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“Miliband appears determined to maintain his antagonistic approach towards Israel, despite the recent revelation that the Israelis tipped off their British counterparts about the recent terror plot aimed at RAF Fairford, which has so far resulted in the arrest of seven suspects. While Miliband’s anti-Israel stance might appeal to Labour’s vocal pro-Palestinian lobby, his preference for puerile gesture politics will be counter-productive in so far as the UK’s broader national security interests are concerned.”
– Con Coughlin, Daily Telegraph (£). The headline of the article is “Ed Miliband won’t admit that Israel is doing the UK’s dirty work.”
The word “contempt” is too mild to really capture the range of thoughts and emotions that I have about the current UK foreign secretary and former energy minister. His conduct in office (including at energy given his championing of Net Zero, regardless of changed circumstances) has increased the vulnerability of the UK, and he has taken such actions largely out of a blinkered ideological worldview and disregard for national security. As such, he illustrates the dangers of what Gad Saad has dubbed “suicidal empathy”.
Three years ago today, Gazan civilians – not themselves Hamas, just Palestinians taking advantage of an opportunity – abducted Shiri Bibas and her children Ariel aged four and Kfir aged nine months. They were held in captivity for an unknown amount of time before being murdered. The children were probably strangled. Hamas, wishing to be part of the Bibas story, eventually held an elaborate public ceremony, complete with jubilant children dancing on stage, before releasing coffins labelled as containing their dead bodies, along with a coffin containing the body of another murdered hostage, 84 year old Oded Lifshitz. The ceremony was arranged with much forethought. Somebody even took the time to make little plaques to put on the coffins of Shiri Bibas and Oded Lifshitz saying, “Date of arrest: October 7th 2023”.
Date of arrest. Their own words. That’s how they think.
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Related posts:
Shani Louk was half German – some thoughts
Kemi Badenoch MP, one of the contenders to be the next leader of the Conservative party, recently and astonishly caused controversy by saying ‘Not all cultures are equally valid’. I agree with this statement. Some cultures are worse than others. Now that ISIS is gone, Hamas-ruled Gaza is probably the most horrible culture currently present on Earth. Please note that this makes absolutely no difference to the obligation of Israel to adhere to the laws of war, even against an enemy that does not. It just lets the Israelis know what to expect from Gaza if they do not defeat Hamas.
Should we conclude that the Palestinians, or the Gazans, are an accursed people by nature? No. There is a dark mirror to the past in the fact that Shani Louk was half German. In living memory Germany fell as low as any nation in human history. Let us not delude ourselves that the attempted extermination of the Jews was carried out by the Nazi party alone. A brave but tiny minority of Germans who were not Nazis sheltered Jews, a larger minority at least did not report their suspicions that their neighbours were doing so, and the majority obeyed the Nazis so long as they remained in power.
Who would have dreamed eighty years ago that one day the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin would be illuminated with an image of the Star of David to remember Jews murdered in a pogrom? Yes, a mere symbol, but a true symbol – Germany re-joined the family of nations decades ago. What brought about this change? The complete military defeat of the Nazi regime. Cynics observe that the change did not happen until after the defeat. Optimists observe that it did happen after the defeat.
How will you be celebrating International Women’s Day?
“Is Israel Weaponizing the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?”
“Green party votes to adopt policy that equates Zionism with racism”, reports the Guardian.
Members voted at the party’s annual conference in Brighton to back a motion that calls for Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, to be “treated as any other form of racism”. It passed by 1,022 votes to 813.
It has been publicly opposed by four of the party’s five MPs, although Zack Polanski, the leader of the Greens in England and Wales, has said he does believe Zionism is a racist idea.
The motion, which is now formal policy, calls for a single Palestinian state in place of Israel, “with equal rights for all”.
Adrian Ramsay, one of the MPs and a former party co-leader, said after the vote that he was “deeply saddened” by the decision, and that the idea of endorsing a single Palestinian state did not match Green commitments to self-determination.
In earlier voting, an amendment ensuring other parts of Green policy were updated to take account of the motion was backed. Three other amendments, including one that said the motion should not be used to “pressure, proscribe or discipline members based on affiliation with Jewish community institutions”, were voted down.
The text of the motion includes this passage:
4. The Green Party affirms the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self
determination, including the right of the Palestinian people to resistance and
liberation from Israeli occupation, domination and subjugation, and acknowledges
that the struggle to achieve that liberation by all available means under
international law is legitimate.
