Some of the big-name celebrities who converged on New York over the weekend need a rocket over their Gaza hypocrisy. Andrew Gardiner reports on Hollywood and those running scared.

You’ve heard them all: big-name musicians and movie stars, lamenting the injustice of it all, and they crusade, it seems, for whatever fashionable campaign has captured the moment. And while causes like global poverty or renewable energy are worthy, where are these luminaries on the more than 230,000 dead and injured in Gaza? 

In some cases, the answer is “nowhere to be found”. Take the celebrity output on Gaza at New York’s Global Citizen festival on Saturday, which was downright demoralising.

Timed for the weekend after the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Global Citizen saw the strangest of role reversals. Days earlier at UNGA, most of the politicians and diplomats we expect nothing from put Gaza front and centre, while at Global Citizen, ‘virtue signalling’ celebs were largely silent on what some have called Israel’s “holocaust”.

A rare but notable exception came, not surprisingly, from Palestinian singer Elyanna, who opened the show, wanting “to pray for my homeland in Palestine.” But after that, the world’s most urgent current crisis gave way to solar power in Africa or the Amazon rainforest.  

On the latter, actress Liza Koshy and ‘Science Guy’ Bill Nye asked the crowd to hold its collective breath, because the Amazon is the “lungs of the Earth.” “It produces about 20 per cent of the oxygen we breathe worldwide (while) pulling global warming carbon out of our atmosphere at the same time”, Nye explained. 

In Australia, precious few celebrities have spoken out against the Genocide. Hugo Weaving went public speaking about the “climate of fear” in the entertainment industry, a climate clearly fearful of backlash by Zionist arts donors and craven administrators.

Courageous pianist Jayson Gillham continues to fight efforts by the Melbourne Symphony to silence him over Gaza, and after a backlash by the arts community when Creative Australia caved to the Israel lobby, artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino were reinstated as Australia’s representatives to the 2026 Venice Biennale.

Guy Pearce is notable as one of Australia’s few big-name actors to speak out against the “normalised horrors” in Palestine. Others have been as quiet as the proverbial church mouse. The suppression of free speech and expression is, however, a global phenomenon, as evinced by events in New York over the weekend.

Among other things, Global Citizen and its founder, Melbourne’s own Hugh Evans, present themselves as central elements in a movement for advocacy on famines stretching from Haiti to Sudan, not unlike Bob Geldof and Live Aid. 

But Geldof has been scathing in his condemnation of Israel’s Gaza onslaught, which “enrages (him) beyond the point of comprehension”. “The (sic) government is clearly out of control, and their army probably as well (and) for the Israeli people to allow this in their name is a despicable disgrace”, he said.

By contrast, Evans has been pretty well mum on Gaza, despite bringing home the Sunhak Peace Prize earlier this year, and despite a consensus emerging from international and Israeli NGOs, UN Special Rapporteurs, and scholars that Gaza is in fact a genocide. Global Citizen has been equally subdued, its last published article on Gaza (excluding one on polio vaccines) coming shortly after the Israeli invasion in 2023. 

That article downplayed the Palestinian toll, while explicitly detailing Israeli casualties. 

Since then, Global Citizen has studiously ignored the Gaza carnage, along with the estimated 902,000 Palestinians who were forcibly displaced (some call that an understatement) and the more than half a million trapped in famine. Its ignoring displacement numbers is somewhat ironic, given that in 2019 – well before the current Israeli assault – the same organisation highlighted a Norwegian article calling Gaza one of the world’s most neglected displacement crises. 

Not surprisingly, one thing Global Citizen failed to mention is the ‘G’ word. 

Music has long played a vital role in political advocacy. At Global Citizen, Nigerian singer Ayra Starr lent her voice to renewable power for Africa, where “some children have no access to light (at night)”, while actors Kristin Bell and Danai Gurira focused on the need to end sexual violence in war.

