“We non-Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that Australia once reached out for us. Didn’t Australia provide opportunity and care for the dispossessed Irish? Did it not for the poor of Britain? The refugees from war and famine and persecution in the countries of Europe and Asia? Isn’t it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkable harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians – the people to whom the most injustice has been done.”

Paul Keating, 1992, then Australian Prime Minister,  gave a speech at Redfern Park – in an inner city suburb of Sydney with an historically large Aboriginal population – for the Australian Launch of the ‘International Year for the World’s Indigenous People’. 

Like a deep red river you flow through my existence

Collecting gentle raindrops that fall on distant mountains

Into a singing dancing torrent that rushes into life

Tumbling crazily through joy and pain and love

Carrying mysterious remnants of dark green jungles

And wild memories of animals and exotic ancient lives

You nourish my spirit as you pass through my heart

Linking my being to the fibres of the universe

Though time inexorably draws your life forward

Until you flow on to meet the great ocean

We have exchanged precious particles of our lives

That you carry with you beyond mortality beyond oblivion

To a distant fertile region outside of our imagination

There you will plant gardens to nourish new generations

Connecting their being with the beginning of time

Jim Scott

Recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq have seen almost 1,200 drone strikes over the past five years, according to new data released to the Bureau.

The information, much of it classified until now, shows that US Air Force drones carried out most of the 1,168 attacks. However British crews are also responsible for a significant portion of the strikes in Afghanistan.
The Bureau has obtained data from the US armed forces, Nato and the UK’s Ministry of Defence. It reveals, for example, that more than a quarter of all armed Coalition air sorties in Afghanistan are now carried out by drones.
While only a fraction of those missions result in strikes, drone strikes in Afghanistan are now taking place on average five times each week

Afghanistan – the US’s most intense conflict
The US’s secret drone campaign in Pakistan and elsewhere is now in its eleventh year and is attracting increasing scrutiny, including academic studies, court cases and, soon, a UN investigation. Ironically, less is known about the use of drones in conventional theatres of war.

The US military and its allies have carried out almost 1,200 drone strikes since 2008 in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq. 

Click here to visit the Bureau’s Covert Drone War project
When the Bureau first approached the US military in August seeking drone data for recent conflicts, we were told the information was classified. Central Command (Centcom) later relented after the Bureau argued there was a strong public interest in releasing the information.
Centcom now says it is committed to publishing statistics on the number of missiles fired by drones in Afghanistan, as part of its monthly reports.

There Is No God Higher Than Truth

Gandhi on the Palestine conflict — 1938

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French…What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct…If they [the Jews] must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs… As it is, they are co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regard as an unacceptable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.”

Mahatma Gandhi, quoted in “Land of Two Peoples” ed. Mendes-Flohr.  Pic from danielleford.com

After losing the vote on Palestinian observer status, Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, was dismissive of the entire exercise. “Today’s grand pronouncements will soon fade,” she said. “And the Palestinian people will wake up tomorrow and find that little about their lives has changed, save that the prospects of a durable peace have only receded.” (New York Times)

In his response, the Israeli UN Ambassador, Prosor said, “The truth is that 65 years ago today, the United Nations voted to partition the British Mandate into two states: a Jewish state, and an Arab state. Two states for two peoples. Israel accepted this plan. The Palestinians and Arab nations around us rejected it and launched a war of annihilation to throw the “Jews into the sea”. 

This of course is not true the Palestinians were not consulted and it was the Jewish militias that began the carnage.

Israel has also announced further illegal settlements in Palestinian areas and other punitive measures in an effort to maintain their long-term program of humiliation and demoralisation of the Palestinian people.

These angry and ridiculous comments from the the UN Ambassadors for Israel and the United States of America and the follow up threats against the Palestinians for gaining UN observer status clearly shows that the game is up for Israel’s long-standing repression and state sanctioned land theft. In fact Susan E Rice will wake up tomorrow and find that the world has changed and the USA is being left in its wake.

It has become very obvious to the world that the actual position of successive Israeli Governments as opposed to its stated position is to make life so unliveable in Gaza that the Palestinians are forced to leave. It is ethnic cleansing by stealth. They have had no intention of ever handing back Palestinian land.

Israel has a long record of disingenuous negotiation on the two state solution. They have combined placatory words with a continuation of dispossession, assassination and humiliation. There can never be a fair solution to the plight of Palestinians under the current unbalanced situation where Israel holds all the cards and has the power of the USA standing behind it.

The Israeli Government has been able to mute criticism of its brutal repression of Palestinians by using a massive well funded international lobby to build on international world sympathy and guilt stemming from the terrible criminal treatment of Jewish people by the Nazis. Israeli Government spokespersons brand critics of Israel as anti-Semitic. Today for many people who were born long after the terrible days of Adolph Hitler, the criminal behaviour of the Jewish State towards Palestinians has almost dried up that sympathy and support.

The overwhelming nature of the UN poll makes the USA a big loser because the massive yes vote shows that the rest of the Western world is fed up with US support of countries whose actions are so extreme and so obviously unfair that they are an embarrassment. In fact it appears many outside the USA not indoctrinated by the Murdoch Press have had the blindfold removed. The game is up and the repression and the lies must stop.

The UN which was the overseer of the partition process was a guilty player in the disposession of the Palestinians. The UN breached its own conventions when it failed to consult or give the people of Palestine a say in the breakup of their country.

The UN must get off its numerous backside and insist on a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians that provides fairness and justice to the people on both sides and which restores the dignity to the people who continue to be cruelly dealt with by their oppressors.