She has become a notorious figure of international interest, shamelessly exploited for news cycles, commercial worth and career advancement. After a trial lasting nine weeks, conducted at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts in Morwell, Victoria, Erin Patterson, a stocky, thick set mother of two was found guilty for three murders and an attempted murder. Date: July 29, 2023 in the town of Leongatha. Her weapon in executing her plot of Sophoclean extravagance: death cap mushrooms (Amanita phalloides) served in a beef Wellington. Her targets: in-laws Don and Gail Patterson, Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, and Heather’s husband, Ian Wilkinson. Of the…
Author: Dr. Binoy Kampmark
It’s made to order. First, eliminate the aid system after creating circumstances of enormous suffering. Then, kill, starve, vanquish and displace those in need of that aid. Finally: give the pretence of humanity by ensuring some aid to those whose suffering you created in the first place. As things stand, the system of aid distribution in the Gaza Strip is intended to cause suffering and destruction to recipients. Since May 26, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an opaquely structured entity with Israeli and US backing, has run the distribution of parcels from a mere four points, a grim joke given the…
He has made it his bread and butter for years: finding society’s kooky representatives, the marginal, the crazed and the touched. But what makes Louis Theroux’s The Settlers troubling is its examination of a seemingly inexorable process in the West Bank, one that has, at its core, a religious, nationalist goal of cleansing and violent purification. The documentary captures Israel’s modern colonial project in real time, and it is one most ugly. The target of the cleansing and eradication – the Palestinians in the West Bank – is awesomely horrific, rationalised by suffocating checkpoints, brooding military posts and endless…
It makes for stark and dark reading. The report for the UN Human Rights Council titled From economy of occupation to economy of genocide makes mention of “corporate entities” who have been enriched by “the Israeli economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide.” Authored by the relentless Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, it is unflinching in its assessments and warnings to companies doing business with Israel. What makes the investigative undertaking by Albanese useful is its examination of the corporate world and its links to the…
When campaigning in 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump was delighted by leaked, hacked or disclosed material that wound its way to the digital treasure troves of WikiLeaks. The online publisher of government secrets had become an invaluable resource for Trump’s battering of the Democratic establishment hopeful, Hillary Clinton, with her nonchalant attitude to the security of email communications and a venal electoral strategy. “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks,” he tooted on what was then Twitter. “So dishonest! Rigged system!” After winning the keys to the White House, he mysteriously forgot the organisation…
The aftermath of Operation Midnight Hammer, a strike by the US Air Force on three nuclear facilities in Iran authorised by President Donald Trump on June 22, was raucous and triumphant. But that depended on what company you were keeping. The mission involved the bombing of the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, and the uranium-conversion facility in Isfahan. The Israeli Air Force had already attacked the last two facilities, sparing Fordow for the singular weaponry available for the USAF. The Fordow site was of particular interest, located some eighty to a hundred metres underground and cocooned…
The initial statement from Australian government sources was one of constipated caution and clenching wariness. Senator Penny Wong’s time as head of the Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs has always been about how things come out, a process unsatisfyingly uncertain and unyielding in detail. Stick to the safe middle ground and sod the rest. These were the cautionary words of an Australian government spokesperson on June 22: “We have been clear that Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program has been a threat to international peace and security.” That insipid statement was in response to Operation Midnight Hammer,…
The confidence trickster was at it again on his visit to The Hague, reluctantly meeting members of the overly large family that is NATO. President Donald Trump was hoping to impress upon all present that allies of the United States, whatever inclination and whatever their domestic policy, should spend mightily on defence, inflating the margins of sense and sensibility against marginal threats. Never mind the strain placed on the national budget over such absurd priorities as welfare, health or education. The marvellous irony in this is that much of the budget increases have been prompted by Trump’s perceived unreliability…
De-escalation has become one of those coarse words in severe need of banishment, best kept in an index used by unredeemable hypocrites. It is used by the living dead in human resources, management worthies and war criminals. It’s almost always used to target the person or entity that exerts retribution or seeks to avenge (dramatic) or merely overcome (mildly) a state of affairs imposed upon them. You might be bullied in the workplace for being fastidious and conscientious, showing up your daft colleagues, or reputationally attacked by a member of the establishment keen to conceal his corrupt practices. When contemplating…
Farce is a regular feature of international relations. It can be gaudy and lurid, dressed up in all manner of outfits. It can adopt an absurd visage that renders the subject comical and lacking in credibility. That subject is the European Union, that curious collective of cobbled, sometimes erratic nation states that has pretensions of having a foreign policy, hints at having a security policy and yearns for a cohering enemy. With its pre-emptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and much civilian infrastructure besides, Israel is being treated as a delicate matter. Condemnation of its attacks as a violation of…
