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The delicious media meltdown over Reform’s success The media elites’ hissy fit over the local-election results is a hilarious rage of the entitled. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/05/the-delicious-media-meltdown-over-reforms-success/

The BBC’s mask didn’t so much slip on Friday as completely disintegrate. When Andrea Jenkyns, formerly of the Conservative Party, was elected the Reform UK mayor for Greater Lincolnshire, the Beeb put out one of the weirdest and most telling tweets of recent times. Jenkyns’s victory marks ‘a return to politics for the former Greggs worker and Miss UK finalist’, it said. Greggs worker? Heaven forfend! You could almost hear the sloshing of spilt macchiatos as the Oxbridge tits of the BBC’s social-media team clocked that someone who once served sausage rolls to the hard-up was now a mayor.

It was undiluted class snobbery. It was a sly jeer designed to get the Beeb’s more middle-class readership chortling with gleeful derision at the thought of such riff-raff-coded people now running the country. I was just a ‘Saturday kid’ at Greggs, when ‘I was 16’, protested Jenkyns. Others pointed out that she’s since been a Conservative MP and even a minister in both Boris Johnson’s and Liz Truss’s governments. Doesn’t matter, guys. Thirty-five years ago she heated up Cornish pasties for hungry working-class people and in the eyes of the BBC that makes her a strange and possibly unsuitable person for high politics.

The Beeb deleted the tweet. Maybe someone’s knuckles were rapped. But we could all see what was happening here. For the benefit of non-British readers, Greggs is a bakery that serves piping-hot pastries and sweet treats. It is especially popular on high streets in ‘left behind’ towns. And it has become shorthand among the chattering classes who can’t quite bring themselves to say ‘oik’ anymore. Make no mistake – when the Beeb said ‘former Greggs worker’, rather than ‘former minister’, it was implying that Jenkyns has rubbed shoulders with wrong’uns; with the little folk who not only voted for Brexit but, worse, also prefer a Greggs chicken bake to a salmon and spinach brioche roll from Benugo.

The Commons foreign affairs hanging tribunal Parliament should be investigating its own deafness to facts about Israel Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-commons-foreign-affairs-hanging

A recent hearing of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee demonstrated that Israel’s defenders and its critics appear to inhabit entirely different planets.

The committee, which was taking evidence on “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, had invited two of Israel’s doughtiest champions, the lawyer Natasha Hausdorff and the writer Jonathan Sacerdoti, to address it.

For the committee’s chair, the Labour MP Emily Thornberry, this appeared to be not so much a fact-finding exercise as a tribunal in which Hausdorff and Sacerdoti were in the dock.

Thornberry asked Sacerdoti: “How do you see ideally Gaza in ten years’ time? What would be a good outcome?” Sacerdoti replied that this would be a de-radicalised Gaza whose inhabitants were no longer committed to genocidal acts.

But as Thornberry’s subsequent challenges to him demonstrated, the only good outcome for her seemed to be a Palestinian state.

When it was Hausdorff’s turn, sparks really flew. “What’s the optimistic future for a Palestinian mother in Gaza, what’s the best thing that could happen?” asked Thornberry.

In any moral universe, the best thing that could happen to such a mother would be for her to stop telling her children that their duty was to murder Jews and martyr themselves in the process, as so many Palestinian Arab women boast of doing.

‘I Saw You Come Out of the Church’: The Persecution of Christians, March 2025 by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21584/persecution-of-christians-march

“Our imam had assured us that when you kill a kafir [infidel], Allah rewards one with a Jannah [paradise]… so I wanted to get that Jannah.” — Hanifa Hamiyat, a Muslim woman who poisoned and killed three people: a young Christian couple, as well as her own 18-year-old daughter, who accidentally ate the same poisoned food the Muslim woman had offered to the Christians; Morning Star News, March 28, 2025, Uganda.

“Pure genocide” experienced by Christians at the hands of Muslims, headlines…. – Nigera

“During the time I was there, Ali did bad things with me… He also beat me whenever I used to cry for my parents and told him that I wanted to go back home. I was kept locked in a room most of the time.” — Saba Masih, age 12, kidnapped, and forced by her kidnapper to convert to Islam and marry him. When her father reported the kidnapping to the police, “the police deliberately misstated Saba’s age,” writing down that she was 16, even though her father kept insisting she was 12; Morning Star News, February 7, 2025, Pakistan.

