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Binoy Kampmark
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Binoy Kampmark - Latest News [Page 27]
Showboating For War: Johnson And Morrison In Israel
Tuesday, 7 November 2023, 11:01 am | Binoy Kampmark
Banished Prime Ministers are an irritation. They clog the airwaves of punditry with their views about how things were and how things should be. But even there, degrees of severity and competence should be observed. The more noble sorts would pursue ... More >>
Taking The Refugee Hysteria Off Ice
Sunday, 5 November 2023, 3:31 pm | Binoy Kampmark
There are many reasons why Australian foreign policy can be viewed from the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe. For one, it is largely dictated, in terms of security, by the competitive, acquisitive urgings of the United States. Fictional reassurances ... More >>
Rishi Sunak’s AI Pitch: The Bletchley Declaration
Saturday, 4 November 2023, 2:34 pm | Binoy Kampmark
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak looks as much a deep fake projection as a thin, superficial representation of reality. His robotic, risible awkwardness makes a previous occupant of his office, Theresa May, look soppily human in comparison. But at the ... More >>
NATO Provoked Putin: Stoltenberg Comes Clean On The Ukraine War
Wednesday, 1 November 2023, 4:33 pm | Binoy Kampmark
For years, John J. Mearsheimer, that seemingly ageless, if somewhat chilly presence at the University of Chicago, has been a thorn of irritation to certain establishment ideas. With his pugnacious sense of realist politics, he has little time for the ... More >>
Muddled Interventions: Haiti, The UN And Resolution 2699
Sunday, 29 October 2023, 6:16 pm | Binoy Kampmark
A country broken by constant foreign interventions, its tyrannical regimes propped up by the back brace of the United States (when it wasn’t intervening to adjust it), marred by appalling natural disasters, tells a sad tale of the crippled Haitian ... More >>
Biden’s Bungles Over Gaza
Saturday, 28 October 2023, 2:06 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The main press stable was keen to see the scrappy benefits of the 31-hour visit to Israel by US President Joe Biden. On National Public Radio (NPR), Scott Neuman expressed the view that the “largely symbolic” visit did yield a few “concrete ... More >>
The Day Guterres Became Relevant
Friday, 27 October 2023, 2:43 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The relevance given to a UN Secretary-General is often judged by the degree of controversy caused. In history, the most relevant are usually targeted. Dag Hammarskjöld, refusing to remain a mere bauble of international office, was almost certainly murdered over ... More >>
Justifying Collective Punishment: Israel’s Assault On Gaza
Tuesday, 24 October 2023, 12:38 pm | Binoy Kampmark
“Erroneous doctrines are current in the world, which declare a man culpable and responsible merely because he is a member or part of a determined country, without taking the trouble to seek or examine whether on his part there has been any personal ... More >>
Cultural Cover-Up: The Sydney Opera House Turns 50
Monday, 23 October 2023, 5:06 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Commemorative occasions are often draped in fatty platitudes. Within such platitudes lie excuses and apologies. People are celebrated after the fact, not for their faults but for their virtues. It’s just the polite thing to do. At the time of their achievement, ... More >>
Rambo’s Pacific Peace Zone
Sunday, 22 October 2023, 8:27 am | Binoy Kampmark
There has always been something impressive, if slightly idiosyncratic, about political ideas emanating from Pacific states. In recent years, on the world’s largest body of water, the various island states seeing themselves as part of the Blue Pacific ... More >>
Fruitless Gestures: Victoria Bans The Nazi Salute
Wednesday, 18 October 2023, 1:58 pm | Binoy Kampmark
It took place with hardly any debate, though it interested some parliamentary members at the committee stage. The Australian state of Victoria now faces laws that will lock a person up for 12 months or punish individuals with fines of A$23,000 or above ... More >>
A Losing Voice: The Fall Of An Indigenous Referendum Measure
Sunday, 15 October 2023, 7:30 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Even before October 14, The Voice, or, to describe in full, the Referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament, was in dire straits. Referenda proposals are rarely successful in Australia: prior to October 14, 44 referenda had ... More >>
Violence Against Human Animals: Images From The Israel-Hamas War
Saturday, 14 October 2023, 9:05 pm | Binoy Kampmark
With the body count rising in this latest, and particularly bloody Israel-Hamas War, the narrative of Israel the wounded, Israel the desperate, has now been annexed to Israel the just warrior State, fighting darkness and primaeval stone age barbarism. ... More >>
Breaking Bread At The Terminus Of Learning
Friday, 13 October 2023, 7:36 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Let this be a lesson to you students. You are now coming to the end of another semester, arbitrarily designated as having an even number of weeks, crammed with a range of objectives that no doubt most of you have not met. For one thing, you did not read. ... More >>
Indecency’s Conspiracy Of Silence: Hamas, Israel And The Use Of Force
Monday, 9 October 2023, 11:53 am | Binoy Kampmark
Shock and horror. But to and for whom? At 6.30 am on October 7, the State of Israel was certainly in shock. From the south, its citizens faced attacks by, as news reports put it, air, sea and land executed by the Islamic militant group Hamas. Within a ... More >>
Nuclear-Powered Fixations: The Trump-Pratt Disclosures
Saturday, 7 October 2023, 8:23 pm | Binoy Kampmark
In April 2021, the Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt had a meeting with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club. According to an ABC News report , “Pratt told Trump he believed Australia should start buying its submarines from the United States, ... More >>
Modi’s Cricket Ploy: Hindutva As Twelfth Man
Wednesday, 4 October 2023, 2:41 pm | Binoy Kampmark
This week, the International Cricket Council’s One Day International tournament will commence in India. The man who will take centre stage during the occasion will be Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, whose earthly attributes are fast becoming, ... More >>
Dianne Feinstein: National Security State Diva
Monday, 2 October 2023, 12:59 pm | Binoy Kampmark
The tributes for the late Democratic Senator from California, Dianne Feinstein, heaped up as word got out. Having served as San Francisco mayor and a senator for three decades from what, on paper at least, is meant to be a progressive state, Feinstein ... More >>
Flagging Support: Zelenskyy Loses Favour In Washington
Sunday, 1 October 2023, 7:54 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Things did not go so well this time around. When the worn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy turned up banging on the doors of Washington’s powerful on September 21, he found fewer open hearts and an increasingly large number of closed wallets. ... More >>
Cruel Prerogatives: Braverman On Refugees At The AEI
Friday, 29 September 2023, 2:17 pm | Binoy Kampmark
Suella Braverman has made beastliness a trait in British politics. The UK Home Secretary, fed on the mush and mash of anti-refugee sentiment, has been frantically trying to find her spot in the darkness of inhumanity. Audaciously, and with grinding ignorance, ... More >>
