Israel’s choice for Palestinians: starve or be killed

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Original article by Tanupriya Singh republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Screenshot from Israeli drone footage of the flour massacre.

Israeli forces killed at least 112 Palestinians after opening fire on a crowd awaiting a food aid truck in northern Gaza on February 29. The massacre took place as one quarter of Gaza’s population is at imminent risk of famine while Israel continues to blockade aid to the besieged strip.

Israeli forces massacred at least 112 people and injured more than 750 when they opened fire on starving Palestinians in the south west of Gaza City on February 29. The “Flour Massacre”, as it is now being called, took place in the early hours of Thursday morning, when people had gathered at the Harun al-Rashid Street awaiting a convoy of aid trucks carrying flour believed to be en route.

Manufactured famine

Israel has decimated northern Gaza in its ongoing, five-month long bombardment of the besieged Strip, and has virtually cut off humanitarian aid, pushing 576,000 people— or one quarter of Gaza’s population— “one step away from famine”.

One in six children under the age of two in Gaza are suffering from acute malnutrition and wasting, with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warning of a “complete agricultural collapse” in northern Gaza by May.

On February 25, the head of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) had stated that the last time aid had entered northern Gaza was January 23, stating that calls to send food aid had “been denied and have fallen on deaf ears”.

On February 20, the UN World Food Program had announced that it was pausing the delivery of “life saving food aid” to northern Gaza. This was despite the fact that aid deliveries had resumed just two days prior after a three-week suspension after an attack on a UNRWA truck.

“In these past two days our teams witnessed unprecedented levels of desperation,” the WFP said, as starving people tried to climb onto trucks to access food. Meanwhile, the agency stated that its trucks had faced gunfire upon entering Gaza City and had distributed only a small quantity of food.

Thursday’s aid convoy was not organized by the UN, but had been coordinated by the Israeli forces.

At least 10 children have died from malnutrition and dehydration in hospitals in northern Gaza, the Palestinian Ministry of Health announced on Thursday, including four children at the Kamal Adwan Hospital and two at Al-Shifa.

It is under these horrific circumstances, with families consuming animal feed to survive, that the first aid trucks in nearly a month entered northern Gaza this week. The Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) had claimed that 31 trucks had entered northern Gaza on February 28. It stated that 20 other trucks had entered on Monday and Tuesday.

Starving Palestinians shot and ran over 

“At about 4:30 in the early morning, trucks started to trickle in. The Israelis just opened random fire on us as if it was a trap. Once we approached the aid trucks, the Israeli tanks and warplanes started firing on us,” a witness had also told Al Jazeera, describing Thursday’s massacre.

After the shooting, Israeli tanks ran over the bodies of those who had been killed and others who lay injured, Al Jazeera’s journalist, Ismail Al-Ghoul had reported. He added that the injured had been rushed to the Al Ahli and Jordanian hospitals, however, “hospitals are no longer able to accommodate the huge number of patients because they lack fuel, let alone medicine”.

Gaza-based human rights organization, Al Mezan, also stated that the intense shooting by the IOF had gone on for an hour and a half.

Videos showed the dead and injured being escorted to the hospitals on donkey-drawn carts.

After releasing a doctored aerial drone footage clip, the Israeli occupation forces claimed that “dozens” of people had been killed and injured resulting from a stampede and that some people had been run over by the trucks. It went on to claim that it had not fired directly at the people around the trucks, and that instead, “armed men” had reportedly fired at the convoy and looted it.

While the Israeli military claimed that the shots had been aimed at the legs of the crowd, the head of the Kamal Adwan Hospital stated that the bullets had been concentrated in the head and upper parts of the bodies. The acting director of the Al-Awda hospital, which had been forced to suspend services earlier this week due to a lack of supplies, also told the Associated Press that of the 176 wounded people brought to the hospital, 80% had gunshot injuries.

The Israeli military later went on to alter its initial claims, saying that a small group of people had moved towards an Israeli tank and soldiers “in a way that endangered” them, after which its forces opened fire. It has claimed responsibility for “fewer than 10 of the casualties”, as reported by the Times of Israel.

In a video statement on Thursday night, military spokesperson Daniel Hagari claimed that there had been no Israeli military strike on the aid convoy and repeated the Occupation’s claim that “Israel puts no limits on the amount of aid that can go into Gaza”. This is demonstrably false as has been made clear by the images, testimonies and reports of starvation that are coming out of Gaza. According to the Euro-Med Monitor, aid deliveries to Gaza in February fell by 50% as compared to January.

