Israel Does What It Wants

Dion Nissenbaum, on the relative impunity enjoyed by Israeli soldiers in the territories, is well worth reading.
Also, check out Steve Clemons’ interview with Mustafa Barghouti. On Obama he unfortunately pulls his punches, but his statistics and observations on the post-Annapolis environment are crucial.

“What happened since Annapolis is really shocking. Since Annapolis, [...]

The Fraud Office Goes to Work

The Serious Fraud Office won its Law Lords appeal today against a court ruling that it acted unlawfully in halting a corruption inquiry into a lucrative arms deal between Saudi Arabia and BAE Systems. The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) took the case to the House of Lords after [...]

Bil’in’s Victory

Following last September’s Supreme Court ruling, the Israeli establishment has finally agreed to raze a portion of the Separation Wall around Bil’in. Despite a very modest ruling by the court, who simply said that the pathway of the wall should reflect security interests rather than the expansion wishes of the Tzufin settlement,

“the defense establishment initially [...]

Israel’s Terrorists

An article in Saturday’s Times examines an old Irgun pamphlet issued by the Israeli prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Menachem Begin.
In the document, Irgun tells British troops: “It is unavoidable that many Jewish soldiers and many British soldiers should fall. And it is only fair that these people know at least why they [...]

Building on the Arguments for the Legalisation of Drugs

In an excellent post on knife crime, Lenin points at an interesting correlation between the rate of knife crime and the enforcement of drug laws.
What about drugs? Andrew Resignato at Florida State University has summed up a wealth of literature on this topic, and concludes that there is in fact scarce data to support the [...]

On Chavs and Political Correctness

Tom Hampson and the Fabian Society should be praised for kickstarting a dialogue which has been sorely missing from the UK over the past few years, and condemning the widespread use of the word ‘chav’. As Ste Forshaw argued in Dissident Warwick earlier this year, it has become a collective noun to describe and denounce [...]

Why Government Policy on Gangs will Fail

There’s a new report out which states the bleeding obvious. The government will ignore it. From the Guardian:
By failing to understand this basic structure, the researchers say, police mistakenly target and sometimes harass individuals who, though gang members, are not breaking any law; the police also repeatedly follow, stop and search the gang members’ family, [...]

On Legal Challenges to the Apartheid Wall

There’s a pretty good little article in this week’s Economist, which describes the actions of some Israelis who work against the occupation their country is imposing upon the Palestinians. I’m doing a little research on this during the summer, so there’ll be more on this soon, but for now I want to draw out the [...]

You Can’t Handle The Truth

The Times reports today that, in an important settlement, the MoD has agreed to pay over £2.8 million to the family of Baha Musa, an Iraqi who died in UK custody. Whilst the Times rather callously focuses on the strain such payouts could place on the army (the paper version’s headline was “MoD Faces Huge [...]

Coincidence and Luck

I’m sitting at home suffering from what my mother has snidely referred to as ‘man-flu’, and so haven’t found the time to do a review of Marxism 2008. In the meanwhile I highly recommend Monbiot’s article from last week in which he muses on an alternative to the established principle of contraction and convergence as [...]