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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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In today’s Guardian there is a review by Stuart Jeffries of a Channel 4 documentary about the October 2003 Hamas attacks on Israel; it is a four-star review (out of five) which praises the programme for its interviews with the Israeli victims and their relatives, with the reservation that it really doesn’t delve into the historical context. The link above is to an archived copy, as the Guardian have removed the original from its website “pending review” after receiving a flood of complaints.

One Day in October is composed of heartbreaking survivor interviews along with disturbing footage from phones and security cameras. If you want insight into why Israel is doing what it is doing in Gaza and Lebanon, this film may help. It clearly demonstrates that the IDF and Mossad were caught napping on 7 October last year as those they were meant to protect were slaughtered. Never again, one might think.

If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians, though, One Day in October won’t help. Indeed, it does a good job of demonising Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, later as shameless civilian looters, asset-stripping the kibbutz while bodies lay in the street and the terrified living hid.

I heard the complaints about this programme on Twitter before I read the article. Former Guardian columnist, now at the reliably pro-Israel Times and Unherd, quipped “does the Guardian understand this was a documentary?” while Simon Sebag Montefiore posted a long tweet bemoaning what he calls the paper’s “final departure from the pluralistic liberal tradition that made it a great newspaper, thanks to its capture by … an activist, ideological, anti-Western and more than that, anti-factual front”. The Guardian, under the same editorship as now, printed whinges from Freeman, who had written for the paper for decades, about the so-called antisemitism in Corbyn’s Labour party, accusing anyone who disagreed with the accusations of ‘gaslighting’ them, along with similar moans from other Jewish writers, some of whom still write for them. It follows the familiar Zionist pattern of alleging bias (and often flooding newspapers, TV stations etc. with co-ordinated letters or emails of complaint) when the media print or transmit anything that is not biased in their favour, and fails to treat the Palestinian side of the story with other than the contempt they expect, a demand they are accustomed to seeing honoured, as we see with the BBC, whose presenters interrupt any guest who calls Israel’s Gaza genocide what it is. They are so used to it, in fact, that they respond with threatening overtures when argued with; we saw the Telegraph’s Zoe Strimpel warn another participant on a panel to “remember the optics of who you’re talking to” when challenged about her denial of Israeli atrocities on BBC’s Politics Live this week: in other words, your name can be blackened if you get on the wrong side of us.

The Zionist demand is that Israeli killings be regarded as always justifiable, even when they are plainly targeted at children, or at other manifestly innocent people, and likewise with the destruction of entire city blocks, schools, universities and the hospitals whose staff are trying to treat people injured by Israel’s missiles and bombs, while Palestinian ones are always to be portrayed as heinous, senseless and racist. Israeli attacks on Palestinians are always to be seen in context (in this case, of the October 2023 attacks) while Palestinian attacks on Israelis are always to be seen in isolation. If you mention the long history of Israeli oppression against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (real oppression, not the mild disadvantage this term is commonly used to mean in the west), they accuse you of being an apologist for terrorism. Again, they use veiled threats to ensure they get their way; we saw this on Channel 4 News a few months ago, where one of their correspondents was lectured by an Israeli representative to be “very wary of trying in any way to contextualise the atrocities of October 7th” when the presenter mentioned the prior occupation of Gaza (in fact, he’d have done better to remind him of the ongoing West Bank occupation and the relentless crimes of the settlers; Gaza’s formal occupation ended in 2005, though an “arm’s length” occupation remained in force). Back in 2004, I attended a rally in Trafalgar Square, London, in which a representative of a fanatical Zionist organisation called Betar issued a threat to British Muslims that we condemn terrorism unequivocally: “moral equivalences and partial condemnations will not be tolerated!”.

