Israel’s key enablers, the G7, plus Australia and New Zealand, have succeeded in muscling Israel back onto the invite list for the commemorations in Nagasaki on 9 August.  Last year Israel was excluded, triggering a refusal by these countries to attend in 2024.  Does the ‘personal’ invitation that Nagasaki has just sent to Israel represent a triumph of Western diplomacy or a sick joke?

The British government has proscribed the non-violent direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. Do they really bear resemblance to Al Qaeda or ISIS, or Israel’s Stern Gang or the IDF? Or, like the French Resistance, will they eventually be recognized as heroes of our time? Will Hollywood romanticize them in their usual tardy way in 50 years time? 

In conversatoin with Eugene Doyle, the Palestinian writer Yousef Aljamal says: “I see writing as an act of resistance, because in times of oppression and injustice, writing is a means of fighting back and resisting, but also documenting and remembering and healing.“ 

Stockholm.  Benjamin Netanyahu’s nomination of Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize means that for the first time in history a political figure involved in a genocide will be nominated for the prestigious award by a leader who has an arrest warrant out for him for the crime of genocide. Netanyahu’s move, however, has triggered a flood of nominations from across the globe.

Within a year of the US assuming trusteeship of the islands another pillar of international law came into effect: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) – which affirms the inherent dignity and equal rights of all humans. Exposing colonised peoples to extreme radiation for weapons testing is a racist affront to this.

Immediately after murdering Fernando Pereira and blowing up Greenpeace’s ship the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, several of the French agents went on a ski holiday in New Zealand’s South Island to celebrate.  Such was the contempt the French had for the Kiwis and the abilities of our police to pursue them.  How wrong they were.

If Iran falls, war in our region – intended or unintended – becomes vastly more likely. Mainstream New Zealanders and Australians suffer from an understandable complacency: war is what happens to other, mainly darker people or Slavs. “Tomorrow”, people in this part of the world naively think, “will always be like yesterday”.

The US-Israeli surprise attack on Iran is literally and figuratively designed to unleash centrifugal forces in the Islamic Republic.  Both Iran’s nuclear programme and its government – in fact, the whole edifice and foundation of the Islamic Republic – is at the beginning of the greatest stress test of its existence.

“JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” Trump said. The Western media described Trump’s and Netanyahu’s threats after the first wave of attacks on Iran as “warnings”.  They were, in fact, expressions of genocidal intent. 

I won’t mince words: what we are witnessing is the racist, genocidal Israeli regime, armed and encouraged by the US, Germany, UK and other Western regimes, launching a war that has no justification other than the expansion of Israeli power and the advancement of its Greater Israel project. 

Eugene Doyle interviews CIA veteran and veteran activist Ray McGovern. “I was alive for the entire World War II, and I heard what was happening to the Jews. I said,”When I get big, I will never let something like that happen. Well, I'm big now!  I'm big and to my dying breath, I'm going to do everything I can to rally support for ending this oppression, this terrible, forced, starving of the people of Gaza.”

Eugene Doyle shares a writer’s journey – of living and writing through the Genocide.

“Following events in Palestine closely, it still comes as a shock when a journalist I have read, seen, heard is suddenly killed by the Israelis. This has happened several times. When it does I take a coffee and walk up the ridiculously steep track behind my house and sit high above the bay on a bench seat I built (badly). That bench is my “top office” where…

The U.S. is seemingly hell-bent on war with China. It is, however, increasingly likely the U.S. will lose such a war for two reasons: advanced computer chips and total production capacity.  For reasons of self-interest alone neither Australia nor New Zealand should join a US-led alliance against China.  

RNZ is failing in its duty to inform the public of an entirely preventable humanitarian catastrophe.

Radio New Zealand is without a doubt one of our very best media outlets. We want it to be even better and a far more detailed investigation of its Israeli-Palestine coverage is needed. This would cover systemic bias, media sourcing and reliability, bias in coverage scale, compliance with code of ethics, comparative coverage analysis, cultural identification bias (proximity), other reasons why some stories aren’t told, the overall framing of the conflict, genocide recognition, and overall balance.

There were many reasons that the U.S. and its allies were defeated in Vietnam.  First and foremost they were beaten by an army that was superior in tactics, morale and political will.  The Quiet Mutiny that came close to a full-scale insurrection within the U.S. army in the early 1970s was an important part of the explanation as to why America’s vast over-match in resources, firepower and aerial domination was insufficient to the task.  

Recalling the liberation of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) on 30 April 1975 is important. What is criminal, however, is that we failed to learn the vital lessons that the U.S. defeat in Vietnam should have taught us all. Sadly much was forgotten and the succeeding half century has witnessed a carnival of slaughter perpetrated by the Western world on hapless South Americans, Africans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, and many more. It’s time to remember.

Just Defence, a Wellington-based defence policy group, is calling on the government to freeze spending on defence and urgently reassess New Zealand’s place in a rapidly changing world.  This comes as the Government has just announced a massive hike in defence spending as part of the 2025 Defence Capability Plan (DCP) – $12 billion over the next four years, including $9 billion of new money. 

Professor Geoffrey Roberts is one of a growing number of ‘free thinkers’ who are rejecting the standard Western propaganda model that frames Putin and Russia as merchants of evil, instead ascribing to them motives that are both pragmatic and commonplace.  This leaves plenty of room to criticize Putin’s regime and its hardball geopolitics.  These academics, however, have shouldered the intellectual’s role to challenge the dominant narrative and expose underlying untruths – “Russia’s totally unprovoked war”, etc.