It was dangerous, irresponsible and wholly wrong to publish the name of the Batley teacher who showed his class images of the Prophet Muhammad - and criminal to threaten him. Meanwhile, this largely fabricated controversy plays into the hands of the far-right movements and think tanks which have poured so much time, effort and intellectual resource into the argument that there are irreconcilable tensions between the West and Islam.

Let's take a step back. It has long been evident that there is an unspoken alliance between Muslim militants and Muslim bashers. Both assert that Islam and the West cannot coexist.This belief is false, as history repeatedly proves, but every time a row like this blows up it strengthens their case, with the mainstream media brutally airing their toxic talking points.

Batley and its aftermath has much less to do with free speech than Britishnewspaper columnists have unanimously asserted

In this articleI will explain why the Muslim parents who complained were probably (I use the word probably because it cannot be stressed too strongly that we do not know all the facts) entitled to do so.

I will provide evidence that the press coverage has been twisted to portray Batley Muslims as bigots at war with so "British values".But first I will show that Batley and its aftermath has much less to do with free speech than Britishnewspaper columnists have unanimously asserted.

We never have had untrammelled free speech in Britain. Racist speech is illegal. So is hate speech and the incitement of violence. Decent people welcome these interdictions. Meanwhile, libel laws punish the publication of false and defamatory material. Generally speaking, these laws are only available to the very rich who abuse them to protect their reputation.

Nevertheless, it is hard to argue that libel laws should not exist.

Then there are the rules which protect the state. Britain and our allies have committed terrible crimes overseas, especially though not exclusively in Muslim countries. It is difficult, sometimes impossible,to get some of these crimes reported.

Bear in mind the fate which can await those who do - such as Julian Assange, who has been held in Belmarsh prison for two years and may yet die in jail. His crime:free speech.

As Millie Cooke and I reportedherein the British Journalism Review, the British mainstream media with rare exceptions - have downplayedor ignored the Assange case.Yet the United States' insistence that Assange should be extradited for reporting thetruth about US war crimes is the most serious case involvingfree speech so far this century.

Julian Assange's case exposes British hypocrisy on press freedom

As far as I can discover (I will correct the record if I am wrong) not one of the writers and polemicists who have written so urgently for free speech in Batley have spoken up for Assange.

NotMathew Syed. NotMatthew Parris,Fiyaz Mughal,Charles Moore,JoannaRossiter, Kenan Malik. NorNick Timothyin the Telegraph. Nor any other among the large congregation of writers who have piled in against the school and the so-called Batley protesters in apparent defence of free speech.

I invite theseinfluential writers, some of whom I greatly admire, to ask themselves whether they have been guilty of double standards. The attempted extradition ofAssange is backed by massively powerful global interests including the might of the US and British governments, supported by the military and political establishment in both countries.

Don't forget that the majority of US crimes exposed by Assange illegal incarceration in Guantanamo and elsewhere, massacresof unarmed civilians, torture were carried out inMuslim countries.

Bear in mind that had these been carried out by a Muslim state against western citizens, these crimes would have been greeted by banner headlines and Assange would today be hailed as a hero. Remember that it's because we are talking about western assaults on Muslims, and not the other way around, that Julian Assange is a pariah and his revelations are suppressed.

I now turn to the events at Batley. On 22 March, a religious studies teacher showed an image of the Prophet Muhammad during a discussion about blasphemy.The teacher is reported to have shown an image from French magazine Charlie Hebdo, but the actual image has not been released - and this report has not been confirmed by the school.

A better argument should be about the right to offend - and whether and when the right to free speech overrides the offence and emotional damage caused

There were protests outside the school last Thursday and Friday morning. The teacher has been suspended pending an investigation and is now in hiding. Most of these images have been described as "cartoons," yet cartoons are normally thought of as humorous.

There's nothing remotely humorous or funny about the images produced by Charlie Hebdo about the prophet. Like the Jyllands Posten Danish cartoons, they were targeted at Muslims and calculated to mock and insult.Any depiction of the prophet, revered by Muslims, is forbidden within Islam. It does not matter how respectfulthe portrayal. And these portraits were not respectful.

Was it necessary to display these images?The teacher could have discussed the issue without showing them.

We do not know exactly what was shown, or how the teacher framed the debate. But this is crucial to an understanding of what happened. Some commentators have presented the debate as an alternative between showing the image and observing blasphemy laws.

I have no knowledge at all of whether the teacher presented the issue in that way, although that is what most observers have assumed. If so, that is not a real debate in the context of a class discussion. Defence of free speech is legal.Enforcement of blasphemy laws is illegal since they were abolished inEngland and Wales in 2008 and more recently in Scotland. That leaves nothing to debate.

I suggest that a better argument should be about the right to offend -and whether and when the right to free speech overrides the offence and emotional damage caused.

As always, this argument should be placed in context. We are talking of a class populated by 13- and 14-year-old children, many of whom are Muslim. Guidance is available for teachers handling delicate issues like this. In the course of preparation of this article, I have found it helpful to consult an information pack for teachers calledLiving with Controversy.

Others might care to do the same.

Prevent: We need to listen to those harmed by UK counter-extremism policy

There is one other consideration which the well-paid and comfortable leader writers at the Telegraph and The Times might not have taken into account. Free speech does not exist for 13-year-old Muslim children in Batley.One phrase out of line in a discussion as sensitive as the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and a teacher might feel he had no choice but to report them under Prevent guidelines.

This means that if the teacher did present the issue as a "debate"between the law and an illegal act, rather than what is lawful and the benefits of self-restraint, he was putting pupils at risk.Once again there is no evidence that he did this, but that is what many of the media commentators rushing to his defence appear to assume.

