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Video: Amnesty shows Israel killed journalist, maimed another, in Lebanon
Warning: distressing footage – forensic examination of footage from 13 October attack, on Lebanese territory, on clearly marked journalists, shows Israeli tank fired once, then again less than a minute later; Amnesty calls for war crime investigation
Detailed analysis by Amnesty International of footage surrounding a 13 October attack on a group of clearly marked journalists shows Israeli tank crew knowingly fired two shells, less than a minute apart, at the group as they filmed in southern Lebanon. One journalist was killed and the other lost her leg in the needless and deliberate assault.
Amnesty has now published its findings under the title “Deadly Israeli Attack on Journalists In Lebanon Must be Investigated as a War Crime”:
Israel has relentlessly bombed schools, hospitals, news offices and homes in Gaza, killing thousands of civilians, mostly women and children – and at least sixty-eight journalists, more than were killed in any other conflict since 1990. Now it has been shown to have committed another wanton Lebanon attack on journalists doing their job, taking another life and wrecking more. The far-right Israeli regime is out of control and flouting international law, while lying wildly and incompetently to try to salvage its public image.
The same story has been seen time and again, including the murder of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, targeted last year as she covered an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in West Bank.
Despite this, western politicians continue to cover for Netanyahu and his fellow war criminals – and UK journalists appear to be ignoring the murder of their colleagues.
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Video: Starmer’s car hits Gaza peace protesters in Glasgow
Keir Starmer’s car and his security convoy have barged through a crowd of Gaza peace protesters in Glasgow, appearing to strike or push at least two of them:
It is not Starmer’s first experience with hitting someone with a vehicle. In 2020, he was let off by police after hitting a cyclist in London hard enough to damage his car – a fact pointed out by numerous respondents on Twitter.
According to close sources, it is not exactly his first experience of getting a free pass from police, either, a reality he repeatedly failed to deny while letting others spin for him.
Nor is it his first experience of having police attempt to intimidate protesters.
Starmer and the police state are never far apart.
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Video: SNP’s Flynn uses PMQs to rip Thatcherite Sunak and Starmer
SNP’s Westminster leader has fun at the expense of red and blue Tories
SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn caused merriment on his own back benches – and parts of the Labour ones – this week when he asked Tory PM Rishi Sunak whether he was worried that he might make history as the first Tory PM to lose an election to lose an election to a fellow Thatcherite, in reference to Keir Starmer’s nauseating praise for the late and unlamented Tory PM, Starmer’s hard-right austerity politics and his enthusiasm for starving poor children:
Flynn is funny. The lack of real political choice – pick blue Tory or red Tory – that the rest of the UK is stuck with by Establishment design is not.
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Video: Corbyn challenges Cleverly over refusal to deny UK troops are operating in Gaza
Former Labour leader demands answers over dodging of Commons question
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has written to Foreign Secretary James Cleverly over the refusal of his underling to say that UK troops are not operating on the ground in Gaza in support of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. In his letter, Corbyn notes the hideous death toll of Palestinian civilians and Israel’s blatant war crimes in Gaza – and demands an answer from Cleverly to his question about the involvement of UK military personnel:
Any UK troops in Gaza are likely to be using Israel-made equipment to help Israel carry out its bombing: in 2021, the UK government awarded a £103m contract to Israeli weapons firm Elbit Systems to provide laser-marking systems.
Tory PM Rishi Sunak has already sent UK ships to the seas off Gaza to provide logistical support to Israeli bombers and troops, but the direct involvement of UK forces in the targeting and killing of civilians would be a major scandal. UK special forces have often operated to provide laser guidance for bombs and Israel’s mass bombing has killed well over 15,000 civilians, around half of them children.
Cleverly is likely to copy his minion and dodge the question.
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Video: Israel’s ‘minister for Hamas rape propaganda is ‘proud to be a racist’
May Golan was withdrawn by Israel in May as proposed new New York consul after outrage over racist rally – now she’s pushing wild claims about Hamas atrocities
Israel’s ‘Minister for the advancement of women’, May Golan, has been at the forefront of the apartheid regime’s latest attempt to dig itself out of the pit of its PR and propaganda disaster over the 7 October Hamas raid.
Among a long list of failed propaganda attempts, the Israeli regime has been caught out trying to fake a ‘Hamas ambush’, faking a ‘recording’ of Hamas operatives, faking ‘evidence’ that Israel did not bomb a hospital and kill five hundred or more refugees – and seeing the news that Israel forces killed many of the Israelis who died during the raid, including the child it used for its atrocity-propaganda push, spread rapidly despite the silence of so-called ‘mainstream media.
So the regime’s latest tactic is to push claims that Hamas committed ‘widespread’ rapes during the raid – and, as so often, its ‘evidence’ is a single ‘eyewitness’. Israel has even been caught using an old image of a killed Kurdish woman soldier that it claimed was an Israeli rape victim. The ‘commissioner’ appointed to ‘investigate’ the rapes is an Israeli lawyer who has previously written a position to justify Israel circumventing the human rights of Palestinian captives and who runs an agency closely linked to Israel’s far-right government – and the commission did not even take any testimony from witnesses.
And one of the main faces of the latest propaganda push is May Golan – a woman who has told a far-right Israeli rally that she is ‘proud to be a racist’ and that ‘it’s our right to be racist’:
So great was outrage at her racism earlier this year that Israel withdrew its proposal to make her its consul in New York – yet despite this very recent history, her claims have been transmitted without scrutiny by the BBC and other UK and international ‘mainstream’ media, and with no mention of her record. Some media have even claimed ‘witnesses upon witnesses’ have testified to the commission about sexual assault by Hamas, even though it heard none.
Israel’s propaganda disaster continues – but so-called ‘mainstream’ media and commentators are slavishly, even enthusiastically, pushing the latest unevidenced narrative.
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The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions – review
In The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions, Adam Kuper interrogates the history of anthropological museums and considers questions of colonialism, race, and cultural appropriation around the artefacts they hold. As these institutions face a moment of global reckoning, Kuper offers a balanced, nuanced book on the historical and evolving role of museums, writes Tim Chamberlain. … Continued
Even the MSM are waking up to the fact that Starmer intends a continuation of Tory austerity
‘Labour’ ‘leader’ refuses to say he won’t cut public services even further
Even the so-called ‘mainstream’ media are waking up to the fact that Starmer is to the right of the Tories – and that a vote for him is a vote for a continuation and even deepening of Tory austerity.
After Starmer claimed yesterday – echoing the 2010 lie of David Cameron’s Tories – that he would have no choice but to continue austerity because of the state of the UK’s finances – Sky’s Beth Rigby wrote:
Laying it on thick when it came to the economic outlook, it was sort of inevitable that he dodged the question when I asked him if he could at least commit to not cutting public service spending further after the next election. And all of it left me asking myself the question: Vote Labour, get Tory austerity?
That’s because the nod to Margaret Thatcher over the weekend, coupled with his warnings over the economy, made the Labour leader, who was once thought to be the heir of Jeremy Corbyn or perhaps Tony Blair, now looking distinctly like a David Cameron/George Osborne tribute act.
If his reference to the vision of Thatcher provoked a backlash from Labour supporters, his refusal to at least commit to investing in public services – beyond the modest sums Labour have found for the NHS and schools, by closing the non-dom tax status and charging VAT on private schools – is likely to leave many in despair…
For those who see public services on their knees, the failure of commitment to investment will perhaps come as a blow. Labour countenance that, with the highest tax burden in 70 years, taxing more is not the solution. Instead, Starmer and his allies hope that investment into the UK economy will be “swift” and within the first term Labour will be able to begin investing again in public services.
If it all sounds gloomy, it’s because it is. While the last Labour team under Corbyn promised billions of public spending, this team, with the COVID debt pile in its rearview mirror, are promising us not much at all beyond having more defined “missions” and being prepared to reform the planning system or the NHS.
Starmer is a political idiot taking us all for fools. The Tory determination to cut and keep cutting sentenced the UK to 14 years of economic shrinkage and stagnation – and sentenced hundreds of thousands of people to needless death. Now because things are bad, Starmer thinks it’s an excuse to continue the same political insanity that made it so bad – and Labour has not even bothered to do an analysis of the impact of its plans on the poor and vulnerable.
The news is only a surprise to Rigby, however. Starmer’s refusal to lift starving UK children out of poverty – even though it would save the UK billions – made perfectly clear long ago what he is.
Vote Starmer, get Tory austerity indeed. Only even worse.
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Dublin city council unanimously agrees to fly Palestinian flag in solidarity with Gaza
Palestinian flag flying during a demo in Manchester (image: S Walker)
Dublin city council will fly the Palestinian flag from its buildings in solidarity with Gaza against oppression and genocide. The move was agreed unanimously by city councillors last night, after a motion was submitted by the Independent Group, Sinn Féin, Social Democrats, People Before Profit and several individual councillors. The flag will be flown for a week, beginning today.
This is not the first time that the flag has appeared above Dublin’s City Hall – in 2017, it was raised to mark fifty years of the illegal occupation of the West Bank. Irish MEPs have been among the most outspoken in the EU parliament against Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
Shamefully, the UK government opted to project the Israeli apartheid occupier’s flag on public buildings, despite strong public opposition.
Dublin councillor Cieran Perry told the Irish Independent:
Over 15,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the indiscriminate attacks begin. More than 6,000 of the victims have been children. This slaughter must stop, we reiterate our call for an immediate ceasefire and for the release of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
It’s obvious Israel couldn’t care less about the widespread disgust at their indiscriminate slaughter of civilians in Gaza so we have to continue to keep the pressure on the leaders in the countries supporting [Israel].
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Israel says it will pursue Gazan Palestinians on Lebanese, Turkish and Qatari territory
Israeli security service director’s threat on Israeli national TV
The director of Israel’s domestic security service, the Shin Bet, has said that the Israeli government intends to pursue Palestinian resistance activists outside Palestine – specifically threatening Turkey and Qatar.
Speaking to Kan, Israel’s national broadcaster, and reported by Israeli paper Haaretz, Ronen Bar compared the 7 October kibbutz raid to the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes, saying:
This is our Munich. Everywhere – in Gaza, in the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon, in Turkey, and in Qatar. It will take us a few years, but we will be there to do it… we are drawing our lessons from the events and are already passing them on to other arenas, not just in the Gaza Strip…
the scope of threats facing the State of Israel is unprecedented in the past year, even before these
events. Even in this case, the main thing is hidden from the eye. There are many things brewing beneath the surface.
As well as constituting an open threat to the sovereignty of three nations, Bar’s comments are exposed as a farce by the fact that Israel knew what Hamas was planning at least a year before the kibbutz raid and did nothing – and that a growing mountain of evidence now shows that the bulk of Israeli casualties during the raid were caused by the Israeli military firing on buildings and vehicles that contained Israeli citizens, and at people on foot that pilots and tank commanders did not pause to identify before destroying.
Despite the mounting evidence, UK and western media have refused to cover the fact of Israeli ‘friendly fire’ under the military’s ‘Hannibal doctrine‘, as it would fatally undermine Israel’s attempts to justify its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
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“Why are you not doing research in your home country?” – The complexities of being from and doing research in the Global South
Reflecting on their experiences of being researchers from the Global South working on the Global South from institutions in the Global North, Ilaha Abasli and Ahmed Elassal discuss how established research methods and training need to take account of more dynamic and situated researcher identities. “Why are you not doing research in your home country?”, … Continued