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Keir Starmer’s blackmailing of Israel is a depraved new low The PM says he will recognise Palestine unless Israel lays down its arms – what a grotesque betrayal of an ally. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/29/keir-starmers-blackmailing-of-israel-is-a-depraved-new-low/

With ‘allies’ like Keir Starmer, who needs enemies? Today the PM said Britain will recognise Palestine unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire in Gaza. This, truly, is a new low for this government. It is moral blackmail masquerading as diplomacy. It is a barely veiled threat against a supposed ally. Starmer is essentially telling Israel that unless it lays down its arms, Britain will reward its enemies. This will go down in history as one of the most scandalous betrayals of a ‘friend’ of modern times.

Starmer says he will recognise Palestine in September, ahead of the United Nations General Assembly, unless Israel bows to his demands. Israel, he says, must call a ceasefire in Gaza, end the ‘appalling’ suffering there, and commit to a ‘wider peace plan’ that delivers a ‘two-state solution’. And if it doesn’t, Britain will join the 147 other nations that recognise Palestine. Shorter version: do as I say, or suffer the consequences.

The imperial arrogance is off the scale. Maybe Starmer thinks it’s the 1920s and there’s still a British Mandate for Palestine that lets London boss around the Jews and Arabs of the Middle East. To make such haughty demands of any ally at war would be bad enough – to make them of an ally that is fighting a brutal battle against an army of anti-Semites that hates the West as much as it does Jews is flat-out psychotic.

Like President Macron before him – who announced last week that France would recognise Palestine in September – Starmer has clearly not thought through his imperious actions. Where would this State of Palestine be? Who would govern it: the corrupt Palestinian Authority or the demented Jew-killers of Hamas? Starmer paid lip service to the need to disarm Hamas, but he cannot escape the sick fact that he is rewarding terrorism. That he is gifting the Palestinian territories with statehood less than two years after a neo-fascist army from those territories launched a barbarous assault on the Jews of southern Israel.

Hamas won’t hear Starmer’s criticism of its actions or his demand that it release the remaining hostages. It will only hear that killing Jews has benefits.

The Muslim Brotherhood: A Terrorist Organization That the US Must Designate as One by Khaled Abu Toameh

Recently, Jordan joined the list of countries that have banned the Muslim Brotherhood: Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Austria. The move came after Jordanian authorities announced that they had arrested 16 people suspected of planning attacks aimed at “targeting national security, sowing chaos and sabotage.”
• The Muslim Brotherhood, in addition, has served as an inspiration for Islamist terror groups Islamic State (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda. According to the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit international policy organization working to combat the growing threat exposed by extremist ideologies: “Before ascending to the highest positions of ISIS and Al-Qaeda, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Osama bin Laden, and Ayman Zawahiri belonged to a common ideological precursor, the Muslim Brotherhood.”
• The Muslim Brotherhood has been able to fool many Westerners by pretending that most of its work is based on charity and humanitarian aid. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mujama al-Islami (Islamic Center) in the Gaza Strip started as a charity and was even licensed by Israel.
• “Since the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood has been aggressively whitewashing its image. By doing charitable work, the Brotherhood pretends to be a humanitarian agency. The charitable work, however, is camouflage for the Brotherhood’s real mission — undermining Western society, promoting Sharia law, and pursuing global domination…. The Brotherhood will use any tactic, including subversion and violence, to dismantle Western societies.” — Pastor Michael Youssef, Daily Wire, June 24, 2025.
• Designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization would give US law enforcement and intelligence agencies the legal tools they need to protect Americans. It would allow them to:
• Freeze financial assets used to fund radical networks;
• Block the travel of known Brotherhood operatives;
• Investigate and prosecute U.S.-based affiliates;
• Expose front groups that serve as recruitment pipelines;
• And cut off the flow of resources from foreign governments and donors.
• Designating the Muslim Brotherhood a Foreign Terrorist Organization is vital not only for the national security of the United States, but also for combating Islamist terrorism around the world. If America’s Arab allies have reached the conclusion that the Muslim Brotherhood is a dangerous Islamist terror organization, there is no reason why the US and other Western countries should continue to pretend that it is all about charitable and humanitarian work.

