Mission & Justice

Michael Shaik & Antony Loewenstein  8/5/08 - 

Michael is the public advocate for Australians for Palestine; Antony is a journalist and co-founder of Independent Australian Jewish Voices.

If you will it,” wrote Theodore Herzl, the founding father of the Zionist movement, in 1902, “it is no dream.” The dream to which he referred was the establishment of a Jewish state in the Arab country of Palestine.To realise the dream, he insisted, the Jews must be willing to seize the reigns of history by renouncing the classical Jewish tradition of pacifism and collaborating with European anti-Semites who supported the Zionist movement as a means of ridding Europe of its “Jewish problem”.

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8/5/08

Iraqis employed at the British embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone claim to have been sexually abused, the Times has reported. The British Foreign Office has received complaints from an Iraqi cleaner and two cooks that a culture of sexual harassment, abuse and bullying exists at the embassy, the report said Thursday. Accusations have been made against British employees of the US service company KBR which was responsible for catering at several embassies in Baghdad.

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Desmond Tutu; 9/5/08

In the present scandal of the attempt to ship tonnes of arms and ammunition to Zimbabwe, it is the Chinese who have spoken the most sense. China’s foreign ministry said the country’s shipment of mortar shells, rockets and bullets was perfectly normal trade. It certainly is. Shipping arms to African governments who could use them to abuse their own people is an abhorrent but almost daily occurrence. And at present there is nothing the international community can do about it because there are no effective global controls on the arms trade. If you want to export weapons to a country that commits gross abuses of human rights, then you can. If you want to sell expensive kit to governments struggling to feed or educate their people, it’s really no problem. You might have to use a few tricks to get around the flimsy patchwork of controls that presently exist but it’s easy and it’s done all the time.

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Graham Reilly; 8/5/08

The Burmese Government has put self-interest ahead of its duty to its citizens, writes Graham Reilly. For the long-suffering people of Burma, life is misery piled upon misery. Since 1962 they have struggled under the repressive rule of an isolationist, economically inept and intensely paranoid military regime immune to domestic and international pressure to introduce political freedom, personal liberty or human rights. Once the region’s rice bowl, the country is now an economic basket case crippled by spiralling inflation and the regime’s allocation of 40% of the national budget to the 400,000-strong military, a commitment that perpetuates its own power and wealth at the expense of the interests of ordinary Burmese.

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9/5/08

The first UN aid plane arrived in cyclone-ravaged Burma last night, but US and other international efforts were on hold after the country’s military generals rescinded their approval for American planes to enter Burma. The generals had bowed to international pressure, agreeing to allow the US military to fly critical aid to survivors of last Saturday’s cyclone, which has left up to 100,000 feared dead and one million missing. Thailand’s Supreme Commander Boonsrang Niumpradit said yesterday Bangkok had convinced Burma’s secretive junta to accept US assistance using planes that have been in Thai-US military exercises. A US embassy official confirmed the decision, but US ambassador to Thailand Eric John said later the flight was not going ahead.

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Richard Ackland; 9/5/08

In recent weeks the charter of rights “debate” has been heading largely in one direction - against. The antagonists have had longer at the megaphone than usual and have cranked up the volume. Cardinal George Pell is out on the barricades, and unsurprisingly he thinks a charter of rights is a bad thing, along with stem-cell research, contraception and abortion. The NSW Attorney-General, John Hatzistergos, and the former premier Bob Carr have lent their voices to the anti campaign. They think you would be crazy if you let anyone other than NSW politicians look after your freedoms. A handful of conservative provocateurs from the fourth estate keep banging away about how awful such legislation would be. These voices are relatively fresh from saying the invasion of Iraq was a good idea, which gets me thinking that surely they cannot be hugely wrong yet again.

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Paige Taylor; 9/5/08

The WA state Government’s three-year overhaul of child protectionservices yesterday topped $500million and will include $112million over four years for more case workers in needy areas such as Aboriginal communities in the remote Kimberley. Within 12 months, an additional 210 child protection workers, service delivery workers and support staff will be deployed to the areas of greatest need.  At a cost of $5 million, remote community workers will be sent to Warmun and Oombulgarri in the East Kimberley.  “Following last year’s review of the former Department for Community Development, we made structural changes and invested significant further funding into protecting our children,” Treasurer Eric Ripper said. The budget allocation comes three months after West Australian Coroner Alastair Hope described the plight of Aboriginal children as “especially pathetic”.

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Michael McKenna; 9/5/08

The Immigration Department has blocked the release of documents relating to the Mohamed Haneef case as his second-cousin was yesterday deported from Britain for withholding information from police investigating last year’s failed bomb plots in London and Glasgow. A week after the opening of the Rudd government inquiry into the bungled case, Dr Haneef’s lawyers launched court action to overturn the Immigration Department’s decision to refuse the release of large numbers of documents under Freedom of Information because it may jeopardise future investigations and discourage bureaucrats from giving frank advice to ministers.

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Sandra O’Malley; 8/5/08

Australia and New Zealand deny they have ditched the possibility of legal action to stop Japanese whaling. Rejecting a report that New Zealand had abandoned taking the legal route, both countries say it remains an option although a diplomatic solution remains their preferred course of action. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith, who is on two-day visit to Tokyo, insisted international legal action remained an option among Australia’s strategies to get Japan to stop the annual cull. “We’ll make a decision about the need for legal action in due course at a time of our own choosing, but we are very keen to exhaust diplomatic measures to try and bring this matter to a conclusion,” Mr Smith said.

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Nuha Adlan; 8/5/08

A two-day conference on domestic violence ended yesterday with participants saying there is no justification in Islam for abuse of women and children. They also came up with a list of demands and recommendations to tackle the problem. Experts from across the Kingdom participated in five sessions of discussions at the first National Experts Meeting to Fight Domestic Abuse Against Women and Children, with all participants agreeing that Islam does not condone abuse and that the problem should be brought to an end. “Traditions that allow abuse should be brought to an end,” said Dr. Maha Al-Munief, executive director of the National Family Safety Program (NFSP), which organized the event. “We will start training courses for people who work with abuse victims… We need cooperation from all NGOs,” she said in a press conference held to announce the recommendations.

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