COMMENTARY: By Andrew Brown

Here is a reliable indicator that you are being managed rather than informed.

When the story gets complicated, when the real cause of your pain points uncomfortably toward power, toward allies, toward the architecture of foreign policy that cannot be questioned, the Murdoch press reaches for a scapegoat.

And so, as Australians watch fuel prices surge by approximately 40 percent, a direct consequence of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, as ABC News has itself reported, the editors and columnists of News Corp’s Australian outlets have a different culprit in mind.

Not Netanyahu. Not Trump. Not the war that has sent energy markets into convulsions and supply chains into chaos. Not the illegal military campaign that blocked one of the world’s most critical shipping arteries and sent insurance premiums for tankers into the stratosphere.

No, their preferred villain is Chris Bowen.

Australia’s Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who did not bomb Iran. Chris Bowen, who does not set the global price of oil. Chris Bowen, whose energy policies, right or wrong, are entirely debatable on their merits, has precisely nothing to do with a US-Israeli military campaign that closed the Strait of Hormuz and triggered the worst fuel price shock in years.

The Bowen beat-up is not journalism. It is misdirection of the most deliberate and dishonest kind. It is the Murdoch press doing what it does most reliably and most effectively — running cover for power, redirecting the public’s legitimate anger toward a safe domestic target, and keeping the real architecture of the crisis, the geopolitical decisions, the alliance commitments, the illegal war, safely out of frame.

Because here is what the Murdoch press will not tell you, and what the mainstream media in general has failed to say with anything like the clarity the situation demands.

Australians are paying more for fuel because a war closed the Strait of Hormuz.

Doh!

That war was launched on February 28 of this year by the United States and Israel against Iran.

It was not sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. It was not authorised by any provision of international law that serious legal scholars recognise as applicable. It was not preceded by any meaningful consultation with allies, including Australia, whose economies would absorb its consequences.

It was a unilateral act of military aggression by the most powerful country on earth and its primary regional client, conducted because they had the weapons to do it and had calculated, correctly, that nobody with the power to stop them would try.

Puppet on a string
And when it happened, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went on the ABC’s 7:30 programme and told Sarah Ferguson that what Australia supported was the American decision to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons and to address Iran’s role in destabilising the region.

Read that answer carefully. It is not an answer about Australian interests. It contains no reference to Australian sovereignty, Australian economic security, or the fuel price increase already beginning when those words were spoken.

It is a recitation, clean, fluent, almost word for word, of the American and Israeli justification for the strikes, delivered in the Prime Minister’s voice, on Australian public television, as though it represented Australia’s own sovereign and independently arrived at conclusion, which it didn’t.

He later described Australia’s contribution to the conflict as “constructive”. He has since said he wants more certainty about the war’s objectives and acknowledged there needs to be an end point.

This is the man who endorsed the war before its objectives had been defined, now asking what they are.

Managed complicity and Murdoch
This is what managed complicity looks like up close. You sign on. You use the ally’s language. You call it constructive. And then, when the consequences arrive in the form of 40 percent fuel price increases and small businesses collapsing under freight surcharge pressure, you allow the media ecosystem you have never seriously challenged to redirect the public’s fury at your own Energy Minister.

The Murdoch press is doing its job. That job is not to inform Australians.

That job, in this specific context, on this specific story, is to protect the US-Israeli alliance from the accountability it deserves and to ensure that the legitimate rage of a population being economically punished for decisions made in Washington and Jerusalem never finds its proper target.

The proprietor of that press empire has spent decades cultivating proximity to exactly the power centres that prosecuted this war.

Murdoch newspapers in the United States were among the most consistent cheerleaders for the military adventurism that set the conditions for what is now unfolding. His Australian mastheads take their foreign policy cues from a worldview that treats American and Israeli strategic interests as essentially synonymous with the interests of the English-speaking world.

That worldview is not Australia’s sovereign foreign policy. It is an ideology dressed as common sense, distributed at scale through the country’s most-read newspapers, and deployed most aggressively when the connection between geopolitical decisions and domestic pain threatens to become too obvious to ignore.

Chris Bowen did not block the Strait of Hormuz. A war did.

An illegal war. Conducted without Australian consent. Endorsed by an Australian Prime Minister on national television, using the language of the people who started it.

And the newspapers owned by a man whose commercial and ideological interests align entirely with the people who started it are telling you it is the Energy Minister’s fault.

That is not a coincidence; it is the system working exactly as designed.

The question is whether Australians are going to keep letting it work.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Right now, the United States and Israel are continuing their bombardment of Iran.

As the confirmed death toll climbs past 1330 and hospitals, schools, and residential neighborhoods are hit daily, the media apparatus that sold you the Iraq war and denied Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians for the last two years is now running the same playbook.

