Harry's Place

David Miliband’s leadership bid website davidmiliband.net has gone live and his promise to listen to what people have to say is core to the new site. It borrows heavily from the innovations of Barrack Obama’s digital campaign, which can only be a good thing, and that translates into a  focus on activism and getting the [...]

I am grateful to Paul Bogdanor for providing me with an article about Communist Cuba. I copy an extract below. If anyone else has kept any old newspaper or magazine articles that they think may be suitable for this series, please do send them in.

UN Report: About 6 Cubans Die Every Day Fleeing Island
Mimi [...]

Martin Bright’s letter to Ken Livingstone has been published in The Jewish Chronicle.
Dear Ken
I was shocked to see that you had called me “a bit of an Islamophobe” on the Iranian state TV channel Press TV in an interview with Andrew Gilligan. There is no evidence for your claim, which is highly defamatory, deeply upsetting [...]

Sunny Hundal, the Labour Tory Lib Dem Labour supporting blogger has written his oddest piece for some time.
It takes the form of an attack on the human rights activist, Gita Saghal. He ends with the following observation:
When you’re desperately trying to pretend the Catholic Church has done nothing wrong then you know something’s gone awfully [...]

Democracy village “Parliament Square Peace Strike” are a group of concerned citizens who are coming together to call for Peace, Justice and Freedom.
The issues which we campaign for are diverse e.g. Peace, an end to the war in Afghanistan, Climate Justice, Civil Liberties, Land Reform, Electoral Reform and much more. We are unified in our [...]

Some may recall a strange character called Alan Hart who has written two volumes of a book, entitled Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. The book was so atrocious that publishing house after publishing house turned the book down and so he self published it. Of course, he blamed the facts that no one [...]

A standard canard of the anti-Zionist far Left is that the Holocaust was in some sense a joint venture between the Nazis and the Zionists. The idea, you see, is that Zionists are so morally corrupt that – unlike all other national liberation movements – they will treat with the Nazis, whose ideological bedfellows they [...]

Republicans in Congress have launched a new website called America Speaking Out, which– according to its creator, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California– will “change the course of history.” The stated purpose is to gather ideas for a new GOP agenda, and then have participants give those ideas a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
As Dana Milbank of The [...]

The BBC reports:
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says it has given first aid training to Taliban members in Afghanistan.
An ICRC statement said the organisation had provided basic training and first aid kits to about 70 members of the “armed opposition” last month.
…
The spokesman said the ICRC’s constitution stipulates [...]

And this soft, pudgy hand is that of someone who purports to be in the vanguard of the proletariat? Has he ever done a day’s physical labor in his life?