13 things every Newcastle United fan should know about the club's new owners

In October 2021 the tyrannical Saudi regime completed the takeover of Newcastle United FC, via the nation's sovereign wealth fund. 

Here are 13 things all Newcastle fans should know about their club's new owners.

It's the Saudi state

This isn't just some rich guys from Saudi Arabia who have bought an 80% stake in Newcastle United, it's the Saudi government's Public Investment Fund (PIF).

Their chairman of this fund the murderous tyrant Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), who is also the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

No matter how much the Premier League tries to maintain the ridiculous pretence that they haven't, what they've done is allowed the nationalisation of Newcastle United, into the ownership of the world's worst regime.

Sportswashing

The Saudi tyrants have invested their oil money all over the world. They've got stakes in Facebook, Twitter, Formula One, Boeing, Bank of America, Disney, Uber ... Wherever you look in the capitalist system, the Saudi tyrants have probably got a stake in it.

The difference between these investments, and Newcastle United, is that their capitalist investments are aimed at making profits, while their investment in Newcastle United is aimed at improving their public reputation, at a massive cost.

Why do you think they've made that appalling wax-faxed woman Amanda Staveley the figurehead of their ownership, despite her only owning a tiny stake in the venture, rather than one of their own head-choppers?

It's all about massaging their public reputation, and putting a slick westernised veneer onto their barbaric autocracy, rather than making any kind of monetary profit.

We've seen it already with Manchester City, and the way huge numbers of Mancs immediately turned themselves into amateur unpaid PR operatives for the Abu Dhabi despots who took over their club.

MBS and the Saudi head-choppers expect to receive exactly the same kind of sycophantic fawning from Geordies.

War crimes

The despotic Saudi regime has been waging war in neighbouring Yemen since 2014, and they've shown absolutely no respect for the normal conventions of war. 

Probably the most famous war crime occurred when they conducted an airstrike against a bus full of school kids, but they've also used helicopter gunships to attack refugees, and deliberately bombed civilian targets across one of the poorest countries on earth.

One of the most despicable tactics the Saudi tyrants use is the targeting of water supplies and food distribution infrastructure, in order to use starvation and disease as weapons of war against the Yemeni people.

Their absolute disregard for human life in the Yemeni conflict has created what the UN has consistently described as "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world".

Terrorism-spreaders

Ever since the oil money started flowing in, the Saudis have been using it to spread their extremist version of Islam (Wahhabism) across the globe. Wherever you find barbaric Islamist terrorists, you'll find financial and logistical links back to Saudi Arabia.

15 of the 19 September 11th attackers were Saudi, and the ideological figurehead of Al Qaida was Osama bin Laden, who came from a wealthy family that's still well connected in the Saudi regime.

During the 2016 US election Hillary Clinton's emails about the Saudis were leaked, and in them she made it absolutely clear that the US administration knew perfectly well that Saudi Arabia funds terrorist outfits like Al Qaida and ISIS.

Jamal Khashoggi

In October 2018 the Saudi government lured the Jamal Khashoggi to the Saudi embassy in Turkey, where he was murdered and dismembered. The remains of his body have never been found.

The aeroplanes used to fly his murderers in and out of Turkey were owned by PIF, the very company used as a front to buy Newcastle United, and the CIA concluded that the murder was ordered by Muhammed bin Salmen himself.

The reason Newcastle United's new owners killed Khashoggi and hacked his body to bits, is that he was a critic of their regime. He was the son of a mega-rich Saudi arms dealer with connections to the Saudi regime, but he saw the light, recognised the vile tyranny for what it was, and began criticising their political repression, and their war crimes in Yemen.

He was a brave man who stood up for what he believed in, and for that, the owners of Newcastle United ended his life, hacked his corpse to pieces, and hid the remains to deny him a proper burial.

They kill journalists just for criticising their horrific regime.

