Imagine a ship full of white people

This is an edited extract from Breaking the Australian Silence,the City of Sydney lecture last night at the Opera House by John Pilger, the 2009 recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize.

The Age – No shipload of whites fleeing disaster would be treated like this

… In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: ”The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst … We should never forget that the reason we have a United Nations convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum.”

Compare that with Rudd’s words the other day. ”I make absolutely no apology whatsoever,” he said, ”for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia …”

Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term ”illegal immigrants” is both false and craven. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear – they are legal. How ironic; the people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire.

And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this. No Indonesian solution for them. More

'Illegal and immoral' – Pilger

AAP – Pilger slams govt’s asylum-seeker policy

Leah McLennan

The winner of this year’s Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger, has labelled the federal government’s asylum-seeker policy “illegal and immoral”.

… “What the Rudd government is doing in preventing them from landing or trying to bribe Indonesia to take them or interning them in what’s effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island … is both illegal and immoral.”

Mr Pilger said the one difference between the actions of Kevin Rudd and former prime minister John Howard was “hypocrisy”.

Mr Pilger noted that in an essay in The Monthly magazine published not long before Mr Rudd became prime minister, he lauded the moral principles of the good Samaritan and left no doubt that he believed refugees should not be treated the way Jews fleeing Nazi Germany were – that is, prevented from entering western countries, including Australia.

“But now Rudd says the diametric opposite: that his government would be ‘tough’ on ‘illegal immigrants’. The term itself is a lie.

“Refugees are not illegal – international law is clear on that.

“When are Australians going to speak out against this outrage being perpetrated in our name?”

Mr Pilger will deliver his Sydney Prize Lecture, titled Breaking the Australian Silence, at the Sydney Opera House on Thursday. More

In other news…

Haaretz – Tutu to Haaretz: Arabs paying the price of the Holocaust

Crikey – Reaction to Pilger award reveals Zionist lobby’s fear of dissent

John Pilger writes about the conflict

From John Pilger’s blog – Distant voices, desperate lives

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the catastrophe facing the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, whose distant voices have appealed to the world for almost as long as the Palestinians.

History teaches us that when no one listens, tragedy ensues. Sri Lanka’s Tamils face terrible suffering. They urgently need to be heard

In the early 1960s, it was the Irish of Derry who would phone late at night, speaking in a single breath, spilling out stories of discrimination and injustice. Who listened to their truth until the violence began? Bengalis from what was then East Pakistan did much the same. Their urgent whispers described terrible state crimes that the news ignored, and they implored us reporters to “let the world know”. Palestinians speaking above the din of crowded rooms in Bethlehem and Beirut asked no more. For me, the most tenacious distant voices have been the Tamils of Sri Lanka, to whom we ought to have listened a very long time ago.

Antony Loewenstein blogs about the conflict – Another failed war on terror hit

The massive crisis in Sri Lanka is starting to get some media traction (and discussion about Western complicity, especially Britain and its arms sales). Too many journalists and nations still regard the onslaught against the Tamils as part of the “war on terror“. Big mistake. John Pilger tackles the subject calmly and offers a necessary comparison:

 

John Pilger signs Sri Lankan Crisis Statement

Mr. John Pilger, renowned Australian  journalist, author and documentary filmmaker has signed the Sri Lankan Crisis Statement.

We continue to receive support for our statement from wider members of the Australian public.

Thank you so much.

Pilger talks about International justice being a farce

The Guardian : Cambodia’s empty dock

International justice is a farce while those in the west who sided with Pol Pot’s murders escape trial.