The Watchdog: Recent Episodes
Lowkey
The new MintPress podcast hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey -- The Watchdog, closely examines organizations in the public interest including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies and that target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media. Listen to the latest Lowkey music on iTunes (https://music.apple.com/us/artist/lowkey/157616301) and Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/artist/7lNJ1ZVAHcx6V4HqC68xRY)
What if everything you’ve been told about the military — “fighting for freedom,” “protecting democracy,” “serving your country” — was a lie?
In this explosive episode of "The Watchdog," British-Iraqi artist and host Lowkey sits down with former Army Ranger and intel insider Greg Stoker, who saw the beast from the inside and walked away from it.
Stoker breaks the silence on:
- How the U.S. military breaks young men to serve the empire
- Why most soldiers join out of economic desperation, not patriotism
- The real reason so many vets kill themselves when they get out
- How the Pentagon built the internet to spy on Americans and suppress dissent
- Why Israel would collapse in weeks without U.S. money and weapons
- Britain’s role as America’s lapdog in every foreign war
“It’s a tripartite genocide,” Stoker says. “The U.S. is the empire. Israel is the colony. And the U.K. gives the whole thing a stamp of legitimacy.”
You won’t hear this on Fox. And you won’t hear it from military recruiters or the GOP establishment either.
This is the raw truth about how our government feeds your sons and daughters into endless wars to prop up foreign regimes, while bankrupting your future.
Lowkey’s U.K. tour starts in September. Tickets here: https://linktr.ee/lowkey0nline
Full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1df4KXhYSNk
Support the show
The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.
We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.
If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:
🔗 Support us on Patreon
Together, we can keep this work going.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
On this powerful episode of "The Watchdog," Lowkey sits down with Ahmed Alnaouq, a Palestinian writer, journalist, and co-founder of We Are Not Numbers—a collective that amplifies Palestinian voices through storytelling.
Alnaouq joins from the U.K. to talk about his best-selling new book, "We Are Not Numbers," a humanizing collection of 74 stories written by 59 Palestinians, two of whom have since been killed during Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.
Alnaouq speaks with urgency about the genocide unfolding in Gaza, the silencing of Palestinian voices, and why it is imperative to talk openly about Zionism—not as abstract theory, but as a lived reality. As he explains:
“We Palestinians are the best equipped to talk about Zionism, because Zionism is a practice on us... We must talk about it!”
The episode also revisits Alnaouq’s viral confrontation with Piers Morgan, during which he dismantled the media narrative that framed the conflict as a religious war. Instead, Alnaouq sets the record straight:
“This is not a religious war. It is a war between colonizers and colonized, between occupiers and occupied… It’s not with the Jews.”
With over 55,000 Palestinians—mostly women and children—killed in Gaza, and the United Nations warning of starvation and collapse, Alnaouq urges the world to act, speak out, and bear witness.
We Are Not Numbers is available now and has already been translated into multiple languages.
Watch the full interview on MintPress News and subscribe to The Watchdog for more conversations that challenge censorship, expose propaganda, and speak truth to power.
Support the show
The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.
We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.
If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:
🔗 Support us on Patreon
Together, we can keep this work going.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
In this powerful episode of "The Watchdog," host Lowkey speaks with Palestinian-American author and activist Susan Abulhawa about her firsthand experiences inside Gaza during the ongoing Israeli assault.
As one of the few Western-based voices to enter the besieged enclave during the genocide, Abulhawa shares her deeply personal account of life under bombardment, the psychological toll of witnessing mass devastation, and the political cost of speaking uncomfortable truths in Western institutions.
Abulhawa reflects on the eerie stillness of Gaza’s ruins, the erasure of daily life, and the overwhelming sense of loss she encountered, both human and environmental.
She also opens up about the backlash she faced upon returning to the West, including de-platforming, public smears, and institutional silencing, such as censorship from major academic venues like Oxford.
This episode intersects witness, memory, and resistance, and why narratives like Abulhawa’s are crucial to breaking the wall of manufactured silence surrounding Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Support the show
The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.
We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.
If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:
🔗 Support us on Patreon
Together, we can keep this work going.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
It was a pogrom, the likes of which have not been seen in Europe since the days of World War Two. Or at least that is how corporate media across the world presented last month’s violence in Amsterdam, as Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv came to play Ajax in football’s Europa League.
In total, five people were hospitalized, with a few dozen more minor injuries. And yet, the event generated hysteria across the West. President Biden, for example, described the supposed attacks against Israelis as “despicable,” adding that they “echo dark moments in history when Jews persecuted.”
Dutch King Willem-Alexander, meanwhile, compared the events to the Holocaust.
Yet even as public official after public official was denouncing the Dutch and spreading the persecution narrative, video clips showing a very different reality were going viral on social media, challenging the official story.
On today’s episode of “The Watchdog,” Lowkey catches up with an eyewitness to November’s violence. Rachid El Ghazoui, better known as Appa, is a legend of Dutch hip hop. Active for over two decades, the rapper is known for his political content and his fierce criticism of racist Dutch politicians, such as Geert Wilders. His lyrics have made him a leading voice among the Moroccan community in the Netherlands.
Appa tells a different story to Biden or King Willem-Alexander, presenting it as a tale of Israeli football thugs trashing a beautiful city, and then being challenged and overpowered by locals. As he told Lowkey:
It actually started with the Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans tearing up the streets, attacking people, throwing stuff at people, kicking people off their bikes, destroying taxis. Being hooligans, actually. They started singing racist songs in the main square, [about] killing Arabs and raping women”
From there, the Israeli thugs were beaten back, and the resistance put up by locals – many of them of Moroccan descent – was treated as a vicious racist attack. Thus, what was a pretty typical case of European soccer hooliganism was transformed for political gain into a supposedly senseless anti-Semitic pogrom.
The plot thickened even further after Israeli media revealed that Israel had sent many Mossad agents to Amsterdam who were present among the Maccabi fans.
Ajax won the game 5-0.
Support the show
The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.
We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.
If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:
🔗 Support us on Patreon
Together, we can keep this work going.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
Israel’s attack on its neighbors could not be sustained without support from the West. And much of that support comes from the United Kingdom. Only a few hundred kilometers from Gaza, the British military base in Akrotiri, Cyprus, serves as the “heartbeat” of the Israeli assault. Israeli warplanes fly there to be serviced and repaired, while Western supply planes fly into the base before making the final trip to Israel.
“Almost no one in this country [the United Kingdom] had heard about it before Gaza and before our work on it,” investigative journalist and returning guest Matt Kennard told Lowkey today, adding:
This is a colony that Britain retained after awarding independence to Cyprus in 1960. But it wasn’t really independent because Cyprus gave 3% of its land mass to the British, on which they built a massive air base on Akrotiri and a massive intelligence base at Dhekelia. And now, they are being used to facilitate a genocide in Gaza, through [supplying] arms, personnel and intelligence.”
Kennard is a writer and journalist for Declassified UK. He has broken several stories about secret British collaboration and support for Israeli actions. Previously, he worked as a reporter for The Financial Times and was a fellow and a director of the Center For Investigative Journalism in London. His latest book is “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy.”
For Kennard, Britain’s active support of Israeli actions makes them participants in the ongoing genocide. Last October, the British government issued a “D Notice” instructing media outlets not to report on any elite U.K. SAS commando operations in Gaza. This action immediately raises the question, “What are British special forces doing in Gaza?”
In addition to weapons sales, logistical aid and political support, Britain also secretly trains Israeli troops. Despite this, the Israeli government has continued to attempt to infiltrate and surveil top-level British politicians. Boris Johnson, for instance, revealed that Benjamin Netanyahu personally attempted to place a listening device in his quarters. Kennard’s investigation revealed that one-third of Johnson’s cabinet had their political careers funded either directly by Israel or by the pro-Israel lobby.
Support the show
The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.
We don’t take corporate ad money. We don’t have billionaire backers. Episodes like this are only possible because of you.
If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:
🔗 Support us on Patreon
Together, we can keep this work going.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
In less than one year, Israel has managed to turn Gaza into rubble. A recent estimate by a global health expert suggested that around 335,000 Gazans could have been killed as a result of the Israeli attacks.
Today, “Watchdog” host Lowkey speaks to one of the survivors of the Israeli bombing, Ahmed al-Naouq. Ahmed al-Naouq grew up in central Gaza and moved to the United Kingdom to attend Leeds University. In 2015, he co-founded We Are Not Numbers, a non-profit group that seeks to tell the stories of Palestinians to the world.
The grief began right away for al-Naouq. “On the 7th of October, my fiancé’s house was bombed, and she lost her brother,” he told Lowkey, adding:
We were lucky because, only two days before the war, she managed to escape Gaza and go to meet with me. And I know that if she did not travel with her parents, all of them would have been killed on the first day of the war.”
For Lowkey, the Israeli attack on Gaza is of historic proportions. He compared it to the 13th-century Mongol invasion of Baghdad in its similarity in that it destroyed thousands of years of civilization. What has been done, he said, was so intensely violent, not just physically but culturally, that it is almost incomparable. On al-Naouq, Lowkey noted that his story:
Really tells us the wider way in which Palestinians have been stripped of their humanity and killed on an industrial scale in Gaza. And it stands as a testament to the will to survive, regardless of the bullying, gangsterism and intimidation from the Zionist project.”
Al-Naouq, a journalist by training, lambasted the deceitful Western media coverage of the attacks, stating:
The media doesn’t care about its own audiences. They don’t care if they don’t know the truth or not. They are seeking their own interests. And clearly, those interests do not correlate with the truth, so we are challenging that by writing our own stories.”
After nearly twelve months of bombing, those attacks show little sign of slowing down, primarily because Western governments continue to supply Israel with the hi-tech weaponry it needs to continue and defend its actions in international bodies such as the United Nations.
Support the show
The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
On this episode of The Watchdog, host Lowkey is joined by three guests to discuss how progressive or radical change is blocked in the U.S. and the U.K. by our political establishment, specifically by the Democratic and the Labour Parties.
Chris Williamson and his communications officer, Ammar Kazmi, join the show to discuss the political situation in the U.K. Between 2010 and 2019, Chris Williamson was a Labour member of parliament and was a shadow cabinet minister under Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. He was eventually forced out of the party he had joined in 1976 as a 19-year-old after he was the subject of a smear campaign depicting him as an antisemite.
Also joining the show today is MintPress CEO and founder Mnar Adley. Adley notes that U.S. politics is set up to fundamentally limit the debate and framework for change by privileging the Democrats and Republicans over third parties, who are shut out of debates, ignored by corporate media, and censored by big tech platforms. All of this is done in order to promote voting for one of the two major parties. But “voting for the lesser evil is still evil,” she said.
While in Corbyn’s cabinet, Williamson pushed him to take more radical positions, such as committing to ending poverty altogether. “We are the sixth-biggest economy in the world. There is really no excuse for anybody to be living in poverty in this country,” he explained to Lowkey. Corbyn, however, was “far too timid” and, ultimately, did not stand up to the vicious waves of attacks and smears against him and his followers, particularly on the question of anti-Semitism. As Williamson said:
It was clear that antisemitism was being weaponized in order to destroy the Corbyn project, to destroy the prospect of a socialist, anti-imperialist government coming to power. But Jeremy lost the plot because he listened to idiots around him who said that he had to placate the Zionist lobby.”
No matter how hard they try, however, there is a growing movement in both countries demanding radical change. And if it continues to gather momentum, both Labour and the Democrats could be overtaken and consigned to the trashcan of history.
Support the show
The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
The British public has spoken, and they have collectively let out a sigh of apathy. The latest election results might have produced a landslide for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. But going beneath the surface, Britons appeared less than pleased with the options they were given. Turnout was among the lowest seen since the 1880s when women (and most men) could not vote.
The notorious British press relentlessly promoted the far-right Reform U.K. party, but to little avail: Reform U.K. ended up with only five seats. Chief amongst those outlets were those of Rupert Murdoch’s empire. The Australian billionaire – described by former prime minister Tony Blair as one of Britain’s four most powerful people and an unofficial member of his cabinet – has worked for decades to push a reactionary agenda into British public life. This has included near-total support for the Israeli government and its expansionist project.
Today, “Watchdog” host Lowkey is joined by Alan MacLeod to discuss the U.K. media’s relentless support for Israel. Alan MacLeod is a senior staff writer and podcast producer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017, he published two books on media and propaganda and regularly teaches media studies at universities. He has recently published investigations into Murdoch’s close connections to the Israeli government and on Cyabra, an Israeli intelligence cutout organization posing as a neutral fact-checking group.
While Israel has failed to defeat Hamas militarily, it has been able to rely on the support of corporate media in the West, and most of all from Murdoch, who has extensive economic and ideological ties to the state of Israel.
Earlier this year, conservative British newspaper The Daily Telegraph went after Lowkey, claiming that a network of Russian, Chinese and Iranian bots was artificially inflating his online pro-Palestine messaging. The basis for this extraordinary claim was an intelligence report from private firm Cyabra.
Yet Cyabra is far from a neutral organization. It was co-founded by Israeli military intelligence veterans and continues to work hand-in-glove with the Israeli government. Moreover, around fifty percent of its employees are military reservists who have been called up to serve in Gaza.
Support the Show.
The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
While the Labour Party may have triumphed in the recent British parliamentary elections, the real victors may have been Israel. Israel and its lobby have deep connections to the British Labour Party, headed by Sir Keir Starmer, and are likely pleased to see him come to power.
On today’s episode of “The Watchdog,” Lowkey is joined by John McEvoy to discuss his work uncovering Israel’s surprisingly firm grip over the British political system. John McEvoy is an investigative journalist for Declassified UK, a media outlet covering British foreign policy and intelligence agencies’ true role around the world.
While Labour has achieved a landslide victory, McEvoy warns that this was not because of widespread public support. Instead, it was down to a split in the vote between the Conservatives and their far-right challengers, Reform U.K. And while the public yearns for change, Starmer has been steadfast in his refusal to adopt bold policies to deliver what the people want. “Keir Starmer is poised to destroy a lot of hopes of British people and those who have wrongly invested their hopes in him. And that's a recipe for political disaster and a wider shift to the right here,” McEvoy told Lowkey.
Perhaps even more worrying is the level of Israeli influence within the Labour Party. Pro-Israel money has flooded in; more than half of the new cabinet has been bankrolled by the British pro-Israel lobby, McEvoy’s recent study revealed.
Starmer has repeatedly refused to condemn Israel or do anything to concretely support a ceasefire in Gaza. His Labour Party has also elevated some of the most shameless propagandists into key positions. One example is Luke Akehurst, the former director of the pressure group, We Believe in Israel.
Throughout its bombardment of Gaza, the U.K. has remained one of Israel’s closest allies. Arms exports have increased since October 7, and London has continued to provide diplomatic cover for the genocide. Moreover, British spy planes continue to fly over Gaza, while military supply planes have made dozens of trips to Israel since the bombardment began, making Britain an accomplice in war crimes.
Support the Show.
The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
While the Labour Party may have triumphed in the recent British parliamentary elections, the real victors may have been Israel. Israel and its lobby have deep connections to the British Labour Party, headed by Sir Keir Starmer, and are likely pleased to see him come to power.
On today’s episode of “The Watchdog,” Lowkey is joined by John McEvoy to discuss his work uncovering Israel’s surprisingly firm grip over the British political system. John McEvoy is an investigative journalist for Declassified UK, a media outlet covering British foreign policy and intelligence agencies’ true role around the world.
While Labour has achieved a landslide victory, McEvoy warns that this was not because of widespread public support. Instead, it was down to a split in the vote between the Conservatives and their far-right challengers, Reform U.K. And while the public yearns for change, Starmer has been steadfast in his refusal to adopt bold policies to deliver what the people want. “Keir Starmer is poised to destroy a lot of hopes of British people and those who have wrongly invested their hopes in him. And that's a recipe for political disaster and a wider shift to the right here,” McEvoy told Lowkey.
Perhaps even more worrying is the level of Israeli influence within the Labour Party. Pro-Israel money has flooded in; more than half of the new cabinet has been bankrolled by the British pro-Israel lobby, McEvoy’s recent study revealed.
Starmer has repeatedly refused to condemn Israel or do anything to concretely support a ceasefire in Gaza. His Labour Party has also elevated some of the most shameless propagandists into key positions. One example is Luke Akehurst, the former director of the pressure group, We Believe in Israel.
Throughout its bombardment of Gaza, the U.K. has remained one of Israel’s closest allies. Arms exports have increased since October 7, and London has continued to provide diplomatic cover for the genocide. Moreover, British spy planes continue to fly over Gaza, while military supply planes have made dozens of trips to Israel since the bombardment began, making Britain an accomplice in war crimes.
Support the Show.
The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
A surprise general election has been called in the United Kingdom, and Labour Party leader Keir Starmer is the overwhelming favorite to become the next prime minister. But today’s guest is looking to upset that grim future.
Andrew Feinstein is standing against Starmer for his Holborn and St. Pancras seat in central London. Feinstein is an expert in the arms trade, a former member of the South African parliament under Nelson Mandela, and a tireless activist, who Watchdog host Lowkey describes as someone who “campaigned for decades on important issues that really cut to the core of power and the way it functions in society.”
Under Starmer’s leadership, the Labour Party has ruthlessly purged leftist, anti-establishment voices from its ranks, including former leader Jeremy Corbyn. Feinstein described Starmer as holding an “authoritarian, undemocratic approach to politics,” accusing him of weaponizing anti-Semitism to carry out a witch hunt against radical elements within the party.
Starmer has given his full-throated endorsement to Israel, even as it carries out a genocidal onslaught against the people of Gaza, and strong-armed the Speaker of the House into shutting down a motion brought to parliament calling for a ceasefire. Meanwhile, he has expelled more Jews from the Labour Party than all other leaders combined, all under the guise of fighting anti-Jewish bigotry.
