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 [...]

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 [...]