On Thursday evening news came through that we had at long last gained the full list of approvals required to travel to report outside Beirut; we were cleared by the Ministry of Information, the Ministry of Defence, and the local authorities.

Laith Marouf of Free Palestine TV called me and suggested we go down together on Friday to the southern capital of Nabatieh, which has been enduring heavy bombing.

I asked Laith to give me half an hour, and did some quick research. Nabatieh is about 12 miles from the Israeli border and has been devastated by Israeli bombing attacks. In the South of the country some 70,000 homes have been destroyed. Following the Gaza model, hospitals, schools, mosques, waterworks, churches, bakeries have all been systematically taken out. In brief occupations Israel has demolished entire villages.

Israel has also deliberately destroyed the crops and livestock.

I read this brilliant article by Hanna Davis for Middle East Eye ten days earlier, which describes Nabatieh in apocalyptic terms. It is centred on interviews with the heroic civil defence workers, who are especially targeted by Israel.

Back at the hilltop, Fakih’s colleagues also spoke about the immense stress and psychological pressure they were under.

“Mentally, we are all struggling,” Hussein Jaber, 30, from Nabatieh’s civil defence, told MEE.

“We are struggling with the lack of stability. We are always on the move, can’t sleep well, and are being put in intense situations,” he said.

“We have to pull out the dead bodies of people we love, friends and families we know, neighbours, people from our own area.”

Since then, the situation had deteriorated even further. 100 people had been reported dead in Nabatieh in a fresh wave of airstrikes the day before.

It had not been exactly safe in Beirut since I had arrived, but now Laith had faced me with the inevitable question. Did I really have the courage to do what I had come to Lebanon in order to do? That is why I had asked for half an hour to research and think it over.

Well, I phoned Laith back and asked him what time we could start.

Laith is good company. A lifelong activist, he has been hounded and demonised by Zionists his entire career, which has centred on attempting to establish independent broadcasting platforms. He is currently trying to grow FreePalestineTV into a serious operation, and is full of cheerful facts about the relative reach of online and broadcast media. I do hope he succeeds.

The next morning Niels gathered his equipment and I took a spare jacket and tie, in case my suit got dusty. Laith arrived with his cinematographer, the debonair and intrepid Hadi Hotait, driving. Hadi’s car is a capacious SUV from which all signs of branding fell off many years ago, along with many other superfluous pieces. He appeared to have an entire film studio packed in the back. I should not have been surprised if, on arrival, a couple of extras had appeared from under the unfathomable mound.

Hadi navigated his way through the backstreets of Beirut between cars triple-parked so badly it seemed a physical impossibility to get between them. Hadi overcame this by the simple expedient of going very fast. I think his old car, like the DeLorean in Back to the Future, enters a different dimension at sufficient speed. I cannot imagine how else he did it.

While I was contemplating that the Israelis might not be as likely to kill me as Hadi’s driving, Laith blithely announced we were not going to Nabatieh after all. The bombing there was so intense this morning that the army had closed the road. We were therefore going to Baalbek instead.

I knew that 60 people had been killed in bombing the day before there. I hated to think what was happening in Nabatieh if it is more dangerous than Baalbek. But on the other hand I had long wanted to go to Baalbek and to see the famed Bekaa Valley, so I was quite pleased.

We chatted away as we climbed the steep ascent of the slopes of Mount Lebanon. Hadi’s ancient car was somehow texting warning messages to his phone: “transmission overheating”, “check fluid levels”. At one stage an old Scotsman popped his head out of all the equipment in the back and said “Captain, the warp drive is not stable.” Although I may have nodded off and dreamt that.

Hadi emerged as a driver of incredible speed and skill, though whether it was an entirely appropriate way to proceed when not on a racetrack might be open to debate. Anyway, we managed only to crash once before we reached the top of the pass and the Bekaa Valley spread out below us like a beautifully worked carpet.

What surprised me was how close it all is. We were only 30 minutes outside of Beirut, and there to my right I could see the Israeli occupied Golan Heights. Straight ahead were the mountain ranges where Hezbollah had defeated Isis. We were on the spot of the defining 1982 battle where the Syrian Army and Iranian-reinforced Palestinians heroically blocked the Israeli advance. Heading to our left, you could be in Damascus by lunch.

I was also surprised that we had not been stopped once, by any kind of security checkpoint. We had passed through a patchwork quilt of different communities, with drifts of posters in the central reservation supporting various factions, changing from Muslim to Christian symbolism and back again with bewildering frequency as we drove along.

We went down into the valley. The land is highly cultivated and I went to look at the soil. At the entrance to the valley it is rich and organic but also red with iron oxide. Further to the South it turns a deep black and becomes rich and pasty in consistency. It smells good.

We made a rendezvous with a convoy of journalists outside a hospital. I will not name it because the fact it was the meeting point might give a crazed Israeli or his AI a “reason” to attack it. The convoy of journalists was being assembled to be taken around the ruins of the previous day’s destruction.

A local official talked to Hadi, and it was clear that I was being singled out in some way. I was at first slightly concerned by this, but then Hadi explained that I was being granted an interview with the Mayor of Baalbek, whose authority covered the whole of the north of the Valley.

We headed into Baalbek itself, about a further fifteen minutes’ drive. It was a lovely sunny day and I was struck by the beauty of the valley. It is not densely populated, but it is extensively populated. Homes are more frequent amongst the farmland than in most rural communities. Baalbek itself has no tall buildings that I saw.

It looks both distinctive and pleasant. Many houses are obviously centuries old. Ancient mosques nestle by ancient churches. The rows of single-storey shops were surprisingly Western in names and goods proffered. We passed a Pizza Hut. But horribly, incongruously, every few minutes we would pass a home or homes that had been massively bombed into rubble.

Like missing teeth in a beautiful smile.

We stopped near the centre of town and met a man and a woman from the local authority. They explained that the Mayor would be coming to meet us in the Temple of Bacchus, because it was felt unlikely the Israelis would bomb there.

Only two days earlier, all four of us journalists had been at the site of an Israeli missile strike in Central Beirut, where the district Mayor had been killed at a community centre providing aid parcels for refugees. Four other people had also been killed, and fifteen seriously injured. Israel has made a point of targeting elected local leaders throughout its invasion, killing a number of mayors in the South.

I thought it ironic to see all the Western politicians repeating the Zionist line that Netanyahu should not be arrested by the International Criminal Court because he is an elected leader, when Netanyahu is killing elected leaders all over Lebanon.

We were, however, told that there would be a delay, because of intense Israeli drone activity over the city. In particular there was one drone circling low right over our heads, and had been for a while. We were to proceed to the ruins and wait.

When we re-entered the vehicle, Hadi, the most light-hearted of company, became suddenly very serious:

Sometimes the drones do miss. They really do. If they fire at us and miss, just get the door open and get as far from the vehicle as you can.

As we drew near, the quality and the extent of the ruins was breathtaking. It is on the scale of the Forum in Rome. What has been excavated is not as extensive as Ephesus but much more is complete. Just what we could see from the road was wonderful, and then the Temple of Venus opened before us on the other side as we drove along. And Pizza Hut.

I had grown rather blasé about drones. I have had Israeli drones buzzing low overhead pretty much the entire month I have now been in Beirut, and while I know that they are missile- as well as surveillance-equipped, and highly lethal, I find it best just to ignore them. But the people with us were extremely concerned that this one had moved along with us as we drove.

It was clearly visible and they pointed out to me that we were right at the centre of its circle. My own sense of geometry rather disintegrates when I tilt my head right back and gaze at an object in a featureless sky, but I took their word for it. They had been living with this lethal threat for months, and their lives depended on understanding it. They even could even tell various actions of the drone by the change in tone of the engines.

Without the mayor, we did not have permission to enter the archaeological complex, so we stood outside the gate. At some stage the atmosphere changed and it became obvious that our hosts were really, really worried. They explained that they were quite sure that the drone had focused on us, specifically. Obviously it would not be safe for the mayor to come in these circumstances.

So the meeting was cancelled.

Instead they were awaiting permission for us to look around the temple complex, but in the meantime we could do nothing but stay where we were. They felt that leaving now might provoke a missile strike. So we just stood there.

I find it hard to describe it to you. It was a lovely sunny day. The soldier inside the locked temple gate was explaining to the local authority people that he had no instructions that would allow our entry. The drone buzzed menacingly right overhead, observing us constantly.

A ginger cat came through the temple railings, and I crouched down, holding out my balled fist so she could rub her head against it. She purred and went back and forth rubbing my fist several times, before lying down to be stroked. I found myself pondering a most unlooked-for dilemma; was I putting the cat in danger by keeping it next to me? Should I chase it away?

The surreal nature of life endured in Baalbek became more evident as two men in donkey jackets strolled by smoking, saying their salaams as they came by, without a hint of concern for the drone above us. Vehicles went up and down the road slowly, as though nothing were wrong.

Then three boys arrived, about eight years old, one on a bicycle. They thought it great fun to see strangers in town in current times and they came up to us and asked lots of questions in Arabic. One showed us tricks on the bike. Strangely, he was wearing a Welsh Rugby Union hoodie. I was acutely aware that the presence of the boys would not in any way deter the Israelis from striking; they would probably enjoy killing them.

I felt a huge anger that this threat is being constantly visited on children by Israel. Almost certainly these children would know some of the sixty people killed the day before. Yet there they were, exactly as friendly and cheeky as children ought to be.

Eventually, the gates were opened and we were allowed in to the temple complex. It is an incredible place and should be much more widely known; it deserves to be as famous as the Pyramids or Petra. Originally the temple of the Canaanite God Baal and his consort Astarte, successive Phoenician, Greek and Roman temple complexes were built, with most of the current buildings being Roman, but constructed on the foundations of the original.

And those foundations are astonishing. The largest blocks of stone I have ever seen used for construction, with some of them weighing 500 tonnes. By comparison, the largest stones in the Pyramids are 80 tonnes and the largest at Stonehenge 50 tonnes. The transport and construction theories for those monuments just can’t be scaled up to 500-tonnes.

Once you tear your gaze around from the Canaanite foundations, the Roman superstructure is intoxicating. It is massive, and there is a finesse and delicacy to the carving not characteristic of Roman work.

Baalbek was conquered by Alexander and he renamed it Heliopolis, its name throughout the Classical era.

Archaeology is contentious in the Middle East. Two days before our visit, an Israeli archaeologist had been killed by Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. At least, that was the media framing. The truth is somewhat more complex.

Zeev Erlich was, despite being in his 70s, armed and in full military uniform. A retired Major in the Israeli Defence Force reserve, Erlich was with a group of soldiers when killed. A Sergeant was killed alongside him and a General wounded.

The Israeli army brought an archaeologist along on its invasion of Southern Lebanon to look for evidence of ancient Hebrew occupation – to justify annexation. At the time of his death he was at the site of the shrine of the Prophet Shamoun Al-Safa, who Christians know as Simon Peter, the first Pope. Very few Christians realise he features positively in the Koran.

It is a reflection of the madness of Zionist ideology that an armed invasion is accompanied by archaeologists to justify it. It is highly probable that thousands of years ago there were Hebrews in Southern Lebanon. The idea that this justifies annexation is so lunatic I find it hard to describe.

In the same time period, Switzerland was occupied by the Celts. This is not in academic dispute; the La Tène culture is one of a number of Celtic cultures that were established in Switzerland in the Classical period. Eventually the Celtic people and their culture moved on, as peoples do over millennia. Such migrations had push and pull factors, but broadly the arrival of more aggressive and militarily capable peoples from the East was a main cause.

But if I said to you “I am a Celt” and demanded the right to move to Geneva, take somebody’s house and throw them onto the street today, you would think I am a complete lunatic. Nobody would accept a Scots or Irish claim to land in Switzerland. And rightly so. Yet that really is the premise of Zionism. And astonishingly, Keir Starmer, Joe Biden, David Lammy, Donald Trump, Ursula von der Leyen, and most of the population of states like Germany and the USA, actually subscribe to this utterly ludicrous, mystical, medievalist nonsense.

So we have fake archaeologists travelling with invading Israeli armies. I do try to avoid comparing Israelis to Nazis because of the Holocaust, but the comparison is compelling. The Nazis loved to justify their crackpot racial theories with fake archaeology, as parodied in the Indiana Jones series.

Zeev Erlich was indeed a dangerous crackpot. He was a founder of the illegal West Bank settlement of Ofra and he wrote numerous articles arguing that the area was historically Jewish and supporting annexation. He led IDF raids on Palestinian communities, or as one of his friends told it to Israeli internet outlet ynet: “He volunteered and assisted soldiers across various sectors, showing his unmatched knowledge of villages and farms”.

As we left the temple complex, the drone still overhead, we stopped and looked at the completely flattened Menshiya Palace, home to the Ottoman Governor, that had been destroyed by Israeli bombing. It stands close to some of the Classical ruins which had been damaged by fragments. There was no justification for destroying this museum other than the obliteration of history and cultural heritage.

We then proceeded on to two civilian houses that had been destroyed. Two people were killed and twelve seriously injured. This was quite a drive away, but the drone followed us and again circled right overhead. I looked through the detritus of the buildings; Laith was very insistent I climb to the top of the rubble, which was frankly very precarious. Coming down was even worse. But close inspection revealed nothing at all but the contents of a normal civilian family home with children.

It was also worth noting that in addition to the two destroyed homes, about ten homes nearby had been rendered uninhabitable. A dozen vehicles had been destroyed; some of them – fifty or sixty metres from the site – appeared to have had their paint burnt off by great splashes of some kind of burning or caustic liquid from the explosion.

