An exiled West Papuan leader living in Australia is calling on Oceania leaders at the Pacific Island Forum meeting in Palau this week to condemn growing military violence in the Indonesian-ruled Melanesian region.

Paula Makabory, an executive member of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), has also appealed to Melanesian Spearhead Group leaders to do the same and to call for an immediate end to the violence in civilian areas and to address the environment crisis in West Papua.

Her call is being supported by several Pacific-based organisations.

• READ MORE: Vanuatu special envoy calls for PIF to ‘reopen’ issue of Pacific access to West Papua
• Missing leaders won’t derail Pacific Islands Forum outcomes, says secretariat
• Other PIF reports
• Other West Papua reports

“The letter sent today to Pacific leaders calls for immediate action because the humanitarian situation has reached a critical juncture, underscored by devastating casualties reported in recent weeks,” Makabory said in a statement.

She cited the following recent incidents as examples of many since mid-2025 until now which showed an escalation of extrajudicial killings and the use of drones and land mines by the Indonesian military in civilian areas:

• Thursday, 18 June 2026: A drone strike in Intan Jaya. At about 1pm local time, an elderly Papuan woman was killed, and two other women were severely injured in an attack involving explosive materials deployed by Indonesian military drones. Local sources indicate an alarming escalation in military tactics, including the use of unmanned aerial vehicles and landmines placed along civilian footpaths.
• Wednesday, 17 June 2026: A fatal shooting in Dekai, Yahukimo. At 4.05 pm local time, a young Papuan man was shot and killed in Yahukimo Regency, Papua Pegunungan. Eyewitness accounts from the victim’s family directly implicated members of the Indonesian Marine Task Force.
• Thursday, 2 July 2026: American pilot Nicholas F. Gosselin of Associated Mission Aviation (AMA) was killed after landing in Yahukimo. The West Papua Liberation Army (TPNPB) claimed responsibility, alleging the aircraft was supporting Indonesian military operations, while Indonesian authorities claimed it was conducting a civilian humanitarian mission.

‘Urgent need for international monitoring’
“Regardless of the competing accounts, this tragic [pilot] incident demonstrates the urgent need for independent international monitoring, transparent investigations, and renewed efforts to de-escalate the conflict and promote human rights,” Makabory said,

“Under the internationally recognised doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the global community — and neighbouring sovereign states in particular — has a duty to step in when a state fails to protect its population from systematic human rights violations.”

She said the continuous deployment of heavy tactical forces had turned residential areas into active conflict zones, where indigenous Papuans were treated with inherent suspicion and lethal force.

There had been 24 extrajudicial killings so far during 2026.

“Severe human rights violations are rarely met with independent investigations or genuine justice, leaving civilian populations entirely defenceless and more than 125,00 people displaced and homeless in the Highlands,” she said.

Makabory said the Indigenous people of West Papua were an integral part of the Melanesian family.

“Their ongoing suffering directly weakens the security and solidarity of the entire Pacific region,” she said.

Collective diplomatic action
Makabory urged Pacific Island Forum leaders to “break the silence” and take collective diplomatic action by issuing a formal condemnation of recent killings in Intan Jaya and Yahukimo, issue a collective call an immediate cessation of military operations in civilian areas, and demand unimpeded United Nations access to investigate human rights abuses.

She also called for condemnation of drone strikes, the establishment of a humanitarian corridor for aid for displaced people in the Highlands, a moratorium on mega projects in West Papua and an independent evaluation of Special Autonomy in terms of pathways to indigenous West Papuan self-determination.

“The report also calls on the PIF leadership to challenge the crushing of peaceful dissent and the widespread destruction of Indigenous land with resulting acceleration of deforestation and regional climate change risks.”

Catherine Delahunty, spokesperson for West Papua Action Aotearoa (WPAA), said the New Zealand and Australian governments were “failing in their critical leadership roles” by their silence on all of these issues.

“The Pacific Islands Forum has called or years for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to be granted immediate, unrestricted access to West Papua to conduct an independent investigation, but this has been ignored and the PIF needs to ensure Indonesia can’t expect status at Pacific meetings while ignoring the PIF requests,” she said.

Makabory said the PIF Special Envoys, Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka and Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape, needed to negotiate a firm timeline for a UN fact-finding mission with Indonesia.

“The PIF and MSG must bring the West Papuan human rights crisis and land crisis to the forefront of the upcoming United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and relevant international human rights forums to ensure global oversight,” she said.

“The survival of our Melanesian brothers and sisters depends on leaders who are willing to champion human rights and regional stability over political convenience.”

The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) should revisit a proposal for an independent regional delegation to visit West Papua and assess reported human rights concerns, says Vanuatu Special Envoy on Decolonisation and Maritime Boundaries Delimitation Joe Natuman.

With the 55th Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting (PIFLM) opening today, Natuman said Pacific leaders would have an opportunity to reconsider the issue and determine how the region could respond to continuing concerns about human rights and the wellbeing of the people of West Papua.

Natuman, a former prime minister, said the Forum had previously proposed sending a delegation to West Papua to assess the human rights situation directly.

• READ MORE: Solomon Islands PM Wale rushes home from Palau after confidence challenge launched
• Other PIF reports
• Other West Papua reports

However, he said the Forum had written to the Indonesian government regarding the proposed visit but had not received a response.

Natuman said direct access remained important if Pacific leaders were to develop a clearer understanding of the situation and consider reports of human rights concerns raised at regional and international levels.

The proposed visit could provide a fact-finding mechanism for Pacific countries, allowing representatives to engage with relevant stakeholders and assess conditions before reporting their findings to the Forum.

Natuman said the issue also extended to the participation of West Papuan representatives in regional and international forums, where he claimed their involvement had faced obstacles.

Similar challenges
He pointed to similar challenges within the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) and said there would be no West Papuan delegation attending the upcoming PIF.

Natuman also referred to discussions surrounding West Papua at United Nations human rights mechanisms in Geneva, arguing that Indonesia’s position within international institutions had presented additional challenges for those seeking greater access to the territory.

With the Forum meeting in Palau, Natuman said Pacific leaders should reconsider West Papua.

Republished from the Vanuatu Daily Post with permission.

Palestine Action activists accused of vandalising a Scottish golf course owned by United States President Donald Trump have been accused of “terrorism” offences, reports Al Jazeera.

The potential use of “terror-scale” sentencing was reported by The Guardian and The New York Times on Friday.

The seven activists, who spray-painted messages in support of Gaza and dug up turf at Trump’s Turnberry golf resort in Ayrshire last year, have been charged with malicious damage “having a terrorist connection,” the newspapers reported.

• READ MORE: Palestine Action activists will not be sentenced as terrorists, judge rules
• Other Palestine Action reports

An initial hearing on the cases is due to open at the High Court in Glasgow on Monday.

The charges stem from a March 8, 2025, protest targeting the resort over Trump’s stance on Gaza. Activists from the British group sprayed red paint across the clubhouse, damaged turf and sprinklers, applied weedkiller to the greens, and painted “Gaza is not 4 sale” across the property.

All seven defendants were charged under ordinary criminal law for malicious property damage. However, the prosecution’s 16-page indictment asserts the acts were “aggravated by reason of having a terrorist connection”.

Palestine Action has been locked in a legal battle with the United Kingdom since the British government proscribed it as a “terrorist” group last year.

‘Protests to save lives’
Cofounder Huda Ammori said that the charges against those involved in the protest at Turnberry made it clear that prosecutors were trying to appease Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We used direct action protests to save lives — the opposite of terrorism — by disrupting the flow of arms being used to murder Palestinians,” she said in a statement.

“By hitting the profits of arms companies and by daring to spray paint on the golf course owned by the demagogue who has enabled Netanyahu’s crimes, we made powerful enemies. The British government chose to appease them by criminalising us as ‘terrorists’,” she added.

Earlier this week, the United States imposed sanctions on Palestine Action and the pro-Palestine international movement Masar Badil, as the administration of President Donald Trump intensifies a global crackdown on critics of Israel.

The US Department of the Treasury also imposed financial penalties on Wednesday against Autistici Inventati, an Italian group that provides digital services to left-wing organisations, including pro-Palestine groups.

John McDonnell, a Labour member of the British parliament and former shadow chancellor of the exchequer, criticised the potential “terror” link in the charges.

“The news that the protesters who allegedly sprayed red paint on Trump’s golf course could face terrorist sentencing, coupled with Trump himself now announcing that he is following Britain’s lead by proscribing Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist’ group, is profoundly embarrassing for Britain,” he said.

“Andy Burnham has inherited this mess from the previous government.

“This must be the wake-up call to drop this absurdly authoritarian ban, before Starmer’s blueprint is adopted by repressive governments around the world to criminalise protest and suppress political dissent.”

According to the rights group Defend our Juries, more than 3500 people — many over the age of 60 — have been arrested for expressing support for Palestine Action after it was proscribed by politicians in July 2025, placing it on the same legal footing as al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS).

The far-left clampdown Rubio announced in Washington last month is manifesting as an anti-Palestine solidarity witch hunt hiding behind the language of counter-terrorism.

— CAGE International (@CAGEintl) August 28, 2026

US ‘anti-Palestine witch hunt’, says rights group
Meanwhile, the human rights organisation Cage International has condemned the US move to designate Palestine Action as a “terror” group, saying Washington is using the “language of counter-terrorism” as a cover to go after people using “lawful direct action” to protest against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

“Palestine Action has now been proscribed as a terrorist organisation on both sides of the Atlantic — first by Britain in 2025, now by Washington,” said Cage International in a statement.

“What unites them is the shared logic that disrupting the supply chain of arms for a genocide passes the ever expanding threshold for terrorism.”

The campaign leaves “no legitimate channel through which Palestinians or their allies are permitted to act”, added the statement.

Anas Mustapha, head of advocacy at Cage, said the US and UK sanctions were part of a “full-spectrum crackdown on Palestine solidarity globally”.

“The UK and US are upending centuries of hard won rights to protect a genocidal state they’re both complicit with,” said Mustapha.

More than 450 University of Sydney (USyd) alumni and current staff have signed a letter calling for a mass meeting to discuss the university’s ties to Israel amid concerns of a crackdown on free speech.

The letter, submitted to Chancellor David Thodey on Tuesday, accused the university of “failing to respond meaningfully to the ongoing genocide in Gaza” which it said “represents a profound moral failure”.

The signatories — among them recipients of Australian AM and OAM honours, a former deputy vice-chancellor and two politicians — are calling for a meeting of Convocation, a body comprising alumni, staff and members of the university’s governing Senate.

• READ MORE: Other university freedom of expression reports

As well as the university’s institutional ties to Israel, the letter noted “an accelerating erosion of freedom of expression” as a crisis warranting a Convocation meeting.

“We want to give voice to the disquiet among staff and alumni and force the university to take this issue seriously. They can’t keep sweeping an ongoing genocide under the rug,” Dr David Brophy, senior lecturer in history, told Deepcut News.

Two weeks to reply
Convocation meetings are common in universities as a means for alumni and staff to provide input into the institution’s governance. The University of Western Australia and University of New England are among those that hold regular Convocation meetings.

The University of Sydney (Amendment Act) Rule 1999 requires Convocation to “hold at least 1 meeting in each year”. The last meeting it held, however, was over three decades ago.

“Convocation is not a relic of a bygone age: meetings were held as recently as the 1990s,” the letter read.

According to the university’s governing document, the chancellor has 14 days from the request to give notice of a meeting — or until September 8. If granted, the meeting is to be held within 28 days of the request — or by September 22.

“Our chancellor is considering the request to summon a meeting of Convocation sent on Tuesday as required under relevant university rules,” a USyd spokesperson told Deepcut.

‘Suppression of dissent’
Campus atmosphere has remained tense since an anti-genocide student encampment was removed in 2024.

That same year, USyd management upgraded its CCTV system, installed additional cameras and introduced restrictions on students setting up stalls.

University staff also report being “unfairly accused of antisemitism for protesting Israel’s actions in Palestine”, according to a statement from the letter’s organisers.

The statement claims there has been a “suppression of dissent in the wake of the 2024 pro-Palestine encampment”.

When asked about the allegations, the USyd spokesperson said, “We remain strongly committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech balanced alongside our obligations to ensure the safety and well-being of our whole community.”

Many seem unconvinced. Jenny Leong, the state Greens MP for Newtown and a signatory to the letter as a former USyd Senate fellow, warned the university’s reputation was at risk.

“The student experience, beyond the classroom, was something that used to be valued by the university, so now to see policies and practices that crack down on the rights of freedom of speech, association and assembly, as well as attempting to silence pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide actions, is cause for serious concern,” she told Deepcut.

Refusal to cut Israeli ties
A key demand of the student encampment was for USyd to cut institutional ties to Israel, in line with several European universities that have taken such a step.

In February 2025, USyd ended an exchange programme with the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Israel but insisted that “recent advocacy against this student exchange had nothing to do with the university’s decision”.

“Our ties with Israeli and other institutions remain in place because we are committed to academic freedom, freedom of speech, and human rights as the university’s central pillars,” a USyd statement read at the time.

USyd’s approach to Israel contrasts with its decision in June this year to boycott “any research collaboration” with Russia in response to its war in Ukraine.

“The fact that the University recently decided to impose a ban on collaboration with Russia shows that the university is capable of firm measures in response to war crimes,” Brophy said.

Antisemitism definition condemned
The letter’s organisers drew attention to a significant NSW Supreme Court ruling this month that found criticism of Israel or Zionism did not constitute antisemitism.

Justice Desmond Fagan was particularly scathing of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which includes criticism of Israel and Zionism and is favoured by the pro-Israel lobby.

Universities Australia’s 39 members, including USyd, adopted a definition of antisemitism that drew on IHRA but was more explicit.

“… criticism of Israel can be antisemitic when it is grounded in harmful tropes, stereotypes or assumptions and when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel … Substituting the word ‘Zionist’ for ‘Jew’ does not eliminate the possibility of speech being antisemitic,” it reads.

The definition was roundly condemned for its implications for free speech, with the Jewish Council of Australia calling it “a dangerous and politicised definition of antisemitism which threatens academic freedom”.

USyd, however, told a NSW parliamentary committee in July 2025 that it had included the controversial definition “as part of the Supplementary Resources to its Anti-Racism Statement” and “does not currently propose to amend the definition”.

That decision, however, is feeding the current backlash.

“There is no place for the IHRA definition of antisemitism on campuses or in any of our public institutions,” Leong said.

“Criticism of the criminal actions of the Israeli government and the IDF, amounting to apartheid and genocide against the Palestinian people, should never be conflated with antisemitism,” she added.

“This conflation is wrong not only because it protects Israel from legitimate criticism, but also because it falsely identifies Jewish identity with the state of Israel — which is in itself an antisemitic trope.”

Republished from Deepcut News under Creative Commons.

I saw a clip going around from the Netflix series “1899” where a woman discovers a crack in the screen of what she had taken to be her world, causing her entire understanding of reality to crumble before her eyes.

Someone had captioned the clip, “Every awakening begins with a fracture in the lie.”

Yeah. It does tend to happen like that.

• LISTEN: A reading by Tim Foley

You start pulling on one thread and then the whole thing unravels. Maybe you start with the Iraq war lies. Maybe 9/11. These days for a lot of folks it’s Palestine.

https://youtube.com/shorts/NcCwpbaCW24

You keep pulling on that thread, uncovering more and more uncomfortable truths, until eventually you discover that pretty much everything you’ve been taught about your world was a lie.

Every war. Everything about how your government really operates. Everything you’ve been told about nations and how they work. Everything about capitalism and communism and how your society is structured. It was all lies, fed to you by parents, teachers, preachers, pundits, politicians and news men from the moment you were old enough to process complex thought.

It can feel scary. It can feel like the end of your world, because in a sense that’s exactly what it is. Your sincere pursuit of the truth leads to the unraveling of everything you thought you knew, and you find yourself plunging into a great abyss of uncertainty about what’s real.

And a lot of people do get lost at this juncture. They plunge down too many rabbit holes with too much paranoia and not enough critical thinking, and they wind up replacing all their old indoctrinated belief systems with new beliefs that are just as crazy and power-serving as the first ones. There’s often a gap between letting go of your old worldview and assembling a new one where it’s easy to get confused and misled.

But if you remain sincere, careful, relentlessly self-honest and dedicated to the truth while ensuring your critical thinking faculties remain operating at full power, you eventually emerge from this chrysalis phase with the wings of a truth-based worldview. You can now not only see through the old lies, but can understand what’s really going on in the world.

And what’s really going on in the world is a lot less pleasant than the fictions you were fed as a schoolchild. You can see that we are ruled by a transnational alliance of plutocrats and government agencies who manipulate world affairs to maximise their power and profits at the expense of ordinary working people around the globe, and you can see that those same powerful abusers are responsible for constructing the fictional power-serving worldview you just freed yourself from.

And when you see how unpleasant the truth is and how hard you had to work to realise it, you understand why relatively few people have awakened to it. From the perspective of the ego, it’s a whole lot of effort and discomfort without much in the way of payoff. Forming a truth-based worldview is something you do for its own sake, and if you’re not the sort of person who views truth as its own reward, then you’re not the sort of person who’s likely to pursue it.

But more and more people are choosing truth. More and more people are spotting a loose thread labeled “Gaza” or “Epstein” or what have you, and giving it a curious tug. Despite the discomfort, despite the required effort, and despite the great cost of having to sacrifice the world they thought they knew, they’re pulling that thread, and they keep on pulling. We’re seeing it more and more every year.

And that gives me hope. I don’t know where this is headed or whether we win in the end, but I’m seeing enough movement in human consciousness at mass scale to continue holding out hope for a better world.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

Last week, JWire reported that my book, How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, had been “removed” from the Waverley public library in Sydney, Australia.

In covering the ban, some Australian media allowed pro-Israel propagandists to casually libel me as antisemitic, a false charge that is completely divorced from the content of the book, which is nuanced and fair and takes on universal themes of human dignity and opposition to colonialism and racism.

My first instinct was to merely post on social media about the banning, noting how absurd and racist the book ban defenders’ logic was, and move on with my life.

• READ MORE: How to Sell a Genocide has been removed from a library near Bondi – but libraries represent freedom of thought
• Waverley Council removes controversial Gaza book after Bondi survivor speaks out
• Other Israeli censorship reports

After all, my book is not the story — nor, if it were, would this be a particular interesting one. On the list of free speech suppressions and libel in the past three years over Palestine, this wouldn’t crack the top 10,000.

But news of the ban was subsequently picked up by The Guardian Australia, The Independent in the UK and the largest newspaper in Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald. And given how poor the coverage of the banning has been, namely by the latter two outlets, I thought this episode could be a good object lesson in how the smearing of Palestine and its defenders operates in mainstream Anglosphere media.

The fact that you can sling around libel without evidence in the largest newspapers in Australia gives us a window into how discussion of basic Palestinian rights is shut down using the most sectarian framing possible.

Let’s break down three tropes featured in the coverage of my book banning that I also detail in the book itself. Forgive me if this is meta — and a touch self-indulgent — but there’s a reason there are striking similarities, and it’s because the Israel lobby and its aggressive PR apparatus more or less use the same script for every act of smearing, censoring, and intimidation.

So they’re worth taking this opportunity to unpack.

1. Feigned credulity: Taking pro-Israel crybully organisations at their word, rounding up to the most sectarian framing possible, and flattening Jewish identity and Zionist ideological activity.

The Independent and Sydney Morning Herald largely embrace the pro-Israel lobby’s framing that the removal of my book was prompted entirely by, or at least largely by, a “complaint from a Bondi attack survivor”. The Independent’s Stuti Mishra would adopt this framing in its headline: “Australian library pulls book on Gaza from shelves after complaint from Bondi attack survivor,” the article announces.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Melanie Kembrey would also accept this framing at face value in her reporting, writing that, “the move follows a report by Jewish news service JWire last week that a survivor of the Bondi Beach massacre had posted on Facebook that she was distressed to see the book displayed on the new-release ‘What’s Hot’ shelf of Waverley Library.”

What’s important to emphasise here is: we have no way of knowing that this is what caused, or even sparked, the removal of the book. This is just an assertion made by those seeking to ban it.

JWire reported, citing an alleged Facebook comment by the survivor in question, that her complaint is what prompted the book’s removal. But The Guardian reports that they were “unable to locate the Facebook post” in question.

More importantly, both Sydney Morning Herald and The Independent seemingly contradict, or at least undermine, this simplistic narrative, by mentioning elsewhere in their articles that, as The Independent noted, the library council “has received multiple complaints about [the book]”.

So was the book banned because a Bondi attack survivor complained, or was it due to the “multiple complaints”? Or was it both? If it was both, do we know which came first: the Bondi survivor complaint or the “multiple” other complaints from, presumably, unrelated parties?

The timeline is important because it suggests a fairly bog standard pro-Israel propaganda technique of front-loading censorship — and other oppressive and illiberal actions — in the most sympathetic and humane language possible. Obviously, “Pro-Israel Organisations Successfully Ban Book on Gaza” hits differently than “Library pulls book on Gaza from shelves after complaint from Bondi attack survivor.”

After all, what kind of heartless monster would want to upset a Bondi attack survivor?

Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive officer of the pro-Israel lobbying organisation ECAJ, was eager to praise my book’s removal from the library, telling The Sydney Morning Herald, “A book of this sort has no place on the shelves of a library, especially one within minutes of where Australians were slaughtered in large part due to the dehumanisation of Jews precisely through this sort of libel.

“I commend the individual who spotted the book, herself a survivor of the massacre, and acted to have it removed.”

Was Ryvchin one of the other “multiple” parties that demanded my book be removed? If so, was it prior to the aforementioned Bondi survivor’s complaint? Did The Herald inquire about his involvement in the campaign to remove the book? Did The Herald ask him to specify examples or provide any evidence of me “dehumanising” Jewish people, a false and libelous accusation?

They did not. He is simply presented as a neutral observer with no involvement in the censorship campaign.

I sent a request for comment to the Waverley library last week, to try and pin down the timeline of the “complaints”. They replied this morning but ignored the question, instead objecting to my use of the word “ban” but not denying it was, indeed, banned.

“Contrary to some media reporting,” the library’s manager informed me via email, “the council has not ‘banned’ the book. It remains a part of our collection; however, it is currently unable to be borrowed pending completion of a review.”

Ah, ok, it wasn’t banned, it’s just “currently unavailable to be borrowed”. Well never mind then. Hopefully this “review” goes my way! A group of organisers in Australia have started a petition calling on the library to restore the book and “protect the public’s right to read”.

But, again, it’s important to make clear that my book being “removed” from one public library isn’t the story. The story is that this is only one part of a broader censorship and bully regime that is rapidly escalating in the West.

This story comes in the context of a massive crackdown on Free Speech in Australia, in particular, which is overwhelmingly targeting pro-Palestine speech and being done in the name of “combating antisemitism”. As Jacob Mchangama and Samantha Barbas noted for MSNOW in January, “what began as a moment of national mourning [in the wake of the Bondi attack] has rapidly turned into one of the most sweeping expansions of hate speech laws and protest restriction powers in the country’s modern history.

Intended as an urgent response to antisemitism, new federal and state measures threaten to reach far beyond violence or direct incitement — reshaping how speech, protest and political dissent are regulated in the wake of terrorism.”

As I detail in said book, namely Chapter 8, “‘Antisemitism’ show trials and the smearing of campus protests,” framing suppression of Israel-critical speech in terms of sensitivity, anti-racism, and “fighting hate” is a textbook pro-Israel bully tactic.

Using liberalism against itself is a consistent and well-documented strategy from Zionist organisations to delegitimise, stigmatise, and brand as hateful those who are meaningfully critical of Israel and its regime of violence against Palestinians.

It’s useful here to distinguish The Guardian’s coverage from that of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Independent. The Guardian’s framing was mostly sceptical and fair. They sought comment from me, my publisher, and other critics of the book ban, and did not overly indulge the “Bondi survivor”.

I should also note that Sydney Morning Herald’s Kembrey did reach out to me for comment, but did so at 12:41 am central time and published her article a couple hours later. So alas, not being awake in the middle of the night costs me an original comment in The Herald. Though I doubt it would have mattered much in the overall credulous and uncritical orientation of the article.

The framing of the ban on my book as the ah shucks, entirely organic result of a “Bondi survivor,” without any interrogation of the source of these “multiple” other complaints, is doing 90 percent of the heavy lifting for the Zionist censorship lobby that was eager to not only praise the decision in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, but frame it in purely sectarian terms. That Sydney Morning Herald and The Independent ran with the simplistic and manipulative “Bondi survivor complained” framing, without an ounce of scepticism, shows how these Israel advocacy organisations score major PR victories before the text of the article or any reporting is even done.

