Latest articles
by Jonathan Cook / March 18th, 2018
Seemingly unrelated events all point to a tectonic shift in which Israel has begun preparing the ground to annex the occupied Palestinian territories.
Last week, during an address to students in New York, Israel’s education minister Naftali Bennett publicly disavowed even the notion of a Palestinian state. “We are done with that,” he said. “They have a Palestinian state in Gaza.”
Later in Washington, Mr Bennett, who heads Israel’s settler movement, said Israel would manage the fallout from annexing the West Bank, just as it had with its annexation of the Syrian Golan in 1980.
International opposition would dissipate, he said. “After two …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 18th, 2018
It has been the great misfit Australian policy since the 1990s: a refugee and immigration policy that shows itself to be scrupulously fair, calculable and clean. Nothing shall be permitted to sully this presumption. Even as refugees and asylum seekers gather dampness, decay and depression in Pacific camps, the Australian immigration policy shall remain, like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.
The comments of Australia’s Peter Dutton who resembles, with each passing day, a plumed and emboldened commissar, have given political figures pause for thought. Openly, and without reservation, the Home Affairs Minister decided to bank for a particular racial group in the …
Is Canada a Metis Civilization? (Part 3 of a 3 part series)
by Eric Walberg / March 17th, 2018
Transition from the Indian Act to Aboriginal self-government
The debate about the Indian Act and how to reconcile the elected councils and the traditionals over the past 40 years has been shaped by the sweeping intent of the White Paper of 1969, issued as Pierre Trudeau began his career as prime minister. It set out a liberal, multicultural challenge, an attempt to supersede the Indian Act by eliminating any special status for natives altogether. This galvanized the natives towards a defence of their special status, above and prior to the colonial settlers. It is a nice historical touch that Prime Minister …
by Ellen Brown / March 17th, 2018
The US Postal Service, under attack from a manufactured crisis designed to force its privatization, needs a new source of funding to survive. Postal banking could fill that need.
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The US banking establishment has been at war with the post office since at least 1910, when the Postal Savings Bank Act established a public savings alternative to a private banking system that had crashed the economy in the Bank Panic of 1907. The American Bankers Association was quick to respond, forming a Special Committee on Postal Savings Legislation to block any extension of the new service. According to …
by Randy Shields / March 17th, 2018
Neocon Max Boot now says it’s better for the Syrian people if Assad stays in power. But we still can’t get the American Left to come to its senses about Syria.
Louis Proyect says in Counterpunch that the suffering coming out of East Ghouta is “on a massive scale reminiscent of Leningrad in 1941.”
According to Wiki, a million and a half people died during the Leningrad siege. According to the authoritative-sounding Syrian Observatory for Human Rights — one anti-Assad guy in a Coventry flat, relying mostly on reports …
by Robert J. Burrowes / March 17th, 2018
Anyone reading the scientific literature (or the progressive news outlets that truthfully report this literature) knows that homo sapiens is on the fast track to extinction, most likely some time between 2025 and 2040.
For a taste of the evidence in this regard focusing on the climate, see here; here; here; and here.
Unfortunately, of course, the climate is not the only imminent threat to human survival. With an insane leadership in the White House in the United States, we are faced with the prospect of nuclear war. And even if the climate and nuclear threats to …
Hundreds of Umm al-Fahm’s streets remain nameless as Israel refuses to allow the town’s Palestinians to honour their national icons
by Jonathan Cook / March 17th, 2018
In the town of Umm al-Fahm, more than a third of all letters never reach their destination. Identity cards, passports and drivers’ licences go missing, welfare cheques are lost, appointments expire, and penalties mount up over unpaid fines.
GPS navigation apps like Waze fail, taxis struggle to find customers, and private delivery companies have to be met at the town’s entrance and escorted in.
It is scene of administrative chaos more appropriate for a village in remotest rural Africa than a town of 60,000 residents in central Israel, one of the wealthiest and most developed countries in the world.
For decades Umm al-Fahm’s …
by Jonathan Cook / March 17th, 2018
After seven years of delays, the Israeli governing parties have agreed the final terms of controversial new legislation that would define Israel exclusively as “the nation-state of the Jewish people”.
