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On 14 April 2026, the Telegraph’s Tony Diver reported that the Green Party is supporting candidates who’ve been smeared as ‘antisemites’ by Zionists in the UK media.

In the past, the Green Party would have shied away from responding to this. Even worse, they wouldn’t have supported their candidates in the first place.

In a refreshing change of pace, however, deputy leader Mothin Ali hit back with the following:

Thanks for highlighting this Tony.
If anyone has been affected by the unfair smears, please do reach out https://t.co/H6CMaaUq0q

— Mothin Ali (@MothinAli) April 14, 2026

Unbowed and unapologetic, as he should be.

Green Party finally step in

For clarity’s sake, a ‘Zionist’ is someone who supports the project of Israel existing as an ethno-nationalist settler colonial project with aims to expand outwards into the wider Middle East.

Here is a senior Israeli minister detailing this – a project they refer to as ‘Greater Israel’:

The plan for a Greater Israel extending over the West Bank into Lebanon and Syria laid out with great clarity by a senior government minister. This is of course completely illegal, goes against all the stipulations of International Law and should lead to immediate sanctions https://t.co/yw02xIpXDx

— William Dalrymple (@DalrympleWill) April 9, 2026

Importantly, ‘Zionist’ does not equal ‘Jewish person’.

This is demonstrable in that not all Jewish people are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jewish.

Many non-Jewish politicians are Zionists – particularly those in the Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel groups:

Members of Labour Friends of Israel, before that grotesque organisation hid their names. https://t.co/VKiRnwtxMk pic.twitter.com/AiiKxsMWLZ

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) April 8, 2026

The UK’s mainstream media is Zionist given that its output aligns with the expansionist aims of the Greater Israel project:

“The IDF are sniping children in the head.”

British 'Journalist' : “Israel are one of our allies..”

“The IDF soldiers were ordered to shoot at Gazans who were waiting for food.”

British 'Journalist' : How can we not support our allies? pic.twitter.com/mmi1rERw55

— Nadira Ali (@Nadira_ali12) April 14, 2026

There are many reasons why we’ve ended up in this situation, including:

• Israel is a key partner to the US, and the UK is subservient to America.
• The Israel lobby has proven to be incredibly effective at making connections within the UK establishment.

"He's one of the best on the inside…"

Shai Masot of the Israeli Embassy sings the praises of new Labour candidate Luke Akehurst and his lobby group in the Al Jazeera documentary The Lobby.pic.twitter.com/pikfMwOJCB

— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) May 29, 2024

The way that UK Zionists push back against their critics is simple and well-documented; they accuse anti-Zionists of being antisemites.

For a time, this strategy was highly effective.

Following Israel’s genocide in Gaza, however, the tide has turned.

This is why we’re seeing high-ranking British politicians pushing back against the status quo.

The Candidate Media Smears Support Group

Diver drew attention to the following internal message within the Greens for Palestine group:

Diver also drew attention to the following response from Ali:

The Telegraph’s dwindling audience may read the above and see antisemitism, but only because they haven’t yet woken up from the genocidal nightmare our media dreamed into existence.

Everyone else can understand that Zionism and the British media are toxic.

Of course a political party should defend its candidates against both.

But this wasn’t always the case.

In the 2024 election, the Green Party dropped a number of candidates who criticised Israel. Among them was the Canary’s Maddison Wheeldon:

[Wheeldon] first put herself forward as a Green candidate, but later heard that she wasn’t going to have their backing. She said this was because of her very outspoken position in support of Palestine and against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. As she highlighted, “there’s this bully atmosphere that we’re… seeing across the media – this intimidation atmosphere” that makes people want to hold their tongues on Palestine. But she isn’t one to back down. And this strength of character meant she had strong support after her break with the Greens

Wheeldon had support because people could see that what Israel was doing was wrong.

Now, the number of people awake to this reality is so great that we can no longer be ignored.

The battle continues

What we’re seeing with the Green Party did not happen overnight.

Opinions shifted on Zionism because of the activists who took a stand against it.

Many of those standing up found themselves smeared and ruined; many were abandoned by the institutions which should have protected them.

