Many congratulations to Palestine on being recognised as a non-member state at the United Nations. There is a distinct irony that, apart from the unreconstructed climate change deniers in the United States, Canada and the Czech Republic, the supporters of Palestinian genocide could only muster votes from the tiniest island states threatened by climate change. Where is the much vaunted American Empire now?

Both the United States and Israel are incapable of introspection; instead they have reacted by saying the rest of the world is mad.

There was also a chilling admission of the United States support for extreme zionist land claims, from Hillary Clinton, who called for negotiation “Between Jerusalem and Ramallah”. Not Tel Aviv; Jerusalem.

I argued a year ago that Palestine could join the International Criminal Court without waiting for this vote. But this vote certainly removes all doubt on that score.

I was absolutely disgusted by William Hague’s offer of support form Palestine if Palestine agreed not to join, or take cases to, the International Criminal Court. It is yet another example of that theme to which my writing constantly returns, the abandonment by neo-con UK governments of the principle of international law in favour of a might is right approach. It was always UK policy to encourage dispute resolution by international courts. Now we are discouraging it.

There is a very important practical point here. As I also wrote a year ago:

There is an extremely crucial point here: if Palestine accedes to the Statute of Rome, under Article 12 of the Statute of Rome, the International Criminal Court would have jurisdiction over Israelis committing war crimes on Palestinian soil. Other states parties – including the UK – would be obliged by law to hand over indicted Israeli war criminals to the court at the Hague. This would be a massive blow to the Israeli propaganda and lobbying machine.

This explains why Hague was so keen to avert Palestinian membership of the ICC. Not only can Palestine indict Israeli war criminals (and they should start immediately with those behind Operation Cast Lead and the attack on the Mavi Marmara) but Britain will be obliged – as will all other European Union countries – to hand them over to the court.

Given that this disgraceful government had specifically enacted legislation to block other avenues for the indictment of Israeli war criminals in the United Kingdom, this is infuriating for our zionist sponsored politicians.

It also raises an interesting point. We have seen the entire political establishment enthusiastically promoting the automaticity of European arrest warrants in the case of Julian Assange. How will those same politicians react to the automaticity of arrest warrants for Israeli war criminals? I suspect that they will suddenly discover there is a need for political intervention in such cases.

I was trying to come up with a witty and apposite acronym for BBC to describe what I have just seen on TV, but all I could manage was Beyond Belief Cunts.

Watching BBC World News here in Accra, I have just seen forty minutes of intense and non-stop Israeli propaganda. A live press conference by Netanyahu and Ehud Barak followed by a long, long interview with Mark Regev in which the most searching BBC question could fairly be paraphrased as “How can you be certain that those dastardly Palestinians will not break the ceasefire and start firing rockets again?”

No attempt whatsoever to give a Palestinian a chance to put over their viewpoint. Now fifty minutes of solid coverage around the ceasefire without a single Palestinian view or pro-Palestinian or pro-peace view. And in that entire fifty minutes not one mention of Palestinian dead.

Beyond Belief Cunts. Actually, it’s not a bad effort.

Strangely, even the sight on television of the body of a small boy, the same age as Cameron, being dug by hand from the bomb rubble, is not what has stayed with me strongest from the latest attack on the Palestinians. Instead, I recall most vividly a radio broadcast on the BBC World Service two days before the attack on Gaza began.

It was a banal, everyday story of Palestinian villagers being evicted from their land in the occupied West Bank, to make way for an Israeli “military zone”. These pastoralists had lost a thousand hectares to the Israelis in the last few years, and now these ancient villages were being finally, forcibly, evacuated in a vicious act of ethnic cleansing. The shepherds claimed that what this was really about, was the precious springs that watered their livestock. Work was already starting to divert their water to nearby, and illegal, burgeoning Israeli settlements.

The BBC World Service TV has this minute, at 9.00am GMT, started its news broadcast as usual from Ashkelon in Israel, highlighting rocket attacks on Israel. There is no mention on the BBC – there has never been any mention on the BBC, or anywhere in the Western mainstream media – that for at least 4,000 years Ashkelon was an Arab town, until in 1948 the entire, Arab population of 12,000 was driven out by armed force, many being massacred. Doubtless some older inhabitants of Gaza are refugees whose home is Ashkelon.

Israel is exercising its right of self-defence in precisely the same sense that Hitler was exercising the right of self-defence in Normandy in 1944 – ie not at all. Why the world puts up with this blatant ethnic cleansing and prolonged, agonizing genocide of the Palestinain people, I have no idea. It is not just about bombs and rockets and deaths now. It is about the shepherds being pushed out of their village in 2012 as part of the same process of the massacre of Ashkelon in 1948, all a process of genocide of the Palestinians in which Obama, Clinton, Cameron and Hague, as two wholw generations of western politicians before them, are actively complicit.