Every article in the mainstream press - bar none - has made essentially the same argument. This case is about free speech versus bigotry.

One thing worries me. We are talking about some of the poorest and least influential people in this country.British commentators pay a zero price for painting these people as bigots who pose an existential threat to our cherished western freedoms.

Episodes like this sometimes make me wonder whether there are in fact two separate categories of free speech. One for us, and one for Muslims

Episodes like this sometimes make me wonder whether there are in fact two separate categories of free speech. One for the rich and one for the poor. One for the powerful and one for the weak. One for us, and one for Muslims. This makes it significant that the only article I have found challenging the consensus was made outside the mainstream media in aself-published blog.

I had not come across the author, Jon Yates, before. He has a book about how to heal fractured societies being published this summer. Yates pointed out that Britain cheerfully acceptsall kinds of interdictions on free speech, and nobody minds. He suggested we should all attempt a mental experiment and imagined that the teacher:

"Had brought in an article from the 1950s America about race relations. He had read it aloud without noticing that in the third and fifth paragraph was the n-word. He had not stopped but had read it out. He had then spent some time loudly discussing exactly how to pronounce the word... Or maybe he decided to act out Othello. To catch everyone's attention, he arrived in class in blackface."

He says that would have been deemed unacceptable. The headmaster would have apologised. The teacher would have been suspended while an investigation was carried out.And that is exactly what happened atBatley. The headmaster acted sensibly. He was not to quote Brendan O'Neill in the Spectator "buckling to religious extremists, cravenly begging for forgiveness for something that ought to be perfectly acceptable in an institute of learning".

Meanwhile, one man more than any other figure has come to embody the "angry Muslims"reportedlyprotesting outside Batley Grammar School. Attentive newspaper readerswill be familiar with his turban, his full silver beard and mask. Photographs present him as the leader of the protests.

I tracked down him down.MuftiMohammed Amin Pandor is a former civil servant. He told me that far from protesting, hewas outside the school at the request of the police, who asked him to calm things down.

I checked. Here isvideo footage of him doing just that,stressing that "due process"should be observed.

Look carefully at the press photographs of Mohammed Pandor and you will see that in some of them the protesters are actually outnumbered by the press.Which was the real baying mob outside the school?

Was it the "angry Muslims"portrayed in British media reports? Or was it the British media on a mission to provoke Boris Johnson's latest culture war?

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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Batley cartoon row: Media on a mission to provoke Boris Johnson's culture war - Middle East Eye

On January 4, a British court blocked a United States request to extradite WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.

The US has charged him with hacking government computers and espionage after he obtained and published hundreds of thousands of classified documents between 2010 and 2011.

District Judge Vanessa Baraister said extradition would be oppressive taking into account Assanges mental health, saying he was at risk of suicide.

Assange was arrested in April 2019 by UK police from the embassy of Ecuador in London, where he had been granted asylum since 2012.

Here is what you need to know:

Assange is an Australian-born computer programmer and founder of WikiLeaks an international, non-profit whistle-blowing organisation that was created in Iceland in 2006.

The 49-year-old, a father, is WikiLeaks publisher and former editor-in-chief. In 2018, Icelandic journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson took over as editor.

Assange came to prominence in mid-2010 after WikiLeaks published US military logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, and US cable leaks in November that year.

Former US military personnel Chelsea Manning sent the information to Assange.

Manning was charged and sentenced to 35 years imprisonment in 2013 for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, and other offences.

The Espionage Act was passed to deter any interference in US military operations and prevent individuals and groups from supporting enemies of the United States.

Mannings sentence was commuted in January 2017, days before then-US President Barack Obama left office.

WikiLeaks shot to fame in April 2010 after the website released a 39-minute video of a US military Apache helicopter firing over and killing more than a dozen Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists.

The footage leaked by private Manning led to global outrage, reigniting a debate over the USs occupation of Iraq and wider presence in the Middle East.

In July that year, WikiLeaks, together with several media outlets, such as the New York Times, published more than 90,000 US military documents related to the War in Afghanistan.

These included previously unreported details about civilian deaths, friendly-fire casualties, US air raids, al-Qaedas role in the country, and nations providing support to Afghan leaders and the Taliban.

Former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning [File: Ford Fischer/News2Share/Reuters]Months later, WikiLeaks published 391,832 documents related to the Iraq War. The reports, also referred to as The Iraq War Logs, provided on the ground details as reported by US troops, dating from January 2014 to December 2019.

The leaks were the single largest in US military history, exposing huge civilian casualties.

In November 2010, WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables, in what is now better known as the Cablegate scandal.

Some 250,000 reports were released, dating back to 1996 up until February 2010. The cables provided analysis and insights from more than 270 US embassies and consulates from around the world.

After Assange was arrested, a grand jury in the state of Virginia charged him with one count of computer intrusion/hacking for allegedly assisting Private Manning in accessing classified documents.

In May 2019, Assange was further charged under the US Espionage Act of 1917 on 17 counts for soliciting, gathering and publishing US military and diplomatic documents in 2010, all provided by Manning.

Assange is the first publisher to be charged under the act.

The leaks highlighted in the indictment include the US diplomatic cables, information on Guantanamo Bay prison detainees and Iraq and Afghanistan activity reports.

The US government has said it will appeal the British courts January 4 decision, with some expecting the trial to go all the way up to the UK Supreme Court.

If Assange is extradited to the US and charged under the Espionage Act, he could face up to 175 years in jail. On the less serious charge of computer intrusion, the WikiLeaks founder would receive a maximum of five years.

Extradition between the UK and the US is rare.

In 2012, a request from the US to extradite UK hacker Gary Mackinnon for hacking into US military databases was rejected. Similarly, the US refused a request from the UK earlier this year to hand over Anna Sachoolas, the wife of a US intelligence officer accused of killing a British citizen due to dangerous driving.

