Letters to the Editor
Australia is moving away from US
August 18, 2025
Bruce Wolpe needs to catch up. Many Australians realised some time ago that Australia needs to distance ourselves from the US. The US has become unreliable and fickle. It is not just Paul Keating saying that we need to engage more with Asia. Take notice of the reader comments in mainstream papers plus in various podcast and you will see that that is exactly what is already happening. One comment that is becoming more persistent is that Australia should revisit AUKUS with a view to considering an alternative. There is a strong view that AUKUS is not the direction...
Peter Sheehy from Blackheath NSW
In response to: The US has changed. Australia hasn’t. It’s time to talk about where the relation
Whitlam dismissal
August 18, 2025
As the years pass, those who thought the rumours surrounding the Whitlam dismissal were most likely a bit paranoid are having to rethink. Decades of US regime change and wars provide a devastating insight into their modus operandi and it ain’t pretty.
Pamela Curr from Brunswick
In response to: 1975: The Whitlam dismissal’s smoking gun
Disruptive doctoring
August 18, 2025
Tony Lawson’s piece invites new approaches to productivity challenges in the health sphere. I invite readers to view this news from China. It certainly promises productivity gains, but there will be a need to discuss the ethical and other concerns that such an approach poses.
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: Well-being, health and the Productivity Roundtable
At least 242 journalists killed: Inaction is complicity
August 18, 2025
Excellent article by Dr Jeremy Webb. The recent Zionist murder in Gaza of journalist Anas al-Sharif and four of his colleagues has sparked outrage around the world. Thus the UN: “The secretary-general calls for an independent and impartial investigation into these latest killings. At least 242 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the war began. Journalists and media workers must be respected, they must be protected and they must be allowed to carry out their work freely. Likewise Free Palestine Melbourne (that helps organise huge Sunday Rallies for Gaza): “Killing journalists, nurses, and civilians will not erase the...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: Where is the outrage? Israel's systematic mass assassination of journalists
Narrative reform is what we need
August 18, 2025
What we need is reform of the way we report taxation. All the major projects in Australia have been financed by public money of one form or another and continue to be. When there is a disaster like a bush fire, flood, drought etc we expect a prompt response in the form of rescues, handouts, fire-fighting equiptment, boats etc. That has to be financed somehow. The taxation debate is usually driven by those who can most afford to pay and benefit most from not paying a share. Like most economic debate, the interchanging of dollars and percentages...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Economic reform and the productivity slowdown
Was this written by Russell?
August 18, 2025
In all likelihood, the letter was not written by Russell but by Ralph Schoenman who dishonestly presented it as written by Russell. On this see Bryan Mabee's book, Confessions of a Philosopher.
Thomas Mautner from Griffith A.C.T.
In response to: Fifty-five years on, Bertrand Russell’s words are worth returning to
Stand with Mary
August 18, 2025
Thank you, Peter. I stand with Mary. I am old, I do not know/trust how to use any social media so I cannot contact her to give her my support. But you and Pearls and Irritations are enabling me to do that. Thank you, Pearls and Irritations as well.
Judith Gamper from Kambah ACT
In response to: Stand with Mary
Outside interference
August 18, 2025
Jeff Kildea admits to being “an outsider with no skin in the game”, yet nonetheless feels qualified to profess his criticism and solutions to the centuries old geopolitical and religious conflict in the Middle East. The most important lesson I learned from my visits to the region (Israel and the occupied territories) was from a local who, in essence, said: you don’t live here, you don’t live with war, terrorism, threats every day, be it from right-wing settler extremists or Hamas terrorists. If you want to decide our future, then live here. This was said by a left-voting...
