ANALYSIS: By Lim Tean

Across my social media platforms, I encounter daily a particular brand of ignorance that I find increasingly impossible to ignore. Iran is dismissed as a crazy country ruled by medieval mullahs, its people caricatured as fanatics who chant “Death to America” for no coherent reason.

And from that caricature flows a conclusion that should horrify any person of conscience — that it is therefore perfectly justifiable for America, Israel, or any other country to bomb Iran, kill its people, and destroy its infrastructure.
This is not analysis. It is the recycling of propaganda as a substitute for thought. And it has real consequences — because populations that are kept ignorant of history can be mobilised to support atrocities committed in their name.

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Iran is not a cartoon. It is one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated civilisations.
And its anger at America is not irrational. It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.
Let me show you why.
The original theft
To understand Iran today, you must begin not in 1979, but in 1908.
In that year, on the sun-baked plains of Khuzestan, workers drilling for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company struck black gold at Masjid-i-Suleiman — the first great oil discovery in the Middle East.
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later become the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and ultimately British Petroleum — the BP that today trades on the London Stock Exchange as a pillar of corporate respectability — had found the resource that would not merely enrich its shareholders, but change the course of world history.
The discovery was not merely commercially significant. It was strategically transformative.
Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had made the fateful decision to convert the Royal Navy’s warships from coal to oil before the First World War — giving Britain’s fleet superior speed and range, but making it utterly dependent on a secure oil supply.
Iranian oil did not merely enrich British shareholders. It powered the British Empire’s ability to wage and win the greatest war in human history. The Iranian people received almost nothing in return.
For decades, Britain extracted Iran’s oil under terms of stunning inequality. Iranian workers toiled in dangerous conditions for poverty wages. Iranian communities near the oilfields lived without electricity, running water, or basic sanitation — while British staff enjoyed swimming pools, clubs, and comfortable salaries.
The Iranian government received a pittance in royalties, and was denied even the right to audit the company’s accounts. Iran’s greatest natural treasure was being systematically looted, and the Iranian people knew it.
A man arose who decided to say: enough.
Mosaddegh and the ‘crime of democracy’
Mohammed Mosaddegh was everything the West claims to want in a Middle Eastern leader. He was democratically elected. He was secular. He was a constitutional lawyer steeped in European liberal tradition, who had studied in Paris and Neuchâtel.
He wore suits, not robes. He believed in parliamentary democracy, the separation of powers, and the rule of law.
In 1951, as Prime Minister, he did something unforgivable. He nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, returning Iran’s oil to its rightful owners — the Iranian people. The Iranian Parliament voted for it unanimously. The Iranian street erupted in celebration.
For the first time in their modern history, Iranians dared to believe that the wealth beneath their feet might actually benefit them.
Britain was apoplectic. The Americans were alarmed. And so, in August 1953, the CIA and MI6 launched Operation Ajax — one of the most consequential covert operations in modern history.
They bribed Iranian generals, hired thugs to create street chaos, spread disinformation, and toppled the democratically elected government of a sovereign nation.
Mosaddegh was arrested, tried, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. He died in 1967, never having been broken, never having recanted — a man of extraordinary dignity whose only crime was wanting his country’s wealth to belong to his country’s people.
In his place, the West reinstalled Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi — and handed him SAVAK, one of the most feared secret police forces in the world, to keep his people in line.
This is the original sin. This is where the story truly begins.
The Shah’s gilded cage
The Shah that America restored and sustained was not a moderniser, whatever his propaganda claimed. He was a man of spectacular vanity and profound disconnect from his own people.
Consider this extraordinary fact: Mohammed Reza Shah held his coronation not once, but effectively twice. He had been on the throne since 1941, but waited until 1967 — 26 years — to hold his formal coronation, because he felt the circumstances had never been grand enough for a ceremony befitting his self-image.
When he finally crowned himself, in a ceremony of breathtaking opulence, ordinary Iranians watched from a distance that was not merely physical.
But the coronation was merely a rehearsal for the true performance of imperial delusion — the celebrations at Persepolis in October 1971.
To mark the 2500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, the Shah staged a spectacle that remains one of the most extraordinary acts of self-aggrandisement in modern political history. Heads of state and royalty from across the world were flown in. A tent city of 50 lavish pavilions was constructed in the desert near the ruins of Persepolis, the ancient Achaemenid capital.
The tents themselves — along with virtually everything else — were imported from France.
Maxim’s of Paris catered the meals. Guests dined on quail eggs stuffed with caviar, crayfish mousse, and roast lamb, washed down with vintage Bordeaux. Iranian culture was largely absent from a celebration ostensibly honouring Iranian civilisation.
The Iranian people were spectators at a party thrown in their name, to which they were not invited.
The estimated cost was anywhere between US$100 million and $300 million — at a time when millions of Iranians lived in poverty, lacking clean water, adequate healthcare, or basic education.
The Iranian people drew their conclusions.
Khomeini’s rational revolution
When Ayatollah Khomeini offered the Iranian people his theory of velayat-e-faqih — the guardianship of the Islamic jurist — and proposed an Islamic Republic as the vessel for a new Iranian order, he was not offering them theology alone. He was offering them dignity.
He was offering them the promise that Iran’s sovereignty, Iran’s resources, and Iran’s future would belong to Iranians — not to the Shah’s court, not to Western oil companies, not to American strategic planners in Washington.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 was a mass movement of extraordinary breadth. Secular nationalists, leftists, intellectuals, bazaar merchants, students, and the religious poor all marched together.
They had different visions of what would come after — but they were united in what they were marching against. A corrupt, repressive monarchy sustained by American power and serving American interests, which had delivered neither freedom nor prosperity to its own people.
When the American Embassy was seized and diplomats taken hostage, the West erupted in outrage. But behind that act was a simple, searing Iranian fear — that America would do in 1979 what it had done in 1953. That Washington would organise another coup, reinstall the Shah, and extinguish the revolution.
The hostage crisis was many things — chaotic, counterproductive, damaging to Iran’s own interests — but it was not irrational. It was the desperate act of a people who had already been betrayed once by American power and were determined not to be betrayed again.
When America armed the man who gassed Iranian children
If the 1953 coup was the original sin, the Iran-Iraq war was the confirmation — the moment that removed any remaining doubt in Iranian minds about what American power truly meant for their people.
In September 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran. It was an act of naked aggression against a revolutionary government that was still finding its footing, launched with the tacit encouragement of Washington, which viewed the chaos of revolutionary Iran as an opportunity to be exploited.
The war that followed lasted eight years. It consumed perhaps one million lives. It was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century’s second half — and it has been almost entirely erased from Western historical memory.
What has been even more comprehensively erased is America’s role in sustaining it.
As the war ground on and Iranian forces began pushing back Iraqi advances, Washington made a decision of breathtaking cynicism. It could not allow Iran to win.
And so America began providing Saddam Hussein with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions, military equipment, and — most damningly of all — with the precursor chemicals for the weapons that Saddam would use to commit one of the most documented war crimes of the modern era.
Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian forces on a massive scale — mustard gas, tabun, sarin. Thousands of Iranian soldiers died in agonising chemical attacks. And Washington knew.
American officials knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons. The intelligence community reported it. And the Reagan administration made a deliberate policy decision to continue supporting Saddam regardless — because an Iranian victory was deemed strategically unacceptable.
The most haunting chapter came not on a battlefield but in a Kurdish village. In March 1988, Iraqi forces attacked Halabja with chemical weapons, killing thousands of Kurdish civilians — men, women, and children — in a single day.
It was the largest chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in history. And even then, Washington’s response was muted, carefully calibrated to avoid jeopardising its strategic relationship with Baghdad.
Iranian mothers who lost sons to American-supplied chemical weapons are still alive today. Iranian veterans who survived those attacks carry the physical scars — destroyed lungs, ravaged skin, broken bodies — into old age. Iran has never forgotten. Iran will never forget.
And yet Western commentators express bewilderment at the “Death to America” chant.
Consider for a moment what that chant actually represents, stripped of its theatrical staging.
It represents the voice of a mother whose son was gassed with chemicals whose precursors passed through American hands. It represents the voice of a nation that had its democracy stolen in 1953, its resources plundered for decades before that, its revolution encircled and sanctioned, and its sons killed in a war that America prolonged deliberately to prevent Iranian victory.
If any Western nation had suffered a fraction of what Iran has suffered at the hands of a foreign power, that chant would be taught in schools as an anthem of righteous resistance. It would be celebrated in films and memorialised in monuments. Instead, because it is directed at American power, it is presented as evidence of Iranian “irrationality”. The arrogance required to sustain that position is staggering.
47 years of punishment
Since 1979, the United States has imposed on Iran some of the most comprehensive and punishing sanctions ever inflicted on any nation in modern history. Sanctions on oil. Sanctions on banking. Sanctions on technology. Sanctions on medicine. Sanctions that have impoverished ordinary Iranians, denied patients access to life-saving drugs, and strangled an economy of 93 million people.
And surrounding Iran on all sides — in the Gulf, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Arabian Peninsula — America has built a vast archipelago of military bases, projecting power and telegraphing threat. Iran has been encircled, economically strangled, and subjected to covert warfare including the assassination of its nuclear scientists on its own streets.
Throughout all of this, Iran has survived. It has adapted. It has built regional influence through patient statecraft, cultivating allies across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. It has advanced its nuclear programme not out of theological ambition but out of the entirely rational calculation that the only nations America does not attack are those that possess nuclear deterrence.
Justice delayed
When analysts speak of America’s strategic defeat in its confrontation with Iran, they reach for the language of geopolitics and military balance. But there is another language that must be spoken — the language of history.
For 47 years, a people of ancient civilisation, extraordinary intellectual depth, and justified grievance have been punished for the crime of reclaiming their own sovereignty. They were punished for Mosaddegh’s ghost. They were punished for daring to say no to a superpower that had grown accustomed to treating the Middle East as its private strategic estate.
The “Death to America” chant that so offends Western sensibilities did not emerge from the Quran. It emerged from Operation Ajax. It emerged from SAVAK’s torture chambers. It emerged from Persepolis while children went hungry. It emerged from sanctions that killed patients who could not obtain medicine.
It emerged from chemical weapons whose precursors passed through American hands. It emerged from a history that the West has studiously refused to confront — because confronting it would require acknowledging that the rage it provokes is not irrational.
It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.
Understanding this does not require endorsing every act of the Islamic Republic. It requires only honesty — the willingness to read history as it actually happened, rather than as Western convenience has chosen to remember it.
Iran is not a cartoon. It is a civilisation. And civilisations have long memories.
Much of the historical foundation of this piece draws on two remarkable books that I commend to every serious reader: Michael Axworthy’s Revolutionary Iran — Axworthy served as Head of the Iran Section at the British Foreign Office before becoming one of the foremost academic authorities on modern Iran — and Scott Anderson’s Shah of Shahs. They changed how I understand this civilisation. They may change how you understand it too.
Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/26/this-is-the-story-that-trump-and-the-west-doesnt-want-you-to-know/