The US indictment against Assange does not include any charges of rape, of which he was accused of by two Swedish women in 2010. Assange has repeatedly denied the accusations.

A Swedish court issued an international warrant for his arrest in 2010 so he could be extradited back to the nordic country. After being released on bail in the UK, Assange was granted asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in June 2012 by then-President Rafael Correa, where he resided for nearly seven years.

On November 19, 2019, all rape charges against Assange were dropped.

While supporters of the Wikileaks publisher have welcomed the UK courts decision, many have expressed caution noting that the case was not decided on the grounds of press freedom.

According to rights groups, Assanges possible extradition and sentencing in the US would be a serious threat to free-speech rights and to the work of investigative journalists around the world.

Amnesty International has said the effect of Assange being convicted on investigative journalists, publishers and anyone who publishes classified government material would be immediate and severe.

US lawyers argue that charges against Assange could be challenged under the USs First Amendment law, which protects the right to freedom of speech and expression.

See original here:

Julian Assange: What you need to know about the WikiLeaks ...

"I'm hiding from an Elon Musk-like character..." Netflix

The character, a white man named James Sullivan (Richard Armitage), is the CEO of a corporation, UTS, that controls suburbs that orbit the earth. The company has big plans to relocate all of humanity to Mars, which it privately owns. UTS corporation dwarfs Tesla, the future-oriented company owned by the South African-born Elon Musk, the richest man on our earth until mid-Februaryhe goes back and forth with Jeff Bezos for this title.

Directed by Jo Sung-hee, Space Sweepers is set in 2092, maintains a fast pace, includes plot twists and turns that are not always easy to track, features lots of explosions, lots of robots, and that raw examination of capitalist class structures we have come to expect from the best of South Korea's directors (The Housemaid, Piet, Train to Busan, Parasite, and so on).

Indeed, the space sweepers in Space Sweepers are basically space janitors. (Incidentally, according to Wikipedia, the show should really be called Space Victory, as that's the literal translation of the film's Korean title, Seungriho.) The janitors are in the risky business of cleaning the space junk that swirls around earth. They are clearly essential workers, but they are paid peanuts.

And so, on one side we have these broke janitors (mostly POCsAsians, Africans, South Asians), and on the other we have a white CEO, who looks to be in his late 40s but who is, in fact, 152-years-old. The rich die hard.

Aditya Mani Jha of Mint Lounge has this to say about it:

But there is one big difference between Musk and Sullivan. Musk wants humans to move to earth because of a solar catastrophe that will happen millions (if not billions) of years from now. The distance between us and that catastrophe is unlikely to get anyone excited about living on another world with another sky, another sun, another year. Sullivan knows this is the key problem in his commercial plans for the Red Planet. Most humans would just prefer stay on earth. The solution to the obstacle? It cannot be said without a SPOILER ALERT.

To get into the mood of what Sullivan has in mind for earthlings who do not want to become totally privatized Martians, let's read one of the best passages in W. G. Sebald's 1998 book The Rings of Saturn:

Can you feel that? If so, then you will easily see what Sullivan has in store for the only living planet in our solar system. By destroying earth's livability, he can force humans to colonize Mars on the terms of a contract. The problem with earth is that everyone (humans, other animals, and also plants) has a right to it, can still lay claim to it, is still attached to the billions of years that formed its biosphere. The contract can only go so far, earthlings. But the mad dream of capitalism has been the creation of a zone that is much like what Dubai is for foreign workers. A zone where citizenship is replaced by the contract.

This is how Daniel Brook describes the guest-worker system in Dubai in his book, A History of Future Cities:

But there is still worker unrest in Dubai, because Dubai is still on earth, the planet that is shared by every living thing. Mars, on the other hand, can be owned by the CEO who makes it livable. And those who are forced to call it home owe everything to the corporation that bankrolled its livability.

Elon Musk will eventually stop this talk about the sun burning the earth to a crisp in an unimaginably distant future and start siding with Sullivan's view of the Mars colonization problem: The essence of earth is irredeemably anti-capitalist.

View original post here:

Elon Musk Is the Ultimate Villain in the Korean Sci-Fi Film Space Sweepers - TheStranger.com

Julian Assange has an unlikely new defender: Sarah Palin, one of his best-known victims.

I am the first one to admit when I make a mistake, the former Alaska governor said in a two-minute video posted to YouTube Saturday.

Wikileaks, the website Assange ran to disseminate purloined data, posted family photos, private messages, and government emails hacked from Palins Yahoo.com account in 2008, weeks after Sen. John McCain named her as his vice-presidential running mate.

I made a mistake some years ago, not supporting Julian Assange thinking that he was a bad guy, Palin continued in the clip. And Ive learned a lot since then He deserves a pardon.

The conservative favorite went on to praise Assange for what he has done in the name of real journalism, and thats getting to the bottom of issues that the public really needs to hear about and benefit from.

Its a 180-degree turnaround from the Republican stance of 12 years ago, when GOP stalwarts vilified Assange for what they saw as a dirty campaign trick.

Hacking strikes at the heart of our democracy, Long Island Rep. Peter King, a top McCain-Palin surrogate, said at the time. You cant go invading someones privacy that way.

Getty Images

AP

Joe Judge choosing Colt McCoy on Sunday night against the...

But since then and particularly after Wikileaks published material that embarrassed Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in 2016 some conservatives have developed a strange new respect for Assange, who faces espionage charges for his release of secret American military documents in 2010.

President Trump, who heaped praise on Assange during his 2016 presidential campaign, is reportedly mulling a pardon.

Palins plea for mercy was first published on the Gateway Pundit website.

