Here is @SlezakPeter - academic and son of Holocaust survivors - powerful speech at the Sydney rally yesterday (1 of 3)

‘I’m among very many Jews, here and around the world to protest what Israel is doing in our name, and I’m proud to join you every week for over a year in solidarity with Palestinians.
 
I want to give a shout-out to those each week holding the banner “Jews Against the Occupation.” Our presence and our solidarity refute the smear that these rallies are antisemitic Jew-hate rallies. I know what antisemitism is and it's not here EVER at these rallies.
 
My mother survived the WW2 Nazi Auschwitz extermination camp, and she always asked why was the world silent? Why did they look away from the genocide of the Jews and do nothing? Today we know the answer as our government and media look away and do nothing for the Palestinians. 
 
Well, in the last few days we have seen the landmark decision by the International Court of Justice – the ICC – an important victory for accountability:
 
The ICC has issued warrants for the arrest of two of Israel’s leaders – Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant. Both are charged as perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity. 
 
Above all, the ICC arrest warrants confirm that those of us protesting here each week, and especially the university student encampments, were right all along. 
 
The war crimes charged against Netanyahu include:
 
• Starvation of the civilian population of Gaza.
 
• depriving them medicine, fuel and electricity.
 
 • military attacks against the civilian population.
 
• murder and other inhumane acts against the civilian population.
 
• blocking humanitarian aid. 
 
• the destruction of the civilian population in Gaza –  which is the very definition of genocide.

Australia as a member of the Rome Statute and ICC is legally under an obligation to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they arrive here. However, Australia is yet to confirm whether or not it will comply with arrest warrants issued for these indicted war criminals…
Cont 2/3
‘The Weekend Australian newspaper (Nov 24, 2004) refers to the “silence by Foreign Minister Penny Wong” who is “pretending to sit on the fence”. And The ABC Headline says “Australia tip-toes around ICC decision” issuing only an opaque motherhood statements.
 
What is she waiting for? 
Well, she is probably ambivalent because in March Albanese and Wong were also referred to the ICC for being complicit in the Gaza genocide in a claim co-signed by over 100 Australian lawyers.
Of course, Zionists in Australia are apoplectic and having a melt-down echoing Netanyahu’s excuses:
 
• Predictably, using the usual get-out-of-jail-free card, he called it an “anti-semitic decision.” 
 
Even in Israel’s newspaper Ha’aretz the headline says:
 
"Netanyahu Brought the ICC Ruling on Himself and Now He's Whining About Antisemitism".
 
There is a great deal of deliberate, cynical confusion about this. Let me be clear: As the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein has said, Israel is a rogue, lunatic state. It is not antisemitic to say Fuck Israel and Fuck Zionism: A guy was arrested on Bondi Beach for wearing this on his T-shirt.
 
•  Netanyahu said “No war is more just than the war Israel has been waging in Gaza” because Israel’s destruction of Gaza is in SELF-DEFENCE !!!
 
This is DECEITFUL, DELUSIONAL BULLSHIT
 
In international law, it’s not actually OK to starve children to death for self-defence!!
 
We have all seen the pictures – mile after mile of residential cities reduced to rubble. What kind of sick mind can consider the complete destruction of Gaza as “self-defence” – targeting Hamas militants hiding behind human shields. 
 
Since October 7 last year, Gaza has been transformed from the largest open-air prison in the world to the LARGEST MASS-GRAVE.

And the OTHER Albanese, the wonderful UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, points out that Israel has no right to defend itself against resistance emanating from the territory it controls under occupation. 
 
On the contrary, according to international law it is the people under occupation who have the right to resist, including the right to armed resistance. 
 
Israel has dropped more bombs on Gaza than the Allied bombing in World War 2 on Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined! More bombs on Gaza in a week than the US dropped on Afghanistan in one year ...
 
In 1967 during the Vietnam War, American scholar Noam Chomsky said something relevant today:
 
“With no further information than this, a person who has not lost his senses must realize that the war is an overwhelming atrocity.”
 
The assault on Gaza is not a “war” but a cowardly act of terrorism by the most sophisticated military force against a defenceless population. 
 
