild and, as the entire process has proven to be, bureaucratic in its self-justification.  The execution of 15 Palestinian emergency workers on the blood ledger will get you the dismissal of a battalion deputy commander for “incomplete and inaccurate reporting” and a reprimand for a brigade commanding officer, in this case the 14th Brigade.  It’s a calculus fantastically obscene, but it is one repeatedly used in various forms when it comes to slaying Palestinians and those who fall victim to the doctrine of expansive force taken by Israel after October 7, 2023.

    The post Euphemistic Practices:  The IDF, Killing Aid Workers and Self-Investigation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Ending the US Dollar’s Exorbitant Privilege

    Has the love, or even more so the fixation, gone with the US dollar, that all cushioning reserve currency that has shown itself unimpeachable for decades?  A curious event teasing and ruffling currency watchers and financiers is becoming a pattern: the US dollar is being sold off, suggesting it has lost its princely shine.  To this can also be added the sale of US Treasuries.

    Even before the global imposition of Donald Trump’s tariff-driven bonanza and his public bruising of Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, the world’s dominant currency was already being moved on.  Since 2014, the Chinese and Russian central banks have tried to move out of US Treasury holdings, preferring the magic of gold.  In 2022, the latter went so far as to link its currency, the ruble, to gold.

    For all that, something far more dramatic would be needed to upset the status of the dollar, and certainly the authority of its “exorbitant privilege”, to use that apt term coined in the 1960s by the then French Minister of Finance, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.  Only “serious economic and financial mismanagement by the United States”, proposed economics professor Barry Eichengreen in 2010, “could precipitate flight from the dollar.”

    In the autumn leading to the 2024 presidential election, there was little to suggest any such flight.  The dollar had markedly appreciated, boosted by the statistical astrology of US economic growth.  This continued after Trump’s victory in November.  The promise of a vigorous tariff policy, one potentially inflationary, also charmed investors keen to make greater returns from their dollars, assuming a raise of interest rates by the Federal Reserve.

    The tariff policy well and truly arrived on “Liberation Day” (April 2), proving to be erratic, arbitrarily derived and often economically illiterate in application.  The precipitated fall of the greenback shocked the currency pundits.  “For several years, the market’s been buying this US growth story, the US stock market’s been outperforming other stock markets, and suddenly you had economists thinking tariffs would push the US into recession,” remarks Jane Foley, head of foreign exchange (FX) strategy at Rabobank.  Additionally, the tariff regime has encouraged countries with current account surpluses denoted in US assets to consider returning them back to domestic markets, something that will further weaken the dollar.

    Trump has also lost patience with Powell, petulantly ventilating on Truth Social that the Federal Reserve chair impose pre-emptive cuts to interest rates, given the White House’s own assessment that the US faces no inflation.  There would be, declared Trump in a post, a “SLOWING of the economy unless Mr. Too Late, a major loser, lowers interest rates, NOW.”  While Europe continued to lower its rates, Powell had proved himself slow on the draw, “except when it came to the Election period when he lowered in order to help Sleepy Joe Biden, later Kamala, get elected.”

    In the angry mist, the President floated the possibility that the central banker might be removed.  His “termination” could not “come fast enough.”  He also charged his advisors to distribute poisoned packages of speculation as to what he intended to do with the recalcitrant Powell.  White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett obliged, telling reporters that, “The President and his team will continue to study that matter [of removing Powell].”

    Then, in true seesaw fashion, the President claimed the opposite of what he meant, a move that also sent the market into another galloping spree.  “I have no intention of firing him,” Trump told reporters on April 22. “I would like to see him be a little more active in terms of his idea to lower interest rates.”

    In the tumult of it all, investors are scouring other havens, shunning the status quo and traditional sensibility of the dollar.  The Japanese yen and Swiss franc are returning to favour.  As is the euro.  While an economist’s word should never be taken as gospel, chief currency analyst at ForexLive, Adam Button offers his view: “The market wants to invest in the fastest growing places, and the US administration is showing that it is not trying to maximize growth, or they have a different idea about how to get there.  And I think that’s rattled the market.”

    Curious events are unfolding as a result of Trump’s carnivalesque approach to trade and markets.  While the value of the greenback has fallen, the returns from 10-year US government bonds have risen.  This is the sort of thing common in new, emerging markets, where capital is susceptible to flight amidst conditions of volatility. In the US, this is the fifth time it has happened in three decades.  Even with the rise in bond yields, the dollar’s slide has not been arrested.

    For the easily panicked, a particular safe haven – and one already identified by central bankers and investors – is gold.  With US government debt no longer attractive for traders, the yellow metal has outperformed most major assets with its giddying rise.  Having passed $US3,500-an-ounce on April 22, the favouring of gold is merely one aspect of a market narrative that has turned the Trump Tariff Wall into the Selling of America.

    Crystal ball gazing is a mug’s game in economics, but countries wishing to see the defanging of dollar diplomacy and greenback bullying long used by Washington to maintain power will see flashes of opportunity.  The dollar’s privilege may no longer be exorbitant.

    The post Ending the US Dollar’s Exorbitant Privilege first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Dotty and Cretinous: Reviewing AUKUS

    Photograph Source: BAE Systems – OGL 3

    It was a deal for the cretinous, hammered out by the less than bright for less than honourable goals. But AUKUS, the trilateral security alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, is now finally receiving the broader opprobrium it should have had from the outset. Importantly, criticism is coming from those who have, at points, swooned at the prospect of acquiring a nuclear-powered submarine capability assuming, erroneously, that Australia somehow needs it.