Read the original:

Sarah Palin calls for Julian Assange's pardon

The UK Governments new action plan to protect journalists will do little to burnish the credentials of a would-be champion of media freedom that continues to imprison the worlds most famous dissident journalist.

Continuing to promote itself as the soi-disant global defender of journalistic freedom, the UK Government has just grandly unveiled a National Action Plan for the Safety of Journalists to protect newsmen and women from harassment and threats. UK journalists have apparently suffered abuse and attacks while going about their work, and the government is selflessly riding to their rescue. The plan involves new training for police officers as well as aspiring and existing journalists, and commitments from social media platforms and prosecution services to take tough action against abusers.

Facebook and Twitter, we are told, are on board, promising to respond promptly to complaints of threats to journalists safety. The government makes no mention of the threat Facebook and Twitter pose to journalism. During the past few years, Twitter and Facebook have been closing down, or threatening to close down, the accounts of journalists, and with cheerful abandon. Moreover, during the 2020 US presidential election, the two social media giants interfered with the work of journalists by preventing the sharing of New York Postsunflattering articles about Hunter Biden, son of then-candidate Joe Biden. Twitter went further and locked the newspapers account for the two critical weeks before the election.

Prime Minister (and former journalist) Boris Johnson issued a statement nobly declaring: "Freedom of speech and a free press are at the very core of our democracy, and journalists must be able to go about their work without being threatened. The cowardly attacks and abuse directed at reporters for simply doing their job cannot continue. This action plan is just the start of our work to protect those keeping the public informed, and defend those holding the government to account."

For all the self-congratulatory verbiage emanating from the government, its hard to discern very much in this plan other than a promise to collect data about the supposed ongoing harassment of journalists.

Among the journalists the government of Boris Johnson will not be rushing to collect data about is of course Julian Assange. Assange has been languishing for nearly two years in HMP Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison dubbed Britains Guantanamo Bay. Its detainees include serial killers, child rapists and child killers, the 2013 murderers of a British Army soldier in Woolwich, the Manchester Arena bomber and the London nail bomber.

Julian Assange has been convicted of nothing other than the minor, procedural crime of skipping bail. Assange did not of course skip bail. In November 2010, Swedish prosecutors obtained a European Arrest Warrant, demanding that Assange be detained in the UK so that he could be questioned in relation to the sexual offense allegations made by two women with whom he had had brief sexual relations and who wanted him to be tested for HIV. Assange had to be questioned in person, and only in Sweden.

Assange fought the extradition request, suspecting that it was a ruse to get him to Sweden, from where he would be swiftly extradited to the United States, which, in all likelihood had prepared a secret indictment against him. The British courts consistently ruled against Assange and in favor of the Swedish extradition request. On June 15, 2012, following the British Supreme Courts dismissal of his challenge to the Swedish extradition request, Assange walked into the Ecuadorian embassy in London and asked for political asylum.

We learned subsequently from e-mail exchanges between the Swedish prosecutors and the UK Crown Prosecution Service, whose head at the time was current Labor Party leader Sir Keir Starmer, the British were encouraging the Swedes to refuse to come to London to interview Assange.

Though Sweden announced in May 2017 that it was discontinuing the investigation of Assange, the British authorities insisted that Assange would still face arrest the moment he stepped out of the embassy on the charge ofbail skipping.

On April 11, 2019, the government of Ecuador withdrew Assanges asylum status, and invited the British authorities to enter the embassy and seize him. Assange was rushed before a judge and immediately sentenced to prison for 50 weeks. Within minutes of his arrest, the United States confirmed what Assange had said all along. It announced that it would seek his extradition on the basis of a secret indictment that had been prepared a year earlier. The charge was that Assange had conspired with Chelsea Manning to hack into a secure computer system. A month later, the United States announced 17 additional charges against Assange under its Espionage Act.

Within a month, UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid signed the extradition warrant that would allow the extradition of Assange to the United States. Javid did this even though the 2004 extradition treaty between the US and the UK explicitly states that Extradition shall not be granted if the offense for which extradition is requested is a political offense. Assanges offense publication of government documents detailing war crimes and official abuses of power is about as political as any offense can get.

In early January 2021, Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied the US extradition request for Assange on the grounds that the inhuman conditions in a US Supermax prison could drive Assange to suicide. Then, with extraordinary inconsistency, she ordered Assange to remain in Belmarsh, the UKs Supermax, while the US appealed her decisiona legal process that could last for years.

Yet even as Assange was languishing in prison, amidst a global pandemic and among some of the worst criminals in the land, the UK Government was launching a campaign to promote itself as the global champion of journalistic freedom and the scourge of unenlightened regimes resisting transparency.

In July 2019, one month after the Home Secretary had signed off on the USs extradition request, the UK Government co-hosted, with Canada, a Global Conference on Media Freedom, part of an international campaign to shine a global spotlight on media freedom and increase the cost to those that are attempting to restrict it. In the spirit of shining a spotlight on media freedom, the UK Foreign Office refused to permit RT and Sputnik to attend the conference. We have not accredited RT or Sputnik because of their active role in spreading disinformation, the Foreign Office explained.

Without a trace of irony, UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt declared to the conference attendees: We are on the side of those who seek to report the truth and bring the facts to light. We stand against those who suppress or censor or exact revenge.

Scarcely a day goes by without the UK Governments sounding off on the persecution of journalists somewhereother than in the UK of course. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has weighed in on the persecution of journalists in Belarus. He was disturbed by, yes, the denial of accreditation. The Belarusian authorities, he tweeted out in August 2020, are continuing to target @BBCNews, local and international media by cancelling their accreditation to report in Belarus. The UK championed the cause of Svetlana Prokopyeva, who was convicted on charges of justifying terrorism, even though she was not sent to prison. During the recent protests over the trial and imprisonment of Alexey Navalny, Raab sternly warned Russia not to target journalists.

