27 February 1933 was a momentous turning point in German history; a lightning rod for what was to follow.

It enabled Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party to quickly transition Germany from a formal democracy (Weimar Republic) to a fascist dictatorship (inspired by Benito Mussolini’s fascist takeover in Italy).

On that day, an unemployed Dutch construction worker named Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the Reichstag (German Parliament) building, causing considerable damage.

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The Nazis first falsely blamed the communists for the fire and then claimed emergency powers to crush all opposition, not just those it blamed.

The event was contrived by the newly formed Nazi government to turn public opinion against its opponents and consequently to successfully achieve these fascist objectives.

This began with the emergency law decree for the Protection of the People and State which restricted free speech and freedom of the press, and allowed the imprisonment of enemies without trial.

Scene setting for US-style ‘Reichstag Fire’
Fintan O’Toole is an advising editor at the New York Review of Books (NYRB). An award-winning journalist and recognised public intellectual, he is a former editor The Irish Times where he still continues as a longstanding columnist.

On 25 July 2025 he began an article (paywalled) in the NYRB on the direction of the United States under President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement with the above-mentioned “Reichstag Fire”: A show of force stepping stone towards a ‘Reichstag Fire’.

O’Toole analysed Trump’s endeavours to militarise American politics and politicise the American military describing them as unfinished business. This meant:

“…defining all those who do not conform to his version of normality as mortal enemies to be confronted as though they were hostile foreign nations [and] … dismantling its self-image as an institution that transcends partisan divisions, is broadly representative of the US population, and owes its primary loyalty not to the President but to the Constitution.”

This analysis continued on to the much reported brutally derogatory narrative and actions (including armed force) against immigrants (which got much worse since the article was published) and Trump’s dishonest delusional endeavour to portray himself as having known “military life”.

This delusional military self-image contrasts with Adolf Hitler’s actual record of being a decorated (Iron Cross) German soldier in the First World War.

It also contrasts with other past dictators; in particular, Benito Mussolini (Italy), Francisco Franco (Spain) and Augusto Pinochet (Chile).

O’Toole refers to Trump’s speech to his supporters at the 6 January 2021 insurrection;

“And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Language and form to achieve absolute military obedience
At the time of the article’s publication in the NYRB, Donald Trump’s militarism was primarily about language and form, including supporting references to the Confederate insurrectionists of the American Civil War in the 1860s.

Pointingly, Fintan O’Toole notes that Trump:

“… is offering soldiers what fascist leaders have always offered their followers: a peculiar amalgam of the thrill of transgression and the submissive surrender to absolute obedience.”

This is the opposite of the military non-partisanship that is necessary in order to defend the US Constitution.

Fintan O’Toole has convincingly outlined an analysis that under Donald Trump’s presidency this emerging authoritarianism in the United States is evolving towards fascism.

In this process, Trump is seeking his own “Reichstag Fire”. This includes seeking in various ways to use his position to rig the mid-term elections in early November for the Congress (House of Representatives) and one-third of the Senate.

Currently he controls both but is likely to lose the former and possibly the latter. Losing control of both is a realistic outcome given popular feeling and mobilisation.

Desperation to seize mid-term US elections
Thirteen months after the above NYRB article was published, the UK newspaper The Independent discussed this endeavour further (August 18): Trump desperate to seize elections.

Journalist Alex Woodward outlined the Trump administration’s numerous roadblocks with courts in his attempts to seize control of these federal elections by establishing a national voter registration list that would be used to decide who is eligible to cast a ballot.

Trump has also not dismissed the idea of declaring a national security emergency to unilaterally enforce his takeover of federal elections. In his reported words:

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK. I’ll leave it at that.”

Woodward reports that Trump could also threaten to use federal troops or law enforcement “…to seize voting equipment or ballots, which would disrupt ballot collection and vote-tallying and insert a hunt for alleged fraud to satisfy his conspiracy theories.”

In another measure to rig the mid-term elections, the Trump administration has abruptly removed the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, an independent agency tasked with supporting election officials.

The practical effect is to leave the key bipartisan agency effectively paralysed weeks before election day.

Election officials are behind-the-scenes public servants. However, they are increasingly on the frontlines of conspiracy theory-fuelled threats.

Woodward reports an annual poll of elections revealing that at least 38 percent of election officials have experienced threats, harassment and abuse because of their job, with more than 60 percent of those threats delivered in person. More than half feared for their safety.

Now is the right time to compare US politics to Nazi Germany
In response to the question “when is the right time to compare US politics to the Nazi era”, The Guardian said “now” on October 3: US politics today compares with Nazi politics in Germany.

Washington DC based British Guardian journalist David Smith writes about a book on the declining white Christian influence in the United States managing to fuel an alliance with Trump and working to reshape its “democracy”.

The book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation after the Christian Turn against Democracy, is by Robert P Jones arising out of a consideration of studied US demographic numbers, Christian nationalism, and Trump’s use of the language of racial purity. This led him to his inescapable conclusion that “This is our 1933”.

Jones began with the rise of the Nazi party and the complicity of the German people, including German Christians and churches.

He cites a Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemöller, who was eventually imprisoned for opposing Hitler. Niemöller is famously remembered for the powerful poem “First They Came”.

For the first four years of Hitler’s reign Niemöller did not fully oppose the Nazis. He later regretted that he and the Protestant German church did not speak out sooner.

Revival of white Christian nationalism strengthens drive to US fascism
David Smith argues convincingly that US democracy is experiencing a severe “backslide” that is directly aided and abetted by an “apostate” white Christianity, including Donald Trump’s language on the campaign trail. Further:

“This dehumanising language, talking about immigrants as vermin, and this racial purity language, like they’re ‘poisoning the blood of our country’. What does that mean? If they’re poisoning the blood, what’s the pure blood? We know where that story goes.”

Smith then refers to Trump’s repeated use of the concept of genetic inheritance. Addressing a mostly white crowd in Minnesota in 2020, Trump declared:

“You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

In his diagnosis, Jones links Trump’s language to the influence and activism of white Christian nationalism:

… white American Christianity has committed a profound act of apostasy by trading its spiritual core for political dominance. By endorsing anti-democratic tactics, white Christian institutions have become the primary engine behind the country’s autocratic slide.

Jones notes that whereas in 2008 white Christian Americans constituted 54 percent of the US population, by 2026 it had dropped to 41 percent. The decline among white evangelicals is even steeper. In 2000, they represented 25 percent of all Americans; today it is 13 percent.

Jones then observes:

“Trump loves to talk about the art of the deal and, in many ways, there’s been a massive quid pro quo deal struck between a declining white evangelical population and Trump. His big appeal to them was less about policy and more anti-immigrant: I’m going to restore an America that looks like you, and I’m going to restore power to the Christian churches.

“He was literally saying on the campaign trail: this is a quid pro quo deal. Give me your votes and you won’t even have to vote again. I’ll fix it so you don’t have to vote again.”

And now for Gleichschaltung
Gleichschaltung is an interesting German word meaning synchronisation or coordination.

In the context of German history it was used to describe the process of Nazification in the mid-1930s; that is, establishing a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society.

On 1 June, I posted on Gleichschaltung in Political Bytes: Gleichschaltung and the far right momentum:

“The NZ First party is a toned-down version of the MAGA movement with deputy leader Shane Jones the loudest proponent of its rhetoric.”

In the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, my narrative in this post includes the following observation:

“New Zealand is a long way away from Nazi Germany in 1933. We are also long way away from having a Gleichschaltung. But, when certain stars align, the unexpected can occur very quickly.

“Donald Trump has succeeded by both synchronisation and coordination over the past nearly 18 months in turning immigrants in the United States into the Jews of Nazi Germany in 1933-35.

“A tipping point leading to our own Gleichschaltung should not be dismissed out-of-hand even if the recipe’s ingredients might be different.”

‘First they came . . .’
It is appropriate to come back to Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem (English translation of the original German version):

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I kept quiet; I wasn’t a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a trade unionist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a social democrat.
When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest

In terms of Donald Trump’s “1933 trajectory” towards the mid-term elections, should he succeed then he will be well-placed to control the institutions necessary to ensure authoritarianism’s success.

This may well include declaring a national emergency based on a false manufactured pretext as was the case with the Reichstag fire in 1933.

However, his vote rigging attempts, along with the growing unpopularity of his presidency, appear to be arousing much public contempt; sufficient for him to lose control of both the Congress and Senate.

As a narcissist who is devoid of empathy, Trump sees strategic and tactical decision making through a limiting narrow lens.

Anything is possible over how responds to such a plausible mid-terms defeat; attempted dictatorial actions stronger than declaring a state of emergency should be anticipated.

In these circumstances concerted political opposition within the Congress and Senate are important, including impeachment moves and investigations into illegalities and corruption.

However, what will be most decisive is popular mobilisation against this drive towards a fascist state in the world’s strongest military power, whether or not Trump’s electoral vote rigging succeeds.

Organising the popular will is the critical task. “Power to people” as the old but permanently relevant slogan goes.

The final word
Meanwhile let’s leave the final word to Robert P Jones. In the epilogue to his above-discussed book he writes:

“Just as God asked Niemöller where he was between 1933 and 1937, God will ask us where we were between 2025 and 2028. Just as Germans who backed Hitler and the Nazi Party after 1933 were fully aware of what they were joining, so Christians who have backed Trump and the MAGA movement a second time know and bear responsibility for what they are now endorsing.”

Not just powerful words; very timely and directly relevant words as well. Time will tell whether Trump and his MAGA movement will achieve this endorsement; but it is not inevitable.

History does not have to repeat itself nor even rhyme a lot. Germany 1933 does not have to be United States 2025-28.

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

ANALYSIS: By Shailendra Singh

In his address at last month’s Pacific Media Summit, Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka highlighted his government’s repeal of Fiji’s Media Industry Development Act 2010, saying that it was in the interest of democracy.

While the Rabuka government has been rightly recognised for scrapping that Act in 2023, another piece of legislation with potential significant implications for journalism remains in force — the Online Safety Act 2018.

Like the Media Act, the Online Safety Act was enacted under the FijiFirst government and gives the state a role in regulating expression.

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The Online Safety Act was tabled in Parliament in 2018 in response to escalating social media abuse, but was controversial from the outset, especially the breadth of its provisions.

The backlash was such that the entire opposition voted against it, arguing that it undermined democracy. Rights groups were similarly alarmed, describing the Act as a “Trojan horse” for censorship.

However, because much of the attention focused on the draconian Media Act, and relatively few people were being charged under the Online Safety Act, the latter escaped sustained scrutiny.

That changed in 2025, as the unabated abuse of digital platforms and a spate of charges laid under Section 24 of the Act, which criminalises the posting of electronic communication that causes harm, brought it back into the spotlight.

Expecting stronger legislation
Currently, the Act is under review and Information Minister Lynda Tabuya, under whose ministry the Act falls, has told Parliament to expect stronger legislation by the end of this year.

To some extent, Tabuya’s call for tougher laws is understandable. The misuse of social media platforms is a global problem, but the threat is considered greater in fragile democracies with multiethnic societies, such as Fiji.

The Online Safety Commission received 1609 complaints in 2025 alone, with more than 50 percent involving cyberbullying, harassment and defamation.

More broadly, policymakers have warned that online misconduct poses a serious national security threat.

In March 2026, Tabuya flagged the increased prevalence of misinformation and disinformation, stating, “A single lie can divide a nation”.  Likewise, Fiji’s National Security Strategy 2025-2029 warned the malicious use of emerging technologies for misinformation and disinformation posed a threat and could “undermine the credibility of national leaders and erode public trust in governance structures”.

Even before the proliferation of social networking platforms, there were concerns in Fiji about the mainstream media’s alleged role in fomenting societal conflict, with some analysis even suggesting that the media acted as a catalyst in the 2000 and 2006 coups.

The increase in digital penetration has added a new dimension to these security challenges.

Young people particularly, the most avid consumers of online networks, risk exposure to disparaging and damaging online discourses, including racism and hate speech.

While these trends are serious and require a firm response, they do not negate legitimate concerns about the flaws in the Online Safety Act.

Implications for media and press freedom
While the aim of the Act is not specifically to regulate media — Section 4 stipulates the law applies to the “whole of Fiji” — media are, nonetheless, caught in its crossfire.

The Act contains no protections for the practice of journalism. Professional journalists using social media platforms in the public interest are lumped with ordinary citizens who may be using them with malicious intent.

This renders journalists and media organisations particularly vulnerable to the Act due to the broad provisions of “electronic communication” that causes “harm” (defined in the Act as “serious emotional distress”), as most of their work is published online and can require critiquing the actions of private individuals and public officials.

The Act also does not differentiate between public and private individuals. In general, public figures such as politicians enjoy a lower level of privacy compared to private citizens. The scrutiny can extend to their private lives should they overlap with, or endanger the fulfillment of, their public duties.

Under the Online Safety Act, media could be held culpable if their reporting causes individuals “serious emotional distress”, which could be a consequence of, for example, news coverage of actual or alleged wrongdoing.

Then there is Section 2’s treatment of electronic communication as “any information, whether truthful or untruthful…”. This suggests journalists publishing legitimate and verified information in the course of their professional duties could face the same criminal liability as bad actors posting untruthful content with malicious intent.

Section 6 raises concerns about the independence of the Online Safety Commission, including the ministerial-appointed Commissioner, which introduces the risk of a political appointment.

Indeed, the appointment of Anne Dunn as the first Commissioner by the then Communications Minister Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum was controversial for this very reason. Dunn contested Fiji’s 2018 election under Sayed-Khaiyum’s FijiFirst Party.

The potential conflict of interest could render the Commission vulnerable to political pressure, and have consequences for the Commissioner’s role as an independent and unbiased authority.

The Act does outline seven factors the courts may use to determine whether an offence has occurred, including: the extremity of the content; the age and characteristics of the victim; whether the posting was anonymous; the repetitiveness and extent of circulation; and its truth or falsity, along with the context in which it appeared.

However, it does not provide specific defences based on public interest, truth, reasonable error, or the absence of malice.

An opportunity for reform
The fact that no journalist or media organisation has been charged under the Act in the eight years since its inception is of little consolation. No journalist or media organisation was charged under the now-repealed Media Act, but we are all aware of that legislation’s deleterious effect on the media sector as a deterrent to robust journalism and a catalyst for self-censorship.

Some criticisms of the Online Safety Act — including its open-ended provisions, the Minister’s role in appointing the Commissioner, and the potentially chilling effect on freedom of expression — are uncannily similar to those expressed about the Media Act.

Against this backdrop, Rabuka’s remarks at the Pacific Media Summit are pertinent. The Prime Minister emphasised that the media are “not a threat to democracy” but a “part of” it.

The reviewers of the Online Safety Act would do well to heed his words, as well as those of Rabuka’s deputy, Manoa Kamikamica, at the same event. Kamikamica stated that while this government was committed to media freedom, there was no guarantee future governments would share the same mindset.

In other words, the weaponisation of the Online Safety Act might not be a present danger, but it cannot be ruled out as a future one.

Associate Professor Shailendra Singh is head of journalism at The University of the South Pacific. This article is derived from his submission to the review of the Online Safety Act 2018 and was first published by Pacific Security. It is republished with the author’s permission. Dr Singh’s views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer.

COMMENTARY: By Jonathan Cook

Benjamin Netanyahu’s whirlwind visit to the United States late last month to address the United Nations General Assembly was further evidence that the Israeli prime minister is now a universal pariah.

He is being abandoned even by his closest allies.

It was perhaps not surprising that 77 nations, including a handful of European states, walked out of the chamber in protest that a wanted war crimes suspect — a fugitive from the International Criminal Court (ICC) — was being given a platform to speak on the world’s largest stage.

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Far more notable was what happened — or rather, didn’t — away from the podium. Netanyahu spent just eight hours in the US before heading back to Israel. It is hard to believe that that was his choice.

He was denied his usual moment in the sun with US President Donald Trump at the White House, and could not even secure a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

There was no invitation to address the US Congress, and with it familiar scenes of legislators rapturously celebrating his anti-Palestinian incitement.

Israel’s former Ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, told Reuters: “I don’t recall a time when the prime minister came to the United States and didn’t meet with the president.”

Stark contrast to Xi
The shunning of Netanyahu stood in stark contrast to the reception of Xi Jinping. The Chinese leader was personally greeted at the airport by Trump with a red carpet and military flyover.

Netanyahu’s UN visit was exploited by both sides — by Israeli officials and Western leaders — to advance their separate, and conflicting, agendas.

Netanyahu is less than a month away from a hotly contested general election in which, for the first time, his failures to prevent Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023 are under intense scrutiny.

According to a growing number of recent reports, he was warned by Egyptian and Gulf leaders of a major event — an “earthquake” — coming from Gaza in the days and weeks preceding Hamas’ breakout, but failed to act.

Netanyahu had scheduled his UN speech for Israeli prime time, to attract the largest domestic audience possible. He took the opportunity to call out other world leaders as “moral cowards” and “hypocrites”.

As Israeli analyst Jonathan Ofir notes, Netanyahu also used the UN platform to smuggle in a biblical phrase in Hebrew that was designed, for listeners back home, to serve as a dog-whistle: a call for Israel to carry out genocide to the bitter end.

Netanyahu’s goal was to demonstrate to voters that he is still a force to be reckoned with on the international stage, and that he alone can make Israel safe from a world supposedly mired in “antisemitic”, anti-Israel sentiment.

Nudging Netanyahu out of office
Western leaders, by contrast, wish to demonstrate the precise opposite, hoping to nudge Netanyahu out of office by suggesting to Israelis that their leader is a spent force, that he has gone too far.

Time to be rid of him.

This may prove no simple matter. Netanyahu is the great political survivor, serving a record near-two decades as his country’s prime minister — longer even than Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion. He has used that time to whip up much of Israeli society into an ever greater, ultra-nationalist, genocidal fervour.

The current antipathy in Western capitals to Netanyahu is most certainly not based on any kind of ethical assessment of Israel’s recent actions: a three-year genocidal rampage through Gaza; the violent expansion of Jewish settlements and ethnic cleansing in the Occupied West Bank; the bombing and ethnic cleansing of south Lebanon; and the Israeli leader’s starring role alongside the US in launching a catastrophic war on Iran whose fallout has destabilised the global economy.

Washington — backed by its European client states — has been an ardent partner to these crimes, supplying the munitions, intelligence and diplomatic leverage to help Israel carry them out.

But Netanyahu now looks to be a political liability, even for Trump.

The US President, nosediving in the polls, needs a scapegoat — and the Israeli prime minister appears the only one suited for the role.

The antagonism is, in part, personal.

Netanyahu seduced Trump on Iran
A number of recent reports indicate that Netanyahu pulled out all the stops to seduce Trump, against the advice of his generals, into launching an unprovoked and illegal war on Iran.