While the Green Party has greatly improved, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a ways to go. We’ve criticised the party’s handling of their ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion, and we’ll continue to criticise them wherever we see a need to do so.

Today, though, we’re celebrating the stand they’ve taken against the British media, and we’re offering our full solidarity to the candidates who are bearing the brunt of the attacks.

They should know they’re not alone, and that we’ll be with them every step of the way.

Featured image via Green Party

By Willem Moore

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Kuwait has arrested journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin in an aggressive social media crackdown. The Gulf state accuses Shihab-Eldin of publicising damage to infrastructure caused by Iranian retaliation to the unprovoked and illegal US-Israeli war.

Prominent Journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin Has Been in Jail for Six Weeks in Kuwait, Faces Trial in Special Tribunalhttps://t.co/6u8QeUpMUU

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) April 14, 2026

Kuwait crackdown

Drop Site News reported on 14 April:

Prominent journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin was arrested six weeks ago in Kuwait where he remains in detention and faces prosecution in a special tribunal over social media posts related to the Iran war. His detention comes as part of a wider crackdown on online speech in Kuwait and other Gulf countries during the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran that has engulfed the region.

CPJ calls on Kuwaiti authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Kuwaiti-American journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, detained under new security and fake news laws.

Read more: https://t.co/H1qBu1OCFg#FreeAhmed #FreeAhmedEldin pic.twitter.com/aCUtmw6i9l

— Committee to Protect Journalists (@pressfreedom) April 14, 2026

The US-based outlet described Shihab-Eldin as “an American born Kuwaiti citizen” and:

award-winning journalist with more than two million followers across social media platforms.

Human rights organisations have condemned his detention. Sara Qudah, the Middle East and North Africa Director for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), told Drop Site:

We are seeing escalating censorship of journalists and news outlets across the world in relation to the Iran war, including in the Gulf. National security is being used as a pretext to crack down on freedom of speech and Shihab-Eldin’s detention is emblematic of that. He must be freed immediately.

He was reportedly arrested on 3 March 2026, five days after the illegal assault on Iran began, and has had little contact with his legal counsel. Drop Site said:

There has been little transparency around his case, but the charges he faces are reported to be related to his social media posts, including a video showing a U.S. fighter jet crash near a U.S. air base in Kuwait, according to CPJ, which stressed that the videos and images he shared had been publicly available.

Adding:

The charges Shihab-Eldin faces may include allegations of spreading false information, harming national security, and misuse of a mobile phone.

Press freedoms

Kuwait, like UAE, has enacted a ban on reporting details of war damage. Only a month ago Shihab-Eldin spoke to Pullitzer-winning reporter Chris Hedges about how the legacy media had capitulated to the US and Israel’s genocidal impulses:

Drop Site said dozens of other people had been detained in similar circumstances. Kuwait has created new courts designed to deliver rapid judgements:

The courts were established to “resolve cases with high speed,” and the Kuwaiti government claimed they were “necessary due to the extreme danger terrorism poses to national stability and peace,” according to Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Wasat.

Authoritarians are carrying out a global assault on press freedom and truth telling. This has only been exacerbated by the genocide in Gaza and the US-Israeli attack on Iran. The Canary stands in solidarity with Ahmed Shihab-Eldin. And with our fellow journalists all over the world who are under attack. He should be freed immediately to continue his vital work.

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton

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Reported return fare hike would see prices surge from under $13 (£10) to over $100 (£74)

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Two books revisit the Bernie Goetz shooting.

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Israeli authorities recently dropped the charges against the five soldiers who raped a Palestinian detainee in Sde Teiman prison

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The world has abandoned, not forgotten, people in Sudan, a top UN official has said. UN coordinator for Sudan Denise Brown said the country was “on repeat”. The war is in its fourth year. Some estimates say 150,000 people have died as a result of the war with over 10 million displaced.

Human rights violations, widespread sexual violence, and sundry other war crimes have been normalised as the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fights the national government.

As Sudan’s war moves into a fourth year, civilians are still being killed, displaced and subjected to widespread sexual violence.

