Take that Kaddish prayer I’ll be saying. It refers to “Israel” three times. The Jews were called Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, centuries before we were called Jews. What’s more, when I say the prayer, I will, following tradition, be facing east – towards Jerusalem. The prayer book in my hand will be full of references to Jerusalem and indeed to Zion, expressing in a hundred poetic ways a yearning to return. This is not some new, political thing. It’s what Jews have been saying and doing for millennia. Many, many centuries before Zionism was a political movement, it was a longing – the need to end a painful exile from the Land of Israel – enshrined in the very heart of Judaism.
- The Guardian, 03/10/2026
The Zionists see nothing in the admiration which their propaganda inspires among many anti-Semites. But they must understand that their ostentatious proclamation of a Jewish nationality that cannot be content with anything but a Jewish State is merely playing into the hands of the enemies of their race.
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This is the position which The Israelite has assumed from the very beginning of this pernicious agitation. Motives should of course always be considered, but wise men have ever held a fool to be more dangerous than a deliberate evildoer, especially to those whom he seeks to serve. We therefore firmly believe that Jewish Zionism has in the few years of its existence done more harm to Israel than has Christian anti-Semitism, and that Herzl and Nordau and their misguided followers have been most efficient allies of Drumont, Stoecker, and their accomplices.
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Zionism and anti-Semitism are twin enemies of the Jews, and the former is potentially more dangerous.
- The American Israelite, reprinted in NYT, 19/01/1902
And when it comes to monetary policy, there’s one question that bedevils many of us: only one in four correctly identified that an increase in interest rates would lead to lower inflation.
In fact, most Australians believe higher rates will lead to higher inflation
Peter Rickards, manager of the RBA’s public education team, says that Australians have a strong understanding of economic issues that relate firmly to their lived experience...
But Rickards says the impact of higher interest rates on inflation is “quite complex”.
Most of us think more about the cost side of the equation: higher interest rates means higher business costs, which means firms have to raise their prices.
Economists, on the other hand, know that higher interest rates slow the economy and make it harder for firms to pass on those higher prices as fewer consumers come through the door.
11 August 2025: ECAJ statement on Australian announcement on recognition of a Palestinian State.
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Australia is now committed to recognising as a State an entity with no agreed borders, no single government in effective control of its territory, and no demonstrated capacity to live in peace with its neighbours.
If you haven’t heard, the F-35 is an expensive death plane used, most recently, to erase Gaza from existence...
Australia sells parts used in its construction, including the release mechanism that allows the bomb bay doors to open and rain death on playgrounds, schools, mosques, etc., whatever depravity this Nazified racist shithole is up to on any given day...
F-35s don’t have other purposes... F-35s – inoperable without Australia’s contribution – have been used to blow up anything resembling life in Palestine. This means that if F-35s had cup holders they’d be lethal cup holders because keeping a genocidal dickweed hydrated is all part of it.
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Wong is applying the same specious neoliberal reasoning that “means” the coal Australia digs from the ground, sells, and burns elsewhere doesn’t count towards our global emissions. It might be “true” in the benignly villainous world of corporate bookkeeping, but in reality it is just homicidal hoodwinking...
Through a convoluted global network that allows for a veneer of deniability (while also ensuring much of the West is grossly complicit), these F-35 parts sometimes go to other countries for assembly before arriving in Israel and mass slaughtering trapped Palestinians.
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In Wong’s shirking of any responsibility, we hear her speaking aloud the type of internal logic that people complicit in atrocity use to detach so they can sleep at night. I was just following orders. There was nothing I could do. I only sold the peaceful parts of the big death plane. To normalise and be comfortable speaking such unrestrained garbage publicly, Wong must be surrounded by psychopaths and sycophants. To mistake this position for reasonableness is an indictment on everyone in Wong’s orbit.
Dave Milner at The Shot.
As Francesca Albanese pointed out, the widespread supply chain is the point: it creates a powerful incentive for participating nations to deny atrocities and genocide are being committed by the recipients of the planes, lest the numerous supplying countries be found complicit in those crimes. Our Foreign Minister's idiot claim that the parts we supply are non-lethal reveals a desperation that stems from the realisation that the crimes can no longer be denied, so we must resort to only denying our complicity.
We've been waiting for this shoe to drop for a while, but it still hits hard.
Just last week I was thinking about Mr Lehrer's friend Hen3ry:
The 3 was silent, you see. Henry was financially independent having inherited his father's tar-and-feather business and was therefore able to devote his full time to such intellectual pursuits as writing. I particularly remember a heart-warming novel of his about a young necrophiliac who finally achieved his boy-hood ambition by becoming coroner. (The rest of you can look it up when you get home.) In addition to writing, he indulged in a good deal of philosophizing. Like so many contemporary philosophers he especially enjoyed giving helpful advice to people who were happier than he was. One particular bit of advice which I recall, which is the reason I bring up this whole, dreary story, is something he said once before they took him away to the Massachusetts State Home for the Bewildered. He said: "Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it."
As I have not recently had the opportunity to visit the comedy albums I listened to obsessively in my youth, and human memory being what it is, I erroneously recalled that Hen3ry's story formed the introduction to Mr Lehrer's song about Mexico, rather than for the finale of that show, the revivalist anthem celebrating the silver lining of a nuclear war: it would leave no-one behind to mourn. (I once saw "We Will All Go Together When We Go" performed at a mid-80s peace/disarmament rally by a prominent Australian folk singer, which would have amused/appalled Mr Lehrer no end.) This memory lapse meant I erased the introduction to "In Old Mexico", the biography of Samuel Gall, inventor of the gall bladder, who had started university majoring "in animal husbandry, until they caught him at it one day", before switching to medicine and inventing gargling, then going on to specialize in "diseases of the rich".
I've linked to it before, I'm sure, but here is Mr Lehrer's concert in Copenhagen.
"The conclusion that it is not antisemitic to criticise Israel is the corollary of the conclusion that to blame Jews for the actions of Israel is antisemitic; the one flows from the other."
Spell it out. It’s absurd. There’s this freaky little Nazified genocidal colony swallowing Palestine, 82% of Israeli residents are in favour of ethnically cleansing Gaza, 47% of them want to murder every man, woman and child still cursed with being alive inside the concentration camp, and if you speak out about it anywhere, even in fucking Australia, you might lose your job...
It all makes it rather obvious you live inside a subservient (and embarrassingly eager) military vassal state to a rotting fascist empire eternally fueled by white supremacy and the blood of the Global South, doesn’t it?