I cannot think of a period in my lifetime when so much was happening in the world so quickly with which it feels that, as a reluctant UK citizen, I have a direct connection and indeed responsibility.
Race riots in the UK, the genocide in Gaza, the attacks on civil liberty and decline in effective democracy across the western world, the ever darkening reach of mass surveillance, including of the individual’s use of currency; those are just a few of the issues in play and the links between all of them are intimate and inextricable.
I do not believe that the race riots have been fomented in order to provide an excuse to crack down further on civil liberties. But that Starmer – whom I suspect will prove to be the most authoritarian Prime Minister in British history – is seizing on them for that prupose is undeniable.
In particular the announcement that the already deeply worrying Online Safety Act will be amended, to give the state still greater power over information sources like the one which you are currently reading, could signal a massive blow to internet freedom.
Publication of “misinformation” is to be criminalised – which means the official narrative will be enforced on social media.
Given that, for example, the government has relentlessly promoted the demonstrably false stories of mass rape by Palestinians on October 7, while studiously failing to notice the vast amount of unquestionable evidence in the last fortnight of systematic rape of Palestinian prisoners on a vast scale by the Israeli Defence Force, no reasonable person can fail to understand the danger of the enforcement of state-approved “truth”.
Articles like my dissection of the state narrative on the Skripals look set to be deemed a threat to the “online safety” of the nation. Alternative narratives over Covid, over 9/11, over the death of David Kelly – any deviation from the official line is liable to be deemed criminal.
Meanwhile, with “two-tier justice” being the latest right wing mantra, we find that race rioters who set fires in inhabited buildings and threw rocks at policemen, in fact get lighter sentences than environmentalists involved in planning non-violent actions.
Predictably, we are already seeing the unrest used as a justification for increased usage of facial recognition technology. 24/7 state surveillance of the individual is no longer a wild dystopian fear.
Looking further afield, the narrative is moved on by the claims that an ISIS-linked terrorist in Austria planned to attack a Taylor Swift concert. This plays nicely into the Taylor Swift theme of the dance class where the girls were horribly murdered in Southport, and reinvigorates the flagging wave of Islamophobia.
Given that ISIS cooperates closely with both Israel and the CIA and has avoided attacking Israel or western targets, while I still can without being locked up may I express my scepticism at this item of news management.
Islamophobia is of course an important link between events here and in the Middle East. While there is of course a small Palestinian Christian minority, there is no doubt that hatred of Muslims is a large driver in the Israeli dehumanisation of Palestinians that paves the psychological grounds for genocide, mass rape and torture.
Here Israel is just acting as the Western colonial enterprise that it is. As the West has sought to seize the physical resources of the Middle East – the hydrocarbons of Iraq, Syria and Libya and the lands of the Palestinians – the deliberate promulgation of Islamophobia at home has driven public support for these ventures, though that public support is thankfully a dwindling commodity.
After decades of being fed nonsense about a war of civilisations and the dangers of Islamic terrorism, whipping up anti-immigrant mobs has not been difficult. It does not require too deep an analysis of the nexus of Islamophobia and wider racism to understand that.
But it is also true that Zionist interests have been extremely keen to stoke this unrest, as a counter-narrative to the mass popular support for Palestine which the genocide has engendered among western populations.
What’s causing the Islamophobic riots across the UK, and why now?
1. The riots have been instigated by the Zionist asset Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (‘Tommy Robinson’), who has been working for the State of Israel since 2009 as part of the so-called ‘counterjihad’ Islamophobia…
— David Miller (@Tracking_Power) August 3, 2024
It is also well worth reading this thread from Lowkey
Tommy Robinson has previously stated he would “fight for Israel in a war.”
This thread examines Robinson and EDL’s very clear material relationship with the Zionist Movement and considers the possibility that the racist attacks and pogroms in Britain are part of that fight.
— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) August 4, 2024
It is also of course impossible to ignore the role of born-again Zionist Elon Musk and his cohort in whipping up the Islamophobic and racist narrative.
These people, of course, always support free movement for themselves. Elon Musk is in fact an immigrant from Africa, whereas “Tommy Robinson” is an immigrant in Spain.
Predictably the state has countered with the anti-semitism narrative, and rather hilariously they have yet again brought out the utterly ludicrous claims of the “Community Security Trust” of an increase in “anti-semitic incidents”.
This time the Trust are claiming a 210% increase in anti-semitic incidents, which is quite modest by their standards. I have pointed out again and again that any journalist with a Maths O-level would have been able to work out that their claims of increases in attacks between 45% and 300% every year for twenty years simply cannot be true or there would now be many hundreds of thousands of attacks on Jewish people per year and thankfully that is plainly untrue.
Every single year since 2005 the Community Security Trust has claimed an increase in anti-semitic incidents of between 42% and 300%. “Journalists” like Peston always retail this.
If true there would now be at least 36,000 violent anti-semitic attacks a year.
Average number of… https://t.co/Tf3Mx7mBj0 pic.twitter.com/bQbjITXgOg— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) October 10, 2023
I suppose if the lie works as propaganda, they simply stick with it. But there could hardly be a starker illustration of the pathetic enslavement of mainstream media journalists that nobody ever queries these plainly impossible claims.
It is also worth noting that as the CST – which gets £12 million a year from the Home Office – construes references to “apartheid Israel” as anti-semitic incidents, then the ICJ Opinion on the Occupied Territories would count as an anti-semitic incident by these Home Office sponsored standards!
Finally, while the racist tide appears to be receding, I commend everybody who got out there to counter-protest. It is extremely dangerous to allow fascists the run of the streets and we must remain both nimble and active.
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It’s not only in the UK. Some weeks after Craig Murray’s chilling detention and interrogation without right to silence or legal advice at Glasgow airport, Scott Ritter, who is also a distinguished former government servant with impeccable credentials, was intercepted when boarding an international airliner flight. Plain clothes officers of some US goverment agency briefly detained him and confiscated his US passport, thus making it impossible for him to travel overseas.
Early this week the FBI formally raided his house and confiscated all his communications devices.
They invoked some obscure anti-terrorism legislation to smear him with an accusation of something I’d never heard of before: “informational terrorism”.
This is beyond Nineteen Eightyfour. If the bastards can do this to distinguished international figures such as Ritter and Murray then they can do it to absolutely any one of us ordinary proles.
A Berlin court has imposed a €600 fine on a woman for using the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” during a protest. Her lawyer has criticized the ruling as a “dark day for freedom of expression.” (from the news organisation Palestine International Broadcast.)
I hope she appeals, and wins, at the ECHR certainly. I might also put it “from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, Palestine shall be a full democracy” or more fully “from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, Palestine shall move from apartheid tyranny to full democracy” .
Just to throw two references into the discussion that hopefully people will find useful:
1. a tactic used by opponents of repression in Hong Kong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_piece_of_paper
2. Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – an absolute MUST READ for anyone who hasn’t already read it:
https://chisineu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/saul-alinsky-rules-for-radicals-1989.pdf
If I understand correctly, Citizens UK is the offspring of Alinsky’s ideas. Are you a member?
Hi. No. They sound good, though, if they’re into Alinsky. (Well, except for the monarchist reference in their name.) I will check them out.
Another opportunity has occurred to me this morning… How about referring back to the great moment in history when Karl Liebknecht began his address to a Mayday public meeting in Berlin 1916 with the famous eight words “Down with the war! Down with the government!”
Liebknecht was promptly arrested and jailed for treason. His words marked a turning point, as the leftwing opposition to World War 1 got its act together.
The most cutting slogan for those of us who oppose genocide in 2024 is very clear: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free“. I would like to see every anti-genocide meeting open with this slogan, badges, etc. Maybe even put candidates up for elections.
This is straight out of the Alinsky playbook – throw it back in the enemy’s face.
What the slogan basically comes down to isn’t this or that detailed position on 1947, 1948, 1967, or the ICJ. It’s more simple than that. It’s equal rights regardless of ethnicity. Equal rights means the end of ethnic supremacy – the end of Israel.
All encapsulated in 10 words. And they’re not tied to any particular organisation. Not bad at all.
What “repression” in HK? You mean baseless smears, identical to islamophobia above, thrown by ‘Tommy Robinsons’ of the east? If you look who exactly is peddling these lies, it’s always far right scum who wants HK to be made UK/UK prison colony again, and to make it even more sad, they are supremacists who despite being 100% ethnic chinese are convinced by UK propaganda they are superior racially to the untermenshen around. Much like banderistas from Kiev howling the exact same thing about Russia despite being ethnically identical.
The smears about China got really pathetic whole last year, with howls about imaginary “genocide” going in full swing (when anyone can visit China, drive there and see it’s BS) while simultaniously denying 200% real, vicious genocides of their proxies in Donbass and Gaza. And now the exact same neonazi scum drove into Russia (Kursk region) solely to shoot and terrorize civilians, proving Putin 200% right yet again, as the whole insane attack has zero logical and strategical value, and funnily enough, whole western press is silent, you can only see mass executions and hunting of children and old women with drones on the social media…
“ Tommy Robinsons’ of the east”
You mean like Joshua Wong, Mr V?
Saw a copy of the “Apple Daily”, the front cover a picture of HK beset by swarms of locusts – sound familiar?
Right. One way to respond to this repressive action might be to get a large number of people to agree to be “co-publishers” of a document saying “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (it doesn’t need to say anything else) and dare the German state to fine them all.
This was how people successfully defeated the attempt to ban Michael Baumann’s book How it All Began: The Personal Account of a West German Urban Guerrilla in the 1970s. “Co-publishers” included Jean-Paul Sartre and Heinrich Boll.
And then refuse to pay the fines.
Obviously not everyone is in a position to be able to participate in this action, but there should be many thousands of people who are.
I’d enthusiastically join in with a mass protest like that. It’s telling that nothing of the sort is being organised by any of the groups who pretend to be supporters of Palestine. I was for a couple of years a member of the British Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and was appalled by it. Completely saturated with frauds, Zionist spies and manipulators, police informants and Christian Biblical Holy Land agitators, the whole organisation was arrogating all the donations and coverage for itself then deliberately doing nothing. I set up a Help for Gaza charity and had contacts in Gaza including the IHH (who organised the 2010 Freedom Flotilla and the Mavi Marmara), and was genuinely able to get help in, including water desalinators. I sank a lot of money into the project, including successfully sending cash via Western Union for medical need in Al Bureij refugee camp (there used to be a WU office in Gaza City), but when I tried to popularise it the Solidarity Campaign and other organisations refused to publicise it or support it in any way. The project failed. The next thing I heard from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was that in the light of the crisis in Gaza, members were encouraged to write to their MP, and join in with a sponsored walk to raise money for the PSC. I have had nothing to do with them since. I’d establish my own campaign and organise civil disobedience protests if I thought anyone would join in.
Agree. In Germany however as you know this is really difficult. Even with people who are willing to – by German standards – citicize Israel any discussion that would try to defend Hamas as a party and administrative body would end.
Which means to say they know very very little. And especially those in the segment of publishing opinions, influence discourse will have a very selected knowledge. They will go back to the 1930s and claim that it was Arab nationalism´s fault (and yeah antisemitism what else) and that even if there were terrorist actions those had nothing to do with the benign nature of Zionism.
In Germany you can not question zionism.
And if you quote the “river” phrase you are regarded as someone rejecting “‘Israel´s right to exist” as the Germans have coined it. This is both informal power policy as well as the outline of laws and penal codes.
This is what I am trying to explain to foreign activists.
Even in the case of the Berlin Aug. 6th court decision the defendant would never openly defend Hamas. It would be her end. Zero chance for an appeal. Hello Hamas, welcome prison.
But if our intellectual culture is not capable fo regarding Hamas et. al. as a core part of the political process, not capable of reckognizing Hamas as part of the solution instead of the problem, if they do not understand that Hamas is 100% legit – well there you have a very long way to walk. And you better find a method which doesn´t include Germany.
They lack the proper education and scholarship. And elites are extremly reluctant to give up their narratives. As I said last week or so, due to a “Holocaust-syndrom” demands for critical reasoning and scrutiny are DOA unless Israel beyond any doubt were responsible for willing to start WWIII or something much much worse than Gaza now, which cannot be spun. (Some nuts – I am sure – would even argue, “we killed them, now we have to sacrifice our own nation” in whatever sick scenario I am not in the mood to sketch out.)
p.s. when trying to explain to people Oct. 7th Norman Finkelstein, whose anlysis is 100% correct, eventually refrained from his position because he saw that it was too far off of what is allowed. Even in the US, even by students who carry the protest.
Israel seems to support IDL/Yaxley-Lennon in the same way that the US has supported extremists abroad. The CIA funding, on the one hand, Neo Nazis and on the other extremist Islamists. Israel’s aim being in order to garner support for themselves in a roundabout way of using EDL (and other similar organisations in other Western countries) to promulgate hate for Islam itself and Islamaphobia against individuals who happen to be ordinary Muslims or even just ‘look’ Muslim.
I don’t agree (being pedantic) that the West, necessarily, seeks access to Middle Eastern (or any other) hydrocarbons. I think that now they are content to ‘put them beyond use’ with both sanctions and the destruction of infrastructure of states with terrorism and civil war. We are now at a stage where, due to the loss of most of the natural gas from the RF, that the US can export its shale gas and make a profit. AFAIK the US is self sufficient in oil/gas and with the advent of shale gas can now export to backfill the loss of Russian gas. Of course it will cost MORE than Russian gas. A real change from a few short years ago when the US Govt was subsidising shale gas in order to keep the industry afloat. Now it is not only profitable but monies can be made from taxation.