Death in the Bekaa Valley is sudden, random and frequent. There are no warnings at all here that Israel is about to bomb and the targets are always civilian homes. Since we have left the Director of the hospital has been killed in his home.

The Israelis claim that all the targets are Hezbollah. Hezbollah is the ruling party here, so they take that to mean any government employee can be targeted. This is of course not the case in international law, and this terror inflicted on a helpless civilian population is a war crime. Many victims appear to be entirely random.

Missiles have never been fired at Israel from within the town of Baalbek.

We then received information that fresh bombing attacks were believed to be imminent; F-35s had been seen and we were ordered to get out as quickly as possible, which we did.

It was an unexpected and then truncated time in the Bekaa Valley, and as darkness fell we were pleased to be driving back to Beirut all still alive and well. My overwhelming reflection is that any fear or pressure we experienced is felt by those in Baalbek every single day. I recall the thoughts I had about the safety of the cat, and wondered how mothers felt, who were making decisions on where their children go from moment to moment which may kill them, in the lottery of death the Israelis have inflicted on the Bekaa Valley.

Well that was an interesting excursion. I look forward to our next tour.

————————–

We have plans for a serious programme of written and video content to be produced in Lebanon between now and Christmas, but this will depend on our obtaining the money to do it.

We require to raise an absolute minimum of sixty thousand pounds, and preferably more. This is for transport, accommodation, logistics and staff.

We are prepared to put our lives on the line to try to bring you the truth from here and counter the Zionist media, but that requires the sacrifice from you readers and viewers of putting in the resource required.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.

I have now also started a Substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post.

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I could not tell the easy, comforting lie.

“No”, I told the woman, her traumatised children clinging to her legs, “I can’t say you are safe here; not one of us is safe. The Israelis are genocidal. But in Lebanon so far, I don’t think they have bombed a school”.

I was with one of 67 families, with 215 children, living as refugees in a small school at Ain Rumaila in Southern Beirut. The area borders the evacuated suburb of Dahiya which the Israelis are systematically demolishing, and bombings rattle the windows of the school every day.

This woman is a school teacher when at home in Southern Lebanon, and her husband a retired soldier. They had to leave their small town with no notice, through an intense air raid, as Israeli bombs destroyed buildings and killed and maimed people all round them.

They got out only with what they could carry. Their home was destroyed behind them.

Israel has targeted refugees all over Lebanon. Just the day before, we had been at the site of a refugee aid centre in central Beirut, which had been targeted for missile attack. The death toll on that attack has now risen to five, with seventeen seriously injured.

I reached that site before I could establish exactly what the target was:

My aim in visiting the school was to let a few refugees tell to camera their own stories about their daily pre-war lives and their communities, so that people might see them as individuals, and not just a huddled mass of misery.

I think that worked. Within 48 hours the resulting video will be available. But what this woman urgently wanted me to tell her was that now they are safe.

And I couldn’t. If the children understood English, then I might perhaps have lied for their sake and replied that everything is OK. But the situation is too serious for self-serving false cheer.

Before I left, one of the families we met who have lost everything and are struggling with basic provision, absolutely insisted we sat and shared their meal of salad and lentils, cooked on a single burner ring directly on top of a gas bottle.

It was a deeply humbling experience to experience their graciousness and warmth to strangers.

Yesterday Amos Hochstein, the US Middle Eastern Envoy, flew in to Beirut to “negotiate” a peace deal between Lebanon and Israel.

Over 3,500 Lebanese have been killed, the majority of them women and children. The bombs that killed them were not only made in the USA, they were supplied by the USA for the purpose. As were the aircraft that dropped them.

The Americans are arrogant enough to send Amos Hochstein, born in the terrorist state to Israeli parents and himself a former member of the IDF, as their “peace envoy”.

And it says everything about America’s real interest in the region that Hochstein’s official position in the Biden Administration is actually Energy Security Adviser.

As I explained in my last article, Israel’s intensified bombing campaign is designed to terrify Lebanon into signing a peace deal that is actually a surrender. It guarantees Israeli armed forces access at will into Southern Lebanon, and military overflight of the entire country.

The access to Southern Lebanon in the latest draft has been supposedly toned down and phrased as “in pursuit of Israel’s right of self-defence”.

As the entire world has seen this last year and more that “Israel’s right to self-defence” is interpreted by both Israel and the United States as the right to commit genocide, Lebanon would be utterly mad to sign this document.

Similarly Lebanon is supposed to be reassured by insertion of the USA as the “guarantor” of the agreement.

You read that right; the county which is currently funding and supplying the genocidal bombing of Lebanon is going to be the guarantor of its safety.

As always in such negotiations, neither side wishes to be seen to be standing in the way of a deal, so the Lebanese were polite to Hochstein and he is now shuttling off to Tel Aviv to seek Israeli agreement to little linguistic tweaks that make it all sound better.

I worry for Lebanon. In another post I will try to outline the myriad ways in which the USA and Israel are attempting to re-open the old divisions of the civil war to undermine the resistance.

One of those ways is of course to convince factions that Israel really wants peace and Hezbollah is blocking a reasonable deal. It is plainly not a reasonable deal, but people made desperate by Israel’s state terror inflicted on their country, may see what they wish to believe.

Should Lebanon accept the deal in the interest of preserving unity, as the US connive, then I have no doubt whatsoever that this deal will shortly be understood to have been a key step on the path to Israeli annexation of Southern Lebanon.

Because it is essential to understand that Greater Israel has been the goal all along of both Israel and the United States.

If you have not by now seen through the Biden administration’s pretence of “trying to restrain” Israel, whilst providing ever greater funding and weapons for the genocide, then you are such a fool that I cannot help you.

Reporting from Lebanon

————————–

We have plans for a serious programme of written and video content to be produced in Lebanon between now and Christmas, but this will depend on our obtaining the money to do it.

We require to raise an absolute minimum of sixty thousand pounds, and preferably more. This is for transport, accommodation, logistics and staff.

We are prepared to put our lives on the line to try to bring you the truth from here and counter the Zionist media, but that requires the sacrifice from you readers and viewers of putting in the resource required.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.

I have now also started a substack account if you wish to subscribe that way. The content will be the same as you get on this blog. Substack has the advantage of overcoming social media suppression by emailing you direct every time I post.

Click HERE TO DONATE if you do not see the Donate button above

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:

PayPal address for one-off donations: [email protected]

Alternatively by bank transfer or standing order:

Account name
MURRAY CJ
Account number 3 2 1 5 0 9 6 2
Sort code 6 0 – 4 0 – 0 5
IBAN GB98NWBK60400532150962
BIC NWBKGB2L
Bank address Natwest, PO Box 414, 38 Strand, London, WC2H 5JB

Bitcoin: bc1q3sdm60rshynxtvfnkhhqjn83vk3e3nyw78cjx9
Ethereum/ERC-20: 0x764a6054783e86C321Cb8208442477d24834861a

Apologies, in setting up Patreon as an alternative subscription method some had requested, I accidentally blocked non Patreon subscribers. Fixed now.

I have also started a gofundme to cover costs of operating in Beirut.

Flying from Rome on a bright Sunday morning, the MEA Airbus was configured for about 300 people. About 20 of us boarded to fly to Beirut. It is a very strange feeling to be on an almost empty commercial airliner, particularly as nearly all of the small number of passengers were in business class, leaving economy class barren.

Two Christian priests travelling economy, with impressive beards and pillarbox hats, were rescued by the hostesses before takeoff and moved forward to business. The flight was entirely uneventful, except that for some reason it served no alcohol, which is new to MEA. Niels suggested they had been warned about us!

We have all seen photos of Israeli bombing near the airport as MEA flights come in to land, but our approach was untroubled and we could not spot any bomb damage in the vast sprawling vista of Beirut as we came down.

Niels Ladefoged and I had toured Germany together, with the film Ithaka, on which Niels was cinematographer. That tour was related in great detail on this blog. So regular readers know the two of us, who arrived into Beirut airport slightly confused.

Our aim in coming to Lebanon was to counter the overwhelmingly pro-Israel narrative of Western media reports of the Israeli assault on Lebanon. Before coming, I had spoken with a friend from my Blackburn election campaign, whom I knew to be very well connected in the Middle East.

This friend had told me he had a sponsor for us in Lebanon who could organise all the necessary logistics, and the first instance of this was the arrival into Beirut. We knew that other activists who had recently arrived had encountered difficulties with Lebanese immigration.

To counter this, we had been asked to provide our aircraft seat numbers before embarking, so we could be met on the plane and escorted through immigration. We had done this, but on arrival nothing happened on the plane.

We saw how it was meant to happen as we disembarked into the finger that led to the terminal: the two priests were whisked through a side door down to a vehicle that waited on the tarmac, to take them straight out of the airport.

As we wandered along the arrivals pathway through the terminal, the feeling of weirdness aroused by the near-empty plane returned. Where there would normally be hundreds of people pouring in from multiple flights, the place was empty and echoing, with just the 20 from our flight trailing through the vast halls.

It felt strange and ominous.

Once we reached immigration, the reason almost everyone had been in business class was apparent, as almost our entire flight headed into the “UN and Diplomatic” lane. That left us and a Lebanese family with small children. As we approached the immigration desk, a man in jeans and a striped shirt approached us, identified himself as a policeman, and asked us to leave immigration and head to a side area.

There were eight disconsolate people waiting there, with five chairs between them. We waited, and waited. Two hours passed uncomfortably. We tried without success to contact the sponsor who was supposed to have helped us with immigration.

Every now and then somebody was called forward into an office, stayed there for ten minutes, then came out and sat down again, looking unhappy. This was an ethnically and socially disparate bunch; the odd brief conversation revealed that European passports were the obvious common factors.

We were in essentially a very tatty corridor; everything from the furniture to the tiling to the counters appeared in need of renovation. It was not dirty; merely worn and chipped.

Niels and I had at no stage been asked for anything at all, not even our names. Our passports had not been inspected. Nothing was happening, very slowly.

I managed to phone my friend from Blackburn, who said he would try to contact our sponsor. After a further hour of waiting, a large uniformed man with a moustache and notably bold spectacles came out and pointed at us.

“Why are you waiting here?” he asked.

“I don’t know”, I replied, “A policeman told us to.”

He called me in to the office.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I am a retired diplomat, and now a journalist.”

“What kind of journalist?”

“Independent media. I publish online.”

“So, you are a social media influencer?”

“Oh no, I am much too old.”

“Aren’t you scared to come to Lebanon at this time?”

“No, I am Scottish.”

This answer was obviously sufficient explanation, and he got up and waved to a subordinate, who took us through and stamped our passports. A very patient driver from the hotel had been waiting four hours for us and had already rather brilliantly tracked down and loaded our luggage.

Heading out into the car, we immediately heard the Israeli drones circling overhead.

I want you to understand how loud this noise is. You do not have to strain to hear it; rather it is impossible to block it. You can still hear it even over heavy traffic.

It is far louder than a normal light aircraft at that height, and the noise must be a deliberate feature, an instrument of psychological warfare. I suppose the comparison would be the deliberate screeching of Stuka dive bombers, although the quality of sound is very different.

To come into a city which is under active bombardment, where dozens of people are killed every single day, is not entirely a comfortable feeling. Particularly when journalists are deliberately and systematically assassinated by Israel and, not to put too fine a point on it, the Israelis are not particularly keen on me.

The large Israeli drones carry a range of unerring missiles, have state-of-the-art surveillance and target-locking capability and can be triggered to fire by AI without human intervention. I would be lying if I pretended that on this first occasion the hairs were not standing on the back on my neck.

But you get used to it.

After this interesting drive through nightfall, we arrived at the Bossa Nova hotel in Sinn el Fil, a Christian area of Beirut, which we had been told would be unlikely to be attacked by Israel.

The hotel is, rather surreally, South American themed, with a restaurant serving only allegedly Brazilian dishes. It is nine storeys high and constructed with massive concrete pillars, and a great many of them. It has a very well-stocked cocktail bar to cater for the most pernickety fan of mixology, though without a presiding mixologist at present. It is allegedly owned by a Scot.

All of the other guests in the hotel were refugees from the evacuated areas. 1.2 million people have been displaced in Lebanon. The human trauma of this is immense, particularly as the homes, farms and businesses these people have left are being systematically destroyed behind them.

Over the next ten days we slowly get to know some of the refugees. A school teacher, a policeman, a farmer, a tailor. All with their large families, crammed in, a family to a room in this hotel which is creaking to cope. Being Lebanese they are tidy and clean, and emerge looking well dressed and groomed.

Like refugees everywhere, they sit listless and morose, displaced and discarded, filling in time doing nothing. Chat is infrequent and subdued. People sit isolated with their thoughts, even from their own families.

They do not look up when somebody walks past. Food in paper bags is brought from local bakers and consumed in the lobby. The free water cooler is the busiest spot in the hotel.

Only the children are happy; an unexpected school holiday, a trip to a city, lots of new friends for games of mass soccer in the hotel courtyard.

When the drones are particularly loud or low, the children race inside, mostly before their mothers have to call. One small boy in particular, about three years old, bursts into tears every time the drones get loud.

The Israelis have made a point of bombing hotels housing refugees, particularly in Christian areas. Turning the Christian community against the refugees is part of the Israeli plan.

The next morning we received a message from our sponsor that a driver, Ali, will come to pick us up. We had explained we wished to start by visiting the much-touted (in Western media) “Hezbollah stronghold” of Dahiya, which is subject to continual bombing.

Ali arrives, a well dressed individual driving a very comfortable and new Lexus saloon. He doesn’t speak any English, but through Google Translate he explains that we need special permits to visit Dahiya.

