“This is a public service announcement, with guitars”
So began the 1982 song, “Know your rights”, by The Clash.
Joe Strummer snarled that we have but 3 rights, beginning with:
Number one
You have the right not to be killed
Murder is a crime
On the weekend of 15 August 2026, you may have heard the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jamie McDonald, speaking after Luigi Mangione admitted to shooting United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The shooting was described by McDonald as a “heinous act”.
He then continued:
“this was not a spontaneous act of violence. It was deliberate. It was deliberate, calculated and premeditated. In the days leading up to the murder, the defendant very carefully prepared for the attack. He tracked Mr Thomson’s whereabouts, conducted surveillance along the route he knew Mr Thompson would take, and positioned himself to carry out the plan.….no grievance, political belief or ideological cause can ever justify murder….any person who celebrates, encourages or excuses actions like these is fundamentally wrong”.
On its face, that seems a pretty non-controversial statement, right? Murder is, as Joe Strummer sang, a crime. But then, if you continue on with The Clash’s lyrics, you’ll find that there are exceptions:
Murder is a crime
Unless it was done
By a policeman
Or an aristocrat
Oh, know your rights
And that is the point of the song. A kid with a grievance kills someone, it’s murder. The State kills someone, it is not.
A kid with a grievance kills one person, it’s murder. The State kills one or kills tens of thousands, it’s not.
So maybe that “all equal before the law” talk just isn’t true? If a kid who kills a CEO is guilty of murder, then surely when a nation kills, that’s murder too?
Why is it different, you might ask. Why is it that the actions of one person are judged by the state as “heinous” whilst the actions of the state, with exactly the same consequence, are not? Indeed, they are celebrated.
A kid kills Charlie Kirk, that’s heinous. Statues are erected in honour of the “fallen hero”. And if someone then splashes pain on said statue then Sarah Sizzle posts on X “Only the worst kind of people would do something so vile. Evil is rearing its head”. When a state instrumentality like ICE kills citizens, no consequence. When the USA bombs a school, a sports hall, a wedding? No consequence and not a feather ruffled.
When a policeman punches a person in the head, say a person lying on a stretcher, or on the ground in George Street, Sydney during a protest labelled as “unlawful” (but when the only thing found to be unlawful are the laws passed to try and supress that protest), no action. But if an ordinary person did that? If an ordinary person did that to a police officer?
When it comes to the Police killing people, with apparent impunity, the United States is the leader. Heavily militarised and heavily armed US “law enforcement” officers kill a lot of people, 1,314 in 2025 alone-more than 3 a day. They killed 1,383 in 2024 and 712 so far this year.
This year has seen the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis (in which city alone 230 people have died at the hands of “law enforcement” since 2000, including the well-known killing of George Floyd in 2020).
The US has killed more than 230 people by blowing their boats up. They didn’t just chance upon them or do it by accident. It is very deliberate. They surveilled and targeted the boats. Sounds just like what prosecutor McDonald was talking about.
But these are relatively small numbers compared to the slaughter committed by governments on a global scale. If we consider examples on a larger scale, the killing of many, is it any different?
According to Brown University’s Watson Institute for Internation and Public Affairs, the wars launched by the US in the last 25 years since 9/11, have killed at least 4.5 million people, (nearly 1 million of them as a direct result of the violence of those wars and the balance through disease, malnutrition, injuries, etc) and displaced more than 38 million people. That might count as a heinous act. And that level of death inflicted by the world’s policeman might help explain why such a blasé attitude is adopted to civilian deaths in their wars and the wars they fund.
But let’s consider some recent events and public statements.
Ben-Gvir can say of Palestinians “There are people who are not worthy of life. They shouldn’t live. They’re not even people” while calling for the Israeli cabal and their armed militias to “kill 30 or 40 people in Gaza every night” and carry out pogroms in the West Bank.
Killing 30 or 40 people a day, with the deliberate intent and planning to do so, seems like murder. Such statements might be “celebrating, encouraging or excusing” murder which U.S Attorney McDonald tells us is “fundamentally wrong”.
Less than a week later, Israeli ambassador to Australia Hillel Newman excused the killing of 7 World Kitchen aid workers by Israel and commented “…one must…understand that not every case where someone dies, where there is a casualty…means there is a criminal liability”. But those who killed the 7 aid workers knew exactly who they were dropping bombs on. They deliberately dropped those bombs and did so with the intention of killing the people in the car. Even if you were to buy the usual lie that “we thought there was a Hamas operative in the car” you might foresee that dropping a bomb on that car would kill everyone in it. And still the Israeli military made the deliberate choice to kill everyone.
