Harry's Place

This is a guest post by Aesop
Once upon a time there was a boy who looked after the sheep for his village. Every now and again a wolf would come and eat one of the sheep, and some of the villagers would complain; but the boy enjoyed looking after the sheep, so he would say “What do you mean, a wolf? I didn’t [...]

In the light of Lauren Booth’s remarkable and outspoken attack on the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, it is clear that the leadership of the PSC are facing a moment of choice: as a mainstream political movement that supports Palestinian self determination, or as a racist movement, whose membership promote and support antisemitism and Holocaust denial. The [...]

On Saturday, Lauren Booth published an extraordinary attack on the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and a defence of Gilad Atzmon and various PSC officeholders who were suspended for links with Holocaust deniers and antisemitism.
The PSC is now facing a grass roots rebellion: a predicament, largely of its own making. Later this morning, I will publish [...]

Nick Lowles of Hope not Hate has been accused of lying by Gilad Atzmon in a thoroughly nasty little article, ‘Hope not Hate? Truth not lies more likely’.  Atzmon, in a later post, accused Lowles of ‘falsifying documents’ relating to correspondence with the Dean of Bradford.  The Dean has now clarified his position, and exonerated [...]

By Eric Lee of LabourStart (cross-posted from Workers’ Liberty)
Last week’s LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference in Istanbul was meant to be an extraordinary event. Activists from the newly-independent unions of the “Arab Spring” countries were due to meet with colleagues from established unions from both developed and developing countries.
As Canadian union activist Derek Blackadder put it, [...]

Here’s a report from National Public Radio about the Afghan girls taking classes in English and computer technology at the Afghan-Canadian Community Center in Kandahar.
Their hunger to learn– to make up for the years under the Taliban when schooling was forbidden to girls– is palpable. It certainly puts me and my relative laziness in [...]

Some refreshingly level-headed observations from Anshel Pfeffer in Haaretz:
CAIRO – “We want a democracy like in Israel.” I heard this sentence twice in January, once in a shopping center in Tunis and a second time on a street near Tahrir Square in Cairo. When I tell people that neither of the men who said this [...]

From Terry Glavin’s book Come from the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan, pages 195-196:
… It was while I was waiting for an all-clear signal in a sand-bagged blast-wall bomb shelter that I quizzed Corporal Erik Lindholm of Victoria, twenty-five, a founding editor of Absolute Underground, a magazine with [...]

This shouldn’t go unmentioned:
Thousands of Muslims and Jews across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa participated last weekend in The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding’s (FFEU) 4th annual Weekend of Twinning.
Since 2008, FFEU has organized hundreds of similar initiatives around the world in cooperation with the World Jewish Congress and the Islamic Society of [...]

When I posted recently on youth unemployment hitting one million, I expressed some alarm over Dominic Raab’s suggested solutions: cut the minimum wage for young people and reduce employment rights.  So it seems only fair to report that the Coalition now appears to be following a very different route with its investment in schemes to [...]