The UK Governments self-congratulatory commitment to media freedom notwithstanding, its own record is rather unimpressive. Journalist advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders publishes an annual survey of the state of journalistic freedom in the world. According to the most recent World Press Freedom Index, the UK has slipped to number 35 in the world. Among the issues Reporters Without Borders raised were the continued imprisonment of Assange, as well as the criminal probe of the July 2019 publication of embarrassing diplomatic cables. The documents, like those of WikiLeaks, were clearly genuine since their appearance in print led to the swift resignation of the UK ambassador to Washington.

The governments action plan is not only self-serving, but also disingenuous. Why do journalists get special protections denied to others? Anyone in the public eyepoliticians, lawyers, judges, athletes, actors, TV celebritiesis likely to experience abuse, personal insults and threats. This rush to single out journalists for special protection smacks of governmental unctuousness, a heavy-handed attempt to flatter journalists by suggesting that they are doing something frightfully dangerous, something likely to provoke powerful interests. Very few journalists do any such thing. Indeed, that the government is so eager to tout the virtues of journalists would surely indicate that it has little to fear from them. The kind of journalist who does indeed take risks, who does dedicate his life to bringing transparency to governmenta Julian Assange, in other wordsis not the sort of journalist the UK Government will do anything to protect. On the contrary, it will aid and abet in his persecution.

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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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Britain proudly announces a plan to protect journalists but if it really cared it would free Julian Assange - RT

Yesterday morning Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Christian Porter is an innocent man under our law.

The PM previously decided there shouldnt be an inquiry into the suitability of Australias first law officer to keep his position after a series of allegations of sexism, sexual misconduct and rape. Porter strenuously denies the allegations.

Morrison based his decision on absolutely zero expert opinion and didnt seek out the solicitor-generals advice. His own two cents (and we can assume Jens guidance) was enough to do away with the serious claims put forward by a woman who later took her own life.

This is the latest display of Liberal men protecting their pack. And this pack, former foreign affairs ministerJulie Bishop said on Monday, is a group with such disgusting machismo they called themselves the big swinging dicks.

The group name was firstouted in 2009byThe AustraliansGlenn Milne. Members reportedly included Christopher Pyne, Steven Ciobo, Greg Hunt, Peter Dutton, Jamie Briggs, Mathias Cormann, Michael Keenan and Morrison.

The claim wasrepeatedby former minister Sharman Stone last month. Bishop said a decade ago and now that this group tried (and failed) to thwart her career. Liberal men have denied the existence of this group in 2009 and today.

Whether the group existed or not, the macho pack mentality it encapsulated certainly still does. Just take a look at who leads them.

On Julian Assanges extradition, Morrisonjokedabout how plenty of his mates have asked me if they can be my special envoy to help sort out the issue with Pamela Anderson. On International Womens Day in 2019 he said thatwomen should rise but not at the expense of [men].

He suggested he needs to contextualise alleged rape victims as his daughters to muster an iota of empathy. He interrupted Social Services Minister Anne Ruston when she was asked about what its like to be a woman in Parliament. When Labors Jim Chalmers said he cried in Kevin Rudds office, Morrisonmocked himfor being sensitive.

Morrison has previously denied his party had a women problem.

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Liberal women have been abandoning their ranks in droves. Most recently, Nicolle Flint stepped down after previouslycalling out sexist abuse. Julia Banks, having previously called out a culture of bullying, said the political system was stuck in time. Bishop resigned after saying the workplace culture was untenable. Former senator Lucy Gichuhi said that male bullies of the Liberal Party need tostop beating up our women.

While women are pushed out of the party after being ruthlessly mocked and bullied by men on the same side as them, there is apack of dudeswho seem to be protected in their positions.

Theres Angus Taylor, who remains in Parliament after the watergate scandal,among other incidents. Duttons pork-barrelling allegations and au pairs have largely been forgotten. Alan Tudge holds his seat even after the alleged poor treatment of and affair with a female staffer. Stuart Robert was brought back even after robotdebt. Paul Fletcher faced nothing forland overpayment.

Lets not forget Porter who alsostacked the Administrative Appeals Tribunalwith his Liberal mates. He was promoted by Malcolm Turnbull just weeks after being reprimanded for being drunk in the company of young women.

The list goes on.

Meanwhile, former Nationals deputy leader and agriculture minister Bridget McKenzie is the only senior Coalition MP to ever face a consequence since Morrison became PM following the sports rorts affair.

Of the men alleged to be in the big swinging dicks group, few remain though they left for different reasons to recent Liberal women.

Pyne and Ciobo left after the 2018 leadership spill, Keenan left in 2019 to spend time with family, and Cormann left last year to pursue a career at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Briggs is one of the few Liberal men to lose his position,resigning in 2015after complaints about his behaviour on a night out in Hong Kong by a female staffer.

All this does little for female representation in Parliament. In the House of Representatives, just31% of members are female a statistic dragged down by the fact women represent just 19.5% of the Coalition party room.

The huge difference in treatment and accountability (and the ignorance to the gender implications that drive this) shows the mentality of the big swinging dicks group is still alive and well.

This article is curated from our sister publication Crikey.

READ MORE

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Time to cut off the influence of the party's 'big swinging dicks' and for PM to listen - The Mandarin

WASHINGTON The Biden administration has signaled that for now it is continuing its predecessors attempt to prosecute Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, as the Justice Department filed a brief this week appealing to a British court to overturn a ruling that blocked his extradition to the United States.

This week, human rights and civil liberties groups had asked the acting attorney general, Monty Wilkinson, to abandon the effort to prosecute Mr. Assange, arguing that the case the Trump administration developed against him could establish a precedent posing a grave threat to press freedoms.

The Justice Department had been due to file a brief in support of its appeal of a judges ruling last month blocking the extradition of Mr. Assange on the grounds that American prison conditions are inhumane.

The appeal was lodged on Jan. 19 the last full day of the Trump administration so the decision to proceed with filing the brief was the first opportunity for the Biden administration to reconsider the disputed prosecution effort. A spokeswoman from the Crown Prosecution Office said on Friday that the American government filed the brief on Thursday.

The brief itself was not immediately available. Filings in British court, unlike in the United States, are not public by default. Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman, said the American government was not permitted to distribute it, but confirmed its filing.

We are continuing to seek extradition, he said.

The case against Mr. Assange is complex and does not turn on whether he is a journalist, but rather on whether the journalistic activities of soliciting and publishing classified information can be treated as a crime in the United States. The charges center on his 2010 publication of diplomatic and military files leaked by Chelsea Manning, not his later publication of Democratic Party emails hacked by Russia during the 2016 election.

Prosecutors have separately accused him of participating in a hacking conspiracy, which is not a journalistic activity. The immediate issue at hand in the extradition case, however, is neither of those things, but rather whether American prison conditions are inhumane.

In January, a British judge, Vanessa Baraitser of the Westminster Magistrates Court, denied Mr. Assanges extradition citing harsh conditions for security-related prisoners in American jails and the risk that Mr. Assange might be driven to commit suicide if held under them. She held that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States.

In its new brief, the Justice Department was expected to defend how the federal Bureau of Prisons handles security inmates and to argue that such conditions were not a legitimate reason for the close American ally to block an otherwise valid extradition request.

Rebecca Vincent, the director of international campaigns for Reporters Without Borders, said the group was extremely disappointed that the Biden Justice Department had pressed on with the effort to bring Mr. Assange to the United States for prosecution.

This marks a major missed opportunity for President Biden to distance himself from the Trump administrations terrible record on press freedom, Ms. Vincent said.

She warned: The U.S. government is creating a dangerous precedent that will have a distinct chilling effect on national security reporting around the world. No journalist, publisher or source can be confident that they wouldnt be criminally pursued for similar public interest reporting.

Ms. Vincent also characterized the case against Mr. Assange as political. In January, however, Judge Baraitser had rejected Mr. Assanges arguments that the American charges against him were politically motivated, ruling that they had been brought in good faith. The Justice Department had said that it was gratified by that part of her ruling.

During the Obama administration, Justice Department officials weighed whether to charge Mr. Assange. But they worried that doing so would raise novel First Amendment issues and could establish a precedent that could damage press freedoms in the United States, since traditional news organizations like The New York Times also sometimes publish information the government has deemed classified.

The Obama administration never charged Mr. Assange. But the Trump administration moved forward with a prosecution. Its first indictment merely accused Mr. Assange of a hacking conspiracy, but it then filed a superseding indictment charging him under the Espionage Act in connection with publishing classified documents.

In 2019, as Mr. Biden was seeking the Democratic Partys nomination for president, The Times asked whether he would keep or jettison the novel Espionage Act charges against Mr. Assange the Trump administration had brought.

In a written answer, Mr. Biden demurred from taking a position on the case but drew a line between journalistic activities and hacking.

Journalists have no constitutional right to break into a government office, or hack into a government computer, or bribe a government employee, to get information, Mr. Biden wrote, adding, We should be hesitant to prosecute a journalist who has done nothing more than receive and publish confidential information and has not otherwise broken the law.

Charlie Savage reported from Washington, and Elian Peltier from London.

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Biden Justice Dept. Asks British Court to Approve Assange Extradition - The New York Times

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has announced plans to guarantee free speech at UK universities. The government is creating the legal framework for state intervention on the campuses, to protect right-wing reactionaries and silence protest.

Williamsons proposals include placing a free speech condition on universities which want to access public funding, allowing the Office for Students (OfS) to fine institutions which breach the condition, appointing a free speech champion to investigate alleged breaches and recommend redress, and allowing academics, students or visiting speakers to sue for compensation where they claim to have had their free speech infringed.

The requirements will also apply directly to student unions, which the government is looking at bringing under the remit of the OfS instead of the Charity Commission.

The announcement follows a letter sent by Williamson to the outgoing and incoming heads of the OfS, Sir Michael Barber and Lord Wharton of Yarm. Under the heading Specific priorities, the education secretary criticised Barber for failing to intervene aggressively enough on the campuses and called on Wharton to do more:

[T]o date there has been little regulatory action taken by the OfS in relation to potential breaches of the registration conditions relating to freedom of speech and academic freedom I intend to publish a policy paper on free speech and academic freedom in the near future and I would like the OfS to continue to work closely with the Department to deliver this shared agenda and ensure our work is closely aligned. I would also like it to take more active and visible action to challenge concerning incidents that are reported to it or which it becomes aware of, as well as to share information with providers about best practice for protecting free speech beyond the minimum legal requirements.

Wharton is a Tory peer who was given the OfS position despite lacking any experience in the higher education sector.

Williamsons free speech proposals are taken almost word-for-word from a report by the right-wing Policy Exchange thinktank last summer, Academic freedom in the UK: Protecting viewpoint diversity. The report called for a Director for Academic Freedom, an academic freedom clause, for the OfS to be willing to exercise its existing powers to fine HEPs [higher education providers] for alleged breaches of academic freedom and for student unions to be subject to the same regulations.

Tom Simpson, a professor at Oxford University and an associate fellow at the Policy Exchange, welcomed Williamsons proposals, before asserting that a very online culture allows the views of a minority to exert disproportionate influence on administrators, and to exert a chilling effect on other academics.

