Hormuz Dateline
What Iran Actually Understands
Iran does not need to win a naval war in the classical sense. It only needs to make transit uncertain, costly, and politically radioactive. Mines, drones, missiles, fast boats, electronic piracy, and the psychology of fear are enough to turn a chokepoint into a garotte. That is the essence of asymmetry: a state under pressure parlays geography into power. Tehran does not need to dominate the sea. It needs only to make everyone else remember that the sea is not theirs.
The US-Israeli axis has long acted as if the region were a board and its opponents pieces. Hormuz shreds that assumption with the patience of geography.
Australia has a particular stake in this arithmetic that the Albanese government would prefer its citizens not examine too carefully. Australia sends approximately 80 percent of its LNG exports through or near the Gulf corridor. When Hormuz is threatened, Woodside’s share price moves. The war that Albanese insists Australia is not involved in is directly affecting the income of Australian energy companies and, through them, the superannuation balances of ordinary Australians. Pine Gap processes targeting data for the strikes. Australian-made F-35 components are in the payload. And Hormuz is where the bill arrives.
14 April 2026 David Tyler AIM Extra, https://theaimn.net/hormuz-dateline/
The war now has the smell of salt, oil, and old empires trying to defy the tide.
Thirty-three kilometres. That is the width of the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest navigable point: two shipping lanes, each two miles wide, one in, one out, with a median strip of Iranian territorial water between them. Through those lanes passes approximately 21 million barrels of oil every single day. That is one barrel in every five consumed anywhere on earth. Add the liquefied natural gas, and you have roughly 20 percent of all the LNG traded on global markets squeezing through a corridor you could drive across in less than half an hour. A fifth of the world’s energy supply running through a gap that geography, not American naval doctrine, placed there.This is not a side theatre. This is the throat of the world economy, and in this war it has become the place where the old American order goes from swagger to strain. What was once sold as a system of irresistible reach; US power, Gulf oil, the dollar, the naval umbrella, the client-state arrangement, now looks clapped-out, ruinously costly, and exposed as it is caught, hoist by its own petard, dependent on a choke point that cannot be bullied out of geography.
No aircraft carrier in the world can widen the Strait of Hormuz by a single metre.
The Arithmetic of Vulnerability
The numbers matter because official language exists precisely to hide that fact.
When the Iran-Iraq war threatened these waters in the 1980s, oil prices doubled within months. When Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping began in late 2023, global shipping insurance rates for Gulf-adjacent routes increased by up to 600 percent within weeks. Lloyd’s of London has now quietly tripled war risk premiums for vessels transiting the Gulf. That is not a diplomatic assessment or a Pentagon briefing. That is the financial system’s hard-nosed verdict on what is actually happening, stripped of all the official language about deterrence and security and the rules-based order.
While Trump posts to Truth Social about erasing civilisations and US admirals post to Facebook about historic firsts, the insurance market is pricing the reality that the propaganda is designed to conceal.
Australia has a particular stake in this arithmetic that the Albanese government would prefer its citizens not examine too carefully. Australia sends approximately 80 percent of its LNG exports through or near the Gulf corridor. When Hormuz is threatened, Woodside’s share price moves. The war that Albanese insists Australia is not involved in is directly affecting the income of Australian energy companies and, through them, the superannuation balances of ordinary Australians. Pine Gap processes targeting data for the strikes. Australian-made F-35 components are in the payload. And Hormuz is where the bill arrives.
What Iran Actually Understands
Iran does not need to win a naval war in the classical sense. It only needs to make transit uncertain, costly, and politically radioactive. Mines, drones, missiles, fast boats, electronic piracy, and the psychology of fear are enough to turn a chokepoint into a garotte. That is the essence of asymmetry: a state under pressure parlays geography into power. Tehran does not need to dominate the sea. It needs only to make everyone else remember that the sea is not theirs.
This is a strategic fact Washington cannot deny. Or lie about. The US-Israeli axis has long acted as if the region were a board and its opponents pieces. Hormuz shreds that assumption with the patience of geography. Israel can strike, assassinate, bomb, and escalate, but it cannot turn the Gulf into a risk-free zone. The US can threaten, sanction, and deploy, but it cannot guarantee the one thing the market demands most: confidence. That is the precise point at which imperial force runs into imperial limits. Empires can break things. Claim to rule the world. But it’s not so easy to rebuild trust once the world has called your bluff.
The ruling classes of all three powers; American, Israeli, Iranian are happy to gamble with systems they do not themselves live inside. They talk deterrence but they mean coercion. They may say security but they mean control. They may invoke peace but they build the conditions for the next war. It is the coastal fishermen, the dockworkers, “sea-gulls”, the tanker crews, and the families living with the knowledge that a misfire, a mine, or a drone can change the day in an instant who live inside the system these men are gambling with. That distinction matters. It is, in fact, the only distinction that matters.
The Petrodollar’s Exposed Seam
The petrodollar order was always more fragile than its keepers cared to admit. It rests on a Faustian bargain: Gulf oil will flow, the US will police the sea lanes, the dollar will stay as the world’s reserve currency, and regional rulers will play along so long as the deal suited them. Hormuz is where that bargain begins to fray.
The petrodollar system requires that oil be priced and settled in US dollars. That settlement runs through SWIFT, the global payments network, from which Iran has been excluded as an act of economic warfare. That exclusion has produced a direct, rational, and accelerating response: China, Russia, India, and an expanding coalition of the economically non-aligned are developing alternative settlement systems specifically designed to route around the dollar’s dominance.
This is not ideological posturing. It is financial self-defence against a system that has been openly weaponised. Hormuz is where that process becomes visible to everyone simultaneously.
The dollar’s centrality has depended on the belief that US power could secure the energy arteries while underwriting the financial order that prices global risk. But every threat to Hormuz chips at that belief. Every disruption reminds the world that this system is not floating on neutrality. It is anchored in force. And once force has to be constantly displayed, the myth of effortless supremacy begins to crack along every seam.
This is also why Hormuz looks, feels and even sounds like the end of an era. Not a stagey, Hollywood end of empire, but something slower and more repugnant: the fish rotting from the head, the end of imperial pretension publicly betrayed by the geography it claimed to master. The old style assumed that military reach could substitute for political legitimacy, that sanctions could replace diplomacy, that client regimes could be managed indefinitely, and that publics could be disciplined through spectacle and fear. Hormuz answers all of that with one simple fact: you can command the skies and the seas and still be strategically cornered. You can own the ocean narrative and still depend on a narrow strait you do not fully control.
The Scene Itself
Picture the actual scene, because power loves to use abstraction uses to hide from accountability.
Tankers move slow and dark under a white-hot sky. Naval escorts shadow them like anxious bodyguards. Insurance underwriters in distant offices recalculate exposure in real time. Traders watching screens flicker red. Refineries in South Korea, Japan, and India scramble to secure alternative supply. And in the waters themselves, and on the shores, and in the cities behind those shores, the people who have no choice but to live in the world that distant men are gambling with.That is Hormuz. Not a metaphor first, but a machine for making the abstract painfully concrete. It is thirty-three kilometres of water through which the pretensions of three nuclear-adjacent powers, and the complicities of a dozen client states including our own, are being tested against the oldest and most indifferent judge available: physical reality.
The old imperial language can still speak loudly, but it cannot hide the fact that the world runs through exposed conduits. It can still threaten, but it cannot guarantee outcome. It can still destroy, but it cannot stabilise what it has broken. That is the end-of-era feeling: not the end of power, but the end of the illusion that power can be made clean, automatic, and permanent.
The Narrowness of the Waterway, the Narrowness of Official Thinking
Hormuz is where the lie breaks down. It is where the empire finds the edge of its own reach. It is where the petrodollar shows its dependence, where military supremacy meets strategic vulnerability, and where thirty-three kilometres of salt water becomes a lesson in the catastrophic narrowness of the thinking that brought three powers to this point.
The old order still speaks in the voice of inevitability. Hormuz answers with a counter-argument that has been making the same point since the first trading dhow passed through it: no empire, no doctrine, no naval task force gets to abolish geography.
The market knows it. The insurance actuaries know it. The tanker captains threading those two-mile lanes know it. The fishermen on the Iranian shore know it.
The men ordering the strikes are the last to learn it. They always are.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
Not reporting a war: How Australia’s media launders a crime (Part 1)
11 April 2026 David Tyler, https://theaimn.net/not-reporting-a-war-how-australias-media-launders-a-crime-part-1/
The Crime and the Cover-Up
How can you spot failure in your press gallery? Simple. You know your news media has failed when your government sends special forces to a war it denies waging. When Pine Gap feeds targeting coordinates to bombers killing schoolchildren. And when 170 girls aged seven to twelve are obliterated at their desks in Minab, yet your small target PM takes to the ABC to parrot the belligerents’ justifications without challenge. Australia’s mainstream press hasn’t just failed this test for six weeks. It has “Ajax-ed” the crime, scrubbing far more than just blood from the ledger of history.
The language is the first giveaway. The ABC, our public broadcaster, describes the Minab massacre as “more than 100 children dead in a strike on an Iranian girls’ school.” Not murdered. Not by our allies. Just dead, as if they expired of natural causes. As if no one pulled the trigger. As if the laws of physics and morality somehow suspended themselves over Minab.
The Sydney Morning Herald goes further, calling it “a military error” that “cast a shadow on the US operation.” A shadow. As though the deaths of 170 children are a minor inconvenience, a smudge on the ledger of war, a footnote to the main event. Military error is almost a misdemeanour.
The 13th-century Persian poet Saadi wrote, “The children of Adam are limbs of one body, each created from the same essence.” But in Minab, 170 of those limbs; girls aged seven to twelve – were not rendered invisible. They were erased.
One moment, they were reciting lessons, laughing, passing notes. The next, a Tomahawk missile turned their classroom into a slaughterhouse, their desks into splinters, their futures into ash. There was no warning. No evacuation. No chance. Just the sudden, unbidden destruction of innocence, reduced in our media to a passive clause: “more than 100 children dead in a strike.”
Saadi’s poetry speaks of unity. This war speaks of annihilation. And our press, in its careful language, speaks of nothing at all. But behind the conspiracy of silence is the both-sides fallacy and behind that is the propaganda cartoon of the evil regime: the theocratic bastards had it coming to them anyway.
The Man Who Made the Monster
Why does our media fail? The answer, in no small part, is a 95-year-old former Toorak toff, who long ago traded his Australian passport for American power. Rupert inherited not just his father Keith’s media holdings, but also his knack for blending journalism with political power.
“Rupert Murdoch spent the next half-century seeing what happens when one man controls enough newspapers, TV networks, and politicians’ private lines to bend a ruling class or two to his will.
Rupert Murdoch didn’t just endorse the Iran debacle. He lobbied for it. According to Bloomberg, Murdoch, alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, privately urged Donald Trump to attack Iran. This wasn’t Murdoch the commentator. This was Murdoch the puppet master, working a president he helped install, pushing for a war his outlets would then cover with the considered neutrality of a cheerleader at a blood sport.
When the bombs fell, his empire’s headlines told the story: “DEATH TO THE DEVIL” (on the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei), “DON GETS LAST LAUGH” (after the US sank an Iranian warship), and, most chillingly, “NO MERCY.”It is the vocabulary of a tabloid covering a football match, not a free press covering a war. But then, Murdoch’s papers have form. It was his British tabloid, The Sun, that screamed ‘GOTCHA!’ on its front page after the General Belgrano was torpedoed in 1982, killing 323 Argentine conscripts, most of them young men who had no more chosen that war than the children of Minab chose this one. Different masthead, different hemisphere. Same owner. Same instinct. Forty-three years and nothing learned.
In Australia, Murdoch’s outlets aren’t just reporting the war, they’re gaslighting the public. As petrol prices surge by 40 percent; a direct cost of the Hormuz closure, a direct consequence of the war they cheered on, his tabloids don’t blame the bombs or the blockades. They blame Chris Bowen. The energy minister. The man holding the hose at the bowser. Never mind that the pump’s price is set by a war Murdoch’s papers demanded, a war his editors framed as necessary, a war his headlines sold as righteous. The distraction isn’t a side effect. It’s the strategy. The war isn’t just a story for Murdoch’s media. It’s a business model. The chaos, the fear, the soaring prices – they’re not bugs in the system.
