Jonathan Cook is a journalist formerly based in Nazareth, previously a staff writer for the Guardian and Observer.

From Wikipaedia:

In 2011, Cook received the Martha Gellhorn special award for journalism, “for his work on the Middle East”.The award citation said Cook’s work on Palestine and Israel made him “one of the reliable truth-tellers in the Middle East”

(Martha Gellhorn was a Jewish novelist, married to Ernest Hemingway, who covered Arab-Israeli conflicts for the Atlantic Monthly in the 60s & 70s.)

His courageous stand in favour of Palestine makes him the sworn enemy of the Guardian and the rest of the British media, alongside other winners of the Gellhorn prize like John Pilger and Julian Assange.

I’m a great admirer of Cook, so I was surprised to find that he had blocked me on X/Twitter. I must have said something critical under one of his posts I suppose, but what? Blowed if I can remember.

There’s a clue here in a tweet by Cook from nine hours ago:

@Jonathan_K_Cook The West is addicted to economic “growth”. That growth depends on burning more fossil fuels. Much of the oil comes from the Middle East. We need to keep colonising that region through military violence to control the oil. California and Gaza: two sides of the same holocaust.

We can all agree with the first 3 sentences, I imagine. 

The 4th is clearly false. We don’t need to keep colonising the Middle East to control their oil. There’s plenty of oil in the US, Russia, Greenland and elsewhere. Only mad US neo-Cons like John Bolton and Bush father & son think that we need to colonise the Middle East. And the very leftwing Jonathan Cook, apparently.

The fifth sentence:

“California and Gaza: two sides of the same holocaust”

is beyond belief. 

Comparing the genocide in Gaza to the Holocaust is normally considered off-limits. 45,000 is quite a small number compared to 6 million, and I speak as someone who forces himself to look at pictures of children with their limbs blown off every single day. 

Cook’s argument seems to be that both the genocide in Gaza and the Californian fires are the result of global warming. It’s perfectly possible that Netanyahu realises that Israel’s continuing growth depends on burning more fossil fuels, and that his genocide in Gaza has the aim of grabbing the oil which exists offshore from Gaza. However, it seems quite a leap to blame fossil fuels themselves. 

As for California, and the “holocaust” of five deaths reported so far, it’s possible that the wind blowing off the desert that has been blamed for the fires is drier than it would have been if 2024 hadn’t been a very hot year. But even if global warming is a myth, it would still be the case that roughly half the years will always be warmer than the year before, meaning that half the time, the vegetation will be drier than it would have been otherwise. Maybe some statistician could calculate the number of millionaires’ houses that wouldn’t have burnt down if 2024 hadn’t been warmer than 2023? That should silence the deniers.

The logical conclusion from this is that someone so completely off the wall as to compare a perfectly normal forest fire that has killed five people so far to the Holocaust can’t be trusted on anything.

I refuse to draw that conclusion, and continue to admire Cook for the courage and honesty of his reporting from Palestine. The fact that he can’t tell the difference between global warming and global warmongering is troubling, but doesn’t reflect on his moral qualities.   

I just want to know why this raving loony blocked me on X.

Tags:

29 Comments

  1. Cook is wrong in every way. BTW, Britain could merely develop its own natural gas reserves. Then the need for Britain to worry about imported natural gas would be greatly reduced, and energy costs would be dramatically reduced.

    Cook is also wrong about California. The wildfires have nothing to do with climate and everything to do with anti-scientific land use, idiotic water management, and forestry management practices that a pyromzniac could not have designed any better.

    The misuse of the word “genocide”, like the fires in California, and Cook’s understanding of climate and the oil industry, has nothing to do with climate and even less to do with CO2.

    Like

  2. slowlyclever6d4f2235e4

    Agreed that Cook is wrong on every point and on the probable causes of the California wildfires. The justification for the use of the word “genocide” is the ruling by the International Criminal Court and the opinion serious organisations like Amnesty International. Of course, it can be argued that serious international organisations have been wrong before about the definition of words, as for example in the case of climate change. Feel free to use some other simple descriptive word for Israel’s actions in Gaza if you like.

