Settler Colonialism is Nothing to Celebrate

Invasion Day 2014

Flame Tree
i distrust whitey
for bloody good reasons
distrust my white privilege
may i be invaded
dispossessed of entitlement
sail ships around ignorance
predations on environment
give back land to land
its song to settle on me
to sustain future
make treaty with truth

Jinjirrie, January 2014.

Related Links

From invasion to resistance in Australia

“Capitalism could not flourish without crushing the resistance of people who wanted to live differently, writes Tom O’Lincoln in Red Flag. That has been true in every corner of the globe. Private property, wage labour and the drive to accumulate capital were incompatible with Aboriginal society. That incompatibility was the basis of the genocide that followed.”

Episode 22: Fuck Off You’re Full Of It* – We Don’t Celebrate Genocide

Why It’s Time to Redefine Australia Day

‘I concluded some time ago now that those who regard Australia Day as Invasion Day are right; the early governors such as Lachlan Macquarie viewed their conflict with the Aboriginal people as war and the terrible orchestrated violence against our Indigenous people lingered well into the 20th century.

Most Australians don’t know – or don’t want to know – about the extent of the violence that accompanied European colonial settlement and that is still synonymous for black Australia with Australia Day.’

Invasion Day: Nothing to Celebrate

Today, on Invasion Day while we remember that “white Australia has a black history” and commemorate the resistance of the Indigenous Australians and the survival of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and our cultures, it is also important that we stand in solidarity with refugees who are being incarcerated by the repeated Australian governments (including the Rudd, Gillard and Abbott govts) in hell holes on Manus Island and Nauru.

Unsurprised a Canadian settler makes the same arguments as zionists do to assert faux “Indigenousness”, like ‘I was born here’ and ‘the 1st Nations people once came from Asia.’ And this is a Canadian settler who supports the liberation of Palestine from zionism.

Angela Mitropoulos on borders, white supremacism and incitement of racism in Australia’s military

“The violence, and indeed increasingly extra-legal violence, that increasingly enforces these shifting bureaucratic and legal placements of the Australian border propels an ever-greater recourse to mythic or naturalised definitions of what it means to be Australian.

But even without these turns to an explicit Southern Cross fascism, widespread Australian emotional attachments to invocations of sovereignty are an expression of colonial anxieties and white supremacy. The borders of Australia are the legacy of English colonization. They are neither natural or eternal.”

Australian navy white supremacist ties busted

Protesting against racist Australia Day in Brisbane

Calling for UN Sanctions Against Australia

In today’s Guardian, Ant Loewenstein rightly advocates the use of UN sanctions to pressure the Australian government to end its regime of terror against hapless refugees corralled in offshore detention camps. Sanctions would make Australians, their racist government, the Australian media and the world sit up and take notice and apply punitive pressure to end Australia’s disgraceful treatment of refugees.

Western leaders live under the belief that they can behave as they like to the powerless and invisible. Asylum seekers are essentially voiceless, reporters are barred from visiting where they’re warehoused in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, and the daily drumbeat of dishonest rhetoric wrongly accuses them of being “illegal”.

Even the threat of sanctions against Australia would enrage the Abbott government and its backers. Australia is a democracy, they will claim. Australia’s decisions are checked and approved by lawyers, they may argue. Australians can vote out recalcitrant regimes, they could state.

And yet transparency over asylum seeker policy has arguably never been more absent.

The shared impunity which the US delivers to its fellow settler colonial human rights abusers is an insult to justice. This impunity must end in order that criminals who abuse human rights of others can be brought to justice. The West has no credibility unless it makes an effort to adher to the values it claims it represents when its orientalists laud it over others.

The Australian government feels invincible, protected under America’s security blanket and selling its dirty coal to the world. We are sold the myth that building remote detention camps will protect us from the “hordes” trying to enter our promised land. It’s impossible not to conclude that Australia, a colonial construction, doesn’t see itself akin to Canada, the US and Israel as countries struggling to cope with people various officials call “infiltrators”. That bubble must be burst, and the threats of sanctions will be the required shot. Until Australia and its defenders appreciate the necessity to treat asylum seekers with dignity and respect, they should feel the world’s opprobrium.

Australian academic faces Israeli lawfare attack from the Shurat HaDin

The right to criticize the policies of another country are at stake

Today an Israeli based law centre, Shurat HaDin, filed a case in the Federal Court of Australia, against Professor Jake Lynch from the University of Sydney’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. They claim that he has supported policies which are racist and discriminatory by his specific endorsement of an academic boycott of Israeli institutions and individuals representing them. Jake Lynch has refused collaboration with Hebrew University because of its support of the illegal occupation of Palestine and close connections with the Israeli armament industry.

This lawfare attack against academic freedom and freedom of speech has been condemned by over 2000 Australian and international human rights advocates from some 60 countries, who have all signed a pledge supporting Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel because of its well documented and clear violations of international and humanitarian law, and offering to be co-defendants in any legal action taken against Lynch.

