In its eagerness to appease supporters of Israel, the media is happy to ride roughshod over due process and basic rights. It’s damaging Australia’s (and New Zealand’s?) democracy.
COMMENTARY:By Bernard Keane
Two moments stand out so far from the Federal Court hearings relating to Antoinette Lattouf’s sacking by the ABC, insofar as they demonstrate how power works in Australia — and especially in Australia’s media.
The first is how the ABC’s senior management abandoned due process in the face of a sustained lobbying effort by a pro-Israel group to have Lattouf taken off air, under the confected basis she was “antisemitic”.
Managing director David Anderson admitted in court that there was a “step missing” in the process that led to her sacking — in particular, a failure to consult with the ABC’s HR area, and a failure to discuss the attacks on Lattouf with Lattouf herself, before kicking her out.
To this, it might be added, was acting editorial director Simon Melkman’s advice to management that Lattouf had not breached any editorial policies.
Anderson bizarrely singled out Lattouf’s authorship, alongside Cameron Wilson, of a Crikey article questioning the narrative that pro-Palestinian protesters had chanted “gas the Jews”, as basis for his concerns about her, only for one of his executives to point out the article was “balanced and journalistically sound“.
That is, by the ABC’s own admission, there was no basis to sack Lattouf and the sacking was conducted improperly. And yet, here we are, with the ABC tying itself in absurd knots — no such race as Lebanese, indeed — spending millions defending its inappropriate actions in response to a lobbying campaign.
The second moment that stands out is a decision by the court early in the trial to protect the identities of those calling for Lattouf’s sacking.
Abandoned due process The campaign that the group rolled out prompted the ABC chair and managing director to immediately react — and the ABC to abandon due process and procedural fairness. Yet the court protects their identities.
The reasoning — that the identities behind the complaints should be protected for their safety — may or may not be based on reasonable fears, but it’s the second time that institutions have worked to protect people who planned to undermine the careers of people — specifically, women — who have dared to criticise Israel.
The first was when some members — a minority — of a WhatsApp group supposedly composed of pro-Israel “creatives” discussed how to wreck the careers of, inter alia, Clementine Ford and Lauren Dubois for their criticism of Israel.
The publishing of the identities of this group was held by both the media and the political class to be an outrageous, antisemitic act of “doxxing”, and the federal government rushed through laws to make such publications illegal.
No mention of making the act of trying to destroy people’s careers because they hold different political views — or, cancel culture, as the right likes to call it — illegal.
Whether it’s courts, politicians or the media, it seems that the dice are always loaded in favour of those wanting to crush criticism of Israel, while its victims are left to fend for themselves.
Human rights lawyer and fighter against antisemitism Sarah Schwartz has been repeatedly threatened with (entirely vexatious) lawsuits by Israel supporters for her criticism of Israel, and her discussion of the exploitation of Australian Jews by Peter Dutton.
Opinion | Australian democracy and the rule of law is being damaged by the media’s willingness to abandon due process and attack those who criticise Israel, writes @bernardkeane.
Targeted by another News Corp smear campaign
She’s been targeted by yet another News Corp smear campaign, based on nothing more than a wilfully misinterpreted slide. She has no government or court rushing to protect her.
Meanwhile, Peter Lalor, one of Australia’s finest sports journalists (and I write as someone who can’t abide most sports journalism) lost his job with SEN because he, too, dared to criticise Israel and call out the Palestinian genocide. No-one’s rushing to his aide, either.
No powerful institutions are weighing in to safeguard his privacy, or protect him from the consequences of his opinions.
The individual cases add up to a pattern: Australian institutions, and especially its major media institutions, will punish you for criticising Israel.
Pro-Israel groups will demand you be sacked, they will call for your career to be destroyed. Those groups will be protected.
Media companies will ride roughshod over basic rights and due process to comply with their demands. You will be smeared and publicly vilified on completely spurious bases. Politicians will join in, as Jason Clare did with the campaign against Schwartz and as Chris Minns is doing in NSW, imposing hate speech laws that even Christian groups think are a bad idea.
Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf was sacked from her job at ABC because she shared an Instagram post from @hrw in which the NGS accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. She is now taking the broadcaster to court. pic.twitter.com/jRmQW2AAl3
Damaging the fabric of democracy
This is how the campaign to legitimise the Palestinian genocide and destroy critics of the Netanyahu government has damaged the fabric of Australia’s democracy and the rule of law.
The basic rights and protections that Australians should have under a legal system devoted to preventing discrimination can be stripped away in a moment, while those engaged in destroying people’s careers and livelihoods are protected.
Ill-advised laws are rushed in to stifle freedom of speech. Australian Jews are stereotyped as a politically convenient monolith aligned with the Israeli government.
The experience of Palestinians themselves, and of Arab communities in Australia, is minimised and erased. And the media are the worst perpetrators of all.
Bernard Keane is Crikey’s politics editor. Before that he was Crikey’s Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics. First published by Crikey.
There are signs that the Ukraine war could be coming to an end, vianegotiations. Apart from senseless death and destruction, its only main achievement has been to further empower corporate elites. It unnecessarily boosted human suffering, much like Israel’sgenocide in Gaza, in the service of an unempathetic, dystopian order. And as the callous competition between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ leaders to out-racist each other shows, this elitist order has a dangerous stranglehold on British politics today.
Ordinary people’s wellbeing and futures depend on upending this cold-blooded, manipulative rule of establishment politicians.
Case study #1: Elites used Ukraine as a battlefield for land and resources
The Western proxy war with Russia could have ended quickly, if the liberal-conservative alliance of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson hadn’t pushed Ukraine away from a peace deal.
Instead, the conflict has: killed many tens of thousands of troops, and about 12,300 civilians; opened Ukraine up to increasing privatisation in service of powerful corporate interests; hurt poor people at home and around the world, disrupting food and energy supplies and contributing to inflation, and forced Western nations to commit resources to keep the unwinnable war going rather than investing in the welfare of their own citizens.
Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, aware of US counterpart Donald Trump’s interest in ending the proxy war with Russia, has used natural resources to try and ensure Washington’s essential support.
Speaking to the Guardian, Zelenskyy promised US corporations “lucrative reconstruction contracts and investment concessions”, along with “priority access to Ukraine’s “rare earths””. Offering opportunities for extracting valuable “rare earth mineral resources” and other minerals like uranium and titanium, he insisted that “for American companies it will create profits”.
Trump has been clear about his interest in these resources.
Case study #2: Callous establishment politicians emphasise our differences to prevent unified resistance
Ordinary people in Ukraine were only fortunate in the sense that Western elites tend to operate refugee policies on what is politically convenient. That’s why the British government was happy to welcome around 213,000 Ukrainians to the UK in less than two years – “equivalent to the number of people granted refuge in the UK from all origins, in total, between 2014 and 2021”.
The scandalous inhumanity of establishment politicians this week, however, saw them oppose one Palestinian family with four children entering the UK in the same way after UK-backed war criminals Israel had destroyed their home during its genocide in Gaza.
Want stability? Then resist dystopia, like the Ukraine war.
We often hear that centrists valuestability, moderation, and pragmatism. But what we have now in the world is far from stability. Both Ukraine and Gaza have revealed that the political and economic elites ruling over us have created a callous, cold-blooded, dystopian world right in front of our eyes. And that threatens everyone’s wellbeing, and darkens everyone’s futures.
Ukraine made some people think the British state was the good guy and the Russian state was the bad guy. But Israel’s genocide in Gaza should have made it clear to most that the British and US governments are the bad guys too.
After the Cold War, it was perhaps understandable for many to think that stability meant embracing capitalism. But the relentless profit-seeking of economic elites has compromised any possibility of progress ever since.
Servile politicians divided us according to our personal identities so that the division between ordinary people and our rulers wasn’t the focus. Meanwhile, the rich entrenched their wealth. In 2024 alone, billionaires increased their wealth by $2tn, “three times faster than the year before”. However, “the number of people living in poverty has barely changed since 1990”.
That’s not ‘stability’. It’s the gradual capture of our political and economic systems by an increasingly empowered super-rich class.
We must ALL unite to stop billionaire-led global destabilisation
Without the divisive influence of the super-rich in Western politics and their support for death and destruction, the world would undoubtedly be a stabler place.
People might be able to talk to each other, coexist peacefully despite our personal, private beliefs and differences, and meet our basic needs.
When the political will exists, it’s perfectly possible to mobilise massive resources to protect people. Just think of the Covid-19 pandemic. Supporting each other’s wellbeing wasn’t radical. It was just common sense. And so is ensuring a minimum level of living standards for everyone, protecting their wellbeing, environment, and future.
That is what creates true stability, not the ongoing rule of tiny elites who completely disregard human suffering in search of personal gain.
We have the receipts, because the increasing inequality in recent decades and simultaneously increasing power of the super-wealthy has been utterly disastrous for ordinary people. In both Ukraine and Gaza, meanwhile, the absence of super-wealthy influence would almost certainly have pushed people to talk instead or perpetuating unwinnable conflicts, reducing human suffering significantly.
Stopping the billionaire-led destabilisation of the world isn’t just a fight for socialists, anarchists, or communists. It’s in the interests of humanity as a whole, with all our unique strengths and flaws. And the sooner we unite to challenge the dystopian order our political and economic elites have built up, the sooner we’ll have true stability.
The New Zealand government and the mainstream media have gone ballistic (thankfully not literally just yet) over the move by the small Pacific nation to sign a strategic partnership with China in Beijing this week.
It is the latest in a string of island nations that have signalled a closer relationship with China, something that rattles nerves and sabres in Wellington and Canberra.
The Chinese have politely told the Kiwis to back off. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters that China and the Cook Islands have had diplomatic relations since 1997 which “should not be disrupted or restrained by any third party”.
“New Zealand is rightly furious about it,” a TVNZ Pacific affairs writer editorialised to the nation. The deal and the lack of prior consultation was described by various journalists as “damaging”, “of significant concern”, “trouble in paradise”, an act by a “renegade government”.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters, not without cause, railed at what he saw as the Cook Islands government going against long-standing agreements to consult over defence and security issues.
“Should New Zealand invade the Cook islands?” . . . New Zealand Herald columnist Matthew Hooton’s view in an “oxygen-starved media environment” amid rattled nerves. Image: New Zealand Herald screenshot APR
‘Clearly about secession’
Matthew Hooton, who penned the article in The Herald, is a major commentator on various platforms.
“Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown’s dealings with China are clearly about secession from the realm of New Zealand,” Hooton said without substantiation but with considerable colonial hauteur.
“His illegal moves cannot stand. It would be a relatively straightforward military operation for our SAS to secure all key government buildings in the Cook Islands’ capital, Avarua.”
This could be written off as the hyperventilating screeching of someone trying to drum up readers but he was given a major platform to do so and New Zealanders live in an oxygen-starved media environment where alternative analysis is hard to find.
The Cook Islands, with one of the largest Exclusive Economic Zones in the world — a whopping 2 million sq km — is considered part of New Zealand’s backyard, albeit over 3000 km to the northeast. The deal with China is focused on economics not security issues, according to Cooks Prime Minister Mark Brown.
Deep sea mining may be on the list of projects as well as trade cooperation, climate, tourism, and infrastructure.
The Cook Islands seafloor is believed to have billions of tons of polymetallic nodules of cobalt, copper, nickel and manganese, something that has even caught the attention of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Various players have their eyes on it.
Glen Johnson, writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, reported last year:
“Environmentalists have raised major concerns, particularly over the destruction of deep-sea habitats and the vast, choking sediment plumes that excavation would produce.”
All will be revealed
Even Cook Island’s citizens have not been consulted on the details of the deal, including deep sea mining. Clearly, this should not be the case. All will be revealed shortly.
New Zealand and the Cook Islands have had formal relations since 1901 when the British “transferred” the islands to New Zealand. Cook Islanders have a curious status: they hold New Zealand passports but are recognised as their own country. The US government went a step further on September 25, 2023. President Joe Biden said:
“Today I am proud to announce that the United States recognises the Cook Islands as a sovereign and independent state and will establish diplomatic relations between our two nations.”
A move to create their own passports was undermined by New Zealand officials who successfully stymied the plan.
New Zealand has taken an increasingly hostile stance vis-a-vis China, with PM Luxon describing the country as a “strategic competitor” while at the same time depending on China as our biggest trading partner. The government and a compliant mainstream media sing as one choir when it comes to China: it is seen as a threat, a looming pretender to be South Pacific hegemon, replacing the flip-flopping, increasingly incoherent USA.
Climate change looms large for island nations. Much of the Cooks’ tourism infrastructure is vulnerable to coastal inundation and precious reefs are being destroyed by heating sea temperatures.
“One thing that New Zealand has got to get its head round is the fact that the Trump administration has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord,” Dr Robert Patman, professor of international relations at Otago University, says. “And this is a big deal for most Pacific Island states — and that means that the Cook Islands nation may well be looking for greater assistance elsewhere.”
Diplomatic spat with global coverage
The story of the diplomatic spat has been covered in the Middle East, Europe and Asia. Eyebrows are rising as yet again New Zealand, a close ally of Israel and a participant in the US Operation Prosperity Guardian to lift the Houthi Red Sea blockade of Israel, shows its Western mindset.
Matthew Hooton’s article is the kind of colonialist fantasy masquerading as geopolitical analysis that damages New Zealand’s reputation as a friend to the smaller nations of our region.
Yes, the Chinese have an interest in our neck of the woods — China is second only to Australia in supplying much-needed development assistance to the region.
It is sound policy not insurrection for small nations to diversify economic partnerships and secure development opportunities for their people. That said, serious questions should be posed and deserve to be answered.
Geopolitical analyst Dr Geoffrey Miller made a useful contribution to the debate saying there was potential for all three parties to work together:
“There is no reason why New Zealand can’t get together with China and the Cook Islands and develop some projects together,” Dr Miller says. “Pacific states are the winners here because there is a lot of competition for them”.
I think New Zealand and Australia could combine more effectively with a host of South Pacific island nations and form a more effective regional voice with which to engage with the wider world and collectively resist efforts by the US and China to turn the region into a theatre of competition.
We throw the toys out
We throw the toys out of the cot when the Cooks don’t consult with us but shrug when Pasifika elders like former Tuvalu PM Enele Sopoaga call us out for ignoring them.
In Wellington last year, I heard him challenge the bigger powers, particularly Australia and New Zealand, to remember that the existential threat faced by Pacific nations comes first from climate change. He also reminded New Zealanders of the commitment to keeping the South Pacific nuclear-free.
To succeed, a “Pacific for the peoples of the Pacific” approach would suggest our ministries of foreign affairs should halt their drift to being little more than branch offices of the Pentagon and that our governments should not sign up to US Great Power competition with China.
Ditching the misguided anti-China AUKUS project would be a good start.
Friends to all, enemies of none. Keep the Pacific peaceful, neutral and nuclear-free.
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
The day I could no longer get out of bed to go to work as a psychiatrist was one of the worst days of my life. For several months I hadn’t been sleeping, couldn’t think clearly, had lost weight, felt exhausted and physically ill, but I’d pushed myself to continue until I finally broke down. My world was caving in on me and thoughts of suicide had seeped into my mind. Everything was hopeless. Like millions of others every single day, I was suffering from depression. I knew that because I’d treated many, many others with the same illness.
Depression is not a ‘normal response’
Nearly one in six people in Britain will experience depression in their lifetime, and it’s twice as common in women as men.
It also kills.
