From Ian:
David Collier:
The Lie Beneath the Tree: From Wikipedia Fiction To Witch Hunt
In September 2025, a large delegation of U.S. legislators visited Ofakim – a small town in southern Israel and one of the communities devastated during the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023. During their visit, they planted trees – a simple, universal memorial act in honour of the murdered civilians.
That act has since been recast by anti-Israel activists as something sinister. Campaigners immediately claimed the trees were planted atop a “depopulated Palestinian village” – and some have gone further, calling for the legislators involved to be forced to resign.
Through a chain of factual errors, activist myth-making, and the quiet authority of “reference” sources that repeat those errors as fact, a unifying gesture of mourning has been transformed into an accusation of moral wrongdoing.
The fabrication of Ofakim as a “depopulated Palestinian village” was subsequently laundered through a media corps that hounded and interrogated participants – not over facts, but over fictions and libels treated as truths.
The truth is simple and decisive. There was no depopulated village at the site of Ofakim. No erased community beneath the tree. Yet the claim persists because it was never presented as an allegation, but instead stated and repeated as established fact – embedded, cited, and endlessly recycled.
In advancing the false “village” narrative, campaigners are not uncovering a buried injustice. They are erasing the victims of a real one – all in service of a story that never happened.
In the end we are left witnessing a witch hunt for people who visited an ally of the United States and planted a tree in memory of those slaughtered in a terrorist massacre.
MacKenzie Scott Sends Millions to Terror-Tied Nonprofit Network
MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, funneled millions of dollars to a left-wing nonprofit network that supports the nation's most virulent anti-Israel and anti-Semitic organizations, including some that are under congressional investigation for their ties to terrorist groups, a Washington Free Beacon review found. Scott announced the grant in an essay that cites Hopi prophecy, bird flocks, and sex as inspirations for her latest round of giving.
Scott recently disclosed sending at least $5 million to the Solidaire Network, which supports what it calls "the front lines of social justice movements" by offering grants to an array of left-wing groups. That includes Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), the US Palestinian Community Network, and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). SJP and AMP face investigations in both the House and Senate for allegedly coordinating with the terror group Hamas to spearhead anti-Israel protests in the United States. Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) pressed the FBI to investigate the "virulently antisemitic" PYM in September after its leader, Aisha Nizar, called on supporters to sabotage the U.S. F-35 supply chain.
Scott disclosed the grants and dozens more last month in an essay, "We are the Ones We've Been Waiting For," the title of a Hopi prophecy "written in the year 2000." The prophecy taught Scott the value of being "active participants in the co-creation of our communities." Scott also offered commentary on the "murmurations" of starling bird flocks "constantly creating their direction together."
"Generosity and kindness engage the same pleasure centers in the brain as sex, food, and receiving gifts," wrote the billionaire divorcee.
Scott's support for the network is part of an onslaught of spending that recently saw her surpass liberal billionaire George Soros's lifetime donation totals. Her approach to that spending is unique—Scott allows her grant recipients to use the money "however they choose" rather than designate it for certain projects or organizations. The Solidaire Network has used that freedom to fund radical anti-Israel organizations in the United States.
In addition to her latest donation, Scott gave the network $10 million in 2021 through her organization Yield Giving. The network went on to spend $2.1 million on a campaign called "Unity & Power" that aims to promote "Palestinian freedom."
From Ian:
Michael Doran:
Giant Abroad, Midget at Home
To those unfamiliar with the anti-Zionist undercurrents of the New Right, the episode might well have appeared as a simple expression of Catholic devotion, which Vance’s online messaging apparatus made a point of rebranding as “Christian.” Lauren Witzke—a “Christian nationalist” former Delaware Senate candidate now aligned with Fuentes—circulated the clip with the caption: “The Vice President of the United States JD Vance opted out of the wall-kissing ritual in Israel, instead choosing to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.” This framing was enthusiastically adopted by other self-styled Christian nationalist influencers like Steve Bannon, who celebrated the need for “a Christian state of Jerusalem.”
Evangelicals, who form the backbone of Trump’s pro-Israel coalition, were pleased by none of this. Protestants contest the historical location of the crucifixion, with some favoring the Garden Tomb and others rejecting both sites as unproven.
The denigration of Israeli national symbols like the Western Wall entirely misreads how evangelicals—and many Catholics—understand the place. Evangelicals do not see a visit to the Wall as an act of submission to Jews. Jesus taught in the Temple; the Gospels and archaeology both attest to the site, and for evangelical theology the covenant with Israel and the covenant fulfilled in Christ are not competing dispensations but a single unfolding promise. To pray at the Wall is, in their view, to stand where Jesus stood and to honor the continuity of God’s dealings with His people.
And Vance, as a Catholic, had no need to play to sectarian sentiments. There is an unimpeachable Catholic precedent: John Paul II’s 2000 pilgrimage, during which he placed a handwritten prayer in the Wall’s stones—“God of our fathers… we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant.” When Vance’s allies mocked “kissing the wall” as a humiliation ritual imposed by Jewish donors, evangelicals and many Catholics saw not bravado but a gratuitous rupture with a shared sacred history. In the Vance–Carlson alignment, they recognized an effort to redefine that history—and to sever the covenantal bond that has long anchored the pro-Israel core of the conservative coalition.
