Terrorism Archives - thegoodwills.com

War is Over – Lennon’s plea for peace, 52 years on

So goes the simple counter melody to John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1971 song, Happy Christmas/War Is Over. The Vietnam war was still raging when Lennon penned this universal message for the album, Imagine.

Fifty-two years later, the 30 children from the Harlem Community Choir who sang on the recording would be in their 50s and 60s now, if still alive. I wonder if any enterprising journalists have tried to find and interview these people.

What in Lennon’s name would they think about the simple call for peace contrasted with what’s going on in December 2023?

As I wrote this, the UN Security Council was trying once more to have its Israel/Gaza ceasefire resolution passed, hopefully without another US veto. Israel insists that a ceasefire will leave it defenceless against Hamas attacks. The inference is that Hamas, as a terrorist group, will pay no heed to a UN resolution.

In case you are confused, the ceasefire resolution passed last week by the UN Assembly is a non-binding agreement. The UN Security Council, however, can force a ceasefire if it gets the resolution passed.

I turned to Al Jazeera for the latest on the Israel/Gaza war, which started on October 7, after Hamas fired missiles on Israel, with 1,200 Israel civilians killed.

The bombing raids and subsequent invasion by Israel has left at least 20,000 Palestinians dead, including large numbers of children.

Which made me wonder when our Prime Minister took the podium at a Lowy Institute function this week and backed Israel’s right to defend itself. Mr Albanese and foreign Minister Penny Wong came out early in the conflict supporting Israel, as did US President Joe Biden

Last week Penny Wong sided with the UN Assembly’s call for a ceasefire, which is a fair U-turn on the original statement. The UN General Assembly resolution was passed 153 votes to 10, with 23 abstentions.

It’s fair to say that any discussion between friends and family over the Israel/Gaza war will inevitably become terse. It usually comes down to one’s heritage and previous experience with sectarian conflicts (Ireland, the former Yugoslavia and Ukraine), which tends to divide families.

My life partner is a Canadian-born Australian who has tracked her Jewish maternal family back to Latvia, where her ancestors fled the pogroms in the late 1800s.

The key difficulty is if you disagree with Israel’s position you are seen as anti-Semitic.

(Ed: I certainly disagree with Israel’s position, and it would seem odd to classify me as ‘Anti-Semitic’- more accurately, anti-uber Zionist).

This a summary of the most recent history from the Council for Foreign Relations: (words in parenthesis are my attempts to clarify)

In 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, known as the Partition Plan, which sought to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. (Britain was given the mandate in 1917 by the League of Nations after seizing Jerusalem from the Ottoman Empire).

On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was created, sparking the first Arab Israeli War. The war ended in 1949 with Israel’s victory, but 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, and the territory was divided into 3 parts: the State of Israel, the West Bank (of the Jordan River), and the Gaza Strip.

Over the following years, tensions rose in the region, particularly between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Following the 1956 Suez Crisis and Israel’s invasion of the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria signed mutual defence pacts (against Israel). In June 1967, following a series of manoeuvres by Egyptian President Nasser, Israel attacked Egyptian and Syrian air forces, starting the Six-Day War. After the war, Israel gained territorial control over the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt; the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan; and the Golan Heights from Syria.

It is demonstrably the case that trouble was expected from the formation of the nation state of Israel. In short, both sides believe they are entitled to occupy the land. These beliefs go back centuries, to biblical times, even. When the British decided to leave Palestine (which they had occupied since the end of WWI), they created a doctrinal vacuum in which Arabs and Jews were supposed to co-exist.

Israel has been accused of genocide (meaning the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group). Israel in turn says it is focused on rooting out and destroying the terrorist group, Hamas.

Whatever you want to call it, the daily footage of ongoing destruction and killing in Gaza, accompanied by hawkish statements from Benjamin Netanyahu, does not point to the UN successfully brokering a lengthy ceasefire.

I just happened to be reading The Fog of Peace, a memoir by French diplomat Jean Marie Guéhenno. Early in his tenure with the United Nations, Guéhenno was asked to review UN peacekeeping missions which had been in place for decades.