    A report by the Strategic Analysis Australia think tank has found that AUKUS, despite the increasingly vain promise of supplying the Royal Australian Navy with nuclear powered submarines in 2032, has already become its own, insatiable beast. As beast it is, with the cost over the next four years for the submarine program coming in at A$17.3 billion, exceeding by some margin the capital budget of the Royal Australian Airforce (RAAF) at A$12.7 billion. One of the authors of the report, Marcus Hellyer, notes that “in terms of acquisition spending, the SSN [nuclear-powered attack submarine] enterprise has already become the ADF’s [Australian Defence Force’s] ‘fourth service’.”
    The report notes some remarkable figures.Expenditure on SSNs is estimated to be somewhere between A$53 billion and A$63 billion between 2024-2034, with the next five years of the decade costing approximately A$20 billion. The amount left over for the following years comes in at $33 to $44 billion, necessitating a target of $10 billion annually by the end of the financial decade in the early 2030s. What is astounding is the amount being swallowed up by the ADF’s investment program in maritime capabilities, which will, over the coming decade, come to 38% of the total investment.
    The SSN program has made its fair share in distorting the budget.The decade to 2033-4 features a total budget of A$330 billion.But the SSN budget of $53-63 billion puts nuclear powered submarines at 16.1% to 19.1% more than either the domains of land and air relevant to Australia’s defence. “It’s hard to grasp how unusual this situation is,” the report notes with gravity. “Moreover, it’s one that will endure for decades, since the key elements of the maritime domain (SSNs and the two frigate programs) will still be in acquisition well into the 2040s. It’s quite possible that Defence itself doesn’t grasp the situation that it’s gotten into.”
    To add to the more specialist literature calling large parts of AUKUS expenditure into question comes the emergence of disquiet in political ranks. Despite the craven and cowardly bipartisan approval of Australia’s dottiest military venture to date, former Labor senator Doug Cameron, who fronts the Labor Against War group, is a symptom of growing dissent.  “There are other more realistic and cost-effective strategies to protect our territorial integrity without subjugating ourselves to a dangerous, unpredictable and unworthy Trump administration.”
    On the other side of the political aisle, former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is pessimistically inclined to the view that Australia will never get those much heralded submarines. “There will be Australian sailors serving on US submarines, and we’ll provide them with a base in Western Australia.” Furthermore, Australia would have “lost both sovereignty and security and a lot of money as well.”
    The spineless disposition of Australia’s political cadres may prove irrelevant to the forced obsolescence of the agreement, given the scrutiny of AUKUS in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The pugilistic nature of the tariff system imposed by the Trump administration on all countries, friendly or adversarial, has brought particular focus on the demands on naval and submarine construction. Senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, told an AUKUS dinner in Washington this month that “We are already having trouble getting these ships and subs on time [and] on budget. Increase those prices – it’s going to be a problem.”
    Taine’s point is logical enough, given that steel and aluminium have been targeted by particularly hefty rates.Given the array of products requiring exchange in the AUKUS arrangement, tariffs would, the senator reasons, “slow us down and make things harder”.
    Another blow also looms.On April 9, the White House ordered the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to comb through the procurement of US Navy vessels in order “to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of these processes” and contribute to the Trump administration’s Maritime Action Plan. Consistent with Trump’s near obsession of reviving national industry, the order seeks “to revitalize and rebuild domestic maritime industries and workforce to promote national security and economic prosperity.”
    Australian taxpayers have every reason to be further worried about this, given the order’s emphasis that US departments and agencies pursue “all available incentives to help shipbuilders domiciled in allied nations partner to undertake capital investment in the US to help strengthen the shipbuilding capacity of the US”. Given that that US submarine industrial base is already promised $US3 billion from Australia’s pockets, with $500 million already transferred in February, the delicious exploitation of Canberra’s stupidity continues apace.
    In the UK, the House of Commons Defence Committee this month announced a parliamentary inquiry into the defence pact, which will evaluate the agreement in light of changes that have taken place since 2021.“AUKUS has been underway for three years now,” remarked Defence Committee chairman and Labour MP, Tan Dhesi. “The inquiry will examine the progress made against each of the two pillars, and ask how any challenges could be addressed.”
    The first pillar, perennially spectral, stresses the submarine component, both in terms of transferring Virginia class SSNs to Australia and the construction of a bespoke nuclear-powered AUKUS submarine; the second focuses on the technological spread of artificial intelligence, quantum capabilities, hypersonic advances and cyber warfare. While Dhesi hopes that the inquiry may throw up the possibility of expanding the second pillar, beady eyes will be keen to see the near non-existent state regarding the first.But even the second pillar lacks definition, prompting Kaine to suggest the need for “some definition and some choices”. Nebulous, amorphous and foolish, this absurd pact continues to sunder.

    The post Dotty and Cretinous: Reviewing AUKUS appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • De Facto Occupation: Israel’s Security Zone Strategy

    Photograph Source: User:שועל, modified by User:MathKnight – File:IDF Caterpillar D9 in action.JPG – CC BY-SA 3.0

    In recent months, the Israeli Defense Forces have been much taken by a term that augurs poorly for peaceful accord in the Middle East.“Security zones” are being seized in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria.Land is, for claimed reasons of self-defence, being appropriated with brazen assuredness.It is hard, however, to see this latest turn as anything other than a de facto military occupation, a situation that will prolong the crisis of vulnerability the Jewish state so wishes to overcome.Israel’s insecurities are much the result of various expansions since 1948 that have only imperilled it to future attack and simmering acrimony.The pattern threatens to repeat itself.

    In Syria, Israel rapidly capitalised on the fall of the Assad regime by shredding the status quo.Within a matter of 11 days after the fleeing of the former President Bashar Al-Assad to Moscow, and again on February 1 this year, satellite images showed six military sites being constructed within what is nominally the UN-supervised demilitarised zone, otherwise known as the Area of Separation.A seventh is being constructed outside the zone and in Syria proper.Such busy feats of construction have also accompanied Israeli encroachment on the land of Syrian civilians, coupled with vexing housing raids, road closures and unsanctioned arrests.
    All this has taken place despite undertakings from Syria’s transitional President Ahmed al-Sharaa that he would recognise the 1974 agreement made with Israel, one which prohibits Israel from crossing the Alpha Line on the western edge of the Area of Separation.“Syria’s war-weary condition, after years of conflict and war, does not allow for new confrontations,” admitted the new leader on December 14, 2024.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was only scornful, regarding the 1974 agreement between the two countries as a dead letter buried by history. “We will not allow any hostile force to establish itself on our border,” he snottily declared.
    Lebanon is also facing a stubborn IDF, one that refuses to abide by the Israel-Hezbollah agreement last November which promised the withdrawal of both forces from southern Lebanon, leaving the Lebanese army to take over the supervising reins.Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, who faces the herculean task of removing Hezbollah’s weapons while potentially integrating members of its group into the Lebanese army, has found his task needlessly onerous.In recent discussions with US deputy Mideast envoy Morgan Ortagus, the Lebanese leader reasoned “that Israel’s presence in the five disputed points gives Hezbollah a pretext to keep its weapons.”
    On April 16, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz promised that such security zones would provide relevant buffers to shield Israeli communities.Ominously, the IDF would “Unlike in the past [not evacuate] areas that have been cleared and seized”.They would “remain in the security zones as a buffer between the enemy and [Israeli] communities in any temporary or permanent situation in Gaza – as in Lebanon and Syria.”
    In Gaza, it is becoming increasingly clear that any prospect of Palestinian autonomy or political independence is to be strangled and snuffed out.Israel has already arbitrarily created the “Morag Corridor”, which excises Rafah from the Strip, and the Netzarim Corridor, which severs Gaza in half.Katz has also promised that the policy of blocking all food, medicine and other vital supplies to Gaza implemented on March 2 will continue, as it “is one of the main pressure levers preventing Hamas from using it as a tool with the population”.
    Displacement orders, euphemised as “evacuation orders”, have become the staple of operating doctrine, the means of creating buffers of guns and steel.On April 11, Israeli authorities issued two such orders, effectively “covering vast areas in northern and southern Gaza”, according to UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric.“Together, these areas span more than 24 square kilometres – roughly the size of everything south of Central Park here in Manhattan.”Within these zones of military seizure lie medical facilities and storage sites filled with vital supplies.
    The UN Human Rights office also expressed its concerns about Israel seemingly “inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life increasingly incompatible with their continued existence as a group in Gaza.”The population was being “forcibly transferred into ever shrinking spaces with little or no access to life-saving services, including water, food, and shelter, and whey they continue to be subject to attacks.”Engaging in such conduct against a civilian population within an occupied territory, the office pointedly observes, satisfies the definition of a forcible transfer, being both a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of 1998.
    The latest doctrine of appropriation and indeterminate occupation adopted by Katz and the IDF has not impressed the Hostages and Missing Families Forum in Israel, long advocating for the release of Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza by Hamas.“They promised that the hostages come before everything,” came the organisation’s aggrieved observation.“In practice, however, Israel is choosing to seize territory before the hostages.”In doing so, the prerogatives of permanent conflict and habitual predation have displaced the more humane prerogatives of peace.

    The post De Facto Occupation: Israel’s Security Zone Strategy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • Reviewing AUKUS

    It was a deal for the cretinous, hammered out by the less than bright for less than honourable goals. But AUKUS, the trilateral security alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, is now finally receiving the broader opprobrium it should have had from the outset. Importantly, criticism is coming from those who have, at points, swooned at the prospect of acquiring a nuclear-powered submarine capability assuming, erroneously, that Australia somehow needs it.

