Displaying posts published in

August 2025

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Annunciation shooting reveals the savagery of identity politics The massacre at a Catholic school in Minneapolis speaks to the apocalyptic narcissism of our times. Brendan O’Neill

By on August 30th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/08/28/the-annunciation-shooting-reveals-the-savagery-of-identity-politics/

“What is most striking is the media coverage of the horror in Minneapolis. It seems muted. There’s little focus on the killer’s anti-Semitism, where we all know that if he’d been Islamophobic it would have dominated the coverage. His trans identity is not significant, say observers who would have thought it very significant indeed if the piece of shit had been an ‘incel’. And just imagine if three acts of barbarism had been carried in recent months under the rallying cry of ‘Fuck Palestine’. The left would be in up arms. But ‘Free Palestine’? Screaming about Israel before you end the lives of pensioners or praying children? They’re silent on that. Perhaps they’re mortified. They should be.”

Maybe it’s because the school has the exact same name as the first one I attended in London – the Annunciation Catholic School – that yesterday’s massacre in Minneapolis horrified me so deeply. Our school also had a church right next door, also called the Annunciation Catholic Church, like the one in Minneapolis. And just like those kids who were so savagely attacked as they clasped their tiny hands together in prayer at 8am, we, too, would make the short journey from school to church to give praise to God for our lives, our families, our friends.

It is hard to comprehend the sheer barbarism of the mass shooting of those Annunciation kids. The suspect – Robin Westman – is said to have shot through the church’s windows. He pumped bullets into innocents in their holy sanctuary. Two children, aged eight and 10, were killed. Six others are in a critical condition. More would have perished were it not for the heroism of the teachers and older pupils. As the school principal said: ‘Adults were protecting children. Older children were protecting younger children.’ Unimaginable courage in the face of unimaginable evil.

All mass shootings chill the blood. Especially school shootings. But there is something distinctly heinous about firing into a church full of kids. For Catholics, the church is a holy haven from the trials and vagaries of life. If the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis is anything like the Annunciation Catholic Church in London that I attended, then to those kids it will have been a place of safety, silence, wonder. That a man clad in black violated their sacred zone with blind, mad violence is unconscionable. The scars of this will last.

As with all crazed shootings, it would be folly to try to derive hard ‘lessons’ from this atrocity. Yet it would be negligent – to the victims, to America – to not ask questions. To not ponder, at least, how such a bestial act, such a vicious clawing at the fabric of civilised society, could take place in 21st-century America. To my mind, it is possible we are witnessing the hyper-violent logical endpoint to identity politics. From what we know about the suspect, it seems his savagery was in some ways the armed wing of the apocalyptic narcissism that identity politics so often engenders and unleashes.

Westman’s atrocity is being investigated as an anti-Catholic hate crime. He’s reportedly a former pupil of the Annunciation. So he will have sat in the very pews he mercilessly fired upon. But there’s more. He was ‘trans’: he changed his name from Robert to Robin and posed as a woman. He was seemingly anti-Christian. The words ‘Where is your God?’ were written on one of his guns – a vile taunt of the children he knew he was about to massacre. And he was virulently anti-Semitic, a passionate loather of Israel. Did the hate he so brutishly visited on those kids spring from his descent into the extremities of these identitarian positions?

It would be reckless to overlook that this is not the first time a trans person has carried out a mass shooting. There was also the massacre at a Christian school in Nashville in 2023, in which six were slaughtered. And the shooting at a school in Denver in 2019. And the massacre at a warehouse in Maryland in 2018. We must not ‘villainise’ the trans community in the wake of the Annunciation shooting, says Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey. This isn’t about villainising anyone – it’s about asking whether the self-regard and self-pity so recklessly sown by the identitarian zeitgeist might be helping to nurture catastrophic levels of anti-social animus.

Westman’s ‘manifesto’ would seem to suggest he was consumed by the vanity of the victim mindset. It included the trans Pride flag and the words ‘defend equality’. He appeared to hate Christians, presumably for their trans-scepticism. He grossly imagined himself as the ‘horrible monster standing over those powerless kids’.

