Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
So what?
If flattening the curve was the idea, then having some infections during August when infection rates were very low helps keep them flat, especially when it wasn't known if there'd be a vaccine or not.
Especially when its fit and healthy people willing to go out who were getting infected. No big deal at all.
"especially when it wasn't known if there'd be a vaccine or not"? Yesterday, you were an expert on international law. Today, an expert on vaccine development.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5 describes the vaccine development landscape in early April 2020, well before EOTHO. We knew vaccines were in development (78 confirmed vaccines in development by 7 April, with 5 in Phase 1 trials). That article was predicting vaccines in use by early 2021; in fact, it was a bit sooner (Dec 2020).
We knew a vaccine was on the way. Having cases before a vaccine rather than after a vaccine is a bad idea.
We didn't know there would be vaccines, we hoped there might be, and certainly they came sooner than expected. Indeed most of Europe didn't have vaccines when we did quite famously, it could have gone the other way around.
Simply saying lockdown and have no activities until vaccines is not a reasonable attitude.
There are things more important than case numbers. That you refuse to accept that is why we'll never see eye to eye on this.
I'm not "Simply saying lockdown and have no activities until vaccines". We won't see eye to eye while you continue to misrepresent what I've said. I'm saying EOTHO was a mistake.
There are lots of things that are important. Case numbers, government spend, jobs in the hospitality sector, mental wellbeing. You have to weigh up the pros and cons of different actions. I started with 2 posts sharing evidence on the pros and cons of EOTHO, but you and Anabobazina seem stuck in some all-or-nothing thinking, so you take criticising EOTHO to be the same as saying everyone should have been locked down all summer. It's not.
I've only responded to you criticising the increase in activity of people going out and enjoying their lives, in August, while case numbers were exceptionally low.
I consider people going out to be an exceptionally good thing, that is good for mental health and the economy and more important than case numbers which were exceptionally low.
You don't seem to.
When do you think people should have been able or encouraged to live their lives, if not in the summer while case numbers were exceptionally low?
Some people are sadly far too content at restricting the rights of others.
Again, I am talking about EOTHO. I am not talking about restricting the rights of others. I am talking about taking the money you pay in tax and using that to promote a particular activity.
If you want to advance a libertarian argument, go for it. EOTHO is not libertarian. It cost lots of taxpayers' money.
Its not libertarian, but we weren't in a libertarian world. Nor did it cost a tiny fraction of what you're claiming.
You are only looking at one side of the ledger. The figure you keep claiming is the amount the scheme so-called "cost" looking at the food side alone.
You're completely ignoring the extra duties, VAT, NICs, Income Tax, reduced furlough bills and much, much more.
I'm giving the figure commonly quoted in the literature. If you have an alternate, evidence-based figure, let's hear it.
On topic - could we see the '22 install some sort of elder statesman to staunch the bleeding?
OGH suggests that the role has no attraction to aspiring Tories. But survival certainly will, and given Brady's comments about excluding the membership and Hunt floating that he might not stand at the next GE...
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not.
(Snipped a load of an interesting post as I wanted to focus on this bit)
I disagree on this. Prevaricating and refusing to condemn Hamas shifts the conversation on to the October 7 attacks and undermines the person being asked as it makes them look like they condone the violence.
A simple "I condemn Hamas and the attacks on 7 October" enables moving the conversation on to what should happen next and what Israel is doing to Gaza and whether that should also be condemned.
Although it doesn't always work out that way. Eg an exchange on here yesterday. A poster condemned the Hamas atrocity and went on to make a couple of pro Palestinian observations (nothing radical just the usual type stuff about their plight).
He got accused of 'buttery'. ie where you are seen to devalue what you've said about something (and cast doubt on your sincerity about it) by going straight into a 'but'. Bit harsh, I thought.
Still, we all post what we like, don't we. All equal in that regard.
True, re yesterday.
The best I've seen people handle this is to be clearly irritated and snap back something like "Of course I condemn X", putting the interviewer back in their box for asking such a stupid and offensive question. It should be a stupid and offensive question, but prevaricating or refusing to answer makes it look like a justified question.
During the pandemic, and especially early on, the government were faced with a serious of hideous no-win choices. It was a case of choosing the least-worst option with *very* little data - for instance, we were unsure how C19 spread. Remember people talking about wiping down mail?
Whatever they did, the government would get criticism, especially as we cannot run the experiment again with different choices. When things were in their hands - e.g. the vaccines - they often acted quite well.
EOTHO was an interesting case. The 'safe' option would have been to not do it, and keep more restrictions on people. But that would have added increased pressure on many businesses, large and small, and on the exchequer, and also possibly mental health - people *wanted* to go out and see others as they used to.
But it was, with hindsight, possibly the wrong decision. But if it was, then I find it hard to castigate the government too much for it. They would be getting criticism not whatever they had done - or not done.
I think the more pertinent question is, not was EOTHO designed to help - which it clearly was - and not even whether it was responsible for the uptick in cases - which it's hard to say it was, on the stats (although there's plenty of noise there to confuse matters including the air bridge the key factor seems to have been the return of schools and unis).
The much more important question is, was it better to spend £849 million on propping up hospitality in the short term or would it have been more sensible to spend that money on measures to make any return to restrictions less likely - e.g. better masks for the NHS, heat curtains for all public buildings so doors could be left open, and air filters for schools and hospitals?
I would have said, based on what I've seen, the answer is 'yes' and therefore it was however well-intentioned, the wrong choice.
I agree with that, but I might suggest that "better masks for the NHS, heat curtains for all public buildings so doors could be left open, and air filters for schools and hospitals?" would have cost far, far more.
And do not forget the mental health aspects of continued lockdown, especially during warm weather.
As I said above, I reckon if the government had done as you had suggested (and it was a reasonable option), then they'd be getting it in the neck anyway. There were only bad choices, even *with* hindsight.
Yes, but that"s my point, wouldn't it have been better to spend money on things that might have avoided - or at least, considerably mitigated - further lockdowns? And for that consideration we should have flung everything else into touch?
Now, in one sense of course, the government did get it triumphantly right. They ploughed huge sums into vaccine development, which was the only guaranteed way to bring the lockdown phase to an end.
But there were an awful lot of short term measures they could have put in place to make things easier in the meanwhile, and didn't.
This would have mattered much less if they hadn't been so inflexible in trying to avoid a lockdown while not doing things that would make it much less likely.
And for that they deserve a great deal of criticism.
However, they deserve far more for flagrantly breaking their own rules and lying about it. That really does show the governing party and the civil service are totally unfit for purpose and need excising.
I say. "PB're arguing about whether EOTHO and the additional deaths were worth the money."
Snaps back instantly: "The Government would have ben far better spending the money on schools. In fact, they've still done nothing about proper ventilation!"
So why don't the Sudeten Germans have a revanchist movement who want to wipe Czechia off the map ?
The fundamental problem is not Israel or the West Bank but Gaza.
And Gaza is a terrorist controlled statelet whose existence is non-viable beyond a population about 15% of what it is.
No, Israel is the problem and has always been. A country that completely disregards international law. Remember Hamas, whatever our own personal feelings, is a democratically elected entity. Why did Hamas get elected? The sheer miserableness of life in Gaza which Israel and the US (and various vasal states like the UK) have facilitated.
The cycle needs to stop or else this will will end badly for both Israelis and Palestinians.
The Sudeten Germans pretty much did have exactly that, but they've more or less died out/given up. Generally speaking, the hatreds caused by WW2 have faded unless reinforced by fresh events or populist politicians - it was commonplace to refuse to buy German or Japanese in my parents' generation, but I don't think anyone still feels that way.
The problem in the Middle East is that populist leaders keep creating fresh reasons for hatred. And we should be prepared to criticise either side for doing that, without getting into the game of justifying it with the last atrocity by the other side.
Long ago and far away the company I worked for wanted to introduce multilingual packaging and faced stiff resistance from the French (first time for everything eh? - ed.) In particular they insisted that packaging with German on it would be very problematic. So they designed a test market to prove the point which included the remains of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane - site of a notorious German massacre. They expected outrage. Nobody batted an eyelid.
"Muslims make up a majority in more than 30 constituencies" - that seemed off to me so I checked. Census 2021 data is easily available. This is incorrect. Muslims were a majority of the 2021 resident population in 3 constituencies, not 30.
I wonder whether it's some mis-reading (deliberate or not) of the data where Muslims are either a plurality or the majority if you exclude those with no religion - i.e. the majority religion among those with religion.
On topic - could we see the '22 install some sort of elder statesman to staunch the bleeding?
OGH suggests that the role has no attraction to aspiring Tories. But survival certainly will, and given Brady's comments about excluding the membership and Hunt floating that he might not stand at the next GE...
Who? Bill Cash? The only alternative leader who might make the slightest difference poll wise is Mordaunt but she is too woke for Tory MPs and members
I say. "PB're arguing about whether EOTHO and the additional deaths were worth the money."
Snaps back instantly: "The Government would have ben far better spending the money on schools. In fact, they've still done nothing about proper ventilation!"
Unfair. All those roofs falling down, or threatening to come down so lessons have to be outside, have improved ventilation very considerably.
From a military perspective this delay ain't half giving Hamas a chance to mine/booby trap every bit of rubble in northern Gaza.
A Bibi has got the strategy wrong.
By delaying he has let the narrative become steadily more pro-Palestinian.
And by allowing hostage negotiations Israel is allowing Hamas to trickle them out for more time and concessions.
A convincing suggestion I’ve seen is that contra his tough guy schtick, Bibi is a chronic ditherer, possibly due to years of shaky coalitions and calculating what will keep him out of jail. He’s obviously crapping himself about the eventual fallout from the intelligence failure on the initial Hamas assault, and he’s crapping himself over the potential fallout from the Israeli casualty rate of a land attack. Unless an IDF armourer has cut his finger not a drop of Israeli blood has been shed during the Gaza barrage while thousands of gallons of Palestine blood has been spilled which fullfills Netanyahu’s vengeance agenda. There’s a good chance that he still doesn’t have a precise strategy.
One of the worst aspects of the Gaza-Israel conflict (er, personally speaking) is the way it can make anyone disappear down a rabbithole of claim and counterclaim, unto the end of Time
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not.
(Snipped a load of an interesting post as I wanted to focus on this bit)
I disagree on this. Prevaricating and refusing to condemn Hamas shifts the conversation on to the October 7 attacks and undermines the person being asked as it makes them look like they condone the violence.
A simple "I condemn Hamas and the attacks on 7 October" enables moving the conversation on to what should happen next and what Israel is doing to Gaza and whether that should also be condemned.
Although it doesn't always work out that way. Eg an exchange on here yesterday. A poster condemned the Hamas atrocity and went on to make a couple of pro Palestinian observations (nothing radical just the usual type stuff about their plight).
He got accused of 'buttery'. ie where you are seen to devalue what you've said about something (and cast doubt on your sincerity about it) by going straight into a 'but'. Bit harsh, I thought.
Still, we all post what we like, don't we. All equal in that regard.
Lots of mentions in that article of: airstrikes on civilians, war crimes, atrocities, etc. Thousands have died; millions have been displaced. I have seen zero coverage in the international press, and no discussions on here. There have been no passionate calls for ceasefires, no large scale demonstrations in the UK, not much of anything at all. There are obviously lots of differences between that war and the one between Israel and Hamas, but it's difficult to move past the fact that one involves the world's only Jewish state, and the other doesn't.
It's stuff like this that makes it very easy to believe that anyone expressing explicit support for Palestinians is, at best being manipulated by antisemitic elements in the press and wider society, and quite often is betraying their own prejudices in that direction as well.
Yes but this follows from what some of us warned about. Israel flattening Gaza risks changing the victim narrative so that Israel is seen as the aggressor and Palestinians (and fellow Muslims) the victims. Of course, this will make no difference in the Middle East, and might even be welcomed by some extreme Israeli politicians because it proves (pace the last thread) that Jews are not safe outside of Israel itself.
(And by some of us, I mean me, many Israelis, the UN, the United States and so on.)
Yet if they don't then the Palestinians (and fellow Muslims) will see them as weak and ripe for plucking. Choice between devil and deep blue sea for Israel.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
I find this attitude bizarre. EOTHO was done in the summer, when you could eat outside, and helped an industry that was/is on its knees thanks to covid lockdowns. People were allowed to meet by then anyway, if it encouraged them to spend in pubs and restaurants rather than have dos at home, so much the better.
Was one of the few good things Sunak has done.
There's an unpleasant authoritarianism being displayed which feels that everything should have been restricted and nobody allowed to enjoy themselves at all.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
What tosh. We're talking about EOTHO. EOTHO was not a restriction. Not doing EOTHO wouldn't have been a restriction either. It was about an unprecedented subsidy costing nearly a billion pounds to encourage an activity.
Encouraging economic activities and ensuring the economy stays afloat is what the Treasury should be doing.
Does assisting citizens to an early grave count as an economic benefit?
What a ridiculous hyperbolic post. People could meet and gather anyway, at that time. Do you have single shred of evidence that Eoho caused excess deaths?
Ctrl+F finds zero uses of the term excess deaths in that link.
More cases means more excess deaths. Or are you going to start claiming that no-one ever died from COVID-19?
Right, so you're just going off an absurd claim any case numbers at all equals excess deaths, despite the fact that excess deaths were negative in August 2020.
So no, there were not excess deaths.
Any evidence for excess deaths, not cases?
Increased cases means more deaths, because COVID-19 kills some of the people it infects. That is not an absurd claim.
So, looking at whether there were excess deaths in August isn't going to tell us much. I've given you the paper that showed increased cases resulting from EOTHO. If you want me to teach you some basic epidemiology, I charge £200 per hour.
What happened to@Alanbrooke's header? Did he diss Radiohead or something equally awful?
Think of this thread as a calm interregnum between the two releases of Alanbrooke's thread. Hopefully the second time the publishing snafu will stay away.
I say. "PB're arguing about whether EOTHO and the additional deaths were worth the money."
Snaps back instantly: "The Government would have ben far better spending the money on schools. In fact, they've still done nothing about proper ventilation!"
Unfair. All those roofs falling down, or threatening to come down so lessons have to be outside, have improved ventilation very considerably.
I will tell her that!
But interestding she had an instant and entirely rational response, without time for thought (and she's not a teacher). (She was definitely thinking about HMG in London.)
PS If things don't improve, it'll have a nice 1930s ambience in many a school - all those sunshine lessons out in the playing fi ... er, I see the fallacy there.
"Muslims make up a majority in more than 30 constituencies" - that seemed off to me so I checked. Census 2021 data is easily available. This is incorrect. Muslims were a majority of the 2021 resident population in 3 constituencies, not 30.
I wonder whether it's some mis-reading (deliberate or not) of the data where Muslims are either a plurality or the majority if you exclude those with no religion - i.e. the majority religion among those with religion.
The thread explores some other interpretations that might be behind “Muslim voters are important in some constituencies” - more of them than the Labour majority, for example. But it’s one of those lazy and misleading stats that’s going to keep being repeated.
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
In what world were things getting better for Palestinians in Gaza, or even the West Bank? Do you think Hamas sprung out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus - no rhyme nor reason? Do you think everyone who talks about this is just a raging anti-Semite or anti-Zionist and has is projecting nuance and context where there is none, like shadows on a wall? Just like the example of NI given at the start of this conversation - they came from a history, a conflict, an occupation. They aren't just evil people with evil thoughts in their heads doing evil deeds for evil ends.
I can consider the motivations and feelings of many Israelis and Zionists - both the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. The colonial mindset, the right to land, the desire for homogeneity and a strong homeland. The desire for a haven, a safe place after the horrors of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism, the fear after the wars with their neighbours, the paranoia that the threat is still ever strong despite Israel being by far one of the best equipped nations militarily in the region. Why can't you do the same for Palestinians? Yes, the unsympathetic - the anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of their perceived enemy, the hatred and violence. But the fear, the death, the lack of security, the lack of change, the constant loss of land and rights and the desire to go home. The death of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. The experience for most Palestinians in Gaza who are under the age of 18 of only knowing life in an open air cage.
The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? Palestinians peacefully march to the border fence in protest in 18-19 and they get shot, sniped. The UN repeatedly calls Israeli settlement schemes illegal, they keep happening. Israel controls their borders, their food, their energy, their water. They look to the West Bank, where apparently peaceful coexistence is "working" - which is where Palestinian labour is allowed to move (for the benefit of Israeli companies), where settlers will still steal land and houses and the IDF will still back them up. Is that what is to be aspired to? And the other Arab Middle Eastern countries increasingly let them die because business with Israel and the US is dependent on them doing so, so the only other friends are equally desperate or extreme.
Almost every conversation here devolves into a statement that the violence of Hamas, their killing of children and women, of Kibutz and raves is a sign of their inherent evil, inhumanity, how they need to be dealt with. And every example of Israeli forces killing children and women, the historical wrongs, the management of Gaza is met with a "well, that's war" and a shrug. Hamas could take the same position, no? "Why did you kill civilians, kidnap them, kill children?" ... "Well, that's war". It doesn't get us anywhere to paint one side as inhuman monsters with inhuman motives.