But the whole show seemed scripted when compared to Glastonbury (UK), where performers queued up (at some personal risk) to highlight the Palestinian plight. “We think about the fact that us as whiteys, we’re the f—ing colonisers, and that’s so disgusting”, lead singer Amy Taylor, from Melbourne band Amyl and the Sniffers, told an energised Glastonbury crowd. 

Events like Glastonbury and Global Citizen matter because they draw attention from audiences who may not otherwise engage with politics, particularly young people. 

“I know for a fact that when we unite, we make noise that leads to real change … governments and corporations listen, policies change, financial investments are made, and progress happens,” Sydney’s own Hugh Jackman told the Global Citizen crowd. 

A choreographed, self censoring vibe

But if the point is engaging young people around issues which truly resonate – and right now that’s Gaza – Glastonbury’s raw energy trumped Global Citizen’s choreographed, self-censoring vibe. An Economist-YouGov poll in the US last month showed well over half those aged 18-29 believe Israel is committing genocide: far more so than older Americans. 

In the pantheon of activist events drawing worldwide attention, there are more Global Citizens downplaying Gaza than Glastonburys taking it on. Yet others were always going to try and square that ledger, such as Brian Eno, whose benefit concert this month saw more than 70 artists converge on Wembley Stadium (UK), including Richard Gere, Paul Weller, Damon Albarn, Annie Lennox and Portishead.

Dubbed Together for Palestine, Gaza was well and truly on the Wembley agenda. 

The self-censorship of organisations like Global Citizen on Gaza should come as no real surprise. We’ve seen it happen here in Australia, where prominentinstitutions were pressured to curb or vary their Gaza coverage, helping manufacture a perspective from which the October 7 attacks occurred in a vacuum, and Israel has every right to “defend itself”. 

Eno’s concert featured words from Ben Jamal, Director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign: “I want you to look into the mirror and ask yourself, ‘what did I do when Gaza was going through a genocide?’” For some, the answer is “very little”, and – as with self-censoring media personalities – the reason why lies in the threat to careers. 

One cautionary tale is that of Melissa Barrera – a star of the horror film franchise Scream – who was fired from her role in the next instalment of that series for posting on social media about the horrors of Gaza. Then there’s left-wing stalwart Susan Sarandon, who was dropped by her Hollywood agency after speaking at a pro-Palestinian rally.

Despite such pressures, those who stayed mum on Gaza during the Global Citizen event might do well to reflect on Jamal’s words. No amount of spin and omission will ultimately obscure the fact that this is genocide, and that they chose to ignore it.

https://michaelwest.com.au/celebs-talk-a-big-game-on-global-hunger-net-zero-but-what-about-the-g-word/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Fyodor Lukyanov: The liberal order is over, and it’s created this unexpected problem
International politics has become theater to mask domestic weakness

BY Fyodor Lukyanov

The liberal order is over. Propriety has been abandoned, rules have been forgotten, and borders no longer mean what they once did. Force still exists, but peace lives only in the imagination of those who cling to old slogans. What we call the “international situation” is a spectacle without a script. The task is to describe it, and to understand it.

Every year, the Valdai International Discussion Club produces a report on the state of the world system. This year’s paper – tellingly titled ‘Dr. Chaos or: How to Stop Worrying and Love the Disorder’ – asks whether the world has entered a revolutionary situation, one that would bring about a wholly new order. The answer is no.

The changes are radical and often alarming, but they are not revolutionary. Why? Because the system is not unbearably unjust to any of the key players. It is decaying, but not so intolerable that it demands overthrow. Institutions are weakening, many survive in name only, but nobody is trying to destroy them outright. Even the most disruptive US administration in recent memory – Donald Trump’s – has never attempted a fundamental overhaul. Washington simply ignores the constraints when it suits its interests.

This is not because the global powers have grown cautious or responsible. It is because the order has become too complex to dismantle. The “top,” once embodied by the ruling great powers, can no longer exercise true hegemony. The United States is the clearest example: it lacks the money, the domestic drive, and even the will to police the world as before. Yet the “bottom,” the so-called global majority, is not demanding revolution either. Rising states see too much risk in total collapse. They would rather climb the ladder within the old framework than tear it down completely.

