Ireland and Eurovision a little thread:

An Irish friend who works in TV has written to make an important point. She believes that Israel is being used as a ‘scapegoat’ for Ireland’s cash-strapped RTE withdrawing from the Eurovision song contest.

(Below 2024 Irish contestant Bambi Thug crying about how awful it was when people pushed back at her bullying of the Israeli contestant). Last year it cost RTE around £400,000 to send Norwegian singer EMMY to Eurovision but she failed to make it to the final.
While Ireland has, in the past, won Eurovision several times, in recent years there has been much discussion in Ireland about whether it offers value for money when so many acts fail to even make it to the final round which is only where spend can be recouped in advertising and prestige.

In almost every story about Gaza, @BBCNews repeats this comment without mentioning the many problems with the genocide scholars organisation:
1) anyone can join it - you don’t need to be a genocide scholar to be a member
2) there was no town hall to discuss the vote as is common and the authors of the motion were kept anonymous
3) 80 of the 500 members are from Turkey which is a Muslim Brotherhood country - Hamas is also Muslim Brotherhood
4) its case rested on false/ half sentence quotes to change the meaning of the words
5) only 36 per cent voted
6) in short, this was a politically motivated vote to push the genocide libel

More below: One member on this unusual vote.

https://twitter.com/drsaraebrown/status/1962611572762910940

Jews don’t count according to the Medical Practitioner’s Tribunal Service.
According them, none of these posts, would leave ‘a reasonable and fully informed member of the public…alarmed or concerned to learn that Dr Aladwan had been permitted to continue in unrestricted medical practice.’ 👇🏼

The interim committee was looking at whether to immediately suspend Dr Rahmeh Aladwan, as pursued by the @gmcuk
The GMC’s case was that ‘there was an evidence of serious and repeated departures from the standards expected of a doctor that risks seriously undermining public trust in Dr Aladwan and the medical profession’.

The (deliciously) fierce arguments were always going to come, especially when you have been stewing at sea on small boats for weeks.
Tempers are going to fray. Dressing up as a keffiyeh pirate becomes less romantic when you have to unblock the loo for the dozenth time. And then there’s the fact that while the 350 terror propagandists on the ‘freedom flotilla’, on their way to ‘break’ the naval blockade surrounding Gaza, may be united by their Jew-hatred, in almost every other aspect, their world views are completely opposite
This week, it emerged that some of the fundamentalist Muslims on the boat aren’t fans of gay people. Who’d have guessed, especially when Western cities are so full of ‘Queers for Palestine’?
Perhaps the ‘red’ element in the red black alliance of the far left should have learned from history: In 2023, leftists in Hamtramck, Michigan, who had once celebrated as their multicultural city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim majority city council, were shocked when that same council, now all male, banned Pride flags from being flown on city property. A year earlier, the council allowed backyard animal sacrifices to the horror of many residents.

Jordan is meant to be one of Israel’s more stable neighbours and even allies with agreements over things like water. But a few days after two IDF soldiers were killed at the Jordanian border, it appears the Jordanian school curriculum is whipping up Jew hatred which is worse than it has been for years.
Text books in the country now contain more anti-Semitic content and calls for violent jihad, a presentation of the peace agreement with Israel as a burden imposed on Jordan - and even justification for the October 7 massacre and the kidnapping of Israeli civilians according to a comprehensive study by the International Policy Research Institute IMPACT-se, published from its office in London.
The books also include:
* Holocaust denial
* Antisemitic tropes
* And literally wipe Israel off the map

More 👇🏼 In the 10th grade citizenship book, the Israeli hostages are described as "settlers" who lived "in Israeli colonies around the Gaza Strip" - a formulation that presents civilians as legitimate targets for harm. This wording is in complete contradiction to the 1994 peace agreement, in which Jordan officially recognized Israeli sovereignty over the country's territories - including those areas.

And this is what it precisely says: "Israel violated the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, refused to withdraw from the occupied Arab territories, and continued its persecution of the Palestinian Arab people and carried out massacre after massacre every day - as well as attacking the Al-Aqsa Mosque. All of this pushed the Palestinian resistance movement in the Gaza Strip to break into the Israeli settlements surrounding the Strip on October 7 2023.”

This is glorious.
Apparently all is not well on the ‘Gaza flotilla’ - there have been ‘creative differences’ over queer rights, Greta Thurnberg and an overexcited journalist.

👇🏼 Splash 1: Flotilla co-ordinator Khaled Boujemâa has announced his resignation in protest at the presence of LGBTQ activists in the flotilla, including Saif Ayadi, who identifies as a “queer activist”.
“We were lied to about the identity of some participants in the vanguard of the flotilla, I accuse the organisers of having hidden this aspect from us,” he complained in two video streams on social media.
Other figures, including activist Mariem Meftah and presenter Samir Elwafi, condemned what they saw as an attempt to impose a cultural progressive agenda unrelated to the Palestinian cause, describing it as a “red line crossed” and an attack on “societal values”.
They warned against using “the sacred cause of Al-Aqsa” to advance unrelated agendas.

