PNeditorial's blog

    31 Mar 2018

    Cathy Breen

    Iraq is the forgotten war that continues to destroy lives, writes a long-time visitor to Iraq, US peace activist Cathy Breen.

    Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet and professor of Creative Writing at Texas State. Her father was Palestinian and a refugee journalist. In one of her poems after 9/11, entitled 'Blood,' she writes:

    I call my father, we talk around the news.
    It is too much for him,
    neither of his two languages can reach it.
    I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
    to plead with the air:
    Who calls anyone civilised?
    Where can the crying heart…

    23 Nov 2017

    David Polden

    Three Palestinian communities face immediate expulsion from their homes in the Jordan Valley and near Jerusalem, and two more in the coming months, warns the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem.

    On 22 November, B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, issued a press release detailing the continuing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

    The release…

    27 Oct 2017

    Milan Rai

    The full references for the Peace News double-pamphlet 1917: The Nonviolent Russian Revolution / 1917: The Grassroots Working-Class Revolution that Lenin Crushed

    These are the footnotes for the double pamphlet written by PN editor Milan Rai in October 2017 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

    Many of these references can be verified online - sometimes whole texts have been scanned and placed online. In other cases, a search for the quoted text will bring up the page in the book referred to.

     

    Footnotes for 1917: The Nonviolent Russian Revolution 

    1 SA Smith, Russia…

    21 Sep 2017

    Catherine Tauriello

    CND marked the opening of the nuclear ban treaty for signatures in New York with an event in Downing Street, central London.

    On 20 September, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) handed in hundreds of letters from citizens across the United Kingdom at No 10 Downing St in London. The United Nations had started to accept signatures for the nuclear arms ban treaty earlier the same day.

    'British democracy has happened this afternoon. The public have made their voice heard, and we hope that the prime minister will take notice,' said Kate Hudson, CND general secretary. 'There’s a big multi-signature…

    21 Jul 2017

    David Mumford

    A report from a Christian conference on nonviolence.

    The practice of nonviolence was an integral part of the life, teaching and work of Jesus. This was the message heard by those attending the conference Reclaiming Gospel Nonviolence, sponsored by the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, Pax Christi and the Fellowship of Reconciliation held in Kinnoull, Perth on 14-16 July.

    John Dear, a Roman Catholic priest from the USA, looked over the life of Jesus and the lives of the early Christians to draw inspiration for the idea that practising peace…

    07 Jul 2017

    PN staff

    122 countries vote in favour of a treaty banning nuclear weapons - Britain refused to participate

    New York, 7 July 2017: Negotiations of a new international treaty that bans nuclear weapons concluded at the United Nations today as the treaty was formally adopted by states. The United Kingdom, alongside other nuclear-armed states, has boycotted the negotiations despite government claims to support multilateral disarmament and a world without nuclear weapons.

    'States that are serious about eliminating nuclear weapons have joined the United Nations treaty negotiations to ban nuclear…

    03 Jul 2017

    Kathy Kelly

    Who carries out the works of mercy in the war-torn country of Afghanistan?

     At an April, 2017 Symposium on Peace in Nashville, TN, Martha Hennessy spoke about central tenets of Maryhouse, a home of hospitality in New York City, where Martha often lives and works. Every day, the community there tries to abide by the counsels of Dorothy Day, Martha’s grandmother, who co-founded houses of hospitality and a vibrant movement in the 1930s. During her talk, she held up a postcard-sized copy of one of the movement’s defining images, Rita Corbin's celebrated woodcut listing…

    28 Jun 2017

    PN staff

    Blending theatre, art and politics, the Peace History Conferences go from strength to strength

    Michael Mears performs This evil thing

    The Movement for the Abolition of War (MAW), organiser of the series of Peace History Conferences, has a strong and creative relationship with the…

    22 Jun 2017

    Milan Rai

    A right-wing British journalist selectively quotes from and distorts an article in an Islamic State magazine, Dabiq, which actually says that IS attacks could be suspended if the west stops its airstrikes, interventions and torture.

    If you want a straightforward example of journalistic dishonesty about terrorism, one clear recent case is provided by right-wing columnist Dominic Lawson in his article, 'Put down the nail bomb - Jeremy wants to talk'.

    Lawson selectively quotes and misrepresents an Islamic State (IS) document which actually contradicts his argument. The article he quotes in fact says that the west could achieve a suspension of IS terror attacks by ending western airstrikes, invasions, occupations,…

    22 Jun 2017

    Milan Rai

    How the mainstream media self-censored 'revenge' for western foreign policy from their reporting on the Manchester attacks

    Fallujah

    In the month since the attack on the Manchester Arena on 22 May, commentators have offered a number of different motivations that could have led a Manchester-born-and-raised 22-year-old to massacre dozens of teenage girls and parents as they left a pop concert.

    While there has been a lot of confident…

    22 Jun 2017

    Milan Rai

    Britain's wars abroad increase the risk of attacks at home: the public knows it, Conservatives know it, and the police and security services know it

    Haditha

    After dozens of civilians are killed by suicide bombing in a large British city, a major opposition politician speaks up linking the atrocity to British foreign policy. There is a short-lived storm of controversy.

    This sequence describes not only the aftermath of the Manchester Arena atrocity on 22 May 2017, but also events after the four…

    22 Jun 2017

    Milan Rai

    How the British mass media exploded with outrage over Jeremy Corbyn's speech linking terrorism with British foreign policy - and then pretended the speech never happened

    The Haditha massacre, Iraq, 2005

    Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn made an extraordinary speech just days after a suicide bomber killed 22 people, nine of them teenagers, one an eight-year-old, at the end of a pop concert in Manchester on 22 May.

    In his speech on 25 May, Jeremy Corbyn linked the Manchester attack to British…

    30 May 2017

    PN staff

    Peace News publishes the first full-face photographs of police officer Andy Coles while he was undercover as 'Andy Davey' in the early 1990s. Coles was exposed as a police infiltrator on 12 May 2017 and forced to resign as deputy police and crime commissioner for Cambridgeshire on 15 May

    Undercover police officer Andy Coles marches in Fairford, March 1991

    Today, Peace News is publishing the first full-face photographs of 'Andy Davey', the identity taken by undercover police officer Andy Coles in 1991 when he infiltrated the nonviolent direct action group ARROW. …

    08 Mar 2017

    Mads Ryle

    Countries in the Global South have been forced into the large-scale extraction of natural resources (coal, oil, minerals, land) in order to export raw materials. It is corporations based in Europe and North America who generally profit. This 'extractivism' is happening even in Bolivia, where the government once presented itself as the protector of Mother Earth.

    SALT, Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia.
    At this time of year I am always in Cochabamba, in the middle of Bolivia, in the heart of South America. The first book anyone wanting to understand the structural dynamics of this region's history reads…

    20 Oct 2016

    Elizabeth Ingrams

    An interview with Daniele Santi – secretary general of the Buddhist peace group, Senzatomica.

    PN: What is Senzatomica?

    Daniele Santi: Our aim is to raise public awareness about the threats of nuclear weapons and to empower each individual to speak out for a world free of nuclear weapons. In order to create an unstoppable force for peace, we launched a touring exhibition, believing that it is people’s right and duty to speak out.…