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WORLD NEWS

A Disunited Kingdom New SNP leadership and an unpopular Labour Party may yet force Scottish independence back onto the political agenda.John Lloyd

https://quillette.com/2025/05/19/a-disunited-kingdom-snp-swinney-forbes-europe/?ref=quillette-daily-newsletter

Many European states have political parties that exist to convince a part of their population to secede and make their own way in a separate polity. Most of these parties are small, electorally insignificant, and only occasionally violent (as on the French island of Corsica). But they are all likely to be assisted by the turbulence of our political moment.

Germany hosts two separatist parties—the Bavaria Party and the Free Voters of Saxony, both of which have local followings but attract only a small number of votes. In Italy, the Northern League was established in the early 1990s to create “Padania,” a new state freed from the corruption of Rome. It has since contracted its name to The League to become a small right-wing party and a partner in the current right-wing government. Belgium is divided between Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south. The country was expected to split after the 2024 election, but the far-right secessionist party in Flanders, Vlams Belang, came second to the more moderate, centre-right N-VA. After seven months of talks, the N-VA formed a national coalition government with Wallonia’s centre-right party, and Belgium is holding together—for the time, at least.

Spain is a country of passionately autonomist regions and it is currently experiencing a period of strong economic growth. But the country’s prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, is under constant attack, and the fragile coalition he leads has been dependent on the support of Catalonian independence parties. An election in the region last year, however, showed a significant rise in support for Catalonia’s pro-government socialist party. This has weakened both of the region’s secessionist parties and the grip they exercise over Sanchez.

So, a tentative peace has settled over the governments of Europe, relieved for now of the immediate worry that their borders will be challenged and that politics will return to a hectic series of late-night meetings called to avert a national break-up. Yet one country still threatens to split into separate states through the process secessionists like to call liberation, and it is the state that most boldly proclaims its national wholeness: the United Kingdom.

How Qatar Bought America The tiny Gulf nation has spent almost $100 billion to establish its influence in Congress, universities, newsrooms, think tanks, and corporations. What does it want in return?By Frannie Block and Jay Solomon

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-qatar-bought-america

On Wednesday, Donald Trump will travel to Qatar. On his trip, the president will visit Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American military facility in the region, and attend meetings with the ruling Al Thani family. Perhaps he will also thank them for the $400 million gift of a luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet that will reportedly be retrofitted for his use, and then transferred to his presidential library.

The airplane deal was signed off by Attorney General Pam Bondi. She used to work at a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm that received $115,000 a month from Qatar to fight human trafficking, according to a 2019 contract reviewed by The Free Press.

She’s not the only one in the administration with ties to the Persian Gulf state.

President Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, led lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs when it represented Qatar’s embassy in Washington. FBI Director Kash Patel worked as a consultant for Qatar, though he didn’t register as a foreign agent.

And then there is Steve Witkoff, president Trump’s longtime friend and senior adviser, who is accompanying him on his trip this week. For months now, Witkoff has served as Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East—and his name has been floated as a future national security adviser. Witkoff also happens to be a beneficiary of Qatar’s largesse: In 2023, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund bought out his faltering investment in New York’s Park Lane Hotel for $623 million.

Meanwhile, the Trump Organization is hard at work planning a new luxury golf resort near Qatar’s capital, Doha, in partnership with a Qatari company. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. will speak next week at the invitation-only Qatar Economic Forum in a session titled “Investing in America.”

If you were just a casual reader of these facts—an ordinary American who doesn’t think much about the Middle East after America’s traumatic wars of the 2000s—you would think Qatar is a top American ally, a trustworthy partner, and a key hub of international commerce—a country in good enough standing that the president of the United States would use its plane as Air Force One.

But Qatar is also a seat of the Muslim Brotherhood, a crucial source of financing to Hamas, a diplomatic and energy partner of Iran, a refuge for the Taliban’s exiled political leadership, financier and cheerleader of Palestinian terrorism, and the chief propagandist of Islamism through its media powerhouse, Al Jazeera, which reaches 430 million people in more than 150 countries.