The promise of a decisive victory persuaded Trump he could secure his place in the history books as the president who “remade the Middle East”. Once Iran was out of the picture, the US would enjoy unchallenged control over the region’s oil.

And all of this would supposedly take place weeks after Trump had cemented his command over Venezuela’s oil, following an illegal operation at the start of the year to kidnap President Nicholas Maduro.

With Iran’s defeat, and Venezuela subjugated, economic rival China would find itself utterly dependent on the US for access to the main lubricant of the global economy. Trump could avoid a direct military confrontation with Beijing, bringing it to heel simply by threatening to turn off the oil spigot.

But, of course none of this came to pass.

Washington is now in an unwinnable war with Iran that has clarified to Tehran the extent of its power over the Strait of Hormuz — and of the parallel power of Ansar Allah, its allies in Yemen, over the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Together, they can inflict unmitigated damage to the world economy.

Soaring petrol prices on US forecourts are likely to be a critical factor in the collapse of the Republican vote in November’s mid-term elections and the likely loss of both Houses to the Democrats, turning Trump into a lame-duck president.

Supremely vulnerable
Meanwhile, the war has educated Washington’s client states in the Gulf that they are supremely vulnerable to any retaliation from Tehran and from Yemen — a fact they are reminded of every time Trump orders another reckless round of strikes on Iran.

For all its military might, Washington has shown it is unable to defend its Gulf allies.

But Netanyahu is not facing a reckoning just because of his role in engineering a disastrous war on Iran.

Despite the best efforts of Western political and media classes over the past three years, the reality of Israel’s destruction of Gaza — and the murder and maiming of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children — has become ever harder to hide or rationalise.

Even among those parts of the public little interested in world affairs, the truth is gradually sinking in, aided by battles in mainstream cultural spaces that have swung conclusively against Israel.

NAZA standing ovation
NAZA, a new documentary on Gaza made by Israeli film-makers, won a record, 25-minute standing ovation at last month’s Venice Film Festival. In it, anonymised Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers document in detail how they engineered genocide in the tiny enclave. It is scheduled to be available to stream for free in November.

Ireland’s team, forced to play Israel in the Uefa Nations League at the weekend, did not hide their feelings. They wore black armbands in a show of solidarity with Israel’s victims in Gaza and refused to shake hands with their opponents. Irish captain Dara O’Shea pledged to donate his match earnings to humanitarian causes in Gaza.

Superstar musician Ed Sheeran has found himself unexpectedly painted as the bad guy for failing to stand by his support act, the rapper Macklemore, over the latter’s comments opposing genocide in Gaza.

Predictably, when faced with pro-Israel stadium owners threatening to pull the plug on the tour, Sheeran caved and dropped Macklemore. But Sheeran is reeling from a widespread backlash that clearly took him by surprise.

And leading British politicians, such as former prime minister Keir Starmer and foreign secretaries David Cameron and David Lammy, are for the first time facing serious critical scrutiny in the mainstream over their conduct towards Gaza.

Last month, a Channel 4 documentary, Britain’s Gaza Secrets Exposed, revealed that British officials had imposed a deeply flawed methodology, apparently so they could ignore mounting evidence of systematic Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

As a result, they were able to duck out of their legal obligations to take action against Israel, including by ending arms sales.

Rising tide of revulsion
Western capitals are finally realising this rising tide of revulsion at the Gaza genocide cannot be staunched.

In the US, where bonds to Israel are invariably described by politicians as “unbreakable”, 62 percent of respondents told Pew in July they had a negative opinion of Netanyahu’s government.

Meanwhile, a poll last month found 60 percent of American Jews want the Israeli prime minister voted out at the forthcoming election.

As Israel’s Haaretz newspaper observed: “Trump is well aware of the consistent, dizzying decline in support for Israel among Americans.”

Which is why he and other Western politicians are desperate to reframe the conversation. Singling out Netanyahu over Israeli atrocities in Gaza does not get them off the hook because they so obviously partnered with him every step of the way.

Instead Western leaders want to switch focus to the West Bank, where their role is more easily obscured and Netahyahu’s law-breaking is unmistakable.

Since October 2023, he, along with his self-confessed fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have given both violent Jewish settler militias and the Israeli military greater freedom to terrorise Palestinian families off their land in preparation for the West Bank’s annexation.

Illegal West Bank settlements role
In the West’s new, self-serving narrative, Netanyahu isn’t a pariah because he is sought by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in starving the people of Gaza.

Nor because the International Court of Justice is currently investigating his government over “plausible” allegations that it is committing a genocide in the enclave.

Nor because his government has overseen the killing of at least 21,000 children there — and most likely, far more.

Nor because he continues to violate a sham “ceasefire”, one in which Israel has killed more than 1400 Palestinians penned up in the ruins of their enclave since the fighting supposedly ended. A further 4900 of Gaza’s residents have been maimed over the same period.

No, Netanyahu is not a pariah in the eyes of Western leaders because of any of these savage crimes — crimes they have been fully complicit in.

His offence — the one they are now determined to focus attention on — is Netanyahu’s role since October 2023 in intensifying the building and expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank to expel Palestinians from their lands.

But this narrative works only if Western politicians and media studiously ignore the context: that for more than half a century, all Israeli governments sponsored settlement expansion, with the aim of ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population.

Exploited the opportunity
Netanyahu is not an outlier in doing this. He simply exploited the opportunity to accelerate West Bank expulsions on the back of world sympathy after Hamas’s single-day attack in October 2023.

The most likely explanation for why Britain and 11 other Western states, including France and Canada, declared their intention last month to impose sanctions on West Bank settlements is that they had received signs from the Trump administration for the first time that there would be no serious repercussions for doing so.

Britain’s new government under Andy Burnham also dared to describe what Israel has done to West Bank Palestinians as “ethnic cleansing”. Notably, and paradoxically, the UK has avoided using the term to describe Israel’s even more brazen ethnic cleansing in Gaza — a campaign of expulsions that have all too clearly been aided by Western bombs and logistics.

Officials under Mike Huckabee, the fervently partisan US ambassador to Israel, reportedly drafted a stinging rebuke in preparation for the British announcement of sanctions. It accused London of replicating the “playbook of the antisemitic boycott, divestment and sanctions [BDS] movement”.

That expected line of attack, favoured by Israel lobby groups, was presumably the reason why Ed Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary, went to such exaggerated lengths to publicly distance his new policy from BDS.

But in fact, no attack materialised from the Trump administration. Instead, Marco Rubio, Miliband’s US counterpart, stated innocuously: “I don’t have any comment on it [the sanctions policy] right now.”

The next day Trump appeared to buy time with a uncharacteristically non-committal response: “I want to find out why all of a sudden has that [the announcement of UK sanctions] happened.”

Trump and Rubio have said nothing more of substance on the matter.

Failure to listen to warnings
Then there is the recent flood of media reports suggesting that Netanyahu personally failed to listen to multiple warnings from Egypt and the United Arab Emirates that an unprecedented attack was coming from Gaza in the days before Hamas’ break-out on 7 October 2023.

Netanyahu has called on Abu Dhabi to deny the leaks. But it has so far failed to help out by doing so.

The two countries, among Washington’s closest client states in the region, have always appeared anxious to avoid openly defying a notoriously vengeful Trump.

In his address to the UN, Burnham noted the dilemma facing Western governments: “We live in an age of low trust in politics. If we were to continue to talk about the two-state solution, but fail to back those words with deeds, that trust will fall even lower — and our enemies will seek to exploit the alienation that follows from that.”

Burnham seems oblivious to the reality: that part of the reason trust is so low is because a succession of British governments have not only colluded in the genocide in Gaza but arrested critics of the genocide as supporters of terrorism.

Miliband demonstrated precisely the kind of hypocrisy Burnham had warned is alienating the public when he told the Labour Party conference last week — to great applause — that “millions of people in this country”, opponents of the genocide, “were right”.

The previous day dozens of protesters had been arrested outside the conference venue for silently holding signs stating: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

Burnham and Miliband wish to have their cake and eat it. Neither has indicated that there is any intention to scrap the previous government’s decision to use terrorism laws against anyone who holds such a sign — or is “right”, as Miliband now admits.

Cynical theatre of distraction
What Western leaders are engaged in here is the cynical theatre of distraction.

The declarations of “You were right” and “We feel your pain”, the promises of sanctions and urgent calls for two states, amount to nothing more than virtue-signalling. They are designed to divert public indignation over Israel’s atrocities away from the complicity of Western capitals and direct it exclusively at Netanyahu.

The new spin suggests the gun-wielding, religious zealots in the West Bank settlements who have been growing ever more violent and politically powerful for over half a century — under successive Israeli governments — are solely Netanyahu’s creation.

The new spin argues that the growing confidence of these pogromists, who have long worked hand in glove with the Israeli military, is entirely unrelated to the West’s unconditional support for Israel over many decades.

In absolving themselves, however, Western leaders are necessarily crafting a new lie to deceive their publics: one that suggests the “settler terrorists” are some kind of personal Netanyahu militia that stands or falls with his premiership.

The implication of this new narrative is that, were Netanyahu to be prised from power, a more empathetic leadership would emerge, one that could be cultivated by Western powers to make peace with the Palestinians.

This is all patent nonsense.

Supremacist political spectrum
Like the Israeli public, leaders from across Israel’s narrow Zionist, ethnic supremacist political spectrum shared the genocidal logic that propelled forward the past three-year erasure of Gaza.

None dissented. All engaged in genocidal incitement.

There is no hope of their making peace with the Palestinians under illegal occupation when Israeli leaders cannot even allow their own Palestinian “citizens” — a much-oppressed minority comprising a fifth of Israel’s population – a meaningful voice in next month’s general election.

The central elections committee, a political body whose members are drawn from Israel’s main parties, voted to ban from standing all four factions representing the Palestinian minority.

Whoever wins next month’s election, whether Netanyahu again or one of his rivals, will keep the country heading on the same ethnic supremacist track Israel has been on for decades. Trump, Burnham, Macron and other western leaders understand this.

They want Netanyahu out of the way not so there is real change but simply so they can revert to what constituted business as usual before the Gaza genocide: a slower, more incremental pace to the eradication of the Palestinian people.

Rebranding the Gaza genocide
They want to be able to rebrand the Gaza genocide as one man’s historic folly, a tragic catastrophe that cannot be reversed but can be mitigated if he is gone.

They want us looking resolutely forwards, to real-estate deals and a distant two-state solution, not backwards: to their active role in levelling the homes of more than two million people – with mostly US munitions that unleashed eight times the explosive force of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Trump administration has already okayed the shipment of vast numbers of these mega bombs to replenish Israeli stocks, even before the result of the Israeli election is known.

Notably, the same Trump administration that allowed Netanyahu, a war crimes suspect, to travel to the UN in New York blocked the putative leader of the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas, from doing so.

In announcing his new sanctions policy targeting Israel’s illegal settlements, Miliband was keen to stress that it would in no way affect intelligence sharing with Israel — the kind of intelligence coordination that saw British planes carrying out surveillance operations over Gaza throughout the genocide.

And while Miliband promised a “double lock against arms exports” to Israel as part of the UK’s sanctions package, in practice not a single existing arms export licence has been revoked or suspended since.

The current fight is not against a genocidal Israeli state or for some illusionary Palestinian state — let alone for justice for the endlessly abused Palestinian people.

Engineering a reset
It is about engineering a reset in which the West gets Israel’s old guard back in charge.

Western leaders have been embarrassed by the froth-mouthed rantings of Netanyahu’s government. This week Smotrich called for Israel to unleash its genocidal Gaza policies on the West Bank — presumably using the very bombs Trump is about to ship them.

He told the Israeli media: “We should do there what we did in Gaza.”

Western leaders fear what that would do to their sinking credibility. And they have allies in Israel, among its opposition, whose vision — at least for the moment — is not Smotrich’s of a Gaza-style eradication of the West Bank.

Rather they envision continuing the current trajectory of gradually turning the West Bank’s small, surviving Palestinian ghettos, trapped in a sea of illegal Jewish settlements, into mini-concentration camps — replicas of Gaza before it was destroyed.

Those are the competing visions among Israelis for the West Bank: the absolute confinement of Palestinians in a series of cages versus their extermination.

That is what is really at stake — nothing more — in the West’s struggle to unseat Netanyahu and uphold its fabled two-state solution.

Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. This article was first published by Middle East Eye and republished from the author’s Substack with permission.

Labour will recognise Palestine, put in place economic sanctions on Israel, and join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

These are among highlights of Labour’s foreign policy stance and the action the party says it will take if elected as the government next month.

Labour’s foreign policy spokesperson Vanushi Walters made that clear in her recent speech alongside the Labour leader, Chris Hipkins, as part of Diplosphere’s foreign policy election series at Parliament.

• READ MORE: Labour sums up its foreign policy approach as ‘independent, principled and unafraid’
• The full Labour foreign policy speech
• Other Gaza genocide reports

Explaining what was meant by “restoring our independent foreign policy”, she said independence was pivotal to New Zealand’s foreign policy approach.

Independence was about agency.

New Zealand’s silence this term on breaches of the United Nations Charter “has been noticed” globally.

“This government’s silence as one after the other States recognised Palestine has been noticed.”

Silence over Palestine
She said the National-led coalition government’s “silence in failing to stand up [with] a sanctions regime, following the ICJ [International Court of Justice] decision on the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, continues to be loud”.

“New Zealand’s abstentions this term, on the floor of the UN whether it be about the reappointment of the High Commissioner of Human Rights or a vote abstaining on indigenous participation at the UN, have been met with confusion by our colleagues in the international space.

“We do not grow our agency if we stand for nothing because that too is a choice that has consequences.

“We lose our reputation as an honest broker and a consistent champion of international law. Make no mistake, the choice to shrink from the moral challenges we face will diminish our agency not expand it.”

Walters said a Labour government would “make full use” of the foreign policy tool box.

“There is a time for quiet diplomacy and there is a time when quiet diplomacy must bend to moral clarity — that is undeniably the case when the scale of human rights abuses is so stark that it amounts to genocide, to ethnic cleansing.

“Labour will recognise the State of Palestine. Labour will place economic sanctions on Israel and ensure the NZ Super Fund and ACC divest from holdings on the UN list of companies operating in the occupied territories.

Labour to join South Africa at ICJ
“Labour will intervene in support of South Africa’s case at the [ICJ] in respect of a breach of the Genocide Convention.”

Walters said that in this time of tension, “we must also remember there are seeds being planted”.

“International Courts continue to perform with diligence the duty of their statutes, people protest with astonishing courage in defence of their rights, humanitarians place everything on the line in the pursuit of development and peace for all, like-minded countries have begun acting on their desire to revisit creative diplomacy in defining new alliances,” she said.

She acknowledged Foreign Minister Winston Peters for his service during this term and under prior governments.

“We disagree on critical aspects regarding the role New Zealand must play in a fraught world, but not on all aspects of foreign policy, and I want to acknowledge in particular the breadth of his travel and the relationships he has maintained in the Pacific as hallmarks of his time in the role.”

Tracing the illegal land, sea and air siege of the Gaza enclave by Israel:

2006: Hamas elected in the last Palestinian legislative election
Israel withheld Palestinian tax revenues and imposed further restrictions on Gaza. Major international donors suspended direct funding to the Palestinian Authority.

That summer Israel launched a major attack on Gaza. On June 28, Israel destroyed all six transformers at Gaza’s only power station.

• READ MORE: Fear and a far-right lurch: How October 7 reshaped Israel
• How Israel’s genocide in Gaza pulled Britons into the Palestine movement
• Three years of Israel’s mass dispossession of West Bank Palestinians
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

2007: Gaza ghetto was sealed
Israel imposed an unlawful land, sea and air blockade on Gaza. For the next 16 years, more than 2 million people were trapped in a strip of land about 40 km long with illegal occupation forces controlling their borders, airspace and territorial waters. Most people could not leave without Israel’s permission. Israel restricted imports, virtually eliminated exports for years, restricted fishing waters and prevented people from accessing farmland along the perimeter.

The United Nations described Gaza’s population as “locked in”. UN bodies repeatedly described Israel’s blockade as collective punishment. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment.

Children born when Israel imposed the blockade were 16 years old by October 2023.

And inside the ghetto came Israel’s attacks:

2008–09: Operation Cast Lead
Israel killed 1383 Palestinians in three weeks — more than the resistance attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

2012: Operation Pillar of Defense
Israel killed 174 Palestinians in eight days.

2014: Israel attacked Gaza for 51 days
Israel killed 2251 Palestinians, including 551 children — more than October 7, 2023.

Then Palestinians tried peaceful resistance.

2018–19: The Great March of Return
For almost two years, Palestinians marched against Israel’s blockade and for their right of return. Israel put snipers on the ghetto walls and shot them.

Illegal occupation forces killed more than 200 people and shot and crippled thousands more during the demonstrations. A UN Commission of Inquiry found that Israeli snipers intentionally shot children, journalists, health workers and people with disabilities who were recognisable as such.

In 2020, Israeli newspaper Haaretz interviewed the snipers. One Israeli sniper described shooting 42 knees in a single day.

It was the end of peaceful resistance in illegally occupied Gaza.

2021: Israel bombed Gaza again
Israel killed 261 Palestinians, including 67 children.

2022: Israel killed another 49 Palestinians, including 17 children.

May 2023: Israel killed another 33 Palestinians.

By October 2023, an entire generation had been born and raised inside Gaza Ghetto under an unlawful Israeli blockade, through repeated Israeli attacks, electricity shortages, polluted water, economic strangulation and an Israeli permit system controlling whether people could leave.

Then came 7 October 2023 — Al-Aqsa Flood.
Al Qassam Brigades and other armed groups broke through the ghetto walls and attacked Israeli military bases and communities.

7 October 2023 was not Year Zero
It came after sixteen years of unlawful blockade.

It came after Israel repeatedly attacked Gaza and killed thousands of people.

It came after the people marched against their imprisonment and Israeli snipers shot them from high on the wall.

It came after decades of illegal occupation.

And what followed is genocide by Israel.

Israel has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians according to the recorded death toll alone. The real number is substantially higher.

As early as July 2024, when the recorded direct death toll stood at 37,396, public-health researchers writing in The Lancet estimated that, once indirect deaths were included, a death toll of 186,000 or more attributable to Israel’s attack on Gaza was plausible.

Israel has displaced almost the entire population of Gaza, many repeatedly. Israel has destroyed homes, neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools, universities, water systems, sanitation systems and much of the infrastructure necessary to sustain human life.

In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the Genocide Convention, with genocidal intent. Its conclusion was unequivocal: Israel is responsible for genocide in Gaza.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful. The Court has also confirmed that the law of occupation applies in Gaza and treats Israel as the occupying power there.