Misogyny

Probably the most famous piece of folk knowledge about Saudi Arabia in the last half-century is the fact that they hate their own women so much, they wouldn't even allow them to drive cars.

Saudi Arabia is still a profoundly misogynistic society in which women barely have any rights.

They're not allowed to travel or get a passport without permission from their male guardian; they're not free to choose who they marry, and until recently Saudi girls as young as 8 were forced into marriages with adult men; they're barred from all manner of professions; they're banned from studying abroad without their male guardian's permission; they're discriminated against in family courts; and feminist activism in Saudi Arabia is treated as akin to terrorism.

Homophobia

Saudi Arabia is one of the most homophobic regimes on earth, which maintains the death penalty for homosexuality.

They kill people for being gay. Do we really need to say any more than that?

Anti-democracy

In 2019 the Saudi tyrants conducted a barbaric mass-execution of 39 people, including one death by crucifixion. Most of the victims were pro-democracy protestors (including a lad who was 16 at the time he attended a pro-democracy street protest!).

These absolute tyrants literally kill people for supporting the democratic rights that British people take for granted. 

Islamist extremism
 

We already know that the Saudi regime is responsible for spreading their violent, extremist Wahhabist interpretation of Islam across the planet, but within Saudi Arabia they're just as bad.

Apostacy (the "crime" of renouncing Islam) still carries the death sentence in Saudi Arabia. 

Most Saudis who renounce Islam are forced into exile, which is especially hard for women because of the travel restrictions they're subjected to. And even then, they're forced to continually look over their shoulders, because Saudi operatives obviously aren't remotely afraid to carry out extrajudicial killings overseas. 

Corruption

The Saudi regime is notoriously corrupt, and they'll do literally anything to get away with it.

The Saudis even threatened acts of terrorism against the UK in order to pressurise the UK government into scrapping a Serious Fraud Office investigation into the estimated £1 billion that Prince Bandar took in bribes from the British arms company BAE.

The threat of Saudi-orchestrated terrorist attacks on British soil was enough to convince Tony Blair to personally intervene to shut down the corruption probe!

Premier League greed

The reason Premier League approval of the Newcastle takeover took so long wasn't that they had any concerns about the corruption, homophobia, democracy-repression, murder of journalists, misogyny, war crimes, terrorism-spreading, Islamist extremism, or even threats of terrorist attacks against the UK ... it's because a TV company with links to the Saudi government had been broadcasting unauthorised streams of Premier League matches!

Once this company put a stop to their unauthorised streams, the Premier League quickly gave the green light to the worst regime in the world to take over one of England's most historic and storied football clubs!

If you're looking for anyone to blame for the absolute shame of these horrific tyrants taking over your club, look no further than greed-obsessed Premier League executives.

Forget whataboutery

"Whataboutery" is one of the weakest debating tactics known to humanity. It's just a distraction strategy aimed at completely derailing the discussion.

• What about other terrible football owners like UAE/Qatar/exploitative US capitalists/Abramovich?
• What about other repressive regimes like North Korea/Iran/Israel? 
• What about other Saudi investments in stuff like Facebook/Twitter?
• What about Mike Ashley's ruthless zero hours contract exploitation at Sports Direct?

All of these other things are varying degrees of bad. And very many people have consistently highlighted and criticised these other things in the past. But the subject of discussion now is the fact that Newcastle United has been bought out by the worst regime in the world. 

The only reason any Newcastle fan is going "what about ...?" is to distract attention and derail the discussion.

It's a shamefully poor debating tactic, which nobody with even a shred of moral decency would try to use.

Buying loyalty?

The Saudi tyrants believe that just because they've bought Newcastle United, they've bought the Newcastle fans' undying loyalty too.

It's up to the people of Newcastle to show them how wrong they are, and that buying the badge doesn't automatically buy them the respect of the Geordie people.

If Newcastle fans have any decency and dignity whatever, the next home game will be absolutely festooned with pride flags, Yemeni flags, women's rights banners, and pictures of Jamal Khashoggi.

Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered by the owners of Newcastle United at the age of 59, so the 59th minute would be a profound moment for the name "Jamal Khashoggi" to ring out around St James' Park, to tell these sick bastards that they might own your club, but they'll never earn your respect if they go around murdering and dismembering their critics.

Will Newcastle United fans put on a show of defiance against the absolutely horrific tyrants who now own their club? Or will the next home game have an absolute party atmosphere, featuring thousands of Geordies giving the worst regime in the world a heroes' welcome with tea towels on their heads?

The game against Spurs on Sunday October 17th will tell the entire world an awful lot about the true character of the Geordie people, won't it?

 

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"Shame it wasn't a brick/grenade": the disgusting social media response to Jeremy Corbyn getting egged

On 19 June 2017 an extreme-right activist and Tommy Robinson acolyte called Darren Osborne carried out a deadly terrorist attack against a random group of Muslims in Finsbury park. During his trial it was revealed that his original plot was to go assassinate Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan.

On the day that Osborne was jailed for the extreme-right terrorist attack he committed, the BBC took the extraordinary step of inviting one of the extreme-right hate preachers who radicalised him onto their flagship news show Newsnight. The softball interview they lavished on Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) is one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the BBC and indicative of concerted efforts to actively bring extreme-right views into the political mainstream.

In March 2019 Jeremy Corbyn paid a visit to the Finsbury Park mosque where he was attacked with an egg. This is no big story in its own right, plenty of politicians have had eggs pelted at them. Anyone old enough to remember the 1990s will remember the footage of Labour stalwart John Prescott trying to batter the guy who egged him.

The story here isn't the egging itself, it's the absolutely despicable social media reaction of the political right.

This is a guy who was the target of an extreme-right terrorist plot who was visiting the site of the deadly terrorist attack the plotter eventually carried out, and literally hundreds of right-wingers have responded to him getting egged by wishing that Corbyn had actually been attacked with a brick or a grenade (the comments in the header image are just a tiny selection of an absolute barrage of violence-craving vitriol from the political right).

What a disgusting country we've allowed ourselves to become where people think it's absolutely fine to publicly wish violence and death on people they disagree with politically.

Labour figures like Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, and Sadiq Khan are the most common targets of these repulsive tides of right-wing hate, but let's not pretend they're the only victims.

There were the High Court judges who ruled against Theresa May's efforts to scrap parliamentary sovereignty who suffered barrages of abuse and death threats after the Daily Mail's despicable rabble-rousing "Enemies of the People" front page (Theresa May subsequently hired the author of this despicable hit piece as her chief spokesperson!).

There are the constant barrages of death threats against anyone who dares oppose, or even moderately critique the absolute shambles the Tory party are making of Brexit.

And there are the endless waves of abuse and threats of violence aimed at left-wing public figures, and especially left-wing public figures who happen to be female, non-white, and/or homosexual.
 

This kind of violent extremist mentality has been fostered by extreme-right figures and hate groups like Tommy Robinson and the Britain First hate chamber, but similar outbursts of abuse and cravings for violence can be found in the Daily Mail and Guido Fawkes comments sections, and especially in pro-Tory Facebook groups.

Huge numbers of people have become absolutely normalised to using social media to do stuff like lobbing abuse, craving and threatening violence, celebrating extreme-right acts of terrorism without any kind of repercussion.

Britain has become normalised to this kind of thing that it's a regular part of people's online experience to witness other people spewing bigoted abuse, wishing for ethnic cleansing, spreading absurd extreme-right conspiracy theories, and craving the violent deaths of politicians, journalists, and public figures.

The kind of stuff that would get us ostracised from our social groups, and probably even arrested if we did it in public spaces in the real world is considered normal in the online world.

I'm not here to tell you that there's some kind of easy solution to this because there clearly isn't. Right-wing websites like Guido Fawkes and the Daily Mail have fostered this grotesque abuse-lobbing violence-craving extreme-right ultranationalist mentality in their comments sections for years, and social media platforms have been letting people spread this kind of hate with impunity for years too.

