“Unipolar” used to mean that the United States was, at least in theory, alone in leading the world. Now “unipolar” means that the United States is alone and isolated in opposition to the world.
On 15 February 2024, Jared Kushner (Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former senior advisor during his presidency) sat down for a long conversation with Professor Tarek Masoud at Harvard University. During this discussion, Kushner talked about ‘Gaza’s waterfront property’, which, he said, could be ‘very valuable’. ‘If I was Israel’, he continued, ‘I would just bulldoze something in the Negev [desert], I would try to move people [from Gaza] in there… [G]oing in and finishing the job would be the right move’.
8 March was not always International Women’s Day, nor has there always
been any such day at all. The idea emerged from the Socialist International (also known as the Second International), where Clara Zetkin of the German Social Democratic Party and others fought from 1889 to hold a day to celebrate working women’s lives and struggles. Zetkin, alongside Alexandra Kollontai of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, sustained a struggle with their comrades to recognise the role of working women and the role of domestic labour in the creation of social wealth. In a context in which women across the North Atlantic states did not have the right to vote, these women intervened in a debate that was taking place among delegates of the Socialist International over whether men and women workers must be united under the banner of socialism to fight against their shared experience of exploitation or
whether women should stay home.
This week we are commemorating the 2003 War against Iraq.
Our thoughts today are with the people of Iraq, whose country was invaded twenty-one years ago on March 20, 2003.
This article first published in June 2005 focusses on the fake intelligence used to justify the invasion.
Colin Powell’s “intelligence report” presented to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003 was fabricated. It confirmed the criminal nature of the 2003 war. Continue reading →
Once upon a time (2010 to be precise), somewhat unexpectedly in a Rose Garden in Westminster, a bromance blossomed. The honeymoon couple – call them Cameron and Clegg – fell out of love in short order, but the unhappy union limped on for a fixed term of five years and a day, during which time many a policy decision was made that was neither fish nor fowl, neither blue nor yellow.
The ongoing imperialist coup works to facilitate western domination and hinder the path to independence for Latin America.
Crime, violence and drug trafficking are nothing new to any Latin American – with the honorable exception of Cubans. But in recent months there has been a very strange sequence of events, not so much because of the events themselves, but because of the national and international political situation in which they are inserted.
Top secret papers reviewed by The Grayzone reveal Tony Blair demanded strikes on civilian targets in Yugoslavia days before NATO attacked them. While the UK military acknowledged a NATO strike on Hotel Jugoslavia would mean inflicting “some civilian casualties,” it insisted the deaths were “worth the cost.”
In 2011, Keir Starmer, then serving as Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), decided to block the application for Tzipi Livni’s arrest for war crimes in Gaza.
Emails that could expose discussions that led to Livni’s escape from prosecution were redacted by the CPS on the basis that their release could potentially undermine the effective conduct of public affairs.
[I’m not too impressed with George Galloway but I suppose beggars can’t be choosers? But maybe he’ll shake up the place a bit. We’ll see. WB]
The Panic Of the Ruling Class
I have known George Galloway my entire adult life, although we largely lost touch in the middle bit while I was off diplomating. I know George too well to mistake him for Jesus Christ, but he has been on the right side against appalling wars which the entire political class has cheer-led. His natural gifts of mellifluence and loquacity are unsurpassed, with an added talent for punchy phrase making.
Over the last weeks, we have witnessed stronger and extreme anti-immigrati policies mooted across Europe. In Portugal the far-right Chega party distributed leaflets campaigning against ‘uncontrolled Islamic Immigration’ in the lead up to its general election; Finland passed temporary legislation to allow border guards to block asylum seekers crossing from Russia; and both Germany and the European Commission are pushing for more ‘offshoring’ of asylum seekers. All this as the UK sees significant actions against the government’s controversial flagship Rwanda scheme.
