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On December 21, Piers Morgan hosted a debate on Palestine between British neoconservative and anti-immigrant activist  Douglas Murray and The Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur. Morgan has been hosting several debates and one on one discussions on Israel/Palestine. He’s had great guests such as Norman Finkelstein, Cornel West, and Dr Gabor Mate arguing against the current genocide in Gaza and for a ceasefire.
Murray would appear to have done well in this debate to anyone who does not know the issue. He was substantive, he is smart, but he was there as a “journalist”, the kind of journalist wearing a …

Han Youngsoo (Republic of Korea), Seoul, Korea 1956–1963.

In October 2023, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published its annual Trade and Development Report. Nothing in the report came as a major surprise. The growth of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) continues to decline with no sign of a rebound. Following a modest post-pandemic recovery of 6.1% in 2021, economic growth in 2023 fell to 2.4%, below pre-pandemic levels, and is projected to remain at …

Critics say Israel is an army with a country, but it is the apartheid state’s supporters who confirm it. Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University has once again launched an initiative to promote the Israeli military even though it violates charity regulations and risks the group’s special tax status.

In a recent end of year fundraising appeal, a group officially dedicated to the “Advancement of Education” sent its members “Supporting Our Student Soldiers”. The CFHU appeal notes: “The We Are One campaign provides scholarships and academic assistance to our returning IDF …

Global warming can add one more notch to its gun belt. The rapid onset of global warming is turning Alaska’s wilderness rivers orange. Global warming impacts Arctic temperatures 2-4 times warmer than the global average, and permafrost that’s been around since before humans sat round crackling cave fires is rapidly melting. Eons of frozen stuff is making its first appearance in tens of thousands of years, clobbering wilderness rivers with deadly toxicity.

Researchers believe the cause(s) is/are (1) acid from minerals leaching iron out of bedrock exposed to water for the first time in millennia and/or (2) bacteria mobilizing iron from …

Finance analysts free of moral scruple can point to Palantir with relish and note that 2023 was a fairly rewarding year for it.  The company, which bills itself as a “category-leading software” builder “that empowers organizations to create and govern artificial intelligence”, launched its initial public offering in 2020.  But the milky confidence curdled, as with much else with tech assets, leading to the company stock falling by as much as 87% of value.  But this is the sort of language that delights the economy boffins no end, a bloodless exercise that ignores what Palantir really does.

The surveillance company …

As a private citizen, the options for suing an intelligence agency are few and far between.  The US Central Intelligence Agency, as with other members of the secret club, pour scorn on such efforts.  To a degree, such a dismissive sentiment is understandable: Why sue an agency for its bread-and-butter task, which is surveillance?

This matter has cropped up in the US courts in what has become an international affair, namely, the case of WikiLeaks founder and publisher, Julian Assange.  While the US Department of Justice battles to sink its fangs into the Australian national for absurd espionage charges, various offshoots …

U.S. “ironclad” support for militarism undercuts attempts to curb right-wing terrorism. From white supremacist violence in the West Bank to gendered violence in Olongapo, we can’t defeat at home what we export abroad.

In his first month as secretary of defense with the J6 Capitol riots fresh in memory, Lloyd Austin rolled out training requirements to combat right-wing extremism in the ranks of the U.S. military.

Extremism has indeed been a problem for quite some time, dating back to early American history when George Washington’s army committed violence against the Haudenosaunee and recaptured enslaved Africans who had fled from plantations. In 1919, …

The Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron is worried.  He is keeping an eye on the ballooning costs of his country’s war against Gaza and the Palestinians.  Initially, the Netanyahu government promised to increase its defence budget by NIS 20 billion (US$5.48 billion) per annum in the aftermath of the war.  But a document from the Finance Ministry presented to the Knesset Finance Committee on December 25 suggests that the number is NIS 10 billion greater.

The Finance Ministry is also projecting that the war against Hamas will cost the country’s budget somewhere in the order of NIS 50 billion …

The failure of the United States to convince the Australian government to send one vessel to aid coalition efforts to deter Houthi disruption of international shipping in the Red Sea was a veritable storm whipped up in a teacup.  The entire exercise, dressed as an international mission titled Operation Prosperity Guardian, is intended as a response to the growing tensions of the ongoing Israel-Hamas War.

Washington has made no secret of the fact that it wants to keep Iran away from Israel’s predations by deterring any provocative moves from Teheran’s proxies.  But Israel’s murderous war in the Gaza Strip is …

As the leaders of this country, this settler-colonial imperialist United States of America, persist in dismissing international calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, I’ve been trying not to fall into utter despair, reminding myself daily despair isn’t an option. But it is difficult not to despair when during a televised genocide of Palestinians currently underway the morally repugnant US Congress puts on the spectacle of a congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses in these United States of America, inviting the heads of three elite private universities in these United States of America to testify, interrogating and …

“My country, right or wrong”, is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober”. — G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (1901), p. 166.

MPs Anthony Housefather and Michael Levitt are more devoted to apartheid Israel than to their own prime minister and colleagues in the Liberal caucus.

— Dimitri Lascaris, 2018

The above tweet was criticized by all the major federal party leaders even though few could argue with it today. After the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) denounced the post as antisemitic, the prime minister, Conservative leader and a cascade of others followed suit.

In a betrayal worth reflecting on, many leftists and self-proclaimed solidarity activists echoed the anti-Palestinian lobby’s criticism. Rather than focusing on Canada’s complicity in apartheid, they prioritized Jewish sensitivities. …

A minor but significant spark of direct action occurred in New York on 15 December. A group of people entered a Whole Foods store (owned by Amazon), took groceries without paying and exited wearing Jeff Bezos masks.

Independent reporter Talia Jane posted the following on Twitter/X:

The action was in protest against corporate wealth alongside increased food insecurity & to call attention to Amazon’s contracts with Israel.

She also posted a video of the event with people throwing around flyers and shouting, “Feed the people, eat the rich!” Jane stated the food was later redistributed and given to food ‘distros’ and community care spaces …

Quentin Matsys (The Netherlands), The Tax Collectors, c. 1525–1530.

Within the United Nations, there is a little-known debate about the status of global tax regulation. In August 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres released a draft document called ‘Promotion of Inclusive and Effective International Tax Cooperation at the United Nations’. This document comes out of a long debate led by the Global South about the unregulated behaviour of transnational corporations (especially the ways in which they avoid taxation) and …

A few things to consider.