Here the Valdai report invokes Lenin’s definition of a revolutionary situation: the ruling class must be unable to rule as before, while the ruled must demand change. Today, the first condition exists but the second does not. Most countries prefer gradual elevation of their status without the gamble of a system-wide rupture.

The shift from hegemony to multipolarity is profound, but multipolarity is not yet an order. It is an environment – fluid, confusing, and non-linear. Instability multiplies because the world is more interconnected than ever, yet also more conflict-ridden. For states, internal stability has become more important than external ambition. Governments everywhere, Russia included, now place domestic development and resilience above dreams of global domination. 

What makes this transition unusual is that it is not driven by ideological revolutionaries. China, the rising giant, does not try to remake the world in its image. It adapts to circumstances and tries to minimize the costs of being at the center. The transformation is objective – a consequence of economic, social, cultural, and technological shifts that unfold simultaneously but not in sync. Only an artificial intelligence, the Valdai report quips, might one day calculate the vector sum of all these forces.

In the meantime, foreign policy is not withering away. On the contrary, international activity has never been greater. But its purpose has changed. States no longer dream of total victory. They seek incremental advantage – small corrections, favorable conditions for the near future, a perpetual negotiation backed by pressure.

The United States, for example, knows it cannot defend its dominance as in the past. Russia, too, will not risk its socio-economic stability for a decisive battlefield triumph. Nuclear deterrence makes full-scale war against major powers unthinkable. Israel may still act as if it can permanently alter the status quo, and Azerbaijan has restored its control over Karabakh. But these are exceptions. For most, international politics is returning to the positional confrontations of the 18th century: bloody contests, yes, but rarely total destruction. The concept of annihilating the enemy, born of the 20th century, looks unlikely to return.

This widespread instability shows just how deep the changes run. Yet here lies the paradox: the modern world is surprisingly resilient. It bends under stress but does not break. The resilience is not born of nostalgia for the Western-made order, nor of a desire to preserve institutions that have outlived their purpose. It stems from the very complexity of today’s world and the internal development of states.

Resilience, then, is not a strategy but a necessity. Governments must adapt to changes they cannot control. They cannot restore the old order, but they cannot afford revolution either. The result is a kind of stubborn endurance, an insistence on muddling through even when no solid foundation exists.

This explains why foreign policy today often looks like theater: endless movement, constant crisis, dramatic talk of threats and enemies. In reality, states are focused inward. External maneuvers serve domestic goals. Even military operations, however destructive, are often meant not to conquer outright but to shore up internal stability or distract from internal weakness.

If this model prevails, international politics will resemble the 18th century more than the 20th. Rivalries will be fierce, wars will flare, but outright conquest will be rare. The “world order” will be less a structure than a shifting balance, with players large and small adjusting to survive.

The West, meanwhile, has lost its monopoly on shaping global rules. It still talks of defending the “liberal order,” but that order has already ended. No new order has yet replaced it. Multipolarity is not a system – it is the absence of one. For some, that is frightening. For others, it is liberating.

The Valdai report concludes that what we are witnessing is not collapse but transition – a revolution without revolutionaries. The powers at the top can no longer command. The majority at the bottom does not wish to rebel. The world is caught in between, disorderly yet durable, unstable yet strangely resilient.

This is the reality we must accept: the liberal world order has gone, and what comes next is unknown. What we can say with certainty is that international politics will be less about universal rules and more about national survival. The old dream of peace through dominance has ended. What remains is a constant, grinding competition – one that Russia and the rest of the world must learn to endure.

This article was first published by the magazine Profile and was translated and edited by the RT team.

https://www.rt.com/news/625649-fyodor-lukyanov-liberal-order-is-over/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

LET'S HOPE THE PEOPLE FROM THE International Development at the Directorate of the World Public Summit CAN MANAGE DOCTOR CHAOS IN PEACE.... THE "LIBERAL GLOBALISTS" MISMANAGED THE OPPORTUNITY OF HARMONY, THROUGH GREED... NOTHING NEW.