When there are 7 deaths caused by the Israeli military killing aid workers (or paramedics, children, hungry people seeking food and refuge, etc) there is no consequence. But if a Palestinian kills an Israeli? Now, that’s murder and that is a mandatory sentence of death by hanging under Israeli law.
Of the 1,200 Palestinians killed in the West Bank since October 2023, the nearly 80,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza in the same period, the 98 Palestinians killed in Israeli prisons in that period, there has been one arrest- a “settler” stupid enough to be caught on film. But will he reach trial or have any consequence? We’ll see.
The slaughter, the murder of 7 people, trying to help others by feeding them when they are starving, was nothing but a “mistake” we are told. And yet whilst calling it a “mistake”, (incinerating 7 people in their cars after deliberately dropping high explosive ordinance on them from a drone) the ambassador can’t event apologise as that might carry “legal ramifications” (such as parting with a few Shekels). It would be the right thing to do, but he can’t bring himself to do it. Luigi Mangione at least admitted that he had done wrong.
The real reason that there was no apology became apparent a few days later when an October 2025 interview with Colonel Nochi Mendel came to light. Mendel was in charge of the killing of the 7 World Kitchen aid workers. He didn’t mince words. He was clear. He said, “I’m not sorry for what I did“. Well, if you’re not sorry, if you don’t think that what you did was wrong, then of course you don’t apologise.
US Attorney McDonald talks about and condemns the “deliberate, calculated and premeditated” actions of Luigi. He points to Luigi tracking and surveilling his target before acting. But isn’t that what we hear is the news every day? That our illustrious friends, Israel and the United States, have engaged in targeted strikes after extensive surveillance? Boasting “you can’t hide”.
And if we want to talk about “deliberate, calculated and premeditated” killing, what better example could there be that the placement of explosives in pagers and triggering their explosion? Now that is the height of pre-meditated murder.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu frequently addresses targeted military strikes as a “core component” of Israel’s doctrine of pre-emptive and self-defensive deterrence against Israel’s regional adversaries. The US President Trump has repeatedly threatened and authorized military operations and targeted strikes. So, if a frightened kid does it, then it’s murder. If the world’s most powerful militaries do it, then its murder. But we don’t call it that.
At the same time that Israel announced that there would be no investigation into the killing of 7 World Kitchen workers, Israel announced that they will “investigate” the circumstances of Hind Rajab’s murder (along with 5 members of her family and the 2 paramedics sent to help her). Those murders occurred in January 2024. For the first time, Israel admits that Israeli soldiers fired on the car she was in and that the passengers in the car were killed as a result of Israeli soldiers firing on the car (and that a tank fired at the ambulance coming to Hind’s rescue). This is after 2 and a half years of denying that Israeli soldiers were even in the area.
What is curious is that Israel chose to release news of the World Kitchen investigation and the proposed “investigation” into Hind’s killing on the same day that the Zomi Frankcom humanitarian award was launched and on what would have been Hind’s 8th birthday.
But it is not just Israel that kills at will and with calculation. It would be wrong to single them out for criticism (even if the above two cases, Zomi Frankcom’s murder and Hind Rajab’s murder, are particularly callous and well known).
On 1 September 2026 the United States dropped bombs on a wedding in Kuhestak, Iran, killing 4, including the bride, and wounding dozens. This was dismissed by the US Vice President with the remark “things happen”. Indeed, they do and the things that happen when the US and bombs are involved are usually civilian deaths, such as the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School bombing 28 February 2026.
The Vice President also offered the assurance that the US “never targets civilians”. If that were true you do wonder why the US has a pattern of bombing weddings, such as the Wech Baghtu wedding party airstrike in November 2008 Afghanistan. Then 37 were killed. All but 4 of those killed were women and children.
That strike led to Hamid Karzai, then Afghan President, to call on then President Obama (the man famous for winning a Nobel Peace Prize whilst authorising the greatest number of drone strikes and extrajudicial killings/murders recorded to that time, but now, of course, exceeded) to ensure that “…there will be no civilian casualties in Afghanistan. We cannot win the fight against terrorism with airstrikes – this is my first demand of the new president of the United States – to put an end to civilian casualties”.
Obama didn’t heed that call, and 46,000-47,000 civilians were ultimately killed in the US led war in Afghanistan before, like Vietnam in 1975, they abandoned the country, this time to the Taliban that they had created and, with it, left the country in poverty and with myriad social and economic problems. That is in addition to the 150,000-200,000 civilians killed in the Iraq war (which country they also left in a mess).
