Maritime intelligence firm Kpler counted 13 vessels crossing the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday.

The number is small. But the number is not the story.

The story is that nine of those 13 took the Iranian-approved route. The route American warned ships against using.

• READ MORE: Trump says he will declare Hormuz US territory ‘pretty soon’
• Other war on Iran reports

Now the question is: Trump says the strait is “under our control”. So whose instructions are the ships following?

The answer is in the arithmetic. Sixty-nine percent of them ignored the American warning and entered Iran’s lane.

That is not a statement. Not a claim. That is a vote.

And the vote was cast by people with hundreds of millions of dollars floating on that water.

Plain language
CNN put it in plainer language. They wrote that the figure does not reflect Trump’s repeated insistence this week that the strait is “open” and under American control.

But today’s article will not only be about counting ships. Because Iran has done something on paper as well, and it has barely been discussed.

In May, Iran created an institution — the Persian Gulf Strait Authority.

According to a report by the US Congressional Research Service, Iran declared that no vessel may pass through the Strait of Hormuz without a valid passage permit issued by this authority.

Notice what that is. It is not a threat. It is administration.

A threat can stop a ship, but build a permit system and you never need to stop one. The ship comes to you and asks for permission.

And this is where Iran’s strategy becomes visible. Early in the war, Iran attacked vessels. That was a display of strength, but it carried a cost — every attack drained away the world’s sympathy.

A legal face
Now Iran attacks less and sells permits instead. Same result, but the face of it is legal.

There is one more line in the CRS report, and it is the foundation of this strategy. Iranian leaders claim it was the June memorandum of understanding that granted them the right to administer shipping through this strait.

Which is Iran saying:”We did not seize this power. You signed it over to us on paper.”

And what Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said on June 23 is now coming true. He said “management of the strait will never return to the way it was before the war”.

But, yes, there is a big “but” here. And it would be unjust not to say it.

That same CRS report notes that Iran’s claim runs counter to geographic reality, because the Strait of Hormuz comprises the territorial waters of both Iran and Oman.

Which means Iran is not legally the sole owner of this strait. On paper, Iran’s claim is weak.

Iran’s lane followed
But paper and water are not the same thing. Whatever the law says, on Thursday nine ships followed Iran’s lane.

Now to America’s answer.

On Friday, the US Treasury issued new sanctions. The targets were Iran’s Shahr Bank, along with individuals, exchange houses and companies spread across several countries, accused of helping Iran move hundreds of millions of dollars clandestinely.

The Treasury said itself that this was its eighth set of sanctions in 2026 against Iran’s alleged shadow-banking system.

Eighth. Eight times in one year.

Now the question is: if seven did not work, why would the eighth?

That is the problem with sanctions. The first one lands a blow. The second raises the pressure. But what does the eighth do?

The eighth only announces that the previous seven did not work.

The new normal
And the strangest thing of all is the oil price. CNN reported that despite no sign of the war ending, and despite traffic through the strait staying low, oil prices are falling.

So you can see for yourselves. The market is no longer listening to war news. The market has decided this is the new normal.

And once something becomes “normal”, the urgency to change it fades.

Meanwhile, on Thursday evening, Abu Dhabi’s state oil company ADNOC said two of its vessels were attacked while transiting Hormuz. No injuries.

Who attacked them? ADNOC did not say. No group claimed responsibility.

Since the war began, 15 ADNOC vessels have been attacked in total. One crew member killed, 20 injured.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is an American ally. And the ally’s ships are burning every week.

Now a word on something that touches South Asian countries too.

Floating Iranian oil
Early in this war, America adopted a tactic — temporarily lifting sanctions on roughly 140 million barrels of Iranian oil already floating at sea, so that supply would rise and prices would fall.

America’s Ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, told Fox News at the time that this oil had previously gone mainly to China. Now it could go elsewhere. He named the places — such as India, Bangladesh or elsewhere

He added that sanctions on the banks would remain in place, so Iran would not see a cent of that money.

Think about what that means. Iran’s oil gets sold, South Asian countries get to buy it, and Iran does not get the money.

Developing countries are offered cheap oil as bait while Iran’s own asset is released onto the market, and the proceeds stay locked inside the American banking system.

That is not trade. That is imperial accounting.

Here I will not quote anyone else. I will give you my own opinion.

Paper ‘control’ v ships moving
The shape of this war is becoming clear now. Everything Trump is doing is on paper. Sanctions, Truth Social posts, declarations of “total control”.

Everything Iran is doing is on the water. Which route, whose permission, which ship and when.

In March, Trump called on China, France, Japan, South Korea and Britain to send ships, “let us open the strait together”. Nobody answered.

Five months on, America has drawn a route through that same strait, and the ships are avoiding it and choosing Iran’s.

Control written on paper, or ships moving on water — which of the two is real power?

Let me finish with the number I started with.

Thirteen ships. Nine on Iran’s route.

Trump says the strait is ours. The ships’ captains are saying something else.

And at sea, the captain has the last word.

Republished from Iran International under Creative Commons.

Today, we mark an extraordinary milestone: 42 years of the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre (FWCC).

As we reflect on this journey, we are reminded of the countless lives that have intersected with our work since 1984. Over the past four decades, 168,145 survivors have accessed the services of FWCC and its branches throughout Fiji.

These include survivors of domestic violence, rape and sexual assault, sexual harassment, child abuse, and other forms of violence and abuse.

• READ MORE: Other Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre reports

Yet numbers alone can never tell the full story.

Statistics cannot capture the fear of a woman escaping violence in the middle of the night. They cannot describe the courage it takes to disclose rape for the first time.

They cannot measure the resilience of survivors who rebuild their lives after trauma, nor reflect the determination of women who refused to give up despite experiencing violence, discrimination, and inequality.

Every individual who walked through our doors came seeking safety, support, and dignity. Many arrived carrying experiences that no one should ever have to endure. Many came believing they were alone. Our role was, and continues to be, to ensure they know they are not.

Principles of feminism
Throughout our history, FWCC’s work has remained firmly grounded in the principles of feminism, women’s human rights, human rights, dignity, equality, and justice. These principles have guided our response to violence against women and girls, shaped our advocacy, informed our research and training, and strengthened our commitment to building a society where all women and girls can live free from violence, discrimination, and inequality.

While our primary focus has been addressing violence against women and girls, our services have always recognised the diversity of the communities we serve. Over the past 42 years, we have worked with women in all their diversity, including women from rural and urban communities, women with disabilities, young women, older women, women from different ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds, and women of different sexual orientations and gender identities.

We have also supported men and boys affected by violence and abuse, as well as members of the LGBTQI+ community who have sought counselling, support, information, and protection.

Looking back, the impact of FWCC extends far beyond the people who directly accessed our services. It can be seen in the women who found safety and rebuilt their lives. It can be seen in the police officers, health workers, teachers, community leaders, faith leaders, and advocates who received training and developed a deeper understanding of violence against women and women’s human rights.

It is reflected in laws, policies, and public conversations that have been influenced by decades of advocacy, research, and evidence-based work. It is reflected in generations of women and girls who now know that they have rights, that violence is never their fault, and that support is available.

Centre’s leadership
No reflection on the journey of the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre would be complete without acknowledging the leadership of our coordinator, Shamima Ali. For more than four decades, she has been the most influential voice for women’s human rights in Fiji and the Pacific. Her unwavering commitment to ending violence against women and girls, advancing gender equality, and holding institutions accountable has helped shape not only the direction of FWCC but also the national conversation on women’s rights and human rights.

Under her leadership, FWCC has grown from a small feminist organisation into a nationally and internationally respected centre for crisis intervention, advocacy, research, training, and feminist leadership. Through times of political uncertainty, social resistance, and changing public attitudes, she has remained steadfast in speaking out against injustice and ensuring that survivors’ voices and experiences remain at the centre of our work.

Some people witness history and others help shape it. Shamima Ali has done both. Thank you, Sham.

We also acknowledge with gratitude the staff, counsellors, trainers, volunteers, trustees, supporters, allies, donors, partners, and communities who have stood with us over the last four decades. Your dedication, commitment, and belief in this work have made these achievements possible.

We also extend our sincere appreciation to the Australian government through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), and the New Zealand government through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT), for their longstanding partnership and support. Their contributions have strengthened efforts to advance women’s human rights and respond to violence against women and girls in Fiji and across the Pacific.

As we reflect on 42 years, we are also mindful of those whose experiences remain unseen and unheard. Their stories remind us that violence against women remains one of the most urgent human rights challenges facing our nation.

That is why our work remains as important today as it was in 1984.

We do not mark anniversaries simply to celebrate longevity. We mark them to honour feminist persistence and resilience.

Our dream has always been to work ourselves out of business. Until that day comes, the work continues.

Republished from the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre website, 13 August 2026.

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.

When you hear “Iran” and “Strait of Hormuz” in the same sentence, what comes to mind?

Tensions? Threats? Chaos? …That’s exactly what the MSM news media want you to think with their headlines.

• READ MORE: Trump says US only ‘semi-negotiating’ with Iran; Israel rejects Gaza plan
• Oil prices climb as Iranian demands cloud outlook for Strait of Hormuz
• Other War on Iran reports

But here’s what they don’t tell you:

Iran let the world sail through that waterway for free for more than 40 years — no tolls, no fees. No questions asked.

Meanwhile, other nations have been charging billions from ships using their strategic routes and nobody bats an eye.

So why the sudden outrage against Tehran? And more importantly, what changed?

Cashing in big time
Meanwhile, what about other nations? They’re cashing in big time:

Suez Canal — billions in fees yearly
Panama Canal — charges for ships of up to $1 million per passage
Turkish Straits — toll booths are alive and well

So when Western powers point fingers at Tehran, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has one simple question:

“Why are we the only ones painted as the ‘bad guys’ when we’ve been the most generous?”

He’s not denying tensions. He’s not dodging responsibility.

He’s just asking for a fair debate, not a one-sided blame game.

Iran didn’t just wake up one day and decide to flex its muscles.

Weakening a nation
The United States has:

• Attacked Iran illegally and without justification;
• Imposed crippling sanctions;
• Sent warships to their doorstep;
• Tried to cut off their oil lifeline; and
• Worked to shrink Iran’s influence in the region.

When you spend 47 years trying to weaken a nation, don’t be surprised when they use what they have to push back.

Every sanction, every threat, every military move — the hostile campaign didn’t break Iran.

It reminded the country of 93 million people how powerful their position really is.

The Strait of Hormuz isn’t just water.

It’s 20 percent of the world’s oil supply passing through daily (before that US-Israel attack on Iran on February 28). And when you corner a country that controls Hormuz,
it will start charging politically, not just financially.

Iran isn’t collecting tolls because they want to. They’re collecting because the US gave them leverage by trying to break them.

If you spent years poking a lion, why are you shocked when it roars and starts charging admission?

There are some conversations a nation keeps postponing because they are uncomfortable. Changing Fiji’s flag is one of them.

We came close to having that conversation in 2015 and 2016. A nationwide design competition was launched, thousands of submissions poured in, opinions were fierce, and for a brief moment it felt as though Fiji was genuinely asking itself who it wanted to be. Then the conversation stalled.

After Fiji’s historic victory in rugby sevens at the 2016 Rio Olympics, the government announced that the flag would remain unchanged. Since then, the issue has largely disappeared from public debate.

• READ MORE: Two dates, one wound: What Girmit Day means for Fiji’s future
• Other Fiji flag reports

But postponing a conversation does not resolve it. If anything, it only leaves unfinished business for another generation. I believe that generation is ours.

I say this not because I dislike our current flag. Quite the opposite. Like millions of Fijians, I have watched it rise at schools, sporting events, military ceremonies and international competitions. I have sung the national anthem beneath it. I have seen athletes wrap themselves in it with tears streaming down their faces.

Those memories are real and meaningful. But memories belong to people, not pieces of cloth. Our love for Fiji does not live inside the Union Jack stitched into the corner of our flag. It lives in us.

The truth is simple. Fiji has been an independent nation since 1970 and a republic since 1987. For almost four decades we have chosen our own governments, written our own laws and determined our own future.

Someone else’s empire
Yet our national flag still carries the most recognisable symbol of the British Empire. I often ask myself a question that has never left me: If we truly believe we stand proudly as an independent republic, why does the first thing the world see on our flag belong to someone else’s empire?

For me, this question is deeply personal.

I am the descendant of girmitiya. My ancestors did not come to Fiji as tourists searching for opportunity. They came under the indenture system established by the British colonial administration after the abolition of slavery.

Between 1879 and 1916, more than 60,000 Indians were transported to Fiji under contracts that promised hope, but too often delivered exploitation, broken families, harsh labour and lives shaped by extraordinary sacrifice.

Many never saw India again. They built roads, cleared fields, harvested sugar cane and helped lay the foundations of the country we now call home. Their suffering was not an accident of history. It happened under the authority of the very empire represented by the Union Jack.

Every Girmit Day, May 14, Fiji rightly remembers those sacrifices. We honour resilience. We celebrate survival. We tell our children that our ancestors endured unimaginable hardship so future generations could stand taller than they ever could.

Yet we continue to fly a flag that still carries the emblem of the colonial power responsible for creating that very system. I have struggled to reconcile those two truths. Pride and pain cannot occupy the same symbol forever.

History never felt distant
Growing up in Kashmir, Lautoka, history never felt distant. It lived in conversations with elders, in temple gatherings, in stories shared over cups of tea, in the Fiji Hindi that flowed so naturally through our home.

I did not fully understand the scale of girmit as a child, but I understood sacrifice. I saw grandparents who measured wealth not by money, but by education. I watched parents work tirelessly because they believed their children deserved opportunities they never had.

Looking back now, I realise those values were inherited from people who had every reason to give up, but refused to. When I see the Union Jack on our flag today, I do not think first of constitutional history or Commonwealth ties. I think of those ancestors. I think of what they endured. And I wonder why their descendants should still carry the symbol of the empire that once denied them dignity.

Some people argue that the Union Jack no longer represents colonialism. They say it now represents history, friendship or tradition. I understand that perspective.

History cannot and should not be erased. Britain’s influence on Fiji is undeniable. Our legal institutions, parliamentary traditions and many aspects of our public administration evolved through that relationship. The Commonwealth continues to play an important role in Fiji’s international engagement.

None of that changes because a flag changes. Britain remains part of our history whether or not its flag appears on ours.

That is precisely the point.

Not about rejecting history
Changing the flag is not about rejecting history. It is about placing history where it belongs — in our museums, our classrooms, our books and our collective memory — not at the centre of our national identity. Mature nations are capable of acknowledging every chapter of their past without allowing one chapter to define them forever.

My own life has only strengthened that belief. I was born in Fiji. I migrated to Auckland in December 2011. Since then I have lived and taught in New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and now Japan. Every country has reminded me of where I come from.

Whenever someone asks me where home is, my answer is still Fiji. Not because I have lived there continuously, but because identity is built from childhood. It is the taste of chicken chop suey from Don’s Restaurant after family outings. It is buying futaa barfi for 20 cents. It is listening to Navtarang’s Top 100 Countdown while polishing black Bata school shoes.

It is Children’s Park in Lautoka, Ram Samy Reddy Rd, laughter with cousins, temple bells, tropical rain and neighbours who somehow knew everyone else’s business. None of those memories have anything to do with an empire. They belong entirely to Fiji.

Our flag should too.

I also reject the false choice that often dominates this conversation. Supporting a new flag does not mean disrespecting those who served beneath the current one. Soldiers who defended peacekeeping missions, athletes who won Olympic gold, teachers who stood before classrooms, nurses who cared for patients and ordinary citizens who loved Fiji under this flag deserve nothing, but gratitude.

Their achievements are not diminished because a future generation chooses a different symbol. The courage belonged to them, not to the fabric they carried.

Learn from the mistakes
If we do revisit this conversation, we must also learn from the mistakes of the last attempt. Too many people felt the process became about selecting attractive designs rather than discussing national identity.

A flag cannot simply be beautiful. It must be meaningful. It should emerge from genuine consultation with iTaukei communities, Indo-Fijians, Rotumans, Banabans, descendants of Pacific Islanders, Chinese-Fijians and every community that calls Fiji home.

It must reflect our ocean, our resilience, our cultures, our environment and our future — not because we want to erase difference, but because we want every child to recognise themselves within it.

I often think about the children I teach. One of the greatest privileges of being an educator is watching young people ask questions adults are often afraid to ask. They understand instinctively that symbols matter. School emblems matter. Family names matter.

National flags matter. They tell stories before anyone speaks a word. What story do we want Fiji’s flag to tell the next generation? That we are still defined by colonial inheritance? Or that we honour our history while confidently writing the next chapter ourselves?

Some will accuse people like me of reopening old wounds. I would argue the opposite. Healing begins when we acknowledge why certain symbols continue to hurt. As the descendant of indentured labourers, I cannot look at the Union Jack without remembering the empire that uprooted my ancestors from India and placed them into a system built on coercion and exploitation.

That history shaped my family. It shaped my language. It shaped my existence. I refuse to pretend that symbol is emotionally neutral simply because time has passed.

Fiji bigger than powers
Fiji has always been bigger than the powers that once ruled it. Bigger than coups. Bigger than politics. Bigger than race. Bigger than the labels that have too often divided us. We are the children of chiefs and farmers, of girmitiya and sailors, of island communities stretching across hundreds of islands, of people who chose Fiji and people whose ancestors had no choice.

Somehow, through hardship and hope, we built one nation together.

Our flag should finally reflect that truth.

Changing it will not solve poverty. It will not lower food prices, improve schools overnight or fix every political disagreement. Symbols alone never transform nations. But symbols tell nations who they believe themselves to be. After nearly 40 years as a republic, Fiji has earned the right to carry a flag that speaks first and foremost of itself.

Not because we reject our past.

But because we are finally confident enough to stand on our own.

Ashneel Jaynesh Prasad is a Fiji-born New Zealand citizen working as a teacher in Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, Japan. This article was first published by The Fiji Times and is republished with permission.

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.

With the victory of progressive Dr Abdul El-Sayed over Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic primary this week, prepare yourself to hear enormous quantities of bullsh*t in the United States about the Democratic Party now being “taken over” by “Democratic Socialists”.

Or as the reliably establishment New York Times described what’s at stake, “can an insurgent candidate, with unabashedly left-wing positions, win in a moderate state?”

Oh, p-l-e-a-s-e.

• READ MORE: How Abdul El-Sayed’s ‘extraordinary’ win stunned pro-Israel establishment

Michigan Democrats didn’t choose Dr El-Sayed because he’s “unabashedly left wing” or a Democratic Socialist (in fact, he’s not).

They chose him because he’s a fighter — at a time when America needs fighters willing to stand up to the worst tyrant who has ever occupied the Oval Office.

Corporate Democrats– such as Haley Stevens, along with Rahm Emanuel, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries — aren’t up to the task because they won’t bite the corporate hands that feed them campaign money.