For 20 years Israel told the world that history begins and ends when Israel suffers.

It does not.

Al-Aqsa Flood belongs to history. It was never Year Zero.

Tracy-Moana Campbell is an employment relations advocate based in Masterton and an activist on Palestinian human rights. She had a commercial orange grove in Lebanon 10km from the Israeli border in 2005-2011. Israel bombed her oranges in 2006. It is a war crime to destroy civilian food sources. This commentary was originally a social media post but has been republished with the author’s permission.

EDITORIAL: By Michael West, founder of Michael West Media

On Friday, Mario Christodoulou, executive producer of ABC Media Watch, quoted two posts we had made on X regarding last Wednesday’s FlyDubai “terror hijacking” incident and asked two questions:

Do you believe this incident was an Israeli Government “false flag” event? If so, on what basis? If not, how do you explain your posts above?

Perpetuating unsubstantiated conspiracy theories like this, especially from an established journalist such as yourself, can help spread misinformation. Your post likely contributed to this. What is your response?

(Full email and X posts below.)

• WATCH MORE: Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post – Netanyahu’s fight for political survival: PR stunts and press control

Our response

Hi Mario,

Excellent questions. You are barking up the wrong tree, however. My take on both flydubai and RAF Fairford is clearly — and the word was used in one of the tweets — “probably” false flags, or at the least “beat-ups” concocted for political advantage.

This view is borne out by evidence of multiple false flag attacks in Australia, as belatedly admitted by police, and around the world.

The bigger story, the real public interest in media coverage of these incidents, is how they are leveraged by our politicians and a compliant mainstream media. The minute they occur, whether actual false flags or just suspicious incidents, they are branded as “terror plots”, “Islamist attacks … jihadis” etc.

This media branding of these events, *before* the circumstances are known and the evidence is established, has given licence to political actions such as the ramping up of hate speech laws in Australia and justification for passing the private data of Australian citizens to foreign parties as per the arrangements with Cellebrite and Palantir.

As a pilot for 20 years I have questions:

– where are the cabin crew here?
– where are the oxygen masks that automatically drop during a rapid emergency descent?
– how did the Capt manage to open the door while being stabbed?
– Omani pilots were not allowed to fly to Israel, why was he allowed?
– how did the offending pilot get a weapon onboard?
– why has this happened so close to elections?
– how are passengers walking around while apparently in a nosedive?
– who else was injured? Nose dives cause significant g force incidents
– why is there two perfectly positioned people recording the incident and not helping?
– why did a plumber take control and not the 2 pilots onboard who would certainly know when an aircraft was in a nosedive?
– why was the plumber speaking in English to Bibi after the flight
– why was he still in his blood soaked clothes 8 hours after the incident

False Flags have been a very effective mechanism to influence public opinion

Hitler burnt down the Reichstag just before his parliament elections and he won the election…changing the course of history.

A full and independent investigation should be carried out here.

Hopefully independent journalist will be allowed to view this too.

— The Long Investor (@TheLongInvest) October 1, 2026

flydubai X post retweeted by MW

Let’s say flydubai is not a false flag in a technical sense; that is, a ploy cooked up by the Netanyahu regime in Israel just a few weeks before the election. Let’s just say it was actually a fight between the pilots and a happy ending. The fact that the initial coverage branded the event as a terrorist hijacking demonstrates that the incident was used for political gain.

The Fairford incident was also branded as a terrorist plot in its initial coverage, egged on by Trump and Rubio and the usual people on social media. Why did they not wait until it became evident that it was 5 lads pilfering diesel before reporting it as terror?

Here in “evidence-land” we try to ignore the noise and report the truth. And the truth is that the mainstream media has blood on its hands, a lot of blood. Its failure to address the exaggerated claims of the October 7 Hamas attacks — 40 babies beheaded, mass gang rapes, babies in ovens, babies on clotheslines — has given licence to genocide, to the worst human atrocities of this century.

Lies have dragged us into war against Iran which is hurting every citizen via higher petrol and food prices.

The effect on humanity has been drastic, and much of that can be foisted home to a failure by a craven media to report responsibly. The media is culpable and the rise of new media such as MWM is due to plunging public confidence in the institutions of power such as the ABC and traditional corporate media.

We haven’t grown from scratch to millions in audience a month by making stuff up.

To be fair, the ABC has done better than corporate media but it is still culpable. Where is the Four Corners on the hasbara movement, the litany of false flag attacks in Australia such as the Dural caravan hoax and the other 12 or so “terror” acts which turned out to be no-hopers with no political ideology apparently paid for by foreign interests?

This is the real story, the culpability of media in genocide, not some guy on X raising credible doubts about the official narrative because the evidence for terror claims does not stack up and the historical evidence of false flags is so compelling it should not be ignored.

As we approach the three-year anniversary of October 7, it would be apposite for traditional media to contemplate its own epic failures, its complicity in the genocide in Gaza. You could start by analysing the lies which have already been debunked.

Here are some questions: how many Israelis were slaughtered by IDF Apache gunships on October 7? Why did Netanyahu ignore warnings of the Hamas attacks from Egyptian and Qatari leaders? What is the evidence for mass rapes and babies beheaded? How and why were the Nova Festival arrangements changed prior to the attacks? Why has there been no official inquiry by Israeli authorities?

And what role did the mainstream media play to give licence to genocide?

Cui bono?

Media Watch email
Thanks for your time on the phone just now. Here’s what I sent via your website portal. 

We’re writing an item examining the FlyDubai incident, which has been widely reported this week, where passengers managed to seize control of a 737 en route to Tel Aviv from Dubai. As part of that story, we are examining the conspiracy theories that have cropped up online, and we noticed you have been posting about this being a “false flag” operation.

There was this repost in particular: 

But also this:

We may mention this in the segment. To my knowledge, there is no evidence this was an Israeli “false flag”, and theories like this are unsubstantiated.

Questions below:

• Do you believe this incident was an Israeli Government “false flag” event? If so, on what basis? If not, how do you explain your posts above?
• Perpetuating unsubstantiated conspiracy theories like this, especially from an established journalist such as yourself, can help spread misinformation. Your post likely contributed to this. What is your response?

Deadline is 5pm today.  Let me know if you are having trouble reaching this.

 ‘Cheap 20 second opinions’
When the show aired last night, host Linton Besser didn’t hold back on the accusations of peddling conspiracy theories and “cheap 20 second opinions”.

We concede that in the absence of ABC’s $1.23 billion budget — even a dedicated team of researchers and others working for an entire week to produce 15 minutes of television for just 42 weeks of the year — that we may be cheap, at least in budget terms, by necessity.

Yet with our humble budget and the goodwill of the community we have managed to break a lot more stories than the ABC in relation to the crime of the century. Where is the ABC’s coverage of Australian charities funnelling money to the IDF and illegal West Bank settlements?

Nowhere, despite it being raised in Parliament.

Where is the coverage of Australians serving with the IDF, a story we broke with FOIs? Where is the coverage of the money trail of public grants to the Israel lobby?

We even beat this billion-dollar corporation on the story of Australian UN commissioner, Chris Sidoti, releasing an independent report for the UN on the systematic slaughter of Palestinian children by the IDF. We were literally first media in the world.

The ABC trundled along timidly a day late with its billion-dollar budget and, typically, buried the story anyway. This — an investigation about a rogue state engaged in genocide which Australia furnishes with weapons parts, to be found by the highest body in the world, to be deliberately murdering children.

Shamelessly buried.

And here they are with the gall, to sermonise about an independent journalist saying on social media that flydubai was “probably” a false flag or at least had been leveraged for political advantage. This, after three years of spinelessly tip-toeing around every single story which mentions the word Israel.

As Media Watch host, my former SMH colleague, and a first-rate journalist, Linton Besser did note in his piece, Benjamin Netanyahu was very quick out of the blocks when the story broke to get on the phone to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News to kick off his media campaign.

With zero evidence Israel’s PM pointed the bone at Iran. Was Iran directly behind the plot, asked career misinformation-spreader Sean Hannity? “Too early to say,” said Netanyahu. Job done, as with the RAF Fairford “terror plot”, Iran named. The rest of the corporate media followed.

This is the way it works and ABC is a part of it. “Israel says”. Frothing forth with every false claim uttered by a war lobby whose lies are established and far too prolific to list here. They are daily.

Is flydubai a false flag?
Is the flydubai incident a false flag? It’s too early to tell but the narrative has changed a lot, the evidence suggests the official story is not credible, even CNN had a pilot demonstrate why it did not stack up. Many questions remain.

“This is Hollywood on steroids … ordinary civilians became superheroes,” Netanyahu told Fox News. “If you’re next hijacked, make sure an Israeli is sitting next to you.”

Is not the story — the story for Media Watch — why are so many sceptical about Israel’s claims? The answer is clear: they lie and twist facts relentlessly. The suspicion is warranted. The propaganda is documented. Why does ABC not cover that, bigger, story?

Our personal favourite was the still glass of water after the 14,300 ft nosedive (no, not the heroic plumber who watched aviation rescue shows or the pilot, Hamam al Hamami, whose name has been translated by scallywags as Bathroom King of Bathrooms).

Why does the ABC continue to trot out the Israel lobby’s propaganda when it has been proven time and time again to be false? The mainstream media has literally, deliberately missed the story of the century.

They avoid the G-word like the plague.

And this cowardice, this complicity by our institutions of power, has degraded all humanity. Our leaders and our institutions, in not standing up to genocide, in perpetuating lies, even rewarding them, have let us all down.

At least we said “probably” a false flag. They can’t even bring themselves — with all their sanctimonious tut-tutting about journalistic integrity to say “probably a genocide”, let alone admit they’ve been captured to the point of even sacking at least one journalist for raising the question.

Just look at the pictures. Gaza razed by US bombs, a population starved and tortured, homeless, 70,000 to 700,000 dead, concentration camps, the largest population of child amputees in history.

You allowed this to happen.

Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker. This article was first published by Michael West Media on 6 October 2026 and is republished with permission.

Palestine Forum of New Zealand stands with Palestinians in Aotearoa and around the world, remembering generations of dispossession and struggle, honouring those who have been lost, and reaffirming the Palestinian people’s enduring demand for freedom, dignity and justice.

We remember. We resist. We remain.

Palestinian history did not begin yesterday, and it will not end today.

• READ MORE: October 7: How three years of Israel’s genocidal war have changed Gaza

For generations, Palestinians have remained connected to their homeland, their families, their culture and their identity despite displacement, occupation and profound loss.

Our story is not defined by a single day.

It is a story of steadfastness, memory, resilience and an unwavering determination to see Palestine free.

From the river to the sea, and across the diaspora, we will continue to speak, organise and stand for justice.

Survived for generations
Palestinians have survived generations of displacement, dispossession and attempts to erase their history and identity. Yet we remain.

Remembering is not about looking backwards. It is about understanding why Palestinians continue to demand freedom and justice and why the world must not look away.

The Palestine Forum of New Zealand calls on Aotearoa New Zealand to stand consistently for human rights, international law, Palestinian self-determination and accountability, and to recognise that Palestinian lives, land, history and dignity cannot be treated as secondary or expendable.

We will not be silent. We will continue to speak, organise and advocate. We will continue to stand alongside Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and throughout the diaspora.

For us, remembrance is also resistance. Every Palestinian story preserved, every family connection maintained, every child taught their history, and every voice raised for justice is an affirmation that Palestine and its people cannot be erased.

The Palestinian struggle is a struggle for the right to live freely, safely and with dignity in the land to which generations of Palestinians remain connected.

We remember.

We resist.

We remain.

And we will continue to work for a future in which Palestinians are free.

Palestine will be free.

Maher Nazzal is chair of the Palestine Forum of New Zealand.

Pro-Palestinian protesters in Aotearoa New Zealand will be the first to kick off a Global Day of Action next Saturday marking 1100 days of Israeli genocide with a rally and march in the heart of the country’s largest city.

Many other protests will be carried out across the country in a wave of solidarity for the people of Palestine suffering from genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank under illegal Israeli occupation.

The Global Alliance for Palestine (GAFP) has issued an urgent call for support worldwide for upholding international law.

• READ MORE: Challenging apartheid, defending human rights and amplifying global solidarity for Palestine
• Other Gaza genocide reports

“In Aotearoa New Zealand, our kaupapa/purpose is to build a landmark demonstration here as part of this worldwide global mobilisation for Palestine, with demonstrations in every major city,” the local organisers for a grand coalition of activist groups, churches and solidarity movements.

“Why does it matter? This mobilisation marks three years — 1100 days — of Israel’s systematic genocide against the Palestinian people.”

Media contact Rana Hamida for the Global March for Palestine Coalition (Tāmaki Makaurau) said: “International law is not optional. On October 10, we the people of the world and here in Aotearoa, demand an end to the violence, complicity and the enabling of a system that fuels crimes against humanity.

“New Zealand has the responsibility to stand on the right side of history, and we will hold our elected government accountable.”

Ceasefire ‘fiction’
The coalition’s statement said that despite diplomatic language and the “fiction of a ceasefire, the bombing of Gaza has not stopped”.

More than 74,200 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military, including more than 18,000 children, and about 70 percent of buildings in Gaza are damaged or destroyed.

In the West Bank, land seizures and forced displacement continue.

The protest coalition said the New Zealand government had refused to “act meaningfully against this genocide. This is complicity.” The following “lack of action” was cited:

• Silence on illegal land seizures — Even when 22 countries, including Australia, Britain and Canada, condemned the latest West Bank land seizure, New Zealand stayed silent;
• Refusal to recognise Palestine — The coalition had the chance to recognise Palestine alongside Australia, the UK and Canada, but refused, calling it a matter of “when, not if” — then did nothing;
• Blocking sanctions — Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick’s Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill was denied even a first reading;
• Failure to support the ICJ case — The government does not support South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which centres on Israel’s violations of the Genocide Convention in Gaza;
• Refusal to ban IDF holiday visas — The government will not alter the Working Holiday Scheme with Israel;
• Ignoring Rocket Lab and Black Sky concerns — The Palestine Solidarity Network of Aotearoa raised concerns with then Defence Minister Judith Collins in November 2024; she refused to investigate. On 12 August 2026, court proceedings were filed in the High Court of Wellington challenging the government’s approval of BlackSky satellites launched from the Rocket Lab site at Māhia, for spying for Israel over Gaza;
• Ongoing military cooperation — The NZDF sent its largest contingent in a decade to RIMPAC 2026, alongside Israel and the US; and
• Denying evidence of illegal abduction and torture. The government has dismissed evidence that Israel illegally abducted and tortured New Zealand citizens and tangata whenua during the Global Sumud Flotilla humanitarian mission, including videos posted by Israeli National Security Minister Ben-Gvir himself showing him taunting and abusing detained flotilla participants.

23+ protests nationwide
More than 23 demonstrations will take place across the motu/nation on October 10, from Whangārei in the north to Waihōpai Invercargill in the south — making this one of the largest coordinated days of action for Palestine ever seen in this country,” said the protest coalition statement.

“In Tāmaki Makaurau alone, more than 50 organisations have endorsed the Auckland rally and march, which will assemble at 2pm at Te Komititanga/Britomart Square before marching to Albert Park,” the statement said.

Groups taking part include 350 Aotearoa, Alternative Jewish Voices, Amnesty International Aotearoa, Auckland Peace Action, Banners for Palestine, Bayan Aotearoa New Zealand, Council of Islamic Organisations of New Zealand, Dayenu: New Zealand Jews against Occupation, Global Sumud Flotilla Aotearoa, ISO – University of Auckland, Justice for Palestine, Kaiāwhina, Kia Ora Gaza, New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, Palestinian Forum of New Zealand, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa, Pax Christi Aotearoa, Polynesian Panther Party Aotearoa, Stop Wars Aotearoa, Students’ Justice for Palestine, Toitū te Tiriti, and Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom Aotearoa.

The march will feature speakers spanning human rights and social justice organisations, political parties, Palestinian families and performances from local artists.

The protesters are demanding:

• Sanction Israel immediately and isolate the apartheid regime. Introduce comprehensive sanctions now, particularly targeting companies supporting illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This includes imposing an immediate arms embargo, supporting the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, and backing Chlöe Swarbrick’s Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill;
• Uphold international law and end impunity. This includes supporting South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice;
• Recognise the State of Palestine;
• End complicity in military supply chains. Halt the export of surveillance technology and other dual-use goods that aid Israel’s military operations, including the launch of BlackSky satellites from Rocket Lab’s Māhia site;
• Expel the Israeli Ambassador and stop the diplomatic cover;
• Revoke the IDF holiday visas programme;
• Permit Palestinian families to settle in Aotearoa New Zealand, as was done for Ukrainian families; and Exit RIMPAC and Five Eyes for a robust, independent foreign policy.

Words matter in politics. They matter even more when a country is debating the document that will determine how it is governed.

That is why remarks by Justice Minister and Acting Attorney-General Siromi Turaga about Fiji’s constitutional review deserve some thought.

Speaking about the journey that has brought the government to this point, Turaga repeatedly invoked God.

• READ MORE: Sweeping changes to Fiji’s governance recommended by Constitution Commission
• Other Fiji constitution reports

“We got here through the miracle of God,” he said.

He spoke of people fasting and of prayer groups, including people who had travelled from Nadi and were praying at his office.

Then came perhaps the most striking part of his remarks when he recalled that the government had initially failed to secure the parliamentary numbers required for constitutional change and had then gone to the Supreme Court.

“We thought we didn’t have the numbers, but God worked in a different way,” he said.

‘We got the numbers’
He then referred to what happened to FijiFirst: “They were deregistered . . . we got the numbers.”

Nothing unusual about a Christian politician expressing his faith. Fiji is a deeply religious country, and Christians are entitled to pray. So are Hindus and Muslims.

While those holding public office do not surrender their religious beliefs when they walk through the doors of Parliament or a government office, there is a difference between seeking God’s guidance and appearing to attribute a political outcome to divine intervention.

FijiFirst was deregistered on July 1, 2024, by the Registrar of Political Parties after failing to make required amendments to its party constitution within the prescribed period. That was an administrative and legal process.

Yet Turaga’s description places that development within a striking sequence:

• The government did not have the numbers;
• People prayed;
• “God worked in a different way”;
• FijiFirst was deregistered; and
• The government got the numbers.

Again, language matters when it comes from someone exercising considerable political and legal authority, and especially now, as Fiji considers fundamental changes to its supreme law.

A Christian should be able to support or oppose the proposed Constitution. So should a Hindu. So should a Muslim. So should someone who follows another faith or professes no religion at all.

Faith and political validation
And this is where Turaga’s words raise a difficult question: when does personal faith become political validation?

If a political leader suggests that God intervened to produce the parliamentary circumstances necessary to advance constitutional change, what message does that send to those who disagree with the changes?