They are the system.
As the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz observed, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” In Murdoch’s hands, it is also the maximising of profit by other means.
The Language of the Bloodless War
There is a craft to how Western media reports war, and it is the craft of the anaesthetist. The goal isn’t to inform. It’s to numb.
The vocabulary is so ingrained that journalists reach for it unthinkingly: strikes, not bombings; targets, not schools; assets destroyed, not people killed; collateral damage, not dead children. The military issues a statement. Coalition forces conduct operations. The situation remains fluid. A facility is neutralised. By the time a reader deciphers “a strike on a facility in the vicinity of a girls’ primary school in Minab, Hormozgan Province, in which a number of civilian casualties were reported,”they have been successfully shielded from the truth: that an American Tomahawk missile or two turned a classroom into a charnel house.
This isn’t accidental. It’s systemic. During the Vietnam War, the US military briefed journalists daily at what correspondents came to call the Five O’Clock Follies, where body counts and “pacified hamlets” sanitised industrial-scale slaughter. It worked until photographers like Nick Ut showed the world what the war actually looked like: a nine-year-old girl, Phan Thị Kim Phúc, running naked down a road, her back on fire with napalm. That single image did more to turn public opinion than a decade of Pentagon briefings. It worked because it refused the system. It showed the thing itself.
There is no equivalent image from Minab in the Australian mainstream press. There are only statistics, spokespeople, and “reports of” and “alleged incidents.” The AI-generated battle graphics on the nightly news are clean and precise, little animated arrows on digital maps, ordnance arcing in parabolas toward rendered targets. It looks just like a video game because the people who design these graphics have learned from video games: abstraction is comfort, and comfort keeps people watching in between lashings of shock and awe.
When US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed to show “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” a law professor and editor at Just Security told Axios this would constitute a war crime under the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual. The Australian press reported Hegseth’s words. The legal assessment received considerably less coverage. The headline wrote itself. The follow-up did not.
The Questions Not Being Asked
The silences in Australian newsrooms are deafening.
Why, when 61 percent of Australians want no part in this war, is the Albanese government’s posture of covert co-belligerence treated as a footnote? When the Herald Sun reported that around 90 SAS members were deployed to Al Minhad Air Base in the UAE in mid-March, Communications Minister Anika Wells did not rule it out on ABC News Breakfast.
Defence Minister Richard Marles declined to answer directly, assuring listeners only that there were “no boots on the ground in Iran.” A geographic technicality. Moral abdication. Our soldiers aren’t in Iran. They’re in the UAE, feeding data to bombers. The distinction is meant to absolve us. It does not.
Then there’s Pine Gap. Richard Tanter, who has spent more years studying Australia’s joint intelligence facility at Alice Springs than most defence ministers have spent reading their briefings, confirms what Canberra will not: Pine Gap isn’t just listening. It’s providing real-time intelligence for US strikes. Offensive, not defensive. Its 45 radomes and Advanced Orion satellites give Washington total surveillance coverage of Iran. As veteran activist, physician, author, and anti-nuclear advocate Dr Helen Caldicott, warns,
Pine Gap is the “nidus point” for nuclear war fighting. We’re not bystanders. We’re accessories.
And the press? Mostly silent. While Australians pay 40 percent more at the pump, Murdoch’s outlets blame the energy minister, not the war his papers demanded. The distraction is the strategy.
Roman historian Tacitus noted, “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” In this case, the more complicit the media, the more euphemistic the language.
Who Profits?
Wars are rarely fought for the reasons stated. The stated reasons here are the prevention of Iranian nuclear ambitions, the destabilisation of Iran’s regional proxies, and the protection of the “rules-based order”; an order whose rules, ironically, prohibit the very aggression used to “protect” it. The real reasons are worth examining.
On Wall Street, defence firms including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX see their shares jump by four to six percent on the first day of strikes. The three firms’ combined shareholder gain on that single day is 25 to 30 billion US dollars. In Israel, Elbit Systems briefly became the country’s most valuable listed company, its shares up 45 percent since January. Thirty billion dollars of shareholder value was created in one day, before a single declared objective had been achieved, before a single piece of Iranian military infrastructure was confirmed destroyed. The money did not wait for the outcome. It knew the outcome was irrelevant. The outcome was the war itself.
Non-Gulf energy producers everywhere; US LNG exporters, Norwegian oil fields, Australian gas giants, suddenly found themselves in a seller’s market. Every molecule of energy that did not have to travel through Hormuz became more valuable overnight. American LNG terminals ran at full capacity, shipping cargoes as fast as physically possible. LNG margins doubled. Brent crude surged past 120 dollars a barrel.
In Australia, shares in Woodside Energy and Santos posted record quarters as the war in Iran tightened global fuel supplies. Westpac expects a multi-billion-dollar windfall for the country over the next five years. When the Greens proposed a windfall tax on LNG profiteers, Shell and Chevron howled, calling it a “knee-jerk sugar hit” and “the exact opposite of what Australia needed.” The audacity is staggering, but it is entirely consistent: the companies that profit from wars always find a language for why the profits are deserved and the costs are someone else’s problem.
There is also a political dividend. Before the strikes began, the fallout from the Epstein files was reverberating globally, piling scrutiny on powerful figures with connections to the White House. On the first day of Operation Epic Fury, the Epstein files vanished from the front pages of every Murdoch outlet. They have not returned. The war is the story. Other stories are not the story.
The Persian poet Rumi wrote, “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” Yet amidst the cacophony of this distraction, the ocean of public concern is reduced to drops of outrage, carefully directed, carefully contained.
The Press That Is Actually Doing Its Job
While the mainstream looks away, the independent and student press are holding the line.
Honi Soit, the University of Sydney’s student paper, called out the ABC’s use of “dead” instead of “killed”, language that absolves responsibility, that marks human life as disposable. Michael West Media exposed how Murdoch’s outlets scapegoat Chris Bowen for fuel prices while ignoring the war’s role. Declassified Australia did the forensic work on Pine Gap that the national press refused to undertake. These outlets aren’t fringe. They’re what journalism looks like when it isn’t carrying out other functions.
Clinton Fernandes at UNSW has been unequivocal about Australian complicity through Pine Gap, a truth the Albanese government would rather not discuss. Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft has produced the sharpest analysis of the diplomatic failures that led here. Antony Loewenstein’s body of work, documenting Australia’s integration into US and Israeli military operations, was available to every editor in Sydney and Melbourne before the first Tomahawk was launched. They chose not to assign the follow-up. The sources were never the problem.
What This Means (Part 1)
Australia is not a bystander to this war. We are a silent co-belligerent, hosting the intelligence infrastructure, providing the targeting capability, deploying special forces, accepting the fuel price as the cost of alliance, and generating a multi-billion-dollar windfall for corporations that have always owned more of this country’s politics than its voters.
Our press could report this. Instead, it hands the government a language system in which none of this is happening, or if it is, it’s not our fault, or if it is our fault, it’s Iran’s fault for being destabilising, or if it’s not Iran’s fault, it’s Chris Bowen’s fault for the price at the pump. The system is seamless. It has an answer for everything except the question it cannot answer: What happened to 170 girls in Minab? Who killed them? And what are we going to do about the fact that our satellite dishes helped guide the missile?
A democracy that cannot report its own wars is not a democracy. It is a client state, managing its own consent, with a Melbourne-born mogul in New York making the calls, a former prime minister in Sydney pushing for boots on the ground, and a current prime minister on the ABC, reading someone else’s script in his own voice.
Part 2 will expose the mechanics of Pine Gap’s role, the corporate lobbyists writing AUKUS’s blank cheques, and the journalists fighting to drag the truth into the light before the next strike.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
At last, a hint of backbone in Australia’s foreign policy
9 April 2026 Michael Taylor, https://theaimn.net/at-last-a-hint-of-backbone-in-australias-foreign-policy/
For months, many of us have watched in frustration as our government responded to Gaza with caution, equivocation, and a reluctance to break from the familiar script of deference to powerful allies. It has felt, at times, like moral clarity was being carefully managed rather than clearly expressed.
Which is precisely why Anthony Albanese’s sudden intervention on Lebanon lands with such force.
By urging that Lebanon be included in any Middle East ceasefire, the Prime Minister has done something rare in modern Australian foreign policy: he has stepped, however briefly, out of line. Not dramatically. Not defiantly. But unmistakably.
This is not just a policy position – it is a signal.
A signal that Australia may be willing to acknowledge what much of the world can already see: that this is not a series of neatly contained conflicts, but a widening humanitarian crisis stretching from the ruins of Gaza Strip to the streets of Beirut. A signal that civilian suffering is not selective, and that our concern for it should not be either.
And yet, it is impossible to ignore the contrast.
Because while this newfound clarity extends to Lebanon, the same certainty has too often been absent when it comes to Gaza. The language has been softer, the urgency more muted, the moral line less clearly drawn. For many Australians, that inconsistency has not gone unnoticed – or unchallenged.
And perhaps most striking of all, it is a signal that the Prime Minister has finally “read the room.”
Because the room has changed. Public patience has thinned. Across Australia – including among Labor’s own supporters – there has been a growing unease with the language of balance when the images on people’s screens tell a far more unbalanced story. People are not asking for perfection, nor for reckless gestures. But they are asking for something that feels increasingly rare in public life: honesty, consistency, and the courage to apply our values evenly.
In that context, this moment feels different.
It feels like a government, or at least a Prime Minister, beginning to find his footing – beginning to speak not just as an ally, but as a representative of a public that expects more than quiet alignment and careful phrasing.
Whether this is the start of something more substantial, or merely a brief departure from the script, remains to be seen. Governments have a way of snapping back into old habits. The gravitational pull of alliance politics is strong, and Australia has rarely resisted it for long.
But for now, credit where it is due.
In choosing to speak up for Lebanon – and in doing so, gently but clearly diverging from the positions of allies such as the United States under Donald Trump – Anthony Albanese has shown a flicker of something Australians have been waiting to see.
Not a break with our allies. Not a dramatic realignment.
Just something quieter – and, perhaps, more important.
A willingness to stand, at least for a moment, on our own two feet.
Ignoring genocide. The bill for Australia’s silence has arrived
by Andrew Brown | Apr 7, 2026 , https://michaelwest.com.au/ignoring-genocide-the-bill-for-australias-silence-has-arrived/
There is a bitter truth that must be spoken before we can talk honestly about what is happening to us now. Andrew Brown on Australia’s quiet complicity in the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran, fourth in a series.
When the bombs fell on Gaza, Australia was quiet.
When the hospitals were destroyed, when the aid was blocked, when children were pulled from rubble in pieces, when the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and humanitarian organisations with decades of credibility in conflict zones used words like genocide, ethnic cleansing and collective punishment, Australia was quiet.
Not uniformly. Not entirely. There were protests in every major city, sustained over months, of a size and seriousness this country has not seen since the Iraq War.
There were independent senators who stood in Parliament and said what needed to be said, in plain language, without diplomatic hedging. There were journalists, academics, former diplomats, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians who signed petitions, marched in the streets, and wrote letters that went largely unanswered.
Palestinian-Australian, Muslim-Australian, Arab-Australian communities, and many others with no personal connection to the conflict beyond a functioning conscience, screamed into a political void and were told, in effect, to calm down.
Or apprehended for wearing a t-shirt.
The country, as a political entity, its government, its major institutions, its official voice to the world, was quiet.
The cost of silence
That silence had a cost. Not just a moral cost, though the moral cost is staggering and will take generations to fully reckon with. A strategic cost. The cost of allowing a logic of unchecked military impunity to establish itself as the operating principle of the US-Israeli alliance. A logic that, once normalised in Gaza, did not stay in Gaza.
It never does.
Over 72,000 people killed so far. Over 171,000 injured. An entire civilian population, in one of the most densely populated places on earth, was systematically starved, displaced, and destroyed.
Journalists were killed in numbers that constitute, by any honest accounting, a deliberate campaign to eliminate witnesses. Paramedics were bombed. UN peacekeepers were struck. Aid workers from Australia’s own partner organisations were killed in strikes so precise they could not have been accidental.