People suffering from it have 30-times the normal risk of suicide. Depression isn’t just ‘unhappiness’ it is an illness that takes over your daily life and prevents you from functioning. It comes in many forms – from the awful, anxious agitation that I experience through to frank psychosis and from milder despair to severe, dark, horrible, speechless melancholia.
However, currently there is a vociferous movement made up of critics of psychiatry, including a very small number from within the profession, who take a different view.
They deny depression is an ‘illness’ and see it as simply a ‘normal response’ to a difficult life. Not surprisingly that’s a very attractive message both for the right-wing bandwagon that wants to cut public spending on mental health, and a government seeking to reduce the cost of Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) sickness benefits.
Fuelling DWP agendas
Last spring, the then-work and pensions secretary Mel Stride said that ‘people with depression or anxiety could lose access to sickness benefits’. By January this year, the headline from the Telegraph said:
More than half a million claiming disability benefits for anxiety and depression: government faces growing pressure to solve worklessness crisis as welfare claims soar since lockdown.
This coincided with the report Change the Prescription from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), founded by former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith. The report informed us (without guidance from epidemiological experts) that “the line in psychiatry for when distress becomes mental ill health is subjective” and “misunderstood mental ill-health is the leaky bucket draining the nation” – whilst further citing the wisdom of prominent critics of psychiatry.
Add in Tony Blair telling us all not to “self-diagnose depression” (how can you not when you can’t see a doctor?) and psychiatry critic professor Joanna Moncrieff, in a recent interview in the Times, widening her critique of antidepressants to include the apparent inadequate willpower of those of us who suffer from depression too (“making changes in your life is difficult and scary, so of course it’s easier at some level to be told to take a pill”) and you have the perfect storm.
DWP benefits for those who are unfit to work because of anxiety and depression, and other mental health problems too, are under greater threat than ever before.
We all must work instead.
Really?
Systemic misogyny
Given women are twice as likely to suffer it’s hardly surprising that the rise in claiming DWP benefits for depression and anxiety is higher in women. Younger women in their thirties, who’ve struggled through the pandemic as they tried to hold together work, family, and homeschooling, and older women in their fifties, with multiple physical problems too which worsen mental health.
Primary care used to help many of these women, but now it’s hard to be seen and continuity of care has disappeared. Waiting lists are interminable. Many will have been unwell for a long time, without the kind of complex care that will help them to recover.
The peak suicide rate for women is age 50-54, and the mean age for the menopause, which can seriously affect our mood is 51. It’s not ‘unhappiness’, it’s illness. We need proper therapy and psychiatric care not workfare and ‘support’.
We’ve been here before
Some remember how, in the 1980s, the antipsychiatry brigade – forerunners of the present naysayers and led by people like American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz who called mental ill health a ‘myth’ – attacked spending on mental health.
His major achievement is what you witness every time you walk through an American city. Severely mentally ill people living on the streets. Forcing people with mental ill health to work is inhumane too. Selecting out those with anxiety and depression to do so will re-stigmatise problems we have been trying so hard to get people to talk openly about.
In the foreword to Change the Prescription, three privileged, older, white, male members of the establishment tell us that:
All of us are subject to variations in our mood. Good days and bad days are a fact of life.
Inequality is a fact of life too where depression is concerned.
As someone who suffers from recurrent depressive illness, I find their and others’ desire to focus on ‘de-medicalising’ mental health all too conveniently supported by those who seem to want to deny its existence altogether. It could result in real harm and suffering, and even more deaths of people struggling with the DWP.
Left to the mercy of the DWP
I returned to work after several months off sick.
I was lucky, I survived, because I had access to good care and treatment and had supportive employers. If I had been left to the mercy of the DWP then I think it would’ve been difficult for me to get through this time and the recurrent periods of depression throughout my life.
Linda Gask’s latest book is Out of Her mind: How we are failing women’s mental health and what must change. It is available from Cambridge University Press here.
With a collection of online platforms that allows the user to share opinions, information, news, or just what their cat got up to that day, we now live in a world that means we can instantly stay in touch. Using digital technology through virtual communities and networks, we can communicate in a way we never have.
But is it really as good as it sounds – or have we all been sucked into a virtual void that actually controls free speech?
Loaded social media…?
In the UK, with Facebook being the most used, we also have Instagram, Threads, TikTok, WhatsApp, X (formally known as Twitter), YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Bluesky – to name a few. The most used platforms are Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, and Instagram.
Current projections put WhatsApp users in the UK by 2025 as being 38.35 million, making it the most popular app used between 16-64 year olds. TikTok is estimated to have around 22.9 million accounts in 2025 (although this figure varies). In January 2025 there was almost 34.71 million Instagram users in the UK, with Facebook having 55.9 million users, and X or Twitter having the lowest users with approximately 17.94 million as of January 2025.
There are clear age differences on what age group uses what platform, according to YouGov, and also differences in gender usage. With unfortunately absolutely no options on gender types other than male or female, it shows that females use WhatsApp the most at a rate of 87% with males using YouTube the most at a rate of 83%.
So, with all these different ways to communicate, why have we become so divided? And further more, who’s really controlling what we are seeing?
Cute cats or controlling capitalism…?
In 2020 the US government announced it wanted to ban the Chinese social media app TikTok, on the advice of the then-and now-president Donald Trump, due to a national security threat. With Trump now the president that threat continues to grow to the over 170 million and increasing users of TikTok in the US as to whether they can continue to use their social media platform, and who owns it or controls it.
After being briefly taken down in the US last month (a decision strongly protested against by its users) it’s still unclear as to what will happen to this social media platform. With Trump implying that he wanted to see a bidding war with Microsoft who were in discussions about buy the platform, it is very unsure as to what will happen. Along with Elon Musk as a potential buyer, Trump has now set up a sovereign wealth fund to yep – not support future generations, but to potentially buy TikTok… #Capitalist!
Whilst this is happening in the US, this unfortunately is affecting us too. With our current Tory-made Online Safety Act, which regulates online speech, facing widespread criticism from economists, Keir Starmer may have to change the law due to backlash from American tech company’s.
Musk’s focus was the social media platform Twitter, now known as X. Beginning in January 2022 Musk started to buy shares in the company, being the largest shareholder in April 2022.
He then made an offer of $44bn to buy the platform, and after becoming the CEO and sacking a few top executives his transformation of Twitter to X was complete. Which of course being the worlds richest person was all probably small change to him – but how does it affect us?
Freedom of speech – or hate speech…?
With Friends star David Schwimmer calling on Elon Musk to remove Kayne West’s account after his antisemitic slurs on X recently, many were left wondering who actually controls what is said on the platform and what are they promoting?
The account was not shut down by X but was instead deactivated by Kayne West himself after firstly thanking Musk for allowing his rant and secondly his attack on both Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar after the US Superbowl.
So, whilst I’m all for freedom of speech, these social media platforms are now clearly a case of it’s not what you know but who you know – and of course how much money you have.
And in a world of narcissistic capitalists that border on the psychopathic, is very clear to see where we are going with this level of social media control – which in my opinion puts our free speech at risk and is incredibly dangerous for all of us.
The danger and influence social media has had, and will continue to have, on our younger generations has too been very clear to see. This has led to a complete social media ban in Australia that starts at the end of 2025 for all 16 year olds and younger.
So while it’s not going to be accessible in Australia for the under sixteens, where will that leave the rest of us?
Social media overload…?
Along with genuinely trying to find the time to keep up with all these different social media platforms and also not be glued to my phone all the time, I like many struggle with “social media overload”.
The accessibility for many of us who are either neurodivergent, chronically ill, or time poor thanks to our circumstances becomes harder as more platforms are created. Not only does this end up creating bubbles of smaller echo chambers, we end up becoming more divided – controlled by different algorithms and misinformation.
Along with the race riots last summer that were led by misinformation, in a completely different situation recently a teacher union rejecting a pay offer was later also put down to misinformation on social media.
With the likes of Musk running the X show and potentially Trump running TikTok, more and more of the voices of individuals trying to fight for their right to be even more visible now – and this is from someone who was shadow banned on Twitter as a disability rights campaigner.
With the cost of living and the new Labour Party government continuing deprivation for many, we also have the issue of data poverty.
Do we have a network error…?
As single mother who couldn’t afford Wi-Fi, I didn’t start using social media until 2015.
Data poverty, often not spoken about, affects 6.8 million households who can’t afford communication services, 1.9 million households that can’t afford a mobile service, and 3.7 million households with children that can’t afford a fixed broadband service. This leaves many of these people without a voice on any social media platform.
So while we’re being overloaded with the voices of the rich few, bombarded with misinformation, and taken down the void of different social media platforms, this new age of information technology could be our success or our downfall.
But either way, we have a “network error” that clearly needs fixing.
I watched US President Donald Trump’s joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week in utter disbelief. Not that the idea, or indeed the practice, of ethnic cleansing of Palestine is new.
But at that press conference the mask has fallen. Recently, fascism has been on the march everywhere, but that press conference seemed to herald an age of naked fascism.
So the Palestinians have just been “unlucky” for decades.
“Their lives have been made hell.” Thank God for grammar’s indirect speech. Their lives have been made hell. We do not know who made their lives hell. Nothing to see here.
Trump says of Gaza: “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings — level it out and create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area . . . ”
I wonder who are those lucky “people of the area” he has in mind, once those “unlucky” Palestinians have been “transferred” out of their homeland.
Trump speaks of transforming Gaza into a magnificent “Riviera of the Middle East”. Obviously, the starved amputees of Gaza do not fit his image of the classy people he wants to see in the Riviera he wants to build, on stolen Palestinian land.
No ethnic cleansing questions
After the press conference, I did not hear a single question about ethnic cleansing, genocide, occupation or international law.
Under the new fascist leaders, just like under the old ones, those words have become old-fashioned and are to be expunged from the lexicon.
The difference has never been more striking between the meek who officially hold the title “journalist” and the brave who actually work to hold the powerful to account.
Now, more than ever, independent journalists are a threatened species. We should treasure them, support them and protest every attempt to silence them.
Gaza is now the prototype. We can forget international laws and international organisations. We have the bombs. You do as we wish or you will be obliterated.
Who now dares say that the forced transfer of a population by an occupying power is a war crime under the Geneva Convention? But then again, Trump and Netanyahu are not really talking about “forced transfer”. They are talking about “voluntary transfer”.
Once the remaining Israeli hostages have been freed, and water and food have been cut off again, those unlucky Palestinians will climb voluntarily onto the buses waiting to transport them to happiness and prosperity in Egypt and Jordan.
Or to whatever other client state Trump manages to threaten or bribe.
Can the International Criminal Court (ICC) command a shred of respect when Netanyahu is sharing the podium with Trump? Or indeed when Trump is at the podium?
Dismantling the international order
Recently, fascist leaders have been dismantling the international order by accusing its organisations and officials of being “antisemitic” or “working with terrorists”. Tomorrow they will defund and delegitimise these organisations without the need for an excuse.
I listen to Trump speak of combatting antisemitism and deporting Hamas sympathisers and I hear, “We will combat anti-Israel views and we will deport those who protest Israel’s crimes.
“And we will continue to conflate antisemitism and anti-Israel’s views in order to silence pro-Palestinian voices.”
I watch Trump and Netanyahu, the former reading the thoughts of a real estate developer turned into a president’s speech and the latter grinning like a Cheshire cat — and I am gripped by fear. Not just for the Palestinians, but for all humanity.
If we think fascism is only coming for people on a distant shore, we ought to think again.
I watch Netanyahu repeating lies that investigative journalists have spent months debunking. Why would he care? The truth about his lies will not make it to mainstream media and the consciousness of the majority of people.
Hamas suspends the release of Gaza captives, accusing Israel of violating the ceasefire by continuing to kill Palestinians and blocking humanitarian aid.
Lies taking hold, enduring
And the more he repeats those lies, the more they take hold and endure.
I wonder how our political leaders will spin our allies’ new, illegal and immoral plans. For years, they have clung to the mantra of the two-state solution while Israel continued to make every effort to render this solution unfeasible.
What will they say now? With what weasel words will they stay on the same page as our friends in the US and Israel?
Netanyhu praises Trump for thinking outside the box. Here is an idea that Israel has spent billions on arms and propaganda to persuade people that it is dangerously outside the box.
Instead of asking Egypt and Jordan to take the Palestinians, why not make Israel end the occupation and give Palestinians equal rights in their own homeland?
Sawsan Madina is former head of Australia’s SBS Television. This article was first published by John Menadue’s public policy journal Pearls and Irritations and is republished with permission.
It generally ends badly. An old tyrant embarks on an ill-considered project that involves redrawing maps.
They are heedless to wise counsel and indifferent to indigenous interests or experience. Before they fail, are killed, deposed or otherwise disposed of, these vicious old men can cause immense harm.
To see Trump through this lens, let’s look at a group of men who tested their cartographic skills and failed: King Lear and, of course, Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte, and latterly, George W Bush and Saddam Hussein.
I even throw in a Pope. But let’s start first with Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump himself.
Benjamin Netanyahu and a map of a ‘New Middle East’ — without Palestine
In September 2023, a month before the Hamas attack on Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to an almost-empty UN General Assembly. Few wanted to share the same air as the man.
In his speech, he presented a map of a “New Middle East” — one that contained a Greater Israel but no Palestine.
In a piece in The Jordan Times titled: “Cartography of genocide”, Ramzy Baroud explained why Netanyahu erased Palestine from the map figuratively. Hamas leaders also understood the message all too well.
“Generally, there was a consensus in the political bureau: We have to move, we have to take action. If we don’t do it, Palestine will be forgotten — totally deleted from the international map,” Dr Bassem Naim, a leading Hamas official said in the outstanding Al Jazeera documentary October 7.
Hearing Trump and Netanyahu last week, the Hamas assessment was clear-eyed and prescient.
Donald Trump In defiance of UN resolutions and international law, he recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, recognised the Syrian Golan Heights as part of Israel, and now wants to turn Gaza into a US real estate development, reconquer Panama, turn Canada into the 51st State of the USA, rename the Gulf of Mexico and seize Greenland, if necessary by force.
And it’s only February. The US spent blood, treasure and decades building the Rules-Based International Order. Biden and Trump have left it in tatters.
Trump is a fitting avatar for the American state: morally corrupt, narcissistic, burning down all the temples to international law, and generally causing chaos as he flames his way into ignominy.
The past week — where “Bonkers is the New Normal” — reminded me of a famous Onion headline: “FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States”.
The Iranians made a brilliant counter-offer to the US plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza and create a US statelet next to Israel — send the Israelis to Greenland! Unlike the genocidal US and Israeli leadership, the Iranians were kidding.
Point taken, though.
King Lear: ‘Meantime we will express our darker purpose. Give me the map there.’
Lear makes the list because of Shakespeare’s understanding of tyrants and those who oppose them.
Trump, like Lear, surrounds himself with a college of schemers, deviants and psychopaths. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
Kent: My life I never held but as a pawn to wage against thy enemies.
Lear: Out of my sight!
Kent and all those who sought to steer the King towards a more prudent course were treated as enemies and traitors. I think of Ambassador Chas Freeman, John Mearsheimer, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, George Beebe and all the other wiser heads who have been pushed to the periphery in much the same way.
Trump, like Lear, surrounds himself with a college of schemers, deviants and psychopaths.
Napoleon Bonaparte I was fortunate to study “France on the Eve of Revolution” with the great French historian Antoine Casanova. His fellow Corsican caused a fair bit of mayhem with his intention to redraw the map of Europe.
British statesman William Pitt the Younger reeled in horror as Napoleon got to work, “Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these 10 years,” he presciently said.
