The title of the book is based on a photograph of a young ni-Vanuatu girl with a “no nukes” placard stating “Please don’t spoil my beautiful face,” which was taken by Robie at the third Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) conference in Port Vila, Vanuatu.
As such, the book is a personal account of Robie’s career in relation to the various political issues, tensions, human rights violations, and conflicts that have affected the Pacific (and the Philippines and Canada), such as the Kanak struggle in New Caledonia, the 1987 military coup in Fiji, and the Bougainville conflict.
The title of the book refers to yet another struggle and protest in the Pacific. It is based on a photograph of a young ni-Vanuatu girl with a “no nukes” placard stating “Please don’t spoil my beautiful face,” which was taken by Robie at the third Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) conference in Port Vila, Vanuatu.
Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face cover
The twenty-four chapters of the book are divided into six parts, dealing with: Robie’s own career and journey into the Pacific; colonial legacies conflicts; indigenous struggles; forgotten wars; environmental struggles; and media education. The broad geographical area, themes, and timeframe covered (from before 1974 to 2013), means Robie presents us with a series of snapshots detailing elements of troubling events that have happened and are happening in the Pacific and beyond.
Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face starts with a foreword (xiii-xv) by Kalafi Moala, deputy chair of Pasifika Media Association, who was jailed in Tonga in 1996 for contempt of Parliament. He acknowledges Robie’s journalistic work in the Pacific and, in particular, Robie’s efforts to set him and his fellow prisoners free. Robie’s subsequent introduction, titled “Trust and transparency,” discusses the interplay between journalism and political power in relation to, in particular, Murdoch. He also highlights his own position as an independent journalist, providing testimonies by third parties to indicate that he is an “impassioned chronicler of Pacific currents” (8) and events.
The first part of the book (Out of Africa), details Robie’s career, the various topics he covered and agencies he worked for across the world, and how he ended up setting his own Pacific News Agency in New Zealand (chapters 2–4). Part 2 covers an array of events and topics that are grouped together as “Colonial legacy conflicts.” It contains Robie’s work in New Caledonia on the Kanak revolt and massacre of Hienghène in New Caledonia in 1984, and the 1987 “nomadization” policy and the aftermath of the siege of Ouvèa (chapters 5, 6, and 8); the “Rise of the Flosse dynasty in Tahiti, 1986 (chapter 7); the 1987 Fiji coup (chapter 9); anti-Chinese riots in Tonga in 1991 (chapter 10); Human rights abuses in the Pacific (chapter 11); and the jailing of the “Tongan three” in 1996, which involved the imprisonment of the earlier mentioned Kalafi Moala (chapter 12). Part 3 of the book is titled “Indigenous Struggles” and covers First Nation Rights in Canada (chapter 13); indigenous people’s struggles in the Philippines (chapter 14); and the Hagahai “biopiracy” affair, whereby the US government issued a patent on the human cell line of a Hagahai (Papua New Guinea) tribesman in 1995 (chapter 15). In part 4, titled “Forgotten wars, elusive peace,” Robie covers the Bougainville conflict (chapter 16); the political instability and violence caused by rogue military leaders in the Philippines (chapter 17); and the victims of this violence and the role of the Philippine Independent Church (chapter 18). The final chapter in this part contains Robie’s reflections on the horror of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in Timor-Leste (chapter 19).
The fifth part of the book (“Moruroa, mon amour”) focuses on climate change and nuclear refugees in the Pacific (Chapter 20); and the politics surrounding the Rainbow Warrior, which was bombed by French secret agents in Auckland in 1985 (chapter 21).
The sixth and final part of the book focuses on media education in the Pacific. The first chapter discusses the issue of freedom of speech, which is centred around Robie’s Pacific Journalism Review article on the topic published in 2002 and an article published in the same year with the subtitle “Don’t shoot the messenger” (chapter 22). The subsequent chapter deals with conflict reporting in the Pacific (chapter 23). In the final chapter (chapter 24), Robie engages with changing paradigms in Pacific journalism, exploring models of news media and news values in the Pacific, journalism’s rights and responsibilities, and that journalists covering issues such as the abuse of power and violations of human rights in the Pacific need to become more critical and deliberative, thereby “becoming part of the solution rather than being part of the problem” (340). Robie’s epilogue consists of a series of snapshots on journalists, the media, and media education in the Pacific, and the responsibilities a new generation of educated journalists have in encouraging positive change in the region.
With the exception of chapter 24, the chapters in Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face are based upon Robie’s earlier work that was disseminated in the media or elsewhere. Most of the chapters consist of earlier published media articles that are briefly introduced and updated. Although Robie’s engaged and critical journalism is very informative and illustrative, the way the book is organized also implies a lack of depth and engagement with, for example, academic work on these topics. This could have been partially addressed by adding a short bibliography to each chapter with key academic works on the issue, instead of providing a short selected biography at the end.
What Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face does offer is a great overview of troubling politics and violence in the region and Robie’s reporting of these events. As such, it is of interest to anyone who is interested in Pacific media and politics, and Robie’s work and coverage of these issues in particular.
Review by Anna-Karina Hermkens, Australian National University, published in Pacific Affairs, University of British Columbia, 89(4), 949-951. December 2016.
Vietnam’s famous Củ Chi tunnel network was on our bucket list for years.
For me, it was for more than half a century, ever since I had been editor of the Melbourne Sunday Observer, which campaigned against Australian (and New Zealand) involvement in the unjust Vietnam War — redubbed the “American War” by the Vietnamese.
For Del, it was a dream to see how the resistance of a small and poor country could defeat the might of colonisers.
“I wanted to see for myself how the tunnels and the sacrifices of the Vietnamese had contributed to winning the war,” she recalls.
“Love for country, a longing for peace and a resistance to foreign domination were strong factors in victory.”
We finally got our wish last month — a half day trip to the tunnel network, which stretched some 250 kilometres at the peak of their use. The museum park is just 45 km northeast of Ho Chi Minh city, known as Saigon during the war years (many locals still call it that).
Building of the tunnels started after the Second World War after the Japanese had withdrawn from Indochina and liberation struggles had begun against the French. But they reached their most dramatic use in the war against the Americans, especially during the spate of surprise attacks during the Tet Offensive in 1968.
The Viet Minh kicked off the network, when it was a sort of southern gateway to the Ho Chi Minh trail in the 1940s as the communist forces edged closer to Saigon.
Checking out the Củ Chi tunnel network near Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City. Image: David Robie/APR
Eventually the liberation successes of the Viet Minh led to humiliating defeat of the French colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
Cutting off supply lines The French had rebuilt an ex-Japanese airbase in a remote valley near the Laotian border in a so-called “hedgehog” operation — in a belief that the Viet Minh forces did not have anti-aircraft artillery. They hoped to cut off the Viet Minh’s guerrilla forces’ supply lines and draw them into a decisive conventional battle where superior French firepower would prevail.
However, they were the ones who were cut off.
The Củ Chi tunnels explored. Video: History channel
The French military command badly miscalculated as General Nguyen Giap’s forces secretly and patiently hauled artillery through the jungle-clad hills over months and established strategic batteries with tunnels for the guns to be hauled back under cover after firing several salvos.
Giap compared Dien Bien Phu to a “rice bowl” with the Viet Minh on the edges and the French at the bottom.
After a 54-day siege between 13 March and 7 May 1954, as the French forces became increasingly surrounded and with casualties mounting (up to 2300 killed), the fortifications were over-run and the surviving soldiers surrendered.
The defeat led to global shock that an anti-colonial guerrilla army had defeated a major European power.
The French government of Prime Minister Joseph Laniel resigned and the 1954 Geneva Accords were signed with France pulling out all its forces in the whole of Indochina, although Vietnam was temporarily divided in half at the 17th Parallel — the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, and the republican State of Vietnam nominally under Emperor Bao Dai (but in reality led by a series of dictators with US support).
Debacle of Dien Bien Phu
The debacle of Dien Bien Phu is told very well in an exhibition that takes up an entire wing of the Vietnam War Remnants Museum (it was originally named the “Museum of American War Crimes”).
But that isn’t all at the impressive museum, the history of the horrendous US misadventure is told in gruesome detail – with some 58,000 American troops killed and the death of an estimated up to 3 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. (Not to mention the 521 Australian and 37 New Zealand soldiers, and the many other allied casualties.)
The section of the museum devoted to the Agent Orange defoliant war waged on the Vietnamese and the country’s environment is particularly chilling – casualties and people suffering from the aftermath of the poisoning are now into the fourth generation.
“Peace in Vietnam” posters and photographs at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Image: David Robie/APR“Nixon out of Vietnam” daubed on a bombed house in the War Remnants Museum. Image: Del Abcede/APR
The global anti-Vietnam War peace protests are also honoured at the museum and one section of the compound has a recreation of the prisons holding Viet Cong independence fighters, including the torture “tiger cells”.
A shackled Viet Cong suspect (mannequin) in a torture “tiger cage” recreation. Image: David Robie/APR
A guillotine is on display. The execution method was used by both France and the US-backed South Vietnam regimes against pro-independence fighters.
A guillotine on display at the Remnants War Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Image: David Robie/APR
A placard says: “During the US war against Vietnam, the guillotine was transported to all of the provinces in South Vietnam to decapitate the Vietnam patriots. [On 12 March 1960], the last man who was executed by guillotine was Hoang Le Kha.”
A member of the ant-French liberation “scout movement”, Hoang was sentenced to death by a military court set up by the US-backed President Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime.
Museum visit essential
Visiting Ho Ch Min City’s War Remnants Museum is essential for background and contextual understanding of the role and importance of the Củ Chi tunnels.
Also for insights about how the last US troops left Vietnam in March 1973, Nixon resigned the following year under pressure from the Watergate revelations, and a series of reverses led to the collapse of the South Vietnam regime and the humiliating scenes of the final Americans withdrawing by helicopter from the US Embassy rooftop in Saigon in April 1975.
The Sunday Observer coverage of the My Lai massacre. Image: Screenshot David Robie/APR
Ironically, we were prosecuted for “obscenity’ for publishing photographs of a real life US obscenity and war crime in the Australian state of Victoria. (The case was later dropped).
So our trip to the Củ Chi tunnels was laced with expectation. What would we see? What would we feel?
A tunnel entrance at Ben Dinh. Image: David Robie/APR
The tunnels played a critical role in the “American” War, eventually leading to the collapse of South Vietnamese resistance in Saigon. And the guides talk about the experience and the sacrifice of Viet Cong fighters in reverential tones.