All the Zionists carping about the Stuart Jeffries article are collaborators in genocide, whether they are Jewish or not. Their aim is to shout down anyone who dares challenge their supremacy. It would be that much easier for those of us who sympathise with the Palestinians to condemn the killings of Israeli civilians by Hamas (much as Muslims living in the west mostly freely condemn terrorism against civilians by Al-Qa’ida or ISIS affiliates) if those demanding it would do the same when Israeli forces are the killers, but they never do. They deny, or they blame Hamas even when Hamas was not present. Politicians mouth platitudes about the need for a ceasefire and for “both sides” to abide by international law, but will not call it genocide, nor interrupt the flow of arms to the side currently engaged in a genocide of a trapped civilian population; people are arrested for having a picture of a glider stuck to their bags while on a demonstration, while arms are freely exported to Israel and the Israeli ambassador is allowed to speak at the Labour party’s conference, something that party would never have done for any Serb Chetnik or representative of the Hutu Interahamwe in the 1990s.

So, it’s a huge shame on the Guardian for giving in to these demands and pulling Stuart Jeffries’ article. The complaints were orchestrated, as such complaints always are, from a pro-genocide lobby which only has a problem with the killing of civilians when they are Israeli civilians. It would not have given in to the same demands from the supporters of one side in a conflict, let alone one as involved in heinous violence as Israel is now; it should not do the same for supporters of Israel.

Image source: Tiberias (@ecomarxi) on Twitter.

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Mohammed Saeed al-Ustaz, aged 7. Shot dead by a sniper on his way to buy milk. (His is the body in the picture below.)

Every so often, when an appalling atrocity of the Israeli occupation force against a Palestinian child is exposed in western mainstream or social media, there will be a Zionist loudly condemning the report as a “modern-day blood libel”. In today’s Observer, there’s a piece by Howard Jacobson, a long-established columnist with the standard Zionist views of mainstream British Jewry, likening the coverage of the Gaza genocide to the mediaeval myth in which Jews were accused of killing Christian children to use their blood to make matzo, or unleavened bread, for Passover. This myth originated in England, after a young boy was found murdered in the Jewish quarter in Lincoln; the boy was buried in a tomb in the city’s cathedral and the myth spread far and wide, being used as a pretext for pogroms against Jews in eastern Europe as recently as the end of World War II. Jacobson claims there is an ‘echo’ of the blood libel in media coverage of the Israeli destruction of Gaza, and now also Lebanon:

Hence the hurt, the anger and the fear that Jewish people have been experiencing in the year since Hamas’s barbaric massacre of Israelis on 7 October and the no less barbaric denials, not to mention celebrations of it, as night after night our televisions have told the story of the war in Gaza through the death of Palestinian children. Night after night, a recital of the numbers dead. Night after night, the unbearable footage of their parents’ agony. The savagery of war. The savagery of the Israeli onslaught. But for many, writing or marching against Israeli action, the savagery of the Jews as told for hundreds of years in literature and art and church sermons.

Here we were again, the same merciless infanticides inscribed in the imaginations of medieval Christians. Only this time, instead of operating on the midnight streets of Lincoln and Norwich, they target Palestinian schools, the paediatric wards of hospitals, the tiny fragile bodies of children themselves. Even when there are other explanations for the devastation, no one really believes them. Reporters whose reports are proved wrong see no reason to apologise. No amendment of their calumnies. What is there to apologise for? It could have been true.

I first learned about the blood libel, as well as about a number of other antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories (notably the Protocols of the Elders of Zion), in a Jewish history module while at university in Aberystwyth in the mid-1990s. Of course, I knew about Jews before that; there had been a few at my school, and I had heard ‘Jew’ used as an insult and stereotypes about Jews being stingy, or involvement in money-lending (this stereotype was mentioned in Jane Eyre, a set text for A-level at the time, and may still be). I had learned about the Holocaust, but nothing about the persecution of Jews in Russia, which lasted a lot longer than Nazi Germany itself did. I was vaguely aware that there were still Nazis who hated Jews (alongside other ethnic minorities that were still perceived as ‘immigrant’ back then) but nothing about the historical involvement of the church in fostering Jew-hatred. I went to three Catholic schools and did not hear anything negative said about Jews until I was in boarding school, which was not church-run or affiliated.