The Atlantic is laundering Netanyahu’s reputation as a “conflict-averse” leader while he tells the world this war lets him do what he’s “yearned for” for 40 years.

Bari Weiss is tweeting fire emojis at pro-war clips, falsely suggesting Iran has nuclear weapons, and devoting journalistic resources to tracking the Instagram likes of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife.

CNN is giving unchallenged airtime to International Criminal Court (ICC)-indicted Israeli officials claiming American soldiers have an “obligation” to die for Israel.

And that’s before the cable news network is taken over by Paramount, the Weiss operation run by the nepo-son of Larry Ellison, the single largest donor to Friends of the IDF.

The BBC, meanwhile, leads with nine dead in Israel while relegating some 180 children killed by the U.S. in a girls’ school in Minab to a footnote.

This is what the legacy media machine looks like in wartime. It has always looked like this.

And it is exactly why we launched Drop Site less than two years ago.

While Weiss and CBS were manufacturing consent for this war, Drop Site has had reporters on the ground reporting the facts.

In just the last week:

• Reza Sayah reported from Tehran on a double-tap bombing that killed over 20 people at a popular square during Ramadan, connecting the tactic to US strikes in Afghanistan, and Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza.
• Drop Site correspondent reported from Minab, where a missile struck a girls’ elementary school and killed 180 children, and from Lamerd, where a sports hall full of teenage girls was bombed during practice.
• We were among the first outlets on the ground verifying the strike in Minab as US and Israeli propagandists sought to deny and deflect.
• We have consistently obtained exclusive information from senior Iranian officials who have contradicted claims by Trump, claims that have just as consistently fallen apart under scrutiny.
• We exposed the fabricated CIA narrative about “tracking Khamenei for months” to his “secret location” — his secret location was his office, and he had refused to relocate.

Republished from Drop Site News.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

ANALYSIS: By Andrew Brown

Australia is being told it faces an unprecedented wave of antisemitism — a crisis requiring extraordinary measures, including a Royal Commission. But police data, court findings, and parliamentary evidence tell a very different story.

This is not a story about denying antisemitism. It is about how inflated claims are being used to silence criticism of Israel, criminalise protest, and narrow democratic space.

Australia is being told it faces a moral emergency so grave it justifies extraordinary measures.

A sweeping wave of antisemitism, unprecedented in scale, is said to be engulfing the country, demanding heightened policing, vast public funding, and now a Commonwealth Royal Commission.

A manufactured narrative?

The claim has been repeated so often it has hardened into common sense. But when examined against evidence rather than repetition, the crisis begins to dissolve. What remains is not a surge in antisemitic violence, but the manufacture of a narrative

and its rapid elevation into state doctrine.

This is not denial of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real, dangerous, and must always be confronted where it occurs.

What is being challenged here is the scale, the framing, and the political use of the claim. When slogans replace evidence, the alleged crisis collapses.

Start with the numbers. Australians are repeatedly told there were around 1200 antisemitic incidents in New South Wales and more than 2000 nationally. These figures are treated as settled fact by politicians and the media.

They are nothing of the sort.

They are not police statistics. They are not court outcomes.

They are self-reported incident logs compiled by advocacy organisations using expansive definitions that collapse political speech into racial hatred. Protest slogans, Palestinian flags, stickers, online criticism of Israel, opposition to Zionism, and support for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions are all counted alongside genuinely hateful conduct.

Dissent counted as hate
Once dissent is counted as hate, the number grows and its meaning evaporates.

When these claims were tested against formal state processes, the picture changed radically. Evidence to the New South Wales Upper House antisemitism inquiry showed that only around 13 to 14 incidents met the threshold for potential criminal prosecution.

New South Wales Police did not dispute this.

From 1200 incidents to low double digit chargeable cases is not a rounding error. It is a categorical difference. If Australia were facing a genuine wave of antisemitic violence, police data and court proceedings would reflect it. They do not.

“Australia is told [of] an unprecedented wave of antisemitism, a crisis requiring extraordinary measures, including a Royal Commission. But police data, court findings, and parliamentary evidence tell a very different story”#auspol https://t.co/ooKp2MqJz0

— 💧Michael West (@MichaelWestBiz) January 10, 2026

Fake terror plots
The panic has been sustained by a series of high profile incidents that do not survive scrutiny.

In Sydney, the so called caravan plot and multiple graffiti and vehicle fire cases were initially framed as antisemitic attacks. Later reporting revealed hoaxes, staged events, or criminal activity unrelated to antisemitism as a social phenomenon.

Corrections arrived quietly, long after the alarm had done its work.

The Melbourne Synagogue fire was, we are told, the work of Iran, so it too cannot be seen as a result of local antisemitism.

More damning still was evidence from police inquiries that hundreds of antisemitic incident reports were generated by a single individual, identified as a Jewish teenager who made more than 500 calls alleging threats and attacks. These reports were logged, counted, and publicly relied upon as indicators of a statewide and national surge before being identified as false or self-generated.

