Elise Desiderio
Norman Finkelstein, author and academic, was punished for his principled stand against Israeli brutality by being denied tenure at DePaul University in June 2007. On 12 November, during a whirlwind British speaking tour, and before delivering a talk in Maastricht about Gandhi’s relevance to the Middle East conflict, Norman Finkelstein sat down with Peace News to discuss nonviolence, Gandhi and the role of the intellectual.
Peace News: What are the current peace prospects in Israel…
A British soldier accused of desertion for refusing to serve in Afghanistan is now being prosecuted for taking part in an anti-war protest, on charges that carry a maximum of 10 years’ imprisonment. Lance corporal Joe Glenton, 27, of the Royal Logistic Corps, appeared in court on 10 November in Aldershot, Hampshire, facing charges of disobeying a lawful order, as well as his desertion charge. At the end of the hearing, Glenton was imprisoned pending his trial.
Joe Glenton spoke…
This year’s G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, drew worldwide attention to radical politics. As in previous years, the streets were saturated with police as well as protesters. This year, however, both radical actors and police brought a new series of high-tech approaches to the summit. In addition to the now familiar truncheons, tear gas, and rubber bullets, police for the first time used the long range acoustic device, or LRAD. This “sound cannon” emits loud and high-pitched noises at…
This month, lance corporal Joe Glenton of the Royal Logistic Corps faces court martial for refusing to return to combat in Afghanistan. Glenton joined the army in 2004, and in 2007 went absent without leave after serving his first tour in Afghanistan. He is thought to be the first British soldier to openly resist government policy.
In a speech on 23 July organised by the Stop The War Coalition, lance corporal Glenton described his experience on the ground in the Middle East.
…To illuminate the credit crunch and to find a new way forward, Peace News has chosen four recently-published books about the financial crisis.
Charles R Morris, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown (Perseus Publishing, 2008; ISBN 9781586485634; pp224; £10.99)
By summer 2007, the American banking policy of lending to house buyers with fragile repaying prospects caught up with itself, leaving American banks with up to $400 billion in lending commitments. Morris predicts that over…
The credit crunch exposed many of the failures of the capitalist system and made us question where to go from here to be rid of the free market’s stranglehold: it seems as if the “invisible hand” of the free market has broken a few fingers. So what other options are being explored? The co-operative movement is one means by which, some argue, workers may find labour equality: being one’s own boss and having equal ownership of an organisation.
To explore the co-operative option, Peace…
This year saw some outstanding court victories, including a legal breakthrough in Nottingham on 14 January when 11 East Midlands activists were allowed to present a legal argument known as “defence of necessity”. They had shut down the Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal-fired power plant in 2007.
The big court wins of the year were the 10 September Kingsnorth Six victory, securing an acquittal on charges of causing £30,000 worth of damage to Kingsnorth power station, and the 11 June Raytheon…
