This is a long but very informed read out of the Venezuela story from former Labour MP @GrahamJonesxMP that is on his Facebook.
I’ve republished below in several parts:

I appeared on the news yesterday to talk about Venezuela. It’s not a country that directly affects the UK, but it is one where people have suffered for years.

I was, bizarrely, asked to chair the Parliamentary Committee on this far-flung place, so I know a great deal about it. That experience often left me despairing at the poor quality of our politicians and media coverage.

I met hundreds of Venezuelans. Many of them also despaired at outside voices pursuing international ideals while conveniently forgetting the plight of ordinary Venezuelans, who have been pleading for help for years.

From an observer’s point of view, this is how it looks to me.

It appears Trump has struck some kind of deal for a bloodless transition. It also appears that members of Maduro’s government have betrayed him for their own ends—financial and criminal—under unrelenting US pressure.

We are told the CIA have been in Caracas since August; that they accessed the presidential palace with ease; and that Maduro was taken without resistance. We are told the Venezuelan air defences, supplied by Moscow, were switched off as a swathe of Chinooks carrying 200 Delta Force personnel flew in.

Trump’s speeches are littered with hyperbole and nonsense, and it’s difficult to pick the bones out of his comments. But two points caught my attention.

First, he said a second US wave wouldn’t be necessary—subtext: the regime remnants have conceded. Second, he implied the US would govern during a transition, which is worrying. Subtext: remnants of Maduro’s system want assurance that the opposition won’t take over immediately and come after them for their crimes and profiteering.

Trump also described the opposition leader, Maria Machado, as a “nice woman” but “not capable”. Subtext: he isn’t picking sides. The read-through is that there is a guarantee to Delcy Rodriguez. In effect, he is telling both sides they will have to accept something uncomfortable for a while.

I’m not sure Trump was comfortable saying America was going to “run” the country. His body language looked flaky—like this is ugly, but necessary.

There are back-channel reports that the US initially wanted the opposition to take over. But after long conversations, the US may have concluded the opposition is divided and not yet capable of managing a transition—especially if the armed forces remain loyal to the old regime and the country risks sliding into civil conflict. 2) Rubio indicated a pragmatic, reluctant conclusion—probably informed by the mistakes of Iraq, where the Ba’ath Party was dismissed and the state became ungovernable—would not be repeated in Venezuela. He said as much. US thinking seems more detailed than some commentary suggests.

It appears a lot of thought has gone into US plans, but the plan pivots on whether the regime remnants “play ball”, and that likely includes uncomfortable guarantees. Trump made an interesting point: a bloodless transition is better than a bloody one. That may be the centre of his decision—but it may also produce ugly, unacceptable, and negative outcomes.

Legally, the issue is simpler than many commentators suggest. The West—including the United Kingdom—recognises the opposition as the legitimate authority, and they have welcomed the US action. If the recognised sovereign authority is not making the case to trigger UN Article 51, then there is no case for illegality on that basis.

There are rival opinions supporting Maduro’s claim that he is the sovereign leader; the corollary is that this was an illegal invasion. You can pick your side on who speaks for the nation. But from a legal point of view, the recognised Venezuelan authority has welcomed the action, describing it as liberation. This also affects who speaks for Venezuela at the UN: two different speeches, two different approaches—one that supports legality, one that argues illegality.

The UK’s legal position since Maduro stole the 2017 election is that the opposition is the legitimate authority. On that view, it is for them to decide whether they were invaded or assisted.

Many commentators mix up the law as they want it to be with the law as it is. My position is aligned with the UK’s stated position: the legitimate opposition is sovereign, and given they won 80/20 in an election that Maduro refused to recognise after losing, it is their view we accept.

Maria Machado was given the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway recently, with every Liberal Democrat wanting a selfie in support. We should not retreat from that support.

There are moral issues too—but there’s more to it.

Maduro held a referendum in 2023 on taking over neighbouring Guyana. The Maduro regime is not in a strong position to lecture on illegal “big brother” interventions.

And given the West believes the opposition won the elections of 2017 and 2024, it is difficult to argue this is “regime change” in the usual sense. The opposition won and should take rightful office.

Maduro is being investigated for serious alleged crimes by the ICC, and Delcy Rodriguez may be mindful not just of US power, but of international courts too. That may be one explanation for why they have thrown Maduro under the bus. I’m sure their own status—and what they are guilty of having done—is front and centre in their thinking.

It also appears the “rules-based order” is fraying—if it ever existed. As I said on TV, there are wider ramifications we need to be mindful of: global threats.

The US cannot be allowed to subsume the democratic process, the will of the Venezuelan people, or Venezuelan sovereignty. Nor can the US be given a green light to act unilaterally elsewhere—for example, Greenland.

In the South China Sea, we must be absolutely clear about what American interventionism means, because we cannot equivocate it with Chinese military action in Taiwan. If we misunderstand Venezuela, we fall into the trap of false equivalence—and into Beijing’s hands.

Then there is the thorny issue of Ukraine: whether the United States continues to supply arms and funding, the effect on the war’s outcome, and the risk of NATO fragmentation. One thing is clear: Europe has to get off US dependency and dramatically increase defence spending to backfill any potential US withdrawal from NATO or from collective allied action.

Then there is Trump’s peace plan in Gaza, which trundles along.

I spent several weeks investigating antisemitism and extremism at @ucl, one of Britain’s most prestigious universities.
Almost every day I was confronted by more shocking stuff:

https://x.com/nicolelampert/status/1988760312032420115/video/1

There’s extremism among the lecturers:
In November, Dr Samar Maqusi, a former UCL researcher lecturing at the university on the origins of Zionism, held a lecture repeating the anti-Jewish conspiracy that Jews had murdered a monk and used his blood to bake holy bread – “a blood libel”.
Another, professor of ophthalmology Michel Michaelides, reposted tweets about “cult Zions” controlling the BBC, and a third, James Smith, a lecturer in humanitarian policy and practice, joined Greta Thunberg on a flotilla to break the blockade of Gaza.
Not forgetting, either, that the university’s lecturers’ union (the UCU) passed a motion shortly after the Hamas attacks calling for “intifada until victory” and this year has been attacking its institution for its “complicity” in normalising relations with Israel. UCL’s obsession with Israel appears well embedded.

Last night the government, including the PM gleefully exclaimed how thrilled they were to have secured the release of an Egyptian most of us have never heard of.
According to Keir Starmer securing the release of Alaa Abed El-Fattah has been a ‘top priority’ for this government.
Who is this man and why did our Government push so hard for a man who says he wants to kill Zionists? 👇🏼


El-Fattah is billed as an ‘Egyptian Brit’ but he was gifted British citizenship in 2021 while in prison. This was after his mother, who was born in Britain went on a hunger strike. His family are prominent Egyptians and Egypt does not recognise (or did not recognise) his British citizenship.
Info from Hansard.

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