An Israeli Jew is charged over referring to 'Nazi Israel'. An anti-genocide protester risks arrest as a terrorist for waving a Palestinian flag. Starmer is intentionally stoking a climate of fear
The same shit is happening in Australia. Segal and Co. appointed by the PM, Albanese - you wonder what dirt the Zionist Lobby has on him - to draft new ways to combat anti-Semitism, as though Australia was on the brink of committing another 'The Holocaust', where another 6 million Jews were going to die in Australia. Yep, that's the state of Lunacy in most Western Countries.
Starmer reminds me of a bureaucratic colonial administrator, self-entitled, and self-serving allegiance to the brutal status quo, with an undercurrent of fear of the 'natives' and fear of the master resulting in the creation of draconian laws to punish, confuse, terrorize, silence, subjugate, the police the enforcers, the party lock-step, naysayers punished. Kafkaesque.
As an outsider, it looks to me that the UK now has fascism without the charisma. A very British kind of fascism, but no less repugnant to any right-minded person.
It is not because we're under Starmer that we're heading this way. It's cos we're under the Washington deep state (ie US based interests in fossil fuels, animal ag, pharma, tech, arms and media).
The more we think it's politicians who are running the country the longer and deeper we'll be in this mess.
Starmer and those before him made the self-serving choice to cede much of UK sovereignty for personal reward and self-gratification. True, it's not easy to undo decades, almost century's old choices, but it's not impossible. it takes courage, curiosity, ethics, vision, hard work, resilience, honesty... the rewards will be long-term, not instant-self-serving-gratification (my guess is that's part of what is holding them back). Should the UK join the BRICS - if it will have them. It's way past time to start evolving for the better, live in the present and think of the distant future, wake-up from the nostalgic dream of Rule Britannia.
Yes trading with and talking to Russia and China would be of enormous benefit. If we could crawl out from under control by Washington.
As to the distant future- it’s looking very likely that the near future, the next few decades, will accelerate us into increaslingly unstable and warming climate, floods, droughts, agricultural failures, starvation and mass migrations.
I have long been publicly critical of the clear decades-long maltreatment (to put it mildly) of the general Palestinian populace by the Israeli government and security/defense agencies — and, with few exceptions, the Western mainstream news-media’s seemingly intentional tokenistic (non)coverage of it.
Still, I was/am pleasantly surprised at reading the cutline below the large photo accompanying a June 26 story (headlined “UK’s largest Jewish group punishes members who broke silence on Gaza genocide”) posted on the Middle East Monitor’s website:
“A young Charedi Orthodox Jew holds a placard during the demonstration. Orthodox Charedi Jews joined many thousands of pro-Palestinian protestors outside Downing Street accusing Israel and Zionists of genocide in Gaza.”
Their vocal humanity-first convictions were/are to me encouraging. Apparently applying a stereotype that Orthodox Jews would be the last to demonstrate with pro-Palestinian protestors and (seemingly, at least) support their cause, I must admit I had negatively prejudged them.
It must be difficult for decent Jews/Semites with such a strong conscience when they publicly denounce Israel’s atrocities and are then denounced and referred to as “self-hating” by the extreme-Zionism powers, likely in large part to try shaming them into self-censoring.
Also, I read last year that there’s been an increase in the rate of suicide among younger or teenaged Jews/Semites since 10/7. I find it hard not to feel for them. They didn’t ask for what happened and especially the horrors currently happening.
Additionally concerning about all of the highly publicized two-way partisan exchanges of verbal fury, in particular via social media, is: What will young non-Israeli Jewish, and Palestinian, children living abroad think and feel if/when they hear such misdirected vile hatred towards their fundamental identity? Scary is the real possibility that such public outpour of blind hatred may lead some young children to feel very misplaced shame in their heritage.
In a poll conducted by the by the Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Anti-Semitism, 37% of Jewish teenagers living in the US expressed sympathy for Hamas.
The figure for the US teenagers who sympathised with the Palestinian people was 66%; and 42% believed that Israel was committing genocide.
These are young people who appear to feel shame in their heritage, which is sad, but I'm not so sure the shame would be 'misplaced'.
This is why they went after TikTok, because of its wide use by young people who are watching and condemning the genocide. I hope the young Republicans' positive reaction to Dave Smith's remarks at TPUSA are a bellwether: he proclaimed that Israel is NOT an ally, they're like the friend that constantly gets you into bar fights and need to be cut loose. He also said they're getting welfare courtesy of the American taxpayer and that needs to end as well.
Recently, the Hind Rajab Foundation filed new elements in their case against Benjamin Netanyahu’s “Executioner of Gaza”, Brigadier General Yehuda Vach. Alongside his 2 brothers, Colonel Golan Vach, and Captain Elishav Vach, have come to be known by human rights observers as Israel’s “first family of genocide.”
"It is to make the public frightened to protest in any meaningful way against Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, whether it be its system of apartheid, its prolonged siege of Palestinian territory, its intensification of a long-standing ethnic cleansing programme, or now its genocide."
Exactly. The establishment wants the public to be afraid, to stay silent and censor themselves so they don't have to take the rap for these human rights violations. The only way to stop this behavior is to continue speaking up, protesting, and getting arrested. It draws more attention to the crimes of the persecutors against the benevolence and courage of the protesters. Keep protesting and Free Palestine!
I've transcribed this from a comment on DDN by Richard Sambrook, details and link at the end. I think it complements brilliantly much of the work Jonathan Cook does.
"... I would say as well, I think it is deep, deep in the marrow of the sort of people who run the BBC and the sort of people who work in media and politics generally, so deep that I think they're unaware of it. They just take it as given that the Israelis are *us* and the Palestinians are *them*.
"There's a broader problem that Western civilization has to confront. We have this blind spot about Zionism and we have it for very understandable reasons, that we inevitably see it through the prism of the Jewish experience in Europe and the crimes of non-Jewish people. Israel is the product of the most appalling racism. At the same time, as a political project, it is a manifestation of the most appalling racism.
"In terms of the people it has inflicted *upon*, the Palestinian people, it is no different from previous settler colonial projects, Rhodesia, South Africa, Algeria. In fact, it's worse, it's more brutal. It has this spurious legitimisation, and the Western world has to lose this blind spot it has about Israel, a state whose defining feature is that it is structured to ensure the domination of one ethnicity over another.
"Zionism is an ideology of ethnic supremacy and until we confront that reality, we're never really going to be able to properly deal with it. In the wake of the genocide, one would hope that that enormously damaging weapon that could be wielded against the left, the accusation of anti-Semitism, has lost its potency. The veil has been stripped away from many of the people who were using it and exposed them as people who were essentially advocates for Israel. If there's one thing we've learned from the genocide, it is that the left must never uncritically accept allegations of anti-semitism."
Transcribed from Richard Sanders, TV producer, journalist and author, at DoubleDownNews (DDN) or YouTube here
At a time when we have an ex-human rights lawyer as PM our most basic human rights are being deliberately eroded.
The Terrorism Act 2000 has been re-interpreted to mean acts that were considered criminal offences for past 25 years, are now terrorist offences.
When someone can be charged for carrying a sign saying “Nazi Israel”, support for certain organisations are outlawed or you get threatened with arrest for using the phrase “Israel is committing Genocide in Gaza” it feels as though we are entering very dark times.
Laws are being designed to be deliberately ambiguous. So it’s open to individual police officers, stations or areas to interpret the law in whatever way suits their purpose. No wonder a majority of previously law abiding people in Britain no longer respect the law!
What the hell is going on in this country people, where are our rights?
Of course it's planned. It's continuity of agenda of the US based interests in oil, animal ag, pharma, arms, tech and media. They object to people pointing out anything that harms their profits- such as that there was no pandemic, no need to lockdown, no need for vaccines or masks, no need to stop burning oil, no need to stop farming other animals for food, no need or right to kill Palestinians to steal gas and no need to wage war on Russia, Iran or China.
The UK is a lap dog of these people. Washington controls the political system all over the West, ping ponging between neoliberal and far right, who act in lockstep and do what they're told. The US may be not be supreme in military hardware but they've got political control of much of the world (with notable exceptions above) to a tee.
People say the empire is dying, that they're desperate and are trying harder to suppress us. They're not really. There still coasting along waiting for the climate crisis to hit the Global South and hoping to ride it out.
It starts with Just Oil, Israel/Gaza, etc but it wont stop with them. Lines have been crossed, markers set down, an atmosphere created. Once certain kinds of laws have been brought into being it's very hard later to repeal them.
no doubt in my mind murdering children and starving people to death is criminal to its core
The same shit is happening in Australia. Segal and Co. appointed by the PM, Albanese - you wonder what dirt the Zionist Lobby has on him - to draft new ways to combat anti-Semitism, as though Australia was on the brink of committing another 'The Holocaust', where another 6 million Jews were going to die in Australia. Yep, that's the state of Lunacy in most Western Countries.
