World Press Freedom Day is a poignant reminder that journalists and media workers are essential for a healthy, functioning society — including the Pacific.
Held annually on May 3, World Press Freedom Day prompts governments about the need to respect press freedom, while serving as a day of reflection among media professionals about issues of press freedom and professional ethics.
Just as importantly, World Press Freedom Day is a day of support for media which are targets for the restraint, or abolition, of press freedom.
It is also a day of remembrance for those journalists who lost their lives in the pursuit of a story.
According to Reporters Without Borders, the press freedom situation has worsened in the Asia-Pacific region, where 26 of the 32 countries and territories have seen their scores fall in the 2024 World Press Freedom Index.
The region’s dictatorial governments have been tightening their hold over news and information with increasing vigour.
No country in the Asia-Pacific region is among the Index’s top 15 this year, with Aotearoa New Zealand falling six places to 19. [Editor’s note: these figures are outdated — from last year’s 2024 Index. Go to the 2025 index here).
Although experiencing challenges to the right to information, other regional democracies such as Timor-Leste (20th), Samoa (22nd) and Taiwan (27th) have also retained their roles as press freedom models.
Storytelling a vital art
Storytelling is inherent in Pacific peoples, and it is vital this art is nurtured, and our narrative is heard loud and clear — a priority goal for Pacific Cooperation Broadcasting Limited (PCBL) and Pasifika TV.
Chief executive officer of PCBL Natasha Meleisea says Pacific-led storytelling is critical to regional identity, but like all media around the world, it faces all sorts of challenges and issues.
“Some of those current concerns include the need for journalism to remain independent, as well as the constructive use of technology, notably AI and that it supports the truth and does not undermine it,” Meleisea said.
Forums such as the Pacific Media Summit are critical to addressing, and finding a collective response to the various challenges, she added.
Resilient media sector
Meleisea said some solutions to these issues were being implemented, to provide a resilient and sustainable media sector in the Pacific.
“It is a matter of getting creative, and looking at alternative platforms for content, as well as seeking international funding and building an infrastructure which supports these new goals,” she says.
“There is no doubt journalists and media workers are essential for a healthy, functioning society and when done right, journalism can hold those in power to account, amplify underrepresented stories, bolster democratic ideals, and spread crucial information to the public.
“With press freedom increasingly under threat, we must protect Pacific story sovereignty, and our voice at the table.”
Republished from Pasifika TV strategic communications.
An international NGO seeking to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza by sea says it has been in talks with Malta’s government about allowing a ship to enter Maltese waters to repair damage caused by a drone attack.
The ship named Conscience, operated by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), suffered damage to its front section including a loss of power when it was hit by two drones just outside Maltese territorial waters in the central Mediterranean early on Friday, the NGO said yesterday.
The coalition, an international non-governmental group, blamed Israel — which has blockaded, bombarded and starved Gaza — for the attack, reports Al Jazeera.
The Conscience, which set off from Tunisia, had been waiting to take on board some 30 peace and humanitarian activists from around the world before trying to sail to Gaza in the eastern Mediterranean.
The ship had been trying to deliver aid, including food and medicines, to the besieged enclave, where aid groups warn people are struggling to survive following a two-month total blockade by Israel.
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg said she was in Malta and had been planning to board the ship as part of the flotilla.
Prime Minister Robert Abela said yesterday that Malta was prepared to assist the ship with necessary repairs so that it could continue on its journey, once it was satisfied that the vessel held only humanitarian aid.
Ensuring safety
Coalition officials said yesterday that the ship was in no danger of sinking, but that they wanted to ensure it would be safe from further attacks while undergoing repairs, and able to sail out again.
Earlier yesterday, the coalition accused Malta of impeding access to its ship. Malta denied the claim, saying the crew had refused assistance and even refused to allow a surveyor on board to assess the damage.
Maltese authorities must permit the ‘Conscience’ immediate safe passage into Maltese waters, and provide all needed assistance as well as protection for the ship and all those on board. #BreakTheSiegehttps://t.co/4da8t80adJ
— Freedom Flotilla Coalition (@GazaFFlotilla) May 4, 2025
“The FFC would like to clarify our commitment to engagement with [Maltese] authorities to expedite the temporary docking of our ship for repairs and surveyors, so we can continue on the urgent humanitarian mission to Gaza,” the coalition said in a statement later in the day.
A Malta government spokesman said its offer was to assist in repairs out at sea once the boat’s cargo was verified to be aid.
Coalition officials said the surveyor was welcome to board as part of a deal being negotiated with Malta.
Israel blocked humitarian aid
Israel halted humanitarian aid to Gaza two months ago, shortly before it broke a ceasefire and restarted its war against Hamas, which has devastated the Palestinian enclave and killed more than 62,000 people.
Another NGO ship on a similar mission to Gaza in 2010 was stopped and boarded by Israeli troops, and nine activists were killed with a wounded 10th victim dying later. Other such ships have similarly been stopped and boarded, with activists arrested.
The New Zealand humanitarian charity Kia Ora Gaza is affiliated with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and a number of New Zealanders have participated in the FFC efforts to break the siege over the past decade.
Hamas issued a statement about the attack off Malta, accusing Israel of “piracy” and “state terrorism”.
Australia (ranked 29th) and New Zealand (ranked 16th) are cited as positive examples by Reporters Without Borders in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index of commitment to public media development aid, showing support through regional media development such as in the Pacific Islands.
The 2025 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has revealed the dire state of the news economy and how it severely threatens newsrooms’ editorial independence and media pluralism.
In light of this alarming situation, RSF has called on public authorities, private actors and regional institutions to commit to a “New Deal for Journalism” by following 11 key recommendations.
The media’s economic fragility has emerged as one of the foremost threats to press freedom.
According to the findings of the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, the overall conditions for practising journalism are poor (categorised as “difficult” or “very serious”) in half of the world’s countries.
When looking at the economic conditions alone, that figure becomes three-quarters.
Concrete commitments are urgently needed to preserve press freedom, uphold the right to reliable information, and lift the media out of the destructive economic spiral endangering their independence and survival.
That is where a New Deal for Journalism comes in.
The 11 RSF recommendations for a New Deal for Journalism:
1. Protect media pluralism through economic regulation Media outlets are not like other businesses and journalism does not provide services like other industries.
Although most news outlets are private entities, they serve the public interest by ensuring citizens’ access to reliable information, a fundamental pillar of democracy.
Media pluralism must therefore be guaranteed, both at market level and by ensuring individual newsrooms reflect a variety of ideas and viewpoints, regardless of who owns them.
In France (25th), debates around media ownership consolidation — particularly involving the Bolloré Group — have highlighted the risks to media pluralism.
In South Africa (27th), the Competition Commission is considering solutions to mitigate the threats posed by giant online platforms to the pluralism of the digital information space.
RSF 2025 World Press Freedom Index summary. Video: RSF
2. Adopt the JTI as a common standard News outlets, tech giants, and governments should embrace the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI), an international standard for journalism.
More than 2000 media outlets in 119 countries are already engaged in the JTI certification process. Launched by RSF, the JTI acts as a common professional reference that does not judge an outlet’s content but evaluates the processes in its production of information, improving transparency around media ownership and editorial procedures, and promoting trustworthy outlets.
This certification provides a foundation to guide public funding, inform indexing and ranking policies, and enable online platforms and search engines to highlight reliable information while protecting themselves against disinformation campaigns.
3. Establish advertisers’ democratic responsibility Governments should introduce the principle that companies have a responsibility to help uphold democracy, similar to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Advertisers should be the first to adopt this concept as a priority, as their decision to shift their budgets to online platforms — or, worse, websites that fuel disinformation — makes them partially responsible for the economic decline of journalism.
Advertisers should be encouraged to link their advertising investments to criteria on reliability and journalistic ethics. Aligning advertising strategies with the public interest is vital for fostering a healthy media ecosystem and maintaining democracies.
This notion of a democratic responsibility for companies has notably been promoted by the steering committee of the French General Assembly of Information (États généraux de l’information) and may be included in the bill that will be examined in 2025 by the French National Assembly.
4. Regulate the gatekeepers of online information Democratic states must require digital platforms to ensure that reliable sources of information are visible to the public and remunerated.
The European Union’s Copyright Directive and Australia’s (29th) News Media Bargaining Code in — the first legislation regulating Google and Facebook — are two examples of legally requiring major platforms to pay for online journalistic content.
Canada (ranked 21st) has undertaken similar reforms but has faced strong resistance, particularly from Meta, which has retaliated by removing news content from its platforms.
To ensure the economic value generated by online journalistic content is fairly distributed, these types of laws must be broadly adopted and their effective implementation must be guaranteed.
Public authorities must also ensure fair negotiations so that media outlets are not crushed by the current imbalance of power between economically fragile news companies and global tech giants.
Lastly, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has made the need for fair remuneration for content creators all the more urgent, as their work is now used to train or feed AI models. This is simply the latest example of why regulation is necessary to protect journalistic content from new forms of technological exploitation.
To mark World Press Freedom Day, 3 May, Europeans Without Borders (ESF), Cartooning for Peace and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) have joined forces for Caricartoons, a campaign celebrating press freedom. Image: RSF screenshot PMW
5. Introduce a tax on tech giants to fund quality information The goal of introducing such a tax should be to redistribute all or part of the revenue unfairly captured by digital giants to the detriment of the media. The proceeds would be redirected to news media outlets and would finance the production of reliable information.
Several countries have already committed to reforms that tax major digital platforms, but almost none are specifically aimed at supporting the production of quality information from independent sources.
Indonesia (127th) implemented a tax on foreign digital services, while also requiring platforms to remunerate media outlets for the use of their content starting in 2024. France also established a specific tax on digital companies’ revenues in 2019.
6. Use public development aid to combat news deserts and strengthen reliable information from independent sources As crises, conflicts and authoritarian regimes multiply, supporting reliable information from independent sources and countering emerging news deserts has never been more important.
Official Development Assistance (ODA) must incorporate support for independent journalism, recognising that it is indispensable not only for economic development but also for strengthening democratic governance and promoting peace.
At least 1 percent of ODA should be allocated to financing independent media outlets in order to guarantee their sustainability.
At a time when certain support mechanisms — such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — are under threat, commitments from donor states are more crucial than ever.
Australia (ranked 29th) and New Zealand (ranked 16th) are positive examples of this commitment, showing support through regional media development programmes, notably in the Pacific Islands.
7. Encourage the development of hybrid and other innovative funding models It is essential to develop support mechanisms that combine public funding with private contributions (donations, investments, and loans), such as the IFRUM, a fund proposed by RSF to reconstruct the media in Ukraine (62nd).
To diversify funding sources, states could strengthen tax incentives for investors and broaden the call for donors beyond their own residents and taxpayers.
8. Guarantee transparency and independence in the allocation of media aid Granting public or private subsidies to the media must be based on objective and transparent criteria that are subject to oversight by civil society. Only clear, equitable aid distribution can safeguard editorial independence and protect media outlets from political interference.
One such legislative solution is the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), which will come into force in 2025 across all European Union member states. It includes transparency requirements for aid distribution, obliges member states to guarantee the editorial independence of newsrooms, and mandates safeguards against political pressure.
Other countries have also established exemplary frameworks, such as Canada (21st), which has implemented a transparent system combining tax credits and subsidies while ensuring editorial independence.
9. Combat the erosion of public service media Public service media are not state media: they are independent actors, funded by citizens to fulfil a public interest mission. Their role is to guarantee universal access to reliable, diverse information from independent sources, serving social cohesion and democracy.
Financial and political attacks against these outlets — seen in many countries — threaten the public’s access to trustworthy information.
10. Strengthen media literacy and journalism training Supporting reliable information means that everyone should be trained from an early age to recognise trustworthy information and be involved in media education initiatives. University and higher education programmes in journalism must also be supported, on the condition that they are independent.
Finland (5th) is recognised worldwide for its media education, with media literacy programmes starting in primary school, contributing to greater resilience against disinformation.
11. Encourage nations to join and implement international initiatives, such as the Partnership for Information and Democracy The International Partnership for Information and Democracy, which promotes a global communication and information space that is free, pluralistic and reliable, already counts more than fifty signatory countries.
RSF stresses that journalism is a vital common good at a time when democracies are faltering.
This New Deal is a call to collectively rebuild the foundations of a free, trustworthy, and pluralistic public space.
Republished by Pacific Media Watch in collaboration with Reporters Without Borders.
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka has paid tribute to all those working the media industry in his message to mark World Press Freedom Day.
He said in his May 3 message thanks to democracy his coalition government had removed the “dark days of oppression and suppressions”.
“Today as we join the rest of the international community in celebrating World Press Freedom Day, let us recommit ourselves to the values and ideals of our fundamental human rights freedom of expression and the freedom of the press,” said Rabuka, a former coup leader.
RNZ Pacific reports Moce was left paralysed and bedridden in 2007 after being assaulted by soldiers shortly after the 2006 military coup.
“Today is also an opportune time to remember those in the media fraternity that made the ultimate sacrifice.”
‘Brave photographer’
“In particular, I pay tribute to my ‘Yaca’ (namesake), the late Sitiveni Moce who died in 2015.
“This brave newspaper photographer was set upon by a mob in Parliament House in 2000, and again by some members of the disciplined forces in 2007 for simply carrying out his job which was to capture history in still photographs.
“His death is a sombre reminder of the fickleness of life, and how we must never ever take our freedoms for granted.”
An 11th-hour blitzkrieg for the Australian election 2025 tomorrow claims the Greens are enabling extremists who “will do anything in their power to establish a worldwide Islamic Caliphate”. Wendy Bacon and Yaakov Aharon investigate the Dark Money election.
SPECIAL REPORT: By Wendy Bacon and Yaakov Aharon
Minority Impact Coalition is a shadowy organisation which appeared on Australia’s political landscape in February of this year.
According to its constitution, its object is to promote “mutual respect and tolerance between groups of people in Australia by actively countering racism and bringing widespread understanding and tolerance amongst all sectors of the community”.
However, it is spreading ignorance, fear and Islamophobia to millions of mostly male Australians living in the outer suburbs and the regions.
Advance is ‘transparent … easy to deal with’ Speaking to an Australian Jewish Association webinar, Roslyn Mendelle, who is of Israeli-American origin and a director of Minority Impact Coalition (MIC), said the rightwing Advance introduced her to the concept of a third party.
“Advance has been nothing but absolutely honest, transparent, direct, and easy to deal with,” Mendelle said.
The electoral laws, which many say are “broken by design”, mean that it will be several months before MIC’s major donors are revealed. Donors making repeated donations below $15,900 are unlisted “dark money”. (This threshold will change to $5000 in 2026).
Who’s paying to undermine Australian democracy? Scam of the week Video: MWM
Coming in second place, are the returns from the Australian Taxation Office.
In NSW, it is targeting Greens candidates everywhere and is also focussed on the Labor-held seat of Gilmore, challenged by Liberal Party candidate Andrew Constance.
Independent journalist Alex McKinnon reported that MIC spokesperson and midwife, Sharon Stoliar, wrote in an open letter:
“When you chant ‘from the river to the sea Palestine will be free’ . . . while wearing NSW Health uniforms, you are representing NSW Health in a call for genocide of Jews. YOU. ARE. SUPPORTING. TERRORISM… I. WILL. REPORT. YOU.”
Its campaign material is authorised by Joshu Turier, a retired boxer and right-wing extremist.
According to Facebook library, MIC’s ads are targeted at men, particularly between ages 35 and 54 in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales.
In mid-April, the group paid for an ad so extreme that Instagram pulled it, leading to Turier reposting on his own Facebook page again this week. He complained that “It’s beyond troubling when our media platforms remove simple, factual material.”
They are ‘coming for us’ {Editor … oh no!} By Wednesday, the video was back on MIC’s Facebook account. The video says that the Greens are deliberately enabling pro-Palestine student protesters, who
“Don’t actually believe in the concept of a nation. They don’t believe in borders. They don’t believe there is a national identity. They believe in the Islamic brotherhood.”
“. . . It is just the beginning. When antisemitism starts, it’s not going to stop. They are going to come for Christians, for Atheists, for Agnostics.”
MIC is spending big on billboards, campaign trucks, and professional videos targeting at least five electorates. But despite their big spending, they cannot be found on the Australian Electoral Commission transparency register.
According to the transparency advocacy group WhoTargets.Me, MIC has spent more than $50,000 on Google and Meta ads in the last month alone. This doesn’t account for billboards, trucks, labour, or the 200,000 addresses letterboxed in late March.
More investigation shows their donations will all flow through the QJ Collective Ltd (QJC), which also “powers” the Minority Impact Coalition website. QJC is registered as a significant third party with the Australian Electoral Commission.
Clones with ghost offices
Advance director Sandra Bourke and Roslyn Mendelle. Image: QJ Collective, Instagram
MIC and Queensland Jewish Collective are virtually identical. They have always had the same directors — with Azin Naghibi replacing Roslyn’s partner, Hava Mendelle, as both QJC and MIC director in March 2025.
When QJC first came to MWM’snotice last year, it was running a relatively well-funded campaign — although limited to several seats — to “Put the Greens Last” in the Queensland state election.
In September 2024, the group’s website stated that it was “non-partisan and not left or right-wing”, and that its “goal was to support Queenslanders in making informed decisions when voting for our leaders”. MIC is the vehicle for this campaign.
Today, neither the QJC nor MIC makes any such claim. The Collective’s website lists its leading “campaign’” as “exposing the two-faced nature of the Labor party”.
The alarming detail While the two “grassroots” groups share several of their total five different associated addresses, mostly consisting of shared offices, it is not a perfect match.
For both groups, directors Mendelle and Turier list their address as 470 St Pauls Terrace, Fortitude Valley, Queensland. There was no name or company, just an address, however, shared offices run by Jubilee Place are available at that location.
