Category: activism
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Why I am wearing that Palestinian badge today

An appeal from a Palestinian woman A year ago we were all shocked (well, those of us paying attention were shocked) to hear of a Palestinian boy reprimanded for turning up at school with a Palestinian flag badge on his coat. Yesterday, I heard Dr Zahira Jaser talking about what it’s like being a Palestinian…
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To AirBnB or not to AirBnB…?

Murder and theft in Palestine is the question. In November, I wrote to the London office of AirBnB. I said… I signed up as an AirBnB host a couple of years ago, partly because I had a bedroom I could spare for a while and it answered the problem of rising household bills, partly because…
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The most extraordinary thing I learned from Marilyn Garson

There are 30 million Christian Zionists in the United States, and there are only 16 million Jews on the planet. Therefore the colonialist project known as Zionism is not primarily a Jewish force. What’s more, with the rise of post-colonialist, anti-racist attitudes in the younger generation, the overlap between Jews and Zionists is getting steadily…
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An entirely selfish request

(A request from me that is, not Richard Medhurst, who is merely asking that random police forces could please stop arresting him and nicking his kit.) It’s like this: I’ve been reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. It’s the size of a brick, but not really the kind of brick you’d take…
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Hastings – How do we take back our town?

This week, a citizen who happened to be a councillor happened to be at an assemblies planning meeting I went to. She informed me that our borough council is doomed. ‘It’s done and dusted,’ she said. The last couple of years have been a rollercoaster of first-priority issues for anyone even remotely involved in politics.…
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Hastings Genocide Memorial Day

Like many people up and down the country, a group of us gathered in Hastings on Saturday 1st February 2025 in support of Palestine. It was a complex event. First and foremost, we were saying STOP ARMING ISRAEL. But as politicians and the media push us to ‘move on’, just because of an extremely fragile…
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Are we doing democracy?

The EU referendum was my first big dilemma after I’d got myself involved in Party politics. At very short notice, David Cameron was asking us for a vote on a complex topic most of us didn’t know much about, and most politicians responded with diatribes about how badly wrong other politicians were, with simplistic catch-phrases…
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Prepare to support your trans comrades

(This is a re-edit of a post from 2022 ( original here ) republished with a few notes in brackets because — well, here we are again, Trump and all, and a heck of a lot of people have learned nothing.) No, I am not saying be ‘a trans ally’. That’s identity-politics nonsense, it’s being…
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DT stands for delirium tremens

“Delirium primarily involves alterations of attention and is characterized by a fluctuating course, difficulty with concentration, and altered mental status. Tremens refers to the tremors seen in patients with delirium tremens.” Shall I say DT instead of Donald Trump from now on? It happens around the third day a person is deprived of (or chooses…
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Unbearable MPs

Hastings is one of many towns that’s been enduring an MP who can never talk about Palestine without first agonizing over October 7th. No context, no proportionality. It’s hard to see it as anything but callous, wilful ignorance and you know, I really don’t think they have any idea just how much they have destroyed…