    A report by the Strategic Analysis Australia think tank has found that AUKUS, despite the increasingly vain promise of supplying the Royal Australian Navy with nuclear powered submarines in 2032, has already become its own, insatiable beast. As beast it is, with the cost over the next four years for the submarine program coming in at A$17.3 billion, exceeding by some margin the capital budget of the Royal Australian Airforce (RAAF) at A$12.7 billion. One of the authors of the report, Marcus Hellyer, notes that “in terms of acquisition spending, the SSN [nuclear-powered attack submarine] enterprise has already become the ADF’s [Australian Defence Force’s] ‘fourth service’.”

    The report notes some remarkable figures. Expenditure on SSNs is estimated to be somewhere between A$53 billion and A$63 billion between 2024-2034, with the next five years of the decade costing approximately A$20 billion. The amount left over for the following years comes in at $33 to $44 billion, necessitating a target of $10 billion annually by the end of the financial decade in the early 2030s. What is astounding is the amount being swallowed up by the ADF’s investment program in maritime capabilities, which will, over the coming decade, come to 38% of the total investment.

    The SSN program has made its fair share in distorting the budget. The decade to 2033-4 features a total budget of A$330 billion. But the SSN budget of $53-63 billion puts nuclear powered submarines at 16.1% to 19.1% more than either the domains of land and air relevant to Australia’s defence. “It’s hard to grasp how unusual this situation is,” the report notes with gravity. “Moreover, it’s one that will endure for decades, since the key elements of the maritime domain (SSNs and the two frigate programs) will still be in acquisition well into the 2040s. It’s quite possible that Defence itself doesn’t grasp the situation that it’s gotten into.”

    To add to the more specialist literature calling large parts of AUKUS expenditure into question comes the emergence of disquiet in political ranks. Despite the craven and cowardly bipartisan approval of Australia’s dottiest military venture to date, former Labor senator Doug Cameron, who fronts the Labor Against War group, is a symptom of growing dissent. “There are other more realistic and cost-effective strategies to protect our territorial integrity without subjugating ourselves to a dangerous, unpredictable and unworthy Trump administration.”

    On the other side of the political aisle, former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is pessimistically inclined to the view that Australia will never get those much heralded submarines. “There will be Australian sailors serving on US submarines, and we’ll provide them with a base in Western Australia.” Furthermore, Australia would have “lost both sovereignty and security and a lot of money as well.”

    The spineless disposition of Australia’s political cadres may prove irrelevant to the forced obsolescence of the agreement, given the scrutiny of AUKUS in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The pugilistic nature of the tariff system imposed by the Trump administration on all countries, friendly or adversarial, has brought particular focus on the demands on naval and submarine construction. Senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, told an AUKUS dinner in Washington this month that “We are already having trouble getting these ships and subs on time [and] on budget. Increase those prices – it’s going to be a problem.”

    Taine’s point is logical enough, given that steel and aluminium have been targeted by particularly hefty rates. Given the array of products requiring exchange in the AUKUS arrangement, tariffs would, the senator reasons, “slow us down and make things harder”.

    Another blow also looms. On April 9, the White House ordered the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to comb through the procurement of US Navy vessels in order “to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of these processes” and contribute to the Trump administration’s Maritime Action Plan. Consistent with Trump’s near obsession of reviving national industry, the order seeks “to revitalize and rebuild domestic maritime industries and workforce to promote national security and economic prosperity.”

    Australian taxpayers have every reason to be further worried about this, given the order’s emphasis that US departments and agencies pursue “all available incentives to help shipbuilders domiciled in allied nations partner to undertake capital investment in the US to help strengthen the shipbuilding capacity of the US”. Given that that US submarine industrial base is already promised $US3 billion from Australia’s pockets, with $500 million already transferred in February, the delicious exploitation of Canberra’s stupidity continues apace.

    In the UK, the House of Commons Defence Committee this month announced a parliamentary inquiry into the defence pact, which will evaluate the agreement in light of changes that have taken place since 2021. “AUKUS has been underway for three years now,” remarked Defence Committee chairman and Labour MP, Tan Dhesi. “The inquiry will examine the progress made against each of the two pillars, and ask how any challenges could be addressed.”

    The first pillar, perennially spectral, stresses the submarine component, both in terms of transferring Virginia class SSNs to Australia and the construction of a bespoke nuclear-powered AUKUS submarine; the second focuses on the technological spread of artificial intelligence, quantum capabilities, hypersonic advances and cyber warfare. While Dhesi hopes that the inquiry may throw up the possibility of expanding the second pillar, beady eyes will be keen to see the near non-existent state regarding the first. But even the second pillar lacks definition, prompting Kaine to suggest the need for “some definition and some choices”. Nebulous, amorphous and foolish, this absurd pact continues to sunder.

    The post Reviewing AUKUS first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Reviewing AUKUS

    It was a deal for the cretinous, hammered out by the less than bright for less than honourable goals. But AUKUS, the trilateral security alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, is now finally receiving the broader opprobrium it should have had from the outset. Importantly, criticism is coming from those who have, at points, swooned at the prospect of acquiring a nuclear-powered submarine capability assuming, erroneously, that Australia somehow needs it.

    A report by the Strategic Analysis Australia think tank has found that AUKUS, despite the increasingly vain promise of supplying the Royal Australian Navy with nuclear powered submarines in 2032, has already become its own, insatiable beast. As beast it is, with the cost over the next four years for the submarine program coming in at A$17.3 billion, exceeding by some margin the capital budget of the Royal Australian Airforce (RAAF) at A$12.7 billion. One of the authors of the report, Marcus Hellyer, notes that “in terms of acquisition spending, the SSN [nuclear-powered attack submarine] enterprise has already become the ADF’s [Australian Defence Force’s] ‘fourth service’.”

    The report notes some remarkable figures. Expenditure on SSNs is estimated to be somewhere between A$53 billion and A$63 billion between 2024-2034, with the next five years of the decade costing approximately A$20 billion. The amount left over for the following years comes in at $33 to $44 billion, necessitating a target of $10 billion annually by the end of the financial decade in the early 2030s. What is astounding is the amount being swallowed up by the ADF’s investment program in maritime capabilities, which will, over the coming decade, come to 38% of the total investment.

    The SSN program has made its fair share in distorting the budget. The decade to 2033-4 features a total budget of A$330 billion. But the SSN budget of $53-63 billion puts nuclear powered submarines at 16.1% to 19.1% more than either the domains of land and air relevant to Australia’s defence. “It’s hard to grasp how unusual this situation is,” the report notes with gravity. “Moreover, it’s one that will endure for decades, since the key elements of the maritime domain (SSNs and the two frigate programs) will still be in acquisition well into the 2040s. It’s quite possible that Defence itself doesn’t grasp the situation that it’s gotten into.”

    To add to the more specialist literature calling large parts of AUKUS expenditure into question comes the emergence of disquiet in political ranks. Despite the craven and cowardly bipartisan approval of Australia’s dottiest military venture to date, former Labor senator Doug Cameron, who fronts the Labor Against War group, is a symptom of growing dissent. “There are other more realistic and cost-effective strategies to protect our territorial integrity without subjugating ourselves to a dangerous, unpredictable and unworthy Trump administration.”

    On the other side of the political aisle, former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is pessimistically inclined to the view that Australia will never get those much heralded submarines. “There will be Australian sailors serving on US submarines, and we’ll provide them with a base in Western Australia.” Furthermore, Australia would have “lost both sovereignty and security and a lot of money as well.”