BBC ‘Verify’ is a joke. This latest screed on the Israel/ Hamas war - or, in its framing, ‘Israel’s war in Gaza’ - is ridiculously even more biased against Israel than usual.
The sources it uses are around 80 per cent anti Israel; it’s a series of attacks with short statements of denial.
Incredibly, it also completely ignores:
1) The fact that Hamas is still holding 48 hostages.
2) The influence of Iran
3) The weekly missiles coming from the Houthis
4) The fact that Hamas has vowed to repeat this again and again. This thread looks at some of the report in detail 👇🏼 Yes he said this but it’s clearly not true and it’s obviously not verified. In the last ten years, in Israel’s neighbour Syria, more than 500,000 people were killed. Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. Millions were and remain displaced. Why is that ignored?

Once the Hampstead ponds started letting trans identified males in, they stopped it being a safe space for women.
Here are some of their stories as told in new @thetimes article about a @SexMattersOrg court case.
Alice on a trans woman in the changing room: "I was horrified and felt totally violated.
Nobody in the changing room said anything, there was a deafening silence.
"I noticed the face of a girl next to me who looked visibly upset as she rushed out. Although the swimmer kept their swimsuit on it was obvious they had male genitalia."

BREAKING: The BBC.
Fresh from the self flagellating report into Greg Wallace, the BBC said it had breached its own editorial guidelines by using the son of a Hamas official as the narrator for a documentary on Gaza.

👇🏼🧵
While it said it had found no undue influence from the boy - the son of a Hamas official - from his parents - it had paid his sister nearly £800 of our money.

Two politicians from opposite sides of the political spectrum - @LordJohnMann and @PennyMordaunt admit to behind ‘stunned’ by the normalisation of antisemitism they encountered for their report which took them six months to compile.

This is what they say:
👇🏼🧵 They found it in the arts and the universities:

‘What are we meant to say as hardened politicians to a young Jewish female performer who told us that following October 7 venues and promoters, who the artist had worked with for years, no longer wanted to engage with her? Or to students who saw their research staff members coming from an encampment with a megaphone, and disabilities liaison staff members who Jewish student’s trust with their health records shouting for an Intifada?’

A few weeks ago I wrote about antisemitism in the music industry.

It feels pertinent to revisit it after yesterday.

This is a snapshot of what I found:

1) One Israeli musician was kidnapped because of his ethnicity. Really. Earlier this year two men were jailed for luring Ishtay Kashti to a farmhouse in Wales to keep him hostage.

He told me:

“Even the police weren’t able to tell me where this thing started but it seems that someone who worked with me or knew of me had given them my name,” he says. “I believe it was probably a product of a heated debate. I had a lot of friends in the music industry who were posting about the war and against Israel and I was responding to them.’ 2) The British band Oi Va Voi had two UK gigs cancelled because they had an Israeli singer whose record cover featured her naked in a watermelon field.

Small thread on what happened at Glastonbury today:

A few weeks ago a music source told me that Glastonbury was in a bind: dozens of acts had threatened to pull out if Kneecap was taken off the line-up due to the terrorism charge for allegedly wearing a Hezbollah scarf.

Thread 👇🏼 I spoke to a young journalist at the Mail, @SabriSun_Miller and we agreed to work on it together as it was basically going to mean some leg work in terms of asking every act.

If you want to have an idea about how antisemitism in the form of antizionism has infiltrated our institutions, I give you a talk at the Royal College of Psychiatrists @rcpsych from Wales today.
Really.
In this first slide we see that suicide bombings fall under ‘resistance’ while Zionism is simply ‘colonisation and occupation’.
In some ways the second slide is worse. Especially when it says ‘call out the dangers of weaponising trauma and other efforts to silence suffering and discrimination.’
This is PSYCHIATRISTS being told to ignore the trauma of Jewish people.
What I would like to know is how any Jewish person can be safe visiting a psychiatrist (a science created by a Jewish man) if they are feeling traumatised by what’s going on - as almost every Jew I know is.
@rcpsych is this really acceptable? Is this inclusive? Because it looks deeply one sided and discriminatory to me.

Every day we see stories about death and pandemonium around food in Gaza so this is a little bit about what I know through interviewing a Gazan via Zoom/ speaking to Israelis and reading.

👇🏼🧵 The Americans have set up an agency called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
with the backing of the IDF who work at a distance from them.
The GHF on the ground is mainly made up of American ex servicemen etc and people from Gaza.