Key members of Qatar’s royal family have made their admiration for Islamism—and Hamas specifically—very clear. Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, the mother of Qatar’s emir and the chairperson of an educational nonprofit funneling millions into American schools, praised the mastermind of the October 7, 2023 massacre, Yahya Sinwar: “He will live on,” she wrote on X after his death last year, “and they will be gone.”

The question is: How did a refuge of Islamist radicalism, a country criticized for modern-day slave labor, become the center of global politics and commerce? How did this tiny peninsular country of 300,000 citizens and millions of noncitizen migrant workers manage to put itself smack-dab in the center of global diplomacy—and so successfully ingratiate itself within the Trump administration?

The England We Once Respected by Nils A. Haug

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21622/england-we-once-respected

The future of Israel and its people will therefore rest on Israel’s own ability to defend its nation…

Israelis will live, and thrive, in their homeland despite ill-intent by their enemies. After all, the Jews are sacred custodians of eternal truths and morality – as the Torah makes clear. The world needs them.

“Instead of demonizing and vilifying Israel, the world should be thanking Israel for being on the front lines in saving Western civilization and the free world.” — Elon Gold, reported by David Suissa, The Jewish Journal, April 29, 2025.

As for England and all of Great Britain, the greatest empire of its time is no more — long gone. Rule Britannia no longer rules anything, not even the streets of London.

Since 1650, after a relatively undisturbed period in England of nearly 400 years, publicly expressed animosity toward the Jews is escalating. Islamist influence in Britain is growing exponentially. The UK’s weak leadership falls into a category of cognitive dissonance from reality, as does its cowardly display against vociferous and dangerous Jew-hatred on the streets of London.

Jews have a long history of residence in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, under King Edward I in 1290 CE, England was one of the first countries to expel Jews from its borders — an event which Oliver Cromwell remedied in 1650, after nearly 400 years.

Since 1650, after a relatively undisturbed period in the UK of nearly another 400 years, publicly expressed animosity toward the Jews is escalating. Towards the end of April 2025, a British journalist who frequently appeared on the BBC’s Arabic channel commenting on Gaza events, reportedly called for “Jews to be burned ‘as Hitler did.'” The BBC lamely explained that the person was not “a member of staff nor part of the BBC’s reporting team.” Even so, the BBC – Britain’s official broadcaster – has frequently allowed pro-Palestinian content and, by implication, anti-Jewish sentiment to be promoted.

Why do so many liberals have a blindspot on Jew hatred? Gary Lineker’s sharing of a ‘Zionist rat’ on Instagram confirms the lethal ignorance of the cultural elites. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/14/why-do-so-many-liberals-have-a-blindspot-on-jew-hatred/

I thought Gary Lineker was a dab hand at spotting things that are reminiscent of the Nazi era? Perhaps someone can explain, then, why he shared an ‘anti-Zionist’ Instagram post that was illustrated with the rat emoji. The Jew as rodent, as vermin-like pest, as the lowest and most diseased of Earth’s beasts – it doesn’t get more Nazi era than that, Gary.

Lineker is in hot water after reposting an Instagram story from the anti-Israel campaign group, Palestine Lobby. It was a post featuring a video clip titled ‘Zionism explained in two minutes’. It was the usual Zio-bashing fare that faux-liberal midwits like Lineker mistake for daring commentary. Only it was worse this time, because the post came with a cartoon rodent, twitching its filthy tale.

You don’t need a PhD in the crimes of 20th-century Europe to feel alarmed – and sickened – by such an image. The vile likening of Jews with rats was all the rage in Nazi Germany. Goebbels pumped out propaganda depicting Jews as a rodent race that ‘carry contagion, flood the continent and devour precious resources’. Der Stürmer published cartoons of Jew-rats being exterminated. ‘When the vermin are dead’, one caption said, ‘the German oak will flourish once more’.

Such gross images were central to the Nazi project of dehumanising Jews. For if Jews were rats, then their incineration in the death camps was not a crime – it was ‘pest control’. To see the ‘Jew rat’ make a comeback in 2025 is chilling in the extreme. And I swear, anyone who says the Palestine Lobby post did not liken all Jews to rats, only Zionists, is going to get slapped. You couldn’t ask for better proof that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism in a keffiyeh than the fact that some of its adherents are now even rehabilitating the rat propaganda of that darkest moment in human history.

