Latest articles
by Jonathan Cook / February 5th, 2018
How did a 14-year-old Palestinian girl who has never set foot in the open-air prison of Gaza find herself being dumped there by Israeli officials – alone, at night and without her parents being informed?
The terrifying ordeal – a child realising she had not been taken home but discarded in a place where she knew no one – is hard to contemplate for any parent.
And yet for Israel’s gargantuan bureaucratic structure that has ruled over Palestinians for five decades, this was just another routine error. One mishap among many that day.
A single, abstract noun – “occupation” – obscures a multitude …
by Binoy Kampmark / February 5th, 2018
As the Sunday news vine began getting heavy, that sole topic of all-consuming, toxic interest – Brexit – threatened to claim the casualty of the British Prime Minister herself, Theresa May. Interest centred on a possible troika that had busied itself on harrying May.
In any context, this troika would have seemed a compilation for pure comic effect: buffoonish Boris Johnson as replacement for PM, Michael Gove as his deputy, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, that “ornament on the backbenchers” as Chancellor. They would be the “dream team”, though the description of a hallucinatory nightmare is probably more appropriate.
In the course of …
by Mina Hamilton / February 3rd, 2018
The retired Generals on the talk-show circuit look grim. They say if the US attacks North Korea, it will retaliate and bomb Seoul, South Korea’s capitol. Hundreds of thousands could die. The Generals look even grimmer. There will be a ground invasion. Result? A possible 20,000 casualties per day.
No one mentions the X factor.
James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson, John Kelly, Nickki Haley – not a peep from them either.
In his State of the Union address the President lingers on the gruesome death of Otto Warmbier, promises “Resolve.” Trump also won’t touch it.
Twenty-four. South Korea has 24 operating nuclear power …
by Andre Vltchek / February 3rd, 2018
It really is a shame, and it is tiring, but it is actually nothing new: there is now total disarray amongst those countless ‘progressive’ and ‘semi-left’ Western intellectuals, publications, movements and political parties.
Cowardice, bloated egos, lack of discipline and intellectual pettiness are often to blame, but that is not all.
It is now absolutely clear that the Western left lost patently and shamelessly. It has almost no power, it has no courage to fight or to take risks, and it counts on no real political following in Europe, North America, Australia or New Zealand. ‘The masses’, those proverbial ‘oppressed masses’, have …
by Binoy Kampmark / February 3rd, 2018
Journalists would have seen it as a scoop, and insisted that no laws had been broken. Politicians might have considered it a calamity. Whatever one terms Australia (parliamentary democracy; constitutional monarchy) secrecy remains the state’s watchword. When it comes to bureaucratic provisions that supposedly safeguard the state against the prying eyes of the public, all justified in their name, Australia does rather well.
This is particularly so on the subject of Cabinet files, insulated from public view by that curious legal creature known as public interest immunity. In its older variant, the term “Crown privilege” was used. Over history, the …
US makes new claims of WMD in Syria
by Rick Sterling / February 3rd, 2018
It’s WMD all over again.
Anonymous “US officials” are once again accusing a targeted “regime” of using “chemical weapons” and threatening that the U.S. military may have to “hold it accountable”. Once again, western media is broadcasting these accusations and threats without skepticism or investigation.
The Washington Post story is titled “Trump administration: Syria probably continuing to make, use chemical weapons”. Jane’s Defence Weekly quotes a U.S. offical saying “They clearly think they can get away with this ….”
Jerusalel Online says “A US official says Syrian President Assad’s forces may be developing new types of chemical weapons, which which …
by Peter Koenig / February 2nd, 2018
The World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos has come and gone, and nothing has really changed. The wonderful people of the world struck again – blowing hot air to the four corners of the world. When in reality the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, wars and conflicts are on the rise – and humanity, at least in the western world, is ever more exposed to propaganda lies and mind manipulations, of which then WEF is just one tiny, miserable example.
For instance, was anybody still listening to the bombastic nonsense coming out of Trump’s and Macron’s throat? It is …
by Binoy Kampmark / February 2nd, 2018
Cambridge — This is a different Cambridge. The gowns are gone, banished to a museum of what Britain was. The traffic and pollution have moved in, angry, irritable, uncompromising. Hopping off the train from Kings Cross, London doesn’t prepare you for the scene, one facing energetic fumes as disarmed citizens before a gas attack.
Another thing is also striking. The builders, constructors and developers have moved in, adding pudgy monsters of glass and cement, trendy forums for shopping and glitzy arenas for communing. Coffee shops have become colonists, and we are being told that eating in Cambridge has improved.
There is a …
by Media Lens / February 2nd, 2018
Open a corporate media website on any given day and you will find someone, somewhere blaming social media for something. No claim is too absurd.
Last week, journalist Sean Williams, who writes for the New Yorker, New Republic and Wired, tweeted us in a state of high anxiety:
I just want you to know you’re ruining the national dialogue and pushing more people towards right wing populism. Really.