COMMENTARY: By Jale Moala

It’s interesting how readily many people in Fiji embrace the work of the United Nations when it supports local programmes such as climate resilience, development, governance and social inclusion.
Yet when the UN publishes reports critical of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, some of the same voices suddenly dismiss it as corrupt, evil or “fake news”.
Recently the UN published a report that accuses Israel of deliberately targeting children in Gaza.

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Facebook comments in response to the report have described the UN as the “enemy of Israel”, “a promoter of lies” and even an organisation that “stands for terrorists”.
The Fijian response raises an interesting question: Is the UN credible only when it says things we already agree with?
Or do we judge its credibility according to who its findings happen to criticise?
No institution is beyond criticism, including the UN. But it is worth remembering that it has maintained an office in Suva since Fiji’s independence, supporting everything from disaster recovery and climate resilience to governance, health and community development.
It seems odd to celebrate its work when it helps Fiji, yet dismiss it outright when its findings are politically or religiously inconvenient.
Jale Moala, one of Fiji’s most experienced and talented journalists, has been editor of the Fiji Daily Post and Pacific Islands Monthly, night editor of The National daily newspaper in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and a senior journalist on several New Zealand news media. This commentary is republished from his Facebook page with permission.

Targeting of Gaza chidren                              Video: ABC News

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/26/jale-moala-why-is-the-un-credible-when-fiji-agrees-but-not-when-its-inconvenient/

RNZ Pacific

Cook Islanders are set to head to the polls in six weeks’ time, the King’s Representative of the Cook Islands, Sir Tom Marsters, has announced.

In a radio announcement, Sir Tom said that on the advice tendered to him by Prime Minister Mark Brown to call for fresh elections, and pursuant to Article 37 of the Cook Islands constitution, he had dissolved Parliament and appointed Wednesday, 12 August, as the date for the next general election.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/26/cook-islands-set-to-head-to-the-polls-in-six-weeks-august-12/

By Margot Staunton of RNZ Pacific

A former coup convict in Fiji claims the country will remain unstable while the Indigenous  iTaukei are economically marginalised.

Josefa ‘Jo’ Nata, who spent 24 years in jail for treason, told the Fiji government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that “the lot of iTaukei has not improved a single bit [as a result of the coups], if anything their situation has regressed”.
“Indigenous [iTaukei] should never again be hoodwinked into supporting any coup supposedly carried out in their name, to raise their standard of living or correct supposed past injustices,” the 68-year-old said.

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Fiji has been rocked by four coups since gaining independence in 1970. The first two, in May and September 1987, were led by then-military Lieutenant-Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, who is the current prime minister.
In 1999, Mahendra Chaudhry was sworn in as the country’s first Indo-Fijian prime minister. Nata, a former journalist, was a political adviser to the Fijian Association Party, a coalition partner in the Labour-led government.
Chaudhry’s election stoked racial tension in Fiji and a year later, the Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF) rebel Counter-Revolutionary Warfare (CRW) unit soldiers, led by businessman George Speight, staged an armed takeover.
Chaudhry and his government were held hostage for 56 days.
Coup public face
Nata became the public face of the coup on 14 May 2000, and although he told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in May that he was not involved in planning it, he admits he played a key role as a negotiator.
“Without realising it, I was getting myself involved. So much so that I was the one administering the oath of office at [swearing-in] before usurper-nominated President Ratu Jope Seniloli,” he told the Commission.
“My face was plastered on TV on every home around Fiji and around the world. The overseas parachute press had started to drop in. If I think back now, the whole charade was a burlesque of Pygmalion proportion.”
Nata told the commission that despite the negative press over the role of the CRW unit in the coup, its soldiers prevented even worse atrocities from occurring to the hostages — including the “last cannibal feast” and “planned assassinations of key people”.
He also claimed that the unit prevented Parliament House in the capital, Suva, from being torched to the ground once it was empty.
According to Nata, the CRW unit was abandoned by those who had allegedly orchestrated events from behind the scenes.
“The unit was left in the lurch carrying the baby. The masters did not show up,” he said.

Branded as ‘mastermind’
Nata said that while the court later branded him as one of the masterminds of the coup, that honour belonged elsewhere.
Since his release from jail on 20 December 2023, he has campaigned against coups.
“No coup, in my view, can ever be justified … for those misadventures we know as coups were based on lies, visions of grandeur and opportunism,” Nata told the commission.
“I have been labelled an opportunist. I do not push back. I accept, worse, I was a hypocrite.”
“I was a traitor, as the court rightly described me. I betrayed my chief, the late Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, the government, the people I worked with and the profession that gave me wings,” he said.
“The reality of unlawful takeovers is that one group of people will suffer more than others. In 1987 and 2000, it was the Indians that suffered. 2006 gave Fijians our fair dessert,” he said.
Despite living together for more than 150 years, indigenous Fijians and Fijians of Indian heritage continued to live largely separate lives, Nata claimed.
Exceptional situations
Although he admitted that there were examples of strong inter-ethnic relations in certain towns and districts, such as the old capital Levuka, Savusavu, Labasa and Ba, he said these were exceptional situations.
Nata told the commission that politics was not the answer, and that Fiji needed intentional and deliberate collaboration at the community level to bridge the divide.
“There should be a willingness to come together. Our ethnic and collective identity and openness are not necessarily opposing poles. It could be the vehicle to bring us together,” he said.
Nata also warned against becoming trapped in the past, saying ignoring difficult truths would not pave the way for true reconciliation.
He urged all Fijians to confront unresolved issues together to build a brighter future.
“We should revisit, untangle, rebuild and move forward together,” he told the commission.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/25/fiji-will-remain-unstable-while-indigenous-people-are-economically-sidelined-says-ex-coup-convict/

COMMENTARY: By Lim Tean

The US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has told the world that Iran’s foreign policy is driven by “pure theology” and that “no one has ever been able to do a successful deal with Iran”.
Both claims are demonstrably false. Both reveal a man profoundly unqualified for the White House office he holds.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is one of the finest diplomatic minds operating in the world today. A career diplomat of 30 years, he was the technical architect of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) — mastering every clause, every verification mechanism, every sanctions schedule across 18 months of gruelling negotiation with the world’s major powers.

