Netanyahu not doing enough to free Gaza hostages, says Biden.
You can vehemently disagree with Netanyahu's policies and harbor deep disdain for the man, while also recognizing that everything he says here is true pic.twitter.com/iNEee1HZrO
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) September 3, 2024
and the only power to respect the rights of women and minorities, which is locked in an existential struggle against the forces of jihadism that menace us all, bought £83m of British arms, a sum that constitutes just 1 per cent of its total weapons purchases.
Yet it is the Jewish state that attracted David Lammy’s criticism yesterday, as he announced that he was suspending 30 arms export licences to Jerusalem amid misinformation that it has been prosecuting the war in Gaza to excess.
Both in terms of kit and intelligence sharing, the Israeli-British security partnership – as enshrined in the 2020 bilateral military cooperation agreement – has been of at least as much benefit to London as Jerusalem. Arguably, it has benefited us more.
Britain’s Watchkeeper surveillance UAVs, based on Israel’s Hermes 450 drone, have saved countless British lives in Afghanistan. British troops have trained on Salisbury Plain with Israel’s cutting-edge Rhino mobile command and control centre.
Mutual assistance has been enjoyed for decades. In 2015, Israeli intelligence helped the Metropolitan police discover a bomb factory in northwest London, complete with three tonnes of ammonium nitrate hidden in disposable ice packs.
Mossad’s former deputy director, Ram Ben-Barak, told me that an Israeli air strike on Syria’s secret nuclear reactor in 2007 was the result of intelligence from British spies. Without it, Bashar al-Assad may have fought his civil war with nuclear weapons as well as chemical ones. Our shared values and interests are significant. What will become of them now?
I am writing this from Tel Aviv, where few Israelis noticed the Lammy announcement yesterday. They could be forgiven for their inattention; the funerals of the six hostages who were executed underground by Hamas were taking place, a development that sapped Israel’s precious store of hope and cast the already anguished country into further depths of mourning. The quirk of timing that led the foreign secretary to single out Israel on a day of national grief was described by Britain’s Jewish Leadership council as “disappointing”.
Nicely understated. More of a disgrace, I'd say – but absolutely no surprise from Lammy.
bes herself as “unashamedly socialist”. (She is the daughter of two Labour activists who have supported former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.)
She has been open on social media in sharing her view on puberty blockers. In one post, she criticised Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s ruling to continue the ban on puberty blockers for children as a “terrible political decision”.
For many medics, one of the greatest surprises isn’t the motion to challenge the Cass review but the sheer number of medics willing to publicly oppose the BMA’s stance. Gerada and Cornwall point out that previously many doctors were fearful of speaking out on issues of child gender treatments. That “bubble” has now burst.
“This has fired up doctors in a way that I hadn’t quite grasped when I signed the letter,” Cornwall says. “When the signatories go up to more than a thousand you realise that actually there’s a massive strength of feeling here.
“That’s because the Cass review was seen as such a relief because people have been so frightened to challenge gender-affirming care for children for fear of being called a bigot.”
A blessing in disguise then? The ideologues who've taken control of the BMA have now revealed themselves, allowing doctors at last to see clearly the true colours and motivation of their union representatives.
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"The Global Imam’s counsel has released a statement condemning Hamas’s barbaric executions and stating in clear terms, “we hold Hamas directly responsible for the deaths and suffering of all innocent lives lost since Oct. 7.”
Why? Because they are logically, factually, and legally responsible, and Jihadism is understood to be a threat to the entire Middle East – Muslims and non-Muslims alike."
The Global Imam's Council? Our story:
The story of our blessed Council begins in early 2007 following the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical government, which fueled sectarianism between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims. As the power vacuum in Iraq widened, many violent movements competed for control over our country’s future. Daily bombings and bitter sectarian battles besieged a once-stable Iraq. As chaos devolved between Sunni and Shi’a factions, ISIS arose around 2006, conducting massacres and other atrocities cloaked in the name of Islam.