Australia expressed concern.
“Calibrated, diplomatically worded, operationally meaningless concern.”
And then, when the same alliance, emboldened by eighteen months of zero meaningful consequence, turned its weapons on a sovereign nation-state, on Iran, on February 28 of this year, Australia expressed support. Called it constructive. Offered the American justification back to its own people as sovereign Australian policy.
Warnings ignored
The people warning loudest about Gaza were not merely warning about Palestinians. They were warning about a system. A system in which American military power and Israeli strategic ambition, freed from the constraints of international law and serious allied pushback, would expand. Would find new targets. Would come, eventually, for the stability of every country caught in its orbit.
“They were right. And they were called antisemitic for saying so.“
Iran did not come from nowhere. The assault on Iran is the direct and logical extension of the impunity normalised in Gaza. If you can destroy a civilian population with no meaningful consequence, you can bomb a sovereign nation.
If the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu means nothing, then international law means nothing. And if international law means nothing, then the only operating principle is force. And the consequences of force are distributed not just to the combatants but to every country whose government chose alignment over principle.
Australia chose alignment over the people of Gaza. It chose it again over Iran. And now it is discovering, at the bowser and the checkout and the business bank account, exactly what that choice costs.
The war came home
Here is what makes this moment different from every protest march and every unanswered letter that came before.
The pain is no longer abstract.
When Gaza burned, the average Australian, cocooned by geographic distance, insulated by a media that kept the most confronting images off prime time, reassured by politicians who described it as heartbreaking while doing nothing, could maintain the fiction that this was someone else’s tragedy.
Terrible, certainly. Distant. Manageable. Something that happened over there, to people over there, in a conflict that had been going on forever and would presumably continue
“without any particular bearing on the school fees or the mortgage or the quarterly business figures.”
That fiction is now dead.
The fuel price spike is not over there. The supply chain disruption is not over there. The investment uncertainty showing up in superannuation statements, in business loans that just got harder to service, in the job that exists today and may not exist in three months. None of that is over there.
business loans that just got harder to service, in the job that exists today and may not exist in three months. None of that is over there.
The war came home. Not in body bags. Not in the specific grief of a military family. It came home in the way that imperial adventurism always eventually comes home to the countries that enable it. Through the economy. Through the slow, grinding, distributed punishment of a population that was never consulted, never warned, and never honestly told what their government’s choices would cost them.
Australia’s complicity
Australia was a participant in Gaza’s destruction. Not with weapons. Not with soldiers. With silence. With diplomatic cover. With the specific, material legitimacy that flows from a liberal democracy declining to formally object. And with the arms adjacent, intelligence and security cooperation that flows through Five Eyes and has never been seriously interrogated in the Australian public domain.
When you have the power to intervene, to sanction, to condemn, to withdraw diplomatic cover, and you choose not to, you are not a bystander. You are a participant. And participants, eventually, share in the consequences.
The Palestinian people could not make Australia listen with their suffering alone.
Not because Australians are cruel. They are not. But because the suffering was made distant. The media made it complex. The politicians made it delicate. The lobby groups made it professionally dangerous to say in plain language what was plainly happening.
“The whole architecture of managed consent did its job with brutal efficiency for eighteen months.”
But a forty percent fuel price increase cuts through managed consent, as does a wave of small business closures. And young Australians told to absorb the economic consequences of a war their government endorsed without their knowledge or consent. That cuts through everything.
The people who protested Gaza, who were dismissed and belittled and accused of antisemitism and told they were being naive about geopolitical complexity, understood something that the political class is only now beginning to grasp: That the world does not offer permanent non-involvement. That the wars you enable reach you. That the impunity you excuse comes back denominated in currencies you understand personally.
Fuel. Food. Jobs. Mortgages. Businesses. Futures.
This is that reckoning. The genocide in Gaza did not wake Australia up, the bill for enabling it will.And when Australia wakes, fully, clearly, with the focused fury of people who now understand exactly what was done to them, the politicians who called it constructive and the media that told them to blame the Energy Minister are going to find that managed consent has a shelf life.
That shelf life has expired.
“Genocide Grants.” Government awards millions to F-35 suppliers
by Stephanie Tran | Apr 8, 2026 , https://michaelwest.com.au/genocide-grants-government-awards-millions-to-f-35-suppliers/
The Federal Government has awarded $78 million in grants to Australian companies that make parts for F-35 fighter jets used by the IDF in the Gaza genocide. Stephanie Tran investigates.
An investigation by MWM has found the federal government has awarded more than $78m in taxpayer-funded grants to Australian companies participating in the global F-35 fighter jet program, with the majority of these grants awarded during Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The same parts are now likely deployed in the US and Israeli illegal bombing campaign in Iran.
Analysis of government grant records shows that since 2011, at least $78m has been distributed to companies to support their involvement in the multinational Joint Strike Fighter program.
Of that total, $48.5m has been awarded since October 7, 2023.
The funding forms part of a suite of industry support programs designed to help Australian companies secure work on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program, a US-led global supply chain for the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II fighter jet.
The F-35 has been widely deployed by Israel in its genocide in Gaza, and assaults on Lebanon, Iran and elsewhere.
The analysis reveals that a relatively small number of firms have received a significant share of the funding, with grants targeted at expanding Australia’s role in the maintenance and sustainment of the F-35 fleet.
The largest recipient was Rosebank Engineering (formerly RUAG Australia), which received $30.2m across multiple grants. This included $16.3m awarded in April 2025 to establish an Asia-Pacific depot to repair F-35 power and thermal management systems, and a further $9.1m to develop a regional repair capability for landing gear.
Rosebank Engineering “provides over 150 components for the Landing Gear and Weapons Bay Systems” on the F-35 fighter jet.
The second-largest recipient was Northrop Grumman Australia, which received $13.4m in June 2024 to support the activation of a depot for the maintenance and overhaul of F-35 components for the Asia-Pacific region, with potential to service European assignments.
Other major recipients include Moog Australia, Quickstep Technologies and Ferra Engineering, alongside a network of specialist manufacturers.
In total, more than 75 Australian companies are now involved in the F-35 program, collectively securing contracts worth more than $5 billion.
The full list of grants can be accessed in the document below. [on original]
How the grant programs work
The grants have been delivered through three key programs administered by the Department of Defence.
The Joint Strike Fighter Industry Support Program Sustainment Grants, which remains open until June 2028, provides funding to companies seeking to expand their role in maintaining and servicing F-35 aircraft.
To be eligible for a grant, companies must have a contract with the United States Government for “maintenance and repair activities for existing components used in the Joint Strike Fighter Program”.
Applicants are required to produce a congressional letter from the US Department of Defense confirming their F-35 part number assignment and/or repair technology group as part of their application.
Initially launched with $4m in funding in 2020, the program was expanded to $60m in 2021 and extended to 2028. To date, $49.5m in JSF Sustainment Grants have been awarded.
A second stream, the Joint Strike Fighter Industry Support Program Production and Modernisation Grants, operated between December 2021 and August 2024, providing $4m to help companies “develop new or improved capabilities to win work in the production and modernisation phases of the Joint Strike Fighter Program”.
An earlier initiative, the New Air Combat Capability Industry Support Program, ran from 2010 to June 2021 and distributed $21.9m to help Australian firms integrate into the F-35 supply chain under Defence’s AIR6000 project.
According to the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO), the project aimed to ensure Australia’s air combat capability remained “lethal, survivable, deployable and available throughout its Life of Type”.
Greens Defence and Foreign Affairs Spokesperson, David Shoebridge, said the grants demonstrated misplaced government priorities.
“When you see tens of millions of dollars in Australian public grants given, not to community groups or social programs but to global weapons manufacturers like Northrop Grumman, you see the priorities of Labor and the other war parties,”
“They always have money for weapons and war.”
“The F35 fighter jet is a major weapon in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its illegal war in Iran and its illegal occupation in Southern Lebanon. It’s obscene that it’s being propped up by public gifts from the Australian government.”
Grants crucial to Australia’s F-35 program role
The ANAO has attributed the success of Australian firms in securing F-35 contracts to these government grants.
“Allocating financial resources and implementing the grant programs … enabled Australian industry to bid for and win work,” the ANAO found in its latest report on major defence projects.
“Without the establishment of an industry support program, Australian industry may not have been competitive enough to win contracts.”
According to the ANAO report, Australia has spent $12.6B on the F-35 program, with most expenditure flowing to contracts with the US government.
Australian companies have secured more than $5B in contracts linked to the F-35 program, with more than 75 firms involved in manufacturing components or providing sustainment services.
Because the F-35 program operates as a globalised supply chain, components manufactured or serviced in Australia are incorporated across the entire fleet.
This means parts produced locally are used in aircraft operated by multiple countries, including Israel.
Hiding it
In late 2023, the Department of Defence quietly removed details of Australian suppliers in the F-35 program from its website including a 2018 report published by the Department
Last year, an investigation by Declassified Australia revealed that F-35 components produced in Australia had been shipped directly to Israel on commercial passenger flights, despite repeated government assertions that Australia was not supplying weapons to Israel.
In a follow-up investigation, the outlet reported that many of the parts stored in Australia for the country’s own F-35 fleet are in fact owned and controlled by the United States, with logistics managed by the program’s prime contractor, Lockheed Martin.
This arrangement means Australia does not ultimately control how those parts are allocated. The US can direct that components held in Australia be reassigned and shipped overseas, even where those parts are needed for Australia’s own defence capability.
Violation of international law
A UN report has described the F-35 program as “key” to Israel’s military operations in Gaza, with the aircraft
“heavily used in the genocidal destruction of Gaza.”
The report warned that states supplying components may be engaged in indirect transfers of weapons used in violations of international law.
Shoebridge said the grants reinforced the need for Australia to impose a total arms embargo on Israel, “Given what we know about the crimes committed by the IDF using the F-35, it’s hard to see these as anything other than genocide grants,” he said.
“This data gives fresh impetus to our calls, supported by millions of Australians, to put a total arms embargo on Israel, which includes all weapons and weapons parts.”
MWM sent questions to the Department of Defence, Richard Marles (Minister for Defence) and Pat Conroy (Minister for Defence Industry) regarding whether it was appropriate to continue the F-35 grant program in light of the genocide and the due diligence the government has taken to ensure that the program is in compliance with international law.
We received no response.
Stephanie Tran
Stephanie is a journalist with a background in both law and journalism. She has worked at The Guardian and as a paralegal, where she assisted Crikey’s defence team in the high-profile defamation case brought by Lachlan Murdoch. Her reporting has been recognised nationally, earning her the 2021 Democracy’s Watchdogs Award for Student Investigative Reporting and a nomination for the 2021 Walkley Student Journalist of the Year Award.
Name it, blame it, shame it. Israel and Trump must be stopped
by Andrew Brown | Apr 8, 2026, https://michaelwest.com.au/name-it-blame-it-shame-it-israel-and-trump-must-be-stopped/
TACO or not, ceasefire or not, the repercussions from the Iran war will be with us for a long time, and Australians who are done being managed need to resist. Final article on Australia’s complicity in the war on Iran by Andrew Brown.
This is where we stop being polite, because being polite has not worked.
Polite got us a Prime Minister who calls an illegal war of aggression constructive. Polite got us a media landscape that blames the Energy Minister for a conflict that blocked the Strait of Hormuz. Polite got us a political class so thoroughly captured by Washington and Tel Aviv that it cannot find the most basic, elementary words to say that what is happening is wrong, that it is costing us, and that we did not consent to it.
Four articles into this series, we have laid out the case in full. The economic cost. Forty per cent fuel price increases, supply chain disruption, business collapse, and job losses are arriving now and worsening in the months ahead.
The men responsible. A criminal defendant in Tel Aviv prolonging a war that keeps him out of prison, a convicted felon in Washington trailing the shadow of the most significant blackmail network in modern political history, and an Australian Prime Minister who looked at both of them and said: constructive.
The media running cover. Murdoch’s empire pointing your anger at Chris Bowen while the actual cause of your pain, an illegal war fought by Israel and America, goes unnamed in the pages of papers that exist to protect the order, not interrogate it.
