“You won’t even make it back to your f**king country”. Genocide as US statecraft.
We are in an era of American statecraft that is largely based around violence, threats of violence and the deployment of sanctions, other forms of financial strangulation, physical blockades and the intimidation of even the US’s closest allies. It didn’t start with Trump.
Talking to the “enemy”: an interview with Russian Ambassador Stanislav Krans
In this interview with Russian Federation Ambassador to Wellington Stanislav Krans we discussed the legality/illegality of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the state of Russian-Western diplomacy, and the central role diplomats should play in bringing the war to an end. We also touched on what it is like to be a Russian diplomat in a Western country.
“You’re a liar! You’re a liar!” New Zealand’s Israel First Foreign Minister Winston Peters has a brain explosion in Parliament.
By impugning the good name of some of our finest citizens Winston Peters betrays his duty to defend New Zealand and puts at risk Kiwis who continue their non-violent campaign to open a humanitarian corridor to the suffering people of Palestine.
“The Most Dangerous Place on Earth.” The Baltics at boiling point.
In recent weeks swarms of Ukrainian drones have traversed the Baltic states on missions to take the war to Russian cities like St Petersburg. It is the latest in a string of “incremental escalations” that military and geopolitical analysts I follow fear may be some of the opening shots in transitioning the “Russo-Ukrainian War” (with massive Western backing) into an open “Russo-European War”. God help us all.
Cry, my beloved New Zealand. Another Kiwi abandoned to the IDF.
There was only one moment when I was interviewing him last week that Mousa Taher broke down and cried. It was a surprising, pivotal moment in the interview. He had just made it back to New Zealand from Israeli detention. Of course, we covered the ordeal – the beatings, the death threats, the scare tactics with dogs, etc – that he and 430 other Global Sumud activists from 60 countries had been subjected to over four days from their interception in international waters to their release and flight to safety in Tűrkiye.
“He’s Māori!” Hāhona Ormsby – a New Zealander in the gruesome Israeli prison system.
I interviewed several of the New Zealanders who, as members of the Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza, were taken hostage by the Israelis in international waters near Cyprus last week and moved to Israel. The sadism and savagery of their mistreatment – clearly designed to intimidate and stop further attempts to open a humanitarian corridor – gave them a small taste of the network of torture camps that hold thousands of Palestinians in captivity suggestive of Dante’s Inferno.
