Dan Lawrence

#DigitalNomad, #SEO'r, #ECommerce'r, pursuing liberty via decentralised, non-authoritarian infrastructures like the internet & tents :)

[Laura Alvarez @LauraAlvarezJC]

‘Our friend’: How the Israel lobby spent £30,000 on Wes Streeting https://t.co/FAnFANcQuj

[Jody McIntyre @jodymcintyre_]

BREAKING NEWS:

All other independent candidates have agreed to stand down in Birmingham Yardley for the sake of a united campaign to unseat Labour Friend of Israel Jess Phillips. Our chances of causing the political shock of the century have just received a huge boost, but we need more volunteers if we want to win. Contact [email protected] and join us on the streets.

This is the opportunity of a lifetime.

[James Foster @JamesEFoster]

.@fiona_lali is the independent left candidate for Stratford & Bow, backed by @wearecollectiv_

Fresh from her takedown of Suella Braverman GB News, Fiona will challenge the establishment parties this #VoteIndependentsDay.

Support her. Help her win ✊

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

Camden you know what to do.

Feinstein is the real deal.

[James Foster @JamesEFoster]

If you didn’t vote @UKLabour in 2017 & 2019 don’t lecture other people on ‘Getting Tories Out’.

Real change - REAL change- was on offer then.

What’s offered now is a change of face but no change to the system that’s failed so many. @Keir_Starmer as bad as any Tory.

#BBCLauraK

[Electronic Intifada @intifada]

The resistance in Rafah; video breakdowns from @intifada livestream day 236, with @JonElmer

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

US State Department whistleblower reveals that Blinken and his officials falsified a report absolving Israel of blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza, overruling their own experts.

Cameron is doing the same in the UK.

Both should stand trial at The Hague.

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

OK everyone, gather round, here's a lovely little story for you all.

Chris Ward - Keir Starmer's former chief of staff - was a longtime close friend.

He stayed at my parent's flat in Edinburgh. We got drunk together, made repetitive Alan Partridge-based gags.

We argued about politics a lot: understandable, given his love of Tony Blair and unrepentant support for the Iraq War.

He was obsessed with becoming an MP in his hometown, Brighton. His greatest ire wasn't reserved for the Tories, but for the Green Party, not least @CarolineLucas, who was something of a demonic figure for him.

We discussed his frustrations at his flatlining career, condemned to a years-long exile of being a parliamentary bagcarrier, until some new MP called 'Keir Starmer' scooped him up.

During the 2020 Labour leadership campaign, Chris Ward regaled me with fascinating tidbits like 'Keir Starmer really wants John McDonnell to stay on as Shadow Chancellor!!"

He would ring me up to promise me that pledges like 'increase tax on the top 5%' were ironclad.

Needless to say I wasn't convinced by this, and didn't vote for his candidate, but there's an insight into just how pathologically dishonest that campaign was.

He then went on to work for 'Hanbury Strategy', a corporate lobbying firm set up by two Tories, one of them the former PR lead for Vote Leave.

What I would say is this.

Lloyd Russell Moyle is a gay man - like all the politicians purged by Starmer so far, from a minority - and the first of his family to go to university, who has been purged from his seat with the help of a nicely timed vexatious complaint.

As Starmer's allies carve up parliamentary seats like colonial administrators divvying up their spoils, Ward - like a vulture - is set to steal this seat with not a single local member voting for him.

Those local members should feel furious. They had a principled, independent-minded MP.

They now have a professional political operator turned corporate lobbyist who will be a stooge for whatever his old boss tells him to say or do, and they have no say over the matter.

Well, I think Brighton deserves better.

Vote @Elaine4Kemptown for the Green Party.

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

Gaza has woken up the world.

People are thirsty for the truth.

This video lifting the veil on Zionism has 1.2 million plays on Instagram in 2 days.

We believe @elonmusk’s X is suppressing it on here.

You know what to do.

[Peter Oborne @OborneTweets]

The Labour Files series on Al Jazeera in September 2022 was totally ignored in mainstream media. In retrospective it was terrifyingly prescient. Anyone who seriously wants to understand the Diane Abbott affair MUST WATCH the whole series.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

It is now indisputable that the Charity Commission is abusing the label “charity” to confer legitimacy on lobby groups engaged in covert political activity subverting what is left of Britain's threadbare democracy.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), which has been designated a charity since its creation a decade ago, was founded to smear critics of Israel as antisemites. Its biggest scalp was Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader.

Buoyed by that victory, the CAA went on to smear as antisemites Jews who oppose Israeli apartheid and war crimes. One of the groups of Jews it has targeted most aggressively is Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), which supported Corbyn.

In 2020, JVL challenged the CAA's status as a charity for just such blatantly political activities. Charity regulations state that “an organisation will not be charitable if its purposes are political”.

