New Statesman

• SOURCE: Aeon Magazine
  7-25-13
  

  Edward Platt: Lost Civilizations Under the Waves Still Fascinate

  Edward Platt is a contributing writer for the New Statesman. His latest book is The City of Abraham: History, Myth and Memory, a Journey Through Hebron (2012).In 1931, a trawler called the Colinda sank its nets into the North Sea, 25 miles off the coast of Norfolk, and dredged up an unlikely artefact — a handworked antler, 21cm long, with a set of barbs running along one side. Archeologists identified it as a prehistoric harpoon and dated it to the Mesolithic age, when sea levels around Britain were more than 100 metres lower than they are today, and the island’s sunken rim, at least according to some, was a fertile plain.

• SOURCE: The New Statesman
  3-21-13
  

  Mehdi Hasan: Anti-Semitism Rampant Amongst British Muslim

  Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and the political director of the Huffington Post UK, where this column is crosspostedIf tomorrow, God forbid, I were to cause the death of an innocent man with my car, minutes after sending a series of texts on my mobile phone, I’m guessing I’d spend the rest of my life riddled with guilt. What I wouldn’t do is go on television and lay the blame for my subsequent 12-week imprisonment at the door of . . . wait for it . . . the Jews. Yet that’s what the Labour peer Nazir Ahmed did in April 2012 – less than five years after causing a car crash on the M1 in which Martin Gombar, aged 28, was killed.“My case became more critical because I went to Gaza to support Palestinians,” he says to his Pakistani interviewer in Urdu, in a video recording obtained by the Times. “My Jewish friends who own newspapers and TV channels opposed this.” The judge who put him behind bars, Lord Ahmed claims, was appointed to the high court after helping a “Jewish colleague” of Tony Blair’s during “an important case”....