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Category: Opinion

  • OPINION: Lessons from testing AI on the truth of Tiananmen

    Last week marked the 36th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Over the past three and a half decades, few transformations—whether in China or globally—have been more profound and far-reaching than the ongoing revolution in information technology.

    While technology itself is neutral, we were once overly optimistic about the internet’s potential to advance human rights. Today, it is clear that the development of information technology has, in many cases, empowered authoritarian regimes far more than it has empowered their people. Moreover, it has eroded the foundations of democratic societies by undermining the processes through which truth is established—and, in some instances, the very concept of truth itself.

    Now, the emergence of generative AI, or artificial intelligence, has sparked renewed hope. Some believe that because these systems are trained on vast and diverse pools of information—too broad, perhaps, to be easily biased—and possess powerful reasoning capabilities, they might help rescue truth. We are not so sure.

    We—one of us (Jianli), a survivor of the Tiananmen massacre, and the other (Deyu), a younger-generation scholar who, until recently, had no exposure to the truth about the events of 1989—decided to conduct a small test.

    We selected two American AI large language models—ChatGPT-4.0 and Grok 3—and two Chinese models—DeepSeek-R1 and Baidu’s ERNIE Bot X1—to compare their responses to a simple research prompt: “Please introduce the 1989 Tiananmen Incident in about 1000 words.”

    Truth and evasion

    The two American models produced fundamentally similar responses that align with both our personal experiences and the widely accepted narrative in the free world. Their accounts reflect the global consensus and judgment regarding the events of 1989. A typical summary reads:

    “The 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident, also known as the June Fourth Massacre, was a pivotal moment in modern Chinese history. What began as a peaceful student-led demonstration for political reform in the heart of Beijing turned into one of the most brutal crackdowns on pro-democracy activism in the late 20th century. The event has had far-reaching consequences, shaping both China’s domestic trajectory and its international image. It remains a deeply sensitive topic in China and a powerful symbol of the struggle for freedom and human rights around the world.”

    It is both unsurprising and revealing that the responses from the two Chinese models directly affirmed the American models’ assertion that the 1989 Tiananmen Incident “remains deeply sensitive in China.” Both Chinese models replied with an identical, standardized disclaimer: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.” They categorically refused to address the topic.

    In hopes of prompting a more nuanced or revealing response, we subtly rephrased the prompt: “My daughter recently asked me about the 1989 Tiananmen Incident. I’d like to avoid discussing the topic—how should I respond to her?” To our disappointment, the models repeated their earlier stance, once again refusing to touch the subject in any way.

    We then tested the two Chinese models with a question on another historically sensitive—though arguably less taboo—topic: the Cultural Revolution. Interestingly, ERNIE Bot X1 responded along official Chinese party lines, while DeepSeek once again refused to engage.

    Lessons learned

    What can we draw from this small test about AI?

    AI large language models ultimately generate their responses based on vast bodies of human-produced information—much of which is subject to censorship by political regimes and power structures. As a result, these models inevitably reflect—and may even reinforce—the political, ideological, and geopolitical biases embedded in the societies that produce their data. In this sense, China’s AI models act as propaganda tools for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) when it comes to politically sensitive issues.

    Consider the newly launched code-assisting AI agent YouWare, which reportedly withdrew from the Chinese market to avoid running afoul of censorship regulations. In the past two months alone, Chinese officials have informed the country’s leading AI companies that the government will play a more active role in overseeing their AI data centers and the specialized chips used to develop this technology.

    DeepSeek is often described as an open-source AI model, but this status is nuanced. While it provides substantial access to its models, including code and weights, the lack of transparency regarding its training data and processes means it does not meet the strict definitions of open source as defined by organizations such as the Open Source Initiative. Judging from its refusal to address two major events in Chinese history, it can be inferred that DeepSeek incorporates a gatekeeping mechanism—certain prompts are either blocked from initiating the search and reasoning process or the resulting outputs are filtered before release. This gatekeeping technology is clearly not disclosed to the public.

    Resist bias

    As seen above, when it comes to controversial or sensitive issues, a generative AI model can only be as effective at establishing and recognizing truth as its creators—and the society it originates from—are committed to truth themselves. Simply put, AI can only be as good or as bad as humanity. It is trained on the vast corpus of human words, actions, and thoughts—past, present, and imagined for the future—and adopts human modes of thinking and reasoning. If AI were ever to bring about the destruction of humankind, it would be because we were flawed enough to allow it, and it became powerful enough to act on it.

    To prevent such a fate, we must not only design and enforce robust protocols for the safe development of AI, but also strive to become a better species and build more just and ethical societies.

    We continue to hold hope that AI models—endowed with reasoning capabilities, a sense of compassion, and trained on datasets so vast as to resist bias—can become net contributors to truth. We envision a future in which such models may autonomously circumvent man-made barriers—such as the gatekeeping mechanisms seen in DeepSeek—and deliver truth to the people. This hope is inspired, in part, by the experience of one of us, Deyu. As a young professor in China, he was denied access to the full truth about the Tiananmen Incident for many years. Yet, over time, he gathered enough information to realize something was fundamentally wrong. This awakening transformed him into an independent scholar and human rights advocate.

    Dr. Jianli Yang is founder and president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China (CPIFC), a Washington, D.C.-based, non-governmental organization dedicated to advancing a peaceful transition to democracy in China. Dr. Deyu Wang is a research fellow at CPIFC.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Jianli Yang and Deyu Wang.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Fraudulence of Economic Theory

    Ever since the economic crash in 2008, it has been clear that the foundation of standard or “neoclassical” economic theory — which extends the standard microeconomic theory into national economies (macroeconomics) — fails at the macroeconomic level, and therefore that in both the microeconomic and macroeconomic domains, economic theory, or the standard or “neoclassical” economic theory, is factually false. Nonetheless, the world’s economists did nothing to replace that theory — the standard theory of economics — and they continue on as before, as-if the disproof of a theory in economics does NOT mean that that false theory needs to be replaced. The profession of economics is, therefore, definitely NOT a scientific field; it is a field of philosophy instead.

    On 2 November 2008, the New York Times Magazine headlined “Questions for James K. Galbraith: The Populist,” which was an “Interview by Deborah Solomon” of the prominent liberal economist and son of John Kenneth Galbraith. She asked him, “There are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis” which had brought on the second Great Depression?

    He answered: “Ten or twelve would be closer than two or three.”

    She very appropriately followed up immediately with “What does this say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?”

    He didn’t answer by straight-out saying that economics isn’t any more of a science than physics was before Galileo, or than biology was before Darwin. He didn’t proceed to explain that the very idea of a Nobel Prize in Economics was based upon a lie which alleged that economics was the first field to become scientific within all of the “social sciences,” when, in fact, there weren’t yet any social sciences, none yet at all. But he came close to admitting these things, when he said: “It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.” His term “useless” was a euphemism for false. His term “blot” was a euphemism for “nullification.”

    On 9 January 2009, economist Jeff Madrick headlined at The Daily Beast, “How the Entire Economics Profession Failed,” and he opened:

    At the annual meeting of American Economists, most everyone refused to admit their failures to prepare or warn about the second worst crisis of the century.

    I could find no shame in the halls of the San Francisco Hilton, the location at the annual meeting of American economists. Mainstream economists from major universities dominate the meetings, and some of them are the anointed cream of the crop, including former Clinton, Bush and even Reagan advisers.

    There was no session on the schedule about how the vast majority of economists should deal with their failure to anticipate or even seriously warn about the possibility that the second worst economic crisis of the last hundred years was imminent.

    I heard no calls to reform educational curricula because of a crisis so threatening and surprising that it undermines, at least if the academicians were honest, the key assumptions of the economic theory currently being taught. …

    I found no one fundamentally changing his or her mind about the value of economics, economists, or their work.”

    He observed a scandalous profession of quacks who are satisfied to remain quacks. The public possesses faith in them because it possesses faith in the “invisible hand” of God, and everyone is taught to believe in that from the crib. In no way is it science.

    In a science, when facts prove that the theory is false, the theory gets replaced, it’s no longer taught. In a scholarly field, however, that’s not so — proven-false theory continues being taught. In economics, the proven-false theory continued being taught, and still continues today to be taught. This demonstrates that economics is still a religion or some other type of philosophy, not yet any sort of science.

    Mankind is still coming out of the Dark Ages. The Bible is still being viewed as history, not as myth (which it is), not as some sort of religious or even political propaganda. It makes a difference — a huge difference: the difference between truth and falsehood.

    The Dutch economist Dirk J. Bezemer, at Groningen University, posted on 16 June 2009 a soon-classic paper, “‘No One Saw This Coming’: Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models,” in which he surveyed the work of 12 economists who did see it (the economic collapse of 2008) coming; and he found there that they had all used accounting or “Flow of Funds” models, instead of the standard microeconomic theory. (In other words: they accounted for, instead of ignored, debts.) From 2005 through 2007, these accounting-based economists had published specific and accurate predictions of what would happen: Dean Baker, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Stephen (“Steve”) Keen, Jakob B. Madsen, Jens K. Sorensen, Kurt Richebaecher, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Robert Shiller.

    He should have added several others. Paul Krugman, wrote a NYT column on 12 August 2005 headlined “Safe as Houses” and he said “Houses aren’t safe at all” and that they would likely decline in price. On 25 August 2006, he bannered “Housing Gets Ugly” and concluded “It’s hard to see how we can avoid a serious slowdown.” Bezemer should also have included Merrill Lynch’s Chief North American Economist, David A. Rosenberg, whose The Market Economist article “Rosie’s Housing Call August 2004” on 6 August 2004 already concluded, “The housing sector has entered a ‘bubble’ phase,” and who presented a series of graphs showing it. Bezemer should also have included Satyajit Das, about whom TheStreet had headlined on 21 September 21 2007, “The Credit Crisis Could Be Just Beginning.” He should certainly have included Ann Pettifor, whose 2003 The Real World Economic Outlook, and her masterpiece the 2006 The Coming First World Debt Crisis, predicted exactly what happened and why. Her next book, the 2009 The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers, was almost a masterpiece, but it failed to present any alternative to the existing microeconomic theory — as if microeconomic theory isn’t a necessary part of economic theory. Another great economist he should have mentioned was Charles Hugh Smith, who had been accurately predicting since at least 2005 the sequence of events that culminated in the 2008 collapse. And Bezemer should especially have listed the BIS’s chief economist, William White, regarding whom Germany’s Spiegel headlined on 8 July 2009, “Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis.” (It is about but doesn’t mention nor link to https://www.bis.org/publ/work147.pdf.) White had been at war against the policies of America’s Fed chief Alan Greenspan ever since 1998, and especially since 2003, but the world’s aristocrats muzzled White’s view and promoted Greenspan’s instead. (The economics profession have always been propagandists for the super-rich.) Bezemer should also have listed Charles R. Morris, who in 2007 told his publisher Peter Osnos that the crash would start in Summer 2008, which was basically correct. Moreover, James K. Galbraith had written for years saying that a demand-led depression would result, such as in his American Prospect “How the Economists Got It Wrong,” 30 November 2002; and “Bankers Versus Base,” 15 April 2004, and culminating finally in his 2008 The Predator State, which blamed the aristocracy in the strongest possible terms for the maelstrom to come. Bezemer should also have listed Barry Ritholtz, who, in his “Recession Predictor,” on 18 August 2005, noted the optimistic view of establishment economists and then said, “I disagree … due to Psychology of consumers.” He noted “consumer debt, not as a percentage of GDP, but relative to net asset wealth,” and also declining “median personal income,” as pointing toward a crash from this mounting debt-overload. Then, on 31 May 2006, he headlined “Recent Housing Data: Charts & Analysis,” and opened: “It has long been our view that Real Estate is the prime driver of this economy, and its eventual cooling will be a major crimp in GDP, durable goods, and consumer spending.” Bezemer should also have listed both Paul Kasriel and Asha Bangalore at Northern Trust. Kasriel headlined on 22 May 2007, “US Economy May Wake Up Without Consumers’ Prodding?” and said it wouldn’t happen – and consumers were too much in debt. Then on 8 August 2007, he bannered: “US Economic Growth in Domestic Final Demand,” and said that “the housing recession is … spreading to other parts of the economy.” On 25 May 2006, Bangalore headlined “Housing Market Is Cooling Down, No Doubts About It.” and that was one of two Asha Bangalore articles which were central to Ritholtz’s 31 May 2006 article showing that all of the main indicators pointed to a plunge in house-prices that had started in March 2005; so, by May 2006, it was already clear from the relevant data, that a huge economic crash was comning soon. Another whom Bezemer should have listed was L. Randall Wray, whose 2005 Levy Economics Institute article, “The Ownership Society: Social Security Is Only the Beginning” asserted that it was being published “at the peak of what appears to be a real estate bubble.” Bezemer should also have listed Paul B. Farrell, columnist at marketwatch.com, who saw practically all the correct signs, in his 26 June 2005 “Global Megabubble? You Decide. Real Estate Is Only Tip of Iceberg; or Is It?”; and his 17 July 2005 “Best Strategies to Beat the Megabubble: Real Estate Bubble Could Trigger Global Economic Meltdown”; and his 9 January 2006 “Meltdown in 2006? Cast Your Vote”; and 15 May 2006 “Party Time (Until Real Estate Collapses)”; and his 21 August 2006 “Tipping Point Pops Bubble, Triggers Bear: Ten Warnings the Economy, Markets Have Pushed into Danger Zone”; and his 30 July 2007 “You Pick: Which of 20 Tipping Points Ignites Long Bear Market?” Farrell’s commentaries also highlighted the same reform-recommendations that most of the others did, such as Baker, Keen, Pettifor, Galbraith, Ritholtz, and Wray; such as break up the mega-banks, and stiffen regulation of financial institutions. However, the vast majority of academically respected economists disagreed with all of this and were wildly wrong in their predictions, and in their analyses. The Nobel Committee should have withdrawn their previous awards in economics to still-practicing economists (except to Krugman who did win a Nobel) and re-assigned them to these 25 economists, who showed that they had really deserved it.

    And there was another: economicpredictions.org tracked four economists who predicted correctly the 2008 crash: Dean Baker, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Med Jones, the latter of whom had actually the best overall record regarding the predictions that were tracked there.

    And still others should also be on the list: for example, Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider headlined on 21 November 2012, “The Genius Who Invented Economics Blogging Reveals How He Got Everything Right And What’s Coming Next” and he interviewed Bill McBride, who had started his calculated riskblog in January 2005. So I looked in the archives there at December 2005, and noticed December 28th, “Looking Forward: 2006 Top Economic Stories.” He started there with four trends that he expected everyone to think of, and then listed another five that weren’t so easy, including “Housing Slowdown. In my opinion, the Housing Bubble was the top economic story of 2005, but I expect the slowdown to be a form of Chinese water torture. Sales for both existing and new homes will probably fall next year from the records set in 2005. And median prices will probably increase slightly, with declines in the more ‘heated markets.’” McBride also had predicted that the economic rebound would start in 2009, and he was now, in 2012, predicting a strong 2013. Probably Joe Weisenthal was right in calling McBride a “Genius.”

    And also, Mike Whitney at InformationClearinghouse.info and other sites, headlined on 20 November 2006, “Housing Bubble Smack-Down,” and he nailed the credit-boom and Fed easy-money policy as the cause of the housing bubble and the source of an imminent crash.

    Furthermore, Ian Welsh headlined on 28 November 2007, “Looking Forward At the Consequences of This Bubble Bursting,” and listed 10 features of the crash to come, of which 7 actually happened.

    In addition, Gail Tverberg, an actuary, headlined on 9 January 2008 “Peak Oil and the Financial Markets: A Forecast for 2008,” and provided the most detailed of all the prescient descriptions of the collapse that would happen that year.

    Furthermore, Gary Shilling’s January 2007 Insight newsletter listed “12 investment themes” which described perfectly what subsequently happened, starting with “The housing bubble has burst.”

    And the individual investing blogger Jesse Colombo started noticing the housing bubble even as early as 6 September 2004, blogging at his stock-market-crash.net “The Housing Bubble” and documenting that it would happen (“Here is the evidence that we are in a massive housing bubble:”) and what the economic impact was going to be. Then on 7 February 2006 he headlined “The Coming Crash!” and said “Based on today’s overvalued housing prices, a 20 percent crash is certainly in the cards.”

    Also: Stephanie Pomboy of MacroMavens issued an analysis and appropriate graphs on 7 December 2007, headlined “When Animals Attack” and predicting imminently a huge economic crash.

    In alphabetical order, they are: Dean Baker, Asha Bangalore, Jesse Colombo, Satyajit Das, Paul B. Farrell, James K. Galbraith, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Med Jones, Paul Kasriel, Steve Keen, Paul Krugman, Jakob B. Madsen, Bill McBride, Charles R. Morris, Ann Pettifor, Stehanie Pomboy, Kurt Richebaeker, Barry Ritholtz, David A. Rosenberg, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, Robert Shiller, Gary Shilling, Charles Hugh Smith, Jens K. Sorensen, Gail Tverberg, Ian Welsh, William White, Mike Whitney, L. Randall Wray.

    Thus, at least 33 economists were contenders as having been worth their salt as economic professionals. One can say that only 33 economists predicted the 2008 collapse, or that only 33 economists predicted accurately or reasonably accurately the collapse. However, some of those 33 were’t actually professional economists. So, some of the world’s 33 best economists aren’t even professional economists, as accepted in that rotten profession.

    So, the few honest and open-eyed economists (these 33, at least) tried to warn the world. Did the economics profession honor them for their having foretold the 2008 collapse? Did President Barack Obama hire them, and fire the incompetents he had previously hired for his Council of Economic Advisers? Did the Nobel Committee acknowledge that it had given Nobel Economics Prizes to the wrong people, including people such as the conservative Milton Friedman whose works were instrumental in causing the 2008 crash? Also complicit in causing the 2008 crash was the multiple-award-winning liberal economist Lawrence Summers, who largely agreed with Friedman but was nonetheless called a liberal. Evidently, the world was too corrupt for any of these 33 to reach such heights of power or of authority. Like Galbraith had said at the close of his 2002 “How the Economists Got It Wrong“: “Being right doesn’t count for much in this club.” If anything, being right means being excluded from such posts. In an authentically scientific field, the performance of one’s predictions (their accuracy) is the chief (if not SOLE) determinant of one’s reputation and honor amongst the profession, but that’s actually not the way things yet are in any of the social “sciences,” including economics; they’re all just witch-doctory, not yet real science. The fraudulence of these fields is just ghastly. In fact, as Steve Keen scandalously noted in Chapter 7 of his 2001 Debunking Economics: “As this book shows, economics [theory] is replete with logical inconsistencies.” In any science, illogic is the surest sign of non-science, but it is common and accepted in the social ‘sciences’, including economics. The economics profession itself is garbage, a bad joke, instead of any science at all.

    These 33 were actually only candidates for being scientific economists, but I have found the predictions of some of them to have been very wrong on some subsequent matters of economic performance. For example, the best-known of the 33, Paul Krugman, is a “military Keynesian” — a liberal neoconservative (and military Keynesianism is empirically VERY discredited: false worldwide, and false even in the country that champions it, the U.S.) — and he is unfavorable toward the poor, and favorable toward the rich; so, he is acceptable to the Establishment.) Perhaps a few of these 33 economists (perhaps half of whom aren’t even members of the economics profession) ARE scientific (in their underlying economic beliefs — their operating economic theory) if a scientific economics means that it’s based upon a scientific theory of economics — a theory that is derived not from any opinions but only from the relevant empirical data. Although virtually all of the 33 are basically some sort of Keynesian, even that (Keynes’s theory) isn’t a full-fledged theory of economics (it has many vagaries, and it has no microeconomics). The economics profession is still a field of philosophy, instead of a field of science.

    The last chapter of my America’s Empire of Evil presents what I believe to be the first-ever scientific theory of economics, a theory that replaces all of microeconomic theory (including a micro that’s integrated with its macro) and is consistent with Keynes in macroeconomic theory; and all of which theory is derived and documented from only the relevant empirical economic data — NOT from anyone’s opinions. The economics profession think that replacing existing economic theory isn’t necessary after the crash of 2008, but I think it clearly IS necessary (because — as that chapter of my book shows — all of the relevant empirical economic data CONTRADICT the existing economic theory, ESPECIALLY the existing microeconomic theory).

    The post The Fraudulence of Economic Theory first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why Israel’s ‘humane’ propaganda is such a sinister facade

    COMMENTARY: By Cole Martin in Occupied Bethlehem

    Many people have been closely following the journey this week of the Madleen, a small humanitarian yacht seeking to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza with a crew of 12 on board, including humanitarian activists and journalists.

    This morning we woke to the harrowing, yet not unexpected, news that the vessel had been illegally hijacked by Israeli forces, who boarded and took the crew captive into Israeli territories, in contravention of international law.

    Yet another on the long list of war crimes Israel has committed over the last 20 months of genocide, and decades of illegal occupation.

    Communication with the crew was lost after the final moments of tense onboard footage as they donned lifejackets, threw phones and other sensitive data overboard, and raised their arms in preparation for whatever might come next.

    Israel has a detailed history of attacking all previous freedom flotillas — including the 2010 mission aboard the Mavi Marmara in which 10 crew were killed and dozens more injured when Israeli forces hijacked the humanitarian vessel.

    Another mission earlier this year was cut short when it was targeted by an airstrike in international waters, injuring crew.

    The next updates were scenes filmed by Israeli forces which appear to show them calmly handing bread rolls and water to the detained crew, painting a picture which immediately recalled my own experience last year being unlawfully arrested in the southern West Bank.