They won’t criticise the billionaire class. They refuse to see how big money has corrupted America.

Billionaires backing neo-fascism
Yet it’s big corporations and the billionaire class that are supporting Trump’s neo-fascism.

They’ve sucked up to Trump for corporate welfare, giant tax cuts, tariff exemptions, antitrust acquiescence, and war contracts. They’ve given Trump hundreds of millions for his inauguration, his ballroom, his 250th birthday, his superPAC.

Jamie Dimon and Wall Street; Elon Musk and his billionaire bros; Brad Carp and his corporate lawyers; Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Ellisons — all have sold their integrity for huge profits.

They’ve created media empires that won’t criticise Trump, financial empires that feed Trump’s crypto, energy empires that feed off Trump’s war, and legal empires that allow Trump to ride roughshod over the rule of law.

Which is why America desperately needs people in Congress who will fight against Trump and his sycophants.

The Democratic Party isn’t being taken over by Democratic Socialists. There’s no civil war between progressives and moderates. We aren’t witnessing an ideological battle between the “left” and the “center”.

We’re seeing America wake up to the tyranny that’s engulfed us, and to a crisis of affordability that’s causing most Americans to struggle financially while fueling the biggest stock market rally in history.

Tyranny is handmaiden of money
When corporate America and Wall Street are unleashed — when the President of the United States has made an implicit deal with the moneyed interests to back him and his authoritarian regime in exchange for tax cuts, deregulation, monopolisation, and pay-to-play corruption — of course prices soar and wages stagnate.

Tyranny is the handmaiden of the moneyed interests.

The Democratic Party’s mega-donor class may be horrified by the rising tide of progressive populism overtaking more than a few primaries this cycle. It spent tens of million of dollars on Stevens — making the Michigan primary one of the most expensive in American history.

Too bad. It’s time that the Democratic Party’s mega-donor class recognises that its real choice is between democracy and tyranny, between an economy that works for all or one that works for a small sliver at the top.

If the mega-donor class chooses the latter, it may be acting in its narrow self-interest, but it will also be acting against the future of this nation.

Robert Reich is a US professor, former Secretary of Labour, co-founder of Inequality Media and writes at robertreich.substack.com

Israel and Iran are unique for starkly different reasons — Israel has less of a right to exist than any other country, while Iran is the only country that has stood up against the assault on international law by the US, Israel and their allies.

That is according to Craig Mokhiber’s comments on The Electronic Intifada Livestream.

Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer with more than three decades of experience. He served as director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights until he resigned in October 2023 over the world body’s failure to act against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

• READ MORE: Why Israel has no right to exist, with Craig Mokhiber
• Other War on Iran reports

“This action of self-defence taken by Iran is the first truly consequential action by a member state,” Mokhiber said of Iran’s response to the US and Israeli aggression it has been facing.

Mokhiber also pointed to resistance by “students on their college campuses, by flotillas, by people’s tribunals, by demonstrations, by the resistance in Palestine, the resistance in Lebanon, by Ansarullah in Yemen”.

‘A formidable state’
“But this is a state,” he said of Iran. “This is a formidable state with real military, diplomatic and political capacities that has stood up and said: ‘No more.’”

By contrast, Mokhiber said, every other country had either been directly complicit or looked away while the US, Israel and their allies committed serial aggression, livestreamed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Contributing editor Jon Elmer reports on several days’ worth of Iranian attacks on US military assets in the region during the previous week, which caused extensive damage.

Republished from The Electronic Intifada with permission.

Why Israel has no right to exist.         Video: The Electronic Intifada

Many of you have seen on social media globally what happened in Gaza this week.

Why has the world remained silent? Why have the mainstream media remained silent?

We, the people on social media, are the ones posting about it across different platforms.

• READ MORE: Gaza holds mass funeral for 112 people killed in Israel’s 2023 Sabra attack
• Other Gaza genocide reports

Thousands of people gathered in Gaza City for the mass funeral of 112 people killed in the Sabra massacre by Israel in 2023 while the world watched in silence.

The dead were members of two families — Al-Hasayneh and Abu Sharia — whose remains were pulled from the rubble of homes destroyed earlier by Israeli airstrikes.

The funeral came during one of the deadliest stretches of Israeli bombardment in recent days, proof that the Gaza genocide‌ has not ended despite ceasefire and deal announcements.

Israel’s plan has not changed since 1948 — the mass expulsion of Palestinians and the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Recovered bodies
Rescue teams recently recovered the bodies of the two families from the site of the Israeli attack in the Sabra neighbourhood on 22 November 2023.

The attack killed 308 members of the two families, including 40 children, 30 women and seven people with disabilities.

The bodies were wrapped in white shrouds. Mourners wept in grief and sorrow while the world looked on without taking action.

So I ask: does US President Donald Trump know about this? Has he been informed?

If he does know, and still doesn’t care, then what is the difference between this and the actions he has accused other countries of committing?

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for some Israeli leaders, yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still traveling to different countries, including the US, and continues to be seen alongside world leaders.

There have been no strong sanctions, and the international pressure has not been as great as many expected.

Heartbreaking world
I cannot describe the kind of world we are living in.

The world is silent. The media are silent. World leaders are silent.

Does this mean the world is unable to do anything to stop leaders accused of committing atrocities?

Where is the international community when it is needed most?

What is the purpose of international law if it is applied only against the weak?

It is truly heartbreaking.

A citizen journalist’s response to the Gaza mass funeral republished from Presstv.ir.

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.

COMMENTARY: By John Hobbs

A friend who lives in Gaza, just posted the following:

“From the sea of Gaza, I do not look out . . . I stand on the edge of the world, shouting in a direction that does not hear, and I know that between me and them there is not just a sea, but a silence that is skilled at betrayal.”

The New Zealand government has remained silent on the issue of genocide by Israel against the peoples of Gaza, despite numerous other countries publicly condemning Israel’s actions as genocide.

From time to time, the government might call for a “two-state solution”, join allies to issue protestations that the harm inflicted on the Palestinian people must stop, demand a ceasefire, or take part in various resolutions at the United Nations calling for an end to atrocities.

But all the while, the Israeli government rapidly expands its illegal settlements and continues to allow settlers to kill Palestinians under the watch of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). Israel is doing everything it can to drive the remaining Palestinian people out of their villages and cities in Occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The gap between the government’s insincere words and its willingness to take real action mirrors the coalition’s approach to Māori. Here at home, it claims to uphold, honour, and respect the Treaty relationship, all while rolling out policies to dismantle the rights owed to Māori as Treaty partners.

Just as it’s important to hold the government to account for domestic policy, it’s equally important to hold it to account for foreign policy. It’s erroneous to think that the two aren’t intimately connected.

Disgraceful foreign policy
The government’s disgraceful foreign policy approach to Gaza and Palestine was shown up recently during a visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territories by former NZ prime minister Helen Clark and the former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson.

The women were there on behalf of “The Elders,” an independent group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela, working for peace, justice, human rights, and a sustainable planet. They stated: “We believe that the policies of the current Israeli government are leading to Palestine disappearing in plain sight.”

STATEMENT | “Palestine must not disappear.”

Following their visit to the Middle East, Mary Robinson, Graça Machel, @HelenClarkNZ and Hina Jilani call on leaders to act now to stop the disappearance of Palestine at the hands of the Israeli government.

Read the full statement… pic.twitter.com/3crFe2bFnk

— The Elders (@TheElders) July 17, 2026

The evidence for this comes from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). In its Humanitarian Situation Report of June 19, 2026, it noted:

“6200 Palestinians, including more than 3000 children, have been forcibly displaced because of settler attacks and related access restrictions across 119 communities. Of these, more than 3,600 people were displaced from 46 communities that have effectively been erased, meaning they were completely emptied of their residents. In 2026 alone, as of mid-June, Israeli citizens, armed and backed by the army, have expelled 2200 Palestinians.”

This is what the person living in Gaza describes as the “silence that is skilled at betrayal”.

Just as it does with Māori, New Zealand uses laudable language to give the appearance of care and decency, but it is a veneer that masks deep insincerity and an unwillingness to take concrete steps to actively protect rights.

There is no doubt the coalition government has “betrayed” the Palestinian people of Gaza, the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. But in fact they’ve done worse. They have potentially made New Zealand complicit in the act of genocide.

Not fulfilled obligations
It is likely that New Zealand has not fulfilled its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948, which requires that “The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.”

Chris Sidoti is an international human rights lawyer, an expert on national human rights institutions, and a member of The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In a recent address in Wellington, he argued that, in addition to not committing genocide, states had an obligation to prevent it.

“States shall act to prevent the commission of genocide and shall punish the commission of genocide. New Zealand has an international legal obligation to act to prevent the commission of genocide.

“That does not require that genocide actually occur. My prime minister, from Australia, is very keen on saying we can’t say whether this is genocide or not. We’re waiting for the International Court of Justice to decide that issue, which may be in the next five or 10 years.

“That’s not the obligation. The obligation is to act to prevent genocide. It is a prior obligation, and it’s an obligation that is designed to ensure that genocide never exists. So it is an obligation in advance.

“In January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued what are called provisional measures, which is like an injunction under your law and ours. And in issuing provisional measures, the Court said that there is a risk that the rights of Palestinians under the Genocide Convention are being or will be infringed. Now, you cannot get a more authoritative case. As of January 2024, all parties to the Genocide Convention have been under an obligation to act to prevent. And the question therefore is, what have you done?”

I recently sought access, through the Official Information Act, to the advice received by the government on New Zealand’s complicity under the Genocide Convention. The government’s decision to withhold the information was reviewed by the Office of the Ombudsman, which in turn supported the government’s right to withhold the advice under legal privilege, as in their view it was not outweighed by the public interest in releasing that information.

How could it not be in the public interest to understand New Zealand’s obligation to act, or otherwise, to prevent genocide?

Labour’s principled stance
Recently, Labour’s foreign policy spokesperson, Vanushi Walters, visited Canberra and met with Noura Saleh, Chargé d’Affaires for the State of Palestine. She is the Palestinian ambassador responsible for the diplomatic relationship between Palestine and Australia and New Zealand.

The last time New Zealand had one-to-one diplomatic engagement with the Canberra-based Palestinian Authority ambassador to New Zealand and Australia was in 2022, when Izzat Salah Abdulhadi visited Wellington at the invitation of former foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta.

That the current government has had no engagement with the ambassador speaks volumes. It’s another example of silence, and silencing.

Sure, New Zealand engages diplomatically at the UN and through its ambassadors in Türkiye and Egypt, but this is all done behind closed doors. The absence of any effort to build a relationship with the Palestinian Authority closer to home is another dimension of betrayal.

What is particularly important as a result of Vanushi Walters’ engagement with Noura Saleh is that she articulated the Labour Party position on Palestine heading into the 2026 election.

Walters stated that Labour was clear about what it would have done if in government now: “We would have recognised Palestine. We would have sanctioned Israel. We would have looked to join South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ. We would have ensured that New Zealand complies with the ICJ opinion on the Occupied Territories.”

This is similar to the Green Party and Te Pāti Māori positions. Both parties have consistently called out Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, and criticised the government for failing to prohibit New Zealand entities from engaging with illegal settlements in the West Bank.

Illegal engagement
Such engagement is illegal under international law, as reflected in a UN Security Council resolution (UNSC 2334), which New Zealand co-sponsored in 2016. The resolution states that nations must cease engagement with settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Successive New Zealand governments have ignored this requirement and continue to do so.

Last year, the Green Party championed a private member’s bill, which sought to apply sanctions against Israel for its illegal occupation and rapid expansion of settlements in the Palestinian territories. The bill, modelled on the Russia Sanctions Act 2022, which imposed sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine, was supported by Labour and Te Pāti Māori, but the coalition government opposed it.

It is time to support those political parties that more accurately reflect the values of compassion, kindness, and human decency, as expressed through tikanga Māori.

John Hobbs has been a career public servant, working for various government departments and ministers. He has a Master of Commerce (Hons) in Economics from the University of Auckland and a Master of Arts (Thesis) with Distinction in Peace and Conflict Studies, from the University of Otago. He is currently undertaking a PhD at Te Ao o Rongomaraeroa, The National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies — Te Tumu School of Māori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies, Otago University.

This article was first published by E-Tangata and is republished with the author’s permission.

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.

Failing To Report for Duty

I’m feeling guilty at not writing down
all the speeches: the speeches by people
whose voices I recorded, the speeches by
people whose notes I photographed, like
the speech by Mark the impassioned unionist,
who pointed out that the bastards on the top
floor are still meeting behind closed doors,
or
the speech by Josephine the impassioned
professor who pointed out that the leaders
who don’t listen to the people are pushing
the people towards a revolution.
or
the speech by Claire who spoke about
the doctor in Gaza who has been imprisoned
and tortured for treating the victims shot in the
chest and between the eyes, little children,
a doctor who kept on trying to save the
children after his own child died. Imprisoned
now. What was his crime?

I’m feeling guilty about not getting it all
down, not writing each speech into a story,
for a news stream that would reach everyone
that would lead to the biggest change ever –
one story that would topple the tyrants and
change the world.

Like one of those stories I thought I would write
when I wanted to become a journalist and then
I became a journalist and I tried to write down
all the speeches and nothing
changed nothing
at all.
— Saige England

Okay, so that’s the poem. And though it sounds a tad hopeless we did have a success last week. So I do have hope. It’s a struggle but we must unite and not give up.

We spoke truth to power and the powerful folded.

Thanks to rallies
Organised by NZDE – New Zealanders for A Democratic Economy, the protesters continue to protest against the attempted privatisation of assets including the port, and the erosion of democracy modelled by the Christchurch City Holdings Limited (CHCHL).

Fortunately some other journalists did manage to write up a report on the protest on Friday outside the CHCHL building.

And thanks to Dr David Robie who published my report about DP World for Asia Pacific Report:

Thanks to Dr Josephine Varghese who lectures in languages and political studies at the University of Canterbury, who rallies time and again for the people who are oppressed.

Thanks to Claire Coveney from Amnesty International, who rallies for the oppressed.

And thanks to Maritime Transport Union’s Lyttelton branch secretary Mark Wilson and Maritime Union Lyttelton branch secretary Gerard Loader who rally for the people.

I learned the lesson a long time ago that people need to join together for change. It’s a great catch cry and it is a cry that has been uttered over and again. As people rise up against wrong:

The people united will never be defeated.

Boosting your spirits
So here are some SONGS to boost your spirits. (I will long remember seeing Palestinian men dancing when Destiny Church members challenged them with racist hatred. The Palestinian men danced against hate. Kicked up their legs and danced).

In similar spirit, here’s a clip when thousands of people of the “Sardines Movement” in Italy rose up against rightwing parties and sang Bella Ciao.

Thousands of people sing Bella Ciao in Turin, Italy.   Video: Luca Dibattista

Breaking unions is a way to break the people. Here’s a clip of the old hit song (banned by the British government at the time) that rings true today (though I would add “woman” into the lyrics, because I’m a staunch union-supporting woman)

A big shout out to all healthcare workers — support the nurses!

Strawbs — part of the union.                 Video: Top 40 1973

Thanks to Sara Campbell and Marney Ainsworth and John Minto and Keep Our Assets (Murray Horton) who rally for a fair deal for the people and the environment, and thanks to Harry Robson and other members of NZDE.

Thanks to all the people who protest against oppression and who stand with the oppressed. Free free Palestine!

Toitū Tiriti!

And thanks to all the journalists, here, there, and everywhere, who risk their livelihoods or their lives to report the truth.

Everyone who does something. Every reporter, every petitioner and protester and letter writer, every poet, every one who rallies for community with community, we do see you!

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.

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.

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

Wednesday: The United States signs a civil nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. A “decades-long, multi-billion-dollar partnership,” Washington calls it.

Thursday: The President Trump logs onto social media and reneges — unilaterally slapping on a new condition that was never part of the deal he just signed.

The condition is that Saudi Arabia must sign on to the Abraham Accords and recognise Israel.

• READ MORE: Is the US-Saudi nuclear deal on, or in limbo?
• Other Lim Tean articles

No phone call to Riyadh first. No consultation. Just a Truth Social post, blindsiding the very partner he’d shaken hands with 24 hours earlier.

And here’s the part Washington seems not to grasp: this precondition is dead on arrival.

MBS has said it again and again, most recently as an official rejection just weeks ago — no normalisation with Israel without an independent Palestinian state, East Jerusalem as its capital, full stop.

The Saudi Foreign Ministry has called it “non-negotiable”. Trump is demanding surrender to a position Riyadh has never once wavered from.

Not statecraft
This is not statecraft. This is not deterrence. This is a superpower treating a sovereign signature as a rough draft — and then attaching a condition it knows, or should know, will never be met.

Ask Kyiv. Ask Tehran. Ask now Riyadh: what is an American signature actually worth?

The Legitimacy Principle is simple — power without consistency is not strength, it is liability.

A state that cannot honour its own agreements within a day, and cannot read its own partner’s red lines, cannot lead a rules-based order. It can only bully one, until the world stops showing up to sign.

Washington is agreement incapable.

Trump’s undercutting of the nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia shortly after it was signed by adding the requirement that the Saudis recognize Israel (they won’t) signals everyone including the Iranians that you can’t trust a deal with Trump. https://t.co/8QoDnZdBNF

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) July 26, 2026

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

In a secret vote on July 24, the member states of the International Criminal Court (ICC) voted to remove Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan.

This was far more than a vote about the alleged serious misconduct of one powerful man. It represents an unprecedented institutional crisis for both the ICC and the entire system of international justice on which the Palestinian and other suffering people of the Global South still place hope.

The Western governments who led the campaign to oust Khan secured 82 votes, comfortably surpassing the required absolute majority of 63. Thirteen states voted against removal, 15 abstained.

• READ MORE: ICC prosecutor Karim Khan removed over ‘political’ sex abuse claims
• The Malaysian lawyer at the heart of the ICC crisis
• NZ called on to back international law in ICC vote – ‘don’t throw in towel’
• Other ICC reports

For the reasons outlined below, the vote in all likelihood is a statement of the West’s coercive power rather than a credible determination of Khan’s guilt.

Khan’s chief lawyer, Tayab Ali, expressed “regret” that the assembly of member states disregarded concerns about due process by more than 180 rights groups and legal experts.

“The decision is unsupported by any lawful or properly reasoned finding that Mr Khan KC committed…

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) July 25, 2026

On the surface, the member states voted on Khan’s fitness for office given the serious allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against him.

Two women charge that Khan used his position of power to sexually pressure them: “Sarah”, a Malaysian lawyer who served as his special assistant at the ICC and alleges he repeatedly subjected her to non-consensual sexual acts, and “Patricia”, who alleges he groped and harassed her as his unpaid intern in 2009, when he was a leading defence lawyer at the court.

On the other hand, the vote was the climax of a high-pressure Israeli and Western effort to unseat Khan after he submitted charges against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant.