    The spineless disposition of Australia’s political cadres may prove irrelevant to the forced obsolescence of the agreement, given the scrutiny of AUKUS in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The pugilistic nature of the tariff system imposed by the Trump administration on all countries, friendly or adversarial, has brought particular focus on the demands on naval and submarine construction. Senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, told an AUKUS dinner in Washington this month that “We are already having trouble getting these ships and subs on time [and] on budget. Increase those prices – it’s going to be a problem.”

    Taine’s point is logical enough, given that steel and aluminium have been targeted by particularly hefty rates. Given the array of products requiring exchange in the AUKUS arrangement, tariffs would, the senator reasons, “slow us down and make things harder”.

    Another blow also looms. On April 9, the White House ordered the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to comb through the procurement of US Navy vessels in order “to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of these processes” and contribute to the Trump administration’s Maritime Action Plan. Consistent with Trump’s near obsession of reviving national industry, the order seeks “to revitalize and rebuild domestic maritime industries and workforce to promote national security and economic prosperity.”

    Australian taxpayers have every reason to be further worried about this, given the order’s emphasis that US departments and agencies pursue “all available incentives to help shipbuilders domiciled in allied nations partner to undertake capital investment in the US to help strengthen the shipbuilding capacity of the US”. Given that that US submarine industrial base is already promised $US3 billion from Australia’s pockets, with $500 million already transferred in February, the delicious exploitation of Canberra’s stupidity continues apace.

    In the UK, the House of Commons Defence Committee this month announced a parliamentary inquiry into the defence pact, which will evaluate the agreement in light of changes that have taken place since 2021. “AUKUS has been underway for three years now,” remarked Defence Committee chairman and Labour MP, Tan Dhesi. “The inquiry will examine the progress made against each of the two pillars, and ask how any challenges could be addressed.”

    The first pillar, perennially spectral, stresses the submarine component, both in terms of transferring Virginia class SSNs to Australia and the construction of a bespoke nuclear-powered AUKUS submarine; the second focuses on the technological spread of artificial intelligence, quantum capabilities, hypersonic advances and cyber warfare. While Dhesi hopes that the inquiry may throw up the possibility of expanding the second pillar, beady eyes will be keen to see the near non-existent state regarding the first. But even the second pillar lacks definition, prompting Kaine to suggest the need for “some definition and some choices”. Nebulous, amorphous and foolish, this absurd pact continues to sunder.

    The post Reviewing AUKUS first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • De Facto Occupation: Israel’s Security Zone Strategy

    In recent months, the Israeli Defense Forces have been much taken by a term that augurs poorly for peaceful accord in the Middle East. “Security zones” are being seized in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Syria. Land is, for claimed reasons of self-defence, being appropriated with brazen assuredness. It is hard, however, to see this latest turn as anything other than a de facto military occupation, a situation that will prolong the crisis of vulnerability the Jewish state so wishes to overcome. Israel’s insecurities are much the result of various expansions since 1948 that have only imperilled it to future attack and simmering acrimony. The pattern threatens to repeat itself.

    In Syria, Israel rapidly capitalised on the fall of the Assad regime by shredding the status quo. Within a matter of 11 days after the fleeing of the former President Bashar Al-Assad to Moscow, and again on February 1 this year, satellite images showed six military sites being constructed within what is nominally the UN-supervised demilitarised zone, otherwise known as the Area of Separation. A seventh is being constructed outside the zone and in Syria proper. Such busy feats of construction have also accompanied Israeli encroachment on the land of Syrian civilians, coupled with vexing housing raids, road closures and unsanctioned arrests.

    All this has taken place despite undertakings from Syria’s transitional President Ahmed al-Sharaa that he would recognise the 1974 agreement made with Israel, one which prohibits Israel from crossing the Alpha Line on the western edge of the Area of Separation. “Syria’s war-weary condition, after years of conflict and war, does not allow for new confrontations,” admitted the new leader on December 14, 2024. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was only scornful, regarding the 1974 agreement between the two countries as a dead letter buried by history. “We will not allow any hostile force to establish itself on our border,” he snottily declared.

    Lebanon is also facing a stubborn IDF, one that refuses to abide by the Israel-Hezbollah agreement last November which promised the withdrawal of both forces from southern Lebanon, leaving the Lebanese army to take over the supervising reins. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, who faces the herculean task of removing Hezbollah’s weapons while potentially integrating members of its group into the Lebanese army, has found his task needlessly onerous. In recent discussions with US deputy Mideast envoy Morgan Ortagus, the Lebanese leader reasoned “that Israel’s presence in the five disputed points gives Hezbollah a pretext to keep its weapons.”

    On April 16, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz promised that such security zones would provide relevant buffers to shield Israeli communities. Ominously, the IDF would “Unlike in the past [not evacuate] areas that have been cleared and seized”. They would “remain in the security zones as a buffer between the enemy and [Israeli] communities in any temporary or permanent situation in Gaza – as in Lebanon and Syria.”

    In Gaza, it is becoming increasingly clear that any prospect of Palestinian autonomy or political independence is to be strangled and snuffed out. Israel has already arbitrarily created the “Morag Corridor”, which excises Rafah from the Strip, and the Netzarim Corridor, which severs Gaza in half. Katz has also promised that the policy of blocking all food, medicine and other vital supplies to Gaza implemented on March 2 will continue, as it “is one of the main pressure levers preventing Hamas from using it as a tool with the population”.

    Displacement orders, euphemised as “evacuation orders”, have become the staple of operating doctrine, the means of creating buffers of guns and steel. On April 11, Israeli authorities issued two such orders, effectively “covering vast areas in northern and southern Gaza”, according to UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric. “Together, these areas span more than 24 square kilometres – roughly the size of everything south of Central Park here in Manhattan.” Within these zones of military seizure lie medical facilities and storage sites filled with vital supplies.

    The UN Human Rights office also expressed its concerns about Israel seemingly “inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life increasingly incompatible with their continued existence as a group in Gaza.” The population was being “forcibly transferred into ever shrinking spaces with little or no access to life-saving services, including water, food, and shelter, and whey they continue to be subject to attacks.” Engaging in such conduct against a civilian population within an occupied territory, the office pointedly observes, satisfies the definition of a forcible transfer, being both a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of 1998.

    The latest doctrine of appropriation and indeterminate occupation adopted by Katz and the IDF has not impressed the Hostages and Missing Families Forum in Israel, long advocating for the release of Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza by Hamas. “They promised that the hostages come before everything,” came the organisation’s aggrieved observation. “In practice, however, Israel is choosing to seize territory before the hostages.” In doing so, the prerogatives of permanent conflict and habitual predation have displaced the more humane prerogatives of peace.

    The post De Facto Occupation: Israel’s Security Zone Strategy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Flexible and Sly: Indonesian Defense Policy, Russia and Australian Anxiety

    Photo by Fang Guo

    Island states tend to be anxious political entities.  Encircled by water, seemingly defended by natural obstacles, the fear of corrupting penetration is never far.  Threats of such unwanted intrusion are embellished and magnified.  In the case of Australia, these have varied from straying Indonesian fishermen who are seen as terrors of border security, to the threatened establishment of military bases in the Indo-Pacific by China.  With Australia facing a federal election, the opportunity to exaggerate the next threat is never far away.

    On April 14, the specialist military publication Janes reported that Indonesia had “received an official request from Moscow, seeking permission for Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) aircraft to be based at a facility in [the country’s] easternmost province.”  The area in question is Papua, and the relevant airbase, Biak Numfor, home to the Indonesian Air Force’s Aviation Squadron 27 responsible for operating surveillance aircraft of the CN235 variety.

    Indonesian government sources had informed the magazine of a request received by the office of the defense minister, Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, following a February meeting with the Security Council of the Russian Federation Sergei Shoigu.  This was not the first time, with Moscow making previous requests to Jakarta for using a base for its long-range aircraft.

