Articles by Jonathan Cook

We found 161 results.


Why Is the ‘Liberal’ Media Peddling the Vilest Genocide Apologism?
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 14 Oct 2024

6 Oct 2024 – Howard Jacobson’s article in today’s Observer may be one the vilest pieces of journalism in Britain in living memory, arguing that any reporting of Israel’s slaughter of many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza is a “blood libel” and antisemitic.

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Israelis Will Dance Again, Vows BBC Film–Will Gaza’s Children Ever Get to Dance?
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 30 Sep 2024

27 Sep 2024 – Gaza’s children have no voice. Their tears evaporate in the summer heat, and merge with the winter rain. No one comes to make a documentary about them. It says much about the institutional racism of the BBC.

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You Can’t Arm a Genocidal State into Moderation. So Why Does the West Keep Trying?
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Sep 2024

4 Sep 2024 – Western governments will never isolate and sanction Israel. The war machine will roll on until either we stop it or its lethal games blow up in all our faces.

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How the Genocide on Gaza Exposed Israeli and Western Fascism
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Sep 2024

13 Sep 2024 – Material and rhetorical support for the genocide of the Palestinian people is everywhere. It’s time to ask why.

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You Can’t Arm a Genocidal State into Moderation. So Why Does the West Keep Trying?
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 9 Sep 2024

4 Sep 2024 – Western governments will never isolate and sanction Israel. The war machine will roll on until either we stop it or its lethal games blow up in all our faces.

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Israeli Soldiers Tell Story of Savage Cruelty in Gaza Hidden from Western Publics
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 Jul 2024

19 Jul 2024 – Women and children are being targeted intentionally, say Israeli whistleblowers. From ground troops to commanders, the rules of war have been shredded

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Trump Got a Bloodied Ear–US ‘Political Violence’ Poses a Far Bigger Danger to the Rest of Us
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 Jul 2024

15 Jul 2024 – Biden and Trump are two rotten figureheads of a rotting empire. Ignore the tribal rhetoric: neither poses an existential threat. But the system behind them does.

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Why the Corporate News Media’s Job Is to Groom Us
Jonathan Cook - TRANSCEND Media Service, 15 Jul 2024

10 Jul 2024 – Large numbers of Palestinians and Ukrainians were killed in missile strikes days apart. The media’s differing treatment of these comparable events is the clue to what the media’s really there to do.

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In Our Make-Believe Politics, the Strings Pulled by the Super-Rich Are All Too Visible
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Jun 2024

15 Jun 2024 – Biden wanders offstage or walks like a geriatric robot. Yet we are meant to believe he’s carefully navigating us through the nuclear tripwires of the West’s serial wars. The elites may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.

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The Day the West Defined the Massacre of 270 Palestinians, 700 wounded, as a ‘Success’
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 17 Jun 2024

On 8 Jun 2024, an Israeli military operation to free four Israelis from Hamas resulted in the massacre of hundreds of women and children. Israelis dance in the streets, the White House hails a ‘daring’ operation, Rishi Sunak expresses relief. How carnage and genocide in Gaza have become the new normal.

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Indeed, There Is No Comparison: Israel’s Crimes Are Far Worse Than Hamas’
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 May 2024

Benjamin Netanyahu is right to dismiss as “absurd and false” the suggestion that there is any equivalence in the atrocities committed by the two sides. Here’s why.

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Biden’s Genocide on Gaza Is Now a War on Truth and the Right to Protest
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 20 May 2024

10 May 2024 – The media’s role is to draw attention away from what the students are protesting – complicity in genocide – and engineer a moral panic to leave the genocide undisturbed.

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Official Lies and Narratives
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 6 May 2024

2 May 2024 – On tonight’s ‘BBC News at Ten,’ the narrative about the campus protests moved even deeper into the realms of mendacious fiction.

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How the Western Media Helped Build the Case for Genocide in Gaza
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Mar 2024

20 Mar 2024 – From obscuring the West’s role in starving Gaza to sensationalised accounts of mass rape by Hamas, journalists are playing the role of propagandists, not reporters.

