Complicit: Britain's Role in the Destruction of Gaza

 

In this episode of Al Mayadeen's The Proximate Aspect, British journalist and author Peter Oborne discusses his book "Complicit: Britain's Role in the Destruction of Gaza," arguing that Britain has played a direct role through arms sales, diplomatic backing, media alignment, and interference with international accountability mechanisms. 

Drawing on legal frameworks and documented evidence, Oborne outlines how Atlanticism, US power, and Britain’s political establishment have shaped policy toward Gaza, while public opposition is ignored and critical voices are sidelined. 

The conversation examines responsibility, impunity, the role of international courts, and whether Gaza could mark a turning point for accountability under international law.

• Introduction
• Complicit: Britain's Role in the Destruction of Gaza
• Can Palestine be freed without dismantling the entire Atlantic structure first?
• What evidence does Oborne's book have on Britain’s complicity in Gaza's destruction?
• Who prosecutes the prosecutors when genocide lawyers enable genocide?
• Does Oborne's own career arc prove that the system kicks out truth-tellers? 
• What really drives Britain's policy?
• Was MBS-US visit a defeat for "Israel" as some might argue? 
• Isn't legal accountability just a comforting fantasy?
• Could the world stop US escalation against Venezuela?

Indoctrinating the Innocent: YWAM, Spiritual Warfare, & Psychology of Control

 

John and Jenny dive into the disturbing intersections between militarism, psychology, and religion within Youth With A Mission (YWAM). Drawing parallels to early Pentecostal cults and authoritarian movements, they examine how “spiritual warfare” language and practices condition young minds for obedience and control. Jenny shares her firsthand experience of life inside YWAM—where teenagers are sent on “target missions,” sleep-deprived prayer watches, and told demons lurk in everyday objects—while John connects these patterns to the mind control methods of Branhamism and early revival cults like those of Frank Sanford and John Alexander Dowie. Together they expose how hyper-spiritualized fear, trauma bonding, and dissociation produce lifelong anxiety and religious PTSD, even as participants believe they are serving God.

Stunning Victories and Rising Repression: a look back at the global student movement for Palestine in 2025

In 2025, students around the world came together to challenge their schools' complicity in the Gaza genocide. Despite heavy repression, they won major victories, including divestment and commitments to cut ties with Israeli institutions.

Beginning amid Israel’s scholasticide and genocide of Palestinians—still ongoing—the sustained global student uprising for Palestinian liberation, or the Student Intifada, has energized, nay radicalized, an entire generation of politically engaged youth and taught them what it means to be counted.

Since 2023, students have reckoned with suspensions, evictions, and expulsions; police and rogue violence; arrests and deportations; and general harassment. But students’ tireless, principled organizing secured academic boycotts, divestment, and institutional severances. Every material win—spurred by powerful symbolic actions, backed by painstaking research—propels us closer to something resembling justice for Palestinians. 

If in 2024 students mobilized en masse internationally in solidarity with Palestinians and their cause for liberation—with actions from Mexico City to Prague, Pondicherry to São Paulo, Wroclaw to Tokyo, Sydney to Santa Cruz—then 2025 student organizing took root and bloomed, with all the struggles, achievements, and setbacks that entail.

Seeing global patterns of student action makes more comprehensive what can feel like distant, horrific geopolitics and, simultaneously, local institution-level activism. But looking back on 2025 reveals the points of connection and unity of thought and action that have existed between students, young people, and much of the general public. 

Students everywhere heard history’s urgent call. They answered it resolutely. Here’s how students organized, struggled, and ultimately won in 2025—and what’s next.  (more...)

Stunning Victories and Rising Repression: a look back at the global student movement for Palestine in 2025

2025 saw the most significant political shift toward Palestinian rights in U.S. history

 

In 2025, there was notable momentum in both the Democratic and Republican parties toward substantive change in U.S. policy on Palestine.

2025 started with a Gaza ceasefire that was never meant to be sustained and is ending with one that was never actually instituted. The year also saw a steady intensification of the occupation on the West Bank, and an unprecedentedly broad wave of Israeli warfare all across the Middle East.

In the United States, the transition from the passionate and self-defeating support for Israel of Joe Biden to the transactional but nonetheless still solid support for Israel of Donald Trump had negligible effect on the superpower policy that is one of the greatest obstacles to the realization of inalienable Palestinian rights. 

But there is real hope we might take this year from a significant movement in the American discourse on Palestine and Israel and that this shift is finally starting to be reflected in American politics, albeit in ways far too small to match the needs of the moment.

Most notably, 2025 saw American public opinion continue its shift away from Israel. 

In July, an article in The Economist, hardly a progressive publication, noted that,

 “Israel’s rightward political shift in recent years, and especially the protracted war in Gaza, has alienated many ordinary Americans. The disquiet about Israel that has been building for some time within the Democratic Party is now growing among Republicans, too. Younger members of both parties have shifted especially dramatically. A fundamental reshaping of one of America’s deepest friendships seems all but inevitable, with huge ramifications for the Middle East and the world.”  (more...)