The World Socialist Web Site described the Policy Exchange report as a manifesto for a political alliance of the Tory government and its social Darwinist periphery, the libertarian right, and the most right-wing sections of the Labour Party. It argues for a combined intervention into both academia and student politics on campus to suppress left-wing protest and give free-reign to far-right ideologues.

That the right feel able to posture as defenders of democratic rights is thanks to the role played by the pseudo-left and identity politics on campus. A similar report by the right-wing Adam Smith Institute (ASI) states, Student unions are perceived as ineffective by students, lack democratic legitimacy, and undermine freedom of association and expression Only one-in-ten students actively participate in student union elections.

This much is true. But contrary to the ASIs self-serving claims, it is a result of the right-wing climatethe scramble of the affluent middle class for personal advance based on assertions of identitywhich dominates official campus politics.

Identity politics has nothing to do with socialist politics, which seeks to unify the working class, allied with the best elements of student youth, in a struggle not for individual or sectional advantage but for social equality. Rooted in irrationalist and reactionary postmodern philosophy, identity politics is opposed to the Enlightenment, and above all Marxism, and is advanced by the pseudo-left to obscure the fundamental division in societyclass.

Lacking popular support or democratic principles, the identity politicians have utilised the practice of no platforming inherited from the 1970s. The tactic gained broader sympathy among students several decades ago because it targeted fascists and the far-right. Even then, it had dangerous political implications in that it was often linked to appeals for proscriptions and bans by the state and other institutions when history has shown repeatedly that measures nominally introduced against the right are then routinely deployed against the left.

The lurch to the right by the petty-bourgeois layers that find a home either in the Labour Party apparatus, various identity-based groups and campaigns, and in the pseudo-left groups, has exposed more clearly the reactionary implications of no-platforming.

By far the most outrageous case is the attempted blacklisting of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, on grounds of the Swedish states concocted sexual assault investigation. In 2012, George Galloway was banned by the National Union of Students on the grounds of being a rape denier for defending Assange. In 2015, Cambridge Students Union attempted to ban Assange from speaking on campus, and Sheffield Students Union tried the same in 2016. Both efforts were overturned by popular opposition.

Campus identity politics assumes its most absurd dimensions in the conflict between different identity groups. In 2016, a National Union of Students LGBT representative at Canterbury University refused to speak alongside gay rights advocate Peter Tatchell, accusing him of being racist and transphobic. In 2015, the student unions womens officer at Cardiff University led a petition of 3,000 students to bar feminist campaigner Germaine Greer from speaking, again for her transphobic views. In 2015, feminist Julie Bindel was barred from speaking at Manchester University students union, which claimed her presence could incite hatred towards and exclusion of our trans students. Bristol University students union voted for a blanket ban on trans-exclusionary radical feminists, most prominently Greer, in 2018. Last year, Oxford historian of class and gender relations Selina Todd was no-platformed by the Oxford International Womens Festival after being labelled a transphobe.

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This is a reactionary, anti-democratic mess. The de facto drawing of a line between someone like Tatchell and members of the far-right is hysterical nonsense and has repulsed large sections of the population, opening the door to government intervention on the campuses, which will be used to invite in the real fascistic right.

Under the protection of the governments new free speech requirements, student protests of the kind which challenged social Darwinist pseudoscientist Noah Carl being awarded a prestigious research fellowship at Cambridge University will be suppressed. Academics like Oxfords Nigel Biggar, who specialises in apologias for the crimes of the British Empire, will be allowed to get on with their mission of creating a right-wing counter-spiral in academia.

The fascists Tommy Robinson and Stephen Bannon, French National Rally leader Marine Le Pen and Alternative for Germany spokesperson Alice Weidel have previously been invited to speak at the Oxford Union, all provoking significant opposition that would now be punished as an attack on free speech. Such invites of despised far-right figures will be encouraged at campuses across the country, led by so-called free speech societies set up by darling of the Tory right and anti-lockdown campaigner Toby Young. Young was the Tories first pick to lead the OfS before his attendance at a secret eugenics conference was exposed in the London Student .

Events in Germany provide a sharp warning. On February 3, seventy German academics founded the Network for Academic Freedom with the declared mission of rehabilitating discredited Professor Jrg Baberowskia leading academic voice of right-wing extremismto promote other far-right voices and demonise students who voice opposition to the relativisation of the crimes of German imperialism, in particular of the Third Reich.

The hypocrisy of the British governments claim to be acting in defence of free speech is on display in Williamsons letter to the OfS heads. Two subheadings below Free Speech and Academic Freedom is Antisemitism, under which the education secretary asks the OfS to help force higher education institutions to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition provides a mechanism to attack free speech regarding opposition to Israel and the ethnic-nationalist ideology of Zionism. It has been used to justify the mass purge of left-wing Labour members and the cancellation of pro-Palestinian events.

The UK government is also proceeding with a review of left-wing extremism aimed at criminalising huge swathes of the left. It will target far-Left fringe groups accused of hijacking important causes and mainstream cultural activitythat is, seeking to advocate their political views. The outcome of this review will build upon the surveillance of students already in place under the Prevent scheme supposedly targeting radicalisation by Islamist groups.

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) unequivocally oppose the governments attempt to regulate political life on campus. State intervention must be opposed and political disputes fought out democratically among students, including, as an urgent question, how to oppose the sharp turn to the right being carried out by the ruling class.

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UK government to appoint free speech champion to spearhead right-wing offensive at universities - WSWS

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

On February 9, the US Justice Department announced that US President Joe Biden, as in so many other areas, intends to serve Donald Trumps second term when it comes to persecuting heroes guilty of exposing US war crimes and embarrassing American politicians.