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Torture, Executions, Babies Left to Die, Sexual Abuse… These Are Israel’s Crimes
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Mar 2024

15 Mar 2024 – Hostages tortured to death. Parents executed in front of their children. Doctors beaten. Babies murdered. Sexual assault weaponised. Why is the same western media obsessively reheating five-month-old allegations against Hamas so reluctant to focus on Israel’s current, horrifying atrocities?

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How the ‘Fight against Antisemitism’ Became a Shield for Israel’s Genocide
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 Mar 2024

7 Mar 2024 – Western capitals no longer treat Israel like a state, a political actor capable of slaughtering children, but rather as a sacred cause. So any opposition has to be a blasphemy.

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The Fates of Gaza and Julian Assange Are Sealed Together
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Feb 2024

23 Feb 2024 – Were they being properly reported, two critically important court hearings this week, in London and The Hague, would expose the US ‘rules-based order’ as a hollow sham

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In Waging War on the UN Refugee Agency, the West Is Openly Siding with Israeli Genocide
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 19 Feb 2024

30 Jan 2024 – Israel has long plotted the downfall of the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency, aware that it is one of the biggest obstacles to eradicating the Palestinians as a people.

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‘Are We the Baddies?’ Western Support for Genocide in Gaza Means the Answer Is Yes
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 1 Jan 2024

27 Dec 2023 – Western leaders have not only backed genocide by Israel on Gaza, but provided diplomatic cover, weapons and other military assistance. The West is fully complicit in the ethnic cleansing of two million Palestinians and the killing of more than 20,000 and the injuring of many tens of thousands more, a majority of them women and children. 

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Hamas ‘Mass Rape’ Claim Lacks Evidence–but It’s Being Used to Justify Genocide
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Dec 2023

18 Dec 2023 – The Western Media’s Refusal to Investigate What Happened on October 7 – Journalists are suppressing evidence from the Israeli military on its killings of many citizens, including the charred remains cited as proof of barbarism by Hamas.

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How Israel Uses an AI Genocide Program to Obliterate Gaza
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 Dec 2023

6 Dec 2023 – According to whistleblowers, Israel’s AI system is generating targets so fast, based on inputs so broad, that everyone in Gaza is in the crosshairs.

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Israel and Its Allies Are Repurposing the Goals and Lies of 1948 – in Gaza in 2023
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 Nov 2023

21 Nov 2023 – Israel is openly carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Yet, just as happened with the first Nakba in 1948, Israel’s lies and deceptions dominate the West’s media and political narrative.

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What the Mainstream Media Fail to Tell You about the 7 Oct Hamas Incursion
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 13 Nov 2023

2 Nov 2023 – It is journalistic malpractice for the media to still be repeating so credulously the Israeli military’s account of that day. And Israel’s actions – from bombing Palestinian families to starving them of food and water – has the blessing of every major western politician.

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Western Media’s Parroting of Official Lies Is Paving Way to Genocide in Gaza
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 23 Oct 2023

16 Oct 2023 – How did we get to the point where Israel can order half of Gaza’s population – more than one million people – to move from the north of their tiny prison to the south of their tiny prison? Catastrophe looms because journalists have failed to hold both Israel and their own governments to account.

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The West’s Hypocrisy Towards Gaza’s Breakout Is Stomach-Turning
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Oct 2023

8 Oct 2023 – There will be little sympathy in the West as, yet again, besieged Palestinians are bombed by Israel, their immense suffering justified by the term ‘Israeli retaliation.’

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Why the Media Aren’t Telling the Whole Story of Libya’s Floods
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Sep 2023

15 Sep 2023 – The reality of the West’s current foreign policy – marketed under the principle of a “Responsibility to Protect” – is all too visible amid Libya’s flood wreckage. There are reasons for Libya’s ‘chaotic’, ‘dysfunctional’ response to the disaster. And to identify them, we need to look closer to home.

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NATO Isn’t Defending Ukraine–It’s Stabbing It in the Back
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 17 Jul 2023

14 Jul 2023 – The US and its allies are sustaining the very war they now cite as grounds for disqualifying Kyiv from NATO membership.

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Daniel Ellsberg Is Lauded in Death by the Same Media That Ignores Assange Rotting in Jail
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Jun 2023

20 Jun 2023 – The stark difference in treatment of the two truth-tellers is a measure of how state criminality is now completely unchecked.

