Today we remember, although, three years on, for Israelis October 7 has not yet ended. Too many questions remain unanswered. It is time for a full state inquiry, which has been denied for far too long. youtu.be/tYonpkwfaXQ

October 7 was, and will always be, a hole in the heart of Israel and the Jewish people. It began on a Saturday morning at 6:29am. The news that unfolded on that black Saturday, hour by hour, forever changed our lives. In remembrance of that horrific day, in remembrance of the 1,200 people murdered, Jews around the world, and all decent and compassionate people, will pause to mourn those senselessly murdered and tortured. We also honor those who fought valiantly to defend the Jewish State of Israel. Our hearts are still broken, but not our spirit.

🚨 ENOUGH WITH THE GENOCIDE ACCUSATIONS. More than 6,000 scholars, historians, legal experts, and public figures have signed an open letter rejecting the claim that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza—including Steven Pinker, Niall Ferguson, Benny Morris, Deborah Lipstadt, John Spencer, Irwin Cotler, and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Calling Israel’s war against Hamas “genocide” is a deeply contested characterization that many experts argue distorts the facts and weaponizes the term. We can debate Israel’s military actions and civilian suffering without misrepresenting what “genocide” means under international law. 🇮🇱 Stand with Israel. Stand against Hamas. Stand for truth. #Israel #Gaza #Hamas #StandWithIsrael #IsraelHamasWar #Genocide #NeverAgain #ProIsrael #Truth #MiddleEast #Christianity #BiblicalProphecy

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Kudos and respect to the Irish players who refuse to cave to the mob. They do their country proud! theguardian.com/football/202…

Palestinianism - The Neo-Fascist Cult Threatening the West How a political virus of conformity, intimidation and antisemitism is eating away at the liberal West Palestinianism is the latest neo-fascist cult overrunning the West. It marches through our streets, occupies our universities and infiltrates our institutions. It intimidates those who challenge it, demands ideological conformity and seeks to silence, punish and exclude those who refuse to submit to its increasingly absolutist view of the world. And like all good fascists, it targets the Jews. Palestinianism is not about supporting ordinary Palestinians or the welfare of Gazan children. They are simply useful vehicles for a hate-filled ideology with a core aim. The demonisation and ultimate destruction of the Jewish state. Thus, one cause has been elevated beyond argument and increasingly beyond reason. There can be but one accepted narrative, accepted vocabulary and morality. Challenge them, or simply fail to behave in the approve manner, and you are not simply wrong. You are morally corrupt, racist, colonialist, genocidal. Worse still, a Zionist (not that they know what that means). You are “contaminated”. You are to be shouted down, ostracized, cancelled, threatened and worse. Jewish students have been intimidated and attacked. They have been denied access and driven off campuses. Synagogues and worshippers have been targeted, even murdered. Jewish businesses and organisations have been boycotted, vandalised and burnt to the ground. Jewish artists, academics and professionals have found themselves cancelled, expected to answer for the actions of Israel. Age old antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories are bandied about, now in the supposedly more respectable language of social justice, human rights and anti-Zionism. In Britain alone, 3,700 antisemitic incidents were recorded last year, the second-highest figure ever. In the United States there were another 6,274. These people actually claim to be anti-racist. Rebranding the Oldest Hatred So, the Jew becomes the Zionist. Jewish power becomes Zionist influence. Jewish control becomes the Zionist lobby. The conniving Jew manipulating governments, banks and the media reappears as the Zionist controlling governments, banks and the media Jew hatred has found a vocabulary through which it can once again enter the mainstream. Same shit. New packaging wrapped in the language of human rights and social justice. None of this happens overnight. And none of it can happen without the acquiescence of people who would be horrified to be called out as part of anything remotely fascistic. Extremist ideologies are normalised by everyone who excuses them. By institutions that accommodate them. By academics who rationalise them. By politicians frightened to challenge them. By activists who march to their tune. And by otherwise decent people who see behaviour they would condemn instantly, yet somehow discover nuance when it’s packaged to appeal to their liberal sensibilities. That is Palestinianism. It has convinced the liberals and progressives in the West that intolerance can be tolerated in the name of tolerance. Intimidation can be excused in the name of justice. Racism can be overlooked in the name of anti-racism. The targeting of Jews can be rationalised and justified, just as long as you refer to them as Zionists. And like all good neo-fascist cults, it demands proof of loyalty and obedience. You must believe. You must repeat. You must condemn. You must boycott. You must demonstrate your purity. Silence is suspicious, nuance cowardice and disagreement or dissent, a crime and evidence of complicity with the “Zionists”. The Purity Test The Ed Sheeran-Macklemore debacle provided an almost perfect demonstration. Sheeran refused to adopt the required absolutism and was mercilessly attacked. He attempted to appease the mob with what was a pretty lame apology, only to face even greater abuse. He did not adhere to the only acceptable vocabulary. He had failed the purity test. He was morally abhorrent and would be punished accordingly. Meanwhile, Macklemore, a disingenuous charlatan and opportunist with a record of antisemitism was lauded for his performative activism, courage and moral purity. All hail to the pure. Pink committed much the same offence. She condemned Hamas and antisemitism while expressing concern for Palestinian civilians, yet still found herself the target of a campaign demanding that UNICEF remove her as a Goodwill Ambassador. Javier Bardem supports he removal, apparently so convinced of his own moral righteousness that disagreement now warrants professional punishment and cancellation. There is a particularly ugly irony in Bardem’s role. He comes from a family that was persecuted by Franco for its politics, including an uncle imprisoned for his opposition to the dictatorship. Yet here he is, generations later, promoting the punishment of another artist for expressing the “wrong” political opinion. The grandson of that history should recognise the authoritarian impulse to punish dissent when he sees it, even if it is wrapped in the politics he supports. History should have taught us all better. Fascism does not begin with concentration camps and mass murder. It begins with political absolutism. When ideological conformity becomes a virtue. When dissent becomes betrayal. When an entire group is targeted for the supposed or invented crimes of some of its members. When conspiracy replaces evidence. When violence and intimidation become legitimate political expression. When the well-intentioned embrace said ideology and march under its banner. And when good people convince themselves that accommodating extremists is preferable to confronting them. Nazi Germany taught us how an extremist ideology moves from the margins into the mainstream, how its language becomes accepted, its assumptions absorbed and how its normalisation corrupts society and inverts morality. Palestinianism Has Learned This Lesson Well. The con is sophisticated. It repackages fundamentally illiberal ideas and behaviour and successfully sells them as liberalism. Its ideology is embraced, its narrative eagerly trumpeted, its falsehoods amplified by individuals who genuinely believe they are still standing for tolerance, human rights and social justice, even as they accept ideological conformity, the silencing of dissent, the use of violence and intimidation and the singling out of Jews, using the acceptable and demonic term, Zionists. Palestinianism has persuaded much of the liberal West that embracing its ideology is not a betrayal of liberal values, but an expression of them. That is how dangerous ideologies become normal. Not because everybody embraces the extremism, but because enough people decide that the extremism is understandable. The people doing this nevertheless continue to regard themselves as anti-racist, progressive and, perhaps most absurdly of all, anti-fascist. But claiming to be anti-fascist does not make your behaviour any less fascistic. Nor does calling yourself anti-racist absolve you when Jews are being targeted. Intolerance does not become tolerance because the person practising it considers himself progressive. Intimidation does not become liberation because the person doing the intimidating is wearing a keffiyeh. This is a level of Western dumbfuckery that beggars belief. Judging behaviour not by what is actually being done, but by the political identity of the person doing it. And that is why this is no longer simply an argument about Israel or even about Jews. It is about what is happening to the liberal West. Every time a university capitulates to intimidation rather than protecting debate, every time an artist is threatened professionally for expressing the wrong opinion, every time an institution decides it is easier to appease the mob than defend the dissenter, and every time antisemitism is excused because somebody has thoughtfully substituted the word “Zionist”, another line moves. What was outrageous becomes controversial. What was controversial becomes tolerated. What was tolerated becomes normal. The ideology pushes a little further. Society accommodates it. It pushes again. And it learns that intimidation works. Fascism does not have to wear the same uniform or speak the same language to reveal the same instincts. Whether in Jack boots or keffiyehs, the impulse to control thought, speech and behaviour, the demonisation of “heritics”, the obsession with ideological purity, the embrace of conspiracy and the collective targeting of Jews are horribly familiar. Palestinianism comprises a good too many of these characteristics. It is absolutist. It promotes conspiracy theories and antisemitic tropes. It legitimises violence and intimidation. It increasingly attributes collective guilt to Jews and treats those who refuse its political catechism as morally abhorrent. Like fascism, Palestinianism demands obedience. It tolerates no dissent, no deviation, no challenge to its ideology. Its narrative is to be accepted, its language adopted and its orthodoxies obeyed without question. No Jackboots This Time, Just a Keffiyeh The mob mentality. Artists hounded for simply expressing an opinion. Performers denied the right to perform. Speakers cancelled. Academics and students shouted down, threatened or driven out. Jews targeted. Celebrities bullied and abused, quite literally reduced to tears. The message is brutally simple. Propaganda, violence and intimidation are the tools. Palestinianism is a virus that rots the brain. It destroys capacity for independent and critical thought. Reason abandoned. Common sense suspended. Truth and morality inverted. It is a totalitarian, neo-fascist cult. Dissent will not be tolerated. Freedom of thought, speech and opinion will be denied. Palestinianism has little or no interest in a Palestinian state and even less regard for the welfare of ordinary Palestinians. Its obsession is Israel and the Jews. But its goals extend far beyond. Left unchecked, Palestinianism will continue to eat away at the West from within. And viruses can have a nasty habit of eventually killing their host.

