"My boyfriend's back"

I can't respond to this post, but I will say this. I did not know Mehdi Hasan did (among the overwhelming mass of his tripe) an arse covering segment on the genocide in Sudan which mostly consists of him parroting anti-Western talking points. So what?

If a country sitting on a rock in the North Atlantic comes to regard a conflict nearly 4,000 kilometres away as more important than almost anything else, it is worth asking why. I like Ireland. It is a small country living next to a much larger neighbour. A country that has never been afraid to speak its mind or stand on its own feet. In that respect, it reminds me of something. But Ireland's apparent obsession with condemning Israel at every opportunity is not healthy. Especially when many of the arguments involved turn out to be the same exaggerations, distortions and manipulations that have long been commonplace in Middle Eastern politics. Why is it not the starting point of public debate in Ireland that Israel, as a state, has every right to exist? Why is it not the starting point that Israel has repeatedly been attacked by opponents who have never reconciled themselves to the establishment of a Jewish state nearly eighty years ago? Why is it not the starting point that the current war began when Hamas committed the worst massacre of Jews since the Second World War on 7 October 2023? Why are so many people in Ireland willing to accept even the most extravagant accusations coming from the Palestinian side, while showing remarkably little interest in hearing the counterarguments? And then there is the critical question. If Israel were to lose this war against Hamas - an outcome that some voices in Ireland seem surprisingly relaxed about - what exactly would follow? Hamas is not a liberal democratic movement. It is an Islamist movement whose ideology has far more in common with groups such as ISIS than with any Western political tradition. An Israeli defeat would be celebrated as a major victory by Hamas and by the Iranian regime, a regime that has spent decades repressing its own citizens and destabilising the wider region. I do not believe that many Irish people genuinely wish to see Hamas achieve its political objectives. Nor do I believe that many Irish people would welcome a major strategic victory for Iran. Or rather, I hope not. Because if there really is a large majority in Ireland that believes a victory for Hamas and Iran over Israel would be a positive development, then the discussion should no longer be about Israel alone. It should also be about Ireland itself - and about what role Ireland wishes to play in Europe.

In 1950, Irish leader Éamon de Valera, along with Irish-Jewish politician Robert Briscoe, paid a visit to the newfound State of Israel. While there, de Valera — who had previously caused a diplomatic uproar when he paid a condolence call upon Hitler's death in 1945 — had dinner with Rabbi Herzog and David Ben-Gurion There will little, if any, substantial pushback from Irish people at the time Indeed, there were no mobs of angry "Paddystinians" on the streets of Cork and Dublin, chanting wildly about "genocide" or the "Nakba" in protest of De Valera's trip to the Jewish State The entire "Paddystinian" movement didn't emerge until decades later, as part of a widespread propaganda effort to manufacture consent for the destruction of the world's largest Jewish community Repeat after me: "Paddystinianism" is a hate movement that deliberately falsifies Irish history for its own nefarious purposes

A massive group of Islamists lying about the actions of perfidious Jews is hardly unprecedented in world history. It's kind of the default of Middle Eastern civilisation.

Oh, and the timing for Kristof's propaganda piece was to get ahead of this. He wasn't tasked with revealing sexual crimes, but with covering for them. And it worked. edition.cnn.com/2026/05/12/m…

