COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

It was with a sense of disgust rather than despair that I read in The Jerusalem Post today [February 2024]: “‘Antisemitic’ UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese banned from Israel.” We’re being gas-lighted again and this is a chance to push back against the narrative that to support victims of Israel is to somehow be antisemitic.

Back in November 2023 as the Israeli exterminations of Palestinians were ramping up, I had the privilege to hear and speak to Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

She visited Wellington as part of a long-scheduled visit to Australia and New Zealand and spoke to government ministers, relief organisations, journalists and packed halls of citizens who shared a sense of horror at what was playing out in Gaza.

Her speeches were filled with knowledge and forensic clarity, only matched by her decency and sense of humanity — which extended to great courtesy shown to a lone and agitated Israeli supporter at a meeting I attended.

In issuing the banning order, two Israeli ministers stated: “The era of Jews being silent is over. If the UN wants to return to being a relevant body, its leaders must publicly disavow the antisemitic words of the special envoy.”

This is of course a vulgar lie told by ministers actively pursuing genocide. These two indeed aren’t silent: the scream, roar and boom of their shells, missiles and snipers’ bullets have shouted to the world how far the Zionist state has descended into the bowels of depravity.

The Jewish diaspora are anything but silent too — I have been immensely impressed by the courage and persistence of Jewish people worldwide who have shunned the fiction that to be anti-Zionist is to be antisemitic. I hear them loud and clear chanting with righteous indignation, “Not in our name!”

Francesca Albanese rejects false accusations            Video: Al Jazeera

Albanese’s riposte
What really steamed the ministers and momentarily deflected their attention from the slaughter of innocents was Albanese’s riposte to a casual lie by French President Emmanuel Macron: “October 7 was the largest antisemitic massacre of our century.”

Albanese responded, quite rightly, surely self-evidently: “The victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism but in response to Israel’s oppression.” She also stated her respect for the victims of the attack.

When courageous people are attacked by malign and powerful actors, it takes moral clarity and steely determination to walk into a sea of troubles and oppose the true villains. We all need to do that now — and not remain silent.

In the past couple of months Israel has, with the complicity of the white-dominated Western countries, tried to destroy UNRWA, the primary UN organisation providing relief to the Palestinian people, as they endure this genocidal siege.

Because of Israel’s powerful allies, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has kept mum and ignored the vast number of human rights atrocities committed by Israel. (Editor: The ICC subsequently issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity on 21 November 2024).

The Israelis have also hoicked and spat out their contempt for the International Court of Justice. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir commented, “Hague Smague — The ICJ has only proven what everyone already knew, that it is only seeking to prosecute the Jewish nation”.

Traducing the ICJ in this way is another attempt to gaslight us all. If we can do one decent thing it would be to get our governments to raise their voices in defence of the brutalised and besieged United Nations.

Stuck in settler colonial regime
Albanese told audiences on both sides of the Tasman: “When I speak of human rights, I speak of both the Palestinians and the Israelis, who are stuck in a settler colonial regime; this is what we have to solve together.”

She went on to say, “ I will always stand with the victim.”

There is good reason to try to silence Francesca Albanese. She is an authority in the detail of the dehumanisation inflicted on the Palestinians. She has seen the daily lack of proportionality, the discourse of genocide, the military and administrative controls, the deprivation of sanitary services, food and medicine, the surveillance technology, the casual killings, the financial chocking of a people, the way the Israelis are eating up Palestine inch by inch as the West looks the other way.

In short, more than most people she understands the structural system of oppression that is denying the Palestinians the right to exist as a people — culturally, economically, politically. She is a humanist and the exact opposite of an antisemite.

Albanese is one of legions of good people besieged by Israel and its allies. The racist white elites in Europe and the USA are more than happy to adopt a definition that conflates anti-semitism with criticism of Israel, using the recently-minted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition as a tool to silence (that word again) defenders of Palestinian rights.

When the right-wing of UK Labour set to work to oust Jeremy Corbyn, they succeeded, deploying an antisemitic slur. By the time the purge had finished, thousands of Labour progressives had been eliminated from the party membership, including large numbers of Jewish progressives.

The Labour Files, a must-see Al Jazeera documentary, based on a data dump of internal Labour files, uncovered the astonishing statistic that if you were a Jewish member of the UK Labour party you were seven times more likely to be expelled for antisemitism than a non-Jew.

Dustbin of dirty tricks
It’s high time we kick this ghastly trope, this despicable manoeuvre equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism into the dustbin of dirty tricks. Jewish people have suffered persecution for their faith over the centuries. It does their memory a huge disservice — not least because now it is quite clear that genocide is the highest stage of Zionism.

For the record: I have Jewish friends who I invite to read and critique my articles before publication. They are not self-hating Jews, they are not antisemitic, and nor am I. We stand shoulder to shoulder with Jewish people worldwide who are appalled at what is being done in the name of Judaism.

Francesca Albanese said something else memorable that evening: “History is also made of watershed moments, when things change. Let’s make this one of them.”

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser based in Wellington, publisher of Solidarity and a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam war. This article was first published by Scoop on 14 February 2024.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

There was another IDF massacre in Gaza on Saturday, reportedly killing dozens of Palestinians.

Israel as usual claimed it was responding to a ceasefire violation by Hamas, but of course there’s absolutely no evidence for this to be found. AP reports that according to the IDF the strikes were launched after a Hamas fighter “shot at troops in southern Gaza,” but that “no soldiers were hurt” in this alleged attack.

Not so much as a scratch. So I guess we’re just expected to take Israel’s word for it.

Now check out these Western media headlines about the massacre and notice the disgusting spin they are placing on the narrative to normalise the continued slaughter of Palestinians:

Do you see what they’re doing here?

The Western press see the killing of Palestinians as such a baseline norm that Israel can massacre dozens of people in Gaza and they’ll go, “Gosh I sure hope this doesn’t lead to any violations of the ceasefire!”

When Israel violates Trump’s ceasefire, the mainstream media calls it “testing” the ceasefire.

There is no circumstance in this or in any other universe in which Hamas could kill 24 Israelis and the media would reduce it to Hamas “testing” the ceasefire. https://t.co/QfaJh2N8bR

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) November 22, 2025

It’s never a ceasefire violation to commit mass murder against Palestinians. It’s only ever a “test” of the ceasefire, or something that happens “amid a fragile ceasefire”.

If Hamas suddenly attacked and killed dozens of Israelis, these empire propagandists wouldn’t be saying “Hmm I sure hope the fragile ceasefire holds up amid this challenging test.” They’d just call it what it is. And it would be the main news story in the world.