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Another Act of Terror–How the Media Do PR for Biden and Zelensky
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 19 Jun 2023

14 Jun 2023 – Coverage of the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and Nord Stream Pipelines shows a western media willing to prioritise anti-Russian propaganda over facts.

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British Warmongering Is Driving Europe Towards Catastrophe in Ukraine
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 29 May 2023

24 May 2023 – From lobbying for fighter jets to supplying depleted uranium, the UK is making sure escalation is the only way forward.

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Nakba at 75: Israel’s State-Building Project Is Unraveling – From Within
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 May 2023

17 May 2023 – Israel’s undoing will not be an attack from Arab states or international sanctions. Rather, its leaders have created a monster they can no longer tame.

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Western Media’s Peculiar Incuriosity about Nord Stream
Jonathan Cook | Consortium News – TRANSCEND Media Service, 1 May 2023

26 Apr 2023 – Seymour Hersh’s investigation is filled with details that could be checked ­— and verified or rebutted — if anyone wished to do so.

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Why the Media Don’t Want to Know the Truth about the Nord Stream Blasts
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 17 Apr 2023

11 Apr 2023 – First, journalists lapped up Russian culpability. Now they peddle a preposterous James Bond-style story. Anything to ignore the US role.

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How BBC Coverage Is Enabling Israeli State Violence at Al-Aqsa
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 10 Apr 2023

6 Apr 2023 – Once again, the British state broadcaster is using a bogus ‘neutrality’ to trick its audience into siding with Israeli state oppression.

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How Social Networks Became a ‘Subsidiary’ of the FBI and CIA
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 Feb 2023

20 Feb 2023 – THE BIG STORY: The Twitter Files have lifted the lid on a secret alliance between Silicon Valley, intelligence agencies and the political establishment.

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Why the Western Media Is Afraid of Julian Assange
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 6 Feb 2023

Text of my talk at #FreeTheTruth: Secret Power, Media Freedom and Democracy, London, 28 Jan 2023. Other speakers: former British ambassador Craig Murray and Italian investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi. Jeremy Corbyn presented the Gavin MacFayden award to Julian Assange for being “the journalist whose work most exemplifies the importance of a free press”. Craig Murray accepted it on Assange’s behalf.

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Russia-Ukraine War: How the US Paved the Way to Moscow’s Invasion
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Jan 2023

10 Jan 2023 – Nearly a year after Russia’s invasion, the western narrative of an ‘unprovoked’ attack has become impossible to sustain.

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Why German State Racism Is Now Directed at the Palestinians
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 28 Nov 2022

23 Nov 2022 – The Holocaust serves, paradoxically, as an alibi for Europeans to assume they are morally superior to others, as the cancellation of an arts prize to Caryl Churchill shows.

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Westerners Live in Denial Convinced They’re the Good Guys
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 17 Oct 2022

14 Oct 2022 – Stark contradictions in West’s treatment of the Ukraine war and the occupation and siege of Palestine should serve as a wake-up call.

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Can Europe Afford to Turn a Blind Eye to Evidence of a US Role in Pipeline Blasts?
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 10 Oct 2022

6 Oct 2022 – The sabotage of the two Nord Stream pipelines leaves Europeans certain to be much poorer and colder this winter, and was an act of international vandalism on an almost unimaginable scale. The attacks severed Russian gas supplies to Europe and caused the release of enormous quantities of methane gas, the prime offender in global warming. 

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Europe, More Than Putin, Must Shoulder the Blame for the Energy Crisis
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 19 Sep 2022

14 Sep 2022 – The same arrogant, self-righteous posturing from the West that fuelled the Ukraine war is now plunging Europe into recession.

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How the Pentagon Dictates Hollywood Storylines
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 8 Aug 2022

4 Aug 2022 – New documentary discloses the ways western publics are softened up for aggressive, global US militarism through the Pentagon’s influence over thousands of films and TV shows.

