Author: Mick Hartley

As @ShMMor wrote: “Hauling the Jews in to plead their case before a special tribunal and face the charge that they are the real Nazis has been the fantasy of every antisemite since the first gavel hit the sound block at Nuremberg.” @amnesty, go to hell.

— Blake Flayton (@blakeflayton) December 5, 2024

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Horne, LNER’s managing director, added: “At LNER, we truly focus on creating an inclusive workplace where our people feel able to be themselves.”

Yet the manager who wrote to Ms Fossick told her: “Given the content of your recent tweets, we believe continuing to engage with your request could lead to harmful discourse and cause distress to our transgender employees and the people that the Pride Train represents.

“The repeated focus on these specific topics, coupled with the use of transphobic language and alignment with anti-trans figures, suggests a potential motive beyond simply seeking information.”

Although the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ruled in Ms Fossick’s favour after she challenged LNER’s refusal to answer her, The Telegraph understands that the information she requested has still not been disclosed.

Have LNER been Stonewalled? I do believe they have.

Jack Delano, March 1943. "Santa Fe Railroad activities across New Mexico. Men coming out of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad shops in Albuquerque at the end of the day's shift."

[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]

Latakia Province on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. As of now, at least, HTS’s remarkable offensive has simply re-set the balance between the areas of control in Syria.

So why should no-one have been surprised by the offensive?

First, because frozen conflicts rarely stay frozen forever. The causes that originally animated them tend to make themselves manifest at a time when one or another of the sides finds it opportune.

Secondly, because all serious observers of Syria have known for a while that behind its rhetoric, the Assad regime is a depleted and rotting structure, dependent on its powerful Iranian and Russian allies for survival. These allies are currently distracted in wars with Israel and Ukraine respectively. HTS, whose leader Abu Mohammed al Jolani is as tactically flexible as he is strategically rigid, spotted the opening and chose to strike.

And lastly, no one should be surprised at rival ethno-sectarian forces, supported by powerful regional and global states clashing in the Middle East across the landscape of collapsed states, because that is the very essence of the way that power is wielded across the region at the present moment. From this point of view, current events in Syria offer a kind of microcosm of the dynamics of the region as a whole. Hopefully, both western governments and publics are watching carefully, and may even emerge better informed about the nature and dynamics of the Middle East.

Not sure about that. If Israel's not involved no one really cares about who's killing, or who and how many are being killed.

>pic.twitter.com/9kbdkBsORj

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) December 4, 2024

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The normally unspoken bit out loud:

“To have a transgender child has made me so much more interesting” Annette Bening, channeling the worst of Hollywood, speaks outside SCOTUS during the Skrmetti hearing.

Are bans on puberty blockers for kids constitutional?

🤷‍♀️ But having a trans kid makes you interesting & wise pic.twitter.com/qQWGFW3Cly

— WomenAreReal (@WomenAreReals) December 5, 2024

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a that gender-affirming care’s evidence base is perilously uncertain.

"Fringe medical voices". You get the picture.

“I felt this charity was harming children…If that is being a Terf then I’m proud to be one.”@RosieMillard defends her decision to step down as chair of the BBC charity Children in Need. #TimesRadio pic.twitter.com/1hhM9evC3v

— Times Radio (@TimesRadio) December 4, 2024

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Janice Turner in the Times has the last word on the BBC and its "100 women" list:

Every year the BBC trolls women by sticking a token biological male in its “100 women” list. It just can’t help itself. Somewhere in the BBC charter must be a clause that women can’t have anything. Certainly not Woman’s Hour, on which Bethany Hutchinson, a Darlington NHS nurse campaigning for female-only showers, was recently grilled by Nuala McGovern like a war criminal. Nor a best woman footballer award, given to Barbra Banda, banned from the Africa Cup of Nations for having male levels of testosterone and who refuses to take a sex test.

But the BBC 100 women 2024 list is a doozy. Among Gisèle Pelicot, a Nobel laureate and brave campaigners against violent suppression in Iran and Afghanistan is a 61-year-old who lived most of their life as a man, fathered two children, took the name Brigitte Baptiste (after the sex symbol Brigitte Bardot) and dresses as a grotesque parody of womanhood, slathered in make-up and wearing low-cut microscopic dresses. But then a “scientist” whose claim to fame is “looking at nature through a queer lens” and deciding Colombia’s national tree has a gender identity would never be fêted if they were a woman.

Meanwhile Baroness Cass, whose report on child gender medicine has changed global policy, was omitted. The BBC putting Baptiste on its list is like Al Jolson winning a Mobo award.

“padding-left: 40px”>There have been so many incidents that have seemed upside down since October 7 that sometimes it is all too much to bear. The celebrations in the street on October 8, the way the BBC keeps parroting Hamas lies, the fact that the murder of Israelis led to record antisemitism in the UK, the Jew hate marching down our streets every weekend while the police watch on. I could go on.

But few examples have been more stark, in my eyes, than what is happening this week.

Yesterday I watched our Prime Minister tell a Labour Friends of Israel lunch that his government stands behind the ‘independence’ of the ICC to issue warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. That means – however much they are presently pussyfooting around the issue – our government will attempt to arrest the Israeli politicians should they step foot on UK soil.

Meanwhile, just a day later, we are literally rolling out the red carpet for the leaders of Qatar, the nation which has for years, housed and funded Hamas….

There is an irony too that of the many things Israel is accused of doing, Qatar gets away with barely a peep from the sanctimonious crew.

Just a few years ago, it bought a World Cup, used slave labour to create the arenas and we stood by and let it happen. Controversial Qatari minister Nasser Al-Khelaifi – not only runs top French team Paris Saint Germain but is also chairman of the European Club Association, making him one of the most influential people in European football. Visit Qatar is an official sponsor of the UEFA Euros 2024 and 2028.

And on greenwashing, how is a country which owes its huge wealth to being one of the largest exporters of liquefied natural gas being hosted by one of the most famous eco-warrior families in the world? Not even Just Stop Oil, the eco-militants who march with the Palestinian cause every weekend seem to be bothered by this visit – where are their protests?

The country’s influential Al Jazeera news network has 70 bureaus and broadcasts a diet of anti-Western material to 150 countries with an audience of approximately 430 million people. This is a hostile voice – one that America and Israel had the good sense to close down.

And where to start with their human rights record? Qatar is a country where you can be locked up for criticising the Emir, where hundreds of thousands of migrant workers have next to no rights, where women need the permission of a male guardian on whether she can marry, study or travel, and where gay people are jailed for their sexual orientation.

There's some irony, I suppose, in the way that Qatar wields its financial clout so brazenly, in the way that Jews were traditionally supposed to. Money talks.