The Watchdog

Just hours before it is set to begin, dozens of acts are withdrawing from the prestigious Sydney Festival in protest of the event’s sponsorship by the Israeli Embassy. One group that has chosen to do so are Melbourne-based musicians Karate Boogaloo, who explained that:

Boycotts and divestments have a strong track record of holding governments and corporations accountable for their actions, which is why Karate Boogaloo is standing in solidarity with Palestinian people and boycotting the Sydney Festival, as a result of it accepting money from the human rights-abusing regime that is the Israeli Government.

The boycott has proven to be a public-relations disaster for Israel, which attempts to use the arts as a way to launder its image across much of the developed world. Today, Lowkey sits down to talk to two of the boycott’s organizers, Sara Saleh and Jennine Khalik. Saleh is a poet and organizer. The daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt and Georgia, she is also the co-editor of the book “Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity.” Khalik is a journalist who has worked for ABC News and The Australian. Like Saleh, she is the daughter of Palestinian refugees.

The Sydney Festival is one of the most established and iconic cultural celebrations Australia has to offer, inviting a huge range of artists and performers from around the world. Yet it caused major controversy after accepting sponsorship from the Israeli Embassy. Saleh accused the festival of being complicit in “art washing” Israeli atrocities, asking Lowkey:

How is it that this festival can reconcile its shallow commitment to First Nations solidarity here [in Australia] while legitimizing and normalizing its relationship with a settler-colonial Apartheid state that we know maintains a system of subjugation and land theft against Palestinians?

Australia is one of Israel’s closest international allies, purchasing Israeli weaponry and voting against international condemnations of its conduct at the United Nations. Khalik explained that simply being Palestinian is a major road block to a successful career in some fields, including hers. Almost immediately after she was hired at The Australian (a national newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch), her editor was accosted by Israeli diplomats who demanded an answer to why they had hired a Palestinian.

Khalik said it was made patently clear by some of her colleagues that she was not welcome in the newsroom because of her ethnicity and her political stances. However, she persevered because:

I did not want to bullied out by the Zionist lobby groups, because that is what they were aiming for. They did not want me there. And they wanted to make me as uncomfortable as possible. And they had journalists on the inside, working in their service.

Despite its best efforts, Israel is losing its control over “narrative management,” with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement gaining momentum worldwide. If Israel’s name becomes toxic in the world of culture, the dam holding political change back might begin to break.

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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 November, a huge underground naval fuel storage facility at Red Hill near Honolulu burst, leaking 14,000 gallons of jet fuel, contaminating the water supply, poisoning scores of people and driving thousands of Hawaiian families from their homes.

The state’s attorney general, David Day, has alleged that the military has essentially no control over the safety of the enormous depot, which holds 250 million gallons of fuel. Day remarked that the state had a “ticking time bomb” on its hands, and that further contamination of its precious water supply was all but inevitable. The tanks sit just feet above the island’s largest aquifer.

And this incident is merely the latest in a long list showing the American empire’s callous disregard for the civilian population of Hawaii, as it puts military needs before the people or the environment. Joining Lowkey today are two Hawaiian activists, Ihilani Lasconia and Daniel Kauwila Mahi. Ihilani is an artist, singer and organizer from Waimānalo; Daniel is a musician, rapper and student from Honolulu.

The two place the latest disaster in the context of centuries of American imperialism, which sees Hawaii as a strategic location for control over the Pacific. The United States overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and formally annexed the islands in 1898. From there, it became a linchpin in the U.S. expansion across the Pacific and the conquest of the Philippines, Guam and other territories, serving as an important military launchpad.

There are 11 military bases on Oahu alone, including the enormous Pearl Harbor, the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command. So militarized have the islands become that around one in ten of all Hawaii residents are servicemen and -women.

“It’s not just the guns and the bombs,” Lasconia told Lowkey, noting that the military has even tested depleted uranium shells at its bases, leading to locals developing cancer. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” of being at ground zero for the American war machine, she added.

The deep-seated racism towards the indigenous population is something that native Hawaiians can feel every day. Lasconia noted that this latest contamination was far from an isolated incident. “Fuel tanks have been leaking for decades now,” she said; “But [it is] because [this time] it affected predominantly white people on the U.S. base that they are doing something about it.” Kauwila Mahi noted that the increased critical coverage of the incident is also prompted by the negative consequences it has for the state's two other sectors of power: the tourism and real estate industries, which do not wish to see further environmental degradation. He sees this as an opportunity to use the Red Hill disaster as a wedge issue to strike back at the excessive militarism on display throughout the islands.