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By Making China the Enemy, NATO Is Threatening World Peace
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 Jul 2022

8 Jul 2022 – NATO’s new posture towards Beijing brings into question its whole claim to be a ‘defensive’ alliance.

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A Lemming Leading the Lemmings: Slavoj Žižek and the Collapse of the Anti-War Left
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 Jun 2022

23 Jun 2022 – The left has sunk a long way since the Iraq war. The renowned public intellectual Slavoj Žižek is the latest recruit to the war hawk camp over Ukraine.

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The Persecution of Julian Assange
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 9 May 2022

4 May 2022 – According to UN torture expert, the UK and US have colluded to publicly destroy the WikiLeaks founder – and deter others from exposing their crimes.

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Russia-Ukraine: Western Media Are Acting as Cheerleaders for War
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 14 Mar 2022

4 Mar 2022 – Journalists are cheering on the arming of militias and civilians making improvised explosives – acts they usually treat as terrorism. It’s suddenly sexy to make IEDs – at least, if the media consider you white, European and “civilised“.

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Pegasus Spyware Row Is Really about Who Controls Cyber Weapons
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 7 Feb 2022

31 Jan 2022 – Washington’s ban on NSO Group is not about safeguarding human rights. It’s about curbing Israel’s dominance of ‘espionage diplomacy.’

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Amnesty Apartheid Report: The Walls Protecting Israel Are Finally Crumbling
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 7 Feb 2022

2 Feb 2022 – The walls protecting Israel are quickly crumbling. A year ago, it was the human rights group B’Tselem. Months later, Human Rights Watch. Now, Amnesty International – an organisation widely viewed as the most authoritative arbiter of what constitutes human rights violations.

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Covid’s Lesson: When Anxious, Isolated and Hopeless, We’re Less Ready to Think Critically
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 10 Jan 2022

6 Jan 2022 – The corporate media is not our friend. The aim of its coverage of the pandemic is not to promote the public good. It is there to feed our anxieties, keep us coming back for more and monetize that distress.

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Assange Ruling a Dangerous Precedent for Journalists and British Justice
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 13 Dec 2021

10 Dec 2021 – The High Court’s ruling paves Assange’s way to a US trial following ‘assurances’ he will not be mistreated. But the US has been persecuting Assange for a decade after he exposed its war crimes.

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Military Pollution Is the Skeleton in the West’s Climate Closet
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 15 Nov 2021

8 Nov 2021 – The US, Israel and the UK are the triumvirate of villains of the climate talks. Their armed forces are the most polluting on the planet – and the goal at COP26 is to keep that fact a closely guarded secret.

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By Calling the Fight for Palestinian Rights ‘Terror’, Israel Turns Reality on Its Head
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 1 Nov 2021

25 Oct 2021 – The aim is to embarrass Europe into defunding Palestinian human rights groups who have been effective at documenting Israeli war crimes, and therefore prevent further scrutiny.

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Amazon and Google: Partners in Israeli Apartheid
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Oct 2021

19 Oct 2021 – Amazon and Google aren’t just doing business with Israel. Through Project Nimbus, they are actively helping to build and improve the technological infrastructure Israel needs to oppress Palestinians.

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CIA Plan to Poison Assange Wasn’t Needed–the US Found a ‘Lawful’ Way to Disappear Him
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 Oct 2021

30 Sep 2021 – The reality of Julian Assange’s years of persecution is far worse than even the picture painted by a new investigation of a thuggish, power-mad CIA bent on vengeance for his role in exposing its crimes.

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Despite Its Exit, the US Will Continue to Wage War on Afghanistan
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 20 Sep 2021

14 Set 2021 – Ever the bad loser, Washington will be tempted to crush the Taliban with sanctions and covert operations, unleashing more chaos.

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On Child Vaccines, the Experts Are Suddenly Reluctant to Follow ‘the Science’
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 13 Sep 2021

4 Sep 2021 – In the rancour over child vaccinations, we have been given a fleeting peek behind the curtain of official medical debate to see the uncertainty that has been actively concealed from us. “The science” is not quite as solid as it seems.

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Craig Murray’s Jailing Is the Latest Move in a Battle to Snuff out Independent Journalism
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 9 Aug 2021

30 Jul 2021 – The supreme court’s refusal to hear Craig Murray’s appeal against his unprecedented conviction for ‘jigsaw identification’ means the British state is now effectively credentialising journalists. Only corporate journalists will be safe from state retribution.

