
Joan
29.4K posts

Joan
@Feijoa_Chutney
The inner musings of a Boomer banned from Talkback radio. Science deniers need not reply



"Estaba mirando desde fuera la ventana de una panadería y vi como soldados sionistas le decían al panadero que si no colaboraba, que tirase a su hijo al horno. Cuando se negó, lo golpearon y tiraron a su hijo al horno" Othman Akel, un palestino superviviente de la Nakba de 1948, durante la masacre sionista de Deir Yassin, vio como las bandas sionistas de Lehi e Irgun quemaron vivo a un niño palestino en un horno... imitando las brutales prácticas de los nazis contra los judíos en el Holocausto, apenas unos años antes.



The Nakba never ended. The Israeli apartheid regime is still committing genocide in Gaza and violently erasing entire communities across Palestine and Lebanon. I'm leading a resolution to recognize the 78th anniversary of Nakba and reaffirm Palestinian refugees' right of return.









He has no right. Peters is the Foreign Minister and no one tells Peters what to do. He should bet back in his lane. rnz.co.nz/news/political…

Targeted by extremism: What the Parliament occupation revealed about Dame Jacinda Ardern’s Covid leadership A clip from Prime Minister reveals the targeted hostility Dame Jacinda Ardern faced in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The scenes captured during the Parliament occupation reveal what happened when New Zealand’s globally recognised leading response collided with conspiracy politics imported through the online rabbit holes of Trump-era extremism. Outside Parliament, the streets were clogged with trucks, campervans and protesters blasting horns through central Wellington for hours on end bringing the city to a halt. Fake gallows stood on the forecourt with ropes hanging from them. Abuse echoed toward the Beehive through loudspeakers while conspiracy slogans spread across the crowd. Inside Parliament, Ardern could hear all of it. Protesters compared her to Hitler while accusing the Government of tyranny over vaccine mandates and public health restrictions. But the footage reveals something deeper than frustration over Covid rules. American flags waved through the occupation. Imported rhetoric dominated signs and speeches. The language increasingly mirrored the conspiracy movements and far-right narratives that surged through the United States during and after Donald Trump’s presidency. Ardern described protesters as having “fallen into someone else’s wormhole.” That observation now lands with added weight today. Under Ardern, New Zealand’s Covid response was internationally recognised during the early stages of the pandemic. Strict border measures, lockdowns and vaccine mandates kept death rates among the lowest in the developed world for long periods. Ardern became one of the most recognisable political figures of the Covid era, praised overseas for decisive leadership and crisis communication. That recognition also turned her into a target. As anti-vaccine movements and misinformation networks exploded online, New Zealand became increasingly exposed to the same conspiracy ecosystems spreading across American social media channels, particularly Facebook. Fringe livestreams, Facebook groups and imported culture war politics began reshaping parts of the anti-mandate movement. The footage captures how personal that hostility became. Ardern spoke about fake gallows carrying the names of politicians and family members. She recalls hearing prolonged abuse through Parliament walls every day while trying to do her job as PM. Public appearances were hijacked after locations were leaked to Facebook. The pressure extended beyond politics and into family life. Online conspiracies targeted Ardern's partner Clarke Gayford and their daughter. One rumour campaign pushed the hashtag “Where is Clarke Gayford?” across social media. “When I’d see it, I would think, here’s at home raising our baby girl,” Ardern said. “I made the choice to be there, my family didn’t, and yet they paid a price.” Despite the pressure, Ardern refused to frame the occupation as representing mainstream New Zealand opinion. She repeatedly described it as a loud minority radicalised by misinformation and extremist overseas rhetoric. Even while acknowledging some New Zealanders held genuine concerns about mandates, Ardern drew a hard line between democratic disagreement and intimidation. “We didn’t intend for mandates to be forever,” she said. “But what I wasn’t going to do was arbitrarily remove them because people were occupying Parliament’s grounds.” Those scenes now stand as one of the clearest examples of how global conspiracy politics reached New Zealand during the pandemic. The occupation became a spectacle that exposed how quickly online extremism, misinformation and imported political radicalisation could spill into real-world harassment aimed directly at a sitting prime minister and her family. Ardern inside Parliament, hearing chants and threats through the walls, remain a telling record of the pressure surrounding one of the most volatile periods in modern New Zealand politics. *Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures, CNN Films, HBO Documentary Films *This footage has been republished for the purposes of educational news reporting and public interest, in accordance with New Zealand’s fair dealing provisions under the Copyright Act 1994. #nzpol




The First Arab-Israeli War & The Creation of The Gaza Strip In the latest instalment of our Gaza series, @DalrympleWill and @tweeter_anita ask: how did neighbouring Arab nations respond to the displacement of Palestinians in 1948?