The tunnel network at Ben Dinh is in a vast park-like setting with restored sections, including underground kitchen (with smoke outlets directed through simulated ant hills), medical centre, and armaments workshop.
ingenious bamboo and metal spike booby traps, snakes and scorpions were among the obstacles to US forces pursuing resistance fighters. Special units — called “tunnel rats” using smaller soldiers were eventually trained to combat the Củ Chi system but were not very effective.
David at the Chu Chi tunnels. Image: FB screenshot
We were treated to cooked cassava, a staple for the fighters underground.
A disabled US tank demonstrates how typical hit-and-run attacks by the Viet Cong fighters would cripple their treads and then they would be attacked through their manholes.
The park also has a shooting range where tourists can fire M-16s and AK-47s — by buying their own bullets.
‘Walk’ through showdown
When it came to the section where we could walk through the tunnels ourselves, our guide said: “It only takes a couple of minutes.”
It was actually closer to 10 minutes, it seemed, and I actually got stuck momentarily when my knees turned to jelly with the crouch posture that I needed to use for my height. I had to crawl on hands and knees the rest of the way.
David at a tunnel entrance — “my knees turned to jelly” but crawling through was the solution in the end. Image: David Robie/APR
A warning sign said don’t go if you’re aged over 70 (I am 79), have heart issues (I do, with arteries), or are claustrophobic (I’m not). I went anyway.
People who have done this are mostly very positive about the experience and praise the tourist tunnels set-up. Many travel agencies run guided trips to the tunnels.
How small can we squeeze to fit in the tunnel? The thinnest person in one group visiting the tunnels tries to shrink into the space. Image: David Robie/APRA so-called “clipping armpit” Viet Cong trap in the Củ Chi tunnel network. Image: David Robie/APR
“Exploring the Củ Chi tunnels near Saigon was a fascinating and historically significant experience,” wrote one recent visitor on a social media link.
“The intricate network of tunnels, used during the Vietnam War, provided valuable insights into the resilience and ingenuity of the Vietnamese people. Crawling through the tunnels, visiting hidden bunkers, and learning about guerrilla warfare tactics were eye-opening . . .
“It’s a place where history comes to life, and it’s a must-visit for anyone interested in Vietnam’s wartime history and the remarkable engineering of the Củ Chi tunnels.”
“The visit gives a very real sense of what the war was like from the Vietnamese side — their tunnels and how they lived and efforts to fight the Americans,” wrote another visitor. “Very realistic experience, especially if you venture into the tunnels.”
Overall, it was a powerful experience and a reminder that no matter how immensely strong a country might be politically and militarily, if grassroots people are determined enough for freedom and justice they will triumph in the end.
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir in 2021 . . . he has advocated a religious war, calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Image: Shay Kendler, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
ANALYSIS:By Ramzy Baroud
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir vowed on August 26 to build a synagogue inside the Muslim holy site Al-Haram Al-Sharif.
Ben-Gvir, as a representation of Israel’s powerful religious Zionist class in the government and society at large, has been candid regarding his designs in occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine.
He has advocated a religious war, calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the starvation or killing of prisoners and the annexation of the West Bank.
In his capacity as a minister in the equally extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir has worked hard to translate his language into action. He has raided the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Mosque repeatedly, and implemented his starvation policies against Palestinian detainees, going as far as defending rape inside Israeli military detention camps and calling the accused soldiers “our best heroes”.
His supporters have carried out hundreds of assaults and dozens of pogroms targeting Palestinian communities in the West Bank.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, at least 670 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since the start of the Gaza war. A large number among those killed and injured were victims of illegal Jewish settlers.
But not all Israelis in the political or security establishments agree with Ben-Gvir’s behavior or tactics. For example, on August 22, Israel’s Shin Bet chief, Ronen Bar, warned against the “indescribable damage” to Israel caused by Ben-Gvir’s actions in East Jerusalem.
Damage to Israel ‘indescribable’ “The damage to the State of Israel, especially now . . . is indescribable: global delegitimisation, even among our greatest allies,” Bar wrote in a letter sent to several Israeli ministers.
Bar’s letter may seem odd. The Shin Bet has been instrumental in the killing of numerous Palestinians, in the name of Israeli security. Bar himself is a strong supporter of the settlements, and as hawkish as is required for the person who leads such a notorious organization.
Bar’s conflict with Ben-Gvir, however, is not that of substance, but style. This conflict is only an expression of a much greater ideological and political war among Israel’s top institutions. This war, however, began before the October 7 attack and the ongoing Israeli war and genocide in Gaza.
Seven months before the start of the war, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said in a televised speech that “those who think that a real civil war . . . is a border we won’t cross, have no idea.”
The context of his comments was the “real, deep hate” among Israelis resulting from the attempts by Netanyahu and his extremist government coalition partners to undermine the power of the judiciary.
Demonstration against judicial reform near the Knesset in Jerusalem, February 20, 2023. Image: Hanay, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
The fight over the Supreme Court, however, was merely the tip of the iceberg. The fact that it took Israel five elections in four years to settle on a stable government in December 2022 was itself indicative of Israel’s unprecedented political conflict.
The new government may have been “stable” in terms of the parliamentary balances, but it destabilised the country on all fronts, leading to mass protests, involving the powerful, but increasingly marginalised military class.
Time of social, political vulnerability
The October 7 attack took place at a time of social and political vulnerability, arguably unprecedented since the founding of Israel atop the ruins of historic Palestine in May 1948.
The war, but particularly the failure to achieve any of its objectives, deepened that existing conflict. This led to warnings from politicians and military men that the country was collapsing.
The clearest of these warnings came from Yitzhak Brik, a former top Israeli military commander. He wrote in Haaretz on August 22 that the “country . . . is galloping towards the edge of an abyss,” and that it “will collapse within no more than a year”.
Though Brik was blaming, among various factors, Netanyahu’s losing war in Gaza, the anti-Netanyahu political class believes that the crisis mainly lies in the government itself.
This solution, according to recent comments made by Herzog himself, is that “Kahanism needs to be removed from the government.”
Kahanism here is a reference to the Kach Party of Rabbi Meir Kahane. Though now banned, Kach has resurfaced in numerous forms, including in Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit Party.
As a disciple of Kahane, Ben-Gvir is set to achieve the vision of the extremist rabbi, that of the complete ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
Kahane addressing his followers in Tel Aviv, 1984. Image: Dan Hadani, National Library of Israel, The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Historic opportunity
Ben-Gvir and his ilk are fully aware of the historic opportunity that is now available to them as they hope to ignite the much-coveted religious war. They also know that if the war in Gaza ends without advancing their main plan of colonizing the rest of the occupied territories, the opportunity may not present itself ever again.
Ben-Gvir’s rush to achieve the religious Zionist agenda contradicts the traditional form of Israeli colonialism, predicated on the ‘incremental genocide’ of Palestinians and the slow ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities from East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Though the Israeli military believes that illegal settlements are essential, they perceive these colonies in strategic language as a “security buffer” for Israel.
The winners and losers of Israel’s ideological and political war are most likely to emerge following the end of the Gaza war, the outcomes of which will determine other factors, including the very future of the state of Israel, per the estimation of General Yitzhak Brik himself.
Dr Ramzy Baroud is a widely published and translated author, an internationally syndicated columnist and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, 2018). He earned a PhD in Palestine studies from the University of Exeter (2015), and was a non-resident scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB. This article is republished from Z Network.
United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) vice-president Octo Mote . . . “We are in a very dangerous situation right now." Image: Screenshot Te Ao Māori News
SPECIAL REPORT: By Te Aniwaniwa Paterson of Te Ao Māori News
West Papuan independence advocate Octovianus Mote is in Aotearoa New Zealand to win support for independence for West Papua, which has been ruled by Indonesia for more than 60 years.
Mote is vice-president of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) and is being hosted in New Zealand by the Green Party, which Mote said had always been a “hero” for West Papua.
Former ULMWP president Benny Wenda has alleged more than 500,000 Papuans have been killed since the occupation, and millions of hectares of ancestral forests, rivers and mountains have been destroyed or polluted for “corporate profit”.
The struggle for West Papuans “Being born a West Papuan, you are already an enemy of the nation [Indonesia],” Mote says.
“The greatest challenge we are facing right now is that we are facing the colonial power who lives next to us.”
If West Papuans spoke up about what was happening, they were considered “separatists”, Mote says, regardless of whether they are journalists, intellectuals, public servants or even high-ranking Indonesian generals.
“When our students on the ground speak of justice, they’re beaten up, put in jail and [the Indonesians] kill so many of them,” Mote says.
Mote is a former journalist and says that while he was working he witnessed Indonesian forces openly fire at students who were peacefully demonstrating their rights.
“We are in a very dangerous situation right now. When our people try to defend their land, the Indonesian government ignores them and they just take the land without recognising we are landowners,” he says.
The ‘ecocide’ of West Papua The ecology in West Papua is being damaged by mining, deforestation, and oil and gas extraction. Mote says Indonesia wants to “wipe them from the land and control their natural resources”.
He says he is trying to educate the world that defending West Papua means defending the world, especially small islands in the Pacific.
West Papua is the western half of the island of New Guinea, bordering the independent nation of Papua New Guinea. New Guinea has the world’s third-largest rainforest after the Amazon and Congo and it is crucial for climate change mitigation as they sequester and store carbon.
Mote says the continued deforestation of New Guinea, which West Papuan leaders are trying to stop, would greatly impact on the small island countries in the Pacific, which are among the most vulnerable to climate change.
Mote also says their customary council in West Papua has already considered the impacts of climate change on small island nations and, given West Papua’s abundance of land the council says that by having sovereignty they would be able to both protect the land and support Pacific Islanders who need to migrate from their home islands.
In 2021, West Papuan leaders pledged to make ecocide a serious crime and this week Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa submitted a court proposal to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to recognise ecocide as a crime.
Support from local Indonesians Mote says there are Indonesians who support the indigenous rights movement for West Papuans. He says there are both NGOs and a Papuan Peace Network founded by West Papuan peace campaigner Neles Tebay.
“There is a movement growing among the academics and among the well-educated people who have read the realities among those who are also victims of the capitalist investors, especially in Indonesia when they introduced the Omnibus Law.”
The so-called Omnibus Law was passed in 2020 as part of outgoing President Joko Widodo’s goals to increase investment and industrialisation in Indonesia. The law was protested against because of concerns it would be harmful for workers due to changes in working conditions, and the environment because it would allow for increased deforestation.