This recognition triggered discontent among evangelicals, which erupted into open confrontation. On Dec. 2, 2025, prominent Christian Zionist Dr. Michael D. Evans—founder of the Friends of Zion Museum—told a Jerusalem Post reporter: “Right now we are having a movement within the MAGA movement that is anti-Israel. It is very serious because it is led by Tucker Carlson, who is very close to the vice president. He is coming out and saying worse things presently than the Nazi Party said at their platform in 1920.” Days later, at a gala event attended by PM Netanyahu and Sarah, his wife, Evans pledged to train 100,000 Christian ambassadors to combat antisemitism and defend Israel, signaling the deepening rift inside Trump’s grand domestic coalition.
Vance’s political use of his own religious journey is therefore clever, but brittle. The intellectual circle that appears to shape his worldview—Deneen and Vermeule, the Catholic integralists—has major influence online, but almost none in electoral politics or within the Republican Party. Catholics as a voting bloc are smaller than evangelicals. Whereas evangelicals overwhelmingly vote Republican, Catholics, traditionally, have been split nearly evenly between the parties, and in recent decades have been far less churchgoing. Furthermore, most American Catholics are not integralists; they are not seeking to impose a premodern moral architecture on a pluralistic, democratic society. If all the true Catholic integralists in the United States gathered for an annual conference, they could fill a mid-sized bistro in Lower Manhattan.
That wager—that Vance can maintain operational loyalty to Israel while gesturing toward a post-evangelical Republican future shaped by Tucker Carlson—puts at risk the most indispensable component of the MAGA coalition: evangelicals. Their support is structural, not ornamental. Trump’s original political breakthrough—uniting evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, traditionalist Catholics, married women, and portions of Black and Hispanic churchgoers in a governing majority—cannot survive any project that treats evangelical Zionism as expendable. The reason why is simple math: Subtract evangelicals (and Orthodox Jews) and the Trump majority becomes a minority.
The strength of MAGA was never doctrinal purity. It was breadth—a unity of people who could never come together around a shared theology but could agree that the Progressive elite was assaulting their fundamental beliefs and their place in American life. That coalition survives only if its political vocabulary remains wide enough to include them. When the coalition fractures, so does the political foundation for a China strategy that can endure after Trump leaves the stage.
The United States will not lose the 21st century to Beijing on some distant battlefield. It will lose it here at home—in X posts and podcast studios—while the grand American majority assembled to prevent that outcome tears itself apart debating whether the Jews orchestrated 9/11.
An Even Better Trump Solution for Gaza
The Arab and Muslim countries, including Pakistan, will not disarm Hamas.
Pakistan -- which does not recognize Israel and does not regard Hamas as a terrorist organization –- was the first country to recognize Iran's Khomeini regime in 1979, just as, in 1947, Iran was the first country to recognize Pakistan's independence. Since then, not only has Pakistan had far closer relations with Iran than with Israel, but, after the Gaza War in 2023, has repeatedly called for Muslim nations to "unite against Israel."
Meanwhile, it is simply not realistic to assume that the Palestinian terror groups will voluntarily hand over their weapons.
These Arab and Muslim heads of state will only take action against Islamist terrorists when they pose a threat to their regimes, security and stability.
The Gaza Strip does not need peacekeepers and monitors. US President Donald J. Trump himself came up with the solution months ago, as he did this week for Venezuela: "We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition. So we don't want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years."
Developers would rush in to create Trump's original vision of a "Gaza Riviera": "Gaza would be under U.S. trusteeship for around ten years 'until a reformed and deradicalized Palestinian Polity is ready to step in its shoes.'"
Those Palestinians in Gaza who wish to leave would be able to do so without fear of being threatened or shot. The US could make sure that any terrorists who refused completely to disarm would, as Trump warned about "bad hombres" in Mexico be "taken care of." If there are legitimate concerns about US troops being put in harm's way, perhaps Gaza's neighbor to the east might help out.
Above all, Trump the master builder could oversee the successful development of some of the world's most magnificent real estate, as he said about Venezuela: "We are going to have our very large United States oil companies go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure... and start making money for the country."
Change the word "oil" above to "real estate development" for Gaza, and Trump will have delivered the most far-reaching peace ever in history -- twice -- to two separate hemispheres.
Arab and Muslim countries might object: it ruins their chances of attacking Israel more easily after Trump leaves office. That is precisely why a pervasive US or Israeli presence in Gaza is the only way to ensure the success of peace in Gaza, peace in the rest of the Middle East, and a spectacular future for the peaceful Palestinians who remain.
From Ian:
Israel Just Exposed The Entire Game
For two years in this war, and for more than two decades before it, the Gaza narrative machine has operated with ruthless efficiency. Hamas supplied the kinetic trigger. Israel responded militarily. Visuals followed. NGOs translated images into moral urgency. UN bodies amplified. Diplomats echoed. Media synchronized. Each layer fed the next. It felt organic because it was always anchored to something burning.
This time, nothing burned.
Israel did not strike a building. It touched a filing cabinet. It asked who is registered, who is transparent, and who is subject to law. Aid kept flowing. Trucks kept moving. Personnel stayed in place. The only thing interrupted was immunity.
And the system lost its mind.
The reaction was not proportional to reality because it was not reacting to reality. It was reacting to exposure. Without a kinetic event to anchor outrage, the system inflated consequence in advance. Predictive catastrophe replaced evidence. Language about chilling effects and existential threats substituted for facts. The tone was urgent, the claims vague, and the timing instant.
That is what a machine does when it fires without a trigger.
Now that the rules are in force and the predicted disaster has failed to materialize, the hysteria looks almost comical. The organizations that screamed loudest were marginal to begin with. Some delivered virtually no aid. Some delivered none at all during the current and previous ceasefires. Aid volumes are unchanged. Life in Gaza today is no different than it was yesterday.
