Friday 23rd of October 2026
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compassion rationed by nationality.....

Backed by their cheerleader-in-chief, Chris Minns, when you thought Murdoch writers couldn’t stoop any lower, they did. Andrew Brown was there.

On October 7, the Daily Telegraph told Sydney that “subhuman ghouls” were gathering again to celebrate a slaughter of innocents. I was at that gathering. It was a candlelight vigil at Town Hall, organised by Jews Against the Occupation ’48. About 200 people came, mostly older Australians.

They prayed for the Jewish and Palestinian dead.

Chris Minns called the vigil “heartless”. Four days later, last Sunday, October 11, thousands marched for Gaza, and Minns called them “disgraceful”. Alex Ryvchin of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry called the marchers “obsessive, extreme and hateful”.

He then announced that “the only attempt at racial extermination occurred on October 7 and was carried out by Palestinians”.

Arsen Ostrovsky of the Israel lobby AIJAC used the Telegraph to brand the rally a hate march and to blame such marches for the Bondi massacre.

Their evidence is a handful of placards. Against it stands a United Nations finding that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, more than 72,000 Palestinian dead, and an estimated 300,000 Australians who crossed the Harbour Bridge.

“Social cohesion?”

The mourners are not wrecking social cohesion. The men who call grief hatred are wrecking it, and they are pushing a narrative Israel spends $730 million a year to spread.

The Telegraph’s front page read SYDNEY’S DAY OF SHAME. Below, it said subhuman ghouls gathered in 2023 to celebrate a slaughter, and “they gather again”. Page four carried the headline “Vile rallies ‘celebrating the slaughter’ of Jews”. The paper went to print before a single candle was lit. It convicted us without waiting to see what we did.

Subhuman. A Sydney newspaper pinned that word on older Jewish Australians gathering to mourn. The word has a history, and every editor at Holt Street knows it.

Chris Minns has a word for candles. Heartless. He lit the Opera House for Israel’s dead within days. The sails have never been lit for Gaza’s. Hind Rajab was six. She begged rescuers for hours from a car full of her dead relatives until Israeli fire killed her too. Minns never called that heartless.

American Jewish surgeon Dr Mark Perlmutter treated Gaza’s children for sniper wounds. The United Nations inquiry on which Australian Chris Sidoti sits found Israeli forces deliberately targeted children. Children had limbs amputated without anaesthetic while a doctor sang them a lullaby. Minns never called that heartless either.

Then 200 people prayed for the dead of both peoples, and he found the word.

This is compassion rationed by nationality.

Minns is no peacekeeper. He is a partisan with a police force, and the Jewish group behind the vigil has taken him to the Supreme Court over his laws against protest. Were all 300,000 on the bridge ghouls too, Premier?

“Lewd gatherings”

Ryvchin called Sunday’s rallies “lewd gatherings”. He said the marchers cannot oppose war “because the war is over”. Then he blamed October 7 on Palestinians. Not on Hamas. On Palestinians.

That is collective guilt, the exact offence he accuses the marchers of committing against Jews. If a marcher said Jews carried out the destruction of Gaza, Ryvchin would call it antisemitism. He has done the same thing to another people.

In the same sentence, he denied the genocide a United Nations commission of inquiry found in September 2025.

Ryvchin looked at 72,000 graves and announced that nothing happened there.

I answered him in public. Declaring the war over does not resurrect a single child. Accountability does not expire when Alex Ryvchin decides the public should stop caring.

If a marcher promotes an antisemitic conspiracy, name the conduct and condemn it. Smearing an entire movement is lazy, and it poisons the cohesion he claims to defend. He offered contempt where evidence was needed and collective blame where precision was essential.

Blaming the blameless

Then Ostrovsky, who runs the Sydney office of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council. He wrote that marches like Sunday’s built the Bondi massacre one chant at a time.

Ostrovsky survived Bondi, and his grief is real, but his claim is a smear without evidence. He ties the gunmen to people who want children to stop dying, and he uses the Bondi dead to do it.

The Australian prints the line and Sharri Markson broadcasts it nightly.

News24 reported the backlash to our vigil before it began.

The hasbara campaign

None of this is spontaneous. Israel has budgeted $730 million this year for hasbara, its global campaign to shape foreign opinion. The narrative is designed there. Palestinians and all who stand with them are the enemy. Israel is the only victim.

Our Premier, the Israel lobby and the Murdoch machine push that narrative here. Whether by instruction or by instinct, they do its work.