Mote says there has been an “awakening”, especially among the younger generations who are more open-minded and connected to the world, who could see it both as a humanitarian and an environmental issue.
The ‘transfer’ of West Papua to Indonesia “The [former colonial nation] Dutch [traded] us like a cow,” Mote says.
The former Dutch colony was passed over to Indonesia in 1963 in disputed circumstances but the ULMWP calls it an “invasion”.
From 1957, the Soviet Union had been supplying arms to Indonesia and, during that period, the Indonesian Communist Party had become the largest political party in the country.
The US engineered a meeting between both countries, which resulted in the New York Agreement, giving control of West Papua to the UN in 1962 and then Indonesia a year later.
The New York Agreement stipulated that the population of West Papua would be entitled to an act of self-determination.
The ‘act of no choice’ This decolonisation agreement was titled the 1969 Act of Free Choice, which is referred to as “the act of no choice” by pro-independence activists.
Mote says they witnessed “how the UN allowed Indonesia to cut us into pieces, and they didn’t say anything when Indonesia manipulated our right to self-determination”.
The manipulation Mote refers to is for the Act of Free Choice. Instead of a national referendum, the Indonesian military hand-picked 1025 West Papuan “representatives” to vote on behalf of the 816,000 people. The representatives were allegedly threatened, bribed and some were held at gunpoint to ensure a unanimous vote.
Leaders of the West Papuan independence movement assert that this was not a real opportunity to exercise self-determination as it was manipulated. However, it was accepted by the UN.
Pacific support at UN General Assembly Mote has came to Aotearoa after the 53rd Pacific Island Forum Leaders summit in Tonga last week and he has come to discuss plans over the next five years. Mote hopes to gain support to take what he calls the “slow-motion genocide” of West Papua back to the UN General Assembly.
“In that meeting we formulated how we can help really push self-determination as the main issue in the Pacific Islands,” Mote says.
Mote says there was a focus on self-determination of West Papua, Kanaky/New Caledonia and Tahiti. He also said the focus was on what he described as the current colonisation issue with capitalists and global powers having vested interests in the Pacific region.
The movement got it to the UN General Assembly in 2018, so Mote says it is achievable. In 2018, Pacific solidarity was shown as the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and the Republic of Vanuatu all spoke out in support of West Papua.
They affirmed the need for the matter to be returned to the United Nations, and the Solomon Islands voiced its concerns over human rights abuses and violations.
ULMWP vice-president Octo Mote . . . in the next five years Pacific nations need to firstly make the Indonesian government “accountable” for its actions in West Papua. Image: Poster screenshot
What needs to be done He says that in the next five years Pacific nations need to firstly make the Indonesian government accountable for its actions in West Papua. He also says outgoing President Widodo should be held accountable for his “involvement”.
Mote says New Zealand is the strongest Pacific nation that would be able to push for the human rights and environmental issues happening, especially as he alleges Australia always backs Indonesian policies.
He says he is looking to New Zealand to speak up about the atrocities taking place in West Papua and is particularly looking for support from the Greens, Labour and Te Pāti Māori for political support.
The coalition government announced a plan of action on July 30 this year, which set a new goal of $6 billion in annual two-way trade with Indonesia by 2029.
“New Zealand is strongly committed to our partnership with Indonesia,” Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters said at the time.
“There is much more we can and should be doing together.”
Te Aniwaniwa Paterson is a digital producer for Te Ao Māori News. Republished by Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific with permission.
Palestinians in Gaza protesting over the February 2013 death of Arafat Jaradat in Megiddo prison. Image: Joe Catron/Flickr/CC BY-NC 2.0
Those who can’t connect barbaric abuses of Palestinians by Israelis — generation after generation — and the crimes of October 7, have little understanding of human nature, writes Jonathan Cook.
ANALYSIS:By Jonathan Cook
For many years I lived just up the road from Megiddo prison in northern Israel, where new film of Israeli guards torturing Palestinians en masse has been published by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.
I drove past Megiddo prison on hundreds of occasions. Over time I came to barely notice the squat grey buildings, surrounded by watch towers and razor wire.
Footage uploaded to Israeli media depicts Israeli occupation forces collectively torturing Palestinians held in Megiddo prison.
The video shows prisoners lying face down on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, while being terrorized by dogs. pic.twitter.com/mZOIC1Glj8
There are several large prisons like Megiddo in Israel’s north. It is where Palestinians end up after they have been seized from their homes, often in the middle of the night. Israel, and the Western media, say these Palestinians have been “arrested,” as though Israel is enforcing some kind of legitimate legal procedure over oppressed subjects — or rather objects — of its occupation.
The prisons are invariably located close to major roads in Israel, presumably because Israelis find it reassuring to know Palestinians are being locked up in such large numbers. (As an aside, I should mention that transferring prisoners out of occupied territory into the occupier’s territory is a war crime. But let that pass.)
Even before the mass round-ups of the past 11 months, the Palestinian Authority estimated that 800,000 Palestinians — or 40 percent of the male population — had spent time in an Israeli prison.
Many had never been charged with any crime and had never received a trial. Not that that would make any difference — the conviction rate of Palestinians in Israel’s military courts is near 100 percent. There is no such thing as an innocent Palestinian, it seems.
Terrifying rite of passage
Rather, imprisonment is a kind of terrifying rite of passage that has been endured by generations of Palestinians, one required of them by the bureaucracy managing Israel’s apartheid-occupation system.
Torture, even of children, has been routine in these prisons since the occupation began nearly 60 years ago, as Israeli human rights groups have been regularly documenting.
View of Meggido prison (on right) from Meggido Hill in 2007. Image: Golf Bravo/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
The imprisonment and torture of Palestinians serve several goals for Israel. It crushes the spirit of Palestinians individually and collectively. It traumatises generation after generation, creating fear and suspicion.
And it helps to recruit a large class of Palestinian informants and collaborators who secretly work with Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, to foil Palestinian resistance operations against Israel’s illegal occupation forces.
This kind of Palestinian resistance, we should note, is specifically permitted in international law. In other words, what the West denounces as “terrorism” is actually legal under the principles the West established after the Second World War.
Paradoxical, to put it mildly.
The humiliation and trauma systematically inflicted on these hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the wider Palestinian society — and the complete lack of concern from the “international community”, or, worse, its complicity — have inevitably fed into growing religious extremism among parts of a Palestinian society that was once largely secular.
No justice, then resistance
If there is no justice, no redress to be offered by the international institutions created by a West that both trumpets its secularism while also flaunting its Christian values, then, Palestinians conclude, maybe they can find justice — or at least retribution — not through futile, rigged “negotiations” but through greater commitment to violent resistance carried out in the name of Islam.
That explains the emergence of the group Hamas in the late 1980s and its relentless growth in popularity.
Hamas’ unapologetic Islamic militancy contrasted with the more accommodationist secular nationalism of Fatah, long led by Mahmoud Abbas. Support for Hamas was something Israel was only too happy to cultivate. It understood that Islamism would discredit the Palestinian cause in the eyes of Westerners and further bond the West to Israel.
But Israel’s system of torture — whether in “normal” prisons like Megiddo or in the giant open-air prison that Israel made of Gaza — also led to an ever greater determination among groups like Hamas to liberate themselves through violence.
If Israel could not be reasoned with, if it only understood the sword, then that was the language Palestinians would speak to Israel. This was precisely the rationale for the atrocities of October 7.
If you were horrified by October 7, but are not more horrified by what Israel has been doing to Palestinians for more than half a century in its prisons, then you are either in a state of deep ignorance — hardly surprising given the lack of media coverage of Israel’s despotic rule over Palestinians — or in deep denial.
If you cannot see the causal connection between the barbaric abuses of Palestinians generation after generation and the crimes committed on October 7, then you have no understanding of human nature.
Family trauma passed down
You have no inner awareness of how you would act had you, your father and your grandfather been tortured in an Israeli prison, a trauma passed down through families little differently than hair colour or build.
The message of Israel’s torture chambers is directed at all of us, not just Palestinians. ‘Black sites’ are about reminding those who have been colonised and enslaved of a simple lesson: resistance is futile.
The findings by Israeli and international organisations that this is going on systematically.
The horrors are staring us in the face. But too many of us are looking away, reverting to the magical thinking of our babyhoods in which, when we cover our eyes, the world disappears.
The horrors of Israel’s prison system aren’t new. They have been going on for decades. What’s new is that Israel has intensified the abuse. It now relishes atrocities it previously hid away like a dark secret.
Israel is lost. It is deep in a black, genocidal hole. The question is, are you going to allow yourself to be sucked into the same void? Are you going to keep covering your eyes? Does the torture end just because you prefer not to see it?
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). Republished from here with the author’s permission. If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
Riria Dalton-Reedy during a live cross for Te Ao Māori News. Image: Te Ao Māori News/File
COMMENTARY: By Jessica Tyson
In recent years Kiingi Tuheitia became known as the “king of unity” with his determined drive forkotahitanga involving rangatahi.
So last week, through his tangihanga and the accession of his successor, a unique first took shape as the largest group of Māori broadcasters to ever work together collaborated with iwi in honouring his “wairua wind”.
Every day during the week-long tangihanga, news and radio teams from many Māori media outlets worked together to broadcast live news breakout shows on Whakaata Māori, online and on social media, showing what was happening on the ground at Tūrangawaewae Marae.
On the final day, Thursday, September 5, an official outside broadcast aired on Whakaata Māori and TVNZ presented by reporters from a variety of Māori media outlets covering the nehu (burial) of Kiingi Tuheitia and the whakawahinga (coronation) of Te Arikinui Kuini Nga wai hono i te po Pootatau Te Wherowhero te Tuawaru.
Aukaha executive producer Roihana Nuri led the news breakout shows throughout the week, with the inclusion and support of kaimahi from news and iwi radio outlets; Te Ao Maōri News, Te Ao with Moana, The Hui, Te Karere, TVNZ, Aukaha News, Tahu News, Tainui Live, Waatea Radio, Nga Iwi FM, Maniapoto FM and Te Reo o Te Uru.
The shows aired live on Facebook and attracted audiences of many thousands from around the country and Australia.
“The highlight was seeing the collaboration of all Māori news and current affairs programmes coming together and having some real old hands and young up-and-coming journos in the mix,” Nuri said. “We were all there for the one kaupapa which was to poroporoaki Kiingi Tuheitia.”
“This is the beginning of what reshaping Māori news media and working together is. We all talk collaboration — this is actual collaboration and action and is about succession because the oldies, like me, we’re not going to be here forever, and we need to start getting our rangatahi in the mix.