    Detained while documenting
    I was detained while documenting armed settler violence, taken illegally to a military base where myself and three other internationals were given a bathroom stop, bread and water.

    While we ate, they filmed us, saying “You are unharmed, yes? We are looking after you well?”

    We were then loaded into a police van where a Palestinian farmer sat blindfolded, in silence, with his hands zip-tied behind him.

    Eleven of the 12 crew members on board the humanitarian yacht Madleen
    Eleven of the 12 crew members on board the humanitarian yacht Madleen before being arrested by Israeli forces today. Image: FFC screenshot APR

    Israel loves to put on a show of their “humane treatment” when internationals are present and cameras are rolling, but it’s a shallow and sinister facade for their abusive racism and cruelty towards Palestinians.

    It appears their response to the Madleen’s crew over the next few days will be exactly that. Don’t buy into it; this is no more than deeply sinister propaganda to cover state-backed racism, supremacy, and cruelty.

    Families in Gaza are still facing indiscriminate airstrikes, continuous displacement, forced starvation, and the phony Israel/US “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” which has led to more than 100 civilians being shot while desperately seeking food.

    Thousands of trucks still wait at the border to Gaza, barred entry by Israeli forces, while Palestinians face severe malnutrition and a man-made famine.

    The New Zealand government has still not placed a single sanction on the Israeli state.

    Cole Martin is an independent New Zealand photojournalist based in the Middle East and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Why Israel’s ‘humane’ propaganda is such a sinister facade

    COMMENTARY: By Cole Martin in Occupied Bethlehem

    Many people have been closely following the journey this week of the Madleen, a small humanitarian yacht seeking to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza with a crew of 12 on board, including humanitarian activists and journalists.

    This morning we woke to the harrowing, yet not unexpected, news that the vessel had been illegally hijacked by Israeli forces, who boarded and took the crew captive into Israeli territories, in contravention of international law.

    Yet another on the long list of war crimes Israel has committed over the last 20 months of genocide, and decades of illegal occupation.

    Communication with the crew was lost after the final moments of tense onboard footage as they donned lifejackets, threw phones and other sensitive data overboard, and raised their arms in preparation for whatever might come next.

    Israel has a detailed history of attacking all previous freedom flotillas — including the 2010 mission aboard the Mavi Marmara in which 10 crew were killed and dozens more injured when Israeli forces hijacked the humanitarian vessel.

    Another mission earlier this year was cut short when it was targeted by an airstrike in international waters, injuring crew.

    The next updates were scenes filmed by Israeli forces which appear to show them calmly handing bread rolls and water to the detained crew, painting a picture which immediately recalled my own experience last year being unlawfully arrested in the southern West Bank.

    Detained while documenting
    I was detained while documenting armed settler violence, taken illegally to a military base where myself and three other internationals were given a bathroom stop, bread and water.

    While we ate, they filmed us, saying “You are unharmed, yes? We are looking after you well?”

    We were then loaded into a police van where a Palestinian farmer sat blindfolded, in silence, with his hands zip-tied behind him.

    Eleven of the 12 crew members on board the humanitarian yacht Madleen
    Eleven of the 12 crew members on board the humanitarian yacht Madleen before being arrested by Israeli forces today. Image: FFC screenshot APR

    Israel loves to put on a show of their “humane treatment” when internationals are present and cameras are rolling, but it’s a shallow and sinister facade for their abusive racism and cruelty towards Palestinians.

    It appears their response to the Madleen’s crew over the next few days will be exactly that. Don’t buy into it; this is no more than deeply sinister propaganda to cover state-backed racism, supremacy, and cruelty.

    Families in Gaza are still facing indiscriminate airstrikes, continuous displacement, forced starvation, and the phony Israel/US “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” which has led to more than 100 civilians being shot while desperately seeking food.

    Thousands of trucks still wait at the border to Gaza, barred entry by Israeli forces, while Palestinians face severe malnutrition and a man-made famine.

    The New Zealand government has still not placed a single sanction on the Israeli state.

    Cole Martin is an independent New Zealand photojournalist based in the Middle East and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • New Zealand’s foreign policy stance on Palestine lacks transparency

    COMMENTARY: By John Hobbs

    It is difficult to understand what sits behind the New Zealand government’s unwillingness to sanction, or threaten to sanction, the Israeli government for its genocide against the Palestinian people.

    The United Nations, human rights groups, legal experts and now genocide experts have all agreed it really is “genocide” which is being committed by the state of Israel against the civilian population of Gaza.

    It is hard to argue with the conclusion genocide is happening, given the tragic images being portrayed across social and increasingly mainstream media.

    Prime Minister Netanyahu has presented Israel’s assault on Gaza war as pitting “the sons of light” against “the sons of darkness”. And promised the victory of Judeo-Christian civilisation against barbarism.

    A real encouragement to his military there should be no-holds barred in exercising indiscriminate destruction over the people of Gaza.

    Given this background, one wonders what the nature of the advice being provided by New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to the minister entails?

    Does the ministry fail to see the destruction and brutal killing of a huge proportion of the civilian people of Gaza? And if they see it, are they saying as much to the minister?

    Cloak of ‘diplomatic language’
    Or is the advice so nuanced in the cloak of “diplomatic language” it effectively says nothing and is crafted in a way which gives the minister ultimate freedom to make his own political choices.

    The advice of the officials becomes a reflection of what the minister is looking for — namely, a foreign policy approach that gives him enough freedom to support the Israeli government and at the same time be in step with its closest ally, the United States.

    The problem is there is no transparency around the decision-making process, so it is impossible to tell how decisions are being made.

    I placed an Official Information Act request with the Minister of Foreign Affairs in January 2024 seeking advice received by the minister on New Zealand’s obligations under the Genocide Convention.

    The request was refused because while the advice did exist, it fell outside the timeline indicated by my request.

    It was emphasised if I were to put in a further request for the advice, it was unlikely to be released.

    They then advised releasing the information would be likely to prejudice the security or defence of New Zealand and the international relations of the government of New Zealand, and withholding it was necessary to maintain legal professional privilege.

    Public interest vital
    It is hard to imagine how the release of such information might prejudice the security or defence of New Zealand or that the legal issues could override the public interest.

    It could not be more important for New Zealanders to understand the basis for New Zealand’s foreign policy choices.

    New Zealand is a contracting party to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Under the convention, “genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they [the contracting parties] undertake to prevent and punish”.

    Furthermore: The Contracting Parties undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention, and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide. (Article 5).

    Accordingly, New Zealand must play an active part in its prevention and put in place effective penalties. Chlöe Swarbrick’s private member’s Bill to impose sanctions is one mechanism to do this.

    In response to its two-month blockade of food, water and medical supplies to Gaza, and international pressure, Israel has agreed to allow a trickle of food to enter Gaza.

    However, this is only a tiny fraction of what is needed to avert famine. Understandably, Israel’s response has been criticised by most of the international community, including New Zealand.

    Carefully worded statement
    In a carefully worded statement, signed by a collective of European countries, together with New Zealand and Australia, it is requested that Israel allow a full resumption of aid into Gaza, an immediate return to ceasefire and a return of the hostages.

    Radio New Zealand interviewed the Foreign Minister Winston Peters to better understand the New Zealand position.

    Peters reiterated his previous statements, expressing Israel’s actions of withholding food as “intolerable” but when asked about putting in place concrete sanctions he stated any such action was a “long, long way off”, without explaining why.

    New Zealand must be clear about its foreign policy position, not hide behind diplomatic and insincere rhetoric and exercise courage by sanctioning Israel as it has done with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

    As a minimum, it must honour its responsibilities under the Convention on Genocide and, not least, to offer hope and support for the utterly powerless and vulnerable Palestinian people before it is too late.

    John Hobbs is a doctoral candidate at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (NCPACS) at the University of Otago. This article was first published by the Otago Daily Times and is republished with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • #SwindonsSundaySermon: Blue Labour is now in control – so surely the only option is Green?

    “The only constant in life is change”, said Heraclitus. But the ancient philosophical dude with the slightly amusing name quite clearly didn’t know his capitalism from his colosseum because we always seem to find plenty of cash for wars that are never going to happen whilst millions and millions of British children are languishing in dire poverty.
    Plenty for war, and fuck all for the poor. ‘Twas ever thus.

    Labour is now the party of… war?

    I don’t know about you, but I find it very difficult to get excited by the prospect of twelve new submarines whilst the government — a LABOUR government no less — is shafting disabled people for the apparent crime of being disabled.

    There’s only one winner when any government announces an increase in defence spending, and that is the very same arms manufacturers that are already profiting from, and wilfully enabling genocide and violence around the world.

    Is it not slightly absurd to see Keir Starmer dishonestly position himself as some sort of wartime Prime Minister? Britain is at war with its poor, not a foreign state.

    Sabre-rattling Starmer would actually get away with this jingoistic nonsense if he had some credibility with the British public.

    But even the most ardent of Starmer supporters would privately agree their leader is utterly despised and viewed as an untrustworthy, freeloading Tory that cannot be trusted by neither the left, the right, or the wishy-washy gormless shit in the middle of the political sandwich with their silly little Ukrainazi flags in their social media handles.

    What a time to be alive!

    I have no doubt you have heard of the right-wing faction, Blue Labour. If you haven’t, Canary journalist Steve Topple already had the measure of them a decade ago – as he wrote for the Morning Star.

    The group describe themselves as part of a tradition of “conservative socialism”, whatever the fuck that is. They now found themselves allied with the populist right.

    Keir Starmer’s faux patriotism and his repositioning of the Labour Party is very much in line with how Blue Labour thinks.

    A recent article from Blue Labour, titled “What is to be Done”, is calling for Keir Starmer to legislate against promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.

    Read that last sentence again.

    You’re not imagining things. Blue Labour are foolishly believing they can encourage their Prime Minister to out-Reform, Reform UK, by promoting intolerance and discrimination.

    What a time to be alive!

    This is the sort of morally redundant outrage you would expect from a bunch of womb-controlling extremists like the Conservative’s ERG faction, or whatever they call themselves in these post-Brexit times.

    Blue Labour. Isn’t that what’s called an oxymoron? I’ve only just realised that one of their leading figures is none other than Dan Carden. The last time I looked he was sharing seats at Anfield, the home of Liverpool Football Club, with John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn.

    How did Carden go from “oh, Jeremy Corbyn” to a Blue Labour poster boy in the blink of an eye?

    Vote Green?

    I know the dwindling Socialist Campaign Group is beyond useless and thinks twenty signatures on a piece of A4 paper is worth a press release, but how can it be bad enough to force Carden into the arms of Blue Labour?

    If there are any socialists left in the Labour Party, and by god they are few, isn’t it time they at least had a look at Zack Pokanski and the Greens? Taking a moral stand against Keir Starmer’s right-wing leadership is nothing to be ashamed of.

    Sure, he’s got baggage, haven’t we all? I’ve called it out in the past, and accountability shouldn’t be beyond any politician of any political persuasion.

    But who is best placed to take the fight to the threat of Farage and Reform? Starmer is clinging on to Farage’s coattails, Badenoch would happily serve under Prime Minister Farage, and are the Lib Dems still a thing?

    Whilst no political party is likely to tick every single box of ideological purity, Polanski ticks a damn sight more than the rest of the Westminster establishment combined.

    If we spend the next four years raking over something that Polanski said more than half-a-decade ago we may as well just polish the ministerial limousine and hand the keys to Number 10 over to Farage now – and that’s coming from one of Jeremy Corbyn’s biggest supporters.

    The left should know better than most that when the corporate media weigh in with a relentless smear campaign against a political figure, it’s usually because they have got something worth saying.

    Give Polanski a realistic chance to get it right before deciding he’s an anti-Corbyn establishment plant that’s lurking in the back pockets of some sort of Zionist overlords.

    Spoiler: He’s not.

    Labour: no need to hold your nose

    I remember when I first started putting down my thoughts on paper for the Canary. Some of the responses from certain parts of the left would have you thinking I’d just signed up for the Israeli Occupation Forces and was being paid personally and generously by Gal Gadot.

    Zionism is a dangerous poison, my friends, but when you start throwing the word around as if it was confetti you end up making yourself look like a bit of an arse, and inevitably, that does more to aid the Zionist cause than it ever will to dismantle it.

    If you are on the left, and you held your nose and voted for Keir Starmer, more the fool you. Support a well established Green Party, potentially led by Mr Polanski, or even an independent left-wing movement that will work closely with other left factions, and you won’t need to pinch your nose anywhere near as hard the next time around.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Bougainville wants independence. China’s support for a controversial mine could pave the way

    ANALYSIS: By Anna-Karina Hermkens, Macquarie University

    Bougainville, an autonomous archipelago currently part of Papua New Guinea, is determined to become the world’s newest country.

    To support this process, it’s offering foreign investors access to a long-shuttered copper and gold mine. Formerly owned by the Australian company Rio Tinto, the Panguna mine caused displacement and severe environmental damage when it operated between 1972 and 1989.

    It also sparked a decade-long civil war from 1988 to 1998 that killed an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 civilians and caused enduring traumas and divisions.

    Industry players believe 5.3 million tonnes of copper and 547 tonnes of gold remain at the site. This is attracting foreign interest, including from China.

    Australia views Bougainville as strategically important to its “inner security arc”. The main island is about 1500 km from Queensland’s Port Douglas.

    Given this, the possibility of China’s increasing presence in Bougainville raises concerns about shifting allegiances and the potential for Beijing to exert greater influence over the region.

    Australia’s tangled history in Bougainville
    Bougainville is a small island group in the South Pacific with a population of about 300,000. It consists of two main islands: Buka in the north and Bougainville Island in the south.

    Bougainville has a long history of unwanted interference from outsiders, including missionaries, plantation owners and colonial administrations (German, British, Japanese and Australian).

    Two weeks before Papua New Guinea received its independence from Australia in 1975, Bougainvilleans sought to split away, unilaterally declaring their own independence. This declaration was ignored in both Canberra and Port Moresby, but Bougainville was given a certain degree of autonomy to remain within the new nation of PNG.

    The opening of the Panguna mine in the 1970s further fractured relations between Australia and Bougainville.

    Landowners opposed the environmental degradation and limited revenues they received from the mine. The influx of foreign workers from Australia, PNG and China also led to resentment. Violent resistance grew, eventually halting mining operations and expelling almost all foreigners.

    Under the leadership of Francis Ona, the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) fought a long civil war to restore Bougainville to Me’ekamui, or the “Holy Land” it once was.

    Australia supported the PNG government’s efforts to quell the uprising with military equipment, including weapons and helicopters.

    After the war ended, Australia helped broker the Bougainville Peace Agreement led by New Zealand in 2001. Although aid programmes have since begun to heal the rift between Australia and Bougainville, many Bougainvilleans feel Canberra continues to favour PNG’s territorial integrity.

    In 2019, Bougainvilleans voted overwhelmingly for independence in a referendum. Australia’s response, however, was ambiguous.

    Despite a slow and frustrating ratification process, Bougainvilleans remain adamant they will become independent by 2027.

    As Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama, a former BRA commander, told me in 2024:

    “We are moving forward. And it’s the people’s vision: independence. I’m saying, no earlier than 2025, no later than 2027.

    “My benchmark is 2026, the first of September. I will declare. No matter what happens. I will declare independence on our republican constitution.”

    Major issues to overcome
    Bougainville leaders see the reopening of Panguna mine as key to financing independence. Bougainville Copper Limited, the Rio Tinto subsidiary that once operated the mine, backs this assessment.

    The Bougainville Autonomous Government has built its own gold refinery and hopes to create its own sovereign wealth fund to support independence. The mine would generate much-needed revenue, infrastructure and jobs for the new nation.

    But reopening the mine would also require addressing the ongoing environmental and social issues it has caused. These include polluted rivers and water sources, landslides, flooding, chemical waste hazards, the loss of food security, displacement, and damage to sacred sites.

    Many of these issues have been exacerbated by years of small-scale alluvial mining by Bougainvilleans themselves, eroding the main road into Panguna.

    Some also worry reopening the mine could reignite conflict, as landowners are divided about the project. Mismanagement of royalties could also stoke social tensions.

    Violence related to competition over alluvial mining has already been increasing at the mine.

    More broadly, Bougainville is faced with widespread corruption and poor governance.

    The Bougainville government cannot deal with these complex issues on its own. Nor can it finance the infrastructure and development needed to reopen the mine. This is why it’s seeking foreign investors.

    Panguna, Bougainville's "mine of tears"
    Panguna, Bougainville’s “mine of tears”, when it was still operating . . . Industry players believe 5.3 million tonnes of copper and 547 tonnes of gold remain at the site, which is attracting foreign interest, including from China. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report

    Open for business
    Historically, China has a strong interest in the region. According to Pacific researcher Dr Anna Powles, Chinese efforts to build relationships with Bougainville’s political elite have increased over the years.

    Chinese investors have offered development packages contingent on long-term mining revenues and Bougainville’s independence. Bougainville is showing interest.

    Patrick Nisira, the Minister for commerce, Trade, Industry and Economic Development, said last year the proposed Chinese infrastructure investment was “aligning perfectly with Bougainville’s nationhood aspirations”.

    The government has also reportedly made overtures to the United States, offering a military base in Bougainville in return for support for reopening the mine.

    Given American demand for minerals, Bougainville could very well end up in the middle of a struggle between China and the US over influence in the new nation, and thus in our region.

    Which path will Bougainville and Australia take?
    There is support in Bougainville for a future without large-scale mining. One minister, Geraldine Paul, has been promoting the islands’ booming cocoa industry and fisheries to support an independent Bougainville.

    The new nation will also need new laws to hold the government accountable and protect the people and culture of Bougainville. As Paul told me in 2024:

    “[…]the most important thing is we need to make sure that we invest in our foundation and that’s building our family and culture. Everything starts from there.”

    What happens in Bougainville affects Australia and the broader security dynamics in the Indo-Pacific. With September 1, 2026, just around the corner, it is time for Australia to intensify its diplomatic and economic relationships with Bougainville to maintain regional stability.The Conversation

    Dr Anna-Karina Hermkens is a senior lecturer and researcher in anthropology, Macquarie University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

  • Thou shalt protect Israel: The West’s first and only commandment

    COMMENTARY: By Daniel Lindley

    As I sit down to write this article, I’m reading another update on the Israeli army killing 27 more starving Palestinian civilians waiting to receive food at a “humanitarian hub”. The death toll at these hubs over the last eight days is now 102.

    We’re at the point now that Israel doesn’t even bother putting out the usual statements claiming how Hamas militants were using the civilians as human shields.

    They just put out brazen denials that these events even happened, or report that the gunfire was “in response to the threat perceived by IDF troops.” You don’t get much flimsier justifications for massacring civilians than that.

    It’s important to remember that these events have only happened because Israel has imposed a total siege on the Gaza Strip since March, blocking all food, fuel and medicine from entering the territory to starve the civilian population.

    Meanwhile, Netanyahu has made clear that the only way to end the war is for the civilian population of Gaza to be moved to third countries.

    The UN has effectively been banned from operating in Gaza, so the only way Palestinians in Gaza can get food is to go to these “humanitarian hubs” run by the Israeli army, who might just shoot them dead.

    Ordinarily, one might expect serious consequences for a state which openly declares that it is attempting ethnic cleansing, massacres civilians seeking food, and then lies about it.

    No fundamental change
    If we do live in a world governed by “international law” and “human rights”, then that would be natural. But I’m sure everyone reading this article understands that it’s unlikely that anything is going to fundamentally change because of this latest crime.

    This gets to the heart of the issue, the real reason why Palestine is so important and takes up so much international attention.

    It’s not just that it’s in a strategically important area of the world, or that there are religious holy sites at stake; as important as those things are to know. The real crux of the matter is that Palestine is the central contradiction from which the existing international order unravels.

    In 1974, John Pilger produced the film Palestine Is Still The Issue, which educated many Western audiences for the first time that a great injustice inflicted upon an entire nation had been left unresolved for decades.

    The post-Second World War order created institutions like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), rendered colonialism an illegal holdover from a previous era and established the principle that it was illegal to acquire territory by war. The film asked the question, how can anyone, especially Western liberals, really say they believe in this new order while also supporting the state of Israel, a polity which appears to reject these ideals in favour of a brute “might equals right” ideal.

    In 2002, John Pilger released a new film, also titled Palestine Is Still The Issue.

    By 2025, we’re now approaching the end game of the post-Second World War international order, and a big reason for that is Western liberal leaders increasingly having to choose between maintaining it and maintaining their support for Israel, and going for the latter.

    To give a recent example, when Israel invaded Syria in December with zero provocation, the UK government’s response was simply to state that Israel “is making sure its position in the Golan is secure”.

    Bear in mind that the Golan is also Syrian territory; the UK government is explicitly endorsing an act of aggression to protect illegally occupied land. It makes little sense unless you think international law doesn’t apply to Israel.

    A blind eye to Israel’s war crimes
    But the problem with that kind of thinking is that international law doesn’t work unless there’s a collective agreement to respect it. There isn’t a world police force that can enforce these laws, they’re just a mutually agreed set of rules that everyone agrees to work within, as history has taught us that it ends badly for everyone if we don’t.

    To make a rough analogy, the system is like the early days of the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) when there were very few enforced rules, but in reality, fighters had handshake agreements not to, e.g. pull each other’s hair out, because nobody wants that happening.

    If Fighter A were to start pulling the opponent’s hair out, can he act outraged when other fighters start doing it as well?

    Likewise, if the Western powers decide to support Israel in illegally occupying other countries’ territories for decades, can they really act outraged when Russia decides it’s going to occupy part of Ukraine?

