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. 

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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. 

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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The Watchdog is 100% independent and listener-supported.

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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.

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.”

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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 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

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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:

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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.

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.

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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.

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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 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 bombshell report is to be believed

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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.

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.”

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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.

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. 

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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.

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 i

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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.

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.

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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.

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. 

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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.

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.

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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.

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

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If you value fearless journalism and critical conversations, please consider joining our community of supporters:

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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.

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 h

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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:

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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.

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

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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:

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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.

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 citiz

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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:

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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 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

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.

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 L

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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.

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.

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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:

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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.

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 j

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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.

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 proje

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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.

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.

You can find this podcast on Spotify, iTunes, and other streaming platforms.

Support this podcast by becoming a member of our Patreon.

Lowkey

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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:

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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 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 work

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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.

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 intel

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.

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, St

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.

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

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.

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 organiza

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.

 
"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, s

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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.

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

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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.

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.

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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:

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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.

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

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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:

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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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Support MintPress work by becoming a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/MintPressNews

Follow Lowkey: https://twitter.com/Lowkey0nline
Follow MintPress News: https://twitter.com/MintPressNews

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 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

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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 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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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 Jan

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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.

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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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 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

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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:

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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.

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: 

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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:

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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 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 s

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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.

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. Fr

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.