It’s important to recognize that the excessive, disproportionate military force against civilians – mass murder – is deliberate – it is official Israeli military policy. It’s actually called the DAHIYA DOCTRINE – GOOGLE IT!! ..
Cont

In an effort to silence me the Zionist Federation have filed a complaint with the HRC for racial vilification, aided by a reporter who can’t do his own research.

Having first used the discredited Anti-Defamation League (they should be called the Anti-Free-Speech-for-anyone-we-do-not-agree-with-League), and the CEO of a company that trains IDF soldiers to become propagandists - to improve Israel’s image to the world (because the country is an apartheid state having stolen land, ‘mowed the lawn’ with gratuitous killing of Palestinians for decades, tortured detainees held often without charge, herded a couple of million people into a ghetto/open air prison, then launched a genocide), to attempt to frame me as a rape and Holocaust denier.
This because I have been sharing the reports of extremely highly regarded independent journalists who have written about the absence of credible evidence the claims of ‘systemic, widespread rape’ by Hamas on Oct 7. The Beheaded Babies, the 40 burnt babies, the genital mutilations, the systemic rape were all unsubstantiated or proven false. The Israelis claim the have footage and photos but the latest U.N. investigation made no finding of rape.
To be clear, I have never said there was No Rape. It is something I could never say - it would be a nonsense for anyone to make such a definitive statement.
Yet the double page story by Chip Le Grand makes no reference to a)my series of tweets about rape over a period of months that make clear I’m referring to systemic rape. The offending tweet is one where I put it would be counter to their mission to spend time on rape because they would jeopardise their mission which was to grab hostages and try to stay alive for long enough to escape. They would have to be pretty dumb to risk it. As it turns out, as I proffered, the latest U.N. investigation found no evidence that would allow them to conclude there had been rape. But Chip Le Grand reports none of this.
His story also took umbrage at my comment that we can’t know how many Israel deaths were caused by the IDF on Oct 7. Many independent commentators are now saying precisely that, including Gideon Levy. Even Piers Morgan can’t accept the Israelis know for a fact that a considerable number of Israelis were not killed on that day, because of the Hannibal Directive. And the. There is the indiscriminate nature of the shelling. There was more than ‘a kernel of truth’. ‘No car should make it back to Gaza’ means all the hostages being killed for a start.
At the risk of boring you, we now move on to The Sequel. 1/ Today I received another email from Chip, who is very well informed about what the Zionist lobby gets up to on a Sunday.

Good morning Mary.

Zionist Federation of Australia chief executive Alon Cassuto is today lodging a complaint against you with the Australian Human Rights Commission under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

The complaint relates to your Twitter post from 4 January, when you reposted a link to a speech by Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah, in which he told Jewish people living in Israel and the occupied territories:

"Here, it is going to be very difficult for you. If you want to be secure, if you want to feel secure, you have an American passport, go back to the United States. You have a British passport, go back to the UK. Here you don't have a future, from the river to the sea the land of Palestine is for the Palestinian people and the Palestinian people only.''

You prefaced the link to the speech with the comment: "The Israeli govt getting some of its own medicine. Israel has started something it can't finish with this genocide.''

Cassuto says that Nasrallah's speech calls for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel and the occupied territories and alleges that, by sharing a link to it with your 30,000-odd Twitter followers, you disseminated hate speech against Israelis and Jewish people.

The ZFA says that through this and more than 100 other Twitter posts since October 7, you have misused your standing and profile as a highly respected former newsreader and face of our multicultural broadcaster, to share extreme propaganda and hateful material.

Could I please ask you:

Why did you share Nasrallah's speech?

Do you agree that material you have shared on Twitter since October 7 vilifies Israelis and Jewish people?

Is there any other comment you would like to make?

Thanks Mary. The ZFA announced earlier today they are holding a 2pm press conference to discuss this matter. I will publish a first take story at 2pm and would like to include your response.

Otherwise, I can update the story anytime before 5pm to include your comments.

I'll also give you a call.

Best regards,

Chip.
 
