Jonathan Cook

Here is a list of the things Andy Burnham is obligated to do to avoid collusion in Israel's genocide in Gaza, according to an International Court of Justice ruling. Will he do any of it? Read my latest here: jonathancook.substack.com/p/burnhams-con…

Burnham talks as if the genocide in Gaza is in the past, but it's happening NOW. Britain is arming Israel NOW. This UN report is from two weeks ago. Burnham must commit to fully ending UK complicity NOW.

@piersmorgan Yeah, I remember it was those same despicably cruel, heartless, abusive woke-left types who celebrated the death of Adolf Hitler. They need to learn to be more respectful of people whose only crime is working for the mass slaughter of others.

Seeing the despicably cruel, heartless and abusive way that many people in UK and US have responded to the deaths of conservative politicians, Ann Widdecombe and Lindsey Graham, reminds me that the least kind people on earth are ironically those on the #BeKind woke left.

Yeah, I remember it was those same despicably cruel, heartless, abusive woke-left types who celebrated the death of Adolf Hitler. They need to learn to be more respectful of people whose only crime is working for the mass slaughter of others.

If Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers feel bold enough to take hostage a US Congressperson at gunpoint, just imagine what these same soldiers and settlers do to Palestinians.

Once again, the Board of Deputies conflates Jews with Israel, a clear example of antisemitism according to the IHRA definition the Board itself promotes. It claims Hamas "launched the conflict" in October 2023, even though Israel has been illegally and belligerently occupying Gaza since 1967 – 20 years before Hamas was even born. And the Board insists that Burnham urgently meet with it – presumably to be reminded that he will face Corbyn's fate of a relentless, manufactured smear campaign unless he guarantees, like Starmer, to support Israel, and its genocide, at all costs.

Watch Andy Burnham’s actions on Gaza as prime minister, don't simply listen to his hollow words of contrition. Here is a checklist of the main things he would do if he was actually serious about ending British complicity in Israel’s genocide. Remember, he is legally obligated to do all the things listed below, according to an International Court of Justice ruling that countries must honour the Geneva Convention and take whatever concrete steps they can to prevent a genocide. He must de-proscribe Palestine Action, and the chilling impact it was intended to have on those protesting British complicity in what UN inquiries, legal experts, human rights groups and Holocaust scholars all believe to be a genocide in Gaza. He must advise the Crown Prosecution Service to drop the impending charges against, and prosecutions of, thousands of ordinary people as “supporters of terrorism” for holding placards opposing genocide. He must insist, more generally, that the UK police stop hounding anti-genocide activists, journalists and lawyers through an expanded and exaggerated interpretation of already-draconian counter-terrorism laws, and also scrap a new National Security Bill being hurried through parliament that will criminalise those trying to scrutinise British collusion in crimes like the Gaza genocide. He must announce that any Briton who has served in the Israeli military – there are at least 2,000 of them – risks being prosecuted for war crimes on their return to the UK, including the son of Britain’s Orthodox chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis. Equally, he must remind the police of their duty to investigate prominent figures in Britain using their platforms to justify or incite genocide. He must commit to ending all arms sales to Israel, not just the measly suspension of 30 out of 350 export licences that was conceded by Starmer. He must also end the carve-out on Britain’s supply of components for the F-35 jets being used to bomb Gaza. He must insist Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, stop production of its killer drones at its UK factories and their shipment to Israel for use in Gaza – drones that a recent United Nations inquiry found were being used to deliberately target Palestinian children. He must refuse to meet Israeli government ministers and generals, as Starmer’s government has repeatedly done in flagrant violation of its legal obligations, and promise to enforce the arrest warrant against Netanyahu, and any other Israeli officials the ICC may have indicted in secret, should they set foot in the UK. He must stop British RAF base Akrotiri, on Cyprus, from being used for spy flights over Gaza, gathering intelligence that is being handed over to Israel and almost certainly directing its attacks on the enclave. He must also block Britain’s role in the weapons supply chain to Israel, with Akrotiri being used to transfer US and German arms that have killed many tens of thousands of Palestinians in the enclave. And he must impose economic sanctions and asset freezes on Israel, equivalent to those on Russia. Will Burnham do all of this? Will he do any of it? Will he even try to do any of it? You know the answer as well as I do. Talk is cheap. Judge Burnham by his actions.