And whose God was Turaga talking about? Whose faith?

When a cabinet minister speaks of God intervening in a political process, Christians may understand those words through their own faith. Yet Fiji’s Constitution does not belong to Christians alone. It belongs to the Hindu family in Labasa, the Muslim family in Ba, the Christian family in Lau and the citizen who believes in no God at all.

The legitimacy of a Constitution governing a democratic, multifaith nation must come from something shared by all its citizens — their consent to the system that governs them.

Again, words matter, especially at a time like this. Therefore, those entrusted with political power should choose their words carefully.

Jale Moala, one of Fiji’s most experienced and talented journalists, has been editor of The Fiji Times, Fiji Daily Post, Islands Business, Pacific Islands Monthly, night editor of The National daily newspaper in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and a senior journalist on several New Zealand news media. This commentary is republished from his Facebook page with permission.

Seeking to discredit reports of its unprecedented killing of journalists in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces last week published a list of 170 slain Palestinians it claimed were not legitimate media workers but members of “terrorist groups”.

Palestinian political analyst Muhammad Shehada, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, reviewed every single entry on the list.

He called it “the most sloppy shameless fraud possible.”

• READ MORE: Al Jazeera rejects Netanyahu’s attack on journalists in UN speech
• Silencing the messenger: Israel kills journalists, while the West merely censors them — David Robie
• West Bank: RSF condemns Israeli army over escalating violence against Palestinian journalists
• Other Gaza media freedom reports

Israeli officials and Western supporters have trumpeted the IDF’s list as a counter to findings by groups like the International Federation of Journalists, which has described Israel’s nearly-three-year-old-war in Gaza as “the deadliest period in the history of journalism” and cataloged at least 240 journalists and media workers killed.

Other global media watchdogs have cited an even higher number while the Qatar-based Al Jazeera news channel has reported at least 270 killed — 12 of them being its own journalists.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has found dozens of cases in which it concluded journalists were targeted deliberately because of their reporting and filed multiple complaints with the International Criminal Court (ICC) alleging war crimes against the press.

The database, which the IDF refers to as the “Press Files,” says “that claim does not tell the full story” and alleges that “individuals presented as innocent journalists were, in fact, militants in the military wings of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and other terrorist organisations.”

Investigating war crimes in Gaza                     Video: Al Jazeera

Claims ‘in-depth’ list
The IDF claims the list was the product of an “in-depth investigation” consisting of open-source information, documents recovered by Israeli forces in Gaza, interrogations of alleged Palestinian militants, and intelligence gathered during military operations.

But as Shehada explained in a thread posted to social media on Sunday, “in the overwhelming majority of those listed, the IDF presents ZERO credible evidence. In most of them, their pages are literally blank”.

In 59 cases, Shehada found that the IDF did not provide any evidence for its claim that a journalist was a member of Hamas or PIJ other than that the claim was “based on multiple intelligence sources”.

Shehada said this amounted to essentially saying “trust me, bro,” which is especially insufficient given the numerous instances in which the IDF has been found to have misled the public about its responsibility for certain attacks, like the killing of 5-year-old Hind Rajab in 2024.

In another 42 cases, Shehada found that the IDF provided only decontextualized “snippets” of files, which were “undated and unspecified”. Without more information, Shehada said, this is “not… evidence of anything”.

“Those snippets could be taken from random files; they could be outdated or fabricated,” Shehada said, pointing to previous cases in which purported Hamas intelligence circulated by Israeli sources was later revealed to be misleadingly presented as fabricated.

Shehada pointed to specific cases in which Israel’s allegations against specific journalists have been undermined by the underlying evidence.

Israel claimed that Al Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul, whom the IDF killed in July 2024, was an operative with Hamas’ elite Nukhba wing and released a supposed Hamas personnel document as proof.

Debunked by RSF
But as Reporters Without Borders has previously explained, the document says al-Ghoul, born in 1997, received a military rank in 2007, when he was 10, while elsewhere saying he joined in 2014.

It also identifies him as an engineer, contradicting the IDF’s description of him as a Nukhba fighter. Israeli troops also detained al-Ghoul at al-Shifa hospital months before he was killed but released him after 12 hours.

The case of Anas al-Sharif, another Al Jazeera journalist killed in 2025, is similar. As Shehada documented for +972 magazine last year, al-Sharif was seriously injured in 2017, listed in a military context in 2019, but described as “suspended” and “unassigned” by 2023 — while another document nevertheless portrays him as an elite Nukhba fighter. He was also reportedly detained and released by Israeli forces during the 2024 al-Shifa raid.

In other cases, the IDF’s evidence outright debunks the military’s own claims. For instance, Israel labeled photojournalist Hassan Aslih — killed by an airstrike at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in May 2025 — as a “military operative.”

But the 2019 Hamas document provided as evidence for this lists him as a “photographer” involved with “media services”.

While the document, if authentic, does establish a relationship between Aslih and Hamas’ Qassam Brigades at least six years before his death, this does not make him a legitimate target under international humanitarian law, which distinguishes between those who have a “continuous combat function” and those who provide political or other indirect forms of support, like media coverage.

Shehada found at least seven cases in which the only evidence provided by the IDF was photos of slain journalists holding guns. In another 12 cases, the IDF provided undated photos of journalists allegedly taking part in Hamas or PIJ military activities.

Israeli journalists’ military service
Shehada noted that many prominent Israeli journalists also have past military service, such as Axios correspondent Barak Ravid, who was an IDF reservist until 2023. “Does that make him a ‘legitimate target’? or a non-civilian forever?” Shehada asked.

The distinction between past military affiliation and active combatant status has been a repeated source of dispute for press freedom groups that have attempted to tally the number of journalists killed.

Last month, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) completed a sweeping review of 229 deaths after Hamas and PIJ published obituaries identifying some people listed as journalists as members of armed groups.

CPJ ultimately removed 22 people from its list, including some it found had participated in combat — but retained others despite militant obituaries, gun photos, or past organisational ties when the evidence did not establish active combatant status.

The “Press Files” database contains 49 cases in which the main piece of evidence is one of these obituaries. Among them are people who CPJ examined and concluded were not active combatants, such as photojournalist Amr Abu Odeh — a 26-year-old freelance photographer for the Anadolu Agency and Reuters — whom the IDF database labels a Hamas “squad commander”.

CPJ examined photos of Odeh wearing a military uniform, which came from a 2021 military training course with Gaza’s Ministry of the Interior. The group noted that “No armed factions in Gaza have claimed Abu Odeh as being affiliated with them, and the IDF has not alleged he was involved in combat”.

‘NOT engaged’ militarily
“In multiple cases, despite obituaries by Hamas/PIJ, the Committee to Protect Journalists investigated thoroughly and concluded those journalists were NOT engaged in any militant activity during the genocide,” Shehada wrote.

“They may have in the past. That doesn’t make them combatants forever.”

He added that the flimsiness of the IDF’s evidence was more striking given the sophistication of the intelligence unit it uses to “dig up dirt” on journalists to provide post hoc justification for their killings, which has been referred to internally as the “Legitimisation Cell,” which was revealed in a +972 investigation.

“If that’s all they can provide as ”evidence“ (e.g. blank pages, random snippets, outdated docs) despite having formidable resources,” Shehada wrote, “then it’s a vindication of Gaza’s journalists!”

Stephen Prager is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Republished under Creative Commons.

Backers of the UK Green Party‘s landmark “Zionism is racism” motion celebrated the proposal’s passing into policy on Sunday, with supporters telling The New Arab that this is the start of a bigger movement.

Nurlan Yermekbayev is one of those very important people most of us in the West have never heard of. I had been travelling with him for two days in the Xinjiang Region of China before I even realised who this quiet, dignified man was.

As the Secretary-General of the SCO — the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation — Yermekbayev helms a multi-state organisation that is helping drive, in their own words, tectonic shifts in global politics, economy, and other spheres of international relations.

How I got an interview with him was almost comedic.

• READ MORE: Other Eugene Doyle articles

I was part of a group of international journalists, politicians, academics and analysts who were hosted on a tour of Xinjiang last month and invited to attend an international conference with the region’s leaders.

It turned out that the main reason the Secretary-General was in the region was for a series of meetings with Party Secretary Chen Xiaojiang and other officials of the region.

Xinjiang is home to 25 million people, about 45 percent of whom are ethnic Uyghur. It is also China’s key gateway to the rest of Eurasia and what many believe will be tomorrow’s new world order.

Our group visited a variety of sites associated with the Belt and Road Initiative, including the Khorgos Gate on the border with Kazakhstan. Khorgos is a centrepiece, a key node in the chains that are binding the countries of Eurasia into a modern Silk Road stretching from Europe to the Sea of Japan. Seeing Khorgos was Yermekbayev’s idea of a bit of R&R.

Massive scale
The scale of what has been — and is being — created across Xinjiang is something you have to see to believe. Long ranks and files of rail freight crossing the border, massive factories and logistics centres popping up like spring mushrooms, millions of new housing units for the population and its booming economy, the caravans of trucks, the endless fingers of pipelines and telecommunications cables extending into the distance and which eventually criss-cross the SCO member states — China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan, Iran and Belarus.

While the rest of the world follows US President Donald Trump’s latest antics, these countries are quietly spending trillions of dollars to create an integrated Eurasia.

Over breakfast one day in the State Guesthouse in Yining, a Brazilian journalist, Nelson de Sá, leant towards me and whispered: “Do you know who that guy there is?” I had seen and greeted the man he was referring to but had no idea.

True, I had been puzzled why, wherever we went, there was a small accompanying motorcade of black sedans, and a mini-bus out of which emerged minders, a few distinguished delegates and various athletic men in suits. “He’s the Secretary-General of the SCO,” de Sá whispered.

“[Expletive!] If I get a chance I’m definitely going to ask for an interview,” I told the Brazilian journalist. The next day at lunch Yermekbayev was seated with Bhokin Bhalakula, Thailand’s former Deputy Prime Minister who was also part of our party. I joined them and we talked about Émile Zola, the Dreyfus Affair, and geopolitics.

At the end of the lunch I asked if the Secretary-General would accept a short interview. Yes. That afternoon.

Immediately before joining our tour, Yermekbayev had been with Presidents Xi Jinping, Putin, Pezeshkian and Erdoğan along with a host of other leaders, including India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, attending the 26th SCO Council of Heads of State summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

40% of global population
The SCO members account for 40 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its GDP and 60 percent of the vast Eurasian landmass, with coastlines on the Indian Ocean, the Arctic and the Pacific. It has seven times the population of the EU, eight times the land area and more than double ($71 trillion) the EU’s GDP (PPP).

It is not a military bloc but it is worth noting that its members include four nuclear-weapon states — China, Russia, India and Pakistan. As I wrote a few years ago: when Eurasia awakes our world will shake. The organisation sees itself as the driver of a fairer multipolar world order that is slowly overtaking the Western-dominated system. This is the Quiet General’s day job.

Over a small table in the hotel in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Yermekbayev spoke in a soft Central Asian accent; a rumbling voice, a bit like an idling tank. He is a former Defence Minister in Kazakhstan, a lieutenant-general, and a long-standing diplomat who has the wonderful title of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. A graduate of Moscow’s Military Red Banner Institute, a sinologist, an author, and a PhD fluent in Mandarin and English, the Secretary-General discreetly commands attention.

Years ago, as Secretary of the Security Council in Kazakhstan he was tasked with dealing with Islamist militants within his country and cross-border counter-terrorism. As with Xinjiang, and, of course, Pakistan, Iran and others in the region, Kazakhstan had serious challenges from militants. The US war on Afghanistan was still raging, with knock-on impacts across the region.

Yermekbayev recalls that the SCO was initially formed as a security organisation in 2001 to combat terrorism, separatism and extremism within the member countries before evolving into the social, economic, security and infrastructure facilitator it is today.

“We realised that sustainable security cannot be provided without solving social and economic issues. And it can’t exist without building trust between our member countries — that’s why building trust is one of the major pillars of our organisation,” Yermekbayev told me.

As the US continues to weaponise the dollar-denominated global trading system, SCO countries are moving closer to the creation of alternative systems. Bilateral trading in national currencies to bypass Western sanctions is growing steadily.

Bilateral commerce
Russia and China, for example, settle over 90 percent of their bilateral commerce in rubles and yuan. Various SCO countries tap into China’s CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System) for bilateral trades. The establishment of an SCO development bank capable of fully protecting Eurasia from Western coercive measures is still, however, on the drawing board.

Yermekbayev stresses the centrality of accepting different systems of governance as one of the keys to the SCO’s success.

“We have parliamentary countries like India and Pakistan. We have Iran and Pakistan which are Islamic republics. But at the same time, we have presidential republics in Central Asia. We have Russia. We have Belarus. So location, ethnic traditions, organisation of the state system may differ, but still all these countries manage to find compromise, manage to sit at the table and discuss issues.”

Yermekbayev also emphasised the “Shanghai Spirit” that drives the organisation — a commitment to multilateralism centred around an agreed code.

“There are six principles. One of them is what you just mentioned: respect for cultural and civilisational diversity. The other principles include mutual equality, mutual trust, mutual profit, and striving for common development. One more important principle is to solve all issues only through negotiations and consultations.

“That’s why, regardless of the size of the country — for example, China is very big — all are equal. It is strictly followed at all levels: junior experts, at the level of ministers, and at the level of heads of state.”

“Regarding the multipolar world — there is a misperception that the SCO is a kind of ‘anti-somebody’ bloc. SCO is not a military-political bloc. For example, in NATO, they have so-called collective security principle (Article 5). We don’t have this.

Multipolar, more fair, world order
“But our leaders consistently declare — and it is written in our declaration — that we stand for a multipolar, more fair, more democratic new world order — one which will better represent the interests of the global south, of developing countries, and also which will be guided by United Nations, by the UN articles, and by international law. So it is a priority for us: international law and United Nations regulations.”

Yermekbayev believes these values and principles are acting as a magnet for new SCO members that is as powerful as the economic factors driving Eurasian expansion.

The Secretary-General is determined to accelerate the SCO’s emergence as a key international institution particularly at this time of rising tensions, unilateral wars and the constant violations of the UN Charter. He told the audience at the Shangri-La Dialogue earlier this year:

“In these conditions, the role of regional organisations continues to steadily increase, with a greater responsibility falling on their shoulders for the affairs in their regions.”

Watch this space. It’s called Eurasia.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region. He contributes to Asia Pacific Report and hosts solidarity.co.nz.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting from Publix, the House of Journalism in Berlin, Germany.

The Pentagon is sending a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East as President Trump considers a new escalation of the US war on Iran. The latest move adds 7000 sailors, up to 3000 Marines, to the US military presence in the region.

Today, we look at the US bombing of a children’s school in the southern Iranian city of Minab on the first day of the 2026 US-Israeli war on Iran. The bombing killed at least 156 people — 120 of them children, 26 teachers, all women. A United Nations fact-finding mission recently concluded the US strike was a war crime, but the Trump administration has not yet even acknowledged US responsibility.

Drop Site News is out this week with a devastating investigation into the bombing of the school. The article and accompanying video is headlined “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave.” We’re joined right now by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, lead author on the report.

In a moment, Jeremy, we’ll play some of your interviews with survivors, first responders and parents. But first, Jeremy, set up what happened that day on February 28.

‘The school that became a grave.’                    Video: Democracy Now!

JEREMY SCAHILL: Thanks, Amy.

You know, we need to back up a few weeks and remember that Iran and the United States were engaged in an intense round of negotiations that were being mediated by the Sultanate of Oman, which had been the main mediator for two decades between the United States and Iran on nuclear issues and had played a major role in brokering the 2015 JCPOA agreement signed under Barack Obama.

And the Iranians were very sceptical about this process, because just some months before these negotiations, in June of 2025, when the Iranians were negotiating with the United States, the US and Israel launched surprise bombing attacks against Iran in what became known as the 12-Day War.

But the foreign minister of Oman, on February 27, had gone to the United States. He met with Vice-President JD Vance in the White House. He came out, and he told media that he was optimistic that a deal was going to be reached and that it would be historic in nature — yes, there were details to work out; nothing was guaranteed — but that there were technical talks scheduled for the following week in Vienna, Austria.

And so, when Iranians woke up on the morning of February 28, let’s remember this was a Saturday, but in Iran, Saturday is the beginning of the school and workweek, and so Iranians were, you know, paying attention to everything, but they went to bed understanding that this process was still going on, that war was very much a possibility, but not believing it was going to start imminently, because you had this next round of negotiations and you had the Omani foreign minister expressing optimism.

Well, then, as people are stuck in traffic jams, they’re getting their kids out the door for school, children start arriving at school, we get the initial reports that there are airstrikes that have happened in Tehran, the capital of Iran. And the first strikes that happened that day were on the residence and offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and so a lot of the media speculation at that point was about whether or not Iran’s supreme leader had been assassinated.

And word starts to spread very quickly across Iran and on state media that there are attacks happening throughout the country. And so, administrators and officials in provinces around Iran begin calling schools and directing principals and teachers to start having parents come to take their children home. There was going to be a shelter-in-place order.

The Iranians had been through this before.

So, as this is happening, we then start to hear shocking reports that in the southern Iranian city of Minab, a missile has slammed into a girls’ school, and we start to see images that show children and the bodies of children. And very quickly, the media narrative sort of becomes — and this is being pushed kind of by the United States — that the school had been right next to an IRGC missile facility and that it was sort of collateral damage.

We did an investigation into this. There’s been some very good reporting on this. This is not a story that we broke. But what we did is we really went deeply into what happened in the experience of Iranians who lived it that day, and by talking to teachers who survived. You know, 26 teachers were killed in this attack — one of them was pregnant — 120 children.

This was not a single bombing or collateral damage. There were at least two direct hits on a school packed with children. That was with Tomahawk cruise missiles, one of the most sophisticated weapons in the US arsenal. And a couple of hours after those initial hits, as first responders came, as parents came, the US launches more strikes.

A total, Iran says, of 13 missiles were launched. The justice minister of Iran told me, “This isn’t a double-tap — a double-tap strike; this is a triple-tap strike.”

You know, one of the most horrifying details, Amy, that we uncovered is that after the first bomb had hit near the school that morning, the teachers didn’t believe that their school would be bombed, because it was a school, and they had gathered the children, many of the children, in the schoolyard because their parents had come to pick them up.

And when the bombs hit not far away from the school, they said, “My god, we need to get everyone back into the school.” So they ushered the children back into the school. One of the teachers took some of the girls into a prayer hall inside of the school, and then, moments later, direct hit with a Tomahawk cruise missile on the school.