And then Lineker comes along and shares it. What was he thinking? He says he wasn’t thinking. His agent says he ‘did not notice [the] rodent emoticon’. And if he had noticed it, ‘he would not have made any connection’, the agent says, which I guess means Lineker is unaware of the history of depicting Jews as rodents. He’s deleted it now, his agent tells us. Is it just me or is that an incredibly perfunctory statement? If I had unwittingly shared an image that echoed Nazi propaganda, I’d be a hell of a lot more contrite. I’d at least say sorry. Not our Gary, though. Maybe he thinks it’s no big deal that he reposted a Zio-rat to his 1.2million IG followers.

That Lineker ‘would not have made any connection’ even if he’d noticed the rodent emoticon doesn’t make his repost any better. In some ways it makes it worse. Why doesn’t he know that Jews were compared to rats? If someone on IG had posted a clip slamming Nigerians as the world’s most toxic people alongside an image of an ape, he’d know very well what they were playing at. His ignorance of the long, grim history of caricaturing Jews as vermin is inexcusable, especially given that he’s been wanging on about the Jewish State for 18 months solid. To use a slogan beloved of his class of imperious Remoaner tossers: ‘Educate yourself.’

Macron scolds Netanyahu, backs review of Europe-Israel trade ties By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/macron-scolds-netanyahu-backs-review-of-europe-israel-trade-ties/

French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “unacceptable” and “shameful” behavior for the blocking of aid to Gaza, and agreed Europe should revisit its cooperation agreement with Israel.

Speaking during a three-hour interview special on French television titled “The Challenges of France,” Macron said of Netanyahu, “What he does is a shame. It’s shameful.”

During the interview, on French channel TF1, the French president fielded questions from public figures and regular citizens on a host of subjects.

“We must fight absolutely to reopen first,” Macron said of Israel’s closing of its borders with the Gaza Strip.

Asked why France does not sanction Israel, Macron said his administration had taken action on several occasions. “We’ve even refused to send [Israel] equipment that would allow them to go into combat. We’re giving them equipment that allows them to protect themselves, particularly against Iranian missiles. But we’ve made things a lot harder,” he said.

Netanyahu responded sharply to Macron’s comments in a statement issued by his office on Wednesday afternoon. “Macron has once again chosen to stand with a murderous Islamist terrorist organization and echo its despicable propaganda, accusing Israel of blood libels,” Netanyahu said.

“Instead of supporting the Western democratic camp fighting the Islamist terrorist organizations and calling for the release of the hostages, Macron is once again demanding that Israel surrender and reward terrorism,” Israel’s prime minister added.

Genocide in Syria: Jihadists Massacre Druze, Christians, ‘Infidels’ by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21614/syria-jihadists-massacre-druze

Ever since the terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) conquered the Syrian capital Damascus with Turkey’s help in December of 2024, HTS fighters and their affiliated militias — often offshoots of ISIS and al-Qaeda — have been massacring religious minorities throughout the country. The internet has been flooded with images… of Alawite men, women and children being barbarically shot at close range.

Most recently, after slaughtering Alawites, HTS and Syria’s new Islamic regime, under the self-proclaimed “presidency” of former jihadist commander Ahmed al-Sharaa, are massacring other religious minorities in the country, including Christians and Druze.

HTS is still designated as a terrorist organization by the UN, EU, US and UK.

Qatar and Turkey are apparently the powers behind the new regime in Damascus.

Sunnis in Inkhil, Daraa, were filmed running buses for those who want to go after the Druze. HTS supporters in Idlib waved ISIS flags and incited against the Druze and Jews.

Endless footage from Syria signals that HTS and its supporters have a genocidal intent towards all religious minorities in the region.

“The targeted areas were the places of Alawites and Christians. Many innocent Christian victims were also killed. Residents of some of those places were forced to leave their homes. Then they were shot and killed. Then their houses, property, and cars were stolen.” — John X, Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch, March 9, 2025.