This is not a footnote. It exposes a systemic failure.

A reporting framework that allows one person to materially inflate incident figures is not measuring social harm. It is manufacturing it. When that data is amplified by media and cited by politicians as “proof” of crisis, the error ceases to be technical. It becomes political.

Political amplification has been decisive. Senior leaders talked up early claims before facts were settled. Media followed. Initial allegations raced into headlines. Clarifications barely whispered.

Public memory retained the fear, not the correction.

What is unfolding follows a pattern of “manufacturing consent” described decades ago by Noam Chomsky who observed that modern democracies rarely suppress dissent through force. Instead, they manage perception by narrowing the range of acceptable opinion while preserving the appearance of open debate.

Australians are still permitted to speak. They are encouraged to condemn antisemitism in the abstract.

But questioning the scale of the alleged crisis, interrogating the numbers, or insisting on a distinction between hatred of Jews and criticism of Israel is treated as suspect. This is not censorship. It is calibration.

‘Fake protesters’ narrative

The consequences have been most visible in the treatment of protest. Australia has seen one of the largest sustained protest movements in its modern history, with weekly demonstrations in support of Palestine drawing tens of thousands.

Jewish Australians march openly.

Jewish speakers address crowds. Jewish banners appear alongside Palestinian ones. The focus is ceasefire and accountability.

Yet these protests are relentlessly framed as incubators of antisemitism.

The misrepresentation following the October 8 gathering near the Sydney Opera House was emblematic. Claims of genocidal chanting were broadcast nationally and internationally. Those present publicly disputed the account.

The disputed version was amplified. The disavowals were marginalised. A contested moment was frozen at its most inflammatory interpretation and reused as an origin myth.

Sydney Harbour Bridge propaganda
The fracture became impossible to ignore after the Harbour Bridge march, one of the largest demonstrations in Australian history. No violence. No arrests. Jewish Australians marching openly.

Yet the event was branded a hate march by the government’s antisemitism envoy.

If a peaceful protest of that scale can be declared hate without evidence, antisemitism is no longer being identified. It is being declared. And once it can be declared, it can be weaponised.

That weaponisation has a clear objective: to shut down criticism of Israel.

As Israel’s war in Gaza has intensified and the occupation of the West Bank has deepened, the international conversation has shifted toward allegations of genocide, apartheid, and war crimes.

Rather than answer those charges, Israel’s defenders have sought to redefine the debate itself. The problem is no longer what Israel is doing. The problem is those who are talking about it.

Criticism of Israel is reframed as antisemitism. Opposition to Zionism is reframed as racial hatred. Support for Palestinian rights is reframed as extremism. Pro-Palestinian protest is recast as a domestic security problem rather than a human rights movement responding to mass civilian harm.

The endgame
This brings us to the endgame. The government’s mandate for a Commonwealth Royal Commission into antisemitism has now been released. It does not ask whether a nationwide antisemitism wave exists. It assumes one.

From its opening premises, the mandate proceeds on the basis that antisemitism is prevalent across Australian society and institutions and that protest, education, and political expression warrant scrutiny. These are not hypotheses to be tested. They are conclusions already reached.

This is not a fact-finding exercise. It is an implementation exercise.

Many Jewish Australians reject this strategy and stand openly with Palestinians. The issue is not Jewish identity. It is the instrumentalisation of antisemitism claims to silence dissent, suppress protest, and shield a foreign state from accountability.

Antisemitism must always be confronted where it exists.

But evidence must precede power.

Anything less is theatre.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

On June 22, American warplanes crossed into Iranian airspace and dropped 14 massive bombs.

The attack was not in response to a provocation; it came on the heels of illegal Israeli aggression that took the lives of more than 600 Iranians.

This was a return to something familiar and well-practised: an empire bombing innocents across the orientalist abstraction called “the Middle East”.

That night, US President Donald Trump, flanked by his vice-president and two state secretaries, told the world: “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace”.

There is something chilling about how bombs are baptised with the language of diplomacy and how destruction is dressed in the garments of stability. To call that peace is not merely a misnomer; it is a criminal distortion.

But what is peace in this world, if not submission to the West? And what is diplomacy, if not the insistence that the attacked plead with their attackers?

In the 12 days that Israel’s illegal assault on Iran lasted, images of Iranian children pulled from the wreckage remained absent from the front pages of Western media. In their place were lengthy features about Israelis hiding in fortified bunkers.

Victimhood serving narrative
Western media, fluent in the language of erasure, broadcasts only the victimhood that serves the war narrative.

And that is not just in its coverage of Iran. For 20 months now, the people of Gaza have been starved and incinerated. By the official count, more than 55,000 lives have been taken; realistic estimates put the number at hundreds of thousands.

Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed. Most schools have been attacked and destroyed.

Leading human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have already declared that Israel is committing genocide, and yet, most Western media would not utter that word and would add elaborate caveats when someone does dare say it live on TV.

Presenters and editors would do anything but recognise Israel’s unending violence in an active voice.

Despite detailed evidence of war crimes, the Israeli military has faced no media censure, no criticism or scrutiny. Its generals hold war meetings near civilian buildings, and yet, there are no media cries of Israelis being used as “human shields”.

Israeli army and government officials are regularly caught lying or making genocidal statements, and yet, their words are still reported as “the truth”.

Bias over Palestinian deaths
A recent study found that on the BBC, Israeli deaths received 33 times more coverage per fatality than Palestinian deaths, despite Palestinians dying at a rate of 34 to 1 compared with Israelis. Such bias is no exception, it is the rule for Western media.

Like Palestine, Iran is described in carefully chosen language. Iran is never framed as a nation, only as a regime. Iran is not a government, but a threat — not a people, but a problem.

The word “Islamic” is affixed to it like a slur in every report. This is instrumental in quietly signalling that Muslim resistance to Western domination must be extinguished.

Iran does not possess nuclear weapons; Israel and the United States do. And yet only Iran is cast as an existential threat to world order.

Because the problem is not what Iran holds, but what it refuses to surrender. It has survived coups, sanctions, assassinations, and sabotage. It has outlived every attempt to starve, coerce, or isolate it into submission.

It is a state that, despite the violence hurled at it, has not yet been broken.

And so the myth of the threat of weapons of mass destruction becomes indispensable. It is the same myth that was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. For three decades, American headlines have whispered that Iran is just “weeks away” from the bomb, three decades of deadlines that never arrive, of predictions that never materialise.

Fear over false ‘nuclear threat’
But fear, even when unfounded, is useful. If you can keep people afraid, you can keep them quiet. Say “nuclear threat” often enough, and no one will think to ask about the children killed in the name of “keeping the world safe”.

This is the modus operandi of Western media: a media architecture not built to illuminate truth, but to manufacture permission for violence, to dress state aggression in technical language and animated graphics, to anaesthetise the public with euphemisms.

Time Magazine does not write about the crushed bones of innocents under the rubble in Tehran or Rafah, it writes about “The New Middle East” with a cover strikingly similar to the one it used to propagandise regime change in Iraq 22 years ago.

But this is not 2003. After decades of war, and livestreamed genocide, most Americans no longer buy into the old slogans and distortions. When Israel attacked Iran, a poll showed that only 16 percent of US respondents supported the US joining the war.

After Trump ordered the air strikes, another poll confirmed this resistance to manufactured consent: only 36 percent of respondents supported the move, and only 32 percent supported continuing the bombardment

The failure to manufacture consent for war with Iran reveals a profound shift in the American consciousness. Americans remember the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that left hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis dead and an entire region in flames. They remember the lies about weapons of mass destruction and democracy and the result: the thousands of American soldiers dead and the tens of thousands maimed.

They remember the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan after 20 years of war and the never-ending bloody entanglement in Iraq.

Low social justice spending
At home, Americans are told there is no money for housing, healthcare, or education, but there is always money for bombs, for foreign occupations, for further militarisation. More than 700,000 Americans are homeless, more than 40 million live under the official poverty line and more than 27 million have no health insurance.

And yet, the US government maintains by far the highest defence budget in the world.

Americans know the precarity they face at home, but they are also increasingly aware of the impact US imperial adventurism has abroad. For 20 months now, they have watched a US-sponsored genocide broadcast live.

They have seen countless times on their phones bloodied Palestinian children pulled from rubble while mainstream media insists, this is Israeli “self-defence”.

The old alchemy of dehumanising victims to excuse their murder has lost its power. The digital age has shattered the monopoly on narrative that once made distant wars feel abstract and necessary. Americans are now increasingly refusing to be moved by the familiar war drumbeat.

The growing fractures in public consent have not gone unnoticed in Washington. Trump, ever the opportunist, understands that the American public has no appetite for another war.

‘Don’t drop bombs’
And so, on June 24, he took to social media to announce, “the ceasefire is in effect”, telling Israel to “DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” after the Israeli army continued to attack Iran.

Trump, like so many in the US and Israeli political elites, wants to call himself a peacemaker while waging war. To leaders like him, peace has come to mean something altogether different: the unimpeded freedom to commit genocide and other atrocities while the world watches on.

But they have failed to manufacture our consent. We know what peace is, and it does not come dressed in war. It is not dropped from the sky.

Peace can only be achieved where there is freedom. And no matter how many times they strike, the people remain, from Palestine to Iran — unbroken, unbought, and unwilling to kneel to terror.

Ahmad Ibsais is a first-generation Palestinian American and law student who writes the newsletter State of Siege.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz