In December you were among the more than 1000 artists who announced their refusal to engage with Bristol’s Arnolfini until the arts centre took reparative action over the censorship of two cultural events programmed by Bristol Palestine Film Festival in November 2023. Today we are writing to thank you for making this campaign possible and to bring you up to date.
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Dr. Andrew Bridgen MP, report to Parliament on the government/NHS response to the virus.
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Credit: Carlos LatuffIs Israel’s strategy to provoke Iran finally backfiring?
This week, adding to a growing number of voices and campaigns rejecting the normalisation of systemic injustice in the criminal legal system, we publish a special issue of Race & Class featuring several important interventions.
Iran launched a historic attack on April 13, hitting Israel with hundreds of drones and missiles.
Good morning everyone! Let’s recap last night’s pyrotechnics. For the first time Iran has launched a full-scale military assault on the Zionist entity with kamikaze drones and ballistic missiles – the attack was in retaliation for the strike on its Damascus consulate on April 1 that killed seven Revolutionary Guards officers, including two senior commanders.
Germany and the United States along with other Western powers are continuing deep-seated historical crimes by way of their proxy war against Russia
The repeating of history might seem tragic, even farcical. One may wonder how such apparent madness can be repeated. But the explanation is straightforward when it is understood that the motive force is the same.
Also available as a PDF.
In this issue:
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On Wednesday, MEPs voted to approve the vast majority of new laws that make up the EU’s Pact on Migration and Asylum, ostensibly the subject of tough
negotiations – at least until the Parliament caved in and accepted the Council’s position on the vast majority of the legislation.
Serious Disruption Prevention Orders are here. The controversial measure, introduced in the Public Order Act 2023, came into effect on the 5 April and campaigners are already warning of the “chilling effect” they will have on the right to protest.
Israeli drones in Gaza play recordings of crying children.
The sounds are used to lure Palestinians eager to help what they believe are children in need, only to shoot and kill them.
NATO has been sold to the world as some kind of international security agency. How Orwellian can you get? Peace means war, security means chaos and threats, and rules-based order means domination and exploitation.
This week marks the 75th anniversary of NATO’s founding in April 1949. The organization has become a global danger to peace and security and should have been disbanded more than 30 years ago when the Cold War supposedly ended. That the alliance was not disbanded attests that its real purpose was always to serve as a weapon for U.S.-led Western imperialism.
A key function of the state-corporate media is to deny reality. They do supply news. But it is no accident that they supply news of a type that covers up the crimes of elite power.
However, the appalling violence and destruction being inflicted in Gaza by Israel are simply too great to conceal. We may well be living through an unprecedented era where the vast crimes of the West, and the complicity of major news organisations, have never been more exposed to the public.
In the past 24 hours, Israeli forces carried out five massacres against families in Gaza, resulting in the killing of at least 54 Palestinians and the injury of at least 82.
Greetings friends!
What would you do if your neighbor was starving? This is not a hypothetical. Right now the U.S. government is deliberately starving the Cuban people 90 miles to our South. We all must act now.
By Hugo Dionisio
Faced with the more-than-announced collapse of the Kiev regime and everything it stands for; the EU is facing a challenge to survive.
The European Union shows all the symptoms of a structure in deep crisis. Like other organizations in the past, the more it tries to convey an image of internal cohesion, the greater the fissures it creates, based on the increasingly rigid demand for compliance with the rules that this appearance of cohesion requires.
Diego Rivera (Mexico), El Agua, Origen de la Vida (‘Water, Origin of Life’), 1951.Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
By November 2023, it was already clear that the Israeli government had begun to deny Palestinians in Gaza access to water. ‘Every hour that passes with Israel preventing the provision of safe drinking water in the Gaza strip, in brazen breach of international law, puts Gazans at risk of dying of thirst and diseases related to the lack of safe drinking water’, said Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, UN special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation. ‘Israel’, he noted, ‘must stop using water as a weapon of war’. Before Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, 97 percent of the water in Gaza’s only coastal aquifer was already unsafe for human consumption based on World Health Organisation standards. Over the course of its many attacks, Israel has all but destroyed Gaza’s water purification system and prevented the entry of materials and chemicals needed for repair.
Diego Rivera (Mexico), El Agua, Origen de la Vida (‘Water, Origin of Life’), 1951.Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
By November 2023, it was already clear that the Israeli government had begun to deny Palestinians in Gaza access to water. ‘Every hour that passes with Israel preventing the provision of safe drinking water in the Gaza strip, in brazen breach of international law, puts Gazans at risk of dying of thirst and diseases related to the lack of safe drinking water’, said Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, UN special rapporteur on the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation. ‘Israel’, he noted, ‘must stop using water as a weapon of war’. Before Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza, 97 percent of the water in Gaza’s only coastal aquifer was already unsafe for human consumption based on World Health Organisation standards. Over the course of its many attacks, Israel has all but destroyed Gaza’s water purification system and prevented the entry of materials and chemicals needed for repair.
Israel and the U.S. are Gangster States
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
Any sign of even tiny opposition is enough to send Israel into a frenzy of bloodletting. Hospital attacks, murders of aid workers, violations of the sovereignty of embassies, are all par for the Zionist course. Friends in Washington talk out of both sides of their mouths with condemnation but always end on the side of their partner in crime.
Did you know that the number of children referred to emergency mental healthcare has soared by more than 50% in three years?
Behind this troubling statistic, there are tens of thousands of stories of young people battling to get the care they need, and a broken system which is failing them every single day.
To understand Germany’s unconditional support for the Israeli genocide, one must understand the origins of the German state
by Matthew Read
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. Photo: Chancellor’s office
The extent of the German government’s support for Israel during its ongoing offensive in Gaza has taken many by surprise. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been even more restrained in his criticisms of Tel Aviv than US President Joe Biden. A central point of reference for German politicians is the notion of Staatsräson (“state reason”). This was a term first coined in an essay by Germany’s former ambassador to Israel, Rudolf Dreßler, in the early 2000s and repeated by Angela Merkel in a speech before the Knesset in 2008. It has since become a centerpiece of German public statements and an ideological tool to legitimize Israel’s “right to self-defense”. As Scholz said on 12 October 2023: “At this moment there is only one place for Germany. We stand with Israel. …This is what we mean when we say, Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson.”
The New Dark Age 