Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Asa Winstanley
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Israel's "war" against BDS is increasingly desperate
A fascinating article by a Jerusalem Post Knesset reporter earlier this month gives quite the insight into the increasingly desperate state of the Israeli “war” against BDS. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement aims to hold Israel to account for its crimes against the Palestinian people. At first ignored, and...
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Buyer beware: Israeli spy tools may be spying right back
Last month I wrote about Israel’s high-tech industry and how integrated it is with with state intelligence and military agencies. Top figures in the same agencies that systematically spy on and persecute Palestinian civilians often later go on to work in the private sector. One reader of that article altered...
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Israel's fanatical settlers can get away with murder – literally
Just before Christmas, a shocking video was broadcast on Israeli television. It showed a large group of Israeli settlers at a wedding celebration dancing and singing. The clip was quickly dubbed the ” wedding of hate” because of the violent nature of the event. In the clip, the wedding guests...
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Playing both sides in Syria
For several years now in this column I have argued that the strategic aim of both Israel and the US in the Syria conflict has been to to actively prolong the war. If you believe their rhetoric about wanting to encourage “stability” in the region, this would seem unlikely....
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Israel wants the civil war in Syria to continue
This weekend Israeli occupation forces bombed out an entire apartment building in Syria, in order to target a leader of the Lebanese resistance forces: Samir Quntar, who died in the attack. It showed once again Israel doing what it does best: killing Arab civilians. There is a long history of...
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The hypocrisy that underlies Cameron’s Muslim Brotherhood 'review'
So after much prevarication, a summary of Cameron’s “intelligence-led” review into the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood has finally been released, sneaked out just before the Christmas break where it will gain little attention from press or MPs. What a farce this document is – or at least the 12-page...
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The UN's ambiguous role in Palestine
The United Nations is supposed to be the guardian of peace and justice in the world. Founded in 1945 “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind,” the UN was sadly flawed from its inception. But those familiar...
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The arrogance of Israeli spy firms
Israel has long been a global hub of terrorism. It is part of a global terrorist network run by the US empire. Israel’s spy agencies, such as the Mossad, are a notorious gang of killers, kidnappers and thugs. Israel’s weapons industry has been a great asset to the cause of...
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The Mossad accelerates its strategy against BDS
One year ago I wrote about the Mossad’s strategy to combat the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. In part, I based my argument on the analysis of former Mossad director Shabatai Shavit, who had written an important, and under-noticed, opinion piece about it in Haaretz, Israel’s liberal daily...
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Syria vote is Jeremy Corbyn's first real test
So here we are again. David Cameron seems determined to plough Britain into another war in another Arab country. This time in Syria. To be precise, Britain has been involved in the covert destabilisation of Syria for years. Western spy agencies (including the Israelis) have been involved in arming and...
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Syriza's U-turn on Israel is now complete
Syriza was a popular leftist political party which was swept to power in Greek elections on its promise to end years of IMF-and EU-imposed austerity. By now, though, the party’s leadership has sold out its principles, implementing the very same austerity it was elected to oppose, even after a massive...
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Israel, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State bogey
The terrorist bogeyman de jour is nowadays of course the so-called “Islamic State”. Do you remember back in the decade or so following the 9/11 attacks on the US? Back then it was all al-Qaeda, all the time. We were all meant to fear and quake in our boots...
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Rebel-linked Israeli businessman has Syrian Jews kidnapped
A bizarre and disturbing story earlier this month shed a tiny sliver of light on the under-reported and murky role of Israel in the increasingly complex Syrian civil war. Agence France Presse reported the story of several Syrian Jews who were taken out of the country by rebel fighters hired...
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The crisis in Israel's arms industry
Last month the heads of four major Israeli arms firms warned their government of a “major crisis” in the country’s arms industry. The value of arms exports is falling at the rate of at least $1 billion per year, the CEOs wrote. In their letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...
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New heights of pandering to Israel in liberal America
This week an influential think tank in the US invited the leader of Israel to address it in Washington DC. Nothing unusual in that you may think. True; except the group was the Center for American Progress, an organisation with close ties to the Democratic party. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,...
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The Israeli plot to jail Raed Salah – part 2 of 2
Read part one here. Since the start of October, at least 61 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli occupation forces (although the death toll is rising, literally as I type) and ten Israelis (often soldiers) have been killed by Palestinians – usually youths armed with knives at the absolute end...
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The Israeli plot to jail Raed Salah – part 1 of 2
As is quite well known, the Palestinian body politic is split between political factions. Historically, the Palestine Liberation Organisation was split between its leftist factions (foremost among them the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and Fatah, the Palestinian national liberation movement. Since the late 1980s and early...
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Hamas in South Africa
Last week top leaders from Hamas, Palestine’s Islamic liberation movement, made an official visit to South Africa. The delegation, led by Khaled Meshaal himself, visited the country at the invitation of the African National Congress, the ruling party. At a press conference, it was explained that the ANC and Hamas...
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Netanyahu's Hitler remarks part of a disturbing trend
Last week Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech to the World Zionist Congress with an extraordinary claim. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time” he said. He only wanted to expel them. It was, he claimed, none other Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem in...
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Egypt's coup regime has devastated its own people in Sinai
A new report by Human Rights Watch has cast light on the scale of the Egyptian dictatorship’s crimes against its own people in the Sinai region. The report on forced evictions in the Egyptian town of Rafah says that “at least 3,255” homes, businesses and other local buildings have been...
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Israel is a threat to the entire region
The Zionist project represented by Israel is a fundamental threat to the entire Middle East. Despite the attempts by Arab dictators to demonise Palestinians and downplay the threat from Israel, many remain unconvinced. In 2013, Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal told former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg in an interview...
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Israel's dystopian dictatorship
Israel takes great pride in its propaganda claim to be the “only democracy in the Middle East”. This is something it bangs on about at sanctimonious length in every international forum it has access to. As well as being totally false for Palestinians (more of which below) it is entirely...
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Israel's 'Prisoner X2' revealed?
In 2013, the Australian press broke the story of Israel’s “Prisoner X”. Ben Zygier was an Israeli-Australian who had become a Mossad agent. But he was effectively disappeared by the notorious spy agency after allegedly betraying its secrets. Zygier supposedly hanged himself while in Mossad custody in 2010, though the...
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Western bombing is only helping Daesh
There’s been much talk by political and media elites in recent days about the supposed need to start a bombing campaign in Syria targeting Daesh, the so-called “Islamic State”. By now, this is a depressingly familiar drumbeat for war. In 2013, the UK parliament surprised many by derailing the prospect...