The Guardian article also says,
While the proposers of the motion argue it will not be used to discipline Jewish members who support Zionism, it is understood that some members are consulting lawyers over whether the policy could be challenged.
Adam Wagner KC, the barrister who led a case which concluded that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour broke equalities laws over antisemitism, said that such a case would have a good chance of success.
“I think there is a strong risk that the motion as passed contravenes the Equality Act 2010, which applies to political parties, as it will discriminate against and harass people who hold Zionist beliefs and Jewish people more generally,” he said.
“Zionism, defined in the broad sense of supporting the establishment, development and protection of a Jewish nation state in its ancestral homeland, the land of Israel, is likely to be a protected belief under the Equality Act 2010.”
There should be no “protected beliefs”. Though I would strongly advise Jewish Greens, and decent people of any religion or no religion to get out, I support the right of any political party to be whatever it chooses to be. What the Green Party of England and Wales has now chosen to be is a Muslim sectarian party.
The triumph of the various “Gaza Independents” in the 2024 election demonstrates that in the modern UK, a Muslim sectarian party whose main interests lie outside the UK can win seats in Parliament. Nonetheless the victory of this motion at the Green Party conference has made a hitherto quite successful strategy of entryism into a previously existing British party too obvious.
EDIT: In this short video clip, Lubna Speitan, the proposer of the “Zionism is Racism” motion, says
“We will continue until we dismantle Zionism from the world – from every country, from every place. They will be shunned. And, inshallah, that time will come when they are opposed, when they are hunted in the same way as the Nazi oppressors were. This is justice. We will obtain freedom. It won’t happen without force.”
This week it was announced that Manchester City FC – which has dominated English football in recent years – has been found guilty by an independent panel of 114 charges relating to the breaking of the Premier League’s financial rules.
- The essential charge is that the owners of the club – in essence the Government of Abu Dhabi – spent more than they were allowed to. Money was funnelled through various off-balance sheet means.
- I am not sure I am using “balance sheet” correctly.
- The judgement leaves little room for doubt. There were only ever 115 charges. The Premier League’s language is not diplomatic.
I doubt that the “appeal” will amount to much.
- I am in two minds about the rules themselves. On the one hand, I think people should be allowed to waste their money in any way they choose. On the other, I don’t like seeing clubs go bust.
- Everybody knew. This always stank.
- The investigation only came about because emails were hacked and published in – of all things – Der Spiegel. Before that the Premier League in traditional British style had turned a blind eye.
- Manchester City seem to think that denial and obstruction is the way to go. They have to know that is not the case. This may be a cultural thing.
- And a political thing. The Prime Minister has thought it a good idea to wade in. It is even beginning to look as if British politicians can be bought. Well, to those who didn’t already think that British politicians could be bought.
- Such machinations do not bode well for the integrity of the government’s recently-formed “independent” football regulator.
- Politics and sport don’t mix. The whole point about sport is that it takes you away from politics.
- This is about sporting integrity: the idea that everyone is playing by the same rules, on and off the pitch. And it is not just the principle of the thing. Sporting integrity sells.
- The Premier League must understand it will take a hit from this. A huge hit. The only real question is how big and for how long. A few years ago I took to watching the Indian Premier League (that’s cricket). It turned out that the team I had been supporting had been bribed to throw games. I haven’t watched cricket since and I doubt I ever will.
- The punishment must be severe. It is the only way that sporting integrity can be rebuilt and shown to be being rebuilt.
- There could be all sorts of claims for compensation: “…We would have had this player. We would have won this. We wouldn’t have been relegated” etc. This could take years to settle.
- Punishment must also be swift. The fans will have their say. There is going to be a very unpleasant atmosphere every time Manchester City take the field. If they take the field… What would happen, I wonder, if clubs refused to play them?
- None of the above has anything to do with the fact I am a Watford supporter and am looking forward to the day when my team wins the FA Cup despite suffering the biggest-ever defeat in a final.
Here’s a topical joke from The Ministry of Wit:
In case the link disappears, it says “Co-pilots must not stab the pilot. This is called assault.” It is parodying a Home Office leaflet called “Understanding behaviours and expectations in the UK: a guide for asylum seekers” (non-illustrated version here), which helpfully explains on page 5 that “In the UK, both people must say ‘yes’ to sex. This is called consent.”