The brief was to weigh up the importance of the missions against the ongoing costs of maintaining them.

This is how I learned of the existence of UNTSO, an observer mission formed in 1949 to monitor the ceasefire between the newly created state of Israel and its Arab neighbours. This mission, based in Jerusalem, is still in place today.

Guéhenno writes that while closing down the mission made good management sense, maintaining it meant making the political point that the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours remains a big issue.

The UN loves acronyms so I should explain that UNTSO is The United Nations Truce Serving Organization. In 2023, the mission has 53 military observers, 81 international civilian personnel and 148 national civilian staff. Some 27 countries including Australia contribute to the ongoing operation of UNTSO. Since we are recording facts, 50 people working for UNTSO have been killed since its establishment 74 years ago.

Meanwhile, our PM and his Foreign Minister remain tied to the US, which is highly unlikely to say Yes to an immediate ceasefire without substantial amendments to the resolution.

Which brings us back to War Is Over, If We Want It.

Lennon is dead, shot by an allegedly disturbed fan in 1980. In the nine years between Lennon’s ultimate call for Peace and his death at an assassin’s hand, 84 wars, civil conflicts, military coups and insurrections went unchecked. Vietnam ended but other wars began.

As Jackson Browne observed in Lives in the Balance:

There’s a shadow on the faces
Of the men who send the guns
To the wars that are fought in places
Where their business interests run,

In the 43 years since Lennon died, there have been 104 wars in which the US was involved. While the US is not actively involved in the Israel/Gaza war, it provides aid to Israel and its foreign policy dictates what happens from here on. Should Australia be aligning itself so closely to the US, given the divisive signals that sends to the Australian people?

Forty percent of us were born overseas and 213,900 of our citizens were born in one of the 23 Middle Eastern countries.

As Lennon sang in 1971: “And so it is Christmas”.

Yes indeed, but it won’t stop Pro-Palestinian public protests in our capital cities and who are we to say they shouldn’t.

I’d probably recommend banning the above discussion at the Christmas table, even though you are now as up to date as you’d want to be.

Find a soothing playlist which should include Silent Night, O Holy Night, a couple of Australian carols (Carol of the Birds, The Silver Bells), and this one, a version of The First Noel set to Pachelbel’s Canon.

Play Fairytale of New York if you must. We prefer Dirty Old Town.

Bob and Laurel

Down the rabbit hole, looking for trouble

The phrase ‘going down the rabbit hole’ could well apply to my activities earlier this week, as I set out to research ‘alternative’ social media networks including those adopted by the right wing.

Before I disappeared down the burrow, I had some idea what I would encounter, having last year researched 4Chan and 8Chan.

My research was thwarted right at the start by Amazon’s reported move to ban Parler from its web-hosting network.

Apple and Google have also removed the Parler App from its app stores. Not surprisingly, www.parler.com has been off-line since Monday.

Parler (pronounced par-lay), at last count had 15 million members, including a significant number of Trump supporters. Parler has been cited as the source of posts inciting violence before last week’s storming of Washington’s Capitol Building. Amazon terminated the app’s internet access at the weekend, having previously warned the social media operator about breaching its moderation rules (deciding which comments to let through).

While Parler went off-line, looking for another web host, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took to his own forum to explain why Trump has been denied access. Twitter had already blocked Mr Trump’s account after earlier labelling some of his tweets as disputed or false claims.

Amazon (and Parler) have not made official comments about the ban, not surprising given the potential for litigation. This piece by the Washington Post (owned, as the article declares, by Amazon owner Jeff Bezos), should suffice as a summary.

The fallout from last week’s rioting at the Capitol Building includes internet giants Facebook and Twitter banning soon to be ex-President Trump from commenting. This could be construed to mean they figure the riots happened because Trump encouraged it (and social media gave the angry mob a place to vent, plan, organise and schedule).

Authorities seemed slow to lay arrest and lay charges, (the FBI today says more than 100 arrested). Those charged include those accused of bringing bombs and weapons into the building. Others, whose faces were caught on video, have so far escaped the link between that and their actual identities. If it had been in CCTV-dominated London, they’d all be nicked by now.

