Greenwash
July 31, 2008
George Monbiot: Both government and corporations claim to be getting greener to help halt the advance of Climate Change through Global Warming but does the factual record support their claims?
Friends of Israel Blind to the Truth
July 19, 2008
Stuart Littlewood looks at the British ‘Friends of Israel’ groups and exposes their disregard for justice, human rights and basic norms of civilised behaviour.
The real Zionist vision does not recognise any maps. It is a vision of a state without borders – a state that expands at all times according to its demographic, military and political power. This warning by the respected Israeli journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery should be impressed on every friend of Israel in the West.
They are so gullible. The Jewish Chronicle last week reported how a group of intrepid Conservative MPs on a “Friends of Israel” junket experienced a “gunfire exchange” in Sderot. One of them said:
”We couldn’t see the gunfire, but could hear that it was close by.” The exchange illustrated the “effects on quality of life that people in the south of Israel suffer on a daily basis. It shows that it is not a sustainable position for these areas to be constantly subject to rocket attacks and that Israel has the right to take appropriate actions to defend its citizens.” Urging Britons to visit Israel, he argued: “It’s very important to show their support for the only democracy in the area. I feel we have a duty and obligation to support Israel.”
Brown Nosing Israel
July 18, 2008
Zionist Gordon Brown
After rather sheepishly celebrating the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Gordon Brown might be angry that his visit to Israel has been leaked by Israel’s Ambassador, Ron Prosor the PR Tosser, breaking diplomatic protocol. He is apparently going to be the first UK leader to address the Knesset on Monday and will reveal an initiative to counter the impressive steps to boycott Israel by the activists in the UCU.
The Israeli Ambassador to Britain Friday promoted Gordon Brown’s first visit to the occupied territories as prime minister, saying that he will be the first UK leader to address the Knesset on Monday.
the British premier [will] announce a “ground breaking initiative” between the UK and Israel during his visit.
“The Prime Minister is due to reveal plans for an academic research and exchange program administered by the British Council and supported by a range of partners, governmental, non-governmental and philanthropic,” it said.
How Britain Wages War
July 17, 2008
John Pilger describes the insidious militarisng of Britain as the effects of two colonial wars and the cover-up of atrocities come home.
The military has created a wall of silence around its frequent resort to barbaric practices, including torture, and goes out of its way to avoid legal scrutiny.
Five photographs together break a silence. The first is of a former Gurkha regimental sergeant major, Tul Bahadur Pun, aged 87. He sits in a wheelchair outside 10 Downing Street. He holds a board full of medals, including the Victoria Cross, the highest award for bravery, which he won serving in the British army.
He has been refused entry to Britain and treatment for a serious heart ailment by the National Health Service: outrages rescinded only after a public campaign. On 25 June, he came to Downing Street to hand his Victoria Cross back to the Prime Minister, but Gordon Brown refused to see him.
The second photograph is of a 12-year-old boy, one of three children. They are Kuchis, nomads of Afghanistan. They have been hit by Nato bombs, American or British, and nurses are trying to peel away their roasted skin with tweezers. On the night of 10 June, NATO planes struck again, killing at least 30 civilians in a single village: children, women, schoolteachers, students. On 4 July, another 22 civilians died like this. All, including the roasted children, are described as “militants” or “suspected Taliban”. The Defence Secretary, Des Browne, says the invasion of Afghanistan is “the noble cause of the 21st century”.
Western Bloc Barbarism
July 17, 2008
Today’s guest editorial is the latest in toni solo’s Globalization and terror series.
It has not always been so hard to map the frontiers of North Atlantic Treaty Organization country foreign policy beyond which US imperialism goes it alone. Nor, until now, have NATO countries’ relations with Israel encroached so blatantly on the enduring symbiosis between Israel’s militarist aggression and the US government’s militarist imperialism. If it is clear by now that US power and influence is less than it was even ten years ago, what might be the implications for how NATO is used and abused in terms of shifting international economic relations and, in particular, the diverse processes of corporate globalization?
A banal anecdote may help set those questions in some kind of manageable framework. Back in 1993, the Irish government, like many other Western European governments got on the transparency and participation bandwagon prior to that year’s UN Human Rights Conference in Vienna. So a bunch of NGOs working on a broad range of human rights matters were invited to a preparatory meeting in Iveagh House, the Department of Foreign Affairs’ building on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. We all sat about a large conference table along with various DFA staff and an avuncular guy informally dressed who turned out to be an important member of the Irish government delegation to the United Nations.
Censored by Money
July 15, 2008
‘England’s mediaevel libel laws are becoming a global menace to free speech,’ writes George Monbiot.
After every test case, the media assume the worst is over: that Britain’s libel laws, designed to protect the powerful from public scrutiny, have been fanged, and freedom of speech will no longer be treated like a crime. And then it gets worse.