Simon Tatz from Newport
In response to: Recognition of Palestine a neocolonial-feel good gesture
No heroes among these leaders
August 18, 2025
One by one, Australia, Britain, France and Canada say they will recognise the Palestinian state in September. They are not being brave or moral. Their governments have been complicit in the genocide. But their leaders have enough sense not to go down in history with their names etched in eternal infamy. Ain't that the truth?! But aren't these belated words their own type of infamy? Watching after their own backs rather than any genuine concern for Palestinians and Palestine. Only caring about genocide when it might hurt them at the polls. Those marching for Palestine have no reason...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Our bravest journalists today are all working and dying in Gaza
Recognition of Palestine matters
August 18, 2025
I agree with the author that recognition of Palestine provides no tangible benefit to the people of Gaza. But I do not agree that it is wrong in principle. I believe recognition acknowledges that the century-long Palestinian struggle is legitimate and puts a moral imperative before us to do more to bring about justice. Israel declared itself a nation without specifying its borders and has been accepted as a nation by most other countries regardless. I see no colonialist imposition in recognising Palestine as a nation since that's how Palestinians see themselves already. Of course, borders remain problematic and...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Recognition of Palestine: A neocolonial, feel-good gesture
Albanese’s missed chance at moral leadership
August 18, 2025
Prime Minister Albanese’s recognition of Palestine is an important step, but it has come far later than it should have. Albanese has long been on the record as supporting Palestinian rights, co-founding the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine in 1998 and acknowledging that peace depends on a two-state solution. Yet when he became prime minister, that conviction gave way to caution. For many months of the Gaza war, as civilian deaths mounted and hospitals were destroyed, his government argued that the “right conditions” were not yet in place. Those conditions, tragically, never appeared. Instead, the world watched as children in...
Sam Abdul from Queensland
In response to: Albanese’s recognition of a Palestinian state implements a long-held Labor ambit
Population growth is now a menace
August 18, 2025
Julian Cribb rightly cites Soaring populations which strain cities, their food and water supplies, to their limits as a major challenge to our survival that even good people choose to ignore. Back in the 1970s, thanks largely to Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, people rightly saw overpopulation as a major environmental issue. Most of my contemporaries limited the number of children they had to two, or at least felt guilty about having a third. Then a combination of misplaced feminist rhetoric plus the Catholic Church conspired to discredit the movement, not helped by coercive birth control policies in India. ...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: The great human brain fade
We don't need another envoy
August 15, 2025
We don't need another highly-paid headline-grabing divisive envoy. What we need is to prosecute the media outlets, journalists and shock-jocks who are applying these labels in a racist way. If the race relations laws are not fit for purpose, then they need to be fixed and quickly. Also there should be a penalty for blocking up the court system with expensive defence of frivoulous claims. I suspect they are tax-deductible, otherwise why go to the expense?
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Breaking: Chilling ‘News Virus’ sweeps Australia
The cancer from the US and Britain
August 15, 2025
Here is an example of a real pathogen about which we definitely do know the origins. The pathogen is virulent and deadly as it has brought about death on a previously unimaginable scale throughout the 20th and now in the 21st centuries and across the planet. The pathogen was first developed deliberately in political laboratories in the UK and the US early last century and was released to infect the world. The name for the pathogen was developed by its creators and became a by-word for its use as a weapon of war. Propaganda was the name and it...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Breaking: Chilling ‘News Virus’ sweeps Australia
A duty of care to Torres Strait Islanders
August 15, 2025
As Robert Graves put it, Truth loving Persians do not dwell upon a trivial skirmish fought near Marathon. School children in France are not taught about the battle of Agincourt. The Black Hole of Calcutta is taught one way in the UK and another in India. When Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind, she was unaware that the South had been defeated. John Howard complained about the black armband of history that attempts to set the record straight about the modern history of Indigenous Australia. Popular history has become little more than a national hagiography. How far the...
John Tons from Flinders University
In response to: White House to vet Smithsonian exhibits to ensure they 'align with Trump's interpretation' of US history
Humanity’s never-ending absurdity
August 14, 2025
In Julian Cribb’s well-annotated piece on the self-generated vortex Homo sapiens sits at the lip of, he attributes a laughing-out-loud quote to one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers. It doesn’t matter if Einstein didn’t say it; it underlines humanities boundless pushing of the envelope. It summons a scenario of Mrs God asking God what he’s doing in the shed that has kept Him late for dinner the last five nights. He proudly described His creation of Earth, the fishes of the sea, the birds of the air and the creatures that walk upon the land. When he explains...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: The great human brain fade
China's internal critics open and transparent
August 14, 2025
According to the negative Nancies in the West, the author of this article should be in serious trouble for his criticisms of government in China. Of course, that view has not been true for nearly 50 years as China encourages vigorous debate about directions and issues, so long as it is constructive. That truth, of course, can be ignored in the interest of promoting anti-China memes.
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: China’s consumption weighed down by weak expectations
Cognitive dissonance
August 14, 2025
Cribbs describes a bleak future, a “loss in human cognitive ability”. We may well have reached a point “where our technology has outpaced our ability to comprehend what it delivers, let alone do anything purposeful to correct it”. Science historian Naomi Oreskes writes that as early as the 1950s, scientists were warning about the dangers of human-made climate change. By the 1970s, the scientific community was highlighting the potential impacts of human activities on global temperatures. ExxonMobil scientists projected that fossil fuel emissions would lead to .02 degrees of global warming per decade, with a margin of error of 0.04...