Excellent investigation by the Times’ Matt Dathan about an antisemitic and antiZionist leader of the civil service’s Muslim Network.
These claims were initially investigated and dismissed by Whitehall mandarins after some members of the Network blew the whistle - which is chilling in itself.
But now the Times has the videos:

👇🏼 The videos show one individual in particular, civil servant Sami Rahman using the antisemitic trope that the ‘Zionist lobby’ had an ‘insidious influence’ on British politics.

This is what is known in the media industry as a ‘reverse ferret’ and very much sums up a day of shame for Britain’s media establishment as Hamas lies appear to have once again ruled the airwaves.

Let’s take a look at what’s happened. 👇🏼🧵 In the early hours - around 5.30am local time - it was announced that the Red Cross Hospital had received a ‘mass casualty influx’ of 179 wounded people with gunshot and shrapnel wounds.
The Red Cross’s statement said simply they had been ‘trying to reach an aid distribution site’.

How the blood libel works: a thread.

Yesterday we saw how the blood libel works like lightening in the social media age, fed by corrupt organisations, amplified by politicians and reported on by credulous reporters.
The lie started with the UN’s emergency coordinator Tom Fletcher who told journalists that 14,000 babies would die in the next 48 hours unless Israel allowed sufficient aid into Gaza.
1/4 It was reported all over the online media all over the world, politicians made videos about it, it was repeated in the House of Commons. It’s in this morning’s newspapers. Because he said it and he’s from the UN.
But it was a lie akin to the ‘45 minutes’ dodgy dossier - and just as dangerous. 2/4

Quite astonishing exchanged in the House of Lords where Baroness Foster asked the government minister if there was oversight of how our money being sent to Palestinians was being spent.

Earlier this week David Lammy revealed a gift of £101m of our money to the Palestinian Authority - a group regarded as hopelessly corrupt by the Palestinian people (one reason why they are so unpopular).

The first answer the Minister gave was unbelievable. The second was perhaps worst.

👇🏼🧵

x.com/jfoster2019/st… Baroness Foster came back to the Minister to demand again what was our hard-earned money being spent on?

https://twitter.com/jfoster2019/status/1917330669388128567

Tonight is the first night of Passover.
Most religions use foods in a symbolic way and the Passover meal - the Seder - is a meal like no other with foods which are only eaten once a year.
The Last Supper is believed to have been a Passover meal (which is why Easter follows Passover/ Pesach and why it’s of interest to Christians even if Jesus had a different sort of Passover meal).

I’ve done a little thread for those who are interested 👇🏼🧵 Passover celebrates the exodus of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt until - eventually (after a miserable 40 years) they find a new land in Canaan which is roughly where Israel now is.
The Israelites had originally followed Joseph (he of the coat of many colours) into Egypt. When the Israelites became a large part of the population they were enslaved and an order went out that newly born males should be murdered.
Moses was one who escaped murder (that’s a whole other story) and he ended up becoming the leader of the Israelites and demanded ‘let my people go’.
When the Pharoah refused, God inflicted ever worse plagues on the Egyptians.
The worst was the final one - Jews were instructed to put lambs blood on their doors so the angel of death would ‘pass over’ their homes as he went to murder the first borns of others.
Pharoah finally allowed the Israelites to leave but they knew there was no time so the bread did not have time to rise; for eight days over Passover we eat unleavened bread or matzo which is like a giant Jacob’s cracker to commemorate this escape from slavery.
During the meal part of the matzo- the afikkomen is hidden for younger members of the family to find.

In September 2024 a story dropped which epitomised the problem the arts world has with the Jewish community.

A ‘rave’ production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream was scrapped just before its first performance at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre.

Very quickly it emerged that new controversial and political aspects had been added to the show. A pro Palestine and pro trans rap.

The Jews were blamed for the abrupt cancellation and ensuing loss of jobs. Not in so many words but we all knew who they meant when Equity etc called out ‘the growing culture of censorship created by funders and pressure groups. We are fighting for artistic integrity, as well as dignity for our members, and all working people.’

But an excellent investigation by @mollssimp for the Manchester Mill site shows the truth is very different.

👇🏼🧵 The story starts well enough. A rave version of the trippy Shakespearean comedy by hot young director Stef O’Driscoll. The plan was that as well as the usual Shakespeare punters, it would be aimed at school kids as it’s a popular set text.

The theatre had had its issues post Covid, like many in be sector but a few successful shows meant it was on a good roll.

Incredibly powerful testimony from released hostage Eli Sharabi who asks where the world was….

My name is Eli Sharabi.
I am 53 years old. I have come back from Hell. I have returned to tell my story.

