Unsurprisingly, Australia’s latest refugee policy is thankfully slammed as a meaningless sham in an election year, with little care for the lives likely to be shattered:

To the roomful of Sri Lankan refugees, little has changed for those left behind since they made their perilous voyage in a wooden boat to Christmas Island last year.
Now living in Brisbane, the young Tamil men — granted asylum in the past few months — are adamant that the flow of boatloads of asylum-seekers will never subside because of any decision of the Australian government.
For them, as well as their brothers, sisters, cousins and friends, Kevin Rudd’s suspension of asylum claims made by Sri Lankans and Afghans is meaningless.
They say it is the ongoing persecution of the Tamil minority — acknowledged by the government in granting asylum to each of them — that will fill as many boats that can be organised by the people-smugglers.
“I risked my life in the boat because I would have been killed if I stayed,” one refugee told The Australian. “It is a very dangerous place for Tamils, and nothing has changed since I left, no matter what the Sri Lankan government tells Australia.
“There are young Tamils still being kidnapped and killed, people are scared and they have no access to medicine or education — they have to leave.”
The eight men — aged between 20 and 36 — yesterday spoke to The Australian on the condition of anonymity.
All of them say they lost family in the civil war, which raged for decades until last year, and all know of people in Sri Lanka who still fear for their lives and are planning to make the voyage.
The average price for passage among them was $US15,000 — restricting the exodus to the children of merchants.
One man said it was a small price to pay by his businessman father, who was willing to “sell everything” to ensure his only son lived long enough to give him grandchildren.

A salutory tale by Paul McGeough in the Sydney Morning Herald on America’s dirty relationship with “thugs” in Kyrgyzstan. Yet more evidence that the “war on terror” continues under the Obama administration and human rights and democracy have nothing to do with it:

The events of the last week in Bishkek have highlighted one of the stranger turns in the region – silence by the US on the human rights shortcomings of the ousted regimes has won it a reputation locally as the bully backer of a corrupt and abusive leader who has been deposed by people power, while authoritarian Moscow is hailed as a defender of democratic reform.

Here’s famed Israeli leftist and novelist David Grossman speaking at a rally in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem on Friday. Whatever the criticisms directed at the organised Left in Israel – and there are many – Grossman’s words here are poignant and powerful:

I think that we are all beginning to grasp — even those who maybe don’t really want to — how 43 years ago, by turning a blind eye, by actively or passively cooperating, we actually cultivated a kind of carnivorous plant that is slowly devouring us, consuming every good part within us, making the country we live in a place that is not good to live in.
Not good not only if you are an Arab citizen of Israel, and certainly if you are a Palestinian resident of the Territories — not good also for every Jewish Israeli person who wants to live here, who cherishes some hope to be in a place where humans are respected as humans, where your rights are treated as a given, where humanity, morality, and civil rights are not dirty words, not something from the bleeding-heart Left. No. These are the bread and water, the butter and milk of our lives, the stuff from which we will make our lives, and really make them lives worth living here.

A travesty that will likely receive little outrage in the Western political elites:

A new military order aimed at preventing infiltration will come into force this week, enabling the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank, or their indictment on charges carrying prison terms of up to seven years.
When the order comes into effect, tens of thousands of Palestinians will automatically become criminal offenders liable to be severely punished.
Given the security authorities’ actions over the past decade, the first Palestinians likely to be targeted under the new rules will be those whose ID cards bear home addresses in the Gaza Strip – people born in Gaza and their West Bank-born children – or those born in the West Bank or abroad who for various reasons lost their residency status. Also likely to be targeted are foreign-born spouses of Palestinians.
Until now, Israeli civil courts have occasionally prevented the expulsion of these three groups from the West Bank. The new order, however, puts them under the sole jurisdiction of Israeli military courts.

The new order defines anyone who enters the West Bank illegally as an infiltrator, as well as “a person who is present in the area and does not lawfully hold a permit.” The order takes the original 1969 definition of infiltrator to the extreme, as the term originally applied only to those illegally staying in Israel after having passed through countries then classified as enemy states – Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria.

See: www.antonyloewenstein.com