2. Reducing claims of genocide in Gaza to a fringe, subjective opinion by a “self-described radical publisher” while omitting it is the overwhelming consensus of human rights and humanitarian organizations, as well as genocide scholars.

The reduction of mainstream opposition to Israel as an unserious or fringe position — while ignoring how widespread and obvious it is outside the corridors of beltway elite circles — is a trope I detailed in Chapter 9 of my book specially under the section, “The Atlantic And The Importance Of Policing Seriousness.”

All three articles framed the fact that Israel committed genocide in Gaza as a mere opinion of mine, without noting it is the broad consensus in the humanitarian and human rights world, as well as that of scholars tasked with studying and determining such matters.

While all three quoted me making this point, they did not report on the fact of this consensus. This isn’t just a vague feeling from a partisan leftwing media critic — it’s the majority academic assessment. They ought to have noted, as I detailed in my unpublished full comment to The Guardian, that genocide in Gaza is the determination of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights — Israel, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, as well as Omer Bartov, Israeli-American professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University; Amos Goldberg, Israeli professor in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Raz Segal, Israeli historian and associate professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and endowed professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University, among dozens of other prominent Israeli and American scholars.

Instead of mentioning any of these liberal validators, that would have shown how fringe the book ban advocates’ position is and how mainstream my headline was, it is presented as a mere claim by the book’s author and we are then served up pat denials from Israel.

“Israel has repeatedly denied committing genocide in Gaza,” notes The Independent (though it does link to an article detailing UN’s claims of genocide). The Guardian writes that “Israel has repeatedly denied that it has committed genocide in Gaza” without highlighting the major humanitarian and human rights groups arguing otherwise.

The fact of Israel committing genocide in Gaza is overwhelming consensus among those tasked with documenting and determining such matters. Presenting this objective reality as my opinion, without citing the underlying evidence supporting it, is playing into the idea the “genocide” label is a fringe or emotionally charged label when it is anything but.

3. Casually conflating Palestine solidarity with antisemitism and ISIS-inspired violence.

The whole point of focusing on the Bondi survivor complainant is, of course, to conflate solidarity with Palestine with the Bondi attack, which was an ISIS-inspired massacre last December that killed 15 Australians (14 of whom were Jewish) and had absolutely zero to do with Palestine, Palestinians, or Gaza.

Indeed, the only major player in Palestine with significant links to ISIS is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who Israeli outlet Haaretz reported last year has been arming ISIS-linked gangs in Gaza to undermine Hamas and steal aid, a fact publicly confirmed by Netanyahu’s former Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

Despite it having no factual basis, conflation of Palestinian militants, civil society and advocacy with “ISIS,” as I note in Chapter 1 of my book, “‘40 beheaded babies,’ the ISIS-ification of Hamas, and how to prime the American public for revenge,” was crucial to propagandising Western audiences and using the blunt instrument of Islamophobia to build sympathy for the cause of open-ended Israeli violence.

None of the above outlets felt it necessary to note that there has been no proven link between the Bondi Attack and Palestine solidarity. The Australian government has spent millions attempting to find such a connection, but alas has come up empty.

Why should pro-Israel advocates be permitted to casually make such a conflation without any reporters noting these two things are wholly unrelated? Why is this conflation of ISIS and Palestine solidarity permitted to be repeated without any attempt to correct this misconception? Perceptions on the part of a handful of motivated actors is not sufficient reason to indulge their delusions.

Nevertheless, racist conspiracy theories conflating Gaza advocacy with violence inspired by a movement and cause that has zero to do with Palestinians, and is largely backed by Israel’s regional allies, is permitted without any pushback because these two things, in the Western, orientalist mind, feel vaguely related.

These are subtle interventions by the above outlets and, as I mention, far from the biggest crimes in Western media related to Palestine. I am not a free speech martyr, as some have alleged, nor do I seek to be. But I think it is useful to note how, when reporting on the banning of a book about media propaganda, we saw at least three of the very tropes detailed in the book being banned.

These subtle framings, while seemingly minor in isolation, add up. They go, before one even notices, from lazy tropes, credulous reporting, and racist assumptions to a narrative, a story. Just like that, the banning of a perfectly sober, rigorous, and nuanced book is framed as a small act of kindness for a terrorism victim.

And the author, who went out of his way to be nonsectarian, to examine universal humanitarian themes, and to highlight Jewish anti-Zionist activism, is accused of horrific dehumanisation in Sydney’s largest newspaper without any pushback or deeper reporting.

The overt suppression of free speech in Australia is another major escalation, and embracing this grimy, misleading, and libelous framing without much thought or scepticism — as The Independent and Sydney Morning Herald did — is yet another example of Western media’s role in selling genocide.

Adam Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of the podcast Citations Needed. His writing has been featured in The Nation, In These Times, The Intercept, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle. Republished from the substack The Column under Creative Commons.

Some years ago when I headed the Pacific Media Centre that I founded at Auckland University of Technology, we ran a postgraduate internship programme at the China Daily in Beijing.

It was part of a professional development exposure platform that also included Jakarta in Indonesia and the Manila in the Philippines, along with several media and university journalism campus outlets in the Pacific, including the University of the South Pacific.

There was nothing else comparable at other journalism programmes in New Zealand, and now there are no opportunities of this kind after the closure of the PMC in 2021.

• READ MORE: China’s growing grip on the Solomon Islands’ fragile media sector
• New Zealanders’ Perceptions of Asia 2026
• Other reports on China and media in the Pacific

But there was some eyebrow raising about our collaboration over China Daily’s soft diplomacy role at the heart of Chinese media as part of its growing outreach into the Pacific along with the global Belt and Road development policy.

Linked to our Asia Pacific journalism studies course with support by the Asia NZ Foundation, these three-month internships provided a good insight into how Chinese media operated for New Zealand journalists graduating with an eye on an Asia-Pacific media future.

“Advanced studies in comparative journalism and media globalisation” and the “political economy” of the countries studied were important parts of our course.

A glimpse of how some media operate outside of the Western bubble.

‘Polishers’ of reports
The journalistic role that the students faced while they were at the China Daily were initially of a subeditorial or copy-editing nature — they were called “polishers” of English-language reports. But as time when on, the opportunities grew, including reporting assignments, feature writing, and broadcasting.

On exchange, we also hosted professional journalists from the China Daily on our journalism papers. Overall the collaborative experience was positive. But the stakes are much higher now.

The China Daily was founded as an English daily in 1981 and although it is owned and published by the Chinese Communist Party’s Publicity Department — the “Propaganda Department” — it is not an “official mouthpiece” of the CCP establishment.

In 2011, it celebrated 30 years of publishing during our collaboration.

China Daily has usually enjoyed a more “liberal” face than most other Chinese state media.

For example, coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre was generally sympathetic to the student protests and at least one account claims that some of its journalists joined in the demonstrations. Also, the paper’s coverage of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2002-2004 was more fact-driven and balanced than the “official” state media.

China Daily has also published sponsored inserts in such global newspapers as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal in the US and Le Figaro in France.

Massive operation
Published out of a large headquarters in Chaoyang district, it is a massive operation by New Zealand standards, publishing the best part of a million copies daily, two-thirds of the copies via special editions reaching at least 150 countries.

But the most visible face of the newspaper in New Zealand and the Pacific these days is online at the China Daily website.

China Daily has often framed its Pacific outreach through official editorials, youth forums and diplomatic rebuttals. It publicises green energy ties, criticises “foreign alarmism regarding regional expansion”, and argues that organisations such as the Pacific Islands Forum must back the one-China policy.

As the Chinese media outreach into the Pacific has been growing in recent years, the rivalry between Beijing, Washington and Canberra has been ratcheted up with accusations of “editorial interference and influence” in some countries, such as Kiribati and Solomon Islands, at least until the change of government in Honiara in May when Matthew Wale ousted the pro-China leadership in a general election.

In an in-depth report just two months before the election, the Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders warned that since Honiara had established diplomatic relations with China in 2019 the Pacific country had become a “strategic arena for Beijing’s influence”.

“By capitalising on the economic fragility of the local media sector, China has stepped up conditional funding, editorial partnerships and influence programmes to disseminate its narratives,” RSF said, calling on the Solomon Islands’ government to make the viability and independence of the media sector a priority.

Outreach invitation
The China Daily has stepped up its outreach initiatives in the Pacific lately as evidenced by an email to me four days ago inviting me to write an op-ed for the publication’s Opinion section. And the deadline is tomorrow.

Signed by an editor of the newspaper’s Opinion Department, the invitation said: “In early September, a high-level forum on media cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region will be held, bringing together senior media professionals and experts to discuss how the region’s media can better foster dialogue, trust and mutual understanding.

“We would be honoured to invite you to contribute an opinion article of around 800 words for publication in China Daily.”

The invitation continued:

“As a reference, we have outlined several possible directions:
1. In the age of AI, how can Asia-Pacific media rebuild public trust?
2. From ‘reporting Asia’ to ‘telling Asia’s stories’: Can Asia-Pacific media move beyond Western narrative frameworks?
3. From “information competition” to media cooperation: How can Asia-Pacific media promote greater mutual understanding across the region?

These topics are only suggestions. We would be delighted if you chose to write on another angle that better reflects your current research or interests.

“Rather than opening with abstract concepts or institutional frameworks, we encourage authors to begin with something timely and tangible: a recent news event, a real-world development, or an everyday experience that readers immediately recognise.

‘Drawing in’ readers
“Once readers are drawn in, the article can naturally expand to explain the broader policy, economic, technological or geopolitical forces behind it. In our experience, this narrative structure makes complex issues far more engaging for a broad international audience.

“The strongest pieces usually build around one central argument, moving from the concrete to the conceptual, from the familiar to the unfamiliar, and from today’s headline to its longer-term implications.

“We particularly value articles that combine the immediacy of current events with original analysis, clear storytelling and practical insights, rather than offering a comprehensive survey of every aspect of the topic.

“In addition to the written article, we would also be delighted if you could record a short video commentary of around one minute.

“A simple self-recorded video using a mobile phone would be perfectly fine. A vertical format with a clean and quiet background would be ideal; there is no need for professional filming or editing, as our team will handle the post-production.”

The invitation continued in the same vein.

Concluding, the email said: “As our production schedule is quite tight, we would greatly appreciate it if you could send us both the article and the video by August 25, 2026.”

My reply? You are reading it right here on Asia Pacific Report.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

Justice Desmond Fagan’s Supreme Court decision in the State of New South Wales v Farhat wrecks the architecture designed by Antisemitism Special Envoy Jillian Segal, adopted by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and enforced across Australia.

Australians have been instructed that hostility towards Israel is hostility towards Jews. The lobby never won that argument. It changed the dictionary instead.

Albanese supplied the imprimatur. NSW Premier Chris Minns supplied the muscle. David Crisafulli criminalised protest slogans. Peter Malinauskas carried the doctrine into the South Australian Parliament.

• READ MORE: NSW ‘seeking urgent advice’ on controversial court ruling that found anti-Israel vandalism was not antisemitic
• A judgment that challenges the IHRA definition of antisemitism
• Other Australia antisemitism reports

Different parties. Different states. The same obedient genuflection.

The vandal who wasn’t an antisemite
Mohommed Farhat was a vandal for hire. He caused more than $110,000 in damage, torched a vehicle and painted “Fuk Israel” across Woollahra.

Justice Fagan found Farhat was recruited and did not know what some slogans meant. Yet the State wanted him branded an antisemite and shackled with 55 terrorism supervision restrictions.

Fagan refused. His judgment is an autopsy of how propaganda becomes administrative fact. Police, prosecutors, the Crown Solicitor and the Director of Public Prosecutions repeated an unexamined claim until repetition replaced proof.

The label was false and “injustice to the defendant” followed.

Then he turned to the definition. The IHRA formulation promoted by Segal and embraced by Canberra was, he found, “verbose and imprecise” and “detached from the reality of common usage”.

Promoting it sought to change the settled meaning of “a word that has been in use in the English language for 150 years” and to “graft” onto the community’s abhorrence of antisemitism ”a parasitic rejection of protest against Israel”.

Fagan cited Pew polling showing 74 percent of Australians unfavourable towards Israel, rising to 79 percent this year, and inferred a “humanitarian reaction to Israel’s genocide of the Gazans”.

A definition that tars four in five Australians is not detecting hatred.

It is outlawing majority opinion.

Antisemitism, Fagan said, is simply “hostility to Jews for their Jewishness”. It is real, repugnant and must be confronted. Israel is a foreign state. Zionism is a political ideology. Neither is entitled to immunity from condemnation.

Protecting Jewish Australians is essential. Protecting a foreign government from criticism is not.

The lobbyist who wrote the law
Segal became Special Envoy after leading the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, whose published mission includes defending Israel, encouraging Zionism and lobbying governments for positions favourable to Israel.

The referee was recruited from one team’s front office.

She may hold those views. She may not launder them through the Commonwealth and receive them back as law.

Albanese outsourced the dictionary to a protagonist, then adopted her every recommendation despite warnings from Jewish and civil liberties groups that it would punish lawful advocacy for Palestine.

Not consultation. Capitulation, formalised in a press release.

The government’s response commits the Commonwealth, states and territories to implementing Segal’s programme. National machinery of compliance, and the premiers queued up to install it.

Minns, Crisafulli, Malinauskas
Minns expanded police powers and created new speech offences. Crisafulli criminalised two protest slogans, with two years in prison where words might reasonably cause somebody to feel menaced, harassed or offended.

Offended. The decay of liberal democracy, compressed into one word.

Malinauskas backed IHRA through the South Australian Parliament, then pressed Adelaide Writers’ Week to dump Palestinian Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah. David Gonski, whose name once meant needs based schooling, now fronts an Antisemitism Education Taskforce with Segal at his side.

The Australian Public Service Commission says IHRA applies in federal workplaces. AHPRA adopted it across 16 professions and more than 960,000 practitioners. A reference tool held over a doctor’s registration is not a dictionary but a threat to a livelihood.

Fear is the cheapest police force ever deployed.

Executive policy cannot rewrite ordinary language. A circular cannot create law. Parliament never enacted IHRA, so the court gave it no force. Not a High Court ruling, but a preview.

Eighteen police, one shirt
I have been the test case.

On 3 November 2024, NSW Police arrested me at Bondi for wearing “Fuck Israel, Fuck Zionism”. I threatened nobody and damaged nothing. I was handcuffed, held six hours, fingerprinted and DNA tested by force over my objection.

Three charges followed, with bail conditions that ran more than a year. At one point I was banned from the eastern suburbs. My home in Surry Hills sat 400 metres from the boundary. One wrong walk meant arrest and up to 12 months in a cell awaiting a hearing.

For a shirt.

All three charges collapsed in December 2025 once my lawyers raised the implied freedom of political communication.

On April 6 this year, as many as 18 officers surrounded me at Bondi over the same shirt, among them Odin squad taskforce officers and two senior officers from area command. Overhead, a drone and a helicopter. On standby, an ambulance and two caged wagons.

Odin is a tactical unit for crowd management, high visibility policing and high risk operations. The high risk operation that morning was a shirt. I took it off. They arrested the shirt. A penalty notice arrived a week later.

Fagan has not decided my remaining matter, but he has demolished its pretence. He found the sprayed “Fuk Israel” was “crude political expression of contempt” for a foreign state, not hatred of Jews. If those words stayed political when painted during a crime spree, they cannot become Jew hatred worn peacefully on cotton.

The obscenity was never the shirt. It was the state power assembled around it.

Segal supplied the language. Albanese supplied the authority. Gonski took the classroom, AHPRA the professions, Minns the handcuffs, Crisafulli the statute book, Malinauskas the Parliament and the festival stage.

Justice Fagan supplied something none of them could survive: the law.

• Editor’s Note: the NSW Government is considering appealing Justice Fagan’s decision.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned and highlighted recent attacks and obstructions committed by the Israeli military against Palestinian journalists reporting from the occupied West Bank.

In a statement, RSF says this targeted violence is aimed at preventing media professionals from doing their jobs.

It also condemned the documented violence by extremist Jewish settlers against the Palestinian population.

• READ MORE:  The Gaza doctrine – Israeli ‘journacide’ and the muted NZ media response
• Other Palestinian journalist reports

“RSF condemns the Israeli army’s attacks on journalists and calls on Israel’s allied governments to pressure the country’s authorities to put an end to these actions,” said Martin Roux, head of RSF’s Crisis Desk.

“Amidst documented violence by extremist Jewish settlers against the Palestinian population in the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers are targeting journalists, thereby preventing information from emerging from this territory, which is increasingly cut off from the rest of the world.

Against the backdrop of intensified repression of Palestinian journalists since 7 October 2023, RSF has documented key incidents over the past three months:

11 May: Violence at Qalandiya camp
Israeli armed forces targeted a group of journalists with tear gas and stun grenades while they were covering a raid on the Qalandiya camp, located between East Jerusalem and the West Bank, both territories under Israeli occupation. The attack specifically targeted a crew from the Qatari channel Al Araby.

16 May: Access to Jenin camp barred
Israeli armed forces barred journalists from entering the Jenin camp in the northern occupied West Bank while military and demolition operations were underway. According to reporters on the scene, Israeli soldiers had sealed off the area.

27 May: Journalist prevented from visiting the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound
Saif Al-Qawasmi, a 25-year-old freelance journalist who works for the Qatari news channel Al Jazeera Mubasher, among others, was detained by police while heading to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem on assignment. He was subsequently questioned about his work by law enforcement and Israeli intelligence for several hours. He was banned from accessing the site (initially for one week, and later for six months) on arbitrary grounds. This punitive access ban is frequently used by Israeli authorities against Palestinian journalists, a practice that predates the crackdown following 7 October 2023.

7 June: Live fire in Balata camp
A group of journalists went to the Balata camp, east of Nablus, to cover a large-scale raid by the Israeli army. Among them were Majdi Mohammed Shteih, a photographer for the US news agency Associated Press, and freelance journalist Sidqi Ayoub Rayyan, who works for the news site Noon Post. According to their accounts to RSF, the Israeli army fired stun grenades in their direction and then opened fire while they were attempting to cover the military operation.

16 June: Targeted attacks in Nablus and Deir Abu Mashaal
In the early hours of the night, while protecting a convoy of extremist Jewish settlers (not necessarily Israeli citizens) who had illegally entered Palestinian territory en route to Joseph’s Tomb, east of Nablus, the Israeli army forced out about 10 journalists reporting in the area (including crews from the Qatari channel Al Jazeera and the Jordanian channel Roya News) using stun grenades, thereby preventing media coverage of the event.

That same day, Motassem Saqf Al-Hayt, a correspondent for the independent news site Quds News Network, was injured after the Israeli army fired tear gas grenades while he was reporting from Deir Abu Mashaal, a village west of Ramallah where other settlers were attempting to establish an outpost.

22 July: Haaretz team obstructed south of Nablus
The Israeli army blocked a vehicle belonging to a team from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz south of Nablus. Soldiers claimed that the move was intended to prevent clashes with settlers established in the area.

On 10 August, the same Haaretz team was blocked and attacked by other settlers near a neighbouring village. This time, Israeli soldiers present at the scene refused to intervene and to protect the journalists, according to accounts.

19 journalists detained
Alongside these attacks against Palestinian journalists covering events, the number of journalist arrests in the occupied West Bank has surged since 7 October 2023. Of the 19 Palestinian journalists from the West Bank detained by Israeli authorities, 15 were arrested after that date.

Most recently, on the morning of 12 August 2026, Israeli armed forces arrested freelance journalist Mohammed Awad, who has notably contributed video work to Agence France-Presse (AFP) and the Qatari channel Al Jazeera, at his home in the village of Beitunia, west of Ramallah, on charges of “terrorism”. When contacted by RSF, the army had not, as of this writing, provided information to substantiate this accusation.

Foreign journalists also targeted
This crackdown on local journalists is compounded by obstacles facing international press correspondents. French journalist Alice Froussard, a contributor to Radio France Internationale (RFI), was deported upon her arrival at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport on June 10. This followed entry bans issued against journalists Queralt Castillo, Khadija Toufik, and Alessandro Stefanelli.

RSF, with the support of its Palestinian partner Watan Academy, continues its commitment to journalist safety. In August, the organisation conducted Hostile Environment Awareness Training (HEAT), tailored to the local context, for 20 Palestinian journalists.

• Read the full report at Reporters Without Borders.

Still drawing international censure for his genocidal call to kill dozens of Gazans daily, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has faced fresh condemnation after visiting the construction site of a gallows where Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis are set to be hanged to death, with select Israelis gathering as spectators.

Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, posted a video to social media in which he gloats about the construction of gallows, which is being built in an undisclosed location in central Israel.

“I promised to worsen the conditions of terrorists in prisons — we kept it,” Ben-Gvir says in the video. “I promised to pass the Death Penalty for Terrorists law — we did.

• READ MORE: Israel builds execution chamber for Palestinians convicted of murder
• Other Israeli execution reports

“And now the death row and hanging facility are also starting to take shape.”

The law to which Ben-Gvir referred was passed in March by the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, and took effect the following month. The legislation changes the rules governing Israeli military courts in the illegally occupied West Bank so that the death penalty effectively applies only to Palestinians who kill Israelis.

Far-right Knesset members, including Ben-Gvir, wore noose-shaped lapel pins to show their support for the legislation.

Ben-Gvir also handed out sweets to Knesset colleagues after the bill passed its first reading.

WATCH: National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir announce expansion of newly approved death row facilities, including observation booths.

‘Terrorists deserve only one thing – death by hanging’ pic.twitter.com/MRKJoSVD9q

— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) August 18, 2026

Viewing booths
Ben-Gvir said the execution site would include viewing booths where victims’ families could watch executions, describing this as something customary in various countries and specifically citing the United States as an example.

“Terrorists deserve only one thing — death by hanging,” said Ben-Gvir, who in 2007 was convicted by an Israeli court of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organisation, whose leader he has openly honoured.

Abdullah al-Zaghari, head of the Palestinian Prisoner Society, urged “effective international action” in response to Ben-Gvir’s comments. Al-Zaghari told Anadolu news agency that the minister’s visit to the gallows site was part of the “continued determination of the Israeli occupation system” to codify incitement against Palestinians.

Leftist Israeli Knesset lawmaker Ofer Cassif excoriated Ben-Gvir’s actions.

“This criminal thug — a sympathiser of murderers of Palestinians, a supporter of terror, and a pathological racist — is also hopelessly infantile,” Cassif told The New Arab. “Soon we will oust him from the government, and next, throw him behind bars.”

European Parliament Vice-President Pina Picierno accused Ben-Gvir of staging “a horrific spectacle that turns the death penalty into a show”.

The liberal US pro-Israel group J Street asked on X, “Are we supposed to believe, as some in the Jewish establishment would like us to, that Ben-Gvir’s words somehow tell us nothing about the country he helps govern?”

Jewish extremists excluded
“He is Israel’s National Security Minister, and he is now celebrating a facility built to execute Palestinians while Jewish extremists are excluded from the law,” the group added.

“As the old saying goes: When someone tells you who they are, believe them. When a government gives someone this much power, we have to reckon honestly with the agenda they are pushing.”

Ben-Gvir — who is under sanctions and banned from countries including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom for inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank — was still being denounced on Wednesday for advocating the daily mass killing of Palestinians, including civilians, in Gaza amid a nearly three-year war that United Nations experts, human rights groups, a South Africa-led case currently before the International Court of Justice, and many others call a genocide.

Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, said on Wednesday — which was World Humanitarian Day — that Ben-Gvir’s “remarks are appalling, they’re outrageous, they’re dehumanising, they’re dangerous, and we condemn them unequivocally.”

A spokesperson for German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Wednesday in Berlin that Merz “strongly condemns Minister Ben-Gvir’s inhumane statements, which violate international law — they are unacceptable.”

“As the occupying power, Israel must treat Palestinians with dignity, protect their property, and ensure public administration and humanitarian aid,” the spokesperson added.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot called Ben-Gvir’s remarks “unbearable and inhumane,” adding that “further sanctions could be imposed, and all options are on the table.”

In the United States, actor and activist Mark Ruffalo said Thursday on Bluesky that “Ben-Gvir is a bloodthirsty psychopath, war criminal, and one of Israel’s beloved genocidal leaders.”

“America and the world should be sanctioning, divesting, and boycotting Israel in every way until this apartheid regime falls,” he added.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams. This article was first published by Common Dreams and is republished under Creative Commons.

The IDF’s decision not to open a criminal investigation into the deaths of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, including an Australian citizen, drew strong condemnation.

But for Palestinians, this has simply become the norm.

Four years ago, when I arrived from Palestine to study for my Master’s degree in Melbourne, Australia, I had a hard time finalising some paperwork related to government services, simply because I could not create an account. The problem was that my country, at the time, wasn’t listed within the governmental system.