Bonaparte was an important historical figure who left a mixed and contested legacy.
Before effective resistance could be organised, he abolished the Holy Roman Empire (good job), created the Confederation of the Rhine, invaded Russia and, albeit sometimes for the better, torched many of the traditional power structures.
Millions died in his wars.
We appear to be back to all that: a leader who tears up all rule books. Trump endorses the US-Israeli right of conquest, sanctions the International Criminal Court (ICC) for trying to hold Israel and the US to the same standard as others, and hands out the highest offices to his family and confidantes.
Hitler “Lebensraum” (Living space) was the Nazi concept that propelled the German war machine to seize new territories, redraw maps. As they marched, the soldiers often sang “Deutschland über alles”(Germany above all), their ultra-nationalist anthem that expressed a desire to create a Greater Germany — to Make Germany Great Again.
All sounds a bit similar to this discussion of Trump and Netanyahu, doesn’t it? Again: whose side should we be on?
Saddam Hussein and George W Bush When it comes to doomed bids to remake the Middle East by launching illegal wars, these are two buttocks of the same bum. Now we have the Trump-Netanyahu pair.
Will countries like Australia, New Zealand and the UK really sign up for the current US-Israeli land grab? Will they all continue to yawn and look away as massive crimes against humanity are committed? I fear so, and in so doing, they rob their side of all legitimacy.
Pope Alexander VI There is a smack of the Borgias about the Trumps. They share values — libertinism and nepotism, to name two — and both, through cunning rather than aptitude, managed to achieve great power.
Pope Alexander VI, born Rodrigo Borgia, father to Lucretia and Cesare, was Pope in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
1494. The Treaty of Tordesillas hands the New World over to the Spanish and Portuguese. Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
He was responsible for the greatest reworking of the map of the world: the Treaty of Tordesillas which divided the “New World” between the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Millions died; trillions were stolen.
We still live with the depravities the Europeans and their heritors unleashed upon the world.
I’m sure the Greenlanders, the Canadians, the Panamanians and whoever else the United States sets their sights on will resist the unwelcome attempt to colour the map of their country in stars & stripes.
History is littered with blind map re-makers, foolish old men who draw new maps on old lands.
Like Sykes, Picot, Balfour and others, Trump thinks with a flourish of his pen he can whisk away identity and deep roots. Love of country and long-suffering mean Palestinians will never accept a handful of coins and parcels of land spread across West Asia or Africa as compensation for a stolen homeland.
They have earned the right to Palestine not least because of the blood-spattered identity that they have carved out of every inch of land through their immense courage and steadfastness. We should stand with them.
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
The Cook Islands finds itself in a precarious dance — one between the promises of foreign investments and the integrity of our own sovereignty. As the country sways between partners China and Aotearoa New Zealand, the Cook Islands News asks: “Do we continue to haka with the Taniwha, our constitutional partner, or do we dance with the dragon?”
EDITORIAL:By Thomas Tarurongo Wynne, Cook Islands News
Our relationship with China, forged through over two decades of diplomatic agreements, infrastructure projects and economic cooperation, demands further scrutiny. Do we continue to embrace the dragon with open arms, or do we stand wary?
And what of the Taniwha, a relationship now bruised by the ego of the few but standing the test of time?
If our relationship with China were a building, it would be crumbling like the very structures they have built for us. The Cook Islands Police Headquarters (2005) was meant to stand as a testament to our growing diplomatic and financial ties, but its foundations — both literal and metaphorical — have been called into question as its structure deteriorated.
Then, in 2009, the Cook Islands Courthouse followed, plagued by maintenance issues almost immediately after its completion. Our National Stadium, also built in 2009 for the Pacific Mini Games, was heralded as a great achievement, yet signs of premature wear and tear began surfacing far earlier than expected.
Still, we continue this dance, entranced by the allure of foreign investment and large-scale projects, even as history and our fellow Pacific partners across the moana warn us of the risks.
These structures, now symbols of our fragile dependence, stand as a metaphor for our relationship with the dragon: built with promises of strength, only to falter under closer scrutiny. And yet, we keep returning to the dance floor. These projects, rather than standing as enduring monuments to our relationship with China, serve as cautionary tales.
And then came Te Mato Vai.
What began as a bold and necessary vision to modernise Rarotonga’s water infrastructure became a slow and painful lesson in accountability. The involvement of China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) saw the project mired in substandard work, legal disputes and cost overruns.
By the time McConnell Dowell, a New Zealand firm, was brought in to fix the defects, the damage — financial and reputational — was done.
Prime Minister Mark Brown, both as Finance Minister and now as leader, has walked an interesting line between criticism and praise.
In 2017, he voiced concerns about the poor workmanship and assured the nation that the government would seek accountability, stating, “We are deeply concerned about the quality of work delivered by CCECC. Our people deserve better, and we will pursue all avenues to ensure accountability.”
In 2022, he acknowledged the cost overruns but framed them as necessary lessons in securing a reliable water supply. And yet, most recently, during the December 2024 visit of China’s Executive Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu, he declared Te Mato Vai a “commitment to a stronger, healthier, and more resilient nation. Together, we’ve delivered a project that not only meets the needs of today but safeguards the future of Rarotonga’s water supply.”
The Cook Islands’ relationship with New Zealand has long been one of deep familial, historical and political ties — a dance with the taniwha, if you will. As a nation with free association status, we have relied on New Zealand for economic support, governance frameworks and our shared citizenship ties.
And they have relied on our labour and expertise, which adds over a billion dollars to their economy each year. We have well-earned our discussion around citizenship and statehood, but that must come from the ground up, not from the top down.
China has signed similar agreements across the Pacific, most notably with the Solomon Islands, weaving itself into the region’s economic and political fabric. Yet, while these partnerships promise opportunity, they also raise concerns about sovereignty, dependency and the price of such alignments, as well as the geopolitical and strategic footprint of the dragon.
But as we reflect on the shortcomings of these partnerships, the question remains: Do we continue to place our trust in foreign powers, or do we reinvest in our own community and governance systems?
At the end of the day, we must ask ourselves: How do we sign bold agreements on the world stage without consultation, while struggling to resolve fundamental issues at home?
Healthcare, education, the rise in crime, mental health, disability, poverty — the list goes on and on, while our leaders are wined and dined on state visits around the globe.
Dance with the dragon, if you so choose, but save the last dance for the voting public in 2026. In 2026, the voters will decide who leads this dance and who gets left behind.
Republished from the Cook Islands News with permission.
Let’s cut to the chase here. If you plan to resettle an entire ethnic group from an area that is their home, you are guilty of ethnic cleansing. There’s no argument. Donald Trump and his criminal plan to turn the Gaza Strip into the ‘MAGA Strip’ is textbook ethnic cleansing.
The attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through the deportation or forcible displacement of persons belonging to particular ethnic groups. Ethnic cleansing sometimes involves the removal of all physical vestiges of the targeted group through the destruction of monuments, cemeteries, and houses of worship.
Sure, you’ll find my column in the section that says “opinion” on the Canary website, but this isn’t a matter of opinion.
If you (quite rightly) thought genocide Joe was an enemy of the Palestinian people, what do you think about neofascist Donald Trump displacing an entire population from their homes?
Angry? Horrified? Genuinely disgusted by Trump’s outlandish remarks?
Maybe, and understandably so, if you believe every single word a renowned liar with a tendency to treat American policy statements as opening gambits in a real estate negotiation.
But I don’t.
Donald Trump: in reality TV mode
What I saw, beyond the sight of a beaming Benjamin Netanyahu close to getting his first erection for several decades, was the President of the United States in full Reality TV star mode.
You’d think Netanyahu would be happy with rinsing the American people for their tax dollars, while the richest country in the world refuses to afford homes and healthcare for tens of millions of its poorest and most vulnerable people.
Shouldn’t the American people now be asking why their businesses cannot get a state contract if they haven’t promised to obey Israel — in THIRTY SEVEN states?
Just imagine the firm that you work for being forced to pledge allegiance to any foreign country, let alone a genocidal pariah state, if they want to be able to afford to pay your wages.
This is subservient insanity of epic proportions.
I digress.
It wasn’t that long ago that Trump was said to fancy getting his micro-hands on a Nobel Peace Prize.
Can you really imagine the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Nobel Assembly, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee simultaneously suffering from a momentary lapse of reason and awarding their coveted prize to a trainee ethnic cleanser that once had the brass neck to compare himself to a modern-day Nelson Mandela?
Not a fucking chance. They’ll be handing out awards to me for contributions to quantum physics before that tangerine twat gets the slightest sniff of a Nobel Peace Prize.
Furthermore, Trump’s superficial plans for the Gaza Strip require absolute cooperation from neighbouring states such as Egypt and Jordan — both of whom are refusing to entertain the possibility of assisting Trump’s vision of the mass ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
And why should they? The Palestinians will remain in Gaza until they die.
Unintended consequences?
I just don’t think Trump, or at least the real decision makers (such as his pro-settler advisers) would be willing to give Russia the licence to expand their operations in Ukraine, because that would be the obvious and immediate consequence of Trump’s America giving notice of their intention to commit a grave and wicked crime against humanity.
Perhaps I’m underestimating the ultranationalist maniac, Trump?
Perhaps he really is foolish enough to think the impunity gifted to Netanyahu by the West as he orchestrated the murder of more than 62,000 humans should also apply to him while he callously attempts to forcibly displace a population of more than two million people.
“Why would they want to live there?”, asks Trump.
I’ll tell you why, you fucking awful, tyrannical stain. It is their home.
Regardless of how many buildings the Israeli terrorists have destroyed, how many innocent lives they have cruelly ended, or how many hospitals, mosques, universities and shops they have completely and utterly levelled, Gaza belongs to the Palestinian people.
We now find ourselves wondering if Starmer’s fraudulent and deeply unpopular government — currently taking a bit of a battering on the domestic front by the repulsive, toad-faced shithouse, Farage — will either completely bend over and drop it’s pants for Trump and Israel or completely bend over and drop it’s pants for Trump and Israel while quietly mumbling a few words about respecting international law.
What started out as Israel’s right to defend itself following 7 October 2023, has somehow ended up being America’s right to forcibly displace more than two million people, just sixteen months later?
This Zionist ideology is somewhat troublesome, don’t you think?
Where is Starmer in all this?
If Keir Starmer truly believes in international law being applied equally and fairly — and I am yet to see anything that suggests that he does — he should be raising serious objections, both publicly and privately at the very highest levels.
A real leader would get on the phone to that ridiculous orange affront to human decency and tell him we’re not fucking interested in his chlorinated chicken, and we’ll muddle on by without them.
But I can’t see Starmer’s donors, such as the pro-Israel lobbyists, allowing the already-complicit Prime Minister to go too far with his condemnation of Trump’s impossible plan.
Even though I don’t think Trump will be able to orchestrate anything like he is suggesting, there is no doubt his provocative comments are likely to have a dangerous impact that stretches way beyond the streets of Rafah.
By the time US President Donald Trump announced tariffs on China and Canada last Monday which could kickstart a trade war, New Zealand’s diplomats in Washington, DC, had already been deployed on another diplomatic drama.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz had said on social media it was “difficult to treat New Zealand as a normal ally . . . when they denigrate and punish Israeli citizens for defending themselves and their country”.
He cited a story in the Israeli media outlet Ha’aretz, which has a reputation for independence in Israel and credibility abroad.
But Ha’aretz had wrongly reported Israelis must declare service in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) as part of “new requirements” for visa applications.
Winston Peters replied forcefully to Cruz on X, condemning Ha’aretz’s story as “fake news” and demanding a correction.
Winston Peters puts Ted Cruz on notice over the misleading Ha’aretz story. Image: X/RNZ
But one thing Trump’s Republicans and Winston Peters had in common last week was irritating Mexico.
His fellow NZ First MP Shane Jones had bellowed “Send the Mexicans home” at Green MPs in Parliament.
Winston Peters then told two of them they should be more grateful for being able to live in New Zealand.
‘We will not be lectured’ On Facebook he wasn’t exactly backing down.
“We . . . will not be lectured on the culture and traditions of New Zealand from people who have been here for five minutes,” he added.
While he was at it, Peters criticised media outlets for not holding other political parties to account for inflammatory comments.
Peters was posting that as a politician — not a foreign minister, but the Mexican ambassador complained to MFAT. (It seems the so-called “Mexican standoff” was resolved over a pre-Waitangi lunch with Ambassador Bravo).
But the next day — last Wednesday — news of another diplomatic drama broke on TVNZ’s 1News.
“A deal that could shatter New Zealand’s close relationship with a Pacific neighbour,” presenter Simon Dallow declared, in front of a backdrop of a stern-looking Peters.
TVNZ’s Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver reported the Cook Islands was about to sign a partnership agreement in Beijing.
“We want clarity and at this point in time, we have none. We’ve got past arrangements, constitutional arrangements, which require constant consultation with us, and dare I say, China knows that,” Peters told 1News.
Passports another headache
Cook Islands’ Prime Minister Mark Brown also told Barbara Dreaver TVNZ’s revelations last month about proposed Cook Island passports had also been a headache for him.
“We were caught by surprise when this news was broken by 1News. I thought it was a high-level diplomatic discussion with leaders to be open and frank,” he told TVNZ this week.
“For it to be brought out into the public before we’ve had a time to inform our public, I thought was a breach of our political diplomacy.”
Last week another Barabara Dreaver scoop on 1News brought the strained relationship with another Pacific state into the headlines:
“Our relationship with Kiribati is at breaking point. New Zealand’s $100 million aid programme there is now on hold. The move comes after President [Taneti] Maamau pulled out of a pre-arranged meeting with Winston Peters.”
The media ended up in the middle of the blame game over this too — but many didn’t see it coming.
Caught in the crossfire “A diplomatic rift with Kiribati was on no one’s 2025 bingo card,” Stuff national affairs editor Andrea Vance wrote last weekend in the Sunday Star-Times.
“Of all the squabbles Winston Peters was expected to have this year, no one picked it would be with an impoverished, sinking island nation,” she wrote, in terms that would surely annoy Kiribati.
“Do you believe Kiribati is snubbing you?” RNZ Morning Report’s Corin Dann asked Peters.
“You can come to any conclusion you like, but our job is to try and resolve this matter,” Peters replied.
Kiribati Education Minister Alexander Teabo told RNZ Pacific there was no snub.
He said Kiribati President Maamau — who is also the nation’s foreign minister — had been unavailable because of a long-planned and important Catholic ordination ceremony on his home island of Onotoa — though this was prior to the proposed visit from Peters.
Public dispute “regrettable’
Peters told the same show it was “regrettable” that the dispute had been made public.
On Newstalk ZB Peters was backed — and Kiribati portrayed as the problem.
“If somebody is giving me $100m and they asked for a meeting, I will attend. I don’t care if it’s my mum’s birthday. Or somebody’s funeral,” Drive host Ryan Bridge told listeners.
“It’s always very hard to pick apart these stories (by) just reading them in the media. But I have faith and confidence in Winston Peters as our foreign minister,” PR-pro Trish Shrerson opined.
So did her fellow panellist, former Labour MP Stuart Nash.
“He’s respected across the Pacific. He’s the consummate diplomat. If Winston says this is the story and this is what’s happening, I believe 100 percent. And I would say, go hard. Winston — represent our interests.”
‘Totally silly’ response
But veteran Pacific journalist Michael Field contradicted them soon after on ZB.
“It’s totally silly. All this talk about cancelling $104 million of aid is total pie-in-the-sky from Winston Peters,” he said.
