I cannot think of a period in my lifetime when so much was happening in the world so quickly with which it feels that, as a reluctant UK citizen, I have a direct connection and indeed responsibility.
Race riots in the UK, the genocide in Gaza, the attacks on civil liberty and decline in effective democracy across the western world, the ever darkening reach of mass surveillance, including of the individual’s use of currency; those are just a few of the issues in play and the links between all of them are intimate and inextricable.
I do not believe that the race riots have been fomented in order to provide an excuse to crack down further on civil liberties. But that Starmer – whom I suspect will prove to be the most authoritarian Prime Minister in British history – is seizing on them for that prupose is undeniable.
In particular the announcement that the already deeply worrying Online Safety Act will be amended, to give the state still greater power over information sources like the one which you are currently reading, could signal a massive blow to internet freedom.
Publication of “misinformation” is to be criminalised – which means the official narrative will be enforced on social media.
Given that, for example, the government has relentlessly promoted the demonstrably false stories of mass rape by Palestinians on October 7, while studiously failing to notice the vast amount of unquestionable evidence in the last fortnight of systematic rape of Palestinian prisoners on a vast scale by the Israeli Defence Force, no reasonable person can fail to understand the danger of the enforcement of state-approved “truth”.
Articles like my dissection of the state narrative on the Skripals look set to be deemed a threat to the “online safety” of the nation. Alternative narratives over Covid, over 9/11, over the death of David Kelly – any deviation from the official line is liable to be deemed criminal.
Meanwhile, with “two-tier justice” being the latest right wing mantra, we find that race rioters who set fires in inhabited buildings and threw rocks at policemen, in fact get lighter sentences than environmentalists involved in planning non-violent actions.
Predictably, we are already seeing the unrest used as a justification for increased usage of facial recognition technology. 24/7 state surveillance of the individual is no longer a wild dystopian fear.
Looking further afield, the narrative is moved on by the claims that an ISIS-linked terrorist in Austria planned to attack a Taylor Swift concert. This plays nicely into the Taylor Swift theme of the dance class where the girls were horribly murdered in Southport, and reinvigorates the flagging wave of Islamophobia.
Given that ISIS cooperates closely with both Israel and the CIA and has avoided attacking Israel or western targets, while I still can without being locked up may I express my scepticism at this item of news management.
Islamophobia is of course an important link between events here and in the Middle East. While there is of course a small Palestinian Christian minority, there is no doubt that hatred of Muslims is a large driver in the Israeli dehumanisation of Palestinians that paves the psychological grounds for genocide, mass rape and torture.
Here Israel is just acting as the Western colonial enterprise that it is. As the West has sought to seize the physical resources of the Middle East – the hydrocarbons of Iraq, Syria and Libya and the lands of the Palestinians – the deliberate promulgation of Islamophobia at home has driven public support for these ventures, though that public support is thankfully a dwindling commodity.
After decades of being fed nonsense about a war of civilisations and the dangers of Islamic terrorism, whipping up anti-immigrant mobs has not been difficult. It does not require too deep an analysis of the nexus of Islamophobia and wider racism to understand that.
But it is also true that Zionist interests have been extremely keen to stoke this unrest, as a counter-narrative to the mass popular support for Palestine which the genocide has engendered among western populations.
It is also well worth reading this thread from Lowkey
It is also of course impossible to ignore the role of born-again Zionist Elon Musk and his cohort in whipping up the Islamophobic and racist narrative.
These people, of course, always support free movement for themselves. Elon Musk is in fact an immigrant from Africa, whereas “Tommy Robinson” is an immigrant in Spain.
Predictably the state has countered with the anti-semitism narrative, and rather hilariously they have yet again brought out the utterly ludicrous claims of the “Community Security Trust” of an increase in “anti-semitic incidents”.
This time the Trust are claiming a 210% increase in anti-semitic incidents, which is quite modest by their standards. I have pointed out again and again that any journalist with a Maths O-level would have been able to work out that their claims of increases in attacks between 45% and 300% every year for twenty years simply cannot be true or there would now be many hundreds of thousands of attacks on Jewish people per year and thankfully that is plainly untrue.
I suppose if the lie works as propaganda, they simply stick with it. But there could hardly be a starker illustration of the pathetic enslavement of mainstream media journalists that nobody ever queries these plainly impossible claims.
It is also worth noting that as the CST – which gets £12 million a year from the Home Office – construes references to “apartheid Israel” as anti-semitic incidents, then the ICJ Opinion on the Occupied Territories would count as an anti-semitic incident by these Home Office sponsored standards!
Finally, while the racist tide appears to be receding, I commend everybody who got out there to counter-protest. It is extremely dangerous to allow fascists the run of the streets and we must remain both nimble and active.