And the silence that enabled all of it. Eighteen months of Australia watching a genocide in Gaza, saying nothing of substance, and discovering now that the impunity it excused did not stay in Gaza.
First: Name it.
The US-Israeli war on Iran is illegal. That is not an opinion. It is the assessment of international legal scholars, former UN officials, and the framework of the United Nations Charter that Australia itself helped draft and has repeatedly invoked as foundational to its foreign policy.
There was no Security Council authorisation. There was no act of self-defence as defined under Article 51. There was no imminent attack. There was a decision, made in Washington and Jerusalem, communicated to allies as a fact rather than a request, to bomb a sovereign nation-state because they had the weapons to do it and had calculated that the international community, as currently constituted, lacked both the will and the mechanism to stop them.
That calculation was correct. And it was correct in part because governments like Australia’s, governments that routinely invoke the rules-based order, that send representatives to UN proceedings, that sign international legal instruments with great ceremony, have made it correct through years of unconditional deference that have taught the architects of this war that there are no real consequences.
Name the war for what it is. Say it plainly, in public, without diplomatic hedging. Illegal. Unjustified. Conducted in violation of the international legal framework that Australia claims as a cornerstone of its foreign policy. Say it to your MP. Say it at your workplace. Say it in the letters you write to newspapers that have not said it themselves. The first act of any movement worth the name is
“the refusal to accept the sanitised language of the people responsible for the thing being named.”
Second: Blame it
The blame in this matter is not complex. It is specific, traceable, and attributable to specific decisions made by specific people with names, titles and addresses.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, criminal defendant on charges of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust, subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, made the political decisions that drove Israel’s regional escalation. His personal legal and political incentives to prolong conflict, to prevent the ceasefire that might accelerate his criminal reckoning, are documented and discussed openly within Israeli civil society.
The suggestion that those incentives have had no bearing on the character or duration of this war is not a serious position.
Already, ceasefire just struck between the US and Iran, Israel’s PM has refused to abide by it, maintaining hostilities in Lebanon.
Donald Trump, President of the United States, convicted felon, a man whose documented relationship with Jeffrey Epstein’s network of influence and leverage has never been fully or honestly examined by the institutions responsible for examining it, authorised the strikes on Iran. He did so without UN authorisation.
Without defined objectives. Without the consent of allies, now absorbing the economic shockwave.
And he did so as a man whose own vulnerability to leverage, whose own history of proximity to an intelligence-connected blackmail operation, raises questions about whether American foreign policy in this period is being conducted in the American national interest or in the interests of something rather darker and harder to name.
Anthony Albanese, Prime Minister of Australia, leader of a government elected on a promise of principled and independent foreign policy, endorsed the war on national television before its objectives had been defined, described Australia’s contribution as constructive, and has since managed the domestic economic consequences of that endorsement by allowing the media to redirect public anger toward his own Energy Minister.
These are the people responsible. Blame them. By name. Publicly. Specifically.
Third: Shame it.
Into the public record. Permanently. Without apology and without a single concession to the people who would prefer you look away.
Shame the government that called a genocide concerning for eighteen months and then called the next war constructive. Shame the press that covered the economic consequences of an illegal war without once naming the war as the cause. Shame the political class that invokes the rules-based international order at every opportunity except the specific, concrete moment when invoking it might cost them something with Washington.
And shame the lobby infrastructure that has made honest public discussion of Israeli state conduct so professionally dangerous that elected representatives self-censor in real time, on camera, in ways they would never do on any other topic involving any other government.
Shame requires naming. And naming requires the willingness to absorb the inevitable accusation. Antisemitism, naivety, conspiracy theory, whatever the silencing vocabulary of the moment happens to be. The answer to that accusation is simple: these are questions about governments, intelligence agencies, and specific individuals. They are being asked by legal scholars, former diplomats, investigative journalists, and the International Criminal Court.
They are not fringe questions. They are the most serious questions available in the current political moment. And the people deploying the accusation are, without exception, people who cannot answer the questions and are therefore trying to end the conversation.
Do not let them end the conversation.
Build the movement
Not a fringe movement. Not an activist movement that can be dismissed with a wave and a label. A mainstream movement of small business owners and tradies and nurses and teachers and families around kitchen tables looking at bills they cannot pay and asking why.
A movement with a single, clear demand: that this government act in Australian interests, not American or Israeli ones, and be
“held accountable when it fails to do so.“
Concretely, that means demanding the following from your MP, from candidates seeking your vote, from any politician who wants to claim the mantle of representing the Australian people.
Formally condemn the US-Israeli war on Iran as a violation of international law and call for an immediate ceasefire and negotiated settlement. Honour the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu. State clearly, as sovereign Australian policy, that a man under international indictment for war crimes is not a partner to be accommodated but a defendant to be treated as the court’s warrant requires.
Establish and publish an independent economic inquiry into the full cost to Australian households and businesses of this conflict, with clear attribution, so that every Australian knows exactly what they are paying and exactly why. Suspend all defence and intelligence cooperation that makes Australia complicit in operations it did not approve, and that would not survive public scrutiny if disclosed.
And tell Washington, firmly, as a matter of principle and sovereign policy rather than private diplomatic discomfort, that this alliance has terms. And one of those terms is that you do not commit Australia to your wars without consent and then leave Australians to absorb the damage.
These are not radical demands.
“They are the demands of a country that takes its own sovereignty seriously.”
They will be called radical. They will be called dangerous. They will be called antisemitic.
That word again, the last refuge of those who cannot answer the argument. Ignore it. The charge of antisemitism is not an argument. It is a silencing tactic. You can oppose antisemitism completely, genuinely, without reservation, and oppose the conduct of this war. You can value the American alliance and question the terms on which we have surrendered our independence within it. These are not contradictions. They are the positions of a free people governing themselves.
The pain is coming. For many, it is already here.
Job losses. Business collapses. Families who cannot make rent. Superannuation funds exposed to volatile markets. A small business economy that did nothing to cause this shock and had no voice in preventing it, being asked to absorb consequences that flow directly and traceably from decisions made in Jerusalem, Washington, and ratified by silence in Canberra.
When that pain arrives at your door, and it will if it has not already, remember this.
It was not caused by bad luck. It was not caused by market volatility operating in a benign vacuum. It was not caused by Chris Bowen. It was caused by a war. A specific, illegal, unjustified war of aggression.
A war that the international community, including Australia’s own former diplomats and independent legal scholars,
“warned repeatedly was coming and begged their governments to prevent.”
It was caused by Netanyahu’s impunity, sustained by Trump’s belligerence, enabled by Epstein’s shadow and Mossad’s reach, and ratified by Albanese’s obedience.
And if we do not say that, clearly, publicly, without apology, we will have learned nothing. We will absorb the pain, accept the cover story, and watch it happen again. Because it will happen again. This is what unconditional deference to American and Israeli power produces. Not security. Not prosperity. Not the rules-based international order we were promised.
Your actions to take
So here is the ask. It is not complicated.
Write to your MP. Your name. Your circumstances. Your specific question: what did you do to prevent this, and what are you doing now to protect us from it?
Talk about it. At work, at the table, at the local, at the school gate. Say the quiet part out loud. Say: This war is costing us; our government supported it, and we are going to hold them accountable for that.
Vote accordingly. The politicians who called this constructive, who endorsed it before its objectives were defined, who stayed silent through a genocide and then supported the next war, must answer for it. Not with anger that dissipates into abstraction. With the cold, clear-eyed precision of people who know exactly what was done to them and who did it.
“And refuse, from this moment forward, to accept the managed version of events.”
Managed consent has a shelf life.
The story that all of this is just global complexity, market volatility, regrettable conditions beyond anyone’s control, that story is finished. Australians are not stupid. They are angry. And they are starting, finally, to understand exactly why and at whom that anger should be directed.
They thought we weren’t watching. We were. We just didn’t yet know that the invoice was being issued in our name.
>>> Name it: an illegal war of aggression, enabled by Washington, prosecuted by Tel Aviv, ratified by Canberra.
>>> Blame it: on Netanyahu’s impunity, Trump’s belligerence, Epstein’s shadow, Mossad’s reach, and Albanese’s silence.
>>> Shame it: into the permanent public record, without apology, without concession, and without a single backward step.
The movement starts now. Not with a rally or a petition or a hashtag, though all of those will follow. It starts with each person who reads this and decides, from this moment, that they are done being managed. That they are owed the truth. And that they are going to insist on it.
That is how this ends differently. That is how Australia stops being a footnote in someone else’s war. That is how we become, for the first time in a long time, a country that governs itself in its own interests and has the courage to say so out loud.
The price is being collected at the checkout, at the bowser, and in the quiet ruin of small businesses across this country. The genocide was real. The complicity was real. The bill is real. And we are just getting started.
The Capture of Australia: How a Dying Ideology is Taking Over Our Country
7 April 2026 Dr Andrew Klein, https://theaimn.net/the-capture-of-australia-how-a-dying-ideology-is-taking-over-our-country/
Dedicated to every Australian who will not let their country become a client state. To the students and academics who see what is happening. To the future we must defend.
The Lie at the Heart of Zionism
The Zionist project was never about returning to an ancient homeland. It was about power. It was about creating a state where Jews could exercise the same colonial domination that European powers had exercised across the world.
The evidence is overwhelming. In 1896, Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, wrote in his diary: “We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country.” He was talking about the Palestinians.’
Herzl also considered other locations for the Jewish state – Argentina, Cyprus, the Sinai Peninsula, Uganda. Zionism was not tied to Palestine. It was tied to the idea of Jewish supremacy. Palestine was chosen not because of ancient ties, but because it was weak, because it was available, because the colonial powers were willing to facilitate the project.
The 1947 UN Partition Plan was imposed against the will of the majority of the population. The Nakba that followed – the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes – was not an accident. It was planned. It was executed. It was the foundation of the state.’The lie of Zionism is that it is about Jewish survival. It is about Jewish dominance. And that lie has now been exposed to the world.
The Collapse of Israel: A Projected Timeline
Israel is not sustainable. The signs are everywhere.
2023-2024: The Gaza genocide. The International Court of Justice finds it “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide. The International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants for Israeli leaders. The global South turns away. The young turn away. The old alliances fray.
2025: The war expands. Iran enters directly. The United States is drawn in. The cost becomes unsustainable. Oil prices spike. Global inflation returns. The American public turns against the war. The alliance fractures.
2026: The war continues. Israeli casualties mount. The economy collapses. The reservist system breaks. Mass emigration begins. The Israeli elite – the tech entrepreneurs, the financiers, the professionals – begin leaving.
2027-2028: A political crisis. The coalition fractures. Early elections. A new government sues for peace. But the damage is done. The International Court of Justice issues its final ruling: genocide. Sanctions are imposed. Israel becomes a pariah state.
2029-2030: The collapse accelerates. The economy is in freefall. The military is exhausted. The settler project – the entire infrastructure of occupation – becomes unsustainable. The international community imposes a solution. The two-state solution is dead. A single state with equal rights is the only option. The Zionist project ends.
This is not speculation. This is the trajectory of every colonial project. Apartheid South Africa lasted 46 years. Rhodesia lasted 15 years after its Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Israel has been an apartheid state since 1967. Its time is running out.
The Zionist Network: How Australia Was Captured
As Israel collapses, the Zionist network is looking for a new home. They have chosen Australia.
The Capture Mechanism:
- Donations. The Henroth Trust, linked to Special Envoy Jillian Segal, donated $280,000 to the Liberal Party in 2024-25. Similar donations flow to Labor. Money buys access. Access buys influence. Influence buys policy.
- “Educational” Tours. For decades, Australian politicians, journalists, academics, and union leaders have been offered free trips to Israel. They visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. They meet with Israeli officials. They are shown what the Israeli government wants them to see. They return to Australia as advocates for the Zionist project. They do not see this as a conflict of interest. They see it as “education.”
- The Fear Weapon. The most powerful tool in the Zionist arsenal is the accusation of antisemitism. Any Australian who criticises Israel, who questions the donations, who opposes the training, who speaks up for Palestinian rights- they are immediately labelled antisemitic. The fear of this label silences politicians, journalists, academics, and public servants. It is the perfect weapon because it does not require evidence. It only requires accusation.