Niall Ferguson: Milei’s Man-made Miracle

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-mileis-manmade-miracle-argentina-economy?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The great English lexicographer Samuel Johnson said of the actor David Garrick that his demise “eclipsed the gaiety of nations and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.” If the Argentine president Javier Milei were ultimately to fail in his bid to extricate his country from a century of economic underachievement, I would feel the same way. Happily, I don’t think he will.

Since he burst onto the Latin American political scene a few years ago, Milei has added immeasurably to both the gaiety of nations and the public stock of harmless pleasure. With his shaggy sideburns and loopy facial expressions, there is more than a hint of the Mad Hatter about him.

Yet there is a method to Milei’s madness. While the world fixates on Donald Trump’s populist cocktail of reciprocal tariffs and big, beautiful deficits, Milei is delivering a man-made miracle that should gladden the heart of every classical economist and quicken the pulse of all political libertarians.

Consider what Milei has achieved in just a year and a half.

When he was sworn in as president in December 2023, the Argentine economy was a seemingly incurable basket case. In 2023, its gross domestic product had shrunk by 1.6 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Perhaps more strikingly, per capita gross domestic product (GDP) on an inflation-adjusted basis was lower than it had been in 2007. Public finances were in disarray. The last time the government had run a surplus was in 2008. The IMF estimated total public debt at around 90 percent of GDP, but the important thing was how much of that debt—more than $40 billion—Argentina owed to the IMF, the culmination of no fewer than 22 programs.

Posh Twats for Palestine How Israelophobia became the favoured hobby of the filthy rich. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/21/posh-twats-for-palestine/

I knew it. As soon as I saw that cast member of the Royal Opera House smugly unfurl his Palestine flag, I knew he’d be some privileged they / them with either blue blood or blue hair. And I was right. His name’s Daniel Perry, he’s a they / them, he was educated at a £48,000-a-year high school, and he calls himself a ‘queer dance artist’. Now all we need to discover is that he has ADHD and he really will be a walking checklist of middle-class twattishness.

Mr Perry has got the pro-Palestine set salivating with infantile glee after he whipped out his flag during the curtain call for Verdi’s Il Trovatore on Saturday evening. A stage manager tried to snatch it from him but Perry yanked it back with all the wild-eyed frenzy of a bloke determined to trend online. He got his way. He’s being gushed over by the internet’s Sun-starved army of armchair Israelophobes. ‘Hero!’, they yelp from their bedrooms, the unbelievably sad bastards.

The Telegraph has Perry’s backstory. He attended an eye-wateringly expensive school in leafy Hertfordshire. He’s nonbinary – sorry, they’re nonbinary. He’s a self-styled ‘queer’ dancer. He seems blissfully unaware that if he ever set foot in Gaza the only pirouette he’d be doing is a mid-air one as Hamas hurled him off a tall building. He recently wore a ‘Free Palestine’ t-shirt to a performance of Cabaret, the musical about the Weimar Republic that foreshadows the rise of the Nazis and the burning of the Jews.

It didn’t take any special insight on my part to guess that this flag-waving irritant would turn out to be a knob of the most insufferably bourgeois variety. Because they’re all like that. Perry belongs to that most vexing clique of preening ‘activists’ – let’s call them Posh Twats for Palestine.

They’re everywhere. Venture into London on a Saturday afternoon and you’ll soon be swarmed by affluent tits in keffiyehs talking rubbish about Israel. Our leafier campuses have been all but colonised by plummy youths screaming the new lie (‘Israel is committing genocide!’) with the same demented fervour with which they once hollered the old lie (‘Transwomen are women!’). The am-dram arseholes of Palestine Action loved to splash around their red paint while wanging on in cut-glass tones about the unholy wickedness of Israel. The government calls them terrorists but they’re something far worse: rich theatre kids.

