Jonathan Cook

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Person.png Jonathan Cook   Amazon Twitter WebsiteRdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
(author, journalist)
JCook.jpg
Jonathan Cook pictured in Nazareth
Born1965
Buckinghamshire, England, UK
ResidenceNazareth,  Palestine
NationalityBritish
CitizenshipBritish,  Israeli
Alma materSouthampton University, Cardiff University, SOAS
Founder/Owner ofJonathan Cook/Website
Member ofAmerican Herald Tribune, The Grayzone, The Unz Review
Interests • Palestine
• Israel
• Zionism
SubpageJonathan Cook/Website
UK journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.

Background

Jonathan graduated from Southampton University in 1987 with a degree in philosophy and politics, and then earned a postgraduate diploma in journalism from Cardiff University in 1989. He gained a masters degree in Middle Eastern studies, with distinction, from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, in 2000. He worked on regional newspapers before becoming a staff journalist at the Guardian in 1994. He later joined the Observer newspaper.

Residence in Nazareth

Jonathan Cook moved to Nazareth to become a freelance reporter in September 2001. He is the only foreign correspondent to be based in Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel. He explains the significance of his choice of location:

“Most reporters covering the conflict live in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, with a handful of specialists based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The range of stories readily available to reporters in these locations reinforces the assumption among editors back home that the conflict can only be understood in terms of the events that followed the West Bank and Gaza’s occupation in 1967. This has encouraged the media to give far too much weight to Israeli concerns about ‘security’ – a catch-all that offers Israel special dispensation to ignore its duties to the Palestinians under international law.
“Many topics central to the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, including the plight of the refugees and the continuing dispossession of Palestinians living as Israeli citizens, do not register on most reporters’ radars.
“From Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel, things look very different. There are striking, and disturbing, similarities between the experiences of Palestinians inside Israel and those inside the West Bank and Gaza. All have faced Zionism’s appetite for territory and domination, as well as repeated attempts at ethnic cleansing. These unifying themes suggest that the conflict is less about the specific circumstances thrown up by the 1967 war and more about the central tenets of Zionism as expressed in the war of 1948 that founded Israel and the war of 1967 that breathed new life into its settler colonial agenda.”

Opinions

“It looks suspiciously like one scene in particular, of people with horrific burns, was staged.”
Jonathan Cook (8 March 2017)  [1]

UNWGAD

On 6 February 2016, Cook wrote on his Blog from Nazareth:

Something extremely dangerous is happening before our eyes as we watch British officials and the corporate media respond to today’s ruling of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which found that Julian Assange is being arbitrarily detained in the UK.

A major international institution upholding the rights of political dissidents around the world as they face illegal detention, abuse and torture is being turned into a laughing stock with the enthusiastic connivance of supposedly liberal media outlets like the Guardian and the BBC.

Reporters, columnists and comedians are pouring scorn on the UNWGAD group, legal experts who until yesterday were widely respected in the west and seen as a final bulwark against the most oppressive regimes on earth.

The most glaring example of this process, as pointed out by the former UK diplomat Craig Murray, is an outright lie being peddled by the British Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond. He says the UN panel is “made up of lay people and not lawyers”. In reality, the panel consists of distinguished legal experts in the field of international law. You can see their CVs here.[2]

Publications

Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

  • Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006)
  • Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008)
  • Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008)

He has also contributed chapters and essays to several edited volumes on Israel-Palestine.

In 2011 Jonathan was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. The judges’ citation reads:

“Jonathan Cook’s work on Palestine and Israel, especially his de-coding of official propaganda and his outstanding analysis of events often obfuscated in the mainstream, has made him one of the reliable truth-tellers in the Middle East.” [3]

The same year, Project Censored voted a report by Jonathan, “Israel brings Gaza entry restrictions to West Bank”, one of the most important stories censored in 2009-10. [4]

Jonathan’s reports and commentaries have appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, the Times and the New Statesman (London); The International Herald Tribune and Le Monde diplomatique (Paris); Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo); The National (Abu Dhabi); The Daily Star (Beirut); The Middle East Report and Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Washington); and The Irish Times (Dublin). He has contributed to many online sites, such as CounterPunch, Israeli Occupation Archive, Al-Jazeera.com and Electronic Intifada.

