Israel's Holocaust

  Back in March I wrote an article on Israel's heavy-handed response to what was then the most recent bout of Palestinian rocket fire into the Jewish State, and the pressing need for talks to take place for a two-state solution. It is now July, and the past three weeks have seen a resurgence of the decades-old conflict on a scale not seen since the pre-Israeli election massacres of Dec '08-Jan '09. 


How Things Stand

  Before we turn to my analysis of the situation, let's have a look at the numbers. Bear in mind, the latest bout of violence - christened Operation Protective Edge by the IDF - began on 08/07/2014.

• Palestinian Deaths: 771 (16:11, 24/07/2014) inc. 605+ civilians (08:00, 24/07/2014)
•                                                                        of which: 132+ children (21:35, 23/07/2014)
• Palestinian Injuries: 4,750 (16:11, 24/07/2014)
• Palestinians Displaced: 140,000 (16:11, 24/07/2014)

• Israeli Deaths: 35 (24/07/2014) inc. 3 civilians (24/07/2014)
• Israeli Injuries: 178 (12:00, 15/07/2014)

  I hate to have to reduce the deaths of real people to mere statistics like this, but the volume of casualties is simply too high to go into details (although the Telegraph has created a thought-provoking spread showing the names and ages of each dead Palestinian child). Each of these deaths - all 806 of them - is a tragedy. But these killings are no accident. They are a result of the policy of Benjamin Netanyahu's government towards Gaza - that it is the stronghold of Hamas, and as such its people are legitimate targets. 

  Netanyahu and his cronies don't seem to care how many civilians or even children die - as long as they pick off a few Hamas fighters. The fact that well over three-quarters of all Gazan casualties have been non-combatants does seem seem to even register - the tanks keep rolling, the missiles keep coming. The deaths keep mounting up. Seventy-six people have died today. 

Netanyahu's Purpose

  The word 'Zionist' is a loaded one. Those who decry Israel's government as Zionist extremists are often accused of being anti-Semitic, but the claim is perfectly legitimate. Zionism is, at its basic level, simply the belief that the State of Israel should exist in its present location. This, in an of itself, is not a particularly extreme view. But Netanyahu's party, Likud, and its partners in the ruling coalition represent something more. 

  Likud are Revisionist Zionists. This ideology originally called for Jewish control of the entirety of the old British Mandate of Palestine - including present-day Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan. The claim to Jordan has largely been dropped, but Likud and their fellows still desire Israeli control over the Palestinian territories. 

  Netanyahu does not want peace - that fact is self-evident. He broke off peace talks with the Palestinians in April after the last flare-up of the conflict and has repeatedly denied Palestine and Gaza in particular the justice it deserves. Hamas' rejection of the most recent ceasefire proposal last week is highly regrettable, and they must accept part responsibility for the civilian deaths since then, but it is understandable that the organisation does not trust Netanyahu when his party's ideology is built around the conclusion of Israeli conquest of the Palestinians' remaining land.

The Consequences of Fascism

  The Israeli government's persecution of the Palestinians has gone on since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, but it is growing seemingly worse under the rule of the fascist Netanyahu. And, no, to call this man a fascist is not,as some have claimed, anti-Semitic - the comparison is exact. His government has advanced a nationalist agenda to force the Palestinian people onto smaller and smaller areas of land, provoking them to violent response and then launching overwhelmingly heavy-handed responses to attempt to crush their resistance. In the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, corporate exploitation of poor Palestinians is rife as major companies collude with the government to take advantage of this source of cheap labour. Palestinians are second-class citizens within their own homeland.

  And they are not the only victims. In France this week, a protest against the Israeli onslaught transformed into anti-Semitic rioting directed at the local Jewish population. Israel's brutal actions are playing right into the hands of groups such as the Front National and other extreme-right Europeans who are able to use them to incite violence against the blameless local Jews. It is a sad fact, but a fact nonetheless, that the actions of the 'Jewish State' are considered by many to be the fault of all Jews. Netanyahu cares as little for his own people outside Israel as he does for the Palestinians trapped within it.

Hope?

  But the tables are turning on this despot. The programme of oppression and ethnic cleansing which this vile man has made his mission is drawing more and more condemnation. Even the UK government, which - along with the USA and Australia - has shamefully backed Likud's war, has warned Netanyahu that the West is losing sympathy for his country's actions. Within Israel, and from amongst the wider Jewish community, groups like Jews for Justice for Palestinians are growing and are criticising more heavily the murder being done against their will but in their name. Netanyahu's agenda is looking more and more precarious.