You don’t hate the mass media enough     Audio/video: Caitlin Johnstone

The imperial media have been framing Israel’s ceasefire violations like this the entire time. Just the other day NBC News ran a report about a different IDF massacre in Gaza titled “Israeli airstrikes kill 25 Palestinians in Gaza, rattling fragile ceasefire”. Last month CNN ran a headline claiming “US-brokered ceasefire appears to survive first major test” after Israel killed at least 44 people, when Israel had been violating the ceasefire every single day up to that point.

The mass media have been running egregiously misleading headlines throughout this entire genocide, which has an overwhelmingly distorting effect on public perception in an information environment where skim-reading has become the norm and most social media users share news stories after just reading the headline.

Killing Palestinians is so normalized and accepted as a baseline expectation in the western press that CNN calls this the “first major test” of the ceasefire after Israel killed people in Gaza every single day since the ceasefire agreement was signed. https://t.co/wTSEKzsDCN

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 19, 2025

It almost feels silly to point out that the mass media are wildly biased in favor of Israel two years into a genocide which they’ve actively run propaganda cover for in brazen acts of journalistic malpractice from the very beginning.

But we can’t let it slip from our attention how evil these imperial spinmeisters are. How racist they are. How mendacious and manipulative they are. However much you hate them, you don’t hate them enough.

These are the people who are informing Western perspectives about what’s going on in our world. They aren’t just deceiving the public with dishonest headlines and precipitously slanted reporting which gets loudly amplified by Silicon Valley algorithms, they are writing the stories which get used and cited by AI chatbots and online platforms like Wikipedia which people are increasingly turning to for information about world events.

They are polluting the entire information ecosystem with a deluge of propaganda they are churning out day after day, year after year.

These freaks are attacking our minds. They are attacking humanity’s ability to understand its waking reality. They are continuously indoctrinating the public into an ignorant, Western supremacist worldview which only values human life when it lives in the correct part of the world, speaks the correct language, practises the correct religion, has the correct skin color, and aligns with the correct geopolitical agendas.

They make everything worse. It’s impossible to have enough disdain for these mass media propagandists.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

The mass atrocity in Gaza is a genocide, obviously, and is an undisguised ethnic cleansing operation.

But it’s also a lot more than that.

It’s an experiment  —  to see what kinds of abuses the public will accept without causing significant disruption to the imperial status quo.

It’s a psychological operation  –  to push out the boundaries of what’s normal and acceptable in our minds so that we will consent to even more horrific abuses in the future.

It’s a symptom  —  of Zionism, of colonialism, of militarism, of capitalism, of Western supremacism, of empire-building, of propaganda, of ignorance, of apathy, of delusion, of ego.

It’s a manifestation  —  of violent racist, supremacist and xenophobic belief systems that have always been there but were previously restrained, meeting with the unwholesome nature of alliances that have long been in place but have been aggressively normalised.

It’s a mirror  —– showing us accurately and impartially who we currently are as a civilisation.

It’s a genocide …                                                Video: Caitlin Johnstone

It’s a disclosure  —  showing us what the Western empire we live under really is underneath its fake plastic mask of liberal democracy and righteous humanitarianism.

It’s a revelation  –  showing us who among us really stands for truth and justice and who has been deceiving us about themselves and their motives this entire time.

It’s a catalyst  –  a galvanising force and a rallying cry for all who realise that the murderous power structures we live under can no longer be allowed to stand, and a blaring alarm clock opening more and more snoozing eyes to the need for revolutionary change.

It’s a test  –  of who we are as a species and what we are made of, and of whether we can transcend the destructive patterning that is driving humanity to its doom.

It’s a question  — asking us what kind of world we want to live in going forward, and what kind of people we want to be.

It’s an invitation  —  to become something better than what we are now.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s Parliament has confirmed the unprecedented punishments proposed for opposition indigenous Te Pāti Māori MPs who performed a haka in protest against the Treaty Principles Bill.

Te Pāti Māori co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi will be suspended for 21 days, and MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke suspended for seven days, taking effect immediately.

Opposition parties tried to reject the recommendation, but did not have the numbers to vote it down.

Te Pati Maori MPs speak after being suspended.  Video: RNZ/Mark Papalii

The heated debate to consider the proposed punishment came to an end just before Parliament was due to rise.

Waititi moved to close the debate and no party disagreed, ending the possibility of it carrying on in the next sitting week.

Leader of the House Chris Bishop — the only National MP who spoke — kicked off the debate earlier in the afternoon saying it was “regrettable” some MPs did not vote on the Budget two weeks ago.

Bishop had called a vote ahead of Budget Day to suspend the privileges report debate to ensure the Te Pāti Māori MPs could take part in the Budget, but not all of them turned up.

Robust, rowdy debate
The debate was robust and rowdy with both the deputy speaker Barbara Kuriger and temporary speaker Tangi Utikare repeatedly having to ask MPs to quieten down.

Tākuta Ferris spoke first for Te Pāti Māori, saying the haka was a “signal of humanity” and a “raw human connection”.

He said Māori had faced acts of violence for too long and would not be silenced by “ignorance or bigotry”.

“Is this really us in 2025, Aotearoa New Zealand?” he asked the House.

“Everyone can see the racism.”

He said the Privileges Committee’s recommendations were not without precedent, noting the fact Labour MP Peeni Henare, who also participated in the haka, did not face suspension.

Henare attended the committee and apologised, which contributed to his lesser sanction.

‘Finger gun’ gesture
MP Parmjeet Parmar — a member of the Committee — was first to speak on behalf of ACT, and referenced the hand gesture — or “finger gun” — that Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer made in the direction of ACT MPs during the haka.

Parmar told the House debate could be used to disagree on ideas and issues, and there was not a place for intimidating physical gestures.

Greens co-leader Marama Davidson said New Zealand’s Parliament could lead the world in terms of involving the indigenous people.

She said the Green Party strongly rejected the committee’s recommendations and proposed their amendment of removing suspensions, and asked the Te Pāti Māori MPs be censured instead.

Davidson said the House had evolved in the past — such as the inclusion of sign language and breast-feeding in the House.

She said the Greens were challenging the rules, and did not need an apology from Te Pāti Māori.

NZ First leader Winston Peters said Te Pāti Māori and the Green Party speeches so far showed “no sincerity, saying countless haka had taken place in Parliament but only after first consulting the Speaker.

“They told the media they were going to do it, but they didn’t tell the Speaker did they?

‘Bunch of extremists’
“The Māori party are a bunch of extremists,” Peters said, “New Zealand has had enough of them”.

Peters was made to apologise after taking aim at Waititi, calling him “the one in the cowboy hat” with “scribbles on his face” [in reference to his traditional indigenous moko — tatoo]. He continued afterward, describing Waititi as possessing “anti-Western values”.