Quite a claim for a project that began in Southampton’s Giddy Bridge public house over a pint and a packet of cheese and onion. We replied:
Two guys …
by Margaret Flowers / February 2nd, 2018
State-level reforms for universal health care are laudable; they are not single payer
Two states with a long history of state-based healthcare reform efforts, California and New York, are hard at work organizing for state bills labeled as single payer healthcare plans. Other states are moving in that direction too. This raises questions by single payer advocates: Can states create single payer healthcare systems? Does state-level work help or hinder our goal of National Improved Medicare for All (NIMA)?
The movement for NIMA gained momentum throughout 2017, largely due to rising …
by Ajamu Baraka / February 2nd, 2018
The ongoing political circus in the capital of the world’s most powerful empire opens almost daily with a new act each day showcasing an even more bizarre and more revealing display of the internal rot of a culture and a political system in decline.
The day before Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address, the Russia-gate drama took an unexpected and dangerous turn with the vote by the House Intelligence Committee to release a now classified memo that alleges that senior members of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) may have misled the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) …
by Norman Ball / February 1st, 2018
The teeth-rattling cognitive dissonance that awaits half the nation (and it’s still fair to ask which half) is going to send some folks into therapy for years. This essay, as you will see, is predisposed to one narrative. The human mind cannot entertain both.
In fact, the reset for many will arrive in begrudging half-measures. They will grumble that the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy finally prevailed on poor Hillary. Psychologically, that will be about the best they can do. Patience, not partisan recriminations, will be the most suitable response.
I have an 80-something year old mother who will not walk on grass …
by Jonathan Cook / January 31st, 2018
For the first time in its history, an interrogator from Israel’s secret police agency, the Shin Bet, is to face a criminal investigation over allegations of torture.
It will be the first probe of the Shin Bet since Israel’s supreme court issued a landmark ruling nearly two decades ago prohibiting, except in extraordinary circumstances, the use of what it termed “special methods” of interrogation.
Before the ruling, physical abuse of Palestinians had been routine and resulted in several deaths in custody.
According to human rights groups, however, the supreme court ban has had a limited impact. The Shin Bet, formally known as the …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 31st, 2018
In this age of reality television (or televised unreality), the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency was not going to miss out. Unlike other chief spies who operate in habitual darkness and moving shadows, Mike Pompeo was very keen to get his voice and opinion across on the British Broadcasting Service.
Pompeo specialises in seeing enemies everywhere, and to be fair, he is remunerated to do so. But he has taken his brief all too enthusiastically, seeing challenges to US hegemony at every corner, contenders for supreme power behind many an action. This, in one respect, is a re-enforcing phenomenon: …
by Gary Olson / January 31st, 2018
Radical: Derived from the Latin radix, which literally means the root or base. In political terms it means penetrating beyond conventional explanations and getting at the root cause of a problem.
In her book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag puzzled over people who still express surprise about all the suffering in the world at human hands. She wrote, “No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.” I would amend Sontag’s indictment to include people who’ve been afforded the luxury of time, resources and access to …
by John W. Whitehead / January 31st, 2018
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.
— Abraham Lincoln, June 16, 1858, at Springfield, Illinois.
History has a funny way of circling back on itself.
The facts, figures, faces and technology may change from era to era, but the dangers remain the same.
This year is no different, whatever the politicians …
by Robert Hunziker / January 31st, 2018
Not since 1953, when the U.S. and the Soviets exploded thermonuclear bombs, has the world been such a powder keg!
Only recently, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock forward 30 seconds. It now registers two minutes to midnight. Verily, it’s lights out when the clock strikes 12:00 midnight. Ka-boom, it’s over!
What’s going on?
Hitherto, in the aftermath of the Cold War, the clock was set all the way back to 17 minutes to midnight. Thereafter, it wasn’t until 1998, when India and Pakistan staged back-to-back nuclear weapon testing, that the famous timepiece moved forward into single digits once …
by Ramzy Baroud / January 31st, 2018
Although the genocide of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar has gathered greater media attention in recent months, there is no indication that the international community is prepared to act in any meaningful way, thus leaving hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees stranded in border camps between Myanmar and Bangladesh.
While top United Nations officials are now using the term ‘genocide‘ to describe the massive abuses experienced by the Rohingya minority at the hands of the Myanmar army, security forces and Buddhist militias, no plan of action to stem the genocide has been put in place.
In less than six months, beginning …
by Edward Curtin / January 30th, 2018
And thus the U.S. left leadership sits in the left chamber of the hall of mirrors, complaining about conspiracy theories while closing its eyes to actual conspiracies crucial to contemporary imperialism.
— Graeme MacQueen, Beyond Their Wildest Dreams: September 11, 2001 and the American Left
It is well known that effective propaganda works through slow, imperceptible repetition. “The slow building up of reflexes and myths” is the way Jacques Ellul put it in his classic, Propaganda. This works through commission and omission.
I was reminded of this recently after I published a newspaper editorial on Martin Luther King Day stating the fact that …
by Kathy Kelly / January 29th, 2018
On January 23rd an overcrowded smuggling boat capsized off the coast of Aden in Southern Yemen. Smugglers packed 152 passengers from Somalia and Ethiopia in the boat and then, while at sea, reportedly pulled guns on the migrants to extort additional money from them. The boat capsized, according to The Guardian, after the shooting prompted panic. The death toll, currently 30, is expected to rise. Dozens of children were on board.
