Untethered: The Friday Five

World 'leaders' join forces to call on Israel to commit to a paltry 21 day ceasefire against Lebanon, and of course Israel refuses; Chappell Roan is hounded for having political integrity by the same people who can't bring themselves to demand it from their presidential candidate; Bisan Owda wins an Emmy for outstanding reporting for 'It's Bisan from Gaza and I'm still alive', despite a pathetic campaign from Zionists to have her nomination rescinded; the Ladies Lounge at MONA's successfully overturns a tribunal decision to render it discriminatory towards men; and a second moon is set to join Earth's orbit on Sunday! 

For the week ending September 30, 2024....this is the Friday Five with Clementine Ford.

PS I am sorry that the sound on this episode is not great! I don't know what went wrong, but it'll be fixed for next week. 

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Let’s face it, we don’t always pay attention to the news. But just in case it comes up at pub trivia or knock off drinks with our friends, we still want to know what’s going on. Clementine Ford’s Friday Five provide's a quick cheat sheet of five of the week’s biggest news items, political gaffes or pop culture tidbits so YOU can bluff your way through whatever comes up. 

It's smart, irreverent, quickfire and to the point - just like that friend who everyone always says should have gone into politics, if only she didn’t hate authority figures and rules.

Chapters

• 0:01 Israel's Escalating Aggression in Lebanon
• 9:53 Political Hypocrisy and Double Standards
• 17:58 Challenges to Women's Spaces and Advocacy

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hello everyone, it is me, clementine Ford, with the very first of the Friday Five. Now, I'd meant to do this last week to go with the launch again of Untethered, but unfortunately I got laryngitis and I lost my voice. You can still hear a little trace of it in my voice today, but no could do last week, so I'm sorry for that. No could do last week, so I'm sorry for that. But here I am with the Friday Five, the very first Friday Five, to bring you up to speed, if you've missed the news this week, with what I think are the five top stories, so that you can go into the weekend with this little primer and really feel confident to fake it till you make it. I'm recording this today on the land of the people. Remember wherever you are, know whose land you're on. So let's get to the Friday Five Now.

Speaker 1: 1:03

For me, obviously, one of the biggest stories that is going on this week, but also this year, as we're coming up to the year-long anniversary of the invasion of Gaza and the genocide being waged by Israel against Gaza, is obviously that Israel has escalated and is now moving into Lebanon, now targeting Lebanese people. We're seeing the same rhetoric and the same propaganda being used by Israel and being supported to an extent not as much as with Palestine, but to an extent by so-called Western quote unquote Western leaders and governments, to the degree that even the other day, I saw a reference to the Hezbollah-led health ministry. Now it's really important to understand that when Israel and the Israeli propaganda messaging machine uses language like the Hamas-led health ministry and Hezbollah-led health ministry, that what they're trying to do is to seed mistrust and that has been consistent over the last year and certainly over many, many years of Israel's aggression and violence towards Palestine and Palestinian people and the occupation that Israel is waging against Palestine. But just be really mindful of it that when you see messaging being repeated in our own mainstream media, that reinforces this idea that somehow this is a freedom fight against a tenuous, shady, shadowy enemy who cannot be trusted, regardless of what people may or may not think about Hamas, the numbers of injuries and fatalities that Hamas has always provided, even prior to October 7th. Because just bear in mind, of course, this did not begin for Palestine on October 7th. In fact, by October 6th, save the Children had already said that 2023 was shaping up to be the deadliest year on record for Palestinian children in the West Bank. The numbers of fatalities and casualties and injuries that have been provided by the health ministry in Gaza has always been seen as consistent and accurate. That's been reported in the Lancet, that's been reported in the Washington Post, that's been reported by the BBC. The question of whether or not they're accurate has never been in doubt until we have been bombarded by the propaganda of this year.

Speaker 1: 3:40

So we are in week two, obviously, of Israel's ramped up aggression towards neighboring states. This is very clearly an escalation of Israeli political intentions to broaden their genocide and ethnic cleansing to, in my view, land grab. And why would they stop? Because they've been given complete license and carte blanche by the international community for the past year to do exactly as they please, which leading to one of the Friday Five, which is that a coalition of nations, including Australia, the UK, the United States of America, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, have called on Israel to commit to an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon of only 21 days. But an immediate ceasefire of only 21 days pursuant to, obviously, israel and Lebanon agreeing. Now the Lebanese prime minister has agreed to that and is enthusiastic about that, but of course, israel has turned around and said no way, no chance. And why would they agree to it? Because, again, they've been given complete license for the last year to do whatever they like.

