TIMES UP IN AUSTRALIA! WILL THE REST OF THE WORLD FOLLOW?

There is a palpable sense emerging around the world that, despite the on-going violence in Iraq and the slow strangulation of the Gazan people by the racist Zionist Israeli government and the continuing on-again off-again threat of attack against Iran, that there is a glimmer – just a glimmer mind – of light that can be vaguely seen at the still distant other end of a long and still deadly tunnel.

A cynic might suggest, perhaps even quite rightly, that that’s easy for me to say being in Australia on the eve of an election that is likely to see the rejection of Prime Minister John Howard’s nearly twelve year old attempt to build the worlds first pseudo-democratic corporatist fascist state. Hopefully, however, Howard’s political demise will be the beginning of the end of extreme right-wing dominance over the western world. Next year President George W. Bush and, more importantly, Vice-President Cheney, will be gone and, if a Democrat becomes president, Bush and Cheney’s neoconservative entourage will be gone with them.

The upcoming farce at Annapolis will further highlight to the world the failure of Western right-wing governments to resolve the sixty year-old conflict that has been the root cause of virtually all of the crises of the Middle East during that period. The people of the Middle East, and particularly of Israel and Palestine, are beginning to reach the end of their tether with their tolerance of their political leaders that have failed time and time again to bring them peace and the people are now looking for alternative more viable answers to their problems including the possibility of the once not even dared to dream of idea of a binational one-state solution now increasingly being seen as the only viable alternative.

Perhaps by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century the peoples of the world would have seen off the extremists of the West whose actions have given us the extremists of Islam. Perhaps the world will have woken up to the fact the extremists of Islam exist because of the arrogance and self-righteous hypocrisy of the Western extremists that want that which is not theirs but belongs instead to those of another faith and culture.

We, the people of the world, might never be able to rid the world of racists and fascists but at least we can take their power away from them. It is too late for those that have been killed and have lost their homes in the struggles against the West in the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere but now perhaps the beginning of the end really is in sight.

It’s been sixty years for the people of Israel and Palestine and it’s been nearly twelve years for those that have had to suffer because of Howard’s extremist policies and its been seven years for those that have had to suffer because of Bush and Cheney’s extremist policies.

Their time is nearly up. It’s better late than never.