Labour’s Willie Jackson congratulated Te Pāti Māori for the “greatest exhibition of our culture in the House in my lifetime”.

Jackson said the Treaty bill was a great threat, and was met by a great haka performance. He was glad the ACT Party was intimidated, saying that was the whole point of doing the haka.

He also called for a bit of compromise from Te Pāti Māori — encouraging them to say sorry — but reiterated Labour’s view the sanctions were out of proportion with past indiscretions in the House.

Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said the debate “would be a joke if it wasn’t so serious”.

“Get an absolute grip,” she said to the House, arguing the prime minister “is personally responsible” if the House proceeds with the committee’s proposed sanctions.

Eye of the beholder
She accused National’s James Meager of “pointing a finger gun” at her — the same gesture coalition MPs had criticised Ngarewa-Packer for during her haka. The Speaker accepted he had not intended to; Swarbrick said it was an example where the interpretation could be in the eye of the beholder.

She said if the government could “pick a punishment out of thin air” that was “not a democracy”, putting New Zealand in very dangerous territory.

An emotional Maipi-Clarke said she had been silent on the issue for a long time, the party’s voices in haka having sent shockwaves around the world. She questioned whether that was why the MPs were being punished.

“Since when did being proud of your culture make you racist?”

“We will never be silenced, and we will never be lost,” she said, calling the Treaty Principles bill a “dishonourable vote”.

She had apologised to the Speaker and accepted the consequence laid down on the day, but refused to apologise. She listed other incidents in Parliament that resulted in no punishment.

NZ Parliament TV: Te Pāti Māori Privileges committee debate.  Video: RNZ

Maipi-Clarke called for the Treaty of Waitangi to be recognised in the Constitution Act, and for MPs to be required to honour it by law.

‘Clear pathway forward’
“The pathway forward has never been so clear,” she said.

ACT’s Nicole McKee said there were excuses being made for “bad behaviour”, that the House was for making laws and having discussions, and “this is not about the haka, this is about process”.

She told the House she had heard no good ideas from the Te Pāti Māori, who she said resorted to intimidation when they did not get their way, but the MPs needed to “grow up” and learn to debate issues. She hoped 21 days would give them plenty of time to think about their behaviour.

Labour MP and former Speaker Adrian Rurawhe started by saying there were “no winners in this debate”, and it was clear to him it was the government, not the Parliament, handing out the punishments.

He said the proposed sanctions set a precedent for future penalties, and governments might use it as a way to punish opposition, imploring National to think twice.

He also said an apology from Te Pāti Māori would “go a long way”, saying they had a “huge opportunity” to have a legacy in the House, but it was their choice — and while many would agree with the party there were rules and “you can’t have it both ways”.

Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi said there had been many instances of misinterpretations of the haka in the House and said it was unclear why they were being punished, “is it about the haka . . . is about the gun gestures?”

“Not one committee member has explained to us where 21 days came from,” he said.

Hat and ‘scribbles’ response
Waititi took aim at Peters over his comments targeting his hat and “scribbles” on his face.

He said the haka was an elevation of indigenous voice and the proposed punishment was a “warning shot from the colonial state that cannot stomach” defiance.

Waititi said that throughout history when Māori did not play ball, the “coloniser government” reached for extreme sanctions, ending with a plea to voters: “Make this a one-term government, enrol, vote”.

He brought out a noose to represent Māori wrongfully put to death in the past, saying “interpretation is a feeling, it is not a fact . . .  you’ve traded a noose for legislation”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone

One thing October 7 did accomplish was getting Israel and its allies to show the world their true face. Getting them to stand before all of humanity to say, “If you resist us, we’ll kill your babies. We’ll deliberately shoot your kids in the head.

“We’ll massacre medical workers. We’ll systematically destroy all your hospitals. We’ll rape you and torture you as a matter of policy.

“We’ll lay siege to the entire civilian population. We’ll make your entire land uninhabitable and then we’ll kick you all out and take it for ourselves.

“We’ll assassinate all your journalists and block foreign journalists from entry so that nobody can see what we’re doing to you.

“We’ll lie about all of these things the entire time, and you’ll know we’re lying, and we’ll know you know we’re lying, and you’ll know we know you know we’re lying.

“And we’ll get away with it anyway, because we hold all the cards.”

Sometimes I’ll run into people who say “What did Hamas expect to happen? They had to know Israel would do this!” They say this in an effort to lay the blame for Israel’s genocidal atrocities at the feet of Hamas, as though Israel is some kind of wild animal who can’t be held accountable for its actions if someone gets too close to its mouth.

But of course Hamas knew Israel and its allies would react this way. Of course they did.

They knew they were dealing with a murderous and tyrannical civilisation that is capable of limitless evil and doesn’t see Palestinians as human beings. They knew it because they’d lived under it all their lives.

That is the problem they were trying to address with their actions on October 7.

Palestine has single handedly unmasked the world

— Rahma (@Rahmazeinegypt) April 6, 2025

You can disagree with the decisions Hamas made on that day. You can say they should have used other means to pursue justice. You can denounce them, hate them, do the whole public ritual necessary for mainstream acceptance in Western society.

But one thing you can’t do is deny that Israel and its allies have been revealing their true face to the world every day since, at levels they previously were not.

It’s all fully visible now. It’s all right there on the surface. We can try to continue pretending we live in a free society that believes in truth and justice and regards all people as equal, but we’ll all know it’s a lie.

What we are, first and foremost, is a civilisation that will actively support history’s first live-streamed genocide. That’s the single most relevant fact about the Western world at this point in history. It’s staring us right in the face every day.

Hamas succeeded in exposing the true face of the empire.    Video: Caitlin Johnstone

October 7 certainly didn’t make life any easier for the Palestinians, but one thing it did do was take away our ability to hide from ourselves.

Hamas reached thousands of kilometres around the world and permanently destroyed our ability to avoid the truth about the kind of dystopia we are really living in.

Our rulers may succeed in eliminating the Palestinians as a people, but one thing they will never be able to do is put those blinders back on our eyes.

What has been seen cannot be unseen.

Caitlin Johnstone is an Australian independent journalist and poet. Her articles include The UN Torture Report On Assange Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Society. She publishes a website and Caitlin’s Newsletter. This article is republished with permission.

This article was first published on Café Pacific.

The chief of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees has described Gaza as “no land” for children, as two rallies were held in New Zealand’s largest city Auckland today to mark Palestine Children’s Day.

Citing the UN agency for children UNICEF, Phillipe Lazzarini said that “at least 100 children are reported killed or injured every day in Gaza” since Israel broke the truce with Hamas on March 18.