We give Ali our passports and he takes photos of them with his phone, sending them to somebody whom he then phones to discuss it. He then speaks into his phone again and shows us on his phone:

“You cannot go to Dahiya now. Permits will take one or two days. But I can take you on a tour of bomb sites, without stopping the car or taking photos.”

So we embark with Ali on a tour of recent death, driving to nine different bomb sites. What is immediately clear is that eight of the nine sites are residential buildings, blocks of flats. Ali is very well informed indeed about each one, relating how many people were killed there – men, women and children.

Ali does not attempt to hide the fact that, in almost every case, there were Hezbollah members present, and sometimes he can tell us who. Flags are planted on top of the mounds of rubble to commemorate these martyrs, and sometimes there are pictures of them in uniform, on planted stakes.

One or two of the sites have been struck by precision missiles targeting an individual apartment, with usually a handful of immediately neighbouring apartments also damaged or destroyed. But at the large majority of the sites whole blocks of apartments, containing 20 or more, have been completely reduced to rubble, much of which is powder.

The same of course is true of the inhabitants. Driving slowly past the sites, it is immediately apparent these residences are civilian, with corners of settees and beds and kitchen equipment jumbled in the rubble and heart-stopping indications of children, including a bright pink poster of a pony, held down by a dust-filled boot.

There is no indication whatsoever of military or industrial activity. It is not a question of Hezbollah hiding behind human shields. It is rather a question of Hezbollah figures being killed alongside their partners, parents and children in their civilian homes, with numerous other families in the block killed too. It is plainly a war crime.

Killing 40 or even 70 entirely innocent people is of no concern to Israel in eliminating a target. Nor do they care in the least how many of them are children. Non-Jewish life simply has zero intrinsic value in their eyes.

But there is also of course a real problem with who is being targeted. Hezbollah is an intrinsic part of Lebanese society. It is a political party with elected members of parliament and forms part of the Government of Lebanon.

Hezbollah also runs extensive health, welfare and infrastructure functions in the predominantly Shia districts, particularly in the South of the country, and these functions and institutions are organically interwoven with the official Lebanese state in a hundred different ways.

So doctors, professors, ambulance drivers, journalists and teachers may be designated “Hezbollah” by Israel, in an exact parallel to the situation with Hamas in Gaza.

So the “terrorist target” Israel is eliminating by bombing an apartment block, with the deaths of forty other people, may not have any military function at all. They may be an ambulance driver. In fact that is one of the most likely possibilities. As in Gaza, Israel is systematically eliminating healthcare workers. In 40 days, it has killed over 200 paramedics in Lebanon. That is five a day on average.

We take a road which bounds Dahiya and, looking into the area, startlingly, the destruction is extremely extensive. Block after block after block of apartments has been levelled. In one place the bomb crater is simply massive, a great deep hole you could fit dozens of buses in, several buses high. It is hard to comprehend the power of such an explosion.

The one building we see which is not residential and which has been bombed is a hospital. It looks gutted with shattered windows. I cannot particularly recall having seen this reported in the West.

It is a deeply sobering experience. We arrive back to the hotel in pensive mood, and take a gin and tonic in the courtyard, as the refugees huddle and the drones buzz overhead. I am awoken by loud explosions in the night, and the next day the smoke is still billowing into the air, rising up about a kilometre from our hotel, and the acrid smell and taste will not wash away.

On Tuesday we had arranged finally to meet our sponsor, a charming and urbane man who is genuinely horrified by the genocide in Gaza and the unfurling carnage in Lebanon. He phones “Ali’s boss” to check on progress with our permits for Dahiya. He advises that we they will be available later that day or the next morning.

We agree to have a day to orient and prepare, and go to Dahiya the next day once the permits are done.

Our sponsor tells us a number of worrying things, including that he had offered friends of his from evacuated areas accommodation in properties he owned outside of Beirut, but that some of the local Christian communities had objected in case the presence of refugees provoked Israeli attack (as indeed is frequently occurring).

He apologised for the delay at the airport and said that a new policy had been introduced the very day we arrived, when dozens of Europeans had been sent back. He had been working behind the scenes to vouch for us (which was later confirmed to me by another source).

The new crackdown on entry is reported in L’Orient Today:

L’Orient Today spoke to and heard reports of dozens of people turned away in recent weeks, including around 10 NGO workers from various organizations, two journalists who received entry bans and were deported, two people who were refused for not having “sufficient grounds to enter the country,” and three passengers from Germany, Spain and the U.S. who were told this past weekend that foreigners can’t enter unless they have a work permit.

According to Ingrid, through her phone, an employee of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs spoke with airport staff who told them that a new law had been implemented restricting entry…

“There has not been a change in the law regarding the entry of foreigners into Lebanon,” a source at General Security told L’Orient Today… “However, due to the security situation in Lebanon, General Security is being more vigilant about who is entering and leaving the country and some people are not permitted entry due to security reasons,” …

A General Security spokesperson said the order came from the Directorate roughly one month ago and that it applies across the board but is focused on the airport. In the last two months, Hezbollah, currently at war with Israel, has suffered a number of profound security breaches, one of which led to the assassination of its leader Hassan Nasrallah. In the two weeks following the escalation into full-out war, starting on Sept. 23, several people were arrested under suspicion of espionage, including a journalist who entered Lebanon on a British passport only to be discovered with an Israeli passport after residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs alerted the authorities to his presence.

“One person making a mistake will affect the others sometimes,” the spokesperson said. “No one [at border control] wants to be labeled as the person who let someone into the country who shouldn’t have been allowed.”

Which sounds entirely reasonable, but read on.

So we had a relaxed day waiting for permits to come through. I sat in the courtyard writing as the drone buzzed overhead, and Niels made a little tweet about it:

Writing in Beirut, Lebanon pic.twitter.com/vYX7B7RGsx

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) October 29, 2024

We then walked out into Beirut. The only way to walk from the hotel is down one side of a buzzing dual carriageway. We crossed a concrete bridge over the sad remnant of the Beirut river.

Its waters entirely diverted for the uses of the great city, the river course is a giant, entirely concreted storm drain, perhaps fifty metres wide and 10 metres deep. In it oozes a trickle of greenish-brown sewage, perhaps three metres wide and ten centimetres deep. The sickly sweet smell is nauseating. Our hotel is on the bank and carries a truly giant neon sign on its flank: “Riverside Bossa Nova”, devoid of irony. Briefly during a storm the river returns to life for a few hours.

Beirut is not pedestrian-friendly. Frequently on major streets there are long stretches with no pavement at all, it having been either never built or removed to make way for car parking, bonnets right up against the building and cars often stacked two deep at right angles to the traffic.

As we walk down the busy Damascus Road to the city centre, major junctions are designed with no provision for pedestrians to cross; not just no pedestrian feature in the traffic lights, but nowhere for them to navigate the sea of open tarmac buzzing with aggressive vehicles.

Scooters buzz pedestrians with almost the malevolence of Amsterdam cyclists.

On the corniche and beach, the tented refugee city that had sprung up along the promenade and beach has been cleared away. Locals are following the tradition of putting their living room in the back of a car and reassembling it on the corniche for the evening, whole families sat around on circles of domestic chairs on the promenade, with tea, chess, backgammon, shishas and gossip.

The glamorous, golden, wide-balconied apartments across the corniche, overlooking the sea, glower mostly dark and empty. The rich have left for Paris, London and New York for the duration of the war.

In this national emergency, temporarily relocating refugees in the vacated apartments of the runaway rich would seem an obvious step. Sadly, that is not the way of the world. Instead the schools are closed and house thousands of refugees. It gives some understanding of how the process developed in Gaza, and we wonder when Israel will start to target the schools here.

It is a lot to think on, and on Wednesday morning we look forward to getting into Dahiya and making our first video report. Ali arrives around noon and says through Google Translate he is ready to take us there. I foolishly assume that this means the permits have come.

We enter into the Dahiya suburb (which is a redundancy – Dahiya just means “suburb”), and I am immediately struck by just how vast is the evacuated area and how very well developed. As we move in, it is a pleasant, middle-class area. It reminds me of good bits of Marseille. There is nothing to distinguish the blocks of flats which have been demolished or damaged from the other residential blocks all around.

Niels has me wired up for sound and the strategy is to record everything, to do some straight-to-camera talks in key areas, and then to edit it down to a short piece in the evening, possibly with a considered reflection added. Accordingly, we are filming as we go along.

In the middle of a long shopping street in Dahiya, Ali – who has appeared very confident and in control, having told us he is Dahiya born-and-bred and knows everybody – pulled up at a checkpoint manned by armed militia in civilian clothes, to check that it is OK for us to get out and film.

Then it all starts to go wrong.

First a young man opens the car doors and politely asks us in good English for our passports, which we give him. He is wearing a red shirt and carries his AK47 with great care, pointing down to the ground.

Ali tells us via phone translation that we should not worry, it is only process. Then the young man comes again and asks for our phones. We give him two each. He then takes Niels’s camera bag and goes through the microphones and other equipment.

Several more militia men are gathering, and the young man leaves. An older man with white hair and beard arrives in a beaten-up saloon car. He does not seem to speak any English other than “Don’t worry!”

Nobody here now speaks English. A huddle of people is now looking in bemused fashion at our phones and equipment. The old man offers us coffee, and two strong, gritty, sweet concoctions are brought in tiny paper cups.

But it has become gradually plain that we are not free to leave. Ali’s confidence has dissipated like a punctured balloon.

Then two larger and more military-looking men appeared in a battered old Jeep Cherokee with cracked windows, followed by a pickup holding several more men with guns. They were obviously in charge. The atmosphere had become much less friendly. I got out of the car and walked round shaking hands, in an effort to remedy this.

Standing on a street strewn with bombing rubble, amid a group of four parked vehicles, three of them Hezbollah, at the centre of a growing knot of armed Hezbollah militia, while missile-armed Israeli drones circled overhead and had us under close surveillance, I could not help but inwardly reflect that I had spent safer afternoons.

There was now nobody around who spoke any English. Our possessions were loaded into, and then taken out of, a series of backpacks, being slowly and carefully inventoried in notebooks each time. Every now and then an item would be brought over for Niels to identify – charger, or microphone, or hard drive – but I don’t think anyone understood his answers.

I looked around the area. It was a well-established shopping street with decent stores, all now shuttered, stretching as far as the eye could see, punctuated by restaurants and cafés.

The area was largely deserted except for one or two armed militiamen on every corner to prevent looting. A few people were around, returning to their homes to collect possessions, and some storekeepers were removing stock into their vans. Many had opened temporary stores elsewhere. The scene was one of quiet order and discipline.

I am sure everybody was aware a bomb could fall without warning on this area under evacuation, and people worked quickly with obvious purpose. But there was no visible emotion.

Just opposite me was a large toy shop with one shutter open, and a cluster of large teddy bears looked at me forlornly over a sit-on electric model car. Occasionally scooters would pass, their occupants waving at our captors.

After what I am sure was a shorter time than it seemed, we were motioned into the rear seat of the Jeep Cherokee behind the two senior men. One man with a gun squeezed on to the passenger seat beside us, and another entered the luggage space behind us.

Ali followed behind driving the Lexus, with armed men both beside and behind him. This did not appear to be playing out well.

I was relieved we left Dahiya for a rather more populated area, but felt very isolated again when the vehicle turned off through a gated entrance guarded by several men openly carrying guns, and pulled up in a small car park opposite a nondescript concrete building.

This had an entrance porch protected by a wrought iron gate. With the entrance doors shut, by placing Niels, Ali and me inside this porch and locking the gate behind us, we were now in an effective cell. The gathering of men discussing our fate grew larger and louder.

After a little while somebody opened the gate to hand us bottles of water. But he also motioned us to turn our chairs and sit with our faces directly to the wall. I made only a token compliance, being far too keen to see what was coming up behind us.

Niels later told me that he thought I was turning away from the wall because of the large amount of blood spatter on it, right in front of my face. I have to say I simply did not notice this. I assume Niels observed correctly, although he is from Scandinavia, and therefore has a dark and brooding imagination.

Eventually somebody arrived in another vehicle who actually spoke very good English. He entered the porch and asked if any of us had ever been in Israel. We answered in the negative. I was hoping to give further explanation of who we were, which side we were on, and how easy it was to prove, when Ali broke in volubly in Arabic.

Our interrogator turned to Ali, who had for some time appeared terrified, and asked him several questions in Arabic, to which Ali responded earnestly. The man then left. This was not helpful as Ali, to my knowledge, knew nothing about either Niels or me.

Shortly afterwards a bag was brought in with our possessions, and there was a further fuss as each was identified, noted and transferred into yet another rucksack. We were then led outside and into the back cab of a large pickup, again surrounded by armed men. Ali did not follow and we did not know where he had gone.

We went back into Dahiya again, and on a deserted street were driven down into an underground car park. This seemed particularly alarming. A single man, apparently unarmed, stood in the car park waiting to receive us. The car doors were opened, we were bundled out and our captors delivered us into his possession.

“Don’t worry”, he said in English, “you are safe now. I am with General Security. We are official Lebanese government state security.”

Having some experience of state security services around the globe, I am afraid I perhaps did not find this as comforting as intended. We were taken up to a corridor, where our possessions were yet again repacked and inventoried.

15 minutes later a vehicle arrived with three more General Security agents, none of whom spoke English. My feeling of unease was deepened when Niels and I were both immediately handcuffed. We were placed in the back of a much nicer Toyota, and driven away with two General Security officers in the front and one between us.

Our next destination was General Security HQ, which was more obviously a government building. On arrival our possessions were inventoried once again, and this time we had to sign an acknowledgement.

