Palestine

The National Museum of American History is part of the celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Surrounded by mock Graeco-Roman edifices with their soaring Corinthian columns, rampant eagles and chiselled profundities, it is at the centre of Empire, though the word itself is engraved nowhere. This is understandable, as the likes of Hitler and Mussolini were proud imperialists, too: on a “great mission to rid the world of evil”, to borrow from President Bush.

In a cover piece for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the US and Israel have finally resolved the problem of the Palestinians, who voted for the “wrong” government. They are to starve them while missiles are fired at their homes and picnickers on a beach.

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger breaks the taboo of the latest ‘potential’ bombs found in London. They are prime minister Gordon Brown’s bomb, too, the ‘inevitable consequence of the lawless invasion of Iraq’ which Brown backed and whose death toll now equals that of the Rwanda genocide.

In an article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how Gaza in Palestine has come to symbolise the imposition of great power on the powerless, in the Middle East and all over the world, and how a vocabulary of double standard is employed to justify this epic tragedy.

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the warnings of genocide in Gaza, and the suffering of 1.4 million Palestinians living a “life in a cage” as the world looks on.  He quotes Israeli journalist Amira Hass on the experience of her mother in a Nazi concentration camp and the Germans who watched, “looking from the side”.

In his latest article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the Palestinian breakout of Gaza offers inspiration for people struggling to bring down the new Berlin Walls all over the world.

In a column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes his first encounter with a Palestinian refugee camp and what Nelson Mandela has called “the greatest moral issue of our age” – justice for the Palestinians. ‘Something has changed’, he writes, referring to the world view of sanctions and a boycott against Israel.

In his latest article for the New Statesman, John Pilger applies to current events Orwell’s description in ‘1984’ of how the Ministry of Truth consigned embarrassing truth to a memory hole. He highlights the killing of a Palestinean cameraman by the Israelis as an example of how “we” are trained to look on the rest of the world as quite unlike ourselves: useful or expendable.

John Pilger writes that “as deserving as Tony Blair is of his George W. Bush Freedom Medal, others cry out for a place in his company”. Following Israel’s assault on Gaza, he offers two additional nominees.

Writing in the New Statesman, John Pilger calls on 40 years of reporting the Middle East to describe the ‘why’ of Israel’s bloody onslaught on the besieged people of Gaza – an attack that has little to do with Hamas or Israel’s right to exist.