Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Somali

  • The politics of popular evil and untrendy truth

    • Frank Brennan
    • 01 September 2015
    1 Comment

    If you want to form government in Australia and if you want to lead the Australian people to be more generous, making more places available for refugees to resettle permanently in Australia, you first have to stop the boats. If you want to restore some equity to the means of choosing only some tens of thousands of refugees per annum for permanent residence in Australia from the tens of millions of people displaced in the world, you need to secure the borders. The untrendy truth is that not all asylum seekers have the right to enter Australia but that those who are in direct flight from persecution whether that be in Sri Lanka or Indonesia do, and that it is possible fairly readily (and even on the high seas) to draw a distinction between those in direct flight and those engaged in secondary movement understandably dissatisfied with the level of protection and the transparency of processing in transit countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia. The popular evil is that political

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Hervey Bay boat arrival from Ireland

    • Frank Brennan
    • 22 September 2014
    5 Comments

    Considering my indebtedness to the two Aborigines who met [my family's ship arriving in Hervey Bay from Ireland] 151 years ago, I owe it to all my fellow Australians to agitate these issues of law, morality and politics here in Ireland so that back in Australia, the homeland which, in my religious tradition, was known as the Great South Land of the Holy Spirit.

    READ MORE
  • MEDIA

    What makes a girl beautiful

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 25 July 2014
    8 Comments

    There's something satisfying about subverting society's idea of what constitutes beautiful: female-led campaigns that flood the media with images of representative faces and bodies reinforce the absurdity of current 'beauty' standards. But this isn't really liberating. No longer is it only the physically exquisite who can pose naked; the plain and the imperfect must be welcomed, too, into the sacred circle of female objectification.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    Al Shabaab's grisly PR pitch

    • Evan Ellis
    • 27 September 2013
    3 Comments

    Last week most Australians had not heard of al Shabaab. But after a grisly four-day 'performance', complete with social media strategy, this has changed. The Nairobi shopping mall massacre was made for media consumption. Kenya might be tempted to simply seek revenge, but a measured, discriminate response that prioritised the safety of all Kenyans would allow the government to draw a line between the 'bad men' and themselves.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    Problems with jihadi tourism

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 26 September 2013
    1 Comment

    Jihadi tourism is big business, oiled by a global recruit base from which various diasporas can be tapped. The attackers on the shopping mall in Nairobi were linked to a Somali based outfit calling itself al-Shabaab, a standing affiliate of al-Qaeda operating in the Horn of Africa. But the Somali case is far from unique. The Afghanistan and Iraqi conflicts netted their fair share of foreign recruits in the fight against US-led forces.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Hostages freed to forgive

    • Gillian Bouras
    • 21 August 2013
    6 Comments

    Forgiving and forgetting are weighty matters. It is unlikely, for example, that Judith Tebbutt and Nigel Brennan, both of whom were held hostage in Somalia, will ever be able to forget their experiences of prolonged isolation, near starvation, and threats of death. Yet both have achieved a kind of forgiveness via the effort to understand their captors' lives.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    The public, the Church, and asylum seekers

    • Frank Brennan
    • 13 August 2013
    1 Comment

    'Like many Australians, I had hoped that the dastardly plan announced on 19 July would stop the boats in the short term, as a stop-gap measure. It is dismaying to learn that appropriate consultations had not occurred with Indonesia with the result that the very people who were to receive the shock and awe message are yet to receive it. There’s only one thing worse than shock and awe; that’s shock and awe that doesn’t work because you haven’t done your homework.' 43rd Barry Marshall Memorial Lecture, Trinity College Theological School, 14 August 2013.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Demystifying famine

    • Ben Coleridge
    • 26 July 2011
    4 Comments

    If one were to believe the news cycle, the current crisis in Somalia would seem to have arisen without warning. But it is part of a pattern we have had plenty of opportunity to observe and recognise. In fact Eastern Africa is historically well acquainted with famine.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    On the waterfront in Genoa

    • Helen Koukoutsis and Jennifer Compton
    • 25 January 2011

    A young man, made of ebony, from Senegal or Somalia or the Côte d'Ivoire, sat down beside me gracefully… I gave him the twenty euro that I had to hand. Stammering, ill at ease, he asked me what I had in mind.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    Tales from the kingdom of force

    • Ben Coleridge
    • 16 August 2010
    2 Comments

    Flicking the frisbee with a well practised arm, Jimmy told me about his former home in Sri Lanka. 'Last time I was there, I was carrying bodies to their graves in my arms, even the bodies of friends.' Homer's Iliad is a poem of force in which, at all times, the human spirit is shown modified by its relations with force.

    READ MORE
  • AUSTRALIA

    Haiti needs to be free

    • Aurelien Mondon
    • 05 February 2010
    7 Comments

    The Haitians need help, but are not a failed people. Two hundred years ago, Haiti became a beacon of light and freedom for all oppressed people. Colonialism was defeated, and the myth of white supremacy dealt a mortal blow. For this, the little country would pay.

    READ MORE
  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    African parables

    • Grant Fraser
    • 15 September 2009
    2 Comments

    Men who stood before the gate .. trail the weight of empty hands, empty pockets .. Back to the shanties .. Where children are launching imagined craft .. Away from the stench of earth .. Into pools .. the colour of Keen's Mustard.

    READ MORE