What does Howard think about

I was watching the TV news the other day and i found myself smack bang in the mindset of a censervative politician. Whilst i have to admit it wasn't a story about war or locking up refugees and as a matter of fact wasn't really the point of the story at all, but it really did let people know (if they noticed it in the first place) what rightwingers actually think about.

The story in question was the little bit of a media stunt carried out by Family First over their push for the government to reduce the tax on petrol by 10c a litre, because it is bad for "aussie families" (obviously migrant families and people not in families must pay a secret lower rate of fuel so as not to be affected). In response to this the news crossed to a televised radio interview with John Howard who said that the proposal was flawed because it would cost somewhere in the range of 3.5 billion dollars and he claimed that if people were to know that he had cut that much money off fuel taxes they would think "why don't you use the money on something else, something like erm, err, erm, more money for the army or erm, err, erm, tax cuts" (now that is not a direct quote but the essence, erms and errs, included of what he said)

Now forgetting that he is counterposing tax cuts with tax cuts, the only other thing that he could think of spending 3.5 billion dollars on was the army on a institution which is designed to kill people. I wonder what people on hospital waiting lists think or people in overcrowded classrooms or people struggling to cope on low pay or welfare with all the cuts to services. The fact is that Howard does not goive two shits about 'battlers' but is preoccupied in shoring up our military to further the aims of his real constituency the big businesses that thrive on Australian imperialism. Oh, and opposing tax cuts with tax cuts, but even then maybe he prefers tax cuts that descrininate against the poor and which puts huge wads back in the pockets of the rich than in seeing an across the board tax cut on something that almost everyone uses.

Who are the real terrorists

Recently we have seen the Australian Muslim Advisory Committee recomend to the Australian government that Hezbollah should be taken off the terrorist list, a request that John Howard claims he won't be swayed on. The media also continue to include terrorist as a prefix whenever it talks about Hezbollah. But are they terrorists? and what actually is a terrorist?

Most people would argue that terrorists are people who use terror to achieve political aims. That is, they create terror by deliberatly targetting enemy civillians. So does that describe Hezbollah? Zionists argue that it does, that unlike the Israel Defence Force Hezbollah targets civillians.

So lets now look at the facts. Lets compare the casualty figures between Israeli's and Lebanese and look at the proportion of civillians who have been killed.

Israel claims that 68 Israelis have been killed in the conflict which includes 41 military personnel. That leaves a civillian death toll of 27. That is 39.7% of casualties have been civillians.

Lebanon claims that 900 Lebanese have been killed. With figures of Hezbollah and military deaths ranging from 106 (from the UK Guardian) to 300 (from Israel) leaving a civillian death toll of between 794 and 600. That puts the percentage of civillian deaths at between 88.22% and 66.66% of all Lebanese casualities.

Those figures beggar the question 'Who are the real terrorists?'