Ordinary people have little power over these companies to stop them from hosting and actively fostering hate, and they've got a perverse financial incentive to allow it to continue, because their business models are based on maximising the number of users, regardless of whether they're racism-spewing, violence-craving, terrorism-sympathising extreme-right freaks or not.

Of course there are things we can do on the micro scale like reporting individual tweets/Facebook comments, or sending copies of people's hateful comments to their employers, asking advertisers whether they're comfortable placing their adverts next on platforms that allow, or even promote hateful views, but this kind of stuff is bailing out a sinking ship with an egg cup.

So what do you suggest. What can be done about the increasingly common normalisation of hate speech and the repugnant hate-fest that so much of our political discourse has degenerated into?

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The forgotten victims of September 11th

Since the atrocities in 2001, the 11th of September has become a national day of mawkish commemoration in the United States, despite the fact that the same kind of extreme Islamist terrorists are still wreaking havoc across Europe and the Middle East, largely thanks to the US invasion of Iraq that followed 9/11 and ended up creating the biggest lawless terrorism breeding ground on earth.

It would take an extremely blinkered view of history to not know that in the 1980s the US actually funded, supplied and trained Al Qaida in Afghanistan, when they were considered "brave freedom fighters" against the Soviet occupation by the western media. 

It would take more historical ignorance/revisionism to fail to realise that the US intervened to fight alongside Islamist militias in Kosovo in the late 1990s, support for Islamist fanatics that was provided several years after the first Al Qaida attack on the World Trade Center in 1993!

And it would take a severe level of self-deception to deny that the September 11th terrorist attacks are "blowback" from the United States' foreign policy tactics from the mid 20th Century onward.

Over the space of just a few years we've seen Al Qaida morph from US funded and supported allies in places like Afghanistan and Kosovo into supposedly the greatest ever threat to American freedom in history. A threat that has been used to impose all kinds of unconstitutional and totalitarian attacks on the liberties of American citizens (and citizens of the rest of the world) such as the "Patriot" Act and the incredible expansion of NSA spying activities. 

This rapid conversion of Al Qaida from US allies to dangerous terrorists was bad enough, but the 9/11 remembrance ceremonies in 2013 were marred by the fact that the US government were straining at the leash to actually help Islamist terrorists in Syria by bombing the Syrian government and creating yet another Iraq style power vacuum for them to thrive in.

Just 12 years since after the 9/11 attacks and the US administration were assuming the American public to be so gullible and compliant that they would accept the US openly siding with the same kind of Islamist terrorists as those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, and inordinately more innocent civilians in Iraq,Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and in terrorist atrocities across Europe too during the last 17 years.

The extreme ignorance and gullibility that would be necessary for the American public to accept the idea that the US political establishment openly siding with Al Qaida and other extreme Wahabi Islamist terrorist groups in Syria, simply because their terrorist activities there coincide with American imperialist interests is also on display in the fact that so many Americans still believe the absurd narrative that "America fights for freedom and democracy across the World".

40 years ago the US backed a violent coup d'etat in Chile and the
imposition of a brutal neoliberal regime led by Augusto Pinochet.

One of the clearest demonstrations of the American determination to actually undermine and destroy freedom and democracy came in Chile after a US-backed military coup that took place on September 11th 1973.

This coup marked the birth of the toxic neoliberal ideology pushed by the Chicago school pseudo-economists. 

In 1973 neoliberalism was a fringe anti-communist economic ideology supported by virtually nobody, today this bankrupt pseudo-economic gibberish is the global economic orthodoxy adhered to by almost all political parties in the West, and enforced across the globe by the machinery of the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation.

To say that neoliberalism had a painful birth in Chile would be an understatement. The man that the neoliberals backed in Chile was a brutal dictator called General Pinochet. 

