Jonathan Cook
Countercurrents.org
Israel
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Past articles by Jonathan:
David Baddiel’s Hollow Racism Apology To Jason Lee| Countercurrents
You may not have heard of the Jewish comedian David Baddiel or the black ex-footballer Jason Lee. You may not care about either of them. But their first-ever → Read More
Palestine Is A Loud Echo Of Britain’s Colonial Past – And A Warning Of The Future| Countercurrents
But my world – like everyone else’s – started to shrink as the pandemic took hold in early 2020. As we lost visitors and the chance to directly engage with → Read More
How A Boy Called Christmas Converted Me To The Politics Of Greed| Countercurrents
A Boy Called Christmas is the origin story for Father Christmas, explaining how a peasant boy called Nicholas living in a gloomy winter kingdom eventually → Read More
After Corbyn, Israel Lobby Turns Its Guns On UK Academia| Countercurrents
The Israel lobby appears to be readying for a campaign to root out leftwing academics in the UK critical of Israel’s continuing oppression of the Palestinian → Read More
CIA Plan To Poison Assange Wasn’t Needed. The US Found A ‘lawful’ Way To Disappear Him| Countercurrents
A Yahoo News’ investigation reveals that, through much of 2017, the CIA weighed up whether to use wholly extrajudicial means to deal with the supposed threat → Read More
Jewish Chronicle’s Libel Payouts Were A Small Price To Pay For Smearing Corbyn And The Left| Countercurrents
The Jewish Chronicle, a weekly newspaper that was saved from liquidation last year by a consortium led by a former senior adviser to Theresa May, has been → Read More
Jewish groups that aid Israel’s war crimes can’t deny all responsibility for those crimes
Here is something that can be said with great confidence. It is racist – antisemitic, if you prefer – to hold Jews, individually or collectively, accountable for Israel’s crimes. Jews are not responsible for Israel’s war crimes, even if the Israeli state presumes to implicate Jews in its crimes by falsely declaring it represents all Jews in the world. Very[Read More...] → Read More
We can defeat the corporate media’s war to snuff out independent journalism
My talk at the International Festival of Whistleblowing, Dissent and Accountability on May 8. Transcript below. I wanted to use this opportunity to talk about my experiences over the past two decades working with new technology as an independent freelance journalist, one who abandoned – or maybe more accurately, was abandoned by – what we usually call the “mainstream”[Read More...] → Read More
In our hurry to conquer nature and death, we have made a new religion of science
Back in the 1880s, the mathematician and theologian Edwin Abbott tried to help us better understand our world by describing a very different one he called Flatland. Imagine a world that is not a sphere moving through space like our own planet, but more like a vast sheet of paper inhabited by conscious, flat geometric shapes. These shape-people can move[Read More...] → Read More
We are living through a time of fear – not just of the virus, but of each other
Welcome to the age of fear. Nothing is more corrosive of the democratic impulse than fear. Left unaddressed, it festers, eating away at our confidence and empathy. We are now firmly in a time of fear – not only of the virus, but of each other. Fear destroys solidarity. Fear forces us to turn inwards to protect ourselves and our[Read More...] → Read More
Why politicians and doctors keep ignoring the medical research on Vitamin D and Covid
It is probably not a good idea to write while in the grip of anger. But I am struggling to suppress my emotions about a wasted year, during which politicians and many doctors have ignored a growing body of evidence suggesting that Vitamin D can play a critically important role in the prevention and treatment of Covid-19. It is time[Read More...] → Read More
The ‘humanitarian’ left still ignores the lessons of Iraq, Libya and Syria to cheer on more war
The instinct among parts of the left to cheerlead the right’s war crimes, so long as they are dressed up as liberal “humanitarianism”, is alive and kicking, as Owen Jones revealed in a column last week on the plight of the Uighurs at China’s hands. The “humanitarian war” instinct persists even after two decades of the horror shows that followed[Read More...] → Read More
Trump may be on trial, but the system that produced him will be acquitted
It is a fitting end to four years of Donald Trump in the White House. On one side, Trump’s endless stoking of political grievances – and claims that November’s presidential election was “stolen” from him – spilled over last week into a mob storming the US Capitol. They did so in the forlorn hope of disrupting the certification process of[Read More...] → Read More
Twitter’s ban on Trump will deepen the US tribal divide
Anyone who believes locking President Donald Trump out of his social media accounts will serve as the first step on the path to healing the political divide in the United States is likely to be in for a bitter disappointment. The flaws in this reasoning need to be peeled away, like the layers of an onion. Twitter’s decision to permanently[Read More...] → Read More
The US and UK may not will Assange’s death, but everything they are doing makes it more likely
There was a hope in some quarters after Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled on Monday against an application to extradite Julian Assange to the US, where he faced being locked away for the rest of his life, that she might finally be changing tack. Washington has wanted Assange permanently silenced and made an example of – by demonstrating to other journalists[Read More...] → Read More
Antisemitism claims mask a reign of political and cultural terror across Europe
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has run a fascinating long report this week offering a disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging across Europe on the issue of antisemitism. The article documents a kind of cultural, political and intellectual reign of terror in Germany since the parliament passed a resolution last year equating support for non-violent boycotts of Israel –[Read… → Read More
Establishment journalists are piling on to smear Robert Fisk now he cannot answer back
Something remarkable even by the usually dismal standards of the stenographic media blue-tick brigade has been happening in the past few days. Leading journalists in the corporate media have suddenly felt the urgent need not only to criticise the late, much-respected foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, but to pile in against him, using the most outrageous smears imaginable. He is suddenly[Read… → Read More
The planet cannot heal until we rip the mask off the West’s war machine
Making political sense of the world can be tricky unless one understands the role of the state in capitalist societies. The state is not primarily there to represent voters or uphold democratic rights and values; it is a vehicle for facilitating and legitimating the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. In a recent post, I wrote[Read More...] → Read More
I Am Greta isn’t about climate change. It’s about the elusiveness of sanity in an insane world
Erich Fromm, the renowned German-Jewish social psychologist who was forced to flee his homeland in the early 1930s as the Nazis came to power, offered a disturbing insight later in life on the relationship between society and the individual. In the mid-1950s, his book The Sane Society suggested that insanity referred not simply to the failure by specific individuals to[Read More...] → Read More
Biden will fail to bring back ‘normal’ politics. What’s needed now is a populism of the left
Analysts are still grappling with the fallout from the US election. Trumpism proved a far more enduring and alluring phenomenon than most media pundits expected. Defying predictions, Trump improved his share of the overall vote compared to his 2016 win, and he surprised even his own team by increasing his share of minority voters and women. But most significantly, he[Read More...] → Read More