At this stage, two rather alarming things were said. The first is that we were asked about medications “in case you have to stay in prison”. The second is that one of the officers said to me, in a hostile tone,

“Why do you want to support the Palestinians? If you want to support the Palestinians, why don’t you go to Gaza and join them?”

It was a reminder that in Lebanon not all on the government side can be assumed to be hostile to Israel.

There was now a further long wait, on broken chairs in a dingy back office, while nothing happened for hours. Eventually an officer arrived who was deemed to have sufficient English to interrogate us, a judgment I would dispute.

We went through my life in minute detail. My date of birth, my parents, their dates of birth, my grandparents, their dates of birth, my brothers and sisters, their dates of birth, my children, their dates of birth, my partner, her date of birth. We also went through my education and every job I had ever held, every single stage taking six times as long as it would if we could communicate freely in the same language.

What we did very little of was discuss who I actually am and why I was in Lebanon in general and Dahiya in particular. My efforts to spend more time on that were simply ignored. I don’t think he understood my explanation that I believed the permits had been applied for and granted.

At one stage my interrogator asked “Dahiya is very dangerous. You can be killed. Why are you not scared?”, and I was delighted to redeploy the line “I am not scared, I am Scottish.” This time I got a smile and a one word response “Braveheart!”

After we had finished, it was Niels’s turn to go through the same process while I waited.

Finally we were told that our passports and possessions would be retained. We would have to return when called to face the investigating judge of the Military Court. Meantime we would be either held in prison or allowed to go, as the judge decided. We would have to wait for this.

We asked what had happened to Ali. We were told he was safe at home with his family, which we mentally filed under “Good if true”. There followed a long and anxious wait for the decision of the judge, and we were acutely aware that the judge had only the information furnished by somebody who had understood very little of what we had said.

One by one the security agents went home, until there was only one man left on this floor of the building, who complained he could not go home until the judge called. Thankfully about 10pm the judge did call, and said that we could be released pending further investigation.

Niels and I walked the two miles back to our hotel to clear our heads.

I accept that the fault was mine. I had assumed that our sponsor and Ali knew what they were doing in applying for the permits, and they had assumed that I understood the permit system. I had failed to take on board that our sponsor was merely a wealthy and well-meaning friend of my Blackburn contact, and had no relevant experience at all.

Mainstream media organisations all employ fixers, at a standard rate of $250 a day, to organise the permits and negotiate these things. I had assumed that to be basically Ali’s role. In fact he was just somebody our sponsor had arranged to drive us, who thought he understood the system but apparently did not.

Given that I was a fool blundering around a war zone where actual Israeli spies had recently been caught, I have nothing to complain about in my treatment either by Hezbollah or by General Security.

There is a psychological terror in the situation that they did their best to allay with coffee and water and assurances that all was OK. At no stage did anybody point a gun at me; at no stage did anybody threaten violence in any way. The Hezbollah militia were notably disciplined and professional for a local volunteer force.

The problem was the situation, not the people. And the situation was my fault.

I was now warned not to publish anything until I had all the proper accreditations, beginning with the Ministry of Information. We could not apply for accreditations until we had got our passports back. So there was nothing to do now except wait for the judge.

The alarming part now was the disappearance of both Ali and our sponsor. The morning after this ordeal, we were surprised to hear nothing from either of them. I contacted the sponsor through his office, and received a response from his secretary not to worry, all would be OK.

This was followed by a message from my friend in Blackburn to say I was not to contact our sponsor again.

Through multiple contacts I was soon in touch with a plethora of people in Lebanon who all were called upon for help and advice. The universal response was not to worry, this was all perfectly normal. One very well-known Lebanese journalist texted me:

“General Security, Military Courts – we all go through this. Do not worry, it’s normal.”

I spoke with a lawyer who said much the same thing, but did also give the useful advice that, while I could not publish journalism without accreditation, there was nothing to stop me being interviewed by accredited journalists, as a well-known person in Beirut.

So I did some of this. I particularly enjoyed this conversation with Laith Marouf for Wartime Café on Free Palestine TV:

I also caught up with Steve Sweeney of Russia Today. You may not be able to watch this in the UK:

RT spoke with Former British diplomat Craig Murray, who flew to Beirut on a mission to expose the truth about Israel’s deadly strikes on civilian areas pic.twitter.com/GUHofWbdcI

— RT (@RT_com) November 2, 2024

We also had a chance to see more of this extraordinarily resilient city of Beirut. Adults in Beirut have lived through a catalogue of civil war, occupation, resistance and disaster, and internal coherence is both weak and elusive.

But this has led to an instinct to survive. When Israel ordered the evacuation of the majority Shia Dahiya district, and commenced to destroy it systematically, the majority of its inhabitants simply moved north within Beirut.

Of the 1.4 million displaced persons, an estimated 400,000 have left, half to Syria or Iran and half to Europe or the United States. Of the remaining 1 million internally displaced, the majority have come into Beirut. The great magnet is Hamra district. I ask a resident why. He replies:

Everybody wants to settle in Hamra. It has bars and brothels, churches and mosques. Everybody has always been welcome in Hamra. It shelters everybody.

It is certainly now extremely crowded, and the traffic is in permanent gridlock. A taxi driver refused to enter with me as he would never get out again. Vehicles are double- and triple-parked, sometimes right across junctions.

The influx reminds me of the Edinburgh festival, minus the bad temper and vomiting stag parties.

We also learn about Dahiya. At what soon becomes a favourite restaurant, there works a young woman named Yasmeena. In her early thirties, she dresses in a Western style, does not wear a veil or scarf, and is the single parent of a seven-year-old. Yet she lived happy and unthreatened in what the Western media calls the “Hezbollah bastion” – until she had to evacuate and her home and possessions were completely destroyed, bombed to oblivion, as she now tells us with momentary tears, soon dispersed by a beaming smile.

Dahiya was founded after the Israel invasion of 1982 brought an earlier flood of Shia refugees from the South, and they founded a place to live among dusty lanes and crops. It rapidly developed into a thriving hub of commerce, and as in refugee areas all over the Middle East – including Gaza – good quality housing, workable infrastructure and good healthcare and, above all, education were developed, with remarkable resource and effort.

The Israelis are now involved in trying to destroy the entire area, systematically, through an unopposed bombing campaign that I predict will, as in Gaza, roll on relentlessly for over a year.

But the interesting thing about Dahiya, as represented by Yasmeena and others like her, is that it had become a centre of freedom of expression, with a café culture and thriving arts scene. Islam was at the centre of the community, but not forced upon anybody and not even Muslims were forced to abide by any particular precepts, while other religions were protected.

Tyre is another example. This great ancient city is under continual bombardment by Israel as another Hezbollah centre, and indeed Hezbollah has there firm political control. Yet it is also a city where anybody can wear swimwear on the beautiful beaches and alcohol is freely available and can be consumed in public with no problems.

In other words, Hezbollah is not at all on the ground as you have seen it portrayed in the West, and bears no relation to ISIS.

In fact the longer I am in Lebanon, the more I realise that much of what I thought I knew, was wrong. I do hope you will stay with me on this journey of discovery.

Six more days roll by in comparative inactivity, with the frustration of being unable to publish or film anything. Israeli bombing intensifies, and starts to occur by day as well as night. The wanton destruction in Southern areas is appalling and the Israelis also start bombing heavily the Bekaa Valley, North East of Beirut, massacring civilians mercilessly. Photographs of dead infants start once again to flood my timeline.

On the Tuesday evening, now nine days after arrival, we are approached in our hotel by a man from General Security, who presents each of us with a summons (“convocation”) to reappear at their HQ at 9am the next day. He says it is to collect our passports. We suspect it is more complicated than that, and try without success to find a lawyer to accompany us.

The next morning we arrive promptly at 9am, and to our dismay are taken again to the same floor we were held in before. We are locked in a dirty waiting room with a single wooden bench and a mattress on the floor. Gradually three other people join us, all suspects.

We are prisoners again.

We talk to one, a young man who was caught, by his own account, taking pictures around his own home and community, just for fun. He has been back four times for interrogation and had spent three nights in prison, which he described as “hell”. He said the food was inedible, the cells overcrowded with nowhere to sleep, and he had witnessed a man screaming in agony and terror with a heart attack but unable to get any attention from the guards.

This did not cheer us much.

We waited in that room until about 11am, when a General Security officer who spoke some English came to interrogate us. We had not seen him before.

He complained the officers last time had done nothing, and he had not seen the file. He then proceeded to start the entire process over again: My date of birth, my parents, their dates of birth, my grandparents, their dates of birth, my brothers and sisters, their dates of birth, my children, their dates of birth, my partner, her date of birth.

I could have screamed.

He brought out my phones from a large brown envelope, and asked me who Eugenia was. I replied I had no idea, I did not know any Eugenia. He said I had Eugenia in my contacts with an Israeli phone number. I said I did not believe so. He asked me to switch on the phone and look, but I could not as it was out of battery and no charger was available.

The second phone did have a charge, and we confirmed it contained no Eugenia. In the process, we came across the messages between me and our sponsor about Ali, the car, and when the permits to visit Dahiya would arrive. These messages were so clear, and made so plain the transgression was a misunderstanding, that he appeared largely to lose interest.

He went through the process also with Niels, and asked us whether we had money to pay for our flights home to Europe. He then went “to speak with the judge” and came back after half an hour with the news that it had been decided we were genuine, and we could stay, which seemed to surprise him.

He declared it was now only a matter of time, but he had to also get the consent of the “Big Boss” of national security to let us go. He did however proceed to ask us a great many more questions, much more acute and relevant than any that had been asked so far, and kept noting down our answers on a laptop – until this point the process had been entirely pen and paper.

Again, it was the strange situation of him being apparently very friendly – he shared his sandwich lunch with me – but at the same time we were prisoners. We were given back our phones and passports, and had to sign for them, but still were not allowed to go.

We then had to sign a form in Arabic three times within printed boxes, and then make an inked thumbprint three times over them. We asked what the form was, and were told it was for our release. It was very hard to believe this – why would you have to sign and thumbprint in triplicate your release? But there was no help for it.

As the afternoon wore on, the officer identified for us the different makes of Israeli drones buzzing overhead, and their capabilities. Then the drones were joined by a deeper rumble, which he said were F-35 jets come to bomb. If General Security HQ has a bomb shelter, they were ignoring it, but a huddle of agents gathered to look out the window and plainly they were concerned.

At 5pm the officers all left, bar one again, who said we had to stay for the answer from the “Big Boss” on our release. Suddenly the return of our passports and phones seemed horribly premature, and we wondered about those triple-signed forms. Initially we were locked back in the dirty waiting room, but then the duty officer (who spoke no English) came and led us to a comfortable office, where we were not locked in.

Finally, at 8pm the “Big Boss” phoned the duty officer to say we could go, and we walked out into Beirut, free but for the Israeli killer drones circling over our heads and the throbbing tones of the F-35s.

We were now desperate to get accredited to report so that we could finally do what we had come to Lebanon to do. So the next morning we went in to the Ministry of Information Press Bureau, armed with credentials supplied by Consortium News.

My work has been carried there for many years, but coincidentally I had just had the great honour to be elected to the Board of Consortium News, replacing my friend the great John Pilger.

The head of the Ministry Press Room looked at us mournfully and told us he was sorry, they could not accept credentials from Consortium News as it was an online publication. Accreditation was strictly limited to print newspapers and broadcast television.

He sent Niels a text confirming what was needed for accreditation, which included an email from the legacy media editor covering an official letter of credentials, and copies of press cards, passports and visas.

To rub salt into the wounds, at that moment the team of journalists from the Zionist, Murdoch-owned, Wall Street Journal came in. They were accorded VIP treatment.

Lebanon’s regulations ensure that only the state- and billionaire-owned, Zionist legacy media can accredit, whereas anti-Zionist alternative media are banned from accreditation and thus publication.

At this stage we might have been forgiven for giving up, but the idea did not cross our minds. We immediately sat down, inside the foreign press room, and set about texting anyone we could think of who might help.

This resulted in numerous dead ends, but through friends in Rome I got an introduction to Byoblu media, an alternative channel that has obtained national TV status in Italy, as both a terrestrial and satellite channel.

They were willing to provide accreditation, and the Editor was willing to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops required by Lebanon, in exchange for occasional news reports, which they will need to dub. They sent us the artwork for the required press cards and we had them made up locally.

Meantime, we had moved out of the hotel and into an Airbnb. It had never been quite plain if our sponsor was paying for the hotel (he had not charged us for the services of the disappearing Ali), but the hotel started to make plain to us that he was not. Finances started to become a real problem, as we now had no transport either and it was obvious that an interpreter was essential. We settled into a cosy Airbnb and started to get organised to live more cheaply.

On Monday morning we were back in the Ministry of Information presenting our new Byoblu credentials. The head of accreditation looked sceptical, but could not find anything immediately wrong with Byoblu TV. Before he left, he phoned somebody and kept mentioning “Byoblu” to them during an animated conversation in Arabic.

He then told us the application would go to General Security for processing. I could imagine the officers there throwing their hands in the air and screaming “Not these two again!”

We returned to the Ministry the next day as instructed, steeled for yet another disappointment. To our amazed delight, we were handed our press accreditations immediately.

We have to get further accreditation from the Ministry of Defence, and from local militias, before we can travel anywhere, but this should not take long.

You are now up to date, and we are poised to start the real reporting from Lebanon. Let us get started!

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We require to raise an absolute minimum of sixty thousand pounds, and preferably more. This is for transport, accommodation, logistics and staff.