I think the conference given by one of the released hostages yesterday was enlightening. She is a long time activist, from what I understand a founding member of Women Wage Peace. She had driven Gazan children and adults to and from hospitals in Israel to get them better healthcare. She said she went through hell, was beaten with a crowbar - and you can argue that her statements about being treated well and her shaking her captor’s hand was all in aid of making sure her husband stays safe. But she, as well as many of those who lost family, either who were killed or kidnapped, still advocate peace and note the humanity of their captors, their enemy. Whilst people here go out of their way to note how killing a cowering 7 year old, an atrocious thing to do, shows how Hamas are all Nazis I saw no one talk about the woman who had soldiers enter her home, ask to eat some of her food, and then left - who seemed just surprised as she was that they had made it across the border and said "do not worry, we are Muslim" when asked if they were going to kill her or her kids.
Total war on Gaza, on Palestinians, will do one thing - create the next generation of people who, wrongly, feel that the only route to justice is wiping Israel off the map. The only long term peaceful solution requires the stronger party, which is undoubtedly Israel, to show mercy first and go to the negotiation table.
So why don't the Sudeten Germans have a revanchist movement who want to wipe Czechia off the map ?
The fundamental problem is not Israel or the West Bank but Gaza.
And Gaza is a terrorist controlled statelet whose existence is non-viable beyond a population about 15% of what it is.
No, Israel is the problem and has always been. A country that completely disregards international law. Remember Hamas, whatever our own personal feelings, is a democratically elected entity. Why did Hamas get elected? The sheer miserableness of life in Gaza which Israel and the US (and various vasal states like the UK) have facilitated.
The cycle needs to stop or else this will will end badly for both Israelis and Palestinians.
There was raging anti-Semitism in the Middle East before Israel was even founded. See here, a pogrom in Baghdad in 1941
Of course at the time there was FAR FAR worse anti-Semitism in Europe, which shames Europe to this day. But anti-Semitism is not some European virus introduced into the Levant by the creation of Israel in 1948, it predates that - and European involvement - by many centuries
@148grss can refer you to some historians who tell a different story:
Indeed, some historians even claim that some instances of violence that was attributed to local anti-Semitism were perhaps instead carried out by Zionists in an attempt to convince Jewish people their positions were more unsafe than they really were and hasten Jewish migration to Israel (the Baghdad Bombings of the early 1950s are believed to be an example of this).
Jesus F C
The mask falls. A pure anti Semite, as suggested
Yuk
I'd agree that, up to a point, anti-semitism was an import from Europe, but it was a 19th century import. The Blood Libel became increasingly prominent, and Arab nationalist intellectuals echoed a lot of arguments made by European anti-semites. Pogroms, in the Middle East, predated the foundation of Israel, even if anti-semitism became more ferocious, following its creation.
Curious anecdote from Aus: people like WFH here because their energy use, including Aircon, is often free during the day (solar panels). Apparently a medium sized apartment block can be energy self-sufficient just from the panels on the roof.
I went to their office this morning, after an amiable hike through Heraklion. I found that the third party website I'd booked with had sent them the following incorrect details:
1) A driving licence number that read '000000000' 2) The wrong time of arrival 3) The wrong name.
So even if my flight hadn't been delayed, I couldn't have had the car.
However, as I apologised and as they clearly felt sorry for me (although I was so bewildered by what happened I kept stammering and they must have thought I was a complete idiot) they not only allowed me to rebook but upgraded me from a Fiat 500 to a Nissan Qashqai.
And we shared a few jokes and all ended up friends.
How's that for customer service?
Doubt if I'll get a refund though.
Lesson learned, at a fairly modest cost - book direct and if the arrival time is tight, book to pick up the following morning.
I went to their office this morning, after an amiable hike through Heraklion. I found that the third party website I'd booked with had sent them the following incorrect details:
1) A driving licence number that read '000000000' 2) The wrong time of arrival 3) The wrong name.
So even if my flight hadn't been delayed, I couldn't have had the car.
However, as I apologised and as they clearly felt sorry for me (although I was so bewildered by what happened I kept stammering and they must have thought I was a complete idiot) they not only allowed me to rebook but upgraded me from a Fiat 500 to a Nissan Qashqai.
And we shared a few jokes and all ended up friends.
How's that for customer service?
Doubt if I'll get a refund though.
Lesson learned, at a fairly modest cost - book direct and if the arrival time is tight, book to pick up the following morning.
Surely that was just someone elses booking rather than wrong name, date and details.....
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
In what world were things getting better for Palestinians in Gaza, or even the West Bank? Do you think Hamas sprung out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus - no rhyme nor reason? Do you think everyone who talks about this is just a raging anti-Semite or anti-Zionist and has is projecting nuance and context where there is none, like shadows on a wall? Just like the example of NI given at the start of this conversation - they came from a history, a conflict, an occupation. They aren't just evil people with evil thoughts in their heads doing evil deeds for evil ends.
I can consider the motivations and feelings of many Israelis and Zionists - both the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. The colonial mindset, the right to land, the desire for homogeneity and a strong homeland. The desire for a haven, a safe place after the horrors of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism, the fear after the wars with their neighbours, the paranoia that the threat is still ever strong despite Israel being by far one of the best equipped nations militarily in the region. Why can't you do the same for Palestinians? Yes, the unsympathetic - the anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of their perceived enemy, the hatred and violence. But the fear, the death, the lack of security, the lack of change, the constant loss of land and rights and the desire to go home. The death of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. The experience for most Palestinians in Gaza who are under the age of 18 of only knowing life in an open air cage.
The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? Palestinians peacefully march to the border fence in protest in 18-19 and they get shot, sniped. The UN repeatedly calls Israeli settlement schemes illegal, they keep happening. Israel controls their borders, their food, their energy, their water. They look to the West Bank, where apparently peaceful coexistence is "working" - which is where Palestinian labour is allowed to move (for the benefit of Israeli companies), where settlers will still steal land and houses and the IDF will still back them up. Is that what is to be aspired to? And the other Arab Middle Eastern countries increasingly let them die because business with Israel and the US is dependent on them doing so, so the only other friends are equally desperate or extreme.
Almost every conversation here devolves into a statement that the violence of Hamas, their killing of children and women, of Kibutz and raves is a sign of their inherent evil, inhumanity, how they need to be dealt with. And every example of Israeli forces killing children and women, the historical wrongs, the management of Gaza is met with a "well, that's war" and a shrug. Hamas could take the same position, no? "Why did you kill civilians, kidnap them, kill children?" ... "Well, that's war". It doesn't get us anywhere to paint one side as inhuman monsters with inhuman motives.
I think the conference given by one of the released hostages yesterday was enlightening. She is a long time activist, from what I understand a founding member of Women Wage Peace. She had driven Gazan children and adults to and from hospitals in Israel to get them better healthcare. She said she went through hell, was beaten with a crowbar - and you can argue that her statements about being treated well and her shaking her captor’s hand was all in aid of making sure her husband stays safe. But she, as well as many of those who lost family, either who were killed or kidnapped, still advocate peace and note the humanity of their captors, their enemy. Whilst people here go out of their way to note how killing a cowering 7 year old, an atrocious thing to do, shows how Hamas are all Nazis I saw no one talk about the woman who had soldiers enter her home, ask to eat some of her food, and then left - who seemed just surprised as she was that they had made it across the border and said "do not worry, we are Muslim" when asked if they were going to kill her or her kids.
Total war on Gaza, on Palestinians, will do one thing - create the next generation of people who, wrongly, feel that the only route to justice is wiping Israel off the map. The only long term peaceful solution requires the stronger party, which is undoubtedly Israel, to show mercy first and go to the negotiation table.
Basically: "let's all focus on that one nice guard at Auschwitz who used to hand out cakes"
Cretin
Question (because I don't know and I'm sure people here do), rather than debating point:
How far down the chain of command did the Nuremberg trials go? In post-Franco Spain, quite a few old thugs either wandered off into the sunset or reinvented themselves as life-long democrats.
It's not a pretty process for evil acts to go unpunished. But unless those involved can draw a line between leaders and led, wolves and sheep, the grim reality is this will continue unto the seventh generation and beyond.
I don’t think the Nuremberg trials themselves went very far down the chain of command, there were other specific trials going on, eg the Belsen trials for Irma Grese and her pals.
I find that behaviour particularly hard to understand. If someone thinks Israel should not defend itself (or that what it is doing in seeking that is disproportionate collective retribution, not defence) then that is one thing. It ranges from the awful to maybe having a point in some parts.
But to go out of your way to remove images of kidnapped hostages? Why? What possible non-awful reason can there be for that? Do they think the people are not captured? Do they think its a good thing they are? Do they want to pretend the massacre never happened so they can use decades old lines without variation?
People used tried to claim it was racist to translate Arabic language newspaper articles into English. Which were often very, very racist. The official English language version of the papers would often not carry the articles.
Apparently “context” is very important in racist crap - some stuff isn’t meant for outsiders, I suppose.
That sounds like the tourist sites in Istanbul, which would have a sign in Turkish (only) saying that Turkish citizens got a 90% discount. Many of the restaurants likely had two menus as well, because I don’t think the locals were paying £7 for a beer.
Savvy thinking. Tourists who've really prepared and immersed in the culture will be rewarded with a discount too.
I say. "PB're arguing about whether EOTHO and the additional deaths were worth the money."
Snaps back instantly: "The Government would have ben far better spending the money on schools. In fact, they've still done nothing about proper ventilation!"
Unfair. All those roofs falling down, or threatening to come down so lessons have to be outside, have improved ventilation very considerably.
I will tell her that!
But interestding she had an instant and entirely rational response, without time for thought (and she's not a teacher). (She was definitely thinking about HMG in London.)
PS If things don't improve, it'll have a nice 1930s ambience in many a school - all those sunshine lessons out in the playing fi ... er, I see the fallacy there.
Boris would have made a great EdSec by that logic, all that playing of the field.
That seems an unfairly short time for @Alanbrooke's provocative header. He deserved longer.
Yes, a very good and pertinent piece. Kay Burley on Sky News just mentioned that Save the Children won’t be happy with the uk government not calling for a ceasefire. Why should their opinion count any more than anyone else’s?
The opinion of a charity specialising in easing children's suffering that current Israeli policy is causing massive suffering to children does seem relevant.
Personally as one of the few MPs who was in both Labour Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Palestine (I was on the executive of the former), I must say I'm losing sympathy with Israel despite the horrific Hamas atrocities. Frankly they should get on with the invasion if they're going to do it and then run the area they occupy until further notice, not just starve the population. And the refusal of a visa to a UN official "to teach them a lesson" sounds petulant and tin-eared.
Did Save the Children make a statement about the Israeli children murdered and kidnapped?
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not.
(Snipped a load of an interesting post as I wanted to focus on this bit)
I disagree on this. Prevaricating and refusing to condemn Hamas shifts the conversation on to the October 7 attacks and undermines the person being asked as it makes them look like they condone the violence.
A simple "I condemn Hamas and the attacks on 7 October" enables moving the conversation on to what should happen next and what Israel is doing to Gaza and whether that should also be condemned.
Although it doesn't always work out that way. Eg an exchange on here yesterday. A poster condemned the Hamas atrocity and went on to make a couple of pro Palestinian observations (nothing radical just the usual type stuff about their plight).
He got accused of 'buttery'. ie where you are seen to devalue what you've said about something (and cast doubt on your sincerity about it) by going straight into a 'but'. Bit harsh, I thought.
Still, we all post what we like, don't we. All equal in that regard.
Lots of mentions in that article of: airstrikes on civilians, war crimes, atrocities, etc. Thousands have died; millions have been displaced. I have seen zero coverage in the international press, and no discussions on here. There have been no passionate calls for ceasefires, no large scale demonstrations in the UK, not much of anything at all. There are obviously lots of differences between that war and the one between Israel and Hamas, but it's difficult to move past the fact that one involves the world's only Jewish state, and the other doesn't.
It's stuff like this that makes it very easy to believe that anyone expressing explicit support for Palestinians is, at best being manipulated by antisemitic elements in the press and wider society, and quite often is betraying their own prejudices in that direction as well.
And the Sahrawis (or Western Saharans), another Arab people, have been under occupation by Morocco since 1975.
There's a certain logic to rushing stuff past so it looks like activity, but people don't get time to think about each one and conclude: that was shit, that was shit too, that was shitter, that was shit-stirring, that was shit-brained
What about the seven bins? Didn't see that mentioned.
Seven Bins for Seven Brothers is the signature policy of modern times.
"Muslims make up a majority in more than 30 constituencies" - that seemed off to me so I checked. Census 2021 data is easily available. This is incorrect. Muslims were a majority of the 2021 resident population in 3 constituencies, not 30.
I wonder whether it's some mis-reading (deliberate or not) of the data where Muslims are either a plurality or the majority if you exclude those with no religion - i.e. the majority religion among those with religion.
Muslims are 6.5% of the overall population, compared to 61% who claim some religious affiliation, so it would seem unlikely, especially as Muslims will form less than 6.5% of the electorate.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not.
(Snipped a load of an interesting post as I wanted to focus on this bit)
I disagree on this. Prevaricating and refusing to condemn Hamas shifts the conversation on to the October 7 attacks and undermines the person being asked as it makes them look like they condone the violence.
A simple "I condemn Hamas and the attacks on 7 October" enables moving the conversation on to what should happen next and what Israel is doing to Gaza and whether that should also be condemned.
Although it doesn't always work out that way. Eg an exchange on here yesterday. A poster condemned the Hamas atrocity and went on to make a couple of pro Palestinian observations (nothing radical just the usual type stuff about their plight).
He got accused of 'buttery'. ie where you are seen to devalue what you've said about something (and cast doubt on your sincerity about it) by going straight into a 'but'. Bit harsh, I thought.
Still, we all post what we like, don't we. All equal in that regard.
Lots of mentions in that article of: airstrikes on civilians, war crimes, atrocities, etc. Thousands have died; millions have been displaced. I have seen zero coverage in the international press, and no discussions on here. There have been no passionate calls for ceasefires, no large scale demonstrations in the UK, not much of anything at all. There are obviously lots of differences between that war and the one between Israel and Hamas, but it's difficult to move past the fact that one involves the world's only Jewish state, and the other doesn't.
It's stuff like this that makes it very easy to believe that anyone expressing explicit support for Palestinians is, at best being manipulated by antisemitic elements in the press and wider society, and quite often is betraying their own prejudices in that direction as well.
There are many people in this country with particular personal connections to Israel/Palestine who may want to speak up on the topic, but I agree that the Left's broader focus on Palestine and not other problems in the world (Sudan, Western Sahara, Abkhazia, etc.) does suggest a bias. I don't know whether that's antisemitism or manipulation by antisemitic elements, or whether it's to do with a particular anti-colonial focus.
That all said, right now, there are obvious reasons why there is a lot of focus on the region.
I went to their office this morning, after an amiable hike through Heraklion. I found that the third party website I'd booked with had sent them the following incorrect details:
1) A driving licence number that read '000000000' 2) The wrong time of arrival 3) The wrong name.
So even if my flight hadn't been delayed, I couldn't have had the car.
However, as I apologised and as they clearly felt sorry for me (although I was so bewildered by what happened I kept stammering and they must have thought I was a complete idiot) they not only allowed me to rebook but upgraded me from a Fiat 500 to a Nissan Qashqai.
And we shared a few jokes and all ended up friends.
How's that for customer service?
Doubt if I'll get a refund though.
Lesson learned, at a fairly modest cost - book direct and if the arrival time is tight, book to pick up the following morning.
Surely that was just someone elses booking rather than wrong name, date and details.....
Nope, correct booking number for me. And the 'wrong name' was my first name repeated three times which caused some puzzlement in their office. Now even though I am a Welshman that seemed excessive.
Their website had been very glitchy when I booked and clearly deleted some stuff, reset others to defaults and copied other stuff across at random. But it was embarrassing.
I was very lucky it was quiet and they had time to sort it out.
The Conservatives will lose no seats in tomorrow's local by-elections - because they are not defending any. We do however have 2 Labour defences (in Coventry and Waltham Forest); 2 Green defences (in Burnley and Lancashire); and 1 Ind defence in Herefordshire).
On topic - could we see the '22 install some sort of elder statesman to staunch the bleeding?
OGH suggests that the role has no attraction to aspiring Tories. But survival certainly will, and given Brady's comments about excluding the membership and Hunt floating that he might not stand at the next GE...
Following the last three general elections the Tories have changed PM every single time. After the last GE twice already.
Whether you view our politics as irredeemably Presidential, or you see these changes of PM as symptoms of a party in government changing policy with dizzying regularity, it shows that the electorate have no idea what they are voting for if they vote Conservative.
If they put their cross against the Tories, and they somehow remain as the government, how long will Sunak be PM? What policies will they have under the next PM, or the one after that?
Installing as PM an elder statesman figure who definitely won't be PM after the election because they won't even be an MP increases this uncertainty in their future direction by several orders of magnitude. I already think that the question: "Who will be PM in 2026 if you win the election?" is going to be enormously damaging to the Tories given what has happened since 2015. Having a caretaker go into the election would be so much worse.
I say. "PB're arguing about whether EOTHO and the additional deaths were worth the money."
Snaps back instantly: "The Government would have ben far better spending the money on schools. In fact, they've still done nothing about proper ventilation!"
Could have done both of course.
