[I’m not too impressed with George Galloway but I suppose beggars can’t be choosers? But maybe he’ll shake up the place a bit. We’ll see. WB]
The Panic Of the Ruling Class
I have known George Galloway my entire adult life, although we largely lost touch in the middle bit while I was off diplomating. I know George too well to mistake him for Jesus Christ, but he has been on the right side against appalling wars which the entire political class has cheer-led. His natural gifts of mellifluence and loquacity are unsurpassed, with an added talent for punchy phrase making.
Over the last weeks, we have witnessed stronger and extreme anti-immigrati policies mooted across Europe. In Portugal the far-right Chega party distributed leaflets campaigning against ‘uncontrolled Islamic Immigration’ in the lead up to its general election; Finland passed temporary legislation to allow border guards to block asylum seekers crossing from Russia; and both Germany and the European Commission are pushing for more ‘offshoring’ of asylum seekers. All this as the UK sees significant actions against the government’s controversial flagship Rwanda scheme.
Two demonstrators in front of the American Embassy in Haiti
At the beginning of March 2024, before the CELAC Heads of State meeting in Kingstown (Saint Vincent and the Grenadines), Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro denounced the new threats to the Haitian people: “We don’t agree with an invasion, whether open or camouflaged. The solution is for Latin America and the Caribbean to accompany, to help Haiti follow its own path and implement its own model, to rebuild its own state, its own institutions, and to resume all forms of cooperation such as the low-cost PetroCaribe oil program launched by Chávez”.
According to Thomas Portes, Deputy of the French National Assembly, it was announced that over 4,185 individuals of French origin are engaged in combat alongside Israeli forces in Gaza. This marks the largest contingent after that of the United States.
The Electronic Intifada livestream is starting soon!
Please note that due to the recent time change in the US our livestream will start an hour earlier than typical for many viewers around the world. Please check the times below.
1800 Palestine time / 1900 Amman time / 1600 GMT / 1600 UK / 1700 CET / 11 am CT / 12 pm ET / 9 am PT
After the news briefing from Nora Barrows-Friedman, we’ll be joined by Ilan Pappé, professor of history at the University of Exeter in the UK and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies.
Pappé gained renown as one of the “new historians,” a group of Israeli scholars who in the 1980s shattered longstanding Zionist lies about the founding of Israel, and corroborated Palestinian accounts of the Nakba using Israeli archival sources.
He’s the author of many books including A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Pappé is also a regular contributor to The Electronic Intifada.
Then we’ll speak to Dr. Ben Thomson, a doctor of internal medicine and a kidney specialist from Canada.
He has been volunteering in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip since 2013, and just returned from Gaza.
Dr. Thomson also worked as a medic during the Great March of Return in 2018, when Israel deployed snipers to murder and maim thousands of unarmed civilians protesting the siege of Gaza and demanding their right to return home.
He has also taught annually at the Islamic University of Gaza, now destroyed by Israeli bombing, and helped develop multiple medical education programs there.
Dr. Thomson was suspended from his job in Toronto in October, after calling out a Canadian Israel lobby group for dehumanizing and inaccurate comments regarding Palestinians.
Along with the latest news from the resistance in Gaza and the West Bank, Jon Elmer will take a look at the US military operation to build a pier in Gaza City and how that plan lines up with Israel’s ongoing construction of a highway south of Gaza City that will divide the Strip between north and south.
We’ll have a roundtable discussion with Ali Abunimah, Asa Winstanley, Jon and Nora to talk about other recent developments and stories.
1800 Palestine time / 1600 GMT / 1600 UK / 1700 CET / 11 am CT / 12 pm ET / 9 am PT
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UNICEF reported a devastating toll of more than 13,000 children that have been killed. According to the agency, children are experiencing malnutrition to the extent that they do not “even have the energy to cry’.
Lights to guide mariners to safety or voices screaming into the void?
In early 2023, three Australian health professionals who had all been ‘struck off’ for speaking out against their government’s pandemic response, decided they must speak up for medical ethics and freedom of debate. They met and set up the Cape Byron Lighthouse declaration. The declaration’s four aims would have been uncontroversial only a few years ago: (more…)
It’s been a while since our last newsletter, and if you signed up to find out if NHS England would provide more details to help you with your choices around its half-billion pound Palantir platform before it “goes live” at the end of March, the answer is now clear. They won’t.
NHS England has said pretty much nothing new in public since before Christmas. The ‘Department of Health in England’ is instead leaving you to puzzle out the process, and to do all the work. As of this newsletter, your choices boil down to this:
On 4 March, Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini presented his startling report on the situation in Gaza (Palestine) to the UN General Assembly. In just 150 days, Lazzarini said, Israeli forces have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, nearly half of them children. Those who survive continue to face Israel’s attacks and are afflicted with the traumas of war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse described in the Bible’s Book of Revelation – Conquest, War, Famine, and Death – are now galloping from one end of Gaza to the other.
Frank Hester, the largest donor to the British Conservative Party, has been found to have made inflammatory remarks about MP Diane Abbott by The Guardian newspaper.
It’s worth noting that Hester’s company, TPP, operates online GP services under a private contract awarded by former Prime Minister David Cameron. Hester has donated over £10 million to the Conservative Party in the last year alone.
A virus hijacks a cell to replicate itself. There is more than one way in which our immune systems can defend us from them. Our bodies have developed sophisticated defence mechanisms to protect us. This article explores how our immune system combats viral infections and the unique challenges presented by cells containing mRNA from vaccines. (more…)
Israeli TV channels aired a number of reports showing the torture and humiliation of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. The videos are consumed by the Israeli public as entertainment, revealing the sadism of Israeli society.
All HART articles also on Substack. Please consider a PAID SUBSCRIPTION so we can continue our work. Comments are open so you can join in the conversation.
The state’s reliance on behavioural science strategies – ‘nudges’ – to facilitate the public’s compliance with covid restrictions has been widely documented. The many psychologists and behavioural scientists advising the government during the covid event (such as those in the SAGE subgroup, SPI-B, and the Behavioural Insight Team, BIT ) have, reasonably, been assumed to hold a significant degree of responsibility for using these methods of persuasion in communication campaigns. Intriguingly, however, several prominent psychological specialists within these advisory groups have attempted to distance themselves from involvement in nudging, not only from the specific use of fear inflation but also – more recently – from being associated with all forms of this type of furtive persuasion. So what is the evidence that the state’s psychological experts are denying responsibility for the deployment of behavioural science strategies, and what could be motivating these claims?
MintPress unpacks The David Project, a scheme that uses AI and facial recognition to match people with online content critical of Israel on social media.
With the help of infamous Islamophobe Douglas Murray, the project’s intention is to limit the ability of pro-Palestinian voices to receive employment.
Prominent journalist Aaron Mate has already made the database; will you be registered next?
This edition of the IRR Newsletter is published as the number of people who have lost their lives attempting to cross the Channel since 1999 surpasses 400. Within the last nine days four more people have tragically died attempting the crossing. Highlighted in our calendar of racism and resistance is the devastating story of a seven-year-old girl who died attempting to reach the UK on board a small dinghy carrying sixteen people, predominantly children, and including her pregnant mother, her father and three siblings.
It is nearly impossible to think of joy while Israel continues its genocidal violence against Palestinians and while the terrible war escalates in the eastern flank of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Tens of thousands of people have been killed and injured and millions displaced in Gaza and near Goma (DRC). In both these places, the immediate demand must be to end the violence, but rising alongside it is the need to end the root of this violence (such as ending the occupation of Palestine). When there are conflicts of this kind, we get trapped in the present, unable to think about the future. Increasingly, the deterioration of everyday life, with famine stalking large parts of the planet, has made it impossible to dream of another world. The demands from Gaza, Goma, and tens of thousands of places across the word are the same: one less bomb, one more piece of bread.
Millions of people took to the streets around the world on March 2nd in solidarity with the people of Gaza as Israel is reportedly preparing an invasion of Rafah later this week, just before the start of Ramadan. In New York City, Havana, Albuquerque, Caracas, British Columbia, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul and beyond, the massive day of mobilization shows that the movement against the Israeli genocide in Palestine will not slow down until the attacks are over.
Even the Democratic Party is being forced to shift its rhetoric in the face of mounting pressure, though it remains steadfast in its support for Israel. Biden’s recent statements about increasing aid to Gaza, and Kamala Harris’ comment that we need an “immediate cease-fire for at least six weeks” come while the U.S. continues to veto ceasefire resolutions in the UN. But new surveys show that more than two thirds of the people in the U.S. support the call for a permanent ceasefire and de-escalation of violence.
And in a brand Center for Economic and Policy Research/YouGov study, 62 percent of respondents who voted for President Biden in 2020 agree with the statement, “The U.S. should stop weapons shipments to Israel until Israel discontinues its attacks on the people of Gaza.”
We’re joined by Miriam Osman, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement.
Yet another child who has been injured by Israel. Ali HamadAPA images
It’s 8 pm in Gaza, Palestine right now, the end of my fourth day in Rafah and the first moment I’ve had to sit in a quiet place to reflect.
I’ve tried to take notes, photos, mental images, but this moment is too big for a notepad or my struggling memory. Nothing prepared me for what I would witness.
Two demonstrators in front of the American Embassy in Haiti
Heba Zagout (1984–2023), Gaza Peace, 2021.
Screenshot from Channel 13 report on Palestinian prisoners. (Photo: Jonathan Ofir Youtube Channel)
A Red Books Day event at the May Day Bookstore in Delhi (India), 2024.
Yet another child who has been injured by Israel. 
The New Dark Age 