Speaker 1: 5:01

And Anthony Albanese, our own lily-livered, pathetic, gutless coward of a prime minister, he has come out swiftly condemning this and has said you know, in an article reported in the Guardian I say to Prime Minister Netanyahu that he needs to listen to the international community, just like the other players in that region need to listen to the international community, and that he has given him a sharp, sharp message. You know what might fucking help Albo? Some fucking sanctions. Enough with the stern warnings and the sharp messaging. Israel is not a child being gently parented. Israel is a fucking aggressive, violent occupier that is using everything at its disposal, which includes US government supplied bombs, to completely annihilate a region of thousands, tens of thousands of people who have been in the region for thousands of years, and no one is moving to stop it.

Speaker 1: 6:11

So after last week's, I hate even referring to it as the pager attack because it just minimizes it. And Jan Fran has an excellent article in Crikey Today about the kind of hysterically turned on, sexualized framing of this by Western media outlets as like some Charles Bond-esque spy vehicle, you know when, the moment when the pages exploded, as if this is a movie, an unrealistic movie about a you know movie about a you know follows his own rules spy beloved by white men the world over. As if it's that kind of scenario and not actually a real life scenario in which one, to my mind, illegitimate state is wielding the most severe of firepower to completely brutalize a people, to demoralize a people and to show exactly what it is the world will let them get away with. So that is the first of this week's Friday Five is the. Escalating is such a terrible word, but given Labor UK and Labor Australia have both obviously settled on a joint messaging of we need to de-escalate the escalation of Israel's violence in Lebanon and our own pathetic leader's response to that, the minimization of it and the expectation somehow that Israel finally, after all this time of being able to do whatever it likes, will listen, that's where we're at now.

Speaker 1: 7:54

Amnesty International reported that on Monday alone just this Monday gone, the 23rd of September at least 558 people, including 50 children and 94 women, were killed, more than 1,800 injured, by Israeli attacks in Lebanon. And you know, are we just going to see another repeat of inhumane, monstrous Zionist rhetoric that somehow this was well. They were all terrorists. They were all terrorists. You need to be really mindful.

Speaker 1: 8:24

I'm assuming that anyone who listens to me either is equally as disgusted and enraged by what Israel has done and been allowed to do and get away with this year, or you're listening to me because you're obsessed with hating everything I say and nothing of what I talk about about your own inhumanity will ever penetrate the fucking thick shield of you know abrogated responsibility that you have to be a decent person to be able to actually listen to anything that I'm saying and to acknowledge your own complicity in this. So if that is you, then fuck you. You're a fucking terrible human and you're probably beyond redemption. Uh, for the rest of you, be really mindful that we are being once again exhausted into, or attempt the attempt to exhaust us into giving up, and we will not do that my third election in voting and the world is changing so rapidly and I want to be part of the generation that changes things for good, because we need it.

Speaker 2: 9:35

So hear from my mouth if you're still wondering no, I'm not voting for Trump and, yes, I will always question those in power and those making decisions over other people.

