Shelling the Aid Seekers: Israel’s “Humanitarian” Project in Gaza
It’s official. If not, it ought to be. Israeli forces freely butcher Palestinians in Gaza of all stripes, standing and states of desperation. They do so casually or indifferently or…
Dr Binoy Kampmark
Self-Defence and Acceptable Murder: Netanyahu Dreams of Regime Change
These are the sorts of things that tend to be discussed in bunkered facilities and grimy locker rooms. Now, very much in the open and before the presses, the head…
Condemning the Right to Self Defence: Iran’s Retaliation and Israel’s Privilege
There is a throbbing complaint among Western powers, including those in the European Union and the United States. Iran is not playing by the rules. Instead of accepting with dutiful…
AUKUS: A Very Antipodean Stupidity
Call it abandonment, anxiety, or just latent stupidity. The messy goo of feelings and fuzzy notions behind Australia’s most injudicious strategic decision is yielding its nasty harvest. Conceived by paranoid…
The Morality of Small Means: Sanctioning Ben-Gvir and Smotrich
They really ought to be doing more. But in the scheme of things, the sanctioning of Israeli’s frothily fanatical ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich by New Zealand, Canada, Norway,…
Catching Israel Out: Gaza and the Madleen “Selfie” Protest
The latest incident with the Madleen vessel, pictured as a relief measure by celebrity activists and sundry accompaniments to supply civilians with a modest assortment of humanitarian aid, is merely…
Bad Old Habits: Israel Backs Palestinian Militias in Gaza
It is one of those things that should be recorded and replayed for eternity: Israel, in order to guard some misplaced sense of security, happily backs Palestinian groups in order…
The Inevitable Souring: Elon Musk Falls Out with Donald Trump
Sandpit politics is rarely edifying and grown toddlers taking their fists to each other is unlikely to interest. But when they feature US President Donald Trump and the world’s wealthiest…
Humanitarian Camouflage: The Debut of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
What a nasty thing it has turned out to be. It involved subversion – Israel’s desire to ignore international tenets of humanitarian aid in favour of expediency and security –…
Roads to War: The EU’s Security Action for Europe Fund
As the world was readying for the Second World War, the insightful humane Austrian author Stefan Zweig made the following glum observation: “Openly and flagrantly, certain countries express their will…
The Killing of Israeli Embassy Staffers: Netanyahu’s Antisemitism Canard
Here was another chance – at least as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw it – of threading one set of events with another. It’s all part of the Israeli…
The Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza: Israel’s Operation Gideon’s Chariots
The latest phase of slaughter and seizure on the part of Israeli forces in Gaza has commenced. Following relentless airstrikes that have left hundreds of Palestinians dead, Operation Gideon’s Chariots…
Celluloid Exploitation: Immigrants and Reality Television
Shocking it might be, yet still part of an old pattern. The US Department of Homeland Security is floating the idea of using a reality television program to select immigrants…
Rehabilitation and Confidence Tricks: Al-Sharaa, Trump and Sanctions
Contrary to the propaganda of moral upstarts, terrorism pays. It proves rewarding. It establishes states and reconstitutes others. It encourages change, for ill or otherwise. The stance taken, righteously pitiful,…
Trump, Planes and the Arabian Gulf Tour
They seemed made for each other. A former reality television star, with dubious real estate credentials, a freakish alienation from the truth, and the various leaders of the Gulf States,…
Commemorating Mummy: Reflections on Mother’s Day
Commercial gimmicks are sometimes impossible to beat off. Their stench and pull follows, even as you look the other way. One occasion is most prominent in this regard. Nostrils get…
White Smoke and Speculation: The Election of Pope Leo XIV
The occasion of electing another Pope was a spectacle in time and, in many ways, outside it. It was the one rare occasion in the twenty-first century where ancient ceremony,…
Expulsion and Occupation: Israel’s Proposed Gaza Plan
Killing civilians wholesale, starving them to convince those unaffected to change course, and shepherding whole populations like livestock into conditions of further misery would all qualify as heinous crimes in…
Fantasy and Exploitation: The US-Ukraine Minerals Deal
The agreement between Washington and Kyiv to create an investment fund to search for rare earth minerals has been seen as something of a turn by the Trump administration. From…
The ICJ, Israel and the Gaza Blockade
The murder and starvation of populations in real time, subject to rolling coverage and commentary, is not usually the done thing. These are the sorts of activities kept quiet and…