    Like

  3. Geoff, thank you for this:

    But even if global warming is a myth, it would still be the case that roughly half the years will always be warmer than the year before, meaning that half the time, the vegetation will be drier than it would have been otherwise. 

    The usual suspects are claiming that a wet year followed by a hot dry one meant that vegetation grew then dried out, making perfect conditions for fires. As you point out, even without “climate change”, that’s not unusual. Other people say that poor wood management practices are to blame. I don’t suppose we’ll ever get a balanced discussion regarding that from the mainstream media.

    As for fossil fuels off the coast of Gaza, given its overwhelming strength, Israel surely doesn’t need to blast Gaza from the face of the earth in order to gain access to said fossil fuels. Whatever one thinks of the rights and wrongs of the terrible events in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East, the idea that it has anything to do with climate change or Israel’s need for fossil fuels is clearly absurd.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. Speaking of the LA wildfires, Brendan O’Neill has an interesting piece in Spiked today:

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/09/no-the-la-inferno-is-not-mother-natures-revenge/

    …When climate activists draw a direct line between the LA inferno and humanity’s ‘burning [of] coal, oil and gas’, it’s clear what they’re saying: these deadly flames are the wages of modernity, the blowback of our industrial revolutions. Everywhere one looks, the fire is being pinned on ‘manmade climate change’. The LA fire is ‘emblematic of a new era of complex, compound climate disaster’, says a writer for the Guardian. If anyone asks you who’s responsible for this calamity, he says, the ‘short answer’ is that it’s being fuelled by the ‘greenhouse gases humans continue to emit’. Anyone else feel like they need a longer answer?

    The sin of gluttony has been replaced by the sin of pollution. Where once it was our avarice that invited fiery judgement, now it’s our emissions. The Los Angeles Times is clear about what has caused its city to be engulfed by flames – ‘human-caused climate change’. All our ‘fossil-fuel burning’ is making infernos like this one more common, it says. Yellow Dot Studios, the climate-awareness group founded by Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay, says ‘the fires in Los Angeles are the result of years of cascading extreme weather conditions, created by carbon pollution from burning oil, gas and coal’.

    ‘The result of…’ – is this really science, or moralism? The idea that our burning of oil to propel vehicles and heat buildings leads directly to an inferno of human habitats – is this rationalism or delusion? If someone can explain to me the difference between the old belief that London caught fire because of its gluttony and the new belief that LA is on fire because of modern man’s dirty habits, I would be most grateful. It seems to me that in both cases fire is treated as the inevitable consequence of the voracious behaviour of the human species.

    You don’t need a PhD in climatology to know that things are more complicated. There have been natural fires on Earth forever, ‘well before the emergence of humans’ – what caused them? And there’s actually less wildfire in America today than there was in the past. The National Interagency Fire Center reports that between 1926 and 1935, an average of 41.5million acres of land were lost to flames every year. From 2013 to 2023, it was 7.02million acres a year. That ‘weather of mass destruction’ we hear so much about doesn’t seem all that destructive. ‘Climate change hasn’t set the world on fire’, says Bjorn Lomborg. On the contrary, the amount of the world’s land consumed by fire has been trending downwards for more than 20 years.

    We seem to be in the grip of the medieval imagination. Every unsettling weather event, every flood, storm and fire, is now chalked up to our filthy emissions, our hubristic antics. There’s a neo-religious feel to the contemporary discussion of weather. Manmade climate change is ‘creating hell on Earth’, said the LA Times a few years back. All Earth’s recent ‘wildfires, floods and pandemics’ have the feel of ‘End Times’, says a writer for the Hill, ‘and it’s our damned fault’. In short, we brought this fiery admonishment upon ourselves, just like the sinners of 17th-century London did. The planet is burning and it’s humanity’s doing, says the Guardian – we’re ‘guilty as hell’.

