MEDIA FREEDOM: By David Robie

In a week’s time next Sunday, it is World Press Freedom Day on May 3. And already our whānau of journalists who are facing horrendous danger at the hands of the Israeli killing machine have had a shocking few days.

During our 133 weeks of protest we have become painfully accustomed to how one journalist after another has been brutally assassinated, some even alongside their family members.

Far more than 260 journalists — the actual number varies with different media freedom monitoring agencies and different methodologies — have been slaughtered in Israel’s war on Gaza since October 2023.

• READ MORE: Journalist Amal Khalil killed by Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon: RSF retraces events and denounces war crimes
• ‘We had Amal Khalil by her hand’s grip. Then Israel murdered her’
• Other Gaza and Lebanon media freedom reports

And some of you may have seen the chilling photograph circulating on some social media channels. It shows 8 Lebanese journalists – four men and four women – smiling and giving peace signs.

Eight Lebanese journalists killed in a month by Israel https://t.co/Fqeji5D3M8

— Pen MacRae (@penmacrae) April 23, 2026

They have all been murdered in the last month, including the tragic killing of Amal Khalil, who died last Wednesday under building rubble in the town of al-Tayri, southern Lebanon, after a double tap attack and then the Israelis fired a stun grenade on the ambulance rescue workers preventing them trying to save her.

But before I talk more about her tragedy and what it means– she was just buried yesterday with thousands at her funeral — I want to show you another photo.

This is Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist working for the Arabic channel Al Jazeera who was a highly popular household name right across the Middle East if not the world.

She was known as the “daughter of Palestine” and she was shot and killed by Israeli occupation forces on 11 May 2022 — just eight days after Media Freedom Day that year.

I have this photo hanging on the wall of my office, thanks to Palestine Youth of Aotearoa, to remind me daily of the brutality and global impunity of the Israelis.

With my experience as a media freedom defender for Pacific Media Watch and Reporters Without Borders since 1996, I have come to a chilling and shameful conclusion:

The fact that there was no accountability for her murder and the US authorities and Biden administration orchestrated a cover-up – even though she was American — signalled to the Netanyahu government that they could target journalists and those bearing witness with absolute impunity.

So this is where we are at now, the Israeli killing machine launched into a bloody massacre of more than 72,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza over the past two plus years, especially targeting journalists, doctors and medical workers, teachers, and aid workers.

And the hypocritical Western countries, including Aotearoa New Zealand, have barely offered a timid bleat.

The Israeli bloodlust has now spread to Lebanon and other countries. The IDF claims that its military is the “most moral in the world”. That claim is an obscenity.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect journalists (CPJ), Israel is by far the world’s biggest killer of media workers.

On its monitoring website it lists the following:

• 260 journalists and media workers killed by Israel, of which:
• 207 were Palestinians killed in Gaza
• 2 Palestinian killed in Gaza during the Iran war
• 2 Palestinians killed in Israeli detention centers
• 31 Yemenis – out of a total of 32 – killed in Yemen
• 6 Lebanese in Lebanon during the war on Gaza
• 9 Lebanese in Lebanon during the Iran war
• 3 Iranians in Iran during the 12-day war

To return to the targeted murder of Amal Khalil, who worked for Al-Akhbar, she was with another journalist, Zeinab Faraj, who was rescued and survived.

The Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders said in a statement by its Middle East desk chief Jonathan Dagher:

“The Israeli army has very likely committed two more war crimes on 22 April, by targeting journalists who were identified as such, obstructing rescue operations and continuing strikes that killed one journalist and injured another.

“Responsibility for these crimes also lies with Israel’s allies, who continue to allow the Netanyahu government to commit them with impunity.”

RSF published a compelling and disturbing timeline of how the IDF blocked her would-be rescuers for seven hours.

CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa regional director Sara Qudah said:

“We knew [Amal] was alive beneath the rubble – a real, breathing presence. Not in the abstract, not as rumour or hope.

“The 40-year-old female journalist, Amal Khalil, whose voice had just reached her family and colleagues, her survival depended on whether the machinery of rescue would be allowed to operate as it is supposed to under international law, and the law of humanity.

“That is what made what followed so difficult to process — not only emotionally, but structurally.

“Because this was not a case of disappearance in the fog of war.

“It was a case of proximity to survival that collapsed into confirmed death while rescue was still theoretically possible.”

Qudah added that her death could not be understood only as an individual tragedy, “although it was that to everyone who knew her, every journalist in the region”.

“It must also be understood as a stress test of the systems that are supposed to prevent this outcome — early warning, protection, humanitarian access and accountability. On each of these dimensions, the case raises unresolved questions.”

Israel is not only killing journalists, it is systematically torturing them — along with hundreds of other Palestinian hostages. CPJ’s recent report, “We returned from hell”, where the watchdog published the in-depth testimonies of 59 media prisoners released from jail since October 2023 is shocking reading.

I would like to finish with a quote by Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein, who visited New Zealand in 2023 to launch his  book The Palestine Laboratory about how the Israeli killing machine exports in brutal technologies — a book that has been translated into many languages and had a profound influence in the world.

“With some notable exceptions, too many in the international media, journalists, editors and owners, have refused to take appropriate action against Israel. No official sanction.

“[They are] still interviewing Israeli spokespeople and politicians as normal. Not treating this as a monumental crime and outrage. Instead, often deferring to unproven Israeli claims that every journalist murdered was a ‘terrorist’.”

This complicity by many journalists — even in our own region — must be widely condemned.

Dr David Robie is convenor of Pacific Media Watch and a media defender with global groups including RSF. He gave this short address at the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) rally in Auckland on Anzac Day.

A South African-born New Zealand critic of Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing today delivered strong praise for his home country’s genocide case filed with the International Court of Justice.

Israel is currently on trial on allegations of genocide with the ICJ in The Hague and South Africa has been joined by at least 15 other countries as accusers — but New Zealand is not among them.

Noting how global iconic leader Nelson Mandela spoke out in his lifetime in support of Palestinian rights, Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) campaigner Achmat Esau said South Africa was not speaking out of convenience, “but out of principle”.

• READ MORE: Global protests mark Palestinian Prisoners Day
  
• Israel passes mandatory death penalty for Palestinians convicted of terrorism, drawing widespread condemnation
• Other Palestinian and Iran human rights reports

Speaking at the combined Banners of Humanity and Banners of Palestine exhibition and concert at the Corbans Art Centre, Esau paraphrased the Irish poet and essayist W B Yeats’ famous 2019 poem “The Second Coming”:

“In a time when the world feels like it is unravelling, we must choose to be that centre — to hold the line for justice, dignity and humanity.”

A veteran activist of the 1981 Springbok tour anti-apartheid protests, he told the audience he was speaking about “camaraderie — a spirit of shared struggle, trust and solidarity” and how it shaped South Africa’s decision to take legal action against Israel at the ICJ and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

On 29 December 2023, South Africa filed a case against Israel at the ICJ, alleging violations of the Genocide Convention in the besieged Gaza Strip.

By January 2024, the court found these genocide allegations “plausible” and ordered Israel to take steps to prevent genocide, a legal order Tel Aviv has since ignored.

Support for South Africa
“Since then, multiple countries have joined the lawsuit action, and South Africa has submitted extensive to support its case,” Esau said.

Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Iceland, Ireland, Libya, Maldives, Mexico, Namibia, Nicaragua, Palestine, The Netherlands, and Türkiye are among countries joining the lawsuit.

The ICC has also issued arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders (all since assassinated).

“in response, South Africa has faced intense pressure — particularly from the United States — through political threats, legal opposition and public condemnation,” said Esau.

“So why does South Africa persist? The answer lies in our history.

“Under apartheid, our struggle for freedom was sustained by international solidarity — by comrades who stood with us in our darkest hours.

“That solidarity shaped who we are.

“Countries such as Cuba, Palestine, Libya and Iran actively supported our liberation.”

Mandela’s message
On Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Island jail after being imprisoned for 27 years, he “honoured them, calling them brothers, comrades and leaders , because they stood with South Africa when it mattered most”.

Esau also cited Mandela’s famous pledge, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Many other speakers, singers and musicans took part at the Banners for Humanity event, which was a fundraiser for the global medical charity MSF — Doctors Without Borders.

The performers included Simon Frost and his daughters; PSNA’s co-chair Maher Nazzal; Taipua Kipa and Delta Johns, Waitakere College rangatahi; Lebanese singer Eva Maria Chasson; Mama Lema Shamaba, of the Democratic Republic of Congo; West Papuan Dr Mary Joku Ponifasio; Fatima Sanussi of Sudan; and Bibi Amina, speaking about Iran.

Masses of protest banners on display included “End genocidal capitalism — Palestine forever”, “IDF = Murder Machine — your silence is complicit with murder”, “Luxon! Sanction Netanyahu now: End U$rael Illegal War$”, and “The more you oppress — the more we will resist”.

Earlier in the day, Achmat Esau had also spoken at a PSNA rally in downtown Auckland’s Te Komititanga Square to mark the Red Ribbon Global Action to stop Israel’s plan to execute Palestinian hostages on the 132nd consecutive week of Gaza protests.

‘Prisoners’ in street theatre
A street theatre performance led by the Artists for Sumud Ensemble and Under the Same Moon featured hooded prisoners (the protesters) and most of the crowd. The group was led by singers Acacia O’Connor and Eva Maria, and Uruguayan artist-filmmaker Eloiza Montaña.

Speakers included Maya Swaid from the Palestinian community and social justice engineer Syed Iqbal, chair of Support Beyond Boards.

Israel is currently holding more than 9600 political prisoners hostage — an 83 percent increase since before the genocide began in October 2023.

Swaid related how many prisoners were arbitraily “taken from their homes, prosecuted and then incarcerated” in prisons notorious for torture under a military court system where they had no rights.

“There are also many women housed in these prisons and more than 3500 people who are not charged with any crime at all,” she said.

“No charge, no trial, no conviction. They are jailed under ‘administrative’ detention based on ‘secret evidence’ that they are not allowed to see in a system where they cannot defend themselves.

United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s latest report has warned that Israel is systematically torturing Palestinians on a scale that “suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent” and that “torture has effectively become state policy” since October 2023, reports Democracy Now!

Earlier this month, the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) passed a law enabling mandatory executions of Palestinian prisoners by a 62-48 vote that has stirred global protests and condemnation by human rights groups.

Britain’s Daily Telegraph is being acquired by a German-based media giant — and now its journalists are formally expected to support Israel.

The Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, has cleared the takeover by Axel Springer SE. Its CEO, Mathias Döpfner, has written to Telegraph staff “outlining his commitment” to the paper.

An employee at The Telegraph has sent me that letter. It is deeply revealing.

• READ MORE: Other Palestine and Iran media reports
• Owen Jones on Substack

Döpfner insists that the values of The Telegraph and the publishing house founded by late tycoon Axel Springer — dubbed “Germany’s Rupert Murdoch” — are aligned. They are, he says, “Freedom, free markets, individual freedom and freedom of speech”.

He goes further. Axel Springer, he explains, is “guided by a clear editorial compass.” Its employees are rooted in its “Essentials” — “core values to which we are firmly committed”.

There is, he adds, “no such thing as neutral journalism”: only journalism that is “pluralistic and surprising, fair, and fact-based.”

And yet, having invoked “freedom of speech” as a foundational principle, he insists these Essentials are not partisan — but rather “define a socio-political framework within which maximum journalistic freedom and intellectual independence can flourish.”

‘We support the right of Israel to exist’
Döpfner then sets out those ‘Essentials’:

1. We stand for freedom, freedom of expression, the rule of law, and democracy.
2. We support the right of Israel to exist and oppose all forms of antisemitism.
3. We advocate the transatlantic alliance between the United States and Europe.
4. We uphold the principles of a free-market economy.
5. We reject political and religious extremism, as well as all forms of discrimination.

Note where “we support the right of Israel to exist” sits: second.

‘Freedom’ — within limits
Döpfner emphasises that editorial independence will be protected, including from pressure by politicians, celebrities, or advertisers. “I value debate in the spirit of pluralism and freedom of expression,” he writes.

But the description of the Essentials is, frankly, Orwellian.

It is not reconcilable to argue that these tenets create the conditions for “maximum journalistic freedom” while simultaneously requiring adherence to a political position on a specific foreign state.

Out of 193 UN member states, only one is singled out in this way.

No state has a “right to exist” under international law. Peoples have a right to self-determination — a right denied, in this case, by Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and by subjecting its people to apartheid, colonisation and genocide.

A Telegraph journalist put it to me bluntly:

To be firmly told by our new parent company-to-be’s CEO that the second most important guiding principle is affirming the right of a country committing genocide and ethnic cleansing is more than a little concerning.

It also raises the question of how any reporting from the paper can be considered factual if that is our core principle.

As they note, this principle comes before any explicit rejection of discrimination.

What ‘Israel’s right to exist’ means in practice
In practice, the phrase “Israel’s right to exist” has been repeatedly deployed by Israel’s cheerleaders across the West to justify Israel’s crimes — from occupation and colonisation to apartheid and, now, mass destruction in Gaza.

It is also telling what is not said. The Essentials do not prohibit racism in general, despite later rejecting “all forms of discrimination”. There is no explicit rejection of Islamophobia, for example, or anti-Arab racism.

Instead, “oppose all forms of antisemitism” is fused directly with “support the right of Israel to exist”.

That conflation matters.

Because we know that defenders of Israel have repeatedly blurred the line between antisemitism and opposition to the actions of the Israeli state.

So how, exactly, might Axel Springer SE interpret “oppose all forms of antisemitism”?

‘Free Palestine’ is a ‘pro-Hamas topic’
There are very strong clues, let’s put it that way.

The late Axel Springer himself declared:

It is the task of our generation to stand firmly by Israel’s side, even if this causes difficulties for our policies elsewhere.

He further added:

The country does not need encouragement, but advocacy, wherever and whenever it can be provided – in the European Community, in the United Nations, in diplomatic relations, at work, in the family.

He described this as a “German duty”.

In June 2021, when employees complained about the Israeli flag being raised at company headquarters, Mathias Döpfner responded:

I think, and I’m being very frank with you, a person who has an issue with an Israeli flag being raised for one week here, after antisemitic demonstrations, should look for a new job.

He was referring to demonstrations against Israel’s assault on Gaza that May.

In October 2023, a Lebanese employee at Welt TV — part of the Axel Springer empire — was dismissed: he says it was after he challenged the outlet’s pro-Israel positions. Axel Springer SE refuse to comment on “individual personnel matters”.

In an internal email which was leaked that year, Döpfner reportedly summarised his political worldview with the phrase: “Zionism über alles” — “Zionism above all.”

He has penned repeated pro-Israel polemics. “Will we stand with Israel against the enemies of freedom despite the risks, or will we allow fear and opportunism to prevail?” he wrote in October 2023, demanding “massive, unstiting political, financial and military support”.

On a podcast for his employees, Döpfner claimed “a majority on Instagram, on other social media, and in particular on TikTok, took sides for the Hamas’ actions.” He argued that “an almost global wave of Anti-Semitism suddenly showed its ugly face”, which he described as a shock, despite knowing “that it is here and there, well hidden or presented in a politically correct manner as Anti-Zionism or “Woke-ism” or whatever.”

And he said something deeply revealing about TikTok:

“Concretely, more than 4 million posts until today have been published under the hashtag of #FreePalestine or other kind of pro-Hamas topics. And only 50,000 something, 53,000 posts basically standing by Israel.”

“Free Palestine”, he argued, was a “kind of pro-Hamas topic”.

Conflating antisemitism with critique of Israel
When Israel launched its first war on Iran last June, Döpfner declared it was “surprising that Israel is not being celebrated worldwide for its historic, extremely precise and necessary strike.” Instead, he claimed:

the public response is dominated by anti-Israel propaganda. The intelligence and precision of Israel’s actions are not admired but are instead used here and there to perpetuate blatantly antisemitic stereotypes. This attitude is characterised not only by racist undertones, but also by a strange self-forgetfulness.

In other words, he directly conflated critique of Israel’s war with antisemitism.

A few months ago, he quoted claims about atrocities committed on October 7th which included: “A first responder testified before the Knesset that he had seen the severed skulls of three children.” The claims that Israeli children were beheaded have been comprehensively debunked.

He went on to write that:

justified criticism of decisions made by an Israeli government is mixed with deep-rooted hatred of Jews and that, as a result, instead of an obvious global wave of compassion and solidarity, a global wave of cold-heartedness and increasingly aggressive anti-Semitism has emerged.

The piece further criticised the German government — Israel’s most loyal European defender — for “massively” restricting arms sales to Israel. Tellingly, he said that decision meant that “From now on, unconditional support for Israel’s right to exist is effectively subject to conditions.”

He described the recognition of Palestinian statehood “as a reward for the barbarism of October 7″.

Last October, Al Jazeera published an investigation into German tabloid Bild, a cornerstone of Axel Springer SE, headlined “The Story of Israel’s Propaganda Machine Specialising in Anti-Palestinian Incitement’.

Al Jazeera reported that the newspaper had suggested that a Palestinian journalist killed by Israel was a “terrorist”, denied famine in Gaza, and published a lengthy report it claimed had been found on the computer of late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. It transpired that the document was old, not authored by Sinwar, and had reportedly been leaked by Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

The newspaper, reported Al Jazeera, had also “consistently demonised pro-Gaza demonstrators in Germany, labelling them as “mobs”, “Israel-haters”, and “anti-Semites”.

Israel’s supporters in the West have launched the biggest assault on free speech since the height of McCarthyism.

We can see where the Telegraph’s new owners stand on that.

Extracted and republished from Owen Jones’ article on his Battlelines substack. Read the full article here.

It is the people of the Global South, not governments, who must resist this subversion of the concepts of the “nation’ and of non-alignment.

The Indian government’s position on the US-Israeli war against Iran shows an unbelievable degree of pusillanimity.

India attended the recent meeting of about 50 countries called by the United Kingdom where Iran was strongly criticised for closing the Strait of Hormuz, but not a word was uttered against the US-Israeli aggression on Iran.

• READ MORE: Iran war’s big winners: Wall Street, weapons firms, AI and green energy
• ‘Vengeance for all’: How Iran’s Lego videos won narrative war against Trump
• Iran hasn’t survived decades of hostile sanctions, assassinations and sabotage by accident – it’s by strategy
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Likewise, India was one of the sponsors of a resolution at the UN General Assembly which criticised Iran for attacking other countries in the Gulf (though Iran was attacking only the American military bases located in those countries). Yet again, not a word was uttered in that resolution condemning the US-Israeli aggression on Iran.

It is also noteworthy that India took several days before expressing any grief over the assassination Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and several weeks before expressing any shock over the brutal killing of 175 innocent schoolgirls in Minab.

Such pusillanimity, however, is not confined to India: as many as 135 countries were co-sponsors of the dishonest and duplicitous UNGA resolution mentioned above, afraid that they would otherwise offend the Americans.

In fact, apart from a handful of countries in the entire world, none has had the gumption to condemn unambiguously the blatantly illegal and immoral war unleashed by the US-Israeli combine against Iran.

Extreme concern
This is a matter for extreme concern, for the attack on Iran abrogates the concept of sovereignty of nations that had been the core concept in the struggle for decolonisation and had underlain the entire post-colonial order. It destroys, in other words, the very rationale for decolonisation.

This pusillanimity on the part of Third World countries is also a matter of great puzzlement. After all, these are countries that have had long and arduous anti-colonial struggles to achieve the status of independent and sovereign states; how can they remain silent when this very sovereignty is being violated in the case of a fellow Third World state by the armed might of US imperialism?

The answer to this question, no doubt complex, must nonetheless incorporate recognition of at least two fractures that neoliberalism has introduced into our world. One is the fracturing of the concept of the “nation” whose coming into being had been accomplished by the anti-colonial struggle.

This concept of the “nation” had differed fundamentally from the European concept that had developed in the wake of the Westphalian Peace Treaties in at least three ways: first, it was inclusive and did not identify any “enemy within”; second, unlike European nationalism it shunned any imperial ambitions of its own, in the sense of having designs over the resources of distant lands; and third, it did not apotheosise the nation as standing above the people whose “duty” supposedly was to serve it.

The coming into being of this inclusive concept of the “nation” was in turn a reflection of the fact that the anti-colonial struggle was a multi-class struggle; and the dirigiste economic regime that was erected after independence, though it promoted capitalist development, also sought to put curbs on rampant capitalism in the name of achieving “national” development.

This was in the interests of preserving its multi-class support base, which even the monopoly capitalists were not averse to at that time, since they had wanted a trajectory of development where the state exercised relative autonomy vis-a-vis imperialism. The existence of a large public sector was a part of this trajectory.

Further, the policy of non-alignment pursued by these dirigiste regimes had complemented this quest for development in relative autonomy from imperialism. Michal Kalecki, the Polish Marxist economist, had erred in calling such regimes “intermediate regimes” and suggesting that the middle classes held decisive power in such regimes; but he had been right in identifying state capitalism (public sector) and non-alignment as the two most distinctive features of these regimes.

Monopoly bourgeoisie
With globalisation of capital, however, things changed. The domestic monopoly bourgeoisie integrated itself with globalised capital and abandoned its agenda of pursuing a development trajectory that was relatively autonomous of the metropolis.

Sections of the upper professional and bureaucratic segments of society, keen to send their children to study and settle down in the metropolis, joined in as supporters of the neoliberal regime that emerged under the aegis of this globalised capital.

The landed rich too sought their fortunes within this new neoliberal order, which not only promoted rampant unrestrained capitalism, but came down heavily against workers, peasants, agricultural labourers, petty producers and the lower salariat. A schism was effected within the class alliance that had been forged in the course of the anti-colonial struggle.

It was no longer the “nation” against the metropolis that was in focus, but big capital including multinational capital against those social groups which stood in the way of instituting rapid “development” defined exclusively in terms of GDP growth-rates.

The interest of big capital was, by a sleight of hand, identified as “national interest”, and the duty of all classes was to promote it.

This shift in the meaning of the term “nation” meant in effect a fracturing of the “nation” whose coming into being was the desideratum of the anti-colonial struggle. Freedom of the “nation” from imperialist domination, far from being the over-riding objective, was no longer even a desired or a relevant objective for the government within a neoliberal setting.

This is the first instance of “fracturing” referred to above. Because of this fracturing, the criterion on the basis of which the government of a neoliberal regime takes decisions is not whether a particular stance defends national sovereignty, but whether it promotes the material interests of big capital which are considered identical with those of the “nation” in its new meaning.

Deafening silences
Siding with the US-Israeli alliance appears, on balance, more advantageous than standing with Iran, the victim of aggression, from the point of view of the interests of big capital in countries of the Global South. This would go some way to explain the deafening silences, mentioned earlier, in the UNGA and other resolutions.

There is also a second “fracture” brought about by the neoliberal regime. While the neoliberal regime is “sold” to the Global South as ushering in export-led growth that would bring about a higher GDP growth-rate for all countries compared with the earlier dirigiste regime, this claim is completely false.

Since the growth rate of aggregate world demand does not increase when more countries pursue an export-led growth strategy, the neoliberal regime that generalises this strategy among all countries is, in effect, forcing them to engage in Darwinian competition against one another, that is, to pursue a “beggar-thy-neighbour” strategy.

Some countries’ higher growth-rate than before under the export-led growth strategy, it follows, must be at the expense of other countries that now experience lower growth-rate than before.

Countries engaged in a race to outdo one another can scarcely be said to be “co-operating” with one another. The effect of a general pursuit of the neoliberal strategy, therefore, is a de facto abandonment of non-alignment, of a trajectory where countries of the Global South stood with one another to face up to imperialism.

Now, countries of the Global South, each obsessed with achieving higher GDP growth and hence, within the neoliberal paradigm, obsessed with drawing in larger metropolitan investment for this purpose, would rather curry favour with imperialism in order to outdo their neighbours.

This leads to a fracturing of the non-aligned movement, which is the second fracturing we mentioned earlier.

The silence of most countries of the Global South in the face of the US-Israeli aggression on Iran, which may appear puzzling at first sight, is not so puzzling after all.

Subverting both ‘nation’, ‘non-alignment’
Neoliberalism has been at work for quite some time in subverting both the concept of the nation and the concept of non-alignment, abandoning the anti-imperialist core that characterised these concepts, and substituting in their place alternative concepts that prioritise the task of currying favour with imperialism over everything else.

The outcome of this process is what we see today.

Capitalism is invariably hostile to any collective praxis against it, even if this collective praxis takes the form of just trade union action. It believes in atomising economic agents.

Neoliberal capitalism, which represents a return to unrestrained and uncontrolled capitalism once more, brings to the fore this tendency toward the atomisation of economic agents, through a break-up of the class alliance that had participated in the anti-colonial struggle, and through a subversion of the non-aligned movement that had stood for collective opposition by countries of the Global South to imperialist hegemony.

It is for the people of the Global South, not the governments currently promoting the interests of the ruling big bourgeoisie, to extend solidarity to the people of Iran. The struggle of Iran against the US-Israeli alliance is of crucial importance for recovering the sovereignty of the Global South.

Dr Prabhat Patnaik is professor emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The views are personal. This article is republished from Newsclick.

Thousands of protesters took part in the “Stop Wars Aotearoa” rallies across New Zealand today, calling for an end to the illegal war on Iran and the brutal onslaught on Lebanon this week breaching a fragile two-week truce.

While high-powered delegations from Iran and the United States were arriving in Islamabad for historic mediation talks being brokered by Pakistan, protesters in Auckland, Christchurch and other places across New Zealand were challenging the US and Israeli “warmongering” and criticising the New Zealand government’s “shameful” stance.

Led by US Vice-President JD Vance, the Americans arrived to take part in direct talks with their Iranian foes for the first time since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

• READ MORE: Historic Iran-US talks to continue for a second day; Israel pounds Lebanon
• ‘Ten minutes of terror’ – Lebanon death toll tops 300 from Israel’s ‘Black Wednesday’
• Ending Israel’s war on peace – Iran’s 10-point proposal is serious
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Ironically, Americans living in New Zealand were among those protesting in Auckland.

Kelby Dalton of Americans Abroad Against the War told the cheering crowd in Aotea Square that many of his compatriots condemned the US warmongering under President Donald Trump and were leaving the US in droves – not because they hated America, but because “we love America” and want the destructive political direction to change.

Stop Wars Aotearoa organiser Joe Carolan declared the protesters opposed all wars and championed freedom – “We’re going to stand up for the people of Iran, stand up for the people of Palestine, stand up for the people of Lebanon, stand up for the people of Venezuela, stand up for the people of Cuba, stand up for this fight against the American empire.”

Carolan said: “We will not be provoked by those who believe in violence down at the US Consulate, those who say that violence can bring freedom, those who think that Netanyahu can guarantee women’s rights in Iran.

“Are you joking?

Counter-protest
He was referring to a small counter-protest of Israel-supporting and monarchist Iranians outside the US Consulate in downtown Auckland who were calling for resumed bombing of Iran.

“These people are guilty of a genocide where 60,000 people have been killed [in Gaza].

“No liberation for women – or anyone in Iran – can come from the pedophile Donald Trump or the genocider Netanyahu.”

The protesters marched to the US Consulate at the Citygroup Building in Customs Street and staged a “die-in” to mark the targeted slaughter of 168 children at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in the southeastern Iranian city of Minab by US bombs.

This tragedy took place on February 28, the opening day of the illegal and unprovoked US-Israel war on the Islamic Republic.

Bill Bradford of the Workers First Union and Filipino community advocate Mikee Santos and a group of Filipino union activists spoke out about how the US military machine and imperialism had exploited migrant communities around the world, especially in the Middle East.

A wide range of speakers, politicians, civil society leaders and trade unionists earlier addressed the main rally, including Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa’s co-chair Maher Nazzal — “we cannot all be free until Palestine is free” — Labour Party’s Phil Twyford; Green Party’s Ricardo Menéndez-March, Alliance Party’s Victor Billot, Council of Trade Unions’ president Sandra Grey and the union choir.

‘Standing with peace and justice’
Two displaced Afghani women speakers thanked everybody for “standing up against American and Israeli imperialism — and for standing with justice and peace”.

Miriam Majud recited a 13th-century humanist poem “Bani Adam” (“Sons of Adam” or “Human Beings”) by Iranian Sufi poet Saadi Shirazi, in Farsi (Persian) and in English.

Bibi Amena gave a speech highlighting Iranian achievements for women in contrast to mainstream media reports.

“I am not from Iran, and I have never visited Iran. But I want to talk about what Iran has done for my people,” she said.

“In 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Iran opened its borders for us. In 2001, when American and NATO forces invaded and brutally occupied Afghanistan, Iran once again opened its borders.

“For 40 years, Iran hosted millions of Afghan refugees — not in camps, but in cities among their own citizens. They gave us homes, schools, hospitals. They gave us a life of dignity.

“Now the same America that destroyed my home Afghanistan attacks Iran. The same Israel that bombs Gaza bombs Iran.

Today I stand with Iran because yesterday Iran stood with my people — just as Iran has and continues to stand with Palestine, with Yemen, Cuba, Lebanon, Venezuela and with every other oppressed nation fighting for freedom from the chains of neocolonialism.”

She pointed out that while the regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv “love to pretend they care about women’s rights – it’s only while bombing them”.

“Today, Iran’s female literacy rate is 99 percent, one of the highest in the world. Over 60 percent of Iranian university students in science and engineering are women,” she said.

“Again, one of the highest statistics in the world. 49 percent of doctors in Iran are women.

“Iranian women are engineers, pilots, doctors, judges, parliamentarians, and professors. They lead pro-government rallies, they guard their bridges and power plants against US and Israeli bombs.

“They’re not waiting for permission from Tel Aviv or Washington.”

‘We can bring change’
In Otautahi Christchurch, Iranian-Kiwi columnist and writer Donna Miles told protesters that New Zealand and the world ought to leave Iran to sort out its own future free of global interference.

“We can bring change. We have brought change. And we can do so if Iranians are left alone — if sanctions are lifted, if the middle class in Iran are able to breathe. And if civil society is able to thrive.

“This is what we need. Leave us alone. America needs to get out of the Middle East.

“Peace in the Middle East is possible. It’s not unachievable. Israel needs to end its occupation of Palestine and America needs to end its imperialism.”

Miles also questioned the New Zealand government?

“How shameful it was to see [Foreign Minister] Winston Peters standing next to [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio soon after Trump made those tweets threatening extremist war crimes wiping out an entire civilisation, ending a country in one night, taking it back to the stone age — and we have a minister who stood there silent.”

Her critical comments came just days after her article in The Press warning that US President Trump “can’t kill off Iranians’ resilient spirit”.

ANALYSIS: By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares

A two-week ceasefire has partially halted the Israel-US war on Iran. The war accomplished precisely nothing that a competent diplomat could not have achieved in an afternoon.

The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war and it is open again now, but with more Iranian control.

Meanwhile, the chaos continues. Israel is intent on blowing up the ceasefire, as this was Israel’s war from the start.

• READ MORE: This illegal US-Israeli attack on Iran is also an assault on the United Nations
• Israel says no ceasefire with Lebanon, US-Iran talks due
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Israel dazzled Trump with the prospect of a one-day decapitation strike that would put Trump in charge of Iran’s oil. Israel, in turn, was out for bigger prey: to bring down the Iranian regime and thereby become the regional hegemon of Western Asia.

The foundation of the ceasefire is Iran’s 10-point plan, which Trump (perhaps unwittingly) called a “workable basis on which to negotiate.” The plan makes sense, but it is a major climbdown for the US, and probably a redline for Israel.

Among other points, the plan calls for an end to the wars raging in the Middle East, almost all of which have Israel at their root cause. The plan would also resolve the nuclear issue, essentially by going back to the JCPOA that Trump ripped up in 2018.

The Iran War, and the other wars raging across the Middle East, trace back to one core Israeli idea, that Israel will permanently and steadfastly oppose a sovereign Palestinian state and will topple any government in the Middle East that supports armed struggle for national sovereignty.

It is crucial to note that the UN General Assembly has passed multiple resolutions, such as Resolution 37/43 (1982), affirming that political self-determination is so vital, that armed struggle in the quest for self-determination is legitimate.

The UN was born, in part, out of the determination to end the centuries of European imperial domination over Africa and Asia. Of course, there would be no cause for armed struggle if Israel would accept a political solution, notably the two-state solution that has overwhelming support throughout the world.

The peace is within reach, if the US grasps it.
Netanyahu’s core goal may be summarised as Greater Israel. This means no Palestinian sovereignty, and no clear boundaries for Israel even beyond the boundary of historical Palestine under British rule after the First World War.

Zionist extremists like Netanyahu’s political allies, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich favour Israeli control over parts of Lebanon and Syria, as well as permanent control over all of what was British Palestine.

America’s Christian Zionists, exemplified by the US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and a strong voter base of Trump, speak of God’s promise to Israel of the lands between the Nile and the Euphrates. Crazy stuff, but these are real beliefs, nonetheless, and they are conveyed in the White House.

Israel’s strategy is therefore regime change in every country that resists Greater Israel, a plan already foreshadowed in the famous political document “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” written by US Zionist neocons as a platform for Netanyahu’s new government in 1996.

We’ve had constant wars in the Middle East since then to implement the Clean Break vision. This has included the war in Libya to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi, the wars in Lebanon, the war to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the war to overthrow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and now the war to topple the Iranian regime.

This is not to say that the US lacks its own grandiose ideas. Israel wants regional hegemony, this is not a secret. Netanyahu confirmed these ambitions in his recent remarks about Israel becoming “a regional power, and in certain fields a global power.”

On the other hand, American officials dream of global hegemony. And Trump dreams of money. He craves the Iranian oil and repeatedly said so.

In any event, it’s clear that this war was Netanyahu’s creation. He and the Mossad chief came to Washington to sell Trump a bill of goods. It’s not hard. Trump was suckered, while everybody else had their doubts about Netanyahu’s claims of an easy one-day decapitation strike — essentially a replay of the US operation in Venezuela.

It’s pathetic to “listen in” on the White House discussion, as revealed by the New York Times. Netanyahu, a con man, presented rosy scenarios of regime change that US intelligence contradicted, yet Trump foolishly accepted.

Trump and Netanyahu were cheered on by Christian Zionists (Hegseth), Jewish Zionists and real-estate developers (Kushner and Witkoff), a faith healer (Franklin Graham), and high-level sycophants (Rubio and Ratcliffe).

Trump himself who was begging for a ceasefire
Until Tuesday evening, it looked like Trump might lead the world blindly to the Third World War. The vulgarity and brutality of his public rhetoric was unmatched in US presidential history.

Now we know that he was desperately seeking an off-ramp and using Pakistan for that purpose. While Trump was telling the world that Iran was begging for a ceasefire, it was Trump himself who was begging for a ceasefire. The Pakistani leader delivered it.

The ceasefire is good, and the 10-point plan is good, even if perhaps Trump didn’t know what was in it when he said that it was a good basis for negotiation. Israel will, in any event, work overtime to break it, and has already started to do so, with carpet bombing of Beirut that is killing hundreds of civilians, and with other strikes.

A permanent US-Iran agreement is the last thing that Netanyahu wants. That would end his dream of Greater Israel.

Yet there is a way to peace and that is for the US to face reality. Israel is the real “terror state,” waging perpetual war throughout the Middle East for a wholly indefensible reason — to have unchecked freedom to terrorise and rule over the Palestinian people and to expand its borders as Israel’s zealots see fit.

To make lasting peace in the Middle East, the US must end its blank check to Israel’s perpetual wars and join with the rest of the world to force Israel to live within its internationally recognised borders of June 4, 1967.

Iran’s 10-point plan can be the basis of a comprehensive regional peace — if the US accepts the reality of a state of Palestine. In that case, Iran would likely agree to stop funding non-state belligerents, and Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and the entire region could live in mutual security and peace.

That outcome should be the basis of a negotiated agreement of the US and Iran in the next two weeks.

American views clear
The American people have made their views clear. A 2025 Pew survey finds most Jewish Americans lack confidence in Netanyahu and back the two-state solution. Most Americans now view Israel unfavourably, the highest unfavourability in history. Sympathy for Israel has hit a 25-year low. Now the political class must catch up with the public.

The peace is within reach, if the US grasps it. Iran’s proposal is serious and the ceasefire is a fragile opening for a comprehensive settlement.

The question is whether the US will, once again, allow Israel to destroy the peace, or rather this time stand up for America’s interests and the world’s interests in a lasting peace.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed the Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. Sybil Fares is a specialist and adviser in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.

Republished under Creative Commons.

An hour before Trump said he’d cause the death of a “whole civilisation” if Iran didn’t open the strait of Hormuz, an Iranian official said the shipping channel would be reopened for two weeks if the United States stopped bombing Iran.

The US has now stopped bombing Iran.

So we’re back to the status quo before Trump began his war.

• READ MORE: Israel’s Lebanon attacks threaten US-Iran ceasefire as negotiations near
• Trump claims ‘success’ in Iran in just 32 days compared to lengthy US wars
• Other US-Israel war on Iran reports

Only now, Iran can credibly threaten to close the strait if it doesn’t get what it wants from Trump — thereby causing havoc to the US and world economies. Trump’s only remaining bargaining chip is his threat of committing war crimes.

In other words, Tuesday’s showdown was a clear victory for Iran and a clear defeat for Trump (although he framed it as a victory).

The Iran fiasco is only the latest in a host of examples revealing how to defeat Trump.

In addition to Iran, similar strategies have been used by China, Russia, Canada, Mexico and Greenland.

Inside the US
Inside the United States, the people of Minneapolis have used them, as have Harvard University, comedian Jimmy Kimmel, writer E Jean Carroll and the law firms Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and WilmerHale.

What’s the strategy that connects them all? All refused to cave to Trump, despite his superior military or economic power.

Instead, they’ve engaged in a kind of jiujitsu in which they use Trump’s power against him, while allowing Trump to save face by claiming he’s won. Consider:

Iran knew it was no match for the superior might of the US (and Israel). So it used cheap drones and missiles to close the Strait of Hormuz and incapacitate other Gulf oil installations, thereby driving up the prices of oil and gas at the pump in the US, which has put growing political pressure on Trump, months before a midterm election. Hence, Trump has been forced to pause his war.

China knew what to do when Trump imposed a giant tariff on Chinese exports to the US: it put restrictions on seven types of heavy rare earth metals and magnets, crucial to US defense and tech industries. Beijing continues to use these rare earth restrictions as tactical levers in ongoing negotiations over trade, rather than demand complete surrender by Trump on his trade policies.

Russia has leveraged its vast deposits of oil and natural gas in gaining leverage over US allies. It has also demonstrated its potential ability to intrude into US elections (the Mueller report detailed a “sweeping and systematic” campaign by Russia to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election, primarily favouring Trump).

Canada and Mexico have won tariff showdowns with Trump by leveraging the US’s substantial economic dependence on them for components and raw materials, but without crowing about their victories.

Greenland has leveraged public opinion globally and in the United States — overwhelmingly against an American invasion or occupation — to curb Trump’s ambitions there.

Minneapolis resistance
Now, as to what’s happened inside the United States:

The citizens of Minneapolis and St Paul have leveraged their asymmetric power against Trump’s ICE and border patrol agents by carefully organising themselves into a force of non-violent resistance to protect immigrants there.

Harvard University’s strategy for resisting Trump’s interference in Harvard’s academic freedom has been to leverage its influence with the federal courts in Boston and the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, to get rulings that stopped Trump (although he’s still trying).

The comedian Jimmy Kimmel turned a political crisis into a ratings victory by using the public backlash against his suspension from ABC, which Disney owns. Since ABC reinstated him, Kimmel has continued to target Trump, and secured his contract through 2027.