School policy was a mess, that is an area I think genuine lessons for a pandemic can be learned, as opposed to journalists salivating over WhatsApp messages of ministers and advisers bitching or scrambling.
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
In what world were things getting better for Palestinians in Gaza, or even the West Bank? Do you think Hamas sprung out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus - no rhyme nor reason? Do you think everyone who talks about this is just a raging anti-Semite or anti-Zionist and has is projecting nuance and context where there is none, like shadows on a wall? Just like the example of NI given at the start of this conversation - they came from a history, a conflict, an occupation. They aren't just evil people with evil thoughts in their heads doing evil deeds for evil ends.
I can consider the motivations and feelings of many Israelis and Zionists - both the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. The colonial mindset, the right to land, the desire for homogeneity and a strong homeland. The desire for a haven, a safe place after the horrors of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism, the fear after the wars with their neighbours, the paranoia that the threat is still ever strong despite Israel being by far one of the best equipped nations militarily in the region. Why can't you do the same for Palestinians? Yes, the unsympathetic - the anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of their perceived enemy, the hatred and violence. But the fear, the death, the lack of security, the lack of change, the constant loss of land and rights and the desire to go home. The death of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. The experience for most Palestinians in Gaza who are under the age of 18 of only knowing life in an open air cage.
The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? Palestinians peacefully march to the border fence in protest in 18-19 and they get shot, sniped. The UN repeatedly calls Israeli settlement schemes illegal, they keep happening. Israel controls their borders, their food, their energy, their water. They look to the West Bank, where apparently peaceful coexistence is "working" - which is where Palestinian labour is allowed to move (for the benefit of Israeli companies), where settlers will still steal land and houses and the IDF will still back them up. Is that what is to be aspired to? And the other Arab Middle Eastern countries increasingly let them die because business with Israel and the US is dependent on them doing so, so the only other friends are equally desperate or extreme.
Almost every conversation here devolves into a statement that the violence of Hamas, their killing of children and women, of Kibutz and raves is a sign of their inherent evil, inhumanity, how they need to be dealt with. And every example of Israeli forces killing children and women, the historical wrongs, the management of Gaza is met with a "well, that's war" and a shrug. Hamas could take the same position, no? "Why did you kill civilians, kidnap them, kill children?" ... "Well, that's war". It doesn't get us anywhere to paint one side as inhuman monsters with inhuman motives.
I think the conference given by one of the released hostages yesterday was enlightening. She is a long time activist, from what I understand a founding member of Women Wage Peace. She had driven Gazan children and adults to and from hospitals in Israel to get them better healthcare. She said she went through hell, was beaten with a crowbar - and you can argue that her statements about being treated well and her shaking her captor’s hand was all in aid of making sure her husband stays safe. But she, as well as many of those who lost family, either who were killed or kidnapped, still advocate peace and note the humanity of their captors, their enemy. Whilst people here go out of their way to note how killing a cowering 7 year old, an atrocious thing to do, shows how Hamas are all Nazis I saw no one talk about the woman who had soldiers enter her home, ask to eat some of her food, and then left - who seemed just surprised as she was that they had made it across the border and said "do not worry, we are Muslim" when asked if they were going to kill her or her kids.
Total war on Gaza, on Palestinians, will do one thing - create the next generation of people who, wrongly, feel that the only route to justice is wiping Israel off the map. The only long term peaceful solution requires the stronger party, which is undoubtedly Israel, to show mercy first and go to the negotiation table.
Basically: "let's all focus on that one nice guard at Auschwitz who used to hand out cakes"
Cretin
Question (because I don't know and I'm sure people here do), rather than debating point:
How far down the chain of command did the Nuremberg trials go? In post-Franco Spain, quite a few old thugs either wandered off into the sunset or reinvented themselves as life-long democrats.
It's not a pretty process for evil acts to go unpunished. But unless those involved can draw a line between leaders and led, wolves and sheep, the grim reality is this will continue unto the seventh generation and beyond.
I don’t think the Nuremberg trials themselves went very far down the chain of command, there were other specific trials going on, eg the Belsen trials for Irma Grese and her pals.
There was no real consistency. A lot of leading Nazis were only lightly punished, whereas some of the small fry were hanged.
On topic - could we see the '22 install some sort of elder statesman to staunch the bleeding?
OGH suggests that the role has no attraction to aspiring Tories. But survival certainly will, and given Brady's comments about excluding the membership and Hunt floating that he might not stand at the next GE...
Yes. We need Earl Home 2023 edition.
The only one I can think of in the Commons with stature is Theresa May. In the Lords? Ken Clark, William Hague - someone like that Outside Parliament? I see that George Osborne has rehabilitated himself on his podcast...
Sunak is sinking the ship. The idea of a putsch against him is entirely rational. But there is no obvious replacement in the Commons who could both win a majority and steady the ship. So look outside.
The Tories have already shown that they don't give a rat fuck about the constitutional niceties - sending Rees-Mogg up to Balmoral to lie to HMQ and illegally close parliament proves that.
So why not a PM in the Lords? Ideally placed to be immune to the infighting of the rats as the ship sinks. But could steady the ship enough so that all isn't lost.
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
In what world were things getting better for Palestinians in Gaza, or even the West Bank? Do you think Hamas sprung out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus - no rhyme nor reason? Do you think everyone who talks about this is just a raging anti-Semite or anti-Zionist and has is projecting nuance and context where there is none, like shadows on a wall? Just like the example of NI given at the start of this conversation - they came from a history, a conflict, an occupation. They aren't just evil people with evil thoughts in their heads doing evil deeds for evil ends.
I can consider the motivations and feelings of many Israelis and Zionists - both the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. The colonial mindset, the right to land, the desire for homogeneity and a strong homeland. The desire for a haven, a safe place after the horrors of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism, the fear after the wars with their neighbours, the paranoia that the threat is still ever strong despite Israel being by far one of the best equipped nations militarily in the region. Why can't you do the same for Palestinians? Yes, the unsympathetic - the anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of their perceived enemy, the hatred and violence. But the fear, the death, the lack of security, the lack of change, the constant loss of land and rights and the desire to go home. The death of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. The experience for most Palestinians in Gaza who are under the age of 18 of only knowing life in an open air cage.
The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? Palestinians peacefully march to the border fence in protest in 18-19 and they get shot, sniped. The UN repeatedly calls Israeli settlement schemes illegal, they keep happening. Israel controls their borders, their food, their energy, their water. They look to the West Bank, where apparently peaceful coexistence is "working" - which is where Palestinian labour is allowed to move (for the benefit of Israeli companies), where settlers will still steal land and houses and the IDF will still back them up. Is that what is to be aspired to? And the other Arab Middle Eastern countries increasingly let them die because business with Israel and the US is dependent on them doing so, so the only other friends are equally desperate or extreme.
Almost every conversation here devolves into a statement that the violence of Hamas, their killing of children and women, of Kibutz and raves is a sign of their inherent evil, inhumanity, how they need to be dealt with. And every example of Israeli forces killing children and women, the historical wrongs, the management of Gaza is met with a "well, that's war" and a shrug. Hamas could take the same position, no? "Why did you kill civilians, kidnap them, kill children?" ... "Well, that's war". It doesn't get us anywhere to paint one side as inhuman monsters with inhuman motives.
I think the conference given by one of the released hostages yesterday was enlightening. She is a long time activist, from what I understand a founding member of Women Wage Peace. She had driven Gazan children and adults to and from hospitals in Israel to get them better healthcare. She said she went through hell, was beaten with a crowbar - and you can argue that her statements about being treated well and her shaking her captor’s hand was all in aid of making sure her husband stays safe. But she, as well as many of those who lost family, either who were killed or kidnapped, still advocate peace and note the humanity of their captors, their enemy. Whilst people here go out of their way to note how killing a cowering 7 year old, an atrocious thing to do, shows how Hamas are all Nazis I saw no one talk about the woman who had soldiers enter her home, ask to eat some of her food, and then left - who seemed just surprised as she was that they had made it across the border and said "do not worry, we are Muslim" when asked if they were going to kill her or her kids.
Total war on Gaza, on Palestinians, will do one thing - create the next generation of people who, wrongly, feel that the only route to justice is wiping Israel off the map. The only long term peaceful solution requires the stronger party, which is undoubtedly Israel, to show mercy first and go to the negotiation table.
So why don't the Sudeten Germans have a revanchist movement who want to wipe Czechia off the map ?
The fundamental problem is not Israel or the West Bank but Gaza.
And Gaza is a terrorist controlled statelet whose existence is non-viable beyond a population about 15% of what it is.
No, Israel is the problem and has always been. A country that completely disregards international law. Remember Hamas, whatever our own personal feelings, is a democratically elected entity. Why did Hamas get elected? The sheer miserableness of life in Gaza which Israel and the US (and various vasal states like the UK) have facilitated.
The cycle needs to stop or else this will will end badly for both Israelis and Palestinians.
There was raging anti-Semitism in the Middle East before Israel was even founded. See here, a pogrom in Baghdad in 1941
Of course at the time there was FAR FAR worse anti-Semitism in Europe, which shames Europe to this day. But anti-Semitism is not some European virus introduced into the Levant by the creation of Israel in 1948, it predates that - and European involvement - by many centuries
@148grss can refer you to some historians who tell a different story:
Indeed, some historians even claim that some instances of violence that was attributed to local anti-Semitism were perhaps instead carried out by Zionists in an attempt to convince Jewish people their positions were more unsafe than they really were and hasten Jewish migration to Israel (the Baghdad Bombings of the early 1950s are believed to be an example of this).
Jesus F C
The mask falls. A pure anti Semite, as suggested
Yuk
I'd agree that, up to a point, anti-semitism was an import from Europe, but it was a 19th century import. The Blood Libel became increasingly prominent, and Arab nationalist intellectuals echoed a lot of arguments made by European anti-semites. Pogroms, in the Middle East, predated the foundation of Israel, even if anti-semitism became more ferocious, following its creation.
I completely disagree
"The Ottoman policy towards religious minorities was primarily based on Islamic tradition, that is, the Koran, Hadith (the sayings and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad), and the precedents and practices inherited from earlier Muslim states. The Koran and Hadith contain numerous negative descriptions of Jews, reflecting the Prophet Muhammad’s fury over the rejection of his religious message by the contemporary Jewish tribes.
"Jews are depicted as a mean, cunning, cowardly, hostile, deceitful, and treacherous people; they deliberately tampered with their own sacred texts; they intrigued against Muhammad and the early Muslim community, they are the Muslims’ worst enemies; they persecuted and killed their own prophets; they reject Allah’s truth; they were cursed by Allah because of their disbelief, and so on.
"These negative depictions of Jews were expanded in early Islamic hagiographic literature on the life of the Prophet (Sira). For example, Jews portrayed as villainous and malicious, although they are weak and ineffectual. Therefore, according to Islamic sources, Jews have been condemned to an existence of wretchedness and humiliation. Moreover, Jews will also be punished in the afterlife, where they will burn in hell."
TLDR: The Ottoman Empire can be seen as more tolerant of Jews than some comparable Christian societies, but it was also absolutely suffused with anti-Semitism, and this comes ultimately from Islamic teaching
From
"Reflection on the Traits and Images Associated with Jews in 17th Century Ottoman Sources"
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
In what world were things getting better for Palestinians in Gaza, or even the West Bank? Do you think Hamas sprung out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus - no rhyme nor reason? Do you think everyone who talks about this is just a raging anti-Semite or anti-Zionist and has is projecting nuance and context where there is none, like shadows on a wall? Just like the example of NI given at the start of this conversation - they came from a history, a conflict, an occupation. They aren't just evil people with evil thoughts in their heads doing evil deeds for evil ends.
I can consider the motivations and feelings of many Israelis and Zionists - both the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. The colonial mindset, the right to land, the desire for homogeneity and a strong homeland. The desire for a haven, a safe place after the horrors of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism, the fear after the wars with their neighbours, the paranoia that the threat is still ever strong despite Israel being by far one of the best equipped nations militarily in the region. Why can't you do the same for Palestinians? Yes, the unsympathetic - the anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of their perceived enemy, the hatred and violence. But the fear, the death, the lack of security, the lack of change, the constant loss of land and rights and the desire to go home. The death of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. The experience for most Palestinians in Gaza who are under the age of 18 of only knowing life in an open air cage.
The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? Palestinians peacefully march to the border fence in protest in 18-19 and they get shot, sniped. The UN repeatedly calls Israeli settlement schemes illegal, they keep happening. Israel controls their borders, their food, their energy, their water. They look to the West Bank, where apparently peaceful coexistence is "working" - which is where Palestinian labour is allowed to move (for the benefit of Israeli companies), where settlers will still steal land and houses and the IDF will still back them up. Is that what is to be aspired to? And the other Arab Middle Eastern countries increasingly let them die because business with Israel and the US is dependent on them doing so, so the only other friends are equally desperate or extreme.
Almost every conversation here devolves into a statement that the violence of Hamas, their killing of children and women, of Kibutz and raves is a sign of their inherent evil, inhumanity, how they need to be dealt with. And every example of Israeli forces killing children and women, the historical wrongs, the management of Gaza is met with a "well, that's war" and a shrug. Hamas could take the same position, no? "Why did you kill civilians, kidnap them, kill children?" ... "Well, that's war". It doesn't get us anywhere to paint one side as inhuman monsters with inhuman motives.
I think the conference given by one of the released hostages yesterday was enlightening. She is a long time activist, from what I understand a founding member of Women Wage Peace. She had driven Gazan children and adults to and from hospitals in Israel to get them better healthcare. She said she went through hell, was beaten with a crowbar - and you can argue that her statements about being treated well and her shaking her captor’s hand was all in aid of making sure her husband stays safe. But she, as well as many of those who lost family, either who were killed or kidnapped, still advocate peace and note the humanity of their captors, their enemy. Whilst people here go out of their way to note how killing a cowering 7 year old, an atrocious thing to do, shows how Hamas are all Nazis I saw no one talk about the woman who had soldiers enter her home, ask to eat some of her food, and then left - who seemed just surprised as she was that they had made it across the border and said "do not worry, we are Muslim" when asked if they were going to kill her or her kids.
Total war on Gaza, on Palestinians, will do one thing - create the next generation of people who, wrongly, feel that the only route to justice is wiping Israel off the map. The only long term peaceful solution requires the stronger party, which is undoubtedly Israel, to show mercy first and go to the negotiation table.
So why don't the Sudeten Germans have a revanchist movement who want to wipe Czechia off the map ?
The fundamental problem is not Israel or the West Bank but Gaza.
And Gaza is a terrorist controlled statelet whose existence is non-viable beyond a population about 15% of what it is.
No, Israel is the problem and has always been. A country that completely disregards international law. Remember Hamas, whatever our own personal feelings, is a democratically elected entity. Why did Hamas get elected? The sheer miserableness of life in Gaza which Israel and the US (and various vasal states like the UK) have facilitated.
The cycle needs to stop or else this will will end badly for both Israelis and Palestinians.
I said the other day that Hamas and Nethanyahu are as bad as each other for the region and I stand by it.
Has Netanyahu tortured and murdered 1,400 civilians, deliberately, in cold blood?
No, he's a warm cuddly Grandfatherly figure who has only radiated goodness on the citizens of the occupied west bank and Gaza strip.
So he hasn't, then?
You said they were as bad each other. Netanyahu might be bad, but Hamas are worse.
They can both feed off each other and not build us towards an enduring and peaceful solution without us needing to draw a false (and unhelpful) equivalence.
I said they were as bad as each other for the region which they are. The whole debacle of that part of the middle east is not just one act of Hamas brutality which means Hamas bad, Nethanyahu good.
My equivalence is neither false nor unhelpful.
Nethanyahu's various regimes have been responsible for many many deaths in Gaza over the years as well as annexing further land from the West Bank. They have not been a partner for peace. They have enabled Hamas, as reported in Times of Israel.
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
In what world were things getting better for Palestinians in Gaza, or even the West Bank? Do you think Hamas sprung out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus - no rhyme nor reason? Do you think everyone who talks about this is just a raging anti-Semite or anti-Zionist and has is projecting nuance and context where there is none, like shadows on a wall? Just like the example of NI given at the start of this conversation - they came from a history, a conflict, an occupation. They aren't just evil people with evil thoughts in their heads doing evil deeds for evil ends.
I can consider the motivations and feelings of many Israelis and Zionists - both the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. The colonial mindset, the right to land, the desire for homogeneity and a strong homeland. The desire for a haven, a safe place after the horrors of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism, the fear after the wars with their neighbours, the paranoia that the threat is still ever strong despite Israel being by far one of the best equipped nations militarily in the region. Why can't you do the same for Palestinians? Yes, the unsympathetic - the anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of their perceived enemy, the hatred and violence. But the fear, the death, the lack of security, the lack of change, the constant loss of land and rights and the desire to go home. The death of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. The experience for most Palestinians in Gaza who are under the age of 18 of only knowing life in an open air cage.
The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? Palestinians peacefully march to the border fence in protest in 18-19 and they get shot, sniped. The UN repeatedly calls Israeli settlement schemes illegal, they keep happening. Israel controls their borders, their food, their energy, their water. They look to the West Bank, where apparently peaceful coexistence is "working" - which is where Palestinian labour is allowed to move (for the benefit of Israeli companies), where settlers will still steal land and houses and the IDF will still back them up. Is that what is to be aspired to? And the other Arab Middle Eastern countries increasingly let them die because business with Israel and the US is dependent on them doing so, so the only other friends are equally desperate or extreme.