QJC and MIC director Naghibi lists her address on both extracts as 740 St Pauls Terrace, a non-commercial building.
Either Mendelle and Turier are living out of a shared office, or Naghibi is unable to remember the address of the shared office she has little real connection to.
Last year, MWM contacted the owners of QJC’s listed office address at Insolvency Company Accountants in Tewantin, Queensland. At first, the firm said that no one had heard of them. Following that, the firm said that the Collective is a client of the firm, however denied any further connection.
A fresh search this year showed an additional contact address listed by the grassroots Collective — this time 1700 km away — at 1250 Malvern Road, Malvern, Victoria. Again there was no name or company, just an address.
Located at that address is boutique accounting firm Greenberg & Co, which specialises in serving clients who are “high net worth individuals”. MWM contacted senior partner Jay Greenberg who said his role was only one of ‘financial compliance’. He said that he did have personal views on the election but these were not relevant. He declined to discuss further details.
Attack of the clones Better Australia is a third party campaigner that, like QJ Collective in 2024, claims to be bipartisan.
Its communications are authorised by Sophie Calland, an active member of NSW Labor’s Alexandria Branch. Her husband Ofir Birenbaum — from the nearby Rosebery Branch — is also a member of the third party Better Australia.
Co-convenor of Labor Friends of Israel, Eric Roozendaal, and former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s secretary, Yaron Finkelstein, provided further campaign advice at a members meeting.
Patron of Labor Friends of Israel and former Senator Nova Peris teamed up with Better Australia for a campaign video last week.
“When Greens leader Adam Bandt refuses to stand in front of the Australian flag,” Peris said, “I ask, how can you possibly stand for our country?”
Better Australia’s stated goal is to campaign for a major government “regardless of which major party is in office”.
The group urges voters to “put the Greens and Teals last”, warning that a Labor minority government would be chaos. The “non-partisan” third party has made no statements on the Liberal-National Coalition, nor on a minority government with One Nation.
Some Better Australia workers — who wear bright yellow jackets labelled “community advisor” — are paid, and others volunteer.
“Isabella” told MWM that her enlistment as a volunteer for the third party campaigner is “not political” — rather it is all “about Israel”.
Previously Isabella had protested in support of the Israeli hostages and prisoners of war held in Gaza.
Better Australia’s “community advisor” “Isabella” at a Bondi Junction polling booth. Image: Wendy Bacon/MWM
Another campaigner told us he was paid by Better Australia. He spoke little English and declined to say more.
Two schoolgirls campaigning at Rose Bay told MWM that they were paid by their father who had chaired a Better Australia meeting the previous evening. They declined to disclose his name.
Calland addressing her Israeli volunteers. Image: Better Australia/Instagram/MWM
MWM later interviewed this woman who is an Israeli on a working holiday visa. She was supporting the campaign because it fits her political “vision”: the Greens and independent MPs like Allegra Spender must be removed from office because they are “against Israel” and for a “Free Palestine” which would mean the end of “my country”.
Allegra Spender denies these assertions.
Greens leader Adam Bandt remained determinedly optimistic, telling MWM that organisations such as Better Australia and MIC,
“are able to run their disinformation campaigns because Australia has no truth in political advertising laws, which enables them to lie about the priorities of the Greens and crossbench without consequence, as well as huge corporate money flowing into politics.
“In this term of Parliament, Labor failed to progress truth in political advertising laws, and instead did a dirty deal with the Liberals on electoral reforms to try and shut out third parties and independents.”
Labor’s candidate for Wentworth, Savannah Peake, told MWM on Tuesday that she had known Calland for 18 months.
Peake said that while she knew Calland had previously founded Better Council, she had only discovered Calland was authorising Better Australia when she arrived at the booth that morning.
Peake told MWM that she had contacted the NSW Labor Head Office to voice her objections and was confident the issue would be “dealt with swiftly”.
The third party campaign runs contrary to Peake’s preferences, which tells supporters in Wentworth to vote #1 Labor and #2 Allegra Spender. MWM repeatedly tried to follow up with Peake throughout the week to find out what action NSW Labor had taken but received no reply.
Liberal candidate for Wentworth, Ro Knox, complies with Better Australia’s call to put Greens last on her voting preferences.
Many people in NSW Labor know about their fellow members’ involvement in Better Australia. The Minister for Environment and MP for Sydney Tanya Plibersek, state member Ron Hoenig and NSW Labor have all previously refused to answer questions.
A Labor volunteer at a Wentworth pre-poll booth told MWM that he disapproved if a fellow party member was involved with the third party. Two older Labor volunteers were in disbelief, having incorrectly assumed that the anti-Teal posters were authorised by the Trumpet of Patriots party.
Another said he was aware of Calland’s activities but had decided “not to investigate” further.
Better Australia focuses on Richmond By the end of the week, Better Australia had left a trail of “Put the Greens last’ placards across Sydney’s Inner West, one of them outside the Cairo Takeaway cafe where the third party’s organiser Ofir Birenbaum was first exposed.
The third party have extended their polling campaign to the seat of Richmond, on the North coast of NSW where campaign sources are expecting more volunteers on election day.
As parties dash to the finishing line, they are calling for more donations to counter the astroturfers. According to website TheyTargetYou, the major parties alone have spent $11.5 million on Meta and Google ads over the last month.
Better Australia splurged $200,000 on ads targeting digital TV, social media, and the Australian Financial Review. Digital ads will continue in the final three days of the election, exploiting loopholes in the mandated political advertising blackout.
The Australian public has made little progress towards transparency in the current term of government.
Until reforms are made, Silicon Valley tech giants will continue to profit from dodgy ads and astroturfing groups sowing division with each Australian election cycle.
Wendy Bacon is an investigative journalist who was the Professor of Journalism at UTS. She worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism. She is a long-term supporter of a peaceful BDS and the Greens.
Yaakov Aharon is a Jewish-Australian living in Wollongong. He enjoys long walks on Wollongong Beach, unimpeded by Port Kembla smoke fumes and AUKUS submarines. The article was first published by Michael West Media and is republished with permission.
After a year and a half of war, nearly 200 Palestinian journalists have been killed by the Israeli army — including at least 43 slain on the job.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has brought multiple complaints before the International Criminal Court (ICC) and continues to tirelessly support Gazan journalists, working to halt the extraordinary bloodshed and the media blackout imposed on the strip.
“Journalists are being targeted and then slandered after their deaths,” RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin said during a recent RSF demonstration in Paris in solidarity with Gazan journalists.
“I have never before seen a war in which, when a journalist is killed, you are told they are really a ‘terrorist’.”
The journalists gathered together with the main organisations defending French media workers and press freedom on April 16 in front of the steps of the Opéra-Bastille to condemn the news blackout and the fate of Palestinian journalists.
The slaughter of journalists is one of the largest media massacres this century being carried out as part of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
RSF said there was “every reason to believe that the Israeli army is seeking to establish a total silence about what is happening in Gaza”.
This was being done by preventing the international press from entering the territory freely and by targeting those who, on the ground, continue to bear witness despite the risks.
Mobilisation of journalists in Paris, France, in solidarity with their Gazan colleagues. Video: RSF
Last year, Palestinian journalists covering Gaza were named as laureates of the 2024 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize, following the recommendation of an International Jury of media professionals.
The advocacy group Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa has condemned the New Zealand government fpr failing to make a humanitarian submission to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearings at The Hague this week into Israel blocking vital supplies entering Gaza.
The ICJ’s ongoing investigation into Israeli genocide in the besieged enclave is now considering the illegality of Israel cutting off all food, water, fuel, medicine and other essential aid entering Gaza since early March.
Forty three countries and organisations have been submitting this week — including the small Pacific country Vanuatu (pop. 328,000) — but New Zealand is not on the list for making a submission.
Only Israel’s main backer, United States, and Hungary have argued in support of Tel Aviv while other nations have been highly critical.
“If even small countries, such as Vanuatu, can commit their meagre resources to go to make a case to the ICJ, then surely our government can at the very least do the same,” said PSNA national co-chair Maher Nazzal.
He said in a statement that the New Zealand government had gone “completely silent” on Israeli atrocities in Gaza.
“A year ago, the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister were making statements about how Israel must comply with international law,” Nazzal said
NZ ‘avoided blaming Israel’
“They carefully avoided blaming Israel for doing anything wrong, but they issued strong warnings, such as telling Israel that it should not attack the city of Rafah.
“Israel then bombed Rafah flat. The New Zealand response was to go completely silent.
Nazzal said Israeli ministers were quite open about driving Palestinians out of Gaza, so Israel could build Israeli settlements there.
PSNA co-chair Maher Nazzal . . . New Zealand response on Gaza is to “go completely silent”. Image: Asia Pacific Report
“And they are just as open about using starvation as a weapon,” he added.
“Our government says and does nothing. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had nothing to say about Gaza when he met British Prime Minister Keir Stamer in London earlier in the month.
“Yet Israel is perpetuating the holocaust of the 21st century under the noses of both Prime Ministers.”
Nazzal said that it was “deeply disappointing” that a nation which had so proudly invoked its history of standing against apartheid and of championing nuclear disarmament, yet chose to “not even appear on the sidelines” of the ICJ’s legal considerations.
ICJ examines Israel’s obligations in Occupied Palestine. Video: Middle East Eye
“New Zealand cannot claim to stand for a rules-based international order while selectively avoiding the rules when it comes to Palestine,” Nazzal said.
“We want the New Zealand government to urgently explain to the public its absence from the ICJ hearings.
“We need it to commit to participating in all future international legal processes to uphold Palestinian rights, and fulfil its ICJ obligations to impose sanctions on Israel to force its withdrawal from the Palestinian Occupied Territory.”
New Zealand’s Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) has upheld complaints about two 1News reports relating to violence around a football match in Amsterdam between local team Ajax and Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv.
The authority found an item on “antisemitic violence” surrounding the match, and another on heightened security in Paris the following week, breached the accuracy standard.
In a majority decision, the BSA upheld a complaint from John Minto on behalf of Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) about reporting on TVNZ’s 6pm 1News bulletin on 9 November 2024.
This comprised a trailer reporting “antisemitic violence”, an introduction by the presenter with “disturbing” footage of violence against Israeli fans described by Amsterdam’s mayor as “an explosion of antisemitism”, and a pre-recorded BBC item.
TVNZ upheld one aspect of this complaint over mischaracterised footage in the trailer and introduction. This was originally reported as showing Israeli fans being attacked, but later corrected by Reuters and other outlets as showing Israeli fans chasing and attacking a Dutch man.
“The footage contributed to a materially misleading impression created by TVNZ’s framing of the events, with an emphasis on antisemitic violence against Israeli fans without acknowledging the role of the Maccabi fans in the violence – despite that being previously reported elsewhere,” the BSA found.
A majority of the authority found TVNZ did not make reasonable efforts to ensure accuracy.
It considered the background to the events was highly sensitive and more care should have been taken to not overstate or adopt, without question, the antisemitic angle.
The minority considered it was reasonable for TVNZ to rely on Reuters, the BBC and Dutch officials’ description of the violence as “antisemitic”, in a story developing overseas in which not all facts were clear at the time of broadcast.
The authority considered TVNZ should have issued a correction when it became aware of the error with the footage. It therefore found the action taken was insufficient, but considered publication of the BSA’s decision to be an adequate remedy in the circumstances.
Western media’s embarrassing failures on Amsterdam violence. Video: AJ’s The Listening Post
In a separate decision, the authority upheld two complaints about a brief 1News item on 15 November 2024 reporting on heightened security in Paris in the week following the violence.
The item reported: “Thousands of police are on the streets of Paris over fears of antisemitic attacks . . . That’s after 60 people were arrested in Amsterdam last week when supporters of a Tel Aviv football team were pursued and beaten by pro-Palestinian protesters.”
TVNZ upheld both complaints under the accuracy standard on the basis the item “lacked the nuance” of earlier reporting on Amsterdam, by omitting to mention the role of the Maccabi fans in the lead-up to the violence.
The authority agreed with this finding but determined TVNZ took insufficient action to remedy the breach.
“The broadcaster accepted more care should have been taken, but did not appear to have taken any action in response, or made any public acknowledgement of the inaccuracy,” the BSA said.
The authority found the framing and focus careless, noting “the role of both sides in the violence had been extensively reported” by the time of the 15 November broadcast. TVNZ had also aired the mischaracterised footage again, not realising Reuters had issued a correction several days earlier.
As TVNZ was not monitoring the Reuters fact-check site, the correction only came to light when the complaints were being investigated.
Other standards raised in the three complaints were not breached or did not apply, the authority found.
The BSA did not consider an order was warranted over the item on November 15 – deciding publication of the decision was sufficient to publicly acknowledge and correct the breach, censure the broadcaster and give guidance to TVNZ and other broadcasters.
Palestinians do not have the luxury to allow Western moral panic to have its say or impact. Not caving in to this panic is one small, but important, step in building a global Palestine network that is urgently needed, writes Dr Ilan Pappé
ANALYSIS:By Ilan Pappé
Responses in the Western world to the genocide in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank raise a troubling question: why is the official West, and official Western Europe in particular, so indifferent to Palestinian suffering?
Why is the Democratic Party in the US complicit, directly and indirectly, in sustaining the daily inhumanity in Palestine — a complicity so visible that it probably was one reason they lost the election, as the Arab American and progressive vote in key states could, and justifiably so, not forgive the Biden administration for its part in the genocide in the Gaza Strip?
This is a pertinent question, given that we are dealing with a televised genocide that has now been renewed on the ground. It is different from previous periods in which Western indifference and complicity were displayed, either during the Nakba or the long years of occupation since 1967.
During the Nakba and up to 1967, it was not easy to get hold of information, and the oppression after 1967 was mostly incremental, and, as such, was ignored by the Western media and politics, which refused to acknowledge its cumulative effect on the Palestinians.
But these last 18 months are very different. Ignoring the genocide in the Gaza Strip and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank can only be described as intentional and not due to ignorance.
Both the Israelis’ actions and the discourse that accompanies them are too visible to be ignored, unless politicians, academics, and journalists choose to do so.
This kind of ignorance is, first and foremost, the result of successful Israeli lobbying that thrived on the fertile ground of an European guilt complex, racism and Islamophobia. In the case of the US, it is also the outcome of many years of an effective and ruthless lobbying machine that very few in academia, media, and, in particular, politics, dare to disobey.
The moral panic phenomenon
This phenomenon is known in recent scholarship as moral panic, very characteristic of the more conscientious sections of Western societies: intellectuals, journalists, and artists.
Moral panic is a situation in which a person is afraid of adhering to his or her own moral convictions because this would demand some courage that might have consequences. We are not always tested in situations that require courage, or at least integrity. When it does happen, it is in situations where morality is not an abstract idea, but a call for action.
This is why so many Germans were silent when Jews were sent to extermination camps, and this is why white Americans stood by when African Americans were lynched or, earlier on, enslaved and abused.
What is the price that leading Western journalists, veteran politicians, tenured professors, or chief executives of well-known companies would have to pay if they were to blame Israel for committing a genocide in the Gaza Strip?
It seems they are worried about two possible outcomes. The first is being condemned as antisemites or Holocaust deniers. Secondly, they fear an honest response would trigger a discussion that would include the complicity of their country, or Europe, or the West in general, in enabling the genocide and all the criminal policies against the Palestinians that preceded it.
This moral panic leads to some astonishing phenomena. In general, it transforms educated, highly articulate and knowledgeable people into total imbeciles when they talk about Palestine.
It disallows the more perceptive and thoughtful members of the security services from examining Israeli demands to include all Palestinian resistance on a terrorist list, and it dehumanises Palestinian victims in the mainstream media.
On ‘Moral Panic’ and the Courage to Speak – Professor Ilan Pappé examines how fear of professional consequences silences Western voices in the face of genocide in Gaza — and what this reveals about power, complicity, and moral responsibility.
— The Palestine Chronicle (@PalestineChron) April 18, 2025
Lack of compassion
The lack of compassion and basic solidarity with the victims of genocide was exposed by the double standards shown by mainstream media in the West, and, in particular, by the more established newspapers in the US, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.
When the editor of The Palestine Chronicle, Dr Ramzy Baroud, lost 56 members of his family — killed by the Israeli genocidal campaign in the Gaza Strip — not one of his colleagues in American journalism bothered to talk to him or show any interest in hearing about this atrocity.
On the other hand, a fabricated Israeli allegation of a connection between the Chronicle and a family, in whose block of flats hostages were held, triggered huge interest by these outlets.
This imbalance in humanity and solidarity is just one example of the distortions that accompanies moral panic. I have little doubt that the actions against Palestinian or pro-Palestinian students in the US, or against known activists in Britain and France, as well as the arrest of the editor of the Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah, in Switzerland, are all manifestations of this distorted moral behaviour.
A similar case unfolded just recently in Australia. Mary Kostakidis, a famous Australian journalist and former prime-time weeknight SBS World News Australia presenter, has been taken to the federal court over her — one should say quite tame — reporting on the situation in the Gaza Strip.
The very fact that the court has not dismissed this allegation upon its arrival shows you how deeply rooted moral panic is in the Global North.
But there is another side to it. Thankfully, there is a much larger group of people who are not afraid of taking the risks involved in clearly stating their support for the Palestinians, and who do show this solidarity while knowing it may lead to suspension, deportation, or even jail time. They are not easily found among the mainstream academia, media, or politics, but they are the authentic voice of their societies in many parts of the Western world.
The Palestinians do not have the luxury of allowing Western moral panic to have its say or impact. Not caving in to this panic is one small but important step in building a global Palestine network that is urgently needed — firstly, to stop the destruction of Palestine and its people, and second, to create the conditions for a decolonised and liberated Palestine in the future.