Whether the US targets civilians or not, a whole lot of civilians seem to get killed, whether as “collateral damage” (again, why that euphemism rather than calling it what it is – “murdered”). And that is just those shot or bombed out of existence. Those numbers don’t account, for example, for those who die from malnutrition caused by shortages created by sanctions and blockades (Madeleine Albright had famously quipped “sanctions are amongst our most effective weapons” and when challenged that sanctions on Iraq had led to preventable deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children responded “I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it”). Tells you something about her morality.
And the reality of these civilian deaths is now revealed in a story about “The Gospel” or “Habsora”, the AI targeting system used by Israel. These revelations make clear just how deliberate such civilian deaths are and why they cannot be called anything other than murder.
The story of “The Gospel” is a coproduction of 2 Israeli publications, +972 Magazine and Local Call. The story somewhat mirrors the revelations of the documentary NAZA recently screened at the Venice Film Festival. That award winning documentary has resulted in Israeli Minister of Culture Miki Zohar indicating an intention to strip the film’s Israeli co-directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of their citizenship for “betraying the state”, suggesting of the directors (and presumably those they interviewed and who revealed the truth about Israel’s actions) that “self-loathing…burns in the creators, who are willing to harm their homeland just to get applause from antisemites around the world”.
And that statement by the Minister reveals the reality that has been paraded before our $124million Royal Commission and which is inherent in the IHRC definition of antisemitism, that criticism of Israel, no matter how justified and accurate, is dismissed and labelled as antisemitic not because it is but because criticism of Israel (and the United States) must be silenced.
What is revealed by these print and film stories, based on statements by Israel soldiers and intelligence officers, is that the killing of civilians is no accident. It is deliberate. The +972 story includes this:
Another source asserted that “nothing happens by accident”. The source reportedly said that “when a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit (another) target.”
“We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
The investigation blames a large number of civilian targets to a particular AI system called ‘Habsora’ (The Gospel).
“This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a ‘mass assassination factory’,” +972 reported.
One of the sources explained that ‘The Gospel’ “processes enormous amounts of data that ‘tens of thousands of intelligence officers could not process’.
This system, according to a former Israeli intelligence officer, “enables the (Israeli) army to run a ‘mass assassination factory,’ in which the ‘emphasis is on quantity and not on quality.’
“Five different sources confirmed that the number of civilians who may be killed in attacks on private residences is known in advance to Israeli intelligence and appears clearly in the target file under the category of ‘collateral damage,” the report said.
One of the sources specified that “When the general directive becomes ‘Collateral Damage 5,’ that means we are authorized to strike all targets that will kill five or less civilians — we can act on all target files that are five or less.”
Going back to Mr McDonald’s statement, this sounds remarkably like “carefully prepared” attacks, where people are “tracked”, where the killers have “conducted surveillance”. It sounds like the killing of civilians might be “deliberate, calculated and premeditated”. It sounds remarkably like a “heinous act”. It sounds like Murder.
But no. We can’t call it that. That would only lead to allegations of antisemitism and “blood libel”, even if these are truths acknowledged and revealed by those Israeli’s who have carried out the attacks and are reported by Israeli journalists and film makers.
And the attempts to silence criticism of Israel come from across the English-speaking world.
Consistent with moves in the US and UK, there are calls for Australian Universities to lose their funding if judged to have not sufficiently stifled antisemitism in the form of pro-Palestinian campus activities.
Visas are denied to pro-Palestinian speakers, whilst 40 past and serving IDF members are invited to participate in the recent Sydney marathon (complete with police security details provided to each runner) and the proscription of pro-Palestinian protest groups, notably Palestine Action, and even the banning, in Queensland, of phrases “Globalise the Intifada” and “From the River to the Sea” (though Israeli ministers use the later phrase routinely without criticism and as a reference to a “Greater Israel” that includes all of Gaza, the West Bank and Golan Heights (as well as parts of Lebanon and Syria)).
Whilst the proscription of Palestine Action has attracted some Australian reportage, by and large critical of Palestine Action, the prosecution of English Jewish activist Tony Greenstein has managed to attract no attention.
Tony was charged under Section 12(1) of the UK Terrorism Act 2000 (introduced by that famed peacenik Tony Blair – the man who last week, in an Orwellian twist, told the Palestinian Authority that they cannot refer to “Palestine” in their school curriculum – as The Party opines “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past“) with inviting support for a proscribed organisation following three social media posts published on 7 October 2023.