Almost every conversation here devolves into a statement that the violence of Hamas, their killing of children and women, of Kibutz and raves is a sign of their inherent evil, inhumanity, how they need to be dealt with. And every example of Israeli forces killing children and women, the historical wrongs, the management of Gaza is met with a "well, that's war" and a shrug. Hamas could take the same position, no? "Why did you kill civilians, kidnap them, kill children?" ... "Well, that's war". It doesn't get us anywhere to paint one side as inhuman monsters with inhuman motives.
I think the conference given by one of the released hostages yesterday was enlightening. She is a long time activist, from what I understand a founding member of Women Wage Peace. She had driven Gazan children and adults to and from hospitals in Israel to get them better healthcare. She said she went through hell, was beaten with a crowbar - and you can argue that her statements about being treated well and her shaking her captor’s hand was all in aid of making sure her husband stays safe. But she, as well as many of those who lost family, either who were killed or kidnapped, still advocate peace and note the humanity of their captors, their enemy. Whilst people here go out of their way to note how killing a cowering 7 year old, an atrocious thing to do, shows how Hamas are all Nazis I saw no one talk about the woman who had soldiers enter her home, ask to eat some of her food, and then left - who seemed just surprised as she was that they had made it across the border and said "do not worry, we are Muslim" when asked if they were going to kill her or her kids.
Total war on Gaza, on Palestinians, will do one thing - create the next generation of people who, wrongly, feel that the only route to justice is wiping Israel off the map. The only long term peaceful solution requires the stronger party, which is undoubtedly Israel, to show mercy first and go to the negotiation table.
Basically: "let's all focus on that one nice guard at Auschwitz who used to hand out cakes"
Cretin
Question (because I don't know and I'm sure people here do), rather than debating point:
How far down the chain of command did the Nuremberg trials go? In post-Franco Spain, quite a few old thugs either wandered off into the sunset or reinvented themselves as life-long democrats.
It's not a pretty process for evil acts to go unpunished. But unless those involved can draw a line between leaders and led, wolves and sheep, the grim reality is this will continue unto the seventh generation and beyond.
I don’t think the Nuremberg trials themselves went very far down the chain of command, there were other specific trials going on, eg the Belsen trials for Irma Grese and her pals.
There was no real consistency. A lot of leading Nazis were only lightly punished, whereas some of the small fry were hanged.
Far more fell victim to summary vengeance.
Sadly, and unfairly, that's often how justice works.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
I find this attitude bizarre. EOTHO was done in the summer, when you could eat outside, and helped an industry that was/is on its knees thanks to covid lockdowns. People were allowed to meet by then anyway, if it encouraged them to spend in pubs and restaurants rather than have dos at home, so much the better.
Was one of the few good things Sunak has done.
There's an unpleasant authoritarianism being displayed which feels that everything should have been restricted and nobody allowed to enjoy themselves at all.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
What tosh. We're talking about EOTHO. EOTHO was not a restriction. Not doing EOTHO wouldn't have been a restriction either. It was about an unprecedented subsidy costing nearly a billion pounds to encourage an activity.
Encouraging economic activities and ensuring the economy stays afloat is what the Treasury should be doing.
Does assisting citizens to an early grave count as an economic benefit?
What a ridiculous hyperbolic post. People could meet and gather anyway, at that time. Do you have single shred of evidence that Eoho caused excess deaths?
Ctrl+F finds zero uses of the term excess deaths in that link.
More cases means more excess deaths. Or are you going to start claiming that no-one ever died from COVID-19?
Right, so you're just going off an absurd claim any case numbers at all equals excess deaths, despite the fact that excess deaths were negative in August 2020.
So no, there were not excess deaths.
Any evidence for excess deaths, not cases?
Increased cases means more deaths, because COVID-19 kills some of the people it infects. That is not an absurd claim.
So, looking at whether there were excess deaths in August isn't going to tell us much. I've given you the paper that showed increased cases resulting from EOTHO. If you want me to teach you some basic epidemiology, I charge £200 per hour.
And then there is the lag between the increase in seriously ill and the hospital's capacity being used up.
Indeed, given the current waiting lists, the excess illness and death from EOTHO might still be in the process of materialising.
Perhaps the August negative excess deaths was because that cohort had already been knocked out in March? If you've only got 6 months left anyway...
We do everything on the cheap and then moan when it turns out to be crap and costly.
Wow, that’s about a third, or perhaps a quarter, of what you’d expect for such a role as a short-term assignment.
You’ll need to understand a fair bit about trade, and also a fair bit about Switzerland, their culture, and their economy. That salary isn’t temping anyone out of a Swiss bank, nor the senior Swiss CS, and isn’t tempting anyone out of retirement either.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not.
(Snipped a load of an interesting post as I wanted to focus on this bit)
I disagree on this. Prevaricating and refusing to condemn Hamas shifts the conversation on to the October 7 attacks and undermines the person being asked as it makes them look like they condone the violence.
A simple "I condemn Hamas and the attacks on 7 October" enables moving the conversation on to what should happen next and what Israel is doing to Gaza and whether that should also be condemned.
Although it doesn't always work out that way. Eg an exchange on here yesterday. A poster condemned the Hamas atrocity and went on to make a couple of pro Palestinian observations (nothing radical just the usual type stuff about their plight).
He got accused of 'buttery'. ie where you are seen to devalue what you've said about something (and cast doubt on your sincerity about it) by going straight into a 'but'. Bit harsh, I thought.
Still, we all post what we like, don't we. All equal in that regard.
Lots of mentions in that article of: airstrikes on civilians, war crimes, atrocities, etc. Thousands have died; millions have been displaced. I have seen zero coverage in the international press, and no discussions on here. There have been no passionate calls for ceasefires, no large scale demonstrations in the UK, not much of anything at all. There are obviously lots of differences between that war and the one between Israel and Hamas, but it's difficult to move past the fact that one involves the world's only Jewish state, and the other doesn't.
It's stuff like this that makes it very easy to believe that anyone expressing explicit support for Palestinians is, at best being manipulated by antisemitic elements in the press and wider society, and quite often is betraying their own prejudices in that direction as well.
Al Jazeera used to have some good coverage on Sudan, but its has been blanked out by the Gaza propaganda war. Shame.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not.
(Snipped a load of an interesting post as I wanted to focus on this bit)
I disagree on this. Prevaricating and refusing to condemn Hamas shifts the conversation on to the October 7 attacks and undermines the person being asked as it makes them look like they condone the violence.
A simple "I condemn Hamas and the attacks on 7 October" enables moving the conversation on to what should happen next and what Israel is doing to Gaza and whether that should also be condemned.
Although it doesn't always work out that way. Eg an exchange on here yesterday. A poster condemned the Hamas atrocity and went on to make a couple of pro Palestinian observations (nothing radical just the usual type stuff about their plight).
He got accused of 'buttery'. ie where you are seen to devalue what you've said about something (and cast doubt on your sincerity about it) by going straight into a 'but'. Bit harsh, I thought.
Still, we all post what we like, don't we. All equal in that regard.
Lots of mentions in that article of: airstrikes on civilians, war crimes, atrocities, etc. Thousands have died; millions have been displaced. I have seen zero coverage in the international press, and no discussions on here. There have been no passionate calls for ceasefires, no large scale demonstrations in the UK, not much of anything at all. There are obviously lots of differences between that war and the one between Israel and Hamas, but it's difficult to move past the fact that one involves the world's only Jewish state, and the other doesn't.
It's stuff like this that makes it very easy to believe that anyone expressing explicit support for Palestinians is, at best being manipulated by antisemitic elements in the press and wider society, and quite often is betraying their own prejudices in that direction as well.
There are many people in this country with particular personal connections to Israel/Palestine who may want to speak up on the topic, but I agree that the Left's broader focus on Palestine and not other problems in the world (Sudan, Western Sahara, Abkhazia, etc.) does suggest a bias. I don't know whether that's antisemitism or manipulation by antisemitic elements, or whether it's to do with a particular anti-colonial focus.
That all said, right now, there are obvious reasons why there is a lot of focus on the region.
Two way traffic of course, I don’t see many on the right showing any concern for the atrociously persecuted in Sudan etc, even taking into account their general lack of concern for people in faraway countries of which they know little.
EXC: Pressure piles on Keir Starmer - More than 150 Muslim Labour Councillors have written directly to the Labour leader demanding he call for a ceasefire in Gaza as backlash over his policy from within his party grows
On topic - could we see the '22 install some sort of elder statesman to staunch the bleeding?
OGH suggests that the role has no attraction to aspiring Tories. But survival certainly will, and given Brady's comments about excluding the membership and Hunt floating that he might not stand at the next GE...
Yes. We need Earl Home 2023 edition.
The only one I can think of in the Commons with stature is Theresa May. In the Lords? Ken Clark, William Hague - someone like that Outside Parliament? I see that George Osborne has rehabilitated himself on his podcast...
Sunak is sinking the ship. The idea of a putsch against him is entirely rational. But there is no obvious replacement in the Commons who could both win a majority and steady the ship. So look outside.
The Tories have already shown that they don't give a rat fuck about the constitutional niceties - sending Rees-Mogg up to Balmoral to lie to HMQ and illegally close parliament proves that.
So why not a PM in the Lords? Ideally placed to be immune to the infighting of the rats as the ship sinks. But could steady the ship enough so that all isn't lost.
If there's no alternative you have no stick with no change. Its why May survived months in office despite bring unable to pass her deal (she even led or close to it in the polls then, remarkably).
And if you cannot find any alternative out of 345 MPs or however many it is now, that's really really bad as a look. So bad I'm not sure the steadying effect would work.
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
In what world were things getting better for Palestinians in Gaza, or even the West Bank? Do you think Hamas sprung out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus - no rhyme nor reason? Do you think everyone who talks about this is just a raging anti-Semite or anti-Zionist and has is projecting nuance and context where there is none, like shadows on a wall? Just like the example of NI given at the start of this conversation - they came from a history, a conflict, an occupation. They aren't just evil people with evil thoughts in their heads doing evil deeds for evil ends.
I can consider the motivations and feelings of many Israelis and Zionists - both the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. The colonial mindset, the right to land, the desire for homogeneity and a strong homeland. The desire for a haven, a safe place after the horrors of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism, the fear after the wars with their neighbours, the paranoia that the threat is still ever strong despite Israel being by far one of the best equipped nations militarily in the region. Why can't you do the same for Palestinians? Yes, the unsympathetic - the anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of their perceived enemy, the hatred and violence. But the fear, the death, the lack of security, the lack of change, the constant loss of land and rights and the desire to go home. The death of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. The experience for most Palestinians in Gaza who are under the age of 18 of only knowing life in an open air cage.
The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? Palestinians peacefully march to the border fence in protest in 18-19 and they get shot, sniped. The UN repeatedly calls Israeli settlement schemes illegal, they keep happening. Israel controls their borders, their food, their energy, their water. They look to the West Bank, where apparently peaceful coexistence is "working" - which is where Palestinian labour is allowed to move (for the benefit of Israeli companies), where settlers will still steal land and houses and the IDF will still back them up. Is that what is to be aspired to? And the other Arab Middle Eastern countries increasingly let them die because business with Israel and the US is dependent on them doing so, so the only other friends are equally desperate or extreme.
Almost every conversation here devolves into a statement that the violence of Hamas, their killing of children and women, of Kibutz and raves is a sign of their inherent evil, inhumanity, how they need to be dealt with. And every example of Israeli forces killing children and women, the historical wrongs, the management of Gaza is met with a "well, that's war" and a shrug. Hamas could take the same position, no? "Why did you kill civilians, kidnap them, kill children?" ... "Well, that's war". It doesn't get us anywhere to paint one side as inhuman monsters with inhuman motives.
I think the conference given by one of the released hostages yesterday was enlightening. She is a long time activist, from what I understand a founding member of Women Wage Peace. She had driven Gazan children and adults to and from hospitals in Israel to get them better healthcare. She said she went through hell, was beaten with a crowbar - and you can argue that her statements about being treated well and her shaking her captor’s hand was all in aid of making sure her husband stays safe. But she, as well as many of those who lost family, either who were killed or kidnapped, still advocate peace and note the humanity of their captors, their enemy. Whilst people here go out of their way to note how killing a cowering 7 year old, an atrocious thing to do, shows how Hamas are all Nazis I saw no one talk about the woman who had soldiers enter her home, ask to eat some of her food, and then left - who seemed just surprised as she was that they had made it across the border and said "do not worry, we are Muslim" when asked if they were going to kill her or her kids.
Total war on Gaza, on Palestinians, will do one thing - create the next generation of people who, wrongly, feel that the only route to justice is wiping Israel off the map. The only long term peaceful solution requires the stronger party, which is undoubtedly Israel, to show mercy first and go to the negotiation table.
So why don't the Sudeten Germans have a revanchist movement who want to wipe Czechia off the map ?
The fundamental problem is not Israel or the West Bank but Gaza.
And Gaza is a terrorist controlled statelet whose existence is non-viable beyond a population about 15% of what it is.
No, Israel is the problem and has always been. A country that completely disregards international law. Remember Hamas, whatever our own personal feelings, is a democratically elected entity. Why did Hamas get elected? The sheer miserableness of life in Gaza which Israel and the US (and various vasal states like the UK) have facilitated.
The cycle needs to stop or else this will will end badly for both Israelis and Palestinians.
There was raging anti-Semitism in the Middle East before Israel was even founded. See here, a pogrom in Baghdad in 1941
Of course at the time there was FAR FAR worse anti-Semitism in Europe, which shames Europe to this day. But anti-Semitism is not some European virus introduced into the Levant by the creation of Israel in 1948, it predates that - and European involvement - by many centuries
@148grss can refer you to some historians who tell a different story:
Indeed, some historians even claim that some instances of violence that was attributed to local anti-Semitism were perhaps instead carried out by Zionists in an attempt to convince Jewish people their positions were more unsafe than they really were and hasten Jewish migration to Israel (the Baghdad Bombings of the early 1950s are believed to be an example of this).
Jesus F C
The mask falls. A pure anti Semite, as suggested
Yuk
I'd agree that, up to a point, anti-semitism was an import from Europe, but it was a 19th century import. The Blood Libel became increasingly prominent, and Arab nationalist intellectuals echoed a lot of arguments made by European anti-semites. Pogroms, in the Middle East, predated the foundation of Israel, even if anti-semitism became more ferocious, following its creation.
I completely disagree
"The Ottoman policy towards religious minorities was primarily based on Islamic tradition, that is, the Koran, Hadith (the sayings and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad), and the precedents and practices inherited from earlier Muslim states. The Koran and Hadith contain numerous negative descriptions of Jews, reflecting the Prophet Muhammad’s fury over the rejection of his religious message by the contemporary Jewish tribes.
"Jews are depicted as a mean, cunning, cowardly, hostile, deceitful, and treacherous people; they deliberately tampered with their own sacred texts; they intrigued against Muhammad and the early Muslim community, they are the Muslims’ worst enemies; they persecuted and killed their own prophets; they reject Allah’s truth; they were cursed by Allah because of their disbelief, and so on.
"These negative depictions of Jews were expanded in early Islamic hagiographic literature on the life of the Prophet (Sira). For example, Jews portrayed as villainous and malicious, although they are weak and ineffectual. Therefore, according to Islamic sources, Jews have been condemned to an existence of wretchedness and humiliation. Moreover, Jews will also be punished in the afterlife, where they will burn in hell."
TLDR: The Ottoman Empire can be seen as more tolerant of Jews than some comparable Christian societies, but it was also absolutely suffused with anti-Semitism, and this comes ultimately from Islamic teaching
From
"Reflection on the Traits and Images Associated with Jews in 17th Century Ottoman Sources"
It's why I said "up to a point". At various points, attempts were made to forcibly convert Jews in North Africa in the Middle Ages. Obviously, Jews had very much a second class status under the Ottomans.
On topic - could we see the '22 install some sort of elder statesman to staunch the bleeding?
OGH suggests that the role has no attraction to aspiring Tories. But survival certainly will, and given Brady's comments about excluding the membership and Hunt floating that he might not stand at the next GE...
Yes. We need Earl Home 2023 edition.
The only one I can think of in the Commons with stature is Theresa May. In the Lords? Ken Clark, William Hague - someone like that Outside Parliament? I see that George Osborne has rehabilitated himself on his podcast...
Sunak is sinking the ship. The idea of a putsch against him is entirely rational. But there is no obvious replacement in the Commons who could both win a majority and steady the ship. So look outside.
The Tories have already shown that they don't give a rat fuck about the constitutional niceties - sending Rees-Mogg up to Balmoral to lie to HMQ and illegally close parliament proves that.
So why not a PM in the Lords? Ideally placed to be immune to the infighting of the rats as the ship sinks. But could steady the ship enough so that all isn't lost.
Lord Frost? The only possible Lord the current Tory party would unite around as leader
I went to their office this morning, after an amiable hike through Heraklion. I found that the third party website I'd booked with had sent them the following incorrect details:
1) A driving licence number that read '000000000' 2) The wrong time of arrival 3) The wrong name.
