Author: Mick Hartley

It's reporting as usual from the BBC in Gaza:

Amid severe food shortages in Gaza, increasingly violent thefts by criminal gangs are now the main obstacle to distributing supplies in the south, aid workers and locals say.

They allege that armed men operate within plain sight of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in a restricted zone by the border.

The BBC has learnt that Hamas – sensing an opportunity to regain its faltering control – has reactivated a special security force to combat theft and banditry.

That might be funny – Hamas combating theft and banditry – but they're quite serious.The IDF are turning a blind eye to these nasty Gaza criminals but look here, over the hill come the brave heroes of Hamas, doing their best to restore order. Well, that's what the Hamas spokesmen say, and the UN – and that's good enough for the BBC's intrepid reporters.

“It is tactical, systematic, criminal looting,” says Georgios Petropoulos, head of the UN’s humanitarian office, Ocha, in Gaza.

He says this is leading to “ultra-violence” in all directions – “from the looters towards the truckers, from the IDF towards the police, and from the police towards the looters”.

There has been increased lawlessness in Gaza since Israel began targeting police officers early this year, citing their role in Hamas governance.

“Hamas’s security control dropped to under 20%,” the former head of Hamas police investigations told the BBC, adding: “We are working on a plan to restore control to 60% within a month.”

Some displaced Gazans in the south welcome the new Hamas efforts against criminal gangs.

“Killing the thieves who stole aid is a step in the right direction,” exclaims one man, Mohammed Abu Jared.

Hurrah for Hamas.

Though there are dissenting voices.

However, others see them as a cynical attempt to take control of lucrative black markets.

“Hamas is killing its competitors in stealing aid,” says Mohammed Diab, an activist in Deir al-Balah. “A big mafia has finished off a small mafia.”

Well OK, this is funny:

No shortage of irony here. pic.twitter.com/puyF9J7lJM

— Chris Rose (@ArchRose90) November 25, 2024

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a desirable consequence we do want. And if that desirable consequence is more important, or if we are under an overriding obligation to prefer it, then our causing the undesirable consequence is proportionate – provided we take all feasible steps to minimise it. That’s the ethical principle of ‘double effect’. The desirable consequence or effect is what we intend; the undesirable effect we accept with active reluctance….

According to this logic, which characterises the ethic of ‘just war’ thinking, it’s permissible to attack a military objective, knowing it will risk civilian casualties, provided that risk is unavoidable and all feasible measures are taken to minimise it. One may intend the effect of disabling enemy combatants, while reluctantly accepting injury to civilians as a tragic side-effect. Certainly, this is permissive, but that’s because, otherwise, the successful waging of war, however just the cause, is practically impossible. Nevertheless, unburdened by concern for military success, the ICC considers that any military action taken in the knowledge that it will put civilians at risk of injury intends – is ‘calculated’ – to destroy them.

Telling against the judgement that Israel has any such intention are the measures taken by its military to minimise harm – giving advanced warning of attacks, using weapons of minimally destructive power, and providing some humanitarian aid.

Plus the fact that much of the humanitarian aid coming in to Gaza was seized by Hamas for their own use.

Had it been sitting in judgement on the prosecution of the war against the massively murderous Nazi empire by Britain and the US, the ICC would have issued arrest warrants for Churchill and Eisenhower. While invading Italy in 1943, the Allies caused old men, women, and children to be torn apart by bombs and shells, exposed to the wintry elements by the destruction of their homes, and starved of food and water. They did this ‘knowingly’, aware of the effects of their unavoidably imprecise bombing and shelling. But they didn’t intend civilian harm and sought to minimise it, as far as war-winning allowed. Nonetheless, their efforts weren’t ‘adequate’ to save tens of thousands from perishing.

Plenty of examples from WW2 – also, for instance, the destruction wreaked on Normandy after the D-Day landings, as the Allies advanced on Paris.

The presumptuousness of a court that declares itself devoted to the cause of ‘lasting peace’, its novel and imprudent intrusion of a concept of fundamental human rights into the laws of war, and its neglect of the principle of double effect, all combine to drive a legal interpretation that makes successful war-fighting unlawful, however just its cause. Thereby the ICC undermines its own authority, forcing states intent on military victory to repudiate its jurisdiction.

from the Arab lands arrived in Israel as refugees, most carrying the 1 suitcase they'd been given 24 hours to pack after millennia of residence, the opposite of a ‘white’ ‘European’ ‘racist’ ‘colonialism’. To apply those labels to that trauma is obscene. (9/10)

The 4th difference is that the int. comm. birthed Israel. The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm erases the mandates that nurtured the Jewish state into being, just as was happening for Arab peoples, same time, same region. Again, utterly unlike the ‘settler colonial’ socs. (10/10)

oklPBsC”>pic.twitter.com/bP8oklPBsC

— Habib Khan (@HabibKhanT) November 24, 2024

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It takes a 16-year high school girl to explain to a room of adults why she and her classmates should not have to tolerate boys in their locker room. That’s where we are now. Can you imagine this a decade ago? Time to end the insanity.https://t.co/mgaT9qOxlv

— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) November 23, 2024

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Minor girls asking to not be forced to undress and shower in front of males is not a hate crime. pic.twitter.com/AKLLAHTQbB

— The Redheaded libertarian (@TRHLofficial) November 22, 2024

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gardless of whatever £5 official piece of paper he holds.

“Strip-searching by its very nature can be degrading and embarrassing, for the woman being searched, and for the policewoman doing the searching.

“When the state allows men to strip women and touch them, then that in my view is state-sanctioned sexual assault. It beggars belief that police leaders view this as a carrot to dangle to get more trans-identified men into the service.”

[A grammatical aside: that singular verb in the first sentence – "The British Transport Police (BTP) is facing legal action" – caught my attention. I'd have written "are facing legal action". I struggle a bit with this. It depends, I suppose, on context. So you'd say "the BBC is an organisation at the heart of British life", but "the BBC are disputing this version of events". Possibly. Depending on whether the emphasis is on the institution itself or on the people within the institution. Maybe. I don't know.]

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Highgate Wood was closed this morning because of the high winds, but Queen's Wood – other side of Muswell Hill Road – stayed open. Tougher trees.

ris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” To me, this came as no shock.

Some of us have been warning the Democrats for years….

Many men are being housed in women’s prisons across the country. There are hundreds of men and boys playing in sports intended for women and girls. And even if there weren’t, how many is too many? Even worse, thousands of children received “gender-affirming care” in the form of hormones or surgeries or both between 2019 and 2023 in the U.S.

The Democrats own this.

President Biden began saying that “transgender discrimination” is the “civil rights issue of our time” in 2012. In 2015, Congressional Democrats introduced the so-called Equality Act, which would redefine “sex” to include the nebulous, sexist, homophobic concept of “gender identity” for all purposes under U.S. civil rights law.

In 2016, President Barack Obama issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to U.S. schools, instructing them to interpret the word sex to include “gender identity” for all Title IX purposes. Democratic support for “trans” has continued apace since then.

Voters last week were not dis- or misinformed about the Democratic Party’s support for “gender identity” over sex. They simply rejected it.

ask enter the women’s facility and proceeded to walk over to the shower area. Wright says he did not have a towel or pool bag, and gave no indication that he was getting changed or going swimming. He then returned and entered the stall next to the one Wright’s daughter was changing in.

Wright then witnessed the man try to peer under the stall divider and into the cubical her daughter was using. She immediately confronted him as he exited, but the man simply responded that he identified as female and that it was his “human right to be in the women’s changing room.”