The supposed “anti-semitism crisis” in Britain’s Labour party is revealing an interesting paradox at the heart of modern discussions of anti-semitism. Undoubtedly there are those who intentionally exploit anti-semitism for political gain. That should be obvious if we pause to consider how much attention leftwing “anti-semitism” (criticism of Israel) – formerly promoted as the “New [...]

After a short reprieve following Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected success in Britain’s general election last year, when he only narrowly lost the popular vote, most of the Labour parliamentary party are back, determined to bring him down. And once again, they are being joined by the corporate media in full battle cry. Last week, Corbyn was [...]

Updated below Something quite extraordinary has been happening on Twitter. Corporate journalists have gone into meltdown after two British media analysts – known as Media Lens – tweeted some friendly advice to idealistic youngsters contemplating a career in journalism. Twitter is a social media forum much loved by corporate journalists – probably because media training [...]

The latest research on the prevalence of anti-semitism on Twitter means Labour MP Ruth Smeeth has some very serious questions indeed to answer, as Alan Maddison observes on the Jewish Voice for Labour website. Smeeth has been one of the key figures in Labour arguing that under Jeremy Corbyn the party has faced a supposed [...]

I am loath to draw more attention to the kind of idiocy that passes for informed comment nowadays from academics and mainstream journalists. Recently I lambasted Prof Richard Carver for his arguments against BDS that should have gained him an F for logic in any high school exam. Now we have to endure Brian Whitaker, [...]

It now emerges that the last four years of Julian Assange’s effective imprisonment in the Ecuadorean embassy in London have been entirely unnecessary. In fact, they depended on a legal charade. Behind the scenes, Sweden wanted to drop the extradition case against Assange back in 2013. Why was this not made public? Because Britain persuaded [...]

This is truly disturbing. The Guardian has published a shocking report that not only has Russia’s Vladimir Putin been using social media to disrupt elections in the world’s finest democracy, the United States of America, but he has now found a way to worm his black propaganda into the minds of Hollywood’s unsuspecting glitterati. If [...]

Time to ‘fess up: I don’t understand economics. I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that I’m not supposed to understand it either. As with some weird cult, maybe economic “laws” are only revealed to initiates. Or maybe no one really understands economics; it’s just some are better at pretending they do. Either way, today’s mystifying [...]

How is that highly schooled people, those who have risen to positions of authority and influence within the west’s higher education systems, so often behave as if the bit of their brain governing rational thought has turned to mush whenever the issue of Israel is raised? Let’s take the case of Richard Carver, a senior [...]

Here is an article on food whose political implications are really worth considering. We already know that people in western societies, particularly the US and UK, are eating far too much junk food, and that this leads to an epidemic of obesity, heart disease and cancer. But the latest research not only reveals the extent [...]

Below is a fascinating 9-minute segment of Al Jazeera’s programme The Listening Post on why climate scepticism persists only in what it terms the Anglosphere media – those in the United States, UK, Australia and Canada. Paradoxically, the media in other big polluters, such as China and India, offer climate change deniers no houseroom at [...]

My politics are very different from Jordan Peterson’s, but like many people I was engrossed by his recent interview with Channel 4’s Cathy Newman (the interview can also be found here). In my case, at least, it was less because of what was said than because of the nature of the encounter. If comments under [...]

Barely a day passes without a new development in the war on social media – that is, the war on us. Today, it is a report that Twitter has emailed hundreds of thousands of its users, warning them that they shared “Russian propaganda”. As WSWS notes: Twitter is warning its users that it knows exactly [...]

This report on Apple CEO Tim Cook’s visit to a UK school to promote the company’s new coding curriculum for schoolchildren could hardly be a better illustration of the way the Guardian newspaper serves as a key propagandist for aggressive global corporate capitalism, helping to create for it a façade of humanitarianism. The Guardian presents [...]

It is time for George Monbiot’s legion of supporters to call him out. Not only is he a hypocrite, but he is becoming an increasingly dangerous one. Turning a blind eye to his behaviour, or worse excusing it, as too often happens, has only encouraged him to intensify his attacks on dissident writers, those who [...]

One can be resolutely in favour of equal pay for men and women and still view the current debate about discriminatory salaries among senior BBC journalists as missing a much bigger point. That is neatly illustrated by the furore over comments by John Humphrys, who presents the BBC’s early morning current affairs programme Today on [...]