    You can call that ‘science’ if you like, but to me it smacks of primitive moralism, a pious damning of man. When even hot weather is referred to as a ‘hound-from-hell heatwave’ and named after Cerberus – the three-headed beast in Dante’s Inferno who torments sinners by tearing them apart – you know we have well and truly left the realm of cool analysis for the pulpit of judgementalism. One consequence of this imbuing of weather with almost sentient power, this transformation of nature’s whims into nature’s retribution, is that it lets our rulers off the hook. There seems to have been a lack of preparedness in LA, with some pointing out that the city’s infrastructure ‘struggled to meet firefighting demands’. Fixing that is surely a better way to guard against future death and destruction rather than demanding the scaling back of modernity itself.….

    Liked by 4 people

  7. Apparently, the problem is one of hydroclimate volatility; although you might have guessed that the preferred term is ‘climate whiplash’. The theory is that it is on the increase, as demonstrated by a study that uses model ensembles to arrive at an attribution:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-024-00624-z#Sec15

    Make of that what you will. You may also wish to reflect upon the fact that at least five distinct urban area fires have been involved:

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg525q2ggl4o

    Make of that what you will. If we factor in the role played by arson, we quickly become involved in a ‘my trend is bigger than your trend’ argument; an argument hampered by the fact that climate scientists are only interested in quantifying the climatic trends (ref the Patrick T. Brown affair).

    Liked by 2 people

  8. Well only a Left wing journalist could conflate Gaza & California as two sides of the same coin.

    Let’s look at the “wildfire” first, two issues immediately become obvious from the images of the burnt out shell footprints- the gap between these “upmarket” homes is absolutely minimum- in the UK you only need to look at modern housing estates to see the same issue, whereas in the early ‘70’s two 3’x2’ (900×600) were used as the gap giving 6’ (1800mm), this was reduced to just 2’ (600mm) allowing on the average estate at least three additional plots that effectively cost zero. With no sensible gap, fire can easily leap the “gap”, now review the water supply issue and placement of fire hydrants, whereas it was standard practice to place these on each street at the corner and every 100yds, it was decided that these were both unsightly and over specified so the numbers were reduced, this also allowed compliance with new water conservancy regulations- resulting in a lack of sufficient fire fighting supply points. Then you need to consider where these homes were built- fabulous views on hillsides and valleys- plenty of trees to shelter under if the sun shines giving a cooling effect- trees have a habit of burning and tend to also burn anything in close proximity. Please note, most homes in America are timber frame, not fully brick and block- timber burns.

    So whilst I can understand the distress of losing your home, if you build a wooden house in amongst the trees, and you build as close to your neighbour as possible, fire should be your number one concern.

    As to Gaza, consider this, if rather than spending the $100 billion given in aid via all the agencies and its main terror supporter, the UN, over the last 60yrs, that cash had been used rather than building terror tunnels, buying and firing rockets, siphoning off billions to allow the top echelon to live in six star luxury- if that money had been invested in improving agriculture, healthcare, construction of decent housing, education, development of natural resources (oil & gas) and even rather radically given each and every adult Palestinian $1million as a nest egg, there would still be a sovereign wealth fund greater to draw on. But then, where would we be without the daily cry that Gaza is a victim of Israel’s genocide (note, genocide is the elimination of a population, Palestinian and Israel populations are 5million and 9million (2024), 80,000 and 90,000 (1948)- for a nation to grow by over 4.9million something other than genocide is happening.

    One further point, what would you do if your neighbour daily broke your house windows, would you a) write about it in the Guardian and whine about how oppressed you felt, or, b) advise him that one more broken window and you will remove all his doors and windows. In that situation, any intelligent person would think “maybe I should stop breaking his windows”.