“The ceasefire at the beginning of the year gave Gaza’s children a chance to survive and be children,” said Lazzarini, who is Commissioner-General of UNRWA.

“The resumption of the war is again robbing them of their childhood. The war has turned Gaza into a ‘no land’ for children. This is a stain on our common humanity.

Harrowing.
At least 100 children are reported killed or injured every day in #Gaza, since the strikes resumed (on 18 March) according to @UNICEF

Young lives cut short in a war not of children’s making.

Since the war began 1.5 years ago, 15,000 children were reportedly…

— Philippe Lazzarini (@UNLazzarini) April 4, 2025

The two Auckland Palestinian solidarity events today marking April 5 — one a children’s activities gathering in Albert Park and the other a regular weekly rally at “Palestine Corner” in downtown Te Komititanga Square — were among 25 activist happenings across the country on week 78 of continuous protests.

In Albert Park, one of the organisers said the children “had lots of fun — painting, drawing, listening to stories, making collages, playing games with Palestinian themes and some families had picnics.”

In “Palestine Corner”, several teachers spoke of the realities of the genocide in Gaza, protesters carried placards with photos and names of children killed by the Israeli bombing, while children coloured pictures and blew bubbles.

Huge toll on children
Reporting from Deir el-Balah, Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reports that children have been among the most severely affected by the continuing Israeli war on Gaza.

“Many of them have been killed, injured and orphaned and we can see that thousands of children have lost their limbs and they are suffering from severe trauma,” he said.

“As the UNRWA spokesperson stated: 51 percent of Gaza’s population are children and they make up the largest proportion of those that were killed since the war began back on October 7, 2023.

“For many children here in Gaza, displacement has taken a very heavy, huge toll on them.

“They have been repeatedly displaced, forced to flee their homes and right now they are forced to live in overcrowded shelters and tents and on the rubble of their destroyed homes and residential buildings.”

The Palestinian Human Rights Organisations Council (PHROC) — made up of nine groups — has written to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk to demand action on Israel in protest over the killing of children.

Israeli forces continued to kill Palestinians on a genocidal scale in Gaza and had created “conditions of life unfit for human survival,” the council told Turk.

Israel’s “intent to eliminate and eventually destroy Palestinians across unlawfully occupied Palestine” is also evident in occupied West Bank, the council said.

The council called on Turk to clearly label Israel’s conduct as genocide, pressure the Israeli government to end its genocide, ensure accountability for Israeli perpetrators, and mobilise the UN to implement a plan to end genocide against Palestinians across the occupied territory.

Albanese’s mandate renewed
Meanwhile, Francesca Albanese will continue to serve as Special Rapporteur until 30 April 2028, a spokesperson for the UN Human Rights Council announced after the vote today in Geneva by the UNHRC to retain her.

The UN Human Rights Council defied the efforts of Israel, the US, The Netherlands and other Western countries trying to unseat Albanese, who has been special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 for the past three years.

Albanese had faced a smear campaign for many months by deniers of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, which she had warned about in October 2023.

She documented the crimes against humanity, notably in her devastating report Anatomy Of A Genocide in April 2024.

The influence of the West is crumbling. Francesca Albanese‘s mandate has been renewed – as it is usual procedure – despite heavy pressure from Western Zionist genocidal lobby ❤️‍🔥 the tables are turning 🔥 pic.twitter.com/vULovc3bVn

— Melanie Schweizer 🇩🇪 (@Melaniebelizi) April 5, 2025

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Marshall Islands marked 71 years since the most powerful nuclear weapons tests ever conducted were unleashed over the weekend.

The Micronesian nation experienced 67 known atmospheric nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958, resulting in an ongoing legacy of death, illness, and contamination.

The country’s President Hilda Heine says her people continue to face the impacts of US nuclear weapons testing seven decades after the last bomb was detonated.

The Pacific Islands have a complex history of nuclear weapons testing, but the impacts are very much a present-day challenge, Heine said at the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting in Tonga last year.

She said that the consequences of nuclear weapons testing “in our own home” are “expensive” and “cross-cutting”.

“When I was just a young girl, our islands were turned into a big laboratory to test the capabilities of weapons of mass destruction, biological warfare agents, and unexploded ordinance,” she said.

“The impacts are not just historical facts, but contemporary challenges,” she added, noting that “the health consequences for the Marshallese people are severe and persistent through generations.”

“We are now working to reshape the narrative from that of being victims to one of active agencies in helping to shape our own future and that of the world around us,” she told Pacific leaders, where the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres was a special guest.

She said the displacement of communities from ancestral lands has resulted in grave cultural impacts, hindering traditional knowledge from being passed down to younger generations.

“As well as certain traditional practices, customs, ceremonies and even a navigational school once defining our very identity and become a distant memory, memorialised through chance and storytelling,” President Heine said.

“The environmental legacy is contamination and destruction: craters, radiation, toxic remnants, and a dome containing radioactive waste with a half-life of 24,000 years have rendered significant areas uninhabitable.

“Key ecosystems, once full of life and providing sustenance to our people, are now compromised.”

Heine said cancer and thyroid diseases were among a list of presumed radiation-induced medical conditions that were particularly prevalent in the Marshallese community.

Displacement, loss of land, and psychological trauma were also contributing factors to high rates of non-communicable diseases, she said.

“Despite these immense challenges, the Marshallese people have shown remarkable resilience and strength. Our journey has been one of survival, advocacy, and an unyielding pursuit of justice.

“We have fought tirelessly to have our voices heard on the international stage, seeking recognition.”

In 2017, the Marshall Islands government created the National Nuclear Commission to coordinate efforts to address testing impacts.

“We are a unique and important moral compass in the global movement for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation,” Heine said.

The US Deputy Secretary of State in the Biden-Harris administration Kurt Cambell said that Washington, over decades, had committed billions of dollars to the damage and the rebuilding of the Marshall Islands.

“I think we understand that that history carries a heavy burden, and we are doing what we can to support the people in the [Compact of Free Association] states, including the Marshall Islands,” he said.

“This is not a legacy that we seek to avoid. We have attempted to address it constructively with massive resources and a sustained commitment,” he told reporters in Nuku’alofa.

A shared nuclear legacy
The National Nuclear Commission chairperson Ariana Tibon-Kilma, a direct descendant of survivors of the nuclear weapons testing programme Project 4.1 — which was the top-secret medical lab study on the effects of radiation on human bodies — told RNZ Pacific that what occured in Marshall Islands should not happen to any country.

“This programme was conducted without consent from any of the Marshallese people,” she said.

“For a number of years, they were studied and monitored, and sometimes even flown out to the US and displayed as a showcase.

“The history and trauma associated with what happened to my family, as well as many other families in the Marshall Islands, was barely spoken of.