On the website of Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, you can read a letter his publishers have received from the law firm Schillings(1). It contains something I have never seen before: a threatened injunction against a book they haven’t read and that won’t be published until September. Acting on behalf of the “private security contractor” Tim Spicer, Schillings gave the publishers three days (the deadline was last Friday) to guarantee that the book does not defame its client, or face “an injunction to restrain publication”.
No publisher can afford to ignore a letter like this. Though libel is a civil rather than a criminal matter in this country, the consequences can be much graver than most criminal convictions. I would rather go to prison for a few weeks for committing a crime than spend five years fighting a libel case, then lose my house and my savings. It is better to be caught mugging than to be caught speaking freely.
Fascism Returns to Europe
July 10, 2008
‘Italy’s campaign against the Roma has ominous echoes of its fascist past, and the silence of our leaders is deafening,’ writes Seumas Milne. ‘This persecution of Gypsies is now the shame of Europe.’
At the heart of Europe, police have begun fingerprinting children on the basis of their race – with barely a murmur of protest from European governments. Last week, Silvio Berlusconi’s new rightwing Italian administration announced plans to carry out a national registration of all the country’s estimated 150,000 Gypsies – Roma and Sinti people – whether Italian-born or migrants. Interior minister and leading light of the xenophobic Northern League, Roberto Maroni, insisted that taking fingerprints of all Roma, including children, was needed to “prevent begging” and, if necessary, remove the children from their parents.
The ethnic fingerprinting drive is part of a broader crackdown on Italy’s three-and-a-half million migrants, most of them legal, carried out in an atmosphere of increasingly hysterical rhetoric about crime and security. But the reviled Roma, some of whose families have been in Italy since the middle ages, are taking the brunt of it. The aim is to close 700 Roma squatter camps and force their inhabitants out of the cities or the country. In the same week as Maroni was defending his racial registration plans in parliament, Italy’s highest appeal court ruled that it was acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that “all Gypsies were thieves”, rather than because of their “Gypsy nature”.
Selective Sentimentality
July 7, 2008
Living in Britain again, I am struck anew by the selective sentimentality of government and media, and how popular acceptance of this emotional manipulation results in restrictions on our freedom of expression.
One stirring talking point has been the 15 British soldiers killed in Afghanistan in June, one of them (horror!) a woman. Lots of stuff on TV and in the papers about heroes sacrificing themselves for their country. Not long ago it was revealed (deliberately?) that good prince Harry had been serving in Afghanistan. Disappointing news. A member of the royal family swaggering armed through Asia makes it more difficult to explain away the current British militarism as ‘Blair’s wars’ and not necessarily the British people’s. Harry mumbled patriotically about the wounded ‘heroes’ he’d accompanied back to Britain, and the nation was encouraged to celebrate British toughness rather than question the justification for these pointless wars.
I sympathise with any parent who loses a child, and I sympathise with the families of young working class people who join the army because they can’t see another way to earn a decent wage or develop useful skills. My advice, however, is to keep well away from the army. Joining the military means signing away your individuality – you agree to kill and be killed on behalf of the state. If your country is under attack this may be justifiable, but the wars Britain is now involved in are offensive, unlawful, against the interests of the British people, and doomed to failure. In their classic ‘Black Soldier’, radical proto-rappers The Last Poets discouraged African Americans from fighting in Vietnam, but if you’re white British the sentiment is easily transferred: if you want to fight a noble battle in defence of your community, you should do that at home, as part of your community. Killing the empire’s enemies is not the same as killing yours.
New Labour Bequeaths Its Racial Politics to BNP
July 7, 2008
‘It’s no surprise that the BNP’s rise and New Labour’s demise are linked,’ writes Gary Younge. ‘The ruling party failed to make the case against racism and xenophobia, pandering instead of standing on principle.’
On Wednesday evening around 7pm, the Reverend Roger Gayler, vicar of St Marks parish, went to answer a knock on the door. It was the night before the Chadwell Heath byelection for Barking and Dagenham council in Greater London, and Gayler had recently written an open letter to his flock.
“I rarely enter the party political arena and do so very reluctantly, but as a matter of Christian principle I feel this time I must,” he wrote. “The [British National party] would divide our community, spread fear through lies, and reduce services to those in our community who most need them (they proposed huge cuts in services for the elderly and young people in their budget). They preach the politics of hate.”
Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties
July 3, 2008
The founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, Rick Falkvinge, explaining the European (and US) copyfight in terms of Copyright Vs. Civil Liberties. In short, for the media industry to prevent breach of copyright they must remove all previously held privacy laws and monitor everything you do online. To prevent this Falkvinge launched the Pirate Party to battle in the Swedish polls. For more on Rick try this video presentation.
Chances are you’ve never been welcomed in front of an audience with “Arrrr!” Chances are, however, that you are not the founder of the Pirates Political Party. It’s a rapidly growing group located in Sweden. The name was chosen to represent piracy, or “stealing” copyrighted products because the Party is firmly against corporate ownership.