Ihilani and Daniel are among a new generation of leaders challenging the empire, although they see themselves as part of a long tradition. “Hawaiians have always opposed militarization throughout Hawaii,” Lasconia said. However, she expects no help from local elected officials, who do not have the power to speak out against the military for fear of reprisals. “It’s not a government; it’s not a democracy; it’s essentially a mafia state run by terrorists who don’t hurt just Hawaii but indigenous peoples across the world,” she told Lowkey.

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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.

For a supposedly developed, democratic nation, the United States locks up an extraordinary number of its citizens. Close to one quarter of the world’s prison population is in the United States. Even on a per capita basis, only El Salvador and Turkmenistan come close to America’s preponderance for incarceration. In a country with a rising population and a falling demand for labor, the government decided to solve this problem by simply locking up millions of its poorest citizens, in the process allowing corporate America to make billions from their suffering. The prison industry is booming: between 1990 and 2005, the U.S. built, on average, a new prison every ten days. 

Joining Lowkey to discuss how prisons became big business is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges. Chris spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Balkans, and the Middle East for The New York Times and currently hosts the show On Contact on RT. His latest book, “Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison,” was published in October.  “The entire system works to railroad primarily poor people and disproportionately poor people of color into this system,” he told Lowkey. “Almost no one in the United States gets a jury trial; 94% of the people in the prison system are coerced by prosecutors to accept a plea deal. Public defenders can only spend 10 or 15 minutes with their clients.”

In “Our Class,” Hedges describes mass incarceration as “the civil rights issue of our age.” “When you incarcerate someone, in essence, the whole family becomes incarcerated,” he said. Some 77 million Americans have a criminal record, while 113 million American adults have an immediate family member who has been to or currently is incarcerated, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. 

Once in the system, it is, by design, extremely hard to escape. Incarcerated individuals are forced to work for pennies per hour (some states pay nothing), while all manner of essential items are not provided and cost exorbitant amounts to purchase from the commissary. As a result, inmates are often released owing thousands of dollars. Having a criminal record bars citizens from many welfare and public housing benefits, as well as applying for jobs in a myriad of professions. For example, during the summer wildfires last year, California prison firefighters worked alongside professionals, tackling some of the worst blazes in American history. For this, they were paid barely $1 per hour, and are blocked from applying to the fire department once they are released. Thus, paying back these odious debts is even harder than it may appear.

Hedges singled out President Biden as playing a particularly key role in turning the United States into an incarceration nation. Biden was “instrumental” in pushing the Democrats into seizing back the “law and order” narrative from the Republicans in the 1990s, helping to pass into law rules such as the Three Strikes Law, which has sent many Americans to prison for life for trivial offenses. The number of crimes worthy of the death penalty was also exanded from barely a handful to 51. Until recently, Biden took credit for the infamous 1994 Crime Bill, which was a key piece of legislation in codifying the prison industrial complex.

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 High Court in London has upheld the U.S. government’s appeal to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a key step towards his rendition to the United States. The Australian publisher faces up to 175 years in prison once he sets foot on American soil.

Whether he ever makes it to the United States is still in question. His legal team has indicated they will challenge the ruling, which will inevitably draw out court proceedings and prolong his stay inside Belmarsh Prison. Also of note is the 50-year-old’s health. This weekend, it was revealed that he had suffered a stroke in October as a result of the stress of the trial.

Two individuals who have been closely monitoring the Assange trial are Pablo Navarette and John McEvoy. Pablo is a British-Chilean filmmaker and the founder of Alborada magazine, an outlet concentrating on Latin American politics. John is an investigative journalist whose work documents the impact of the British national security state on public life. In November, the pair published an article entitled ‘“A Lot of Mistakes”: The Guardian and Julian Assange,’ which can be read on MintPress News. Today, they discussed the role that The Guardian, and the mainstream press more generally, have played in persecuting him.

It is now known that UC Global – the private security firm hired to protect the Ecuadorian Embassy, where Assange was confined – was secretly spying on their charge, sending the information they gleaned back to the U.S. government. This included security cameras and audio bugs.