• READ MORE: Palestinian theologian warns against trusting Israel over Hind, medics killings probe
• What did Al Jazeera’s investigation into Israeli war crimes in Gaza reveal?
• Who was Hind Rajab and why is Israel investigating her killing?
• Israeli military launches criminal probes into killings of 5-year-old and paramedics
• Other Gaza genocide reports

There was no “Palestine” or “West Bank” and not even a slot for “Occupied Palestinian Territories”. At another interaction with local bureaucracy, the worker who received my passport commented that it was the first time he had seen a Palestinian one.

“I am sorry,” he said politely, “but I can’t even see it on the map.”

By the time we left Melbourne in 2024 and returned to our home in Ramallah, a lot had changed. For many months, hundreds of thousands of people gathered every Sunday in the city centre, raising Palestinian flags and calling to end Israel’s war in Gaza.

Watching these protests develop and gather steam, I came to realise that they were taking place not because Australia had become as “pro-Palestinian” as some of the media coverage had suggested, but rather because Israel’s image had badly deteriorated.

Australian opinion shifted
In September of 2025, the shifts in Australian public opinion regarding Israel and the occupation found their way into the country’s official policies, when the government in Canberra recognised Palestine. Australia was one of several influential countries to do so in recent years.

One of the most influential turning points in Australian public views of Israel came in April 2024 when an Israeli airstrike on Deir al-Balah killed seven aid workers from the humanitarian organisation World Central Kitchen, among them Zomi Frankcom, a 43-year-old woman from Melbourne.

For many Australians watching the horrors in Gaza from afar, that was the moment the war became personal.

This week, an internal inquiry by the Israeli military determined there was no criminal wrongdoing by any of the officers or soldiers involved in the fatal incident. Two years after the aid workers had been killed, Israel made clear it had no intention to punish anyone for their deaths, or even allow a proper independent investigation.

In Australia, this decision has been received with a mixture of anger and disappointment. The Australian Foreign Minister summoned the Israeli ambassador in protest.

I was following the headlines in Australia’s leading news websites from my home in Ramallah and realised how different my expectations as a Palestinian are from Israel, compared to those of many Australians. For me, there was nothing surprising about the Israeli military shielding soldiers from accountability.

Adla Alnazer is a public policy consultant and former adviser to the Palestinian government. This article was first published by Haaretz.

Palestinian Christian theologian Reverend Munther Isaac, the director of the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice, has questioned the Israeli military’s announcement that it will investigate the killing of Hind Rajab and other Palestinians in the Gaza genocide.

After two years of denial, Israel has officially admitted firing on the 5-year-old’s car on on 29 January 2024. But her family and others don’t expect justice.

Reverend Munther asked in a post on X: “Can we, in any seriousness, trust the Israeli military to investigate itself?”

• READ MORE: Who was Hind Rajab and why is Israel investigating her killing?
• Israeli military launches criminal probes into killings of 5-year-old and paramedics
• Other Gaza genocide reports

“And let us not forget: There are thousands of Hinds in Gaza — thousands of children killed, each with a name, a family, a story, and a future stolen from them,” he said.

“Justice must prevail. Justice will prevail.”

Can we, in any seriousness, trust the Israeli military to investigate itself?

And let us not forget: There are thousands of Hinds in Gaza—thousands of children killed, each with a name, a family, a story, and a future stolen from them.

Justice must prevail. Justice will… pic.twitter.com/f2eecJejXJ

— Munther Isaac منذر اسحق (@MuntherIsaac) August 19, 2026

Rajab’s mother, Wissam Hamada, continues to travel to several cities globally to speak out about the unimaginable impact of Israel’s war on children, even though she is unable to watch the critically acclaimed Oscar-nominated docudrama, The Voice of Hind Rajab, about her daughter’s death because hearing Rajab’s voice remains too painful.

More than 20,000 children have been killed by the Israeli military in the war on Gaza with a total death toll of more than 73,000 Palestinians.

In the killing of the paramedics that is also being investigated, Israeli troops fired on an ambulance driving to retrieve casualties from an Israeli offensive in the southern city of Rafah. They then fired on other emergency vehicles that came looking for the first one, according to phone footage and the sole survivor of the shootings.

Fifteen medics and emergency responders from the Red Crescent and Gaza’s Civil Defence were killed.

Australia summons Israeli envoy over ‘outrage’
Meanwhile, Australia has summoned Israel’s ambassador to express “outrage” over the Israeli military’s decision not to pursue criminal proceedings against those responsible for a 2024 drone attack that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza.

The victims included 43-year-old Australian citizen Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom.

The Israeli military announced that an extensive internal review found no “reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct” to justify opening criminal investigations into the April 2024 attack.

Israeli authorities previously cited operational errors, misidentification, and procedural failures for the strike on the clearly marked aid convoy.

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said Canberra learned of the decision moments before its public release on World Humanitarian Day, calling the timing “especially insulting” to Frankcom’s family, humanitarians globally and all Australians.

“This decision falls far short of the accountability we expect,” Wong said in a statement.

“The Australian government will not stop pressing Israel for justice for Zomi and her colleagues.”

Wong summoned Ambassador Hillel Newman in Canberra, and instructed Australia’s envoy in Tel Aviv to lodge formal objections directly with Israeli officials.

The Australian government reiterated that disciplinary measures alone were insufficient for an alleged mistake of this magnitude and stated it would continue to press Israel for justice, full transparency, and formal criminal accountability.

In a Double Down News (DDN) video report, British filmmaker Richard Sanders begins a summary of a “horrific new [United Nations] report” with a listing of three atrocities committed by Israeli forces against Palestinian children.

Sanders tells of an infant who was shot in the head while breastfeeding in his mother’s arms, a 16-year-old boy whose body was mutilated by an Israeli tank, and teenage boys deliberately shot by Israeli soldiers in a game of “target practice”.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry released the report on June 23.

• READ MORE: Western media coverage of Gaza erases Palestinians from the story
• How Netanyahu govt media reforms risk deepening Israeli press bias
• Other Gaza media reports

Titled “The Essence of Childhood Has Been Destroyed,” it was the first to focus on crimes and violations against Palestinian children in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Vijay Prashad at CounterPunch called it an “accusation of extraordinary gravity.” In 100-pages, the investigation documents Israeli security forces’ direct killing, degrading, and inhumane treatment of Palestinian children, including sexual and gender-based violence and torture.

The report also documents the destruction of schools and civilian infrastructure and amounts to a gruesome compendium of how Israel is destroying Palestinian childhood and denying the Palestinian people a future and self-determination.

As the human rights lawyer Srinivasan Muralidhar, who chaired the UN commission and led the press conference that announced its findings, bluntly summarised, “By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist.” This is genocide.

Trump’s Board of Peace claims contradicted
The UN report flatly contradicted the claims made by President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace that conditions in Gaza were improving.

The UN report stated that the amount of available aid is woefully inadequate to meet the needs of hungry, wounded people, living in appalling conditions, who are being squeezed into 30 percent of what was once the Gaza Strip.

The UN report further noted the admission of one Israeli soldier: “It feels like a game. You can sit in some basement of a house, safe, with your helmet off, scratching your balls, half-dressed, and kill Palestinians.”

The new report sits atop an ever-expanding mass of documentation of Israeli war crimes committed since October 7, 2023. This trove consists of journalistic documentation, investigations compiled by the UN and other aid agencies, and by human rights lawyers who have corroborated the testimonies of victims of sexual torture with forensic evidence of their broken bodies.

It includes damning evidence from Israeli soldiers themselves, who have recorded their crimes as they committed them and subsequently posted those recordings online. The combined record of evidence includes visuals of massacres, satellite footage, and audio recordings of specific events such as the January 2024 killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab, as documented by Forensic Architecture.

Journalists bear witness, with corroborating evidence, to seeing their colleagues killed by targeted Israeli strikes. Compilations of detailed refutations of falsified Israeli “pseudo-evidence” produced to deny its crimes must also be considered a significant part of this trove. In short, as many have observed, the genocide in Gaza is the most well-documented in history.

The most well-documented but contested genocide in history
And yet, in the face of all the evidence, Israel’s genocide remains the most contested in history. Israel simply denies what it’s doing.

As Ramzy Baroud wrote, Israel’s enemy is not merely its armed adversaries; “it is the judge, the independent human rights observer, and the UN investigator whose sole mandate is to document violations of international law.”

Israel relentlessly claims that all these agencies are lying to make Israel look bad, and that all criticism of the state of Israel is based on antisemitism.

A look at The New York Times coverage of the UN’s June 23 report illustrates how the media amplify Israeli denials by dutifully replicating them. Amid details of the carefully documented horrors that lie within the report, The New York Times announced that Israel’s UN mission in Geneva dismissed it as a “libelous sham” and condemned the UN commission as a “fundamentally flawed mechanism whose very purpose is to single out and vilify Israel”.

Another quote from the Israeli Foreign Ministry sandwiched in the article claimed that the UN report “completely erases Israeli children who were brutally murdered, kidnapped, and targeted by Hamas, while ignoring Hamas’ cynical use of Palestinian children as human shields and pawns of war.”

The Times let this statement stand without qualification, even though most of it is false.

The UN report does include incidents of Hamas killing Israeli children during and since the October 7 attacks — which it also noted were the focus of two prior reports, made to the Human Rights Council in June 2024 and the General Assembly in October 2024 — though they pale by comparison to Israel’s subsequent atrocities.

Israel has killed 20,000+ children
Hamas killed one infant on October 7, 2023. In the two years since then, Israel has killed more than 20,000 children, including 440 newborn babies.

But US media have never fully covered what actually happened on October 7. Israeli civilians and children were killed that day by Israeli security forces who were ordered to fire on everyone, employing the Hannibal Directive, to prevent hostages from being taken.

Additionally, the claim that Hamas used “human shields” during the genocide was always a fabrication. In a May 2025 article titled “One Side Routinely Uses Human Shields in Gaza — But Not the Side That’s Usually Blamed,” FAIR’s Gregory Shupak wrote that Israel and its backers “have completely distorted this concept, in an apparent attempt to give their massacres in Gaza a veneer of legality.”

Scholars Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon are cited to explain how the human shield discourse has been misapplied in Gaza: “Israel has cited Hamas’s underground tunnel system to cast every square inch of Gaza as a human shield.”

This misdirection “has functioned to erase the possibility of Palestinian civilianness altogether.” Shupak added that the “corruption of the meaning of ‘human shields’ has distorted much of the corporate media coverage of the Gaza genocide”.

Another example from the commission’s report describes BBC reporting of a CCTV videotape of soldiers shooting a boy, then standing around for 45 minutes watching him bleed to death. They shot at his mother to stop her from coming to his aid. They also blocked two Palestinian ambulances from reaching him, and they were seen planting a rock next to him as “evidence” that Israeli security forces had acted in “self-defence”.

Although Israel has provided no evidence to contest the videotape, corporate news outlets, such as The New York Times, have given the Israeli military opportunities to claim the boy was “a terrorist” who “attempted to attack soldiers”.

Not a shred of evidence
Without the Israeli government having produced a shred of evidence to support its accusations, the establishment press has allowed Israeli officials to cast doubt on a well-documented case of murder. For almost three years, this cycle of denial has dominated corporate coverage, making this the most contested genocide in history, despite the troves of evidence to the contrary.

This is ironic given that, even as Israeli officials deny these claims when talking to news media, statements admitting and celebrating their crimes circulate widely on internet platforms. In the DDN video, Richard Sanders shows footage of the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, saying, “Erase Gaza … do not leave a child there. Expel all the remaining ones at the end so that they will not have a resurrection … Every child born there is already a terrorist, from the moment of his birth.”

This announcement of intent to continue a genocide to its conclusion could not be made clearer. Indeed, though there are long lists of statements by Israeli officials that constitute incitement to genocide, they are ignored by corporate media frames of denial. Israelis are demanding the right to commit genocide, even as they deny they are doing so.

The UN commission recognised and condemned Israel’s ongoing determination to expand territorially, saying that such long-term goals violate international law.

Spending millions on public relations and failing
The UN’s latest report comes at a time of crisis for the Israeli state, as global citizens are registering their revulsion at Israel’s seemingly endless violence. Israel’s approval ratings are plummeting in the United States and globally.

As of May 2026, only 16 percent of Americans support unconditional aid to Israel, and in June 2026, historic progress was made in the House of Representatives, with seventy-three cosponsors for the Block the Bombs bill to impose a partial embargo against sending any more US weapons to Israel.

Global outrage, anti-genocide disgust, and solidarity with the Palestinian struggle have shifted the global paradigm and dramatically changed the political landscape. Reporting on the Second Anti-Zionist Jewish Congress held in Dublin, Ireland, Ramzy Baroud argued that the shift in global perceptions over the past two years has been driven by independent journalism and Palestinians themselves reclaiming their own narrative.

In response, Israel is investing millions of dollars to revive its image. In one initiative, Israeli propagandists have abandoned calling ethnic cleansing “voluntary migration,” a term repeated frequently in establishment media. A new initiative will refer to it as “a plan of free movement.”

As Caitlin Johnstone writes, “They never say ‘It’s time to stop doing the things that cause people to hate us,’ they just say ‘It’s time for a rebrand.’” Despite millions of dollars spent on hasbara, Israel’s PR campaigns are failing. Dr Baroud argues that “the damage Israel has done to itself through its barbaric practices in occupied Palestine is simply impossible to overcome.”

As Dr Baroud has aptly noted, “Corporate media exist to serve corporate interests.”

Government and corporate elites and states can continue to support Israel militarily and economically only as long as establishment media continue to rehearse the lies, falsifications, and denials of its genocide in Gaza. Through propaganda and strategic alliances, Israel seeks to evade any accountability for genocide. That evasion would be impossible without the complicity of the corporate media.

Palestinian storytellers fundamentally reshaping the global conversation
Western newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have not changed their editorial approach throughout this genocide, but Omar Zahzah, author of Terms of Servitude, argues that independent media, social media platforms, and Palestinian storytellers are not only fundamentally reshaping the global conversation but are also being censored for it. And that is true.

Sadly, however, the establishment press steadfastly continues to provide the Israeli state the cover it needs to deny its crimes against humanity and bury its genocide. It’s long past time for legacy media to stop allowing Israel to hide behind its own journalistic malpractice.

The fact that newsrooms still allow a foreign military — one that is openly censoring Western media and content posted to Big Tech platforms, committing genocide, and murdering journalists — to dominate the language of US journalism must come to an end. It has become far too obvious to the rest of the world.

This was first published by Project Censored and is republished from CounterPunch under Creative Commons.

Dr Robin Andersen is professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University. She is an award-winning author of a dozen single and co-authored books. Her most recent book is The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza. Andersen’s work examines film, television, and media coverage of war, the environment, politics, and elections. Her writing has appeared in CounterPunch, LA Progressive, The Progressive, Salon, Common Dreams, and ScheerPost, among others.

Fiji’s High Court has granted an application seeking the release of seven electronic devices seized by police from British-Fiji journalist and sports marketing official Charlie Charters.

The application was heard before Justice Pita Bulamainaivalu after preliminary issues were raised concerning the proper parties to the proceedings and the transfer of the matter between the Fiji Independent Commission Against Corruption (FICAC), the Fiji Police Force and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

Acting DPP Nancy Tikoisuva, appearing as a interested party, told the court that, following the stay of proceedings, the matter should have come to an end and the devices and other property belonging to Charters should have been released.

• READ MORE: Fiji judge orders motion seeking return of journalists’ e-devices seized by police
• Other Charlie Charters reports

Tikoisuva said the office had discussed the matter with police and agreed with the application seeking the release of the devices.

She also acknowledged that the continued retention of the devices should not have occurred after the stay was granted.

She further submitted that any consequential orders following the stay should have included the release of the exhibits and property belonging to Charters.

Lawyer Juleen Fatiaki for Charters welcomed the DPP’s position and thanked the office for its assistance to the court.

The court subsequently granted the application and ordered the release of Charter’s seven electronic devices.

Republished from The Fiji Times with permission.

A country currently indicted for genocide has no business training our teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand on the topic of genocide. The notion is ludicrous.

Under this National policy Kiwi teachers are going to be trained about genocide by Israelis.

It is intended that some Kiwi teachers will be sent to Israel for indoctrination tours.

• READ MORE: Holocaust education now part of the NZ curriculum
• Israel has no business teaching anyone’s children about the systematic dehumanisation of others — Marilyn Garson
• When truth in protest is under attack, don’t give disinformation a platform

Kiwi teachers will be able to meet happy Palestinians in Israel. That is what South Africa’s apartheid government used to do — come meet the happy Blacks in Johannesburg. Soweto? Where’s that?

Israel is currently indicted for genocide by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has an arrest warrant out for him issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) — for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The ICJ declared Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory to be unlawful on 19 July 2024.

Any and all Israeli presence in Palestinian territory is unlawful. Notwithstanding that, Israel carries on its slaughter as though the law itself does not exist.

It is beyond belief that a New Zealand government could have come up with a policy so ludicrous and so deeply offensive.

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.

Counsel for Fiji-British journalist Charlie Charters has been ordered by High Court judge Justice Pita Bulamainaivalu to serve a motion seeking the return of the 7 electronic devices seized by police on the police chief today.

The motion was filed after police re-seized the devices last Friday under a fresh search warrant, despite an earlier Magistrates Court order for the devices to be returned to Charters’ solicitor, Seforan Fatiaki, by 1pm.

Charters’ counsel, Juleen Fatiaki, told the High Court that Seforan Fatiaki had called to the police CID about 1pm last Friday, when the fresh search warrant was issued.

• READ MORE: Charters’ lawyers cite constitutional protection for journalistic sources
• Other Fiji media freedom reports

She said when Fatiaki was served with the warrant, they put police on notice that they were invoking Section 1(3) of the Criminal Procedure Act, stating that information on the devices was confidential and privileged.

Justice Bulamainaivalu, who joined the proceedings online from Labasa, questioned whether the magistrate who signed the warrant was aware of the High Court’s stay order on the FICAC proceedings.

Juleen Fatiaki said she was not aware and confirmed that Magistrate Sufia Hamza signed the warrant.

She also said that they had only been able to serve the motion to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions after receiving the files back from court this morning and had not been able to serve it on the Police Commissioner.

A hearing on the return of the devices will be held on Monday.

Meanwhile, DPP counsel Alisha Lal told the court they were appearing only as a friend of the court.

Earlier, Fiji Times journalist Anish Chand reported that Charters’ lawyers would tell the High Court that the confidentiality of journalistic sources was protected by Fiji’s Constitution and common law in their challenge over the re-seizure of his electronic devices.

Charters said the devices contained confidential journalistic material, information capable of identifying sources and communications with his legal advisers.

A court struggle featuring Daily Blog editor and media freedom defender Martyn Bradbury has taken a surprise turn, with Free Speech Union (FSU) board member and political commentator Ani O’Brien being revealed as the complainant behind “secret” proceedings, reports Radia Waatea.

Bradbury, who is a regular commentator on Radio Waatea covering politics and current affairs, is defending proceedings brought under the Harmful Digital Communications Act over four items published by The Daily Blog, New Zealand’s largest independent leftwing media website.

O’Brien asked the Auckland District Court today to lift the order preventing her being identified to end public “speculation”.

• READ MORE: ‘I am now legally censored from even talking about being censored’ – Martyn ‘Bomber’ Bradbury
• Other Martyn Bradbury reports

However, The Post reports the FSU has condemned the actions of O’Brien, saying it did not support her case against Bradbury and was unaware of it until the media reported it last week.

Radio Waatea reports that the case has “become a significant debate about where freedom of political expression ends and harmful online communication begins”.

This was “made more unusual by O’Brien’s role with an organisation established to advocate for free speech”.

O’Brien had previously been protected by a court-ordered suppression order last month while pursuing the case, which was first heard in open court last week.

The Post had applied to the court to remove reporting restrictions on the proceedings.

‘Crippling’ unreformed law
FSU chair Stephen Franks said the case showed how “crippling” it could be for freedom of speech, and for the public right to know, when an unreformed law gagged “everyone but insiders from even knowing about a case”, reports The New Zealand Herald.

According to Radio Waatea and also The Daily Blog, the proceedings concerned four posts published by the website which O’Brien had alleged “contained personal attacks, ridicule and abuse”.

She had initially complained to Netsafe before taking the matter to the court under the Harmful Digital Communications Act.

An interim court decision last month found O’Brien had established breaches of two communication principles under the Act, relating to “indecent or obscene” communications and the use of digital communications to “harass” an individual.

Bradbury was ordered on an interim basis to remove the disputed posts, although the judge declined to order him to apologise.

“The dispute has since developed into a wider argument about the boundaries of free speech and the powers available under legislation intended to protect people from serious online harm,” Radio Waatea said.

Bradbury has opposed the proceedings and has argued that his political commentary should be protected by the “right to freedom of expression”.

Seeking legal advice
He also declared earlier on The Daily Blog he was prepared to go to jail to defend the principle.

Last week, Judge David Sharp ordered Bradbury to remove commentary about the case on the website and to seek legal advice.

Today, the judge ruled that other information about the case would remain suppressed on an interim basis, including the nature of the alleged harmful communication.

He set the next court hearing for December 9.

Besides editing The Daily Blog, Bradbury presents a weekly television political panel, The Bradbury Group, and is a regular commentator for Radio Waatea on political and government issues affecting Indigenous Māori.

In an editorial, Radio Waatea manager Matthew Tukaki wrote: “There is something deeply ironic about a high-profile member of the Free Speech Union turning to the courts seeking restrictions on speech she finds offensive.

“That is now the uncomfortable backdrop to the legal battle involving Waatea political commentator and The Daily Blog editor Martyn Bradbury and Free Speech Union board member Ani O’Brien.

“And the irony is difficult to ignore.

“The Free Speech Union has built its public reputation championing the proposition that freedom of expression must protect speech that is uncomfortable, unpopular and offensive. That principle matters precisely because free speech becomes meaningless if it extends only to opinions we approve of.”

How Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese built an unelected censorship apparatus for Jillian Segal without a vote, a bill or a debate, while the Coalition demanded more was covered in Part One. It ended with a question polite Australia refuses to ask. Today, in Part Two is the answer. Andrew Brown reports for Michael West Media.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

The architecture would be scandal enough on paper. It did not stay there. Antisemitism Commissioner Jillian Segal took an oath at a Royal Commission.

Segal conceded regulators had found little inaccuracy in ABC and SBS reporting on Israel and Gaza. The journalism was true.

Her objection was that the truth made Israel look bad. Her remedy was another oversight body and more positive stories about the amazing startup nation

• READ MORE: The Segal State 1 – the public office Australia never voted for
• The Segal State 2 – the mask, the children, the money and the answer

A taxpayer-funded official told a Royal Commission, under oath, that accurate reporting is a problem the state should fix with pressure for flattering coverage.

Under oath, the mask came off
Show the starving children of Gaza if you insist, then cut to a cheerful Israeli tech segment for balance.

There are countries where officials talk like that. None of them are democracies. And the Prime Minister kept her in office anyway.

Then she reached for the children

University students, Segal observed, are relatively fixed in their ideas. Younger children are more open. Education, she said, is a tool for building ideas, cohesion and culture.

An advocate surveyed the population, identified the audience least capable of arguing back, and proposed to begin there.

She unveiled a National Centre for Education Against Antisemitism to train government, business and police at scale and capture the hearts and minds of Australians. Her phrase.

The Gonski taskforce runs from early childhood to university. Something in the curriculum, Segal mused, might have to come out.

Jewish history and the Holocaust belong in every classroom. So do Islamophobia, anti Palestinian racism, the frontier massacres and the stolen generations.

A curriculum organised around one contested political definition does not teach children to think. It teaches them which conclusions are safe. Australians have a name for a state programme built to capture the hearts and minds of other people’s children. It is not education.

The $50,000 question
Twelve days before Segal’s appointment, Henroth Investments, directed by her husband, gave $50,000 to Advance Australia. The same Advance that torched the Indigenous Voice for being too much power for one group of Australians.

Segal denies involvement. The Klaxon documented the couple’s record of joint donations, down to a photograph beside a plaque naming both as donors.

Perhaps she knew nothing of a $50,000 gift from her own household’s company on the eve of her elevation. Any other appointment, this donation triggers an inquiry by Friday. This one drew a shrug. Albanese is not neutral. He benefits from the question never being asked.

The answer
Now the question you carried overnight. Why one form of racism and not the others?

In 1991, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody delivered 339 recommendations. Both parties let them rot for three decades while the death toll passed 590 First Nations people. No envoy. No machinery.

In 2025, Segal delivered 49 actions. The Commonwealth adopted every one within months, put her in charge, and stood a $130 million Royal Commission behind her. Muslim Australians, mosques attacked, got an envoy for show.

