Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Binoy Kampmark
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Not forgetting the victims: Club Epstein and crimes against humanity
With a sex trafficking, flesh peddling empire of favours, logistics and the good time to be had by the powerful, the gigantic scale of Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal network continues to disturb. The least savoury digital library on the planet, available through the offices of the US Justice Department as the…
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Objective fallacy: Eulogies on the passing of the law based international order
The eulogies are starting to wear thin. The lamented passing of the rules and law-based order only makes sense to those who believed that such rules and laws existed in the first place. How easy to forget that the spanning hegemon of each age always presumes that its laws and…
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Bad Beginnings: The End of New START
How awful could it get? The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expired on February 5, terminating an era of arms control and imposed limits on lunatically contrived nuclear weapons programs of the United States and Russia. The New START Treaty entered into force on February 5, 2011 and…
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Mandelson: Trapped in the Epstein web
Jeffrey Epstein certainly got around. He moved virally, galloping through the cells of the establishment. What was more, he was permitted to. Dead and buried, the financier, convicted paedophile, sex trafficker, eugenics follower, and the man all in power would want to know, continues to ruin reputations, casting doubt on…
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Precarious invitations: Israel’s President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia
Things are getting rather ropey on the invitation of Israeli President Isaac Herzog to visit Australia on 8th February. It came amidst the anguish following the Bondi Beach attacks of 14th December 2025 on attendees of a Hanukkah event by two gunmen, leaving 15 dead. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese…
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Dooming the Chagos deal: The Diego Garcia dilemma
When remote islands start to interest chatterboxes in think tanks and bureaucrats in foreign ministries, we can only assume that some matters will be exaggerated over others. With the Chagos Islands, there is one matter that is hard to exaggerate. The plight of its indigenous population has been horrendous, treated…
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The preaching Pentecostal: Scott Morrison in Israel
Australia’s former Prime Minister and faithful Pentecostal Scott Morrison never passes up the chance to express an opinion if it will net him a reward. As one of various politicians of the right (and far rightist) hue invited by Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, he…
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Dancing with European nationalism: Israel’s Generation Truth antisemitism conference
Held between 26th and 27th January at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center and called Generation Truth, the second international conference on combating antisemitism was a picture of cracking contradictions. Organised by Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, it featured speakers from various far-right groups, many European, and…
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The gangster’s brief: The Barr Doctrine, Noriega and Maduro
US President Donald Trump might leave an impression of violent novelty, at least for the leader of a nominal liberal democracy, soiling international relations with the gangster’s touch. This sense of iconoclasm is misplaced. While his conduct regarding the abduction of Nicolás Maduro certainly dumps mightily on the precepts of…
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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…