Dr Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian, political scientist, and former politician. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. This article is republished from The Palestine Chronicle, 19 April 2025.
30 April 1975. Saigon Fell, Vietnam Rose. The story of Vietnam after the US fled the country is not a fairy tale, it is not a one-dimensional parable of resurrection, of liberation from oppression, of joy for all — but there is a great deal to celebrate.
After over a century of brutal colonial oppression by the French, the Japanese, and the Americans and their various minions, the people of Vietnam won victory in one of the great liberation struggles of history.
It became a source of inspiration and of hope for millions of people oppressed by imperial powers in Central & South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
Civil war – a war among several
The civil war in Vietnam, coterminous with the war against the Western powers, pitted communists and anti-communists in a long and pitiless struggle.
Within that were various strands — North versus South, southern communists and nationalists against pro-Western forces, and so on. As various political economists have pointed out, all wars are in some way class wars too — pitting the elites against ordinary people.
As has happened repeatedly throughout history, once one or more great power becomes involved in a civil war it is subsumed within that colonial war. The South’s President Ngô Đình Diệm, for example, was assassinated on orders of the Americans.
By 1969, US aid accounted for 80 percent of South Vietnam’s government budget; they effectively owned the South and literally called the shots.
Donald Trump declared April 2 “Liberation Day” and imposed some of the heaviest tariffs on Vietnam because they didn’t buy enough U.S. goods! Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
US punishes its victims
This month, 50 years after the Vietnamese achieved independence from their colonial overlords, US President Donald Trump declared April 2 “Liberation Day” and imposed some of the heaviest tariffs on Vietnam because they didn’t buy enough US goods!
As economist Joseph Stiglitz pointed out, they don’t yet have enough aggregate demand for the kind of goods the US produces. That might have something to do with the decades it has taken to rebuild their lives and economy from the Armageddon inflicted on them by the US, Australia, New Zealand and other unindicted war criminals.
Straight after they fled, the US declared themselves the victims of the Vietnamese and imposed punitive sanctions on liberated Vietnam for decades — punishing their victims.
Under Gerald Ford (1974–1977), Jimmy Carter (1977–1981), Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), George H.W. Bush (1989–1993) right up to Bill Clinton (1993–2001), the US enforced the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) of 1917.
The US froze the assets of Vietnam at the very time it was trying to recover from the wholesale devastation of the country.
Tens of millions of much-needed dollars were captured in US banks, enforced by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The US also took advantage of its muscle to veto IMF and World Bank loans to Vietnam.
Countries like Australia and New Zealand, to their eternal shame, took part in both the war, the war crimes, and imposing sanctions and other punitive measures subsequently.
The ‘Boat People’ refugee crisis While millions celebrated the victory in 1975, millions of others were fearful. The period of national unification and economic recovery was painful, typically repressive — when one militarised regime replaces another.
This triggered flight: firstly among urban elites — military officers, government workers, and professionals who were most closely-linked to the US-run regime.
You can blame the Commies for the ensuing refugee crisis but by strangling the Vietnamese economy, refusing to return Vietnamese assets held in the US, imposing an effective blockade on the economy via sanctions, the US deepened the crisis, which saw over two million flee the country between 1975 and the 1980s.
More than 250,000 desperate people died at sea.
Đổi Mới: the move to a socialist-market economy In 1986, to energise the economy, the government moved away from a command economy and launched the đổi mới reforms which created a hybrid socialist-market economy.
They had taken a leaf out of the Chinese playbook, which under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping (1978 –1989), had moved towards a market economy through its “Reform and Opening Up” policies. Vietnam saw the “economic miracle” of its near neighbour and its leaders sought something similar.
Vietnam’s economy boomed and GDP grew from $18.1 billion in 1984 to $469 billion by 2024, with a per capita GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP) of $15,470 (up from about $300 per capita in the 1970s).
After a sluggish start, literacy rates soared to 96.1 percent by 2023, and life expectancy reached 73.7 years, only a few short of the USA. GDP growth is around 7 percent, according to the OECD.
An unequal society Persistent inequality suggests the socialist vision has partially faded. A rural-urban divide and a rich-poor divide underlines ongoing injustices around quality of life and access to services but Vietnam’s Gini coefficient — a measure of income inequality — puts it only slightly more “unequal” as a society than New Zealand or Germany.
Corruption is also an issue in the country.
Press controls and political repression As in China, political power resides with the Party. Freedom of expression — highlighted by press repression — is severely limited in Vietnam and nothing to celebrate.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) rates Vietnam as 174th out of 180 countries for press freedom and regularly excoriates its strongmen as press “predators”. In its country profile, RSF says of Vietnam: “Independent reporters and bloggers are often jailed, making Vietnam the world’s third largest jailer of journalists”.
Vietnam is forging its own destiny What is well worth celebrating, however, is that Vietnam successfully got the imperial powers off its back and out of its country. It is well-placed to play an increasingly prosperous and positive role in the emerging multipolar world.
It is part of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the ASEAN network, and borders China, giving Vietnam the opportunity to weather any storms coming from the continent of America.
Vietnam today is united and free and millions of ordinary people have achieved security, health, education and prosperity vastly better than their parents and grandparents’ generations were able to.
In the end the honour and glory go to the Vietnamese people.
Ho Chi Minh, the great leader of the Vietnamese people who reached out to the United States, and sought alliance not conflict. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
I’ll give the last word to Ho Chi Minh, the great leader of the Vietnamese people who reached out to the United States, and sought alliance not conflict. He was rebuffed by the super-power which had a different agenda.
On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh square:
“‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’
“This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.
“… A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eight years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent.
“For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country — and in fact is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilise all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.”
And, my god, they did.
To conclude, a short poem attributed to Ho Chi Minh:
“After the rain, good weather.
“In the wink of an eye,
the universe throws off its muddy clothes.”
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
Claire Charters, an expert in indigenous rights in international and constitutional law, has told the United Nations the New Zealand government is pushing the most “regressive” policies she has ever seen.
“New Zealand’s policy on the Declaration (on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) sits alongside its legislative strategy to dismantle Māori rights in Aotearoa New Zealand, which has received global attention for its regressiveness,” said Charters.
While in New York, Charters organised meetings between senior UN officials, New Zealand diplomats, and Māori attending UNPFII.
The officials included the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Rights, Dr Albert Barume, Sheryl Lightfoot, the Vice-Chair of the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP), and EMRIP Chair Valmaine Toki (Ngāti Rehua, Ngātiwai, Ngāpuhi).
Charters said the New Zealand government should be of exceptional concern to the UN, given that the country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Winston Peters, had publicly expressed his rejection of the declaration.
In the same year, Peters claimed Māori were not indigenous peoples.
“New Zealand’s current government, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs specifically, has expressly rejected the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It has committed to not implementing the declaration,” said Charters.
Indigenous people’s forum at the United Nations. Video: UN News
Charters invited the special rapporteur to visit New Zealand but also noted that the government ignored EMRIP’s request for a follow-up visit to support New Zealand’s implementation of UNDRIP.
She also called on the Permanent Forum to take all measures to require New Zealand to implement the declaration.
Republished from Te Ao Māori News with permission.
Claire Charters presenting her intervention on the implementation of UNDRIP – this year’s theme for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigneous Issues. Image: Te Ao Māori News
French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls, who is visiting New Caledonia this week for the third time in two months, has once again called on all parties to live up to their responsibilities in order to make a new political agreement possible.
Failing that, he said a potential civil war was looming.
“We’ll take our responsibilities, on our part, and we will put on the table a project that touches New Caledonia’s society, economic recovery, including nickel, and the future of the younger generation,” he told a panel of French journalists on Sunday.
He said that he hoped a revised version on a draft document — resulting from his previous visits in the French Pacific territory and new proposals from the French government — there existed a “difficult path” to possibly reconcile radically opposing views expressed so far from the pro-independence parties in New Caledonia and those who want the territory to remain part of France.
The target remains an agreement that would accommodate both “the right and aspiration to self-determination” and “the link with France”.
“If there is no agreement, then economic and political uncertainty can lead to a new disaster, to confrontation and to civil war,” he told reporters.
“That is why I have appealed several times to all political stakeholders, those for and against independence,” he warned.
“Everyone must take a step towards each other. An agreement is indispensable.”
Valls said this week he hoped everyone would “enter a real negotiations phase”.
He said one of the ways to achieve this will be to find “innovative” solutions and “a new way of looking at the future”.
This also included relevant amendments to the French Constitution.
Local parties will not sign any agreement ‘at all costs’ Local parties are not so enthusiastic.
In fact, each camp remains on their guard, in an atmosphere of defiance.
And on both sides, they agree at least on one thing — they will not sign any agreement “at all costs”.
Just like has been the case since talks between Valls and local parties began earlier this year, the two main opposing camps remain adamant on their respective pre-conditions and sometimes demands.
The pro-independence Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS), largely dominated by the Union Calédonienne, held a convention at the weekend to decide on whether they would attend this week’s new round of talks with Valls.
They eventually resolved that they would attend, but have not yet decided to call this “negotiations”, only “discussions”.
They said another decision would be made this Thursday, May 1, after they had examined Valls’s new proposals and documents which the French minister is expected to circulate as soon as he hosts the first meeting tomorrow.
FLNKS reaffirms ‘Kanaky Agreement’ demand
During their weekend convention, the FLNKS reaffirmed their demands for a “Kanaky Agreement” to be signed not later than 24 September 2025, to be followed by a five-year transition period.
The official line was to “maintain the trajectory” to full sovereignty, including in terms of schedule.
On the pro-France side, the main pillar of their stance is the fact that three self-determination referendums have been held between 2018 and 2021, even though the third and last consultation was largely boycotted by the pro-independence camp.
All three referendums resulted in votes rejecting full sovereignty.
One of their most outspoken leaders, Les Loyalistes party and Southern Province President Sonia Backès, told a public rally last week that they had refused another date for yet another referendum.
“A new referendum would mean civil war. And we don’t want to fix the date for civil war. So we don’t want to fix the date for a new referendum,” she said.
However, Backès said they “still want to believe in an agreement”.
“We’re part of all discussions on seeking solutions in a constructive and creative spirit.”
Granting more provincial powers
One of their other proposals was to grant more powers to each of the three provinces of New Caledonia, including on tax collection matters.
“We don’t want differences along ethnic lines. We want the provinces to have more powers so that each of them is responsible for their respective society models.”
Under a draft text leaked last week, any new referendum could only be called by at least three-fifths of the Congress and would no longer pose a “binary” question on yes or no to independence, but would consider endorsing a “project” for New Caledonia’s future society.
Another prominent pro-France leader, MP Nicolas Metzdorf, repeated this weekend he and his supporters “remain mobilised to defend New Caledonia within France”.
“We will not budge,” Metzdorf said.
Despite Valls’s warnings, another scenario could be that New Caledonia’s political stakeholders find it more appealing or convenient to agree on no agreement at all, especially as New Caledonia’s crucial provincial elections are in the pipeline and scheduled for no later than November 30.
Concerns about security But during the same interview, Valls repeated that he remained concerned that the situation on the ground remained “serious”.
“We are walking on a tightrope above embers”.
He said top of his concerns were New Caledonia’s economic and financial situation, the tense atmosphere, a resurgence in “racism, hatred” as well as a fast-deteriorating public health services situation or the rise in poverty caused by an increasing number of jobless.
“So yes, all these risks are there, and that is why it is everyone’s responsibility to find an agreement. And I will stay as long as needed and I will put all my energy so that an agreement takes place.
“Not for me, for them.”
Valls also recalled that since the riots broke out in May 2024, almost one year ago, French security and law enforcement agencies are still maintaining about 20 squads of French gendarmes (1500 personnel) in the territory.
This is on top of the normal deployment of 550 gendarmes and 680 police officers.
Valls said this was necessary because “any time, it could flare up again”.
Outgoing French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc said in an interview recently that in case of a “new May 13” situation, the pre-positioned forces could ensure law enforcement “for three or four days . . . until reinforcements arrive”.
If fresh violence erupts again, reinforcements could be sent again from mainland France and bring the total number to up to 6000 law enforcement personnel, a number similar to the level deployed in 2024 in the weeks following the riots that killed 14 and caused some 2.2 billion euros (NZ$4.2 billion) in damage.
Carefully chosen words Valls said earlier in April the main pillars of future negotiations were articulated around the themes of:
“democracy and the rule of law”;
a “decolonisation process”;
the right to self-determination;
a “fundamental law” that would seal New Caledonia’s future status;
the powers of New Caledonia’s three provinces; and a future New Caledonia citizenship with the associated definition of who meets the requirements to vote at local elections.
Valls has already travelled to Nouméa twice this year — in February and March.
Since his last visit that ended on April 1, discussions have been maintained in conference mode between local political stakeholders and Valls, and his cabinet, as well as French Prime Minister François Bayrou’s special advisor on New Caledonia, constitutionalist Eric Thiers.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Filipo Tarakinikini has been appointed as Fiji’s Ambassador-designate to Israel.
This has been stated on two official X, formerly Twitter, handle posts overnight.
“#Fiji is determined to deepen its relations with #Israel as Fiji’s Ambassador-designate to Israel, HE Ambassador @AFTarakinikini prepares to present his credentials on 28 April, 2025,” stated the Fiji at UN twitter account.
Tarakinikini is also Fiji’s current Ambassador to the United Nations.
In a separate post, Deputy Director-General Eynat Shlein of Israel’s international development cooperation agency said she was “honoured” to meet Tarakinikini.
“We discussed the vast cooperation opportunities, promoting & enhancing sustainable development, emphasizing investment in capacity building & human capital,” she said on X.
Centre of controversy
Pacific Media Watch reports that Lieutenant-Colonel Tarakinikini was at the centre of controversy in Fiji in 2005 when he was declared a “deserter” by the Fiji military.
Great honor to have have this timely briefing @EynatShlein, Ambassador Roi @IsraelMFA#Fiji is determined to deepen its relations with #Israel as Fiji’s Ambassador-designate to Israel, HE Ambassador @AFTarakinikini prepares to present his credentials on 28 April, 2025 … https://t.co/mGPKjYM5Qc
Beginning in 2003, he was the UN Department for Security and Safety’s (UNDSS) Chief Security Adviser in Jerusalem, as well as in Kathmandu, Nepal, from 2006 to 2008.
From 2008 to 2018, he served in numerous United Nations integrated assessment missions, programme working groups, restructuring and redeployments and technical assessment missions.
‘Weapons of war’
Yesterday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) began week-long hearings at The Hague into global accusations of Israel using starvation and humanitarian aid as “weapons of war” and failing to meet its obligations to the Palestinian people in Gaza as the occupying power in its genocidal war on the besieged enclave.
Forty countries are expected to give evidence.
The ICJ has been tasked by the UN with providing an advisory opinion “on a priority basis and with the utmost urgency”.
Although the ICJ judges’ opinion is not binding, it provides clarity on legal questions.
In January 2024, the ICJ ruled that Israel must take “all measures” to prevent a genocide in Gaza.
Then in June, it said in an advisory opinion that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza was illegal.
Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted on arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The International Court of Justice began hearings today into Israel’s obligations towards the presence and activities of the UN, other international organisations and third states in occupied Palestine.
The case was prompted by Israeli bills outlawing the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa) in October 2024, an event that sparked global outrage and calls for unseating Israel from the UN due to accusations that it violated the founding UN charter, particularly the privileges and immunities enjoyed by UN agencies.
The ICJ hearings coincide with Israel’s continued ban on humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip since March 2 — more than 50 days — and the intensification of military attacks that have killed hundreds of civilians since the collapse of ceasefire on March 18.
It will be the third advisory opinion case since 2004 to be heard before the World Court in relation to Israel’s violations of international law.
About 40 states, including Palestine, are presenting evidence before the court between April 28 and May 2. Israel’s main ally, the United States, is due to speak at the Peace Palace on Wednesday, April 30.
The hearings follow the resolution of the UN General Assembly on 29 December 2024 (A/RES/79/232), mainly lobbied for by Norway, requesting the court to give an advisory opinion on the following questions:
“What are the obligations of Israel, as an occupying Power and as a member of the United Nations, in relation to the presence and activities of the United Nations, including its agencies and bodies, other international organisations and third States, in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including to ensure and facilitate the unhindered provision of urgently needed supplies essential to the survival of the Palestinian civilian population as well as of basic services and humanitarian and development assistance, for the benefit of the Palestinian civilian population, and in support of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination?”
Middle East Eye’s live coverage of the ICJ hearings.
The UNGA’s request invited the court to rule on the above question in relation to a number of legal sources, including: the UN Charter, international humanitarian law, international human rights law, privileges and immunities of international organisations and states under international law, relevant resolutions of the Security Council, the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council, as well as the previous advisory opinions of the court:
the opinion of 9 July 2004 which declared Israel’s separation wall in occupied Palestine illegal; and
the 19 July 2024 advisory opinion, which confirmed the illegality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and Israel’s obligation as an occupying power to uphold the rights of Palestinians.
‘Nowhere and no one is safe’ Swedish lawyer and diplomat Elinor Hammarskjold, who has served as the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs and its Legal Counsel since 2025, opened the proceedings.
“Under international law, states are prohibited from acquiring territory by force,” Hammarskjold said in her opening comments.
She explained that Israel was not entitled to sovereignty over the occupied territories, and that the Knesset rules and judgments against UNRWA “constitute an extension of sovereignty over the occupied Palestinian territories”.
“Measures taken on basis of these laws, and other applicable Israeli law in occupied territories is inconsistent with Israel’s obligations under international law,” she concluded.
She further outlined Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law as an occupying power and obligations under the UN Charter, emphasising that it has a duty to ensure the safety of both the Palestinian people and UN personnel.