Palestinian Australians burying entire families got lectures about tone.

So ask the questions underneath. Which cause has a professional, funded, decades old lobby behind it, and which buried its peak body by Act of Parliament? Which flatters the US alliance, and which indicts the Crown? Which form of justice costs the Treasury nothing, and which costs it the continent?

And that lobby did not merely ask. After October 2023, it campaigned, through ECAJ, AIJAC and the Murdoch press behind them, and Anthony Albanese capitulated.

Then he kept capitulating.

He adopted the plan entire. He kept Segal in office after her testimony. He will not touch the donation. For this Prime Minister, capitulation is not a moment. It is a method.

Follow those questions to the end and you reach the ugliest truth in Australian public life. This state does not fight racism. It prices it.

The cheap kind gets a ministry. The expensive kind gets an anniversary. That hierarchy of harm is now official Commonwealth policy. Nobody voted for it. Nobody was asked. It was imposed. And Segal is that policy made flesh.

The lobby’s president turned the nation’s umpire.

Minns, the enforcer
The state tier belongs to Chris Minns. His government rammed hate speech and protest laws through Parliament, with Coalition votes, while the Dural caravan was waved at a frightened public. Police then established the plot was a fabricated criminal con. A premier who legislates on a hoax and keeps the laws when it collapses has told you what they were for.

Segal’s definition, Minns’s truncheon, opposition applause. A pincer on political expression, built in 18 months, and not one voter asked.Tear it out

This is Australia in 2026. Speech graded in Canberra. Protest policed in Sydney. Children next. An open society has one rule that cannot bend. No unelected hand on the levers of speech. Segal’s office breaks it by existing.

Albanese built this office, hid its costs, ignored the donation on its doorstep and shielded its occupant. Every excess is his. So is the precedent. The apparatus does not dissolve when Segal departs. It sits waiting for the next government, and the Coalition is not planning to dismantle it. It is waiting for the keys.

End Segal’s appointment. Abolish the office.

Repeal the NSW laws passed on a hoax. Open a parliamentary inquiry into its creation, its costs and its occupant’s household donations. Replace the wreckage with one national rights framework protecting every Australian from every form of racial and religious hatred, equally.

No envoys. No favourites. No exceptions.

So make it the question of the next election. Put it to every candidate, of every party, at every doorstop, until they answer. Will you vote to abolish the Segal State? Watch who squirms. Vote accordingly.

Australia needs protection from racism.

All of it, for all of us, or it is not protection. It is patronage. And Australia does not need the Segal State.

ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook

When is it possible to declare that a society has moved from liberal democracy, however imperfectly realised, to authoritarian rule?

Is there a moment when it is suddenly obvious the change has occurred? Does authoritarianism announce its arrival?

Or is it a process that gradually unfolds, where restraints on executive power are dismantled piece by piece until the tide cannot be reversed?

• READ MORE: Other Jonathan Cook articles
• Other Gaza genocide reports

Is the turn to authoritarianism something that can only be understood after the event, when all opportunities to halt the slide have been missed?

And how do we admit to ourselves that we have been stripped of our most basic and cherished freedoms — of speech, assembly and protest — when we are no longer free to speak, meet or protest?

The unpalatable truth is that Britain is already far down this path. And if you are unaware of the earthquake that has been taking place, that may be because — just as you might expect when authoritarianism comes calling — the very first to be smothered are the voices sounding the alarm.

A media owned by billionaires and the state — the parties that, in an age of growing popular discontent, have most to gain from the accretion of executive power and the silencing of dissent — have no reason to illuminate the encroaching darkness.

Foot work for authoritarianism
An ostensible Labour government under the outgoing Keir Starmer has done much of the foot work to usher in the new, ominous political climate.

It was precisely Starmer’s credentials as a human rights lawyer that provided the British state with the cover story it needed for an unprecedented assault on the freedoms fought for by earlier generations.

There are few signs that his successors, whether it be a new figurehead in the genocide-supporting Labour Party or Nigel Farage’s immigrant-bashing Reform, will change direction.

The logic driving Britain’s slide towards authoritarianism is being set not just by politicians, but by a British establishment that needs to sell its collusion in genocide and illegal wars abroad and to find easy scapegoats — immigrants — to blame for its failures at home.

The job of the main political parties, reliant on billionaire donors who also own the corporate media, is to shore up these narratives.

It was Starmer’s Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who incautiously gave the clearest expression to the British state’s vision of our future.

In a speech in January she laid out her ambition to harness new developments in AI to create an all-powerful, all-seeing “Big Brother” surveillance state of the kind foretold by George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984.

‘Panopticon’, the perfect prison
Mahmood even compared this future to the “panopticon” — a reference to 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s perfect prison: a central watchtower (the state) surrounded by a circle of windowed cells where the inmates (the public) would be visible at all times.

Bentham understood that this was not just about physical control. As he observed, the sense of being constantly observed would be a “new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind”. The inmates would police their own behaviour to avoid punishment.

Starmer’s successor, Andy Burnham, is reportedly keen to keep Mahmood a key figure in his government. But this isn’t about a single government minister.

Mahmood is the symptom of a deeper malaise, not its cause. The architecture of the new systems of control, as well as the erosion of freedoms and the cultural traditions that supported them, were already well advanced when she was appointed to the Home Office.

Whoever holds the reins of power in the months and years to come will be able to exploit these existing powers to the maximum, and then extend them further.

Once the spirit of authoritarianism takes hold, it becomes ever harder to stuff it back into the box. Only concerted mass protest can remind the state where ultimate power resides. And it is precisely this kind of protest that is being demonised and criminalised one step at a time.

If it is possible to identify a single moment when the new authoritarianism moved out of the shadows, it was some 15 years ago. That was the moment the state launched its protracted campaign against Julian Assange to vilify and incarcerate him.

Incensed US over war crimes
The founder of the whistleblowing platform WikiLeaks had incensed the United States and its loyal British sidekick by publishing details of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq both wanted to be kept secret.

It was probably no coincidence that, at the time, Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service and making repeated trips to meet Washington’s most senior law officers. Contrary to protocols, records of these discussions were destroyed by his officials.

We will never know what instructions Starmer was given by the US regarding Assange. But a possible clue survived the further, and highly irregular, destruction by Starmer’s department of related correspondence between UK and Swedish prosecutors from that time.

One of the few surviving emails is revealing. It shows that Sweden was considering dropping an investigation into Assange for lack of evidence, as he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London fearful of what lay in store.

Starmer’s staff, who were supposed to be neutral arbiters between Sweden and Assange’s legal team, angrily told the Swedes: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”

In another email, the same CPS official told Swedish counterparts: “Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition.”

Later, with the active connivance of the UK and its courts, the US showed its true hand. Washington began extradition proceedings on the preposterous grounds that Assange had committed “espionage” by publishing details of its war crimes.

Caged in prison
Assange was caged in a high-security prison in London for years, often unable to meet his lawyers, his health failing, on a trumped-up, nakedly political charge.

This was a terrifying, unprecedented assault on the right of journalists to publish evidence of state wrongdoing in the public interest. And yet the billionaire-owned media could barely stifle their yawns.

There was a two-fold gain from Assange’s decade-long abuse and the trampling of his legal rights.

First, it established a very visible precedent in which the rule of law was turned on its head. The roles of victim and victimiser were reversed.

Assange, who had published incontrovertible evidence of US and British war crimes, was the one behind bars. British officials who approved and hid those crimes not only evaded justice but were free to hound and smear Assange.

This has been the theme ever since, as the British state has intensified its curbs on speech and protest, with Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians often serving as the testing ground for authorising this new crackdown.

In the second half of the 2010s, Jeremy Corbyn — Starmer’s predecessor as Labour leader — found himself and his supporters roundly vilified as “antisemites”.

Forewarning of the future
Why? Because they tried to bring attention to Israel’s criminal actions — a forewarning of what was to come, as Israel unleashed what legal experts, Holocaust scholars, human rights groups and United Nations investigators have all concluded is a genocide in Gaza.

In a properly functioning democracy, those who smeared Corbyn and other critics of Israel would have been permanently discredited.

Instead, UK officials — the same officials colluding in Israel’s current crimes by shipping arms to Israel, by carrying out surveillance flights to guide Israel’s bombing campaigns against Gaza’s civilians, and by offering diplomatic cover — simply stepped up the demonisation campaign.

As millions of Britons took to the streets, the Starmer government — and the British state behind it — not only labelled them as antisemites but radically rewrote the statute books to criminalise opposition to Israel’s genocide.

Direct action group Palestine Action, which had been targeting Israeli arms factories operating on UK soil, was proscribed as a “terrorist” group equivalent to al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

Holding placards protesting the genocide, as thousands of respectable British citizens did, became “support for terrorism”, risking a jail term of up to 14 years.

Reality was once again inverted.

UK supports state terrorism
Britain continues to actively support Israeli state terrorism.

But it was those ringing the alarm — those trying to stop these shipments, those opposed to British collusion in Israeli state terrorism, or those simply appalled by the undermining of basic rights to protest — who were arrested and charged as “terrorists”.

Meanwhile, documents show Elbit Systems continues to enjoy unrestricted access to British government officials.

Second, in stigmatising and isolating Assange for publishing details of US and UK war crimes, the British state was able to draw its own fake distinction between “good” and “bad” journalism — a distinction the billionaire-owned media was only too happy to embrace.

Assange, whose independent platform WikiLeaks had held Washington and London’s feet to the fire for committing war crimes, had in the process shamed the establishment media for their unwillingness to do likewise.

He exposed the extent to which corporate journalists, dependent on access to the rich and powerful for stories, conspire in the covert, unaccountable ways power is exercised by the state.

The media are not watchdogs; they are lap dogs, representing the interests of the billionaire class.

Independent media not tolerated
The British state — and its security services — made clear they would not tolerate truly independent or critical media that could expose their hypocrisies or bring them to book.

In response, the billionaire-owned media not only hung Assange out to dry. It joined the government in a chorus of claims that independent outlets were either peddling “fake news” or serving as “Kremlin assets” spreading “disinformation“.

It amplified the pressure from politicians on social media platforms, the billionaires’ new plaything, to tighten their algorithms to hide independent journalists, and stymie these dangerous new competitors in the battle for truth.

Similarly, corporate media cheerled the government’s decision to ban Russia Today, the Russian state’s news channel. It quickly became all but impossible for UK audiences to hear Russia’s version of events in the mainstream media, as Britain and European states built the case for permanent confrontation with Moscow.

The European Union imposed an even more draconian ban — upheld last month by the EU’s Court of Justice — that makes it a criminal offence to repeat any information reported by RT, and other banned outlets, even if demonstrably true. The law’s purpose is to supposedly “protect public order and safety”.

In recent weeks, two prominent US commentators, Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker, have been denied entry to the UK over their criticisms of Israel. Uygur was due to speak at an Oxford University debate.

In this new authoritarian climate, truth is defined as whatever the state wants their citizens to know. Meanwhile, disinformation — “Russian propaganda” or “antisemitism” — is whatever those same states insist their citizenry must not hear.

Brazen reversal of Enlightenment
This is a brazen reversal of 350 years of the Western Enlightenment, with its professed belief both in the primacy of reason and that ideas must be tested through debate and critical scrutiny.

Now it matters not what is being said, but only who is saying it.

And unsurprisingly, the billionaire-owned, Western media has endorsed this new regime. After all, its voice — representing the interests of the super-rich — is guaranteed a hearing.

No surprise, then, that this same privileged media corps has continued to meekly accept its exclusion from Gaza by Israel as the biggest crime in modern history unfolds — even now, in the midst of a supposed ceasefire that Israel keeps breaking.

Because what matters is who is allowed to speak: Israel, not Gaza’s Palestinians, whether what Israel says is true or, as invariably turns out to be the case, a lie.

In line with this precept, the billionaire-owned media has barely raised a murmur as Israel has slaughtered Gaza’s journalists in unprecedented numbers — killing more of them than in two world wars, Vietnam, the Yugoslav wars and Afghanistan combined.

The lives of Palestinian journalists — like the reporting they have had to do alone under Israeli bombardment — count for nothing in the Western media because of who they are.

Genocide ‘erased as a crime’
Genocide — the what — has been erased as a crime because it is we — the West — who are helping to carry it out.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, reportedly facing a political and donor backlash, scrapped last year its annual Global Impunity Index — which measured where journalists are murdered with impunity — after it became clear Israel would top the rankings.

Now the same committee is being accused of caving in to these pressures by raising doubts about who counts as a journalist in Gaza — doubts that will serve to embolden Israel, which claims that Palestinian journalists, indeed all Palestinians, are terrorists in disguise.

The who has to be rewritten because the what cannot be denied.

The same story is unfolding in the UK, where independent British journalists have been detained at the airport or had their homes raided at dawn by counterterrorism police for “wrong-think” about the Gaza genocide and British complicity in it. They too face up to 14 years in jail.

That has sent a chilling message to other journalists, those that lack the protection of a billionaire patron or the state, about what can be said.

None of this is, or will be, confined to Gaza. The upending of Enlightenment values, as should be clear by now, is part of a much bigger political project to normalise and entrench this creeping authoritarianism.

Hard to reverse precedent
The proscription of Palestine Action and placard-holding has paved the way for the British state to designate any opponent — challenging its lawbreaking or contesting its right to dictate truth — as a criminal or a supporter of terrorism. A precedent has been set, and now approved by the UK courts, that will be hard to reverse.

The state has many tools at its disposal, some of which it is already wielding, again to no protest from billionaire-owned media “watchdogs”.

A particularly powerful one is “debanking”: forcing individuals or groups who disrupt the narrative of Western state moral and legal authority out of the financial system, driving them into a kind of purdah that makes it near-impossible for them to function in the modern, Western world.

Notably again, Assange and WikiLeaks were an early victim of the use of debanking as a political weapon. Washington imposed sanctions in late 2010, shortly after WikiLeaks exposed US and British war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, cutting off almost all of its donor revenue.

Sanctions — what some describe as a “financial death penalty” — have already been imposed on several judges and staff of the International Criminal Court over the issuing of an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for committing crimes against humanity in Gaza.

UN legal expert Francesca Albanese, at the forefront of highlighting Western complicity in Israel’s genocide, has also been debanked.

In Britain, Palestinian and Islamic-run charities have long faced harsh restrictions on their ability to operate financially, usually on the basis of claims that they may be funnelling donations to proscribed groups.

But this has gradually expanded to mainstream Palestine solidarity organisations and to individuals caught up in the ban on Palestine Action.

The Canary debanked
In an even more disturbing, if predictable, development, Lloyds Bank has now debanked The Canary, a leftwing publication whose criticisms of Labour’s capture by Big Business have long proved a thorn in the party bureacracy’s side. The Canary can no longer pay staff, and its news operation is in jeopardy.

This is the same Canary that the Labour Together project led by Morgan McSweeney — who propelled Starmer to power on behalf of the billionaire-friendly, pro-genocide Labour right — identified early on as a threat. His mantra was reportedly: “Destroy The Canary or The Canary destroys us.”

As investigative journalist Paul Holden sets out in his book The Fraud, which documents Labour Together’s covert, law-breaking operations, McSweeney almost succeeded in destroying The Canary. He created an astroturf group, Stop Funding Fake News, that lobbied advertisers to boycott the publication.

Labour Together under McSweeney’s successor, Josh Simons, would then launch a smear campaign on Holden and refer him to British security services as a supposed Kremlin asset.

Like a bad penny, Simons has turned up again, this time giving up his Makerfield seat for Andy Burnham to return to Westminster. Simons is now one of Burnham’s political advisers.

This systematic assault on the right to scrutinise the British state’s actions has been extended to the legal profession too.

Last month, Dan Kovalik, a respected US human rights lawyer and professor, was detained at Liverpool airport by counterterrorism police and questioned over his criticisms of Western foreign policy in Gaza and Iran.

Detained by police
Fahad Ansari, a British human rights lawyer, was detained by police last year on return to the UK from a family holiday in Ireland under Schedule 7 of the draconian Terrorism Act of 2000.

Both men had their electronic devices seized, despite protests that this was unlawful and violated their privileged lawyer-client communications.

Ansari’s detention appears to be a blatant act of political retaliation and intimidation. He had made legal representations challenging a Home Office decision in 2021 to expand the proscription of Hamas to its political wing. Hamas has never launched a military operation in Britain.

For the submission, Ansari had assembled a group of experts to argue that the expanded proscription — long desired by Israel — was having a profoundly chilling effect on the work of lawyers, scholars, human rights groups and journalists in documenting and discussing Israeli crimes in Gaza.

Five UN legal experts wrote protesting the abuse of Ansari’s rights as a lawyer, warning that “such measures threaten to criminalise, stigmatise and have chilling effects against lawyers and legal associations carrying out lawful work in national security and counter-terrorism matters”.

That seems to be precisely the point. Harassing lawyers is a feature, not a bug, of Britain’s new authoritarianism.

An even more visible victim of this new assault on the legal profession is the highly respected barrister Rajiv Menon.

Key human rights cases
He has worked on some of the most important human rights cases of modern times, challenging failures and abuses of power by the state in relation to the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, the deaths of nearly 100 Liverpool football fans at Hillsborough, and the 72 victims of the Grenfell Tower fire.

He is currently facing contempt of court proceedings after making a closing speech in January that persuaded a jury not to convict six Palestine Action defendants of any of the charges brought by the British state against them. In 2024, the six had targeted an Elbit factory.

It is believed to be the first time that a lawyer has been prosecuted for contempt of court over a closing speech. Garden Court Chambers, where Menon has practised for three decades, said the proceedings had sent “shock waves through the legal profession”.

It warned of a severe chilling effect on barristers, who might be more reluctant to mount a strong defence, especially in politically charged trials, for fear of reprisals.

All of this should be seen in the context of the government’s equally unprecedented moves to erode the cornerstone legal principle of the right to trial by jury.

Authoritarian states permit no meaningful restraints on their ability to impose their will. Independent-minded lawyers and juries are just such a brake.

But perhaps the most sustained assault by the British state has been on the rights to protest and assembly, making it increasingly dangerous to express a view in the public space.

2 million in street power
Since some two million people took to the streets to oppose Britain’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, new ways have been sought to restrict the ability of ordinary citizens to raise their voice against the abuse of governmental and state power.

Recent legislation allows police to ban protests because they are “too noisy” or cause “serious unease”. Disruption has been redefined to now include hindrance to any daily activity. Protests can be barred if they have a “cumulative” impact.

These are all inherent features of protest. The mass demonstrations against Britain’s illegal attack on Iraq were noisy, disruptive and repeated — as have been the marches against Britain’s collusion in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

By judging the legality of protest according to these selective and largely subjective criteria, the state has given the police huge latitude to decide which protests should be criminalised and which allowed. It is hardly surprising then that the police are currently concentrating their efforts on the anti-genocide marches, which highlight British collusion in Israel’s crimes.

Facial recogition technology — pioneered by Israel against Palestinians — is being rolled out too, normalising the Panopticon state so beloved by Mahmood.

Where is all of this leading? The answer is to a new piece of legislation that was hurried through Parliament by the Home Secretary.

The National Security (State Threats) Act gives the state unprecedented powers to proscribe groups, as it did with Palestine Action, but now without having to claim to have evidence of a terrorist threat.

Claiming a ‘hostlle’ group
The Home Secretary can make such a designation unilaterally, without any parliamentary oversight, simply because he or she claims the group is a “hostile” foreign state actor that poses a threat to national security or public safety.

Mahmood has already done so with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), effectively Iran’s military.

Further, anyone who works with or receives a “material benefit” — defined to include “information” — from a proscribed group can be jailed for up to 14 years. That includes expressing support for the group or sharing information it has provided.

Simply hosting an event where someone expresses support for the group could open one to prosecution, as could posting something on social media that the British state claims is a hostile foreign state “talking point” — whether or not the information is true.

Once again, this is an assault on the most fundamental of Enlightenment values.

In the National Security Act, it matters only who is passing on the information, not what the information is, or whether it is truthful. There is no public interest defence, such as exposure of criminality by the British state or its allies.

There is no exemption for journalists, lawyers, scholars or human rights groups. It will be impossible for them to do the most essential part of their job: digging out information, testing claims from one side against the other’s, and allowing audiences to determine the truth.

Baring of journalists
Assuming Hamas is declared a hostile foreign actor, as seems all but certain, journalists will be barred from collecting details of Palestinian casualties from Gaza’s Health Ministry or speak to doctors there. Why? Because the Hamas government runs the Health Ministry and hospitals.

Worse, it would be impossible for journalists to visit Gaza to investigate Israeli crimes — something that will delight Israel — because such a visit would need to be organised through the Hamas government. To do so would risk 14 years in jail.

The same will be true for reporting from Iran or Russia, if the Home Secretary so decides.

The only apparent carve-out will be for journalists who get approval from the British government beforehand.

That should ensure that only the most compliant, access-driven journalists, belonging to state and billionaire-owned media, will be able to engage with “hostile” foreign actors — in ways the British state can be sure will best represent its interests.

Under this new law, the search for truth, and potentially the truth itself, will be criminalised.

The National Security Act systematises all the other developments we noted earlier. It gives the state carte blanche to criminalise anyone who scrutinises or challenges its moral or legal authority.

Search for the truth
Who should be in uproar over this monstrous legislative assault on the right to search for truth, to hold the state accountable, to act as a watchdog on the abuse of power?

If the billionaire-owned media did any of the above, news outlets would be leading the pushback. As it is, they are mostly silent — because they do none of these things.

It will be independent journalists, commentators, lawyers and human rights activists who will be picked off one by one, sending a message to everyone else to keep their heads down.

Starved of real information and critical scrutiny of the British state’s actions, the public, so it is hoped, will become more ignorant, more docile, more passive as their rights are steadily stripped away.

As the climate crisis intensifies, as resource wars accelerate, as austerity at home bites deeper, the finger will be pointed not at the real culprits — the super-rich, their media and the captured state — but at earlier victims of the West: those fleeing from the wars we initiated, from an increasingly unstable climate our inflated consumption provoked, and from a paucity of resources following centuries of colonial theft.

While we are encouraged to blame “the immigrants”, or “the Muslims”, or “the left”, or “the Israel haters”, the state is in a race to erect a scaffolding of control to protect itself before we wake up to the deception.

Time is running out on all fronts. The lack of urgency to address these crises is not because the crises don’t exist, but because our passivity has been engineered. The truth is we are already in the Panopticon, and our minds are already deeply fashioned for obedience.

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.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Andrew Brown

Remember the referendum in which Australians voted to create a Voice to Parliament for Israel?

You don’t. It never happened. We got one anyway.

In 2023, 60.06 percent of Australians rejected a constitutionally recognised Voice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. A body that could make representations only on matters concerning the people whose ancestors have been here 60,000 years.

• READ MORE: Reports on the Bondi Royal Commission

Too much, the No campaign shrieked. Division. Privilege. Special treatment.

Nine months later, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese handed Jillian Segal what the Voice never dreamed of asking for. Not a right to be heard. Power. No election. No parliamentary vote. No hearing.

A three-year commission reporting personally to the Prime Minister, with a mandate reaching into every campus, newsroom, classroom, gallery, charity, arts contract and visa file in the Commonwealth.

Australia has never seen an office like this. Not once in 125 years.

We have been here before and we said no. In 1951, Robert Menzies asked Australians for power to outlaw communism and police political belief. Even Menzies put it to a referendum, because a democracy does not seize control of ideas by fiat.

A frightened people refused him.

That refusal became a founding settlement of this country. The state does not decide what citizens may think.

A captain’s call
Albanese tore up that settlement with a press release. No referendum. No bill. No debate. One man appointed one advocate, and the checkpoint went up.

An open society grants authority over its citizens three ways — election, appointment ratified by Parliament, or a court, ruling in public, subject to appeal.

Segal’s power arrived by none of them. The word for that is illegitimate. Not unlawful. Worse. Lawful, and

authorised by nobody but one man.

Do not look to the opposition for rescue. The Coalition demanded a national antisemitism crackdown before Labor delivered one, and its only complaint since is that the checkpoint is too small and the universities let off too lightly.

Resistance has come from the crossbench alone. When both major parties agree on machinery this size, the voters have been deleted from the equation. Neither will ask whether Segal’s authority is legitimate, because both intend to use it. That is imposition.

That is Australia in 2026.

Say it plainly. Antisemitism is real. It is sometimes murderous. Jewish Australians deserve safety, delivered without mercy by police, courts and criminal law against anyone who menaces a synagogue or a schoolchild.

Safety does not require a private advocate enthroned above the speech of 27 million people. That is not protection. That is capture.

The wrong person, chosen on purpose
Segal ran the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. She chaired the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce. Israel lobby groups.