“What happened to the Marshallese people is something that we would not wish upon any other Pacific island country or any other person in humanity.”

She said the nuclear legacy was a shared one.

“We all share one Pacific Ocean and what happened to the Marshall Islands, I am, sure resonates throughout the Pacific,” Tibon-Kilma said.

“I think compensation for survivors is key,” she said.

“It is part of a transitional justice approach. I can’t really speak to the breadth and the depth of the compensation that would need to be provided, but it is certainly an ongoing issue for discussion.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

To understand antisemitism, we need a meaning for ‘semitism’, and another -ism to contextualise semitism.

Literally, semitism means the promotion of the Semitic people, whoever they might be. The most appropriate comparator for ‘semitism’ is ‘hamitism’, relating to the ‘hamites’ or ‘Hamitic people’; analogous to the ‘Semitic people’. These are archaic terms, befitting the nineteenth century pseudo-sciences of eugenics, physiognomy and phrenology; semitism is a bible-derived concept of a preferred race, and of racism.

Our particular interest in 2024 is in two subsets: a racial subset of the Semitic people known as the ‘Jewish People’, or the Jewish ethnos or ‘nation’ (ie where a nation is a ‘people’ rather than a sovereign territory; and a racial subset of the Hamitic people, known today as ‘Palestinians’. Semite is named after Noah’s son ‘Shem’; hamite is named after Hoah’s son ‘Ham’. The biblical ‘curse of Ham’ was invoked in particular with regard to Ham’s youngest son Canaan, the putative father of the Canaanites, especially including today’s Palestinians.

While the Palestinian Arabs have been deemed by some Christians and Jews to belong to a cursed ethnicity, the mythistorical Jewish ethic line – descended from Shem – came to be known as a (or ‘the’) chosen people. Hence semitism (or philosemitism) is the presumption of the exceptionalism of the Jewish ethnicity. Antisemitism, then, can be regarded as a dislike or disapproval of the Jewish ‘race’. (For a few though, antisemitism seems to mean a denial of this presumption of exception.) Likewise, antihamitism, while it could be understood as a denial of the curse, is probably best understood as an analogue of antisemitism; as a dislike of or disapproval of the Palestinian ‘race’. In their most extreme forms, antisemitism and antihamitism are both presumptions in favour of the expulsion or genocide of an ethnic people. Both forms of discriminatory hatred need to be equally condemned.

While there is no scientific evidence that there was ever such a thing as a Jewish race or a Palestinian race, there are Jewish ethnicities (plural). Many people who have taken DNA tests will have some of their ancestry defined as Sephardic Jewish or Ashkenazi Jewish; but never simply ‘Jewish’. (Nobody will have Christian or Muslim as an ‘ethnicity’.) These Jewish ethnicities show in these tests because of widespread historical exclusions, within Jewish communities, of non-Jews as marriage partners; thus these initially religious communities may be classified as ancestral endogamies and, on that basis, as ethnicities. We should not be distracted; Judaism is the foremost (ie progenitor) of the monotheistic religions. Jewishness is a meme, not a gene. A ‘secular Jew’ – or a ‘secular Muslim’ – is an oxymoron; a non-religious adherent to a religion.

Endogamy cultures can be problematic, not so much because of inbreeding within a limited gene pool, but mainly because of the antipathies caused by self-segregation. In some places there has been widespread and mutual self-segregation; the West Russian ‘Pale of (Jewish) Settlement‘ which lasted formally for over a century (until World War 1; and informally for much longer) was one such territory in which endogamy bred hatred and hatred bred endogamy. Reciprocal apartheid. Further, the lands of that former Pale were particularly coveted in the 1930s by the German National Socialists for the realisation of their Lebensraum policy.

Antisemitism as a panoply of Christian Judeophobias

Orthodox Antisemitism

In the years between 300 BCE and 300 CE, the Eastern Mediterranean was politically and then culturally, a ‘Hellenic’ (ie Greek) empire; a cultural empire which gained two unofficial capital cities, Byzantium and Alexandria. That empire was Romanised from the first century BCE; ie subject to the political (but not cultural) hegemony of Rome.

Judaism, as the vanguard for monotheism – a novel religio-cultural phenomenon – became a successful proselytising religion, especially within the Hellenic cultural sphere. In say 200 CE, by far the majority of Jews in the world were converts. Judaism’s spiritual home city was Jerusalem, the principal city of Judah/Judea. There were also many Jewish converts in the territories to the north and east of Jerusalem; and there were still rabbinical Jews in Babylon (in modern Iraq), which is where early Jewish intellectuals decamped to after the fall of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE.

With the rise of Christianity in the Eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century CE, this new aggressive monotheism largely displaced Judaism in the Roman empire; many Eastern Mediterranean Jews either converted to Christianity, or emigrated. Many of the emigrants travelled west; with many migrating Jews converting many of the ‘pagans’ (especially Berbers) of the Western Mediterranean to monotheism. These people, initially mostly in the African ‘Maghreb’, became the Sephardic Jews.

Just as in the Christian Reformation in the sixteenth century, the new aggressive faith used the rhetoric of cultural-racism against Judaism, the hitherto established faith. Thus Orthodox archbishops such as John Chrysostom of Constantinople waged a vicious rhetorical war against the Jews. (Refer Simon Schama, Story of the Jews, episode 2.) Central themes of this rhetoric were the alleged complicity of the Jewish priesthood in the execution of Jesus Christ (by Christians deifying Jesus, his crucifiers therefore became guilty of deicide); and a greater tolerance for the practice of moneylending, in particular the usurious practice of ‘making money from money’.

In turn, those loyal to Judaism saw the Christian concept of the Holy Trinity as a ‘slippery slope’ away from monotheism; ie, away from the First Commandment of Moses.

Schisms

Christianity may be understood as the first of the great schisms. Islam later became the second schism from the Jewish branch, and Roman Catholicism the second schism of the Christian branch. After that, Protestantism became the great schism from the Catholic branch, during the Reformation of the sixteenth century.

Just as Calvinism became the most anti-Catholic form of Protestant Christianity around the year 1550, 1,200 years earlier the emerging Greek Christian Orthodoxy (based in Byzantium renamed Constantinople, now Istanbul) became the most virulently anti-Jewish form of Christianity. In contrast, the Islamic schism from Judaism did not promote a hatred of the parent religion. Islam was never antisemitic in the way that Orthodox Christianity was.

The Islamic – or Koranic – variant of ‘Abrahamic’ monotheism rapidly proselytised in North Africa and Southwest Asia; this process – both cultural and military – was known as ‘Jihad’. While Islam proved popular, in part because of its tax advantages in Islamised territories, it was tolerant towards monotheistic non-converts; Jews with Muslim overlords generally prospered. (Muslims became known as Ishmaelites, in reference to Ishmael, the eldest son of Abraham, the mythical father of the Islamised – largely ‘Hamitic’ – races.) Christianity was the least tolerant of the three monotheist branches of biblical Judaism.