A lot of subscribers have asked what I made of the Nick Kristof oped. So much has already been said. What more is there to say? My first thought was everyone else's. Horrifying. Testimonies of pain and torture. We know that the Israeli Prisons Service is notoriously incompetent. There have been cases of Hamas prisoners abusing each other, and even famous cases of them abusing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison systems struggle with the problem: New York prisons face 2,000 claims against them. So abuse of prisoners isn't merely possible, it's guaranteed. October 7 and the ensuing war sent thousands of detainees into the prisons. And in the early months, drafted into the system undertrained reservist guards. Guards who had seen Hamas's videos gleefully documenting their crimes. I expected, therefore, a hard-hitting story of real abuse, something Israeli leaders must take notice of. And then I came across the first obvious lie. And then the second. And then an odd claim -- maybe possible, but how exactly? -- and then another just like it. And a famed Hamas propagandist laundered as a reliable source. And then another. Why, if there is no doubt that abuse occurred -- and there is no doubt -- was there so much obvious propaganda in Kristof's oped? I won't pretend the lies weren't a relief. They were. It's agony to read about Israeli criminality, and the lies let me cast doubt on the whole narrative. There's an obvious propaganda campaign at work here. But as claim followed claim, it became hard not to wonder: Despite the propaganda, what part is nevertheless true? How bad has it gotten? So here's what we know, or at least what I think I know. This is a campaign that seeks our destruction. Kristof quotes people who celebrated October 7 and want Israel destroyed, and will lie to achieve that goal. We know how the lies in this story made their way into it, where they came from and what purpose they serve. Even so, I'm not willing to conclude there's no truth at all in there, just because there are lies. Dogs did not rape anyone. The people who invented that particular inanity claimed it without evidence, knowing that no one, certainly not self-appointed moral arbiters like Nick Kristof, would ever bother checking the provenance of the claim. Because they never, ever do. Because why would they? So the claim spreads through the millions-strong activist network without investigation, exciting and mobilizing -- not because anyone understands how it might be possible but for the sheer thrill of it. And it's cited by Kristof as a reliable report. A recent report by a Norwegian NGO, also referenced, claimed "systemic sexual violence" in the West Bank by citing just 16 cases across three years in a geographic region containing as many as three million Palestinians and over half a million Israelis. And some of the examples scarcely cleared the bar for harassment. But the NGO in question knew for a fact that no journalist would look too deeply into any of it. And indeed, no journalist did. Because they never, ever do. Because why would they? Friends, a paper trail is being created. Just like they created a paper trail on mass starvation in Gaza -- mass starvation first claimed in early 2024, and then claimed again and again by NGOs, the UN, everybody. Some were nuanced warnings of a "possibility," some declared it had arrived. The headlines from both were largely the same. And then, in thundering silence, the mass starvation claim just faded away, never having materialized -- while billions of ordinary people around the world who don't follow too closely remain convinced that countless Gazans died of starvation. So they moved on. A Lancet letter claiming hundreds of thousands of deaths spread like wildfire, mostly because (a) nobody actually read or understood what it claimed and (b) nobody cared enough to check if it was remotely plausible. Then, just in case anyone forgot Lancet, came the claim by UN rapporteurs of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children -- 380,000 infants under five allegedly died, more than the entire population of infants in Gaza. Stupid, right? But it was repeated again and again by activists and protestors. No one checks, no costs are exacted for the never-ending barrage of fakery. Because why would they? A wild religious frenzy has taken hold. Hatred of Israel is now definitional to the left, and to parts of the right. Greta Thunberg has forgotten all about climate change. An enemy of humanity has been identified just in time to unleash all the pent-up religious rage that this troubled secular age won't allow against anyone else. And by complete and utter coincidence, that enemy you're suddenly allowed to hate is vaguely associated with the Jews. Yes, alas, it really is that simple. But also, dear friends -- bear with me -- it isn't. All the above is true. They're fucking liars and bigots. They marched in their millions, again and again and again, for weeks and months and years -- marches completely unprecedented in their size, regularity and duration in all the history of the West, in all the history of war, larger by orders of magnitude than all other marches for all other conflicts and wars and suffering combined, even those caused by their own governments. And no serious person pretends that anything similar could ever have coalesced or will ever coalesce again unless Israel is involved. "But we fund you," shouts the American activist to explain this mind-numbing selectivity. Then why did one-third of the city of Amsterdam march? Or millions of Spaniards, Brazilians and Indonesians? It was unprecedented and it was everywhere. And Kristof has joined the new religion. Not by being concerned about abuse, but by not caring one whit whether he's trafficking in truths or lies. Only the Jews will ask to distinguish between the two. He just needs to throw it all on the page, and his membership in the glorious crusade is assured. Alas, the Jews are correct about the nature of this moment. Some things are so big and fundamental, so assumed and widespread, that they become hard to see. Fish don't notice the water. Activists who can only ever march against Jews are convinced they are merely righteous