Speaker 1: 9:53

Which leads me to my second of this week's Friday Five, which is one woman who will not give up, and that is Chapel Rowan, the 26-year-old musician who has had a meteoric rise to fame with the aptly titled Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess debut album, who has been just most disgracefully bullied and trolled across social media this week because she again a 26-year-old musician who has been very clearly on the record with her views towards Israel and Palestine and the Palestinian people and her disgust really at the democratic administration that has allowed for this to happen, that has supplied the weapons for this to happen, that has not done anywhere near enough to protect trans rights in america, which is obviously one of queer rights, is one of her big issues, um, and she turned down an invitation to perform at the white house, which is something that so many american liberals and for australian listeners I use liberals in the small L liberal sense would not do, because they fucking froth at establishment power and, being either tangentially next to it or invited into the fold, they would fucking love to perform at the White House and stand alongside a genocide enabler and supporter because they don't actually care about the broader issues and they don't have care about the broader issues, and they don't. They don't have the kind of political backbone that gives them the confidence and the courage to give up that kind of access, because because all that matters to them, as always, is themselves and their own, their own privilege and their own power. So so Chapel Rowan has been being horribly bullied in the most kind of predictable of ways, and I will say that there is a special level of like high, fucking vitriolic misogyny that cis, white gay men in particular love to direct towards women and lesbians, especially who have political views. Because she wouldn't endorse Kamala Harris, that she wouldn't explicitly come out and endorse a presidential candidate who has refused to commit to ending arms supply to Israel. And somehow Chapel Rowan, this 26 year old musician who has done far more to raise awareness for the rights of queer people and for trans people, especially in America, is now being held accountable for any possible risk of Harris being elected. That this is what is crazy to me that there are grown adults who refuse to interrogate their own fucking privilege when it comes to ignoring genocide, who refuse to even countenance the fact that, for them, genocide not being a red line is reflective of their values as opposed to well, you know it's the lesser of two evils. No, it's just, it doesn't matter to you. That's the basic point, and it's clear and obvious. And now I'm not saying that that's true for every single person who's voting Democrats in this election.

Speaker 1: 13:05

Obviously, there are people who will be fundamentally harmed by a Trump government and by Trump's America, but let's also be very realistic about the fact that America today, in September almost October 2024, is nearing the end of a four-year Democratic administration that has failed to do any of the things that will protect the rights of trans kids in America, that has failed to do anything to codify Roe v Wade. And that's not. People will say, well, that's because they don't have the congressional power. Now, you know when the Democrats did have the congressional power in 2009, when the newly elected Barack Obama, who still had three, four years of his presidency left, said well, it's not really a priority right now. So really important as well for people to think what is it that the Democrats have benefited from by not making it a priority? If you always dangle abortion rights and abortion access as a sort of plausibly removed right, then you can always guarantee that come election time, you can say well, unless you elect us, then you will lose your abortion rights. The fact is that in America now, under a democratic administration, states with the right to issue their own decrees on abortion have been able to destroy abortion access, have been able to significantly harm anyone who needs access to an abortion. So it's not even a guarantee that, if you were to elect a democratic president, that, oh God, thank God, thank God, everything's fine. Now Everything has been saved. We've saved America.

Speaker 1: 14:51

The only people who believe that are people who can exist in America today without any risk to themselves, without any risk to their livelihood, to their well-being and to their own liberal sense of being a good, decent person, and that is the privileged few. That is, the ones, exactly the ones, the famous ones, the ones with access, the ones with money and platforms, who are being expected, in the case of Chapel Rowan, to endorse or enthusiastically endorsing too much fucking applause and saccharine praise. You know to see someone in this scenario, to see a white cis man say, in a world where you can be Chapel Rowan, who doesn't endorse and puts the election at risk, choose to be a Taylor Swift, puts the election at risk, choose to be a Taylor Swift. As if Taylor Swift, a billionaire, who took weeks, if not months, to come out and say anything at all politically about what's been going on this year and even then didn't mention Palestine or Gaza once, but simply said well, abortion rights on the table, and I believe Kamala Harris will be a good leader and that she has our best interests at heart. I'm paraphrasing, obviously as if somehow that was like a really incredible step forward for her. This is the thing. It's like I feel enraged and almost like hysterically, like I'm going crazy looking at how Chapel Rowan is being subjected to the full weight of everybody's not not just expectations, but demands, when they will not address a single demand to Harris or to the Democrats who were saying that unless you elect us, then America will fall. You need us to protect the country and so, instead of everyone softly, softly stepping around and saying, well, don't say anything, because then we could lose the election, don't say anything about their problems, because then people might know that they've got problems, we'll wait for them to get elected and then we'll make our demands as if that makes any kind of fucking political sense whatsoever.

Speaker 1: 16:48

The most powerful time in a voter's life and in the collective of voters' lives is the moment, just before an election, where the party or an individual wants their vote, why on earth would Kamala Harris possibly fucking listen to people about Gaza after November? Why would she feel compelled to move the party to the left when she's accepting enthusiastically the endorsements of Republicans? People don't seem to have a problem with that. They seem to want to really believe that. Oh, maybe the Republicans are becoming left-wing. They hate Trump so much that they're becoming left-wing. No, trump is a lunatic. But the Republicans only began to endorse the Democratic candidate when it wasn't Joe Biden because they believed that Joe Biden would lose to Trump. And now it's at risk. Now a Trump win and therefore a Republican win is at risk, and so they are putting their fucking pennies in the jar of Kamala Harris because they're like that is where we will get our influence listened to. People should be very fucking worried about that.

