First of all, here's what we have for you this week:
- Killer Grabs: Quotes from around the traps.
- Leaks, briefs and screenshots: The story behind Creative Australia's Sabsabi backflip — By Osman Faruqi
- The Good Ones: The best journalism, opinion and entertainment for you to enjoy.
Here at Lamestream HQ, we always want to be improving what we bring to you as our supporters. From the journalism through to the experience of being a subscriber.
Today, we're publishing Osman's exclusive investigation into the dropping and reinstatement of Khaled Sabsabi as Australia's representative at the Venice Biennale by Creative Australia – revealing stunning parallels with events in the Lattouf case.
You will also notice a few cosmetic changes to your newsletter, which we hope you like. We'd love to hear from you, though, if you have any ideas for what you'd like to get from us.
It's still early days for the two of us. There is a lot to do and only so many hours in the week, but we're dedicated to making Lamestream the best outlet it can possibly be.
Killer Grabs
"Hard to narrow down to just 10." — Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, when sharing his votes for Triple J's Hottest 100 Australian songs of all time.
I guess when you are exclusively drawing your list from white, male singers and songwriters who record guitar music it's hard to pick just 10, considering how many millions exist. I never thought I'd say this, but give me Obama's best of lists any day of the week.
"According to internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with The New York Times." – The NYT describing its source for a story on Zohran Mamdani.
Someone illegally hacked into Columbia University because they oppose their affirmative action policy, shared that information with a prominent online racist figure, who in turn shared it with the NYT, who then wrote a hatchet job attacking Mamdani. I think we have discovered just how much the media hate this guy.
"I love the film-making, but I did feel that it was a bit of a moral cop-out.” – James Cameron on Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer.
How's Avatar #16 going, bro?
Leaks, briefs and screenshots: The story behind Creative Australia's Sabsabi backflip
By Osman Faruqi
Behind-the-scenes lobbying by pro-Israel figures, emailed complaints to senior officials at publicly funded organisations, hatchet jobs in The Australian designed to force the removal of a well-known Lebanese-Australian from a public position — it's all extremely familiar to those of us who followed the sacking of Antoinette Lattouf from the ABC.
A Lamestream investigation can reveal that the same kinds of tactics used to pressure ABC management to get rid of Lattouf were also deployed to target artist Khaled Sabsabi, when he was appointed Australia's representative to the 2026 Venice Biennale in February this year. And, as was the case with Lattouf, those tactics were initially successful — raising serious questions about Creative Australia's willingness to defend artists and withstand pressure from the right-wing media and pro-Israel lobbyists.