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He doesn’t need briefing notes. He is the briefing note.

Rubio:

Doing a deal with Iran is not easy. I said it yesterday, I’ll repeat it again today.
We have to understand that Iran ultimately is governed, and its decisions are governed, by Shia clerics, radical Shia clerics.
These people make policy decisions on the basis of pure… pic.twitter.com/2Xz26wbzui
— Clash Report (@clashreport) February 16, 2026

When Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner sit across the table from him to negotiate, the contrast is almost painful to witness. Here is a man who has spent three decades studying the granular architecture of nuclear nonproliferation, sanctions law, and regional security arrangements facing two real estate developers from New York who cannot tell a centrifuge from a footnote.
Detail at his fingertips
Araghchi has every detail at his fingertips: the technical specifications, the legal precedents, the diplomatic history, the red lines and their rationale. His American counterparts are essentially improvising.

This is not negotiation. This is a doctoral examiner sitting down with students who have not read the syllabus.
Iran has concluded deals — repeatedly. The 2015 JCPOA was negotiated with five permanent Security Council members plus Germany. It was verified by the IAEA. It worked. It was America that tore it up.
And then there is Rubio himself. Anyone who has watched him testify before Congress will know exactly what I mean. What you witness is not statecraft. It is a man who has made a career of spouting propaganda and ideological talking points — recycling neoconservative slogans in place of analysis, substituting bluster for knowledge, and confusing belligerence with strength.
He has never demonstrated a serious understanding of Iran’s political structure, its factional dynamics, its strategic doctrine, or its negotiating history.
The words in that image are not merely wrong — they are terrifying in what they reveal about the man now simultaneously occupying the offices of Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. That such extraordinary concentration of foreign policy power should rest in hands this ignorant is one of the most alarming facts about American governance today.
Revealing Washington’s incapacity
What Rubio is actually revealing is not Iranian irrationality. He is revealing Washington’s own incapacity — its inability to honour commitments, sustain agreements, or treat adversaries as strategic actors deserving of serious engagement.
The most dangerous diplomats are not the radical ones. They are the ignorant ones — those who mistake their own ideological blinkers for geopolitical insight.
In my assessment, Rubio is the most ignorant and incompetent Secretary of State the United States has produced since the Second World War.
That is not hyperbole. It is a considered judgment from someone who has studied American foreign policy across eight decades.
The world deserves better. So, frankly, does America.
Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/25/lim-tean-marco-rubio-embarrasses-himself-and-america-over-iran/

By Christina Persico of RNZ Pacific

The Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) has formally outlined its final position on its political future, proposing a three-stage pathway towards self-government and eventual independence.

President Ishmael Toroama presented its position to the independent facilitator who is overseeing the joint technical consultations between the ABG and the Papua New Guinea government.
Bougainville would continue preparations for self-government until 1 September 2027, focusing on strengthening institutions, governance systems, peace and security, and economic readiness.

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From that date, Bougainville would enter a period of self-government, “exercising the fullest practical and constitutional authority available under the existing legal framework, including additional powers provided under Section 289 of the Constitution”.
“The proposal further envisages Bougainville attaining independence in 2030, as defined during the referendum process as an independent nation-state recognised under international law and separate from the State of Papua New Guinea.”
Toroama said the pathway provides certainty, preserves peace, and honours the democratic choice expressed by the people.
In 2019, a referendum was 97.7 percent in favour of independence, but the final decision rests with PNG’s national Parliament, as provided for under the Bougainville Peace Agreement.
Consistently honoured
Toroama said Bougainville has consistently honoured both the letter and spirit of the Peace Agreement.
“This position is not founded on emotion or convenience. It is founded on the Bougainville Peace Agreement, on Part XIV of the Constitution of Papua New Guinea, and on the solemn commitments and agreements that have guided our journey and preserved peace to date,” he said in an ABG statement.
“Our objective has never been confrontation. Our objective has always been reconciliation, partnership and a peaceful transition founded on law and mutual respect.”
According to Toroama, the 2019 referendum delivered a clear mandate from the people of Bougainville in favour of independence and that subsequent consultations between the ABG and the national government had produced several important agreements, including the Joint Communique of 11 January 2021, the Kokopo Joint Statement, Wabag Joint Statement, APEC Joint Statement, Era Kone Covenant and the Melanesian Agreement.
A cost-of-services report has also been filed, with acting president and Minister for Treasury and Finance, Albert Punghau, saying the 97.7 percent vote for independence must be matched by “fiscal readiness”.
“A sovereign people must be served by a government that can sustain itself,” he said.
“The report we launch today, ‘From Here To There’, speaks directly to both governments — the National Government of PNG and the Autonomous Bougainville Government — on the financial stewardship of our people’s resources, and the political responsibility of building Bougainville into nationhood.”
15-year process
Earlier this week, PNG’s ruling PANGU Party said it would support a 15-year transition process for Bougainville, regardless of whether Parliament votes for or against independence.
Prime Minister James Marape outlined the proposal in a statement defending PNG’s constitutional process for deciding Bougainville’s political future.
He said the process would be conditional on Bougainville demonstrating financial self-sufficiency, maintaining peace and stability, and eliminating armed violence and factionalism.
The Prime Minister said Bougainville would need to generate enough internal revenue to fund at least 70 percent of its annual budget over a five-year period.
Marape repeatedly stressed that Bougainville’s future could only be decided through constitutional processes established under the 2001 Bougainville Peace Agreement and incorporated into Papua New Guinea’s constitution.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/25/bougainville-sets-out-full-three-stage-proposal-for-independence-by-2030/

COMMENTARY: By Saige England

Good on the Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) for its submission to the Royal Commission.
The New Zealand Jewish Council is so very different to the Jewish Council in Australia. The latter has far larger numbers and more clout, over there at least.
The NZ Jewish Council has clout and applies it. It is heavily involved in New Zealand media, some members are journalists, and it has long been running a hasbara propaganda campaign.

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‘The JCA submission says two important drivers of antisemitism are the “growth of far-right, neo-Nazi and conspiracist movements, which represent a significant and often overlooked threat to Jewish communities, and the aggressive actions of the state of Israel and conflation of Jewish identity with Israel”.’
— The Guardian
Freebies to Israel if you play the toxic game — dehumanise Palestinians, deem them all terrorists, and declare Israel the promised land for one people, not the other.
The New Zealand Jewish Council spreads lies. I know this for a fact. One of its key members who is lauded in New Zealand film and television defamed John Minto, a humanitarian, called him antisemitic, I challenged that and asked him to provide evidence.
Of course there was none. This man who is Jewish and influential in entertainment and journalism defamed Damien O’Connor and said he was antisemitic. Again I challenged him and asked for evidence. There was none.
Zionism inflates antisemitism
I have news for Zionists and their allies in the media who are doing this. Conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism inflates antisemitism. They know it.
It is not fair, is not sensible, rational or compassionate. It is baiting and inciting.
The NZ Jewish Council applies one law for Jews and one for Muslims, different standards completely. One can be the victim, the other is never the victim, in its view.
I previously supported the NZ Jewish Council when I witnessed media bias in a programme featuring a former Waffen SS officer who praised Hitler and claimed he did not know about what happened to the Jews. It was impossible not to know about the systemic murder of masses of Jews, then and now.
When the evidence points to the contrary, the journalist should call it, everytime. Evidence.
This Gaza genocide. More than 75,000 killed — children, little children, babies, women, aid workers, journalists. A target on their backs for being Palestinian.
I have been appalled at the NZ Jewish Council’s double standards, its staunch sense of entitlement, its clear political view that the only good Jews are Zionists, its supremacism.
Stalwart Zionists
The NZ Jewish Council is run by and supported by stalwart Zionists. It does not represent humanitarian Jews because it is Zionist, because it fails to call out a genocide which has murdered tens of thousands of infants, aid workers, and more journalists than World War One and Two combined and the total number of recent wars.
Genocide is not a conflict, it is not a war. The massacres have been carried out since the Nakba. It was always the plan.
Jews have fought against Zionism, literally. The Bund. Jews against Zionism.
Not all Jews are Zionists and the NZ Jewish Council fails to recognise it and support those who support all people equally.
I know about antisemitism. When I worked in a shop I was asked if I was Jewish, when I asked why the question was asked, I was told by the customer that they would never buy from a Jew. My grandfather’s people hid their Jewishness due to anti-semitism.
My aunt was yelled at in the street: ‘You black Jews are all the same’. I know the difference between antisemitism and pro-colonisation Zionism, one supports equality and the other robs other people of their rights.
I stand firmly with the most oppressed people in the world, Palestinians, and for the dismantling of the state of supremacism, apartheid and genocide, a state which always had a policy of steal the land, assimilate those who won’t resist, and exile and exterminate the rest.
And this is why I say it is antisemitic to support the Zionist state. When we free Palestinians we free ourselves from the chains of one kind of victimhood. The victimhood that leads people to become persecutors and create more victims. Zionism.
Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/25/saige-england-praise-for-australias-jewish-council-but-nzs-council-is-hasbara-propaganda-campaign/

Democracy Now! AMY GOODMAN: In Britain, Keir Starmer has announced his resignation as prime minister and leader of the Labour Party following growing pressure from within the Labour Party to step down. Starmer spoke earlier on Monday: PRIME MINISTER KEIR STARMER: The chance to change the lives of millions of people for the better, that’s what I came into politics for.