Speaker 1: 17:58

If they think that Kamala Harris will win the election and they're endorsing her now, it means they want something for that endorsement.

Speaker 1: 18:07

And circling back to Chapel Rowan, that is all true, but no one wants to call it out.

Speaker 1: 18:13

Instead, they would rather scream and yell and belittle and berate a 26-year-old who, by the way, owes nobody anything when it comes to her political views, but who has been more politically courageous than the vast majority of any American collection of celebrities at any point in history, at any point in history.

Speaker 1: 18:43

So I feel like everyone who is hounding her needs to fucking wake up to themselves, have a good hard look at themselves and start to question why it is they would rather hold a non-politician, a musician, to a greater standard of behavior, to more account and for more responsibility to win this election than they would their own candidate. People need to reflect on that, because their own lack of political nous and courage is going to fuck them in the end and when Harris gets elected which I believe she will and suddenly she's not doing any of the things that they thought they could negotiate with her after the fact, if they even care to follow up on them a lot of these people don't they just want to keep things the way that they are now because the system right now works very well for them. Then any surprise they express is of their own making.

Speaker 2: 19:36

In 30 seconds, the patriarchy was smashed and the verdict demonstrates a simple truth Women are better than men.

Speaker 1: 19:47

And that was Kersh Kaishal speaking just today about the overturning of a tribunal decision that would have forced her exhibition at Mona to be closed. The ladies' lounge was accessible only to women and was a statement, obviously, on the exclusivity of gentlemen's clubs, and also a place where women could gather together free of men and males' presence and the male gaze, et cetera, et cetera. But, of course, nothing that women, and feminists in particular, win for ourselves can ever just be allowed to be. And there's an irony, of course, that everyone will. Well, transphobes will get up in arms about trans women being allowed to play sports in the category to which they belong, gender-wise, um, and somehow we've got a distinctity of women's spaces. But when it comes to art, when it comes to something like the ladies lounge, well, there are a lot of people who are very annoyed about, because if men aren't the ones who are controlling who gets to go in and out of women's spaces, and that's a big problem, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 20:54

So a discrimination case was brought against Mona and Kershia a few months ago, in March. This discrimination case was brought by a New South Wales man who was furious that he was denied entry to the ladies' lounge. Now, let's be honest, you didn't fucking want to go into the ladies' lounge. But dudes like this, they look for every possible reason to be pissed off and excluded and to make the point somehow that women are getting too much. It's like whenever I mentioned the women's baths in Sydney and Coogee, and there's always some fucking nonsense about how that's discrimination. Why do men have their own swimming baths? It's like, go and petition the council. I'm sure a lot of women would fucking love for you to have your own swimming bath where you could just go and swim with each other and leave us in peace. But that's the thing is, they don't want their own spaces because the whole world belongs to men. Why would they want more exclusivity, unless it's obviously gentlemen clubs where they can plan business and they can succeed at being masters of the universe? Anyway, back in March, when this case was brought forward, it was found that, yes, the ladies lounge was discriminatory, and so Kershia Kaushal was like well, fuck that, I am going to fight this. And she's turned the whole court case procedure into its own bit of performance art, you know, turning up with an entire group of women dressed in suits walking into Simply Irresistible, all decked out in their uniform, red lipstick and I believe even in one of the early trial days. One of them was, as part of the performance art, reading a copy of my book Fight Like a Girl, which is very exciting. So that original tribunal decision which declared that it was discriminatory, has been overturned today and it's pretty amazing.

Speaker 1: 22:46

And I think that you know, listening to that soundbite earlier on, some people might kind of take umbrage at the fact that Kershia said we've smashed patriarchy. I believe that she was being extremely tongue in cheek of obviously this is not the end of patriarchy. But when she says things like we've proven that women are better than men and men may appeal the decision, but I do not find them appealing. I think she's just. She's a little bit like me in that she, you know, is waving a red rag at the bull. She's basically saying like come and get me, because every time you try I will turn this into another bit of performance art and I will make this a theatrical production and I say fucking hats off to her for that because it is very entertaining. We need a little bit of entertainment these days hey everyone, this is Bissan from Gaza.