  As long as the USA and the UK continue to fund the Israeli war machine, we will not see the end of this bloody struggle. Likud and its partners will continue to persecute the people of Palestine until they no longer can. It is up to the people of Israel to push for a change in their government's brutal policy, and for the rest of the world to force their own governments to withdraw their support for this fascist regime and push for a two-state solution, so that Jews and Palestinians might live side-by-side in peace. The beginnings of this shift are already being felt - let us not lose momentum, but continue onwards. For while Israel remains an apartheid state, and Netanyahu's holocaust continues, we will never live in a world where peace and freedom reign.

Europe 2014 - The Results are In

  The results are in now for the British portion of the European elections. I say British specifically because, at the time of writing, Northern Ireland has yet to declare theirs - but, since the electoral system is different and the motivations for voting revolve heavily around the nationalist v. unionist split which is not present elsewhere, I think we can safely proceed with the analysis. So, where do we stand?


UKIP Ascendant

  In a nutshell, this is the big political story of the day - UKIP have topped a national election for the first time ever, and they're loving it. Nigel Farage has been talking of political earthquakes for a while now, but it does now look as if he really might have gone and done it.

  Having said that, we must be careful not to overstate the impact of UKIP's victory. They got 24 MEPs out of 70 for Great Britain - just over a third - which is a not inconsiderable feat, but Labour was close behind on 20 and the Tories just behind them with 19. This does not represent a mass conversion to UKIP among the general population; it represents an almost three-way split in the vote between the three principal neoliberal parties in the UK. The amount of attention the mainstream media have placed on UKIP's victory is understandable from a sensationalist point-of-view, but is hardly justifiable academically - the Tories beat Labour in 2010 by a wider margin, but were unable to form a single-party government. Be clear - this is no landslide.

  It is, however, undeniably a major development in British politics. There are, it seems to me, three major factors behind the rise of UKIP - disaffection with the political classes, the perception of mass immigration from within the EU and a complete inability of the pro-EU side to articulate any kind of argument against the rampant media-fuelled Euroscepticism which has taken hold of the country. Exploitation of these three trends in popular opinion has allowed Farage to make good his promise and claim victory on Europe.

  The question is, what now? What does the success of UKIP at these elections mean for the general election in less than a year's time? Farage claims that UKIP will take a number of seats in Westminster in 2015 whilst the other parties seem to be of the opinion, wishful thinking or not, that this short-term boost will desert him and UKIP will find itself beaten well back into fourth. The first-past-the-post electoral system in use for general elections means that UKIP will have their work cut out - the party received nearly a million votes in 2010 but won no seats - but to suggest, as Philip Hammond has done, that all those who donned the purple on Thursday will take up the blue and the red again in less than twelve months is absurd. 

  Sadly, it is quite likely that UKIP will make their electoral breakthrough in Westminster in the next year - whether at the Newark by-election scheduled for the fifth of June or next April remains to be seen (I suspect the latter). It may even hold the balance of power, though I would deem that very unlikely, but even one UKIP MP should be a worrying prospect to anyone whose fondness for neoliberalism and xenophobia is anywhere near as limited as mine.



Where Have All the Lib Dems Gone?

  Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear... The Liberal Democrats, having fought the election as 'the Party of In', are O-U-T Out. Ten of the party's eleven MEP's fell to the scythe of public opinion, leaving poor Catherine Bearder (representing South-East England) the only member the UK liberal will send to Brussels when the European Parliament reconvenes in July. 

  Well, I can't say I'm particularly shocked - or that I'll be losing much sleep over this turn of events. The Lib Dems may profess to be the party of in, but it was their miserable failure to articulate the arguments for the EU - coupled with a stubborn refusal to tackle the issues it does have, such as its democratic deficit and the madness of the proposed TTIP deal - which caused them to suffer such a humiliating defeat. In essence, the Liberal Democrats are identical to the Tories and Neo-Labour in every way OTHER than their uncompromising support for the EU, and they failed to explain why that difference alone made them worth voting for over and above those two parties. Therefore, is it really any wonder that their votes were siphoned off?

