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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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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Alistair Lyon; 8/5/08

While Israel celebrates its 60th birthday, Palestinian refugees mourn the 1948 Nakbeh (catastrophe) when they lost their homeland. Often ignored in Middle East peace talks, they cling to a “right of return”. Alia Shabati was 12 when she fled Jewish attacks on her village of Kabri, occupied a few days after Israel’s creation. Now a matron of 72, wearing a flowery blue dress and white headscarf, her memories of Kabri in today’s northern Israel are vividly intact, unlike the village, which was wiped off the map. “We had houses and land,” Shabati said in the living room of her modest dwelling in the alleys of Beirut’s Burj Al Barajneh refugee camp. “We had olives, grapes, prickly pears and dates. We had orchards and fields. Now what do we have? Nothing.”

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Omar; 8/5/08

In two weeks, my wife will bring our child into the world. The unborn baby is happy now, nestled within its mother’s womb and somewhat protected from the violence and suffering that exists in Gaza. I am naturally worried for mother and child. When she delivered our last child, my wife developed several medical complications. Due to the blockade on Gaza, such complications can no longer be treated in local hospitals and medical facilities.If my wife were to have an acute problem during natural birth there would be no medication or treatment available, putting her and the unborn at considerable risk. In light of this, we decided a while back that she would have a Caesarean-section rather than natural child birth. C-sections, at least, are available in Gaza.

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Martin Chulov; 8/5/08

In the heart of a grey refugee camp surrounded by dog-eared photos of dead men, on the eve of Israel’s 60th Independence Day today, a crippled old Arab warlord sits reflecting on the future of his one-time sworn enemy. Mohammed Ghawanmeh with a framed picture of deceased Palestinian Authority and Fatah leader Yasser Arafat. Picture: Stewart Innes Mohammed Ghawanmeh is the type of Palestinian who Israelis hope holds the key to the next six decades and beyond. Like others in the Jalazone refugee camp, near the West Bank administrative capital of Ramallah, Ghawanmeh accepts that another, older key - that to the coveted family home in what is now Israel - is no longer of use to him. “We are not going back and we know it,” he says. “It is time to look to the future.”

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Matthew Franklin & Patrick Walters; 8/4/08

Kevin Rudd is poised to dump Labor’s post-September 11 plan to establish a US-style department of homeland security, amid warnings the administrative upheaval involved would be so great it would put national security at risk. It is understood next Tuesday’s federal budget will not include any money for the proposal, nor for Labor’s plan to create a coast guard. Mr Rudd shelved the proposals after his election, pending a review into the administrative consequences being prepared by former Defence Department head Ric Smith. Mr Smith’s report, due at the end of June, is expected to put the case against the creation of a new department that would encompass domestic security agencies including the Australian Federal Police, ASIO and Customs. Several sources have confirmed there is little appetite for change within senior levels of the government.

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On Behalf Of Graeme Ferguson; 7/5/08; Kevin Toomey OP

Peter Murnane OP became parish priest of St Benedicts shortly after I went to St David’s. I came to appreciate him as one of the most Christ-like priests I have met. Peter has the capacity to act in highly creative ways to ensure that the Gospel is demonstrated in life.

He planted - with others - a city garden on waste land on the edge of the Auckland motorway. With the Dominican nuns in St Benedicts, he had created an entire wall of the church property painted by graffitti artists who were being hounded by the city authorities. (more…)

Conor Foley; 6/5/08

The latest charges brought against Tareq Aziz, the deputy prime minister of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, have reignited debate about the legality of the Iraq war. The specific charge that he now faces is of ordering the summary execution of a group of rice merchants. However, the campaign group Indict is also calling for him to be charged with war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression. This final charge, which centers on his role in launching the invasions of Iran and Kuwait, brings inevitable comparisons with the US-led invasion of Iraq five years ago. Indeed, it is difficult to see how a legal distinction between Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980 and some of the justifications that supporters of the invasion of Iraq now rely upon.

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Gwynne Dyer; 6/5/08

“Terrorism,” like “fascism,” is one of those words that people routinely apply to almost any behavior they disapprove of. We had a particularly impressive spread of meanings on display last week. At one extreme, the US State Department released its annual “Country Reports on Terrorism,” a congressionally mandated survey of all the incidents that the United States officially regards as terrorism. There were, it said, 14,499 such attacks last year. (That’s 71 down from the previous year, so there is hope.) At the other extreme, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor and current nemesis, when asked to justify his earlier remark that the 9/11 attacks on the United States were “America’s chickens coming home to roost,” helpfully explained that the US had dropped atomic bombs on Japan and “supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans,” so what did Americans expect?

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