“Will Burnham do all of this? Will he do any of it? Will he even try to do any of it?” A base checklist @Jonathan_K_Cook on what Burnham must legally, politically and morally do if he’s remotely serious about stopping the genocide, sanctioning Israel, and supporting Palestine.

Beyond revealing the depravity of the ruling class, the genocide in Gaza has unveiled the true inner workings of the global financial order — as regular people continue to struggle, war concentrates wealth into the hands of the transnational oligarchs running the world, providing them pretexts to develop technology that increases their capacity to control disobedient populations and secure their own class interests. Watch my full interview with @FranceskAlbs at the link below.

The same tax-haven billionaires who bankrolled the Tory party are now hedging their bets by bankrolling Nigel Farage and Reform. Lowkey on how Farage isn't taking on the establishment – he is the establishment.

Lowkey exposes Netanyahu’s terrifying $14 billion plan to control your mind. Watch here: youtube.com/watch?v=5Sd3O-…

"They could not stop you from looking at Palestine, so they bought the screen you were looking through." How the western ruling class and the Zionist lobby spent $14 billion to take back control of our minds:

The arms trade is a corrupt fraud: A former head of NATO working for a firm that promotes arms sales gets to invoke fear as though he’s an independent expert. Defence budgets increase by billions. Arms companies make a fortune. Individuals like this profit. Our politicians and political parties get big paydays. Corrupt to the core and we are paying for it all.

Andy lad. Get off Starmer’s fence. You either accept the evidence before your own eyes, or you don’t. There is no ‘appear’ about it. Genocide. War crimes. Say it.

I thought that this must be an exaggeration but have now read the judgement and it is true, To repost any item from Russia Today - even it if is completely true, or a World Cup feature - is a crime in the EU.

Keir Starmer's Sordid Legacy/Dictatorship lives on: The UK government wants to suppress independent journalism & artificially promote legacy media on YouTube, legally forcing YouTube to change its algorithm to promote state sanctioned news outlets at the expense of popular independent journalists, outlets and creators. The reason of course is that outlets like ours hold the government and powerful to account, unlike the ever increasingly unpopular and sychopantic corporate and state media they are seeking to force you to consume. This Labour government is fast becoming the most authoritarian and unpopular Government in UK history:

BREAKING (bones) Why does "Bring Them Home" exist only for some hostages? Because in Apartheid Israel, where only Jewish lives matter, brutalising the Palestinians isn't an anomaly - it is the system. And the silence around it is the exact measure of our collective hypocrisy.

I am gravely concerned by reports of a severe deterioration in the condition of Dr. Abu Safiyah. We reiterate our demands for his release, along with all other doctors being held without charge.

