Welcome to Andy Worthington

My account of Israel’s descent into unparalleled depravity over the last 365 days, drawing on and summarizing my experiences of being perpetually sickened by the relentless evidence of uncountable atrocities committed by Israel and recorded and live-streamed by Palestinians themselves, and by the public glorification of these crimes by their killers, who, shamefully, have been relentlessly defended and supported by most western leaders, as the international community’s “rules-based order” has effectively collapsed. I also look at how, marking the anniversary of the October 7 attacks last year, Israel is now repeating its war crimes and crimes against humanity in Lebanon, and seeking war with Iran, and, in Gaza, is marking the anniversary by launching the Gaza genocide Part 2, which involves once more bombing and invading northern Gaza to deal with the 300,000 to 500,000 Palestinians who have resisted every effort to remove them over the last year, so that northern Gaza can become a “closed military zone”, where, eventually, its rabid settlers can eventually realize their long-cherished dreams of colonizing it with luxury beachfront properties built on the corpses of murdered Palestinians.

Photos from, and my report about the nine global monthly coordinated vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that took place across the US and around the world on October 2, 2024, the last vigils before the Presidential Election on November 5. The vigils take place on the first Wednesday of every month, and the next date is November 6, the day after the election, when I urge people to turn out to demand the release of prisoners before the end of the Biden presidency.

My latest interview with Chris Cook on his Gorilla Radio show in western Canada, in which we discussed WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange’s first public appearance since he regained his freedom in June, and recent clampdowns of freedom of expression via social media censorship, which also included the new album by The Four Fathers, a collection of protest songs that was also caught up in the censorship dragnet, making us, briefly, “the band that was banned.”

My report on Julian Assange’s powerful testimony at a hearing of the Legal Affairs Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg on October 1, 2024, at what was his first public appearance since his release in June. Also included is a transcript of his testimony, plus a video.

My reflections on my recent family holiday in Sicily, in which I refreshed my mind and my general sense of well-being through a ten-day digital detox, which involved me being completely offline — away from the internet and from all social media, and without a phone. To balance my very evident privilege, I also assess the environmental cost of flying, the increasing recognition that summers are getting noticeably hotter in the Mediterranean, despite an “entitlement” culture that still believes that a foreign summer holiday is some sort of “right”, and the hidden environmental pressures of tourism — or over-tourism.

Announcing the release of The Four Fathers’ new album, ‘Songs of Loss and Resistance’, on Bandcamp, featuring ten original songs — mostly protest songs, nine by me, and one by our guitarist Richard Clare — which is available to listen to for free, or, if you’d like, to buy as a download, or even as a limited edition CD. You can also buy individual tracks as downloads. The album covers tumultuous events in the UK and globally over the last eight years, including the existential threat to humanity posed by climate collapse, the Grenfell Tower fire, the Brexit referendum, the anti-gentrification Tidemill garden occupation in Deptford, the ongoing plight of Guantánamo’s “forever prisoners”, and the unjust imprisonment of WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange. It was recorded sporadically, between July 2018 and January this year, with the great Charlie Hart, a multi-instrumentalist and producer, best-known as a member of Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance in the 1970s and ‘80s, who also plays electric piano and accordion on three of the songs.

My latest quarterly fundraiser, in which I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing work on Guantánamo, as a reader-funded independent journalist and activist, over the next three months. As well as providing some context for why this work remains important, I also discuss my other writing — on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and climate collapse — pointing out how, to varying degrees, my work is part of a wider effort by other independent voices to counter the general indifference and misinformation that pervades almost the whole of the mainstream media.

Photos from, and my report about the eleven global monthly coordinated vigils for the closure of Guantánamo that took place across the US and around the world on September 4, 2024. The vigils take place on the first Wednesday of every month, and the next date is October 2.

This is meant to hit hard, and I hope it does. It’s my analysis of how, faced with the the gravest threat humanity has ever experienced — wildly accelerating climate collapse, which will make the planet uninhabitable for humans, and probably in the not too distant future — our leaders have, instead, suffered a massive psychic collapse, unable to accept that, as I describe it, “everything our neoliberal societies have worshipped and profited from over the last 40 years is killing us”, and have “collectively retreated into a broken psychic landscape in which, as so often in human history, if faced with something uncomfortable — as, in this case, our own wilful and self-imposed extinction — they have chosen to slaughter everyone instead, and to lay waste to human environments to make them uninhabitable.”

A long read in which I highlight the profound and consequential differences between those who see the events of October 7, 2023 as having occurred in a vacuum, and who seek to justify their extraordinarily murderous response as some sort of necessity borne of their perceived “exceptionalism”, and those who, in contrast, correctly understand that the events of October 7, however horrendous, were part of a 57-year history of, on the one hand, occupation, oppression, apartheid, murder and brutal arbitrary imprisonment, and, on the other, the resistance to it, and that nothing can justify an open-ended military response of such severity, and involving the indiscriminate slaughter of so many civilians that it not only invites comparisons with the most brutal regimes in history; it also threatens to fatally undermine the international “rules-based order” established in the wake of the Second World War to try to prevent such atrocities from ever taking place again. In an attempt to understand the position taken by those who are trapped in a bubble of exterminating fury focused on the events of October 7, I draw on a recent and revelatory article by the renowned scholar Omer Bartov, written after a recent and disturbing visit to his home country, and I also seek to understand the position taken by most of the leaders of the west, whose unquestioning support for this unending aggression makes a mockery of their claims to hold any kind of moral high ground, has led to the disturbing and unprecedented suppression of internal dissent, and also threatens, eventually, to lead to them being held complicit in the grave crimes that have been taking place over the last ten and a half months.