As we saw with Jewish complaints about so-called antisemitism in the Labour party in the 2010s, many Jews think that non-Jews’ attitudes to them and to Israel are motivated by age-old antisemitic beliefs that bubble up through our unconscious, when in fact most British people do not know about a lot of these things unless they decide to study them in depth, as I did, while Jews learn about them from their families or schools. When we hear reports from doctors about treating children in Gaza who had been shot by snipers in the streets, or left to die in a car surrounded by their dead family, waiting for an ambulance that will never come because its crew have been murdered, or hear about the sheer numbers of children suffering the loss of limbs or eyes and undergoing amputations without anaesthetic, we don’t think about Jews back in mediaeval Lincoln murdering children to use their blood as a food ingredient because most of us have never heard of that myth. What we see is a nation using the methods of modern warfare to annihilate a native population that will not stop resisting the seizure of their country, given a free hand and an unlimited supply of munitions by the brainwashed leaders of western countries.

Image source: Martyrs of Gaza, via X (Twitter).

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This summer I’ve made two attempts to learn how to ride a motorcycle. Both failed. On the first occasion, in early July, I was just getting the hang of riding the bike around the yard and changing the gears up and down when the instructor set a new task, the day was warming up and I was getting hot in the protective clothing you have to wear and started stalling and flubbing everything I was trying to do, and I ended up leaving the session early. The second time was last Monday; I thought trying a scooter would make things a little easier as I had already learned how to use gears the previous time, but in the event could not even bring myself to ride the thing at all. I don’t know if I will try a third time; there are some training companies that offer one- or two-hour lessons, while others offer nothing other than the standard CBT (Compulsory Basic Training), in some cases with an offer of a second try at a reduced rate.

I previously looked into learning to ride a motorcycle twice, once in the mid-90s when I was in my early 20s and still at university, the second in the late 2000s when I was in my early 30s. The first time, bike shop attendants told me that I shouldn’t really consider travelling from London to Aberystwyth and back on a 125cc motorcycle (perhaps this was advice I should have ignored; after all, it’s around 200 miles, a distance that regular commuting will run up in a couple of weeks); buying one would have meant taking out a student loan, which I had hitherto managed to avoid doing with parental help, but the old car I had acquired from my uncle had become undriveable as part of the body had rusted so bad that the rear shocks had gone straight through. In the end, I decided against it. The second time was after a job agency boss had told me I should “get a little scooter” when public transport was often failing to get me to work on time. I looked around some of the same places I’d looked at ten or so years earlier, but in the event, a family tragedy led me to knock the idea on the head once again. This time, the reasons were more practical: being able to commute without getting stuck in London’s interminable traffic jams, and perhaps a more pleasant way to get to some of the country parks and stately homes where I like to take pictures, as well as (for small bikes at least) being able to do twice or three times as many miles on a gallon of petrol as I do in my car. Initially I was considering a three-wheeler, as there are tricycles with two wheels at the front rather than the back which are a little wider than a motorcycle and can be ridden on a car licence, but the road tax and insurance costs meant this would be a costly option, far more in the long term than actually learning to ride a motorcycle.

However, despite having done a bit of research, look at training videos on YouTube showing how you operate the gears on a bike and so on, nerves still got the better of me, twice. On the first occasion I came in pretty confident that I’d complete it and the following day I’d be going out, getting a bike and riding it home, and that biking would be a new hobby I’d be able to enjoy in the coming months (less so in the winter, but I had no plans to get rid of the car), and suddenly my plans had all evaporated and there was a void; even at times when I was comfortable with the idea of never riding again, I kept thinking to myself “what am I going to do with my life now?”. The practical advantages of riding still exist, though any bike with an engine bigger than 500cc will be no more economical than my car or in fact less, which is puzzling given that my car has a one-litre engine and still has a whole cabin to pull around whereas a motorbike’s comforts consist of a cushion and nothing else: no adjustable seats, no air conditioning, no stereo or any of the other things you see in a car that add weight. If I was downsizing from a three-litre four-by-four then almost any bike would be an improvement, but my car is already one of the most economical petrol cars going. The other reason I am still tempted to try again is that, as with learning to ride a bicycle (or doing so without stabilisers), which I did when I was a child and I now cycle all the time, there is a fear barrier that has to be overcome and that once overcome, riding gets easier.