The bill is now expected to be fast-tracked through the Israeli parliament and on to the statute books in the coming weeks.
Approval by the parliament’s justice committee this week of the Basic Law, which carries much greater weight than normal legislation, marks a dangerous turning-point for Palestinians, according to analysts.
Amir Ohana, the committee’s chair, called it the “law of all laws”, while a government minister termed it “Zionism’s …
by Graham Peebles / March 17th, 2018
Tadesse is a 28-year-old Ethiopian from the capital, Addis Ababa. Like thousands of others he took part in demonstrations over the last three years, and together with family members, refused to pledge support for the Ethiopian government. Such displays of political dissent led to him being repeatedly imprisoned, tortured and cruelly mistreated. Now safe in Europe, he is in physical pain and psychological anguish as a result of the barbaric way he was treated in prison.
His experience is typical of contemporary Ethiopia where state violence and human rights abuses are commonplace. For the last 27 years the country has been …
by Hiroyuki Hamada / March 16th, 2018
For every immigrant, speaking about his or her home country can be somewhat emotional and personal. For us immigrants, the experiences of leaving former identities framed in memories of the land, people, smells, tastes, smiles, laughter, tears and other feelings wrapped in the native tongues and rebuilding our own personhoods in foreign words, foreign-scapes, foreign frameworks held together with the values, beliefs and norms of others gives us a special opportunity to see our world dimensionally. Some of us recognize the mechanisms carefully hidden by the very machination of the social structure. The revelation, at the same time, reveals our essential beings hidden in our former-selves.
When I …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 16th, 2018
It takes much to make a figure like Rex Tillerson seem not merely sane but competent. The Trump administration, with its almost paranormal sense of revisionism and fantasy, has managed to make old Rex seem mildly credible. His sacking, inflicted with adolescent petulance, was bound to happen.
At stages, Tillerson came across with clues and cues about what would happen, for instance, with the North Korean nuclear imbroglio. In December 2017, he suggested the possibility of talking, without conditions, to North Korean leaders, quipping that they could even talk about the shape of the table they might wish to sit at.
It …
by Adnan Al-Daini / March 16th, 2018
Following the economic crash of 2008, Tory governments have put cutting the budget deficit (the difference between what the government receives in taxes and what it spends) and reducing the national debt at the centre of their economic policy. Austerity, principally, was their method of doing that. That is cutting government spending on our vital services and additionally freezing public sector pay. Austerity has caused untold misery to millions of our citizens; meanwhile Britain’s national debt now stands at 86% of GDP, an increase from 40% just before the economic crash.
Cutting government spending as a way of reducing …
by Andrey Fomine / March 16th, 2018
Yesterday’s sharply-worded joint statement on the Skripal case issued by Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and Theresa May, which included the latest reiteration of the strange accusations leveled against Russia, threatens to push the row between Russia and the West to a new, much more serious level. Why is this happening and and what is motivating these Western leaders?
The tone and content of the statement leave no doubt that the West holds Russia responsible for the attempt on Skripal’s life and that it has no intention of listening to any objections or rebuttals. The demand that Moscow provide …
by Othello / March 16th, 2018
History will remember that a Gulf state had a role in expelling the foreign minister of a superpower and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
— Abdulkhalez Abdullaa, UAE Political Science Professor
Tweet by prominent UAE political science professor, Abdulkhalez Abdullaa, as quoted in a recent article on The American Conservative.
