Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Asa Winstanley
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Roseanne Barr’s racism is welcome in Israel
The disgraced American actor-comedian Roseanne Barr was welcomed warmly in Israel last month. No surprise in that, you may think, but it now appears that this was precisely because of her racism. Once the toast of the liberal Hollywood establishment, Barr has over the past few years re-modelled herself...
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Eurovision and the meaning of the cultural boycott of Israel
Drawing on religious terminology, Israel claims to be a “light unto the nations”, an example for the rest to follow. In past eras, this spin had a certain degree of success among gullible western liberals and even some leftists. But no more, it seems, as Israel’s international standing continues to...
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John Bolton: the neocon hawk shoring up Israel in the White House
Neocon hawk John Bolton is a warmonger left over from the George W Bush administration who has returned to the centre of power in Washington DC. There, he continues to agitate for war against Iran, or essentially anyone else who gets in America’s way. Furthermore, Bolton is so rabidly...
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The pro-Israel lobby goes for broke
Ever since leading pro-Israel lobby financier Sheldon Adelson intervened in the 2016 election heavily in favour of Donald Trump, the now-president’s Middle East policies (if you can even call them that) have become more and more openly in favour of the Zionist state. To call casino tycoon Adelson an “Israel...
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Israel's reliance on forgery and violence is rooted in its history
Louay Kuhail and Amir Al-Nimra were taking a selfie on the roof of a building in Gaza City when they were bombed to death, without warning, in an Israeli airstrike...
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2018 was another year of BDS victories
An old saying attributed to Gandhi goes: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you and then you win.” This saying is, broadly speaking, the right way to understand Israel’s response to the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, since it was first founded...
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Israeli censorship increasingly engenders a self-defeating backlash
It might not look like it, but in many ways Israel is in a bind. Of course, Israel is a fundamentally oppressive, racist, apartheid state which is increasingly in bed with some of the world’s worst regimes – including Saudi Arabia’s brutal absolutist monarchy, and the anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi-arming government in...
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The road to the liberation of Palestine
The late, great Palestinian Marxist leader George Habash used to state that the road to the liberation of Palestine passed through the capitals of every Arab state. For decades, Habash was the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), remaining influential in that group right up...
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Marc Lamont Hill should be reinstated without delay
'CNN should reinstate Marc Lamont Hill without delay. The channel’s act of political and racist censorship should not be allowed to stand.'...
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Israel’s censorship regime goes global
For a government which brashly boasts of being “the only democracy in the Middle East” Israel in reality has a lot of anti-democratic tendencies. The main one of these is the simple reality that Israel enforces a military dictatorship over millions of Palestinians. These people – in the West Bank and...
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The relentless censorship of anti-Zionist Jews
Tony Greenstein is slowly but surely being disappeared from the internet. A renowned anti-Zionist Jew who has long been active in the Palestine solidarity movement and on the wider political left, Greenstein is being censored by powerful American internet companies. In the latest incident, his account on Twitter has...
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Israeli propaganda is recycled from the dustbin of South African history
As has been elucidated by many people – including my colleague Ben White in one of his excellent books, and myself in this column – Israel is an apartheid state. This does not mean that Israel is the same in every single respect as South Africa was under its...
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Airbnb must also withdraw from the occupied Golan Heights
In November, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement won its latest of many such victories against Israeli occupation and racism. After a sustained three-year BDS campaign, the popular online holiday-home rental company Airbnb finally bowed to pressure and agreed to delist properties based in illegal Israeli settlements in the...
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Israel’s death squads endanger humanitarian aid workers
One of the tactics that Israel uses to launder its image around the world could be termed “aidwashing” or perhaps “bluewashing”, after the blue used by the UN in its iconography. This is the method by which Israel portrays itself as a “humanitarian” country in order to distract from the...
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Repression of the BDS movement is a sure sign of its success
Despite powerful and globally coordinated Israeli attacks against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, BDS is not simply surviving; it is thriving. That is the conclusion of a new report from the Transnational Institute written by Bina Ahmad, Phyllis Bennis and Ben White. Shrinking Space and the BDS Movement is...
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A wake up call for Israel’s liberal supporters
The excellent American journalist Eli Clifton revealed last week that notorious anti-Palestinian Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has taken a $120,000 “consulting” fee from the Gatestone Institute. This “right-wing” think tank is regarded by many as extremely “anti-Muslim”. Dershowitz has long been known as an active apologist for Israeli war...
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How Israel helped murder Jamal Khashoggi
The murder of Jamal Khashoggi by the despotic Saudi regime has sent waves of revulsion around the world’s media. Much of this condemnation is hypocritical. The same mainstream media that regularly propagandises for the Saudi regime now wants us to take its limited criticisms of one particular Saudi prince seriously. The...
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How Google wipes Palestine off the map
Google's dedication to Israel's occupation can be seen in its maps and its refusal to recognise the reality of Israel’s apartheid system for Palestinians...
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Israel’s covert influence campaigns in the West
All the hype about Russia aside, the special investigation in the US by Robert Mueller has shed light on something concrete: the real story is IsraelGate. Israel’s covert influence campaigns in Western democracies are manifold. Israel is attempting to subvert the UK’s elections by running a years-long interference campaign against opposition...
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Why Israel sees BDS as a ‘strategic threat’
As leaders of a state that is totally alien to the region and its indigenous peoples, Israeli political and military planners are obsessed with what they term “strategic threats”. Such “threats” have varied over the years. The prime targets have included former Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Palestine Liberation...
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The disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi and the Israel-Saudi alliance
The apparent kidnapping and possible murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia is a shocking indictment of a regime entirely without redeeming features. He walked into the Saudi embassy in Turkey last week to obtain documentation finalising his divorce, but he has yet to return. His fiancée waited...
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What’s behind Qatar’s shift towards Israel? (Part 2)
Part 2 Read part 1 here One of the lobbyists working for Qatar in the US last year was Nick Muzin, who at one stage was paid an eye-watering $300,000 a month for his services. As reported at The Electronic Intifada, the main result of Muzin’s work seems to have been...
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What is behind Qatar’s shift towards Israel? (Part 1)
Over the past year or so, the tiny Gulf state of Qatar has been getting increasingly close to pro-Israel figures from the United States. Things are so bad that Qatar last year donated a quarter of a million dollars to some of America’s mostly rabidly anti-Palestinian, hard-right Zionist organisations,...
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How ironic that a Palestinian has been jailed by Israel for advocating prisoners’ rights
Ayman Nasser, a Palestinian human rights activist, has been jailed indefinitely by Israel with neither a trial nor even formal charges being filed against him. This is a bitter irony that is emblematic of the brutal military dictatorship enforced by Israel in occupied Palestine, for Nasser is the legal...
