Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Asa Winstanley
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The pro-Israel Lobby’s pressure against Al Jazeera’s exposé should be ignored
Under pressure from abroad, the government of Qatar has shelved an important Al Jazeera film. The TV network’s investigative unit went undercover for months in the US to expose the pro-Israel Lobby. My colleagues and I at the Electronic Intifada have just released the very first clips from the film. Despite...
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Israel takes out ‘BDS insurance’ to protect Eurovision
There’s perhaps no greater barometer to measure the lengths to which Israel will go to defame, attack and sabotage the global movement for Palestinian rights than its attitude towards BDS. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, remember, is nothing more than an attempt to told Israel accountable under concepts...
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The Arab people will never accept Israel
“Israel was imposed on us” – those are the words of a Jordanian activist who filmed a recent video showing construction of the Israel-Jordan gas pipeline. The video, posted to social media recently, shows the demolition of what the videographer says are olive trees that had been more than...
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Silicon Valley’s war against Palestine
The tech giants in Silicon Valley are no friends to democracy. Knowledge of this basic fact is necessary to understand the modern world. The social media and other internet monopolies which dominate their respective sectors have immense, unaccountable power, with next to nothing in the way of rules or...
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The Saudi-Qatari media war
For such a small country, the Gulf emirate of Qatar has had a large influence over Arabic media. Beginning back in 1996, the renowned 24/7 satellite TV channel Al Jazeera began to carve out a unique and influential place for itself among Arab viewers. For the first time, the...
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Zionist extremists are now the mainstream in Israel
The Zionist movement has always been a schizophrenic one. The mainstream ruling factions of the movement, and later of the state of Israel, once claimed to be “socialist” in character. But in fact, the “labour Zionist” tradition that included figures such as first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, war...
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How Israel armed the drugs cartels – part 2
Read part 1 here The Medellin Cartel’s military leader was Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, who set up “self-defence” squadrons to protect his “ranchers” from left-wing guerrillas like the FARC, which had been taxing their cocaine exports. Rodriguez Gacha and his affiliated far-right death squads were responsible for some of the...
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How Israel armed the drugs cartels – part 1
When I lived in the West Bank a decade ago, I heard from Palestinians in both Hebron and Jerusalem more than once that the Israeli occupation forces tolerate or even encourage the sale of hard drugs among the Palestinian population that they control. The theory was that it was...
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Israeli innovation is based on theft
Israel is a settler-colonial state. Maintaining its status as the “Jewish state” in a land whose population is mostly non-Jewish requires a regime of complete and utter brutality. It requires the denial of basic human rights to the Palestinian people. First among those rights to be denied is the...
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The Palestinian village where Israel forbids everything
Nabi Samwil is a small Palestinian village located in the West Bank, which has been targeted since 1967 by the Israeli forces...
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How Israel helped Latin America’s death squads – part 2
Read part 1 here When the PLO sailed out of Beirut and into a second exile in Tunisia, its fighters left most of their weapons behind. Israel managed to capture most of these arms, and reportedly sold them to the Contras death squads in their war against the left-wing...
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How Israel helped Latin America’s death squads – part 1
The US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, announced on Wednesday that the country was pulling out of the UN Human Rights Council. Trump-appointee Haley accused the council of being “a cesspool of political bias” and of having an “unending hostility towards Israel.” She also slammed the UNHRC for...
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Macron’s embrace of Israel is a throwback to France’s imperial past
The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, has, to an extent, changed his country’s foreign policy towards Israel, making it more favourable. This is part and parcel of Macron’s neoliberal, pro-American, Atlanticist bent, a tendency which has even seen him snuggle up to hard-right US President Donald Trump. Macron’s embrace...
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Is Israel now seeking US recognition of its occupation of Syria’s Golan?
After Donald Trump’s recognition of the illegal Israeli annexation of Jerusalem by moving his country’s embassy to the city, the next prize that some in American and Israeli political echelons want him to hand to Israel seems to be a chunk of Syria. Senator Ted Cruz – the religious...
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The Christian Zionist narrative helping to boost Trump
When you think of US President Donald Trump, the last thing that probably comes to mind is the image of a religious man. Unlike some previous presidents, Trump clearly does not practice Christianity, and shows no interest whatsoever in leading a religious life. America is a fairly religious country,...
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The Islamophobia industry and the Israel lobby
The Al Jazeera film documented some of the ways the Islamophobia industry's incitement and hate-filled ideology filters through to and inspires the perpetrators of such violence....
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The ongoing Nakba and its forthcoming defeat
Tuesday, 15 May, marked the 70th anniversary of what the Palestinian people term Youm al-Nakba, or the Day of Catastrophe. The Nakba is the defining event that formed and solidified the Palestinian liberation struggle. Between 1947 and 1948, more than 750,000 Palestinians – about half of the Arab population...
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Abbas' speech was only the latest example of anti-Semitism by Israel's supporters
Too many people within the Labour Party, and even some within Britain’s Palestine solidarity movement, either fundamentally misunderstand or refuse to see the true nature of the Palestinian Authority. The PA is not the “Palestinian government” and neither is it the leader of the Palestinian struggle. Indeed, the “authority”...
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The Saudi-Israeli embrace will doom both regimes
Last month The Intercept came out with an interesting report which suggested that US presidential advisor (and son-in-law) Jared Kushner was even closer to the ruling elite in Saudi Arabia than previously thought. According to the website’s sources, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman boasted that Kushner was “in his...
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Front companies and Israel's global terrorist network
A common tactic for intelligence agencies is the use of front companies. In books about Israeli spy agencies, the tactic is a frequent reappearance. Former Mossad officer Victor Ostrovsky’s book “By Way of Deception” gives details of some of the ways Israel’s notorious overseas spying and assassination agency operates....
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How Israel has aided America’s neo-colonialism in Africa
One of the perennial debates about the nature of the pro-Israel lobby in western countries such as the US and Britain is the degree of influence that it wields over foreign policy. This is often summed up as the question of whether the Israeli tail is actually wagging the...
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Israel’s murder of a Palestinian academic should be condemned unequivocally
Assassins from an Israeli spy agency gunned down a Palestinian academic from the University of Kuala Lumpur in cold blood on the streets of Malaysia last weekend, according to the murdered man’s family. The father of Fadi Al-Batsh told the media that he was convinced the Mossad was behind...
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It’s time to admit that Israel is an apartheid state
One of the facts about Israel that is often disputed is its status as an apartheid state. There are, obviously, some differences between the Israeli regime occupying Palestine and the former white supremacist regime in South Africa. On that basis, apologists for Israel reject the “label” of apartheid. Worse...
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The Palestinians have started their Great March of Return
As I write this, Palestinians in Gaza have begun what one of their leaders has called a major new phase towards the liberation of Palestine and the return of their refugees. A series of marches is taking place, each heading towards the illegal occupation fence which Israel maintains around...