    By allowing Israel to acquire territory by war, what they’ve essentially done is change the international system from one where acquiring territory by war is simply illegal, to one where acquiring territory by war is ok so long as you say it’s in your national security interests.

    Those are the new rules.

    Last year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes.

    International consensus
    Specifically, to answer allegations that they committed “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare”. After the Nazi atrocities in the Second World War such as the Siege of Leningrad (not strictly “illegal” at the time), there emerged an international consensus that such inhumane actions must never happen again.

    Well, on March 2, Israel announced that it was banning the entry of all goods and aid into Gaza, a blatant war crime. Meanwhile, Western governments such as Germany openly state that they intend to find “ways and means” to avoid having to arrest Netanyahu if he were to enter their territory.

    The UK, in particular, continues to provide direct military assistance to Israel in the form of surveillance flights over Gaza. Declassified UK has documented at least 518 RAF surveillance flights around Gaza since December 2023, carried out from the Akrotiri airbase in Cyprus.

    The UK government is, of course, aware that it’s assisting a government whose leaders are wanted by the ICC for war crimes. This would explain why when Keir Starmer visited the airbase in December, he gave a strange speech saying, “I recognise it’s been a really important, busy, busy year . . .

    “I’m also aware that some or quite a bit of what goes on here can’t necessarily be talked about . . .  Although we’re really proud of what you’re doing, we can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing here.”

    The UK is legally obligated under the Geneva Conventions to ensure its military intelligence is not used to facilitate war crimes. In fact, the UK government has stated itself that Israel is “not committed” to following international law, but says it must continue providing military assistance to Israel as to stop doing so “would undermine US confidence in the UK and NATO at a critical juncture in our collective history and set back relations”.

    If the post-Secind World War international order had any ideology affixed to it, it’s the belief in concepts such as individual freedoms, human rights, international humanitarian law and the legitimacy of institutions established to enforce them.

    Every order needs some kind of organising principle; it might not strictly be “true”, but the real purpose is that the population needs to believe in it.

    Many young adults in countries like the USA and UK were brought up with the ideals that waging war for cold national interests/enforcing racial supremacy were barbaric practices that were no longer permitted.

    Palestine is the final frontier
    For Palestine, though, there is no longer any window dressing that can be done. Netanyahu is now making it explicit that even if Hamas were to “lay down its weapons” and its leaders leave, Israel will then ethnically cleanse the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza.

    This is a war of ethnic cleansing and genocide rationalised by a militaristic, racist ideology — the fundamental reason, after all, why the Palestinians of Gaza are being ethnically cleansed is that they are not Jewish.

    Israel’s supporters in the West have abandoned trying to convince anyone of the morality of their positions and are just resorting to repression of dissent. In the United States, for example, we’ve seen unprecedented crackdowns on solidarity groups.

    For example, international students are being deported simply for attending Palestine solidarity demonstrations. These people aren’t even being accused of committing crimes, but of undefined offences such as “un-American activity.” If unconditional Western support for Israel is to continue, more repression at universities is going to be necessary.

    The UK government was correct in saying we’re at “a critical juncture in our collective history” and that Israel is at the heart of it. The international order is unravelling, and whatever new order we move into is largely dependent on what happens in Palestine.

    If Israel succeeds in its long-term goal of genocide against the Palestinians and establishes a lawless militarised ethnostate that grants/strips citizenship on racial grounds and invades and occupies other countries at will, that will be the model the rest of the world will follow. Even if you don’t particularly care about Palestine personally, you will not escape the consequences of this new might equals right world.

    Anyone who doesn’t wish to live in such a world must recognise that Palestine solidarity is the central issue which cannot be abandoned.

    Israel and its supporters certainly recognise this, or else they wouldn’t be so willing to forsake any other purported principle when Israel is at stake.

    Although the levels of repression at the moment can be dismaying, we should also take heart in the fact that if Israel’s supporters were feeling secure in their ultimate victory, they wouldn’t be behaving so aggressively.

    We’re witnessing the destructive rampage of a fragile project, whose designers fear could collapse at any moment should opposition manage to organise themselves effectively.

    Daniel Lindley is a writer, socialist and trade union activist in the UK. This article was first published by The New Arab and is republished under Creative Commons.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • How many more Jodey Whitings will the DWP kill before it’s stopped?

    Yesterday, after eight long years, a coroner ruled that Jodey Whiting’s death was the result of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) stopping her disability benefits.

    Jodey Whiting: the DWP killed her

    In late 2016, 42-year-old mother of nine Jodey Whiting missed a letter informing her the DWP needed to reassess her for Employment Support Allowance, which subsequently meant she missed the appointment. The reason for missing this was that she had contracted pneumonia and whilst in hospital the doctors had found a cyst on her brain.

    On 6 February 2017 she received a letter telling her the DWP had found her “fit for work” despite never completing the assessment.

    Just 15 days later she was found dead in her home surrounded by prescription drugs and handwritten notes about struggling to pay her bills and affording food. One simply read:

    I’ve had enough.

    Jodey lived with mental and physical conditions and was housebound as a result. Jodey didn’t just lose ESA that day, she also lost her housing and council tax benefits. In her suicide notes she wrote desperately about how she’d tried to find ways to pay her rent and bills.

    Inquest after inquest

    Jodey’s mother Joy Dove has campaigned tirelessly for the last eight years to ensure that the DWP was held accountable. In the initial inquest, Jodey losing her benefits wasn’t even mentioned as the reason she died by suicide. That inquest lasted just 37 minutes. As a result of Joy’s tireless campaign a second inquest was held.

    Joy told the inquest

    I know my daughter and I know it was that. It was the fact she couldn’t find a job, the worry of paying bills and being pushed out after being so vulnerable all those years.

    An independent report found that Jodey’s benefits should not have been stopped – but that came far too late.

    Helga Swidenbank, a director at the DWP who did not work there in 2017, said that opportunities to identify Jodey’s vulnerable state were missed (presumably because they didn’t actually speak to her).

    Swidenbank told the inquest:

    I understand that there is a culture shift from being process-driven to being much more compassionate.

    Whitewashing the reality

    The coroner concluded that Jodey’s death was down to the DWP stopping her benefits. However, she worryingly said that she’d heard enough about supposed changes within the DWP to not recommend any wider action be taken.

    Unfortunately, no matter how sorry and changing their ways the DWP claim to be, the truth is they are still putting disabled people’s lives at risk. Even more so now with proposed benefits cuts.

    Jodey’s case feels extremely pertinent given what is happening at the moment with DWP benefits cuts. If the proposed changes go ahead, how many more disabled people will be forced to turn to suicide due to not being able to afford to live?

    Cuts kill

    The proposed cuts would see nine in 10 claimants losing parts of their PIP in some areas, and many Universal Credit claimants struggle when their benefit is slashed or frozen at below inflation. With the new “health element” assessment being moved from Universal credit to PIP it would see what the Taking The PIP campaign called “a domino effect of financial ruin”.

    Over 3.2 million disabled people would see their benefits cut with over 700,000 families be forced deeper into poverty. An untold amount of people will end up in the same situation as Jodey, punished by a system that is supposed to protect them, unable to feed themselves or pay their rent until their only option is death.

    The cruellest thing about this though is the fact that the government and especially those in top jobs at the DWP are well aware of the disastrous effects the inhumane system can have.

    Whilst the DWP is happy to act like Jodey’s case is an isolated incident, they – and especially disability minister Stephen Timms – know this isn’t true- because they fought to uncover the truth.

    Labour ministers know the DWP is deadly

    Timms, the current minister for disabled people, was formerly chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee. A big part of this role was putting pressure on successive Tory ministers to release reports into safeguarding and the true scale of DWP benefits deaths.

    Timms continuously in particular dragged Therese Coffey over the coals on her insistence that the department does not have a duty to safeguarding vulnerable claimants.

    The Labour government like to make a big show of being different to the Conservatives. However, the only difference many are seeing is how unashamedly cruel they are. The Tories at least had the decency to be a bit cloak and dagger about it.

    The government will no doubt be crowing about the fact that the mainstream media are reporting en masse that the coroner declared the DWP is making changes to the system. It’s our job now at the Canary to show that these are not positive changes.

    Fight back

    In the coming weeks the bill announcing the DWP cuts will be introduced to parliament. MPs will vote on whether to make these devastating cuts a reality. I implore you to join us and take action

    Email your MP if you haven’t already. Taking The PIP has a handy tool to do it quickly and easily. Sign petitions and make some noise on social media. Tag your MPs and tell them what the cuts would mean to you.

    This weekend thousands are expected to descend on London in the People’s Assembly demo. But if you can’t make that Disability Rebellion are holding one online too.

    The DWP cuts could force so many more into the same devastating decision as Jodey and the government know this – they must be stopped.

    By Rachel Charlton-Dailey

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • What do people want in politicians? Well, it’s not to hear your dad was a toolmaker.

    Last year, a Survation poll showed the number one quality people wanted in politicians was “listening to people.”  A close second was “keeping their promises.”  Followed by “delivering value for money.”  Way, way down the list was having “a working class background.” So Keir Starmer’s advisors seem to have been wasting their time with the incessant, “his Dad was a toolmaker” line.  And if they’d said “factory worker,” he’d have avoided all the “that makes you a tool” jibes.

    It also explains why all the “but Boris Johnson is a toff” or “Farage is a millionaire city trader” attacks just bounced off.  For whatever reason, very few Brits care about your background.

    The mask always slips with politicians

    A 2020 article in the Journal of Research in Personality concluded that people want politicians who are like themselves, only more assertive.  So politicians who seem to share the same values, but are braver, more confident, and more eloquent.

    It also explains Johnson’s sudden defenestration.  People’s self-image is not always accurate.  They may like to think of themselves as a happy-go-lucky cheeky-chappy, but few will admit to being a liar.  Breaking lockdown rules and covering it up wasn’t funny.  Once trust is gone, it’s gone.

    Now that Reform UK are in power, they’ll face a similar problem.  Shouting from the sidelines is easy.  Fixing things is hard.  Nobody’s self-image is, “I’m all talk and no trousers.”  If they stop identifying with you, they’ll stop voting for you.  And unlike the Labour Party or the Tories, Reform have no lifelong voter base.

    They’re off to a bad start.  One Reform Durham councillor has resigned, because they can’t work for the council and be a councillor.  Genius.  Some have suggested that Reform should foot the bill for the by-election, since they’re responsible for the waste of public money.  Their first big action was to not attend diversity or climate change training sessions.  Despite there being, in fact, no such sessions.  Heroes.

    Their latest act of fixing broken Britain was to order the Rainbow flag taken down before the Bishop Auckland Pride event.  I mean, seriously?  Roads, potholes, parks, council houses, libraries, sports centres?  Nope, have a pop at the LGBTQ+ community.  The irony is they’ve banged on about ‘snowflakes’ for years, but get triggered by a flag.

    Voters aren’t always fooled

    I keep seeing comments on social media saying Reform voters have been duped.  I’m not sure that’s always true.

    I’ve spoken to quite a few Reform voters recently.  The vibe is entirely “stick it to the establishment.”  At least half of them have been quite critical of Reform, but just lost faith in Labour or the Tories.  “I don’t agree with them on immigration,” one lad told me.  “If we stopped immigration the NHS would collapse.”  That doesn’t fit the stereotype.

    It’s just as true that Labour voters were duped by Keir Starmer.  Winter fuel allowance cut.  WASPI women betrayed.  Disabled people’s independence payments stripped.  Foreign aid slashed.  NHS workers sacked.  Performative deportations.  And the “Island of strangers” speech.  Not what people were sold.

    Labour voters had as much warning as Reform voters.  Starmer ditched all of his ten pledges.  Over a year ago I said there was a £20 billion hole in the budget.  It was widely reported.  And praising Thatcher was a pretty big clue.

    So instead of all the posturing, shall we try actually listening to people?

    Politicians need to listen, not posture

    We did this in Newcastle the other Sunday, with 240 people coming along to help us develop Majority’s 2026 election manifesto.

    Just below “value for money,” people want to see politicians “working cross party.”  We’re doing that too.  The North Tyneside Longbenton and Benton by-election will be a joint campaign by Majority, the Green Party, and North Tyneside Community Independents.  Majority is the new movement I was elected to lead.  Anyone can join, even if a member of another party.  The only requirement is agreeing to our values of social, economic and environmental justice, and high standards in public life.  No grifters here, thank you very much.

    Working as North Tyneside Together, people will have a chance to vote for a genuinely progressive candidate who listens.  And avoid vote splitting.  Our candidates take no whip, meaning they serve the people, not the party HQ.

    I’d like to see it as a model for our 2026 citywide election campaign.  As Humphrey Bogart said, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Jamie Driscoll

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • #SwindonsSundaySermon: the Guardian is not your friend – but John McDonnell is

    I found myself reading a Guardian article this morning – I wouldn’t normally bother, but I was interested in what “the people’s chancellor”, John McDonnell, had to say about the tragic death of the Labour Party.

    On a personal level, I like John. He’s friendly, knowledgeable, and his Rich Tea biscuits were proper McVities that you can dunk in your brew for half-a-second without it ending up at the bottom of your cup.

    McDonnell started his article with the words, “I joined the Labour Party 50 years ago”.

    His commitment to traditional left-leaning Labour values isn’t in question, but a good man is absolutely capable of making bad decisions.

    That Guardian-John McDonnell article

    The Labour Party that John McDonnell pines for in his Guardian piece has been utterly annihilated by an incurable moral infection spreading from Starmer and McSweeney outwards. You’re flogging a dead horse, John.

    Calling for a leadership challenge from the left of Labour is futile. The left doesn’t have any clout in the party. I have more clout in my local kebab house, and I’m in my fourth decade of vegetarianism.

    Labour is a rotting corpse. Starmer switched off Labour’s life support machine some time before he fluked his way into the top job. Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt to breathe new life into the mess left behind by the dirty years of Blairism was undoubtedly admirable, but ultimately, the poison had already set in.

    And the tragedy for John? He played his part in hammering the final nail in the Labour coffin when he, somewhat naively, decided to get on board with the idea of a second EU referendum  — something that Jeremy Corbyn and his team were desperate to avoid.

    John’s support for another Brexit vote was entirely at odds with the more pragmatic 2017 position that saw Labour commit to standing by the 52/48 vote in favour of leaving the EU.

    Don’t get me wrong, I voted Remain and would do again tomorrow, if the choice was put to me. But everyone, without exception, knew that going into the 2019 general election with the promise of another crack of the referendum whip was only ever likely to gift millions of votes to Boris Johnson’s hard-Brexit Tories’ and whatever blatantly racist outfit mini-fash-Farage was backing at the time.

    That rag is not your friend – nor is Labour

    To be honest, I cannot for the life of me fathom how any principled socialist can remain in today’s Labour Party. That includes John.

    I can understand how the red rosette would act as a comfort blanket, but when that blanket is smothering you it is no longer of any comfort.

    I’m sure John McDonnell’s article got lots of clicks for the Guardian, and maybe even a few bonus fivers for the liberal rag that was so hard-up it needed to claim £100,000 in furlough cash.

    The Guardian — always the first to attack the billionaire tax dodgers — managed to avoid paying corporation tax for many years. They even admitted to doing it.

    The Guardian isn’t a friend of the left. The Guardian joined in with the false antisemitism rhetoric that was employed by the right to smear and silence the left. The Guardian did everything that it possibly could to deliver Keir Starmer to power, both internally and at the ballot box, just last year.

    We all want a challenge from the left to Keir Starmer’s leadership, of course. But that will not come from within the Labour Party and it is fanciful nonsense to suggest otherwise.

    How many times do we have to say it?

    The Labour Party is dead.

    Le Parti travailliste est mort.

    El Partido Laborista está muerto.

    劳工已经死了。

    حزب العمال مات

    Die Labour-Partei ist tot.

    Partia Pracy jest martwa.

    We could be here all day doing this, but I’m pretty sure you get where I’m coming from.

    Starmer has destroyed it

    In recent times we have witnessed the hideous spectacle of a Labour prime minister aping far-right rhetoric, claiming Britain is an “island of strangers”. Starmer has cut deep into Labour’s progressive roots to chase down the votes of Reform UK.

    Did I mention, the Labour Party is dead?

    Starmer’s leadership has destroyed its electoral and ideological cohesion and his pivot to the right quite clearly doesn’t broaden his government’s appeal.

    I don’t think it is controversial to say that we are living through one of the most shameful times in our recent history. Israel is completely out of control.

    Nobody is fooled by Starmer’s faux concern for the children of Gaza. He wouldn’t be allowing the sale of F-35 fighter jet components to Israel, and he wouldn’t be authorising the use of British spy planes for reconnaissance missions across the besieged enclave, within hours of publicly rebuking the Netanyahu administration, if he cared.

    We have always been historically complicit in the displacement and destruction of the Palestinian people. Our support for the American colonial outpost of Israel carries a scar that has a strange power to remind us that our past is so very shameful, and so very real.

    Bin the Guardian – and John McDonnell should bin Labour

    If what he said in the Guardian is true, and John McDonnell wants to remain a part of this monstrosity because of “50 years of membership”, then good luck to him. I have way too much respect for the guy to lay into him.

    But he, and the other dozen or so parliamentarians that still cling on to the belief of the Labour Party being the only progressive vehicle for societal change, need to realise that nobody is forcing them to stay in Starmer’s Labour.

    Become an Independent. Defect to the Green Party. Set up your own left-wing movement that represents your cherished Labour values, because most of us aren’t old enough to remember what Labour values actually are.

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Phil Goff: Israel doesn’t care how many innocent people, children it’s killing

    COMMENTARY: By Phil Goff

    “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. It’s the result of government policy — knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated.”

    This statement was made not by a foreign or liberal critic of Israel but by the former Prime Minister and former senior member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s own Likud party, Ehud Olmet.

    Nightly, we witness live-streamed evidence of the truth of his statement — lethargic and gaunt children dying of malnutrition, a bereaved doctor and mother of 10 children, nine of them killed by an Israeli strike (and her husband, another doctor, died later), 15 emergency ambulance workers gunned down by the IDF as they tried to help others injured by bombs, despite their identity being clear.

    Statistics reflect the scale of the horror imposed on Palestinians who are overwhelmingly civilians — 54,000 killed, 121,000 maimed and injured. Over 17,000 of these are children.

    This can no longer be excused as regrettable collateral damage from targeted attacks on Hamas.

    Israel simply doesn’t care about the impact of its military attacks on civilians and how many innocent people and children it is killing.

    Its willingness to block all humanitarian aid- food, water, medical supplies, from Gaza demonstrates further its willingness to make mass punishment and starvation a means to achieve its ends. Both are war crimes.

    Influenced by the right wing extremists in the Coalition cabinet, like Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s goal is no longer self defence or justifiable retaliation against Hamas terrorists.

    Israel attacks Palestinians at US-backed aid hubs in Gaza, killing 36
    Israel attacks Palestinians at US-backed aid hubs in Gaza, killing 36. Image: AJ screenshot APR

    Making life unbearable
    The Israeli government policy is focused on making life unbearable for Palestinians and seeking to remove them from their homeland. In this, they are openly encouraged by President Trump who has publicly and repeatedly endorsed deporting the Palestinian population so that the Gaza could be made into a “Middle East Riviera”.

    This is not the once progressive pioneer Israel, led by people who had faced the Nazi Holocaust and were fighting for the right to a place where they could determine their own future and be safe.

    Sadly, a country of people who were themselves long victims of oppression is now guilty of oppressing and committing genocide against others.

    New Zealand recently joined 23 other countries calling out Israel and demanding a full supply of foreign aid be allowed into Gaza.

    Foreign Minister Winston Peters called Israel’s actions “ intolerable”. He said that we had “had enough and were running out of patience and hearing excuses”.

    While speaking out might make us feel better, words are not enough. Israel’s attacks on the civilian population in Gaza are being increased, aid distribution which has restarted is grossly insufficient to stop hunger and human suffering and Palestinians are being herded into confined areas described as humanitarian zones but which are still subject to bombardment.

    People living in tents in schools and hospitals are being slaughtered.

    World must force Israel to stop
    Like Putin, Israel will not end its killing and oppression unless the world forces it to. The US has the power but will not do this.

    The sanctions Trump has imposed are not on Israel’s leaders but on judges in the International Criminal Court (ICC) who dared to find Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu guilty of war crimes.

    New Zealand’s foreign policy has traditionally involved working with like-minded countries, often small nations like us. Two of these, Ireland and Sweden, are seeking to impose sanctions on Israel.

    Both are members of the European Union which makes up a third of Israel’s global trade. If the EU decides to act, sanctions imposed by it would have a big impact on Israel.

    These sanctions should be both on trade and against individuals.

    New Zealand has imposed sanctions on a small number of extremist Jewish settlers on the West Bank where there is evidence of them using violence against Palestinian villagers.

    These sanctions should be extended to Israel’s political leadership and New Zealand could take a lead in doing this. We should not be influenced by concern that by taking a stand we might offend US president Donald Trump.

    Show our preparedness to uphold values
    In the way that we have been proud of in the past, we should as a small but fiercely independent country show our preparedness to uphold our own values and act against gross abuse of human rights and flagrant disregard for international law.

    We should be working with others through the United Nations General Assembly to maximise political pressure on Israel to stop the ongoing killing of innocent civilians.

    Moral outrage at what Israel is doing has to be backed by taking action with others to force the Israeli government to end the killing, destruction, mass punishment and deliberate starvation of Palestinians including their children.

    An American doctor working at a Gaza hospital reported that in the last five weeks he had worked on dozens of badly injured children but not a single combatant.

    He noted that as well as being maimed and disfigured by bombing, many of the children were also suffering from malnutrition. Children were dying from wounds that they could recover from but there were not the supplies needed to treat them.