    Interesting to note that not one country in the Middle East will take any Palestinians into their own countries, ask yourself why.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. PS Geoff, I have just spotted your reference to constant rain in 1928 in your cover picture. A useful reminder for people who have studied no history. In the 1920s and 1930s the climate in the US was at least as “extreme” as today, if not more so.

    1928 saw the introduction of a Floods Act in the USA, as a response to the great Mississippi flood of 1927. People really should read history, then they might be a little less alarmed about today’s climate.

    Liked by 1 person

  10. With reference to the LA wildfires – a personal note.

    My youngest daughter lives (or more accurately lived) in Pacific Palisades, the most affected area and where the fires started. She and her family were evacuated at very short notice and were only able to take important papers, passports etc. with them. Thank goodness they’re safe – although their house has burned down and they’ve lost all their possessions including items of sentimental value. They’re bearing up remarkably well although unsurprisingly suffering from a degree of shock.

    Needless to say this has been taking up a lot of my time. However I have commented on various current Spectator articles. These three in particular may be of interest:

    The case against a ‘climate emergency’ by Lionel Shriver: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-case-against-a-climate-emergency/

    China hawks could cause a fresh headache for Labour by Steerpike: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/china-hawks-prepare-fresh-headache-for-labour/

    Will Rachel Reeves have to go back on her word? by Katy Balls: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/will-rachel-reeves-have-to-go-back-on-her-word/

    Liked by 3 people

  11. Very sorry to hear about your daughter and her family but relieved to learn they are safe. My thoughts are with you and yours, Robin.

    Liked by 2 people

  13. The BBC has responded by deploying the BBC Verify team, which is always quickly out of the blocks to cast doubt on anything said by Trump or Musk. And much though I dislike both Trump and Musk, this one-sided approach to fact-checking does them little credit. The latest can be found here:

    “Fact-checking criticism of California Democrats over fires”

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czj3yk90kpyo

    I was prepared to be persuaded, given that Trump’s claims do sound like his usual half-baked nonsense. However, they don’t seem to have dug very deep and they don’t provide links or hard data to back up what they cite against Trump, instead coming up with limp stuff like:

    Experts say this decision isn’t impacting the efforts to tackle these wildfires.

    Equally, this isn’t totally convincing:

    Although southern California is currently experiencing a drought, data shows its reservoirs are almost all currently above the historic average for this time of the year. None are at significantly low levels.

    Almost all above the historical average for this time of year. None are at significantly low levels. Sounds to me as though they are low.

    And the BBC really struggles convincingly to knock this one back:

    For the latest financial year, the LA Fire Department (LAFD) budget was reduced by $17.6m (£14.3m).

    In a memo to Mayor Bass last month, LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley warned that the cuts had “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, such as wildfires”.

    The only expert they cite is Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources. Apparently this makes him more of an expert on fire-fighting than the LA Fire Chief.

    Liked by 2 people

  15. Jit – thanks for that Wiki link, which gives some context to the LA fires that the main UK MSM seem reluctant to report.

    1 quote from it –

    “Santa Ana winds often bring the lowest relative humidities of the year to coastal Southern California. These low humidities, combined with the warm, compressionally-heated air mass, plus the high wind speeds, create critical fire weather conditions. The combination of wind, heat, and dryness accompanying the Santa Ana winds turns the chaparral into explosive fuel feeding the infamous wildfires for which the region is known.”

    It links to this Wiki page – List of California wildfires – Wikipedia

    Partial Quote –

    “More than 350,000 people in California live in towns sited completely within zones deemed to be at very high risk of fire. In total, more than 2.7 million people live in “very high fire hazard severity zones”, which also include areas at lesser risk.[9] Climate change in California has lengthened the fire season and made it more extreme.[10][11]“

    I am in no way suggesting that Climate Change/Global Warming has not played a role in this disaster for LA people affected. And my heart goes out to those who lost loved ones, property, everything.