The writer E Jean Carroll defeated Donald Trump in two civil cases over sexual abuse and defamation, ultimately securing over $88 million in damages from him — verdicts that have been upheld by federal appeals courts.

Carroll’s lawyers used a civil lawsuit, requiring a lower burden of proof than proving a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. They presented the jury with Trump’s Access Hollywood tape and testimony from other Trump accusers. His depositions, where he called her a “whack job”, were played for the jury.

The law firms Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, and WilmerHale refused to follow Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms that had represented causes or clients that Trump opposed.

First Amendment rights infringed
The firms leveraged constitutional arguments with the federal courts — arguing that the orders infringed on their First Amendment rights to advocate whatever causes they wished, violated the constitution’s separation of powers because the orders would prevent the judiciary from considering challenges to executive authority, and violated their clients’ rights under the constitution to be represented.

The Justice Department ultimately dropped its fight against these firms in March 2026 after federal appellate judges also found Trump’s orders unconstitutional.

What’s happened to the countries and organisations that have caved to Trump?

All have strengthened Trump’s leverage over them. Europe seems incapacitated, fearing Trump will leave Nato (despite a US law prohibiting it), but unable to decide where to draw the line with him.

The media network ABC continues to lose viewers, while being subject to Trump’s next whims. CBS was purchased by the Trump allies Larry Ellison and his son, David, and is hemorrhaging talent.

Columbia University has been racked by dissent from both students and faculty. The Trump regime continues to make demands of it.

The law firms that caved in to Trump’s executive orders have seen lawyers exit who felt the deals betrayed the firms’ values and principles.

Microsoft dropped Simpson Thacher to work with Jenner & Block — a firm that fought Trump. Students at elite law schools have also reportedly begun to shun firms that struck deals with the Trump regime.

Bottom line: there’s now a clear blueprint for how to defeat Trump. It’s available to any country, organisation or person on which he seeks to impose his will: reject his demands and then use your own asymmetric power — a form of jiujitsu — to turn Trump’s power against him.

Robert Reich, a former US Secretary of Labour, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and he blogs at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and in the UK. This article is republished from his Facebook page — other Robert Reich articles at Asia Pacific Report.

Greenpeace International has announced that the MY Arctic Sunrise — one of its largest vessels — will be taking part in the upcoming Global Sumud Flotilla relaunch in order “to directly challenge Israel’s ongoing blockade of aid to Gaza”.

The green group said the Arctic Sunrise, an icebreaker that’s been part of Greenpeace’s fleet since 1995, will be “sailing alongside more than 70 vessels and over 1000 participants” in the second Global Sumud Flotilla, which is scheduled to set sail from Barcelona on April 12, with subsequent stops in Syracuse, Italy, and Lerapetra, Greece en route to Gaza.

Greenpeace said the Arctic Sunrise “is providing operational and technical support” for the flotilla.

• READ MORE: Other Global Sumud Flotilla reports
• Kia Ora Gaza website

“The devastation inflicted on Gaza has become a dangerous doctrine of impunity, now spreading to Lebanon through relentless destruction and deepening human suffering,” Greenpeace Middle East and North Africa executive director Ghiwa Nakat said in a statement.

“The Greenpeace ship is joining this people-led mission to demand safe, unhindered humanitarian access to Gaza and to challenge the illegal blockade that continues to devastate civilian life.

“We stand firmly against war crimes, deliberate starvation, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and ecocide,” Nakat added.

“This flotilla is a call to governments around the world to end their silence, protect humanitarian action, and act with urgency and principle to uphold international law, human dignity, and justice.”

Specialised medical care
Global Sumud Flotilla organisers said the 2026 mission will focus on specialised medical care, with more than 1000 healthcare professionals aiming to deliver lifesaving medicines and equipment to Gaza, where 29 months of Israeli war and siege have left the Palestinian exclave’s medical infrastructure in ruins.

Last year, dozens of boats carrying hundreds of activists from over 40 nations took part in the last Global Sumud Flotilla — sumud means “perseverance” in Arabic — as it attempted to break Israel’s naval blockade and deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid including food, medicines, and baby formula to starving Gazans amid a growing famine.

Israeli forces intercepted and seized the flotilla vessels in international waters in early October, arresting all aboard the boats and temporarily jailing them in Israel, where some — including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg — said they were physically and psychologically abused by their captors.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition has made numerous attempts to break Israel’s blockade by sea, all of which ended in more or less the same way.

In 2010, Israeli forces raided one of the first convoys carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza by sea. The Israeli attackers killed nine volunteers aboard the MV Mavi Marmara, including Turkish-American teenager Furkan Doğan and a 10th died later.

Numerous experts and the entire United Nations Security Council — except the United States — have called the starvation of Gaza deliberately created by Israel, whose Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, are wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.

Israel — whose assault and siege of Gaza have left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead or wounded — is also facing a genocide case in the International Court of Justice filed by South Africa and formally supported by nearly 20 countries, including Spain, the mission’s country of departure.

Cycle of destruction
“At this time of escalating war, triggered by US and Israeli militaries and cascading into a cycle of destruction and pain across the Middle East, we are honoured to answer the call to join the Sumud Flotilla,” Greenpeace Spain executive director Eva Saldaña said yesterday.

“While world governments have lacked the courage and conviction to uphold international law and their obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza, the Sumud Flotilla has been a shining light of humanitarian solidarity and a symbol of hope in action.”

Global Sumud Flotilla leaders applauded Greenpeace’s decision to participate in its 2026 mission.

“Greenpeace’s history of defending the seas, confronting injustice, and taking action in defence of life makes them a powerful addition to our 2026 spring mission,” said Global Sumud Flotilla steering committee member Susan Abdullah.

“We sail together in the same direction, with a shared determination to help break Israel’s illegal siege of Gaza.”

Republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons.

From time to time, I post transcripts I’ve come across of particularly insightful conversations. Here’s one that’s particularly relevant to the US “No Kings” Day protests at the weekend.

Recently, The Conversation hosted a webinar in which executive editor and general manager Beth Daley interviewed John Shattuck, professor of practice at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and Oliver Kaplan, associate professor at Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs at the University of Denver and a visiting scholar at Stanford University.

Shattuck is the former president of Central European University in Hungary, where he defended academic freedom against a rising authoritarian government. Kaplan is the author of Resisting War: How Communities Protect Themselves. This interview has been condensed and edited for print.

• READ MORE: ‘No Kings’ protests erupt across the US, with a Minnesota focus

BETH DALEY: What is an authoritarian regime, and what are their characteristics?

JOHN SHATTUCK: The authoritarian, often referred to as a “king,” is the ideal role from the point of view of the king, but certainly not from the point of view of the people. Authoritarian characteristics include centralised unlimited power, the opposite of democracy; no accountability and no rule of law; no independent courts; no checks and balances on how the king operates; rule by fear and coercion, and when necessary, in order to carry out the king’s orders, rule by by force.

There are no individual rights or civil liberties except those the king decides to allow those who are loyal to him to have, at least until he decides to take them away.

That’s a nutshell informal description of an authoritarian regime. A special threat today is that an authoritarian can emerge from a democratic election, and, indeed, a democratic election can be used to turn a weak democracy into an authoritarian regime.

But when this happens, it opens the door to challenge the authoritarian in a subsequent election if civic activism can defend the electoral process by which the authoritarian was elected.

BD: What are we seeing and not seeing in the US that other countries have gone through in terms of authoritarian government?

OLIVER KAPLAN: I think we are heading toward an autocracy, if not there already. In their 2026 report, the Varieties of Democracy Project writes that the US is no longer a liberal democracy and is moving into “competitive authoritarianism,” marked by executive overreach and erosion of judicial and legislative checks. The report notes that US democracy is being dismantled at a speed that is “unprecedented in modern history”.

We are seeing shifts in terms of concentration of power to the executive branch and a disregard of the rule of law, things like ignoring court orders and difficulty with holding the executive branch accountable. We are also seeing the militariSation of law enforcement, monitoring of US citizens, and what some refer to as the dual state — that the state is working for some people while causing more challenges for or oppressing other people.

One of the things we’re not seeing at full force yet is a complete shutdown of civic space. We’re able to hold this kind of conversation, and people are still able to dialogue and go out on the street.

There are some efforts at curtailing free speech, and I think there’s some self-censorship possibly happening. But there’s still this open space and a powerful mass movement growing in this country.

USA today:

7 million Americans in the streets today protesting for freedom.
3,000 cities and towns. Every single state. “No Kings” protests against the authoritarianism of the Trump. This is one of the largest demonstrations in American history.

pic.twitter.com/cLAwlXK69f

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) March 28, 2026

BD: John, you were on the front lines, particularly in Hungary as the head of Central European University. What did you see there that has parallels today to the US?

JOHN SHATTUCK: There’s certainly a parallel between Hungary and the US, even though the countries are very different in size, history and background. What I saw in Hungary when I became president of Central European University in 2009 was a weak, new democracy that was only established in 1990 after 70 years of fascism and communism.

I was in Hungary from 2009 to 2016 and, despite the differences, I could begin to see some parallels. Many people had grievances in Hungary about how their economy was operating, particularly after the global financial crisis that affected Hungary more than any other Eastern European country.

Then there was an urban-rural divide, the urban elite versus the rural majority in the country.

Along came a cynical populist-nationalist politician, Viktor Orbán. Orbán started manipulating these grievances, and did so to significantly divide Hungarian society. He attacked many of the institutions of democracy, which were increasingly unpopular because of people’s grievances.

He went after elites, and foreigners, and migrants, and the media. And he blamed all of them for the country’s problems. He then was able to ride these grievances into office.

Once in office, Orbán amended the constitution and laws relating to the Parliament. He undermined the independence of the media and the judiciary so as to centralise power. All of this happened while I was running an international university in Budapest, which remained independent because it received no funding from the Hungarian government.

We were able to resist the increasingly authoritarian regime over issues of academic freedom. The government tried to shut down our programmes of migration studies and gender studies, and tried to censor aspects of our history department.

These authoritarian attacks are similar to what we’ve seen happening in the US, and in fact, Viktor Orbán was greatly admired by Donald Trump, and a lot of the playbook that Orban has followed was mirrored in Project 2025 in the US under Trump.

BD: How do communities respond in different ways to authoritarian regimes?

OLIVER KAPLAN: Pro-democracy movements and protection types of movements at the local level often co-occur. For example, in Colombia there have been various leftist movements and political parties that have pushed for greater democratic opening while communities mobilise to keep people safe and help them cope with repressive conditions.

In places like Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala, communities built trust and support networks to provide aid, such as for people who needed food assistance. This provides space to independently operate and preserve the community.

The US has parallels, such as innovating early warning networks to get advance notice of risks and threats, by communicating using the Signal app. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, villages set up radio networks, and in Ukraine they have sophisticated early warning networks to get word of airstrikes and drone attacks.

Fact-finding and countering stigma are important, and in the US we’re seeing that in the form of the video recording and publicising of harmful actions. This has played out similarly in Syria with fact-finding to protect nongovernment organisations.

There’s also accompaniment where outside actors come in to provide support to communities. Around the world, church organisations play important accompaniment roles. We’re seeing clergy in the US step up and visit places that are at risk.

And then, there are protests, the most visible kind of action. In Minnesota, we’ve seen communities actually setting up community barricades, which has also happened in Mexico, Colombia and Northern Ireland. Communicating the nonviolent nature of these movements is important to avoid any pretext for additional crackdowns.

I think Americans have been taking similar actions to other places around the world in part because there are some similar background conditions: repression and strong social capital networks. Those two things come together to produce these strategies.

BD: Could you speak more about the need to build a clear narrative and a positive one?

JOHN SHATTUCK: There are two basic rules for how to resist authoritarianism that I’ve learned from experience: Build a diverse coalition and develop a unifying theme. You need a diverse coalition in order to appeal to a broad range of the public, and in order to do that, you need agreement on the goal and values of what you’re trying to accomplish.

You need a clear and unifying narrative. The narrative often involves economic issues and issues of corruption, since there’s often a great deal of corruption in authoritarian regimes.

Hungary will have its next parliamentary election in April in which Orbán will seek his fifth term as prime minister. The opposition has developed a broad coalition and a unifying theme, while Orbán is using the centralised instruments of government and media that he controls to try to manipulate public opinion.

The opposition coalition is headed by Peter Magyar, who was once a major supporter of Orbán’s government. Magyar’s name can be magical in Hungary — sort of like a “Joe America” in the US.

With Magyar as its head, the opposition is aiming to peel off supporters of the regime. It’s campaigning on economic grounds, with a positive message and on moderate terms. And most importantly, it includes parties from the left, right and center.

Poland has succeeded in doing what the Hungarian opposition is attempting. It managed to vote out an authoritarian government by putting together a broad coalition to defend the independence of the Polish judiciary. That became a coalition to elect parliamentarians in 2023, and that succeeded in changing the government.

BD: How important is the preexisting social fabric of a community to the success of a protest movement?

JOHN SHATTUCK: It’s important, but complicated. Hungary had a very weak civil society after 70 years of totalitarian fascism and communism. When I was there, the very word to “volunteer,” which we think of as the essence of community action and service, was seen to be a bad word in Hungarian because it was closely associated with collaborating with the regime.

In the US, we’re the opposite in a sense, although the US is now slipping on this. We have a long history of volunteerism, we have all these civil society organisations, we have a tradition of barn raising, people getting together with their neighbours and doing things in their communities. This is very much a part of the American spirit and a core value.

But today, I would say a combination of consumerism and economic individualism coming out of decades of economic deregulation has caused our civil society to fray. But the authoritarian challenge that we face now, and the way in which we are beginning to respond to it, is in fact bringing communities back together again.

I think what happened in Minneapolis is an example of that. And this may reflect a growing capacity to resist an authoritarian regime.

Republished from Robert Reich’s Substack, originally published by The Conversation. Republished under Creative Commons.

Robert Reich is an American professor, writer, former Secretary of Labour, and author of The System, The Common Good, Saving Capitalism, Aftershock, Supercapitalism, The Work of Nations. He is also co-founder of Inequality Media.

Who is in charge of this war: Israel or the United States?

One side believes Israel lured Trump into a trap from which he cannot extricate himself. The tail is wagging the dog.

• READ MORE: US-Israeli war on Iran widens with first attack from Yemen
• US-Israel war on Iran: What’s happening on day 29 of attacks?
• Why is the West dancing to Israel’s tune? What’s leading us to disaster
• Other war on Iran and Palestine reports

The other believes that the US, as the world’s sole military super-power, is the one that writes the geo-strategic script. If Israel acts, it is only because it serves Washington’s interests as well. The dog is wagging the tail.

Certainly, the idea that the tail, the client state of Israel, could be wagging the dog, the military juggernaut that is the US, seems, at best, counter-intuitive.

But then again, there is plenty of evidence that suggests advocates for the tail wagging the dog scenario may have a case.

They can point to the fact that Trump launched this war of choice on Iran despite winning the presidency on an “America First” platform in which he promised: “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

Rushed into war
His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, openly stated that the administration was rushed into war, finding itself apparently unable to restrain Israel from attacking Iran.

Joe Kent, Trump’s top counter-terrorism official, noted in his resignation letter that the administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

Addressing the Israeli Parliament last October, Trump appeared to confess to being under the thumb of the Israel lobby. As he praised himself for moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the illegally occupied city of Jerusalem, he repeatedly pointed to his most influential donor, the Israeli-American billionaire Miriam Adelson, before observing: “I actually asked her once, I said, ‘So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means, that might mean, Israel, I must say.”

A video from 2001 shows Benjamin Netanyahu, now Israel’s Prime Minister, caught secretly on camera, telling a group of settlers: “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.”

Former US president Barack Obama, who ran up against Netanyahu repeatedly as Obama tried and failed to limit the expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements, thought the same.

In his 2020 autobiography, he wrote that the Israel lobby insisted that “there should be ‘no daylight’ between the US and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to US policy.”

Any politician who disobeyed “risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election”.

Obscuring the relationship
But any rigid, binary way of framing the relationship between the US and Israel obscures more than it illuminates.

I addressed this issue in my 2008 book on Israeli foreign policy, titled Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iran, Iraq and the Plan to Remake the Middle East. My conclusion then, as now, was that the relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv was better understood in different terms: as the dog and the tail wagging each other.

What does that mean?

Israel is Washington’s most favoured client state. It must, therefore, operate within the “security” parameters for the Middle East laid down by the US.

In fact, part of Israel’s job — the reason it is such an important client state — is because it has, until now, been able to enforce those parameters on others in the region.

But the story is more complicated than that.

At the same time, Israel seeks to maximise its ability to influence those parameters in its own interests, chiefly by shaping military, political and cultural discourse in the United States, through the many levers available to it.

Mobilised by Zionist lobbies
Zionist lobbies, both Jewish and Christian, mobilise large numbers of ordinary people to support whatever Israel claims to be in both its and US interests.

Mega-donors like Adelson use their wealth to cajole and intimidate US politicians.

Think-tanks with murky funding write legislation on Israel’s behalf that US politicians wave through.

Legal organisations, again with opaque funding, weaponise the law to silence and bankrupt.

And media owners, all too often in Israel’s camp, mould the public mood to stigmatise as “antisemitism” anything that opposes Israeli excesses.

This makes for a very messy arrangement.

The trouble with the idea that the US simply dictates to Israel — rather than that the two are constantly bargaining over what constitutes their shared interests — becomes apparent the moment we consider the two-and-a-half-year genocide in Gaza.

Desire to ‘disappear’ Palestinians
Israel has long had a fervent desire to disappear the Palestinians, whether through ethnic cleansing or genocide.

It wants the whole of historic Palestine, and the Palestinians are an obstacle to the realisation of that goal. Should the opportunity arise, Israel is also keen to secure a Greater Israel that requires grabbing and annexing substantial territory from neighbours, particularly Lebanon and Syria — as it is doing again right now.

After the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, Israel seized on the chance to renew in earnest the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians it began in 1948, at the state’s founding.

It carpet-bombed Gaza, creating a “humanitarian crisis”, to force Egypt to open the floodgates into Sinai, where it hoped to drive the enclave’s population. Cairo refused.

As a result, Israel tried to increase the pressure by slaughtering and starving the people of Gaza. In legal terms, that constituted genocide.

But the idea that the US was deeply invested in Israel carrying out a genocide in Gaza, or directed that genocide, or had any particular interest in the genocide taking place, is hard to sustain.

Washington — first under Biden, then under Trump — gave Israel cover to carry out the mass slaughter of the Palestinian population, and armed and financed the genocide. But that is very different from it having a geostrategic interest in the mass slaughter.

Indifferent to Palestinians’ fate
Rather, the US is and always has been largely indifferent as to the fate of the Palestinians, so long as they are contained. They can be locked up permanently in occupation prisons.

Or ethnically cleansed to Sinai and Jordan. Or given a pretend statelet under a compliant dictator like Mahmoud Abbas. Or exterminated.

The US will bankroll whichever option Israel believes best serves its interests — so long as that “solution” can be sold by pro-Israel lobbies to western publics as a legitimate “response” to Palestinian “terrorism”.

What Israel could get away with changed on 7 October 2023. The US was prepared to approve Israel shifting from a policy of intermittently “mowing the lawn” in Gaza — short wrecking sprees — to the incremental levelling of the whole of Gaza.

In other words, Israel worked all its levers to persuade Washington that it was the right time for it to get away with genocide. It sold to the US the plan that Gaza could now be destroyed.

To present that as Washington’s plan is simply perverse. It was decisively Israel’s plan.

That doesn’t diminish in any way US responsibility for the genocide. It is fully complicit. It paid for the genocide. It armed the genocide. It must own it too.

Similar Iran war analysis
A similar analysis can be applied to the Iran war.

The US and Israel share the same larger policy towards Iran: they want it contained, weak, unable to exert influence. But they do so for slightly different reasons.

Israel demands to be regional hegemon in the Middle East, an invaluable client state with privileged access to Washington policymakers. Its supremacy and impunity, therefore, depend on Iran — its only plausible rival in the region — being as weak as possible and incapable of forging effective alliances with armed resistance groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Equally, Washington wants Israel unthreatened, leaving its ally free to project US imperial power into the Middle East.

But it has a more complex set of interests to consider. It needs to ensure that the Arab monarchies remain compliant, and it does so by both wielding a stick — threatening to unleash the attack dog of Israel on them should they disobey — and proffering a carrot — promising to shield them under its security umbrella against Iran so long as they stay loyal.

The ultimate goal is to guarantee unchallenged US control over the flow of oil and thereby the global economy.

In other words, the US has to weigh far more interests in how it deals with Iran than Israel does.

Effects on the global economy
Unlike Israel, Washington has to consider the effects of an attack on Iran on the global economy, to assess any impact on the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and protect against rival powers like China and Russia exploiting strategic missteps.

For those reasons, Washington has traditionally preferred maintaining a degree of stability in the region. Instability is very bad for business, as is being demonstrated only too clearly right now.

Israel, by contrast, regards its struggle against Iran in existential terms. Many in the Israeli cabinet view it as a religious war. They are not interested in simply containing Iran – a decades-old policy they believe has failed. They want Iran and its allies on their knees, or at least in so much chaos that they cannot pose any kind of challenge to Israeli regional hegemony.

That point was highlighted by Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s former national security adviser, this week in an interview with Jon Stewart. He cited recent comments to him by Israel’s former military intelligence lead on Iran, Danny Cintrinowicz, that Netanyahu’s aim is to “just break Iran, cause chaos”.

Why? “Because,” says Sullivan, “as far as they’re concerned, a broken Iran is less of a threat to Israel.”

In other words, Israel wants to engineer instability in Iran, which is sure to spread instability across the region.

Those two agendas, as should be clear by now, are not easily compatible. Which is why Netanyahu has spent decades working every lever at his disposal in Washington to create an appetite for war.

Had war been self-evidently in US interests, his efforts would have been superfluous.

Israel deployed its lobbies
Instead, Israel has had to deploy its lobbies, marshal its donors and recruit sympathetic columnists to slowly shift the public mood to the point where a war was conceivable rather than patently dangerous.

And most importantly of all, Israel nurtured an intimate, ideological alliance with the neocons — hawkish, zealously pro-Israel US officials — who long ago gained a foothold in the inner sanctums of Washington.

Each recent administration has been a cat-fight over whether the neocons or more “moderate” voices would win out. Under George W Bush, the neocons dominated, leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Israel’s short war on Lebanon in 2006, and a failed plan to expand the war to Syria and then Iran.

I documented all of this in Israel and the Clash of Civilisations.

Under Obama, the neocons were forced to take more of a back seat, which is why his administration was able to sign a nuclear deal with Iran that held until Trump ripped it up in 2018, during his first term as president. Biden, as with so much else, dithered.

In Trump’s second term, the neocons seem to be firmly back in charge, again weaving their mischief. The result — an illegal war on Iran — is likely to be a strategic catastrophe for the US, and a potential, if short-lived, victory for Israel.

So isn’t this the same as saying the tail wags the dog?

Sole repositories of power
No, not least because that assumes the visible realm of US politics — the President, the Congress, the two main political parties — are the sole repositories of power in the system.

Even in this visible sphere, support for Israel has dramatically waned since the Gaza genocide. As the illegal war on Iran grows ever more costly, both in treasure and lives, support for Israel among US voters is going to fall off a cliff.

Israel is for the first time a deeply partisan issue, dividing Democrats and Republicans, as well as a generational divide between the young and old. It is even splitting the MAGA base Trump depends on.

This political polarisation will continue to get much worse, ultimately freeing braver figures in US politics to start speaking out in franker terms about Israel’s nefarious role.

But power in the US isn’t just wielded at the formal, visible level. There is a permanent bureaucracy, with an institutional memory, that operates out of sight. We have gained brief glimpses of its covert operations from the work of Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s publishing platform for whistleblowers, and from Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who revealed illegal mass surveillance by the US state of its own citizens.

Both suffered serious consequences for their efforts to bring a little transparency to a profoundly corrupt system of secret power. Assange was locked away in a London high-security prison for many years as the US sought to extradite him on trumped-up “espionage” charges, while Snowden was forced into exile in Russia to evade arrest and long-term incarceration.

That bureaucracy — sometimes referred to as the Deep State, or the military-industrial complex — doesn’t play or fight fair. It doesn’t need to. It operates in the shadows.

Curtailing Israel’s influence
Were it to so choose, it could undermine the Israel lobby, and thereby curtail Israel’s influence over the visible realm of US politics.

It could effectively do to the leaders of the lobby — AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Zionist Organisation of America, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, Christians United for Israel, and others — what it did to Assange and Snowden.

It could, for example, influence public discourse to begin questioning whether these groups are really serving US interests or acting as foreign agents. That would, in turn, free up space for the media and legislators to call for tighter restrictions on these groups’ activities, requiring them to register as such.

The permanent bureaucracy is doubtless capable of doing much darker, underhand things too.

The fact that it hasn’t chosen to do any of this yet suggests Israel’s goals are not seen so far to be significantly in conflict with US goals.

But that could be about to change. In fact, the current, all-too-public debates about Israel driving the US into a war against Iran — an idea already seeping into popular consciousness — may be the first salvoes in the battle to come.

If the war on Iran turns out to be a catastrophic misstep, as it gives every appearance of being, there will be a price to pay — and leading US politicians are likely to scramble to shift the blame on to Israel. It may be that they are already getting in their excuses.

The all-too-visible freedom Israel has enjoyed in Washington to buy, bully and silence could soon become a central liability. It will not be hard to argue that a system so clearly open to manipulation that the US could be bounced into a self-sabotaging war needs to be remade, to prevent any repeat of such a disaster.

This may be the biggest lesson Washington learns from the war on Iran. That it is time to stop the tail wagging so vigorously.

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 on the author’s Substack and reepublished with permission.

When Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, was assassinated in the opening stages of the US-Israeli war against Iran, I didn’t mourn.

Khamenei was not someone who deserved to be mourned notwithstanding my contempt for the increasing use of assassination by aggressor nations; in this case the United States and Israel.

Having said this, had either US President Donald Trump or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu been assassinated I would have “not mourned” them even more.

• READ MORE: How should NZ respond to the US bombing Iran
• Trump poses headache for NZ
• Luxon’s fumbling, floundering response
• Risky Iran attack gamble
• Government response a disgrace

On the other hand, along with thousands of residents in the Iranian city of Minab a mass funeral, I did privately mourn for the at least 165 schoolgirls and staff killed in the opening hours of the US-Israeli strikes when one of their missiles hit a girls’ elementary school.

Two words distinguish Iran from United States and Israel
Understanding what distinguishes Iran from both the United States and Israel begins with two uncomplimentary words — repression and genocide.

Repression is the action of subduing someone or something by force. This can include suppressing thoughts or desires in people so that they remain unconscious. Iran’s theocratic political system is unquestionably repressive.

If, in some way, you question the regime or the governing values enough there is a high risk of repression. Keep your head down and you are likely to be safe. If not then you are likely to be in danger.

In contrast, genocide is the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

Genocide a characteristic of Israel and US government policies
Israel’s policy of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland now incorporates genocide as the main means of achieving this objective, particularly in Gaza which is there for all to observe.

While Israel is the practitioner of genocide in Gaza, the United States is the enabler and main funder. This is in terms of both funding weapons supplies and political support for Israel’s brutal military occupation of this small remaining piece of Palestinian land.

Without this US support there would be no genocide in Gaza; like the West Bank, just ongoing repression.

While it is right to condemn repressive actions by the Iranian government, it is mindbogglingly immoral for these genocide supporting governments to make any judgment call on Iran, let alone declare war on the country.

Understanding the Islamic Republic
As discussed above, the Islamic Republic is a repressive government towards those who oppose it in some public way. But repression is not its only characteristic.

Iran is a highly diverse nation. While 61 percent of its population are Persian, there are more than 20 ethnic groups in total. Major minority groups include Azeris (16-24 percent), Kurds (7-10 percent), Lurs (2-6 percent), Baloch (2 percent), Arabs (1-3 percent) and Turkmens (2 percent).

As many as 99 percent of Iranians in the Republic are Muslim, predominantly Shia (90-95 percent) with the remainder comprising the Sunni minority.

While the Islamic Republic state is dominated by Shia Islam, there are recognised minority religions which are granted reserved parliamentary seats. These include Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism.

An exception is the Baháʼí faith, a world religion was founded in the 19th century mainly in Iran. It may be the second largest non-Muslim religion in the country.

Many Iranian Baháʼí have a previous Muslim background and are subjected to persecution. However, this is an inherited persecution that goes back to the mid-19th century.

Iran is not repressive towards minority ethnic groups because of their ethnicity. Azeris, for example, are not repressed because they are Azeris; only if they “put their heads above the barricades” so to speak.

The same can be said for Sunni Muslims and non-Muslim religions, except for Baháʼí whose repression is historical, predating the Islamic Republic by over a century.

But if the Republic is only seen as despotic, then an entire historical legacy explaining so much more than this is lost.

Iran is home to one of the world’s oldest continuous major civilisations, with historical and urban settlements dating back to the 5th century BC.

In spite of invasions by foreign powers, such as the Greeks, Arabs, Turks, and Mongols, the Iranian national identity was repeatedly asserted and preserved despite several changes in its dynastic empires.

The Pahlavi dynasty legacy
In 1925, Reza Khan established the Pahlavi (and last) dynasty. Following a military coup he became the new dynasty’s first Shah. In 1941, however, he was overthrown with his son Mohammad-Reza  becoming the second and last Pahlavi Shah.

Initially there were hopes of a constitutional monarchy. However, in 1951. Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq got sufficient parliamentary support to nationalise the British-owned oil industry.

In response, Mosaddeq was briefly removed from power in 1952. But, due to a popular uprising in support of him, he was quickly but reluctantly reappointed by the Shah. This enabled Mosaddeq to briefly exile the Shah in 1953 after surviving a subsequent failed military coup.

However, in August 1953, Mosaddeq was deposed by a successful US-supported military coup that was also actively supported by Britain.

The Shah then returned to power ruling Iran as a brutal autocracy with strong US support until the 1979 revolution and the Shah’s final overthrow.

Oil was central to the Shah’s policies. His government entered into agreement with an international consortium of foreign companies which ran the Iranian oil facilities for the next 25 years, splitting profits 50-50 with Iran. However, Iran was not allowed to audit the companies’ accounts or have members on their board of directors.

The Iran that the Islamic Republic inherited in 1979, on the one hand, had never been colonised; unlike much of Africa and Asia, for example. It had a proud national identity. On the other hand, under the Pahlavi dynasty, particularly in its last 25 years. it had become subservient to the United States and the oil companies.

The Shah’s autocratic regime was overthrown by a powerful mass popular movement. Among the forefront of this unstoppable movement were those that came to lead the new Islamic Republic.

The republic was the consequence of this popular will. While today there is strong internal Iranian opposition to the leadership of the Republic, there is also strong internal support for it

In 1979, Iran’s political system had changed from an autocracy to a theocracy. But there was more to it than this.

The hated legacy, under the last Shah, of the interests of Iranians being subservient to that of US imperialism, was powerful. In no small part this shaped the Islamic Republic’s politics. It was reinforced by US support for Iraq’s protected war against Iran in the 1980s.

Further, whereas the Shah held openly expressed racist views on Arabs, the republic saw it differently.

In particular, it intuitively supported Palestinian self-determination which put it at odds with Zionist Israel.

Iran also empathised with countries with quite different political systems, such as secular Cuba, that had been subjected to continuing US hostility and shared Iran’s antipathy towards US imperialism and supported for Palestine.

While your enemy’s enemy may not be your friend, nevertheless there may be principled shared interests.

Understanding the United States and its imperialism
Imperialism put simply is a policy of extending a powerful country’s economic power, exploitation of, and influence over other countries. Historically this has been through colonisation, invariably by the use of military force.

Historically the biggest imperialist power was the British Empire which, by the early 20^th century, included much of Africa and Asia (and beyond).

The United States is now the world’s strongest imperialist power.

The United States began as an imperialist power in the early 20th century, particularly in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. Since the Second World War it has become, by far, the biggest imperial power reinforced by the most powerful military.

Put simply, capitalism is an economic system relentlessly driven by the maximisation of wealth accumulation. Imperialism is the highest and most extensive form of capitalism.

In this context, particularly since 1953, Iran under the Pahlavi dynasty was a complicit pawn willingly exploited by US imperialism.

This ended in 1979 by the popular will that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic; something US imperialism has never forgiven and the republic has never forgotten.

In other words, the US-Islamic Republic relationship is a recipe for continuous conflict and has reached its highest point with the current US-Israel initiated war.

False confusing justifications for the US-Israel war
The failure of the United States (and Israel) to acknowledge the above discussed escalating conflict to the point of outright war between them and the Islamic Republic has led to their muddled and changing false justifications for the war.

The truth of the matter is that the war centres on the republic’s firm opposition to US imperialism and support for Palestinian self-determination. The use of deceitful justifications is a public relations attempt to fudge this truth.

One false argument is that Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons. However, in the short war last June, the US and Israel boasted that they destroyed Iran’s nuclear weapons capability.

What is the lie — what they said then or what they now say? More likely it is both. After all Israel is the only country possessing nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Further, unlike Iran, it isn’t a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

In fact, there is only one nuclear power in Middle East — Israel. But while Israel is ignored, Iran hypocritically is the focus of deceitful accusations and intense pressure, and now war.

Another false justification is that the US, in particular, wants to save Iranian lives by ending the repression. It is barely worth the time rejecting this claim from supporters and practitioners of genocide.

Further their bombing has already killed more than 1400 Iranians (a reported 30 percent are children) and rising. More than 17,000 have been injured including over 1000 children. Hypocrisy at its peak.

A related occasional justification is restoring democracy. But the Islamic Republic is more democratic than the outright autocracy it replaced and no less democratic than the ruthless US ally Saudi Arabia; admittedly they are both low thresholds.

Perhaps the most damming indictment of the claimed justifications is the recent resignation of Donald Trump’s Director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, Joe Kent.

Explaining this dramatic decision, Kent referred to his concerns about the justification for military strikes in Iran. These included that, despite Trump’s claims, there was no imminent threat from Iran and that the US was “manipulated” by Israel.

Consequently Kent advised that he “cannot in good conscience” back the Trump administration’s war against Iran. Both optimistically and bravely he urged the President to end it.

In fact, Trump’s disingenuousness and underestimation of the strength of Iranian resistance and fightback have made a ceasefire improbable for some time.

Iran already agreed to a ceasefire in June. But the US and Israel broke it even though diplomacy discussions were underway.

US, Israel can’t be trusted
Why would Iran agree to another ceasefire just to give the US and Israel enough time to regroup and start another war against a combative but weakened Iran.

Iran now believes that the US and Israel can’t be trusted and it would be better to try to further weaken them instead. After all, what does Iran have to lose!

Words like reaping and sowing come to mind!

Since the mid-1980s successful New Zealand governments have had an independent foreign policy.

However, especially under the current government, we have drifted back towards being aligned with our former position of being a United States lapdog.

This observable drift was further escalated by the government’s response through Prime Minister Christopher Luxon (in an embarrassingly mashed way) and Foreign Minister Winston Peters.

In summary, while maintaining a loud silence on the US-Israeli bombing of Iran, they condemned Iran’s own bombing response in those neighbouring Arab countries with US military bases.

These US bases would be akin to Iran having its own military bases in Canada and/or Mexico (perhaps Cuba; just saying).

There has been considered media coverage of the government’s response to the war beginning with Bryce Edwards’ Democracy Briefing (March 1): How should NZ respond to the US bombing Iran.

Christopher Luxon fumbles and flounders in toe-cringingly style  

Edwards was followed by two Sam Sachdeva Newsroom articles (March 2 and 3): Trump poses headache for NZ and Luxon’s fumbling, floundering response.

To complete this considered coverage was international relations expert Professor Robert Patman, also in Newsroom (March 3): Risky Iran attack gamble.

However, it took former Prime Minister Helen Clark to demonstrate the type of political leadership we deserved to have (having herself demonstrated this over the disastrous US-led war in Iraq nearly two decades ago).

Her uncompromising criticism of the government’s response included calling it a “disgrace” (March 1): Government response a disgrace.

While Clark didn’t use the term “lapdog” to describe the government’s position, if she had she would have been right.

Repressed by Iranian government – but terrified of regime collapse
The insights of Iranians critical of the Islamic Republic’s repressive nature but even more critical of the US-Israel bombing of Iran are invaluable.

Below is an extract from a Facebook post (March 2) from an Iranian man’s YouTube channel. Consistent with the theme of my comments above, this Iranian expresses the paradox Iranians involuntarily now find themselves in — caught between an internal repressive regime and external narcissistic warmongers.

In his words:

“As an Iranian, I can tell you the situation is no longer just political — it’s existential. We are trapped between two collapsing structures: one internal, one external. On one hand, we face a deeply dysfunctional government, led by the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Republic’s unelected institutions.

“Decades of economic mismanagement, suppression of dissent, and brutal ideological control have alienated multiple generations. No one believes in reform anymore — because every attempt has either been co-opted or crushed.

“But here’s the paradox: We are also terrified of regime collapse — because we’ve watched the aftermath of Western intervention in countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. Each was promised freedom; each descended into chaos, civil war, or foreign occupation.

“So no, we don’t trust the US or Israel. Not because we support our regime — but because we know how imperial powers treat ‘”liberated” nations in the Middle East.

“Freedom, in their language, often means vacuum, fire, and permanent instability. Right now, many Iranians live with three truths at once: The Islamic Republic is morally and politically bankrupt. The alternatives offered by foreign actors are not liberation — they’re collapse.

“A bad government is survivable. No government is not. We are not silent because we agree. We are cautious because we’ve learned — too well — what happens when superpowers decide to “help”.

“In a sentence: Iran is a nation held hostage by its own regime, but haunted by the fate of its neighbors. We are stuck in a house we hate, surrounded by fires we fear more.”

The final word — and what a word it is
Sahar Delijani is an Iranian American author most known for her internationally acclaimed debut novel, Children of the Jacaranda Tree. It has been translated into 32 languages and published in more than 75 countries.

In her own courageous and insightful words:

I was born in an Iranian prison. My parents were held in their jails. My uncles lie in their mass graves.

Nothing you can tell be about the crimes of the Iranian regime that I haven’t lived in blood and bone.

That does not mean that I want my people bombed, maimed, killed, their homes in ruins.

If your vision of liberation is only through the destruction of innocent lives, then it’s not freedom you’re after.

These words are more than eloquence; more than heart rendering. They convert complexity into simplicity; they are powerful; they speak truth to power.

They deserve to be the last word in this article.

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.

Since the Solomon Islands established diplomatic relations with China in 2019, the Pacific country has become a strategic arena for Beijing’s influence.

By capitalising on the economic fragility of the local media sector, China has stepped up conditional funding, editorial partnerships and influence programmes to disseminate its narratives.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the Solomon Islands’ government to make the viability and independence of the media sector a priority.

• READ MORE: Other Solomon Islands media reports

One day in January 2024, Lloyd Loji, publisher of the Island Sun, one of the country’s leading dailies, reportedly received a call from a Chinese diplomat.

According to the investigative outlet In-depth Solomons, the diplomat expressed the embassy’s “concern” about an op-ed published that same day on the election of the new president of Taiwan and its implications for relations between China and Western countries.

At the end of the call, the Chinese diplomat explicitly asked the newspaper to relay articles he had sent, reflecting Beijing’s official position on regional affairs.

The Chinese diplomat did not stop at interfering in the editorial line of the Island Sun.