Oversight is routine everywhere else on earth. The claim that humanitarian life hinged on a handful of unregistered actors evaporated the moment the calendar flipped.
This is the tell.
A neutral humanitarian system would say fine, here is our paperwork. A professional operation would welcome clarity. What we saw instead was panic. Because this was never about logistics. It was about exemption. It was about the quiet assumption that certain actors exist above sovereignty, beyond law, and immune from scrutiny because their narrative utility outweighs their operational relevance.
Hamas understood this arrangement perfectly. Its ground strategy was designed to manufacture content. Dense terrain. Embedded infrastructure. Human shields. Hostages. Every Israeli response produced raw material. The cognitive system harvested the output and converted it into pressure. That partnership required constant shock to remain hidden.
Israel’s regulatory adjustment removed the shock.
By acting non kinetically, Israel denied Hamas visuals and denied the narrative apparatus its fuel. With no rubble to point at and no bodies to display, the system turned inward to protect itself. It screamed before anything happened. It forecasted doom that never arrived. It tried to portray paperwork as persecution. In doing so, it exposed its own wiring.
There is a slight smirk to be had here, not because the issue is trivial, but because the reaction was so naked. The system was not being bombed. It was being asked for ID. The outrage was never proportional to the act. It was proportional to the threat of what would be revealed.
Now that the rules are live and Gaza has not collapsed, the spectacle dissolves. What remains is the uncomfortable truth that much of the international outcry was never about aid. It was about preserving a system designed to perpetuate the crisis it needs to function. A system that has mastered the manufacture of constant emergency, catastrophe, and atrocity to justify its own existence.
And this is where the moment becomes historic.
For years, the Palestinians and their allies fought on two fronts while Israel fought on one. Hamas provoked kinetic responses that activated a ready made diplomatic and narrative machine. Israel won battles and lost framing. Over and over again.
This time, Israel stepped sideways.
It did not rush back into escalation. It enacted a lawfare offensive that normalized scrutiny and exposed corruption. It resisted pressure to provide new images. It refused to feed the machine bodies. It went after the infrastructure that made the reflex possible in the first place.
That is not symbolic legislation. That is adaptation.
Israel finally recognized the non kinetic battlefield and responded with precision. With the stroke of a pen, through a perfectly ordinary regulatory act, it exposed something far larger than any single NGO. It revealed a moral economy built on exemption, opacity, and permanent emergency.
Today it looks like a quiet administrative event. Tomorrow it may be remembered as the moment the Palestinian strategy began to unravel, not because Hamas lost another tunnel or commander, but because the ecosystem that converted its tactics into global leverage was finally exposed and interrupted.
Priti Patel:
Starmer’s silence on Iran is shocking
Labour’s neglect of our defence and national security is unacceptable.
As a responsible Opposition, the Conservative Party has a clear and comprehensive plan to tackle the threats posed by Iran. First, we would stand by Britain’s allies to work with them on plans to prepare for all scenarios.
Never again should we be on the sidelines while the USA and Israel defend Western values and interests. We should be working with them, offering UK expertise, capabilities and resources, including the use of our base at Diego Garcia, which we would not be surrendering sovereignty over.
Second, where Iran has failed to adhere to the requirements made of it on its nuclear programme, we would make the autocrats of Tehran and their backers feel the economic pain as a result.
The snapback process needs to be implemented in full and we need to go further with our international partners and unilaterally. We’d also follow the money, the cryptocurrency, and all the other methods Iran is using to circumvent the sanctions and go after those facilitating, supporting and bankrolling this regime.
Third, we’d call out the ongoing cruelty, brutality and repression of the Iranian people. Just as Conservatives backed freedom and democracy for those living under communist tyranny in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, we must speak out and condemn everything the tyrants of Tehran are doing to their own people and give them hope that the torch of freedom will never be extinguished.
And fourth, we’d ensure that our military, intelligence and security services are resourced with the funding and powers to keep us safe and our Sovereign Defence Fund would counter the threats we face, dismantle terrorist plots and bring those responsible to justice.
Maduro, the IRGC, and the Globalization of the Terror Threat to Israel
Venezuela and the Iranian Regime
Iran and Venezuela have maintained a relationship since the 1950s. However, the strength and direction of the relationship increased significantly in 2005. The strategic partnership encompassed the realms of politics, military, and economics. In 2007, then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez signed a formal “anti-imperialist” alliance, alluding to the U.S.
By 2020, a military company directly tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) established itself in Venezuela. Then, in 2022, amid U.S. oil sanctions, Venezuela and Iran signed a 20-year agreement, whereby Iran transferred oil to Venezuela. The two countries have coordinated the exchange of gasoline and gold, providing both regimes with sanctions-evasion mechanisms and alternative revenue streams. The partnership allowed Iran to establish a growing presence in Venezuela while diverting some of the profits it makes in Venezuela to its terror network in the Middle East.
In the years leading up to the U.S. military operation, Venezuela began developing drones using Iranian-trained experts overseen by the Islamic Republic, reflecting a deepening military collaboration. Beyond that, Venezuela’s state-owned airline, Conviasa Airlines, has been involved in the Iranian regime’s global illicit arms network.
In effect, Venezuela became not merely an economic partner but a strategic outpost for Iran, extending Tehran’s influence closer to U.S. borders while reinforcing its global network of illicit trade and terror financing.
After the U.S. operation, Qatar issued a statement of disapproval, knowing that ultimately, the capture of Maduro would have profound impacts on Qatar as well, which is also linked to Iran’s terror network.
