Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Binoy Kampmark
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Artificial Intelligence, crime and prisons: Mahmood revisits the panopticon
When does the rot start in a politician? For some, it commences the moment election to office is confirmed. Others need to become cabinet ministers before being wholly blighted. UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood may provide a classic case study. Given that security matters fall within her purview, it was…
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Carney at Davos: Removing that sign in the window
“It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry – that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.” These were the grave reflections of Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark…
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Gaza vanishing: Trump’s Board of Peace
Donald Trump’s Board of Peace overseeing the reconstruction of Gaza was always going to raise a host of niggling questions. From the outset, the US President made it clear he would be the helmsman of what was essentially an outfit of selected corporate overseers tilling the soil for The Donald’s…
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A cruel truce: Israel’s ongoing demolition of Gaza
What matters peace if it permits killing, maiming and destroying the infrastructure of a society supposedly once at war? This is the situation facing Gaza as the occupying Israeli forces go about their business making the Strip even more uninhabitable for the Palestinian residents, ensuring that that land will be…
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Festival of cowardice: The cancellation of Randa Abdel-Fattah
Boards of directors are a funny bunch. Often lacking expertise, claiming knowledge they do not have and insight that never illuminates, its members can make the cockup the stuff of legend. Instead of minding their own business and leaving the Adelaide Writers’ Week to take place without incident as part…
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Candid imperialism: Trump, racketeering and Venezuelan oil
It usually takes archival digging, the golden gaffe, an ill-considered remark and occasional spells of candour by those in power, to admit that the United States has, in common with other imperial powers, brutal ambitions. An example of the latter was General Smedley Butler who, at his death in 1940,…
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A shameful sham: The US Justice Department, fake cartels and Maduro
The Trump administration is increasingly resembling a government previously abominated by the current US president as entangling, bumbling, and prone to fantasies. President George W. Bush was well versed in baseless existential threats stemming from Mesopotamia, supposedly directed by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. There was a critical problem in…
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Confronting genocide with civil disobedience: The Pine Gap protests and Gaza
While the secret signals and surveillance facility at Pine Gap in Northern Australia, officially named the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG) is billed as a joint affair between Australia and the United States, it is nothing of the sort. Just as offices direct the callow intern to make the…
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Venal reactions: US allies validate Maduro’s abduction
On the surface, abducting a Head of State is a piratical act eschewed by States. A Head of State enjoys absolute immunity from foreign criminal jurisdiction, known as ratione personae, at least till the term of office concludes. The International Court of Justice was clear enough about this principle in…
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The Don-roe Doctrine in action: Trump’s gangster intervention in Venezuela
It has been an accusation long levelled at certain US politicians that their brains might have been softened by a lengthy diet of television, Westerns, and the heroic triumphalism of the prattling cowboy. There was never going to be a break with this tradition regarding President Donald Trump, except the…
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Secessionist pantomime: Israel recognises Somaliland
For a country so upset about recognition being afforded peoples under their thumb and control, the Israelis have decided to get into the state recognition business with festive aplomb. Africa’s Somaliland presented itself as a suitable candidate, an entity that remains part of Somalia but has asserted its own autonomy…
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A thesis confirmed: Epstein, Dershowitz and the Israel lobby
Conman, convict, paedophile and a life terminated in circumstances of purported suicide. The list for Jeffrey E. Epstein, figure of cosmic social and political influence in the United States, is long. Trafficking in female flesh for his extensive client list, lubricated by his lover Ghislaine Maxwell, tends to be the…
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Sanctioning Fever: The United States, European Union and Free Speech
At present, there is a pot-calling-the-kettle-black approach being taken by the European Union and the United States regarding the imposition of sanctions upon individuals deemed hostile to free speech. On 23 December, the US State Department announced that it would bar five European citizens accused of spearheading efforts to pressure…
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Indiscriminate suppression: Attacking pro-Palestinian protests after the Bondi killings
It has become a wallowing cringe. The extolling of multi-cultural values, the incessant self-praise of diversity, variety and cosmopolitanism, only to then impose, in the name of such values, a restrictive regime of speech, language and conduct seemed suitable to – who else? – the jerky authorities. In diversity we…
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Using the slain: Israel exploits the Bondi Beach shootings
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rarely passes an opportunity to comment upon the way Jews in other countries are treated. While the manic hatred directed against Jews remains one of history’s grotesque legacies, opportunism in the Netanyahu government is a ready instinct. With a customary sense of perversion, Netanyahu has…
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Perfectly appropriate: Trump, Infantino and the FIFA Peace Prize
He craves it, and, to some extent, his desire was satisfied. President Donald Trump did get a peace prize. Not the peace prize picked out by self-important Norwegian non-entities, but the inaugural curiosity of FIFA, an organisation famed for opacity, corruption and graft. What the critics missed in all of…
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A ceasefire in name only: Gaza’s prolonged purgatory
A ceasefire can be a strange thing. The assumption, generally speaking, is that the parties to it restrain themselves for a period of time, ordering their forces and disciplining their charges from straying. But straying happens, transgressions inevitable. Some are genuine enough: silly misunderstandings, hot headed confusion, a fear that…
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Clownish proscriptions: Challenging the Palestine Action ban
On 20 June, members of Palestine Action broke into a Royal Airforce base at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, going on to spray paint two military aircraft activists claimed were being used in “direct participation in the commission of genocide and war crimes across the Middle East.” This was deemed so horrible…
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Things happen: Trump, the Crown Prince and killing Khashoggi
The Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is at it again. Gulling, wooing, and grinning his way into the establishment of another country, he is greasing palms and making deals. Effusive and flattering of his host, this time US President Donald Trump, he received a state welcome on 18…
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Clandestine cleansing: Al-Majd Europe, Gaza and Israeli policy
According to its website, the mission of Al-Majd Europe, yet another odd charity organisation operating in the mash and rubble of Gaza, is “dedicated to providing essential humanitarian aid, educational opportunities, and sustainable development projects to Palestinian communities.” Leaving little by way of information, the charity was clearly one of…
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Reviving UNRWA’s remit: The ICJ, Israel and humanitarian aid in Gaza
Few times in its history has the International Court of Justice been this busy, if ever. For anyone ignorant of the world court’s existence till now, it has blanketed news coverage with provisional orders and advisory opinions on the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Each order is accompanied by another layering…
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Worlds extinguished: Hostage returns, central casting and the Gaza ceasefire
Depending on which source you consult, the twenty-point peace plan of President Donald Trump for securing peace in Gaza shows much exultance and extravagant omission. The exultance was initially focused on the return of the hostages. It then shifted to the broader strategic goals of the various parties. Commentary on…
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Outsized and eccentric: The farce behind the Nobel Peace Prize
The fuss about the Nobel Peace Prize has always been excessively outsized to its relevance. Like most prizes, the panel is bound to have its treasure trove of prejudices and eccentricities in reaching any decision. Thin resumes have swayed the Norwegian committee to acts of dottiness. Surprising moments of dark…
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Estranged realities: Israel and the Global Sumud Flotilla
Showing that cloddishness that we have come to expect from them, Israel’s detention of the activists on the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) was a coarse and violent affair. Having been intercepted in international waters on route to Gaza to break the Israeli-imposed blockade, the 470 or so activists, hailing from…