The head of the CAA is Gideon Falter, who was caught out last month misrepresenting an argument with a Met police officer to suggest the officer had made an antisemitic remark. During the row, Falter had claimed he was being prevented from crossing a road in London during a march against the genocide in Gaza because he is Jewish.

A video of the incident, however, shows the police had stopped Falter and other CAA activists on public order grounds, because they were trying to provoke a confrontation with the marchers.

After years of foot-dragging, the Charity Commission has now decided – preposterously – that the JVL is not “a person that is or may be affected" by the CAA's smear campaign against it. In other words, the commission has chosen to sidestep making a decision on whether the CAA is a political lobby group masquerading as a charity, when it all too clearly is.

The commission's pretext is patently a falsehood too. The CAA has been at the forefront of efforts to get Jewish members of JVL expelled from the Labour party, and under Sir Keir Starmer has enjoyed a great deal of success.

Starmer has been only too willing to expel Labour party members for being the "wrong sort of Jews" – that is, ones who make him look bad by opposing the current atrocities in Gaza when he has publicly backed the genocide there as Israel "defending itself".

Whatever the Charity Commission claims, the JVL is most certainly an "affected party". The CAA has been rooting out leftwing Jews from one of Britain's two main political parties. It has done so because those Jews make it implausible to claim that all British Jews support Israel's slaughter in Gaza and that, therefore, it is antisemitic for the rest of us to oppose it.

The CAA needs its charity status, if only to make it credible for the political and media class to cite it as some of sort of dispassionate arbiter of antisemitism rather than what it is: an Israel lobby group trying to covertly influence British foreign policy to a genocidal Israel's advantage and silence critics through smear and intimidation campaigns.

The CAA is not the only Israel lobby group being offered protection by the Charity Commission. The UK branch of the Jewish National Fund, which actively assists the Israeli state in promoting policies to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homes, also enjoys charity status in Britain. Campaigners have spent years futilely trying to get the commission to take action. If expelling Palestinians from their lands is considered charitable activity, then the word has lost all meaning.

Note too that the JNF – a critical partner in the Israeli state’s apartheid regime over Palestinians – is one of the main funders of the Campaign Against Antisemitism. Surprise, surprise: the Israel lobby is there to advance the interests of a foreign state.

The left has long argued that the British establishment – through the Conservative party, the now-dominant rightwing of the Labour party, and the state-corporate media – has been coopting willing Israel lobby groups like the CAA to do its dirty work of cleansing British politics of progressives.

Were the left not forced continually on to the defensive, it might be in a position to stress alternatives to permanent austerity at home and permanent war abroad, policies that just so happen to enrich British elites.

The Charity Commission, like other institutional structures of the British state, is very much part of that establishment. Which is why it made a doubly nonsense ruling this week in refusing to remove the CAA’s charitable status.

The British political system is rigged. This week the Charity Commission confirmed that it is committed to keeping it that way.

This article, Under cover of ‘charity’ status, the Israel lobby is subverting UK politics, can be read here, with supporting links: https://t.co/XrDboK7xm8

[Chris Nineham @ChrisNineham]

Whitehall was completely shut down by protestors tonight in one of the biggest static protests I have ever seen outside Downing Street. Watch this….

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

A major investigation reveals that since Palestine acceded to the ICC war crimes court in 2015:

* Israel has been spying on the court continuously, and trying to hack its databases;

* Israel has directly threatened ICC officials and their families. Various plots have included smearing and intimidating the previous chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, trying to 'recruit' her, and launching a sting operation against her husband;

* Israel has designated several Palestinian legal and human rights groups as 'terrorist organisations' for assisting the ICC;

* Israel has intercepted all calls made between the ICC and Palestinians in the occupied territories, following a ban on ICC investigators entering the territories to conduct research.

That not only explains why the ICC has been so incredibly slow in bringing any war crimes charges against Israeli leaders – it finally did so last week.

It also indicates that Israel's strikes on Gaza might not only be targeting Hamas fighters. Palestinian witnesses to Israeli war crimes may have been priority targets for execution too.

More here: https://t.co/BPbmcl4jmk

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

Dismantle Zionism in full.

There is no other way.

Evil of this magnitude cannot be negotiated with or attenuated.

It must be vanquished.
https://t.co/LhaYcoCA3n

[Laura Alvarez @LauraAlvarezJC]

Happy birthday to my favourite person and the real leader of the people. Let's celebrate his birthday by getting everyone to #VoteCorbyn
Sign up https://t.co/wcq0ty3orC
I ❤️ Jeremy Corbyn t-shirt.

[Halima Khan @HalimaNyomi]

I’M STANDING IN STRATFORD AND BOW

As the Whistleblower of the Labour Party

It’s time we had a representative who will hold truth to power, for Justice for us all.

Vote Halima Khan as the first MP in Stratford and Bow

and the first Whistleblower to be elected into Parliament

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

We’re with you, Leanne.

Wes Streeting is a genocide supporter who wants to give our NHS to his mates in the private sector.