“We need to start to be able to share the knowledge, share the skills, the tricks of the trade.”
Peata Melbourne and Tumamao Harawira presented the lives breakouts from the studio at Whakaata Māori. Image: Te Ao Māori News/File
On day one, six reporters presented the news breakouts but that quickly increased later in the week as more regional and national news services freed up their resources to join the collaboration.
“On the final uhunga day, I think we had 13 reporters and presenters in the mix of that two hour pre-show before the big broadcast started,” Nuri recalled.
“All of the reporters and presenters had kaupapa to talk about; parking, roadblocks, mahi ringawera, hauora stuff. It’s a lot of information to give to the tens of thousands going to descend on Tūrangawaewae.”
The news breakouts were presented by Peata Melbourne and Tumamao Harawira in the Whakaata Māori studio. They crossed live to reporters at Tūrangawaewae including Riria Dalton-Reedy, Michael Cugley, Kereama Wright, Moana Maniapoto, Matai Smith, Shakayla Andrews-Alapaki, Regan Paranihi, Aroha Broughton, Te Kawa Paora, Herewini Waikato, Kawe Roes, Te Okiwa Mclean and Timoti Tiakiwai.
Aukaha reporter Te Kawa Paora during his live cross. Image: Te Ao Māori News/File
Working behind the scenes were more than 50 kaimahi (staff) including studio operators, producers, engineers, editors, camera operators, journalists and digital content creators from across the Māori media sector.
“There are so many moving pieces,” Nuri said “I was really extremely proud of every single individual who participated in our news breakouts over the seven days of Kiingi Tuheitia’s tangihanga.”
Te Ao with Moana journalist Te Rina Kowhai jumped in to help manage the operational grunt across the broadcast as line-up producer, pulling on her vast experience both technically and editorially.
Although it was a sad occasion, the Kiingitanga, for Kowhai, brought kotahitanga for the Māori media sector.
“For me unity, reo me ona tikanga, has always driven me and the kaupapa in this industry,” Kowhai said.
She also reflected on veteran Māori broadcasters, who had mentored her such as the late Whai Ngata, Hone Edwards, Miki Apiti, and especially the late Derek Wooster who had directed Te Arikinui Te Atarangikaahu’s tangihanga.
“Derek would tell me all the stories, the fond memories, the technical logistics of how they covered the late Te Arikinui Te Atarangikaahu tangi and now I have my own stories to tell. We’ve made history through this Māori media sector collaboration and I feel optimistic for our rangatahi coming into this space. It’s been a huge privilege.”
Behind the scenes as Te Reo o Te Uru reporter Aroha Broughton goes live. Image: Te Ao Māori News/File
Strong advocate for rangatahi With Kiingi Tuheitia such a strong advocate for rangatahi, producers wanted to prioritise the rangatahi voice in the news breakouts. Many of the young reporters were paired up with senior reporters to help produce their live crosses.
“We’ve got these amazing senior journos and presenters in the mix but it was about bringing the rangatahi in there on a sad occasion but quite a historical moment.
“We have a new queen, nearly a rangatahi queen, Kuini Nga Wai hono i te po. So a lot of things said to me, in terms of my experience, we needed to get as many of our rangatahi from all of our programmes into this.”
Shakayla Andrews-Alapaki from Tahu News said she felt “really honoured to be here because nō Te Wai Pounamu ahau (I’m from the South Island). I’ve travelled all this way to be a kairipoata (reporter) and it’s the biggest kaupapa in my lifetime so far as a Māori. So, nōku te hōnore ki te tae mai ki kōnei ki te whakanui tō tātou nei kiingi (I’m honoured to be here to celebrate our king).”
Te Reo o Te Uru reporter Regan Paranihi said, “Mōku ake, he mea nui i te mea ko ia te Kiingi. Ko ia te Kiingi mō ngāi tātou te iwi Māori. Nā reira, i runga i tērā āhuatanga, nōku anō te maringa nui kia whai wāhi ki tēnei kaupapa i runga anō i te kotahitanga o te noho me te ao pāpāho Māori. Koira tāna i whai nei i roto i tēnei tau tata nei, ko te kotahitanga me te kite i te kotahitanga i roto i te ao pāpāho Māori. Koirā pea te ōhākī i waiho e ia mō mātou. Nō reira nōku te maringa nui, ka mutu, ka mahara ake au i tēnei wā mo te roanga o tōku oranga.”
“For me personally, it’s significant because he’s the king. He is our Māori king. So, because of that, I feel fortunate to be a part of this event, and to be a part of this united effort by the Māori broadcasting industry. That’s what he was striving for over the last year or so, it was unity, and now we’re seeing unity in the Māori media. Perhaps that is the legacy he has left us. So, I feel very fortunate, and I will remember this time for the rest of my life.”
Waikato-Tainui communications and engagement manager Jason Ake said he heard the phrase ‘Ko koe te kiingi o kotahitanga, ko koe te kiingi o te rangatahi (You are the king of unity, You are the king of the youth)’ said by speakers on the ātea during the pōwhiri.
“So what we did see is absolutely those two things in full force. We got to see Māori media organisations collaborate, kotahitanga, and we also got to have a significant part of that reflected in the rangatahi voice as well. So I think we achieved absolutely what he was known for and what he was being recognised for in that space. So well done.”
‘Iwi-led and media-supported’ On the final day, thousands from across Aotearoa and the world tuned into the official broadcast led by the Kiingitanga, aired live on Whakaata Māori and TVNZ of the historic coronation of Kuini Nga Wai hono i te po and the nehu of Kiingi Tuheitia.
Experienced journalists presented the show including Julian Wilcox, Stacey Morrison, Tom Roa, Mihingarangi Forbes, Tini Molyneux, Scotty Morrison, John Campbell, Oriini Kaipara, Matai Smith, Te Arahi Maipi and Maiki Sherman.
In a social media post, Kaipara said: “May this new wave of solidarity continue to grow alongside our inherent right to mana motuhake. May it strengthen us all as a collective in a turbulent industry. May us oldies and not-so-oldies hear, see, value and nurture our awesome rangatahi to become their best selves and let them lead the way from time to time”.
Whakaata Māori news and current affairs director Blake Ihimaera said the official broadcast was “iwi-led and media supported”.
“For me personally, I’ve always been a big believer in iwi and the power of iwi and watching the Kiingitanga, Waikato-Tainui waka in action was amazing to witness,” she said.
“That official broadcast, being made by the Kiingitanga and taken by all of the stations, was another collaboration; one emphasising that iwi are in control of their narrative. It’s their kaupapa but we can support it and make it amazing.”
Collaboration with iwi radio Another highlight was the inclusion of iwi radio outlets including Tainui Live, Waatea Radio, Nga Iwi FM, Maniapoto FM and Te Reo o Te Uru.
As well as having radio journalists on the ground at Tūrangawaewae, Te Reo o Te Uru executive producer and Te Korimako o Taranaki station manager Tipene O’Brien travelled to Whakaata Māori in Auckland during the week to watch and learn the process of delivering a broadcast from behind the scenes in the studio.
“That was a big eye-opener for us. The overall goal for us is to be able to take those ideas and implement them at a regional level. Obviously, the difference is that we don’t have the big budgets and we don’t have the human resources that they do, but I think, if we understand the concepts of how they do it, we can figure out how to adapt it and customise to our needs and wants.”
Before each newsbreak ended, presenters handed over the audience to the Kiingitanga Facebook page to continue to watch the live coverage of each pōwhiri at Tuurangawaewae.
Ake said: “It was really exciting for us because at one point there we handed over an audience of between 120,000 and 130,000 viewers straight into the Kiingitanga page, so it wasn’t starting off cold and it gave good context leading into it every morning and afternoon.”
Ake said it was important for national and regional news to continue to collaborate because “a lot of regionally significant stories would otherwise be lost on a national platform.”
“Sometimes those stories have equal weight back home. It’s great listening to some of the nationally focused news that takes place but, equally, I think the focus for regional stories, there is a hunger for them and the landscape is moving very, very quickly in that regard,” Ake said.
He said linear broadcasting would probably be dead or defunct within the next five years so news outlets needed to create content where “our people are either listening or watching”.
“We can’t carry on delivering content on platforms where our people actually have a [lower] consumption rate. We need to go to them and we know more and more they are consuming stuff digitally and online and TVNZ and Whakaata Māori have recognised that.”
The future is collaboration Ihimaera said now that Māori media had collaborated on “the biggest kaupapa of our lifetime”, she expected it to continue to happen.
“We’ve set a foundation for that to happen further. The future is collaboration and so, whatever kaupapa it might be, we probably will be using all of our our partners because it’s only right.”
Ihimaera said Whakaata Māori and Te Ao Māori News would work to collaborate with other Māori media during Te Matatini next year.
O’Brien said Te Reo o Te Uru would “certainly be contributing in a big way” to produce content in collaboration with other outlets during Te Matatini.
“It’s a messaging that’s coming clear from Te Māngai Pāho that we need to look at collaborating and working together.”
Te Māngai Pāho is the government-funded agency that provides funding for media and content to promote Māori language and culture. Whakaata Māori is also government-funded but is expected to receive a $10.3 million funding decrease over the next two financial years.
“We made history — we are right now being supported by the government [but] they could support a lot more,” Nuri said.
“I feel we just demonstrated and showed the power of kotahitanga within Māori media. I think the government will be willing to have a conversation about how we create an innovative digital future for us.”
This week Whakaata Māori and Te Ao Māori News have already collaborated with the Ngā Manu Kōrero to bring a livestream of its pōwhiri online.
Jess Tyson is a multimedia journalist and digital producer for Te Ao Māori News. She has also worked as co-presenter for Rereātea, Māori Television’s online midday news bulletin, as well as an Online Reporter. This article was first published by Te Ao Māori News and is republished with the author’s permission.
We need to begin thinking, feeling, and living in accordance with this new reality. We cannot continue along the ecocidal, omnicidal trajectory that our small circles of compassion have made possible, or else we will go extinct. Image: caitlinjohnstone.com.au
We can’t keep living like this. Our species cannot continue living on this planet as though what happens to other people and other organisms around the world has nothing to do with us. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone
The other day someone on Twitter asked me why he should care about what’s happening in Gaza, saying, “Why should I care about anyone that isn’t in a 20 mile radius of where I live?”
I was a bit taken aback by this. I must confess I live in a bit of an echo chamber when it comes to caring about the world; most people I interact with from day to day either agree with me or disagree with me about the abusive nature of the empire and what our problems are and what should be done about them, but the one thing they all have in common is that they care.