Back in March, a panel of judges tasked with reviewing the charges against Khan unanimously cleared the prosecutor of wrongdoing. In reporting to the ICC’s oversight body — the Bureau of the Assembly of States Parties (ASP) — the panel found that allegations against Khan did not establish Karim Khan’s misconduct or breach of duty under relevant framework.

In the normal course of affairs, this would have been a final determination.

Political vote
In an unprecedented manoeuvre, the Executive Bureau of the ASP decided to push ahead with Khan’s ouster by setting aside the legal process and turning it into a political vote by the member states.

As I reported earlier this week, more than 180 Palestinian civil society organisations and rights groups argued the disciplinary process “has been reduced to a political referendum following the national interests of individual States Parties”.

The Palestinian Human Rights Organisations Council (PHROC), the largest coalition of Palestinian civil society organisations, decried the Karim Khan disciplinary process saying it had “failed all parties” and is “corroding” the court’s independence.

In their statement, PHROC said: “Notably, the Bureau, as a political body composed of diplomats, does not have the independence, impartiality or legal expertise to make assessments on the legal characterisation of conduct, nor did it enjoy the same timeframe as the ad hoc Panel to independently examine the two reports and 5000 pages of evidence.”

Let’s be clear: if these states actually cared about justice for victims of sexual violence and the coercion of vulnerable women, men and children to the predation of powerful men, we would have seen the following:

They would have condemned Israel following the 2025 release of the United Nations “Report of the Commission of Inquiry: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023”.

Earlier this month I met Chris Sidoti, a distinguished Australian human rights lawyer. He is a member of the UN Commission which recently released its report, “The essence of childhood has been destroyed”: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023.

Children targeted
“There was the direct targeting of children by snipers and quadcopters, and here the evidence that we collected, subject to all those rigorous tests that we applied, left us in no doubt that children were being explicitly and deliberately targeted,” Sidoti said.

I have written about the sexual depravity committed against Palestinian prisoners at Sde Teiman prison by Israeli forces, including rape-murder. It was brought to the world’s attention by none other than Major-General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the IDF’s Military Advocate General (Israel’s top military lawyer/prosecutor).

To date she is the only person who has been punished in relation to these sordid events; her crime was to secretly release the footage of Palestinian prisoners being sodomised with metal implements.

Netanyahu referred to the rapists as “our heroic soldiers”. As with all these examples, New Zealand, Australia, UK and all the Usual Suspects mumbled and averted their gaze.

Tearing down the pillars of international law is now a full-on Western project. Just this week, the US Secretary of State declared that Washington will lead a “whole-of-government response” to neutralise the court’s jurisdiction.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Marco Rubio said: “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.”

One should never forget that Karim Khan’s predecessor as Chief Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, was sanctioned, had her US assets frozen, and tormented by the Americans for having prepared a case against US forces for murder, torture and other war crimes in Afghanistan.

Western impunity
The case never went ahead; Western impunity was preserved.

Impunity is embedded in US law: the “Hague Invasion Act” is the informal name for the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act (ASPA), a United States federal law passed in 2002. It authorises military action if any US military personnel or government officials face prosecution by the ICC at The Hague, Netherlands.

ICC judges from UK, Peru, France, Benin, Fiji, Slovenia, Georgia and Canada have had their credit cards blocked, their funds seized and their freedom of movement restricted through sanctions imposed by the US and supported by financial institutions, digital platforms and European governments.

Imagine that: judges unable to even pay for a meal in a restaurant because they committed the crime of fulfilling their duties under international law to prosecute war crimes. And the response from the Western governments? Silence.

Professor Yusra Suedi, international law scholar at the University of Manchester, told Pascal Lottaz this week: “I think that the International Criminal Court is a necessary idea. I think the history of geopolitics has indicated that something like this was needed in the world. The ICC’s institutional structure is an important source of hope for many people, especially during these difficult times.”

Lottaz, Associate Professor at Kyoto University, is the host of Neutrality Studies. He makes a very good point about the political value of the international courts: “In an imperfect world, they are a venue and a way to build political pressure.”

All victims of sexual violence should see the predators face justice. A court of law, not a political kangaroo court, is the appropriate venue to determine Karim Khan’s guilt or innocence.

I just wish that the US servicemen who recently killed the 165 schoolgirls and staff in Minab, Iran, would face justice. I wish that the US servicemen who raped and murdered hundreds of Vietnamese girls and women at My Lai faced justice.

I wish the rapists at Abu Ghraib and all the US black sites faced justice. I wish the thousands of Palestinian hostages suffering today through the living hell of the Israeli gulags could one day be free and see their tormentors face a reckoning before the law.

For the moment, thanks to New Zealand, Australia, the UK, US and all the other state sponsors of criminality, we do not live in such a world. May that day come soon.

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

In this interview with Reza Nazar Ahari, the Iranian Ambassador to Wellington, we discussed the war, the state of diplomacy with the West, issues of sovereignty, defence and the internal politics of Iran.

He provided some fascinating analysis into why the Western strategy on Iran has been so disastrously flawed.

• READ MORE: Trump insists Tehran wants deal; Israeli army, settler attacks in West Bank
• Other War on Iran reports

The US has stated many objectives, many reasons for launching the war. For Iran, what is at stake?

The Americans have come to take control of all things in Iran — not just the oil of Iran and the land of Iran, but to take control of Iranians’ own identity, our independence and our way of life.

President Trump said once during the war, “a whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again”. In spite of having suffered enormous damage and paid a heavy price, Iran has to defend itself because otherwise there will be no Iran.

Especially in the West, the way to eliminate your enemy is not only by hard power, by artillery, by guns. There are many other means: by the media, by demonising, by culturally attacking a country, by imposing sanctions. In the last decades we have been under all of these types of attacks. We are one of the best in the world in knowing how to counter all of these attacks.

What we’re seeing from Iran is you are very powerfully standing up for Iranian sovereignty in the face of an astonishing assault.

National identity is the main asset of any nation and it should be studied first. When President Trump said, “Iran must unconditionally surrender”, it suggests he has not read the history of this nation. Surrender is the worst thing for us. It’s the same with calling for zero enrichment, giving up our missiles and our allies – they don’t understand the identity of the Iranian people.

We fought against Saddam Hussein for 8 years to ensure we did not lose a centimetre of our land. When you don’t understand things like that, it can cause many mistakes, as we have seen.

This brings us to the important role that diplomats and analysts should play in helping foreign states understand the unique culture, political dynamics, and so on, of a country.

When you look back a century, when the British Empire wanted to have influence in our region, they sent their scholars, their scientists, their researchers to our countries. They lived with us, and understood the identity of the people. I’m not arguing about bad decisions or good decisions, but the decisions were always made through that very close study.

Today “expert” Americans just sit at their desks looking at the internet without knowing what happens in the heart of Iranians, in the mind of Iranians.

What you are suggesting is that an at-distance unfamiliarity with Iranian culture has led to strategic blunders that have hurt not just Iranians but Americans and the West.

Exactly. Americans started their war against Iran on the basis of what they did in Venezuela, and also what they were told by Israelis — “You target this, you kill these people, and all the people will come out to change their government.” It was very simplistic, very superficial, which helps explain why they failed.

Another mistake by Americans is that they think they can solve their problems with guns and missiles. They think that solves all problems, without the need to rethink, to analyse and to take a more profound approach.

How should the war launched by the US and Israel on February 28 be viewed through the lens of the United Nations Charter and its core principles, for example, the prohibition on the use of force and the respect for the territorial integrity of states?

There are obvious positions stated in the Charter of the United Nations that when a country is attacked or invaded by any country, it is the responsibility of other countries to condemn the attack and to help to stop that.

New Zealand did so in the Russia–Ukraine case. It immediately condemned Russia and imposed sanctions. However, when it came to Iran, there was no condemnation of the United States or the Israeli regime, nor were any sanctions imposed on them.

In the case of Iran, some countries even expressed positions in support of the aggressor rather than the country that had been attacked.

The West loves to talk about the international rules-based order, but as you said, we seem to be moving to the rule of the gun which is a tragedy for all of us. What would your advice be to medium-sized powers like New Zealand? How should they respond to that situation?

It is strange if a country — any country — makes their policies exactly like a country on the other side of the world just because they are allied nations. I believe each country should live according to their identity, not according to their alliances.

Each country has a unique identity, has unique geography, has unique capabilities, unique history, and according to them they should identify their unique foreign policy.

When we looked back in time at New Zealand, we found a sense of independence, making your own identity. In the past, for example, I think New Zealand very correctly believed that no nuclearisation should happen around its waters from both an environmental and from an international political point of view.

What is your rapport with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs?

Actually, it was strange to me, because after the US broke the ceasefire, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs called me in. When the United States attacked Iran, they didn’t call in the American ambassador; they called me in! But it was an opportunity for me to explain the reason for the recent developments in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

Your posting here may finish at the end of this year. Any regrets? Any final impressions?

I actually love New Zealand because it gave a very peaceful experience for me and my family. Definitely when I leave New Zealand, I will miss this country and its very good people. I have one regret in regard to my time in New Zealand. I tried but I failed to encourage a think tank in international and political affairs, a space for very serious but informal dialogue with scholars focusing on the Middle East region, diplomats, foreign policy people.

This is called Track Two Diplomacy — it is very active in many countries, including Iran. I would encourage something like this in the field of international relations and diplomacy with Iran.

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

America’s entire emergency oil reserve now covers 16 days. Sixteen.

The world spent 40 years building a shock absorber for exactly this war — and burned it down in five months.

What comes next isn’t just a higher petrol price. It’s a bill mailed to every fragile economy on earth, at the worst possible moment to receive one.

• READ MORE: US bombs Iran as IRGC and Houthis claim attacks on ships in Hormuz, Red Sea
• Lim Tean: You cannot bomb a strait open – Hormuz, Chabahar and the coming battle for Bab el-Mandeb
• Other Lim Tean articles

The economic consequences of war
In 1919, Keynes wrote his famous polemic — The Economic Consequences of the Peace — a warning that the true cost of the Treaty of Versailles would not be paid at the signing table, but for years afterward, by economies nobody had bothered to examine while the ink dried.

The world was so consumed by the drama of the settlement that it missed the mechanism that would define the following decade.

We are making the same mistake now, in reverse. Everyone is watching the war. Almost no one is watching the buffer.

The numbers that matter
Since February, the world has been drawing down oil reserves it spent four decades accumulating. International Energy Agency (IEA) member states held 4.1 billion barrels in strategic reserves in 2004. By 2026, that figure has fallen to 1.8 billion.

The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve — 414 million barrels at the war’s outset — had fallen to roughly 316–320 million by mid-July, its lowest level since 1983. American crude inventories overall, reserve included, are at their lowest since 1984.

Put that in terms people can actually feel: at America’s total daily consumption of just over 20 million barrels a day, today’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve alone covers barely 16 days. Sixteen days. That is the entire emergency margin behind the world’s largest economy — before commercial stockpiles and ordinary imports, which normally do the heavy lifting, have to carry the load on their own.

This is not incidental. It is the entire reason the war has felt, to most people, survivable.
Governments made a deliberate choice: burn the buffer, keep prices tolerable, buy time for diplomacy.

in March, the IEA itself coordinated the largest emergency release in its history — 400 million barrels. It worked. Prices that could have spiralled were instead managed.

The US bombs Iran for the 12th consecutive night.

Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abbas Araghchi, says Tehran’s defence doctrine is an “eye for an eye”.

Follow our LIVE coverage: https://t.co/kGUykdVSBy pic.twitter.com/rvYFPnzhph

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 23, 2026

But a reserve is not a subsidy. It is a loan against the future, and the bill is now due. The IEA estimates that refilling what has been drawn down will require an extra one million barrels a day of supply, sustained, for three years — a claim on the market running through 2029.

That is not a wartime cost. That is a peacetime cost, arriving after the guns fall silent, exactly as Keynes argued the costs of Versailles would.

The collision nobody is pricing
Here is the trap. The refill has to happen at scale, which means sustained buying pressure on oil for the rest of the decade. At the same time, markets are expecting a return to surplus once the war ends. Cheap oil and an aggressive refill bid cannot coexist for long — every government rushing to rebuild its stockpile at once will bid up the very barrels it is trying to buy cheaply.

The floor under oil prices for the next three years is being set in storage tanks, not on a trading screen.

What I see from the insurance market
I spent three and a half decades in marine war risk and P&I before any of this made headlines, and the insurance data tells the sharpest version of this story. Before the war, hull war-risk cover for a Hormuz transit cost roughly 0.1–0.15 percent of a vessel’s value — background noise.

During the worst weeks, that spiked as high as 4 percent for seven days of cover on some routings — a 4000-fold multiple on a single VLCC transit, turning a $150,000 cost into $5–7 million.

Rates eased when the US-Iran MoU was signed in June. Then three vessels were attacked in Omani waters this month, two UAE supertankers were struck in the strait itself, and rates snapped back to roughly 5 percent as the new market norm.

That volatility is not a shipping story. It is a leading indicator. War risk premiums move days before oil prices catch up, because underwriters are pricing the war in real time, with their own capital, before anyone else has to.

Right now they are telling you the ceasefire architecture is fragile and the reserve cushion behind it is nearly gone.

What this means for the price of everything
This is where the story stops being about oil and starts being about you. A three-year refill bid of a million extra barrels a day, colliding with markets that expected relief once the shooting stopped, does not stay in the energy pages. It moves into diesel, into freight, into fertiliser, into the price of the food on the shelf and the electricity bill in the post.

Every supply chain on earth still runs, in the end, on the price of a barrel of crude.

And it is landing on an economy that had no slack to begin with. Global growth going into this war was already sluggish — most major economies limping along on thin margins, high debt loads, and a decade of accumulated fragility. Layer a multi-year oil-price floor and a cost-of-living shock on top of that, and the honest question is no longer whether we are heading for a mild recession.

It is whether the world has the reserves — financial as much as physical — to stop a downturn like this becoming something considerably deeper. I do not say that to be alarmist. I say it because the people who priced the 4000-fold jump in war-risk insurance premiums were not being alarmist either. They were simply the first to see what was coming.

The peace will not be peace
When the war ends — and it will end — the headlines will move on. They always do. But the refill bid doesn’t end with the war. The insurance market’s memory doesn’t reset with a ceasefire. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve’s physical withdrawal infrastructure, built in the 1970s for a 25-year lifespan and now pushed well past it, doesn’t repair itself.

Keynes’s argument was never really about Versailles. It was about the danger of a world that mistakes the signing of an agreement for the resolution of its underlying economics.

We are about to make exactly that mistake again — celebrating a ceasefire while the real invoice, three years long and running through 2029, quietly gets mailed to every economy that depends on oil.

The war will end. The economic consequences of the war will not.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

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.

Ten nights of bombing. Zero endgame. And now a second chokepoint just slammed shut.

This is what happens when you resume a war without a strategy.

Tuesday brought the clearest proof yet that what we are watching in the Gulf is not a series of isolated flare-ups, but a coordinated strategic encirclement — one I have been calling the “security belt” thesis since Iran’s Quds Force commander first used that exact phrase in June.

• READ MORE: Iran attacks Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan; says 2 tankers in Hormuz ablaze
• Lim Tean: You cannot bomb a strait open – Hormuz, Chabahar and the coming battle for Bab el-Mandeb
• Other War on Iran reports

What happened today?
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps struck US radar and air-defence installations across the Gulf, claiming the destruction of a missile-defence radar and an F-15 sheltered in Jordan, and hitting Amazon’s data infrastructure in Bahrain.

Senior Hamas official Khaled Meshaal has congratulated Khalil al-Hayya on being named as the head of Hamas’s political bureau.

LIVE updates https://t.co/LRy6Ugekjx

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 21, 2026

This is now the 10th consecutive night of US strikes on Iran, launched at the direction of President Donald Trump, with CENTCOM confirming further attacks on Iranian air defence, radar, missile and drone sites.

But the more consequential news is at sea. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy intercepted and stopped two tankers in the Strait of Hormuz it labelled “non-compliant” — language that should alarm every shipowner and P&I underwriter reading this.

Iran is no longer simply harassing traffic through Hormuz. It is asserting a compliance and inspection regime over the strait — a direct challenge to the transit passage rights guaranteed under UNCLOS.

Hormuz is now estimated at roughly 89 percent interdiction under Iranian naval enforcement.

And now, the second door has closed

Yemen’s Houthis announced on Monday a full maritime blockade of Saudi Arabia through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait — the 29km chokepoint linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, carrying roughly 12 percent of global trade and a quarter of the world’s container traffic.

The Houthis frame it as retaliation for the Saudi blockade of Yemen and a strike on Sanaa airport. But the timing is what matters strategically: Saudi Arabia had spent the last four months rerouting the bulk of its crude exports westward through the East-West pipeline to Red Sea terminals — precisely because Hormuz was already closed.

That escape valve is now being shut too.

For the first time in this conflict, Saudi Arabia sits trapped between two blocked corridors. Brent crude has surged roughly 30 percent off its July lows, trading near US$88 a barrel.

The Legitimacy Principle at work
This is the Dual Hegemony thesis made visible: Iran holding the eastern gate at Hormuz, its aligned Houthi forces holding the western gate at Bab al-Mandeb — two actors, one strategic architecture, squeezing the Arabian Peninsula from both flanks regardless of how tightly Tehran and Sanaa formally coordinate operations.

Whether or not the two theatres are directly commanded in tandem, the effect is the same: nearly a quarter of the world’s oil and gas supply now sits hostage to a war that shows no sign of a negotiated off-ramp.

For the war-risk and P&I markets, the signal is unmistakable. This is no longer a single-chokepoint risk to be hedged and rerouted around. It is a dual-corridor structural crisis, and premiums, routing, and insurer exposure will need to be repriced accordingly.

The question now is not whether the world absorbs a Hormuz shock. It is whether it can absorb both at once.

Washington’s self-inflicted trap
But there is a second story here, and it is arguably the more damning one: what this does to Trump’s position.

Trump did not have to resume this war. A Memorandum of Understanding was on the table only weeks ago — his own administration’s negotiated off-ramp. It collapsed because Iran acted to defend the one asset that actually matters to it, control of Hormuz, and Trump’s team, led by Vance’s negotiators, signed language loose enough for Tehran to exploit.

Trump himself complained this week that Iran “always breaks” agreements — an extraordinary line from a president whose own record of walking out on international agreements is well known. He chose escalation. Nobody forced his hand.

BREAKING:

President Trump says Iran always breaks agreements, so the U.S. will strike them hard. pic.twitter.com/waWiTxZW08

— Litest (@Litest) July 13, 2026

Ten consecutive nights of strikes later, American service members have already been killed in Iraq and Jordan, and reporting from inside Washington describes an administration that still cannot articulate what victory looks like.

