News from the US suggests that president-elect Donald J. Trump is perceived by many to be the US commander-in-chief while President Joe Biden fades into political nothingness ahead of the inauguration on January 20. A couple of examples illustrate the point. Earlier this week, Trump gave an occasionally irreverent hour-long press conference at Mar-a-Lago in [...]
The political week commenced with the launch of the Muslim Votes Matter campaign last Sunday at the Broadmeadows Town Hall in northern Melbourne. And it ended on Thursday with Labor frontbencher Bill Shorten’s announcement that he will be resigning as the member for Maribyrnong in inner-city Melbourne early next year. In this instance, the Australian [...]
There was a time when anti-Semitism was virtually non-existent on Australian university campuses. I recall a debate at Melbourne University just after the Six Day War of June 5-10, 1967, when Israel fought – and won – a defensive war against the combined military forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Israel’s victory led to the [...]
It’s nearly a decade since Geoffrey Blainey, Australia’s leading historian, dismissed “talk of the history wars raging in Australia”. Writing in The Weekend Australian on February 21, 2015, he commented that the usage of the word war in this context was mistaken. Blainey’s point was that “controversy, not war, will continue for a long time to [...]
What’s missing from some of the discussions about the likely electoral impact of a Muslim party or a Muslim Vote political movement turns on a full understanding of preferential voting in the Australian federal voting system. The Australian electoral system is unusual in two circumstances. First, voting is compulsory – even if Australians vote out [...]
Kim Williams, the recently appointed ABC chair, was in the news again this week. The Nine newspapers reported on Monday that, addressing ABC Radio National staff in late July, he had criticised the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster’s digital news platforms. Put simply, Williams claimed that much of what the ABC presented as news was not really news at [...]
Across the West, anti-Semitism is on the rise. It was evident before Hamas broke a ceasefire agreement on October 7 and engaged in a barbarous attack on southern Israel. And it has increased significantly since – so much so that some Jews feel unsafe living in some democratic societies, including Australia. Moreover, Hamas and Hezbollah [...]
In the conclusion to his 2004 book Fascists, American scholar Michael Mann distinguished between the 20th-century European fascists and the “few crackpots and thugs” of the 21st century “who call themselves fascists or Nazis”. He added: “As a word in usage today, it appears largely as the exclamation ‘Fascist!’ – a term of abuse hurled [...]
This is shaping up as one of the most newsworthy years in recent decades. What with the attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump leading up to the US presidential election in November, the general election in Britain, the elections in India and France, the forthcoming Australian election and more besides. Including the Ukraine-Russia war and [...]
To understand the present it helps to have sound knowledge of the past. The suggestion that an entity termed The Muslim Vote will run candidates against the Labor Party in some seats it holds in western Sydney and northwest Melbourne has raised the issue of religious or sectarian parties in Australia. This has led to [...]