In-depth Solomons reports that he also emailed the owners and editors of the country’s main media outlets, urging them to adopt the Chinese narrative on the Taiwanese elections and sharing two articles he asked them to publish.

The Solomon Star, the other major daily of the Solomon Islands, duly published the articles supplied by the Chinese embassy. Both the Solomon Star and Island Sun depend on Chinese funding as the country’s media landscape is facing structural economic difficulties.

Economic precarity as Beijing’s gateway
With fewer than 700,000 inhabitants and a limited advertising market — which is increasingly dominated by social media companies — news organisations in this nation face structural economic hardship.

These vulnerabilities deepened during the covid-19 pandemic and the collapse of traditional press revenues which mostly consist of advertising, making external funding essential to survival, whether from Australia, China or the United States.

Unlike support from other foreign partners, Chinese assistance often comes with editorial conditions.

After 15 years as a journalist in the Solomon Islands, Priestley Habru — now a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide — told RSF about the demands made by the Chinese embassy to Island Sun after he left the outlet. According to his network, after the diplomatic mission donated computers, the newsroom was instructed to “stop publishing articles on Taiwan’s President.”

An investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an international investigative journalism network, also revealed that in 2022 the Solomon Star sought SI$1.15 million (about US$140,000) from China to modernise its infrastructure, pledging in return to promote Beijing’s image as the islands’ “most generous and trustworthy” partner.

Following revelations about attempts by Chinese diplomats to directly interfere with the Island Sun and the country’s leading media outlets in early 2024, Beijing appears to have adopted a more discreet approach.

Ofani Eremae, president of the Media Association of Solomon Islands (MASI), explained to RSF that several local outlets have signed agreements with Chinese state media to use the state media’s content — which is fully controlled by the Chinese authorities — free of charge.

In early 2026, CCTV+, China’s state-owned international video news service, also offered MASI and In-depth Solomons use of its raw video footage and live broadcast signals free of charge, and invited them to sign cooperation agreements. Both In-depth Solomons and MASI have not yet responded to the proposal.

A global coalition of activists is preparing to launch the largest ever flotilla of aid ships aimed at breaking Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), made up of civil society and grassroots groups from South Africa, Spain, Ireland, Türkiye, Norway, Brazil, France — and Aotearoa New Zealand — is planning to sail again in spring this year.

In October 2025, Israeli forces kidnapped the crew members of 41 aid ships as they approached the shores of Gaza.

• READ MORE: Kia Ora Gaza and NZ’s contribution to the blockade busters
• Activists announce new, bigger aid flotilla to set sail for Gaza in March
• Other Gaza Freedom Flotilla reports

Activist Greta Thunberg and Novara Media contributor Kieran Andrieu were among those detained for several days and subjected to violence and abuse by guards that they said amounted to torture.

Organisers did not specify how many ships would be involved this time, but in February the Nelson Mandela Foundation said there would be more than 100 boats.

Mandela’s grandson, Mandla Mandela, was among those who took part last year.

“Following the sailing of FFC’s Madleen boat in June 2025, a wave of new initiatives emerged, expanding the movement into a broader international effort to send not just one boat, but fleets, and not just a mission, but a coordinated, sustained challenge to Israel’s siege and violent settler colonial policies,” the FCC said in a statement.

“Our actions aim to uphold international law and to support the Palestinian people’s rights to freedom of movement, self-determination, and dignity.

“With our governments fueling genocide and failing to uphold their legal and moral obligations, the people of global civil society are rising together in larger and larger numbers.”

Despite agreeing to a ceasefire in October last year, Israel has continued its genocide in Gaza, attacking and killing civilians there on an almost daily basis, while severely restricting the entry of food, medicine and other essentials into the strip.

“This flotilla is collective action on a massive global scale — uniting activists, legal experts, parliamentarians, medical professionals, engineers, artists, journalists, and other people of conscience across the world,” the FCC said.

Joshua Carroll is a writer and journalist, and a contributor to Novara Media.

#MyAgendaSumud#GlobalMovementtoGaza#gazzesanageliyoruz#globalsumudflottilla pic.twitter.com/NX1mdhC0Vo

— GlobalSumudflotilla (@1ElegantFriends) October 1, 2025

ANALYSIS: By Ramzy Baroud

• Israel’s military strategy has long relied on psychological dominance and deterrence built on overwhelming violence.
• Massacres during the Nakba helped establish fear as a strategic tool to weaken Palestinian resistance.
• Doctrines such as the Dahiya Doctrine and “mowing the grass” reinforced Israel’s image of invincibility.
• The Gaza genocide and regional escalation have severely weakened Israel’s psychological deterrence.
• The war on Iran may accelerate the collapse of Israel’s most important strategic asset: fear.

READ MORE: Hormuz fears spike; Israel kills 19 in Lebanon; Gulf states face Iran raids
Other US-Israeli war on Iran reports

Wars are rarely fought only on battlefields. They are also fought in the minds of societies, in the perception of power and vulnerability, and in the political imagination of entire regions.

Israel understood this principle early in its history, and psychological dominance became a central component of its military doctrine.

From the earliest years of the Zionist project, the idea that power must appear overwhelming was openly articulated. In 1923, the Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in his famous essay The Iron Wall that Zionism would only succeed once the indigenous population became convinced that resistance was hopeless.

Only when Palestinians realised they could not defeat the Zionist project, he argued, would they accept its permanence.

The Nakba reflected the logic
The events surrounding the Nakba of 1947–48 reflected this logic. Between 800,000 and 900,000 Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee their homes, as hundreds of villages were destroyed or depopulated.

The expulsions occurred through a combination of direct military assault, forced displacement, and the collapse of Palestinian society under war.

Massacres played a crucial role in spreading fear. The killings at Deir Yassin in April 1948, in which more than 100 civilians were killed by Zionist militias, quickly reverberated across Palestine. But Deir Yassin was only one among many massacres that occurred during that period.

Killings in places such as Lydda, Tantura, Safsaf, and numerous other villages contributed to a climate of terror that accelerated the depopulation of Palestinian communities.

The psychological impact of these events was enormous. News of massacres spread from village to village, convincing many Palestinians that remaining in their homes meant risking annihilation.

The lesson was clear: war could function not only as a tool of conquest but as an instrument of psychological domination.

The Doctrine of Fear
Over time, this approach evolved into a broader strategic culture that emphasised deterrence through overwhelming violence. Israel’s wars were designed not only to defeat enemies militarily but to reinforce a perception that resistance against Israel would always end in devastating consequences.

Israeli leaders have frequently expressed this philosophy openly. In the early years of the state, Moshe Dayan, one of Israel’s most influential military figures, famously declared that Israelis must be prepared to live by the sword.

The remark captured the belief that Israel’s survival depended on constant readiness to use force and on maintaining a reputation for military ruthlessness.

Decades later, Israeli leaders continued to frame the country’s identity in similar terms. In the mid-2000s, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak described Israel as a “villa in the jungle,” a phrase that reflected a worldview in which Israel saw itself as a fortified island of civilisation surrounded by hostile and supposedly barbaric surroundings.

This perception reinforced the idea that Israel must always project overwhelming strength. Any sign of weakness, according to this logic, would invite attack.

The doctrine took more concrete form in the early 21st century. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Israeli strategists articulated what later became known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after the Beirut suburb that was heavily bombed during the conflict.

The doctrine advocated massive and disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure associated with resistance movements.

The purpose was not only to destroy military targets but to inflict such devastation that entire societies would be deterred from supporting resistance groups.

A similar philosophy guided Israel’s repeated wars on Gaza. Israeli strategists began referring to these periodic campaigns as “mowing the grass.” The phrase suggested that Palestinian resistance could never be permanently eliminated but could be periodically weakened through short and devastating military operations designed to restore Israeli deterrence.

For decades, this strategy appeared to work. Israel’s military superiority, combined with unwavering American support, reinforced an image of invincibility that shaped political calculations across the Middle East.

But psychological dominance depends on belief, and belief can erode.

Gaza and the crisis of deterrence
The first major rupture in Israel’s aura of invincibility occurred in May 2000, when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon after years of occupation and sustained resistance from Hezbollah. Across the Arab world, the withdrawal was widely interpreted as the first time Israel had been forced to retreat under military pressure.

Israel attempted to restore its dominance in the 2006 Lebanon war, but the outcome again challenged the image of decisive Israeli military superiority. Despite massive bombardment and ground operations, Hezbollah remained intact and continued to launch rockets until the final days of the conflict.

Yet the most profound blow to Israel’s psychological doctrine occurred decades later with the events surrounding October 7 and the war that followed.

Israel’s response to October 7 was the devastating Gaza genocide. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were killed or wounded, and nearly the entire Strip was destroyed,

The scale of violence was unprecedented even by the standards of previous Israeli wars on Gaza. Yet the objective was not merely military retaliation or collective punishment. It was also an attempt to restore the psychological balance that Israel believed had been shattered.

This logic had been expressed years earlier by Israeli leaders. During Israel’s earlier war on Gaza in 2008–09, then-Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni openly suggested that Israel must respond in a way that demonstrates overwhelming force: When Israel is attacked, “it responds by going wild — and this is a good thing”.

In other words, war itself functioned as psychological theatre. But the Gaza genocide produced a very different outcome.

The myth begins to collapse
Modern wars unfold not only through military operations but through images that circulate instantly across the world. During the Gaza genocide, countless videos spread across social media showing Israeli armoured vehicles — including the once-feared Merkava tanks — being struck by relatively simple Palestinian anti-tank weapons.

For generations, Israel’s military power had been associated with technological invincibility. Suddenly, millions of viewers were witnessing something entirely different: a powerful army struggling against resistance fighters operating under siege conditions.

The war on Iran has intensified this psychological transformation.

For decades, Israeli society — and much of the region — believed that Israel’s territory was protected by an almost impenetrable defensive shield. The sight of waves of Iranian missiles striking targets inside Israel has therefore carried enormous symbolic weight.

These images challenge one of the most deeply embedded assumptions in Middle Eastern politics: that Israel is militarily untouchable.

At the same time, other actors are exploiting this shift in perception. Hezbollah continues to maintain significant military capabilities despite repeated Israeli attacks. Palestinian resistance groups remain active despite the devastation of Gaza.

Meanwhile, Ansarallah in Yemen has disrupted shipping routes in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, demonstrating how even non-state actors can reshape strategic realities.

Existential frame
Israeli leaders themselves increasingly frame the current confrontation as existential. Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly described the war as a struggle for Israel’s survival, echoing earlier language about living by the sword.

Yet the deeper crisis may not be purely military. Israel remains one of the most heavily armed states in the world. But the aura of invincibility that once magnified that power is fading.

Once fear begins to disappear, restoring it becomes extraordinarily difficult.

And that may be the most important consequence of the war on Iran — not the destruction it produces, but the collapse of the psychological doctrine that sustained Israeli power for decades.

Dr Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of eight books. His latest book, Before the Flood, was published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include Our Vision for Liberation, My Father was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Dr Baroud is a non-resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). This article was first published by The Palestine Chronicle and is republished here with permission. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

COMMENTARY: By Michael West

We are led by fools and sycophants. The illegal, unprovoked invasion of Iran is not just garden-variety stupidity. This is stupidity on a grandiose, stratospheric scale.

The Israeli propaganda narrative that Iranians would sprinkle rose petals at the feet of their invaders has not come to pass. It has already been demolished in fact.

Instead of bringing freedom and democracy — “regime change” — we have brought chaos, possibly a world war, and definitely the destruction of the Middle East.

• READ MORE: War rages in the Middle East as Trump vows to continue Iran attack — death toll tops 1000
• Iran mourns 165 girls, staff killed in school strike during US-Israel war
• Other US-Israel attack on Iran reports

The world economy is being hit hard as we write; oil prices spiralling, energy prices about to soar, and the inexorable spectre of inflation and recession.

And it didn’t have to happen.

This was a war of choice. Even without the “Epstein Coalition” — as the Iranian media so aptly dubs their invaders — murdering 165 Iranian school girls on day one, “peace through strength” was never going to happen.

Quite the contrary. The illegal and unprovoked invasion of Iran has hardened the resolve of Iranians, who are massing in their hundreds of thousands across the country to mourn their dead and chant “Death to America”, to back their regime.

Where was the advice?
The Epstein Coalition killed the Ayatollah, who was actually against nuclear power; he was a moderate.

Did Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong not seek advice from Foreign Affairs that attacking Iran was folly, that the anti-regime protesters were a minority, that the pre-invasion protests were a Mossad and CIA psyop, that Iran might attack US proxy states in the region, that invasion would be a Brobigdadgian mistake?

Or did they ignore the advice in favour of a Washington regime compromised by the Epstein pedophile scandal?

And now, we see the feeble, hypocritical whining by Israel and its supporters about Iran attacking the Gulf states. Is that our only moral defence?

Decades of supporting these regimes: Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — US proxy states all — regimes now unravelling, the oil price is soaring, inflation and recession are beckoning globally.

Images are emerging from Bahrain of locals cheering on the Iranian missiles. Were DFAT and our politicians unaware of popular angst in the Gulf states against American imperialism?

And what did they expect Iran to do in the face of this existential threat? Not blow up American bases and infrastructure while the US attacked them; after the US betrayed them at the very negotiating table when they were offering significant concessions on nuclear enrichment, all to avoid war? This war.

War drums over Tehran.             Video: The West Report

Australia, the US flunkies
Yet here was Australia, Saturday night, first out of the blocks worldwide to throw its support behind Donald Trump and his preposterous “Operation Epic Fury”, a probable pedophile being blackmailed and led around by the genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu like a pony at the fairground show.

“Operation Epstein Fury”, it was fast labelled. The soaring, craven stupidity is hard to grasp. Both major parties backing it.

Albo first, then Angus Taylor rushing to tow the Donald’s line. Then, One Nation’s Pauline Hanson, too, who even congratulated and praised Netanyahu. We are led by fools and sycophants.

The flawed defence of atrocity
To address the empty rhetoric of the pro-war lobby, criticism of this war does not equate to support for the regime in Iran. Defenders of the US-Israel atrocity are busy with their swarms of social media bots peddling the argument that “you are an Islamist terror supporter” if you criticise the invasion.

This is the 2026 version of “You are a Hamas supporter” if you argue against genocide in Gaza.

The cold facts of this debacle are that regime change does not work, that Iran did not want this war, that Iran appears to be exceptionally well prepared, that the Epstein Coalition, which Australia supports, is daily backing war crimes: blowing up hospitals, schools and civilian infrastructure.

This is a war which has already been lost.

The obvious reality is that regime change wars are a demonstrable failure. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Iraq — a million dead, irretrievable regional stability. In Afghanistan, 20 years, trillions of dollars spent, four US presidents, six Australian PMs — all to replace the Taliban . . . with the Taliban.

And here we are, the world’s busybodies, doing it again.

Who would ever negotiate with the US in good faith again, or Israel for that matter? Iran did not want this war. Iran has not attacked another country in 300 years.

The US lured them to the negotiating table, then, without warning, murdered their leadership. This echoes last year’s 12-day war, where Israel and the US lured them in on the premise of good faith talks, then murdered them and now play the victim.

What did they expect Iran to do in the face of this existential threat?

The record speaks for itself. The US is the biggest invader of other countries in history. Israel has, last year alone, attacked Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Palestine, Qatar, Tunisia, Malta, and Greece.

Six illegal attacks of sovereign nations, as well as three illegal attacks in international waters equals nine all up. In one year.

And now they are invading Lebanon again, seizing more territory as their puppets, America, fight their campaign against Iran.

Albo, what are you doing?
We know who the warmongers are. We are the warmongers. Yet, in his bizarre statement of support, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was the fastest out of the blocks of all the allies on the weekend, issuing a false statement.

Australia stands with the brave people of Iran in their struggle against oppression.

For decades, the Iranian regime has been a destabilising force, through its ballistic missile and nuclear programs, support for armed proxies, and brutal acts of violence and intimidation.

Iran…

— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) February 28, 2026

The claim, echoed by the usual warmongers of the Lib-Lab establishment, is that Iran is guilty of attacks on Australian soil, referencing alleged attacks on a deli in Bondi.

Apart from the common sense, why would Iran commit an act of terror on a deli in Bondi? Senior police have conceded that there is no evidence of this.

The nuclear furphy
Then there is the age-old claim that Iran is about to produce nuclear weapons. The US and Israel’s nuclear risk claims have been so roundly discredited it’s a joke.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to instigate a war against Iran for 30 years — claiming Iran is days away, weeks away, months away from nuclear missiles.

And they were at the negotiating table again when the Epstein forces murdered them.

The propaganda
We are now seeing mainstream media decry the “illegal attacks” on Israel and the Gulf states. Yet the ‘victim card” is tapped out.

Around the world, outside the legacy media propaganda, there is little sympathy for Israel having razed Gaza and slaughtered between 72,000 and 700,000 Palestinians while stealing more land in the West Bank daily.

It will continue. The media and political classes have failed so majestically that they can only try to salvage their authority with more propaganda.

The deplorable coverage of the murdered schoolgirls in Iran is a case in point. The “40 beheaded babies” and the “mass rapes” of Hamas filled the headlines in the West on October 8, 2023. Yet real murders — 165 murdered schoolgirls — have hardly rated a mention. Yes, a mention perhaps, but a side story, buried, no headlines of outrage.

Can’t handle the truth?

Is the truth too hard to handle? Is it not evident to everybody except the most brainwashed advocate of the Epstein lobby that Israel — the government, the state — is the problem here?

Netanyahu has won his ambition to drag America into a war against Iran, and if you follow the money, while world stock markets teeter, the stock market in Tel Aviv is surging, replete with weapons companies as it is.

Meanwhile, the ASX is tanking, ergo our savings. Oil prices are surging, ergo higher energy prices and inflation. The Houthis, Iran’s allies, are shooting again in the Red Sea while, on the other side of the Arabian peninsula, Iran has blocked the Straits of Hormuz, choking off a large chunk of the world’s oil supply.

Higher prices in India and China will mean higher prices for imports and inflation around the world.

The lessons of history have not been learnt; in fact, they have been discarded in spectacular fashion.

> 70 years ago, Iran looked just like any Western country.
> Short skirts, rock’n’roll, open universities.
> It’s 1953. Iran elects a secular socialist: Mohammad Mossadegh.
> He nationalizes oil. That pisses off BP.
> Cold War excuse.
> CIA and MI6 stage a coup. Operation Ajax.
>… pic.twitter.com/ZNWaLdBlCN

— Dr. Simon Goddek (@goddek) March 1, 2026

Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says New Zealand’s stance on the United States and Israeli bombing of Iran mirrors that of Australia.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the government supported the United States acting to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

A statement by Luxon and Foreign Minister Winston Peters yesterday “acknowledges” the strikes.

• READ MORE:  Trump says Iran attacks to continue until ‘all objectives’ achieved
• World leaders react cautiously to U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran
• Critics say weak NZ response over US-Israel attacks on Iran a ‘disgrace’
• UN’s Guterres condemns US-Israeli strikes, retaliatory attacks by Iran
• Other US-Israel attack on Iran reports

Asked on RNZ’s Morning Report whether New Zealand supported the attacks, Luxon repeatedly refused to say the word, but said it condemned the Iranian regime as evil and as having claimed countless lives.

“We think Iran has been repressing its own people. We think it’s been arming proxies and terrorist organisations. We think it has been developing its ballistic and nuclear programmes and years of diplomacy hasn’t actually paid any fruits,” he said.

“We understand fully why the Americans and Israelis have undertaken the independent action that they have taken to make sure Iran can’t threaten people.”

Pressed on whether the strikes were legally right, Luxon said it would be up to the US and Israel to explain the legal basis for their attacks.

NZ should back international rules
Former Prime Minister Helen Cark has called the government’s stance a “disgrace” and says New Zealand should support a rules-based international order.

Luxon said what was disgraceful was the repressive Iranian regime which had killed thousands of its own people who had taken to the streets calling for freedoms.

“Iran has been a destabilising force. It has supported armed proxies throughout the region. It has seen tens of thousands of people murdered by own government, who were asking for freedom and rights.”

Australia and Canada have openly supported the strikes on Iran.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for “genuine dialogue and negotiations” after the US and Israel military strikes across Iran, calling the attacks a grave threat to “international peace and security”.

In a statement on Sunday, Luxon and Foreign Affairs Minister and Winston Peters said New Zealand had consistently condemned Iran’s nuclear programme and its “destabilising activities” in the region and “acknowledged” the strikes.

“Iran has, for decades, defied the will and expectations of the international community. The legitimacy of a government rests on the support of its people. The Iranian regime has long since lost that support,” they said.

“In this context, we acknowledge that the actions taken overnight by the US and Israel were designed to prevent Iran from continuing to threaten international peace and security.”

Luxon and Peters condemned in the “strongest terms Iran’s indiscriminate retaliatory attacks” on neighbouring states.

The statement also said “we call for a resumption of negotiations and adherence to international law.”

Call out illegal strike
Clark told Morning Report said the statement was a disgrace.

“What was wrong with it was it didn’t call out the illegal strike against Iran in the middle of diplomatic negotiations “which were going quite well and further talks were scheduled,” she said.

“The whole point of international law is to put rules around when force is legitimate.”

“A strike is justified if there is an imminent threat of attack, which clearly there was not.”

She said the initial strikes by the US and Israel violated international law.

“The New Zealand government seems only interested in the Iranian retaliation and not looking at the reason for the retaliation, which was the attack by the United States and Israel,” she said.

“I think it’s consistent with a steady drift in New Zealand foreign policy to realign strongly with the United States, which at this particular time seems even more questionable as a strategy.”

“We’re not putting a stake in the ground in defence of the international rule of law.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

For decades, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American neoconservatives have dreamed of only one foreign policy goal — having the United States fight a regime-change war against Iran.

With the Oval Office occupied by Donald Trump — who campaigned for a full decade on a vow to end regime-change wars and vanquish neoconservatism — their goal has finally been realised.

Early Saturday morning, the United States and Israel began a massive bombing campaign of Tehran and other Iranian cities.

• READ MORE: US, Israel attack Iran live: Israel claims Khamenei killed, Iran denies
• Israel strikes two schools in Iran, killing more than 100 people
• Marilyn Garson: Waking up to terror in this new world of impunity
• Other US-Israel attack on Iran reports

President Trump posted an eight-minute speech to social media purporting to justify his new war, dubbed “Operation Epic Fury.”

Trump’s war cry was filled with the same slogans and clichés about Iran that Americans have heard from the carousel of bipartisan neocons dominating US foreign policy for decades: Iran is a state sponsor of “terror”; it is pursuing nuclear weapons; it took American hostages 47 years ago (in 1979); it repressed and kills its dissidents, etc.

As if to underscore how fully he was embracing the very foreign policy dogma he vowed to reject, Trump invoked the Marvel-like “Axis of Evil” formulation that White House speechwriter David Frum wrote for George W. Bush at the start of the War on Terror.

Iran’s government, President Trump proclaimed, is one determined to “practise evil”. This is how Bush — speaking of Iraq, Iran and North Korea — put it in his 2002 State of the Union address: “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil.”

Not quick targeted bombing
Trump left no doubt about the scope and ambition of his new war. This will not be a quick or targeted bombing run against a few nuclear sites, as Trump ordered last June as part of Israel’s 12-day war with Iran.

There is nothing remotely constrained or targeted about any of this. Instead, this new war is what Trump called a “massive and ongoing” mission of destruction and regime-change, launched in the heart of the Middle East, against a country of 93 million people: almost four times the size of Iraq’s population when the US launched that regime change war back in 2003.

That Trump claimed to have “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme last June — just eight months ago — was not something he meaningfully acknowledged in his new war announcement, other than to vaguely assert that Iran somehow resumed their nuclear programme.

In fact, Trump seemed to delight in repeating the same triumphalist rhetoric that he used last year when he assured Americans that Iran’s nuclear programme could no longer pose a threat as a result of Trump’s triumphant Operation Midnight Hammer.

In lieu of outlining any clear mission statement for this new war, let alone a cogent exit strategy, Trump offered a laundry list of flamboyantly violent vows.

The US will “totally obliterate” Iran’s ballistic missile programme (which Iran could not use to reach the American homeland but which Trump admitted last June caused Israel “to get hit very hard” in retaliation).

Trump also promised that the US would “annihilate” Iran’s navy. And he told Iranians: “the hour of your freedom is at hand . . . bombs will be dropping everywhere.”

Prepared for US body bags
Trump also attempted to prepare the nation for caskets and body bags of American soldiers returning to the US.

“The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost; we may have casualties,” the President said. But, said the man who did everything to avoid military service including during the Vietnam War, mass death of American soldiers “often happens in war”.

In sum, Trump just launched the exact war that most of his MAGA movement professed to oppose. That included one of Trump’s most influential supporters, the late Charlie Kirk, who repeatedly maligned the neocons’ drive for war with Iran as “pathologically insane,” and warned that grave disaster of historic proportions would be the result:

The false claims behind this new war with Iran are ones we have extensively documented.

In Trump’s war announcement, he claimed — as he did at Tuesday’s State of the Union address — that Iran refuses to promise that it will not obtain nuclear weapons. The exact opposite is true: Iran has stated this clearly, unequivocally and repeatedly, and did so as recently as this week.

“Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon,” proclaimed Iran’s Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi.

The consequences of this new Trump/Netanyahu war of choice cannot be predicted with any degree of certainty. Already, Iran has launched numerous retaliatory ballistic missiles at Israel, as expected, and has also attacked US military bases in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait.

But the lack of predictable outcomes is, of course, precisely the point. If the US and Israel succeed in their stated goals of widespread “annihilation” and regime change, then they will create, at the very least, a huge power vacuum in the middle of the world’s most volatile region that will require US resources and a sizable military presence for years if not decades to come.

One of the world leaders most responsible for the Iraq War, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, admitted that it was the invasion of Iraq that gave rise to ISIS.

Massive fraud
It is hard to overstate what a massive fraud Donald Trump, his campaign and his political movement are. For more than a decade, Trump has ranted and raved against the evils of regime-change wars and neoconservative dogma, only to launch a new war that most perfectly encapsulates and aggressively advances both.

He spent years falsely warning that former President Obama would start a war with Iran because of how weak and inept Obama supposedly was at negotiation and diplomacy, only to now do that himself (rather than start a new war with Iran, as Trump predicted, Obama entered a diplomatic agreement with them which major nuclear bodies attested was effective in monitoring Iran’s nuclear activities: a deal which Trump, at Israel’s insistence, tore up in 2018).

Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump mercilessly mocked Marco Rubio for receiving millions in donations from Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, money that Trump said would “mould [Rubio] into [their] perfect little puppet,” only for himself to become not only the largest beneficiary of Adelson funding in history, but to become the ultimate puppet of the Adelsons’ agenda, one which Trump has clearly acknowledged — when speaking in Israel last year — is an agenda that puts the interests of Israel atop everything, including Americans’ interests:

“I get her in trouble with this, but I actually asked [Miriam] once… ‘What do you love more? The United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer.

“That might mean Israel,” Trump says, smiling, while looking at the dual Israeli-American national.

And it is not an exaggeration to say — in fact, basic honestly requires one to say — that the 2024 Trump/Vance campaign is one of the most fraudulent political campaigns in American history:

Just one week before the 2024 election, Tulsi Gabbard proclaimed that “a vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney and a vote for war, war and more war.” Conversely, Gabbard said, “a vote for Donald Trump is a vote to end wars, not start them.”

Other than immigration, this “no-new-wars” theme was the most central to Trump’s political appeal and his political promises since he emerged on the political scene a decade ago.

One can rehash the decades of now-trite arguments about Iran as much as one wants. But such endless debate cannot alter the facts here that are indisputable and fundamental.

Iran has not attacked and could not have attacked the United States at home. No such attack was even arguably imminent. The new war that Trump just started with Israel is thus the definitive war of choice.

In contrast to the lie-driven 18-month public campaign of Bush and Cheney to convince the American public to support an invasion of Iraq, there has been virtually no attempt made, as I documented this week, to even explain to the American public why a new war with Iran is necessary or desirable.

There has been no Congressional approval sought let alone obtained, notwithstanding the US Constitution’s exclusive assignment of war-making powers to the Congress.

In his novel 1984, George Orwell highlighted the dangerous insanity of war propaganda with this leading example: “WAR IS PEACE.” Yet that is precisely the rationale invoked by various Trump supporters to somehow depict this new war as aligned with Trump’s vows of peace (starting massive new wars is merely “peace through strength”).

This is, obviously, the war that Israel and Trump’s largest Israel-loyal donors most wanted and have long been pressuring him to start. Pro-Israel billionaires like Bill Ackman, long-time pro-Israel warmongers like Lindsey Graham, and Israel First activists like Mark Levin are of course already boisterously celebrating this new war against Israel’s primary adversary.

But this is ultimately an American war, one that Trump unilaterally started and for which Trump is responsible. Notably, of course, it is not Trump or his family, but instead everyone else in the world, who will bear the costs and burdens of the war.

This was the point Trump famously emphasised shortly before the 2024 election — on November 1 — when explaining why Washington is full of sociopathic warmongers such as Dick and Liz Cheney who constantly start wars in which other people’s families, but never their own, must go fight and die.

As Trump’s senior White House advisor Stephen Miller said about those comments, “warmongering neocons love sending your kids to die for wars they would never fight themselves.” Indeed they do, Stephen Miller.

Do not expect meaningful opposition from the Democratic Party. Some of them, perhaps most, will make loud noises in protest. But the party’s senior leader, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), this week urged Trump to make the case to the public about why this war was necessary, whereas Schumer last June mocked Trump for attempting to obtain a peace deal with Iran and accusing him of “chickening out” of the war with Iran that he prosed.

Some Democrats, such as Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), are effusively praising Trump and his new war.

This new war against Iran is as pure a continuation of the bipartisan DC posture of endless war that has, more than any single cause, destroyed American prosperity, standing, and future over the last six decades at least.

The only question now is how many people will die, for how long the damage will endure, and what new unforeseen evils will be created in its wake.

Republished under Creative Commons.

This is a moment of great peril for the small Caribbean nation of Cuba. Nothing less than its sovereignty is on the line as the US drives its knee into the neck of 10 million Cubans by means of a crushing air and sea blockade and a set of secondary sanctions designed to muscle the nations of the world into compliance to the hegemon.

The issues are not particular to Cuba; we are in the midst of a militant US that is determined to assert domination through force.

It was therefore a pleasure to spend time this week with Luis Ernesto Morejón Rodríguez, Cuba’s Ambassador to New Zealand in Wellington.

New Zealand activist Roger Fowler, a longtime Gaza solidarity organiser and Palestine Chronicle contributor, who died last Saturday, leaves a legacy of principled resistance.

Roger Fowler was a beloved figure in the global solidarity movement and a steadfast advocate for justice in Palestine. He leaves behind a legacy defined by courage, compassion, and an unwavering commitment to a cause greater than himself.

Born in New Zealand, Roger dedicated much of his life to amplifying the voices of the oppressed and building bridges of solidarity across continents.

• READ MORE:  Roger Fowler, a legend of the Aotearoa solidarity movement, dies at 77
• Roger Fowler’s legacy – and the Polynesian Panthers connection
• Other Roger Fowler reports

As coordinator of Kia Ora Gaza (Aotearoa New Zealand), he played a central role in grassroots efforts to challenge the inhumane blockade of Gaza and to bring aid and hope to its people.

Under his leadership, Kia Ora Gaza organised and supported international aid convoys and solidarity flotillas aimed at breaking the siege and delivering humanitarian assistance to besieged communities.

The most significant international moment connected to those efforts was 2010, during the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which sought to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Solidarity networks across the world — including activists in Aotearoa New Zealand — mobilised politically, financially, and logistically around that initiative and subsequent flotilla attempts in the following years.

Inspired countless others
His determination and moral clarity inspired countless others to act with purpose and humanity in the face of injustice.

Roger’s voice was both passionate and principled. Even as his health declined, he remained a familiar presence at solidarity rallies across New Zealand, uplifting crowds with his words and his spirit.

To his friends and fellow activists, he was not only a colleague but a guiding light, a man of “great integrity and character with passion for justice”.

Beyond activism in the streets, Roger was also a thoughtful and committed writer. Through his contributions to The Palestine Chronicle, he brought stories of international solidarity to wider audiences.

His work illuminated both the daily struggles of Palestinians and the global networks of activism that stand with them.

In these difficult times, Roger’s work will continue to live on in the movements and projects he helped build. His life stands as a testament to the enduring power of solidarity, conviction, and the belief that ordinary people can make extraordinary differences.

The Palestine Chronicle family joins his loved ones, friends, and comrades in mourning this profound loss, and in honoring a life devoted to justice, dignity, and the freedom of Palestine.

This article was first published by The Palestine Chronicle under the title “Remembering Roger Fowler: A life devoted to justice and Palestinian freedom” on 23 February 2026.

• Roger Fowler’s life is being celebrated today at Ngā Tapuwae Community Centre, 255 Buckland Road, Mangere, 10-2pm, Wednesday, February 25.

A world premiere of a new documentary revealing the devastation of rainforest in the southeastern part of West Papua is one of two films being screened in Aotearoa New Zealand next month.

Billed as “Sinéma Merdeka: Stories from West Papua”, the programme is showing the heart of a hidden Pacific conflict and will be presented live by celebrated Papuan journalist and Jubi News founder Victor Mambor.

The two films are Pesta Babi — Colonialism in Our Time and Sa Punya Nama Pengungsi (My name is Pengungsi).

• READ MORE: West Papua Solidarity Forum, mini film festival aim to educate
• WATCH the trailer for Presta Babi

“Pesta Babi” (The Pig Party), directed by Cypri Dale and Dandhy Laksono, is being premiered at the Academy Cinema, Auckland CBD, at 6pm on Saturday, March 7.

Filmed under siege and a draconian media ban, the filmmakers offer a rare and
urgent glimpse into indigenous life in Merauke, where Indonesian bulldozers have been systematically destroying their pristine rainforest home.

This film is co-produced by Jubi, Ekspedisi Indonesia Baru, Greenpeace, Yayasan Pusaka, and Watchdoc Documentary.

The unofficial trailer of Pesta Babi                               Video: Jubi Media

The second film, “Sa Punya Nama Pengungsi”, directed by Yuliana Lantipo is set against the backdrop of escalating government violence and the displacement of an estimated 100,000 Indigenous Melanesian people from their lands.

“My name is Pengungsi” is centred on the story of two Papuan children born in the midst of the conflict. Both are named “Pengungsi”, which in English means “Refugee”.

Films talanoa
The films will be followed by a Q&A/Talanoa with Mambor and film director Dandhy Laksono, and hosted by Dr David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report and deputy chair of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN).

“These films give a powerful insight into the hidden occupation and oppression inside West Papua which all people in Aotearoa need to see to understand what our neighbours are enduring,” said an organiser Catherine Delahunty.

The twin-film festival is part of a weekend West Papua Solidarity Forum programme at the Auckland University Old Choral Hall, 7 Symonds Street, on Saturday, March 7, and on Sunday, March 8, at the Taro Patch, Papatoetoe.

There will also be a public media seminar, “Kōrero With Victor Mambor – West Papua: Journalism as Resistance” at the Whānau Community Centre and Hub at 165 Stoddard Rd, Mt Roskill (next to Harvey Norman), featuring journalist and filmmaker Victor Mambor at 6pm, Monday, March 9.

West Papua is the western half of New Guinea island and has been occupied by Indonesia since 1963. The independent state of Papua New Guinea is the eastern half.

Organisers of the film screenings are West Papua Action Tāmaki Makaurau. The group notes that more than 500,000 civilians have been killed in a slow genocide against the indigenous population, according to human rights agencies.

Basic human rights such as freedom of speech are denied and Papuans live in a constant state of fear and intimidation.

Foreign journalists have generally been barred entrance.

Traditional ways of life are under threat as huge tracts of rainforest are cut down to make
way for Indonesian palm oil and food estates, the world’s largest gold mine and ever-increasing transmigration from Indonesia, making Indigenous Papuans a minority in their own land.

• Book tickets for the “Sinéma Merdeka: Stories from West Papua” here.

ANALYSIS: By Wendy Bacon

Many who witnessed the horrific police violence in Sydney’s CBS on the evening of February 9 say they had never seen anything like it before.

After a week of broadcasts of police “kettling”, viciously assaulting and pepper spraying peaceful protesters, the NSW Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) announced an independent investigation into the police conduct.

It will examine the policing operation as well as individual cases of unlawful policing.

• READ MORE: Mainstream media. When silence becomes editorial policy
• Other Herzog protest reports

One of the matters LECC should investigate is which politicians and senior police were involved in organising a massive increase in available police powers shortly before Herzog’s arrival, and what instructions were given to police on the ground about those powers.

The legislation that was used is a little-known act called the Major Events Act 2009, under which the NSW Minister for Tourism, Stephen Kamper, approved a new regulation which transformed Herzog’s visit into a “major event”.

Major Events Act
The objects of the Act are to bring “benefits” to spectators and enhance NSW’s reputation for holding events. The Act grants special powers to plan and regulate major events, including shutting off access to areas, searching people, and using “reasonable force” to compel citizens to comply with directions.

It relieves the state of most liability for damage caused in the exercise of these powers.

The powers have the potential to severely impact the exercise of citizens’ political rights, which is probably why the Act includes a section that a political protest must not be declared a major event. The Act is designed to cover events of a “sporting, cultural or other nature”.

These police powers triggered the lack of restraint witnessed last Monday. This does not mean that police actions were lawful, but that these were the powers under which they thought they were acting.

As one constable who was part of two lines blocking protesters from entering Town Hall Square said when questioned, “I heard something about a major event.”

Court challenge failed
The new regulation was announced on Saturday, February 7, just 48 hours before Herzog arrived.

The Palestinian Action Group (PAG), represented by Hanna Legal, had 24 hours to challenge the regulation.

PAG’s case was that the regulation was “unreasonable”, “disproportionate” and was created for an improper purpose of suppressing protests. Within an hour of NSW Supreme Court Justice Robertson Wright dismissing the challenge, NSW Police were already using the Major Event powers.

Before dismissing the Palestinian Action Group challenge on Monday, Justice Wright said that he found both sides’ arguments persuasive and that it was difficult to decide. But there was no hint of uncertainty in his judgment, which adopted almost all of the NSW government’s case.

The judge, who is near retirement, was described on his appointment as “a soldier, a historian and a gentleman”. His reasons were not published until two days later.

By that time, protesters had been violently flung to the ground while praying, and hundreds had been trapped and assaulted in Town Hall Square. People were blinded or choked with pepper spray. Others had been hospitalised with broken limbs or bleeding wounds.

Journalist and filmmaker James Ricketson, 76, had been injured in an assault by six officers and held in a cell for five hours without water before being released without charge. Videos of NSW police punching people had gone viral around the world.

Premier Chris Minns, Minister for Police Yasmin Catley and Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon defended the police actions as “reasonable” in the circumstances.

Not a political event?
Few would disagree that Herzog’s visit to Australia was the key political event of last week. Yet key to the judgment was Wright’s determination that the Herzog visit wasn’t.

Before he arrived, Herzog defined the purpose of his visit as rebuilding Australia’s relationship with Israel. He brought a top-level delegation from Jewish national institutions with him. This was in evidence before the judge.

Also in evidence was the fact that Chris Sidoti, who had sat on a UN Commission of Inquiry that found Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and that Herzog had incited it, had called for his arrest in Australia.

But Justice Wright found that politics was not a “defining” or “dominant” purpose for the visit and that it was a “cultural event”.