It’s official. If not, it ought to be. Israeli forces freely butcher Palestinians in Gaza of all stripes, standing and states of desperation. They do so casually or indifferently or maliciously. True, they might get the odd militant here and there, but the supposedly professional Israeli Defense Forces is rather good at killing civilians. In what is becoming an almost daily occurrence, Israeli security personnel are slaughtering those seeking humanitarian aid from facilities that are obscenely restricted and appallingly located. What is unclear in the process is how devastating Palestinian militias armed and supported by the Israelis have been in…
These are the sorts of things that tend to be discussed in bunkered facilities and grimy locker rooms. Now, very much in the open and before the presses, the head of state of one country is openly advocating murdering another head of state before news outlets with little reaction. Lawbreaking has become chic, and Israel has taken the lead. The pre-emptive, illegal strike on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure by Israel was not merely an attempt to arrest an alleged existential threat from yielding fruit (that weapons of mass destruction canard again); it was also a murderous exercise of institutional decapitation. Instead…
There is a throbbing complaint among Western powers, including those in the European Union and the United States. Iran is not playing by the rules. Instead of accepting with dutiful meekness the slaughter of its military leadership and scientific personnel, Tehran decided, promptly, to respond to Israel’s pre-emptive strikes launched on June 13. Instead of considering the dubious legal implications of such strikes, an act of undeclared war, the focus in the European Union and various other backers of Israel has been to focus on the retaliation itself. To the Israeli attacks conducted as part of Operation Rising Lion, there…
Pre-emptive attacks in international law are rarely justified. The threat must evince itself through an obvious intent to inflict injury, evidence preparations that show the threat to be what Michael Walzer calls a “supreme emergency”, and arise in a situation where risk of defeat would be dramatically increased if force is not used. Reaching an assessment on that matter is almost impossible. Evidence of such a threat by the aggressor state is bound to be speculative, concealing other strategic objectives that make that action amount to illegal, preventive war. Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure are taking place…
As the world was readying for the Second World War, the insightful humane Austrian author Stefan Zweig made the following glum observation: “Openly and flagrantly, certain countries express their will to expand and make preparations for war. The politics of rearmament is pursued in broad daylight and at breakneck speed; every day you read in the papers arguments in favour of armaments expansion, the idea that it reduces unemployment and provides a boost to the stock exchange.” This is not so different from the approval by European Union countries on May 27 of a €150 billion loan program known as…
On April 22, militants from The Resistance Front (TRF), a group accused by Indian authorities of being linked to the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group, slaughtered 26 tourists in the resort town of Pahalgam in the Indian administered portion of Kashmir. This came as a rude shock to the Indian military establishment, who decided that rebellious sentiments in the region had declined. (In March 2025, an assessment concluded that a mere 77 active militants were busying themselves on India’s side of the border.) The feeling of cooling tensions induced an air of complacency. Groups such as the TRF, along with a fruit…
Here was another chance – at least as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw it – of threading one set of events with another. It’s all part of the Israeli security state’s playbook: any killing of Jews or its citizens, wherever they might be, will have a causal link to rabid, drooling antisemitism. To protest ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, dispossession, starvation as a tool of war, and the conscious infliction of humanitarian catastrophe on a population is equivalent to believing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These accusations and charges are seen as blood libels on the Jewish people,…
The latest phase of slaughter and seizure on the part of Israeli forces in Gaza has commenced. Following relentless airstrikes that have left hundreds of Palestinians dead, Operation Gideon’s Chariots is now in full swing, begun even as Israel and Hamas concluded a second day of ceasefire talks in Doha. The intention, according to the Israeli Defense Forces, is to expand “operational control” in the Strip while seeking to free the remaining Israeli hostages. In the process, it hopes to achieve what has, to date, been much pie in the sky: defeating Hamas and seizing control of the enclave. The…
Shocking it might be, yet still part of an old pattern. The US Department of Homeland Security is floating the idea of using a reality television program to select immigrants vying for US citizenship. Whether this involves gladiatorial combat or inane pillow battles remains to be seen, though it is bound to involve airhead celebrity hosts and a set of fabricated challenges. What matters is the premise: the reduction of a government agency’s functions to a debauched spectacle of deceit, desperation and televisual pornography. Much, in some ways, like the Trump administration itself. In an interview with The Wall Street…
Contrary to the propaganda of moral upstarts, terrorism pays. It proves rewarding. It establishes states and reconstitutes others. It encourages change, for ill or otherwise. The stance taken, righteously pitiful, on not negotiating with those who practise it, is as faulty as battling gravity. The case of Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is a brilliant example of this. While seen as a new broom that did away with the government of President Bashar al-Assad in such stunning fashion, al-Sharaa’s bristles remain blood speckled. The scene says it all: a meeting lasting 37 minutes in Riyadhwith a US President holding hands…