Palestine’s ambassador to the UN, Ammar Hijaz accused Israel of using humanitarian aid as “weapons of war”.
He told the court that Israel’s efforts to starve, kill and displace Palestinians and its targeting of the organisations trying to save their lives “are aimed at the forcible transfer and destruction of Palestinian people in the immediate term”.
‘Children will suffer irreparable damage’
In the long term, he said, “they will also ensure that our children will suffer irreparable damage and harm, placing an entire generation at great risk”.
Irish lawyer, Blinne Ni Ghralaigh, who is representing Palestine, outlined Israel’s obligations as a UN member, including its obligations to cooperate with the UN and to protect its staff and property, as well as to ensure the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, and to abide by UN resolutions and court orders.
“Israel’s violations of these obligations are egregious and ongoing,” Ghralaigh told the court.
The hearings are ongoing until Friday.
Sondos Asem reports for the Middle East Eye. Republished under Creative Commons.
“The day-to-day chaos of the American political news cycle can make it hard to fully take stock of the seismic shifts that are happening,” said Clayton Weimers, executive director of RSF North America.
“But when you step back and look at the whole picture, the pattern of blows to press freedom is quite clear.
“RSF refuses to accept this massive attack on press freedom as the new normal. We will continue to call out these assaults against the press and use every means at our disposal to fight back against them.
“We urge every American who values press freedom to do the same.”
Here is the Trump administration’s war on the press by the numbers: *
427 million – Weekly worldwide audience of the USAGM news outlets silenced by Trump
In an effort to eliminate the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) by cutting grants to outlets funded by the federal agency and placing their reporters on leave, the government has left millions around the world without vital sources of reliable information.
This leaves room for authoritarian regimes, like Russia and China, to spread their propaganda unchecked.
However, RSF recently secured an interim injunction against the administration’s dismantling of the USAGM-funded broadcaster Voice of America,which also reinstates funding to the outlets Radio Free Asia (RFA) and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN).
8,000+ – US government web pages taken down
Webpages from more than a dozen government sites were removed almost immediately after President Trump took office, leaving journalists and the public without critical information on health, crime, and more.
3,500+ – Journalists and media workers at risk of losing their jobs thanks to Trump’s shutdown of the USAGM
Journalists from VOA, the MBN, RFA, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are at risk of losing their jobs as the Trump administration works to shut down the USAGM. Furthermore, at least 84 USAGM journalists based in the US on work visas now face deportation to countries where they risk prosecution and severe harassment.
At least 15 journalists from RFA and eight from VOA originate from repressive states and are at serious risk of being arrested and potentially imprisoned if deported.
180 – Public radio stations at risk of closing if public media funding is eliminated
The Trump administration reportedly plans to ask Congress to cut $1.1 billion in allocated funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). These cuts will hit rural communities and stations in smaller media markets the hardest, where federal funding is most impactful.
74 –Days the Associated Press (AP) has been banned from the White House
On February 11, the White House began barring the Associated Press (AP) news agency from its events because of the news agency’s continued use of the term “Gulf of Mexico,” which President Trump prefers to call the “Gulf of America” — a blatant example of retaliation against the media.
Despite a federal judge ruling the administration must reinstate the news agency’s access on April 9, the White House has continued to limit AP’s access.
64 – Disparaging comments made by Trump against the media on Truth Social since inauguration
In addition to regular, personal attacks against the media in press conferences and public speeches, Trump takes to his social media site nearly every day to insult, threaten, or intimidate journalists and media workers who report about him or his administration critically.
13 –Individuals pardoned by President Trump after being convicted or charged for attacking journalists on January 6, 2021
Trump pardoned over a dozen individuals charged with or convicted of violent crimes against journalists at the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection.
6 –Federal Communications Commission (FCC) inquiries into media companies
Brendan Carr, co-author of the Project 2025 playbook and chair of the FCC, has wasted no time launching politically motivated investigations, explicit threats against media organisations, and implicit threats against their parent companies. These include inquiries into CBS, ABC parent company Disney, NBC parent company Comcast, public broadcasters NPR and PBS, and California television station KCBS.
4 – Trump’s personal lawsuits against media organisations
While Trump settled a lawsuit with ABC’s parent company Disney, he continues to sue CBS, The Des Moines Register, Gannett, and the Pulitzer Center over coverage he deemed biased.
$1.60 – Average annual amount each American pays for public media
Donald Trump has threatened to eliminate federal funding for public broadcasting, framing the move as a cost-cutting measure.
However, public media only costs each American about $1.60 each year, representing a tremendous bargain as it gives Americans access to a wealth of local, national, and lifesaving emergency programming.
The United States was 55th out of 180 nations listed by the RSF World Press Freedom Index in 2024. The new index rankings will be released this week.
* Figures as of the date of publication, 24 April 2025. Pacific Media Watch collaborates with RSF.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
Activists for Palestine paid homage to Pope Francis in Aotearoa New Zealand today for his humility, care for marginalised in the world, and his courageous solidarity with the besieged people of Gaza at a street theatre rally just hours before his funeral in Rome.
He was remembered and thanked for his daily calls of concern to Gaza and his final public blessing last Sunday — the day before he died — calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s genocidal war on the Palestinian enclave.
Several speakers thanked the late Pope for his humanitarian concerns and spiritual leadership at the vigil in Auckland’s “Palestinian Corner” in Te Komititanga Square, beside the Britomart transport hub, as other rallies were held across New Zealand over the weekend.
“Last November, Pope Francis said that what is happening in Gaza was not a war. It was cruelty,” said Catholic deacon Chris Sullivan. “Because Israel is always claiming it is a war. But it isn’t a war, it’s just cruelty.”
During the last 18 months of his life, Pope Francis had a daily ritual — he called Gaza’s only Catholic church to see how people were coping with the “cruel” onslaught.
Deacon Sullivan said the people of the church in Gaza “have been attacked by Israeli rockets, Israeli shells, and Israeli snipers, and a number of people have been killed as a result of that.”
In his Easter message before dying, Pope Francis said: “I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace.”
‘We lost the best man’
Also speaking at today’s rally, Dr Abdallah Gouda said: “We lost the best man. He was talking about Palestine and he was working to stop this genocide.
“Pope Francis, as a Palestinian, as a Palestinians from Gaza, and as a Moslem, thank you Pope Francis. Thank you. And we will never, never forget you.
“As we will always talk about you, the man who called every night to talk to the Palestinians, and he asked, ‘what do you eat’. And he talked to leaders around the world to stop this genocide.”
Pope Francis called Gaza’s Catholic parish every night. Video: AJ+
In Rome, the coffin of Pope Francis made its way through the city from the Vatican after the funeral to reach Santa Maria Maggiore basilica for a private burial ceremony.
It arrived at the basilica after an imposing funeral ceremony at St Peter’s Square.
The Vatican said that more than 250,000 people attended the open-air service that was held under clear blue skies
Dozens of foreign dignitaries, including heads of state, were also in attendance.
Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re eulogised Pope Francis as a pontiff who knew how to communicate to the “least among us” and urged people to build bridges and not walls.
In Auckland at the “guerrilla theatre” event, several highly publicised examples of recent human rights violations and war crimes in Gaza were recreated in several skits with “actors” taking part from the crowd.
Palestinian Dr Faiez Idais role played the kidnapping of courageous Kamal Adwan Hospital medical director Dr Hussam Abu Safiya by the Israeli military last December and his detention and torture in captivity since.
Palestinian Dr Faiez Idais (hooded) during his role played for courageous Kamal Adwan Hospital medical director Dr Hussam Abu Safiya held prisoner by Israeli forces. Image: APR
Khalil was seized by ICE agents from his university apartment without a warrant and abducted to a remote immigration prison in Louisiana but the courts have blocked his deportation in a high profile case.
He is one of at least 300 students who have been captured ICE agents for criticising Israel and its genocide.
A two-year-old child holds a “peace for all children” in Gaza placard at today’s rally. Image: APR
The skits included a condemnation of the US corporation Starbucks, the world’s leading coffee roaster and retailer, with mock blood being kicked over fake bodies on the plaza.
The backlash against the brand has caused heavy losses and 100 outlets in Malaysia have been forced to shut down.
Singers and musicians Hone Fowler, who was also MC, Brenda Liddiard and Mark Laurent — including their dedicated “Make Peace Today” inspired by Jesus’ “Blessed are the peacemakers” — also lifted the spirits of the crowd.
Protesters call for an end to the genocide in Palestine, both in Gaza and the West Bank. Image: APR
When the US Embassy knocked on my door in late 2024, I was both pleased and more than a little suspicious.
I’d worked with them before, but the organisation where I did that work, Tohatoha, had closed its doors. My new project, Dark Times Academy, was specifically an attempt to pull myself out of the grant cycle, to explore ways of funding the work of counter-disinformation education without dependence on unreliable governments and philanthropic funders more concerned with their own objectives than the work I believed then — and still believe — is crucial to the future of human freedom.
But despite my efforts to turn them away, they kept knocking, and Dark Times Academy certainly needed the money. I’m warning you all now: There is a sense in which everything I have to say about counter-disinformation comes down to conversations about how to fund the work.
There is nothing I would like more than to talk about literally anything other than funding this work. I don’t love money, but I do like eating, having a home, and being able to give my kids cash.
I have also repeatedly found myself in roles where other people look to me for their livelihoods; a responsibility that I carry heavily and with more than a little clumsiness and reluctance.
But if we are to talk about President Donald Trump and disinformation, we have to talk about money. As it is said, the love of money is the root of all evil. And the lack of it is the manifestation of that evil.
Trump and his attack on all of us — on truth, on peace, on human freedom and dignity — is, at its core, an attack that uses money as a weapon. It is an attack rooted in greed and in avarice.
In his world, money is power
But in that greed lies his weakness. In his world, money is power. He and those who serve him and his fascist agenda cannot see beyond the world that money built. Their power comes in the form of control over that world and the people forced to live in it.
Of course, money is just paper. It is digital bits in a database sitting on a server in a data centre relying on electricity and water taken from our earth. The ephemeral nature of their money speaks volumes about their lack of strength and their vulnerability to more powerful forces.
They know this. Trump and all men like him know their weaknesses — and that’s why they use their money to gather power and control. When you have more money than you and your whānau can spend in several generations, you suddenly have a different kind of relationship to money.
It’s one where money itself — and the structures that allow money to be used for control of people and the material world — becomes your biggest vulnerability. If your power and identity are built entirely on the power of money, your commitment to preserving the power of money in the world becomes an all-consuming drive.
Capitalism rests on many “logics” — commodification, individualism, eternal growth, the alienation of labour. Marx and others have tried this ground well already.
In a sense, we are past the time when more analysis is useful to us. Rather, we have reached a point where action is becoming a practical necessity. After all, Trump isn’t going to stop with the media or with counter-disinformation organisations. He is ultimately coming for us all.
What form that action must take is a complicated matter. But, first we must think about money and about how money works, because only through lessening the power of money can we hope to lessen the power of those who wield it as their primary weapon.
Beliefs about poor people
If you have been so unfortunate to be subject to engagement with anti-poverty programmes during the neoliberal era either as a client or a worker, you will know that one of the motivations used for denying direct cash aid to those in need of money is a belief on the part of government and policy experts that poor people will use their money in unwise ways, be it drugs or alcohol, or status purchases like sneakers or manicures.
But over and over again, there’s another concern raised: cash benefits will be spent on others in the community, but outside of those targeted with the cash aid.
You see this less now that ideas like a universal basic income (UBI) and direct cash transfers have taken hold of the policy and donor classes, but it is one of those rightwing concerns that turned out to be empirically accurate.
Poor people are more generous with their money and all of their other resources as well. The stereotype of the stingy Scrooge is one based on a pretty solid mountain of evidence.
The poor turn out to understand far better than the rich how to defeat the power that money gives those who hoard it — and that is community. The logic of money and capital can most effectively be defeated through the creation and strengthening of our community ties.
Donald Trump and those who follow him revel in creating a world of atomised individuals focused on themselves; the kind of world where, rather than relying on each other, people depend on the market and the dollar to meet their material needs — dollars. of course, being the source of control and power for their class.
Our ability to fund our work, feed our families, and keep a roof over our heads has not always been subject to the whims of capitalists and those with money to pay us. Around the world, the grand multicentury project known as colonialism has impoverished us all and created our dependency.
Colonial projects and ‘enclosures’
I cannot speak as a direct victim of the colonial project. Those are not my stories to tell. There are so many of you in this room who can speak to that with far more eloquence and direct experience than I. But the colonial project wasn’t only an overseas project for my ancestors.
Enclosure is one of the core colonial logics. Enclosure takes resources (land in particular) that were held in common and managed collectively using traditional customs and hands them over to private control to be used for private rather than communal benefit. This process, repeated over and over around the globe, created the world we live in today — the world built on money.
As we lose control over our access to what we need to live as the land that holds our communities together, that binds us to one another, is co-opted or stolen from us, we lose our power of self-determination. Self-governance, freedom, liberty — these are what colonisation and enclosure take from us when they steal our livelihoods.
As part of my work, I keep a close eye on the approaches to counter-disinformation that those whose relationship to power is smoother than my own take. Also, in this the year of our Lord 2025, it is mandatory to devote at least some portion of each public talk to AI.
I am also profoundly sorry to have to report that as far as I can tell, the only work on counter-disinformation still getting funding is work that claims to be able to use AI to detect and counter disinformation. It will not surprise you that I am extremely dubious about these claims.
AI has been created through what has been called “data colonialism”, in that it relies on stolen data, just as traditional forms of colonialism rely on stolen land.
Risks and dangers of AI
AI itself — and I am speaking here specifically of generative AI — is being used as a tool of oppression. Other forms of AI have their own risks and dangers, but in this context, generative AI is quite simply a tool of power consolidation, of hollowing out of human skill and care, and of profanity, in the sense of being the opposite of sacred.
Words, art, conversation, companionship — these are fiercely human things. For a machine to mimic these things is to transgress against all of our communities — all the more so when the machine is being wielded by people who speak openly of genocide and white supremacy.
However, just as capitalism can be fought through community, colonialism can and has been fought through our own commitment to living our lives in freedom. It is fought by refusing their demands and denying their power, whether through the traditional tools of street protest and nonviolent resistance, or through simply walking away from the structures of violence and control that they have implemented.
In the current moment, that particularly includes the technological tools that are being used to destroy our communities and create the data being used to enact their oppression. Each of us is free to deny them access to our lives, our hopes, and dreams.
This version of colonisation has a unique weakness, in that the cyber dystopia they have created can be unplugged and turned off. And yet, we can still retain the parts of it that serve us well by building our own technological infrastructure and helping people use that instead of the kind owned and controlled by oligarchs.
By living our lives with the freedom we all possess as human beings, we can deny these systems the symbolic power they rely on to continue.
That said, this has limitations. This process of theft that underlies both traditional colonialism and contemporary data colonialism, rather than that of land or data, destroys our material base of support — ie. places to grow food, the education of our children, control over our intellectual property.
Power consolidated upwards
The outcome is to create ever more dependence on systems outside of our control that serve to consolidate power upwards and create classes of disposable people through the logic of dehumanisation.
Disposable people have been a feature across many human societies. We see it in slaves, in cultures that use banishment and exile, and in places where imprisonment is used to enforce laws.
Right now we see it in the United States being directed at scale towards those from Central and Latin America and around the world. The men being sent to the El Salvadorian gulag, the toddlers sent to immigration court without a lawyer, the federal workers tossed from their jobs — these are disposable people to Trump.
The logic of colonialism relies on the process of dehumanisation; of denying the moral relevance of people’s identity and position within their communities and families. When they take a father from his family, they are dehumanising him and his family. They are denying the moral relevance of his role as a father and of his children and wife.
When they require a child to appear alone before an immigration judge, they are dehumanising her by denying her the right to be recognised as a child with moral claims on the adults around her. When they say they want to transition federal workers from unproductive government jobs to the private sector, they are denying those workers their life’s work and identity as labourers whose work supports the common good.
There was a time when I would point out that we all know where this leads, but we are there now. It has led there, although given the US incarceration rate for Black men, it isn’t unreasonable to argue that in fact for some people, the US has always been there. Fascism is not an aberration, it is a continuation. But the quickening is here. The expansion of dehumanisation and hate have escalated under Trump.
Dehumanisaton always starts with words and language. And Trump is genuinely — and terribly — gifted with language. His speeches are compelling, glittering, and persuasive to his audiences. With his words and gestures, he creates an alternate reality. When Trump says, “They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the dogs!”, he is using language to dehumanise Haitian immigrants.
An alternate reality for migrants
When he calls immigrants “aliens” he is creating an alternate reality where migrants are no longer human, no longer part of our communities, but rather outside of them, not fully human.
When he tells lies and spews bullshit into our shared information system, those lies are virtually always aimed at creating a permission structure to deny some group of people their full humanity. Outrageous lie after outrageous lie told over and over again crumbles society in ways that we have seen over and over again throughout history.
In Europe, the claims that women were consorting with the devil led to the witch trials and the burning of thousands of women across central and northern Europe. In Myanmar, claims that Rohinga Muslims were commiting rape, led to mass slaughter.
Just as we fight the logics of capitalism with community and colonialism with a fierce commitment to our freedom, the power to resist dehumanisation is also ours. Through empathy and care — which is simply the material manifestation of empathy — we can defeat attempts to dehumanise.
Empathy and care are inherent to all functioning societies — and they are tools we all have available to us. By refusing to be drawn into their hateful premises, by putting morality and compassion first, we can draw attention to the ridiculousness of their ideas and help support those targeted.