The fate of these communities should not be left to al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists in Syria. Moreover, Syria should not be left to the savagery of al-Sharaa and his HTS offshoots of ISIS and al-Qaeda, or to Turkey’s terrorist mastermind, Erdogan.

For years, Erdogan has repeatedly vowed to “liberate Jerusalem,” as he seems to be attempting to rebuild the Ottoman Empire and install himself as Sultan. Now, with HTS and his other proxy militias in Syria, Erdogan finally has the unimpeded path he has been waiting for to do it.

Ever since the terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) conquered the Syrian capital Damascus with Turkey’s help in December of 2024, HTS fighters and their affiliated militias — often offshoots of ISIS and al-Qaeda — have been massacring religious minorities throughout the country. The internet has been flooded with images — some discredited as old or manipulated, but many not — of Alawite men, women and children being barbarically shot at close range.

Most recently, after slaughtering Alawites, HTS and Syria’s new Islamic regime, under the self-proclaimed “presidency” of former jihadist commander Ahmed al-Sharaa, are massacring other religious minorities in the country, including Christians and Druze.

HTS is still designated as a terrorist organization by the UN, EU, US and UK.

A giant calumny Was a London audience quietly nodding along with Jew-hatred on stage? Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/a-giant-calumny?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Last week I finally got to see Giant, the much-acclaimed play by Mark Rosenblatt about the antisemitism of the children’s author Roald Dahl.

It’s superbly written and magnificently acted. But I found watching it in a London theatre deeply uncomfortable.

The audience laughed sympathetically at the on-stage Dahl putting down the Jewish woman who objects to his rampant Jew-hatred. Was the audience actually nodding along to what he was saying?

For some of his vile lines are what British Jews are now hearing as a matter of unexceptional routine.

The play deals with the furore in 1983 after Dahl published a savage article in the Literary Review about Israel’s war in Lebanon. “Never before in the history of man,” he wrote, “has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much pitied victims to barbarous murderers”.

That’s precisely the vicious claim that has made many British Jews today feel that their country has turned into a nightmarish alternative universe. After the Hamas-led atrocities against Israelis on October 7 2023, many switched rapidly from pitying the victims of genocidal aggression to portraying them as barbarous murderers for defending themselves against it.

In the play, the publisher Tom Maschler — portrayed as the kind of British Jew who shudders at the very thought of living among so many other Jews in Israel — presents Dahl’s grotesque antisemitism as moral because it’s wrapped up in compassion for the Palestinians. That’s precisely the gaslighting to which British Jews are today being subjected.

The Self-Serving, Tyrannical War on Food ‘Climate Change’: Grift of the Century, Part II by Robert Williams

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21591/war-on-food

“Animal-based foods, especially red meat, dairy, and farmed shrimp, are generally associated with the highest greenhouse gas emissions,” according to the UN.

What to eat instead? The WEF has for years aggressively been advocating insects to be approved as a food ingredient for human consumption. European Union member states have happily complied with the WEF’s wishes… As a special treat, EU member states, in 2021, approved the introduction of mealworms, migratory locusts and house crickets as so-called “novel food” that can legally be sold in foodstuffs.

The “climate change” movement is huge business; the billionaires pushing this scrofulous narrative have it all figured out. They have been investing in plant-based fake meat foodstuffs to reap the profits once the war on farmers has been won… If these highly processed foods are not healthy, too bad. The earnings will line the WEF elites’ pockets.

“Alternative proteins” would have to replace meat, Bill Gates said in a 2021 interview; the climate crisis “is much worse than the pandemic.” For that reason, he is also betting on Nature’s Fynd, a company that makes food that sounds irresistible. “This company, Nature’s Fynd, is using fungi. And then they turn them into sausages and yogurt. Pretty amazing,” Gates said.

The elites know what they are doing. Shutting down farms and killing livestock means that prices will skyrocket, even more than they are today, forcing “ordinary” people without the financial means of Gates, Bezos and Klaus Schwab to stop eating meat, and eventually live off plants and insects to “save the planet,” all while the citizenry’s elected and unelected overlords continue living their billionaire lifestyles.

