Gaza
Killing the Witnesses
Israel killed Anas al-Sharif because it feared what he could still show the world.
The rest of the blog
Israel killed Anas al-Sharif because it feared what he could still show the world.
Jenrick’s “medieval attitudes” line isn’t about protecting women — it’s about importing the far right’s script into the Tory mainstream. From Powell to Farage, the cast has changed but the grammar is the same: the outsider as danger, the nation as victim, the politician as saviour.
Keir Starmer’s proscription of Palestine Action marks a new stage in Britain’s authoritarian turn, retooling counter-terrorism laws to criminalise dissent, define solidarity as “terrorism”, and dress up political repression as public safety.
Gilbert Achcar’s The Gaza Catastrophe is not a plea for sympathy. It is a political weapon. Written in the midst of genocide, it strips away the euphemisms, the diplomatic theatre, and the moral fog. This war, he argues, is a settler-colonial project. Accelerated to its most brutal form, with the full backing of the Western powers who claim to uphold human rights. Achcar names the system, maps its historical scaffolding, and indicts not only Israel but the global order that enables it. This is not a book of mourning. It is a call to act.
Right to Buy was never just a housing policy. It was a weapon. It stripped councils of their power, turned tenants into property owners, and recast collective provision as individual gain. The result wasn’t freedom but fragmentation: social housing gutted, rents soaring, and the right to strike undermined by the threat of eviction. Thatcher didn’t just sell homes. She sold a new class alignment, and we’re still living in its ruins.
In 1984, we built a nuclear bunker out of cardboard boxes in the corner of our classroom. Each of us brought something for survival—Look-In mags, tins of beans, but no tin opener. Even as kids, we knew it was useless. That was the point. You couldn’t market nuclear war as survivable. Forty years on, the language has changed but the logic remains. The bomb hasn’t gone away, it’s just become background noise. The treaties are gone. The madmen are in charge. And the system that built the bomb still holds it, not to use necessarily, but to remind us who gets to decide if we live.
The modern-day barons don’t run trade unions, they sail £100 million yachts and bankroll governments. Yet it’s the rail cleaner or the guard who’s cast as the threat. What’s truly appalling is not that Eddie Dempsey wants to strike fast, but that workers can’t strike in solidarity with Palestinians, can’t refuse to load weapons bound for Gaza, can’t use their collective strength to win better conditions across sectors. The right fears not chaos—but class power.
Do We Really Need Another Autopsy of 2024?
Alexander Dugin has declared the Istanbul peace talks “meaningless theatre” and announced the arrival of “total war.” He wants Russia (not just its army, but its soul) put on a permanent war footing.
The President has weaponised billion-dollar lawsuits to silence reporting, chill satire, and punish dissent. After ABC and CBS paid out millions, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was cancelled days after mocking a Trump settlement. Now he’s suing Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal over a sketch linked to Epstein. This isn’t about truth. It’s about fear, and who’s allowed to speak.
Trump isn’t reopening Alcatraz. He’s pointing at the ruins and saying: this is what we’ll do to them. It’s not
Dugin is no longer prophesying. He’s grieving. What was once a militant theology of MAGA as civilisational rebirth has curdled into lament. Trump, the anointed disruptor, has become just another functionary—an “object,” not a “subject.” The Deep State wasn’t slain, the Epstein files remain sealed, Israel is unchallenged. Dugin’s dream wasn’t defeated in battle. It drowned in compromise.
There was a time when the production line ordered more than goods, it ordered life. Work meant wages, wages meant stability, and stability gave the illusion of progress. That was Fordism. What remains now is the shell of that promise, retrofitted as nationalist fantasy. The factory is gone, but its myth has been repurposed. Not to build, but to blame.
He fed them tales of satanic cabals and deep-state executions, and now expects them to believe the Epstein dossier is boring.
Dugin doesn’t need Trump to lead anymore. He just needs him to stall. The real project now is building a soft-theocratic death cult that prays for collapse but never acts. Spectators waiting for revelation, not revolution. Fifty days to Armageddon. Maybe. Maybe not. That’s the point.
The bullet missed, but the image hit. And it’s the image that rules now. Trump, mid-stumble, hand to ear, flanked by agents in suits. It has already been cropped, filtered, multiplied. Not just a moment, but a message: the strongman under fire, the martyr made live. The spectacle doesn’t distract from the violence; it packages it. Sells it. Projects it across TVs, phones, and tablets until belief hardens into doctrine. This is what power looks like in the age of algorithmic memory: not stability, but survival on camera.
Butler isn’t really about politics. It’s about belief. The bullet didn’t just graze him; it made him sacred. The messy contradictions of 2016 are gone. What’s left is atmosphere, myth, and the story of a man who bled on stage and got up again. The faithful took it as a sign. This isn’t reporting. It’s scripture. A gospel for a leader who survives everything, and so, must rule.