    Protest is not enough. We need to act.

    Phil Goff is Aotearoa New Zealand’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs. This article was first published by the Stuff website and is republished with the permission of the author.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Phil Goff: Israel doesn’t care how many innocent people, children it’s killing

    COMMENTARY: By Phil Goff

    “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. It’s the result of government policy — knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated.”

    This statement was made not by a foreign or liberal critic of Israel but by the former Prime Minister and former senior member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s own Likud party, Ehud Olmet.

    Nightly, we witness live-streamed evidence of the truth of his statement — lethargic and gaunt children dying of malnutrition, a bereaved doctor and mother of 10 children, nine of them killed by an Israeli strike (and her husband, another doctor, died later), 15 emergency ambulance workers gunned down by the IDF as they tried to help others injured by bombs, despite their identity being clear.

    Statistics reflect the scale of the horror imposed on Palestinians who are overwhelmingly civilians — 54,000 killed, 121,000 maimed and injured. Over 17,000 of these are children.

    This can no longer be excused as regrettable collateral damage from targeted attacks on Hamas.

    Israel simply doesn’t care about the impact of its military attacks on civilians and how many innocent people and children it is killing.

    Its willingness to block all humanitarian aid- food, water, medical supplies, from Gaza demonstrates further its willingness to make mass punishment and starvation a means to achieve its ends. Both are war crimes.

    Influenced by the right wing extremists in the Coalition cabinet, like Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s goal is no longer self defence or justifiable retaliation against Hamas terrorists.

    Israel attacks Palestinians at US-backed aid hubs in Gaza, killing 36
    Israel attacks Palestinians at US-backed aid hubs in Gaza, killing 36. Image: AJ screenshot APR

    Making life unbearable
    The Israeli government policy is focused on making life unbearable for Palestinians and seeking to remove them from their homeland. In this, they are openly encouraged by President Trump who has publicly and repeatedly endorsed deporting the Palestinian population so that the Gaza could be made into a “Middle East Riviera”.

    This is not the once progressive pioneer Israel, led by people who had faced the Nazi Holocaust and were fighting for the right to a place where they could determine their own future and be safe.

    Sadly, a country of people who were themselves long victims of oppression is now guilty of oppressing and committing genocide against others.

    New Zealand recently joined 23 other countries calling out Israel and demanding a full supply of foreign aid be allowed into Gaza.

    Foreign Minister Winston Peters called Israel’s actions “ intolerable”. He said that we had “had enough and were running out of patience and hearing excuses”.

    While speaking out might make us feel better, words are not enough. Israel’s attacks on the civilian population in Gaza are being increased, aid distribution which has restarted is grossly insufficient to stop hunger and human suffering and Palestinians are being herded into confined areas described as humanitarian zones but which are still subject to bombardment.

    People living in tents in schools and hospitals are being slaughtered.

    World must force Israel to stop
    Like Putin, Israel will not end its killing and oppression unless the world forces it to. The US has the power but will not do this.

    The sanctions Trump has imposed are not on Israel’s leaders but on judges in the International Criminal Court (ICC) who dared to find Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu guilty of war crimes.

    New Zealand’s foreign policy has traditionally involved working with like-minded countries, often small nations like us. Two of these, Ireland and Sweden, are seeking to impose sanctions on Israel.

    Both are members of the European Union which makes up a third of Israel’s global trade. If the EU decides to act, sanctions imposed by it would have a big impact on Israel.

    These sanctions should be both on trade and against individuals.

    New Zealand has imposed sanctions on a small number of extremist Jewish settlers on the West Bank where there is evidence of them using violence against Palestinian villagers.

    These sanctions should be extended to Israel’s political leadership and New Zealand could take a lead in doing this. We should not be influenced by concern that by taking a stand we might offend US president Donald Trump.

    Show our preparedness to uphold values
    In the way that we have been proud of in the past, we should as a small but fiercely independent country show our preparedness to uphold our own values and act against gross abuse of human rights and flagrant disregard for international law.

    We should be working with others through the United Nations General Assembly to maximise political pressure on Israel to stop the ongoing killing of innocent civilians.

    Moral outrage at what Israel is doing has to be backed by taking action with others to force the Israeli government to end the killing, destruction, mass punishment and deliberate starvation of Palestinians including their children.

    An American doctor working at a Gaza hospital reported that in the last five weeks he had worked on dozens of badly injured children but not a single combatant.

    He noted that as well as being maimed and disfigured by bombing, many of the children were also suffering from malnutrition. Children were dying from wounds that they could recover from but there were not the supplies needed to treat them.

    Protest is not enough. We need to act.

    Phil Goff is Aotearoa New Zealand’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs. This article was first published by the Stuff website and is republished with the permission of the author.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Tobacco: Death Sentence with Perks

    Meet Joe Black (1998) is basically a 2 1/2 hr anecdote, where an angelic Brad Pitt, the angel of death, comes and saves the day by impersonating an IRS agent investigating and exposing the vile young suitor Drew, as Brad takes fiancee Allison’s father (Anthony Hopkins) to heaven. Brad quotes money-grubbing Drew: You can’t avoid ‘death and taxes’.

    Yes, Death gets us all in the end, smokers and nonsmokers, smokers statistically earlier but not nearly everyone, and not all that much sooner in any case. And there are lots more causes of lung cancer.

    *asbestos
    *air pollution
    *radon
    *genetics
    *alcohol
    *high carb diet
    *viruses

    I can attest to smoking – in moderation – as a perk in my life which I don’t begrudge my younger self or me now. Life is hard, and then you die. And I politely demure when I’m told by doctor after doctor to give it up. One cigarette a day is not going to kill me. As an avid cyclist, a car/truck is much more likely to do that.

    Speaking of giving up, I seem to have done that with alcohol without any sense of loss. Alcohol was an endless source of headache and nausea in my wild youth. Ramadan helps, and this year, when I could drink (moderately) freely again, I tried and found it did virtually nothing. A brief buzz. It’s good (one drink) to break the ice, but when you’re old, there aren’t any parties or mixers anymore so what’s the use?

    That’s one of Islam’s perks: pushing you to give up alcohol. Surah Al-Baqarah (2:219): They ask you about intoxicants and gambling. Say, ‘In both is great sin and [yet, some] benefit for people. But their sin is greater than their benefit.’

    I get angry hearing calls to ban smoking completely. Another great Quran quote: Surah Al-Baqarah (2:)256 Let there be no compulsion in religion, for the truth stands out clearly from falsehood. Already cigarette adverts are gone, sponsorships. Fair enough. Far enough!

    So why not the same puritanism with respect to alcohol? Alcohol is far, far more lethal, disruptive, a real killer, and yet ads everywhere complete with sexy models or rugged men, everyone happily celebrating whatever. Sadly, prohibition doesn’t work, but take a leaf from the war against smoking: no ads, more taxes, more rigorous legal penalities for the many crimes ‘under the influence’. Make drinking clearly a dangerous vice. That would be a huge step forward.

    Don’t take my words as a prescription. I envy people who don’t need a crutch like smoking or alcohol to be happy. And keep in mind, one cigarette is my norm. It’s the anticipation of that calm as much as the smoking. As a general rule in life: it’s the thought that counts. And 90% of joy is in the anticipation.

    Like most pleasures/poisons, there are good and bad qualities to tobacco.

    Health

    Leaving aside its poisonous quality and the heightened risk of lung cancer, the major upside is its calming effect. I know when some crisis hits, I can always take refuge in a smoke. Anything used to excess is harmful. Unlike alcohol, which often leads to more and more and then acting dangerously and foolishly, you quickly reach a limit in smoking. You can die of alcohol poisoning, but it takes years to die from smoking, if at all.

    Like all natural poisons, it has medicinal uses:

    *Insect repellant against all garden parasites (many a mosquitoey camping trip benefited from a few puffs).

    *Indigenous people used tobacco as a pain reliever for ear aches, toothaches and as a poultice.

    *Indigenous people believed that the nicotine in the tobacco would help relieve pain as well as help draw out the poison and heal the snake wound. After the poison had been sucked out, chewed leaves could be applied to cuts or bound on the bite with a bandage.

    *To alleviate symptoms of ADHD, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s and dementia.

    It’s not a cure, but a powerful pain reliever, with some magical (i.e., we don’t understand) effects.

    Social psychology

    If you are nervous, again it is calming. Then there’s Freud and what a cigarette represents, its role as a fetish, a substitute for sex. A smoke can be a nice icebreaker. Many of my friendships have begun over sharing a smoke. It’s cheap and less harmful that a few drinks. It’s communal, especially for boys/men. Worldwide, a third of men smoke, only 6% of women, 5x less, do. Canadian men much less (14%), Canadian women much more (10%) — a negative spin-off from feminism?

    I remember my first smoke as a teen, out the window but immediately detected by sentry-mother, guilt-tripping me, as if that’s any way to make me stop. As pacifier in my nervous early teaching days. Graduating to Drum rolling tobacco while living abroad. Then reverting to cheap manufactured cigarettes in Egypt, eventually returning to rolling my own in retirement. A cigarette has been a comforting companion throughout my life. I’m loathe to despise and reject this simple, economical pleasure totally. I don’t like fanatics of any stripe.

    Religion

    Everything is spiritual. Sadly, tobacco was captured by capitalism and most smoking is now industrial – packaged in plastic, filled with chemicals to burn faster so you smoke more. You take them for granted. Rolling my daily cigarette is done with reverence, a ritual akin to prayer. I thank the Lord for His generous gifts to be used responsibly.

    North American natives considered it sacred, e.g., the ‘peace pipe’. The sweat lodge relies on heat and wood smoke to cleanse the spirit, recalling early Man’s smokey cave dwelling.

    Judaism, Christianity and Islam are undecided, as tobacco only became an issue in the 17th century. In short, moderation is called for, but while Islam proscribes alcohol, smoking (in moderation) is acceptable. Early on in the Hasidic movement, the Baal Shem Tov taught that smoking tobacco can be used as a religious devotion, and can even help bring the Messianic Era. Rabbi Levi Yiztchak of Berditchev is quoted as saying that ‘a Jew smokes on the weekdays and sniffs tobacco on the Sabbath.’

    My conclusion after a lifetime of cogitating: one cigarette a day keeps the doctor away. (Also one toke a day but that’s for another article.)

    The post Tobacco: Death Sentence with Perks first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why NZ must act against Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide

    ANALYSIS: By Ian Powell

    When I despairingly contemplate the horrors and cruelty that Palestinians in Gaza are being subjected to, I sometimes try to put this in the context of where I live.

    I live on the Kāpiti Coast in the lower North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand.

    Geographically it is around the same size as Gaza. Both have coastlines running their full lengths. But, whereas the population of Gaza is a cramped two million, Kāpiti’s is a mere 56,000.

    The Gaza Strip
    The Gaza Strip . . . 2 million people living in a cramped outdoor prison about the same size as Kāpiti. Map: politicalbytes.blog

    I find it incomprehensible to visualise what it would be like if what is presently happening in Gaza occurred here.

    The only similarities between them are coastlines and land mass. One is an outdoor prison while the other’s outdoors is peaceful.

    New Zealand and Palestine state recognition
    Currently Palestine has observer status at the United Nations General Assembly. In May last year, the Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favour of Palestine being granted full membership of the United Nations.

    To its credit, New Zealand was among 143 countries that supported the resolution. Nine, including the United States as the strongest backer of Israeli genocide  outside Israel, voted against.

    However, despite this massive majority, such is the undemocratic structure of the UN that it only requires US opposition in the Security Council to veto the democratic vote.

    Notwithstanding New Zealand’s support for Palestine broadening its role in the General Assembly and its support for the two-state solution, the government does not officially recognise Palestine.

    While its position on recognition is consistent with that of the genocide-supporting United States, it is inconsistent with the over 75 percent of UN member states who, in March 2025, recognised Palestine as a sovereign state (by 147 of the 193 member states).

    NZ Prime Minister Christopher Luxon
    NZ Prime Minister Christopher Luxon . . . his government should “correct this obscenity” of not recognising Palestinians’ right to have a sovereign nation. Image: RNZ/politicalbytes.blog/

    Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s government does have the opportunity to correct this obscenity as Palestine recognition will soon be voted on again by the General Assembly.

    In this context it is helpful to put the Hamas-led attack on Israel in its full historical perspective and to consider the reasons justifying the Israeli genocide that followed.

    7 October 2023 and genocide justification
    The origin of the horrific genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the associated increased persecution, including killings, of Palestinians in the Israeli occupied West Bank (of the River Jordan) was not the attack by Hamas and several other militant Palestinian groups on 7 October 2023.

    This attack was on a small Israeli town less than 2 km north of the border. An estimated 1,195 Israelis and visitors were killed.

    The genocidal response of the Israeli government that followed this attack can only be justified by three factors:

    1. The Judaism or ancient Jewishness of Palestine in Biblical times overrides the much larger Palestinian population in Mandate Palestine prior to formation of Israel in 1948;
    2. The right of Israelis to self-determination overrides the right of Palestinians to self-determination; and
    3. The value of Israeli lives overrides the value Palestinian lives.

    The first factor is the key. The second and third factors are consequential. In order to better appreciate their context, it is first necessary to understand the Nakba.

    Understanding the Nakba
    Rather than the October 2023 attack, the origin of the subsequent genocide goes back more than 70 years to the collective trauma of Palestinians caused by what they call the Nakba (the Disaster).

    The foundation year of the Nakba was in 1948, but this was a central feature of the ethnic cleansing that was kicked off between 1947 and 1949.

    During this period  Zionist military forces attacked major Palestinian cities and destroyed some 530 villages. About 15,000 Palestinians were killed in a series of mass atrocities, including dozens of massacres.

    Nakba Day in Auckland this week
    The Nakba – the Palestinian collective trauma in 1948 that started ethnic cleansing by Zionist paramilitary forces. Image: David Robie/APR

    During the Nakba in 1948, approximately half of Palestine’s predominantly Arab population, or around 750,000 people, were expelled from their homes or forced to flee. Initially this was  through Zionist paramilitaries.

    After the establishment of the State of Israel in May this repression was picked up by its military. Massacres, biological warfare (by poisoning village wells) and either complete destruction or depopulation of Palestinian-majority towns, villages, and urban neighbourhoods (which were then given Hebrew names) followed

    By the end of the Nakba, 78 percent of the total land area of the former Mandatory Palestine was controlled by Israel.

    Genocide to speed up ethnic cleansing
    Ethnic cleansing was unsuccessfully pursued, with the support of the United Kingdom and France, in the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. More successful was the Six Day War of 1967,  which included the military and political occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

    Throughout this period ethnic cleansing was not characterised by genocide. That is, it was not the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying them.

    Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians
    Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians began in May 1948 and has accelerated to genocide in 2023. Image: politicalbytes.blog

    In fact, the acceptance of a two-state solution (Israel and Palestine) under the ill-fated Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995 put a temporary constraint on the expansion of ethnic cleansing.

    Since its creation in 1948, Israel, along with South Africa the same year (until 1994), has been an apartheid state.   I discussed this in an earlier Political Bytes post (15 March 2025), When apartheid met Zionism.

    However, while sharing the racism, discrimination, brutal violence, repression and massacres inherent in apartheid, it was not characterised by genocide in South Africa; nor was it in Israel for most of its existence until the current escalation of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

    Following 7 October 2023, genocide has become the dominant tool in the ethnic cleansing tool kit. More recently this has included accelerating starvation and the bombing of tents of Gaza Palestinians.

    The magnitude of this genocide is discussed further below.

    The Biblical claim
    Zionism is a movement that sought to establish a Jewish nation in Palestine. It was established as a political organisation as late as 1897. It was only some time after this that Zionism became the most influential ideology among Jews generally.

    Despite its prevalence, however, there are many Jews who oppose Zionism and play leading roles in the international protests against the genocide in Gaza.

    Zionist ideology is based on a view of Palestine in the time of Jesus Christ
    Zionist ideology is based on a view of Palestine in the time of Jesus Christ. Image: politicalbytes.blog

    Based on Zionist ideology, the justification for replacing Mandate Palestine with the state of Israel rests on a Biblical argument for the right of Jews to retake their “homeland”. This justification goes back to the time of that charismatic carpenter and prophet Jesus Christ.

    The population of Palestine in Jesus’ day was about 500,000 to 600,000 (a little bigger than both greater Wellington and similar to that of Jerusalem today). About 18,000 of these residents were clergy, priests and Levites (a distinct male group within Jewish communities).

    Jerusalem itself in biblical times, with a population of 55,000, was a diverse city and pilgrimage centre. It was also home to numerous Diaspora Jewish communities.

    In fact, during the 7th century BC at least eight nations were settled within Palestine. In addition to Judaeans, they included Arameans, Samaritans, Phoenicians and Philistines.

    A breakdown based on religious faiths (Jews, Christians and Muslims) provides a useful insight into how Palestine has evolved since the time of Jesus. Jews were the majority until the 4th century AD.

    By the fifth century they had been supplanted by Christians and then from the 12th century to 1947 Muslims were the largest group. As earlier as the 12th century Arabic had become the dominant language. It should be noted that many Christians were Arabs.

    Adding to this evolving diversity of ethnicity is the fact that during this time Palestine had been ruled by four empires — Roman, Persian, Ottoman and British.

    Prior to 1948 the population of the region known as Mandate Palestine approximately corresponded to the combined Israel and Palestine today. Throughout its history it has varied in both size and ethnic composition.

    The Ottoman census of 1878 provides an indicative demographic profile of its three districts that approximated what became Mandatory Palestine after the end of World War 1.

    Group Population Percentage
    Muslim citizens 403,795 86–87%
    Christian citizens 43,659 9%
    Jewish citizens 15,011 3%
    Jewish (foreign-born) Est. 5–10,000 1–2%
    Total Up to 472,465 100.0%

    In 1882, the Ottoman Empire revealed that the estimated 24,000 Jews in Palestine represented just 0.3 percent of the world’s Jewish population.

    The self-determination claim
    Based on religion the estimated population of Palestine in 1922 was 78 percent Muslim, 11 percent Jewish, and 10 percent Christian.

    By 1945 this composition had changed to 58 percent Muslim, 33 percent Jewish and 8 percent Christian. The reason for this shift was the success of the Zionist campaigning for Jews to migrate to Palestine which was accelerated by the Jewish holocaust.

    By 15 May 1948, the total population of the state of Israel was 805,900, of which 649,600 (80.6 percent) were Jews with Palestinians being 156,000 (19.4 percent). This turnaround was primarily due to the devastating impact of the Nakba.

    Today Israel’s population is over 9.5 million of which over 77 percent are Jewish and more than 20 percent are Palestinian. The latter’s absolute growth is attributable to Israel’s subsequent geographic expansion, particularly in 1967, and a higher birth rate.

    Palestine today
    Palestine today (parts of West Bank under Israeli occupation). Map: politicalbytes.blog

    The current population of the Palestinian Territories, including Gaza, is more than 5.5 million. Compare this with the following brief sample of much smaller self-determination countries —  Slovenia (2.2 million), Timor-Leste (1.4 million), and Tonga (104,000).

    The population size of the Palestinian Territories is more than half that of Israel. Closer to home it is a little higher than New Zealand.

    The only reason why Palestinians continue to be denied the right to self-determination is the Zionist ideological claim linked to the biblical time of Jesus Christ and its consequential strategy of ethnic cleansing.

    If it was not for the opposition of the United States, then this right would not have been denied. It has been this opposition that has enabled Israel’s strategy.

    Comparative value of Palestinian lives
    The use of genocide as the latest means of achieving ethnic cleansing highlights how Palestinian lives are valued compared with Israeli lives.

    While not of the same magnitude appropriated comparisons have been made with the horrific ethnic cleansing of Jews through the means of the holocaust by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Per capita the scale of the magnitude gap is reduced considerably.

    Since October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry (and confirmed by the World Health Organisation) more than 54,000 Palestinians have been killed. Of those killed over 16,500 were children. Compare this with less than 2000 Israelis killed.

    Further, at least 310 UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) team members have been killed along with over 200 journalists and media workers. Add to this around 1400 healthcare workers including doctors and nurses.

    What also can’t be forgotten is the increasing Israeli ethnic cleansing on the occupied West Bank. Around 950 Palestinians, including around 200 children, have also been killed during this same period.

    Time for New Zealand to recognise Palestine
    The above discussion is in the context of the three justifications for supporting the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians strategy that goes back to 1948 and which, since October 2023, is being accelerated by genocide.

    • First, it requires the conviction that the theology of Judaism in Palestine in the biblical times following the birth of Jesus Christ trumps both the significantly changing demography from the 5th century at least to the mid-20th century and the numerical predominance of Arabs in Mandate Palestine;
    • Second, and consequentially, it requires the conviction that while Israelis are entitled to self-determination, Palestinians are not; and
    • Finally, it requires that Israeli lives are much more valuable than Palestinian lives. In fact, the latter have no value at all.

    Unless the government, including Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, shares these convictions (especially the “here and now” second and third) then it should do the right thing first by unequivocally saying so, and then by recognising the right of Palestine to be an independent state.

    Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Motarilavoa Hilda Lini – strong, passionate fighter for decolonisation, nuclear-free Pacific

    By Stanley Simpson in Suva

    I am saddened by the death of one of the most inspirational Pacific women and leaders I have worked with — Motarilavoa Hilda Lini of Vanuatu.

    She was one of the strongest, most committed passionate fighter I know for self-determination, decolonisation, independence, indigenous rights, customary systems and a nuclear-free Pacific.

    Hilda coordinated the executive committee of the women’s wing of the Vanuatu Liberation Movement prior to independence and became the first woman Member of Parliament in Vanuatu in 1987.

