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September 2025

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

What Kneecap said is far worse than you think The collapse of their case is good news, but we still need to talk about their unhinged Israelophobia. Brendan O’Neill

By on September 27th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/27/what-kneecap-said-is-far-worse-than-you-think/

I’m glad the terror case against Kneecap has been thrown out. No one, not even tossers in tea cosies, not even crap rappers in Provo fancy dress, should be dragged to the dock for what they say. Yes, even if what they’ve said is ‘Up Hamas, up Hezbollah’. Freedom of speech must include the freedom to gush over neo-fascists. The liberty to utter is meaningless if it doesn’t cover the liberty of lowlifes to sing the praises of armies of anti-Semites. It’s gross, I know, but speech often is. Better that we trust ourselves to handle vile ideas than that we invite the state to infantilise us by reprimanding those we find offensive.

Here’s the main reason I’m happy the case collapsed: because now the court with real moral authority – the court of public opinion – can do its job. We don’t need wizened judges to tell us which ideas are ‘good’ and which are ‘bad’. We can decide for ourselves, through free, frank debate. And in the case of Kneecap, that’s exactly what we should do. The state’s case against them may have withered on a technicality, but the court of public opinion’s judgment upon these darlings of the Israelophobic bourgeoisie should be ferocious indeed.

It was band member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh (aka Mo Chara) who found himself in court. He was charged with expressing support for a proscribed terror group following the emergence of footage showing him holding up the Hezbollah flag at a gig in London in November 2024. Footage also showed the band hollering ‘Up Hamas, up Hezbollah!’ to the glee of the Israel-hating rich kids in their audience. Today, the chief magistrate at Woolwich Crown Court decreed that the charges against Mo Chara were ‘null’ because they were not brought within the statutory time limit.

Now that the state has finally butted out of this speech-related scandal, we the people can have our say. I’ll kick it off: what Kneecap said is even worse than you think. They didn’t just wave the Hezbollah flag, which would have been sickening enough given Hezbollah is an avowedly racist movement devoted to violently excising the ‘cancerous’ Jews from the Middle East and pushing them back to ‘Germany, or wherever they come from’. No, they also smiled – smiled – following the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.

For two years now, Kneecap have openly flirted with the ideologues of violent Israelophobia. On 8 October 2023, just hours after Hamas raped and butchered more than a thousand Jews in southern Israel, they posted a beaming pic of themselves on social media. ‘Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle’, they said, sporting wide grins and with a Palestine flag hanging in the background. As Jewish grandmothers were being dragged into dank tunnels in Gaza, as the blackened corpses of young Jews were being disentangled by early responders, Kneecap were smiling. They saw a pogrom and they said ‘Solidarity’.

They said ‘Up Hamas’ just a year after Hamas killed more Jews in one day than anyone else since the Nazis. They said ‘Up Hamas’ after it had been established that Hamas had thrown grenades at Jewish children, had beaten to death young Jewish women and had boasted to their families back in Gaza about how many Jews they had slaughtered with their own hands. They said ‘Up Hamas’, a movement founded with the express aim of exterminating Israel’s Jews, and which as recently as 2021 was inciting people to buy ‘five-shekel knives’ and ‘cut off the heads of Jews’.

One of the Kneecap trio – the one who’s nearly 40 – posed with a book consisting of the collected speeches of Hassan Nasrallah, the late leader of Hezbollah. This is a book that refers to Jews as the ‘descendants of apes and pigs’.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Blind Leading the Dumb—and the Hateful America’s schools are collapsing not from lack of funding but from a teacher pipeline that churns out ideology instead of knowledge—leaving students functionally illiterate. By Stephen Soukup

By on September 27th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/27/the-blind-leading-the-dumb-and-the-hateful/

About three decades ago, when I was part of the Washington research team of a now-defunct brokerage house, I worked (with my then-boss) on a report about the state of the American education system. The results—unsurprisingly—were not good. The system was in disarray, with towns, cities, and even the federal government spending more and more tax dollars on education every year and getting worse and worse results. The educational and political establishments had convinced the American people that the problem with education was that they simply weren’t spending enough money on it and that, if they did, the people who broke the system in the first place could fix it and, by extension, could fix the country as well. Unfortunately, the data showed definitively that this was untrue.