If you were a paranoid person you would say that Biden met with Right Sector the week before the coup to ENCOURAGE them to overthrow the government rather than wait for the new elections after ALL their demands had been met. Further you might be tempted to think that was done with the aim of starting the fighting in the East (from 2014) knowing that RF would react to the coup by wishing to defend the country against their Neo Nazi overthrowers. This would then lead you to suspect that it wasn’t the RF who blew up their own pipeline in some kind of ‘huff’ but rather the US and friends to ensure that RF gas couldn’t reach further into Europe – in order to allow US shale gas to reach a high enough price to be profitable. But that’s just paranoid ramblings TBH.
Hydrocarbons are the aim of both wars. The US blew up Nordstream because it bypassed the pipeline which crosses Ukraine, and so Russia was selling clean gas direct to Europe. Europe then got tankers of dirty US fracking gas instead, extraction of which has fractured their water table and lowered it significantly across the Mid-West. Russia has a lot of oil and gas and is therefore potentially free of OPEC controls. Gaza has more than enough gas to supply Europe. The pipelines are in place to Cyprus and beyond into Europe, also east into Turkey and beyond. Iran has a lot of oil and Saudi would like to manage it on behalf of the dollar hegemony, and in return for all the lethal weaponry it can afford to buy. Except we know really that Saudi is the wild card which plays for both sides. British and Dutch companies tried to get agreements with the PA to extract and deliver the gas to Europe but Israel says no, and if the only way to have full and uncontested ownership of it all is killing every last Palestinian then whatever it takes they will do.
We are all invested in relying on this gas once it comes on stream to Europe and beyond.
This has all been a long time in the planning and Russia held the balance of the peace in the ME until Kissinger died last year. Now the gloves are off. The signed treaties which kept peace and stability are being breached by Israel with US support. Not all Israelis agree with their genocidal government’s intent. Many would not believe the IDF could possibly be carrying out these atrocities to camera.
Elon Musk is under pressure from Netanyahu to ensure that starlink satellite internet does not operate over the occupied territories. He was unwillingly complicit but now he is wedged behind Trump. Trump promising his followers they will only need to vote one last time. Musk controlling the internet and the voting machines. Evangelical Christian wealth funds curtailing freedom of expression.
Cameron poured billions of ‘taxpayers money’ into arms companies and personally hosted arms fairs while he was PM. All those shiny new toys are lethally primed and ready for use. Putin is very cross that close at hand film footage of the hundreds of Russian soldiers blown up in Russia is narrated in English, indicating British involvement in the escalation, and a lot of state of the Art military hardware left Lakenheath yesterday morning, the finest of it recently arrived from Alaska.
Skin in the game indeed.
Jewish communities are frightened that any mainstream media officially recognising Israeli genocide may put them at risk. Muslims are frightened that people concerned for the safety and welfare of Palestinians are putting their communities at risk from white supremacists.
These are valid concerns, but the unacceptable atrocities, war crimes, and starvation of the Palestinian people still need to be confronted, and criminals brought to justice, however long it may take.
Iran may be sending its forces surreptitiously into Israel to try and stop the attacks on Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, and Netanyahu is demanding boots on the ground which the US is providing to address Iranian forces inside Israel ostensibly.
Starmer has a lot on his plate.
“ This has all been a long time in the planning and Russia held the balance of the peace in the ME until Kissinger died last year.”
Can you explain this statement, Alyson? America has been blowing up countries in “ME” for at least twenty years. Russia’s role seems inconsequential, apart from the intervention in Syria but Syria is just one country in West Asia.
The rape issue is one more example of how every zionist accusation is a confession. There is now even CCTV footage of a Palestinian prisoner being gang raped by Israeli soldiers, a practice that IsraelI civil society has determined to normalise and ennoble.
Naturally the British media is suppressing the whole depraved story and is scrambling for any means of portraying zionists as oppressed victims. Hence their headlining of the latest red herring report from CST, which also cites “Free Palestine” and “From the River to the Sea” as anti-Semitic attacks. Condemnation of rape will no doubt very soon be added to the list. The Prime Minister has also rushed to foreground the CST report, a very useful deflection not only from him abetting the holocaust in Gaza but also from his culpability for the domestic racist riots (having helped normalise Islamophobia and stoked anti-immigrant fervour.)
I look forward to your take on the complete absolution of Kamala Harris and in the meantime will up my donation.
Big Stand Up to Racism rallies will take place all over England tomorrow (Saturday) – the whole UK for all I know. Please spread the word and be present if you can.
Aren’t there alternatives to PayPal which is a den of thieves
try directly through your bank? Craig gives his account number at the bottom of his article (I dislike PayPal [C*A connection], can’t access it without “registering”, so no-go there). good luck
Tommy Robinson’s connection with Zionism is news to me, and even sounds like a crackpot conspiracy theory. The Jewish community doesn’t seem to have welcomed Robinson’s support in its demonstrations against anti-semitism. So much the better; the younger generation might be rejecting Israeli apartheid better than their elders as well.
Well of course the Jewish Community doesn’t welcome this racist thug, any more than they welcome that genocidal maniac Netanyahu.
Robinson’s bodyguard at the ajewish Community demonstration in support of genocide was provided by the “Campaign Against Antisemitism”.
https://x.com/Lowkey0nline/status/1728784287183360110
Beyond his fundraising activities, “Tommy Robinson” seems to serve as some weird inversion of a figurehead or mascot. The Campaign Against Antisemitism can make a public spectacle of getting the police to evict him from their marches, so that his numerous but less recognisable followers can continue shouting Islamophobia and waving Union Jacks alongside the Israeli flags.
MJ – (the Wikipedia links below are all to the latest revision of the relevant page to keep them consistent with my excerpts; hence the funny URLs):
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tommy_Robinson_(activist)&oldid=1239434220#Financial_support
– Robinson has received over £2 million in donations and sponsorship, much of it from foreign sources tied to governments in Russia and Israel.[158]
– In 2017, American far-right billionaire Robert J. Shillman funded Robinson’s fellowship at the right-wing Canadian website Rebel News, with Robinson receiving over $6,000 (£5,000) per month.[241]
– In 2018, Robinson received £2 million in donations that were sought by opponents of his imprisonment.[242] That same year, the American/Israeli Middle East Forum think tank (led by Daniel Pipes and described as “fomenting anti-Muslim sentiment”) said it had been funding rallies in Robinson’s support and paying legal costs in his appeal against his prison sentence.[243]
And further, if you look up Robert J. Shillman mentioned above:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_J._Shillman&oldid=1238716225#Political_activities
– Shillman sits on boards of The Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, and the David Horowitz Freedom Center.[3][7][8]
Tony Greenstein at https://azvsas.blogspot.com/ has documented EDL members among the Zionist protests, and the EDL had a “Jewish division”:
– When Moore was head of the EDL’s Jewish Division, she established links with a far-right Jewish American group, the Jewish Task Force.[223]
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chaim_Ben_Pesach&oldid=1238936485#Jewish_Task_Force
– …the Jewish Task Force raises money for the claimed purpose of funding Jewish settlers in the West Bank and runs a website with the stated goal of saving Israel, the United States, and the West.[9] Pesach is banned from entering Israel because of his terrorist acts and his Kahanist associations, which are outlawed in Israel.[10] The Jewish Task Force is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center
Why be surprised? Israel is an apartheid state, so of course fascists support it.