We are prepared to put our lives on the line to try to bring you the truth from here and counter the Zionist media, but that requires the sacrifice from you readers and viewers of putting in the resource required.

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I have a confession to make.

When a journalist writes this it generally means they will proceed to reveal something they hope will actually show them in a good light or justified in some way. But I have a real confession to make, of something I did that was wrong.

Somewhere in the UK, among the papers of a dead loved one which nobody has the heart to throw out, in cardboard boxes in dusty attics or deep in the filing cabinets of Jeremy Corbyn, exist still a few copies of thousands of letters bearing my authentic signature.

These letters, on expensive paper with an impressive Foreign and Commonwealth Office crested header, state that the British Government will not deal with the African National Congress because it is a terrorist organisation.

Many of them go on to state that Nelson Mandela is a terrorist who was rightly convicted of terrorism by a South African court after a free and fair trial.

I really did write those thousands of letters, not just sign them. I did not believe a single word of it, and was only “doing my job” as a civil servant, but in a sense that makes it worse.

So I know how many government functionaries currently feel in carrying out the government’s policy of supporting and indeed actively participating in genocide.

When I joined the FCO, in my “fast stream” intake of 22 I was one of only two who was not public school and the only one who was not Oxbridge. I also had the unusual background of being a member of CND, Friends of Palestine and various other activist groups.

I could not be excluded because in the several days and stages of public examinations I had (tied with 2 others) outperformed everybody else of the 80,000 people who had entered the Civil Service administrative exams (it was 1984 with 3.5 million unemployed).

But the security services were not happy, and my “positive vetting” was delayed. This is an extremely exhaustive process (nowadays direct vetting) for those with the highest security clearance. An MOD officer, usually retired military, is assigned to investigate everything about you for months, including interviewing many who know you.

So while I joined the FCO in September 1984, for five months I was not given a job but rather put on full time French language training together with three other misfits (one of whom I think was being given extra investigation because his uncle was Roger Hollis).

In the end my positive vetting was left with a query, and I was pulled in to see the Head of Personnel Department. They said that they had decided to grant my vetting certificate, but that I was going to be placed on the South Africa (Political) desk as a direct test of whether it was possible for me to put my politics aside and function as a civil servant.

So I did. You tell yourself many things to get by, chiefly that the UK is a democracy and ministers are elected by voters to determine policy; whereas you as a civil servant are merely carrying through the wishes of the voters.

Thatcher was Prime Minister and she simply was a straightforward supporter of apartheid. This is much denied but I am an eye witness. Geoffrey Howe was Foreign Minister and it was never easy to determine what he thought about anything. Junior ministers running day to day policy were Lynda Chalker and Malcolm Rifkind, who were both viscerally anti-apartheid.

But the line that Mandela was a terrorist and the ANC a terrorist organisation was dictated by Thatcher and absolutely insisted upon.

It is difficult now to explain the intensity of feeling in the UK and the strength of the anti-apartheid campaign. Scores of letters would arrive every day, many from MPs, and – this bit is hard to believe now – in those days every letter would be answered point by point, not with a generic reply.

I was writing those replies by hand, and then giving them to the secretaries to type up. In 1985 the Department got its first word processor and I was able to draft forty template paragraphs and select from those for the replies. But out those replies went from Craig Murray, stating that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist, thousands of them.

I was very actively involved in the Whitehall battle to change the policy, but that is a different story which I have in part explained before.

But this is an extremely important thought that I want you all to ponder.

In 1985, the Terrorism Act 2000 was still 15 years away. There was no such thing as a proscribed organisation under the Terrorism Act.

Under today’s legislation, every single one of those people writing in support of the African National Congress or out campaigning for the release of Nelson Mandela would have been liable for arrest under Section 12 1 (a) of the Terrorism Act.

That is the danger of allowing the state to dictate whom you must consider a terrorist and punishing those who disagree with the state.

In 1985 the official position of the British state was that the ANC were terrorists and apartheid South Africa were the good guys.

In 2024 the official position of the British state is that Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorists and apartheid Israel are the good guys.

The state can be wrong.

It is therefore not an irony that Starmer and Cooper banned Nelson Mandela’s grandson from entering the UK as a “terrorist sympathiser” because of his support for Palestine. In this as so much else, Starmer is a follower of Thatcher.

The difference forty years later is that the state is now persecuting British citizens and locking them up for daring to say that the state can be wrong.

The ANC example explains why it is essential we do not give way to this pressure.

Let us face facts. Like most resistance units against colonialism, the ANC were indeed forced by the exigencies of asymmetric warfare into actions that were careless of, or even targeted the lives of, colonial settler civilians.

That did not put them on the wrong side of history. Apartheid South Africa was wrong just as Apartheid Israel is wrong. Occupied people have, in international law, the right of armed resistance. Within that context of lawful struggle, individuals remain accountable for individual war crimes.

The Terrorism Act, abused by the Israel lobby to make it illegal to support Israel’s opponents, is fundamentally bad legislation. It literally provides for up to 14 years in jail if you “express an opinion” in favour of a proscribed organisation.

40 years ago it would have been used against the large majority of the population who “expressed an opinion” in favour of the ANC, officially viewed as a terrorist organisation.

The sickening ratcheting up of pressure on Palestine supporters by super Zionist Keir Starmer continued yesterday with a 6am raid on highly distinguished journalist Asa Winstanley. All his electronics and journalistic materials were seized.

Today 10 UK police launched a pre-dawn raid on the home of Asa Winstanley, one of Britain’s leading and most celebrated investigative journalists.

All this devices, so all his journalistic materials, were seized and are now with the authorities.

He was not charged with a crime. pic.twitter.com/bT9fpnE8rU

— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) October 17, 2024

Panicked Zionist “elites” who run western states are lashing out in fear at their opponents. As their popular support evaporates in the face of clear evidence of appalling Israeli atrocities, they are resorting to the methods of fascism.

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Today is my 66th birthday, so I am hoping that you will forgive an article that is at core the anecdotal ramblings of an old man.

It was inspired by horror at Wes Streeting (I could end the sentence there but I shall continue it) ‘s plan to give weight loss jabs to the unemployed.

The unemployed are more likely to be underweight than the population average, and this attempt to portray the unemployed as lazy couch potatoes is vile in many ways. Its masking as an “investment” in the economy by Big Pharma is chilling.

If it goes ahead, how many years do you think we are away from those who refuse to have the drug injected into their veins, having their benefits stopped?

How are we to view this attempt to use the “unproductive” as lab rats for Big Pharma?

It has also been announced that the government is to send employment advisers into mental health wards to try to get sick people back into work. This is astonishing. It is extremely difficult to access any mental health care at all on the NHS.

To get residential care requires in truth a level of mental health crisis that indicates a threat to life of yourself or others. Yet people from mental health wards are going to be got into work, when there are hundreds of thousands of perfectly well people desperate for a good job who cannot find one?

What is the purpose of this nonsense other than propaganda and stigmatisation of the unemployed?

Which leads me to my anecdotes on the NHS and its purpose.

Sixty years ago or so, when my siblings or I were sick enough to be in bed, my mother would phone the surgery and the GP would come to our home to see us. This was perfectly normal. It is probably difficult for Generation Z to believe this really used to happen.

Now if I am sick enough to be in bed, I have to phone the surgery precisely at 8am and go through the lottery of getting in to the phone queue, rather than the engaged signal as the queue is at capacity. I may have to call numerous times.

If I do manage to get into the queue I have to hope I get to the front of it before all appointments are taken. If I fail, I cannot make an appointment for the next day but have to try my luck again then, once more at precisely 8am, while a hundred other people are trying exactly the same thing.

If I am fortunate enough to make it through the queue, I am de facto triaged by a receptionist with no medical qualifications but to whom I have to explain my medical symptoms.

She will then, if she thinks I have a case, explain my symptoms to a doctor and I may come out of this process, not with the doctor coming to my home, nor with me attending the surgery, but with a phone call from the doctor and a down the line diagnosis.

I find that everybody I have spoken to – and from all parts of the UK – has to put up with the same system. I cannot believe we have fallen in to accepting this.

It is not medical treatment. It is not a national health service, it is a notional health service.

If I feel really bad I can attempt to bypass the system and go to the hospital Accident & Emergency service, which I will find clogged with scores of other desperate people, waiting hours and hours to try to get medical attention.

I have not told this story before, but about three years ago I was invited to a party in Ealing after one of the Assange hearings. I had just one glass of wine and started to feel dizzy and nauseous, so I made my excuses and left.

I got a taxi back to the hotel near the Old Bailey where I was staying, but collapsed in the street just across from the hotel. I vomited and could not stand up. The problem was my heart condition. I phoned 999 and was told by the ambulance service it would be approximately three hours before an ambulance could reach me.

Passers by assumed I was a drunk or drug addict and gave me a wide berth. After a very cold half hour (it was I think February) a group of Irishmen stopped to help me and carried me into my hotel. I quite soon fell asleep on the bed and the next morning felt fine – and went back into court.

I spent several months this year living in Greece. I had very bad bronchitis and pitched up at the local rural medical centre, the equivalent of the GP surgery. I was seen immediately by two doctors, examined at length, X-rayed and given an ECG and left with prescriptions, all within an hour of turning up.

Some months later I fell and dislocated my shoulder, in a highly remote rural location and after midnight. An ambulance arrived within half an hour and drove me for 90 minutes to the hospital in Volos, where my shoulder was reset.

Now here is the kicker. UK spending per capita on public healthcare is twice Greek spending per capita on public healthcare.

Yet while we spend twice as much, the experience of this patient (I did warn you this is going to be personal and anecdotal) is that key aspects of the Greek system are far better.

The NHS is in a state of near disaster. The reason is that it has been hollowed out for private profit, with the designated “profit centres” which give a high return hived off to private contractors (though not visibly to the patient), and the public purse left paying for the complicated and expensive bits.

Of course, we hear from those the wonderful stories of great care.

The reason we pay such a huge sum per capita for public healthcare – £3,600 a year for every man, woman and child in the UK – and get such a totally unacceptable service in return, is that private companies are sucking out the money for profit.

10% of NHS patients are in fact privately treated, overwhelmingly for the cheapest and simplest problems, and private contractors suck 18% of the NHS budget.

I do not pretend that reform is not needed in the NHS – but getting out the private bloodsuckers and removing the profits would be a good first step.

Renationalisation of the NHS is urgently required.

If it were not so profitable then private healthcare lobbyists would not be bribing our politicians. Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting and Yvette Cooper have between them received over £750,000 from private healthcare lobbyists and companies.

As with the Israel lobby, the essential corruption of our politics is what drives the entire policy agenda of the political class. There is an overwhelming case for banning elected politicians and their parties from accepting large donations.

The chances of this happening short of a revolution are zero.

May I urge you to look at this video of the public meeting we held on the NHS during my Blackburn election campaign. Leaving aside my very obvious exhaustion, I was absolutely fascinated by the speeches of Mary Whitby and Dr Bob Gill.

Purely in terms of its content, I think paradoxically this small gathering was one of the best political meetings I have ever witnessed. I absolutely promise you it is worth your time and attention, and you will come out of it looking at the NHS in an entirely different light.

I most certainly did.

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Today is the grand opening of the Salisbury Festival of Russophobia, otherwise known as the Public Inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess, an unfortunate victim of imperialist spy games.

Do not be fooled. This is not in any sense a genuine public inquiry, supposed to get at the truth. This is an inquiry like the Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly, designed entirely to conceal the truth and further the official narrative.

In the Kelly case, the official narrative was that one of the world’s leading experts in chemical weapons, with access to instant-action neurotoxins, decided to kill himself after leaking that Iraq had no WMD. He chose to do so by cutting his wrist veins with a rusty penknife and waiting for a slow and painful death in the woods.

The ambulance crew who picked Kelly up testified that there was very little blood and they did not think that he could have bled out, but the Inquiry considered there was little blood because it must have “soaked into the soil”. Nobody thought to dig up the soil and check.

In the Dawn Sturgess case, we are supposed to believe that two top Russian agents sent to kill Sergei Skripal chose a “novichok” nerve agent as the manner of death. In broad daylight they painted this on the front door of his house, in full view of the neighbours and passers-by on the packed housing estate and without any protective equipment, despite the fact that a tiny droplet on your skin could kill you.

The agents then went for a walk in Salisbury town centre, looked in the window of an antique shop, and put the perfume bottle containing the novichok back in its packet including somehow resealing the cellophane wrapping. They then placed the “perfume” in a charity bin.

They then made their getaway on the notoriously unreliable Sunday train service.

The Skripals came back home, and both touched the door handle. Despite the novichok being instant-acting and extremely deadly, they then went out for lunch and ate a full meal and drank wine and had a high old time for three hours, being joined and photographed by their MI6 handler Pablo Miller (whose existence is D-noticed).

After their meal, the novichok finally took effect and they both collapsed on a park bench. Despite the fact that they were different ages, sexes and weights and presumably contacted differing amounts of novichok, they both collapsed at just the same moment, about three hours after contact, so neither of them was able to call for help.

But luckily the very first person to come across them on the park bench was, completely by coincidence, the Chief Nurse of the British Army, who just happened to be passing. They went to hospital and were saved and did not die after all.

A policeman sent to their house touched the door handle and also got novichok poisoning, and he later got ill and was hospitalised, but did not die either. He had returned to his own home and later it was found that he had got novichok all over the light switches and door handles there, but by great fortune his family, who continued to live in this house, did not get ill from it.

The official explanation of this is that it was “a miracle”.