Trump told Americans in a primetime address that the US is “winning big” without once explaining what winning means or how the war ends. There is no regime-change theory of the case. There is no ceasefire architecture on the table. There is only the tempo of the bombing.

Now Washington’s strategic dilemma has just deepened, whether or not that was the intent. Every American strike that fails to reopen Hormuz makes the war look more like a stalemate Trump cannot afford politically. Every escalation invites further retaliation against the very Gulf infrastructure and shipping lanes the US campaign is supposedly designed to protect.

And a US president who staked his credibility on ending wars quickly now finds himself presiding over a widening one, with rising body counts, a global oil market absorbing repeated shocks, and no visible theory of how any of this concludes.

This is the cost of resuming a war without first answering the most basic question any commander is supposed to answer: what does the end state look like?

Months ago, Trump promised this war would last “four to five weeks at most.” It has now dragged on far longer, and the strategic picture is worse, not better, than when he started.

That is not an accident of geography. That is the price of impulse dressed up as resolve.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

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.

Strip away the communiqués about the embattled Strait of Hormuz and look at the data, because in maritime commerce the data never lies.

Before the war began in late February, roughly 130 vessels transited the Strait of Hormuz every day. It is the aorta of the global energy system — a fifth of the world’s oil, a third of its seaborne LNG.

Then came the American campaign, announced in March with a simple promise: bombing would reopen the strait.

• READ MORE: Ship ablaze in Hormuz Strait after attack – crew rescued
• Two US soldiers dead in Jordan – Trump’s ego has restarted a war he cannot win
• Other War on Iran reports

The verdict of the tankers
Consider what four months of that promise has produced. Over the three days of July 10–12, a total of 73 vessels crossed– fewer than 25 a day.

On July 12, the day CENTCOM completed its fourth strike wave in a single week, transits collapsed to 11. By last Thursday and Friday, shipping data showed just three commodity vessels crossing in 24 hours, with not a single VLCC or LNG carrier transiting for two consecutive days.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence reports that no vessel above 10,000 deadweight tonnes has used the Oman-side “Southern Highway” — the very corridor the Americans coordinate and champion — with its transponder on since July 7.

Read that sequence again. More bombs, fewer ships. Every single escalation wave since March has deepened the shutdown. The strikes are not failing to achieve their objective. They are producing its opposite — measurably, in Kpler and Lloyd’s List data, week after week.

The tanker market has voted with its keels.

Chabahar and the CENTCOM confession
Last week the campaign reached Chabahar, where American forces destroyed the maritime control tower at the Shahid Kalantari port. The stated rationale: the tower was an IRGC surveillance node, and its destruction “protects freedom of navigation”.

Examine that claim on the map before you examine it in law. Chabahar sits on the Gulf of Oman — outside the Strait of Hormuz entirely. It is Iran’s only deep-water port with direct access to the Indian Ocean, the one Iranian harbour whose traffic never touches Hormuz at all.

It is also the port India has spent a decade and hundreds of millions developing as its corridor to Afghanistan and the North-South Transport Corridor. Striking it does nothing to reopen Hormuz. It does, however, tell New Delhi exactly how much its equities weigh in Washington’s calculus.

And a port’s traffic control tower is the classic dual-use facility. Whatever surveillance function it may have served, it is also the instrument that sequences civilian shipping safely in and out of a harbour.

Destroying it does not enhance safe navigation in those waters; it degrades it. Iranian maritime domain awareness, meanwhile, rests on coastal radar, drones, dhows and AIS itself. One tower blinds no one.

But the deepest problem is in CENTCOM’s own language. The strike, we are told, protects freedom of navigation “for all vessels, except for ships attempting to violate the ongoing US naval blockade against Iran.”

CENTCOM: THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TOWER DIRECTLY DEGRADES IRGC’S ABILITY TO COORDINATE ATTACKS ON INNOCENT CIVILIAN CREW MEMBERS. FURTHERMORE, THE STRIKE PROTECTS FREEDOM OF NAVIGATION IN REGIONAL WATERS FOR ALL VESSELS, EXCEPT FOR SHIPS ATTEMPTING TO VIOLATE THE ONGOING U.S. NAVAL…

— First Squawk (@FirstSquawk) July 17, 2026

I have practised in the law of the sea for more than 35 years, and I can tell you that sentence is a confession. Freedom of navigation under UNCLOS is not selective. It cannot be granted to some flags and withdrawn from others at the discretion of one navy.

A blockade is not the protection of free navigation — it is its suspension. What the United States is defending in Hormuz is not the principle of open seas. It is a claim to decide who sails. That is not freedom of navigation. That is contested control, dressed in the vocabulary of the thing it replaced.

This is the Legitimacy Principle in its purest form: a rule becomes real only at the point of enforcement. Washington says the strait is open. The point of enforcement is the strait itself — and at the point of enforcement, three ships crossed in a day.

What the underwriters know
Here is what no CENTCOM statement will ever change, and it is the lesson of a career spent in war risk and P&I.

Straits are not opened by admirals. They are opened by underwriters.

A shipowner does not ask whether the US Navy has declared a corridor safe. He asks what his war risk premium is, whether his P&I cover survives the transit, whether his crew will sail, and whether his charterer will pay.

War risk premiums respond to kinetic activity in the area — full stop. It does not matter whose ordnance is falling or whose infrastructure is burning. Every strike, on either side’s assets, keeps the Strait of Hormuz uninsurable at commercial rates. And an uninsurable strait is a closed strait, whatever the press releases say.

This is why the bombing cannot work even on its own terms. The campaign’s theory is that destroying Iranian capabilities restores confidence. But the underwriter does not price Iranian capabilities. The pricing is based on violence — and the campaign itself is the violence.

The second chokepoint
And now the war has done what escalation always does: it has multiplied the battlefield.

On July 16, Reuters reported — from three sources — that Iran has instructed the Houthis to stand ready to close Bab el-Mandeb if the United States strikes Iranian power infrastructure, as Trump threatened on July 14.

JUST IN:

Iran has reportedly told the Houthis to close the Bab al-Mandab Strait if the United States attacks power plants.

– Reuters pic.twitter.com/j171TCvR6q

— China pulse (@Eng_china5) July 16, 2026

A source close to the Houthis says the missiles and drones are already deployed in the highlands overlooking Hodeidah and the Gulf of Aden, awaiting the order. And the trigger is not in Sana’a: IRGC representatives already inside Yemen will decide when the gate closes.

Understand what this means. Bab el-Mandeb — the “Gate of Tears” — carries 10 to 15 percent of global maritime trade and a significant share of Europe’s energy imports. Since Hormuz shut, the Red Sea route has been precisely the alternative on which Gulf exporters and the entire architecture of workarounds has depended.

Close it, and the Middle East’s two great oil gates are shut simultaneously. Every laden vessel between Asia and Europe rounds the Cape of Good Hope, adding two to three weeks and rewriting freight economics overnight. South African ports are already running heavy.

The Americans set out to open one chokepoint by force. They are on the verge of closing two.

The loaded gun
Let me be rigorous rather than merely alarmed, because the counter-argument deserves its hearing.

There is a serious school of thought — well argued this month by Yemeni analysts — that Tehran will never actually pull this trigger. A proxy’s value lies in the threat, not the execution.

The Houthis’ leverage over Hodeidah, Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea terminals, the risk of dragging Egypt and the Gulf states into open confrontation: three concentric circles of deterrence all counsel restraint. The loaded gun on the table, in this view, is worth more than the fired one.

In a stable environment, I would agree. But this is not a stable environment. It is an escalation spiral in which each side has repeatedly done the thing the analysts said was too costly to do. Iran was not supposed to close Hormuz. The United States was not supposed to blockade a nation of ninety million people. Chabahar was not supposed to be struck. The power grid was not supposed to be threatened.

Deterrence logic assumes rational actors husbanding their leverage — but four months of this war have shown both capitals converting leverage into rubble at every juncture. The gun stays holstered only until someone’s escalation makes the holster untenable. Trump’s power-grid ultimatum may be exactly that.

The reckoning
Machiavelli warned that wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please. Washington began this campaign believing that firepower could substitute for the one thing that actually opens sea lanes: the confidence of the men and women who insure, crew and charter the world’s ships.

Four months on, the strait is emptier than ever, a second chokepoint is mined with intent, and the phrase “freedom of navigation” has been bent into its own negation — freedom for all vessels, except.

The rule is only real at the point of enforcement. At the point of enforcement, the sea is empty.

You cannot bomb a strait open. You can only bomb it shut.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

Two American service members are dead. Another is missing. Four more were medically evacuated after Iranian ballistic missiles and drones struck a US base in Jordan on Friday night.

The American death toll in this war now stands at 16, with more than 430 wounded.

And none of it needed to happen.

• READ MORE: US hits Iran nuclear site; Kuwait desalination plant on fire after attack
• US launches new Iran strikes after two soldiers killed: What’s the latest?
• Other War on Iran reports

The off-ramp Trump threw away
Five weeks ago, Donald Trump had in his hands something no American president has held since 1979: a signed memorandum of understanding with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Islamabad Memorandum, mediated by Pakistan, gave him everything he claimed to want — a cessation of hostilities, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and a 60-day window to negotiate a comprehensive settlement.

“Ships of the World, start your engines,” he crowed on social media. “Let the oil flow!”

President Trump:

The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade. Ships… pic.twitter.com/hhZnbVm5tg

— World Source News (@Worldsource24) June 14, 2026

He could have walked away a peacemaker. He could have claimed — with some justification — that he had achieved his military objectives and brought Iran to the table. History hands few leaders such a clean exit from a war of their own making.

Instead, the criticisms got to him. The commentators who called the MOU a “capitulation”. The hawks who said he had let Tehran off the hook. The whispers that he had blinked.

A more disciplined statesman would have ignored the noise and banked the win. Trump could not. His ego demanded vindication, and so — seizing on alleged violations that both sides traded in equal measure — he declared the ceasefire “over” and unleashed eight consecutive days of bombardment on Iran.

Yesterday, Tehran formally suspended its commitments under the interim deal. The statement read out on Iranian state television called Trump’s signature “worthless and invalid.” Asked about it, Trump said he “couldn’t care less”.

He should care. Because the memorandum was the only off-ramp he had. And he has just burned it.

Napolean, Hitler, and the fatal arithmetic of ego
I have written before about what happens when leaders substitute ego for strategy. Napoleon crossed the Niemen in 1812, not because Russia threatened France, but because his pride could not tolerate a Tsar who defied the Continental System.

Six months later, the Grande Armée — the finest fighting force in Europe — had been reduced to a frozen remnant staggering back across the Berezina.

Hitler launched the Ardennes offensive in December 1944 against the unanimous advice of his generals, gambling his last armoured reserves on a fantasy of splitting the Allies. Within a month, the Wehrmacht had lost the men and machines it needed to defend Germany itself.

The pattern is always the same. The leader mistakes an adversary’s restraint for weakness. He confuses the opening phase of a war with its outcome. And he doubles down at precisely the moment when a wiser man would consolidate and withdraw.

Trump is now running the same script. After eight days of renewed bombardment, Iran has not capitulated. It has hit back — hard. Four separate Iranian missile attacks struck US bases in Jordan in the past week alone, wounding dozens and destroying helicopters, before Friday’s strike killed two soldiers.

Iranian drones and missiles have forced air defences into action across Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Jordan simultaneously. This is not a defeated adversary. This is a state executing precisely the forward-defence doctrine it has spent 40 years building.

The arithmetic of attrition
Remember what happened in the first phase of this war. America’s stockpiles of interceptors and precision munitions were drawn down at a rate that alarmed the Pentagon’s own planners. Defending fixed bases against waves of cheap drones and ballistic missiles is the most expensive proposition in modern warfare: you exchange million-dollar interceptors for hundred-thousand-dollar projectiles, night after night.

Iran manufactures its weapons at home. America must ship its own across two oceans — through waters Iran is actively contesting.

The longer this drags on, the worse that arithmetic becomes. And it will drag on, because Iran’s strategy does not require it to defeat the United States. It requires only that it endure — bleeding American forces, closing the Strait of Hormuz to shipping, and letting war-risk premiums and blockade economics do the rest.

As someone who spent three decades in marine insurance and war risk, I can tell you: the market is already pricing what the White House will not admit. A fifth of the world’s seaborne crude ran through Hormuz. It is not flowing now.

The second checkpoint: Bab al-Mander
And now Tehran has placed its next card on the table. Reuters reports that Iran has instructed the Houthis to close the Bab al-Mandeb Strait — the gateway between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden — if Trump follows through on his threat to strike Iran’s power grid.

This is not posturing. Houthi missiles and drones are already deployed near the strait, awaiting an order that Revolutionary Guard representatives inside Yemen will control. The IRGC has stated its doctrine in a single sentence: the region’s energy exports will be “either for everyone or for no one”.

Understand what this means. With Hormuz shut, the Red Sea became the world’s escape valve — the Saudis have been rerouting crude across their east-west pipeline to Yanbu, and roughly seven percent of global oil output squeezed through the Bab al-Mandeb last month, alongside some 12 percent of all global trade bound for the Suez Canal. Close that strait, and both of the Middle East’s export arteries are severed simultaneously. A quarter of the world’s energy supply — blocked at both ends.

There is no third route. There is no pipeline capacity that can absorb it. Ali Akbar Velayati put it plainly: the Resistance has the capability to lock both waterways.

The global economy is already careening towards crisis on the closure of one chokepoint. The closure of two is not a crisis. It is a convulsion — fuel rationing, freight rates at wartime levels, insurance markets in seizure, inflation surging through every economy on earth. And the trigger for it now sits not in Washington but in Sanaa, in the hands of a militia that answers to Tehran.

Trump’s own escalation has handed Iran a weapon aimed at the wallet of every household in the Western world.

No way out
Here is the difference between this round and the last. In June, Pakistan could mediate because both sides retained something to trade. Today, Iran has declared Trump’s signature “worthless”. What Iranian leader can now sign a document bearing that signature and survive politically? What mediator can broker a deal when one party has publicly established that the other’s word means nothing?

Iran’s Supreme Leader says US breaches show Trump’s signature is ‘worthless’ https://t.co/U1boWrA4ct https://t.co/U1boWrA4ct

— Reuters (@Reuters) July 18, 2026

Trump has manoeuvred himself into the one position a great power must never occupy: a war he cannot win, cannot afford, and can no longer end.

Napoleon at least had Moscow to march towards. Trump is bombing a country of 90 million people with no defined objective beyond his own vindication, while his soldiers die defending bases that exist only to sustain the war that endangers them.

Sixteen Americans are dead. More will follow.

And every one of them is the price of a president who was handed peace and could not bear to keep it.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

Last night I attended a packed meeting in Lyttelton against the takeover attempt by DP World of the Lyttelton Port. This is a local, regional, national, and international issue.

The meeting was organised by New Zealanders for A Democratic Economy. It was chaired by John Minto, a long time campaigner for human rights.

Think evil predator company with a track record in taking over international ports — sackings, enviro hazards and links to Epstein…  and you have DP World in a nutshell.

• READ MORE:  Community, unions meet over Lyttelton Port takeover bid, as decision looms
• Dubai-based DP World replaces chief named in Epstein files
• Top Canadian pension fund halts deals with UAE firm over Epstein ties
• Bribery allegations threaten DP World’s expansion plans in India
• Major multinational port operator paid zero tax in Australia while raking in billions
• Other DP World reports

I have researched the history of DP World and it is accused of being corrupt — and good at keeping the corruption out of sight — but that’s the way with these tax-evading companies.

Who pays for their profits? The people, the taxpayers through rate-hikes and workers, through redundancies. DP World loves replacing people with AI.

Predator companies like this start on the port and move into other areas because ports are a gateway to transport and other industries.

This is a local, regional, national and international issue about power and control.

It is about power being taken out of the hands of people and placed in the hands of predator companies.

Workers made redundant
Last night heard from workers who have been made redundant water side. Men who cared about community.

We heard from Gerard Loader, secretary at the Lyttelton branch of the Maritime Union of New Zealand and who is also the national vice-president of the union.

Loader presented as a union official, and also as a boy who grew up, married, had children and works in Lyttelton. He recalled the days when Lyttelton was a hive of activity, a harbour full of ships, trucks, trains, seafarers and “wharfies”.

He gave relevant background to the development of the takeover.

In 2023, the Lyttelton Port Company (LPC) appointed a new CEO in Graeme Sumner and chair of the board Barry Bragg.

“Not long after that we started hearing rumours of plans to privatise city assets, with DP world being mentioned more than once,” said Loader.

“So with the support of the greater community we lobbied council and demonstrated at the CCHL AGM achieving our goal of keeping our assets in public control, albeit with a lot of contorted right-leaning faces looking on in disappointment.”

Battle won, but war continues
That battle was won, but the war is far from over, he said.

“Since early 2024 we have been challenging or asking all LPC management, board members, councillors etc about the persistent rumours of DP World wanting to lease the port operations as a way to get around the mandate of keeping the port in public ownership, and to a man they have all denied or deflected the issue saying they know nothing or it is out of their hands, or we cannot interupt the process as we have to follow due diligence etcetera.

“Then to hear the announcement in June of Tonui (3 runanga and DP World) putting in an unsolicited bid to CCHL for the leasing out of port operations for a 30-year contract was a slap in the face to not only the employees at LPC but the people and ratepayers of Christchurch who have basically been lied to for the last two years by everyone, as DP World and Tonui have been negotiating behind closed doors on this, and in the words of LPC CEO Graeme Sumner, the worst kept secret in Canterbury.”

Barry Bragg is chair of LPC board, was on the Ngāi Tahu Property board for seven years, and is the deputy chair of Stevensons Limited who specialise in concrete and construction.”

Loader said the fact that Bragg claimed he “knew nothing about it”, when asked directly at the Christchurch City Council meeting on June 3, raises more questions than it answers.

Whether the powers that be had full knowledge, or they truly knew nothing while a deal of this magnitude was being discussed, as a ratepayer was “deeply concerning”, Loader said.

“Whose interests do they have at heart?”

End of people’s control
He added that if this “deal” proceeds it would be the end of the port being controlled by the people in the interests of Christchurch city and all profits going back to the Canterbury region.

Rather, the port would be controlled by a huge foreign monopoly which would only have their profit margin at the heart of the operation.

His words were sobering. There is no illusion that control has already slipped and deals are being made behind the scenes.

That is typical of Dubai-based DP World.

The broligarchy is alive and kicking and it does not care about the Tangata or the Whenua or the Moana.

We heard from researcher Edward Miller, of the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability (CICTAR) who has investigated DP World’s control of Australian ports.

This company evades tax and so rates rise. Rise and rise. The burden on tax payers is massive because the company is all about profit and not about sharing or caring for community.

The port is the first point of take over and not the last.

Need to stop this
We need to stop this. We need to stop this asset sale and others.

We need to ensure our community is heard and heeded, and not made redundant.
Councils and the government work for us. It is not the other way around.