Guardian journalist Stephanie Kirchgaessner was aware of the spying long before it was made public. Yet rather than blowing the whistle, she instead chose to write highly dubious articles insinuating that he was an agent of Russian malfeasance.

The Guardian was one of WikiLeaks's partner organizations, being fed bombshell after bombshell, revelations that helped build its brand and its audience. Yet, far from standing up for free speech, it was in the lead in attacking WikiLeaks and its founder. Of particular note is Luke Harding, who published the passcode to a trove of WikiLeaks documents, an act that the U.S. government claims endangered its representatives around the world.

In 2018, Harding also published a viral story that claimed that Assange had secretly met with Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and unnamed “Russians” while in the Ecuadorian Embassy. The insinuation was that Assange (and Russia) was partly responsible for Trump’s shocking election in 2016.

From being Assange’s partner, the newspaper morphed into “the spearhead of a campaign of vilification by the mainstream media,” Navarette told Lowkey.

MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.

Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube.

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.

“Unregulated capitalism is a suicide pact” – Noam Chomsky did not hold back today when discussing the worldwide economic system and the world’s acceleration towards climate collapse. Chomsky made the comments in the context of the recent COP26 climate-change conference in Glasgow, where global leaders gathered to discuss global environmental threats, but little of any note was achieved.

The renowned linguist and political scientist also trained his ire on the European Union and its treatment of refugees fleeing from NATO’s wars in the Middle East and North Africa, calling it “one of the worst crimes of the modern age,” and claiming it made “what Trump did to refugees look mild” by comparison. 

“[There are] thousands of people dying in the Mediterranean, trying to flee from Africa, where Europe has a certain history -- it destroyed Africa for centuries. People are trying to flee from the wreckage and the Europeans are saying ‘go drown in the Mediterranean,’” he explained, noting that Europe had also set up military bases in Niger (one of the poorest countries in Africa) in a bid to stop migrants from even making it to the Mediterranean. 

“The message is ‘don’t come anywhere near us. We destroy you for a couple of hundred years, we enslave your population, we prevent you from developing, we murder and slaughter you, but don’t come anywhere near our shores,’” he told Lowkey; “I don’t think there are words to describe this; ...it is a hideous crime.”

While widely hailed as the father of modern linguistics, Noam Chomsky has, for well over half a century, also been one of the sharpest and most committed voices critiquing the crimes of the United States government. Having written well over 100 books on a range of subjects – from politics to media to science and history – Chomsky was at ease discussing many of the biggest questions facing humanity today. 

Among those questions is the increasing American hostility towards China and the possibility of a terminal nuclear war. While the 92-year-old University of Arizona professor was critical of Chinese actions in the South China Sea, he reserved most of his criticism for the U.S. government, which he claimed sees the world in much the same way as the head of an organized crime syndicate views a turf war. “The ‘threat’ of China is China’s existence; it exists as a major power that the United States cannot push around, cannot intimidate, and does not follow U.S. orders. That is intolerable. Any mafia don can explain that,” he told Lowkey.

In this wide ranging conversation, Lowkey and Chomsky also discuss U.S. war crimes, the rise of conservative academic star Jordan Peterson (and what that says about academia), and the concocted antisemitism crisis in British public life. 

MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.

Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube.

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 United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) is celebrating as, with almost all votes counted, they appear to have won 20 out of the country’s 23 states in Sunday’s regional “mega elections.” More than 70,000 candidates stood for one of 3,082 public positions, including local mayorships, councillors, regional legislators and state governors -- the vast majority of candidates affiliated with opposition parties.

The landslide victory was watched over by international observers from 55 countries, including a delegation from the European Union, who praised the organizational capacity of the National Electoral Council, effectively endorsing the proceedings.

This will no doubt anger many in Washington. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described the vote as a “grossly skewed” contest controlled by a dictatorship that carries out, “arbitrary arrests and harassment of political and civil society actors, criminalization of opposition parties’ activities, bans on candidates across the political spectrum, manipulation of voter registration rolls, persistent media censorship, and other authoritarian tactics.”