Six years ago, I inherited a Labour Party that was politically, financially and morally bankrupt. I was told time and time again that my party was finished, that we were consigned to history, that a majority at the general election, let alone a landslide majority, was impossible.

But we proved those people wrong, because we changed our party, ripping out the poison of antisemitism, restoring trust on the economy, defenCe and national security, and becoming a party that once again stood proudly with, not against, our national flag.

AMY GOODMAN: Starmer’s election as prime minister in 2024 ended more than a decade of Conservative rule in the UK. But during his time in office, he has faced mounting opposition over his embrace of austerity measures and a cost-of-living crisis in Britain, as well as his crackdown on Palestinian solidarity protesters.

Starmer’s announcement paves the way for Britain to have its seventh leader in 10 years. Former Manchester mayor, newly elected Labour MP Andy Burnham, is widely expected to become the next prime minister. However, some leaders of the British left have warned Burnham may do little to shift from Starmer’s policies.

British MP Jeremy Corbyn, who led the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020, said Burnham’s, quote, “basic economic strategy and views seem to me to be accepting too much of the austerity we’ve had imposed on us,” and added in an interview with Sky News that Burnham, “doesn’t appear to be doing anything different internationally,” referring to Britain’s supply of weapons to Israel for its war on Gaza and beyond.

We’re joined now in Paris, France, by Geoffrey Robertson, renowned human rights lawyer, founding head of Doughty Street Chambers, Europe’s largest human rights law practice. He has been widely described as a mentor to Starmer, who worked at the law firm for nearly two decades.

Geoffrey Robertson is also a former UN judge who ran the UN war crimes court in Sierra Leone. His most recent book is titled World of War Crimes: Eyeless in Gaza … and Beyond.

Geoffrey Robertson, before we ask you about Britain’s crackdown on Palestine solidarity activists, the so-called “Elbit 4”, we want to get your response to the announcement by the prime minister that he is stepping down.

GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Well, there is a connection, you know.

I advised him over the weekend that if he had the numbers — or, if he didn’t have the numbers, he should do a deal with Burnham, who is the obvious favorite to succeed him, because he’s a bit more charismatic than Keir, who’s a bit dull for the public taste.

But if he didn’t have the numbers, he shouldn’t resign, but rather do a deal with Burnham that he became his foreign minister, because Keir Starmer, in my view, has been absolutely brilliant as prime minister dealing with foreign affairs, most importantly, of course, dealing with Donald Trump.

And he has not conceded to Trump. He has not joined in the illegality of the invasion of Iran, as Trump was insisting. He’s kept the distance and kept Britain out of the war crimes that Trump has tried to pull it into.

So, for that reason, I hope he stays on in that capacity, but we don’t know. If he had the numbers, I advised him to make a speech accepting that he made several mistakes, which he has.

He has, for example, in relation to the left. And the leftwing of the Labour Party is, if you like, the beating heart of the party. They don’t know or don’t accept the need ever for economic austerity, but they have got the heart and soul of what is traditionally the Labour Party.

And they were upset by his support for Israel. In particular, they were upset by his prohibition on any protest from Palestine Action, a group that protests about Israeli attacks on Palestine. And he had them banned and had — over 3000 people are now awaiting trial for holding up banners saying that they support Palestine Action.

So, that kind of thing lost him popularity in the Labour Party. It was his attack on the left, his fraying out of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn, who led it for several years, and Keir was one of the ministers.

That just wasn’t seen as just.

So, if he moved a little more to the left, and — he may well have kept the party onside, but I think he really lost support in the party because he was perceived as too rightwing for it and because he was too boring.

He lacked charisma.

Everyone went around saying this, from a party whose most uncharismatic leader was Clement Attlee, just after war, had no charisma whatsoever, but did the great thing that Britain now boasts of, like the National Health Service, and so forth.

So, it’s sad that charisma is now a quality for leading the Labour Party, but there it is. AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been fierce in criticising governments like the US and Britain, as well, for its approach to Israel and Palestine, and you specifically talk about what’s happened to Palestine Action.

Last week, four Palestine Action activists in Britain were sentenced as “terrorists” over their involvement in a 2024 protest and raid on a factory operated by one of Israel’s largest arms manufacturers, Elbit Systems. In May, the four activists, known as the Elbit 4, were found guilty of criminal damage for destroying property at the Elbit facility.

But unbeknown to lawyers or the jury, the judge in the case added a terrorism component to the case months earlier. It’s the first time a judge has issued terrorism sentencing enhancements on people who were not actually charged with or convicted of terrorism.

Their prison sentences range from four to over seven years. They must also legally register to a law enforcement terrorist surveillance system for 15 years following their release from prison.

Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori told Novara Media in response: “This is the first case, and therefore the test case, for trying to convict activists as terrorists, using a manipulated court process.” So, Geoffrey Robertson, you just wrote a piece for the new magazine The Key, headlined “Punishing Protest as Terrorism.” Can you explain the significance of what happened in this case, and put it in the context of your new book, World of War Crimes: Eyeless in Gaza … and Beyond?

GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Well, it goes like this. For several centuries, Britain’s democracy has been affected, influenced, improved by protest, protests for the vote. The vote for women came about because of quite violent protests, and the vote generally.

I mean, we could go back and look at the way protest movements of one sort or another, particularly in America, were actually led by people who were devoted democrats.

And now we have a situation where, thanks to a law passed by the Conservative government, not by Labour, recently, a few years ago, that sentencing cases where you have quite ordinary crimes that protesters often commit, like criminal damage, usually dealt with by a fine or an 18-month sentence, if the damage was bad, is now — can be coupled by the judge — not the jury, but the judge can, if he decides in his own mind that they’re terrorists, he can make them go to prison for a lot longer, be labelled as terrorists, be discriminated against in prison.

All sorts of bad things can happen to these young, usually, and sincere, but maybe headstrong, protesters, because although they’re — all they want to do is to change the attitude of the British government, which was very slow in complaining about the massive killings in Gaza.

That’s all they want to do, and yet that is a ground this judge the other day, dealing with four protesters who smashed up a little bit of Elbit, the drone manufacturers — this judge secretly decided that they were terrorists, and so could do all those harsh things to them.

And that, I think, is one matter which needs to be sorted, because we have Mr.

Vance coming over and telling us how we get things wrong, and this would be a good example of because it’s quite contrary to our idea of justice that anyone should be sent to prison for long periods and have all this discrimination against them, when they haven’t been convicted by a jury.

AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to end by naming the Elbit 4, as they are known, and who they are: Leona Kamio, 30 years old, a nursery school teacher; Samuel Corner, 23, and Fatema Rajwani, 21, students; and Charlotte Head, 30, a domestic abuse case worker.

The original content of this programme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/24/palestine-action-terror-sentencing-starmer-resignation-but-labour-change-unlikely-over-israel-policy/

By Patrick Decloitre of RNZ Pacific

The French High Commission in New Caledonia has banned all alcohol sales until next Sunday — June 28, the provincial elections day.

The ban enforcement started on Monday and will last until Sunday at midnight, local time.
The ban concerns the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages.