This a deeply disappointing, borderline irresponsible interview of Morgan McSweeney from @bbcnickrobinson. It looks like impunity in action. Has the media not learnt any lessons from Mandelson and of the need to properly scrutinise political actors? It is the BBC's job to hold political actors to account, to pose them real questions, and to get them to put a proper version of events on the record. That is all the more important for a figure like McSweeney, who has wielded extraordinary power and has led or participated in attacks on legitimate, factual journalism, but who has never spoken about his role in these scandals on the record. The interview doesn't touch, once, on the rock-solid evidence of McSweeney's serious unlawful misconduct or the Labour Together/APCO scandal. This stuff is widely available and easy to verify. Here is a reminder of what we know about McSweeney, about which he wasn't asked a single thing: 1. McSweeney was Company Secretary of Labour Together from July 2017 to April 2020. During this period he failed to report over £700,000 in donations to the Electoral Commission. This was plainly unlawful. LT was found guilty and fined for this offence, but said in public it was an 'administrative oversight.' 2. McSweeney failed to report donations after he had unsuccessfully attempted to convince the Electoral Commission he didn't need to report them in late 2017. 3. McSweeney failed to report donations after the Electoral Commission told him, explicitly, that Labour Together had a legal duty to report donations. 4. McSweeney engaged in a two-month correspondence with the Electoral Commission in early 2018, in which it was clear he knew he had to report donations. Yet he failed to do so for over two years thereafter. 5. McSweeney failed to report donations even though he was telling MPs he was reporting donations, and even though Labour Together's website also stated that it was declaring donations to the Electoral Commission. 6. McSweeney failed to report donations even after Shabana Mahmood, on Labour Together's behalf, wrote an article for LabourList in February 2020 stating that Labour Together was reporting its donations. At the very time Mahmood wrote the donations, LT was taking in donations it was failing to declare. 7. McSweeney used this undeclared money, to fight an undeclared, covert war on the Labour Party leadership between 2017 and 2020. He also used it to pay for polling which was then fed into Starmer's leadership bid. Materials produced by McSweeney during his time at LT was fed, word-for-word, into Starmer's campaigning material. According to Rachel Wearmouth, McSweeney spent 'every spare moment' during the last six weeks of 2019 to prepare Starmer's leadership bid, during which time McSweeney was drawing a salary from LT. 8. When Labour Together was put under investigation by the Electoral Commission for McSweeney's failure to report donations, McSweeney was consulted by LT's lawyer Gerald Shamash. The email recording this consultation and its contents were published by the Tory Chairman Kevin Hollinrake and have been available in public for a year. The email raises serious questions about whether LT was candid in its responses to the Electoral Commission and, in particular, McSweeney's correspondence with the Commission in 2017/2018 that shows he was aware of the need to report donations. Early correspondence between LT and the Electoral Commission shows that, despite being asked to provide all information of relevance to the Commission's inquiries, LT failed to even mention McSweeney's name, let alone the phone call. 9. In early 2019 McSweeney launched an astroturf campaign called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN) , with his friend and factional ally Imran Ahmed. It was supported by @SteveReedMP and operated out of the same office as Labour Together. SFFN purposefully set out to 'eviscerate' the economic viability of @TheCanaryUK and to destroy the livelihoods of its journalists, many of whom were long-time members of the National Union of Journalists. At no stage in its first year operation did SFFN declare its controlling minds. Instead it presented itself as a 'grassroots' campaign of well-meaning activists. McSweeney and Ahmed tried to take out proper journalism because they saw it as a threat to their political objectives. "Destroy the Canary or the Canary destroys us," is what McSweeney told Labour Together insiders according to Anushka Asthana. SFFN made promiscuous allegations of antisemitism against The Canary - the antisemitism that McSweeney claims is what drove his factional war on the left - which were found to have no substance when reviewed by a panel of media lawyers and practitioners at media regulator Impress. SFFN repeatedly inferred that The Canary was antisemitic because it run articles quoting left-wing and anti-Zionist Jews disturbed by aspects of the "antisemitism crisis." 10. SFFN also targeted well-known US media sites, which led to McSweeney being directly called out by the US State Department. His colleague, Imran Ahmed, is now sanctioned by the US because the US accuses the company he and McSweeney set up, CCDH, of being part of a global censorship complex. 