Meanwhile, the “perfume” sat in the charity bin. It sat there for months and months, despite the fact that it was emptied regularly and despite the fact that Charlie Rowley was one of a number of people who also regularly stole from that bin.

Somehow both the bin’s official and unofficial emptiers continually missed the perfume bottle, again and again and again. Finally, several months later, the perfume bottle’s mysterious invisibility cloak failed and Charlie Rowley saw it.

He gave it to his girlfriend Dawn Sturgess, who put some perfume on and died. Charlie Rowley got ill but did not die. He was later able to tell the press inconvenient facts, like the cellophane on the perfume was fully sealed and that he took stuff from that bin fairly often.

When Rowley and Sturgess were taken to hospital, the police descended and sealed off the house and made a massive terrorism theatre of searching it, that went on for days. They were searching for a small container of liquid.

Finally, after days and days of 24/7 painstaking combing through the house by England’s finest, somebody spotted a perfume bottle sitting in plain sight on the kitchen counter, and the novichok was found!

Presumably the perfume’s invisibility cloak had spluttered into life again for a few days before fizzling out.

That really is the official story. Yes, it really is. You are not supposed to notice the massive glaring holes in it. If you want to check up on all the sources and links, here is one I made earlier.

I had intended to attend the inquiry in person. Even the most incompetent lawyer would be able to demolish this ridiculous official narrative with great ease. But then I realised that the entire Inquiry is structured to prevent that happening.

Nobody is going to ask difficult questions. The one person who could is the lawyer representing the family of Dawn Sturgess, but her family have been propagandised into total adherence to the official line, presumably by a combination of mainstream media and official hand-holding.

Sturgess’s family have understandably become focused on hatred for the Russians, whom they have been told killed their daughter. The line their KC is instructed to pursue is to query why the state was not more effective in protecting their daughter from those evil Russians.

The other “core participants” – the council, police and health authorities – will be back-covering on similar lines, and we can be pretty sure the Inquiry will conclude with plaudits all round about how well everybody pulled against the evil Ruski menace, and a few “lessons learned” saws.

The role of the “public” is to witness the show inquiry. Nobody else gets to ask a question. “Intelligence” material provided by the security services will not be made public. The Inquiry has already been told this morning by the British Government representative that this is essential to assure future informers of confidentiality.

The scene has been set by an utterly ludicrous attempt to stir up Russophobia by MI5. In the last week the Head of MI5 has solemnly assured us that Russia is attempting to launch chaos on the streets of the UK, and we are told by security service sources that the evil Ruskis plan to disrupt UK ambulances.

I am pretty sure Putin also has an evil plan to eat your grandmother.

Never Trust A Man Who Dyes His Hair

Dawn Sturgess died six miles from the official UK govt facility that manufactures novichok “for test purposes” – and incidentally where David Kelly once worked. Her death reinforced the official Salisbury narrative at a time when public scepticism was growing.

I am pretty sure poor Dawn, who had fallen on hard times and was just the kind of person the Establishment views as dispensable, was a victim of state violence.

I am quite certain that if so, it was not the Russians.

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Before Alex Salmond, Scottish Independence was an impossible dream, a romantic aspiration, outside the realm of practical politics. After Alex Salmond, it is the dominant question in Scottish politics and by far the biggest threat to the UK state.

I would argue that, with every poll for a decade showing overwhelming support for Independence among the under 30s and support for the UK only in a majority in the over 55s, Alex made Independence inevitable.

In Scotland’s national story, he deserves a place alongside William Wallace and Robert Bruce. (In my last conversation with Alex, about two weeks ago, he told me that new historical research made it pretty certain that Robert the Bruce was born in England. I told him that I knew that – in the family castle near Chelmsford, Essex, to be precise – and I had in fact published it about twenty years ago.)

I am really sad he has left us. It leaves a hero-sized hole in my consciousness. Very shortly after he retired as First Minister and Nicola Sturgeon replaced him, I said in reply to a comment on this blog that while I was not sure about Nicola, I would walk through fire for Alex.

In the end I did have to walk through fire, being imprisoned for publishing too much of the truth about the plot to destroy Alex and his reputation. Afterwards Alex very simply said “You had my back. I will always have yours.” We never mentioned it again; we both understood.

I am not going to give a history of Alex’s political career. There are plenty of others to do that. But I do want to recall that Alex was the only leading British politician to oppose the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 – on the day that Tony Blair called on NATO to intensify the bombing.

Alex vigorously opposed the invasion of Iraq and led campaigns to have Tony Blair impeached by parliament after being proven to have lied over Iraqi WMD, and also campaigned for charges against Bush and Blair at the International Criminal Court. He opposed the devastating bombing of Libya that plunged that country into a chaos from which it has never recovered.

His penultimate tweet referenced Starmer as following in Blair’s warmongering footsteps:

Starmer’s “we stand with Israel” declaration seems eerily reminiscent of a previous Labour Prime Minister’s open-ended commitment of some 20 years ago to stand with the USA on Iraq “come what may”. (1/3) https://t.co/s0oExsqwwc

— Alex Salmond (@AlexSalmond) October 2, 2024

Alex led an extremely tight and efficient SNP government of Scotland from 2007–2014 which had a long list of social accomplishments to be proud of and established Scotland as a more left-wing polity than England, with no tuition fees, free social care for the elderly, better childcare, free NHS prescriptions etc.

His weakness was that he was over-trustful and did not see the British security services coming. I know, because he told me, that Alex regretted allowing Angus Robertson to force through an amendment to SNP party policy in favour of Scotland remaining in NATO. Ironically, Alex did so because he thought it would pre-empt and buy off the US and UK security services, when of course they were actually behind it.

I do not pretend I had more than a nodding acquaintance with Alex before the plot to destroy him came to fruition. When he summoned me to meet him urgently on a cold, damp Edinburgh night I was delighted to go to see my hero. What he told me dropped my jaw.

But what stays with me most about that evening, in a bedroom of the George Hotel in Edinburgh, is that what he told me made it absolutely obvious that the plot against him was initiated in and directed from Nicola Sturgeon’s office. He was plainly in huge emotional pain over this.

He was also focused on Liz Lloyd, whom he believed to be an MI5 agent. He said that Lloyd had no connection to Scottish Independence and had initially been placed inside the SNP as an intern to an MP (or MSP, I forget) by a British Government graduate training scheme.

If you want to revisit today the conspiracy against Alex Salmond, I do recommend you read my affidavits in my own contempt of court hearing (as redacted for publication by the Crown Office).

The state deemed these affidavits so dangerous that Scotland’s corrupt judiciary quite literally ruled that they do not exist at all. They are “so evidently untrue as not to require cross-examination”. They were not accepted as evidence in my own case for which they were my evidence, which is truly remarkable. I was jailed with my evidence not even considered, or tested, as “self-evidently untrue”.

I swear to you and to the entire world, on my life and on every thing that I love or that is holy, that every single word is true. There has never been any evidence that anything in them is untrue. Everything we have learnt about the SNP in the last three years supports the truth of my story. Nothing has contradicted it.

In that last conversation with me, Alex was excited about recent council by-election results for his new party, Alba. It has been obtaining about six per cent, which would be enough to get representation in the Scottish parliament with its proportional system. More importantly, most SNP voters were now giving second preferences to Alba rather than the Greens, which he felt was an important shift.

Alex was very happy that Alba was more openly radical than the SNP. Anti-NATO and anti-monarchy, it represents a more radical route to Scottish Independence.

For a former First Minister to be building up a tiny party from scratch and getting 6% of the vote may be portrayed by some as humiliating. But Alex was really excited and upbeat about it; he relished the challenge and was thinking long term. There were days in his young life when 6% would have been a decent result for the SNP. He was simply bubbling with enthusiasm.

I should also recall the occasion when he hosted Peter Oborne, David Davis and me to dinner at a Mayfair restaurant and we got through three bottles of champagne before we even started to order. Alex was enormously good company and really enjoyed the finer things in life.

Heaven just got more fun. At least Alex will never have to worry about seeing his perjured accusers there.

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Western governments are deeply involved, strongly against the will of the majority of their population, in committing a colonial genocide of indigenous people. This happens because the political class have been bought by the Zionist lobby. The causes may run deeper, but that is the mechanism.

Democracy has therefore failed, having been fatally corrupted. In these circumstances, civil disobedience is not just ethically justified, it is the duty of the good citizen.

Palestine Action continue their highly effective actions to disrupt the chain of supply of the Israeli weapons industry.

On Friday morning I was at the Old Bailey with Palestine Action co-founder Richard Barnard (and afterwards in the pub, but let us draw a veil).

Richard was charged with support for terrorism under Section 12 (1) of the Terrorism Act in relation to a speech that he gave a year ago today. This carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years. He was also charged with incitement to criminal damage.

The trial has been set for Manchester on 14 April. I hope that we can see a very large show of support outside the court on that day. Because it is a jury trial, to discuss the facts of the case could be in contempt of court.

I think I may however note that ministers and officials had discussed the prosecution of Palestine Action activists with representatives of Israeli weapons companies and of the Israeli Embassy. It is entirely illegitimate for private companies and foreign states to influence prosecutions.

Barnard nevertheless had been told that the investigation was closed – until it was revived and charges brought by the new “Labour” government, with the specific involvement of the Attorney General.

I then headed to Blackburn in relation to some individual cases of injustice and imprisonment on which I was asked for help during my election campaign, and am working.

By sheer coincidence, while I was there two female supporters of Palestine Action were arrested just outside town, at the Palestine Action protest at the BAE factory at Samlesbury.

What is very plain is that the police used quite unnecessary levels of violence to arrest two young women, who were not engaged in violent behaviour. There was no need whatsoever for officers to press one woman down to the road with their knees in her back, and pinion her arms behind her back with handcuffs.

This routine use of state brutality to discourage dissent is so commonplace now it is accepted as normal. But we must never allow it to become normal.

The women were taken to Blackburn police station and I was able to get down and join the small vigil outside protesting at their being held.

Meanwhile Palestine Action have come up with another brilliant move this week, targeting the offices of Allianz Insurance, who both invest in and insure the activities of Elbit systems, the Israeli arms manufacturer with several UK factories.

Palestine Action has my wholehearted support because their activities are carefully targeted at the roots of the Israeli arms industry in the UK. This is the right kind of direct action.

I am less enamoured of the activities of climate change protestors Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion. Either causing major disruption to the general public, or carrying out acts deliberately intended to cause shock and outrage, appear to me very strange activities which are counter-productive in gaining public support.

You can make intellectual arguments for closing roads or tube lines or pretend attacks on sanctified art works, but if the net result is to antagonise the general population to your cause, it is just an exercise in self-righteousness.

This does not mean in any way I support the excessive jail sentences that have been handed out to climate protestors. I certainly do not, and believe custodial sentences to be completely inappropriate for political protest.

But if they were to target for direct action the corporate HQs of Big Oil, or their major financiers and suppliers, they would be hugely more effective in getting their message across.

We know for certain that for decades the environmental movement has been heavily infiltrated by government agents. My suspicion is that some of the strange and unhelpful paths direct action protestors have gone down were initiated by agents provocateurs.

My admiration for those willing to act on their beliefs is not dimmed where they are slightly misguided in targeting.

In this increasingly authoritarian society, we shall continue to see growing numbers of political prisoners. The linked website is a good start but does not include the many cases of young Muslims jailed on extremely dubious terrorism-related convictions.

It is essential to the health of society that there is a vanguard of people willing to take direct action and ultimately to pay the price of imprisonment. Every great movement for social justice has needed such.

“What they hold over us is fear of getting arrested or going to prison. But if anything, this experience has taken away my fear. They’ve done the worst that they can do to me and I’m fine.”

— Francesca Nadin, a Palestine Action political prisoner https://t.co/OTAzhnUeHP

— Palestine Action (@Pal_action) October 8, 2024

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At the end of Julian Assange’s testimony before the Judicial Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, 95% of the entire room of 220 people rose in a standing ovation.

The audience consisted of members of the Parliamentary Assembly, who are delegated members of their national parliaments, from all over Europe. Furthermore they included members of the full European political spectrum, including the dominant national parties.

The audience also included Council of Europe staff and experts, and worldwide media. Note this well – and I have never witnessed anything remotely like this – the 100 or so media representatives all stood and joined in the applause. I need to stress this was largely not the alt media, but the legacy media in all its pomp.

Glancing up a level, they were even standing and applauding behind the glass of the interpreters’ booths.

The dignity and clarity of Julian’s prepared statement and the stark honesty of his delivery provoked this reaction, coupled with sympathy for a man who has unjustly suffered extreme hardship and deprivation for years. I hope it was a valuable and affirming moment for Julian, so richly deserved.

But I must confess I looked over at the applauding media, and thought how Julian had been slandered and traduced and his case entirely misrepresented for over a decade. I recalled how he had been wrongly represented for years as a sexual offender and as a lunatic who smeared excrement on walls.

Oh well … “there is more joy in heaven at one sinner that repenteth”.  If the mainstream media are now willing to give positive coverage to Julian’s thoughts, that will be a good thing, as indeed largely happened over this event. His words on the assassination of journalists in Gaza and on the programming of targets in Gaza using AI were an excellent pointer towards where his thoughts are trending.

I also was very worried about Julian’s health. I do not wish in any way to detract from his extremely good performance and the success he had and deserved. But to me, the signs that he has not fully recovered yet were very obvious. His physical recovery appears to be complete; he looked fit and had lost that prison puffiness. But after years of isolation the brain takes longer to re-adapt to stimuli.

The old sparkle and fire were not yet quite there. His voice had little variation in tone and pitch, and a slight hesitation in delivery. He answered questions adequately and thoughtfully but the quickfire command was lacking and sometimes he appeared not to have caught the thrust of the question.