Herzog’s tour did have cultural aspects, such as a trip to Bondi to meet victims of the December massacre and visits to a synagogue and school. But Herzog and Zionist leaders also consistently stressed that an important purpose was to encourage the Australian government to stand with Israel.

The act has never been used for a foreign dignitary visit before or at such short notice.

Until last week, no one would have imagined that this law would be used to enable police violence to be unleashed on peaceful citizens protesting against a controversial visit by a foreign head of state.

But a bright idea by the NSW Police changed this.

Police concerns
As public opposition to Herzog’s visit grew and likewise support for a peaceful march from Town Hall to Parliament House during Herzog’s visit, senior police became concerned that the new anti-protest law passed on December 23 might not be sufficient to stop a big march in Sydney.

The ban over most of the CBD and the Eastern Suburbs was extended on February 2. On the same day, according to evidence tendered in last week’s court case, NSW police advised the government that the Major Events Act, with its extensive powers, could help avoid any risks to Herzog during the visit, advising “Police will be empowered to address any behaviour which poses a security threat or risk to the Presidential Visit.”

It is worth noting that nothing was ever planned at the protest related to a security threat or risk to Herzog. That was also in evidence.

The Cabinet office then prepared a minute setting out arguments, including ones for and against protests, for the Minister for Tourism Kamper to consider before making his decision. He was then told to sign but not date his recommendation, which was agreed to by the NSW Executive Council and gazetted on Friday, February 6.

In arguing that the regulation had been declared for the improper purpose of suppressing protests, PAG’s barrister Felicity Graham relied on the timing of events and material in the Cabinet minute. She also relied on Premier Chris Minns’ media conference on Saturday, February 7, in which he announced the “Major Event”.

Minns talked about 3500 police, fines of more than $5500 for disobeying directions and needing to prevent “the clash of mourners and protesters”. The latter seemed to be an idea of Minns’ own making because there was never any plan for protesters to be near mourners.

Suppressing protests to keep us safe
Justice Wright agreed that it would be improper for the purpose of the regulation to be the suppression of protests. But he found that protests could be suppressed if it was consistent with the goal of facilitating “safety and crowd control” and that there was no intention on the part of the Minister or any other relevant person to “adversely affect any protest or right to protest except to the extent reasonably appropriate to facilitate the conduct of the visit”.

He agreed that there was no evidence that the protest would interfere with the President, but found that it did not matter.

When PAG’s barrister Felicity Graham argued that the powers in the Regulation could lead to unjust treatment of citizens, even those who were not protesters, the judge appeared mildly exasperated.

He assumed that officers act “reasonably”.

That turned out to be wildly optimistic. If the purpose was to keep us all safe, it had the opposite effect.

PAG is considering an appeal. The event is over, but there are many potential cases against the police, and the Act restricts liability and compensation. It might also be possible to raise implications of the Major Events Act on “freedom of expression”, which was not attempted in the short one-day hearing.

A protest was held near Parliament on Friday evening with a speech delivered from her hospital bed by a woman who suffered broken vertebrae: “We will not be silent. He [MInns] needs to take full responsibility for this and the laws that were passed. The police who did it need to take responsibility.”

If the Major Events Act can validly be used in protests, it needs reform. Imagine if the UN decided to hold a major climate conference backed by fossil fuel interests in Sydney? The whole city could be shut down to protesters.

Accountability for this disaster must start at the very top and run through to the police on the ground.

Wendy Bacon is an Australian investigative journalist who was professor of journalism at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism. She is a long-term supporter of a peaceful BDS movement and the Greens. This article was first published by Michael West Media and is republished with permission.

Citizen journalists bring to our attention the truths that we need to know. Being a witness to such truths is different to doom scrolling. It is about awareness.

This is about knowing the truths that the people who run this deteriorating world, want to hide.

Victims everywhere are begging to be heard and seen. And some people are revealing these truths. Some are trained in journalism, some are freelancing because the mainstream is not the clear clean truth stream, and some are self-trained.

• READ MORE: Amnesty calls for independent probe of ‘shocking’ Australian police violence against peaceful protesters
• Other articles by Saige England

The role of filming and reporting the truth is vital in an era when books are banned, when the names of predators are redacted, when the people at the top are part of an oligarchy that supports murder and rape.

A couple of years ago — almost to the day — I was pepper sprayed by a frontline policeman for filming police brutality against peaceful protesters standing on the footpath in Lyttelton Aotearoa New Zealand.

In that situation police seized people and hurled them to the ground. In other instances, as with human rights activist, John Minto, they seized baffled people and hauled them onto the road.

The men and women in blue vests and black gloves, formed a scrum over each seized civilian. They pummelled and beat them viciously, and hauled them into vans. Minto suffered a gash down his forehead.

Nightmares last longer
Others had similar wounds and thanks to the direct illegal use of pepper spray, many suffered a sense like glass in their eyes. In my experience, those painful symptoms lasted weeks. The nightmares lasted longer.

Early last year, I was banned from my own Town Hall for witnessing the State of the Nation speech by Winston Peters. One of that leader’s loyal fans complained that I was taking notes. I produced my press card. Made no difference.

I witnessed a leader inciting hatred. Witnessing. The security guards banned me. The police upheld the ban. I am a multi-award winning reporter who has reported from conflict zones around the world. And I see the conflict increasing.

In the United States, in Europe, in Australia, in Aotearoa New Zealand, what are we learning?

The right to support the right of all human beings to live on their land is decreed a crime by our leaders. Why? Because some have more than others and they want to protect their “more” and push others to have less, even nothing.

These are the actions of totalitarian capitalist regimes intent on retaining power over the land, the rivers, and all the waterways.

We see it in the US with ICE killing a woman who was poet and a mother, we see it in the killing of a nurse, and all the disappearances, people — including children — hauled off streets and “disappeared”.

Police kicking 2 women
We see it with police kicking and beating two women wearing abayas in the Netherlands. If they are assaulting women in public we can be certain they are also molesting women behind the public gaze.

We see totalitarian push back against human rights in Germany and France, Australia and New Zealand.

Let’s call this flagrant attack on democracy what it is.

It is imperialism. Yes I know, it sounds like I’m recalling Thatcher. But hey she never went away. Her Daddy abused her friends and she loved him. Thatcher was an abuse enabler.

Like Blair. Like Trump. Like other abusers who hold power. It is no surprise that many of these leaders who were raised by power hungry predators, become predators. They exploit others.

Really it is a very simple equation. Democracy is impossible under financial imperialist capitalism.

Imperialism upholds the right of one people to reign supreme over another. We aren’t talking about something that ended over a hundred years ago. We are talking about something that is being perpetuated now.

Shameful exploitation
And by now, those of us who are descended by people who usurped and enslaved, are coming to a difficult conclusion — that it is shameful, this history of exploitation.

As one Quaker researcher said: “What I have learned is that if my ancestors were not as radical for human rights as I have hoped, I can at least be different, be radical for human rights now.”

Greed, predatory behaviour is handed down from predator to predator. It used to favour the oldest son. Now it just faces those prepared to sell out to buy in.

Mercenary capitalist entrepreneurs control society and they govern our countries. The brutes who exploit are connected.

So back to the streets. Back to what some reporters saw and reported and what others who aren’t real reporters, failed to report.

Let’s pick apart the claims of incitement. Incitement for what?

Chanting crime
The authorities in NSW deem that it should be a crime for any citizen to chant these words.

From.

The.

River.

To.

The.

Sea.

What next? Will Jews be told they can no longer chant in Hebrew: le shana haba b’yerulashaem. See the parallel.

Next.

Year.

In.

Jerusalem.

Every year Jews around the world chant — as they have for decades and decades — the vow that next year they will be in Jerusalem. They lived in Europe. They lived in the US.

And this they chanted.

Perhaps that is why it bothers Zionists and supporters of genocide. But it wasn’t a return.

Jews who recite this are Europeans and Americans, New Zealanders and Australians.

When they talk of exile, they are talking in mythological proportions, invoking the Bible and tribalism, Goliath and David.

Zionist regime supreme
But one group is reigning supreme. The Zionist regime has pushed thousands of Palestinians out of their homes, and murdered tens and tens and tens and tens of thousands, and still this genocide continues.

But has New South Wales deemed it a crime for Jews to chant “next year in Jerusalem”?

No.

Nor should it. People have the right to chant.

But let’s understand the real history, rather than the propaganda pumped out by a multi million dollar US-Israeli think thank.

Thanks to very real anti-semitism, Europe did not want to rehome Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. Britain helped out with an imperialist Zionist strategy that pushed Palestinians out of their homes.

Some Jews fled, refused to do what had been done to them. Good on those Jews. And good on those Jews around the world who stand for societies that care and share, that don’t steal and kill.

I am worried about the implications of any law that bans a chant by exiled people. Will it become a crime for any group of people to chant about their desire to return to lands from which they were exiled?

Governments around the world are leaning that way. They stomp down on Indigenous people, on refugees, on immigrants. They protect their excessive power and privilege.

Blaming immigrants
It’s very popular among these regimes to blame immigrants who come from land that was raped and raided by imperialism. Just tune into our ageing playboy Winston Peters.

Make no mistake under regimes such as this, no one is safe. No one.

It is clearly a crime for others to stand alongside those who have been oppressed and exiled, so will it one day be deemed a crime to talk about ALL the stolen children? Like the stolen indigenous children? The children born in a certain place, on certain land, near a river, near the sea.

Will it be a crime to talk about those abused in state homes?

Will the imperialist histories be redacted? Oh they are. The narrative is changed. The victims can barely survive.

I witnessed some of this so I can remind myself and I can remind you.

When I first went to Israel in 1982 the Begin regime invaded Lebanon. Desecrated people dreaming under cypress trees.

The Israeli Offence Force assisted then, in the genocide, of around 3000 children, women, and men — Palestinians — in refugee camps.

Evil massacre
It was a bloodbath, an evil massacre carried out under stealth, at night. The victims did not have a chance. They had no one to defend them. They were murdered by mercenary Israeli soldiers.

One Israeli soldier, Ari Folman, later made a film, Waltz with Bashir which depicts how he came to realise he was among the soldiers who surrounded the camps and fired flares to illuminate the area for the Lebanese Christian Philangist militia.

Like most soldiers, he was only “following orders”. It haunted him.

The ghosts of every massacre carried out by every totalitarian state like Israel haunt the world. And every regime that supports it is responsibile.

Imperialism is the bloodstain that won’t wash out until the notion of super and special entitlement due to race or class or religion is extinguished.

It is racist and classist and it is wrong.

I wrote my novel The Seasonwife because I wanted to show the truth — that people down the bottom rungs of the class system were exploited by those at the top to exploit indigenous people.

Criminalised the poor
We need to know these truths. And they can be proved. Settler colonialism is not a pretty policy, it was dreamed up by a country that created poverty and criminalised the poor. It sent them out to do its dirty work. Oh some rode on those waves but others were submerged. And Indigenous people lost their rights.

Here in Aotearoa a Treaty was forged, a treaty which clearly gives Indigenous people the right to rangatiratanga. And successive legal acts pushed indigenous people down, breached the principles of that partnership.

When one partner is the abuser the partnership is not equal.

We must remember the crimes of imperialism. We must. Because the past is now.

The massacres of Palestinians is an extension of every colonial crime. The crimes are connected: slavery; forced servitude; exile due to poverty; apartheid, assimilation, extermination.

It is a thread from this ocean to that river to that ocean. From here to there. From Europe to the Levant and the Middle East. All the greed-mongers benefit.

The crimes against Palestinians have been going on for more than seven decades. Research the Nakba. Before the British aided and mounted a violent rape-and-kill takeover, Muslims and Jews and Christians worshipped alongside each other in Palestine. It is easy enough to find documentary evidence of this pleasant land on YouTube.

Look at it now. Look at the difference between Haifa or Tel Aviv and Gaza.

Standing against supremacy
Any Jew who has a soul, who has a conscience, will not stand for the slaughter of innocents or for the creation of a white apartheid supremely state. In the US most Jews are against this, and increasingly so are Jews in Australia and New Zealand, standing up against the supremacy of Zionism.

And Christians need to stand too. It is KKK fundamentalist to support the extermination of people. There is nothing holy in supporting theft and expulsion and the gunning down of women, children, and men.

When we invoke laws that support genocide we create a soul-less compassionless society.

A truly Humanist, Animist, any Values-based system will create a society with laws that uphold rather than extinguish, human rights.

It was a white Australian male who used his inheritance to kill 51 people praying at two mosques in Christchurch New Zealand. The Iman who greeted him at the door welcomed him as “a brother”.

It was a Muslim man who risked his life and suffered terrible injuries while tackling two ISIS-inspired extremist gunmen at Bondi Beach in Sydney. That Muslim man stepped in front of a gun to defend Jewish children, women, and men.

I met many such kind, brave, peace-loving men when I lived in the Middle East and I experienced the utmost hospitality from Muslims.

I differentiate between all people and their regimes.

Greed in common
The regimes that uphold human rights violations are all connected. They all have one thing in common: greed.

Their rulers are predators.

Israel is a US-supported state responsible for mass murder, for genocide, for apartheid, for stealing children decade after decade.

Every government that has failed to denounce that State of Hate is acting against the right of people — all people — to real and precious freedom.

Once again, I call down my Jewish ancestors who experienced, as I have, anti-semitism — in standing against the supremacism that is Zionism.

I stand with Jews Against Zionism. I stand with Jews for Peace. I stand with Jews Against Genocide.

I stand with Jews who support the right of Palestinians to return. Yes to the land, yes to that beautiful river, and to that precious sea. I stand with their right to live where they want to live.

Right to protest
And I stand with the right of all citizens to protest. I stand with the right of citizen journalists to film and report human rights violations.

In my social media posts I continually put aggressive impulsive patriarchal police on notice. I let them know that violence by people who are supposed to protect, is unacceptable.
Their actions could lead to them being incarcerated.

Maybe not now, not yet, but one day. Their violent actions could certainly lead to them being jobless.

Their violent actions will be seen over and over again. The truth won’t be erased.

And I say this to mainstream reporters, please do your job. Join a union and oppose the patriarchy that presents propaganda as truth. Some reporters on the ground in Sydney who said they saw violence by the police and no violence from protesters, but the BBC and RNZ changed that narrative.

News presenters who were not present at the scene presented a skewed version provided by their government. They became a mouthpiece for propaganda. And in doing so they supported totalitarianism.

Reporters must not be mouthpieces for what one commentator so aptly described as the Broligarchy. Predators.

Out of police
The policeman who pepper sprayed me, two years ago, when I took footage of assaults against peaceful civilians by violent police, is no longer in the force. Perhaps he has joined the great raft of unemployed.

I would like to think he can be educated into compassion, that he can learn, that the hard look in his eye will one day be softened when he holds a brown grandchild in his arms.

Think twice police. Think twice reporters. Think twice every one who reads this.

Would you want your children to support all human rights? Do you think words like river and sea and return should be banned? Do you think the colour of the grass and the colour of a rose should be denounced as evil?

Do you think people should have the right to live on their land unmolested? Do you think the land and the waterways should be respected or bombed to dust, drained for its minerals?

Do you believe in freedom? If you do, then know that those who are upholding the right of one people to strip the rights of others, will not leave it there.

These totalitarian leaders are united. As one commentator put it, they are the broligarchy. They are connected. They are predators. And they will use force to shut you up and shut you down.

But I hold hope.

Moral weapon — the truth
Every citizen journalist who films human rights crimes being carried out by the arm of the government is armed with a valuable moral weapon: the truth.

Every citizen journalist reporting these truths is a hero.

The truth might be redacted, those who speak it or shout it might become victims, but in calling it out, they fall on the side of freedom and they will be remembered.

Freedom will come. Because it must. The greed mongers who rule must not prevail.

When the truths of victims is heard, the predators lose the narrative, and then they lose their power.

We are all connected in the lifestream of this tiny, precious blue planet. A spark is born and that spark is creativity, it is the spark that rises from destruction and despair.

Never stop witnessing
Harmony. Peace, and Tranquility is possible if our goal is cooperative living.

So be a witness, and never stop witnessing. Raise your voice, raise your heart and your soul. We are all connected and related because we are all brothers and sisters and cousins, spinning on this spinning orb, sparks in the eye of the universe.

Sparks of creativity are born in societies where nurturers are valued rather than predators and exploiters.

In such a world, peace will prevail.

One fine day.

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.

Free speech and a free press are the bedrock of American democracy.

Over the past year, those liberties have come under threat in ways not seen in generations.

The events of recent weeks — including the arrest of two journalists for covering protests in Minnesota, and the raid on the home of a Washington Post reporter — represent a dangerous escalation.

• READ MORE: Washington Post announces massive layoffs in blow to storied paper
• ‘Journalism is not a crime’ – US journalists arrested for covering ICE church protest
• Other US media freedom reports

These are not isolated incidents. They are the latest in a sustained pattern of actions that are systematically undermining press freedom and the public’s right to know.

Such actions are unacceptable and intolerable.

The board of directors at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) stands unequivocally in defence of a free and independent press — one that can report the facts and hold power to account without intimidation or interference.

For more than 40 years, CPJ has been consistent in its defence of journalists. As a nonpartisan, nonprofit organisation, we stand with journalists whenever they are threatened or placed in peril, anywhere in the world — including in the United States.

We hold all political leaders to the same standard. We will not be silenced by pressure, harassment, or efforts to punish journalists and those who support them.

A free press and the factual information journalists provide are essential to democracy, public safety, and social stability. Without them, the public is at greater risk.

This role is explicitly recognised and protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Journalists have the right to report the news. Efforts to obstruct, punish, or deter them from doing so violate not only their rights, but the rights of all Americans.

CPJ stands with Don Lemon, Georgia Fort, Hannah Natanson, and all journalists targeted for doing their jobs in the United States.

Today we call on leaders across political, civic, and business life — especially those who lead media organisations — to speak out clearly and publicly in defence of press freedom.

Republished from the Committee to Protect Journalists website.

As Meta, TikTok, Instagram and X continue to dominate online social spaces, a new platform called UpScrolled has entered the scene.

It is not built around dances or memes, but instead positions itself as a space promising fewer shadowbans and greater freedom of political expression, particularly for pro-Palestinian voices.

So, what is it exactly, and why are users switching?

• READ MORE: Gaza-based journalist Bisan Owda regains TikTok account after outcry
• Other Palestine reports

UpScrolled was launched in July 2025 by Palestinian-Australian app developer Issam Hijazi.

At first glance, the platform feels familiar. It features an up and down scrolling video feed reminiscent of TikTok, alongside profile pages, comments and direct messaging features similar to Instagram.

The similarities, however, appear to end there. Unlike major platforms where opaque algorithms determine which content is amplified and which is buried, UpScrolled claims to operate differently.

The platform describes itself as a space where “every voice gets equal power”, promising to operate without “shadowbans, algorithmic games, or pay-to-play favouritism”, according to its website.

In an interview with Rest of World, Hijazi said the motivation behind the launch was the overwhelmingly pro-Israel content he saw being promoted on more established platforms following 7 October 2023.

Working for what he described as big tech companies at the time, Hijazi expressed deep frustration.

“I could not take it anymore. I lost family members in Gaza, and I did not want to be complicit. So I was like, I am done with this, I want to feel useful,” he said.

The Tech for Palestine incubator, an advocacy project that funds technology initiatives supporting the Palestinian cause, has publicly backed the platform.

Moderation without the black box
Hijazi said UpScrolled’s content moderation process differs from other social media platforms in that it does not selectively censor particular groups or viewpoints.

Content deemed illegal, such as the sale of narcotics or prostitution, is removed, but when it comes to free speech, the approach is rooted in transparency, ethics and equal treatment.

According to 7amleh, the Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media, major tech platforms such as Meta have consistently engaged in a “systemic and disproportionate censorship of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian content”. This includes the removal of posts, restrictions on account visibility and, in some cases, permanent bans.

Throughout the war on Gaza, numerous Palestinian organisations, activists, journalists, media outlets and content creators were targeted over their pro-Palestine views.

Bisan Owda, an award-winning Gaza-based journalist with more than 1.4 million followers on TikTok, is among the most prominent recent examples, whose account was reportedly permanently banned earlier this week — but has now been reinstated after a global outcry.

Critics argue that censorship concerns extend beyond the Palestinian issue, affecting other sensitive topics, including criticism of US government policies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

High profile commentators critical of the Trump administration have reported what they describe as a systematic effort to remove or suppress their videos and content.

Users flock to UpScrolled
Users frustrated with big tech’s control over online narratives have increasingly turned to the new platform.

UpScrolled has reached number one in the social networking category of Apple’s App Store in both the US and the UK.

As of Tuesday, the app had been downloaded around 400,000 times in the US and 700,000 times globally since its launch. An estimated 85 percent of those downloads occurred after January 21 alone, according to data from marketing intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

The Palestinian-founded app has also seen a surge in downloads following the recent acquisition of TikTok by American billionaire Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle.

Ellison is a prominent supporter of Israel and maintains close ties with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He has also financially backed the Israeli military, including a $16.6 million donation made during a 2017 gala organised by the Friends of the Israeli Forces.

The timing of UpScrolled’s rise has therefore not gone unnoticed. The platform appears to have capitalised on widespread frustration and anger over biased content moderation, offering an alternative built around transparency and user control.

The app remains a work in progress, with users having reported crashes and server overloads amid its rapid growth over the past week.

Still, UpScrolled poses a challenge to dominant platforms and highlights a growing appetite for social media spaces that give users greater control over what they see and share.

Republished from the Middle East News Agency (MENA) and The New Arab.

“You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.” Although made in an American context, this observation by President Harry S. Truman has universal appeal.

It highlights the unpredictable and treacherous nature of politics, whether it’s the chameleon-like antics of politicians or the fickleness of voters. The precariousness of politics was felt most acutely in Suva as recently as October 2025.

Few anticipated that two of Fiji’s three deputy prime ministers, elected with much fanfare in December 2022, would be forced to resign over allegations of failure of ministerial integrity.

• READ MORE: Other Fiji reports

The Fiji Independent Commission Against Corruption (FICAC) is an autonomous body, at least constitutionally, but Dr Biman Prasad and Manoa Kamikamica’s indictments still sparked speculation about political conspiracies and high-level skulduggery.

This political earthquake was far removed from the euphoria of the People’s Alliance Coalition election victory over the FijiFirst government — on the promise of a fresh start.

Led by Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka, the People’s Alliance Party’s partnership with the National Federation Party and the Social Democratic Liberal Party secured electoral victory on a show of unity and a set of vote-winning pledges: cost-of-living relief, curbing government wastage and greater media freedom.

Restoring media freedom was relatively straightforward, perhaps because it was cost-free, and it was implemented almost immediately through the repeal of the draconian Media Industry Development Act.

Other pledges more difficult
Other pledges — such as addressing the national debt and the budget deficit — proved far more difficult, in part because of global economic conditions, as did the challenge of resisting the urge to increase parliamentary salaries, which went up by 130–138 percent.

Additional benefits were thrown in for good measure: tax-free vehicle purchases for cabinet ministers, increased overseas travel allowances for the prime minister and president, and non-taxable duty allowances, business-class travel, and enhanced life insurance coverage for MPs.

In comparison to other jurisdictions, the salary increases may not, in themselves, be unreasonable. The core problem, as noted by some observers, is that Parliament should not be determining its own benefits.

The approval of the benefits also stunned many because of the Coalition’s longstanding criticism of FijiFirst over pay levels, and its pre-election pledges to slash them.

Moreover, there were questions of affordability given Fiji’s ballooning debt and deficit situation, which the Coalition had pledged to address as part of its plan to eliminate what it considered were the excesses of the previous FijiFirst government.

Increasing parliamentary benefits seemed an odd way of honouring those commitments.

There is also the question of whether taxpayers are getting what they are paying for. But perhaps the increase in benefits should not have been entirely surprising, since such outcomes are often consistent with the realities of politics in Fiji, and elsewhere.

Lying could cost politicians
So much so that Wales, for example, is considering becoming the world’s first country to introduce laws that would mean politicians could lose their jobs for deliberate lying during election campaigns.

Fijian voters, who may be disillusioned, are not entirely powerless. With elections scheduled for next year, they may well turn the tables on their representatives by springing a few surprises of their own at the ballot box.

Governance, after all, is a shared responsibility between the government and the governed. Voters usually get the government they vote for, and recent experiences would be a reminder of the importance of informed participation in politics, and the prudent use of voting power.

Especially when, as a nation, Fiji has a long and arguably worsening experience with unfulfilled or broken promises, whether by politicians or coup leaders.

Fiji’s coup culture and its fallout are a reminder of the saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

The 1987 and 2000 coups were carried out by political and military elites claiming to represent indigenous iTaukei interests, while the 2006 coup was justified on the grounds of good governance, equality and national unity.

It is safe to assume that none of these utopian promises have fully materialised. The country appears more divided than ever, and too many people still remain trapped in poverty.

Costs of elite power struggles
According to World Bank estimates, of the roughly 258,000 people (29.9 percent) in poverty, about 75 percent are iTaukei, which underscores how ordinary communities bear the costs of elite power struggles rather than benefit from them.

Coup instigators’ rhetoric is one thing, but what is more troubling is that our elected leaders increasingly seem unbothered by going back on their word — even by their own low standards of keeping election promises.

Granted, structural pressures typical of a young, transitional democracy like Fiji can make reforms around debt and budget deficits quite complex and difficult to achieve.

However, successive governments are failing even when it comes to basic good governance policies and practices, which are often the pillars of sustainable development.

As part of its self-proclaimed “clean-up campaign”, the ousted FijiFirst government promised many things, including merit-based appointments to boards and other government positions.

Instead, appointments were frequently made on the basis of offspring, as at the Fiji Sports Council; siblings, as at the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation; and in-laws and cronies in various other institutions.

This was rightly criticised ad nauseam by the Coalition when in opposition, with the promise to address it once in power. But has the Coalition honoured its word, or are we just seeing more of the same?

Disproportionately marginalised
Some observers have argued that under the FijiFirst Government, appointments made in the name of merit had disproportionately marginalised iTaukei representation in certain areas.

Against this backdrop, the Coalition’s approach to appointments has been described by some as a form of “rebalancing” by prioritising iTaukei candidates.

The concern now being raised is whether the pendulum may have swung too far in the other direction, and whether appointments continue to be made largely based on family ties, clanship, kinship and friendship.

These questions are not just about due process: appointments to key positions also shape the country’s long-term progress and development. In this context, merit should not become an afterthought, nor should appointments result in any form of blatant exclusion, as both can undermine confidence in the system, with the risk of exacerbating Fiji’s brain drain dilemma across all ethnicities, including among qualified iTaukei.

This possibility was obliquely raised recently by none other than the Chair of the Great Council of Chiefs (GCC), Ratu Viliame Seruvakula, who stated that Fiji needed other races to progress.

“If every other race left Fiji, we’d be doing exactly what we were doing to cause more pain to the country,” he said.

As Truman noted, politics can be a dirty game. To make politics cleaner, politicians must be accountable, with a longer-term vision for the country.

Punishing at the polls
One way to make politicians take voters seriously is to punish them at the polls if they fail to keep their promises.

This is the path to a healthier, performance-based political system that facilitates development — driven by the fear of and respect for the voter’s power. This depends not only on politicians, but also on an engaged, ethical and informed electorate that votes on issues, rather than on the basis of race, religion, party or personality.

As the country entered 2026, Prime Minister Rabuka offered a welcoming and constructive New Year’s message, emphasising teamwork, unity and inclusiveness: “Fijians must work together with faith, hope, and shared responsibility to overcome challenges and build a stronger, united nation.”

The Prime Minister reminded the country that the Coalition government was elected on a “promise of integrity, inclusion and reform”. Since these virtues were the Coalition’s mantra and its winning formula in the 2022 elections, the government would do well to apply this thinking consistently in its day-to-day decisions and long-term vision for the country.

The bottom line, as alluded to by the GCC chair, is that indigenous leadership now plays a central role in shaping Fiji’s political direction. With that power comes a duty to build a country that works for future generations of iTaukei while also ensuring that ethnic minorities continue to feel included and valued as equal stakeholders in a shared future.

Shailendra B. Singh is associate professor of Pacific journalism at The University of the South Pacific, based in Suva, Fiji, and a member of the advisory board of Pacific Media. This article appeared first on Devpolicy Blog, from the Development Policy Centre at The Australian National University.

A decisive hearing before the Israeli Supreme Court on whether the press will have independent access to Gaza is due to take place tomorrow.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) will be participating as amici curiae and call on the member states of the Media Freedom Coalition (MFC) to take concrete steps towards guaranteeing unrestricted, independent media access to the Gaza Strip.

For more than two years, free movement in and out of the besieged territory has been prohibited, and more than 220 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli army.

• READ MORE:  Massacre of Gaza journalists triggers RSF’s Black Monday protest
• Other Gaza journalists reports

“But in Gaza, the absence of foreign journalists is depriving the global public of independent information from diverse sources while dangerously isolating Palestinian journalists.

“The inaction of states around the world encourages censorship and sets a dangerous precedent for other conflicts, to the detriment of civilian populations, humanitarian aid and political decisions based on verified facts.

“We call on these governments to act without delay to defend the public’s right to unrestricted, independent and reliable news.”

Having been admitted as an amicus curiae by the Israeli Supreme Court on 23 October 2025 along with the CPJ, RSF will be represented in the courtroom on January 26 by its director-general Bruttin and its Supreme Court lawyer, Michael Sfard.

RSF has emphasised that “the Supreme Court has the opportunity to finally uphold essential democratic principles in the face of propaganda, disinformation and widespread censorship and put an end to two years of the meticulous, unrestrained destruction of journalism in and about Gaza.

‘No excuse, no restriction’
“No excuse, no restriction can justify keeping Gaza closed to international, Israeli and Palestinian media. That is the appeal we are making to the Israeli Supreme Court by joining the Foreign Press Association’s petition.”

More than 220 Palestinian journalists have been killed since the beginning of the war, including at least 68 slain while working, according to RSF data.

On January 20, while the ceasefire, already repeatedly violated by the Israeli army, remained in force, an Israeli strike killed Mohammad Salah Qashta, Anas Ghneim and Abdul Raouf Samir Shaat, three freelance journalists who worked with international news agencies, while they were filming a report in the al-Zahra area south of Gaza City.

The 29 MFC member states that signed the statement on media access to Gaza are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

RSF and CPJ are members of the MFC Consultative Network.

Republished from Reporters Without Borders (RSF) by Pacific Media Watch.

Australia’s two federal combating antisemitism bills, the New South Wales laws providing the means to shutdown street protests and move on stationary public assemblies, along with the envoy’s plan to combat antisemitism and the Royal Commission into the same prejudice, have all been set in place following two ISIS-fuelled killers murdering 15 people at Bondi Beach six weeks ago.

While some of these measures were drafted in a hurry immediately post-Bondi in a theatrical attempt to prevent what had already occurred, much of the “combating antisemitism” smorgasbord of laws that serve to clamp down on free speech and the right to political communication in general, appear to have been waiting in the wings for the right political moment to enact.

These dramatic changes that have been foisted upon the country’s public square have been central to a broad campaign that the Zionist lobby has been progressing both locally and throughout the Western world, which is difficult to pin down as most of this advocating takes place behind closed doors, while when featured in the media, these positions are increasingly reflected as the norm.

• READ MORE: Caitlin Johnstone: Oppose Israel’s abuses while you still can
• Australia’s frightening new ‘hate speech’ laws are clearly aimed at pro-Palestine groups
• Other Australian hate speech laws reports

The Zionist lobby is also known as the Israel lobby. Political Zionism advocates for the establishment of a Jewish state on Palestinian land, which is today Israel.

A key outcome of the doctrine of Zionism is the displacement and genociding of Palestinians. And it is these truths, and the fact that the Gaza genocide is in progress, that make it necessary to progress the lobby’s agenda right now.

But while the Albanese government is implementing the envoy’s plan and a Royal Commission into antisemitism, which both include a definition of antisemitism that serves to block criticism of Israel at the behest of the lobby, the scope of the federal hate laws further reveal desperate Labor and Liberal parties attempting to shore up power in the face of a drastically shifting political climate.

McCarthyite Zionism
While the Israel lobby has long been understood to have an excessive influence upon the US political establishment, the sway of the Zionist lobby in Australia had not been common knowledge among the broader public until Gaza, as over the past 26 months of the mass slaughter and starvation programme, the lobby’s propaganda machine has been actioned in an attempt to hide this.

As the internet filled with footage of Israeli state actors perpetrating horrific acts in the Gaza Strip in late 2023, the Australian public sphere became a place to attack constituents for speaking out about this worst atrocity since the genociding of Jewish people during the Second World War, and the key way to silence these critics was to charge them with antisemitism — the hate that stoked the Holocaust.

The central target of the local Zionist lobby has been the Palestine solidarity movement, which has been a loud secular voice sprung from a diverse constituency.

Yet, federal and state Labor leaders have been labelling these people, who have been calling for an end to the practice of exterminating humans to obtain land, as outright antisemites and further implied they’re somewhat terroristic.

Assisting in the progression of the Zionist lobby’s hasbara mission, a documentary about rising antisemitism was aired last year, then a series of staged antisemitic crimes swept Sydney streets, rallies against Israel’s barbarity in Gaza have been framed as antisemitic, Jewish voices decrying Israel have been labelled self-hating, while attempts to remove Palestinian voices are underway.

According to US professors Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler, the Israeli state and the Zionist lobby commenced framing criticism of Israel as antisemitic in the late 1960s.

This idea is predicated upon Israel being a Jewish state. It denies the fact that many Jewish people globally don’t adhere to the doctrine of Zionism. And it rests on a flimsy link that only holds because of the force of the lobbyists.

Getting our hasbara on
The Zionist lobby got a foot in the door when PM Anthony Albanase appointed arch-Zionist Jillian Segal to the newly created position of Australian Special Envoy on Antisemitism in July 2024.

This had appeared to be spurred by the moral panic around antisemitism, however it has since come to light that the envoy programme exists across the Western world, with the first US envoy appointed in 2004.

Segal released her Plan to Combat Antisemitism in July 2025. Albanese implemented it straight after Bondi.

At its heart, the plan inserts the IHRA definition of antisemitism that blocks criticism of Israel into every level of Australian government and all its institutions. Further aspects involve the monitoring of tertiary institutions and the media for antisemitism or rather, anti-Israel sentiment.

The IHRA working definition of antisemitism comprises of two lines and 11 examples of hatred towards Jewish people, seven of which involve criticising Israel.

The body that produced it has never officially adopted it. However, as one of its drafters has been warning over the past decade, the Zionist lobby has been weaponising the definition to silence anti-Israel criticism globally.

The determination to hold a Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is the result of an all-pervasive campaign to see it established post-Bondi massacre, with the suggested reason being to understand how such a terrorist action was able to come to fruition.

Further moral panic
However, the criminal case against one shooter rules this out, so the inquiry will likely serve to stoke further moral panic.

The NSW government commenced seriously stamping out protest in April 2022.

So, the blanket ban on protests, or the public assembly restriction declaration regime rolled out post-Bondi, can be understood as not only placating the Zionist lobby, via the silencing of Palestine solidarity rallies on Gadigal land in the Sydney CBD, but it’s also as a continuation of the closing of the public sphere.

The 50 pages of hate crime laws the Albanese government whipped out of its back pocket last week, appeared so broad that the suggestion is the measures were in the works long before the antisemitic attack in Bondi on 14 December 2025.

ASIO boss Mike Burgess hinted at a need for these last year, so as to stamp out groups, like the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network and Islamic group Hitz ut Tahrir, as they had both been understood to be hovering just beneath the threshold of criminal activity.

So, broad is the reach is the new listing prohibited hate group regime that the major concern right now is that they might be applied to stamp out pro-Palestinian sentiment and protest in the public square to again placate the Zionist lobby.

But further, these laws sitting on the books could likely be used by a future “true blue” führer, so that their opposition can be eradicated on taking office.

The fallacy of necessitated free speech denial
NSW premier Chris Minns’ favoured mantra over the period of the Gaza genocide — or the rise in antisemitism in Australia if one is being “politically correct” — has been along the lines of “the reason NSW does not have free speech protections like they do in the United States, is that this state has a multicultural society and therefore, divergent voices must be tempered”. Yet, this is a lie.

During the 1890s drafting of the Australian Constitution, those involved determined not to enshrine rights in the founding document, as it might result in discriminatory laws already on the books that specifically applied to First Nations people and Chinese people becoming invalid, former High Court Justice Micheal Kirby has noted on occasion.

This was just prior to the 1901 federation of Australia, which was when various pieces of legislation were passed in order to progress the White Australia policy. So, rights were initially denied in this country to maintain a form of white supremacy.

The premier is not only progressing this line when the moral panic around antisemitism is in full flight, but he is also suggesting that the right to free speech should not be protected in NSW, over and over again, after NSW MP Jenny Leong introduced the Human Rights Bill 2025 last October, which seeks to protect free speech, or “freedom of opinion and expression”, among other rights.

The failure to protect free speech in this country was initially about maintaining power when attempting to establish an ethnostate. But the ongoing denial of rights protections since Australia embraced multiculturalism commencing in the 1970s, has really been about politicians maintaining power, and not an attempt to save various ethnic groups living here from annihilating each other.

The idea progressed by Minns is that the broad free speech protections in the United States, which are contained in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, would be a problem in our community because it is multicultural.

However, while the US has traditionally been understood to have been a melting pot of different ethnicities, what is operating as societies in both countries today are based upon multiethnicities, and they’re pretty much the same.

The progression of the “combating antisemitism” laws and policies right now is all about placating the Zionist lobby, while Israel takes as many pounds of flesh as it desires upon occupied Palestinian territory, in order to prevent the ongoing mass civil society outcry over this ethnic cleansing, the mass starvation and mass murder, along with the genocidal tactics that are ongoing in the Gaza Strip.

Yet, the federal listing of prohibited hate group regime also provides the ability to the major parties to criminalise their political opponents as hate groups — think, the Greens — at a point in time when the long-term capture of holding government office by the majors is now under threat.

Paul Gregoire is a Sydney-based journalist and writer. He is the winner of the 2021 NSW Council for Civil Liberties Award For Excellence In Civil Liberties Journalism. Prior to Sydney Criminal Lawyers®, Paul wrote for VICE and was the news editor at Sydney’s City Hub.

The Paris-based global media freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the guilty verdict against Filipino journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio whose case has been challenged since her arrest almost six years ago.

Cumpio was found guilty today on a charge of “financing terrorism” in the Philippines, and now faces a sentence of between 12 and 18 years in prison.

RSF released a statement condemning the verdict and questioning the Philippines government’s commitment to a free press.

• READ MORE:  RSF and partners strongly condemn conviction of Frenchie Mae Cumpio for baseless “financing terrorism” charges
• Groups slam Frenchie Mae Cumpio’s conviction as ‘miscarriage of justice’
• As journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio’s trial enters final phase, a look back at nearly six years of judicial ordeal
• Other Philippines press freedom reports

“We are appalled by this verdict. Three RSF investigations and evidence presented in court by Frenchie Mae Cumpio’s lawyers clearly show how fabricated this case has been from the very beginning,” said RSF Asia-Pacific Bureau advocacy manager Aleksandra Bielakowska
in the statement in Taipei today.

Local and international groups have condemned the conviction of 26-year-old community journalist Cumpio, saying it sends a “chilling message” to media, activists, and even ordinary people in the Philippines, reports Rappler.

“Frenchie Mae Cumpio’s conviction represents a devastating failure on the part of the Philippine justice system and the authorities’ blatant disregard for press freedom,” said Bielakowska.