He must be defeated. Let’s go. #Leanne4IlfordNorth

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

The horrors Israel is inflicting on the Palestinian inmates of its secret torture prison Sde Teiman – and, on an even bigger scale, on the Palestinians in the death camp that is Gaza – are about much more than simple vengeance for 7 October.

Sde Teiman is the small torture chamber, mirroring the much bigger torture chamber of Gaza itself, where bombs and starvation are achieving precisely the same ends.

Until seven months ago, Israel’s goal was to keep the Palestinians a subjugated, enslaved, hopeless people, confined to a series of concentration camps in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They were expected to remain mute in their suffering and invisible to the outside world.

Over the long term, it was assumed that Palestinians would prefer to flee their immiseration in these permanently occupied, colonised lands.

The slave revolt of 7 October – brutal and ugly as such revolts have been throughout history – was a devastating shock. Not just to an Israel wedded to its racist, hands-on colonial project of subjugating the Palestinian people. It was also a shock to the West’s wider colonial project, into which Israel is so tightly integrated.

In Washington’s “rules-based order”, the only meaningful rule is that what Washington and its clients want, they get. The planet, its resources and peoples are viewed as little more than playthings by the world’s superpower-in-chief.

Revolts to this order – whether advanced by Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran – cannot be allowed to become a model. The “rules-based order” must be restored with a savagery necessary to teach the the colonised and enslaved their place.

That was the message of Washington’s own black sites needed in its futile “war on terror”, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo – sites that drew on Israel’s experiences of “breaking” inmates at its earlier secret torture prison, Facility 1391.

The complicity of western establishments in Israel’s current genocide is not an anomaly. It does not derive from a misunderstanding or confusion. The western political and media class see the genocide in Gaza as clearly as the rest of us. But for them, it is justified, required even. The colonised and oppressed must be taught that resistance is futile.

Sde Teiman, like the Gaza death camp, is serving its purpose. It is there to break the human spirit. It is there to turn the Palestinians into willing collaborators in their own destruction as a people, in their own ethnic cleansing.

And a subliminal message is being directed at the western public at the same time: this could also be your fate if you do not join in cheerleading Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.

This is an extract from latest article The message of Israel’s torture chambers is directed at us all, not just Palestinians: https://t.co/tzMmOt5hon

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

A journalist who recently resigned from CBC – Canada's equivalent of the BBC – blows the whistle on the channel's whitewashing of Israel's attack on Gaza.

She tells how senior editors regularly pulled interviews with Palestinians, or pre-taped them so comments too critical of Israel – and references to genocide – could be edited out. Palestinian experts were blacklisted entirely.

The newsroom was openly terrified of incurring the wrath of the Israel lobby. A complaint could quickly lead to the termination of a staff member's career.

Some junior staff, on precarious short-term contracts, were unhappy about anti-Palestinian attitudes expressed by senior journalists, but dared not speak up.

When the whistleblower herself raised concerns, and pointed to the inconsistencies in CBC's use of language about Gaza when compared to its coverage of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's treatment of the Uighurs, she was told it might be time for her to take 'mental health' leave.

When she spoke out more forcefully, pro-Israel editors said her comments made them 'uncomfortable', and one accused her of antisemitism. Neither the fact that an audio recording shows this allegation was a smear nor the fact that the whistleblower's father was Jewish and fled the Holocaust offered protection.

Similar scenes will have been playing out across western newsrooms, not least at the BBC.

No one should be under any illusion that the western media are making serious efforts to report the reality in Gaza, or hold Israel to account, or give a voice to the weakest and most vulnerable (Gaza's children).

Media institutions, like the West's political institutions, are utterly complicit in Israel's slaughter and active starvation of Gaza's population.

Establishment journalists who don't support Israel's right to carry out a genocide are either keeping their heads down or, like the author of the article below, they have resigned.

More here: https://t.co/pW2AAZ6t8Q

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

Much has been made of the fact that the ICC's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, consulted a panel of legal experts that unanimously supported his decision to apply for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

The most famous of those experts is Amal Clooney.

Less noticed is that the panel also included Theodor Meron, who was a pivotal legal authority in Israel's foreign ministry at the time Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza in 1967.

As disclosed in Gershom Gorenberg's book The Accidental Empire (2006), it was Meron who advised the Israeli government in a secret memo at that time that any settlements it built in the newly occupied Palestinian territories would be flagrantly illegal under International law – a war crime.

Every Israeli government since 1967 has lied that the legal advice it received from its own officials was that the settlements were not illegal.

Some 57 years later, Meron has again pointed out the criminal nature of Israel's actions towards the Palestinians. And once again, Israeli leaders are lying through their teeth in denying that they are systematically breaking international law in Gaza.

Just as Israeli leaders knew they were committing war crimes in 1967, they know they are committing even grosser crimes against humanity now. And every western leader knows this too. They just don't want you to know.