    Like

  17. Mark Hodgson

    While I enjoy reading most of your articles, occasionally your TDS (and now MDS) causes you to not only miss the wood for the trees, but to swerve into them. I’m referring to your gritted teeth comments on the BBC “fact checking” Trump and Musk – I admit that I too have an eye mote, as I regard the BBC as congenitally unable to fact check anything dislikeable to them. They just point blank refuse to, as does the Aus ABC.

    The Santa Ana winter winds are a phenomenon known for at least 5000 years. Please use Google Earth if you wish for this picture: centred in the southern end of the Nevada desert 50-100km east of the Pacific Palisades is a smallish geographic basin that invariably develops a high pressure system during winter. With the coastline about 230km west of this often generating a low pressure system, that pressure differential causes strong wind movement east to west through the Palisades and other associated hills formations. This wind is funneled through the narrow canyons and valleys of the Palisades and with the pressure differential forcing the air flows, the winds then develop increased velocity.

    If it’s been a drier year or two, the forest is ripe for combustion (I’m in Aus, this is kindy to us). Ignition points may be from lightning or perhaps someone’s blow torch. The wind carries burning ember masses ahead for up to 3km, where they spark a new firefront.

    None of this is anything other than simple. If there has been no backburning of collected forest detritus (I think the Americans call it brushwork) then the fuel load will explode. If the water reservoirs are empty, both ground firefighters and aircraft cannot refill within a useful time frame.

    The BBC will have none of this.

    Liked by 1 person

  18. Regarding the reservoirs, this at American Thinker reports that one of the largest in Palisades had been drained for repairs. That makes the BBC Verify claims at least a bit iffy. Maybe it isn’t true – but maybe also BBC’s approach was not particularly thorough.

    To an outsider, the events have the aroma of a disaster caused in no small part by incompetence, and where local officials are desperate to blame climate change to deflect blame. With a compliant legacy media leading the cheers.

    Liked by 2 people

  19. ianl,

    I don’t believe I have TDS or MDS, though the BBC certainly does. I simply listen to what Trump says, and I worry deeply that the soon-to-be-leader of the free world is such a person (ditto re Musk, mutatis mutandis). What I see/hear in Trump is a disorganised narcissist, a bully, someone who appeals to the basest emotions and who has grave difficulty telling the truth from a lie. Having said that I have always recognised that beneath all the bluster and bullying, his instincts are often correct – whether that’s about his insistence that NATO members pay their fair share; not trusting Iran and believing the rest of the western world was mad to try to do a deal with them allowing access to nuclear material; to having no truck with the net zero agenda and for calling out the Paris Agreement as a means whereby the developed world is shackled while the developing world (and much of the world that is already at least part-developed) do what they want and laugh at us, etc etc. I hope I always weigh up the facts (insofar as one can safely discern fact from fiction) and arrive at appropriate conclusions.

    Having said that, my comments yesterday on Geoff’s article were broadly dismissive of the BBC Verify line and I do generally take the view that the terrible problems LA has suffered are likely to be because houses are built too close together in unsafe and inappropriate locations from the wrong materials; forestry practices aren’t what they were; and the authorities have been complacent. In broad brush terms that’s what Trump said, though I suspect his casual attitude to precise details has allowed the likes of BBC Verify to denigrate his claims far more easily than should be the case.

    But speaking of BBC Verify and of discerning fact from fiction, the BBC Verify article I linked to earlier has been stealth-edited. I wish I had cut and pasted here what it yesterday said about fire hydrants – basically that they weren’t much of an issue, that over the system as a whole pressure was inevitably going to run low when there was so much demand, etc etc. Now (perhaps because they had little choice given that Governor Newsom has changed his tune) the article says this:

    On Friday, Governor Newsom confirmed reports that have been swirling this week that a water shortage hit the fire hydrants, hampering the emergency response.

    Firefighters in Los Angeles have told the BBC firsthand that they experienced shortages.

    Newsom called for an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure to hydrants and the unavailability of water from the reservoir.