Residents from northern Gaza told the organization that they had received calls from the Israeli military ordering them to move towards central and southern Gaza to access food and water. Meanwhile, not only has Israel restricted the entry of trucks into the Strip, it has continued to carry out military operations, targeting civilian police officers tasked with guarding the convoys, and shelling and shooting at people waiting to receive aid, the organization noted.

“Intentionally depriving people of food is clearly a war crime. Israel has announced its intention to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part, simply for being Palestinian. In my view as a UN human rights expert, this is now a situation of genocide,” UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, stated in an interview with the Guardian, earlier this week.

“This means the state of Israel in its entirety is culpable and should be held accountable – not just individuals or this government or that person.”

Israeli impunity and concerns surrounding aid airdrops 

While Hagari had tried to bolster Israel’s “humanitarian” credentials, Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir released a statement on X saying that “total support” must be given to Israeli forces in Gaza “who acted excellently against a Gazan mob that tried to harm them.”

“Today it was proven that the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza is not only madness while our abductees are being held in the Strip under substandard conditions, but also endangers the IDF soldiers. This is another clear reason why we must stop transferring this aid, which is in fact aid to harm the IDF soldiers and oxygen to Hamas.”

However, the Israeli narrative was seemingly unconvincing for most. Thursday’s massacre has drawn sharp international condemnation, including by the United Nations, China, Turkey, Qatar, Lebanon, Jordan, Australia, Italy, Brazil, France, and others. While condemning the “bread massacre”, Colombian president Gustavo Petro also announced that the country would be suspending weapons purchases from Israel, adding that the “whole world must blockade [Israeli PM] Netanyahu”.

Meanwhile, an emergency session of the UN Security Council was convened on Thursday to discuss the massacre. However, a draft declaration prepared by Algeria expressing “deep concern” over the killings and noting that they had been caused by Israeli forces opening fire, was ultimately blocked by the US. “The parties are working on some language to see if we can get to a statement”, US deputy ambassador Robert Wood said, adding that “the problem is that we don’t have all the facts”.

Speaking ahead of Thursday’s meeting, Palestinian Ambassador Riyad Mansour had stated that Thursday’s massacre “is a testimony to the fact that as long as the Security Council is paralyzed and vetoes casted, then it is costing the Palestinian people their lives”.

“[T]he Security Council should say enough is enough and if they have a spine and determination to put an end to these massacres from happening, all over again, what we need is a ceasefire”.

US and Western powers scramble to construct “the other side” of the massacre

During a US State Department press briefing on Thursday, spokesperson Matthew Miller was asked by veteran journalist Said Arikat whether anyone but Israel was holding aid from going into Gaza. Miller responded saying that there was solely a “distribution problem” “because there are police officers, some of whom are members of Hamas, who have been providing the security for that distribution and what Israel says is that they have a legitimate right to go after members of Hamas”.

When asked to confirm that “you don’t have any doubt that only one side did the shooting and the killing and the shelling of these people”, Miller said he had seen “different reports” that “other people were shooting” and that they were waiting for an investigation.

Israel’s allies in the west, including Germany and European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen have similarly sought “explanations” and investigations instead of explicitly condemning Thursday’s killings. Even when condemnations have been made, the language remains evasive and the perpetrator unnamed, with the killings called a “carnage among civilians”.

While consistently obstructing any kind of international intervention against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, all while handing the Occupation the tools to carry out the massacres, the US is now reportedly considering air-dropping aid to Gaza.

As Israel has continued to impede air delivery through land routes, Jordan and Egypt have airdropped small amounts of aid into Gaza in recent days, with harrowing visuals emerging of Gazans wading into the sea as some of the packages fell into the water. Belgium also announced on Friday that it would airdrop aid.

While a necessary measure under the circumstances, those working in humanitarian and aid agencies, such as Refugees International head and former USAID official, Jeremy Konyndyk have stated that aid airdrops must be recognized “as a form of bureaucratic obstruction by Israel”.

“Facilitating airdrops – and driving media coverage around them – gives the public appearance that Israel is cooperating with humanitarian efforts. But ensures that the amounts of aid getting in are negligible enough to still perpetuate the overall blockade strategy.”

The fact that the US is now considering airdrops can be seen as yet another attempt for it to whitewash Israel’s crimes and its own complicity in them— including the 17 year long brutal siege of Gaza, giving Israel the power to engineer hunger in the besieged strip, a power the Zionist entity has also used in the past.

