Andrew Neil has written a powerful column in today’s Mail about Owen Jones’s bizarre, 25-minute YouTube video in which he reacts to being shown footage of Hamas’s barbaric attacks on October 7th. Here is an extract:
While accepting – several times – that Hamas did indeed commit war crimes on that terrible first Saturday of October, Jones nevertheless proceeds to nitpick, undermine, question and sow seeds of suspicion about the veracity of parts of the video. It is a worrying, disturbing, chilling, often irrational performance which descends into incoherence as it reaches its weary end.
Jones regards the IDF video as Israeli propaganda designed to justify the death and suffering that it has since rained down on northern Gaza in retaliation for October 7th.
If that is its purpose, then it has clearly failed. As the death toll of civilians, including thousands of women and children, mounted while much of Gaza City was reduced to rubble, public opinion across the globe has turned against Israel, as it always does when it responds to some terrorist atrocity.
Even America, the only ally that matters to Israel, is insisting that – with hostilities breaking out again now hostage swaps are over – the IDF must be more careful, considered and proportionate in its efforts to wipe out Hamas.
Israel has indicated it is listening and will behave differently in the next phase of its war on Hamas. But Jones is wrong. The real purpose of the video was not to pave the way for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. It was to show the world exactly what Israel is up against.
How can you negotiate with people capable of such barbarism? What is the point when the Hamas leadership has already pledged to launch more October 7s the moment it has re-established the capacity to do so.
Its aim is not to force Israel to the bargaining table but to wipe it off the map. It revels in killing Jews simply because they are Jews. Exactly what kind of ‘peace deal’ can you do with people committed to your extermination?
Throughout his long ramble, oddly cold and calculating, Jones fails to confront or respond to any of these points. Instead, he concentrates – curiously, perhaps even immorally – on trying to establish that, though Hamas are indeed evil, perhaps they are not quite as evil as the Israelis are making out… and anyway there are lots of evil Israelis too.
It has long been an outrageous conceit of the British hard Left – and proof positive of its moral bankruptcy – that Hamas, a bloodthirsty terrorist group, and the IDF, the military arm of a thriving, disputatious democracy under constant threat, are two sides of the same coin.
Jones is certainly keen to give Hamas the benefit of the doubt and cut its killers the sort of slack he would never grant the IDF. He accepts that Israeli women and children were massacred but is strangely keen to point out that the IDF video provides no “conclusive evidence” that babies were beheaded, women raped and children killed “intentionally”. What kind of bizarre mindset, what sort of moral vacuum leads anybody to posit such crazy caveats?
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Brendan O’Neill had a similar reaction to Andrew Neil when viewing the Owen Jones reaction video. He writes: “It provides the starkest proof yet of the collapse of moral reason and plain decency that has occurred on the middle-class left these past seven weeks.” You can read the rest of his piece in Spiked.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
‘Saoirse (pronounced “Sur-sha”)’
Saoirse is pronounced “Seer-sha”.
In case anyone meets her, Saoirse Ronan apparently pronounces her name SUR-sha. She says herself Seer-sha is also another, very common pronunciation.
It’s a bit of a minefield. I think this may be where the problems started:
‘The earliest written records of Gaelic are in Ogham, a script used in early medieval Ireland. Ogham is sometimes called the “Celtic tree alphabet” because each letter is associated with an Irish tree name’
I know a few women called Saoirse, I’ve never heard anyone pronounce it ‘Sur-sha’, not even people on TV or radio referring to Saoirse Ronan. It’s a bit odd, it’s like someone called Vera wanting it to be pronounced ‘Vura’.
There’s an MP from Northern Ireland called Sorcha Eastwood, but it’s spelt Sorcha, not Saoirse.
Are you sure it’s not pronounced “id-i-ot?”
Courts have to start handing out exemplary punishment for this offence.
In cases with rock solid DNA evidence for murder, I, personally, would have at least one perpetrator every year shot.
This would provide both useful live firing practice for our young soldiers, who would queue round the block to participate, and a stark deterrent to potential offenders.
Anybody who appoints themselves as a spokesperson for victims of rape and sexual assault, whilst simultaneously being of the “Refugees welcome”/”Women can have penises and enter female spaces and sports” is an idiotic, deluded, hypocritical traitor.