[E]ven in Indonesia, which is often presented as an exceptionally moderate Muslim nation, Christians are being persecuted for blasphemy…. — Morning Star News, March 21, 2025, Indonesia.

Coptic Christians, for some inexplicable reason, must have become the most careless and fire-prone people in the world: more Coptic churches than any other kind seem to keep “accidentally catching fire.” — Coptic Solidarity, March 17, 2025, Egypt.

The following are among the abuses and murders inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of March 2025.

Uganda: On March 16, Hanifa Hamiyat, a Muslim woman poisoned and killed three people: a young Christian couple, as well as her own 18-year-old daughter, who accidentally ate the same poisoned food the Muslim woman had offered to the Christians for sharing Christ with the daughter. The Christian woman she killed was six months pregnant. When local leaders later questioned Hanifa, she confessed to poisoning the food, saying:

“I never intended to kill my daughter, but my plan was to kill the neighbors because of taking my daughter to church during this holy month of Ramadan. Our imam had assured us that when you kill a kafir [infidel], Allah rewards one with a Jannah [paradise] called Firdausi, so I wanted to get that Jannah.”

Europe’s Illegal Land-Grab: Part II by Karys Rhea

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21491/europe-illegal-land-grab-part-ii

[T]he IDF tends to be… focused on immediate, critical threats from Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Iran.

[Many in Israel] demand a zero-tolerance policy towards illegal construction, regardless of EU funding and lawsuits, and have called on the Israeli government to initiate a long-overdue diplomatic effort that will make it clear to the EU that it has established red lines that will be enforced.

It may even be that right-wingers such as [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and others have risen to power precisely because of growing Israeli frustration over fundamental threats such as this one having long gone ignored.

In 1967, Israel fought a monumental six-day war against neighboring Egypt, Syria and Jordan, who attacked the small country with the declared goal of wiping the Jewish state off the map. To the amazement of the international community, Israel unexpectedly emerged victorious, gaining control over multiple territories, including the West Bank. Historically known as “Judea and Samaria,” and before 1948 home to a thriving Jewish population, the West Bank was illegally occupied by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan without international recognition from 1948 to 1967. In that time, Jordan ethnically cleansed the Jewish residents and destroyed dozens of synagogues. It re-named the region the “West Bank,” meaning “west of the Jordan River,” to sever any Jewish connection to the land in an attempt to legitimize its occupation of territory that was never part of its internationally recognized borders.

When Israel wrested control of the West Bank from Jordan in 1967, it refrained from annexing the territory, immediately offering to exchange land for peace. This unprecedented overture was met with the resounding “Three No’s” at the infamous 1967 Arab League Summit in Khartoum: “No peace with Israel. No negotiation with Israel. No recognition of Israel.” Consequently, the West Bank came under Israeli military rule.

Why India and Pakistan are on the brink of war The Kashmir terror attack has brought longstanding tensions to boiling point. Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/01/why-india-and-pakistan-are-on-the-brink-of-war/

Not for the first time, nuclear-armed rivals Pakistan and India have exchanged fire in the disputed territory of Kashmir. The fighting follows last week’s jihadist attack, in which 26 non-Muslim tourists were killed at a popular beauty spot in Pahalgam, Kashmir. Responsibility for the attack has since been claimed by the Resistance Front, an affiliate of the Pakistan-based jihadist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which orchestrated the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 175 people.

Although Islamabad denies any involvement, India’s response shows it doesn’t believe the denials. New Delhi has closed the border to Pakistan, expelled diplomats and ordered almost all Pakistani citizens to leave India. In an unprecedented move, it has also suspended the 65-year-old Indus Waters Treaty, which guarantees water supply to Pakistan and provides 80 per cent of the water Pakistan uses for agriculture. According to reports, the Indian authorities have now arrested 1,500 people in Kashmir and destroyed homes linked to the alleged attackers.