  The protest vote, meanwhile, was essentially hoovered up by UKIP - with the those left-wingers who would never vote for Farage's mob in a million years defecting to the Greens instead - and thus was the Liberal Democrats' coffin sealed. Will we see a similar collapse next May at the general election? Quite possibly - some projections are suggesting a loss of a third of their Parliamentary seats. The devastation is unlikely to be as total as at Europe - public dissatisfaction with the EU was undoubtedly the main factor behind this disaster, and that should recede somewhat by next year - but I would not be surprised to see considerably less yellow rosettes on election night than in 2010.

  And frankly, I can't wait.



Labour and the Tories - Eds Are Going to Roll...

  I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.


  As far as the Tories and Labour are concerned, that was a close one - only one seat and 1.5% of the vote between them. For Labour, that's not good - not good at all. At this point in an election cycle, the Opposition should be trouncing the government in every poll. Taken together with the party's lacklustre performance in the local elections - an increase in only 338 councillors in the strongest Labour-voting seats - and its average poll lead of scarcely above the margin of error, this would seem to suggest that Labour are most certainly not on course for a majority in the general election. 

  Of course, anything could happen over the next year, and it's not looking too good for the Tories either - the peculiarities of first-past-the-post mean that they generally need a good two-point lead over Labour nationally to get a victory on the basis of uniform swing, and this they most certainly do not have. A hung Parliament, then, is looking increasingly likely - not that it hasn't seemed that way for some time - with the Lib Dems probably holding the balance of power. Still, political predictions are usually wrong, so who knows? - we might end up with a majority Christian People's Alliance government after all.

  If we do, I'm emigrating. 



Green Explosion? Not Quite...

  Natalie Bennett (the Green Party leader in England and Wales) suggested her party might treble its number of MEPs. Sadly, this was not the case - the Greens won only one additional seat, in the South-West of England, to add to their London representative and Keith Taylor's stronghold in the South-East. 

  This actually quite surprised me - I thought six was optimistic, but I would have thought a fourth Green was not an unreasonable expectation. Perhaps that's the old confirmation bias acting up again - it's not really a secret I vote Green whenever I get the chance - but the fact they are the only party with a sensible policy towards Europe (have a referendum because hey, we're a democracy, campaign to stay in and then do their utmost to fix the issues with its democratic processes and mad international trade deals) would seem to have made them the ideal choice in a European election. 

  Regardless, an increase of one might not sound amazing - it isn't - but it is, technically, +50% so I suppose that's something. Any other party would kill for an exponential like that. This increase is likely due to the fallout from the Lib Dems going into coalition with the Tories - as some on the left of the party have drifted into the Labour camp, still some others (realising Neo-Labour for the neoliberal pack of liars they are) will have turned to the Greens. As for the reason they didn't do better - that's a little trickier, but likely has something to do with UKIP attracting the majority of the protest vote, some of which would otherwise have gone to the Greens - especially considering 73% of UKIP voters are demonstrably left-wing. 



The Rise of European Fascism

  Those are some words which should scare the hell out of you. They scare the hell out of me. It's tempting, given that the only fascist MEP from the UK - the BNP's Nick Griffin - lost his seat, to think that these elections were a triumph for democracy. UKIP - who might be on the same right-wing populist spectrum as the BNP and others, but are relatively moderate by comparison - have swallowed up the BNP's support base and put paid to Griffin's vile organisation. It's very tempting, but it's also very narrow-minded.

  Because elsewhere in Europe, things are changing. For the worse. In France, Marine Le Pen's anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim Front National won the elections, gaining 24 MEPs; in Hungary the openly neo-Nazi party Jobbik won approximately 15% of the vote - a comedown from their general election showing, but still enough to claim 3 seats; Greece's Golden Dawn, the leader of which has a Swastika tattoo and much of which's leadership is currently in prison for racially-motivated crimes, claimed another three - their first ever MEPs. All across Europe, the far-right has either advanced or held its ground, with the result that this European Parliament will contain more fascists and fascist sympathisers than it will Greens and Liberals combined.

  The rise of UKIP in the UK is infinitely preferable to the triumph of these kinds of people on the continent, but it is all symptomatic of the same fundamental disease - the poison of right-wing populism: engineered by the media, fuelled by economic devastation and politicians' inability to connect with their electorates and exploited by thugs, racists and ultra-nationalist fearmongers across Europe. We need a fundamental change in our political culture, not just in the UK but across the EU - and indeed, across the Western world - or this sorry tale will only get worse. 