There is no genocide. The accusations has zero basis in fact. It's a blatant lie!

If you are still wondering what Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are up to...

Stunning visual by @MummyisT shows rockets, missiles, & drone attacks by Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis & Iran (the mothership) since Oct 2023. I've been here a lot of that time-felt 1st hand the rain of destruction & dodged plenty of "incoming."

Motaz Azaiza, a "photojournalist" formerly based in Gaza, admits: Hamas manages a group chat that includes every journalist in Gaza. All of the media campaigns coming out of Gaza were orchestrated propaganda efforts.

“Naza” and the Ethical Narcissism of Venice There’s Nothing “Luvvies” Love More Than a Good Piece of Anti-Israel Propaganda to Feed Their Moral Grandiosity 25 Minutes says a lot. That is how long the audience at the Venice Film Festival stood and applauded NAZA, the new film about Israel’s war in Gaza from Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. A standing ovation, replete with Palestinian and Lebanese flags waving around the auditorium. The two filmmakers were visibly moved as the great and good of the international film industry rose to celebrate them and their film, although in truth seemed rather more impressed with their own virtue. Perhaps remaining seated, refusing to pander to the useful idiots, would have been the greater act of courage. The record standing ovation tells us rather more about the Venice Film Festival and the sanctimonious world of the international film industry, forever basking in the warm glow of its own imagined virtue and moral grandiosity, than it does about the quality of NAZA. The film is presented as a documentary. It isn’t! It’s a cynical piece of propaganda. That doesn’t mean everything in it is untrue. Good propaganda rarely works that way. It takes a small amount of truth, the facts that support the story it wants to tell, then ignores those that don’t, carefully avoids the inconvenient and problematic elements that undermine its case and serves up what remains as the whole truth and nothing but. Abraham and Szor make their position perfectly clear, declaring that Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians was “calculated and intentional”, while the official Venice synopsis describes NAZA as revealing the systems behind “Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza”. They are not so much presenting an argument as shovelling their political views down the throats of an all too willing and receptive audience. Speaking to Le Monde, Abraham declared that as Israelis, “we are all complicit to some extent” in the crimes he alleges have been committed in Gaza. An entire country smeared with collective guilt. Importantly, smeared by one of their own. Taking us rather neatly from criticism of Israel’s conduct in the war to the demonisation of Israeli society itself. Israel has deliberately engaged in the mass killing of Palestinian civilians and our two intrepid filmmakers will show you how. So, 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers (supposedly), most of them anonymous, are prepared to make some of the most serious accusations imaginable about their own army. They talk about indiscriminate killing, artificial intelligence, civilian casualty thresholds, aid distribution sites and so-called no-go zones. One anonymous officer even describes “mass killing on an industrial scale”. A film long on accusations, but apparently, short on evidence. These are serious allegations and should be treated as such. If Israeli soldiers deliberately killed civilians, investigate them. If commanders knowingly authorised illegal attacks, hold them accountable. If rules were broken, establish what happened and why. But spare us the pretence that 24 carefully selected, mostly anonymous Israelis provide anything approaching a complete or honest picture of how Israel fought this war. They can’t and they don’t. I have spent much of the past two years interviewing Israeli soldiers and reservists who fought in Gaza. Special forces, infantry, tank crews, artillery, drone operators and fire-support officers. Their stories are complicated and sometimes uncomfortable. They talk about mistakes, confusion, fear, exploring the moral hazards and terrible consequences of fighting in an urban battlefield densely populated with civilians. They describe attacks cancelled due to civilian presence. Of support fire withheld. Targets abandoned. Soldiers placed at greater risk, as commanders attempted to protect civilians. They talk of warnings and evacuations, about being refused permission to fire while at risk and the constant difficulty of distinguishing Hamas fighters from the civilians among whom they deliberately operated. Hamas fighters fought in civilian clothes. They saved their uniforms for macabre ceremonies returning Israeli hostages, both alive and dead. In addition to the tactical reasons for civilian garb, that way if terrorists were killed, they could be counted as civilians and not combatants. Throughout the war, these reservists had their own personal struggles to do what was needed, do what was right, stay alive and return home with their humanity intact. Their testimonies don’t prove every Israeli soldier behaved properly or that every attack was as it should be. Neither does the testimony of NAZA’s 24 “witnesses” prove otherwise. What these reservists do tell us however, is that there is a whole other side to this story. Apparently, it isn’t nearly as interesting to the Western media. In 2025, the UK’s ITV gave us Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War. Another collection of Israeli soldiers prepared to make deeply damaging allegations about their own army. ITV promoted the programme around allegations of “serious breaches of international law”, including indiscriminate bombardment, the use of human shields and the shooting of civilians. Again the film was long on accusations but short on actual evidence. Moreover, despite hundreds of thousands of Israelis serving during this war, we are still waiting for documentaries and media coverage featuring soldiers who reject these accusations and provide a legitimate and wholly different perspective. There is an enormous appetite in Europe for a particular kind of Israeli testimony. Israelis prepared to attack their own country are welcomed onto television screens, into newspapers and on the stages of international film festivals. God forbid Israelis who were there and who reject these claims, be given any platform at all to tell their side of the story. That selective interest in Israeli testimony is merely part of the much larger dishonesty at the heart of NAZA. Hamas spent years and an enormous amount of money building an extraordinary underground military network beneath densely populated civilian areas. The tunnels are said to be larger than the London underground. Estimates put it at around 500 hundreds kilometres of tunnels, with command centres, communications, weapons stores and accommodation providing Hamas with protection and an underground infrastructure from which to fight. In October 2023, Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk was asked why, having constructed some 500 kilometres of tunnels, Hamas hadn’t built shelters for Gaza’s civilian population. His response was refreshingly honest. The tunnels were built to protect Hamas fighters from Israeli aircraft. Protecting Gaza’s civilians, he said, was the responsibility of the United Nations and Israel. These tunnels could have easily provided shelter and safety from bombing to ordinary Gazans, yet Hamas deliberately denied them access. I guess our film industry justice warriors missed that part of the script. Perhaps they simply took a red pen to it. Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, the principal architects of October 7, knew exactly what would follow. Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel, raped, mutilated, immolated and butchered almost 1,200 people and dragged 251 hostages back into Gaza. Sinwar knew Israel would respond with overwhelming force. Indeed, he was counting on it. The harsher the response, the better. The greater the destruction, the more terrible the pictures. The more Palestinians killed, the greater the international outrage. The greater the outrage, the greater the pressure on Israel. Sinwar understood that Hamas could never defeat Israel militarily, but Palestinian death and suffering could be used to defeat it politically. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Sinwar described civilian deaths in Gaza as “necessary sacrifices”, invoking Algeria’s enormous losses in its war for independence. Palestinian civilians weren’t simply the tragic collateral damage of Hamas’s strategy. Their suffering was integral to the plan. You cannot honestly tell the story of Palestinian suffering in Gaza while removing the strategy of the organisation that started the war, embedded itself within the civilian population, built hundreds of kilometres of shelter for its fighters but not its civilians, and understood perfectly well that the resulting Palestinian death and destruction would become one of its most effective assets against Israel. Ignore it and everything becomes wonderfully simple. Show the bomb, not what was being targeted. Show the destroyed building, not what was inside or underneath it. Show the Palestinian civilian, or was he a Hamas operative in civilian clothes. Show the tunnel, but neglect to mention who was or wasn’t allowed inside it. Show the dead without differentiating between combatant and non-combatant. Refrain from examining the strategy that deliberately left civilians exposed. Find Israelis prepared to condemn Israel, while ignoring the Israelis who fought the same war and tell a very different story. Call it a documentary. This sleight of hand is particularly relevant to the very title of NAZA. The term is a Hebrew military acronym for “collateral damage”, used to denote the anticipated number of civilian casualties from an attack, which the filmmakers themselves present as evidence of Israel’s calculated killing of civilians. The idea that military officers sit around calculating how many civilians might die before approving an attack certainly sounds horrific. Except, that is exactly what militaries are supposed to do. It is an essential part of the proportionality assessment required under the laws of armed conflict. The relevant question isn’t simply whether civilians were expected to die, but what was being targeted, its military importance, how many civilians were believed to be at risk, what precautions were taken and whether the anticipated civilian harm was excessive in relation to the expected military advantage. Context matters. Which is precisely why propaganda works so much better without it. NAZA isn’t terribly interested in the answers that might complicate its story. Neither, apparently, is Venice. As a film, NAZA challenged nothing, risked nothing. It simply fed Venice its favourite dish of the day. And boy did the love it. Kudos, then, to our two intrepid filmmakers. Abraham and Szor have been here before. They were two of the four filmmakers behind, No Other Land, another half-baked, one-sided and one-dimensional piece of propaganda, carefully crafted to tell half the story while studiously avoiding the inconvenient facts and uncomfortable realities that could have messed with their narrative. Naturally, Hollywood lapped it up. It won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film, celebrated by the usual Israel haters and sanctimonious, virtue-signalling morons who know little and understand even less when it comes to the Middle East, but are delighted to accept half a story so long as it was the half they wanted to hear. Now Abraham and Szor are back with NAZA. Produced by ideological allies, The Guardian and JW Films. It was executive produced by another anti-Israel Jew, Oscar winning director Jonathan Glazer. And of course, it was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at Venice. With a record breaking 25 - minute ovation, it was already a winner. It also went on to win Venice’s Special Jury Prize. Cue yet more applause. There is clearly a market for this stuff. Producers prepared to make it, newspapers and broadcasters prepared to promote it, festivals desperate to screen it, critics eager to praise it and audiences apparently willing to remain on their feet for the best part of half an hour. All you have to do is confirm their bias, massage their fragile sense of self and validate their moral superiority. Abraham and Szor are entitled to make whatever films they want. Israelis are free to accuse their government, their army and their fellow citizens of the most terrible crimes imaginable, publish those accusations, make films about them, travel the world promoting them, collect the awards and return home. Israel is after all a liberal democracy. Long may that continue. Oh, the irony. But freedom to create propaganda doesn’t oblige the rest of us to accept it as anything else. Moreover, being Israeli doesn’t make Abraham and Szor’s version of this war true. It doesn’t make the views of 24 carefully selected Israelis more correct or any more authentic than the experiences of the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of soldiers and reservists who fought in Gaza and who tell an entirely different story altogether. Never mind 25 minutes of applause. To their shame, neither Venice or any other festival is prepared to give alternative voices any time at all to tell their story. In the words, so powerfully delivered by Jack Nicholson they “can’t handle the truth! In truth, they have no interest in the truth. Truth is so messy. Propaganda is so much more palatable. NAZA is simply the latest offering. And they love it.

