Harry's Place

So, it is almost that Global Peace and Unity time of year again.
Regular readers of Harry’s Place will remember that, every year, the Islam Channel invites some of the most extreme and nasty Islamists – supporters of attacks on our troops, of terrorism (outside the UK, of course), Holocaust denial, wife beating, and so on [...]

With his insufferable sucking-up to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, film director Oliver Stone has long reminded me of the pro-Soviet leftwing power worshipers identified by Orwell during World War II.
Nonetheless I consider his “Wall Street” the great iconic movie of the 1980s and I’ve been sort-of looking forward to the sequel.
But I’m not sure [...]

In 1776 the United States declared their independence. Part of the Declaration of Independence was an attack on King George III, and this I shall ignore. But there is a passage towards the beginning of the declaration that I have always admired. This passage is learned and can be recited by heart by many Americans [...]

The Sunday Mirror reports that Ed Balls is reported to be considering a decision to abandon his lacklustre Labour leadership bid after he failed to win the backing of Britain’s biggest union Unite. The union has thrown its weight behind Ed Miliband.
Ed Miliband is now backed by Unite and the GMB. With Balls doing poorly [...]

Or at least some American Trotskyists are somewhat smarter than some British Trotskyists– sometimes.
(First, a word of explanation: one Trotskyist groupuscule, the US Socialist Workers Party, publishes a newspaper called The Militant. The slightly more significant International Socialist Organization [ISO] publishes a website called, um, Socialist Worker.)
During its convention this year the US SWP conducted [...]

In the past I’ve ridiculed a subset of American liberals and Democrats for an annoying tendency to threaten to leave the country– most often for Canada– if things don’t go their way politically. In the end, they rarely do. And at least some liberals have a sense of humor about it:

But there’s a corresponding (and [...]

Cross-posted from For a democratic secular Iran
At a time like this all efforts should be made to expedite regime defections. The whole establishment has run out of options and could crumble like a pack of cards if the right push is given. What is happening to the defected Iranian diplomat, Abolfazl Eslami in Japan, does [...]

This is a cross post by Carmel Gould at Just Journalism.
Scathing critiques of Israeli policy are the bread and butter of Guardian writer, Rachel Shabi. However, in her latest contribution, ‘Israel turns upon its own,’ published in print and online, she goes much further than the facts will carry her.
Depicting an alleged descent by Israel [...]

This is a cross-post from Mark Gardner at the CST Blog.
Now, from the very deepest depths of ‘whatever will they think of next’ comes news that iconic 1970s pop group, Boney M, were requested by the organisers of the Palestine International Festival in Ramallah to not sing their hit number, “By the Rivers of Babylon”.
Regrettably [...]

This is a cross post by Dave Rich of the CST
The Jewish Chronicle reports that the government has announced measures to amend the law on universal jurisdiction for war crimes. The proposed change will take the power to issue an arrest warrant out of the hands of local magistrates, so that it rests solely with the [...]