Author: jimmy

Some Deaths Really Matter – The Disproportionate Coverage of Israeli And Palestinian Killings

The missing, ugly reality is that over the last 13 years, on average, one Palestinian child has been killed by Israel every 3 days. Since the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000, 1,523 Palestinian children have been killed by Israel’s occupation forces. Over the same time period, 129 Israeli children have been killed. Thus, the ratio of Palestinian children to Israeli children killed is more than ten to one. You would be forgiven for not having the slightest inkling of this from Western media coverage.

Pity the Children

For the United States, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be over soon. We will leave behind, after our defeats, wreckage and death, the contagion of violence and hatred, unending grief, and millions of children who were brutalized and robbed of their childhood. Americans who did not suffer will forget. People maimed physically or psychologically by the violence, especially the Iraqi and Afghan children, will never escape. Time and memory will play their usual tricks. Those who endured war will begin to wonder, years from now, what was real and what was not. And those who did not taste of war’s noxious poison will stop wondering at all.

Avoiding The J Word: Ilan Pappe on Hardtalk

History is an attempt to narrate the past. A few brave historians aim for a consistent narrative that sets events within the appropriate context which includes ideology, culture and heritage. Most historians however, are engaged in the opposite: the active concealment of the shameful i.e. that which is better to shove under the carpet. Instead of identifying the Zionist crime within the context of Jewish history and culture, Pappe attempts to isolate the Zionist crime by disconnecting it from Jewish history and continuum.

I was bullied by BBC over academic report on indyref bias – the Scottish media blackout must end

Senior BBC figures reported me to senior staff at my university and colleagues of mine were even warned to ‘stay away’ from me. I see this as a clear form of bullying by a powerful corporation. The great crime I’d committed was in publishing the results of a study which indicated that BBC Scotland’s coverage of the Scottish independence referendum between September 2012 and September 2013 noticeably favoured the No campaign.

“Lessons from Libya: How Not to Intervene”

NATO’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold, while also exacerbating human rights abuses, humanitarian suffering, Islamic radicalism, and weapons proliferation in Libya and its neighbors. If Libya was a “model intervention,” then it was a model of failure.

Rebekah Brooks

While she was Editor, and while she was Chief Executive, numerous people who reported directly to her were engaged in an active criminal conspiracy, the results of which she was seeing almost every single day, and to which hundreds of thousands of pounds of company money were diverted without her noticing. The leader of the criminal conspiracy, Coulson, not only reported directly to her, but she was shagging him too. She still noticed nothing.

Smedley Butler and the Racket That Is War

War is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

Fear and loathing at Hotel Babylon

ISIS won’t take over Baghdad. But like a freak mutant, in a Hardcore Sunnistan goes Hollywood fashion, it might go even more bonkers and try to take over Amman, Doha and even Riyadh.

The Empire of Chaos will keep betting on – what else – chaos. And it’s going swimmingly its way – from the real possibility of a final push towards a Great Kurdistan (in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and even Iran) to sectarian militia hell all across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Yemen. Not to mention all possible ramifications in Northern Africa, Central Asia and the North Caucasus.