    The frazzled response in Australia to the possibility of a Russian presence on Indonesian soil betrays its presumption. Just as Australia would rather not see Pacific Island states form security friendly ties with China, an anxiety directed and dictated by Washington, it would also wish those in Southeast Asia to avoid the feelers of other countries supposedly unfriendly to Canberra’s interests.

    Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, who has an addict’s fascination with security menaces of the phantom variety, sprung at the claims made in Janes.  “This would be a catastrophic failure of diplomatic relations if [Australian Foreign Minister] Penny Wong and [Prime Minister] Anthony Albanese didn’t have forewarning about this before it was made public,” he trumpeted.  “This is a very, very troubling development and suggestion that somehow Russia would have some of their assets based in Indonesia only a short distance from, obviously, the north of our country.”

    The Albanese government has tried to cool the confected heat with assurances, with the PM reaffirming Canberra’s support for Ukraine while stating that “we obviously do not want to see Russian influence in our region”.  It has also accused Dutton for a streaky fabrication: that Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto had “publicly announced” the details.

    Australia’s Defence Minister, Richard Marles, also informed the press that he had spoken to his counterpart Sjamsoeddin, who duly replied “in the clearest possible terms [that] reports of the prospect of Russian aircraft operating from Indonesia are simply not true.”

    Besides, a country such as Indonesia, according to Marles, is of the friendly sort.  “We have a growing defence relationship with Indonesia.  We will keep engaging with Indonesia in a way that befits a very close friend and a very close friendship between our two countries.”  This sweetly coated nonsense should have gone out with the façade-tearing acts of Donald Trump’s global imposition of tariffs, unsparing to adversaries and allies alike.

    Marles continues to operate in a certain twilight of international relations, under the belief that the defense cooperation agreement with Jakarta “is the deepest level defense agreement we’ve ever had with Indonesia, and we are seeking increasing cooperation between Australia and Indonesia at the defense level.”  Whether this is, the case hardly precludes Indonesia, as an important regional power, from conducting defense and foreign policy on its own terms with countries of its own choosing.

    In January, Jakarta officially added its name to the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) group, an alternative power alignment that has been foolishly disregarded in terms of significance by the United States and its satellites.  Subianto’s coming to power last October has also heralded a warmer turn to Moscow in military terms, with both countries conducting their first joint naval drills last November in the Java Sea near Surabaya.  (Indonesia is already a market for Russian fighter jets, despite the cloud of potential sanctions from the US Treasury Department.)  For doing so, self-appointed disciplinarians, notably such pro-US outlets as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, have questioned the country’s fabled non-aligned foreign policy.  Engaging Russia in cooperative military terms supposedly undermined, according to the think tank’s publication The Strategist, Jakarta’s “own stated commitment to upholding international law.”

    Such commentary is neither here nor there.  The Indonesian military remains jealous and proprietary, taking a dim view of any notion of a foreign military base.  Retired Major General TB Hasanuddin, who is also a Member of Commission I of the Indonesian House of Representatives, points to constitutional and other legal impediments in permitting such a policy.  “Our constitution and various laws and regulations expressly prohibit the existence of foreign military bases.”

    Any criticism of Jakarta’s recent gravitation to Moscow also refuses to acknowledge the flexible, even sly approach Indonesia has taken to various powers.  It has done so while maintaining a firm independence of mind.  In the afterglow of the naval exercises with the Russian Navy, Indonesia’s armed forces merrily went about the business of conducting military exercises with Australia, named Keris Woomera.  Between November 13 and 16 last year, the exercise comprised 2,000 personnel from the navy, army and air force from both countries.  As Australia frets and fantasizes about the stratagems of distant authoritarian leaders, Indonesia has the last laugh.

    The post Flexible and Sly: Indonesian Defense Policy, Russia and Australian Anxiety appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Flexible and Sly: Indonesian Defence Policy, Russia, and Australian Anxiety

    Island states tend to be anxious political entities. Encircled by water, seemingly defended by natural obstacles, the fear of corrupting penetration is never far. Threats of such unwanted intrusion are embellished and magnified. In the case of Australia, these have varied from straying Indonesian fishermen who are seen as terrors of border security, to the threatened establishment of military bases in the Indo-Pacific by China. With Australia facing a federal election, the opportunity to exaggerate the next threat is never far away.

    On April 14, the specialist military publication Janes reported that Indonesia had “received an official request from Moscow, seeking permission for Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) aircraft to be based at a facility in [the country’s] easternmost province.” The area in question is Papua, and the relevant airbase, Biak Numfor, home to the Indonesian Air Force’s Aviation Squadron 27 responsible for operating surveillance aircraft of the CN235 variety.

    Indonesian government sources had informed the magazine of a request received by the office of the defence minister, Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, following a February meeting with the Security Council of the Russian Federation Sergei Shoigu. This was not the first time, with Moscow making previous requests to Jakarta for using a base for its long-range aircraft.

    The frazzled response in Australia to the possibility of a Russian presence on Indonesian soil betrays its presumption. Just as Australia would rather not see Pacific Island states form security friendly ties with China, an anxiety directed and dictated by Washington, it would also wish those in Southeast Asia to avoid the feelers of other countries supposedly unfriendly to Canberra’s interests.

    Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, who has an addict’s fascination with security menaces of the phantom variety, sprung at the claims made in Janes. “This would be a catastrophic failure of diplomatic relations if [Australian Foreign Minister] Penny Wong and [Prime Minister] Anthony Albanese didn’t have forewarning about this before it was made public,” he trumpeted. “This is a very, very troubling development and suggestion that somehow Russia would have some of their assets based in Indonesia only a short distance from, obviously, the north of our country.”

    The Albanese government has tried to cool the confected heat with assurances, with the PM reaffirming Canberra’s support for Ukraine while stating that “we obviously do not want to see Russian influence in our region”. It has also accused Dutton for a streaky fabrication: that Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto had “publicly announced” the details.

    Australia’s Defence Minister, Richard Marles, also informed the press that he had spoken to his counterpart Sjamsoeddin, who duly replied “in the clearest possible terms [that] reports of the prospect of Russian aircraft operating from Indonesia are simply not true.”

    Besides, a country such as Indonesia, according to Marles, is of the friendly sort. “We have a growing defence relationship with Indonesia. We will keep engaging with Indonesia in a way that befits a very close friend and a very close friendship between our two countries.” This sweetly coated nonsense should have gone out with the façade-tearing acts of Donald Trump’s global imposition of tariffs, unsparing to adversaries and allies alike.

    Marles continues to operate in a certain twilight of international relations, under the belief that the defence cooperation agreement with Jakarta “is the deepest level defence agreement we’ve ever had with Indonesia, and we are seeking increasing cooperation between Australia and Indonesia at the defence level.” Whether this is the case hardly precludes Indonesia, as an important regional power, from conducting defence and foreign policy on its own terms with countries of its own choosing.

    In January, Jakarta officially added its name to the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) group, an alternative power alignment that has been foolishly disregarded in terms of significance by the United States and its satellites. Subianto’s coming to power last October has also heralded a warmer turn to Moscow in military terms, with both countries conducting their first joint naval drills last November in the Java Sea near Surabaya. (Indonesia is already a market for Russian fighter jets, despite the cloud of potential sanctions from the US Treasury Department.) For doing so, self-appointed disciplinarians, notably such pro-US outlets as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, have questioned the country’s fabled non-aligned foreign policy. Engaging Russia in cooperative military terms supposedly undermined, according to the think tank’s publication The Strategist, Jakarta’s “own stated commitment to upholding international law.”