Feinstein is a white Jewish man who grew up in Apartheid South Africa. His mother is a survivor of Hitler’s genocidal ambitions, having hid for three years in a Viennese coal cellar to avoid detection by the Nazis. He became active in the anti-Apartheid struggle and became an elected official for the African National Congress during the country’s transition to democracy. He eventually resigned after being refused the right to investigate billions of dollars worth of arms deals signed by Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki.
He warns that Starmer’s approach to politics represents a threat to democracy in the United Kingdom, and wants his campaign to be completely different, the antithesis of Starmer.
Feinstein stressed that local issues, such as hunger, unemployment, and a lack of housing, would be the key issues he would fight on. Nevertheless, he maintains an international perspective and is hopeful things are about to radically change across the globe. “This period of late neoliberal capitalism, which has bequeathed the world such injustice and such inequality, must be on its last legs. And that’s what gets me out of bed every morning,” he said.
Support the Show.
The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
One of the most sickening aspects of the continued Israeli aggression against the people of Gaza is the near-total support it is receiving from Western governments. That is what our guest today on “The Watchdog” tells Lowkey.
“Gaza has also exposed the true hypocritical face of the Western countries and those Western values which they have been claiming for years and years,” Dalloul Neder said, adding: "Values such as human rights, the wartime protection of civilians, the rights of patients, doctors, protection of hospitals and of civilians. Gaza was enough to expose Western hypocrisy and complicity – whether it is the United Kingdom or the United States – all such values fell like leaves in Gaza.”
Dalloul Neder is a Palestinian man living in Manchester, U.K., who lost five members of his family in a December Israeli attack. He still has many relatives trapped in Gaza, including some who have the right to live in the U.K., but, despite their requests for help, have heard nothing from British authorities. A recent clip of him confronting senior Labour Party MP Angela Rayner went viral as he interrupted her public event, showing the room images of his murdered relatives before he was assaulted and detained by British police.
Today, he told Lowkey that his intention was to put pressure on the Labour Party to abandon its near-total support for the Israeli project of destroying and colonizing Gaza. However, as the pair discussed today, that is easier said than done, given that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer built his career on purging left-wing, anti-war activists from the party, framing their opposition to Israeli aggression as anti-Semitism. Starmer’s predecessor as leader, Jeremy Corbyn, for example, was kicked out of the party, along with many of his supporters. “Who is more deserving of a suspension from the Labour Party? Jeremy Corbyn or [Iraq War architect] Tony Blair,” Neder asked Lowkey, who noted that the years of dehumanization Corbyn received from the British establishment was an extension of the dehumanization Palestinians receive to this day.
Neder and Lowkey contrasted the duplicitous actions of the West with those of nations in the Global South, especially those of South Africa, which has led the way in attempting to hold Israel accountable for its crimes at the International Court of Justice.
“The whole world decided to let us down and kill many more women just like my mother. My mother was part of a wider structure in Gaza: we are now talking about more than 31,000 martyrs, among them 12,000 innocent children killed… God willing, we shall see more examples like South Africa, and justice will be served,” Neder said.
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The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
Even after more than 100 days of genocidal attacks on Gaza, the Israeli assault continues to rage. The onslaught itself is very well documented by courageous Palestinian journalists who risk their lives daily. However, the role of Western governments in all this is not nearly as widely reported.
Joining “The Watchdog” today to talk about this issue is returning guest Matt Kennard, a writer and investigative journalist for Declassified UK. Kennard has broken several stories about secret British collaboration and support for Israeli actions, which he will discuss today. Previously, he worked as a reporter for The Financial Times and was a fellow and a director of the Center For Investigative Journalism in London. His latest book is “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy.”
On October 13, the U.K. government announced it was deploying a wide range of military assets to the Eastern Mediterranean area, including spy planes and 1,000 troops. From its military bases in Cyprus, the British military has been flying large numbers of supply flights to Israel, helping sustain the Israeli attack. As Kennard noted, in December 2020, the U.K. government signed a secret military agreement with Israel that likely commits it to “defending” the apartheid state if it comes under attack.
Britain’s military hub in the region is RAF Akrotiri, a vast, sprawling military compound in southern Cyprus. It is not only the center of British imperialism in the Mediterranean but is also home to more than 120 U.S. airmen and hosts of spies from the N.S.A. From there, both countries project their power across the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa.
But even as the British government supports Israel, the Israeli state is attempting to penetrate and interfere in U.K. politics. In 2019, Alan Duncan revealed that he was blocked from becoming Middle East Minister in Theresa May’s cabinet at the behest of the Israelis because of his mildly pro-Palestine positions. The Conservative Friends of Israel – which acts as a front group for the Israeli state – wields enormous power within the party, including the ability to make and break political careers.
The Labour Party is also deeply connected to Israel, to the point where Israeli lobbyists have funded 40% of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet. This kind of “entrenched espionage” eats away at and makes a mockery of the idea of British democracy, Kennard told Lowkey today
Support the show
The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
For nearly a decade, Professor David Miller has been in the crosshairs of the pro-Israel lobby. But in recent years, their campaign against him has intensified. Miller was fired by Bristol University in the U.K. following a ferocious campaign by the Israel lobby, which even led to direct government intervention in the case. He has been holding the university to account in an employment tribunal and expects the results very soon. In this episode of “The Watchdog”, host Lowkey catches up with Miller to hear the latest on his case.
Professor Miller has a long background in studying P.R. and propaganda, originally focussing on media spin on Northern Ireland, the HIV/AIDS crisis and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It was the latter that first brought him to study Islamophobia and how it functions in society.
Today, Miller and Lowkey described how so much of the hostile atmosphere towards Muslims is actually driven by the state and committed Zionist organizations that try to influence it. For example, 12 of the top 13 funders of the Islamophobic Henry Jackson Society, a British think tank that influences U.K. public policy, were groups founded by Zionists. And three-quarters of the organizations that fund these Islamophobic groups also bankroll the building of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Miller was sacked from his position as Professor of Sociology after a pressure campaign involving Zionist student groups and even members of parliament, who accused him of “inciting hatred against Jewish students.”
In 2019, a student filed a complaint against him, claiming he was racist toward Jewish people.
But that was only the start of the affair. After Miller was acquitted, there began a massive media campaign against him, leading to more than 100 members of the House of Commons and House of Lords signing a letter demanding he be sacked.
This massive state intervention into the freedom and independence of academia is a free speech issue that few of those who make it their business to supposedly champion the free flow of ideas have touched.
The Kafkaesque witch hunt against Miller bears a strong resemblance to how Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was hounded out of politics. Ironically, Miller’s book, “Bad News for Labour: Anti-Semitism, the Party and Public Belief,” details how bogus charges of anti-Semitism were weaponized against Corbyn in order to defame and destroy him.
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The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
The British state – and quite possibly its Israeli counterpart – are attempting to shut down Palestine Action. Since its founding in 2020, the activist group has launched hundreds of operations against arms factories across the United Kingdom, especially Israeli ones. Its goal is to break British complicity in the Israeli military-industrial complex. Palestine Action has already caused serious economic damage to companies like Elbit Systems.
Joining Lowkey on this edition of “The Watchdog” is Huda Amori. Born in the U.K., Amori is a Palestinian-Iraqi whose father was chased out of his home by Israeli soldiers in 1967 and forced to flee without even a pair of shoes.
Decades later, Amori has found a way to fight back, using direct action to occupy and shut down Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms firm. With the help of the community in her native Oldham, Amori and Palestine Action’s occupation has forced Elbit Systems to leave the town and sell their factory at a substantial loss. Last summer, they abandoned their London headquarters. And last winter, the British Ministry of Defence canceled around £280 million (around U.S.$340 million) of contracts with the company.
Amori is about to go to court and stand trial for her actions. She is looking at the possibility of receiving considerable jail time. Apart from the usual offenses, she and others have been charged with blackmail – a charge with serious consequences, as she explained to Lowkey today:
One of the most concerning things about the blackmail charge is that it allows [the authorities] to put on orders. If you are convicted and imprisoned, even after your release from prison, you can be banned for life from campaigning, from signing a petition, from doing anything towards campaigning for the freedom of the Palestinian people. So it is clearly extremely politically motivated.”
Amori and the other members of Palestine Action maintain they are not criminals and are, in fact, attempting to disrupt a criminal enterprise whereby Britain aids an illegitimate occupation by an apartheid regime by supplying it with weaponry crucial in harassing, surveilling and killing Palestinians.
Despite the smears and condemnation from mainstream politicians, and despite the serious consequences they are facing (nine group members have been sent to jail), Palestine Action remains resolute in its determination to shut down the illegal occupation.
Support the show
The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
9/11 is a date that will live in infamy. But for much of the world, September 11 conjures up images of another deadly assault against freedom and liberty. Exactly 50 years ago today, the democratically-elected socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was overthrown in a far-right military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet.
Today, “Watchdog” host Lowkey talks to two guests who know the story of “the First 9/11” better than almost anyone. Roberto Navarette was a 17-year-old medical student at the time of the coup, and was imprisoned – like tens of thousands of his countrymen – in open air stadiums. He survived being tortured and shot by the regime, and eventually escaped, settling in the United Kingdom.
Ironically, the U.K. government had actually been working very hard to ensure Allende’s downfall, and later to keep Pinochet in power, as John McEvoy’s work has revealed. Based on documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws, McEvoy has shown how the U.K.’s MI6 had been training Latin American police and militaries in torture tactics and other ways in which to suppress domestic dissent. Britain had long had strong economic interests in the region, considering it an unofficial part of its empire. McEvoy is an academic, historian and journalist specializing in uncovering Britain’s relationship with Latin America. He is currently producing a documentary film – “Britain and the Other 9/11” about the U.K. government’s covert campaign against Allende and its subsequent support for Pinochet.
Today, Lowkey speaks to Navarette and McEvoy about the coup and its legacy on the world.
Allende was a particular threat to the establishment in Washington and London. Not simply because he was a Marxist head of state, but because he was democratically elected and believed in coming to power through entirely legal means. This, for Navarette, terrified many in the West, as it undermined completely their claims about socialism being an anti-democratic ideology.
The 1973 coup reverberated around the world. Not only did it become the blueprint for further U.S.-backed operations in Latin America, but Chile became a laboratory for neoliberal economics. The country was flooded with economists from the University of Chicago, who promised to transform it into a modern utopia.
Instead, the nation was ruined, with economic crashes and total devastation for ordinary Chilean citizens. The rich, along with foreign corporations made out like bandits, and neoliberalism began to be adopted wholesale across the world, leading to the rampant inequality that plagues the planet today.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
The world holds its breath. Last month, the Nigerien military overthrew President Mohamed Bazoum, declaring an end to his corrupt reign and a new era of anti-imperialist, pan-African struggle. While most Nigeriens actually support the move (a new poll found that 73% of the country wants the army to stay in power) Niger’s West African neighbor Nigeria has strongly objected, and has tried to organize an invasion force to restore Bazoum.
The regional body, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), has condemned the events in Niger. But its 15 member states are split on how to react. Western powers, however, including France and the United States, have supported boots on the ground, and even considered sending troops themselves – a move that could draw Russia into a conflict that could make Libya or Syria look minor by comparison.
Here to explain the tense situation that could ignite a world war is David Hundeyin. Hundeyin is an investigative journalist from Nigeria and the founder of “West Africa Weekly.”
While the coup has been opposed in the West, Hundeyin explains that inside the country, the military is seen – rightly or wrongly – as leading “anti-imperialist movement; a popular movement against French imperialism.”\
The threat of invasion is far from an idle one. Since 1990, ECOWAS has launched military interventions in seven West African countries, the most recent being in the Gambia in 2017. The group’s actions have ignited significant pushback across the region, with many describing it as a tool of Western imperialism.
Currently leading ECOWAS is Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu. Tinubu has earned plaudits in the West as a defender of democracy and someone not willing to let another country be taken over by the army. While Tinubu has been praised in the media, his own background calls into question his democratic credentials. As Hundeyin’s reporting exposed, Tinubu made his fortune from trafficking heroin in Chicago and had hundreds of thousands of dollars seized by the U.S. government. There are many other U.S. cases against Tinubu which have never seen the light of day, prompting many to speculate that he is an American intelligence asset.
Will the new government succeed? Will African be plunged into war? And what is the U.S. role in all of this? To find out more, watch the full interview here.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
Labour Party leader Keir Starmer is many bookmakers’ favorite to become the next prime minister of the United Kingdom. Yet behind the politician’s bland, squeaky-clean image lies an individual relentlessly obsessed with power and how to attain it.
From being an ally of socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn as recently as 2019, Starmer has pulled the Labour Party far to the right in an attempt to return them to their position as the red wing of the British oligarchy.
Today’s guest on “The Watchdog” with Lowkey is Matt Kennard. Kennard is a writer and investigative journalist with the British outlet Declassified UK. Previously, he worked as a reporter for The Financial Times and was a fellow and a director of the Center For Investigative Journalism in London. He has recently published a five-part series of articles on Starmer’s past and his connections to British and American state power. His latest book is “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy.”
Before becoming an elected politician, Starmer was a barrister and served as head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), a body that oversees roughly 800,000 prosecutions per year. “Starmer started at the Crown Prosecution Service in 2008. And his time at the CPS is marked by how reactionary and how establishment-friendly he is,” Kennard told Lowkey. Kennard’s recent journalistic work also showed that Starmer secretly served on the Trilateral Commission, a shadowy organization with deep connections to the U.S. national security state. Starmer did not tell his boss, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, as the latter would surely have vetoed the appointment, especially as Starmer worked closely with two former heads of the CIA at the Trilateral Commission. Meanwhile, CIA chief Mike Pompeo declared that the U.S. would do everything it could to stop Corbyn from coming to power.
All the while, Starmer was living it up on the public purse. Kennard’s research has found that Starmer billed the British taxpayer nearly £500,000 (around U.S.$630,000) in expenses, including £160,000 on a chauffeur-driven car during his first two years in the position. “This is a guy who likes living it up, basically,” Kennard said.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
Today in “The Watchdog” studio, Lowkey is joined by Assange’s wife Stella. Stella Assange is a South-African born lawyer and human rights defender. Her most famous case is undoubtedly that of her husband, whom she married in 2022. For years, Stella has tirelessly traveled the world raising awareness of Julian’s situation. Before marrying Julian, she attained degrees from the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London and from the University of Oxford. Earlier this year, she met with Pope Francis to discuss the situation of whom Lowkey described as “the political prisoner of our time.”
For Lowkey, Assange’s brilliance was taking his anti-war passions and finding a way to directly work with units within the U.S. military to make the public aware of the illegal, immoral, and deeply unpopular decisions being taken in our name. As he said today:
Some of the most deeply heinous and hideous aspects of the Iraqi and Afghan occupations by the U.S., Britain and their allies, have been revealed within the WikiLeaks files. We are talking about millions of documents being made available to the public to understand truly what was happening.”
Despite this, the media cheered Assange’s arrest. The Washington Post’s editorial board, for example, claimed Assange was “no free-press hero” and insisted the arrest was “long overdue.” Likewise, The Wall Street Journal demanded he faces some “accountability,” claiming, “His targets always seem to be democratic institutions or governments.” Yet, as Lowkey and Stella discussed today, the implications for a free press from this case are extraordinary and perilous.
Stella also put a human face to the story, discussing how difficult her husband’s persecution has been. “It’s a daily struggle. It is up and down… Prison life is part of our daily life,” she said, noting that prison authorities limit how much they can speak. When she first met Julian, he was 39. He is now 52, and his health has seriously deteriorated.
Yet even if Assange is somehow liberated, he has still suffered greatly, as Stella told Lowkey. “We will still have been robbed of our lives together. Our children will have been robbed of their early childhood with their father. We are never going to get that back,” she said.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
The election of longtime peace activist and anti-imperialist Jeremy Corbyn to the position of leader of the U.K. Labour Party inspired hope and dread across the nation. Hope from millions of ordinary people, who, for once, saw a politician that represented them, and dread from the British establishment, who feared what a radical like Corbyn could do if he were elected prime minister.
Corbyn was subjected to one of history's most prolonged and intense propaganda campaigns. He has been labeled everything from a terrorist sympathizer a communist spy, and a national security threat.
However, the most sustained attack on Corbyn was that he was a raving anti-Semite. We now know this was in no small part down to a coordinated smear campaign from the Israeli government and its supporters. Here to talk about the forces working in harmony to destroy Corbyn’s movement is returning guest Asa Winstanley.
Asa notes how the movement to topple Corbyn started by targeting his allies. “People around Corbyn started to be picked off, one by one. And that, ultimately, just a few years later, led to Corbyn's political assassination and the movement's decapitation. It was a war of attrition,” he noted. Unfortunately, Corbyn did not see the danger and “appeasement became a knee-jerk instinctive response” from the people around him.
While Asa’s work has shown how the Israeli Embassy was intimately involved in the skulduggery, the British deep state was also a key player. In 2015, a senior British Army general claimed that if Corbyn were elected, this would precipitate a military coup. Mike Pompeo, head of the CIA at the time, said that the U.S. would take measures to prevent Corbyn from reaching power.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
It is often better to talk about solutions rather than problems. And today, on "The Watchdog," Lowkey talks to British-Palestinian intellectual Ghada Karmi about her new book, "One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel."
In "One State," Karmi envisages uniting the land, from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, under one secular, democratic nation, allowing refugees to return to their homeland in safety and enjoy the same rights and securities that those currently living there have. She insists that this is the only way to end the anti-democratic nature of the Israeli state.
Lowkey and Karmi have previously teamed up to debate at the Oxford Union together, and earlier this summer, they were scheduled to discuss her new book in person at a London book launch with the Balfour Project. Yet the night before the event was planned, Karmi received a phone call telling her that it had been canceled. The reason? A Zionist organization called Yachad had pressured the Balfour Project over Lowkey's inclusion.
For the Balfour Project, she alleges, "keeping them [Yachad] happy was more important than keeping me and you happy." Thus, the event was canceled. There is likely more to this cancellation than a misunderstanding; while the organization's official mission is to "empower British Jews to support a political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," in reality, it works closely with Israeli intelligence organizations Shin Bet and Shabak.
Karmi is a survivor of the Nakba of 1948 – the nascent Israeli state's systematic expulsion of Palestinians from their land. While many understand the Nakba as an ongoing process, there is no doubt that 1948 stands out as a particularly bloody and genocidal year in Palestinian history. Today, she talked of her childhood memories, how, despite her parents' assurances, she had a premonition that her family would never be back, and how her family never talked about Palestine because it was simply too traumatic.
One of the little-publicized aspects of the Nakba was the severance of human ties so that people who had been your neighbors, friends or employers somehow disappeared. Because in the rush to save one’s family, where were those people? And as so often happened, they were never reclaimed. Those people went, we don’t know where, and they didn’t know where we had gone. And that is a significant aspect of our eviction of our homeland that often is not talked about.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
The truth can’t be racist, wrote British Home Secretary Suella Braverman in April of this year, as she peddled xenophobic and debunked tropes about South Asian men being a particular threat to British children. Braverman’s comments come after nearly a decade of national hysteria about so-called Pakistani “grooming gangs” roaming around the country, sexually abusing white children while overly woke authorities watch on, helpless, too scared to act, lest they be called racist.
Braverman, who herself is of South Asian (Indian) origin, made these comments in the far-right magazine The Spectator, an outlet that has published articles with titles such as “In Praise of the Wehrmacht” and "A fascist takeover of Greece? We should be so lucky." Nevertheless, her screed breathed new life into the relentless push to demonize British Muslims.
Here to talk about “grooming gangs,” academic malpractice, pseudoscience, and the malfeasance of the ruling British Conservative Party is Dr. Ella Cockbain, an associate professor in the Department of Security and Crime Science at University College London. Cockbain has been at the heart of scrutinizing the dangerous media tropes presenting Muslims as a threat. She is the author of the article “Failing Victims, fuelling hate: challenging the Harms of the ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ Narrative,” published in the academic journal Race & Class.
Cockbain claims that Braverman is an “overtly racist” politician, noting her (false) comments that members of grooming gangs are “almost all British-Pakistani” and that their victims are “overwhelmingly white girls from disadvantaged or troubled backgrounds” have done much to undermine tolerance and coexistence in the United Kingdom.
“These things are not facts,” Cockbain said; “actually, they [Braverman’s claims] directly contradict the findings of her own department, the U.K. home office.” While Cockbain agrees that men of Pakistani origin have committed horrific crimes against children, so have people from all other racial, ethnic, religious and class backgrounds. Yet when other offenders – particularly white men – attack children, their race is never singled out as a causal factor. Thus, when Jimmy Saville, Rolf Harris, Prince Andrew or a host of other high-profile white abusers hit headlines, there is no campaign to demand all white men be put under high surveillance, and there are no far-right marches demanding payback for what whites have done to “our children.”
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
It is now over four years ago that Julian Assange was spirited away from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and detained in Belmarsh's maximum security prison. Being locked in a tiny concrete room for more than 1500 days has taken a serious toll on the Australian publisher; reports from this week suggest that his health is “deteriorating by the minute.”
One man who has covered the Wikileaks co-founder’s case closer than almost anyone is Kevin Gosztola. Gosztola is an American journalist, the managing editor of Shadowproof and co-hosts the Unauthorized Disclosure Podcast with Rania Khalek. He is the author of the new book “Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case against Julian Assange.” Today, he joins “Watchdog” host Lowkey to talk all things WikiLeaks, Assange, leaks and cybersecurity.
The U.S. government has always been hostile to leakers revealing embarrassing or compromising information about its actions. But Gosztola states that the Central Intelligence Agency’s “gloves came off” in 2017 as it ramped up its attacks on Assange. By 2017, CIA Director Mike Pompeo had labeled WikiLeaks as a hostile non-state intelligence service and began turning the screw. For Gosztola, the CIA’s response was a symptom of the agency’s insecurity; “And so at that point, the CIA probably feels they are threatened, their whole regime of pursuing the global war on terrorism is in jeopardy as a result of WikiLeaks,” he told Lowkey.
It is often forgotten how much incredible, extraordinary information WikiLeaks provided the world. This included the Guantánamo prison manuals, which showed that the U.S. Army hid prisoners from Red Cross inspectors and illegally held captives in solitary confinement to soften them up for interrogation.
What WikiLeaks published was barely a toothpick in a forest compared to the amount of information the U.S. national security state keeps secret. Every day, Gosztola said, Washington produces tens of millions of pieces of classified information. This means, he added that it is becoming increasingly difficult and unwieldy to keep all these secrets under lock and key. If this continues, it might become “impossible for the U.S. government to keep doubling down and adding more infrastructure… eventually, the system might actually collapse in on itself because it isn’t able to support all of the stresses that are being put on it to protect” itself, he adds
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
Even as Israel’s war against Palestine continues unabated, a new movement has arisen in the United Kingdom, challenging the Israeli war machine – and it has been winning some impressive victories.
Founded in 2020, Palestine Action is a grassroots activist movement that seeks to end British complicity in Israeli war crimes by shutting down arms manufacturing sites across the U.K. Today, Lowkey welcomes back Palestine Action co-founder Huda Amori to talk about the rise of her organization that has taken the country by storm and has weapons manufacturers fleeing. Born in the U.K., Amori is a Palestinian-Iraqi whose father was chased out of his home by Israeli soldiers in 1967, and forced to flee, without even a pair of shoes.
Decades later, Amori has found a way to fight back, using direct action to occupy and shut down Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms firm. With the help of the community in her native Oldham, Amori and Palestine Action’s occupation has forced Elbit Systems to leave the town and sell their factory at a substantial loss. Last summer, they abandoned their London headquarters. And last winter, the British Ministry of Defence canceled around £280 million (around U.S.$350 million) of contracts with the company.
Elbit’s products, such as drones and surveillance tech, are directly used on the civilian population of Palestine, Amori explained. They are then marketed as “battle tested” around the world and sold to countries like Australia and India.
“If you are building weapons here to be sent back to Israel to be used against Palestinians, or if you are a customer of weapons that have been developed on the Palestinian people, then you are just as guilty,” Amori said, adding:
For example, the British Ministry of Defence buy many of these weapons after they have been developed and used against the Palestinians, which only encourages the further development and use of weapons on Palestinians, and to continue the occupation. This cycle of violence just continues to benefit the oppressors and work against the oppressed.”
While Amori and Palestine Action are constantly charged and regularly appear in court for criminal damages, they are yet to be convicted. Indeed, once they get in front of a jury to tell their story, it is often Elbit Systems that seems to be on trial. At the end of last year, a jury at the Crown Court unanimously found Amori and her colleagues innocent, accepting that they were trying to prevent an even bigger crime from taking place. The jury even proceeded to thank the activists for their bravery publicly. Some, Amori claimed, went so far as to blow kisses at them.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
Israel is currently engulfed in strife, as hundreds of thousands have come out to protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial power grab. Netanyahu is attempting to overhaul the judicial system and has dismissed defense minister Yoav Gallant, a move that ignited a storm of indignation.
But as returning “Watchdog” guest Asa Winstanley notes, observers should not mistake this for a liberatory movement. “The protests are not for democracy as they claim. They're for preserving the Jewish citizens of Israel's own privileges within the settler colonial entity. That's what they're for,” Winstanley told Lowkey today, adding:
They're not advocating for an equal state, even of all its citizens. Even of all the Palestinian citizens of Israel who live within Palestine, not even advocating for equality for them, let alone the equality of the majority of the population between the river and the sea…they're not seeking equality.”
Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist who has been writing about Palestine and the Israel lobby since 2005. He is also the author of the new book “Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Took Down Jeremy Corbyn.” It focuses on the Corbyn era and how an effective smear campaign against him destroyed the movement that brought him to power.
Nevertheless, the scale of the protests and the fact that they have so much support from among the establishment makes this something worth watching, argued Lowkey, who notes that Mossad chief David Barnea has broken protocol and allowed his agents to join the movement and publicly protest.
For many, Netanyahu’s attempts to bend the judicial system to his will signal a dangerous descent into authoritarianism. Winstanley, however, is not convinced, telling Lowkey:
Some are trying to kind of posit what's happening as a slip into fascism. But the fascism was always there. You don't get much more fascistic than the cleansing and displacement of three quarters of a million people simply for existing from the land that they were in!”
The United Kingdom, where both Winstanley and Lowkey are from, has long collaborated with Israel, even before it was established. The Balfour Declaration, which the British government signed in 1917, paved the way for the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine. Since then, the U.K. has been a close ally of Israel, promoting its interests and defending it from criticism to this day.
This collusion includes, if Winstanley’s new
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
Is your data really safe online? Whether you like it or not, it is likely that much of it is stored by Oracle, a gigantic, U.S.-based company that has become one of the largest and most influential tech corporations in the world.
Yet the company’s intimate ties to both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Israeli national security state should be cause for enormous concern, our guest today argues. In episode 56 of “The Watchdog” podcast, Lowkey is joined by returning visitor, Alan MacLeod.
Alan MacLeod is senior staff writer and podcast producer for MintPress News. He has worked at the company since 2019. Before joining MintPress, he was an academic and a freelance journalist specializing in Latin America and in analyzing media and propaganda. Together with Lowkey, he published an investigation into Oracle’s connections, titled, “Openly Pro-Israel Tech Group Now Has Control over UK’s Most Sensitive National Security Data.”
Together, the pair lay out Oracle’s extraordinarily close relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA was the company’s first customer in the 1970s. Indeed, the name “Oracle” comes from Project Oracle, a CIA operation that Oracle founder and former CEO Larry Ellison worked on. Since then, the relationship has only flourished, as MacLeod explained:
Ever since its beginning and even before its beginning in the 1970s, as being fundamentally intertwined with the U.S. national security states, Oracle grew from a very small, fledgling company into a multibillion dollar behemoth that it is today, and it has done that through getting fat off of the huge contracts that Washington hands out.”
Former CIA director Leon Panetta is a member of Oracle’s board of directors, and, if media reports are to be believed, Ellison personally asked his close friend Benjamin Netanyahu to take a seat at Oracle’s highest table as well.
The connection to Israel’s prime minister is illustrative of a deep collaboration between Oracle and Israel. Indeed, the company sees aiding the Israeli government as equally important as making money. CEO Safra Catz, laid out Oracle’s purpose, stating:
We are not flexible regarding our mission, and our commitment to Israel is second to none. This is a free world and I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel, then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry [Ellison] and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country, and no one should be surprised by that.”
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
From hotshot lawyer to head of the Crown Prosecution Services (CPS), Keir Starmer is perhaps not the first person many would associate with the British Labour Party. But the party’s shift in ideological stance under former Prime Minister Tony Blair opened the door for the highly polished Starmer to become the leader.
Joining Lowkey on today’s episode of “The Watchdog” is Oliver Eagleton, author and assistant editor of the journal, The New Left Review. Eagleton knows Starmer well; his 2022 biography, “The Starmer Project: a Journey to the Right,” forensically dissects both Starmer’s background and his rapid ascension to the top of the party and details the Labour Party’s ideological shift from social democracy to neoliberalism.
Today, Eagleton highlights the 60-year-old politician’s questionable relationship with Washington during his time as Director of Public Prosecutions, stating:
Starmer developed a close relationship with the Obama administration…he went over to Washington and had a series of meetings with Eric Holder, head of the DOJ [Department of Justice] who, at the time, is the guy most famous for developing the legal infrastructure around the Obama administration’s drone program.”
Starmer has played a key role in the prosecution of Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange. As head of the CPS, he used every weapon in his arsenal to keep the Australian publisher in the country and under constant surveillance, even threatening Swedish prosecutors who wished to drop their charges against him – the entire pretense underwriting Assange’s detention.
“Swedish prosecutors had grown tired of the case, [it was]consuming a lot of resources, and they want to drop it. Again, the CPS intervenes and says ‘no, no, no, you must keep the case going,’” Eagleton told Lowkey; “The exact form of words that they used were: ‘don't you dare get cold feet.’”
Eagleton was unimpressed by Starmer’s political history or his ideological consistency. “He is just sort of a political chameleon or a blank canvas, and he can sort tack right or tack left, depending on who he is listening to at that moment,” he said. What we do know is that the leader of the Labour Party pushed for tougher sentences for a whole range of crimes and demanded more police presence in working-class communities.
Before wrapping up, Oliver Eagleton makes a fundamental distinction between Keir Starmer and Tony Blair as leaders of the Labour Party.
Many have compared Starmer, both in outlook and in tone, to Tony Blair. Yet Eagleton says that this is, if anything, unfair to Blair, noting,
Blair’s politics were, for all their faults, forward-looking and upbeat and optimistic…whereas Starmer is something very different, the whole line of verve of Blairism, the vitality is gone, and instead you have this grim sense of just regressing back to the point before the 2010s, when these different populist challenges emerged.”
Watch the whole interview here, exclusively at MintPress News.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
The No2Nato campaign was developed to challenge the “consensus in Westminster” and to prevent “a direct war between NATO and Russia.”
NATO’s war has led to the death of 100,000 soldiers on each side and at least 6,900 Ukrainian civilians, the displacement of over 14 million and the destruction of at least eight percent of its houses and 50 percent of the country’s energy infrastructure.
Despite the staggering loss of life, the United States and at least 27 other countries continue to transfer weapons to Ukraine, increasing the likelihood of sparking a nuclear war.
With talks of sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, it’s no surprise that we have “seen massive jumps of value in the shares of companies like Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems.” As Lowkey puts it, “this is the business of war, and that is NATO’s function in the world.” Indeed, it was NATO bombed Libya 7,700 times in seven months, not to mention the infamous 20-year war in Afghanistan, which resulted in 250,000 deaths.
Today's guest, former UK MP and member of the Socialist Labour Party, Chris Williamson, believes that NATO is no longer necessary, reminding listeners that the alliance was created to challenge “the threat allegedly posed by the Soviet Union, which, with western prodding, collapsed in 1991. So why is NATO still in existence?”
What may surprise some listeners is that many of NATO's employees now work for mainstream media outlets, including the BBC and Sky News. Lorna Ward worked as Foreign News Editor at Sky News while advising the Deputy Commander of NATO in Afghanistan.
As Lowkey puts it, it’s clear that there is an “Incestuous revolving door relationship between organizations like NATO and the main places in which we understand the world through, which is the BBC.” In fact, as the interview reveals, several BBC employees were employed by NATO while simultaneously working for the BBC, including Defence Correspondents who became NATO Spokespeople.
The next No2Nato conference will be held in London on Saturday, February 25.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
Joining Lowkey on this special episode of “The Watchdog” is the creator of the Netflix film, “Farha”, a movie the Israeli government has gone to great lengths to prevent from reaching the masses.
Darin J. Sallam begins the episode with a breakdown of her award-winning film…
It’s the story of a 14-year-old Palestinian girl whose dream is to get an education in the city…the dream changes from getting an education in the city to surviving in a room that she was locked up in by her father to protect her life when the Haganah soldiers invaded her village.”
The Haganah, a Zionist military organization, was heavily involved in the Nakba, a systematic campaign between 1947 and 1949 to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its indigenous peoples. During this period, at least 750,000 Palestinians were forcefully expelled by such militia forces. Over 70 massacres were committed, more than 15,000 Palestinians were killed, and 520 villages were destroyed.
Lowkey draws a comparison between his music and the film, both of which have been smeared by Israeli lobbyists as inciting violence. He asks Sallam how she responds to the Israeli government figures claiming the film is a form of incitement.
She responds that,
It is based on true events and this killing scene that they’re very upset about is just a drop in the ocean…it’s nothing compared to what happened…they have a problem watching the truth…They can’t silence our voices and they [Israel lobby] try to just stop the film of streaming on Netflix…we will not accept this, and we will keep speaking our side of the narrative and make our voices reach everywhere.”
Sallam also describes how she was able to get her creation on Netflix.
After the film screening in Toronto, the film started touring festivals around Europe. It’s literally like everywhere now. In Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Australia, everywhere, and then after a year and a half, we met with Netflix, and they acquired the film to stream it worldwide. I think this is one of the things that made them [Israeli officials] very angry…”
Darin Sallam is a Jordanian writer and director. holds an MFA from the Red Sea Institute for Cinematic Arts (RSICA) and has published a number of award-winning films, including “Still Alive”, “The Dark Outside” and “The Parrot”.
Watch the whole interview here, exclusively at MintPress News.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
After being chased by racists through London in 1997, Ricky Reel was found dead in the River Thames. For many years, his family struggled to convince the Metropolitan Police to investigate his death. Ricky’s mother Sukdhev was then later informed that SpyCops from the Special Demonstration Squad had spied on the family campaign. Lowkey speaks to the grieving mother still struggling for justice for her son almost 20 years later.
“Throughout his 20 years, there hasn’t been a day where I haven’t missed him…the police officer told me the story, told me that Ricky and his friends had been attacked…still turned around and said, I’m sorry, I’m not going to take a statement…”
While police racism has become a national issue in the United States, the situation in the U.K., if Reel’s case is anything to go by, is not so dissimilar. “They were racist,” Sukdhev said of the police, adding,
They were stereotyping our family because we happened to be an Asian, working-class family. And also sexism was also in there because I’m a woman. I stood up to face them.”
She also claimed that once her son’s body was found, the police categorically refused to investigate the matter.
Continuing the conversation, Lowkey discusses the Special Demonstration Squad. This undercover unit infiltrated hundreds of groups for over 40 years, including the Justice for Ricky Reel Campaign, which Sukdhev set up to investigate the death of her son.
