Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Please Explain

Former senator for the Australian Greens, Scott Ludlam, has resurfaced as a Guardian Australia columnist... with mixed results. To deconstruct just these two sentences:

"Syria, and Yemen, and Gaza, each in their own way, are terminal signs that our system of global governance is truly broken." (Syria exposes the broken state of global governance. How do we respond? 16/4/18)

Why Gaza, and not Palestine?

"No party to these bruising conflicts can say with a straight face that they are acting in good faith, or with any regard to the 'international rules-based order' in which post-second world war generations have placed their trust."

To focus here just on Gaza/Palestine, by 'party to the conflict,' does Ludlam mean that neither Israel nor the Palestinians are 'acting in good faith,' or adhering to international law? If so, this statement of equivalence between the two suggests that he has no idea of the underlying settler-colonial nature of the problem. In 2018!

1 comment:

Grappler said...

The shifty hypocrisy of our leaders. There was a great commenter on Mondoweiss a few years ago who, unfortunately, has disappeared, but his posts are still in the archive there, I believe. His pseudonym was "hostage". His posts, measured and scholarly, were those of someone who really understood the legalities of the I/P situation, quoting the relevant legislation and history.