Memories.

This lady in Scotland, Morgan, became an unusual heroine earlier this year when she sang a Hebrew song with full gusto. She had stumbled into a global minefield, the most toxic row on earth. But all the Palestine flags didn’t put her off. She revelled in the adoration and invitations to Friday night dinners and to Israel. And she’s still singing.

"Once the deliberate murder of civilians can be legitimised, pretty much anything can be justified. Every terrorist organisation has a cause. Every terrorist has a grievance. Nobody ever strapped on a suicide vest believing they were the bad guy. That doesn’t make them freedom fighters, or anything close." Twenty five years ago, that was clear to all. But, try telling that to left wing activists today, the self declared social justice warriors in the West who invert truth, morality and logic to fit their warped world view. Twenty-Five Years On. – Corrupting the Memory of 09/11 A generation with no actual memory of the worst terror attack in US history is increasingly willing to reconsider its meaning. Last week another 36 names were added to the Fire Department of New York City (FDNY) World Trade Center Memorial Wall, all members who died over the past year from illnesses related to their work in the rescue and recovery operation at the World Trade Center following the murderous attack twenty-five years ago on 09/11, 2001. This week the New York City Police Department (NYPD) unveiled a new memorial to its own dead. Twenty-three NYPD officers were killed on 09/11. More than 469 members have since died from illnesses connected to their service in the aftermath of the attacks. A quarter of a century on, the deadly impact of 09/11 continues to kill. Vivid Memories On 09/11, 2001, nineteen Al-Qaeda Islamist terrorists hijacked four passenger aircraft. Two were flown into the World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon. The fourth crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back, attempting to recover the aircraft from the hijackers. At 8.46 that morning, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower. At 9.37, a third aircraft struck the Pentagon. At 9.59, just 56 minutes after it had been hit, the South Tower collapsed. Four minutes later, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers. At 10.28, the North Tower collapsed. Just 102 minutes had passed since the first plane hit. Two aircraft had brought down the Twin Towers, another had struck the Pentagon and a fourth had crashed in Pennsylvania. The United States had suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in its history. 2,977 innocent people who had gone to work, boarded a flight, started a shift or simply begun another ordinary Tuesday morning were dead. For those of us old enough to remember that day, the images remain indelible. The second aircraft hitting the South Tower as the North Tower burned. People jumping to their death from the upper floors, rather than be consumed by flames. The buildings collapsing. New York disappearing beneath a cloud of dust and debris. Firefighters and police officers running towards the carnage while everyone else ran away in fear and desperation. We can argue the rights and wrongs of America’s response. Afghanistan began as a war to destroy Al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban regime that had given it sanctuary, but became America’s longest war, ending twenty years later with the Taliban back in power and tens of thousands of Afghan civilians dead. Iraq, despite a swift military victory, descended into a catastrophe of insurgency, sectarian bloodshed and political failure that cost hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. Guantanamo Bay, rendition and torture compromised the very values America claimed to be defending. For all its military successes, the wider War on Terror ultimately failed to deliver as promised, leaving behind two decades of war, an enormous human cost and Islamist extremism very much alive. None of this changes what happened on 09/11 or the sheer murderous intent behind it. Al-Qaeda hijacked civilian aircraft and turned them into weapons to murder as many innocent people as possible. Its radical Islamist ideology called for jihad against America and the West. For years Bin Laden had been openly calling for Americans and their allies, civilian and military, to be killed. He wanted them dead, believed he had a religious duty to kill them and built an organisation dedicated to doing precisely that. In New York City, the 09/11 memorial stands where the towers once stood. Every anniversary the names of the dead are read aloud. Fire stations carry photographs of the men and women they lost. Families continue to mourn. First responders are still dying as a result of their brave actions that day and in its aftermath. Reframing 09/11 But 25 years on, America has changed. Its adversaries and sworn enemies are increasingly cast as the oppressed, as victims, while terrorism is rationalised, contextualised and even legitimised as resistance. A generation has now grown up with no memory of 09/11. They didn’t watch the second aircraft hit. They didn’t see people jumping from the towers live on television. They didn’t spend hours wondering what was happening or whether another attack was coming. They didn’t experience the shock, the fear and doubt that permeated the entire country. They know 09/11 only as history, and history is considerably easier to reframe. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch put it simply in her speech this week. “The men who attacked this city were terrorists. The men and women who ran into the towers to save innocent lives were heroes. Twenty-five years cannot be allowed to blur that distinction, and shame on those who do.” Twenty-five years ago, there was no need for the New York Police Commissioner to point out the obvious, to point out the difference between good and evil. And yes, it is that black and white! The fact she felt the need to do so reveals the depth to which society has fallen. Exposing the Rot It took another terrorist atrocity, a mass slaughter of innocent people, thousands of miles away, to expose just how far this has gone. On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, joined by thousands of Gazans, poured across the border into southern Israel on a killing spree of medieval brutality. They murdered 905 Israeli and foreign civilians. Another 415 soldiers and members of the security forces fell in the fighting, while 251 people were abducted into Gaza. There was nothing ambiguous about what happened. They raped and mutilated. Whole families were burned alive, murdered in their homes. Children were tortured and killed in front of their parents, parents in front of their children. Young people were butchered at a music festival. The horror wasn’t incidental to the attack. From the outset that was the goal. It was filmed and live streamed to show and to shock the world. The Israeli response would be severe. It would bring terrible suffering, death and destruction to Gaza. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, architect of the slaughter, knew it all too well. He was counting on it. It was part of his plan. October 7 was designed not simply to slaughter Israelis and shock the world. Sinwar understood exactly the price ordinary Gazans would pay and considered their sacrifice necessary. The payoff would come in propaganda. And he didn’t have to wait long. Within days, even hours of the October 7 attack, weeks before the Israelis went into Gaza, the massacre was already being rationalised as resistance, even celebrated. Despite the videos filmed by the terrorists themselves, in the West, in New York City, the atrocities were being explained away. Rape was denied. Israel was blamed for the murder of its own people. Hamas terrorists were lionised, romanticised and hailed as heroic resistance fighters. Before it had acted, Israel was being accused of genocide in a well-planned, well-rehearsed campaign of demonisation. At NYU, Ryna Workman, then president of the law school’s Student Bar Association, declared “unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinians in their resistance” and said “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life”. At Columbia, student groups declared “full solidarity with Palestinian resistance”. National Students for Justice in Palestine called October 7 a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance”. In March 2024, Columbia students organised an unauthorised event called “Resistance 101”. Charlotte Kates of Samidoun told students there was “nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas”. Khaled Barakat spoke of his “friends and brothers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP” and told students their activism mattered to the “resistance in Gaza”. Seven months later, the US Treasury designated Samidoun a “sham charity” serving as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a US-designated terrorist organisation, and identified Barakat as a member of the PFLP leadership. A genocidal death cult deliberately murders civilians in a mass terror attack. And while the atrocities are still being committed, while the bodies are still warm, the left in West is already rationalizing and even celebrating the attack as “resistance”. All this happening in New York City, just up the road from Ground Zero. It Never Stops at the Jews Once the deliberate murder of civilians can be legitimised, pretty much anything can be justified. And justification doesn’t stop with Hamas or in the Middle East. Every terrorist organisation has a cause. Every terrorist has a grievance. Nobody ever strapped on a suicide vest believing they were the bad guy. That doesn’t make them freedom fighters, or anything close. But tell that to the left in the US. Foul-mouthed, left-wing outrage merchant, Hasan Piker exemplifies this new approach. In 2019, he ranted on his show: “This is so insane. America deserved 9/11, dude. Fuck it, I’m saying it. We fucking totally brought it on ourselves, dude. Holy shit. We did. We fucking did.” A couple of days later, Piker was given the opportunity to explain himself. By his uncle, Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks. Did anyone say nepotism? Asked directly whether he meant that America deserved 9/11, he replied: “No. Obviously not.” What he meant was that American foreign policy, its arming of insurgent groups and destabilisation of the Middle East had produced “a direct consequence, a boomerang effect rather, if you will, in causing 9/11.” Apparently “America deserved 9/11” required some clarification. More revealing is what happened to Piker after his rant. His audience grew, as did his influence. He has become one of America’s biggest political streamers, appearing alongside Democratic politicians and candidates on the campaign trail. Saying America deserved 09/11 didn’t make him a pariah. Quite the opposite. After October 7, as the worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history was being reframed, rationalised and even justified, along with others, many of his fans turned their attention to 09/11. Reinventing Osama Bin Laden Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America” resurfaced on TikTok. Young Americans were reading the justification for the worst terrorist attack in American history, written by the man who planned and orchestrated it. Apparently, he may have had a point. Maybe 09/11 needed some context and a refresh. The letter wasn’t secret. Nobody had discovered it behind a filing cabinet at the CIA. Bin Laden had been telling the world what he believed for years. One widely circulated video declared that “everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie”. Others encouraged their followers to read the letter and spoke about seeing 09/11 differently after doing so. And of course, conspiracies galore emerged, especially those accusing Israel of being behind 9/11. The same logic used to rationalise October 7 works just as well for 09/11. Hamas had grievances, so October 7 becomes resistance. Bin Laden had his own justification for attacking America, so 09/11 becomes understandable, perhaps even deserved. The focus shifts from what the terrorists did to why they did it, and ultimately, to blame the victim. Suddenly, Bin Laden is no longer a mass murderer and terrorist. He is someone whose reasoning for mass murder deserves another hearing. The Guardian removed the transcript of Bin Laden’s letter it had hosted for years after traffic surged. TikTok began removing content promoting it after the hashtag associated with the letter attracted more than 10 million views. An Emerson College poll published this week gives some idea of how badly the history itself is already fading. Only 24 per cent of Americans spontaneously named Al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden when asked who was responsible for the attacks. Another 19 per cent answered terrorists or extremists more generally. Ten per cent blamed the US government or called it an inside job. Among Americans under 30, 27 per cent simply didn’t know They weren’t there. They don’t remember it. They only encounter 09/11 through history lessons, social media, algorithms, conspiracy theories and, apparently, Osama bin Laden explaining his side of the story. Into that vacuum comes an ideology that tells them terrorism can be understood through power, oppression and grievance, where understanding morphs into justification. A Different New York State of MInd Twenty-five years after 09/11, Zohran Mamdani is New York’s first Muslim mayor. He has unequivocally condemned the attacks and called Piker’s claim that America deserved them “objectionable and reprehensible”. His own record on terror, however, is rather less reassuring. Mamdani once rapped “My love to the Holy Land Five”, a reference to men convicted of providing material support to Hamas. During his mayoral campaign, he repeatedly refused to condemn “globalize the intifada”, eventually saying he would discourage its use. He describes Israel’s war in Gaza as genocide and, when asked directly whether Hamas should lay down its arms and relinquish control of Gaza, declined to say. More than 100,000 people have signed a petition, launched by relatives of 09/11 victims, asking Mamdani to stay away from the 25th anniversary commemoration at Ground Zero. Mamdani will attend. The fact that such a petition exists at all, let alone one attracting more than 100,000 signatures, says plenty about the political distance New York has travelled since 2001. A New Strategy On 09/11 New York was attacked by Islamist terrorists. Twenty-five years on, its Police Commissioner feels the need to remind the city that the men who attacked it were terrorists and the men and women who ran into the towers to save innocent lives were heroes. “Never Forget” was never simply about remembering the date, the towers or the horrific images. It’s remembering what happened, who did it and making damn sure they can never do it again. Twenty-five years later, the worst terror attack in US history is still claiming lives. Yet even as the death toll continues to rise, there is a growing desire to rationalise and contextualise 09/11. Corrupt the memory of 09/11 and you corrupt far more than history. You corrupt the values that distinguish victim from perpetrator, right from wrong, the very foundations of Western society. Perhaps it’s time to look at 09/11 as the opening shot in a long-term campaign. Over the past twenty-five years that campaign has evolved from terror and violence to money, influence and the steady infiltration of key institutions and ultimately the corridors of power. Its success can now be measured in a generation of Americans willing to revisit, reframe and ultimately bastardise the memory of 09/11.