To be fair to the Home Office, given that the top ten countries from which asylum seekers come are, in order, Eritrea, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iran, Ethiopia, Iraq, Syria, Turkey* and Vietnam, there is a need to educate many men from the first eight of these countries that in the UK women have the legal right to refuse sex. In those eight countries marital rape is not a crime. The furore about the leaflets was because they reveal that the government knows damn well that education on sexual consent is particularly necessary for men from Muslim countries. It just doesn’t want to say so because the official ideology is that all cultures are equal. There is an ongoing legal case concerning the government’s reluctance to reveal crime figures analysed by nationality of offender.
It came after the Centre for Migration Control (CMC), a think tank, asked the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to reveal the total number of convictions broken down by nationality and offences for the seven years under freedom of information laws.
The MoJ initially refused, saying that to gather the data would be too expensive and that publishing the information could lead to the identification of individuals in breach of their rights to privacy.
Both arguments were rejected by the information watchdog. However, The Telegraph revealed last month that David Lammy, then justice secretary, sanctioned legal action seeking to overturn this ruling.
Opposition parties claimed the MoJ’s actions amounted to a “cover-up”.
One of the first political demonstrations I ever attended, over forty years ago, was in defence of refugees and asylum seekers. I still have great sympathy for those who seek freedom from oppression, such as Iranian Christians fleeing the Islamic Republic, and for the genuinely moderate Muslims – the almost comical over-use of that phrase does not mean they do not exist. But the current UK asylum regime is an illustration of the old medical saying that “the dose makes the poison.”
*My auto-correct tried to change “Turkey” to “Türkiye”. No.
“In a way, these Palestine enthusiasts resemble medieval Crusaders, who dreamt of recapturing Jerusalem because it was the place where Jesus died and rose again. Muslims, of course, detest the word `crusade’, partly because they deny the crucifixion of Jesus and regard the symbol of the cross as idolatrous, but their mentality is similar, from the other side of the religious fence. The equivalent of a crusader is a jihadi. Some of them assert a sacred right for Muslims to control the third holiest place in Islam, Jerusalem – by force if necessary.
Even those mainly white pro-Palestinian activists, presumably including Mr Polanski, who have no interest in religious questions, regard the place as holy in their political world-view. To them, it is the crucible of the `colonial’ oppression of the `wretched of the earth’ by Americans and British and `Zionists’, with their vast powers conjured up in their fevered imaginations. If I were a voter in Holborn and St Pancras, I would feel angry with any candidate playing this game. And if I were a Jewish voter, I would be afraid.”
– Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph (£)
Moore is writing about next week’s by-election for the parliamentary seat of Holborn and St Pancras. A leaflet image from the Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, a candidate, features a flag in the background that is unidentified but not the flag of his party. It is red, white and green. The unnamed flag is that of Palestine. So a candidate in an election to the House of Commons chooses, as his main flag emblem, that of a disputed geographic area, for as Moore says, Palestine isn’t and has never been a country with its own laws and government.
The late Rod Liddle, who knew how to be rude in his articles with tremendous enthusiasm, once dubbed Mr Polanski a “snaggle-toothed halfwit”. The danger is that it is too easy to dismiss this man as a fool. He is undoubtedly a very foolish man in some ways but he has a certain scruffy cunning.
“BBC removes 11 Mitchell and Webb comedy sketches from iPlayer,” reports the BBC.
You want to see the sketches more, now, don’t you? Thank you, “Basil the Great”.
Edit: And here’s the Civil War re-enactors sketch, courtesy of Giop Saus on YouTube.
Season 2 of “That Mitchell and Webb look” was made in 2007. At that time, TM&WL’s style of comedy was seen as mildly left wing and definitely anti-racist. They certainly saw themselves that way. Almost twenty years later, the Civil War sketch is genuinely thought-provoking comedy. Within the context of the sketch, I instinctively get why Mitchell’s character stops the re-enactment after Webb’s character says, “I am going to kill you with this big machete” in an African accent. I think the fake accent coupled with a portrayal of motiveless savagery tips it over to being racist (remembering that the whole thing is a act within an act, and the man waving the machete is portrayed as being frightfully worried that his portrayal of a “real” Sudanese machete-waver might be racist). But if asked to point out exactly why the whole idea of white British people re-enacting the Second Congo War is racist, my hand does several mid-air circuits without ever quite coming in to land. Why is it perfectly OK for a man to put on a great big wig and wave a sword about in order to play a Royalist officer in the English Civil War but not OK to put on a great big wig and wave a machete about in order to play a militia leader in the Second Congo War? Is it because the re-enactor played by Webb is white and presumably is descended from ancestors who might well have fought in the English Civil War but no one (so far as I know) looking like him fought in the Second Congo War? If so, would it be equally unacceptable to have a black British re-enactor play the Cavalier – as seems to be the fashion these days?