Iran: Its Foreign Ministry’s Agents of Influence in Sweden and the US by Nima Gholam Ali Pour

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21770/iran-agents-sweden

The “Iran Experts Initiative” (IEI)… was first proposed in 2014 by… a member of the internal think tank of Iran’s Foreign Ministry, the “Institute for Political and International Studies” (IPIS).

Ali Vaez and Ariane Tabatabai… were also members of the IEI.

How can all these prominent think tanks and influential experts enter into cooperation with IPIS, which — apart from being an integral part of the Iranian regime — organized a Holocaust conference in 2006 featuring Holocaust deniers such as David Duke and the neo-Nazi German National Democratic Party (NPD)?

The purpose of the IEI for the Iranian regime has been to establish a number of reputable and knowledgeable contacts who support the idea of a “nuclear deal” — which, in the long run, means that the regime in Iran will get nuclear weapons — and to promote Iran’s perspective on this nuclear deal and its desired structure in Western Europe and North America.

[T]he Swedish Security Service considers Iran to be one of the three countries that pose the greatest threat to Sweden.

Does anyone seriously believe the mullahs’ lies that they do not want to build nuclear weapons?

If the mullahs truly wanted peace, they would dismantle their support for terrorist organizations, abandon their ambitions to build nuclear weapons, stop pouring resources into fueling conflicts in neighboring countries, and cease spreading hatred toward the Western world.

The door must be closed to these lobbyists for the Iranian regime…. The mullahs’ regime is an enemy of the West, but the mullahs’ lobbyists must be treated as enemies, too.

On January 31, Sweden’s TV4 reported that leaked documents from Iran’s Foreign Ministry linked Iran expert Rouzbeh Parsi, head of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, to a network initiated by Iran’s Foreign Ministry, with the aim of increasing the country’s influence in the West. Since 75% of the funding for the Swedish Institute of International Affairs comes from the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Sweden’s Foreign Minister, Maria Malmer Stenergard (pictured), demanded more information regarding these allegations. (Photo by Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images)

On January 31, Sweden’s TV4 reported that leaked documents from Iran’s Foreign Ministry linked Iran expert Rouzbeh Parsi, head of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, to a network initiated by Iran’s Foreign Ministry, with the aim of increasing the country’s influence in the West.

Why Al-Jazeera Should Be Designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21773/designate-al-jazeera-terrorist-organization

Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, Al-Jazeera has been openly serving as the unofficial mouthpiece of Hamas and its military wing, Izaddin al-Qassam.

Even before the war, Hamas’s political and military leaders often chose Al-Jazeera to spread their propaganda and call for jihad (holy war) against Israel.

Hamas knows it can trust Al-Jazeera: the two share the same radical Islamist ideology that calls for the elimination of Israel and replacing it with an Islamist terror state.

Hamas does not need its own television station. It has Al-Jazeera, one of the most influential and wealthiest TV networks in the Arab world. This is what happens when most of the funding comes from Qatar, which has used its ties with Islamist groups, especially Muslim Brotherhood, as soft power to boost its regional and global influence.

Al-Jazeera, for its part, has been extremely protective of its friends in Hamas. The television station does not allow any criticism of Hamas or Qatar. When a Palestinian dares to criticize Hamas during a live interview, Al-Jazeera quickly cuts off the interview.

Last year, Israeli security forces disclosed intelligence information and numerous documents found in the Gaza Strip that confirm the military affiliation of six Al-Jazeera journalists with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the second-largest terror group in the coastal territory.

One does not have to be an expert in journalism or the Middle East to understand that Al-Jazeera is nothing but a terrorist organization masquerading as a media outlet.

A number of Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain understand the dangers of Al-Jazeera.

That is why they have shut the offices of Al-Jazeera, blocked its websites and demanded that Qatar curb the television station. Even the Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by Mahmoud Abbas… suspended Al-Jazeera’s broadcasting in the West Bank….

