Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Binoy Kampmark
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The release of Julian Assange: Plea deals and dark legacies
One of the longest sagas of political persecution has ended. If you believe in final chapters, that is. Nothing about the fate of Julian Assange seems determinative. His accusers and inquisitors will draw some delight at the plea deal reached between the WikiLeaks founder’s legal team and the US Department…
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Victory for the disposables: The sentencing of the Hindujas
In his seminal work on modern slavery, Kevin Bales does away with certain, antiquated concepts. In its insidious, older form, one focused on the concept of natal alienation, slaves were chattels and assets, owned outright. Each slave system was distinct and protean, if marked by certain universal features. The universal…
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Quibbling about killing: Netanyahu’s spat with Washington
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is unhappy. Not so much with the Palestinians, whom he sees as terroristic, dispensable and a threat to Israeli security. Nor with the Iranians, who he swears will never acquire a nuclear weapon capacity on his watch. His recent discontent has been directed against the…
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Fractious arenas: Netanyahu dissolves his war cabinet
You could almost sense the smacking of lips, and the rubbing of hands in glee. The departure of Benny Gantz from the Israeli war cabinet, which had served as a check against the conventional security cabinet, presented a perfect opportunity for those who felt his presence to be stifling. In…
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Ukraine, continued aid and the prevailing logic of slaughter
War always commands its own appeal. It has its own frazzled laurels, the calling of its own worn poets tenured in propaganda. In battle, the poets keep writing, and keep glorifying. The chattering diplomats are kept in the cooler, biding their time. The soldiers die, as do civilians. The politicians…
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Diamonds and coal dust: Slaughter at Nuseirat
The ashes had barely settled on the Rafah tent camp incinerated by an Israeli air strike before the next, gorged massacre presented itself for posterity’s gloomy archive. It was intended as a golden operation and had been months in the making. The rescue of four Israeli hostages, the killing of…
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The EU elections have seen the right on the march
The EU elections from 6-9 June have presented a chaotically merry picture, certainly for those on the right of politics. Not that the right in question is reliably homogeneous in any sense, nor hoping for a single theme of triumph. A closer look at the gains made by the conservative…
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Modi’s comeuppance: The waning of Hindutva
Lock them up. The whole bally lot: the pollsters, the pundits, the parasitic hacks clinging to the life raft of politics in the hope of earning their crust. Yet again, the election results from a country have confounded the chatterers and psephologists. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was meant to…
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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 Commons…
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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 in…
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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 British…
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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 airstrike.…
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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. It…
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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 or…
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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 judges.…
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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 report…
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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 in…
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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 interested.…
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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 personnel…
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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 East).…
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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 of…
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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 unearth…
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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 has…