Joe Glenton is a journalist covering war, defence and security. He was a British soldier for six years, serving in Afghanistan. He has written for the Guardian, Independent, Vice and others. His book Soldier Box was published in 2013. He is currently writing a book on the hero soldier myth.
It was as good as Daily Mail headlines get. “The Guardian has handed a gift to terrorists.” Paraphrasing a speech by new MI5 Chief Andrew Parker, in which the top spy took aim at the paper for publishing Edward Snowden’s leaks, the catchy language, though designed to pimp newsprint, testified to the gravity of Britain’s GCHQ crisis. (More…)
Today my foot is mostly bruise-colored. I dislocated a toe last week training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I pointed out its new weird angle, and we all laughed. One of my training partners snapped it back so quickly that I barely had time to chomp the lapel of my gi. (More…)
For many outside her blessed shores, Britain is a cold, little enigma where some muddied twist of history has permitted a hereditary monarchy to continue existing alongside the Internet. If the British Isles were the USS Enterprise, someone would have declared we had been drawn into a tear in the space-time continuum decades ago. (More…)
It was, and likely remains, standard practice for troops deploying to our current theatres of war to be briefed by an official from the British equivalent of the NSA, known as GCHQ. Our man was a rather dusty-looking character, who seemed more like an academic than a spook, as he ambled out onto a stage to give us a briefing on information security. (More…)
The English climate is lamentable at the best of times. No. Not the weather. The political climate. But today we seem to be dealing with something more profound than the perfunctory shenanigans of Great Britain’s political aristocracy. (More…)
Modern Zionism is characterised by, among other things, an enormous capacity for nationalist chauvinism. The policies of the Israeli government towards the Palestinians are brutal, and totally unjustifiable. Yet, by reducing the words ‘fascist’ or ‘fascism’ to a stock slur aimed at Zionists or Israelis, we obscure the grim reality of authentic fascism and cheapen the meaning of the term itself. (More…)
The British workplace must become more accommodating to Muslim women. So went the title of a Reyhana Patel op-ed piece, in Independent Voices. Pretty common sense, no? Nothing to disagree with there. Well, not to everyone. The article was in fact attracting considerable attention from the most dubious of quarters. The commentary was quite awful. (More…)