READ MORE: Provincial elections: USTKE issues voting instructions a few days before the vote
Other Kanaky New Caledonia elections reports

The measure is supposed to “prevent public unrest”, among other reasons.
The High Commission said New Caledonia is experiencing a tense economic and social situation, as well as “delinquency” especially in the capital Nouméa and its greater area.
It also said law enforcement agencies, police and gendarmerie, are “regularly targeted by stone-throwing”.
Similar measures were taken during the May 2024 violent unrest.
‘Sensitive’ periods
It was also enforced several times at perceived “sensitive” periods, such as the anniversary of the riots, on May 13, or the symbolic date of September 24 which marks the anniversary of New Caledonia becoming a French colony in 1853.
Political parties in New Caledonia are now in full campaign mode.
Pacific journalist Nic Maclellan told RNZ Pacific Waves the key concerns for voters were the ones that faced every country.
“There’s a lot of concern about the current state of public services, particularly around health and public transport, both of which have suffered since the 2024 crisis,” he said.
“A major concern is frustration among young people about the cost of living, about access to housing, particularly about access to jobs.”
He said the fuel crisis was not as front of mind as in other countries, but still a factor.
“Certainly, the cost of living is pretty stark here, and fuel has gone up. It has affected key industries like tourism.
“Key sectors like nickel — nickel smelting and nickel mining — tourism, and others are affected by global energy costs. But front of mind is, as I say, about the cost of public services, which have been very much disrupted by the crisis in 2024 and in many cases haven’t recovered to the full level.”
The pro-France united list brings together Les Loyalistes, Rassemblement-LR, and Génération NC; while the pro-independence FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front, including Union Calédonienne) is one of the main components of the pro-independence movement.
And this year a UNI (Union Nationale pour l’Indépendance) movement is also running separately after its two main pillars, PALIKA (Kanak Liberation Party) and UPM (Union Progressiste en Mélanésie) broke away from FLNKS in August 2024.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/24/alcohol-sales-banned-in-new-caledonia-as-provincial-election-approaches/

By Johnny Blades of RNZ Pacific

Bougainville Copper Limited has been told its licence for the Panguna copper and gold mine has been suspended.

BCL said it was considering its position after the Autonomous Bougainville Government’s Registrar of Tenements advised that as a consequence of new mining legislation the company’s rights under the exploration licence for the mine had been suspended.

The ABG has picked a new partner to redevelop the long-mothballed mine, which Bougainville’s leaders see as a critical resource for the autonomous Papua New Guinea region’s independence aspirations.

READ MORE: Bougainville president warns against ‘unauthorised’ Panguna mine forum Other Panguna mine reports A new 25-year mining licence has been granted to Bougainville Minerals Ltd, a company controlled by the ABG and local landowners.

This comes after the ABG passed amendments to the Bougainville Mining Act. The ABG’s President, Ishmael Toroama said the new development was a significant strengthening of landowner participation. “Landowner rights, compensation rights, local content participation and benefit sharing rights and royalties are preserved.

Landowner equity participation is preserved and strengthened,” Toroama said in a statement. BCL, the long-time licence holder, said it was considering its position as to what steps, if any, it will take.

“The company is currently reviewing the Bougainville Mining (Amendment) Act 2026 to confirm the position set out in the letter from the Autonomous Bougainville Government’s Registrar of Tenements, and that the legislation referred to is in fact enacted and having the force of law,” BCL said in a notice to the ASX.

Panguna is one of the world’s largest copper-gold deposits, still containing an estimated 5.3 million tonnes of copper and 19.3 million ounces of gold. The mine has been closed since 1988, when grievances over mine operations ignited the Bougainville civil war.

The ABG has also engaged an Indian company, Lloyds Metals, to partner with the local-based company in efforts to redevelop the mine.

Lloyds recently moved machinery and equipment into the Panguna mine area in order to conduct feasibility and exploration work.

This story was first published on

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/23/bougainville-copper-limited-takes-stock-after-panguna-licence-setback/

INTERVIEW: By Ibrahim Othman In an unprecedented move on New Zealand‘s political scene, the Free Palestine Party Aotearoa has been launched with the Palestinian cause at the heart of its political platform, describing it as the foremost moral, political and economic issue in the world today.

The party’s launch comes in an election year with the ballot on November 7, amid growing debate over New Zealand‘s position on Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and its relations with Israel.

In an interview with The New Arab, party leader Paul Hopkinson has discussed the reasons behind its formation, its political goals, its position on Palestine and Aotearoa New Zealand foreign policy, and how he sees the party’s role in the country’s political life.

READ MORE: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Gaza children part of genocide: UN inquiry The new Middle East: How the Old Order died and what is rising in its place Other Palestine reports Why did you choose to establish a party focused on Palestine in New Zealand, rather than limiting yourselves to participation in events and protest movements?

And why now? We chose to establish a party built around the Palestinian cause because we believe it is the most important moral, political and economic issue facing New Zealand and the world today. It is the most important moral issue because it represents the greatest genocide and holocaust of this century, taking place in full view of the entire world.

It is also the most important political issue for our country because any state that fails to oppose this genocide and defend international law not only becomes complicit in these crimes against humanity but also loses its credibility and standing on the international stage.

In addition, from an economic perspective, it is the most important issue facing New Zealand and the world because the Israeli regime‘s practices and acts of aggression, alongside the United States, against Palestine and Lebanon — as well as its war on Iran — are pushing the world not only towards recession, but towards depression if they continue.

We all take part in protests and events in support of Palestine, and most of us have been involved in supporting the Palestinian cause for decades. The holocaust of the Palestinian people has been ongoing for more than 78 years.

All the parties currently represented in the New Zealand Parliament have held power at different stages, but they have failed to support international law or take action against Israel when atrocities were committed against the Palestinian people.

The mainstream media, because of its biased coverage, has also become complicit in the ongoing holocaust of the Palestinian people. We believe that having an officially registered political party will put this issue directly before the people of New Zealand.

As for the timing, it is linked to the fact that Palestine and the Palestinian people have not faced this level of threat since the Nakba in 1948, regardless of the fact that 2026 is an election year in the country.

New Zealand’s pro-Palestinian party founder Paul Hopkinson . . .

“This is the most important moral issue because it represents the greatest genocide and holocaust of this century, taking place in full view of the entire world.” Image: The New Arab The party’s name, “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea”, is controversial and has already drawn criticism.

Why did you choose this name in particular? The party’s name for registration purposes is Free Palestine, while our main slogan is “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea”. We hope to change the party’s name to this slogan once the registration process is complete.

We chose this slogan and want to adopt it as the party’s name for two reasons. First, because it is the only solution capable of achieving peace in the Middle East and justice for all Palestinians.

Second, because it preserves freedom of expression on Palestine, a freedom that no longer exists in the United Kingdom, Germany and elsewhere. Are you concerned that the party’s name could become a point of confrontation and alienate the public and other political forces, rather than helping the party become a force for Palestinian advocacy?

As for the criticism this may provoke, it is impossible to support Palestine without being criticised by Zionists and their supporters. The slogan “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” is not confrontational. Rather, it is a just and clear solution to the genocide and oppression practised by the Israeli apartheid state.

The one-state solution was the answer to apartheid in South Africa, and we, as supporters of Palestine, cannot allow Zionists and their supporters to determine what may be said or done.

The March for Peace in Auckland, New Zealand, last Saturday with protesters outside the US Consulate . . . protests like this have happened across Aotearoa for the past two-and-a-half years yet are rarely reported by the biased mainstream media.

Image: Kerry Sorensen-Tyrer What is the party’s legal status? Has it been officially registered, met the requirements and received approval? The party is still in the registration phase, and this process takes time. We believe we have submitted a strong and comprehensive registration application.

However, the party faces many administrative obstacles and will be subject to opposition and strict scrutiny. Despite this, strong public support has enabled us to gain, in record time, a number of paid-up members far exceeding the legal minimum requirement of 550.

How would you explain your political programme, and who are you seeking to address in New Zealand?

Our political programme, as outlined in our principles, is based above all on respect for international law, human rights and UN resolutions, and on demanding an independent foreign policy that does not make New Zealand complicit in crimes against humanity.

The right of return and a democratic one-state solution were positions held by the Palestine Liberation Organisation before the disastrous Oslo Accords. This position remains that of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, as well as many other groups that represent Palestinians.

I would also note here that Hamas also believes in a one-state solution. Ultimately, it must be the Palestinian people who decide the nature of their state. We intend to direct our political programme to all New Zealanders.

We also plan to use our position as a registered political party to hold all other parties to account on the issue of Palestine.

Our six core principles, in brief, are: the right of return; the primacy of international law and UN resolutions; respect for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in relation to Zionist violations; the one-state solution; unconditional support for all forms of Palestinian resistance; and an independent New Zealand foreign policy, including withdrawal from military and security alliances with the United States.