For more than ten years prior to the rise of ISIS, senior Islamic leaders and honorable Imams gathered regularly at the ancient Supreme Islamic Seminary in Baghdad, Iraq, to discuss the affairs of their respective Muslim communities. These gatherings included numerous Islamic authorities, muftis, and countless prominent figures. As a result, tens of mosques, Islamic centers, educational institutes and charitable organizations were established. In the wake of the tragic events of 2014 and the occupation of Iraqi cities by ISIS terrorists, the Iraqi government invited peace-loving and patriotic Imams to combat the spread of ISIS’s ideological terrorism and Islamist propaganda, and to encourage the many brave, civilian Iraqi men and women who took it upon themselves to liberate their cities from terrorism….
See here for that statement on Hamas, if you can't read it as set out above.
Lewis Wickes Hine, 1921. "Powerhouse Mechanic and Steam Pump"
[Photo: Shorpy/Lewis Wickes Hine]
Lewis Wickes Hine's iconic paean to manual labour, posted at Shorpy to mark yesterday's Labor Day in the US.
https://t.co/KERrQBaqU6 pic.twitter.com/ZhkJOKeadk
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) September 2, 2024
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Full text:
When I say that Germany has its own “morality police,” I am referring to the so-called “Sharia Police,” self-appointed enforcers of Sharia law.
Since I published the video of a Muslim man harassing two women for not wearing “proper” clothing, I have received direct messages from many Iranian women, particularly from academia. They share the same concerns about these morality enforcers in European countries but are often silenced and labeled Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, or right-wing.
Whether we like it or not, these Sharia or morality police known as “Amr bi al-maruf” a collective duty of Muslims to encourage righteous behavior and discourage immorality, exist in many European countries. Often linked to mosques, they impose their version of religious law, targeting women and girls for not wearing the “proper hijab.” This mirrors the experiences of women in Iran. In Iran, when Sharia Police violently harass women for not covering their hair, officials often mislead the world by claiming these are just religious groups, not the official police.
Sources in the Muslim community in Germany report that these so-called Sharia Police have appeared in cities like Wuppertal and Berlin, harassing women under the guise of promoting hijab and Sharia laws. This issue extends beyond isolated incidents, with moral enforcers emerging in schools and neighborhoods with Muslim majorities.
Our investigative work is crucial in sparking necessary conversations and actions. I’m confident that if journalists in Germany raise their voices and conduct thorough reports, it will compel the authorities to act. I recall when we urged the German government to shut down the Islamic centers. Initially, we were labeled, but eventually, the government recognized the links to terrorism and regimes like the Islamic Republic. We must continue exposing these threats.
I've no idea if this type of Sharia policing on the street goes on here in the UK (though there was the recent case of a man who assaulted three women in Bradford, calling them "prostitutes" for not wearing traditional dress) but of course the pressure on many Muslim women – from mosques, in their homes – to conform to Islamic dress codes, with hijab or even the niqab, is part of this same dynamic of threats to women if they don't accept their assigned subservience.
style=”padding-left: 40px”>“Instead of supporting children and their families to accept and manage the developmental realities of growing up into a healthy adulthood, these guides suggest, as the transgender movement suggests, that there is a magical alternative. This magical alternative is, in reality, a lifetime of psychological misery and medicalisation worth millions of pounds to pharmaceutical companies and the medical industry. Numerous de-transitioners are now testament to this fact.”…
Top Scots paediatrician Dr Jennifer Cunningham, who specialises in autism, also warns of an “almost casual reference” to taking controversial cross-sex hormones in the guides which can not only cause lifelong changes but also life-limiting side-effects.
She said LGBT Youth Scotland’s Trans and Non-Binary and Questioning Coming Out Guide is full of images of young people emerging as colourful butterflies, and says the guide is littered with concerning content….
“Our children are now being told that the categories “man” and “woman” or “boy” and “girl” are outdated conventions rather than scientific facts.
“The big problem is that the ‘evidence’ in these guides is actually ideology, not real evidence drawn from scientific study or a research project. And they simply ignore the growing body of evidence about the lifelong harm transitioning does cause.
It gets worse.