During his dictatorship over 3,000 people were "disappeared" (captured and tortured to death) whilst another 28,000 were detained without trial, most of them suffering torture and in many cases sexual abuse too. 

Aside from those tortured and killed and the families that survived them, other victims of this brutal US backed dictatorship included protesters that were burned alive in the streets by the police and musicians who had their fingers broken before being machine gunned to death.
 

The Americans weren't the only ones to back
Pinochet's murderous right-wing dictatorship,
The Thatcher government in Britain
supported him too.

  This brutal and oppressive Chilean regime was supported by the US administration because to successive American governments and their corporate backers, right-wing military dictatorship, imprisonment without trial, torture, rape and extrajudicial killings were an insignificant price to pay when it came to securing access to the Chilean economy so that it could be used as a playground for the neoliberal pseudo-economists from the Chicago School, and opened up for exploitation by US corporations.

The Chilean regime was part of the US financed Operation Condor, which was a plan to control the population of the southern cone of South America through the instillation of  brutal right-wing military dictatorships. 

The members of this anti-democratic group were the Pinochet military dictatorship in Chile, the Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguay, the Banzer military dictatorship in Bolivia, the Brazilian military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985 and the 12 year military dictatorship in Uruguay. 

Undoubtedly the most brutal members of Operation Condor were the US backed Argentine Junta that joined in 1976, after the military coup against Isabel Perón.

Photos of the disappeared in Buenos Aires, 2004.

The US backed military dictatorship in Argentina was yet another playground for the Chicago school neoliberal pseudo-economists. 

Whilst the US backed military dictatorship were busy murdering an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians and torturing countless thousands more, "the Chicago Boys" were imposing their favoured economic ideology (deregulation, mass privatisation, lax tax enforcement, massive tax cuts for the rich, regressive tax hikes for the poor and ordinary, destruction of welfare provision, revocation of rights and liberties, wage repression ... ), resulting in poverty and chaos for millions of Argentines. 

The state terrorism of this savage regime meant that few people dared to speak out against this US-backed economic vandalism.

Some of the favoured tactics of the Argentine junta included torture, extrajudicial killings, throwing people out of aeroplanes without parachutes (death flights) and the kidnapping of pregnant women in order to steal their babies to give to supporters of the regime, after which the mothers were executed without trial.

In the late 1970s the US and the Argentine junta collaborated in "Operation Charly" to export their model of brutal right-wing dictatorship to Central America (Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala) and in 1980 the Argentine junta, the US administration and the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie collaborated to assist the "Cocaine Coup" in Bolivia which installed Luis García Meza. 

Meza was another brutal dictator and upon his instillation in power he immediately outlawed all political parties, exiled opposition leaders, banned trade unions, silenced the press and oversaw the murder of over 1,000 people in just 13 months in power.

The 45th anniversary of the US backed military coup in Chile will pass virtually unnoticed in the United States, and great swathes of the public will continue to believe the comforting lies that the US has a history of promoting democracy and freedom, rather than a demonstrable history of deliberately and callously undermining them.

The millions of victims of the vile US backed Latin American dictatorships are not the only people that should be remembered on September the 11th. 

The countless global victims of the vile "greed is a virtue" neoliberal pseudo-economic ideology devised by the Chicago Boys, supported by the US government and born in Chile on this day in 1973 also just as worthy of remembrance as the victims of the September 2001 atrocities.
                        

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Jeremy Corbyn should demand an apology from Chris Grayling over his defamatory comments

On the BBC Radio 4 Today programme the Tory government minister Chris Grayling told an absolute whopper of a lie about Jeremy Corbyn. Unsurprisingly the Today programme presenters didn't think to call Grayling out on his lie, they just left it there, further rotting away the BBC's own shockingly degraded reputation, as well as his.

The lie Grayling resorted to was a claim that "Jeremy Corbyn attended the funeral of terrorists" in Tunisia.