You have previously described the New Zealand government’s position on Palestine as “cowardly”. Why, and what steps do you believe it has failed to take? I think I have already made my views on the failures of the New Zealand government clear.

As I said, the holocaust of the Palestinians has been ongoing for 78 years. Throughout this entire period, the New Zealand government has been part of military and security alliances, including the Five Eyes alliance, with the United States, which is Israel’s main supporter.

The alliance includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Since the beginning of the latest genocide against the Palestinian people, New Zealand soldiers have taken part in military exercises with the Israeli army and US forces.

On the other hand, successive New Zealand governments have failed to take any steps to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law or to support UN resolutions related to Palestine. None of the politicians or parties in our country has shown the courage to take practical steps against the Israeli apartheid state or hold it accountable in any international institution.

As the national spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine campaign in New Zealand, how do you respond to those who view your association with this cause as controversial? As I mentioned, I am the national spokesperson for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in New Zealand.

As is clear from the party’s principles, we offer unconditional support for all forms of Palestinian resistance, including armed resistance. I do not see this as controversial because international law grants Palestinians, as a people under occupation, the right to all forms of resistance, including armed resistance.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine is also not listed as a terrorist organisation in New Zealand. I believe that other resistance organisations, such as Hamas and other Palestinian factions, should not have been placed on any terrorism list either, if New Zealand had an independent foreign policy.

What message would you like to send to members of New Zealand’s Jewish community who may have concerns or reservations about your party’s positions? As is clear from our six core principles, nothing in them should concern anyone who believes in human rights and justice, regardless of their ethnicity or religion.

There are many Jews within our movement in New Zealand and around the world who support Palestine. The attempt by Zionists and their supporters to link all Jews to the most lethal and depraved apartheid regime in the modern world is shameful.

Republished from The New Arab under Creative Commons.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/23/paul-hopkinson-why-nzs-free-palestine-party-seeks-to-put-gaza-genocide-at-centre-of-politics/

RNZ Pacific

Papua New Guinea’s ruling PANGU Party says it would support a 15-year transition process for Bougainville, regardless of whether Parliament votes for or against independence.
Prime Minister James Marape outlined the proposal in a statement defending PNG’s constitutional process for deciding Bougainville’s political future.
Bougainville, which is an autonomous region within PNG, voted overwhelmingly for independence in a non-binding referendum in 2019, but the final decision rests with PNG’s national Parliament, as provided for under the Bougainville Peace Agreement.

READ MORE: Bougainville’s Toroama accuses PNG of breaching Melanesian Agreement
Other Bougainville independence reports

Marape said if parliament voted in favour of independence, the constitution allowed for a negotiated transition period of up to 15 years, during which powers would be progressively transferred from Port Moresby to Bougainville.
He said the process would be conditional on Bougainville demonstrating financial self-sufficiency, maintaining peace and stability, and eliminating armed violence and factionalism.
The prime minister said Bougainville would need to generate enough internal revenue to fund at least 70 percent of its annual budget over a five-year period.
But Marape also said that if Parliament rejected independence, under PANGU’s plan, the referendum result should remain “alive” rather than being extinguished.
Under that scenario, Bougainville would still be given the same 15-year period to meet agreed benchmarks before Parliament reconsidered the issue.
“What I meant was that the issue will not be finally resolved by a single vote alone,” Marape said, in reference to his comments in Parliament recently that “a yes can become a no and a no can become a yes”.
“The parliamentary vote simply begins the next stage of our collective journey as a nation.”

Constitutional path
Marape repeatedly stressed that Bougainville’s future could only be decided through constitutional processes established under the 2001 Bougainville Peace Agreement and incorporated into Papua New Guinea’s constitution.
He said Parliament, not the national government, had the final authority to decide the referendum outcome.
“Breaking up a country is the most serious decision any Parliament can make,” he said.
“It is only proper that a super-majority befitting a constitutional change should determine such a matter.”
Marape also defended Parliament Speaker Job Pomat’s position that a three-quarter parliamentary majority should be required in order to ratify the result to approve independence. Bougainville’s leaders have voiced frustration over this high majority threshold.
The prime minister said he would continue discussions with Bougainville leaders and wanted Parliament to consider the referendum outcome on August 30, subject to agreement from the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG).
Bougainville’s referendum saw 97.7 percent of voters support independence from PNG after decades of conflict and the Peace Agreement brokered in 2001.

This story was first published on

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/22/pngs-ruling-party-supports-15-year-transition-period-for-bougainville/

By Christina Persico of RNZ Pacific

Ardie Savea has been named All Blacks captain, as head coach Dave Rennie today revealed his first squad at Feilding Yellows Rugby Club.
Savea said he would be drawing on the leadership from those around him, and those who have come before, to inspire and ground him.
“To serve this team, its people and its fans is one of the greatest honours in sport,” he said.

READ MORE: All Blacks squad: Four uncapped players in Dave Rennie’s first squad, Ardie Savea named captain
Other All Blacks reports

“I believe this role is about empowering everyone in the group to be the best that they can be — from the leadership, to the players and wider staff.
“We pay tribute to those who have gone before us while also acknowledging that the responsibility of writing the next chapter in the All Blacks story lies with us.”
Savea thanked his wife, Saskia, and their children — Kobe, Keeon and Kove — as well as parents and extended family and friends.
“We are blessed to have a ‘village’ that walks alongside us.”
Rennie said they know Savea will do an outstanding job of leading the team on and off-field.
“Ardie is highly respected by his team-mates and cares deeply about the black jersey.”
Pasifika heritage
Other players with Pasifika heritage named in the All Blacks include Asafo Aumua, Samisoni Taukei’aho, George Bower, Pasilio Tosi, Tupou Vaa’i, Patrick Tuipulotu, Wallace Sititi, and Quinn Tupaea.
Xavier Numia, Anton Segner, Fehi Fineanganofo and Josh Moorby are the debutants.
Tamaiti Williams, Scott Barrett, Fabian Holland and Leicester Fainga’anuku were unavailable due to injury.
The All Blacks’ first game of the season is against France on July 4.
Nations Championship Fixtures:

Saturday 4 July: France, One New Zealand Stadium, Christchurch, 7.10pm NZST
Saturday 11 July: Italy, HNRY Stadium, Wellington, 5.10pm NZST
Saturday 18 July: Ireland, Eden Park, Auckland, 7.10pm NZST
Sunday 8 November: Scotland, Sottish Gas Murrayfield, Edinburgh, 3.10am NZDT
Sunday 15 November: Wales, Principality Stadium, Cardiff, 3.10am NZDT
Sunday 22 November: England, Allianz Stadium, London, 3.10am NZDT
27-29 November: Nations Championship Finals Weekend, Allianz Stadium, London

The full 34-man squad:
Hookers
Asafo Aumua (29 / Hurricanes / Wellington / 20)
Codie Taylor (35 / Crusaders / Canterbury /106)
Samisoni Taukei’aho ( 28 / Chiefs / Waikato / 43)
Props
Ethan De Groot (27 / Highlanders / Southland / 40)
George Bower (34 / Crusaders / Otago / 25)
Xavier Numia * (27 / Hurricanes / Wellington / 0)
Tyrel Lomax (30 / Hurricanes / Tasman / 48)
Fletcher Newell (26 / Crusaders / Canterbury / 35)
Pasilio Tosi (27 / Hurricanes / Bay of Plenty / 16)
Locks
Tupou Vaa’i (26 / Chiefs / Taranaki / 45)
Patrick Tuipulotu (33 / Blues / Auckland / 56)
Josh Lord (25 / Chiefs / Taranaki / 12)
Sam Darry (25 / Blues / Canterbury / 8)
Loose Forwards
Peter Lakai (23 / Hurricanes / Wellington / 8)
Simon Parker (26 / Chiefs / Northland / 8)
Ardie Savea (32 / Moana Pasifika / Wellington / 106) (Captain)
Wallace Sititi (23 / Chiefs / North Harbour / 19)
Luke Jacobson (29 / Chiefs / Waikato / 24)
Anton Segner * (24 / Blues / Auckland / 0)
Halfbacks
Cameron Roigard (25 / Hurricanes / Counties Manukau / 17)
Cortez Ratima (25 / Chiefs / Waikato / 21)
Kyle Preston (26 / Crusaders / Wellington / 1)
First Five-Eighths
Ruben Love (25 / Hurricanes / Wellington / 5)
Beauden Barrett (35 / Blues / Taranaki / 144)
Damian McKenzie (31 / Chiefs / Waikato / 74)
Midfielders
Jordie Barrett (29 / Hurricanes / Taranaki / 78)
Quinn Tupaea (27 / Chiefs / Waikato / 24)
Billy Proctor (27 / Hurricanes / Wellington / 11)
Anton Lienert-Brown (31 / Chiefs / Waikato / 88)
Outside Backs
Caleb Clarke (27 / Blues / Auckland / 33)
Fehi Fineanganofo * (23 / Hurricanes / Bay of Plenty / 0)
Leroy Carter (27 / Chiefs / Bay of Plenty / 6)
Josh Moorby * (27 / Hurricanes / Waikato / 0)
Will Jordan (28 / Crusaders / Tasman / 54)
This story was first published on

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/22/one-of-the-greatest-honours-in-sport-ardie-savea-as-all-blacks-captain/

ANALYSIS: By Lim Tean

An Israeli cabinet minister has named the new Middle East on live radio —  and he named it in alarm.
What Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli called the “Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan axis” is not a threat. It is the architecture of a new regional order.
And once you see its logic, you cannot unsee it. Here is what it means — and what it means for America.