    Such commentary is neither here nor there. The Indonesian military remains jealous and proprietary, taking a dim view of any notion of a foreign military base. Retired Major General TB Hasanuddin, who is also a Member of Commission I of the Indonesian House of Representatives, points to constitutional and other legal impediments in permitting such a policy. “Our constitution and various laws and regulations expressly prohibit the existence of foreign military bases.”

    Any criticism of Jakarta’s recent gravitation to Moscow also refuses to acknowledge the flexible, even sly approach Indonesia has taken to various powers. It has done so while maintaining a firm independence of mind. In the afterglow of the naval exercises with the Russian Navy, Indonesia’s armed forces merrily went about the business of conducting military exercises with Australia, named Keris Woomera. Between November 13 and 16 last year, the exercise comprised 2,000 personnel from the navy, army and air force from both countries. As Australia frets and fantasises about the stratagems of distant authoritarian leaders, Indonesia having the last laugh.

    The post Flexible and Sly: Indonesian Defence Policy, Russia, and Australian Anxiety first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Blue Origin’s Female Celebrity Envoys

    Indulgent, vain and profligate, the all-female venture into space on the self-piloted New Shepard (NS-31) operated by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin was space capitalism and celebrity shallowness on full show, masquerading as profound, moving and useful.

    The crew consisted of bioastronautics research scientist and civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King, pop entertainer Katy Perry, film producer Kerianne Flynn, former NASA scientist and entrepreneur Aisha Bowe and Lauren Sánchez, fiancée of Jeff Bezos. The journey took 11 minutes and reached the Kármán line at approximately 96 kilometres above the earth.

    Blue Origin had advertised the enterprise as an incentive to draw girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It also shamelessly played on the background of some of the crew, with Nguyen promoted as “the first Vietnamese and south-east Asian female astronaut” whose presence would “highlight science as a tool for peace” and also project a potent “symbol of reconciliation between the US and Vietnam”.

    Phil Joyce, Senior Vice President of New Shepard, thought it a “privilege to witness this crew of trailblazers depart the capsule today”. Each woman was “a storyteller” who would “use their voices – individually and together – to channel their life-changing experience today into creating lasting impact that will inspire people across our planet for generations.”

    What was more accurately on show were celebrity space marketers on an expensive jaunt, showing us all that women can play the space capitalism game as well, albeit as the suborbital version of a catwalk or fashion show. Far from pushing some variant of feminism in the frontier of space, with scientific rewards for girls the world over, we got the eclipsing, if not a wholesale junking, of female astronauts and their monumental expertise.

    It hardly compared, at any stretch or by any quantum of measure, with the achievement of Russian cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, who piloted a Vostok 6 into earth’s orbit lasting 70 hours over six decades prior. To have Sánchez claiming to be “so proud of this crew”, tears cued for effect, gave the impression that they had shown technical expertise and skill when neither was required. It was far better to have deep pockets fronting the appropriate deposit, along with the necessary safe return, over which they had virtually no control over.

    Dr Kai-Uwe Schrogl, special advisor for political affairs at the European Space Agency, offered a necessarily cold corrective. “A celebrity isn’t an envoy of humankind – they go into space for their own reasons,” he told BBC News. “These flights are significant and exciting, but I think maybe they can also be a source of frustration for space scientists”. How silly of those scientists, who regard space flight as an extension of “science, knowledge and the interests of humanity.”

    The Guardian was also awake to the motivations of the Bezos project. “The pseudo progressiveness of this celebrity space mission, coupled with Bezos’s conduct in his other businesses, should mean we are under no illusion what purpose these flights serve.” With Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the space tourism market, marked by its bratty oligarchs, is becoming competitive. In an effort to corner the market, attractive gimmicks are in high demand.

    The cringingly superficial nature of the exercise was evident in various comments on the fashion aspect of the suits worn by the crew. Here was branding, and the sort that could be taken to space. As Sánchez stated: “Usually, you know, these suits are made for a man. Then they get tailored to fit a woman. I think the suits are elegant, but they also bring a little spice to space.” Blue Origin had capitalised on NASA’s own failings in 2019, which saw the abandoning of an all-female spacewalk for lacking appropriately fitting spacesuits.

    On their return, the female cast performed their contractual undertakings to bore the press with deadly clichés and meaningless observations, reducing space travel to an exercise for the trivial. “Earth looked so quiet,” remarked Sánchez. “It was quiet, but really alive.” King, after getting on her knees to kiss the earth, merely wanted “to have a moment with the ground, just appreciate the ground for just a second”. (Surely she has had longer than that.) Perry, on her return after singing What a Wonderful World during the trip, overflowed with inanities. She felt “super connected to life”, as well as being “so connected to love.”

    On the ground were other celebrities, delighted to offer their cliché-clotted thoughts. “I didn’t realise how emotional it would be, it’s hard to explain,” reflected Khloé Kardashian. “I have all this adrenaline and I’m just standing here.” From a family of celebrities that merely exist as celebrities and nothing else, she had some advice: “Dream big, wish for the stars – and one day, you could maybe be amongst them.”

    Amanda Hess, reflecting on the mission in the New York Times, tried to put her finger on what it all meant. “The message is that a little girl can grow up to be whatever she wishes: a rocket scientist or a pop star, a television journalist or a billionaire’s fiancée who is empowered to pursue her various ambitions and whims in the face of tremendous costs.” Just not an astronaut.

    The post Blue Origin’s Female Celebrity Envoys first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Perfume, Power and Emmanuel Macron

    Photograph Source: governo.it – CC BY 3.0 IT

    Apparently, he is addicted to it. The French President, Emmanuel Macron, adores using perfume. The variety: Dior Eau Sauvage. Dior states that the perfume is characterised by notes of Calabrian bergamot and Papua New Guinean vanilla extract. The company is also keen to glorify elements of power and nobility in the scent.

    Apparently, the use of that particular fragrance by the France’s head of state happens to be “industrial” in application, “at all hours of the day”, intended to impress “less-accustomed visitors” with “the floral and musky scent, as refined as it is powerful.” A former aide is quoted as claiming that the President’s use is far from subtle, a way of “marking his territory”. Former minister Stanislas Guerini is also found stating that “everyone holds their breath for a few moments before [his] arrival.” That’s if we believe the findings of Le Parisien journalist Olivier Beaumont in The Tragedy of the Élysée (La Tragédie de L’Élysée).

    The field of scent and odours teems with what might be loosely called analysis of the self-evident and palpably obvious. Scent is worn for calculated reasons: for impression, the pursuit of sex, an expression of power. An article in Women’s Wear Daily from June 1990 is pungent with examples, much of it featuring garden gnome psychology. “Those who select a different fragrance for every occasion use scents as a means of shaping their social image,” Mark Snyder, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota is quoted as saying. “All odors trigger an emotional response,” one Susan Schiffman, medical psychologist at Duke University blandly states.

    According to the book, Macron’s choice of fragrant dousing is driven by power – and ensuring that everyone else working with him knows about it. “Just as Louis XIV made his perfumes an attribute of power when he paraded through the galleries of Versailles, Emmanuel Macron uses his as an element of his authority at the Élysée.”

    These revelations about Macron’s excessive use have caused something of a ripple. “It is one thing at a school dance or nightclub when you are a horny teen,” writes Zoe Strimpel in The Spectator. “Outside of these contexts, it can be a nauseating, terrible thing.” The Daily Telegraph dives into the shallow currents of social media to use the term“blusher blindness”, meant to signify “an inability to objectively gauge how much blusher one is applying – often resulting in overly roughed cheeks.”