First they came for the unvaccinated but I said nothing because I was vaccinated.
Starmer reminds me of a bureaucratic colonial administrator, self-entitled, and self-serving allegiance to the brutal status quo, with an undercurrent of fear of the 'natives' and fear of the master resulting in the creation of draconian laws to punish, confuse, terrorize, silence, subjugate, the police the enforcers, the party lock-step, naysayers punished. Kafkaesque.
I've long thought the IHRA (mis)definition was deliberately concocted to sow discord.
If it hadn't have existed, it would've been necessary for them to have invented it...
As an outsider, it looks to me that the UK now has fascism without the charisma. A very British kind of fascism, but no less repugnant to any right-minded person.
This is a frightening direction that Britain is heading under Starmer. Thank you for calling this out so clearly.
It is not because we're under Starmer that we're heading this way. It's cos we're under the Washington deep state (ie US based interests in fossil fuels, animal ag, pharma, tech, arms and media).
The more we think it's politicians who are running the country the longer and deeper we'll be in this mess.
Yes, I agree. Not just about Starmer. It’s a whole system.
Starmer and those before him made the self-serving choice to cede much of UK sovereignty for personal reward and self-gratification. True, it's not easy to undo decades, almost century's old choices, but it's not impossible. it takes courage, curiosity, ethics, vision, hard work, resilience, honesty... the rewards will be long-term, not instant-self-serving-gratification (my guess is that's part of what is holding them back). Should the UK join the BRICS - if it will have them. It's way past time to start evolving for the better, live in the present and think of the distant future, wake-up from the nostalgic dream of Rule Britannia.
Yes trading with and talking to Russia and China would be of enormous benefit. If we could crawl out from under control by Washington.
As to the distant future- it’s looking very likely that the near future, the next few decades, will accelerate us into increaslingly unstable and warming climate, floods, droughts, agricultural failures, starvation and mass migrations.
Yes, enjoy the moment, live in the present.
I have long been publicly critical of the clear decades-long maltreatment (to put it mildly) of the general Palestinian populace by the Israeli government and security/defense agencies — and, with few exceptions, the Western mainstream news-media’s seemingly intentional tokenistic (non)coverage of it.
Still, I was/am pleasantly surprised at reading the cutline below the large photo accompanying a June 26 story (headlined “UK’s largest Jewish group punishes members who broke silence on Gaza genocide”) posted on the Middle East Monitor’s website:
“A young Charedi Orthodox Jew holds a placard during the demonstration. Orthodox Charedi Jews joined many thousands of pro-Palestinian protestors outside Downing Street accusing Israel and Zionists of genocide in Gaza.”
Their vocal humanity-first convictions were/are to me encouraging. Apparently applying a stereotype that Orthodox Jews would be the last to demonstrate with pro-Palestinian protestors and (seemingly, at least) support their cause, I must admit I had negatively prejudged them.
It must be difficult for decent Jews/Semites with such a strong conscience when they publicly denounce Israel’s atrocities and are then denounced and referred to as “self-hating” by the extreme-Zionism powers, likely in large part to try shaming them into self-censoring.
Also, I read last year that there’s been an increase in the rate of suicide among younger or teenaged Jews/Semites since 10/7. I find it hard not to feel for them. They didn’t ask for what happened and especially the horrors currently happening.
Additionally concerning about all of the highly publicized two-way partisan exchanges of verbal fury, in particular via social media, is: What will young non-Israeli Jewish, and Palestinian, children living abroad think and feel if/when they hear such misdirected vile hatred towards their fundamental identity? Scary is the real possibility that such public outpour of blind hatred may lead some young children to feel very misplaced shame in their heritage.
In a poll conducted by the by the Israeli Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Anti-Semitism, 37% of Jewish teenagers living in the US expressed sympathy for Hamas.
The figure for the US teenagers who sympathised with the Palestinian people was 66%; and 42% believed that Israel was committing genocide.
These are young people who appear to feel shame in their heritage, which is sad, but I'm not so sure the shame would be 'misplaced'.
This is why they went after TikTok, because of its wide use by young people who are watching and condemning the genocide. I hope the young Republicans' positive reaction to Dave Smith's remarks at TPUSA are a bellwether: he proclaimed that Israel is NOT an ally, they're like the friend that constantly gets you into bar fights and need to be cut loose. He also said they're getting welfare courtesy of the American taxpayer and that needs to end as well.
Thank you Jonathan 👏👏👏
These greedy monster ready to persecute their own people if they refused to be brainwashed/deceived.