The way the training system and the training ‘scene’ works does not make it easy for new riders, in my opinion. Unlike with learning to drive a car, there is a one-day compulsory basic training (CBT) course which is a set-piece series of lectures and exercises (a talk on safety and protective equipment, a couple of hours’ tuition on basic riding and manoeuvres, a Highway Code lecture followed by a two-hour road ride) in which one instructor can be split between four trainees (though only two for the road ride). This is typically carried out in a confined space, such as a school playground, car park or some other small yard, so at no point can you just ride. By contrast, when we learn to drive a car, we have a series of one-to-one lessons that last as long as it takes to get up to test standard. There are not many training companies that offer one-to-one CBT or introductory lessons; some in fact warn learners off companies that offer the latter, when a couple of hours to get the hang of riding without worrying about taking the instructor’s time from three other trainees might be what someone needs. The cost of any non-CBT training session ranges from £30 to over £60 per hour; CBT itself in London often costs considerably more than even in nearby towns such as Crawley. I have seen one-to-one CBT advertised as costing £500; by contrast, the two-day HIAB operation course I attended earlier this year cost £725 (i.e. £362.50 a day) for one-to-one tuition, and a HIAB-equipped truck costs a lot more than a 125cc motorcycle.

Gear — protective equipment — is another stumbling block. Helmets are compulsory; gloves, boots and suitable clothing are recommended, and nobody will train you without them. However, getting hold of gear if you’re new to the scene is a chore. The gear shop near me, when I went in to buy a helmet, directed me to get a full-face helmet when I had expressed a preference for an open one, because I feared a full-face helmet would not work well with glasses, and I ended up with one that wasn’t very comfortable. Getting boots was also an ordeal; their boot selection is all laid out on the shelves (rather than in boxes in a store room as in a normal shoe shop), boots are often in sizes nothing like normal shoe sizes (I ended up with a size 13 when I am normally a 10) and there was a security tag through one of the lace holes, preventing me from doing it up properly. After the first CBT disaster, I took the helmet back to the shop unused; the cashier initially refused to give me a cash refund (if you buy online, they have to, but not for store purchases) until I told him that his voucher would be no use to me. After the second, I hung on to the boots as I suspect he’d not have made the same allowance a second time. On both occasions, it occurred to me to cancel the CBT sessions, but it was too late for a refund. I don’t dispute the need for gear when riding on the road (although I see plenty of riders without it, especially the delivery riders) but it can be sweltering on a hot day when you’re stationary and trying to listen to an instructor. That’s not a good way to learn a new skill. Perhaps doing the basic (off-road) training on grass would be better than on concrete, as they could then ease up on the gear (particularly the jacket).

Motorcycling isn’t exactly in my blood. My dad rode when I was a young child, but (as is common with young men who get married and have kids, it seems) sold his bike long enough ago that I can’t remember what make and model it was. He then cycled ten miles to work and back each day until we moved to New Malden, where it was no longer practical and took the train. I know two people who have quit, in one case because he slipped on oil and although he was not badly hurt, the bike (a Harley Sportster) was a wreck. People have lucky escapes and decide that they’ve pushed their luck enough and it’s time to quit while they’re ahead. I’ve been told that riding at 150mph is a feeling like no other, but my ambitions aren’t that extreme; I just want to be able to leave the car behind when I go to work or otherwise out alone, and pay a bit less for petrol.

Image source: Rainmaker47, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 4.0 licence.

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