Disinformation is the tool used to dehumanise. It always has been. During the COVID-19 pandemic when disinformation as a concept gained popularity over the rather older concept of propaganda, there was a real moment where there was a drive to focus on misinformation, or people who were genuinely wrong about usually public health facts. This is a way to talk about misinformation that elides the truth about it.
There is an empirical reality underlying the tsunami of COVID disinformation and it is that the information was spread intentionally by bad actors with the goal of destroying the social bonds that hold us all together. State actors, including the United States under the first Trump administration, spread lies about COVID intentionally for their own benefit and at the cost of thousands if not millions of lives.
Lies and disinformation at scale
This tactic was not new then. Those seeking political power or to destroy communities for their own financial gain have always used lies and disinformation. But what is different this time, what has created unique risks, is the scale.
Networked disinformation — the power to spread bullshit and lies across the globe within seconds and within a context where traditional media and sources of both moral and factual authority have been systematically weakened over decades of neoliberal attack — has created a situation where disinformation has more power and those who wield it can do so with precision.
But just as we have the means to fight capitalism, colonialism, and dehumanisation, so too do we — you and I — have the tools to fight disinformation: truth, and accurate and timely reporting from trustworthy sources of information shared with the communities impacted in their own language and from their own people.
If words and images are the chosen tools of dehumanisation and disinformation, then we are lucky because they are fighting with swords that we forged and that we know how to wield. You, the media, are the front lines right now. Trump will take all of our money and all of our resources, but our work must continue.
Times like this call for fearlessness and courage. But more than that, they call on us to use all of the tools in our toolboxes — community, self-determination, care, and truth. Fighting disinformation isn’t something we can do in a vacuum. It isn’t something that we can depersonalise and mechanise. It requires us to work together to build a very human movement.
I can’t deny that Trump’s attacks have exhausted me and left me depressed. I’m a librarian by training. I love sharing stories with people, not telling them myself. I love building communities of learning and of sharing, not taking to the streets in protest.
More than anything else, I just want a nice cup of tea and a novel. But we are here in what I’ve seen others call “a coyote moment”. Like Wile E. Coyote, we are over the cliff with our legs spinning in the air.
We can use this time to focus on what really matters and figure out how we will keep going and keep working. We can look at the blue sky above us and revel in what beauty and joy we can.
Building community, exercising our self-determination, caring for each other, and telling the truth fearlessly and as though our very lives depend on it will leave us all the stronger and ready to fight Trump and his tidal wave of disinformation.
Mandy Henk, co-founder of Dark Times Academy, has been teaching and learning on the margins of the academy for her whole career. As an academic librarian, she has worked closely with academics, students, and university administrations for decades. She taught her own courses, led her own research work, and fought for a vision of the liberal arts that supports learning and teaching as the things that actually matter. This article was originally presented as an invited address at the annual general meeting of the Asia Pacific Media Network on 24 April 2025.
When the US Embassy knocked on my door in late 2024, I was both pleased and more than a little suspicious.
I’d worked with them before, but the organisation where I did that work, Tohatoha, had closed its doors. My new project, Dark Times Academy, was specifically an attempt to pull myself out of the grant cycle, to explore ways of funding the work of counter-disinformation education without dependence on unreliable governments and philanthropic funders more concerned with their own objectives than the work I believed then — and still believe — is crucial to the future of human freedom.
But despite my efforts to turn them away, they kept knocking, and Dark Times Academy certainly needed the money. I’m warning you all now: There is a sense in which everything I have to say about counter-disinformation comes down to conversations about how to fund the work.
There is nothing I would like more than to talk about literally anything other than funding this work. I don’t love money, but I do like eating, having a home, and being able to give my kids cash.
I have also repeatedly found myself in roles where other people look to me for their livelihoods; a responsibility that I carry heavily and with more than a little clumsiness and reluctance.
But if we are to talk about President Donald Trump and disinformation, we have to talk about money. As it is said, the love of money is the root of all evil. And the lack of it is the manifestation of that evil.
Trump and his attack on all of us — on truth, on peace, on human freedom and dignity — is, at its core, an attack that uses money as a weapon. It is an attack rooted in greed and in avarice.
In his world, money is power
But in that greed lies his weakness. In his world, money is power. He and those who serve him and his fascist agenda cannot see beyond the world that money built. Their power comes in the form of control over that world and the people forced to live in it.
Of course, money is just paper. It is digital bits in a database sitting on a server in a data centre relying on electricity and water taken from our earth. The ephemeral nature of their money speaks volumes about their lack of strength and their vulnerability to more powerful forces.
They know this. Trump and all men like him know their weaknesses — and that’s why they use their money to gather power and control. When you have more money than you and your whānau can spend in several generations, you suddenly have a different kind of relationship to money.
It’s one where money itself — and the structures that allow money to be used for control of people and the material world — becomes your biggest vulnerability. If your power and identity are built entirely on the power of money, your commitment to preserving the power of money in the world becomes an all-consuming drive.
Capitalism rests on many “logics” — commodification, individualism, eternal growth, the alienation of labour. Marx and others have tried this ground well already.
In a sense, we are past the time when more analysis is useful to us. Rather, we have reached a point where action is becoming a practical necessity. After all, Trump isn’t going to stop with the media or with counter-disinformation organisations. He is ultimately coming for us all.
What form that action must take is a complicated matter. But, first we must think about money and about how money works, because only through lessening the power of money can we hope to lessen the power of those who wield it as their primary weapon.
Beliefs about poor people
If you have been so unfortunate to be subject to engagement with anti-poverty programmes during the neoliberal era either as a client or a worker, you will know that one of the motivations used for denying direct cash aid to those in need of money is a belief on the part of government and policy experts that poor people will use their money in unwise ways, be it drugs or alcohol, or status purchases like sneakers or manicures.
But over and over again, there’s another concern raised: cash benefits will be spent on others in the community, but outside of those targeted with the cash aid.
You see this less now that ideas like a universal basic income (UBI) and direct cash transfers have taken hold of the policy and donor classes, but it is one of those rightwing concerns that turned out to be empirically accurate.
Poor people are more generous with their money and all of their other resources as well. The stereotype of the stingy Scrooge is one based on a pretty solid mountain of evidence.
The poor turn out to understand far better than the rich how to defeat the power that money gives those who hoard it — and that is community. The logic of money and capital can most effectively be defeated through the creation and strengthening of our community ties.
Donald Trump and those who follow him revel in creating a world of atomised individuals focused on themselves; the kind of world where, rather than relying on each other, people depend on the market and the dollar to meet their material needs — dollars. of course, being the source of control and power for their class.
Our ability to fund our work, feed our families, and keep a roof over our heads has not always been subject to the whims of capitalists and those with money to pay us. Around the world, the grand multicentury project known as colonialism has impoverished us all and created our dependency.
Colonial projects and ‘enclosures’
I cannot speak as a direct victim of the colonial project. Those are not my stories to tell. There are so many of you in this room who can speak to that with far more eloquence and direct experience than I. But the colonial project wasn’t only an overseas project for my ancestors.
Enclosure is one of the core colonial logics. Enclosure takes resources (land in particular) that were held in common and managed collectively using traditional customs and hands them over to private control to be used for private rather than communal benefit. This process, repeated over and over around the globe, created the world we live in today — the world built on money.
As we lose control over our access to what we need to live as the land that holds our communities together, that binds us to one another, is co-opted or stolen from us, we lose our power of self-determination. Self-governance, freedom, liberty — these are what colonisation and enclosure take from us when they steal our livelihoods.
As part of my work, I keep a close eye on the approaches to counter-disinformation that those whose relationship to power is smoother than my own take. Also, in this the year of our Lord 2025, it is mandatory to devote at least some portion of each public talk to AI.
I am also profoundly sorry to have to report that as far as I can tell, the only work on counter-disinformation still getting funding is work that claims to be able to use AI to detect and counter disinformation. It will not surprise you that I am extremely dubious about these claims.
AI has been created through what has been called “data colonialism”, in that it relies on stolen data, just as traditional forms of colonialism rely on stolen land.
Risks and dangers of AI
AI itself — and I am speaking here specifically of generative AI — is being used as a tool of oppression. Other forms of AI have their own risks and dangers, but in this context, generative AI is quite simply a tool of power consolidation, of hollowing out of human skill and care, and of profanity, in the sense of being the opposite of sacred.
Words, art, conversation, companionship — these are fiercely human things. For a machine to mimic these things is to transgress against all of our communities — all the more so when the machine is being wielded by people who speak openly of genocide and white supremacy.
However, just as capitalism can be fought through community, colonialism can and has been fought through our own commitment to living our lives in freedom. It is fought by refusing their demands and denying their power, whether through the traditional tools of street protest and nonviolent resistance, or through simply walking away from the structures of violence and control that they have implemented.
In the current moment, that particularly includes the technological tools that are being used to destroy our communities and create the data being used to enact their oppression. Each of us is free to deny them access to our lives, our hopes, and dreams.
This version of colonisation has a unique weakness, in that the cyber dystopia they have created can be unplugged and turned off. And yet, we can still retain the parts of it that serve us well by building our own technological infrastructure and helping people use that instead of the kind owned and controlled by oligarchs.
By living our lives with the freedom we all possess as human beings, we can deny these systems the symbolic power they rely on to continue.
That said, this has limitations. This process of theft that underlies both traditional colonialism and contemporary data colonialism, rather than that of land or data, destroys our material base of support — ie. places to grow food, the education of our children, control over our intellectual property.
Power consolidated upwards
The outcome is to create ever more dependence on systems outside of our control that serve to consolidate power upwards and create classes of disposable people through the logic of dehumanisation.
Disposable people have been a feature across many human societies. We see it in slaves, in cultures that use banishment and exile, and in places where imprisonment is used to enforce laws.
Right now we see it in the United States being directed at scale towards those from Central and Latin America and around the world. The men being sent to the El Salvadorian gulag, the toddlers sent to immigration court without a lawyer, the federal workers tossed from their jobs — these are disposable people to Trump.
The logic of colonialism relies on the process of dehumanisation; of denying the moral relevance of people’s identity and position within their communities and families. When they take a father from his family, they are dehumanising him and his family. They are denying the moral relevance of his role as a father and of his children and wife.
When they require a child to appear alone before an immigration judge, they are dehumanising her by denying her the right to be recognised as a child with moral claims on the adults around her. When they say they want to transition federal workers from unproductive government jobs to the private sector, they are denying those workers their life’s work and identity as labourers whose work supports the common good.
There was a time when I would point out that we all know where this leads, but we are there now. It has led there, although given the US incarceration rate for Black men, it isn’t unreasonable to argue that in fact for some people, the US has always been there. Fascism is not an aberration, it is a continuation. But the quickening is here. The expansion of dehumanisation and hate have escalated under Trump.
Dehumanisaton always starts with words and language. And Trump is genuinely — and terribly — gifted with language. His speeches are compelling, glittering, and persuasive to his audiences. With his words and gestures, he creates an alternate reality. When Trump says, “They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the dogs!”, he is using language to dehumanise Haitian immigrants.
An alternate reality for migrants
When he calls immigrants “aliens” he is creating an alternate reality where migrants are no longer human, no longer part of our communities, but rather outside of them, not fully human.
When he tells lies and spews bullshit into our shared information system, those lies are virtually always aimed at creating a permission structure to deny some group of people their full humanity. Outrageous lie after outrageous lie told over and over again crumbles society in ways that we have seen over and over again throughout history.
In Europe, the claims that women were consorting with the devil led to the witch trials and the burning of thousands of women across central and northern Europe. In Myanmar, claims that Rohinga Muslims were commiting rape, led to mass slaughter.
Just as we fight the logics of capitalism with community and colonialism with a fierce commitment to our freedom, the power to resist dehumanisation is also ours. Through empathy and care — which is simply the material manifestation of empathy — we can defeat attempts to dehumanise.
Empathy and care are inherent to all functioning societies — and they are tools we all have available to us. By refusing to be drawn into their hateful premises, by putting morality and compassion first, we can draw attention to the ridiculousness of their ideas and help support those targeted.
Disinformation is the tool used to dehumanise. It always has been. During the COVID-19 pandemic when disinformation as a concept gained popularity over the rather older concept of propaganda, there was a real moment where there was a drive to focus on misinformation, or people who were genuinely wrong about usually public health facts. This is a way to talk about misinformation that elides the truth about it.
There is an empirical reality underlying the tsunami of COVID disinformation and it is that the information was spread intentionally by bad actors with the goal of destroying the social bonds that hold us all together. State actors, including the United States under the first Trump administration, spread lies about COVID intentionally for their own benefit and at the cost of thousands if not millions of lives.
Lies and disinformation at scale
This tactic was not new then. Those seeking political power or to destroy communities for their own financial gain have always used lies and disinformation. But what is different this time, what has created unique risks, is the scale.
Networked disinformation — the power to spread bullshit and lies across the globe within seconds and within a context where traditional media and sources of both moral and factual authority have been systematically weakened over decades of neoliberal attack — has created a situation where disinformation has more power and those who wield it can do so with precision.
But just as we have the means to fight capitalism, colonialism, and dehumanisation, so too do we — you and I — have the tools to fight disinformation: truth, and accurate and timely reporting from trustworthy sources of information shared with the communities impacted in their own language and from their own people.
If words and images are the chosen tools of dehumanisation and disinformation, then we are lucky because they are fighting with swords that we forged and that we know how to wield. You, the media, are the front lines right now. Trump will take all of our money and all of our resources, but our work must continue.
Times like this call for fearlessness and courage. But more than that, they call on us to use all of the tools in our toolboxes — community, self-determination, care, and truth. Fighting disinformation isn’t something we can do in a vacuum. It isn’t something that we can depersonalise and mechanise. It requires us to work together to build a very human movement.
I can’t deny that Trump’s attacks have exhausted me and left me depressed. I’m a librarian by training. I love sharing stories with people, not telling them myself. I love building communities of learning and of sharing, not taking to the streets in protest.
More than anything else, I just want a nice cup of tea and a novel. But we are here in what I’ve seen others call “a coyote moment”. Like Wile E. Coyote, we are over the cliff with our legs spinning in the air.
We can use this time to focus on what really matters and figure out how we will keep going and keep working. We can look at the blue sky above us and revel in what beauty and joy we can.
Building community, exercising our self-determination, caring for each other, and telling the truth fearlessly and as though our very lives depend on it will leave us all the stronger and ready to fight Trump and his tidal wave of disinformation.
Mandy Henk, co-founder of Dark Times Academy, has been teaching and learning on the margins of the academy for her whole career. As an academic librarian, she has worked closely with academics, students, and university administrations for decades. She taught her own courses, led her own research work, and fought for a vision of the liberal arts that supports learning and teaching as the things that actually matter. This article was originally presented as an invited address at the annual general meeting of the Asia Pacific Media Network on 24 April 2025.
There was faint hope that efforts to achieve a ceasefire deal in Gaza would succeed. That hope is now all but gone, offering 2.1 million tormented and starved Palestinians dismal prospects for the days and weeks ahead.
Last Saturday, the Israeli Prime Minister once again affirmed he had no intention to end the war. Benjamin Netanyahu wants what he calls “absolute victory” to achieve US President Donald Trump’s so-called vision for Gaza of ethnic cleansing and annexation.
To that end, Israel is weaponising food at a scale not seen before, including immediately after the October 7 attack by Hamas. It has not allowed any wheat, medicine boxes, or other vital aid into the Gaza Strip since 2 March.
This engineered starvation has pushed experts to warn that 1.1 million Palestinians face imminent famine.
Many believe this was Israel’s “maximum pressure” plan all along: massive force, starvation, and land grabs. It’s what the Israeli Minister of Defence, Israel Katz, referred to in March when he gave Palestinians in Gaza an ultimatum — surrender or die.
A month after breaking the ceasefire, Israel has converted nearly 70 percent of the tiny territory into no-go or forced displacement zones, including all of Rafah. It has also created a new so-called security corridor, where the illegal settlement of Morag once stood.
Israel is bombing the Palestinians it is starving while actively pushing them into a tiny strip of dunes along the coast.
Israel only interested in temporary ceasefire
This mentality informed the now failed ceasefire talks. Israel was only interested in a temporary ceasefire deal that would keep its troops in Gaza and see the release of half of the living Israeli captives.
In exchange, Israel reportedly offered to allow critically needed food and aid back into Gaza, which it is obliged to do as an occupying power, irrespective of a ceasefire agreement.
Israel also refused to commit to ending the war, just as it did in the Lebanon ceasefire agreement, while also demanding that Hamas disarm and agree to the exile of its prominent members from Gaza.
Disarming is a near-impossible demand in such a context, but this is not motivated by a preserved arsenal that Hamas wants to hold on to. Materially speaking, the armaments Israel wants Hamas to give up are inconsequential, except in how they relate to the group’s continued control over Gaza and its future role in Palestinian politics.
Symbolically, accepting the demand to lay down arms is a sign of surrender few Palestinians would support in a context devoid of a political horizon, or even the prospect of one.
While Israel has declared Hamas as an enemy that must be “annihilated”, the current right-wing government in Israel doesn’t want to deal with any Palestinian party or entity.
The famous “no Hamas-stan and no Fatah-stan” is not just a slogan in Israeli political thinking — it is the policy.
Golden opportunity for mass ethnic cleansing
This government senses a golden opportunity for the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the annexation of Gaza and the West Bank — and it aims to seize it.
Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya recently said that the movement was done with partial deals. Hamas, he said, was willing to release all Israeli captives in exchange for ending the war and Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza, as well as the release of an agreed-on number of Palestinian prisoners.
But the truth is, Hamas is running out of options.
Netanyahu does not consider releasing the remaining Israeli captives as a central goal. Hamas has no leverage and barely any allies left standing.
Hezbollah is out of the equation, facing geographic and political isolation, demands for disarmament, and the lethal Israeli targeting of its members.