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Israel’s New Government Will Deepen Rifts, Not Heal Them
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 7 Jun 2021

4 Jun 2021 – Ignore all the talk of a historic, post-Netanyahu era in which settlers and ‘Arabs’ work together in government. The new coalition will quickly turn sour – and Israel’s large Palestinian minority will, as always, pay a heavy price.

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In Our Hurry to Conquer Nature and Death, We Have Made a New Religion of Science
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Apr 2021

19 Apr 2021 – We are not conquerors of our bodies, of the planet, of the universe – and if we imagine we are, we will soon find out that the battle we’re waging is one we can never hope to win.

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Picnic Video Exposes Both Faces of Israeli Apartheid
Jonathan Cook | Mondoweiss – TRANSCEND Media Service, 8 Mar 2021

17 Feb 2021 – Israel upholds a system of Jewish supremacy over the land, and it doesn’t matter whether those challenging its apartheid rule are Palestinian subjects without rights or “Arab” citizens supposedly with full rights.

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By Putting Big Pharma’s Patents before Patients, Doctors Will Further Erode Trust in Experts
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 8 Mar 2021

2 Feb 2021 – It is not just that expert institutions have been captured wholesale by corporate elites over the past 40 years and that, as a result, knowledge, experience and expertise have been sidelined in favour of elite interests – though that is undoubtedly true. The problem runs deeper: these institutions were rarely as competent or as authoritative as we fondly remember them being. They always served elite interests.

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Why Politicians and Doctors Keep Ignoring the Medical Research on Vitamin D and Covid
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 15 Feb 2021

15 Feb 2021 – 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.

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The ‘Humanitarian’ Left Still Ignores the Lessons of Iraq, Libya and Syria to Cheer on More War
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Jan 2021

22 Jan 2021 – The instinct among parts of the left to cheerlead the right’s war crimes dressed up as liberal “humanitarianism” is alive and kicking even after two decades of the horror shows that followed the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US and UK; the western-sponsored butchering of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi unleashing a trade in slaves and arms; and the west’s covert backing of Islamic jihadists who proceeded to tear Syria apart.

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Israel Is Losing the Fight to Obscure Its Apartheid Character
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Jan 2021

14 Jan 2021 – New report by rights group B’Tselem will make it harder to smear Israel’s critics as antisemites for arguing that Israel is a racist state. For more than a decade, Israeli politicians and US diplomats from the “peace process industry” warned that, without a two-state solution, Israel is in danger of becoming an “apartheid state”.

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Claims of Antisemitism Conceal a Reign of Political and Cultural Terror across Europe
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Dec 2020

11 Dec 2020 – The perverse secular priorities of European culture now place the sanctity of a militarised state, Israel, above the sanctity of a religion with a billion followers.

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How Gulf States Became Business Partners in Israel’s Occupation
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Dec 2020

14 Dec 2020 – Since signing the Abraham Accords, the UAE and Bahrain have been actively colluding with Israel’s settler movement and military authorities.

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Capitalism Is Double-Billing Us: We Pay from Our Wallets only for Our Future to Be Stolen from Us
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 2 Nov 2020

25 Oct 2020 – Externalities may sound like innocuous jargon, but they and the economic system that requires them are killing us, our children and the planet. Focusing on how externalities work and how they have come to dominate every sphere of our lives is to understand how we are destroying our planet – and offer at the same time the waypost to a better future.

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Social Media’s Erasure of Palestinians Is a Grim Warning for Our Future
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 2 Nov 2020

26 Oct 2020 – There is a growing unease that the decisions taken by social media corporations can have a harmful impact on our lives. Facebook, Google and Twitter are not neutral platforms. They control the digital public square to aid the powerful – and can cancel any of us overnight.

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The Guardian’s Deceit-Riddled New Statement Betrays Both Julian Assange and Journalism
Jonathan Cook - TRANSCEND Media Service, 5 Oct 2020

26 Sep 2020 – A decade ago, remember, the newspaper worked closely in collaboration with Assange and WikiLeaks to publish the Iraq and Afghan war diaries, which are now the grounds on which the US is basing its case. The paper barely bothered to cover the hearing, even though it is the most concerted attack on press freedom in living memory.