I regret that your last line makes sense. Israel has a racist regime, and so, as you say, we would expect the Israeli right wing and EDL to be similar in disposition to each other (and to apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany in the past).
Not all Jews are Zionists.
you will never hear the voice of an anti-zionist Jew in the media or public life. Starmer has expelled all such Jews from the Labour Party.
You (Pears) have made an important point. Leaders like Simone Zimmerman and Avigail Aberbanel in the younger generation, and Miko Peled and Ilan Pappé in the older one, are exerting an important and valuable influence. Not to mention religious Jewish groups like the Neturei Karta.
The inevitability of the Israeli State founded in 1948 veering towards fascism was pointed out by Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt amongst others at the time. This was at a time of Labour Zionism when the country was led by the likes of Ben Gurion while terrorists like Begin were on the fringes of political life. The flood of right-wing Zionists from the USSR changed the political balance inside Israel.
“Tommy Robinson’s connection with Zionism is news to me, and even sounds like a crackpot conspiracy theory.”
A crackpot conspiracy theory which turns out to be true. Perhaps some adjustment of what is perceived as crackpot is required.
Fair enough. Though I would expect TR to associate with the more extreme Zionists, what Ilan Pappé calls the “State of Judea” (settlers in Israel’s occupied territories) rather than the “State of Israel”, though both are creators of apartheid of course.
“The Jewish community doesn’t seem to have welcomed Robinson’s support in its demonstrations against anti-semitism. ”
The remaining Jewish community in the UK are, by and large, not Zionist. The Zionist Jews have mostly gone to Israel.
Police Scotland are already using facial recognition technology – as are the supermarkets, the minute you set foot in the supermarkets your face is scanned by it – Glasgow has more CCTV cameras per-head-of-population than anywhere else in the UK.
Facial Recognition Technology can be banned – San Francisco manage to ban it in 2019 – whether or not it is still banned I’m not sure .
https://newatlas.com/san-francisco-facial-recognition-ban/59681/
UK authorities risk overreaching in the current hysteria. Draconian fines and the social media platforms they are threatening could ultimately, simply boycott the UK – resulting in a different kind of chaos. Imagine no access to gmail accounts, Youtube; Facebook,Twitter etc – authorities would be begging them to resume their services as public and corporate anger mounted. These platforms are, in some ways, more powerful than the politicians. It’s like the recent debate over privacy and end-to-end encryption; the government has backed down afaik, because losing things like WhatsApp, Apple’s Facetime and Telegram would infuriate the electorate, and cast the UK as uniquely authoritarian, for a supposedly ‘western’ country.
Politicians don’t understand how the internet works either; all this talk of fining tech giants – as if a few companies control everything online. If Twitter are fined into overzealous censorship, those far right folks have multiple options; ranging from self-hosting for like-minded communities, to hosting in countries the UK has little sway over. I find it staggering even this blog has been subjected to repeated DDoS – an approach expected from an authoritarian regimes, not the wEsT – before, I assume(?), moving behind a CDN?
Right now, UK authorities really have it quite good from a monitoring perspective; insomuch as, if a social media post goes up, on say Twitter, that contains criminally actionable content, the police can simply contact Twitter, heck, they may have people permanently on site, who’ll divulge the IP address of said poster, which, in due course they’ll match to a UK ISP account. If the far right vanish to shadier, more private forums, there’ll be no monitoring and restrictions on speech whatsoever. Another option is these people become experts in chaining proxies to hide their real IPs.
Worth also remembering we had massive problems with organised football hooliganism before social media existed, and the Toxteth riots (1981) poll tax riot (1990) were also pre-internet. Blaming the internet for every ill in society is a lazy politician’s excuse.
Ah yes. Stan Cohen (1972) “Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers” – recreated and recreated and recreated with the corporate media as ever the main conduit for the arch moral entrepreneurs.
Cont…
They initially took the ‘legal but harmful’ speech definition out of the patronising, infantilising ‘Online Safety Act,’ because one person’s ‘harmful’ is wide open to interpretation i.e. it’s too subjective to be part of any workable legislation. Natural justice demands the law should be clear; if reinstated, as London’s Khan urges, the Act would risk becoming a Charter for hurt feelings, with lots of silly test cases. As if the courts aren’t backlogged enough already without adding that stupidity.
If implemented, it’d almost certainly lead to all sorts of inconsistent enforcement, enforcement which will make a mockery of the legislation and legitimise the “two tier” grievance. On that, I actually think the whole ‘two tier policing’ claim is a novel attempt by various pro-Israel lobby figures and certain right-wing newspaper columnists to ‘use’ the far right to get the pro-Gaza protests banned on spurious grounds. Robinson has been heavily involved in pushing this ‘two tier’ grievance online; it’s an attempt to draw a false equivalence between the banned, frequently violent, far right, and peaceful pro-Palestine marchers. It’s certainly an interesting approach by the pro-Israel lobby and their allies, but I doubt pro-Palestine voices, appalled by the ongoing slaughter, will be silenced by any new law based on some absurdly flawed false equivalence.
Now Priti Patel – who was famously fired for secret meetings with Israeli officials : https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/08/priti-patel-forced-to-resign-over-unofficial-meetings-with-israelis – is chipping in with the ‘two-tier policing’ line https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/10/priti-patel-riots-two-tier-policing/
Weird, isn’t it, how Robinson is so supportive of Israel, and how Israeli flags are frequently seen at, of all places, far-right rallies. If authorities want to look for state actor level interference, whipping this anti-Muslim stuff up online, they do worse than discovering the connections and cultivation, by Israel, of parts of the UK’s far-right.
But alas, I guess, because it’s Israel – a notional ally – they won’t bother. Just imagine were it Russia though and Russian flags at those far-right demos.