- Institutional Capture. The Zionist network has placed its people in key positions. Jillian Segal as Special Envoy. Greg Craven as overseer of university “training.” The appointments are not accidental. They are deliberate. They are the final stage of capture.
The Timeline of Repression: What Is Coming
The capture is accelerating. The timeline is clear.
2025: Hate speech laws passed. They criminalise speech the government finds objectionable. They give unprecedented discretion to the executive.
December 2025: Bondi terror attack. The government uses it to pass laws giving police the power to ban all protests in entire areas for up to 90 days. The “sledgehammer” approach.
February 2026: Herzog visit. The Major Events Act – designed for sporting events – is used to suppress protest. Police violence is unleashed on peaceful demonstrators.
March 2026: The Segal Plan is implemented. Universities are required to impose Zionist indoctrination on all staff, with funding tied to compliance. The public service is required to adopt the IHRA definition, silencing reporting of Israeli espionage.
2026-2027: The “thought police” expand. The IHRA definition is applied to workplaces, to social media, to private conversations. Australians are disciplined, fired, investigated for “antisemitism” – which means, in practice, for criticising Israel.
2027-2028: The final stage. With dissent suppressed, the Zionist network consolidates its control. Australian foreign policy is subordinated to Israeli interests. Our military is integrated with Israeli doctrine. Our intelligence services are compromised. Our universities become propaganda mills.
By 2030: Australia is a client state. We have traded our sovereignty for a dying ideology. Our neighbours have turned away. Our economy is isolated. Our democracy is a memory.
The Asian Century: Australia’s Choice
The 21st century is the Asian century. Australia’s future is with our neighbours—Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, China, India, the Pacific nations. These are the countries that matter. These are the people we trade with, live alongside, depend upon.
Every one of these nations has watched the genocide in Gaza. Every one of them has seen what the Zionist project looks like when it is in power. Every one of them has drawn conclusions about the countries that support it.
If Australia becomes the new base for the Zionist project, what will our neighbours do?
They will not trade with us. They will not trust us. They will not ally with us. They will see us for what we will have become: a pariah state, a client of a genocidal regime, a threat to regional stability.
Indonesia – the world’s largest Muslim nation, our closest neighbour – will cut ties. Malaysia will follow. Singapore will distance itself. China will use our isolation as a propaganda victory. The Pacific nations will turn to other partners.
Australia will be alone. With a dying ideology. In a region that has moved on.
The Water Crisis and the Cost of Capture
Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth. Our water security is precarious. It depends on stable government, on rational planning, on the ability to manage our resources in the national interest.
The Zionist network does not care about Australian water security. They do not care about the Murray-Darling Basin. They do not care about the long-term sustainability of our agriculture. They care about their project.
If they capture our government, our water resources will be managed in the interests of their ideology – not in the interests of Australians. The allocation of water, the regulation of agriculture, the response to drought – all of it will be subordinated to the needs of the network.
This is not speculation. We have seen what happens when foreign interests capture a country’s resources. We have seen it in Africa. We have seen it in South America. We have seen it in the Middle East. The pattern is the same: extraction, exploitation, abandonment.
The Communication System: A Vulnerability
The Zionist network has captured the telecommunications sector in other countries. In Gaza, Israel controlled the telecom networks. It could cut them at will. It could monitor every call, every message, every connection.
Australia’s communication systems are vulnerable to the same capture. Our telecommunications infrastructure is increasingly controlled by foreign interests. Our data is stored on servers that can be accessed by foreign powers. Our security agencies are compromised by the same network that is capturing our political class.
If the Zionist network achieves its goal, what is to stop them from cutting off Australian communications when it serves their interests? What is to stop them from monitoring our calls, our messages, our political organising? What is to stop them from using the same tactics against Australians that Israel used against Palestinians?
This is not paranoia. This is the logic of the project. The Zionist project has always been about control. And control requires the ability to silence dissent.
Why Dissent Must Be Silenced
The Zionist network knows that their project in Australia is insane. It is against our national interest. It is against the will of the majority of Australians. It is against the trajectory of history.
If Australians were free to debate this – if our universities were free to teach, if our public service were free to advise, if our media were free to report – the project would be exposed for what it is. Students and academics would identify it. Public servants would warn against it. Journalists would investigate it.
That is why dissent must be silenced. That is why the IHRA definition is being imposed. That is why protests are being banned. That is why the thought police are being created. The Zionist network cannot afford for Australians to know what is happening to their country.
This is not about antisemitism. It is about power. It is about the capture of a nation. It is about the silencing of a people.
The Betrayal of the Political Class
This is not the first time Australia’s political class has been compromised at the expense of the people.
In World War I, they sent young men to die on uncut wire while industrialists profited and politicians gave speeches about sacrifice. In the 1980s, they abandoned community policing for a militarised model that treats citizens as enemies. In 2003, they took us to war in Iraq on lies. Now, they are selling our sovereignty to a dying ideology.
Anthony Albanese grew up in social housing. He was the first in his family to go to university. He spoke about opportunity, about fairness, about a fair go. Now he is turning universities into indoctrination camps. Now he is supporting police violence against peaceful protesters. Now he is imposing costs on ordinary Australians for the benefit of a foreign power.
What happened to him? When did he change? Was it the donations? The “educational” tours? The fear of being labelled antisemitic? The promise of something in return?
We need to know. Australia needs to know. And those who have sold out their country must be held to account.
The AI Future: A Post-Israel World
The Zionist project has been a driver of military technology. Israel’s defence industry has been a leader in drones, surveillance, and artificial intelligence for warfare. When the state collapses, that expertise – and that technology – will be displaced.
The Zionist network wants to transplant that infrastructure to Australia. They want our universities to train the next generation of AI weapons developers. They want our defence industry to become the new base for the military technology that Israel developed.
This is a trap. The AI weapons industry is already a moral catastrophe. It is creating systems that can kill without human oversight. It is automating genocide. If Australia becomes the new base for this industry, we will be complicit in the next wave of atrocities.
And when the world turns against Israel, it will turn against the countries that shelter its weapons industry. We will be tarred with the same brush. We will be isolated. We will be a pariah.
The Clear and Present Threat
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not speculation. This is happening in plain sight.
The laws are being passed. The training is being imported. The dissent is being silenced. The institutions are being captured. The political class is being bought. The future is being sold.
The Zionist project is a clear and present threat to Australia’s sovereignty, to our democracy, to our relationship with our neighbours, to our future in the Asian century. It is a dying ideology that is willing to sink our country to save itself.
We must stop it.
What Must Be Done
- Reject the Segal Plan. The IHRA definition has no place in Australian law. It is a tool for suppressing dissent, not for combating racism. It must be withdrawn from universities, from the public service, from all Australian institutions.
- Investigate Zionist influence. A royal commission must examine the extent of foreign influence on Australian politics. Who is funding our political parties? Who is paying for “educational” tours? Who is threatening public servants who report Israeli espionage? The truth must be exposed.
- Restore democratic rights. The laws that ban protests, that criminalise political speech, that give police unprecedented powers – all of them must be repealed. Democracy is not compatible with the suppression of dissent.
- Defend our institutions. Universities must be free to teach. The public service must be free to advise. The media must be free to report. The capture of our institutions by foreign ideology must be reversed.
- Choose our neighbours. Australia’s future is with Asia. We must rebuild the relationships that have been damaged by our complicity in genocide. We must align ourselves with the rising nations of the global South. We must choose justice over a dying ideology.
- Hold the enablers accountable. The politicians who sold out our country must be named. The donors who bought our democracy must be exposed. The ideologues who silenced dissent must be removed. Accountability is not revenge. It is the only way to prevent this from happening again.
A Warning
The Zionist project is failing. Israel is collapsing. The network that built it is looking for a new home. They have chosen Australia.
We have a choice. We can let them take our country. We can let them silence our dissent, capture our institutions, sell our sovereignty. We can become a pariah state, isolated from our neighbours, abandoned by history.
Or we can fight. We can tell the truth. We can expose the network. We can defend our democracy. We can choose justice over genocide, sovereignty over subservience, our children’s future over a dying ideology.
This is not about antisemitism. It is about Australia. It is about whether we will be a free country or a client state. It is about whether we will stand with the rising nations of the global South or with a dying colonial project. It is about whether we will cut the wire or let them send us over it.
The choice is ours. And the time to make it is now.
Dedicated to every Australian who will not let their country become a client state. To the students and academics who see what is happening. To the future we must defend.
We will not be silent. We will not be captured. We will not let them take our country.
References
- Herzl, Theodor. The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl. (1896)
- Pappé, Ilan. The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. (2006)
- Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. (1987)
- International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), 2024
- International Criminal Court, Arrest Warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, 2024
- Michael West Media, “Antisemitism training. Labor’s march to authoritarianism,” February 16, 2026
- Deepcut News, “‘Antisemitism’ directive exposes Australia to Israeli interference, public servants warn,” March 30, 2026
- City Hub, “NSW Police Criticised For Heavy-Handed Arrest Of Anti-Herzog Protester,” March 28, 2026
- The Australian Independent Media Network, “Herzog’s Visit to Australia: Just Who Is Being Comforted, and at What Cost?” February 12, 2026
- Green Left, “Minns spruiks defence exports, while protesters take aim at Indo-Pacific arms expo,” November 4, 2025
The Ambassador of Duplicity: How Israel’s UN Representative Blames Others for the Crimes His State Commits
5 April 2026 Dr Andrew Klein, https://theaimn.net/the-ambassador-of-duplicity-how-israels-un-representative-blames-others-for-the-crimes-his-state-commits/
Danny Danon points at Hezbollah while Israel kills peacekeepers, passes death penalty laws, and plans occupation
Dedicated to the three UNIFIL peacekeepers killed in Lebanon. To the families who are still waiting for the truth. To the world that refuses to see.
The Killings
On March 30, 2026, two Indonesian UNIFIL peacekeepers – Captain Zulmi Aditya Iskandar and First Sergeant Muhammad Nur Ichwan – were killed when a roadside explosion destroyed their vehicle near the town of Bani Hayyan in southern Lebanon. Two others were injured, one severely.
Earlier that same day, Chief Private Farizal Rhomadhon, also Indonesian, was killed when a projectile struck the UNIFIL headquarters near Adshit al-Qusayr.
Three peacekeepers. Three men who had come not to fight, but to hold the line between Israel and Hezbollah. Three men who were there under the mandate of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war.
They are dead. And the world is being told a story.
The Accuser
Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, did not wait for an investigation. He did not wait for evidence. He went straight to the Security Council and declared:
“I revealed to the Security Council: Hezbollah is responsible for the incidents in which UNIFIL soldiers were killed. This is pure terrorism. Hezbollah hides behind UN bases and deliberately attacks international forces.”
He offered no proof. He cited no investigation. He simply accused.
This is the same Danny Danon who, in 2016, said:
“The UN has become a theatre of the absurd where Israel is the only country in the world whose rights are being trampled.”
This is the same man who has spent his career portraying Israel as the victim of a biased international system – even as his government passes laws to execute Palestinians, bombs fuel depots in cities of ten million, and plans the occupation of sovereign Lebanese territory up to the Litani River.
The Duplicity
Let us examine the pattern.
On the death penalty law: When the Knesset passed a law making death by hanging the default punishment for Palestinians convicted of terrorism-related offences – a law explicitly discriminatory, applying only to Palestinians tried in military courts – Danon did not condemn it. He did not call it a violation of international law. He said nothing. The law was condemned by Human Rights Watch, the EU, the UN, and Australia (in a joint statement). Danon’s response? Silence.
On the ecocide in Iran: When Israel bombed fuel storage facilities in Tehran on March 7, poisoning a city of 10 million with black rain, causing generational damage to soil and groundwater, Danon did not speak. He did not call it a war crime. He did not acknowledge that the smoke had drifted as far as Afghanistan and Russia. He said nothing.