Venezuela and Hezbollah
Iran has exploited this connection with Venezuela to expand its terror and criminal networks across South America. Hezbollah, in particular, has leveraged the region as a hub for narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and illicit finance, with Hezbollah-affiliated operatives based in Venezuela playing a documented role in these schemes. Through drug trafficking corridors, Hezbollah has generated significant revenue used to finance its terrorist activities abroad.
Hezbollah’s vast terror network includes clans based in Venezuela and other South American countries that assist in the movement of funds through different banks in order to finance Hezbollah’s terror activities. One major operation in 2011 exposed the scale of this network, resulting in the arrest of approximately 130 individuals and the seizure of roughly $23 million in illicit funds.
Hezbollah’s involvement in narcotics and organized crime led the U.S. government in 2018 to designate the group as one of the world’s top five transnational criminal organizations, placing it alongside major drug cartels. This designation underscored the critical reality that Hezbollah is not solely a terrorist organization driven by ideology, but a sophisticated hybrid entity that fuses terrorism with large-scale criminal enterprise, exploiting weak states and corrupt regimes like Venezuela to fund and sustain its global operations.
Venezuela has also bypassed U.S. sanctions by using Hezbollah to smuggle gold, whereby the IRGC facilitated the sale of Iranian oil and accepted gold as a form of payment, which was directed toward Hezbollah terrorists.
From Ian:
Israeli embassy accuses BBC of ignoring Iran protests while ‘obsessing’ over Gaza
The BBC is embroiled in a row with the Israeli embassy after the broadcaster was accused of obsessing over Gaza while “largely ignoring” the ongoing protests in Iran.
Alex Gandler, the embassy’s official spokesman, said on X that there had been “near-total silence” on BBC news bulletins about the demonstrations against Tehran’s Islamic theocratic leaders.
He questioned the BBC’s impartiality, claiming it continued to devote huge resources to its coverage of events in Gaza.
The corporation criticised Mr Gandler’s claims as “factually incorrect”, but the spat amounts to the latest evidence of a worsening relationship between the Israeli government and Britain’s national broadcaster over its coverage of the Middle East since the Oct 7 attacks.
At least seven people have been killed during clashes between protesters and security forces that have spread across Iran since they first started in the capital on Dec 28.
Mr Gandler took to X to respond to John Simpson, the BBC’s veteran foreign correspondent, who had said it was difficult to get reporters into Iran.
The embassy spokesman said: “This is not a good take. The scale of BBC coverage devoted to Gaza, including over the past few days, vastly exceeds that given to wars and humanitarian crises elsewhere in the world.
“At the same time, the near-total silence on Iran is striking. A broadcaster that claims global impartiality cannot obsess over one theatre of conflict while largely ignoring the regime that destabilises the entire region.”
The logic behind Kazakhstan’s Abraham Accords move
When Kazakhstan announced on Nov. 6, during President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s visit to Washington, that it would join the Abraham Accords, the decision raised a more interesting question than the move itself: Why did Astana take this step before Azerbaijan, despite Baku’s far deeper and longer-standing strategic ties with Israel?
For years, Azerbaijan had been widely viewed as the natural candidate to lead Central Asia and the Turkic world into the Accords framework. Its close cooperation with Israel in energy, defense and intelligence, combined with shared concerns about Iran, made Baku the obvious frontrunner. Yet when the moment arrived, it was Kazakhstan—not Azerbaijan—that moved first.
The explanation lies less in bilateral relations with Israel than in how the Abraham Accords are currently being deployed.
Reactivating and expanding the Abraham Accords has become a priority of the Trump administration. While the Accords formalize normalization between Israel and Muslim states that were never at war with it—and therefore differ fundamentally from classic peace treaties—their current strategic significance extends well beyond Israel.
They function as a framework for advancing American influence in regions contested by Iran, China and Russia. From this perspective, Kazakhstan’s decision was driven not by the state of its relations with Israel, which have long been stable, but by Astana’s broader geopolitical weight and signaling value.
Kazakhstan’s move was therefore not ideological and only marginally symbolic, it was a calculated signal to Washington, one that Astana could afford to send, and Baku could not, as its relations with Moscow remain strained. As a result, it cannot discard Turkey, whose stance on the Abraham Accords remains highly critical.
Hind Rajab Foundation files criminal complaint against IDF soldier in Czech Republic
The Hind Rajab Foundation recently filed a criminal complaint to Czech authorities against an Israeli soldier who is visiting the country, the group announced Friday, accusing the soldier of war crimes allegedly committed in Gaza.
The foundation, a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel legal group based in Belgium and named for a 6-year-old Gazan girl killed in January 2024, has filed dozens of criminal complaints against Israeli soldiers and officials who are visiting or stationed in European countries over the past two years.
According to the group, the IDF soldier in question is currently a tourist in Prague.
The group’s complaint alleges that the soldier, as a member of the Givati Brigade, took part in “genocide, war crimes, and persecution of civilians committed during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.”
Givati has been deployed extensively during the war in Gaza, which began when the Hamas terror group attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.
Israel vehemently denies it has committed war crimes or genocide in Gaza, and says it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities, stressing that that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
Since the soldier is currently in the Czech Republic, the group claims that Prague must prosecute the soldier due to its “obligations under international and domestic law”
“These crimes fall under universal jurisdiction. Where a suspect is present on Czech territory, prosecutors are not merely empowered to act — they are legally obliged to do so,” the complaint alleges.
There was no immediate response from Czech authorities.
