Remember back to 2009, when there was a huge row over allegations in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that Israel had been secretly harvesting body parts from Palestinians in the occupied territories. There were problems with this story, which suggested that Israel had a shoot-to-kill policy so that it could get organs from those it killed. [...]

A nice piece from Neil Clark on how the corporate media shut down debate by describing as “conspiracy theories” those stories that reflect badly on our leaders, however well-grounded the stories are in fact. At the same time, the western media peddle outrageously unsubstantiated stories that reflect badly on official enemies as serious “news”. In [...]

There’s a good article from George Monbiot today, highlighting the obvious but usually unmentionable point that the British (and American) political system has been entirely captured by the corporations. They really run the country, with the politicians simply fronting the show. Implicitly echoing Russell Brand’s point about the futility of voting, Monbiot notes that Britain’s [...]

Scientists have finally produced the evidence that Yasser Arafat was poisoned, using radioactive polonium. Traces were found in Arafat’s body and the surrounding earth (i.e. after dispersion from decomposition) 18 times higher than normal. The documentation can be seen here. Now there aren’t so many countries that have access to polonium, or to the techniques [...]

I’m not the first and I won’t be the last person to observe that wealthy Palestinians and Arabs in the West have made no effort to organise or marshall their resources to influence Western opinion equivalent to that done by Jewish elites. So when we have a rare example of an Arab investing in such [...]

Is there more to life than Russell Brand? I guess so, though it doesn’t feel that way right now. Admittedly, I am starting to get a little self-conscious about all my eulogising of Brand in these posts, but it is difficult not to be inspired into thinking aloud by his own provocative contributions – the latest [...]

One of the themes of the criticism of Russell Brand for his revolutionary talk and dismissal of the point of voting is that he is spurning a right that his and our forebears struggled for. When he turns his back on the corrupt political system, this line of thinking goes, he dishonours those, like the [...]

A fine essay from Media Lens on the treacherous ground that Russell Brand is treading in airing his revolutionary message on corporate media like the BBC. There is much to mull over in the points they raise about Brand’s aversion during his Jeremy Paxman interview to pointing the finger at one set of corporations – [...]

Naomi Klein attends a leading US scientific conference to hear a top scientist argue not only that his computer models show the world’s climate is careening out of control because of mankind’s environmental pillage but that the same models show the only hope of stopping the impending catastrophe comes from the resistance of those the [...]

One of my concerns about Uri Avnery is that, whatever the good work he has done as a journalist and peace activist, especially in regard to the occupied territories, he still has an ability to write utter nonsense when it comes to what is happening inside Israel. It is difficult to know whether this is [...]

As it’s obviously going to be Russell Brand Day today, I’ll stick to the theme. Here he is, as guest editor of the New Statesman, fleshing out at length the ideas he only got to hint at during the Paxman interview on Newsnight. He’s starting to sound like Chris Hedges, with jokes – which, for [...]

What indicates to me that Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald and Russell Brand, whatever their personal or political differences, are part of an important social and ethical trend is the huge irritation they cause to the media class who have spent decades making very good livings being paid by the media corporations to limit our intellectual [...]

Great to see Russell Brand getting fired up like this on Newsnight, finally showing his anger at Jeremy Paxman’s tedious incomprehension that Brand’s refusal to vote for any of the candidates in a corrupt political system might actually be both a more rational and a more ethical act than Paxman’s choice over decades to conspire [...]

Nazareth has been arguing for decades that it should host the first Arab university in Israel. Successive governments have turned a deaf ear, fearful that an Arab university teaching in Arabic might make the local “minorities” uppity. A few years back, a group of academics set up their own college in the city, calling it [...]

I always read with disbelief the annual international corruption perception index, which puts Israel at the lower end of the developed world but still ahead of many European countries. In the last index, Israel ranked 39th place against Italy’s 72nd. Whose perception? Israelis certainly regard their country as corrupt: 73 per cent believe “government agencies [...]

One never wants to sound churlish but it is truly astounding that it has taken this long for Amnesty and Human Rights Watch to issue a definitive, non-definitive judgment on whether US drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere are war crimes. In a brave and bold move (sarcasm!), they have concluded that such strikes [...]