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Showing posts with label Editor's Choice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Editor's Choice. Show all posts
Irish Times 📰 Written by Fintan O’Toole.

If Israel-Palestine is, for us, a story about Ireland then it should not be a simplistic narrative of good and evil

According to Maurice Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, the Herbert Park Hotel in Dublin cancelled a booking for 70 delegates to last week’s international conference on combating anti-Semitism.

The conference was held here as part of Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the European Union. Some of the delegates are Jewish, some are not – Ireland’s representative, Colm O’Loughlin, is a principal officer at the Department of Justice.

According to Cohen, the hotel manager asked him whether the Israel Defense Forces would be involved. “Nothing I had said had anything whatsoever to do with the Israeli army, yet somehow that was where the conversation had gone.” The booking was subsequently cancelled without explanation.

Whatever the intentions of the hotel (and one suspects that the cancellation was motivated more by a desire to avoid the possibility of protest than by any conscious prejudice), this should be just as upsetting to Irish people as the effective cancellation of Sally Rooney in the UK over her support for Palestine Action.

Continue @ Irish Times. 

Zionism Is Not Racism, Any More Than Irish Nationalism Is Sectarianism

Peter Tatchell ★I’ve been a Green Party member for 22 years. 

I have supported Palestinian rights for 54 years. The Green Party conference narrowly passed the motion, "Zionism is racism".
 
This may result in a significant fall in public support for the Green Party; particularly given the way it is being spun by much of the media & Labour. It is not anti-Jewish but can be perceived as such because of careless wording e.g. no condemnation of antisemitism. This could undo the recent huge successes of the Greens. I doubt most Green Party members support all elements of the motion.
 
It was passed as a result of an organised campaign by key people who had no significant history of support for the Greens. Some openly declared they do not care if the motion results in the Greens losing votes & seats. It might cost Zack Polanski the Holborn & St Pancras by-election if the vote is tight.
 
I am disappointed that Zack failed to speak out more clearly & publicly against the troubling aspects of the motion.
 
I agree with the motion in almost all respects but it is problematic in Three ways.

Continue @ Peter Tatchell.

A Green Problematic

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

Green Party Inclusive Terminology Guidance Bars Women from Brighton

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink – George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

On Friday, as the largest conference in the Green Party’s history opened in Brighton, two of its members gave an interview from outside the building. Zoe Hatch and Jude English, directors of the Green Women’s Declaration, had been refused entry. Hatch said they had all been suspended or expelled, and that what they believed amounted to agreeing with the Supreme Court about single-sex provision for women, which she thought most of the British public did too. Saying it inside the Green Party, she said, is no longer allowed.

Shahrar Ali, the party’s former deputy leader, was outside as well, telling GB News he had been barred from attending and intended to go back to court. Inside, the party was holding what its own spokesperson had called, a fortnight earlier, the most democratic conference of any political party in Britain.

Continue @ Heartlands Tribune.

You Cannot Protect What You Cannot Define 🪶The Green Party’s Language Ban

Weekly Worker ☭ Written by Paul Demarty.

He was undoubtedly the tragic victim of an openly racist attack dog and a baying mainstream media. 

However, maintaining that Jason Arday was not guilty of plagiarism is worse than useless. We need the truth about him and, more importantly, the whole neoliberal university system.

There is a general commotion to answer the question, ‘Who killed Jason Arday?’

On one level, this is a bit silly. Though we await confirmation from a coroner or some such authority, it seems abundantly clear that he killed himself. Weeks into a media feeding frenzy, in which public allegations of plagiarism fed into a detailed examination of the spectacular life story he had retailed in his career as a celebrity academic, he had already resigned from his post at Cambridge University, and it had become clear that most of the grandiose claims he had made about his biography were false.

He had not been a non-verbal autist until the age of 11, nor illiterate at 18. He had not played for Crystal Palace, or been a pro snooker player, or run 600 miles in six days, or miraculously recovered from a brain tumour. 

Continue @ Weekly Worker.

Fraudsters, Great And Small

Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières ★ Kai I analyses the BJP’s latest assault on trans rights in India, situating it within the broader structures of Hindu nationalism, capitalist patriarchy, and the bourgeois family.