“While there is of course a small Palestinian Christian minority, there is no doubt that hatred of Muslims is a large driver in the Israeli dehumanisation of Palestinians” – Though the incidents are trivial by comparison, Christians are targeted too:
“soldiers turned places of worship [Christian churches] into places of filth, into toilets, and covered the floor with their feces… The mind cannot grasp the terrible and savage things that were done” – Israel’s First Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett, 1949
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2016-01-23/ty-article/.premium/sharetts-censure-of-soldiers-who-desecrated-churches/0000017f-dbfa-d3a5-af7f-fbfee7fa0000
“Vandals have destroyed dozens of crosses at a Christian cemetery west of Jerusalem… in recent years there have been a spate of hate crimes targeting churches and Christian cemeteries, with the perpetrators believed to be Jewish extremists”
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4750637,00.html
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230626-israel-is-targeting-palestinian-christians/
Racism is ingrained in Israel… “it not only extends to Palestinian Christians and Muslims, but also to [black] Jews…. racially discriminated against in housing, employment, education, the army and even in the practice of their religion”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0306396811433110
Thank goodness for blogs – otherwise, how would the world know of your genius analysis?
Next time, start with “dear diary….”
Don’t forget Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter with his own money. It’s true that he’s said to have given a guarantee to the lending banks, but whether it was on his own account or underwritten by another party is unknown. I don’t believe for one moment that he’s deciding what he does with Twitter completely independently as Mr Impetuous Swashbuckler.
Who knows whether his interview with Trump will happen on Monday? Might be bigger than Putin-Carlson if it does. Has Musk even confirmed it yet? Or is it only at the stage of Trump gobbing off? It’s hard to see an interview with a presidential candidate fit into the Musk brand at all. He did a show with Netanyahu of course, but that was hardly an interview, hardly journalism whether shockjocking or otherwise. Word is that a Trump-Musk gig might damage the market for Musk’s all-electric pillock cars in Europe.
Mr Murray is right about the “two-tier” justice meme.
The police & courts are completely, thoroughly and comprehensively shit in distinct & different ways. Dependent on the context or issue at hand.
This neoshitlib regime is bad for everyone, save the very pigs who run it.
Also one should add:
People need to be out protesting against the Westminster regime. Who bear all conceivable responsibility, for every aspect of the beshitted state of the UK and it’s wider social & socioeconomic problems.
Not a paltry rat-bag of EDL re-treads who latched on like barnacles, to the legitimate if misdirected angst of normal people.
Who gives a damn about some low, grifty goon like “Tommy whatshisnuts” in Spain or who funds him? The Kier Starmer’s of this world. Are the very reason the little droog exists as a public figure, to start with.
After all the “far-right” (whatever the hell that is) haven’t been in power, whilst fucking up the country for my entire goddamn lifetime.
Craig.
What is a Paypal payment card?
I have been using Paypal for years and as far as I know I do not have such a thing as a Paypal payment card. Also Paypal sends an email to the associated email address for each payment made so anyone who checks their email has no excuse for not knowing that regular payments have stopped.
I have not referred to a “Paypal payment card”. Most people subscribe via Paypal by entering their debit or credit card details (rather than paying via a Paypal balance). When that card expires and one payment fails, Paypal simply moves the subscriber to “suspended subscriptions”.
Paypal does not warn people that this has happened and most people appear not to notice. This blog now has over 700 suspended subscriptions. That is different to subscriptions which have been actively canceled which appear separately (and is a much lower number).
Ha, that makes sense. I pay Paypal via my bank account so it does not expire. Also I use Paypal when making any internet purchase if the seller has a Paypal option.
However I also speculate that Paypal may set an expiry date for the regular payments by someone who connects to Paypal via a bank account but only starts regular payments and does not use Paypal at sufficient frequency to make one off payments or start new regular payments.
Well, naturally none of that is political, because *they* don’t suppress dissent using filthy, sneaking Brezhnev style methods in “our (managed) democracy”.
/sarc
“Paypal does not warn people that this has happened and most people appear not to notice.”
To be fair to Paypal, it is really the responsibility of the card holder to update all the regular payments being made from a card when that card expires. Much better not to use Paypal and then this sort of thing wouldn’t need to be done.
Of course, the Trumpian lunatics really, really don’t like Taylor Swift so my instinct would be to look at these “ISIS” suspects’ links to the American far right.
Oh and what convenient timing for the outrageous ruling against Shamima Begum (and indeed every British citizen/subject)
Starmer’s target for online suppression won’t be the anti-Muslim right, whom he has done so much to court and legitimise. Rather it will be the section of society that he and the rest of the establishment have smeared and striven to delegitimise for the past decade: dissident (or actual) leftwingers. The silencing of the left has become even more imperative now that the British elite is supporting a genocide.
Starmer’s whole pitch for the party’s leadership was a deliberate ‘bait and switch’ exercise in targeted disinformation. And the vast majority of his 10 pledges were cost neutral or would actually save money, so his pathetic claim that the pandemic intervened to prevent them being in the manifesto, is manifest rubbish: he never intended to do those things; as he’s not even remotely left-wing.
I think the vicarious responsibility they are trying to impose and enforce on social media platforms will backfire too.
Imho, the US govt should be defending its hugely successful tech sector more vigorously against this attempt by European (EU) officials like the overbearing, unelected Commissioner for Internal Market, Thierry Breton, plus European governments, like France and the UK to impose punitive fines. They appear to be attempting to use the US tech sector as a cash cow, by imposing fines based on global turnover for hosted content they dislike.
These companies, created in the US, offer free services to Europeans, supported by generated ad revenues. Europeans, in turn, have freely chose to use them. Europeans don’t own these platforms, nor do European govts, and the executives would be well within their rights to refuse to pay any issued fines on this basis. What can the EU Commission, the French and UK govts do? Block them at national level by intercepting their citizens’ DNS queries? Well, that would infuriate our own citizens and that anger would be directed at the EU and national govts. Imagine the corporate, business reaction if say Apple withdrew its services; no icloud emails, no FaceTIme the UK and France would grind to a halt.
There are simple ways around such things too; like having resolver is running on a VPS (virtual private server) located outside of the UK, France et al, so they can’t intercept those DNS queries. You can even hide your DNS resolver’s IP address behind Cloudflare CDN (Content Delivery Network). Your VPS can run as a VPN server. The fact that so many Chinese citizens bypass their highly sophisticated Great Firewall of China(GFW) using these methods, shows how the UK, France et al would be fighting a futile, losing, idiotic battle if they attempted a block.
Starmer was an obvious fraud, years before Bliar courted him just before he retired as DoPP. I pointed this out to someone who was tasteless enough to be a member of the Liarbour Partei and who voted for him. This time she abstained from the fake election.
In another scandalous German court decision the court rejected the plea by a Palestinian woman to stop German arms shipments to Israel.
The core argument (article by German lawyer Benjamin Düsberg):
“(…) Against this backdrop, the fact that both courts rejected the applications on the grounds that “it cannot be predicted that the Federal Government will grant licenses for arms deliveries in violation of the Federal Republic of Germany’s obligations under international law” is simply laughable. This follows not only from the latest Scholz statement, but also from the entire history of the Federal Republic of Germany, which has never cared about international law when supplying arms all over the world. The wars supported by Germany in Turkey against the Kurds, Saudi Arabia against Yemen, the armament of apartheid South Africa and the military dictatorships in Egypt are just a few examples.
