Dear Peter Gabriel, As a teenager in a cold and grey North Shields in the 1970s one of my treasured possessions was a red hooded sweat-shirt into which my friend Eddie Thomas had sewn the titles of Genesis albums in beautiful, flowing, many-colored silken threads. After school and paper rounds, we’d sit listening to Foxtrot…
100 artists including Ken Loach, Mark Rylance and Susan Sarandon have signed an open letter indicting Israel as an illegitimate ‘settler colonial’ society. Fathom editor Alan Johnson sets out the reasons why it isn’t, in the form of an open letter to one of the signatories, his culture hero Peter Gabriel. Dear Peter Gabriel, As…
Why Palestinians prefer to work for Israeli employers, Palestinian Media Watch, Tuesday, 19 October 2021 Palestinians in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip are excited. Israeli authorities have decided to allow thousands of them to work in Israel. The news about the Israeli decision spread like wildfire, prompting tens of thousands of Palestinians to converge on the…
Worker power is essential to building our economy from the COVID-19 crisis better than before and developing the economy from the bottom up and the middle out. On Labor Day, President Joe Biden announced, “When unions win, workers across the board win.” Although Biden outlined the achievements of the US labor movement over history, he…
Firstly, let me say this is not a conventional book review. It is more so an ongoing critical reflection on what the anti-Zionist Left (i.e. those who reject Israel’s continuing existence as a Jewish state even within the Green Line borders, and instead advocate so-called universalistic solutions which in the current political culture of the…
A Federal Court decision handed down on August 31 confirmed that University of Sydney staff have a legal right to be protected from disciplinary action when exercising intellectual freedom. The decision resulted from an appeal brought by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and Dr Tim Anderson, a former Political Economy academic, against the University of Sydney. Anderson was sacked…
Victoria will become the first state or territory in Australia to make the public display of Nazi symbols illegal – in a landmark reform to help stamp out hateful behaviour and boost human rights protections. The Andrews Labor Government will also extend the state’s anti-vilification protections beyond race and religion to cover areas such as…
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) welcomed today’s landmark Federal Court judgment that ruled University of Sydney staff have a legal right to be protected from disciplinary action when exercising intellectual or academic freedom, under the terms of the NTEU collective workplace agreement. The appeal decision found that the University of Sydney collective agreement contains a legally…
A controversial University of Sydney lecturer who was sacked after superimposing a swastika on an Israeli flag has won a key victory in his battle to be reinstated, with the federal court declaring academics at the institution are entitled to convey even offensive views in their area of expertise. The decision reverses a previous court…
After a long night of deliberations, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced to the Knesset on Aug. 2, “Ladies and gentlemen, Israel has a budget!” The cabinet ministers, who voted unanimously for it, burst into a round of applause. The intense pressure facing the new government was gone: The coalition had survived its first major test.…