As Trumps presidency drew to an end, some activists held out hope that hed pardon political prisoner Julian Assange, whose incarceration at the hands of the Swedish, British, and US governments has, according to the UNs Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, gone on for more than a decade now (between British prisons and de facto house arrest in Ecuadors London embassy). No dice. Trump handed out plenty of pardons to political cronies, but left Assange in stir.

In January, British judge Vanessa Baraitser declined to extradite the founder of WikiLeaks to the US on trumped up (pun intended) espionage charges. Not because the charges are clearly nonsense, though they are. Nor because neither Assanges person or his alleged actions were subject to US jurisdiction, though they werent. She denied the extradition because she (probably correctly) considers Assange a suicide risk if hes handed over.

The Biden regime intends to appeal Baraitsers decision instead of dropping the false charges, firing the prosecutors who filed them, pardoning Assange, and awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, all of which would come to far to less than he deserves.

Bidens attitude is less surprising than Trumps. During the 2016 campaign, Trump praised WikiLeaks for releasing Democratic National Committee emails that detailed the joint campaign between the DNC and Hillary Clintons presidential campaign to ensure that she, and not US Senator Bernie Sanders, received the partys presidential nomination.

Prior to that, WikiLeaks had embarrassed then Secretary of State Clinton with its Cablegate release, which demonstrated that Clinton had ordered US diplomats to spy on UN officials.

And even before that, WikiLeaks had released Collateral Murder, a classified US military video of US troops murdering Iraqi civilians and Reuters journalists in Baghdad. The murders took place before Obama became president, but his regime participated in the militarys cover-up of the incident and oversaw its failure to bring the killers to justice.

You can probably see why Joe Biden is less inclined than Donald Trump to let such a criminal walk free. If theres a mystery here, its not why Biden wont do the right thing; its why Trump didnt.

The wheels of justice may turn slowly, but if they grind exceedingly fine the British courts will deny extradition with finality and free Assange, while Biden, Trump, and numerous others will eventually answer to charges of violating US Code, Title 18, Sections 241 and 242 conspiracy against Julian Assanges rights and deprivation of those rights under color of law.

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Same as the Old Boss, Julian Assange Edition - CounterPunch.org - CounterPunch

Media freedom groups and supporters of Julian Assange have asked the Biden administration to drop the USs pursuit of the WikiLeaks' founder, saying Donald Trump was opposed to the idea of a free press.

In their first appeal to the US government since Joe Biden became president less than three weeks ago, more than 20 groups working to promote human right and a free media, wrote to the department of justice, asking it to drop the case against Mr Assange, saying they were fearful "the way that a precedent created by prosecuting Assange could be leveraged.

The indictment of Mr Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do, said the letter, signed by groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Journalists at major news publications regularly speak with sources, ask for clarification or more documentation, and receive and publish documents the government considers secret. In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalise these common journalistic practices.

There was no immediate response from the White House. But in a short statement released on Monday evening, a spokesperson for the department of justice, said: "We are continuing our efforts to seek the extradition of Julian Assange."

In early January, a British judge in London turned down a request extradition from the US to send Mr Assange to America to face a total of 18 charges, that accused him of breaches of the Espionage Act and hacking into a Pentagon computer.

The 1917 Espionage Act, passed at a time when the US was at war, does not allow a defendant to argue they were acting in the public interest.

In her ruling on January 4, the the judge, Vanessa Baraitser of Westminster Magistrates Court, said she believed the case had been brought in good faith and said the accusations levelled at Mr Assange would constitute a crime in Britain.

Yet, she said she feared the risk the 49-year might take his own life, were he sent to the US, was very high. As a result, she ordered Mr Assange to be remain in jail while the US authorities appealed her decision, and sought to provide additional information about the steps that would be taken to ensure the WikiLeaks' founder did not harm himself, if he was extradited.

Supporters of Mr Assange welcomed the judges ruling in the short term, but said they feared the US would continue to seek to punish the Australian citizen.

He and his supporters say the US wants to stop him and his organisation from publishing details of the Wests deadly actions around the world, often carried out as part of the so-called war on terror.

Julian has the reputation as a speaker of the truth. And WikiLeaks revealed war crimes, and crimes against humanity, Mr Assanges father, John Shipton toldThe Independent earlier this year.

The persecution of Julian is to destroy the capacity of Julian to speak the truth about what's happened over the last 20 years or so, and the destruction of the Middle East.

Some of the most powerful information was provided to WiliLeaks by former army intelligence officer Chelsea Manning. She was arrested in 2010, and sentenced her to 35 years in a military prison at Fort Leavenworth.

She spent almost seven years in detention, much of it in solitary confinement, before the sentence was commuted by Barack Obama shortly before he left office.

In their letter, the activists point out the Obama administration, of which Mr Biden was a key part, decided not to pursue the prosecution of Mr Assange. The Trump administration positioned itself as an antagonist to the institution of a free and unfettered press in numerous ways. Its abuse of its prosecutorial powers was among the most disturbing, the letter says.

We are deeply concerned about the way that a precedent created by prosecuting Assange could be leveragedperhaps by a future administrationagainst publishers and journalists of all stripes.

The New York Times said the department had a deadline of Friday to file a brief in the British court if it wanted to continue to pursue the matter. The department is currently headed by a caretaker official, Monty Wilkinson, the acting attorney general. The letter was addressed to him.

In recent days, Stella Morris, Mr Assanges partner and the mother of two of his children, has said despite Britain being hit by cold weather, his winter clothes remained in prison storage.

She wrote: Julian should be warm, at home with me and his two sons.

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Julian Assange supporters urge Joe Biden to drop prosecution saying Trump was opposed to free press - The Independent