Why do some Americans and Westerners still consider Al-Jazeera a credible and professional media station if so many Arabs view it as an organ of Islamist terrorists and Jihadis? … It is time to designate Al-Jazeera as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

On June 18, the Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera TV network (in Arabic) broadcast another “exclusive” video of a speech by Abu Obaida, the masked spokesman of the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas.

This is the group that started the current war in the Gaza Strip, when thousands of its members invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, murdering 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and wounding thousands. Another 251 Israelis and foreign nationals were kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, where 50 are still held captive. At least 20 of those hostages are believed to be alive.

It did not come as a surprise that the video of the Hamas spokesman was first broadcast on Al-Jazeera. Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, Al-Jazeera has been openly serving as the unofficial mouthpiece of Hamas and its military wing, Izaddin al-Qassam.

We are coming apart How asylum, multiculturalism and contempt for the masses turned Britain into a tinder box. Tom Slater

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/20/we-are-coming-apart/

It’s been almost a year since the Southport massacre. That sunny morning, etched forever in infamy, when Axel Rudakubana committed his barbaric, depraved murders of three young girls at a dance class in the Merseyside seaside town. It sparked the worst anti-migrant riots Britain has seen in modern times, fuelled by false claims Rudakubana was a Muslim, small-boats asylum seeker. But to anyone who had been paying attention, the seeds of that horrific unrest were sown long before that.

Before Southport, Middlesbrough, Rotherham and many more towns and cities descended into nihilistic violence last summer, with peaceful protests being overrun by racists and opportunists trying to burn down migrant hotels and pelting mosques with bottles and bricks, there were plenty of signs that something was about to snap.

In Knowsley, also in Merseyside, in February 2023, a protest outside a hotel housing asylum seekers was leapt on by troublemakers and turned into a riot. The protest was called after a young girl was allegedly propositioned by a migrant on the street. This detail was naturally omitted in much of the mainstream media’s coverage, even though local media had covered it and the police were investigating. The true blame, the broadcasters piously intoned, lay with ‘misinformation’.

This pattern keeps repeating itself. A violent or sexual crime allegedly committed by a migrant causes tensions to flare, while the media and politicians play dumb. We saw it again in Ballymena last month, where the attempted oral rape of a girl by two Romanian Roma boys was followed by days of rioting, first targeting the homes of the alleged rapists before spilling over into undiscerning racist rage – visited upon innocent migrants, too. Heartbreakingly, members of the area’s thriving Filipino community took to putting signs on their doors, bearing Union flags and the words ‘Filipino lives here’, in the hopes they would be spared from the carnage.

There’ll Always Be an England—But Will It Be Free? In modern Britain, you can be flagged by police for a joke, banned from pubs for banter, and blacklisted for thoughts deemed hostile—even when no crime occurred. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/20/therell-always-be-an-england-but-will-it-be-free/

Sitting here in London, I wonder what Ross Parker and Hughie Charles would think if they could join me for a pint. I suspect that the authors of the famous 1939 song “There’ll Always Be An England” would be puzzled, not to say alarmed, over some recent developments in this green and pleasant land.

“There’ll always be an England,” these songsters wrote, “and England shall be free/if England means as much to you/as England means to me.”

But the question is, does it? Does England mean as much to the ruling establishment as it once did? The words “free” and “freedom” are repeated several times in “There’ll Always Be An England.” That’s the theme, the hope, the conviction: that Britain would triumph because of its native love of freedom.

How do things look now? Let me introduce you to two recent developments that would have astonished Messrs. Parker and Charles—police tracking of “non-crime hate incidents” and a so-called “banter ban” that is on the threshold of becoming the law of the land.

The practice of recording “non-crime hate incidents” by the police became law in June 2023. Ponder this:

Where there is no criminal offence, but the person reporting perceives that the incident was motivated wholly or partially by hostility, the incident will be recorded as a non-crime hate incident. Police officers may also identify a non-crime hate incident, even where no victim or witness has done so.