Thanks for the many good wishes. I am now quite well, even if a lot slimmer. The problem was purely physical on this occasion, though Nadira and Cameron flying out to join me certainly helped me feel a lot better. I shall be back in the UK at the weekend.

Hillary Clinton is repeating the methodology of the Iran/Contra affair, using “black” funds to finance the operation to ensure President Correa is not re-elected.

I had two excellent sources for the news that the US/UK strategy against Julian Assange was to ensure the defeat of President Correa in Presidential elections next spring, and then have him expelled from the Ecuadorean Embassy. One source was within the UK civil service and one in Washington. Both had direct, personal access to the information I described. Both told me in the knowledge I would publish it.

Of course Assange is not the only reason Clinton wants rid of Correa; but it adds spice and urgency.

We now have completely independent evidence from Chile that this CIA operation exists, from journalists who were investigating a smuggling operation involving 300 kg per month of cocaine, organised by the Chilean army and security services.

The links to US intelligence emerged after an anonymous source from the Agencia Nacional de Inteligencia (ANI) told Panoramas News that the smuggling of 300 kilos of cocaine was in fact a highly sensitive CIA/DEA operation that would help to raise money to topple the government of Ecuador. The operation is similar to the one carried out by the Agency in Central America during the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980’s, the source said.

A few days ago I published information I had received that Patricio Mery Bell, the director of the news programme which broke the story, had been lured to a meeting with a young lady “informant” who had worked with CIA-backed anti-Cuban groups in Miami. She had then accused him of sexual assault (does any of that scenario sound familiar?) He was arrested and his materials had been confiscated. However I took the article down after jst a few minutes because I had received the information in emails from sources I did not know previously, and was unsure it could stand up. It does now appear that this is indeed true.

My Washigton informant had told me, as I published, that the funds for the anti-Correa operation were not from the CIA budget but from secret funds controlled by the Pentagon. This could not be done by CIA funds because, perhaps surprisingly, for the CIA to operate in this way is a crime in the United States.

Whether my informant knew or suspected that the “secret Pentagon funds” were drug money I do not know. They did not mention narcotics.

I make mistakes. I have ocasionally regretted something I wrote. However I have never written anything motivated by hatred of another race or religion, yet I am too “extreme” for the mainstream media. But Melanie Phillips, darling of the Mail and the BBC, can write this kind of incitement to religious hatred:

Romney lost because, like Britain’s Conservative Party, the Republicans just don’t understand that America and the west are being consumed by a culture war. In their cowardice and moral confusion, they all attempt to appease the enemies within. And from without, the Islamic enemies of civilisation stand poised to occupy the void.

With the re-election of Obama, America now threatens to lead the west into a terrifying darkness.

Can somebody please show anything I have written which is anywhere near as ill-motivated? Or anything near as barking mad? Yet Phillips is mainstream and I am in some way understood to be “beyond the pale” of accepted opinion. How does this happen?

Islam is a religion. I know a great many extremely good Muslims. There are also some bad ones, just as there are good and bad Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, you name it. What if I were to write:

“In their cowardice and moral confusion, they all attempt to appease the enemies within. And from without, the Jewish enemies of civilisation stand poised to occupy the void.”

Why is not everybody protected from hate speech? Unfortunately we don’t have an appropriate word as strong as “racist” to describe the kind of vile bigot Phillips is, Muslims not being a race. For Phillips to accuse Obama of conspiring with racial intolerance while promoting evil and hatred herself, is unspeakable.

Actually if Phillips is acceptable as a mainstream commentator, I am proud that I am not.

My friend Mike Arnott of Dundee TUC has done more than anybody to record the story of the outstanding Dundonian contribution to the early war against fascism; seventeen men from Dundee died in the International Brigade.

I wonder what they would think about the alliance between the right wing Spanish “Popular Party” and the Tories plus, reportedly, New Labour to plan a demand for the expulsion of an independent Scotland from the European Union?

New Labour’s commitment to keeping Trident in Scotland, to ending free prescriptions and to imposing university tuition fees makes it, I suppose, unremarkable that they would feel comfortable in this company.

The Tories have today denied that they have made any formal deal on a united front against Scottish and Catalonian independence, while acknowledging that meetings between the Scottish Tories and the Popular Party have taken place. (To discuss what else, one wonders? Property prices on Tory retirement homes in Spain?)

Four more years of drone killings, Guantanamo, crazy FBI agent provocateur plots, whistleblower prosecutions and surveillance of citizens were going to come whoever won. Goldman Sachs funded both candidates royally. I probably prefer the slightly tempered or disguised neo-con to the red meat neo-con, but let nobody pretend it makes a vast difference.

