With its banks secured in the warmth of the southern spring, Australia is not news internationally. It ought to be. An epic scandal of racism, injustice and brutality is being covered up in the manner of apartheid South Africa.
John Pilger
Try to laugh, please. The news is now officially parody and a game for all the family to play.
The British lawyer Gareth Peirce, celebrated for defending victims of miscarriages of justice, wrote recently in relation to the conflict in Northern Ireland.
聯Zimbabwe shows Africa is still in the despots聮 grip聰, said the headline in the London Observer over an article by Keith Richburg.
Two weeks ago, I presented a young Palestinian, Mohammed Omer, with the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.
The voices of those who know how to help Burma are all but extinguished by a virus called the 聯war on terror聰.
Beyond the sound and fury of its conquest of Iraq and campaign against Iran, the world聮s dominant power is waging a largely unreported war on another continent 聴 Latin America.
When the outside world thinks about Australia, it generally turns to venerable cliches of innocence 鈥 cricket, leaping marsupials, endless sunshine, no worries. Australian governments actively encourage this. Witness the recent 鈥淕鈥檇ay USA鈥 campaign, in which Kylie Minogue and Nicole Kidman sought to persuade people in the US that, unlike the empire鈥檚 problematic outposts, a gormless greeting awaited them Down Under. After all, George Bush had ordained the previous Australian prime minister, John Howard, 鈥渟heriff of Asia鈥.
The breakout of the people of Gaza in late January provided a heroic spectacle unlike any other since the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the smashing down of the Berlin Wall.
I walked with Roberto Navarrete into the national stadium in Santiago, Chile. With the southern winter鈥檚 wind skating down from the Andes, it was empty and ghostly. Little had changed, he said: the chicken wire, the broken seats, the tunnel to the changing rooms from which the screams echoed. We stopped at a large number 28. 鈥淭his is where I was, facing the scoreboard. This is where I was called to be tortured.鈥
One of the leaders of demonstrations in Gaza calling for the release of the BBC reporter Alan Johnston was a Palestinian news cameraman, Imad Ghanem. On July 5, he was shot by Israeli soldiers as he filmed them invading Gaza. A Reuters video shows bullets hitting his body as he lay on the ground. An ambulance trying to reach him was also attacked.
The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. 鈥淭hey were sick and some were dying鈥, she says. 鈥淭hen my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable 鈥榣ooking from the side鈥.鈥
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