On Tuesday, US authorities announced new arrests and charges including Jacob Anthony Chansley, also known as Jake Angeli. They also charged Derrick Evans, a recently-elected member of the West Virginia House of Delegates. The US Attorney’s office said Mr Evans was identified on a video, shouting as he crossed the threshold into the Capitol, “We’re in, we’re in! Derrick Evans is in the Capitol!”

The pair and one other man were charged in Federal Court in connection with the violent incursion into the Capitol.

Chansley, the most identifiable of those captured on video or security cameras was hard to miss, with his red white and blue face paint, tattooed chest, horned helmet and bearskin toupee.

He was charged with “knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, and with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.”

On Tuesday I clicked ‘like’ on multiple Facebook posts condemning Australia’s acting Prime Minister Michael McCormack for seemingly taking ex-president Trump’s side over the Twitter ban. The debate, free speech vs consequences. rumbles on.

McCormack’s attempts to compare the riots with last year’s Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice were described by Amnesty International as “deeply offensive”.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who is on leave, last week condemned the rioters over the “terribly distressing” violence and called for a peaceful transfer of power.

But unlike many other world leaders, he refused to acknowledge Trump’s role in inciting the mob that gate-crashed the US Capitol building.

Just in case you think things like that only happen ‘over there’, there are stridently right-wing politicians in our own parliament saying provocative things. The Guardian reported that government backbencher George Christensen said over the weekend he would push for laws to “stop media platforms from censoring any and all lawful content created by their users”.

Further to Parler’s ban, social media posts have appeared claiming that ‘ultra left-wing radicals’ have downloaded Parler profiles aplenty and a mass ‘doxxing’ is feared.

Doxxing in this context means a deliberate dumping of publicly available data with the aim of ‘outing’ people who express strong views on social media. Apparently it (the gleaning), has been going on for some time.

At this point, like my friend Mr Shiraz, who finished his daily rant on Facebook and went outside to prune trees, I turned my mind to substantive issues in Australia.

It seems the combined media coverage of Covid-19 and life in Trumpistan* has pushed Australia’s refugee issues off the news agenda.

Since I recently joined a local refugee support group which aims to help refugees in a positive way, I thought I should play my part.

I started by writing to the Southern Downs Regional Council, asking Mayor Vic Pennisi to join the 168 local governments in Australia who have designated their regions a ‘Refugee Welcome Zone.’

Our near neighbour, Toowoomba Regional Council, declared the city as such back in 2013 – before it was even a ‘thing’.

The Refugee Council of Australia definition of a ‘Refugee Welcome Zone’ is: ‘a Local Government Area which has made a commitment in spirit to welcoming refugees into the community. The aim is to uphold the human rights of refugees, demonstrate compassion for refugees and enhance cultural and religious diversity in the community’.

There’s a bit of a precedent, with participants widespread throughout Australia including the City of Sydney (NSW), Brisbane City Council (Qld), the City of Subiaco (WA), Clarence City Council (Tasmania) and Port Macquarie-Hastings Council (NSW).

There are eight local governments in Queensland who have rolled out the welcome mat for refugees, including Brisbane, Gold Coast, Logan, Townsville, Toowoomba and Noosa Council.

In applying myself to letter writing, I broke the cycle of ‘doom-scrolling’ which is a catch-phrase to describe the act of constantly updating news and social media feeds on one’s mobile phone. They say it makes anxious people grind their teeth at night.

This insidious condition worsens for every day the US inauguration grows closer; for every day we endure live press conferences updating our region’s Covid status.

In what must surely now be recognised as a classic FOMM digression, the phrase ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’ has been nabbed by an enterprising South Australian winemaker.

Down the Rabbit Hole Wines is clever marketing in an industry that seems switched on to it. I should also tell you about a Victorian winemaker whose label is Goodwill Wine. I don’t imbibe, but She Who Does tells me the red is worthy of their loose adaptation of our band name (www.thegoodwills,com).

Brand names aside, ‘going down the rabbit hole’ is defined by dictionary.com as a metaphor for something that transports someone into a wonderfully (or troublingly), surreal state or situation.

I rest my case.