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The US Is Using The Guardian to Justify Jailing Assange for Life–Why Is the Paper So Silent?
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 28 Sep 2020

22 Sep 2020 – Julian Assange is not on trial simply for his liberty and his life. He is fighting for the right of every journalist to do hard-hitting investigative journalism without fear of arrest and extradition to the United States. Assange faces 175 years in a US super-max prison.

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For Years, Journalists Cheered Assange’s Abuse. Now They’ve Paved His Path to a US Gulag
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 7 Sep 2020

2 Sep 2020 – Court hearings in Britain over the US administration’s extradition case against Julian Assange begin in earnest next week. The decade-long saga that brought us to this point should appall anyone who cares about our increasingly fragile freedoms. A journalist and publisher has been arbitrarily deprived of his liberty for 10 years and tortured for much of that time through intense physical confinement and endless psychological pressure.

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Writers’ Open Letter against ‘Cancel Culture’ Is About Stifling Free Speech, Not Protecting It
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 20 Jul 2020

9 Jul 2020 – It is easy to agree with the letter’s generalised argument for tolerance and free and fair debate. But the reality is that many of those who signed are utter hypocrites, who have shown precisely zero commitment to free speech, either in their words or in their deeds. Further, the intent of many them in signing the letter is the very reverse of their professed goal: they want to stifle free speech, not protect it.

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As US Protests Show, the Challenge Is How to Rise Above the Violence Inherent in State Power
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 8 Jun 2020

2 Jun 2020 – Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin would not have been charged with the murder of George Floyd had the US not been teetering on a open revolt. Had demonstrators not turned out in massive numbers on the streets and refused to be corralled back home by the threat of police violence, the US legal system would have simply turned a blind eye to Chauvin’s act of extreme brutality, as it has done before over countless similar acts.

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Profiting From Loss: How Business in Illegal Israeli Settlements Continues Unchecked
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 2 Mar 2020

18 Feb 2020 – After lengthy delays, the United Nations finally published a database last week of 112 businesses that have been profiting from Israel’s illegal annexation and settlement activity in the West Bank. UN efforts to protect Palestinian land from economic exploitation are failing and exposing the hypocrisy of western states.

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Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’ Won’t Bring Peace – That Was the Plan
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 3 Feb 2020

29 Jan 2020 – The White House has discarded the traditional US pose as an “honest broker” between Israel and the Palestinians. Palestinian leaders were not invited to the ceremony. This was a deal designed in Tel Aviv more than in Washington. The proposal deliberately includes a host of unrealisable preconditions before what remains of Palestine can be recognized.

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Hebron Plan Is Israel’s Reminder to Palestinians That Settler-Power Knows No Limits
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Dec 2019

10 Dec 2019 – With its plan for a new Hebron settlement, Israel has reminded Palestinians that there are no limits – military, legal, moral or diplomatic – to the settlers’ power. Israel will annex land where it chooses and deceptively refashion the resulting apartheid system as the rule of law.

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Capitalism’s Suicidal Trajectory Can’t Be Ignored
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Nov 2019

20 Nov 2019 – If we make it out of the climate emergency, we may view the decades that followed WWII as halcyon days – at least relative to now. But the stark reality is that we are in a sinking boat – the sinking boat of capitalism. The hole is growing and water rushing in faster by the day.

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How the Hand of Israeli Spy Tech Reaches Deep into Our Lives
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Nov 2019

11 Nov 2019 – Digital age weapons developed by Israel to oppress Palestinians are rapidly being repurposed against Western populations who have long taken their freedoms for granted. Israeli software used on Palestinians is producing new cyber weapons that are rapidly being incorporated into global digital platforms.

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Israel Is Silencing the Last Voices Trying to Prevent Abuse of Palestinians
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 Nov 2019

10 Nov 2019 – It is a sign of Israel’s overweening confidence in its own impunity that it so openly violates the rights of those whose job it is to monitor human rights. Palestinians, meanwhile, are rapidly losing the very last voices prepared to stand up and defend them against the systematic abuses associated with Israel’s occupation.

