Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Asa Winstanley
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Israel moves to cover-up its alliance with al-Qaeda in Syria
Sedqi al-Maqet, a Syrian activist who lives in the Israeli-occupied part of Syria known as the Golan Heights was interned after a dawn raid on his home by Israeli secret police at the end of February. Until quite recently, the Israeli media was absolutely banned from mentioning his case...
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The persistence of the Palestinian Authority
For years now, analysts and observers of Palestine have predicted a third intifada, or uprising against occupation. The first intifada which, lasted from 1987 until 1993, caught everyone off guard, and few predicted it. This included the PLO itself. While political cadres of the various PLO factions were active on...
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Saudi aggression in Yemen will fail
Saudi Arabia and Israel are the two most malign influences in the Middle East. In a region blighted by (mostly western-backed) dictatorships, these two regimes stand out because of their influence. They are what I have termed, the permanent counter-revolution. Israel is an apartheid regime which institutionalises racism against...
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Netanyahu's lies
That racket you can hear coming from the general direction of liberal Zionists is the sound of lamenting and wailing at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu’s election victory. They are not upset at the prospect of Netanhayu leading Israel into a more entrenched system of anti-Palestinian apartheid, more entrenched colonial...
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Israel's elections: a festival of all-party racism
In the aftermath of Israel’s latest elections there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth in liberal Zionist circles. Despite momentarily high-hopes that the Zionist Union, led by Israel’s Labor party, could poll strongly, perhaps even coming out of top, the far-right ruling Likud party won convincingly. Incumbent Prime Minister...
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Cameron buries Muslim Brotherhood report to please Gulf tyrants
Monday was all set to be the day that the government finally published its long-delayed report into the British activities of the Muslim Brotherhood. But it has now been delayed, once again. The review was commissioned almost a one year ago, and has reportedly been gathering dust on the PM’s...
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Israeli army admits aiding al-Qaeda in Syria
An under-noticed news report last week confirmed previously-held suspicions and strong implications that Israeli troops are aiding the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate. Speaking to Israeli occupation troops last week, a Wall Street Journal reporter on the ground in Mount Bental (part of the occupied Golan Heights) found that...
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Israel an 'apartheid state', says South African Muslim MP they tried to woo
Around about the same time that Al-Jazeera started to publish the Spy Cables, another story about Israel broke in South Africa, and was covered a fair deal in that country’s press. Haaretz, the liberal Israeli newspaper reported that Israel’s deputy ambassador in South Africa had written to security at Ben...
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Peter Oborne: HSBC closures of pro-Palestinian accounts part of US 'attack on democracy'
In December, Peter Oborne, then the chief political commentator at The Telegraph wrote a long, thorough and well-researched piece with Alex Delmar-Morgan about several prominent British Muslims whose bank accounts had been unceremoniously closed by HSBC. The people involved were activists, journalists, charity workers and business people. They included Anas...
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South Africa must expel all Israeli spies
The full implications of the latest scoop from Al Jazeera’s investigative unit are still being digested, and the story is not over quite yet. But the leaked documents published so far, culled from the recent archives of the State Security Agency (SSA), are a damning indictment of both Israeli...
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Spy Cables show America's hypocrisy on Hamas
The publication by Al Jazeera and The Guardian this week of a cache of cables leaked from the files of the South African intelligence services has been enlightening. Some of the stories that have come out so far only confirm things that were already known. However, these are still valuable...
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Spies posing as journalists endanger us all
A common pretext when human-rights-abusing regimes arrest and detain journalists is to accuse them of being spies for a hostile power. In many cases such accusations are baseless. For example, there was the time in 2012 when two Welsh freelancers working for the Iranian-owned channel Press TV were detained by...
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Israel is not a democracy
Long-standing Israeli propaganda has it that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East”. The statements of Western political leaders, particularly from the US and UK, often also make this claim as part of their justification for fostering ties with Israel. They claim the mantle of “democracy” for...
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Hezbollah's calculations
At the end of January, Israeli occupation forces in the south of Lebanon came under attack by Hezbollah, the Lebanese resistance movement. Two days later a piece in the Washington Post revealed that the CIA had been behind the 2008 assassination of Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s top military commander. Several commentators...
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Egypt's ‘Zionist’ ban on Hamas
An Egyptian court on Saturday banned the Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas – Palestine’s Islamic resistance movement. The decision meant that Egypt now lists Al-Qassam as a “terrorist” organisation for the first time. The court accused Hamas of involvement in attacks on Egyptian military personnel in...
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Israel may be arming Al-Qaeda in Syria
A perennial PR theme of the Syrian regime since the civil war and uprising erupted in March 2011 was that the opposition was all Islamist extremists and Al-Qaeda, and that there were no secular or democratic forces involved in the uprising against the government. On Monday, in an interview with...
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Will Israel enter the Syrian civil war?
Yesterday, Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Islamic resistance movement, responded to recent Israeli aggression by attacking Israeli occupation forces on patrol in the south of Lebanon. The operation came in response to an Israeli attack on Syria ten days prior, which killed several Hezbollah and Iranian fighters, along with an Iranian general. Among...
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New Greek government's pro-Palestine stance not as strong as Israelis fear
The parochial Israeli press has been reacting with concern to the election victory in Greece of Syriza, the left-wing anti-austerity party. While the parochial British press has been fretting about the “collision course” that Syriza has supposedly set the country on with Europe, or with “the markets,” in Israel...
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Brilliant new book documents rise of Islamic State
The British media’s coverage of the civil war in Syria since 2011 has been simply woeful. From the start is has been dominated by the illusions and self-interest of the British state, and its imperial masters in Washington DC. But Patrick Cockburn’s brilliant reporting has been perhaps the brightest exception...
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Britain and Palestine in history: The racism of Barbara Tuchman
I recently completed reading an old book: Bible and Sword: Britain and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour. Originally published back in 1956, it was written by Barbara Tuchman, the late American historian and journalist. I read it for two reasons: it was recommended in the footnotes of...
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Charlie Hebdo: When is 'terrorism' not 'terrorism'?
In the immediate wake of last week’s hideous attacks on the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, a former deputy director of the CIA told the New York Times it was “the worst terrorist attack in Europe since the attacks in London in July of 2005”. This quote was...
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Hamas: between resistance and government (part 2)
Just who is Mohammad Dahlan, the deposed and disgraced Gaza warlord, who “lost” Gaza for Fatah back in 2007? And how true are recent media reports that he may be about to make a big come back on the Palestinian scene, possibly even aided by his arch-enemy, the Hamas...
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Israel-Palestine fault line develops in UK comedy
Comedian Ivor Dembina made headlines in the Jewish and comedy industry press last week. Dembina, who is Jewish, has barred several comedians from performing at his club to due their support for Jewish National Fund gigs – a racist organization with quasi-government status in Israeli law. The JNF controls 93...
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America's empire of torture and hypocrisy
A spokesperson for the Iranian foreign ministry on Sunday had something quite interesting to say. Seizing on the growing movement in the US that is pushing for justice for the ever-growing list of young black men killed by racist white police, a foreign ministry spokesperson criticized America’s human rights...