“Why did they spy on me? All I was asking was for justice for my son. All I was asking was for you to do a proper investigation, simply because I kept on pointing on their mistakes...I felt like a second-class citizen. They treated me like dirt," she said.
Watch the whole interview here, exclusively at MintPress News.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
Via the Twitter Files, new Twitter owner Elon Musk has helped to reveal several hair-raising stories about the extent of U.S. national security state operations on social media. However, as today’s guest explains, Musk himself is a key cog in the military-industrial and surveillance states being built by Washington.
Joining Lowkey today is return guest Alan MacLeod, a Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017, Alan published two books: “Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting” and “Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent,” as well as a number of academic articles.
The podcast begins with Alan discussing Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, a space firm and military contractor with close links to the CIA. He describes how SpaceX’s Starlink communications devices are being used by both the Ukrainian military and by anti-government activists in Iran to further Washington’s goals in those two countries.
As Alan explains, Starlink is “an internet service which allows anyone with a terminal to directly connect to one of many thousands of satellites that are orbiting the earth.”
Such channels of communication can prove to be of use towards the CIA and other intelligence services in the region, such as Mossad, which retains an illustrious reputation of purporting misinformation to support the overthrow of democratically elected governments in the Middle East. Stalinks also allow ways for U.S.-backed groups inside the country to remain online and in communication with one another without the knowledge of the government.
Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran has been one of the U.S.’ prime targets for regime change.
Suspicion towards Musk continued to rocket, as we delved further into his relationship with both NASA and more generally the National Security State. Alan describes how, from the very outset, Musk’s company was nurtured by the CIA in with the explicit expectation that it would work closely with Washington and become a key asset once established. SpaceX was also bankrolled by the U.S. government to the tune of billions of dollars.
The dialogue then shifts to the revelations discovered from the Twitter Files, the direct involvement of American intelligence personnel in the production of the video game series “Call of Duty,” and later the role played by U.S., Israeli and even German intelligence agencies in carrying out the assassination of Iranian general and statesman, Qassem Soleimani. The pair also discuss the disastrous effects of U.S. militarism, noting that at least 6 million people have died in America’s post-9/11 wars, a crusade that has only resulted in destroying the region.
Watch the whole interview here, exclusively at MintPress News.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
Support for the British Monarchy has rapidly declined, especially among young people, where near equal amounts of respondents say the country should become a republic as continue with the current system. In this episode of “The Watchdog,” Lowkey speaks to Symon Hill, a British activist who was recently arrested for questioning the proclamation of Charles as King following the death of his mother Queen Elizabeth.
Lowkey begins by scrutinizing the infrastructure of information in British society. In doing so, the British-Iraqi rapper makes multiple references to the coordinated smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, and how it was orchestrated by private organizations following his nomination to lead the Labour Party. The conversation then shifts to the main topic of today, the unpopularity of King Charles III. Charles has been pelted in public with eggs on two separate occasions since his mother’s death.
Protesting the proclamation of King Charles III, Symon Hill, who had been arrested, stressed how he:
Finds it hard to stomach that in the 21st century, anybody being told that we must accept a head of state, with no say at all in who that is…so when this was said about Charles as Lord and King, I called out, who elected him?...”
Talking about his detention, Hill added:
It was me who they grabbed hold of and dragged me away and arrested me…what really appalls me, if you watch the video of that man heckling [Prince] Andrew, is that a few royalists in the crowd basically grab him and start beating him up and yet the police don’t arrest them.”
Formerly a campaigns manager at the Peace Pledge Union, Hill currently teaches history via evening courses for the Workers' Educational Association. “…If you can be arrested for saying a couple of sentences in the street that the establishment don’t like, then I think we’re in a very scary place,” he said.
The conversation steers to the absurdities of the recently passed Police Crime Sentencing Courts Act (2022). Equipping the Metropolitan Police with arbitrary powers, the law will “restrict movement at protests…it allows them [the police] to close down protests that are considered too noisy,” Hill warned. According to many domestic organizations, the act itself is a fundamental threat to the ideals and standards of British democracy and should be repealed immediately.
Watch the whole interview here, exclusively at MintPress News.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic, political campaigner, and a MintPress video and podcast host. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique, and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network, and The Peace and Justice Project founded by Jeremy Corbyn.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
In this week’s episode of “The Watchdog,” Lowkey begins discussing how the mainstream media silences academics, musicians to award-winning filmmakers, such as Ken Loach, for their outspoken stance on Palestinian rights.
Lowkey is joined by Professor David Miller, formerly of Bristol University and Zeeshan Ali, who runs the successful YouTube channel, Smile2Jannah. David, who was subjected to a coordinated three-year campaign by the Zionist lobby, is a leading British scholarly critic of Israel.
Kick-starting the podcast, Lowkey wastes no time in discussing the ousting of Professor David Miller from Bristol University, drawing attention to the support of Zeeshan Ali, who published a petition in support of him. The petition accumulated over 40,000 signatures. “This is getting ridiculous now. Enough is enough…it’s just a matter of time till it comes knocking on your doorstep and there’s no one left to defend you,” Ali said.
But when did all this type of censorship begin? Was it during the Corbyn era, or did it precede that?
The topic of discussion then shifts to the 2022 World Cup, and the way the success of the Moroccan team was dealt with in the mainstream media. Teams from the Global South succeeding was not taken well in many places in Europe. Commentators on Danish television, for example, compared the scenes of Moroccan players hugging family members with monkeys.
Later to the anatomy of the campaign against Qatar, with Miller identifying several Israel lobby groups as key to the groundswell of pushback against Qatar hosting the World Cup.
The final section of the podcast focuses on the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson, and his recent pro-Israel turn. Lowkey reveals some interesting connections between his employer, The Daily Wire, and key Israel military and intelligence institutions – connections you will only find out about if you watch the interview here, exclusively at MintPress News.
Watch the whole interview here, exclusively at MintPress News.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic, political campaigner, and a MintPress video and podcast host. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique, and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network, and The Peace and Justice Project founded by Jeremy Corbyn.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
Rishi Sunak is Britain’s new prime minister. Sunak was not elected, even by Conservative Party members, who, just weeks earlier, had chosen Liz Truss. However, she was immediately turned upon by senior party members.
Sunak is the darling of the establishment, chief amongst it the British state broadcaster, the BBC. In 2020, the BBC presented him as a literal superhero, describing him as the chancellor who would “save the country’s economy.” In reality, government incompetence over COVID, Brexit and sanctioning Russia wrecked the economy, leading to rampant inflation and a pressing cost of living crisis affecting all Britons.
For this latest episode of “The Watchdog”, Lowkey again talks to Alan MacLeod, this time about the BBC’s extremely close links to the ruling Conservative Party. While often criticized by right-wingers as a bastion of liberalism, a multitude of top BBC executives and directors are directly linked to Toryism. For example, BBC chairman Richard Sharp was a senior adviser to many top Tories, including both former prime minister Boris Johnson and Sunak himself. Sharp has also donated at least £400,000 to the party.
Meanwhile, as MacLeod noted, the BBC’s former head of political programming, Robbie Gibb – the brother of a Tory cabinet minister – left the broadcasting corporation to become the director of communications for Conservative prime minister Theresa May.
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer and Podcast Producer for MintPress News. He has worked at the company since 2019. Before joining MintPress, he was an academic and a freelance journalist specializing in Latin America and in analyzing media and propaganda. His latest article, “The BBC-to-NATO Pipeline: How the British State Broadcaster Serves the Powerful,” explores how the United Kingdom’s state broadcaster is nowhere near as independent as it insists it is.
A dangerous unit
In the second half of the podcast, the pair discuss MacLeod’s latest findings on Israeli military surveillance organization Unit 8200. In a new investigation, MacLeod found that hundreds of former Unit 8200 agents have been appointed to influential positions in some of the biggest and most influential Silicon Valley tech and communications companies. This includes Google, Amazon, Twitter and Microsoft. There, they oversee much of these companies’ development and security.
This is an alarming finding because, as is well-documented, Unit 8200 has carried out massive spying operations on Palestinian citizens, compiling sensitive information such as medical records and sexual histories, and used it to blackmail and extort them. Its graduates are also responsible for designing many of the most controversial and invasive hacking tools ever created, including the infamous Pegasus spyware that was used to eavesdrop on tens of thousands of politicians, journalists and activists across the world.
Watch or listen to this interview exclusively at MintPress.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
In episode 45 of The Watchdog podcast, Lowkey explores the issue of life inside Israeli prisons. Currently, 30 Palestinians are on hunger strike, protesting the Israeli government’s policy of indefinitely detaining their political enemies without trial or evidence. Last week, 900 further prisoners refused their meals as a sign of solidarity.
“We will continue with our struggle, knowing what awaits us of repression, abuse, isolation, confiscation of our clothes and pictures of our children, thrown into concrete cells devoid of everything, except for our bodies and our pain,” the prisoners said in a statement.
The most high profile of the hunger strikers is Salah Al-Hamouri, a French-Palestinian human rights defender. Detained without charge or trial for six months, Al-Hamouri has refused all food since September 25. In response, Israeli authorities unleashed a series of punitive measures, including transferring him to solitary confinement. He is now isolated in a 2x2 meter cell with little to no ventilation.
This, according to Milena Ansari, is par for the course for Palestinians who object to Israeli domination. “I don’t think there is any violation that hasn’t taken place on Salah,” she told Lowkey today, noting that he was detained while still a schoolboy, shot at, and arrested six times. Milena Ansari is the international advocacy officer for Addameer, a prisoner support and human rights association. Addameer monitors the treatment of people arrested in the West Bank and Gaza by both the Israeli police and by the Palestinian Authority.
Also joining us on the Watchdog podcast today is Rula Jamal LLM, head of monitoring and documentation at al-Haq, an independent Palestinian human rights organization based in Ramallah. Al-Haq was established by a collective of human rights lawyers in 1979.
Last year, the Israeli government designated both Addameer and al-Haq as terrorist groups, a move that was condemned by Amnesty International and other leading organizations.
Jamal explained that Al-Hamouri’s case was far from unusual, except in the worldwide attention it was receiving, telling Lowkey that,
...The Israeli occupation detains Palestinians solely upon ‘secret evidence’ that is neither disclosed to the detainees themselves, nor their lawyers. Palestinians under administrative detention can be held for an indefinite time, without ever receiving any charges or evidence against them for their detention, or ever standing a fair trial.”
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the gr...
The Israeli state has been losing the battle for Western public opinion for quite some time now. Even in the United States, its closest ally, support for Israel is waning, while sympathy for Palestine has more than doubled since 2013, according to a series of Gallup polls.
Knowing this, Israel has redoubled its efforts in soft power. Joining Lowkey today are three people who have closely monitored these efforts: Dr. Ramzy Baroud, Jessica Buxbaum, and Alan MacLeod.
One example of Israel trying to launder its image in pop culture is the character of Sabra, an Israeli superhero and Mossad agent. Sabra features in the upcoming Marvel blockbuster, “Captain America: New World Order.” Baroud asked Lowkey the question, “why now?” Why had this controversial character made a return, noting,
The timing of introducing Sabra fits really nicely into the progression of Israeli propaganda in American movies and in the entertainment industry in general. We are living in an age now, where a superhero can actually be a Mossad agent!”
Baroud explored this in detail in his recent MintPress News article, “From Exodus to Marvel: The Israelification of Hollywood.”
This latest attempt at woke imperialism is particularly notable, Baroud said, as,
Mossad is a notorious organization that is responsible for the assassination of many people, sabotage, destruction, all sorts of sinister business. This is by no means the kind of agency or organization that should be introduced to American youth as if they are the saviors of the human race.”
Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and editor of The Palestine Chronicle, as well as a non-resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs. He is the author of six books, including “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out,” co-written with Professor Ilan Pappé.
Jessica Buxbaum highlighted the many connections Marvel Studios – particularly its senior executives – have with the apartheid state. Marvel Entertainment chairman Isaac Perlmutter, for example, grew up in 1948-occupied Palestine and served in the IDF during the 1967 Six-Day War, alongside Marvel CEO Avi Arad. Her recent investigation found that many other Marvel senior figures had donated to Zionist organizations, or even to campaign funds for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Also joining Lowkey today is Alan MacLeod, whose latest investigation goes through emails published by WikiLeaks showing that many of Hollywood’s most influential producers work closely with the Israeli government and the IDF in order to whitewash its crimes, promote its image, and stamp out any pro-Palestine sentiment in the entertainment world. This went so far as senior entertainment executives introducing IDF officers to other celebrities in an effor
Support the showThe MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the gr...
Lowkey begins this latest episode by delving into recent revelations around the case of Shamima Begum, a British national who fled the U.K. as a teenager and joined ISIS in Syria. Lowkey examines the new admission that a Canadian secret service agent trafficked at least 140 British citizens into Syria. He also examines Turkish police claims that this agent’s handler was believed to be British intelligence working out of the Canadian Embassy. It is important to remember that the British Monarch is the head of state in Canada.
When asked about these activities, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau responded that his intelligence agencies must be “creative and flexible.” To gauge the response to this, Lowkey is joined by Sally Letts, the mother of Jack Letts, a Canadian citizen who is currently detained in a prison in Northern Syria after travelling there during the war. Both Letts and Begum have had their British citizenship stripped by the government, despite the question marks surrounding their journeys there.
As a direct reply to Trudeau, Sally Letts suggests his statement could be read as meaning that it is “perfectly acceptable for the Canadian Security Service here to engage in child trafficking.”
Richard Walton, former head of the Metropolitan Police Counter Terrorism Command, sought to justify this policy:
If you are running agents on the ground, you are acquiescing to what they are doing. You are turning a blind eye”
During the podcast, Sally and Lowkey explored the Active Change Foundation and its curious role in obtaining the conviction of her and her husband for funding terrorism. Their son had been imprisoned three times by ISIS and his family sought to rescue him. Discussing how this Prevent-backed counter-extremist organization, which initially portrayed itself to be an ally to the family, was secretly gathering intel and giving false impressions to the family about rescuing their son. This in turn led to the conviction of Jack’s parents. Thus, the steps taken by Active Change Foundation toward the Letts family are eerily reminiscent of FBI entrapment cases in the United States.
Sally Letts identifies parallel similarities between her son’s case and Shamima Begum, pointing out that the person who facilitated Jack’s journey to Syria has gone uncharged by the police, despite ample evidence. Sally told Lowkey that the family now believes it likely that the person that facilitated Jack’s entry is an informant of the intelligence services. She laments the dehumanization of both Shamima Begum and her son Jack have been,
Demonized as monsters. They are not given human rights like other people…universal human rights seem to have been thrown out the window in all of these cases under the guise of terrorism.”
Join Lowkey today for a critically important discussion about current events and the future of the world, and do not forget to subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform.
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The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
In today’s episode, former Google employee Ariel Koren joins Lowkey and articulates her experience at the big tech giant, claiming it has gradually developed an institutionalized pro-Israeli bias. She also reveals ways in which employees attempting to hold the company accountable for unethical contracts, such as that of Project Nimbus, are being targeted and intentionally silenced.
Google, alongside Amazon, has signed a contract worth $1.2 billion, titled “Project Nimbus”, which will provide a cloud system service for both the Israeli military and the Israeli government.
Disturbingly, the project was announced May in 2021, the same month Israel killed at least 260 Palestinians in Gaza. Adding insult to injury, it was during this period that Amnesty International found Israel guilty of practicing Apartheid against the Palestinian people.
Former employee Ariel Koren claims that:
"Google systematically silences Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, and Muslim voices concerned about Google’s complicity in violations of Palestinian human rights – to the point of formally retaliating against workers and creating an environment of fear…in my experience, silencing dialogue and dissent in this way has helped google protect its business interest with the Israeli military and government”.
According to Google’s spokesperson, Shannon Newberry:
"The Project [Nimbus] includes making Google cloud platform available to government agencies for everyday workload, such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education.”
However, there is also evidence that Project Nimbus will also empower Israeli mechanisms of surveillance, data collection and even interrogation.
As Lowkey explains:
"In one Nimbus Training Webinar, a google engineer confirmed to an Israeli customer that it would be possible to process data through Nimbus in order to determine if someone is lying”.
Lowkey then posits Project Nimbus as the climax of a long push by Israel to harness Google to do what it wants. Lowkey points to a mission creep over the last decade which saw several key Israeli organizations set up to move both big tech jobs to the apartheid project and former Israeli military personnel into the companies themselves. The aim of this, he asserts, is to make a meaningful BDS project an impossibility by integrating Israel into big tech companies vital to the global economy.
Want to hear more about this issue? Join Lowkey and Ariel Koren today for a critically important discussion. Keep updated for many more interesting topics to be discussed by subscribing on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
Support the show
The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
European countries, as well as the United States, continue to be imperiled by an economic crisis following the imposition of sanctions on Russia. The policy has backfired spectacularly and has had worse economic ramifications on those levying the sanctions, than those being sanctioned. In this week’s episode, Lowkey speaks to respected U.S. economist Dr. Richard Wolff, discussing the links between the war in Ukraine, inflation, and the class war at home.
Before exploring the people's definition of inflation, Dr. Wolff contextualizes the economic crisis currently unfolding across the West.
In the conversation, Lowkey and Dr. Richard Wolff expose ways economic policy can be a code term for class war. They delve into the way the cost of enmity towards Russia is being placed on the shoulders of the working class in the West, which recently experienced one of the worst crashes of capitalism in its history.
The 2020 – 2021 crash, one of the worst public health disasters in modern history, a terrible inflation on top of that…"
Lowkey then questions Dr. Wolff on the threat to the primacy of the dollar posed by pushing billions of people in Russia, China, and India into trading with each other in currencies other than the dollar.
He asked Dr. Wolff, why is it that the political leaders across Europe and the US might have carried out such an act of economic self-harm.
