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 [...]

Here is a very useful series of infographics in the Christian Science Monitor showing that Israel’s settlements have expanded at their fastest rate during renewed activity in the so-called peace process. However, the Monitor doesn’t answer its own question: “Why do Israeli settlements expand more during peace talks?” So let me do it: They expand [...]

For a whole generation of British journalists (my generation), Harold Evans was our mentor. He wrote the textbooks on reporting and editing that we all read at journalism college. In a sense, he invented the modern “professional” journalist; before him, journalism was largely seen as a trade. He is still widely revered. His life since [...]

In the video below, Jeremy Scahill fills out a little more detail on the new media venture he, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are working on. Good to hear that they don’t intend to have a boss or be subject to the interference of editors. They are obviously hoping to create some sort of journalist [...]

Times are good for Nick Davies of the Guardian. Thanks to the trove of documents Julian Assange brought his way, he gets to be played by the ultimate cool character actor David Thewlis in the new Wikileaks movie Fifth Estate. And yet Nick Davies’ continuing role in this affair is chiefly to discredit Wikileaks and [...]