The passengers had already risked the perilous journey from African shores to Yemen, a dangerous crossing that leaves people vulnerable to false promises, predatory captors, arbitrary …
by Andre Vltchek / January 29th, 2018
It could be truly comical, if it were not to be so dangerous for millions of people living all over the world. The Empire, once mighty, ruthless and frightening is now jumping around like a dog infected with rabies; it is salivating, barking loudly, its tale is stiff between its legs.
It snaps left and right, and periodically it is even trying to bite a piece of Moon off. But the Moon is far, too far, even for the best armed and the most aggressive country on Earth.
Iran is much closer, and so are North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Russia, China, Pakistan …
Very Complicated
by Gregory Barrett / January 29th, 2018
Pink Floyd always was, and still is, wildly popular and successful here in Germany. The legendary rock group’s former bass player and singer, Roger Waters, still has quite a following here too as a successful solo artist. That following does not, however, include the German government, nor does it include supporters of the current government of Israel, who last fall successfully petitioned the broadcasting honchos who run Germany’s public television network ARD to drop a planned live concert by Mr Waters from the programming schedule. The grounds: as a supporter of the BDS boycott movement and a passionate advocate of …
by John Steppling / January 29th, 2018
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
— Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928
For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to …
by Peter Koenig / January 29th, 2018
Transcript of Skype Interview with PressTV
Background by Michelle Nichols:
UNITED NATIONS, January 26 (Reuters): The United States will seek to boost its case for United Nations action against Iran when Security Council envoys visit Washington on Monday to view pieces of weapons that U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley says Tehran gave to Yemen’s Houthi group.
Haley and her 14 council colleagues will also lunch with President Donald Trump, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, said Friday.
The Trump administration has for months been lobbying for Iran to be held accountable at the United Nations, while at the same time threatening to quit a …
by Graham Peebles / January 29th, 2018
Pollution has become an everyday affair; a murderous way of life which, according to a report published in The Lancet, is responsible for the deaths of at least nine million people every year. The air we breathe is poisoned, the streams, rivers, lakes and oceans are filthy, — some more, some less — the land littered with waste, the soil toxic. Neglect, complacency and exploitation characterize the attitude of governments, corporations and far too many individuals towards the life of the planet, and its rich interwoven ecological systems.
The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health, which is yet another cry …
by Robert J. Burrowes / January 29th, 2018
As our world spirals deeper into an abyss from which it is becoming increasingly difficult to extricate ourselves, some very prominent activists have lamented the lack of human solidarity in the face of the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya.
While I share the genuine concern of the Yemeni Nobel peace laureate Tawakkol Karman and Burmese dissident and scholar Dr Maung Zarni, and have offered my own way forward for responding powerfully to the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya, in my view the lack of solidarity they mention is utterly pervasive and readily evident in our lacklustre official and …
by John V. Walsh / January 28th, 2018
The original front page top headline on Friday’s New York Times (January 26) was: “Trump Did Not Fire Mueller in June.” The subheading was: “Also Trump did not fire Mueller in July, August, September, October, November, December or even January.”
You may be mystified by this, dear reader, since the headline you read, which was not the original but an altered version, was: “Trump Ordered Mueller Fired, but Backed Off When White House Counsel Threatened to Quit.” Now clearly that first part is not true, for if Trump had ordered Mueller fired, he would not be there now. But Mueller is …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 28th, 2018
I won’t even start with the old rule that when there’s a contract killing, it’s usually the killer who first offers their condolences.
— Nenad ?anak, Radio Free Europe, January 22, 2018
The highest form of scandalous patriotism is real estate, often blood soaked, and almost always fortified. What one controls is often less important as who is doing so. In the case of Kosovo, attempts at control, overt and covert, have been exerted for years. Officially, Serbia lacks de facto effectiveness, a state of affairs in place since the aftermath of the 1999 bombings by NATO. Neither does Albania, which also …
(Hint: It's that perennially false panacea, Money)
by Norman Ball / January 28th, 2018
The Republicans are up to their usual shenanigans. There they are again, sitting on the Right. Don’t like it, Democrats? At least we (and they) know who they are. Posing the question as Pete Townshend did years ago, we must ask of the Blue Team: “Who are you? Who, who, who, who?”
Prior to the election and on these very ‘pages’, I argued how neither American party can reasonably be called Moderate Right, never mind Centrist or Left. I even suggested (with perhaps a dash of tongue-in-cheek) that a Trump-Sanders anti-TPP, labor-management ticket would provide the …
by Andre Vltchek / January 27th, 2018
Afghanistan is now facing mortal danger. It has to survive, but it is not clear how it can manage.
Hotel Intercontinental in Kabul, which was attacked by gunmen last Saturday, used to fit like a glove, like a grandmother’s couch. Outside, the war has been raging. Millions of Afghan lives were aimlessly broken, hundreds of thousands lost. The price of more than 16 years of NATO occupation has exceeded $1 trillion, but instead of bringing peace and prosperity, it has reduced Afghanistan to rubble.
My room in hotel
All …