Here are the actual facts:

• At the invitation of the Tunisian Prime Minister in 2014, Jeremy Corbyn attended a remembrance ceremony for the victims of an Israeli terrorist atrocity (the 1985 bombing of the Palestinian government in exile in Tunis that was even condemned by Margaret Thatcher at the time).

• The event was not a "funeral" in any way shape or form because nobody was buried there on the day Corbyn visited.

• None of the eight terrorists who carried out the Munich attack are even buried in Tunisia, let alone in the graveyard Jeremy Corbyn visited (five are buried in Libya, two in unknown graves after being assassinated by the Israelis, and one was last seen in hiding in 1999).

• There is no evidence that the Black September members who were buried in the graveyard in 1992 were "terrorists" or Munich "plotters" as alleged in the shockingly dishonest Daily Mail front page that kicked off this latest anti-Corbyn smear campaign. 

• If Israel did have any evidence whatever of their involvement in the Munich plot, then perhaps they should have arrested them and put them on trial, rather than carrying out an extrajudicial assassination?

In light of these basic facts, Grayling's accusation that "Jeremy Corbyn attended the funeral of terrorists" is clearly highly inaccurate and defamatory.
Even by the utterly debased standards of British political discourse, you can't just accuse people of attending the funeral of terrorists with no factual justification whatever.

And even considering Grayling's stupidity, you would have thought that he would have learned the lesson that baselessly slandering your political opponents is an unwise move after Ben Bradley's mega-viral apology Tweet over the Czech spy nonsense (still the most viral Tory Tweet of 2018 by far!).

In my view Jeremy Corbyn should instruct his lawyers to offer Chris Grayling the chance to avoid legal action by making a public apology for his defamatory statement (perhaps in the form of a Ben Bradley type "please retweet" apology from an official Tory party account) and a significant donation to a Israeli-Palestinian peace organisation.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Why are the mainstream media not talking about how this extreme-right fanatic was radicalised?

A fanatical extreme-right hate preacher has been jailed for two years after numerous disgusting anti-Muslim rants and a threat to kill Jeremy Corbyn.

Jonathan Jennings was jailed by Swansea crown court for his social media postings, and for lobbing a brick at a local police station after he was warned to stop posting vile abuse and threats.

Here are some of the things that Jennings wrote:

• Called for Muslims to be sterilised

• Claimed Adolf Hitler was "born 100 years too soon"

• Promoted the idea of a "bomb a mosque day"

• Threatened to "Jo Cox" Jeremy Corbyn if he ever becomes Prime Minister

• Said that Muslims should be gassed

• Praised a racist thug who kicked a pregnant woman in the stomach as a "national hero"

• Changed his Twitter handle to "Muslim Slayer"

• Called for Gina Miller to be executed as a traitor

• Called for JK Rowling to be hanged

• Called for Muslims to be burned on bonfires

One of the most interesting and important aspects of this case is one that has received no mainstream media coverage whatever is the question of how this extreme-right fanatic was radicalised.

This is an important question because we already know that the Britain First hate chamber helped to radicalise at least two murderous extreme-right terrorists, and we also know that the Finsbury Park killer had Tommy Robinson quotes in the hire van he used as his murder weapon.
So who was Jennings radicalised by?

It's actually spectacularly easy to see who Jennings was radicalised by given his (bold/reckless/stupid) decision to not wipe down his social media accounts once it was clear he was facing prosecution for his online ranting.

So it's no surprise whatever to find that Jennings is a Tommy Robinson acolyte, as well as being a Facebook follower of several other extreme-right agitators like Paul Joseph Watson, Milo Yianopolous, Sargon of Akkad, Mike Cernovich, and Count Dankula.

It's hardly surprising that Jennings follows the Muslim-fearmongering Leave.EU campaign, other Brexity Facebook pages like "Leave Means Leave", and "Get Britain OUT of the EU" and two vitriolic anti-Labour pages too.