He has been a senior consultant and lead writer on two major reports by the International Crisis Group, a think-tank based in Washington and Brussels dealing with conflict resolution. [5] [6]

 

Documents by Jonathan Cook

TitleDocument typePublication dateSubject(s)Description
Document:A dissenting opinion on Nelson Mandelaarticle6 December 2013Nelson Mandela
Document:A lesson from Brussels we refuse to learnarticle24 March 2016"Terrorism"
"War on Terror"
Simon Jenkins
2016 Brussels Bombing
Commentary on the shortcomings of a Simon Jenkins article on the Mass murder in Brussels
Document:Abuses show Assange case was never about lawblog post27 May 2019United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention
Emma Arbuthnot
Julian Assange/Imprisonment
Craig Murray says: "As a summary of the truly breathtaking series of legal abuses by states against Julian Assange, that the corporate and state media has been deliberately distorting and hiding for a decade, this excellent account by Jonathan Cook cannot be bettered."
Document:Anti-semitism is cover for a much deeper divide in Britain's Labour partyArticle20 February 2019"Antisemitism"
Luciana Berger
Labour Friends of Israel
Jeremy Corbyn
Joan Ryan
Tom Watson
Ruth Smeeth
Jewish Labour Movement
Jewish Voice for Labour
International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
Paradoxically, the Labour breakaway group may have inadvertently exposed the weakness of its hand. The eight MPs have indicated that they will not run in by-elections, and for good reason: it is highly unlikely they would stand a chance of winning in any of their current constituencies outside the Labour Party.
Document:Antisemitism threats will keep destroying Labourblog post12 February 2020"Antisemitism"
Board of Deputies of British Jews
Jeremy Corbyn
Brexit
Owen Jones
Jewish Labour Movement
Jewish Voice for Labour
2020 Labour Party leadership contest
If we are only allowed to gently chide Israel in ways that cannot meaningfully advance Palestinian rights, if we are prevented from discussing the strategies of staunchly pro-Israel lobbyists to silence Israel’s critics, if we are denied the right to push for an international boycott of Israel of the kind that helped blacks in South Africa end their own oppression, then nothing is going to change for the Palestinians.
Document:Assange ruling a dangerous precedent for journalists and British justiceArticle10 December 2021War crime
Julian Assange/Imprisonment
Ian Burnett
Timothy Holroyde
And yet despite all this, the English High Court ruled on 10 December 2021 that it was satisfied with “assurances” that Assange’s wellbeing would be protected were he extradited to the United States. British judges may be persuaded by those assurances. Many others, including Assange, will not be.
Document:Brexit reveals Corbyn to be the true moderateblog post12 September 2019Neoliberalism
Boris Johnson
Jeremy Corbyn
Tom Watson
Brexit
Capitalism
It is time to stop acting like zealots for neoliberalism, squabbling over which brand of turbo-charged capitalism we prefer, and face up to our collective responsibility to change our and our children’s future.
Document:Craig Murray’s jailing is the latest move in a battle to snuff out independent journalismblog post30 July 2021Craig Murray
Wikileaks
Julian Assange
Vanessa Baraitser
Lady Leeona Dorrian
National Union of Journalists
Ed Vulliamy
Jigsaw Identification
Assange and Murray are not only telling us troubling truths we are not supposed to hear. The fact that they are being denied solidarity by those who are their colleagues, those who may be next in the firing line, tells us everything we need to know about the so-called mainstream media: that the role of corporate journalists is to serve establishment interests, not challenge them.
Document:Empire of Liesspeech25 February 2011Iraq War 2003
Corporate Media/Propaganda
Document:George Monbiot’s excuses for not speaking out loudly in defence of Assange simply won’t washblog post6 October 2020The Guardian
Neoliberalism
George Monbiot
David Leigh
Julian Assange/Imprisonment