As the US continues to writhe in the throes of Russiagate, it is amazing to see the victory laps being taken for Rex Tillerson’s removal as Secretary of State by those who are admittedly agents of foreign states. As the above-mentioned article makes clear, certain Middle East countries and their …
by Craig Murray / March 16th, 2018
I have now received confirmation from a well placed FCO source that Porton Down scientists are not able to identify the nerve gas as being of Russian manufacture, and have been resentful of the pressure being placed on them to do so. Porton Down would only sign up to the formulation “of a type developed by Russia” after a rather difficult meeting where this was agreed as a compromise formulation. The Russians were allegedly researching, in the “Novichok” programme a generation of nerve agents which could be produced from commercially available precursors such as insecticides and fertilisers. This substance is …
by Peter Koenig / March 16th, 2018
Hilarious! Fired by Twitter. Apparently, that’s how Rex Tillerson learned about his dismissal, while he was talking to Chinese diplomats about a possible rapprochement between Pyongyang and Washington. Frankly, Tillerson is no loss to humanity. The only point in his favor is that he disagreed with Trump on the Iran Nuclear Deal. Trump wants to abolish it (following like a poodle Netanyahu’s orders), but Tillerson doesn’t. As former Exxon CEO and oil mogul, he may have personal and corporate interests in Iran, and especially in not destroying Iran. But these have nothing to do with a human approach; this is …
by Ralph Nader / March 16th, 2018
Trump Imitation Day will take place online on April 1, this April Fools’ Day, 2018—a day driven by the vast and varied online networks of America with all of their imagination and organizational capability.
Here is the rationale behind this special style of giving Trump a reverse dose of Trumpism. Trump has proven repeatedly that he is a serial prevaricator, bully, cheater, boaster, malicious myth-maker, racist, abuser of women, slanderer, violator of laws and the Constitution and emerging war-monger.
Openly, through his appointees, he is destroying crucial, …
by Shepherd Bliss / March 16th, 2018
Sonoma County, California — Driving through small-town Sebastopol on March 14 toward the Senior Center, this 73-year-old noticed groups of young students with signs gathering on downtown street corners and waving to motorists. These active participants in direct democracy joined thousands who walked out of schools across the U.S. and the world, organized by the Women’s March Youth branch.
As I got closer to the students, a variety of feelings, thoughts, and memories emerged. Tears of appreciation began to drip from my eyes, as I learned why they were protesting.
Then I smiled at them and flashed the peace sign, as I …
Metis Civilization or Canada Syndrome: (Part 2 of a 3 part series)
by Eric Walberg / March 15th, 2018
Six Nations, southwest of Hamilton, Ontario, is the largest reserve in Canada, with 27,000 members, though only 12,000 live on the reserve. It is a mini-multicultural nation, the only reserve in North America that has all six Haudenosaunee nations living together.
The Haldimand Proclamation, negotiated by Joseph Brant on behalf of the Six Nations in 1784 in gratitude for native support of Britain against the American revolutionaries, was, until 1924, governed by the traditional native government, now called the The Haldimand Proclamation. It promised the lands “six miles deep from each …
Anti-Empire Report #156
by William Blum / March 15th, 2018
Much ado about nothing.
That’s the “Russian interference” in the 2016 American election.
A group of Russians operating from a building in St. Petersburg, we are told in a February 16 US government indictment, sent out tweets, Facebook and YouTube postings, etc. to gain support for Trump and hurt Clinton even though most of these messages did not even mention Trump or Clinton; and many were sent out before Trump was even a candidate.
The Russian-interference indictment is predicated, apparently, on the idea that the United States is a backward, Third-World, Banana Republic, easily manipulated.
If the Democrats think it’s so easy and …
by Yves Engler / March 14th, 2018
Would it surprise you to learn the Canadian military spends millions on art and history?
Until April the Canadian War Museum is hosting an exhibition of war art from the Ukraine created through the Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP). In 2014–15 eight artists were sent to observe Operation UNIFIER, Canada’s “training” mission to support Ukraine’s armed forces.
Until April the Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP) is hosting an exhibition of war art from the Ukraine created through the Canadian Forces Artists Program (CFAP). In 2014–15 eight artists were sent to observe Operation UNIFIER, Canada’s “training” …
by Julian Vigo / March 14th, 2018
I am constantly amazed in this day and age where Americans have a President who touts anything he doesn’t agree with as “fake news” that is the moment that people grow cynical of the term. Despite Donald Trump’s ability to shun astute critique of his politics, the term does carry currency in terms of how true or false news stories are. But it is not just American media that is stuck within this paradigm of readers never knowing what is or is not true, the British who have a nationally subsidized media whereby residents in the UK must pay …
by Edward Curtin / March 14th, 2018
Donald Trump’s days of playing the passive/aggressive host of a reality-television game show are coming to an end. Either he fires all the apprentices who might slightly hesitate to wage a much larger world war and lets the bombs fly, or he will be replaced by one who will. Signs are that he has learned what his job entails and the world will suffer more death and destruction as a result.