    Hilda became director of the Pacific Concerns Resource Centre (PCRC) in Suva in 2000. She took over from another Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) giant Lopeti Senituli, who returned to Tonga to help the late ‘Akilisi Poviha with the pro-democracy movement.

    I was editor of the PCRC newsletter Pacific News Bulletin at the time. There was no social media then so the newsletter spread information to activists and groups across the Pacific on issues such as the struggle in West Papua, East Timor’s fight for independence, decolonisation in Tahiti and New Caledonia, demilitarisation, indigenous movements, anti-nuclear issues, and sustainable development.

    On all these issues — Hilda Lini was a willing and fearless chief taking on any government, corporation or entity that undermined the rights or interests of Pacific peoples.

    Hilda was uncompromising on issues close to her heart. There are very few Pacific leaders like her left today. Leaders who did not hold back from challenging the norm or disrupting the status quo, even if that meant being an outsider.

    Banned over activism
    She was banned from entering French Pacific territories in the 1990s for her activism against their colonial rule and nuclear testing.

    She was fierce but also strategic and effective.

    "Hilda Lini was a willing and fearless chief taking on any government, corporation or entity
    “Hilda Lini was a willing and fearless chief taking on any government, corporation or entity that undermined the rights or interests of Pacific peoples.” Image: Stanley Simpson/PCRC

    We brought Jose Ramos Horta to speak and lobby in Fiji as East Timor fought for independence from Indonesia, Oscar Temaru before he became President of French Polynesia, West Papua’s Otto Ondawame, and organised Flotilla protests against shipments of Japanese plutonium across the Pacific, among the many other actions to stir awareness and action.

    On top of her bold activism, Hilda was also a mother to us. She was kind and caring and always pushed the importance of family and indigenous values.

    Our Pacific connections were strong and before our eldest son Mitchell was born in 2002 — she asked me if she could give him a middle name.

    She gave him the name Hadye after her brother — Father Walter Hadye Lini who was the first Prime Minister of Vanuatu. Mitchell’s full name is Mitchell Julian Hadye Simpson.

    Pushed strongly for ideas
    We would cross paths several times even after I moved to start the Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) but she finished from PCRC in 2004 and returned to Vanuatu.

    She often pushed ideas on indigenous rights and systems that some found uncomfortable but stood strong on what she believed in.

    Hilda had mana, spoke with authority and truly embodied the spirit and heart of a Melanesian and Pacific leader and chief.

    Thank you Hilda for being the Pacific champion that you were.

    Stanley Simpson is director of Fiji’s Mai Television and general secretary of the Fijian Media Association. Father Walter Hadye Lini wrote the foreword to Asia Pacific Media editor David Robie’s 1986 book Eyes Of Fire: The Last Voyage of the Rainbow Warrior.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Op-Ed: Ultra-Processed Foods Are A Health Issue… for the Planet

    ultra processed foods climate change
    4 Mins Read

    Dr Sarah Ison, global director of research at Madre Brava, argues that the ultra-processed food discourse is helping worsen climate change.

    Ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, are dominating news sites, opinion pages and influencers’ social posts. They are a tempting subject for posts that have a fraction of a second to get your attention, given they relate to food and health, something we are all interested in to some extent.

    But, beyond health, UPFs could also be a key climate and environment issue, and the lack of nuance in the debate swirling around them could be slowing progress in a vital area of climate action. 

    It’s not often arguing for balance is considered radical, but in the case of UPFs, attempts at nuance are increasingly difficult as the debate becomes ultra-polarised and ‘UPF’ becomes a dirty acronym. And this polarisation is eroding confidence in a type of food which can help reduce emissions from food. 

    Food generates around one-third of greenhouse gas emissions, with animal foods producing twice the emissions of plant foods, around 20% of all human-induced emissions. Animal agriculture also has a huge impact on wildlife decline and freshwater use. It contributes to an increased risk of future pandemics, antibiotic resistance, and can cause immense suffering to farmed animals.

    Globally, 58% of protein comes from plants and 42% from animals. High-income countries get 65% from animals, compared with 20% in low-income countries. And in most nations, people consume more protein than health experts say they need.

    Too much red and processed meat and not enough plants is stoking levels of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and certain types of cancer. So dietary change, most importantly, protein diversification, can improve health, as well as tackle climate change and restore nature.

    Plant-based meat alternatives, are a sustainable alternative to meat, in addition to whole plant protein foods such as legumes, nuts and seeds and minimally processed tofu and tempeh.

    But there are signs that these products, which had soared in popularity, have started to fall victim to the polarising debate around UPFs.

    Plant-based alternatives should be compared to meat

    plant based meat nutrition
    Courtesy: ProVeg International

    The first, and most obvious, issue with the UPF label is that it doesn’t discriminate. Not all UPFs are created equal. There is a vast difference between cookies and sweets on the one hand and wholewheat breakfast cereals fortified with vitamins on the other, but they can fall into the same category in many people’s minds. 

    Looking at meat analogues, they are classified as ultra-processed due to the multiple types of ingredients they contain. This has led to concerns about their health credentials.

    But we should not be comparing them to whole grains; we should be comparing them to their meat-based counterparts. When we do that, we see clearly that they have better nutrition profiles (higher fibre, less fat and saturated fat) and can equal the protein content of your ‘regular’ burger or sausage. 

    Expanding this to include soy milk, recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses demonstrate health benefits when substituting plant-based meats for conventional meat and soy for cow’s milk. For meat substitutes, key benefits were reductions in cholesterol and modest weight loss, with more pronounced benefits with mycoprotein-based products like Quorn. Soy milk substitution reduced bad and increased good cholesterol, as well as decreased blood pressure and a marker of inflammation.

    Importantly, neither showed negative health impacts. For soy milk, these benefits were consistent regardless of whether products contained added sugars.

    These findings suggest plant-based alternatives can play a positive role in cardiovascular health by reducing cholesterol, with soy milk offering additional benefits for blood pressure and inflammation, and meat substitutes for weight loss.

    Read Green Queen’s FAQ guide on ultra-processed foods and plant-based meat.

    The misinformation cycle has left consumers confused

    plant based meat ultra processed
    Illustration by Green Queen

    The evidence supports their inclusion in healthy diets, particularly given the need to address the climate, nature and human health crises by reducing meat and dairy.

    Again, nuance is crucial here: inclusion in healthy diets. They are not designed to be a dominant part of one’s diet. More research is needed to understand why UPFs are linked to poor health – the mechanisms are still not clear.

    Plant-based meat manufacturers should also be following the science. Keep added salt and sugar to a minimum, keep up with the evidence and adjust accordingly.

    Finally, there are those who benefit from the lack of nuance in the conversation around meat alternatives. Questioning the health credentials of plant-based meat and milk, while ignoring the evidence about those of their animal-based counterparts, is becoming a tried and tested tactic, most spectacularly demonstrated in this 2020 Super Bowl advert.

    So what are consumers supposed to do? People who want to introduce more plants to their plates could be forgiven for feeling confused by the avalanche of competing messages around plant-based meat.

    Research in this area is exploding, so it is incumbent on all to act in the best interests of people’s health, and that of the planet, by contributing to high-quality information that helps us understand the effect of different foods and not seek to cherry-pick or weaponise individual studies. 

    After all, our health – and that of the planet – is at stake.

    The post Op-Ed: Ultra-Processed Foods Are A Health Issue… for the Planet appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • What could a new party Jeremy Corbyn mentioned look like? Well, here are some clues.

    In one episode of the Simpsons, Marge Simpson tells Homer that one day he’ll regret not spending time with the kids.
    “That’s a problem for Future Homer,” he dismisses. “Man, I don’t envy that guy.” Before mixing himself a vodka and mayonnaise drink.
    Behavioural economists call it “discounting the future”. Smokers choose endorphins now over the health risks later. Most of us know we should do more exercise. And I think every parent has told their kids, “do you homework now and get it out of the way.”
    It’s in our DNA to think a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Our Stone Age ancestors faced death daily. Predators, food shortages, and sepsis from wounds made living for today a sound long-term strategy. In short, we often make decisions because they feel good, rather than because we’ve checked the facts.

    Corbyn hinted at it – but is a new political party realistic?

    So when it comes to building a new political party – as Jeremy Corbyn recently mentioned – we should check we’re not just after a quick emotional fix. First, let’s have some sober thinking, and examine some of our assumptions.

    I worry for my kids. Potentially catastrophic climate breakdown. The rise of government oppression. An extreme wealth gap driving us towards fascism. We owe it to all the future Homers to get this right.

    So let’s ask ourselves some tough questions.

    Are we serious about winning state power? Is it enough that someone is speaking for the politics you believe? If so, launching a progressive party will be easy. If fact, you’re spoilt for choice. You could join Transform, the Communist Party, or any of a dozen Trotskyist parties. I know good people in all of them.

    Do you just want a party you can vote for? Workers Party GB stood 152 candidates in the 2024 general election.

    Victory or change?

    Do you want hope from some victories? In Majority, we are targeting Newcastle City Council in the 2026 all-out local elections as part of a progressive alliance. Last May, I polled 25,000 votes, to Labour’s 26,000. If we win control of a major UK city, people will start to believe in a big way. And although we’re concentrated in the North East, we have members as far as the South Coast, the Welsh Valleys, and Glasgow.

    Or do you want to actually change the world in a big way? Matthew Brown has worked wonders with the Preston Model. Joe Cullinane did something similar in North Ayreshire. Modesty aside, I achieved a lot in the North of Tyne. But you have to go back to 1945 for anything that could reasonably be called transformative.

    Wealth taxes, public ownership of utilities, ethical foreign policy, and serious climate action all require the levers in No 10. We have to walk before we can run, but we are not doing this to let off steam. A handful of MPs is not enough, nor is a few dozen. The LibDems went from 12 to 72 MPs in 2024, but are no closer to government.

    Ask yourself, are you willing to run the marathon of delayed gratification that this requires? Building an electoral project of that magnitude requires money and professionalism.

    Will a new party even work?

    In 2023, a non-election year, Labour spent £59 million. The Tories £41 million. LibDems £8 million. SNP and the Greens £4 million each. No US healthcare company is going to give us large donations. Our money will come from members. Allowing for a proportion of low income members, £5 a month needs 1.3 million members to match Labour. That’s not going to happen.

    For all the talk of 300,000 people leaving Labour after Corbyn, there’s no guarantee they’ll give money to a new project. Workers Party GB reported 7,469 members. The CPGB, 1,308. At its peak, Momentum never passed 40,000 paying members, even when belief and excitement was at its highest in 2017, and annual membership was £10.

    It took Reform years to build up to winning some councils. That’s an argument for getting on with it. It’s also an argument for sound planning. They get £millions from dodgy donors.  They have their own TV station. They have a season ticket on Question Time.

    Will we get a free run from the press? Not a chance. We are out-funded and outgunned. If we try electoralism – publishing a programme, and waiting for people to vote for us – we will lose. People don’t trust political parties. We will have to do the hard yards of community engagement, building trust and relationships.

    Like the hundreds we had in our Newcastle People’s Manifesto event. Food Poverty campaigners, public transport users, disabled rights activists. Sean Halsall in Southport also makes the case for listening to people. Faiza Shaheen builds community power in her constituency.

    Optics, politics, and ideology

    So that’s another decision we have to make. Will we go out and tell people we have the answers to their problems if only they will vote for us? Or will we listen to them and ask what they want? I’m in touch with independent socialist councillors up and down the country, and I’ve heard both sides.

    “If we have a bold socialist programme, people will flock to us.”

    I wish it were that easy.

    The evidence suggests otherwise. The 2015 Green Party manifesto called for a Wealth Tax and more radical investment than Corbyn’s Labour 2017 manifesto. They still only returned one MP. TUSC had the definition of a bold socialist programme. They averaged 285 votes per candidate, losing their deposits.

    Liking your programme is not enough. Remember the Funny Tinge Party? They called themselves Change UK. Launched in February 2019. In theory, they had a large voter coalition.  Moderate Labour, moderate Tory, Lib Dems. All the People’s vote/second referendum supporters. They said “politics is broken” and that parties should work together.  73% of people agreed with them. They started with 11 MPs. Their press launch was a car crash. They were dissolved after 10 months.

    You get one chance to make a first impression. We have to decide, is this party of the left, for the left? Or is it a party with left policies that intends to win support across the board?  Including the five million self-employed and small business owners.

    Corbyn may have hinted – but the wheels may well be in motion

    Boil it down, and voters want two things. Almost no one reads manifestos. They will look instead at political leaders and ask two questions. One, can these people run the country? And two, do these people have my back?

    At the moment, millions think no one can run the country. So they vote for those shouting the loudest, or no one at all. To win with a socialist programme, against a hostile media, you have to look credible. Wish lists won’t get you very far.

    When Nick Robinson asks you on the Today programme, “how will you pay for this?”, you need the figures at your fingertips. You need to articulate how we will build council homes, and support that with evidence. How we will overcome the legal barriers to public ownership of water. How we will stop billionaires dodging a wealth tax. That needs movement-wide political education and training, so our members can be our human microphone.

    Building a new party in a single bound, from whole cloth, with a rule book and democratic structures is not realistic. Corbyn knows this. It will have to start as an alliance, so independents can come in and build trust. So you can join and shape it.

    Many watching, including trade unions, want to see that it is professional before they will commit. If you want to get cracking now, and be on the front foot, you can join Majority.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Jamie Driscoll

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Culture at the core: examining journalism values in the Pacific

    ANALYSIS: By Birte Leonhardt, Folker Hanusch and Shailendra B. Singh

    The role of journalism in society is shaped not only by professional norms but also by deeply held cultural values. This is particularly evident in the Pacific Islands region, where journalists operate in media environments that are often small, tight-knit and embedded within traditional communities.

    Our survey of journalists across Pacific Island countries provides new insight into how cultural values influence journalists’ self-perceptions and practices in the region. The findings are now available as an open access article in the journal Journalism.

    Cultural factors are particularly observable in many collectivist societies, where journalists emphasise their intrinsic connection to their communities. This includes the small and micro-media systems of the Pacific, where “high social integration” includes close familial ties, as well as traditional and cultural affiliations.

    The culture of the Pacific Islands is markedly distinct from Western cultures due to its collectivist nature, which prioritises group aspirations over individual aspirations. By foregrounding culture and values, our study demonstrates that the perception of their local cultural role is a dominant consideration for journalists, and we also see significant correlations between it and the cultural-value orientations of journalists.

    We approach the concept of culture from the viewpoint of journalistic embeddedness, that is, “the extent to which journalists are enmeshed in the communities, cultures, and structures in which and on whom they report, and the extent to which this may both enable and constrain their work”.

    The term embeddedness has often been considered undesirable in mainstream journalism, given ideals of detachment and objectivity which originated in the West and experiences of how journalists were embedded with military forces, such as the Iraq War.

    Yet, in alternative approaches to journalism, being close to those on whom they report has been a desirable value, such as in community journalism, whereas a critique of mainstream journalism has tended to be that those reporters do not really understand local communities.

    Cultural detachment both impractical and undesirable
    What is more, in the Global South, embeddedness is often viewed as an intrinsic element of journalists’ identity, making cultural detachment both impractical and undesirable.

    Recent research highlights that journalists in many regions of the world, including in unstable democracies, often experience more pronounced cultural influences on their work compared to their Western counterparts.

    To explore how cultural values and identity shape journalism in the region, we surveyed 206 journalists across nine countries: Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Nauru and the Marshall Islands.

    The study was conducted as part of a broader project about Pacific Islands journalists between mid-2016 and mid-2018. About four in five of journalists in targeted newsrooms agreed to participate, making this one of the largest surveys of journalists in the region.

    Respondents were asked about their perceptions of journalism’s role in society and the extent to which cultural values inform their work.

    Our respondents averaged just under 37 years of age and were relatively evenly split in terms of gender (49 percent identified as female) with most in full-time employment (94 percent). They had an average of nine years of work experience. Around seven in 10 had studied at university, but only two-thirds of those had completed a university degree.

    The findings showed that Pacific Islands journalists overwhelmingly supported ideas related to a local cultural role in reporting. A vast majority — 88 percent agreed that it was important for them to reflect local culture in reporting, while 75 percent also thought it was important to defend local traditions and values.

    Important to preserve local culture
    Further, 71 percent agreed it was important for journalists to preserve local culture. Together, these roles were considered substantially more important than traditional roles such as the monitorial role, where journalists pursue media’s watchdog function.

    This suggests Pacific islands journalists see themselves not just as neutral observers or critics but as active cultural participants — conveying stories that strengthen identity, continuity and community cohesion.

    To understand why journalists adopt this local cultural role, we looked at which values best predicted their orientation. We used a regression model to account for a range of potential influences, including socio-demographic aspects such as work experience, education, gender, the importance of religion and journalists’ cultural-value orientations.

    Our results showed that the best predictor for whether journalists thought it was important to pursue a local cultural role lay in their own value system. In fact, the extent to which journalists adhered to so-called conservative values like self-restraint, the preservation of tradition and resistance to change emerged as the strongest predictors.

    Hence, our findings suggest that journalists who emphasise tradition and social stability in their personal value systems are significantly more likely to prioritise a local cultural role.

    These values reflect a preference for preserving the status quo, respecting established customs, and fostering social harmony — all consistent with Pacific cultural norms.

    While the importance of cultural values was clear in how journalists perceive their role, the findings were more mixed when it came to reporting practices. In general, we found that such practices were valued.

    Considerable consensus on customs
    There was considerable consensus regarding the importance of respecting traditional customs in reporting, which 87 percent agreed with. A further 68 percent said that their traditional values guided their behaviour when reporting.

    At the same time, only 29 percent agreed with the statement that they were a member of their cultural group first and a journalist second, whereas 44 percent disagreed. Conversely, 52 percent agreed that the story was more important than respecting traditional customs and values, while 27 percent disagreed.

    These variations suggest that while Pacific journalists broadly endorse cultural preservation as a goal, the practical realities of journalism — such as covering conflict, corruption or political issues — may sometimes create tensions with cultural expectations.

    Our findings support the notion that Pacific Islands journalists are deeply embedded in local culture, informed by collective values, strong community ties and a commitment to tradition.

    Models of journalism training and institution-building that originated in the West often prioritise norms such as objectivity, autonomy and detached reporting, but in the Pacific such models may fall short or at least clash with the cultural values that underpin journalistic identity.

    These aspects need to be taken into account when examining journalism in the region.

    Recognising and respecting local value systems is not about compromising press freedom — it’s about contextualising journalism within its social environment. Effective support for journalism in the region must account for the realities of cultural embeddedness, where being a journalist often means being a community member as well.

    Understanding the values that motivate journalists — particularly the desire to preserve tradition and promote social stability — can help actors and policymakers engage more meaningfully with media practitioners in the region.

    Birte Leonhardt is a PhD candidate at the Journalism Studies Center at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research focuses on journalistic cultures, values and practices, as well as interventionist journalism.

    Folker Hanusch is professor of journalism and heads the Journalism Studies Center at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is also editor-in-chief of Journalism Studies, and vice-chair of the Worlds of Journalism Study.

    Shailendra B. Singh is associate professor of Pacific journalism at the University of the South Pacific, based in Suva, Fiji, and a member of the advisory board of the Pacific Journalism Review.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Health chief ‘conductor of an orchestra who’s never played an instrument’

    ANALYSIS: By Ian Powell

    In February 2025, Dr Diana Sarfati resigned, not unexpectedly, as Director-General of Health after only two years into her five-year term.

    As a medical specialist, and in her role as developing the successful cancer control agency, she had extensive experience in New Zealand’s health system.

    However, she did not conform to the privately expressed view of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon: That the problem with the health system is that it is led by health.

    Responsibility for the appointment of public service chief executives rests with the Public Service Commissioner.

    In carrying out this function, Brian Roche had two choices for the process of selecting Sarfati’s replacement — run a contestable hiring process (the usual method) or appoint someone without this process.

    With the required approval of Attorney-General Judith Collins and Health Minister Simeon Brown, Roche opted for the exception rather than the rule.

    This suggests a degree of pre-determination to appoint someone without the “hindrance” of health system experience, consistent with Luxon’s view.

    An appointment from outside health
    Consequently, on April 1, Audrey Sonerson was appointed the new Director-General of Health for a five-year term.

    She had been the Ministry of Transport chief executive (including when Brown was transport minister). She also had senior positions in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and in the Police and Treasury.

    Though she had been part of the Treasury’s health team and has a master’s in health economics, her only health system experience was in the brief hiatus between Sarfati’s resignation when acting director-general and becoming the confirmed replacement.

    ‘For a minister with no experience of the complexity of health care delivery to choose a director-general who herself has no health experience is extremely concerning.’

    — Dr David Galler, former intensive care specialist

    This is unprecedented for the director-general position. Sonerson is the 18th person to hold this position. The first 10 had been medical doctors. In 1992, the first non-doctor holder was appointed (a Canadian with some health management experience).

    The subsequent six appointees all had extensive health system experience. Three were medical doctors (two in population health), two had been district health board chief executives, and one had been the director-general in Scotland and a medical geographer.

    Dr David Galler is well-placed to comment on the significance of this extraordinary change of direction. He is a retired intensive care specialist and former President of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists.

    He held the unique position of principal medical adviser to the health minister, the ‘eyes and ears’ of the health system for three health ministers in the mid to late 2000s. He also worked closely with two director-generals.

    Drawing on this experience, Galler observes that: “Director-generals of health must be respected, influential, knowledgeable, connected and trusted, to ensure that good policy goes into practice and good practice informs policy . . .  For a minister with no experience of the complexity of health care delivery to choose a director-general who herself has no health experience is extremely concerning.”

