dainee

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

Why does the Greens' "Zionism is racism" policy provoke such fear from the UK's political and media class?

Because it collapses their key script – by emphasising that the struggle to end Palestinian oppression is against a racist political movement, Zionism, not against Jews.

The political and media class are so desperate to keep advancing this script that they're now forced to defame the UK's only Jewish party leader as an antisemite to make it make sense.

It doesn't make sense – can never make sense – because it's a lie.

[dainee @daineeglitch]

@DalrympleWill @BBCNews imagine still saying 'i'm a zionist' without flinching. zionists are in a deep psychosis that no evidence or reality can bring them out of. i hope they can save their own humanity before they destroy everyone else's.

[Jean-Luc Mélenchon @JLMelenchon]

Plein de monde partout, calme et joyeux partout quand les policiers ne sont pas là. Des images que vous ne verrez pas dans l'officialité médiatique.

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

Caroline Lucas has called for Green Party member Lubna Speitan—who has had 56 relatives killed in Gaza genocide—to be suspended

Speitan’s crime? Naming the ideology which killed her family

Lucas is getting loads of airtime because she is doing the establishment’s work for them. Extremely ugly spectacle

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

The Greens who were happy to muddle along making zero national impact whatsoever now want to throw Zack Polanski under the bus.

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

Just to sound an optimistic note. The backlash was always going to be insane. Its intensity is reflective of fact that they know the Rubicon has been crossed. There is no going back now

The Zionist-designed Oslo ecosystem—including many putatively "pro-Palestinian" groups and institutions—allows criticism of Israeli crimes but leaves Zionism (the racist ideology motivating them) as an untouchable redline

This whole system is thankfully now in pieces. And this is just the start. Go harder

[Mohammed El-Kurd @m7mdkurd]

Your definition of Zionism does not matter. Nor does mine. Zionism is defined by its material manifestations. The purpose of a system is what it does. And the Zionist system does racism and genocide. Simple. Please spare me the arrogant insufferable graaating Oxbridge debates. Your opinions are irrelevant. People are dying.

[Dr Nafeez Ahmed @NafeezAhmed]

I watched the Jason Arday lecture Aaron Bastani repeatedly circulated to 1.4 million people as supposed proof that Arday was a “conman” – someone who, he said, could speak for more than 40 minutes while saying “nothing”.

That is an extraordinary characterisation of what is actually in the video, playing well to the racist gallery.

Arday’s delivery is undeniably repetitive. It is discursive, jargon-heavy and often far less concise than it could be. Some empirical claims are asserted rather than demonstrated.

One would be free to take issue with that.

But Bastani did not merely say: “I think this is a weak lecture.”

He said Arday was a “conman” and “literally a con artist”. And the lecture simply does not substantiate that allegation.

Arday quite obviously does say things.

His central argument is that racial inequalities in universities are reproduced not only through overt discrimination, but through what gets taught, who determines what counts as legitimate knowledge, who teaches it, and whether students from different backgrounds can meaningfully participate in academic life.

He argues that an “inclusive curriculum” cannot merely mean letting everyone through the door while leaving the substance and culture of the institution untouched.

He argues that overwhelmingly Eurocentric academic canons marginalise histories and intellectual traditions outside Europe.

He links curriculum, belonging and participation to racial awarding gaps.

He calls for students to participate in constructing curricula rather than simply completing module feedback forms.

He argues that unconscious-bias training is inadequate without deeper discussion about racism.

He criticises academic hierarchies which make it difficult for students to challenge lecturers.

And one of his strongest themes is that responsibility for combating institutional racism has disproportionately fallen on women of colour – including while men of colour have sometimes benefited from that labour – when it should instead be a collective responsibility.

You can reject every one of those arguments.

You can say the language is fashionable, the theoretical framework is wrong, the evidence is insufficient, the presentation is meandering, or the whole thing could have been said in a quarter of the time.

But you cannot seriously say he “says nothing”, unless you are deliberately attempting to perpetrator your own con - or are literally, yourself, utterly ignorant of the concepts he is discussing.

More importantly, the actual lecture is considerably more nuanced than the caricature subsequently constructed around Arday.

He explicitly distinguishes “whiteness” as a structure of power and privilege from white people themselves.

He acknowledges his own privilege “as a male or as a black male”.

He says everybody carries biases, including himself, and uses his own possible prejudice towards middle-class people – rooted in his working-class upbringing – as an example.

He argues for putting yourself in uncomfortable intellectual spaces.

He advocates difficult conversations rather than censorship.

He says students should be able to challenge academics.

This, of course, doesn't prove every argument Arday made was correct, or that he was a brilliant lecturer.

But where, precisely, is the "con"?

Calling someone a con artist is not an academic judgement. It is an allegation about their honesty.

A rambling keynote making arguments you disagree with is not evidence of a con, and never was. There is a vast evidential gulf between:

“I think this lecture is bad.”

and

“This man is literally a con artist.”

Repeatedly telling hundreds of thousands of people to “Watch it!” does not bridge that gulf.

Bastani did not make this accusation once in passing. He repeatedly jumped onto the Arday story and returned to the “conman” allegation, helping turn a contested argument about one academic’s work and career into an attack on his basic honesty and legitimacy.

Only after Arday’s death has Bastani now acknowledged that he should not have called him a conman – while accompanying that concession with a lengthy boring self-assuaging justification of why he regarded the wider story as newsworthy.

But saying afterwards that the word should not have been used does not erase what happened .

Bastani had no evidence in this lecture that Arday was a con artist. What he had was his own racist contempt for Arday’s performance. He transformed that subjective judgement into a sweeping allegation of personal fraud, repeatedly broadcast it to a huge audience, and encouraged others to treat watching the video as though it somehow proved the charge.

This was an evidential sleight of hand which helped egg on a much wider public pile-on against a man already being witch-hunted across the media as a fraud.

Who was the "con man", really?

[dainee @daineeglitch]

@verdur_in Who are you and what are you even talking about lol

[dainee @daineeglitch]

@verdur_in He was generous to call it writing

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Zack Polanski, "When I studied history at school. Tudors, Romans, a bit of WWII. I don't remember talking about empire or colonisation"

Historian William Dalrymple, "It is possible to do at A'Levels modules on the British empire, but very few people do them"

"Which means most British people are entirely ignorant for what is for better or worse the most important thing Britain ever did"

"Britain drew it's empire, completely changed the face of the world over the course of 300-400 years"

"Not only did they change it within a local European context, but they completely upended flows of global trade and eco-systems which had existed for millinia"

"For most of history, India and China dominated the world economy, and Europe was an add-on"

"They were producing about 70% of the world's GDP, that's still the case in the 18th century"

"When we're looking at the world today, China already the world's number two economy, and India about to be number three overtaking Japan and Germany"

"What we're seeing is a reversal of the trading system to a pr colonial period - it's taken 80 years since the British left India"

"We're seeing the world recover form this brief blip where Europe smashed its way around the globe moving populations and natural resources around, looting some places, bringing wealth to Europe"

"If you look at the big National Trust country houses, if it's a big palladian house, the sort you'd see in a Jane Austin Sunday night drama"

"If it's on the east coast of the country, quite probably it was built by the East India company money, in other words the looting of India"

"If it's on the west coast, near Liverpool or Bristol, it's more likely to be slave money, from the Caribbean"

"These two sources of wealth brought capital into Britain, and cotton into Britain, which was then milled in the industrial revolution, which gave the seed capital for Britain to accelerate massively through the industrial revolution"

"Which catapulted England from an upper middle position in Europe"

"It transforms Britain and the world"

"But what gives us great prosperity often detracted from the prosperity of the looted countries, or countries that have been plundered for enslaved people"

"And it remains a strange quirk of our history system that we learn more about the wives of Henry VIII, than we do about the entirely looting of India, or the Caribbean slave trade"

"Two crucial moments in Britain's and the world's history"

"The reason we don't learn it, is because when the British empire ended, it became something people stopped talking about"

"By the time you get to Monty Python in the 1970s or late 60s, the Empire is a joke"

[Diane Abbott @HackneyAbbott]

There is a lot of myth-making about Starmer's leadership, much of it unchallenged.
It is hard to support the claim Starmer 'saved the Labour party' when he got 560,000 votes fewer than Corbyn in 2019.
2024 was a Tory collapse, not a Labour surge.
(via HoC Library).

