Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Binoy Kampmark
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The return of Nigel Farage is a Tory Party nightmare
Few have exerted as much influence on the tone and outcome of elections in the UK over the past thirty years as Nigel Farage. Fewer still have done so while never actually winning an election campaign. In seven attempts at standing for a seat in the UK House of...
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Inexplicable investments: Elbit Systems and Australia’s Future Fund
Australia’s sovereign wealth fund stands somewhat modestly at A$272.3 billion. It has crawled into some trouble of late. Investors, especially those who are tinged with a sense of morality, are keeping an eye on where the fund’s money goes. Inevitably, a good slice of it seems to be parked...
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Ming vase politics: UK Labour and purging the Corbynistas
By any reckoning, this was the move of a fool. A fool, it should be said, motivated by spite larded with caution. Evidently playing safe and adopting what has been called a “Ming Vase strategy” — hold it with scrupulous care and, above all else, avoid danger — the...
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The stuffing of crime: Israel’s Rafah strike
It was much like witnessing a boy killing flies, with a slight afterthought of apology. The spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, did little to acquit himself, or the cause, as to why more Palestinian civilians had been indulgently killed in yet another Israeli...
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Australia’s anti-ICC lobby
Throwing caution to the wind, grasping the nettle and every little smidgen of opportunity, Australia’s opposition leader, Peter Dutton, was thrilled to make a point in the gurgling tumult of the Israel-Hamas war. Israel’s leaders, he surmised, had been hard done by the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s meddlesome ways....
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The rages of equivalence: the ICC Prosecutor, Israel and Hamas
The legal world was all abuzz. The diplomatic channels of various countries raged and fizzed. The rumour was that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with his cabinet colleagues, were bracing themselves for a stinging intervention from the International Criminal Court, a body to which they give no credence...
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The sentencing of David McBride is a brutal punishment
David McBride, the man who revealed that Australia’s Special Forces in Afghanistan had committed atrocities and faced a compromised chain of command, was sentenced on 14 May to a prison term of five years and eight months. Sometimes, it’s best not to leave the issue of justice to the...
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Dodging the issue: The Biden administration report on Israel’s use of US weapons
It truly is pushing the envelope of lunacy to assume that this latest revelation was revelatory. US weapons, the wonks in Washington find, are being used by the Israeli Defence Forces to kill their opponents, many of them Palestinians, and most of them civilians. These are detailed in a...
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Palestine’s case for full UN membership
“I find it rather difficult to make it clear to my children why we are not eligible, for from one point of view it isn’t quite clear to me,” wrote an anonymous individual in “The Jew and the Club” published in The Atlantic, October 1924. Such quotations must surely make...
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Israel has attacked free speech by closing Al Jazeera’s Jerusalem bureau
“Politics,” claimed the harsh, albeit successful, 19th century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, “is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.” To that we can add the stark awareness of being prudent, gingerly wise and appropriately cautious. And mind how you go...
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Every university should divest from the military-industrial complex
The rage against Israel’s military offensive in Gaza since 7 October has stirred students to protest at a number of US university campuses and, indeed, in other countries. Echoes of the anti-Vietnam War protests are being cited. All-too-often docile consumers of education are being prodded and found to be...
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Anzac Day and the pageantry of deception
On 25 April every year, the military parade can be witnessed along Melbourne’s arterial Swanston Street with its banners and crowds bedecked in medals, ribbons and other decorations. Many will have been on their feet since the Anzac Day dawn service, keen to show that they “turned up”. Service...
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Israel’s Anti-UNRWA Campaign Falls Flat
The Israeli authorities, in their campaign of remorseless killing, doctoring and adjusting the numbers of the Palestinian populace for whatever future awaits, have been found wanting on accusations that Hamas terrorists packed, stacked and filled UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near...
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Suspending the rule of tolerable violence: Israel’s attack and Iran’s retaliation
The Middle East has, for some time, been a powder keg where degrees of violence are tolerated with ceremonial mania and a calculus of restraint. Assassinations can take place at a moment’s notice. Revenge killings follow with dashing speed. Suicide bombings of immolating power are carried out. Drone strikes...
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Secret Agreements: The Australian-Israel Defence Memorandum of Understanding
While the Australian government continues to pirouette with shallow constancy on the issue of Israel’s war in Gaza, making vacuous utterances on Palestinian statehood even as it denies supplying the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) with weapons (spare parts, it would seem, are a different, footnoted matter), efforts made to...
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Death by Algorithm: Israel’s AI War in Gaza
Remorseless killing at the initiation of artificial intelligence has been the subject of nail-biting concern for various members of the computer-digital cosmos. Be wary of such machines in war and their displacing potential regarding human will and agency. For all that, the advent of AI-driven, automated systems in war...
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Germany, Gaza and the World Court: Broadening the scope of genocide
Can it get any busier? The International Court of Justice, aka the World Court, has been swamped by submissions alleging genocide. The site of interest remains the Gaza Strip, the subject of Israel’s unremitting slaughter since 7 October last year and the cross-border incursion by Hamas. The retaliation by...
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Killing aid workers: Australia’s muddled policy on Israel
The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was distraught and testy. It seemed that, on this occasion, Israel had gone too far. Not too far in killing over 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a staggering percentage of them being children. Not too far in terms of using starvation as a weapon...
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Israel’s war on aid workers in Gaza
Eulogies should rarely be taken at face value. Plaster saints take the place of complex individuals; faults transmute into golden virtues. But there was little in the way of fault regarding Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom’s purpose, and her tireless work for the charity World Central Kitchen (WCK) in northern Gaza...
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Starvation in Gaza: The World Court’s latest intervention
Rarely has the International Court of Justice (ICJ) been so constantly exercised by one topic during such a short space of time. On 26 January, the World Court, considering a filing made the previous December by South Africa, accepted Pretoria’s argument that the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment...
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Distinctions without difference: The UN Security Council and the Gaza ceasefire
The UN Security Council presents one of the great contradictions of power within the international system. On the one hand vested with enormous latitude in order to preserve international peace and security, it remains checked, limited and, it can be argued, crippled by an all too regular use of...
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Holding US foreign policy accountable for complicity in the genocide in Gaza
The next stage of an intriguing legal process seeking to hold the Biden administration accountable for its failure to prevent, as well as being complicit in, alleged acts of genocide taking place in Gaza, was taken on 15 March. It all stems from a lawsuit filed last November in...
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Australia, the National Security Committee and invading Iraq
Archivists can be a dull if industrious lot. Christmas crackers are less important than the annual New Year announcement in Canberra, when the National Archives of Australia releases documents like a new born in the information world. The event is not without irony, given that such documents are often...
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Aid wars over Gaza: resuming donations for UNRWA
The steady and ruthless international campaign by Israel to defund the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), is unravelling. The lynchpin in the effort was a thin, poison-pen dossier making claims that 12 individual UNRWA employees (out of 13,000 working in Gaza)...
