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 [...]
One of the problems for the left is the desperate need of too many of its best and brightest to maintain legitimacy “in the mainstream”. In practice, those who could be advancing radical new agendas or ways of thinking to deal with the catastrophic problems we face end up spending too much time watching their [...]
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 [...]