Last week: One of my readers (a beekeeper) chided me for calling the bee disease ‘Fowlbrood’. I’m blaming the spellchecker, as I already knew it was ‘American foulbrood’ or AFB.

*Trumpistan: a term for the parts of the USA which support Donald Trump

A few words about Christchurch and global grief

christchurch-global-grief — Christchurch and global grief – artwork by Isaac Westerlund

Last Friday’s massacre in Christchurch by a lone gunman was, as numerous people opined on Twitter, the per capita equivalent of New Zealand’s 9/11. The 50 people killed represent 3,000 fatalities in a similar attack in the US. That does give perspective to the overwhelming feelings of sorrow and confusion many of us felt last Friday and the global grief we have felt every day since.

New Zealand rarely makes international headlines, unless it’s an earthquake, a volcanic eruption or the Wallabies beating the All Blacks. We mourn the irrevocable loss of innocence.

Like Ten’s social commentator Waleed Aly, I did not really want to talk about this today, but as he and others have said, I feel as if I need to say something. I grew up in a sleepy little town in the North Island, a place where nobody locked up and people left their keys in the ignition while they went across the road to the dairy for a bottle of milk.

I remember the shock that was shared around the country in 1963 (I was 15), when President John F Kennedy was assassinated. Things like that didn’t happen in New Zealand so we were shocked, dismayed and very sad. Then as with Christchurch, we shared in a global grief experience.

Songwriter Kath Tait, an expat Kiwi living in London, found out about the massacre at two Christchurch mosques when she got up on Saturday morning (Friday night over here).

She wrote on Facebook: “I’m totally gutted; it’s a big shock for us NZers because we still cling to the notion that NZ is a safe peaceful place and not really a part of the wider world out there. I guess we’re wrong about that.”

George Jackson, a fiddle player now based in Nashville but raised in NZ, encapsulated his feelings by re-learning a plaintive waltz written by his great-great grandfather George Dickson.

Song of the Tui

I spent the weekend at the Blue Mountains Music Festival where more than a few festival guests had something to say about the atrocity in Christchurch, which had only just happened. As we all now know, 50 people died of gunshot wounds inflicted by a lone attacker and many more suffered serious injuries. A male person has since been arrested, by two brave rural coppers in Christchurch for, of all things, an armed offenders’ training course.

He has been charged with one count of murder and remanded in custody until April 5. Like New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, I refuse to speak his name. And, despite a plethora of online and offline speculation about the alleged perpetrator’s background and likely motives, it remains for a court to decide upon his fate.

Irish songwriter Luka Bloom started his set at the festival in Katoomba saying that people who perpetrate such atrocities “Do not speak for me – “they never have and they never will.”

“They have no idea about the amount of love there is in this world,” he said.

And as Laurel Wilson recounts: “When New Zealand comedy duo, The Topp Twins, who hail from Christchurch, first heard about the atrocity that had occurred in their city, they asked each other, “How can we go on stage and be funny after that?”

“The Topp twins are two openly lesbian, feminist, politically active sisters who are also very, very entertaining – loved by a great diversity of fans in their native New Zealand but also in Australia and elsewhere. They have, no doubt, known prejudice themselves, but have not let it define or limit them. I believe this is the message that they wished to convey when they decided to go ahead with their show at the Blue Mountains Music Festival. And they lifted everyone’s spirits when they finished the show with an audience participation version of ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’, complete with choreography”.

Stephen Taberner, musical director of the Spooky Men’s Chorale, is also from Christchurch. He refrained from commentary about the events of that day, instead recalling an incident he once witnessed where a mother was remonstrating with one of her kids. The mother said to one of the other kids: “Don’t stir the pot”, which Taberner said meant, “Don’t make things worse.”

The Spooky Men then closed out the festival with a stirring rendition of Joni’s Mitchell’s The Fiddle and the Drum.

Taberner’s wisdom in choosing to bypass commentary or bare his feelings was the right choice, given the amount of pot-stirring that’s been going on over the past seven days on social media and in the conventional press.