Postscript
This does relate to the EU, I promise. As some of you know, the EU and the USA are currently trying to force through a deal which will allow US corporations to sue European governments in secret courts for regulating their operations and to forcibly buy out essential public services such as the NHS. Please help to stop them by signing this petition.

Narendra Modi - The Rise of 'India's Milosevic'

  On Friday, the results came in for the world's single biggest election, a poll covering most of a subcontinent where 815 million people have the chance to cast their vote. The Indian General Election took twelve days to complete, and a further four to count the votes. This is truly a momentous event, easily the most important so far this year, yet it got virtually no mainstream coverage in the UK or US media.

  The really worrying thing about this election in particular, though, isn't the lack of attention the Western media pay to such an important event - concerning though that is. No, the scary thing is that this election marked the ascension to power in India of Narendra Modi, leader of the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP. Modi swept to power in a landslide, with his party taking 282 of the Lok Sabha's 543 seats, whilst his wider electoral alliance won a further 54 - a total of 62%, compared to its closest rival's paltry performace of just 11%. 

  This is a party, let me make it clear, which has as its official policy a ban on Muslim immigration from neighbouring Bangladesh, whilst opening its arms to Hindu Bangladeshis; a party which states the existence of Pakistan to be illegal and has been consistently hostile towards this and other Islamic states in the region; and which is generally considered the political wing of the Hindu nationalist paramilitary the RSS, an organisation frequently linked to violent acts of terror and banned four times in India by both pre- and post-independence governments.

  In short, the BJP is bad news.

  Narendra Modi himself is a particularly vile example of an already distasteful organisation. Leader of Gujarat state since 2001, Modi was implicated in the Hindu-Muslim race riots of 2002 in that state, which killed around 2000 people - mostly Muslims. Modi's personal involvement has never been proved, but it is certain that Gujarat state police and BJP government officials were involved. Despite receiving heavy criticism for his inaction over the violence, Modi remained in power - and actually stepped up his anti-Muslim rhetoric in the aftermath of the tragedy.

  India is the world's second-largest country in terms of population and seventh-largest by land area; it has the world's third-largest economy by PPP and possesses armed forces of 1.3 million troops, as well as nuclear weapons. This is a powerful nation, make no mistake, and it is now in the hands of a man who until 10 months ago was banned from entering the UK due to his extremist views and connections with the 2002 riots. 

  Modi has been likened to Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević by Mehdi Hasan and to Adolf Hitler by former Indian Union Minister Mani Shankar, but the extreme nature of these comparisons - which has, perhaps understandably, generated calls for restraint in that small portion of the media which is paying any attention - risks undermining the very real point that this is a man with extremely disturbing views, and a history demonstrating his willingness to allow them to be realised, who has now been handed the keys to power in one of the world's upcoming superpowers, with the capability to launch nuclear strikes and a very clear target on its doorstep to aim at.

  And THAT should make us very worried indeed.

Europe 2014 - The Countdown Begins

  Yesterday marked a landmark in the run-up to the European Parliament elections - the one-month-to-go mark, and the beginning of the official campaigning season. On the 22nd of May, the 508 million people of the EU's 28 Member States will choose their representatives in the world's only directly elected supranational legislature.

  It's a big moment. It has been five years since the last chance the European people had to make this decision, and it's safe to say that quite a bit has changed. The economic situation has improved - but crucially, nowhere near as much or as quickly as predicted. The balance of power in the European Parliament currently favours the European People's Party - the alliance of the Christian, conservative centre-right. That could be all about to change.

  The dynamic in Europe has shifted since 2009. The prevailing wisdom of that time was austerity - cuts, cuts, cuts in public expenditure in a desperate attempt to bring the economic crisis under control. Five years on, austerity has had mixed success. Whilst it appears to have brought the immediate crisis under control, the wider economic problems of the continent have not been addressed and the economy of Europe is stagnating.

  The effect of this disillusionment with the centre-right political mainstream has been a lurch to more extreme politics. The far-right are on the rise, and the leaders of the established political forces of the continent are worried. As well they might be. 

  In France, Marine Le Pen and her Front National have become the third-largest political force in the country. In the Netherlands, it is Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom which has claimed the right-wing platform, its anti-immigration policies appealing to many in this time of economic turmoil. These groups are fast becoming powers in the emerging landscape of European politics, and look set to claim a considerable number of seats at the forthcoming elections.

