Weaponry, artistry, artifice and theft
A round-up of recent items
On artificial intelligence
Black Inc Books, a Zionist-owned Australian publisher, recently asked its authors to consent to an amendment of their publishing agreements, allowing their work to be used to train artificial intelligence through third-party agreements with an ‘unnamed AI company’.
Black Inc is the censorious ‘progressive’-posturing book-publishing arm of Schwartz Media. Here are two of my previous articles about this company, against which Palestinians and many First Nations people have established a clear picket line:
While a Zionist company’s embrace of artificial intelligence should surprise no one, it’s worth remembering that many of the online platforms we are currently tethered to already participate in the training of AI.
Disappointingly and increasingly, organisers are also using AI to generate ‘revolutionary’ imagery, posters or calls to action — or simply to entertain each other. If we consider ourselves as being on the ‘left’, we must opt out of AI with the same diligence and discretion with which we opt out of Zionism and US imperialism. We should absolutely never use AI in our own organising, or recreationally, to generate ‘artwork’, or to machine-write our texts.
When we use AI, we exploit human artists and writers. AI is not ‘inspired’ by its source material: that material is stolen.
When we use AI, we help train the very technology that imperialist and colonial militaries are already using to surveil, target, oppress and mass-murder in places like Palestine and West Papua. As Al Mayadeen reports:
‘Israel’s’ notorious military intelligence unit, Unit 8200, has developed a dangerous AI system modelled after ChatGPT to further its brutal surveillance of the occupied Palestinian territories. This AI tool, fuelled by intercepted Palestinian communications, processes spoken Arabic in real time, giving ‘Israel’ unprecedented power to monitor, control, and oppress. From flagging dissent to tracking human rights activists, this surveillance system enhances ‘Israel's’ control over Palestinian lives, making it easier than ever to target innocent individuals … As AI technology advances, the threat to privacy and human rights grows ever more alarming.
On 4 April, Moroccan Harvard graduate and Microsoft engineer Ibtehal Abu Saad disrupted the company’s 50th anniversary, accusing the company of aiding the Zionist entity’s genocide in Gaza through AI tech and military contracts.
‘They might come after me’, she said:
but my fear of retaliation doesn’t even compare to my fear of contributing to technologies used to bomb innocent people. To me, my greatest fear is waking up on an ordinary workday only to find out that the code I wrote might have played a part in killing children. That’s the haunting thought that consumed me.
Microsoft has since fired Abu Saad.
AI technologies are also being used to oppress those working from the imperialist core. On 2 April, Helyeh Doutaghi, an Iranian scholar, announced that she had been terminated from Yale Law School based solely on AI-fabricated allegations from a Zionist platform calling itself ‘Jewish Onliner’.
At the time of her suspension, Doutaghi posted:
I was given only a few hours’ notice by the administration to attend an interrogation based on … AI-generated allegations against me, while enduring a flood of online harassment, death threats, and abuse by Zionist trolls, exacerbating ongoing unprecedented distress and complications both at work and at home …
Rather than investigate the source of these allegations first, the nation’s ‘top law school’ accepted them at face value, and shifted the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, treating me, prima facie, as guilty until proven otherwise. Whether Yale Law School’s attorneys knowingly relied on AI-fabricated claims or simply chose wilful ignorance remains unanswered.
Last week, following her termination, Doutaghi posted:
Do we acquiesce to the repression imposed by a genocidal Western order or do we join the majority world of the Global South, led by the Palestinians fighting against the Zionist death machine, in continuing to raise costs & end impunity granted to those waging genocidal war?
Meanwhile, the US government is reportedly using AI to scour social media and revoke visas of students who it perceives as supporters of ‘terrorism’.
The US military has also partnered with Scale AI and weapons manufacturer Anduril in a dystopian program called ‘Thunderforge’, using AI technology provided by both Google and Microsoft.
Of course, these technologies will inevitably be used to oppress those of us opposing imperialism from the colonial vassals of empire, including here on occupied Aboriginal Land.
Zionists also regularly use AI to generate images of their heroism, military achievements, victimhood and popular support, because these things simply don’t exist for them in reality.
Let’s not emulate these despicable and embarrassing losers. Revolutionary movements are grounded in truth, lived experience and materiality. They don’t require faked images or non-human ‘artwork’.