We have to grapple with the possibility that a culture that forces the individual ever more inwards, inviting them to obsess over their own fantasy identities and to loathe any ‘phobe’ who refuses to genuflect at their altar of the self, is wrenching people ever further and ever more violently from society itself. Sure, most identitarians merely harbour a latent contempt for the average citizen who refuses to validate their hallucinatory self-image. But perhaps some are pushed a little further. Perhaps it was more dangerous than we thought, or certainly foolhardy, to greenlight this politics of recognition that pits the self-pitying individual against the mass of society.

Then there was Westman’s anti-Semitism. It was by all accounts deep and grotesque. ‘Israel must fall’ was written on one of his guns. ‘Free Palestine’, he said. He wrote about murdering ‘filthy Zionist Jews’. ‘Six million wasn’t enough’, he said. By my calculation this is the third act of lethal violence carried out in the US at least partly under the auspices of ‘anti-Zionism’. First there was the slaughter of two Israeli Embassy workers outside a Jewish museum in Washington, DC. Then the scalding of elderly Jews with a flammable liquid in Colorado. And now the slaying of Catholic kids by a devoted Israel-hater. In all three cases, the killer either wrote or said: ‘Free Palestine.’

We need to talk about this. It speaks, surely, to the anti-civilisational bent to ‘anti-Zionism’. That innocents can be slaughtered under the banner of hating Israel, whether it’s an 82-year-old Jew burnt to death in Colorado or two Catholic kids shot to death in Minneapolis, suggests there is a deep anti-human rot to this supposedly political position.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Iran’s Ideology and Missiles Endanger the West: If Hitler Had Nuclear Weapons, Do You Think He Would Not Have Used Them? by Majid Rafizadeh

By on August 30th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21868/iran-missiles-ideology

In his latest statement, Amir Hayat-Moqaddam [member of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission] openly declared that Iran is capable of striking all of Europe and even US cities such as Washington and New York with missiles launched from offshore Iranian ships.

Western policymakers had been hoping for decades that engagement, dialogue and economic deals could temper Tehran’s revolutionary zeal. The regime’s latest statements, however, show that such hopes are illusory: Iran is not guided by pragmatic statecraft but by an uncompromising ideology that explicitly calls for global expansion of its revolution.

Hayat-Moqaddam’s words are not vague threats. They are a boast, a proclamation of a plan decades in the making. Such statements must be taken seriously: they reveal the true intentions of the regime: to extend its deterrent power by threatening both Europe and America, and to hold the West hostage to the fear of devastating missile strikes.

Iran’s investment in its ballistic missile arsenal is not defensive; it reflects a doctrine of “deterrence by punishment,” the idea that Iran can intimidate adversaries by holding their cities, infrastructure, and populations at risk of destruction. In this sense, Iran’s missile arsenal is not just a tool of war — it is an instrument of political leverage, designed to project power far beyond Iran’s borders.

[J]ust one missile tipped with a nuclear warhead hitting a European or American city would be catastrophic. Iran is estimated to still have thousands of ballistic missiles that can reach Europe when launched from Iranians soil. If launched from ships at sea, the continental United States is also within range of Iran’s missiles, as Iran is now openly warning.

Iran’s threat is not hypothetical; it is a proven capability paired with a proven willingness to use it.

Since 1979, Iran’s leaders have always regarded the United States and Europe as enemies, even before the West imposed sanctions or intervened in regional conflicts. The hostility is not reactive; it is ideological. Like Nazism in the 20th century, the Iranian regime’s ideology cannot be appeased with compromises.

The West must abandon the false hope that diplomacy alone will alter Tehran’s course. Sanctions must be maintained and expanded, not lifted in exchange for empty promises. The United States must keep a military option on the table, making clear that if Iran crosses red lines, it will face devastating consequences.

Iranian diplomats who serve as spies or agents for the regime’s ideological mission should be expelled, embassies shuttered, and Iran’s international presence curtailed. Equally important is supporting the Iranian people, many of whom have repeatedly risked their lives in protests calling for an end to clerical rule. The collapse of the regime from within is the only real long-term solution to the threat Iran poses to the world.