    Tips are offered for Macron with unasked, hollow generosity, many amounting to a shoddy excuse to plump for preferred products. (The “Mr President Could Do Far Better” discipline.) Fragrance journalist (they do exist), Alice du Parcq is more than up to the task. “Scent can be truly very potent, so if you’re spending time in close proximity to a lot of other people you should be a little more gentle with your approach,” she chides. Avoid, she advocates, spraying on wrists. Why not the top of each forearm? “This makes the scent last longer as it’s less likely to come off every time you wash your hands.” The fragrance lingers, as “the skin is more textured and it also clings to an arm hair, which is porous.”

    The advertising note emerges from the opinions of Thomas Dunckley, who markets himself as “fragrance expert, writer, trainer, event host and speaker”. He suggests that products less concentrated in fragrance oils might be appropriate when seeking a balance. “An eau de cologne is a good way for a man to wear a pleasant fragrance without making a statement or overpowering.” He throws in the recommended products: Eau de Guerlain and Acqua di Parma.

    The disciplinarian view is most evident in the commentary that accuses the French leader of revealing a character fault. As with one of his predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy, size and stature are matters of comment regarding Macron, implying that a manufactured defect requires remedies of exaggeration. Small men demand large substitutes, broad covers, gargantuan distractions. The spare frame will not do.

    If one has to use perfume, suggests Strimpel, why not do so differently? “A French leader might, one would think, go for something more openly, proudly elite, since he is not hamstrung by the modern British obsession with appearing to be one of the people,” she squawks. A fault is swiftly detected: immaturity. Perhaps Macron confused his abode of power with the school where he met his wife, Brigitte, “planting the seed (or perhaps it was the scent?) that would eventually lead her to return his passion.”

    The fragrance analysts and perfumeries will be delighted to know that a head of state is so enamoured with a specific product. Those wishing to make a fuss about workplace attitudes and dispositions will also add, and have added, their worthless observations. Ultimately, the use, or otherwise, of French power would not come down to a fragrance but a decision marked by other considerations. The fragrance cabal and tabloid titterers may have you think otherwise.

    The post Perfume, Power and Emmanuel Macron appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Perfume, Power, and Emmanuel Macron

    Apparently, he is addicted to it. The French President, Emmanuel Macron, adores using perfume. The variety: Dior Eau Sauvage. Dior states that the perfume is characterised by notes of Calabrian bergamot and Papua New Guinean vanilla extract. The company is also keen to glorify elements of power and nobility in the scent.

    Apparently, the use of that particular fragrance by the France’s head of state happens to be “industrial” in application, “at all hours of the day”, intended to impress “less-accustomed visitors” with “the floral and musky scent, as refined as it is powerful.” A former aide is quoted as claiming that the President’s use is far from subtle, a way of “marking his territory”. Former minister Stanislas Guerini is also found stating that “everyone holds their breath for a few moments before [his] arrival.” That’s if we believe the findings of Le Parisien journalist Olivier Beaumont in The Tragedy of the Élysée (La Tragédie de L’Élysée).

    The field of scent and odours teems with what might be loosely called analysis of the self-evident and palpably obvious. Scent is worn for calculated reasons: for impression, the pursuit of sex, an expression of power. An article in Women’s Wear Daily from June 1990 is pungent with examples, much of it featuring garden gnome psychology. “Those who select a different fragrance for every occasion use scents as a means of shaping their social image,” Mark Snyder, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota is quoted as saying. “All odors trigger an emotional response,” one Susan Schiffman, medical psychologist at Duke University blandly states.

    According to the book, Macron’s choice of fragrant dousing is driven by power – and ensuring that everyone else working with him knows about it. “Just as Louis XIV made his perfumes an attribute of power when he paraded through the galleries of Versailles, Emmanuel Macron uses his as an element of his authority at the Élysée.”

    These revelations about Macron’s excessive use have caused something of a ripple. “It is one thing at a school dance or nightclub when you are a horny teen,” writes Zoe Strimpel in The Spectator. “Outside of these contexts, it can be a nauseating, terrible thing.” The Daily Telegraph dives into the shallow currents of social media to use the term “blusher blindness”, meant to signify “an inability to objectively gauge how much blusher one is applying – often resulting in overly roughed cheeks.”

    Tips are offered for Macron with unasked, hollow generosity, many amounting to a shoddy excuse to plump for preferred products. (The “Mr President Could Do Far Better” discipline.) Fragrance journalist (they do exist), Alice du Parcq is more than up to the task. “Scent can be truly very potent, so if you’re spending time in close proximity to a lot of other people you should be a little more gentle with your approach,” she chides. Avoid, she advocates, spraying on wrists. Why not the top of each forearm? “This makes the scent last longer as it’s less likely to come off every time you wash your hands.” The fragrance lingers, as “the skin is more textured and it also clings to an arm hair, which is porous.”

    The advertising note emerges from the opinions of Thomas Dunckley, who markets himself as “fragrance expert, writer, trainer, event host and speaker”. He suggests that products less concentrated in fragrance oils might be appropriate when seeking a balance. “An eau de cologne is a good way for a man to wear a pleasant fragrance without making a statement or overpowering.” He throws in the recommended products: Eau de Guerlain and Acqua di Parma.

    The disciplinarian view is most evident in the commentary that accuses the French leader of revealing a character fault. As with one of his predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy, size and stature are matters of comment regarding Macron, implying that a manufactured defect requires remedies of exaggeration. Small men demand large substitutes, broad covers, gargantuan distractions. The spare frame will not do.

    If one has to use perfume, suggests Strimpel, why not do so differently? “A French leader might, one would think, go for something more openly, proudly elite, since he is not hamstrung by the modern British obsession with appearing to be one of the people,” she squawks. A fault is swiftly detected: immaturity. Perhaps Macron confused his abode of power with the school where he met his wife, Brigitte, “planting the seed (or perhaps it was the scent?) that would eventually lead her to return his passion.”

    The fragrance analysts and perfumeries will be delighted to know that a head of state is so enamoured with a specific product. Those wishing to make a fuss about workplace attitudes and dispositions will also add, and have added, their worthless observations. Ultimately, the use, or otherwise, of French power would not come down to a fragrance but a decision marked by other considerations. The fragrance cabal and tabloid titterers may have you think otherwise.

    The post Perfume, Power, and Emmanuel Macron first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Junk Science and Bad Policing: The Homicide Prediction Project

    Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

    The law enforcement breed can be a pretty dark lot.  To be paid to think suspiciously leaves its mark, fostering an incentive to identify crimes and misdemeanours with instinctive compulsion.  Historically, this saw the emergence of quackery and bogus attempts to identify criminal tendencies.  Craniometry and skull size was, for a time, an attractive pursuit for the aspiring crime hunter and lunatic sleuth.  The crime fit the skull.

    With the onset of facial recognition technologies, we are seeing the same old habits appear, with their human creators struggling to identify the best means of eliminating compromising biases.  A paper published by IBM researchers in April 2019 titled “Diversity in Faces” shows that doing so ends up returning to old grounds of quackery, including the use of “craniofacial distances, areas and ratios, facial symmetry and contrast, skin color, age and gender predictions, subjective annotations, and pose and resolution.”

    The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in identifying a form of predictive criminality perpetuates similar sins.  Police, to that end, have consistently shown themselves unable to resist the attractions supposedly offered by data programs and algorithmic orderings, however sophisticated.  These can take such crude forms as those advanced by Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco, a devotee of that oxymoronic pursuit “intelligence-led policing,” stacked with its snake oil properties.  A 2020 Tampa Bay Times piece on the exploits of that Florida county’s sheriff’s office made it clear that Nocco was keen on creating “a cutting-edge intelligence program that could stop crime before it happened.”