Based on our research, we concluded that something more obvious—and more uncomfortable—than funding was the real root of the problem with American education. It was obvious because… well… it just was. It made perfect sense. It was uncomfortable because it hit close to home. We knew that what we had learned would likely be taken as insulting or, at the very least, overly provocative by a number of our clients and other readers, including friends and even family. My mom was a teacher. We both had friends who were teachers or whose spouses and/or kids were teachers. Like almost everyone, we had fond memories of that one (or more) special teacher who, when we were kids, helped us in some unique way or influenced us profoundly. Teachers are, for good reason, heroic figures in much of American history. And yet, everything we read and heard and studied indicated that teachers were an enormous part of the problem with American education.

To be clear, the main culprits in our story were teachers’ colleges, not individual teachers. Still, the colleges were a problem because they were churning out inferior products, which, of course, meant that many of the teachers in the American education system were not up to the job—the absolutely imperative job of preparing the next generations of Americans for intellectual and professional life.

In our report, titled “The Dumb Leading the Blind,” we noted the difficult truth that the nation’s education schools had largely become a dumping ground for college students who couldn’t hack it in any other degree program. That wasn’t—and isn’t—to say that all students who wanted to be teachers were dumb. Far from it. Most were smart and earnest and dedicated and resembled the heroic teachers of American lore. At the same time, however, what they were being taught was mostly nonsense: bland, simplistic, often trite twaddle that was disguised and legitimized as “educational theory.” Ed. School curricula were so preposterous and so lacking in academic rigor that almost anyone could—and did—pass without much effort. A multi-decades-long effort by educational “reformers” to shift the focus of teacher instruction away from subject matter and to cognitive theory and epistemology had meaningfully dumbed down the curricula. In turn, students who failed out of other colleges ended up earning degrees in ed. schools because it was shockingly easy to do so. Meanwhile, smart and earnest students were denied a proper education by their instructors, who taught down to the lowest common denominator.

All of this, we argued, suggested that American K-12 education would, in the long run, grow even worse, even more expensive, and even more controversial. And that could only bode ill for the nation as a whole.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Thank You, President Trump: Turning Decades of Iranian Impunity Into Accountability by Majid Rafizadeh

By on September 27th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21924/trump-iran-accountability

Oil sales are a lifeline for the Iranian economy, funding both domestic governance and external operations, including support for proxy militias. If these funds were curtailed, the regime would struggle to maintain its internal stability while simultaneously attempting to sustain influence abroad. Such an economic squeeze would heighten domestic discontent, increase political pressure on leaders, and force Tehran to consider its options in a more constrained and exposed position than ever before.

Iran is apparently aware that it faces an administration under Trump that is determined to maintain the pressure until meaningful, verifiable changes occur. Tehran’s desperation underscores the effectiveness of the strategy: when authoritarian regimes are confronted with coordinated, uncompromising pressure — duress — they are forced to confront their vulnerabilities and recalibrate their behavior.

Understanding the “language” of authoritarian regimes has been a critical factor in Trump’s success. Maximum pressure is not subtle; it is a direct communication that dictators understand. It combines visibility of consequences, clarity of demands, and the credible threat of continued escalation. For Iran, this has meant that there is no ambiguity about the costs of pursuing nuclear weapons, maintaining proxy operations, or destabilizing the region. Force, coordinated international sanctions, and strategic diplomacy have created an environment where the regime cannot rely on its previous strategies of coercion or intimidation. This approach demonstrates that sustained, multidimensional pressure can achieve outcomes that decades of negotiation and partial agreements could not.

The future for the Iranian regime, under continued maximum pressure, depends on the EU maintaining a firm stance as well. Iran’s nuclear program must be dismantled entirely, financial and military support for proxy groups curtailed, and no concessions offered that could weaken the credibility of the strategy.

This historic moment represents an opportunity to reshape the region, limit the threats posed by Iran, and reinforce the principle that force, when applied strategically, remains a decisive tool in addressing state-sponsored aggression and nuclear proliferation – also in countries other than Iran.

The Iranian regime finds itself in a situation it has never faced in its more than 40 years of ruling. The pressures it is now under are the result of a coordinated and relentless approach by President Donald J. Trump, whose policies are systematically targeting every pillar of the Iranian state that supports its nuclear ambitions, regional influence and financial stability.

The strategy, often described as “maximum pressure,” is applying economic, military, and diplomatic force in a way that previous administrations, despite decades of involvement in Middle Eastern affairs, could not or did not. This approach has forced the Iranian leadership to confront the consequences of its actions while leaving no room for misinterpretation about the seriousness of U.S. resolve. The result is an Iranian regime that is significantly weakened, isolated, and desperate for relief, yet it faces the U.S. under the Trump administration and Israel united in maintaining the pressure until its nuclear program is completely dismantled and its destabilizing influence curtailed.

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