An essay written about Birmingham’s North Yemeni Islamists. I’ve touched on the two individuals mentioned in this piece in other pieces. However, as the Commonwealth Games 2022 approach we have every right to know if what the produce of their presence in Birmingham will be cataclysmic?
To read the full essay click here.
The NATO military intervention in Libya in 2011 separated the wheat from the chaff for many people. Those who still support the so-called “Libyan revolution” never mention that it was NATO warplanes that ultimately dislodged the rule of Muammar Ghadhaffi and rendered a once prosperous and independent Libya into a basket case of refugees, slavery, human trafficking and warring jihadi warlords. The ultimate act of blowback from this intervention was the Manchester Arena suicide bombing of 2017 which killed 22 people. For these people there is no connection between British military intervention in Libya and an off-script jihadi blowing himself up in the imperial metropole. These same people who rarely speak of what NATO and its de-facto jihadi henchmen did to Libya also keep their heads well down when it comes to the dirty war on Syria. The GCC, Turkey, Israel and the West joined forces to support the Islamist crazies to not only over throw the Syrian government but destroy the state a la Libya. The CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore means nothing to these people.
This essay is about one of these people. A British based academic with supposedly left wing leanings and courageously declared pronouns. Like many lefty academics, Professor Khalili has had nothing to say about the regime change operations in Libya and Syria or the nasty British guided war on Yemen which has resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis but has made British Aerospace billions in arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Like most left leaning British based academics, the domestic politics and society of the United States is the platform she uses to express, furbish and flex her left leaning opinions. During last year’s Zionist war on Palestine, she erroneously informed her tens of thousands of Twitter followers that the Axis of Resistance states i.e Syria and Iran use the Palestinians as “pawns”. But it may well be that it is actually the Professor who is a “pawn” of some shadowy political organisation or at the very least she knows which contemporary issues to avoid to maintain her socio-cultural position.
Most dictionaries would define “bullshit” as making a statement in order to deceive or trick. It is my opinion that this was the intention behind the tweet. From another angle, the tweet wasn’t written in ignorance because Professor Khalili is surrounded by books and has first hand experience of Iranian politics and history. Therefore, a very credible assumption is that her intention was to bullshit her social media followers. I discuss the flawed tweet here.
The British writer David Baddiel’s polemic, Jews Don’t Count outlines his critical observations of politically progressive minded people during Mr. Jeremy Corbyn’s stewardship of the Labour Party between 2015 and 2020. Baddiel’s thesis is that progressive people, at the very least, are beholden to a stubborn anti-semitic blind spot. How is it that progressives jump aghast at the slightest slight towards any given racial, religious or sexual minority but are amiss when people of Jewish faith are maligned or grotesque anti-semitic tropes are instrumentalised to score political points. Ipso facto Baddiel legitimately asks, “why is there not a level playing field around racism?”
First of all, lets the scene. Jeremy Corbyn was overwhelmingly elected as Labour Party leader in September 2015 to the dismay of all wings of the British establishment. Corbyn had opposed the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and domestically always battled for the less privileged in British society. In the leadership race, there was a phenomenal 40 per cent difference between Corbyn and his closest rival. Yet, Corbyn was seen as a hopeless and hapless figure for the next 18 months. In the run up to the June 2017 General Election opinion polls showed the Labour Party trailing Theresa May’s ruling Conservative Party by up to 20 per cent. Pollsters were projecting a shoe-in for May, an increase in the Conservative slim parliamentary majority and a welcome trouncing for Corbyn. Instead, Corbyn’s Labour defied expectations and eliminated the governing Conservative’s majority. He increased the Labour Party vote to the highest it had been since Tony Blair’s first election victory in the 1997.
Many of the episodes Baddiel chronicles in his polemic occurred after the 2017 election. This review will highlight some of those episodes and also focus on its main shortcoming.
An essay about Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) so-called “investments” into the British economy can be read on the al-Mayadeen English website. I argue that investments such as the Saudi Arabian in Newcastle United Football Club, Qatar’s in all aspects of London or UAE in British infrastructure projects are modern day neo-colonial plunder and loot in plain sight.
“[Hitler] is only the ghost of our own past rising against us. He stands for the extenuation and perpetuation of our own methods…”[1] George Orwell
Hollywood’s “Dunkirk” movie, released to rave reviews in the midst of the Trump presidential era and a year after the UK Brexit vote, clocked in more than $500 million at the box office worldwide. The so-called ‘World War Two’ blockbuster depicted retreating British troops in the French coastal city of Dunkirk evading the German air force as they attempted to safely board boats back to England. But how exactly did this desperate state of affairs arise? This essay provides a general overview of the military developments which led to the retreat at Dunkirk and identifies the similarities in the world view of the main belligerent parties.
No one kissed their loved one’s goodbye and then embarked on the journey to fight in the Hundred Years’ War or the Thirty Years’ War for that matter. Likewise, when war was declared many centuries later in Europe in September 1939 no one absurdly tempted fate to announce World War Two had began. Actually, in 1939 there was then no such conflict known as World War One. The war that is now known as World War One, was then known as the ‘Great War’. Yet as the cold European autumn and winter of 1939 naturally seasoned into the following year’s spring, the latest round of European warfare pitched two white supremacist camps against each other.
On one side were the imperialist nations of Britain, France, Belgium, Holland and their allies. Western historians possess an empirically-lacking fascination to refer to the imperialist nations in their literature as “democracies” or “allies” rather than for what they actually were, white supremacist nations who denied democracy to hundreds of millions of non-white inhabitants in their colonial territories while plundering them.[2] These four imperial powers had prided themselves on conquering and plundering colonial territories for the last 300 years. On the other side, was Nazi Germany and its allies. Nazi Germany was led by Mr. Adolf Hitler, a dictator with strong racial prejudices similar to those held by the leaders of the imperialist camp. Continue reading
Colonial Karma 