I used to live in Kibbutz Be’eri with my British-born wife, Lianne,
and my daughters, Noiya and Yahel.
It was a beautiful community.
We were all passionate about creating the best life for our children and for our neighbors.
At 16, I left Tel Aviv for Be’eri, seeking a peaceful home away from the concrete city.
I found a loving community and knew I would raise my family there.
Many asked why we lived near Gaza – but to me, Be’eri was heaven.
Lianne came from Bristol, UK, as a volunteer.
She was meant to stay a few months but she met me, and we fell in love.
We were married for 23 years, and had two wonderful daughters and a dog, Mokka.

On October 7, my Heaven turned to Hell.
Sirens began, Hamas terrorists invaded, and I was ripped away from my family, never to see them again.

For 491 days, I was kept mostly underground in Hamas terror tunnels, chained, starved, beaten and humiliated. I was held captive in the darkness – isolated from the world – by Hamas terrorists.

They took pleasure in our suffering. I survived on scraps of food, with no medical attention and no mercy.

When I was released, I weighed just 44 kilos. I had lost over 30 kilos, nearly half my body weight. For 491 days, I held onto hope. I imagined the life we would rebuild.
I dreamed of seeing my family again. Only when I returned home, I learned the truth.

My wife and my daughters had been slaughtered by Hamas terrorists on October 7.

I am here today, less than six weeks after my release, to speak for those still trapped in that nightmare.

For my brother, Yossi, murdered in Hamas captivity, his body still held hostage.

For Alon Ohel, still 50 meters underground. I swore to him that I would tell his story.

For Hersh, Ori, Eden, Carmel, Almog, and Alexander, murdered in cold blood by their captors.

For every hostage still in Hamas’ hands.

I am here to tell you the whole truth.

On the morning of October 7, at 6:29 AM, the red alerts began to come through on Lianne’s phone.
I told her not to worry. “It will be over soon,” I said.
Minutes later, we heard that terrorists were infiltrating our community. They were inside the kibbutz.
Again, I reassured her. “The army will come, they always come”.
We heard gunfire, screaming, explosions.
And then, we heard the terrorists at our door.
We had no weapons, no way to fight back.
Lianne and I made a decision – we would not resist.
We hoped we could save our daughters. The door opened. Our dog barked.
The terrorists opened fire.
Lianne and I threw ourselves over our daughters, screaming for the terrorists to stop.
Suddenly, ten terrorists were inside my home.
They took our phones.
Two of them grabbed me.
They took my wife and daughters to the kitchen. I couldn’t see them any more.
I didn’t know what was happening to them.
I was screaming their names, and they were screaming mine.
I told Lianne not to be afraid.
But this was fear beyond anything I have ever felt.
Then I knew I was being taken. As they dragged me out, I called out to my girls:
“I will be back.”
I had to believe that. But that was the last time I ever saw them.
I did not know I should have said goodbye, forever.

Outside was like a warzone.
My peaceful home – my slice of Heaven – was gone.
I saw over a hundred terrorists filming themselves celebrating, laughing, partying in our gardens as they massacred my friends and neighbors.
They dragged me to the border, beating me the whole way. My face was swollen, my ribs bruised.
When we arrived in Gaza, a mob of civilians tried to lynch me.
They pulled me from the car, but the terrorists rushed me away into a Mosque.
I was their trophy. I thought about Lianne, Noiya and Yahel. Were they still alive?
For the first 52 days, I was held in an apartment.
I was tied up with ropes.
My arms and legs were tied so tightly the ropes tore into my flesh.
I was given almost no food, no water, and I couldn’t sleep.
The pain was unbearable. Sometimes, I would just faint from the pain, only to wake up to that pain again and again.
Then, on November 27, 2023, Hamas took me into a tunnel. Fifty meters underground. Again, the chains were so tight they ripped my skin.
They never took them off. Not for a single moment.
Those chains tore at me until the day I was released.
Every step I took was no more than ten centimeters.
Every walk to the bathroom took an eternity.
I cannot begin to describe the agony.
It was hell.
I was fed a piece of pita a day. Maybe a sip of tea.
Hunger consumed everything.
They beat me. They broke my ribs. I didn’t care.
I just wanted a piece of bread.
There was never enough food.
Sometimes, if we begged enough, we would get something extra.
We had to choose: an extra piece of pita or a cup of tea.
Sometimes, they threw us dry dates, and it felt like the greatest gift in the world.
We had to beg for food, beg to use the bathroom.
Begging was our existence.
We strategized over every meal.
One day, I cut myself with a razor, just to make them believe I was injured.
I collapsed on my way to the bathroom so they would think I was too weak and encourage them to give us more food.
It worked. They gave us more food.
We survived off those small victories.

Do you know what it means to open a refrigerator?
It is everything.