You would think that, as the reverberations from last week’s Manchester terror attack continue to be felt, the UK media would be scouring through the literal and figurative rubble trying to find leads. After all, is that not what a profit-driven media in a free society is supposed to do? But in the case of this attack, the [...]
It is quite extraordinary to read today’s coverage in Britain’s supposedly left-liberal newspaper the Guardian. In the “man bites dog” stakes, the day’s biggest story is the astounding turn-around in the polls two weeks before the British general election. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has narrowed the Conservatives’ lead from an unassailable 22 points to 5, according to [...]
Trust Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian to ask the most pertinent question of the coming British general election and then fail to offer the one answer staring him in the face. After examining the manifesto commitments of the Conservative and Labour parties, he asks: “British voters look like they’re rejecting Santa and embracing Scrooge. Why?” Why indeed? [...]
Tom Suarez has written an important history of early Zionism, State of Terror, finding in British archives a wealth of evidence damaging to the Zionist cause. The archives reveal a troubling story of a colonial settler movement prepared to ally itself with powerful anti-semites in European governments to achieve its goal of creating a Jewish state [...]
This is the first British general election in decades in which there is anything approaching a real political choice. For that reason, even the most liberal elements within the corporate media are jettisoning the pretence of neutrality and objectivity. The stakes are simply too high. In fact, their bias has become so overt that even a veteran [...]
A decade ago I published a book, Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, that examined Israel’s desire to Balkanise the Middle East, using methods it had refined over many decades in the occupied Palestinian territories. The goal was to unleash chaos across much of the region, destabilising key enemy states: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The [...]
George Monbiot is again on one of his intermittent witch-hunts against “the left” – on this occasion, against anyone questioning whether the Syrian regime was responsible for the chemical weapons attack in Idlib earlier this month. In a post on his website, called simply “Disavowal”, he dismisses those who have raised doubts about the official western [...]
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly is in trouble, as he faces a series of sexual harassment cases. The dilemma for Fox News CEO Rupert Murdoch is this: either he dumps the station’s “top performing star, who they are paying in the high teens of millions per year”; or he must endure the wrath of the advertisers. Already 11 [...]
In an interview with the Jewish Chronicle at the weekend, Owen Jones announced that he would soon be making his first trip to Israel to see friends and would take the opportunity to visit the occupied Palestinian territories. Let us hope Jones makes every effort during his stay to get the full story of what has [...]
The ongoing Ken Livingstone (“Get Corbyn!”) saga grows yet more preposterous. After outrage that the former London mayor had said Hitler was a Zionist (when he clearly hadn’t, as I pointed out at the time here and here), Labour suspended Livingstone amid accusations that he had made anti-semitic, offensive and false historical claims. Now as Livingstone fights to avoid [...]
Robert Stuart, a tenacious blogger, has been picking away at a scab the BBC would rather leave firmly in place. His forensic research concerns an edition of the BBC’s flagship investigative current affairs show Panorama called Saving Syria’s Children. It was broadcast more than three years ago, as many in the media were trying to push [...]
Here is an exclusive the Guardian has held back from its readers for 26 years. It is finally published on its pages today. In 1991 the Shell oil company produced a half-hour film, Climate of Concern, for showing in schools and universities, that set out the dangers of climate change, apparently with unnerving accuracy. The [...]
I have never been overly sold on Owen Jones. From his platform at the Guardian, he has spent far too much time whining about Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his failure to reach out to voters rather than using his rare spot in the mainstream media to help him to do precisely that. But this [...]
It is not often I recommend a Jonathan Freedland column, but this one is interesting in the way it reveals, mostly inadvertently, what is bad and what helpful about a Trump White House. As Freedland notes, the more we learn about Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon, the more dangerous this administration seems. Bannon apparently [...]
Speaking to me for my report last month on the killing by police of Yacoub Abu al-Qiyan during the demolition of his home in Umm al-Hiran, in the Negev, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld made three allegations against Abu al-Qiyan that he said proved he was a terrorist. All of them have now been shown to [...]
Here is another image (copyright: Keren Manor) that conveys the situation of Palestinians – these ones Palestinian citizens of Israel – more completely than any words. The man on the ground is Ayman Odeh, a member of the Israeli parliament, the head of the Joint List, the third largest party in the parliament, and the highest-ranking Palestinian [...]
Forget the empty posturing of world leaders in Paris yesterday. This photo (copyright: Nedal Eshtayah/Anadolu Agency) tells us what the Israel-Palestine “conflict” is really about. Imagine for a second that the little boy – how old is he, eight, nine? – is your son, trying to adjust his keffiyeh because it keeps falling over his eyes and [...]