Yale, Ben-Gvir and Banning Palestinian Groups
Universities are in a bind. As institutions of learning and teaching, knowledge learnt and taught should, or at the very least could, be put into practice. How unfortunate for rich…
Fallibility, Dirty Wars and Pope Francis I
The very idea of infallibility sets one up for the mighty fall. But the Pope, temporal head of all Catholics, is one such character, the papacy one such institution, arrogantly…
The Selling of America: Ending the US Dollar’s Exorbitant Privilege
Has the love, or even more so the fixation, gone with the US dollar, that all cushioning reserve currency that has shown itself unimpeachable for decades? A curious event teasing…
Euphemistic Practices: The IDF, Killing Aid Workers and Self-Investigation
Few armed forces have managed to make murder and executions the stuff of procedural aberration rather than intentional practice. Killing civilians and unarmed personnel is the stuff of misreading and…
Dotty and Cretinous: Reviewing AUKUS
It was a deal for the cretinous, hammered out by the less than bright for less than honourable goals. But AUKUS, the trilateral security alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom…
De Facto Occupation: Israel’s Security Zone Strategy
In recent months, the Israeli Defense Forces have been much taken by a term that augurs poorly for peaceful accord in the Middle East. “Security zones” are being seized in…
Flexible and Sly: Indonesian Defence Policy, Russia and Australian Anxiety
Island states tend to be anxious political entities. Encircled by water, seemingly defended by natural obstacles, the fear of corrupting penetration is never far. Threats of such unwanted intrusion are…
Gender Stunts in Space: Blue Origin’s Female Celebrity Envoys
Indulgent, vain and profligate, the all-female venture into space on the self-piloted New Shepard (NS-31) operated by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin was space capitalism and celebrity shallowness on full show,…
Killing Paramedics: Israel’s War on Palestinian Health
It was a massacre. Fifteen emergency workers, butchered in cold blood by personnel from the Israeli Defense Forces in southern Gaza on March 23. It all came to light from…
Withdrawal Symptoms: Hungary, Europe and the International Criminal Court
Europe seems to be suffering paroxysms of withdrawal, notably when it comes to international conventions. Many states on the continent seem to have decided that international law is a burden…
Addressing Hate Speech and Incitement: Holding Meta Accountable in Africa
It was yet another unwelcome development for Mark Zuckerberg’s technology titan Meta, the parent company of Facebook. The High Court of Kenya has found that the US-based entity can be…
Closed for Business: The Oddities of Trump’s Tariffs
Liberation Day, as April 2 was described by US President Donald Trump, had all the elements of reality television perversion. It also had a dreamy, aspirational hope: that factories would…
For the Love of Landmines: European States Exit the Ottawa Convention
Paranoia manifests in various ways. It can eat away individuals in desperate solitude, whittling away sanity and balance. It can be enlisted in the making of policy. The latter can…
Secrecy and Virtue Signalling: Another View of Signalgate
There has been a fascinating, near unanimous condemnation among the cognoscenti about the seemingly careless addition of Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic to the chat chain of Signal by US…
Authoritarian Politics: Netanyahu’s War on Israeli Institutions
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waging a war on many fronts. He has ended the tense ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza in spectacularly bloody fashion and resumed bombing of…
Trump’s Star Wars Revival: The Golden Dome Antimissile Fantasy
Bad ideas do not necessarily die; they retire to museums of failure and folly, awaiting to be revived by the next proponent who should know better. The Iron Dome shield…
Kirsty Coventry, Rebranding and the IOC
The International Olympic Committee, the sporting world’s equivalent of a white-collar crime family, has made its decision on who will succeed the outgoing president, Thomas Bach. Representatives gathered in Greece…
Careless People, Meta and Restricting the Digital Town Square
There is much talk in this age of heaving tech behemoths about the digital town square, where views can be aired with confidence, impunity and, at stages, disconcerting stupidity. Tech…
Back to Tried Failures: The New Offensive on Gaza
If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your only option. This is proving very much to be the case with the resumption of savagely lethal strikes on Gaza…
The Script of Anxiety: Poland’s Nuclear Weapons Fascination
With the Ukraine War and the retreat of the United States from what has routinely been called Europe’s security architecture, states are galloping to whatever point of presumed sanctuary is…