From Ian:
The dark comedy of the Islamo-left alliance
Yet towards the end of 2025, in Britain at least, we have also seen signs that this political coupling might just be starting to come apart. That middle-class ‘progressives’ are slowly discovering they don’t have as much in common with the uber-reactionaries on their Islamic flank as they might have thought. That sharing a demented loathing of the world’s only Jewish State might not be enough to sustain a relationship between the choose-your-own-pronoun crew and ultra-conservative Muslim men.
The first signs of strain between Muslim sectarians and the woke left became apparent during Mothin Ali’s campaign to become a Green Party deputy leader. On 7 October, the day of Hamas’s massacre, he said Palestinians had the right to ‘fight back’. In 2024, he celebrated his election to Leeds City Council with shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar!’, declaring it ‘a win for the people of Gaza’. Ali is certainly keen on the Greens’ anti-Israel zealotry and general anti-Western misanthropy. Yet, as a committed Muslim, he is rather less keen on the Greens’ Pride-filled, trans-rights activism. And so during his deputy-leadership campaign back in August, he refused to sign ‘pledges’ on behalf of the Greens’ various LGBTQIA+ groups – much to those activists’ apparent shock and dismay.
But the tensions in the Green Party were nothing compared with those that have humiliated Your Party in recent weeks and months. Semi-launched last July, amid bickering and squabbling over precisely who Your Party belonged to, this Corbyn 2.0 vehicle was clearly designed to exploit the surge in Islamo-leftist sentiment. Fronted by Jeremy Corbyn himself, sometime ‘friend’ of Hamas and Hezbollah, and onetime Labour MP and permanent sixth-former Zarah Sultana, it also featured four independent, ‘pro-Gaza’ Muslim MPs: Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan and Iqbal Mohamed.
The ‘pro-Gaza’ Muslim men were certainly on board with Your Party’s anti-Israel zealotry. But it seems they were less keen on Your Party’s support for every hue of gender-identity politics. And so, following criticism from Your Party’s leftist fanboys, fangirls and fantheys, Hussain flounced off in mid-November, citing ‘veiled prejudice’ and ‘generalised accusations and offensive slurs’ towards Muslim men. He was quickly followed by Mohamed, who also complained about ‘false allegations and smears made against me’.
The cultural chasm between let-it-all-hang-out ‘progressivism’ and illiberal Islam was fully exposed at Your Party’s calamitous conference in late November. In between denunciations of Israel, a series of pasty-looking social inadequates stumbled up to the lectern to shout their pronouns and denounce the ‘transphobia’ of their ‘socially conservative’ (ie, Muslim) comrades. The absurdity of the Islamo-woke coupling has been laid bare. Activists who think bearded men can be women marching alongside bearded men who don’t want women to be seen in public. How was this ever going to last?
Another event in Tower Hamlets in late October captured the emerging conflict in starker terms still. The setting was, absurdly enough, a counter-protest against a UKIP march that had already been cancelled and moved elsewhere. It was here that leftist activists, marching under the banner of Stand Up to Racism, coalesced with hundreds of masked Muslim men chanting ‘Zionist scum, off our streets’. Phone footage captured a momentary exchange between one of the left-wing marchers and one of their supposed allies. ‘There’s no need for that’, the leftist activist says in relation to something or other, ‘We’re on the same side, bruv’. The masked Muslim man’s response is sharp: ‘No, we’re not.’
These are portentous words. Leftists might not realise it yet, but as that masked man said, they are really not on the same side as Islamists and Islamic activists on the vast majority of political issues. They have allowed their shared loathing of Israel, animus towards the West and turn against modernity to blind them to this most blatantly obvious of truths. The crumbling of this silly and sinister alliance cannot come soon enough.
Iranians are rising up against their brutal Islamist rulers
It should be said that the Islamic Republic is not about to fall. But these protests show that it is in trouble. Many in Iran were already turning against their repressive Islamic state in the years before its shadow war with Israel broke out into the open in July last year. Since then, the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy has been further undermined. And what happens in Iran won’t stay there. It will have profound ramifications for a region shaped for years by the Islamic Republic’s regional power-plays.
All of which makes the relative lack of interest in the protests on the part Western liberal media and the broader ‘progressive’ class seem even more puzzling. Many news outlets have paid them a cursory notice, with BBC News finally publishing its first bit of coverage of the protests three days in – this despite the presence in the region of its much-vaunted channel, BBC Persian. Elsewhere, the NGO-ocracy, which likes to imagine itself a keen advocate of civil rights, appears to have little interest in Iranian security forces turning guns, tear gas and water cannons on their own people. Indeed, Amnesty International spent the past few days tweeting about fossil fuels, systemic racism and the rights of indigenous reindeer herders – not a mention of Iranians’ brave struggle for more freedom. Middle-class progressives, who have spent the past couple of years obsessing over Israel’s role in the Middle East, barely seem interested in Israel’s principal antagonist.
It would be easy to put the scant attention given to the protests down to the distractions of the so-called holiday season. But that ignores a darker truth. The West’s ‘progressive’ classes struggle intellectually and ideologically with criticising the Islamic Republic of Iran. To support Iranians struggling against the regime’s harsh Islamic strictures, including mandatory hijab-wearing, sits uneasily alongside progressives’ support for Muslim identity politics, and a warped ‘anti-imperialism’ that more often sees Iran as the victim. And so they prefer to look away, and talk about something else, like reindeer herders.
This happened in 2022, when the ‘Women, life, freedom’ protests shook the Islamic Republic to its foundations and cost the lives of hundreds of protesters. In response, Western ‘progressives’ barely managed to murmur some vague words of support for those brave men and women before they got back to championing the hijab as a symbol of liberation and ‘calling out’ Islamophobia.