According to Dr. Richard Wolff:
Maybe we have desperate politicians who have linked their careers to this war in Ukraine…therefore they are willing to spend to the last dollar of their peoples taxes to hold onto a situation that is spinning badly out of control”.
They conclude that this war has hastened the inevitable rise of China as the world's economic powerhouse.
Want to hear more about this issue? Join Lowkey and Dr. Richard Wolff today for a critically important discussion. Keep updated for many more interesting topics to be discussed by subscribing on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform.
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Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
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It is a story that is straight out of a dystopian science fiction novel. Big social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and Google, have gone on a hiring spree, recruiting dozens of CIA officers to run their most important, politically sensitive departments – and almost no one is talking about it.
In episode 39 of “The Watchdog” podcast, Lowkey speaks to Alan MacLeod, a journalist who has spent months painstakingly combing through employment databases and corporate social media sites like LinkedIn to catalog this national security state infiltration of many of the largest social media platforms.
One of these platforms is Facebook, the world’s most influential news distributor. Recently, the Silicon Valley giant released a PR video featuring a man they identify as “Aaron” – the company’s Senior Product Policy Manager for Misinformation. Aaron informs viewers that he and his team think deeply about how to balance their commitment to freedom of speech with their duty to protect users from harm and violence, and underlines that “transparency is incredibly important in the work I do.”
There is one problem with this, as MacLeod explained:
Aaron is, in fact, a senior CIA agent. Or at least he was until a couple of years ago, when he left his post at the agency, where he was a senior analytic manager, to take a job at Facebook. As Facebook itself describes, he is basically the person in charge of the team that is deciding what gets zapped off the platform and what gets promoted.”
Nor was he a minor pen pusher at the CIA. In fact, he was so high up that he wrote the President’s Daily Brief, a document read out to the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office every day. The fact that a former high-ranking CIA member is now influencing content moderation on Facebook should concern everyone, MacLeod notes, telling Lowkey that,
This has huge consequences, not just for media organizations who live and die by the amount of clicks they get on Facebook...but it also affects what 3 billion people see in their news feeds. Because that’s how many people actually get their news from Facebook.”
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer and Podcast Producer for MintPress News. He has worked at the company since 2019. Before joining MintPress, he was an academic and a freelance journalist specializing in Latin America and in analyzing media and propaganda.
His series of articles for MintPress News has highlighted the connections between the national security state and big social media outlets like Reddit, Facebook, Google, TikTok and Twitter. To understand more about this worrying trend, follow the links above or watch the interview exclusively at MintPress News.
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The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
The well propagated myth is that Britain functions democratically. This, of course, flies in the face of a system where a monarchy established by the Normans in 1066 still holds weight in society. More than 1,000 laws passed through the British parliament have been vetted by the representatives of the Royal Family. There 792 unelected peers and 26 unelected bishops in the House of Lords in comparison to merely 650 elected members of parliament.
Even to get to this very limited level of political representation where all people could vote regardless of property ownership it took over 300 years of struggle – from the Putney Debates and the Levellers to the Chartists and the Suffragettes. It even entailed people sacrificing their lives for the right to vote with the slaughter of protestors in Manchester at the now infamous Peterloo Massacre. It took centuries of agitation, prison, deportation to penal colonies and World War I for the British establishment to grant universal suffrage. And it was not even until after 1928 that all people over 21 were allowed to vote for political representation in parliament.
But Britons still live in a managed society. Today, Lowkey is joined by Kit Klarenberg to discuss the ways in which elements within the British establishment have been able to impose their will on the supposed democratic system in Britain over the past 100 years.
Starting with Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Prime Minister smeared with a fake letter in the 1920s to Harold Wilson being spied on and conspired against through Operation Clockwork Orange, the intelligence services have been a vital constituency for any political leader to win over and keep on side.
The sweeping aside of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister has made headlines across the world, as Conservative Party figures fight for the leading role in the country. However, it seems there may have been more than meets the eye to the drip feeding of negative stories about Johnson over the past six months.
Lowkey and Kit Klarenberg examine the evidence of possible interference in the political system to achieve the removal of Boris Johnson from power.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. He writes for The Grayzone and MintPress News.
Join Lowkey today for a critically important discussion about current events and the future of the world, and do not forget to subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
Support the show
The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
On this week’s edition of The Watchdog podcast, Lowkey explores the growing movement to free Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and is joined by his father John Shipton, to do so. Imprisoned in Belmarsh high security prison in London since 2019, and before that confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy, Assange has spent a decade locked up. If extradited to the United States, he faces up to 175 years in prison.
Yet there are signs that his future might be brighter than his past. The global movement to free him, Shipton explains, is growing. In Australia, dozens of members of parliament have come together to lobby for Assange’s release. In the United Kingdom, 23 MPs from across the political spectrum have done the same. Indeed, the parliaments of every single European nation have an Assange friendship group. And 26 major NGOs have signed a letter of support that was recently sent to President Biden.
But, as Shipton explained to Lowkey, these groups are not acting on their own accord, but rather are reacting to popular pressure. As he said:
These elements of institutions, parliaments and NGOs and governments represent an upwelling tide of support. They don’t do it out of their own motivation. They do it because they either feel the injustice from the upwelling tide of support or realize as parliamentarians that their position is to carry this forward into the institutions of Parliament and resolve the situation.”
The Biden administration is also coming under attack from Latin American nations. Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador recently publicly stated that if Biden extradites Assange, he should tear down the Statue of Liberty as freedom will be over.
“He is the best journalist of our time in the world and has been very unfairly treated, worse than a criminal..This is an embarrassment to the world,” Lopez Obrador added.
Both Shipton and Assange feature in a new documentary film, Ithaka, which details the struggle to free Assange and the emotional toll it has taken on his family. The film is directed by Ben Lawrence and produced by Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton. Late last month, Lowkey hosted a special screening of the film in London, alongside Shipton and Assange’s wife, Stella.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
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Much to his embarrassment, U.K. Labour Party leader Keir Starmer hit the headlines last week, after footage of him being accosted by local activist Audrey White went viral. Millions of people around the world have watched the video showing Starmer physically wilting at the ferocity of White’s convictions, as she accuses him of “feeding into Tory ideology” and actively destroying his own party. Commenters have noted that footage of a politician actually being held accountable by a member of the public is as refreshing as it is entertaining.
Just days after the event, she received a letter informing her she had been purged from the Labour Party.
Ms. White has refused interviews with many major outlets but gladly accepted the chance to speak to Lowkey. A proud Liverpudlian, Ms. White was aghast when Starmer began writing a column for The Sun newspaper, an outlet owned by notorious arch-conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch. The Sun has a particularly dismal reputation in Liverpool after it lied about the Hillsborough Stadium disaster, accusing Liverpool F.C. fans of urinating on and robbing the corpses of their dead comrades. In total, 97 people were killed after authorities botched their handling of a football crowd, leading to death by stampede and crushing.
Talking with Lowkey, Ms. White said she felt Starmer had some nerve to show his face in Liverpool after allying with Murdoch’s media empire:
I couldn’t believe that he had the gall to come to our city after writing in The Sun newspaper. I couldn’t believe it! I thought ‘how provocative is he?! When Jeremy Corbyn came, there were 10,000 people on a rainy Monday evening in the winter. Of course, Starmer had to sneak in the back door of the Spine Building to speak to business people. And then he had to sneak in the back door of my local restaurant. And lo and behold, he is in front of me with two wonderful filmmakers. So it was a gift.
Ms. White’s comments echo many of the hundreds of thousands of people who joined the Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in 2015. Starmer, however, has dramatically reversed the party’s direction, suppressing dissent from below. On Starmer, veteran political scientist Noam Chomsky said that "He's returning Labour to a party that will be Thatcher-lite in the style of Tony Blair."
Audrey White is a longtime activist who first came to national attention in 1983. As the manager of a clothes store, she stood up for her workers’ rights to have company-supplied uniforms. In response, she was sexually harassed and fired on the spot. Her refusal to go quietly, however, plus the huge support she received from people around the country, ended with a change in the law that outlawed sexual harassment at work. White’s story was turned into the 1987 movie “Business as Usual”, starring Glenda Jackson.
Ms. White was also targeted by the press and the right-wing of the Labour Party during the anti-semitism crisis surrounding the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Today, she talks about the viral Starmer moment, Corbyn, the spirit of Liverpool, and her life of organizing.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
Support the show
The well propagated myth is that Britain functions democratically. This, of course, flies in the face of a system where a monarchy established by the Normans in 1066 still holds weight in society. More than 1,000 laws passed through the British parliament have been vetted by the representatives of the Royal Family. There 792 unelected peers and 26 unelected bishops in the House of Lords in comparison to merely 650 elected members of parliament.
Even to get to this very limited level of political representation where all people could vote regardless of property ownership it took over 300 years of struggle – from the Putney Debates and the Levellers to the Chartists and the Suffragettes. It even entailed people sacrificing their lives for the right to vote with the slaughter of protestors in Manchester at the now infamous Peterloo Massacre. It took centuries of agitation, prison, deportation to penal colonies and World War I for the British establishment to grant universal suffrage. And it was not even until after 1928 that all people over 21 were allowed to vote for political representation in parliament.
But Britons still live in a managed society. Today, Lowkey is joined by Kit Klarenberg to discuss the ways in which elements within the British establishment have been able to impose their will on the supposed democratic system in Britain over the past 100 years.
Starting with Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Prime Minister smeared with a fake letter in the 1920s to Harold Wilson being spied on and conspired against through Operation Clockwork Orange, the intelligence services have been a vital constituency for any political leader to win over and keep on side.
The sweeping aside of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister has made headlines across the world, as Conservative Party figures fight for the leading role in the country. However, it seems there may have been more than meets the eye to the drip feeding of negative stories about Johnson over the past six months.
Lowkey and Kit Klarenbeg examine the evidence of possible interference in the political system to achieve the removal of Boorish John from power.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. He writes for The Grayzone and MintPress News.
Join Lowkey today for a critically important discussion about current events and the future of the world, and do not forget to subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform.
The MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
Support the show
"Everyone can see that the U.S. has been in decline for several years,” Ben Norton told Watchdog host Lowkey today, explaining that the days of a unipolar world where Washington dominates the planet are over.
Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the founder and editor of Multipolarista, a website dedicated to presenting international and geopolitical news through the lens of multipolarity. “Obviously this is going to be a decades-long process of decline,” he said of the United States, “But we are very clearly seeing alternatives emerging.”
In the past two decades, the U.S. grip on global power has been slipping, and new nations and organizations have begun to emerge that challenge American dominance. One of these is the BRICS, an economic and increasingly political bloc of emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Argentina, Iran and others have expressed an interest in joining this alliance, which has now laid out plans for its own bank and international currency, two moves strike at the heart of American economic hegemony.
“Now that the U.S. has sanctioned one-quarter of the global population, and especially now with the economic war on Russia, BRICS has emerged as this new economic infrastructure bringing countries together that want to get around Western sanctions,” Norton said.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spurred the U.S. and its NATO allies to attempt to force poorer nations to turn their backs on Russia, politically and economically. And they have been trying to do the same in an effort to prevent China’s continued economic rise. But it has been to little avail, as even nations not known for defying orders have refused to line up behind the West.
For Norton, this is because these states see the writing on the wall: that U.S. economic and political power is waning and that the 21st century will be a multipolar one. As he explained:
Not only are countries around the world saying they want to continue doing business with China and Russia because they want Chinese technologies and goods and Russian commodities but they are also saying ‘look, we can do business with these countries and they don’t force us to privatize all of our state assets, they don’t force us to cut social spending and the minimum wage,’ [like the U.S. does]...Countries are saying that ‘we have done this neoliberal model for decades and it has resulted in disaster.’”
China is now the world’s manufacturing powerhouse, while Russia is a huge source of vital commodities such as oil and natural gas, food and fertilizer. The U.S., by contrast, has little to offer except missiles and Netflix. Yet through coups, sanctions and other forms of economic warfare, the U.S. has been able to dictate the economic path of the world.
“What the U.S. is doing is trying to prevent any alternatives to the neoliberal capitalist model,” Norton said. Washington retains a strong military edge, however. The worry is that if all it has is a hammer, it will see nails everywhere it goes.
Another region challenging the U.S.-run global order is Latin America, where we have seen a resurgence of left-wing anti-imperialist movements. Many of these have come to power already. Later on this year, however, Brazil is poised to elect Lula da Silva as president. If the largest and most populous country in the region re-elects an anti-imperialist socialist as its leader (as polls predict it will), it could be a significant and permanent blow against American power in the Western hemisphere, a region President Joe Biden calls “America’s front yard.”
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The MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
In a massive blow to its operations, Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems has been forced to abandon its chique London headquarters, thanks to sustained pressure from Palestine Action. The final blow came earlier this month after activists threw red paint over the office and blockaded its entrance. This comes on top of the news that in January, Elbit Systems had decided to sell their arms factory in Oldham, U.K., at a significant loss, after the site was repeatedly occupied by the same group.
Today, Lowkey speaks to one of the co-founders of Palestine Action, Huda Amori. Originally from Bolton (around 12 miles from Oldham), Amori is Palestinian-Iraqi. Her father was chased from his home by Israeli soldiers in 1967.
“This is a company whose whole business model is based on the destruction of Palestine,” she told Lowkey, adding:
Elbit Systems was founded in Israel in 1966. And the main reason they were founded was to aid the dispossession, displacement and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Since then, they have continued to develop their weapons on the occupied people of Palestine. These weapons are often built in part or in full here in Britain, in our towns and cities across Britain and then are shipped off across the world to be used by other repressive regimes. Elbit systems manufacture 85% of Israel’s military drone fleet. These drones are constantly used to entrench the Apartheid system over the captive population in Gaza, used to surveil, attack and murder Palestinians.”
One of the world’s largest arms manufacturers, Elbit produces much of the Israeli Defense Forces’ machinery and ammunition and markets its products around the world as “battle tested” on Palestinians. Its products are sold globally, notably to the Indian military, helping their efforts to occupy Kashmir, and to British law enforcement, who are using the company’s facial recognition software.
“Whenever you see an attack on Palestinians, 99% of the time you can trace that back to Elbit Systems. If they are not producing the whole weapon, they are producing parts of it,” Amori said.
Despite the significant material and reputational damage done to Elbit Systems, the company is extremely hesitant to take Palestine Action activists to court. The company finds itself in a lose-lose scenario whereby not prosecuting those practicing direct action against it encourages more of the same but doing so risks a barrage of negative publicity and scrutiny, plus the chance that a jury will side with Palestine Action, as has happened before. As Amori said,
We wanted to get Elbit in court. We wanted to expose their crimes. And we knew that whatever happened, we could argue our case and we wanted to turn it around onto Elbit’s crimes because that is the reason we take action. This company shouldn’t be allowed to be here in the first place.”
Join us to hear more about this groundbreaking news and what more is coming from Palestine Action.
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The Israel-Palestine conflict is not just being fought in the streets of Hebron or Gaza; it is also being fought in the classrooms of America. Leading this struggle for the Israeli side is a group called the Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS). Jerusalem-based journalist Jessica Buxbaum has been investigating the ICS and scrutinizing their role in shifting the public debate in the U.S. Jessica joins Lowkey to discuss her recent MintPress News investigation, “Institute for Curriculum Services: How an Israel Lobby Group Infiltrated US Education.
In recent years, progressive activism has forced the United States to begin to deal with the reality of its racist part. These anti-racist movements have attempted to correct what they see as a whitewashing of racist violence from history textbooks. The ICS has attempted to position itself in this post-Black Lives Matter milieu, claiming that their organization exists to give a more accurate picture of Jewish history in textbooks and clear up lingering misconceptions and stereotypes. “But really,” Buxbaum told Lowkey today, “they are just a front for the Israeli lobby.”
Jessica Buxbaum is an investigative journalist specializing in Middle Eastern politics and current affairs. Aside from MintPress News, her work can also be found in Middle East Eye, The New Arab, and Gulf News.
Buxbaum sent Freedom of Information requests to the education boards of all 50 states and found that the ICS was involved in a pressure campaign to monitor and change the wording and framing of school textbooks across the country in order to present a one-sided, pro-Israel narrative to children.
Examples included requests to delete all references to “Palestine,” “Palestinian territories,” or the “West Bank”; removing information about Palestinian culture and heritage; and even demands to amend maps, so that areas such as East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights appear not as illegally annexed but as territorially part of Israel.
“A lot of it is about erasing Palestine, anything that references the natives of Palestine, Palestinians as an indigenous people, that Palestinians have inhabited the land for thousands of years. All those things, they want to have deleted,” Buxbaum told Lowkey.
Another key prong in the ICS attack on the truth is to present Palestinian leadership as violent and the Israeli state as a noble, peace-loving democracy. The word “settlers,” the ICS requested, should be replaced by “communities.” “Wall” with “security fence,” “militant” with “terrorist,” and so on. References to Israel capturing the West Bank in 1967 should be removed and depictions of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat should include that he “direct[ed] countless terrorist attacks against Israelis.” It should also, the ICS suggests, be made clear that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East.”
The ICS has hosted dozens of training seminars with thousands of schoolteachers across the United States, presenting the issue in a framework conducive to the outlook of the Israeli government. The organization has also recommended that American students be discouraged from finding their own sources of information on the internet, and instead be instructed to use resources from the Anti-Defamation League or the Jewish Virtual Library.
However, attempts to propagandize children with a pro-Israeli government narrative are not limited to the United States. Lowkey also shares his research into how a similar phenomenon is happening in the United Kingdom.
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Elon Musk is not some crusading rebel railing against the establishment; he’s one of the key drivers of the U.S. surveillance state. That is the message that Alan MacLeod gave Lowkey in this latest episode of “The Watchdog.”