“The Philippines should serve as an international example of protecting media freedom — not a perpetrator that red-tags, prosecutes and imprisons journalists simply for doing their work.

‘Highlights systemic issues’
“This sentence only highlights the systemic issues in the country and the urgent need for comprehensive reforms.

“We renew our call on President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to act without delay to end this injustice and release Frenchie Mae Cumpio immediately.

“Without his decisive action, there will be no meaningful difference from previous administrations that showed no regard for upholding a free press.”

Committee to Protect Journalists Asia-Pacific director Beh Lih Yi said the court ruling was “absurd” and that the promises made by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to uphold press freedom were “nothing but empty talk”.

She added that the Philippines must stop criminalising journalists.

According to the 2025 RSF World Press Freedom Index, the Philippines is 116th out of 180 countries surveyed.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a speech at Davos this week that signals there may still be a leader in the West worth following.

“Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” he warned.

The Canadian PM was brutally honest about Western conduct in the world but shone a bright light on a better path forward.

• READ MORE: ‘The end of the world as we know it’: Is the rules-based order finished?

At a time when the US has pivoted to a smash-and-grab deployment of hard power that now extends to its closest allies, Carney stepped up.

The speech wasn’t a rhetorical tour de force; it was better than that: it was a declaration by the leader of a major, middle ranked Western power that the snivelling compliance, the fawning and the keep-your-head-down approach that has typified the collective West’s response to Trumpism is at a strategic dead end.

We are at a moment which Carney defines as “a rupture in the world order”.

Nostalgia is not a strategy
“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy,” Carney said.

At a time when the US is led by a criminal toddler who can’t stop whining about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize even as he attacks country after country, it is refreshing to encounter a leader who thinks and speaks like a statesman of the first rank.

“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.

“But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” Carney said.

A modern non-aligned movement
Carney did not reference the Non-Aligned Movement formed at the Belgrade Conference in September 1961 but it leapt to my mind when I heard him say:

“In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: compete with each other for favour or to combine to create a third path with impact.”

Carney also reaffirms the importance of the institutions that the West itself, including Canada, has severely weakened in recent years — WTO, UN and COP to name three. Russia, with its invasion of Ukraine, comes in a distant second in this regard.

With an assertive, aggressive US hell-bent on getting whatever it wants, Carney looks on the times we have entered with much-needed clarity. His call is for an alliance of middle powers.

In a word: collectivism.

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and what Carney is proposing have similarities, particularly structurally, but also significant differences, particularly ideologically.

Not least Carney is a reformer and not at heart an anti-imperialist. He is the former head of both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada and will not be seen in a Che Guevara t-shirt any time soon.

As with the NAM, however, Carney advocates collective leverage, resistance to client-state dependency and using internationalism to resist divide-and-rule by great powers.

“When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It’s the ‘performance’ of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”

The giants who formed the Non-Aligned movement were Josip Broz Tito (Yugoslavia), Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt), Jawaharlal Nehru (India), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), and Sukarno (Indonesia). They gathered nations around  the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence”: mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality and mutual benefit, peaceful coexistence.

In a nutshell: the polar opposite of the Western Rules-Based Order. Carney’s speech echoed many of the same sentiments.

“The powerful have their power. But we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.

“And it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.”

Brilliant. But converting a speech into a movement that mobilises countries in an effective way requires commitment and resources we need to see emerge at pace.

In the 1960s and 70s, it was about small and middle powers navigating a course between two superpower blocs — a passage between Scylla (Soviet Union) and Charybdis (United States). Today we all must navigate the rough and rowdy world of the US, China and a resurgent Russia.

Canada’s astonishing resistance to the Empire
What is astonishing is that this time around, the impulse to rally together comes not from a socialist country like the former Yugoslavia or a “black Third World country” (in 1960s parlance) like Tanzania, but from the beating heart of the white-dominated Western world – from Canada, one of the capitals of the Western empire.  My, how times have suddenly changed.

This should act as shock therapy to somnolent countries like Australia and New Zealand who cleave to a past that no longer exists. Carney has shown the power of looking at the world through untinted lenses (though Macron did look pretty cool in Davos in his blue sunnies).

A rare moment of honesty about Western conduct
I don’t recall a Western leader being so open about the ear-splitting hypocrisy and double-dealing of the West.  Most impressively, Carney gives a clear signal of what needs to be done to survive in this world of jostling hegemons.

More submissive leaders like Christopher Luxon of New Zealand and Australia’s Anthony Albanese should take careful note because, as Carney says, we are at a turning point in the world.

Carney, who previously mumbled his way through issues like Venezuela and Gaza, made a valuable contribution to confronting the desolation of reality:

“First it means naming reality. Stop invoking ‘rules-based international order’ as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion.”

In time, this may open the door to Truth and Reconciliation.  The genocide in Gaza is an example par excellence of the falsity of the rules-based order; Venezuela’s recent rape by the Americans, greeted with shuffling indifference by the West, traduced international law. The lawless bombing of Iran, the starvation of hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians in a blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia and armed by the US and UK are just a few of many such examples.

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim,” Carney said.

Noting the standing ovation Carney received, the threat to Greenland has clearly acted on the Western countries as a shock therapy that the Gaza genocide, the bombing of Iran and the attack on Venezuela failed to deliver.

Carney stands on the shoulders of giants
I would point out that former leaders like prime minister Helen Clark of New Zealand have been arguing along these lines for years, advocating, for example, for a nuclear free Pacific and recommending “that we always pursue dialogue and engagement over confrontation.”

Warning that Trump was too unstable to be relied on, she told a  conference in 2025 that New Zealand “should join forces with other countries across regions who want to be coalitions for action around these issues, not just little Western clubs.”

I’ll give the last word to the late Julius Nyerere, first President of Tanzania, from a 1970 speech to the Non-Aligned Movement. It expresses a worldview in accord with Carney’s speech but which is the polar opposite of 500 years of Western conduct from Christopher Columbus to Donald Trump:

“By non-alignment we are saying to the Big Powers that we also belong to this planet. We are asserting the right of small, or militarily weaker, nations to determine their own policies in their own interests, and to have an influence on world affairs which accords with the right of all peoples to live on earth as human beings equal with other human beings.

“And we are asserting the right of all peoples to freedom and self-determination; therefore expressing an outright opposition to colonialism and international domination of one people by another.”

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. 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 the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/01/19/one-year-into-trumps-second-term-repressive-us-president-on-track-to-join-worlds-worst-press-freedom-predators/ Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:37:26 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=122599 Reporters Without Borders

After winning re-election in 2024, Donald Trump promised to be a dictator “on day one”.

When it comes to press freedom, he has kept his word, extending the war on the press he launched while running for his first term with grave attacks on access to reliable information worldwide.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which monitors “press freedom predators” worldwide, has compiled a timeline of his administration’s assaults on the media in the past year and warns that he risks sinking to the levels of authoritarian regimes.

President Trump’s hostility towards the media predates his return to the White House in 2025. For the past 10 years, he has labelled journalists and media outlets he disagrees with as “the enemy of the people” and “fake news”.

• READ MORE: Congress must rein in Trump’s war on press freedom after FBI raid on journalist
• Other Donald Trump and the media reports

His attacks coincide with a broader decline in the news media’s public esteem: according to Gallup, only 28 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media.

In his second term in office, though, Trump has matched his history of violent rhetoric with a series of concrete actions that have severely damaged freedom of the press in the United States and around the world.

In the past 12 months, he has censored government data, dismantled America’s public broadcasters, weaponised independent government agencies to punish media that criticise his actions, halted aid funding for media freedom internationally, sued disfavored outlets, applied pressure to install cronies to lead others, and more

These actions echo the anti-press measures of the ruthless dictators in the “political” category of the 2025 Press Freedom Predators List, such as President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Similar alarming levels
RSF is concerned that Trump’s increasingly authoritarian tactics could eventually descend to similarly alarming levels.

The Press Freedom Predators List exposes systemic attempts to silence the free press by highlighting actors who wield an outsized, harmful influence on press freedom in five categories: political, security, legal, economic and social.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr has already made the 2025 list in the “legal” category, while Trump-aligned tech mogul Elon Musk was featured in the “economic” category.

“It’s easy for Donald Trump’s individual attacks on our press freedom to wash away into the constant churn of the news cycle,” said Clayton Weimers, executive director, RSF North America.

But put them all together and one conclusion is unavoidable: the US president is waging an all-out war on press freedom and journalism. Trump is a press freedom predator.

“Any coverage, journalist, or outlet that displeases him becomes a target, and not just with empty threats. He and his administration have gone out of their way to punish, investigate, damage, defund, and castigate the independent news media.

“Trump’s war on press freedom has dramatic consequences for American democracy and trustworthy news coverage worldwide, and needs to be stopped.”

January: the explosive start to Trump’s second term
January 7 – In an early example of a company prematurely complying with Trump’s threats, Meta guts its fact-checking programme. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and several other Big Tech executives attend Trump’s inauguration soon thereafter.

January 20 – Trump issues an executive order “ending federal censorship,” effectively eliminating government monitoring of misinformation and disinformation.

January 22 – FCC Chairman Brendan Carr reinstates previously dismissed licensing complaints against three major US television broadcasters, ABC, CBS, and NBC,for their 2024 election coverage, but declines to reinstate a similar complaint against Trump-friendly cable outlet Fox News.

January 29 – Carr launches a full investigation into public media networks PBS and NPR, complementing political efforts to cut their federal funding.

January 24 – Trump freezes almost all foreign aid, dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and cutting more than $268 million allocated by Congress to support media freedom worldwide. Independent news outlets around the world are thrown into chaos.

February: sanctions and censorship
February 3 – The Trump administration takes down thousands of US government pages covering information ranging from vaccines to climate change.

February 6 – Trump issues sanctions against International Criminal Court officials in retaliation for their investigation into war crimes committed by Israeli forces in Gaza, including attacks against hundreds of journalists.

February 8 – Trump demands a $20 billion settlement from CBS over the network’s editing of an interview with his election opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris.

February 11 – The White House bars Associated Press reporters from covering White House events in retaliation for their refusal to adopt Trump’s preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico.

February 21 – The Trump administration lays off workers responsible for handling FOIA requests for information, creating barriers for reporters’ access to vital data.

February 25 – The White House announces major changes to the White House press pool and declares it will be choosing who is allowed to attend press briefings.

March: US public broadcasters gutted
March 14 – Trump issues a decree dismantling the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees the allocation of funds to US public broadcasters Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), the Middle East Broadcast Networks (MBN), Radio and Television Marti,  and Radio Free Asia (RFA). RSF soon files a lawsuit to save VOA.

March 14 – Trump baselessly accuses the news media of “illegal behavior” in a speech widely seen as encouraging the Department of Justice to target Trump’s perceived enemies in the media.

March 15 – The Trump administration places all Voice of America (VOA) personnel on administrative leave, stopping virtually all news production.

April: more cuts to public media
April 13 – Trump begins to punish law firms taking pro bonowork he doesn’t agree with, including the protection of journalists.

April 15 – The Trump administration announces that it plans to cut funding for NPR and PBS.

April 25 – The Justice Department rescinds a policy that prevented reporters’ phone records from being searched.

May: Pentagon access limited
May 13 – All wire service reporters are barred from Air Force One during Trump’s trip to the Middle East.

May 15 – Over 500 VOA employees receive termination notices, despite a court order injunction won by RSF and co-plaintiffs including VOA journalists and their unions.

May 24 – Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth limits access for credentialed press within the Pentagon, hindering vital reporting on the country’s defence headquarters.

June: police violence against reporters
June 3 – USAGM senior advisor Kari Lake lays out plans to cut more than 900 employees from the USAGM workforce.

June 8 – Trump sends the National Guard to Los Angeles following protests over immigration raids.

June 14 – Journalist Mario Guevara is detained while reporting on immigration raids in Atlanta, Georgia. Though the charges against him are dropped and he is ordered released, local police transfer him to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which begins deportation proceedings against him, despite his legal work status.

July: Trump critic taken off air
July 11 – Judge issues a temporary injunction against the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for using excessive force. Since June 6, at least 70 attacks against journalists have been reported.

July 18 – The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is not renewed after the late night host Colbert criticises the settlement between CBS’ parent company Paramount and President Trump, casting a pall over the network’s political independence.

July 19 – Trump sues the Wall Street Journal for its report on his ties to disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

August: restrictions for foreign journalists
August 8 – The Department of Homeland Security proposes severe restrictions to visas for foreign journalists in the US.

August 26 – Trump-appointed ambassador to Türkiye Tom Barrack tells Lebanese reporters to “act civilised” and accuses them of being “animalistic” when they ask him questions.

September: crackdown fueled by death of Charlie Kirk
September 17 – In another dangerous precedent for censorship, ABC pulls late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel off the air after pressure from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr over Kimmel’s comments on Republican politicians’ reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death.

September 19 – The Department of Defence requires reporters to sign an unconstitutional oath pledging to only publish information “authorised for public release,” prompting the vast majority of the Pentagon press pool to walk out en masse.

September 28 – Reporter Asal Rezaei has a pepper ball shot through her car window outside an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois. ICE agents also pointed their guns at journalists, and several other reporters were hit by pepper balls in the following days.

September 29 – YouTube, one of the largest sources of news for Americans, agrees to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit with Trump after his social media accounts were suspended following the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

September 30 – An ICE agent assaults two journalists outside an immigration court in New York City. One of them, L. Vural Elibo from Turkish outlet Anadolu, is hospitalised.

October: journalist deported after months behind bars
October 3 –  Mario Guevara is deported to El Salvador after more than 100 days in ICE custody.

October 17 – Trump refiles a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times for its reporting on the 2024 election.

October 18 – LAPD officers attack journalists at No Kings Protest in direct violation of an injunction issued in July.

October 28 – Reporters are barred from covering an immigration hearing in Maryland. Journalists’ ability to access immigration proceedings are hindered due to a government shutdown.

October 31 – The Trump administration restricts media access in the West Wing of the White House, barring reporters from a second-floor area known as “Upper Press,” traditionally open to reporters and White House communications staff.

November: new government website created to smear media outlets
November 10 – Trump threatens to sue the BBC over its editing of footage from the insurrection instigated by pro-Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.

November 17 – The State Department announces new restrictions and press pass rules for journalists attempting to enter the Harry S. Truman building.

November 18 – Trump dismisses the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and defends Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman.

November 18 – Trump shouts “Quiet, piggy!” at Bloomberg journalist Catherine Lucey, one of several personal attacks he lobs at multiple women reporters throughout November and into the early days of December.

November 28 – The Trump administration launches a “Hall of Shame” webpage targeting various media outlets and encourages citizens to submit complaints to a White House-run tip line targeting journalists.

December: a court defied
December 2 – Trump announces he will close overseas VOA offices, contradicting a judge’s return-to-work order from April.

December 10 – Trump inserts himself into the potential merger of Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount and Netflix, pressuring for the sale of news channel CNN.

December 20 – CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pulls a story about deportation from the programme 60 Minutes, sparking backlash over the politicisation of the network.

First published by RSF on 14 January 2026. Republished by Pacific Media Watch.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/01/16/eugene-doyle-iran-in-the-vortex-whats-really-going-on-and-the-invisible-hand-of-israel/ Fri, 16 Jan 2026 09:01:00 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=122472 COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

If you want to understand what’s going on in Iran, abandon what the Persians invented centuries ago: Manichaeism. We use the term today to denote political framing which is simplistic, black-and-white, two-dimensional — a world of Angels (us) and Demons (them).

This article recognises multiple perspectives, including those of an activist associated with the anti-government Woman Life Freedom movement whom I interviewed this week.

First, however, let us look at the geopolitical manoeuvres at work and “The Invisible Hand of Israel”.

• READ MORE: Gulf countries gear up diplomacy to stave off US-Iran escalation
• Israel tries to drag US into ‘fighting wars on its behalf,’ says Iran’s foreign minister
• Other Iran reports

The invisible hand of Israel
Former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told Israeli army radio this week that Israel must be ready to act when the Iranian “regime” is ready to fall.

“At this moment, when what matters most is the mass action on the ground, we need to stay in the background and steer things with an invisible hand,” said Gallant, who is the subject of an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant.

Former CIA director and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted this week: “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them.”

The Iranian regime is in trouble. Bringing in mercenaries is its last best hope.

Riots in dozens of cities and the Basij under siege — Mashed, Tehran, Zahedan. Next stop: Baluchistan.

47 years of this regime; POTUS 47. Coincidence?

Happy New Year to every Iranian in the…

— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) January 2, 2026

I don’t believe this was a case of letting the cat out of the bag; I think this is both true and a form of psy-ops (psychological warfare), trying to unnerve the Iranian government and encourage the kind of harsh crackdown that regimes resort to when they feel cornered.

MI6, CIA and Mossad are active in Iran, much to the frustration of many of the large numbers of anti-government protesters determined to end the rule of the clerics.

According to Israeli and Western sources, tens of thousands of Starlink terminals were smuggled into Iran to bypass any internet shutdown. Yet the government — apparently using sophisticated Chinese “kill switches” — were able to disable most of them, thus decoupling people within Iran from external coordinators.

Trump: ‘Help is on the way’
“Help is on the way,” Trump said menacingly on January 12.  How did that kind of “help” go for Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan or so many other countries going back to the Guatemalan Silent Genocide or the Vietnam War?

American “help” resulted in the overthrow of the democratically-elected Mossadegh government and the installation of authoritarian rule under Shah Pahlavi in 1953. The West got their hands on the oil.

This time if they cannot get regime change they will be happy with regime destruction, civil war and the end of the multi-century project for a unified and sovereign Iranian state. So far, things have not gone to plan.

Long-standing Israeli security analyst Ehud Ya’ari told Israeli Channel 12 this week that the Iranian government remained firmly in control and that there was no evidence of momentum in the protests.

“I want to say things that disappoint not only the viewers, but also me,” he said. “At the moment, we do not see a continued expansion of the uprising.

“It is not taking on new and larger dimensions, as it did in 1978–1979 before Khomeini returned to Tehran.”

This is inconvenient if the West indeed plans to launch a war.  The first Gulf War was partially sold on the killing of imaginary Incubator Babies, the Second Iraq War was sold on imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction, the genocide in Gaza was launched amid lurid tales of imaginary Beheaded Babies.

War propaganda peddled by our mainstream media demands worthy victims.

Western contempt for international law could get a lot of people killed

As shown in Palestine and in Iran, the West tends to have a spitting contempt for international law if it is their team that tramples on it. Two cornerstones we should never forget are:

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter – Prohibition of Force: All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.

And, yes, that does include powerful white countries. And yes, that does include Russia.

Secondly, we should never forget the 1965 UN Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in Domestic Affairs.

Back in the 1980s the Reagan Administration secretly sold weapons to its enemy Iran to secretly fund Nicaraguan Contra death squads. In the 1984 Nicaragua Case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), international law was clarified by reaffirming that the principle of non-intervention “involves the right of every sovereign State to conduct its affairs without outside interference”.

Alastair Crooke, a former high-ranking member of Britain’s MI6, an expert on Islamist revolution, says Mujahedeen-e-Khalq fighters trained by the CIA in Albania, along with Kurdish fighters trained by the US in Syria, infiltrated Iran recently and played an important role in the violence.

“We’ve had demonstrations periodically in Iran but these were much more violent.” He suggests the ploy was to provoke retaliatory regime violence which could act as an accelerant to further popular escalation.

Some important truths about what is happening in Iran
There is a large anti-government portion of the population which has long-standing and genuine grievances.  I know and admire a few of them. There have also been equally large pro-government protests, largely unreported in the Western media.

Foremost among the anti-government protesters are women and, for that reason, I interviewed Aida Tavassoli, an Iranian women’s rights activist with the Woman Life Freedom movement.

“I think the people of Iran are just so fed up right now,” she told me. “I’ve always said Iran is like a pressure cooker. Each uprising is like you put more steam in the pressure cooker. Eventually it will explode.”

Aida became active in advocacy for women’s rights in Iran in 2022 when Jina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, died in a Tehran hospital after being arrested by Iran’s morality police for allegedly improper hijab wearing. Her death sparked major protests inside Iran and around the world.

The circumstances of her death are, typically, contested.

“The whole world basically erupted into protests over the lack of women’s rights in Iran,” Tavassoli says. “The entire legislation of Iranian law is against women; they treat us as second-class citizens. We have basically no right to divorce, to the custody of children, to say no to child marriage. There’s a lot of honour killings in Iran, which we think are perpetuated by these discriminatory laws.”

This time around the most prominent anti-government groups rally around Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed Shah, who lives in the US, is endorsed by Israel, the US and powerful parts of the Iranian diaspora. According to Iran watchers I follow, his popularity within Iran is limited.

Pahlavi is in direct contact with Trump.  He publicly supported the American bombing of his own country last year.  He has expressed a desire to be in Tehran sooner rather than later.

“We will soon be by your side.” he tweeted to protesters, urging them to stay on the streets.

Images of rallies around the Western world in support of the anti-government action inside Iran typically show three flags prominent in the protests – the Lion and Sun flag of the Pahlavi regime, the Israeli flag, and the US flag.  This alliance between the monarchists, the Israelis and the Americans is concerning for many Iranians, including anti-government people like Aida Tavassoli.

“It almost feels like Reza Pahlavi and his dear friends — the Israelis and Americans — are stealing our revolution,” Tavassoli says. She emphasises any change should come from civil society inside Iran not external actors.

London-based Middle East Eye, with reporters on the ground, says “Iranian protesters reject US and Israeli interference”.

MEE quotes one of the protesters, Sara: “We want regime change, but we do not want our country to be destroyed. And given Israel’s record, it would not be surprising if they tried to exploit this situation.”

Not in any way discounting the validity and determination of many anti-government protesters, the events of the past month show all the tell-tale signs of a US “colour revolution”.

The Islamic Republic is under the kind of pressure that the West has become adept at applying.

The US reneged on the JCPOA nuclear agreement in 2018. Subsequent sanctions and further isolation are powerful. US-Israeli assassinations and missile attacks triggered the 12-day War last year.

Some believe the sharp decline in the Iranian currency this month was part of an orchestrated destabilization campaign. Combine this with corruption and what is widely assessed as incompetent economic management and you have all the ingredients for serious discontent.

Ordinary Iranians are suffering and frustrated; many are turning against the government.

The US is moving more attack assets into the region; Israel apparently wants to try its luck again. Here we go, yet again.

Professor Glenn Diesen: “The result is always the same — from the Arab Spring onward. The country which was to be liberated is instead destroyed. So we’ve all seen this movie before.”

Government incapable of reform?
Protesters make the valid point that the Iranian government has shown itself incapable of the kind of reform that would recognise the pluralistic nature of Iranian society. Whether it is capable of reform is a moot point but all regimes crack down on dissent in the face of serious external threats and that is why I believe the US-Israel-EU approach is disastrous and counterproductive.

Change must come from within and not be imposed by powerful hostile countries — not least by ones actively pursuing genocide in Palestine.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. 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 the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/01/16/evening-star-rising-girlhood-in-the-aeta-heartlands-of-the-philippines/ Fri, 16 Jan 2026 08:36:36 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=122491 SPECIAL REPORT: By Keeara Ofren

The lives of children will always tell the past and future of any community. My colleague Estelle and I will never forget the day we met Ximena*.

Last month, I lived alongside the Aeta community of the Philippines, observed their daily lives and human rights issues in the area. Life was different here, a peaceful pace; with locals who loved and trusted us so much.

Aeta culture is the oldest continuous culture in the Philippines. The people come from an earlier migration than Austronesians. They are dark skinned, many have curly hair and they speak a different language to Tagalog.

• READ MORE: A Filipino tribe fights to stay as a ‘Smart City’ rises on a former US base
• Other Indigenous reports in the Philippines

Amid turkeys, fire ants and lizards, we’d notice Venus in the starry sky, as if watching over the village. Ximena was a teenage girl who would frequent the local convenience store and would help out around the village. She had a particular spirit which transcended language.

Ximena was dignified and thoughtful, there was something about her which made us think that she carried herself like a leader.

Do you remember what it was like to be 14 years old? It is formative, nostalgic, freeing and stressful all at the same time.

I remember what it was like being 14 — rock and roll Catholic school, friend group fights, the dawning feeling that your hometown and parents would not have all the answers you were seeking. Fourteen for many of us was the time which we would start to develop our own political crust and values which could shape us forever.

Unique insight
With Ximena, I knew that I would have a unique insight, to find out what it was like to be an Indigenous girl in the Philippines. On paper, things seemed to be going well for Ximena. She was a dance champion, athletics team member and honour roll student.

But nothing prepared us for the heartbreak to come.

Estelle and I bonded with Ximena with a conversation of things which dominate teenage life — pop culture idols and how much Ximena loved to study makeup skills online. Ximena loved Marian Rivera. It is not hard to see why. Marian is a skilled dancer, she played Marimar in the Filipino telenovela of the same name. This show is symbolic of the Filipina maiden, a poor but resilient and devoted woman who works hard for her happy ending.

As soon as I asked Ximena, “how is school?”, Ximena’s sunny expression faded, as if her confidence sank.

“Honestly, I don’t like it. I don’t have any friends there. Sometimes I just cry behind the school buildings because I can’t take it. My mom tells me not to worry, that bad people get what’s coming to them in the end. But it’s hard.

“People tell me at school that my family and I will go nowhere in life. I even had someone say, ‘I wish you wouldn’t even exist’. I see other Aeta kids but I try not to mingle with them because I already feel so different”.

Ximena tells us that the students’ comments come from people looking down on the poor in Philippine society. For example, she tells us a story of when she found a group chat where students had taken photos of her lunch, which was steamed taro and rice.

Typical meal
This is a typical meal in the Aeta world, but to the students, this was a desperate meal of the poor. They all laughed.

We were horrified to hear that Ximena found that a teacher was in this very group chat too.

On other days, students would throw her lunch away or tamper with it. My eyes start welling up and it’s Ximena who strokes my hair and gives me a hug. I respond by saying that I understand what it is like to feel put down and hurt, I also had difficult teenage experiences.

“High school is not forever sweetheart. People love and care for you. Keep that love alive. Believe in yourself and speak confidently.”

“Thank you Ate (an affectionate term for ‘big sis’). You’re cute. It’s hard to fight back and to know what to do. I just cry at the back of the school. I want to focus on what is good for me. I like learning at school and I want to focus on that.”

Estelle explains to Ximena, that it’s ok to feel hurt and that there are many ways to fight back; even just learning, being clear when people make you uncomfortable and being her same loving self is a form of staying strong in that situation.

That being said, Estelle and I did give a chuckle and cheer when Ximena said that one day, she was so sick of the bullying, that she said to her tormentors, “What the hell is your problem?! We’re both brown! Your skin darkens in the sun too!”.

Open racism
“It’s more fun in the Philippines”, the tourist taglines say, and we all know Filipinos for the soft power of happy go lucky and kind locals. This was shattered by Ximena’s stories of the town; which were dotted with experiences of open racism which reminded me of stories of how people  Riovera.

Randoms trying to instigate physical fights, people making a huge deal about your skin colour and hair texture and how people openly belittle you. For this reason, Ximena and other Aeta teens avoid walking around town on their own.

Does Filipino society accept Aeta people? For Ximena, she hoped so with her former friend group. That was until the day where they blackmailed her into smoking two packets of cigarettes in one go.

Ximena passed out and had to be rushed to hospital for severe nicotine poisoning. Due to her lack of oxygen and organ damage, her father was her blood transfusion donor.

Ximena’s father later passed away due his own health complications after this transfusion.

“After that, I vowed that I would do everything to take care of my family and to think about my studies and life most of all. I need to be around people who are good to me.” Ximena may not have friends at school anymore, but we were pleased to hear that Ximena was one in a friend group of 15 girls outside of her school in the neighbourhood, including non-Aeta girls who would stick up for Ximena.

In times like that, we always remember those who stood by us and those whom we stood with. Ximena remembers her new friends fondly. I think they will remember her too for what she has guided them to learn; the meaning of integrity as a friend.

Dreaming big
High school is also the time of part time jobs and a taste of independence. Ximena dreams big and makes those dreams come true. With her job as a nanny, she sends most of her money to her family, but I’m glad to know that she finds time to be a teen too.

She saved enough money for an iPhone, makeup and matching shoes and clothes for herself and her friends. We loved hearing that.

Life is more than grades too, what stays with us are the memories we have with friends and how we grew as people. This is stored in certain textures of pizza dough, nail polish shades, the music we listened to on commutes, mall perfume testers and the thrilling feeling of being about to choose and buy our own clothes.

For Ximena, these memories are stored in pink trainers, eyeliner, Budots electronic music and trying to figure out if a TikTok video is AI or not. But for Ximena, her part time job casts a shadow over her freedom.

“I nanny and help out at another house. The kids are naughty but the mother is kind. I like them but it’s not my real dream. My dream is to go to university and study English.”

Estelle notices a certain hesitation with Ximena. We learnt that while Ximena’s mother has since remarried and life continues nicely in their village home, Ximena’s mother is also having health problems.

Ximena tells us that it is somewhat inevitable that she will have to drop out of school later, to focus on working full time to support the family.

Special connection
Society debates about what it means to be Indigenous and what makes up the legal definitions of indigeneity, with all points being areas of controversy. These include being an originating group in an area, a history of violence, war or subjugation, cultural distinctiveness, a special connection to land, separate authority structures and/or realities of poverty.

But who wins from this controversy? And how do we adequately address the more urgent experiences of Aeta people? Ximena tells us of a time where she was hospitalised after 4 days of eating nothing but salt water. There was simply no food at home.

Aeta people have low school retention and literacy rates; due to adverse experiences at school, geographic barriers and poverty. This means that many Aeta are itinerant workers and are often exploited at work. Families are in cycles of poverty due to how prevalent discrimination is.

Despite everything, Ximena is hopeful that she could be the one to break free and guide her siblings too; Estelle and I felt that she was an articulate, loving and thoughtful girl with immense potential.

We all talk through what we all love, what gives us hope and what we like to work on outside of work and school. “My favourite subject is math. I like art too. But most of all, in my spare time, I write stories about my life.” We ask if she is comfortable to share one. It is a prayer about her family and how much she loves all of them.

Ximena was able to excel in her life despite all odds. It is like she has a guiding star with a compelling power. “When I’m exhausted, when my body wants to give up in a running race, I just close my eyes and think about my family. That makes me continue, and then, I win.”

* Name changed

Keeara Ofren is a law, politics and international relations graduate based in Aotearoa New Zealand. She writes a “cheeky, vibrant and provocative” blog at K For Kindling where this article was first published after a recent human rights exposure visit to the isolated Indigenous heartland of the Aeta people in Luzon, Philippines. Republished with permission.

More information and a call to action:
International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines
A global network of churches, trade unions, environmentalists and NGOs aiming to inform the world about the human rights situation in the Philippines. ICHRP carries out human rights fact finding, human rights education for communities and moral support for Philippine grassroots organisations.
https://ichrp.net/donate/

Karapatan
Karapatan is a Filipino human rights NGO alliance carrying out rights documentation and research as well as providing legal aid for communities facing human rights violations. Karapatan also provides engagement with international mechanisms for peace and reporting human rights issues in the Philippines.

Website: https://www.karapatan.org/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/karapatan/
Karapatan Central Luzon, an area where many Aeta communities are based: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61555246921656

Michael Beltran
Filipino journalist active on Al Jazeera writing about the human rights situation in the Philippines, including of the Aeta people.
https://www.aljazeera.com/author/maykel-beltran

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/01/15/from-palestine-to-minneapolis-ice-and-israel-use-the-same-violent-playbook/ Thu, 15 Jan 2026 05:35:41 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=122409 Renee Good, like many Palestinians before her, died because authoritarian forces decided she did not deserve to live, and because the entire legal and political structure exists to ensure those agents never face meaningful consequences for murder.

ANALYSIS: By Ahmad Ibsais

On January 7, ICE agents shot Renee Good three times through her car window as she seemingly tried to drive away from them in Minneapolis.

Then, they blocked ambulances from reaching her for 15 minutes while she bled out in the driver’s seat with her partner beside her.

Within hours, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was calling Good, the woman who had just been executed in broad daylight by a federal agent, a “domestic terrorist,” claiming the agent had acted in self-defence against a woman allegedly trying to run him over with her vehicle.

• READ MORE: Other Palestine reports

If this sounds familiar, it should, because it is the exact same play Israel deploys every single time they kill a Palestinian.

Take, for example, on December 6, just a few weeks ago, when Israeli soldiers in Hebron, in the southern occupied West Bank, ordered 17-year-old Ahmad Rajabi to stop his car. He stopped and then they shot him dead anyway.

They prevented emergency services from reaching Ahmad and shot at them as well. There are countless others just like Rajabi.

ICE and the Israeli army are using the same playbook because they are born of the same system of state violence and white-supremacy — the same machinery of racialised control that has been refined in Palestine and imported to American cities through deliberate policy and corporate profit. As Noura Erakat penned, the “imperial boomerang” has already made its way back.

Making the dead ‘responsible’
Calling victims “terrorists” is how you make the dead responsible for their own deaths. Israel has spent decades making it so that every Palestinian killed at a checkpoint was “trying to ram soldiers,” every journalist shot while wearing a press vest was “operating with militants,” every child killed was somehow an imminent threat requiring lethal force. How else can you justify turning Gaza into a graveyard?

This is what occupation looks like everywhere it exists, in every context where armed agents operate with total impunity over populations denied meaningful legal protection or political power.

And beyond the paramilitary forces swarming the streets, the same digital systems of occupation are also migrating back here.

Palantir runs ICE’s case management systems that track and monitor immigrants to enable fast-track deportations, and that same company provides AI-based targeting platforms for Israeli military airstrikes that decide which Palestinians to kill using data that includes private communications between Palestinian Americans and their relatives in Gaza.

Israeli companies like Elbit and Paragon provide radar, surveillance, and spyware directly to ICE and Homeland Security. The Anti-Defamation League sponsors law enforcement exchange programs where American police travel to Israel to learn “best practices” in checkpoint management, crowd suppression, and in turning entire populations into security threats.

The impunity of those who worship at the idol of war are identical too. Qualified immunity in the United States functions exactly like the impunity Israeli soldiers enjoy when they kill Palestinians, creating a closed legal loop that makes accountability structurally impossible.

The doctrine ensures that each new killing cannot establish precedent because there is no precedent to point to.

Sham investigations
Israeli soldiers kill Palestinians regularly followed by sham investigations that are opened and then quietly closed months or years later, and prosecutions almost never materialise at all. Remember Shireen Abu-Akleh?

But Renee is not the first to have been murdered by ICE. At least 30 people died in ICE custody in 2025 alone, making it the deadliest year for ICE detainees since 2004.

We know Renee because of the visibility of her murder, but ICE spent 2025 disappearing brown bodies whose names most of us will never know. It is also worth mentioning that these systems go beyond the Trump Administration as many Democrats will run to proclaim.

Obama adopted ICE as a fledgling agency, and it was Obama and his party that started ICE on their path to the military force they have become. ICE exists to terrorise immigrant communities through detention, deportation, and death, to make survival a privilege for anyone who falls outside the constantly narrowing boundaries of who counts as deserving protection.

ICE has a $170 billion budget over four years, making ICE the 13th largest army in the world.

Renee Good and Ahmad Rajabi died because paramilitary authoritarian forces decided they did not deserve to live, and because the entire legal and political structure exists specifically to ensure those agents never face meaningful consequences for murder.

Moral arc for justice
The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice only when we bend it ourselves. Thus, we must resist.

Resistance means refusing to accept any of this as normal or inevitable or just the way things work. It means protesting to demand prosecution of the agent who killed Renee Good under Minnesota state law. It means organising to defund and ultimately abolish ICE entirely, because an agency with a $170 billion budget that terrorises communities cannot be reformed into something humane.

And it means understanding that Palestinian liberation is, in fact, tied to all of us. And, as Palestinians have taught the world, we must take freedom into our own hands. From Minneapolis to Palestine, occupation must be dismantled completely and entirely, or it will keep killing and keep expanding until none of us are safe from it.

Ahmad Ibsais is a first-generation Palestinian American and a law student who writes the newsletter State of Siege. This article was first published by Mondoweiss. Republished under Creative Commons.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2026/01/13/chris-hedges-the-global-machinery-of-terror/ Tue, 13 Jan 2026 04:00:37 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=122325 The Trump administration is consolidating the familiar machinery of terror of all authoritarian states. We must resist now. If we wait, it will be too late, warns The Chris Hedges Report.

ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

I have seen the masked goons who terrorise our streets before. I saw them during the “Dirty War” in Argentina, where 30,000 men, women and children were “disappeared” by the military junta.

Victims were held in secret prisons, savagely tortured and murdered. To this day, many families do not know the fate of their loved ones.

I saw them in El Salvador, when death squads were killing 800 people a month. I saw them in Guatemala under the dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt.

• READ MORE: Ian Powell: The Nicolás Maduro kidnapping, US imperialist expansion and implications for New Zealand
• Jonathan Cook: From Gaza to Venezuela, the US has been unmasked as the serial villain
• Other state terrorism reports

I saw them in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I saw them in Iran under the rule of the ayatollahs where I was arrested and jailed twice and once deported in handcuffs. I saw them in Hafez al-Assad’s Syria.

I saw them in Bosnia, where Muslims were herded into concentration camps, executed and buried in mass graves.

I know these goons. I have been a prisoner in their jails and spent hours in their interrogation rooms. I have been beaten by them. I have been deported, and in several cases banned, from their countries. I know what is coming.

Terror is the engine that empowers dictatorships. It eliminates dissidents. It silences critics. It dismantles the law. It creates a society of timid and frightened collaborators, those who look away when people are snatched off streets or gunned down, those who inform to save themselves, those who retreat into their tiny rabbit holes, pulling down the blinds, desperately praying to be left in peace.

Terror works.

The iron doors have not yet shut. There are still protests. The media is still able to document state atrocities, including the January 7 murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross.

Doors closing fast
But the doors are closing fast. ICE has deported over 300,000 people and detained nearly 69,000 others — as well as been involved in 16 shootings, including four killings — since Trump began his campaign against immigrants.

ICE, our Americanised Gestapo, is being birthed.

Resistance must be collective. We must assert not only our individual rights, but economic, social and political rights — without them we are powerless. Resistance means organising to disrupt the machinery of commerce and government.

It means preventing arrests by patrolling neighborhoods to warn of impending ICE raids. It means protesting outside detention facilities. It means strikes. It means blocking streets and highways and occupying buildings. It means providing photographic evidence.

It means sustained pressure on local politicians and police to refuse to cooperate with ICE. It means providing legal representation, food and financial assistance to families with members detained. It means a willingness to be arrested. It means a nationwide campaign to defy the state’s inhumanity.

If we fail, the dimming flames of our open society will be snuffed out.

Authoritarian states are constructed incrementally. No dictatorship advertises its plan to extinguish civil liberties. It pays lip service to liberty and justice as it dismantles the institutions and laws that make liberty and justice possible.

Sporadic resistance
Opponents of the regime, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts to resist. They throw up temporary roadblocks, but they are soon purged.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago” notes that the consolidation of Soviet tyranny “was stretched out over many years because it was of primary importance that it be stealthy and unnoticed.” He called the process “a grandiose silent game of solitaire, whose rules were totally incomprehensible to its contemporaries, and whose outlines we can appreciate only now.”

“What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?” Solzhenitsyn asks.

“Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

“After all, you knew ahead of time those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”

Czesław Miłosz, in “The Captive Mind,” also documents the creep of tyranny, how it advances stealthily, until intellectuals are not only forced to repeat the regime’s self-adulating slogans but, as our leading universities did when they caved to false allegations of being bastions of antisemitism, embrace its absurdism.