Faced with a barrage of criticism from some of his followers, George Monbiot, The Guardian’s supposedly fearless, leftwing columnist, offered up two extraordinarily feeble excuses this week for failing to provide more than cursory support for Julian Assange over the past month, as the Wikileaks founder has endured extradition hearings in a London courtroom.
Document:HSBC and the sham of Guardian’s Scott TrustArticle3 March 2015BBC
The Guardian
Glenn Greenwald
Seumas Milne
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
HSBC
Alasdair Milne
Scott Trust Ltd
Swiss Leaks
Britain, we are told, is privileged to have two “liberal” media outlets, the BBC and Guardian, that are seen either as neutral or as a leftwing counterbalance to the rightwing agenda of the rest of the media. Here are three illuminating articles and a short video that should help to dispel any such illusions.
Document:How top Labour officials plotted to bring down Jeremy CorbynArticle16 April 2020"Antisemitism"
Jeremy Corbyn
Tom Watson
Iain McNicol
Keir Starmer
Equality and Human Rights Commission
Sam Matthews
The stench of cover-up is already in the air. Keir Starmer's Labour needs to come clean and admit that its most senior officials defrauded hundreds of thousands of party members, and millions more supporters, who voted for a fairer, kinder Britain.
Document:Israeli immigration plan for ethnically pure bunker statearticle18 January 2012Israel
Document:Keir Starmer's ‘antisemitism’ sacking is a signal that Israel is safe in his handsArticle29 June 2020Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Palestine
Keir Starmer
Rebecca Long-Bailey
Maxine Peake
Crackdown by UK Labour leader on left-wing rival will subdue critics of Israel in his party ahead of Israel's annexation move
Document:Labour's next leader has already betrayed the leftblog post21 February 2020Board of Deputies of British Jews
Labour Friends of Israel
Jeremy Corbyn
Keir Starmer
Jewish Labour Movement
Rebecca Long-Bailey
2020 Labour Party leadership contest
Lisa Nandy
The next Leader of the Labour Party is already a prisoner to the "institutional antisemitism" narrative. That means their hands are chained not only to support for Israel, but to the reactionary politics in which Israel as a Jewish state makes sense – a worldview that embraces its style of ethnic, chauvinist, militaristic, segregationist politics.
Document:Labour’s witch-hunt against Ken Livingstonearticle31 March 2017Jonathan Freedland
Jeremy Corbyn
Ken Livingstone
Iain McNicol
Owen Jones
Jewish Labour Movement
Labour's kangaroo court trying to justify suspending Ken Livingstone for stating the fact that Hitler supported Zionism
Document:MI6, Theresa May and the Manchester attackArticle30 May 2017MI6
Theresa May
Amber Rudd
Cressida Dick
2017 Manchester bombing
Salman Abedi
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group
Saleh Ibrahim Mabrouk
Hashem Abedi
Ramadan al-Abedi
Ismail Abedi
And so the story of MI6 and Theresa May, their sponsorship of Islamic jihadism, and the likely “blowback” the UK just experienced in Manchester is a sleeping dog no one seems willing to disturb.
Document:Monbiot is not only a hypocrite, but a bully tooArticle12 January 2018Syria
Bashar al Assad
George Monbiot
White Helmets
It is time for George Monbiot’s legion of supporters to call him out. Not only is he a hypocrite, but he is becoming an increasingly dangerous one!
Document:More Guardian ‘brainwashing’ on Putincommentary24 March 2014Corporate media
2014 Ukraine coup
A master-class in how the celebrated 'Free-Press' of the Western commercially controlled media is harnessed to the narrative requirements of the Establishments of which they are a part, turning them into little more than propaganda organs where major foreign policy issues are concerned.
Document:My offer to Owen Jones: A tour of Nazaretharticle3 April 2017Zionism
Moshe Dayan
Jerusalem
Owen Jones
Jewish Labour Movement
Two-state solution
