Jonathan Cook Podcast

Israel is the only country in the world that does not recognise its own nationality. Why? Because a common national identity would sabotage Israel’s carefully veiled system of segregation. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Even if Starmer's likely successor, Andy Burnham, wants change, he'll face formidable external controls from the financial markets and insuperable internal constraints from the Labour machine. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Originally published here: Although my posts are freely accessible, they are reader-supported. If you liked this one or any of the others, please consider sharing it with friends and making a donation to support my work. You can do so by becoming a paid Substack subscriber, via Paypal or my bank account, or alternatively setting up a monthly direct debit mandate with GoCardless. A complete archive of my writings is available on my website. I’m on X and Facebook. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Labour wants the repression of Palestine Action to serve as a blueprint for politics. Why not lock up opposition party leaders and any constituents who protest government policy? Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

In October 2023, Israel found an excuse to breathe new life into an old story of slaughter and expulsion. The chief differences this time have been of scale and duration. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Judge Johnson so rigged the trial of anti-genocide activists that 1000s of legal professionals have urged him to step down from the sentencing hearing. But Johnson's dirty work is not yet complete. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

War and profit are intimately tied together. The billionaires cannot secure their profits without war, or the threat of it – whether against workers at home or against other nations abroad. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

The disorientating goal of the Israel lobby has been to loosen evidence thresholds, constrain critical thinking, and redefine racism and criminality. The effects have bled into dangerous new policing norms. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

What the past 20 years of lies and misdirections about Iran have sought to hide is a simple fact: it is not Tehran that is led by unhinged, genocidal megalomaniacs threatening the security of the region and the world. It is Tel Aviv and Washington. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Just as apartheid states always end up producing a violent, oppressive, surveillance institution like Israel's Shin Bet, capitalist states always end up producing voracious, unscrupulous, anti-democratic business entities like the corporation. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

The Epstein class are once again imposing a discourse trap for the anti-racist left on antisemitism. The question for Zack Polanski, as for Corbyn before him, is whether the spear of an insurgent politics can pierce the billionaires' defences. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Israel's genocide in Gaza and its ethnic cleansing in Lebanon have exhausted the West’s moral legitimacy. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the West’s military primacy. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

The real story of Starmer’s political subservience and vulnerability to Peter Mandelson is not being told by the establishment media. For good reason. Because the media itself is deeply implicated in this bigger story, of decade-long dirty tricks and illegality. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

From Jimmy Savile to Peter Mandelson, Sir Keir Starmer has proved he is the most clueless man ever to have entered high office. Here are a few highlights of his long history of career-enhancing ignorance. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Tony Blair proves there’s no price to be paid for engineering mass slaughter in the service of western empire. Which is why those crimes not only continue, but grow in scale. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Netanyahu pitched the war on Iran as a repeat of Israel’s apparent 'audacious feat' of smashing Hezbollah. The US president should have noted instead Israel’s moral and strategic defeat in Gaza. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

The joint US-Israeli war on Iran has thrust back into the spotlight a divisive debate about whether the dog wags the tail, or the tail wags the dog. Who is in charge of this war: Israel or the United States? Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Western publics are softened up for aggressive, global US militarism – of the kind now only too evident in the war on Iran – through the Pentagon’s chokehold on thousands of blockbuster films and TV shows. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Raffi Berg may be fighting in the courts for damages from Owen Jones, but it's really the BBC in the dock – for being utterly wedded to an editor whose objectivity on Israel is so clearly in question. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

There is no clear rationale from Washington for the attack on Iran because the author of this attack is not to be found in either the White House or the Pentagon. This plan was cooked up in Tel Aviv decades ago. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

In this catastrophic war of choice, it is Tehran fighting a rearguard action to restore geopolitical sanity. If Iran loses, god only knows where Israel and the US will drag the world next. The world’s fate, in a real sense, is in Tehran’s hands. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

At the Munich Security Conference, the US announced its intent to crush all opposition to its permanent status as imperial top dog – even if that means destroying everything, and all of us, in the process. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

The political and media classes that once venerated Mandelson and are now cutting him adrift are the same ones that spent five years destroying Corbyn. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Palestine Action wasn’t banned because it’s a terrorist organisation, a new documentary shows. It was banned because large corporations, like the weapons firm Elbit Systems, have captured the UK government. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

It took considerable courage for the jury in the Palestine Action trial to ignore the demands to convict from the judge, the government, the police and the media. Instead they weighed the actual evidence and found the prosecution case was legal chicanery. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