So even if my flight hadn't been delayed, I couldn't have had the car.
However, as I apologised and as they clearly felt sorry for me (although I was so bewildered by what happened I kept stammering and they must have thought I was a complete idiot) they not only allowed me to rebook but upgraded me from a Fiat 500 to a Nissan Qashqai.
And we shared a few jokes and all ended up friends.
How's that for customer service?
Doubt if I'll get a refund though.
Lesson learned, at a fairly modest cost - book direct and if the arrival time is tight, book to pick up the following morning.
Reasonable outcome but yes, never, ever, ever book a hire car through a third-party. The paper trail is shambolic and can lead to long waits at the airport (I once waited for almost three hours for the Italians to give me the keys to a car that I had 'booked' several months in advance of my arrival ––– lesson duly learned).
I find local hire firms are almost always the best, look for reviews online and find one that is close to the arrivals hall.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not.
(Snipped a load of an interesting post as I wanted to focus on this bit)
I disagree on this. Prevaricating and refusing to condemn Hamas shifts the conversation on to the October 7 attacks and undermines the person being asked as it makes them look like they condone the violence.
A simple "I condemn Hamas and the attacks on 7 October" enables moving the conversation on to what should happen next and what Israel is doing to Gaza and whether that should also be condemned.
Although it doesn't always work out that way. Eg an exchange on here yesterday. A poster condemned the Hamas atrocity and went on to make a couple of pro Palestinian observations (nothing radical just the usual type stuff about their plight).
He got accused of 'buttery'. ie where you are seen to devalue what you've said about something (and cast doubt on your sincerity about it) by going straight into a 'but'. Bit harsh, I thought.
Still, we all post what we like, don't we. All equal in that regard.
Lots of mentions in that article of: airstrikes on civilians, war crimes, atrocities, etc. Thousands have died; millions have been displaced. I have seen zero coverage in the international press, and no discussions on here. There have been no passionate calls for ceasefires, no large scale demonstrations in the UK, not much of anything at all. There are obviously lots of differences between that war and the one between Israel and Hamas, but it's difficult to move past the fact that one involves the world's only Jewish state, and the other doesn't.
It's stuff like this that makes it very easy to believe that anyone expressing explicit support for Palestinians is, at best being manipulated by antisemitic elements in the press and wider society, and quite often is betraying their own prejudices in that direction as well.
Well there's the 1st (sad) point that we don't care much about Africa and Africans. Then the 2nd (also sad) point is that Israel Palestine is a hot button 'left v right' topic. When you analyse responses and counterresponses what you find (very often) is that people on the left are more animated about what people on the right are saying about the conflict than the conflict itself. Likewise on the right the anger is more focused on what people on the left are saying about the conflict than the conflict itself. The discourse is quite meta.
One of the worst aspects of the Gaza-Israel conflict (er, personally speaking) is the way it can make anyone disappear down a rabbithole of claim and counterclaim, unto the end of Time
I do not have endless time. I must work
Later
Indeed. the recent Rory/Campbell podcast on the subject (outstanding BTW) was quite short, so Rory started the story as recently as 66AD, entirely missing out the destruction of the first Temple 586BC, Joshua (1200BC??), the call of Abraham (2000BC??) Noah (no idea) and the creation of the stars.
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
In what world were things getting better for Palestinians in Gaza, or even the West Bank? Do you think Hamas sprung out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus - no rhyme nor reason? Do you think everyone who talks about this is just a raging anti-Semite or anti-Zionist and has is projecting nuance and context where there is none, like shadows on a wall? Just like the example of NI given at the start of this conversation - they came from a history, a conflict, an occupation. They aren't just evil people with evil thoughts in their heads doing evil deeds for evil ends.
I can consider the motivations and feelings of many Israelis and Zionists - both the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. The colonial mindset, the right to land, the desire for homogeneity and a strong homeland. The desire for a haven, a safe place after the horrors of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism, the fear after the wars with their neighbours, the paranoia that the threat is still ever strong despite Israel being by far one of the best equipped nations militarily in the region. Why can't you do the same for Palestinians? Yes, the unsympathetic - the anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of their perceived enemy, the hatred and violence. But the fear, the death, the lack of security, the lack of change, the constant loss of land and rights and the desire to go home. The death of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. The experience for most Palestinians in Gaza who are under the age of 18 of only knowing life in an open air cage.
The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? Palestinians peacefully march to the border fence in protest in 18-19 and they get shot, sniped. The UN repeatedly calls Israeli settlement schemes illegal, they keep happening. Israel controls their borders, their food, their energy, their water. They look to the West Bank, where apparently peaceful coexistence is "working" - which is where Palestinian labour is allowed to move (for the benefit of Israeli companies), where settlers will still steal land and houses and the IDF will still back them up. Is that what is to be aspired to? And the other Arab Middle Eastern countries increasingly let them die because business with Israel and the US is dependent on them doing so, so the only other friends are equally desperate or extreme.
Almost every conversation here devolves into a statement that the violence of Hamas, their killing of children and women, of Kibutz and raves is a sign of their inherent evil, inhumanity, how they need to be dealt with. And every example of Israeli forces killing children and women, the historical wrongs, the management of Gaza is met with a "well, that's war" and a shrug. Hamas could take the same position, no? "Why did you kill civilians, kidnap them, kill children?" ... "Well, that's war". It doesn't get us anywhere to paint one side as inhuman monsters with inhuman motives.
I think the conference given by one of the released hostages yesterday was enlightening. She is a long time activist, from what I understand a founding member of Women Wage Peace. She had driven Gazan children and adults to and from hospitals in Israel to get them better healthcare. She said she went through hell, was beaten with a crowbar - and you can argue that her statements about being treated well and her shaking her captor’s hand was all in aid of making sure her husband stays safe. But she, as well as many of those who lost family, either who were killed or kidnapped, still advocate peace and note the humanity of their captors, their enemy. Whilst people here go out of their way to note how killing a cowering 7 year old, an atrocious thing to do, shows how Hamas are all Nazis I saw no one talk about the woman who had soldiers enter her home, ask to eat some of her food, and then left - who seemed just surprised as she was that they had made it across the border and said "do not worry, we are Muslim" when asked if they were going to kill her or her kids.
Total war on Gaza, on Palestinians, will do one thing - create the next generation of people who, wrongly, feel that the only route to justice is wiping Israel off the map. The only long term peaceful solution requires the stronger party, which is undoubtedly Israel, to show mercy first and go to the negotiation table.
Basically: "let's all focus on that one nice guard at Auschwitz who used to hand out cakes"
Cretin
Question (because I don't know and I'm sure people here do), rather than debating point:
How far down the chain of command did the Nuremberg trials go? In post-Franco Spain, quite a few old thugs either wandered off into the sunset or reinvented themselves as life-long democrats.
It's not a pretty process for evil acts to go unpunished. But unless those involved can draw a line between leaders and led, wolves and sheep, the grim reality is this will continue unto the seventh generation and beyond.
Do you mean the Nuremberg trials or all trials related to war crimes in the Nazi-era? The Nuremberg Trials themselves only had 199 defendants across 13 trials, so a tiny minority of top-brass.
More broadly, there were a lot of individual trials over many years and several countries for actions of individuals who were part of the Nazi regime (about 100,000 in Germany/Austria and more in other countries). Aside from some high profile cases (most notably the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel following his capture in Argentina) a lot of these were either acquittals on variations of "only following orders" or pretty lenient sentences considering the gravity of the matters covered. In West Germany in particular, Konrad Adenauer very much soft-pedalled on denazification, broadly on the basis you suggest of "where does it stop?"
There were some high-profile examples of people who'd probably committed fairly significant war crimes essentially getting away with it or at least being rehabilitated to a degree that wasn't merited (Wernher Von Braun, Albert Speer etc). Kurt Waldheim is an obvious example of someone who had a front-line political career despite being pretty heavily implicated, although when the extent of his involvement was revealed, it did ultimately end his career (he stayed on as Austrian President to the end of his term, rather remarkably, but essentially nobody that mattered would have anything to do with him after about 1987).
We do everything on the cheap and then moan when it turns out to be crap and costly.
Wow, that’s about a third, or perhaps a quarter, of what you’d expect for such a role as a short-term assignment.
You’ll need to understand a fair bit about trade, and also a fair bit about Switzerland, their culture, and their economy. That salary isn’t temping anyone out of a Swiss bank, nor the senior Swiss CS, and isn’t tempting anyone out of retirement either.
On topic - could we see the '22 install some sort of elder statesman to staunch the bleeding?
OGH suggests that the role has no attraction to aspiring Tories. But survival certainly will, and given Brady's comments about excluding the membership and Hunt floating that he might not stand at the next GE...
I hope the Tories do get rid of Sunak and install Braverman.
My thinking.
It is way too late to save the Tories from defeat. Whatever loony right wing bounce Braverman will get will be offset by both a further abandonment by those repelled by her and also those repelled by the idea of a 4th PM since the last election. Even if she tries to negate the latter by going for an election straight away she leaves herself no time to change the fortunes of the Tory party.
The upshot of this is that the Tories lose the election whenever it happens and Braverman is discredited and dumped.
There will be some short term pain with her becoming PM but there will be little enough time for her to do any real damage and my aim is to see any future threat of her becoming PM wrecked as comprehensively as possible.
We do everything on the cheap and then moan when it turns out to be crap and costly.
Wow, that’s about a third, or perhaps a quarter, of what you’d expect for such a role as a short-term assignment.
You’ll need to understand a fair bit about trade, and also a fair bit about Switzerland, their culture, and their economy. That salary isn’t temping anyone out of a Swiss bank, nor the senior Swiss CS, and isn’t tempting anyone out of retirement either.
So who do they expect to actually hire?
Someone who will do as they are told by the next Lord Frost.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not.
(Snipped a load of an interesting post as I wanted to focus on this bit)
I disagree on this. Prevaricating and refusing to condemn Hamas shifts the conversation on to the October 7 attacks and undermines the person being asked as it makes them look like they condone the violence.
A simple "I condemn Hamas and the attacks on 7 October" enables moving the conversation on to what should happen next and what Israel is doing to Gaza and whether that should also be condemned.
Although it doesn't always work out that way. Eg an exchange on here yesterday. A poster condemned the Hamas atrocity and went on to make a couple of pro Palestinian observations (nothing radical just the usual type stuff about their plight).
He got accused of 'buttery'. ie where you are seen to devalue what you've said about something (and cast doubt on your sincerity about it) by going straight into a 'but'. Bit harsh, I thought.
Still, we all post what we like, don't we. All equal in that regard.
Lots of mentions in that article of: airstrikes on civilians, war crimes, atrocities, etc. Thousands have died; millions have been displaced. I have seen zero coverage in the international press, and no discussions on here. There have been no passionate calls for ceasefires, no large scale demonstrations in the UK, not much of anything at all. There are obviously lots of differences between that war and the one between Israel and Hamas, but it's difficult to move past the fact that one involves the world's only Jewish state, and the other doesn't.
It's stuff like this that makes it very easy to believe that anyone expressing explicit support for Palestinians is, at best being manipulated by antisemitic elements in the press and wider society, and quite often is betraying their own prejudices in that direction as well.
There are many people in this country with particular personal connections to Israel/Palestine who may want to speak up on the topic, but I agree that the Left's broader focus on Palestine and not other problems in the world (Sudan, Western Sahara, Abkhazia, etc.) does suggest a bias. I don't know whether that's antisemitism or manipulation by antisemitic elements, or whether it's to do with a particular anti-colonial focus.
That all said, right now, there are obvious reasons why there is a lot of focus on the region.
To a certain extent it's a more important conflict because of the oil supply consequences. When we stop using oil for energy, and have enough oil from other sources for plastics, etc, then I'd expect conflicts in the Middle East to slide down the international agenda.
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
In what world were things getting better for Palestinians in Gaza, or even the West Bank? Do you think Hamas sprung out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus - no rhyme nor reason? Do you think everyone who talks about this is just a raging anti-Semite or anti-Zionist and has is projecting nuance and context where there is none, like shadows on a wall? Just like the example of NI given at the start of this conversation - they came from a history, a conflict, an occupation. They aren't just evil people with evil thoughts in their heads doing evil deeds for evil ends.
I can consider the motivations and feelings of many Israelis and Zionists - both the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. The colonial mindset, the right to land, the desire for homogeneity and a strong homeland. The desire for a haven, a safe place after the horrors of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism, the fear after the wars with their neighbours, the paranoia that the threat is still ever strong despite Israel being by far one of the best equipped nations militarily in the region. Why can't you do the same for Palestinians? Yes, the unsympathetic - the anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of their perceived enemy, the hatred and violence. But the fear, the death, the lack of security, the lack of change, the constant loss of land and rights and the desire to go home. The death of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. The experience for most Palestinians in Gaza who are under the age of 18 of only knowing life in an open air cage.
The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? Palestinians peacefully march to the border fence in protest in 18-19 and they get shot, sniped. The UN repeatedly calls Israeli settlement schemes illegal, they keep happening. Israel controls their borders, their food, their energy, their water. They look to the West Bank, where apparently peaceful coexistence is "working" - which is where Palestinian labour is allowed to move (for the benefit of Israeli companies), where settlers will still steal land and houses and the IDF will still back them up. Is that what is to be aspired to? And the other Arab Middle Eastern countries increasingly let them die because business with Israel and the US is dependent on them doing so, so the only other friends are equally desperate or extreme.
Almost every conversation here devolves into a statement that the violence of Hamas, their killing of children and women, of Kibutz and raves is a sign of their inherent evil, inhumanity, how they need to be dealt with. And every example of Israeli forces killing children and women, the historical wrongs, the management of Gaza is met with a "well, that's war" and a shrug. Hamas could take the same position, no? "Why did you kill civilians, kidnap them, kill children?" ... "Well, that's war". It doesn't get us anywhere to paint one side as inhuman monsters with inhuman motives.
I think the conference given by one of the released hostages yesterday was enlightening. She is a long time activist, from what I understand a founding member of Women Wage Peace. She had driven Gazan children and adults to and from hospitals in Israel to get them better healthcare. She said she went through hell, was beaten with a crowbar - and you can argue that her statements about being treated well and her shaking her captor’s hand was all in aid of making sure her husband stays safe. But she, as well as many of those who lost family, either who were killed or kidnapped, still advocate peace and note the humanity of their captors, their enemy. Whilst people here go out of their way to note how killing a cowering 7 year old, an atrocious thing to do, shows how Hamas are all Nazis I saw no one talk about the woman who had soldiers enter her home, ask to eat some of her food, and then left - who seemed just surprised as she was that they had made it across the border and said "do not worry, we are Muslim" when asked if they were going to kill her or her kids.
Total war on Gaza, on Palestinians, will do one thing - create the next generation of people who, wrongly, feel that the only route to justice is wiping Israel off the map. The only long term peaceful solution requires the stronger party, which is undoubtedly Israel, to show mercy first and go to the negotiation table.
So why don't the Sudeten Germans have a revanchist movement who want to wipe Czechia off the map ?
The fundamental problem is not Israel or the West Bank but Gaza.
And Gaza is a terrorist controlled statelet whose existence is non-viable beyond a population about 15% of what it is.
No, Israel is the problem and has always been. A country that completely disregards international law. Remember Hamas, whatever our own personal feelings, is a democratically elected entity. Why did Hamas get elected? The sheer miserableness of life in Gaza which Israel and the US (and various vasal states like the UK) have facilitated.
The cycle needs to stop or else this will will end badly for both Israelis and Palestinians.
There was raging anti-Semitism in the Middle East before Israel was even founded. See here, a pogrom in Baghdad in 1941
Of course at the time there was FAR FAR worse anti-Semitism in Europe, which shames Europe to this day. But anti-Semitism is not some European virus introduced into the Levant by the creation of Israel in 1948, it predates that - and European involvement - by many centuries
@148grss can refer you to some historians who tell a different story:
Indeed, some historians even claim that some instances of violence that was attributed to local anti-Semitism were perhaps instead carried out by Zionists in an attempt to convince Jewish people their positions were more unsafe than they really were and hasten Jewish migration to Israel (the Baghdad Bombings of the early 1950s are believed to be an example of this).
Jesus F C
The mask falls. A pure anti Semite, as suggested
Yuk
I'd agree that, up to a point, anti-semitism was an import from Europe, but it was a 19th century import. The Blood Libel became increasingly prominent, and Arab nationalist intellectuals echoed a lot of arguments made by European anti-semites. Pogroms, in the Middle East, predated the foundation of Israel, even if anti-semitism became more ferocious, following its creation.
I completely disagree
"The Ottoman policy towards religious minorities was primarily based on Islamic tradition, that is, the Koran, Hadith (the sayings and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad), and the precedents and practices inherited from earlier Muslim states. The Koran and Hadith contain numerous negative descriptions of Jews, reflecting the Prophet Muhammad’s fury over the rejection of his religious message by the contemporary Jewish tribes.
"Jews are depicted as a mean, cunning, cowardly, hostile, deceitful, and treacherous people; they deliberately tampered with their own sacred texts; they intrigued against Muhammad and the early Muslim community, they are the Muslims’ worst enemies; they persecuted and killed their own prophets; they reject Allah’s truth; they were cursed by Allah because of their disbelief, and so on.