Armed Iraqi groups have signalled their willingness to hand over weapons to the government in Baghdad in order not to be in the crosshairs of Washington or Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile, the Houthis in Yemen have sustained heavy losses from hundreds of massive US airstrikes. Despite their defiant tone, they cannot change the current dynamics.
Tehran distanced from Houthis
Finally, Iran is engaged in what it describes as positive dialogue with the Trump administration to avert a confrontation. To that end, Tehran has distanced itself from the Houthis and is welcoming the idea of US investment.
The so-called Arab plan for Gaza’s reconstruction also excludes any role for Hamas. While the mediators are pushing for a political formula that would not decisively erase Hamas from Palestinian politics, some Arab states would prefer such a scenario.
As these agendas and new realities play out, Gaza has been laid to waste. There is no food, no space, no hope. Only despair and growing anger.
This chapter of the genocide shows no sign of letting up, with Israel under no international pressure to cease the bombing and forced starvation of Gaza. Hamas remains defiant but has no significant leverage to wield.
In the absence of any viable Palestinian initiative that can rally international support around a different dialogue altogether about ending the war, intervention can only come from Washington, where the favoured solution is ethnic cleansing.
This is a dead-end road that pushes Palestinians into the abyss of annihilation, whether by death and starvation or political and material erasure through mass displacement.
Nour Odeh is a political analyst, public diplomacy consultant, and an award-winning journalist. She also reports for Al Jazeera. This article was first published by The New Arab and is republished under Creative Commons.
The former head of BenarNews’ Pacific bureau says a United States court ruling this week ordering the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) to release congressionally approved funding to Radio Free Asia and its subsidiaries “makes us very happy”.
However, Stefan Armbruster, who has played a key role in expanding the news agency’s presence in the region, acknowledged, “there’s also more to do”.
On March 14, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to defund USAGM outlets Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks, including placing more than 1300 Voice of America employees on leave.
“This order continues the reduction in the elements of the Federal bureaucracy that the President has determined are unnecessary,” the executive order states.
Armbruster told RNZ Pacific Waves that the ruling found the Trump administration failed to provide evidence to support their actions.
Signage for US broadcaster Voice of America in Washington, DC . . . Trump administration failed to provide evidence to support its actions. Image: RNZ Pacific
“[Judge Royce Lamberth] is basically saying that the actions of the Trump administration [are] likely to have been illegal and unconstitutional in taking away the money from these organisations,” he said.
Order to restore funding
“The judgments are saying that the US administration should return funding to its overseas broadcasters, which include Voice of America [and] Radio Free Asia.”
He said that in America, they can lay people off without a loss, and they can still remain employees. But these conditions did not apply for overseas employees.
“Basically, all the overseas staff have been staff let go, except a very small number in the US who are on visas, dependent on their employment, and they have spoken out about this publicly.
“They have got 60 days to find a job, a new sponsor for them, or they could face deportation to places like China, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
“So for the former employees, at the moment, we are just waiting to see how this all plays out.”
Armbruster said there were hints that a Trump administration could take such action during the election campaign, when the Trump team had flagged issues about the media.
Speed ‘totally unexpected’
However, he added the speed at which this has happened “was totally unexpected”.
“And the judge ruled on that. He said that it is hard to fathom a more straightforward display of arbitrary, capricious action, basically, random and unexplained.
“In short, the defendants had no method or approach towards shutting down USAGM that this Court could discern.”
Armbruster said the US Congress funds the USAGM, and the agency has a responsibility to disburse that funding to Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and Radio Free Asia.
The judge ruled that the President does not have the authority to withhold that funding, he said.
“We were funded through till September to the end of the financial year in the US.
“In terms of how quickly [the executive order] came, it was a big surprise to all of us. Not totally unexpected that this would be happening, but not this way, not this hard.”
BenarNews ‘gave a voice’ The BenarNews Pacific bureau was initially set up two-and-a-half years ago but evolved into a fully-fledged bureau only 12 months ago. It had three fulltime staff based in Australia and about 15 stringers and commentators across the region.
“We built up this fantastic network of people, and the response has been fantastic, just like Radio New Zealand [Pacific],” Armbruster said.
“We were doing a really good thing and having some really amazing stories on our pages, and big successes. It gave a voice to a whole lot of Pacific journalists and commentators to tell stories from perspectives that were not being presented in other forums.
“It is hard to say if we will come back because there has been a lot of court orders issued recently under this current US administration, and they sometimes are not complied with, or are very slowly complied with, which is why we are still in the process.”
However, Armbruster remains hopeful there will be “some interesting news” next week.
“The judgment also has a little bit of a kicker in the tail, because it is not just an order to do [restore funding].
“It is an order to turn up on the first day of each month, and to appraise the court of what action is [the USAGM] taking to disburse the funds.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network today condemned the Fiji government’s failure to stand up for international law and justice over the Israeli war on Gaza in their weekly Black Thursday protest.
“For the past 18 months, we have made repeated requests to our government to do the bare minimum and enforce the basic tenets of international law on Israel,” said the protest group in an open letter.
“We have been calling upon the Fiji government to uphold the principles of peace, justice, and human rights that our nation cherishes.
“We campaigned, we lobbied, we engaged, and we explained.
“We showed the evidence, pointed to the law, and asked our leaders to do the right thing. Our pleas fell on deaf ears. We’ve been met with nothing but indifference.”
The open letter said:
“Dear fellow Fijians,
“As we gathered tonight in Suva at the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre compound, Israel has maintained an eight-week blockade on food, medicine and aid entering Gaza, while continuing to bomb homes and tent shelters.
“At least 52,000 people in Gaza have been killed since October 2023, which includes more than 18,000 children. The death toll means that one out of every 50 people has been killed in Gaza. We all know that the real number of those killed is far higher.
“Today, at least 13 people were killed in Israeli attacks. Among the dead were three children in a tent near Nuseirat in central Gaza, and a woman and four children in a home in Gaza City.
“Also reportedly killed in a recent attack was local journalist Saeed Abu Hassanein, whose death adds to at least 232 reporters killed by Israel in Gaza in this genocide.
“For the past 18 months, we have made repeated requests to our government to do the bare minimum and enforce the basic tenets of international law on Israel. We have been calling upon the Fiji Government to uphold the principles of peace, justice, and human rights that our nation cherishes.
“We campaigned, we lobbied, we engaged, and we explained. We showed the evidence, pointed to the law, and asked our leaders to do the right thing. Our pleas fell on deaf ears. We’ve been met with nothing but indifference.
“Instead our leaders met with Israeli Government representatives and declared support for a country accused of the most heinous crimes recognised in international law.
“Fijian leaders and the Fiji Government must not be supporting Israel or planning to set up an Embassy in Israel while Israel continues to bomb refugee tents, kill journalists and medics, and block the delivery of aid to a population under relentless siege.
“No politician in Fiji can claim ignorance of what is happening.
“Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed.
“Many more have been maimed, traumatised and displaced. Hospitals, clinics, refugee camps, schools, universities, residential neighbourhoods, water and food facilities have been destroyed.
“We must loudly name what’s happening in Gaza – a GENOCIDE.
“We should name the crime, underline our government’s complicity in it, and focus our efforts on elevating the voices of Palestinians.
“We know that our actions cannot magically put an end to the GENOCIDE in occupied Palestine, but they can still make a difference. We can add to the global pressure on those who have the power to stop the genocide, which is so needed.
“The way our government is responding to the genocide in Gaza will set a precedent for how they will deal with crises and emergencies in the future — at home and abroad.
“It will determine whether our country will be a force that works to uphold human rights and international law, or one that tramples on them whenever convenient.
“There are already ongoing restrictions against protests in solidarity with Palestine including arbitrary restrictions on marches and the use of Palestine flags.
“We have had to hold gatherings in the premises of the FWCC office as the police have restricted solidarity marches for Palestine since November 2023, under the Public Order (Amendment) Act 2014.
“Today, we must all fight for what is right, and show our government that indifference is not acceptable in the face of genocide, lest we ourselves become complicit.
“History will judge how we respond as Fijians to this moment.
“Our rich cultural heritage and shared values teach us the importance of always standing up for what is right, even when it is not popular or convenient.
“We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people out of a shared belief in humanity, justice, and the inalienable human rights of every individual.”
In Solidarity Fijians for Palestine Solidarity Network
Part Two of Solidarity’s Vietnam War series: The folly of imperial war
COMMENTARY:By Eugene Doyle
Vietnam is a lesson we should have learnt — but never did — about the immorality, folly and counter-productivity of imperial war. Gaza, Yemen and Ukraine are happening today, in part, because of this cultural amnesia that facilitates repetition.
It’s time to remember the Quiet Mutiny within the US army — and why it helped end the war by undermining military effectiveness, morale, and political support at home.
There were many reasons that the US and its allies were defeated in Vietnam. First and foremost they were beaten by an army that was superior in tactics, morale and political will.
The Quiet Mutiny that came close to a full-scale insurrection within the US army in the early 1970s was an important part of the explanation as to why America’s vast over-match in resources, firepower and aerial domination was insufficient to the task.
Beaten by an army that was superior in tactics, morale and political will. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
‘Our army is approaching collapse’ Marine Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr wrote: “By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non-commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.” — Armed Forces Journal 7 June, 1971.
A paper prepared by the Gerald R Ford Presidential Library — “Veterans, Deserters and Draft Evaders” (1974) — stated, “Hundreds of thousands of Vietnam-era veterans hold other-than-honorable discharges, many because of their anti-war activities.”
Between 1965-73, according to the Ford papers, 495,689 servicemen (and women) on active duty deserted the armed forces! Ponder that.
For good reason, the defiance, insubordination and on many occasions soldier-on-officer violence was something that the mainstream media and the Western establishment have tried hard to expunge from our collective memory.
Something that the mainstream media and the Western establishment have tried hard to expunge from our collective memory. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
‘The officer said “Keep going!” He kinda got shot.’ At 12 years old in 1972, I took out a subscription to Newsweek. Among the horrors I learnt about at that tender age was the practice of fragging — the deliberate killing of US officers by their own men, often by flicking a grenade — a fragmentation device (hence fragging) — into their tent at night, or simply shooting an officer during a combat mission.
There were hundreds of such incidents.
GI: “The officer said, ‘Keep on going’ but they were getting hit pretty bad so it didn’t happen. He kinda got shot.”
GI: “The grunts don’t always do what the Captain says. He always says “Go there”. He always stays back. We just go and sit down somewhere. We don’t want to hit “Contact”.
GI: “We’ve decided to tell the company commander we won’t go into the bush anymore; at least we’ll go to jail where it’s safe.”
Hundreds of GI antiwar organisations and underground newspapers challenged the official narratives about the war. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
US Army — refusing to fight “Soldiers in Revolt: G.I. Resistance During the Vietnam War,” by David Cortright, professor emeritus at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, himself a Vietnam veteran, documents the hundreds of GI antiwar organisations and underground newspapers that challenged the official narratives about the war.
Cortright’s research indicated that by the early 1970s the US Army was close to a full mutiny. It meant that the US, despite having hundreds of thousands of troops in the country, couldn’t confidently put an army into combat.
By the war’s end the US army was largely hunkered down in their bases. Cortright says US military operations became “effectively crippled” as the crisis manifested itself “in drug abuse, political protest, combat refusals, black militancy, and fraggings.”
Cortright cites over 900 fragging incidents between 1969–1971, including over 500 with explosive devices.
“Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units,” Colonel Heinl said in his 1971 article.
At times entire companies refused to move forward, an offence punishable by death, but never enforced. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
At times entire companies refused to move forward, an offence punishable by death, but never enforced because of the calamitous knock-on effect this would have had both at home and within the army in the field.
‘The rebellion is everywhere’ It was heroic journalists like John Pilger who refused to file the reassuring stories editors back in London, New York, Sydney and Auckland wanted. Pilger told uncomfortable truths — there was a rebellion underway. The clean-cut, spit-and-polish boys of the 1960s Green Machine (US army) had morphed into a corps whose 80,000-strong frontline was full of defiant, insubordinate Grunts (infantry) who wore love beads, grew their hair long, smoked pot, and occasionally tossed a hand grenade into an officer’s tent.
John Pilger’s first film “Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny”, aired in 1970. “The war is ending,” Pilger said, “because the largest, wealthiest and most powerful organisation on earth, the American Army, is being challenged from within — by the most brutalised and certainly the bravest of its members.
“The war is ending because the Grunt is taking no more bullshit.”
That short piece to camera is one of the most incredible moments in documentary history yet it likely won’t be seen during the commemorations of the Fall of Saigon on April 30.
At the time, Granada Television’s chairman was apoplectic that it went to air at all and described Pilger as “a threat to Western civilisation”. So tight is the media control we live under now it is unlikely such a documentary would air at all on a major channel.
“I don’t know why I’m shooting these people” a young grunt tells Pilger about having to fight the Vietnamese in their homeland. Another asks: “I have nothing against these people. Why are we killing them?”
Shooting the messenger Huge effort goes into attacking truth-tellers like Pilger, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, but as Phillip Knightley pointed out in his book The First Casualty, Pilger’s work was among the most important revelations to emerge from Vietnam, a war in which a depressingly large percentage of journalists contented themselves with life in Saigon and chanting the official Pentagon narrative.
Thus it ever was.
Pilger was like a fragmentation device dropped into the official narrative, blasting away the euphemisms, the evasions, the endless stream of official lies. He called the end of the war long before the White House and the Pentagon finally gave up the charade; his actions helped save lives; their actions condemned hundreds of thousands to unnecessary death, millions more to misery.
African Americans were sent to the front in disproportionately large numbers – about a quarter of all frontline fighters. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Race politics, anti-racism, peace activism
Race politics was another important factor. African Americans were sent to the front in disproportionately large numbers — about a quarter of all frontline fighters. There was a strong feeling among black conscripts that “This is not our war”.
In David Loeb Weiss’ No Vietnamese ever called me Nigger we see a woman at an antiwar protest in Harlem, New York. “My boy is over there fighting for his rights,” she says, “but he’s not getting them.” Then we hear the chant: “The enemy is whitey! Not the Viet Cong!”
We should recall that at this time the civil rights movement was battling powerful white groups for a place in civil society. The US army had only ended racial segregation in the Korean War and back home in 1968, there were still 16 States that had miscegenation laws banning sexual relations between whites and blacks.
Martin Luther King was assassinated this same year. All this fed into the Quiet Mutiny.
Truth-telling and the lessons of history Vietnam became a dark arena where the most sordid aspects of American imperialism played out: racism, genocidal violence, strategic incoherence, belief in brute force over sound policy.
Sounds similar to Gaza and Yemen, doesn’t it?
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
Despite calls from women’s groups urging the government to implement policies to address the underrepresentation of women in politics, the introduction of temporary special measures (TSM) to increase women’s political representation in Fiji remains a distant goal.
This week, leader of the Social Democratic Liberal Party (Sodelpa), Cabinet Minister Aseri Radrodro, and opposition MP Ketal Lal expressed their objection to reserving 30 percent of parliamentary seats for women.
Radrodro, who is also Education Minister, told The Fiji Times that Fijian women were “capable of holding their ground without needing a crutch like TSM to give them a leg up”.
Lal called the special allocation of seats for women in Parliament “tokenistic” and beneficial to “a few selected individuals”, as part of submissions to the Fiji Law Reform Commission and the Electoral Commission of Fiji, which are undertaking a comprehensive review and reform of the Fiji’s electoral framework.
Rabuka said it devalued “the dignity of women at the highest level of national governance.”
“This specific issue makes me wonder at times. As the percentage of women in population is approximately the same as for men, why are women not securing the votes of women? Or more precisely, why aren’t women voting for women?” he said.
Doubled down
The Prime Minister doubled down on his position on the issue when The Fiji Times asked him if it was the right time for Fiji to legislate mandatory seats for women in Parliament as the issue was gaining traction.
Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka . . . “Why aren’t women voting for women?” Image: Fiji Parliament
“There is no need to legislate it. We do not have a compulsory voting legislation, nor do we yet need a quota-based system.
However, Rabuka’s Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs and Deputy Speaker Lenora Qereqeretabua holds a different view.
Qereqeretabua, from the National Federation Party, said in January that Parliament needed to look like the people that it represented.
“Women make up half of the world’s population, and yet we are still fighting to ensure that their voices and experiences are not only heard but valued in the spaces where decisions are made,” she told participants at the Exploring Temporary Special Measures for Inclusive Governance in Fiji forum.
She said Fiji needed more women in positions of power.
“Not because women are empirically better leaders, because leadership is not determined by gender, but because it is essential for democracy that our representatives reflect the communities that they serve.”
Lenora Qereqeretabua on the floor of Parliament . . . “It is essential for democracy that our representatives reflect the communities that they serve.” Image: Fiji Parliament
‘Shameless’ lag
Another member of Rabuka’s coalition government, one of the deputy prime ministers in and a former Sodelpa leader, Viliame Gavoka said in March 2022 that Fiji had “continued to shamelessly lag behind in protecting and promoting women’s rights and their peacebuilding expertise”.
He pledged at the time that if Sodelpa was voted into government, it would “ensure to break barriers and accelerate progress, including setting specific targets and timelines to achieve gender balance in all branches of government and at all levels through temporary special measures such as quotas . . . ”
However, since coming into power in December 2022, Gavoka has not made any advance on his promise, and his party leader Radrodro has made his views known on the issue.
Fiji women’s rights groups say temporary special measures may need to be implemented in the short-term to advance women’s equality. Image: RNZ Pacific/Sally Round
Fijian women’s rights and advocacy groups say that introducing special measures for women is neither discriminatory nor a breach of the 2013 Constitution.
