A NY Yankee in QE2's Court 🇵🇸 🇱🇧

👏👏👏

AIPAC pushing Trump to fight Iran on behalf of Israel The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a prominent pro-Israel lobbying group, has indeed been vocal in advocating US engage in military action against Iran

Acknowledge the Gaza Genocide The UN Commission found Israel guilty of four out of five acts specified in Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention against Palestinians

Greed ruins everything‼️

The Israeli Knesset has passed a bill allowing them to execute Palestinian hostages!

@Keir_Starmer You fight for your clients not the U.K. and not for our society

Ben Jamal and I face trial the week after next for organising peaceful protest on 18 January last year… Here is some of what happened that day

American Activist Kwame Ture Perfectly describing Z10NISM & it's founder in 55 seconds:

Trump isn't paying anyone, the taxpayers pay it all‼️ It’s important for people to understand the "government" means the taxpayer‼️ FOR PROFIT PRISON CAMPS‼️

Happy Birthday Dennis Skinner✊ 94 today🎂

This got Dennis Skinner kicked out of the House of Commons for one day. For Cameron though, the 'Dodgy Dave' label has stuck for 10 years... particularly after his tax arrangements were exposed in the Panama Papers and his $10 Million profit from the Greensill scam came to light.

The UK does not have a welfare problem. It's got a corrupt politician and corrupt political elite problem. It's got a billionaire problem. Tax the rich.

Just shut your mouth for a minute and just listen to them! They will confess to it all!

Dennis Skinner: 'After the 2nd World War and without a penny to spend we built a National Health Service, we built council houses, we found jobs for 600,000 servicemen, we introduced pensions for the old, free education... and at the end of it unemployment was only 2.2%'

Soon all the people who still remember the horror of life for working class people before the creation of the NHS will be dead... and their testimony will become hearsay to those who would strive to capitalise on ill health. Harry Leslie Smith reminds us:

By now, I’m sure many of you have watched this exchange between @CarriePrejean1 Carrie Prejean Boller and an American Jewish Zionist leader. I am deeply grateful for her courage. This confrontation sheds light on two issues that have shaped public discourse for years: the definition of Zionism, and the increasingly aggressive claim that being anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic. I’m also grateful that more and more Americans are finally beginning to see the problem we have been pointing to for years: the attempt to impose one definition and one set of rules on the rest of the world—rules everyone is simply expected to accept without question. Let me be clear: the central problem with Zionism is not complicated. Zionism established a homeland for the Jewish people on someone else’s land. Palestine was not empty. This is not a theoretical debate for Palestinians. We are the people who have lived the consequences: dispossession, expulsion, fragmentation, military rule, and erasure—Muslims and Christians alike. (And yes, I have the same objection to any state built on an exclusive religious identity. A state should belong to all its people.) But Israel was founded on the land of others—and its exclusive identity continues to dismiss, marginalize, and erase half the population. What makes this even more troubling is that this project is repeatedly presented as something “Christian,” as if Christians are obligated to endorse it—something Carrie made clear she does not support as a Catholic. This is precisely why moments like this matter: they expose how the conversation is manipulated. Again and again, they mischaracterize what you are actually saying. Being anti-Zionist does not mean that Israel does not have the right to exist. Being anti-Zionist means Israel does not have the right to exist as a state built through the expulsion of Palestinians, and sustained by policies that treat Palestinians as second-class citizens—including, by the way, Palestinian Christians. So pay attention to the tactic: they try to change the rules of engagement by claiming you are calling for Israel’s destruction, when that is clearly not what you are saying. This is not confusion. It is a deliberate distortion meant to shut down the conversation, avoid accountability, and portray any critique as extremist. And there is another layer to this: the problem of what I can only call an imaginary Zionism—a Zionism that speaks as if Palestinians do not exist. It speaks about safety and refuge, but refuses to account for the people displaced for the project to succeed, and the price Palestinians continue to pay today—in the form of the genocide in Gaza. For Palestinians, Zionism is not an abstract identity debate. It is a political project with a clear history. Zionist leaders themselves spoke openly of “transfer.” They admitted the logic of removal. They named it. They defended it. And the world watched it happen. So let me ask plainly: as a Palestinian—on the receiving end of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing—if I oppose Zionism, does that make me anti-Semitic? Of course not. And yet, this is what we have been dealing with. The IHRA definition of antisemitism—unfortunately adopted by many Christians without acknowledging its serious problems, especially when it comes to Zionism—has made honest conversation nearly impossible. In practice, it has functioned as a tool to police speech: to make any serious critique of Zionism, or any naming of Palestinian dispossession, immediately suspect. This is why I am grateful for Carrie’s courage. She refused to accept the imposed rules. She refused to allow a political ideology to redefine her faith. And she refused to allow Palestinian suffering to be erased. We need more of this moral clarity. Not to attack Jewish people, deny Jewish suffering, or trivialize antisemitism—which is real and deadly—but to insist that opposing an ideology of dispossession is not hatred, and that justice for Palestinians is not extremism. Because Palestine was not empty. And Palestinians—Christians and Muslims—are not invisible. Not then. Not now. And one final thing: Carrie wore a Palestinian flag. I want to say how much I appreciated that. We felt seen. In a session where Palestinian suffering was dismissed—and where even the reality of genocide was denied—that simple act of symbolism, of choosing to visibly affirm our humanity, meant more than many people realize.