Manufactured fear engenders self-doubt. It makes a population — often unconsciously — conform outwardly and inwardly. It conditions citizens to relate to those around them with suspicion and distrust. It destroys the solidarity vital to organising, community and dissent.

Effective state terror
The historian Robert Gellately, in his book “Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany,” argues that state terror in Nazi Germany was effective not because of omnipresent state surveillance, but because it fostered a “culture of denunciation”.

Rat out your neighbors and coworkers and survive. If you see something, say something.

The worse it gets, the more established institutions, desperate to survive, silence those who warn us.

“Before societies fall, just such a stratum of wise, thinking people emerges, people who are that and nothing more,” Solzhenitsyn writes of those who see what is coming. “And how they were laughed at! How they were mocked!”

The Austrian writer Joseph Roth, whose early warnings about the rise of fascism were largely dismissed, and who told fellow intellectuals to stop naively appealing to “the remains of a European conscience,” saw his books tossed into the bonfires in the spring of 1933 during the Nazi book burnings.

So far, we have not burned books, but have banned nearly 23,000 titles in public schools since 2021.

The authoritarian state cannibalises the institutions that foolishly aid and abet the witch hunts. It replaces them with pseudo-institutions populated with pseudo-legislators, pseudo-courts, pseudo-journalists, pseudo-intellectuals and pseudo-citizens.

Columbia University is a shining example of this willful self-immolation. Nothing is as it is presented.

Violent kidnappings
There are increasing numbers of violent kidnappings by masked ICE agents in unmarked cars on our city streets. People are ripped from their vehicles and beaten. They are arrested outside schools and day care centers. They are raided at work, thrown onto the floor, handcuffed, driven away in vans and shipped off to concentration camps in countries such as El Salvador.

They are seized when they appear at court for a green card application or interview to finalise a visa.

Once detained, they disappear into the labyrinth of over 200 detention centers, where they are moved from one facility to the next to hide them from family, lawyers and the courts. Due process, once a constitutional right afforded to everyone in the United States, no longer exists.

“Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states,” Hannah Arendt writes in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” “The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”

The FBI, in an example of how justice is perverted, refuses to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies in Minneapolis, blocking access to any evidence that would allow them to file criminal charges against Jonathan Ross.

Killing of unarmed citizens by the state is carried out with impunity.

ICE has more than doubled the size of its force since early 2025 — to 22,000 agents — hiring 12,000 new officers in four months from a pool of 220,000 applicants.

It plans to spend $100 million over a one-year period to hire even more recruits, part of the $170 billion for border and interior enforcement, including $75 billion for ICE, to be spent over four years. Salaries for these new recruits, poorly trained and often haphazardly vetted, will range from $49,739 to $89,528 a year, along with a $50,000 signing bonus — split over three years — and up to $60,000 in student loan repayments.

New detention centres
ICE is building new detention centers nationwide in 23 towns and cities. It promises that once it is fully operational, it will go door-to-door as part of the largest deportation effort in American history.

ICE agents, intoxicated by the licence to kick down doors while wearing body armor and firing automatic weapons at terrified women and children, are not warriors as they imagine, but thugs. They have few skills, other than weapons training, cruelty and brutality. They intend to remain employed by the state. The state intends to keep them employed.

None of this should surprise us. The repressive techniques used by ICE and our militarised police were perfected overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Occupied Palestine, and earlier in Vietnam.

The ICE agent who murdered Good was a machinegunner in Iraq. A night raid in Chicago, with agents rappelling from a helicopter to storm an apartment complex filled with terrified families, does not look any different from a night raid in Fallujah.

Aimé Césaire, the Martinician playwright and politician, in “Discourse on Colonialism” writes that the savage tools of imperialism and colonialism eventually migrate back to the home country. It is known as imperial boomerang.

Césaire writes:

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!”

And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civiliSation in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

Democracy’s last gasps
During the interregnum between the last gasps of a democracy and the emergence of a dictatorship, the nation is gaslighted. It is told the rule of law is respected. It is told democratic rule is inviolate. These lies mollify those being frog-marched into their own enslavement.

“The majority sit quietly and dare to hope,” Solzhenitsyn writes. “Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake!”

Maybe, the fearful say, Trump and his minions are only being bombastic. Maybe they don’t mean it. Maybe they are incompetent. Maybe the courts will save us. Maybe the next elections will end this nightmare. Maybe there are limits to extremism. Maybe the worst is over.

These self-delusions prevent us from resisting while the gallows are being constructed in front of us.

Authoritarian states start by targeting the most vulnerable, those most easily demonised — the undocumented, students on college campuses who protest genocide, antifa, the so-called “radical left,” Muslims, poor people of color, intellectuals and liberals.

They strike down one group after the next. They blow out, one by one, the long row of candles until we find ourselves in the dark, powerless and alone.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article was first published on the Chris Hedges Substack page and is republished with permission.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/12/01/west-papuan-liberation-fighters-risk-extermination-by-indonesias-high-tech-forces/ Mon, 01 Dec 2025 07:19:41 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=121826 As activist groups around the world observe December 1 — flag-raising “independence” day for West Papua today marking when the Morning Star flag was flown in 1961 for the first time — Kristo Langker reports from the Highlands about how the Indonesian military is raising the stakes.

SPECIAL REPORT: By Kristo Langker in Kiwirok, West Papua

While DropSite News usually reports on, and from, parts of the world where the US war machine operates, in this story, the weaponry in question is made by a multinational French weapons manufacturer and Chinese manufacturer.

However, you will see the structure is the same — the Indonesian government using drones and helicopters to terrorise and displace the people of West Papua, while the historical reason imperial interests loom over the region stems from a US mining project in the 1960s.

The videos in this story are well worth watching — exclusive interviews with the guerilla group fighting off the drones and airplanes with bows and arrows.

On 25 September 2025, Lamek Taplo, the guerilla leader of a wing of the West Papua National Liberation Army (Tentara Pembebasan Nasional Papua Barat, or TPNPB), left the jungle with his command to launch a series of raids on Indonesian military posts.

Indonesia had established three new military posts in the Star Mountains region in the past year, according to NGO Human Rights Monitor, with sources on the ground telling Drop Site News that nearby civilian houses and facilities — including a church, schools, and a health clinic — had been forcibly occupied in support of the military build-up.

5 Indonesian soldiers shot
Despite being severely outgunned, the command shot five Indonesian soldiers, killing one, while suffering no casualties themselves, according to Taplo and other members of his group.

The raids continued for three more days. The command shot the fuselage of a helicopter and burned five buildings that Taplo’s group claimed were occupied by Indonesian security forces.

Taplo was killed less than three weeks later by an apparent drone strike. During an October 13 interview a week before his death, Taplo, a former teacher himself, told Drop Site why TPNPB targeted a school:

“It’s because they (Indonesian military) used it as their base. There’s no teacher — only Indonesians. I know, because I was the teacher there, too . . .  Indonesia sent ‘teachers’. However, they’re actually military intelligence.”

Indonesia has laid claim to the western half of New Guinea island since the 1960s with the backing of the US. For the past year, the Indonesian military has ramped up its indiscriminate attacks on subsistence farming villages, especially those that deny Indonesian rule.

The military presence has been growing exponentially after the October 2024 inauguration of President Prabowo Subianto, who is implicated in historic massacres in Papua from his time as commander of Indonesia’s special forces — called Komando Pasukan Khusus or “Kopassus”.

According to witnesses interviewed in Kiwirok and its surrounding hamlets, and documented in videos, there are now snipers stationed along walking tracks, and civilians have been shot and killed attempting to retrieve their pigs.

Indonesian retaliated
Indonesia immediately retaliated against TPNPB’s September attacks by sending two consumer-grade DJI Mavic drones, rigged with servo motors, to drop Pindad-manufactured hand grenades.

One drone targeted a hut that Taplo claimed did not house TPNPB but belonged to civilians.

No one was killed as the grenade bounced off the sheet metal roof and exploded a few meters away. The other drone flew over a group of TPNPB raising the Morning Star flag of West Papua but was taken down by the guerrillas before a grenade could be dropped.

Ngalum Kupel TPNPB celebrating the capture of a drone. September 28, 2025.

• Watch video by Ngalum Kupel/TPNPB at the Drop Site link

Holding the downed drone and grenade, Taplo likened the ordeal to Moses parting the Red Sea for the escaping Israelites: “It’s like Firaun and Moses . . .  It was a miracle.”

Then joking: “The bomb (grenade) was caught since it’s like the cucumber we eat.”

Over the next few weeks, a series of heavier aerial bombardments followed.

Video evidence
Videos taken by Taplo show two Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano turboprop aircraft darting through the air, followed by the thunderous sound of ordnance hitting the mountains.

Despite the fact that thousands of West Papuans have been killed in bombings like these since the 1970s, Taplo’s videos are the first to ever capture an aerial bombardment from the ground in West Papua, owing to the extreme isolation of the interior.

In fact, many highland West Papuans’ first contact with the outside world was with Indonesian military campaigns.

Ostensibly a counter-insurgency operation against a guerrilla independence movement, these bombings are primarily hitting civilians — tribal communities of subsistence farmers.

The few fighters Indonesia is targeting are poorly armed lacking bullets, let alone bombs — and live on ancestral land with their families. The most ubiquitous weapon among these groups remains the bow and arrow.

Taplo told Drop Site the bombings began on Monday, October 6.

“Firstly they (Indonesia) did an unorganised attack: they dropped the bomb randomly . . .  they just dropped it everywhere. You can see where the smoke was coming from.

“Even though it was an Indonesian military house, they just dropped it on there anyway. That was the first one; then they came back. The first place bombed after was a civilian house; the second was our base.”

Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano bombing and strafing the mountains. October 6, 2025

• Watch the video by Lamek Taplo and Ngalum Kupel, TPNPB, at DropSite News

Former Dutch colony
West Papua was a Dutch colony until 1962, when Indonesia, after a bitter dispute with the Netherlands, secured Washington’s backing to take over the territory.

Just three years after Washington tipped the scales in favour of Indonesia in their dispute with the Netherlands, the nationalist Indonesian President Sukarno was ousted in a US-backed military coup in 1965.

Hundreds of thousands of Indonesian leftists (or suspected leftists) were killed in just a few months by the new regime led by General Suharto.

Indonesia’s acquisition of West Papua is often treated as an event peripheral to this coup, yet both events held a symbiotic relationship that would become the impetus for many of the mass killings perpetrated by Indonesia in West Papua.

Forbes Wilson, the former vice-president of US mining giant Freeport, visited Indonesia in June 1966, and in his book, The Conquest of Copper Mountain, he boasts that he and several other Freeport executives were among the first foreigners to visit Indonesia after the events of 1965.

Wilson was there to negotiate with the new business friendly Suharto regime, particularly regarding the terms of Freeport’s Ertsberg mine, which was set to be located under Puncak Jaya — the tallest mountain in Oceania.

This mine eventually became the world’s largest gold and copper mine and Indonesia’s largest single taxpayer. The mine’s existence was one of the primary reasons Indonesia gained international backing to launch a vicious Malanesian frontier war against the native and then-largely uncontacted Papuan highlanders.

The “war” continues to this day, though it is largely unlike other modern conflicts.

Like frontier ‘wars’
Instead, the concerted Indonesian attacks are most comparable to the US and Australian frontier wars. Indonesia, one of the world’s largest and most well-armed militaries, is steadily wiping out some of the world’s last pre-industrial indigenous cultures and people.

West Papuans have fought back, forming the Free Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, or OPM) and its various splinter armed wings, whose most prominent one is the TPNPB.

Due to the impenetrable terrain of the mountain highlands, the Indonesian military has difficulty fighting the TPNPB on the ground, often instead resorting to indiscriminate aerial bombardments.

The TPNPB’s fight is as much about West Papuan independence as it is an effort by localised tribal communities and landowners using whatever means to prevent Indonesian massacres and land theft.

“No army has ever come to protect the people. I live with the people, because there’s no military to protect my people,” Taplo said in a video sent just before his death.

“From 2021 until this year 2025, I have not left my land; I have not left the land of my birth.”

In October 2021, the Indonesian military launched one of these bombing campaigns in the remote Kiwirok district and its surrounding hamlets in the Star Mountains — deep in the heart of the island of New Guinea.

Little information
Because of this isolation, very little information about these bombings trickled out of the mountains — save for a few images of unexploded mortars and burning huts.

Only a handful journalists, including the author of this article, have been able to visit the area, and it took years and multiple visits to the Star Mountains for the full scale of the 2021 attacks to be reported.

It was eventually revealed that the Indonesian assaults included the use of most likely Airbus helicopters that shoot FZ-68 2.75-inch rockets, designed by French multinational defence contractor Thales, and reinforced by Blowfish A3 drones manufactured by the Chinese company Ziyan.

These drones boast an artificial intelligence driven swarm function by which they litter villagers’ subsistence farms and huts with mortars improvised with proximity fuzes manufactured by the Serbian company Krušik.

A largely remote, open-source investigation by German NGO Human Rights Monitor revealed that hundreds of huts and buildings were destroyed in this attack. More than 2000 villagers were displaced, and they still hide in makeshift jungle camps.

“The systematic nature of these attacks prompts questions of crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute,” the report noted. Additionally, witnesses interviewed by this author gave the names of hundreds who died of starvation and illness after the bombings.

With little food, shelter, weapons, or even internet to connect them to the outside world, many of the thousands of Ngalum-Kupel people displaced since 2021 are displaced again — likely to die without anyone knowing — mirroring countless Indonesian campaigns to depopulate the mountains to make way for resource projects.

Long-term effects
The impact of the latest wave of attacks in October 2025 is likely to be felt for years, as the bombs destroyed food gardens and shelters and displaced people who were already living in nothing more than crowded tarpaulins held up by branches, while having already been forced to hide in the jungle after the 2021 bombings.

“It is the same situation with Palestine and Israel — people are now living without their home,” said Taplo.

On 6 October 2025, Indonesia retaliated further, deploying two aircraft that aviation sources confirmed to be Brazilian-made Embraer EMB 314 Super Tucano turboprops. These planes were filmed bombing and strafing the mountains.

Drop Site confirmed that some of the shrapnel collected after these attacks is from Thales’s FZ 2.75-inch rockets — the same rockets used in the 2021 attacks.

In January this year, Thales’s Belgium and state-owned defence company, Indonesian Aerospace, put out a press release titled: “Indonesian Aerospace and Thales Belgium Reactivate Rocket Production Partnership,” which boasted the integration of Thales designed FZ 2.75-inch rockets with the Embraer Supertucano aircraft.

Though these were not the only ordnance deployed, some of the impact zones measured over 20m, and the shrapnel found in these craters was far heavier and larger than that from the Thales rockets.

Shrapnel ‘no joke’
“It’s no joke. It was long and big. It could destroy a village . . . ” said Taplo before picking up a piece of shrapnel around 20cm long.

“This is five kilograms,” he said, weighing the remnants.

Inspecting Impact zone from bombings on 6 October 2025.

• Watch the video by Ngalum Kupe/TPNPB here.

A former Australian Defence Force air-to-ground specialist told Drop Site that the large size of the shrapnel and nature of the scarring and cratering indicate that the bomb was not a modern style munition. It was most likely an MK-81 RI Live, a variant of the 110kg MK-81 developed and manufactured by Indonesian state-owned defence contractor Pindad.

“This weapon system is unguided, and given the steep terrain, it is unlikely that a dive attack could easily be used, providing the enhanced risk of collateral damage or indiscriminate targeting given the weapons envelope,” the specialist said. Pindad did not respond to Drop Site’s request for comment.

Photos from a February Pindad press release about the development of the MK-81 RI Live show these bombs loaded on an Indonesian Embraer Supertucano.

A week later, Indonesia hit again. At around 3am, on October 12, a reconnaissance aircraft flew over the camp where Taplo’s command and their families were sleeping, waking them just in time to evacuate before another round of bombs were dropped == again, most likely the MK-81 RI Live.

Bomb strike on video
Taplo captured the bomb’s strike and aftermath on video. Clearly shaken, he makes an appeal for help, saying “UN peacekeeping forces quickly come to Kiwirok to give us freedom, because our life is traumatic . . .

“Even the kids are traumatised; they live in the forest, and seek help from their parents, ‘Dad help me. Indonesia dropped the bomb on the place I lived in.’”

• Indonesia bombing Kiwirok on 12 October 2025. Watch the video by Lamek Taplo.

On the morning of October 19, a drone dropped a bomb on a hut near where Taplo was staying. Initially, the bomb didn’t detonate, leaving enough time for civilians to evacuate the area.

After the evacuation, Taplo and three men returned to remove the ordnance, which then detonated and instantly killed Lamek Taplo and three others — Nalson Uopmabin, 17; Benim Kalakmabin, 20; and Ike Taplo, 22.

Speaking to Drop Site just hours after Taplo was killed, eyewitnesses say the drone was larger than the DJI Mavics deployed earlier and were similar in size to the Ziyan drones from 2021.

Photos taken of the remnants of the bomb show the tail of what was most likely an 81mm mortar.

“The presence of drones — similar to that of DJI quadcopters and [with] improvised fins for aerial guidance — have been employed [just as] ISIS used those weapons systems in Syria,” the former Australian Defence Force air-to-ground specialist told Drop Site.

Plea to Pacific nations
On October 26, civilians in Kiwirok sent an appeal to the government of Papua New Guinea and other Pacific Island nations. So far, there has been no response, despite these bombings occurring on Papua New Guinea’s border.

The last communication Drop Site received from Kiwirok indicated that the bombings were continuing and the mountains still swarmed with drones — limiting any chance of escape.

Pictures posted on social media in November by members of Indonesian security forces, those stationed in Kiwirok, give some insight into the level of zeal with which Indonesia is fighting this campaign.

An Indonesian soldier can be seen wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a skull wearing night vision goggles, a gun, and a lightning bolt forming a cross behind it. The caption reads “Black Zone Kiwirok.”

Another photo shows soldiers sitting in front of a banner which reads “Kompi Tempur Rajawali 431 Pemburu” — a reference to the elite “Eagle Hunter” units set up in the mid 1990s by then-General Prabowo Subianto to hunt down Falantil guerillas in Timor Leste.

As there has been no record of these units being deployed in Papua — nor of an “Eagle Hunter” unit made up of soldiers from the 431st Infantry Battalion — it is unclear whether these banners are just Suharto-era nationalism on display, or if they signify that these units have been revived.

On his final phone call with the outside world, just before the signal cut out, Taplo vowed to continue the TPNPB’s fight: “We will fight for hundreds of days . . .

“We will fight . . .  This war is by God. We have asked for power; we have prayed for nature’s power. This is our culture.”

Republished from DropSite News.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/11/27/indonesias-gaza-peacekeeping-mission-risks-enforcing-a-broken-status-quo/ Thu, 27 Nov 2025 10:29:27 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=121705 ANALYSIS: By Dr Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat

Indonesia is preparing one of the largest peacekeeping deployments in its history — a 20,000-strong force of soldiers, engineers, medics and logistics personnel — to enter the shattered and starving Gaza Strip.

Three brigades, three hospital ships, Hercules aircraft, a three-star general, a reconnaissance team, battalions for health services, construction and logistics — Jakarta is moving with remarkable speed and confidence.

But the moral clarity that Indonesia prides itself on in its support for Palestine is now in danger of being muddied by geopolitical calculation.

• READ MORE: Amnesty warns ‘genocide not over’ as Israel strikes across Gaza
• Indonesian Navy says 3 hospital ships ready for Gaza mission
• Other Gaza reports

And that calculation, in this case, is deeply entangled with a plan conceived and promoted by US President Donald Trump — a plan that critics argue would freeze, not resolve, the structures of domination and blockade that have long suffocated Gaza.

Indonesia must ask itself a hard question: Is it stepping into Gaza to help Palestinians — or to help enforce a fragile order designed to protect the status quo?

For years, Indonesian leaders have proudly stated that their support for Palestine is grounded not in expediency but in principle.

President Prabowo Subianto has reiterated that Jakarta stands “ready at any moment” to help end the suffering in Gaza. But readiness is not the same as reflection. And reflection is urgently needed.

Tilted towards Israel
Trump’s so-called stabilisation plan envisions an International Stabilisation Force tasked with training select Palestinian police officers and preventing weapons smuggling — a mission framed as neutral but structurally tilted toward Israel’s long-standing security demands.

The plan does little to address the root political causes of Gaza’s devastation. It does not confront Israel’s decades-long military occupation.

It does not propose a just political horizon. And it does not establish meaningful accountability for continued violations, even as reports persist that ceasefire terms are repeatedly breached.

A peacekeeping force that does not address the underlying conditions of injustice is not peacekeeping. It is de facto enforcement of a deeply unequal arrangement.

Indonesia’s deployment risks becoming just that.

Former deputy foreign minister Dino Patti Djalal has urged caution, warning that Indonesian troops could easily be drawn into clashes simply because the territory remains saturated with weaponry, competing authorities and unresolved political tensions.

He argues that Indonesia must insist on crystal-clear rules of engagement. With volatility always a possibility, a mission built on ambiguity is a mission built on quicksand.

Impossible peacekeeper position
His warning deserves attention. A peacekeeper who does not know whether they are expected to intervene, withdraw or hold ground in moments of confrontation is placed in an impossible position.

And should Indonesian forces — admired worldwide for their professionalism — be forced to navigate chaos without a political framework, Jakarta will face unpredictable political and humanitarian consequences at home and abroad.

More troubling is the lack of political strategy behind Indonesia’s enthusiasm. Prabowo’s government frames this mission as a humanitarian and stabilising operation, but it has not clarified how it fits within the long-term political resolution that Indonesia claims to champion.

For decades, Jakarta has stood consistently behind a two-state solution. Yet today, after the destruction of Gaza and the collapse of any credible peace process, many Palestinians and international observers argue that the two-state paradigm has become a diplomatic mirage — repeatedly invoked, never realised, and often used to justify inaction.

If Indonesia truly wants to stand for justice rather than merely stability, it must be willing to articulate alternatives. One of those alternatives — controversial but increasingly discussed in academic, political and human rights circles — is a rights-based one-state solution that guarantees equal citizenship and security for all who live between the river and the sea.

Such a political horizon would require courage from Jakarta. Supporting a single state would mean breaking sharply from US policy preferences and acknowledging that decades of partition proposals have failed to deliver anything resembling peace.

But Indonesia has taken courageous positions before. It has spoken against apartheid in South Africa and, most recently, called out the global community’s double standards in the treatment of Ukraine and Palestine.

Jakarta must be moral voice
If Jakarta wants to be a moral voice, it cannot outsource its vision to a proposal drafted by an American administration whose approach to the conflict was widely criticised as one-sided.

Indonesia’s soldiers are being told they are going to Gaza to help. That is noble. But noble intentions do not excuse political naivety.

Before Jakarta sends even a single battalion forward — before the hospital ships are launched, before the Hercules engines warm, before the three-star commander takes his post — Indonesia must ask whether this mission will move Palestinians closer to genuine freedom or merely enforce a temporary calm that leaves the underlying injustices untouched.

A peacekeeping force that sustains the structures of oppression is not peacekeeping at all. It is maintenance.

Indonesia can — and must — do better.

Dr Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is the director of the Indonesia-MENA Desk at the Centre for Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS) in Jakarta and a research affiliate at the Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore. He spent more than a decade living and traveling across the Middle East, earning a BA in international affairs from Qatar University. He later completed his MA in International Politics and PhD in politics at the University of Manchester. This article was first published by Middle East Monitor.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/11/19/regional-pacific-student-journalists-condemn-samoa-pms-ban-as-deeply-troubling/ Wed, 19 Nov 2025 08:47:43 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=121330 Pacific Media Watch

Regional student journalists at the University of the South Pacific have condemned the Samoan Prime Minister’s ban on the Samoa Observer newspaper, branding it as a “deliberate and systemic attempt to restrict public scrutiny”.

The Journalism Students’ Association (JSA) at USP said in a statement today it was “deeply
concerned” about Samoan Prime Minister La’aulialemalietoa Leuatea Schmidt’s ban on the Samoa Observer from his press conferences and his directive that cabinet ministers avoid responding to the newspaper’s questions.

“The recently imposed suspension signals not merely a rebuke of one newspaper, but a more deliberate and systemic attempt to restrict robust public scrutiny,” the statement said.

• READ MORE: Samoa editor says media freedom under attack in response to PM’s ban
• Samoa Observer: The PM’s wish and our promise – editorial
• Samoan PM bans nation’s only newspaper from government access
• JAWS quiet on ban, concerned over media control
• The PM’s wish and our promise – Samoa Observer editorial
• Samoan PM back home as journalist alleges assault outside his residence
• Other Samoa media reports

“It raises serious concerns about citizens’ right to information, as well as the erosion of transparency, accountability, and public trust.”

The statement, signed by JSA president Riya Bhagwan and regional representative Jean–Marc ‘Ake, said that equally worrying was a public declaration by the Journalists Association of Samoa’s (JAWS) executive who wished the Samoa Observer editor’s face “had been disfigured” during an assault outside the Prime Minister’s residence last Sunday.

“We also note reports of physical confrontations involving journalists outside the Prime Minister’s residence, which are deeply troubling. This is an alarming trend and signals a reverse, if not decline in media rights and freedom of speech, unless it is dealt with immediately,” the JSA said.

“With its long-standing dedication to reporting on governance, human rights, and social
accountability issues, the ban on the Samoa Observer strikes at the heart of public discourse and places journalists in a precarious position.

Not an isolated case
“It risks undermining their ability to report freely and without the fear of reprisal.”

Sadly, said the JSA statement, this was not an isolated case.

“Earlier this year, the JAWS president Lagi Keresoma faced defamation charges under Samoa’s libel laws over an article about a former police officer’s appeal to the Head of State.

“Samoa’s steep decline in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index further highlights the ongoing challenges confronting Samoan media.”

JAWS’ recent statement highlighting government attempts to control press conferences through a proposed guide, further added to the growing pattern of restrictions on press freedom in Samoa.

“These recent incidents, coupled with the exclusion of the Samoa Observer, send a chilling
warning to Samoan journalists and establish a dangerous precedent for media subservience at the highest levels,” said JSA.

“Journalists must be able to perform their work safely, without intimidation or assault,
as they carry out their responsibilities to the public. These incidents raise serious
questions about the treatment of media professionals and respect for journalistic work.

“As a journalism student association with many of our journalists and alumni working in
the region, we are committed to empowering the next generation of journalists.

“The JSA is especially concerned that these attacks are eroding youth confidence in the
profession.

“We believe strongly in defending a space where young people can enter a field that is critical to democratic accountability, public oversight, and civic engagement.”

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/11/13/the-60-un-member-states-complicit-with-the-gaza-genocide-why-their-role-will-haunt-them/ Thu, 13 Nov 2025 05:30:25 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=121085 UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese talks to journalist Chris Hedges about her new report that examines how 60+ countries are complicit in Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity demonstrated to the world in a “livestreamed atrocity”.

INTERVIEW: The Chris Hedges Report

After two years of genocide, it is no longer possible to hide complicity in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. Entire countries and corporations are — according to multiple reports by UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese — either directly or indirectly involved in Israel’s economic proliferation.

In her latest report, Gaza Genocide: a collective crime, Albanese details the role 63 nations played in supporting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. She chronicles how countries like the United States, which directly funds and arms Israel, are a part of a vast global economic web.

This network includes dozens of other countries that contribute with seemingly minor components, such as warplane wheels.

• READ MORE: The Chris Hedges Report

Rejection of this system is imperative, Albanese says. These same technologies used to destroy the lives of Palestinians will inevitably be turned against the citizens of Israel’s funders.

“Palestine today is a metaphor of our life and where our life is going to go,” Albanese warns.

“Every worker today should draw a lesson from what’s happening to the Palestinians, because the large injustice system is connected and makes all of us connected to what’s happening there.”

The transcript:
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine, in her latest report, Gaza Genocide: a collective crime, calls out the role 63 nations have in sustaining the Israeli genocide. Albanese, who because of sanctions imposed on her by the Trump administration, had to address the UN General Assembly from the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa, slams what she calls “decades of moral and political failure.”

“Through unlawful actions and deliberate omissions, too many states have harmed, founded and shielded Israel’s militarized apartheid, allowing its settler colonial enterprise to metastasize into genocide, the ultimate crime against the indigenous people of Palestine,” she told the UN.

The genocide, she notes, has diplomatic protection in international “fora meant to preserve peace,” military ties ranging from weapons sales to joint trainings that “fed the genocidal machinery,” the unchallenged weaponization of aid, and trade with entities like the European Union, which had sanctioned Russia over Ukraine yet continued doing business with Israel.

The 24-page report details how the “live-streamed atrocity” is facilitated by third states. She excoriates the United States for providing “diplomatic cover” for Israel, using its veto power at the UN Security Council seven times and controlling ceasefire negotiations. Other Western nations, the report noted, collaborate with abstentions, delays and watered-down draft resolutions, providing Israel with weapons, “even as the evidence of genocide … mounted.”

The report chastised the US Congress for passing a $26.4 billion arms package for Israel, although Israel was at the time threatening to invade Rafah in defiance of the Biden administration’s demand that Rafah be spared.

The report also condemns Germany, the second-largest arms exporter to Israel during the genocide, for weapons shipments that include everything from “frigates to torpedoes,” as well as the United Kingdom, which has allegedly flown more than 600 surveillance missions over Gaza since war broke out in October 2023.

At the same time, Arab states have not severed ties with Israel. Egypt, for example, maintained “significant security and economic relations with Israel, including energy cooperation and the closing of the Rafah crossing” during the war.

Francesca Albanese talks to Chris Hedges                      Video: The Chris Hedges Report

The Gaza genocide, the report states, “exposed an unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments, betraying the trust on which global peace and security rest.” Her report coincides with the ceasefire that isn’t. More than 300 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israel since the ceasefire was announced two weeks ago.

The first major ceasefire breach on October 19 led to Israeli air strikes that killed 100 Palestinians and wounded 150 others. Palestinians in Gaza continue to endure daily bombings that obliterate buildings and homes. Shelling and gunfire continue to kill and wound civilians, while drones continue to hover overhead broadcasting ominous threats.

Essential food items, humanitarian aid and medical supplies remain scarce because of the ongoing Israeli siege. And the Israeli army controls more than half of the Gaza Strip, shooting anyone, including families, who come too close to its invisible border known as the “yellow line”.

Joining me to discuss her report, the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the complicity of numerous states in sustaining the genocide in Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine.

Before we get into the report, let’s talk a little bit about what’s happening in Gaza. It’s just a complete disconnect between what is described by the international community, i.e. “a ceasefire”, the pace may have slowed down, but nothing’s changed.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yes, thank you for having me, Chris. I do agree that it seems that there is a complete disconnect between reality and political discourse. Because after the ceasefire, the attention has been forced to shift from Gaza elsewhere.

I do believe, for example, that the increased attention to the catastrophic situation in Sudan, which has been such for years now, all of a sudden is due to the fact that there is a need for, especially from Western countries and the US, Israel and their acolytes to focus on a new emergency.

‘There is the pretence that there is peace, there is no need to protest anymore because finally, there is peace. There is no peace.’

There is the pretence that there is peace, there is no need to protest anymore because finally, there is peace. There is no peace. I mean, the Palestinians have not seen a day of peace because Israel has continued to fire, to use violence against the Palestinians in Gaza. Over 230 Palestinians have been killed since the ceasefire, 100 of them in one day in 24 hours, including 50 children.

And starvation continues. Yes, there has been an increase in the number of trucks, but far, far below what is needed with much confusion because it’s very hard to deliver aid. All the more, Israel maintains a control over 50 percent of the Gaza Strip while the entire Gaza population is amassed in small portions, guarded portions of the territory.

So there is no peace. Meanwhile, while the Security Council seems to be ready to approve a Security Council resolution that will create a non-acronistic form of tutelage, of trusteeship over Palestine, over Gaza, the West Bank is abandoned to the violence and the ethnic cleansing pushed by armed settlers and soldiers while Israel jails continue to fill up with bodies to torture of adults and children alike. This is the reality in the occupied Palestinian territory today and so it makes absolutely no sense where the political discourse is.

CHRIS HEDGES: Two issues about Gaza. One, of course, Israel has seized over 50% or occupies over 50 percent of Gaza. And as I understand it, they’re not allowing any reconstruction supplies, including cement, in.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: This is also my understanding. They have allowed in food, water and some essential materials needed for hospitals, mainly camp hospitals, tents. But anything related to sustainability is prohibited.

There are many food items that are also prohibited because they are considered luxurious. And the question, Chris, is, and this is why I harbor so much frustration these days toward member states because in the case of genocide, you have heard yourself the argument, well, the recalcitrance of certain states to use the genocide framework saying — and it’s pure nonsense from a legal point of view — but saying, well, the International Court of Justice has not concluded that it’s genocide.

Well, it has concluded already that there is a risk of genocide two years ago, in January, 2024. But however, even when the court does conclude on something relevant like in July, 2024, that the occupation is illegal and must be dismantled totally and unconditionally, this should be the starting point of any peace related or forward-looking discussions.

Instead of deliberating how to force Israel to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territory, member states continue to maintain dialogue with Israel as Israel has sovereignty over the territory. See, so it’s completely dystopic, the future they are leading Palestinians out of despair into.

But they are also forcing the popular movement, the global movement that has formed made of young people and workers to stop. Because look at what’s happening in France, in Italy, in Germany, in the UK — any kind of attempt at maintaining the light turned on Palestine from Gaza to the West Bank is assaulted. Protests, conferences, there is a very active assault on anything that concerns Palestine.

So this is why I’m saying we are far, far beyond the mismanagement of the lack of understanding, I mean the negligence in approaching the question of Palestine, it’s active complicity to sustain Israel in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

CHRIS HEDGES: Which, as you point out in your report, has been true from the beginning despite a slight change in rhetoric recognising the two-state solution. The UK did this while only cutting back on shipments by 10 percent.

But I want to ask before we get into the report, what do you think Israel’s goal is? Is it just to slow-walk the genocide until it can resume it? Is it to create this appalling, uninhabitable, unlivable ghetto? What do you think Israel’s goal is?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: I think that now more than ever it is impossible to separate and distinguish the goals of Israel from the goals of the United States. We tend to have a fragmented view of what happens, analysing for example the relationship between Lebanon and Israel, between Iran and Israel, or between Israel and the Palestinians.

‘One of the things that Palestine has made me realise is the meaning of “Greater Israel” because I do believe that what the current leadership in Israel has in mind and it’s supported by many willing or not in the Israeli society, many who are fine with the erasure of the Palestinians.’

In fact, do, I mean, one of the things that Palestine has made me realise is the meaning of “Greater Israel” because I do believe that what the current leadership in Israel has in mind and it’s supported by many willing or not in the Israeli society, many who are fine with the erasure of the Palestinians.

But there is this idea of Greater Israel and for a long time I have been among those who thought, who were wondering what it is, this “Greater Israel” because of course you look at the map by Israeli leaders in several occasions with this Greater Israel going from the Nile to the Euphrates and you say come on they cannot do that, they cannot occupy Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq.

But then everything changes when you look at it from a non-territorial border expansion perspective. And if you think that in fact domination can be exerted, established, other than by expanding the physical borders and through military occupation, but through domination and financial control, control from outside, power domination, you see that the Greater Israel project has already started and it’s very advanced.

Look at the annihilation of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon. So all those who were historically considered not friends of Israel have been annihilated. And the other Arab countries that remain either do not have the capacity to confront Israel and perish the thought they explored the idea of unity among them or with others. And the others are fine with it.

Ultimately, I think that Greater Israel is the quintessential explanation of the US imperialistic design in that part of the world for which the Palestinians remain a thorn in the side not just for Israel but for the imperialistic project itself because the Palestinians are still there resisting.

They don’t want to go, they don’t want to be tamed, they don’t want to be dominated so they are the last line, the last frontier of resistance, both physically and in the imagination. And therefore, you see, the fierceness against them has scaled up, with the US now getting ready with boots on the ground to get rid of them. This is my interpretation of the general design behind Israel-United States, where Israelis are going to pay a heavy price like many in the region, not just the Palestinians.

CHRIS HEDGES: So you see the imposition of American troops in Gaza as another step forward to the depopulation of Gaza.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yes, yes, yes, I don’t trust any promise made to the Palestinians either by Israel or by the United States because what I’ve seen over the past two years shows me, demonstrates to all of us in fact, that they don’t care at all about the Palestinians. Otherwise, they would have seen their suffering.

‘The beginning of genocide has changed my perception of the world in a way, for me personally, it’s the end of an era of innocence when I really believed that the United Nations were a place where things could still be advanced in the pursuit of peace.’

It’s just not like people like us who can really divide their life. Is it pre-genocide? Does it happen to you as well? Are you talking of pre-genocide or after genocide? Because in fact, the beginning of genocide has changed my perception of the world in a way, for me personally, it’s the end of an era of innocence when I really believed that the United Nations were a place where things could still be advanced in the pursuit of peace.

Now I don’t think so, which doesn’t mean that I think that the UN is over, but in order not to be over, in order to make sense to the people, it is to be led by dignity, principles like dignity, equality and freedom for all. And we are absolutely far from that today.

CHRIS HEDGES: And what is it that brought you to this decision? Is it the acceptance of this faux ceasefire on the part of the UN, or was it before this moment?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: No, it’s before. It’s before. It’s the fact that for two years most states, primarily in the West, but with the acquiescence of other states in the region have supported the Israeli mantra of “self-defence”.

Sorry, it was a mantra because again, self-defence has a very, I’m not saying that Israel had no right to protect itself. Of course Israel had suffered a ferocious attack on October 7. Some say similar to the attacks it had inflicted on the Palestinians. Others say more brutal, say less brutal. It doesn’t matter.

Israel suffered a horrible, violent attack. Israeli civilians suffered a horrible attack on October 7th. But hey, this didn’t give the possibility to Israel to invoke Article 51 of the UN Charter, meaning the right to wage a war.

This is not legal. And on this I can say I’m surprised by how conservative are member states when it comes to the interpretation of international law, except on this, in the sense that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has already set the limits of the right of invoking self-defence for member states.

And it can only be done against states where there is a concrete threat that the state will attack which is not the case here. So yes, Israel could defend itself, but not wage a war. And while the war was clearly identifiable more for its crimes than not its tendency to avoid crimes, member states have continued to say nothing and it was very extreme violence against the Palestinians in Gaza but also against the Palestinians in the West Bank. And for two years they’ve not used their power to stop it.

So I’m convinced that in order to have a political shift vis-à-vis Israel, there must be a political shift at the country level, because governments are completely subdued to the dictates of the US. Of course, if the US wanted, this would stop, but the US with this constellation of figures in the government is not going to stop.

And plus look at how the West in particular has contributed to dehumanise the Palestinians. Even today you hear people saying yes, Palestinians have been killed in these numbers because they’ve been used as human shields when the only evidence that they’ve been used as human shields is against Israel because Israel has used Palestinians as human shields in the West Bank and in Gaza alike.

You see Palestinians have returned to be wrapped into this colonial tropism of them being the savages, the barbarians, in a way, they have brought havoc upon themselves. This is the narrative that the West has used toward the Palestinians. And by doing that, it has created, they have created the fertile ground for Israel’s impunity.