One has to look at what Zionism did when the Labour party was directing it – in Israel’s formative stages and for most of its history. Only then can you understand that what you see in Hebron or Nablus was created in Haifa and Nazareth first. The template was set in Israel, at a time and place where there were no security issues. It was not Palestinian bombs Israel feared from its Palestinian citizens but their wombs.
Document:No fair hearing for Assange at the Guardianarticle5 February 2016Wikileaks
Julian Assange
Corporate media
The Guardian
United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention
Demonstrates the Establishment-friendly double standards of the UK's flagship 'Left-wing' newspaper - The Guardian - through analysis of its coverage of a UN decision on the political asylum of Julian Assange
Document:Spot-Shootarticle13 July 2010Drone
Israel/Defense Forces
On the use of drones against Palestinians
Document:The 7 years of lies about Assange won’t stop nowBlog post11 April 2019Julian AssangeA brief resume of the lies and deceptions promoted by The Establishment about Julian Assange during his asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.
Document:The Dangerous Cult of The Guardianarticle28 September 2011"Antisemitism"
The Guardian
Criticism of The Guardian's policy on censorship of topics including "anti-semitism" and Wikileaks
Document:The EHRC’s report into Labour antisemitism is the real ‘political interference’blog post7 November 2020Board of Deputies of British Jews
Boris Johnson
Jonathan Freedland
Jeremy Corbyn
Joan Ryan
Ken Livingstone
Keir Starmer
Jewish Labour Movement
Campaign Against Antisemitism
Equality and Human Rights Commission
Ephraim Mirvis
Pam Bromley
It is instructive to compare the certainty with which the EHRC treats Councillor Pam Bromley’s ambiguous remarks as irrefutable proof of antisemitism in Labour with its complete disregard for unmistakably antisemitic comments from Boris Johnson, the man actually running the country. That lack of concern is shared, of course, by the establishment media and Jewish leadership organisations.
Document:The corporate media’s world of illusionsblog post11 June 2018Official narrative
Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Corporate media/Censorship
Razan al-Najjar
Once one is prepared to step through the door, to discard the old Great Western Narrative script, the new narrative takes its hold because it is so helpful. It actually explains the world, and human behaviour, as it is experienced everywhere.
Document:The deeper truths journalists are blind toarticle21 February 2016Corporate mediaCorporate media is constitutionally incapable of honest objective reporting on matters affecting the vital interests of Establishment power
Document:The dirty secret Europe is hiding at the COP27 climate summitArticle16 November 2022Big Oil
Nord Stream
"Climate crisis"
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine
COP27
Energy Charter Treaty
Grand declarations at COP27 on tackling the climate emergency are sabotaged by the Energy Charter Treaty from the 1990s that sees European nations held to ransom by the energy companies
Document:The method in Netanyahu's madnessspeech18 July 2011Benjamin Netanyahu
Mark Regev
Document:The plot to keep Corbyn out of powerblog post3 July 2019Jeremy Hunt
Boris Johnson
Jeremy Corbyn
Mike Pompeo
Chris Williamson
Equality and Human Rights Commission
Russell Brand
The weaponisation of anti-semitism against Corbyn has become so normal that, even while I was writing this post, a new nadir was reached. Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary who hopes to defeat Boris Johnson in the upcoming Tory leadership race, as good as accused Corbyn of being a new Hitler, a man who as prime minister might allow Jews to be exterminated, just as occurred in the Nazi death camps.
Document:The sharks circling around Corbyn scent bloodblog post26 March 2018"Antisemitism"
Jeremy Corbyn
Jewish Chronicle
The sharks circling around Jeremy Corbyn will not ignore the scent of his bloodied wounds; rather, it will send them into a feeding frenzy. As hard as it is to do when the elites so clearly want him destroyed, Corbyn must find his backbone and start to stand his ground.