"These negative depictions of Jews were expanded in early Islamic hagiographic literature on the life of the Prophet (Sira). For example, Jews portrayed as villainous and malicious, although they are weak and ineffectual. Therefore, according to Islamic sources, Jews have been condemned to an existence of wretchedness and humiliation. Moreover, Jews will also be punished in the afterlife, where they will burn in hell."
TLDR: The Ottoman Empire can be seen as more tolerant of Jews than some comparable Christian societies, but it was also absolutely suffused with anti-Semitism, and this comes ultimately from Islamic teaching
From
"Reflection on the Traits and Images Associated with Jews in 17th Century Ottoman Sources"
The Ottoman Empire was anti-semitic, though far worse for the Armenian Christians, but tempered by sloth and inefficiency. Hence the large Jewish community that fled Western Europe, particularly Spain after the Reconquista settled in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean in such places as Thessaloniki and Alexandria. There are still Ladino speaking Shepardic Jews, an archaic form of Jewish Spanish.
Anti-semitism was ubiquitous in Europe at the time, and the Ottoman Empire, alongside the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were the places of refuge at the time.
There’s lots to criticize this government over but I tend to think any government would struggle in its response to the pandemic .
I doubt Labour would have done much better .
They wouldn't. But they want you to forget they were demanding we purchase PPE from vendors who didn't actually have any PPE. And then criticised the governemnt for, er, buying from vendors who didn't actually have any PPE.
Everyone on the planet was trying to source PPE at the same time. That we never actually ran out of it should - nothwithstanding some scammers who got in the mix - be a credit to the procurement powers of this government.
LOt of government scammers and friends and families though, many billions defrauded that they ahve decided not to chase , wonder why.
On topic - could we see the '22 install some sort of elder statesman to staunch the bleeding?
OGH suggests that the role has no attraction to aspiring Tories. But survival certainly will, and given Brady's comments about excluding the membership and Hunt floating that he might not stand at the next GE...
I hope the Tories do get rid of Sunak and install Braverman.
My thinking.
It is way too late to save the Tories from defeat. Whatever loony right wing bounce Braverman will get will be offset by both a further abandonment by those repelled by her and also those repelled by the idea of a 4th PM since the last election. Even if she tries to negate the latter by going for an election straight away she leaves herself no time to change the fortunes of the Tory party.
The upshot of this is that the Tories lose the election whenever it happens and Braverman is discredited and dumped.
There will be some short term pain with her becoming PM but there will be little enough time for her to do any real damage and my aim is to see any future threat of her becoming PM wrecked as comprehensively as possible.
Braverman is too clever to fall into that trap.
Why be a fag end PM who likely loses by a landslide when she could have a chance to take over as Leader of the Opposition, blame Sunak and Hunt for election defeat and possibly even win in another 5 years against an unpopular Starmer government if the economy is in poor shape and taxes and inflation high
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not.
(Snipped a load of an interesting post as I wanted to focus on this bit)
I disagree on this. Prevaricating and refusing to condemn Hamas shifts the conversation on to the October 7 attacks and undermines the person being asked as it makes them look like they condone the violence.
A simple "I condemn Hamas and the attacks on 7 October" enables moving the conversation on to what should happen next and what Israel is doing to Gaza and whether that should also be condemned.
Although it doesn't always work out that way. Eg an exchange on here yesterday. A poster condemned the Hamas atrocity and went on to make a couple of pro Palestinian observations (nothing radical just the usual type stuff about their plight).
He got accused of 'buttery'. ie where you are seen to devalue what you've said about something (and cast doubt on your sincerity about it) by going straight into a 'but'. Bit harsh, I thought.
Still, we all post what we like, don't we. All equal in that regard.
Lots of mentions in that article of: airstrikes on civilians, war crimes, atrocities, etc. Thousands have died; millions have been displaced. I have seen zero coverage in the international press, and no discussions on here. There have been no passionate calls for ceasefires, no large scale demonstrations in the UK, not much of anything at all. There are obviously lots of differences between that war and the one between Israel and Hamas, but it's difficult to move past the fact that one involves the world's only Jewish state, and the other doesn't.
It's stuff like this that makes it very easy to believe that anyone expressing explicit support for Palestinians is, at best being manipulated by antisemitic elements in the press and wider society, and quite often is betraying their own prejudices in that direction as well.
Well there's the 1st (sad) point that we don't care much about Africa and Africans. Then the 2nd (also sad) point is that Israel Palestine is a hot button 'left v right' topic. When you analyse responses and counterresponses what you find (very often) is that people on the left are more animated about what people on the right are saying about the conflict than the conflict itself. Likewise on the right the anger is more focused on what people on the left are saying about the conflict than the conflict itself. The discourse is quite meta.
A few things: 1) We also don't care very much about Arabs, unless there happens to be Jews on the other side. Why? 2) Easy to see why the right doesn't care very much about Africa and Africans (at least from your point of view). What's the Left's excuse? 3) Also easy to see why the Right is energised by Left wing antisemitism being displayed around the conflict. What's the Left's excuse for getting animated about people supporting Israel's right to defend itself following a massacre?
EXC: Pressure piles on Keir Starmer - More than 150 Muslim Labour Councillors have written directly to the Labour leader demanding he call for a ceasefire in Gaza as backlash over his policy from within his party grows
My prediction of an Islamic Party forming seems to be more likely because of this latest trouble. I can’t find when I suggested it using the search function
On topic - could we see the '22 install some sort of elder statesman to staunch the bleeding?
OGH suggests that the role has no attraction to aspiring Tories. But survival certainly will, and given Brady's comments about excluding the membership and Hunt floating that he might not stand at the next GE...
I hope the Tories do get rid of Sunak and install Braverman.
My thinking.
It is way too late to save the Tories from defeat. Whatever loony right wing bounce Braverman will get will be offset by both a further abandonment by those repelled by her and also those repelled by the idea of a 4th PM since the last election. Even if she tries to negate the latter by going for an election straight away she leaves herself no time to change the fortunes of the Tory party.
The upshot of this is that the Tories lose the election whenever it happens and Braverman is discredited and dumped.
There will be some short term pain with her becoming PM but there will be little enough time for her to do any real damage and my aim is to see any future threat of her becoming PM wrecked as comprehensively as possible.
Braverman is too clever to fall into that trap.
Why be a fag end PM who likely loses by a landslide when she could have a chance to take over as Leader of the Opposition, blame Sunak and Hunt for election defeat and possibly even win in another 5 years against an unpopular Starmer government if the economy is in poor shape and taxes and inflation high
So, Tories on 150 seats in GE 2024, 50 seats after GE 2029...
On topic. I don't care how absurd replacing Sunak would be - they ARE absurd and will do it if they thought it would help. I don't think it will happen because who do you replace him with? Can the parliamentary party coalesce around a true winner? And either get that person through the members vote or get away without one?
Sunak will be PM until January of 2025.
The biggest problem is that there is no one obvious to take over in a coronation. Not that coronations tend to work anyway (Sunak, May, Brown...), and a contest would be a ridiculous indulgence.
Sunak should call a GE in the spring. The longer this drags on the worse it gets.
It makes sense to go to the country in the Spring.
November: Autumn Statement (or is it a Budget?) in which the Chancellor confirms the Triple Lock and an 8% increase in state pension for the core vote.
November: Flights resume to Rwanda.
December: Inflation falls to between 5% - 6% (roughly half of where it was).
Autumn/Winter: Number of boat crossings falls (though not stopped).
January: Close 50 hotels housing migrants appealing to the Right.
March: Close a further 50 hotels housing migrants (100 in total) appealing to the Right.
April: 8% increase kicks in.
April: Dissolve Parliament and call an Election as the Prime Minister who has halved inflation, stopped the boats, got rid of migrants and protected the Triple Lock.
Of course, the fly in the ointment is the Supreme Court. If they rule against the Government on the Rwanda plan then the Government may be tempted to say "We can't close the hotels because we can't send them to Rwanda. We're being held back by an activist judiciary".
It is a plausible timeline, although the one thing that could muddy the waters is the impending war in the middle east and what happens there.
Alot of labours support is pro Palestine, not just the Muslim vote. They could easily be turned off labour due to its avid pro Israel stance.
They could but most of the strongest pro Palestinian Labour vote is in safe Labour seats in Bradford, Birmingham, Luton, Bethnal Green etc.
Whereas the highest Jewish vote is in Tory marginals like Finchley and Golders Green and Chipping Barnet
I am pretty sure the entire Jewish vote will now shift. en masse, to the Tories. Labour cannot be trusted, will be the thought, no matter what Starmer says
It is far too small to sway an election but, as you imply, could shunt a couple of seats to Sunal that might otherwise have been lost
I wonder what the same process will do in the USA? Florida?
Locally ,Im surprised we havent heard much from George Galloway, he's the dog that hasnt barked in the current conflict.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not.
(Snipped a load of an interesting post as I wanted to focus on this bit)
I disagree on this. Prevaricating and refusing to condemn Hamas shifts the conversation on to the October 7 attacks and undermines the person being asked as it makes them look like they condone the violence.
A simple "I condemn Hamas and the attacks on 7 October" enables moving the conversation on to what should happen next and what Israel is doing to Gaza and whether that should also be condemned.
Although it doesn't always work out that way. Eg an exchange on here yesterday. A poster condemned the Hamas atrocity and went on to make a couple of pro Palestinian observations (nothing radical just the usual type stuff about their plight).
He got accused of 'buttery'. ie where you are seen to devalue what you've said about something (and cast doubt on your sincerity about it) by going straight into a 'but'. Bit harsh, I thought.
Still, we all post what we like, don't we. All equal in that regard.
Lots of mentions in that article of: airstrikes on civilians, war crimes, atrocities, etc. Thousands have died; millions have been displaced. I have seen zero coverage in the international press, and no discussions on here. There have been no passionate calls for ceasefires, no large scale demonstrations in the UK, not much of anything at all. There are obviously lots of differences between that war and the one between Israel and Hamas, but it's difficult to move past the fact that one involves the world's only Jewish state, and the other doesn't.
It's stuff like this that makes it very easy to believe that anyone expressing explicit support for Palestinians is, at best being manipulated by antisemitic elements in the press and wider society, and quite often is betraying their own prejudices in that direction as well.
Does the fact there are no 100,000-person demos about Muslims being killed in Yemen mean everyone supporting Ukraine is antisemitic, islamophobic, or what? Or is this just meaningless whataboutery?
Question (because I don't know and I'm sure people here do), rather than debating point:
How far down the chain of command did the Nuremberg trials go? In post-Franco Spain, quite a few old thugs either wandered off into the sunset or reinvented themselves as life-long democrats.
It's not a pretty process for evil acts to go unpunished. But unless those involved can draw a line between leaders and led, wolves and sheep, the grim reality is this will continue unto the seventh generation and beyond.
Not very far down - there was a deliberate decision to stop at the top layer. Stalin would I think have cheerfully agreed to shoot everyone who was in the SS for a start (since they'd just got through killing something like 10% of the Soviet population, he probably reflected popular opinion), but he allowed himself to be persuaded to stick to the top layer. Both sides in the Cold War (especially but not exclusively the West, I think) then took some middle-ranking Nazis and used their admin or scientific skills.
Britain and the US "learned the lesson" of the bad precedent of doing that, when we decided NOT to give admin jobs to any Baathists in Iraq. Because almost everyone with admin skills had been a Baathist, that created a power vacuum which has been widely criticised as a major cause for subsequent chaos. It's hard to get it right!
You're right, the Holocaust trials didn't go down very far at all. Holocaust history is something I've been reading a lot of these past few years. The sheer scale of the Holocaust - the logistics and number of people involved in things like scheduling the trains, for example - went on right to the dying days of the regime. The current view is that the stories soldiers on leave reported about the mass killings, the extraordinarily candid photos they took and sent home to be developed, the rumour mill, meant that, unless you were very determined to not hear it, it was very easy in Germany to know that something very bad had happened to the Jews. For example, many Germans felt that the ferocity of the Allied strategic bombing campaign was retribution for what had happened to the Jews.
Post-war, especially as the Cold War intensified, everyone wanted to forget. The Soviets were the new enemy, Germany had to be reconstructed as a bulwark against Communism. Tens of thousands of people were directly complicit, far far beyond those who took the high-level decisions, far far beyond people in SS uniforms standing in the camps themselves. So it was largely ignored.
Couple of good books I've read recently on this are Martin Davidson's 'The Story of Hitler's Final Solution' and Nicholas Stargardt's 'The German War'.
Post-war Germany was infested with former Nazis. In the civil service, in the judiciary, the government, everywhere. It was unavoidable. And Germany was silent on this until the historians who were born after the war and came of age in the 60s and 70s began to question what their parents and grandparents had done.
EXC: Pressure piles on Keir Starmer - More than 150 Muslim Labour Councillors have written directly to the Labour leader demanding he call for a ceasefire in Gaza as backlash over his policy from within his party grows
Loosing them will make Starmer's coming government stronger.
EXC: Pressure piles on Keir Starmer - More than 150 Muslim Labour Councillors have written directly to the Labour leader demanding he call for a ceasefire in Gaza as backlash over his policy from within his party grows
My prediction of an Islamic Party forming seems to be more likely because of this latest trouble. I can’t find when I suggested it using the search function
Nah, there was an attempt after the Iraq war thar went nowhere. There isn't a political will for it in Britain, other than as someone to make up the numbers alongside Lord Buckethead and Britain First on election night.
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
In what world were things getting better for Palestinians in Gaza, or even the West Bank? Do you think Hamas sprung out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus - no rhyme nor reason? Do you think everyone who talks about this is just a raging anti-Semite or anti-Zionist and has is projecting nuance and context where there is none, like shadows on a wall? Just like the example of NI given at the start of this conversation - they came from a history, a conflict, an occupation. They aren't just evil people with evil thoughts in their heads doing evil deeds for evil ends.
I can consider the motivations and feelings of many Israelis and Zionists - both the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. The colonial mindset, the right to land, the desire for homogeneity and a strong homeland. The desire for a haven, a safe place after the horrors of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism, the fear after the wars with their neighbours, the paranoia that the threat is still ever strong despite Israel being by far one of the best equipped nations militarily in the region. Why can't you do the same for Palestinians? Yes, the unsympathetic - the anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of their perceived enemy, the hatred and violence. But the fear, the death, the lack of security, the lack of change, the constant loss of land and rights and the desire to go home. The death of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. The experience for most Palestinians in Gaza who are under the age of 18 of only knowing life in an open air cage.
The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? Palestinians peacefully march to the border fence in protest in 18-19 and they get shot, sniped. The UN repeatedly calls Israeli settlement schemes illegal, they keep happening. Israel controls their borders, their food, their energy, their water. They look to the West Bank, where apparently peaceful coexistence is "working" - which is where Palestinian labour is allowed to move (for the benefit of Israeli companies), where settlers will still steal land and houses and the IDF will still back them up. Is that what is to be aspired to? And the other Arab Middle Eastern countries increasingly let them die because business with Israel and the US is dependent on them doing so, so the only other friends are equally desperate or extreme.
Almost every conversation here devolves into a statement that the violence of Hamas, their killing of children and women, of Kibutz and raves is a sign of their inherent evil, inhumanity, how they need to be dealt with. And every example of Israeli forces killing children and women, the historical wrongs, the management of Gaza is met with a "well, that's war" and a shrug. Hamas could take the same position, no? "Why did you kill civilians, kidnap them, kill children?" ... "Well, that's war". It doesn't get us anywhere to paint one side as inhuman monsters with inhuman motives.
I think the conference given by one of the released hostages yesterday was enlightening. She is a long time activist, from what I understand a founding member of Women Wage Peace. She had driven Gazan children and adults to and from hospitals in Israel to get them better healthcare. She said she went through hell, was beaten with a crowbar - and you can argue that her statements about being treated well and her shaking her captor’s hand was all in aid of making sure her husband stays safe. But she, as well as many of those who lost family, either who were killed or kidnapped, still advocate peace and note the humanity of their captors, their enemy. Whilst people here go out of their way to note how killing a cowering 7 year old, an atrocious thing to do, shows how Hamas are all Nazis I saw no one talk about the woman who had soldiers enter her home, ask to eat some of her food, and then left - who seemed just surprised as she was that they had made it across the border and said "do not worry, we are Muslim" when asked if they were going to kill her or her kids.
Total war on Gaza, on Palestinians, will do one thing - create the next generation of people who, wrongly, feel that the only route to justice is wiping Israel off the map. The only long term peaceful solution requires the stronger party, which is undoubtedly Israel, to show mercy first and go to the negotiation table.
Basically: "let's all focus on that one nice guard at Auschwitz who used to hand out cakes"
Cretin
Question (because I don't know and I'm sure people here do), rather than debating point:
How far down the chain of command did the Nuremberg trials go? In post-Franco Spain, quite a few old thugs either wandered off into the sunset or reinvented themselves as life-long democrats.
It's not a pretty process for evil acts to go unpunished. But unless those involved can draw a line between leaders and led, wolves and sheep, the grim reality is this will continue unto the seventh generation and beyond.
Do you mean the Nuremberg trials or all trials related to war crimes in the Nazi-era? The Nuremberg Trials themselves only had 199 defendants across 13 trials, so a tiny minority of top-brass.
