A week after the Rudd government announced Australian troops would join the US and NATO-led troop surge in Afghanistan, a May 4 US air strike on two villages in the country’s south-west killed up to 150 civilians, including many women and children.
Pip Hinman
PM Kevin Rudd likes to tell us he is against “extreme capitalism”. Like US President Barack Obama, Rudd tries to give capitalism a more human face, pretending it’s now something different to the neoliberal nightmare of the past three and a half decades.
The Sydney Stop the War Coalition called a snap protest on April 15 against government plans to send more Australian troops to Afghanistan.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, in Washington last week to meet US President Barack Obama, made clear the ALP government’s support for the US’s wars overseas. The Australia-US war alliance is as strong as ever, he declared.
The Iraqi workers movement is again beginning to organise, despite contending with the difficult conditions of occupation and war, and in defiance of harassment and arrests by the US military.
NSW police have entered an out-of-court settlement with anti-war activist Paddy Gibson after he sued them for wrongful arrest during the APEC protests in Sydney in September 2007.
After the Australian Jewish News decided on March 11 to pull a paid advertisement for the upcoming lecture tour by Professor Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, the Emanuel Synagogue, which had agreed to have Halper speak to a class of 12 people, suddenly withdrew its invitation.
Deputy PM Julia Gillards outspoken support for Israels attack on Gaza earlier this year prompted angry criticism from many, including from inside her own party.
Such is the outrage caused by Israels latest attack on Gaza in December-January that even some local governments in New South Wales have passed, or are considering, motions condemning the attack and calling on the Australian government to ban the sale of any military material to Israel.
On February 13, Australian troops killed five children and injured at least two other adult civilians in a night-time “operation” in Afghanistan’s southern Oruzgan province.
The news, on February 3, that South African dock workers in Durban had decided not to unload an Israeli ship due in on February 8 was welcomed by the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), a section of which wants the union to join the international campaign of sanctions against apartheid Israel.
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