Outside my little bubble I suspect this “why should I care?” sentiment is probably pretty common, though.
There’s a 2017 Huffington Post article by Kayla Chadwick titled “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People” which expresses frustration at this type of attitude, because it is very difficult to argue against. If you’re not already the sort of person who would naturally care about the death and suffering in Gaza, it’s going to be hard to get you to see why you should.
If you’re missing the part of yourself which hurts when it sees children ripped apart by Israeli bombs, you’re going to have a hard time understanding the value of that part.
But I like a challenge. So I’ve had a bit of a think about it, and I’ve come up with the most honest and complete answer to this question that I am able to produce right now. It might not convince anyone, but it is a well-reasoned answer.
Why should you care about Gaza? Because we can’t keep living like this. Our species cannot continue living on this planet as though what happens to other people and other organisms around the world has nothing to do with us. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore.
For better or for worse, we now live on a planet with eight billion humans who are no longer separated by distance in the way we used to be. This species which spent so much of its development relating to itself in units of small tribes is now an intimately networked global community whose behavior is literally altering the face of this planet, and we need to start acting like it.
We need to start doing what Einstein called “widening our circle of compassion” beyond our small tribal units of people we personally know and like, or we simply won’t be able to survive and thrive on this planet.
The inability of ordinary people to think globally is directly affecting our lives in the here and now.
The ability of plutocrats to exploit cheap labor overseas directly affects how much you and your neighbours can earn to provide for yourselves and your families. If we had true international class solidarity, they wouldn’t be able to get away with that anymore.
The ability of corporations to feed our biosphere into the capitalism machine and offload costs of production onto the ecosystem to maximise profits directly affects the kind of environment we’ll all be living in in the coming years. Corporate suits can only get away with this because the citizenry who vastly outnumber them have been manipulated into accepting their cancerous behavior.
The ability of war profiteers and empire managers to push for more war and militarism around the world directly affects how much of our nation’s wealth and resources are allocated to supporting the needs of ordinary people at home, and threatens us all with the looming possibility of nuclear armageddon.
The imperial propaganda machine works so hard to manufacture consent for this madness because otherwise nobody would consent to it.
The oligarchs and government agencies who run the US-centralised empire are able to exploit our tendency to only care about our immediate surroundings to construct global mechanisms which affect everything — including our immediate surroundings. All it takes is a little narrative manipulation coupled with our own nearsightedness to keep us from seeing what they’re doing.
They destabilise entire regions in the Global South with war and imperialist extraction, and when people start fleeing those horrible conditions they use propaganda to manipulate those in the Global North into hating immigrants instead of focusing on what’s driving the mass exoduses.
They deliberately maintain a level of unemployment to artificially depress wages, and then propagandise the working poor into thinking the unemployed are parasitic welfare moochers.
They create a controlled opposition false dichotomy between two mainstream political factions who both serve the capitalist empire in every meaningful way, and then manipulate both sides into blaming all the problems this causes on the other side instead of on the architects of this whole disaster.
These manipulations would not work if our circles of compassion were sufficiently wide. The same moral myopia which causes us to fail to see a Palestinian child as worthy of our care and attention also causes us to fail to recognise the underlying causes of all the major problems we see all around us.
It’s true that caring about that Palestinian child, in and of itself, will yield you no personal material gain. But being the sort of person who would care about that Palestinian child will help pave the way from hell on earth to paradise.
Enough humans having a wide enough circle of compassion to care about the suffering of other humans who they will never meet is all it will take for us to create a healthy world.
Our species can no longer existentially afford small circles of compassion. We can no longer afford ignorance and apathy. We’ve got to start learning about what’s happening in the world, thinking in terms of global community, and caring about our fellow beings on this planet in the way we care for our friends and neighbors.
Sure that’s not our tendency right now, but every species eventually hits a point where it needs to adapt or go the way of the dinosaur. That’s where we’re at right now.
The days where “rugged individualism” could be defended as a rational worldview are long over, if it was ever rational to begin with.
This isn’t the 12th century. We’re not going from birth to death in tiny communities unconnected to the rest of the world. Whatever device you’re reading this on has parts from multiple foreign countries, which passed through countless foreign hands to come into yours.
We all touch one another’s lives around the world from distances which used to have no relevance to the human experience of this planet.
We need to begin thinking, feeling, and living in accordance with this new reality. We cannot continue along the ecocidal, omnicidal trajectory that our small circles of compassion have made possible, or else we will go extinct.
That’s why you should care about Gaza. Because humanity’s collective failure to care about such things is driving our species further and further into misery and dystopia, and closer and closer to the precipice of eternal oblivion.
Kiingi Tuheitia is laid to rest at Taupiri maunga this week. Image: RNZ/Nick Monro
RNZ MEDIAWATCH:By Colin Peacock
“Anticipation is growing. The warriors are ready. They’re preparing themselves. The paddlers are already on their waka,” Scotty Morrison, alongside veteran journalist Tini Molyneux, told viewers from the banks of the Waikato River.
It was Thursday, and the body of Kiingi Tuheitia was being escorted to the barge to take him to his resting place on Taupiri maunga.
That prompted Morrison — the presenter of TVNZ’s Te Karere and Marae — to recall that council permission was required in 2006 for Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu to make the same journey.
“In 2008 after the Waikato River settlement … a request was put in by Waikato Tainui that they had more control over the river. This time they could say: ‘We’re taking our King on the awa at this particular time,’” Morrison said.
“That’s mana motuhake for you,” Molyneux replied.
Times have changed a lot for the media since 2006 too.
Whakaata Māori now has two TV channels, which both carried live coverage of the ceremonies over five days.
The Kiingitanga’s own channel also broadcast live throughout on YouTube and Facebook as well.
The Kiingitanga’s own channel live broadcast.
Another broadcaster who joined that epic broadcast on Friday, Matai Smith, reminded viewers that the notion of media is not what it was in 2006 either.
“We know that we live in a world of TikTok and Instagram. [We know] the relevance of the Kiingitanga to Waikato Tainui, but also to us here in Aotearoa — and many of us could be seen as quite ignorant of the significance of this kaupapa,” Smith said.
Kuini Nga wai hono i te po is crowned . . . “it’s going to be interesting to see how she shapes Kiingitanga into this modern age.” Image: Kiingitanga/RNZ
“I’ve been checking the socials because she is 27 years old, and the average age of Māori is also 27 years old. This is the way that this generation communicates,” Forbes said, noting that her own social feeds filled up with tributes to the new Kuini.
While the tangihanga itself was a sombre and highly ceremonial occasion, the live coverage also had moments of levity on the paepae — and between broadcasters and their guests.
All this played out at Tuurangawaewae marae less than a fortnight after dignitaries and the media gathered for the annual Koroneihana celebration of the coronation of Kiingi Tuheitia.
The historic moment in te ao Māori and New Zealand history was covered comprehensively over five days thanks to collaboration between Whakaata Māori and the iwi radio network Te Whakaruruhau. It was probably the longest continuous multimedia coverage of any event in our media’s history.
So how was all this done?
Kawe Roes hosting Kawe Korero on Whakaata Māori. Image: Maori Television screenshot
One of those in the media pack at Tuurangawaewae throughout was former Whakaata Māori presenter Kawe Roes, who is now a digital media reporter for Waatea News.
The Auckland-based Waatea also provides news to Te Whakaruruhau o Ngā Reo Irirangi Māori — the national iwi radio network.
“Tainui and the Kiingitanga already have systems in place to make it easy for broadcasting. They’ve been doing live streams for nearly 15 years,” Roes told Mediawatch.
“In my years of broadcasting, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the amount of talent that was put into making sure Kiingi Tuheitia had the best broadcast for his tangihanga for the whole world to watch.
“Once Tuheitia had taken the throne, he literally became the king of social media. By doing that so early Kiingitanga and Koroneihana events were able to transition from a special broadcast that might have been done in the TVNZ days to a livestream.
“The hardest part wasn’t getting anyone there. We had so many people to choose from, including journalists like myself who are versed in te reo and English. You also had Māori journalists who were just versed in English and Iwi radio networks were also part of that.”
The Morning Report team at the tangi for Kiingi Tuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII and the naming of the new Māori monarch, 5 September 2024. Image: Layla Bailey-McDowell/RNZ
Roes said it was one big collective effort.
“The kaupapa was that the broadcast was more important than the brands. Even though we’re in different organisations, we all know each other. We’re a very small family, and I think by having that rapport made the job easier.
“We shared all our knowledge. I was sharing knowledge of Kiingitanga and Tainui whakapapa with a New Zealand Herald reporter.”
“We put that to the side. If I, as a Māori journalist, can’t help him then what am I doing on my job, really?
“At the end of the day, we’re here to put out an amazing story. And for me, that’s what made it beautiful.”
Were they broadcasting in the service of Kiingitanga and iwi around the country? Or to be the eyes and ears of people who could not be there? To capture it all for history? Or all of the above?
“From our Māori broadcasting perspective, it was all about quality … because we knew it was going to be historic. The journalists, they took all the knowledge around them, and they put out some amazing content.”
Back to the future
Dr Ruakere Hond speaks to Morning Report at the tangi for Kiingi Tuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII and the naming of the new Māori monarch. Image: RNZ/Layla Bailey-McDowell
The Kiingitanga evolved to deal with the Crown over urgent matters such as land sales and alienation. Now there is a young queen who is of the digital generation at a time when Māori/Crown relations are again tense and controversial.
“So it’s going to be interesting to see how she shapes Kiingitanga into this modern age. She is the boss. She is now the queen of Māoridom and how she wants to roll with tikanga, how she wants to roll in a digital space is up to her,” Roes said.
“From what I can tell, a lot of the status quo will remain. The only thing I would suggest is be careful who you’re talking to, not because of what you’re going to say, but we don’t want to overuse the majesty, and people end up hōhā listening to her.
“The reality is — in my Tainui perspective — we look at them with a sense of tapu. That means you don’t naturally go up to them and start talking. But we might see her going to Waitangi for instance.
“With young people, that might be where she thrives a bit more, and she can connect more with rangatahi — and she’s an easy lady to talk to.”
Māori media have treated the Kuini’s accession in a reverential way. But when seeking the voice of Māoridom on political or controversial things, that will have to change.
“I think the King changed the media landscape when throwing out support for the Māori Party. We’ve got an example there on how we can critique and how we can ask questions.