Shurat HaDin has taken many similar actions internationally against groups who support the BDS movement. Professor Stuart Rees comments, “It seems that this firm, Shurat HaDin works in the civil courts as a proxy for the Israeli government and security forces, seeking to shut down any criticism of the state of Israel and its ongoing human rights abuses and violations of international law.”

In August, Shurat HaDin lodged a complaint in the Human Rights Commission against Jake Lynch’s refusal to sponsor an Israeli academic from the Hebrew University, now they want to silence this highly regarded academic, by taking their complaint to the Federal Court. This challenges the right to take non violent action in support international human rights law and the rights of the dispossessed Palestinians. Australians for BDS condemns racism in all forms, and specifically anti-Semitism.

“Israel’s occupation and ethnic cleansing machinery continue unabated but the moral force that used to drive that process is fast eroding and, as out of touch as the Abbott government and anti-BDS activists in Australia may be, there is an undeniable shift in the balance of moral power. International civil society is holding Israel to account in a way no government has ever been able to do”.

Press release by Randa Abdel Fattah, Australian Palestinian lawyer and writer.

Press conference with Professor Stuart Rees and Professor Peter Slezak
Date: WED Oct 30th (today)
Time: 2pm
Location: Queen’s Square, Junction of King, Phillip and Macquarie Streets, Sydney (St James Station)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen’s_Square,_Sydney

UPDATE

Professor Peter Slezak speaks at the press conference:

Related Links

Academics to fight Federal Court action claiming support for BDS racist
Two Thousand Defendants For Human Rights
Israeli lawyers group Shurat HaDin unmasked as Mossad proxy
Defending The Right To Dissent
Defend free speech and human rights and support the BDS
The Israeli government’s official ‘lawfare’ contractor

On Empire, Settler Colonialism and the Environment

The Fall

The Powell Doctrine

Don’t expect me to care about your empire
its sacrifices, its bloody flag that hides
money men from scrutiny
your capitalism, your patriarchy
your imbalances, your hatred for trees,
your intrepid ‘pioneers’, your usurpers,
your love for hard-footed soil-squandering
sheep, cattle and goats,
always the goats, eroding,
as you do, you and your greed,
enslaving us all for your short-term gains,
your pollution, your land-clearing,
your civilisation, your corrosion,
your obsession with domination,
the fire in my belly burns you to ash,
i am the thorny bush
even your goats find indigestible.

Jinjirrie, September 2013.

The Travails of the Ruling Class

Is the US still wondering why?
will twin towers
of ignorance and greed ever fall?
profits before people,
drones before homes
helter skelter before shelter
who dwells in mansions
paid for by war expansions?
endless terror
padding coffers of rich
deserving poor
are thrown in the ditch.
red raw capitalism
shrouded in religious schism
who’s jealous of freedom to bomb at will
the empire glories in spoils of the kill.

Jinjirrie, September 2013.

A Spell for Staying Well

One sip of moonlight, stirred with the tip of a dandelion,
look high up there to the right, the buddha sits and grins,
does he say it’s all an illusion when the pain walks in,
hold that choice between one delicious word and another,
even if the universe inevitably steals the last laugh.

Jinjirrie, September 2013.

Election Day 2013 – Of Privilege, Boats and Dinosaurs

Of Stoats and Boats

Abbotalypse Now
So here’s the day of voting depression
where Murdoch bigans pervert the election,
democratic choice stolen by stoats
Minime Canutes can’t stop the boats
but piss on the people to rise the tide
of ignorance, racism and bigotry inside
this greedy country that doesn’t want to share
and still bleats “Advance Australia Fair”.

Jinjirrie, September 7, 2013.

End misogyny, end the Abbottalypse
Source

Of Privilege and Dinosaurs

Clive Palmer elected, can it be true?
There’s never been a pollie quite like you,
with dinosaur pets and refloated boats
Who could begrudge a palmeresque gloat?
Surely it can’t be as bad as it seems,
Australia ruled again by miners’ dreams,
flogging the farm, building more dams –
Abbott looks like he’s won ten Grand Slams,
Yet when into the House waddles Clive Palmer
will the members remember to don their armour,
For he’s the only Clive in the village
Protected by parliamentary privilege.

Jinjirriem September 8, 2013.

Murdoch media control
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And for posterity, my interaction with Warren Mundine on twitter.


News Corp nepotism
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Gina and Rupie
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Related Links

Abbott’s attack of Racial Discrimination laws
Bashing the blacks on legal aid – the LNP paves the road to ‘assimilation by incarceration’
Coalition caned over claims of cash cuts
Thom Yorke Shares His Australian Election Views With ‘Abbottalypse Now’ Essay
Abbottalypse Now
Angry protest forces Abbott retreat in Sydney
Murdoch celebrates conservative victory in Australia with Twitter tirade

Abbott - Lord of the Ring
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Murdoch casts public servants as a public disservice

Sign the petition to have Newscorp’s nepotistic subversion of the Australia election investigated by the Press Council

Abbottgenics
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