A paediatric staff nurse withdrew her autistic daughter from class after she received inappropriate photos of a man in bed with a child and messages on self-harming from her school LGBT club members.
Now the outraged mum is paying £20,000 a year private school fees after finding every other secondary in East Lothian was signed up to LGBT Youth Scotland’s School Charter Scheme….
Brendan O'Neill in Spiked – The deaths of these hostages shame the Western conscience:
When I saw the photos of the four men and two women killed by their captors in a dank lair in Rafah, I thought to myself: there are people in my community here in the UK who have defaced posters of these people. There are people on my streets who scrawled the word ‘coloniser’ on their faces. There are people in my profession who described the day they were kidnapped as a ‘day of celebration’. There are people in London – and New York, Berlin, Sydney – who expressed solidarity not with these six seized Jews, but with the racists who seized them.
And it made me think: it is not enough today to condemn Hamas. We must also ask how so many in the West came to share in Hamas’s twisted, bigoted hatred for these six human beings. Why so many in the West made excuses for their abduction, vandalised their likenesses and falsely called their persecution ‘resistance’. The barbarism uncovered in Rafah is on Hamas. But the Western conscience is not wholly innocent of this depraved crime….
But this goes beyond foolish ‘left’ apologism for Hamas. It goes beyond excuse-making for terror. There is a case to be made that the self-styled progressive conscience of the West has not been complacent in the face of Hamas’s barbarism, but complicit. Many in the West played an active role in justifying the kidnapping of people like Goldberg-Polin, Lobanov, Gat, Sarusi, Yerushalmi and Danino. They actively bolstered the kidnappers’ claims to be resistance fighters, and they actively prevented the raising of awareness of the kidnap victims, particularly through the destruction of posters featuring their faces. They were more than bystanders to a pogrom – they were unpaid PR men for the pogromists.
He's not wrong.
A letter to the Times today from James Johnson, Chairman of the BMA council from 2003-07:
Sir, As a former chairman of the BMA council I, like so many other members, have been horrified and saddened by the direction taken by the organisation in recent years. The latest idiocy is its peremptory rejection of the Cass review, a position on which it has completely failed to consult the members it purports to represent (“Doctors quit BMA over trans children stance”, news, Aug 27).
At its best, the BMA has been highly effective both in representing the interests of doctors and in promoting better public health and patient care. Examples include its evidence-based campaigns on smoking, seatbelt legislation, medical school expansion and boxing control. Sadly, the BMA has succumbed to entryism, with a group of ideologues now dominating the council. Their views are a world away from those of most doctors, but they seem intent on taking a wrecking ball to the organisation I was proud to serve for many decades.
esn’t love writing. She may like certain writers (she’s very enthusiastic about her friends’ woeful poetry, for example) but she doesn’t even understand what writing is. She sought employment in a field where freedom of speech is first principles stuff and then tried to censor and cancel a writer with whom she personally disagreed.
Naturally, Creative Scotland tried to cover it all up.
The organisation went through a “disciplinary” procedure and allowed Tarbuck to remain in post. Not only that, it was agreed she would not deal with “gender critical” writers to avoid a “conflict of interest”.
That is deranged. Tarbuck is a living, breathing conflict of interest. Not only was she protected, her bosses made life more comfortable for her, removing from her the triggering duty of reading and thinking about things that made her unhappy, and allowing her to stay, a malevolent presence, a schoolyard bully given legitimacy, and then protected, by cowardly and amoral philistines.
The scandals swirling around Creative Scotland are many and bleak. The cumulative effect should be the humiliation of those senior executives who protected their six-figure pay and pension packages, while ignoring their responsibilities to the public purse, and then cut funding for new artists….
Naive artists, writers and musicians have spent much of the past week urging the Government to step in with a financial boost for Creative Scotland. It’s time for them to wise up.
Our national arts quango now exists only to employ those who work for it.
If you’re an artist with hopes for the future, you should be demanding Creative Scotland’s closure, not begging like a fool for it to be given a lifeline.
Update: there's more from Euan McColm on Creative Scotland in the Spectator today.