The Russian Jews

In the second half of the first millennium, all three monotheisms were seeking converts among bordering polytheist populations. Judaism continued to make progress in two main areas, in addition to the Western Mediterranean. These were Yemen (and subsequently Ethiopia), and Khazaria.

Khazaria (the Khazar Khaganate; see map) was a mixed European and Turkic territory to the north of the Caucasus Mountains, in modern-day southwestern Russia; mountains which include Europe’s highest, Mt Elbrus.) It is this region that gave to people of European ethnicity the label ‘Caucasian‘.)

The Khazar Khaganate dates from 650 CE, and lasted in some form until the early 13th century.

In the eighth century, the Khazarian people – especially the ruling class, realising that it was not a matter of whether to convert to monotheism but to choose which faith to adopt – had three to choose from. Realising that they would have less socio-political autonomy if they adopted either of the two religions on their doorstep, they chose Judaism. As converted Jews, they were deemed subsequently to be descended from Ashkenaz, a son of Noah’s other son Japheth. The Khazarites became  the Ashkenazi Jews (albeit not a popular view within the twentyfirst-century Israeli secular priesthood; refer Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People). In the year 1000 CE, for example, this was the most populous Jewish community in the world.

Around the year 1220, the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish polities in those steppe-lands were erased by the Mongol invaders. The predominantly Jewish population of Khazaria fled into the emerging Russian territories; Slavic lands whose people were then consolidating their faith as Orthodox Christians. (Religious ‘water’ and ‘oil’ didn’t really mix; there would be minimal assimilation between these two populations.)

In later centuries, these Ashkenazi Jews almost certainly mixed with other Jewish groups who had moved east, especially from the Central Europe. (In The Missing Link of Jewish European Ancestry: Contrasting the Rhineland and the Khazarian Hypotheses, Eran Elhaik, using DNA analysis, establishes the ethnic predominance of the Khazarites within those Jewish communities of the Pale.)

Catholic Antisemitism

The schism between the (Greek) Orthodox and (Roman) Catholic churches was a slow-moving affair, which covered most of the second half of the first millennium CE. By and large, Catholicism acquired the same antisemitism, though developed a greater degree of pragmatism towards Judaism.

Orthodox Christianity and Islam emerged as much bigger geopolitical threats than Judaism to Catholic western Europe. Judaism receded to the periphery of monotheistic West Eurasia (to use the sensible name adopted by James Belich in his 2022 book The World the Plague Made, noting that North and Northeast Africa also belonged to this geopolity).

The basics of the European geopolitical fracture that still stands today were established during the reign of the Frankish emperor, Charlemagne. By the early ninth century, Catholicism prevailed across the entirety of Western and Central Europe. (There were still ‘pagan’ pockets – eg, in Scandinavia; otherwise, the border established by Charlemagne is that of today’s European Union. We note that the Catholic parts of the former Yugoslavia are in the European Union, and the Orthodox and Muslim parts of that former union are not. We also may note that Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus are exceptions; they are more Orthodox than Catholic. And we note that the post-Catholic Protestantisation of northern Europe occurred many centuries after Charlemagne.)

Simon Schama (in his Story) notes that Judaism came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066; this suggests that the Frankish kingdoms (which became France) had been a significant recipient of the racially diverse Jewish refugees from the Eastern Mediterranean. And it suggests that the (still relatively small) Rhineland (western German) population of Jews in Medieval Europe also arrived via that French route.

In the centuries either side of 1000 CE, the fusion of Jewish, Muslim and Christian cultures seems to have created a synergy, creating a cultural high tide of tolerance and intellectual osmosis. An interesting consequence may have been the emergence of modern banking. Pure banking developed in a Mediterranean world in which money-lending (usuary; charging interest) was prohibited by Christian and Muslims, though was pragmatically tolerated when the money-lenders were Jews. (Early banking was a side-hustle of rich Italian and Spanish merchants, who made written promises – promissory notes – and ‘cleared’ them among each other. They invested the money in their possession – their mercantile profits – to finance ventures; as financier shareholders of each venture, they would take a share of the profits or losses.)

It was Christian Kings and Princes who did much of the borrowing from Jewish moneylenders; these entitled overlords had a propensity to turn to antisemitism when they become insolvent. The Catholic world became especially prickly towards its cultural rivals, including Judaism, in the later decades of the 12th century.

Antisemitism in western Europe seems to have emerged around the same time that Catholic Crusader groups had conquered much of the ‘Holy Lands’ (the Levant; modern Syria/Lebanon and Israel/Palestine) from both Muslim and Orthodox overlords. Tolerance and pragmatism towards Jews largely fell apart in Spain, England and France in the twelfth century, leading to expulsions of Jews from those countries; and the boosting of the Rhineland population of Jews. Shama mentions the problem of antisemitism emerging in England during the reign of the Crusader King (Richard ‘Lionheart’; 1189-1199); indeed, Richard’s mother Eleanor had been responsible for expelling Jews from her ancestral territory of Aquitaine. Jews were expelled from Spain in stages from the 12th to the 14th centuries; and from England during the 13th century.

This is about the same time (early twelfth century) as when the Khazarite Jews had to flee (northwest into West Russia) from the Golden Horde established by the Mongol emperor Genghis Khan.

Neither Shlomo Sand nor Simon Shama mentioned the terrible atrocities committed upon Jews – especially in western Germany and Switzerland – during the first and biggest round of the Black Death (1348 to 1352; the ‘Plague’). But it’s true. Many Jews were scapegoated and grotesquely murdered; accused of having poisoned the wells in many central European towns.

Christian Poland, which was less affected by the Black Death than Western Europe, gained a reputation for relative tolerance towards Jews. So, it is likely that Eastern and Western Europeans converged in the territories we today call Poland, creating a relatively cosmopolitan population of Jews; Jews who practiced their faith while also mixing more easily with their Catholic (and later Protestant) neighbours; that is, more easily than the larger populations of Jews further east were able to integrate with their Orthodox neighbours.

Protestant Antisemitism (including Christian Zionist Antisemitism)

While the Bible (Old Testament) became more important for Jewish populations in recent centuries, the newer Talmud was a substantially more important text in the practice of Judaism in the medieval period.

It was the Protestant Christians during and after the Reformation who first took to the Bible – both Testaments – as literal statements of history and prophecy. Jews suddenly played an affirmative role as the spiritual and biological ancestors of Christians; of particular importance, they played an important role in Christian prophecy (including apocalyptic prophecy), especially in the momentum to re-establish an ethnoreligious state called ‘Israel’.