"We are on repeat in Sudan", the UN’s top humanitarian official in the country warned on Monday, calling for urgent action to stop the fighting. pic.twitter.com/4U29nPFIFS

— UN News (@UN_News_Centre) April 13, 2026

And although the world’s great power have failed to help, many of them are involved – pursuing their own interests at the expense of the Sudanese population. Neighbouring states have also become entangled.

Brown told journalists:

We are on repeat in Sudan. Please don’t call this a forgotten crisis. I’m referring to this as an abandoned crisis.

The UN website said:

Humanitarians in Darfur have treated close to 2,500 survivors of sexual violence over the past year. Ms. Brown said the impact goes far beyond the immediate survivors, affecting families, communities and children born as a result of sexual violence.

She also highlighted mass killings around El Fasher, where she said 6,000 people were killed in three days according to verified information, while the real number could be higher.

Brown asked:

What more has to happen for everyone to sit up and pay attention, to find a solution?

And:

She urged Member States to focus on the forces driving the war, including the flow of weapons and the wider war economy. She also referred to questions around the Darfur arms embargo and whether enough is being done to enforce it.

Arms flows into Sudan

As the Canary has reported, the UAE has been a major backer of RSF in its war with the Sudanese government. Turkey, Egypt, Israel and many more countries are pursuing their own interests in Sudan too. British military components has also shown up on the battlefield in RSF hands. The UK is a major arms supplier to UAE.

As the Canaryhas said in our previous coverage of this poorly understood genocidal war:

The war in Sudan is theoretically between RSF and the Sudanese government. But foreign states pursuing their own interests are backing the combatants. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), for example, backs the RSF with arms and equipment. Egypt backs the government, alongside Russia, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Israel has backed both sides at different times.

The mounting death toll is similarly mindboggling:

RSF has killed Sudanese civilians in vast numbers. And some estimates say 150,000 people have died and over 10mn have been displaced by fighting.

You can read more of our reporting on RSF and Sudan here.

Beyond time for action

On 9 April, a Yale forensic human rights thinktank reported how vehicles modified for paramilitary use was flowing into Sudan via Ethiopia And, as in war zones all over the world, drones have become a deadly factor in the fighting. France 24 reported on 14 April that UN aid chief Tom Fletcher claimed nearly 700 people had been killed by drones so far in 2026.

Fletcher said:

We need action now – to stop the violence, protect civilians, ensure access to communities in greatest danger, and fund the response.

This grim and chastening anniversary marks another year when the world has failed to meet the test of Sudan.

Sudan’s plight is truly hideous but it barely seems to register amid various other wars raging around the world. Yet it is an inescapable fact that the killing there is taking place on a scale which likely exceeds that in Gaza and, for example, Iran – so far, at least. Like those conflicts it is a result of centuries of imperial intervention by regional and global powers – not least, Britain. The horrors in Sudan should be reported with the same vigour.

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton

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CHRIS SEARLE on Mike Westbrook who died aged 90

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MEN’S FOOTBALL: Rotherham slumped to a 3-0 defeat at Wigan on Tuesday evening that condemned them to relegation from League One. The South Yorkshire side have won only three of their last 27 matches and new manager Lee Clark has picked up just one point in six games. At the other end of the table, Cardiff moved to the verge of promotion with a stoppage time equaliser in their 1-1 draw at Huddersfield.

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The US invasion of Venezuela at the beginning of this year is an event of historic significance. With the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife under a hail of bullets and bombs, the Trump administration announced the definitive end of the ‘rules-based’ world order.

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Israel’s so-called internal security service detains an Israeli woman over allegedly spying for Iranian intelligence agencies.

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By David Swanson, Progressive Hub, April 15, 2026

Nell Bernstein’s new book is called In Our Future We Are Free: The Dismantling of the Youth Prison. It tells us that in the United States in 2000 the number of young people held inside locked buildings was 108,800 and in 2022 it was 27,600. At least two-thirds of youth prisons and jails have been shut down. This is an enormous, dramatic, positive development in an era when most people imagine that the closest thing to good news out there is a stretch of 8 hours without any social media posts from Trump.