I’m beyond uninterested in this obviously unwell, demon infected, nicotine addicted raving lunatic, but the part at 46 seconds did make me chuckle. via: @TheMilkBarTV

Dont like the man but I agree with him on this .

When the statement is preceded with "as a Jew", in this case, "a proud British Jew", you pretty much know what's coming next. When it comes to Israel, Britain wants its cake and to eat it too, as it allows domestic politics and electoral concerns to drive foreign policy. jewishnews.co.uk/the-foreign…

When it comes to Israel, Pedro Sánchez has little time for the complexities of history, borders, sovereignty or security. Instead, he reaches for false accusations of genocide, war crimes, starvation and settler colonialism. 70,000 people cross into Spanish territory in 48 hours. Suddenly, history matters. Borders matter. Sovereignty matters. Security must be maintained. Funny that. Pedro Sánchez’s Performative Politics Come Home to Roost Spain’s immigration crisis in North Africa has exposed the hypocrisy, double standards and dangerous consequences of Pedro Sánchez’s politics. For the past three years Pedro Sánchez has presented himself as Europe’s moral conscience on Israel. Colonialism. Occupation. Genocide. Few Western leaders have been more willing to lecture the Jewish state on how a civilised nation should behave. His government recognised a Palestinian state while Hamas still held Israeli hostages, delivering a victory to Hamas, albeit a pyrrhic one, sending a dangerous message to the world. Hamas could claim, the greatest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust and the ruthless sacrifice of Gaza are what delivered state recognition, something that no peace negotiations or compromise could ever achieve. Spain has repeatedly led European diplomatic efforts against Jerusalem and has seldom missed an opportunity to remind the world how a civilised nation ought to behave. Then Came Ceuta On the 30th and 31st of July 2026, within just forty-eight hours, around 70,000 people crossed into the Spanish enclave on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, overwhelming a city with a population of just 84,000. Spain did exactly what every sovereign government would do. It deployed the army, reinforced its borders and returned the overwhelming majority of those who had entered illegally back to Morocco. Sanchez stated that the Ceuta migrant crisis ‘a violation of territorial integrity A perfectly reasonable response perhaps, but for Spain both the irony and the hypocrisy was there for all to see. Morocco insists Ceuta and Melilla are occupied territories and the last remnants of European colonialism in North Africa. Madrid rejects that claim without hesitation. It expects the world to accept that they are legitimately Spanish. As far as Spain is concerned, the matter is settled. Ceuta and Melilla are populated by Spanish citizens, governed under Spanish law and form an integral part of the Spanish state. Morocco’s claim changes nothing. Melilla has been under Spanish rule since 1497. Ceuta was taken by Portugal in 1415 and became Spanish in 1668. Both came under Iberian rule centuries before the modern Moroccan state existed. That is why Spain rejects Morocco’s claim and insists they are not colonies but integral parts of Spain. Whether one accepts that argument or not is almost beside the point. Spain expects its history to be understood in all its complexity. History is indeed complicated. Borders are complicated. Sovereignty is complicated. Nations inherit realities that are not always neat or easily reconciled with modern political slogans. Spain argues that centuries of history, geography, national identity and strategic necessity explain why Ceuta and Melilla remain Spanish despite Morocco’s objections. Curiously, for Sanchez, such justification apparently only to applies to Spain. When Sánchez speaks about Israel, history becomes largely straightforward or irrelevant. Geography barely merits a mention. Security concerns are dismissed as excuses. Complexity gives way to slogans about occupation and colonialism, as though one of the world’s most intractable conflicts can be reduced to a few campaign placards and a student union motion. It isn’t analysis. It’s ideology masquerading as foreign policy. It is intellectually dishonest and hypocritical. One Rule for Spain Spain has no intention of relinquishing Ceuta or Melilla. It has no reason to. It considers them Spanish territory and sees no obligation to negotiate their future simply because Morocco claims them. Again, that is Spain’s sovereign right. That does, however, make it rather difficult to present yourself as an anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist champion of indigenous peoples. Spain’s argument rests not only on history and sovereignty but on the people themselves. Ceuta and Melilla are home to Spanish citizens who regard themselves as Spanish and expect Madrid to defend both their citizenship and the territory in which they live. Spain sees no moral or political obligation to uproot them simply because Morocco disputes its sovereignty. Israel, on the other hand, the country Pedro Sánchez attacks so readily and accuses of occupation, settler colonialism and refusal to compromise, took a very different approach. In the interests of peace, in 1979, Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, a territory larger than the entire state of Israel. Then in 1992, made territorial concessions as part of its peace agreement with Jordan. Both peace treaties have endured to this day. Then, in December, 2005, Israel undertook one of the most traumatic and divisive decisions in its history. More than 8,000 Israeli citizens were forcibly removed from their homes in Gaza against their will. Entire communities were dismantled. Synagogues were abandoned. Farms were left behind. Jewish cemeteries were excavated and reburied inside Israel. Families who had lived there for decades were literally dragged from their homes by Israeli soldiers. Gaza was left “Judenfrei” (Jew free). Israel could argue history, legality, security, even indigeneity. It’s citizens certainly didn’t want to leave their homes and objected outright to giving up Gaza to the Palestinians. It did so because an elected Israeli government concluded that relinquishing territory, despite the enormous risks, political and human cost, offered the best chance and hope for a better