More broadly, there were a lot of individual trials over many years and several countries for actions of individuals who were part of the Nazi regime (about 100,000 in Germany/Austria and more in other countries). Aside from some high profile cases (most notably the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel following his capture in Argentina) a lot of these were either acquittals on variations of "only following orders" or pretty lenient sentences considering the gravity of the matters covered. In West Germany in particular, Konrad Adenauer very much soft-pedalled on denazification, broadly on the basis you suggest of "where does it stop?"
There were some high-profile examples of people who'd probably committed fairly significant war crimes essentially getting away with it or at least being rehabilitated to a degree that wasn't merited (Wernher Von Braun, Albert Speer etc). Kurt Waldheim is an obvious example of someone who had a front-line political career despite being pretty heavily implicated, although when the extent of his involvement was revealed, it did ultimately end his career (he stayed on as Austrian President to the end of his term, rather remarkably, but essentially nobody that mattered would have anything to do with him after about 1987).
People like Field Marshal von Manstein, Wilhelm Stuckart, Eric von dem Bach-Zelewski, Gerhard Klopfer, Gottlob Berger, Otto Hoffman, and scores of other big fry merited execution, but got away with it.
EXC: Pressure piles on Keir Starmer - More than 150 Muslim Labour Councillors have written directly to the Labour leader demanding he call for a ceasefire in Gaza as backlash over his policy from within his party grows
My prediction of an Islamic Party forming seems to be more likely because of this latest trouble. I can’t find when I suggested it using the search function
Yes, or a revival of Respect? Not sure that it will amount to a bad thing, overall for SKS. Generally speaking, religious identity factions are something mainstream political parties can do without, as long as it doesn't upend the political maths too much.
On topic. I don't care how absurd replacing Sunak would be - they ARE absurd and will do it if they thought it would help. I don't think it will happen because who do you replace him with? Can the parliamentary party coalesce around a true winner? And either get that person through the members vote or get away without one?
Sunak will be PM until January of 2025.
The biggest problem is that there is no one obvious to take over in a coronation. Not that coronations tend to work anyway (Sunak, May, Brown...), and a contest would be a ridiculous indulgence.
Sunak should call a GE in the spring. The longer this drags on the worse it gets.
It makes sense to go to the country in the Spring.
November: Autumn Statement (or is it a Budget?) in which the Chancellor confirms the Triple Lock and an 8% increase in state pension for the core vote.
November: Flights resume to Rwanda.
December: Inflation falls to between 5% - 6% (roughly half of where it was).
Autumn/Winter: Number of boat crossings falls (though not stopped).
January: Close 50 hotels housing migrants appealing to the Right.
March: Close a further 50 hotels housing migrants (100 in total) appealing to the Right.
April: 8% increase kicks in.
April: Dissolve Parliament and call an Election as the Prime Minister who has halved inflation, stopped the boats, got rid of migrants and protected the Triple Lock.
Of course, the fly in the ointment is the Supreme Court. If they rule against the Government on the Rwanda plan then the Government may be tempted to say "We can't close the hotels because we can't send them to Rwanda. We're being held back by an activist judiciary".
It is a plausible timeline, although the one thing that could muddy the waters is the impending war in the middle east and what happens there.
Alot of labours support is pro Palestine, not just the Muslim vote. They could easily be turned off labour due to its avid pro Israel stance.
They could but most of the strongest pro Palestinian Labour vote is in safe Labour seats in Bradford, Birmingham, Luton, Bethnal Green etc.
Whereas the highest Jewish vote is in Tory marginals like Finchley and Golders Green and Chipping Barnet
I am pretty sure the entire Jewish vote will now shift. en masse, to the Tories. Labour cannot be trusted, will be the thought, no matter what Starmer says
It is far too small to sway an election but, as you imply, could shunt a couple of seats to Sunal that might otherwise have been lost
I wonder what the same process will do in the USA? Florida?
Locally ,Im surprised we havent heard much from George Galloway, he's the dog that hasnt barked in the current conflict.
EXC: Pressure piles on Keir Starmer - More than 150 Muslim Labour Councillors have written directly to the Labour leader demanding he call for a ceasefire in Gaza as backlash over his policy from within his party grows
I’m not sure that Starmer is feeling quite as much pressure, as these councillors and activists wish him to be feeling.
On topic - could we see the '22 install some sort of elder statesman to staunch the bleeding?
OGH suggests that the role has no attraction to aspiring Tories. But survival certainly will, and given Brady's comments about excluding the membership and Hunt floating that he might not stand at the next GE...
Yes. We need Earl Home 2023 edition.
The only one I can think of in the Commons with stature is Theresa May. In the Lords? Ken Clark, William Hague - someone like that Outside Parliament? I see that George Osborne has rehabilitated himself on his podcast...
Sunak is sinking the ship. The idea of a putsch against him is entirely rational. But there is no obvious replacement in the Commons who could both win a majority and steady the ship. So look outside.
The Tories have already shown that they don't give a rat fuck about the constitutional niceties - sending Rees-Mogg up to Balmoral to lie to HMQ and illegally close parliament proves that.
So why not a PM in the Lords? Ideally placed to be immune to the infighting of the rats as the ship sinks. But could steady the ship enough so that all isn't lost.
I hate to find myself defending Rees-Mogg, but his advice in that case wasn't a actually a lie.
It was subsequently ruled by the Supreme Court, overruling three of the four other courts that had considered it, to be wrong.
And given the law they cited was actually a very obscure one, it would be very unfair to have expected anybody who wasn't an academic style expert in Scottish electoral law (which is where it was) to have known about it.
He's a lying, hypocritical twat for other reasons though.
I don’t wish to pick on Professor Edmunds who seems no worse than the other Covid modellers and in some ways was more alert to the social and economic damage of lockdowns. But none of this stuff was very long ago. The videos are still on YouTube. We cannot allow a quasi-judicial process to get away with memory-holing events that millions of people saw on television and which went viral on social media. Hold politicians to account by all means, but let’s ask some probing questions of the scientists who got it wrong time and time again too.
EXC: Pressure piles on Keir Starmer - More than 150 Muslim Labour Councillors have written directly to the Labour leader demanding he call for a ceasefire in Gaza as backlash over his policy from within his party grows
My prediction of an Islamic Party forming seems to be more likely because of this latest trouble. I can’t find when I suggested it using the search function
Nah, there was an attempt after the Iraq war thar went nowhere. There isn't a political will for it in Britain, other than as someone to make up the numbers alongside Lord Buckethead and Britain First on election night.
The will might be there as the Islamic population keeps growing.
We do everything on the cheap and then moan when it turns out to be crap and costly.
Wow, that’s about a third, or perhaps a quarter, of what you’d expect for such a role as a short-term assignment.
You’ll need to understand a fair bit about trade, and also a fair bit about Switzerland, their culture, and their economy. That salary isn’t temping anyone out of a Swiss bank, nor the senior Swiss CS, and isn’t tempting anyone out of retirement either.
So who do they expect to actually hire?
I would guess they will be looking at interest from people at the end of their career with experience of business in and with Switzerland where the salary is largely irrelevant - the salary is just a token but I’m sure that whoever takes it will get a nod that a bauble awaits at the end of the process - worth way more than a few hundred grand extra salary when you are already wealthy from your career.
So if you are a Brit ex Swiss Banker, or high-up in Rolex etc and you are ready to retire why not take this role, all expenses trips between London and Switzerland, tack on a bit of skiing, long lunches and boardroom meetings like when you were working anyway but not full days or weeks. At the end you walk away as Sir Swiss Tony for a year or two of doing what you were doing before and likely a load of extra well paid NEDs due to your enhanced Status as Sir and former Chief Trade Negotiator for UK/Switzerland.
EXC: Pressure piles on Keir Starmer - More than 150 Muslim Labour Councillors have written directly to the Labour leader demanding he call for a ceasefire in Gaza as backlash over his policy from within his party grows
I’m not sure that Starmer is feeling quite as much pressure, as these councillors and activists and 'WilliamGlenn' wish him to be feeling.
On topic - could we see the '22 install some sort of elder statesman to staunch the bleeding?
OGH suggests that the role has no attraction to aspiring Tories. But survival certainly will, and given Brady's comments about excluding the membership and Hunt floating that he might not stand at the next GE...
Yes. We need Earl Home 2023 edition.
The only one I can think of in the Commons with stature is Theresa May. In the Lords? Ken Clark, William Hague - someone like that Outside Parliament? I see that George Osborne has rehabilitated himself on his podcast...
Sunak is sinking the ship. The idea of a putsch against him is entirely rational. But there is no obvious replacement in the Commons who could both win a majority and steady the ship. So look outside.
The Tories have already shown that they don't give a rat fuck about the constitutional niceties - sending Rees-Mogg up to Balmoral to lie to HMQ and illegally close parliament proves that.
So why not a PM in the Lords? Ideally placed to be immune to the infighting of the rats as the ship sinks. But could steady the ship enough so that all isn't lost.
Lord Frost? The only possible Lord the current Tory party would unite around as leader
The point is to steady the ship though, not sink it deeper and faster.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not.
(Snipped a load of an interesting post as I wanted to focus on this bit)
I disagree on this. Prevaricating and refusing to condemn Hamas shifts the conversation on to the October 7 attacks and undermines the person being asked as it makes them look like they condone the violence.
A simple "I condemn Hamas and the attacks on 7 October" enables moving the conversation on to what should happen next and what Israel is doing to Gaza and whether that should also be condemned.
Although it doesn't always work out that way. Eg an exchange on here yesterday. A poster condemned the Hamas atrocity and went on to make a couple of pro Palestinian observations (nothing radical just the usual type stuff about their plight).
He got accused of 'buttery'. ie where you are seen to devalue what you've said about something (and cast doubt on your sincerity about it) by going straight into a 'but'. Bit harsh, I thought.
Still, we all post what we like, don't we. All equal in that regard.
Lots of mentions in that article of: airstrikes on civilians, war crimes, atrocities, etc. Thousands have died; millions have been displaced. I have seen zero coverage in the international press, and no discussions on here. There have been no passionate calls for ceasefires, no large scale demonstrations in the UK, not much of anything at all. There are obviously lots of differences between that war and the one between Israel and Hamas, but it's difficult to move past the fact that one involves the world's only Jewish state, and the other doesn't.
It's stuff like this that makes it very easy to believe that anyone expressing explicit support for Palestinians is, at best being manipulated by antisemitic elements in the press and wider society, and quite often is betraying their own prejudices in that direction as well.
Does the fact there are no 100,000-person demos about Muslims being killed in Yemen mean everyone supporting Ukraine is antisemitic, islamophobic, or what? Or is this just meaningless whataboutery?
Just pointing out inconsistencies. Based on kinabalu's posting history, I'm sure he'd appreciate his potential biases towards minority groups being highlighted, so he can address them.
EXC: Pressure piles on Keir Starmer - More than 150 Muslim Labour Councillors have written directly to the Labour leader demanding he call for a ceasefire in Gaza as backlash over his policy from within his party grows
My prediction of an Islamic Party forming seems to be more likely because of this latest trouble. I can’t find when I suggested it using the search function
Yes, or a revival of Respect? Not sure that it will amount to a bad thing, overall for SKS. Generally speaking, religious identity factions are something mainstream political parties can do without, as long as it doesn't upend the political maths too much.
EXC: Pressure piles on Keir Starmer - More than 150 Muslim Labour Councillors have written directly to the Labour leader demanding he call for a ceasefire in Gaza as backlash over his policy from within his party grows
My prediction of an Islamic Party forming seems to be more likely because of this latest trouble. I can’t find when I suggested it using the search function
Nah, there was an attempt after the Iraq war thar went nowhere. There isn't a political will for it in Britain, other than as someone to make up the numbers alongside Lord Buckethead and Britain First on election night.
We do everything on the cheap and then moan when it turns out to be crap and costly.
Wow, that’s about a third, or perhaps a quarter, of what you’d expect for such a role as a short-term assignment.
You’ll need to understand a fair bit about trade, and also a fair bit about Switzerland, their culture, and their economy. That salary isn’t temping anyone out of a Swiss bank, nor the senior Swiss CS, and isn’t tempting anyone out of retirement either.
So who do they expect to actually hire?
I would guess they will be looking at interest from people at the end of their career with experience of business in and with Switzerland where the salary is largely irrelevant - the salary is just a token but I’m sure that whoever takes it will get a nod that a bauble awaits at the end of the process - worth way more than a few hundred grand extra salary when you are already wealthy from your career.
So if you are a Brit ex Swiss Banker, or high-up in Rolex etc and you are ready to retire why not take this role, all expenses trips between London and Switzerland, tack on a bit of skiing, long lunches and boardroom meetings like when you were working anyway but not full days or weeks. At the end you walk away as Sir Swiss Tony for a year or two of doing what you were doing before and likely a load of extra well paid NEDs due to your enhanced Status as Sir and former Chief Trade Negotiator for UK/Switzerland.
Thinking about it some more, that’s about all that makes sense. Someone who’s already so rich they don’t care about the salary, with the nudge nudge of a sword tap on the shoulder once the job is finished.
During the pandemic, and especially early on, the government were faced with a serious of hideous no-win choices. It was a case of choosing the least-worst option with *very* little data - for instance, we were unsure how C19 spread. Remember people talking about wiping down mail?
Whatever they did, the government would get criticism, especially as we cannot run the experiment again with different choices. When things were in their hands - e.g. the vaccines - they often acted quite well.
EOTHO was an interesting case. The 'safe' option would have been to not do it, and keep more restrictions on people. But that would have added increased pressure on many businesses, large and small, and on the exchequer, and also possibly mental health - people *wanted* to go out and see others as they used to.
But it was, with hindsight, possibly the wrong decision. But if it was, then I find it hard to castigate the government too much for it. They would be getting criticism not whatever they had done - or not done.
I think the more pertinent question is, not was EOTHO designed to help - which it clearly was - and not even whether it was responsible for the uptick in cases - which it's hard to say it was, on the stats (although there's plenty of noise there to confuse matters including the air bridge the key factor seems to have been the return of schools and unis).
The much more important question is, was it better to spend £849 million on propping up hospitality in the short term or would it have been more sensible to spend that money on measures to make any return to restrictions less likely - e.g. better masks for the NHS, heat curtains for all public buildings so doors could be left open, and air filters for schools and hospitals?
I would have said, based on what I've seen, the answer is 'yes' and therefore it was however well-intentioned, the wrong choice.
I agree with that, but I might suggest that "better masks for the NHS, heat curtains for all public buildings so doors could be left open, and air filters for schools and hospitals?" would have cost far, far more.
And do not forget the mental health aspects of continued lockdown, especially during warm weather.
As I said above, I reckon if the government had done as you had suggested (and it was a reasonable option), then they'd be getting it in the neck anyway. There were only bad choices, even *with* hindsight.
Yes, but that"s my point, wouldn't it have been better to spend money on things that might have avoided - or at least, considerably mitigated - further lockdowns? And for that consideration we should have flung everything else into touch?
Now, in one sense of course, the government did get it triumphantly right. They ploughed huge sums into vaccine development, which was the only guaranteed way to bring the lockdown phase to an end.
But there were an awful lot of short term measures they could have put in place to make things easier in the meanwhile, and didn't.
This would have mattered much less if they hadn't been so inflexible in trying to avoid a lockdown while not doing things that would make it much less likely.
And for that they deserve a great deal of criticism.
However, they deserve far more for flagrantly breaking their own rules and lying about it. That really does show the governing party and the civil service are totally unfit for purpose and need excising.
"But there were an awful lot of short term measures they could have put in place to make things easier in the meanwhile, and didn't."
I'm far from sure that's the case, if you're talking about installing stuff in buildings. It would have cost a fortune, and required a massive workforce if stuff I've been told was true. It just was not practical. It's easy enough to do for one building; but for every building in every school? Every building in every hospital? Every office?
I know someone whose business is fitting out supermarkets. During the pandemic, the company was crazily busy just designing, creating and fitting those plastic screens between cashiers and public. From what he said, they were totally overloaded. And that's just screens at supermarkets; small, easy-to-fit items.
On topic - could we see the '22 install some sort of elder statesman to staunch the bleeding?
OGH suggests that the role has no attraction to aspiring Tories. But survival certainly will, and given Brady's comments about excluding the membership and Hunt floating that he might not stand at the next GE...
Yes. We need Earl Home 2023 edition.
The only one I can think of in the Commons with stature is Theresa May. In the Lords? Ken Clark, William Hague - someone like that Outside Parliament? I see that George Osborne has rehabilitated himself on his podcast...
Sunak is sinking the ship. The idea of a putsch against him is entirely rational. But there is no obvious replacement in the Commons who could both win a majority and steady the ship. So look outside.
The Tories have already shown that they don't give a rat fuck about the constitutional niceties - sending Rees-Mogg up to Balmoral to lie to HMQ and illegally close parliament proves that.
So why not a PM in the Lords? Ideally placed to be immune to the infighting of the rats as the ship sinks. But could steady the ship enough so that all isn't lost.
Lord Frost? The only possible Lord the current Tory party would unite around as leader
The point is to steady the ship though, not sink it deeper and faster.