“But you’ll only ever get to the monarch through spokespersons, and that’s why you have people like Rahi Papa and (Kīngitanga’s chief of staff and adviser) Ngira Simmonds, who bring those thoughts to the media. Tainui are across how to deal with media — an iwi who have been dealing with the Crown for 166 years.”
Colin Peacock is the RNZ Mediawatch presenter. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The mainstream [Australian] media is very largely a mouthpiece for Washington propaganda. And that American propaganda is pushed out through the legacy media. Image: Pearls and Irritations
Of the international intelligence information that comes to Australian agencies from the Five Eyes, 90 percent comes from the CIA and related US intelligence agencies. So in effect we have the colonisation of our intelligence agencies These agencies dominate the advice to ministers, writes John Menadue.
Michael Lester:Hello again listeners to Community Radio Northern Beaches Community Voices and also the Pearls and Irritations podcast. I’m Michael Lester.
Our guest today is the publisher and founder of the Pearls and Irritations Public Policy online journal, the celebrated John Menadue, with whom we’ll be so pleased to have a discussion today. John has a long and high profile experience in both the public service, for which he’s been awarded the Order of Australia and also in business.
As a public servant, he was secretary of a number of departments over the years, prime minister and cabinet under a couple of different prime ministers, immigration and ethnic affairs, special minister of state and the Department of Trade and also Ambassador to Japan.
And in his private sector career, he was a general manager at News Corp and the chief executive of Qantas. These are just among many of his considerable activities.
These days, as I say, he’s a publisher, public commentator, writer, and we’re absolutely delighted to welcome you here to Radio Northern Beaches and the P&I podcast, John.
John Menadue: Thank you, Michael. Thanks for the welcome and for what you’ve had to say about Pearls and Irritations. My wife says that she’s the Pearl and I’m the Irritation.
ML:You launched, I think, P&I, what, 2013 or 2011; anyway, you’ve been going a long while. And I noticed the other day you observed that you’d published some 20,000 items on Pearls and Irritations to do with public policy. That’s an amazing achievement itself as an independent media outlet in Australia, isn’t it?
JM: I’m quite pleased with it and so is Susie, my wife. We started 13 years ago and we did everything. I used to write all the stories and Susie handled the technical, admin, financial matters, but it’s grown dramatically since then. We now contract some of the work to people that can help us in editorial, in production and IT. It’s achieving quite a lot of influence among ministers, politicians, journalists and other opinion leaders in the community.
We’re looking now at what the future holds. I’m 89 and Susie, my wife, is not in good health. So we’re looking at new governance arrangements, a public company with outside directors so that we can continue Pearls and Irritations well into the future.
Pearls and Irritations publisher John Menadue . . . “I’m afraid some of [the mainstream media] are just incorrigible. They in fact act as stenographers to powerful interests.” Image: Independent Australian
ML: So you made a real contribution through this and you’ve given the opportunity for so many expert, experienced, independent voices to commentate on public policy issues of great importance, not least vis-a-vis, might I say, mainstream media treatment of a lot of these issues. This is one of your themes and motivations with Pearls and Irritations as a public policy journal, isn’t it? That our mainstream media perhaps don’t do the job they might do in covering significant issues of public policy?
JM: That’s our hope and intention, but I’m afraid some of them are just incorrigible. They in fact act as stenographers to powerful interests.
It’s quite a shame what mainstream media is serving up today, propaganda for the United States, so focused on America.Occasionally we get nonsense about the British royal family or some irrelevant feature like that.
But we’re very badly served. Our media shows very little interest in our own region. It is ignorant and prejudiced against China. It is not concerned about our relations with Indonesia, with the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam.
It’s all focused on the United States.We’re seeing it on an enormous scale now with the US elections. Even the ABC has a Planet America programme.
It’s so much focused on America as if we’re an island parked off New York. We are being Americanised in so many areas and particularly in our media.
ML: What has led to this state of affairs in the way that mainstream media treats major public policy issues these days? It hasn’t always been like that or has it?
JM: We’ve been a country that’s been frightened of our region, the countries where we have to make our future. And we’ve turned first to the United Kingdom as a protector. That ended in tears in Singapore.
And now we turn to the United States to look after us in this dangerous world, rather than making our own way as an independent country in our own region. That fear of our region, racism, white Australia, yellow peril all feature in Australia and in our media.
But when we had good, strong leaders, for example, Malcolm Fraser on refugees, he gave leadership and our role in the region.
Gough Whitlam did it also. If we have strong leadership, we can break from our focus on the United States at the expense of our own region. In the end, we’ve got to decide that as we live in this region, we’ve got to prosper in this region.
Security in our region, not from our region. We can do it, but I’m afraid that we’ve been retreating from Asia dreadfully over the last two or three decades. I thought when we had a Labor government, things would be different, but they’re not.
We are still frightened of our own region and embracing at every opportunity, the United States.
ML: Another theme of the many years of publishing Pearls and Irritations is that you are concerned to rebuild some degree of public confidence and trust that has been lost in the political system and that you seek to provide a platform for good policy discussion with the emphasis being on public policy. How has the public policy process been undermined or become so narrow minded if that’s one way of describing it?
JM: Contracting out work to private contractors, the big four accounting firms, getting advice, and not trusting the public service has meant that the quality of our public service has declined considerably. That has to be rebuilt so we get better policy development.
Ministers have been responsible, particularly Scott Morrison, for downgrading the public service and believing somehow or other that better advice can be obtained in the private sector.
Another factor has been the enormous growth in the power of lobbyists for corporate Australia and for foreign companies as well. Ministers have become beholden to pressure from powerful lobby groups.
One particular example, with which I’m quite familiar is in the health field. We are never likely to have real improvements in Medicare, for example, unless the government is prepared to take on the power of lobbyists — the providers, the doctors, the pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies in Australia.
But it’s not just in health where lobbyists are causing so much damage. The power of lobbyists has discredited the role of governments that are seduced by powerful interests rather than serving the community.
The media have just entrenched this problem. Governments are criticised at every opportunity. Australia can be served by the media taking a more positive view about the importance of good policy development and not getting sidetracked all the time about some trivial personal political issue.
The media publish the handouts of the lobbyists, whether it’s the health industry or whether it’s in the fossil fuel industries. These are the main factors that have contributed to the lack of confidence and the lack of trust in good government in Australia.
ML: A particular editorial focus that’s evident in Pearls and Irritations is promoting, I think in your words, a peaceful dialogue and engagement with China. Why is this required and why do you put it forward as a particularly important part of what you see as the mission of your Pearls and Irritations public policy journal?
JM; China, is our largest market and will continue to be so. There is a very jaundiced view, particularly from the United States, which we then copy, that China is a great threat. It’s not a threat to Australia and it’s not a threat to the United States homeland.
But it is to a degree a threat, a competitive threat to the United States in economy and trade. America didn’t worry about China when it was poor, but now that it’s strong militarily, economically and in technology, America is very concerned and feels that its future, its own leadership, its hegemony in the world is being contested.
Unfortunately, Australia has allowed itself to be drawn into the American contest with China. It’s one provocation after another. If it’s not within China itself, it’s on Taiwan, human rights in Hong Kong. Every opportunity is found by the United States to provoke China, if possible, and lead it into war.
I think, frankly, China will be more careful than that.
China’s problem is that it’s successful. And that’s what America cannot accept. By comparison, China does not make the military threat to other countries that the United States presents.
America is the most violent, aggressive country in the world. The greatest threat to peace in the world is the United States and we’re seeing that particularly now expressed in Israel and in Gaza.
But there’s a history. America’s almost always at war and has been since its independence in 1776. By contrast, China doesn’t have that sort of record and history. It is certainly concerned about security on its borders, and it has borders with 14 countries.
But it doesn’t project its power like the US. It doesn’t bomb other countries like the United States. It doesn’t have military bases surrounding the United States.
The United States has about 800 bases around the world. It’s not surprising that China feels threatened by what the United States is doing. And until the United States comes to a sensible, realistic view about China and deals with it politically, I think they’re going to make continual problems for us.
We have this dichotomy that China is our major trading partner but it’s seen by many as a strategic threat. I think that is a mistake.
ML: But what about your views about the public policy process underlying Australia’s policy in reaching the positions that we’re taking vis-a-vis China?
JM: There are several reasons for it, but I think the major one is that Australian governments, the previous government and now this one, takes the advice of intelligence agencies rather than the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Our intelligence agencies are part of Five Eyes. Of the international intelligence which comes to Australian agencies, 90 percent comes from the CIA and related US intelligence agencies. So in effect we’ve had the colonisation of our intelligence agencies and they’re the ones that the Australian government listens to.
Very senior people in those agencies have direct access to the Prime Minister. He listens to them rather than to Penny Wong or the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. On most public issues involving China, the Department of Foreign Affairs has become a wallflower.
It’s a great tragedy because so much of our future in the region depends on good diplomacy with China, with the ASEAN, with the countries of our region.
Those intelligence agencies in Australia, together with American funded, military funded organisations such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute have the ear of governments. They’ve also got the ear of the media.
Stories are leaked to the media all the time from those agencies in order to heighten our fear of the region. The Americanisation of Australia is widespread. But our intelligence agencies have been Americanised as well, and they’re leading us down a very dangerous path.
ML: I’m speaking with our guest today on Reno Northern Beaches Community Voices and on the Pearls and Irritations podcast with the publisher of Pearls and Irritations Public Policy Journal, John Menadue, distinguished Australian public servant and businessman.
John, again, it’s one thing to talk about that, but governments, when they change, and we’ve had a change of government recently, very often, as I’m sure you know from personal experience, have the opportunity and do indeed change their advisors and adopt different policies, and one might have expected this to happen.
Why didn’t we see a change of the guard like we saw a change of government?
JM: I think this government is timid on almost everything. It was timid from day one on administrative arrangements, departmental arrangements, heads of departments.
For example, there was no change made to dismantle the Department of Home Affairs with Michael Pezzullo. That should have happened on day one, but it didn’t happen.
Concerns we’ve had in migration, the role of foreign affairs and intelligence with all those intelligence agencies gathered together in one department has been very bad for Australia.
Very few changes were made in the leadership of our intelligence agencies, the Office of National Assessments, in ASIO. The same advice has been continued. In almost every area you can look at, the government has been timid, unprepared to take on vested interests, lobbyists, and change departments to make them more attuned to what the government wants to do.
But the government doesn’t want to upset anyone. And as a result, we’re having a continuation of badly informed ministers and departments that have really not been effectively changed to meet the requirements and needs of, what I thought was a reforming government.