11. When I started reporting on McSweeney's undeclared money and his secret campaigns, including by taking damning primary documents to the Sunday Times, Labour Together appointed APCO Worldwide to produce a 'package' that would 'proactively undermine' my factually accurate, public interest reporting. To be clear: APCO were hired to 'proactively undermine' my reporting on McSweeney and his role in Starmer's rise. The intention, as shown in internal docs, was to protect both Starmer and McSweeney's reputations ahead of an imminent general election, while I was trying to warn people about the true nature of this project and it's unlawful origins. 12. APCO produced an insane, ludicrous, highly defamatory report that accused me, my family and my colleagues of being part of a pro-Kremlin network of journalists and speculating that I received hacked documents from Russia. APCO also investigated @Gabriel_Pogrund, with whom I'd collaborated with on the Sunday Times story, making a series of offensive comments about him and his ethnicity. APCO identified a range of other journalists in the UK and US as "persons of interest" to be investigated. This highly invasive, despicable investigation targeted my work colleagues and my family, including by finding my home address and mapping my personal relationships. Labour Together and its Managing Director, Josh Simons, reported me to the National Cyber Security Centre on the basis of this mad, insane report. 13. Less than a month ago, it was revealed that McSweeney and his buddy Paul Ovenden (later Chief of Strategy at Number 10, who would resign following revelations from my book) were copied into emails about the investigation. McSweeney plainly knew about APCO's investigation. Simons, in one mail, wrote to set up a meeting with McSweeney, Ovenden and APCO's Tom Harper in 'HQ' to discuss the 'Paul Holden report.' Three days after this meeting I was reported to the NCSC, along with my colleagues and family members. Emails show Simons was coached in how to make a 'crime report' about me to the NCSC. 14. The APCO/Labour Together scandal was so ugly and so damning that Labour Together has been forced to change its name. It also led to the resignation of Josh Simons as a Junior Minister. The Speaker of the House has supported calls for a Parliamentary inquiry into Labour Together. 15. Josh Simons thereafter stepped aside as the MP for Makerfield in order to make way for Andy Burnham, the incoming PM who has displaced McSweeney's man, Starmer. There is a straight and clear line between attempts to protect McSweeney from scrutiny in 2024 and Starmer's resignation in 2026. So, to make this clear: there was a massive scandal because plans were put in motion to stop questions being asked about McSweeney's unlawful failure to declare money... and now the public broadcaster is failing to ask McSweeney questions about the money. Has the media learnt nothing from the Mandelson scandal about what happens when you don't properly scrutinise political actors? And here's some things McSweeney and Robinson did talk about, but which doesn't bear scrutiny: 1. Starmer didn't just take some suits and glasses as 'freebies' during the election campaign. He took over £100k in freebies between 2021 and 2024, more than every Labour leader since Tony Blair combined. In addition to free clothes, Starmer took football tickets, tickets to watch the horse racing, and free holiday accommodation for his family from a billionaire. One of his football freebies was donated by a company that had only just been forced to pay a £11m settlement because the installed faulty and potentially flammable cladding on tower blocks in Gosport. Taking these donations means that Starmer had conflicted himself on key areas of policy even before he was elected. 2. Both McSweeney and Robinson quickly collude in claiming that Sir Keir Starmer didn't say that Israel 'has that right' to shut off water, fuel, food and electricity to Gaza. But we've all seen the video, where what Starmer has said is utterly plain. Multiple Ministers went on air to defend the statement thereafter. Does the BBC really think that huge numbers of Muslim councillors immediately left the Party by mistake, because they can't understand plain English? 3. McSweeney has said that Labour Together was 'neutral' during the 2020 leadership election. But Labour Together, and its key associates, have said repeatedly since 2022/2023 that LT backed Starmer's leadership bid. You can find these comments on the Wayback Machine in about two minutes. 4. McSweeney says he never intended to rid the Party of Corbynism. There are now multiple accounts, including from the country's leading political editors and journalists, about how McSweeney crafted and distributed strategy documents, including a plan called 'Operation Red Shield' and a 2017 SWOT analysis, that set out plans to undermine Corbyn's leadership and install a new leader who would 'renew' the Party. 5. This is not the first time that McSweeney has spoken to the media. Instead, it is the first time he has let his comments be attributed to him in public. Multiple journalists have spoken about how he was the source of stories damaging to his opponents. While he was Chief of Staff at Number 10, he was meeting with the editors of the major UK newspapers more regularly than Number 10's own head of comms. We know this because transparency regulations means that these meetings are recorded and can easily found on the gov website. This man has shaped our media discourse, and our political epistemology, in profound and disturbing ways. It is utterly disingenuous to claim that this is the first time he's spoken to the media.