A respected retired African President told me last week that George Bush did more for Africa than Obama. Amazingly, I believe that to be true; whatever his motives, a number of Bush initiatives pumped real money into useful African infrastructure. Obama’s relations with Africa have almost entirely revolved around location of military bases.

Perspective changes as you move around the globe.

This is a genuine offer. I will pay £100 to any person who can provide a convincing reason why Denis MacShane’s expense fiddling, involving his creating false invoices, was not a criminal offence. Your argument does not have to be unanswerable – merely respectable. Up to three prizes will be given, for the three first and not essentially the same convincing arguments.

This competition specifically is open to employees of the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service; we would love to know their reasoning. It baffles me. I confess I can think of no single circumstance in this case that would prevent MacShane being convicted for theft and fraud. What is the answer?

Denis MacShane is a criminal. If he wants to try his chances with a jury, the libel courts are open to him and I am here.

The most reliable Israeli mouthpiece in the House of Commons, Dennis MacShane, has today resigned as an MP after stealing £20,000 in expenses. This was not a case of a doubtful claim – MacShane actually created, himself, 19 false invoices.

Why he has not been prosecuted and jailed is a question well worth discussion.

At the time that he stole that money, his long term partner was the journalist Joan Smith, who presumably also benefited from it. She wrote this astonishing article in the Guardian:

” I am sick of my country and this hysteria over MPs. People have been led to believe that we are governed by a corrupt political class. This is sanctimonious nonsense.”

Smith is of course a great expert in sanctimonious nonsense, and a leader of the New Labour war criminal movement in their attacks on Julian assange:

It was BICOM mouthpiece Denis MacShane who attacked Paul Flynn as “antisemitic” for querying the purpose of the long series of meetings between Matthew Gould, Adam Werritty and Liam Fox, some of which included Mossad. In doing so, MacShane did not mention his own role in setting up the first of those meetings, on 8 September 2009, and that he had been present at the start of that meeting. The FCO tried to hide that fact by deleting the entire diary entry for the meeting – but that very act prompted an old colleague to tell me.

Talk of “round up the usual suspects”. Gary Glitter and Freddie Starr are not even low-hanging fruit for the Met, they are windfalls.

Jimmy Savile’s behaviour was evidently priapistic, and his predeliction for under-age sex, it is plain, was indulged continually in semi-public situations. The risk or exposure, or the thrill of his own incredible immunity, appear to have been part of the enjoyment.

I do not accept that there were two Jimmy Saviles; that one, the open pervert, only appeared when he was with the conveniently already discredited Gadd and Starr, and the other entirely respectable Savile was the friend of Royalty, senior politicians and public servants and entirely blameless in his behaviour. It seems to me much more intrinsically probable that the mutual indulgence of shared vices was the stuff of his friendships in both groups.

Savile’s elevation into the social elite brought him the immunity from prosecution for sexual exploitation that social elites always appear to enjoy. The “posh” part of Savile’s social circle continues to be protected, while Glitter and Starr will satisfy the public mood for revenge.

I am sure there is a great deal more to know than Glitter and Starr. I fear we shall never be permitted to know it.

The rabid anti-Europeanism displayed in the recent House of Commons debate on EU funding was a further clarification of a simple political truth. The real choice facing Scotland in 2014 is, “Which union do you wish to be in?”

Scotland can either be independent within the European Union or part of the United Kingdom outside the European Union. In joining the pro-UKIP wing of the Tory Party in the vote, Ed Milliband was, with short term shrewdness, tapping in to a bottomless well of English atavism that I have no doubt, from living there and simple observation of those around me, is leading England inexorably out of the European Union.

UKIP support rises, the Tory xenophobes bray, New Labour joins them because as always it scents the way to money and power. The English have already kept the UK out of Schengen and the Euro, the two most important developments in the history of the EU and both of which it would be great to be in. (On my advice a company here in Ghana is now buying tens of millions of pounds of manufactured equipment from Sweden, switching source from the UK, because the weak Euro gives much better value for money). The UK is already out of some of the most important aspects of the EU, snad the rest will follow.

When did any major English political figure dare to suggest in public that the EU is a good thing? That, incidentally, is a genuine question. Any answers? Neither English politicians nor media care to hide their gloating at the Eurozone’s economic difficulties, and the London media still makes daily predictions of the end of the Euro, despite having been wrong on the subject 1,000 days in a row.

Most amusing is when pundits who don’t actually support the EU themselves leap with glee when they can find a Spaniard wishing to be disobliging about an independent Scotland’s EU status. Said Spaniard is suddenly the ultimate authority on EU law, even though the same pundits deride Spain in every other circumstance.

It won’t be on the ballot paper. But the real question for the Scots is “Which union do you wish to be in?”