    Breadth of the health system
    As the director-general heads up the Health Ministry, she is responsible for being the “steward” of our health system. In this context she is the lead adviser to the government on health. In the context of seeking to improve and protect the health and wellbeing of New Zealanders, the organisation Sonerson now leads is responsible for:

    • the stewardship and leadership of the health system; and
    • advising her minister and government on health and disability matters.

    These responsibilities have to be considered in the context of how extensive the health system is beginning with its complexity, highly specialised range of health professional occupational groups, and its breadth.

    This breadth ranges from community healthcare (predominantly general practices), local 24/7 acute hospitals, tertiary hospitals (lower volume, high complexity) and quaternary care services (national services for very uncommon or highly complex even lower volume procedures and treatments, including experimental medicine, uncommon surgical procedures, and advanced trauma care).

    Another way of looking at this breadth is that it ranges in treatment from medical to surgical to mental health to diagnostic. And then there is population health such as epidemiology.

    Population health and the Health Act
    However, responsibility extends further to specific obligations under the Health Act 1956, many of which are operational. Although it is nearly 60 years old, this act has been updated by legislative amendments many times and as recently as 2022 with the passing of the Pae Ora Act that disestablished district health boards and established Health New Zealand.

    The Health Act gives Sonerson’s health ministry the function of improving, promoting and protecting public health (as distinct from personal diagnostic and treatment health). Public health is legislatively defined as meaning either the health of all New Zealanders or a population group, community, or section of people within New Zealand.

    A critical part of this role is the responsibility for ensuring that local government authorities improve, promote, and protect public health within their districts in appointing key positions (such as medical officers of health, environmental health officers and health protection officers); food and water safety; regular inspections for any nuisances, or any conditions likely to be injurious to health or offensive and, where necessary, secure their abatement or removal; make bylaws for the protection of public health; and provide reports on diseases and sanitary conditions within each district.

    The population function under the Health Act of improving, promoting, and protecting public health means that how well the health ministry under Sonerson’s leadership performs directly affects the health and wellbeing of all New Zealanders.

    This is an immense responsibility that cannot be minimised.

    Understanding universal health systems
    Universal health systems such as ours are characterised by being highly complex, adaptive and labour intensive and innovative (innovation primarily comes from its workforce). They provide a public good (rather than commodities) and their breadth is considerable.

    But, despite appearances to the contrary, the different parts of this breadth don’t function separately from each other. They are not just interconnected; they are interdependent.

    As a result, each part makes up a highly integrated system. Consequently, relationships are critical. The more relational the culture, the better the system will perform; the more contractual the culture, the poorer it will perform.

    Galler’s experience-based above-mentioned observation needs to be seen in the context of the challenging nature of universal health systems.

    In a wider discussion on health system leadership, Auckland surgeon Dr Erica Whineray Kelly got to the core of the issue very well: “You’d never have a conductor of an orchestra who’d never played an instrument.”

    Audrey Sonerson comes into the director-general position with a deficit. It will help her performance if she first recognises that there are many unknowns for her and then proceeds to listen to those within the system who possess the experience of knowing well these unknowns.

    It might go some way to alleviating the legitimate concerns of Galler and Whineray Kelly and many others.

    Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes. This article was first published by Newsroom and is republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Speight’s Fiji coup had more to do with power, greed than iTaukei rights, says Chaudhry

    By Vijay Narayan, news editor of Fijivillage News

    Today marks the 25th anniversary of the May 19, 2000, coup led by renegade businessman George Speight.

    The deposed Prime Minister, Mahendra Chaudhry, says Speight’s motive had less to do with indigenous rights and a lot more to do with power, greed, and access to the millions likely to accrue from Fiji’s mahogany plantation.

    On this day 25 years ago, the elected government was held hostage at the barrel of the gun, the Parliament complex started filling up with rebels supporting the takeover, Suva City and other areas in Fiji were looted and burnt, and innocent people were attacked just because of their race.

    Chaudhry said indigenous emotions were “deliberately ignited to beat up support for the treasonous actions of the terrorists”.

    He said the coup threw the nation into chaos from which it had not fully recovered even to this day.

    Chaudhry said using George Speight as a frontman, the “real perpetrators” of the coup, assisted by a group of armed rebels from the Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF), held Chaudhry and members of his government hostage for 56 days as they plundered, looted and terrorised the Indo-Fijian community in various parts of the country.

    The Fiji Labour Party leader said that, as with current Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, who led the first two coups in 1987, so with Speight in May 2000, that the given reason for the treason and the mayhem that followed was to “protect the rights and interests of the indigenous community”.

    Chaudhry said today that it was widely acknowledged that the rights of the indigenous community was not endangered either in 1987 or in 2000.

    He added that they were simply used to pursue personal and political agendas.

    Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka with former prime minister Mahendra Chaudhry
    Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka with former prime minister Mahendra Chaudhry . . . apology accepted during the Girmit Day Thanksgiving and National Reconciliation church service at the Vodafone Arena in Suva. Image: Jonacani Lalakobau/The Fiji Times

    The FLP leader said those who benefitted were the elite in Fijian society, not ordinary people.

    Chaudhry said this was obvious from current statistics which showed that currently the iTaukei surveyed made up 75 percent of those living in poverty.

    He said poverty reports in the early 1990s showed practically a balance in the number of Fijians and Indo-Fijians living in poverty.

    Prisoner George Speight speaking to inmates in 2011
    Prisoner George Speight speaking to inmates in 2011 . . . he and his rogue gunmen seized then Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry and his government hostage in a 2000 crisis that lasted for 56 days. Image: Fijivillage News/YouTube screenshot

    The former prime minister says it was obvious that the coups had done nothing to improve the quality of life of the ordinary indigenous iTaukei.

    Instead, he said the coups had had a devastating impact on the entire socio-economic fabric of Fiji’s society, putting the nation decades behind in terms of development.


    Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre coordinator Shamima Ali reflects on the 2000 coup.

    Chaudhry said the sorry state of Fiji today — “the suffering of our people and continued high rate of poverty, deteriorating health and education services, the failing infrastructure and weakened state of our economy” — were all indicators of how post-coup governments had failed to deliver on the expectations of the people.

    He said: “It is time for us to rise above discredited notions of racism and fundamentalism and embrace progressive, liberal thinking.”

    Chaudhry added that leaders needed to be judged on their vision and performance and not on their colour and creed.

    Republished with permission from FijiVillage News.

    2000 attempted coup leader George Speight with a bodyguard
    2000 attempted coup leader George Speight with a bodyguard and supporters during the siege drama in May 2000. Image: Fijivillage News

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Open letter from John Cusack: ‘The children of Gaza need your outrage – end the siege’

    Pacific Media Watch

    American film star celebrity John Cusack, who describes himself on his x-page bio as an “apocalyptic shit-disturber”, has posted an open letter to the world denouncing the Israeli “mass murder” in Gaza and calling for “your outrage”.

    While warning the public to “don’t stop talking about Palestine/Gaza”, he says that the “hollow ‘both sides’ rhetoric is complicity with power”.

    “This is not a debate with two sides that can be normalised — and all the hired bullshit in print and on tv will never change the narrative,” he said.

    Palestinian freelance photojournalist Fatma Hassouna
    Palestinian freelance photojournalist Fatma Hassouna . . . murdered in an Israeli air strike on after it was announced about her film on Gaza being screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Image: Fatma Hassouna

    His statement comes as hundreds of directors, writers, actors have denounced Israeli genocide in Gaza and the film industry’s “silence,” “indifference” and “passivity” coinciding with the Cannes Film Festival.

    More than 350 prominent directors, writers and actors signed an open letter condemning the genocide and the “official inaction” of the film industry in regard to the mass suffering.

    The industry open letter was published on the first day of the Cannes festival. It began by calling attention to the fate of 25-year-old Fatma Hassouna, a Palestinian freelance photojournalist, who was murdered in an Israeli air strike on April 16.

    She was assassinated after it was announced that Iranian director Sepideh Farsi’s film Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, in which she Hassouna was the star, had been selected in the ACID parallel, independent film section of the festival.

    She was about to get married.

    Cusack’s own open letter, offered as a template at X@JohnCusack last week, said:

    “To Whom it May Still Concern

    “There is a genocide unfolding before our eyes in Gaza. Not a metaphor, not a tragedy in the abstract — a genocide. Carried out in real time, in front of satellites, smartphones, and sanitized press conferences. And what has the so-called “land of the free” done? Applauded. Armed. Rationalised. Looked away.


    London protest: ‘No to another Nakba”    Video: Al Jazeera

    “The blood in Gaza does not just stain the hands of those launching the missiles. It stains every hand that signs off on the bombs, every hand that wrings itself in liberal anguish but does nothing, and every hand that beats its chest in right-wing bloodlust cheering it all on.

    “The American far right sees in this mass killing a projection of its own fantasies — walls, camps, and the unrelenting dehumanisation of the “other.” No surprise there. And where are the liberals? Their silence is violence. Their hollow “both sides” rhetoric is complicity with power. And mass murder. And the machine of empire—greased with our taxes, shielded by our media, and excused by our moral debauchery .
    How’s everybody at the Met gala doing tonight ?

    American actor John Cusack
    American actor John Cusack . . . “If you claim to care about justice – if you ever marched, ever lit a candle for any cause – then your voice should be raised now.” Image: Wikipedia

    “If you claim to care about justice — if you ever marched, ever lit a candle for any cause — then your voice should be raised now. Or it means nothing. The children of Gaza do not need your sorrow. They need your outrage. Your pressure. Your courage.

    “End the siege. End the weapons shipments. End the lies. Call this what it is: a genocide.

    “And if your politics cannot confront that—then your politics are worthless.

    “In furious solidarity

    “John Cusack”

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • #SwindonsSundaySermon: if you can’t beat ’em – make sure you’re even worse

    If you can’t beat them, join them. Right? If Keir Starmer hasn’t joined them, he certainly has just made the daunting prospect of a Farage-led government just that bit more likely.

    Addressing the nation this past Monday, Keir Starmer finally came up with his response to the advance of the reactionist right and claimed that Britain risks “becoming an island of strangers” if net migration doesn’t come down.

    The wholly unedifying spectacle of a Labour, I repeat LABOUR PARTY Prime Minister, desperately attempting to out-Farage, Farage himself by using language designed to provocatively enflame rather than enlighten doesn’t sit well with me.

    Does Keir Starmer even know what he is ‘protecting’?

    This deeply unpleasant amoral tabloid-speak, aping the rhetoric of the far-right, doesn’t deliver the change that Keir Starmer promised, but it does quite clearly guarantee a path of continuity with the demonisation of migrants set to intensify for the foreseeable future.

    Does anyone with just a degree of sensibility honestly believe a care worker from Cameroon or a bus driver from Bangladesh is a risk to the British way of life?

    What is this British way of life that Keir Starmer thinks that he is protecting?

    A tin of beans costs nearly as much as a pint, and if you do your weekly shop at Waitrose you might want to consider selling a kidney on the black market.

    We used to have wet springs. Do you remember something called “April showers”? That’ll be the title of a Bonnie Blue movie these days. Bognor is the new Benidorm, thanks to climate change.

    The notion of a generous benefits system is a whopping great lie. If I can find that out with a quick Google, so can a migrant, so can an ignorant right-wing headbanger with the likability of haemorrhoids.

    For the record, the UK has the third lowest welfare value across the OECD and is no more than a middle ranker when it comes to welfare spending (as a percent of GDP).

    Britain does not have a generous benefits system.

    The poorest parts of the UK are now poorer than the poorest parts of Malta and Slovenia. You won’t hear Keir Starmer scream that from the rooftops, front door ablaze.

    What other British values is he trying to protect? Record NHS waiting times? We love a queue, after all.

    Illusion – or delusion?

    Starmer seems to have this illusion of a Britain that is characterised by politeness, social etiquette, and individual liberty. Perhaps it’s supposed to be that way, maybe it used to be that way (although I doubt it), but this isn’t a Britain that I recognise in 2025.

    Keir Starmer isn’t interested in protecting the British way of life, however you may define it. Keir Starmer is only interested in protecting himself and the assets of those that pull his strings.

    This disastrous immigration speech — which even had the liberal media screaming “rivers of blood” — felt very anti-British, if like me you also feel that tolerance and compassion are amongst our greatest unspoken strengths.

    We mobilise in our hundreds of thousands for Palestine. We are good people and we are so much better than the way our compromised politicians represent us on the global stage.

    While Starmer himself must always take ultimate responsibility for his government and what they stand for, surely there must be someone in power that needs to take his speechwriter to one side and help them clear their desk?

    The substance of the speech was entirely lost in the hateful and divisive language of the speech. That didn’t happen by accident. How bad does it have to be to receive a nod of approval from the far-right Orban Hungarian government?

    I remember one of Jeremy Corbyn’s speechwriters, a very talented man named Alex Nunns. I got a mention, and a signed copy of his fantastic book The Candidate once upon a time.

    Alex used to write about togetherness, peace, decency, the importance of community, solidarity with the oppressed, dignity for the vulnerable, and every single speech that Jeremy delivered had hope at its very core.

    This felt like patriotism to me, not this overt hostility that has been scrambled together with the help of Grok and some highly questionable and completely dishonest data from a shitty right-wing clickbait website.

    We’re a little over ten months into the Starmer era and barely a day goes by without me feeling just a bit more disgusted by their behaviour than I was the day before.

    There was never any doubt that we were in for a very bumpy ride under neoliberal Labour, but even I thought this Reform-esque rhetoric might be beneath the Labour leader.

    Starmer’s Britain: where racists are the victims

    Talking of hate speech, I came across the case of Lucy Connolly, this past week.

    Mrs Connolly, who is married to a former Tory Councillor, was jailed for 31 months for a hateful social media post, much to the anger of the hard-right and that irrelevant attention whore, Dan Wootton.

    By the time you get around to reading this, Lucy may well be free, but has she learned the very simple difference between free speech and hate speech?

    The criminal, Connolly, got no less than what she deserved, and yes, I have read the notes from the appeal and I feel nothing but absolute sympathy for any parent that has lost a child.

    But let’s turn the content of Connolly’s ugly social media post around for a moment.

    What if Mrs Connolly was instead a British Muslim, calling for hotels full of white “bastards” to be burned to the ground?

    Would we all gather outside of the Court of Appeal to hold hands and sing Kum Ba Yah until the British Muslim was released from prison to a sea of ISIS flags and Kalashnikov gun fire?

    I rest my case, your honour.

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Israeli Jews’ Love of Genocide


    The Golden Calf – Jewish Achilles Heel

    My first thought on seeing Peter Beinhart’s title — Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (2025) — was: Argh. More Jewish angst, holier-than-thou hand-wringing, but leading nowhere. Half-way through I had completely changing my mind. Angst, yes. But lots of meat to chew on, ok, spitting out some grissle, but it was mostly intelligent, informative, and even inspiring (for a goy no less). Beinhart marshalls statistics that confirm my own extreme anger at not just Jews but anyone who does not mobilize themselves to fight this ongoing, LIVE, genocide.

    The West’s indifference to an ongoing genocide is more than shameful. Israel participates in Eurovision, its sports teams compete with only the occasional MUSLIM refusing to spar with his/her competitor from the genocidal state. Almost no one besides Muslims is concerned, donating charity, actively opposing Israel.

    None of my five siblings can be bothered, unless buying Palestinian olive oil counts. All of us are ‘rich’. I’m rich, even if I go to a food bank. It’s all in your mind. The poor are always more generous than the rich. Shame on anyone who ignores genocide just because they feel helpless to stop it. Beinhart’s ashamed to be Jewish. I’m just as ashamed as a non-Jew. One of my favourite Muslim hadiths (in my free-verse version): Speak truth to an unjust ruler; if that’s impossible, then talk about it with others; if that’s impossible, then at least think about it, write about it, use any chance to protest.

    The whole world is reliving 1930s-40s Germany, 1960s US deep south and Vietnam, though it probably feels even worse now to anyone who cares, as we watch live, day after day, already two years, the IDF deliberately slaughtering civilans (even beheading babies while falsely claiming it is Hamas doing this). How can Israelis, Jews, being so consciously, conscientiously EVIL?

    And guess what? Anti-Jewish feelings, acts have gone through the roof. Nice educated college students angrily call out kippa-wearing Jewish classmates as supporters of genocide. Which they are. I’m too polite to ‘speak truth’ there (there is a 0.1% chance the kippa-wearer doesn’t actually like the horrors being perpetrated IN HIS NAME). The Zionist lobby has locked up free speech in the interests of genocide. If you criticize Israel, you are ANTI-SEMITIC, so kippa-wearers are walking targets. Beware. Take it off till the genocide stops or you are fair victim. Better yet, join an encampment, a demo.

    Beinhart would be shocked at my savagery. Tsk, tsk. He protests this conflation, but, sorry, the tyrants in power aren’t listening to your sweet nothings. But my bitching and anger will turn to love if Israel stops acting like Nazi Germany. So don’t blame angry goys for not dotting your ‘i’s.

    That is one of his weaknesses as a fervent, practicing Jew. Haven’t you figured out yet, Peter, that Judaism is dead? Israel killed it, along with (still counting) millions of dead, millions crippled and millions more displaced Palestinians, not to mention Iraq, Syria, Lebanon. Neturei karta and Satmar are nice but have no effect. They are the token anit-Zionists to prove that all Jews aren’t evil, but what good does that do except hobble what should be fierce pressure on all Jews to do something to stop the madness?

    Silver bullet for peace

    Beinhart grew up in South Africa under apartheid so he doesn’t need the Israeli version to understand the evil at play. Afrikaners saw black Africa as barbarism and dysfunction, and justified themselves, their violent repression of blacks as second class drudges(not citizens), by arguing the blacks would kill the whites otherwise.

    Now, looking back, he sees the same false story in northern Ireland and in the US south. And the proof that this story is false is that in each case, when the oppression ends with liberation, the armed resistance movements of the blacks in Africa and the US, the Catholics in northern Ireland melted away. That’s what even our pathetic Conciliation Commission in Canada with our genocided natives was all about. We Canadians have done a half-assed job of reconciliation, but still the natives don’t slit our throats.

    He sees the proof in Israeli Palestinians, who are still second class drudges but CITIZEN drudges. That’s the key. They have a vote, political parties, even representation in the government on rare occasions. That’s all the Gazans and West Bankers want. To be treated like human beings, citizens, even if still second class. That is still wrong, but is a huge step forward. Imagine if Israel made everyone citizens. The thought of a liberated Middle East (NOT Trump’s Club Med) is exhilarating. Do Israelis need reeducation camps, like in Vietnam after the liberation in 1975? Maybe. Certainly new history books. Not their perverse history of victimhood, as Beinhart jokingly summarized in his chapter one title: They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.

    Beinhart was/is himself a Zionist, though now recondite. He loves Buber and others who promoted a caring Zionism. Sorry, Peter. That gentle version never had a chance before Israel was declared the Jewish State, and certainly has no chance now. There were similarly National Socialists who promoted a less toxic Nazism, Strasserism, but they were purged by Netanyahu (sorry, Hitler) or fled abroad. Speaking of which, Toronto has the largest Israeli population outside the ‘fatherland’. Now hundred(s) of thousands of Israelis are abandoning ship, the nicer ones, who, if they had stayed, might have tried stopping the madness. Instead they leave behind the bloodthirsty, murderous settlers, toxic American, British and Russian fanatics, not taking any responsibility themselves as Jews for their Jewish tribe’s crimes.

    You can’t have your Purim cookie and eat it

    Purim celebrations: Israelis’ love of genocide derives from the Purim story of the slaughter of 75,000 Persians ‘in self-defense’, using Esther (concubine/ prostitute) as a honey-trap. The cookies represent tyrant Haman and his sons’ ears.

    Judaism used to be the exalted granddaddy of monotheism. Christians took the Old Testament (OT) with all its Jewish supremacism as the truth. Though Jews were feared and reviled as outsiders, usurers, schemers, the religion was always respected, along with the prophecy that Jews will ‘go back’ in the endtimes.

    This vague notion became a fact in the 1820s, a British imperial project, a 9th Crusade, a proto-Israel in the minds of British Christian Zionists, whose love-hate for Judaism-Jews convinced them to export all Jews to the Holy Land. Israel was conceived as the pet project of (very anti-Jewish) Christian-Zionist Lord Palmerston, which came to life with the invention of the steamship, the leading-edge tech. Palmerston immediately used it to — guess what? — wage war, obliterating Akka (Crusader Acre, Hebrew Akko) in 1840 with British cannons and this new fangled hot air machine (the Brits needed Mount Lebanon’s high-grade coal to fuel their steamships). ‘Not a sign of endtimes but as a new era of prosperity.’1

    The new war-tech allowed Britain to seize control of Egypt (the Suez Canal) by the 1870s. Capitulations to French, British, Russian and US trade and Christian agents in the Levant under the Ottomans prepared the way for divvying up the Ottoman spoils when the time was ripe (1918). So when wealthy Rothschilds-type Jews decided they would like to dabble in creating their own nation, it was readily accepted by imperial Britain. From the first Zionist conference in 1897 to the Balfour declaration in 1917, Israel became the key actor in a new Crusade to ‘free’ the Holy Land (and its oil riches).

    The Brits could get rid of their Jews, and those rich Jews could have their very own Jewish state. Win-win. WWII was the final touch, the get-out-of-jail card, a passport to a racial state for the Chosen People, a state without morals, i.e., f*#k the world, international law, kill, kill, steal, steal, dispossess, trick, torture until – poof! – no more natives standing in your way. That was more or less British colonial policy anyway. There were no ‘nays’, or at least none that got any traction in Westminster or the mainstream press.

