Middle East Monitor
clear
Free Subscription
Middle East Monitor

Creating new perspectives since 2009

Middle East Monitor
 

Asa Winstanley

AsaWinstanley

Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist living in London who writes about Palestine and the Middle East. He has been visiting Palestine since 2004 and is originally from south Wales. He writes for the award-winning Palestinian news site The Electronic Intifada where he is an associate editor and also a weekly column for the Middle East Monitor.

 

Items by Asa Winstanley

  • Cameron's Muslim Brotherhood probe is already a fix

    David Cameron this week splashily announced a “review” into the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK. Right away, it seemed to me an obvious farce. The sheer hypocrisy and self-interest is laughable. Speaking through its London lawyers, the Muslim Brotherhood responded that it “intends to openly engage with...

  • The US, UK and Saudi Arabia are to blame for al-Qaeda's resurgence

    Last week I finished reading Abdel Bari Atwan’s latest book, After Bin Laden: al-Qaeda, the Next Generation. This renowned Palestinian journalist is regarded as an international expert on al-Qaeda, the extremist jihadi network. Atwan’s sweeping account takes the reader around those parts of the world blighted by the presence of...

  • War of the puppets

    The Hamas-Fatah “reconciliation” process is one of the most long-running and interminable dramas in the Palestinian sphere, second only to the Israeli-American “peace process” – which is still being inflicted on the Palestinian people more than 20 years after it started. But move over, factional rivalry: there is a new...

  • Cameron's Knesset cuckoo-land

    David Cameron was visiting the Israeli government in occupied Palestine this week. Reading his speech to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, it is striking just how grovelling it is. Cameron spends large portions of the speech trying to prove his Zionist credentials. Just how much more will I do for thee,...

  • Israel's love-in with Europe's new Nazis

    With an acting government in power in Ukraine, Channel 4 News last night reported from Kiev on some of the latest developments. This included an interview with Right Sector leader Dmyiro Yarosh. Right Sector is an armed fascist – some say neo-Nazi – gang that has been at the forefront...

  • Israel's latest attempt to incite Muslim-Christian sectarianism will fail

    On Monday Israel’s parliament, the Knesset passed yet another retrograde and discriminatory law. But there was a new twist this time. Racist Likud legislator Yariv Levin championed the law. The goal, in his words, was to “introduce balance to the State of Israel, and connect us with the Christians,...

  • Dire state of Libya is a warning against intervention in Syria

    Despite September’s narrow House of Commons defeat for the government’s push to launch a war against Syria, there are signs that rumblings about western “intervention” could be set to return. As the peace talks in Geneva were breaking down last weekend, it was reported in the Wall Street Journal  that...

  • BDS opponents still don't get it

    With the recent Scarlett Johansen affair, mainstream media coverage of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement reached new heights around the world. The Hollywood actor was backed into the position of having to choose between the high-profile charity Oxfam and her lucrative new advertising contract with SodaStream – an...

  • The US and UK are still to blame in Iraq

    Earlier this month in London Twiggy Garcia, a courageous barman, made an attempt to place Tony Blair under citizens’ arrest. This action may have been largely symbolic, but it had a huge resonance around the world, and was widely reported.   Garcia said that Blair responded to his request to accompany...

  • Egypt's military plots destabilization of Gaza

    Egyptian military officials have been making more threats against the Hamas-led government in the Gaza Strip. Speaking to different journalists, they say they will embark on a new campaign of subversion against Palestine’s Islamic Resistance Movement. To the military dictatorship that has overtaken Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is public enemy...

  • Israel's new plan of ethnic cleansing in the desert

    The birth of a “Jewish state” in a country overwhelmingly not Jewish required a massive act of ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist militias executed this catastrophe by driving out some 750,000 Palestinians. This is commemorated as the Nakba. The latest incarnation of this on-going Nakba is...

  • The peace process merry-go-round

    The 13th of September will mark 20 years since the White House lawn signing ceremony between Yasser Arafat and Yitzak Rabin, flanked by former US President Bill Clinton. The signing of Declaration of Principles initiated the related series of agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization known as...

  • Arab Idol will not liberate Palestine

    Muhammad Assaf, a Palestinian singer from a Gaza refugee camp won the Arab Idol reality TV show. I was in Ramallah on the night of his victory, and I too celebrated enthusiastically. I too felt as if the divided Palestinian national body, spread around Gaza, the West Bank and the...

  • Don't be fooled by Israel's "negotiations"

    The peace process circus continued this week, as officials from Israel met in Jerusalem with negotiators from its Palestinian Authority puppet regime Wednesday night. Meeting in secrecy at the dead of night, it now looks as though the talks are due to become a weekly fixture for the next nine...

  • The NSA spy scandal's Israeli connection

    This month’s historic disclosures about the US National Security Agency by tireless journalist Glenn Greenwald have embarrassed the Obama administration and its allies. Greenwald’s source is Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who has blown the whistle on a massive global snooping programme. The disclosures to date are massive and...

  • Western powers "doing nothing" in Syria? If only

    Here we are again. A decade on from the American-British war of aggression against Iraq, the cruise-missile liberals are demanding that “something must be done” about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “Something” inevitably amounts to bombing. What would it take for them to shut up for once? I wish TV producers...

  • Palestinians of all faiths face persecution by Israel

    This Ramadan, Israeli restrictions on Palestinians worshippers in Jerusalem are as bad as ever. According to a weekly report of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs: “age criteria and permit requirements continued to be applied and Palestinians from the Gaza Strip...

  • Egypt's military regime demonizes the Palestinian people

    The Arab world is going through a turbulent period. A wave of popular uprisings that began in December 2010 with the self-immolation of Muhammed Bouazizi in Tunisia has had ripples as far west as Morocco and as far east as Bahrain. Complicated and unpredictable revolutionary processes have been set in...

  • Inventing a genocide as pretext to bomb Syria

    Of all the stupid justifications given for the American plan to bomb Syria, this week I read the stupidest one yet in a Guardian column. Probably the most common stupid reason is that which states America’s “credibility” will be damaged if it doesn’t bomb Syria. This is the “credibility” of...

  • Israel's military dictatorship jails peaceful Palestinian activists

    Media coverage of the release of 26 Palestinian prisoners last week, such as it was, tended to focus on their alleged crimes. Especially in the Israeli media, the reader is called to sympathise with Israeli victims and understand what a great sacrifice Israel is supposedly making for peace. Palestinian prisoners,...

  • Are Israeli spooks reading your emails?

    Courageous American journalist Glenn Greenwald had another massive scoop this week, revealing a secret agreement that American spy agency the NSA made with Israel. A memorandum of understanding between the NSA and Israel’s equivalent agency (which the Guardian published in full), provided to Greenwald by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, shows that...

  • Is Zionism more "Christian" than "Jewish"?

    A poll of American Jews published by Pew Research this week had a headline finding that many will perhaps find surprising: “Jews’ feelings for Israel are equaled or even exceeded by those of white evangelical Protestants.” Pew found that 82 percent of white evangelicals “believe God gave the land of Israel...

  • Edward Said's legacy lives inside us

    This past week marked a decade since the sad, early passing-away by cancer of Edward Said, and I would like to dedicate this column to him. Edward Said was an intellectual and moral powerhouse. As an English literature professor at New York’s Columbia University, for many years he was the...

  • Israel and Saudi Arabia: the permanent counter-revolution

    What has the record of 2011’s Arab uprisings taught us so far? One could list many things, but to me, the most striking reality is the now open nature of the alliance between Saudi Arabia and Israel. This alliance represents a permanent counter-revolution which together dominates the region – fully...