Sunak and Hunt have steadied the ship after Truss and Kwarteng, the next Tory leader will almost certainly be right of Sunak
On topic - could we see the '22 install some sort of elder statesman to staunch the bleeding?
OGH suggests that the role has no attraction to aspiring Tories. But survival certainly will, and given Brady's comments about excluding the membership and Hunt floating that he might not stand at the next GE...
I hope the Tories do get rid of Sunak and install Braverman.
My thinking.
It is way too late to save the Tories from defeat. Whatever loony right wing bounce Braverman will get will be offset by both a further abandonment by those repelled by her and also those repelled by the idea of a 4th PM since the last election. Even if she tries to negate the latter by going for an election straight away she leaves herself no time to change the fortunes of the Tory party.
The upshot of this is that the Tories lose the election whenever it happens and Braverman is discredited and dumped.
There will be some short term pain with her becoming PM but there will be little enough time for her to do any real damage and my aim is to see any future threat of her becoming PM wrecked as comprehensively as possible.
Braverman is too clever to fall into that trap.
Why be a fag end PM who likely loses by a landslide when she could have a chance to take over as Leader of the Opposition, blame Sunak and Hunt for election defeat and possibly even win in another 5 years against an unpopular Starmer government if the economy is in poor shape and taxes and inflation high
So, Tories on 150 seats in GE 2024, 50 seats after GE 2029...
People said the same about how extremist Thatcher was in 1975, yet the poor economy of the more centrist Callaghan's government and the Winter of Discontent even saw her win in 1979.
Remember too even Corbyn got a hung parliament in 2017, if the government is unpopular and/or the economy poor any Opposition leader can win in the right circumstances no matter how extreme
On topic - could we see the '22 install some sort of elder statesman to staunch the bleeding?
OGH suggests that the role has no attraction to aspiring Tories. But survival certainly will, and given Brady's comments about excluding the membership and Hunt floating that he might not stand at the next GE...
Yes. We need Earl Home 2023 edition.
The only one I can think of in the Commons with stature is Theresa May. In the Lords? Ken Clark, William Hague - someone like that Outside Parliament? I see that George Osborne has rehabilitated himself on his podcast...
Sunak is sinking the ship. The idea of a putsch against him is entirely rational. But there is no obvious replacement in the Commons who could both win a majority and steady the ship. So look outside.
The Tories have already shown that they don't give a rat fuck about the constitutional niceties - sending Rees-Mogg up to Balmoral to lie to HMQ and illegally close parliament proves that.
So why not a PM in the Lords? Ideally placed to be immune to the infighting of the rats as the ship sinks. But could steady the ship enough so that all isn't lost.
Lord Frost? The only possible Lord the current Tory party would unite around as leader
The point is to steady the ship though, not sink it deeper and faster.
Sunak and Hunt have steadied the ship after Truss and Kwarteng, the next Tory leader will almost certainly be right of Sunak
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not.
(Snipped a load of an interesting post as I wanted to focus on this bit)
I disagree on this. Prevaricating and refusing to condemn Hamas shifts the conversation on to the October 7 attacks and undermines the person being asked as it makes them look like they condone the violence.
A simple "I condemn Hamas and the attacks on 7 October" enables moving the conversation on to what should happen next and what Israel is doing to Gaza and whether that should also be condemned.
Although it doesn't always work out that way. Eg an exchange on here yesterday. A poster condemned the Hamas atrocity and went on to make a couple of pro Palestinian observations (nothing radical just the usual type stuff about their plight).
He got accused of 'buttery'. ie where you are seen to devalue what you've said about something (and cast doubt on your sincerity about it) by going straight into a 'but'. Bit harsh, I thought.
Still, we all post what we like, don't we. All equal in that regard.
True, re yesterday.
The best I've seen people handle this is to be clearly irritated and snap back something like "Of course I condemn X", putting the interviewer back in their box for asking such a stupid and offensive question. It should be a stupid and offensive question, but prevaricating or refusing to answer makes it look like a justified question.
Yes. And I think I'll quickly put my view down here, good a time as any. Then I can just refer people to it whenever things get lurid. Yes, what a good idea. Here we go:
The Hamas atrocity was of a scale and barbarity such that Israel have to hit back hard. Hamas knew this. It's 'on them' in that respect. You can't ignore the context (being the longtime oppression of the Palestinians) but in no way does this justify what Hamas did on 7 Oct. Not one iota.
So Israel are justified in a big response. IMO they are justified in seeking to punish those responsible and degrade their capability to do anything like this again. But if they can't do this without effectively waging war on the Palestinian population of Gaza they should think again and re-calibrate. The justification is lost if the price is too high.
Comments
The best I've seen people handle this is to be clearly irritated and snap back something like "Of course I condemn X", putting the interviewer back in their box for asking such a stupid and offensive question. It should be a stupid and offensive question, but prevaricating or refusing to answer makes it look like a justified question.
Now, in one sense of course, the government did get it triumphantly right. They ploughed huge sums into vaccine development, which was the only guaranteed way to bring the lockdown phase to an end.
But there were an awful lot of short term measures they could have put in place to make things easier in the meanwhile, and didn't.
This would have mattered much less if they hadn't been so inflexible in trying to avoid a lockdown while not doing things that would make it much less likely.
And for that they deserve a great deal of criticism.
However, they deserve far more for flagrantly breaking their own rules and lying about it. That really does show the governing party and the civil service are totally unfit for purpose and need excising.
I say. "PB're arguing about whether EOTHO and the additional deaths were worth the money."
Snaps back instantly: "The Government would have ben far better spending the money on schools. In fact, they've still done nothing about proper ventilation!"
I do not have endless time. I must work
Later
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Sudan_(2023)
Lots of mentions in that article of: airstrikes on civilians, war crimes, atrocities, etc. Thousands have died; millions have been displaced. I have seen zero coverage in the international press, and no discussions on here. There have been no passionate calls for ceasefires, no large scale demonstrations in the UK, not much of anything at all. There are obviously lots of differences between that war and the one between Israel and Hamas, but it's difficult to move past the fact that one involves the world's only Jewish state, and the other doesn't.
It's stuff like this that makes it very easy to believe that anyone expressing explicit support for Palestinians is, at best being manipulated by antisemitic elements in the press and wider society, and quite often is betraying their own prejudices in that direction as well.
Salary £73k + £20k paid into pension.
https://www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi?jcode=1883169
I wonder what the Swiss bod will be on.....
We do everything on the cheap and then moan when it turns out to be crap and costly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOJHz3pU7mI
It takes time for deaths to occur. You increase spread, more people get COVID-19, exponential growth means then even more people get COVId-19, deaths follow in due course. I quote, "There is a delay between a person becoming infected with COVID-19 and being admitted to hospital or dying, and this is reflected in the lags in trends." from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19latestinsights/deaths
So, looking at whether there were excess deaths in August isn't going to tell us much. I've given you the paper that showed increased cases resulting from EOTHO. If you want me to teach you some basic epidemiology, I charge £200 per hour.
But interestding she had an instant and entirely rational response, without time for thought (and she's not a teacher). (She was definitely thinking about HMG in London.)
PS If things don't improve, it'll have a nice 1930s ambience in many a school - all those sunshine lessons out in the playing fi ... er, I see the fallacy there.
I went to their office this morning, after an amiable hike through Heraklion. I found that the third party website I'd booked with had sent them the following incorrect details:
1) A driving licence number that read '000000000'
2) The wrong time of arrival
3) The wrong name.
So even if my flight hadn't been delayed, I couldn't have had the car.
However, as I apologised and as they clearly felt sorry for me (although I was so bewildered by what happened I kept stammering and they must have thought I was a complete idiot) they not only allowed me to rebook but upgraded me from a Fiat 500 to a Nissan Qashqai.
And we shared a few jokes and all ended up friends.
How's that for customer service?
Doubt if I'll get a refund though.
Lesson learned, at a fairly modest cost - book direct and if the arrival time is tight, book to pick up the following morning.
Oh, sorry, not what you meant?
Only an amateur-hour ad agency could omit it.
That all said, right now, there are obvious reasons why there is a lot of focus on the region.
Their website had been very glitchy when I booked and clearly deleted some stuff, reset others to defaults and copied other stuff across at random. But it was embarrassing.
I was very lucky it was quiet and they had time to sort it out.
Would you want the job ?
Whether you view our politics as irredeemably Presidential, or you see these changes of PM as symptoms of a party in government changing policy with dizzying regularity, it shows that the electorate have no idea what they are voting for if they vote Conservative.
If they put their cross against the Tories, and they somehow remain as the government, how long will Sunak be PM? What policies will they have under the next PM, or the one after that?
Installing as PM an elder statesman figure who definitely won't be PM after the election because they won't even be an MP increases this uncertainty in their future direction by several orders of magnitude. I already think that the question: "Who will be PM in 2026 if you win the election?" is going to be enormously damaging to the Tories given what has happened since 2015. Having a caretaker go into the election would be so much worse.
School policy was a mess, that is an area I think genuine lessons for a pandemic can be learned, as opposed to journalists salivating over WhatsApp messages of ministers and advisers bitching or scrambling.
Far more fell victim to summary vengeance.
The only one I can think of in the Commons with stature is Theresa May.
In the Lords? Ken Clark, William Hague - someone like that
Outside Parliament? I see that George Osborne has rehabilitated himself on his podcast...
Sunak is sinking the ship. The idea of a putsch against him is entirely rational. But there is no obvious replacement in the Commons who could both win a majority and steady the ship. So look outside.
The Tories have already shown that they don't give a rat fuck about the constitutional niceties - sending Rees-Mogg up to Balmoral to lie to HMQ and illegally close parliament proves that.
So why not a PM in the Lords? Ideally placed to be immune to the infighting of the rats as the ship sinks. But could steady the ship enough so that all isn't lost.
"The Ottoman policy towards religious minorities was primarily based on Islamic tradition, that is, the Koran, Hadith (the sayings and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad), and the precedents and practices inherited from earlier Muslim states. The Koran and Hadith contain numerous negative descriptions of Jews, reflecting the Prophet Muhammad’s fury over the rejection of his religious message by the contemporary Jewish tribes.
"Jews are depicted as a mean, cunning, cowardly, hostile, deceitful, and treacherous people; they deliberately tampered with their own sacred texts; they intrigued against Muhammad and the early Muslim community, they are the Muslims’ worst enemies; they persecuted and killed their own prophets; they reject Allah’s truth; they were cursed by Allah because of their disbelief, and so on.
"These negative depictions of Jews were expanded in early Islamic hagiographic literature on the life of the Prophet (Sira). For example, Jews portrayed as villainous and malicious, although they are weak and ineffectual. Therefore, according to Islamic sources, Jews have been condemned to an existence of wretchedness and humiliation. Moreover, Jews will also be punished in the afterlife, where they will burn in hell."
TLDR: The Ottoman Empire can be seen as more tolerant of Jews than some comparable Christian societies, but it was also absolutely suffused with anti-Semitism, and this comes ultimately from Islamic teaching
From
"Reflection on the Traits and Images Associated with Jews in 17th Century Ottoman Sources"
https://journals.openedition.org/hamsa/564
My equivalence is neither false nor unhelpful.
Nethanyahu's various regimes have been responsible for many many deaths in Gaza over the years as well as annexing further land from the West Bank. They have not been a partner for peace. They have enabled Hamas, as reported in Times of Israel.
Indeed, given the current waiting lists, the excess illness and death from EOTHO might still be in the process of materialising.
Perhaps the August negative excess deaths was because that cohort had already been knocked out in March? If you've only got 6 months left anyway...
Is that what the Tories are doing with Truss ?
You’ll need to understand a fair bit about trade, and also a fair bit about Switzerland, their culture, and their economy. That salary isn’t temping anyone out of a Swiss bank, nor the senior Swiss CS, and isn’t tempting anyone out of retirement either.
So who do they expect to actually hire?
EXC: Pressure piles on Keir Starmer - More than 150 Muslim Labour Councillors have written directly to the Labour leader demanding he call for a ceasefire in Gaza as backlash over his policy from within his party grows
And if you cannot find any alternative out of 345 MPs or however many it is now, that's really really bad as a look. So bad I'm not sure the steadying effect would work.
It'd be one step only from the GOP chaos.
I find local hire firms are almost always the best, look for reviews online and find one that is close to the arrivals hall.
More broadly, there were a lot of individual trials over many years and several countries for actions of individuals who were part of the Nazi regime (about 100,000 in Germany/Austria and more in other countries). Aside from some high profile cases (most notably the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel following his capture in Argentina) a lot of these were either acquittals on variations of "only following orders" or pretty lenient sentences considering the gravity of the matters covered. In West Germany in particular, Konrad Adenauer very much soft-pedalled on denazification, broadly on the basis you suggest of "where does it stop?"
There were some high-profile examples of people who'd probably committed fairly significant war crimes essentially getting away with it or at least being rehabilitated to a degree that wasn't merited (Wernher Von Braun, Albert Speer etc). Kurt Waldheim is an obvious example of someone who had a front-line political career despite being pretty heavily implicated, although when the extent of his involvement was revealed, it did ultimately end his career (he stayed on as Austrian President to the end of his term, rather remarkably, but essentially nobody that mattered would have anything to do with him after about 1987).
My thinking.
It is way too late to save the Tories from defeat. Whatever loony right wing bounce Braverman will get will be offset by both a further abandonment by those repelled by her and also those repelled by the idea of a 4th PM since the last election. Even if she tries to negate the latter by going for an election straight away she leaves herself no time to change the fortunes of the Tory party.
The upshot of this is that the Tories lose the election whenever it happens and Braverman is discredited and dumped.
There will be some short term pain with her becoming PM but there will be little enough time for her to do any real damage and my aim is to see any future threat of her becoming PM wrecked as comprehensively as possible.
Anti-semitism was ubiquitous in Europe at the time, and the Ottoman Empire, alongside the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were the places of refuge at the time.
Why be a fag end PM who likely loses by a landslide when she could have a chance to take over as Leader of the Opposition, blame Sunak and Hunt for election defeat and possibly even win in another 5 years against an unpopular Starmer government if the economy is in poor shape and taxes and inflation high
1) We also don't care very much about Arabs, unless there happens to be Jews on the other side. Why?
2) Easy to see why the right doesn't care very much about Africa and Africans (at least from your point of view). What's the Left's excuse?
3) Also easy to see why the Right is energised by Left wing antisemitism being displayed around the conflict. What's the Left's excuse for getting animated about people supporting Israel's right to defend itself following a massacre?
Post-war, especially as the Cold War intensified, everyone wanted to forget. The Soviets were the new enemy, Germany had to be reconstructed as a bulwark against Communism. Tens of thousands of people were directly complicit, far far beyond those who took the high-level decisions, far far beyond people in SS uniforms standing in the camps themselves. So it was largely ignored.
Couple of good books I've read recently on this are Martin Davidson's 'The Story of Hitler's Final Solution' and Nicholas Stargardt's 'The German War'.
Post-war Germany was infested with former Nazis. In the civil service, in the judiciary, the government, everywhere. It was unavoidable. And Germany was silent on this until the historians who were born after the war and came of age in the 60s and 70s began to question what their parents and grandparents had done.
Fascinating subject for me. I could type all day.
But one to watch, in any case.
It was subsequently ruled by the Supreme Court, overruling three of the four other courts that had considered it, to be wrong.
And given the law they cited was actually a very obscure one, it would be very unfair to have expected anybody who wasn't an academic style expert in Scottish electoral law (which is where it was) to have known about it.
He's a lying, hypocritical twat for other reasons though.
https://thecritic.co.uk/revisionist-lockdown-history/
So if you are a Brit ex Swiss Banker, or high-up in Rolex etc and you are ready to retire why not take this role, all expenses trips between London and Switzerland, tack on a bit of skiing, long lunches and boardroom meetings like when you were working anyway but not full days or weeks. At the end you walk away as Sir Swiss Tony for a year or two of doing what you were doing before and likely a load of extra well paid NEDs due to your enhanced Status as Sir and former Chief Trade Negotiator for UK/Switzerland.
https://www.conservativemuslimforum.org/can-we-help/resources/muslim-demographics-by-constituency/
I'm far from sure that's the case, if you're talking about installing stuff in buildings. It would have cost a fortune, and required a massive workforce if stuff I've been told was true. It just was not practical. It's easy enough to do for one building; but for every building in every school? Every building in every hospital? Every office?
I know someone whose business is fitting out supermarkets. During the pandemic, the company was crazily busy just designing, creating and fitting those plastic screens between cashiers and public. From what he said, they were totally overloaded. And that's just screens at supermarkets; small, easy-to-fit items.
Remember too even Corbyn got a hung parliament in 2017, if the government is unpopular and/or the economy poor any Opposition leader can win in the right circumstances no matter how extreme
The Hamas atrocity was of a scale and barbarity such that Israel have to hit back hard. Hamas knew this. It's 'on them' in that respect. You can't ignore the context (being the longtime oppression of the Palestinians) but in no way does this justify what Hamas did on 7 Oct. Not one iota.
So Israel are justified in a big response. IMO they are justified in seeking to punish those responsible and degrade their capability to do anything like this again. But if they can't do this without effectively waging war on the Palestinian population of Gaza they should think again and re-calibrate. The justification is lost if the price is too high.