ML: In that context, AUKUS and the nuclear submarine deal might be perhaps a case in point of the broader issues and points you’re making. How would you characterise the nature of the public policy process and decision behind AUKUS? How were the decisions made and in what manner?
JM: By political appointees and confidants of Morrison. There’s been no public discussion. There’s been no public statement by Morrison or by Albanese about AUKUS — its history, why we’re doing it.
It’s been left to briefings of journalists and others. I think it’s disgraceful what’s happened in that area. It’s time the Australian government spelled out to us what it all means, but it’s not going to do it. Because I believe the case is so threadbare that it’s not game to put it to the public test.
And so we’re continuing in this ludicrous arrangement, this fiscal calamity, which Morrison inflicted on the Albanese government which it hasn’t been game to contest.
My own view is that frankly, AUKUS will never happen. It is so absurd — the delay, the cost, the failure of submarine construction or the delays in the United States, the problems of the submarine construction and maintenance in the United Kingdom.
For all those sorts of reasons, I don’t think it’ll really happen. Unfortunately, we’re going to waste a lot of money and a lot of time. I don’t think the Department of Defence could run any major project, certainly not a project like this.
Defence has been unsuccessful in the frigate and numerous other programmes. Our Department of Defence really is not up to the job and that among other reasons gives me reason to believe, and hope frankly, that AUKUS will collapse under its own stupidity.
But what I think is of more concern is the real estate, which we are freely leasing to the Americans. We had it first with the Marines in Darwin. We have it also coming now with US B-52 aircraft based out of Tindal in the Northern Territory and the submarine base in Perth, Western Australia.
These bases are being made available to the United States with very little control by Australia. The government carries on with nonsense about how our sovereignty will be protected.
In fact, it won’t be protected. If there’s any difficulties, for example, over a war with China over Taiwan, and the Americans are involved, there is no way Americans will consult with us about whether they can use nuclear armed vessels out of Tindal, for example.
The Americans will insist that Pine Gap continues to operate. So we are locked in through ceding so much of our real estate and the sovereignty that goes with it.
Penny Wong has been asked about American aircraft out of Tindal, carrying nuclear weapons and she says to us, sorry but the Americans won’t confirm or deny what they do.
Good heavens, this is our territory. This is our sovereignty. And we won’t even ask the Americans operating out of Tindal, whether they’re carrying nuclear weapons.
Back in the days of Malcolm Fraser, he made a statement to the Parliament insisting that no vessels or aircraft carrying nuclear weapons or ships carrying nuclear weapons could access Australian ports or operate over Australia without the permission of the Australian government.
And now Penny Wong says, we won’t ask. You can do what you like. We know the US won’t confirm or deny.
When it came to the Solomon Islands, a treaty that the Solomons negotiated with China on strategic and defence matters, Penny Wong was very upset about this secret agreement. There should be transparency, she warned.
But that’s small fry, compared with the fact that the Australian government will allow United States aircraft to operate out of Tindal without the Australian government knowing whether they are carrying nuclear weapons. I think that’s outrageous.
ML: Notwithstanding many of the very technical and economic and other discussions around the nuclear submarine’s acquisition, it does seem that politically, at least, and not least from the media presentation of our policy position that we’re very clearly signing up with our US allies against contingency attacks on Taiwan that we would be committed to take a part in and we’re also moving very closely, to well the phrase is interoperability, with the US forces and equipment but also personnel too.
You mentioned earlier, intelligence personnel and I believe there’s a lot of US personnel in the Department of Defence too?
JM: That’s right. It’s just another example of Americanisation which is reflected in our intelligence agencies, Department of Defence, interchangeability of our military forces, the fusion of our military or particularly our Navy with the United States. It’s all becoming one fused enterprise with the United States.
And in any difficulties, we would not be able, as far as I can see, to disengage from what the United States is doing. And we would be particularly vulnerable because of the AUKUS submarines. That’s if they ever come to anything. Because the AUKUS submarines, we are told, would operate off the Chinese coast to attack Chinese submarines or somehow provide intelligence for the Americans and for us.
These submarines will not be nuclear armed, which means that in the event of a conflict, we would have no bargaining or no counter to China. We’d be the weak link in the alliance with the United States.
China will not be prepared to strike the mainland United States for fear of massive retaliation. We are the weak link with Pine Gap and other real estate that I mentioned. We would be making ourselves much more vulnerable by this association with the United States.
Those AUKUS submarines will provide no deterrence for us, but make us more vulnerable if a conflict arises in which we are effectively part of the US military operation.
ML: How would you characterise the mainstream media’s presentation and treatment of these issues?
JM: The mainstream media is very largely a mouthpiece for Washington propaganda. And that American propaganda is pushed out through the legacy media, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the news agencies, Fox News which in turn are influenced by the military/ business complex which Eisenhower warned us about years ago.
The power of those groups with the CIA and the influence that they have, means that they overwhelm our media. That’s reflected particularly in The Australian and News Corporation publications.
I don’t know how some of those journalists can hold their heads. They’ve been on the drip feed of America for so long. They cannot see a world that is not dominated and led by the United States.
I’m hoping that over time, Pearls and Irritations and other independent media will grow and provide a more balanced view about Australia’s role in our region and in our own development.
We need to keep good relations with the United States. They’re an important player, but I think that we are unnecessarily risking our future by throwing our lot almost entirely in with the United States.
Minister for Defence, Richard Marles is leading the Americanisation of our military. I think Penny Wong is to some extent trying to pull him back. But unfortunately so much of the leadership of Australia in defence, in the media, is part and parcel of the mistaken United States view of the world.
ML: What sort of voices are we not hearing in the media or in Australia on this question?
JM: It’s not going to change, Michael. I can’t see it changing with Lachlan Murdoch in charge. I think it’s getting worse, if possible, within News Corporation. It’s a very, very difficult and desperate situation where we’re being served so poorly.
ML: Is there a strong independent media and potential for voices through independent media in Australia?
JM: No, we haven’t got one. The best hope at the side, of course, is the ABC and SBS public broadcasters, but they’ve been seduced as well by all things American.
We’ve seen that particularly in recent months over the conflict in Gaza. The ABC and SBS heavily favour Israel. It is shameful.
They’re still the best hope of the side, but they need more money. They’re getting a little bit more from the government, but I think they are sadly lacking in leadership and proper understanding of what the role of a public broadcaster should be.
I don’t think there’s a quick answer to any of this. And I hope that we can extricate ourselves without too much damage in the future. Our media has a great responsibility and must be held responsible for the damage that it is causing in Australia.
ML: Well, look, thank you very much, John Menadue, for joining us on Radio Northern Beaches and on the Pearls and Irritations podcast. John Menadue, publisher, founder, editor-in-chief of, for the last 13 years, the public policy journal Pearls and Irritations. We’ve been discussing the role of the mainstream media, independent media, in the public policy processes too in Australia, and particularly in the context of international relations and in this case our relationships with the US and China.
Thank you so much John for taking the time and for sharing your thoughts with us here today. Thanks for joining us John.
JM: Thank you. Let’s hope for better days.
John Menadue, founder and publisher of Pearls and Irritations public policy journal has had a senior professional career in the media, public service and airlines. In 1985, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for public service. In 2009, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Adelaide in recognition of his significant and lifelong contribution to Australian society. This transcript of the Pearls and Irritations podcast on 10 August 2024 is republished with permission.
If there are no red lines for Israel when it comes to brutalising Palestinian civilians trapped inside Gaza, why would there be any red lines for those kidnapped off its streets and dragged into its dungeons? Image: www.jonathan-cook.net
Israel’s zealots are ignoring the pleas of the top brass. They want to widen the circle of war, whatever the consequences.
ANALYSIS: By Jonathan Cook
There should be nothing surprising about the revelation that troops at Sde Teiman, a detention camp set up by Israel in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel, are routinely using rape as a weapon of torture against Palestinian inmates.
Last month, nine soldiers from a prison unit, Force 100, were arrested for gang-raping a Palestinian inmate with a sharp object. He had to be hospitalised with his injuries.
At least 53 prisoners are known to have died in Israeli detention, presumed in most cases to be either through torture or following the denial of access to medical care. No investigations have been carried out by Israel and no arrests have been made.
Why should it be of any surprise that Israel’s self-proclaimed “most moral army in the world” uses torture and rape against Palestinians? It would be truly surprising if this was not happening.
After all, this is the same military that for 10 months has used starvation as a weapon of war against the 2.3 million people of Gaza, half of them children.
It is the same military that since October has laid waste to all of Gaza’s hospitals, as well as destroying almost all of its schools and 70 percent of its homes. It is the same military that is known to have killed over that period at least 40,000 Palestinians, with a further 21,000 children missing.
It is the same military currently on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court in the world.
No red lines If there are no red lines for Israel when it comes to brutalising Palestinian civilians trapped inside Gaza, why would there be any red lines for those kidnapped off its streets and dragged into its dungeons?
I documented some of the horrors unfolding in Sde Teiman in these pages back in May.
Months ago, the Israeli media began publishing testimonies from whistleblowing guards and doctors detailing the depraved conditions there.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has been denied access to the detention camp, leaving it entirely unmonitored.
The United Nations published a report on July 31 into the conditions in which some 9400 captive Palestinians have been held since last October. Most have been cut off from the outside world, and the reason for their seizure and imprisonment was never provided.
The report concludes that “appalling acts” of torture and abuse are taking place at all of Israel’s detention centres, including sexual violence, waterboarding and attacks with dogs.
The authors note “forced nudity of both men and women; beatings while naked, including on the genitals; electrocution of the genitals and anus; being forced to undergo repeated humiliating strip searches; widespread sexual slurs and threats of rape; and the inappropriate touching of women by both male and female soldiers”.
There are, according to the investigation, “consistent reports” of Israeli security forces “inserting objects into detainees’ anuses”.
Children sexually abused
Last month, Save the Children found that many hundreds of Palestinian children had been imprisoned in Israel, where they faced starvation and sexual abuse.
And this week B’Tselem, Israel’s main human rights group monitoring the occupation, produced a report — titled “Welcome to Hell” — which included the testimonies of dozens of Palestinians who had emerged from what it called “inhuman conditions”. Most had never been charged with an offence.
It concluded that the abuses at Sde Teiman were “just the tip of the iceberg”. All of Israel’s detention centres formed “a network of torture camps for Palestinians” in which “every inmate is intentionally condemned to severe, relentless pain and suffering”. It added that this was “an organised, declared policy of the Israeli prison authorities”.