    The counter to this was impressive in its savagery.  Such forms of law enforcement featured, in the view of criminologist David Kennedy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, “One of the worst manifestations of the intersection of junk science and bad policing”, in addition to its utter lack of “common sense and humanity”.

    The trend towards data heavy systems that supposedly offer insight into inherent, potential criminality has captured police departments in numerous countries.  A recommendation paper from the European Crime Prevention Network notes the use of “AI tools in hopes of rendering law enforcement more effective and cost-efficient” across the European Union.  Predictive policing is singled out as particularly attractive, notably as a response to smaller budgets and fewer staff.

    In the United Kingdom, the government’s Ministry of Justice has taken to AI with gusto through the Homicide Prediction Project, a pilot program that hoovers up data from police and government data sets to generate profiles and assess the risk of a person committing murder.  The program, commissioned by the Prime Minister’s Office in 2023 and involving the MoJ, the Home Office, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) and the Metropolitan Police in London, only came to light because of a Freedom of Information request by the charity Statewatch.

    According to the Data and Analysis unit within the MoJ the data science program explores “the power of MOJ datasets in relation to assessment of homicide risk”, the “additional power of the Police National Computer dataset” in doing the same, and “the additional power of local police data”.  It also seeks to review the characteristics of offenders that increase such a risk, exploring “alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment and homicide.”

    What stands out in the program is the type of data shared between the agencies.  These include types of criminal convictions, the age a person first appeared as a victim (this includes domestic violence), and the age a person had their first encounter with the police. But also included are such matters as “health markers which are expected to have predictive power”, be they on mental health, addiction issues, suicide, self-harm and disability.

    The use of predictive models is far from new for the wonks at the MoJ.  Those used in the Offender Assessment System (OASys) have been previously found to profile people differently in accordance with their ethnicities.  The National Offender Management service noted in a 2015 compendium of research and analysis of the system between 2009 and 2013, “Relative predictive validity was greater for female than male offenders, for White offenders than offenders of Asian, Black and Mixed ethnicity, and for older than  younger offenders.”

    Statewatch researcher Sofia Lyall has little to recommend the program, renamed for evidently more palatable consumption the Sharing Data to Improve Risk Assessment program. “Time and again, research shows that algorithmic systems for ‘predicting’ crime are inherently flawed.”  The Homicide Prediction Project was “chilling and dystopian”, profiling individuals “as criminals before they have done anything.”  She is also convinced that the system will, as with others, “code in bias towards racialized and low-income communities” while posing grave threats to privacy.

    The unit claims that the work is only intended for dry research purposes, with “no direct operational or policy changes” arising because of it, or any individual application to a “person’s journey through the justice system.”  This is a nonsensical assertion, given the sheer temptations open to officials to implement a program that uses hefty data sets in order to ease the task of rigorous policing.  The representatives of law enforcement crave results, even those poorly arrived at, and algorithmic expediency and actuarial fantasy is there to aid them.  The “precrime” dystopia portrayed in Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report (1956) is well on its way to being realised.

    The post Junk Science and Bad Policing: The Homicide Prediction Project appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Junk Science and Bad Policing: The Homicide Prediction Project

    The law enforcement breed can be a pretty dark lot.  To be paid to think suspiciously leaves its mark, fostering an incentive to identify crimes and misdemeanours with instinctive compulsion.  Historically, this saw the emergence of quackery and bogus attempts to identify criminal tendencies.  Craniometry and skull size was, for a time, an attractive pursuit for the aspiring crime hunter and lunatic sleuth.  The crime fit the skull.

    With the onset of facial recognition technologies, we are seeing the same old habits appear, with their human creators struggling to identify the best means of eliminating compromising biases.  A paper published by IBM researchers in April 2019 titled “Diversity in Faces” shows that doing so ends up returning to old grounds of quackery, including the use of “craniofacial distances, areas and ratios, facial symmetry and contrast, skin color, age and gender predictions, subjective annotations, and pose and resolution.”

    The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in identifying a form of predictive criminality perpetuates similar sins.  Police, to that end, have consistently shown themselves unable to resist the attractions supposedly offered by data programs and algorithmic orderings, however sophisticated.  These can take such crude forms as those advanced by Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco, a devotee of that oxymoronic pursuit “intelligence-led policing,” stacked with its snake oil properties.  A 2020 Tampa Bay Times piece on the exploits of that Florida county’s sheriff’s office made it clear that Nocco was keen on creating “a cutting-edge intelligence program that could stop crime before it happened.”

    The counter to this was impressive in its savagery.  Such forms of law enforcement featured, in the view of criminologist David Kennedy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, “One of the worst manifestations of the intersection of junk science and bad policing”, in addition to its utter lack of “common sense and humanity”.

    The trend towards data heavy systems that supposedly offer insight into inherent, potential criminality has captured police departments in numerous countries.  A recommendation paper from the European Crime Prevention Network notes the use of “AI tools in hopes of rendering law enforcement more effective and cost-efficient” across the European Union.  Predictive policing is singled out as particularly attractive, notably as a response to smaller budgets and fewer staff.

    In the United Kingdom, the government’s Ministry of Justice has taken to AI with gusto through the Homicide Prediction Project, a pilot program that hoovers up data from police and government data sets to generate profiles and assess the risk of a person committing murder.  The program, commissioned by the Prime Minister’s Office in 2023 and involving the MoJ, the Home Office, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) and the Metropolitan Police in London, only came to light because of a Freedom of Information request by the charity Statewatch.

    According to the Data and Analysis unit within the MoJ the data science program explores “the power of MOJ datasets in relation to assessment of homicide risk”, the “additional power of the Police National Computer dataset” in doing the same, and “the additional power of local police data”.  It also seeks to review the characteristics of offenders that increase such a risk, exploring “alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment and homicide.”

    What stands out in the program is the type of data shared between the agencies.  These include types of criminal convictions, the age a person first appeared as a victim (this includes domestic violence), and the age a person had their first encounter with the police. But also included are such matters as “health markers which are expected to have predictive power”, be they on mental health, addiction issues, suicide, self-harm and disability.

    The use of predictive models is far from new for the wonks at the MoJ.  Those used in the Offender Assessment System (OASys) have been previously found to profile people differently in accordance with their ethnicities.  The National Offender Management service noted in a 2015 compendium of research and analysis of the system between 2009 and 2013, “Relative predictive validity was greater for female than male offenders, for White offenders than offenders of Asian, Black and Mixed ethnicity, and for older than  younger offenders.”

    Statewatch researcher Sofia Lyall has little to recommend the program, renamed for evidently more palatable consumption the Sharing Data to Improve Risk Assessment program. “Time and again, research shows that algorithmic systems for ‘predicting’ crime are inherently flawed.”  The Homicide Prediction Project was “chilling and dystopian”, profiling individuals “as criminals before they have done anything.”  She is also convinced that the system will, as with others, “code in bias towards racialized and low-income communities” while posing grave threats to privacy.

    The unit claims that the work is only intended for dry research purposes, with “no direct operational or policy changes” arising because of it, or any individual application to a “person’s journey through the justice system.”  This is a nonsensical assertion, given the sheer temptations open to officials to implement a program that uses hefty data sets in order to ease the task of rigorous policing.  The representatives of law enforcement crave results, even those poorly arrived at, and algorithmic expediency and actuarial fantasy is there to aid them.  The “precrime” dystopia portrayed in Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report (1956) is well on its way to being realised.

    The post Junk Science and Bad Policing: The Homicide Prediction Project first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.