This time around, the world must not look away. As the Iranians struggle to free themselves from the deathly grip of Islamic theocracy, they deserve our enduring solidarity.
Jewish community files complaint over Catalonia map identifying Jewish, Israeli-linked businesses
According to Enfoque Judío, repeated anti-Israel decisions by the government and the labeling of Israel as a “genocidal state” in the context of the Israel-Hamas War against the terrorist group have contributed to what the outlet described as the normalization and spread of antisemitism in Spain.
“Barcelonaz is not a harmless map: it is an instrument of stigmatization that contributes to this climate of hostility and, directly or indirectly, invites discrimination against Jews and Israeli citizens, the boycott of their businesses, and even violence. We already saw in Australia the process that led to the Sydney attack a few weeks ago,” a source involved in combating antisemitism told Enfoque Judío.
Enfoque Judío reported that Barcelona and Catalonia have, in recent years, become focal points of antisemitism described as being presented under the banner of “anti-Zionism,” including demonstrations, graffiti, boycott campaigns, and government and municipal decisions.
In its presentation, Barcelonaz describes itself as a “collective” project aimed at highlighting “the multiple branches of the Zionist economy in our city,” according to Enfoque Judío. The map includes sectors such as arms manufacturing, technology, tourism, energy, real estate, gastronomy, and education.
The project does not distinguish between Israeli companies, Jewish-owned local businesses, or multinational corporations operating in Israel, Enfoque Judío reported.
Listed entities include arms manufacturers such as Airbus, Indra, and Thales; technology companies including IBM and Microsoft; logistics firms such as Siemens and Volvo; energy companies, insurers, and 39 financial institutions ranging from Deutsche Bank to BBVA. The map also includes real estate and tourism businesses, kosher food establishments, and the Hatikva Jewish school in Barcelona.
According to Enfoque Judío, users are encouraged to expand the list, with selection criteria prioritizing sectors such as arms and cybersecurity, particularly where connections to Zionism are described as less “obvious.”
Members of the Spanish Jewish community have submitted complaints to GoGoCarto, comparing the initiative to historical practices that preceded the boycott of Jewish businesses, Kristallnacht, and the Holocaust, Enfoque Judío reported.
In a letter cited by Enfoque Judío, complainants requested the removal of the site, stating that the project “clearly has an antisemitic and discriminatory character, as it seeks to identify and stigmatize a population on the basis of its religious affiliation, real or supposed.”
The letter further argues that the initiative violates French laws on incitement to hatred and discrimination and calls on GoGoCarto to “adopt the necessary measures to bring this practice to an end,” citing Articles 225-1 and 24 of the July 29, 1881 law on freedom of the press, according to Enfoque Judío.
From Ian:
Why Somaliland works and the international system pretends it does not
Which is where Israel comes in. Somaliland is almost an ideal strategic partner: anti-jihadist, aligned with the Gulf camp, hostile to Iran’s regional axis, and positioned opposite Yemen along one of the most sensitive maritime corridors on earth. Quiet security and commercial relationships already exist. Israeli planners understand its value. In a different legal universe, Somaliland would be a natural candidate for an overt strategic partnership.
Israel recognizes Somaliland exists because it has absorbed Houthi attacks for two years from Yemen. And Israel is not alone in being upset at the Houthis: For much of the past two years, the Houthis have been attacking shipping headed for the Suez Canal, impeding global trade and contributing to a sharp fall in container traffic through the Red Sea, forcing ships to reroute around Africa and adding time, fuel, and operational cost. That disruption is estimated to have affected goods worth roughly US $1 trillion in global commerce and pushed freight and insurance costs sharply higher.
Given its unique position as a victim of the Houthis, Israel would really appreciate a forward base in Small Island, and in particular in the port of Berbera, for intelligence and operations activities so that they can stop the Houthi mayhem. And if they do this, that would actually be a huge favor to their dear friends in Egypt who have lost billions of dollars a year in Suez Canal revenues because of the Houthis. The economic bleeding is real, and everyone in the region knows it, even if they pretend not to.
If the Western alliance wants to prevent this part of the world from blowing up entirely, it needs to quickly get the Saudis, the Emiratis, and probably also the Israelis into one room with padded walls and locked doors – until they agree on a plan.
The result is an inversion that borders on absurdity. Somaliland meets every test the world claims to care about: governance, territorial control, democratic legitimacy, security cooperation. Somalia fails them. And yet Somalia is recognized while Somaliland is denied. This inversion is the price of prioritizing a post-colonial system built on inherited lines.
Recognizing Somaliland would establish three principles the international order is not yet prepared to tolerate: that performance matters, that secession can stabilize rather than shatter, and that colonial borders are not sacred. Those principles would rewrite the logic of statehood itself across entire regions. So Somaliland remains the world’s most functional non-state: stable, democratic, strategically vital, and permanently unrecognized.
The Somaliland Gamble
The day after Netanyahu’s announcement, the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) issued a statement denouncing the recognition while repeatedly referring to the institutions of the sovereign State of Israel as “occupation authorities.” The communiqué also invoked the need to preserve “stability” in the Horn of Africa—a ridiculous claim since the entire region has known little sustained stability for nearly five decades. Predictably, Qatar declared that it would be preferable for Israel to “recognize the State of Palestine.”