In turn, Pakistan has responded by shutting down airspace and halting trade, all the while insisting that the Pahalgam attack was a ‘false-flag operation’, supposedly staged by India as a pretext for war. Ominously, it has described the decision to restrict water supplies as an ‘act of war’. Pakistan says it has ‘reinforced’ its military on the grounds that an attack by India is ‘imminent’.

While a tentative ceasefire has existed between India and Pakistan since 2021, there are well-founded fears that current tensions will escalate well beyond cross-border gunfire and into a full-blown war. This is far from unimaginable, as India and Pakistan have fought four wars against each other since partition in 1947. A deep religious antagonism – Pakistan is a hardline Islamic society and India increasingly Hindu nationalist – makes them perennially uneasy bedfellows, even without the added complications of disputed borders.

James R. Copland, Charles Yockey EU Regulatory Overreach Threatens American Sovereignty Brussels’s sweeping new environmental and labor mandates are an extraterritorial power grab. Congress and the executive branch should push back.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/eu-green-deal-parliament-environmental-labor-mandates

Most Americans pay little heed to the machinations of the European Parliament, the European Commission, or the various regulatory bodies of the European Union. They should. As part of its expansive EU Green Deal, Brussels bureaucrats have been working to put American companies that do business in Europe—or even those that merely do business with companies that do business in Europe—under the thumb of onerous environmental and human rights standards. This extraterritorial regulatory power grab would apply even when the European diktats directly conflict with American law.

The threat of overseas governments regulating American businesses is the “fifth horseman of the regulatory state,” to borrow a framing one of us (Copland) used in a 2018 City Journal article. In that article, subsequently expanded into a book, Copland described how regulation by administration, regulation by prosecution, regulation by litigation, and progressive anti-federalism combined to control huge swathes of economic activity largely untethered by national elections. To those four, we can now add: regulation from abroad.

This fifth horseman poses dangers similar to those of progressive anti-federalism. If we should worry about local officials in, say, New York City or San Mateo County, California affecting national policy, then we should be at least as concerned about far-reaching regulatory efforts from foreign governments that purport to transform American corporate governance.

Turkey: Sweeping Arrests, Torture, Censorship by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21582/turkey-arrests-torture-censorship

On March 19, just days before the March 23 primaries of Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu — the CHP’s leading candidate who was thought by many possibly to win the next presidential election against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — was arrested on contested charges of “corruption and terrorism.”

A day earlier, on March 18, Imamoglu’s university degree was revoked, “citing ‘nullity’ and ‘clear error’ as grounds for cancellation… The decision affects Imamoglu and 27 other individuals whose academic credentials have now been invalidated….”

“All of the detainees, absolutely all of them, were tortured terribly while being detained. They were tortured terribly in the detention vehicle, while being taken to Gayrettepe [police station]. There are young people among them who are in really bad shape. What is terrible is that there is nothing [as evidence against them] in their investigation files, not even a photo against them. ….. [T]hese are revenge trials. The prosecutors who took testimonies of detainees yesterday, today do not talk with the lawyers, in any way… This is not a [proper] judiciary.” — Sezgin Tanrıkulu, MP from the CHP opposition party, March 27, 2025.

Meanwhile, Erdogan’s regime has arrested many dissident journalists and continues to apply financial and judicial pressure on media outlets that refuse to operate as mouthpieces for the regime.

“There was no chance for a defense…. The decision appears prepared beforehand.” — Elif Taşdöğen, attorney, medyanews.net, January 22, 2025.

Meanwhile, the government continues to pardon and release imprisoned Turkish Hizbullah terrorists.

The Erdogan regime’s support for Islamic terror groups such as Hamas and ISIS (Islamic State) is also well-documented…..

Meanwhile, do Europeans really want the possibility of up to 87 million more Turkish citizens flooding Europe?

On March 19, just days before the March 23 primaries of Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu — the CHP’s leading candidate who was thought by many possibly to win the next presidential election against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — was arrested on contested charges of “corruption and terrorism.”

New German government to include first-ever Jewish woman minister Karin Prien, currently an education minister at the state level and spokesperson for her party’s Jewish Forum, is only second Jewish federal minister appointed since end of WWII

https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-german-government-to-include-first-ever-jewish-woman-minister/

Incoming German prime minister Friedrich Merz has named Karin Prien as education minister, the first Jewish woman appointed as a minister in the country, and only the second Jewish minister overall, since the Holocaust.