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UN Expert’s Call to Stop Israeli Settlement of Palestinian Territories Falls on Deaf Ears
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Nov 2019

27 Oct 2019 – The judge who laid down the legal architecture needed to establish Israel’s settlements has just died. But his legacy has inspired a fresh generation of jurists to create new mechanisms for dispossessing the Palestinians.

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US Democrats Cultivated the Barbarism of ISIS
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Oct 2019

18 Oct 2019 – There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria. One does not need to defend Trump’s actions or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the departure of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger picture.

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Uninhabitable: Gaza Faces the Moment of Truth
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 14 Oct 2019

13 Oct 2019 – Israel has ignored warnings by the UN that Gaza is about to become uninhabitable, acting as if Palestinians there can be caged, starved and abused indefinitely. Now crises are unfolding on all fronts – social, economic, political and humanitarian. The Dahiya Doctrine: “We will apply disproportionate force on [any area resisting Israel] and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan.”

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Sur Baher Home Demolitions Illustrate a Vicious Spiral of Oppression in Palestine
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 5 Aug 2019

28 Jul 2019 – Recent events have shone a spotlight not only on how Israel is intensifying its abuse of Palestinians under its rule, but the utterly depraved complicity of western governments in its actions. The more the West represses criticism, the more Israel luxuriates in its impunity.

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In Bahrain, the Horizon of Peace Stretched Further Away from Palestinians
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 1 Jul 2019

30 Jun 2019 – The Peace to Prosperity workshop, held in Manama, is just the latest in a long-running series of impossible propositions. As with previous peace plans, Donald Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ makes impossible demands of the Palestinians. The aim once again is to force the Palestinians to reject it – and provide Israel with a pretext to seize more of their homeland.

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Jerusalem’s Old City: How Palestine’s Past Is Being Slowly Erased
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Jun 2019

20 Jun 2019 – Israel has controlled East Jerusalem and the walled Old City since the 1967 war in which it also occupied the adjacent West Bank. The Israeli occupation has left its physical and political mark within the historic walls, with most Palestinians barred from visiting Al-Aqsa

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Trump Enjoys Bipartisan Support for His Plan to Eradicate the Palestinian Cause
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 17 Jun 2019

15 June 2019 – The White House’s prolonged financial bullying of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians’ government-in-waiting, has reached the point where there are now credible warnings that it is close to collapse. The US seeks to engineer a suitable regional environment before it begins implementing the ‘deal of the century’.

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Abuses Show Assange Case Was Never About Law
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 3 Jun 2019

27 May 2019 – It is astonishing how often one still hears well-informed, otherwise reasonable people say about Julian Assange: “But he ran away from Swedish rape charges by hiding in Ecuador’s embassy in London.” That short sentence includes at least three factual errors. In fact, to repeat it, as so many people do, you would need to have been hiding under a rock for the past decade – or, amounting to much the same thing, been relying on the corporate media for your information about Assange.

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The Western Media Is Key to Syria Deceptions
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 May 2019

24 May 2019 – By any reckoning, the claim made this week by al-Qaeda-linked fighters that they were targeted with chemical weapons by the Syrian government in Idlib province – their final holdout in Syria – should have been treated by the western media with a high degree of scepticism. That the US and other western governments enthusiastically picked up those claims should not have made them any more credible.

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(Français) Sept années de mensonges sur Assange et ce n’est pas fini
Jonathan Cook | Investig’Action – TRANSCEND Media Service, 15 Apr 2019

14 Avr 2019 – Depuis sept ans, depuis le moment où Julian Assange s’est réfugié à l’ambassade équatorienne à Londres, ils nous disent que nous avions tort, que nous étions des théoriciens du complot paranoïaques. On nous a dit qu’il n’y avait aucune menace réelle d’extradition d’Assange vers les États-Unis, que tout cela était dans notre imagination fiévreuse.

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A Liberal Elite Still Luring Us towards the Abyss
Jonathan Cook - TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Feb 2019

27 Jan 2019 – A group of 30 respected intellectuals, writers and historians has published a manifesto bewailing the imminent collapse of Europe and its supposed Enlightenment values of liberalism and rationalism… There are small voices struggling to be heard above the roar of the dying liberal elites and the trumpeting of the new authoritarians. They need to be listened to, to be helped to share and collaborate, to offer us their visions of a different world.