The only currently elected politicians that Jennings follows on Facebook are Donald Trump and the Tory Brextremist-in-chief Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Just think about it. If a Jeremy Corbyn following leftist had been jailed for issuing an online threat to kill Jacob Rees-Mogg, do you think the mainstream media would have completely ignored that angle?

Even forgetting the threat to kill Jeremy Corbyn, if this vile anti-Muslim anti-Semitic ranter had been following Jeremy Corbyn's Facebook page rather than Jacob Rees-Mogg's, do you really honestly think the mainstream media would have failed to mention it at all in their report on his sentencing?

Given that his Facebook likes are clear for everyone to see, it's not even remotely difficult to find out who this guy was radicalised by. Yet the mainstream media have absolutely failed to cover it for some reason.

Of course reactive defenders of the extreme-right will try to argue that not all Tommy Robinson followers end up spewing vitriolic bigotry, issuing social media death threats, and/or carrying out acts of extreme-right terrorism, but the evidence is absolutely clear now that a percentage of them do.

If the online agitators who inspire disgusting tirades of bigoted abuse and online threats to kill (Jonathan Jennings), and actual terrorist atrocities (like Darren Osborne) had been Salafi Islamist hate preachers rather than extreme-right fanatics, then there's absolutely no way they would be given platforms to spew their hate and conspiracy theories on the BBC in the way Tommy Robinson was on the very day that one of his followers was jailed for carrying out a deadly terrorist atrocity.

In the end part of the blame for this rise in violent and abusive extreme-right fanaticism must be apportioned to the social media platforms that host these extreme-right hate preachers, and another part of the blame falls squarely on the mainstream media outlets like the BBC that actively help to boost their profiles, and inject their extremist politics into mainstream political discourse.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The hard-right Daily Express propaganda rag is openly intimidating British MPs

In November 2017 Theresa May's Tories and their bigoted DUP enablers forced a shambolic hard-right anti-democratic power grab called the EU Withdrawal Bill through the House of Commons.

The opposition parties attempted to make several amendments to limit this outrageous Tory power grab, but without the support of the vocal Tory so-called "mutineers" (who all, despite all of their fine words, actually voted in favour of it) they simply didn't have the numbers to constrain Theresa May's dictatorial and anti-democratic ambitions, so the bill scraped through to the next stage.

The House of Lords made 15 amendments to the bill and sent it back to the House of Commons.

Not all of the Lords' amendments are sensible, but most of them are (see image).

Whether we agree with the amendments or not (I disagree with amendment 110A for example, but very strongly support amendment 11) debating proposed amendments to government legislation is clearly a perfectly normal function of our sovereign parliament.

One of the big problems is that Theresa May and the Tories have made an absolute mockery of parliament by allocating just 12 hours to debate and vote on the 15 amendments (a paltry 48 minutes per amendment).

Then there's the fact that the right-wing propaganda barons are absolutely terrified that the opposition parties and some of the so-called "mutineer" Tory MPs will inflict a string of humiliating defeats on Theresa May and the hard-right Brextremist faction who control her every move.

None of the amendments are about stopping Brexit. They're all about constraining the Brextremists' most anti-democratic and dictatorial urges, limiting the social and economic damage the hard-right Tory Brextremists can do through Brexit, and ensuring that the Brexit process in conducted in a democratic manner.

This reality doesn't suit the Brextremist propagandists who work for hard-right propaganda rags like the Daily Express though, so they've simply warped reality to pretend that the parliamentary debate over the 15 House of Lords Amendment is some kind of cynical plot to derail Brexit and undermine "the will of the people".

What's more is the way they're predicting perilous consequences for any MP who dares to support the efforts to constrain Theresa May's dictatorial and anti-democratic EU Withdrawal legislation.

The Express hacks are well aware that the Labour MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered in the street by an extreme-right terrorist just two years ago.