Fiona Colin from Melbourne
In response to: The great human brain fade
Courage missing in action
August 14, 2025
Conservative Australian Governments have been purchased by the big largely overseas gas extractors and in the case of Labor have been, at least in recent years, scared witless of them. Unlike the Norwegians who have built the biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world, by ensuring gas and oil companies pay for the resources they have extracted, Australia has allowed itself to be either bought or frightened into handing over the patrimony of the Australian people to rapacious multinational companies with hardly a whimper. Now there is a surprise!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Albanese is crying poor, but we’re losing billions a year from untaxed gas
When the education system can't learn about itself
August 14, 2025
As a 70-plus individual in rapid decline, I find believable and interesting that all this is happening at a time of comercialisation of the education system, with record school and university attendance, and a preoccupation with data collection. I left school after year 11 and our large technical school barely had enough students to fill a year 12 mixed class. The class sizes would be envied today and only the best went on to university. Now most go on to higher education and university and we have a shortage of tradies and truck-drivers. Taxi-drivers are completing university in...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: The great human brain fade
Opposition obduracy to recognition of Palestine
August 14, 2025
Chris Sidoti's commentary on the much-belated and pitifully weak statement of intention to recognise the State of Palestine by the Albanese Government is, in the existing circumstances, restrained almost to the point of a fault. Whacko-the diddle-oh for a baby step forward for Albanese and Wong, even though it contains restraints and limitations that make it only one step above tokenism. Have they not noticed that as the international community becomes more restive, the Netanyahu and IDF activity has expanded into an orgy of both highly targeted and also random bastardly killing? We are getting into the area...
Richard Llewellyn from Colo Vale
In response to: What will Australia's recognition of Palestine mean in practical terms?
The conflation, thus confusion, of anti-Zionism with antisemitism
August 14, 2025
Anyone who's studied philosophy would know that Zionism is a matter of policies intended to create and maintain a Jewish state (definition of Jewish is a rabbit hole); antisemitism is the hatred and fear of Jews for merely being Jews. Conflating Zionism with the Jewish people should be repudiated on all occasions – one of Zionism's major policies is the ethnic cleansing of the non-Jewish people, which puts the lives of Jewish people on a level with the policy of ethnic cleansing. I'm not Jewish myself, but some of my ancestors were — putting policies like ethnic cleansing on...
Wesley Parish from Tauranga, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
In response to: The Segal report and the universities
Mere words don’t feed
August 14, 2025
For almost two years, our government has watched the Palestine people bombed, crushed, torn, starved and shot, and it has moved our government to do the sum total of nothing. Footage coming out of Gaza from heroic journalists made clear that all this destruction was in the cause of a Greater Israel. The intent of the Israeli occupation was not hidden – it was crystal clear. We all knew that Israeli talk amounted to committing genocide on the Palestinians to steal resources, and expand into Syria and Lebanon. Our government pontificates that it will recognise a Palestinian state. But...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: Dates are 'luxury' – and other ways Israel hinders aid trucks from reaching star
Rights come with responsibilities
August 14, 2025
Julian Cribb's statement in his article, “Most poignant of all is the fact that parents, everywhere, seem content to ruin their children’s future for the sake of their own present comfort, convenience and luxury. Their claim to 'love their children' is a false narrative, contrived to exculpate their own childlike self-centredness” is one of the most powerful I’ve ever read. As a school teacher, for more than 20 years, I’ve seen this exact sentiment play out in all its variations. Its consequences on the ground in the classroom never ceased to astonish me. I can’t tell you the amount...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: The great human brain fade
Reef – or grief?
August 14, 2025
As the government’s 2035 emissions reduction target looms, Imogen Zethoven nominates the Great Barrier Reef as its litmus test. With global warming at 1.5 degrees for 2024, ocean temperatures have become an existential threat to coral. The Reef may recover if action is taken urgently to reduce or remove its threats within the next few years, as outlined by the International Coral Reef Initiative. Underpinning this protection must be a substantial reduction of fossil fuel use, and the establishment of an independent authority overseeing legally enforceable national environmental standards. If we — and many others — can take...