We heard from poet Gary McCormick who said we, the people, have power. We have the power to stop this. We are the voice.

We heard from Māori women who talked about the generations to come. We heard form Māori women who talked about the terrible effect this would have on the environment. A greedy parasite controlling the port.

We heard from Sara Campbell who spoke eloquently and passionately about the toll this will take on our environment.

“We’re living in a rapidly warming world. The last 11 years have been the hottest on record.

“Aotearoa now has the highest proportion of threatened species in the world.

“And right here in Whakaraupō, the ecology is under immense pressure. This harbour is home to our nationally vulnerable Hector’s dolphins.”

And yet:

“I truly believe we can stop DP World,” she said.

And the crowd cheered.

“And 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.”

No media present
As for me, I will try to publish articles in the media on this but the news media was not there. The newspapers were not present. Radio was not present.

Once the port mattered to media. Now, where is it?

We need to notice this. We need to draw attention to it, we need to join the protest against it. Or it will be too late. And what then?

As Gerard Loader said: “When my grandson asks what I did to stop it, I want to be able to tell him I did everything I could.”

Community for community. Rise people, rise.

Saige England is a humanitarian journalist and activist for community and the environment. She was present in support of community action. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

• Sign the petition Keep Our Port Public to show there is no public mandate for privatisation
• More information on Our Port Public website

One of the oldest tropes in journalism is that it should be balanced; that journalists have a responsibility to present all sides of a given issue with equal weight. This view also holds that appearing to be critical of one side and sympathetic to another amounts to “bias”.

That notion of balance sounds ideal. After all, journalists should be neutral observers who favour nobody, so if anybody feels as though their side is not presented with equal measure, the journalist has somehow failed.

That failure was what Jillian Segal accused the ABC of in her evidence to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion last week. In her evidence, the antisemitism envoy lamented that the ABC’s reporting on Gaza “created an impression of great negativity about Israel”.

• READ MORE: Antisemitism envoy Segal slams ABC, SBS ‘Israel bias’, wants to vet media
• The problem of false balance when reporting on science
• Other Gaza media coverage reports

“It’s the perception of the Jewish community feeling constantly that they are being faced with reporting about the Middle East, about Gaza, and about Israel in a way that paints Israel constantly in a negative light,” she said.

For the country’s supporters, that is understandable. As Segal went on to point out, there has been a “disproportionate” number of stories critical of Israel.

And Liberal MP and prominent member of the Jewish community Julian Leeser told ABC Radio National:

I think the public broadcasters actually have to be prepared to address systemic bias against Israel in their reporting, and I think they need to subject themselves to greater transparency mechanisms as outlined by the envoy.

But the term “balance” implies finding equivalence between the two competing positions. Sometimes journalists cover stories where achieving balance amounts to a serious distortion of what is actually taking place.

Jillian Segal wants ‘independent group’ to examine ABC’s Israel coverage  Video: Guardian Australia

The pitfalls of both-sideism
A standard, if lazy, tactic for avoiding accusations of bias is to give equal space to opponents in an issue, presenting them as equally valid.

If you give five minutes to a vaccine researcher, you must give the same time to a sceptic. It is something journalists sometimes dub “both-sideism”.

The media grappled with that challenge in covering climate change. In the early heated stages of the debate, news organisations would often place a climate sceptic next to a climate scientist in the name of “balance”.

By 2018, the BBC’s news director Fran Unsworth had had enough. She circulated a briefing note that acknowledged, “Climate change has been a difficult subject for the BBC, and we get coverage of it wrong too often”.

The briefing went on to say, “Manmade climate change exists: if the science proves it we should report it.” And in a section on balance, the note said:

to achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage, in the same way you would not have someone denying that Manchester United won 2-0 last Saturday. The referee has spoken.“

As journalism academic Jonathan Foster of Sheffield University used to tell his students, “If someone tells you it’s raining and another tells you it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out the f—ing window and find out which is true.”

Who has the power?
The conflicts between Israel and its neighbours (in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran) are not football matches, and journalists are not referees.

But any journalist thinking about how to fairly cover the crises is likely to spend far more time looking at the human cost of Israeli bombs and tanks, than the impact on Israeli civilians.

That is simply because the greater impact of the conflict is felt outside Israel’s borders.

Any reporting that suggests an equivalence of experience between Israelis suffering Hamas rockets, and the Palestinians in Gaza bearing the weight of the Israeli military assault would be plainly disingenuous. Hardliners on both sides are calling for annihilation of the other, but only one side has tanks, fighter jets and control of food, water and medical supplies over the border.

That raises another journalistic cliche: “holding power to account”. It is rooted in the idea that the media’s job is to expose the impact of power on those who have none.

Israel has indisputably been projecting its might well beyond its borders, and correspondents in the region who failed to cover the consequences on ordinary civilians would be rightly criticised.

None of this is to suggest the experience of Israelis or the government’s arguments should be ignored.

But in a world of competing perspectives, the job of journalists is not to make everyone happy. Their job is to accurately and fairly represent the views of everyone involved and on that score, the ABC has been succeeding.

Imperfect, but largely accurate
The national broadcaster has not been perfect of course. The ombudsman found five breaches of editorial standards (out of more than seven thousand complaints).

Its own editorial director Gavin Fang acknowledged they were far too slow to correct a United Nations report that falsely claimed 14,000 children could die of starvation in Gaza within two days.

In her testimony to the Royal Commission, Jillian Segal conceded the government’s broadcast regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, had not “found a great deal of inaccuracy” in the ABC’s reporting.

But she argued she’s trying to achieve “the more complex, nuanced issues of prioritisation, impartiality and objectivity and balance”.

“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.”

Perhaps she is right. But positive stories explicitly designed to cancel out the negative start to look like propaganda. And that is something journalists should never accept.

Peter Greste is professor of journalism at Macquarie University and the executive director for the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom. He also serves as an independent journalist on the Australian Press Council. This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished under Creative Commons.

Late last year, the British government suppressed a report that contained warnings from its intelligence agencies that climate change could drive mass migration and trigger a nuclear war in Asia.

A copy of the report, obtained by The Times, warned of collapsing ecosystems potentially triggering acts of eco-terrorism, and the possibility of NATO being drawn into conflicts over remaining breadbaskets in Russia and Ukraine.

It said: “Forests in Canada and Russia might pass a tipping point by 2030, as might glaciers in the Himalayas that fed rivers on which two billion people depended.”

• READ MORE: Suppressed climate report warned of mass migration and nuclear war
• New Zealand: Defence assessment on climate change and security released
• Palau’s President warns of rising nuclear anxiety in the Pacific and other Chinese missile test reports

In Australia, a 2022 climate change threat assessment by the Office of National Intelligence was described as “terrifying” by Senator David Pocock.

Similarly to the UK, the Albanese government has refused to release the full report.

A 2018 New Zealand Defence Force assessment declared climate change “one of the most significant security threats of our time, and one that is already having adverse impacts both at home and in New Zealand’s neighbourhood.”

New Zealand’s “neighbourhood” — otherwise known as the South Pacific — is on the frontlines of climate change, with low-lying atoll nations like Tuvalu and Kiribati predicted to be uninhabitable by the end of the century.

Pacific in forefront
Pacific Island nations have been at the forefront of efforts to force the world — particularly the rich world — to act.

Last year’s historic advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which found that countries have a legally binding obligation to address climate change, was initiated by Vanuatu.

The contrast between New Zealand and Australia’s reactions to the court ruling and the existential threat faced by our neighbours, versus their response last week to China’s ballistic missile test which landed in the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, is instructive.

Vanuatu Climate Change Minister Ralph Regenvanu has criticised both New Zealand and Australia for continuing with fossil fuel exploration and warned they could find themselves in court on the wrong side of the ICJ ruling.

New Zealand is ranked 44th on the Climate Change Performance Index, down from 28th in 2021. Australia is 56th of the 63 countries (plus the European Union) included in the index.

When it comes to dealing with the existential threat of climate change, both countries are laggards.

But when it comes to updating their military hardware for interoperability with US forces in the new Cold War with China, they’re keen to be seen at the front of the pack.

‘Biggest peacetime increase’
Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles has boasted that the country is seeing the “biggest peacetime increase in defence spending in our nation’s history”.

The defence budget is projected to hit A$96.6 billion by 2033, or 3 percent of GDP.

New Zealand has committed to doubling its defence spending from the current 1 percent to 2 percent in the next eight years.

Its recent purchase of five US-built MH-60R Seahawk helicopters, costing NZ$2.6 billion, was made with the expressed intention of making New Zealand’s armed forces interoperable with the US military.

Officially, New Zealand’s only military ally is Australia, but with its commitment to interoperability, regular military secondments, and participation in joint exercises, nuclear-free New Zealand is a card-carrying member of the Western alliance. (Former Labour prime minister Jacinda Ardern spoke to a NATO conference in Madrid in 2022.)

Both Australia and New Zealand are justifying the billions of dollars being spent on high-end killing machines by hyping up the so-called China threat.

Leaders on both sides of the Tasman were quick to pounce on last week’s ballistic missile test by China as evidence of a growing military threat.

Unacceptable, unwelcome
New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said it was unacceptable, unwelcome, and concerning.

“This is an intercontinental ballistic missile test, the second that we’ve seen in recent years, having not had one in the region for 40 years, from China,” RNZ reported him saying.

“We are living in a region that is proudly nuclear free … we don’t want to see increasing militarisation in our region.”

What was left unsaid is that, according to The New York Times, the US tests between five and 10 Minuteman missiles every year, and both New Zealand and Australia are ramping up purchases of military hardware — massively increasing the militarisation of the region.

Australia, a signatory of the Treaty of Rarotonga, which established the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone, has three nuclear-powered submarines on order at a cost of more than A$300 billion.

If Prime Minister Luxon was truly concerned about the increasing militarisation of the South Pacific, he would not be expressing interest in New Zealand joining Australia and Fiji in the “Ocean of Peace Alliance” announced last week.

Peace needs climate justice
Following the announcement of Fiji’s first-ever military alliance, the Pacific Elders Group — whose membership includes former heads of state — released a strongly worded statement reiterating its position that climate change is the region’s most urgent concern:

“An Ocean of Peace cannot be built on a narrow security agenda. Peace cannot be separated from climate justice or from the forces that produce insecurity in Pacific lives: climate change, fossil fuel dependence, extractive industries, militarisation, nuclear legacies, gendered violence and the denial of self-determination. These are the challenges that any genuine Pacific peace agenda must confront.”

Sadly, New Zealand and Australia’s actions suggest they are more committed to militarisation than climate action.

Last month, the New Zealand Defence Force announced its first Harpoon missile launch from a P-8A Poseidon aircraft during a joint military exercise with the armed forces of the US, Australia, Canada, and Japan in the Philippine Sea.

The two missiles fired — estimated cost between NZ$3 million to NZ$6 million — were supplied to New Zealand by Australia.

Millions of dollars blown on sinking a decommissioned warship that could have gone to, say, providing half a dozen Pacific Island villages with solar panels, rather than ramping up a new Cold War.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by his Substack Towards Democracy.

The most important response to Trump’s Hormuz announcement did not come from Beijing, Brussels or the United Nations. It came from Tehran, and it was four words long. “POTUS is absolutely right.”

That was Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, replying to the President’s declaration that the United States would henceforth be “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT” and would be “reimbursed” at the rate of 20 percent on all cargo transiting the waterway. Araghchi agreed that whoever secured the Strait deserved compensation — adding only that Iran had always been its “true guardian”, and that 20 percent was too much.

Iran, he said, “will be fair.”

• READ MORE: Lim Tean: The Hormuz ‘guardian’ turns pirate – 20% for tribute
• US carrying out new attacks on Iran after Trump’s threats
• Other Lim Tean articles

Understand what just happened. The two states now fighting for control of the world’s most important oil artery are no longer arguing about whether ships must pay tribute to pass. They are haggling over the rate.

For 75 years, the entire edifice of the “freedom of the seas” rested on the opposite principle. Yesterday, its chief architect demolished it in a single post.

POTUS is absolutely right. Whoever provides secure and safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be compensated for this service.

Iran has always been the GUARDIAN of the Strait and will remain so FOREVER.

20% is of course too much. We will be fair

— Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) July 13, 2026

What the law actually says
I practised shipping law for more than three decades, and I want readers to grasp how radical this announcement is in legal terms.

The regime governing straits like Hormuz is called transit passage, codified in Part III of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Its roots go back further, to the International Court of Justice’s very first case — Corfu Channel (1949) — where the court held that warships and merchant vessels alike enjoyed a right of passage through international straits that coastal states may not obstruct in peacetime.

Two pillars hold up this regime:

First, transit passage cannot be suspended. Not by the coastal state, not by anyone. Article 44 of UNCLOS is explicit.

Second — and this is the provision every reader should remember — passage cannot be taxed. Article 26 permits charges upon foreign ships only for specific services rendered to that ship, such as pilotage or towage. A general levy for the privilege of passing is flatly prohibited.

Even for coastal states.

Now consider the American position. The United States has no coastline on the Strait of Hormuz. It is not even a party to UNCLOS — for four decades Washington has insisted that transit passage binds Iran as customary international law, enforced by the US Navy on behalf of all nations.

Oman and Iran, the actual littoral states, could not lawfully charge a single dollar for mere passage. The United States has now proposed to charge 20 percent of cargo value — from 10,000 km away — as a matter of what the President calls “FAIRNESS.” (A laden VLCC carrying two million barrels of crude at today’s prices approaches US$30 million per transit).

That is not the enforcement of the international waterway doctrine. It is its replacement by tribute.

The trap Tehran sprang
Here is where Araghchi’s four words become lethal.

Customary international law — the only legal basis America has ever had in Hormuz, since it never ratified UNCLOS — is formed by two elements: the consistent practice of states, and the belief that such practice is legally required (opinio juris).

When Iran instituted its permit-and-fee regime for the Strait earlier this year, Washington’s legal position was simple: no state may condition or charge for transit passage. Iran’s regime was unlawful per se.

That position is now dead. Killed not by Iranian missiles, but by an American post. If the “guardian” of the Strait may lawfully charge 20 percent for security services, then a fortiori the coastal state — with genuine sovereignty over the waters in question — may charge for the same service.

Araghchi grasped this instantly. His reply conceded nothing and captured everything: you have adopted our legal theory; we now dispute only the price.

The United States has spent decades building the customary law of the sea through its own state practice. It is now dismantling that law by the same mechanism. Every future tribunal, every future crisis, every future power that wishes to tax a chokepoint — the Bosphorus, Malacca, Bab-el-Mandeb, the Panama approaches — will cite July 2026 as the moment the precedent was set by Washington itself.

However, President Trump has since backed away from the 20 percent charge, confirming that he was changing the “maritime security fee into historic multi-billion-dollar investment”.

He combined military strength with economic leverage, “securing major investment commitments instead of collecting fees”.

UPDATE: President Trump confirms the conversion of the proposed 20% maritime security fee into historic multi-billion-dollar investment.

President Trump combined military strength with economic leverage, securing major investment commitments instead of collecting fees.

This… pic.twitter.com/Y8LElvI6dZ

— Donald J Trump Posts TruthSocial (@TruthTrumpPost) July 15, 2026

A blockade without a war — the underwriter’s nightmare
There is a second legal absurdity buried in the announcement that only those of us from the maritime world will fully appreciate.

The President declared the reinstatement of “THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE” — stopping not only Iran’s ships but Iran’s customers. Blockade, in the law of naval warfare, is a belligerent right. It exists only in a state of armed conflict, it must be formally declared and notified, and it must be effective and impartial.

The San Remo Manual sets out these requirements precisely.

Yet Washington simultaneously insists it is not at war with Iran.

Consider the position of a shipowner, a P&I club, or a war risk underwriter today. A “blockade” that is not a blockade, imposed by a state that is not a belligerent, targeting “customers” of Iran — an undefined class that could sweep in any tanker that has ever lifted Iranian crude.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority has declared passage “currently unfeasible” and maintains that its own permit system is the sole lawful route through the Strait.

Two sovereigns. Two permitting regimes. One body of water. Every vessel in the Gulf now sails under competing assertions of authority, each of which the other deems an act of war.

War risk premiums do not price legal theory — they price uncertainty. And there has never been uncertainty like this.

The guardian and the protection racket
Readers of this page know my argument: the “rules-based international order” has not been destroyed by its challengers. It is being liquidated by its author — sold off, asset by asset, for cash.

The freedom of the seas was the crown jewel of that order. It was the one rule America enforced with genuine consistency, because it was the rule from which American power flowed. The Royal Navy built the doctrine in the 19th century; the US Navy inherited it in the 20th.

Its moral force rested on a single proposition: the guardian takes nothing for itself. The seas were policed disinterestedly, and that disinterest was the legitimacy.

“Guardian” is an old word. In the waters I have worked in for 30 years, everyone understands what it means when an armed party offers you “safety and security” in exchange for a percentage of your cargo. It is the oldest business model on the sea. We did not used to call its practitioners guardians.

The Strait of Hormuz will remain open or it will close; the ceasefire will be rebuilt or it will collapse. But the doctrine — the idea that the world’s waterways belong to the community of nations and may not be farmed for revenue — died this week.

Not because Iran closed the Strait. Because America opened a toll booth.

The rules were never the order. Power was the order. The rules were its receipts.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

COMMENTARY: By Jeffrey Loewenstein

Sarah Schwartz, co-founder of the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA), gave evidence at the Royal Commission into Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion last week.

I venture to suggest that it will come to be seen that Schwartz gave seminal evidence which the Commissioner is going to find hard to ignore when she is writing her report; evidence supported yesterday by the compelling testimony of Jewish university peace activist Yasmine Johnson.

Until Schwartz gave her evidence, we had seen testimonies given by members of the Jewish community — some of which can only be described as very troubling in terms of evidence — which sometimes bordered on hysterical.

• READ MORE: Saige England: Call out the Zionist hypocrisy – genociders are settler colonialists on steroids
• Antisemitism envoy Segal slams ABC, SBS ‘Israel bias’, wants to vet media
• Other Bondi Royal Commission reports

But, the elephant in the room?

Were the “attacks” described really attacks of an antisemitic nature,

or were they people venting their anger and outrage at Jews seen to be rusted-on, unquestioning supporters of Israel’s egregious actions in Gaza?

Take the example of a university student in Canberra who just yesterday was reported in the Nine media thus: ”Liat told the Commission she had felt “very physically unsafe” during the long encampment at her university campus … when people would laugh and leer at me and say, ‘Look at the baby killer, look at the genocide supporter’”.

No, that is not pleasant, but the fact is — a fact unchallenged aside from the state of Israel itself and the likes of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) — that more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed by the state of Israel and more than 44,000 injured since October 2023.

Why the rise in antisemitism?
What was more than significant, is that many of those who gave evidence of alleged antisemitism demonstrated absolutely no introspection. Why had there been a rise in anti-semitism since October 7?