So, the protected site of the school, the parents and the teachers thought that they would find shelter there, and the United States directly bombed that school while they were inside.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, I want to go to the voices of the people themselves. This is an excerpt of your Drop Site News new investigation, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave,” featuring interviews with Yaghoub Yazdanpanah. His daughter Fatemeh died in the strike. But first, this is preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem. She survived the bombing.

HOSSNIYEH SALEM: [translated] Like any other day, I got my child ready at 7:00, because my son is in fifth grade and attended the same school. I got my child ready and headed to school.

My son went to the boys’ school, and I stayed at preschool in my own class. Our school had two floors. The upper floor was for the girls, and the downstairs was for the boys.

One section was for preschool. You can say there were three schools there. There were students there from all walks of life, children from working-class families, educators. We had all kinds of students there.

YAGHOUB YAZDANPANAH: [translated] I have to go back a little and tell you about how I chose this school. Fatemeh’s mother and I had noticed Fatemeh’s overflowing intelligence. When we would tell her a story, she would never forget the story, and she would recite the story moment by moment, word for word.

I wanted to find a very good school that would address Fatemeh’s needs and her active mind. After asking a lot of questions, I found Shajareh Tayyebeh School.

HOSSNIYEH SALEM: [translated] After the lesson started, we handed out books, and the children did their activities. I took the children to the schoolyard, the park that was in our schoolyard, so the children could play. The time was around 9:30, I think, when I was informed by a friend that the war had started and they had hit Tehran.

JEREMY SCAHILL: In the first moments of the US and Israeli bombing campaign, they strike the personal residence and offices of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran. And they killed, assassinated not only Khamenei, but members of his family.

They start then striking other leadership targets of the IRGC, the elite military force of Iran; political offices in Iran; government ministries in Iran. And word starts to spread all across the country that this isn’t just like a one-off airstrike, that this does seem to, in fact, be a full-scale war.

HOSSNIYEH SALEM: [translated] Administrators said there are war conditions, and it’s better if the children go home early. We didn’t have a single thought or didn’t imagine that they may want to hit our school.

In complete calm and relaxation, we were calling families and telling them to come and take their children. As they were coming to get the kids, a number of the children had left, and some were still at the school. I first heard the sound of an explosion.

ON-SCREEN TEXT: After a missile strike nearby, some teachers ushered children back inside the school for protection.

HOSSNIYEH SALEM: [translated] The preschool children were 5 years old, and all they did was yell, “Miss! Miss!” and were crying. I ran to the children. I just said, “Get under the table!” I didn’t think they were going to hit the school. I just thought that someplace had been hit. I said, “Don’t be afraid. Sit down.”

I heard this horrible sound, and it was so close, two simultaneous sounds. They’re still in my ear. My son even describes them.

“Woosh, boom! Woosh, boom!” And then explosion. Plaster was falling. The ground was shaking. And at that moment, I just looked at my preschool girls and my son, and I said to myself, “It’s over. Now is the time when we go under the rubble. It’s going to fall now.”

Then there were no more sounds. The class was full of smoke and dust. I told my son, “Yassin, run and open the door. Let’s get out!” My preschool kids didn’t have shoes on since our classroom was carpeted. I took the children in my arms, one by one, and brought them outside. We exited from the preschool yard gate until we reached the first street.

I looked behind me, and I saw smoke and fire coming from the school office. All I said to the preschool children was, “Kids, just look in front of you. Don’t look back!”

I told everyone to run to the school because they had hit the school. “The children are under the ruins. Go save them!”

AMY GOODMAN: That’s an excerpt from Drop Site News’ new investigation, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave.” That was preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem. She survived the bombing. In this clip, we hear more from Yaghoub Yazdanpanah, who describes how he raced to the school to look for his little daughter Fatemeh.

YAGHOUB YAZDANPANAH: [translated] It was like something was telling my heart that the school they were talking about was Shajareh Tayyebeh. I lost it. I left my classroom, ran home, took my car and sped to Minab.

When I arrived, I said, “Oh no!” The unimaginable had happened. As soon as I arrived there, I saw there was no school left. Two-thirds of the school, maybe more, had been destroyed.

Smoke was rising from all over the school. It had turned into rubble. For a moment, I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare.

AMY GOODMAN: In this excerpt from Drop Site News’ new investigation, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave,” we hear two Iranian Red Crescent Society emergency workers describing the utter devastation following the US strike on the Minab school.

EHSAN MOHSEN: [translated] Mothers came to me and said, “My daughter is in the classroom,” “My son is in the classroom. In God’s name, please bring me my son.”

We didn’t know how to answer these families. Each body part that was brought out from the building and taken to the ambulances, the families ran, looking to see who it was.

YAGHOUB YAZDANPANAH: [translated] People kept coming and coming to help, to remove children from under the ruins. All of us were there waiting. I, a 32-year-old father, was waiting for them to bring my daughter from under the ruins. Imagine the depth of this catastrophe and how hard it was for us.

MAJID DADANIA: [translated] There was a father with us who was searching for his two children until it was 4:00 or 5:00 at night, when his fingers no longer worked. His fingers were covered in blood. He had lost his fingernails. In that same condition, he fell asleep.

There was also a father — we had nothing to give him. All that remained was a school bag and shoes. Where we had collected the school bag and shoes, the father sat and was talking to the school bag and shoes.

He was just talking to the school bag and shoes. Nothing from his child has been recovered.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, those are two Red Crescent workers, an excerpt of Drop Site News’ new investigation, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave.”

In March, President Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth denied the US was responsible for bombing the school. They spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One.

REPORTER: Did the United States bomb a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran on the first day of the war and kill 175 people?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, in my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.

REPORTER: Is that true, Mr. Hegseth, that it was Iran who did that?

DEFENCE SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH: We’re certainly investigating.

REPORTER: Still investigating?

DEFENSE SECRETARY PETE HEGSETH: But the only — the only side that targets civilians is Iran.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We think it was done — we think it was done by Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump. In July, President Trump told a different story, appearing on Fox News, talking about the airstrike.

TREY YINGST: There are images from this site that show fragments that appear to be from US Tomahawk missiles. Is it possible that old intelligence or a mistake during a very active time in the war led to this event?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It is, but it’s also possible that those images that you have are AI-generated. … Now, I know we’re waiting for a conclusive report. I don’t think there can be a conclusive report.

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, really? So, that’s President Trump talking about the report. Jeremy Scahill, you are the co-founder of Drop Site News. This is an incredible investigation, “Massacre at Minab.” Can you respond to what Hegseth and Trump said? And talk about the state of the investigation into this deadly attack on the schools, February 28, that killed over 150 people, as you said, 120 of them children.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Amy, I think there’s only two possibilities here for what actually happened that day. On the one hand, it’s possible that because Pete Hegseth came in with a tone set by Trump himself that civilian deaths don’t matter, that soldiers and military personnel should not worry about killing or injuring civilians, that they eliminated the entire department that is supposed to do civilian harm mitigation, that they used AI, including Maven systems developed by Palantir, to rush to develop as many targets as possible, that they had old satellite photos that indicated that this was a military base and not a school, and that because of that disregard for civilians and civilian life, they pushed forward and said, “We want to break records”.

They’re always talking about records — “and maximised lethality.” And so, it was a process where they didn’t care, and they just started striking everything.

On the flip side of it — and, you know, a former senior State Department official told me this — knowing what she knows about the entire system and the fact that this was struck in the first hours of the first day of this war that they had been planning, that something very sinister may well be at the core of this.

So, you know, it’s important to say, up until the year 2013, this was — this area in Minab was actually a facility that was operated by the IRGC. We obtained documents, and the satellite photos also show this clearly, showing that in 2014 the school filed for registration.

The IRGC donated the land. The province redistricted the whole area, and the IRGC actually moved most of its facilities more than 3 km away. That base, which was a publicly known base, was not hit during these attacks that morning. Instead, it was an area that was a school, a car wash, a clinic — what we would call in America a strip mall — and the only remaining IRGC building in that vicinity was an administrative office of the naval forces of the IRGC, and they had totally vacated that property after the June 2025 war.

So, what happened that day was there was literally no presence of the IRGC whatsoever there. And in fact, satellite photos from just weeks — that the public can see — from just weeks before the strike, you could see the murals on the wall. You could see the soccer field. Some of the satellite photos show shadows of tiny people playing outside.

I spoke to Wes Bryant, who used to be one of the people in charge of civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon up until 2025. His division was the one that Hegseth shut down. And he said that under the rules in the doctrine, they should have checked the most readily available satellite imagery before launching any strike of that nature. The other thing is, Tomahawk cruise missiles have cameras on them. They can loiter. They can shift direction.

So, there are many, many questions that need to be asked about this.

This is one of the single gravest war crimes that I’m aware of since Vietnam. It’s akin to the Amariyah shelter bombing in Baghdad, Iraq, in the 1991 Gulf War, when the US dropped a bomb, a bunker buster bomb, ripped open a hole in a bunker where hundreds of civilians were, and then dropped another 2000-pound bomb directly, incinerating more than 400 people. It rises to the level of gravity of that crime.

And it’s really just shocking that there isn’t more outcry from the American public and the US Congress. This is one of the most severe war crimes. And it’s not like, you know, the tone under Obama, where he says, “Oh, oops, we tortured some folks,” or they said, you know, “We regret this.”

Trump’s people are defiant about this. And the Democrats, you know, they’re not in control of the Congress right now, but this should be front and center of foreign policy questions toward Donald Trump. If the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives, they should go after them for this. These are war crimes.

AMY GOODMAN: Has any — has any investigation been done by the US government, made public?

JEREMY SCAHILL: No, the United States Central Command is supposedly doing an investigation, but Bradley Cooper, the head of CENTCOM, lied in front of Congress and said this was an active IRGC missile base. There’s no evidence to suggest that there ever were missiles launched from this site. And this was congressional testimony.

It seems like the best-case scenario is that they kind of say this was human error, artificial intelligence and outdated maps, because the threat was so serious, and we moved forward, and, oops, this was a mistake. That would be the best-case scenario.

The worst-case scenario, in some ways, is that Trump’s people and the Pentagon just simply say, “Oh, no, this is Iranian propaganda. We still think that maybe the IRGC bombed it themselves.”

That’s why it’s so important to have actual investigations. The UN sent a commission there, and they’ve determined that it’s a war crime, just on the basis of the idea that if they used AI, if they used systems where they shut down the civilian harm mitigation and they didn’t check to see what was there before they launched the missile, that satisfies the legal barriers to indicate that a war crime, not just a crime against humanity, was committed.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, we just have 20 seconds, but the devastating pictures of — I mean, the victims are not only those who’ve died, but the children that survived, that are saying to their parents, “I wish I had been one of the martyred to be with my friends.” These last 20 seconds, the effect today?

JEREMY SCAHILL: You know, one of the drawings from the psychologist, a child just drew a severed hand. And she said, you know, that the kids feel like they did something wrong, that they don’t understand why their friends died and they weren’t able to save them.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, we have to leave it there. It is an incredibly devastating report. Jeremy is co-founder of Drop Site News. We’ll link to your new investigation and film, “Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave.”

The original content of this programme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence. Republished by Asia Pacific Report under Creative Commons.

Pro-Palestine protesters targeted Christchurch’s Te Pae Convention Centre yesterday to highlight the National Aerospace Summit’s alleged ties with Israeli military.

The protesters from Peace Action Ōtautahi started their action at Victoria Park from 7am, Allied Media reports.

Police said two men, aged 56 and 23, had been arrested after vehicles were allegedly used to block emergency entrances to the aerospace summit.

• READ MORE: Two arrested as anti-Israel protesters target New Zealand Aerospace Summit
  
• Protesters block Aerospace Summit in Christchurch in 2025
• Other Gaza, Palestine reports

Last year 30 people were arrested during a similar protest.

The protesters aimed to raise public awareness of what it said were ties between the aerospace sector, the United States military, and Israeli Defence Force, which has been condemned worldwide for its almost three years of genocide in Gaza killing at least 74,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.

Along with Palestinian flags, protesters’ banners declared “Stop arming Israel”, “No weapons in Ōtautahi,” “Keep space for peace”, “If the [NZ] government won’t shut down war criminals, the people will”, and “Sanction Israel for genocide”.

About 600 delegates were reportedly attending the summit, with speakers and delegations from the United States, Canada, Germany, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Representatives from the European Union and European Space Agency were also taking part.

Police Superintendent Lane Todd said officers respected the right to peaceful protest, but “will not tolerate actions that threaten public safety or intimidate others exercising their lawful rights”.

A Peace Action Ōtautahi spokesperson said its “Swarm the Summit” protest concerns centred on the dual-use nature of aerospace technology and links between some summit exhibitors and military operations.

Palestinian lawyer Muhammad Dahleh says moves to exclude Palestinian-led parties and candidates from Israel’s elections this month amount to “institutional discrimination,” arguing that the disparity is rooted in Israeli law, reports Al Jazeera.

His comments come as a hearing in the Israeli Supreme Court is under way this week to consider the decision to disqualify the country’s main Arab-majority political lists from the elections on October 27.

“Basically, it’s institutional discrimination, but it goes back to the legislation itself,” Dahleh told Al Jazeera in an interview from occupied East Jerusalem.

• READ MORE: Other Gaza, Palestine reports

He said Israel’s Basic Laws barred parties that denied the country’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, as well as parties or candidates deemed to support armed struggle by a hostile state, or an organisation designated by Israel as a “terrorist organisation”.

“That’s what they are using now against the Arab or the Palestinian parties inside Israel,” Dahleh said.

He contrasted their exclusion with the treatment of extremist Israeli politicians accused of making inflammatory statements against Palestinians.

“This discrimination, as I said, it’s institutionalised. It’s set in the law itself,” Dahleh said.

Gaza death toll hits 74,000+
Meanwhile, the eath toll from Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has risen to 74,040, according to the Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Eight people have been killed and 26 wounded in Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip over the latest 24-hour reporting period, according to the ministry.

The ministry said 1439 people had now been killed and 5052 wounded since a “ceasefire” took effect in October.

Israel has killed at least 74,040 Palestinians and wounded 175,168 since October 2023 when its genocidal war on Gaza began, the ministry said.

The seeds of resistance and later community empowerment began in Tāmaki Makaurau in a humble but lively bookshop in a rundown two-storeyed shop at 436 Queen Street. Called the Resistance Bookshop, it became the headquarters for protesters in 1969 for three years as anti-Vietnam War action grew and grew.

This was where many students, workers and radicals gathered — including the young Roger Fowler — to plan their protest action. Many of them lived in dilapidated inner-city flats within a stone’s throw of the bookshop.

As the anti-war movement gained momentum, many young men faced conscription into the New Zealand army and there were fears that conscripts would be drafted to fight in Vietnam — as was their fate in the United States and Australia.

• READ MORE: Other Roger Fowler reports

Fowler, an icon of Aotearoa protest and community empowerment, recalled how those men whose “number came up” in the archaic Compulsory Military Training (CMT) “lottery law” were ordered to report to a special train at Auckland Railway Station.

They were “transported to the Waiouru army camp to endure a harsh, three-month course of military training plus follow-up camps,” wrote Fowler.

“My number was drawn and I refused to go; instead burning my draft card at a demonstration at the US Consul’s Paritai Drive mansion.

“I organised a protest at the railway station, where fellow Resistance supporters and I handed out leaflets, encouraging the young conscripts on the train to disembark and refuse to go.

“I was later arrested for refusing to attend the army call-up, then locked up in Mt Eden prison for about three weeks for refusing the pay the fine.”

Fowler recalled that this period of “defiant non-compliance” by conscripts led to the founding of the Organisation to Halt Military Service (OHMS). Eventually, the pressure paid off when the Norman Kirk-led Labour government was elected in November 1972 — and it immediately scrapped CMT.

This saga is one of many stories of the people’s resistance that are recounted in a new book being launched next Saturday, Ponsonby People’s Union: At the Frontline of Community Activism in the 1970s, with an overview written by Roger Fowler in the months before he died earlier this year. Many activists from the era, including his wife and fellow campaigner, Dr Lyn Doherty (Ngati Porou and Ngāpuhi), have also contributed.

Arrested 20 times
He was arrested or charged more than 20 times “during those turbulent years”, and was imprisoned four times for refusing to pay fines — a political prisoner.

Reading about this period was particularly poignant for me because in 1969 I was living in Melbourne as the young activist editor of the independent Sunday Observer and being threatened with prosecution for writing an editorial urging young Australians to burn their draft cards.

I didn’t know Roger, Lyn and their whānau then. This came many years later, especially when we crossed paths over our Palestine activism with Roger founding and campaigning with the Kia Ora Gaza project in a sustained effort to break the cruel Israeli siege of the Gaza enclave to deliver humanitarian aid.

Veteran activist Roger Fowler, co-founder of the Ponsonby People’s Union and a founding member of the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, died on 21 February 2026, aged 77. His whānau have put in tremendous mahi in their effort to try to complete this remarkable book before his death, and it is a compelling testament to his life, and to the comrades and activist supporters.

Fowler’s “vision, energy and guitar helped sustain a remarkable initiative in collective action” for a fairer and better community.

Back to the Resistance Bookshop.

In fact, there were three of them – one each in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. They were at the “forefront of this vibrant groundswell of protest and rebellion”. Young people, including many students, spearheaded new forms of activism such as “sit-ins, street theatre, graffiti, leaflets, protest songs and pickets”.

‘Bowels of the underground’
Countless leaflets and screen-printed posters were produced from what was dubbed “the bowels of the underground”.

Auckland’s Resistance Bookshop was also a popular rendezvous for Australian and US draft dodgers who had fled to New Zealand to escape the Vietnam War.

The Progressive Youth Movement (PYM) was at the forefront of street protests venting outrage at the pointless slaughter in Vietnam and the “brutal oppression in apartheid South Africa”.

Within walking distance of the Resistance Bookshop — few protesters had cars back then — were two popular hangouts: the Babel restaurant in Victoria Street, and the Kiwi Tavern pub in Symonds Street.

The Vietnam War protests peaked with about 35,000 taking part but eased off as NZ troops were gradually withdrawn from 1971 onwards. Committed activists began looking for a fresh “meaningful direction”.

Many of the serious radicals who had left the bookshop formed an inner city Marxist study group exploring works by Mao Zedong and Lenin, and other more modern authors analysing class struggles against capitalism.

“PMY activist and secretary Cliff Kelsall and I became friends and workmates as labourers on various building sites,” wrote Fowler. ”We started exploring ideas about urban activism, especially inspired by the appeal of Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and George Jackson to ‘bring the war back home’, by Newton’s concept of grassroots community organising, building a global network of ‘revolutionary intercommunalism’, and by Seale’s clarion call to ‘Seize the time’.”

North Vietnamese meeting
In 1972, a group of the “young radicals” were invited to meet a visiting North Vietnamese delegation, including the mayor of Hanoi, at the Auckland University Student Union building.