Costs will continue to rise for as long as people permit those “leaders” to determine how we should live and what we should eat. The time to put a stop to their warmhearted “protection” is now.

The United Nations, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and other international organizations trying to implement fanciful agendas on “climate change” are waging a war on food.

“About a third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions is linked to food,” the UN posits.

“The largest chunk of food-related greenhouse gases comes from agriculture and land use. This includes, for instance, methane from cattle’s digestive process, nitrous oxide from fertilizers used for crop production, carbon dioxide from cutting down forests for the expansion of farmland, other agricultural emissions from manure management, rice cultivation, burning of crop residues, and the use of fuel on farms.”

To get to “net zero,” apparently, we are supposed to greatly reduce, or entirely stop, eating meat.

“Animal-based foods, especially red meat, dairy, and farmed shrimp, are generally associated with the highest greenhouse gas emissions,” according to the UN.

Oslo’s sovereign fund drops Israeli firm for operating in ‘West Bank’ By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/oslos-sovereign-fund-drops-israeli-firm-for-operating-in-west-bank/

Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund with more than $1.7 trillion in assets, announced on Sunday it has sold all its shares in Israel’s Paz Retail and Energy Ltd.

The fund, which invests surplus capital from Norway’s petroleum sector, quit the stock because Paz operates infrastructure for the supply of fuel to Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria.

“By operating infrastructure for the supply of fuel to the Israeli settlements on the West Bank, Paz is contributing to their perpetuation. The settlements have been established in violation of international law, and their perpetuation constitutes an ongoing violation thereof,” according to a May 11 statement on Norway’s Council on Ethics website.

The Council on Ethics, set up by Norway’s Ministry of Finance, gives recommendations to the Norges Bank Executive Board, which manages Government Pension Fund Global. The board bases its decisions on which companies to exclude from investment based on those recommendations.

This is the second Israeli company barred from the fund. In December 2024, the board excluded Israeli telecommunications group Bezeq, based on a recommendation by the Council of Ethics for the same reason—that it “supplies telecommunications services to businesses and private individuals in Israel and the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.”

Government Pension Fund Global prides itself on operating according to environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing principles.

Human Rights NGOs: A Crisis of Trust – The Root Causes and Recommended Remedies Dr Helena Ivanov

https://henryjacksonsociety.org/publications/human-rights-ngos-a-crisis-of-trust-the-root-causes-and-recommended-remedies/

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are facing a deepening crisis of trust, with confidence in them steadily declining on a number of fronts across both developed and developing countries according to survey data. This erosion of trust threatens their ability to operate effectively. This report seeks to analyse the origins of this crisis of trust and offer targeted policy recommendations for NGOs. If implemented, these measures should help restore confidence in the sector, allowing it to carry out its vital work more effectively.  

The crisis of trust has worsened over the last few years. For instance, significant doubt surrounds the conduct and research of human rights NGOs towards Israel, particularly since the 7 October attacks. As Michael Powell tells us in his recent The Atlantic article: “organizations that explicitly valued impartiality and independence have become stridently critical of Israel.” In the same article, Powell argues that human rights organisations frequently apply double standards. He highlights how once-impartial groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which originally pursued clear and principled objectives, have become increasingly biased – particularly in their approach to the Israel–Hamas war. 

This report does not aim to assess the validity of the accusations of bias against these NGOs. Instead, it argues that the mere presence and frequency of such comments contribute to a substantial erosion of trust in the NGO sector. In a conflict where the stakes are so high, and given the critical role that NGOs play in protecting human rights both in times of peace and war, it is essential to find a way to address these concerns and restore genuine confidence in the work of these organisations.  

Another factor contributing to this erosion of trust is the increasing perception of double standards. When NGOs focus on and push for the highest ethical standards for Western companies, they create a perception that they are inadvertently distorting developing markets and contributing to worsening human rights conditions on the ground – as their activities result in critical strategic assets and operations being taken over by Chinese, Russian or other similarly less scrupulous entities.