Not because Hamas attacked Israel. No, it was, in many cases people showing their anger, yes, in some instances in a totally misguided way, at Israel’s actions in Gaza. Why did some 300,000 people from all walks of life and all ages, march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on a foul, wet and windy day?

The palpable anger by a significant part of the Australian community, including many Jews, at what Israel did in Gaza, and continues to do to this day, is reflected in the sober evidence given at the Royal Commission yesterday by Yasmine Johnson, a co-convener for Students for Palestine and a protest organiser.

Following her evidence, Johnson, who is Jewish, told the media

the idea that campus protests “create a dangerous atmosphere, fear for people, is farcical”.

Antisemitism, anti-genocide conflation
“What we’ve heard,” she said “so far is day after day after day of evidence which conflates legitimate anti-genocide, pro-Palestine activism with genuine antisemitism which exists in our society.”

The earlier mentioned witness Liat, and others like her, may feel uncomfortable about what is being shouted out at her as much as she probably sees posters like “Free Palestine” as confronting and antisemitic, but has Liat — who acts as a  spokesperson for the Australasian Union of Jewish Students — either personally or on behalf of her organisation ever publicly accused Israel of being responsible for war crimes in Gaza, even if not genocide? Almost certainly, not!

And that is the rub.

Might this alleged antisemitism just have had something to do with Jews so visibly parading around with Israeli flags draped across their shoulders, waving Israelis flags at solidarity rallies for Israel, Jewish communal leaders excoriating those who called out Israel for engaging in genocide or starving children, and welcoming the Israeli President as their “national leader”?

Really? I thought we were Australians.

The “average” person could be forgiven for concluding that members of the Jewish community were demonstrating that they identified with and supported Israel.

The question to be asked here is why it is that criticising Israel by Jews is said to make the speaker a self-hating Jew, a “kapo” a “Judenrat” or, as in the case of Schwartz, to even be accused on ABC Radio National as being “anti-Jewish?”

They are shameful, offensive and disgraceful epithets. They are intended to be so.

Not to be ignored in the above is that the likes of a Mark Leibler, the ECAJ, AIJAC, the Zionist Federation of Australia and similar groups see Jews who criticise Israel as a no-go area even if they, falsely, assert that Jews are free to openly express their views about Israel.

It’s simply untrue!

There is the expectation from these quarters that all Jews will, as a matter of solidarity, support Israel as the Zionist/Jewish homeland. With this forked-tongue and double-speak it is no wonder that the sort of slurs and insults which Schwartz described at the Royal Commission are rife in the Jewish community.

A climate of fear
Conversely, those in the Jewish community who might otherwise speak out against Israel fear that they will be subjected to all manner of insults and even the break-down of family relationships.

Given the airing of Schwartz’s evidence, one has to also wonder why there has been total silence from the usually vocal Jewish organisations. Should they not be publicly calling out vilification of fellow-Jews, calling for vilification to be stopped and asking for respect for those Jews who are not Zionists, strident or not.

Proof of the “attitude” in the Jewish community to those who are not at one with supporting Israel is clearly demonstrated by the Australian Jewish News which, just last week, pulled a story attacking those in the Jewish community who attacked their fellow Jews with the the sort of offensive epithets directed at Sarah Schwartz.

My Israel question
I can speak personally to how the Jewish community reacts when Israel or the Israel Lobby comes under scrutiny. Back in 2006, Melbourne University Press published my son Antony Loewenstein’s book My Israel Question. The book flew off the shelves.

The response from the so-called powers-that be in the Jewish community — including a Jewish Federal member of  Parliament in Parliament, even exhorting people not to buy the book — bordered on feral.

Even putting aside the death threats to my son and his then partner, as an example of hate mail — which Schwartz has so clearly shown in her evidence — one early so-called correspondent wrote that he hoped that when the Nazis came to Australia that he and his parents would be the first to be marched into the gas chambers.

Unhinged? Yes!

But as Schwartz spelt out in her evidence at the Royal Commission many in the Jewish community see attacking those who do not support Israel 100 percent as legitimate. And if that extends to thuggery, look no further than the Jewish group the Lions of Zion and their “activities” — an organisation supported by the powers that be in the Jewish community.

Thankfully the JCA has provided an ever-growing forum and voice for Jews who will not remain silent given Israel’s genocide in Gaza and breaches of multiple international laws and conventions.

Let’s not forget, while Israel denies what a slew of scholars, human rights organisations and aid and medical agencies have found — including those learned on genocide, some of whom even live in Israel itself — the facts on the ground speak volumes. We have all seen and read about it.

Israel clearly stands guilty as charged!

The United States went to war to stop Iran charging tolls in the Strait of Hormuz. It has now imposed a toll 15 times larger. Where is the “international waterway” chorus now?

For five months, we were treated to a sermon. Foreign ministries from Brussels to Tokyo to the Gulf capitals lined up to recite the catechism: the Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway. Freedom of navigation is sacrosanct.

No state may impose charges on innocent transit. Iran’s proposal to levy a passage fee was denounced as extortion, as hostage-taking of the global economy, as a violation of the law of the sea so grave that it justified war.

• READ MORE: US carrying out new attacks on Iran after Trump’s threats
• Other Lim Tean articles

On Monday, the President of the United States announced that America will henceforth be known as “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT” — and that as guardian, it will be reimbursed at the rate of 20 percent of the value of all cargo passing through the waterway. Effective immediately.

Let us do the arithmetic the hymn-singers will not do. Iran was reportedly seeking something in the region of US$2 million per vessel — a figure the United States declared intolerable, a casus belli. A 20 percent ad valorem charge on a laden VLCC carrying two million barrels of crude at today’s prices approaches US$30 million per transit.

BREAKING: The UAE says two national tankers were hit by Iranian cruise missiles in the Strait of Hormuz, killing one crew member and injuring eight others. Authorities say the fires have been contained. pic.twitter.com/xfMDH2EHgn

— Al Jazeera Breaking News (@AJENews) July 13, 2026

The United States bombed Iran over a toll, and has replaced it with a toll 15 times greater — collected not by the coastal state whose territorial sea the shipping lanes actually pass through, but by a power projecting force from half a world away.

There is a word for demanding a percentage of cargo value from merchant vessels under threat of naval interdiction. The word is not “guardianship.” Every shipping lawyer knows the word. Every P&I club knows the word. The Barbary corsairs knew the word, and they at least had the honesty to use it.

The law they invoked now condemns them
I have spent more than three decades in shipping law, and I want readers to understand precisely what has been done to the legal order these governments claimed to defend.

Article 38 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) guarantees the right of transit passage through straits used for international navigation. That right is absolute in a way few rights in international law are: it cannot be suspended, and it cannot be conditioned on payment — not to the coastal state, and certainly not to a third power that has appointed itself gatekeeper.

Article 42 permits bordering states to regulate certain matters, but expressly forbids any regulation that has the practical effect of denying, hampering or impairing transit. Article 26, governing territorial seas, states the principle in terms a child could understand: no charge may be levied upon foreign ships by reason only of their passage.

When Iran floated its toll, every chancellery in the Western world could recite these provisions from memory. Legal advisers produced learned memoranda. Editorial boards thundered. Now the United States — which, let us remember, has never even ratified UNCLOS — imposes a charge an order of magnitude larger, on a strait whose shipping lanes run through Iranian and Omani territorial waters, and the chancelleries have discovered the virtue of silence.

The US military says it has begun a third night of strikes against Iran, hours ahead of a planned reinstatement of a naval blockade on Iran announced by President Donald Trump. https://t.co/UrU0tRWO2A

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) July 13, 2026

The historical parallel is exact, and it is damning. For four centuries, Denmark extracted the Sound Dues from every vessel passing between the North Sea and the Baltic — a percentage of cargo value, paid under the guns of Kronborg Castle. The maritime powers spent generations denouncing this as a relic of feudal extortion incompatible with the freedom of the seas, and finally abolished it by treaty in 1857.

The principal architect of that abolition — the state that refused on principle to pay tribute for passage through an international strait — was the United States of America.

And there is an older irony still. The founding myth of the American navy is the refusal to pay the Barbary states for safe passage in the Mediterranean: millions for defence, but not one cent for tribute. Two and a quarter centuries later, America has not merely agreed to tribute. It has become the party collecting it.

The hymn sheet, revisited
So let us now address the chorus. Where are all the governments now — the ones who spent the spring singing from the hymn sheet of the “international waterway”?

You told us this was about principle. You told us that the freedom of navigation through international straits was a pillar of the rules-based order, that small trading nations above all depended upon it, that Iran’s toll was piracy dressed in the language of sovereignty.

Very well. The test of a principle is whether you will state it against your friends. Iran’s proposed charge was a rounding error compared to what Washington has just decreed. If US$2 million was piracy, what is US$30 million? If Iran holding the world economy hostage justified war, what does the “Guardian of the Hormuz Strait” holding it hostage justify — a strongly worded communiqué? An awkward pause at the next summit?

The silence answers the question. The principle was never the freedom of the seas. The principle was that the patron does not pay; the patron collects. The rules-based order, as I have argued at length in these pages, was never a body of rules at all. It was a hierarchy wearing the costume of law, and the costume has now been removed in public.

Consider what Gulf producers are being asked to accept. They cheered — some openly, some through gritted teeth — as American ordnance fell on Iran in the name of keeping the strait free.

Their reward is a levy on their own exports larger than anything Tehran ever contemplated, imposed unilaterally, with no treaty, no consent, no sunset clause, and no forum in which to contest it. They have exchanged a neighbour’s toll booth for an emperor’s tax farm, and they are expected to call it protection.

Seems like Trump just made a pitch for the Iranian toll system.

Because the Iranians were going to charge $1mn per ship, which would amount to 1-2% of the value of the cargo of an oil tanker.

But Trump is going to charge 20%! pic.twitter.com/m2lpNbxd0W

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) July 13, 2026

What the underwriters will decide
Here is the dimension the political commentary will miss, and it is the one that will actually determine events. The Strait of Hormuz now has two rival authorities, each asserting control, each attaching conditions to passage. Iran’s Strait Authority has declared passage unfeasible until calm is restored and speaks of permits and designated corridors.

Washington declares the strait open, promises convoys, and demands its 20 percent.

For the war risk underwriter in London or Oslo, this is not a geopolitical abstraction. It is an impossible risk matrix. Compliance with one authority is defiance of the other. A master who joins an American convoy has identified his vessel with a belligerent; a master who hugs the Iranian corridor and pays Tehran invites interdiction by the self-appointed guardian.

Either course may void cover or trigger exclusions. Add a 20 percent cargo levy to war risk premia already at extraordinary levels, and the commercial mathematics of the strait collapse entirely. The blockade of Hormuz will be completed not by mines or missiles but by the quiet refusal of underwriters to write the risk — a mechanism I have described in the past, when the enforcement power of marine insurance was still treated as an exotic footnote.

The reckoning
Every empire that turned its guarantees into revenue streams discovered the same thing: protection that must be purchased is indistinguishable from the threat it purports to guard against, and clients who are billed like subjects begin, quietly, to shop for alternatives. The two corridors of the New World Order — the ones I have written about since earlier this year — just became three: Iran’s, America’s, and the growing routes that avoid both.

To the governments who sang from the hymn sheet: you were not defending the freedom of the seas. You were defending the exclusive right of your patron to price it. Now the invoice has arrived, addressed to you, at 20 percent of everything you own that floats.

How does it feel?

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

I loathe hypocrisy. I am sure you do too. So let’s state this plainly. The genociders have employed hypocrisy as a defence.

It is the weakest of all defences. It is the wall that crumbles.

It is NOT antisemitic to stand against the state of supremacy and genocide, the Zionist state. It is not anti-semitic to state that the state should be dismantled.

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It is not antisemitic to state that every single massacre of Palestinians — their forced exile and the attempted extermination of all Palestinians, is wrong.

It is not antisemitic to demand a different state, one where all Palestinians have the right of return and where the land — from the river to the sea — can be shared.

The vast majority of Zionists in the world are not Jewish, they are born-mad-again people who identify as Christian and who have adopted a violent notion that violence is fine as long as it is directed against Palestinians.

Settler colonialism on steroids. Again.

Starving Indigenous people
Like the history of colonialism everywhere — an Empire killing and starving Indigenous people. In Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the US, Australia, New Zealand — the Palestinians have been ground down and cast into dust.

The only sensible stance is to stand against the carnage and to say never again means never again for everyone.

I know many Jews who stand against the fascism of Zionism. The Bund was a whole movement of Jews who stood for this.

Once again, and again and again, I call down my Jewish ancestors in standing with them and with all humanitarians who support the rights of Palestinians to live on the land, from the river, to the sea, free of apartheid, free of exile, free of the fear of snipers and bombs.

Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

The only positive thing about the Iran war heating up again is that Lindsey Graham won’t be around to enjoy it.

The bloodthirsty South Carolina senator breathed his last on Saturday, succumbing to what his office describes as “a brief and sudden illness” after a political career dedicated to promoting wars, airstrikes and proxy conflicts at every possible opportunity.

People have long poked fun at the hypocrisy of Lindsey Graham living as an obvious closeted gay man in a political party with a virulently anti-LGBTQ platform. I personally have always found Graham’s sexual attraction to men a lot less interesting than his sexual attraction to acts of mass military slaughter.

• LISTEN: A reading by Tim Foley

Ever since the death of Graham’s dear friend John McCain, nobody on Capitol Hill has been able to match his gleeful enthusiasm for the shredding of human bodies using high-priced war machinery.

Wherever there was any debate about dropping bombs, launching missiles, toppling foreign governments, arming proxy forces, or imposing starvation sanctions, you could always count on Lindsey Graham to be the first and loudest voice arguing in favour of more death and destruction.

Graham has personally taken credit for persuading President Trump to begin the war with Iran. In the months leading up to his unexpected demise, the senator had advocated for direct US military interventionism in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Yemen, Nigeria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and had just returned from a trip to Kyiv promoting the US proxy war against Russia.

He was literally pushing for more war and military expansionism until the very end of his life.

All the world’s worst people are publicly expressing their grief about the loss of their beloved war slut, from Trump to Benjamin Netanyahu to Itamar Ben-Gvir to Tom Cotton to Mike Huckabee. Meanwhile, everyone who’s not a warmongering psychopath is having a splendid day.

Well, at least Lindsey Graham is dead                   Video/audio: Caitlin Johnstone

Of course we’re seeing imperial narrative managers like Piers Morgan wagging their fingers and chiding their audiences not to speak ill of the dead, but the hell with them. We’re not doing that.

JUST IN – Lindsey Graham and Trump pose together with a “Make Iran Great Again” hat, signed by Trump. pic.twitter.com/656ctZp52M

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) January 5, 2026

Politeness is not more important than Lindsey Graham’s victims. The liberal desire for propriety and nice feelings does not outweigh the importance of naming and shaming Graham’s frenetic scramble to murder as many human beings as he possibly could throughout his evil, miserable life.

Sara and I grieve with the American people over the loss of our dear friend, Senator Lindsey Graham.

In our recent meeting, I said, “Lindsey is a great friend of Israel and a cherished friend of mine. We have no better friend than Lindsey.”

Lindsey understood that the security… pic.twitter.com/JG2mUUAfFT

— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) July 12, 2026

Lindsey Graham is dead, and it is good that he is dead. May his omnicidal ideology soon join him in the arms of the cold, cold ground. May the insane, insatiable god he worshipped cease to gain recognition on this planet.

Lindsey Graham is dead. At least that’s one good thing. No matter what else happens today, they can’t take that away from us.

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.

On October 9, 2023, just after the State of Israel began its ongoing genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, Sarah Cotte, a French-Ethiopian student at SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies) in London gave a speech at a rally organised by the SOAS Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! Society.

Her speech was “expressing support for the right of Palestinians to armed resistance against occupation and ethnic cleansing by the Israeli state”, as the Defend the SOAS 2 website explains.

The speech was filmed on a phone and shared online, and, in response, the vicious and vindictive pro-Israeli lobbying group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), scouring the internet for dissent, shared the video and tagged the Metropolitan Police.

• READ MORE: How were the Filton 4 sentenced for terrorism when they weren’t convicted of terrorism?
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This led, in January 2024, to Sarah being arrested in a dawn raid on her home, on the basis that she had committed a crime under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act for “inviting support for a proscribed organisation”, which is punishable by a prison sentence of up to 14 years.

It took another 13 months for the Metropolitan Police to formally charge Sarah, and, on the same day, another SOAS student was also arrested on suspicion of an offence under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act, although they have not been charged.

Together, however, they are known as “the SOAS 2″.

On June 22, two years and nine months since Sarah made her speech, her trial began at the Old Bailey, with the prosecution alleging that her speech on October 9, 2023 “intentionally or recklessly” encouraged support for Hamas.

Disgraceful broadened proscription
Crucially, although the military wing of Hamas was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK government in 2001 (ignoring the fact that it is a legitimate resistance movement to illegal occupation and oppression), it was not until December 2021 that then-foreign secretary Priti Patel, an ardent Zionist, broadened the proscription to encompass the whole of Hamas, which, disgracefully, enabled an entire civilian government, and everyone who worked for it, to be regarded as terrorists.

In her closing remarks after the week-long trial, the defence barrister, Margo Munro Kerr, “reminded the jury that Ms Cotte’s speech was completely legal and that protecting solidarity with Palestine is ‘an absolute necessity in a democratic society’”, as the Morning Star described it.

A spokesperson for Defend the SOAS 2 told the newspaper, “This trial has never been about justice; it is about intimidation. The Terrorism Act 2000 is being deployed by a Zionist-supporting Labour government precisely as it was intended: to systematically criminalise anti-imperialists and silence solidarity with liberation movements.

“While Israeli war criminals enter Britain fresh from committing genocide in Gaza without a glance from the police, a young woman is dragged through the courts for speaking the truth.

“Sarah did not break under the prosecution’s pressure, and neither will we.”

On July 8, after failing to reach a verdict, the jury was dismissed, and a retrial was scheduled for September 14.

Sarah told Socialist Worker that, as the newspaper described it, her trial was “part of a broader crackdown on the Palestine movement and our civil liberties”.

‘Repressing’ Palestine movement
As she described it, “The state has no choice but to repress the Palestine movement”, because it “has politicised so many young people in the past two years.”

As the Morning Star added, she “explained the state has a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, it is targeting direct actionists such as the Filton 25 activists and the Brize Norton 6, but it is also trying to criminalise activists for speaking out against genocide.”

Speaking outside the court, Sarah told supporters, “We know that we are on the side of justice. We are on the side of liberation. We are on the side of people who fight back, people who strive for a better world, people who want to build a different system.

“The British state is on the side of terrorism, it’s on the side of apartheid, it’s on the side of colonialism, it’s on the side of imperialism.”