Sporting Contradictions: Athletes, the Olympics and Climate Change
The time has come for arguably the sporting world’s most famous mafia organisation to select its new chief. The various turf-conscious representatives of the International Olympic Committee will be busy…
Militarising Europe: The EU Defence Spending Bug
We live in dangerous times, and politicians are happy to be cheerleaders of that supposed fact. They do not care to reassure; they merely care to strike fear into hearts…
Aggrieved Speculation: The Trump Illness Hypothesis
The critics are utterly beside themselves in trying to understand the bruising odds and turns of Donald J. Trump, the reality showman and business tycoon who became US president twice. …
Macron’s Offer: France and the Delusions of Nuclear Deterrence
The singular antics of US President Donald Trump, notably towards supposed allies, has stirred the pot regarding national security in various capitals. From Canberra to Brussels, there is concern that…
Righteous, Confused and Unwilling: Europe’s Ukrainian Predicament
There is something deeply moving about the ignorance and scatty nature of politicians. At points, it can even be endearing. In the apparently wide wake left by the mauling of…
Zelensky: Victim of Colosseum Politics
There was a revolting tabloid quality to the Oval Office reception given to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on February 28, but then again, President Donald Trump is a tabloid brute,…
Fiendish Experiments: Trump’s Guantánamo Bay Migrant Detentions
Guantánamo Bay has been a fiendish experiment in US law for decades. The fiendishness lies in the subversion. Operating as a naval base in Cuba, this contentious facility has been…
Israel’s Annexation Drive: The West Bank and Expelling Palestinian Refugees
It has the feeling of a ghastly ending, one pushed along by desperation and eagerness. First, levelling Gaza and turning it to an uninhabitable moonscape, with the promise of a…
Feeling Very Fine: Picasso the Printmaker at the British Museum
This is Pablo Picasso the way he is rarely seen – at least in so far as the hundred or so pieces at the British Museum’s Picasso: Printmaker have been…
Far From Benign: The US Aid Industrial Complex
The US aid program began in earnest in the early stages of the Cold War, with an intention to beat off the contenders from the Soviet bloc in the postcolonial…
Cutting the Ghost Budget: Elon Musk versus the Pentagon
The rampaging antics of a querulous, sociopathic tech oligarch as he busies himself identifying which government departments to raid, trim, if not abolish altogether, understandably concerns those in the business…
A Thief’s Mentality: Trump, Real Estate and Dreams of Ethnic Cleansing
President Donald J. Trump likes teasing out the unmentionable, and the Israel-Palestinian situation was hardly going to be any different. With a touch of horror and the grotesque, he offered…
Funeral Atmospherics at the British Library
On October 23, 2023, the British Library, one of the world’s finest repositories of knowledge, was subjected to a cyber-attack. Some 600GB of files, including the personal data of Library…
Pity the Poesy: Mark Rutte, NATO and Spending for War
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting” (1919) There have been politicians who have fancied themselves as poets. …
Bitter Harvests: The Gaza Ceasefire
Twinning the terms “ceasefire” and “Gaza” seems not only incongruous but an obscene joke. This is largely because the ceasefire announced on January 15 between Israel and Hamas could have…
Situation Critical: UNRWA and its Continued Operations
In April last year, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini told the United Nations Security Council that “an insidious campaign to end UNRWA’s operations is under way, with serious implications for peace…
AUKUS: Flawed and Sinking
A stillborn agreement treated as thrivingly alive; an understanding celebrated as consensual and equal. The AUKUS security arrangement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, envisaging the transfer…
Detained Without Charge: Eleven Yemenis Leave Guantánamo
On January 6, the Pentagon announced that it had “resettled” 11 Yemeni men to Oman after detaining them over two decades without charge at the US naval facility of Guantánamo…
Arresting and Killing Greenies: Targeting Climate Change Protests
Climate change, like any crisis afflicting earth and humanity, is bound to bring out the best and the worst of a species that soils its nest, salts the earth, and…
Join the Army; Travel to Exotic, Distant Lands; and Radicalise
It has been popular to see political and religious radicalisation as something oddly separable from institutions of state. State institutions are meant to cope and cure the condition, not foster…
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