Issue #1 - Mean Green machine

Green grassroots resist IHRA; MI5's role in the spycops; EI podcast with Lowkey.

Welcome to the first ever issue of my newsletter — Palestine is Still the Issue. Please forward it to your friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, comrades and the bloke you met down the pub (back before the pandemic kept us all at home).

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Caroline Lucas helps Israel lobby smears

Last week I wrote about how the raging national (and indeed, international) battle over the IHRA’s highly bogus and entirely politicised definition of anti-Semitism has now spread to the UK’s Green Party:

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(Technically it’s the Green Party of England and Wales. The Scottish Greens are a separate party and support independence.) Caroline Lucas, the party’s only MP, has come out in favour of the IHRA definition — something many party activists find highly disturbing and are resisting. Read all about it in my report.

Britain’s secret political police

Last week I also had my first ever article published for Declassified UK. Mark Curtis and Matt Kennard’s investigative outfit has been doing some sterling reporting on the global machinations of the British state.

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It’s a long overview of the spycops scandal. While the topic is not a new one, I feel like many people — even on the left — do not quite understand the sheer scale of this infiltration and sabotage campaign. It is our COINTELPRO. Also new is the MI5 angle — our “Security Service” was (and almost certainly still is) up to its neck in this.

This is what I tired to convey in the piece. I’ve had a lot of good feedback on it, which is gratifying, as it took more than a month to write. It’s long, but do please give it a read when you have time. I suggest having a large mug of tea to hand — or something stronger.

Lowkey on the EI podcast

Also released last week was the latest episode of the EI podcast. Nora and I recently expanded to video, so it was a perfect time to get British-Iraqi rapper Lowkey onto the show (you can still listen to the audio edition through all the usual channels).

We asked Lowkey about a wide variety of issues. He talked about everything from David Miller, Islamophobia (and the Zionist movement’s role in promoting it) to drill music — a hip-hop genre which has been causing a moral panic in the British press.

I’m particularly proud of this episode — do have a listen.

Mental health crisis in Gaza

Palestinian refugee Tamam Abusalama has escaped the Israeli-Egyptian siege on the Gaza Strip and is living in Belgium.

Click to read full article

But the nightmare has not ended for her. Tamam’s bravery in a recent piece she wrote for EI sheds light on a much wider mental health crisis caused by Israeli occupation, wars and apartheid. Read my weekly MEMO column to find out more.

What I’ve been reading

1. Ali Abunimah’s latest exposé of Emgage, a Muslim group which supports the US empire. Like the US and UK deep states, and like the Zionist movement, in recent times, Emgage have been pushing the claim that there is a “genocide” against the Muslim Uyghur minority in China’s Xinjiang province.

2. Joseph Massad on the the myth of the “lesser evil” and the new Joe Biden administration. Every piece by Massad demands to be read.

3. Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal on Alexander Reid Ross, the “anarchist” academic who’s up to his eyeballs in links to spooks, cops and imperialists. The Grayzone is smashing it, as always.

4. Sophia Purdy-Moore on the growing movement to support David Miller (something we’ve been covering a lot at EI since last month) and protect him from the influential Zionist campaign to have him fired from Bristol university. I am a big supporter of The Canary.

Tweet of the Week

Lobster Magazine @LobsterMagazine

@selmermorerules Yes, it's very good indeed.

My inaugural Tweet of the Week goes to @LobsterMagazine, for this glowing review of my long spycops piece, linked to above. I’ve been a fan of venerable parapolitics magazine Lobster since I first discovered a paper copy (remember those?) at the late lamented Books etc. on Charing Cross road many years ago (the building was a TK Maxx last I checked).

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