Israel: The Kingdom of Lies

Racism is common to most and probably all societies. Laws never seem entirely to eliminate it. It was the essential tool in the creation of modern settler states. The United States could not have come into existence without the obliteration of North American Indian cultures and of large numbers of the people themselves. They had to die so the US could be born. In Australia the indigenous people of Tasmania were wiped out to the last man, woman and child, while on the mainland the tribes were massacred, confined, stripped of their ancestral land and eventually turned into fringe dwellers. Until recently Australia had a prime minister who could deny that aboriginal children of mixed ‘blood’ were taken from their parents up to the 1930s and refused to issue any expression of remorse for their mistreatment. More recent targets of racism have been Lebanese and Vietnamese immigrants, while the Howard federal government’s racist treatment of Iraqi and Afghan refugees and asylum seekers remains one of the most shameful chapters of Australia’s history.

Read more...