“Somebody’s lost their marbles on this, and the one who’s possibly on the ground looking for them is Winston Peters.
“He didn’t need to be in Tarawa in early January at all. This is pathetic. This is like saying I was invited to my sister’s birthday party and now it’s been cancelled,” he said.
Not a comparison you hear very often in international relations.
“While the conspiracy around Kiribati and China has deepened, no one is noticing the still-viable Kiribati-United States treaty which prevents Kiribati atolls [from] being used as bases without Washington approval,” he added.
Kiribati ‘hugely disrespectful’
But TVNZ’s Barbara Dreaver said Kiribati was being “hugely disrespectful”.
In a TVNZ analysis piece last weekend, she said New Zealand has “every right to expect better engagement than it has been getting over the past year.”
Dreaver — who was born in and grew up in Kiribati and has family there — also criticised “the airtime and validation” Kwansing got in the media in New Zealand.
“She supports and is part of a government that requires all journalists — should they get a visa to go there — to hand over copies of all footage/information collected,” Dreaver said.
Kwansing hit back on Facebook, accusing Dreaver of “publishing inane drivel” and “irresponsible journalism causing stress to locals.”
“You write like you need a good holiday somewhere happy. Please book yourself a luxury day spa ASAP,” she told TVNZ’s Pacific Affairs reporter.
“Despite this media issue, the government of Kiribati remains convinced the strong bonds between Kiribati and New Zealand will enable a resolution to this unfortunate standoff,” it said.
Copping the blame
Another reporter who knows what it’s like to cop the blame for reporting stuff diplomats and politicians want to keep out of the news is RNZ Pacific’s senior journalist and presenter Lydia Lewis.
Last year, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese questioned RNZ’s ethics after she reported comments he made to the US Deputy Secretary of State at the Pacific Islands Forum in Tonga — which revealed an until-then behind closed doors plan to pay for better policing in the Pacific.
She’s also been covering the tension with Kiribati.
Is the heat coming on the media more these days if they candidly report diplomatic differences?
TVNZ Pacific senior journalist and presenter Lydia Lewis . . . “both the public and politicians are saying the media [are] making a big deal of things.” Image: RNZ Pacific
“There’s no study that says there are more people blaming the media. So it’s anecdotal, but definitely, both the public and politicians are saying the media (are) making a big deal of things,” Lewis told Mediawatch.
“I would put the question back to the public as to who’s manufacturing drama. All we’re doing is reporting what’s in front of us for the public to then make their decision — and questioning it. And there were a lot of questions around this Kiribati story.”
Lewis said it was shortly before 6pm on January 27, that selected journalists were advised of the response of our government to the cancellation of the meeting with foreign minister Peters.
Vice-President an alternative
But it was not mentioned that Kiribati had offered the Vice-President for a meeting, the same person that met with an Australian delegation recently.
A response from Kiribati proved harder to get — and Lewis spoke to a senior figure in Kiribati that night who told her they knew nothing about it.
Politicians and diplomats, naturally enough, prefer to do things behind the scenes and media exposure is a complication for them.
But we simply wouldn’t know about the impending partnership agreement between China and the Cook Islands if TVNZ had not reported it last Monday.
And another irony: some political figures lamenting the diplomatically disruptive impact of the media also make decidedly undiplomatic responses of their own online these days.
“It can be revealing in the sense of where people stand. Sometimes they’re just putting out their opinions or their experience. Maybe they’ve got some sort of motive. A formal message or email we’ll take a bit more seriously. But some of the things on social media, we just take with a grain of salt,” said Lewis.
“It is vital we all look at multiple sources. It comes back to balance and knowledge and understanding what you know about and what you don’t know about — and then asking the questions in between.”
Big Powers and the Big Picture Kwansing objected to New Zealand media jumping to the conclusion China’s influence was a factor in the friction with New Zealand.
“To dismiss the geopolitical implications with China . . . would be naive and ignorant,” Dreaver countered.
Michael Field pointed to an angle missing.
“While the conspiracy around Kiribati and China has deepened, no one is noticing the still viable Kiribati-United States treaty which prevents Kiribati atolls being used as bases without Washington approval,” he wrote in his Substack.
In the same article in which Vance called Kiribati “an impoverished, sinking island nation” she later pointed out that its location, US military ties and vast ocean territory make it strategically important.
Questions about ‘transparency and accountability’
“There’s a lot of people that want in on Kiribati. It has a huge exclusive economic zone,” Lewis said.
She said communication problems and patchy connectivity are also drawbacks.
“We do have a fuller picture now of the situation, but the overarching question that’s come out of this is around transparency and accountability.
“We can’t hold Kiribati politicians to account like we do New Zealand government politicians.”
“I don’t want to give Kiribati a free pass here but it’s really difficult to get a response.
“They’re posting statements on Facebook and it really has raised some questions around the government’s commitment to transparency and accountability for all journalists . . . committed to fair media reporting across the Pacific.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
In the run-up to the Delhi assembly polls to be held on February 5, several opinion polls are viral on social media. Some opinion polls project a landslide win for the incumbent Aam Aadmi Party while some project a win for the BJP.
Is AAP Projected to Win with 58-60 seats as Claimed by its Leader?
On February 4, the district president of AAP women wing in Delhi Sakshi Gupta tweeted an opinion poll purportedly released by news outlet ABP, which projected a whopping 58-60 seats for AAP, 10-12 seats for the BJP and zero seats for Congress. “Kejriwal is making a comeback”, remarked Gupta while sharing a video of the purported opinion polls. The video momentarily shows ABP journalist Pooja Sachdeva before tickers detailing the opinion poll show up on screen. (Archive)
Several other users, noticeably signed with the Aam Aadmi Party, tweeted the video. (Archives- 1, 2, 3)
It is pertinent to note that opinion polls are usually conducted after the voting ends. Consequently, we did not find any opinion poll officially released by ABP News. Furthermore, ABP News issued a statement wherein they denied having published any such opinion poll.
#FakeNewsAlert | सोशल मीडिया पर abp न्यूज़ के नाम से एक फर्जी वीडियो वायरल किया जा रहा है. इस तरह का कोई भी ओपिनियन पोल abp न्यूज़ द्वारा नहीं चलाया गया है.
आपसे अनुरोध है कि फर्जी खबरों से बचें और सही खबरों के लिए हमारे सोशल मीडिया हैंडल पर ही भरोसा करें.
Upon a closer look at the video, we also noticed some discrepancies in the viral video. For instance, the audio does not match what Sachdeva says in the beginning. A slowed-down version of this part is attached below.
Taking cue from this, we took a key frame from the beginning of the viral video where Sachdeva is visible and ran it through Google reverse image search. We were able to trace it back to an ABP news clip. The original clip shows Pooja Sachdeva reporting on Rahul Gandhi’s campaign in Delhi’s Patparganj and Okhla on January 28. A side-by-side comparison of the viral clip and the original clip is attached below. If one compares Sachdeva’s hand gestures, one can understand that the clips are same, only the audio replaced.
Similar Opinion Poll also Tweeted by AAP Leader, this time Attributed to Aaj Tak
Sakshi Gupta had put out another opinion poll projecting AAP win, this time attributing it to Aaj Tak. The tweet, now deleted, consisted of a video which predicted AAP would win 56-58 seats while BJP would win 12-14 seats and Congress would win zero seats. Here is an archive of her tweet.
This has also been tweeted by several users. (Archives- 1, 2, 3)
*दिल्ली चुनाव से ठीक पहले आजतक का सर्वे*
केजरीवाल का फिर से मुख्यमंत्री बनना तय
आम आदमी पार्टी को *56-58 सीटों पर बढ़त*
कांग्रेस एक बार फिर 0⃣
*ये तो प्रचंड जीत है, वाक़ई में मान गये केजरीवाल को, हमें भी विधायक उसी का बनाना है जिस पार्टी का मुख्यमंत्री बन रहा हो* pic.twitter.com/yZEqXamv5u
Aaj Tak released a fact-check report of the viral video stating that no such opinion poll had been conducted by them. The report additionally states that the voice of Aaj Tak anchor Saeed Ansari had been modified using AI to make the commentary that can be heard in the background. Ansari also denied announcing any such opinion poll. Moreover, the report noted that certain text seen in the video has overlapping text, which is unusual for news tickers.
Graphic retrieved from Aaj Tak fact-check report
Another feature that indicates that the audio may have been AI-generated is that a lot of words have been pronounced in an anglicized manner. For instance, the word Delhi has been pronounced with a ड-sound instead of a द-sound.
Opinion Poll viral, this time Projecting Landslide Win for the BJP
A video of a purported opinion poll by ABP News is also viral on social media. According to it, the BJP is projected to win 49 seats while the AAP and Congress parties are projected to win 16 and five seats respectively. User @ManojSr60583090 tweeted the video and garnered 20.5k views and 544 retweets at time of the writing of this article. (Archive)
As mentioned earlier, ABP News has not conducted an opinion poll for the Delhi elections yet. Taking to Twitter, the outlet categorically denied publishing such opinion polls They issued two consequent statements for the two viral opinion polls.
“We will take legal action against such people”, read one of their statements. Read here and here.
The trend of politicians and influencers sharing misleading opinion polls on social media often falsely attributing them to reputable media outlets is, however, not a new one. The 2025 Delhi assembly polls have proven to be no exception.
We all get things wrong from time to time. Okay, perhaps not the Canary editorials because they’re always on the money, and my favourite allotment king, my G, Jeremy Corbyn. But most of us get it completely wrong at some point. Back in 2019, known polyp on the anus of humanity, Peter Mandelson, possibly for the first time in his miserable, snivelling life, got something right.
Exactly one year ahead of the Communist Party of Vietnam’s 14th Party Congress, the Central Committee convened its 10th Plenum, where General Secretary To Lam further solidified his lock on the party.
There were a number of personnel changes in the convocation that started Sept. 18, 2024, the most important of which was the elevation of Lam’s longtime protege and former deputy minister of public security, Nguyen Duy Ngoc, to the Politburo.
Upon his election as general secretary, following Nguyen Phu Trong’s death in July 2024, Lam appointed Ngoc to be the head of the Central Committee Office.
This is not a sexy position, but it is the absolute nerve center of the Communist Party, responsible for setting up, drafting documents and agenda-setting for party plenums, as well as a host of other personnel issues. If one wanted loyal eyes and ears ahead of a party congress, the Central Committee Office is as good a place as any.
Lam did meet some resistance when he tried to quickly elevate Ngoc as the standing chairman of the Secretariat, when Luong Cuong was elected president in August 2024. There appears to have been some concern at the time that Lam was amassing too much power. But at the 10th Plenum, Ngoc was elected to the Politburo.
This is surprising, because under Party rules, one is only eligible to be on the Politburo after one full term on the Central Committee. Ngoc only joined the 13th Central Committee in January 2021.
That speaks volumes about the trust To Lam has in him, as well as the lock Lam has on the Politburo and the Central Committee.
Lam is governing with a sense of pragmatic urgency, fearful of falling into the middle income trap.
He is pushing ahead with a major government re-organization that will lead to roughly one-fifth of civil servants losing their jobs and 10 ministries being folded into just five. That shakeup is meant to improve government efficiency, and speed up decision-making.
But to get all that done, Lam needs to put in place loyal supporters of his agenda, and remove corners of resistance.
Tran Cam Tu, head of Vietnam’s Party Secretariat, meets with Li Xi, a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee in Beijing, Nov. 6, 2023.(Yin Bogu/Xinhua via Getty Images)
Agenda supporters needed
To that end, another big personnel announcement at the 10th Plenum was that Tran Cam Tu would relinquish his position as standing chairman of the Central Inspection Commission, or CIC, in order to concentrate his time and energy as a head of the Party Secretariat.
Tu has been seen as a potential impediment to Lam. As the head of the CIC he controls the one investigative apparatus focusing on central-level officials that Lam did not have full control over; and no one used anti-corruption investigations to take down rivals more effectively than Lam, himself.
Ngoc has assumed control over the CIC, while the Ministry of Public Security is firmly in the grips of another protege, Luong Tam Quang. Now both men are on the Politburo. Lam has control over the two key investigative agencies ahead of the 14th Party Congress, which will allow him to disqualify and neutralize rivals with dispatch.
The Central Committee’s Organization Commission, which is in charge of personnel issues for the Party, is already in the hands of another Lam loyalist, Le Minh Hung. Hung’s father, was a former minister of public security where he oversaw Lam’s rise.
Moving to the Secretariat is Deputy Prime Minister Tran Luu Quang, which adds a much needed voice with economic experience to the Party’s day-to-day operations center.
There are a few other things to note about the personnel choices.
This increases the number of Politburo members who came out of the Ministry of Public Security, currently seven out of 16, or 44%. That seems to reinforce the inherent insecurity of the Communist Party of Vietnam, or CPV.
Second, Ngoc hails from Lam’s home province of Hung Yen, creating an even greater concern about a provincial faction. If the Nghe An provincial faction was dominant a few years ago, they have been clearly supplanted by the boys from Hung Yen.
To Lam recently appointed another protege from Hung Yen to head Dong Nai province, who will likely be elevated to the Central Committee.
Third, the expansion of the Politburo makes some inherent sense for Lam going into the 14th Congress. The CPV is a conservative body and by tradition, no more than 50% of the body is replaced.
So we might see the gradual expansion of the Politburo in the coming year so that Lam has more wiggle room to push aside rivals. If he were able to get the Politburo up to 18, then the retirement of eight or nine would create the opportunity to clear out more dead wood.
Vietnam’s former Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung waves at the opening of the National Assembly’s autumn session in Hanoi on Oct. 20, 2022.(Nhac Nguyen/AFP)
Courting the South
Ahead of the 10th Plenum, though, was another event that had important political implications. To Lam awarded the highest party honor to former Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung.
Dung had vied to become the CPV General Secretary at the 12th Congress in January 2016, but lost to Nguyen Phu Trong. The two men despised each other.
Dung promoted a vision of growth based on market reforms. Trong saw that as not only a betrayal of socialist values, but as a policy that would enhance inequality and corruption, leading to the party’s loss of legitimacy.
Although out of central decision making, Trong could never make corruption allegations against Dung stick. Meanwhile, Dung quietly positioned his American-educated son for advancement. Now the minister of construction, Nguyen Thanh Nghi, was recently made the deputy party chief of Ho Chi Minh City.
Lam quickly and publicly courted Nguyen Tan Dung upon being elected general secretary. It was not just the simpatico of former Ministry of Public Security officials.
While Lam’s lock on the party apparatus is very strong, he has one shortcoming: Southerners are really under-represented on the Politburo and other central-level bodies. In part, this is because Trong really worked to purge the southern party apparatus, which he deemed as too free wheeling.
At present, only three of the 16 Politburo members are southerners — two are from the central region, while the remainder are northerners. Southerners are demanding greater representation on the 14th Politburo and Central Committee.
Key to winning southern support is Nguyen Tan Dung, the most politically connected and savvy politician in the south. As such, his son, Nguyen Thanh Nghi is likely to be elevated.
So while Dung’s Gold Star medal clearly signals the end of the Nguyen Phu Trong era, it also reflects the one key bloc that To Lam is actively courting so that he can put in place a leadership team of his making, not the traditional balances amongst factions and regions.
Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or Radio Free Asia.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Zachary Abuza.
Why has any discussion about Israel, its violations of international law, and the international legal expectations for third party states to hold IDF soldiers accountable not been addressed in Aotearoa New Zealand?