READ MORE: Lim Tean: Why standing on the wrong side of history cost Germany its UNSC seat
Other Lim Tean articles

❝What we are witnessing is the rise of a new axis❞

Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli says Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan axis ‘is worrying’, linking three countries to recent US-Iran deal https://t.co/53i0KcwcAR pic.twitter.com/iOVMd6kEDI
— Anadolu English (@anadoluagency) June 17, 2026

The confession in the alarm
When Amichai Chikli went on Israel’s 103 FM radio this week to warn of the rise of a “Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan axis,” he wasn’t making a prediction. He was issuing a confession.
An adversary’s alarm is always the most reliable confirmation that a structural shift has occurred — and what Chikli named in anxiety, we must now examine with clarity.
The old Middle East is gone. What is rising in its place is an architecture that no Western foreign policy establishment has yet fully reckoned with — one in which American primacy has been displaced, Israeli military dominance has been exposed as insufficient, and the two great Indigenous powers of the region, Iran and Türkiye, are emerging as the twin poles of a new order.
The moment the Old Order broke
The proximate event was the US-Iran framework agreement — now signed and in force. Trump signing it at the Palace of Versailles during dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday evening, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signing from Tehran.
But the manner of its emergence is as consequential as its content.
Washington and Tehran reached their temporary truce on April 8 through Pakistani mediation. The framework itself was shaped by Pakistan, Qatar, and Türkiye — playing, as one account noted, “different but complementary roles.”
Qatar hosted senior Iranian officials and maintained communication channels. Türkiye provided consistent diplomatic backing and called repeatedly for a negotiated resolution. Pakistan’s Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir was the crucial bridge, maintaining simultaneous contacts with both Washington and Tehran.
Notice who was absent from this architecture — Israel. Notice who else was absent — the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia. These are the three traditional American-anchored Gulf states that for three decades defined the regional order alongside Washington.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself admitted the scale of his marginalisation. At his first press conference in three months, he conceded he did not know what was actually written in the agreement.
The leader of the Middle East’s most powerful military, possessor of an undeclared nuclear arsenal, was reduced to a bystander while the region’s future was negotiated without him.
Trump, at the G7 summit in France, publicly described Netanyahu as “crazy” and said “without me, there would be no Israel.” Strip away the Trumpian grandiosity and a devastating strategic truth remains: Israel’s security has never rested on its own foundations, but on American patronage. And that patronage is being fundamentally recalibrated.
For American readers, this demands a moment of honest reflection. The United States spent trillions of dollars and decades of strategic energy constructing a Middle Eastern order anchored on Israeli military dominance and Gulf monarchy stability. That order has not been dismantled by an adversary’s military victory. It has been quietly superseded — by diplomacy conducted through channels America did not control, by actors America did not invite, producing an outcome America did not architect. That is a more profound kind of displacement than defeat in battle.
The dual-hegemon architecture
What is emerging is not a successor Pax — not Chinese, not Russian, not any external power’s regional order. It is something rarer and more durable: a regional order anchored by Indigenous great powers.
Iran and Turkey are the twin poles. Between them they possess the military depth, the demographic weight, the geographic centrality, and the independent foreign policy capacity that no other regional actor can match. Iran controls the eastern arc — Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen — through its network of allied movements and state relationships.
Türkiye commands the northern tier, projects power into Syria, maintains NATO membership as a strategic hedge, and has emerged as the region’s most consequential diplomatic broker.
This is not a partnership moving in perfect harmony. Türkiye and Iran are rival civilisational powers with a long history of strategic friction. The more precise framework is managed bipolarity — two hegemons who converge sufficiently on the containment of Israeli expansionism to cooperate diplomatically, while competing for influence across the Arab world’s contested spaces.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made his country’s position unambiguous. Speaking to Parliament, he declared that Israeli aggression in Lebanon and Syria had reached a point where it threatened Türkiye directly, and called Israel the single biggest obstacle to regional peace.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, speaking alongside Russia’s Sergey Lavrov in Moscow — a symbolically charged backdrop — welcomed the US-Iran agreement but crucially called for it to evolve into “a structural and lasting security architecture rather than a temporary period of calm”.
That phrase is the key to understanding Ankara’s ambition. Turkey is not interested in episodic crisis management. It is seeking to institutionalise a new regional order in which it is a permanent rule-setter — the Ottoman inheritance reframed for the 21st century.
Iran, militarily weakened by the six-week Israeli offensive but diplomatically rehabilitated by the agreement, emerges in a paradoxical position of strength. It has traded military confrontation for international legitimacy, secured the rehabilitation of its economy, and — crucially — retained its regional network intact. The agreement has not dismantled Iranian power projection. It has brought Iran back into the international system while leaving its strategic depth untouched.

