Month June 2015
Last year was a “blood year” in the Middle East – massacres and beheadings, fallen cities, collapsed and collapsing states, the unravelling of a decade of Western strategy. We saw the rise of ISIS, the splintering of government in Iraq, and foreign fighters – many from Europe, Australia and Africa – flowing into Syria at a rate ten times that during the height of the Iraq War. What went wrong?
Thousands of hours of research by renowned theater and television writer Eric Bogosian’s has turned his new book Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged The Armenian Genoicide into a fluid, riveting.
2015 marks the Centenary of the largest ever massacre of Christians in history, in Armenia in 1915, when Muslim Turks turned the streets to blood. This is a masterful account of the assassins who hunted down the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide.
An Indonesian court recently rejected the final appeals for clemency for a group of foreigners facing the death penalty for drug charges, attracting worldwide condemnation. The Indonesians didn’t care. The foreigners were perfect fodder for one of the largest and most expensively orchestrated jihad spectacles the world has ever seen. Snowing in Bali lays bare just how common drugs have been in Bali for decades, and how closely allied with the trade are the Indonesian elites. Indonesia’s President Wododo faced a storm of international criticism for refusing to grant clemency; and was entirely indifferent. In the world’s largest Muslim country, a religious grouping incensed worldwide by the conduct of Westerners in the Middle East, the killing of foreigners is not something that on the face of it caused any distress to the locals. Amongst others, Australian taxpayers contribute almost a billion dollars in foreign aid to Indonesia each year, but the President did not even bothered to take the Australian Prime Minister’s calls. The Indonesian justice system is notoriously corrupt; and has now been laid bare for the world to see. Those who sold the drugs to the foreigners were never charged. The police who took their usual bribes were never charged. And Indonesia got exactly the jihad spectacle it wanted.
Inside Australia’s Anti-terrorism Laws and Trials, by leading legal experts Andrew Lynch, Nicola McGarrity and George Williams, tracks developments since the nation’s first anti-terrorism laws were introduced in great haste and, as the authors observe, were stunning in scope and number. They claim latest laws introduced in 2014 were similarly extensive and controversial. Yet again, powers and sanctions once thought to lie outside the rules of a liberal democracy except during wartime have become part of Australian law.
With Australia’s terror alert at the highest level possible and following the recent detention of terrorists planning attacks on the Centenary celebrations of Anzac Day, security has been stepped up around Australia; and most notably at Gallipoli in Turkey, where both the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot and New Zealand Prime Minister Peter Key will attend. Both Prime Ministers, having taken their nation’s military back into Iraq in the fight against Islamic State, are prime targets. Peter Fitzsimons best selling book Gallipoli records how, on 25 April 1915, Allied forces landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in present-day Turkey to secure the sea route between Britain and France.