ANALYSIS:By Katrina Mitchell-Kouttab
Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa national chair John Minto’s campaign to identify Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers in New Zealand and then call a PSNA number hotline has come under intense criticism from the likes of Winston Peters, Stephen Rainbow, the Jewish Council and NZ media outlets. Accusations of antisemitism have been made.
Despite making it clear that holding IDF soldiers accountable for potential war crimes is his goal, not banning all Israelis or targeting Jewish people, there are many just concerns regarding Minto’s campaign. He is clear that his focus remains on justice, not on creating divisions or fostering discrimination, but he has failed to provide strict criteria to distinguish between individuals directly involved in human rights violations and those who are innocent, or to ground the campaign in legal frameworks and due process.
Any allegations of participation in war crimes should be submitted through proper legal channels, not through the PSNA. Broader advocacy could have been used to address concerns of accountability and to minimise any risk that the campaign could lead to profiling based on religion, ethnicity, or language.
While there are many concerns that need to be addressed with PSNA’s campaign, why has the conversation stopped there? Why has the core issue of this campaign been ignored? Namely, that IDF soldiers who have committed war crimes in Gaza have been allowed into New Zealand?
PSNA’s controversial Gaza “genocide hotline” . . . why has the conversation stopped there? Why has the core issue about war crimes been ignored? Image: PSNA screenshot APR
Why has any discussion about Israel, its violations of international law, and the international legal expectations for third party states to hold IDF soldiers accountable not been addressed? Why is criticism of Israel being conflated with racism, even though many Jewish people oppose Israel’s war crimes, and what about Palestinians, what does this mean for a people experiencing genocide?
Concerns should be discussed but they must not be used to protect possible war criminals and shield Israel’s crimes.
It is true that PSNA’s campaign may possibly target individuals, including targeting individuals solely based on their nationality, religion, or language. This is not acceptable. But it has also uncovered the exceptionally biased, racist, and unjust views towards Palestinians.
Racism against Palestinians ignored
Palestinians have been dehumanised by Israel for decades, but real racism against Palestinians is being ignored. As a Christian Palestinian I know all too well what it is like to be targeted.
In fact, it was only recently at a New Zealand First State of the Nation gathering last year that Winston Peter’s followers called me a terrorist for being Palestinian and told me that all Muslims were Hamas lovers and were criminals.
The question that has been ignored in this very public debate is simple: are Israeli soldiers who have participated in war crimes in Aotearoa, if so, why, and what does this mean for the New Zealand Palestinian population and the upholding of international law?
By refusing to address concerns of IDF soldiers the focus is deliberately shifted away from the actual genocide happening in Gaza. If IDF soldiers have engaged in rape, extrajudicial executions, torture, destruction of homes, or killing of civilians, they should be investigated and held accountable.
Countries have a legal and moral duty to prevent war criminals from using their nations as safe havens.
Since 1948, Palestinians have been subjected to systematic oppression, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, violence and now, genocide. From its creation and currently with Israel’s illegal occupation, Palestinian massacres have been frequent and unrelenting.
This includes the execution of my great grandmother on the steps of our Katamon home in Jerusalem. Land has been stolen from Palestinians over the decades, including well over 42 percent of the West Bank. Palestinians have been denied the right to return to their country, the right to justice, accountability, and self-determination.
Living under illegal military law
We are still forced to live under illegal military law, face mass arrests and torture, and our history, identity, culture and heritage are targeted.
Almost 10 children lose one or both of their legs every day in Gaza according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNWRA). 2.2 million people are starving because Israel refuses them access to food. 95 percent of Gaza’s population have been forced onto the streets, with only 25 percent of Gaza’s shelters needs being met, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.
One out of 20 people in Gaza have been injured and 18,000 children have been murdered. 6500 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip were taken hostage by Israel who also stole 2300 bodies from numerous cemeteries. 87,000 tons of explosives have been dropped on all regions in the Gaza Strip.
Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon who worked in Al Shifa and Al Ahly Baptist hospital and who is part of Medicine Sans Frontiers, estimates as many as 300,000 Palestinian civilians, most of them children, have been murdered by Israel.
This is because official numbers do not include those bodies that cannot be recognised or are blown to a pulp, those buried under the rubble and those expected to die and have died of disease, starvation and lack of medicine — denied by Israel to those with chronic illnesses.
‘A Genocidal Project’: real death toll closer to 300,000. Video: Democracy Now!
As a signatory to the Geneva Convention, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and UN resolutions, New Zealand is expected to investigate, prosecute and deport any individual accused of these serious crimes. This government has an obligation to deny entry to any individual suspected of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.
IDF has turned war crimes into entertainment
Israel has violated all of these, its IDF soldiers filming themselves committing such atrocities and de-humanising Palestinians over the last 15 months on social media.
IDF soldiers have posted TikTok videos mocking their Palestinian victims, celebrating destruction, and making jokes about killing civilians, displaying a disturbing level of dehumanisation and cruelty. They have filmed themselves looting Palestinian homes, vandalising property, humiliating detainees, and posing with dead bodies.
They have turned war crimes into entertainment while Palestinian families suffer and mourn. Israel has deliberately targeted civilians, bombing schools, hospitals, refugee camps, and even designated safe zones, then lied about their operations, showing complete disregard for human life.
Israel and the IDF’s global reputation among ordinary people are not positive. Out on the streets over 15 months, millions have been demonstrating against Israel. They do not like what its army has done, and rightly so. Many want to see justice and Israel and its army held accountable, something this government has ignored.
Israel’s state forced conscription or imprisonment, enforced military service that contributes to the occupation, ethnic cleansing, systematic oppression of a people, war crimes and genocide is fascism on display. Israel is a totalitarian, apartheid, military state, but this government sees no problems with that.
The UN and human rights organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly condemned Israeli military operations, including the indiscriminate killing of civilians, the use of white phosphorus, and sexual violence by Israeli forces.
While not all IDF soldiers may have committed direct atrocities, those serving in occupied Palestinian territories are complicit in enforcing illegal occupation, which itself is a violation of international law.
Following orders not an excuse
The precedent set by international tribunals, such as Nuremberg, establishes that following orders is not an excuse for war crimes — meaning IDF soldiers who have participated in military actions in occupied areas should be subject to scrutiny.
This government has a duty to protect Palestinian communities from further harm, this includes preventing known perpetrators of ethnic cleansing from entering New Zealand. The presence of IDF soldiers in New Zealand is a direct threat to the safety, dignity, and well-being of our communities.
Many Palestinian New Zealanders have lost family members, homes, and entire communities due to the IDF’s actions. Seeing known war criminals walking freely in New Zealand re-traumatises those who have suffered from Israel’s illegal military brutality.
Survivors of ethnic cleansing should not have to live in fear of encountering the very people responsible for their suffering. This was not acceptable after the Second World War, throughout modern history, and is not acceptable now.
IDF soldiers are also trained in brutal tactics, including arbitrary arrests, sexual violence, and the assassination of Palestinian civilians. The presence of war criminals in any society creates a climate of fear and intimidation.
Given their history, there is a concern within New Zealand that these soldiers will engage in racist abuse, Islamophobia, or Zionist hate crimes not only against Palestinians and Arabs, but other communities of colour.
New Zealand society should be scrutinising not just this government’s response to the genocide against Palestinians, but also our political parties.
Moral bankruptcy and xenophobia
This moral bankruptcy and neutral stance in the face of genocide and racism has been clearly demonstrated this week in Parliament with both Shane Jones and Peter’s xenophobic remarks, and responses to the PSNA’s campaign.
Winston Peter’s tepid response to Israel’s behaviour and its violations is a staggering display of double standards and hypocrisy. Racism it seems, is clearly selective.
His comments about Mexicans in Parliament this week were xenophobic and violate the principles of responsible governance by promoting discrimination. Peters’ comments that immigrants should be grateful creates a hierarchy of worthiness.
Similarly, Shane Jones calling for Mexicans to go home does not uphold diplomatic and professional standards, reinforces harmful racial stereotypes and discriminates based on one’s nationality. Mexicans, Māori, and Palestinians are not on equal standing as others when it comes to human rights.
Why is there a defence of foreign soldiers who may have participated in genocide or war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories, but then migrants and refugees are attacked?
“John Minto’s call to identify people from Israel . . . is an outrageous show of fascism, racism, and encouragement of violence and vigilantism. New Zealand should never accept this kind of extreme totalitarian behaviour in our country”. Why has Winston Peter’s never condemned the actual racism Palestinians are facing — including ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, and apartheid?
Why has he never used such strong language and outrage to condemn Israel’s actions despite evidence of violations of international law? Instead, he directs outrage at a human rights activist who is pointing out the shortcomings of the government’s response to Israels violations.
IDF soldiers’ documented atrocities ignored
Peters has completely ignored IDF soldiers’ documented atrocities and distorted the campaign’s purpose for legal accountability to that of violence.
There has been no mention of Palestinian suffering associated with the IDF and Israel, nor has the government been transparent in admitting that there are no security measures in place when it comes to Israel.
For Peters, killing Palestinians in their thousands is not racist but an activist wanting to prevent war criminals from entering New Zealand is?
Recently, Simon Court of the ACT party in response to Minto wrote: “Undisguised antisemitic behaviour is not acceptable . . . military service is compulsory for Israeli citizens . . . any Israeli holidaying, visiting family or doing business in New Zealand could be targeted . . . it is intimidation towards Jewish visitors . . . and should be condemned by parties across Parliament.”
This comment is misleading, and hypocritical.
PSNA’s campaign is not targeting Jewish people, something the Jewish Council has also misrepresented. It is about identifying Israeli soldiers who have actively participated in human rights violations and war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories.
It intentionally blurs the lines between Israeli soldiers and Jewish civilians, as the lines between Palestinian civilians and Hamas have been blurred.
Erases distinction between civilians and a militant group
Even MFAT cannot use the word “Palestinian” but identifies us all as “Hamas” on its website. This erases the distinction between civilians and a militant group, and conflates Israeli military personnel with Jewish civilians, which is both deceptive and dangerous.
The MFAT website states the genocide in Gaza is an “Israel-Hamas” conflict, denying the intentional targeting of Palestinian civilians and erasing our humanity.
Israel’s assault has purposely killed thousands of children, women and men, all innocent civilians. Israel has not provided any evidence of any of its claims that it is targeting “Hamas” and has even been caught out lying about the “mass rapes and burned babies”, the tunnels under the hospitals and militants hiding behind Palestinian toddlers and whole generations of families.
Despite this, MFAT had not condemned Israeli war crimes. This is not a just war. It is a genocide against Palestinians which is also being perpetrated in the West Bank. There is no Hamas in the West Bank.
The ACT Party has been silent or outright supportive of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, despite overwhelming evidence of war crimes. If they were truly concerned about targeting individuals as they are with Minto’s campaign, then they would have called for an end to Israel’s assaults against Palestinians, sanctioned Israel for its war crimes, and called for investigations into Israeli soldiers for mass killings, sexual violence and starving the Palestinian people.
What is clear from Court and Seymour (who has also openly supported Israel alongside members of the Zionist Federation), is that Palestinian lives are irrelevant, we should silently accept our genocide, and that we do not deserve justice. That Israeli IDF soldiers should be given impunity and should be able to spend time in New Zealand with no consequences for their crimes.
This is simply xenophobic, dangerous and “not acceptable in a liberal democracy like New Zealand”.
New Zealand cartoonist Malcolm Evans with two of his anti-Zionism placards at yesterday’s “march for the martyrs” in Auckland . . . politicians’ silence on Israel’s war crimes and violations of international law fails to comply with legal norms and expectations. Image: Asia Pacific Report
Erased the voice of Jewish critics
ACT, alongside Peters, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Labour leader Chris Hipkins, and the Jewish council have erased the voice of Jewish people who oppose Israel and its crimes and who do not associate being Jewish with being Israeli.
There is a clear distinction, something Alternative Jewish Voices, Jewish Voices for Peace, Holocaust survivors and Dayenu have clearly reiterated. Equating Zionism with Judaism, and identifying Israeli military actions with Jewish identity, is dangerously antisemitic.
By failing to distinguish Judaism from Zionism, politicians and the Jewish Council are in danger of fuelling the false narrative that all Jewish people support Israel’s actions, which ultimately harms Jewish communities by increasing resentment and misunderstanding.
Antisemitism should never be weaponised or used to silence criticism of Israel or justify Israel’s impunity. This is harmful to both Palestinians and Jews.
Seymour’s upcoming tenure as deputy prime minister should also be questioned due to his unwavering support and active defence of a regime committing mass atrocities. This directly contradicts New Zealand’s values of justice and accountability demonstrating a complete disregard for human rights and international law.
His silence on Israel’s war crimes and violations of international law fails to comply with legal norms and expectations. He has positioned himself away from representing all New Zealanders.
While we focus on Minto, let’s be fair and ensure Palestinians are also being protected from discrimination and targeting in New Zealand. Are the Zionist Federation, the New Zealand Jewish Council, and the Holocaust Centre supporting Israel economically or culturally, aiding and abetting its illegal occupation, and do they support the genocide?
Canada investigated funds linked to illegal settlements
Canada recently investigated the Jewish National Fund (JNF) of Canada for potentially violating charitable tax laws by funding projects linked to Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, which are illegal under international law.
In August 2024, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) revoked the Jewish National Fund of Canada’s (JNF Canada) charitable status after a comprehensive audit revealed significant non-compliance with Canadian tax laws.
On the 31 January 2025, Haaretz reported that Israel had recruited the Jewish National Fund to illegally secretly buy Palestinian land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
What does that mean for the New Zealand branch of the Jewish National Fund?
None of these organisations should be funnelling resources to illegal settlements or supporting Israel’s war machine. A full investigation into their financial and political activities is necessary to ensure any money coming from New Zealand is not supporting genocide, land theft or apartheid.
The government has already investigated Palestinians sending money to relatives in Gaza, the same needs to be done to organisations supporting Israel. Are any of these groups supporting war crimes under the guise of charity?
While Jewish communities and Palestinians have rallied together and supported each other these last 15 months, we have received no support from the Jewish Council or the Holocaust Centre, who have remained silent or have supported Israel’s actions. Dayenu, and Alternative Jewish voices have vocally opposed Israel’s genocide in Gaza and reached out to us. As Jews dedicated to human rights, justice, and the prevention of genocide because of their own history, they unequivocally condemn Israel’s actions.
Given the Holocaust, you would expect the Holocaust Centre and the Jewish Council to oppose any acts of violence, especially that on such an industrial scale. You would expect them to oppose apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and the dehumanisation of Palestinians as the other Jewish organisations are doing.
Genocide, war crimes must not be normalised
War crimes and genocide must never be normalised. Israel must not be shielded and the suffering and dehumanisation of Palestinians supported.
We must ensure that all New Zealanders, whether Jewish, Israeli or Palestinian are not targeted, and are protected from discrimination, racism, violence and dehumanisation.
All organisations are subject to scrutiny, but only some have been.
Instead of just focusing on John Minto, the ACT Party, NZ First, National, and Labour should be answering why Israeli soldiers who may have committed atrocities, are allowed into New Zealand in the first place.
Israel and its war criminals should not be treated any differently to any other country.
We must shift the focus back to Israel’s genocide, apartheid, and impunity, while exposing the hypocrisy of those who defend Israel but attack Palestinian solidarity.
There has rightly been much debate and analysis over New Zealand’s decision to review the aid it gives to Kiribati.
It’s a big deal. So much is at stake, especially for the I-Kiribati people who live with many challenges and depend on the $100 million aid projects New Zealand delivers.
It would be clearly unwise for New Zealand to threaten or cut aid to Kiribati — but it has every right to expect better engagement than it has been getting over the past year.