Chris Young from Surrey Hills, Vic
In response to: The Great Barrier Reef is the litmus test for the forthcoming 2035 emissions red
The defusing of political anger
August 13, 2025
It was with a sense of resigned dismay that I read the prim statement about Gaza in the Sidoti interview you posted on 13 August: Well, so far we’ve not used the term genocide. This is an issue that we’re looking at. I take it that we refers to the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, of which Sidoti is the commissioner. It reminded me of something that Arundhati Roy said some years ago about NGOs, which are meant to act independently of governments. Her comments apply with even greater force to inter-governmental...
Peter Blunt from Siem Reap
In response to: What will Australia's recognition of Palestine mean in practical terms?
Low fertility and national happiness aligned
August 13, 2025
Thanks to Noel Turnbull for directing attention to the annual UN-backed World Happiness Report. It's worthwhile going to the bottom of the table and comparing the ten unhappiest with the ten happiest at the top. Just as happiness appears to be associated with a cold climate, unhappiness could be loosely associated with a hot one. Nevertheless, a closer association can be found with fertility rates (the number of children per woman). With the exception of Israel, (2.92), all the happiest countries have fertility rates between 1.43 (Costa Rica) and 1.97 (Iceland). Apart from Israel, all are below replacement (2.1)...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: Are you happy?
Cut the Yanks loose!
August 13, 2025
As Michael intimated, I feel the US economy has been bankrupt (in more ways than one!) for some time. The US has proven that it does not want any other currency to be elevated (eg oil sales in euros instead of US dollars). However, I feel the world will experience instability until a form of international currency that is not dependent on the American dollar (or any other country's currency) is generated. The dollar would then float and settle to a level that was sustainable. Until that time, the US can print money that devalues dollars held by other...
Doug Foskey from Tregeagle
In response to: Trump's fantasies and the American economy
Bear witness: Remembering heroic Anas al-Sharif
August 13, 2025
Heroic Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif was recently martyred in Gaza with four other journalist colleagues and left us a final inspiring message: “Yet I never stopped telling the truth as it is, without falsification or distortion – so that God may bear witness over those who stayed silent, accepted our killing, and did nothing to stop the massacre our people have endured for more than a year and a half”. Similarly, the key imperatives from the WW2 Jewish Holocaust and indeed from all genocide and holocaust atrocities are “zero tolerance for lying”, “zero tolerance for racism”, “bear witness” and...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: ‘I entrust you with Palestine’: The final testament of Anas al-Sharif
Opinions and headlines
August 13, 2025
This article reinforces my opinion that it is full of opinions, not facts, and what we know about opinions is that everybody has one. As fast as one opinion is given, many others appear. For example, on Tuesday, the RBA interest rate cut went in the space of one interview from a bonus for homeowners with a mortgage, to a problem for people with savings in the bank. Then it went to inflation, which wasn't said to be the problem, it was productivity. Again, the talk went from being a win for the government to a RBA vote of...
Bob Perace from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Trump's fantasies and the American economy
Our image reflected back to us
August 13, 2025
The Israeli state has learned well the lessons of the US and British experiences of war. They have learned from all the aggressive wars, that the US and before it the UK have launched since the beginning of the information age, that control of the narrative is vital if they are to get away with mass murder. The principal problem in doing that is either capturing or killing those who tell the truthful stories of the crimes as they are committed. Hence the deliberate, calculated assassination campaign against those truth-tellers. The UN, controlled as it is by the...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Tributes, condemnation pour in over slain Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza
At last, a legal fightback
August 13, 2025
The corrupt, criminal and scandalous Zionist Government and its many co-conspirators around the world have developed the technique of using the law to bury critics of their genocidal activities. Because they are so well funded by US taxpayers and various complicit Jewish oligarchs around the world, they have used threats of lawfare to silence the Western world. Thank God, we are now beginning to get some courageous people who are prepared to use the law to fight back against this silencing of dissent and exposing the mass murder being perpetrated daily in Gaza and the West Bank. It...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Australian Jewish Association accused of hate campaign: Landmark legal action launched
The long hand of building your kingdom
August 13, 2025
Jack Waterford's article on the complexities of security and protest, as usual, is a great read. I thought that Burgess had a vested interest in scary threats to get more funding. Fear facilitates funding, though I was scared of the mention of Mike Pezzullo having another go. Thanks Jack and P&I.