They're also well aware that just a few months ago another jailed extreme-right terrorist admitted that he'd plotted to assassinate Jeremy Corbyn before carrying out a murderous attack against random Muslims at Finsbury Park instead.

They're also well aware of the tidal waves of extreme-right abuse and death threats triggered by previous right-wing headlines attacking judges ("Enemies of the people") and politicians ("Mutineers", "Proud of yourselves").

These vile hard-right hacks know exactly what they're doing when they print massive front page headlines threatening harmful consequences to politicians who refuse to bow down to Theresa May and the hard-right Brextremist faction who control her every move.

They know that what they're doing is nothing short of intimidation.

If opposition MPs and Tory "mutineers" are hit with yet another wave of abuse and death threats after the publication of this intimidatory front page, these irresponsible right-wing hacks should be held accountable.

And if the worst comes to the worst and another MP is physically assaulted or even killed for daring to defy the tyrannical machinations of Theresa May and the Brextremists, the role of the right-wing press in repeatedly whipping up these tides of hard-right hatred must be investigated.

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OR

The timeline of shame

In March 2018 the Saudi tyrant Mohammed bin Salman began a month-long tour of Western nations, securing new arms deals with Britain, the United States, and France.

In early March 2018 the brutal Islamist tyrant received a warm Tory welcome in London. Against a backdrop of widespread criticism of the repressive Saudi regime and their ongoing campaign of war crimes in Yemen, Theresa May agreed a new arms deal with the Saudi regime to supply them 48 Typhoon jets. This deal was signed off by the UK government despite their full knowledge that the Saudis have been using British-manufactured weapons to commit horrific war crimes.

Later that month Bin Salman rocked up in the United States to meet Donald Trump. The President of the United States demeaned his office and his nation by begging the Saudi tyrant to "share the wealth" by buying more American-manufactured weapons. The trip concluded with a new $670 million deal to supply the repressive kingdom with anti-tank missiles and spare parts for tanks and helicopters.

And then Bin Salman appeared in Paris to meet Emmanuel Macron. The trip concluded with the French government agreeing to essentially scrap their managed arms export strategy in order to hawk weapons to the Saudi tyrants directly. Of the three leaders Macron is under the most domestic pressure to halt arms sales to the Saudis because of their appalling human rights record and their war crimes in Yemen, but he ignored public opinion in order to make French arms sales to Saudi Arabia even easier!

And then just one week later France, the United States and the United Kingdom collaborated to launch missile attacks on Syria (including targets that had been declared free of chemical weapons just weeks earlier by the OPCW).

It's absolutely obvious that the main beneficiaries of these attacks on Syria are the Saudi-backed Islamist terrorists who have been losing the war there. We know they're Saudi backed because the US government admitted as much in the leaked Hillary Clinton emails.

We also know that Saudi Arabia has produced the second most ISIS fighters (after Tunisia), and that the country is the single biggest source of pro-ISIS propaganda on social media.

Within five weeks of starting his arms deal tour all three of his major arms-dealer nations have decided to bypass their own parliaments in order to militarily support the Saudi destabilisation agenda in Syria.

The truly alarming thing about this scandalous situation isn't that France, the US and the UK are selling weapons to tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia (they're three of the five biggest arms dealing nations on earth), nor that they're actively assisting the Saudis in their strategic destabilisation of their Middle East neighbours (they've been happy to watch Saudi Arabia spread Salafi Islamist extremism all over the globe for decades), but that the mainstream press in all three countries simply refuse to explain the Saudi role in all of this.

All three leaders cynically bypassed their parliaments to carry out these attacks. All three leaders defied public opinion to carry out these attacks. And all three leaders are sickeningly close to the vile and repressive Saudi regime whose Islamist proxies in Syria are the main beneficiaries of these attacks.

If mainstream media hacks were even remotely interested in holding the powerful to account then the scandalous involvement of democracy-hating Saudi Arabia in all of this would be a central theme of the Syria airstrikes coverage, but it simply isn't.

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