What has been disturbing is the airtime and validation given to a Kiribati politician, newly appointed Minister of Women, Youth, Sport and Social Affairs Ruth Cross Kwansing.
It’s helpful to analyse where this is coming from so let’s make this very clear.
She supports and is currently a minister of a government that in 2022 suspended Chief Justice William Hastings and Justice David Lambourne of the High Court, and justices Peter Blanchard, Rodney Hansen and Paul Heath of the Court of Appeal.
She supports and is part a government that deported Lambourne, who is married to Opposition Leader Tessie Lambourne — and they have I-Kiribati children. (He is Australian but has been in the Kiribati courts since 1995).
She supports and is part of a government that requires all journalists — should they get a visa to go there — to hand over copies of all footage/information collected.
She also benefits from a 220 percent pay rise that her government passed for MPs in 2021.That same year, ministers were gifted cars with China Aid embossed on the side, as well as a laptop from Beijing.
Amidst a gushing post about a president who recently gave this rookie MP a ministerial post, Cross Kwansing wrote of the “media manufactured drama” and “the New Zealand media, in its typical fashion, seized the opportunity to patronise Kiribati, and the familiar whispers about Chinese influence began to circulate”.
These comments shouldn’t come as any surprise as blaming the media is a common tactic of politicians and Cross Kwansing is no different.
Just because the new minister doesn’t like what New Zealand has decided to do doesn’t mean it must be “media manufactured”.
Her comment that “the New Zealand media, in its typical fashion, seized the opportunity to patronise Kiribati” is also ridiculous.
The journalist that broke the story — myself — is half I-Kiribati and incredibly proud of her heritage and the gutsy country that she was born in and grew up in, with family who still live there.
Cross Kwansing has been a member of parliament for less than six months. To not discuss the geopolitical implications with China, given the way the world is evolving and Kiribati’s close ties, would be naive and ignorant.
Pacific leaders frustrated
It is not just New Zealand that Maamau has refused to meet. Over the last two years, Pacific Island leaders have spoken of frustration in trying to engage with the president.
Maamau is known to be a pleasant man and enjoyable to converse with. But, for whatever reason, he has chosen not to engage with many leaders or foreign ministers.
Cross Kwansing has helpfully shared that the president announced to his cabinet ministers that he would delegate international engagements to his vice president so he could concentrate “intently on domestic matters”.
Fair enough. Except that Maamau has chosen to hang on to the foreign minister portfolio.
It is quite right that New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters would expect to engage with his Kiribati counterpart — especially given the level of investment and numerous attempts being made, and then a date finally agreed on by Maamau himself.
Six days before Peters was meant to arrive in Kiribati, the island nation’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs told the NZ High Commission there that the president was now “unavailable”. In the diplomatic world, especially given the attempts that had preceded it, that is hugely disrespectful.
There are different strategies the New Zealand government could have chosen to take to deal with this. Peters has had enough and chosen a hardline course that is likely to have negative impacts on New Zealand in the long term, but it’s a risk he obviously thinks is worth taking.
Cross Kwansing has spoken about prioritising cooperation and mutual respect over ego and political posturing. Absolutely right — except that this piece of helpful advice should also be taken by her own government. It works both ways for the sake of the people.
Barbara Dreaver is of Kiribati and Cook Islands descent. She was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2024 for services to investigative journalism and Pacific communities. This TVNZ News column has been republished with permission.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
The committee hearings for the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill got started this week, and not without controversy. Mainly that, so determined to keep out any organisations with legitimate concerns, Leadbeater has had to relent not once, but twice to allow experts and disability activists to be able to provide evidence after initially denying them. Many things have been discussed within…
Well today was the day disabled people dreaded. After showboating in all the right-wing rags about Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) cuts, and telling the Sun that “we cannot keep footing the bill for jobless Britain”, Reeves took to the lectern on Wednesday 29 January and delivered her plan for growth. For the last few months disabled people have been once again living in fear that our…
It didn’t come as a surprise to see President Donald Trump sign executive orders to again pull out of the Paris Agreement, or from the World Health Organisation, but the immediate suspension of US international aid has compounded the impact beyond what was imagined possible.
The slew of executive orders signed within hours of Trump re-entering the White House and others since have caused consternation for Pacific leaders and communities and alarm for those operating in the region.
Since Trump was last in power, US engagement in the Pacific has increased dramatically. We have seen new embassies opened, the return of Peace Corps volunteers, high-level summits in Washington and more.
All the officials who have been in the region and met with Pacific leaders and thinkers will know that climate change impacts are the name of the game when it comes to security.
It is encapsulated in the Boe Declaration signed by leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum in 2018 as their number one existential threat and has been restated many times since.
Now it is hard to see how US diplomats and administration representatives can expect to have meaningful conversations with their Pacific counterparts, if they have nothing to offer when it comes to the region’s primary security threat.
The “on again, off again” approach to cutting carbon emissions and providing climate finance does not lend itself to convincing sceptical Pacific leaders that the US is a trusted friend here for the long haul.
Pacific response muted
Trump’s climate scepticism is well-known and the withdrawal from Paris had been flagged during the campaign. The response from leaders within the Pacific islands region has been somewhat muted, with a couple of exceptions.
Vanuatu Attorney-General Kiel Loughman called it out as “bad behaviour”. Meanwhile, Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape has sharply criticised Trump, “urging” him to reconsider his decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement, and plans to rally Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) leaders to stand with him.
It is hard to see how this will have much effect.
The withdrawal from the World Health Organisation – to which the US provides US$500 million or about 15 percent of its annual budget – creates a deep funding gap.
In 2022, the Lowy Pacific aid map recorded that the WHO disbursed US$9.1 million in the Pacific islands across 320 projects. It contributes to important programmes that support health systems in the region.
In addition, the 90-day pause on disbursement of aid funding while investments are reviewed to ensure that they align with the president’s foreign policy is causing confusion and distress in the region.
Perhaps now the time has come to adopt a more transactional approach. While this may not come easily to Pacific diplomats, the reality is that this is how everyone else is acting and it appears to be the geopolitical language of the moment.
Meaningful commitment opportunities
So where the US seeks a security agreement or guarantee, there may be an opportunity to tie it to climate change or other meaningful commitments.
When it comes to the PIF, the intergovernmental body representing 18 states and territories, Trump’s stance may pose a particular problem.
The PIF secretariat is currently undertaking a Review of Regional Architecture. As part of that, dialogue partners including the US are making cases for whether they should be ranked as “Strategic Partners” [Tier 1] or “Sector Development Partners [Tier 2].
It is hard to see how the US can qualify for “strategic partner” status given Trump’s rhetoric and actions in the last week. But if the US does not join that club, it is likely to cede space to China which is also no doubt lobbying to be at the “best friends” table.
With the change in president comes the new Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He was previously known for having called for the US to cut all its aid to Solomon Islands when then Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare announced this country’s switch in diplomatic ties from Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China.
It is to be hoped that since then Rubio has learned that this type of megaphone diplomacy is not welcome in this part of the world.
Since taking office, he has made little mention of the Pacific islands region. In a call with New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters they “discussed efforts to enhance security cooperation, address regional challenges, and support for the Pacific Islands.”
It is still early days, a week is a long time in politics and there remain many “unknown unknowns”. What we do know is that what happens in Washington during the next four years will have global impacts, including in the Pacific. The need now for strong Pacific leadership and assertive diplomacy has never been greater.
Dr Tess Newton Cain is a principal consultant at Sustineo P/L and adjunct associate professor at the Griffith Asia Institute. She is a former lecturer at the University of the South Pacific and has more than 25 years of experience working in the Pacific islands region. This article was first published by BenarNews and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
What will happen to Australia — and New Zealand — once the superpower that has been followed into endless battles, the United States, finally unravels?
With President Donald Trump now into his second week in the White House, horrific fires have continued to rage across Los Angeles and the details of Elon Musk’s allegedly dodgy Twitter takeover began to emerge, the world sits anxiously by.
The consequences of a second Trump term will reverberate globally, not only among Western nations. But given the deeply entrenched Americanisation of much of the Western world, this is about how it will navigate the after-shocks once the United States finally unravels — for unravel it surely will.
Leading with chaos Now that the world’s biggest superpower and war machine has a deranged criminal at the helm — for a second time — none of us know the lengths to which Trump (and his puppet masters) will go as his fingers brush dangerously close to the nuclear codes. Will he be more emboldened?
The signs are certainly there.
President Donald Trump 2.0 . . . will his cruelty towards migrants and refugees escalate, matched only by his fuelling of racial division? Image: ABC News screenshot IA
So far, Trump — who had already led the insurrection of a democratically elected government — has threatened to exit the nuclear arms pact with Russia, talked up a trade war with China and declared “all hell will break out” in the Middle East if Hamas hadn’t returned the Israeli hostages.
Will his cruelty towards migrants and refugees escalate, matched only by his fuelling of racial division?
This, too, appears to be already happening.
Trump’s rants leading up to his inauguration last week had been a steady stream of crazed declarations, each one more unhinged than the last.
Denial of catastrophic climate consequences
And will Trump be in even further denial over the catastrophic consequences of climate change than during his last term? Even as Los Angeles grapples with a still climbing death toll of 25 lives lost, 12,000 homes, businesses and other structures destroyed and 16,425 hectares (about the size of Washington DC) wiped out so far in the latest climactic disaster?
The fires are, of course, symptomatic of the many years of criminal negligence on global warming. But since Trump instead accused California officials of “prioritising environmental policies over public safety” while his buddy and head of government “efficiency”, Musk blamed black firefighters for the fires, it would appear so.
Will the madman, for surely he is one, also gift even greater protections to oligarchs like Musk?
“…pave the way for my Administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure Federal agencies”.
So, this too is already happening.
All of these actions will combine to create a scenario of destruction that will see the implosion of the US as we know it, though the details are yet to emerge.
The flawed AUKUS pact sinking quickly . . . Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with outgoing President Joe Biden, will Australia have the mettle to be bigger than Trump. Image: Independent Australia
What happens Down Under?
US allies — like Australia — have already been thoroughly indoctrinated by American pop culture in order to complement the many army bases they house and the defence agreements they have signed.
Though Trump hasn’t shown any interest in making it a 52nd state, Australia has been tucked up in bed with the United States since the Cold War. Our foreign policy has hinged on this alliance, which also significantly affects Australia’s trade and economy, not to mention our entire cultural identity, mired as it is in US-style fast food dependence and reality TV. Would you like Vegemite McShaker Fries with that?
So what will happen to Australia once the superpower we have followed into endless battles finally breaks down?
‘Trump has promised chaos and chaos is what he’ll deliver.’
His rise to power will embolden the rabid Far-Right in the US but will this be mirrored here? And will Australia follow the US example and this year elect our very own (admittedly scaled down) version of Trump, personified by none other than the Trump-loving Peter Dutton?
If any of his wild announcements are to be believed, between building walls and evicting even US nationals he doesn’t like, while simultaneously making Canadians US citizens, Trump will be extremely busy.
There will be little time even to consider Australia, let alone come to our rescue should we ever need the might of the US war machine — no matter whether it is an Albanese or sycophantic Dutton leadership.
It is a given, however, that we would be required to honour all defence agreements should our ally demand it.
It would be great if, as psychologists urge us to do when children act up, our leaders could simply ignore and refuse to engage with him, but it remains to be seen whether Australia will have the mettle to be bigger than Trump.
Republished from the Independent Australia with permission.
This article was written before The Electronic Intifada’s founding editor Ali Abunimah was arrested in Switzerland on Saturday afternoon for “speaking up for Palestine”. He has since been released and deported.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Ali AbunimahIsrael smuggled one of its soldiers out of Cyprus, apparently fearing his detention on charges related to the genocide in Gaza, according to Dyab Abou Jahjah, the co-founder of The Hind Rajab Foundation.
Abou Jahjah, a Belgian-Lebanese political activist and writer, told The Electronic Intifada livestream last week that his organisation was stepping up efforts all over the world to bring to justice Israeli soldiers implicated in the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children over the last 15 months.
Gaza Ceasefire Day 5. Video: The Electronic Intifada
Speaking from Gaza, Electronic Intifada contributor Donya Abu Sitta told us how people there are coping following the ceasefire, especially those returning to devastated homes and finding the remains of loved ones.
She shared a poem inspired by the hopes and fears of the young children she continued to teach throughout the genocide.
Despite the ceasefire, Israel has continued to attack Palestinians in some parts of Gaza. That was among developments covered in the news brief from associate editor Nora Barrows-Friedman, along with the efforts to alleviate the dire humanitarian situation.
Contributing editor Jon Elmer covered the latest ceasefire developments and the resistance operations in the period leading up to it.
We also discussed whether US President Donald Trump will force Israel to uphold the ceasefire and what the latest indications of his approach are.
‘There is an openness to the glee and celebration of genocidal violence in Israel that I think goes beyond anything we saw during the Iraq war or during apartheid in South Africa.’
And this writer took a critical look at Episcopal Bishop of Washington Mariann Edgar Budde.
She has been hailed as a hero for urging Donald Trump to respect the rights of marginalised groups, as the new president sat listening to her sermon at Washington’s National Cathedral.
But over the last 15 months, Budde has parroted Israeli atrocity propaganda justifying genocide, and has repeatedly failed to condemn former President Joe Biden’s key role in the mass slaughter and did not call on him to stop sending weapons to Israel.
Pursuing war criminals In the case of the soldier in Cyprus, The Hind Rajab Foundation filed a complaint, and after initial hesitation, judicial authorities in the European Union state opened an investigation of the soldier.
“When that was opened, the Israelis smuggled the soldier out of Cyprus,” Abou Jahjah said, calling the incident the first of its kind.
“And when I say smuggling, I’m not exaggerating, because we have information that he was even taken by a private jet,” Abou Jahjah added.
The foundation is named after Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was in a car with members of her family, trying to escape the Israeli onslaught in Gaza City, when they were attacked.
The story of Hind, trapped all alone in a car, surrounded by dead relatives, pleading over the phone for rescue, a conversation that was recorded by the Palestinian Red Crescent, is among the most poignant and brazen crimes committed during Israel’s genocide.
According to Abou Jahjah, lawyers and activists determined to seek justice for Palestinians identified a gap in the efforts to hold Israel accountable that they could fill: pursuing individual soldiers who have in many cases posted evidence of their own crimes in Gaza on social media.
The organisation and its growing global network of volunteers and legal professionals has been able to collect evidence on approximately 1000 Israeli soldiers which has been handed over to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
In addition to filing cases against Israeli soldiers traveling abroad, such as the one in Cyprus, and other recent examples in Brazil, Thailand and Italy, a main focus of the foundation is individuals who hold both Israeli and another nationality.
“Regarding the dual nationals, we are not under any restraint of time,” Abou Jahjah explained. “For example, if you’re Belgian, Belgium has jurisdiction over you.”
Renouncing their second nationality cannot shield these soldiers, according to Abou Jahjah, because courts will take into account their citizenship at the time the alleged crime was committed.
Abou Jahjah feels confident that with time, war criminals will be brought to justice. The organisation is also discussing expanding its work to the United States, where it may use civil litigation to hold perpetrators accountable.
Unsurprisingly, Israel and friendly governments are pushing back against The Hind Rajab Foundation’s work, and Abou Jahjah is now living under police protection.
“Things are kind of heavy on that level, but this will not disrupt our work,” Abou Jahjah said. “It’s kind of naive of them to think that the work of the foundation depends on a person.”