As with the case of Moog 4 — activists facing a retrial for direct action against an arms factory supplying weapons for the genocide, after the jury failed to reach a verdict — and as happened most prominently with the Filton 6, activists who took direct action against an Elbit Systems facility in Bristol in August 2024, and were acquitted of the main charge against them in February this year, the government, with the support of complicit lawyers and judges, refuses to accept defeat.

When jurors are unable to convict, or choose not to, on the basis of their consciences, the government keeps hammering away until it gets the result that it wants; in the case of the Filton 6, notoriously, that meant securing a conviction by the jury on lesser charges at the retrial, followed by the judge grafting a “terrorism connection” onto their conviction at the sentencing phase.

This is not justice, and it is to be hoped that it will backfire, with jurors becoming ever more wary of convicting defendants at all, as they recognise that they are not being allowed to exercise their fundamental rights to take decisions based on the merits of the cases before them, but are being manipulated in a toxic politically-biased charade, which is about defending a foreign country committing a genocide, and defending the rights of its arms companies to contribute to, and profit from that genocide.

The activists have true justice on their side; their opponents have only complicity in the most monstrous crimes of our lifetimes.

Former US Vice-President Mike Pence wants Donald Trump to “finish the job” in the Strait of Hormuz.

After 130 days of war that failed to reopen it for a single day, a shipping lawyer must explain to the Pence who actually rules the Strait.

It isn’t CENTCOM. It is a committee room in London.

• READ MORE: US and Iran halt attacks as mediators rush to get diplomacy back on track
• Vessels transit Hormuz despite renewed fighting between US and Iran
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Mike Pence declared this week: “If the Iran deal is over, President Trump should unleash the Armed Forces of the United States to finish the job: destroy their nuclear and missile programmes, end support for terrorist proxies and restore freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Finish the job. Consider the phrase. It implies the job was ever within America’s power to finish — that somewhere in the arsenals of the United States there exists a munition capable of reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

There isn’t. There never was. The past 130 days have proven it beyond any argument, and the fact that Pence has not absorbed the lesson tells you how little the American political class understands about the war it started — and how catastrophically ill-advised Trump has been by the men around him.

What the bombs couldn’t do
Let us recall the record, because the record is merciless.

On 28 February, the United States and Israel launched their grand aerial campaign against Iran. Washington called it Operation Epic Fury. Iran answered by closing the Strait.

The United States then imposed a naval blockade of Iranian ports, struck hundreds of targets, and deployed the full theatrical repertoire of American power. Thirteen American service members came home in coffins. More than 7000 people died across the region.

And the Strait? The Strait remained closed.

Tanker traffic through the world’s most vital energy chokepoint collapsed by more than 90 percent. Some 360 vessels sat stranded on either side of the passage.

Eight of the world’s largest container lines abandoned the Gulf entirely and sent their ships around the Cape of Good Hope, as if Suez and Hormuz had never been cut, as if we had returned to the age of sail.

That is the “job” Pence wishes to finish. Four months of the most intensive American military operations since Iraq did not restore freedom of navigation for a single day. Only a negotiated settlement — the Islamabad Memorandum of June 17, brokered by Pakistan, not won by CENTCOM — briefly cracked the Strait open.

And when that truce collapsed this week, with Iran striking commercial vessels and Trump declaring the ceasefire over, the Strait slammed shut again within hours.

The bombs opened nothing. The diplomats opened it briefly. The bombs are now guaranteeing it stays closed. This is the arithmetic Pence cannot count.

The judge who actually rules the strait
Here is what Pence, and evidently Trump’s advisers, have never understood: the Strait of Hormuz is not governed from Washington, or even from Tehran. It is governed from London, from the unglamorous committee rooms of the marine insurance market.

I spent decades in international shipping law, across Iran, Indonesia, Ukraine and half the maritime world, and I can tell you that no force on earth moves a merchant vessel that its insurers have abandoned.

Every commercial ship afloat carries three layers of insurance. There is Hull and Machinery cover — H&M — insuring the vessel itself, an asset worth $100 million or more for a modern VLCC. There is Protection and Indemnity cover — P&I — insuring against third-party liabilities: pollution, crew death and injury, wreck removal, cargo claims.

And there is Cargo insurance, covering the value of the goods themselves — and a laden supertanker’s crude can today be worth nearly as much as the ship that carries it.

All three carry war risk exclusions. War, mines, drones, missiles — none of it is covered under standard terms. To sail into a zone of conflict, an owner must purchase separate War risk cover, and that cover is switched on and off by the Joint War Committee of the London market, which maintains the list of designated high-risk areas.

When the JWC lists an area, premiums explode, cover becomes voyage-by-voyage, renewable in seven-day windows, cancellable on notice.

When underwriters lose confidence entirely, cover simply evaporates — and a ship without insurance does not sail. Its lenders forbid it. Its charterers refuse it. Its flag state warns against it.

Now observe what actually happened in this war. Within 48 hours of the February strikes — before Iran had laid a single mine, before the IRGC had struck a single tanker — the war risk market had already shut the Strait. Insurers terminated existing policies. The Joint War Committee designated the entire Persian Gulf.

Premiums that stood at 0.25 percent of hull value surged past 1 percent, then to several percent — for a single transit. On a $150 million VLCC, that is millions of dollars per voyage, before the cargo is even insured.

Daily charter rates for supertankers quadrupled toward $800,000.

The insurance market closed the Strait before Iran’s navy did
The commercial shutdown preceded the physical blockade. That single fact demolishes Pence’s entire thesis. You cannot bomb your way to freedom of navigation, because freedom of navigation is not a military condition. It is a commercial one.

It exists when a Lloyd’s underwriter is willing to write a policy at a price a shipowner can bear. No B-2 strike has ever changed an actuarial table in the attacking power’s favour. Every strike makes the table worse.

The market never believed the peace
And here is the detail that should end this debate permanently. Even during the June truce — even after Trump stood at Versailles proclaiming “Ships of the World, start your engines” — the war risk designation never came off.

The Joint War Committee did not delist the Gulf. Premiums remained at multiples of their pre-war level. Underwriters kept writing cover voyage by voyage, week by week, ready to withdraw at the first drone.

The men who price risk for a living looked at Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding and rendered their verdict: they did not believe it. July 8 proved them right. The market understood what the White House did not — that a ceasefire built on deferred questions, contested toll clauses and mutual bad faith was a pause, not a peace.

Now, with the MOU dead, any prospect of the designation lifting is dead with it. The Strait’s status as a war zone is entrenched for the foreseeable future.

Mike Pence proposes to fix this with more air strikes. Understand what that means in practice: every American bomb that falls on Iran adds basis points to a war risk premium, extends the JWC’s listed area, and pushes more tonnage onto the long route around Africa.

Even if the United States Navy physically escorted every tanker — an operational fantasy in waters saturated with Iranian drones, missiles and mines — the underwriters would still price the corridor as a battlefield, because it would be one.

Washington already tacitly admitted this when it directed the Development Finance Corporation to stand up a $40 billion reinsurance backstop, turning the American taxpayer into the marine insurer of last resort. When your own government must insure the ships because the market will not, you have conceded that the market does not believe your military assurances.

There is no clearer confession of strategic failure.

The victory America threw way
The tragedy — and I use the word deliberately — is that America had its exit in March. In the first weeks of the war, Trump declared that Iran’s military had been destroyed and the Strait was open.

The obvious move, the move a Bismarck or a Nixon would have made, was to declare victory and walk away. Announce that the nuclear facilities lay in ruins, that the objective was achieved, and that the Strait of Hormuz — through which barely a trickle of America’s own oil passes — was henceforth the problem of those who actually depend on it: China, which draws over 40 percent of its seaborne crude through the passage, India, Japan, Korea, Europe.

Let Beijing negotiate with Tehran over tolls. Let Asia underwrite the convoys. America, the world’s largest oil producer, could have watched from across two oceans.

Instead, Washington chained its prestige to a waterway it does not need and cannot control, and handed Iran the greatest strategic gift imaginable: a permanent instrument of leverage over the global economy that costs Tehran almost nothing to wield.

Iran does not need to win a naval battle. It needs only to keep the actuaries nervous — a drone here, a mine there, a seized tanker when the mood takes it. Its Persian Gulf Strait Authority now sells passage to favoured nations at seven-figure fees, exercising precisely the sovereignty over the Strait that its negotiators promised it would never surrender.

The Strait, as Iran’s chief negotiator said plainly, will not return to pre-war conditions. He was telling the truth. Washington simply refused to hear it.

The lesson Pence will never learn
This is what the collapse of the old order looks like in practice — what I have called the Legitimacy Principle. American power can destroy, but it can no longer compel. It can level a nuclear facility, but it cannot make a Greek shipowner send a $150 million vessel and 25 souls through a minefield.

It can blockade Iranian ports, but it cannot force a Lloyd’s syndicate to write a policy it knows will lose money. The instruments that actually govern the world’s arteries — insurance markets, charter rates, the quiet risk calculus of men in London and Singapore and Piraeus — do not answer to CENTCOM.

Mike Pence looks at the Strait of Hormuz and sees a target list. A shipping lawyer looks at it and sees a war risk clause. The clause has beaten the target list for 130 days, and it will beat it for a 130 more.

“Finish the job” is not a strategy. It is the sound of a man who has learned nothing, advising a president who was told nothing, about a war that neither of them can win.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

Despite advice from wiser heads, US President Donald Trump and his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth swallowed the bait from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and launched a miserably conceived, poorly executed and catastrophic war on Iran earlier this year.

Trump is no FDR and Hegseth is no Carl von Clausewitz; it’s more like Dumb and Dumber Went to War.

These are the same people New Zealand, Australia, South Korea and the Philippines’ leaders are betting the family farms on.  Weep, my beloved country.

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The Iran lesson: the practical limits of US power
For people in the Asia-Pacific region, the failure of the US-Israeli war on Iran should seriously bring into question long-standing alignments with the US. If the contest between the US and China ever goes kinetic, it is highly likely the US and its allies will be defeated.

The consequences for all the people of Asia-Pacific, all the way down to New Zealand, will be immense.

If the two behemoths refrain from striking the enemy’s mainland, the heavy blows will fall on allies like the Philippines, Australia, South Korea and New Zealand.  I think that was part of the signalling when China fired a nuclear-capable ICBM into the Pacific last week.

This was immediately after Australia signed a defence pact with Fiji, and New Zealand announced it was joining the US-led Project Arcadia — a Five Eyes programme designed to build an AI-enabled, integrated digital battlespace command system. In other words, much deeper integration with the US war machine.

In December 2025 someone in the US establishment leaked to The New York Times “The Overmatch Brief” — a secret Pentagon summary of years of US war-gaming that showed the Chinese outgunned the US in all the areas that will count in a conventional war.

Whoever that person was, I suspect they were trying to avert war, trying to stop the kind of imbecilic decision Trump made just months later in the attack on Iran.

At the heart of the problem for the US and its allies is the West’s steady decline in manufacturing capacity. Modern wars are, as strategists said in the Second World War, about who can get the most stuff to the battlefield.

China is now the factory of the world and, if faced with a war, it can rapidly ramp up production of all the weapons of war to a level that is beyond the ability of the West to respond.

The leaked Overmatch Brief recognised that America’s preference is for high-value weapon systems like aircraft carriers and the performance-plagued F-35 jets that are likely to be overrun by vast numbers of Chinese weapons systems produced at a fraction of the cost.

Faced with China’s synchronised opening salvos of hypersonic missiles, cyber warfare, electronic warfare and anti-satellite warfare, US forces could face immediate sensor blindness and possibly a crippling blow to key assets within days.

Dr Andreas Krieg of King’s College London is a leading Gulf expert who I follow closely. He spoke recently on Middle East Eye’s “Unapologetic” about the war on Iran: “I think it has undone the American empire in a way that I don’t think the American empire will bounce back.

“It is probably the most seismic shift in regional power we have seen in the past 30 years or so.”

In all likelihood, the US-Israeli war on Iran has been paused, not ended, but certain home truths are clear.

Thanks to Trump and Hegseth we have seen the practical limits of US power. Short of scaling up and bringing in 500,000 to 1 million troops, and the full weight of the US navy, army and airforce, Iran cannot be defeated.

Success, if possible, would likely take years, by which time global energy would be wrecked for a generation, triggering an economic calamity.

Setting aside the illegality, immorality and depravity of such a campaign, what is clear is we are witnessing the end of US global hegemony and the slow, violent birth of a multipolar world order.

If long-besieged Iran — the world’s 51st-ranked economy — was able to force the Americans to sue for peace, what are the prospects of the US getting an ass-whopping from a China that has the military and the manufacturing power, the home advantage and, above all, the existential need to see off the Western empire?

As with the Gulf states which recently sided with the US, reparations demanded — in this instance by China — for such a war could be staggering for America’s Pacific allies.

A peer-on-peer war is a different beast
There are important differences between the US attack on Iran and a peer-on-peer war with China. The Iranian strategy was to hit US bases, hit Israel and escalate horizontally by attacking US allies in the Gulf.

Iran had to absorb tens of thousands of strikes without replying in kind (say, sinking a warship).  Sinking the US fleets will be the first order of business if war breaks out with China.

Any attack by the US on the Chinese mainland will almost certainly be immediately answered by at least reciprocal strikes on the US mainland. Heaven help any allies (that’s us) who paint a target on their backs and join the Americans.

Empty shelves and the innovation question
New Cold War warriors like the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington underscore the importance of technological innovation in winning wars. Fair point. America has impressive capabilities in this space but China is a fast-follower and, increasingly, a leader.

One example: China has built the DF-27, the world’s first intercontinental anti-ship ballistic missile, a carrier-killer that can hunt its prey for 8000km.

In its report  “Is the United States Prepared for a War with China?” (2026), CSIS evaluated US military capacity after the clear overreach of the war on Iran. Along with numerous other military analysts, CSIS highlighted the rapid expenditure of hard-to-replace missiles, interceptors and other munitions that, along with commitments to the Gaza genocide (not their term) and the war in Russia and Ukraine, have left the shelves perilously low on supplies for America’s next war.

The reality is US defence is run first and foremost for the benefit of a private sector that is hugely overpriced and slow-to-deliver. It will take years to get the stockpile of precision cruise missiles (like the SM-6, SM-3 IB, JASSM, and Tomahawk) up to anything like a level to fight a superpower-on-superpower war.

Should this surprise anyone? The military-industrial capacity of China now dwarfs Uncle Sam’s. Guess who can produce the most long-range drones, naval drones, interceptors and whatever weapon of war you could choose?

China today accounts for about half of all global shipping production by tonnage — much of it can quickly be converted to wartime production. The US builds less than 2 percent and is woefully slow. The Americans continue to invest heavily in aircraft carriers (nine more are on the drawing board), each costing in excess of US$10 billion — despite hypersonic missiles ensuring any that are within thousands of kilometres of a war zone will almost certainly be sunk by a swarm of missiles.

China’s deep structural resilience, its mature leadership, and its careful marshalling of its resources, makes it the likely victor in a war no one should start and possibly no one can decisively win. War is madness. Diplomacy and moderation are the cure.

For all the reasons above, the current defence settings in both Australia and New Zealand are wrong-headed and wedded to a world that is rapidly disappearing into the rearview mirror.  The specific perils our leaders are placing us in is the subject of my next article.

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

“They’re scum … they’re led by sick people and they’re vicious, violent people.

There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.” Trump said after bombing Iran yesterday and and again today — and threatening to tear up the MOU.

The pussy-grabbing “Leader of the Free World” has always had poor impulse control but we are moving into a new phase with F-bombs, real bombs and threats to entire civilisations becoming daily occurrences.

What has largely been left unreported after Trump’s outburst at the NATO Summit in Ankara is the elegant response from the Iranians.

• READ MORE: Tehran hits Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar after deadly US strikes
• Millions attend funeral prayers for Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei and family
• Other war on Iran reports

Iran’s Fars News Agency reported Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi dismissing Trump’s insulting remarks. He stressed that Tehran does not answer vulgarity with vulgarity, but with action.

FM: Iran Not to Answer Vulgarity with Vulgarity, But with Actionhttps://t.co/iFneZILzw2 pic.twitter.com/vyy3T2wfSY

— Fars News Agency (@EnglishFars) July 8, 2026

“Addressing the Civilised and Courageous Nation of Iran with derogatory language does not diminish its Greatness,” Araqchi said. He added that Iranians were renowned for their “civility, culture, and strong moral values”.

I can vouch for that. I have visited Iran a couple of times, most recently in 2018, and have friendships with Iranians today. Some are anti-government, some are pro-government; all are intelligent, courteous people.

Travelling through Iran it is impossible not to notice that good manners and generosity are deeply embedded in Iranian culture.

And then there’s the Americans.

Best-in-class days gone
I remember attending the APEC summit in Kuala Lumpur in 1998 with the New Zealand delegation. At the time the American diplomats were considered best-in-class, to be emulated. Those days are long gone.

When Trump said in an earlier threat over the Strait of Hormuz: “You close it and you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your fucking country” his diplomats made no efforts to soften the edges.

Trump threatened to end the entire Iranian civilisation overnight and the collective West did not demur. No class.

The West is now led by a senile version of Sammy The Bull Gravano, the New York mobster — violent, uncultured and believing that whacking someone is the solution to every problem.

Trump’s outbursts may not simply be a reflection of his lack of moral education but are likely symptomatic of his serious cognitive decline. Dementia experts cite a sudden increase in swearing or crude language as a neurological symptom.

The pussy-grabbing Leader of the Free World has always had poor impulse control but we are moving into a new phase with F-bombs, real bombs and threats to entire civilizations becoming daily occurrences.

While Trump rants, Tehran’s sophisticated diplomatic corps — packed with PhDs who understand the nuances of international law far better than the real estate agents Trump sends in to bat for the USA — have quietly outmaneuvered the Americans in purely diplomatic terms.

The reason for Trump’s potty-mouthed tantrum is clear: he’s not getting away with murder.

The Iranians are not letting the Americans and Israelis get away with breaching the Memorandum of Understanding.

Tehran safeguarding sovereignty
Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Esmail Baqaei stated that the United States has violated the framework of the Islamabad Accord signed by the two countries, stressing that Tehran will firmly safeguard its national interests and sovereignty.

It is impossible to read the text of the MOU and not see that Iran is on firm ground.  Article One of the signed MOU reads:

“The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, and their allies in the current war, by signing this MoU, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final Deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and other provisions of this paragraph.”

Pacta sunt servanda — “agreements must be kept” — has been a bedrock of international law since before the Roman Empire.  American Exceptionalism has, until now, given itself an exception to the rule. No more, one hopes.

Israel’s war and war crimes in Southern Lebanon have continued since the US signed the MOU.  Iran is imposing a new rule on the Middle East: the rules apply to everyone, including the US and Israel.

Last night, America bombed Iran. Again.

Dozens of strikes — four to five times heavier than the last round — against radar sites, anti-ship missile batteries, and the Revolutionary Guard’s swarm boats. Explosions lit up Bandar Abbas, Sirik, and Qeshm Island.