Bernstein also tells us that even now the United States still has the highest rate of youth incarceration on the planet. This fact helps to convey some sense of how extremely out of sync with the rest of the world the United States was in 2000. As with militarism, gun distribution, environmental destruction, adult incarceration, and various other ills for which it’s hard to fit the United States on the same graph with the other 96% of humanity, the madness of sticking young people in cages was not “inevitable” or “natural” or a public “service.” Unlike those other maladies, this one has been dramatically reduced. What remains of it is still horrific, still full of sadistic cruelty, still imposed with a huge racial bias, and still part of a larger problem that sees armed police in schools, children routinely arrested, and huge numbers placed on house arrest with ankle bracelets or otherwise supervised by those who view them as enemies rather than as precious friends and loved ones.

Even in that context, what we have in the 75% reduction in the caging of children is a story of successful work toward the abolition of an accepted norm heavily marketed to us less than a generation back as absolutely critical to our physical safety. The story of how this has been done, regardless of whether or not it continues, could be of great service to those working for the abolition of police, prisons, borders, wars, and other evils.

Bernstein’s account includes a number of lessons.

One is that youth incarceration depended on secrecy and lies. Sadistic torture was carried out with impunity. Once the tide could be turned in the direction of an alternative approach to children, there were powerful videos and shameless testimony available, waiting to shock people open to being shocked.

Another is that, not just all-out “tough-on-crime” cruelty, but also all variety of “reforms,” had to be given a chance, and far more than a chance, before many were ready to declare that caging kids needed ending, not mending.

Another is that advances made in one corner of the United States were of great value in pursuing the same advances in other parts of the United States — much greater value than similar and even more dramatic, not to mention earlier, advances in the rest of the world.

The first-person stories of young people — and their families — victimized by youth incarceration were one of the most powerful tools. The courage of those speaking out at risk of retaliation was critical. Bringing the general culture to respect young people as worthy of contributing to the policy debate necessarily meant getting better policies directed at young people.

Also critical was bringing on-board academics and foundations that could provide research, data, and respectability to the obvious.

Virtuous cycles had to be set in motion. Alternative services and sentencings could create empty beds in prisons. Empty beds in prisons could raise the financial cost of keeping the other beds filled. So could requiring that children be treated in compliance with laws rather than simply warehoused and abused. “Fiscally responsible” politicians shifting money to proven solutions could empty out even more beds. And so on.

It had to be an inside-job. As Trumpies demolish the Department of Education or the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Health and Human Services from the top down, opponents of youth incarceration had to get themselves hired to run youth incarceration programs in various cities and states, in some cases dismantling one and moving on to another as serial abolishers.

Luck and trends outside of the control of those doing the good work mattered. National trends in crime rate and other factors not easily and quickly manipulated mattered. Still, some influence was possible. Ceasing to treat minor behaviors as crimes lowered the crime rate which lowered media crime hysteria which allowed more intelligent policies.

Undoing the old system was a struggle not just against belief in it but also against the simple inertia of it, including especially the jobs question — the jobs of the so-called guards or “corrections” officers. Finding people better jobs will be a necessary element of all change until we get a jobs guarantee and/or other stronger social programs. A side benefit of undoing a system that conditions people to engage in fascistic cruelty is a society with fewer such people in it.

As progress is made, more people become more able to imagine further progress. To get to the unimaginable in 20 years, you have to get to the extreme limits of the imaginable at least a few separate times.

There are many hurdles and steps backward and phony steps forward. There are people bypassed by reforms that don’t grandfather them in. There are relatively successful reforms that stall further progress. And then there is the society at large. To succeed in one area, other areas need to do well too. Families need to do well economically. We need good schools. We need fewer guns. We need to reduce incarceration not only for nonviolent crimes but also for violent ones — including by taking known steps to reduce violent crime. But we need to not stop at preventing crime by treating everyone as a potential criminal. We need to get to a point of treating everyone as a wonderful benefit to the world.

If you’d like to discuss Nell Bernstein’s book with Nell Bernstein, join us online here.

If you’d like more states to end the practice of sentencing young people to life in prison without parole, go here.

The post Will Youth Prisons Be Found Only in History Books? Could War Meet the Same Fate? appeared first on World BEYOND War.

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