An aerial view of Stansted Airport

This week the Labour government announced that it supported the plan to expand Heathrow airport with a third runway as well as to build the East Thames crossing, an additional road tunnel (or two) between Essex and Kent, east of London. The former in particular had been shelved by the former Tory government which had originally supported it, as a result of the contraction of air travel during the Covid pandemic. However, they’re both insane, wasteful, destructive projects which will cause huge amounts of disruption for years to come, and in the case of Heathrow, be bad for the planet at a time when the climate is already starting to collapse faster than the forecasts of 20 years ago said it would. George Monbiot tackles the issue in today’s Guardian; he accuses the new government of behaving like Liz Truss when she was PM, using insults such as “time-wasting nimbys”. In opposition, Starmer congratulated climate campaigners who won a legal victory against Heathrow’s expansion, proclaiming that “there is no more important challenge than the climate emergency” in a tweet from February 2020. Today, his chancellor Rachel Reeves tells us that growth trumps other things.

The air travel lobby has been pushing hard for the expansion of Heathrow for decades; they tell us we risk losing out to Paris, Amsterdam or Frankfurt because our sole hub airport is at full capacity. The upshot, they tell us, is that planes are circulating in the air waiting for a runway slot, producing more pollution, and a third runway will enable them to land more quickly. That sounds convincing, until you hear the government telling us that this is all about growth. The way growth works is that flights will increase, until that new runway is full to capacity as well and the owners will be demanding more of west London to bulldoze for yet another new runway (Heathrow’s own website tells us that the plans make way for another 260,000 flights annually). We do have other airports, of course, notably Stansted which is in the middle of the countryside with fairly good road links which are not full of local traffic as a result of being within, or right on the edge of, a big city. The region around London has three other airports with a full-size runway each; two of these overwhelmingly offer flights to Europe, while Heathrow largely offers long-haul flights. Connecting these up better would enable people to fly into Heathrow, take a train to Luton and then another plane to a smaller European destination while Heathrow concentrated on the long haul flights; right now there is no direct link between any of London’s airports except between Gatwick and Luton. But really, we should not be building opportunities for more air travel when the planet needs us to be flying a lot less.

Having worked in air cargo, I know that the cargo infrastructure there is bursting at the seams; it long ago outgrew the actual cargo area inside the airport estate, much of it now being based outside it on the Stanwell Road. Facilities are miserly, with two toilets between all the truck drivers, some of whom (at least before Brexit) had travelled from Europe. Much of the cargo that formerly went on passenger planes out of Heathrow is now going on dedicated cargo planes from Stansted (where facilities for drivers are equally dire, though waiting times are usually much shorter). The new runway would be located over part of the M25, with other local roads ripped up or rerouted; that stretch of the M25 is the widest (six lanes each way) and probably busiest with local traffic, airport traffic and long-distance traffic all in competition. The western route around London is preferred by some drivers as it avoids the toll at the Dartford crossing on the other side; the government has no plans to remove this. The expansion will require the destruction of an entire village (Longford) and large parts of other neighbouring villages, such as Colnbrook, Harmondsworth and Sipson, and the new flight paths will blight other areas currently unaffected by aircraft noise, such as Harlington, Cranford and Heston; some of these areas also contain a lot of airport-related industries, such as hotels and distribution depots. Two main roads will have to be rerouted, with the new arrangement providing a short cut across Colnbrook between the M25 and M4, something the current arrangement prevents, freeing up local roads for local traffic.

As for the east Thames crossing, I have not yet heard an answer as to how they plan to improve links between the A2 and A20 corridors east of the M25. Currently, there are two dual carriageways (the A229 and A249) with complicated, slow, roundabout-based interchanges and there seem to be no plans to change that. The main route to the port of Dover and the Channel Tunnel nowadays is the M20, not the M2, and cross-channel freight has to go via Maidstone to queue for customs clearance on the M20; the A2 is mostly used by local traffic to north Kent. The danger of building another crossing east of Dartford is that people going to Dover, the Channel Tunnel and elsewhere in south Kent will use it to avoid congestion at Dartford, causing more congestion at these junctions (and along other local roads, such as the A227 and A228) while seeking to reach the M20. The major cause of congestion at Dartford is the intermittent closure of one of the tunnels to escort petrol tankers; all that is needed is an extra tunnel so that this can be carried out without disrupting normal traffic. This will have the added benefit of permitting three lanes in each direction when the bridge is closed because of the weather or maintenance.

Finally, we have to address the London-centricity of these plans. A major and increasing source of discontent for people in the north of England is that infrastructure investment always goes to London and the surrounding area; transport links between the two groups of cities on either side of the Pennines consists of one motorway, one unelectrified double-track rail line and a selection of two-lane mountain roads, one of the better used of which is in danger of falling down a hillside. Northerners often say that you can tell which trains are going to London as they are the modern electric ones with more carriages. By throwing yet more money at infrastructure in the wealthy south while continuing to neglect the north, Labour risks losing the voters it won back from the Tories in 2024 to Reform come the next election, as opinion polls published this week suggest they might. We cannot have growth solely based on endless roadbuilding and airport expansion; we need industries which can sustain themselves and there’s a limit to how much productive land we can spare, but if Labour are going to invest in infrastructure, it should be in parts of the UK that aren’t already smothered with it.

Image source: Danielson8181, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) 4.0 licence.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Post-Covid transport policy and ‘Eco-Ableism’
• What use is Manston? A geography lesson for corporate ‘local’ media
• Why are there conspiracy theories around traffic reduction schemes?
• An unfortunately necessary upgrade
• Relaxing drivers’ hours is a bad idea

Elsie Dot Stancombe and Bebe King, two of the girls killed in the July 2024 Southport massacre

Last week Axel Rudakubana, an 18-year-old man born in Cardiff of Rwandan parentage, pled guilty to three murders and multiple counts of attempted murder and carrying a knife in connection with last August’s Southport massacre in which three young girls were stabbed to death at a dance class in the town near Liverpool. The crime led to rumours being spread that the attacker was an immigrant, which was a pretext for racist riots in cities across the country. Rudakubana was sentenced to detention “at Her Majesty’s pleasure”, the juvenile equivalent of a life sentence, with a minimum ‘tariff’ of 52 years, which means he will not be considered for parole until he is 70. (A juvenile, as he was a few days shy of his 18th birthday at the time of the attack, cannot be sentenced to a whole-life sentence.) Much has been revealed about Rudakubana’s violent past and his obsession with violence, but the same people who cheered on the summer riots last year have still not let go of their belief that Rudakubana was a Muslim, or motivated by “Islamist ideology” (when he was brought up Christian and no evidence exists that he converted), or that the incident has something to do with immigration because his father was a Rwandan refugee in the mid-1990s. The prime minister, meanwhile, has responded with the promise of a public inquiry and that nothing will stand in the way of making sure such a crime cannot happen again; in other words, he will surely find something to ban or some obstacle put in the way of people living their lives to make sure that particular horse cannot bolt again.

It has been reported that Rudakubana was referred to Prevent, the scheme for intercepting and diverting people who have (or appear to have) started on a path which may lead to involvement in terrorism, several times since age 13, when he was expelled from his secondary school after declaring his intention to take a knife to school to attack an alleged bully, and each time declared unsuitable for their intervention because he appeared to be motivated by no particular ideology. It’s no secret that Prevent was first aimed at Muslims, and it’s well-known that Muslim parents fear their children being referred to it on the basis of a political opinion they have expressed in class about something like Palestine. It’s also a fact that right-wing securocrats have poured scorn on the suggestion that anyone but Muslims poses a major threat, dismissing it as wokery or “political correctness gone mad”, despite the declining influence of groups like Al-Qa’ida and then ISIS and the decreasing potency of the actual terrorist attacks inspired by them (stabbings and vehicle rammings rather than shootings and bombings, which suggests the lack of both know-how and access to materials) and the increasing frequency of incidents associated with extreme misogyny and the “Incel” subculture. Prevent had not been allowed to keep itself up to date since the “war on terror” years in which it was set up, thus it had no means of diverting people driven by more straightforward hatred than ideology.

Some of the same people who hyped the “rape gang” controversy out of nowhere two weeks ago have clung to the lies they spun during the riots last summer. Axel Rudakubana is Black, therefore it’s about immigration, as they see no difference between immigrants and their descendants born here (some of whom are of mixed parentage). If his father had not been granted asylum quite legitimately more than ten years before he was born, this atrocity would not have happened; the idiot logic on which so much anti-immigrant policymaking is based. They tell us over and over again that these things happen because we “allow people to immigrate who do not share our values”, regardless of whether the perpetrator was ever able to immigrate or ever had a choice about being born here, let alone where their parents or even grandparents had been born, or whether that hostility was born from the violent racism Black and Asian people suffered for much of the three decades after they began settling here. The simple fact is that school shootings have become a routine fact of life in the USA where guns are readily available and some young people will be living in homes where there are automatic weapons. That is not true in the UK, but everyone is aware of them and when people know that is one way of expressing their anger, the likelihood that someone will do it increases. It is a case of the “genie being out of the bottle” which cannot be shoved back in again.

Some more mainstream figures have been making some equally ridiculous suggestions. On Tuesday, the home secretary Yvette Cooper promised a public inquiry into, among other things, “how Axel Rudakubana was able to murder three girls at dance class despite being on the authorities’ radar” according to the Guardian’s Pippa Crerar. The answer is that up until the day of the crime, he had not committed any crime serious enough to merit restricting his access to children; all his violence had been directed at adults or his own schoolmates, not children much younger than himself. We put those sorts of restrictions on known child molesters, not tearaways with morbid obsessions. The government complain that a video of a bishop being stabbed in Sydney last year was still available on Twitter everywhere except Australia; the video would have been copied numerous times making banning every copy of it impossible, and his being able to view it before setting off probably was not the reason he did the murders anyway. The previous government has already legislated onerous requirements for operators of “social media” websites to ensure the safety of teenagers who might use them, resulting in a number of forums either blocking British users or shutting down, as they cannot afford to comply (of course, the major players such as Facebook can and the unscrupulous will not); it has been observed that the government reacts to every such incident by looking for ways to control the Internet rather than to improve the services which might have been able to help Rudakubana well before he committed these murders. That, of course, would cost money.

Alice Dasilva Aguiar, aged nine, murdered by Axel Rudakubana

In her interview with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC1 yesterday, the Tory opposition leader Kemi Badenoch blamed the attack on people who “despite being here from childhood or born here, they’re not integrating into the rest of their society; they hate their country, and they’re being told that everything about the UK is terrible”. Kuenssberg pointed to the Rudakubanas’ involvement in the church and their son’s Christian upbringing and asked Badenoch what her evidence was that the crimes were anything to do with lack of integration; she responded with an irrelevant aside about rape gangs, and by claiming that it was a ‘problem’ that every time ‘we’ try to “have these conversations”, they were shut down by demands for evidence. The BBC noted that the judge who sentenced Rudakubana did not mention his supposed lack of integration. Rather, this was a loner who had developed obsessions and fascinations with violence and such people exist among many other ethnic groups as well. Kuenssberg, despite asking her for evidence, did not make that point at all, nor did she reinforce the point that claims need evidence.

Finally the same people looking to blame immigrants are also casting blame at Axel Rudakabana’s family (with one racist numbskull on Twitter drawing attention to how his innocent brother’s wheelchair was funded by public donations); there is an assumption that they must have known and said nothing over the five supposed years between his expulsion from his first secondary school and the July 2024 murders. They are actually facing a police investigation for failing to report one of the later incidents; what we do know is that his father had intervened to prevent him going off armed in a taxi to carry out another violent attack. If he gave up reporting, it’s because he had given up expecting any results. Peter Hitchens tells us he has a “sneaking suspicion” that Rudakubana’s sudden change of personality at age 13 was due to marijuana use, but offers absolutely no evidence; given that he has been arrested numerous times since age 13, he would have had at least one drug test, so surely the police will know if he had used cannabis or even if he was acquainted with any dealer, since you can’t simply buy the drug at the corner shop.

But ultimately, the Southport massacre was one person’s idea from beginning to end and that person is Axel Rudakubana, and he is now in prison where he is no danger to society. It’s not his family’s fault, it’s not his school’s fault, nor the fault of other Black people, or Rwandans, let alone asylum seekers, Channel boat migrants or Muslims, none of which he was. By the same token, the fault for the August riots lie with none of those people either, nor even with Keir Starmer who followed legal protocol by refusing to divulge more information than was appropriate, but with those who participated, those who spread the misinformation that fed them and those who made excuses. If it’s a time to face up to anything, it’s the destruction of the services which might have guided him away from his fascination with destruction, and maybe kept him off the streets and safe while doing so. If our government want to honour the three girls who were murdered and make it less likely that such an atrocity might ever happen again, they might like to put some of those things back in place and reconfigure Prevent to tackle the growing tendency of extreme online misogyny. To people like Matt Goodwin, Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch, it’s an opportunity to talk about the same things they’ve been talking about for years, diverting everything onto. Rudukabana was Black, therefore it’s a race issue and by extension an immigration issue rather than an issue of misogyny and our broken education and mental health systems. One can be reacted to with violence; the other will take time and money.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Musk, Goodwin, racism and rape
• The benefits of learning Jewish history
• They weren’t protests
• Racist thugs on the rampage
• The ‘elitism’ of mere thought

Lucy Lowe, a 16-year-old girl murdered in 2000 by an abusive older boyfriend and pimp in Telford

The past week or so we’ve seen the incoming American presidency flex its muscles by threatening countries hitherto thought to be their allies, with Donald Trump proposing the annexation of Greenland, a country that is a self-governing territory of NATO member Denmark, and Elon Musk shooting off his mouth about the British political system which he clearly knows nothing about; he tells us that Reform will form the next government, while also telling that party that Nigel Farage is not the leader he wants (if it is to have millions of pounds of his money) because he refuses to entertain the football hooligan “Tommy Robinson”. Musk has also called for the ‘liberation’ of this country from its ‘tyrannical’ government, while both Reform and Tory politicians have taken the opportunity to reopen the issue of the “grooming gangs”, groups of mostly Pakistani criminals who lured young teenage girls, mostly from poor white families in provincial towns, with sweets, drinks, rides in fast cars and promises of love and then raped them, and allowed their friends to do the same. The agenda of Reform and other ‘populist’ Right politicians here has been to portray these men not just as the criminal scum they are, and as most people including most Pakistanis and most Muslims consider them to be, but as typical Pakistanis, acting out of prejudices that all Pakistanis and most Muslims share.

To answer some of Musk’s claims first: we have a political system here, a democratic process, which is the focus of much criticism but we have elections and indeed we had one last July. It was widely discussed on his ‘X’ social media platform (i.e. Twitter) so I’m sure he heard about it. Reform gained five MPs from nothing. Labour won a parliamentary majority and the majority of the popular vote went to progressive parties, including Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists. Reform and the Tories, combined, lost. Farage’s parties have never gained as much as 15% of the popular vote, not least because Farage is a one-trick pony who diverts every discussion onto immigration. As in most democratic countries, we have elections every few years. In the US’s case, it’s four; in ours, it’s usually five. As for our system being ‘tyrannical’, our system has benefits the US’s does not, chiefly that outside Scotland and Wales, there is one law for everyone and laws do not change when you go from town to town and there are fewer opportunities than in the US for people to make a living telling others what to do. We do have local councils, of course, but they are circumscribed in what they can do; they cannot make laws as such, only administrative decisions. They don’t tell people what they can and can’t grow in their own backyard, for example, and we do not have “homeowners’ associations” doing the same. The US’s constitution has a poor history of supporting ordinary people’s rights and freedoms; it defends the right of those with power and wealth to use them, and the judges Republicans have recently stacked the Supreme Court with have heightened that tendency.

Musk also fails to understand why Nigel Farage did not want to allow “Tommy Robinson” anywhere near his party, let alone have influence over it. The answer is that Robinson is a thug with a substantial criminal record, and a history of self-serving, counterproductive publicity stunts which on one occasion nearly caused the collapse of an actual trial of a grooming gang. His fans, including some in the “Reform” party, portray him as a political prisoner; he is in prison currently because of having been held in contempt for persistently repeating disproven claims about a child, putting the child and his family in danger. Political parties need to be respectable to get votes from people who are not thugs and have a modicum of intelligence and education; allowing “Tommy Robinson” in would have the opposite effect.

Musk’s claims have resulted in the “grooming gang” issue exploding out of nowhere this week; there has not been a new case nor any other reason why it should be in the news. There was actually an inquiry into various kinds of sexual abuse ten years ago; its findings were not acted upon by the former government, which now accuses Labour of complicity, while populists claim it was not good enough because it did not treat the Pakistani gang angle as some sort of issue unto itself nor reach the racist conclusion they wanted. We now have Reform MPs with a private school education and a background in finance posing as champions of the working class, yet they rarely if ever use that phrase without putting ‘white’ in front. They weren’t doing so when Thatcher was destroying the industries that fed those communities forty years ago; Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage were both adults during the miners’ and steelworkers’ strikes of the 1980s. Were they on the picket lines? Of course not; Farage, after leaving Dulwich College in 1982, was in a cushy job trading metals for Drexel Burnham Lambert, while Rupert Lowe was working with his buddy Nick Leeson at Barings Bank. The only connection they have with the working class is a fondness for pitting some working-class people against others by exploiting resentment and prejudice.

Rupert Lowe last week stood up in the Commons and put a litany of loaded questions (which he said had also been submitted in writing) to the government, among them demands that any relatives of members of the gangs who he presumed were complicit because they knew should also be deported. Obviously he’s a banker, not a lawyer, but in this country you cannot presume guilt by association; you have to prove that someone knew or was complicit beyond reasonable doubt, and besides, mandatory reporting for professionals — not ordinary people — was proposed in Alexis Jay’s report ten years ago, and not delivered. He demanded that visas for Pakistanis and aid to Pakistan be paused until the government there agrees to accept the deportees; the fact is that the gangs were formed here, largely by people born here, whose parents or grandparents (not all of whom are still alive) were innocent of any such wrongdoing when they left Pakistan, that many of the original migrants from Pakistan were Pakistani for fewer than 20 years between independence (at which point they may have only just moved to Pakistan from elsewhere in former British India) and moving to the UK (indeed, many never relinquished their British citizenship), so their connection to Pakistan is tenuous, and that British aid to Pakistan is largely aimed at assisting minority communities, including Christians. As demonstrated in the case of Shamima Begum, a theoretical and unclaimed right to nationality of any country is not the same as actual nationality, something British politicians are well aware of.

These people also respond with contempt to any mention of racism in regard to their sudden ‘concern’ for rape victims. Well, if you are only interested in this issue when the perpetrators appear to be Pakistanis, or as a pretext to shout about “mass immigration”, it’s reasonable to presume that your motive is racism. Abuse of all sorts has been exposed in a variety of settings, including institutional, from time to time over many years and the same people now frothing about “Pakistani gangs raping our white working-class girls” were nowhere to be seen or heard when previous cases of organised abuse were uncovered. Their demand that we withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights will make some of these abuses more difficult to escape, because those rights safeguard everyone’s right to a family life, to dignity, to freedom, which includes the disabled people, the children and others most likely to find themselves institutionalised. They accuse Pakistanis of looking down on “our girls” and allege that the police and social services failed to act “because they feared being called racist”; any member of any visible minority who has had dealings with the police will know how absurd this claim is, while those who supported the victims will tell you that police and other professionals harboured the same views and believed the same myths as the offenders, and were liable to blame victims and their families.

The members of the grooming gangs, or rape gangs, whatever we call them, were criminals. Many of them had prior criminal records and were involved in other criminal activities at the same time as they carried out their sexual exploitation. They are not the only organised crime outfits to also abuse and exploit women and girls; the difference with some of the others is that the exploitation is inter-racial rather than intra-racial (i.e. of girls and women of their own background). Statistics on sexual crime show that in fact Asian men’s representation among sexual offenders is proportional to their share of the general population, if not lower (bear in mind that sexual assault generally is underreported); it is not sexual abuse per se but this particular modus operandi that is peculiar to them. While some of them may have appeared respectable, all of their activities are contrary to Islamic law on numerous levels. It’s against Islam to deceive people (such as by posing as a lover or friend to ensnare someone in order to harm them), to separate a child from their family without reason, to supply or traffic alcohol, to supply or traffic any other narcotic for recreational use, to kidnap or assault anyone, to have sex or sexual contact outside marriage, to rape anyone, to organise the rape of anyone. These are all crimes, and criminals and criminal gangs exist in a variety of communities, some of which abide by religious laws that explicitly or implicitly forbid such behaviour. It does not make the whole community guilty, nor does it put any onus on the other members of that community to somehow prove their opposition.

Finally, one of the most odious of those making political capital of the grooming gang situation is the academic turned demagogue Matthew Goodwin. In his speech to the Reform party conference posted as a video on Twitter, he claimed that the British people had had “a new religion” shoved down their throats whereby people were required to accept that the majority was bad and the minority good, but that “this time it’s a little different; it’s the Pakistani Muslim minority that has been abusing the majority”, offering examples of three young girls who were killed by men linked to such gangs, including Lucy Lowe (pictured above) whose older ‘boyfriend’, although he behaved in similar ways, was not part of a gang, and Charlene Downs whose two abusers, although from Muslim backgrounds, were not Pakistanis. So this is open racism, the stereotyping of a whole community according to a small number of its worst members and lumping in all Muslims with Pakistanis, being delivered at Reform’s conference, without interruption from party officials and applauded by his audience. As for why the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the UK and George Floyd in the US got more press coverage, it is because the police who killed George Floyd and failed to bring Steven Lawrence’s murderers to justice for decades or ever are paid for by the public to protect all of us. It was demonstrations by the Black community that brought these issues to public consciousness; are they supposed to sit quietly because their long-standing oppression is less important than the abuse of white girls in other parts of the country, or the world?

So no, it’s not racist to be concerned, outraged even, about the existence of gangs grooming and sexually abusing girls. However, if you are only interested in the matter when the girls are your colour and the perpetrators not, and you talk in a way that suggests that this is all there is to the matter when it is not, when you conflate a crime with one specific modus operandi in order to incriminate and foment hostility to the ethnic group associated with it, and you refer to white women and girls but nobody else as “our girls”, that suggests that your motive is racism rather than any sincere concern for victims of sexual abuse.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Nigel Farage will not be Prime Minister
• The benefits of learning Jewish history
• Racist thugs on the rampage
• It’s Islamophobia, thank you
• Ask a loaded question …

Members of the White Helmets arrive in the Ummayad mosque in Damascus for Friday prayers

Last week the 53-year-old Assad dynasty in Syria was finally overthrown by one of the rebel militias which had broken out of Idlib, a city near the Turkish border in the north-west, two weeks or so before. This brings to an end a civil war which began at the time of the Arab Spring, 12 years ago, where mass popular demonstrations led to long-standing dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia ending, though as we have seen since, only briefly. Bashar al-Assad and some of his close family have fled to Russia, though others have been captured and some already killed. The forces that now rule the country opened up all of Assad’s prisons when they liberated a city; the liberation of Damascus itself was accompanied by that of the infamous Sednaya prison north of the city, where people had been held in some cases for over 40 years, in one case for beating an Assad family member in an equestrian competition and in another for refusing to bomb civilians in Hama following the 1982 uprising, where some of the female prisoners had borne children after having been raped by guards and where some of the prisoners had been massacred as the rebels closed in. (The equally infamous Tadmor prison, in the desert east of Damascus, had been destroyed by ISIS in 2015.) While ordinary Syrians celebrate in the streets, overseas supporters of the Assad regime spout the usual conspiracy theories about the former rebel fighters being “al-Qa’ida”, backed by Israel or the US, or both, and accusing Muslim supporters of the revolution of being concerned only for “the supremacy of their sect” and discarding Palestine as soon as this was achieved.

Three things differentiate the fall of Assad from other recent regime changes that happened in the Arab world in the past 20 years or so. First, unlike most of the Arab Spring revolutions, Assad was defeated in a war. He did not beat a tactical political retreat, with the president resigning and allowing a free election or two while the old guard remained in positions of power, such as the top ranks of the military, the judiciary and in political parties that were allowed to contest elections. The forces that drove him out (after his former Iranian and Russian allies deserted him) are now in full control, albeit with Israel strengthening their occupation of the Golan region, and can set the conditions by which any future political parties operate. It is possible that some senior officials from the old regime that were unable to flee will be killed; given the enormity of some of their crimes, this is no bad thing. Second, unlike in Libya and, in the more distant past, Afghanistan and Somalia, it was one faction which secured the major cities in the west of the country (Kurdish factions already controlled most of the east), which makes it less likely that Syria will become a “failed state” warred over by the former rebel factions with no recognisable government. Third, the defeat of Assad was a Syrian-led affair; it was not made possible by a foreign invasion, unlike the removal of Saddam Hussain (and an invasion with no forward planning, at that).

The liberation of Syria comes in the midst of the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza. 80% of Syrians and the vast majority of Gaza Palestinians are Muslims. In many western countries, a lot of the politicians and activists who appeared sympathetic to Muslims’ interests, and who were the most supportive of us when we were under attack here, were also sympathetic to the Assad regime because they regarded it as ‘socialist’, independent of western ‘imperialist’ domination, and anti-Zionist. (As we now know, the Syrian regime participated in the “extraordinary rendition” programme during the 2000s and tortured people on the Americans’ behalf.) Many of us joined coalitions to oppose the war on Iraq, most of us not out of sympathy for Saddam Hussain but because we did not want a Muslim country invaded by a country seeking to kill Muslims, any Muslims, in revenge for a terrorist attack in their country. We had also seen the invasion of Afghanistan which was still at war nearly two years on at that point. As time wore on, much of the “anti-war” contingent showed its true colours, openly showing its links to the Assad regime and, like Zionists now, slandering its opponents, calling them liars, terrorists or foreign agents, and denying well-documented atrocities such as massacres and chemical weapon attacks (even after Israel released some of Assad’s chemical weapons onto the streets of Damascus in a bombing raid). Many Muslims fell into the same trap, focussing on Palestine and attaching themselves to these activists who “talked the talk” about Palestine while defending other oppressive regimes in the Muslim world as long as the oppressors were Arabs and struck an “anti-western” pose, however empty. 

Others express fear that the new HTS government will turn into the Taliban. This is based only on stereotypes about Muslims and assumptions that we are all the same. Others unwittingly debunked that fear by posting footage they claimed to be of a girls’ school in Idlib where all the girls were wearing abayas and hijabs, and had their faces covered if they were older. Syria is not Afghanistan or even Pakistan; it has a high literacy rate and until the civil war produced large numbers of medics, engineers and other science/technology graduates every year, men and women, and the mothers and sisters of most of the HTS leadership would have received this education. (This is not to say there was nothing to criticise about Syrian state education; it was often militaristic and included a fair bit of propaganda, but produced a mostly literate population.) Last week in the Guardian Mona Eltahawy alleged that “the laws and lexicon of human rights do not recognise that intimate partner violence is a form of torture, because it is only what the state can do to men that is taken seriously – and what men do to women is just ‘domestic violence’”, just days after women had been released from those same prisons, some of them having given birth to children after being raped by guards, not knowing who the fathers of their children, who had been prisoners all their young lives and never seen daylight, were. Some women are sleeping in their own beds this week for the first time in years, not fearing the visit of a guard (or several), or have been reunited with husbands they had feared had been murdered, and probably starting to cook in their own kitchen again. It’s not the time for articles about women being pushed back into the kitchen after a revolution, at a time when these things are comforts, not a prison.

Because of what I knew about Assad’s regime, because I have friends who are Syrian or who are married to Syrians, I was always wary about sharing content from Assad supporters about the ongoing Gaza genocide. A lot of other Muslims are less so. Yes, they’re “good on Palestine” but often see the whole world through the prism of that one conflict; they profess to be against Islamophobia, but say nothing when Muslims are being oppressed in a Muslim country. Time and again they ask why neither HTS nor ISIS (Israeli Secret Intelligence Service, they called it) ever exchanged fire with Israel; the answer came last week, when HTS became Israel’s neighbour and the same would have been true if ISIS had ever taken Damascus. To see them mourning the overthrow of the Assad regime makes one wonder what their idea of a “free Palestine” consists of. It is not Syrians’ duty to suffer a stultifying oppressive regime in perpetuity to maintain the illusion of a “free Palestine”, or the illusion that their ruler cared about that at all, and to those who cry “free Palestine” while telling Syrians they should have carried on suffering, or denying their sufferings, I say this: a Palestine with enormous and brutal prisons like those of Assad’s Syria, with an economy geared towards enriching the ruling family and its cronies, and with state informants and thugs all over it like a rash would not be a free Palestine at all.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The benefits of learning Jewish history
• There’s a genocide going on
• The Holocaust, Gaza and “how genocide happens”
• Guardian caves in to racist pressure on Gaza
• The irrelevance of the Blood Libel

Farage at his favourite activity since being elected: meddling in American politics.

In the last few weeks there has been a lot of talk about the likelihood of the Reform UK party gaining power in the UK in the next few years, about the government or various MPs having to stand down, and about Elon Musk spending a large amount of money on winning an election for Nigel Farage and putting him into 10 Downing Street at some time in the near future. All of this is ludicrous, ignorant talk from people who do not know much about politics here. Some of it is braggartry, some of it is scaremongering and some of it is driven by real fears. There has been fuel poured on the fire by a petition calling for a new general election which, although it gained enough votes to merit a debate in parliament, was dismissed out of hand, giving people in right-wing echo chambers on both sides of the Atlantic a pretext to tell each other how “out of touch” the government is and how much contempt the “metropolitan liberal elite” hold for “real people”. All nonsense.

To take the petition first, it’s not the largest petition that has been presented to parliament and not the largest to have been dismissed. In the wake of the 1832 Catholic Emancipation Act, there was an enormous petitioning effort to oppose the act, which granted Catholics the vote. It was widely believed that doing this would allow Catholics to undo the Reformation and use the state to persecute Protestants as heretics. The Romantic poet Robert Southey, for example, wrote that he supported granting the vote to other non-Anglicans, “Jews and all”, but not to Catholics as “they will not tolerate”. The petition (according to the historian Linda Colley the biggest petition in British political history, although she wrote before Brexit) was disregarded and the Spanish Inquisition never showed up. More recently, millions signed petitions to hold a second referendum on Brexit or just disregard the first. They too were disregarded, not least as neither gained as many signatories as the vote to leave in the 2016 referendum. The reason millions signed the anti-Brexit petition was because everyone could see what a disaster leaving the EU was becoming. This petition has so far gained nearly three million signatures, which will mean a debate (on 6th January), but there will be no general election as we have just had one, and the fact that the people who opposed the winning party before the election still oppose them is not a reason to call another.

As for the prospect of a Reform government, this overlooks the fact that the party, which has traded as UKIP and Brexit Party in previous elections (the rump of UKIP still exists, but when Farage moved, so did his supporters), has never polled 15% in any election. With Nigel Farage as leader, UKIP polled 12.6% in the 2015 election; after he stepped down, they slumped to 1.8% in 2017. In 2019, Farage’s Brexit Party did not field candidates against pro-Brexit Tories, resulting in a vote share of only 2%. This time, they scored 14.3% but won only five seats, a well-known artefact of the First Past The Post electoral system which rewards local majorities, not thinly-spread votes across the country. The party has a history of its MPs being former Tories who defected, as with Douglas Carswell in Clacton (now represented by Farage) and more recently Lee Anderson in Ashfield (in Nottinghamshire); it does not have councillors on any of the county or district councils where they currently have MPs. Indeed, it has no history of service in local government at all, an important training ground for people seeking to run for parliament and an important means for parties to build connections with local communities, nor do many of its current parliamentarians have any real connection to the areas they purportedly serve. For example, Rupert Lowe, now MP for Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, owns a farm in Gloucestershire, had stood in a by-election in Kingswood, a suburb of Bristol, in February 2024, had previously been an MEP for the West Midlands, had stood for Cotswold as a Referendum Party candidate in 1997, and has also owned Garforth Town football club (a West Yorkshire non-league side) and been chairman of Southampton FC. So, he gets about (though his base appears to be Gloucestershire).

Farage and his cheerleaders are known for harping on their status as outsiders, as being champions of “real people”, as being apart from the “liberal elite” and free of so-called “luxury beliefs”. In fact, Farage, Lowe and Richard Tice are all privately educated men with a background in the finance industry. Their MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock in Essex, James McMurdock, though educated at a state school, also worked in banking for 17 years before being elected. Only Lee Anderson really comes from a working-class background and has a real link with the area he serves. Any time they talk about so-called elites, they are referring to intellectuals, not to the super-rich or the financial elite who have been the cause of much impoverishment and suffering over the past twenty years or so with the 2008 crash and the financier-dominated Tory austerity government. Reform’s supporters are emboldened by Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, but Farage is not as wealthy as Trump, nor as famous, and unlike Trump does not have the backing of a major party. He is more comparable to Ross Perot, a businessman who ran an anti-NAFTA presidential campaign in 1992 and won 19% of the popular vote (more than Farage has ever polled), though this did not translate into any electoral college votes.

The government elected last July has four and a half years left to run. During that time, they can make an impression and show the public how they respond to any crisis that arises. The Tories had that opportunity in 2020 with the Covid outbreak, and blew it, despite entering on a high and getting their main election promise out of the way in the first couple of months. There is an awful lot to criticise Keir Starmer and his government for, but the things the Faragists and some of the Tories attack him for, such as not divulging confidential information about a police investigation and not just holding a general election at their demand, are right and proper. The Faragists’ platform is their media, such as Talk TV and GB News, which gives them the opportunity to pretend to themselves that they are the majority; in fact, the Tories and Reform combined won only 38% of the vote in the election and were outpolled by Labour and the Lib Dems combined at 45.9%. Farage and his cabal have a lot of money (with or without Elon Musk’s contribution) and are able to make a lot of noise, but this does not mean they have a positive contribution to make; Farage is politically a one-trick pony, notorious for diverting every discussion onto immigration, and how much headway he can make with such arguments depends on the circumstances of 2028 or 2029 and how Starmer deals with them. 

Possibly Related Posts:

• Against the “liberal elite” media trope

Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in Amsterdam performing their chant taunting a local rival club “you’re the whores of Arabs”. Source

The other day I saw a tweet by Stephen Pollard, former editor of London’s Jewish Chronicle, columnist, TV personality and Zionist — no, not the one complaining about all the ads on dating websites saying “no Zionists” since some mysterious event that started around last autumn, but one commenting on Gary Lineker’s departure from the BBC’s Match of the Day programme. It said “Wishing Gary Lineker well in his new role as Emeritus Professor of Jewish History at Qatar University”. Lineker is not leaving immediately; he has said he will step down after covering the current Premier League season (which finishes next May) and then cover the forthcoming FA and World Cups, which will keep him at the BBC until the summer of 2026. Lineker left school with four O-levels (one of two predecessors to the GCSE exam), so I very much doubt he will be taking up a professorship in anything but, perhaps, football. An honorary doctorate may beckon, maybe from Leicester university. But the tweet was intended as a taunt, but in an age where accusations of antisemitism are used to slap anyone down who challenges Israel’s right to oppress or massacre Palestinians, learning a bit of Jewish history is essential to answering these claims.

I studied politics and history at what is now Aberystwyth University (then the University of Wales) in the 1990s and did a module on Jewish history in my second year, under Professor William Rubinstein, who died earlier this year. I asked Rubinstein about his politics and he told me that he supported the peace process, as a lot of people did at the time as hopes in it were high then, but had been a Likud supporter in the 1980s. He was, by his own admission, quite right-wing and nobody would accuse him of being a “self-hating Jew”. But he taught the history of the Jews of Europe focussing on the period from the 18th to the mid-20th century, through the Tsarist persecutions, the migration to North America and western Europe, Zionism and the Holocaust. This includes the development of anti-Jewish prejudice from being religiously-based, from societies defined as Christian and the Jew perceived at best as foreign, as regarding their home as the Middle East rather than Europe, and at worst as the rejectors or even killers of Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, through to the race-based antisemitism and conspiracy theories of the 19th century onwards. I don’t recall feeling that I was being preached to although other students did complain about him; one student accused him of presenting opinion as fact.

He taught us about pogroms. He taught us about the blood libel. These are phrases that are bandied around a lot nowadays, often by people who know what these terms mean but count on their audience not knowing. The blood libel involves using the blood of Christian children as a food ingredient for Passover, so not every claim of Jews killing non-Jews (especially in Gaza where most Palestinians are Muslim, not Christian) is a blood libel, and if there is video evidence, it’s not a libel at all. A pogrom (the term originates in Tsarist Russia, where such attacks on Jews were a frequent occurrence) is not a fight; it’s an organised mob attack on a community (not, say, a group of football hooligans) in which the state is often either involved or looks the other way. Jewish conspiracy theories (such as found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion) were about large, global conspiracies which control or spearhead multiple opposing ideologies; they do not include any accusation of political corruption or collusion involving a group of Jews. Anyone who has studied the history of antisemitism will know that an awful lot of recent accusations of it bear no resemblance to the real thing, nor to anything that would be called racism if it was about any other group.

The two books I studied from were The Course of Modern Jewish History by Howard M Sachar, which is readily available in both print and E-book, and The Jew in the Modern World by Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, which is available secondhand fairly cheaply on Amazon or in a ridiculously expensive newer edition from Oxford University Press. The latter is a collection of texts depicting the development of European Jewry from the 18th to the 20th century, some written by Jews, others by non-Jews including samples of the antisemitism of various times, including racist tracts and examples of anti-Jewish legislation. I didn’t pursue it after I finished that course, so I couldn’t recommend any shorter books than those two that would be useful to anyone looking for an overview of the history rather than to actually study it in depth. But an understanding of the history is vital for anyone advocating for Palestinian rights, or for Muslims’ rights in modern western society where Zionists routinely profess to be triggered by the mere reminder that Arabs, and especially Palestinians, exist and that other points of view exist than theirs.

Possibly Related Posts:

• There’s a genocide going on
• The Holocaust, Gaza and “how genocide happens”
• Guardian caves in to racist pressure on Gaza
• The irrelevance of the Blood Libel
• They weren’t protests

Last Saturday in the British media I saw two articles, one on the BBC News site by a writer whose name I didn’t notice (on a second look, it’s their North America correspondent, Anthony Zurcher) and the other by Jonathan Freedland which was, as usual on a Saturday, top billing on the Guardian’s ‘Journal’ section, both asking how Donald Trump could have staged a comeback from the “electoral abyss” of early 2021 to be the Republican nominee for the presidency and to stand a chance of winning. Trump, as Zurcher points out, will be the only person who returned to the White House having previously lost a presidential election; his fightback started when he retained the support of a number of Republicans following his retreat to Florida at Biden’s inauguration, which he failed to attend, and escaped conviction following his impeachment. He then benefited from things like the rise in the price of gas in 2022, which dented Biden’s poll ratings despite being not his fault but the result of the invasion of Ukraine. What they both fail to mention is the impact of Biden’s support for Israel in Gaza: Freedland mentions it once, in the penultimate paragraph, and Zurcher never.

In my experience, the genocide in Gaza has affected a lot of people beyond the usual people who concern themselves with Palestine, namely the Muslim community and the small number of left-wing pro-Palestinian activists, and I see some of the same footage being shared on non-Muslim social media feeds as on those of the Muslims I follow. It’s the first genocide that has been broadcast over both social and conventional media by both its victims and its perpetrators. I have heard it said that the Gaza genocide has exhibited a depravity that goes beyond the definition of genocide; I am not convinced, as orgies of cruelty have been a feature of previous genocides including the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide. The people responsible for this, however, have broadcast their ‘exploits’ on social media, uploading clips of soldiers (and visiting ‘celebrities’) signing missiles that were going to be used on civilian targets and posing in the lingerie of the Palestinian women whose homes they had ransacked. Both ordinary soldiers and the official Israeli military social media channels have broadcast footage of gratuitous destruction which could in no way have been justified as attacking or removing terrorist infrastructure, as at the university they destroyed with planted explosives that must have been installed when they controlled the site. We hear of children being shot in the head by snipers, and huge numbers of children losing limbs or enduring amputations without anaesthetic. The brutality of both male and female SS guards was noted at post-war trials; such things as shooting random prisoners from a balcony and beating female prisoners to death with a whip made of braided cellophane. 

Some of those guards were hanged following the Belsen trials; today’s mass murderers, when discharged from or on leave from the Israeli military, are free men, and are free to enter the western countries where some of them enjoy citizenship, and people who protest their presence (or protest when they walk back into chaplain’s jobs for Jewish student communities) are accused of being antisemitic. Both British and American politicians stubbornly refuse to entertain the idea that this is a genocide, proclaiming that “this is war” as if wars were no longer fought between soldiers but by competitively massacring civilians, endlessly repeating the mantra that Israel “has a right to defend itself” while occasionally asking Israel to abide by “international humanitarian law”, though not having any intention of putting any meaningful pressure on them to do so, and throwing accusations of antisemitism not only at anyone who protests through demonstrations on the street and on campus, but also at UN officials who are doing their jobs by reporting on Israel’s relentless atrocities.

It didn’t have to be this way. It’s possible to condemn a terrorist atrocity without also condoning a revenge massacre; they would understand this perfectly if a murder on the streets of London were to be answered by the murder of several members of the killer’s family. Two wrongs, let alone two atrocities, do not make a right: most people understand this. Our political class does not. Over the last 20 years or so, Israel’s oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank has been getting worse and worse with settler encroachments and gratuitous violence increasing with impunity, making normal life impossible, while Jewish community bodies police more and more aggressively how we talk about Israel with the collusion of the mainstream media and the leadership of political parties, with the result that merely acknowledging that Palestinians exist exposes one to threats and people have lost jobs as a result of smear or cry-bully campaigns.

There is a collection of letters in today’s (Thursday’s) paper dissecting the result. Again, there is no mention of Gaza in any of them. But it’s not only Gaza that escapes mention, it’s the miserable turnout. Trump won nearly 1.5 million fewer votes this year than in 2020; Harris lost more than 13 million compared to Biden’s tally in 2020. A party does not lose this many votes because its candidate is a woman. One puts it down to the “woke left” insulting their opponents by calling them names such as ‘deplorables’ and ‘garbage’, but the “woke left” were around in 2020 as well. Biden had immense goodwill when he was elected; people made enormous efforts to ensure that Trump did not win the previous election (and it was as much anti-Trump as pro-Biden). Besides Gaza, there was another factor rarely discussed, which was the economy, which as in the UK has been hit by inflation linked to the war in Ukraine and the resulting shock to the oil industry. During the last year of Trump’s last presidency, people were getting stimulus cheques to help them through a time in which work was scarce, but the same was not true for the rise in the cost of living that struck during Biden’s time. Trump, of course, would not have done the same in response to hardship caused by inflation rather than a pandemic, or even a forthcoming major flu epidemic, but people — at least people who did not suffer the losses of close friends or family, or who were not severely ill from it themselves — will still remember that time as an easier one than Biden’s.

But the ‘populist’ Right are keen for everyone to learn the same lesson: we’re right. Matthew Goodwin, on his Twitter (X) account, proclaimed “Two things clear. Leftists need to ditch woke and move back to the centre. Conservatives need to actually be conservative”. As Aditya Chakrabortty commented in today’s Guardian (in a column that did mention Gaza), explanations based around populism “almost always wind up with well-lunched commentators ventriloquising the opinions of people they’ve never talked to and in whose worlds they’ve never set foot”. As with Brexit, material explanations for these political upsets are things populist writers always shy away from, as it would mean addressing the economic orthodoxies that caused the hardships that brought them about. But for a repeat of 2020, it would have required the same enthusiasm and the same effort to get voters out who normally do not vote, young people in particular, and there will never be much enthusiasm from voters concerned about social justice for a candidate who has spent the past year supporting a genocidal foreign state with limitless supplies of weapons and denying acts of cruelty and depravity that everyone can see with their own eyes. I could tell from a year ago that persuading many people to vote for Biden (who was still the candidate then) was going to be an uphill battle; it is one that they could have avoided the need to fight, which only one side could lose, and which they have lost.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Holocaust, Gaza and “how genocide happens”
• Guardian caves in to racist pressure on Gaza
• The irrelevance of the Blood Libel
• They weren’t protests
• Don’t mention the genocide

On social media this past week or so, in discussions about Israel’s stepping-up of its atrocities against the civilian population of north Gaza, there has been some talk of how genocides are allowed to happen. It has been suggested that the Holocaust happened because ordinary Germans stood by and let it happen, and that there were ample signs apparent to the general population, such as the trains rolling across the country (and people driving them, knowing that they were carrying a human cargo). Likewise, the genocide raging in Gaza and now the massacres of civilians across Lebanon (not targeted at Hizbullah, as Christian communities and churches have been attacked as well) have been put down to the ‘fact’ that nobody is doing anything. I am sceptical about this notion: genocides do not abate because of popular protest but because they are arrested militarily.

Nazi Germany was a police state. The term ‘Gestapo’ is often used to refer to secret police forces, or to other spying entities, but it was the actual name of the German secret police (it was short for Geheime Staatspolizei or “Secret State Police”). As with any dictatorship, there were elements of the population that actively supported the regime, some who were apolitical and those who were opposed to it and of those, some more courageous than others. While it is easy to blame ordinary Germans for “just letting it happen”, it is less easy to think of ways they could have prevented the bits of it they saw other than, say, by refusing to inform on Jews that were hiding from the police, that would not put them individually or their families in grave danger. A lot of the people saying this have never spent longer in a dictatorship than a couple of weeks’ holiday in Egypt. As it happens, an earlier programme of Nazi mass murder — the T4 programme of ‘euthanasia’ of disabled people — was scaled back after protests from people of influence, such as doctors and bishops, but something like a street protest could have easily been beaten down and its organisers imprisoned.

When it comes to Gaza, it’s not true that nobody is doing anything: there have been major protests throughout the western world, occupations on university campuses in the US and some courageous acts of sabotage against companies in the UK that make or service military hardware destined for Israel. It is the political class that remains committed to allowing the genocide to go ahead, accusing every entity that offers any military resistance to Israel’s genocide of “continuing to destabilise peace in the Middle East”. Likewise, during the Bosnian genocide of the 1990s, there was widespread popular support for military action to stop it, but it was met with contempt from the political class who told people not to be silly: it was a civil war and everyone knows you don’t interfere in a civil war. We now know that European politicians were unwilling to intervene because they regarded Bosnia as a Muslim country to be alien to Europe. The Rwandan genocide would have been difficult to arrest because of its location, but Bosnia is Europe, and we knew what was going on in 1992, and our political class let it continue for three more years.

At least then, nobody was openly and gleefully cheering the genocide on, as we see in the case of Gaza, and few people openly denying it despite copious evidence. The western political class and its servile commentariat repeat taunts such as “it’s war, and if you don’t like it, don’t start wars” (Brianna Wu is particularly fond of this kind of taunt). All the genocides mentioned in this article happened during a war. “Israel has the right to defend itself,” they remind us endlessly. Defending oneself happens when under attack; reprisal massacres against a civilian population more than a year after the event are not self-defence, especially when that population are not citizens of a foreign power but disenfranchised natives in the same country. Israel offers ‘evidence’ of Hamas, Hizbullah or whoever using tunnels, or hiding weapons in civilian infrastructure or near homes, and the servile commentariat repeat it eagerly, regardless of it being obviously fabricated or not actually showing what is claimed (tunnels, underground bunkers and the like are a common means of defence — our Cold War bunkers are now a tourist attraction and have been used as film sets — and Lebanon has been attacked by Israel before). Every so often we see the “liberal Zionist” politicians (liberalism for me, fascism for thee) such as Keir Starmer parrot platitudes about a “two-state solution”, a dream that has been dead in the water for twenty years and which more recent Israeli politicians have openly opposed, while blaming everyone but Israel for Israel’s choice to massacre unarmed Palestinian civilians.

There must be military action to stop the Gaza genocide. It matters not where it comes from (Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps were liberated mostly by Stalin’s Soviet troops, not British or American troops although they did liberate some of those in Germany itself, such as Bergen-Belsen). It is western politicians who are the enablers of the genocide of the Palestinians by both supplying Israel with weapons and allowing their existing equipment to be serviced here, knowing their intended use, and by failing to take military action to arrest the genocide, while accusing anyone protesting it of being Hamas supporters or antisemites. Media outlets have a share in the responsibility, as some of them cheer it on by calling for victory over or destruction of Hamas, ignoring the vastly greater numbers of civilian victims, the destruction of hospitals and schools etc. and the lack of actual military engagement with Hamas, while others suppress Palestinian voices and tip-toe around the feelings of the genocide’s supporters, as we have seen from the Guardian in the UK. There are of course the Jewish groups that have harassed anyone defending the Palestinians’ right to live in peace in their own country, free of Israeli military and settler abuse and violence, with false accusations of racism for decades, and continue to do the same now that the violence has progressed to genocide.

But popular protest on its ownwill not stop Israel’s genocide. It’s not ordinary people’s fault that Israel’s depravities were not stopped in October 2023, let alone a year later. The fault lies wholly with our political class, the Labour and Conservative parties here in the UK and both the Republican and Democratic parties (the latter especially, as it holds executive power) who have made the choice to throw in their lot with the mass murderers, and the major media organisations. But what protest there has been, has been weak, perhaps because the protest movement is dominated by people with a long-standing (and well-founded) aversion to western military action; during the Bosnia genocide the debate was over military action to stop it, a demand made openly in newspaper columns and on radio phone-ins, and politicians called for Serb forces and positions to be bombed. Here, we talk of ceasefires with an expectation that Israel’s rulers will just honour such a request, which clearly they will not. The talk should be of action, not words.

Image source: Tim Ellis, via Flickr. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (BY-NC) 2.0 licence.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Guardian caves in to racist pressure on Gaza
• The irrelevance of the Blood Libel
• They weren’t protests
• Don’t mention the genocide
• Seething with anger