A handful of Jeffrey Epstein's most disposable allies will now be sacrificed to satisfy our hunger for accountability. But don’t be fooled: the Epstein culture is still going strong. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

International law is absolutely clear. If the US attacks Iran, it would be a war of aggression and the “supreme international crime”. The job of even supposedly liberal media like the Guardian is to persuade you this is not what is at stake. To disbelieve your lying eyes. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

The BBC is pushing the case for an illegal war on Iran with even bigger lies than Trump's. The UK state broadcaster streams disinformation into our living rooms – deceptions that not only leave us clueless about important international events but drive us ever closer to global conflagration. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Feckless European leaders like Keir Starmer let Israel and the US tear up international law in Gaza. Now, faced with Greenland and Ukraine, they are suffering from a severe case of buyer’s regret. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

A UK tribunal cleared British-Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu Sittah of misconduct charges initiated by UK Lawyers for Israel, over supposedly antisemitic social media posts. Yet, the media still sides with the utterly discredited apologists for genocide. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

A new film about Hind Rajab's murder points to a deeply sick Israeli society, driven into the darkest of places by a racist ideology that says Jewish lives count, Palestinian lives don’t. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Difficult as it is for westerners to hear, we don’t need a stronger West, we need a weaker one. Harder still, Donald Trump is teaching us that the very concept of 'the West' is an illusion. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

The path to Caracas – and potentially next to Mexico, Colombia, Cuba and Greenland, other targets of Donald Trump’s colonial greed – was paved in Gaza. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Israel is expelling 37 aid groups – a likely death sentence for 100,000s of Palestinians. But the New York Times speaks only of 'new rules' in Gaza, and 'suspensions' for those who 'resist registration' Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Starmer's government has set the most dangerous of precedents: it can now outlaw any political group it chooses as a terrorist organisation – and thereby make it impossible to defend it. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

While western publics are being demonised as racists, the technology and strategies used today against Palestinians will become the walls of tomorrow’s prisons for us all. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Sir Mark Rowley, your primary concern is not public safety but protecting the interests of the British establishment. And it has decreed that no opposition to Israel’s genocide will be tolerated. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Netanyahu, a suspected war criminal and fugitive from justice, is being given a platform by every western news outlet to turn reality on its head and blame others for a supposed “crisis of antisemitism” he is centrally responsible for stoking. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

A world where corporations run the politicians, promote endless war and secretly manipulate public opinion through the media. Thankfully, these bleak visions never materialised. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

The band Primal Scream had the audacity to tell its audience that the British government is complicit in genocide. They have been reported to the police for doing so, and the UK media is once again baying for blood. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Israel has penned us all into a 'debate', one entirely divorced from reality, that relates only to those killed directly by its bombs and gunfire in Gaza – not the genocide it is waging by other means. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

The current trial in London of six peace activists for attacking an arms factory is proving just how determined the British state is to hollow out the public’s civil, political and legal rights to justify its continuing support for Israel’s slaughter of Gaza’s children. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

The film ‘Palestine 36’ is a potent reminder that the blueprint for Israel's depraved war crimes in Gaza were laid down by a British empire whose tyranny the Palestinians tried - and failed - to end. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Six political prisoners who targeted factories arming Israel's genocide are weeks into a hunger strike. But in contrast to the IRA's 1980s hunger strike, this one is being blanked by the media. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Ousting the review judge in the appeal against Palestine Action's proscription, and replacing him with a panel of three new judges, is a desperate attempt to create a veneer of judicial authority in support of the actions of Keir Starmer's outlaw government. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

The western media's failure to report the reality of Gaza didn’t start on 7 October 2023. It’s always been like this. I know because for 20 years I suffered firsthand the same editorial pressures now faced by my colleagues. Here’s why journalists won’t tell you the truth about Palestine. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

The BBC is now in a death loop: it grows ever more craven to the billionaires, shifting the political centre of gravity further rightwards, even as the billionaire-owned media claim it's too 'left wing'. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Isn’t Islam inherently violent? What stopped the Islamic world having an Enlightenment? Why are some Muslims so into head-chopping? And isn’t Hamas the same as Islamic State? I respond to four of the biggest fallacies about Islam. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

The legal and ethical earthquake from Israel’s carnage in Gaza was never going to be contained in Gaza. As the Maccabi Tel Aviv row shows, the shockwaves for Britain will keep growing louder. Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe

Starmer wanted punk band Bob Vylan prosecuted for chanting 'Death to the IDF!' Four months on, he's bullying the police to let Israeli football thugs into the UK to chant 'Death to the Arabs!' Get full access to Jonathan Cook at jonathancook.substack.com/subscribe