Document:The witchfinders are now ready to burn CorbynBlog post28 February 2019Labour Friends of Israel
Jeremy Corbyn
Tom Watson
Jon Lansman
Momentum
McCarthyism
Jewish Labour Movement
Campaign Against Antisemitism
Jewish Voice for Labour
Chris Williamson
WitchHunt
Jackie Walker
Marc Wadsworth
Israel lobby
Jeremy Corbyn’s allies are being picked off one by one, from grassroots activists like Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth to higher-placed supporters like Chris Williamson and Seumas Milne. Soon Corbyn will stand alone, exposed before the inquisition that has been prepared for him.
Document:UK Labour party teeters on brink of civil war over antisemitismArticle27 July 2020"Antisemitism"
Labour Party
Jeremy Corbyn
Iain McNicol
Keir Starmer
David Evans
Mark Howell
Labour Party member Mark Howell is suing former General Secretary Iain McNicol for “breach of contract” and is demanding that those named in the leaked report be expelled from the party (see "Mark Howell for Justice": https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mark-howell-for-justice/).
Document:Under Trump, the Israel lobby is a Hydra with many headsArticle30 May 2018Benjamin Netanyahu
Military-industrial-congressional complex
Saudi Arabia
Christian Zionism
Donald Trump
Mike Pence
Nikki Haley
"Alt-right"
Israel lobby
Since Trump took office, the Israel lobby has mobilised four other powerful lobbies: Christian evangelicals, the alt-right, the military-industrial complex and Saudi Arabia
Document:Was there a Wuhan lab leak?blog post1 June 2021Biological weapon/Research
COVID-19
Wuhan Institute of Virology
WHO
Anthony Fauci
Peter Daszak
EcoHealth Alliance
Nicholas Wade
No meaningful lessons will be learnt about what really happened in Wuhan. Maintaining the illusion of truth will continue to take precedence over uncovering the truth. And for that reason we are doomed to keep making the same screw-ups. As the next pandemic will doubtless attest.
Document:Whenever it truly matters, from Assange to Corbyn, George Monbiot cripples the leftArticle11 October 2022Julian Assange
The Guardian
Jeremy Corbyn
George Monbiot
George Monbiot is treated by much of the left as a figurehead, one whose environmentalism earns him credibility and credit with the left on foreign policy issues, from Syria to Ukraine, in which he echoes the same talking points one hears from Keir Starmer to Liz Truss. While on matters at home, like Assange and Corbyn, he sucks the wind out of the left’s sails.
Document:With Panorama's hatchet job on Labour antisemitism, BBC has become pro-Tory mediaArticle11 July 2019"Antisemitism"
Labour Party
Boris Johnson
Jeremy Corbyn
Shai Masot
Jewish Labour Movement
Jewish Voice for Labour
John Ware
The question is why did the BBC’s flagship political investigations show decide that the marginal problem of racism in Labour was a much more urgent matter than the provable and significant racism in the Conservative Party?

 

A Quote by Jonathan Cook

PageQuoteDate
Independent media“We are subject to no editorial oversight or control, apart from our own self-imposed sense of what is right and fair, or in some cases what we think our readers are ready to hear. We have no bosses or advertisers to please or appease. Our owners are the readers. And with an owner that diverse and diffuse, we have been freed of the tyranny of billionaires and corporations.
This new model of journalism is revolutionary. It is genuinely pluralistic media. It allows a much wider spectrum of thought to reach the mainstream than ever before. And perhaps even more importantly, it allows independent journalists to examine, critique and expose the corporate media in real time, showing how little pluralism they allow and how often they resort to blatant falsehood and propaganda techniques.”
2021

 

Event Participated in

EventStartEndLocation(s)Description
International Festival of Whistleblowing Dissent and Accountability8 May 20218 May 2021InternetWhistleblowing event held in 2021.
Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.


References

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