Chip Le Grand
Chief reporter 
 
2/ .. see my reply

BREAKING:
#Assange Agrees to Plead Guilty in Exchange for Release, Ending Standoff With U.S.
NYTimes (thread) ‘..agreed to plead guilty on Monday to a single felony count of illegally disseminating national security material in exchange for his release from a British prison, ending his long and bitter standoff with the United States.
Mr. Assange, 52, was granted his request to appear before a federal judge at one of the more remote outposts of the federal judiciary, the courthouse in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, according to a court filing made public late Monday. It was a fitting twist in the case against Mr. Assange, who doggedly opposed extradition to the U.S. mainland.’

How the U.S. has fueled Israel's decades-long war on Palestinians - Rashid Khalidi, Los Angeles Times 🧵

‘Whoever the settlers were and wherever they came from, with whatever connections to the land, the resistance to them would have been essentially the same as that of the Irish, Algerians, Native Americans, Zulus or Libyans to intruders bent on expelling them and taking the land. Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionism that produced the Likud Party, stated bluntly: “Every native population in the world resists colonists.” And as Edward Said noted, it was the particular misfortune of the Palestinians to be the victims of victims’

latimes.com/opinion/story/… ‘This process of settler colonialism produced the dispossession of a large part of Palestine’s native population and the theft of their lands and property. This was achieved through the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians during Israel’s establishment in 1948 (over 55% of the total Arab population of Palestine at the time), and of over 250,000 in 1967, with none of them allowed to return. This phased ethnic cleansing was essential in order to turn a majority-Arab country into a majority-Jewish state. It could not have been done in any other way, since it proved to be impossible to “spirit” the Palestinians “discreetly” out of the country, a desire that Theodor Herzl confided to his diary. For the last 56 years, these same practices of colonization and dispossession have proceeded inexorably in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.’

In an article on the future of the US alliance in the Australian Journal of International Affairs, the Co-Chair of the Parliamentary Friends of the United States and of #AUKUS in the Parliament, Luke Gosling, says moving from ‘interoperability’ to ‘interchangeability’ as @… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… He cites a Loewy Poll that shows the majority of Australians support the alliance but Gosling worries that an even greater majority fear entanglement in a war. “Still, it’s heartening 76% of Australians believe the US would defend Australia..”.

This is a failure of the our… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

FM Penny Wong will address @PressClubAust today to respond to criticism of her and of AUKUS by Paul Keating.

She will also have to explain the shift in her position since moving from Opposition to Govt, pointed out starkly by Hugh White in The Monthly.

The Stepped up… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… She is spinning the US battle to maintain hegemony as a battle to preserve multipolarity. Gobsmacking hutzpah.

Excellent article by Hugh White:

‘if AUKUS stands, it is inconceivable that Aus would not fight by America’s side if America ever goes to war with China.’

AUKUS is the NATO of the Asia Pacific - we become like any NATO nation, a US base for global war themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/apr… In Opposition, @SenatorWong
‘clearly understood that in calling for a new multipolar order in Asia she was advocating an outcome very different from the goal of US policy.’

Here is something to retweet over and over in our troubled times ahead, and be forever grateful to the great @DanielEllsberg

Do not underestimate the power of protests - it gives hope to the world and clips the wings of war mongers.

(short thread) #nuclearwar #Russia #China… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Regarding the trend among youth “to favour humanistic values” that gives Ellsberg hope.

Ref: Island Off the Coast of Asia, Instruments of Statecraft in Aus Foreign Policy, Clinton Fernandes, MUP

What does it take for our govt to get it?
No understanding of recent history of Ukraine.
How about getting hit in the face with a wet fish?
The Russians are fighting Nazism in #Ukraine #Russia ⁦@SenatorWong⁩ ⁦@AlboMP⁩ Here’s some more research if you still doubt the nature of the situation in #Ukraine

“Ukraine’s Azov movement has grown from a militia of fringe far-right figures & football hooligans .. into a multipronged social movement that has become the envy of the global far right. In… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Join me online (Facebook - Marrickville Peace Group)
or at Marrickville TowHall at 4.45pm today AEST
for a discussion on the lies that lead to war, #AUKUS, US ForeignPolicy, geopolitical shifts, and #China
We cross to Col L Wilkerson in the US, who has told me (thread) ‘China so far is not a belligerent nation — actually, it need not be as its manufacturing capacity & thus its industrial base already surpasses that of any other country in the world…
China's supreme diplomat Wang Yi's recent orchestration of a rapprochement between Teheran ..

