The problem with media-run "conversations" on gender is not merely the — John Pilger

"[On the September 11 attacks] In these surreal days, there is one truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America last week and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else."

"Twenty years ago today, in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a gun was fired close to where I was standing. One bullet passed over my shoulder and struck a woman in the face; another lodged in the brain of a man who almost certainly would have become president of the United States. Robert Kennedy had seen his assassin leap on to a table and take aim; the flash of the little mans shiny yellow jacket remains indelible with me. "No!" Kennedy had screamed, half glancing for a space against the wall, anywhere, to escape. He lay mortally wounded beside a refrigerator, half smiling, tousled hair, eternal youth applied for; the face on the posters."

"It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it."

"[On Barack Obama:] No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous Change you can believe in, it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. We will be the most powerful, he often declared."

"We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down as privileges from a parliament, or a boardroom, or an institution, but that peace is only possible with justice and with information that gives us the power to act justly."

"I have always had a great deal of admiration for Bob Hawke and the work he did as ACTU president; in fact its a shame hes not still ACTU president. If he is as I found him last week, now that hes bereft of booze and smokes and on a Pritikin diet, I would quite frankly prefer he returned to the booze."