The criminal nature of the enterprises that presume to call themselves our democratic governments becomes clearer by the day. Edward Snowden’s leaks – and the drama provoked by them since – underline the lawlessness of their actions. The latest disclosure is that the Ecuadorean embassy in London – home to Wikileaks leader Julian Assange, who is [...]
The black ops by Washington to keep our minds off the content of Edward Snowden’s revelations – that the US government and its allies are transforming themselves into a global Big Brother – continues apace. We started with stories about Snowden the “high school dropout”, the guy with a lapdancer girlfriend etc. Then we had a raft [...]
One of the notable things about Glenn Greenwald is that, unlike other big-name journalists, he’s not shy about highlighting the moral and professional failings of mainstream journalism. It was a joy to see him pointing out the other day that Mika Brzezinski was using “White House talking points” during an interview, and telling David Gregory to [...]
Everything that’s wrong with our politics and media is encapsulated in this single story in the Guardian. Obama, like recent US presidents, has been a disaster for the environment. But he can give a good speech, and he has finally done so on climate change. Environmentalists in the US are in ecstasy, and the media are [...]
The refrain from many, including in the media, over the NSA revelations has been that the point of all the data mining in programmes like Prism is for security: to keep us safe from terrorists. Today the Guardian has new disclosures proving that these spying programmes are not primarily driven by security; the goal is gaining [...]
Kudos to Glen Greenwald, who has found the proof that the US security services have direct access to the servers of all the main internet brands we use: Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, Youtube, Microsoft, Skype, etc. The programme, called Prism and run by the National Security Agency, began way back in 2007, under Bush, and has carried on [...]
Israel has a new education minister from Yair Lapid’s so-called centrist party, Yesh Atid. Shay Piron is a rabbi and a settler. Interestingly, Haaretz reports on one of his recent utterances that is a blasphemy for secular and liberal Zionists. According to Haaretz, he told a meeting of the Knesset’s Education, Culture and Sports Committee [...]
There are many reasons to be greatly disturbed about the way the US has become a Stasi-style surveillance state. This Glenn Greenwald article highlights a new depth plumbed by the Obama Administration. As with the AP case last week, US officials, it is revealed, secretly read the emails of a journalist, Fox News’ James Rosen. [...]
Is there any US institution with a backbone when it comes to criticising Israel, even when the criticism is only implicit? Today the Newseum, a museum to the news industry based in Washington DC, caved in to pressure from the Israel lobby and removed two Palestinian cameramen from its yearly roll call of journalists killed [...]
I’m not quite sure what the subliminal message of this Guardian report is: I suspect it is to imply that Stephen Hawking was bullied into joining the boycott of Israel. But that aside, it is pretty big news – assuming it’s true – that Noam Chomsky was one of those who signed a letter to [...]
Every few years, an Israeli government or state agency makes a grand promise that it is going to fix the historic injustices perpetrated against the country’s Palestinian citizens. No one in the Palestinian minority believes it, of course, but such declarations make awfully good hasbara. Israel’s supporters trot out these promises as proof that things [...]
Simon Tisdall was once my boss at the Guardian. Either I’ve changed a lot since I left the paper more than a decade ago (undoubtedly true!), or he’s subsequently become nothing more than a mouthpiece for the US-Israeli security establishments (and there’s plenty of evidence for that!). This “analysis” of US options on Syria is [...]
A few days ago I reported on the BBC’s apparent caving in to Zionist pressure to ditch at the last moment a documentary called Jerusalem: An Archeological Mystery Story. I speculated that this was an act of political censorship in line with other recent craven positions on Israel and the Palestinians adopted by BBC executives. [...]
It’s difficult to overestimate the weak-kneed position of BBC senior editors in relation to Israel nowadays. But even by the corporation’s craven standards, this one takes the biscuit. Last night BBC4 (the BBC’s slightly more highbrow channel) was due to show a documentary on archeology in Jerusalem. It’s a fascinating topic, given Jerusalem’s rich history, [...]
One matter I’ve been trying to understand for a while is the power of Avigdor Lieberman always to get his way. Corruption is endemic to Israel and its politics, of course, even more so than it is in our ever-more corrupt western societies. But still this matter seems to go beyond the fact that Lieberman [...]
The Boston bombing was good news for Israel, or so says Ron Dermer, one of Netanyahu’s closest aides and the man tipped to be the next Israeli ambassador to Washington. Dermer: “If you can look, historically, there was a big change after 9/11, and I am sure that after the tragic bombing in Boston, people [...]
Israel’s social justice movement (now led by millionaire TV presenter Yair Lapid, it seems!) was doomed to irrelevance the moment it chose to prefer inclusion of the settlers’ interests over those of the country’s Palestinian citizens. Now we have the evidence. According to a study by the Israeli Institute for Economic Planning, between 1996 and [...]