The Telegraph has discovered that a day of mourning is sacred. Every January 26 First Nations people mourn invasion and dispossession, and every January 26 the Telegraph cheers the party on. Its columnist Anthony Dillon dismissed “attempts to shame us” for celebrating. At Holt Street,

grief is sacred when it serves Israel and a nuisance when it belongs to Aboriginal people.

These men cheapen the word antisemitism at the very moment Jewish Australians need it to mean something.

I stood among the ghouls. They prayed for every child killed since that day, Israeli and Palestinian alike.

The Telegraph looked at that and saw something less than human. That tells you nothing about the vigil.

It tells you everything about the Telegraph and those who work there.

https://michaelwest.com.au/a-vigil-for-the-dead-for-some-subhuman-ghouls-to-murdochs-goons/

 

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         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

 

tears......

 

Pam Batkin

Wall of Tears: 18,457 names for the children killed in Gaza

 

A vast public artwork naming 18,457 children killed in Gaza has arrived in Sydney, confronting viewers with individual lives too easily reduced to statistics.

Phil Buehler’s 15-metre-long, three-metre-high public artwork, which names the 18,457 children killed in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 19 July 2025, is in Sydney. The Wall of Tears was unveiled in Brooklyn, New York, on 29 January this year, and brought to Western Australia in July by the Perth Doctors Medical Aid for Palestine group. After exhibitions in Western Australia and on the lawns of Parliament House in Canberra, it is now in Sydney, where the exhibition is supported by Amnesty International Australia. It is on exhibition at Pitt Street Uniting Church until 28 October.

Phil Buehler hopes people will “see the faces, read the stories of some of the few dozen I’ve scattered throughout … that’s the part that gets me when I look at it. You see their faces full of joy and hope, snapshots from graduations and birthday parties and family gatherings and knowing that these kids’ lives were just cut short … I hope that might lead people to think about how they might help, even if it’s just, to take a photo of the mural and pass it along on their social media or to their friends.”

The wall is an invitation to meditate, reflect, grieve and be moved to action.

Around 200 people attended the launch of the Wall of Tears on Friday night. Chris Sidoti, Australia’s former human rights commissioner and member of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, spoke of a 14-year-old boy who was shot last November by Israeli soldiers, who then stood around casually for 45 minutes while he bled to death. He emphasised the special legal protections that are owed to children in armed conflict and challenged us to make the Wall of Tears a message of hope: a provocation for peace and justice.

Dr Saira Hussain, a consultant anaesthetist who has completed four volunteer medical missions in Gaza, shared heartbreaking experiences of working with children who had been horrifically injured in bombings.

Suzan Wahhab, president of Palestinian Christians in Australia, spoke of her life as a child in Jerusalem, living side by side with Muslim and Jewish families, and how the violence has escalated since then. Suzan called us all to recognise how Jewish, Christian and Muslim faith traditions each understand human beings as made in the image of God, as loved by God.

Speakers from the Muslim Collective, Hindus for Human Rights, and Jewish and Christian speakers from Sydney Friends of Standing Together each brought calls for compassion, justice and peace.

The many, growing, diverse voices across our country and the world calling for justice and peace in Palestine offer hope.

As Rev Charissa Suli, national president of the Uniting Church, says, “To remain silent about the disproportionate suffering and long-standing oppression faced by Palestinians would be to deny the truth of what we see and can never give us a just peace.”

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/10/wall-of-tears-18457-names-for-the-children-killed-in-gaza/

GUSNOTE: THESE ARE THE NAMES OF THOSE "RECORDED"... MANY MORE CHILDREN HAVE BEEN KILLED [WITH THEIR FAMILY] AND FORGOTTEN...

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

 

OUR HEARTS BLEED FOR ALL THE FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES AFFECTED BY THE TRAGIC ACT OF TERRORISM AT BONDI.
THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN AUSTRALIA DESERVES AS MUCH PEACE AS ALL THE PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.

AND WE MEAN IT.

heart of stone....

 

Vijay Prashad: Israel’s Ongoing Violence Against Palestine

Israel’s destruction of Palestinian infrastructure, its control over Palestinian money and Western corporate complicity in apartheid are interconnected fronts of the same offensive.

 

 

Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign has devastated Gaza’s wastewater system and destroyed or damaged nearly 90 percent of the territory’s water and sanitation infrastructure since 2023. 

Every day, 45,000 cubic metres of untreated sewage are discharged into the Mediterranean Sea while an additional 15,000 cubic metres seep into the ground. This collapse of sanitation infrastructure has led to an infestation of rats and other rodents in Gaza, with 2-in-3 children living in displacement sites plagued by these vermin. 