In a joint statement in October last year, six non-government organisations called on the government to enforce provisions for temporary special measures for women in political party representation and ensure that reserved seats are secured for women in all town and city councils and its committees.
“Nationally, it is unacceptable that after three national elections under new electoral laws, there has been a drastic decline in women’s representation from contesting national elections to being elected to parliament,” they said.
“It is clear from our history that cultural, social, economic and political factors have often stood in the way of women’s political empowerment.”
Short-term need They said temporary special measures may need to be implemented in the short-term to advance women’s equality.
“The term ‘temporary special measures’ is used to describe affirmative action policies and strategies to promote equality and empower women.
“If we are to move towards a society where half the population is reflected in all leadership spaces and opportunities, we must be gender responsive in the approaches we take to achieve gender equality.”
The Fijian Parliament currently has only five (out of 55) women in the House — four in government and one in opposition. In the previous parliamentary term (2018-2022), there were 10 women directly elected to Parliament.
According to the Fiji Country Gender Assessment report, 81 percent of Fijians believe that women are underrepresented in the government, and 72 percent of Fijians believe greater representation of women would be beneficial for the country.
However, the report found that time and energy burden of familial, volunteer responsibilities, patriarchal norms, and power relations as key barriers to women’s participation in the workplace and public life.
Fiji Women’s Rights Movement (FWRM) board member Akanisi Nabalarua believes that despite having strong laws and policies on paper, the implementation is lacking.
Lip service
Nabalarua said successive Fijian governments had often paid lip service to gender equality while failing to make intentional and meaningful progress in women’s representation in decision making spaces, reports fijivillage.com.
Labour Party leader Mahendra Chaudhry said Rabuka’s dismissal of the women’s rights groups’ plea was premature.
Chaudhry, a former prime minister who was deposed in a coup in 2000, said Rabuka should have waited for the Law Reform Commission’s report “before deciding so conclusively on the matter”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
To learn more, RNZ Pacific spoke with Australian National University academic Dr Thiago Oppermann, who has spent many years in both Bougainville and PNG.
James Marape (second left) and Ishmael Toroama (right) during joint moderations talks in Port Moresby last month. Image: Autonomous Bougainville Government
Don Wiseman: We’ve had five-and-a-half years since the Bougainville referendum, but very suddenly in the last couple of months, it would seem that Bougainville is picking up pace and trying to really make some progress with this march towards independence, as they see it.
Are they overplaying their hand?
Dr Thiago Oppermann: I do not believe that they are overplaying their hand. I think that the impression that is apparent of a sudden flurry of activity, arises partly because for the first two years after the referendum, there was a very slow pace.
One of the shortcomings of the Bougainville Peace Agreement (BPA) was that it did not set out a very clear post-referendum path. That part of the process was not as well designed as the parts leading to the referendum, and that left a great deal of uncertainty as to how to structure negotiations, how things should be conducted, and quite substantial differences in the views of the Papua New Guinean government and the ABG (Autonomous Bougainville Government), as to how the referendum result would be processed further.
For instance, how it would it need to be tabled in Parliament, what kind of vote would be required for it, would a negotiation between the parties lead to an agreement that then is presented to the Parliament, and how would that negotiation work? All these areas, they were not prescriptive in the BPA.
That led to a period of a good two years in which there was very slow process and then attempts to get some some movement. I would say that in that period, the views of the Bougainvilleans and the Papua New Guineans became quite entrenched in quite different camps, and something I think would have to give eventually.
Why the Bougainvilleans have moved towards this point now, I think that it bears pointing out that there has been a long process that has been unfolding, for more than two years now, of beginning the organic process of developing a Bougainvillean constitutional process with this constitutional development committees across the island doing a lot of work, and that has now borne fruit, is how I would describe it.
It happens at a point where the process has been unblocked by the appointment of Sir Jerry Mataparae, which I think sets a new vigour into the process. It looks now like it’s heading towards some form of outcome. And that being the case, the Bougainvilleans have made their position quite clear.
Sir Jerry Mateparae (middle) with representatives of the PNG and Bougainville governments at the second moderation in April 2025. Image: ABG
DW: Well, Bougainville, in fact, is saying it will be independent by 1st September 2027. How likely do you think that is?
TO: I think there’s a question that comes before that. When Bougainville says that they will be independent by such a date, what we need to first consider is that the process of mediation is still unfolding.
I think that the first thing to consider is, what would that independence look like, and what scope is there within the mediation for finding some compromise that still suits Papua New Guinea. I think that there’s a much greater range of outcomes than people realise within this sort of umbrella of independence, the Bougainvilleans themselves, have moved to a position of understanding independence in much more nuanced terms than previously.
You might imagine that in the aftermath of this fairly brutal and bitter civil conflict, the idea of independence at that time was quite a radical cut towards “full bruk loose” as they say.
But the reality is that for many post colonial and new states since World War Two, there are many different kinds of independence and the degree to which there remains a kind of attachment with or relationship with the so called parent colonial country is variable, I should add.
I do not want to digress too much, but this concept of the parent colonial country is something that I heard quite a lot of when I was studying the referendum itself. Many people would say that the relationship that they had to Papua New Guinea was not one of enmity or of like running away, it was more a question of there being a parent and Bougainville having now grown up to the point where the child, Bougainville, is ready to go off and set up its own house.
Many people thought of it in those terms. Now I think that in concrete terms that can be articulated in many different ways when we think about international law and the status of different sovereign nations around the world.
DW: If we can just look at some of the possibilities in terms of the way in which this independence might be interpreted. My understanding is, for Bougainville it’s vital that they have a degree of sovereignty that will allow them to join organisations like the United Nations, but they’re not necessarily looking to be fully independent of PNG.
TO: Yes, I think that there would be like a process underway in Bougainville for understanding what that would look like.
There are certainly people who would have a view that is still more firmly towards full independence. And there will be others who understand some type of free association arrangements or something that still retains a closer relationship with Papua New Guinea.
I do not think many people have illusions that Bougainville could, for instance, suddenly break loose of the very deep economic connections it has with Papua New Guinea, not only those of government funding, but the commercial connections which are very, very deep. So suddenly making that disappear is not something people believe it’s possible.
But there are many other options that are on the table. I think what Bougainville is doing by having the announcement of the Independence Day is setting for Papua New Guinea saying, like, “here is the terms of the debate that we are prepared to consider”. But within that there is still a great deal of giving and taking.
DW: Now within the parliament in PNG, I think Bougainville has felt for some time that there hasn’t been a great deal of understanding of what Bougainville has been through, or what it is Bougainville is trying to achieve. There’s a very different lineup of MPs to what they were at the turn of the century when the Bougainville Peace Agreement was finalised. So what are they thinking, the MPs from other parts of the country? Are they going to be supportive, or are they just thinking about the impact on their own patch?
TO: I am not entirely sure what the MPs think, and they are a very diverse bunch of people. The sort of concern I think that many have, certainly more senior ones, is that they do not want to be the people in charge when this large chunk of the country secedes.
I think that is something that is important, and we do not want to be patronising the Papua New Guineans, who have a great deal of national pride, and it is not an event of celebration to see what is going on.
For many, it is quite a tragic chain of events. I am not entirely sure what the bulk of MPs believes about this. We have conducted some research, which is non randomised, but it is quite large scale, probing attitudes towards Bougainvillean independence in 2022, around the time of the election.
What we found, which is quite surprising, is that while, of course, Bougainville has the highest support for independence of any place in Papua New Guinea, there are substantial numbers of people outside Bougainville that are sympathetic to Bougainvillean independence or sympathetic towards implementing the referendum.
I think that would be the wording, I would choose, quite large numbers of people. So, as well as, many people who are very much undecided on the issues. From a Papua New Guinean perspective, the views are much more subtle than you might think are the case. By comparison, if you did a survey in Madrid of how many people support Catalan independence, you would not see figures similar to the ones that we find for Papua New Guinea.
DW: Bougainville is due to go to elections later this year. The ABG has stated that it wants this matter sorted, I think, at the time that the election writs are issued sometime in June. Will it be able to do this do you think?
TO: It’s always difficult to predict anything, especially the future. That goes double in Papua New Guinea and Bougainville. I think the reality is that the nature of negotiations here and in Bougainville, there’s a great deal of personal connections and toing and froing that will be taking place.
It is very hard to fit that onto a clear timeline. I would describe that as perhaps aspirational, but it would be, it would be good. Whether this is, you know, a question of electoral politics within Bougainville, I think there would be, like, a more or less unanimous view in Bougainville that this needs to move forward as soon as possible. But I don’t know that a timeline is realistic.
The concerns that I would have about this, Don, would be not just about sort of questions of capacity and what happens in the negotiations in Bougainville, but we also need to think about what is happening in Papua New Guinea, and this goes for the entire process.
But here, in this case, PNG has its hands full with many other issues as well. There is a set of like LLG [Local Level Government] elections about to happen, so there are a great deal of things for the government to attend to. I wonder how viable it is to come up with a solution in a short time, but they are certainly capable of surprising everybody.
DW: The Prime Minister, James Marape, has said on a number of occasions that Bougainville is not economically ready or it hasn’t got the security situation under control. And my understanding is that when this was raised at the last meeting, there was quite a lot of giggling going on, because people were comparing what’s happened in Bougainville with what’s happening around the rest of the country, including in Southern Highlands, the province of Mr Marape.
TO: I think you know for me when I think about this, because I have worked with Bougainvilleans for a long time, and have worked with Papua New Guineans for a long time as well. The sense that I have is really one of quite sadness and a great missed opportunity.
Because if we wind the clock back to 1975, Bougainville declared independence, trying to pre-empt [the establishment of] Papua New Guinea. And that set in train a set of events that drastically reformed the Papua New Guinean political Constitution. Many of the sort of characteristic institutions we see now in Papua New Guinea, such as provinces, came about partly because of that.
That crisis, that first independence crisis, the first secession crisis, was resolved through deep changes to Papua New Guinea and to Bougainville, in which the country was able to grow and move forward.
What we see now, though, is this sort of view that Bougainville problems must all be solved in Bougainville, but in fact, many of the problems that are said to be Bougainville problems are Papua New Guinea problems, and that would include issues such as the economic difficulties that Bougainville finds itself in.
I mean, there are many ironies with this kind of criticism that Bougainville is not economically viable. One of them being that when Papua New Guinea became independent, it was largely dependent on Bougainville at that time. So Bougainvilleans are aware of this, and don’t really welcome that kind of idea.
But I think that more deeply there were some really important lessons I believe that could have been learned from the peace process that might have been very useful in other areas of Papua New Guinea, and because Bougainville has been kind of seen as this place apart, virtually as a foreign nation, those lessons have not, unfortunately, filtered back to Papua New Guinea in a way that might have been very helpful for everybody.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Pope Francis has died on Easter Monday, aged 88, the Vatican announced. The head of the Catholic Church had recently survived being hospitalised with double pneumonia.
“Dear brothers and sisters, with deep sorrow I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis. At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the house of the Father.”
There were many unusual aspects of Pope Francis’ papacy. He was the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas (and the southern hemisphere), the first to choose the name “Francis” and the first to give a TED talk.
He was also the first pope in more than 600 years to be elected following the resignation, rather than death, of his predecessor.
From the very start of his papacy, Francis seemed determined to do things differently and present the papacy in a new light. Even in thinking about his burial, he chose the unexpected: to be placed to rest not in the Vatican, but in the Basilica of St Mary Major in Rome – the first pope to be buried there in hundreds of years.
Vatican News reported the late Pope Francis had requested his funeral rites be simplified.
“The renewed rite,” said Archbishop Diego Ravelli, “seeks to emphasise even more that the funeral of the Roman Pontiff is that of a pastor and disciple of Christ and not of a powerful person of this world.”
Straddling a line between “progressive” and “conservative”, Francis experienced tension with both sides. In doing so, his papacy shone a spotlight on what it means to be Catholic today.
The Pope’s Easter Blessing Video: AP
The day before his death, Pope Francis made a brief appearance on Easter Sunday to bless the crowds at St Peter’s Square.
Between a rock and a hard place Francis was deemed not progressive enough by some, yet far too progressive by others.
His apostolic exhortation (an official papal teaching on a particular issue or action) Amoris Laetitia, ignited great controversy for seemingly being (more) open to the question of whether people who have divorced and remarried may receive Eucharist.
He also disappointed progressive Catholics, many of whom hoped he would make stronger changes on issues such as the roles of women, married clergy, and the broader inclusion of LGBTQIA+ Catholics.
The reception of his exhortation Querida Amazonia was one such example. In this document, Francis did not endorse marriage for priests, despite bishops’ requests for this. He also did not allow the possibility of women being ordained as deacons to address a shortage of ordained ministers. His discerning spirit saw there was too much division and no clear consensus for change.
Francis was also openly critical of Germany’s controversial “Synodal Way” – a series of conferences with bishops and lay people — that advocated for positions contrary to Church teachings. Francis expressed concern on multiple occasions that this project was a threat to the unity of the Church.
At the same time, Francis was no stranger to controversy from the conservative side of the Church, receiving “dubia” or “theological doubts” over his teaching from some of his Cardinals. In 2023, he took the unusual step of responding to some of these doubts.
Impact on the Catholic Church In many ways, the most striking thing about Francis was not his words or theology, but his style. He was a modest man, even foregoing the Apostolic Palace’s grand papal apartments to live in the Vatican’s simpler guest house.
He may well be remembered most for his simplicity of dress and habits, his welcoming and pastoral style and his wise spirit of discernment.
He is recognised as giving a clear witness to the life, love and joy of Jesus in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council – a point of major reform in modern Church history. This witness has translated into two major developments in Church teachings and life.
Pope Francis on respecting and protecting the environment. Image: Tandag Diocese
Love for our common home The first of these relates to environmental teachings. In 2015, Francis released his ground-breaking encyclical, Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home. It expanded Catholic social teaching by giving a comprehensive account of how the environment reflects our God-given “common home”.
Consistent with recent popes such as Benedict XVI and John Paul II, Francis acknowledged climate change and its destructive impacts and causes. He summarised key scientific research to forcefully argue for an evidence-based approach to addressing humans’ impact on the environment.
He also made a pivotal and innovative contribution to the climate change debate by identifying the ethical and spiritual causes of environmental destruction.
Francis argued combating climate change relied on the “ecological conversion” of the human heart, so that people may recognise the God-given nature of our planet and the fundamental call to care for it. Without this conversion, pragmatic and political measures wouldn’t be able to counter the forces of consumerism, exploitation and selfishness.
Francis argued a new ethic and spirituality was needed. Specifically, he said Jesus’ way of love – for other people and all creation – is the transformative force that could bring sustainable change for the environment and cultivate fraternity among people (and especially with the poor).
Synodality: moving towards a Church that listens Francis’s second major contribution, and one of the most significant aspects of his papacy, was his commitment to “synodality”. While there’s still confusion over what synodality actually means, and its potential for political distortion, it is above all a way of listening and discerning through openness to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
It involves hierarchy and lay people transparently and honestly discerning together, in service of the mission of the church. Synodality is as much about the process as the goal. This makes sense as Pope Francis was a Jesuit, an order focused on spreading Catholicism through spiritual formation and discernment.
Drawing on his rich Jesuit spirituality, Francis introduced a way of conversation centred on listening to the Holy Spirit and others, while seeking to cultivate friendship and wisdom.
With the conclusion of the second session of the Synod on Synodality in October 2024, it is too soon to assess its results. However, those who have been involved in synodal processes have reported back on their transformative potential.
Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, explained how participating in the 2015 Synod “was an extraordinary experience [and] in some ways an awakening”.
Cardinals use a centuries-old voting process to elect a new pope, complete with smoke signals to indicate the outcome. And the next papal conclave will be the most diverse in Catholic history.
— The Conversation U.S. (@ConversationUS) April 21, 2025
Catholicism in the modern age Francis’ papacy inspired both great joy and aspirations, as well as boiling anger and rejection. He laid bare the agonising fault lines within the Catholic community and struck at key issues of Catholic identity, triggering debate over what it means to be Catholic in the world today.
He leaves behind a Church that seems more divided than ever, with arguments, uncertainty and many questions rolling in his wake. But he has also provided a way for the Church to become more converted to Jesus’ way of love, through synodality and dialogue.
Francis showed us that holding labels such as “progressive” or “conservative” won’t enable the Church to live out Jesus’ mission of love – a mission he emphasised from the very beginning of his papacy.
The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa has appealed to Foreign Minister Winston Peters askingto New Zealand initiate a call for an internationally enforced “no-fly” zone over Gaza.
PSNA co-chairs John Minto and Maher Nazzal said in a statement this would be a small but practicable step to “blunt Israel’s continuing genocidal attacks” on Palestinians.
“Gaza is recognised under international law, and by the New Zealand government, as part of the illegally Occupied Palestinian Territory,” they said.
“As such, Israel’s intrusion into Gaza airspace is illegal, and is elevated to a war crime when its aircraft attack Palestinian civilians there to further what the International Court of Justice has described as a ‘plausible genocide”.”
Minto and Maher said the United Nations had repeatedly said there were no safe places in Gaza for Palestinian civilians, where even so-called “safe zones” were systematically attacked as Israel “terrorised the population to flee from the territory”.
“Suggestions for a no-fly zone have been made in the past but there has never been a better time for a concerted international effort to enforce such a zone over Gaza,” said Minto.
“In the week leading up to Anzac Day there is no better time for New Zealand to stand up and be counted.
“New Zealanders from past conflicts, including in that very region in 1917 and 1918, have died in vain if today’s politicians refuse to speak out to end the death and destruction in Gaza.”
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Pope Francis, the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics, has died aged 88 a day after he made his first prolonged public appearance since being discharged from hospital.