Another statement of condemnation issued by the ministry, this time co-signed by twenty-one Arab and Muslim states, including Algeria and Iran, cast the move as contrary to international law and warned that it “threatens international peace.” It further insinuated that Israel plans to relocate Palestinians to Somaliland from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The claim is patently absurd, yet it has gained traction within Islamist networks, including those maintained by Iran. That this statement—a typo-ridden mess clumsily assembled by a slave-owning petrostate and endorsed by some of the world’s worst abusers of human rights—was conspicuously not signed by any of the signatories to the Abraham Accords, such as Morocco, Bahrain, or the UAE, tells one all that needs to be known about its credibility.
Qatar has its own strategic interests in the Horn of Africa: it sustains pressure on Israel through the Houthis and other Islamist networks in the region. In Somalia, Qataris attempt to influence state policy through generous donations of foreign aid and the support of Muslim Brotherhood elements with Mogadishu’s governing elite.
Since 1996, Qatar has positioned itself as a mediator in a range of Horn of Africa disputes—from the Eritrea–Yemen conflict over the Hanish Islands to the Eritrea–Djibouti standoff at Ras Doumeira. Meanwhile, it has hosted Omar al-Bashir, the former Sudanese leader charged with genocide and crimes against humanity over atrocities in Darfur.
This is why Israel’s recognition of Somaliland poses such a problem for Doha. Somaliland represents a model of bottom-up stability that neither relies on Islamist mobilisation nor requires Qatar’s mediation. Worse still (for Qatar, that is), Israel threatens to help Somaliland defend itself, without Qatari help.
For the first time, an autonomous region long denied international standing has been acknowledged as a sovereign state not by the usual pantheon of Islamist or postcolonial patrons, but by Israel. Crucially, this has occurred in the framework of the Abraham Accords, which Abdullahi has publicly claimed Somaliland will join. The Abraham Accords began as a regional normalisation initiative but have expanded to encompass countries like Kazakhstan and possibly Indonesia.
The example of Somaliland may also inspire other stateless peoples in would-be autonomous regions. One such case is Kabylia, an Amazigh-Berber region in Algeria whose provisional government in exile has recently declared independence. While Kabylia’s circumstances differ markedly from Somaliland’s, the precedent is nonetheless clear. The Somaliland gamble suggests that a new pathway may be opening, in which emerging states that demonstrate internal cohesion, resist extremist domination, and align with a rules-based security order can find sponsors beyond the old gatekeepers. If that is so, then Somaliland is not an anomaly, but a new beginning: one more aligned with Israel’s interests than with Qatar’s.
Statehood hypocrisy: Why it's no for Somaliland, Kurdistan, but yes for Palestine
ISRAEL WAS the only country that supported the 2017 Kurdish independence referendum. A few years earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that “The Kurds have proven a commitment to political moderation, and they are worthy of their own political independence” and that “Israel supports the legitimate efforts of the Kurdish people to achieve their own state.”
No surprises here either: The Palestinians – the people who want the whole world to fight for them so that they can have their own state – categorically rejected the Kurdish independence referendum. Saeb Erekat, a long-time peace negotiator and an adviser to President Mahmoud Abbas, said in an interview with the Al Arabiya Channel that “Kurdish independence would be a poisoned sword against the Arabs.”
Barghouti described Israel as the only country to “recognize the separatist Somaliland,” and Davutoglu’s Israeli recognition of Somaliland is part of a broader strategy to fragment Islamic countries and neutralize key states through encirclement.
The vocabularies of separatism or agents of Israel are outdated and have been deployed for decades to legitimize the massacres in Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq committed against Kurdish civilians over the past decades. Arab, Turkish, and Iranian fascists and Islamists alike have launched vicious campaigns against the Kurds, and always used Israel or The Jews as a scapegoat.
In 1966, then-Iraqi defense minister Abd al-Aziz al-Uqayali blamed the Kurds of Iraq for seeking to establish a “second Israel” in the region. Sixty years later, the term “second Israel” is still perpetuated, claiming Kurdistan is imitating “Yahudistan,” meaning the land of the Jews or Israel.
JUST A couple of weeks ago, Turkish media claimed that the Kurdish-led SDF “is now in Zionist Israel’s lap,” and that it is Israel’s “strategy to divide Syria via the SDF.” Similar rhetoric is now being deployed against the more than six million Somalilanders, using Barghouti’s own words describing them as a bunch of “separatists” and accusing Israel of tearing and dividing, saying that Israel seeks to “destabilize the Horn of Africa.” This is similar to what the late Saeb Erekat said about Kurdish independence as being “a poisoned sword against the Arabs.”
Not long ago, a Turkish newspaper affiliated with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ran a “scoop” claiming that the Israeli government is holding clandestine talks with Kurdish leaders in Erbil (Kurdistan-Iraq) to relocate tens of thousands of Israeli Jewish Kurds to the Kurdish region in Iraq. These kinds of conspiracies are a regular occurrence in Turkish, Iranian and Qatari media to appeal to antisemitic elements in their societies.
The majority of Muslim states, including the so-called “State of Palestine” view both Zionism and Kurdish nationalism as projects of Western colonial imperialism. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has repeatedly accused the US for seeking to create a “new Israel” in the region due to its support of the Kurdish people.
I salute the Israeli government for becoming the first nation to recognize Somaliland. And I am happy to see so many Israelis and Kurds taking to social media to congratulate Somalilanders on this truly historic moment. To my Somaliland sisters and brothers, I offer massive congratulations!
