In these days of obsession with Breaking News, it is worth returning to a story sometimes to see what happened to it. The bomb in Jerusalem 8 days ago which killed a British lady at a bus stop is a good example. The Israeli government has announced – on no discernible evidence, that the bomb [...]

I pray that the bus stop bomb in Jerusalem today does not herald a return to this kind of terrorism in Israel. Terrorism is always a form of racism because it involves an indiscriminate attack upon a people. Killing and wounding innocent civilians is nothing to be proud of, whoever does it. It is also [...]

The West is extremely selective about which enemies of freedom it opposes and which it supports, to the extent that it is a necessary conclusion that liberty is not a real factor in western foreign polcy. As part of the western world, it is the hypocrisy of my own wider community that most troubles me. [...]

Israel is requesting an extra US $20 billion in military aid from the USA, in addition to the US $30 billion ten year programme given to Israel in 2007 by George Bush. While Israel did not face an immediate threat to its security, Barak told the WSJ, “The issue of qualitative military aid for Israel [...]

William Hague deserves some credit for upgrading the status of the Palestinian mission to the UK. It is something that implacably zionist New Labour would never contemplate. But, unlike many other EU countries, the head of mission will still not be recognised as an ambassador, and there are interestingly divergent takes on this in The [...]

Israel’s unbelievably smug and callous “report” on the murderous attack on the Gaza aid convoy, showed again the State of Israel’s fundamentally racist view of which human beings are expendable. It also showed how little Israel is concerned about completing the alienation of the regional power, Turkey. The Al Jazeera revelations of how desperately the [...]

I expect you need to be on Facebook to go to this link: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Gaza-Youth-Breaks-Out-GYBO/118914244840679 The Guardian published their manifesto yesterday. It may be superfluous but I nonetheless think it should be repeated as widely as possible: GAZA YOUTH’S MANIFESTO FOR CHANGE: “We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, [...]

Many thanks to the anonymous commenter who posted this in response to my plea for information on the current state of the Gaza Blockade. They didn’t post a link, so it is reproduced here in full. As I suspected, there has been no real change in the Israeli strangulation of Gaza. By Vittorio Arrigoni, Gaza [...]

I presume that Israel’s “agreement” to ease the Gaza blockade after the murders on the Mavi Marmara was just a ploy to influence the international media until the agenda moved on, which it now well and truly has. Is there any reliable and up to date information on the current state of the blockade, particularly [...]

“The stronger one is the one who can absorb the violence and the anger from the other and change it to love and understanding…This is the real jihad.” – Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari Sheikh Bukhari died last week, and is much mourned by religious Uzbeks, and especially the exiled opposition leadership, to whom he was [...]

You really do need to watch all of this video from the Christian Broadcasting Network: A couple of years ago, while giving a lecture at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I was astonished when a lecturer told me that half of his students would agree with the proposition that a war in the [...]

There is a peculiar symmetry about the Bloody Sunday inquiry into the killing by soldiers of unarmed demonstrators concluding just as the Israeli inquiry into the shooting of unarmed peace activists is set up. But there is another fascinating common factor – David Trimble. Trimble opposed the Bloody Sunday inquiry from the start. This from [...]

Warning: This video is very upsetting I realise some of you may have already seen this. But I feel an obligation to post it. The Israeli tactic of blocking all communication from the ship and detaining the passengers for days allowed Israeli doctored pictures to be the only ones broadcast by the mainstream news media. [...]

Israeli Attack on the Mavi Marmara, May 31st 2010 // 15 min. from Cultures of Resistance on Vimeo. Lara Lee managed to hide this footage from the Israelis when they confiscated all the evidence from passengers. This video shows plainly a bloodstained ship before any commandos boarded, and that the passengers were not teroorists preparing [...]

Child smuggling food into the Warsaw Ghetto Child smuggling food into Gaza We hoped the world would never forget. How tragic that it is Israel that has forgotten most completely.

This extraordinary passage is from the State Department’s Daily Brieifng yesterday: QUESTION: Mr. Crowley, it is the Israeli’s actions that need to be investigated. So how can Israel, too ?” best investigation ?” why is the United States opposed to UN investigation? MR. CROWLEY: As we’ve said, we are completely supportive of an impartial investigation [...]

http://www.economist.com/node/16264970

Today I link to something that I did not enjoy reading, just to illustrate a point. It is a truly poor article by one Niles Gardiner in the Telegraph. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100041748/the-world-demonises-israel-once-again/ I point out merely in passing that the first few hundred overwhelmingly negative comments were deleted by the Telegraph. But the real reason I link [...]

Of all the defences of Israel killing unarmed Turkish protestors – the majority of them shot in the back, four in the back of the head execution style – Nick Cohen’s ramble must be the least coherent by a very highly paid hack. As far as I can make any sense at all of his [...]

The Rachel Corrie has now been illegally boarded by the Israeli military in international waters. As usual the BBC’s immediate reaction is simply to retail Israeli propaganda. The Rachel Corrie has been boarded “with the full compliance of the crew”, BBC News tells us. That is almost certainly not true, unless you count without violent [...]