Back in the days of the first Cold War – the late 1950s to early 1960s when our little world came close to extinction – my very large family appeared …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 13th, 2018
It says a lot that societies who are still part of what is rather weakly called the free world could do this. Technology, viewed as emancipating and rewarding, can actually introduce different chains and shackles, becoming repellent and self-defeating.
The field of privacy is one such precarious area, permanently assailed by the chest-thumping innovators. Privacy, that intangible phenomenon Mark Zuckerberg, at one point, thought had been abolished as a social norm, less by the vague controls of Facebook than by the volition of users to “share information”.
The world of surveillance has gone total and, of greater concern, become totalising. Social …
by John W. Whitehead / March 13th, 2018
Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning. From metal detectors to drug tests, from increased policing to all-seeing electronic surveillance, the public schools of the twenty-first century reflect a society that has become fixated on crime, security and violence.
— Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes
Just what we don’t need: more gun-toting, taser-wielding cops in government-run schools that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to prisons.
Microcosms of the police state, America’s public schools already contain almost …
by Ramzy Baroud / March 13th, 2018
If scandal-plagued Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, exits his country’s political scene today, who is likely to replace him? And what does this mean as far as Israel’s Occupation of Palestine is concerned?
Netanyahu, who is currently being charged with multiple cases of corruption, misuse of government funds and public office, has, for years, epitomized the image of Israel internationally.
In Israel, Netanyahu has masterfully kept his right wing Likud Party at the center of power. Even if as part of larger coalitions – as is often the case in the formation of most of Israeli governments – the Likud, under …
by Greg Maybury / March 13th, 2018
A Shabby Deck of Political Cards
For those folks who haven’t seen Ukraine on Fire (UOF), the Oliver Stone-produced documentary on the on-going Ukrainian crisis, it is not overstating the case to say it’s an essential historical document and one of the most important, insightful political documentaries of recent times. It may also be one of the most portentous.
Quite apart from the illuminating history lesson the film delivers as a backdrop to the current situation in one of Europe’s most pivotal of battlegrounds, there are many takeaways from the film. To begin, it stands as a vital corrective of the …
by Andre Vltchek / March 13th, 2018
People in the Middle East are joking, cynically:
“From Incirlik, Turkey to Al-Azraq, Jordan with love.”
That is, if they pay any attention to the movement of NATO troops in this part of the world.
They should.
At least one substantial part of an incredibly deadly and aggressive force has been gradually relocated, from an ‘uncertain’ and according to the West suddenly ‘unreliable’ country (Turkey), to the impoverished but obedient Kingdom of Jordan.
It is now clear that NATO is not sure, metaphorically speaking, which direction Turkey is going to fly in, and where it may eventually land. It is panicking and searching, ‘just in …
by Andrey Fomine / March 12th, 2018
Last week it was widely reported that a former Soviet and Russian military intelligence officer Sergey Skripal, working for MI6 since 1995, convicted in Russia of high treason in 2006 and released to UK under the 2010 US-Russia spy swap, was found unconscious with his daughter on a public bench near a shopping center in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England. The British media and its eccentric foreign minister were swift to blame Russian secret services for attempted assassination of Skripal, who up to now is still in a coma in …
Parades, tin soldiers, demigods, faux leaders, commercials and military toys invading DC
by Paul Haeder / March 12th, 2018
Cognitive dissonance in Psychology
The psychological tension that occurs when one holds mutually exclusive beliefs or attitudes and that often motivates people to modify their thoughts or behaviors in order to reduce the tension.
Anxiety that results from simultaneously holding contradictory or incompatible attitudes, beliefs, or the like, as when one likes a person but disapproves of one of his or her habits.
Motivated Ignorance in Politics
Motivated ignorance can be simply defined as when people don’t want to know the facts. While ignorance is defined as a lack of knowledge, education or understanding; motivated ignorance is when others choose not to educate themselves out …
