Bits and Pieces.

Image Credits: your intrepid reporter.

Last Friday hundreds of students, their parents, activists, unionists and First Nations representatives gathered at Sydney Town Hall to demand effective action against climate change.

Image Credits: your intrepid reporter.

Heavy rain fell as a series of speakers addressed the crowd, exiting fromn Bathurst Street to march.

These are the protesters’ demands:

• No new oil, coal, or gas projects, including the Adani mine
• 100% public renewable energy and exports by 2030
• Fund a just transition and job creation for fossil fuel workers and their communities
• Real carbon cuts, not offsets
• First Nations-led solutions that guarantee land rights and care for Country.

As usual in those events, excessive heavy police presence surrounded the rally. This time, however, no police officer ranking above sergeant saw it fit to endure the rain. Concern for the public’s safety has a limit, it seems.

Image Credits: your intrepid reporter.

Reporters were as conspicuous by their absence. A Google News search using the string “climate protesters sydney” yielded two results: the West Australian and The Daily Mirror.

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Lately, the State of Israel is having a hard time: to the worrying anti-democratic initiatives of the Netanyahu regime, we have to add that generally respected international human rights NGOs are beginning to call it an apartheid State.

To make things worse, in the areas the State of Israel illegally seized in 1967 and still occupies, and where illegal settlements proliferate, settler attacks these last few days against Palestinians start to look a lot like the old-fashioned pogroms which once targeted Jewish populations in Europe.

Enter Israel apologists. The word “apartheid” cannot be used to describe Israel, they say, for it only applies to situations where a minority oppresses a majority, to the minority’s benefit. But the majority of the Israeli population is Jewish.

Following that line of thought, apartheid applied to South Africa because there it was a white minority oppressing a large black and mixed race majority.

Now, astute readers may say the objection of Israel apologists is childish: they are evidently saying something like “don’t look at the facts, let’s focus instead on semantics”.

Astute readers would be right, of course. The whole things is obviously a diversion, a red herring.

But the thing is that, on top, that red herring is not only false, but demonstrative of ignorance.

You see, in situations like this, it’s always helpful to study the etymology of words. And “apartheid”, although widely used in English speaking countries, is not of English origin. It comes from the Dutch and it was kept in Afrikaans, the language of South African Afrikaners (aka Boers). Over there it was used to describe the practice of keeping people of different categories (in the South African case, racial categories), regardless of their share in the South African population, unmixed, separate (yes, you guessed it: apart).

In other words, one could translate the Dutch/Afrikaans “apartheid” with an English neologism: “apart-hood”. But that’s not really necessary. The word “segregation” as used in the American south fits the bill.

It also seems, to me, to fit the policy of the State of Israel towards the Palestinians.