Original article by Tanupriya Singh republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue ReadingIsrael’s choice for Palestinians: starve or be killed

The War on Gaza and Israel’s Fascism Debate

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https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-war-on-gaza-and-israel-s-fascism-debate

Western critics of Israel’s apartheid policies and far-right government are frequently accused of antisemitism, but leftist and left-liberal Israelis have been decrying the country’s descent into fascism for years. In this article, Alberto Toscano argues that fascism is embedded in the logic of Israel’s colonial project.

Green-lit by Western governments and described by myriad human rights law experts as demonstrating clear ‘genocidal intent’, the State of Israel’s retaliation against Hamas’s Al Aqsa Flood October 7 attack has also elicited talk of fascism in multiple quarters. In a collective statement, the Birzeit University Union of Professors and Employees has spoken of ‘colonial fascism’ and of the ‘pornographic call to death of Arabs by settler Zionist politicians across the political lines’; in their own declaration, the Communist Party of Israel (Maki) and the left-wing coalition Hadash ‘put the full responsibility on the fascist right-wing government for the sharp and dangerous escalation’; meanwhile, Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro described the onslaught on Gaza as the ‘first experiment to deem all of us disposable’ in a ‘global 1933’ marked by climate catastrophe and capitalist entrenchment. Even quoting these lines probably falls foul of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which has served as an important instrument in efforts to curtail peaceful international solidarity activism against Israeli apartheid, especially in the guise of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. 

And yet the recognition of an incipient fascism in the latest Netanyahu government and even Israeli society at large seems, if not mainstream, certainly prominent in public discourse in Israel itself, not least in the wake of protests against the recent judicial reforms aimed at eviscerating the vaunted autonomy of Israel’s Supreme Court. Four days before the Hamas attack, the newspaper Ha’aretz published an editorial under the heading ‘Israeli Neo-Fascism Threatens Israelis and Palestinians Alike’. One month earlier 200 Israeli high school students declared their refusal to be conscripted thus: ‘We decided that we cannot, in good faith, serve a bunch of fascist settlers that are in control of the government right now.’ In May, a Ha’aretz editorial opined that the ‘sixth Netanyahu government is beginning to look like a totalitarian caricature. There is almost no move associated with totalitarianism that has not been proposed by one of its extremist members and adopted by the rest of the incompetents it comprises, in their competition to see who can be more fully full fascist,’ while one of its editorialists described an ‘Israeli fascist revolution’ ticking off all items in the checklist, from virulent racism to a contempt for weakness, from a lust for violence to anti-intellectualism. 

These recent polemics and prognoses were anticipated by prominent intellectuals like the renowned historian of the far Right Ze’ev Sternhell, who wrote of ‘growing fascism and a racism akin to early Nazism’ in contemporary Israel, or the journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery, who escaped Nazi Germany at age ten, and who, not long before his death in 2018, declared that 

the discrimination against the Palestinians in practically all spheres of life can be compared to the treatment of the Jews in the first phase of Nazi Germany. (The oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories resembles more the treatment of the Czechs in the “protectorate” after the Munich betrayal.) The rain of racist Bills in the Knesset, those already adopted and those in the works, strongly resembles the laws adopted by the Reichstag in the early days of the Nazi regime. Some rabbis call for a boycott of Arab shops. Like then. The call ‘Death to the Arabs’ (‘Judah verrecke’?) is regularly heard at soccer matches.

But the fascism ‘godfathered’ by Netanyahu cannot just be reduced to fundamentalist settlers and their stratagems of dispossession (including the deep tendrils into the state of Smotrich’s settler NGO, Regavim, and its lawfare against Palestinian land and property rights); it is also firmly anchored in the business interests and legislative maneuvers of billionaires who, in Israel as in India or the US, are happy to combine national-conservative mobilisations against decadent metropolitan ‘elites’ with the ruthless defense of profit and privilege. In a recent interview, the Israeli Holocaust historian Daniel Blatman observed

Do you know what the biggest threat is to the continued existence of the State of Israel? It’s not Likud. It’s not even the thugs who run wild in the territories. It’s the Kohelet Policy Forum [a reference to a conservative, right-wing think tank supported by wealthy U.S. donors]. […]  They are creating a broad social and political manifesto which, if adopted eventually by Israel, will turn it into a completely different country. You say “fascism” to people and they picture soldiers cruising the streets. No. It won’t look like that. Capitalism will still be extant. People will still be able to go abroad – if they are allowed into other countries. There will be good restaurants. But a person’s ability to feel that there is something protecting him, other than the regime’s good will – because it either will or not protect him, as it sees fit – will no longer be there. Israeli society was ripe to receive the present government. Not because of Likud’s victory, but because the most extreme wing pulled everyone after it. What was once extreme right is today center. Ideas that were once on the fringes have become legitimate. As a historian whose field is the Holocaust and Nazism, it’s hard for me to say this, but there are neo-Nazi ministers in the government today. You don’t see that anywhere else – not in Hungary, not in Poland – ministers who, ideologically, are pure racists.

