Matthew Carr's Blog, page 59
July 18, 2014
Flight MH17: A Pretext for War?
It is too early to know what happened to Flight MH17. It may indeed have been shot down by Russian separatists, as the Ukraine government and its western allies are claiming. Or it may have been shot down by forces … Continue reading →
July 16, 2014
Threats
As our governments never cease to remind us, the world is a dangerous and unstable place where catastrophe is always waiting just around the corner, and where the evil ones are always seeking to do us harm. Luckily, here in … Continue reading →
July 13, 2014
The Deaths of Others: 10 ways that Israel justifies the killing of Palestinians
Modern war is rarely limited to the ‘battlefield’ or war zone. Today’s wars are also waged in tv news studios, chat shows and op ed columns, in what the Pentagon calls ‘public diplomacy’ or ‘information warfare’ that attempts to shape … Continue reading →
July 11, 2014
Walter White, Aneurin Bevan, and the end of the NHS
There can’t be many fans of tv crime drama who are unaware of the grim trajectory of Walter White in the hit series Breaking Bad. To those who don’t know, White begins the series as a humble chemistry teacher diagnosed … Continue reading →
July 9, 2014
Gaza’s Groundhog Day
After nearly a month of trying, Netanyahu and his hawkish government have got their war, and once again the Palestinians of Gaza have borne the brunt of it. Last night Israel carried out 160 air strikes on the Gaza Strip, … Continue reading →
July 8, 2014
The Honourable Woman
I tend to be wary of Western films and dramas about the Middle East. Too often they tend to reduce Middle Eastern politics to easily digestable and simplistic tropes whose primary purpose is entertainment. As Jack Sheehan has pointed out … Continue reading →
July 6, 2014
Obama’s New Threat
America has always had a contradictory and ambivalent attitude towards the outside world. On the one hand it celebrates its heritage as a nation of immigrants and a place of refuge, to whom the Statue of Liberty holds out a … Continue reading →
July 4, 2014
Leaving the Huffington Post
Since 2011 I have posted 66 of my blog posts on the UK Huffington Post website. It has been for me, an odd and often disconcerting experience, to find myself on the same website as Alistair Campbell, Cherie Blair, or … Continue reading →
July 3, 2014
One, two, three viva l’Algerie
Algeria is not a country that has had much to celebrate recently. In the 1990s, the Algerian government’s refusal to accept an imminent Islamist victory in national elections prompted a savage conflict between the ruling FLN and an array of … Continue reading →
July 2, 2014
Netanyahu’s Blood Feud
There is nothing that Benjamin Netanyahu likes better than a self-righteous act of retributive violence against Palestinian ‘terrorists’, and the murders of the three kidnapped Israeli teenagers have given him an excuse in spades. From the moment these teenagers disappeared, … Continue reading →