2025 saw the most significant political shift toward Palestinian rights in U.S. history

Fighting fascism in America during a genocide in Palestine

 

We must insist on drawing connections across time and place — from the Holocaust to Gaza, or ICE detention to Israeli prisons — to disrupt the normalization of authoritarianism at every turn.

“These times make me think of 1933,” my neighbor commented as our sons zoomed down a hill on their bikes. This was a common sentiment in the early months of President Donald Trump’s second term — how to stop a leader with fascist tendencies who had gained power through a democratic process. 

But it wasn’t our usual neighborhood conversation. Rümeysa Öztürk, a graduate student at Tufts University, where I teach, had recently been kidnapped by masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents for writing an op-ed in our student newspaper in support of Palestinian rights and student governance. The alarming video of the incident had left us all shaken.

My neighbor explained that his great-grandparents had come to the United States from Europe in the decades before the Holocaust. But other branches of his Jewish family had stayed and were entirely wiped out. This time, he expected, my publicly Palestinian family was more at risk than his. I think I nodded blandly. For many months, my mind had been with Palestinians in Gaza, where a genocide was underway. His concern for my family seemed to me both alarming and abstract.

Another friend had been encouraging me, for the sake of my family’s security, to apply for a new citizenship. We were at the town pool when she quipped, “There are the people who left in 1933, and the people who left in 1939. The former left with their property.” Watching our sons dive off the boards in sync, splashing and circling underwater before reemerging, I thought to myself: The property values in our town are solid, so even if we must leave, we’ll get a good price.

Again, as I tried to respond, I faltered in the strange space between my uncertain fears about what might happen here and my horrified knowledge of outright genocide and ethnic cleansing there. In the last two years, Israel has destroyed or damaged 81 percent of all structures in Gaza, including more than 81,000 homes in Gaza City alone. Despite the so-called “ceasefire,” Israel has denied Palestinians access to materials necessary to make even temporary shelters for winter, and the cold and flooding has meant only more deprivation and death. At least 40,000 Palestinians in the northern West Bank have been made homeless due to Israeli forced displacement in Tulkarem and Jenin.  (more...)

Fighting fascism in America during a genocide in Palestine

Bearing witness to the gruesome end of Western liberalism

 

Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a searing indictment of Western liberalism. It especially exposes corporate journalism’s distortions, lies and incitement of a genocide – even while that genocide is being livestreamed to millions of people around the world for all to bear witness.

Written during the peak of Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, El Akkad’s book is a kind of meditation on genocide that will have lasting significance. In the blurbs on the back of the book cover, it is described as “part elegy, part rallying cry” and “a landmark of truth telling and moral courage.”

Its impact may be greater because it avoids the detailed documentation of the atrocities and war crimes committed or the evidence of intent needed to meet the requirements of the United Nations genocide convention.

“This is not an account of [the] carnage,” El Akkad cautions early on. Rather it is “an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.”

It is also an “account of an ending,” he promises, “the moment millions of people looked at the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this.”  (more...)

Bearing witness to the gruesome end of Western liberalism

How Intelligence, Politics, and Foreign Interests Shaped America’s Religious Movements

 

Christianity is back at the centre of American life, but not necessarily in the way most believers imagine. Churches are fuller, Christian language saturates politics, and faith-based identity has become a mobilising force once again. Yet beneath this revival lies a more unsettling reality: for decades, U.S. government agencies have treated religion not as sacred ground, but as strategic terrain.

This is not theory. During the Cold War, the U.S. State Department and intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA, recognised theology, doctrine, and religious institutions as instruments of influence. Faith was studied, guided, and at times quietly reshaped to serve geopolitical aims. The goal was rarely to destroy belief outright; rather, it was to domesticate it, align it, and render it strategically useful.

Initiatives like the Doctrinal Warfare Program illustrate the scale of this engagement. Churches with mass followings, moral authority, and transnational reach were not simply tolerated; they were targeted for influence. Orthodox congregations in the U.S. and abroad were monitored to ensure alignment with Western interests. Catholic seminaries became conduits for doctrinal shaping, funding networks, and leadership development favourable to U.S. objectives. Even Protestant and Evangelical movements, decentralised and spontaneous, were quietly steered through cultural engagement, philanthropic networks, and selective amplification of certain voices.

Sincere people seeking truth, purpose, and transcendence found themselves caught in influence systems they neither designed nor understood. Their worship, community, and faith became tools in a broader psychological and cultural battle they never consented to.

The CIA’s Doctrinal Warfare Program, particularly its work with Roman Catholic institutions, offers a rare glimpse into how intelligence agencies approach faith. Unlike cinematic portrayals of spies manipulating events, this program operated through subtler, more effective channels.  (more...)

How Intelligence, Politics, and Foreign Interests Shaped America’s Religious Movements