Further, Protestantism – especially the more Evangelical forms (eg Calvinism) – was attractive to the expanding Plague-recovery mercantile communities of Northwest Europe. Under the auspices of the reformed Church, the sanctions against usury – sanctions against making money from money – were increasingly downplayed. Christians could do business with Jews again; soon enough though, these two mercantile-religious communities became rivals. While Jews were no longer proselytisers, the mercantile Protestants (especially the Dutch) were eager expansionists, expanding their new capitalist domains throughout the much of the world; although only encroaching on the coastal communities of the Islamic World of the Indian Ocean rim, and of the ‘Far East’.

Protestant antisemitism was born out of capitalist rivalry; and out of the new Christian racial tropes, which facilitated the acceptance of intensely racist forms of slavery. In the nineteenth century – in the era of emerging ethno-nationalism within Europe, and emerging racial supremacism – the Jewish ‘nation’ became a rivalrous irritant to increasingly nationalist Christianity. Further, as Shlomo Sand observed, in Eastern Europe, a more dangerous form of ethno-nationalism emerged; one which built on the original Orthodox tradition of antisemitism. This eastern rivalry had morphed from being mainly religious to mainly ethnic; especially Slavs versus Jews.

To the west of Europe, in the now geopolitically dominant United Kingdom, Christian Zionism became a thing. While (Protestant) Christian Zionism had its roots in the Puritan era of Oliver Cromwell in the 1640s and 1650s, by the 1830s the upper crust of even Anglican society wanted Jews to be ‘over there’ rather than ‘over here’. Although the United Kingdom elected a Jewish Prime Minister – Benjamin Disraeli – in the 1860s, this only reinforced latent antisemitism amongst his dour political rivals. (Queen Victoria found Disraeli to be more personable than his political opponents.)

Anyway, through that century, there was increasing (mainly Christian) talk in the United Kingdom and Western Europe about re-establishing a Jewish homeland, though not necessarily in Jewish biblical home-lands in the Eastern Mediterranean. The possibility of an expansion of Jewish settlement in Palestine emerged, however, as the then overlords of the Levant – the Turkish Ottomans – appeared to be presiding over of a dying empire. The European ‘great powers’ were lining up to divide the ‘Middle East’ – an annoyingly Britocentric term – between them.

This possibility didn’t stop the British ruling-class antisemites from concocting (just after 1900) a plan to establish a Jewish ‘homeland’ in Uganda. While Uganda is a pleasant and fertile territory in Africa, this resettlement proposal tells much about the irredeemable racism of West Europeans towards the presumed ‘inferior’ races; especially but not only Africans. And it shows zero sensitivity to Jewish sensibilities regarding their biblical homeland.

Meanwhile the antisemitic pogroms in Eastern Europe – mainly in the then Russian Empire – continued as Slavic nationalisms were gaining pace. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Ashkenazi Jews emigrated to their destinations of choice: United States and United Kingdom.

For European Jews, the interwar crisis began in 1924 when the United States closed down their immigration from Europe; and the United Kingdom pretty much did the same thing. The United States’ near-prohibition of Jewish immigration lasted until the mid-1950s. It was only after 1924 that large numbers of Eastern European Jews looked to emigrate to (British Mandatory) Palestine; that’s where British and American immigration policy deflected them to.

Then, in the 1930s, the German National Socialists (Nazis) started both scapegoating their Jewish residents (effectively blaming them for the Great Depression, on account of apparent Jewish overrepresentation in the finance industry) and coveting their lands in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the newly independent Baltic States, and especially Soviet Russia.

The new Jewish residents in British Palestine recreated the segregated lifestyles they had known in Russia, creating much animosity between them and their new Palestinian neighbours. Pretty much by definition, these settlers were Zionists, because they were recreating the biblical promised land of Zion, even though they would rather have gone to the United States. The indigenous Palestinian population resented the new settlers; not because of their ethnicity, but because of their insensitivity and exclusiveness; an insensitivity comparable with many prior experiences of other indigenous peoples in the face of settler-colonisation.

Many immigrants from the west Russian territories were Socialist Zionists; indeed, it was that leftish faction which largely ruled modern Israel from its formalisation in 1948 until the mid-1970s. Other interwar settlers included the fascist Zionists of the Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang. Still others – including the Irgun, which became Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party – were on the less-extreme political right. All of these settler-Zionist factions formed resistance militias that became anti-British (ie anti- the new post-Ottoman overlord of the southern Levant) and (after the 1929 uprising) anti-Palestinian. (Just as Hamas is a resistance militia today.) The anti-Palestinian aspect of this settler militancy became, over time, increasingly racist; it became antihamitic, a racial prejudice as problematic as antisemitism.

Around 1940, the Lehi fascists tried to do a deal with Adolf Hitler. Both the Nazis and the Lehi wanted the European Jews to leave Europe. The Lehi wanted a mass transfer of that population to their new Zion in the Levant. Great Britain, in particular, was in the way. From the British point-of-view, the time to create an exclusively Jewish homeland had passed; the logistics of a mass resettlement programme during World War Two were impossible, and racism had passed its peak in the United Kingdom.

For Hitler, those logistics of a mass transfer to Jews to Palestine were always going to be problematic; exponentially more so once Germany was at war with Britain. Instead, Hitler reconsidered the British antisemitic plan to transfer the European Jews to Africa. After May 1940 there was a pro-Nazi puppet government installed in Southern France – the Vichy regime – which had control over France’s imperial territories. Hitler formulated a plan to settle the Eastern European Jews to Madagascar! While never practical, Winston Churchill certainly made such a transfer quite impossible. The United Kingdom invaded and conquered the Vichy French territory of Madagascar in 1942. (Who said the British military was overstretched in 1942? In that year, Winston Churchill argued that Australian troops should stay in Europe. John Curtin, the new Australian Prime Minister, wanted those soldiers to return home to defend Australia.)

Hitler’s options for the Jews substantially narrowed. His antisemitism and desire for lebensraum had left him committed to the removal of this population, but with no destination to remove them to, and few resources to do the removing. The rest became tragic history – from 1942 to 1945 – of the worst possible kind.

Still – even after the Holocaust – the pro-Israel antisemitic United States denied immigration entry to Jews, except that is for a few handpicked ones. Most holocaust survivors of World War Two were left with only one option; to migrate to British Palestine or (after 1948) to Israel. The Lehi (who fought the British during WW2), the Irgun, and the socialistic Haganah all served as ‘freedom fighters’ from 1946 to 1948. This was a successful militant insurgency. The British departed as soon as the United Nations was formed; they couldn’t wait to leave. The United Kingdom supported the creation of an ethnocratic sovereign state as the eventual solution to its longstanding antisemitic project of resettlement, indeed hoping that large numbers of British-resident Jews would join the refugee Jews in the new state of Israel.

