This week Mahmoud Abbas’ wife, Amina, secretly had leg surgery in Israel, after it was judged she needed an operation beyond the capability of hospitals in the occupied territories, given the restrictions imposed by … Israel. We all understand that the Palestinian president wakes up each morning with a US diplomatic knife hovering close to [...]

I have had further thoughts about my brief Facebook comments attacking the International Committee of the Red Cross. I accused the organisation of hypocrisy for calling for the immediate release of the three abducted Israeli teenagers while refusing to call for a similar release of the nearly 200 Palestinian children effectively taken hostage by a member state of the UN (Israel) while in [...]

I can’t remember watching a documentary that, using a single case study, so effectively strips away the political theatre we see in the mainstream media to reveal the horrifying exploits of the gangsters who run our energy corporations and political systems. In Egypt’s Lost Power, Al-Jazeera have produced an absorbing 45-min film that, on one level, shows how a couple of corrupt businessmen – one Egyptian, [...]

In their latest alert, Media Lens examine a familiar argument about journalistic “professionalism”, this time made by the popular British philosopher Alain de Botton in his new book The News: A User’s Manual – and one that appears to have made an impact on Russell Brand, for example. De Botton argues that the reason the news is [...]

Here is a simple infographic (possibly behind the Haaretz paywall) setting out how Israel has engineered a series of hurdles to prevent intermarriage, especially between Jews and non-Jews. There are no civil institutions in Israel dealing with marriage (and many other personal status issues), meaning that only hardline Orthodox rabbis get to determine who marries a [...]

This article on business efforts to create a craze for smartwatches profoundly depressed me. We are burning up the planet to feed our incessant craving for new gadgets. And now a bunch of corporations – worried that almost all of us have a smartphone and that the market is stagnating – is trying to encourage us [...]

There is something positively Orwellian about an Orwell Prize that chiefly honours a writer not for his political truth-telling, or originality, or even risk-taking, but for his “lucidity and elegance”. After all, Leni Riefenstahl is widely credited with making visually stunning movies, but most of us would shrink from the idea of an Orwell Prize in 1935 that celebrated a leading Nazi propagandist. [...]

You can understand a lot about journalists and journalism by examining our professional nervous tics. We all have them – and they tell you a lot about the hidden assumptions that drive the news agenda. Peter Beaumont, the Guardian’s new Jerusalem bureau chief, and a veteran reporter, is a good liberal journalist with both a [...]

A nice post from Interventions Watch, assessing the backwards and forwards on Seymour Hersh’s latest investigation suggesting that Turkey was behind the sarin gas attack on Ghouta last August. I would go a little further. What I find irritating is seeing so many people who should know better invest their energies in abusing Hersh and [...]

Back in February the Guardian quietly announced a deal with the global consumer goods corporation Unilever. Here is the beginning of the Guardian’s press release: Guardian News and Media today officially launches Guardian Labs – its branded content and innovation agency – which offers brands bold and compelling new ways to tell their stories and [...]

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has a second fascinating essay that rewrites the official record of the sarin gas attack on Ghouta, near Damascus, in August last year. As usual, Hersh uses his sources in the US security establishment to throw light on what took place. The bottom line: Turkey was almost certainly the party responsible [...]

One can write endlessly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as I do, and never feel one has conveyed a proper sense of a peculiar pathology that has taken hold of many in Israeli society and makes them so impervious to any kind of self-reflection and self-criticism. We are all susceptible to this kind of unreason, of [...]

Dear Shaun, I wanted to bring my readers’ attention to your response to my critique of your recent article in the Guardian headlined “Ukraine and Crimea: what is Putin thinking?”. Given that you commented late, and only on Facebook, most of those who read the critique probably never saw your reply. I am therefore posting [...]

It’s not often I post good news about Israel, but this is one of those rare occasions. According to a report by Amira Hass, Israel has ended its blanket policy of racial profiling at Ben Gurion airport. This means most Palestinian citizens, and other non-Jews like me, will no longer be routinely subjected to degrading [...]

What does Benjamin Netanyahu hope comes next, after his stalling formally ends the peace process? My best guess is he thinks that, if he can hold on a couple more years, he will have in office the Republican candidate of his choice. Am I suggesting that Netanyahu can decide who is US president? No, but [...]

I spend a lot of time on this blog criticising the propaganda role of liberal media, including my former newspaper the Guardian. Media critics like Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman have called it “brainwashing under freedom”. Because of a long filtering process before they reach positions of influence, journalists working for the corporate media in [...]