On a personal note: if you consume my work, be assured that I’ll never employ AI in any step of my own artmaking or writing process.
In the words of Hayao Miyazaki (whose life’s artistry has recently been so thoroughly ransacked and debased by an AI ‘trend’) viewing AI-generated animation in 2016: ‘I am utterly disgusted’.
On Australian weaponry
‘Australian designed weapon trialled by Israel’s military’ was Friday’s headline from Australia’s Zionist-infiltrated state media, the ABC:
Israel’s military has completed trials of an advanced weapon made by a Canberra-based defence supplier which boasts its ‘high precision’ and ‘lethal’ product can strike targets up to two kilometres away
This contradicts the Australian government’s continuing denial, via slippery semantics, of the existence of an Australian-Israeli weapons trade. Crystal Andrews does a thorough job of analysing this rhetoric on today’s Zee Feed post — but let’s not exceptionalise these lies. The Australian colony — like the Zionist colony it helped militarily to establish — was conceived on lies, built on lies, and maintains itself through an ever more twisted knot of lies.
Nor does the design and manufacture of weaponry provide a complete portrait of Australian military complicity. The Australian government has always provided diplomatic cover to the Zionist colony, and has always obediently amplified Zionist military propaganda. We also know that the Albanese government is directly contributing to the genocide in Palestine via the accommodation of a US spy base at Pine Gap1.
Of course Australia’s military participation in Zionist colonialism didn’t start yesterday. In 1918, for example, Australian, New Zealand and British soldiers attacked the village of Sarafand al-Amar. They executed Palestinian men with bayonets, axe handles and sharpened sticks, filling a well with their bodies, before burning the village to the ground. On the momentum of bloodlust, the ANZACs then attacked a nearby Palestinian Bedouin camp, killing a number of people and setting fire to their homes.2
The Surafend massacre is generally downplayed by Australian, New Zealand and British sources, and is generally referred to as the Surafend ‘incident’ or the Surafend ‘affair’. Australia continues to celebrate the ANZAC ‘light horsemen’ as heroic: they are convenient avatars of both Australian and Israeli origin mythology. Thus from Palestine to Aboriginal Land, the false histories of western imperialist projects are intimately entwined.
In 2021, during yet another escalation of genocidal Zionist and US imperialism in Palestine, I wrote:
The
Australiancolony contributes ideologically and militarily to the occupation of Palestine. This furthers our obligation to oppose Zionist infiltration, manipulation and censorship of the arts and media — especially when it masquerades as 'progressivism'.
The context for that writing was the silence of Australian artists (a community that had been screaming itself hoarse about BLM the previous year), the complicity of news media, and the failure even of the most 'radical' platforms to embrace the Unity Intifada.
Four years later and almost nothing has changed.
Stagnation dressed as progress
On 7 April, a fundraiser to ‘Support the Venice Biennale 2026 Exhibition by Khaled Sabsabi’ announced that it had raised $82,000 in a single weekend. Six days later, we can only guess at the current figure. For those of us engaged in mutual aid3, it’s nauseating to imagine what such a sum would mean to an entire community in Gaza.
The
Australianart industry — its artists, administrators, gallerists, institutions, media and promotional ecosystem — has for 16 months maintained a near-universal silence on Palestine. Silent cowardice, silent careerism, silent capitulation, performed ‘neutrality’.And now, within the space of a few days, this industry has proven that it is, in fact, capable of mobilising en masse in the face of injustice; rallying around a cause, releasing immediate statements, writing urgent open letters, posting in solidarity, demanding answers, demanding accountability, demanding change, naming names, expressing outrage.
Genocide has proven unworthy of outrage. The shredded flesh of thousands of children has proven unworthy of outrage. Incinerated refugee tents and hospitals have proven unworthy of outrage. Babies forced to perish and rot alone in their NICU incubators have proven unworthy of outrage. Daily massacres have proven unworthy of outrage. The annihilation of entire Palestinian family lines has proven unworthy of outrage.
But an artist being prevented from attending the Venice Biennale? Suddenly everyone has found their voice.