“We have legal teams across the planet, very capable people. Our data is spread across the planet,” Abou Jahjah added. “There’s nothing they can do. This is happening.”
Resistance report In his resistance report, Elmer analysed videos of operations that took place before the ceasefire, but which were only released by the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, after it took effect.
He also previewed Saturday, 25 January, when nearly 200 Palestinian prisoners were released in exchange for four Israeli female soldiers.
Will Trump keep Israel to the ceasefire? Pressure from President Trump was key to getting Israel to agree to a ceasefire deal it had rejected for almost a year. But will his administration keep up the pressure to see it through?
There have been mixed messages, with Trump recently telling reporters he was not sure it would hold, but also intriguingly distancing himself from Israel. “That’s not our war, it’s their war.”
We took a look at what these comments, as well as a renewed commitment to implementing the deal expressed by Steve Witkoff, the president’s envoy, tell us about what to expect.
As associate editor Asa Winstanley noted, “this ceasefire is not nothing.” It came about because the resistance wore down the Israeli army, and statements from Witkoff hinting that the US may even be open to talking to Hamas deserve close attention.
‘Largely silent’ By her own admission, Bishop Mariann Budde has remained “largely silent” about the genocide in Gaza, except when she was pushing Israeli propaganda or engaging in vague, liberal hand-wringing about “peace” and “love” without ever clearly condemning the perpetrators of mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians, demanding that the US stop the flow of weapons making it possible, or calling for accountability.
This type of evasion serves no one.
You can watch the programme on YouTube, Rumble or Twitter/X, or you can listen to it on your preferred podcast platform.
I must admit, I have been somewhat distracted by the chaotic events unfolding not just across the pond, but also the dodgy ceasefire deal that doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest when the colonialist outpost of Israel fancies killing some more children for no other reason whatsoever than the fact they’re not Israeli. It’s not hard to become distracted by the world’s richest moron throwing a…
It was a cold day in Washington, DC, on Tuesday when Donald Trump was sworn in for his second stint as President of the United States of America.
On account of freezing temperatures, the inauguration ceremony was moved indoors to the Capitol Rotunda, and the weather became a primary focus of much pre-inauguration media commentary.
The Reuters news agency reported that this was “one of the coldest inauguration days the US has experienced in the past few decades”, while also providing other crucial ceremony updates such as that “Mike Tyson snacked on a banana in the overflow room”.
I, myself, watched the event on my computer in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, where it is precisely the opposite of cold and where I have spent the past several days battling the scorpion population that has taken up residence in my house.
By the end of Trump’s swearing-in, however, I was undecided as to what was less pleasant: killing scorpions or watching the next episode of American dystopia unfold.
I tuned in at 11am, meaning I had a full hour before Trump took centre stage; for much of this time, the audience in the rotunda was treated to musical selections befitting a carousel or a circus.
The frigid weather outside was, meanwhile, at least probably good practice for life on Mars, a territory Trump would soon claim for the United States during his inaugural speech: “And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”
Not the only territorial conquest
This, to be sure, was not the only territorial conquest Trump promised. He also reiterated his determination to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” as well as to seize control of the Panama Canal because “American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape, or form”.
President Donald Trump . . . “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”. Image: The Conversation
But the Mars comments earned a maniacal grin from one person in the audience: the gazillionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, known for such ideas as that the “next really big thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there”.
Musk was one of various representatives of the earthly super-elite who — unlike poor Mike Tyson — made the cut for a spot in the rotunda. Also present were Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok.
As Al Jazeera noted the day prior to the inauguration, Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly donated $1 million to the ceremony, while “Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have said they would donate $1 million, along with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who donated $1 million”.
As of January 8, Trump’s inauguration fund had already racked up a record $170 million.
Anyway, what better way to “Make America Great Again” than by supercharging the plutocracy?
Declaring at the start of his speech that “the golden age of America begins right now”, Trump went on to express numerous other hallucinations, including that “national unity is now returning to America”. Never mind that the tyranny of an astronomically wealthy minority is not exactly, um, unifying.
Luckily on Planet Trump, reality is whatever he says it is. And Trump says that “sunlight is pouring over the entire world”.
‘Historic executive orders’
In his speech, Trump announced a “series of historic executive orders” that according to him, will jumpstart the “complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense”.
Among these executive orders was the declaration of “a national emergency at our southern border”, paving the way for the deportation of “millions and millions of criminal aliens” and entailing the deployment of the US military “to repel the disastrous invasion of our country”.
Under Trump’s command, the US “will also be designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organisations”. Then there’s the new “official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female”.
And of course, the more emergencies, the better: “[T]oday I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill.”
Recoiling at the very thought of environmentalism, Trump proclaimed: “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”
And if we happen to destroy Earth in the process, well, there’s always Mars.
As usual, the continuous invocation of God during the inauguration ceremony made a fine mockery of the ostensible separation of church and state in the US, and Trump revealed the reason he had survived a July assassination attempt in the state of Pennsylvania: “I was saved by God to make America great again.”
Overlap with Martin Luther King Jr Day
Last but not least, Trump took advantage of the overlap of his inauguration with Martin Luther King Jr Day, celebrated annually in the US on the third Monday of January, to pledge that “we will make his dream come true” — which would probably be easier if Trump himself weren’t a bona fide racist.
Indeed, Trump’s notion that “our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable” would seem to be distinctly at odds with King’s assessment of the US as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world”.
None of this is to imply that the Democrats have not done their part in terms of purveying global violence or upholding plutocracy, perpetuating brutal inequality, terrorising refuge seekers, and so on.
But Tuesday’s inaugural charade was an exercise in nihilism — and, as I return to my scorpions and Trump goes about making dystopia great again, I think I’ll take Mars over the “golden age of America” any day.
Belén Fernández is the author of Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center (OR Books, 2022), Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), and Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016). She writes for numerous publications and this article was first published by Al Jazeera.
Another week, another absolutely bullshit story about what the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) plans to subject benefits claimants to. This week, “benefits cheats could lose driving licences”. In amongst the launch of the government’s new proposals in their latest CRACKDOWN on benefits fraud, DWP boss Liz Kendall slipped out something truly ridiculous. Explaining the new plans to have…
People get ready
There’s a train a-coming
You don’t need no baggage
You just get on board
All you need is faith
To hear the diesels humming
Don’t need no ticket
You just thank the Lord
You might have seen Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s speech at the National Prayer Service in the United States following Trump’s elevation to the highest worldly position, or perhaps read about it in the news.
It’s well worth watching this short clip of her sermon if you haven’t, as the rest of this newsletter is about that and the reaction to it:
‘May I ask you to have mercy Mr President.’ Video: C-Span
I found the sermon courageous, heartfelt, and, above all, decent. It felt like there was finally an adult in the room again. Predictably, Trump and his vile little Vice-President responded like naughty little boys being reprimanded, reacting with anger at being told off in front of all their little mates.
That response will not have surprised the Bishop. As she prepared to deliver the end of her sermon, you could see her pause to collect her thoughts. She knew she would be criticised for what she was about to say, yet she had the courage to speak it regardless.
What followed was heartfelt and compelling, as the Bishop talked of the fears of LGBT people and immigrants.
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s speaking at the National Prayer Service. Image: C-Span screenshot
She spoke of them as if they were human beings like the rest of us, saying they pay their taxes, are not criminals, and are good neighbours.
The president did not want to hear her message. His anger was building as his snivelling sidekick looked toward him to see how the big chief would respond.
The President didn’t want to hear her message. Image: C-Span screenshot
Vented on social media
So, how did the leader of the free world react? Did he take it on the chin, appreciating that he now needed to show leadership for all, or did he call the person asking him to show compassion — “nasty”?
That’s right, it was the second one. I’m afraid there’s no prize for that as you’re all excluded due to inside knowledge of that kind of behaviour from observing David Seymour. The ACT leader responds in pretty much the same way when someone more intelligent and human points out the flaws in his soul.
Donald then went on his own Truth social media platform, which he set up before he’d tamed the Tech Oligarchs, and vented, “The so-called bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a radical left hard-line Trump hater”.
Which isn’t very polite, but when you think about it, his response should be seen as a badge of honour. Especially for someone of the Christian faith because all those who follow the teachings of Christ ought to be “radical left hard-line Trump haters”, or else they’ve rather missed the point. Don’t you think?
Certainly, pastor and activist John Pavlovitz thought so, saying, “Christians who voted for him, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Of course, if you were capable of shame, you’d never have voted for him to begin with.”
Pastor and activist John Pavlovitz responds.“She brought her church into the world of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart,” continued the President, like a schoolyard bully.
I thought it was a bit rich for a man who has used the church and the bible in order to sell himself to false Christians who worship money, who has even claimed divine intervention from God, to then complain about the Bishop not staying in her lane.
Speaking out against bigotry
If religious leaders don’t speak out against bigotry, hatred, and threats to peaceful, decent human beings — then what’s the point?
Wow. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde fearlessly calls out Trump and Vance to their faces. This is heroic. pic.twitter.com/igyKzC8dRo
I admired Budde’s bravery. Just quietly, the church hasn’t always had the best record of speaking out against those who’ve said the sort of things that Trump is saying.
If you’re unclear what I mean, I’m talking about Hitler, and it’s nice to see the church, or at least the Bishop, taking the other side this time around. Rather than offering compliance and collaboration, as they did then and as the political establishment in America is doing now.
Aside from all that, it feels like a weird, topsy-turvy world when the church is asking the government to be more compassionate towards the LGBT community.
El Douche hadn’t finished and said, “Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology!”
It’s like he just says the opposite of what is happening, and people are so stupid or full of hate that they accept it, even though it’s obviously false.
So, the Bishop is derided as “nasty” when she is considerate and kind. She is called “Not Smart” when you only have to listen to her to know she is an intelligent, well-spoken person. She is called “Ungracious” when she is polite and respectful.
Willing wretches
As is the case with bullies, there are always wretches willing to support them and act similarly to win favour, even as many see them for what they are.
Mike Collins, a Republican House representative, tweeted, “The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.”
Isn’t that disgusting? An elected politician saying that someone should be deported for daring to challenge the person at the top, even when it is so clearly needed.
Echoing the teachings of Jesus and calling out Trump’s cruelty, ignorance, and bigotry to his face, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde delivers a sermon for the ages. Bishop Budde stared down authoritarian fascism and said ‘Not today, motherfucker.’ pic.twitter.com/JDBDa5RAgs
Fox News host Sean Hannity said, “Instead of offering a benediction for our country, for our president, she goes on the far-left, woke tirade in front of Donald Trump and JD Vance, their families, their young children. She made the service about her very own deranged political beliefs with a disgraceful prayer full of fear-mongering and division.”
Perhaps most despicably, Robert Jeffress, the pastor of Dallas’s First Baptist Church, tweeted this sycophantic garbage:
Attended national prayer service today at the Washington National Cathedral during which Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde insulted rather than encouraged our great president @realDonaldTrump. There was palpable disgust in the audience with her words. @POTUS
Those cronies of Trump seem weak and dishonest to me compared to the words of Bishop Budde herself, who said the following after her sermon:
“I wanted to say there is room for mercy, there’s room for a broader compassion. We don’t need to portray with a broadcloth in the harshest of terms some of the most vulnerable people in our society, who are, in fact, our neighbours, our friends, our children, our friends, children, and so forth.”
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde a courageous stand. Image: https://cathedral.org/about/leadership/the-rt-rev-mariann-edgar-budde/Speaking up or silent?
Over the next four years, many Americans will have to choose between speaking up on issues they believe in or remaining silent and nodding in agreement.
The Republican party has made its pact with the Donald, and the Tech Bros have fallen over each other in their desire to kiss his ass; it will be a dark time for many regular people, no doubt, to stand up for what they believe in even as those with power and privilege fall in line behind the tyrant.
Decoding symbolism in Lord of the Flies. Image: https://wr1ter.com/decoding-symbolism-in-lord-of-the-flies So, although I am not Christian, I am glad to see the Church stand up for those under attack, show courage in the face of the bully, and be the adult in the room when so many bow at the feet of the child with the conch shell.
In my view Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde is a hero, and she does herself great credit with this courageous, compassionate, Christian stand
First published by Nick’s Kōrero and republished with permission. For more of Nick Rockel’s articles or to subscribe to his blog, click here.
Canada is also in Trump’s sights with trade tariff threats and claims it should be the 51st US state. Its government has vociferously opposed Trump’s comments, begun back-channel lobbying in Washington, and prepared for trade retaliation.
Both cases highlight the coming challenges for management of the global US alliance network in an era of increased great power rivalry — not least for NATO, of which Denmark and Canada are member states.
Members of that network saw off the Soviet Union’s formidable Cold War challenge and are now crucial to addressing China’s complex challenge to contemporary international order. They might be excused for asking themselves the question: with allies like this, who needs adversaries?
Oversimplifying complex relationships Trump’s longstanding critique is that allies have taken advantage of the US by under-spending on defence and “free-riding” on the security provided by Washington’s global network.
In an intuitive sense, it is hard to deny this. To varying degrees, all states in the international system — including US allies, partners and even adversaries — are free-riding on the benefits of the global international order the US constructed after the Cold War.
But is Trump therefore justified in seeking a greater return on past US investment?
Since alliance commitments involve a complex mix of interests, perception, domestic politics and bargaining, Trump wouldn’t be the deal-maker he says he is if he didn’t seek a redistribution of the alliance burden.
The general problem with his recent foreign policy rhetoric, however, is that a grain of truth is not a stable basis for a sweeping change in US foreign policy.
Specifically, Trump’s “free-riding” claims are an oversimplification of a complex reality. And there are potentially substantial political and strategic costs associated with the US using coercive diplomacy against what Trump calls “delinquent” alliance partners.
US military on parade in Warsaw in 2022 . . . force projection is about more than money. Image: Getty Images/The Conversation
Free riding or burden sharing? The inconvenient truth for Trump is that “free-riding” by allies is hard to differentiate from standard alliance “burden sharing” where the US is in a quid pro quo relationship: it subsidises its allies’ security in exchange for benefits they provide the US.
And whatever concept we use to characterise US alliance policy, it was developed in a deliberate and methodical manner over decades.
US subsidisation of its allies’ security is a longstanding choice underpinned by a strategic logic: it gives Washington power projection against adversaries, and leverage in relations with its allies.
To the degree there may have been free-riding aspects in the foreign policies of US allies, this pales next to their overall contribution to US foreign policy.
Allies were an essential part in the US victory in its Cold War competition with the Soviet-led communist bloc, and are integral in the current era of strategic competition with China.
Overblown claims of free-riding overlook the fact that when US interests differ from its allies, it has either vetoed their actions or acted decisively itself, with the expectation reluctant allies will eventually follow.
During the Cold War, the US maintained a de facto veto over which allies could acquire nuclear weapons (the UK and France) and which ones could not (Germany, Taiwan, South Korea).
In the 1980s, Washington proceeded with the deployment of US missiles on the soil of some very reluctant NATO states and their even more reluctant populations. The same pattern has occurred in the post-Cold War era, with key allies backing the US in its interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The problems with coercion Trump’s recent comments on Greenland and Canada suggest he will take an even more assertive approach toward allies than during his first term. But the line between a reasonable US policy response and a coercive one is hard to draw.
It is not just that US policymakers have the challenging task of determining that line. In pursuing such a policy, the US also risks eroding the hard-earned credit it earned from decades of investment in its alliance network.
There is also the obvious point that is takes two to tango in an alliance relationship. US allies are not mere pawns in Trump’s strategic chessboard. Allies have agency.
