Pilger: stop the propaganda on Israel
SYDNEY Peace Prize winner John Pilger launched a scathing attack on the media's coverage of Israel during a lecture at the Sydney Opera House on Thursday night.
SYDNEY Peace Prize winner John Pilger launched a scathing attack on the media’s coverage of Israel during a lecture at the Sydney Opera House on Thursday night.
Speaking before a capacity audience in the concert hall, Pilger, a journalist, author and filmmaker, criticised the Australian media for its ‘modern propaganda’ particularly when it came to coverage of the Gaza war.
“In no other democratic country is the discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as it is in Australia”, he said to applause. “Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty nine members of one family‚ babies, grannies‚ are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed.”
He urged the audience to read the Goldstone Commission Report, stressing the point that it was written by ‘Jewish judge’ Richard Goldstone.
“Those who speak from the article of freedom are working hard to bury the United Nations report. For only one nation, Israel, has the right to exist in the Middle East, only one nation has the right to attack others, only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Australia fawning over its leaders.”
Pilger also criticised United States President Barack Obama for ‘stepping up [George W Bush’s] wars and starting his own war in Pakistan’.
“Like Bush, [Obama] is threatening Iran, a country Hilary Clinton said she was ‘prepared to annihilate’. Iran’s crime is its independence … Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn’t occupy anyone else’s land and it hasn’t attacked any country, unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and provides for the Middle East on America’s behalf.”
The Sydney Peace Prize is the only international peace prize awarded in Australia.
The citation for the Sydney Peace Prize refers to significant contributions to ‘peace with justice’, awarded to an organisation or individual ‘who has made significant contributions to global peace’.
Past recipients of the prize have included Professor Muhammad Yanus, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson.