RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/05/dont-let-free-speech-be-a-victim-of-these-riots/

Here comes the crackdown. After days of rioting and disorder across England, Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to get tough – and not just on those criminal and far-right elements directly involved in the despicable violence that followed the horrendous murder of three young girls in Southport last Monday. The thuggish and racist behaviour of the few has rapidly become a pretext for constraining the liberties of the many.

The UK prime minister, in two Downing Street press conferences last week, unveiled a suite of proposals to try to quell the rioting. He vowed to impose criminal-behaviour orders on certain agitators. He threatened to roll out facial-recognition software and AI to help track people’s movements. Most striking of all, he damned the supposedly malign influence of ‘large social-media firms and those who run them’, and demanded that they get a firmer grip on the posting of misinformation. He also warned that there would be consequences for those who ‘whip up’ disorder by spreading rumours or speculation online.

The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, went further this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. She declared social-media companies to be responsible for both the ‘shocking misinformation that has escalated’ the riots, as well as ‘the deliberate organisation of violence’ on these platforms.

It is entirely possible to loathe the actions of these rioters, while also being alarmed by the government’s response and its implications for free speech. Any crackdown on so-called misinformation, or even on the ‘whipping up of hatred’, is not going to be confined to those who are directly participating in or inciting violence. It will inevitably be wielded against dissenting views more broadly. This is always what happens.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/02/christians-have-become-the-worlds-laughing-stock/

Earlier this month, the Church of England issued new ‘guidance’ for teachers at Anglican schools – all 4,630 of them, attended by around one million children. It asserted the modish nonsense that biological sex is secondary to identity and that a ‘transgender man’ is someone ‘who was assigned female at birth but identifies and lives as a man’. The same goes for a ‘transgender woman’, but in reverse.

The schools practise what they preach, too. Earlier this year, one mother told the Telegraph that her four-year-old daughter, who attends a Church of England school, was having to share a toilet with another little ‘girl’ who apparently has a penis. The child’s sex was hidden from classmates and the kids were, naturally, distraught when they found out. According to parents, the ‘transgender’ child ‘flashed their willy’ at the girls.

I guess we were almost expecting it. You could practically see Justin Welby replacing his rainbow Pride badge with an updated pink-blue-and-white ‘Trans Pride’ one. He likely spends his mornings in front of the mirror, practising telling teachers to challenge ‘outdated terms’ and making sure he gets that moving-with-the-times face just right.

As an Anglican, I am well-accustomed to what passes for the ‘thinkers’ of my church acting like embarrassing parents trying to get down ‘wit’ da kidz’. No indignity seems too great to comprehend now. So what if in Genesis 1:27 it says, ‘So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them’? Get with the programme. Apparently, He created they / them.

Christians in the West are so used to being disappointed by their own alleged spiritual leaders that being picked on has come to seem par for the course. Which is why the robust reaction – though not, of course, from our man in Canterbury – to the Last Supper tableaux at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony last week came as something of a surprise.

Anyone who watched even part of the roughly four-hour omnishambles on Friday will have been struck by the theme of extraordinary silliness-on-steroids. It was, as one user on X described it, ‘the longest, wettest episode of Eurotrash ever’.

At times, though, the whole farce did – as silliness often does these days – shade into something sinister. There was the grotesque presence of drag queens, blackface for misogynists, forever seeking to remind us how ridiculous women are. Then there was the beheaded queen – not a king, one notes, dead men not being ‘sexy’ in the way dead women are. She was used as a prop to a dreary heavy-metal band, who talked straight-faced of their desire ‘to give hope to people’. But it was the apparent parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s mural that pushed the opening ceremony from silliness into truly sinister. It was yet another symptom of one of the great cowardly crusades of our age – the war on Christianity.

While ordinary Christians across the world expressed their outrage, the spiritual leader of my faith had nothing to say about the ordeal. This says a lot about how dangerously out of touch the CofE – what my husband amusingly dubbed ‘the BBC of E’ – is with its own congregation. As Anglican Ink pointed out over the weekend, the Bishop of Worcester was quick to call the ceremony ‘unnecessary and highly offensive… the secular elite would not dream of mocking other faiths in this dreadful manner’. Meanwhile, ‘the Archbishop of Canterbury, who spoke of his anticipation of viewing the opening ceremony, has been silent about the deliberate affront to Christians by the organisers’.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/27/stop-the-ukrainian-meatgrinder/

Nearly eleven months ago, in August 2023, the New York Times reported that U.S. officials had estimated that some 500,000 Russians and Ukrainians had been killed, wounded, or missing in the then 18-month Ukrainian War.

Both Russia and Ukraine underreport their losses. Hundreds of thousands of additional casualties have followed in the 28 months of fighting.

In the West, the mere mention of a negotiated settlement is considered a dangerous appeasement of Russia’s flagrant aggression. In Russia, anything short of victory would be seen as synonymous with the collapse of the Putin regime.

Yet as the war nears two and a half years this summer, some facts are no longer much in dispute.

Controversy still arises over the circumstances of the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Russia charges that the West engineered the “Revolution of Dignity”—an effort to westernize the former Soviet republic, to expand the borders of Europe right to the doorstep of Russia, and eventually to fully arm Ukraine as a member of NATO.

Westerners counter that most Ukrainians wished to be part of Europe and independent from Russian bullying—and they had a perfect right to ask to join either NATO or the EU or both despite anticipated escalating tensions.

After the heroic Ukrainian defeat of the 2022 Russian bid to take Kyiv, there have been few significant territorial gains by either side.

Like the seesaw bloodbath on the Western Front of World War I, neither side has developed the momentum to force the other to negotiate or grant concessions.

As nuclear Russian threats against Europe mount, NATO is seeking to regain deterrence capabilities by boosting defense budgets, incorporating robust frontline nations Sweden and Finland, and uniting over shared concerns about Russian aggression.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/islam/2024/05/the-left-bows-low-and-cries-allahu-akbar/

Odd bedfellows are often found in politics or war, but is the secular Left’s lovey-dovey relationship with the anti-Semitic, genocidal Hamas fanatics in Gaza and, indeed, Islam generally, really such an odd pairing? We are entitled to speculate because there appears  no limit to what it would take for the woke Left to say, along with a majority of other Australians, ‘to hell with Hamas, to hell with Islam’.  Neither the bestial nature of the Hamas terror attack on Israel and the imported Jew-hate that consequently erupted here in Australia, nor the Muslim teen jihadi’s stabbing of a Sydney bishop, have proved to be a threshold too far for the modern Left.

No matter what depths of depravity are reached by Islam, it remains ring-fenced by the impregnable force-field of ‘Islamophobia’, one of the top sins in the Woke catechism and zealously enforced by the Left, even though ‘Islamophobia’ should more accurately be called ‘Islamo-awareness’ rather than an ‘irrational’ fear of Islam. Whilst Islamo-Fascism has a long history (one common enemy in particular united both the  Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Fuhrer, for example), Islamo-Leftism is a relatively new phenomenon in a Left which has traditionally been wary of, indeed hostile to, ‘radical Mohammedans’ (in Trotsky’s words) and their milieu.

So, what is going on with the infatuation of the Left with the barbaric, Jew-killing, gay-hating, women-raping, head-lopping religious fundamentalists of the Islamic faith, and their often silently supportive, more ‘moderate’, brethren?

Islam’s demographic march

Like the rest of the West, Australia is beginning to undergo Islamicisation.  In 1966, Muslims made up fewer than one in a thousand Australians (Islam did not statistically reach even the 0.1 per cent population needed to warrant its own religion category in the Census of that year).  From that invisibly low base, however, the acceleration has been rapid.  By the 2021 Census, Muslims in Australia had reached a population of 813,392 or 3.2 per cent of the total population.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/monsters-on-the-loose-israel-is-the-canary/

Not long ago, the monsters were kept sealed up tight somewhere. Just a few decades ago, western values maintained the international order. But when the monsters escape, as they did on October 7, the monsters go after Jews.

Western values that governed international and domestic norms are being replaced by chaos and authoritarianism around the world, as well as here at home.

First Israel. What makes October 7 so sinister is that the monsters went after Jews in their place of ultimate sanctuary – Israel. They dragged them from their homes and murdered them in Israel instead of Berlin’s Scheunenviertel, the long vanished Jewish quarter, or any of the sites of other pogroms across history.

October 7 was different and illustrated how precarious Israel’s existence is.

The monsters seem to be on the loose around the globe, even in Europe. In eastern Europe the postwar international order is under attack, where even recognized international borders are meaningless.

Perhaps the very term “postwar” no longer has currency. Perhaps we are so far removed from that war which governed so much about the last eight decades – including Israel’s right to exist – that the term “postwar” is obsolete.

The West seems to have forgotten the lessons of 1914 or 1939. Land for peace is back in vogue, despite always being a fool’s gambit – whether in the West Bank, Sudetenland or Donetsk.

Few in the West seem to understand how close to the cliff we are. Too many are too busy staring at their phones.

The only western-style democracy in the middle east is in an existential fight for survival. Meanwhile, domestic anti-Semites are raiding private homes of noted Jewish law professors and bullying students on campus who support Israel’s right to exist.

