Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Asa Winstanley
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Is Israel now imposing ‘petty apartheid’?
A recent move by an Israeli mayor to ban Palestinian Arab citizens from a public park has prompted many to ask if Israel is moving towards the imposition of what used to be called “petty apartheid”. Israel is by definition an apartheid state already and has been so since its...
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Far from being impartial, Panorama was a partisan attack on Labour's left
Right from the opening, there were glaring signs that Wednesday night’s “Panorama” would be anything but the impartial public broadcasting that the BBC claims to champion. The hour-long special was supposed to prove that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn has become a hive of anti-Semitism. In reality, it only proved the...
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The Israeli occupation’s fig leaf
Spare a thought for the human rights groups in Palestine committed to documenting, holding to account, and otherwise having to deal with Israel’s racist regime. Groups such as Al Haq, B’Tselem, Adalah and Al-Mezan are just some of the many groups which create an array of valuable reports, papers, videos,...
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How Israeli ‘rules of engagement’ allow soldiers to shoot children in the back
The Haifa-based Palestinian human rights group Adalah has done a lot of important work over the years. Its name is Arabic for “justice”. Much of Adalah’s work focuses on the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, or the “Palestinians of the 1948 territories” as they often describe themselves. The group...
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Why arch-racist Katie Hopkins loves Israel
The views of Katie Hopkins represent a particularly British form of fascism. Similar in some ways to US President Donald Trump, she rose to national fame through reality TV. Both appeared on the same franchise, The Apprentice – a particularly crass example of the genre. Hopkins appeared as a contestant in...
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Mohamed Morsi was murdered by US imperialism
Egypt’s only elected President, Mohamed Morsi, is dead. He died in court, apparently of a heart attack. But the reality is that the Egyptian dictatorship murdered him, and thus by US imperialism. He had been denied much-needed medical treatment by the military regime. His supporters called the death “full-fledged murder.” Second, only...
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War against Iran will not end well for the aggressors
Here we go again. The shadow of war is again cast over the Persian Gulf. Having already destroyed Iraq over the past decade and more, the US is now threatening to do the same to Iran. The escalation of events in recent weeks is, frankly, alarming, but a military invasion...
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Israel deliberately wounding Palestinian civilians in Gaza
A new World Heath Organization report on Gaza this month made for shocking reading. But as usual when it comes to our hopelessly Israel-sympathetic media, there was barely a whisper about it in the “mainstream” papers. It states that in the course of the year following the start of the Great...
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Israel depends on anti-Semitism
As I write, the latest episode of the “Labour anti-Semitism crisis” is playing out with depressing predictability on social and news media. Pete Willsman, a left-wing member of Labour’s rule-making national executive, has reportedly had his party membership suspended after a secret audio recording – apparently of him – was...
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The BDS campaign against Eurovision was a major success
One of the primary targets of the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement over the past year was the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest that took place in Tel Aviv earlier in May. Despite the protests, the contest went ahead and, on the day, none of the acts scheduled...
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Israel’s malign global influence campaigns
For three years after Donald Trump narrowly won 2016’s elections, much of America’s establishment corporate press was obsessed with the “Russiagate” conspiracy theory. This was a relentless deluge of excrement flung in the faces of the viewing public by (supposedly) liberal cable news channels. The entire charade came crashing down...
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Israel’s threat to world peace
Headlines this week about an apparent rift between top British and US military officers over Iran were a reminder of just how embedded the UK’s military is within the US world empire. This closeness has only heightened during the era of US President Donald Trump. The mere idea that a...
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Trump’s Palestine 'deal' dead before launch
There is seemingly no stopping deluded prospectors digging for nuggets of gold in the empty mine of Palestinian leaders’ capitulation. True, that mine once contained rich seams. Small, but rich enough. In 1993 Yasser Arafat terminated the First Intifada, the popular Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. In exchange, he got...
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Israel’s Eurovision flop
The Eurovision song contest is set to take place in Israel later this month. The Israeli government is treating the event as a major propaganda opportunity, with full support from the state, backed by more than $30 million in government financing. It’s even decreed the effort a “national project”. But recent Israeli...
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Israel’s ‘Nation-State Law' merely confirms its lifelong racist nature
The “nation-state” basic law passed in the Israeli parliament last year was denounced widely in the West. The law states that Israel does not belong to all its citizens, but is instead the “the Nation-State of the Jewish people”. The text further stipulates that the “right to exercise national...
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Palestinians are suing the illegal Israeli settlers who list stolen property on AirBnB
Last year, AirBnB declared that it would withdraw listings on its site from Israeli settlers based in Jew-only colonies in the West Bank...
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The self-declared Jewish state is a light unto the Islamophobes
Islamophobia has become the leading identifier of far-right groups all around the world. Fascism always requires an “other”, a demonised minority group that can be scapegoated and blamed for all the world’s ills, whether real or imagined. In Nazi propaganda, a global Jewish plot was said to control the forces...
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Why Zionism has always been a racist ideology
Labour’s Shadow Justice Minister Richard Burgon expressed regret this week for having stated in a speech some years ago that Zionism is the “enemy of peace”. He should not have apologised. His 2014 comments were a simple matter of historical fact, and he should have stood by them. Liberal and...
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The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump
Some years ago, I met a landlord briefly who was an Iraqi. After volunteering to tell me his land of origin, he began to explain his theory that ISIS — Daesh — was created by the CIA, America’s Central Intelligence Agency. When discussing Al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State with...
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The arrest of Julian Assange is an existential threat to journalism
Julian Assange, the publisher of WikiLeaks, was hauled by force out the Ecuadorian embassy in London on Thursday. British secret police snatched him at the invitation of the embassy, which had revoked Assange’s asylum, first granted in 2012. Despite pretence that the arrest pertains to a minor bail-jumping charge –...
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US recognition of the annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights doesn’t do Israel any favours
Now that the United States has given the imperial stamp of approval to Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, what does the future hold? Well, the move announced by President Donald Trump this week augers badly. Al-Marsad, the Arab human rights centre in the Golan Heights, condemned Trump’s move....
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Labour’s McCarthyism
Another one bites the dust. Left-wing MP Chris Williamson is the latest prominent Labour figure to be thrown to the wolves. On Thursday he was suspended from the party for an unspecified “pattern of behaviour.” This comes after a long campaign of incitement against Williamson by the Israel lobby. It began in the...
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On US imperialism, Israel is more attack dog than client state
One particularly frank imperialist described the logic of the hoped-for British patronage of the Zionist movement, as the empire stood on the brink of occupying Palestine in 1917. This movement would ultimately go onto wipe Palestine off the map in order to establish Israel on the ruins of the...
