Here is my latest appearance on Analysis, a current affairs programme that airs on the Islam Channel.
Watch part one here (they have disabled embedding so you’ll have to click the link). Here is part two:
Author: asa
PA’s negotiations with Israel unlikely to go anywhere
Column on Kerry’s sham negotiations:
But the main reason why Kerry’s deal-making is unlikely to lead anywhere is Israeli intransigence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and even Lieberman (currently positioning himself as next prime minister) may be inclined to get behind the deal. But the same cannot be said for their coalition partners, Uri Ariel’s “Jewish Home” party.
BDS opponents still don’t get it
What Israel’s apologists still don’t get is that, much like the Palestinian cause itself, BDS is a popular, grass-roots and humanist campaign.
So here is some free advice for them: you can’t make the “BDS threat” go away by throwing money at the problem. Previously the Israeli government seems to have tried ignoring the problem, but that didn’t work, so now they are trying a different tack: freaking out about it.
Documents reveal Zionist group spied on US student delegation to Palestine
Nora Barrows-Friedman and myself spent much of January working on this major investigative piece, after we at The Electronic Intifada obtained secret documents of The Amcha Initiative and the Investigative Taskforce on Campus Antisemitism. Not long after we approached them for comment, ITCA responded by effectively shutting down its website (it now demands a user name and password). You can get an idea of what the site used to look like using the Internet Archive.
We’ve published the main document at the end of the report itself, as well as several other of the files mentioned in the article in an accompanying blog post.
A right-wing Zionist group in California infiltrated a student trip to Palestine in 2012, a raft of secret documents obtained by The Electronic Intifada shows.
The documents confirm long-held activist suspicions that anti-Palestinian political groups are spying on student activists.
The files give a rare insight into the murky world of pro-Israel groups’ surveillance of students and other activists in campuses across the United States.
The US and UK are still to blame in Iraq
On Iraq, and Blair’s war crimes:
Blair’s propaganda line often goes that the death toll is not his responsibility, because it was the consequence of the sectarian civil war that followed the invasion. This is a total lie.
In fact, by now, we know that the sectarian civil war was instigated by the American occupiers of Iraq as a matter of early policy.
Egypt’s military plots destabilization of Gaza
On rumours of an Egyptian “invasion” of Gaza:
After the Muslim Brotherhood, the spectre of Hamas has been been another primary boogie man for the generals. Pro-regime media outlets have relentlessly harped on with one farcical conspiracy theory after the next about Hamas – including the ridiculous claim that Morsi wanted to hand the Sinai over to Hamas.
With the Brotherhood dealt with, these latest Egyptian army threats do not come as a surprise.
Egypt’s farcical election
Buoyed by a newly invigorated cult of personality centred around Sisi, the military dictatorship decided to shore up its power by staging an election to usher in a new constitution. It will free the army, police and intelligence services from civilian control, giving the coup a legalistic veneer.
Once, Saddam Hussein used to to claim 99 percent of Iraqis had voted for him. The dictator Mubarak and his party “won” rigged elections with 80-88 percent. Sisi decided to out do him.
Shared ideology helps explain US support for Israel
On the shared values of shared colonialisms:
Regev’s reply was stark, but honest: “Yes, as the Americans did to the Indians.”
It was a clear statement of Israel’s really-existing ideology, intentions and practice. It is refreshing in the sense that at least she openly stated her racist animosity to Palestinians. It stands in contrast to liberal Zionism’s smokescreens about “peace,” while at the same time carrying out the same policies.
Israel’s West Bank torture regime
The only democracy in the universe:
More recently, Israel has hit on a new physiological torture technique on Palestinians – but it is one carried out on entire villages and neighbourhoods. It affects innocent men, women and children, who are not even accused of a crime. Israeli soldiers do this simply because they can.
They are calling them “training exercises” or “mock raids”. Soldiers invade Palestinian homes and make arrests without explaining what is going on. Lovingly-built homes are upended in apparent searches for weapons. Houses are surrounded with armed soldiers. Children are terrified.
Boycott Israel campaign succeeding despite minimal resources
On the Israel lobby’s cash-money vs. BDS:
It’s safe to say that only one of these salaries could fund entire pro-Palestinian organisations for several years and yet it is these under-funded groups that are winning more and more significant milestones in the struggle towards building the BDS counter-siege on Israel. No wonder Zionist organizations are worried. The infamous Reut Institute recommendations for Israel to “sabotage” pro-Palestinian justice groups rated BDS as much as a threat to Israel’s apartheid system as armed resistance. Reut dubbed the former a “delegitimisation network” and the latter the “resistance network”.
In broad daylight, a Saudi-Israeli alliance
My latest MEMO column. The permanent counter-revolution continues:
This is the same man who boasts to the western press about Jordan, Palestine and Yemen being “under our hegemony,” with the rule of his chequebook. Put aside that hypocrisy, as well as the open sectarian agitation for the moment and note how brazen this alliance now is.
The Israeli and and Saudi regimes find themselves in the same trench across the region.
Nelson Mandela’s long history of support for Palestine
The ANC was a national liberation movement. In that era, revolutionary freedom fighters looked not to placating the west, but to each other as they built not only rhetorical, but very real material links.
Mandela visited the revolutionary leaders of Algeria in 1962, he built links with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.