Here's what we have for you this week:
- Killer Grabs: Melania's meltdown, and the dumbest question asked this week.
- Israel's Bombing Of Lebanon Proves It's Not A Pariah. It's Enabled By All Of Us — By Osman Faruqi
- The Good Ones: A new flick, the best Lebanese journalists to follow and journos get told to use more AI, damnit!
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In this week's newsletter, Os writes about one of the worst massacres in Lebanon in decades, when Israel launched 100 strikes in less than 10 minutes, killing more than 250 people.
There is a direct line connecting how Western media and politicians, including here in Australia, discuss Israel to how it acts with impunity. When our media outlets continually run cover for a nation whose leaders openly threat annexation and ethnic cleansing, when our politicians remain closely allied to a country who can't stop slaughtering civilians and refuse to condemn it when they do, why would we expect anything to change?
Osman Faruqi
Killer Grabs
"If this war in Iran has shown us nothing else, hasn't it proved once and for all that your obsession with renewables will only lead us down the track to another energy crisis?" – Liam Bartlett from Seven News asks energy minister Chris Bowen
Nothing else. Not another thing to be learned.
And people think we're unkind when we talk about the intellects that rise to the top of Australian journalism.
Bartlett is considered a heavyweight veteran investigative reporter at Seven, which is apparently the reputation you earn there by fronting misleading and bullying reports about trans kids.
He also spent two years working at oil company Shell, as their "Global Head of TV". Presumably that means he was the only guy who knew how to work the remote?
"The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today," – First Lady Melania Trump, in a rare public statement from the White House on Friday.
Is it just us or does every time someone has announce they are not linked to Jeffrey Epstein, it just makes you think they are definitely linked to Jeffrey Epstein?
Also, you have to hand it to Melania for waiting until after the US-Iran ceasefire to remind us all that this Epstein situation is actually quite a massive deal and we should all return to paying attention to it.
"Researcher Brené Brown was misquoted in an interview published on April 6. She described herself as “solidly in my fuck it era” rather than “solidly in my fucking era'." – The Financial Times issues a correction.
Readers of the print edition of the world's most respectable financial newspaper might have been excited to learn that TEDx corporate feminist Brené Brown was getting out there.
Unfortunately, she's just been gripped by nihilistic accelerationism. Who hasn't been, babe?
Israel's Bombing Of Lebanon Proves It's Not A Pariah. It's Enabled By All Of Us
It took less than 24 hours after the US and Iran agreed to a ceasefire for Israel to remind the world of its barbaric addiction to slaughter, and how it believes – with good reason – it can act with total impunity and face zero consequences.
As part of the US-Iran deal to pause military attacks for two weeks pending broader negotiations, Hezbollah was informed it was also subject to the ceasefire. Its officials publicly announced they would abide by the ceasefire and stopped their attacks on Israel.
Israel’s response to this extraordinarily hard-fought and fragile agreement was to launch its biggest bombardment on Lebanon during the current war, killing over 250 people and injuring another 1,100. Most of the strikes were in civilian areas, including central Beirut, where Israel failed to issue evacuation orders.
There were two reasons Israel launched such a merciless offensive, dubbed “Eternal Darkness”. The first was simple petulance on the part of Benjamin Netanyahu, who was frozen out of the negotiations and as a result is facing ridicule on the international stage and in Israel.
The second was to remind us that it can invade, occupy and slaughter as many people as it wants, and the world will do nothing to stop them. What happens next will determine if that remains the case.
The world has continually made excuses for Israel’s depravity in Lebanon
Over the last few weeks, the Western media has adopted a particularly tortured and entirely false formulation to describe the genesis of the current conflict.