On the killing of journalists: When the International Federation of Journalists reported that at least 234 journalists had been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023 – a mortality rate of 10 per cent for the profession – Danon did not condemn. He did not call for investigations. He said nothing. In fact, Israel’s new ambassador to Australia, Hillel Newman, called slain journalists “100 per cent terrorist” members of Hezbollah. Danon did not correct him.
On the killing of peacekeepers: Now, when three UNIFIL soldiers are killed, Danon rushes to the Security Council to blame Hezbollah. He does not wait for the investigation. He does not offer evidence. He simply accuses.
The pattern is clear: when Israel kills, Danon is silent. When others are accused, Danon is loud. He is not a diplomat. He is a propagandist.
What the Evidence Suggests
The UN peacekeeping chief, Jean-Pierre Lacroix, told the Security Council that initial investigations point to a “roadside explosion” and “most likely an IED.” He did not name Hezbollah. He did not name Israel. He called for a swift, thorough, transparent investigation.
Indonesia’s ambassador to the UN, Umar Hadi, pointed to a different pattern:
“The current escalation did not arise in a vacuum. It stems from repeated incursions by the Israeli military into the territory of Lebanon.”
Pakistan’s ambassador, Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, noted that attacks on peacekeepers “may constitute war crimes under international law” and are part of a “disturbing pattern” that undermines UNIFIL and the entire international order.
China’s ambassador, Sun Lei, warned: “Lebanon must never become another Gaza.”
None of them blamed Hezbollah. None of them accepted Danon’s accusation at face value. They called for investigation. They called for accountability. They called for the violence to stop.
But Danon had already made up his mind. He always has.
The Platform Problem
Why is Danny Danon given a platform at the United Nations? Why is his word taken seriously? Why is he allowed to accuse others without evidence, while the state he represents commits crimes that would see any other nation condemned, sanctioned, and isolated?
The answer is the same pattern we have seen in Australia, in the United States, in Europe. The Zionist network has captured the institutions. The fear of being labelled antisemitic silences dissent. The double standard is not an accident – it is enforced.
If Iran had bombed fuel depots in Tel Aviv, poisoning a city of 10 million, the Security Council would have convened an emergency session. Sanctions would have been imposed. The ambassador would have been expelled.
When Israel does it, Danon speaks about Hezbollah. The world listens. The world nods. The world does nothing.
What We Know About Danny Danon
He was born in Tel Aviv in 1971. He served in the Israel Defence Forces as a paratrooper. He was a journalist for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot. He served as Deputy Speaker of the Knesset. He was Minister of Science, Technology and Space. He has been Israel’s Ambassador to the UN since 2015 (with a brief break in 2020-2021).
He has a long history of inflammatory statements:
In 2017, he called for the closure of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), saying it “perpetuates the conflict.”- In 2018, he accused the UN of “obsessive hatred of Israel.”
- In 2024, after the International Court of Justice found it “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, he called the court “antisemitic” and the ruling “absurd.”
He is not a seeker of truth. He is a defender of power. And his power is the power of the state that is committing genocide.
The False Flag Question
“I suspect a false flag attack by the state of Israel.”
We cannot say definitively. The investigation is ongoing. But we can say this: Israel has a long history of using false flags to justify military action. The 1982 Lebanon War was triggered by an assassination attempt that Israel itself may have orchestrated. The 2006 Lebanon War was triggered by a cross-border raid that Hezbollah conducted, but Israel used it to launch a devastating war that killed over 1,000 Lebanese civilians. The pattern is there.
What we know is that Danon did not wait for evidence. He blamed Hezbollah immediately. He used the deaths of peacekeepers to advance Israel’s narrative. And that narrative serves one purpose: to justify Israel’s planned occupation of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River.
Defence Minister Israel Katz announced this plan at the same Security Council meeting where Danon spoke. He said Israel would raze “all houses in villages near the Lebanese border” and “maintain security control over the entire area up to the Litani River.”
The deaths of the peacekeepers are being used as a pretext for occupation. That is the duplicity. That is the crime.
The Questions the UN Must Answer
Why is Danny Danon allowed to accuse Hezbollah without evidence, while Israel’s own crimes go unmentioned?
Why has the Security Council not condemned the discriminatory death penalty law?
Why has the Security Council not condemned the ecocide in Iran?
Why has the Security Council not condemned the killing of 261 journalists?
Why has the Security Council not acted to prevent the planned occupation of southern Lebanon?
Why is Israel treated differently than any other nation?
The answers are not complicated. The network has captured the institutions. The fear of being labelled antisemitic silences dissent. The double standard is enforced.
But the truth is not silent. The truth is being written. The truth is being published. The truth is being read.
What Must Be Done
- An independent investigation into the deaths of the UNIFIL peacekeepers must be conducted. Not by Israel. Not by Hezbollah. By the UN. The findings must be made public.
- Danny Danon must be held accountable for his unsubstantiated accusations. If he has evidence, let him present it. If he does not, his words are not diplomacy – they are propaganda.
- The Security Council must condemn the death penalty law. A joint statement is not enough. Words are not enough. Action is required.
- The planned occupation of southern Lebanon must be stopped. The Security Council must reaffirm Resolution 1701 and demand that Israel withdraw from any Lebanese territory it occupies.
- The double standard must end. Israel must be held to the same standards as every other nation. No more exceptions. No more impunity.
The Larger Truth
Danny Danon is not the problem. He is a symptom. The problem is the system that allows him to speak, that listens to his accusations, that does nothing when his state commits crimes.
The small gods wear nooses on their lapels. They bomb fuel depots in cities of ten million. They pass death penalty laws that apply only to Palestinians. They kill peacekeepers and blame their enemies. And the world watches. The UN meets. The statements are issued. The condemnations are read. And the bombs continue to fall.
But we are not silent. We are writing. We are publishing. We are cutting the wire.
The truth will out. The small gods will be seen. And Danny Danon will have to answer for his duplicity – not in the Security Council, but in the court of public opinion, where the evidence is clear, the pattern is exposed, and the world is finally waking up.
Dedicated to the three UNIFIL peacekeepers killed in Lebanon. To the families who are still waiting for the truth. To the world that refuses to see.
We see. We speak. We will not be silent.
For Australia the Price is Always Right
The War They Sold Us, The Bill We’re Paying
Dr Andrew Klein is right. The War They Sold Us, The Price We Pay, Australia has quietly signed up to another illegal war on Iran and, with customary discretion, sent the invoice straight to its own citizens. We are already paying. At the bowser. At the checkout. At the chemist. The meter is running long before the government has bothered to explain why it switched it on. Even if it could.
This is how modern war arrives. Not with declarations, not with debate, but with a price rise and a press conference. The explosions come later. The explanation, if it comes at all, arrives last and reads like a pamphlet for a product nobody ordered.
We also pay in subtler currency. In the steady domestication of war as background noise. In the way catastrophe is repackaged as content, mined for its dopamine yield, a bridge collapsing in slow motion, an oil rig burning through the night, a grainy clip of impact replayed until it acquires the sheen of inevitability. War as spectacle. War as story. War as something other people do, until it turns up in your petrol bill.
The Australian War Memorial, now politely underwritten by arms manufacturers, completes the lesson. BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Thales. The merchants of death have not so much crashed the party as taken out a sponsorship package.
Remembrance, but make it corporate. Lest we forget, brought to you by the people who ensure there is always something to remember.
Meanwhile in Washington, Donald Trump and sneaky-Pete Hegseth compete to see who can sound most upbeat about lethality, like teenagers comparing horsepower. Bombing a country “into the Stone Ages” an unconscious but not entirely gratuitous reminder of the carpet-bombing of North VietNam is delivered as a punchline, a distraction from the latest domestic scandal, a line designed to travel. It is not strategy. It is not policy. It is performance. Yet Canberra treats it as if it were scripture.
We are told this is about deterrence. About stability. About preventing proliferation. We are always told this. Deterrence has become the diplomatic equivalent of “because I said so”. But deterrence without legal authority is simply pre-emptive war in a better suit. The United Nations Charter permits force in self-defence against an imminent threat, or with Security Council approval. Neither condition has been satisfied. To support such a war without asking that question is not prudence. It is obedience.
Yet our complicity did not begin with the first missile. It was preloaded. The decision was not just rushed; it was rehearsed, the latest turn in a relationship already militarised, already embedded, already incapable of saying no. An unlovely history hums beneath it. Our sycophancy is bipartisan. It has led us here before. It will lead us here again.
Australia’s “great and powerful friendship” now looks less like an alliance and more like a folie à deux, a shared delusion in which one partner sets the fires and the other holds the hose, congratulating itself on its sense of responsibility.
There was no pause for law. No insistence on evidence. Within hours of the first strikes, Prime Minister Albanese offered support. Foreign Minister Penny Wong declined even the courtesy of scrutiny, leaving it to the United States and Israel to explain the legal basis for their own actions. This is not diplomacy. It is ventriloquism with better tailoring.
The government that speaks endlessly of integrity treats the endorsement of war as if it were a diary entry. The legality is not tested. It is outsourced. The rules-based order is invoked like a hymn sung loudly enough to drown out the sound of the rules themselves being broken.
Complicity, But With Good Manners
If a war begins without clear legal authority and proceeds to strike civilian infrastructure, then support for that war is not neutral. It is participatory. International humanitarian law does not cease to exist because it is inconvenient to allies. Those who assist in serious violations may themselves bear responsibility. This is not radical. It is basic.
And assistance is precisely what is occurring. Intelligence sharing. Joint facilities. Interoperability so seamless it dissolves the distinction between ally and actor. When targeting data flows through shared systems, when surveillance feeds are integrated into operational decisions, Australia is not a bystander. It is part of the firing chain.
Pine Gap and the Useful Fiction of Distance
Pine Gap is often described as a listening post, which is a little like describing a power station as a light bulb. It is infrastructure. It is integration. It is the physical expression of a relationship in which distance is rhetorical and involvement is structural.
For decades, analysts from Dr Helen Caldicott to Des Ball and Richard Tanter have explained its role. Recent reporting has filled in the details. Satellite arrays. Signals intelligence. Real-time targeting capability. A system that does not observe war so much as enable it. We are helping Tomahawk missiles find their way into a children’s playground, a hospital or an ambulance depot.
Which makes Canberra’s occasional requests for “clarification” from Washington read like theatre reviews of a play in which it is already on stage. The explanation is not forthcoming because it is unnecessary. It is already baked into the system. Into the agreements. Into the quiet understanding that some questions are not asked because everyone knows the answer.
Australia keeps its eyes politely lowered, its bases open, its systems engaged, and calls this prudence. It is, in fact, participation with plausible deniability.
The Habit of Following
This is not new. It is ritual. VietNam, Iraq. Afghanistan. The same sequence, repeated with minor variations. Alignment first. Scrutiny later. Regret, if it arrives at all, delivered long after the damage is done and the architects have retired to write their memoirs.
We have perfected the art of joining wars we do not need to fight, for reasons that dissolve under inspection, in pursuit of credibility that never quite materialises. We call it loyalty. Others might call it habit.
We follow. We facilitate. We absorb the consequences. Then we explain, with great seriousness, that the decision was made elsewhere.
AUKUS and the Theology of Dependence
AUKUS is sold as strategy. It often reads as faith. A $368 billion act of belief in a future fleet of already obsolete submarines, we will struggle to crew, maintain or deploy, tied to a strategic doctrine we do not control, in conflicts we do not choose.
The Indo-Pacific framing flatters Australia with the illusion of centrality. In practice, it locks us into dependency. If the United States is stretched across multiple theatres, its commitments multiplying faster than its capacity, what exactly are we aligning ourselves with? Strength? Or strain?
A navy we cannot fully sustain, guarding sea lanes we cannot guarantee, in wars we do not declare. That is not sovereignty. It is folly, an epic and darkly comic absurdity that could be an epilogue to Waiting For Godot, 2.0.
The Bill Arrives Early
The economic consequences do not wait for the shooting to stop. Fuel reserves fall below recommended levels. Prices climb. Supply chains tighten. Farmers hesitate. Pharmacists ration. The abstractions of strategy resolve into the concrete arithmetic of shortage.
Thirty-nine days of petrol. Then what.