Speaker 1: 23:34

I'm still alive item number four on this week's Friday Five is the incredible Emmy win to Bissan from Gaza. It's Bissan from Gaza and I'm still alive. In conjunction with Al Jazeera, bissan won the Emmy for outstanding reporting and what I found actually watching the footage of it. Now, I know that they do these Emmys as a sort of a side bar to the official televised event, but I don't know if I'm just really sensitive about it, but I was like where's the fucking standing ovation, where's the louder applause than this? And all I could think was this is going to make Deborah Messy that's her name now I'm not Deborah Messing, deborah Messy very mad.

Speaker 1: 24:18

Deborah Messing is obviously the actress from I mean, actress is a generous term to call her, I suppose but she was in Will and she has been so utterly pathetic for the last year, crying the most fucking empty tears about how oppressed she is and her own victimhood. And she went to Israel and she was like I've come home. It's like, girl, you're from Poland, you're Eastern European, it's okay, it's all right to be Eastern European, it's okay, it's alright to be Eastern European, but you're not fucking indigenous to the Swana region. Anyway, she led a campaign to have the Emmys rescind Bissan's nomination and I would have just really loved to have been there to see her face when she heard the news that Bissan won. And, of course, the terrible truth about it is that Bissan shouldn't have had to win her first Emmy for reporting on still being alive in a, you know, midst of genocide being waged by one of the most diabolical, soulless, inhumane states in history. But here we are and we can only hope, I suppose, that the continued recognition of the work that the dwindling group of journalists operating in Gaza because of course, israel has killed most of them that they continue to be heard and that we are reaching a tipping point where there is no excuse for anyone who persists in ignoring this or downplaying it. You know, what we are watching is ethnic cleansing, genocide, brutal murder, and it won't be forgotten.

Speaker 1: 26:09

And finally, I wanted to, I guess, just remind people in a spot of astrological news number five on the Friday Five, that this Sunday we are having a pretty incredible space-related event in that we are sucking an asteroid into our orbit for, I think, 30 days, two months maybe, and we're going to basically have I mean, it's being called a mini moon, but it's really just a rock that's going to circle the earth for a period of about two months. Um, which is just kind of cool, I think, just as a final kind of closing bit of weekly news. Not everything is doom and gloom. Just think that outside of all this we are just a collection of unknowable, random, bizarre. Why are we even here? How did we even evolve organisms floating around in space on a rock and just trying our best at the end of it all, to love, to be loved, to maintain hope and to experience some level of joy. And we'll be joined in that quest this Sunday by a second little mini moon. So I suppose that's really the message of that fifth little bit of news is the world and the experience of living is full of just wondrous, unexplainable majesty. And if you can take a moment over this weekend, this long weekend in Australia, to go and lie on the grass I mean we can all do with touching grass a bit more. Go and lie on the grass somewhere, either in the daytime and suck up some of that much-needed vitamin D that we're finally getting, or go and lie outside in the daytime and suck up some of that much needed vitamin D that we're finally getting, or go and lie outside in the night and look up at the stars or whatever you can see of them in the cities, and just remember that, when it comes down to it all, we are just floating on a rock in space. None of us know what we're doing, and the best thing we can do in that scenario is to reach out, hold hands and just to commit to loving each other through it.

Speaker 1: 28:35

Thank you for joining me for the very first of the Friday Five. Please let me know what you think. Send me an email on untetheredpod at gmailcom. You can also send me questions for Monday's Dear Clementine hotline to untetheredpod at gmailcom. Obviously, of course, you can listen to Untethered on Wednesdays, which is my long conversations with incredible people, the first of which came out a couple of weeks ago with Shelley Manson from Garbage, and then just this week I spoke with Nadine Shemlay. Both of those conversations were so enriching and validating and incredible and I hope you enjoyed them. If you are enjoying the podcast as well, then please rate it, review it and subscribe and tell your friends about it. It has been a pleasure being with you this Friday evening and I hope to spend many more Fridays with you breaking down the news of the week and giving you that little cheat sheet to your weekends. Until next time, stay untethered and stay informed.