Initially firmly supporting Israel, since October 7 the radicals who staff this administration – whether at the State Department, White House or Department of Defense – have asserted their influence. Support for Israel in the executive branch is withering.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/01/the-unbearable-sanctimony-of-the-pro-palestine-set/

Britain’s ‘queer’ activists aren’t happy. In fact the poor dears are fuming. They haven’t been this pissed off since the last time some middle-aged woman politely requested the right to shower at the gym without seeing a tumescent knob in the neighbouring cubicle. For one of their cultural icons has done something unconscionable. He’s broken the cardinal moral code of right-on society. He’s deviated from the holy law of the upper-middle class. Brace yourselves: he has agreed to share a space with – my God – someone from Israel.

This is the story of Olly Alexander – a singer, I hear – who has caused much weeping and gnashing of teeth among people with purple hair. All because he has refused to pull out of the Eurovision Song Contest in protest at Israel’s inclusion. Even following receipt of a hectoring missive from Queers for Palestine – the movement that single-handedly killed satire – Mr Alexander said he will perform his track ‘Dizzy’ at the famously camp competition in Sweden in May. For a ‘queer’ to defy Queers for Palestine is tantamount to a Muslim flouting the hadiths. It’s the social wilderness for Olly now.

‘There can be no party with a state committing apartheid and genocide’, said the humourless goons of Queers for Palestine. Perhaps these luvvies would rather party in Gaza. I’m sure homophobic Hamas would enjoy a good dance on their graves. Israel’s inclusion in Eurovision will help to whitewash its ‘crimes against humanity’, they insisted, and thus everyone of good, woke conscience should refuse to take part. Mr Alexander demurred, saying he’d rather use the Eurovision ‘platform’ to bring folk ‘together’ and issue a ‘call for peace’. Oh God, he’s going to writhe around with a Palestine flag, isn’t he?

The moral hubris of these people is mind-blowing. Imagine how drunk on your own righteousness you would have to be, how in love with your own virtuous reflection, to imagine that your decision to boogie or not to boogie could reshape events in the Middle East. The idea that Olly Alexander withdrawing from Eurovision might help save Gaza is only outdone in dumbness by the idea that his remaining in Eurovision to yelp ‘Peace now!’ might help save Gaza. I hate to break it to you, fellas, but no one in Gaza, Israel, Iran, Qatar, America or anywhere else outside of the hip eateries of Dalston gives a solitary shit whether ‘Dizzy’ happens or not.

This bourgeois catfight over whose virtue-signal will be most effective reveals so much about the fashion for boycotting Israel. It’s increasingly clear that the fad for forswearing Israeli music and culture and food is less about liberating Palestine than about liberating one’s own ego. It’s about making a spectacle of one’s own moral rectitude. Being Israel-free has become a shortcut to the righteous highground, a means for movers and shakers to say: ‘See how pure I am?’ The clash between Queers for Palestine and Olly Alexander isn’t over the most effective way to assist Gaza – it’s a virtue-off, a tussle between tossers over who’s the most morally worthy.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/02/14/the-arbitrary-tyranny-of-woke-censorship/

So in Britain in the 2020s, you can be sentenced to jail for making a racist joke about Meghan Markle in private, but you’ll only get a slap on the wrist if you publicly celebrate the racist monsters of Hamas.

That’s the takeaway from yesterday’s judgement in the case of the three young women charged with celebrating Hamas’s barbarism by wearing images of paragliders on a demo shortly after the 7 October pogrom. I have ‘decided not to punish’ you, said Judge Tan Ikram as he handed the women a 12-month conditional discharge. This is the same judge who just a few weeks ago decided he would punish – severely – six retired police officers who had shared racist gags about Markle and others in a private WhatsApp group. He gave them prison sentences, mercifully suspended.

So there you have it. Slur a duchess and you get jail. Big up Hamas and you get a telling off. Rarely has the arbitrary rule of woke censorship been so starkly revealed.

The three women were convicted under the Terrorism Act at Westminster Magistrates’ Court yesterday. They were found to have displayed articles that might arouse suspicion that they are supporters of a proscribed organisation – Hamas. The articles were printouts of stock images of paragliders. On a ‘pro-Palestine’ march in London on 14 October, just a week after Hamas carried out its anti-Semitic rampage, two of the women had paraglider pics taped to their backs and the other had one stuck to her placard.

It wasn’t hard to work out what the pics were a nod to – the Hamas pogromists who got into Israel by air, on paragliders, on 7 October. The Crown Prosecution Service said the display of such images amounted to a ‘glorification of the actions’ of Hamas. The women were found guilty, but Judge Ikram seemed in a forgiving mood. ‘You crossed the line, but it would have been fair to say that emotions ran very high on this issue’, he said. Hence, he ‘decided not to punish’ them. Their conditional discharge means they’ll receive no sentence.