Prien, a lawyer who currently serves as education minister of the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, is a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union party, whose National Board she co-chairs. Prien serves as spokeswoman for the CDU’s Jewish Forum.

The cabinet named Monday is expected to enter office on May 6.

Born in Amsterdam, where her maternal grandparents moved from Germany before Hitler’s rise to power, Prien moved to Germany when she was young and took citizenship there at 26.

Though she was not raised religious, she grew up conscious that members of her father’s family had been killed in the Holocaust. When Prien became a German citizen, she said, it was for her mother “a big to-do, and she didn’t really like it.”

In 2016, after a visit to the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem at age fifty, Prien began to speak openly about her Jewish heritage.

Three years later, when a German satirical party fielded candidates bearing the last names of key figures in the Nazi regime, Prien criticized the gag, saying, “To claim that one wants to fight right-wing populists in this way is either naive, a lie or at least not very intelligent.”

The incoming education minister has returned on several occasions to the theme of antisemitism following the Hamas terror group’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which started the ongoing war.

China caves on 125% tariff for major US export after White House predicts Beijing can’t keep up

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/china-caves-on-125-tariff-for-major-us-export-after-white-house-predicts-beijing-can-t-keep-up/ar-AA1DQXAe?

China waived a 125% tariff on ethane imports from the U.S. on Tuesday, according to a report from Reuters.

China had initially imposed the tariff earlier this month as part of its retaliation against President Donald Trump’s Liberation Day tariff campaign. China is responsible for purchasing roughly half of America’s ethane exports each year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Chinese companies that rely on U.S. ethane include Satellite Chemical, SP Chemicals, Sinopec, Sanjiang Fine Chemical and Wanhua Chemical Group, while the key U.S. exporters are Enterprise Products Partners and Energy Transfer.

Ethane joins a growing list of products that China has granted tariff exemptions for amid the ongoing trade war with Washington.

Spain’s blackouts are a disaster made by Net Zero Renewables have made our energy grids dangerously unreliable.Fraser Myers

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/29/spains-blackouts-are-a-disaster-made-by-net-zero/

‘We face a long night’, warned Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez yesterday evening, after much of Spain, Portugal and south-west France were plunged into darkness by the worst power outage in European history. Tens of millions of people were left without electricity. Trains were halted, planes were grounded and the internet was shut down. Modern life ground to a halt across the Iberian Peninsula. Although the exact causes of the blackout have yet to be declared, we can be certain of one thing: the risk of such outages will only get worse as we embark on the path towards Net Zero.

Spain and Portugal are increasingly reliant on solar and wind power. Renewables were supplying 80 per cent of electricity just before the outages. The blackouts were triggered by a rapid loss of power – of around 15GW, the equivalent of 60 per cent of Spain’s national electricity demand. It is not clear what exactly led to this loss, although a cyber attack has been ruled out. What matters is that a renewable-heavy grid is far less able to absorb this kind of shock than one that runs on traditional energy sources.

Coal and gas plants, or hydroelectric dams, have what is called ‘inertia’ built into the system, whereas wind and solar do not. The spinning turbines used in traditional energy generation will not immediately grind to a halt when there is a fault, acting as a buffer against power outages. ‘In a low-inertia environment’, explains energy expert Kathryn Porter, ‘if you have had a significant grid fault in one area, or a cyber attack, or whatever it may be, the grid operators therefore have less time to react. That can lead to cascading failures if you cannot get it under control quickly.’

It is not as if Europe’s leaders are unaware of these risks. The International Energy Agency (IEA), which vociferously promotes Net Zero in public, circulated a confidential paper to world leaders last week, ahead of the UK government’s summit on the future of energy security. According to Bloomberg, the IEA warned that ‘systemic challenges will emerge from balancing increasingly renewable-dominated grids’. For energy systems to work, supply needs to be matched precisely to demand, or ‘balanced’, which is made infinitely more difficult with renewables, which are so variable and unpredictable – a fact green ideologues are usually reluctant to acknowledge.