Two demonstrators in front of the American Embassy in Haiti
At the beginning of March 2024, before the CELAC Heads of State meeting in Kingstown (Saint Vincent and the Grenadines), Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro denounced the new threats to the Haitian people: “We don’t agree with an invasion, whether open or camouflaged. The solution is for Latin America and the Caribbean to accompany, to help Haiti follow its own path and implement its own model, to rebuild its own state, its own institutions, and to resume all forms of cooperation such as the low-cost PetroCaribe oil program launched by Chávez”.
According to Thomas Portes, Deputy of the French National Assembly, it was announced that over 4,185 individuals of French origin are engaged in combat alongside Israeli forces in Gaza. This marks the largest contingent after that of the United States.
The Electronic Intifada livestream is starting soon!
Please note that due to the recent time change in the US our livestream will start an hour earlier than typical for many viewers around the world. Please check the times below.
1800 Palestine time / 1900 Amman time / 1600 GMT / 1600 UK / 1700 CET / 11 am CT / 12 pm ET / 9 am PT
After the news briefing from Nora Barrows-Friedman, we’ll be joined by Ilan Pappé, professor of history at the University of Exeter in the UK and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies.
Pappé gained renown as one of the “new historians,” a group of Israeli scholars who in the 1980s shattered longstanding Zionist lies about the founding of Israel, and corroborated Palestinian accounts of the Nakba using Israeli archival sources.
He’s the author of many books including A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Pappé is also a regular contributor to The Electronic Intifada.
Then we’ll speak to Dr. Ben Thomson, a doctor of internal medicine and a kidney specialist from Canada.
He has been volunteering in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip since 2013, and just returned from Gaza.
Dr. Thomson also worked as a medic during the Great March of Return in 2018, when Israel deployed snipers to murder and maim thousands of unarmed civilians protesting the siege of Gaza and demanding their right to return home.
He has also taught annually at the Islamic University of Gaza, now destroyed by Israeli bombing, and helped develop multiple medical education programs there.
Dr. Thomson was suspended from his job in Toronto in October, after calling out a Canadian Israel lobby group for dehumanizing and inaccurate comments regarding Palestinians.
Along with the latest news from the resistance in Gaza and the West Bank, Jon Elmer will take a look at the US military operation to build a pier in Gaza City and how that plan lines up with Israel’s ongoing construction of a highway south of Gaza City that will divide the Strip between north and south.
We’ll have a roundtable discussion with Ali Abunimah, Asa Winstanley, Jon and Nora to talk about other recent developments and stories.
1800 Palestine time / 1600 GMT / 1600 UK / 1700 CET / 11 am CT / 12 pm ET / 9 am PT
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UNICEF reported a devastating toll of more than 13,000 children that have been killed. According to the agency, children are experiencing malnutrition to the extent that they do not “even have the energy to cry’.
Lights to guide mariners to safety or voices screaming into the void?
In early 2023, three Australian health professionals who had all been ‘struck off’ for speaking out against their government’s pandemic response, decided they must speak up for medical ethics and freedom of debate. They met and set up the Cape Byron Lighthouse declaration. The declaration’s four aims would have been uncontroversial only a few years ago: Continue reading →
It’s been a while since our last newsletter, and if you signed up to find out if NHS England would provide more details to help you with your choices around its half-billion pound Palantir platform before it “goes live” at the end of March, the answer is now clear. They won’t.
NHS England has said pretty much nothing new in public since before Christmas. The ‘Department of Health in England’ is instead leaving you to puzzle out the process, and to do all the work. As of this newsletter, your choices boil down to this:
On 4 March, Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini presented his startling report on the situation in Gaza (Palestine) to the UN General Assembly. In just 150 days, Lazzarini said, Israeli forces have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, nearly half of them children. Those who survive continue to face Israel’s attacks and are afflicted with the traumas of war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse described in the Bible’s Book of Revelation – Conquest, War, Famine, and Death – are now galloping from one end of Gaza to the other.