When asked a question by German MP Sevim Dağdelen – a constant friend and doughty campaigner for him for many years – he plainly did not recognise her and at that point declared himself too tired to continue.

I am well acquainted with jet lag, and this was not just that.

I am also well acquainted with the effects of solitary confinement, having endured four months of it. Julian has endured 17 times more, preceded by eight years in the Embassy, with the added extreme pressure of not knowing when and even if it would ever end. Remember, as reported by Prof Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, and now reaffirmed by the Council of Europe, Julian’s treatment amounted to years upon years of torture.

Julian himself stated at the start of his presentation that “the years of isolation have taken their toll”. In a press conference afterwards, Stella stated that, without violating Julian’s privacy, his recovery is far from complete.

I hope that the support of the Council of Europe has given a real boost to Julian’s morale, but I also hope that he will now return to concentrate on his recovery and not seek to dive back in to public affairs again too fast.

I see great pressures on Julian from those who wish, from the best of motives, to involve him in various causes in this crucial moment of crisis, of not just armed conflict, but a crisis of values and beliefs exacerbated by technology.

Julian indicated that his primary future interests may lie in AI, cryptology and neurotechnology and their uses and abuses. In the press conference without Julian, Kristinn Hrafnsson, Editor in Chief of Wikileaks, said that the future of Wikileaks and Julian’s role in it would be discussed, but Julian had only been free a few weeks and more time was needed before big decisions were taken.

I am sure this is right, and please take this article as a plea from me to everybody to leave Julian alone and give him more time – as much as he wants – fully to recover. He is a man, not a cause or a principle.

I might add here that obviously my own 14 years of work in campaigning to free Julian is done. This was a triumphant coda. Here I am looking very much younger making a speech outside the Ecuadorean Embassy on the day Julian entered it:

Here I am more than a decade later making a speech after his last High Court extradition appeal hearing:

It was a long, hard road in between, and one that took me across the world and caused me to meet so many wonderful campaigners and make so many wonderful friends, every one of whom contributed to the climate that eventually led to Julian’s release.

Enjoying champagne in Strassbourg with @Stella_Assange, @IFJGlobal president @DomPradalie, former British ambassador @CraigMurrayOrg and legal observer, @deepa_driver to celebrate @coe resolution on Julian #Assange based on @sunnago‘s report pic.twitter.com/1wT46p2KuR

— Stefania Maurizi (@SMaurizi) October 2, 2024

You can see Julian’s full speech and question and answer session here:

The Council of Europe is the grandfather of European institutions. It is not the European Union and is not the Organisation for Cooperation and Security in Europe. The Council of Europe’s mandate is to promote democracy and human rights, and it was a key instrument of detente, although Russia has recently left in protest at hypocrisy in the Council’s targeting.

Unlike the European Union, the Council of Europe has no economic role. Unlike the European Parliament of the EU, which makes law in conjunction with the Council and Commission, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) is not a legislative body. Nor is it directly elected.

National parliaments of the member states of the Council of Europe send delegates from among their members to comprise PACE. So it consists of national domestic MPs.

In the case of the UK, several of these are members of the House of Lords. We therefore had the anomaly that the judicial committee before which Julian appeared, in a European body dedicated to promoting democracy, was chaired by a British politician for whom nobody had ever voted, Lord Richard Keen, a Scottish Tory.

The subsequent debate passed a resolution which specifically recognised that Julian Assange had been a political prisoner. This was the only aspect of the report and resolution on which the Atlanticists attempted to mount a rearguard action. They did not attempt to remove the elements on freedom of speech and information, on US war crimes and ending impunity, on protection for whistleblowers, on abuse of judicial process, or on the appalling conditions of Julian’s detention. But they did try to remove the phrase political prisoner.

They failed. Only the extreme Atlanticists voted for the amendments to that effect, primarily from the British Conservative Party and the Polish Law and Justice Party. At the final vote on the resolution they could muster only 13 votes against to 88 for.

The reason that delegates from ALDE and the EPP supported the resolution in PACE, when their colleagues in the European Parliament blocked such action, is that party leaderships take much less control in PACE. It was therefore able to set up a committee to investigate the case, with an excellent report produced by its Icelandic rapporteur.

I spoke with three members of the committee who all told me they had been shocked by how much the true facts of the case diverged from media accounts.

The European Parliament by contrast has refused to look at the Assange case at all and both the EPP and ALDE have point blank refused to discuss it even at internal group meetings.

This PACE report has no enforcement clout, but it can make a real difference to perception. The PACE report and resolution on torture and extraordinary rendition, for example, to which I myself gave witness evidence, had a major effect on public and political opinion and in getting the media to accept those events as fact.

The European Court of Human Rights is a Council of Europe body. Resolutions of PACE are of interest to the ECHR. One thing we learnt from Julian is that his plea bargain contains provisions against him going to the ECHR over his treatment, and against making Freedom of Information requests.

I assume that if he breaks these conditions, there is a mechanism within the USA by which his prosecution or at least sentencing can re-open. But I cannot see how it could be enforced against him in Europe. The ECHR is not going to accept that the right to appeal over fundamental rights can be signed away in a coerced agreement, and I cannot see even the UK seeking to extradite somebody to the US because they appealed to the ECHR.

It appears unthinkable.

It may be relevant that among Assange’s strangely large entourage were the Belgian and French lawyers who had been specifically tasked with preparing his appeal to the ECHR had the UK courts ordered his extradition. So watch this space…

It is also of note that PACE has selected Sweden for a Periodic Review of its human rights record beginning next year. Those behind the selection proposed it specifically so that a report can be produced that takes a deep dive into the extraordinary concoction of sexual assault allegations against Assange and their misuse by the authorities, as detailed in Nils Melzer’s remarkable book. So again, watch this space…

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Netanyahu is desperate to keep war simmering along and to draw the USA closer and closer to him. At the same time he cannot send ground forces into South Lebanon where they will take massive casualties.

Israel can assassinate, it can employ indiscriminate terrorism and it can bombard from the air, and it has done all these things against Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran. But Israel cannot destroy Hamas nor Hezbollah, cannot get back its hostages from Gaza and cannot make Northern Israel safe for its colonialists.

Nothing Israel is doing in any way advances those declared objectives and in fact makes all of them increasingly unlikely ever to be attained.

But as Biden and Harris accept and reinforce every single escalation and every single illegality, Israel’s stranglehold on its western vassal politicians gets ever stronger. Those have now all (including both UK Labour and Conservative ministers) supported illegality well beyond the stage where there is any going back. They have now to hope that they will be “justified” by military victory.

The Iraq war shows that however illegal the war, if you win you get to write – or at least interpret – the rules of international law. I wish I could come up with good counter-examples. “Justice” is visited only upon losers.

But the problem for Netanyahu, Sunak, Starmer, von der Leyen et al. is that just what victory looks like, nobody seems in the least clear.

We appear to be locked into a hideous distortion of existentialism, where the killing of Arabs of any age and sex is in itself the path of virtue and a reason for living.

Israel’s TikTok army of child-killers, rapists and lingerie-flaunters will take heavy casualties if it advances into Lebanon. It is currently launching intense air attacks, but it cannot destroy Hezbollah that way, not even were it to triple the colossal amount of explosive it has dropped on Gaza.

Netanyahu’s strategy of assassinations and deadly stunts appears to be an attempt to goad Hezbollah out of their own territory into a suicidal advance into Israel. But Nasrullah is not falling for it.

It is worth stressing that, contrary to the propaganda, in the last year Israel has hit Lebanon with five missiles for every one sent by Hezbollah.

Meantime the United Kingdom’s claims to respect international law are exposed as an utter sham as it failed to vote for the UNGA Resolution giving effect to the International Court of Justice’s Advisory Opinion on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian Territory.

The ICJ’s ruling that the Occupation is itself an illegal act, and that states must do nothing which can assist Israel to maintain it, sets out a clear legal status quo which the UK is equally clearly breaking.

When the ICJ decision came out on 19 July, the FCDO statement was as follows:

We have received the Advisory Opinion issued by the International Court of Justice on Friday 19 July and are considering it carefully before responding. The UK respects the independence of the ICJ.

The promised response has never come; unless you take the failure to vote at the UN General Assembly for the implementation of the ICJ ruling as the response. The decision to suspend 8% of arms export licenses for Israel was framed not in terms of this ICJ ruling – which logically can only require the cessation of all arms sales to Israel – but more broadly in terms of unspecified possible breaches of international humanitarian law.

In its “explanation of vote” at the UN General Assembly, the UK deliberately ignored a key tenet of the ICJ Opinion. The UK stated:

“our abstention reflects our unwavering determination to focus on efforts to bring about a peaceful and negotiated two-state solution,”

This ignores the ICJ ruling that Israel must leave the occupied territories before any negotiations. An occupied people cannot negotiate with, in effect, a gun held at their head. That is explicitly why the ICJ did not accept that the Oslo Accords alienated any Palestinian rights in international law.

The UK is still – directly contrary to the ICJ – attempting to maintain that Palestine’s right not to be occupied was signed away at Oslo.

British military flights, weapons supplies and intelligence cooperation with the Israel occupation continue unabated. Starmer’s total support for Israel is now a fixed part of the governing landscape, as the failure to condemn the terrorist device attacks on the Lebanon makes clear.

The US and UK are now hopelessly yoked to a Netanyahu nihilist strategy of which the primary aim is to retain his own power and immunity from prosecution by permanent conflict, of a kind which makes his allies ever more complicit and which will rope them in to active military support.

That requires constant Israeli aggression against an axis of resistance that has so far refused to be provoked into major conflict. Israel’s plan is to humiliate Iran and its allies to an extent that a full-on regional war becomes inevitable, in which the United States will fight alongside them – and very probably the Sunni Arab regimes too, I am extremely sorry to say.

This is plainly madness that is entirely against the interests of the Western powers themselves. But their politicians, including very directly Biden and Starmer, are so compromised by Zionist-lobby money that there appears to be no escape, short of popular revolt in the West.

The West is bound to Israel by the simple, unalloyed mechanism of cash paid to politicians. That is the truth.

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Keir Starmer has left about 70% of the landscape of historic western political and economic thought vacant to his left. It is unsurprising that a new party will arrive to claim the unoccupied ground.

A meeting at the weekend discussed a new party provisionally called The Collective, which may be led by Jeremy Corbyn, who addressed the meeting. That was strangely secretive but seems to have been an adjunct of Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Movement international conference, which occurred simultaneously and featured many of the same cast.

The Collective is not new. This name was used for a loose coalition of independent candidates in the last general election, although it did not register as a political party so the name was not on the ballot paper. I had expected it to join forces with the Workers Party for which I stood, which did not happen. I think a non-aggression pact was broadly observed, though I recall grumbles.

My general attitude is positive – I think a new left party is urgently needed as it sinks in to people just how right wing Starmer is. He is also becoming massively unpopular very quickly, while the Tories still are.

But I believe these practical points are important on the detail of what needs to be done on the left in the UK today.

1) Corbyn and Galloway must come together.

The Workers’ Party got 210,000 votes at the General Election, which is a good start that cannot be ignored, and is building a membership and organisational base.

I count both men as friends and I know they get on fine on a personal basis. Jeremy remains the leader who gained three million more general election votes in 2017 than Keir Starmer did in 2024. George Galloway has a large base of dedicated support.

The failure to come together as a united left in the 2024 general election was a historic opportunity lost. The blame for this did not lie with Galloway, who in January 2024 himself put a motion to the Workers Party conference enabling such merging. I did not discuss it direct with Jeremy, but I believe he thought his best chance of election was as an Independent.

My own belief is that a Corbyn-led party might have won several seats and this was a tactical mistake by Jeremy; whereas George needs to tone down his populist social conservatism, which alienated many around Jeremy, if the aim is for a united left.

The biggest mistake of all would be for the two parties to refuse to unite; which sadly is far from impossible. Initially any new party needs to be led by Jeremy to establish itself. George should be Deputy Leader. Neither man would wish to serve for an extended period.

I would like to see Andrew Feinstein eventually lead, not least because he most definitely would not want to do it.

2) The party must be anti-Zionist.

The destruction of Jeremy’s very real prospects of being Prime Minister by the utterly ludicrous, Establishment-organised slur of antisemitism cannot simply be ignored.

The truth is, I am very sorry to say, that as Labour leader Jeremy was far too willing to attempt to appease the Zionist lobby, by throwing people who would have walked through fire for him under the bus. Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone and Chris Williamson are among the scores of people who come to mind.

A great many of the expelled activists were Jewish.

A new party of the left should make plain that these anti-genocide activists are positively welcome, and celebrated.

3) The party must avoid cliquishness

If the new party is essentially Jeremy’s project, this is a problem. He does tend to surround himself with a very tight and unchanging group. If you will allow me a moment of delusion of grandeur, the fact that they held a conference on forming a new party of the left and did not bother to contact Craig Murray is an indicator they are not reaching out widely.

According to the report in the Canary, the Director of the new party will be Pamela Fitzpatrick, who is Director of Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project, unelected to either position.

I exclude Ms Fitzzpatrick from this next, because I simply do not know in her case. But one irony, and the reason so many decent activists were stabbed in the back when Corbyn was leader, is that many of the close Corbyn clique are in fact Zionists.

They are “soft” Zionists, you know, the ones who want to treat the natives kindly, pat Palestinians on the head and build them cultural centres in their reservations. But Zionists they are. They support the continued existence of the terrorist entity in the Middle East.