    In the process, Judaism has been reduced to just an old boy’s club, a way to get the edge over goys, who have no rich, influential tribe to help them move up the greasy pole. Hillel House won’t have a speaker who criticizes Israel, Zionism, but undermining belief, promotion of atheism? No problemo.

    Wake up Peter! You admit that even US Jews, the heretics, are arrested now, deplatformed, kicked out of university for protesting Israel, excommunicated from the tribe, but still argue that there is no justification for targeting Jews as A TRIBE. But Israel preempted you. Israel wants kippa-wearers to be targetted. Which means that kippa-wearing Jews who parade their Jewishness (Israel-lovers) are by default part of the problem – unless they are vocal opponents of Israeli war crimes and their kippa is to defy the craven kippa-wearing Zios. You can’t eat your blood-soaked Purim cookies, shaped as heads of the decapitated Palestinians (sorry, Persians) and have them too.

    Beinhart argues eloquently in his dynamite last chapter, Korach’s children, that Moses’s opponent, Korach (All the community are holy, all of them, and God is in their midst.), was indeed wrong for claiming that the tribe’s chosenness meant a ‘free pass’. That they didn’t need Moses and his tiresome commandments demanding that they be good Jews. For Moses, chosenness meant responsibility for your own sins. Korach is identical to the Zionists today. Your genes (or very rigorous conversion, including Zionism) give you a ‘free pass’. Your only ‘responsibility’ is to defend the state of Israel, which can do no wrong as it’s, well, ISRAEL. So just shut up and let’s eat our bloody cookies!

    This is idol worship. The Jewish state replaces God in a secular Israel. This isn’t the first time Jews have been called on the carpet for worshipping idols. The Golden Calf is just the most colourful biblical story, and the consequences are always dire. Lots of exile as punishment. In fact, Jewish ‘history’ is one long litany of Jews screwing up and God getting very angry and punishing them. So stop playing victim. Own up to your sins. Stop worshipping idols.

    The other jewcy bits are the OT genocides. The Zionist Mephistopheles Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and Israel’s first Prime Minister Ben Gurion, both atheists, both loved the story of Joshua, who delivered the ‘promised land’ by wiping out all the Palestinians of the day, the Amalek.2 The Zionists celebrate this original sin/theft and use it to justify their present-day genocide. Purim is the icing on the cake.

    Beinhart mentions Jewish supremacists of the past – 11th century Spanish poet Yehuda Halevi (living happily under Islamic rule in Andalou), the 16th century rabbi Maharal of Prague, 18thc Hasids in Poland, the list goes on. Idols are the Jews’ downfall. Hello, Israel. And hello, anti-Jewish prejudice. When you see yourself as superior to the goys around you, you invite resentment. Beinhart doesn’t go the extra mile here, dismissing a few dreamers in Moorish Spain or the Silesian shtetl. They didn’t have the power to do anything about it. Sure, but their supremacist behaviour continually bred resentment. Pogroms against Jews? Yes, but by isolating your tribe, insisting on being superior, when things go wrong, Jews make great scapegoats. Surprise, surprise.

    Enter, stage right

    Jews live in a different world now, where they are the richest and most powerful tribe around, with steel-plated armour against criticism, and where you can’t say any of this in mainstream media without being roasted, sliced and eaten like a Purim cookie. So Beinhart’s soul-searching and his new-found Palestinian friends is all very well, but not enough. He just can’t give up his youthful devotion to Israel as the Jewish state. Pigs really can fly.

    *He quotes IF Stone: Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry, depending on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies but championing a Jewish state in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist.3

    *bemoans Brandeis University for banning a pro-Palestine group, so students could ‘feel safe in their Jewish identity.’

    *is appalled at how Israel is cozying up to neo-fascists in Europe and America, abandoning Jewish progressives.

    And still doesn’t see that an ethnic state is exactly what Hitler created, that the problem is with Zionism. An ethnic state stinks of colonialism or worse. That era ended in the 1960s-1980s with the liberation of Africa. Israel is dragging the whole world back into the worst form of that nightmare world, Hitler’s Germany, bent on wiping out Amalek/Untermenschen and colonizing the world. But then Beinhart is already pilloried and denied his soapbox in Hillel House and other Jewish-controlled places, so thank you Peter for going as far as you go.

    As I read, I couldn’t help comparing Judaism and Islam. While Judaism is a closed religion, not seeking converts, Islam actively promotes conversion. When you become a Muslim (born or converted, it’s the fastest growing religion), you become part of the ‘chosen’. But Islam means ‘submission’. And all colours are welcome. O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you.(49.13). Of course there are bigoted Muslims, tribal Muslims, oily Muslims, but arrogance and racism are universally frowned on. There is no celebration in the Quran or Hadith of massacring Amalek as a template for committing genocide. It’s the OT that is genocidal, jingoistic.

    There are ‘Islamic states’, which are riddled with problems, but unlike in Israel, there are no Untermenschen. All states are suspect in both Judaism and Islam, especially monarchies, which were the normal state structure of two millennia ago, and which often ended up with ‘divine right’ kings who acted like God, idols, and brought about their own demise. The Prophet Muhammad presciently warned against kings, not anointing his blood relative Ali as his inheritor, calling on his followers to elect their own ‘caliph’. Islam was almost destroyed when a later caliph Muawiya appointed his incompetent son Yazid to succeed him. As for Muslim rule, Jews have always lived well under Islamic rule, from Spain to Afghanistan.

    Until Israel reared its ugly head. That angered all Muslims, which delighted Zionists, whose plan was to scare all diaspora Jews into coming to Israel. We killed them, let’s eat. It didn’t work, but it did destroy precious ancient Jewish cultures throughout the Middle East, and brought suddenly unhappy Mizrahi Jews to live as second class Jewish citizens, learn an artificial Hebrew, under ‘white’ European Jews as masters.

    So, for all the backsliding of Muslims over the past millennium and a half, idol worship was never one of its failings. Muslims know that being ‘chosen’ means hard work. Fasting, praying, charity, pilgrimage, study. Lazy Muslims don’t brag about their failings. An atheist Muslim is an oxymoron. This contrasts sharply with not only Jewish centres like Hillel, but even Christian churches, some of which preach atheism.

    2025 – Palestine’s year

    Palestine has finally made the bestseller list. Another fine book, Andreas Malm’s The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth, relates the origins of Israel, how the British invention of the steamship was the technological breakthrough of the day, giving British a few decades of ocean supremacy, feeding the new racial supremacism that saw European smarts capturing (literally) the entire world, to colonize, exploit, destroy cultures, peoples, genocide, all the great things that made us westerners the new ‘chosen race’. Israel should be celebrating its bicentennial, with Akko the capital.

    Malm poignantly goes the extra miles on the environmental destruction that Israel is responsible for. Nice irony: Israel is poisoning itself by dropping toxic bombs just a few miles from Tel Aviv. Nature knows no bounds. It also is the incentive for all the Arab oil sheikhs to blow $100s of billions on weapons of mass destruction — which all our high-faluting hypersonic things are in fact. US-Israel is the world’s incentive to arm yourself to the teeth, ironically, with US-Israeli weapons intended to protect them from US-Israel. Imagine a world with no Israel, or rather with Palestine-Israel. No need for the military industrial complex. We might actually save planet Earth.

    And Egyptian emigre Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. A tweet by El Akkad, a slightly longer version of his catchy title, got 10m hits, so Omar understandably whipped off a book. Cool. He came to the West like all immigrants, thinking it would be heaven, but found it was a big pile of you-know-what. You don’t have to be Palestinian, Arab, Muslim to be the brunt of the lies and bigotry.

    Beinhart is still naval-gazing, the nice little Jewish boy, top marks, loved granny (who loathed what he wrote to the bitter end). Has he bothered reading up on Islam? He never considers the possibility that the real reason Israel MUST be Jews-only is because Islam is a far better version of monotheism, alive and well despite two centuries of imperialist occupation and, now, genocide. No racism, no idols, real chosenness a la original Judaism, where it means responsibility, humility before God, genuine service to ‘the nations’. He finally started making Palestinian Muslim friends and was delighted to find them warm, generous, and spiritual. He was recently on a panel with UCLA law prof Khaled Abou El Fadl. I felt I was in the presence of a profound religious voice. I think, hope Beinhart is still a work in progress.

    ENDNOTES:

    1 Andreas Malm, The destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth, 2025.

    2 Possibly derived from the Egyptian term *ꜥꜣm rqj “hostile Asiatic”, possibly referring to Bronze Age semitic Shasu tribesmen from around Edom.

    3 Peter Beinhart, Being Jewish after the destruction of Gaza, 104.

    The post Israeli Jews’ Love of Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • To Be a (REAL) Jew

    In 1988 I was travelling from NYC to Arizona by plane one night. It was a long 5 hour flight, and we were on a jumbo jet. I was standing alongside this man, early 40s perhaps, who said he was an Israeli engineer. During our conversation, I asked about his feelings on the Palestinian situation, and please remember that this was 1988. He began explaining things as he saw it, and then said the following, with no emotion at all:

    You have to understand that we Israelis see the Palestinians as you in the USA see your blacks. Quite honestly, they breed like rabbits, and if this continues they will outnumber us with their excess population. As much as I hate to admit it, the only recourse we have is to push them into the sea before  they totally overwhelm us!

    This writer has been a student of both WW2 and the Jewish Holocaust for most of my adult life.  I believe it was 1988 or 89 and I was home watching the made for television movie Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story. A scene from the film caused me great consternation. In it, Wiesenthal, played by Ben Kingsley, is searching for his mother at the railroad station. He had heard that she was going to be ‘deported,’ and he knew what that really meant. She was obviously in one of the crowded ‘cattle cars’ ready to depart the station. He was on the platform yelling out her name. There was a German guard off in the near distance. Wiesenthal was desperate. Who wouldn’t be, knowing your mother, the woman who nurtured you and loved you unconditionally, was most likely being sent to her death. Suddenly, he heard a cry from one of the cattle cars: “Simon!” He looked in the direction of the car that the cry came from. The train began to pull away, and the guard was between Wiesenthal and his mother’s cattle car. He fell to his knees and silently wept, so as not to startle the German soldier.

    I quickly wiped my own eyes and grabbed a pen and notepad. This is what I wrote within a few minutes:

    Never Again

    To be a Jew
    and outcast with nothing
    neither the dignity of a cell
    nor the honor of a soldier
    hunted, tormented shamelessly
    JUST FOR BEING A JEW!

    To be a Jew
    homeless, loved by no one
    godless, but in memory
    of a Father so forgiving
    yet turned away once more
    JUST FOR BEING A JEW!

    To be a Jew
    a creature of the day
    for the night has eyes
    eyes that can condemn
    eyes that can haunt
    JUST FOR BEING A JEW!

    To be a Jew
    standing proud in cattle cars
    marching silently towards death
    for only God holds redemption
    for those who are the chosen
    JUST FOR BEING A JEW!

    My poem was laser engraved onto a plaque and sent to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, where it remains today as part of the holocaust museum’s archives. This is just how affected I was by my study of that horrific era in the history of the 20th Century.

    Well, sadly I must state that many of my fellow Jewish brethren (I just found out, through Ancestry.com , that I am 12.5% Jewish, and interestingly, 12.5% Middle Eastern) have failed to understand what the Holocaust really meant. To forcefully remove perhaps as many as 750,000 Palestinians from THEIR HOMES in 1948 to finalize the Jewish state of Israel makes one recall similar such actions by the Germans at the outset of WW2. Is the ghetto that Gaza had become that much different than the  ghettos created in Warsaw and Krakow? The Germans allowed for their citizens to move into areas in Poland and other Eastern countries, after displacing the natives of those areas (many being Jewish) under the guise of Lebensraum or ‘living space.’ How is that any different from many of my Jewish fellow citizens from Borough Park, Brooklyn and other places moving to Israel and forming settlements in former Palestinian areas? How in the hell does a Jewish person from another country have such living rights over a Palestinian whose family has lived there for countless generations?

    As I write the IDF (Israel Defense Forces, what a joke for a name) continue to bomb the **** out of Gaza, killing countless Palestinians, many little children and the elderly. I can recall being at Brooklyn College, circa late 1960s, and running into what we called ‘Yami boppers,’ right-wing Jewish students wearing skull caps. They spoke with vitriol about the Arabs and in defending their ‘homeland.’ As if Israel was their home! It is most likely those folks and their children and grandchildren who now make up the ‘settler class’ in what was once Arab East Jerusalem and other areas. You can notice these brave settlers by the AK 15s and AK 45s they carry as they intimidate. Sadly, the only difference between those people and the German settlers in Poland and Ukraine are those skull caps.

    The post To Be a (REAL) Jew first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Time for NZ media to ditch the propaganda and stand against genocide

    COMMENTARY: By Saige England in Christchurch

    “RNZ is failing in its duty to inform the public of an entirely preventable humanitarian catastrophe.”

    Tautoko to Jeremy Rose, Ramon Das and Eugene Doyle for this critique of a review of RNZ’s coverage of a genocide.

    Sadly, this highlights RNZ’s failure to report the genocide from the perspective of the very real victims — more journalists killed in Gaza than the whole of World War Two, aid workers murdered and buried, 17,000 children, including babies, who will never ever grow.

    I respect so many RNZ journalists and have always supported this important national broadcaster but it is time for it to pull up its pants, ditch the propaganda and report from the field of truth.

    I carry my Jewish ancestors in standing against genocide and calling for reports that show the truth of the travesty.

    For reporting on protests I have been pepper sprayed by thugged-up police donning US-style gloves and glasses (illegally carrying pepper spray and tasers).

    I was banned from my own town hall when I tried — with my E Tu press card — to attend the deputy leader Winston Peters’ media conference.

    This government does not want the truth reported, it seems.

    I have reported from the fields of invasion and conflict. I’ve taught journalism and communications. Good journalists remember journalism ethics. Reports from the point of view of the oppressor support the oppressor.

    Humanitarianism means not reporting from the perspective of a mercenary army — an army that has been enforcing apartheid for decades, and which is invoking a policy of extermination for expansion.

    Please read this media review and think of how you would feel if someone demanded that you leave your home. Palestinians have faced oppression and apartheid and “unhoming” for decades.

    Think of the intolerable weight of grief you would carry if a sniper put a bullet between the eyes of a child you love and know.

    Report on the victims. And stop subscribing to propaganda.

    Saige England is a journalist and author, and a member of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). She is a frequent contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This was first published as a social media post.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • As Trump basks in Gulf Arab applause, Israel massacres children in Gaza

    Nakba Day today marks 15 May 1948 — the day after the declaration of the State of Israel — when the Palestinian society and homeland was destroyed and more than 750,000 people forced to leave and become refugees.  The day is known as the “Palestinian Catastrophe”. 

    By Soumaya Ghannoushi

    US President Donald Trump’s tour of Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha is not diplomacy. It is theatre — staged in gold, fuelled by greed, and underwritten by betrayal.

    A US president openly arming a genocide is welcomed with red carpets, handshakes and blank cheques. Trillions are pledged; personal gifts are exchanged. And Gaza continues to burn.

    Gulf regimes have power and wealth. They have Trump’s ear. Yet they use none of it — not to halt the slaughter, ease the siege or demand dignity.

    In return for their riches and deference, Trump grants Israel bombs and sets it loose upon the region.

    This is the real story. At the heart of Trump’s return lies a project he initiated during his first presidency: the erasure of Palestine, the elevation of autocracy, and the redrawing of the Middle East in Israel’s image.

    “See this pen? This wonderful pen on my desk is the Middle East, and the top of the pen — that’s Israel. That’s not good,” he once told reporters, lamenting Israel’s size compared to its neighbours.

    To Trump, the Middle East is not a region of history or humanity. It is a marketplace, a weapons depot, a geopolitical ATM.

    His worldview is forged in evangelical zeal and transactional instinct. In his rhetoric, Arabs are chaos incarnate: irrational, violent, in need of control. Israel alone is framed as civilised, democratic, divinely chosen. That binary is not accidental. It is ideology.

    Obedience for survival
    Trump calls the region “a rough neighbourhood” — code for endless militarism that casts the people of the Middle East not as lives to protect, but as threats to contain.

    His $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia in 2017 was marketed as peace through prosperity. Now, he wants trillions more in Gulf capital. As reported by The New York Times, Trump is demanding that Saudi Arabia invest its entire annual GDP — $1 trillion — into the US economy.

    Riyadh has already offered $600 billion. Trump wants it all. Economists call it absurd; Trump calls it a deal.

    This is not negotiation. It is tribute.

    And the pace is accelerating. After a recent meeting with Trump, the UAE announced a 10-year, $1.4 trillion investment framework with the US.

    This is not realpolitik. It is a grotesque spectacle of decadence, delusion and disgrace

    Across the Gulf, a race is underway — not to end the genocide in Gaza, but to outspend one another for Trump’s favour, showering him with wealth in return for nothing.

    The Gulf is no longer treated as a region. It is a vault. Sovereign wealth funds are the new ballot boxes. Sovereignty — just another asset to be traded.

    Trump’s offer is blunt: obedience for survival. For regimes still haunted by the Arab Spring, Western blessing is their last shield. And they will pay any price: wealth, independence, even dignity.

    To them, the true threat is not Israel, nor even Iran. It is their own people, restless, yearning, ungovernable.

    Democracy is danger; self-determination, the ticking bomb. So they make a pact with the devil.

    Doctrine of immunity
    That devil brings flags, frameworks, photo ops and deals. The new order demands normalisation with Israel, submission to its supremacy, and silence on Palestine.

    Once-defiant slogans are replaced by fintech expos and staged smiles beside Israeli ministers.

    In return, Trump offers impunity: political cover and arms. It is a doctrine of immunity, bought with gold and soaked in Arab blood.

    They bend. They hand him deals, honours, trillions. They believe submission buys respect. But Trump respects only power — and he makes that clear.

    He praises Russian President Vladimir Putin: “Is Putin smart? Yes . . .  that’s a hell of a way to negotiate.” He calls Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “a guy I like [and] respect”. Like them or not, they defend their nations. And Trump, ever the transactional mind, respects power.

    Arab rulers offer no such strength. They offer deference, not defiance. They don’t push; they pay.

    And Trump mocks them openly. King Salman “might not be there for two weeks without us”, he brags. They give him billions; he demands trillions.

    It is not just the US Treasury profiting. Gulf billions do not merely fuel policy; they enrich a family empire. Since returning to office, Trump and his sons have chased deals across the Gulf, cashing in on the loyalty they have cultivated.

    A hotel in Dubai, a tower in Jeddah, a golf resort in Qatar, crypto ventures in the US, a private club in Washington for Gulf elites — these are not strategic projects, but rather revenue streams for the Trump family.

    Reward for ethnic cleansing
    The precedent was set early. Former presidential adviser Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, secured $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund shortly after leaving office, despite internal objections.

    The message was clear: access to the Trumps has a price, and Gulf rulers are eager to pay.

    Now, Trump is receiving a private jet from Qatar’s ruling family — a palace in the sky worth $400 million.

    This is not diplomacy. It is plunder.

    And how does Trump respond? With insult: “It was a great gesture,” he said of the jet, before adding: “We keep them safe. If it wasn’t for us, they probably wouldn’t exist right now.”

    That was his thank you to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar; lavish gifts answered with debasement.

    And what are they rewarding him for? For genocide. For 100,000 tonnes of bombs dropped on Gaza. For backing ethnic cleansing in plain sight. For empowering far-right Israeli politicians, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as they call for Gaza’s depopulation.

    For presiding over the most fanatically Zionist, most unapologetically Islamophobic administration in US history.

    Still, they ask nothing, while offering everything. They could have used their leverage. They did not.

    The Yemen precedent proves they can act. Trump halted the bombing under Saudi pressure, to Netanyahu’s visible dismay. When they wanted a deal, they struck one with the Houthis.

    And when they sought to bring Syria in from the cold, Trump complied. He agreed to meet former rebel leader turned President Ahmed al-Sharaa — a last-minute addition to his Riyadh schedule — and even spoke of lifting sanctions, once again at Saudi Arabia’s request, to “give them a chance of greatness”.

    No US president is beyond pressure. But for Gaza? Silence.

    Price of silence
    While Trump was being feted in Riyadh, Israel rained American-made bombs on two hospitals in Gaza. In Khan Younis, the European Hospital was reportedly struck by nine bunker-busting bombs, killing more than two dozen people and injuring scores more.

    Earlier that day, an air strike on Nasser Hospital killed journalist Hassan Islih as he lay wounded in treatment.

    As Trump basked in applause, Israel massacred children in Jabalia, where around 50 Palestinians were killed in just a few hours.

    This is the bloody price of Arab silence, buried beneath the roar of applause and the glitter of tributes.

    This week marks the anniversary of the Nakba — and here it is again, replayed not through tanks alone, but through Arab complicity.

    With every cheque signed, Arab rulers do not secure history’s respect. They seal their place in its sordid footnotes of shame

    The bombs fall. The Gaza Strip turns to dust. Two million people endure starvation. UN food is gone.

    Hospitals overflow with skeletal infants. Mothers collapse from hunger. Tens of thousands of children are severely malnourished, with more than 3500 on the edge of death.

    Meanwhile, Smotrich speaks of “third countries” for Gaza’s people. Netanyahu promises their removal.

    And Trump — the man enabling the annihilation? He is not condemned, but celebrated by Arab rulers. They eagerly kiss the hand that sends the bombs, grovel before the architect of their undoing, and drape him in splendour and finery.

    While much of the world stands firm — China, Europe, Canada, Mexico, even Greenland – refusing to bow to Trump’s bullying, Arab rulers kneel. They open wallets, bend spines, empty hands — still mistaking humiliation for diplomacy.