Israel had been a longstanding antisemitic project, with the object of both cleansing Europe of Jews and creating a Europe-ish sovereign state in the ‘Middle East’, a state that would help to project a European-style foreign policy in a region which was set to undergo full decolonisation.

Conclusion

Israel today has arisen as a consequence of two millenniums of antisemitism in its various Christian forms. Israel is a nation-state, which – if it wishes not to be a pariah state – must abide by the same rules as any other nation state. It is not exceptional – the rules do not allow for exceptionalism – and the rules do not allow for the new nation to promote an alternative form of racism that’s as bad as antisemitism.

Jews are an ethnically diverse people with a shared cultural heritage; Judaism is a culture rather than a nation. A significant number – though not a majority – of the Jewish people live in the nation-state of Israel, a nation state that’s 76 years-old and counting. It’s a nation which presently pursues a relatively soft form of antihamitic Apartheid within its internationally accepted boundaries, and a much harsher form of antihamitism within its occupied territories. There is a clear analogy between the occupied territories of Palestine today and the occupied (and client) territories of Europe’s belligerent powers in the 1940s.

All nation states’ governments are equally able to be criticised; by those countries’ citizens, by residents and by non-residents. Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism; it’s criticism of the way that nation-state projects itself across the wider world, and about how it racially and culturally discriminates (sometimes with extreme violence) against people or peoples over which the Israeli authorities have a duty of care.

Past victims of racism have more reason than most to avoid being present perpetrators of racism.

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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

My name is Muzhgan Samarqandi and I am from Baghlan, Afghanistan, but living in New Zealand with my Kiwi husband and our son. Like Charlotte Bellis, I too was a broadcaster in Afghanistan, back when this was possible for a woman without being a foreigner.

As a mother, my heart goes out to Charlotte, and I sincerely hope she and her partner get to New Zealand so she can give birth at home surrounded by her family.

As someone who has travelled for study and work and love, and who does not share the same passport as their significant other, my heart goes out to everyone stranded overseas, and I sincerely hope they can all get home and be reunited with their loved ones.

But as an Afghanistani woman, who has only recently emigrated from Afghanistan to New Zealand, I have to speak up.

I almost did so when Charlotte interviewed Abdul Qahar Balkhi, the Taliban spokesperson with the Kiwi accent. She went easy on him. For example, at the end of the interview, she asked what he had to say to those who called the Taliban “terrorists”.

He said people didn’t really believe they were terrorists, but this was just a word the US used for anyone who didn’t fall in line with their agenda. There were no further questions.

This was a man who claimed responsibility on behalf of the Taliban for attacks on innocent civilians. A man who has admitted to crimes against humanity. It made me so upset to see him get away with answers like that. But then my energy was taken up just coping with the reality of what was happening to my friends and family in Afghanistan.

Social media responses
But now, when I read Charlotte’s letter in the New Zealand Herald and see the media and social media responses, I see the situation in my country being trivialised, and it makes me angry.

Charlotte refers to herself asking the Taliban in a press conference what they would do for women and girls, and says she is now asking the same question of the New Zealand government.

I understand there are problems with MIQ. And I understand the value in provoking change with controversy. But what I don’t understand is how someone who has lived and worked in Afghanistan, and seen the impact of the Taliban’s regime on women and girls, can seriously compare that situation to New Zealand.

Afghanistani women who resist or protest the regime are being arrested, tortured, raped and killed. Young girls are being married off to Talibs (a member of the Taliban). Education and employment are no longer available to them.

A 19-year-old girl I know from my village, who was in her first year of law last year is now, instead, a housewife to a Talib.

There are so many stories like this.

The Taliban distort Islam
Charlotte says the Taliban have given her a safe haven when she is not welcome in her own country. This is obviously a good headline and good way to make a point. But it is an inaccurate and unhelpful representation of the situation.

One commentary on Instagram, re-posted by Charlotte, suggested her story represents the truly Muslim acts of the Taliban, which the Western media have not shown. This makes me angry.

If a person in power extends privileges to someone who doesn’t threaten their power, it doesn’t mean they are not oppressive or extremist or dangerous.

The Taliban distort Islam and manipulate Muslims for their political gain. They violate the rights of women and girls, and it is offensive to compare them to the New Zealand government in this regard.

New Zealand is no paradise, I have experienced my fair share of racism here, and I am sure the MIQ situation can be improved.

But relying on the protection of a regime that is violently oppressive, and then using that to try to shame the New Zealand government into action, is not the way to achieve that improvement.

It exploits and trivialises the situation in Afghanistan, at a time when the rights of Afghanistani women and girls desperately need to be taken seriously.

Muzhgan Samarqandi works for an international aid agency in New Zealand. Her article was first published on the TV One News website and is republished here with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The massive gathering in Christchurch’s Hagley Park has reassured and uplifted their shocked community, say New Zealand Muslim leaders.

About 20,000 people gathered in Hagley Park to observe two minutes of silence and the Muslim call to prayer on Friday along with thousands more at other events across the country, including Auckland’s Domain.

Pacific Media Centre photographer Del Abcede was on hand to capture these images at Ponsonby’s Al-Masjid Al-Jamie mosque and Aotea Square on a day when women across New Zealand of all faiths reclaimed the hijab. More photos can be seen on her Facebook page.

Ponsonby and Aotea day of prayer, reflection

1. Praying for peace at Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

2. The crowd at Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

3. Tongan flag and flowers at the Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

4. Samoan flag and flowers at the Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

5. Flowers and messages at the Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

6. Hijab power at Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

7. Hijab power at Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

8. Hijab power at Ponsonby Mosque. Inage: Del Abcede/PMC

9. Hijab power at Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

10. Hijab power at Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

11. Policeman and hijab at Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

12. Priest and hijab at Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

13. The Ponsonby Mosque crowd. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

14. Hijabs and Ponsonby’s Sacred Heart Church in the background. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

`15. Gang member paying his respects at Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

16. Thanks to New Zealand from the Muslim community at Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

17. Child and the mourning flowers at Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

18. Flowers and messages at Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

19. “Love and support” at Ponsonby Mosque. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

20. “Free hugs and free scarves” Aotea messages. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

21. Flowers beside the statue of former mayor Sir Dove-Myer Robinson in Aotea Square. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

22. Police and the hijab in Aotea Square, Auckland. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

23. Hijabs in Aotea Square. Image: Del Abcede/PMC

24. “The most merciful person is the one who forgives when he is able to take revenge.” – Imam Ali Image: Del Abcede/PMC

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz