There was a time before the NSA was able secretly to collect personal data about us all, all the time. There was a time when it was much harder for our governments to know what we were up to. There was a time when they struggled to control the flow of information. In those days, [...]
Hidden away both behind the Haaretz paywall and in its business pages is one of the most astute articles I’ve seen in the Israeli media. It tells how Israel (more so even than other western states) has been taken over by a security elite – what is termed here a “security network” – that has [...]
Four depressing things to be learnt by decoding a new report from the British defence ministry, in response to very minor cuts in the military budget. 1. The British military thinks the problem associated with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan was one of “perception”. The sources cite a long-term weariness in the British population [...]
The Economist has found itself at the centre of another of those “anti-semitic cartoon” rows. The cartoon has upset the Israel lobby because it shows, well, that the Israel lobby has a lot of influence in Congress. The article it illustrated refers to President Obama’s attempts to reach a deal with Iran, a diplomatic process [...]
A great piece from George Monbiot. Good to see him tackling the paradoxes of freedom. It’s worth quoting him at length, though note that I have appended an important point of criticism. We appear to possess an almost limitless ability to sit back and watch as political life is seized by plutocrats; as the biosphere [...]
There is an interesting video of Glenn Greenwald talking about the supposed NSA reforms on the Bill Maher show. I don’t know much about US television, but I guess Maher is another one of those Larry Sanders-type talk show hosts. So Maher’s swipes at Edward Snowden’s sanity, calling him “nuts” for a couple of his [...]
Glenn Greenwald makes a brief return today to the Guardian in a column exposing the sham “reforms” President Obama has promised in the wake of worldwide outrage at the NSA’s data mining of its own citizens (and lots of foreigners too). Greenwald elegantly explains why he doesn’t buy a word of Obama’s speech, and then [...]
Liberals can sound pretty pathetic when their back is to the wall, and liberal Zionists even more so. A case in point is Eric Alterman. Rania Khalek has initiated important criticisms, amplified by both Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss, that not only establishment media such as the NYT but also the most progressive media in the US, such [...]
I just watched Gasland, three years after its release, and it left me open-jawed, shaking. That doesn’t happen very often. I know that corporations are amoral, profit-driven entities that have no compunction about destroying the planet if they can make a quick buck first. I also know that our political systems have been almost entirely [...]
There’s a common mistaken assumption that Israelis’ hostility towards Palestinians and Arabs is based on a justified / deluded (take your choice) sense of the danger they pose. Israelis’ insecurity, it is often believed, derives from centuries of persecution of Jews around the world. In reality, this is only a part of the story. There [...]
Seymour Hersh publishes his latest, illuminating essay on the machinations of the US security state, this time in regard to Syria. Hersh makes a very convincing case that the US had no credible intelligence that August’s chemical weapons attack in Ghouta using sarin was carried out by Assad’s troops but that it did know that jihadi [...]
What I am going to write here will doubtless make me unpopular with some readers, even if only because they will assume that what follows about Nelson Mandela is disrespectful. It is not. So let me start by recognising Mandela’s huge achievement in helping to bring down South African apartheid, and make clear my enormous [...]
I hadn’t heard of the novel The Almond Tree and I shall now avoid it, having read Susan Abulhawa’s review. There is an insufferable cultural arrogance to Israelis and Jews who think they can create a Palestinian protagonist not only as the vehicle for their “art” but as a way to heal wounds between Israelis [...]
Glenn Greenwald on sharp form, as ever, and the BBC interviewer, on this occasion Stephen Sackur, on woeful form, as ever. The last five-minute exchange, starting at about 19.20 mins, when Sackur ends up defending Britain’s security services against Greenwald’s charge that they lied during the Iraq war, is simply jaw-dropping in its asinine, dangerous [...]
As someone living in Nazareth, I think about Jesus far more often than I might have otherwise. Not, of course, as the object of devotion of followers who never met him, or as the figurehead of a set of institutions that cashed in on his fame long after he was dead. I think about him [...]
I have the honour of being the latest subject of a column by Louis Proyect, on his blog “The Unrepentant Marxist”, concerning my recent post criticising the decision of Jeremy Scahill and Owen Jones to bolt the upcoming Stop the War conference. I appreciate the mainly restrained tone in Proyect’s criticism, and wish to reciprocate [...]
A photographer friend, Asim Rafiqui, has alerted me through his blog Spinning Head to a depressingly unilluminating / illuminating interview in the NYT with Josef Koudelka, one of photography’s grandmasters. Koudelka has just published a book of his photographs of the wall Israel has built across Palestine. By all accounts the photographs are an unequivocal [...]