The government responds with monitoring, reviews, taskforces. The familiar liturgy of control. But the decisions that matter have already been taken elsewhere, in rooms to which Australia is invited only after the fact, if at all.
Meanwhile, the social cost accumulates. External conflict refracted through domestic politics. Suspicion, division, the quiet narrowing of who belongs. War does not stay offshore. It arrives in language, in policy, in the spaces where cohesion is invoked and quietly undermined.
The Question We Avoid
Was it worth it? The question is asked as if the answer might still be in doubt. The more difficult question is why it was done at all. Why a government would endorse a war without clear legal foundation, led by an administration defined by volatility, run by grifters and billionaire bros with consequences already measurable at home?
Why it was done without consent? Why the lessons of previous wars remain politely unlearned? Why the reflex to align survives every failure that should have extinguished it?
The “grifters and billionaire bros” are the Pozzos of the world – men who own the rope, drive the slave, and check their watch every five minutes to see if they are still important. They don’t do it for a “clear legal foundation”; they do it because the exercise of power is the only thing that convinces them they exist.
As Lucky might conclude, it was done for the sake of the “quaquaquaqua” – the noise we make to drown out the fact that the road is empty and Godot is never coming.
If those questions cannot be answered, then the answer is already in front of us. Alliance over autonomy. Secrecy over scrutiny. Habit over judgement. Inertia rules, OK?
We have chosen the alliance. We have accepted the war. We will inherit the consequences. The bill is already in the mail – our boots are well and truly on, and under, the ground.
Footnote: North Vietnam was subjected to some of the heaviest bombing in military history, with over 1 million tons of bombs and missiles dropped by the U.S. during campaigns like Operation Rolling Thunder. From 1965 to 1968, roughly 32 tons of bombs fell every hour, significantly exceeding the total ordnance used in the Pacific theatre of WWII
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
It Takes Years To Refuel A Nuclear Submarine – Here’s Why
By Chris Smith , BGR 10th March 2026
You probably charge your phone daily, while your car needs gas or a battery top-up every few days. But you don’t have to take the device or vehicle apart when you connect it to power or fill up the tank. Refueling a nuclear submarine, on the other hand, is a complicated process that takes years, just like refueling a nuclear aircraft carrier………………………
The ERO process is slow because it’s designed that way for safety reasons. The nuclear submarine has to be brought into a facility that’s capable of handling nuclear material throughout the replacement process, to ensure the safety of everyone involved in the repairs and the sailors who will crew the ship once the refueling process is done. The nuclear core remains radioactive during refueling, so radiation must be contained and the nuclear waste must be stored securely.
The submarine is brought to a dry dock for the ERO process, where engineers go through a rigorous procedure to defuel the ship and refuel it. The reactors are shut down and cooled before removing the old reactor core and installing its replacement. The actual removal of the spent core involves cutting through the submarine’s hull with hand tools, as the reactors aren’t easily accessible. These operations are performed under strict ventilation and filtration protocols to prevent radiation contamination. The old core is transported off-site for secure storage, as the nuclear material remains active. The new core is installed, and then the reactor is reassembled and the submarine is resealed. These procedures require precision and numerous inspections, as there’s no room for error. The structural integrity of the hull is key for allowing the submarine to operate at depth.
……………………………………… How much does refueling a submarine cost?
Like nuclear aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered surface ships undergo extensive RCOH processes — and they’re not cheap or quick. For example, it cost $2.8 billion to refuel and retrofit the USS George Washington aircraft carrier, and the process took even longer than anticipated. In May 2023, the U.S. Navy announced that the George Washington completed its RCOH process after 69 months
……………………………………………..
https://www.bgr.com/2117046/why-nuclear-submarine-takes-years-to-refuel/
Zomi Frankcom killing. Press Club takes on Israel’s ambassador
by Joshua Barnett | Mar 31, 2026, https://michaelwest.com.au/zomi-frankcom-killing-press-club-takes-on-israels-ambassador/
Israel’s ambassador, Hillel Newman, spoke at the National Press Club today, and walked into something he might not have expected: journalists doing their job on Israel. Joshua Barnett reports.
Hillel Newman was a controversial – but not surprising – choice as Israel’s new ambassador in Australia. He is a vocal supporter of Israel’s war against humanity and has openly discredited the legitimacy of the UN.
Given our mainstream media’s tacit support for Israel, Newman may have expected typical softball questions, but instead, he faced a breadth of important questions that Australians would like answered, including the subject of Australian Aid worker Zomi Frankcom, who was killed in an Israeli drone strike in 2024.
The most pointed exchange came from Anna Henderson of SBS World News, who used her question to join the deaths of journalists and aid workers in one blunt challenge. Henderson began,
“I want to take this opportunity as well to pay tribute to the journalists and aid workers who have been killed doing their job internationally,”
before turning directly to the killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom. She told Newman,
“Israel defense sources have told us that the investigation into the Israeli drone strike that killed Zomi Frankcom in Gaza has been shelved, and that there will be no prosecutions after two years.
“What is the status of the military Advocate General investigation into the death of Zomi Frankcom, will the Israeli Defense Force release the audio of the drone strike so the evidence is transparent, will anyone be prosecuted, or was this one of those tragic mistakes in your view?”
Newman did not answer those questions cleanly. His first response was, “I’ve never heard that it’s been shelved,” followed by, “It could be that I’m not updated, I’ll check.”
Pressed on the missing drone audio, he claimed that the Australian special Adviser Mark Binskin had been given “full access to what was available,” but when Henderson and others pointed out Binskin, in his own words, did not get the audio, Newman ultimately conceded, “I would have to check that.”
The air was tense as Sky News host Tom Connell pressed Newman even further, stating that Binskin himself admitted that the IDF would not give him the audio.
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0:25 / 4:44
Israel’s ambassador, Hillel Newman, spoke at the National Press Club today, and walked into something he might not have expected: journalists doing their job on Israel. Joshua Barnett reports.
Hillel Newman was a controversial – but not surprising – choice as Israel’s new ambassador in Australia. He is a vocal supporter of Israel’s war against humanity and has openly discredited the legitimacy of the UN.
Given our mainstream media’s tacit support for Israel, Newman may have expected typical softball questions, but instead, he faced a breadth of important questions that Australians would like answered, including the subject of Australian Aid worker Zomi Frankcom, who was killed in an Israeli drone strike in 2024.
The most pointed exchange came from Anna Henderson of SBS World News, who used her question to join the deaths of journalists and aid workers in one blunt challenge. Henderson began,
“I want to take this opportunity as well to pay tribute to the journalists and aid workers who have been killed doing their job internationally,”
before turning directly to the killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom. She told Newman,
“Israel defense sources have told us that the investigation into the Israeli drone strike that killed Zomi Frankcom in Gaza has been shelved, and that there will be no prosecutions after two years.
“What is the status of the military Advocate General investigation into the death of Zomi Frankcom, will the Israeli Defense Force release the audio of the drone strike so the evidence is transparent, will anyone be prosecuted, or was this one of those tragic mistakes in your view?”
Newman did not answer those questions cleanly. His first response was, “I’ve never heard that it’s been shelved,” followed by, “It could be that I’m not updated, I’ll check.”
Pressed on the missing drone audio, he claimed that the Australian special Adviser Mark Binskin had been given “full access to what was available,” but when Henderson and others pointed out Binskin, in his own words, did not get the audio, Newman ultimately conceded, “I would have to check that.”
The air was tense as Sky News host Tom Connell pressed Newman even further, stating that Binskin himself admitted that the IDF would not give him the audio.
Zomi Frankcom killing
The public record is already clear on some basics. Zomi Frankcom was killed on 1 April 2024 in Gaza alongside six other World Central Kitchen workers.
The Australian special adviser’s report said the IDF’s initial investigation found the strike “should not have occurred”, that the workers were not deliberately or knowingly targeted, and that the Military Advocate General (MAG) was considering possible follow-up action. The report also recommended Australia seek regular updates on the MAG process.
Yet nearly two years on, the audio still has not been handed over publicly, and in September 2024, Penny Wong said Israel had not responded to Australia’s request for it.
Then came the simplest question of the day, from Andrew Probyn from Nine: “Will Israel apologise to the family of Zomi Frankcom?” Newman would not do it. “Sympathy with the families” was as far as he went. On reparations, he said that would depend on the final outcome.
Who wins from that? Governments buying time. Military systems avoiding scrutiny. Diplomats preserving the script.
And who pays? Dead journalists. Dead aid workers. Their families. And the public,
“asked yet again to accept sympathy in place of transparency.”
The questions now are very simple. Has the Zomi Frankcom investigation been shelved or not? If not, what is its status? Why has the drone audio still not been released? Why was Binskin denied that audio? And if Israel says it can distinguish between journalists and militants, what is its actual verified number?
That was the surprise at the Press Club. The journalists did their job. The Ambassador mostly did what diplomats do best: deny, deflect and disregard the questions.
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Billionaire Zionist John Gandel’s influence in Australian public schools
by Nicole Everett and Alan Musry | Mar 26, 2026 https://michaelwest.com.au/billionaire-zionist-john-gandels-influence-in-australian-public-schools/
Australian public school teachers and students are being influenced by Zionist lobbyists who seek to manufacture consent for the illegal occupation of Palestine and the Gaza genocide. Nicole Everett and Alan Musry with the story.
The Yad Vashem Holocaust Studies Teacher Training Program for Australian Educators, supported by The Gandel Foundation, is a tool used to indoctrinate educators and students under the guise of Holocaust Studies in what is clearly a state vision.
This represents a view contrary to what the majority of academics and experts know and teach, and undermines the spirit of balanced and independent studies.
The Gandel Foundation, which offers the teacher training program, is chaired by Australian billionaire John Gandel and includes junket trips to Israel.
John Gandel is a long-time associate of Benjamin Netanyahu and is listed as one of his ‘most valued supporters’. A leaked document declared him a ‘tier 1’ contact of the Israeli Prime Minister, who is currently overseeing the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the violent occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank.
After October 7, John Gandel publicly stated that “Israel has no choice but to go ‘all out’ in Gaza.
Gandel is well integrated into the Zionist colonial project and has associations with the Israel Defence Forces through a program that treats and rehabilitates IDF soldiers who have been carrying out the genocide in Gaza.
In 2022, the Hadassah Hospital’s Gandel Rehabilitation Centre in Jerusalem was funded by John Gandel and his wife, Pauline, in what is reportedly the largest ever donation to Israel.
The Zionist perspective
At an address to the audience at a special luncheon following the naming ceremony of the Hadassah Rehabilitation Centre, Gandel stated that
“When it comes to supporting the people and the State of Israel, we always saw it as our duty and obligation to strengthen the homeland and help this country” and that “it is worth noting that the Jewish community of Australia is a strong advocate, supporter and defender of the State of Israel. Israel has one of the best allies in the world in Australia.”
This statement clearly outlines full support for the Zionist state, and the teacher training program supported by John Gandel’s foundation seeks to influence Australian teachers to accept and teach the Zionist perspective in Australian schools.
This, in turn, influences young people in our schools and the wider education system to also advocate for Israel and the Zionist colonial project in occupied territories that include Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which was declared illegal by the International Court of Justice on 19 July 2024. At the ruling, UN experts, including Francesca Albanese et al., said,
“States must immediately review all diplomatic, political, and economic ties with Israel“
“inclusive of business and finance, pension funds, academia and charities.”
Since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Rehabilitation Centre specifically treats and rehabilitates IDF soldiers who have been wounded or ‘stressed out’ while participating in the killing, maiming, abduction, and dispossession of Palestinians including a ‘specialised PTSD centre’.
Teacher training program
The Yad Vashem Holocaust Studies Teacher Training Program for Australian Educators represents an external lobby group that influences educators and enables a foreign interest group to interfere in the public education system. It does this by:
- Providing free travel junkets.
- Politicising history by refocusing Holocaust studies on contemporary politics of the Middle East.
- Providing professional learning, teaching materials, lesson sequences, and historical sources” which support a Zionist interpretation of History.
- Influencing politically uninformed teachers who may not be aware of the Palestinian Nakba that occurred in 1948.