They will have been strategising how to deal with Trump since before the presidential campaign in 2024. Their options range from withholding cooperation to various forms of defection from an alliance relationship.
Are the benefits associated with a disruption of established alliances worth the cost? It is hard to see how they might be. In which case, it is an experiment the Trump administration might be well advised to avoid.
Dr Nicholas Khoo is associate professor of international politics and principal research fellow, Institute for Indo-Pacific Affairs (Christchurch), University of Otago. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
Celebration time. Some Palestinian prisoners have been released. A mother reunited with her daughter. A young mother reunited with her babies.
Still in prison are people who never received a fair trial, people that independent inquirers say are wrongly imprisoned. Still in prison kids who cursed soldiers who walked into their villages wielding guns.
Still imprisoned far too many Palestinians who threw stones against bullets. Still imprisoned thousands of Palestinian hostages.
Many of us never knew how many hostages had been stolen, hauled into jails by Israel before 7 October 2023. We only heard the one-sided story of that day. The day when an offence force on a border was taken by surprise and when it panicked and blasted and bombed.
When that army guarding the occupation did more to lose lives than save lives.
Many never knew and perhaps never will know how many of the Palestinians who were kidnapped before and after that day had been beaten and tortured, including with the torture of rape.
We do know many have been murdered. We do know that some released from prison died soon after. We do not know how many more Palestinians will be taken hostage and imprisoned behind the prison no reporter is allowed to photograph.
Israelis boast over prison crime
The only clue to what happens inside is that Israelis have boasted this crime on national television. The clue is that Israeli soldiers have been tried for raping their own colleagues.
Make no mistake, this is a mean misogynist mercantile army. No sensible rational caring person would wish to serve in it.
No mother on any side of this conflict should lose her child. No father should bury his daughter or son. No grandparent should grieve over the loss of a life that should outlive them.
The crimes need to be exposed. All of them. Our media filters the truth. It does not provide a fair or full story. If you want that switch for pity’s sake go to Al Jazeera English.
The Palestinian people were forced to flee their homes in Gaza. Those who were never responsible for any crime were bombed out of their homes, they fled as their families were murdered, burned to death, shot by snipers. They fled while soldiers mocked their dead children.
They return home to ashes. If we want peace we must face the truths that create conflict. We are all connected in peace and war and peace.
Peace is the strongest greeting. It sears the heart and soars the soul.
It can only be achieved when we recognise and stop the anguish that causes oppression.
Saige England is a freelance journalist and author living in the Aotearoa New Zealand city of Ōtautahi.
COMMENTARY:By Steven Cowan, editor of Against The Current
New Zealand’s One News interviewed a Gaza journalist last week who has called out the Western media for its complicity in genocide.
For some 15 months, the Western media have framed Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza as a “legitimate” war.
Pretending to provide an objective and impartial view of “the Gaza War”, the Western media has failed to report on the atrocities that the Israel has committed in Gaza. The true face of Israel’s genocidal assault has been hidden behind the Western media’s determination to sanitise genocide.
Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed’s appeal to the world and the Western media. Video: Dawn News
Even the deliberate targeting of journalists by the Israeli “Defence” Force (IDF), a war crime, has not moved the Western media to take action. More than 200 journalists have been killed in Gaza and the Western media has remained silent.
The New Zealand and Pacific media also have nothing to be proud of in their coverage of events in Gaza. They, too, have consistently framed Israel’s genocidal rampage as a legitimate war and swept Israel’s war crimes under the carpet.
Some news outlets, like NZ’s Newstalk ZB, have gone as far as to defend Israel’s actions.
With the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza last week, One News, for the first time since Israel began its murderous assault, chose to talk live to a Palestinian journalist in Gaza. That journalist was 22-year-old Abubaker Abed.
Ignored by Western media
While One News introduced him as a reporter for the Associated Press, most of Abed’s reports have been for Palestinian news outlets like The Electronic Intifida.
On January 11, Abed made a speech condemning the Western media’s complicity in genocide. While the speech has been widely circulated in the social media, it has been ignored by the Western media.
In New Zealand, the important speech has failed to make it to the One News website.
One News interviewing Gaza journalist Abubaker Abed who has called out the Western media for its complicity in genocide.
This article was first published on Steven Cowan’s website Against The Current. Republished with permission.
Trump doesn’t just hate nonbinary Mexicans, he also wants disabled people dead
Okay he didn’t say that specifically, but he came very close to it. Just a few minutes after announcing that anyone who lost their job in the military because they refused to be vaccinated against Covid would reinstated and back paid, he dealt an unusually subtle blow to disabled people
Right in between declaring he’d take back the Panama Canal and that they’d go to fucking Mars was this:
We will end the chronic disease epidemic and keep our children safe, healthy and disease-free.
Of course there’s something glaringly obvious here, you can’t “end” chronic illness, because the clues in the name – they’re chronic. You can however deny support, make it harder for disabled people to get treatment, and actively work to endanger them.
So how is Trump planning to “end chronic disease”? Well it sure as fuck ain’t through support and funding research. As always, Trump didn’t elaborate on his actual plan or concept of a plan for this. But his previous work and pledges give us a pretty clear picture and either way it’s gonna be a shit old time for disabled people in America, again.
Judge Trump by his record
Trump’s own record of wanting to deny children disability benefits and severely reduce disability benefits speaks for itself. But wait, there’s more.
Project 2025, which Trump denies having anything to do with yet attempted to enact 64% of it’s 2016 policies, has some particularly nasty ideas for people with disabilities and chronic conditions.
The biggest of all is that it wants to put “time limits or lifetime caps” on Medicaid, which would kick low income people off their health insurance after an arbitrary amount of time. This means the poorest disabled people would be forced to skip, delay, or all out stop their potentially life saving treatment.
On top of this it also wants to make it easier for drug companies to boost the prices of medication by repealing the Inflation Reduction Act which caps medication costs and makes vaccinations free for those over 65 and with certain disabilities. This means some medication could rise by $4,000 annually and risk not being able to vaccinate themselves against things such as shingles and the flu.
Thankfully though Trump isn’t operating alone. Surely someone level headed will be in charge of the Medicare and Medicaid.
Oh wait it’s fucking Dr Oz off the telly, the guy who claimed there was arsenic in apple juice.
The real threat to disabled lives
Okay, at least the health secretary isn’t a complete conspiracy theorist. Nah wrong again, it’s Robert F Kennedy Jr, he of brain worms and claiming vaccines caused autism fame. He also believes chronic illness only originated in the 1980s.
In November he unveiled the Make America Healthy Again plan, because of course it’s called that. It’s basically all food is poison, you cant trust medication, and instead we should all be drinking raw milk.
I wish I was exaggerating here.
As well as firing all the actual nutritional scientists from the health agency, he thinks all food is “poison”. He’s however, bizarrely against vegetable oils and thinks we should go back to cooking with saturated animal fats. He also thinks kids shouldn’t be eating grains (for some reason) and that we should all be drinking raw milk, which has been linked to the recent bird flu outbreak.
Big surprise, brain worm guy hates medication
RFK Jr is also – big surprise – massively against taking any types of medication. During campaigning, he pledged to criminalise SSRIs and Adderall. It’s okay! It’s not like these are drugs which many people rely on to live.
He is however a massive believer in alternatives to drugs. On Twitter he said the FDA had waged “war on public health”. He then accused the agency of “aggressive suppression” of anything that “advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma”. This included but is not limited to sunshine (yes really), hydroxychloroquine (which the FDA does regulate and is patented), ivermectin (again regulated and patented), vitamins (yep you guessed it), exercise and psychedelics.
He also of course, thinks you shouldn’t trust the water supply, because – of course he does.
Drugs are bad kids, but not those ones
If hydroxychloroquine sounds familiar to you, that’s because it’s the drug Trump, RFK Jr and many others started touting as a cure to Covid.
What it actually does is prevent malaria and help manage the symptoms of lupus and arthritis. FDA pulled the use of it for Covid due to lack of evidence, but there were also concerns about rich folk buying it in bulk and increasing the price so disabled people who relied on it couldn’t afford it.
If RFK Jr decides to reverse the ruling, whilst stopping companies from hiking up prices, many could be at risk.
His obsession with psychedelics is particularly troubling as there are fears he could push through dangerous drugs whilst limiting those that actually help people with mental health issues. For instance last year the FDA rejected Lykos Therapeutics’ MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD after some of the participants in the trial participants reported feeling suicidal and even attempting suicide.
The next four years will be life threatening for many
While Trump may claim he wants to end chronic disease, there is no way to do this that would not spell the mass murder of disabled people.
That’s why it felt like a punch in the gut when, during the religious section of the inauguration, was the religious section Father Francis Mann, beseeched god to
inspire our new leaders to be champions for the vulnerable and advocates for those whose voices are often silenced.
Because nothing says championing the vulnerable like making it illegal to be nonbinary, mass deportations, and essentially wiping out disabled people.
I wish there was some sort of hopeful message here. But unfortunately it seems that Trump’s second term is going to be even scarier and more dangerous for marginalised people than the last one.
The following is a short letter from Canary reader Sarah Gale. Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union, has announced his retirement at the age of 63.
Elected in 2021, Lynch led the union through significant industrial actions, notably the extensive rail strikes from 2022 to 2024.
Prior to his tenure at RMT, he worked as a qualified electrician and was blacklisted for union involvement, leading him to co-found the Electrical and Plumbing Industries Union in 1988.
Lynch expressed pride in the union’s resilience against challenges, stating “We can all be proud that our union stood up against the wholesale attacks on the rail industry by the previous Tory government and the union defeated them”.
The RMT has initiated the process to elect a new general secretary, with the election concluding in May 2025.
Possibly the greatest prime minister we never had, is retiring. Mick Lynch, the working class lad from Paddington, left school at 16 and then proceeded to eloquently perform common sense verbal gymnastics with brazen truth twisters, who, when they failed to outsmart him, then resorted to slander and the proverbial grasping at straws.
Mick amplified the voices of poorly paid and precariat workers everywhere and not just his RMT union members.
I was fortunate to meet him twice, once at an ‘Enough is Enough’ rally in 2022 and then on the march to save the ticket offices in 2023 where I saw many hopeful faces proudly holding up placards saying, “Mick Lynch for Prime Minister.” You couldn’t meet a more authentic bloke; he looked chuffed when I gifted him a copy of Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and informed me, “that’s my bible.”
Mick, like all readers of the Canary I’m sure, refuses to believe that a fairer society is impossible – a society where everyone can and does thrive. Mick epitomises the celebrated quotation from the Welsh thinker and writer, Raymond Williams:
To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.
I wish Mick Lynch a well-earned retirement and hope he lives to see the words of another great man, albeit a fictional one, come to fruition:
The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.’
An Al-Jazeera Arabic special report translated by The Palestine Chronicle staff details how Israel’s military strategy in Gaza, aimed at dismantling Hamas and displacing Palestinian civilians, has failed after 470 days of conflict.
ANALYSIS: By Abdulwahab al-Mursi
On May 5, 2024, nearly seven months into Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the main goal of the war was to destroy Hamas and prevent it from controlling Gaza.
However, over 250 days since this statement, and 470 days into the Israeli aggression, it has become clear that Netanyahu’s promises have faded into illusions.
In the early hours of the first phase of the ceasefire on Sunday, Israeli military radio reported that Hamas forces were reasserting their control over Gaza, stating that Hamas, which had never lost control of any part of the territory during the war, was using the ceasefire to strengthen its grip.
This development highlights the gap between Israel’s strategic objectives and the reality on the ground, as images from Gaza continue to reveal widespread devastation and loss of life, yet Hamas remains firmly in control.
Popular Support: The backbone of Hamas Military literature highlights the concept of “Center of Gravity” (COG) for military organisations, a concept that can vary depending on the organisation and context.
In the case of Hamas and Palestinian Resistance, the central element of their strength lies in the support of the local population.
This grassroots support provides Hamas with invaluable social depth, a continuous supply of human resources, and strong strategic backing.
The popular support and belief in the resistance’s strategic choices and leadership have allowed Hamas to maintain its popular mandate to achieve Palestinian national goals.
Recognising this, Israel has targeted Gaza’s civilian infrastructure both militarily and psychologically, aiming to raise the costs of supporting the resistance and weaken Hamas’s popular base.
Israel has treated Gaza’s entire civilian infrastructure as military targets, believing that expanding the death toll among civilians and inflicting maximum suffering would force the population to turn against Hamas.
Yet, despite these efforts, images of celebrations in Gaza, even in areas heavily targeted by Israel, underscore the exceptional nature of the Gaza situation, where resistance culture is deeply rooted and unyielding.
The strategic consciousness of Gaza’s people There appears to be a collective strategic awareness among Gaza’s people to maintain a victorious image at all costs, even in the midst of devastating humanitarian crises.
This desire to project an image of resistance and triumph, despite the overwhelming tragedy, has led to spontaneous public displays of support for Hamas and resistance forces, reinforcing their resolve against the Israeli onslaught.
Failure of forced displacement plans In the initial weeks of the war, Israel revealed its plan to forcibly relocate Gaza’s population.
Israeli media outlets reported in October 2023 that Netanyahu had proposed relocating Gaza’s residents to other countries.
However, after months of war, Gaza’s residents have shown an unshakable determination to remain, with displaced individuals in refugee camps celebrating their return to their homes, despite the widespread destruction they have suffered.
In northern Gaza, particularly in Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun, Jabaliya, and Shuja’iyya, Israel’s attempts to prevent the return of displaced residents became a significant obstacle to a ceasefire agreement, delaying it for months.
Israel’s plan, known as the “Generals’ Plan” by former Israeli military advisor Giora Eiland, aimed to create a buffer zone in northern Gaza by applying immense military and living pressures on the population.
However, as evident from the ongoing images from the region, the displaced population continues to resist and return, undermining Israel’s relocation goals.
Hamas’s military structure endures One of Netanyahu’s primary goals was to dismantle Hamas’s military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades.
However, in the early hours of the first phase of the ceasefire, images showed Hamas fighters organising military parades in southern Gaza, signalling the resilience of Hamas’s military structure even before the ceasefire officially began.
Despite Israeli claims of killing thousands of Hamas fighters and destroying significant portions of Gaza’s tunnel network, the rapid and organized emergence of Al-Qassam forces on the ground suggests that these Israeli claims may have been aimed more at reassuring the Israeli public about the progress of the war, rather than reflecting the true situation on the ground.
Failure of post-war plans In December 2023, Netanyahu rejected Palestinian proposals that Hamas be included in Gaza’s post-war governance, insisting, “There will be no Hamas in the post-war period; we will eliminate them.”
Throughout the war, Israel attempted various unilateral methods to manage Gaza, including direct military administration and creating a new technocratic authority with local leaders, but all efforts failed.
Israeli military attempts to distribute humanitarian aid in Gaza also proved ineffective, as the army struggled to manage these operations.
As the conflict nears what is supposed to be its final phase, the governance structure in Gaza has not changed.
Hamas’s leadership, especially the Al-Qassam Brigades, continues to operate effectively, and the ceasefire agreement has allowed for the resumption of local security forces.
Even after Israel’s targeted assassinations of 723 members of Gaza’s police and security apparatus, the resilience of Gaza’s security forces has remained evident.
This failure of Israel’s post-war vision was highlighted by a comment from a political analyst on Israeli i24 News, who questioned the results of the prolonged military operation: “What have we achieved in a year and five months?
“We destroyed many homes, lost many of our best soldiers, and in the end, the result is the same: Hamas rules, aid enters, and the Qassam Brigades return.”
Republished from The Palestinian Chronicle with permission.
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