And what will it change? Nothing.

• READ MORE: Trump says MoU to end Iran war is over, ‘waste of time’ dealing with Tehran
  
• Other Lim Tean articles

Because the strikes were a response to something far more revealing: in the space of 24 hours, three tankers — a Qatari LNG carrier, a Saudi supertanker, and a third vessel hit by drone — were struck in the Strait of Hormuz.

Look at where they were hit. All three were transiting the southern corridor hugging the Omani coast — the route Washington has designated, patrolled, and blessed with the protection of the US Navy.

That is the whole story in one map. The Strait of Hormuz today is not one waterway. It is two rival corridors.

A northern route, designated by Tehran, where ships must register with Iran and sail under Iranian rules. And a southern route, sponsored by America, where the Gulf states send their oil under the shadow of the Fifth Fleet.

‘No American route’
Iran’s message this week could not be clearer: there is no American route through “their” strait.

Tehran did not even claim the attacks. It didn’t need to. State television simply noted that a vessel had “ignored warnings”. After the American bombs fell, Iran’s military declared it would deliver a “crushing response” and that the only safe passage through Hormuz “is one set by Iran”.

Understand what is actually being contested here. This is not about tankers. It is about governance. For 80 years, freedom of navigation in the Gulf has meant navigation on Washington’s terms.

Iran is now asserting something revolutionary: that the power which sits astride the strait — geographically, permanently, immovably — will write the rules of passage. Not the US Navy. Not the Joint Maritime Information Center in Bahrain.

And here is what Washington refuses to grasp: Iran has already priced in the bombs. It absorbed strikes 10 days ago. It absorbed heavier strikes last night. It will absorb the next round too.

Every strike costs America political capital, splits it further from European allies who have barred their bases from offensive operations, and pushes oil and bond yields higher. Every strike costs Iran some radar stations and speedboats — assets it regards as expendable ammunition in a war of endurance.

Iran is the dog that has the Hormuz bone between its teeth. You can beat the dog. You can bomb the dog. The dog will yelp, bleed — and bite down harder.

Not bargaining chip
For Tehran, control of Hormuz is not a bargaining chip. It is the last and greatest source of leverage it possesses, the one card through which the rising regional hegemon dictates the terms of 20 percent of the world’s energy.

The rules-based order said the strait belonged to everyone. The emerging order says the strait belongs to those with the legitimacy — and the will — to hold it. Iran is betting it can outlast American patience.

History suggests the dog usually keeps the bone.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform. He also hosts Lim’s Substack.

On March 5 of this year, the United States launched a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Travelling at speeds of more than 24,000 km/h, it landed near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 6700 kilometres away, 24 minutes later.

Minuteman III missiles can deliver up to three separate nuclear warheads, each more than 20 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

On March 3, 2025, the Marshall Islands formally announced its intention to join the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone by signing the Treaty of Rarotonga.

• READ MORE: NZ accuses China of going against peace and stability of Pacific
• RIMPAC 2026: Part 1 – World’s biggest naval games a dress rehearsal for the coming ‘war on China’
• Other RIMPAC reports

Searches of The New Zealand Herald and Stuff websites for stories about the missile test, and the signing of the treaty come up empty.

And yet, on Tuesday, both The Herald and The Post led with news that China had test-fired a nuclear-capable ballistic missile in the Pacific. Neither report made any mention of the at least 15 ballistic missile tests fired into the Pacific by the US since 2021.

How many missiles has the US fired into the Pacific — did Australia protest those?

Here are the dates that the US test fired nuclear-capable ICBM missiles 7,000kms into the mid-Pacific:

•2026: March 5, June tbc.
•2025: February 19, May 21, November 4.
•2024: June 4,… pic.twitter.com/v6nxkRGA9U

— Peter Cronau (@PeterCronau) July 7, 2026

“The Pacific Islands Forum leaders have made clear that they want the Pacific to be an ocean of peace. We believe this test is inconsistent with that objective,” Wong said.

Wong isn’t wrong.

Kiribati criticised US test
In 2024 Kiribati publicly criticised an earlier test of a Minuteman III missile that also landed in the Ronald Reagan Space and Missile Test Range located near the Kwajalein Atoll. As the name suggests, the tests are a regular occurrence.

A statement from the President’s Office, reported by RNZ, said Kiribati objected equally to China and the US using the South Pacific for test-firing nuclear-capable missiles.

“Kiribati continues to advocate for the cessation of weapons testing in the Pacific Ocean and urges global cooperation to ensure the peace, security, and stability of our shared environment. We remain committed to protecting the peaceful future of the Pacific and safeguarding the well-being of future generations.”

It is a thought — almost — echoed by Winston Peters in his response to the Chinese test: “This missile was fired into the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone established by the Treaty of Rarotonga. China’s action goes against the object and intent of that Treaty.”

You will search long and hard to find any similar criticism of the US missile tests by Ministers Peters and Wong. That is despite the people of the Marshall Islands themselves and the leaders of neighbouring countries making it clear any testing of ballistic missiles in the Pacific goes against the spirit of the Treaty of Rarotonga.

The Chinese missile test is widely being reported as a response to Australia and Fiji’s signing of the Ocean of Peace Alliance the previous day.

Without confirmation from China, it is impossible to know for certain, but it seems likely that the alliance — which New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has expressed interest in signing up to — is seen as a ratcheting up of military tensions in the South Pacific.

When it comes to the “object and intent” of the Treaty of Rarotonga, mentioned by Peters, few if any of the signatories would have countenanced one of their members purchasing nuclear-powered submarines.

Australian nuclear submarines plan
But in 2023, Australia announced it was doing just that with the planned purchase of three nuclear submarines at an estimated cost of more than A$300 billion (about 15 times the combined GDP of the Forum countries excluding New Zealand and Australia).

Shortly after the announcement, then Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Damukana Sogavare told the UN General Assembly that his nation “would like to keep our region nuclear-free and put the region’s nuclear legacy behind us… We do not support any form of militarisation in our region that could threaten regional and international peace and stability.”

The legacy Sogavare mentions is nowhere felt more keenly than the Marshall Islands, where the US carried out 67 atmospheric nuclear tests between 1946 and 1956, resulting in sky-high rates of thyroid cancer.

The US has paid out just US$150 million in compensation despite the internationally mandated Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal having awarded more than US$2 billion in personal injury and property claims.

A survey by the Asia New Zealand Foundation earlier this year found that just 23 percent of New Zealanders viewed China as a threat, compared to 35 percent who saw the US as one.

The US has more than 5000 nuclear warheads with 1700 actively deployed; China has 620 with 34 deployed.

China has a long-standing policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, while the US refuses to rule it out.

When our leaders claim to be supporting Pacific countries in their commitment to a nuclear-free Pacific by rightly criticising China’s missile tests while steadfastly refusing to criticise the US regular testing of intercontinental nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, they are indulging in hypersonic hypocrisy.

Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by his Substack Towards Democracy.

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

This is a story about what has been taken and what can be saved.  I had the honour and pleasure of interviewing Dr Emalani Case, a Hawai’ian (Kānaka Maoli) academic and activist about the cultural, political and environmental impact of RIMPAC 2026 on Hawai’i.

We also discussed the wider implication of the surge in US-led militarism in the Pacific, its dangers for all Pacific nations, and what a better vision of our future might look like.

Dr Emalani Case is a senior lecturer in Pacific Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland. She has written extensively on Indigenous rights, environmental impacts, and decolonial movements across Oceania.

I see that you’re named after Queen Emma.

She was the godmother of my great grandmother. She loved her people and cared for their health. She was instrumental in creating the Queen’s Hospital on Oʻahu and worked to create spaces of safety, health and genuine security.If I could make some link between RIMPAC and her —  RIMPAC is not about the health of the people; it’s not about our safety; and it’s not about our future.

RIMPAC is representative of the militarisation of our islands. There’s always this claim that it is for our benefit, for our protection and for the security of Hawai’i and the region, but beginning with the military-backed overthrow of the kingdom, the military has always been there for America’s imperial interests.

The PR for the event suggests the military exercise is conducted in an environmentally and culturally sensitive manner.  Is it? What makes you stand up to RIMPAC?  

You can’t say that you are aligned with the interests of the people or even with the environment when you’re based on destruction and violence.

I’ve experienced militarism and really felt it in visceral ways. When you grow up in Hawai’i, the military becomes normalised. It’s in your face all the time. It actually wasn’t until I moved away from Hawai’i that I realised, “Oh, it’s actually odd to see helicopters every day, and it’s an odd thing to see tanks driving through your community.”

Growing up in Waimea, which is about 40 miles from Pōhakuloa, one of the biggest military training facilities in the Hawai’ian archipelago, we could hear and feel when they were doing live target bombing there.

I grew up with parents who were activists in their own right, always fighting for our language, our way.  My mom was part of opening a Hawai’ian language preschool in my town and my dad was always fighting for our rights to continued access to our land, to be able to hunt and harvest, and fish.

So I grew up with that, and I grew up experiencing militarism and observing the violence. That led me to naturally stand against RIMPAC.

Tell us more about the rhetoric that the military are here to protect you — and us.

There’s a myth that the military is here to protect us. I always ask: who’s here to protect us from the military?

They see us as being sacrificeable and dismissible. When you start to confront this notion that we are supposed to be patriotic American citizens, that it’s our duty to give up our land and it’s our duty to sacrifice our places … that can be quite confronting for people.

Militarism shouldn’t be normalised, it is highly destructive. We need to unravel and challenge military rhetoric, because it is so strong.

I had a lot of family members around me who had already started to push back against that. We have a Hawai’ian Renaissance, this huge reawakening of political consciousness that started in the 1970s around the time of the bombing of Kaho‘olawe, one of our islands [for Vietnam war live firing training]. So I was born in the 80s, and I grew up with that reawakening, that renaissance, that revitalisation of language and culture, and dance.

It’s beautiful and it’s strong. We’ve got a really strong nation of people who are still learning, still unraveling, and still dismantling these normalised ideas, this colonial rhetoric.

What else do people need to understand about the negative impact massive events like RIMPAC have on the environment?

If you take Pōhakuloa — as just one example — you have these long stretches of black lava. It might look empty but under that lava is a massive aquifer. If you bomb on top of that and contaminate it with the chemicals that then seep into the soil, there’s major environmental damage.

If you repeatedly bomb a place, the threat to the aquifer is serious.

The logo for RIMPAC looks like a tourist advertisement for a tropical paradise.

That image of Hawai’i as a tourist paradise is strategic. The tourism industry is working as a mask for all of this other violence that’s happening here.

RIMPAC is part of this alliance of nations that ultimately might do crazy things like start a war on China? How worried should we be?

We have to confront these things like RIMPAC that are pulling us together in really dangerous, violent ways. It means confronting how militarism in one place actually shapes and even bolsters militarism in other places across the Pacific.

When these countries do decide to come together and wage war on China, that’s going to impact all of us.

There’s an image of the future that’s a very dark one but there’s also a positive one, that the Pacific can be an ocean of peace. Tell us, how you would like to see things shape up?

I think for anybody who does this work, there has to be a vision of something positive and beautiful. Otherwise, why do we do all of this? My vision for the Pacific is, of course, not just the absence of conflict.

As Pacific peoples, we have responsibilities to engage in some kind of decolonial dreaming and envisioning — as Linda Tuhiwai Smith says: to think beyond the absence of something, and to think about what our futures actually look like, and feels like, and smells like in a future that is demilitarised.

I dream I wake up to silence because I’m too used to waking up to chaos. I want that silence in that moment to breathe and just hear nothing but birds or laughter or all the things that should be there. What peace is to me is waking up in a peaceful environment and having the energy to truly care for people. That brings us back to Queen Emalani.

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, and he contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts solidarity.co.nz.

From June 24-July 31, dozens of countries will be taking part in the latest edition of the massive RIMPAC military exercises that take place every two years — including New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Belgium, Ecuador, Norway, and Vietnam. The carbon emissions alone are staggering. Eugene Doyle outlines the high stakes involved in the first of three articles.

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

As a dress rehearsal for the coming war on China, RIMPAC is a big deal. This year’s event is billed as bringing together global naval forces to address “the current threat China is posing in the Indo-Pacific region”.

Every two years the US Pacific Fleet/Indo-Pacific Command at Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i, hosts the Rim of the Pacific exercise, the world’s largest international maritime war games.

RIMPAC gathers the US and its allies together for a show of force and a building of interoperability, cementing relationships and ensuring countries like Australia and New Zealand are increasingly integrated into weapons procurement and US war plans so they can act as  “force multipliers” for the United States.

• READ MORE: India sends sub-hunter to US-hosted RIMPAC, world’s biggest naval war game
• Backgrounder: The Asia-Pacific arms race has taken an ominous turn
• Other RIMPAC reports

“The suggestion of being a force multiplier is both absurd and kind of terrifying,” says Valerie Morse of Peace Action.

“We don’t want to be part of a US war in the Pacific. We need to stop engaging in things like RIMPAC.”

Veteran peace activist Mike Smith (Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Kahu) agrees: “What on earth are we doing there? The American strategy is to bind so-called allies, partners and friends all around the Pacific into a proxy force to fight for the US.

“The only thing the Americans know how to do is to bomb other countries. It’s never worked, but it’s what they do. Being led into war as a proxy for a belligerent power is just a nightmare yet our present government, Foreign Affairs, Defence Department, and security agencies are all leading us in that direction.”

Thousands of troops, dozens of ships
From June 24-July 31 dozens of countries are represented, including New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Belgium, Ecuador, Norway, and Vietnam.  Tens of thousands of personnel, dozens of surface ships, including the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, naval drones and submarines, hundreds of aircraft, and all the tools of modern warfare get together to game out Armageddon.

They rehearse amphibious operations, anti-submarine warfare, air defence exercises, cybersecurity and all the systems of combined operations warfare.  The carbon emissions alone are staggering.

Unbelievably, the PR for the event suggests the military exercise is conducted in an “environmentally and culturally sensitive manner”.  Tell that to Abby Martin, the US activist and journalist who will visit Australasia in July and has produced an outstanding documentary  “Earth’s Greatest Enemy – documenting the environmental cost of history’s biggest empire”.

“The reason we’re at this tipping point is because of the cumulative emissions of carbon in the atmosphere — for which the US is the top contributor. The US military alone is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet, at 270,000 barrels of oil a day … more than 150 countries.

“How is that possible?” asks Abby Martin.

Valerie Morse says, “My starting point with RIMPAC was engagement with other Pacific activists who are concerned about US militarisation across the Pacific — that includes Hawai’i, Guam, and places like Okinawa.

“Like many bits of military training, it is imperial pageantry — showing who runs the Pacific. The United States is very keen to say the Pacific is our lake.”

‘Anglo-Saxon Lake’
Just after the Second World War, General Douglas MacArthur was even more explicit: the Pacific from now on was an “Anglo-Saxon Lake”.  Hawai’ian academic and activist Emalani Case challenges this imperialist framing in my next article.

Hawai’ian activists have long campaigned against the impact of so many vessels, so many explosions, on the local environment.

Liz Remmerswaal from World Beyond War raises another reason to distance ourselves from RIMPAC: “Israel is one of the 30 countries that’s participating. For people of good conscience who care about the genocide going on in Gaza, you have to ask: ‘Why would we want to have anything to do with a group of countries which included Israel?’”

The answer, dear reader, appears to be “values”. We share values, according to RIMPAC public relations, with the Americans and Israelis.

Above all, however, RIMPAC is part of the US containment of China strategy.

Radio NZ and reporter Guyon Espiner helped set the scene this week when they gave retired US Brigadier-General David Stilwell a half an hour soap box to tell New Zealanders to embrace US nuclear ships, think Trump is doing a good job, fear wild-eyed Iranian terrorists, spend much, much more on the military, and be afraid, very afraid, of China.

“If you read New Zealand’s defence strategy and the defence capability review, China is seen as the threat,” says Mike Smith says.

“That’s totally stupid. China’s not a threat to us; it’s offering to cooperate with us. The threat to our prosperity comes from the United States.”

Most loathed countries
Smith’s comment is supported internationally. Of the 132 countries surveyed in the Global Country Perceptions Ranking (Nira Data), the USA sits at 128 out of 132 countries surveyed, with Israel claiming the spot as the most loathed country on the planet.

China was invited to just two RIMPACs — in 2014 and 2016 — before being struck off the invitation list as the security competition in the South China Sea ramped up.  Taiwanese media has been promoting the idea of Taiwan being invited to future RIMPACs, another step up the escalation ladder in terms of crossing China’s red lines on the behaviour and status of what it considers an integral part of China.

There are many good reasons countries like the Philippines, New Zealand and Australia  should cancel their subscription to RIMPAC and, more importantly, decline to enlist if a war with China erupts. The United States will in all likelihood be defeated.

How this could unfold is the subject of the third article in this series. The effective defeat of the US at the hands of Iran should be a salutary lesson … but some people never learn.

Fighting alongside the US puts us on the side of an empire that is committed to genocide and whose military industrial complex demands forever wars. The more allies the US has, the more likely megadeath will happen, and the once-peaceful Blue Pacific could be turned red with the blood of innocents.

Should war come and China prevails and pushes the US to the periphery of the region, there will be inevitable consequences for US allies who attacked China.  That is well worth pondering.

We are at a hinge moment in world history; US supremacy is receding. Tomorrow will not be the same as yesterday, and we should adjust to new realities, not cleave to old certainties.

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, and contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts solidarity.co.nz.

It is hard not to feel the deepest sense of shame as a New Zealander following the United Nations Independent Commission report released last week. (UN report details the “overwhelming” scale of children killed in Gaza).

This report details Israel’s direct targeting of Palestinian children in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank.

Most know the shocking case of Hind Rajab but this report exposes not just the deliberate, casualised killing of children individually but its industrial scale.

• READ MORE: A UN report details the ‘overwhelming’ scale of children killed in Gaza. It raises grave legal questions
• Gaza genocide – how many UN findings will the West ignore?
• Other Gaza genocide reports

It’s easy to see how this has occurred. A study by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has found 62 percent to 76 percent of Jewish Israelis partially or fully agree that there are “no innocents in Gaza”.

Israeli political and military leaders have used such genocidal rhetoric against Palestinians for decades, and particularly in the last three years.

These leaders have set the tone for the behaviour of the public and the individual soldiers who do the killing.

Dehumanising a population as Israeli leaders have done is always the first step to genocide.

The most tragic aspect, however, is this would not have happened had the New Zealand government and other Western governments sanctioned Israel decades ago for the brutality of its illegal occupation in Palestine, its ethnic cleansing and its mass killing of Palestinian children as detailed in the UN report.

They are still silent even now — choosing to stand with those killing the children.

The shame of their betrayal of New Zealand values will last for generations.

John Minto is national campaign coordinator of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This letter was first published by The Press.