Australian state premier says antiwar protest spoils ‘beautiful Christmas tradition’
Jacinta Allan, the premier of Australia’s southeastern Victoria state, has attacked pro-Palestinian protesters after a department store cancelled the launch of its Christmas window display due to a planned rally against the war in Gaza at the popular retail outlet in central Melbourne.
Allan labelled the protest “divisive” saying “blocking the Christmas windows won’t change a thing in the Middle East, but it will let down a bunch of kids in Melbourne”. “We cannot let ugly protests ruin a beautiful Christmas tradition,” she said.
Activist group Disrupt Wars called for a “Crash the Christmas Windows” rally on Sunday, encouraging people to bring banners, flags, placards and noise-makers to peacefully highlight that there should be no festive fun while children are being massacred in Gaza.
Australian department store chain Myer postponed the launch event on safety grounds while the protest organisers also announced they had called off their rally, saying they were pleased with the outcome and that children should be able to enjoy the window display without a “consumerist party”.
Tell that to the 17,000 orphans fending for themselves in Gaza
Dutch government defused crisis over Israeli football violence, prime minister says
Moroccan-born Nora Achahbar has unexpectedly quit her role as junior finance minister after far-right leader Geert Wilders blamed Moroccans for attacks on fans of Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Dutch capital on November 7.
Achahbar decided to exit the government on Friday after a heated cabinet meeting discussing the violence.
“The polarising interactions of the past weeks made such an impact on me that I am no longer able to effectively carry out my duties as deputy minister,”
Achahbar said in her resignation letter to parliament.
Achahbar’s resignation triggered an emergency meeting in which other cabinet members of her centrist New Social Contract (NSC) party also threatened to quit.
Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof said late on Friday that his cabinet had reached an agreement that no other NSC members would resign. Schoof had attributed the violence to people “with a migration background”, while Wilders claimed that the perpetrators were “all Muslims” and “for the most part Moroccans”.
Dutch authorities however reported that the Israeli fans set fire to a Palestinian flag before the match, chanted anti-Arab slurs and vandalised a taxi.
Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters gather at De Dam in Amsterdam ahead of the UEFA Europa League match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv on November 7
Western media didn’t do much more than ‘parrot Israeli propaganda’
Mohamad Elmasry, a media studies professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, has finished empirical studies looking at Western media coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.
He found that Western media didn’t do much more than “parrot Israeli propaganda regarding al-Shifa Hospital [in Gaza City] and the war more generally”.
Western news outlets “tended to rely overwhelmingly on Israeli and pro-Israeli sources. Palestinian sources were mostly neglected as were pro-Palestinian sources,” he told Al Jazeera.
“It’s not a conspiracy; it’s not as though journalists are showing up to work and saying, we’re really going to make the Israelis look good today. But there is a structural problem here today,” Elmasry added.
“Western news organisations simply do not get Israel-Palestine right.”
