Category: Opinion/Commentary or International Affairs or Middle East

The Rules-Based Order: Where America Gets Away with Murder, and Everyone Else Gets the Bombs

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The US and its allies including Australia don’t give a fig about Iranian or Palestinian lives. If they did, they wouldn’t be starving Iranians with sanctions that block medicine, food and fuel. They wouldn’t be funding insurgents who turn protests violent, ensuring the regime cracks down harder. They wouldn’t be threatening war while pretending to care about “the brave Iranian people”.

The US’s Multi‑Front War: A House of Cards

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President Trump’s “Caracas raid,” enabled by the mysterious “Discombobulator,” epitomized a “Butch Cassidy” approach to international relations: a quick smash-and-grab to seize vital resources. Yet, as the rusty reality of Venezuela’s dilapidated oil infrastructure and a $200 billion repair bill quickly proved, the high-tech crowbar of the Discombobulator couldn’t fix what decades of neglect and sanctions had broken. Now, as a similar high-stakes gambit unfolds in the Persian Gulf against Iran, leaders like Brazil’s Lula caution against the “terrorism on an industrial scale” that comes with mistaking a tactical victory for a sustainable policy.

When Antisemitism Becomes a Political Weapon

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n the wake of Bondi, grief is being channelled into a dangerous misdiagnosis: that Jewish safety requires conflation, censorship, and punitive power. This essay argues for a public health approach to violent extremism, warns against collapsing Judaism into Israeli state policy, and shows how selective vigilance and entrenched Islamophobia undermine prevention and make everyone less safe.

The Pressure Cooker Has Exploded: Gaza, Genocide, and the Great Western Amnesia

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October 7 did not fall from the sky like a biblical plague. It was not spontaneous combustion. It was the predictable detonation of a pressure cooker sealed shut by decades of occupation, humiliation, and the kind of slow-motion strangulation that would make Kafka blush. Yet here we are; watching Western leaders clutch their pearls while the Israeli war machine turns Gaza into a graveyard, all under the banner of “self-defence”.