On Palestine's Independance Day, November 15, seven Palestinian activists and one journalist were arrested after boarding an Israeli bus headed for Jerusalem from settlements within the West Bank.
The action and arrests highlight the similarities between Israel's system of oppression in Palestine and the era of Jim Crow segregation in the United States' south.
Campaign spokesperson Hurriyeh Ziadah said: "Both white supremacists and the Israeli occupiers commit the same crime: they strip a people of freedom, justice and dignity.
Anti-racism
Aboriginal affairs minister Jenny Macklin released the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Report on Consultations on October 18. The federal government facilitated “community consultations” across the NT between June and August, discussing future policy toward Aboriginal communities after the Northern Territory Emergence Response (NT intervention) legislation expires in June next year.
Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s secretary-general, has slammed the Northern Territory intervention, saying that it is making the problems facing Aboriginal Australians worse, AAP reported on October 7.
He said the government’s “top-down externally driven” efforts to close the gap on Aboriginal socio-economic disadvantage were instead having the opposite effect”. Amnesty was appalled that current policies had in effect caused “forced evictions from their traditional homelands”.
Walk With Us: Aboriginal Elders Call Out to Australian People to Walk with them in their Quest for Justice
Compiled and published by Concerned Australians
$15, 71 pages, hard cover
wwww.concernedaustralians.com.au
Walk With Us is the long awaited sequel to the highly regarded and recommended This Is What We Said — Australian Aboriginal People give their views on the Northern Territory Intervention, published in February last year.
There is a sharp reality disconnect in the Black community.
On the one hand, the Black population continues to support the first African American president, Barack Obama, by more than 90%.
Yet the plight of the Black communities is at its worst condition in three decades. Official unemployment is over 16% ― twice that of whites and iabout 30% for young African Americans.
Black household income is in decline and the lowest of the five major ethnic groups. Poverty is at the highest levels in 30 years.
Australia, at least for me, is a paradox. As Dorothy McKellar famously wrote, “I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges and droughts and flooding rains”.
The extremes in our landscape and our weather seem to have been etched into our national psyche as well, which is something I’ve never quite understood.
Pat Eatock laughs at the suggestion that her successful Federal Court action against Andrew Bolt and News Ltd has jeopardised free speech. Bolt is one of Australia’s most widely read columnists, boasting 3 million visits a month.
On September 28, Justice Mordecai Bromberg ruled that the ultra-conservative columnist Bolt had breached the Racial Discrimination Act in two articles he wrote in 2009 in which he criticised “fair skinned Aborigines” for what, he argued, was a choice they had made to identify as Aboriginal.
Pat Eatock laughs at the suggestion that her successful Federal Court action against Andrew Bolt and News Ltd has jeopardised free speech. Bolt is one of Australia’s most widely read conservative columnists. His blog boasts 3 million web hits a month.
On September 28, Justice Mordecai Bromberg ruled the ultra-conservative columnist Bolt had breached the Racial Discrimination Act in two articles he wrote in 2009 in which he criticised “fair skinned Aborigines” for what, he argued, was a choice they had made to identify as Aboriginal.
“Most countries don’t detain asylum seekers” or, if they are detained, they “are only detained until the UNHCR recognises them and then they are released,” Robyn Sampson, researcher with the International Detention Coalition told a public meeting on alternatives to detention of asylum seekers.
Green Left Weekly, Socialist Alliance and other left-wing groups, have received more attention than normal in recent weeks in the mainstream media and even in state and federal parliamentary debates.
This attention has mainly been in response to the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israeli apartheid and has mostly consisted of nasty allegations of anti-Semitism, with endless colourful references to Hitler and the Nazi’s Holocaust.
On September 21, death row prisoner in the state of Georgia, Troy Davis, was killed by lethal injection. His execution came despite a campaign from around the world in his defence, including by Amnesty International, and protests outside the prison where he was held and across the US. Last-minute legal appeals in the US Supreme Court failed to stop the execution.
Davis was found guilty of the murder of police officer Mark MacPhail in 1989 and sentenced to death.
Troy Davis was executed by the state of Georgia on September 21.. Journalist Jon Lewis was present at the execution and told media waiting outside the prison that Davis was “defiant until the very end, defending his innocence until the end”.
Davis was convicted of killing off duty Georgia police officer Mark MacPhail in 1989. He was sentenced to death.
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