👏👏👏

In 2026, the financial siege that strangled Cuba for more than six decades became a military one. Five oil tankers seized in a single month. 7.3 million barrels confiscated. One of the tankers was not even under sanctions. The largest naval deployment in the Caribbean since 1962. US drones surveilling Mexican tanker routes. An executive order threatening tariffs on any country on earth that sells Cuba a single barrel of oil. Mexico, facing $400 billion in trade exposure to the US, stopped shipments. Venezuela's supply was destroyed by force. No alternative supplier was willing to risk retaliation or seizures. 20-hour daily blackouts. Hospitals on generators running out of diesel. Families cooking with wood. The Secretary of State testified to Congress that regime change is the objective. The President said: "I think it's just going to fall." But the siege did not begin in 2026. It began decades ago, and it was never unilateral. 187 nations vote to condemn the US embargo on Cuba every year. 33 consecutive years. The most lopsided vote in UN history. And every year, every country that votes against it lets its banks enforce it anyway. The reason is structural. 88% of all global foreign exchange transactions touch the US dollar. 95% of cross-border dollar payments clear through 42 American banks. One country controls the pipes through which the world's money moves. That is all it takes. Any foreign bank that processes a Cuba-related payment faces ruin. BNP Paribas was fined $8.9 billion. Société Générale, $1.34 billion. HSBC, $1.9 billion. Standard Chartered, $1.1 billion. ING, $619 million. $13.5 billion in penalties against foreign banks from countries that formally oppose the embargo. The lesson was received. Most foreign banks now refuse all Cuba operations. Several countries passed laws making it illegal for their own companies to comply with the US embargo. Total enforcement of those laws over 30 years: one fine. $15,000. Against a hotel in Mexico City. The votes against the blockade are symbolic. The fines are real. And the machinery does not stop at banking. A US private equity firm buys a Dutch software company. 23 years of Cuban contracts, severed in a week. A US corporation acquires two Swiss ventilator manufacturers. Deliveries to Cuba stop overnight. An American cargo company refuses to deliver Jack Ma's donated medical supplies to Cuba. It was the only country in Latin America that did not receive them. PayPal blocks any transaction containing the word "Cuba." Including orders for a cocktail recipe book. Cuba does not lose these suppliers to politics. It loses them to mergers, algorithms, and compliance departments that would rather cut off an entire country than risk a phone call from OFAC. The result: 35 children on a pediatric ward vomiting 28 to 30 times a day because the anti-nausea drug essential for chemotherapy cannot be sourced from anywhere on earth. An 89-year-old woman implanted with a pacemaker recycled from a dead patient, two years of battery life, because no manufacturer will sell to Cuba. 69% of necessary medicines unavailable. Infant mortality rising for the first time in decades. When one nation controls the infrastructure through which the world trades, and weaponizes that control to deny an island of 11 million people fuel, medicine, food, pacemakers, ventilators, software, insurance, shipping, and banking for more than six decades, while every other nation on earth formally objects and none enforces its objection, the word for that is SIEGE. The longest siege in modern history. Condemned annually. Enforced permanently.

Stop doing these things, according to the Stoics.

Give hope. Give love. Watch the change.