Related post: The fact that a British person’s ancestors were not British is not shameful and need not be concealed
“Dear Ed Sheeran, fence-sitting is so last century: musicians can no longer opt out of politics”, writes Zoe Williams in the Guardian.
Macklemore, both onstage and in his own statement, has rebuffed the argument that voicing support for Palestinians and criticising Israel and its actions in Gaza and the West Bank is antisemitic. (In 2014, he apologised for a costume he wore on stage, which critics said was antisemitic, saying: “I respect all cultures and all people.”)
So musicians “can’t” opt out of politics, but political opinion journalists opting out of either stating their own opinion as to whether Macklemore’s grotesque “Jewface” costume shown in this BBC article from 2014 might be a teensy-weensy bit anti-semitic, or of linking to a picture of it so that readers can decide for themselves, is just fine, apparently.
Macklemore should be free to throw Nazi salutes while prancing in his fake black beard and prosthetic hooked nose. He should be free to insult the general public’s intelligence and flatter his own public’s bigotry by saying with a smirk that he had no idea that anyone might think he was caricaturing a Jew. Zoe Williams should be free to pretend that she didn’t see the pictures in that BBC article despite having taken her “which critics said was antisemitic” line straight from it. And I’m free to say that for Zoe Williams, who was once longlisted for the Orwell Prize, to write an article demanding that Ed Sheeran take a side while averting her own eyes from blatant racism and concealing it from her readers makes her a worthy successor to Squealer.
97 of them were murdered by Muslim terrorists.
Here is a list of terrorist incidents in Great Britain this century, stating the ideology behind the attack, its date, the place it took place, the name usually given to the attack, and the number of victims killed.
Irish Republican – 09 September 2000 – MI6 HQ, London – MI6 rocket launcher attack – 0 killed.
Irish Republican – 04 March 2001 – BBC TV Centre – BBC TV Centre car bomb – 0 killed.
Irish Republican – 03 August 2001 – Ealing – Ealing car bomb – 0 killed.
Islamist – 07 July 2005 – London Transport system – 7/7 bombings – 52 killed.
Islamist – 21 July 2005 – London – 7/7 copycat bombs – 0 killed.
Other – 18 January 2007 – Various – Start of Miles Cooper letter bomb campaign – 0 killed.
Islamist – 30 June 2007 – Glasgow Airport – Glasgow airport attack – 0 killed.
Islamist – 14 May 2010 – East Ham – Stabbing of Stephen Timms MP – 0 killed.
Extreme Right – 29 April 2013 – Various – Start of Pavlo Lapshyn terrorism campaign – 1 killed.
Islamist – 22 May 2013 – Woolwich – Murder of Lee Rigby – 1 killed.
Irish Republican – 10 February 2014 – Various army recruitment offices – Start of New Irish Republican Army parcel bomb campaign – 0 killed.
Islamist – 18 February 2016 – Rochdale – Murder of Iman Jalal Uddin – 1 killed.
Extreme Right – 16 June 2016 – Birstall, West Yorkshire – Murder of Jo Cox MP – 1 killed.
Islamist – 22 March 2017 – Westminster Bridge, London – 2017 Westminster attack & murder of PC Keith Palmer – 5 killed.
Islamist – 22 May 2017 – Manchester Arena – Manchester Arena bombing – 22 killed.
Islamist – 03 June 2017 – London Bridge – 2017 London Bridge attack and Borough Market stabbings – 8 killed.
Extreme Right – 19 June 2017 – Finsbury Park, London – Finsbury Park attack – 1 killed.
Islamist – 15 June 2017 – Parsons Green, London – Parsons Green tube bombing – 0 killed.