people enraged by war, without ever pausing to wonder why the only war that ever enraged them or ever made its way to their phones was one particular war, and not larger and deadlier wars also conducted with Western weapons and money. And so the Jew is made fearful once more. Throughout Christendom and Islam, he is being returned to his proper place in the social hierarchies of old, complete with anxious conversos and ideological purity tests. And yet, still, despite it all, their lies aren't the end of the story. Their lies are a separate story. A campaign of lies that constitutes a return to the mean for the Jewish condition in the West. A campaign meant to justify brutality against us, not to end war or suffering. And despite all of it, dear Jews, there really is abuse. It's nowhere near as much as the psychotic claims of these fantasists. Not by orders of magnitude. If it was, they wouldn't need to lie so much. But it's there nonetheless. Many dozens of cases at least, probably in the low hundreds by now, most of them without any sexual aspect, but still wanton violence. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the army gave a few estimates to the courts a couple of times over the past three years. There have been many indictments filed against soldiers, serious ones. I know something about a handful of those cases. I know that the problem is real. It's there, it's real, and it doesn't seem to be stopping. And if it isn't stopped with an iron will and uncompromising hand, it will continue to fester and grow. And it must be said: neither Ben Gvir nor Netanyahu are interested in fixing it. Nobody at the top cares about the rights of prisoners. Let me be clear: For the first time in my life, I support a death penalty. No one who crossed over the border to massacre and kidnap on October 7 should be left alive; they came to kidnap children precisely because they sought the release of mass murderers kept alive in our prisons. Hamas, as always, in its totalizing brutality, forces the choice: If their murderers live, our children may die. I choose our children. And those who came for our children cannot be deterred, reformed or deradicalized. They murder their own to clear a path to murdering ours. And so I believe they must die. We must try, convict and destroy them. And even I, radicalized in this narrow, specific way, say we cannot collapse into torture or abuse. That's not justice. It isn't even vengeance. It is participation in Hamas's way of war. Nor do our leaders seem to care about the simple breakdown of discipline that these abuses represent, the kind of breakdown we saw again and again with the incidents of looting in Gaza and in the early cases of prisoner abuse that came to light. No, dogs aren't being trained to systematically rape prisoners, you nattering halfwits. And no, Hamas propaganda operatives are not reliable sources on the question of Israeli crimes. The vast, vast majority of soldiers are honorable men who walked into fire so our families may live. The whole world may turn on them; I will stand with them, grateful for their sacrifice. And Kristof, a willing purveyor of propaganda happily feigning that he can't see the water and thrilling to a moral crusade engineered by would-be genocidaires he pretends not to understand -- is no messenger of moral reckoning. But friends, so fucking what. Let the narcissistic guttersnipes strut their moral emotions before the world, let the UN publish endless reports that don't hold up to basic scrutiny, let the NGOs dream their rabid, sick dreams that no journalist ever fact-checks -- yes, they're lying. But so fucking what. We still, for ourselves -- because fuck them -- must see that it isn't all fake. The problem is real. It's far smaller than they claim, but real nonetheless. And when discipline and morality break down, it can only get worse. We either crack down now or we watch it fester and grow. And our own Ben Gvirs are stubbornly refusing to fix what is actually broken, the real thing in the real world. And so we are caught in a strange sort of vise, the same vise we find ourselves in with the genocide lie: A vast propaganda machine that seeks to destroy us -- countless activists too high on their own self-regard to see the irony of raging against a "genocide" while calling for the erasure of a people -- all while our own incompetent, venal, self-absorbed political class insist in their mindless chatter on confirming every claim of our enemies for sheer, bald egomania. I'm sick of it all. I know you're all sick of it too. And that, in a nutshell, is what I think about this. Just because they're lying, just because a vast perfidious campaign has overwhelmed global elites in a bid to clear the way for our removal, just because they're still, after two millennia, building their visions of redemption on The Evil Jew -- doesn't mean there isn't also, separately, a problem on the ground. So what do we do now? Simple. We see it, we acknowledge it's happening, we bring our rage to our inept leaders until they bend to our will and act to stop the breakdown... And we soldier on. We soldier on because the enemy really is coming to murder us. Because Hamas must still go if Gaza is ever to rise to a new day. Because Hezbollah will yet destroy Lebanon on the altar of destroying us. Because the ayatollahs built their whole damn religion on the extermination of our children. We fix the broken things within us as if the pogromists and their simpering Kristofs don't exist. We owe no answers to the propagandists who seek to clear a path to our deaths. But we do owe answers to ourselves. Let the screaming mob rage and churn like so much sea-foam. Despite that raging mob, despite the enemy who still seeks our destruction, and yes, despite feckless incompetents like Ben Gvir, our minister of prisons, who claim to lead us -- we remain the strongest, freest Jews who ever lived, more capable and committed than our self-destructive enemies ever imagined. And the task is still before us, yet to be completed, the sacred duty given to our generation to ensure our children don't have to face the genocidaires who now surround us. We do not waver, we do not stumble. We soldier on. Because fuck them all.