“Among issues discussed,” recalled Fowler, “I asked about the idea that had been quietly floating about, of organising an international militia to support the Vietnamese struggle — similar to the International Brigades that about a dozen young Kiwis had joined up with in the 1930s to fight Franco’s fascists during the Spanish Civil War.”

Several New Zealand medics had volunteered then too, explained Fowler, including the activist and late Invercargill Mayor Tim Shadbolt’s aunt, Rene Shadbolt.

“The startled visitors politely responded: “Thanks, but no thanks.” The Vietnamese suggested that the New Zealanders should instead support their struggle by building a “homegrown revolutionary movement”.

“Advice some of us took to heart,” noted Fowler.

This led to the foundation of an urban movement to organise around “real life struggles and developing survival skills” — useful for the then working class neighbourhoods of Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, Freeman’s Bay and Newton.

From the Resistance Bookshop, the movement had now graduated to become the Ponsonby People’s Union for Survival and Freedom (PU, for short), with its headquarters at 15 Ponsonby Road in a rundown block of shops skirting Western Park, a block long since demolished to provide more space in the reserve.

‘Clear sense of purpose’
“We decided we needed to start with a clear unified sense of purpose,” wrote Fowler. “A Ten Point Statement of Direction evolved, inspired by the Ten Point Programme adopted earlier by the US Black Panther Party.

“This statement was to become our set of guiding principles for positive practical actions and for addressing the key issues facing our community – such as substandard housing, police harassment, poor education and health services, racism, women’s rights, costly food, arbitrary evictions, and the isolation of prisoners, often in faraway prisons, from their families and loved ones, and advancing social cohesion.”

As Fowler summed up the problem-solving objective, “we aimed to advance the wellbeing, resilience, social cohesion and survival of our community and to strive for civil liberties and freedom from oppression”.

Although clearly influenced by Newton and the Black Panthers — but never a “copycat” movement, PU often operated as a “sister organisation” cooperating with the Polynesian Panthers — of anti-Dawn Raids fame — the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ), PYM, Ngā Tamatoa, ACORD and “other left activist groups of the day”.

While deciding on PU’s programmes, Cliff Kelsall and Fowler met Polynesian Panthers leaders at their office in Three Lamps, Ponsonby (honoured today with a pavement panther tile), and forged a warm rapport and community partnership that lasted for the seven-year life of the union and beyond. First up for collaboration was a community food co-op.

“We wanted the co-op to engage with people and encourage them to work together as volunteers around the common goal of sustaining our households with fresh, low-cost food,” wrote Fowler.

And the movement introduced itself in 1972 through leaflets as “a community-based group of people getting together to try to solve common problems and build a real community with control over its own destiny”.

Borrowed old trucks
The Ponsonby headquarters had four upstairs bedrooms and a meeting room (plus garage space and a courtyard), so Kelsall and Fowler immediately moved in with others to help pay the rent — at $15 a week!

To get the food co-op underway, the collective borrowed old trucks from their networks, collated food orders and bought fresh vegetables and fruit in bulk from the downtown Turners & Growers markets each Monday morning.

“By cutting out the middlemen, up to half of the retail prices were slashed. And we knew the goods were fresh,” Fowler wrote.

“We would choose to buy – at rock bottom prices – spotted apples and misshapen pumpkins that no retailer wanted on their display shelves.”

The co-op was an ideal platform for supporting other struggles, especially during the 1977 Timber Workers’ Union dispute — “when we dispatched our truck packed to the roof with donated food to support workers on the picket line at Kawerau”.

The PU also helped about 300 locked out workers at the NZMC Honda car assembly plant and set up a co-op distribution depot at the Panmure Town Hall.

People’s Union activists carried on taking part in anti-Vietnam War protests and over “other issues of the day”. One of the memorable banners read: “Learn from the Vietnamese — unite to defeat our common enemies”.

China ‘educational tour’
In 1975, the NZ China Friendship Society facilitated a “workers’ educational tour” of China, which included six People’s Union activists — including Roger Fowler, his wife Lyn Doherty, and the late mayor Tim Shadbolt of Invercargill: “We visited communal farms, big worksites, and met renowned NZ author Rewi Alley.”

This was six years before I also — now living back in Aotearoa after several years in Paris, France, following the 1968 student riots — went on a Friendship Society visit to China and wrote a series of articles for The Auckland Star.

Now as a semi-retired journalist with also strong beliefs about community-owned and independent media, I was heartened to read Roger Fowler’s chapter on the PU’s independent information efforts.

Fowler wrote about this PU initiative saying: “The People’s Union started to attract the interest of some established media, though unlike other left organisations, we never courted the media. We believed it was more important for people to develop our own independent ‘people’s media’.

“However, a journalist from the Women’s Weekly followed the food co-op for her scoop one day and wrote a sympathetic article.”

In 2016, Roger Fowler and former Polynesian Panther Party members Tigilau Ness and Tuu’ulenana Iluli attended the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

In 2025, Fowler and Ness collaborated with a vinyl album, “Songs of  Struggle and Solidarity”.

Prison whānau bus trips
Among the many projects of the PU was in 1972 starting a visitors’ weekly free bus run to Pāremoremo maximum security prison near Albany, and a monthly bus trip to Waikēria Borstal near Te Awamutu.

“These services were very popular, as both prisons were purposely located far away from any viable public transport, making family or community relationships difficult for many,” Fowler wrote.

“We once crowded about 80 people into a 55-seater bus to Waikēria. Polynesian Panther Party leader Tigilau Ness brought along his guitar and would get a big singalong going from the back seat – his ‘American Pie’ got everyone joining in the chorus, ‘Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie . . . “

The People’s Union food co-op became a key organising tool and platform, recalled Fowler, for another important “problem solving” programme – defending tenants. The PU centre became the “go-to place for local people facing issues inflicted by rapacious landlords, a major problem that plagued the area”.

Fowler pays tribute to community activist Betty Wark and her 1976 Tole Street “tent city” occupation of a public park in Ponsonby in protest for “decent housing”.

In a page devoted to her campaigning, Helene Connor is quoted saying; “Housing the homeless and utilising the buildings to their full extent became a passion for Betty. The Tole Street tent ‘village’ kept going for several months while Betty continued to look for suitable accommodation to house the group.”

Vasau family eviction
Fowler recalled “one of our most high-profile housing cases was the eviction of the Vasau family from their home in Norfolk Street, Ponsonby, in 1974”.

“A new owner had told the family to leave their family home of five years, so he could bang the rent up. They had nowhere to go, so had no choice but to stay and fight.

“One day when nobody was home the landlord seized the chance to break in and toss the family’s furniture and belongings outside.”

The People’s Union was called and activists along with neighbours moved the family’s belongings back inside and barricaded the house. Eventually, six months later the landlord returned along with a senior police officer and a court order.

The good news was that the court order along with community support actually helped the family gain a new state house in South Auckland for their home.

Police harassment “was often a problem for some of the people we worked with,” recalled Fowler. A police “task force” would parade through the streets and stop outside local pubs.

“They would intimidate people, usually in an arrogant, racist manner. They called this ‘team policing’, but the People’s Union newspaper compared them to an invading army.”

Defining historical event
The Māori Land March in 1975 “was a defining event in the history of Aotearoa — People’s Union members supported the march in many ways, whether joining with the marchers on the road, feeding them, or supplying the bus so that kaumatua could rest when they needed to”.

Fowler devoted an inspired chapter to the struggle of Takaparawhau–Bastion Point. On 6 January 1977, Ngāti Whātua’s Ōrākei Action Committee “put out an urgent call for supporters to join a tent protest” at Takaparawhau, Bastion Point.

“The vast area of open fields was under direct threat by the Muldoon government, which intended to develop the land as elite real estate for upmarket housing.”

Fowler quoted Sharon Hawke, one of the protest occupiers and the daughter of Joe Hawke, one of the leaders, declaring in Takaparawhau, the people’s story: “This was to become one of the greatest shows of strength in modern [NZ] history.”

“The protest camp evolved into a formidable village occupation that stood firm on the disputed land, until evicted by 600 police 506 days later. The uniting catchcry was: ‘Bastion Point is Māori Land’.”

People’s Union activists were there in the protest from the beginning. The land was “unprotected, windswept terrain exposed to the elements which can be very harsh”. The PU advocated the need to build shelters and huts rather than relying on tents. Some people were able to bring on caravans.

Activists from the PU hired a large rotary hoe to help dig vegetable gardens and the protest community rapidly grew into a “living village” — it was “transformed into a vibrant marae”.

Lyn Doherty and Roger Fowler lived in the protest village “in a little tin shack at the rear of Arohanui [the wharenui] — cooking toasted sandwiches for breakfast on a small methylated spirits burner each morning”.

Shameful Bastion Point raid
On 25 May 1978, a massive police operation moved to evict and demolish the village. On that fateful morning, 222 Ngāti Whātua and supporters were arrested and all the buildings were demolished and removed in a shameful repressive action by the state.

“But although we lost the battle,” recalled Fowler, “we won the war — the land remains as public space under Ngāti Whātua control.”

The Ponsonby food co-op grew until about 600 local households were taking part by the end of the 1970s. But the inner Auckland suburbs of Ponsonby and Grey Lynn and their demographics were rapidly changing. Old houses were being sold and renovated as the suburbs were being “gentrified” and rundown shops were being converted into cafes, restaurants and fashion boutiques.

Sadly, the final edition of People’s Union community newspaper in April 1979 announced the closure of the Ponsonby People’s Union, saying “the need for an ‘umbrella’ organisation to coordinate a wide range of community action (from prison visiting to food co-ops) is no longer necessary”.

However, Roger Fowler and whānau expanded their community activism to their new home in Māngere East, where Roger drove buses and was an Engineers Union delegate before managing the Mangere East Community Learning Centre.

In 1999, he was awarded the Queens Service Medal for community service.

Roger and Lyn have four children — Tawera, Hone, Maia and Kahutia — and 11 mokopuna.

Besides the book’s overview by Roger Fowler, there are 22 contributed chapters by activists in an 18-page section titled “Other activists’ voices”. This includes essays by Sir Bob Harvey, David Williams, Dr Lyn Doherty (“The shooting of Daniel Houpapa – a gross miscarriage of justice”), Vivian Hutchinson, Wayne Toleafoa, Rod Davis, Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua, Anna and Barry Lee, Catherine Manning (a profile on her mother Pat Hammond), Joris de Bres, Fuimaono Norman Tuiasau, and Tigilau Ness (“A legacy to pass onto our children”).

As well as the historical record of a remarkable era in the 1970s, the book is adorned with a superb gallery of photographs and graphic art. The Fowler whānau have worked extraordinarily hard to bring this publication to fruition after Roger’s death. A labour of love.

Something new that I learned from reading the book is that along with being such an influential activist and strategic organiser, protest entertainer and singer, Roger Fowler was also a gifted political cartoonist. Such extraordinary talent.

In the foreword, Nick Bollinger sums up: “Even though Roger writes in this book that ‘we never considered ourselves as part of a “youth culture” or so-called “alternative counterculture”, when I look back the People’s Union for Survival and Freedom stands out as perhaps the most inspiring application of countercultural ideals. I am very glad its story — and Roger’s — is at last being told in these pages.”

And so am I.

• Ponsonby People’s Union: At the Frontline of Community Activism in the 1970s, overview by Roger Fowler, and contributors (Steele Roberts), 2026, 102 pages.
• Two book launch events: Saturday, 3 October 2026, 1pm-3.30pm, The Ponsonby Community Centre, 20 Ponsonby Terrace, Auckland.
  Sunday, 11 October 2026, 1-4pm, Whare Wānanga, Level 2, Tāmaki Pātaka Kōrero – Auckland Central Library, 44/46 Lorne St, CBD.

AGAINST THE CURRENT: By Steven Cowan

The ferocity with which sections of the New Zealand right have moved to discredit Nicky Hager’s new book Dirty Work before even turning a page tells its own story.

It is the same reflexive hostility that has greeted every major investigation Hager has produced over the past three decades: a rush to delegitimise, to sneer, to dismiss, all before the evidence has been examined.

But this time the haste has been almost comical. Within hours of the book’s release, Newstalk ZB’s Tim Beveridge — who could not possibly have read it — declared it “junk” and banned callers from discussing it on his overnight show.

• READ MORE: Other Nicky Hager reports

Beveridge’s contempt was not grounded in analysis; it was a strike against uncomfortable truths. His close association with Jordan Williams of the Taxpayers’ Union, a regular guest on Beveridge’s Saturday afternoon show, only underscores how tightly woven these networks of mutual reinforcement have become. When a book threatens the legitimacy of that ecosystem, the ecosystem responds like a single organism.

National Party MP and former minister Chris Penk, too, performed the same ritual denunciation. In a column for Stuff, he admitted he had not read Dirty Work — then proceeded to attack it anyway.

Penk reduced Hager’s investigation to a caricature: “a person with left-wing views disagrees with people with right-wing views.”

Penk’s dismissal was not an argument; it was another conservative signal that the book should be treated as illegitimate and unworthy of engagement.

But more revealing still was the intervention of Dane Giraud, a member of the Free Speech Union (FSU) and a committed Zionist defender of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. According to Giraud, those who take Hager seriously belong to an “elite intelligentsia” suffering from something he calls “Free Speech Union derangement”.  This “elite (liberal) intelligentsia” is apparently inherently hostile to an organisation like the FSU because it is an authentic grassroots movement representing everyday working-class people.

FSU’s dishonest portrayal
This is a thoroughly dishonest portrayal of the FSU. It is not a working-class organisation that has emerged organically from within the workplace. It is a rebranded conservative lobby group, born out of the Taxpayers’ Union in 2018 and co-founded by corporate and political operatives including Jordan Williams. Its board includes several committed Zionists, and its campaigns consistently align with the interests of the political right.

To describe such an organisation as “grassroots” is not merely dishonest; it is an appropriation of working-class language for elite political ends. Traditional unions are democratic institutions funded and governed by workers themselves. They exist to bargain collectively, to protect wages, to improve safety, to build solidarity.

The FSU, by contrast, operates as a top-down lobby group focused on legal interventions, media pressure campaigns, and cultural warfare. It is structurally indistinguishable from the constellation of conservative advocacy outfits that have proliferated over the past decade — groups that claim to defend “free speech” while consistently mobilising against progressive movements, academic institutions, and public broadcasters.

Giraud’s rhetorical manoeuvre — painting critics as elitist while presenting the FSU as authentically proletarian — is a classic deflection. It shifts attention away from the organisation’s funding sources, political alliances, and ideological commitments. It reframes scrutiny as snobbery.

But Hager’s work has never been about cultural disdain; it has been about mapping the hidden architecture of influence. Dirty Politics exposed how attack blogs, political strategists, and wealthy donors coordinated smear campaigns. Dirty Work continues that tradition by tracing how lobby groups like the Taxpayers’ Union and their offshoots shape public debate while presenting themselves as neutral civic actors. To investigate such structures is not “derangement”. It is democratic hygiene.

The right’s panic over Dirty Work is therefore unsurprising. Hager’s investigations threaten the mythology that groups like the FSU and the Taxpayers Union depend on: the myth of independence, the myth of grassroots authenticity, the myth of representing “ordinary New Zealanders” rather than well-connected political networks.

When those myths are punctured, the public can see these organisations for what they are — professionalised advocacy machines that weaponise culture-war grievances to advance conservative interests.

A shadow infrastructure
From a left-wing perspective, Dirty Work is invaluable precisely because it illuminates the machinery of contemporary conservative politics. It shows how consent is manufactured, how outrage is cultivated, how media ecosystems are manipulated, and how lobby groups coordinate narratives across platforms. It reveals the connective tissue linking talkback hosts, political operatives, advocacy groups, and sympathetic MPs.

Furthermore, it does not claim that these actors are engaged in a grand conspiracy; rather, it shows how shared interests, ideological alignment, and personal networks create a shadow infrastructure of influence that operates largely out of public view.

If the book has a limitation, it is that it stops short of connecting these dynamics to the deeper failures of capitalism itself — the structural incentives that reward polarisation, the economic interests that benefit from deregulation and austerity, the corporate funding streams that sustain lobby groups committed to shrinking the public sphere.

But even without that broader analysis, Dirty Work arms progressives with the factual ammunition needed to challenge the narratives that dominate New Zealand’s political discourse. It exposes the machinery behind the manufactured outrage, the faux-populism, and the relentless attacks on public institutions.

The right’s rush to bury the book before reading it is not a sign of confidence. It is a sign of fear. Hager has once again pulled back the curtain, and those who prefer to operate in the shadows are scrambling to turn off the lights.

Republished from Steven Cowan’s blog Against The Current with permission.

• Dirty Work: The Taxpayers’ Union and New Zealand’s Hard Right, by Nicky Hager, 2026 (Potton & Burton).

Al Jazeera has rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attack against the network during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, the news channel reports.

In a statement on Friday, Al Jazeera Media Network said it “categorically rejects” Netanyahu’s remarks, regarding them as the latest example of Israel’s “sustained campaign against Al Jazeera and its journalists”.

In his address at the UNGA on Thursday, where he attacked critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and pogroms in the occupied West Bank, Netanyahu singled out Al Jazeera.

• READ MORE: Al Jazeera rejects Netanyahu’s remarks about the network in his address to the UN General Assembly
• Al Jazeera decries ‘unfounded’ Israeli claims about its Gaza journalists
• ‘Baseless lies meant to sanitise his genocide’ – Mayor Mamdani hits back after Netanyahu’s attacks during UN speech
• Other Gaza media freedom reports

He called the network one of the world’s “toxic media outlets” that intends to “brainwash young minds to hate Israel”.

Al Jazeera said Netanyahu wanted to stop the outlet from “reporting facts from the ground, documenting events, providing context and ensuring that a range of voices and perspectives are heard”.

Further rejecting Netanyahu’s verbal assault, Al Jazeera said the fact that “such rhetoric was delivered from the podium of the United Nations is a matter of particular concern, given the threat such rhetoric poses to the safety of Al Jazeera journalists working in the field”.

“This rhetoric cannot be separated from the heavy toll borne by Al Jazeera’s journalists in Gaza,” the network’s statement added.

Israel’s war on journalists -targeting Al Jazeera               Video: Al Jazeera

270+ journalists killed in Gaza
More than 270 journalists have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s genocidal onslaught. At least 12 of the victims had been reporting for Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera said the network “has lost a number of journalists and camera operators while they were carrying out their work. Some were subjected to campaigns of incitement and vilification before being targeted”.

Of the more than 75,000 people killed in Gaza, at least 706 are family members of journalists of Palestinian journalists, according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate.

Israel has repeatedly cracked down on Al Jazeera and used pressure campaigns against Qatar.