Advocacy for Israel is her right as a private citizen. It is also the precise reason no honest government would put her near an office ruling on the boundary between antisemitism and criticism of Israel. Albanese did not blunder into the conflict. He shopped for it.

Her selection sits buried under Freedom of Information redactions. Up to $16.9 million was approved for the Envoy offices. You were not asked. You were not told. You are paying her a reported $1070 a day, and Home Affairs refuses to tell you her salary.

The machinery of a small authoritarian state
Jillian Segal produced a 20-page plan. Thirteen recommendations. Forty nine actions. And behind them, nothing. No published evidence base. No consultation paper. No regulatory impact statement.

Not one piece of credible research showing any of it would prevent a single antisemitic incident. For all the rigour on display, the plan might as well have been drafted at her Point Piper kitchen table. In December 2025, the government swallowed it whole anyway, named it a programme of work led by Segal, and pledged action on every recommendation, unquestioned.

Read the list and ask which country you are living in. Media monitoring. A university report card. Withholding university funding. Terminating academic grants. Stripping charities of their status. Screening visa applicants for their opinions. Ideological training for the public service. Cancellation clauses so arts grants can be ripped back from artists who say the wrong thing about the wrong state.

The fig leaf is that Segal cannot personally cancel anything. Her office helps define the offence, grades the accused and recommends the sentence.

Ministers supply the muscle and the deniability. Prosecutor, judge and probation service in one unelected body, answerable only to the man who created it. Build this for any other subject and Australians would name it instantly.

A censorship ministry.

A rigged definition, wired into everything
At the centre sits the contested IHRA definition, whose own lead drafter has protested its use as an enforcement weapon. The ABC, SBS, Amnesty International and hundreds of scholars warn its Israel-related examples can melt criticism of a state into hatred of a people. Segal bolts it into government regardless.

From January 2027, universities must define antisemitism under an enforceable national standard. Then Segal’s report card marks whether the definition is appropriate, while her plan demands IHRA everywhere. Choice, the way a loan shark offers choice.

No vice-chancellor will need to be ordered to censor.

They will censor themselves in advance.

That is only the architecture. Then Segal took an oath and showed what it is for.

And hold one question in your head overnight, the one polite Australia refuses to ask. Why does one form of racism summon a ministry, a report card and $130 million, while First Nations families waited 30 years and 590 deaths in custody for recommendations nobody implemented?

Why machinery for one hatred and a media release for the rest? You are not supposed to ask. Ask anyway.

• Part 2: the mask off under oath. The plan for your children. The $50,000 nobody will investigate. And the question answered.

Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist. This article was first published by Michael West Media and is republished with permission.

The Free Palestine Party is now an official list party and will be on every ballot paper for New Zealand’s general election on November 7.

The Free Palestine Party is the only party in this election dealing with the most pressing economic, political and moral issue facing Aotearoa and the world today, said a statement by the party.

This crisis is caused by the “apartheid colony of Israel backed by US military power destabilising the Middle East”.

• READ MORE: ‘Triple tap’ in Gaza, Iran and the Hind Rajab atrocities condemned at Stop Wars rally
• Other Gaza genocide reports

More than 60 percent of the people of Aotearoa believe that the New Zealand government should sanction Israel for its human rights abuses, this rises to 68 percent among 18-29 year olds.

The only way to bring peace to the Middle East, stop a global depression and end the holocaust of our time, is to put an end to the apartheid state of Israel, just like apartheid South Africa.

The people of Aotearoa helped fight for the end of the apartheid state of South Africa and thousands of Kiwis today have joined the ongoing protests against the crimes of Israel.

“It is time for Kiwis and Aotearoa to be leaders in the struggle against Zionism and Israel, as we were in the anti-nuclear and anti-apartheid movements,” said the Free Palestine Party statement.

Centre of NZ politics
“The party has become registered with the Electoral Commission to push this issue to the centre of New Zealand politics “where it should be”.

Protesters over the Gaza genocide have held weekly demonstrations at multiple venues across New Zealand for 149 weeks — the longest continuous protests on an issue in New Zeakand’s history.

Six main principles in the party’s platform would help in the fight against apartheid and would stop New Zealand from being complicit in the crimes against humanity of Israel and the United States, said the statement:

The principles are:

• The right of Return for all Palestinians;
• The primacy of international law and UN resolutions;
• Upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in relation to Zionist abuses;
• Single State Solution for the whole of Palestine;
• Unconditional support for all forms of Palestine resistance; and
• Independent NZ foreign policy and withdrawal from military and security alliances with US.
• More information on the Free Palestine Party

United States unilateral sanctions, the kind being imposed on Cuba today, are deadlier for children than war according to a major piece of research published in The Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal.

Totally ignored by the mainstream media, the report has bombshell findings that should call into question the use of sanctions to impose punishments on entire populations for the actions of their governments.

A staggering 500,000 civilians die annually due to US and EU unilateral sanctions that many Western countries help enforce.

• READ MORE: ‘To play God’: How US pressure has shattered Cuba’s healthcare
• Other sanctions reports

Sanctions are ‘more tremendous than war’
The report by Professor Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón and Mark Weisbrot vividly underscores US President Woodrow Wilson’s comment that sanctions were “something more tremendous than war.”

“Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality: a cross-national panel data analysis” data-mined major studies covering the years 1971-2021. Its primary source was the Global Sanctions Database (GSDB), internationally the most comprehensive aggregator of global datasets on sanctions.

Analysing research covering the years 1971-2021 across 152 countries, the researchers found that unilateral sanctions (such as those imposed on Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Yemen and Iraq) were “associated with an annual toll of 564,258 deaths, similar to the global mortality burden associated with armed conflict.” Imagine that: every year, for decades, sanctions (primarily US and EU sanctions) have taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians — and that rate has accelerated, not declined, because American use of sanctions has exploded in recent years.

According to the Global Sanctions Database (GSDB), 25 percent of all countries have been put under US, EU, or UN sanctions in the 2010–22 period! That’s a massive leap from 8 percent in the 1960s. For this short article I will focus on Cuba but the same lessons apply to whatever countries are targeted for unilateral sanctions.

Saving the babies of Cuba
Professor Francisco Rodriguez, an economist at Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies is the lead author of the study. He says: “Our findings reveal that unilateral and economic sanctions, particularly those imposed by the USA, lead to substantial increases in mortality, disproportionately affecting children younger than 5 years.”

Some Americans are fighting every day to save the babies of Cuba. Others, like the President and the Secretary of State, are doing everything they can to kill Cuban babies and thousands of others of the most vulnerable citizens of the besieged Caribbean island.

This is not hyperbole; it is policy that is playing out on our watch.

Medea Benjamin, the great American activist from the CodePink peace organisation, recently visited Cuba to bring medicines and medical supplies to Cuba’s pediatric hospitals.

She is now under investigation for doing so — for breaking US unilateral sanctions.

“Basically, we want to help save babies, and that, according to Trump, is something that must be investigated. Because ‘How dare we want to help the Cuban people? How dare we love the Cuban people?’ If indeed the charge is that we love the Cuban people — ‘Guilty!’ I want my government to leave the Cuban people alone, not to be strangling them by keeping oil from the island, by sanctions that are so brutal. I want them to stop threatening to invade Cuba. I want them to listen to the global world opinion that every single year at the United Nations overwhelmingly says: lift the blockade.”

Sanctions: the modern ‘Siege Engine’
Why the silence from the mainstream media about the report’s findings? Why did they choose to ignore what in a sane and decent world would have been earth-shaking revelations?

Dr Josephine Varghese of the University of Canterbury suggests this is because the West puts great effort into burying inconvenient truths. She specialises in the intersections of colonialism, capitalism and structural violence and told me this week: “The United States has openly admitted that the purpose of the sanctions is to create conditions so bad that the people in Cuba will turn against their own government.”

Cuba’s entire electricity grid collapsed last week, driving millions of Cubans to the brink — just what the US wants.

“At the ground level, sanctions have a deadly impact,” Dr Varghese says. “Cuba had such impressive achievements in health, for example, in lowering infant mortality.

“The current sanctions and punishments are targeting this. We are seeing nurses and doctors having to manually operate ventilators and incubators for premature babies.”

Luis Ernesto Morejón Rodríguez, Cuba’s ambassador to Wellington, New Zealand, reinforced this message when he told me of the human impact of the blockade:

“I think about children fighting cancer whose chances of survival have been devastated because the chemotherapy drugs and other essential medicines they need are simply not available.

“Years ago, around 65 percent of these children could expect to survive. Today, because treatments are interrupted or cannot be provided at all, that figure has been tragically reversed: as many as 85 percent may not survive.

“I think about the parents waiting for a phone call that never comes because more than 100,000 Cubans — including over 12,000 children — are still waiting for surgery.

“Cuba once had one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the Americas. Today that rate has more than doubled, rising from around four to more than nine deaths per thousand live births.

“These are not just numbers. They are children who should still be alive, families carrying unbearable pain, and healthcare professionals forced to make impossible choices every day.

“Political differences should never be settled at the expense of ordinary people, and certainly never at the expense of children.”

Now that we know that sanctions have effects on the health and mortality of civilian populations similar in magnitude to those of armed conflict, what should we do about it? Will we continue to shrug and look the other way out of fear of the US or indifference to human suffering?

Will we have the courage to at last recognise the inconvenient truth that the US and the EU have killed civilians on a scale, albeit at a slower pace, greater than the German government of the 1940s?

Isn’t it time to find the courage to oppose this? The reform of the entire sanctions framework must be a global priority. Unilateral secondary sanctions (forcing other countries to implement sanctions) is already illegal under international law.

Such is the power of the US and the EU — controlling as they do a large portion of the levers of international trade and finance — that most countries bow down and comply. For the sake of children suffering now and millions more not yet born, that must end and a new era which restrains and reforms the use of sanctions must be ushered in.

As the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire said: “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”

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

Of late, Australia’s public broadcaster ABC has been altering the way it sees the world around it. Bound by a national charter, but modified from within after years of ideological, technical, and operational transfer, the organisation is failing in its duty to inform Australians.

This is occurring at a time of great uncertainty, when it is needed to function healthily, truthfully, the most.

The ABC’s subjective and selective journalism jolts through a country in flux, emblematic of a broader act of censorship that goes on to form the body of a foreign influenced effort to moderate the country’s resting state to entertain the previously unthinkable.

• READ MORE: Other media credibility reports

In a world at boiling point, in a nation being led down the garden path by powerful small interests working in concert to shape public perception and limit the range of acceptable debate, the decline of the ABC has been felt by many Australians.

With pandemics, bushfires, floods, wars and a live streamed genocide still unravelling unabated, the elite power structures that have controlled our country’s destiny have revealed themselves to be nothing short of diabolical — propped up by a corporate media apparatus that works directly in lockstep with the interests of the billionaires and powermongers of Australia’s shallow rooted elite.

In this time of power and consolidation, the ABC has been commandeered and realigned through a concerted effort carried out by a network of former commercial media executives and political appointees who have steadily replaced the organisation’s independent traditions with a more compliant, establishment-friendly outlook.

Ten years under the Coalition, squeezed from above, the ABC has been augmented from root to branch in a process of attrition. A decade of siloing and compartmentalising the old guard, replacing board members with former corporate media hatchetmen, and replacing outgoing ABC stalwarts and custodians with new-wave stenographers who kicked off their trade weaving in the dark arts of Murdoch, has left the ABC almost unrecognisable.

Sinophobic news specials
Barrie Cassidy got replaced by David Speers, ABC people get replaced by non-ABC people — and sooner rather than later we have Sinophobic news specials with moody music, too much airtime wasted on Hughsey, Sandilands and Stefanovic, and a repellent tabloid MSG-like shimmer can be seen on the once mighty public broadcaster.

The ABC once had a star factory within the organisation, with an organic workplace ethos, that produced inhouse some of the better journalists in the world. People like Mark Colvin, Caroline Jones and Kerry O’Brien defined the standard at the ABC by living it and bleeding it into the fabric of the organisation.

Now, as the old guard are washed out, they are replaced by former Murdoch heavies and corporate news executives.

These days, David Speers (News Corp), Patricia Karvelas (News Corp) and Clare Armstrong (News Corp), partner with CEO Kim Williams (News Corp, Foxtel) and a constellation of former corporate suits. A new ethos seeps into the organisation.

People like former Nine CEO Hugh Marks (current ABC managing director), see fit to continue the cultural transfer, employing former News Corp finance reporter Alex Turner-Cohen, and hiring London-based writer-at-large for The Nightly Latika Bourke.

Bourke is one of the most hawkish journalists in the country, enjoying her plum job co-presenting the ABC’s Global Roaming programme on Radio National while continuing to write articles for Kerry Stokes that look like they’re proofread by the military industrial complex.

The Shot’s editor Dave Milner recently covered a Pine Gap landback demonstration in the Northern Territory, where a powerful gathering of local Arrernte Indigenous families laid down four demands for land back, closure of the base, reparations, and compensation for the families in Gaza impacted by the base’s opaque operations.

The ABC told what resembled a story, waltzing around the glaring demands reflecting a national groundswell, and reducing the story to an ambiguous, if not futile, demonstration on an empty red desert highway.

Proof the ABC erased Gaza from its Pine Gap coverage         Video: The Sunday Shot

Israeli govt talking points
On the ABC, this is the way things are done now. And it looks like Patricia Karvelas positing Israeli government talking points almost three years into a UN-declared genocide in the name of balance, or a vibe coded report on the virtues of the Ukraine war with a comic book analysis from Matt Bevan, or it’s a rude and misguided gotcha themed interview from Sara Ferguson.

And just as seen outside Pine Gap, the national broadcaster is gaslighting the shit out of us on a raft of crucial issues. So where is the public interest at the ABC?

Is it in the public interest to frame Iran as some form of equal aggressor in the Netanyahu-Trump led conflict in West Asia? Is the community better off entertaining future wars with China with ideologically conflicted journalists who have no idea? Is it objective to run positive narratives on the inevitability of AUKUS, or speak for the Ukrainian and Russian people on their appetite for war, or omit the clear demands of the Arrernte people for the immediate closure of Pine Gap?

Is it in the public interest to move heaven and earth to engineer a curated and macabre middle ground on an open-cut UN declared genocide, in the name of “balance”?

The new ABC hosts private weapons industry investor and former-general Mick Ryan flogging off his drones in one hand while gesticulating towards the need for more endless drone wars with the other. It gives regular airtime to daggy-dad militarist Dr Malcolm Davis spinning his love for movies like Red Dawn into real life fantasies that involve unrealistic military scenarios that have terrible human consequences.

And it provides a runway to Epstein friend and former Israeli PM Ehud Barak to put a spin on his country’s genocide as the Epstein files loom with his name all over them.

Encroaching authoritarianism, sovereign transfer, foreign interference; these are all things good journalists should be working towards unpacking. But not in Australia, where a convergence between the media, business and political classes has morphed our press into subjective stenographers rather than objective truth tellers.

Joining the national decline
It’s devastating to see the national broadcaster, stacked with its corporate media heavies, joining in the national decline, rather than tirelessly working to uncover it and prevent it.

At a time of crisis and uncertainty, with clear power differentials impacting the sovereign independent trajectory of the country, the absence of quality ABC analysis, with conscious critical thinking applied, has hyperaccelerated the demise of the reasonable in the country — giving up sacred ground in the Australian discourse and ceding it to the foreign influenced dark forces that conjure a new image of what this country should look like.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983 states within it that it is the responsibility of the ABC to provide innovative and comprehensive broadcasting services of a high standard within Australia.

Within the ABC Code of Practice, accuracy, impartiality, and fair and honest dealing are listed as key principles. But in 2026, with the country in the state that it is, Australians feel that they are missing an independent national broadcaster to balance the droning hum of misinformation and political dishonesty.

Bringing back the old theme song and changing the blue tint and the classic ABC font won’t cut it. Latika Bourke isn’t George Negus. David Speers’ Sky News prestige doesn’t cut through to the high brow hard politics junkies in Australians who mourn for the lost tones of Barrie Cassidy and Kerry O’Brien and gravitate like husks in the places their voices used to be.

This is why the ABC is failing. It’s been run into the ground by the very people who longed for its demise, the same people who pipe a new paradigm on reluctant ABC consumers and loyal ABC staff that wonder what is going on, and stick around out of habit hoping the revisionists will go away one day.

By accepting orthodoxies from Washington, Tel Aviv, and people linked to the arms trade, we now have the ABC promoting war in Europe, entertaining tensions with China, and accepting the morbid orthodoxies that see military, economic and diplomatic support for Israel in its horrific genocidal sojourns throughout West Asia.

Journalists sacked, staff cautioned
Journalists that highlight that fact are sacked, staff that seek to expand those details are cautioned, exhausted into leaving, or guided into paddocks until they retire and their role can be handed to another wolf in sheep’s clothing from the corporate kennel.

In the process of remodelling the national broadcaster, those responsible have flogged the essence of the ABC. They now flog partial stories Australians need to hear in full, and flog the narratives of the elite and the dangerous at the expense of the truth. Whether it is a gotcha interview on 7.30, the omission of vital public interest information, or a corporate decree that silences staff inside the building itself, the ABC has fallen dramatically and may never get up again.

The abdication of the ABC away from the people and into the arms of the narratives of power is a tragedy for Australia during such consequential times.

For decades the ABC acted as a guardrail, ignored the haters, and fearlessly drove the standard of journalism in Australia. Now, it contributes to the mess, sitting in the pig-sty with the commercial media, so much so it’s hard to tell which is which, such is the stench.

Republished by Pacific Media Watch from The Shot under Creative Commons.

COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

Apparently antisemitism simply fell from the sky. Fully formed. Immaculately conceived.

Entirely unrelated to anything happening in Gaza.

That is the finding Australia has pre-purchased for $131.1 million, confirmed at Senate Estimates in February, with $91 million alone for staffing, property, lawyers and security.

• READ MORE: Other Bondi Royal Commission reports

Every single dollar buys theatre.

Measure the obscenity. The banking royal commission, which gutted an entire industry’s misconduct, cost $75 million. Aboriginal Deaths in Custody cost $50.2 million.

This inquiry outspends both combined. Meanwhile there is no royal commission into the domestic violence killing a woman most weeks, none into Islamophobia, now soaring.

Australia found $131 million for the one inquiry designed never to ask an obvious question.

Blame where it belongs. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wrote the answer into the question.

His Letters Patent instruct the Commission to find the drivers of antisemitism in extremism and radicalisation, the war deleted from the terms of reference before Commissioner Virginia Bell was even sworn in.

The Albanese government wrote the verdict into the terms of reference, then spent more than the banking royal commission to have a judge read it back. Here is what the money is buying.

Commissioning an alibi
Albanese promised the inquiry would deliver, in his own words, the right outcome. A Prime Minister announcing the right outcome in advance is commissioning an alibi.

This is the government that will gesture at recognising Palestine while refusing to utter the word genocide, that ships F35 components into the supply chain of the slaughter, that sanctions two Israeli ministers and calls it courage.

It needed a grand national explanation for collapsing social cohesion that never once mentions its own complicity.

For $131 million, it has bought one.

The process delivered. In the first three days of hearings, 23 of 36 witnesses characterised criticism of Israel, opposition to Zionism or Palestine advocacy as antisemitic.

Jewish organisations opposed to Zionism were refused leave to appear. Palestinian voices were excluded for lacking a direct and substantial interest.

The accused were barred from the courtroom so the prosecution could run unopposed at public expense.

The grievance parade
And the substance? A grievance parade.

The ABC and SBS hauled in to answer for Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal’s strong perception, her phrase, that their Gaza coverage lacks balance, then interrogated for declining the contested IHRA definition Bell waved through as uncontroversial.

Keffiyehs, flags, watermelon art, chants of Free Palestine, student encampments and fundraisers for maimed children tendered as exhibits of hate. Protest. Tents. Journalism.

Every place an ordinary Australian expressed solidarity with a people being exterminated, recast at public expense as a crime scene. Australians are not being investigated for hating Jews.

They are being investigated for objecting to a genocide.

The complainants were welcomed like royalty. Alex Ryvchin of the ECAJ, who called the anti-Israel movement indistinguishable from neo-Nazism, testified at length while his silk objected to opposing counsel merely uttering the word genocide, a finding the International Court of Justice considered plausible back in January 2024.

Robert Gregory of the self-appointed Australian Jewish Association, which the ECAJ itself calls unrepresentative, told the Commission the government egged on antisemitism, fresh from blaming Bondi on visas for Palestinians fleeing the bombs.

Sky’s the limit
Sky News completes the circuit, wheeling Gregory out to demonise protesters, then feeding its own segments back into the panic as evidence.

The outcomes are as predetermined as the terms.

Come December 14, expect IHRA stamped across the public service and pushed onto civil society, work Segal has begun.

Expect ABC oversight its own ombudsman rejected. Expect protest reframed as policing, and regulators monitoring speech the way AHPRA already does, having admitted under oath it watches nurses and doctors for criticism of Israel after Segal’s pressure.

Expect everything blamed but the war.

And expect antisemitism not to fall, because you cannot cure what you refuse to diagnose. Every recommendation will manufacture the resentment it claims to fight, and Labor will call the wreckage cohesion.

For almost three years the world has watched a genocide live-streamed by a state claiming to act in the name of the Jewish people, while its Australian cheer squad defended, excused or denied every atrocity.

Now they ask why anger grows.

None of this excuses antisemitism. Not one word of it. The Bondi gunmen murdered Jews for being Jews, and the law should fall hard on every bigot who follows them.

Fifteen dead Australians deserved a fearless inquiry. They got a pantomime, their graves deployed as a shield for a foreign state and the government that armed it.

The elephant is blocking the doorway and eating $131 million of paperwork, yet everyone keeps peering around it, declaring there is nothing to see.

This Commission will not defeat antisemitism. It will deliver the most expensive whinge in Australian history, commissioned by a government purchasing its own absolution with public money.

Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and a Palestine peace activist.

The National Union of Journalists (NUJP) of the Philippines calls it “outrageous” for the Vice- President to insult the work of Philippine news organisations

The NUJP criticised Vice-President Sara Duterte over remarks she made on July 30 and released by her office a day later, saying she denigrated Philippine news organisations and promoted social media as an alternative.

Duterte said Philippine news organisations fell short of international standards and accused them of “worshipping money”.

• READ MORE: Congress wants to regulate social media. Here is what’s on the table
• How Congress is looking to regulate deepfakes
• Other Philippines reports

“Unfortunately, kung gagawin talaga natin araw-araw na Diyos ang pera, wala talagang pagbabago na mangyayari sa ating bansa. Sa journalism man, sa mainstream media man o sa iba’t ibang aspeto ng ating bayan,” Duterte said.

(Unfortunately, if we continue worshipping money, there won’t be any real change happening in our country. Whether in journalism, in mainstream media, or in other aspects of our country.)

Duterte also praised social media and its use as an alternative platform for helping people see “the truth”. Disinformation has continued to thrive on various social media platforms.

‘Dictator’s tactics’
In the statement, the NUJP said that by denigrating the media, “Sara is unleashing one of tactics straight out of a dictator’s playbook: controlling information and demonising the independent press and weaponising social media for her propaganda”.

The NUJP recalled that the Philippine media had borne the attacks of Duterte-era leadership, and a number of them garnered awards and recognition from the international community because of their reporting.

It also pointed out that social media was far from being a “platform for truth” as misinformation and disinformation was prioritised by social media algorithms, and lies, as a result, spread faster than truth.

Republished from Rappler with permission.

The BBC recently interviewed an Israeli settler who said that all the Palestinians in four surrounding villages should be exterminated to avenge an Israeli who was killed while terrorising a Palestinian village last month, adding that just a single Jewish life is worth 10 million Palestinian lives.

“I think now after they kill one Israeli people, we need to kill all the people in Tal and Sarra, even Jit and Farata,” lawyer Yehuda Shimon told the BBC.

“It sounds like you’re saying one Jewish life is worth hundreds or thousands of Palestinian lives,” replied the BBC’s Lucy Williamson in the interview.

• LISTEN: A reading by Tim Foley

“Million,” Shimon corrected her. “One Jewish life, it’s 10 million, okay?”

“That just sounds racist,” Williamson responded, to which Shimon replied, “Yes, I know, I know. But this is the truth.”

The interaction has been going viral on social media as people react to the blatant display of the extremist ideology held by the settlers who are working to gradually squeeze Palestinians off their land in the West Bank.

And while it is true that Shimon’s comments are extremely evil and racist, that’s not what I personally found interesting about the interview. What I found interesting was Williamson’s response.

I mean, it is a bit rich watching a BBC reporter act shocked and offended by somebody saying they think Jewish lives are worth more than Palestinian lives. After all, the premise that Jewish lives are worth more than Palestinian lives has coloured every aspect of Western news media reporting on Israel and Palestine for generations.