  Wilders and Le Pen represent the more respectable wing of the far-right movement - a fact which in and of itself should be profoundly disturbing. Others are more emphatic - Jobbik in Hungary are open in their anti-Semitic and anti-LGBT views, whilst Greece's Golden Dawn are self-declared neo-Nazis. All across the continent, the far-right is rearing its head.

  In the UK, our own far-right party - the BNP - is mercifully set on what appears to be a course of self-destruction. For this, we should be glad, but we have - of course - a usurper to their vacated throne. UKIP, hovering in the murky political territory between the nasty-but-accepted Tories and the rightfully ostracised BNP, have expertly stolen the fascists' thunder.

  Advocating unilateral withdrawal from the European Union, UKIP are currently second in the EU election polls and - if they follow the course they did five years ago - may well win. Whilst they are clearly infinitely preferable to their fascist and fascist-leaning counterparts on the continent, they still represent the same general sorts of feelings - anger at the dire straits the country finds itself in, and a self-righteous, indignant self-confidence that they know who to blame it all on. Just because the anti-foreigner brigade in this country are slightly less rabid, doesn't mean we should be gulled into thinking them balanced, reasonable individuals.

  So in a month's time, when you go to cast your vote at the ballot box, think on this - what kind of a Europe do YOU want to see? United and strong - or divided and overrun by nationalist prejudices?

  I know my answer.

From Putin With Love

Maria Alyokhina took this photograph of herself and
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova in the back of a police van

  Vladimir Putin has done it again. Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, two members of the Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot have been arrested in Sochi. Their crime? Well, in this case, the nefarious deed of walking down a street.


  The two women had planned to shoot a music video for a new song, Putin Will Teach You to Love Your Motherland in a local Church. Given the vast and entirely unwarranted overreaction to the punk collective's now-famous protest at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, it would perhaps not have been much of a surprise if they had been arrested during such an action. But they never made it. Instead, they were picked up by police whilst on their way to the planned protest. They have been accused of robbery, but as yet no charges have been filed. 

  Clearly, though, this accusation is pure nonsense. Perhaps, were the incident isolated, we might be persuaded to reluctantly swallow the official story. But it is not. At least nine people are in police custody for clearly political motives, among them former Italian MP and LGBT rights campaigner Vladimir Luxuria, with an unidentified number of others having been picked up but subsequently released. This assault on the rights and freedoms of both the Russian people and international visitors to the Winter Olympics host city is characteristic of the heavy-handed and oppressive Putin regime, but that the authorities have carried on their campaign of repression when the city is in the full glare of the international spotlight demonstrates both the cavalier ease with which they can carry out such actions and the security Putin feels in his control of the country. It is a fresh reminder, if any were needed, that this is a man and a government willing to do anything to maintain its iron grip.

  But has Putin made a mistake? By re-arresting Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova, so soon after their two-year internment in separate Siberian concentration camps was cut short by the politically-motivated Amnesty Bill last December, huge publicity will surely be drawn to the political skirmishes around Sochi which, thus far, the media has been too blinded by the glittering spectacle of the games themselves to focus on. By making two women who have already been identified as targets of the Putin regime once more into martyrs for the cause, Putin will perhaps find the small but growing number of voices raised against his corrupt leadership become louder. 

  Whilst most Russians have sadly been sufficiently taken in by the conspiracy of Church and State to mutilate their morality that they are ambivalent towards, or even support, the persecution of minorities in their native country, there are enough who refuse to bow to Putin's warped image of the world to cause problems for his administration. The international community, meanwhile, whilst as ever slow to react has - in general - been a supporter both of Pussy Riot and the wider human rights campaign. As this news hits the headlines, perhaps it will start to filter through to the collective world consciousness that the problems in Russia remain as great now as they ever were - and perhaps now, finally, we might start to do something about it.

  One thing is for certain - the neo-fascism of Vladimir Putin and his allies in the Orthodox Church is just as corrupt, just as damaging as the Stalinist perversion of Marxism in the old Soviet Union was. The rest of the world has a duty to respond to the plight of those people trapped by Putin's barbaric, coercive laws into a life of lies and violence and to do our best to rescue them from the clutches of what is, now more than ever, an evil empire.