You cannot be both concerned about women’s personal safety and be a woketard, it’s not possible. These people are frauds and traitors to their own sex.
There would be altogether less sex crimes if there were less people in society who belonged to these two misogynist cults. Less stabbings and mutilation of kids/young people also.
This from Germany illustrates my point about who the actual perpetrators of the majority of sexual assaults and stabbings are, and ignoring this by potentially introducing female-only carriages on trains is hardly getting to the root cause of the problem. Especially considering you can now change your gender in Germany from the age of 14yrs, this idea seems even more pointless;
”Antje Kapek, the transport policy speaker for the Green Party in Berlin, has called for the introduction of train carriages for exclusive use by female passengers. This follows a shocking upsurge in serious sex crimes on trains and buses, with Berlin alone experiencing the equivalent of more than one such assault every day. Frankfurt is heading in a similar direction.
Transport hubs across Germany are becoming less safe. Federal Police recorded 13,543 violent crimes at train stations in the first half of 2024.
Critics point out that such changes to ticketing and rolling stock would leave the basic problem intact, that of sexual aggression from men. For the German Greens, this points to a separate issue they would rather not discuss: the actual men being arrested for these offences. When news outlet NiUS analysed a list of the names of suspected rapists from North Rhine-Westphalia, it concluded that 55.8 percent of the perpetrators were either not German or from a migrant background.
The Greens—who fully supported the opening of Germany’s borders in 2015—would sooner not address the fact that men from specific communities are disproportionately represented in the crime statistics compared to their numbers within the overall population. Women-only train carriages would respond to a symptom of the problem, in the deflection-oriented style preferred by the collapsed traffic light coalition government.
Other examples of this approach involve telling railway staff in Thuringia that ticket inspection is now discretionary and that conductors can opt out of checking the credentials of passengers who appear to be foreign, due to the threat of assault. Nationally, faced with a wave of stabbing, the authorities are considering a ban on knives in public with blades over 6 cm in length. This focus by the government on objects rather than perpetrators helps explain why German voters are growing bemused and angry with the official failure to grasp the nettle of violent crime.”
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/german-greens-advocate-women-only-train-carriages/
The 3 photos of men in blackface are definitely Welsh miners. This is why the Welsh Labour party needs to destroy white culture.
https://x.com/Basil_TGMD/status/1857100800054468634
It isn’t just rape and murder of white women though is it. Today’s papers report the murder of a 24 yr old woman found in the boot of a car in Ilford, East London. Her name was Harshita Brella (Harshita is an Indian name) and the police believe she was murdered by someone known to her. (In other words, they suspect it could be an “honour” killing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39nwjygjgro
We have imported millions of men from a cultural and religious background who believe women and girls are their property to be disposed of – literally – however they wish. If they have no care or respect for the individuality and rights of their own women/girls, why should they have any for white girls who they consider to be slags and “easy meat?”
Prophesied in the book of Revelation:
And he cried with a mighty voice, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great! She has become an abode of demons, and a prison of every unclean spirit, and a prison of every unclean and hated bird. For all the nations have drunk from the wine of her raging fornication, and the kings of the earth have fornicated with her.”
Babylon the Great stands for western civilisation, standing on the foundations of the first civilisation that rose up in Uruk Mesopotamia and now sexualised to the point of being depicted as a prostitute. The nations, symbolised as birds (Daniel 4:14), have introduced unclean religions into the city. Thus the largest mosque in the western world by land area is the Mosque of Rome, with Strasbourg’s not far behind. Demons have returned to the house that was swept clean of them and brought with them spirits more evil than themselves. The sense is not that they are captives, rather they hold the city captive.
More on this in When the Towers Fall: A Prophecy of What Must Happen Soon.
This was 5 years ago but is about pathological altruism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o40yZO2QPc
It happened again.
And an update 1 year ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzWVkHlAXhQ&t=183s
It happened again.
These are very much related.
Ah, the acting profession where they are at their best when somebody else tells them what to do and what to say. They should stick to that.
Never heard of this Ronan nonentity and I’m quite pleased about that. What a waste of space!