That’s why the Western press expressed disproportionately more shock and horror at October 7 than the far more egregious Israeli abuses which led up to it and the far more egregious Israeli abuses which followed.

It’s why you saw howling outrage at the Bondi shooting in Sydney last year when the same number of Palestinians getting killed on any given day in Gaza never even makes a blip in the news.

On 26 March 2025, 15 Palestinians were killed by the IDF during a ceasefire in Gaza. On the December 14 that same year, 15 people were killed at Bondi Beach in Sydney in a mass shooting by ISIS members directed at Jewish Australians.

All mainstream Western institutions view Palestinian lives as worthless   Video: Caitlin Johnstone

Two instances of mass murder. Same exact number of victims. But you only heard about one of them.

Why did you only hear about one of them? Because only one of them made the news.

The mainstream press spent weeks urgently reporting on the Bondi shooting, frenetically working to falsely associate an ISIS terrorist attack with pro-Palestine demonstrations by uniformly repeating the line “This is what globalise the intifada looks like” in news outlets throughout the Western world.

Report after report after report was published about how Jews are being attacked, how Jews are feeling unsafe, and what new laws and free speech restrictions must be rolled out in order to stomp out pro-Palestine sentiment to protect the Jews.

Nothing remotely similar happened on the 26 March 2025. As far as the Western press were concerned, 15 Palestinians getting killed in Gaza was just another Wednesday.

This is because all mainstream Western media outlets hold the same racist opinions about Palestinians as those that were voiced by Yehuda Shimon.

So do all mainstream Western political parties. So do all other mainstream Western institutions. So do all supporters of the state of Israel. They all believe Jewish lives are worth more than Palestinian lives, as evidenced by the policies they support and the news stories they pay attention to.

The BBC has a well-documented history of extensive pro-Israel bias, with its own reporters complaining that they’ve been performing PR for the Israeli government and its own editor losing a libel lawsuit against a journalist who exposed his pro-Israel slant.

They spent years running cover for an active genocide with “Hamas-run health ministry says” headlines and passive-language verbal gymnastics to protect Israeli information interests, so you know that when Lucy Williamson objects “That sounds racist!” to an Israeli settler claiming Jewish lives are worth far more than Palestinian lives, she’s not actually upset at his belief system.

She just knows you’re not supposed to say such things out loud.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

Media Insider: Complainant wants apology and blog posts permanently removed; blogger Martyn Bradbury says he’s fighting for ‘free speech’

The good news is that I am not in prison. Yet.

I am deeply disappointed about today’s Court Case that I can’t talk about.

My hope was that this appalling abuse of process would be thrown out.

It wasn’t.

• READ MORE:  Gagged NZ editor’s ‘free speech’ case adjourned as judge warns Daily Blog over ‘contempt’ risk
• Complainant wants apology and blog posts permanently removed; blogger Martyn Bradbury says he’s fighting for ‘free speech’
• Blogger warned freedom of speech ‘not absolute’ and to watch what he posts amid court case
• Martyn Bradbury says he’s ‘gagged’ as court battle over blog posts delayed; welcomes Free Speech Union support
• I am now legally censored from even talking about being censored –- The Daily Blog
• Why I am willing to go to prison tomorrow for Free Speech – The Daily Blog editor
• Sinister ‘Free Speech Union’ attacks investigative journalist for being investigative

I am now legally censored from even talking about being censored.

This is Free Speech in Aotearoa New Zealand 2026.

The court case continues next week — I call on all Mainstream media to cover it

NZME, ZB, The Post and Stuff have covered the story.

RNZ and TVNZ, the public broadcasters, were both missing in action.

Republished from The Daily Blog.

Daily Blog editor and publisher Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury’s gagging case has been adjourned until next week, with the judge warning today that latest posts defending “free speech” might be risking contempt of court.

Bradbury’s TDB article yesterday claiming that he “faced 6 months imprisonment or a $5000 fine to censor 4 blogs” along with republication of his public debate commentary last month defending free speech was removed and replaced with a heading declaring:

This blog where I say I am prepared to go to prison for free speech is now legally censored.

The page also carried a “Redacted” line.

• READ MORE: Complainant wants apology and blog posts permanently removed; blogger Martyn Bradbury says he’s fighting for ‘free speech’
• Blogger warned freedom of speech ‘not absolute’ and to watch what he posts amid court case
• The Post rejects demand to take down reporting on Bradbury blog dispute
• Martyn Bradbury says he’s ‘gagged’ as court battle over blog posts delayed; welcomes Free Speech Union support
• I am now legally censored from even talking about being censored –- The Daily Blog
• Why I am willing to go to prison tomorrow for Free Speech – The Daily Blog editor
• Sinister ‘Free Speech Union’ attacks investigative journalist for being investigative

A “secret” complainant had successfully obtained an interim court order to remove four blog posts by Bradbury that were alleged to have breached New Zealand’s Harmful Digital Communications Act (HDCA).

The news media have been denied details of the allegations about the four posts that had been ordered removed from The Daily Blog, the largest leftwing website in New Zealand.

Bradbury, 52, representing himself without a lawyer, appeared in the Auckland District Court before Judge David Sharp. The complainant, whom news media are not allowed to name due to a court order, appeared via video-link.

Legal advice urged
The judge urged Bradbury to seek legal advice.

Bradbury was quoted by The New Zealand Herald, the country’s largest daily newspaper, as saying outside the court that he would fight to have the posts reinstated and was still prepared to go to jail if necessary, in order to preserve the principle of free speech.

He also said he would not apologise to the complainant, and he told the Herald the case was a “terrible abuse of process”.

Adjourning the case until next Thursday, Judge Sharp warned Bradbury that his “public comments on legal proceedings may risk seeing him found in contempt of court”, reports The Post.

The Free Speech Union (FSU) said in a statement New Zealand’s Harmful Digital Communications Act was “bad law”.

“It was well meant but naive, and we have said so for years. Nothing has happened to soften that judgement,” FSU chair Stephen Franks said.

Franks said the act gave courts powers that could “too easily be used to shut down lawful expression, including speech about powerful people that the public has every right to hear”.

Bradbury has had a long broadcasting, media and politics career — and also as a media educator — that began in 1997 as editor of the University of Auckland student publication Craccum.

Host of The Bradbury Group
“According to Stuff media he became a show host on radio station Channel Z in the late-1990s, and editor of music magazine Rip It Up in the mid-2000s. Bradbury was also a producer and host on the now-defunct TV channel Alt TV.

In the 2010s, Bradbury became involved in politics and worked as a consultant with Hone Harawira’s Mana Party.

He launched The Daily Blog in 2013 and in recent years has also hosted a podcast on iwi Māori radio station Waatea and a weekly television programme The Bradbury Group, widely regarded as the country’s best political analysis panel.

Tonight’s Bradbury Group live discussion — featuring Labour leader Chris Hipkins, Green Party’s Lawrence Xu-nan, Qiulae Wong, Michael Wood and Maria Slade — is expected to raise the free speech issue.

EDITORIAL: By The Daily Blog editor and publisher Martyn Bradbury

Daily Blog editor and publisher Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury yesterday declared he has been served “legal directives . . . under pain of 6 months imprisonment or a $5000 fine to censor 4 blogs”.

He also declared:

“We can’t tell you who is doing this.

“We can’t tell you why it’s being done.

“We can’t tell you how it’s being done.

“And we can’t tell you what has been censored.”

Today he has declared that he is willing to go to prison for Free Speech when he is due to appear in the Auckland District Court. His reasons why?

This is what he said in a speech given at this year’s Keith Locke Memorial Debate on Free Speech last month.

Moderator: Jane Kelsey
For the Affirmative: Martyn Bradbury (leader), Verity Johnson, Thomas Beagle
For the Negative: Simon Wilson (leader), Anjum Rahman, Yasmine Serhan

… you either believe in Free Speech or you don’t.

I do.

I can’t tell you who is doing this.

I can’t tell you what has been censored.

I can’t tell you why.

I can’t tell you what.

I can’t tell you how.

I am making it clear in court tomorrow.

The Bradbury Group is booked to go live 8pm on Tuesday – but IF I am in prison, Matthew Tukaki from Waatea will step in as host.

You either believe in Free Speech or you don’t.

On June 6, I published a Political Bytes post criticising the mis-named “Free Speech Union” (FSU) for opposing the exercise of free speech, in the context of fulfilling his duty of care for student wellbeing, by Otago University vice-chancellor Grant Robertson when raising a personal concern: Opposing free speech in practice.

In my words:

“The self-styled Free Speech Union has complained to Otago University over its vice-chancellor Grant Robertson both expressing his personal views on a NZ First parliamentary bill seeking to define what is a woman and what is a man and for his assessment on the 2026 Budget as it impacted universities.”

• READ MORE: Martyn Bradbury says he faces prison over blog posts; Free Speech Union ‘not across’ it
• The Daily Blog: We have secretly been taken to court and I’m facing 6 months in prison: We can’t tell you who, how, why or what
• The Daily Blog: Why I am willing to go to prison tomorrow for Free Speech — Martyn Bradbury

I concluded the post as follows:

“Attacking Grant Robertson for exercising his duty of care for student wellbeing crassly exposes the cloak of hypocrisy that the Free Speech Union hides beneath.

“It would be the honest thing for the Free Speech Union to rename itself as the ‘Selective Free Speech Union’ or the ‘Free Speech for the Political Right Union’. Just saying!”

Sinister FSU attack on investigative journalist
As sceptical as I was about the credibility of the FSU’s claimed commitment to genuine free speech, I never expected nearly two months later its sinister attack on an investigative journalist for being investigative in her questions to Health Minister Simeon Brown.

The attack was reported (paywalled) by The Post deputy editor Luke Malpass (July 28):  FSU attacks reporter for asking health minister questions.

The context was what I have previously described in my health systems blog Otaihanga Second Opinion (July 2) as a purging of the Medical Council leadership: Health minister purges Medical Council leadership.

At the heart of the issue
At the heart of the issue was the minister’s express ideological opposition to the council’s recognition of the importance of doctors understanding “cultural competence” or “safety” when caring for and treating patients.

But it went further. Brown is proposing a law change requiring the Medical Council and the other health regulatory authorities, such as the Nursing Council, to carry out government policies.

In other words, end the arms-length independent relationship between health practitioner regulatory authorities and government by enabling political interference in their work thereby undermining their prime statutory purpose of ensuring public safety.

Daring to ask questions
Luke Malpass reports that the day before publication of his article (Monday, July 27) The Post’s national affairs editor Andrea Vance emailed a series of questions to the Health Minister about his appointment of Dr Manoja Kalupahana to the Medical Council.

This had been announced on the Beehive website earlier that day (gazetted the previous Friday).

In his words:

“Before an answer was received and within three hours of the query going to the minister, the Free Speech Union issued a press release attacking Vance for even asking the questions.”

Vance’s questions were about the process of the appointment, rather than the suitability or political views, of Dr Manoja Kalupahana.

Again in his words:

“They focused on the appointment process: whether Brown was aware of her previous public profile before appointing her to the Medical Council; whether officials, Health New Zealand or the council were consulted; whether any concerns were raised about public confidence; and whether the minister had discussed the appointment with the Free Speech Union.”

These were all good questions by a quality investigative journalist. Consequently it was surprising that later the same day the FSU, to whom the minister’s office had promptly forwarded her questions, released a media statement stridently attacking her for her action.

Malpass described FSU’s attack as accusing Vance of an attempt to put Dr Kalupahana’s “lawful political views” on trial and warning against ideological tests for public appointments.

However, none of Vance’s questions involved Dr Kalupahana’s political views. They were about the appointment process, including a suspicion about FSU involvement.

For context, in 2023, Dr Kalupahana’s social media activity became the subject of a workplace complaint and media scrutiny.

A Stuff reporter had contacted her seeking comment about her online posts and their relevance to her role as a doctor. However, no story was published.

Nevertheless Malpass reports that the controversy “…became a cause célèbre for the FSU, which argued it showed health professionals could face consequences for expressing lawful opinions outside their clinical roles”.

Also published on July 28 was Andrea Vance’s own paywalled piece on the issue providing further context and background: Doctor at centre of ‘free speech’ row appointed to Medical Council.

Dr Kalupahana was, in fact, one of four new announced ministerial appointments to the council. As it turns out, she is a member of the FSU. Another doctor appointed to the council, Dr Roderick Mulgan, is on the FSU governing board and former president.

The fallout from the controversy over the Health Minister’s appointment process and FSU’s defence of it continued in Stuff (as the owner of The Post) later the same day with an article by senior political reporter Anneke Smith: Health minister accused of using ‘personal troll farm’ to attack reporter.

And there is more
The FSU got it badly wrong. Andrea Vance is not one for being intimidated into silence.

On July 29, she followed up with another paywalled article that revealed political intrigue (arguably scheming) into the escalating controversy: FSU lobbies health minister over regulating doctors.

In her words:

“A former chairperson of the Free Speech Union (FSU) — who lobbied Health Minister Simeon Brown over proposed changes to how doctors are regulated — has been appointed to the Medical Council.

“Roderick Mulgan, who remains a board member of the FSU, was one of four new members appointed to the council by Brown last week. That includes senior Auckland anaesthetist Manoja Kalupahana, whose anonymous social media activity became the focus of a high-profile FSU campaign. The others are Derek Sherwood and Andie Cook.

“The appointments come as Brown moves to give ministers greater powers over how doctors are regulated and the rules they must follow. He has also overhauled the Medical Council, declining to reappoint its chairperson and deputy in June.

“In May 2025, Mulgan and Kalupahana met with Brown in Auckland as part of an FSU delegation to discuss concerns about freedom of speech and conscience rights in healthcare, including cases involving doctors facing disciplinary action.

“A Health Ministry briefing prepared for the meeting identified Mulgan as FSU chairperson at the time. It recorded that the organisation wanted to discuss its correspondence with the Minister, the Government’s consultation on health workforce and patient prioritisation, and cases before the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal.

“The group argues health regulators have moved beyond their role by requiring practitioners to engage with particular views on issues such as Māori health inequities, colonisation and gender.

“The meeting was requested by the FSU and included then chief executive Jonathan Ayling, and liaison adviser Stephanie Martin.”

Spilling the ideological beans

Spilling the beans is an often used idiom for when secret information is released, usually inadvertently.

In a paywalled article published in NZ Doctor (July 28) health journalist Alan Perrott reports a possibly hyped FSU spilling its own ideological beans.

Perrott attributes this “bean-spilling” (my word, not his) to the above-mentioned Dr Mulgan (former FSU president and current board member) as follows:

“Stating that Māori are ‘disadvantaged because of systemic biases in the system’ represents a ‘well-known hard-left view’, says specialist GP and newly appointed Medical Council member Roderick Mulgan.

“Such a view holds ‘that there are nebulous biases in the world and in the health system that somehow or other undermine the welfare of Māori just because they are Māori,’ Dr Mulgan says.

“Dr Mulgan made the comments to The Platform host Sean Plunket on 25 March while discussing three draft consultation documents on cultural safety and competence and hauora Māori released by the Medical Council. 

“Dr Mulgan, also a lawyer and international director of the Free Speech Union, is one of four new appointments confirmed yesterday by Health Minister Simeon Brown, six weeks after Mr Brown changed the authority’s leadership. 

“On the consultation documents, Dr Mulgan says: ‘Whether or not these perspectives [as laid out in the documents] are valid or reasonable, it is highly contested. 

“’So, there are plenty of people who will say yes they are, and there will be plenty of people saying no they’re not, and it is not for regulatory bodies to pick sides in a contested ideological debate and mandate that its members, by reason of being members, must support these perspectives.’ ”

Dr Mulgan is at the very least as ideological as those he criticises are. The fact that he used the hard rightwing The Platform to make his claims is indicative.

Linking colonialisation in different ways to Māori health inequities is not confined to a  “hard-left” (whatever that means), well-known or otherwise.

While this link is certainly not a unanimous view, it is a view shared by many well-beyond the “hard left”, including those of “soft-left”, liberal and compassionate conservative opinions.

Perrott includes a response to Dr Mulgan from another specialist GP, Dr Rawiri McKree Jansen:

“…the statements made by his colleague are ‘troubling and disturbing’ and in denial of systemic biases within healthcare. 

“We need better representation on the Medical Council than the ideological perspective he brings.” 

Where does the FSU stand on a threat to real free speech?
There are many issues raised in the above discussion, particularly the threat to patient safety by the political undermining of the statutory health practitioner regulatory authorities.

However, that is more appropriate for my health system blog Otaihanga Second Opinion.

In this post I focus on the hypocrisy and political tactics of the FSU. Regardless of its name, an organisation that attacks an investigative journalist for investigating a subject that is contrary to the organisation’s political ideology is itself an opponent of free speech.

Instead, it is nothing more than a mask for hard-rightwing trolls. But now an opportunity presents itself for FSU to partly (ever so slightly) redeem itself.

“Bomber” Bradbury is the prolific editor of the leftwing The Daily Blog. On August 2 he reported a particularly vicious legal threat: Secretly threatened with potential six months imprisonment. [Disclosure: The Daily Blog republishes with permission my blog posts]

His blog has been served legal directives under pain of six months imprisonment or a $5000 fine to censor four blog posts. He describes the intimidatory threat this way:

“We can’t tell you who is doing this.

“We can’t tell you why it’s being done.

“We can’t tell you how it’s being done.

“And we can’t tell you what has been censored.”

Bradbury is constrained by legal secrecy but hopes that all these matters can be exposed in an Auckland District Court hearing scheduled for August 4. A ruling allows media to cover this in the courtroom.

Bomber Bradbury is not noted for quietness. In fact, few can surpass him for noise. But now something has; the deafening silence of the Free Speech Union over this nasty threat to free speech makes the editor of The Daily Blog mute by comparison.

Why is this so? Is it simply because the FSU is a hard rightwing troll organisation? Or is it something even more sinister? Just asking.

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.

Television New Zealand outdid itself last week.

For decades it has been a direct funnel for Israeli propaganda into our living rooms and last week TVNZ news editors managed to turn an Israeli pogrom against a Palestinian community into the need for Israel to launch a “major counter-terrorism operation” against Palestinians.

• READ MORE: Israel kills 19 in Gaza as attacks escalate despite latest Trump plan
• Other Palestinian resistance reports
• Other John Minto reports

Here is the complaint we have lodged with TVNZ:

Complaint Re 1News 6pm news bulletin on Saturday, 25 July 2026, under the free to air broadcasting standard #6 related to accuracy.

Context
The context in which this news item was presented to viewers is that Israeli settlers, backed by the Israeli military, have been conducting violent attacks on Palestinian communities across the Occupied West Bank over many years, but most intensively over the past three years.

These attacks have been labelled pogroms where Palestinians have been killed, their houses and cars torched, their property destroyed, their livestock stolen and no redress available from the Israeli state.

This situation has been documented exhaustively by the United Nations, human rights groups in Israel and internationally — including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

There are thousands of videos online recorded these attacks as well as numerous in-depth analyses showing this is a central strategy of the Israeli state to steal Palestinian land and dispossess the Palestinian people.

The New Zealand government has a public list of the most notorious of these settlers who it refuses to let enter New Zealand.

All this would have been known to 1News editors even if 1News has chosen not to inform the wider public in any significant manner in its news bulletins.

1News report on Saturday, 25 July, 6pm
The news report included some indeterminate footage with the 1News presenter saying:

“Israel has launched a major counterterrorism offensive in the Occupied West Bank following a deadly clash between Palestinian residents and Israeli settlers and security forces.

“Four Palestinians and two Israelis including a security guard and a soldier were killed in the incident in a village south of Nablus. Several others from both groups were injured.
Palestinians say settlers targeted their homes. Israel says a group of Israeli hikers were attacked.”

Our complaint
1News framed the report in Israeli propaganda terms by stating “Israel has launched a major counterterrorism offensive”.

1News failed to attribute its description of a “counterterrorism offensive” to whatever Israeli sources it was relying on to frame it in such a way.

A “counterterrorism offensive” is an Israeli government claim. 1News has reported it as a fact, that Israel is responding and not initiating action, and that the nature of that action is “counterterrorism”.

The 1News claim is similar to the non-attribution of a statement made by ThreeNews, for which the BSA upheld a complaint, on 22 April 2025-081, when the reporter stated that “Israel chose to respond to … ceasefire violations”.

In the July 25 instance, viewers are told by 1News that Israel was responding to a terrorist attack, or attacks, of some sort.

However, it was blatantly clear to anyone who had read any online reports that the recent violence started as a co-ordinated settler pogrom against a Palestinian community with the Israeli government endorsed aim of ethnic cleansing.

The 1News framing editorially points the finger at Palestinians as the attackers/aggressors and Israelis as the victims — the inverse of the truth.

1News’ presentation of Israel’s justification for its “counterterrorism offensive” is a response to “an attack on Israeli hikers”.

This Israeli explanation would have been ignored or pointed out as not true, if it had been subjected to basic journalistic scrutiny.

In the context of the incident described above it was so implausible as to be laughable.

Hikers don’t set fire to vehicles, destroy property and terrorise Palestinian families. There was plenty of evidence available for 1News to ignore or dismiss Israel’s explanation.

Alongside the lead-in to the story, the 1News description of a “deadly clash”’ is an assumption of it being Palestinians who were in the wrong.

The 1News report helps give political cover to Israel to continue its ethnic cleansing policies against Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

It encourages viewers to see Palestinians as the problem. Such framing of events gives Israel impunity in its war crimes (ethnic cleansing is a war crime).

It is literally a deadly framing for Palestinians.

This 1News report, like the majority of Western agency reporting on the Middle East, centres Israeli narratives, Israeli explanations and Israeli justifications with barely a passing nod to Palestinians.

The report amounts to a lie.

John Minto is national campaign coordinator of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). Republished from PSNA with permission.

During the ongoing Israeli genocide of Gaza, Palestinian journalists have been courageously reporting under Israel’s bombs, drones and snipers. More than 260 journalists have been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023 alone.

Reporting on Israeli bombardments and firing continues to be extremely dangerous for Palestinian journalists, who are completely cut off from the world.

It is at this point which media giant Al Jazeera reportedly abruptly ended the contracts of 24 journalists in Gaza it had employed, breaking earlier alleged promises of job security with the channel.

• READ MORE: The essential role of journalists in Gaza and the West Bank — UN
• 60%–75% of surviving journalists in Gaza have lost their homes or been forcibly displaced
• Other Gaza journalists reports

Al Jazeera in Gaza is dismissing some of the most important and prominent journalists who carried the responsibility of delivering the truth throughout the months of war, in a humiliating way that does not reflect the sacrifices they made.

These journalists stood on the front…

— Tamer Nahed (@Tamer_Alnoaizy) July 26, 2026

According to reports from Gaza, the journalists’ “salaries were stopped and they were referred to a private company identified as “Media,” where they would be paid on a piecework basis without permanent contracts, insurance or clear employment protections.”

This is after many of the terminated journalists had for years risked their lives reporting and filming Israel’s crimes against Palestinians in Gaza.

In fact, without their footage and reports, Al Jazeera could not have produced and financially gained from its own breaking reports.

One of these journalists is cameraman Mahmoud Shalha, who was the cameraman for well-known and beloved journalist Anas al-Sharif. Together, they courageously covered relentless Israeli bombardments in northern Gaza.

Murdered journalists
Sharif and five other journalists were murdered when Israel attacked the Al Jazeera journalists’ tent at Shifa hospital on August 10, 2025.

Shalha was called away from the site by an uncle just a few hours before the Israeli airstrike, he said, noting he had worked alongside Anas and the other journalists daily throughout the genocide.

أهذا حقًّا ما كان ينتظرني؟

في أي لحظة، كان من الممكن أن أكون شهيدًا وأنا أنقل المشهد والصورة، وأحاول إيصال الحقيقة إلى العالم. لكنني اليوم أجد نفسي، بكل أسف، مفصولًا من قناة الجزيرة دون سابق إنذار.

أنا الناجي الوحيد من استهداف خيمة قناة الجزيرة عند بوابة مستشفى الشفاء، والذي…

— Mahmoud.b.shalha محمود شلحة (@Mahmoudshalh) July 25, 2026

He wrote about his abrupt termination by Al Jazeera:

“At any moment, I could have been a martyr while transporting the scene and the images, trying to convey the truth to the world. But today, I find myself, with all due regret, severed from Al Jazeera channel without any prior warning.

“Since the beginning of the war, I worked as a cameraman with Al Jazeera’s martyred correspondent Anas al-Sharif, then with the two martyrs Anas al-Sharif and Muhammad Qurayqea after our colleague Fadi al-Wahidi was injured, and I continued my work with the channel after their martyrdom, despite the risks and harsh conditions.”

His post goes on to highlight that this work was his mission which he believed in, and was the sole source of income to support his family.