I added the italics to underscore the surreal, Orwellian nature of the practice. If you say something mean about somebody, prepare to have your remarks—or even just your “whole or partial” hostility recorded and put into an official database that might then be scrutinized by prospective employers.

Who or what oversees this database? The College of Policing, a private company that provides guidance for the police forces of England and Wales. Recording such incidents is not required by Parliament. Rather, it is part of the increasingly vast, quasi-governmental surveillance apparatus that has grown up in formerly free countries, such as the UK.

The College of Policing defines “hostility” as the expression of “ill-will,” “ill-feeling,” and “dislike.” This means, a paper for the Free Speech Union notes, “that certain thoughts are now being policed.”

Karoline Preisler: Germany’s Bravest Protester and a Singular Voice of Conscience — A Profile in Courage

https://tjvnews.com/news/international/karoline-preisler-germanys-bravest-protester-and-a-singular-voice-of-conscience-a-profile-in-courage/

In a time when standing with Israel in the heart of Europe can invite hostility and even personal danger, Karoline Preisler has emerged as a singular and fearless voice of moral clarity. A German lawyer, politician, and unwavering advocate for truth, Preisler has distinguished herself on the streets of Berlin — not merely as a public figure, but as a conscience in action. Her steadfast support for Israel and her unrelenting stand against antisemitism have made her a symbol of integrity and fortitude, as documented by numerous observers, including the Tagesspiegel and the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

What sets Preisler apart — and renders her exceptionally praiseworthy — is that she undertakes this courageous stand not as a member of the Jewish community nor as an Israeli citizen, but as a German woman acting on principle alone. Her advocacy is a testament to the highest ideals of moral responsibility: the conviction that injustice must be confronted, and that silence in the face of hatred is complicity.

Karoline Preisler’s career began in the legal and political arenas. Having studied law at the University of Potsdam, she joined Germany’s Free Democratic Party (FDP) in 2013, becoming active in local politics and civic engagement. From 2014 until 2023, Preisler served as chairwoman of the Arno Esch Foundation, affiliated with the FDP of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Her tenure reflected her commitment to democratic values, civic responsibility, and the rule of law.

Stop The Avarice and Cowardice: Europe Must Confront Iran’s Regime by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21756/europe-avarice-cowardice-iran

Iran’s reach does not stop “just” with assassinations and terror cells. The regime is now a key player in one of the most significant wars in Europe since World War II: the Russia-Ukraine war.

The “EU3” — France, Germany, and the United Kingdom — still have the legal authority to initiate this “snapback” mechanism. If they act before October 18, 2025, they can reimpose the full slate of UN sanctions on Iran that were lifted as part of the flawed 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) “nuclear deal.” These sanctions include restrictions on Iran’s missile program, military exports and financial networks. Tehran has not only violated the JCPOA — it has blown it to pieces

Europe is actually pretending to stand for democracy and human rights while doing business with the “world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.”

It took decades to build the international sanctions regime that US President Barack Obama tragically dismantled in 2015 with the JCPOA. Letting that structure collapse completely would be… an invitation for Iran to continue rebuilding its path toward nuclear weapons without consequence.

Beyond the snapback mechanism, the EU might sever all diplomatic and economic ties with the Islamic Republic; close every Iranian embassy in Europe; expel every Iranian ambassador; cut all trade deals, freeze all assets, and sanction every official linked to the regime’s terror apparatus. Maintaining business as usual with Iran only emboldens its rulers by signaling to them that the EU is unwilling to confront danger when it sees it.

The European Union has remained in a state of diplomatic paralysis, watching from the sidelines as the United States and Israel have shouldered the burden of confronting the Islamic Republic of Iran.

While American and Israeli leaders are taking real, tangible risks to counter the threat posed by Tehran and its vast global network of terror, European officials have chosen the path of appeasement, delay, cowardice and greed, all the while bashing Israel for coming to its rescue instead of thanking it.