Media partisanship leads not only to a collective demonisation of an assigned ‘enemy’, it leads to contempt for fellow journalists who won’t be co-opted into concealing the truth to protect the anointed.
Short thread on the contempt for Assange and Hersh: Hersh said a journalist from Die Welt called (you’d be forgiven in thinking he was writing a story about the Nordstream sabotage) to ask him why he wrote the story.. Did he know it would help Russia? Similarly, Assange has been accused of publishing the DNC emails to help Trump..

What would war with #China look like for Australia? Part 2 - ABC News
Behm: ‘Australia has a "fundamental strategic pathology – to support the interests of the US at the expense of our own."’ abc.net.au/news/2023-02-2… ‘Korea was an unnecessary war, as were the conflicts in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Vietnam and Iraq were illegal wars, with the US Administration(s) lying to their citizens and their allies about the strategic necessity and the morality of the use of armed force.’

In contemplating the unfolding war in Ukraine, it helps to recall the lessons of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Small thread on how to start a proxy war and make it a success - famously recommended by Zbigniew Brzezinski A fervent anti-communist, Jimmy Carter’s National Security advisor hatched a plot to create a ‘Soviet Vietnam’ - to lure the Soviet Union into an unwinnable depleting war. Disparate Afghan war lords - collectively known as the Mujahideen - had been attempting to overthrow

Military buildup & AUKUS breast beating has nothing to do with protecting trade with China from China, it’s about the freedom to conduct military & intelligence activity in another country’s Exclusive Economic Zone - something China makes clear is not on arena.org.au/trade-routes-o… The US “fears that if China’s position were to gain greater international acceptance, it would affect the United States’ ability to project naval and air power in other EEZs such as the Persian Gulf..” (1 of 2)

I have requested permission to observe 20 April #Assange hearing when the magistrate will issue the order to extradite him to the US. The order will then go to the UK Home Secretary Priti Patel for approval. Assange's defence will make submissions to Patel by May 18th. They intend to appeal the original decision on the grounds of Press Freedom and Fair Trial.

Day 2 of the US High Court #Assange Extradition Appeal in London.
Today the Defence will counter the arguments presented yesterday, & raise new reports from former US officials that the CIA considered kidnapping or murdering Assange. I’ll be covering proceedings on this thread. They will also argue that if the Court decides to admit the US assurances & view them as comprehensive, then consideration will need to be given to which tribunal ought to assess their trustworthiness & will propose Baraitser as she has heard days of detailed evidence.

The US High Court Extradition Appeal in London is scheduled to start in about an hour.
I’ll be monitoring on the videolink - along with other journalists - and will keep you posted on this thread.
#Assange The 5 grounds on which the HC has agreed the US can appeal are:

1. That the Extradition judge applied S91 of the Act improperly ie that extradition would Not be Oppressive or Unjust

2. The Judge should have given the US the opportunity to offer assurances

I’ll be following the UK High Court Appeal by the US

in the case of Julian #Assange

and **live tweeting**

Starts at 10.30am London time on 11 August - in just a few hours.

You can follow this thread, and quite a few others! It appears this Court has allowed other observers besides journalists, unlike Judge Baraitser who barred human rights groups and parliamentarians form the Extradition hearing.
Amnesty International’s rep has been approved as was the Australian Parliamentary Assange supportgroup

#Assange Bail Hearing 6 January 2021
On the videolink to London and waiting to cross to the court room.

Within 2hrs we’ll know if Julian will walk out of that court room or head back to Covid infected Belmarsh to spend potentially another couple of years while appeals are heard. They are having internet problems. Our screen was frozen for 10 mins. They fixed it but mine is frozen again. Trying to reconnect. @AndrewJFowler & I still in the virtual waiting room

#Assange Extradition Decision

Joined the videolink to London’s Old Bailey.

There are 12 of us on this link so far, but journalists can join for another half an hour.

Well cross to the court room shortly before 10 London time. ABC News Europe correspondent @lb_online also on the link

Extradition September hearing Day 17 (19 incl 2 Covid),
expected to be the final day.

Joined the video link waiting to cross to the court room. Today we expect to hear an update on the Spanish surveillance case and summaries of the remaining witness statements.

I’ll provide as much information as I can on this thread.