Tal Steiner, head of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, which has long campaigned against the systematic torture of Palestinian detainees, wrote last week that Sde Teiman “was a place where the most horrible torture we had ever seen was occurring”.
In short, it has been an open secret in Israel that torture and sexual assault are routine at Sde Teiman.
The abuse is so horrifying that last month Israel’s High Court ordered officials to explain why they were operating outside Israel’s own laws governing the internment of “unlawful combatants”.
The surprise is not that sexual violence is being inflicted on Palestinian captives. It is that Israel’s top brass ever imagined the arrest of Israeli soldiers for raping a Palestinian would pass muster with the public.
Toxic can of worms
Instead, by making the arrests, the army opened a toxic can of worms.
The arrests provoked a massive backlash from soldiers, politicians, Israeli media, and large sections of the Israeli public.
Rioters, led by members of the Israeli Parliament, broke into Sde Teiman. An even larger group, including members of Force 100, tried to invade a military base, Beit Lid, where the soldiers were being held in an attempt to free them.
The police, under the control of Itamar Ben Gvir, a settler leader with openly fascist leanings, delayed arriving to break up the protests. Ben Gvir has called for Palestinian prisoners to be summarily executed — or killed with “a shot to the head” — to save on the costs of holding them.
No one was arrested over what amounted to a mutiny as well as a major breach of security.
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, helped whip up popular indignation, denouncing the arrests and describing the Force 100 soldiers as “heroic warriors”.
Other prominent cabinet ministers echoed him.
Three soldiers freed
Already, three of the soldiers have been freed, and more will likely follow.
The consensus in Israel is that any abuse, including rape, is permitted against the thousands of Palestinians who have been seized by Israel in recent months — including women, children and many hundreds of medical personnel.
That consensus is the same one that thinks it fine to bomb Palestinian women and children in Gaza, destroy their homes and starve them.
Such depraved attitudes are not new. They draw on ideological convictions and legal precedents that developed through decades of Israel’s illegal occupation. Israeli society has completely normalised the idea that Palestinians are less than human and that any and every abuse of them is allowed.
Hamas’s attack on October 7 simply brought the long-standing moral corruption at the core of Israeli society more obviously out into the open.
In 2016, for example, the Israeli military appointed Colonel Eyal Karim as its chief rabbi, even after he had declared Palestinians to be “animals” and had approved the rape of Palestinian women in the interest of boosting soldiers’ morale.
Compensation suit dismissed
In 2015, Israel’s Supreme Court dismissed a compensation suit from a Lebanese prisoner that his lawyers submitted after he was released in a prisoner swap. Mustafa Dirani had been raped with a baton 15 years earlier in a secret jail known as Facility 1391.
Despite Dirani’s claim being supported by a medical assessment from the time made by an Israeli military doctor, the court ruled that anyone engaged in an armed conflict with Israel could not make a claim against the Israeli state.
Meanwhile, human and legal rights groups have regularly reported cases of Israeli soldiers and police raping and sexually assaulting Palestinians, including children.
A clear message was sent to Israeli soldiers over many decades that, just as the genocidal murder of Palestinians is considered warranted and “lawful”, the torture and rape of Palestinians held in captivity is considered warranted and “lawful” too.
Understandably, there was indignation that the long-established “rules” — that any and every atrocity is permitted — appeared suddenly and arbitrarily to have been changed.
The biggest question is this: why did the Israeli military’s top legal adviser approve opening an investigation into the Force 100 soldiers — and why now?
The answer is obvious. Israel’s commanders are in panic after a spate of setbacks in the international legal arena.
‘Plausible’ Gaza genocide
The ICJ, sometimes referred to as the World Court, has put Israel on trial for committing what it considers a “plausible” genocide in Gaza.
Separately, it concluded last month that Israel’s 57-year occupation is illegal and a form of aggression against the Palestinian people. Gaza never stopped being under occupation, the judges ruled, despite claims from its apologists, including Western governments, to the contrary.
Significantly, that means Palestinians have a legal right to resist their occupation. Or, to put it another way, they have an immutable right to self-defence against their Israeli occupiers, while Israel has no such right against the Palestinians it illegally occupies.
Israel is not in “armed conflict” with the Palestinian people. It is brutally occupying and oppressing them.
Israel must immediately end the occupation to regain such a right of self-defence — something it demonstrably has no intention to do.
Meanwhile, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the ICJ’s sister court, is actively seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes.
The various cases reinforce each other. The World Court’s decisions are making it ever harder for the ICC to drag its feet in issuing and expanding the circle of arrest warrants.
Countervailing pressures
Both courts are now under enormous, countervailing pressures.
On the one side, massive external pressure is being exerted on the ICJ and ICC from states such as the US, Britain and Germany that are prepared to see the genocide in Gaza continue.
And on the other, the judges themselves are fully aware of what is at stake if they fail to act.
The longer they delay, the more they discredit international law and their own role as arbiters of that law. That will give even more leeway for other states to claim that inaction by the courts has set a precedent for their own right to commit war crimes.
International law, the entire rationale for the ICJ and ICC’s existence, stands on a precipice. Israel’s genocide threatens to bring it all crashing down.
Israel’s top brass stand in the middle of that fight.
They are confident that Washington will block at the UN Security Council any effort to enforce the ICJ rulings against them — either a future one on genocide in Gaza or the existing one on their illegal occupation.
No US veto at ICC
But arrest warrants from the ICC are a different matter. Washington has no such veto. All states signed up to the ICC’s Rome Statute – that is, most of the West, minus the US — will be obligated to arrest Israeli officials who step on their soil and to hand them over to The Hague.
Israel and the US had been hoping to use technicalities to delay the issuing of the arrest warrants for as long as possible. Most significantly, they recruited the UK, which has signed the Rome Statute, to do their dirty work.
It looked like the new UK government under Keir Starmer would continue where its predecessor left off by tying up the court in lengthy and obscure legal debates about the continuing applicability of the long-dead, 30-year-old Oslo Accords.
A former human rights lawyer, Starmer has repeatedly backed Israel’s “plausible” genocide, even arguing that the starvation of Gaza’s population, including its children, could be justified as “self-defence” — an idea entirely alien to international law, which treats it as collective punishment and a war crime.
But now with a secure parliamentary majority, even Starmer appears to be baulking at being seen as helping Netanyahu personally avoid arrest for war crimes.
That has suddenly left both Netanyahu and the Israeli military command starkly exposed — which is the reason they felt compelled to approve the arrest of the Force 100 soldiers.
Top prass pretexts
Under a rule known as “complementarity”, Israeli officials might be able to avoid war crimes trials at The Hague if they can demonstrate that Israel is able and willing to prosecute war crimes itself. That would avert the need for the ICC to step in and fulfil its mandate.
The Israeli top brass hoped they could feed a few lowly soldiers to the Israeli courts and drag out the trials for years. In the meantime, Washington would have the pretext it needed to bully the ICC into dropping the case for arrests on the grounds that Israel was already doing the job of prosecuting war crimes.
The patent problem with this strategy is that the ICC isn’t primarily interested in a few grunts being prosecuted in Israel as war criminals, even assuming the trials ever take place.
At issue is the military strategy that has allowed Israel to bomb Gaza into the Stone Age. At issue is a political culture that has made starving 2.3 million people seem normal.
At issue is a religious and nationalistic fervour long cultivated in the army that now encourages soldiers to execute Palestinian children by shooting them in the head and chest, as a US doctor who volunteered in Gaza has testified.
At issue is a military hierarchy that turns a blind eye to soldiers raping and sexually abusing Palestinian captives, including children.
The buck stops not with a handful of soldiers in Force 100. It stops with the Israeli government and military leaders. They are at the top of a command chain that has authorised war crimes in Gaza for the past 10 months – and before that, for decades across the occupied territories.
What is at stake
This is why observers have totally underestimated what is at stake with the rulings of the ICC and ICJ.
These judgments against Israel are forcing out into the light of day for proper scrutiny a state of affairs that has been quietly accepted by the West for decades. Should Israel have the right to operate as an apartheid regime that systematically engages in ethnic cleansing and the murder of Palestinians?
A direct answer is needed from each Western capital. There is nowhere left to hide. Western states are being presented with a stark choice: either openly back Israeli apartheid and genocide, or for the first time withdraw support.
The Israeli far-right, which now dominates both politically and in the army’s combat ranks, cares about none of this. It is immune to pressure. It is willing to go it alone.
As the Israeli media has been warning for some time, sections of the army are effectively now turning into militias that follow their own rules.
Israel’s military commanders, on the other hand, are starting to understand the trap they have set for themselves. They have long cultivated fascistic zealotry among ground troops needed to dehumanise and better oppress Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. But the war crimes proudly being live-streamed by their units now leave them exposed to the legal consequences.
Israel’s international isolation means a place one day for them in the dock at The Hague.
Israeli society’s demons exposed The ICC and ICJ rulings are not just bringing Israeli society’s demons out into the open, or those of a complicit Western political and media class.
The international legal order is gradually cornering Israel’s war machine, forcing it to turn in on itself. The interests of the Israeli military command are now fundamentally opposed to those of the rank and file and the political leadership.
The result, as military expert Yagil Levy has long warned, will be an increasing breakdown of discipline, as the attempts to arrest Force 100 soldiers demonstrated all too clearly.
The Israeli military juggernaut cannot be easily or quickly turned around.
The military command is reported to be furiously trying to push Netanyahu into agreeing on a hostage deal to bring about a ceasefire — not because it cares about the welfare of Palestinian civilians, or the hostages, but because the longer this “plausible” genocide continues, the bigger chance the generals will end up at The Hague.
Israel’s zealots are ignoring the pleas of the top brass. They want not only to continue the drive to eliminate the Palestinian people but to widen the circle of war, whatever the consequences.
That included the reckless, incendiary move last month to assassinate Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran — a provocation with one aim only: to undermine the moderates in Hamas and Tehran.
If, as seems certain, Israel’s commanders are unwilling or incapable of reining in these excesses, then the World Court will find it impossible to ignore the charge of genocide against Israel and the ICC will be compelled to issue arrest warrants against more of the military leadership.
A logic has been created in which evil feeds on evil in a death spiral. The question is how much more carnage and misery can Israel spread on the way down.
Jonathan Cook is a writer, journalist and self-appointed media critic and author of many books about Palestine. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. Republished from the author’s blog with permission.
![The mainstream [Australian] media is very largely a mouthpiece for Washington propaganda](https://davidrobie.nz/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/US-policy-Pearls-680wide.png "US policy Pearls 680wide")