    In a letter addressed to the heads of the LA Department of Water and Power and LA County Public Works, Newsom said that reports of inadequate water supplies are “deeply troubling” .

    “Losing supplies from fire hydrants likely impaired the effort to protect some homes and evacuation corridors,” he wrote.

    “We need answers to how that happened,” he continued, adding that he expects the agencies to “fully and transparently” share information and records for the state’s probe.

    Adam Van Gerpen, a captain with the Los Angeles fire department, confirmed to the BBC that his crew, which has been tackling the Pacific Palisades blaze, and other crews battling other wildfires, ran out of water, forcing them to “improvise”.

    This demonstrates everything that’s wrong with BBC Verify at two levels. First, they rushed to put out a hit job on Trump’s claims before properly checking if they were true. Their three comments from Daniel Swain have been reduced to one such comment now and the article in one critical area now says the opposite to what it said only yesterday evening. Secondly, the BBC has stealth-edited the article without making it clear that its line has changed. It’s little short of disgraceful. And with no apparent sense of irony, the story that the oh-so-trusted BBC Verify yesterday told us was a non-story is now the leading story on the BBC website:

    “Hydrants issue impaired LA wildfires fight, governor says as evacuation area grows”

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cg7z9zjv90jt

    Watching the BBC at work leaves me feeling we’re all playing parts in 1984.

    Liked by 2 people

  20. PS Thank you for your kind words about my articles. The great thing about Cliscep is that contributors and readers alike are not – as climate worriers would like to believe – a monolithic group of people. Our political views vary greatly. Long may that be the case, and long may this be a forum where we can disagree freely and politely.

    Liked by 2 people

  21. Thank you for your alertness Mark.

    and

    v2 and v3 of that page, via the excellent News Sniffer, as recommended to us by Stew.

    The BBC have claimed in the past, I think, that they cannot highlight every edit to a news article. However, Verify articles should not be so edited. It seems obvious that if the original Verify article was not in possession of all the relevant facts, it ought not to have been rushed out.

    Liked by 4 people

  22. News Sniffer tells us the article has changed seven times. While that’s not necessarily the same as BBC Verify having to correct seven errors in the first version, it represents strong evidence that the BBC deploys its Verify team to quash stories, or versions of reality, that it doesn’t like, and achieving its desired objective matters far more to it than accuracy and truth.

    Liked by 2 people

  26. Geoff & others on this thread. The UK MSM are rightly reporting on the devasting & tragic fires in California (Clive Myrie from BBC even reported from the scene, as if his presence makes any new news).

    With all this coverage on wildfires on the west coast, I wondered what the (unreported in UK news) cold snap on east coast was like –

    Winter Storm Brings Heavy Snow and Power Outages to Mid-Atlantic – The New York Times

    Wonder why deadly cold snap in eastern US is not given some coverage?

    Liked by 1 person

  27. dfhunter,

    No need to wonder – quite simply it doesn’t fit the agenda, while the LA wildfires do.

    Liked by 1 person

  28. https://skepticalscience.com/climate-role-LA-fires.html

    ‘The New Year has rung in with one of the most horrific wildfire events in world history: an urban firestorm in the Los Angeles metro area that has killed at least five people…’

    I think the death toll is now 24, so in no way is it a trivial event. But one of the most horrific wildfires in world history?

    (Any updates about your daughter and her house, Robin Guenier? Very, very sorry to hear about that.)

    Liked by 1 person

  29. Lara Trump eviscerated online after asking ‘how climate change is the reason’ for devastating LA fire conditions

    “Social media users are slamming Lara Trump after she demanded an explanation for why people believe climate change is responsible for the wildfire conditions that have devastated Southern California.”

    At the end – “Donald Trump has baselessly blamed President Joe Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom for the lack of water to fight the blazes. From news to politics, travel to sport, culture to climate – The Independent has a host of free newsletters to suit your interests”

    “Independent” my a*rse.

    Like

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.