CHRIS HEDGES: Let’s talk about the nations that you single out in your report that have continued to sustain the genocide, either through weapons shipments, but also the commercial interests. I think your previous report talked about the money that was being made off of the genocide. Just lay out the extent of that collaboration and to the extent that you can, the sums of money involved.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah, yeah, let me start with introducing generally two components, the military component and the trade and investment ones, which are quite interrelated. And states have, in general, I name 62 states, primarily Western states, but with substantive collaboration of states from the Global South, global majority, including some Arab states.

So they have altogether ignored, obscured and somewhat even profited from Israel’s violations of international law through military and economic channels. So military cooperation through arms trades or intelligence sharing has fueled Israel’s war machine during the occupation, the illegal occupation, and especially during the genocide while the United States and Germany alone have provided about 90 percent of Israel’s arms export.

At least 26 states have supplied or facilitated the transfer of arms or components, while many others have continued to buy weapons tested on the Palestinians. And this is why in my previous report, the ones looking at the private sector, I was shocked to see how much the Israeli stock exchange had gone up during the genocide.

And this is particularly because of a growth in the military industry. On the other hand, there is the trade and investment sector. Both have sustained and profited from Israel’s economy. Think that between 2023, 2024, actually the end of 2022 and 2024, exports of electronics, pharmaceuticals, energy minerals and what is called the dual-use have totaled almost US$500 billion, helping Israel finance its military occupation.

Now one third of this trade is with the European Union while the rest is complemented by North American countries, the US and Canada, who have free trade agreements with Israel and several Arab states that have continued to deepen economic ties.

Only a few states have marginally reduced trade during the genocide, but in general the indirect commercial flows, including with states that have supposedly no diplomatic relations with Israel, have continued undisturbed.

It’s a very grim picture of the reality. But let me add just one extra element. I do believe that in many respects, the problem is ideological. As I said, there is a tendency to treat Ukraine, for example, vis-a-vis Russia, in a very different fashion than Palestine versus Israel. And this is why I think there is an element of Orientalism that accompanies also the tragedy of the Palestinian people.

CHRIS HEDGES: Talk a little bit about the kinds of weapons that have been shipped to Israel. These are, and we should be clear that, of course, the Palestinians do not have a conventional army, don’t have a navy, they don’t have an air force, they don’t have mechanized units, including tanks, they don’t have artillery, and yet the weapons shipments that are coming in are some of the most sophisticated armaments that are used in a conventional war.

And as a leaked Israeli report, I think it was +972, provided, 83 percent of the people killed in Gaza are civilians.

FRANCISCA ALBANESE: Yes, yes. First of all, there are two things that are weapons, what is considered conventional weapons and dual-use. And both should have been suspended according to the decision of the International Court of Justice concerning Israel in the Nicaragua v. Germany case.

Meanwhile, there are two things: there is the transfer of weapons directly to Israel, and this includes aircraft, materials to compose the drones, because Israel doesn’t produce anything on its own, it requires components — artillery shells, for example, cannon ammunition, rifles, anti-tank missiles, bombs.

So these are all things that have been provided primarily by the United States. Germany, which is the second largest arms exporter to Israel has supplied a range of weapons from frigates to torpedoes.

And also, and then there is Italy, which has also provided spare parts for bombs and airplanes and the United Kingdom, who has played a key role in providing intelligence. And there is also the question of the UN. Not everything is easy to track because the United States have traveled … the United States are the prime provider of weapons, also because they are the assembler of the F-35 programme.

So there are 17 or 19 countries which cooperate and all of them say, well, you know, I mean, yes, I know that the F-35 is used in Israel, by Israel, but I only contribute to a small part. I only contribute to the wheels. I only contribute to the wings. I only provide these hooks or this engine.

Well, everything is assembled in the US and then sold or transferred or gifted to Israel. And it’s extremely problematic because this is why I say it’s a collective crime, because no one can assume the responsibility on their own but eventually all together they contribute to make this genocide implicating so many countries.

CHRIS HEDGES: So Francesca, Israel is the ninth largest arms exporter in the world. To what extent do those relationships have? I mean, I think one of the largest purchasers of Israeli drones is India. We’ve seen India shift its position vis-a-vis Palestine.

Historically, it’s always stood with the Palestinian people. That’s no longer true under [Narendra] Modi. To what extent do those ties affect the response by the 63 some states that you write about for collaborating with the genocide.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: So let me first expand on this. Weapon and military technology sale is a core component of Israel’s economy. And since 2024, it has constituted one third of Israeli exports. And of course, there are two elements connected to this, is that these exports enhances Israel’s manufacturing capacity, but also horribly worsens the life of the Palestinians because Israeli military technology is tested on the Palestinians under occupation or other people under other Israeli related military activities.

Now, the fact that the arms export has increased of nearly 20 percent during the genocide, doubling toward Europe. And only the trade with Europe accounts for over 50 percent of Israeli military sales, selling to so many other countries, including in the Global South, the Asia and Pacific states in the Asia-Pacific region account for 23 percent of the purchase, with India being probably the major. But also 12 percent of the weapons tested on the Palestinians are purchased by Arab countries under the Abraham Accords. So what does it tell us?

It explains what you were hinting at in the question, the fact that this is also reflected in the political shift toward Israel that has been recorded at the General Assembly level. If you see how some African countries and Asian countries, including India, are behaving vis-a-vis Israel, it’s 180 degrees turn compared to where they were in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

This is because on the one hand, Israel is embedded in the global economy, but also it’s a global economy that is veering toward ultra liberal, I mean, it’s following ultra-liberalist ideologies and therefore capital and wealth and accumulation of resources, including military power, comes first.

‘It’s very sad, but this is the reality . . . since the end of the Cold War that there has been an increasing globalisation of the system where the common denominator is force.’

It’s very sad, but this is the reality. And it’s important to know because this is a long, as I was hinting before, my sense is that this is a long term trajectory that didn’t start on October 7, 2023. I mean, probably since the end of the Cold War that there has been an increasing globalisation of the system where the common denominator is force.

I mean, there is this, not a common denominator, but the unifying factor for many is force, how the monopoly of force that comes with weapons, capital and algorithms. And yeah, this is where the world is going.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, we’ve seen these weapons systems which of course are tested. They’re sold as bad. say the term is battle tested without naming the Palestinians, but they are sold to Greece to hold back migrants coming from North Africa. They are used along the border in the United States with Mexico.

And it’s not just that these weapons are “battle tested” on the Palestinians and we haven’t even spoken about these huge surveillance systems, but the very methods of control, the way they’re used are exported through military advisors.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Of course, because in fact, the Israeli population is made almost entirely of soldiers. Of course, there are those who do not enlist in the army for religious reasons or because they are contentious objectors, they’re a tiny minority. But the majority of the people of Israelis go through the army.

And then many of them transfer their know-how or what they have been doing into their next career steps. So the fact that Israel, as I was documenting in my previous report, Israel’s startup economy has a huge dark side to the fact that it’s connected to the military industry and to the surveillance industry.

There is a significant body of Israeli citizens who are going around providing advice, intelligence and training in the Global South both to mercenaries and states proper like Morocco. So there is an Israelisation and Palestinianisation of the international relations or rather of the relations between individuals and states.

And I think the interesting thing, this is why I’m saying Palestine is such a revealer, it’s because, as you say, eventually these tools of control and securitisation have concentrated in the hands of those who are fortifying borders at the expense of refugees and migrants.

So it’s really clear what’s happening here. There are oligarchs who are getting richer and richer and more and more protected in their fortresses where the state is providing the fertile ground to have it, but it’s not states that are benefiting from this inequality, because the majority of the people within states, look at the US, but also in Europe, are not benefiting from anything, in fact.

They’re victims. This is why you equally exploit it. This is why I’m saying it’s another degree of suffering, of course, than the Palestinians. But every worker today should draw a lesson from what’s happening to the Palestinians, because the large injustice system is connected and makes all of us connected to what’s happening there.

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, internally as well. I mean, with Sikh farmers who were protesting Modi were out on the roads, suddenly, over their heads were Israeli-made drones dropping tear gas canisters.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: Yeah, exactly. Drones are one of the most exported devices from Israel’s technology and they are in use by Frontex to surveil the Mediterranean Sea, as you were saying, the US-Mexican border. But more and more, they’re getting into people’s lives.

Also look at the way certain technologies have been perfected across borders. I remember earlier this summer, this is very anecdotal, I’ve not done research on it, but I knew that we were seeing something quite and horribly revolutionary.

This year, this summer during the protests in Serbia, where students and ordinary citizens were taken to the streets against the government and have been protesting for one year now, people in Serbia. I saw the use of these sound weapons, oxygen-fed weapons.

So there are bombs that produce such a pain in the body who finds itself in the wave that it’s excruciating. And then of course people try to flee, but they also lose senses, et cetera. And I’ve seen this in Serbia.

And now I understand that it’s being used in Gaza as well, where the bomb doesn’t produce fire, it produces a movement of air that causes pain to the body and even to internal organs. It’s incredible. And these are weapons that have been perfected through testing here and there, and Serbia keeps on selling and buying military technology to and from Israel.

CHRIS HEDGES: I just want to close with, I mean, I think your reports, the last two reports in particular, show the complete failure on the part of governments as well as corporations to respond legally in terms of their legal obligations to the genocide. What do we do now? What must be done to quote Lenin?

How, because this, as you have pointed out repeatedly, really presages the complete breakdown of the rule of law. What as citizens must we do?

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: I think that we have passed the alarm area. I mean, we are really in a critical place and I sense it because instead of correcting itself, the system led by governments is accentuating its authoritarian traits. Think of the repressive measures that the UK government is taking against protesters, against civil society, against journalists standing in solidarity with Palestine, for justice in Palestine.

In France and in Italy at the same time, conferences academic freedom is shrinking and in the same days, conferences of reputable historians and military and legal experts have been cancelled owing to the pressure of the pro-genocide groups, pro-Israel groups in their respective countries. People, including in Germany, are being persecuted, including academics, for their own exercise of free speech.

This tells me that there is very little pretense that Western states, so-called liberal democracies, the most attached to this idea of democracy are ready to defend for real. So in this sense, it’s up to us citizens to be vigilant and to make sure that we do not buy products connected or services connected to the legality of the occupation, the apartheid and the genocide.

And there are various organisations that collect lists of companies and entities, including universities that are connected to this unlawful endeavor. BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] is one, don’t buy into the occupation who profits profundo, but also students associations.

‘There is a need to speak about Palestine, to make choices about Palestine and not because everything needs to revolve around Palestine, but because Palestine today is a metaphor of our life and where our life is going to go is clearly evident in this.’

And this is something that has taught me, it’s very touching because it’s really the work of students, faculty members and staff that has mapped what each university does. And I think it gives the possibility to act, everyone in our own domain. Then of course there is a need to speak about Palestine, to make choices about Palestine and not because everything needs to revolve around Palestine, but because Palestine today is a metaphor of our life and where our life is going to go is clearly evident in this.

But also we need to make sure that businesses divest. Either through our purchase power, people have to step away and stop using platforms like Airbnb or Booking.com. I know that Amazon is very convenient, but guys, we might also return to buy books in libraries, ordering books through libraries.

Of course, not all of us can, but many do, many can. On the way to work, buy a book in a library, order a book in a bookstore. We need to reduce our reliance on the tools that have been used, that have been perfected through the slaughter of the Palestinians. And of course, make government accountable. There are lawyers, associations, and jurists who are taking government officials to court, businesses to court. But again, I do not think that there is one strategy that is going to be the winning one.

It’s the plurality of actions from a plurality of actors that is going to produce results and slow down the genocide and then help dismantle the occupation and the apartheid. It’s a long trajectory and the fight has just started.

CHRIS HEDGES: Thank you, Francesca, and I want to thank Thomas [Hedges], Diego [Ramos], Max [Jones] and Sofia [Menemenlis], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times. This interview is republished from The Chris Hedges Report.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/11/13/timor-lestes-xanana-gusmao-pays-tribute-to-journalist-robert-domm-over-independence-struggle/ Thu, 13 Nov 2025 05:13:30 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=121067 Pacific Media Watch

Timor-Leste Prime Minister Kay Rala Xanana Gusmão has paid tribute to the “courageous and determined” contribution of Australian journalist Robert Domm to the struggle of the Timorese people in gaining independence from Indonesia. He died last Friday.

Domm was remembered for meeting in secret with the then Timorese resistance leader Gusmão in an exclusive interview.

“The government and people of East Timor are deeply saddened by the passing of Robert Domm, whose courage and determination helped bring to the world the truth of our fight for self-determination,” Gusmão’s statement said.

• READ MORE: Death of journalist Robert Domm — PM Xanana recognises his contribution during resistance
• Other Timor-Leste reports

“In September 1990, when few in the world were aware of the devastation in occupied East Timor, or that our campaign of resistance continued despite the terrible losses, Robert Domm made the perilous journey to our country and climbed Mount Bunaria to meet with me and the leadership from FALINTIL.

“He was the first foreign journalist in 15 years to have direct contact with the Resistance.

“Your interview with me, broadcast by the ABC Background Briefing programme, broke the silence involving Timor-Leste since 1975.

“He conveyed to the world the message that the Timorese struggle for self-determination and resistance against foreign military occupation was very much alive.

Merchant seaman
“Robert Domm visited East Timor in the 1970s, then under Portuguese colonial control, as a merchant seaman on a boat crossing between Darwin and Dili, transporting general cargo and fuel.

“He returned in 1989, when Indonesia allowed tourist entry for the first time since 1975.

“He returned in 1990, allegedly as a “tourist”, but was on a secret mission to interview me for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

“Robert Domm’s journey to find me took extraordinary courage. His visit was organised by the Timorese resistance with, as he later recalled, “military precision”. He involved more than two hundred people from Timore who guided him through villages and checkpoints, running great risk for himself and the Timore people who helped him.

“He was a humble and gentle Australian who slept next to us on the grounds of Mount Bunaria, ate with us under the protection of the jungle and walked with our resistance soldiers as a comrade and a friend. I am deeply moved by your concern for the people of Timore.

He risked his own life to share our story. His report has given international recognition to the humanity and the resolve of our people.

“Following the broadcast, the Indonesian military carried out large-scale operations in our mountains and many of those who helped them lost their lives for our freedom.

Exposed complicity
“Robert continued to support East Timor after 1990. He spoke out against the occupation and exposed the complicity of governments that have remained mute. He was a co-author, with Mark Aarons, of East Timor: A Tragedy Created by the West, a work that deepened the international understanding of our suffering and our right to self-determination.

“He remained a friend and defender of East Timor long after the restoration of independence.

“In 2015, twenty-five years after his maiden voyage, Robert returned to East Timor to commemorate our historic encounter. Together, we walked to Mount Bunaria, in the municipality of Ainaro, to celebrate the occasion and remember the lives lost during our fight.

“The place of our meeting has been recognised as a place of historical importance.

“In recognition of his contribution, Robert Domm was awarded the Order of Timor-Leste in August 2014. This honour reflected our nation’s gratitude for its role in taking our struggle to the world. Robert’s contribution is part of our nation’s history.

“Robert’s soul now rests on Mount Matebian, next to his Timorese brothers and sisters.

“On behalf of the government and people of East Timor, we express our deepest condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of Robert Domm. His courage, decency and sense of justice will forever remain in the memory of our nation.”

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/11/05/making-a-stand-against-the-global-assault-on-press-freedom/ Wed, 05 Nov 2025 10:06:53 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=120745 COMMENTARY: By Kasun Ubayasiri

We are gathered here to mark the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists.

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) National Media Section usually campaigns for journalists’ rights and industrial agency in Australia — but today, we join hands with the IFJ — International Federation of Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Reporters sans frontières — Reporters Without Borders, to make a stand against the global assault on press freedom.

The past few years have been particularly hostile for journalists around the world.

• READ MORE: RSF expresses ‘regret’ over new Israeli Supreme Court delay on Gaza media access
• Other media freedom reports

From the press briefing rooms in the White House to the streets of Gaza, journalists have been in the crosshairs.

Shortly after assuming office in January 2017, US President Donald Trump accused the press of being an “enemy of the American people”. He has doubled down in his second term.

We have seen newsroom after newsroom fall foul of White House press secretaries; we saw bans on CNN, The New York Times, the LA Times and Politico back in 2017, and now, the Associated Press for simply refusing to fall in line with the so-called renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.

Three weeks ago, the world watched Pentagon journalists exit en masse, after rejecting Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s latest edict.

Another White House rule
Just last week, we saw the declaration of another White House rule — this time, restricting credentialed journalists from freely accessing the Press Secretary’s offices in the West Wing.

These attacks on US soil are complemented by an equally invidious assault on media outlets on a global scale.

Funding freezes and mass sackings have all but silenced Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Asia — the latter of which employed several of our colleagues here in Queensland and the Pacific.

We have seen Trump’s verbal attack on the ABC’s John Lyons, and how that presidential tantrum led to the ABC being excluded from the Trump–Starmer press conference in the UK.

Apparently, they simply didn’t have space for the national broadcaster of the third AUKUS partner — and all this with barely a whimper from the Australian government.

But then, why would our Prime Minister leap to journalism’s defence when he sees fit to exclude Pacific journalists from his Pacific Island Forum press conference — in, you guessed it, the Pacific.

This enmity towards journalism, has been a hallmark of the Trump presidency.

Blatant ignorance, hubris
His blatant ignorance, hubris, and perfidy — indulged by US allies — has emboldened other predators and enemies of the press around the world.

As at December 2024, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) listed 376 journalists as being imprisoned in various countries around the world — it was the highest number three years running, since the record started in 1992.

China topped the list with 52 imprisoned journalists, with Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory a close second with 48.

Myanmar had 35, Belarus 33, Russia 30 and the list continues.

Among this group are 15 journalists arrested in Eritrea more than two decades ago, between 2000 and 2002, who continue to be held without charge.

And it gets worse.

The same CPJ database records 2023, 24 and 25 as the worst years for the deaths of journalists and media workers — worse than the years at the height of the US and allied invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the war against the Islamic State.

Killed journalists
The war in Gaza accounts for a significant number of these deaths.

A staggering 185 journalists and media workers have been killed directly because of their work in the past 25 months — on a small strip of land just 2.3 per cent the size of Greater Brisbane.

I urge you to read the ICRC case study on the legal protection of journalists in combat zones. It clearly explains how Protocol 1 of the Geneva Convention protects journalists, even when they engage in producing “propaganda” for the conflicting parties.

Since our vigil 12 months ago, the CPJ has recorded the deaths of 122 journalists and media workers around the world. These are deaths the CPJ has confirmed as being directly linked to their work — such as those killed while reporting in combat zones or on dangerous assignments.

Of those, 33 were confirmed murders — meaning those journalists were deliberately targeted.

A staggering 61 of those 122 were killed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory — in Israel’s war on Gaza. Another 31 were killed in a single day during targeted Israeli airstrikes on two newspapers in Sana’a in Yemen. And three more were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a compound housing journalists in Lebanon — meaning Israeli defence forces were responsible for 78 percent of last year’s killings.

We talk of Israel’s attack on journalists because it is unprecedented, but Israel is by no means the only perpetrator of such crimes — there was the Mozambique journalist murdered during a live broadcast; a video journalist tortured and killed in Saudi Arabia; and a print journalist tortured and killed in Bangladesh.

Today we read the names of 122 fallen comrades and remember them one by one.

Dr Kasun Ubayasiri is co-vice president of the MEAA National Media Section. He gave this address at the annual vigil in Brisbane Meanjin last Sunday, on International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists. Republished with the author’s permission.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/11/04/eugene-doyle-venezuela-and-trumps-war-to-save-the-ancien-regime/ Mon, 03 Nov 2025 18:42:13 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=120683 COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

“The Past is not dead; it is not even past.”

William Faulkner was right: past events continue to inform and shape our world.  With powerful forces gathering to reassert US dominance over not just Venezuela but the entire Western hemisphere, the vexed issue of local elites, for example Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado and her backers, enlisting an imperial power in domestic broils, is again top of the agenda.

Back in the 1980s I studied in France.  The most thrilling lecture of my university career was an outline of the significance of the Battle of Valmy, a crucial win for the young French Revolution.

The lecture was given by the distinguished historian Antoine Casanova.

• READ MORE: Other Venezuela reports

One of the revolutionary generals that day in 1792 was a Venezuelan, Francisco de Miranda, who in time, returning to the Americas, would wrest power from imperial Spain and become leader of an independent Venezuela.

Miranda knew Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and, of significance to this story, the father of the Monroe Doctrine, President James Monroe. Were he alive today he would again unsheathe his sword to fight King Donald Trump and all the forces of L’Ancien Régime.

L’Ancien Régime — the “Old Order” — refers to the system of absolute monarchy, hereditary privilege, and rigid social hierarchy where a tiny elite owned everything while the masses owned little or nothing.

In today’s world, given the concentration of power among the few in our countries, I extend the term Ancien Régime to capture the way the US, working in concert with local elites, is operating in ways that would be familiar to a Bourbon King or a British monarch.

If they had such a thing as shame, the American elites should wince that their country, born out of an epic anti-colonial struggle, now plays the role of a Prussian army seeking to impose its will on another state.

1792. La patrie en danger. The homeland is in peril.
The monarchies of Europe had rallied their armies for an assault on France to destroy the Revolution that had swept from power not only King Louis XVI but the entire absolutist order of L’Ancien Régime.

After a string of victories, the invaders swung their armies towards Paris, intent on snuffing out the revolution, to ensure the contagion did not infect the rest of Europe. Desperate, the French Assembly declared “La Patrie en danger” and called on patriotic citizens to rally to the flag.

The two world orders clashed in a pivotal battle at Valmy, 200 km northeast of Paris on 20 September 1792.

At Valmy, for the first time in history, the battle cry that General Miranda and others called out — and thousands of citizen soldiers answered — was “Vive la nation!”  “Long live the Nation! (not for a king, nor an emperor, nor a god).

Confronting them on the field was the superpower of the day, the best armed, best drilled war machine in history: the Prussian Army, led by Prince Field Marshall Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand. As well as his Prussians, he commanded the army of the Holy Roman Empire and, significantly, L’Armée de Condé, led by King Louis XVI’s cousin and comprised of French royalist émigrés.

To the citizen soldiers of France, this latter group were traitors to their country, men who put their privileges and their class ahead of the interests of their homeland. This is a theme relevant to discussions of Venezuela today.

Things went badly for the republican French in the opening and the lines wavered.  The Venezuelan Miranda, history records, raced his charger up and down the lines, urging the troops to sing La Marseillaise, written earlier that year by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle. We know it now as the French National Anthem. It is a stirring call to arms, a passionate appeal to fight the enemies of the nation.

French First Republic
Long story short, the French prevailed that day and France’s First Republic was declared in Paris two days later.  A witness to the battle was the German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who, by way of consolation — I would have thought a little rashly —  told some dejected Prussian officers, “Here and today, a new epoch in the history of the world has begun, and you can boast you were present at its birth.”

Today Francisco Miranda’s name is among the 660 heroes of the Republic engraved on L’Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He has been called the “First Global Revolutionary”, having fought in the American War of Independence as well as his other exploits in Europe and Latin America.

Some of my fellow students at L’Université de Franche-Comté were South and Central Americans who had fled political persecution. Their stories were my first exposure to the concept of “death squads”.

This was a time when El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua were drenched in blood as a pitiless struggle was waged by the US and the local military and financial elites on one side, and coalitions of workers, peasants, intellectuals, teachers and various progressives on the other.

Repeated US interventions to support companies like United Fruit Company went hand in hand with brutal suppression of peasant workers. The CIA-backed coup that overthrew democratic progressive Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 led to a war — the Guatemalan Genocide or The Silent Genocide — in which 200,000 were killed and tens of thousands more “disappeared” over the succeeding three decades. Amnesty International estimated 83 percent of those killed were indigenous Maya people.

In 1980, while I was in France, Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, was gunned down mid-service by a killer working for El Salvador’s military dictatorship. A quarter of a million people braved the junta to attend his funeral.

Romero’s fate was sealed when he appealed to US President Jimmy Carter to end aid to El Salvador’s military dictatorship.

Death squads follow
Whether we look at the Iran Contra scandal, Reagan’s funding of the infamous Honduran Battalion 316 or any of dozens of such organisations, the pattern is clear: where the US wishes to assert control via elites, death squads follow. The State Department and CIA spent decades building and evolving El Salvador’s National Security Agency. They helped compile lists of leftists, intellectuals and all sorts of people who were then eliminated by the regime’s death squads.

While I was getting an education in history, literature and politics, tens of thousands were killed in Argentina by the US-backed Junta during the “Dirty War”. Similarly in Chile, from the US-promoted military takeover forward, being a social worker, teacher or trade unionist could be a fatal occupation.

Sadly, as most people my age know, one could go on and on and on about US covert activity to destroy democratic movements and foster alliances with the most vicious oligarchs on the continent.  That is why I fear for Venezuela and I have zero confidence in any political leader who calls for US direct military and paramilitary (via CIA) action in her own country.

For these reasons and more, I shuddered when I heard Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace laureate Maria Corina Machado praising Donald Trump and urging him to continue his pressure campaign, saying only Trump can “save Venezuela”.

“I dedicate this prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause,” she wrote in a post on X.

Praising a man who is indiscriminately killing your own citizens is not, in my estimation, a good look for either a Nobel Peace laureate or a patriot. Francisco Miranda would roll in his grave.

The price of freedom from foreign powers is often counted in millions of lives and centuries of struggle; it should not be given away lightly.

The Maduro government has its fans and its detractors; both can mount solid arguments.

One thing I believe is firmly in its favour, however, is that, for its many faults, it is a national project that seeks to resist dominance from foreign interests, foremost the US.  I will give the last word to Sebastián Francisco de Miranda y Rodríguez de Espinoza (28 March 1750–14 July 1816):

“I have never believed that anything solid or stable can be built in a country, if absolute independence is not first achieved.”

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. 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 the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/11/03/rsf-expresses-regret-over-new-supreme-court-delay-on-gaza-media-access/ Sun, 02 Nov 2025 18:29:19 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=120636 Pacific Media Watch

The Paris-based global media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) says it “regrets” the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to grant the Tel Aviv government 30 days to respond to a petition to allow journalists access to the Gaza Strip following the ceasefire.

RSF said in a statement it believes the blockade on access — in place for more than two years — remains illegal, unjustifiable and contrary to the public’s fundamental right to news and information, and should be lifted at once.

During a hearing before the Supreme Court on October 23 — in which RSF participated as an interested party having contributed an amicus brief in the petition by the Jerusalem-based Foreign Press Association (FPA) — the Israeli government acknowledged that the ceasefire constituted a significant change in circumstances justifying a review of its policy on journalists’ access.

• READ MORE: ‘Gaza has been the deadliest place for journalists in any conflict,’ says UN
• Israel used to lie about killing journalists — now it barely bothers to do so. What happened?
• Who killed Shireen?

The court ordered the Israeli government to present a clear position on its blockade in light of the new circumstances but granted it another 30 days to do this, despite the urgency of the situation and although the Israeli government had already benefited from six postponements since the start of these proceedings.

“If the blockade preventing journalists from entering Gaza was already illegal and seriously violated the fundamental right to information of the Palestinian, Israeli, and international public, it is now totally unjustifiable,” said RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin.

“RSF deplores the Supreme Court’s decision to give the Israeli government 30 days to reach this obvious conclusion, and calls on the Israeli government to open Gaza’s borders to journalists immediately and without conditions.”

Israel has closed off Gaza and denied external journalists’ independent access to the besieged territory since 7 October 2023.

To counter this ban, RSF has joined the FPA’s petition for the Gaza Strip’s borders to be opened to independent entry by journalists, and filed an amicus brief with the Israeli Supreme Court on October 15 that was designed to help the judges understand the FPA’s position.

Who killed Shireen?
Meanwhile, an investigation into Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s assassination reveals new evidence and cover-ups by Israeli and US governments.

This major investigative documentary examines the facts surrounding the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Akleh, as she was reporting in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, in May 2022.

Palestine: Who killed Shireen?         Video: Al Jazeera

It sets out to discover who killed her — and after months of painstaking research, succeeds in identifying the Israeli sniper who pulled the trigger.

Eleven Al Jazeera journalists have been killed by the Israeli military among at least 248 Gaza media workers slain by the IDF, reports Anadolu Ajansı,

A UN spokesman on Friday marked the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists yesterday with a reminder of the dangers faced by journalists worldwide — particularly in the Gaza Strip.

“Nearly nine out of 10 journalists killings remain unresolved. Gaza has been the deadliest place for journalists in any conflict,” Stephane Dujarric, spokesman to the UN secretary-general, told reporters.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for “independent, impartial” investigations into the killings of journalists, emphasising that “impunity is an assault on press freedom and a threat to democracy itself,” Dujarric said.

“When journalists are silenced, we all lose our voice,” he said.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/10/29/pacific-lawmakers-call-for-creation-of-human-rights-commissions-to-fight-nuclear-testing-legacy/ Wed, 29 Oct 2025 07:18:03 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=120433 By Mark Rabago, RNZ Pacific Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas correspondent

A Marshall Islands lawmaker has called on Pacific legislatures to establish and strengthen their national human rights commissions to help address the region’s nuclear testing legacy.

“Our people in the Marshall Islands carry voices of our lives that are shaped by this nuclear legacy,” Senator David Anitok said during the second day of the Association of Pacific Island Legislatures (APIL) general assembly in Saipan this week.

“Decades later, our people still endure many consequences, such as cancer, displacement, environmental contamination, and the Micronesian families seeking safety and care abroad. Recent studies and lived experience [have shown] what our elders have always known-the harm is deeper, broader, and longer lasting than what the world once believed.”

• READ MORE: Other nuclear testing reports

Anitok said that once established, these human rights commissions must be independent, inclusive, and empowered to tackle not only the nuclear testing legacy but also issues of injustice, displacement, environmental degradation, and governance.

“Let’s stand together and build a migration network of human rights institutions that will protect our people, our lands, our oceans, our cultures, our heritages, and future generations,” he said.

“Furthermore, we call upon all of you to engage more actively with international human rights mechanisms. Together, it will help shape a future broadened in human rights, peace, and dignity.”

To demonstrate the Marshall Islands’ leadership on human rights, Anitok noted that the country has been elected to the UN Human Rights Council twice under President Dr Hilda Heine — an honour shared in the Pacific only once each by Australia and Tahiti.

Pohnpei Senator Shelten Neth echoed Anitok’s call, demanding justice for the Pacific’s nuclear testing victims.

“Enough is enough. Let’s stop talking the talk and let’s put our efforts together — united we stand and walk the talk.

“Spreading of the nuclear waste is not only confined to the Marshall Islands, and I’m a living witness. I can talk about this from the scientific research already completed, but many don’t want to release it to the general public.

“The contamination is spreading fast. [It’s in] Guam already, and the other nations that are closer to the RMI,” Neth said.

He then urged the United States to accept full responsibility for its nuclear testing programme in the Pacific.

“I [want to tell] Uncle Sam to honestly attend to the accountability of their wrongdoing. Inhuman, unethical, unorthodox, what you did to RMI. The nuclear testing is an injustice!” Neth declared.

Anitok and Neth’s remarks followed a presentation by Diego Valadares Vasconcelos Neto, human rights officer for Micronesia under the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who discussed how UN human rights mechanisms can support economic development, health, and welfare in the region.

Neto underscored the UN’s 80-year partnership with the Pacific and its continuing commitment to peace, human rights, and sustainable development in the wake of the Second World War and the nuclear era.

He highlighted key human rights relevant to the Pacific context:

• Right to development — Economic progress must go beyond GDP growth to include social, cultural, and political inclusion;
• Right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment — Ensuring access to information, public participation, and justice in environmental matters; and
• Political and civil rights — Upholding participation in governance, freedom of expression and association, equality, and self-determination.

Based in Pohnpei and representing OHCHR’s regional office in Suva, Fiji, Neto outlined UN tools available to assist Pacific legislatures, including the Universal Periodic Review, special procedures (such as thematic experts on water, sanitation, and climate justice), and treaty bodies monitoring state compliance with human rights conventions.

He also urged Pacific parliaments to form permanent human rights committees, ratify more international treaties, and strengthen legislative oversight on human rights implementation.

Neto concluded by citing ongoing UN collaboration in the Marshall Islands-particularly in addressing the human rights impacts of nuclear testing and climate change-and expressed hope for continued dialogue between Pacific lawmakers and the UN Human Rights Office.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/10/22/chris-hedges-remove-curse-of-gaza-genocide-before-it-becomes-the-norm/ Wed, 22 Oct 2025 04:37:19 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=120096 This lecture “Requiem for Gaza” was delivered to a sold out audience at the University of South Australia in Adelaide after journalist Chris Hedges’ appearance was cancelled by the Australian National Press Club.

EDWARD SAID MEMORIAL LECTURE: By Chris Hedges

The Gaza, the one that existed on the morning of October 7 is gone, decimated by months of saturation bombing, shelling, bulldozing and controlled demolitions. All that was familiar when I worked in Gaza has vanished, transformed into an apocalyptic landscape of shattered concrete and rubble.

My New York Times office in the center of Gaza City. The Marna boarding house on Ahmed Abd el-Aziz Street, where after a day’s work I would drink tea with Margaret Nassar, the elderly woman who owned it, a refugee from Safad in northern Galilee. On my last visit to Marna House, I forgot to return the room key. Number 12. It was attached to a large plastic oval with the words “Marna House Gaza” on it. The key sits on my desk.

Friends and colleagues, with few exceptions, are in exile, dead or, in most cases, have disappeared, no doubt buried under mountains of debris.

• READ MORE: Australia’s National Press Club blocks Hedges’ Gaza media talk, lines up former Israeli officer
• Other Chris Hedges articles

The daily rituals of life in Gaza are no longer possible. I used to leave my shoes on a rack by the front door of the Great Omari Mosque, the largest and oldest mosque in Gaza, in the Daraj Quarter of the Old City. The white stone walls had pointed arches and a tall octagonal minaret encircled by a carved wooden balcony that was crowned with a crescent. The mosque was built on the foundations of ancient temples to Philistine and Roman deities as well as a Byzantine church.

I washed my hands, face and feet at the common water taps, carrying out the ritual purification before prayer, known as wudhu. Inside the hushed interior with its blue-carpeted floor, the cacophony, noise, dust, fumes and frenetic pace of Gaza melted away.

The mosque was destroyed on December 8, 2023, by an Israeli airstrike.

The razing of Gaza is not only a crime against the Palestinian people. It is a crime against our cultural and historical heritage — an assault on memory. We cannot understand the present, especially when reporting on Palestinians and Israelis, if we do not understand the past.

There is no shortage of failed peace plans in occupied Palestine, all of them incorporating detailed phases and timelines, going back to the presidency of Jimmy Carter. They end the same way. Israel gets what it wants initially — in the latest case the release of the remaining Israeli hostages — while it ignores and violates every other phase until it resumes its attacks on the Palestinian people.

It is a sadistic game. A merry-go-round of death. This ceasefire, like those of the past, is a commercial break. A moment when the condemned man is allowed to smoke a cigarette before being gunned down in a fusillade of bullets.

The Edward Said Memorial Lecture.            The Chris Hedges Report

Once Israeli hostages are released, the genocide will continue. I do not know how soon. Let’s hope the mass slaughter is delayed for at least a few weeks. But a pause in the genocide is the best we can anticipate.

Israel is on the cusp of emptying Gaza, which has been all but obliterated under two years of relentless bombing. It is not about to be stopped. This is the culmination of the Zionist dream. The United States, which has given Israel a staggering $22 billion in military aid since Oct, 7, 2023, will not shut down its pipeline, the only tool that might halt the genocide.

Israel, as it always does, will blame Hamas and the Palestinians for failing to abide by the agreement, most probably a refusal — true or not — to disarm, as the proposal demands. Washington, condemning Hamas’s supposed violation, will give Israel the green light to continue its genocide to create Trump’s fantasy of a Gaza Riviera and “special economic zone” with its “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians in exchange for digital tokens.

Of the myriads of peace plans over the decades, the current one is the least serious. Aside from a demand that Hamas release the hostages within 72-hours after the ceasefire begins, it lacks specifics and imposed timetables. It is filled with caveats that allow Israel to abrogate the agreement, which Israel did almost immediately by refusing to open the border crossing at Rafah, killing a half dozen Palestinians and cutting in half the agreed upon aid trucks to 300 a day because the bodies of the remaining hostages have yet to be returned.

And that is the point. It is not designed to be a viable path to peace, which most Israeli leaders understand. Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom, established by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to serve as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and champion messianic Zionism, instructed its readers not to be concerned about the Trump plan because it is only “rhetoric.”

Israel, in one example from the proposal, will “not return to areas that have been withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”

Who decides if Hamas has “fully implemented” the agreement? Israel. Does anyone believe in Israel’s good faith? Can Israel be trusted as an objective arbitrator of the agreement? If Hamas — demonized as a terrorist group — objects, will anyone listen?

How is it possible that a peace proposal ignores the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion, which reiterated that Israel’s occupation is illegal and must end?

How can it fail to mention the Palestinian’s right to self-determination?

Why are Palestinians, who have a right under international law to armed struggle against an occupying power, expected to disarm while Israel, the illegally occupying force, is not?

By what authority can the U.S. establish “temporary transitional government,” — Trump’s and Tony Blair’s so-called “Board of Peace” — sidelining the Palestinian right to self-determination?

Who gave the U.S. the authority to send to Gaza an “International Stabilization Force,” a thinly veiled term for foreign occupation?

How are Palestinians supposed to reconcile themselves to the acceptance of an Israeli “security barrier” on Gaza’s borders, confirmation that the occupation will continue?

How can any proposal ignore the slow-motion genocide and annexation of the West Bank?

Why is Israel, which has destroyed Gaza, not required to pay reparations?

What are Palestinians supposed to make of the demand in the proposal for a “deradicalized” Gazan population? How is this expected to be accomplished? Re-education camps? Wholesale censorship? The rewriting of the school curriculum? Arresting offending Imams in mosques?

And what about addressing the incendiary rhetoric routinely employed by Israeli leaders who describe Palestinians as “human animals” and their children as “little snakes”?

Rabbi Ronen Shaulov, Israel’s version of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, bellowed:

“All of Gaza and every child in Gaza, should starve to death. I don’t have mercy for those who, in a few years, will grow up and won’t have mercy for us. Only a stupid fifth column, a hater of Israel has mercy for future terrorists, even though today they are still young and hungry. I hope, may they starve to death, and if anyone has a problem with what I’ve said, that’s their problem.”

Israeli violations of peace agreements have historical precedents.

The Camp David Accords, signed in 1978 by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin — without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) — led to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which normalised diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt.

Subsequent phases of the Camp David Accords, which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never implemented.

The 1993 Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, saw the PLO recognise Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. Yet, what ensued was the disempowerment of the PLO and its transformation into a colonial police force.

Oslo II, signed in 1995, detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state. But it too was stillborn. It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” were to be delayed until “final” status talks. By then, Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were scheduled to have been completed.

Governing authority was poised to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. Instead, the West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C. The Palestinian Authority had limited authority in Areas A and B while Israel controlled all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.

The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands that Jewish colonists seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law — was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. This instantly alienated many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees.

As a consequence, many Palestinians abandoned the PLO in favour of Hamas. Edward Said called the Oslo Accords “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians”.

The scheduled Israeli military withdrawals under Oslo never took place. There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank when the Oslo agreement was signed. Their numbers today have increased to 700,000.

The journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo:

“A sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood.”

Israel unilaterally broke the last two-month-long ceasefire on March 18 of this year when it launched surprise airstrikes on Gaza. Netanyahu’s office claimed that the resumption of the military campaign was in response to Hamas’s refusal to release hostages, its rejection of proposals to extend the cease-fire and its efforts to rearm. Israel killed more than 400 people in the initial overnight assault and injured over 500, slaughtering and wounding people, including children, as they slept.