Hind Rajab Foundation, July 2025
Recently, the Hind Rajab Foundation filed new elements in their case against Benjamin Netanyahu’s “Executioner of Gaza”, Brigadier General Yehuda Vach. Alongside his 2 brothers, Colonel Golan Vach, and Captain Elishav Vach, have come to be known by human rights observers as Israel’s “first family of genocide.”
SUPPORT THIS FIGHT FOR JUSTICE https://donate.stripe.com/cN228hbY5g7jaM84gg
"It is to make the public frightened to protest in any meaningful way against Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, whether it be its system of apartheid, its prolonged siege of Palestinian territory, its intensification of a long-standing ethnic cleansing programme, or now its genocide."
Exactly. The establishment wants the public to be afraid, to stay silent and censor themselves so they don't have to take the rap for these human rights violations. The only way to stop this behavior is to continue speaking up, protesting, and getting arrested. It draws more attention to the crimes of the persecutors against the benevolence and courage of the protesters. Keep protesting and Free Palestine!
thank you Jonathan,
you are a beacon in a darkening west
and we WILL KEEP STANDING!
Free Palestine!
I've transcribed this from a comment on DDN by Richard Sambrook, details and link at the end. I think it complements brilliantly much of the work Jonathan Cook does.
"... I would say as well, I think it is deep, deep in the marrow of the sort of people who run the BBC and the sort of people who work in media and politics generally, so deep that I think they're unaware of it. They just take it as given that the Israelis are *us* and the Palestinians are *them*.
"There's a broader problem that Western civilization has to confront. We have this blind spot about Zionism and we have it for very understandable reasons, that we inevitably see it through the prism of the Jewish experience in Europe and the crimes of non-Jewish people. Israel is the product of the most appalling racism. At the same time, as a political project, it is a manifestation of the most appalling racism.
"In terms of the people it has inflicted *upon*, the Palestinian people, it is no different from previous settler colonial projects, Rhodesia, South Africa, Algeria. In fact, it's worse, it's more brutal. It has this spurious legitimisation, and the Western world has to lose this blind spot it has about Israel, a state whose defining feature is that it is structured to ensure the domination of one ethnicity over another.
"Zionism is an ideology of ethnic supremacy and until we confront that reality, we're never really going to be able to properly deal with it. In the wake of the genocide, one would hope that that enormously damaging weapon that could be wielded against the left, the accusation of anti-Semitism, has lost its potency. The veil has been stripped away from many of the people who were using it and exposed them as people who were essentially advocates for Israel. If there's one thing we've learned from the genocide, it is that the left must never uncritically accept allegations of anti-semitism."
Transcribed from Richard Sanders, TV producer, journalist and author, at DoubleDownNews (DDN) or YouTube here
https://youtu.be/IETxE7VErPA?si=0D2D4BuknPP0M3bt
It all feels planned.
At a time when we have an ex-human rights lawyer as PM our most basic human rights are being deliberately eroded.
The Terrorism Act 2000 has been re-interpreted to mean acts that were considered criminal offences for past 25 years, are now terrorist offences.
When someone can be charged for carrying a sign saying “Nazi Israel”, support for certain organisations are outlawed or you get threatened with arrest for using the phrase “Israel is committing Genocide in Gaza” it feels as though we are entering very dark times.
Laws are being designed to be deliberately ambiguous. So it’s open to individual police officers, stations or areas to interpret the law in whatever way suits their purpose. No wonder a majority of previously law abiding people in Britain no longer respect the law!
What the hell is going on in this country people, where are our rights?
Of course it's planned. It's continuity of agenda of the US based interests in oil, animal ag, pharma, arms, tech and media. They object to people pointing out anything that harms their profits- such as that there was no pandemic, no need to lockdown, no need for vaccines or masks, no need to stop burning oil, no need to stop farming other animals for food, no need or right to kill Palestinians to steal gas and no need to wage war on Russia, Iran or China.
The UK is a lap dog of these people. Washington controls the political system all over the West, ping ponging between neoliberal and far right, who act in lockstep and do what they're told. The US may be not be supreme in military hardware but they've got political control of much of the world (with notable exceptions above) to a tee.
People say the empire is dying, that they're desperate and are trying harder to suppress us. They're not really. There still coasting along waiting for the climate crisis to hit the Global South and hoping to ride it out.
It starts with Just Oil, Israel/Gaza, etc but it wont stop with them. Lines have been crossed, markers set down, an atmosphere created. Once certain kinds of laws have been brought into being it's very hard later to repeal them.