(…)”.
see:
https://archive.is/p2wiy
In essence it shows that the UN´s /ICJ´s concept of preventive actions against possible genocide which is the sole most important reason for their existence is disregarded by and in fact incompatible with German legal reasoning. Since assumptions and “plausibilities” (like Gaza genocide) do not suffice to make a legally convincing point. That this is aburd and criminal if looked at closely proves how incompetent German legal tradition is in the face of state power and elite interests.
We did criticize the fact that the ICJ stopped short of defining it as a factual genocide. I don´t know if legally in Germany that would have made enough additional impact.
What in fact is shocking is the Scholz government so openly defying the other war crimes.
Why is there no lawyer calling for his indictment?
The US court rejected the case against Biden. But this is a different country and with even more evidence available since.
Donald Trump’s plane made an emergency landing in Montana, USA, yesterday.
If his “interview” with Elon Skum doesn’t happen, one interesting thing to watch for is whether any editors in the MSM “notice” or not. Most journalists can’t see further back than the Instagram or Twitter post they saw on their smartphone two minutes ago. And even those who might otherwise notice won’t say anything about something until they get the OK from higher up. Not authorised to be responded to or commented upon? Then it didn’t happen. People get habituated.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump wants to snuggle up to Musk and announced that he would do so on prime time, thinking it would be like being back in the wrestling ring, without having cleared it with Musk first. Musk is mostly a puppet in my opinion, but those who hold his strings aren’t. They’re not going to let Trump AMOG them.
An interesting bit in Trump’s broadcast from his palace of poor taste at Mar-a-Lago was when somebody asked him a question and he responded “Oh, give me a break”. It was as if he went out of character and, for a few seconds, dropped the persona he wears. He looked like a tired elderly businessman who has bullshitted and scammed all his life, thinks it’s seeming an awfully long time since he necked his last pill, and is about to hit the rocks.
Here’s the clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_0JzH6ycco
“Oh give me a break.”
Sorry for multiposting, but this one is interesting… Here’s Trump in 2020, when he was pressurising an official in Georgia to cheat in the presidential election (in which endeavour he was unsuccessful):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbFc9T7KXA0#t=3m25s
“Fellas, I need 11000 votes. Give me a break.”
Let’s just say a Trump victory in 2024 seems highly unlikely. He’s saying “Give me a break” again – not in private this time, but in public. He’s not reliving past victories. That can be a very empowering thing to do. He’s reliving past failures. He’s reliving banging his head against the wall and losing. His life is catching up with him.
Bully boy bites the dust.
Another setback or two may well smash him.
(For those interested in betting, Nikki Haley is probably good value.)
Julian Assange would have a huge amount to say about all of these points (such as: war, state surveillance, silencing of dissent, free speech etc..).
Speaking of the Skripals – Craig, have you spoken to Julian yet?
He has been disappeared. Not a public word from him since he supposedly became “free” and returned to Australia. When he arrived, we are told he spoke on the phone with the PM. We saw him striding off the plane, fists in the air. There is no way in the world that he is so in need of recovery that he can’t speak freely for himself about his plans or thoughts on the dire current state of the world. And there is no way that he would not want to speak for himself. So where is he? Why has he not said a public word since his release?
Craig, please use your direct connections to get an answer to these simple and honest questions. There is no longer any excuse (such as delicate legal processes or negotiations) for his continuing silence and disappearance. Thanks.
Patience dear Andrew, put yourself in his position. Would you not have a deficit on freedom, family, empathy and need for normality after 11 hectic years in self exile and uk high security terrorist imprisonment?
How about letting Julian make a decision again, rather than putting demands and pressure that is unnecessary?
If anyone puts themself in Julian’s position they would need to consider the following:
He always had a lot to say about everything important, even when he was in the embassy. He was prolific on Twitter and produced his own interview show (remember his first guest on “The World Tomorrow”? It was Nasrallah). He even oversaw the release of the “Vault 7” documents. That all stopped when he was silenced in March 2018 by having his internet cut.
When he was in Belmarsh he didn’t have a voice, even though there was no legal restriction on him being able to directly communicate with the public. In an interview with Nils Meltzer he was even reported to have said that his biggest complaint was that in prison “I don’t have a voice”.
Well, now he is supposed to be “free”, but he has not uttered a single word.
If you really put yourself in his position, you would see that doesn’t make sense and you would ask ‘why?’.
In Australia, under the ASIO Act, he could theoretically be being held indefinitely for “questioning in relation to national security matters”. He could be the subject of a “control order” forbidding him from speaking publicly.
For the reason of just those possibilities alone, I will not just shut up and go along with the implausible narrative that Julian has not a single word to say for himself and we should all move along as if there is nothing odd about this total silence from him.
Just as a thought experiment, how long would it take without a single public word from Julian in his own voice until you became just a little bit concerned for his wellbeing?
Julian’s release was not without conditions; I don’t know what they were but he may have to think carefully before making any announcements. I would have thought that was self-evident. His partner has released statements which I am sure you will be able to find on the web if you are curious.
Julian’s release actually WAS without conditions. If you are curious you can find the actual plea agreement document signed by Julian on the web, and you can also see video of the comments by his US lawyer Barry Pollack to the media outside the US Court in Saipan, where he said exactly that.
Anyone else want to have a try?
Andrew,
Based on my own experience of release from four months solitary confinement and the psychological effects, I advised Stella and Julian to take a long time with just themselves and the kids before coming back into society. I am sure they will have had professional advice to that effect too.
I have not had direct contact with Julian but I have with Stella and John. I am sure all is well.
Craig, sincere thanks for engaging with my comments. I hope you can see that I am genuine in my concerns.
As an aside, you may recall that I am a Barrister in Australia (27 years and counting). This week I had a Trial in Lismore, Northern NSW, for a few days. I went to Terania Street, North Lismore and stood outside Julian’s old home wondering where he is and when he will be able to speak freely for himself, in his own words, not through some intermediary. Sadly, due to government incompetence and fealty to larger outside forces, almost every home in the street is now fenced off and due for destruction (even though they are all in good condition structurally) simply because the area was inundated by flooding in 2022. Lismore has always flooded for as long as anyone can remember, and it’s always bounced back. This time it has been prevented from coming back under its own steam. Tragic and senseless.
But back to the topic at hand.
On 30th November 2021 you were released from prison. You immediately, in front of the prison and a hundred supporters, addressed the media for about 16 minutes (the video is on your blog). You spoke freely in your own voice expressing your thoughts about a range of important topics.
On 6th December 2021 you wrote a long post about prison, and your thoughts on current events.
On 9th December you went down to London for one of the Judgments in the Assange case and on 13th December posted a detailed piece about that.
December 15th saw another long and detailed post about the world and the SNP.
