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…
Binoy Kampmark
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Frail Egos and Sandpit Colonialism: Australia, the United States and Invading Iraq
Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard is in the news again. The release of Australian cabinet documents from 2004 – a supposed treat for historians of Australian history each new…
Jimmy Carter, Israel and the Apartheid Question
The late centenarian, Jimmy Carter, occupied a difficult position in the line of imperial magistrates we know as US Presidents. Coming to power in the aftermath of murderous US adventurism…
Sinking Mike Pompeo: Tucker Carlson, Assange and Trump
Mike Pompeo’s role in the first Trump administration as both director of the Central Intelligence Agency and US Secretary of State will be forever associated with the venom and desperation…
Jesting on the Environment: Australian Mining Gets a Present
Mining magnates seem to have it all. Far more significant than royalty, such figures are the unelected captains of industry who know that governments will do whatever they can to…
Ruthless Settlements: BHP, Brazil and the Samarco Fundão Dam Class Action
The BHP Group, as with other mining giants, has much explaining to do in the way it has approached the environment. It has become a master of the greenwashing experiment,…
Crippling UNRWA: The Knesset’s Collective Punishment of Palestinians
The man has a cheek. Having lectured Iranians and Lebanese about what (and who) is good for them in terms of rulers and rule (we already know what he thinks…
Protecting the Merchants of Death: The Police Effort for Land Forces 2024
September 11. Melbourne. The scene: the area between Spencer Street Bridge and the Batman Park-Spencer Street tram stop. Heavily armed police, with glinting face coverings and shields, had seized and…
Killing Bazaars: The Land Forces Expo Down Under
Between September 11 and 13, the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC) will play host to a bazaar of networking and deal making as part of a show that really…
Foregone Conclusions: Paul Kagame Retains Power
Rwanda has become a curiosity as an African state. The mere mention of its name tugs the memory: colonial tragedy, ethnic violence, genocide. Then comes stable rule, for the most…
Bypassing Parliament: Westminster, the Royal Prerogative and Bombing Yemen
There is something distinctly revolting and authoritarian about the royal prerogative. It reeks of clandestine assumption, unwarranted self-confidence and, most of all, a blithe indifference to accountability before elected representatives. …
Holstering a Career: Wayne LaPierre Resigns from the NRA Executive
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The now departed chief executive of the National Rifle Association of America (NRA) should know. Wayne LaPierre’s time had come to resemble a…
Killing Australians in Lebanon: Selected Targets; Selective Morality
The killing of an Australian-Lebanese national Ibrahim Bazzi, his Lebanese wife Shorouq Hammoud, and his brother Ali Bazzi by the Israeli Defence Forces in a missile strike in southern Lebanon,…
The Economic Incentive: Blocking Israel’s Supply Chain
If demography is destiny, as Auguste Comte tells us, then economics must be current, pinching reality. The Israel-Gaza conflict is invigorating a global protest movement against the state of Israel…
A Growing Butcher’s Bill: Israel’s War Spending
The Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron is worried. He is keeping an eye on the ballooning costs of his country’s war against Gaza and the Palestinians. Initially, the Netanyahu…
Red Sea Deployments: Canberra Says No
The failure of the United States to convince the Australian government to send one vessel to aid coalition efforts to deter Houthi disruption of international shipping in the Red Sea…
Day X Marks the Calendar: Julian Assange’s ‘Final’ Appeal
Julian Assange’s wife, Stella, is rarely one to be cryptic. “Day X is here,” she posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter. For those who have followed her remarks,…
False Transitions and Global Stocktakes: The Failure of COP28
The time has come to treat the sequence of UN Climate Change Conferences, the latest concluding in Dubai, as a series of the failed and the abysmally rotten. It shows…
Flirting With Nuclear Energy Down Under
It was a policy that was bound to send a shiver through the policymaking community. The issue of nuclear energy in Australia has always been a contentious one. Currently, the…
A Flawed and Dangerous Presence: US Troops in Syria
Despite a focus on boxing China in the Indo-Pacific, US involvement in the Middle East continues to be widespread and problematic. While Israel is given its regular steroid diet of…
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