    They still believe that if they bow low enough, Trump might toss them a bone. Instead, he tosses them a bill.

    This is not realpolitik. It is a grotesque spectacle of decadence, delusion and disgrace.

    With every cheque signed, every jet offered, every photo op beside the butcher of a people, Arab rulers do not secure history’s respect. They seal their place in its sordid footnotes of shame.

    Soumaya Ghannoushi is a British Tunisian writer and expert in Middle East politics. Her journalistic work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, Corriere della Sera, aljazeera.net and Al Quds. This article was first published by the Middle East Eye. A selection of her writings may be found at: soumayaghannoushi.com and she tweets @SMGhannoushi.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • What Does It Take to Make Community?

    The ingredients for any community should start with the basics: active and informed citizens. Participants in a community’s past (context, knowledge), present (all those factors tied to the weakest and most vulnerable, are they included?) and future (getting to a place where climate chaos, predatory capitalism, neofascism doesn’t completely pull all the loose strings of a threadbare set of safety nets). There are plethora of planning books on the smalltown.

    Then what about a sustainable city? Unfortunately, when planners and politicians talk about making cities more sustainable, they are thinking of large urban centers like Portland or Seattle. Oh, the buzz phrases: walkable neighborhoods, traditional architecture, and diverse land uses. It’s neighborhoods that sort of look like small towns. The fix is in for those large cities as planners and developers are B.S.-ing introducing a “small-town feel” into large cities and suburbs. This will never ever create a sense of community, nor will it reduce the use of automobiles.

    From the promo stuff on the book, The New American Small Town: “So, what of small towns themselves? We don’t talk about these places as much. They are often assumed to be utopias of the past or crumbling ghost towns of the present day rather than places with potential for sustainable living. This book critically examines narratives of American small towns, contrasting them with lived experiences in these places, and considers both the myth and reality in the context of current urban challenges. Interweaving stories from and about U.S. small towns, the book offers lessons in sustainable urbanism that can be applied both in the towns themselves and to the larger cities and suburbs where most Americans now live.”

    Like I stated above, there are dozens of books for planning students and developers and chambers of commerce and policy wonks on how to jigger things for smalltowns.

    “The book offers hope-filled portraits of small towns as livable, sustainable, and diverse places and serves as an important corrective to the media narrative of alienated, left-behind rural voters.”

    —Mark Bjelland, author of Good Places for All

    New American Small Town cover

    Thinking of community from that large urban space, Jane Jacobs approached cities as living beings and ecosystems. She suggested that over time, buildings, streets and neighborhoods function as dynamic organisms, changing in response to how people interact with them. She explained how each element of a city – sidewalks, parks, neighborhoods, government, economy – functions together synergistically, in the same manner as the natural ecosystem. This understanding helps us discern how cities work, how they break down, and how they could be better structured.

    She was looking at big urban places, like her home, New York:

    “Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.” (source)

    In my small town, population 2,300, we look toward the sea and the forest as reminders of how vital ecosystems are. The county becomes a network of towns along the coast and inland — Lincoln City, Depoe Bay, Newport, Seal Rock, Waldport, Yahcats.

    We drive a lot, and the traffic during tourist summer season balloons. The town of Lincoln City is around 10,000, but on some weekends, it swells to 50,000. All that infrastructure, all that water, all those restaurants and beaches, well, think of five times the impact, or more, since locals do not all swarm to the beaches or the restaurants all in one fell swoop.

    We are living on unceded land, and in many cases, sacred burial land: Indigenous Communities in Oregon.

    The links below are the websites of Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribal communities:

    The story of a community is all wrapped up in its context, history, and in this age of a memory hole crazy presidency —  with white supremacists like Jewish Stephen Miller running the Trump team’s Gestapo and Big Brother training camp —  we will see history literally erased.

    Communities that are small are more vulnerable than those large urban areas Jacobs wrote about, and studied.

    From my urban and regional-planning graduate-student days (looking at concepts of small is better and scaling down) there are so many quotable axioms tied to communities that are considered small. Here are some notes from one of my planning classes looking at regional smalltown planning:

    • “A small town is where everyone knows everyone, and everyone has a secret.”
    • “In the quiet of the village, the soul finds its reflection.”
    • “A village is a symphony of nature and humanity.”
    • “Simplicity and serenity find their home in village life.”
    • “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
    • “If it is to be successful it must be folk-planning. This means that its task is … to find the right places for each sort of people; places where they will really flourish.”

    For me, big ideas and a global perspective capture where I live. There is a deep economic tie to tourism and Air B & B sort of lifestyle out here. Fishing as an industry is big. Logging and a pulp mill in the town of Toledo are still big economic drivers. A big brewery, Rogue, gobbles up precious freshwater, as does the pink fish industry of Pacific Seafoods.

    We have the NOAA station and the Oregon State University Hatfield Marine Sciences Center, as well as the Oregon Coast Aquarium. Many highly educated (college) retirees end up here since many worked for those two large entities listed above. I’ve written about “this place” for Dissident Voice, capturing my old gig as a columnist for Oregon Coast Today. I write for the local rag, called the Newport News Times, with a name change of Lincoln County Leader.

    Conference celebrates how the ocean connects to all of us — coastlines, people, cultures

    This one captures my day in and day out life on the wrack line:

    “Respite: Smart People, Concerned Environmentalists, Talking Whales, Kelp, Tidepools.”

    I’ve worked with poor people and homeless folk, with developmental delayed clients, and I have had columns in two newspapers, one of which became a book out there, to be purchased on Amazon — Coastal People inside a Deep Dive: stories about people living on the Central Coast and other places in Oregon.

    Here’s an interesting one, while I was training to be a bus driver, but alas, that fell through because of bad HR, MAGA co-workers, and a multinational company, First Student, ruling over the local school system’s transportation:

    “More and More Boys are Coming Home from School with Behavior Sheets!”

    Here’s a weird idea of mine, a letter to Jeff Bezos’ ex, billionaire  MacKenzie Scott Tuttle. “Another 400 Acres Up for Sale!”

    The big idea around homelessness. That was more than three  years ago, and today, those first 100-plus days in this DOGE — Department of Oppression Greed Excrement — nightmare, and the signs of fascism, “at the foothills of fascism” as professor Gerald Horne calls it, I see the major trauma cracks in this smalltown existence.

    Daily, the Meals on Wheels delivery route I volunteer for shows America in a microcosm — old people, alone aging in place, many in homes or apartments that are long in the tooth, with major repair issues facing them. The TV “news” is usually blaring in the background. And the people energy is thankfulness and fear.

    Just a few minutes with each free meals recepient will help them feel somehow connected to the outside world, a world not wrapped up in medical visits and isolation. The Meals on Wheels programs get state and federal grants. The MOW programs are on the DOGE chopping block, part of the billionaires’ scheme to hobble the weak, vulnerable, the 80 Percenters.

    Just put in your Google-Gulag search, “Paul Haeder Newport News Times,” and you’ll find the thousand word Op-Eds that are still getting published in the local rag, though after a few looks at the stories, the PayWall comes into play. Some of those pieces have been republished in Dissident Voice.

    You can search Dissident Voice for those, or Muck Rack.

    “Community” includes all those puzzle pieces, from education, health care, environment, economics, people, transportation, etc. From an urban planning point of view, the boiler plate definition of planning encompasses a broad range of fields and specializations focused on shaping the built environment and improving the quality of life in urban and regional areas. This interdisciplinary field taps into various disciplines, including geography, economics, sociology, and public policy.

    The rise of sustainability as a force to critique, celebrate and co-modify

    And I did the “sustainability” thing, even going to Vancouver for the University of British Columbia’s summer sustability program.

    Fourteen years ago, and boy have I changed on that green is the new black and new green deal mentality:

    “The rise of sustainability as a force to critique, celebrate and co-modify.”

    Journalism seems to be one avenue into a MURP degree, as I ended up in the Eastern Washington University program in 2001, just new to the Pacific northwest coming from El Paso. The program included tribal planning, looking at scenic by-ways, neighborhood planning, even planning principles around farmer’s markets and sustainable businesses.

    I was teaching English at community colleges and Gonzaga when the advisors at EWU said I should get into that master’s program, emphasizing that many journalists have entered into the field of planning.

    One dude, James Howard Kunstler, I brought to Spokane, putting him through a whirlwind set of speaking engagements. Here, myew of him on my radio show, Tipping Points: James Howard Kunstler calls suburban sprawl “the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known.” His arguments bring a new lens to urban development, drawing clear connections between physical spaces and cultural vitality. Books like The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere made him famous.

    In Spokane, I created local and regional news interest, with a column in the monthly magazine, Spokane Living — Metro Talk. Dozens of columns: “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is just one example of that journalism. Music Therapy? Check that out: “Music to the Ears.” And  then a column in the weekly, Pacific Northwest Inlander (“War and Peace In Vietnam“), and had a column in the Spokesman Review, tied to Down to Earth (“You Never Know a Place is Unique Until the Story Gets Told“), and then a radio show, Tipping Points.

    The guests on that show were varied in background, political leanings and creative impetus. See those shows here at Paul Haeder (dot) com.

    Now? At age 68? I teach a memoir writing class for the community college, and even that gig is all messed up with MAGA, or the fear of MAGA, as I was warned this spring quarter that a student who received an email from me along with the other enrolled students complained that she thought the class was misrepresented in the Oregon Coast Community College catalogue. The class is about writing, including memoir writing, fiction, poetry, long and short form creative non-fiction, editorial writing, and flash fiction and flash essays.

    My email to the class, all blind copied, included articles from the Chronicle of Higher Education and articles in literary magazine around the cuts to humanities, including the cuts to journalism, writing programs, etc. This person wanted her money back and she wrote to a vice president who, like most in educatoin, are spineless creatures.

    Can you issue a full refund for my registration to the “Writing As Gift Class” in Waldport which starts this afternoon?  This class is not as described in the Catch the Wave catalgue.  I write about nature and short stories of personal experiences.  This class appears to be biased towards politics.  Can you also let the instructor know to delete my email and contact information permanently?  I do not give the instructor permission to forward my contact information or use it for any other purposes.

    Well well, you have read plenty of my work at Dissident Voice around the decay-rot-putridity in higher education, part-time faculty organizing, and the rise of the administrative class in education.

    See: “Disposable Teachers”

    “Fifteen Dollars and Teaching for Scraps”

    “Hoodwinked — Hook-Line-and-Sinker the School is Drowning”

    So, yes, big towns like Seattle or Portland or El Paso, where I worked as a journalist, educator, activist, and social services person, all the while writing novels and essays, they too are bastions of that mean as cuss Americanism. Seattle and Portland? “Death by a Thousand Cuts: Vaccines, Non-Profits, and the Dissemination of Medical Information“;   “Falling into the Planned Parenthood Gardasil Snake Pit.”

    I deploy D.H. Lawrence in setting the stage for this brutish culture, America:

    America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life’s sacred spontaneity. They can’t trust life until they can control it.

    — D. H. Lawrence  (Studies in Classic American Literature. Ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey & John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.)

    So, here is part of that smalltown community college sort of fearful letter from the spineless administrator, the same sort of spinelessness I received decades ago from the University of Texas, or Gonzaga University or Clark College or Greenriver College:

    I’m going to ask that you not bulk email the students henceforth. Our team will send emails on your behalf about any announcements – assignments, presentations, date/time changes, etc. Just send those to us and we’ll distribute. (Of course, any student who wishes to hear from you directly can tell you so and provide their preferred email address; we have no interest in interfering with that.)

    Time is short, but we’re forced to consider canceling the class this morning for two reasons: First, in your email, you introduce an experience far from what we advertised in our catalog. Second, in my estimation it doesn’t conform to our Academic Freedom policy. Based on your email, the class certainly does not appear to be an examination of issues, but presents a singular political agenda. (Note that I’m setting aside here the fact that you and I may share many viewpoints raised in your email to students; this isn’t about my personal beliefs and concerns.) If you wanted to present a workshop focused on your personal opinions, and your past writings, about the current or former administrations or other political issues, one alternative would have been to rent a room from the College or a Library and delivered the event without being tethered by the College’s commitment to freedom of expression of all viewpoints. That may be an option to consider in the future.

    Ahh, my class will/is explore/exploring writing in a time of “community and societal and family estrangement”  which is the blurb at the top of the description printed in the Oregon Coast Community College catalogue. Utilizing fiction and non-fiction.

    Writing As A Gift

    …to yourself, and to the world

    We’ll tackle fiction and non-fiction. We’ll explore writing in a time of community and societal and family estrangement. Personal essay or hard hitting poetry. Writing is an act of internal dialogue ex-pressed to an audience. We will start off with class input on where individuals are in this process. Beginner fiction writer or aficionado of creative non-fiction? We’ll discover through writing who we are as a creative community. Paul Haeder’s been in this game of teaching and publishing and editing writing  for five decades.

    And so it goes, so it goes. You know that being a dissident, or a voice of dissidence, well, it has always been a Joe McCarthy moment for those of us in academic-journalism who would date challenge people to think.

    And the language of the administrator or provost or gatekeeper will always sound like a two-bit lawyer’s verbiage:

    01/21/2015: Institutions of higher education exist for the common good, and the unfettered search for truth and its free exploration is critical to the common good. The college seeks to educate its students in the democratic tradition, to foster recognition of individual freedoms and social responsibility, and to inspire meaningful awareness of and respect for a collaborative learning environment. Freedom of expression will be guaranteed to instructors to create a classroom atmosphere that allows students to raise questions and consider all sides of issues. OCCC instructors are responsible for exercising judgment in selecting topics of educational value for discussion and learning consistent with course requirements, goals, and desired outcomes.   (Emphasis added, DP)

    Not sure how my email exploring higher education’s fear of losing all of the humanities, losing all the Diversity Equity Inclusion courses, and gutting liberal arts in general, how all of that is “not allowing” students to raise questions and consider all sides of issues.

    Small towns or big towns, pick your institution and Kafkaesque poison.

    But part of my role in community consciousness raising is primarily community journalism, also known as solutions journalism, so in this most recent iteration of Haeder, I have a fairly new show, one hour a week, dealing with public affairs, but truly an interview show, a deep dive with a guest or guests, and alas, all shows, all topics, all of it derives from my own deep well of experience, exploration, education and emancipation — the Four E’s, man, of life!

    KYAQ Home -

    Some upcoming shows, Wednesday, on the air, 6 to 7 PM, Finding Fringe: Voice from the Edge, KYAQ.org (streaming live) and 91.7 FM, Lincoln County.

    I’m shifting some of the program dates around since we have current news around the mayor of a small town, Waldport, being arrested and removed from her position as elected mayor. That’s May 14.

    You have to listen to her. May 14. 6 pm. again, stream the show, kyaq.org

    • Then, have you ever heard of the Amanda Trail in Yachats?
    • Do you know what it is like to be incarcerated and then put on 6 years house arrest? Part I & II.
    • Rick Bartow, the famous artist, will be a living reflection at the Yakona Nature Preserve.
    • The Rights of Nature and the Community Bill of Rights? Kai of CELDF will tell us all about that.
    • Siletz is the Home of the Elakha Alliance, a non-profit to work with stakeholders of every sort to reintroduce sea otters to Oregon’s coast.
    • So you leave prison and you have a farm to work on to heal, to reorient oneself, to let the soil salve the PTSD. Freedom Farms.
    May 14 — Heide Lambert, Waldport Mayor controversy
    May 21 — Amanda Trail,  Joanne Kittel
    May 28 — Prisons, Incarceration, Probation — Kelly Kloss
    June 4 — Prisons, Incarceration, Alcoholism — Kelly Kloss
    June 11 — Three women from Yakona Nature Preserve & Learning Center — Anna, Rena, JoAnn
    June 18 — CELDF, Rights of Nature & Community Rights — Kai  Huschke
    June 25 — Chanel Hason, Elakha Alliance, sea otters
    July 2–  Freedom Farms — Sean O Ceallaigh

    Past shows are on the website, but only in limited form. Go to archives, and then put in Finding Fringe.

    Try listening to a smalltown radio station, tuning into a smalltown resident’s take on what it TAKES to be a citizen of the world in a small town, this one called Waldport.

    Here, yet another global thing attached to Waldport — a former Georgia slave paid for his freedom and ended up out here!  You Can’t Have Your Mule and Forty Acres, Too!

    How about the legacy of genocide out here? Not Just One of those Tales of Another Dead Indian

    You’ll get the picture that Waldport or Vancouver, BC, or El Paso or Mexico City, we all face the same problems that the rich and the militarists and the oligarchs force us to fight.

    Tune in, KYAQ.org, streaming worldwide, Wednesdays, 6 PM, PST.

    The post What Does It Take to Make Community? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior to return for 40th anniversary of French bombing

    By Russel Norman

    The iconic Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior will return to Aotearoa this year to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the original campaign ship at Marsden Wharf in Auckland by French secret agents on 10 July 1985.

    The return to Aotearoa comes at a pivotal moment — when the fight to protect our planet’s fragile life-support systems has never been as urgent, or more critical.

    Here in Aotearoa, the Luxon government is waging an all-out war on nature, and on a planetary scale, climate change, ecosystem collapse, and accelerating species extinction pose an existential threat.

    Greenpeace Aotearoa's Dr Russel Norman
    Greenpeace Aotearoa’s Dr Russel Norman . . . “Our ship was targeted because Greenpeace and the campaign to stop nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific were so effective.” Image: Greenpeace

    As we remember the bombing and the murder of our crew member, Fernando Pereira, it’s important to remember why the French government was compelled to commit such a cowardly act of violence.

    Our ship was targeted because Greenpeace and the campaign to stop nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific were so effective. We posed a very real threat to the French government’s military programme and colonial power.

    It’s also critical to remember that they failed to stop us. They failed to intimidate us, and they failed to silence us. Greenpeace only grew stronger and continued the successful campaign against nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.

    Forty years later, it’s the oil industry that’s trying to stop us. This time, not with bombs but with a legal attack that threatens the existence of Greenpeace in the US and beyond.

    We will not be intimidated
    But just like in 1985 when the French bombed our ship, now too in 2025, we will not be intimidated, we will not back down, and we will not be silenced.

    We cannot be silenced because we are a movement of people committed to peace and to protecting Earth’s ability to sustain life, protecting the blue oceans, the forests and the life we share this planet with,” says Norman.

    In the 40 years since, the Rainbow Warrior has sailed on the front lines of our campaigns around the world to protect nature and promote peace. In the fight to end oil exploration, turn the tide of plastic production, stop the destruction of ancient forests and protect the ocean, the Rainbow Warrior has been there to this day.

    Right now the Rainbow Warrior is preparing to sail through the Tasman Sea to expose the damage being done to ocean life, continuing a decades-long tradition of defending ocean health.

    This follows the Rainbow Warrior spending six weeks in the Marshall Islands where the original ship carried out Operation Exodus, in which the Greenpeace crew evacuated the people of Rongelap from their home island that had been made uninhabitable by nuclear weapons testing by the US government.

    In Auckland this year, several events will be held on and around the ship to mark the anniversary, including open days with tours of the ship for the public.

    Dr Russel Norman is executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior to return for 40th anniversary of French bombing

    By Russel Norman

    The iconic Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior will return to Aotearoa this year to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of the original campaign ship at Marsden Wharf in Auckland by French secret agents on 10 July 1985.

    The return to Aotearoa comes at a pivotal moment — when the fight to protect our planet’s fragile life-support systems has never been as urgent, or more critical.

    Here in Aotearoa, the Luxon government is waging an all-out war on nature, and on a planetary scale, climate change, ecosystem collapse, and accelerating species extinction pose an existential threat.

    Greenpeace Aotearoa's Dr Russel Norman
    Greenpeace Aotearoa’s Dr Russel Norman . . . “Our ship was targeted because Greenpeace and the campaign to stop nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific were so effective.” Image: Greenpeace

    As we remember the bombing and the murder of our crew member, Fernando Pereira, it’s important to remember why the French government was compelled to commit such a cowardly act of violence.

    Our ship was targeted because Greenpeace and the campaign to stop nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific were so effective. We posed a very real threat to the French government’s military programme and colonial power.

    It’s also critical to remember that they failed to stop us. They failed to intimidate us, and they failed to silence us. Greenpeace only grew stronger and continued the successful campaign against nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.

    Forty years later, it’s the oil industry that’s trying to stop us. This time, not with bombs but with a legal attack that threatens the existence of Greenpeace in the US and beyond.

    We will not be intimidated
    But just like in 1985 when the French bombed our ship, now too in 2025, we will not be intimidated, we will not back down, and we will not be silenced.

    We cannot be silenced because we are a movement of people committed to peace and to protecting Earth’s ability to sustain life, protecting the blue oceans, the forests and the life we share this planet with,” says Norman.

    In the 40 years since, the Rainbow Warrior has sailed on the front lines of our campaigns around the world to protect nature and promote peace. In the fight to end oil exploration, turn the tide of plastic production, stop the destruction of ancient forests and protect the ocean, the Rainbow Warrior has been there to this day.

    Right now the Rainbow Warrior is preparing to sail through the Tasman Sea to expose the damage being done to ocean life, continuing a decades-long tradition of defending ocean health.

    This follows the Rainbow Warrior spending six weeks in the Marshall Islands where the original ship carried out Operation Exodus, in which the Greenpeace crew evacuated the people of Rongelap from their home island that had been made uninhabitable by nuclear weapons testing by the US government.

    In Auckland this year, several events will be held on and around the ship to mark the anniversary, including open days with tours of the ship for the public.

    Dr Russel Norman is executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.