By December 21st you were in fine form fulminating about the injustices of your own case in one post and in another on the same day going into detail about Ukraine.
Good for you. You were free and free to speak publicly in your own voice. I mean no offense when I say that Julian is every bit as strong-willed, intelligent and egotistical as you are.
And that’s why I simply cannot accept third party trust (no matter how sincere) that “all is well” when Julian has not uttered a single word in public for nearly 7 weeks since he supposedly walked “free” from Belmarsh. Nothing??!
You have contact with Stella and John, surely they can either let you speak with Julian yourself or at least tell you when he will be speaking for himself in his own voice?
PS: I note Stella has some upcoming appearances at “Bitcoin” conferences, so surely by then Julian will also be appearing publicly again?
Nice to see that, thanks. I get a little impatient with people who seem unable to imagine what Assange’s life has been like these past years.
Well – someone(s) are paying Robinson and as far as I know it isn’t The Department for Work and Pensions.
If they are he must be a special case.
A nutcase?
O/T.
If true its very sad – Iain was indy through and through – he’ll be sorely missed.
“TRIBUTES have been paid to the significant Scottish independence campaigner Iain Lawson who has died.
The former SNP man fought for Scotland’s independence cause for half a century and showed unswerving loyalty to the country’s steel industry.
Lawson has been described as a “warrior for independence” and “was a giant of the National movement” during the 80s and 90s as his successful business career helped the SNP form a sound financial footing as a party.”
Craig Murray should count himself lucky he is not treated like Tulsi Gabbard who previously had not known she was on a special ‘quiet skies’ domestic terror watch list. Or maybe he is.
Sonya LaBosco, the Executive Director of the Air Marshal National Council (AMNC), an advocacy association for Federal Air Marshals. Disclosing Gabbard had been placed on a domestic terror watch list, the former Marshal LaBosco told a disturbing story:
According to LaBosco… Gabbard is unaware she has two Explosive Detection Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist (explosives), one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshals on every flight she boards.
https://www.racket.news/p/american-stasi-tulsi-gabbard-confirms
Just increased my subscription to help out. Keep up the excellent work Craig!
Thankfully David Miller, when winning that Industrial Tribunal case which declared Zionism cannot be equated with Judaism, established that criticizing Zionism/Israel is legal under the Equal Opportunities Act, including this wonderful short video from Richard Medhurst ‘F*ck Israel’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAzPZZsMe9E
I agree with everything Richard says.
Hear Hear.
Though I am not sure that the draconian new lawd were always planned. The Stop protestors are obvious agit prop. Having access to sites, massive press and tv present. Police idle as they block a MOTORWAY!! The same goes for the XR and the whole little miss nature elf Gretta’s appearance and now mysterious relative disappearance – maybe she will reappear as a grown saviour goddess of the Garden!
or not if she actually has a mind and has walked away from the task she was created for.
We easily faced down the menacing police presence, the alarmist messages being filtered around the community and our hopeless ziofascist supporting MP’s call for residents to keep away! By the presence of our wide and varied community the bored summer holiday youth with no money, who had been enticed to come and have a rumble with the cops were diffused too. As they became confused, as were the police, by the presence of so many of the community in the street.
Being happy and Present bearing witness. The yoof all wandered off at 9 for dinner, since all their fast food joints had been shuttered.
Boy oh boy our MP is wearing some egg on her face, hid behind her big sunglasses. Seemed upset that there was no trouble! And started back peddling as night fell. Now trying to own the mass community presence as having something to do with her!
The bloody handed harridan has not mentioned anything about the daily slaughter and bombing of Gaza and has no criticism at all of her beloved zio fascist illegal apartheid entity! She can go do one.
‘Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.’
Muslim Council of Britain says government did not respond to its communications as Muslims were targeted across the country.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-government-ignored-muslim-council-britain-riots
Compare this with Starmer’s permanent prostration before the genocide-supporting Chief Rabbi, Jewish Leadership Council, Board of Deputies, Community Security Trust et al.
What can explain it?
I am continually astonished by the inability of the majority of members of species homo sapiens to understand normal homo sapiens behavior. Homo sapiens see criminal behavior as being only that of individuals and are oblivious to the fact that the worst crimes are committed by individuals acting as agents of collectives such as nations, peoples or settler groups. A fundamental characteristic of every human mind is the US/THEM divide: species members see bad behavior as only applying to those they see as OTHER, and assume that those on the US side are by default good unless proved otherwise.
Any characteristic of a homo sapiens can make her or him OTHER, being of a group over which we have power and whose labor, land or female fertility we covet, convicted criminal status, disability, politics, race, religion socioeconomic class etc. ……. Homo sapiens are completely unable to recognize bad collective behavior when people like US do it.
Take genocide and racism for example. The majority see these as rare, only happening at certain places and in a few times: for example German Occupied Europe during World War II or the US South during Jim Crow. Yet these things happen again and again and again but quickly disappear from common knowledge. They also disappear from history books. History is not the past but is what is written about the past, and what is left out is as important as what is included. Of course there are revisionist or “black armband (Hat Tip former Australian Prime Minister John Winston Howard)” historians who disinter evidence of inconvenient facts. Both Australia and Israel have such but their writings are much less read than the books of conventional Nationalist ones.
Look into the past of any empire or most colonial settler states and you will find many mass killings or genocides. Israel is an exception. The Zionists have never intended but to rid the lands they occupy of Palestinians but until recently it was seen as being somewhat in the future but now that future has arrived. NOW the Israelis do not care if they have to kill every Palestinian within their reach or just enough to get the remainder to accept “humanitarian transfer” to a squalid refugee camp in a Moslem country from which they will not be allowed to return.
The UK has a rose-colored view of British Imperial rule in India and Ireland. The Indians and Irish disagree. Millions died in India when the British needed to quell revolts or when they imposed famine to export available food for profit or for the Second World War. In Palestine the less cruel path would be to take Donald J. Trump’s suggestion and complete the genocide to the last Palestinian. The solutions adopted in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA of reducing the indigines to a pathetic remnant underclass criminalized, deculturized and mostly descended from Europeans because of many generations of exploitation of the differential sexual access ratio – or as I call it “The Rape Ratio” – are extremely cruel. In Australia there is much argument about “THE GAP” between indigenous quality of life and that of citizens overall and an attempt to CLOSE THE GAP gap has been going on for some time, but of the 19 indicators defining THE GAP, only 5 are improving. I believe I speak for the majority of Australians when I say the reason we cannot close the gap is that we are incapable of effectively doing good to people we hate. Members of species homo sapiens can forgive those who do harm to them or do harm to their relatives but can never forgive those to whom they (or those with which they feel affiliation) have done harm. Homo sapiens don’t like criticism and the more justified it is, the more self-righteously they react negatively. The visible damage to the first nations people, if acknowledged as being due to OUR actions, increases our hate. Of course we find other reasons.