Islamist – 14 August 2018 – Palace of Westminster – 2018 Westminster car attack – 0 killed.
Extreme Right – 16 March 2019 – Various – Vincent Fuller racist attacks – 0 killed.
Islamist – 29 November 2019 – London Bridge – 2019 London Bridge stabbings – 2 killed.
Islamist – 09 January 2020 – Whitemoor Prison, Cambridgeshire – Whitemoor prison stabbings – 0 killed.
Islamist – 02 February 2020 – Streatham, Lambeth, London – 2020 Streatham stabbing – 0 killed.
Islamist – 20 June 2020 – Forbury Gardens, Reading – 2020 Reading stabbings – 3 killed.
Islamist – 15 October 2021 – Liegh-on-Sea, Essex – Murder of David Amess MP – 1 killed.
Islamist – 14 November 2021 – Liverpool Women’s Hospital, Liverpool – Liverpool Women’s Hospital bombing – 0 killed.
Extreme Right – 30 October 2022 – Dover – Dover firebomb attack – 0 killed.
Extreme Right – 02 April 2024 – Hindlip, Worcestershire – Attack on asylum seeker at Hindlip – 0 killed.
Islamist – 02 October 2025 – Heaton Park Synagogue, Manchester – Manchester Synagogue attack – 2 killed.
Islamist – 31 December 2018 – Victoria Station, Manchester – Manchester Victoria station attack – 0 killed.
Islamist – 29 April 2026 – Golders Green Synagogue, London – Golders Green Synagogue attack – 0 killed.
The list was compiled from these Wikipedia pages:
List of terrorist incidents in Great Britain in the 2000s
List of terrorist incidents in Great Britain in the 2010s
List of terrorist incidents in Great Britain in the 2020s
I have excluded from the count the three young girls murdered in Southport by Axel Rudakubana because although he was charged under the Terrorism Act 2000 for possession of ricin and a military study of an Al-Qaeda training manual, I am not convinced his motive was political. I have also excluded the killing of Anne Widdecombe from the count because the suspect is awaiting trial and the presumption of innocence applies. If these two cases were included, the proportion of terrorist murders this century that were carried out by Muslims would be 97/104; 93% rather than 97%.
I do not blame innocent Muslims for the crimes of their co-religionists. I do not claim that all or most Muslims are terrorists. I honour those many Muslims who have fought against Islamic terrorism, at horrendous risk to themselves and their families. I do not deny that there are other sorts of terrorists out there, including those who seek to murder Muslims. But 97 out of 100 is a very high proportion.
“They can’t see why they are hated” wrote Seamus Milne two days after the 9/11 attacks.
Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don’t get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force – just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.
Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process – or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world – seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.
But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of “civilisation”, with its overtones of Samuel Huntington’s poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.
As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush’s father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel’s 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.
Gaza, eh? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Seamus Milne continued as a Guardian columnist for another fifteen years until he left to become Executive Director of Strategy and Communications for the Labour Party under its then-leader Jeremy Corbyn. In all that time I never once saw him recommend that Palestinians, or Muslims more generally, or anyone other than Westerners should ask themselves why they are hated.
Lots of news today. Nigel Farage has stood down as MP for Clacton, stating he will seek to be re-elected in the resulting by-election. The Daily Mail has defeated Prince Harry and several other high-profile claimants in a phone hacking case brought against it in the High Court, a result that Lord Dacre, the Mail’s publisher, has hailed as a victory for press freedom.
The papers were no doubt equally full on this day twenty-one years ago, before the 7 July 2005 London bombings wiped everything else off the front page.
And, btw, when it comes to words, Trump made one of his most astonishing public lies recently about how Putin did not help Iran in the recent war. Speaking at the G7, Trump went out of his way to praise Putin for being “neutral” in the Iran War. Here is what he said.
“And I want to thank Vladimir Putin, he was very neutral. They could have made it much more difficult for us.”
Of course, Russia was anything but neutral in the war, and provided key support to Iran, support that seems to have helped the Iranians win the war and defeat US forces (and defeat Trump). This Russian help went from vital drone components, targeting intelligence to help the Iranians hit US bases, sanctions evasion help and the delivery of finished munitions.
So Trump has recently gone to great lengths to lie and protect Putin and to loosen sanctions on the Russian economy. But hey, he did not insult Ukraine.
People are such rubes.
– Phillips P. OBrien
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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