The Peace and Justice Project has laudable aims and does advocacy and campaigning work worldwide, with a focus inter alia on South America, influenced by Jeremy’s impressive and underrated wife Laura. But I am obliged to say it is not the most transparent of organisations.

The Peace and Justice Project Ltd is a private company. I believe it has a very serious membership income but I am not entirely sure what it is. The published accounts tell you next to nothing, certainly not its income or membership figures.

There are a number of linked organisations – Progressive International is another – which appear to primarily exist to pay their staff to do stuff that other activists do for nothing, only with added layers of self-importance and entitlement.

Perhaps the paying bit is a good thing, and doubtless the abuse is much worse in the world of right-wing think tanks. But there is just something about it all that does not quite sit right with me, and makes me think it is not a good basis for a mass political party.

So, in short, a genuine new party of the left cannot just automatically get run by the bunch around Jeremy Corbyn, as appears to be the presumption.

4) The party must avoid British Unionism

I have always found it very strange that there are those who support Irish unification but oppose Scottish Independence. The current support of the UK state for the genocide in Gaza is just one example of its malevolence, which is a feature and not a glitch.

In Scotland the large majority of the left wing are pro-Independence; while the right, including the Starmerite right, are overwhelmingly Unionist. The space for a radical left unionist party is very small indeed.

The desire to break up the imperialist UK – whose continuing Imperial instincts have helped devastate Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Palestine in recent times – is a perfectly decent left-wing impulse.

The Alba Party in Scotland is already anti-NATO and anti-monarchy, among other left-wing markers.

Ideally, a new left party should simply leave Scotland (and perhaps Wales) alone. If it does wish to campaign in Scotland, it should take the line that Independence is for the Scottish people alone to decide, and support the unfettered right of the Scottish people to choose, at a minimum.

But any genuine left-wing party should wish to break up the rogue UK state.

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Alongside Richard Medhurst I had the chance to state rather more truth than is generally heard inside the United Nations in Geneva:

“Not only is the West complicit in the Genocide in Palestine, the ruling class of the West is so scared of its own citizens that it is now prepared to persecute its own citizens in support of a genocide”.

Richard Medhurst followed up on the same theme:

Our appearance at the UN was organised by Justice for All International, an admirable Geneva based NGO with which I am proud to be associated. If you can donate to their continuing crowdfunder I should be grateful. Please note that neither Richard nor I stand to receive anything from this other than (hopefully) travel expenses. Their crowdfunder is here.

On an apparently unrelated note, the scandal of the day is Keir Starmer receiving money from wealthy donors for designer clothes and accessories for his wife and himself. In the video above I am wearing the second-hand suit I bought in the Hague when I pitched up for the ICJ South Africa/Israel Genocide case. It doesn’t appear to detract from my words at all.

In the video I state that the reason the western ruling class support Israel is that they are bought.

UK civil servants are not allowed to receive gifts above a very small monetary value, in case they are influenced. I cannot understand why elected politicians are not subject to the same rule. They are in receipt of perfectly adequate public salaries and administrative and policy support from the public purse.

Why are any donors allowed to pay to influence them?

I would say the same for political parties. Individual donations over £1,000 should be banned, from people or organisations. If that shrank party machines, that would be entirely a good thing.

If the West is ever to return to meaningful democracy, these are a small but essential proportion of the changes required in our corrupt systems.

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I just sat through a recording of the Trump/Harris debate. Ignoring the merits of their political stances, I agree with the general consensus that Kamala Harris “won” in performance terms, but only because Trump was awful.

Both were of course terrible on Palestine. While I appreciate that that is of most interest to perhaps a majority of my readers, and that it is a key issue for a significant slice of US voters, it is not what this post is about. I am considering more broadly the prospects for who becomes US President.

Trump’s ability to make a coherent argument appears to have deserted him and he was easily sidetracked by Harris into irrelevant quibbles, notably on rally attendances.

While Harris said nothing even vaguely impressive herself, and was wide open to attack on her own record, Trump did not seem sufficiently in command of the logic of debate effectively to counterpunch.

I suspect that the debate will have done very little to affect public support, because Trump’s attack messages on immigration will motivate his followers regardless, and he kept banging then out.

But I wanted to focus in on the shameless bias of the moderators in favour of Harris. The framing of questions to each candidate was far more hostile towards Trump. Let me take the first four questions asked, two to each candidate:

David Muir to Trump:

“Mr President, I do want to drill down on something you both brought up. The Vice President brought up your tariffs, you responded, and let’s drill down on this. Because your plan, it is what she calls, it is essentially, a national sales tax. Your proposal calls for tariffs, as you pointed out here, on foreign imports across the board. You recently said that you might double your plan imposing tariffs of 20% on goods coming into this country. As you know many economists say that with tariffs at that level, costs are then passed on to the consumer. Vice President Harris has said it will mean higher prices on gas, food, clothing, medication, arguing it will cost the typical family nearly 4,000 dollars a year. Do you believe Americans can afford higher prices because of tariffs.”

Note what is happening here. Muir twice quotes Harris and validates her assertion that a tariff is a sales tax: “it is what she calls, it is essentially, a national sales tax”. He then quotes Harris again on it costing American families $4,000 a year. His question then to Trump is not framed as whether he agrees with Harris’s assertion, but the much more loaded question of “Do you believe Americans can afford higher prices?”

I am in general inclined towards free trade myself, but a tariff is not simply a sales tax, and the $4,000 a year claim is utter nonsense.

The average US household spends only about 11% of its consumption on imported goods. That equates to about $8,000 worth of imported goods per household per year.

Even if Trump were to slap a 20% tariff on all imported goods – which is not his plan – and even if all those goods currently enjoyed zero tariff – which is certainly not the case – and even if there were no import substitution and the entire cost was passed on to the consumer – neither of which would be the case, it plainly is not remotely possible that a 20% tariff on part of $8,000 of spending could cost $4,000.

But whereas various nonsenses spouted by Trump were “fact-checked” by the moderators, Harris’s completely clueless propaganda was endorsed and reinforced.

Trump however ought to have been able to counter by talking of the purpose of promoting domestic production and encouraging domestic industry and agriculture. His inability to do so – and indeed to counterpunch with logical refutation on anything – made this deeply unsatisfying watching.

Lindsey David to Trump

“I want to turn to the issue of abortion. President Trump you have often touted that you were able to kill Roe v Wade last year. You said that you were proud to be the most pro-life President in American history. Then last month you said that your administration would be great for women and their reproductive rights. In your home state of Florida you surprised many with regard to your six-week abortion ban because you initially said that it was too short and said (quote) “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks”. But then the very next day you reversed course and said that you would vote to support the six-week ban. Vice President Harris says that women should not trust you on the issue of abortion because you have changed your position so many times. Therefore why should they trust you?”

Note the aggression in the phrasing of this question, and the use of the negative connotation verb “touting” in the setup. Also throwing in of amplifier phrases… “the very next day”.

Now contrast the tone with the superficially “combative” questions to challenge Harris

David Muir to Harris:

“We are going to turn now to immigration and border security. We know it’s an issue to Republicans, Democrats, voters across the board in this country. Vice President Harris, you were tasked by President Biden with getting to the root causes of migration from Central America. We know that illegal border crossings reached a high in the Biden administration. This past June President Biden passed tough new asylum restrictions. We know the numbers since then have dropped significantly. But my question to you tonight is why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act, and would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?”

This is fascinating because plainly the intention is to appear to be tackling Harris, while the entire framing of the question is slanted to favour her. The characterisation of Harris’s role is precisely the framing of her campaign team: she was not in charge of border control or immigrant policy, but rather of tackling “the root causes” of immigration. This is exactly how Harris wants it put, but not really true.

Furthermore the problem is presented as essentially solved, again an extremely dubious proposition, and the question is basically – why did it take you so long?

After a couple of exchanges between the candidates Muir leapt in to interject and reinforce a point already made by Kamala Harris:

David Muir:
“President Trump on that point I am going to invite your response”
Trump:
“Well I would like to respond”
David Muir:
“Let me just ask though, why did you try to kill that bill, and successfully do so, that would have put thousands of extra agents on the border?

Let us then look at the framing of another “challenging” question to Harris:

Lindsey David to Harris:

Vice President Harris, in your last run for President you said you wanted to ban fracking, now you don’t. You wanted mandatory buyback programmes for assault weapons, now your campaign says you don’t. You supported decriminalising border crossings, now you are taking a harder line. I know you say that your values have not changed, so then why have so many of your policy positions changed?

Note how, with both questions to Harris, the answer is provided within the question. The immigration question was presented as solved and the flip flop question as reflecting consistent values. Harris did grab on to the proffered lifeline and banged on about her values as a “middle class kid”, and all the hard luck cases she claimed to have been inspired to help.

On Palestine, naturally both vied to present themselves as the staunchest supporters of Israel. Kamala Harris did genuflect towards protection of Palestinian civilians and the Palestinian right of self-determination, but this was so obviously a token gesture from Israel’s chief armers and funders as to not need further comment.

All in all, extremely dispiriting. Harris came over as an entirely unprincipled political operator who will adopt whatever positions serve her career, but is rather more intellectually competent than previously expected. Trump came over as a loose cannon which nobody has loaded.

As with Starmer, there is no doubt that Harris is the Deep State shoo-in candidate, and the priming of the debate in her favour is hardly unexpected. It does require an effort of textual analysis to pin it down, and I hope I have given you a start on that.

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As Starmer and Reeves subject the UK economy to yet more austerity and deregulation, the Scottish Government takes the blame for cutbacks caused by an economic policy in which they have zero say.

That has always been the problem with devolution: it is responsibility without power – an invidious position to be in.

That is not to say the Scottish government does not make plenty of mistakes of its own – the absurdly large sums of money thrown at the “third sector”, often to further pet causes, is one example.

Angus Robertson has just imposed cuts on Creative Scotland programmes, when the arts are a powerful economic driver for Scotland. What he has not done is cut the bloated Creative Scotland itself. Scotland spends considerably more on the administration of the arts than the creation of art.

The SNP has embraced the entire Freeport scam, which is deregulation gone wild and a recipe for human and environmental exploitation.

All this is a reminder that in an Independent Scotland, life will not be perfect and we will still have some appalling politicians. But it also shows that devolution is an effective weapon against Independence because the Scottish Government faces almost inevitable unpopularity from implementing Westminster-enforced policy.

The pretendy “parliament” at Holyrood is a jumped up regional council, no more than that. As we look back on ten years since the Independence referendum, we can mourn the gradual decline in governmental competence at Holyrood.

Still more can we mourn the undeniable fact that for the SNP leadership devolution was enough. They like pretending to be a government and in the last decade have done nothing to advance Independence (other than a Supreme Court hearing for the power to hold a referendum, which they were always going to lose but still deliberately threw, to make sure).

The truth of the conspiracy by Sturgeon to jail Alex Salmond continues to leak out bit by bit. I would add this thought:

When I first (before the Salmond trial) saw the WhatsApp messages between the conspirators plotting the allegations, I could not understand at all why the police were not investigating conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

I realised that in fact the conspiracy stretched beyond Sturgeon’s office and SNP HQ, and the police and the Crown Office had to be corruptly involved too. I remain absolutely convinced of that.

I have written recently of the revolutionary atmosphere that pervaded the Independence campaign ten years ago – the feeling that a new nation could be built that was radically fairer and more equal.

For me, the most significant date in Scottish history in my lifetime was 31 January 2020. On that night the UK left the EU, and Sturgeon assembled the SNP MPs and MSPs for an announcement. There was widespread anticipation she would announce a referendum, given massive public opinion on Scotland against leaving the EU. Independence had established a sustained polling lead.

Instead Sturgeon climbed down completely and said that there were “no tricks or clever wheezes” that could bring Independence. That was the Rubicon moment for the SNP, the day that they became a unionist party and not an Independence party.

I also want to make an observation about the 2014 Referendum. While I was making myself ill, dashing all over Scotland giving numerous speeches, I noticed the almost total absence of both Sturgeon and Robertson from the street campaign. Neither was frequently in broadcasting studios either, especially in the crucial last week. I have been told Sturgeon experienced a medical event, but that does not fully explain it.

This Labour government is going to become very unpopular, very quickly. Starmer achieved the second lowest ever percentage of votes cast for his party of any Prime Minister in British history.

Only Ramsay MacDonald’s 1923 minority government had a narrower base of support:

1923 MacDonald 30.7%
2024 Starmer 33.7%
2005 Blair 35.2%
2010 Cameron 36.1%

If you look not at percentage of voters but percentage of the total electorate, the result is even more stark:

2024 Starmer 20.2%
2005 Blair 21.8%
1923 MacDonald 21.8%
2010 Cameron 26.7%

One in five eligible voters cast their votes for Starmer. If you look at the other lowest examples, MacDonald led a minority government, Cameron a coalition, and Blair had to resign after two years.

Do not allow the fluke first past the post result to fool you. A Labour victory in the next Holyrood election is not inevitable. And yes, I do intend to stand for Alba.

The blog is in something of a financial crisis. Over half of subscriptions are now “suspended” by PayPal, which normally happens when your registered credit or debit card expires. The large majority of those whose accounts are “suspended” seem to have no idea it has happened. This is different from “cancellation” which is deliberate.

Please check if your subscription is still active. There is in fact no way to reactivate – you have to make a new subscription with a new card if your card expired.

The bank standing order method works very well for those who do not want to use PayPal.

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Forgive me for pointing out that my ability to provide this coverage is entirely dependent on your kind voluntary subscriptions which keep this blog going. This post is free for anybody to reproduce or republish, including in translation. You are still very welcome to read without subscribing.

Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with every article, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.

Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.

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