I do not believe that any adequate improvement of life conditions of First Nations People in Australia is possible, but completing the genocide relatively mercifully and quickly is. All we have to do is take our cue from our Good Friends the Israelis, work ourselves up to a frenzied level of hatred after staging a few false-flag acts of terrorism or tricking some of them into attempting to carry out such acts. We have to smear them with very nasty words for behavior that many of us carry out. The word “TERRORIST” is a magic spell that can strip all legitimacy from a defined group of homo sapiens. Corresponding counter-spell terms to be used by THEM against US do not exist. If they did exist they would be “STATE TERROR”, “STATE TERRORIST” and “TERROR STATE”. Australia, The UK and USA and all NATO nations who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq are TERROR STATES, and all of their soldiers are STATE TERRORISTS (not just the ones who summarily executed enemy citizens on the assumption that they were terrorists or because there was not not enough room in a helicopter). The regime change and buggery of Colonel Gadaffi was also an act of STATE TERROR, before which Libya was a functional state with working civil society but is now a failed state ruled by bandits and at civil war.
My suggestion to Australia is also applicable to Canada, New Zealand and the USA for their first nations questions and also to Narendra Modi when he contemplates his multiple non-Hindu questions.
One thing that I omitted from my previous post is that not all OTHERISMS are of the same intensity.
Australia, the UK and the USA have many immigrants from East Asia and South Asia and descendants thereof but currently the level of hostility they receive is much less than that towards the indigenous and Negroes. They are considered model minorities and a good example for the real OTHERS, 5% discrimination as against 70% to 90%.
Of course as the power of the European West declines and that of China and India rises that may change and fear of fifth columnism, spying and terrorism may increase anti-Asian hostility.
This is already happening with ethnic Chinese scientists in the USA and the AUKUS pact may cause an increase in Australia and the UK.
A Modest Proposal
I am sure that sometime after Jonathan Swift’s satirical suggestion a timeline split off in which elite UK restaurants served whole spit roasted Irish 2 year olds with apples in their mouths.
I am doing this on my phone for the first time as I am constantly losing my Internet connection on my laptop, having just discovered how you find the link to a video on YouTube, and, how to copy and paste it. Anyway, I’m not gonna risk going back to the video to copy the title, but it’s a former British soldier laying the blame on the riots where they belong:
https://youtu.be/EuCLsX2TaZA?si=I6Nm_pHE1vaT9JFV
[ Double Down News: “Former British Soldier EXPOSES UK Riots” (8 Aug 2024) – YouTube, 11m 5s ]
Blame 4 the riots even! Spotted the following videos on there in the recommends as well:
Jeremy Corbyn to form group of pro Palestine independents
Nigel Farage punished in polls following far right riots
“denying two-tier policing is insane” talk tv
In the jvl introduction to an article they reposted recently it says the following:
The MP for Finchley – Sarah Sackman, even claimed that the antiracist rally in Finchley on August 7th would be antisemitic.
During the first few days of the riots I heard a couple of people equating them with the pro-palestinian marches, one of them on news night in a discussion in the studio – ie the guy from conservative home, whose name escapes me just now.
Here’s a link to the article, and and the jvl introduction:
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/jews-need-to-be-part-of-the-antifascist-resistance/
on torture in Israeli prisons –
The title of this post taken literally:
“(…) In the United States’ Guantanamo Bay detention camp, nine prisoners were killed in twenty years; in Israel, it’s sixty detainees in ten months.(…)”
Gideon Levy who is being quoted here also says: “(…)The indifference to all these things defines Israel.”(…)”
Not just Israel. B´Tselem´s report in Germany is virtually unreported. Of course everyone entrusted with writing about Israel knows about this.
The handy short text on the matter by Jacobin here:
https://archive.is/e95ro
The original torture report is in the forum.
This scale (10,000 Palestinians in prisons since Oct.) cannot stay unpunished without it being institutionalized as a culture of hatred.
This has been known too. I read about this 30 years ago. I still read about it. No outrage.
Abu Ghraib coined a term and a scandal. I assume would we receive images like in latter case about Israel today nobody would take notice in the MSM.
This reminds me of something the late great Donald Woods said in his book “Biko” (page 358): “If you feel impelled to enforce at all costs a separation of races, you have to end up killing people”. Subsequent pages are also good resource material. For example (page 360): “If a minority can only preserve its culture by oppressing the majority in a common country, that minority culture has no right to exist in that country”.
Steve Biko has his counterparts in Palestinian medical specialist doctors who have died in Israeli detention. Israelis brought up to be racist are willing to murder Palestinian detainees (brutalising them till they succumb amounts to the same thing).
International sanctions against Israel are necessary to effect a move from apartheid to full democracy. The key is persuading the United States, but writing to our MPs here is also a good idea.
Thx fo the recommendation.
What is so tiring or infuriating (depending on whether I have had a coffee already) is the hypocrisy: German media are now full of childish texts about Russian prisons. The very same week the torture report – which trumps anything in scale so far – comes out and remains dead in the water as far as public attention is concerned.
Could the coverage of Russian prisons in the German media that you refer to have had anything to do with recent prisoner swaps?
Of course. And I am aware of the conjunctions here.
But – by historic chance – almost at the same time there was another event – the publication of B´Tselem´s prison torture report after several Palestinians had been released.
However having 2 stories covering the same issue, one was entirely neglected even though it contained the much more pressing and scandalous and important content.
On another point: Hamas treated its hostages incomparably better than Israelis treat their Palestinian prisoners.
But try to say that in public in Germany. You would get into serious trouble.
All you can do is screaming inside. At least that´s how I feel.
I cannot understand why anyone with a UK bank account would want to use Paypal. A bank standing order is more cost-efficient (most banks don’t charge anything for transfers to another UK bank) and is not at the mercy of arbitrary political decisions by Paypal. If Paypal decides it doesn’t like what you write, it can and usually will ban you from receiving any funds from it.
The reason to use Paypal is for people not in the UK, as it’s difficult sending regular bank transfers internationally, in a sum in sterling.
It’s not difficult at all. Perhaps you should try changing your bank?
@MrScrooge – It’s not a sending bank in Britain that’s the problem – it’s receiving banks in many countries where it may not be as easy as you think to arrange for a person to collect sterling.
@Townsman – It can be easier to open a business account at Paypal than at a British high street bank. But both are subject to “political decisions”. “Politically exposed persons” is one bit of lingo that’s used.
Many things that many people assume are easy are actually not easy at all for some people given the position they are put in.
You’re talking about UK. I am not.
“The reason to use Paypal is for people not in the UK, as it’s difficult sending regular bank transfers internationally, in a sum in sterling.”
Well, then, perhaps Paypal is better for foreign subscribers, but we have no idea what proportion of the suspended payments originate from outside the UK. Craig could easily ask for people in the UK not to use Paypal and offer it for an alternative for those outside.