On the 30th of March, the Indian parliament passed a bill proposing a series of amendments that redefine the rights and identification of trans Indians. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill removes the right of transgender people to self-identification, reduces prison sentences for sexually assaulting trans women, and subjects the trans community to dehumanising medical exams in exchange for legal protections. This is an attack against one of the largest queer communities in the world – produced by a Hindu nationalist political project that combines capitalist modernisation with a traditionalist family structure. Revolutionaries globally need to stand in solidarity with trans people in India.

The Hindutva government, currently dominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has faced sustained criticism for enacting discriminatory laws and inciting violence against ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities in India. This includes the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which explicitly excludes minorities such as Eelam Tamils and Muslims from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan from seeking citizenship following refugee status. 

Continue @ ESSF. 

India 🪶 The BJP’s War On Trans Rights


Q&A: Student activism on American campuses in response to the war in Gaza has become a national debate over where to draw the line between political dissent and antisemitism.

Even as many universities have moved to restrict, disperse or discipline protest activity, demonstrations — and the arguments about how to describe them — have continued, raising questions about free speech, campus safety and whether criticism of Israel is being conflated with anti-Jewish hatred.

Alan Wald, the H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, is a historian of the 20th-century U.S. cultural Left. He discusses parallels to Cold War-era campus politics, Zionism and how debates over the meaning of antisemitism shape campus protests over Israel and Palestine.

Q/ What is Zionism — and why do you describe becoming a Zionist as a “choice” rather than an identity?

A/ Understanding Zionism requires one to enter complex political terrain. The assertion that Zionism is essential to Jewish identity is misleading for several reasons. Judaism is a monotheistic religion at least 3,000 years old, whereas Zionism began as a secular-led political movement in the late 19th century. 

Continue @ ESSF. 

Zionism Is A Political Choice 🪶 Not Always A Part Of Jewish Identity

Irish Times 📰 Written by Sinéad O'Sullivan. 

Europe has stumbled into a new growth paradigm with a reliance on the permanent threat of war

At the launch of the White Paper for European Defence – Readiness 2030, Ursula von der Leyen declared the era of Europe’s peace dividend “long gone”. Peace, apparently, was a phase that we have now outgrown.

The EU’s centre of gravity has rapidly moved from a focus on trading to armament, as outlined by von der Leyen in early 2025, and this transfer of meaning is not happening through defence memorandums but through nation state treasuries. Consider the following: the European Commission is in the midst of mobilising €800 billion defence spending by 2030; more than 15 member states have activated “escape clauses” to enable an economic breach of fiscal rules to procure weapons; €150 billion of so-called “bomb bonds” has been raised for collective borrowing; a new multilateral bank – the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank – is targeting hundreds of billions of euro, with Belgium, Greece, Romania, Latvia and Ukraine among its founders; Canada has been admitted as a non-EU member state, in a leadership role, on many of these initiatives.

Continue @ Irish Times.

The Irish Government Is Helping To Usher In A New Wartime Economy In Europe

Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières ★ Written by  Ilya Matveeva.

Hostages to the Kremlin: Russia’s Billionaires Between War and Nationalization

Russia’s billionaire class has recovered its pre-war collective wealth, but the conditions sustaining that recovery are already exhausted. 

Western sanctions have closed off the internationalization that previously gave the oligarchs leverage over the Kremlin, while wartime nationalization has reminded them that domestic property rights remain conditional on political loyalty. 

Andrey Melnichenko’s profile in The Economist - a public declaration of fealty to Vladimir Putin wrapped in the language of sovereignty - exemplifies the class’s impotence. 

Ilya Matveev argues that the safety valve of exit is gone, organizational capacity has atrophied after twenty-five years of enforced political abstinence, and democratization would threaten oligarchic fortunes as severely as Putinism. Russia’s tycoons are, in his conclusion, Putin’s hostages and will share his regime’s fate. [AN]

Among the eight billionaires removed from the Russian Forbes list in 2026, only four were dropped because their businesses became less valuable. Three others had their assets nationalized by the state: Dmitry Kamenshchik lost Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport, Konstantin Strukov his gold-mining operations, and Denis Shtengelov his food conglomerate. 

Finally, one person, Yandex founder Arkady Volozh, was removed from the list following his renunciation of Russian citizenship.

Continue @ ESSF.

The Russia’s Billionaires Dilemma 🪶 Putin Threatens Them, But Protects Their Wealth

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