While commentators have been heartened and dismayed in equal measure at the prospect of the South African billionaire’s takeover of Twitter, they all appear to agree that Musk will make huge changes to the platform. Yet very few have acknowledged the basic fact that Musk’s fortune comes in no small part due to his close connections to the national security state.
As MacLeod explained, SpaceX was only able to get off the ground with the help of In-Q-Tel, the venture capitalist wing of the CIA, as well as with huge financial backing from NASA. Today, the company competes with Lockheed Martin and Boeing for gigantic military rocket contracts, helping organizations like the Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office launch their spy satellites into orbit, thereby performing a crucial service to the global surveillance system.
The MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
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On May 24, an 18-year-old gunman fatally shot 22 people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Police reportedly refused to confront the killer, locked him in a room full of children, physically prevented parents from getting involved and even allegedly rescued their own children first.
The massacre has once again brought the United States’ unique obsession with firearms to the fore, with renewed calls to ban assault rifles. But even among gun control advocates, few realize the connections between the Second Amendment and white supremacy.
Today’s guest is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Originally from Oklahoma, Dunbar-Ortiz is a writer, historian and activist, possibly best known for her 2014 classic book, “An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States.” She argues that the context behind the Second Amendment is that the newly-independent United States needed “well-regulated militias” of white men to “kill Indians and take their land”, or to form slave patrols that would hunt down black people fleeing their captivity. It is out of these slave patrols that the first police departments were formed.
Ultimately, she argues, the need for such armed militias arose from the fact that the white colonists were on recently stolen land, surrounded by hostile groups who were trying to get their land back. As she notes, it was a crime to give or sell a gun to a Native American.
The MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
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The cold-blooded killing of Shireen Abu Akleh earlier this month has made headlines around the world. An Israeli soldier shot the veteran Al-Jazeera journalist in the head while she was reporting on their raid on a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin.
Shireen’s niece Lina first heard of the news from her father, who phoned her early in the morning to tell her she was injured. Today, Watchdog host Lowkey speaks to Lina Abu Akleh about her aunt’s work, legacy, and the ongoing war against the press.
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In the twenty-ninth installment of “The Watchdog” podcast, Lowkey speaks to Todd E. Pierce about the global reach of the U.S. empire and its totalitarian ambitions to control the entire planet. Todd is a retired U.S. Army officer and defense attorney whose experiences serving at the front line of empire moved him to become a defender of its victims. Towards the end of his military service, he volunteered to become a defense attorney for three prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Previously a neoconservative cold warrior, Pierce joined the military at an early age and served in the first Gulf War. Yet after being exposed to the realities of neoconservative doctrine, his faith in the project began to waver.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the U.S. victory in Iraq, American war planners were giddy with excitement and dreamed of a world where they had “full spectrum dominance.” It was at this point that top neoconservatives like Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby began to outline their plans for total world domination. As Pierce told Lowkey, their position was essentially:
The world now is subject to our control and we would not tolerate any country having the ability...to cause us to hesitate in our decision making, even for legitimate grievances. It’s totalitarian. It is a totalitarian doctrine that we tried to impose on the world. And it is still our doctrine."
Inside the U.S. as well, they saw little need for the façade of democracy and developed their “unitary executive theory,” a notion Pierce described as “the idea that the U.S. president can do anything he or she wishes to do. It is no less than that: it’s a dictatorship.”
Unlike many in the country, Pierce became more radical as he got older and increasingly came to oppose the empire he served for years. Today, Pierce is a searing critic of U.S. human rights discourse, claiming that Washington’s actions around the world have “made a mockery” of the phrase. From protecting torturers to defending human rights-abusing allies like Saudi Arabia, the U.S. has fundamentally undermined its own position. As he has argued, “Everything that we have done since 9/11 is wrong.”
Todd E. Pierce served with the 349th Psychological Operations Company and the 205th Infantry Brigade as a senior NCO. In 2008, he was assigned to the Office of the Chief Defense Counsel. An American lawyer, military historian, former army computer technician, and former Judge Advocate General Defense Attorney, he volunteered to defend Guantanamo Bay inmates, describing the legal theory underpinning the detention camp as an attack on the Constitution.
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Israel is once again attacking the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Israeli forces storming the ancient religious complex fired tear gas and rubber bullets, seriously injuring hundreds and killing at least one person.
The latest series of attacks is the most consequential since those in May last year, events that led to the Israeli military killing hundreds of Palestinians, injuring thousands, and forcing tens of thousands to flee their houses.
“What is happening at Al-Aqsa right now is more dangerous than at any other time in the past,” Dr. Ramzy Baroud told Lowkey today. Dr. Baroud is a journalist and editor of The Palestine Chronicle, as well as a non-resident senior research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs. He is the author of six books, including “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out,” co-written with Professor Ilan Pappé.
The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
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In this edition of The Watchdog Podcast, Lowkey talks to Alan MacLeod about Ukraine, how the media is covering the conflict, and the promotion of supposedly “independent” Ukrainian media outlets that are quietly being funded by Western governments.
Chief among these is The Kyiv Independent, a newspaper that was barely three months old at the time of the Russian invasion but has shot to prominence in the West, being relentlessly promoted on television and radio and in print. As a result, it has managed to garner over two million followers on Twitter and raise millions of dollars in crowdfunding.
However, far less known is that The Kyiv Independent was born thanks to a grant of over CA$200,000 from the Canadian government, which made the donation through the European Endowment for Democracy. Furthermore, virtually all of The Kyiv Independent’s staff came from The Kyiv Post, an outlet that has long been financially supported by NATO, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and Western governments, meaning that for years they were directly in the pay of the national security state. Perhaps, then, The Kyiv Independent is not quite as independent as it makes itself out to be.
Furthermore, as MacLeod explained, many Kyiv Independent journalists come from suspect backgrounds, including individuals who previously worked for NATO think tank The Atlantic Council, the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, or for the Council on Foreign Relations.
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The MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.For Episode 24 of The Watchdog Podcast, Lowkey is joined by journalist Ben Norton to discuss the recent U.S.-backed coup in Pakistan, the West’s plan to turn Ukraine into a neverending war, and the new multipolar global order taking shape before our eyes.
Ben Norton is a Nicaragua-based journalist whose work is focused on U.S. foreign policy and international politics. He recently launched his new journalism platform, Multipolarista. His video content can also be found at Rokfin and on YouTube.
Today, he sat down to speak to Lowkey about the recent U.S.-backed coup against Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. Earlier this month, Khan was removed from his position following a vote of no confidence in his leadership, after several small parties from his coalition changed their allegiance.
Join Lowkey today for a critically important discussion about current events and the future of the world, and do not forget to subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
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This week Lowkey is joined by Asa Winstanley, an investigative journalist living in London, who writes about Palestine and the Middle East. He hails from the south of Wales and has been visiting Palestine since 2004. He writes for the groundbreaking Palestinian news site The Electronic Intifada, where he is an associate editor, and also writes a weekly column for the Middle East Monitor.
Winstanley explores the post-WW2 period of European history and reveals examples of Nazis being rehabilitated, subsumed into the U.S. machinery of empire, and dispatched as Cold Warriors.
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Pro-Israeli government campaigners were left bitterly disappointed when, earlier this month, their campaign to remove Palestinian activist and academic Shahd Abusalama from her position at Sheffield Hallam University failed.
“I have been wholly exonerated of the false charges of antisemitism, brought under the unfit-for-purpose IHRA definition,” Abusalama announced, adding that she has actually been offered a more secure contract with the university, giving her more protection from these smears.
The Jewish Chronicle, Britain’s self-proclaimed “oldest Jewish newspaper,” was furious with the decision to allow an “activist who praised terrorists” to continue in her position, labeling the Yorkshire institution a “hostile environment” for British Jews to study at.
Today, Abusalama joins Watchdog host Lowkey to talk about her upbringing in a Gazan refugee camp, her struggles with the powerful Israel lobby, and her future.
Shahd Abusalama is an artist, activist, teacher, and co-founder of the London-based Hawiyya Dance Company. Her writings can be found on her blog, Palestine From My Eyes. In her role as associate lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, she will be teaching a course on postcolonial media culture.
Born into an activist family, Abusalama grew up in Jabalia Refugee Camp in northern Gaza. When he was at a young age, her father was imprisoned and tortured, and was sentenced to over 700 years in an Israeli prison (he was released in 1985 in a prisoner exchange deal). Charges had been brought against her because she displayed a poster with the words “Stop the Palestinian Holocaust” and referred to the Israeli bombing of Gaza in May of last year using the same language.
She considers claiming this as evidence of antisemitism is ludicrous. “Any Palestinian liberation organization is deemed terrorist by the occupying power. This is ridiculous, of course… As Palestinians living under occupation, we have a right to resist,” she told Lowkey today.
Nevertheless, the Israel lobby has achieved a number of victories in previous years, notably whipping up a media furor over antisemitism in the Labour Party, something that helped the right wing of the party purge prominent anti-war, anti-apartheid activists from its midst.
Of late, however, there has also been a series of serious setbacks for the state of Israel and its PR campaign. Dozens of performers pulled out of the Sydney Festival in January over its financial relationship with the Israeli embassy, while Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems recently shut down its plant in Oldham near Manchester after activists occupied it, stopping production of drones being used to harm civilians. In previous episodes, the Watchdog Podcast covered both these issues in depth. Join us for another in-depth conversation about Israel, Palestine and free speech.
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“The U.S. military is the largest institutional polluter in the world. There is no corporation or industry that compares to the damage and devastation done by the U.S. war machine,” Abby Martin told Watchdog host Lowkey today.
Abby Martin is a California-based artist, journalist and filmmaker who is host of The Empire Files, a series that analyzes the world through the framing of the United States as a global empire. Her upcoming movie, “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” exposes how the U.S. military and America’s endless wars are a key driver in catastrophic climate change.
The film, cataloging the military’s brazen destruction of the environment, has taken Abby across the world, from the frozen wastes of Alaska to the COP 26 conference in Scotland to Hawaii, where a devastating fuel leak at the Navy’s Red Hill storage facility has poisoned the island’s drinking water and caused countless hospitalizations.
While corporate media have largely looked the other way, The Watchdog Podcast covered this story in January, interviewing two Hawaiian activists organizing against the military presence on the mid-Pacific archipelago.
Hawaii’s attorney general, David Day, remarked that the state had a “ticking time bomb” on its hands, and that further contamination of its precious water supply was all but inevitable. The tanks sit just feet above the island’s largest aquifer. The Environmental Protection Agency issued an executive order demanding the military remove the fuel from these leaking tanks. Yet the military has essentially refused to do so.
“They gave the Navy 30 days to come up with a plan to defuel these tanks,” Martin told Lowkey today. “And what did the Navy do after those 30 days? They responded with a legal case saying ‘No, we are actually going to fight this in court.’ And I think that really shows the imperial arrogance of this institution, that it knows simply that it is above the law!”
The two also discussed the COP 26 conference and the U.S. government’s refusal to even estimate its armed forces’ emissions, let alone put a cap on them. Martin also updated Lowkey on recent events in her court case against the state of Georgia, one of the many states that require anyone doing business with them to sign a pledge promising never to engage in the boycotting of Israel.
Finally, they also talked about the latest flashpoint of U.S. imperialism in Ukraine. Martin argued that if the roles were reversed, everyone would understand how aggressive Washington’s actions have been, stating:
Let’s say Russia moved 3,000 troops and sent lethal arms to the [U.S.] border with Canada or Mexico. Of course, that wouldn’t happen; but if it did, what do you think the U.S. political and media establishment would do? It would be a complete meltdown saying that we need to bomb Russia, like drop a nuke on them or something. The double standard and hypocrisy is stunning – it never ceases to amaze me.
Join Lowkey and Abby for a wide-ranging discussion on war, climate and current events.
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Today, Watchdog host Lowkey is joined by investigative journalist Matt Kennard to discuss how the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has infiltrated foreign media in an attempt to export obedience to the United States government and promote Washington’s interests around the world.
In the late twentieth century, the CIA developed an infamous reputation, both inside and outside the United States, as scandal after scandal hit the agency. COINTELPRO quietly infiltrated and subverted all manner of domestic democratic movements, including the student movement, the civil rights campaign, the hippie movement and the Black Panthers. The Church Committee, chaired by Sen. Frank Church (D-ID), revealed to the public that the CIA had also infiltrated hundreds of the largest and most important domestic media outlets in order to shape public discussion. Meanwhile, abroad, the CIA had funded death squads in Central America and organized the overthrow of several foreign leaders.
The National Endowment for Democracy was the Reagan administration’s solution to the storm of negative publicity. Established in 1983 as a semi-private company, the NED’s job was to be the group to which the U.S. government outsourced its dirtiest work. This was done almost completely openly. “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” NED co-founder Allen Weinstein proudly told The Washington Post.
The NED quickly went to work undermining the governments of Eastern Europe in the name of democracy and freedom of speech. Yet, as Kennard told Lowkey, once the Communist-era regimes fell, it actually expanded its scope to act as a worldwide force for projecting U.S. government interests everywhere.
In recent years, the NED has been funneling money to protest leaders in Hong Kong, carrying out dozens of operations against the government of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, attempting to overthrow the Cuban government, and has even organized rock concerts inside Venezuela in an effort to destabilize the country.
But Kennard’s latest research shows that the NED is also conducting influence operations in the United Kingdom. The agency is quietly funding British journalistic outlets and press organizations to the tune of $3.5 million. As Kennard told Lowkey today:
From our research, it is quite clear that democracy and freedom are not the priorities of the NED because we could not find even one grant given in any of the six U.S.-backed Gulf dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait). Not one pro-democracy group in those countries received an NED grant that we could find. So it is effectively about projecting American power rather than freedom and democracy.
A former reporter for The Financial Times, Kennard is now chief investigator at Declassified UK, an investigative journalism outlet concentrating on British foreign policy, military and state power. He is deeply concerned about his findings, and the presupposition that U.S. actions inside Britain are benevolent.
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On January 13, campaigners announced that, after years of popular pressure and direct action, Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems had decided to bite the bullet and sell its factory located in Oldham in the northwest of England.
A week later, there was another victory for the anti-war activists, as a British judge dismissed the case against three members of the group Palestine Action who were on trial for occupying Elbit’s factory in Shenstone, 60 miles to Oldham’s south.
Today, The Watchdog speaks to three key members of the campaign to force Great Britain to divest itself from aiding in war crimes around the world.
Adie Mormech is a member of Manchester Palestine Action and has been involved in organizing against Elbit Systems since 2014. Before that, he lived and worked in Gaza. In 2009, he was among a group of 21 human-rights workers arrested by the Israeli military.
Wakas is a co-founder of Oldham Peace and Justice, the group that spearheaded the occupation of Elbit’s factory, causing it eventually to close its doors permanently. He has regularly volunteered in Palestine with the international solidarity movement, notably in the Jordan Valley and Hebron.
Mehek is a 20-year-old student from Oldham studying forensic science at the nearby University of Huddersfield. A key member of the local group, she is a regular at their demonstrations.
There have been almost 100 actions against weapons companies complicit in the killing of Palestinians in just one year. The movement is growing thanks to support from the local community and from the judicial systems, where activists put on trial have been consistently found not-guilty by juries. Also aiding their efforts have been British firefighters. In May, they were called to remove activists from the roof of a weapons factory in Leicester owned by Elbit and Thales U.K. However, they refused to do so, even siding with the protestors. “As firefighters, we are, and remain, a proud humanitarian service and our role does not involve law enforcement,” read a statement from the Fire Brigades Union. “[We] stand in support of Palestinian solidarity and the right to protest,” they added.
Around the world, Elbit Systems markets its products, such as drones and high-tech laser weapons, as “battle tested” and “field proven” thanks to their attacks on Gaza. Yet their decision to sell their Oldham factory (at a significant loss of over $4 million) can only be seen as a victory for the activists. “Arms companies are running around scared. They don’t know what to do because they have never had that level of exposure before,” Adie said, while praising the efficacy of direct action. “If loads of people locally decide that they are hellbent on stopping this weapons factory from functioning, it will stop. And that is the biggest story here,” he added.
However, this story has barely been mentioned in the corporate press, leaving only alternative media such as Tribune Magazine, Mondoweiss, The Canary, and The Morning Star to cover it, something Lowkey suggested is because billionaire-funded media do not want more Brits joining this growing movement.
To find out more, watch or listen now, because you are unlikely to hear about this story on TV or in print.
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Both “Harry Potter” star Emma Watson and the book’s author, J.K. Rowling, have been courting controversy: the former for posting a message of solidarity with the Palestinian people on her official Instagram page; the latter after comedian Jon Stewart took her to task for the insensitive and antisemitic portrayal of goblins in her book and movie franchise.
Yet while Rowling was defended by a wide range of pro-Israel groups who rushed to her side, Watson was slandered as a secret anti-Jewish bigot by figures as official as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Joining Lowkey today on The Watchdog to discuss this blatant double standard is MintPress Senior Staff Writer and Podcast Producer Alan MacLeod. Before joining MintPress News in 2019, Alan was an academic whose work focused on propaganda, media and power. He has published a number of peer-reviewed academic papers on the subject, as well as two books: “Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting,” and “Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent.” His latest article, “J.K. Rowling’s Hypocrisy: The Author who Smeared Jeremy Corbyn Gave Us Books and Films Full of Antisemitic Stereotypes,” can be read on MintPress News.
MacLeod suggested that the furor over Watson’s anodyne message, contrasted with the collective defense of Rowling, can be explained by examining their positions on Israel. While Watson has traditionally supported liberal or progressive causes, Rowling has been something of a champion of the apartheid state. An Israeli marketing firm ranked her as the fourth most important pro-Israel personality online – the highest Gentile on the list. Rowling has consistently opposed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, calling it “divisive and discriminatory.” She was also a leader in the campaign to unseat Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn over his alleged antisemitic remarks. Corbyn is and was a champion of Palestine liberation and had been highly critical of Israeli governmental policies.