Pakistan: The nuclear keystone
The actor most consistently underestimated in Western analysis is Pakistan — and yet Pakistan may be the keystone of the entire new architecture.
Pakistan is the only Muslim-majority nuclear power. Its Army Chief personally bridged Washington and Tehran to produce the April 8 truce. It sits at the heart of the Türkiye-Qatar-Pakistan diplomatic axis. And it has recently formalised a defence pact with Saudi Arabia.
That last point demands careful attention — and contains a particular irony for American readers.
Saudi Arabia’s strategic anxiety is acute. If American primacy in the region is receding, Riyadh needs an alternative security guarantee. It needs, specifically, nuclear cover. China has been proposed as one possible guarantor. But Pakistan is the more structurally coherent answer — and the answer whose historical roots run deepest.
Saudi money was instrumental in funding Pakistan’s nuclear programme during the 1970s and 1980s. This was never a secret in strategic circles. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s original conception of an “Islamic bomb” was always partly conceived with the broader Muslim world — and implicitly with Saudi Arabia — in mind. The recent Saudi-Pakistan defence pact is not a bilateral footnote. It is the formal institutionalisation of a security relationship whose nuclear dimension has always been implicit.
Here is the American irony: Washington funded, armed, and sustained Pakistan through decades of the Cold War and the War on Terror. American taxpayers financed the Pakistani military establishment that built the Islamic world’s first nuclear arsenal.
That arsenal may now serve as the instrument by which Saudi Arabia quietly exits the American security umbrella — replacing it with an Islamic solidarity framework that carries far greater domestic legitimacy in Riyadh than any guarantee from Washington ever did.
History has a sharp sense of irony. America built the tools of its own displacement.
Lebanon: The proving ground
Lebanon is not a footnote to this architectural shift. It is its most immediate and visible proving ground — the theatre where the transition from old order to new is being tested in real time.
Israel’s continued strikes on south Lebanon, even after the US-Iran framework was announced, reveal the central tension of this transitional moment. Netanyahu, sidelined from the deal and facing devastating domestic criticism, is using Lebanon as the one theatre where he can still project agency. But in doing so, he is accelerating precisely the dynamic that isolates Israel further from the emerging order.
Erdoğan’s response was explicit and historically significant: Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Syria had reached a point where they threatened Türkiye directly, with Ankara’s security now tied to its two neighbouring countries. That is an extraordinary statement from a NATO member — effectively drawing a Turkish strategic red line over Lebanese and Syrian territory.
Under the old American-anchored order, no such red line existed. Lebanon was perpetually sacrificed, a weak state with no regional protector capable of imposing real costs on Israeli operations. That calculus has now changed.
Hezbollah emerges weakened militarily but strategically sheltered. Iran’s diplomatic rehabilitation does not require Hezbollah’s disarmament — it requires Lebanon’s stabilisation as a buffer state within the New Order. The agreement creates pressure for a ceasefire, not for the dismantling of the network that gives Iran its Lebanese strategic depth.
For Israel, this is the core dilemma: military operations in Lebanon that once carried manageable costs now risk triggering a broader regional response that the new architecture makes structurally coherent for the first time.
The coming reckoning: Bahrain, UAE and the Abraham Accords
The states facing the most acute strategic exposure in the new architecture are Bahrain and the UAE — the two Arab signatories of the Abraham Accords most deeply integrated into the Israeli-American axis.
They signed those accords in 2020 premised on a specific geopolitical bet: that American military primacy was durable, that Israeli military dominance was unassailable, and that normalisation with Tel Aviv was the winning ticket to regional security and economic modernisation.
Every one of those premises has now been shaken to its foundation.
American primacy has visibly receded — demonstrated not by any declaration, but by the simple fact that the most consequential regional agreement in a generation was negotiated without Washington in the lead role, and with Washington explicitly sidelining Israel from the process. Israeli military might, while still formidable, has been shown to have strategic limits.
And normalisation with Israel now carries reputational and security costs that were never priced into the original Abraham Accords calculation.
Bahrain and the UAE possess sovereign wealth, infrastructure, and relationships that retain value in any regional configuration. But they are now exposed on multiple flanks simultaneously — caught between an American patron recalibrating its commitments, an Israeli partner increasingly isolated from the new regional consensus, and an emerging order being constructed around axes from which they were conspicuously absent.
Their most likely path is quiet hedging rather than dramatic realignment. Expect both states to begin softening their public identification with Israeli positions, to deepen economic ties with Türkiye and expand back-channel contacts with Tehran, and to use their sovereign wealth funds as instruments of strategic repositioning — investments that signal accommodation with the New Order without requiring a formal rupture with Washington.
Abu Dhabi in particular, will seek to be useful to all sides simultaneously. But the window for comfortable hedging is narrowing. The longer Bahrain and the UAE remain identified with a receding order, the less leverage they will carry when they eventually seek terms with the one that is rising.
Oman and Qatar occupy the opposite end of the spectrum. Oman’s historic role as a quiet back-channel to Iran — it was instrumental in facilitating the early Obama-era nuclear conversations that eventually produced the JCPOA — gives it standing and credibility in the New Order. Qatar’s role in the current mediation, hosting senior Iranian officials and explicitly supporting Pakistani-led diplomacy, has purchased it significant goodwill from Tehran. Both states will navigate the transition with relative comfort.
Saudi Arabia’s inevitable pivot
Saudi Arabia’s position is the most consequential and the most delicate of all.
MBS built his regional vision on three pillars: American security guarantees, economic modernisation through Vision 2030 anchored in Western and Israeli-adjacent investment, and a forthcoming normalisation with Israel that was to be the capstone of the Abraham Accords architecture. That capstone now looks not merely delayed but structurally implausible.
The pivot toward Iran and the new regional order is not a choice Riyadh makes from strength. It is a response to the collapse of the strategic alternative. The 2023 Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran rapprochement was the first clear signal. The new architecture now accelerating around the Iran-Türkiye axis makes the logic of that pivot not merely rational but increasingly urgent.
Saudi Arabia cannot indefinitely maintain a posture of confrontation with Iran while its American patron visibly disengages, while the new regional order is being built by actors — Turkey, Pakistan, Qatar — with whom Riyadh has workable and historically deep relationships, and while its own population’s Islamic solidarity instincts run counter to alignment with an Israel conducting military campaigns across the Muslim world.
The Pakistani nuclear umbrella is what makes this pivot strategically viable without strategic nakedness. It allows Riyadh to reduce its dependence on American extended deterrence without being exposed — and to do so through an Islamic solidarity framework that carries profound domestic legitimacy in a way that a Chinese or Russian guarantee never could.
A Saudi Arabia sheltered by Pakistani nuclear deterrence, reconciled with Iran, and aligned with the Turkey-Qatar axis is a Saudi Arabia that has successfully navigated the transition without catastrophic rupture with anyone.
The pivot will not be announced with fanfare. It will happen gradually — through accumulating diplomatic signals, quiet investment reorientations, and careful distancing from Israeli positions on Gaza, Lebanon, and the broader regional conflict. By the time it is fully visible to Western analysts, it will already be irreversible.
Conclusion: Reading the tide
What Amichai Chikli named in alarm this week, we should name with analytical precision: the emergence of a new Middle Eastern order anchored by Indigenous power, shaped by Islamic solidarity and civilisational assertion, and no longer organised around American primacy or Israeli military dominance.
Iran and Turkey will not always agree. Their rivalry is ancient and will resurface across multiple theatres. But on the foundational question of this historical moment — that the old externally-imposed order must be replaced by one reflecting the region’s own balance of forces — they are aligned.
And that alignment, backstopped by Pakistan’s nuclear capability, lubricated by Qatar’s financial diplomacy, and increasingly accommodated by a pivoting Saudi Arabia, is sufficient to constitute a genuinely new architecture.
For America, the lesson is not that it has been defeated. It is that it has been superseded — which is a more permanent condition. The tools America built, the relationships America cultivated, the arsenals America funded across decades of Cold War and counter-terrorism strategy, have been repurposed by actors pursuing their own civilisational interests.
That is not a betrayal. It is simply how history works when the tide turns.
The states that bet on the Old Order — Bahrain, UAE, and above all Israel — now face a reckoning whose full dimensions are only beginning to become visible. The states that positioned themselves wisely — Türkiye, Iran, Pakistan, Qatar, and soon Saudi Arabia — will shape what comes next.
History rewards those who read the tide correctly. The tide has turned. The only remaining question is who moves with it — and who insists on standing still as the water rises.
Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/21/the-new-middle-east-how-the-old-order-died-and-what-is-rising-in-its-place/

By Patrick Decloitre of RNZ Pacific

The Greater Nouméa bus network service will be maintained on New Caledonia’s provincial election day, Sunday June 28, bus operator Tanéo/Mixed Syndicate of Urban Transports (SMTU) has confirmed.

The announcement follows complaints by several political parties in the French Pacific territory, with less than two weeks to go before the crucial provincial elections.
The greater Nouméa bus network was severely impacted following the May 2024 violent unrest, which affected Nouméa and its immediate suburbs.

READ MORE: Campaigning in full swing as New Caledonia heads toward crucial provincial elections
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It has since resumed a limited service only from Mondays to Saturdays — but no longer on Sundays.
The new price of tickets (about US$4.8 for a single one-way fare) and the reduced number of stops has also come under heavy criticism.
Meanwhile, in a recent decision directly related to the provincial elections in the south of New Caledonia’s main island (including Nouméa), it was decided that the former 56 polling stations in the area have now been merged into 9 voting centres.
One of New Caledonia’s prominent pro-independence parties, the Union Calédonienne (UC), has recently challenged the polling stations re-jig in court, arguing that the merger of polling stations effectively penalises Indigenous Kanak and low income families who could not afford taxis or their own private vehicles.
No Sunday services
It also observed that the public bus service no longer operates on Sundays.
The situation forced some voters to walk several kilometres to reach the nearest polling station.
A similar network of merged polling stations was implemented during the municipal elections in March 2026.
However, Nouméa’s administrative tribunal dismissed the case on June 12.
In a media release on Thursday, Tanéo clarified that on an “exceptional” basis, their buses will operate on the Nouméa and Greater Nouméa network from 8am to 6pm at a pace of about one bus per hour on election day.
It said this was a similar service to the one usually practised on Saturdays for Nouméa and its suburban communes of Païta, Mont-Dore and Dumbéa.
The Nouméa and Greater Nouméa Area make up for more than 65 percent of New Caledonia’s total population of 265,000 people.
Advance tickets needed
But Tanéo said that passengers would have to buy their tickets in advance or recharge their bus passes because “no ticket will be sold onboard”.
Passengers who have already subscribed to a valid pass can also use it on election day.
Tanéo/SMTU said its decision to restore a minimum service on election day would be implemented at its own cost, estimated at around US$55,000.
Earlier this month, the company also announced the introduction of new subscriptions (including a monthly pass at US$57.64 or US$145 quarterly).
Reacting to the announcement which is being perceived as a significant gamechanger, Union Calédonienne said on social networks that it was “an important step forward”.
“It brings us closer to two fundamental principles in any democracy: voters’ equality in front of the suffrage and the sincerity of the vote, regardless of voters’ social condition, their commune of residence or their transportation constraints.”

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/06/21/greater-noumea-bus-service-to-be-maintained-on-election-day/