The attack scuttled the second stage of the agreement, which would have seen Hamas release the remaining living male hostages, both civilians and soldiers, for an exchange of Palestinian prisoners and the establishment of a permanent ceasefire along with the eventual lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Israel has carried out murderous assaults on Gaza for decades, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn.” No peace accord or ceasefire agreement has ever gotten in the way. This one will be no exception.

This bloody saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged: the dispossession and erasure of Palestinians from their land.

The only peace Israel intends to offer the Palestinians is the peace of the grave.

History is a mortal threat to the Zionist project. It exposes the violent imposition of a European colony in the Arab world. It reveals the ruthless campaign to de-Arabise an Arab country. It underscores the inherent racism towards Arabs, their culture and their traditions.

It challenges the myth that, as former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak said, Zionists created, “a villa in the middle of a jungle.” It mocks the lie that Palestine is exclusively a Jewish homeland. It recalls centuries of Palestinian presence. And it highlights the alien culture of Zionism, implanted on stolen land.

When I covered the genocide in Bosnia, the Serbs blew up mosques, carted away the remains and forbade anyone to speak of the structures they had razed. The goal in Gaza is the same, to wipe out the past and replace it with myth, to mask Israeli crimes, including genocide.

The campaign of erasure allows Israelis to pretend the inherent violence that lies at the heart of the Zionist project, going back to the dispossession of Palestinian land in the 1920s and the larger campaigns of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, does not exist.

This denial of historical truth and historical identity also permits Israelis to wallow in eternal victimhood. It sustains a morally blind nostalgia for an invented past. If Israelis confront these lies it threatens an existential crisis. It forces them to rethink who they are. Most prefer the comfort of illusion. The desire to believe is more powerful than the desire to see.

As long as truth is hidden, as long as those who seek truth are silenced, it is impossible for a society to regenerate and reform itself. It becomes calcified. Its lies and dissimulation must be constantly renewed. Truth is dangerous. Once it is established it is indestructible. The Trump administration is in lock step with Israel. It too seeks to prioritize myth over reality. It too silences those who challenge the lies of the past and the lies of the present.

The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of an historical process. It is not an isolated act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonialism.

This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but all these measures — the killing of civilians, the ethnic cleansing, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians.

The incursion on October 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the cover to implement its own version of the final solution. October 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine.

Israel’s weaponisation of starvation is how genocides always end. I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of General Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs blocked food and aid to Srebrenica and Gorazde.

Starvation was weaponised by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in World War II.

German soldiers used food as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in The Ghetto Fights. “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”

And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.

This tactic is as old as warfare itself.

Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies.

It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of October 7. This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA.

The near total blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, reduced Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they were forced to crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they were stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This was by intent.

The nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 UNRWA aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south. Palestinians were herded like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They received, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food. Most received nothing. And when the crowds became unruly in the chaotic scramble for food the Israelis and the mercenaries gunned them down, killing 1700 and injuring thousands more.

The genocide marks a break from the past. It marks the exposure of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians, dressed in Israeli army uniforms and with their hands bound, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations buildings or mass casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out sexual assaults of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists”. The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of ceasefire agreements.

Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed.

The expansion of “Greater Israel” — which includes the seizing of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights, southern Lebanon, Gaza and the occupied West Bank, where some 40,000 Palestinians have been driven from their homes and which I expect will soon be annexed by Israel — is being cemented into place.

But the genocide in Gaza is only the start. The world is breaking down under the onslaught of the climate crisis, which is triggering mass migrations, failed states and catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, storms, flooding and droughts. As global stability unravels, industrial violence, which is decimating the Palestinians, will become ubiquitous.

Israel’s annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed upon laws and rules, one often violated by the US in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but one that was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The US and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide, but obstruct the demand by most nations for an adherence to humanitarian law. They have carried out attacks against the only nation — Yemen — which has tried to halt the genocide.

The message this sends is clear: We have everything. If you try and take it away from us we will kill you.

The militarised drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watch towers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheid existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance are as familiar to the desperate migrants along the Mexican border or attempting to enter Europe as they are to the Palestinians.

Israel, which as Ronen Bergman notes his book Rise and Kill First in has “assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world,” cynically employs the Nazi Holocaust to sanctify its hereditary victimhood and justify its settler-colonial state, apartheid, campaigns of mass slaughter and Zionist version of Lebensraum.

Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, saw the Shoah, for this reason, as “an inexhaustible source of evil” which “is perpetrated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation”.

Genocide and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany or Israel.

Aimé Césaire, in Discourse on Colonialism, writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man,” applying to Europe the “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the nègres d’Afrique.”

The near-annihilation of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population, the German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 — then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrate something fundamental about “Western civilization”.”

The moral philosophers who make up the Western canon — Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, David Hume, John Stuart Mill and John Locke — excluded enslaved and exploited people, indigenous peoples, colonised people, women of all races and the criminalised from their moral calculus. In their eyes European whiteness alone imparted modernity, moral virtue, judgment and freedom. This racist definition of personhood played a central role in justifying colonialism, slavery, the genocide of Native Americans and First Nations people in Australia, our imperial projects and our fetish for white supremacy.

So, when you hear that the Western canon is an imperative, ask yourself for whom?

“In America,” the poet Langston Hughes said, “Negros do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”

The Nazis, when they formulated the Nuremberg laws, modeled them on American Jim Crow-era segregation and discrimination laws. America’s refusal to grant citizenship to Native Americans and Filipinos, although they lived in the U.S. and U.S. territories, was copied by the German fascists to strip citizenship from Jews. American anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial marriage, was the impetus to outlaw marriages between German Jews and Aryans.

American jurisprudence classified anyone with one percent of Black ancestry, the so called “one drop rule,” as Black. The Nazis, ironically showing more flexibility, classified anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents as Jewish.

The millions of victims of colonial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, Australia, the Congo and Vietnam, for this reason, are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacknowledged by their Western perpetrators.

The fact is that genocide is coded in the DNA of Western imperialism. Palestine has made this clear. The genocide in Gaza is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers”.

Israel embodies the ethnonationalist state the far-right dreams of creating for themselves, one that rejects political and cultural pluralism, as well as legal, diplomatic and ethical norms. Israel is admired by these proto-fascists because it has turned its back on humanitarian law to use indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those condemned as human contaminants. Israel is not an outlier. It expresses our darkest impulses and I fear our future.

I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organisation by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.

Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995 by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.

Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine.

Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”

There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project, mirroring the strain of fascism in American society. Unfortunately, for us, the Israelis and the Palestinians these fascistic strains are ascendant.

Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018:

“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here, the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people. [W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”

The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far-right Zionists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of the Nazi’s blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compares to the Biblical Amalekites, massacred by the Israelites.

Euro-American settlers in the American colonies used the same Biblical passage to justify the genocide against Native Americans. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand.

Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque — the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army — to be demolished. The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will become a Jewish version of Iran.

There are over 65 laws which discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those living in the occupied territories. The campaign of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, many by rogue Jewish militias who have been armed with 10,000 automatic weapons, along with house and school demolitions and the seizure of remaining Palestinian land is exploding.

Israel, at the same time, is turning on “Jewish traitors” – within Israel and abroad — who refuse to embrace the demented vision of the ruling Jewish fascists and who denounce the genocide. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, homosexuals and pacifists — are targeted. The judiciary, according to plans put forward by Netanyahu, will be neutered. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as “disloyal” will be deported.

Israel could have exchanged the hostages held by Hamas for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, which is why the Israeli hostages were seized, on October 8th. And there is evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them, killing perhaps hundreds of their own soldiers and civilians.

Israel and its western allies, James Baldwin saw, is headed towards the “terrible probability” that the dominant nations “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.”

The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European nations as it carries out genocide has imploded the post-World War II international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilisation.

Pankaj Mishra writes:

“At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century — just as the First World War was for a generation in the West.”

We must name and face our own darkness. We must repent. Our willful blindness and historical amnesia, our refusal to be accountable to the rule of law, our belief that we have a right to use industrial violence to exert our will marks, I fear, the start, not the end, of campaigns of mass slaughter by industrialised nations against the world’s growing legions of the poor and the vulnerable.

It is the curse of Cain. And it is curse we must remove before the genocide in Gaza becomes not an anomaly but the norm.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This Edward Said Memorial Lecture was hosted by the Australian Friends of Palestine and delivered at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, on 18 October 2025.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/10/15/pacific-media-watch-backs-rsf-call-for-urgent-end-to-gaza-media-blockade/ Tue, 14 Oct 2025 11:47:26 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=119826 Pacific Media Watch

Pacific Media Watch supports the call by the Paris-based global media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) for justice for the victims of crimes against journalists in Gaza, and its demand for immediate access to the Palestinian enclave for exiled journalists and foreign press.

The ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, confirmed on Friday, 10 October 2025, came after two years of unprecedented massacres against the press in Gaza.

Since October 2023, the Israeli army has killed nearly 220 journalists, including at least 56 slain due to their work.

• READ MORE: IFJ condemns Australian lobby censorship bids to ‘silence’ reporting on Gaza
• Other Pacific Media Watch reports

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which has filed five complaints with the International Criminal Court, has called in a statement for justice for the victims, and the urgent evacuation of media professionals who wish to leave.

The ceasefire agreement in Gaza under US President Donald Trump’s peace plan has so far failed to produce an end to the media blockade imposed on the besieged Palestinian territory.

According to RSF information, several bombings struck the north of Gaza on the day the agreement was announced, 9 October. One of them wounded Abu Dhabi TV photojournalist Arafat al-Khour while he was documenting the damage in the Sabra neighbourhood in the centre of Gaza City.

While the agreement approved by the Israeli government and Hamas leaders allows humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, it does not explicitly mention authorising access for the foreign press or the possibility of evacuating local journalists.

‘Absolute urgency’
Jonathan Dagher, head of the RSF Middle East Desk, said in a statement: “The relief of a ceasefire in Gaza must not distract from the absolute urgency of the catastrophic situation facing journalists in the territory.

“Nearly 220 of them have been killed by the Israeli army in two years, and the reporters still alive in Gaza need immediate care, equipment and support. They also need justice — more than ever.

“If the impunity for the crimes committed against them continues, they will be repeated in Gaza, Palestine and elsewhere in the world. To bring justice to Gaza’s reporters and to protect the right to information around the world, we demand arrest warrants for the perpetrators of crimes against our fellow journalists in Gaza.

“RSF is counting on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to act on the complaints we filed for war crimes committed against these journalists. It’s high time that the international community’s response matched the courage shown by Palestinian reporters over the past two years.”

Since the start of the Israeli offensive in Gaza in October 2023, the Israeli army has killed nearly 220 journalists in the besieged territory. At least 56 of these victims were directly targeted or killed due to their work, according to RSF, which has filed five complaints with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the past two years, seeking justice for these journalists and end impunity for the crimes against them.

In addition to killing news professionals on the ground and in their homes, the Israeli army has also targeted newsrooms, telecommunications infrastructure and journalistic equipment.

Famine hits journalists
Famine continues to afflict civilians in the Strip, including journalists, yet aid is barely trickling in and all communication services have been destroyed by two years of bombing.

On October 9, Israeli authorities and Hamas leaders reached a 20-point ceasefire agreement in Cairo, Egypt’s capital, as part of Donald Trump’s plan to establish “lasting peace” in the region.

This is the second ceasefire in Gaza since 7 October 2023, the first put in place at the beginning of the year and broken in March 2025, shortly after a strike killed the renowned Al Jazeera journalist Hossam Shabat.

Israel is ranked 112th among the 180 nations surveyed by the annual RSF World Press Freedom Index and Palestine is 163rd.

Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/10/13/ifj-condemns-australian-lobby-censorship-bids-to-silence-reporting-on-gaza/ Sun, 12 Oct 2025 21:57:28 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=119713 Pacific Media Watch

The global peak journalism body has condemned the targeting, harassment, and censorship by lobby groups of Australian journalists for reporting critically on Israel’s war on Gaza.

The Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and its Australian affiliate, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), said in a statement they were attempts to silence journalists and called on media outlets and regulatory bodies to ensure the fundamental rights to freedom of expression and access to information were upheld.

In a high-profile case, Australia’s Federal Court found on June 25 that Lebanese-Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf was unlawfully dismissed by the national public broadcaster, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), for sharing a social media post by Human Rights Watch relating to violations by Israel in Gaza, reports IFJ.

• READ MORE: Palestinian journalist Saleh Aljafarawi shot dead in Gaza City clashes

Lattouf was removed from a five-day radio presenting contract in Sydney in December 2023, with the judgment confirming her dismissal was made to appease pro-Israel lobbyists.

On Seotember 24, the ABC was ordered to pay an additional $A150,000 in compensation on top of A$70,000 already awarded.

In a separate incident, Australian cricket reporter Peter Lalor was dropped from radio coverage of Australia’s Sri Lanka tour by broadcaster SEN in February after he reposted several posts on X regarding Israeli attacks in Gaza and the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel.

“I was told in one call there were serious organisations making complaints; in another I was told that this was not the case,” said Lalor in a statement.

Kostakidis faces harassment
Prominent journalist and former SBS World News Australia presenter Mary Kostakidis has also faced ongoing harassment by the Zionist Federation of Australia, with a legal action filed in the Federal Court under Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act for sharing two allegedly “antisemitic” posts on X.

#Australia: A number of Australian journalists have been targeted, harassed, and censored by lobby groups for reporting critical of Israel’s war on Gaza. @withMEAA @IFJGlobal https://t.co/KqMXmFC2n1

— IFJ Asia-Pacific (@ifjasiapacific) September 29, 2025

 

Kostakidis said the case failed to identify which race, ethnicity or nationality was offended by her posts, with a verdict currently awaited on a strikeout order filed by Kostakidis in July.

The MEAA said: “MEAA journalists are subject to the code of ethics, who in their professional capacity, often provide critical commentary on political warfare.

“These are the tenets of democracy. We stand with our colleagues in their workplaces, in the courtrooms, and in their deaths to raise our voices against the silence.”

The IFJ said: “Critical and independent journalism in the public interest is more crucial than ever in the face of incessant pressure from partisan lobby groups.

“IFJ stands in firm solidarity with journalists globally facing harassment and censorship for their reporting.”

Journalist killed in Gaza City

Meanwhile, gunmen believed to be part of Israeli-linked militia, have killed Palestinian journalist Saleh Aljafarawi, south of Gaza City, after the ceasefire, reports Al Jazeera.

Social media posts showed people bidding farewell to the 28-year-old who had been bringing news about the war over the last two years through his widely watched videos, the channel said.

Several people accused of attacking returnees to Gaza City by colluding with Israeli forces were killed during clashes in the area where Aljafarawi was shot dead, sources told Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera said that more than 270 Palestinian journalists had been killed in Gaza since the war began in October 2023.

BREAKING: Prominent Palestinian journalist Saleh Aljafarawi has been killed by gunmen in Gaza City’s al-Sabra neighbourhood, making him one of more than 270 journalists killed since Israel’s war began in 2023.

LIVE updates: https://t.co/yOyLZarHaa pic.twitter.com/cXinQKS4WW

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) October 12, 2025

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/10/12/sara-awad-why-gaza-still-looks-to-the-freedom-flotillas-for-true-peace/ Sun, 12 Oct 2025 03:25:31 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=119683 COMMENTARY: By Sara Awad

On October 10, a ceasefire in Gaza was officially announced. International news media were quick to focus on what they now call “the peace plan”.

US President Donald Trump, they announced, would go to Cairo to oversee the agreement signing and then to Israel to speak at the Knesset.

The air strikes over Gaza, they reported, have stopped.

• READ MORE: Freedom Flotilla Coalition condemns Israel for continuing to illegally imprison and abuse human rights defenders
• ‘Treated like animals’ – NZer activists detained by Israeli forces arrive home
• Genocide two years on: It is the West, not Gaza, that must be deradicalised

The bombs have indeed stopped, but our suffering continues. Our reality has not changed. We are still under siege.

Israel still has full control over our air, land and sea; it is still blocking sick and injured Palestinians from leaving and journalists, war crimes investigators and activists from going in.

It is still controlling what food, what medicine, and essential supplies enter.

The siege has lasted more than 18 years, shaping every moment of our lives. I have lived under this blockade since I was just three years old. What kind of peace is this, if it will continue to deny us the freedoms that everyone else has?

‘Deal’ overshadowed flotilla kidnap
The news of the ceasefire deal and “the peace plan” overshadowed another, much more important development.

Israel raided another freedom flotilla in international waters loaded with humanitarian aid for Gaza, kidnapping 145 people on board — a crime under international law. This came just days after Israel attacked the Global Sumud Flotilla, detaining more than 450 people who were trying to reach Gaza.

These flotillas carried more than just humanitarian aid. They carried the hope of freedom for the Palestinian people. They carried a vision of true peace — one where Palestinians are no longer besieged, occupied and dispossessed.

Many have criticised the freedom flotillas, arguing that they cannot make a difference since they are doomed to be intercepted.

I myself did not pay much attention to the movement. I was deeply disappointed, having lost hope in seeing an end to this war.

But that changed when Brazilian journalist Giovanna Vial interviewed me. Giovanna wrote an article about my story before setting sail with the Sumud Flotilla. She then made a post on social media saying: “for Sara, we sail”. Her words and her courage stirred something in me.

Afterwards, I kept my eyes on the flotilla news, following every update with hope. I told my relatives about it, shared it with my friends, and reminded anyone who would listen how extraordinary this movement was.

‘Treated like animals’ – NZer activists detained by Israeli forces arrive home

‘She became the light’
I kept wondering — how is it possible that, in a world so heavy with injustice, there are still people willing to abandon everything and put their lives in danger for people they had never met, for a place, most of them had never visited.

I stayed in touch with Giovanna.

“Until my last breath, I will never leave you alone,” she wrote to me while sailing towards Gaza. In the midst of so much darkness, she became the light.

This was the first time in two years I felt like we were heard. We were seen.

The Sumud Flotilla was by far the biggest in the movement’s history, but it was not about how many boats there were or how many people were on board or how much humanitarian aid they carried. It was about putting a spotlight on Gaza — about making sure the world could no longer look away.

“All Eyes on Gaza,” read one post on the official Instagram account of the flotilla. It stayed with me, I read it on a very heavy night when the deafening sound of bombs in Gaza City was relentless. It was just before I had to flee my home due to the brutal Israeli onslaught.

Israel stopped flotillas, aid
Israel stopped the flotillas. They abused and deported the participants. They seized the aid. They may have prevented them from reaching our shores, but they failed to erase the message they carried.

A message of peace. A message of freedom. A message we had been waiting to hear for two long, brutal years. The boats were captured, but the solidarity reached us.

I carry so much gratitude in my heart for every single human being who took part in the freedom flotillas. I wish I could reach each of them personally — to tell them how much their courage, their presence, and their solidarity meant to me, and to all of us in Gaza.

We will never forget them. We will carry their names, their faces, their voices in our hearts forever.

To those who sailed toward us: thank you. You reminded us that we are not alone.

And to the world: we are clinging to hope. We are still waiting — still needing — more flotillas to come. Come to us. Help us break free from this prison.

The bombing has stopped now, and I can only hope that this time it does not resume in a few weeks. But we still do not have peace.

Governments have failed us. But the people have not.

One day, I know, the freedom flotilla boats will reach the shore of Gaza and we will be free.

Sara Awad is an English literature student, writer, and storyteller based in Gaza. Passionate about capturing human experiences and social issues, Sara uses her words to shed light on stories often unheard. Her work explores themes of resilience, identity, and hope amid war. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/10/09/two-years-after-october-7-israels-war-gazas-ashes-and-the-collapse-of-moral-authority/ Wed, 08 Oct 2025 23:48:48 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=119567 ANALYSIS: By Elijah J Magnier

Two years ago, Israel suffered what was perhaps the most jarring day in its modern history. The events of October 7, 2023, weren’t just a military failure or an intelligence lapse — they were a national humiliation. Police stations were stormed and overrun. Military posts were taken. Soldiers and officers, including from elite units, were killed or captured. The Gaza Division of the Israeli army, a symbol of Israel’s long-standing dominance over the Strip, fell into chaos.

Israel invoked the Hannibal Doctrine — a policy that allows military forces to prevent the capture of soldiers even at the cost of their lives, by opening fire on both Hamas and the kidnapped Israelis. That day, it wasn’t theory — it was execution.

In the fog of panic, Israeli fire turned on its own, and the thin line between protecting society and sacrificing civilians for strategic ends evaporated.

• READ MORE: Gaza in a thousand faces – Al Jazeera looks back at two years of Israel’s war
• Two years after October 7: Israel’s reckoning

But October 7 was just the opening act. What followed was a war unlike anything Israel had fought in fifty years — brutal, relentless, and devastating in scale and ambition. Gaza was not merely targeted; it was systematically dismantled. What began as retaliation became something else entirely: an erasure.

The illusion of military supremacy
Two years into the war, one fact is undeniable: Israel, backed by some of the most powerful military alliances in the world, has failed to conquer a territory smaller than half of New York City. 365 square kilometers — that’s all Gaza is. Yet despite overwhelming force, technological advantage, and political cover, the Israeli army has been unable to fully occupy it.

This failure is especially glaring given the scale of destruction. Over 200,000 tons of explosives have been dropped on Gaza — the equivalent of 20 nuclear bombs without radiation. That’s not metaphor. That’s the measure of how far Israel was willing to go and is not willing to stop yet: flattening entire towns, turning hospitals, schools, mosques, residential towers, universities, even cemeteries into rubble.

Gaza has endured more concentrated bombing than any territory since the Second World War.

Indeed, what Gaza has endured over the past two years dwarfs even some of the most infamous wartime bombardments of the twentieth century. In February 1945, Allied forces dropped roughly 3,900 tons of explosives on Dresden in a three-day firestorm that killed an estimated 25,000 to 35,000 people and obliterated much of the city. Where Dresden became a symbol of wartime excess, Gaza is witnessing destruction on a scale so vast it makes Dresden look like a prelude.

And unlike Dresden, Gaza’s devastation has been broadcast live, in real time, to a world that cannot claim it did not know.

But Israel was never alone and had every advantage and complicity: real-time intelligence from the United States and Britain, precision munitions from Germany, satellite targeting, drone supremacy, complete air dominance. And still, two years on, it cannot claim control over this tiny strip of land.

The problem was never firepower. It was urban warfare — a terrain where bombs are blunt tools and conquest requires something far more difficult: boots on the ground, close-quarters control, and the ability to hold territory without hemorrhaging soldiers or sparking endless insurgency.

The Israeli army, trained for dominance but not for urban occupation, found itself caught in a repetitive, grinding cycle: enter, level, retreat, repeat.

Neighborhoods were captured and declared “secured,” only to be abandoned and recontested days later. Troops rotated in and out of ruined zones, unable to maintain sustained presence. For every area leveled, resistance either moved underground or regrouped elsewhere. The war turned into a grim spectacle of destruction without achievement.

This revealed a contradiction at the heart of Israel’s military doctrine: it can destroy almost anything, but it cannot hold what it destroys. Air supremacy means nothing when the battlefield is a bombed-out maze. Gaza’s density, devastation, and defiance turned every advantage into a liability.

So while the Strip lies in ruins, it is not conquered. And that truth — buried under declarations of “strategic success” — is the defeat Israel cannot admit.

The real objective: Not security—territory
Israel’s war was not, as officially claimed, about eliminating Hamas or rescuing hostages. That narrative collapsed quickly under the weight of Israel’s own actions. From the beginning, hostage negotiations were treated as peripheral. Every time progress was made on potential ceasefires, it was Netanyahu’s office that pulled the plug — because every hostage released made the war harder to justify. Every ceasefire threatened to slow the campaign just enough for the world to ask uncomfortable questions.

This was never about hostages. It was about Gaza. More specifically: it was about removing Gaza as an obstacle to territorial ambition.

Netanyahu, cornered by political instability, corruption trials, and a fragile coalition held together by the far-right, saw in October 7 a chance to do what had always been unspoken: clear Gaza. Not of Hamas, but of Palestinians. Permanently. Not by announcement, but by attrition — bombing, starvation, siege, trauma.

Gaza’s civilian population wasn’t collateral damage. It was the target.

Destroying Gaza wasn’t a means to defeat an enemy. It was a means to reshape a demographic reality. This wasn’t defense. It was a conquest dressed up as security.

When the mask falls
In war, the first casualty is truth. But in this war, truth didn’t die quietly — it was dragged into the open, exposed by the very actors trying to hide it. Israeli soldiers live streamed brutality. Government officials made genocidal statements on public platforms. Civilian infrastructure was not accidentally struck — it was deliberately annihilated.

At first, the world made excuses. Israel had been attacked and was “entitled to defend itself”. But over time, the scale, duration, and clarity of its actions stripped away any remaining ambiguity. When every hospital (38 in total) becomes a target, when entire neighborhoods are turned to rubble, when starvation is used as a weapon — it becomes impossible to speak of “defence” without insulting reason.

And so the global tide turned. Governments hesitated, but people didn’t. From Berlin to Boston, from Sydney to Cape Town, millions marched — not for Hamas, but for the principle that no state, however victimised, has the right to massacre an entire population in response.

Israel didn’t just lose global support. It lost the moral framing that had shielded, or it had hid behind, it for decades.

It had positioned itself as a democracy surrounded by enemies. But democracies don’t bomb refugee camps, don’t livestream the deaths of children, don’t cut off water to two million people and don’t hold hostages’ lives hostage to political calculus.

Israel’s loss over the last two years hasn’t been military — it’s been existential. The myth of invincibility is broken. The image of moral exceptionalism, cultivated so carefully for decades, has shattered. Netanyahu, once a master manipulator of global opinion, now finds himself isolated, distrusted, even among allies.

What October 7 exposed was the weakness of Israel in the one arena it believed itself untouchable: control. It wasn’t just a border breach. It was a rupture of the entire apparatus that had kept Gaza contained for years. Fences, drones, AI, intelligence, surveillance — all of it failed.

And when the mask of control slipped, the response wasn’t strategic — it was criminally vengeful. It was rage mixed with blood thirst. But rage isn’t a strategy, rage destroys. And over two years, rage has destroyed Gaza — and with it, Israel’s future.

Netanyahu’s calculus: Eternal war
The war served Netanyahu well—at least at first. It silenced his critics. It unified a fractured public. It postponed trials. It gave him relevance again. But the deeper logic was more disturbing: war is the only environment where his political survival is guaranteed.

Peace, by contrast, is a threat. Peace requires compromise. Peace requires vision. Netanyahu offers neither.

Each time a ceasefire neared, his government collapsed it. Each time hostages were close to freedom, the process was torpedoed. To free the hostages would be to end the war. To end the war would be to lose power. This is the twisted loop that has defined Israel’s leadership for two years. Hostages weren’t bargaining chips — they were leverage. They were the excuse for ongoing brutality.

And the world saw it. Every broken deal, every last-minute sabotage, made it harder to pretend this was about security. By the end of the second year, no serious government believed Netanyahu was acting in good faith. Even allies began to distance themselves, not out of principle — but out of shame. What’s remarkable isn’t that Israel committed war crimes — it’s that it did so while assuming the world would look away.

For decades, that assumption held. But this time was different.

Technology turned every phone into a witness. Every child pulled from rubble was broadcast in real time. Every lie was challenged within seconds. The world saw the crimes as they happened — and watched as Israel confirmed them with its own footage.

No state can withstand that level of exposure and retain legitimacy.

Even in the US, the last bastion of unconditional support, the consensus cracked. Young people rejected the old narratives. Jewish voices joined Palestinian ones. The streets filled with dissent, not just from the fringe but from the center. Israel’s status as a protected partner is no longer guaranteed.

In Europe, traditional guilt-driven loyalty gave way to disgust. Governments clung to old alliances, but the public broke ranks. Supporting Israel was no longer an expression of Western solidarity — it became a political liability.

Ceasefire, but not peace
Now, with pressure mounting, ceasefire talks are back — this time in Egypt, under the bizarre influence of Donald Trump, whose re-entry into international politics has added a surreal dimension to an already surreal conflict. But few believe the talks will produce anything lasting. Netanyahu has built his power on conflict. He has no incentive to end it.

Even if a deal is signed, it’s unlikely to hold. The machinery of occupation, the logic of dispossession, the appetite for dominance — it remains intact. This war may pause. But the ideology that fueled it still governs Israel.

And that’s the real crisis: not the bombs, not the destruction, not even the deaths — but the belief that this can go on forever.

Israel may declare victory over Hamas. It may claim strategic success in degrading enemy capabilities. But that’s not what the world sees.

What the world sees is a nation that responded to horror with horror. A nation that lost its soul in pursuit of a war it could never truly win. A nation that allowed vengeance to become policy, and policy to become annihilation.

Two years later, Gaza lies in ruins. But so does Israel’s credibility. So does the illusion of a “moral army.” So does the narrative of self-defence that once made its case persuasive to the world.

Hamas lit the match. But Israel poured the fuel, struck the steel, and claimed the fire was purification.

In the end, what remains isn’t security. It’s ash.

Elijah J Magnier is a veteran war zone correspondent and political analyst with over 35 years of experience covering the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). He specialises in real-time reporting of politics, strategic and military planning, terrorism and counter-terrorism; his strong analytical skills complement his reporting. His in-depth experience, extensive contacts and thorough political knowledge of complex political situations in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan and Syria provide his writings with insights balancing the routine misreporting and propaganda in the Western press. He also comments on Al Jazeera.

]]> https://asiapacificreport.nz/2025/09/03/chris-hedges-the-betrayal-of-palestinian-journalists/ Tue, 02 Sep 2025 19:51:15 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=119467 Western reporters are full partners in the genocide. They amplify Israeli lies, which they know are lies, betraying Palestinian colleagues who are slandered, targeted and killed by Israel.

ANALYSIS: By Chris Hedges

There are two types of war correspondents. The first type does not attend press conferences. They do not beg generals and politicians for interviews. They take risks to report from combat zones.

They send back to their viewers or readers what they see, which is almost always diametrically opposed to official narratives. This first type, in every war, is a tiny minority.

Then there is the second type, the inchoate blob of self-identified war correspondents who play at war. Despite what they tell editors and the public, they have no intention of putting themselves in danger.

• READ MORE: Children, journalists among 105 killed in Israeli onslaught in Gaza
• Other Israeli war on Gaza reports

They are pleased with the Israeli ban on foreign reporters into Gaza. They plead with officials for background briefings and press conferences. They collaborate with their government minders who impose restrictions and rules that keep them out of combat.

They slavishly disseminate whatever they are fed by officials, much of which is a lie, and pretend it is news. They join little jaunts arranged by the military — dog and pony shows — where they get to dress up and play soldier and visit outposts where everything is controlled and choreographed.

The mortal enemy of these poseurs are the real war reporters, in this case, Palestinian journalists in Gaza. These reporters expose them as toadies and sycophants, discrediting nearly everything they disseminate. For this reason, the poseurs never pass up a chance to question the veracity and motives of those in the field.

I watched these snakes do this repeatedly to my colleague Robert Fisk.

Took huge hit
When war reporter Ben Anderson arrived at the hotel where journalists covering the war in Liberia were encamped — in his words getting “drunk” at bars “on expenses,” having affairs and exchanging “information rather than actually going out and getting information” — his image of war reporters took a huge hit.

“I thought, finally, I’m amongst my heroes,” Anderson recalls. “This is where I’ve wanted to be for years. And then me and the cameraman I was with — who knew the rebels very well — he took us out for about three weeks with the rebels.

“We came back to Monrovia. The guys in the hotel bar said, ‘Where have you been? We thought you’d gone home.’ We said, ‘We went out to cover the war. Isn’t that our job? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’

“The romantic view I had of foreign correspondents was suddenly destroyed in Liberia,” he went on. “I thought, actually, a lot of these guys are full of shit. They’re not even willing to leave the hotel, let alone leave the safety of the capital and actually do some reporting.”

You can see an interview I did with Anderson here.

This dividing line, which occurred in every war I covered, defines the reporting on the genocide in Gaza. It is not a divide of professionalism or culture. Palestinian reporters expose Israeli atrocities and implode Israeli lies. The rest of the press does not.

Palestinian journalists, targeted and assassinated by Israel, pay — as many great war correspondents do — with their lives, although in far greater numbers.

Israel has murdered 245 journalists in Gaza by one count and more than 273 by another. The goal is to shroud the genocide in darkness.

No other war close
No war I covered comes close to these numbers of dead. Since October 7, Israel has killed more journalists “than the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.” Journalists in Palestine leave wills and recorded videos to be read or played at their death.

The colleagues of these Palestinian journalists in the Western press broadcast from the border fence with Gaza decked out in flak jackets and helmets, where they have as much chance of being hit by shrapnel or a bullet as being struck by an asteroid. They scurry like lemmings to briefings by Israeli officials. They are not only the enemies of truth, but also the enemies of journalists doing the real work of war reporting.

When Iraqi troops attacked the Saudi border town of Khafji during the first Gulf War, Saudi soldiers fled in panic. Two French photographers and I watched frantic soldiers commandeering fire trucks and racing south. US Marines pushed the Iraqis back.

But in Riyadh, the press was told of our gallant Saudi allies defending their homeland. Once fighting ended, the press bus stopped a few miles down the road from Khafji. The pool reporters clambered out, escorted by military minders. They did stand-ups with the distant sound of artillery and smoke as a backdrop and repeated the lies the Pentagon wanted to tell.

Meanwhile, the two photographers and I were detained and beaten by enraged Saudi military police, furious that we had documented the panicked flight of Saudi forces, as we tried to leave Khafji.

My refusal to abide by press restrictions in the first Gulf War saw the other New York Times reporters in Saudi Arabia write a letter to the foreign editor saying I was ruining the paper’s relationship with the military. If not for the intervention of R.W. “Johnny” Apple, who had covered Vietnam, I would have been sent back to New York.

I do not fault anyone for not wanting to go into a war zone. This is a sign of normality. It is rational. It is understandable. Those of us who volunteer to go into combat — my colleague Clyde Haberman at The New York Times once quipped “Hedges will parachute into a war with or without a parachute” — have obvious personality defects.

Pretend war correspondents
But I fault those who pretend to be war correspondents. They do tremendous damage. They peddle false narratives. They mask reality. They serve as witting — or unwitting — propagandists. They discredit the voices of the victims and exonerate the killers.

When I covered the war in El Salvador, before I worked for The New York Times, the paper’s correspondent dutifully regurgitated whatever the embassy fed her. This had the effect of making my editors — as well as editors of the other correspondents who did report the war– question our veracity and “impartiality.”

It made it harder for readers to understand what was happening. The false narrative neutered and often overpowered the real one.

The slander used to discredit my Palestinian colleagues — claiming they are members of Hamas — is sadly familiar. Many Palestinian reporters I know in Gaza are, in fact, quite critical of Hamas. But even if they have ties with Hamas, so what?

Israel’s attempt to justify targeting journalists from the Hamas-run al-Aqsa media network is also a violation of Article 79 of the Geneva Convention.

I worked with reporters and photographers who had a wide variety of beliefs, including Marxist-Leninists in Central America. This did not prevent them from being honest. I was in Bosnia and Kosovo with a Spanish cameraman, Miguel Gil Moreno, who was later killed with my friend Kurt Schork.

Miguel was a member of the right-wing Catholic group Opus Dei. He was also a journalist of tremendous courage, great compassion and moral probity, despite his opinions about Spain’s fascist ruler Francisco Franco. He did not lie.

Seeking to crush
In every war I covered, I was attacked as supporting or belonging to whatever group the government, including the US government, was seeking to crush. I was accused of being a tool of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, Hamas, the Muslim-led government in Bosnia and the Kosovo Liberation Army.

John Simpson of the BBC, like many Western reporters, argues that the “world needs honest, unbiased eyewitness reporting to help people make up their minds about the major issues of our time. This has so far been impossible in Gaza.”

The assumption that if Western reporters were in Gaza the coverage would improve is risible. Trust me. It would not.

Israel bans the foreign press because there is a bias in Europe and the United States in favour of reporting by Western reporters. Israel is aware that the scale of the genocide is too vast for Western outlets to hide or obscure, despite all the ink and airtime they give to Israeli and US apologists.

Israel also cannot continue its systematic campaign of annihilation of journalists in Gaza if it has to contend with foreign media in its midst.

Israeli lies amplified by Western media outlets, including my former employer The New York Times, are worthy of Pravda. Beheaded babies. Babies cooked in ovens. Mass rape by Hamas. Errant Palestinian rockets that cause explosions at hospitals and massacre civilians. Secret command tunnels and command centers in schools and hospitals. Journalists who direct Hamas rocket units. Protesters of the genocide on college campuses who are antisemites and supporters of Hamas.

Israel ‘lies like it breathes’
I covered the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis, much of that time in Gaza, for seven years. If there is one indisputable fact, it is that Israel lies like it breathes. The decision by Western reporters to give credibility to these lies, to give them the same weight as documented Israeli atrocities, is a cynical game.

The reporters know these lies are lies. But they, and the news outlets that employ them, prize access — in this case access to Israeli and US officials — above truth. The reporters, as well as their editors and publishers, fear becoming targets of Israel and the powerful Israel lobby.

There is no cost for betraying the Palestinians. They are powerless.

Call those lies out and you will swiftly find your requests for briefings and interviews with officials rebuffed. You won’t be invited by press officers to participate in staged visits to Israeli military units. You and your news organisation will be viciously attacked.

You will be left out in the cold. Your editors will terminate your assignment or your employment. This is not good for careers. And so, the lies are dutifully repeated, no matter how absurd.

It is pathetic watching these reporters and their news outlets, as Fisk writes, fight “like tigers to join these ‘pools’ in which they would be censored, restrained and deprived of all freedom of movement on the battlefield”.

When Middle East Eye journalists Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz, along with Reuters photojournalist Hussam al-Masri, and freelancers Moaz Abu Taha, and Mariam Dagga — who had worked with several media outlets, including the Associated Press — were killed in a “double tap” strike — designed to kill first responders arriving to treat casualties from initial strikes — at Nasser Medical Complex, how did Western news agencies respond?

‘Hamas camera’
“Israeli military says strikes on Gaza hospital targeted what it says was a Hamas camera,” the Associated Press reported.

“IDF claims hospital strike was aimed at Hamas camera,” announced CNN.

“Israel army says six ‘terrorists’ killed in Monday strikes on Gaza hospital,” the AFP headline read.

“Initial inquiry says Hamas camera was target of Israeli strike that killed journalists,” Reuters said.

“Israel claims troops saw Hamas camera before deadly hospital attack,” Sky News explained.

Just for the record, the camera belonged to Reuters, which said Israel was “fully aware” the news agency was filming from the hospital.

When Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and three other journalists were killed on August 10 in their media tent near al-Shifa Hospital, how was it reported in the Western press?

Pulitzer prize-winner
“Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalist It Says Was Hamas Leader,” Reuters titled its story, despite the fact al-Sharif was part of a Reuters team that won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize.

The German newspaper Bild, published a front page story headlined: “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza.”

The barrage of Israeli lies amplified and given credibility by the Western press violates a fundamental tenet of journalism, the duty to transmit the truth to the viewer or reader.

It legitimizes mass slaughter. It refuses to hold Israel to account. It betrays Palestinian journalists, those reporting and being killed in Gaza. And it exposes the bankruptcy of Western journalists, whose primary attributes are careerism and cowardice.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report”. This article is republished from his X account.

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