The Urban Dictionary’s broader definition of ‘stir the pot’ might give us pause for thought about which media outlet we trust:

Pot-stirrer: Someone who loves to proliferate the tension and drama between two or more feuding people/groups in public…in hopes of starting a shitstorm of drama and uncomfortable conflict…”

The above could also aptly describe our accidental Senator, who has been in the public eye, grabbing headlines for all the wrong reasons. Boycott his press conferences, I say. He will still be free to say what he wants to say, just not on the front page.

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern put the lid firmly back on the pot with an apolitical, compassionate approach that above all took the feelings and beliefs of the Muslim victims of the massacre into account. Within days, she and Muslim leaders were collaborating with police to fast-track the release of the victims’ bodies to their families. The Islamic faith requires that burial rituals happen as soon as possible. The fact the NZ PM understood this and promised that the country would also pay for the burials, built a few bridges at a time when all connection could have been lost.

Defining the nation’s role in this global grief, she wrote in a commemoration book: “On behalf of all New Zealanders we grieve, together we are one, they are us.”

These words have taken on a life of their own, as a hashtag on social media. In just three words she defined New Zealand’s inclusive attitude towards refugees and immigrants in general. Ms Ardern’s approach every day since has been consistent, compassionate and yet firm, as shown with the swift introduction of stricter gun laws.

The chief pot-stirrers, unfortunately, are the loosely-regulated chat sites and bulletin boards where people can post anonymously. Telcos including Telstra, Optus and Vodaphone are temporarily blocking websites which continue to broadcast the live GoPro video filmed by the assailant as he went about his bloody business. None of the Telcos will say which websites they are actively blocking, although they say the bans will be lifted once the video is removed.

Apart from George’s fiddle tune, the most moving thing I have seen about the Christchurch massacre is a black and white ink drawing by Isaac Westerlund of a Maori woman and a Muslim woman exchanging the Hongi. This is a traditional Maori greeting where two people briefly touch noses and foreheads, exchanging a symbolic breath of life.

Thanks to open-hearted people like Isaac Westerlund and George Jackson, the healing power of music and art help us overcome emotions we don’t quite understand and to make sense of the senseless.

#theyareus

*A Tui is a native bird with a distinctive tuft of white feathers at the throat and a beautiful call.

Terrorised in London (still)

There’s a Waifs’ song with a plaintiff chorus that defines the homesick expatriate – “I’m in London still, I’m in, la la London still.”

I’m a Waifs’ fan but never thought much of London. The capital city of England, despite its numerous parks and gardens, museums and galleries, ancient monuments and centuries of history etched into every building, was never among my peak travel destinations.

Sure, I was broke, lonely and depressed on my first two excursions in the 1970s. But subsequent visits, when not broke, lonely or depressed still left me with those negative impressions: the sooty smell, the pressing crowds, the awful smelly tubes, the poor huddled masses waving flags outside the gilded palace. I could go on.

There were magic moments; hearing a choir sing in St-Martin-In-The-Fields, visiting the Tate Gallery on a day when there were very few people about; a lovely day at Kew Gardens with a broke, lonely and depressed friend, back in the early 1970s before the tranquillity was ruined by flight paths in and out of Heathrow.

But those moments and memories are supressed beneath the intangible air of menace which permeates some London boroughs. Even when living among Aussie and Kiwi expats who gathered in Shepherd’s Bush and Earl’s Court, there was (to me), an air of something violent about to happen.

My broke, lonely and depressed Aussie mate advised. “Mate, you should leave the weed alone – it’s making you paranoid.” But even when I took his advice, the loneliness and depression persisted.

We were living in a suburban squat, which is something poor people can still do in London, where squatter’s rights hold firm.

Back in London 1970-something, we pooled our money, pinched a bit from the household petty cash and went to see the new Martin Scorsese movie, Mean Streets. It’s about a wannabe mobster who gets in over his head. The violence and desperation cheered us up no end.

I’ve been thinking about those la-la London days in the aftermath of the callous, premeditated attack on innocent bystanders at London Bridge, which left eight people dead and 48 injured.

In the early 1970s, the Irish Provisional Army had London in a state of fear. In case you’d forgotten, the IRA’s reign of terror in Ireland and in the UK between 1969 and 1997 makes the attacks by fanatics in Manchester and London look like random, unrelated incidents.