Iran’s leadership openly declares its intent to spread its revolution and to target Europe with missiles. To ignore such declarations would be an unforgivable mistake.

Unfortunately, the Iranian regime’s threats are not empty rhetoric. They are a continuation of a consistent ideological vision that has driven its policies since its Islamic Revolution in 1979. Iran’s leadership openly states that they seek not only the destruction of Israel but also the subjugation of the West. Iran’s missile arsenal and naval drills show that it is actively preparing for this confrontation; its ambitions for nuclear weapons underscore the urgency.

The West must not turn a blind eye or entertain illusions of “moderation.” Just as Europe once ignored Hitler’s ideology at its peril, ignoring Iran’s Islamist regime would be a historic mistake. The only path forward is to maintain relentless pressure, prepare militarily, support the Iranian people, and never allow this radical regime to realize its apocalyptic goals.

Recent remarks by a senior Iranian official, Amir Hayat-Moqaddam, a member of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, once again confirmed what many in the West have feared: the Islamic Republic of Iran’s grand strategy has always included targeting not only Israel and its neighbors but also Europe and the United States.

In his latest statement, Hayat-Moqaddam openly declared that Iran is capable of striking all of Europe and even US cities such as Washington and New York with missiles launched from offshore Iranian ships.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Gaza Part Three: Root Causes and Real-World Consequences By Thaddeus G. McCotter and Andrew Zack

By on August 30th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/30/gaza-part-three-root-causes-and-real-world-consequences/

Rewarding Hamas with a “two-state solution” ensures more terror, fuels antisemitism, and ignores Israel’s right to defend itself against eradication.

This is the third and final installment of a three-part series on the Gaza situation, political fallout, root causes, and real-world ramifications.

Certainly, the spark of the present crisis is Hamas’ cowardly terrorist attack upon Israeli civilians. Indeed, for many people—and not only in Gaza and the Arab world—the existence and continued survival of Israel is the paramount problem. But absent Israel’s eradication and, quite likely, a genocide of its Jewish citizens, this root cause must be taken as a given. What, then, within Gaza, the Arab world, and many Western nations, are some corollary root causes exacerbating the difficulty in forging an Arab recognition of Israel’s right to exist?

As patently evidenced by their customary lack of material support and unwillingness to permit resettlement, most Arab nations use the Palestinians as a pawn to deflect their own populations from focusing on liberty, democracy, and prosperity at home. This would constitute an existential crisis for these authoritarian nations, which would likely be unable to survive their failure to meet the rising expectations of their peoples. The great dilemma for these Arab nations: should a free, democratic, prosperous, and peaceful Gazan state be created, it will not be in their regimes’ best interests. Far better for them to have Palestinians’ and the Arab world’s unrest, invective, and violence directed at Israel than internally at their governments. For example, following this cynical strategy, many Sunni and Shia nations abet the propagation of hatred within the Palestinian people. This includes inculcating the young with hatred of Israel and Jews in general, which will poison the prospects for peace for generations to come.

These Arab regimes are not alone in doing so, for, despite claiming to support peace and the “two-state solution,” they have partners in international institutions and many Western nations who have their own root causes for promoting hatred of the Jewish state and its citizens, including their prejudicial ideological imperatives and domestic political aims.

In the West, particularly, an ancient hatred has melded with postmodernism to produce virulent antisemitism. Traditionally housed on the right, over the past half-century, antisemitism had been in retreat or at least dormant in this political quarter. This is no longer the case, as an influential cadre of neo-isolationists spinning many thinly veiled anti-Israel tropes has spurred a recrudescence of antisemitism on the right. Why has this not been routinely and righteously denounced by the left, which until recently had been a bastion against antisemitism?

Because, unlike yesterday’s liberals, today’s progressive movement is postmodernist. Influenced by the Baby Boomers’ old New Left that, in turn, was imbued with the radical theories of European socialists and Marxists, today’s postmodernists—including the bulk of American progressives—are secular to the core and hostile to all religion. As a result, they have rejected the Biblical notion that we are all created in God’s image and hence are all endowed with human dignity. 

Continue reading →