Harry's Place

Join the protest
Global Action Day – 26 June 2009 – Free the jailed union leaders and May Day activists
Friday, 26 June 2009, in London
12:30pm to 1.30pm
Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 16 Princes Gate, London SW7 1PT
(parallel to Kensington Road, not far from the Royal Albert Hall).
Join trade unionists, exiled Iranians and human rights [...]

In Iran, trade unionists are martyrs in the true sense of the word: i.e. in that they are imprisoned and tortured for their beliefs, as opposed to blowing themselves up in mosques and marketplaces.
Those of us who are on the Left honour their sacrifice.
But not to Andy Newman, so it seems.
Here is a very [...]

This is a guest post by Chas Newkey-Burden 
I’ve long admired Alan Dershowitz. I remember reading his superb book The Case For Israel, cover to cover, during a red-eye flight back to Britain from New York City. It was a key moment in turning me further away from the widespread default position of liberal British gentiles: [...]

Read more about outraged British academics’ campaign to boycott Iranian universities after the murder of students and protesters and the trashing of university dormitories and the fixing of an election and the suppression of minorities and the public hanging of gay teenagers, er, where exactly?
Meanwhile Tom Gross has an excellent round-up media coverage of [...]

Dave Dudley, Leninist Vanguard (personal capacity)
Democracy denied.
Middle class reformists thwarted.
A shadowy council of scholars and elders holding forth.
Left activists in Britain pontificating that we shouldn’t judge others by our own standards of democracy.
I am, of course, referring to reports coming out following the SWP’s special conference convened to debate the question of members’ democracy within [...]

Anti-Zionism is the trojan horse through which the ideas and arguments of the extreme Right have entered the extreme Left.
Here are a few examples.
- SWP/UCU’s Tom Hickey standing in front of Ismael Patel’s ‘anti-Zionist’ reading list. The list includes the Holocaust denier, Roger Garaudy.
- the Scottish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign’s John “International Jewry” Wight, who supports [...]

Watch George Galloway on PressTV – the very definition of a lickspittle!
The most remarkable point of the programme comes at 5 minutes 30. A black South African calls up to compare the Iranian elections to politics under apartheid. Galloway actually has the gall to support and defend the Iranian system.
He cuts the black South African [...]

Guest post by Judeosphere
Yvonne Ridley– Talibanette and Press TV broadcaster– has weighed in with her views of the current unrest in Iran:
Despite my efforts, I could not find one single mainstream newspaper which covered the Iranian elections in an objective way. Exactly the same thing happened when the Palestinians swept Hamas to power–in its arrogance [...]

There is something pleasingly redemptive about the life story of John Bercow. He’s kid from a comprehensive school, who rose to become Secretary of the Immigration and Repatriation Committee of the very right wing Tory ginger group, the Monday Club. Yet, by 2002, he had resigned from the Tory front bench, over IDS’s last ditch [...]

This is a guest post by Nora Mulready
Over the last three years I have had hundreds of conversations with people about life in Iran. I have long believed Iran’s to be a deeply repressed society in which freedom is curtailed in the name of religion and by an assortment of ‘holy men.’ I was initially [...]