[Sir Norman of Nowhere. 🏴‍☠️ @Normanjam67]

A collection of clips of Labour MP's condoning genocide.
Never forget, never forget.

[Asa Winstanley @AsaWinstanley]

This is what state capture looks like:

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

The UK is spending £369m refurbishing Buckingham Palace for King Charles, who has £22bn and gets £500m more a year.

He can pay for his own renovations, £369m is more than England spends on building Social Housing in an entire year for the whole country.

[Zarah Sultana MP @zarahsultana]

Andy Burnham voted for the Iraq War, an illegal war that killed over a million people.

As Health Secretary, he helped drive NHS privatisation.

He joined Labour Friends of Israel, opposed BDS as “spiteful”, praised Israel as a “democracy”, and called the Balfour Declaration “British values in action”. He is a Zionist.

Stop pretending he’s a radical alternative, he’s more of the same.

[asad rehman @chilledasad100]

Rajiv Menon isn’t simply one of the country’s leading human rights lawyers - having been involved in some of the most important cases holding the State to account in recent history from the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry , Hillsborough, Spy Cops he has been a life long anti-racist 1/

[Adnan A. Husain @adnanahusain]

One part of the travesty of the Filton 6 actionists’ trial and retrial that has received less attention but is very important: Rajiv Menon, King’s Council, barrister for a member of the Filton 6, is being persecuted on a wholly unprecedented charge of contempt of court, carrying a punishment of up to two years imprisonment, for mentioning legal history and principles of law that allow juries to make independent decisions on conscience that Judge Johnson ruled out.

In the first trial’s closing statement to the jury, Menon pointed out the case that established this principle from 1670 and quoted the public plaque outside the Old Bailey (the central court in London) commemorating the case. He also reminded the jurors six times that the judge could not direct them to convict. The jury exonerated all the defendants in that first trial. Now they have been retried and convicted on some charges.

It sounds like Rajiv Menon is being punished for being extremely good at his job and for explaining the actual law relevant to the rights of the jury that this establishment judge close to the UK police and security services unethically suppressed to secure a political conviction to protect Elbit Systems. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Judge Johnson set up the rules and judgments precisely to engineer a conviction to circumvent the propensity of juries to acquit actionists. Then he plans to sentence them under extremely harsh terrorism laws by manipulating unjustly what jurors could know. Rajiv Menon initially disrupted that plan in the first trial. So now the judge and state are going after him.

We must support Rajiv Menon, a fantastic and principled barrister, and the actionists against the UK state’s punitive crackdown on those using democratic rights to protest and stop the Israeli arms industry from facilitating war crimes, illegal occupation and genocide. The corrupt and complicit political establishment in the UK has shown themselves willing to evacuate rights to free speech and assembly, jury trials, press freedom and a host of democratic rights for all citizens simply to protect Israel’s impunity and their own complicity in the genocide.

Support Rajiv Menon for defending pro-Palestine actionists and condemn what the UK courts and injustice system have done to jury trials and democratic rights!

[Diane Abbott @HackneyAbbott]

There is a myth, very widely held in Labour, that we achieved an huge popular victory in 2024 under Starmer.
In fact we won 9.7 million votes, over 3 million fewer than in 2017 and half a million less than the 'disastrous' 2019 poll.
We won because the Tories imploded in 2024.

[Zarah Sultana MP @zarahsultana]

The whole country knows it: Keir Starmer is a barefaced liar.