Michael Breen from Robertson NSW
In response to: The long hand of your country of origin
Tools for fighting disinformation
August 13, 2025
In 2023, Lucy Hamilton, writing in Pearls and Irritations, revealed that Advance Australia, a conservative lobbying group, has links to the US-based Atlas Network, described as a front for fossil fuel corporations that “blocks climate action and attacks democracy globally. An anonymous whistleblower on Advance’s email list claims its latest goal is to “raise $450,000 by August 31” to campaign against net zero in Australia over the next “two-three years.” The International Panel on the Information Environment, in Facts, Fakes, and Climate Science, warns that “powerful actors … intentionally spread inaccurate or misleading narratives about anthropogenic climate change”, eroding...
Ray Peck from Hawthorn
In response to: Secrecy and the climate disinformation industry
Twelfth opportunity
August 12, 2025
The twelfth opportunity would be to stop scaremongering over the Port of Darwin which was leased as an economic opportunity and remains an economic opportunity though the expansion is being hamstrung by uncertainty. China and other countries in general have enough hardware surveilling the world to not require a person with binoculars and a mobile phone to report ship movenents out of Darwin and what brand of wipes the American Marines are using.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Eleven opportunities for Australia
Palestine recognition
August 12, 2025
The Australian Government’s conditional proposal for the recognition of Palestine is untenable for both reasons of principle and practical reasons. “Hamas” (like the ANC in South Africa) took part in armed resistance of an oppressive regime as years of failed negotiations presided over by Western Governments facilitated the ongoing oppression. How is a peaceful transition to occur without Hamas involvement? If members of Hamas are to be excluded from involvement in the negotiations for the establishment of the government of Palestine, why are not the members of the genocidal Israeli regime similarly excluded? Exclusion of “Hamas” confers a...
John Curr from MANLY
In response to: The occupation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza was always Netanyahu’s intention
Labor needs a leader who listens – Chris Minns isn't that person
August 11, 2025
Premier Chris Minns has become a liability to NSW Labor. His refusal to listen — whether to his own MPs, unions, or the party’s grassroots — shows a stubborn arrogance that has no place in a Labor leader. As John Menadue observed, Minns is “out of step with the values of the Labor movement and the principles of democratic participation. His championing of heavy-handed anti-protest laws, with penalties of up to two years in jail and fines of $22,000 for peaceful demonstrators, betrays Labor’s proud history of standing up for civil liberties and the right to dissent. Senior...
Sam Abdul from Queensland
In response to: NSW Premier and the right to protest
What happens if we shift the paradigm?
August 11, 2025
This is only the latest in an endless series of articles on what government needs to do to fulfill its raison d’etre, facilitating the improved well-being of the nation. Few ever question the paradigm that was adopted globally in the 1980s that replaced the once-clearly understood role with one that says the public sector is best seen as a profit-making business competing for customers’ dollars. Few ask what turned the problems of the last quarter-century into seemingly intractible ones that are implied as permanent features of our supposedly best-ever economic system. I’m talking about what George Monbiot termed...
Terry Constanti from Annandale NSW
In response to: Well-being, health and the Productivity Roundtable
Australia soon to become a nuclear waste dump
August 11, 2025
Finally, after all the chatter about the cost of AUKUS, delivery, manning, deployment etc somebody is talking about what has been my concern all along: the radiation effect and nuclear waste disposal. I seem to recall reports of beached Russian nuclear submarines rotting away and polluting the Arctic seas and also reports of higher levels of nuclear-related deaths of submariners worldwide. I am concerned that with the usual practice of secrecy on US and UK bases on Australian soil, we will quietly become an unregulated nuclear waste dump for the world, probably without the benifit of cheap storage...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: The British experience with nuclear-powered submarines: Lessons for Australia
ASIO mistakes
August 11, 2025
Paddy Gourley makes some excellent points in his analysis of ASIO chief, Mike Burgess’ annual Hawke Lecture. But he is too kind in his assessment of Burgess’ account of ASIO’s historic performance. Burgess’ account of the Combe/Ivanov Affair is at best misleading. Burgess quotes then prime minister, Bob Hawke, saying after the event: There was no question in my mind that we had to be tough, decisive and immediate in our reaction. Any pussy footing around… could have been seen as… soft on the threat of Soviet espionage… I knew it was a sort of make-or-break situation. And...
