Let the bile run free

Should a mainstream news organisation be providing a platform for these views? Richard Barnbrook, the British National party’s London Assembly member, has used a blog on the Daily Telegraph’s website to blame immigrants and their sons for knife and gun crime among young people in the capital after a spate of murders. Under the headline…

Trouble in the Communist “paradise”

My following article appears in the Amnesty International Australia’s Uncensor campaign about human rights in China: The suffering of earthquake victims should not mask the authoritarian tendencies of the ruling elite, writes Antony Loewenstein. The ongoing humanitarian catastrophe after the Sichuan earthquake has revealed a side of China that is rarely glimpsed. After months of…

The opposite of Bush?

Joshua Landis, founder of Syria Comment blog, tells the American Conservative what hardline Zionists are currently fretting about: The anxiety on the part of the Jewish Right is that Obama is the Manchurian candidate, that he has secret sympathy with Muslims, and the whole war of terror which relies on demonizing Islam isn’t going to…

The shocking economic future

Professor Joseph Stiglitz, US economist and former senior vice-president of the World Bank asks Naomi Klein, author, a question at the recent Hay literary festival: Q In The Shock Doctrine, you talk about how free-market fundamentalists use economic crises to impose policies they would not normally be able to put into place. What do you…

How to speak to journalists for dummies

After the recent revelations of a Pentagon-led plan to twist US media coverage of the “war on terror”, Wikileaks uncovers a 2006 document titled, “Media is the Battlefield: Tactics, Techniques and Procedures“. Produced for those in the US military, typical statements include: You do not have to regurgitate the Secretary of Defense’s responses, but you…

Time to find new friends

How Bush and his mates are increasingly irrelevant in the Middle East. (Though this doesn’t stop many Western NGOs still supporting the worst aspects of Israeli occupation policies.)

Ditching politeness

Ken Silverstein, Harpers, May 23: Mark Slouka has a terrific piece in the June issue of the magazine that convincingly argues against political politeness. “In the long term, it is [the] tilt toward deference, this willingness to hold our tongues and sit on our principles, that truly threatens us, even more than the manifold abuses…

The Left should oppose repression

I’ve spent most of my professional life skewering the unhinged tendencies of the Right (not least debunking its support for Israeli violence). Sadly, some on the Left are equally ideological and blind to their own propaganda. Western support for Cuba remains fairly strong on the Left, despite the vast evidence that Fidel Castro ran a…

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