Facing up to 14 years in prison for describing the breakout from the Gaza Strip as a “Gaza ghetto uprising”, (and whilst simultaneously condemning the violence perpetrated) Greenstein delivered a blistering closing defence to the jury that resulted in spontaneous applause echoing from the packed public gallery.
I have included below the reportage from The Canary of Tony’s closing remarks to the jury that preceded his acquittal. The comments are instructive of the ends to which the state, in this case the UK government, will go to deal with and seek to silence criticism of Israel’s actions. The trial did not result in Tony’s conviction (a Jewish man routinely labelled as antisemitic). However, a few weeks later, the bank accounts of The Canary were frozen by two banks resulting in that media site’s inability to operate.
From The Canary 22 August 2026:
Giving evidence, Greenstein described Gaza as a cage and a human prison where Palestinians had been locked up for 57 years, asking the jury to imagine living under an inescapable blockade with poisoned water and power cuts. He insisted that when a colonial power holds another people down, those people have the right to resist….
Greenstein anchored his anti-Zionism in his family history and Jewish heritage. He recounted how his family fled Poland while most relatives were murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp, and recalled how his father, Rabbi Solomon Greenstein, stood at Cable Street in 1936 against Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Raised as a religious Zionist who celebrated the 1967 war, Greenstein became an anti-Zionist in 1969 after researching the Nakba for a school debate.
Greenstein drew chilling parallels between historical and contemporary fascist rhetoric, pointing out how Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and Nazi architect Heinrich Himmler both used identical dehumanising language by referring to human beings as animals to justify mass slaughter.
In an impassioned section of his address, Greenstein confronted the jury directly with the realities of the ongoing genocide:
If the devil exists, it is amongst those who prohibit anaesthetics entering Gaza. It is amongst those who deliberately starve children to death, those who bomb tents and burn children alive, and those who call Palestinians “human animals”.
Explaining his use of the phrase “Gaza ghetto uprising”, Greenstein invoked Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. When Edelman died in 2009, he was accorded a state funeral with full military honours in Poland, yet he remained despised and boycotted by the Israeli establishment because he was a lifelong anti-Zionist who explicitly stated that Gazans were being treated just like Jews were in Warsaw, addressing Palestinian fighters as fellow partisans. Greenstein warned the jury that Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000 is written so broadly that it would have criminalised the Warsaw uprising itself, remarking that it is wide enough to drive a coach and horses through.
Turning to the state’s targeting of Palestine Action, Greenstein drew a direct historical comparison with the Suffragettes. He stressed that the Suffragettes engaged in far more violent direct action — not just smashing windows but setting off bombs — yet today they are universally celebrated as having been on the right side of history. He told the jury that future generations will view Palestine Action in exactly the same way. He contrasted this with the grotesque abuse of counter-terror legislation, pointing out that while roughly 200 people were arrested for terrorism in 2024, that figure rocketed to 3,000 in 2025, with the average terror suspect now being a 50-something white woman.
He challenged the deep hypocrisy of the state and the architects of the counter-terror legislation. Greenstein pointed out the grim irony that Tony Blair and Jack Straw introduced the Terrorism Act 2000 while launching illegal imperialist wars across Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign invasions that directly bred Islamic State, destabilised the region, and brought blowback to the UK in the form of the 7/7 London bombings and the Manchester Arena attack. The very politicians who engineered modern terror legislation were the ones whose foreign policies brought terrorism to British soil.
He contrasted this with double standards in the establishment media, pointing out that mainstream figures like Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart interviewed Abu Mohammad al-Jolani — the former leader of the proscribed Syrian militant group HTS (formerly the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda) who previously had a multi-million-dollar CIA bounty on his head before becoming Syria’s president — without facing dawn raids or device seizures. He reminded the jury that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had once labelled Nelson Mandela a terrorist, noting that history always delivers its own verdict on such political classifications.
Citing John Stuart Mill, George Orwell’s maxim that liberty means telling people what they do not want to hear, and Benjamin Franklin’s warning on trading liberty for security, Greenstein likened the state’s prosecution to Idi Amin’s famous quip that freedom of speech exists, but not freedom after speech.
Drawing his address to a close, Greenstein quoted Lord Devlin on trial by jury being the lamp that shows freedom lives and cited the 1670 Bushell’s Case commemorated on the wall of the Old Bailey, which established the constitutional right of juries to acquit according to their conscience without judicial intimidation.
And hence the closing verse of the Clash’s song, is prescient, enumerating right number three:
You have the right to free speech
As long as
You’re not dumb enough to actually try it