Dear @owenjonesjourno. As editor of Jewish News, I was appalled by the language my deputy used towards you. There is no excuse for the unnecessary use of a full stop before a coordinating conjunction. The sentence should, of course, have read: “I am Deputy Editor of Jewish News and I’m respectfully asking you to fuck right off.”

Mark Ogge is an innumerate moron. He doesn't understand how custodial share registries work. He probably thinks that all the Maccas are owned by Ronald McDonald.

“It isn’t antisemitic to disagree with Israeli government policies.” But Israel’s critics cannot actually name an Israeli government policy they disagree with that meets all of the following criteria: (a) the policy actually exists, and either (b) (i) other nations do not have the same policy, or, (ii) other nations indeed do have the same policy and the Israel critic also criticizes the other nations as often, as loudly, and in the same manner as he or she criticizes Israel. If you cannot meet those criteria, then you are treating the Jewish state — the only country with a predominantly Jewish population, and the country in which half of the world’s Jews live — in a different manner. And THAT is antisemitic.

I say, fucking go for it.

As everyone is putting their two cents out there: I think it is quite likely that Ben Roberts-Smith is a psychopathic killer; I also think that killing Taliban-adjacent combat aged men is probably the most socially useful thing a psychopathic killer could do.

This is the sort of magical thinking that once would have got a person on the wrong side of 60 forcibly confined in an asylum and forcefed lithium until they stopped touching themselves.

I wonder why that happened? Yes, yes Cuban peasant, your kid’s dialysis might have cut out mid-cleanse, but didn’t you enjoy hearing Kneecap’s rendition of ‘Drug Dealin Pagans’

Paul Ehrlich was genuinely one of the worst people of the 20th century. Everything he stood for was wrong; everything he advocated for was evil. x.com/derektmuller/status/20…

If you ever find yourself having respect for the lifers in the Foreign Service or DFAT - just remember they're full to the brim of midwit conspiracist antisemites like old mate here.

Notice the answer from the Eastern States is always "Tax Western Australians More". You can set your watch by it. They are shameless.

re: israeli intel: a huge deficit in western thinking on israel is the erasure of mizrahi jews, a category that includes persian jews. about ~50 percent of the population has some mizrahi background. these people inform the unique identity of israel itself; they also bring rich cultural linguistic knowledge, regarding arab & persian language/culture. many mizrahi jews in israel live within the cultural linguistic traditions of the surrounding countries. transmitted generationally. when we erase MENA jews--sephardim as well--we fail to understand much of israel, including certain 'tribal' aspects, many of which seem foreign to western eyes. by 'tribal', i mean, here, kinship and communal networks, loyalties and social structures that predate and operate alongside formal institutions. and how these communal networks interact w/ one another, both in rivalry and also allegience. israeli bedouins; israeli druze; israeli persian; israeli kurd. we see so much israeli vs. (muslim) arab, often in terms of nationstate boundaries. we often do not see these other communal relationships. to get back to the original point, when we forget MENA israeli jews, we also neglect to more deeply understand an important level of *why* israeli intel is so good. leaving all other questions/debates aside, it's simply a fascinating phenomena in its own right. this ability to gather intel. israelis who carry within their families deep, deep knowledge of all the surrounding regions. as well as cultural & linguistic fluency. MENA jews, by the way, are also more likely to be right-wing than those who come from ashkenazi heritage. this is not a judgment. it's a statement of fact. the more aggressive right-wing israeli governments succeed b/c of MENA jewish support. perhaps an uncomfortable fact for western leftists. on a more abstract level, regardless of what one thinks of recent developments, the israeli ability to gather such intel should be considered every time a westerner ignorantly declares israelis as 'foreigners' to the region. they are most certainly not foreigners. you can argue that what they have achieved is 'bad,' you cannot call them 'foreigners.' they know so much for a reason.

As a friend recently said to me: “MeToo is for privileged girls who take selfies with cupcakes on IWD, but deny that sexual violence and atrocities occurred on October 7”