Two months have passed since Khaled Sabsabi was uninvited from the Venice Biennale and from the Australian art community we have still seen more collective outrage and organising on this issue — and in defence of a decontextualised notion of 'freedom of artistic expression' — than we have against an actual genocide. A genocide in which Australian creative institutions and organisations remain near-universally complicit.
What can be said about an artistic 'community' built so profitably on the popular aesthetics of anti-establishment and anti-colonial ‘radicalism’, performed within the safest of curatorial parameters, while carefully ensuring that the status quo is never sufficiently challenged, while never placing one’s career beyond an embarrassingly low threshold of discomfort?
What are we risking? What are we actually sacrificing? What counter-revolutionary colonial parameters are we allowing to be marketed as 'radicalism'?
Overwhelmingly, our 'community' sustains itself on hubris, individualism and opportunism, coerced from us by an intractably self-referential and thoroughly Zionist-infiltrated industry. The revolutionary choice is to refuse that coercion.
The Australian arts community has failed Palestine. I don't mean 'could have done better'. I don't mean 'room for improvement'. I don't mean 'slowly building a movement'. I mean it has comprehensively failed Palestine. All while clinking its champagne glasses to the saleable vibes of white-cube 'decolonial' theory.
If this industry had even the slightest capacity for shame, it would never recover.
Update: SaVĀge K’lub and the NGA
In February, I wrote about the censorship of two Palestinian flags included in a tapestry by the art collective SaVĀge K’lub at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA).
In that text, I suggested that, while the NGA had been widely critiqued, the role of SaVĀge K’lub had been ignored. Despite The Guardian reporting that SaVĀge K’lub ‘pushed back’ and did not ‘bend over’, the collective did in fact agree to enact the NGA’s censorship, facilitating the erasure of Palestine from its own work in order to preserve their relationship with a Zionist-compliant institution, while allowing that institution’s continued extraction of cultural capital from the censored tapestry’s display.
After publishing that text, I was contacted by the uncompromising collective Kia Mau, and my initial wariness of SaVĀge K’lub was affirmed. Kia Mau’s image had been included in the tapestry without permission or consultation, unfairly implicating them in SaVĀge K’lub’s willing capitulation to institutional Zionism.
On 10 March, Kia Mau released the following important statement:
As a collective of artists and movement leaders, we are gravely disappointed to be making this public statement.
We have spent the past 3 weeks attempting to address a serious violation of our rights and principles in private, within the bounds of tikanga, only to be met with deflection, minimisation, and evasion. The harm caused by the unauthorised use of our work and the subsequent censorship within the National Gallery of Australia demands accountability, and we can no longer allow this issue to remain unaddressed.
Nine months ago, the copyright-protected artwork of Robyn Kahukiwa, used to represent Kia Mau, was taken without consent and incorporated into an installation piece exhibited in the Australian National Gallery by the SaVĀge K’lub art collective, under the leadership of Rosanna Raymond. At no point were we asked for permission, nor would we have given it under the conditions in which it was displayed.
The unauthorised use of our work was harmful in itself, but the situation was further compounded when the gallery, deeming a Palestinian flag in the installation a political risk, ordered it to be covered. The installation artists complied with this censorship, creating the false impression that we endorsed both the censorship and the installation itself.
Kia Mau would never, ever agree to such an act and stand in full solidarity with Palestine.
Throughout [SaVĀge K’lub curator Rosanna Raymond’s] media statements of the past nine months, the theft has been invisibilised and minimised. In addition to claiming the art as theirs and accepting money for it, the SaVĀge K’lub have presented themselves as the victims of censorship and downplayed the agency they exercised in capitulating to the gallery.
While the western art industry remains overwhelmingly cooperative with Zionism — and while contemporary artists are overwhelmingly self-censoring and obfuscating in order to safeguard their careers (even as those very careers are coasting on the academic fumes of decolonialism) — it’s so important that we acknowledge and amplify these genuine and steadfast acts of transnational solidarity.
‘The Pine Gap US surveillance base located outside of Alice Springs in Australia is collecting an enormous range of communications and electronic intelligence from the brutal Gaza-Israel [sic] battlefield – and this data is being provided to the Israel Defence Forces.’ — Declassified Australia
The Surafend Massacre مجزرة صرفند , by UnMonumental
Here’s an excellent current campaign for any reader with the capacity to contribute:
