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”.
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.
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.”
Left supports Right defending liberty
June 29, 2008
Tony Benn’s principled support for David Davis’s reelection. (thanks Tom)
Libertarians from the Left and Right sometimes meet in the middle against an authoritarian state. In 1961, having served for 10 years as an MP for Bristol South East, I was declared disqualified because my father had been a peer and he had died. It was argued that I had inherited his peerage.
A by-election was called, and, despite my disqualification, I decided to contest it to argue a point of principle. Winston Churchill, the former Conservative Prime Minister, sent me a letter of support for which I am, to this day, most grateful.
I must be the only Labour candidate who has ever circulated 30,000 copies of a letter from a Tory leader to my constituents. The law that prevented me sitting in the Commons was later changed as a result of that by-election.
Fortress Britain
June 26, 2008
Variant, Issue 32, Summer 2008; Spinwatch, June 23, 2008; Scoop (New Zealand), June 25, 2008; UK Watch, June 25, 2008; Media Monitors Network, June 25, 2008; Dissident Voice, June 27, 2008
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“The public has to be more alert”, warned one “international terrorism expert” in the Daily Mail late last year, because Scotland “is set to become another Israel within five years”. “[A]nti-terror measures will soon become a common feature of life”, he added, requiring “routine arming of police officers”. He called for increasing children’s “awareness of the dangers of terrorism” and for them to be “encouraged” to report anything “out of the ordinary”.
The oracle of doom was one Amnon Maor, identified as the head instructor of counter-terrorism for the IDF and Israeli border police.[1] Maor is working with security firm 360 Defence, based near Glasgow, which is “training Scottish police, military and civilians in security techniques”. This wouldn’t be the first time the British police benefits form Israeli anti-terror expertise; so had the police squad that carried out the extrajudicial execution of the young Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes in the London underground.
In the post-September 11 world, Naomi Klein writes, Israel has pitched its “uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror’”. Britain, which is now in possession of its own occupied Arab territory, is eager to learn; and it has discovered that the only thing more useful than a thing to fear is fear itself. The give away line in Maor’s prescription above is his offer to increase children’s awareness of the dangers of terrorism. Absent the real thing, fear should suffice. The Prime Minister may not have many achievements to his name, but he can claim patents to ‘Fortress Britain’, whose battlements sit on a foundation of fear.
Read the rest of this entry »
Welsh Assembly Sparks Outrage in Boycott Call
June 16, 2008
Welsh Assembly Presiding Officer Dafydd Elis-Thomas is to be commended for urging colleagues to boycott a visit by Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor. In a leaked email he is quoted as saying “I am unwilling to accept the invitation to meet the ambassador because of my objection to the failure of the state of Israel to meet its international obligations to the Palestinian people of the Holy Lands. I would invite other colleagues to do the same.” This call has generated a lot of press: I count at least 9 newspaper articles including the Daily Mail, BBC, Jerusalem Post, Jewish Chronicle, AFP, Wales Online, etc. All of them negative I might add.
The BBC counters Mr Elis-Thomas’s email with 6 spokesmen and you’ll notice they quoted no-one who was in favour of the boycott. One of the 6 was Rodney Berman, the leader of Cardiff council, who believes Wales’ Jewish community would be shocked at the “strident tone.” He then adds “If AMs have concerns, as I do myself, about policies followed by the Israeli government then surely it’s better to use this event to talk about those concerns rather than to put up barriers which can only promote further misunderstanding.”
Frankly I was very impressed with the email and am delighted to hear that Dafydd is “standing by what he had written.” What Rodney Berman is missing is that there has been talk for the last 40 years of occupation and it has solved nothing. Israel has refused to obey International Law, as judged most recently in 2004 by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and ignores countless UN resolutions. Israel knows well that it’s failing these commitments and we now need less talk and more political pressure to force positive action. I congradulate Dafydd Elis-Thomas for his stand – it would seem there are still some decent people willing to put their necks out for a just cause. Also Berman presumes that all Jews would be shocked, many I know would be delighted by this stand. The only people that will be shocked are pro-Israel supporters (Jewish or not) whose bias prevents them from acknowledging the horrendous Israeli human rights and legal record.
What’s more curious is why a Muslim member of the assembly invited Prosor in the first place? Mohammed Asghar claims that he knows a lot from the Palestinian side but not a lot from the other side. I would advise him that the Ambassador / Hasbara goon Prosor is not the best source for an objective opinion.
Of further interest is how fast Mr Elis-Thomas’s wikipedia page was edited. Is this a part of the information “war” launched by pro-Israel lobbying group CAMERA? The added content is certainly bias: including choice quotes such as, his objections target “a country that has withdrawn from 89 percent of the land it conquered in 1967, and he fails to deal with the complexity of a Gaza Strip controlled by ruthless radicals who mete out death penalties to gays.” This is ignoring Israeli’s legal obligations as judged by the ICJ and is rather crude propaganda.