From Ian:
Douglas Murray:
Alaa Abd el-Fattah and our misplaced priorities
Unfortunately, the government has made such a big homecoming fandango for El-Fattah that a few people have started to look into what our latest arrival actually believes. Of foremost concern is the fact that he seems not much to like the country that has done so much to spring him from Sisi’s jails. In a set of social media posts from 2010, he called the British people ‘dogs and monkeys’. He also described British history as ‘pure BS’, claiming that we ‘enslaved a fifth of humanity’ and ‘massacred millions’. Why exactly someone would want to come to a country filled with so many infidel ‘dogs and monkeys’ is, I suppose, a question for another day. But these are El-Fattah’s views about us and once again we can all agree there is nothing wrong with that and it all just makes him another weave in the rich tapestry of our diverse and multicultural nation.
In a set of other online posts, El-Fattah said he wanted to kill ‘all police’, and – astoundingly enough – he has stern views about Jews and Zionists. The latter should, according to our latest import, all be killed. It is ‘heroic’, he has said, to kill ‘any colonialists and especially Zionists’, adding of Zionists: ‘We need to kill more of them.’
It is worth dwelling on that. After the Manchester synagogue attack in October, Starmer, David Lammy and all the rest of them stressed how we can’t let ‘hate’ into our country, and need to stop people riling up nastiness. But all the time they were making a priority of bringing a man into the UK who hates the British people, wants police officers to be killed and thinks the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.
At such moments, of course, Starmer’s political opponents realise that there might be some political capital to be made from highlighting this obscenity. Robert Jenrick and others spent the post-Christmas period rampaging across X trying to highlight El-Fattah’s historic views and point at Starmer’s evident present-day numpty-ness.
But, as I can often be found saying, there is always another level to this hell. On this occasion it comes from the following fact.
It is not merely Starmer who has made El-Fattah into the human rights case de nos jours. It turns out that each of our swiftly rotating previous Conservative governments also thought that his case should be a priority for them. Liz Truss’s government thought so, as did Rishi Sunak’s. The Home Office also made the release of this Egyptian a priority by granting him citizenship. The then foreign secretary James Cleverly boasted: ‘We will continue to work tirelessly for his release.’ Again, you and I may have thought that the Home and Foreign Offices might have tried to bring migration down several notches. Instead they ramped migration up to historic highs. And why not, when they were working so ‘tirelessly’ for El-Fattah’s release.
Which party was in power when British citizenship was given to El-Fattah while he was still in jail? Why the gloriously competent Tory government of Boris Johnson, of course.
In any case, put aside for the time being the political game which has resulted from the case and consider the following rather more important question. Does anybody anywhere in government have access to Google? Or any other search engine? Does anybody in the Home Office have the capability to press ‘Control’ and ‘F’ on their keyboard and search for past public comments by a foreign national they are so eager to bring into the UK? There was a time when we might have had some faith that a British official might phone an Egyptian counterpart and ask a few questions about a chap before awarding him citizenship, let alone making a ‘priority’ of getting him on to these shores. But all the government officials, Labour and Conservative MPs, and actresses such as Olivia Colman, who campaigned for El-Fattah’s release seem not to have taken a moment even to Google him.
That is the problem for the UK. Everything that should be a priority is not a priority, and the last things that should be a priority are made a priority by governments of all stripes. Happy new year, by the way.
Human Rights Commissioner demands PM call Royal Commission into Bondi terror attack
Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay has thrown her weight behind calls for a federal Royal Commission into the Bondi terror attack, as pressure mounts on Anthony Albanese to reconsider his refusal.
Ms Finlay publicly endorsed a Royal Commission on Wednesday night, warning that a narrow review into intelligence and law enforcement failures would not go far enough to confront the underlying causes of the massacre.
Her intervention comes after the Prime Minister on Thursday refused to reveal the unnamed "actual experts" who he claimed advised him against establishing a Royal Commission.
The Commissioner said the attack could not be separated from the surge in antisemitism gripping the country and argued the issue demanded the most powerful form of public inquiry.
“The Richardson Review will examine our national security framework. But understanding the deeper causes of violence is critical,” Ms Finlay said in a post to LinkedIn.
“The Bondi terrorist attack was driven by anti-Semitism. Confronting that directly must be a national priority.
“A federal Royal Commission is essential to fully understand what has happened and ensure it never happens again.”
Former Army chief accuses government of blocking Bondi enquiry
Scores of Australian business leaders call for Bondi Royal Commission in open letter
More than 100 Australian business leaders from across the country have called for a Commonwealth Royal Commission into the Bondi terror attack in a powerful open letter.
The written statement, signed by the scores of top business leaders, calls for a Commonwealth Royal Commission into antisemitism and the events leading up to the Bondi massacre.
The signatories include former Reserve Bank governors Philip Lowe and Glenn Stevens, and a wide range of current and former chairs and CEOs including Tennis Australia chairman Jane Hrdlica, Woolworths Group chairman Scott Perkins and GrainCorp's Alison Watkins.
In total, 138 businessmen and women have called for the royal commission into the “national crisis”, which they argue requires a “national response”.
Their letter adds to the growing chorus of voices – including Jewish leaders, politicians and Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner – who have called on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to establish a royal commission to investigate the tragedy.
The non-partisan statement noted the families of the victims of the Bondi terror attack have been joined by a “wide cross section of leaders” publicly campaigning for a royal commission.
“As business leaders and proud Australians committed to upholding our values of tolerance and mutual respect, we recognise the need for clear answers as to how the Bondi massacre could occur,” the open letter read.
“We must end the unprecedented harassment, intimidation and violence directed at the Australian Jewish community since October 7, 2023.
“This is a national crisis, which requires a national response.”
Monday, January 05, 2026