Regardless, the level of violence shown in the 2017 attacks on May 22 and June 3 drove British authorities to escalate the threat level to ‘critical,’ then ‘severe’ (‘severe’ meaning a terrorist attack is highly likely).

Parents of young people determined to head off to Europe for an adventure are in a state of high anxiety. According to DFAT there are more than 130,000 Australian residents living in the UK. As of June 7, 10,610 Australians had registered with Smart Traveller as currently visiting the UK. When you add in exchange students and people on two-year work visas, the collective angst at home is understandable

Our parents were similarily horrified when in the early 1970s we left for the obligatory OE (overseas experience) with our brand new backpacks and passports.

“The IRA is leaving parcel bombs on the Tube,” my Dad warned. “And in pubs.”

“Dad, I could get killed crossing Karangahape Road,” I replied.

Teenagers and people in their early 20s have the carefree mindset “it’ll never happen to me.” It will, however, happen to someone. And ‘it” does not have to be a random terrorist event. On average 171 people have been murdered in Greater London every year since 1990 – more than three per week.

And you might get killed or maimed by accident. Pedestrians and cyclists are always at risk on London roads, though a mitigation campaign seems to be working.

Transport for London (TfL) figures show that the number of people killed or seriously injured on London’s roads fell by 3% in 2015.

The June 2016 report, the latest available, said the numbers of people killed or seriously injured fell from 2,167 to 2,092 compared with 2014. There were 84 fewer serious injuries (2,040 to 1,956) over the same period. However there was a 7% rise in traffic fatalities (from 127 to 136). Fatal and serious injuries involving cyclists fell by 10% compared to 2014 (nine fatalities down from 13).

TfL says it is making “good progress” on its target for reducing death and serious injury on our roads by 50% by 2020.

These are just a few examples of how living in a city of 8.75 million carries a correspondingly higher level of risk. The rate of crime against Londoners jumped substantially in 2015, according to Metropolitan Police. The murder rate was up by more than 14% with 113 murders occurring in the capital in the 12 months to September 2015.

But as people who watch Lateline know, London, with a murder rate less than 2 per 100,000 is a long way down the list of the world’s most dangerous cities.

This Wikipedia entry lists 50 cities where the murder rate ranges from 34.43 (Durban SA) to 130.35 (Caracas, Venezuela).

If you are the nervous type, scratch these 50 cities off your wish list. While 19 of these high-murder risk cities are in Brazil (where nine-year-old kids armed with hand guns prowl the streets), four cities are in President Trump’s United States of America (St Louis, Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans).

Not that any of this makes the attacks on London Bridge or at the Ariana Grande concert a fortnight earlier any less serious. But I find myself pondering the faux bravado of politicians who bluster and bluff, saying “enough is enough.” It’s exactly what the parents of uncontrollable teenagers say, when trying to deal with the latest escapade, be it drugs, drinking, truanting or under-age sex. As actions plans go, they are futile.

There’s an air of futility and misdirection about the current focus on Muslim radicals and how the ‘tread softly’ approach is not working.

The far right in Britain and here in Australia simplistically call for a ban on all things Islam. Maybe my memory is hazy (I was drinking in those days), but I don’t recall anyone calling for a ban on people from Northern Ireland living and working in the UK.

Australia’s shameful mood of xenophobia (fear of foreigners), is not restricted to Muslims.

An editorial in the New Zealand Listener last month, “They’re just not that into us,” used modern dating argot to discuss how Kiwis are being marginalised. And it’s government-sponsored. The list of discriminatory policies includes:

Full user-pays fees for New Zealand students;
Summary detention and deportation for Kiwi felons;
(Scientifically unjustified) bans on NZ apples;
New citizenship barriers;
Open criticism of New Zealand’s foreign policy.

The leader writer adds: “The one affront we can be sure wasn’t deliberate is Australia’s export of myrtle rust.”

As the editorial says, penalising New Zealand residents is a handy (and popular) way to distract attention from the Turnbull government’s political and fiscal woes. It would not surprise to see the UK Prime Minister (whoever that May be), misuse Muslims in the same way.