future, for both Israelis and Palestinians. Whether one believes that decision was courageous, naïve or catastrophic is beside the point. Israel made it. Many in Israel claim that the slaughter of October 7th came as a direct result of the disengagement. Spain has never been confronted with such decisions. It has never had to dismantle communities built over generations or send its own soldiers to remove fellow citizens from their homes. One wonders what Spain’s reaction might be to thousands of rockets falling on Ceuta or Melilla from Morocco. How would Sanchez respond. We saw Spain’s uncompromising approach to Basque and Catalonian bids for independence. How would thousands of rockets and terror attacks be treated. Hypothetical of course. But it does make you think. Spain’s moralising is so difficult to take seriously. Madrid reserves every historical, political and sovereign argument for itself while denying Israel the benefit of arguments that are infinitely stronger and grounded in a security reality that Spain has never and hopefully, will never experience. Then, There’s Immigration Across Europe, governments are struggling with the consequences of years of ideological thinking on immigration, paying the price for policies that ignored the realities of borders, sovereignty and human nature. For years, Sánchez has championed an increasingly permissive approach to illegal immigration, replacing the language of borders, deterrence and national sovereignty with that of compassion, inclusion and humanitarian responsibility. Arguing that Spain needed migrants to sustain its economy and offset demographic decline, Sánchez’s government launched one of Europe’s largest regularisation programmes, to legalise around 500,000 undocumented migrants already in the country. By the time applications closed, almost 1.3 million people had applied. That may reflect a spectacular miscalculation, the sheer scale of illegal immigration in Spain or the irresistible message to illegal migrants that Spain was open for business is open to debate. More likely a combination of all three. Then one day, seventy thousand people crossed into Spanish territory. The rhetoric disappeared almost overnight. The Spanish government did not respond with seminars about compassion or lectures on freedom of movement. It responded with soldiers, police, fences and deportations. Apparently at one stage or another, governments eventually discover that borders are real and not political theory. That territorial integrity and security are one of the first responsibilities of the government. The crisis then led to what some might consider the inevitable consequences of the political culture Pedro Sánchez had helped create in Spain. Bizarre accusations and conspiracy theories. Within hours of the border being overwhelmed, social media was filling with claims that Israel had engineered the crisis to punish Spain for recognising a Palestinian state and Sanchez’s anti-Israel rhetoric. There isn’t a shred of evidence. As we have learned over the past three years, evidence is increasingly optional where Israel is concerned. The accusation fits a narrative that Sánchez and much of the European left have spent years nurturing. Israel is the root of all evil. When portrayed as the source of instability and injustice, of inhumanity, it isn’t much of a stretch for people to conclude that pretty much any crisis, no matter how absurdly unrelated, somehow leads back to the Jewish state. The oldest hatred has always adapts to the politics of the day. It once blamed Jews for poisoning wells. Today it blames Israel for migration crises, economic problems and geopolitical instability. The language has changed. The instinct has not. But, what does this tell us about Spain, or perhaps more accurately it’s leader and his government? Spain’s challenge is illegal immigration. Israel’s challenge is survival. Spain is dealing with organised people-smuggling networks, demographic pressure and a difficult relationship with Morocco. Serious problems, certainly, but they bear no comparison with a country that has spent decades confronting suicide bombers, rocket attacks, kidnappings, cross-border raids and terrorist organisations openly committed to its destruction. Despite that harsh reality, Israel has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to make territorial concessions. Spain has never had to contemplate such dilemmas, until now that is, with no where near the consequences that Israel faces on a daily basis. Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel. Jewish history and artifacts permeate the land. Jews have been present on the land for over 3,000 years. Zionism is perhaps the most successful national liberation movement of the 20th century. An indigenous people achieving self-determination and a state of their own in their historical homeland. The state of Israel is a modern miracle. Yet Sanchez accuses Israel of settler colonialism. And we have Spain’s North African “enclaves”. Spain still governs two territories on the African continent, Ceuta and Melilla, along with several smaller islands off the Moroccan coast. Ceuta has been under Iberian rule for more than six centuries and became Spanish in 1668. Melilla has belonged to Spain since 1497. Madrid insists they are simply parts of Spain. Morocco, on the other hand insists they are Europe’s last colonial possessions in North Africa. Just a Matter of Time Apparently, the only reason they are enclaves and not colonies is because Spain says so. There’s zero indigeneity. They were originally established as colonies, but that was six hundred years ago. And that makes it OK. Apparently, the only reason they are enclaves and not colonies is because Spain says so. There is zero indigeneity. They were established as colonies. Six hundred years later, history has apparently absolved them. Which raises an awkward question. If six centuries are enough to transform colonialism into legitimacy for Spain, how long must the Jewish people wait before Pedro Sánchez extends Israel the same courtesy? Are sovereignty and legitimacy solely a matter of time? If so, how long until Sanchez ceases to accuse Israel of settler colonialism? How long before Sanchez declares Palestinian claims to the land null and void? And if he continues with his policies, how long before Spain loses sovereignty, and its way of life, not over its “enclaves”, but over its entire country.