In September 2026, an exceptional algal bloom clogged filtration systems at five of Israel’s six desalination plants, with the Israeli environmental group Zalul warning that untreated sewage from Gaza was contributing to the worsening crisis.

As you sow, so shall you reap.

A ceasefire does not rebuild a home. In Gaza, Palestinians still live among the ruins of Israel’s campaign of mass killing and destruction. A year after the ceasefire took effect, hundreds of thousands remain in worn-out tents, temporary shelters, and damaged buildings. The halt in major fighting has not even restored the basic conditions in which people can live with dignity. 

[Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s top expert on Palestine, last week said the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza continues after the “ceasefire.”] 

The destruction in Gaza cannot be captured by data alone, though numbers do give a sense of the scale of the devastation wrought by Israel and its allies. 

For instance, a recent U.N. Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report found that 92 percent of Gaza’s economic establishments had been destroyed or damaged. 

In 2025, real GDP per person was $212, just 17 percent of its already low 2022 level, and more than 90 percent of Gaza’s working-age population was without employment. 

By May 2026, just $17 billion had been pledged towards the estimated $71.5 billion cost of Gaza’s recovery and reconstruction and only a small fraction of the pledged funds had been disbursed. Gaza will remain a ruin for some time yet to come.

Families in Gaza who have lived in tents for over two years report that their living spaces are so cramped that every aspect of family life — from conversation and cooking to sleeping and bathing — takes place without privacy. 

A mapping exercise by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) of more than 500 displacement sites found that only about half were within 500 metres of a safe space for women and girls. As of late July,17 such spaces remained closed for lack of funding and two more for security reasons, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. 

Psychosocial specialist Abeer al-Shurafa told al-Araby al-Jadeed [or The New Arab] that 

“the closely stuck tents leave people’s lives exposed to others and create conditions that encourage prying, interference in family affairs, and eavesdropping on conversations. Many of the problems that now exist between families are directly linked to this imposed reality. The absence of privacy affects the upbringing of children and relations between spouses and may contribute to an increase in family disputes and divorce rates because what once took place inside the home now happens in an exposed space where others can hear it.”

UNFPA reported that between April and June 2026, cases of gender-based violence recorded by 10 case-management partners rose 27 percent compared with the previous quarter. The three most commonly reported forms of violence — denial of resources, psychological and emotional violence and physical assault — each accounted for roughly one third of reported cases while forced and early marriage accounted for 2.6 percent. 

These figures cannot be separated from the material conditions created by Israel’s assault on Gaza. The destruction of homes, property and livelihoods, together with the breakdown of family and social support under displacement, has made women more dependent on aid agencies and men in their families for food, water, shelter and income.

Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank Israeli forces demolish Palestinian homes and Zionist settlers drive communities from land that their families have inhabited for generations. This displacement is not an accident.

In January and February 2025, Israeli forces entered the Palestinian refugee camps in Jenin, Nur Shams and Tulkarem, forcibly displaced their populations and destroyed hundreds of homes, roads and other civilian infrastructure. The roughly 33,000 expelled Palestinians remain barred from returning.

In February 2026, after years of attacks and harassment, Israeli settlers forced the 45 members of a Bedouin herding community out of al-Wadi al-Shamali, north of al-Lubban ash-Sharqiya in the occupied West Bank. 

The expulsion left the valley without a Palestinian presence, enabling settlers to extend their control over grazing land and threatening some 2,000 dunams of surrounding farmland, including olive groves. This seizure, along with Israeli plans to build thousands of illegal settlement units in the E1 area near Jerusalem, undermines the territorial basis of a future Palestinian state.

Less often discussed is the economic stranglehold that Israel exercises over the occupied Palestinian territory. According to the UNCTAD report, the Israeli government deducted or withheld more than $3.67 billion in Palestinian revenues between January 2019 and March 2026.

Palestinian dependence extends into the currency itself. Much of the income earned by Palestinians enters Palestinian banks in Israeli shekels. But Israel limits how much physical cash those banks can return to Israel’s banking system. 

Data from the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS) show that between 2021 and 2024, the permitted transfers did not keep pace with the volume of cash that required repatriation. The resulting surplus fills bank vaults with money that cannot readily be lent or used to settle payments, leading some banks to restrict new shekel deposits. The MAS study cites an IMF estimate that the cost of holding this surplus reduced Palestinian banks’ profits by about 20 percent.