If this is indeed the case -- that the Maduro administration is autocratic and repressive --  why did so many people still come out to support and vote for Maduro and the PSUV? Joining Lowkey to discuss this is Diego Sequera, a columnist for investigative journalism outlet Mision Verdad. One of the sharpest and most cogent thinkers on radical politics, Sequera is also a member of the Samuel Robinson Institute, a think tank based in Caracas.

While President Nicolás Maduro has undoubtedly presided over a period of serious economic dislocation, it is important to remember it was not always this way. The socialist movement first came to power in 1999 under Hugo Chavez who, in just a few short years, radically transformed the country.

Under Chavez, school enrollment went from 45% to 90% nationwide. The number of people in primary education rose from only 500,000 in 1998 to 2.8 million by the time of his death in 2013 -- a 460% rise. Sequera described this as “the biggest literacy campaign in history.” “In a very few years, illiteracy, which was pretty high here, was eradicated completely… Here you had people 80 years old finishing their high school and then starting university,” he told Lowkey. This would have been unthinkable before the Bolivarian revolution.

Thus, there remains a great deal of good will towards the PSUV. Sunday’s result underscores the notion that the Venezuelan people blame the U.S. sanctions for their suffering, rather than purely pointing the finger at the government.

MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.

Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube.

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 Venezuela, Britain is dedicated to supporting the U.S.’s sanctions regime against the country, responsible for more than 100,000 deaths already. McEvoy’s work has revealed the existence of a secret British “reconstruction unit” inside Venezuela -- an organization dedicated to overthrowing the Maduro government and planning for a future Venezuela without him.

The British government also ordered the Bank of England to freeze around $2 billion worth of gold belonging to the government of Venezuela, on the grounds that it no longer recognized Maduro, instead choosing the unelected Juan Guaidó as the country’s legitimate ruler. “Venezuela has been a key target of the hybrid war,” McEvoy explained to Lowkey.

McEvoy’s academic work at the University of Liverpool focuses on Western interference in Latin America. He recently revealed that the British government had worked tirelessly in the 1960s to prevent the anti-imperialist socialist Salvador Allende from coming to power, and, once he was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup d’etat, supported fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. The U.K. government protected Pinochet even after he was removed from office, including paying for his legal fees in his extradition case to Spain, where he was wanted to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

Just as Britain protected war criminals in the past, today it is helping to persecute those who expose war crimes, such as Julian Assange.

A major thorn in the side of the British establishment, McEvoy is having increasing trouble uncovering documents, his FOIA requests being constantly dismissed in cases he believes to be politically motivated. The FOIA system is supposed to be blind and neutral. However, he told Lowkey, “it has become clear that they have got a blacklist of journalists that they have effectively blocked releasing information to… It’s a signal of a receding democracy.”

The two also discuss threats to independent journalism at home, specifically the silent campaign to destroy the funding model of alternative media. A group called Stop Funding Fake News was set up in 2019, supposedly in an effort to pressure businesses to remove ads from websites sharing hateful or misleading content. However, McEvoy’s research found that the vast majority of its ire was directed at left-wing alternative news outlet The Canary, leading him to conclude that the project was a “thinly veiled censorship campaign against independent media in the U.K.” 

MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.

Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube.

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.

A small English village is hardly the first place that comes to mind when mentioning the war in Yemen. Yet Warton in the northwest of England is playing an oversized role in what the United Nations has repeatedly called “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” The Lancashire village is home to an airfield and a manufacturing site where weapons dealer BAE Systems maintains, repairs and rearms Saudi jets responsible for much of the worst destruction in Yemen.

Today, Lowkey speaks to Phil Miller, an investigative journalist and producer who is currently a staff reporter for Declassified UK. He has just released the documentary “Warton’s War on Yemen,” which exposes how BAE Systems is playing a key role in the carnage in the Middle East. Every week, aircraft arrive from and leave for Saudi Arabia carrying crucial supplies to keep the Kingdom’s war machine going.

War is big business. A 2018 paper found that an estimated 7,000 employees of U.K. contractor companies, civil servants, and temporarily deployed military personnel were currently aiding Saudi forces in their attack on Yemen. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the Kingdom is by far Britain’s most important arms customer, responsible for 49% of all international weapons purchases.

Miller also described the British royal family as “effectively lobbyists for BAE Systems,” as they are often sent to the Middle East to drum up orders for U.K.-made weapons.