’15 second call’
“But a phone call that didn’t exceed fifteen seconds was enough to end it all. Al Jazeera’s management informed me of the termination of my employment, without explaining any reason, or giving prior notice, or paying my dues, and even without a single word of thanks.”

Al Jazeera exploited Palestinian journalists from Gaza, using their heroism and courage under Israeli fire—reporting during the worst of Israeli atrocities against Palestinian civilians and journalists and still reporting now—and now has abruptly ended the contracts of 24…

— Eva Karene Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) July 27, 2026

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate reported at the end of June that 60 percent–75 percent of the surviving journalists in Gaza have lost their homes or have been forcibly displaced, reporting that, “journalists in Gaza have been subjected to an unprecedented campaign targeting their lives, workplaces, and homes, in the context of a war that has sought not only to silence their voices but also to uproot the very environment in which journalism is practised.”

Journalists in Gaza upload their work from tents or wherever of the sparse locations there is an internet connection. These are impossible conditions for most people, but Palestinian journalists deal with it in order to keep conveying their reality to an outside world that has seemingly lost interest after a so-called ceasefire in October 2025.

NO CEASEFIRE, ISRAEL CONTINUES TO GENOCIDE GAZA

The Cradle reported on July 27 that since the 11 October 2025 “ceasefire,” 1203 Palestinians have been killed, 3900 wounded. These murders are due to Israeli attacks which continue near-daily in Gaza, far from most news headlines now.

The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate has called on Al Jazeera to reconsider the termination of the journalists and contracted staff working with Al Jazeera Mubasher (Live) in the Gaza Strip.

It said it had received a complaint from affected journalists and employees who objected to the termination of their contracts and their transfer to a private media company. “Media organisations, regardless of their stature, have a professional and ethical responsibility to honour their commitments to employees and to handle contractual or administrative changes in a fair and transparent manner.”

Prominent journalists dismissed
As other Palestinians in Gaza pointed out, “Al Jazeera in Gaza is dismissing some of the most important and prominent journalists who carried the responsibility of delivering the truth throughout the months of war, in a humiliating way that does not reflect the sacrifices they made.

“…These journalists lived through every detail of the war, faced threats, had their photos placed on wanted lists, and were separated from their families and children out of fear of being targeted yet they chose to remain in the field and continue telling the truth, no matter the cost. These journalists do not deserve for years of courage and sacrifice to be reduced to this. They deserved recognition, loyalty, and respect not humiliation and an ending that ignores everything they gave.”

On July 26, The non-profit Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor published a statement calling for urgent international efforts, “to lift the media blackout in the Gaza Strip, protect journalists, enable the immediate entry of independent international media, and ensure access to protective gear and press equipment, as journalists continue to be targeted for over 1000 days during the ongoing genocide in the enclave.”

It notes that since October 2023 alone, “more than 262 journalists have been killed in the Gaza Strip, with hundreds more injured or arrested, according to local and international press and human rights institutions, marking the highest toll recorded against media workers in any contemporary conflict.”

I’ve shared any of reports of what Palestinian journalists put their lives on the line for — and indeed paid for with the lives — to share their reality of Palestinians being hunted and massacred in Israel’s still ongoing genocide of Gaza.

If Al Jazeera does not reverse its unjust decision, then it is grossly unjust on these courageous journalists whose footage and reporting Al Jazeera wouldn’t have had without them.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian activist and freelance journalist who has lived in Gaza for three years. This article had no response from Al Jazeera.

EDITORIAL: By The Daily Blog editor and publisher Martyn Bradbury

Comrades.

The Daily Blog is New Zealand’s largest leftwing blog; we have been around for 13 years.

We’ve had many fights over the years.

This one is perhaps the most alarming.

• WATCH: The Bradbury Group
• Breaking: Free Speech Issue

TDB has been served legal directives from the Star Chamber under pain of 6 months imprisonment or a $5000 fine to censor 4 blogs.

We can’t tell you who is doing this.

We can’t tell you why it’s being done.

We can’t tell you how it’s being done.

And we can’t tell you what has been censored.

I am facing Court action Tuesday this week and I am calling on all mainstream media to apply to cover this. A ruling allows media to cover this in the Court room.

When you find out who is doing this. Why they are doing this. How they are doing this, and what has been censored.

I am making it clear in court on Tuesday the following.

1 – I beg the Court to immediately throw this terrible abuse of process out.

2 – I’m not going to apologise.

3 – I will not pay a fine.

4 – I want to immediately repost my 4 censored blogs.

5 – I want everyone involved in this to be made public, because Free Speech issues like this are definitely in the public interest

6 – I’m prepared to go to prison for Free Speech.

Let’s see what happens on Tuesday.

Wish me luck Comrades.

In solidarity

The Revolution continues

PS – Look, If I do actually get arrested in Court on Tuesday, can someone set up a give-a-little account? I’m going to need money to pay my bills because I’ll be in prison!

PPS – The Bradbury Group is booked to go live 8pm on Tuesday – but IF I am in prison, Matthew Tukaki from Waatea will step in as host.

PPPS – If I go to prison, please can you do me a Shawshank Redemption and send so many books in that they shame the State for putting me in prison in the first place. 

Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

It’s a commonly repeated statistic that the US military is the world’s largest institutional polluter, but what exactly does that mean?

The quest to find a real answer to that question led journalist and documentary filmmaker Abby Martin and her husband and co-director Mike Prysner on a five-year journey from defence contractor conferences and international climate gatherings to the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) military training exercises and the fight against the construction of a military base in Okinawa that would fill in its iconic Oura Bay.

The result is Earth’s Greatest Enemy, released last year — but just screened in Australia and New Zealand over the past month — independently through Martin and Prysner’s own Empire Files, with editing by Taylor Gill and an original score by Anahedron.

• READ MORE: The Pentagon is the biggest polluter on the planet — ABC Late Night Live

The film uses personal narrative, research, investigative reporting, interviews, and live footage to detail all the ways in which the Pentagon poisons the planet, including greenhouse gas emissions, the ecocide of war, and the toxins left behind long after the fighting has stopped.

“When you combine all of this, it is completely undeniable that this force that is upheld by extreme violence is the greatest threat to all living things on Earth,” Martin told Common Dreams.

World’s largest polluter?
Toward the beginning of the film, Martin sets out to explain how the Pentagon can count as the world’s largest institutional polluter, and why the numbers behind that fact actually undersell its impact.

It turns out, Martin told Common Dreams, that this statement is only based on the amount of oil the US military purchases on paper, which comes to 270,000 barrels per day. This puts its emissions at 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, more than 150 countries.

This itself is a staggering amount of carbon pollution.

As Martin explains in the film: “It would take the average American driver over 40 years to burn as much fuel as a single flight of a Boeing Pegasus. The US flies more than 600 of these tankers.”

But it’s also only the tip of the melting iceberg. Through an interview with scientist Stuart Parkinson, Martin reveals how that 55 million keeps ballooning when considering life cycle emissions from military equipment and from the equipment purchased by NATO allies, projected to reach 295 million metric tons by 2028, or more than half of all countries. And that figure excludes the use of military equipment in war, or the emissions from reconstructing cities leveled by US-made bombs.

In one particularly candid interview, a major-general tells Martin that it’s great to develop alternative energy sources, “but let’s not walk away from what fuels today’s national security, which is oil. You have to have it.”

And until something is developed that can completely replace oil, “I think you need to keep the alternatives in check,” he says.

Statements like these give the lie to the idea that the US can have a “green military empire,” Martin said.

They also show how difficult it is to separate the US military’s carbon footprint from that of the fossil fuel industry itself.

“Everything has really been wrapped up into securing the fossil fuel, building the infrastructure for fossil fuel, and maintaining that infrastructure empire in order to maintain a fossil fuel economy,” she told Common Dreams.

“So you have to look at the military as actually the institution that’s actually keeping the fossil fuel infrastructure in place through brutality and violence.”

‘Human detritus’

The film also makes clear that carbon pollution isn’t the only kind of pollution the military generates.

“Once you get into the research, you realise every stone unturned is an entire other documentary because it’s not just emissions, it’s the totality of pollution that the military is emitting on a daily basis, the dumping of toxic waste, the legacy contamination, that alone is still killing people every day,” Martin said.

The film spends much of its run time digging into the landfill of military waste, from melted down pucks of plastic dumped off Navy boats and unused munitions exploded in the desert to decades of water contamination at Camp Lejeune, the 26 million marine mammals the US Navy is permitted to harm or kill over five years of training, and the more than 250,000 bullets left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan for every person killed.

Martin said that almost every fact or anecdote she unearthed surprised her.

“No matter what you think you know, it’s worse. It’s actually worse because of how big it is and how every face is a story, every victim is a story,” she said.

One of the most devastating stories comes at the film’s beginning, as viewers spend time with Lavon Johnson, an Iraq War veteran who once starred in a US Army commercial and is now living on Veterans Row, a stretch of tents bearing American flags lined up outside the Veterans Affairs hospital in Brentwood, Los Angeles.

“My life is so fucked!” he declares as he lifts his hands from the piano he furiously plays despite the nerve damage caused by exposure to hydraulic fluid while in the Army.

In the next scene, viewers see the camp being demolished by police, juxtaposed with images of war, pollution, and environmental destruction, such as soldiers breaking down doors or dumping trash off of boats, oil pump jacks working, and beachside homes collapsing into a rising tide.

Martin said she was inspired to open the film with Johnson because of a letter that late Iraq War veteran Tomas Young wrote to former President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney before he died, referring to himself and other victims of the invasion as “human detritus your war has left behind”.

“That always stuck with me, that line, ‘the human detritus,’” Martin told Common Dreams. “And that is exactly what they do to veterans. That is exactly what they do to veterans… they’re churned up and spit out. They’re the cannon fodder of the system. And for what?”

Prysner is an Iraq veteran who spoke out against the war, and Martin is very clear that veterans are not the target of the pairs’ critique.

“This isn’t about service members,” she said. “This isn’t about hating the military. This is about accountability and justice for them. We’re fighting for service members and every living person on Earth, because we are all victims of this.”

The demolition of Johnson’s camp cut through with clips of war and weather disaster illustrates this point, and could serve as a sort of thesis for the film, showing that the US military ultimately turns everything it touches into detritus, including, if it’s not stopped, the planet itself.

“Everything on Earth is in Lavon’s tent,” Martin said.

A movie and a movement
This sense of connection is ultimately why Martin decided to keep Earth’s Greatest Enemy as a two-hour feature documentary rather than pivoting to a documentary series, despite the fact that, the more she dug, the more she realised “it could be 10 documentaries.”

She also ran into roadblocks when seeking Hollywood distribution. While environmentalist distributors would praise the film and compare it to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, they also said frankly, “You’re never going to be able to get anyone to buy this stuff.”

But, Martin said, “I was so committed to making a movie because movies were what radicalised me,” citing inspiration from films like The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, War Made Easy, and Michael Moore’s filmography.

Ultimately, her stubbornness paid off.

“It shows that everything from ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to Gaza to the climate, that everything is connected,” she said. “Veterans, soldiers, the Indigenous people on the receiving end of this.

“If you care about cold water and good air, you can’t walk away from this not being impacted. And that was the goal. The goal is to lock people in and explain the totality and to bring you down to the depths of hell.”

She added: “We have to understand those depths, and you can’t get that with a 20-minute segment. You just can’t. You have to go through the pain of all the victims in this community and come out the other side empowered with the truth and the resolve that we have to change this.”

Change is a large part of Martin’s motivation for making the film, by educating people about the scope of the military’s destructive force and connecting them into a broader coalition.

Martin speaks in the film about coming to political consciousness and beginning her career as a journalist during the Iraq War, meeting Prysner through their shared opposition to war and empire, and developing “profound climate anxiety” following the birth of the pair’s first child.

She lamented that the climate and anti-imperialist movements have been largely siloed over the past two decades, though that is beginning to change.

Through local screenings, she said she wanted to “try to build the environmental movement with the anti-war movement together because… even though the consciousness is expanding, it’s not happening fast enough. And we are simply out of the luxury of time.”

The sense of urgency has only increased with US President Donald Trump’s second term. While the film does not cover this period, it points to many developments that have shaped the past 12 months, including Trump’s claim that he attacked Venezuela for oil, his imperialist push to control Greenland, and his deployment of ICE to terrorise US cities.

‘Big plan for climate crisis’
Toward the end of the movie, Martin includes a segment on the militarisation of US policing and warns that “this is our system’s big plan for the climate crisis.” She also films a panel on “Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic” in which the generals speaking tell US companies they have an “open invitation” to experiment in Alaska.

“We know what they want the Arctic for, and it’s to pillage every last drop,” Martin said. “So if environmental organisations are not thinking this together, we have to do it for them. We have to do it for them quickly.”

So far, she has seen encouraging signs, with several Sierra Club chapters stepping up to host screenings and enthusiasm from the mainstream environmental groups, parks departments, and other city officials she has invited to attend.

But education is not her only goal.

“After we educate everyone, I hope to decommission the military empire,” Martin said.

For Martin, that doesn’t mean not having a military for self-defence, but rather decommissioning the 800 or so bases the US military maintains around the world and transforming the infrastructure into something that could help local communities in a climate-friendly way.

It also means accountability for harm caused and redirecting military spending toward basic needs like housing and healthcare, and certainly not giving the Pentagon another $600 billion as Trump desires.

While that may seem like an impossible task given the current political climate, Martin maintains a sense of revolutionary optimism, encouraged by the global mobilisation against the genocide in Gaza and the way that people are increasingly seeing the links between the multiple crises and struggles around the globe.

“There’s so many of us,” Martin told Common Dreams. “We care about the planet. We have a vested stake in life. And that’s our vision.”

“It’s like they have a vision of death and destruction for profit,” she continued. “Our vision is life, and we have to fight for it with every fibre of our being. And let this movie assist you however you can do that.”

• Earth’s Greatest Enemy, directed by Abby Martin and Mike Prysner, The Empire Files, 120min.

Olivia Rosane is the opinion editor and a staff writer for Common Dreams. This article is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

• For more information about Abby Martin’s documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy go to earthsgreatestenemy.com or email theempirefiles@gmail.com

• If your activist group wants to organise a community screening of this documentary in Aotearoa New Zealand, contact World Beyond War’s Liz Remmerswaal: lizrem@gmail.com

As +972 Magazine’s audience engagement manager, social media is a huge part of my job. I use it daily — not only to promote the magazine’s articles, but also to gauge audience reactions, opinions, and ideas regarding our work.

We simply cannot escape using social media: Most of our readers are there, and it is where millions of people around the world get their news and analysis.

But doing this work also puts me in the position of seeing how social media reacts to our content. I don’t mean the people there; I mean the hidden hand that is the platforms’ algorithms and policies.

• READ MORE: +972 Magazine independent journalism from Israel-Palestine

In other words, I see how some posts remain hidden from much of our audience, while others spread far and wide.

Among Palestinians, and those who write and report on Palestine, it has been common knowledge for years that social media platforms are not neutral, and have in fact actively fought against Palestine-related content — even to the point of limiting posts that merely contain the word Palestine in Arabic.

Palestinians and Arabs alike have responded to this by trying to trick the system: misspelling the word Palestine, or hiding the word shaheed (martyr) by inserting periods and commas.

For the most part, this suppression has remained anecdotal. No one knew exactly how these systems work or what the algorithms prioritise. People could describe the censorship they were experiencing, but evidence of a formal policy was difficult to come by.

Thanks to an extensive new Palestinian-led investigation into Meta, however, that is no longer the case.

Five years of deliberate erasure
7amleh (pronounced “Hamleh”), the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, gathered more than 3500 documented cases of Meta restricting Palestinian content over the past five years, on platforms including Facebook and Instagram. They gave this phenomenon a name, “platformicide,” describing the deliberate erasure of Palestinian existence and narratives in the digital sphere.

On the latest episode of The +972 Podcast, I spoke to 7amleh’s executive director, Nadim Nashif, about what exactly they discovered — and how we can fight back.

Meta is censoring Palestinian content, and now we have proof

The consequences, especially in Gaza, have been life or death. Social media is one of a few avenues for Gazans to document attacks, issue warnings, and communicate information that can determine whether others survive.

Yet Meta has repeatedly restricted their accounts, blocked them from live-streaming, and removed footage under policies related to violence or dangerous organisations, even when the material was clearly journalistic.

Although facing an uphill battle, 7amleh’s work shows that these policies can and should be challenged. To do so, Nashif argues, civil society must develop methods of holding technology companies accountable — methods grounded not in anecdote, but in evidence.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Nadim Nashif, and subscribe to The +972 Podcast wherever you listen.

Republished from +972 magazine.

The Chinese Ambassador to New Zealand was typically restrained, dignified but crystal clear when he responded to Foreign Minister Winston Peter’s racist outburst in Parliament this week.

Wang Xiaolong said on X: “We have absolutely no interest in being dragged into the domestic politics of other countries. Suffice it to say, sometimes, a statement says more about the person that makes it than anything or anybody else.” Boom.

On Wednesday, Green Party MP Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan heckled the Foreign Minister about his vaccination status during a debate in Parliament. The notoriously thin-skinned Peters shouted: “I know you just came here five minutes ago. Go back where you come from, you loud mouth!”

• READ MORE: ‘There’s a game going on here’: Luxon asks for votes in response to Peters’ immigrant comments
• Winston Peters ‘inviting a sacking’ with attack on Chinese-born MP, says Helen Clark

We have absolutely no interest in being dragged into the domestic politics of other countries. Suffice it to say, sometimes, a statement says more about the person that makes it than anything or anybody else.

— Wang Xiaolong (@AmbChina2NZ) July 29, 2026

For the record Dr Xu-Nan, born in Tianjin, China, arrived in New Zealand as a child in the 1990s. He is the Green Party’s first Chinese MP and says he “hopes to create bridges across various tauiwi [ethnically diverse] communities and bring together the collective wisdom of these communities to find solutions to the bigger challenges facing Aotearoa [New Zealand].” Exemplary.

In contrast, in the space of 30 seconds, the undiplomatic Foreign Minister racially insulted a fellow MP, derided the Chinese government, cast slurs on immigrants and rehearsed talking points better suited to a MAGA rally in Eastern Kentucky than the New Zealand Parliament.

In response to criticism, including from Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, the Foreign Minister doubled down, flaming the Chinese system of government.

“We live in a democracy that includes free speech and rights — those two values that certain other countries not only limit, but do so with force. If that offends the pearl clutchers and the communist shills labelling it as ‘dangerous’ — welcome to New Zealand,” the country’s top diplomat said.

The Chinese Ambassador’s comments have just proven the point I made in the House yesterday.

No amount of pearl clutching and faux outrage is going to change it.

We live in a democracy that includes free speech and rights – those two values that other certain countries not…

— Winston Peters (@winstonpeters) July 30, 2026

Revealing US poll
It is worth pointing out that, according to polling, as reported by the conservative US outlet Newsweek, the overwhelming majority of people living in China (83 percent) say they live in a democracy whereas only 43 percent of people in the United States say the US is a democracy.

Why a Foreign Minister would do this is baffling. News outlets across Asia, including The Straits Times and South China Morning Post, carried news of the slurs against China dished out by the New Zealand minister. It made news in France and as far away as Kenya.

Peters likes using spicy language but his insult to the ambassador and the Chinese system of government is gratuitous and will not be welcome in Beijing where New Zealand’s share price has been dropping sharply since the Luxon government ramped up both anti-China rhetoric and moved rapidly to more deeply integrate with the US military. Ludicrously, the PM simultaneously says he wants to double trade with China!

Bianca Ranson of Anti War Aotearoa, which advocates for a more respectful engagement with China, said Peter’s comments were deliberately insulting to China and the Chinese people.

“He’s not fit to be foreign minister. At a time when tensions are heightened around immigrants and racism, we have Winston Peters reaching for the far-right playbook, emboldening racists and giving them an example of how to treat others. New Zealand’s support for Israel has already damaged our standing in the world and this just underlines that something has gone seriously wrong.”

The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), which New Zealand ratified in 1972, says that signatory states and their officials commit “to engage in no act or practice of racial discrimination against persons, groups of persons or institutions and to ensure that all public authorities and public institutions, national and local, shall act in conformity with this obligation.”

Dog-whistling to his base
Peters was clearly dog-whistling to his primary base — those older white New Zealanders who lean into rather than away from anti-Māori, anti-immigrant, and anti-Chinese invective. With elections coming up in November, the Foreign Minister would rather damage relations with both China (our greatest trading partner) and the hundreds of thousands of New Zealand citizens of Chinese ethnicity in order to pull in a few extra votes.

His New Zealand First Party regularly race-baits, with one MP telling non-white MPs to “show some gratitude” and talking about a “butter chicken tsunami” at the time of the recent visit to New Zealand of India’s PM Narendra Modi.

“We have a PM who is so weak that he fails to show any kind of leadership in protecting our most important trading partnership,” Bianca Ranson says.

“He allows the minister of foreign affairs to insult other nations and peoples. It’s actually quite weird to have a foreign minister trotting out this old white boy racist stuff like this. If Luxon doesn’t act, that too will speak volumes.”

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 also contributes to Asia Pacific Report and he hosts solidarity.co.nz

“When you’re speaking in Parliament you may think you have a hat on as NZ1st leader but….offshore you are going to be seen as foreign minister. The statements you make will either give credit to your country or they won’t. We know what the case is here.” https://t.co/Tyw5t3Zjdy

— Helen Clark (@HelenClarkNZ) July 31, 2026

The people won. The environment won. The Lyttelton port remains in public hands. For now.

Please join the protest tomorrow. There is more on the table. And the battle for the port is far from over.

The DP World deal being dropped can be attributed to rousing support and brilliant speakers who moved hearts and minds at a public meeting in Lyttelton two weeks ago. Thanks to these people and organisations the proposed deal with DP World (yes, that predator company with a shocking track record) has been turned down.

• READ MORE: Christchurch City Holdings rejects DP World-backed proposal to take over Lyttelton Port
• Capitalism. Colonialism. Why the DP World money trail leads to destruction — Saige England
• A tale of power being taken from the people and handed to predator companies
• Other Lyttelton Port reports

The people united and they were not defeated!

One of the public meeting speakers, environmental campaigner Sara Campbell, says: “While this is a win in the fight for public control of public assets … the fight is far from over.”

A protest outside CCHL offices tomorrow will go ahead as planned. At those offices, the CCHL will be deciding on LPC’s $800 million proposal to expand the port, which includes further land reclamation.

“We are demanding that LPC-CCHL does not proceed without full public scrutiny, consultation and partnership with mana whenua,” says Campbell.

The official ‘back down’
This is the official press release from the Christchurch City Holdings Limited (CCHL) backing down from the proposed DP World deal:

“Christchurch City Holdings Limited (CCHL) have declined to proceed with a proposal to lease operations at the port.

“The unsolicited proposal from Tōnui Consortium, representing DP World and three Runanga: Ngāti Wheke, Ngāi Tūāhuriri, and Te Taumutu, was received by CCHL in June.

“The consortium proposed acquiring a majority interest in a long-term lease of the operating entity of LPC.

“CCHL Chair, Bryan Pearson, acknowledged the effort by the Tōnui Consortium in considering the future of Lyttelton Port and preparing the proposal. ‘Lyttelton Port is a strategic asset for the city and region, and there are diverse groups within our community with interests in its future,’ says Bryan Pearson.

“’Our assessment of the proposal, as presented, is it does not meet the threshold for ongoing consideration and is not sufficiently compelling to warrant further detailed investigation by CCHL, or additional consultation with Council given its Letter of Expectation.’

“CCHL is mindful of the LPC workforce and the breadth of community interest in the port’s operation.Christchurch City Council’s 2026/2027 Letter of Expectation to CCHL is explicit in its direction, which does not support leasing the port and encourages retention of a directly employed workforce.

“CCHL reached its conclusion specifically considering LPC’s improving operational and financial performance, as well as input provided by LPC on the resilience of its infrastructure and the leadership required to maintain a culture of safety and efficiency.

“Bryan Pearson says ‘CCHL maintains full confidence in the LPC board and management and their operation of the port, and continues to work closely with LPC in considering the port’s long-term development and associated investment.'”

My view on this is that this is one victory and full credit goes those who spoke against this deal, who rallied and organised and spoke against the devious bid: NZDE — New Zealanders for a Democratic Economy; the Maritime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ) Lyttelton branch secretary Gerard Loader; the Rail and Maritime Transport Union (RMTU) Lyttelton Port branch secretary Mark Wilson; environmental campaigner Sara Campbell; human rights and Keep Our Assets campaigner John Minto; Marney Ainsworth and the Māori people who spoke up — and all the people who signed the petition against this potential travesty.

In these times when there seems to be few gains — when so much is taken out of public hands — it is great to see people move change.