They seemed made for each other. A former reality television star, with dubious real estate credentials, a freakish alienation from the truth, and the various leaders of the Gulf States, who never found truthful assessments that were worthwhile anyway. This was certainly no time to be frugal and modest. Many a country might be dealing with soaring prices, inaccessible housing markets, and the cost of eggs, but nothing would be spared in spoiling US President Donald Trump with overpriced kitsch and exotica. Here was the MAGA brand in full flower. With crude indulgence, Saudi Arabia’s putative leader, Crown Prince Mohammed…
The occasion of electing another Pope was a spectacle in time and, in many ways, outside it. It was the one rare occasion in the twenty-first century where ancient ceremony, the old boy network – many presumptive virgins – along with festivedressing up, were seen with admiration rather than suspicion. Feminists were nowhere to be heard. Women knew their place; the phallocrats were in charge. Secret processes and factions, unscrutinised by media or any temporal body, could take place in secure, deliberative seclusion. Reverential followers of unquestioning loyalty turned up to the square of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome awaiting…
It has been unedifying, and, it should be said, far from noble. But being unedifying has become something of a day specialty for Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, notably when giving interviews from commodious abodes in California. On taking a step down from the subsidised duties that characterise his position, the disgruntled Royal fled the stable and made for the United States. He had found love with Meghan Markle, but it proved to be that sort of noisy, declarative love that Buckingham Palace loathes, and his relatives generally try to sedate. The latest tremor of narcissistic display on the Duke’s…
Killing civilians wholesale, starving them to convince those unaffected to change course, and shepherding whole populations like livestock into conditions of further misery would all qualify as heinous crimes in international law. When it comes to Israel’s war in Gaza, this approach is seen as necessary politics, unalloyed by the restraints of humanitarianism. When confronted with these harsh realities on the ground, unequivocal denials follow: This is not happening in Gaza; no one is starving. And if that were the case, blame those misguided savages in Hamas. As the conflict chugs along in pools of blood and bountiful gore, the…
The dust had barely settled on the Australian federal election on May 3 before the hagiographers, mythmakers and revisionists got to work. If history is seen as a set of agreed upon facts, there was a rapidly growing consensus that Labor’s imposing victory had been the result of a superb campaign, sparkling in its faultlessness. This did not quite match pre-election remarks and assessments. The government of Anthony Albanese had been markedly unconvincing, marked by dithering, short sightedness and a lack of conviction. It had, rather inexplicably, made the conservative Coalition led by that cruel, simian looking automaton Peter Dutton,…
The agreement between Washington and Kyiv to create an investment fund to search for rare earth minerals has been seen as something of a turn by the Trump administration. From hectoring and mocking the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before the cameras on his visit to the US capital two months ago, President Donald Trump had apparently softened. It was easy to forget that the minerals deal was already on the negotiating table and would have been reached but for Zelensky’s fateful and ill-tempered ambush. Dreams of accessing Ukrainian reserves of such elements as graphite, titanium and lithium were never going…
The murder and starvation of populations in real time, subject to rolling coverage and commentary, is not usually the done thing. These are the sorts of activities kept quiet and secluded in their vicious execution. In the Gaza Strip, these actions are taking place with a confident, almost brazen assuredness. Israel has the means, the weapons and the sheer gumption to do so, and Palestinians in Gaza find themselves with few options for survival. The strategic objectives of the Jewish state, involving, for instance, the elimination of Hamas, have been shown to be nonsensically irrelevant, given that they are unattainable. …
Universities are in a bind. As institutions of learning and teaching, knowledge learnt and taught should, or at the very least could, be put into practice. How unfortunate for rich ideas to linger in cold storage or exist as the mummified status of esoterica. But universities in the United States have taken fright at pro-Palestinian protests since October 7, 2023, becoming battlegrounds for the propaganda emissaries of Israeli public relations and the pro-evangelical, Armageddon lobby that sees the end times taking place in the Holy Land. Higher learning institutions are spooked by notions of Israeli brutality, and they are taking…
The very idea of infallibility sets one up for the mighty fall. But the Pope, temporal head of all Catholics, is one such character, the papacy one such institution, arrogantly paraded before religion, faith and principle, as an individual and office hovering between humankind and God. Unfortunately for the papal record, infallibility in any spiritual sense is no guard against spotty records and stains. It certainly does not erase what came before, though good efforts are often made to reinvent it. Pope Francis I, eulogised as the pontiff of the periphery and the oppressed, was not averse in his pre-papal…
Has the love, or even more so the fixation, gone with the US dollar, that all cushioning reserve currency that has shown itself unimpeachable for decades? A curious event teasing and ruffling currency watchers and financiers is becoming a pattern: the US dollar is being sold off, suggesting it has lost its princely shine. To this can also be added the sale of US Treasuries. Even before the global imposition of Donald Trump’s tariff-driven bonanza and his public bruising of Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, the world’s dominant currency was already being moved on. Since 2014, the Chinese and Russian…