That British-made arms are being used against civilian populations is not in doubt. A 2020 report from Oxfam noted that Saudi forces were deliberately targeting medical and water infrastructure, having done so over 200 times since the conflict began. This amounted to one attack every 10 days on average. There have been over 21,000 Coalition air raids on the country since 2015, according to the Yemen Data Project.

Miller studied politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London before switching to journalism. An acclaimed filmmaker, he is also author of the book “Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes.” Join Lowkey and Miller for a frank discussion about the incredible secret role Britain is playing in major war crimes.

MintPress News is a fiercely independent, reader-supported outlet, with no billionaire owners or backers. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and by subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.

Also, be sure to check out the new Behind the Headlines channel on YouTube.

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.

Earlier this week, rapper Lowkey joined campaigners on the streets of Oldham as they protested at the Elbit Ferranti weapons factory located in the northern English town.

While the post-industrial town of 96,000 people might not seem like a likely flashpoint for the Israel-Palestine conflict, many of the weapons used against the civilian Palestinian population are actually manufactured there by the Israeli arms corporation.

In this interview, Lowkey speaks to the co-founders of Palestine Action, Huda Ammori and Richard Barnard, both of whom have been arrested for their anti-Apartheid activism. Ammori is a Palestinian-Iraqi whose father was chased from his home by Israeli soldiers in 1967. He was forced to flee to Iraq without even a pair of shoes.

In 2006, at the height of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, nine activists in Northern Ireland forced their way into the offices of Raytheon, a major arms manufacturer. Once inside, they destroyed everything they could, from servers to computers to documents. At their trial two years later, they were found not guilty by a court, the decision spurring Raytheon to close down operations in the United Kingdom.

Palestine Action hopes that their actions will have a similar effect, and ultimately force British manufacturing to divest from Israeli war crimes.

While much has been made about the unshakeable U.S. support for Israel, the United Kingdom has been receiving much less negative attention. The British military has designated Israel as a “strategic partner” and has sold the country over half a billion dollars worth of arms since 2015. U.K. forces also help train the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), with a small number of British soldiers stationed inside the country as well.

After the Israeli bombardment of Gaza in the summer, then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally thanked his British counterpart Boris Johnson for his “unwavering” support for his state’s actions.

Here, Johnson’s government is at odds with the British public, only around 10% of whom, when polled, say their sympathies lie more with Israel than with Palestine. There is widespread anger at Israeli atrocities. Yet this has not b

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 British National Health Service (NHS) once stood as an internationally renowned example of a tax-funded health system that delivered public-health services to millions of British citizens, lifting a huge burden from the sick. However, the rise of neoliberal policies in the United Kingdom has targeted the NHS to become the latest victim of a U.S.-U.K. economic trade deal that would put health care services in the hands of private U.S. corporations.

This means that private U.S. healthcare corporations would capitalize on the taxpayer funded budget, “creating private insurance-style funding pools” similar to how healthcare is conducted in the U.S.

In this segment of The Watchdog, host Lowkey is joined by Bob Gill -- family doctor, NHS campaigner and director of the film The Great NHS Heist -- who argues that the NHS is heading towards becoming a ”two-tier system that will be lower quality, more expensive, bureaucratic, with perverse incentives that damage professionalism, patients, taxpayers and the privately insured, who risk claims being denied or capped, as we see clearly in America.”

Gill’s film makes clear parallels between the U.S. healthcare system and how it’s making its way into the NHS. For example, the film exposes how the transition of control of these budgets to insurance companies is now presided over by “Simon Stevens as Chief Executive of NHS England since 2014, formerly president of global expansion for UnitedHealth,” America's largest private health insurance conglomerate.

This new system also puts the once-private patient data into the hands of Big Tech giants --  outsourced data-systems and pharmaceutical companies that will market their drugs to patients while incentivizing prescriptions for medical doctors.

The corporate takeover of the NHS is already having dire effects on an already economically struggling society, especially in the post-COVID era, with patients being forced to pay for more out-of-pocket costs that are handing major profits to U.S. healthcare and insurance companies.   “The comprehensive range of NHS services salami, sliced down to a remnant of poor standard emergency care in fewer locations. For non-urgent care the choices will be to go without treatment, pay out of pocket or buy top-up insurance,” Gill wrote in 2020.

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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.