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Inside Banksy’s The Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Dec 2018

We check in to Banksy’s bizarre Palestinian hotel, where the hospitality is as peculiar as the message is powerful.

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From Marc Lamont Hill to the Quakers, No Criticism of Israel Is Allowed
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 10 Dec 2018

7 Dec 2018 – The reactions to Marc Lamont Hill, the Quakers and Airbnb reveal that in practice there is no criticism of Israel that will be treated as legitimate – and that when it comes to the suffering of Palestinians, the only acceptable stance is silence.

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The Guardian Ups Its Vilification of Julian Assange
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 3 Dec 2018

28 Nov 2018 – It is welcome that finally there has been a little pushback, including from leading journalists, to the Guardian’s long-running vilification of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. The Guardian story will prepare public opinion for the moment when Ecuador’s rightwing government under President Lenin Moreno forces Assange out of the embassy, having already withdrawn most of his rights to use digital media.

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Brazil’s Bolsonaro: A Monster Engineered by Our Media
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 5 Nov 2018

30 Oct 2018 – Social media and fake news are apparently the reasons Bolsonaro won at the ballot box. Without the gatekeepers in place to limit access to the “free press” the rabble has supposedly been freed to give expression to their innate bigotry. This is now the default consensus of the corporate media, whether in its rightwing incarnations or of the variety posing on the liberal-left end of the spectrum like the Guardian. The people are stupid, and we need to be protected from their base instincts. Social media, it is claimed, has unleashed humanity’s id.

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The Neoliberal Order Is Dying -Time to Wake Up
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Sep 2018

20 Sep 2018 – In my last blog post I argued that power in our societies resides in structure, ideology and narratives – supporting what we might loosely term our current “neoliberal order” – rather than in individuals. Significantly, our political and media classes, who are of course deeply embedded in this neoliberal structure, are key promoters of the very opposite idea: that individuals or like-minded groups of people hold power; that they should, at least in theory, be held accountable for the use and misuse of that power; and that meaningful change involves replacing these individuals rather than fundamentally altering the power-structure they operate within.

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Why We Are Blind to the System Destroying Us
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Sep 2018

15 Sep 2018 – I rarely use this blog to tell readers what they should believe. Rather I try to indicate why it might be wise to distrust, at least without very good evidence, what those in power tell us we should believe.

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Our Broken System Has No ‘Moderate’ Devotees
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 17 Sep 2018

13 Sep 2018 – Western politics is tearing itself apart, polarising into two camps –it is the narrative of corporate media. The warring camps are “moderate centrists” and “extreme right”. But what if this isn’t a feud between two opposed ideological camps but rather two differing – and irrational – reactions to the breakdown of late-stage capitalism as an economic model, a system that can no longer offer plausible solutions to the problems of our age?

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There Is a Deeper, Darker Agenda Afoot as the US Cuts UNRWA Funding
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 3 Sep 2018

The US State Department said on Friday [31 Aug] it would no longer continue its $360 million annual contributions to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, depriving it of a third of its budget. The move follows an announcement last week that Washington had slashed $200 million from other aid programmes for the Palestinians. Refugees are the final loose end in forcing Palestinians to accept Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ peace plan.

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Uri Avnery, TRANSCEND Member and Israeli Activist for a Palestinian State, Dead at 94
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 Aug 2018

20 Aug 2018 – Uri Avnery, a self-confessed former “Jewish terrorist” who went on to become Israel’s best-known peace activist, died in Tel Aviv today, following a stroke. He was 94.

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Israel Is Bulldozing Khan Al Ahmar – And with It the Two-State Solution
Jonathan Cook – TRANSCEND Media Service, 9 Jul 2018

8 Jul 2018 – Israel finally built an access road to the West Bank village of Khan Al Ahmar last week, after half a century of delays. But the only vehicles allowed along it are the bulldozers scheduled to sweep away its 200 inhabitants’ homes. If one community has come to symbolise the demise of the two-state solution, it is Khan Al Ahmar.

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