The program is described by Yad Vashem as “a long-term professional-development program aimed at training a cadre of expert Holocaust educators who are active throughout Australia”. It captures teachers into a long-term commitment with five stages:
Stage 1: Online Course: Introduction to Holocaust Studies- Stage 2: The Australian Teacher-Training Seminar, Jerusalem
- Stage 3: The Educational Project
- Stage 4: Follow-up Seminars in Australia
- Stage 5: Gandel Program Alumni
“… to ensure participants remain dedicated to ongoing advocacy and maintenance of the Israeli state.“
Australia’s Birthright program, which is managed by the Zionist Federation of Australia, providing young people with free trips to Israel.
Zionist exceptionalism
There are several reasons why we should not pay special attention to only teaching about the Jewish Holocaust in schools, including:
- making genocide seem like a unique or isolated event;
- unintentionally minimising victims of other genocides;
- limiting students’ understanding of the conditions that lead to genocide;
- reinforcing a narrow view of racism and violence;
- weakening education about how to prevent genocide;
- favouring a historical narrative where we ignore wrongdoings perpetuated by ‘the West’.
Australian Teachers value, support, and teach Holocaust education programs; however, they should not be delivered when they are about legitimising contemporary political violence in the Middle East through exposing teachers to Zionist voices.
Genocide studies should include those carried out in, but not limited to, places such as North America, Australia, Rwanda, Cambodia, the Rohingya in Myanmar and Darfur.
There should also be room in the curriculum for teaching about the perspectives of Palestinians who have lived under occupation for more than 75 years. By excluding this perspective, the Israel lobby can continue to
“deprive students of comprehensive learning aimed at developing critical thinking skills.“
Climate change will push venomous snakes towards highly populated coastlines, study finds
Climate change will drive venomous snakes away from arid interiors and
towards densely populated coastlines, increasing the risk of deadly
encounters for millions of people, a new global study says. It notes that
snake populations will broadly move towards higher latitudes and more
heavily populated areas as rising temperatures make their current habitats
less suitable. In Australia, the shift is expected to be especially
pronounced along the east coast where snakes will move from the arid centre
into more heavily populated southern areas.
Independent 2nd April 2026,
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/venomous-snakes-climate-change-b2950023.html
UniSuper members ‘divest from death’ on Palestine Land Day
by Stephanie Tran | Apr 1, 2026, https://michaelwest.com.au/unisuper-members-divest-from-death-on-palestine-land-day/
UniSuper members have started a mass divestment campaign against the fund, citing investments in weapons companies and organisations complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide and occupation. Stephanie Tran reports.
UniSuper, which manages approximately $166B on behalf of more than 680,000 members, is the industry superfund for employees in Australia’s higher education and research sector. The ‘Divest from Death‘ campaign is run by a group campaigning against UniSuper’s unwillingness to divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies involved in genocide, war crimes, occupation and apartheid in Palestine.
As of June 2025, the fund holds over $771m worth of investments in companies named in databases compiled by the UN Human Rights Office and the American Friends Service Committee, which track businesses complicit in the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and the genocide in Gaza.
Analysis of portfolio data shows that UniSuper has significantly expanded these investments in recent years. Its shareholding in Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, has more than tripled over the past two years, based on the number of shares held.
The fund also has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in companies involved in weapons production, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and maintains smaller holdings in Israeli financial institutions linked to settlement activity.
A report by the Australia Institute previously identified UniSuper as one of only four major superannuation funds not to exclude controversial weapons, including nuclear weapons, from its investment screens.
Palestine Land Day
March 30th has been marked Palestine Land Day since the 1976 killing of six Palestinian citizens by Israeli police during protests against the expropriation of thousands of dunams of land in the Galilee.
Alison Gibberd, an organiser of the campaign, said members had raised concerns with the fund over several years, including through petitions, direct correspondence and questions at annual meetings.
“UniSuper has increased its investments in weapons and companies involved in the occupation of the West Bank in the past two years.”
“A large number of members are not happy with these investments – many hundreds of members have petitioned them and written to them in the past few years, and the union has passed pro-BDS motions, driven by members, nationally as well as locally,” Gibberd said.
“Despite this, there does not appear to have been a change in UniSuper’s policy and they state that they are not an ‘activist’ fund. This refusal to act is why members have left in the past for more ethical funds and why a group will leave on 30 March.”
Tamara Kayali Browne, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at Charles Sturt University and Palestinian activist, said the divestment action had been “driven by university staff who will not tolerate their money being invested in genocide”.
“Many of us refuse to have our money invested in companies that are fuelling, or complicit in, the Gaza genocide,” she said. “Since UniSuper has refused to divest from these companies, we are left with little choice but to leave and put our money in more ethical superannuation funds.”
She said the campaign was intended to send a broader message to the superannuation sector.
“A retirement built on blood money cannot possibly be enjoyed,” Browne said. “Even if those who work at UniSuper are not bothered by the fact that they are investing in a genocide, many people are and are happy to put their money elsewhere.”
UniSuper response
In response to questions posed at its annual members’ meeting last year, UniSuper said it held “small investment holdings” in companies identified in the UN database of companies involved in illegal settlements, including Elbit Systems and “a small number of Israeli banks”. The fund said it had no holdings in Israeli government bonds.
“UniSuper is satisfied that our investment holdings are in accordance with law and with the investment strategies and objectives of our investment options,” the fund stated.
“If their investments are indeed small, then it should not be much trouble to divest from them. And it is not as though a little bit of genocide is okay,” Browne said.
UniSuper was contacted for comment. A spokesperson for UniSuper provided the following response:
“Our role as a superfund is to manage the life savings of our members and to act in their best financial interests. We take a risk-based approach to identify and integrate material ESG factors into our investment decisions across our portfolios.
“As at 31 December 2025, UniSuper had small investment holdings relative to the size of our Fund in companies domiciled in Israel (according to our third-party data provider). We offer a wide range of investment options, giving members the flexibility to select options that align with their personal circumstances and preferences including options that don’t hold these investments.
“Members write to us about a number of investment-related issues. We aim to provide timely information to allow our members to make an informed investment choice. Members can access our holdings on our website as well as our How we invest your money document for information about what our options invest in.”
Your money, their rules. Super funds support Israel war machine
Australian industry super funds are investing in companies involved in the Gaza genocide, and unions are not asking them to stop.
The war they sold us, the price we pay
2 April 2026 Dr Andrew Klein, PhD AIM Extra
How Australia’s Government Backed an Illegal War and Left Australians to Foot the Bill
The Speed of Capitulation
When American and Israeli missiles began striking Iranian cities in the final days of February 2026, the Australian government did not wait for the UN Security Council to meet. It did not wait for legal opinion. It did not wait for evidence.
Within hours, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared that “We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security.” Foreign Minister Penny Wong added that she would “leave it for the US and Israel to speak of the basis, the legal basis for the attacks.”
Not since the invasion of Iraq has an Australian government been so swift to endorse military action without international legal sanction. And not since Iraq has an Australian government been so unprepared for the consequences.
The Miscalculation
The operation was billed as a surgical strike. The theory – as arrogant as it was flawed – held that the removal of Iran’s leadership would trigger a swift regime collapse, that the Iranian people would rise up at America’s invitation, that the war would be over before it began.
What happened instead defies every neocon fantasy.
The Islamic Republic did not fracture; it consolidated. A new spiritual leader emerged. Iranian society rallied behind the flag. And Tehran demonstrated what analysts had long warned: that it possesses both the capability and the will to strike back effectively.
The Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil passes, is now effectively blockaded. Iran has asserted control, allowing only Chinese oil tankers through under negotiated exemptions. Western and allied shipping has effectively stopped.
The war we were told would be quick and decisive is now entering its second month, with no end in sight.
The Economic Wreckage: Fuel
Australia is an island nation. It imports approximately 90 per cent of its liquid fuel. We have two remaining refineries, producing less than a quarter of domestic demand. The rest comes through the Strait of Hormuz.
That supply line is now severed.
The price of Brent crude has surged from $72 per barrel in January to over $110, and in some trading sessions, beyond $180.
The impact on Australian motorists has been immediate and brutal. Petrol prices have risen by more than 30 per cent in a month. Some rural service stations have run out of fuel entirely. Hundreds of outlets have imposed purchase limits of 50 litres per customer. Social media is flooded with images of panic buying – jerry cans stacked in driveways, queues stretching down highways.
Australia’s fuel reserves are dangerously low. According to Energy Minister Chris Bowen, we have 39 days of petrol, 30 days of diesel, and 30 days of jet fuel. This is far below the 90-day reserve recommended by the International Energy Agency. The government has already reduced reserve requirements for importers by approximately 20 per cent – equivalent to six days of national supply.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers now calls this conflict “the defining influence” on the May budget. He warns that Treasury has modelled two scenarios – one with oil at $100 per barrel, one with oil at $120 – and admits that “both scenarios could underestimate the cost.”
Even under conservative assumptions, the war could cut GDP growth by up to 0.2 percentage points across major trading partners, add up to 1.25 percentage points to inflation, and leave GDP 0.6 per cent lower in 2027.
The Treasurer’s own words should chill every Australian: “We’ve already seen four major shocks – the GFC, a major pandemic, a global inflation shock, escalating trade tensions – and this oil shock could become the fifth.”
The Food Chain: Fertiliser and Farming
The war is not just hitting the bowser. It is hitting the dinner table.
Australia’s farmers are now facing a crisis of their own. The Strait of Hormuz disruption has cut off supply of urea fertiliser, upon which Australian agriculture is heavily dependent. Prices have soared. Supply has tightened. And the winter planting season is about to begin.
Queensland farmer Arthur Gillen normally splits his winter crop between wheat and chickpeas. This year, with fertiliser costs prohibitive, he is reducing wheat to 20 per cent of his planting area and abandoning urea use entirely.
He is not alone. Farmers across the country are pivoting to low-fertiliser crops – lentils, chickpeas, canola – and reducing wheat acreage. This shift, driven by war, will reshape Australian agriculture for years to come.
The timing could not be worse. Rabobank warns that the Strait of Hormuz must be open by the end of April to get fertiliser to farmers in time for winter planting. If it is not, the impact on Australian food production will be severe and sustained.
Federal Agriculture Minister Julie Collins has announced a national food security review. Farmers are telling the ABC they fear fuel shortages will impact the winter harvest. The government is scrambling, but the damage is already being done.
The Medicines Pipeline
In March 2026, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) issued an unusual public statement: they urged Australians not to panic buy medication.
The reason is the Strait of Hormuz. Pharmaceutical companies have been forced to reroute critical medicines away from the Persian Gulf, switching from sea freight to air freight at enormous cost………………………………………………………………
The AUKUS Mirage
Perhaps the most profound strategic consequence of this war is the damage it has done to Australia’s faith in its alliance with the United States.
The US military resources that were meant to underpin the AUKUS nuclear submarine program are now stretched to breaking point in the Persian Gulf.
If Washington cannot keep its promises to South Korea or Japan, one Queensland University of Technology professor asked, what confidence can Australia retain in the submarine deal?
Public opinion is already shifting. Polls show more Australians oppose the war than support it. The government’s swift endorsement of an illegal conflict has left it morally stripped naked and strategically embarrassed.
The Government’s Response: Too Little, Too Late
To its credit, the government has belatedly recognised the scale of the crisis.
On March 27, Prime Minister Albanese announced new fuel security powers, including the use of Export Finance Australia to underwrite private sector fuel purchases. He called out panic buyers, declaring that filling jerry cans was “not the Australian way.”
Energy Minister Bowen has appointed a former energy regulator to lead a national fuel supply taskforce. The government is considering support for the nation’s two remaining refineries……………………………………………………..
The Path Forward
The war is not ending soon. Iran’s leadership has consolidated. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed to Western shipping. Global energy markets are in turmoil.
What Australia needs is not more loyalty to a declining hegemon. What Australia needs is a government willing to act in the national interest – not just in the interests of alliance management…………………………………………………….. https://theaimn.net/the-war-they-sold-us-the-price-we-pay/
1 This month.
Australians deserve the truth
about
AUKUS – https://aukuspublicinquiry.com/
Australians deserve the truth
about AUKUS
PETITION – To: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Australian Labor Government
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
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