Phillip Dexter – Roscoe Palm
04 July 2011

Phillip Dexter and Roscoe Palm on the complex lot of our youth in advancing the revolution

Julius Malema is a rebel with a cause, but what he lacks is a credible, practical or even realistic roadmap to get where he wants to go. There is no doubt that a generation after political liberation, the people have been largely left behind by the elite in the ruling party and by the, mainly White wealthy section of our population who have benefited from the fruits of democracy disproportionately.

While Malema’s analysis of South Africa is rooted in the emotional rather than the intellectual, it doesn’t make his points about the failures of land reform, the continuing disempowerment and poverty of the majority or the scourge of racism any less true. These resonate with the vast majority of South Africans because it is their daily, lived experience.

Click here to continue reading “Juju’s dilemma” by Phillip Dexter and Roscoe Palm.

Published: July 10, 2011

Let’s hope phone-hacking scandal in the UK will finally help rein in his evil empire

Is this Britain’s own Watergate, with consequences that could prove as disastrous for Cameron as they had been for Nixon? The prime minister may try hard to put up a brave face, pretending to be outraged by the shenanigans of Murdoch’s media empire even as he tries to smear everyone with the muck that he finds himself in over the phone-hacking scandal. “We have all been in this together” was the refrain in his speech on Friday, drawing attention to the close ties his Labour predecessors enjoyed with Murdoch.

That however is unlikely to rescue Cameron from the storm that has exploded in his face and could very well prove the undoing of his government. Of course, the intense love affair between Blair and Murdoch, who owns nearly half of the British press, is hardly a secret. It may have played a decisive role in Blair making it to 10 Downing Street and poor Gordon Brown being thrown out of it after Murdoch switched his patronage to the Tories.

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Issue number twelve of the anarchist communist journal *Zabalaza: A Journal of Southern African Revolutionary Anarchism* is now available online in PDF

Link to PDF: http://zabnew.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/zabalaza12.pdf

Activists sail from Corsica as others pledge to continue efforts to reach Palestinian territory with humanitarian aid.

Al Jazeera English
05 Jul 2011

A French boat has set sail for Gaza from Corsica in the latest attempt by activists to deliver aid to the Palestinian territory, according to a journalist aboard the vessel.

The Dignite al Karama, which left the western Mediterranean island overnight is, thus far, the only boat in a flotilla organised by pro-Palestinian activists to successfully sail for Gaza, with most confined to ports in Greece.

The vessel’s passengers include Olivier Besancenot, head of the New Left Party in France, French politician and member of the European Parliament Nicole Kiil-Nilsen, and other well-known French personalities.

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by Richard Falk
4 July 2011

The reports that two of the foreign flagged ships planning to be part of the ten vessel Freedom Flotilla II experienced similar forms of disabling sabotage creates strong circumstantial evidence of Israeli responsibility. It stretches the imagination to suppose that a sophisticated cutting of the propeller shafts of both ships is a coincidence with no involvement by Israel’s Mossad, long infamous for its overseas criminal acts in support of contested Israeli national interests. Recalling the lethal encounter in international waters with Freedom Flotilla I that took place on 31 May 2010, and the frantic diplomatic campaign by Tel Aviv to prevent this second challenge to the Gaza blockade by peace activists and humanitarian aid workers, such conduct by a state against this latest civil society initiative, if further validated by incriminating evidence, should be formally condemned as a form of ‘state terrorism’ or even as an act of war by a state against global civil society.

Click here to continue reading “Sabotaging Flotilla II: Waging War Against Civil Society” by Richard Falk.