Trapping this cash in Palestinian bank vaults creates more than an awkward pile of banknotes. Payments to suppliers depend on a functional correspondent banking link with Israeli banks. A breakdown of this system could disrupt imports of electricity, fuel, and water. 

In August 2026, Israel agreed to bring forward the fourth-quarter shipment of 4.5 billion shekels, easing the immediate pressure. 

But discretionary shipments do not end a system in which Israel determines whether Palestinian banks can process payments in the currency on which much of the Palestinian economy depends. Electronic payments may slow cash accumulation, MAS argues, but they cannot remove that structural constraint.

Israel is not the only beneficiary of this policy of apartheid, strangulation, and expropriation. 

On Sept. 25, the U.N. Human Rights Office updated its database of enterprises involved in specified activities linked to Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem. 

The updated list includes companies based in France (Egis and Egis Rail), Germany (Heidelberg Materials AG), the Netherlands (Booking.com), and the United States (Airbnb, Booking Holdings, Expedia Group and Tripadvisor). 

The report identifies activities such as services that sustain settlements and the commercial exploitation of land or other natural resources. It assesses different forms of corporate involvement, including contribution and direct linkage, rather than making a criminal finding about every firm.

These are familiar names because settlement commerce is folded into ordinary consumer and business infrastructure: a holiday listing, a transport service, a quarry product. 

The database is explicitly limited to settlement-related activities: it is neither a census of every company profiting from the occupation nor the end of the inquiry into those it names.

The U.N. Human Rights Office asks states to regulate businesses under their jurisdiction and calls on companies to prevent or address adverse human rights impacts. The question for Western governments is concrete: will they let companies registered at home continue to provide the services and material connections that enable the settlements?

While writing this newsletter, I came across “Nablus Street” by the journalist and poet Mustafa Abu Sneineh in an anthology of contemporary Palestinian verse. The poem seethes with frustration at apartheid, genocide, and expropriation. Ordinary life rubs against these ugly phenomena.

It was a wordless confession.
I recall the sun sliding into the darkness of the settlement,
Soldiers with guns beating the sunset
until it passed out.

A lovestruck boy stealing poems from Nizar Qabbani
and love letters from The Snow Comes Through the Window.
I’m still a lovestruck boy
Even though the sun has long since gone under
Even though my first confession of love
Was made in the crosshairs of the occupation’s guns.

I want to walk on Nablus Street with you too and to read Hanna Mina’s The Snow Comes Through the Window (1969). Mina, who was born in Syria, worked as a barber and distributed the Communist newspaper Sawt al-Shaab (Voice of the People) on the streets. His novel follows Fayyad, a leftist writer who flees to Lebanon to escape political persecution. It is the story of a sensitive man who moves from private fear to collective struggle. The soldiers in the poem beat the sunset, but the next day, the sun rises and brightens the sky.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow atChongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations.  His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

This article is from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

https://consortiumnews.com/2026/10/14/vijay-prashad-israels-ongoing-violence-against-palestine/

 

 

AS YOU READ THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, KNOWING THAT IT IS THE BIBLE OF THE DEVIL, YOU HAVE A BRAIN OF SLOPPY MUSH AND A HEART OF HYPOCRITICAL STONE...

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

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         RABID ATHEIST.

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OUR HEARTS BLEED FOR ALL THE FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES AFFECTED BY THE TRAGIC ACT OF TERRORISM AT BONDI.
THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN AUSTRALIA DESERVES AS MUCH PEACE AS ALL THE PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.

AND WE MEAN IT.

 

normal people....

 

Normal People author Sally Rooney has said her novels will no longer be supplied to booksellers in the UK as a result of her support for Palestine Action.

The Irish novelist said last year she intended to carry on using her royalties to support the group, which is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK.

In a statement to BBC News, Rooney said further publication of her work could constitute a "serious criminal offence", so she had agreed with her publisher Faber not to continue supplying her books in the UK.

"I have made every effort to be honest with the public about my beliefs and intentions, and I am wholly prepared to accept the consequences," she said.

Ebook editions have already been removed from sale in the UK, although many book shops still have existing stock of physical copies.

Waterstones confirmed to the BBC that Faber had advised there were no restrictions on booksellers keeping their current copies on the shelves.

Rooney has sold more than six million books globally, including 2.3 million in the UK, according to NielsenIQ BookData.

Normal People was released in 2018 and turned into a hit TV series two years later, effectively launching the acting careers of Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones.

READ MORE: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmx23q4g307vo

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….