Its insights notwithstanding, this passage also painfully demonstrates what liberal Israeli polemics against the rise of fascism bracket. Namely, Palestinians. Soldiers do cruise the streets in Israel and occupied Palestine. Millions of people ruled by Israel cannot go abroad. Or indeed return home. The ‘pure’ racism voiced without compunction by the likes of Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir is a product of the racism that structures and reproduces colonial domination, for bad faith liberals as much as for giddy fascists. 

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/the-war-on-gaza-and-israel-s-fascism-debate

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Survivors mark 79 years since the liberation of Auschwitz

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/survivors-mark-79-years-since-the-liberation-of-auschwitz

People light candles by the monument at the Birkenau Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, Poland, January 27, 2024

SURVIVORS of Nazi death camps marked 79 years since the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau at a modest ceremony in southern Poland on Saturday.

About 20 survivors of various camps set up by Nazi Germany across Europe laid wreaths and flowers and lit candles at Auschwitz’s Death Wall, where thousands of inmates, mostly Polish resistance members and others, were executed.

Later the group, along with state officials and other participants, gathered for a ceremony by a brick women’s barrack at nearby Birkenau that has recently undergone conservation.

The group prayed and lit candles at the monument in Birkenau, near the crematoria ruins, to remember around 1.1 million camp victims, mostly Jews.

Events were also held in many other countries to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates the Nazis’ killing nearly six million European Jews and countless others.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/survivors-mark-79-years-since-the-liberation-of-auschwitz

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Coming soon

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I need to start opposing USUK’s intention to start WW3 in support of Israel and the status quo, injustice, genocide, war crimes, and in opposition to human rights and democracy, about how UK not only does not have a mandate but is acting despite huge demonstrated opposition to it’s actions.

Continue ReadingComing soon

The Western Double Standard Enabling Attempted Genocide in Gaza

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Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants' surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

I can only quote an excerpt of this article. Recommended.

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/west-enabling-genocide-in-gaza

Philo-Zionism now holds that to “stand with” the colonizing state of Israel is not to hate Palestinians, but to love Jews; but to stand with the Palestinian liberation is not to love Palestinians, or humanity, justice, or freedom, but to hate Jews. This results in the conflation of Palestinian liberation with antisemitism, and the criminalization of solidarity with Palestinians across Europe and the U.S.

The shocking statement by U.S. President Joe Biden that the October attack by Hamas was “as consequential as the Holocaust” is replete with dark meaning. The ubiquitous refrain that Hamas is “evil,” and that the group’s attack was the worst attack against Jews since the Holocaust, transforms the Palestinian struggle from an anti-colonial one to an antisemitic one.

It relocates the terrain from which Palestinians act from one rooted in their own history and lived experiences to a Eurocentric drama familiar to Western publics, in which the only significant actors are evil Nazis, innocent Jewish victims, and their American and allied saviors.

Christian and Jewish enthusiasts for Israel are thus confirmed in their conviction that Palestinians are not resisting a colonizing state that was built coercively on their land—one that has devastated their lives, brutalized their families, and besieged, exiled, harassed, intimidated, humiliated, incarcerated and murdered them for decades with impunity. Rather, Palestinians kill Israelis simply because they hate Jews.

Only the total denial of Palestinian history and context makes such a preposterous conclusion tenable. And it makes genocide possible once again.

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/west-enabling-genocide-in-gaza

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Zelensky and Trudeau lead ovation for Waffen SS veteran in Canada’s parliament

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/zelensky-and-trudeau-lead-ovation-waffen-ss-veteran-canadas-parliament

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recognize Yaroslav Hunka, who was in attendance and fought with the First Ukrainian Division in World War II before later immigrating to Canada, in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Friday, Sept. 22, 2023.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau recognize Yaroslav Hunka, who was in attendance and fought with the First Ukrainian Division in World War II before later immigrating to Canada, in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Friday, Sept. 22, 2023.

