These are the plain texts of the latest three 'Dear Scotland' posts. To get the illustrated originals please subscribe to have them e-mailed directly:
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Oct 8
In today’s Scotsman, Martin O’Gorman defends the indefensible - the UK’s political and military support of the settler colonialist project that is Israel. Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism in which settlers create societies distinct from the indigenous population and seek to control land and resources and establish their own economy and system of governance.
The UK is a pro at settler colonialism, having practiced it for centuries (and is currently practicing it on Scotland). It passed its know-how on to its former colony, which “settled and colonised” America, killing and displacing millions of native Americans while importing slave labour from Africa.
Now America’s middle eastern settler colonial project known as Israel, with vast financial and military assistance from the US, has for the last 76 years “settled and colonised” Palestine, culminating in the current genocide of its people. The daily horrors of exploding body parts in Gaza has now spread to Lebanon, all instigated by Israel’s psychopathic addiction to killing.
It’s not fanatical, Mr. O’Gorman, to resist a brutal and illegal occupation, the constant slaughter of innocent men, women and children, and the systematic destruction of one’s culture, society and history.
The fanatical terrorist in the Middle East is not Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran, but Israel. Israel is the alien splinter of settler colonialism that the west inserted into the region to secure its unfettered access to oil, aided and abetted by western compliant dictators like el-Sisi, Abdullah and Mohammed Bin Salman. In the last year alone, Israel has bombed Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran - five sovereign states that predate the existence of Israel.
The UK is a puny power hanging on for dear life to America’s coattails, but both are going down. The western world order, founded on settler colonialism, is dying before our eyes.
I hope Scotland has the foresight and courage to get out before it’s too late.
Oct 10
Who is Viceroy Murray kidding when he boasts that “Labour will lift people out of poverty - again”?
He cites the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s most recent report on poverty in Scotland, which makes me wonder if he’s even read it:
“It [UK government] still holds the majority of the responsibility for the social security system and while many of its weaknesses pre-date the current government, in its manifesto the Labour Party (at a UK level) committed to ‘reviewing Universal Credit so that it makes work pay and tackles poverty’. There is much to do for the new UK government to keep up its end of the social contract in Scotland.”
The report recommends the UK “remove the benefit cap and 2-child limit,” neither of which Starmer will do. 2000 families in Scotland are impacted by the former which the Scottish administration has tried to alleviate through discretionary housing payments. Ditching the 2-child limit would lift 10,000 kids out of poverty.
The report calls for other changes only the UK can make and stresses that these are MINIMAL. It begs the UK government to rebuild the tattered social contract and praises the Scottish administration:
“The introduction of the Scottish Child Payment (SCP) and the reforms to how disability benefits are delivered show initial steps to an improved system…. we predict that the SCP would reduce child poverty in Scotland by around 4% between 2020-23 and 2024-25.”
It’s a reason Scotland’s child poverty rate (24%) is lower than in England (31%) and Wales (28%).
The UK state is failing because it’s failing its people and most egregiously, its children. The Viceroy’s English Labour party, which Danny Dorling says ‘lost its soul’ in the late ‘90s, is in bed with its corporate donors, so will do nothing to alter the trajectory of this failing state.
The Scottish People need to end this farce.
Oct 11
Two days ago, the GrayZone journalist Jeremy Loffredo was beaten, kidnapped, blindfolded and taken to an Israeli military base by the Israeli Offensive Forces (IOF) along with 4 other journalists.
Four were released but Loffredo remains captive. His crime? Doing journalism. He was reporting on the damage Iranian missiles inflicted on the Nevatim airbase and near Mossad’s Tel Aviv HQ earlier this month, which Israel is keen to conceal from the rest of the world. He is being charged with “aiding the enemy.”
You can watch Loffredo’s last dispatch from Israel here, where he reported:
“Since the missile strikes, Israeli authorities have attempted to downplay the significance of the attacks, censored the locations of missile impacts from media publication, and claimed that Iranian missiles targeted Israeli civilians.
What I saw today, here in Israel, is clear evidence that Iran was targeting the same Israeli intelligence and military infrastructure that has been used over the past year to carry out brutal assassinations and attacks.”
Loffredo’s attorney said:
“[He] published the information openly and fully, without attempting to hide anything. If this information constitutes aiding the enemy, many other journalists in Israel, including Israeli reporters, should also be arrested.”
The 28-year-old could face life imprisonment or even the death penalty. What does the United States have to say about Israel’s brutal treatment of an American citizen doing his job? Nothing, so far.
This despite the fact that US media outlets PBS and ABC News openly featured the aftermath of the Iranian missile strikes but face no such charges.
The latest information is that the Israeli judge overseeing the case ordered Loffredo’s release because the Israeli military censors allowed Israeli media to publish both word of his arrest and the publications that led to it, so could no longer justify his detention. However, the Israeli police have appealed the decision, so Loffredo remains in custody until tomorrow’s appeal hearing.
It’s not just Israel and the US that are preventing journalists from reporting Israel’s crimes. In August, Richard Medhurst was arrested at Heathrow on August 15th on charges under Section 12 of the UK’s Terrorism Act of 2000. Section 12 of the Act criminalises opinion and can lead to a sentence of up to 14 years in prison. He was held for 24 hours and was accused of “allegedly expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization.” He was never given a clear reason for his arrest, but believes it stems from his reporting on Israel’s genocide, in which the UK is complicit. He lives in Vienna but must report to a UK police station in 2 months.
“I felt the whole process is meant to intimidate you and make you feel like you’re being crushed by the state, by the government, that the government is in control … You’re not allowed to say anything, and you have to shut up and accept this.”
At the end of August, UK journalist Sarah Wilkinson was arrested for content she published online about the genocide in Gaza. Her house was raided by 16 plainclothes police officers, her electronic devices were confiscated and the urn containing her mother’s ashes was desecrated.
The same day as her arrest, the co-founder of Palestine Action, Richard Barnard, was charged with 3 offences under the Terrorism Act 2000 for comments he made in two speeches.
So-called democratic governments are waging an all-out war on free speech, threatening, intimidating and imprisoning ordinary citizens and the few brave journalists who are trying to do their job - to inform the citizenry and hold power to account.
Unless more of us speak up and openly resist these fascist moves by our governments, those of us who express opinions at odds with state-sanctioned narratives could face the same fates.
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