The British have destroyed their traditional freedom of speech and the press, even more so than the US. From Craig Murray at consortiumnews.com:
raig Murray denounces the U.K.’s persecution of Richard Barnard for calling out his country’s role in the manufacture of instruments for the death and maiming of Palestinians.
Matam high-tech park in Haifa, Israel, where military manufacturer Elbit Systems has one of the buildings in the foreground. (Zvi Roger, Haifa Municipality, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Once you have been active in politics for a few decades, you get used to the popular convulsions of support for Palestine every few years when Israel military action against Gaza becomes particularly intense. Then follows a ceasefire, the media move on and Israel resumes the daily routine of low-level evictions, destruction of tree crops, imprisonments and murders that accomplishes the gradual extinction of the territories that the Western powers pretended to intend for a Palestinian state.
For the media, 50 Palestinian children killed in a week has been a story. The regular killing of 50 a year is not; and anybody who thinks it is must be labeled an anti-Semite and hounded from political life.
As a young man, the two great injustices we campaigned on were South Africa and Palestine. I never dreamt the latter abuse would possibly outlast me. These two issues resonated so much because they were both remnants of European colonial arrogance, founded on racism and a sense of cultural superiority.
Nowadays I cannot even think myself into a mindset that says that for the greater good of the United Kingdom, it is O.K. to deport the entire population of the Chagos Islands to make way for a military base. But that was the view not just of governments, but of Labour governments, inside my own lifetime.
I should like to think that the undeniable openness of Israeli apartheid rule has made a fundamental shift in thinking towards Palestine, but I do not think much has in fact changed. The media and political class remain bought and paid for on the issue.