The change came because the people spoke out. They used their hearts and minds.
The people won but it is a temporary win.

This was a close call. Too close. Predator companies still loom large and secret meetings are still being held behind closed doors.

It’s not the end. The battle continues. We need to keep our port clean and safe for the people and the environment.

KOA welcomes ‘victory’
Keep Our Assets convenor Murray Horton said KOA was pleased that Christchurch City Holdings Ltd (CCHL) had rejected the unsolicited proposal from the Tōnui Consortium (comprising DP World and three runanga) to acquire a long term lease of Lyttelton Port Company’s (LPC) operations.

“This is a victory for common sense. Lyttelton Port is a vital strategic asset for Christchurch, Canterbury, the South Island and, indeed, the whole country. So, it is vital that it remains in public ownership and control, subject to democratic accountability through the elected Christchurch City Council,” he said.

”KOA congratulates the port unions and grassroots community groups who have successfully campaigned to keep our port public.

“It would have been particularly egregious if DP World, 100 percent state-owned by the United Arab Emirates, had got its sticky fingers on Lyttelton’s revenue stream. The UAE is a highly dodgy state indeed.

“We savour the victory but know that we can’t relax our vigilance. Lyttelton is an attractive target for transnational corporations and their local allies. This is not the first time a move has been made on our port. Twenty years ago a similar unsuccessful bid was made, involving a Hong Kong corporation. There well be another ‘unsolicited offer’ in the future.”

And KOA was fully aware that, behind closed doors, CCHL was conducting a review of Enable, the broadband company, and another of CCHL’s portfolio of publicly-owned companies. There remained a threat to sell that, said Horton.

“Time and again the people of Christchurch have made it very clear that they want the city’s publicly-owned assets to remain exactly that. This decision by CCHL recognises that reality.”

And the last word goes to MUNZ’s Gerard Loader: “We thank the people of Lyttelton and greater Christchurch getting in behind this campaign as it was all for our next generations and what we leave for them.

“From the bottom of our hearts.

“Now we have crossed the DP World hurdle our focus now turns to keeping ‘Enable’ in the hands of future generations, so the fight continues.’

“See you all at the march tomorrow.”

In solidarity.

Saige England is a humanitarian journalist and activist for community and the environment. She was present at the Lyttelton public meeting last week in support of community action. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

• Tomorrow’s protest rally outside the CCHL offices 8-10am

A leading Palestine solidarity group in New Zealand has challenged Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to explain why his government has not revealed how the country voted at the International Criminal Court over the ouster of ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan after intense Israeli and US lobbying.

Khan has been under attack from Israel and the US because he successfully filed arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza.

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) spokesperson Rinad Tamimi said Israel and the US had “intensified their lobbying and diplomatic bullying” after an ICC Judicial Panel established to examine the evidence on claims of sexual abuse against Khan declared they were “unanimously of the opinion that the factual findings by OIOS (the ICC evidence collecting body) do not establish misconduct or breach of duty under the relevant legal framework”.

• READ MORE: Israel accused of ‘buying Pacific votes’ over plan to open Nauru embassy in Jerusalem
• Former UN oversight chief says ICC prosecutor Karim Khan is ‘victim of massive stitch-up’
• ‘Humiliating as a New Zealander’: Helen Clark slams decision to abstain on UN vote
• How Volker Turk won new UN rights chief term despite US, Israel opposition
• Other Gaza genocide reports

Israel and the US rejected the ICC legal ruling and demanded a vote of all member states of the ICC to remove Khan. That vote was held on Friday and Khan was removed from office.

“The key question for Mr Luxon is ‘Did we capitulate to Israel/US pressure, or did we stand up for the ICC’s legal processes?” Tamimi said in a statement.

“We are not able to make any judgment on the allegations against Mr Khan, but New Zealand should have voted against his expulsion and insisted a proper judicial process be followed.

“Did we?” asked Tamimi.

“In October last year, Foreign Minister Winston Peters issued a formal statement, with Nordic ministers in Stockholm, to ‘reaffirm our unwavering support for the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court’.”

“Mr Peters, did we waver on Friday?”

Khan’s removal lines up neatly with the fight to neutralise Netanyahu’s arrest warrant. Coincidence is a luxury intl law can no longer afford.

This proves that justice DOES threaten Apartheid Israel & Co. So if the ICC is paralysed, lawyers and judges worldwide must do more. https://t.co/wQEoPEoiIF

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) July 25, 2026

“New Zealand has already failed numerous times to uphold international law in the face of Israeli/US pressure. We want an assurance the Coalition [government] didn’t throw in the towel again.”

Controversy over NZ abstention
Meanwhile, there is also controversy over New Zealand’s abstention over the vote extending Volker Türk as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Former Prime Minister Helen Clark has strongly criticised the decision by New Zealand to abstain, saying the vote put the country in “very bad company” and made her “feel humiliated to be a New Zealander.”

New Zealand was one of just 13 countries to abstain in the UN General Assembly vote to reappoint Türk for another four years.

The General Assembly voted 144 in favour, 10 against with 13 abstentions to renew Türk’s four-year term from 12 October 2026 until 11 October 2030.

Astonished to see #NZ Govt vote against reappointment of @volker_turk as UN High Commissioner for #HumanRights. NZ was 1 of 13 abstentions; there were 144 Yes, 10 No. This demands a “please explain” from NZG as to why it didn’t support @antonioguterres recommendation to reappoint https://t.co/tkYvds42uL

— Helen Clark (@HelenClarkNZ) July 25, 2026

The abstention placed New Zealand outside the overwhelming majority of UN member states that supported Secretary-General António Guterres’ recommendation to reappoint the Austrian diplomat, while also stopping short of joining the ten countries that opposed the appointment.

Turk, who has served in the role since 2022, will become the first person to serve two full terms as the UN rights chief since the position was created in 1993.

The role of UN human rights chief is inherently controversial because it requires public criticism of governments of UN members for alleged rights violations.

Turk’s outspoken criticism of policies in Israel, Russia and the US has put him at odds with all three countries.

Turk has repeatedly criticised Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, its deadly assault on Lebanon, and a “shameful” lack of accountability for its rights abuses in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Vanuatu’s government has issued a stinging rebuke to the country’s customary leaders who have reportedly called for revoking the appointment of the first woman to lead the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) Secretariat.

Dr Anna Naupa, a Pacific politics expert and ni-Vanuatu woman, was appointed MSG Secretariat Director-General last month, with Vanuatu Prime Minister Jotham Napat describing her as “one of the nation’s top minds”.

“Vanuatu believes the success of the MSG under Dr Naupa’s leadership will depend on never losing sight of that founding spirit — solidarity, justice, and self-determination for our peoples,” Napat said.

• READ MORE: Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre blasts ‘misogynistic attack’ over MSG leadership
• Malvatumauri demands revocation of Dr Naupa’s MSG DG appointment by July 30

However, the Malvatumauri National Council of Chiefs, which is a constitutionally mandated body, has reportedly “issued an ultimatum” to Napat, “demanding the immediate revocation of Dr Anna Naupa’s appointment,” according to the Vanuatu Daily Post.

The traditional leaders want a man to head the organisation “to align with customary traditions”, according to the front page of Thursday’s edition of the newspaper.

“The council warned that if the government fails to rescind the appointment by 30 July 2026, traditional leaders across the country will initiate customary actions to challenge the decision,” the report said.

In a statement on Thursday, the Vanuatu government called the council’s stance “regressive, divisive, and an embarrassment”.

Based on merit
The government said Naupa’s appointment was based on merit and she was selected after “a rigorous, independent MSG panel process involving all MSG member countries”, adding it fully backed Naupa’s appointment.

“By dragging the entire nation into this stance, the Malvatumauri has done a disservice to Vanuatu.

“At a time when Vanuatu is being recognised internationally for leadership on climate justice, and on regional solidarity, this act seeks to drag our country backward.”

The government also condemned the Vanuatu Daily Post for publishing the council’s views.

“To platform and amplify misogyny without context or challenge is to normalise it. Our media must lift the standard of national discourse, not lower it.”

The Vanuatu Prime Minister’s Office is demanding a public apology from the Malvatumauri National Council of Chiefs to Naupa, to the women of Vanuatu, and to the people of the MSG region.

“Vanuatu’s future depends on unity, on merit, and on respect. We will not allow outdated and discriminatory attitudes to define us on the regional or world stage.”

COMMENTARY: By Saige England

Auckland rejected DP World.

Environmental campaigners and campaigners for protecting assets, and campaigners for workers rights, believe Christchurch needs to do the same.

This updated commentary on an important local, regional, national and international issue, includes environmental campaigner, Sara Campbell’s full speech. It also gives more background to the company toying with the port of Lyttelton.

• READ MORE: A tale of power being taken from the people and handed to predator companies — Saige England
• DP World back story: From ports to proxy armies – tracing the UAE’s regional footprint in Sudan, Yemen and the Horn
• ‘He is one of us’: Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged conversations with Emirati billionaire
• Epstein flipped Israel’s Gaza-tested biometric scanners into Nigeria ports deal for UAE
• Dubai-based DP World replaces chief named in Epstein files
• Sultan took peep at Auckland Ports

Back in 2009 (a year after Jeffrey Epstein was convicted), when he was still mates with the convicted sexual abuser and human trafficker, DP World’s head, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, was nosying around the port of Auckland.

A few years later, the former DP World Group chairman and CEO, Sultan Bin Sulayem, and by then, convicted sex offender Epstein, got down to some buddy boy business with the Zionist state of Israel.

“I am in Berlin with the Israeli defence minister, I have told him about you and Sheik Mohamed,” Bin Sulayem wrote to Epstein in March 2012. “He would like to meet you both.”

And in another email Epstein told Sultan bin Sulayem (DP World chairman and chief executive up until February this year) that he “loved the torture videos”.

Parasitic corporations
Corporations like this are parasites. These sharks circle and you don’t see their fins until it is too late.

Let their comms people and lawyers (on their mega pay scale) argue as much as they like, removing one person does not clean up this corporation’s reputation.

DP World has a poor history in Africa, and Queensland, so while it might make the right initial noises it will not in the long-term pay heed to Te Tiriti O Waitangi.

The Sultan resigned from the company in February 2026. But if this was a clean company it would not have a dirty history.

All these deals to take over public assets are dirty aren’t they? Deals to take over public assets take from the people, they don’t give to the people.

They represent short-term gain (for those at the top) for long-term pain.

Who will benefit in the long run? Not the people. Not the port. Not the whenua. Not the moana.

Spin propaganda
Big corporations pay huge salaries to communications people to spin propaganda. I could have worked in that field myself, could have earned a big salary spinning dirty stories and making them seem good.

I refuse to be bought because I believe that the only way to save our environment is to keep our assets in public ownership — owned by the people for the people.

We need legislation that removes the ability of any company to take control of the port.

We need legislation that removes the ability of any company to own our public assets.

Capitalism. Colonialism. The money trail leads to destruction.

This takeover bid by DP World for the Lyttelton Port was engineered when one of the worst players in the world, Epstein’s torture-loving mate, was at the company’s helm.

And the company promoted that man all the way to the top. It can’t possibly claim it did not have a clue.

Exploiting people
The company, like colonial companies of the past, controls ports, takes resources. This international company will argue that it does not, but it does exploit people.

Not the people at the top — of course not — it exploits the people on the ground. It pushes them out.

If this company comes to town people will be replaced by AI. It will claim that will make the workplace safer, because of automation. Goodbye jobs.

And as it avoids taxes by investing offshore in tax havens the public carries the burden of costs . . . hello rate hikes.

This is a local, regional, national, and international issue.

Here is Lyttelton local and environmental campaigner Sara Campbell speaking about the environmental risks of privatising our port.

“I don’t think I have a lot to add; the fundamentals of private ownership and DP World’s track record have already been covered . . . and the same system that treats workers as disposable — with low wages, unsafe conditions, and no say — is the same system that treats our water, our forests, and our air as disposable,” she says.

Aggressive profit-seeking
“It’s a system that puts aggressive profit-seeking ahead of the wellbeing of communities, workers, and the environment.”

Saige England: A tale of power being taken from the people and handed to predator companies

DP World has an appalling environmental record.

“For example, according to reports by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime, the UAE — specifically the emirate of Dubai, the home base of DP World — acts as a major global transit corridor and hotspot for environmental crimes. It serves as a massive hub for illegal wildlife and flora trafficking.”

She points out that the drive to maximise shareholder profit strips away the ability of the public to lead healthy lives.

“The cost of living keeps climbing while oil companies, power companies, supermarkets, and banks make record profits. Often price-gouging in a crisis.”

Most of the profits are sent offshore to shareholders, she says.

”We spend a lot of time in politics asking how we break up duopolies and oligopolies that take so much from us.

Monopoly asset
“Well, our port is a monopoly asset. There’s no other port in our region this size. It’s not feasible to build another just to keep freight prices down.

“So if DP World takes over operations, their first priority will be shareholder profit.

”That means our freight prices go up. And when freight goes up, the price of almost everything goes up too.”

Campbell says easing the port isn’t just about one contract. It’s a gateway to even more privatisation.

“DP World’s own strategy is to acquire the whole supply chain. They call it ‘an end-to-end service’.”

But the reality is a privately owned foreign company seizing profit and control across our entire logistics network.

“By the time the lease is up, they’ll be so entrenched it’ll be almost impossible to operate without them. And that gives them even more power to lobby for the next contract.

Promises mean little
“Whatever promises DP World puts in the first contract don’t mean much to me,’ says Campbell.

“They’re far better resourced than we are to fight in court and once given a foothold their lobbying power increases over time.”

There will never be an easier time to stop DP World becoming entrenched in our country than now, Campbell says.

Like other speakers at the public meeting in Lyttelton organised by New Zealanders for a Democratic Economy, she expressed anger at the port management LPC and CCHL, saying: “who the hell do they think they are?”

“Can someone please remind them we own the port, not them. How dare they proceed with a seven-hectare land reclamation without our consent. A decision that has significant, negative impacts on the ecological health of our harbour. We couldn’t even hold our elected councillors accountable, because the decision didn’t cross the council table.

“Now, LPC is proposing a $800 million expansion with further land reclamation and I fear we will shut out of that decision too.”

She pointed out that the world is rapidly warming, that the last 11 years have been the hottest on record, and Aotearoa now has the highest proportion of threatened species in the world.

Immense pressure
“And right here in Whakaraupō, the ecology is under immense pressure. This harbour is home to our nationally vulnerable Hector’s dolphins.”

The people need to have the right to demonstrate their priorities.

“Priorities for our community, for our workers, and for the ecosystem — not for a corporate balance sheet.”

Campbell says she believes the Lyttelton deal can be stopped but it does not stop there.

“I believe we can change how the port is run. To a model where we’re actually at the table.

“Where mana whenua and the unions are strategic partners in decision making.”

Saige England is a humanitarian journalist and activist for community and the environment. She was present at the Lyttelton public meeting last week in support of community action. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

Yesterday Marnie Ainsworth (from Keep Our Assets) and others made submissions to the Christchurch City Council.

• More action is being organised by New Zealanders for a Democratic Economy and Keep Our Assets

Israel’s Environment Ministry has removed the protected status of Nile crocodiles to allow them to be used in a moat guarding the country’s largest detainment camp, a move requested by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The story has been widely covered by Israel’s English-language press, alternative media worldwide, and news sites in non-English-speaking countries.

But, in the Anglosphere, there is a virtual news blackout.

• READ MORE: Israel strips crocodiles of protected status to pave way for crocodile-infested moat — Democracy Now!
• Israel plans ‘alligator Alcatraz’ for Palestinian prisoners
• Other Israeli prison reports

Searching within New Zealand and Australian internet domains yields nothing. In the UK, only The Telegraph has reported the story; the BBC and The Guardian do not deem it newsworthy.

In the US, the only report I have seen was by the progressive independent outlet Democracy Now!

It feels nigh on impossible that a similar event in Putin’s Russia, Iran, or any number of dictatorships would go unreported by the BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Age, The New Zealand Herald, or the English-language newswires.

Democracy Now’s headline — ”Israel strips crocodiles of protected status to pave way for crocodile-infested moat“ — is about as clickbaity as hard news gets.

Barbarism as state policy
Veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz: “National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is taking Israel to the next stage in its development: barbarism as a legal and explicit state policy.”

“Sadism is no longer just for deviants; it is the new political correctness,” he continued.

“After years in which barbarity and sadism toward Palestinians were hidden as something shameful and repressed — and mainly as the exception to the rule — Ben-Gvir is moving them to centre stage to great applause from some of the crowd and silence from the rest.”

A relative in Israel messaged me asking whether I had seen the crocodile story — the “true reality in Israel”. She included this translated snippet from the breaking news story.

“Exclusive: The Crocodile Snatch: The Nature and Parks Authority opposed the establishment of Ben-Gvir’s crocodile prison, but Environmental Minister Silman amended the law, paving the way for the transfer of the animals. Among other things, Silman determined that the Nile crocodile is a ‘cultivated wild animal’ that can be raised within a security entity.”

That Ben-Gvir is monstrous is not news. The Australian and New Zealand governments, along with those of the UK and Canada, have banned him from entering their countries for inciting pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank and promoting the expansion of illegal settlements.

But the monstrousness of Israel’s gulags is newsworthy — if underreported.

18,500 Palestinians detained
In March, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese released a report stating: “Since October 2023, more than 18,500 Palestinians have been detained across the occupied Palestinian territory, including at least 1500 children. Thousands remain in detention without charge or trial. Many have been forcibly disappeared. Nearly 100 detainees have died in custody.

“Detainees have been abused in unfathomable ways, including rape with bottles, metal rods and knives, starvation, breaking of bones and teeth, burning, being spat upon, and being attacked and urinated upon by dogs.”

Albanese said: “A system that has long been used to dominate, degrade and break Palestinians has evolved and hardened into state doctrine.

“It is defended by politicians, rationalised by legal institutions, sanitised by media narrative and tolerated by governments that continue to arm and shield Israel.”

The name of Ketziot Prison, where the crocodiles are to be deployed, will be familiar to some from news reports of the abuse of Freedom Flotilla volunteers held there earlier this year.

News of their mistreatment and images of Ben-Gvir abusing them cut through the Western media fog and prompted rare condemnations from Western governments.

Israel’s ambassadors in Wellington and Canberra were called in for ritual reprimands.

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong described the images as “shocking and unacceptable”.

Unacceptable face
Similar statements and actions were made by the US, the UK, France, Italy, and Canada. Ben-Gvir is the unacceptable face of an apartheid regime that all those countries accept and, to differing degrees, abet.

The detained Flotilla activists repeatedly pointed out that their treatment — as appalling as it was — was minor compared with what Palestinian prisoners endure daily.

There was nothing like the same reaction from Western governments when a video of Ben-Gvir taunting imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti emerged in August last year.

Following the visit, Ben-Gvir reportedly said: “We entered Marwan Barghouti’s cell and he was crying in terror. I told the jailers to keep treating them like that,” adding, “When we enter Israel’s prisons, the Palestinian prisoners piss their pants when they see us, they piss themselves out of fear.”

The video was reported by mainstream media outlets but not as prominently as the one showing the abuse of the international activists.

Ben-Gvir is not just a comic-book villain; he is a high-ranking member of the Israeli cabinet. He has a picture of Baruch Goldstein, the convicted terrorist who killed 29 Palestinians, hanging in his Knesset office, and he himself acts as a state terrorist, marshalling the full force of Israel’s prison system and police in his campaign against Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Supporters of Israel argue that the country attracts a disproportionate amount of bad publicity.

‘Great negativity’
Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, told the Australian Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion that the ABC’s coverage of Gaza “created an impression of great negativity about Israel.”

Segal claimed there had been a “disproportionate” number of critical stories.

“They could run positive stories about other things Israel is doing,” she said. “The amazing startup nation, things like that. They very rarely do that. There is no attempt at that part of the agenda.”

The Jerusalem Post reported last week that Israeli defence-tech start-ups working with the Defence Ministry raised nearly US$3 billion in the first six months of 2026 — three times the amount raised in all of 2025.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Lebanon, and its bombing and assassination campaigns in the war on Iran have been a boon for the self-described startup nation.

Gaza is history’s first AI-assisted genocide, and our media are paying it too little attention, not too much.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. He has a Substack: Towards Democracy.

The strongest sign that the International Criminal Court (ICC) still has teeth is that the most powerful administration in the world is trying to pull them out.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared this week that the Trump administration would use “all the tools at our government’s disposal” to “dismantle” the ICC, calling it a body run by “smug globalists” and “hostile Third World governments” whose investigations into US officials would mean “the death of the US as a sovereign and independent nation”.

Analysts and legal observers say the real motivation may have less to do with protecting American soldiers and more to do with protecting the people currently in power.

• READ MORE: Trump administration vows to ‘disable’ International Criminal Court
• NZ called on to back international law in ICC vote – ‘don’t throw in towel’
• Mamdani: Netanyahu is a war criminal, but New York cannot arrest him
• Other ICC reports

The ICC, based in The Hague in the Netherlands, was established in 2002 to prosecute war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. The US has never ratified the Rome Statute, meaning the court does not have automatic jurisdiction over American officials.

Congress reinforced that position the same year by passing the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which prohibits cooperation with ICC investigations and authorises the president to use military force to free any American detained by the court — a provision widely known as the “Hague Invasion Act”.

What has shifted is the scale of potential exposure. Trump launched a war against Iran that legal scholars describe as illegal under international law.

A missile strike on the first day of the war on February 28 killed more than 100 children at a school in Minab in the southeastern Iran, with a preliminary military investigation concluding the US was likely responsible.

Mamdani: Netanyahu is a war criminal, but New York cannot arrest him https://t.co/8rHXkij1xH via @AJEnglish

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) July 22, 2026

Trump has also repeatedly threatened to bomb civilian infrastructure, and in April told Iran that “a whole civilisation will die tonight” unless the Strait of Hormuz reopened, language legal experts say could constitute incitement to genocide under international law.

At home, the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Trump v United States granted presidents “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for official acts, closing the domestic accountability door.

The ICC remains one of the few avenues where accountability could still theoretically apply.

Rubio’s campaign to dismantle it is, in that context, less a defence of American sovereignty than a bid for permanent impunity.

Republished from BP Daily under Creative Commons.

New Zealand journalist and video story teller Cole Martin has given a heartfelt and challenging personal account of what it is like living in Palestine under siege.

At a recent public kōrero hosted by the Whānau Community Centre and Hub in Auckland’s Mt Roskill, he described the challenges and highlights of several extended visits to Palestine bearing witness as a Christian — the most recent trip for six months last year.

Since returning to Aotearoa New Zealand he has been giving kōrero at public meetings and church groups, talking to news media, and exhibiting collections of his photographic evidence.

• READ MORE: Improvements in Pacific media freedom, but a shameful silence on Gaza ‘death trap’ — Pacific Media Watch
• Other Talanoa TV reports

He spoke to hosts Nik Naidu and David Robie of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) for Talanoa TV’s Community Lens programme.

“I’ve been to Palestine a number of times over the last few years, mostly recently I was living there for six months in 2025,” he says.

“I first got became aware of what was happening and got involved when I travelled there in 2019 and I kind of saw the tip of the iceberg of how bad things were.

“And I was really shocked and when I came back to Aotearoa and hearing some of the narratives going on and the ignorance of what was happening on the ground — particularly narratives within my own Christian faith community.

“People were making the assumption that the modern state of Israel was a continuation of the ancient land of the Israelites, and a lot of other harmful narratives that go with that.”

Journalist Cole Martin on Palestine                 Video: Talanoa TV

• Sky TV Channel 83 Face TV : Community Lens Show
• Episode 05 – Palestine with Cole Martin, Rotuman Language Week 2026 Hula Fit, Kite Festival — as seen on TV

Community Lens is a programme “celebrating local events in our communities and conversations with leaders and residents”

It is a TV show that highlights what’s happening in our local communities.

We explore the stories, events, people, and grassroots initiatives that are shaping our neighbourhoods. And we help amplify the voices of community leaders, organisers, and residents.

Through celebrating and better understanding our diverse communities, Community Lens aims to improve social cohesion and help build a better future for all people and our beautiful nation.

Featuring and appreciation to :
Cole Martin
Dr David Robie
Asia Pacific Media Network
Niki Maro & the Hula Fit Team
NZ Rotuman Community Centre
Auckland Rotuman Fellowship Group
Auckland Kite Show
and all other participants and interviewees

PRODUCER
The Whānau Community Trust

PRODUCTION MANAGERS
Ernestina Bonsu-Maro and Rachael Mario

Hosted by Nik Naidu, Ernestina Bonsu-Maro and Rachael Mario

A Talanoa TV Production with Face TV Sky Channel 83

Broadcast on 1 July 2026.