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY and Justin Trudeau led the Canadian Parliament in a standing ovation for a Waffen SS veteran on Friday evening.

Mr Hunka was applauded for fighting against the Soviet Red Army with the “first Ukrainian division” — as the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (“Galicia”), a largely Ukrainian Nazi collaborator unit, was renamed in March 1945 as Germany was on the point of losing the war.

Following the incorporation of openly neonazi units like the Azov and Aidar battalions into the Ukrainian military, the incident underlines the way the war is being used to rewrite history and rehabilitate fascist collaborators while depicting the Soviet Union as the aggressor in World War II.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/zelensky-and-trudeau-lead-ovation-waffen-ss-veteran-canadas-parliament

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ITV News | Coronation Arrests and Police Oppression | 6 May 2023 | Just Stop Oil

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00.50am. https://www.itv.com/news/london/2023-05-06/animal-rights-activists-bemoan-met-police-arrests-miles-away-from-coronation

The Animal Rising activist group, who interrupted the Grand National earlier this year, alleged that 14 of its members were detained in the borough of Hackney, “several miles away from the coronation”.

In a statement, it said the arrests took place during “an all-day nonviolence training” workshop that had been “publically advertised”.

In a statement released later on Saturday evening, the Metropolitan Police said it arrested 14 people in East London “on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”.

https://www.itv.com/news/london/2023-05-06/animal-rights-activists-bemoan-met-police-arrests-miles-away-from-coronation

Continue ReadingITV News | Coronation Arrests and Police Oppression | 6 May 2023 | Just Stop Oil

Braverman accused of adopting fascist tactics in grooming gang crackdown

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I noticed these nasty dog-whistle politics from Braverman. It struck me that the Fascists that Braverman is reaching out to – since they are often poorly educated and engage in mistaken and misleading stereotypes – would in all likelyhood recognise Braverman and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as ‘Pakis’. It’s desperate politics.

4/3/23 To clarify the term Paki will not be applied correctly according to ethnicity or heritage. It’s abuse applied to anyone not quite white who tans easily, certainly Braverman and Sunak.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/braverman-accused-of-adopting-fascist-tactics-in-grooming-gang-crackdown

SUELLA BRAVERMAN was accused of “borrowing from fascists and Nazis” today by singling out Pakistani men as being responsible for grooming girls for sexual abuse in Britain.

The Home Secretary has caused outrage after yet more inflammatory language when addressing the government’s crackdown on grooming gangs.

She said a “predominance of certain ethnic groups – and I say British Pakistani males” saw women “in a demeaned and illegitimate way and pursue an outdated and frankly heinous approach in terms of the way they behave.”

But the singling out of a specific ethnic group flies in the face of previous Home Office-commissioned research, which found most group child sex offenders are men under the age of 30, and the majority are white.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/braverman-accused-of-adopting-fascist-tactics-in-grooming-gang-crackdown

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Civicus rates UK civil liberties and democracy alongside Serbia, Kyrgyzstan, Hungary and Burkina Faso in annual survey, amid government’s war on civil rights – but there will be no improvement under a Starmer government

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Original article republished from the Skwawkbox for non-Commercial use.

The map of Civicus-rated countries

The UK’s democracy and civil life have been downgraded to ‘obstructed’ in the Civicus annual survey of almost two hundred countries, because of the Tories’ assault on rights of protest and strike. ‘Obstructed’ is just one level above the ‘repressed’ status of countries such as Kazakhstan, Guatemala or Jordan and puts the UK on a par with countries like Burkina Faso, Hungary and Kyrgyzstan.

In fact, the UK’s rating should arguably be worse, as the Civicus index does not appear to take into account the importance of functional political media to hold governments to account and the UK’s media structure is fundamentally broken, with most media acting as Establishment mouthpieces, apologists and cheerleaders on many issues, keeping the public in the dark and suppressing unrest.

Tragically for the people of this country, the situation is likely to get worse rather than better. ‘Opposition’ leader Keir Starmer, a ‘long-time servant of the security state’ has amply demonstrated that is fully on board with the government’s attacks on democratic and civil rights and on proper journalism.

Since the assault on Corbyn’s Labour succeeded, the UK continues to slide into fascism.

Original article republished from the Skwawkbox for non-Commercial use.

Continue ReadingCivicus rates UK civil liberties and democracy alongside Serbia, Kyrgyzstan, Hungary and Burkina Faso in annual survey, amid government’s war on civil rights – but there will be no improvement under a Starmer government