In the second part of the show, the two talk about MacLeod’s work exposing the connections between Hollywood and the national security state. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that the Department of Defense has been involved in the production of over 800 movies and over 1,100 U.S. TV shows. From military movies like “12 Strong” and “Lone Survivor” to blockbusters like “Iron Man” and comedies like “Brüno,” the military plays a leading role in manufacturing pop culture.
If it is to help with the production of a movie or TV show, the military usually demands complete editorial control over the entire process, often rewriting entire scripts and changing scenes to present itself in the best light possible. In return, they offer military bases to shoot on, access to the latest military technology like battleships or fighter jets, soldiers to appear as extras, and help acquiring uniforms and other props. MacLeod went through how the documents show that the four previously mentioned movies were changed in order to send a pro-military, pro-war message.
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Just hours before it is set to begin, dozens of acts are withdrawing from the prestigious Sydney Festival in protest of the event’s sponsorship by the Israeli Embassy. One group that has chosen to do so are Melbourne-based musicians Karate Boogaloo, who explained that:
Boycotts and divestments have a strong track record of holding governments and corporations accountable for their actions, which is why Karate Boogaloo is standing in solidarity with Palestinian people and boycotting the Sydney Festival, as a result of it accepting money from the human rights-abusing regime that is the Israeli Government.
The boycott has proven to be a public-relations disaster for Israel, which attempts to use the arts as a way to launder its image across much of the developed world. Today, Lowkey sits down to talk to two of the boycott’s organizers, Sara Saleh and Jennine Khalik. Saleh is a poet and organizer. The daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt and Georgia, she is also the co-editor of the book “Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity.” Khalik is a journalist who has worked for ABC News and The Australian. Like Saleh, she is the daughter of Palestinian refugees.
The Sydney Festival is one of the most established and iconic cultural celebrations Australia has to offer, inviting a huge range of artists and performers from around the world. Yet it caused major controversy after accepting sponsorship from the Israeli Embassy. Saleh accused the festival of being complicit in “art washing” Israeli atrocities, asking Lowkey:
How is it that this festival can reconcile its shallow commitment to First Nations solidarity here [in Australia] while legitimizing and normalizing its relationship with a settler-colonial Apartheid state that we know maintains a system of subjugation and land theft against Palestinians?
Australia is one of Israel’s closest international allies, purchasing Israeli weaponry and voting against international condemnations of its conduct at the United Nations. Khalik explained that simply being Palestinian is a major road block to a successful career in some fields, including hers. Almost immediately after she was hired at The Australian (a national newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch), her editor was accosted by Israeli diplomats who demanded an answer to why they had hired a Palestinian.
Khalik said it was made patently clear by some of her colleagues that she was not welcome in the newsroom because of her ethnicity and her political stances. However, she persevered because:
I did not want to bullied out by the Zionist lobby groups, because that is what they were aiming for. They did not want me there. And they wanted to make me as uncomfortable as possible. And they had journalists on the inside, working in their service.
Despite its best efforts, Israel is losing its control over “narrative management,” with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement gaining momentum worldwide. If Israel’s name becomes toxic in the world of culture, the dam holding political change back might begin to break.
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In November, a huge underground naval fuel storage facility at Red Hill near Honolulu burst, leaking 14,000 gallons of jet fuel, contaminating the water supply, poisoning scores of people and driving thousands of Hawaiian families from their homes.
The state’s attorney general, David Day, has alleged that the military has essentially no control over the safety of the enormous depot, which holds 250 million gallons of fuel. Day remarked that the state had a “ticking time bomb” on its hands, and that further contamination of its precious water supply was all but inevitable. The tanks sit just feet above the island’s largest aquifer.
And this incident is merely the latest in a long list showing the American empire’s callous disregard for the civilian population of Hawaii, as it puts military needs before the people or the environment. Joining Lowkey today are two Hawaiian activists, Ihilani Lasconia and Daniel Kauwila Mahi. Ihilani is an artist, singer and organizer from Waimānalo; Daniel is a musician, rapper and student from Honolulu.
The two place the latest disaster in the context of centuries of American imperialism, which sees Hawaii as a strategic location for control over the Pacific. The United States overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and formally annexed the islands in 1898. From there, it became a linchpin in the U.S. expansion across the Pacific and the conquest of the Philippines, Guam and other territories, serving as an important military launchpad.
There are 11 military bases on Oahu alone, including the enormous Pearl Harbor, the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command. So militarized have the islands become that around one in ten of all Hawaii residents are servicemen and -women.
“It’s not just the guns and the bombs,” Lasconia told Lowkey, noting that the military has even tested depleted uranium shells at its bases, leading to locals developing cancer. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” of being at ground zero for the American war machine, she added.
The deep-seated racism towards the indigenous population is something that native Hawaiians can feel every day. Lasconia noted that this latest contamination was far from an isolated incident. “Fuel tanks have been leaking for decades now,” she said; “But [it is] because [this time] it affected predominantly white people on the U.S. base that they are doing something about it.” Kauwila Mahi noted that the increased critical coverage of the incident is also prompted by the negative consequences it has for the state's two other sectors of power: the tourism and real estate industries, which do not wish to see further environmental degradation. He sees this as an opportunity to use the Red Hill disaster as a wedge issue to strike back at the excessive militarism on display throughout the islands.
Ihilani and Daniel are among a new generation of leaders challenging the empire, although they see themselves as part of a long tradition. “Hawaiians have always opposed militarization throughout Hawaii,” Lasconia said. However, she expects no help from local elected officials, who do not have the power to speak out against the military for fear of reprisals. “It’s not a government; it’s not a democracy; it’s essentially a mafia state run by terrorists who don’t hurt just Hawaii but indigenous peoples across the world,” she told Lowkey.
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For a supposedly developed, democratic nation, the United States locks up an extraordinary number of its citizens. Close to one quarter of the world’s prison population is in the United States. Even on a per capita basis, only El Salvador and Turkmenistan come close to America’s preponderance for incarceration. In a country with a rising population and a falling demand for labor, the government decided to solve this problem by simply locking up millions of its poorest citizens, in the process allowing corporate America to make billions from their suffering. The prison industry is booming: between 1990 and 2005, the U.S. built, on average, a new prison every ten days.
Joining Lowkey to discuss how prisons became big business is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges. Chris spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Balkans, and the Middle East for The New York Times and currently hosts the show On Contact on RT. His latest book, “Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison,” was published in October. “The entire system works to railroad primarily poor people and disproportionately poor people of color into this system,” he told Lowkey. “Almost no one in the United States gets a jury trial; 94% of the people in the prison system are coerced by prosecutors to accept a plea deal. Public defenders can only spend 10 or 15 minutes with their clients.”
In “Our Class,” Hedges describes mass incarceration as “the civil rights issue of our age.” “When you incarcerate someone, in essence, the whole family becomes incarcerated,” he said. Some 77 million Americans have a criminal record, while 113 million American adults have an immediate family member who has been to or currently is incarcerated, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
Once in the system, it is, by design, extremely hard to escape. Incarcerated individuals are forced to work for pennies per hour (some states pay nothing), while all manner of essential items are not provided and cost exorbitant amounts to purchase from the commissary. As a result, inmates are often released owing thousands of dollars. Having a criminal record bars citizens from many welfare and public housing benefits, as well as applying for jobs in a myriad of professions. For example, during the summer wildfires last year, California prison firefighters worked alongside professionals, tackling some of the worst blazes in American history. For this, they were paid barely $1 per hour, and are blocked from applying to the fire department once they are released. Thus, paying back these odious debts is even harder than it may appear.
Hedges singled out President Biden as playing a particularly key role in turning the United States into an incarceration nation. Biden was “instrumental” in pushing the Democrats into seizing back the “law and order” narrative from the Republicans in the 1990s, helping to pass into law rules such as the Three Strikes Law, which has sent many Americans to prison for life for trivial offenses. The number of crimes worthy of the death penalty was also exanded from barely a handful to 51. Until recently, Biden took credit for the infamous 1994 Crime Bill, which was a key piece of legislation in codifying the prison industrial complex.
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The High Court in London has upheld the U.S. government’s appeal to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a key step towards his rendition to the United States. The Australian publisher faces up to 175 years in prison once he sets foot on American soil.
Whether he ever makes it to the United States is still in question. His legal team has indicated they will challenge the ruling, which will inevitably draw out court proceedings and prolong his stay inside Belmarsh Prison. Also of note is the 50-year-old’s health. This weekend, it was revealed that he had suffered a stroke in October as a result of the stress of the trial.
Two individuals who have been closely monitoring the Assange trial are Pablo Navarette and John McEvoy. Pablo is a British-Chilean filmmaker and the founder of Alborada magazine, an outlet concentrating on Latin American politics. John is an investigative journalist whose work documents the impact of the British national security state on public life. In November, the pair published an article entitled ‘“A Lot of Mistakes”: The Guardian and Julian Assange,’ which can be read on MintPress News. Today, they discussed the role that The Guardian, and the mainstream press more generally, have played in persecuting him.
It is now known that UC Global – the private security firm hired to protect the Ecuadorian Embassy, where Assange was confined – was secretly spying on their charge, sending the information they gleaned back to the U.S. government. This included security cameras and audio bugs.
Guardian journalist Stephanie Kirchgaessner was aware of the spying long before it was made public. Yet rather than blowing the whistle, she instead chose to write highly dubious articles insinuating that he was an agent of Russian malfeasance.
The Guardian was one of WikiLeaks's partner organizations, being fed bombshell after bombshell, revelations that helped build its brand and its audience. Yet, far from standing up for free speech, itwas in the lead in attacking WikiLeaks and its founder. Of particular note is Luke Harding, who published the passcode to a trove of WikiLeaks documents, an act that the U.S. government claims endangered its representatives around the world.
In 2018, Harding also published a viral story that claimed that Assange had secretly met with Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and unnamed “Russians” while in the Ecuadorian Embassy. The insinuation was that Assange (and Russia) was partly responsible for Trump’s shocking election in 2016.
From being Assange’s partner, the newspaper morphed into “the spearhead of a campaign of vilification by the mainstream media,” Navarette told Lowkey.
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“Unregulated capitalism is a suicide pact” – Noam Chomsky did not hold back today when discussing the worldwide economic system and the world’s acceleration towards climate collapse. Chomsky made the comments in the context of the recent COP26 climate-change conference in Glasgow, where global leaders gathered to discuss global environmental threats, but little of any note was achieved.
The renowned linguist and political scientist also trained his ire on the European Union and its treatment of refugees fleeing from NATO’s wars in the Middle East and North Africa, calling it “one of the worst crimes of the modern age,” and claiming it made “what Trump did to refugees look mild” by comparison.
“[There are] thousands of people dying in the Mediterranean, trying to flee from Africa, where Europe has a certain history -- it destroyed Africa for centuries. People are trying to flee from the wreckage and the Europeans are saying ‘go drown in the Mediterranean,’” he explained, noting that Europe had also set up military bases in Niger (one of the poorest countries in Africa) in a bid to stop migrants from even making it to the Mediterranean.
“The message is ‘don’t come anywhere near us. We destroy you for a couple of hundred years, we enslave your population, we prevent you from developing, we murder and slaughter you, but don’t come anywhere near our shores,’” he told Lowkey; “I don’t think there are words to describe this; ...it is a hideous crime.”
While widely hailed as the father of modern linguistics, Noam Chomsky has, for well over half a century, also been one of the sharpest and most committed voices critiquing the crimes of the United States government. Having written well over 100 books on a range of subjects – from politics to media to science and history – Chomsky was at ease discussing many of the biggest questions facing humanity today.
Among those questions is the increasing American hostility towards China and the possibility of a terminal nuclear war. While the 92-year-old University of Arizona professor was critical of Chinese actions in the South China Sea, he reserved most of his criticism for the U.S. government, which he claimed sees the world in much the same way as the head of an organized crime syndicate views a turf war. “The ‘threat’ of China is China’s existence; it exists as a major power that the United States cannot push around, cannot intimidate, and does not follow U.S. orders. That is intolerable. Any mafia don can explain that,” he told Lowkey.
In this wide ranging conversation, Lowkey and Chomsky also discuss U.S. war crimes, the rise of conservative academic star Jordan Peterson (and what that says about academia), and the concocted antisemitism crisis in British public life.
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The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) is celebrating as, with almost all votes counted, they appear to have won 20 out of the country’s 23 states in Sunday’s regional “mega elections.” More than 70,000 candidates stood for one of 3,082 public positions, including local mayorships, councillors, regional legislators and state governors -- the vast majority of candidates affiliated with opposition parties.
The landslide victory was watched over by international observers from 55 countries, including a delegation from the European Union, who praised the organizational capacity of the National Electoral Council, effectively endorsing the proceedings.
This will no doubt anger many in Washington. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described the vote as a “grossly skewed” contest controlled by a dictatorship that carries out, “arbitrary arrests and harassment of political and civil society actors, criminalization of opposition parties’ activities, bans on candidates across the political spectrum, manipulation of voter registration rolls, persistent media censorship, and other authoritarian tactics.”
If this is indeed the case -- that the Maduro administration is autocratic and repressive -- why did so many people still come out to support and vote for Maduro and the PSUV? Joining Lowkey to discuss this is Diego Sequera, a columnist for investigative journalism outlet Mision Verdad. One of the sharpest and most cogent thinkers on radical politics, Sequera is also a member of the Samuel Robinson Institute, a think tank based in Caracas.
While President Nicolás Maduro has undoubtedly presided over a period of serious economic dislocation, it is important to remember it was not always this way. The socialist movement first came to power in 1999 under Hugo Chavez who, in just a few short years, radically transformed the country.
Under Chavez, school enrollment went from 45% to 90% nationwide. The number of people in primary education rose from only 500,000 in 1998 to 2.8 million by the time of his death in 2013 -- a 460% rise. Sequera described this as “the biggest literacy campaign in history.” “In a very few years, illiteracy, which was pretty high here, was eradicated completely… Here you had people 80 years old finishing their high school and then starting university,” he told Lowkey. This would have been unthinkable before the Bolivarian revolution.
Thus, there remains a great deal of good will towards the PSUV. Sunday’s result underscores the notion that the Venezuelan people blame the U.S. sanctions for their suffering, rather than purely pointing the finger at the government.
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In Venezuela, Britain is dedicated to supporting the U.S.’s sanctions regime against the country, responsible for more than 100,000 deaths already. McEvoy’s work has revealed the existence of a secret British “reconstruction unit” inside Venezuela -- an organization dedicated to overthrowing the Maduro government and planning for a future Venezuela without him.
The British government also ordered the Bank of England to freeze around $2 billion worth of gold belonging to the government of Venezuela, on the grounds that it no longer recognized Maduro, instead choosing the unelected Juan Guaidó as the country’s legitimate ruler. “Venezuela has been a key target of the hybrid war,” McEvoy explained to Lowkey.
McEvoy’s academic work at the University of Liverpool focuses on Western interference in Latin America. He recently revealed that the British government had worked tirelessly in the 1960s to prevent the anti-imperialist socialist Salvador Allende from coming to power, and, once he was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup d’etat, supported fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. The U.K. government protected Pinochet even after he was removed from office, including paying for his legal fees in his extradition case to Spain, where he was wanted to stand trial for crimes against humanity.
Just as Britain protected war criminals in the past, today it is helping to persecute those who expose war crimes, such as Julian Assange.
A major thorn in the side of the British establishment, McEvoy is having increasing trouble uncovering documents, his FOIA requests being constantly dismissed in cases he believes to be politically motivated. The FOIA system is supposed to be blind and neutral. However, he told Lowkey, “it has become clear that they have got a blacklist of journalists that they have effectively blocked releasing information to… It’s a signal of a receding democracy.”
The two also discuss threats to independent journalism at home, specifically the silent campaign to destroy the funding model of alternative media. A group called Stop Funding Fake News was set up in 2019, supposedly in an effort to pressure businesses to remove ads from websites sharing hateful or misleading content. However, McEvoy’s research found that the vast majority of its ire was directed at left-wing alternative news outlet The Canary, leading him to conclude that the project was a “thinly veiled censorship campaign against independent media in the U.K.”
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A small English village is hardly the first place that comes to mind when mentioning the war in Yemen. Yet Warton in the northwest of England is playing an oversized role in what the United Nations has repeatedly called “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” The Lancashire village is home to an airfield and a manufacturing site where weapons dealer BAE Systems maintains, repairs and rearms Saudi jets responsible for much of the worst destruction in Yemen.
Today, Lowkey speaks to Phil Miller, an investigative journalist and producer who is currently a staff reporter for Declassified UK. He has just released the documentary “Warton’s War on Yemen,” which exposes how BAE Systems is playing a key role in the carnage in the Middle East. Every week, aircraft arrive from and leave for Saudi Arabia carrying crucial supplies to keep the Kingdom’s war machine going.
War is big business. A 2018 paper found that an estimated 7,000 employees of U.K. contractor companies, civil servants, and temporarily deployed military personnel were currently aiding Saudi forces in their attack on Yemen. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the Kingdom is by far Britain’s most important arms customer, responsible for 49% of all international weapons purchases.
Miller also described the British royal family as “effectively lobbyists for BAE Systems,” as they are often sent to the Middle East to drum up orders for U.K.-made weapons.
That British-made arms are being used against civilian populations is not in doubt. A 2020 report from Oxfam noted that Saudi forces were deliberately targeting medical and water infrastructure, having done so over 200 times since the conflict began. This amounted to one attack every 10 days on average. There have been over 21,000 Coalition air raids on the country since 2015, according to the Yemen Data Project.
Miller studied politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London before switching to journalism. An acclaimed filmmaker, he is also author of the book “Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes.” Join Lowkey and Miller for a frank discussion about the incredible secret role Britain is playing in major war crimes.
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Earlier this week, rapper Lowkey joined campaigners on the streets of Oldham as they protested at the Elbit Ferranti weapons factory located in the northern English town.
