What is the meaning behind today’s Royal Family pageantry and what is its contemporary significance?
This essay looks at the various stages of how the British Monarchy has legitimised itself over the last 140 years.
To read, click here to al-Mayadeen website.
I don’t accept Asa Winstanley’s reply to my review of his book. I shall be very brief in this response as I intend to write something else about the book in more detail at a later date.
Winstanley claims that, “Abd al-Wahid writes as if he made up his mind about my book before reading it and then refused to let the actual text alter his foregone conclusions.” I would like to assure Winstanley this wasn’t the case. I read the book chronologically from front to back and I noted that Winstanley didn’t first mention the “Balfour Declaration” until almost two thirds into the book on pg.196 – I found this peculiar. Thereafter the defining document which laid the foundations for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is only mentioned a handful of times if that. Specifically, as he says, on pg.236 where he very briefly explains what the document is.
The focus of Winstanley’s reply is mainly based around what he wrote between pages 49 and 53. In these pages Winstanley mentions Britain’s historical support for Zionism but within the context of Labour’s Party relationship with the Poale Zion group not within the context of the Balfour Declaration issued by the British government in 1917. So when he claims in these pages that Britain “began reneging on its pledge to hand Palestine over to the Zionist movement…” What exactly is the “pledge”? Keep in mind I’m reading the book in the aforementioned chronological order. Those of us who are au fait with some of the history should immediately recognise what this “pledge” is, but many more, probably the majority, simply do not. Continue reading
Asa Winstanley’s book, Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn is about the anti-Semitic slurs, smears, allegations, insinuations directed at the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership between 2015 and 2020. As a journalist for the pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist Electronic Intifada journal, Winstanley had a front row seat to the unfolding political drama in real time. Corbyn had primarily offered the British electorate an escape from domestic neo-liberalist policies which had dominated politics from the 1980s. Winstanley’s thesis is that certain individuals and Zionist advocacy groups sometimes working in tandem with elements of the Zionist colonial Apartheid state “brought down Jeremy Corbyn”.
The review can be read on the Mondoweiss website by clicking here.
Lost in the continued maelstrom over the extent of anti-semitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party between 2015 and 2020 is a very important question: what exactly is Corbyn’s position on the Zionist colonial entity? While leader, Corbyn “rarely spoke” about the Zionist colonisation of Palestine, that is the Palestinian cause. Yet on three occasions he revealed his actual stance. Herein, I show far from being any kind of anti-Zionist, Corbyn was very loyal to and appreciative of the Zionist-colonial project in Palestine.
Firstly, within a year of Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party in September 2015 the Blairite old guard, which had dominated the Party since the mid-1990s, were agitating to cast him asunder and rid of him. In the summer of 2016 Corbyn faced a leadership challenge and during a debate with challenger Owen Smith (Member of Parliament for Pontypridd), Corbyn waxed lyrical about the Zionist colonial-settler state. Continue reading
Against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of world’s inhabitants, American and British imperialist forces, led respectively by George W. Bush and Tony Blair, invaded Iraq twenty years ago on a poisoned puree of allegations and claims revolving around Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq, possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The British political and media establishment produced some of the most fabulous lies in the run-up to the Iraq war. Among the most famous fabrications for the case for war was that Iraq could deploy WMDs within “45 minutes” and that Iraq had made ‘Uranium purchases from Niger’. For the warmongers in the imperial metropole, both these fabrications proved Iraq was an imminent threat to “world peace” and both were quickly proved to be false after the invasion.
As short-lived as these fabrications proved to be, another fabrication about Britain’s role in imperialist warmongering has stood the test of time. That is, the notion that Britain is United States’ “poodle”. That is, contemporary British military intervention is a result of Britain’s subservience to United States foreign policy. To read more click here.
Churchill's Colonial Karma 