Two years ago, Israel’s cabinet voted to shut down Al Jazeera in the country, immediately ordering the closure of its offices and a ban on the network’s broadcasts. This came after Israel’s Knesset passed a law allowing the government to temporarily close down foreign media outlets it deemed a “threat to security”.

“These measures do not target Al Jazeera alone; they also undermine the right of every person to access truthful information and independent journalistic coverage,” Al Jazeera said on Friday.

It added that “the role of journalism is to provide the world with facts and context, while respecting the right and ability of individuals to assess sources and form their own opinions.”

Republished by Pacific Media Watch from Al Jazeera.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has hit back after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to the UN General Assembly podium to accuse him of supporting Hamas and making Jewish New Yorkers “feel unsafe” — remarks that came after delegates from scores of countries walked out of the chamber to protest against the far-right fugitive’s presence.

Refuting allegations that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — where Israeli forces have killed more than 75,000 Palestinians, including more than 21,500 children, since the Hamas-led attack of October 2023 — Netanyahu said: “To all those spreading these lies about my country and about our brave soldiers, whether they sit in this hall or in the office of the antisemitic mayor of New York City, I say this: Shame on you.”

“Mr Mamdani, since you were elected mayor of this city, many Jews no longer feel safe in New York,” the prime minister claimed. “It’s no wonder … You falsely and repeatedly accuse Israel of genocide. Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide.

• READ MORE: Gaza watches Israel’s elections with fear and antipathy
• Pezeshkian speaks from the heart, but with legal, moral and strategic clarity
• Other Iran, Palestine reports

“And that’s exactly what Mr Mamdani’s Hamas buddies would have done to us had we not stopped them. They would have killed every last one of us.”

Mamdani issued a statement later saying: “As he has done time and again, Prime Minister Netanyahu used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitise his genocide of Palestinians.

“Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defence minister, are fugitives from the International Criminal Court, where they are accused of murder and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. The ICC also issued arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, but Israel assassinated them.

Third country arrest
While neither Israel nor the United States is a party to the Rome Statute governing the ICC, the treaty states that people from nonsignatory states who commit alleged crimes in states that are party to the treaty — as Palestine is — can be arrested in third countries and subsequently tried by the court.

Israel’s war on Gaza: Abbas and Netanyahu address the UNGA     Video: Al Jazeera

Mamdani has said that Netanyahu should be arrested and brought before the Hague-based tribunal for trial, but that he lacks the legal authority to apprehend the prime minister in New York.

The International Court of Justice — also located in The Hague, Netherlands — is currently processing a genocide case filed against Israel by South Africa and formally supported by nearly 20 nations.

The case is based on what the ICJ called the “plausibility” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The court has issued a series of provisional orders for Israel to adhere to the Genocide Convention — orders that critics say Israel has simply ignored.

Last year, an independent UN commission of inquiry found that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, a conclusion shared by the International Association of Genocide Scholars and other experts, including many Israeli and diaspora Jewish academics, jurists, human rights campaigners, and others.

As Netanyahu prepared to deliver his UN speech on Thursday, delegates from a reported 77 nations walked out of the chamber in protest.

“If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall — please do so now,” the prime minister said. “Thank you very much.”

While some observers applauded the display of solidarity with Palestinians, others expressed disgust that Netanyahu was allowed to address the world body and that he has not yet been brought to justice.

War criminal Netanyahu has completely isolated Israel at the world stage – When he came today to UN General Assembly podium to speak, there was mass walkout and he was booed. Shamelessly, he called them ‘moral cowards’! pic.twitter.com/w5Oo78SeJv

— Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) September 24, 2026

UN failure to stop genocidal war
“The head of the genocidal Israeli apartheid regime, a fugitive indicted for crimes against humanity, was allowed to enter the US and to address the UNGA today, without arrest,” said Craig Mokhiber, a former senior UN official who resigned in protest of what he described as the world body’s failure to stop Israel’s genocidal war.

“Netanyahu insulted delegations, openly celebrated the regime’s many crimes, bragged about its terrorist pager attacks on Lebanon, repeated the regime’s debunked genocide propaganda, defended the illegal occupation of Palestine and Syria, lied incessantly, called violent, racist, illegal Zionist settlers ‘peaceful’ and ‘honorable people,’ labeled human rights defenders as ‘antisemites,’ even arrogantly attacked American citizens and officials for speaking out against the regime’s crimes,” he continued.

“This violent psychopath cannot hide behind [US President Donald] Trump’s skirts forever,” Mokhiber added. “He (and his collaborators) must be captured and brought to justice. And the UN must finally act to isolate the regime and hold it accountable. ”

Referring to Netanyahu’s address and Trump’s threat on Tuesday to “annihilate” Iran during his rambling, lie-laden General Assembly speech, University of Colorado Law School associate professor Maryam Jamshidi said on social media, “Between Trump threatening Iran w/annihilation and Netanyahu bragging about Israel’s pager attacks, the UN podium has become a venue for promoting genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.”

Meanwhile, people took to the streets of New York to protest Netanyahu’s presence in the city, US complicity in Israeli crimes, and to show solidarity with Palestinians.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside UN headquarters in Turtle Bay for a sit-in demonstration led by Jewish Voice for Peace. Demonstrators blocked roads while chanting slogans including, “Netanyahu you can’t hide, you are wanted for genocide!”

As Common Dreams reported earlier on Thursday, more than 100 demonstrators were arrested.

Among those reportedly arrested were progressive congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier; actors Susan Sarandon, Hannah Einbinder, and Cynthia Nixon; New York state Assemblymember Emily Gallagher (D-50); Democratic New York City Councilmembers Chi Ossé and Alexa Avilés; former Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning; and Palestinian American political activist Linda Sarsour.

“I will never, ever be silent,” Sarsour said on Facebook. “I will never just accept the world as it is. I want history to record for future generations of Palestinians that we fought. At every turn. In every way. When it was easy and when it was hard.”

“I want Palestinian girls in Gaza to see me in my hijab and my unapologetic Palestinian blood fighting for them to live FREE,” she added. “This is bigger than all of us. Netanyahu is a war criminal and belongs in The Hague, not the United Nations.”

Netanyahu faces a general election in Israel on October 27.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Republished from Common Dreams on a Creative Commons licence.

With the US midterm elections just weeks away, US President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to put a positive spin on a war with Iran that shows no sign of letting up, reports the Al Jazeera media watch programme Listening Post.

Climbing fuel and grocery prices, the president’s provocative social media posts and the Pentagon’s combative relationship with the media are making that story harder to sell.

Contributors:
Laicie Heeley – Editor-in-chief, Inkstick
Mark Kimmitt – Former US Assistant Secretary of State
Negar Mortazavi – Host, The Iran Podcast
Samira Mohyeddin – Founder, On The Line Media

On our radar:
Revelations from Israeli newspaper Haaretz about what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knew before the October 7 attacks have ignited a firestorm in the country. Netanyahu calls the reporting fabricated and is threatening to sue. Ryan Kohls reports.

How covid coverage broke trust in the US:
Six years on from the start of the pandemic, covid-19 is back in the headlines — and so are questions about how newsrooms covered it.

The Listening Post’s Nicholas Muirhead on how the pandemic broke trust in the US.

Featuring:
Amesh Adalja – Infectious Disease Physician, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
Frances E Lee – Co-author, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us
Jeanne Lenzer – Investigative Medical Journalist

The Listening Post, 13 September 2026.

Reaching communities beyond Pacific capitals must remain at the heart of journalism as technology creates new ways for the region to share its stories, says Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka.

Opening the 8th Pacific Media Summit in Savusavu, Rabuka said the vast distances separating Pacific communities should not prevent people from being informed, heard and connected.

The summit theme, “Reaching the Remote: Media and Digital Innovation for a Connected Blue Pacific,” reflected a challenge that was bigger than technology.

• READ MORE: Rabuka urges Pacific media to verify facts, warns over rise of AI
• Other PINA reports

“Connectivity is more than just technological issue. It is a development issue. It is an inclusion issue. It is a resilient issue,” Rabuka said.

For communities far from major centres, he said access to reliable information could affect their ability to access services, participate in national discussions and respond during emergencies.

Rabuka said this was particularly important during cyclones, floods and other disasters, when accurate and timely information could save lives.

He urged Pacific journalists to go beyond reporting from capital cities and document what was happening in communities across the region.

“Reaching the remote means reaching the people,” he said.

Pacific responsibility
Rabuka said Pacific reporting also had a responsibility to take the region’s own experiences to wider audiences.

He pointed to issues including climate change, oceans, fisheries, natural resources, poverty, inequality, economic pressures and transnational crime as matters that needed to be reported through the experiences of Pacific communities.

“These are not simply statistics. They are stories about people, families, communities and livelihoods,” he said.

He said the Pacific should not be defined only by outside reporting.

“The Pacific should not only be spoken about. The Pacific must also speak for itself,” Rabuka said.

While technology could expand the reach of Pacific journalism, Rabuka said it also created greater responsibility for journalists to maintain professional standards.

He warned that information could reach thousands of people before it had been properly checked, while artificial intelligence, synthetic content and digital manipulation were creating new challenges for newsrooms.

Stronger media literacy
Rabuka said journalists needed to verify information and citizens needed stronger media literacy to assess what they see and hear.

“We need citizens who can question what they see and hear. We need journalists who can verify information and we need newsrooms that can adapt to new technologies while protecting professional standards,” he said.

He also linked responsible journalism to the role of the media in a democracy, saying journalists must continue to question institutions, investigate issues and hold those in positions of power accountable.

Rabuka said disagreement between governments and the media was normal in a democracy and should not prevent dialogue.

Instead, he said, differences should encourage better questions, better information and better decisions.

The Prime Minister also announced the establishment of the Pacific Centre for Communications and Journalism, through a partnership between Fiji National University and the Fijian Media Association (FIMA).

The centre will provide a platform for professional training, research, regional cooperation and the development of future Pacific media leaders, with a focus on digital journalism, media literacy and the responsible use of emerging technologies.

Rabuka said strengthening Pacific journalism would require cooperation between governments, media organisations, civil society, academia, development partners and stronger regional media networks.

He said the goal should be a media sector capable of adapting to technological change while retaining the professional standards that underpin public trust.

Prishanta Sharma is a third-year student journalist at The University of the South Pacific (USP), Laucala Campus. She was sponsored by PINA and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to participate in a pre-summit workshop in Savusavu.

President Masoud Pezeshkian came to New York with a written text. After hearing US President Donald Trump at the same rostrum the day before, he set it aside, telling delegates he had prepared a speech before the US president called Iran a terrorist state.

He was, by most accounts, the first leader to speak at the UN in person in the middle of a war with the United States.

Speaking from the heart is why the historic address will be heard well beyond the hall. It should not hide how precise it was — legally, morally and strategically.

• READ MORE: Gaza watches Israel’s elections with fear and antipathy
• Other Iran, Palestine reports

He opened with photographs of dead children, victims of American and Israeli bombs, and a direct reply: “We have been the victims of terrorism.

“We have only defended ourselves. We are not terrorists.”

Palestinians know this inversion well. A people defends itself, and the aggressor calls the defence terrorism. Anyone who has watched the last seven months with clarity will recognise it.

He answered the bullying Trump had put on display, musing aloud about “annihilating” Iran, by standing on the ground of law. Everything said against Iran from that podium, he argued, contradicted the UN Charter.

Use of force, threats forbidden
He is right. Article 2(4) forbids not only the use of force but the threat of it, and a head of state weighing the annihilation of a fellow member state before the General Assembly is as plain a threat as the Charter’s drafters could have imagined.

Iran asks for no special treatment, only the sovereign equality the Charter promises every member. On the nuclear file, his formula was “no nuclear weapons, and no limitations to peaceful nuclear technology.”

That is the NPT’s own bargain: the treaty bars non-nuclear states from acquiring the bomb, and its Article IV guarantees the “inalienable right” of every party to peaceful nuclear energy “without discrimination.”

He was equally plain that Iran built its defences to guarantee that any strike on its cities is answered. In Nicaragua v. United States, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) held that international law places no limit on a sovereign state’s armaments beyond what it accepts by treaty.

Iran’s President Pezeshkian displays images of Iran’s martyred Leader and the several children murdered in the US-Israeli attacks on Iran during his UNGA address.

Follow Press TV on Telegram: https://t.co/GHI09iAGh2 pic.twitter.com/eGDt1DDAHA

— Press TV (@PressTV) September 23, 2026

He also took apart the Israeli-made story that Iran’s political establishment is on the verge of collapse, and that Iranians would welcome foreign invaders. For seven months people have been in the streets daily in support of the defence effort.

The same fact answers Trump’s claim that the Iranian state has killed tens of thousands of its own people. A population does not rally under bombardment behind a government it regards as its killer.

Naming the war crimes
Then he named the war crimes. He showed images of the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab and of a sports hall in Lamerd where children had been playing. A weapon that scatters tens of thousands of tungsten fragments cannot be used on a school or a gymnasium without striking indiscriminately.

A UN fact-finding mission reported this month that there are reasonable grounds to believe the United States committed war crimes in the February 28 strikes. The US delegate left the hall during this passage. Pezeshkian drew the parallel with Gaza, where the ICJ has ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide and the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for its prime minister and former defence minister.

He turned next to Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Israel stays outside the NPT and accepts no comprehensive safeguards, although the Security Council called on it in Resolution 487 of 1981 to place its facilities under IAEA safeguards, and the General Assembly repeats the call every year.

Israel has struck the capitals of its neighbours in breach of the Charter and carries out a documented pattern of war crimes, yet keeps its weapons with impunity. Iran, which has acted only in self-defence for two centuries, is sanctioned and attacked instead, although its facilities remain under an IAEA safeguards agreement.

On Hormuz, he described a strait closed to Iran even as it serves to ship missiles and weaponry into the surrounding region. The law of the sea does not allow this.

The 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, which Washington invokes but has never ratified, requires ships passing through a strait to refrain from any threat or use of force against the states bordering it. Under the older rule of innocent passage, a ship serving an attack on the coastal state is no longer in innocent passage at all.

Will not be shut out
Iran will not be shut out of its own waters while others use them to make war on it.

He closed on the indivisibility of security: it exists for everyone in the region or for no one. The idea has a long pedigree. European states wrote it into the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 and restated it in 1999, pledging not to strengthen their own security at the expense of others.

“We want strong neighbors,” Pezeshkian said. Iran has always been open to diplomacy, “without accepting the language of force.”

Rez Nasri is an international lawyer, foreign policy analyst, and he writes about Iran in Persian, English and French.

Fiji Minister Sitiveni Rabuka has urged Pacific journalists to check and verify information before disseminated it to the public, warning that the rise of artificial intelligence, synthetic content and digital manipulation had added to the challenges facing journalists.

Speaking at the opening of the 8th PINA Pacific Media Summit in Savusavu, Fiji, yesterday, he said headlines could reach thousands of people before facts were properly checked and verified.

False claims, he added, could spread before accurate information reached the public.

• READ MORE: In the wake of MIDA, Fiji’s news industry has turned full circle for media freedom
• Other PINA reports

“This is why professional standards matter more than ever,” he said.

He said his call for caution was not a call for journalists to remain silent.

“This is not a call for silence. It is a call for responsible journalism.”

Inflamed social tensions
He called for greater caution, especially, when reporting issues that could inflame social tensions or contribute to conflict, particularly as information spreads rapidly online.

“Information can travel across the world in seconds or in fractions of a second,” he said.

He said digital innovation should strengthen public understanding and regional co-operation rather than become a tool for misinformation, disinformation or sensationalism that divided communities.

Rabuka also called for greater media literacy, saying citizens needed to question what they saw and heard, while journalists needed to verify information.

He said newsrooms also needed to adapt to emerging technologies while maintaining professional standards.

“Freedom also comes with responsibility.”

He said a free, independent and professional media remained important to a healthy democracy.

‘Check Pacific’ launched
Pacnews correspondent Pita Ligaiula reports that Cook Islands News editor Rashneel Kumar has called for Pacific media, civil society and universities to work together to tackle the growing threat of misinformation and disinformation across the region.

Speaking at the media summit, he introduced “Check Pacific”, a new platform aimed at bringing regional organisations and practitioners together to respond to misinformation.

“We want our civil societies, our media practitioners, and universities to come together and work together to actually battle this misinformation,” he said.

Kumar said misinformation and disinformation were major challenges for Pacific countries, particularly given the region’s geographical remoteness and separation.

Republished with permission.

After facing public scrutiny, some of the members of different Māori delegations to Israel have spoken out about the trip.

The trips were reported to have been organised and funded by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with conflicting claims over whether they were fully or partially funded. The Israeli Embassy has declined to confirm the details.

The trip was advertised under the banner of “business and innovation”.

• READ MORE: ‘Is it NZ First, or Israel First?’ Ormsby challenges NZ foreign minister Peters
• Māori delegation’s Israel trip under scrutiny over funding and itinerary
• Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission of Inquiry finds
• Other Gaza reports

But questions remained on why Māori leaders were going to Israel, while its government is committing a genocide in Gaza.

‘The other side of the story’
One of the people who have just recently come back from the trip was Iwi leader Renata Hakiwai, who believed the trip was to promote Israel and to “provide the other side of the story”.

He claims the trip was partly due to personal reasons as well.

“I have interest in business technology and innovation, and the cohort was about business technology and innovation,” he said.

“As a child, you learn around the Bible, and as a Christian, I thought, ‘Wow, this is a good opportunity for me to visit some of these sites’.”

Before going, Hakiwai stated he had “anti-Semitic thoughts”, but his mind was changed after the visit.

He called himself a “truth seeker” and pointed to social media’s algorithm for people believing certain stories over others, which was one of the reasons he went.

“One thing I found is that you get an algorithm on TikTok or social media, and it can totally consume someone’s brain with a certain subject, and I had to check myself.

“I started learning the other side, and some of the history, and some of the reasons as to why things have been happening, and that’s sort of the reason why I thought, ‘Actually, I need to go and hear what’s on the ground and some of the truths’.

“And so it changed my mind totally.

“I haven’t swung right to the other side, but I think my view is probably a little bit more balanced.”

Hakiwai admits he did not speak to any Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank, but did visit the Gaza Envelope, an area of southern Israel bordering the Gaza Strip.

When asked by Te Ao with Moana whether he could present a balanced view without speaking to people in Gaza and the West Bank, he instead pointed to the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023.

“I think to myself, if my daughter or my young fellow or kids were at that concert, I would want ultimate revenge.

“Obviously, Israel came down hard. Have they come down too hard? Potentially,” said Hakiwai.

“I didn’t read too much into the UN stuff, because I even know at the UN there’s opposing views depending on what side of the board you sit on,” said Hakiwai.

He also said he did not believe a two-state solution would work because of Hamas.

Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN finds        Video: UNNews

‘They didn’t really like being asked the hard questions’
Indigenous lawyer Maui Solomon was invited on the trip but was later excluded for asking “hard questions”.

“I was maybe half an hour talking with [the organiser], and I just did not have a good vibe because I was asking the hard questions. And to be fair to Riki [Manarangi], actually, he said, ‘Ask the hard questions’. But yeah, they didn’t really like being asked the hard questions,” he told Te Ao with Moana.

Solomon said he had already intended not to go before being kicked out of the group.

He claims to have tried showing those in the delegation what happened to Māori who supported Palestine in Israel.

“I also posted to the group a video of Hāhona Ormsby, a Māori who had been there as part of the flotilla delivering aid into Gaza. He says in that video that he was captured, he was bound, he was beaten, he was tortured, he was kneed in the genitals. And he was singled out because he was Māori. He’s got a full mataora.

“As a result of that, I was excluded because I was ‘fear-mongering’.

“So I was merely highlighting what some of the concerns were, but then I was accused of just buying into all of the fear-mongering, and someone accused me of being an algorithm.”

He believes the trip was to promote the people of Israel as “Indigenous”, not a “business and innovation” trip.

“I’d also heard that Israel had been bringing Indigenous peoples from Australia and Canada and the United States over there.

“But that’s what seems to be the agenda is for the State of Israel to say they have the support of Indigenous peoples around the world, and therefore they are also Indigenous.

“Some of the comments I’ve heard from former delegates who have been there is exactly that. It’s all been pro-Israel, State of Israel, and that they are Indigenous to the region, so whether there’s been a brainwashing going on or whatever?”

Solomon said it’s concerning that the Israeli government was reaching out to Aotearoa.

In saying that, adding that he might have gone if there was more transparency and the delegation was allowed to enter Gaza to see what was happening first-hand.

‘I want to make decisions myself’
Former Broadcaster Neil Waka went on the 2025 delegation after being shoulder-tapped to join.

He told Te Ao with Moana he “hesitantly” said yes.

Waka said he did not regret going to Israel, despite the deaths happening in Gaza — more than 75,000, mostly women and children, have been killed since October 2023.

“People are very ferocious about their thinking around Israel and Gaza. I know they are, but I don’t have to agree with them because they think a certain way, and I certainly don’t follow trends.

“I want to make decisions myself over whether or not I believe certain things, and it all came back to the ideologies to me.

“It just came back to this organisation wants a complete eradication of Israel. This organisation wants to just exist,” said Waka.

When questioned on whether he spoke to any Palestinian people in their own space, Waka immediately said: “No, I never wanted to”.

“For me, personally, I didn’t trust that that was a place [Gaza] that I’d be safe.”

Similar to Hakiwai, the former broadcaster doesn’t believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

“Yeah, look, some people can say it is, but a genocide is the absolute ethnic cleansing or eradication of a people. That’s not happening.

“That’s just not happening because Israel has the power to do that if they wanted to. Now, if they did that, if they threw in nukes and just cleaned up the whole of Gaza, evil. They’re not doing that.”

He instead blames the current state of Gaza on Hamas, not Israel.

Te Ao with Moana pointed out similarities between Waka’s talking points and those of the Israeli government.

“I’m just going on what my feeling is. Did I feel comfortable being there all the time? No. Did I feel comfortable that I could talk to whomever I wanted to? Yes. Do I agree with everything that happens on both sides? No.

“I don’t think anyone’s perfect in this. What I find the most fascinating is that one side is being globally attacked.”

First published by Te Ao Māori News and republished with permission.

• Watch Te Ao with Moana on Māori+, every Monday at 8 pm.

A West Papuan advocacy movement has praised the “Pacific family’s bravery” in standing up for human rights in West Papua and has appealed to the region’s leaders to protest over the latest massacre at this week’s UN General Assembly in New York.

“Justice and peace in West Papua can only come through international pressure,” said United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny Wenda.

“On behalf of the ULMWP and the West Papuan people, I wholeheartedly condemn the brutal massacre of six West Papuan civilians by the Indonesian military in Yahukimo.”

• READ MORE: Papuan civilians shot in latest security forces violence in Yahukimo
• Other West Papua reports

Wenda said in a statement that this latest massacre demonstrated how vital it was that Pacific nations maintained their pressure on Indonesia to allow a UN Human Rights visit.

Last month, the Pacific Islands Forum reaffirmed its 2019 call for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to be allowed into West Papua, while Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) leaders suggested that Indonesia’s associate membership would be reviewed if no visit took place.

Ten Papuan gold-panners were reported to have been shot — six of them killed — by Indonesian security forces in Samboga Village, Yahukimo Regency on September 18.

The men were already being monitored by drone as they left the panning site in the evening, and were shot as they encountered a roadblock on the public road into the village.

Bodies held back
No warning shots were fired and there was no exchange of fire between the Indonesian military and the West Papuan National Liberation Army (TPNPB). The victimes were named as: Yonas Aje, 22; Pilatus Porpom, 25; Daniel Timuka, 19; Kani Borpom, 20; Yanus Patika, 28; and Elli Timuka, 28.

According to a TPNPB press release, the victims’ bodies had yet to be evacuated by churches or humanitarian groups because the site remained under control of the military.

“The viciousness and cruelty of the Indonesian coloniser knows no limits — not only do they kill civilians at will, they also refuse to release their bodies to their families,” Wenda said.

“These 10 civilian gold miners were victims of the Indonesian occupation twice over.

“First, they were dispossessed by the takeover of their ancestral lands. Second, they were murdered for trying to make a living in the new world the occupation has created.

“Their names are added to the more than 60 West Papuan civilians murdered by the Indonesian state in 2026 alone.”

Death sentence condemned
The ULMWP also condemned the death sentence handed down to Karel Fatem, an Indigenous West Papuan TPNPB member who was set to become the first political prisoner executed by the Indonesian state in more than a decade.

“The TPNPB are not criminals or terrorists, they do not bomb or attack in Java or Sumatra: they are the West Papuan home guard. It is not the TPNPB who turned West Papua into a killing field,” said Wenda.

“There have always been West Papuans who defend themselves, their environment, their mountains and their forests. We demand that the Indonesian courts immediately reverse its sentence and frees all West Papuan political prisoners.”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We profile a remarkable new documentary about Paulo Freire, the acclaimed Brazilian educator whose revolutionary approach to teaching connected literacy to critical thinking and democratic participation.

In the early 1960s, Freire led an experiment in adult education in the northeastern Brazilian town of Angicos that helped hundreds of rural adults learn to read and write in just 40 hours.

Freire rejected rote memorisation, instead favouring culture circles, where students and educators drew on their own lives to learn vocabulary and develop critical consciousness.

But the experiment was abruptly halted in 1965, when Brazil’s military overthrew President João Goulart in a US-backed coup. The literacy campaign was dismantled. Students burned their books out of fear of persecution. Paulo Freire himself was imprisoned and forced into exile for 16 years.

The new documentary, Reading the World, draws on rare archival footage of the 1960s Brazil and weaves together the memories of farmers, students, educators who took part in the culture circles. This is the film’s trailer.

NEWSREEL: [translated] In Angicos, a small town of Rio Grande do Norte, next to an old railway station, a revolution has begun.

MARIA MIRANDA GOMES: [translated] Before the school came, I didn’t even know how to sign my name, because I had never gone to school.

LUZIA DE ANDRADE: [translated] No one cares about poor people who don’t know anything. They taught us that if we studied, we could be citizens.

PAULO ALVES DE SOUZA: [translated] Paulo Freire, for us, was a symbol of kindness in our lives. I had the seeds of education planted in my chest directly by him.

MARCOS GUERRA: [translated] At the time, Brazil was living through a period of great political fervoUr. There was a desire to change things, a desire to transform the country.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is another clip from Reading the World that features Paulo Freire himself, speaking in 1975.

PAULO FREIRE: [translated] At that moment, the literacy students realise that transforming reality through their work, actions and reflections is a way to create and recreate the world.

And they take on the role of a transformer, not of an object.

AMY GOODMAN: The film Reading the World, or Lendo o Mundo, focuses on a time in Paulo Freire’s life before he wrote the famous book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It comes as Brazil prepares for its general election next month.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is up for reelection. His challengers include Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is now in prison for his role in the 2022 coup attempt. Lula and Paulo Freire were longtime allies.

For more, we’re joined by Catherine Murphy, co-director of Reading the World, which recently premiered here in New York and will air on PBS WORLD Channel on October 9. And we’re joined by Maria Luisa Mendonça, a consulting producer on the documentary, director of the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! In fact, President Lula just met with the New York mayor, Mamdani, yesterday here in New York. Tell us about Lendo o Mundo. Tell us about this amazing documentary, Reading the World.

Reading The World                          Video: Democracy Now!

CATHERINE MURPHY: Well, thank you so much for having us.

You know, Paulo Freire was one of the most influential educators of the past century and is still widely studied all around the world. But the studies often focus on his ideas, his philosophies, his books, and much less is known about his original praxis, the beginning, those early on-the-ground, in-the-trenches, grassroots-level experiences that Paulo Freire had in the years leading up to writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed and his other first books.

And that’s exactly what we ask in this film. We explore these years leading up to writing his first books. And we ask: Who were his closest collaborators? What was that collective that he was working with? And importantly, we ask: Who were the students?

How can we look at this experience through their eyes and through their words, their voices, and sort of see them as co-creators of this methodology that continues to make impacts around the world?

Brazil at the time was highly feudal and colonial. One percent of the population owned the vast majority of the arable land. In the northeast, 70 percent of people were illiterate, could not read and write. And if you couldn’t read and write, you could not vote. So, it was also prohibited to do any kind of rural union organising. So, these were these institutionalised, intersecting ways to keep the majority of people outside of any personal and political empowerment. And this was the Brazil that Freire and his collaborators were seeking to change.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Maria Luisa, could you talk — what was — what was revolutionary or unusual about Paulo Freire’s methods, his pedagogical methods?

MARIA LUISA MENDONÇA: Yes, I think one of the most important points of his philosophy is that everyone has knowledge. So, when he started this group, teaching farmers, farm workers that sometimes didn’t even get paid with money — sometimes they just worked for food — in a very poor area, very remote area in the countryside in the northeast of Brazil, when they gathered together, they felt that they had knowledge.

So, the key point about Paulo Freire’s philosophy is that everyone has knowledge. And teaching is about exchanging knowledge, and it’s about seeing the world around you. So, teaching has — needs to have meaning, and learning needs to make sense for people from the concrete reality where they live.

And I think this is something that is very needed in all levels of education all over the world.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Catherine, as Brazil prepares for its elections this year, what does your film show so powerfully in the lessons of Paulo Freire that are necessary to keep alive today?

CATHERINE MURPHY: Well, I think it’s important to understand that the demands of the grassroots movements in the early 1960s, when Paulo Freire was working, remain the demands of grassroots movements in Brazil today. For a more democratic and more just Brazil, with greater access to quality education, with expanded voting rights, with political representation through people and sectors of the society that have been historically excluded — women, Afro-Brazilians and Indigenous people — representing themselves and the country, the real Brazil, also advancing labor rights and labor relations, and, importantly, this land justice and land tenure issue, which is still such a huge problem in Brazil today.

So, these issues which were the core of the early 1960 movements are defining, at the core of the presidential debate now and what will be the future vision of the nation.

AMY GOODMAN: The 1964 coup, what happened to Paulo Freire?

CATHERINE MURPHY: So, Paulo Freire was arrested soon after the coup. He was taken to jail for 70 days and forced into exile, during which time he lived all over the world and started writing his books, and wrote his first books, Pedagogy of the Oppressed and others.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain Pedagogy of the Oppressed, this seminal work.

CATHERINE MURPHY: Yes. So, Paulo Freire’s seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was really largely based on this Angicos experience and his first experiences in Brazil, looking at how to democratise education, to democratise the entire society.

And after he left Brazil, Pedagogy of the Oppressed circulated clandestinely in Brazil during the years of the dictatorship and circulated openly around the rest of the world.

But then, Paulo Freire also engaged with a number of adult education projects around the world during those two decades that he was out of Brazil, notably in Guinea-Bissau working with Mário Cabral, in Nicaragua working with Fernando Cardenal, and working with grassroots social justice educators all over the world, including in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to end with Paulo Freire in his own words from the film Reading the World.

PAULO FREIRE: [translated] I said that we had to challenge the illiterate adults and the groups of illiterate adults, challenge them with certain representations of the concrete reality they experienced.

The original content of this programme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License and is republished under Creative Commons.

In 2023, Fiji’s Media Industry Development Authority (MIDA) was scrapped, marking a significant moment for Fiji’s media landscape.

A year later, at the PINA Media Summit in Niue, Fijian journalists spoke openly about rebuilding — of a media industry that was learning to find its feet again, reclaim its confidence and, importantly, rediscover its freedom.

At that Niue meeting, we lobbied and won the bid to bring 2026 PINA Summit to Fiji.

• READ MORE: Other PINA Pacific media summit reports

This week, we are in Savusavu and with Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka choosing to attend and officially open the summit almost four years after his government threw out MIDA, it feels like a full circle has been completed.

The Prime Minister’s announcement that Fiji National University will partner with the Fijian Media Association to establish a media training centre in Suva was the icing on the cake.

It is a significant commitment to strengthening journalism skills, professional development and the future of Fiji’s media industry.

Allowed media space
Love him or hate him, Prime Minister Rabuka has maintained an open and accessible relationship with Fijian journalists. He has taken questions, faced tough interviews and allowed the media space to scrutinise his government and his decisions.

For an industry that has spent years navigating uncertainty, rebuilding trust and finding its voice, having the Prime Minister open the regional media summit in Fiji — and announce support for journalist training — was more than symbolic.

It was a reminder of how far we have come, and how much further we still have to go.

Republished from Fiji Times managing digital editor Anish Chand’s social media post with permission. He is a former Fiji TV news operations manager.

The Palestine Forum (PFNZ) has challenged New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters over the country’s response to the Gaza as a test of commitment to international law, human rights and self-determination, saying “meaningful action” is needed now.

“Words alone do not end occupation,” said Maher Nazzal, chair of PFNZ.

“Statements alone do not stop settlement expansion. Humanitarian assistance alone does not deliver self-determination.

• READ MORE: Other Palestine Forum reports

“And ‘when, not if’ is not a timetable.”

Nazzal said Peters had presented Palestinian statehood recognition as an example of New Zealand pursuing an “independent, multi-directional foreign policy” including where New Zealand has differed from some of its closest partners.

“Palestine is not a talking point or a diplomatic case study,” Nazzal said in a statement.

In 2025, New Zealand had decided not to recognise the State of Palestine, while several close partner countries, including Australia and the UK, had proceeded with recognition.

‘When, not if’
The NZ government had argued that recognition needed to make a “tangible contribution” to a lasting two-state solution.

“Now, in September 2026, Peters is again saying Palestinian statehood is a matter of ‘when, not if’.

“So when?” asked Nazzal.

He said Palestinians had waited generations for freedom, justice and self-determination.

“An independent foreign policy should not mean simply having the freedom to delay,” Nazzal said.

“It should mean having the courage to act according to principles — even when doing so is uncomfortable, politically difficult or inconvenient for powerful partners.

“New Zealand has repeatedly affirmed the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and support for a two-state solution.

Forum’s wish list
“If Palestinian statehood is genuinely a matter of ‘when, not if’, then Palestinians should not be expected to wait indefinitely for New Zealand to decide that the time is right.”

The Palestine Forum calls on New Zealand to:

• Recognise the State of Palestine without further unnecessary delay;
• Uphold international law consistently and without double standards;
• Strengthen accountability for violations of international humanitarian and human rights law;
• Take meaningful action against settlement expansion and settler violence;
• Ensure humanitarian assistance reaches Palestinians in need;
• Support Palestinian self-determination and political agency; and
• Use New Zealand’s diplomatic voice to pursue an end to the occupation and a just and lasting peace.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has condemned Israeli actions in Gaza and the occupied West Bank in a blistering speech at the United Nations General Assembly, reports Al Jazeera.

In a address that saw the Israeli delegation walk out and Palestinian representatives applaud, Erdogan spoke of Israel’s continuing war crimes in Gaza and the escalation of illegal settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank.

“With the support of [US President Donald] Trump, we contributed to a ceasefire. But despite this so-called ceasefire, more than 1300 civilians have been murdered in Gaza,” he said.

• READ MORE: Erdogan accuses Israel of ‘genocidal mindset’ at UNGA

Although Hamas and other Palestinian groups have accepted the second phase of the October ceasefire framework agreement, he said “Israel is not putting an end to its actions in Gaza, and the West Bank is going through the most challenging time as the illegal Israeli settlers occupy the region”.

Erdogan described Gaza as “the most inhumane, most shameful concentration camp of our time”.

“We face a genocidal mindset that can never get enough of killing. No one with humanity, mercy or conscience can turn a blind eye,” he added.

Gaza situation ‘very dire’
Salman Shaikh, a former UN official who has spent time in Gaza and the founder of The Shaikh Group, said “Erdogan is absolutely right”.

He told Al Jazeera that the situation in the enclave was indeed “very, very dire”, adding that the comments made by the Turkish president during his UNGA address were significant.

“What was significant in Erdogan’s speech was [this idea] that we can’t let what is happening in Gaza and the occupied West Bank become a normalised situation,” said Shaikh, adding that Türkiye was an “indispensable regional and international actor spanning many geographies and organisations”.

French President Emmanuel Macron told the UN General Assembly that the situation in Gaza was “shameful”.

“What is our credibility worth if we remain inactive on Gaza? Some claim that peace has been achieved, but this has not opened up humanitarian deliveries. The spectacle, it is shameful. Shame on all of us,” Macron said.

He also commented on the US-Israel war on Iran, stressing that the Strait of Hormuz should not be used for “blackmail” and that the waterway’s reopening “is a priority”.

Echoing his earlier remarks at the UN General Assembly, the US President Donald Trump once again threatened Iran with “annihilation”.

“We’ve isolated Iran financially and hopefully they’ll do the right thing fast,” he said. “There will be a time when it’s too late, and we won’t have the chance of letting them survive as a nation.

“I would like to see that, and I can tell you that people around this table would like to see it,” he added in a meeting with GCC and Arab leaders on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Guterres warns against ‘ethnic cleansing’
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that Israeli violence, displacement and illegal settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank were undermining prospects for peace and raising the risk of “ethnic cleansing”.

“Violence, displacement, and settlement expansion by Israel in the occupied West Bank are bulldozing the path to peace and raising the specter of ethnic cleansing,” Guterres said in his address to the 81st UN General Assembly.

“We cannot allow the two-state solution to disappear before our eyes,” he added.