On Easter Sunday, Pope Francis entered St Peter’s Square in an open-air popemobile shortly after midday, greeting cheering pilgrim crowds and blessing babies.
The Pope, who had recently spent five weeks in hospital being treated for double pneumonia, also offered a special blessing for the first time since Christmas.
At the address, an aide read out his “Urbi et Orbi” — Latin for “to the city and the world” — benediction, in which the Pope condemned the “deplorable humanitarian situation” in Gaza.
“I express my closeness to the sufferings . . . of all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people,” said the message.
“I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace.”
On the same day, Francis — who has been Pope for 12 years — also held a private meeting with US Vice President JD Vance to exchange Easter greetings.
Among responses from world leaders, Vance said his “heart goes out to the millions of Christians all over the world who loved him”, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said it was “deeply sad news, because a great man has left us,” and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Pope France would be remembered for his efforts to build “a more just, peaceful and compassionate world.”
Most vocal leader on Gaza
Reporting from Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary said the Pope’s death was “another sad day for Gaza — especially for the Christian Catholic community’ in the besieged enclave.
“He is seen as one of the most vocal leaders on Gaza. He was always condemning the war on Gaza, and always asking for a ceasefire and asking for the end of this conflict,” she said.
“According to the Christian community in the Gaza Strip, he was in contact with them daily, asking them what they need and asking about what they are facing, especially as this community has been attacked several times during the course of this war.
“At this stage, the Palestinians need someone to stand by them, to defend and support them.
Traditionally, when the Pope dies or resigns, the Papal Conclave — cardinals under the age of 80 — vote for his successor.
To prevent outside influence, the conclave locks itself in the Sistine Chapel and deliberates on potential successors.
While the number of papal electors is typically capped at 120, there are currently 138 eligible voters. Its members cast their votes via secret ballots, a process overseen by nine randomly selected cardinals.
A two-thirds majority is traditionally required to elect the new pope, and voting continues until this threshold is met.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Pope Francis, the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics, has died aged 88 a day after he made his first prolonged public appearance since being discharged from hospital.
On Easter Sunday, Pope Francis entered St Peter’s Square in an open-air popemobile shortly after midday, greeting cheering pilgrim crowds and blessing babies.
The Pope, who had recently spent five weeks in hospital being treated for double pneumonia, also offered a special blessing for the first time since Christmas.
At the address, an aide read out his “Urbi et Orbi” — Latin for “to the city and the world” — benediction, in which the Pope condemned the “deplorable humanitarian situation” in Gaza.
“I express my closeness to the sufferings . . . of all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people,” said the message.
“I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace.”
On the same day, Francis — who has been Pope for 12 years — also held a private meeting with US Vice President JD Vance to exchange Easter greetings.
Among responses from world leaders, Vance said his “heart goes out to the millions of Christians all over the world who loved him”, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said it was “deeply sad news, because a great man has left us,” and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Pope France would be remembered for his efforts to build “a more just, peaceful and compassionate world.”
Most vocal leader on Gaza
Reporting from Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary said the Pope’s death was “another sad day for Gaza — especially for the Christian Catholic community’ in the besieged enclave.
“He is seen as one of the most vocal leaders on Gaza. He was always condemning the war on Gaza, and always asking for a ceasefire and asking for the end of this conflict,” she said.
“According to the Christian community in the Gaza Strip, he was in contact with them daily, asking them what they need and asking about what they are facing, especially as this community has been attacked several times during the course of this war.
“At this stage, the Palestinians need someone to stand by them, to defend and support them.
Traditionally, when the Pope dies or resigns, the Papal Conclave — cardinals under the age of 80 — vote for his successor.
To prevent outside influence, the conclave locks itself in the Sistine Chapel and deliberates on potential successors.
While the number of papal electors is typically capped at 120, there are currently 138 eligible voters. Its members cast their votes via secret ballots, a process overseen by nine randomly selected cardinals.
A two-thirds majority is traditionally required to elect the new pope, and voting continues until this threshold is met.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
Part one of a two-part series: On the courage to remember
COMMENTARY:By Eugene Doyle
The first demonstration I ever went on was at the age of 12, against the Vietnam War.
The first formal history lesson I received was a few months later when I commenced high school. That day the old history master, Mr Griffiths, chalked what I later learnt was a quote from Hegel:
“The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn the lessons of history.” It’s about time we changed that.
Painful though it is, let’s have the courage to remember what they desperately try to make us forget.
Cultural amnesia and learning the lessons of history Memorialising events is a popular pastime with politicians, journalists and old soldiers.
Nothing wrong with that. Honouring sacrifice, preserving collective memory and encouraging reconciliation are all valid. Recalling the liberation of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) on 30 April 1975 is important.
What is criminal, however, is that we failed to learn the vital lessons that the US defeat in Vietnam should have taught us all. Sadly much was forgotten and the succeeding half century has witnessed a carnival of slaughter perpetrated by the Western world on hapless South Americans, Africans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, and many more.
Honouring sacrifice, preserving collective memory and encouraging reconciliation are all valid. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
It’s time to remember.
Memory shapes national identity As scholars say: Memory shapes national identity. If your cultural products — books, movies, songs, curricula and the like — fail to embed an appreciation of the war crimes, racism, and imperial culpability for events like the Vietnam War, then, as we have proven, it can all be done again. How many recognise today that Vietnam was an American imperial war in Asia, that “fighting communism” was a pretext that lost all credibility, partly thanks to television and especially thanks to heroic journalists like John Pilger and Seymour Hersh?
Just as in Gaza today, the truth and the crimes could not be hidden anymore.
How many recognise today that Vietnam was an American imperial war in Asia? Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
If a culture doesn’t face up to its past crimes — say the treatment of the Aborigines by settler Australia, of Māori by settler New Zealand, of Palestinians by the Zionist state since 1948, or the various genocides perpetrated by the US government on the indigenous peoples of what became the 50 states, then it leads ultimately to moral decay and repetition.
Lest we forget. Forget what? Is there a collective memory in the West that the Americans and their allies raped thousands of Vietnamese women, killed hundreds of thousands of children, were involved in countless large scale war crimes, summary executions and other depravities in order to impose their will on a people in their own country?
Why has there been no collective responsibility for the death of over two million Vietnamese? Why no reparations for America’s vast use of chemical weapons on Vietnam, some provided by New Zealand?
Vietnam Veterans Against War released a report “50 years of struggle” in 2017 which included this commendable statement: “To VVAW and its supporters, the veterans had a continuing duty to report what they had witnessed”. This included the frequency of “beatings, rapes, cutting body parts, violent torture during interrogations and cutting off heads”.
The US spends billions projecting itself as morally superior but people who followed events at the time, including brilliant journalists like Pilger, knew something beyond sordid was happening within the US military.
The importance of remembering the My Lai Massacre While cultural memes like “Me Love You Long Time” played to an exoticised and sexualised image of Vietnamese women — popular in American-centric movies like Full Metal Jacket,Green Beret, Rambo, Apocalypse Now, as was the image of the Vietnamese as sadistic torturers, there has been a long-term attempt to expunge from memory the true story of American depravity.
The most infamous such incident of the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre of 16 March 1968. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
All, or virtually all, armies rape their victims. The US Army is no exception — despite rhetorically jockeying with the Israelis for the title of “the world’s most moral army”. The most famous such incident of the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre of 16 March 1968 in which about 500 civilians were subjected to hours of rapes, mutilation and eventual murder by soldiers of the US 20th Infantry Regiment.
Rape victims ranged from girls of 10 years through to old women. The US soldiers even took a lunch break before recommencing their crimes.
The official commission of inquiry, culminating in the Peers Report found that an extensive network of officers had taken part in a cover-up of what were large-scale war crimes. Only one soldier, Lieutenant Calley, was ever sentenced to jail but within days he was, on the orders of the US President, transferred to a casually-enforced three and half years of house arrest. By this act, the United States of America continued a pattern of providing impunity for grave war crimes. That pattern continues to this day.
The failure of the US Army to fully pursue the criminals will be an eternal stain on the US Army whose soldiers went on to commit countless rapes, hundreds of thousands of murders and other crimes across the globe in the succeeding five decades. If you resile from these facts, you simply haven’t read enough official information.
Thank goodness for journalists, particularly Seymour Hersh, who broke rank and exposed the truth of what happened at My Lai.
Senator John McCain’s “sacrifice” and the crimes that went unpunished Thousands of Viet Cong died in US custody, many from torture, many by summary execution but the Western cultural image of Vietnam focuses on the cruelty of the North Vietnamese toward “victims” like terror-bomber John McCain.
The future US presidential candidate was on his 23rd bombing mission, part of a campaign of “War by Tantrum” in the words of a New York Times writer, when he was shot down over Hanoi.
The CIA’s Phoenix Programme was eventually shut down after public outrage and hearings by the US Congress into its misdeeds. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Also emblematic of this state-inflicted terrorism was the CIA’s Phoenix Programme, eventually shut down after public outrage and hearings by the US Congress into its misdeeds. According to US journalist Douglas Valentine, author of several books on the CIA, including The Phoenix Program:
“Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers”.
Common practices, Valentine says, quoting US witnesses and official papers, included:
“Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shock (“the Bell Telephone Hour”) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; “the water treatment”; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair.”
No US serviceman, CIA agent or other official was held to account for these crimes.
Tiger Force — part of the US 327th Infantry — gained a grisly reputation for indiscriminately mowing down civilians, mutilations (cutting off of ears which were retained as souvenirs was common practice, according to sworn statements by participants). All this was supposed to be kept secret but was leaked in 2003.
“Their crimes were uncountable, their madness beyond imagination — so much so that for almost four decades, the story of Tiger Force was covered up under orders that stretched all the way to the White House,” journalists Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss reported.
Their crimes, secretly documented by the US military, included beheading a baby to intimidate villagers into providing information — interesting given how much mileage the US and Israel made of fake stories about beheaded babies on 7 October 2023. The US went to great lengths to hide these ugly truths — and no one ever faced real consequences.
The US went to great lengths to hide these ugly truths. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Helicopter gunships and soldiers at checkpoints gunned down thousands of Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, much as US forces did at checkpoints in Iraq, according to leaked US documents following the illegal invasion of that country.
The worst cowards and criminals were not the rapists and murderers themselves but the high-ranking politicians and military leaders who tried desperately to cover up these and hundreds of other incidents. As Lieutenant Calley himself said of My Lai: “It’s not an isolated incident.”
Here we are 50 years later in the midst of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, with the US fuelling war and bombing people across the globe. Isn’t it time we stopped supporting this madness?
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
Next article: The fall of Saigon 1975: Part two: Quiet mutiny: the US army falls apart.
Back in 1982, a young Mel Gibson starred as a foreign correspondent who was dropped into Jakarta during revolutionary chaos in The Year of Living Dangerously. The 1967 events the movie depicted were real enough, but Mel Gibson’s correspondent Guy Hamilton was made up for what was essentially a romantic drama.
There was no romance and a lot more real life 25 years later in Balibo, another movie with Australian journalists in harm’s way during Indonesian upheaval.
Anthony La Paglia had won awards for his performance as Roger East, a journalist killed in what was then East Timor — now Timor-Leste — in December 1975. East was killed while investigating the fate of five other journalists — including New Zealander Guy Cunningham — who was killed during the Indonesian invasion two months earlier.
The Correspondent has a happier ending but is still a tough watch — especially for its subject.
Met in London newsrooms
I first met Peter Greste in newsrooms in London about 30 years ago. He had worked for Reuters, CNN, and the BBC — going on to become a BBC correspondent in Afghanistan.
He later reported from Belgrade, Santiago, and then Nairobi, from where he appeared regularly on RNZ’s Nine to Noon as an African news correspondent. Greste later joined the English-language network of the Doha-based Al Jazeera and became a worldwide story himself while filling in as the correspondent in Cairo.
Actor Richard Roxburgh as jailed journalist Peter Greste in The Correspondent alongside Al Jazeera colleagues Mohammed Fahmy and Baher Mohammed. Image: The Correspondent/RNZ
Greste and two Egyptian colleagues, Baher Mohamed and Mohamed Fahmy, were arrested in late 2013 on trumped-up charges of aiding and abetting the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation labeled “terrorist” by the new Egyptian regime of the time.
Six months later he was sentenced to seven years in jail for “falsifying news” and smearing the reputation of Egypt itself. Mohamed was sentenced to 10 years.
Media organisations launched an international campaign for their freedom with the slogan “Journalism is not a crime”. Peter’s own family became familiar faces in the media while working hard for his release too.
Peter Greste was deported to Australia in February 2015. The deal stated he would serve the rest of his sentence there, but the Australian government did not enforce that. Instead, Greste became a professor of media and journalism, currently at Macquarie University in Sydney.
Movie consultant
Among other things, he has also been a consultant on The Correspondent — now in cinemas around New Zealand — with Richard Roxborough cast as Greste himself.
Australian professor of journalism Peter Greste …. posing for a photograph when he was an Al Jazeera journalist in Kibati village, near Goma, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on 7 August 2013. Image: IFEX media freedom/APR
“I eventually came to realise it’s not me that’s up there on the screen. It’s the product of a whole bunch of creatives. And the result is … more like a painting rather than a photograph,” Greste told Mediawatch.
“Over the years I’ve written about it, I’ve spoken about it countless times. I’ve built a career on it. But I wasn’t really anticipating the emotional impact of seeing the craziness of my arrest, the confusion of that period, the claustrophobia of the cell, the sheer frustration of the crazy trial and the really discombobulating moment of my release.
“But there is another very difficult story about what happened to a colleague of mine in Somalia, which I haven’t spoken about publicly. Seeing that on screen was actually pretty gut-wrenching.”
In 2005, his BBC colleague Kate Peyton was shot alongside him on their first day in on assignment in Somalia. She died soon after.
“That was probably the toughest day of my entire life far over and above anything I went through in Egypt. But I am glad that they put it in [The Correspondent]. It underlines … the way in which journalism is under attack. What happened to us in Egypt wasn’t a random, isolated incident — but part of a much longer pattern we’re seeing continue to this day.”
Supporters of the jailed British-Egyptian human rights activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah take part in a candlelight vigil outside Downing Street in London, United Kingdom, as he begins a complete hunger strike while world leaders arrive for COP27 climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in 2022. Image: RNZ Mediawatch/AFP
‘Owed his life’
Greste says he “owes his life” to fellow prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah — an Egyptian activist who is also in the film.
“There’s a bit of artistic licence in the way it was portrayed but . . . he is easily one of the most intelligent, astute and charismatic humanitarians I’ve ever come across. He was one of the main pro-democracy activists who was behind the Arab Spring revolution in 2011 — a true democrat.
“He also inspired me to write the letters that we smuggled out of prison that described our arrest not as an attack on … what we’d actually come to represent. And that was press freedom.
“That helped frame the campaign that ultimately got me out. So, for both psychological and political reasons, I feel like I owe him my life.
“There was nothing in our reporting that confirmed the allegations against us. So I started to drag up all sorts of demons from the past. I started thinking maybe this is the universe punishing me for sins of the past. I was obviously digging up that particular moment as one of the most extreme and tragic moments. It took a long time for me to get past it.
“He’d been in prison a lot because of his activism, so he understood the psychology of it. He also understood the politics of it in ways that I could never do as a newcomer.”
“Unfortunately, he is still there. He should have been released on September 29th last year. His mother launched a hunger strike in London . . . so I actually joined her on hunger strike earlier this year to try and add pressure.
“If this movie also draws a bit of attention to his case, then I think that’s an important element.”
Another wrinkle
Another wrinkle in the story was the situation of his two Egyptian Al Jazeera colleagues.
Greste was essentially a stranger to them, having only arrived in Egypt shortly before their arrest.
The film shows Greste clashing with Fahmy, who later sued Al Jazeera. Fahmy felt the international pressure to free Greste was making their situation worse by pushing the Egyptian regime into a corner.
“To call it a confrontation is probably a bit of an understatement. We had some really serious arguments and sometimes they got very, very heated. But I want audiences to really understand Fahmy’s worldview in this film.
“He and I had very different understandings of what was going … and how those differences played out.
“I’ve got a hell of a lot of respect for him. He is like a brother to me. That doesn’t mean we always agreed with each other and doesn’t mean we always got on with each other like any siblings, I suppose.”
His colleagues were eventually released on bail shortly after Greste’s deportation in 2015.
Fahmy renounced his Egyptian citizenship and was later deported to Canada, while Mohamed was released on bail and eventually pardoned.
Retrial — all ‘reconvicted’
“After I was released there was a retrial … and we were all reconvicted. They were finally released and pardoned, but the pardon didn’t extend to me.
“I can’t go back because I’m still a convicted ‘terrorist’ and I still have an outstanding prison sentence to serve, which is a little bit weird. Any country that has an extradition treaty with Egypt is a problem. There are a fairly significant number of those across the Middle East and Africa.”
Greste told Mediawatch his conviction was even flagged in transit in Auckland en route from New York to Sydney. He was told he failed a character test.
“I was able to resolve it. I had some friends in Canberra and were able to sort it out, but I was told in no uncertain terms I’m not allowed into New Zealand without getting a visa because of that criminal record.
“If I’m traveling to any country I have to say … I was convicted on terrorism offences. Generally speaking, I can explain it, but it often takes a lot of bureaucratic process to do that.”
Greste’s first account of his time in jail — The First Casualty — was published in 2017. Most of the book was about media freedom around the world, lamenting that the numbers of journalists jailed and killed increased after his release.
Something that Greste also now ponders a lot in his current job as a professor of media and journalism.
Ten years on from that, it is worse again. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says at least 124 journalists and media workers were killed last year, nearly two-thirds of them Palestinians killed by Israel in its war in Gaza.
The book has now been updated and republished as The Correspondent.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
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