Jeremy Corbyn and the usual suspects want you to believe that Israel is attacking children flying kites. The truth however, is that Corbyn's friends in Hamas are cynically using kites as weapons of war. They have done so before and are now testing the waters to see if they can do so again. Bottom line, neither Hamas, nor Corbyn and his ilk, give a flying f*** for the children of Gaza, as long as they can be exploited to demonise the Jews. Weaponising Kites Is No Child’s Play Hamas has turned kites and balloons into weapons before. Now it is testing Israel’s resolve while the bad actors and useful idiots pretend it’s all about Gazan children. Jeremy Corbyn is outraged. He has found yet another Israeli atrocity to condemn. “Israel has said that paper kites flown by Palestinian children will be treated as weapons of war.” Indeed, it did. Corbyn goes on to stress the point. “Read that again. This is the reality of genocide: the total destruction of innocence, freedom and joy.” Oh, those dastardly Jews are at it again. The UN Human Rights Office was equally appalled. Its spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani described Israel’s threat to evacuate areas from which kites were being launched as “outrageous”, reducing the entire episode to “children’s kite flying”. Hamas is loving it. Senior Hamas official Basem Naim condemned the “utter audacity” of describing “innocent children’s activities as armed operations”, while Al Jazeera reported accusations that Israel was using kites as a “pretext” to escalate attacks on Gaza. Their allies in the West, the bad actors, the “activists” and the useful idiots are making the most of it. It’s a powerful and emotive story. Palestinian children, deprived of almost everything, are now being denied the simple pleasure of flying paper kites because Israel is apparently, so deranged that even a child’s toy is considered a weapon of war. Only, nobody is stopping Palestinian children from flying kites in Gaza. Israel is drawing the line at kites being deliberately flown across the border from Gaza into Israel. And with good reason. This is Not the First Time In 2018, Palestinians in Gaza began flying kites across the border into Israel. Before long, incendiary material was being attached to them. Balloons followed, carrying incendiary devices and, eventually, explosives. During the campaign, more than 1,600 fires were started across southern Israel and thousands of acres of farmland, forests and nature reserves were burned. Crops and agricultural equipment were destroyed, wildlife was decimated and communities along the Gaza border spent months dealing with fires deliberately started by incendiary devices on kites floating across from Gaza. They were highly effective weapons of war. Cheap, primitive, almost impossible to prevent from crossing the border and, because they looked so innocuous, perfect both as weapons and as propaganda tools. In May 2018, an explosive device attached to a kite landed near Kibbutz Nahal Oz and ignited a wheat field. Explosive devices were subsequently attached to balloons. In September, Israeli police intercepted balloons from Gaza near the Urim-Re’im junction with a hand grenade attached. A hand grenade attached to floating balloons. Perhaps Jeremy Corbyn needs to “read that again” Facts Can be so Inconvenient He, of course, neglects to mention these not insignificant details, as he peddles yet more falsehood and propaganda to demonise the Jewish state. Why muddy the waters and undermine your spurious claims with facts and context? The past use of kites as weapons of war disappears. Incendiary devices, deleted. Explosive devices deleted, as are grenades attached to balloons, as if they never existed. All that remains is a Palestinian child with a kite and an Israeli government determined to destroy his “innocence, freedom and joy.” Al Jazeera quotes a Palestinian analyst saying it is “inconceivable” that a nuclear power could regard “a paper kite flown by a Palestinian child” as a security threat. A perfectly contrived image and narrative. That is, if it were so. It isn’t. Far from it. Kites and Balloons as Weapons of War Israel acknowledges the kites recently recovered inside Israel were not carrying incendiary or explosive devices. The concern is what the renewed launches represent and what’s next. Once bitten, twice shy. A senior Israeli defence official told Reuters that Hamas is encouraging Gazans to fly the kites across the border in order to provoke Israel. Hamas denies the accusation, insisting that Israel is exploiting supposedly innocent activity as an excuse for further military action. The tactic is clever, precisely because the first kites are harmless. Send them across the border and watch what Israel does. Test its surveillance, its response, the tolerance of the communities on the other side and the willingness of the Israeli government to act. If Israel does nothing, continue and push the limits further. If Israel responds forcefully, Hamas gets something almost as useful: another propaganda campaign portraying Israel as a brutal military power attacking Palestinian children. Israel is damned if it responds and reckless if it doesn’t. And right on cue, the bad actors and useful idiots rush to do their bit. Corbyn turns the story into another accusation of genocide. The UN strips away the historical and security context and reduces the issue to “children’s kite flying.” Al Jazeera finds commentators to ridicule the very idea that Israel might have legitimate concerns. The US-led Board of Peace overseeing the Gaza ceasefire is rather less sentimental. It stated that “all militant activity in Gaza must stop, including the flying of kites”. Apparently, the international body charged with overseeing the ceasefire also believes there is something going on beyond the innocent childhood pastime of flying kites. If you have ever flown a kite as a kid, or flown one with your kids, you will know that the whole point is to keep it in the air, attached to the string. Kids tend to cry when their kite gets loose and flies away. They don’t generally fly kites to send them somewhere else, let alone deliberately across an international border. So, one may ask, who exactly is launching these kites into Israel? Lest we forget, according to the ceasefire, Hamas is supposed to be disarming. It’s not. After almost three years of the catastrophic war, Gaza desperately needs rebuilding. Its people need homes, schools, hospitals, jobs and some prospect of a future beyond another generation being sacrificed to Hamas’s endless war against Israel. None of that can happen until Hamas adheres to the agreement and disarms. Yet rather than disarm, Hamas has brutally reasserted control in Gaza, is rearming, reorganising and once again testing Israeli border security. Before October 7, Israel spent years tolerating Hamas provocations precisely because it wanted to avoid another war. Incendiary balloons were contained. Riots at the fence were managed. Sporadic rocket fire was met with limited responses. Israel convinced itself that Hamas could be deterred and that restraint would buy quiet. It was a terrible miscalculation. Hamas drew rather different conclusions. Fool Me Once On October 7, Israelis discovered the catastrophic consequences of allowing Hamas to probe, provoke and prepare while convincing themselves that every individual incident was too small to justify a serious response. Israel will not make that mistake again. Some of the latest kites have landed around the same kibbutzim Hamas terrorists invaded on October 7, raping, mutilating, immolating and slaughtering residents, as they dragged others into Gaza. Telling the people who are returning to live in their homes where they are their neighbours suffered these atrocities, that they should relax because these particular kites are harmless requires an astonishing degree of arrogance and total lack of empathy from people sitting safely in London, Geneva and Doha. They remember all too well what happens when Israel ignores the warning signs, and they remember the weaponized kites. There is something particularly sick and repulsive about Hamas once again exploiting children. But it is nothing new. Hamas has spent years brutalising Palestinian childhood in pursuit of its war against Israel. It has indoctrinated children, glorified jihad and martyrdom, operated youth camps involving weapons and military training, and repeatedly exposed children to confrontation and violence. For Hamas, Gazan children’s innocence itself is useful, something to be exploited fully. A Hamas terrorist carrying an RPG makes a lousy image. A Palestinian child with a kite is priceless. Hamas knows exactly what it is doing. It knows Israel cannot afford to ignore attempts to probe its border, and it knows that the moment Israel responds, the usual suspects will rush to turn another Hamas provocation into another Israeli crime. And just like that, Hamas disappears. So, do the incendiary kites, the explosive balloons, the thousands of acres in Israel torched and Hamas’s refusal to disarm. All that remains is the image Hamas wants the world to see: a Palestinian child with a paper kite and Israel somewhere on the other side. Corbyn and the rest take it from there, wrapping it in the language of “innocence, freedom and joy.” And yet, those who profess to care so deeply about Gazan children give a free pass, and even provide succour, to the terrorist organisation that has ruled Gaza for almost twenty years, brutalising, exploiting and sacrificing those same children. Hamas has stolen their innocence, robbed them of a future. It refuses to disarm and insists on continuing its war against Israel, whatever the cost to ordinary Gazans. Still, the sanctimonious virtue signalling and selective outrage remain, reserved exclusively for the Jewish state. It is the same grotesque inversion that has characterised so much of the coverage of this war. Hamas acts. Israel reacts. Context is removed. Israel’s reaction becomes the story. No one in Israel cares how many kites are flown over Gaza. The problem starts when they are deliberately flown across the border into Israel, particularly when Palestinians have already demonstrated just how easily something as innocuous as a kite can be turned into a weapon. Israel has not forgotten the fires, nor should it be expected to. Israel learned its lesson the hard way and has no intention of making the same mistake again. Jeremy Corbyn is right about one thing. Palestinian children are being robbed of their childhood. Hamas is the thief. The kites may currently be harmless. The game Hamas is playing is anything but. And it is no child’s play.