Paul Malone from Ocean Grove
In response to: Mike Burgess on the ASIO soapbox again
It never was a secret plan
August 11, 2025
It was always a plan to occupy Gaza since day one of the Six-Day war. Are Jeruselem and the Christians safe from the next phasę of the Israeli plan? This plan was written around the 13 century BCE.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide. SA
In response to: Israeli military plans to occupy Gaza City in major escalation of war
Trump's cuts to science are philistine acts
August 11, 2025
The quote “Truth is therefore the aim of science; science is the search for truth from Karl Popper encapsulates the scientific method which he believed would protect future generations from assaults on the truth. Unfortunately, neither Donald Trump nor Robert Kennedy Jr have any notion of the principles underlying science and, consequently, have done irreparable harm to the American people. The cancellation of US$600 million in funding to the company Moderna for development of an mRNA vaccine against bird flu, and then another US$500 million for 22 more projects developing mRNA vaccines, are philistine acts. All because Kennedy thinks...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: Trump and Kennedy are destroying global science. Even Einstein questioned facts
Head in the sand politics
August 11, 2025
When politicians of all persuasions spend all their time and our money passing laws to stop the general voting public telling them how they feel (protesting), this is what you get and it's not democracy. I think it's nothing to see here, look over there: politics.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: From Hiroshima to Gaza: Eighty years of failing to contain violence
Fantasy in Tel Aviv and reality in Gaza
August 11, 2025
What is being deliberately spread by complicit Western mainstream media as the truth is the output of a well-oiled and US-funded Israeli PR campaign designed to keep the ugly truth from us. But even within Israel, alternative voices are telling the truth. That truth is that Israel faces an existential crisis, both within its military and its economy. The IDF has suffered vastly more casualties than the Israeli and world public are being told. A figure of 10,000 dead is widely agreed by external military analysts. over 100,000 reservists have failed to turn up when called up and hundreds...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Israeli military plans to occupy Gaza City in major escalation of war
The Jewish resistance
August 11, 2025
Millions of decent Jews around the world have struggled with the conflict between their belief in the state of Israel and the daily atrocities that state is committing against the Palestinian people. Like billions of other people around the planet they are repulsed and nauseated by what is being done in their names. That demonstrates unequivocally the vacuity of the use of the valid problem of antisemitism to cloak these crimes against humanity in the garb of self-defence. I thank these doctors for joining the world community in abhorring these crimes and seeking their immediate cessation.
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: How we at Physicians for Human Rights Israel decided that the Gaza war is a geno
We're there: The shame of leaving it too late
August 11, 2025
The genocide continues and still all we get from our government is words, words totally ignored by the Israeli Government and its supporters. No action. No BDS. No recognition of Palestine. But our PM says recognition of Palestine is only a matter of time. What a meaningless comment. It's not time, but what happens in time that is important. What is Anthony Albanese waiting for, what has to happen, in that unspecified length of time, for him and his government to formally recognise Palestine and its people? Is he waiting for the genocide to be complete? Or is he...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: As Netanyahu moves toward full takeover of Gaza, Israel faces a crisis of international credibility
People who live in glass houses...
August 11, 2025
Australians are often quick to condemn the human rights record of other countries. I suggest before doing that, they should first read the 30 July, 2025 letter of the Northern Territory Paediatricians to the chief Minister of the Northern Territory as one example of the inhumane treatment of fellow Australians, in this case the incarceration of Aboriginal children, detailing their poor physical and mental state when the first come to the notice of our justice system. On reading that letter, it's not hard to justify calling Australia a country with an entrenched and systematic racism problem. To those who...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Call for national action to prevent 'torture' or death of incarcerated First Nat
Who is reviled by whom?
August 11, 2025
An extremely well-argued article, but just one small caveat. The reference in the sentence Putin’s Government is perhaps second only to Benjamin Netanyahu’s as the world’s most reviled litigant, depends very closely on the definition of the world that is adopted. Make no mistake if we are genuinely talking about the whole world, rather than just the 15% segment that is the West, then the most reviled litigants are easily the US as number one, followed by its satrap Israel. Russia, for the other 85% of humanity, doesn't score anywhere near the top as is demonstrated by that...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: The Russians’ lost plot: will they find serenity or are they dreaming?
Australia must be excluded from any say on Palestine
August 11, 2025
Two main points. First, it is well past time that Australian media commentary about 7 October 2023 take into account what the Israeli media itself noted in 2024, that the so-called “Hannibal Directive” was issued to Israeli forces, resulting in hundreds of cannon shells and missiles fired from gunships and tanks, making it impossible to determine how many Israeli casualties on that day were inflicted by their own forces. Second, it is important that the Australian Government be held accountable for its many-stranded elements of complicity in genocide, and be excluded completely from having any say or playing...
Peter Henning from Melbourne
In response to: Justice for Palestine: Why Hamas must be involved