As with Ari Folman’s movie-length cartoon Waltz with Bashir, this film is most commonly viewed as a confession, by a former Israeli soldier, about his part in the 1982 Lebanon War. My personal view is that whilst both Waltz with Bashir and Lebanon are most certainly products of a personal and collective process of redemption, in Lebanon Samuel Maoz makes three aesthetic choices that violently differ from those made by Ari Folman in Waltz with Bashir.
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A response to Luca Lana’s Eclipse 1
The following statement was written to accompany a rather novel – meaning tiny – installation by Luca Lana, titled “Eclipse 1”. The installation is set into the wall in the back lanes of Melbourne, and measures just 20x30cm. Showing at TwentyByThirty Gallery, Melbourne @ 20 Presgrave Place, off Little Collins Street. Until 31 March. The Abrahamic religions [...]
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Playboy Magazine, and the proliferation of nukes
Julia Gillard would be well advised to seek out an edition of this month’s Playboy. If approached with open eyes an article by Arms Control Wonk blogger Joshua Pollack has the capacity to recast the Australia-India relationship.
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Red river: The blacklisting of Rio Tinto
In February 1995, Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto announced three deals that secured access into Grasberg, a massive gold and copper mine in the Indonesian province of West Papua. This is the story of why the mine has been deemed “gorssly unethical” by the Norwegian government.
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Victoria’s state library: what a bloody pity
To be sure, the State Library of Victoria offers a beautiful architectural environment in which to work – but under continued weak management it is incapable of serving the public as its current funders, the Victorian public, would expect.
READ MOREAustralia’s Middle East diaspora on the Palestine Boycott, Divestment & Sanction (BDS) campaign
Following the reaction to my blog post on the application of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) of Israel campaign in October, I approached five members of the Middle East diaspora and community in Australia to each discuss, in their own words, the following proposition: “To what extent is the BDS effective at balancing competing “harms” – the [...]
READ MOREThe Lowy Institute’s bizarre rebuttal
The Lowy Institute for International Policy, an Australian think tank based in Sydney, have distributed a series of rebuttals to my series of essays criticising the Australian Government’s decision earlier this month to open the doors to uranium sales with India.
READ MORECould Australia’s record on arms control harm UN Security Council bid?
Last Friday over fifty states at the UN rejected US-led attempts to introduce a lesser standard of arms control. Australia, however, was not one of them, writes NAJ Taylor.
READ MOREAn inventory of Australian WikiLeaks cables relating to cluster munitions negotiations
As I explored at length in Al Jazeera in August, a series of WikiLeaks cables relating to cluster munitions demonstrate how Australia actively sought to water down treaty text relating to ‘military interoperability’ – that is, the ability for foreign militaries to conduct joint operations.
READ MOREThe loopholes in the Labor Party’s Cluster Munitions Bill
Labor caucus today voted not to amend its widely criticised Cluster Munitions Prohibition Bill to remove two loopholes that go against the spirit and intent of the international Convention on Cluster Munitions. I will be on the ABC Radio National breakfast program with Fran Kelly on Wednesday morning to discuss the Caucus vote alongside defence minister Stephen Smith.
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