While the post-industrial town of 96,000 people might not seem like a likely flashpoint for the Israel-Palestine conflict, many of the weapons used against the civilian Palestinian population are actually manufactured there by the Israeli arms corporation.
In this interview, Lowkey speaks to the co-founders of Palestine Action, Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard, both of whom have been arrested for their anti-Apartheid activism. Ammori is a Palestinian-Iraqi whose father was chased from his home by Israeli soldiers in 1967. He was forced to flee to Iraq without even a pair of shoes.
In 2006, at the height of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, nine activists in Northern Ireland forced their way into the offices of Raytheon, a major arms manufacturer. Once inside, they destroyed everything they could, from servers to computers to documents. At their trial two years later, they were found not guilty by a court, the decision spurring Raytheon to close down operations in the United Kingdom.
Palestine Action hopes that their actions will have a similar effect, and ultimately force British manufacturing to divest from Israeli war crimes.
While much has been made about the unshakeable U.S. support for Israel, the United Kingdom has been receiving much less negative attention. The British military has designated Israel as a “strategic partner” and has sold the country over half a billion dollars worth of arms since 2015. U.K. forces also help train the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), with a small number of British soldiers stationed inside the country as well.
After the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in the summer, then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally thanked his British counterpart Boris Johnson for his “unwavering” support for his state’s actions.
Here, Johnson’s government is at odds with the British public, only around 10% of whom, when polled, say their sympathies lie more with Israel than with Palestine. There is widespread anger at Israeli atrocities. Yet this has not been mobilized into much in the way of direct consequences. Palestine Action hopes to change this.
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The British National Health Service (NHS) once stood as an internationally renowned example of a tax-funded health system that delivered public-health services to millions of British citizens, lifting a huge burden from the sick. However, the rise of neoliberal policies in the United Kingdom has targeted the NHS to become the latest victim of a U.S.-U.K. economic trade deal that would put health care services in the hands of private U.S. corporations.
This means that private U.S. healthcare corporations would capitalize on the taxpayer funded budget, “creating private insurance-style funding pools” similar to how healthcare is conducted in the U.S.
In this segment of The Watchdog, host Lowkey is joined by Bob Gill -- family doctor, NHS campaigner and director of the film The Great NHS Heist -- who argues that the NHS is heading towards becoming a ”two-tier system that will be lower quality, more expensive, bureaucratic, with perverse incentives that damage professionalism, patients, taxpayers and the privately insured, who risk claims being denied or capped, as we see clearly in America.”
Gill’s film makes clear parallels between the U.S. healthcare system and how it’s making its way into the NHS. For example, the film exposes how the transition of control of these budgets to insurance companies is now presided over by “Simon Stevens as Chief Executive of NHS England since 2014, formerly president of global expansion for UnitedHealth,” America's largest private health insurance conglomerate.
This new system also puts the once-private patient data into the hands of Big Tech giants -- outsourced data-systems and pharmaceutical companies that will market their drugs to patients while incentivizing prescriptions for medical doctors.
The corporate takeover of the NHS is already having dire effects on an already economically struggling society, especially in the post-COVID era, with patients being forced to pay for more out-of-pocket costs that are handing major profits to U.S. healthcare and insurance companies. “The comprehensive range of NHS services salami, sliced down to a remnant of poor standard emergency care in fewer locations. For non-urgent care the choices will be to go without treatment, pay out of pocket or buy top-up insurance,” Gill wrote in 2020.
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Instead of simply stopping its human rights abuses, the Israeli government has built an extensive and sophisticated public relations network across the West in order to protect itself from criticism.
Today, Lowkey speaks to one of the latest victims of that smear campaign, Professor David Miller. A prominent critic of the state of Israel’s policies, Miller was recently sacked from his position as Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol, after a pressure campaign involving Zionist student groups and even members of parliament, who accused him of “inciting hatred against Jewish students.”
Miller, a graduate of the University of Glasgow Media Group, was appointed to his position at Bristol University in 2018. He also held positions at the University of Strathclyde from 2004 until 2011 and the University of Bath from 2011 until 2018.
Miller is the creator of the websites SpinWatch and Powerbase, both of which are dedicated to revealing networks of influence and power in Western society. Much of his academic work revolved around Islamophobia in the post-9/11 era. Miller maintained that Zionist organizations were one source of anti-Muslim bigotry, an accusation that put him on a collision course with those groups.
The final blow came late last month, as the university, under enormous external pressure, sacked Miller, citing his comments that certain Jewish students were being used as “pawns of Israel.”
Miller’s case has drawn considerable attention from those who see it as a harbinger of things to come. An open letter to Bristol University defending him as an “eminent scholar” was signed by hundreds of academics and public intellectuals -- including prominent Jewish public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Norman Finkelstein and Illan Pappe, who described him as a trailblazer “exposing the role that powerful actors and well-resourced, co-ordinated networks play in manipulating and stage-managing public debates, including on racism."
Miller is far from the first academic to be targeted in such a manner, and it is unlikely that he will be the last. Ironically, Miller’s book, “Bad News for Labour: Anti-Semitism, the Party and Public Belief,” detailed how bogus charges of anti-Semitism were weaponized against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in order to defame and destroy him. Just such an occurrence appears to have happened in his case as well.
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What was the Afghanistan War all about? That is the question on many people’s lips after a devastating 20-year campaign that has killed an estimated 176,000 people and displaced nearly 6 million more.
Today, Watchdog host Lowkey is joined by a man who knows the war from both inside and out. Matthew Hoh was at the forefront of the American empire’s campaign in the Middle East, first serving as a captain in the U.S. Marines, then moving to the Department of Defense and the State Department. In 2009, he publicly resigned from his position in the State Department in Zabul Province, Afghanistan, over U.S. policy in the country, which he saw as both illogical and immoral.
The recent fall of the U.S.-backed Afghan government, only days after NATO troops withdrew, and the Taliban’s quick re-emergence as the dominant political force in the country were no surprise to him. “The same thing would have happened in 2009 [when I was there],” Hoh told Lowkey today. “This has always been a house of cards; any little thing was going to cause it to collapse.”
Hoh, who has since become an anti-war activist, discussed the reasoning behind his decision to follow his conscience and leave his lucrative and distinguished career behind him. Already jaded after his experiences in Iraq, he told Lowkey that he was “holding on to the hope that somehow the Afghan War was going to be different and somehow fundamentally a war worth fighting… I didn’t want to let go of who I had become and the career I was in.”
The North Carolinian also described the extraordinary waste and corruption in both the U.S. and the Middle East, noting that 40% of the “aid” money scheduled for places like Iraq and Afghanistan never leaves the U.S. at all, staying in what is now colloquially known as “Raytheon Acres” -- the ring of expensive suburbs around Washington, D.C., home to the headquarters of a myriad of weapons contractors and aid agencies alike. “The one place that reconstruction was successful was in Northern Virginia,” Hoh quipped. And 20% more goes to management fees, leaving barely 10 cents on the dollar for the actual projects in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Today, Matthew Hoh has left that life behind and is a Senior Fellow with the Center for International Policy and a member of the Eisenhower Media Network, organizations challenging orthodox thinking in U.S. foreign policy.
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The war in Afghanistan appears to be drawing to a close. But Western atrocities in the Middle East continue, with the 20-year-old War on Terror estimated to have displaced over 37 million people globally.
One particularly noteworthy example is the onslaught in Yemen, driving the country to become “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” in the opinion of the United Nations. Currently, more than half the country — 14 million people — are considered to be at risk of starvation.
While the Saudis may be doing the majority of the fighting, they are being armed, trained, aided and supported by the United States, Great Britain, and other Western nations profiting from the suffering.
One man who knows more than most about this is Ahmed Al-Babati. Ahmed was a lance corporal in the British Army until last August, where he staged a public protest in London, demonstrating against British complicity in the violence.
Explaining his decision, he said:
I joined the army in 2017 and took an oath to protect and serve this country, not to be part of a corrupt government that continues to arm and support terrorism. What made this decision so easy for me and why I choose to sacrifice a lot of things, including possibly my freedom, is the simple fact that I myself, as somebody who was born in Yemen, could have easily fallen victim to one of those air strikes or died from hunger. I’ve seen too much not to speak out and I’d rather sleep peacefully in a cell than stay silent for a paycheck."
Ahmed Al-Babati joins Watchdog host Lowkey today to discuss his life, his protest, British crimes in the Middle East, and what can be done to put a stop to endless war.
In this free-flowing conversation, Lowkey and Al-Babati discuss Britain’s role in the world. “Whether it is Yemen, Afghanistan or Palestine, it seems like we are at the center of the problems happening around the world. And the reason for that is that we benefit from it; we profit from it,” Al-Babati said.
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The world’s news feeds have been inundated this week with a deluge of images of the extremely hasty American retreat from Afghanistan. After militarily occupying the country for two decades and spending an estimated $2 trillion, the American-backed Afghan government lasted barely a week without U.S. troops backing it up. President Ashraf Ghani almost immediately fled to nearboring Tajikistan, reportedly taking hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen cash with him.
The scenes of desperate Afghans crowding into the last American planes have made this week an extremely embarrassing one for the U.S. and its allies. But what about the human cost of two decades of occupation?
One man who knows more than most about the absurdities of the war is Joe Glenton. A former soldier in the British Army, he refused to return to Afghanistan, citing his moral objections to the conflict, for which refusal he served six months in a military jail. Joe Glenton joins Watchdog host Lowkey to discuss his experiences and the recent events in the country.
Like many working class people, Glenton saw the military as a potential way out of poverty. He passed through basic training and was deployed to Kandahar Province in 2006. The Army told him he would be going there to help Afghan women, to allow girls to go to school, to build infrastructure, and to stop the booming illicit opium trade. However, he soon became disillusioned with what was going on. He developed a creeping sense of “I think we’re being lied to,” he told Lowkey. And what was sold as a peacekeeping mission almost immediately became a hot war. “It very quickly became clear that our presence had become a lightning rod. Where there hadn’t been an insurgency, there suddenly was one,” he added, noting that “on this supposed peacekeeping mission we ran out of high-artillery ammunition.”
After repeated mortar shelling, Glenton began manifesting the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and once back in the United Kingdom, he publicly refused to return, leaving the country but eventually coming back to fight his case. Today, he is an activist and a writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent and The New Internationalist. His book, “Soldier Box: Why I Won't Return to the War on Terror,” was published in 2013.
In this frank discussion, Glenton opens up about the cult of imperialism within the British Army, his experiences with the opium trade, and the completely foreseeable collapse of the Afghan government.
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The new MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip-hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know -- including intelligence, lobby and special-interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
Hollywood is not exactly known for being a hotbed of anti-war, anti-imperialist activism. Indeed, so close is the relationship between the national security state and Tinseltown that the Department of Defense casually tweeted out on Oscar Night that it works closely with its “partners” in Hollywood to ensure the military is presented in a positive light.
“Jack Ryan” star John Krasinski went further, explaining that he had an extremely close bond with the CIA. “I owe them everything,” he said. “The CIA is something that we should all not only cherish but be saying thank you for every single day. They’re always trying to do the right thing,” he said of the agency, claiming they “care about the country in a bigger, more idealistic way.”
Hollywood is also a keen supporter of America’s unofficial fifty-first state, and all its highly questionable activities in the Middle East. As Israel was carrying out a blockade of the Gaza Strip, commonly referred to as the world’s largest open-air prison, celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Gerard Butler, Andy Garcia and Pharrell Williams raised over $60 million for the Israeli Defense Forces at a fundraiser.
One celebrity who has spoken up against Israeli actions is the star of “The Vampire Diaries,” Michael Malarkey. As the Israeli government began bombing Gaza in the wake of its storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in May, the 38-year-old actor wrote on his Instagram account:
The obsessive lengths being used to delegitimize anyone taking a stand against Israel’s apartheid regime are deceitful, despicable, and undemocratic. Those who employ such techniques want us to ignore the multitude of human rights abuses, the usage of illegal weapons and warfare, the unending occupation, the illegal annexation of Palestinian territories, and the callous bloodshed of innocents."
“Now is the time to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel and to openly challenge those few other countries that have long sponsored the Occupation and vetoed UN resolutions condemning it,” he concluded.
Michael Malarkey joins “The Watchdog” host Lowkey today to discuss his career in show business, his political activism, and the difficulties of working in an industry so intertwined with the national security state. “It’s fear-based for a lot of people,” he told Lowkey, explaining why more people in Hollywood do not speak up about their political convictions. “I think we’re at this very interesting and important place in our human history, where we are awakening,” he added, expressing hope that there is now a possibility for building organizations that can fight for a better world.
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Since the 1960s, the U.K. police have been charged with surveilling and infiltrating some 1,000 political, environmental or social justice organizations. Much of this involved undercover work. As part of their false personas, many officers entered romantic relationships with activists, leading to the births of a number of children whose mothers were completely unaware of their partners’ double lives. More than 20 women have come forward to claim they were “raped by the state” in such a way.
Today, The Watchdog is talking to Tom Fowler about the so-called “Spycops” scandal in the United Kingdom. Fowler is a veteran activist from South Wales involved with a number of groups that were spied upon and infiltrated by police. His work can be found at SpyCops.Info, where he hosts a weekly podcast that shines a light on police malfeasance.
In this conversation, Fowler notes that after the spectacular success of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the United Kingdom, the police have looked for any way to prevent other widespread radical movements from gaining momentum. In time, this technique expanded to the point where spy cops had infiltrated virtually the entire New Left, as well as the environmental movement and anti-war groups. Greenpeace, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, and the Fire Brigades Union were all targeted.
So effective was this strategy that, at one point, the National Secretary of the Troops Out [of Northern Ireland] movement was an undercover police officer. On the other hand, the police showed no interest in surveilling violent far-right gangs or organizations, with which they became almost tacitly aligned.
And while so many commentators complain about the excesses of cancel culture, the police are known to have worked with the private sector to maintain a secret blacklist of radical subversives (i.e., people who were the best union organizers), who were barred from jobs in their professions. In this sense, they became the enforcers for the upper class.
The police have been less than forthcoming throughout the Spycops scandal, attempting to deny as much involvement as possible. To what extent is this policy still in place? And what techniques do police continue to use to infiltrate and derail any movement challenging the status quo? Fowler and Lowkey discuss all this in a free-flowing and explosive conversation.
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Today, The Watchdog is talking about Australia, immigration and racism with Australian comedian and activist Aamer Rahman.
Rahman is a stand-up comedian and one half of the comedy duo “Fear of a Brown Planet.” Originally born in Saudi Arabia, he moved to Melbourne at an early age. Although he trained as a lawyer, he found his calling on stage. His comedy deals with overtly political topics like race, imperialism and terrorism.
When thought about at all, Australia is usually presented as a friendly, like-minded nation; a welcoming democratic, and stable state. This is certainly how many Americans who visit experience it. However, underneath that veneer lies a darker past.
Established by the British as a penal colony and later, a settler-colonial state, genocide of the native population has been central to Australia’s story from the very beginning. As British colonization gathered speed in the 19th century, so did the attacks against its Aboriginal peoples. Wherever the Europeans went, massacres followed.
Until well into the 1970s, the Australian government maintained a policy of removing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, placing them into spartan boarding schools in an attempt to destroy native culture forever.
Taking their land were Europeans. Until 1973, the country’s immigration laws were formally described as the “White Australia policy”, barring Asian and other non-white populations from settling in the world’s sixth-largest nation. To this day, immigrants are regularly discriminated against, while the country maintains a particularly harsh policy on refugees.
Australia maintains close political ties to the United Kingdom, with British Home Secretary Pritti Patel seeing the country’s offshore migrant detention centers, referred to by some as “concentration camps” as a model for the U.K. to follow.
Many of the changes to Australia’s overtly racist policies were brought in by the government of Gough Whitlam (1972-1975). Whitlam began to recognize Aboriginal land claims, moved the country closer towards the Non-Aligned Movement and opposed nuclear weapons testing. Yet he did not last long, as a British and American plot to remove him from office succeeded, an event that, for many, effectively ended Australia’s brief run as an independent state and turned the country into an outpost of the American empire.
MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
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The new MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey closely examines organizations that are in the public interest to know about including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
For the launch of “The Watchdog,” we examine the idea that Israel, through well-camouflaged proxies, has been making efforts to merge with the U.S.national security state. The podcast delves deep into two organizations we deemed essential to this process of entryism. For this task, we enlisted the help of the prolific writer, researcher into intelligence, surveillance, civil liberties, and big tech on the macro and the micro-level, Whitney Webb.
The first part of the podcast focuses on the IDF Unit 8200, a military intelligence unit in the Israeli Army known for monitoring Palestinian communication and using that information to blackmail them. The unit has also carried out cyber attacks on other states. Unit 8200 gave birth to the NSO Group, the supposedly private company responsible for the Pegasus Spyware which has recently been used around the world to target dissidents, journalists, activists, and more. The lesson which must come from this global scandal is that companies with any Unit 8200 involvement must be seriously examined.
The NSO group is far from the only way in which Unit 8200 actors have been able to insinuate themselves into the business of other governments. Following a 2012 policy set by the Benjamin Netanyahu government, Israel set about siphoning the functions of its military intelligence into private companies. Former Unit 8200 members set up staff and numerous important cybersecurity companies across the world, tasked with guarding swathes of very sensitive data.
Whitney Webb explores her research by looking at Unit 8200 founded and-or staffed organizations like Cybereason, National Start-up Central, and Cyber Threat Intelligence League which between them have access to masses of information in both the U.S. and UK. Lowkey draws a connection between Cybereason, their partner Leidos and the 2012 British census. He also delves into the recently widely referenced cybersecurity company Proofpoint, identifying for the first time the connection between this company and Unit 8200.
MintPress is fiercely independent. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/MintPressNews)