RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/31/edinburghs-shameful-cancellation-of-jewish-comedians/

Two Jewish comedians, Rachel Creeger and Philip Simon, had their Edinburgh Fringe Festival slots cancelled last week thanks to alleged ‘safety concerns’. Simon was also dropped from a second venue in Edinburgh for his social-media posts calling, among other things, for the return of the Israeli hostages.

I wish I was making this up, but in 2025, being Jewish is considered a safety risk. Whistlebinkles, the venue that was slated to host Creeger and Simon’s gigs, decided to cancel the shows when bar staff expressed fears of feeling ‘unsafe’. These concerns were reportedly raised when the venue was told it would need extra police protection to guarantee the safety of Jewish acts.

Rachel is a friend of mine. I’ve seen her show, Ultimate Jewish Mother, and it mainly features laughs about motherhood and how to make good chicken soup. She is the only female Orthodox Jew on the comedy circuit and the only dangerous thing about her is that she may drown you in love and cuddles. Each year at the Edinburgh Fringe, she hosts Friday night dinners for other Jews and makes sure there is kosher food for everyone who needs it. It makes me sick to think her presence at a comedy venue might lead to anyone feeling ‘unsafe’.

Philip Simon was not only taken off the line-up at Whistlebinkles, he was then barred from the Banshee Labyrinth, too. The management cited its ‘duty of care to our customers and staff members’. Having monitored his social media, the venue said it was ‘inappropriate’ to host anyone whose ‘views and actions align with the rhetoric and symbology of groups associated with humanitarian violations’ – ie, Israel. The supposedly offending tweets included images from a vigil for Israeli hostages, a call to ‘stand strong against terror’ and a plea not to forget the rape victims of 7 October 2023. All demands for peace, in other words.

‘I am still processing the concept that in 2025 I can be cancelled just for being Jewish’, Simon said in a statement on Saturday. His and Creeger’s cancellations are the obvious, if alarming, outgrowth of the campaigns to cancel anyone with any connections to Israel.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/21/posh-twats-for-palestine/

I knew it. As soon as I saw that cast member of the Royal Opera House smugly unfurl his Palestine flag, I knew he’d be some privileged they / them with either blue blood or blue hair. And I was right. His name’s Daniel Perry, he’s a they / them, he was educated at a £48,000-a-year high school, and he calls himself a ‘queer dance artist’. Now all we need to discover is that he has ADHD and he really will be a walking checklist of middle-class twattishness.

Mr Perry has got the pro-Palestine set salivating with infantile glee after he whipped out his flag during the curtain call for Verdi’s Il Trovatore on Saturday evening. A stage manager tried to snatch it from him but Perry yanked it back with all the wild-eyed frenzy of a bloke determined to trend online. He got his way. He’s being gushed over by the internet’s Sun-starved army of armchair Israelophobes. ‘Hero!’, they yelp from their bedrooms, the unbelievably sad bastards.

The Telegraph has Perry’s backstory. He attended an eye-wateringly expensive school in leafy Hertfordshire. He’s nonbinary – sorry, they’re nonbinary. He’s a self-styled ‘queer’ dancer. He seems blissfully unaware that if he ever set foot in Gaza the only pirouette he’d be doing is a mid-air one as Hamas hurled him off a tall building. He recently wore a ‘Free Palestine’ t-shirt to a performance of Cabaret, the musical about the Weimar Republic that foreshadows the rise of the Nazis and the burning of the Jews.

It didn’t take any special insight on my part to guess that this flag-waving irritant would turn out to be a knob of the most insufferably bourgeois variety. Because they’re all like that. Perry belongs to that most vexing clique of preening ‘activists’ – let’s call them Posh Twats for Palestine.

They’re everywhere. Venture into London on a Saturday afternoon and you’ll soon be swarmed by affluent tits in keffiyehs talking rubbish about Israel. Our leafier campuses have been all but colonised by plummy youths screaming the new lie (‘Israel is committing genocide!’) with the same demented fervour with which they once hollered the old lie (‘Transwomen are women!’). The am-dram arseholes of Palestine Action loved to splash around their red paint while wanging on in cut-glass tones about the unholy wickedness of Israel. The government calls them terrorists but they’re something far worse: rich theatre kids.