Unlike Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer has never described Hezbollah as his friends. But other than that, when it comes to Israel there is now little of consequence to differentiate them, says Stephen Pollard in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
On Saturday 12 people, including children, were killed when a rocket hit a village in the Golan Heights. Some Hezbollah operatives immediately celebrated the attack as a triumph – until it emerged that the victims were Druze rather than Jewish, at which point the terrorist group did a swift backtrack and said it had nothing to do with them.
The timing could hardly have been more poignant. Israel has been fighting Hamas and Hezbollah since the October 7th massacre, most obviously against Hamas in Gaza but also in response to Hezbollah’s bombardment of northern Israel. Over 80,000 Israelis have had to be evacuated as the Iranian proxy fires up to 200 missiles a day on Israel.
Yet who is regarded by our Government as the villain in this? Israel. On Friday, the deadline passed for legal objections to be raised to the application by the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for an arrest warrant against Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
The previous Conservative Government was working alongside Germany on arguments against the application – that the ICC has no jurisdiction in Israel and that this was a matter for the world-renowned Israeli courts. But the Government dropped this, allowing Friday’s deadline to pass. In effect, the U.K. now supports the issuing of arrest warrants against the leader and Defence Minister of one of our closest allies because they are defending their country against terror.
Worse, the Government is set to halt arms sales to Israel on “humanitarian” grounds following much-trailed new legal advice.
Worth reading in full.
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.
A very helpful example of pseudo science.
It’s the kind of garbage collectivists lap up while searching for policies to solve social problems. We’re all, not just the homeless, like little lab rats on which they can act upon to “make the world a better place”.
This is similar to the Universal Basic Income which is another fraud. Hand every person £1K per month on top of the welfare system which sets a minimum level of income. Ridiculous. If you are homeless you cannot be handed cash. You need to repair many other issues first. The Welfare state is broke and broken. Enough already.
UBI would actually be better than the current welfare system. No means test, no discrimination, no perverse incentives.
There are big differences in why people might be homeless (or appear to be). Complex mental or physical health issues make some people unsuitable to ‘normal living’. Given social housing or sheltered accommodation and these people will still find their way back on the streets. Similarly there are the drug addicts and alcoholics that exhibit severe anti-social behavioral traits that money alone wont fix. Then there are the ‘professional’ beggars, there are also those exploited by criminal gangs in what is known as modern slavery.
Only anecdotally, but in a country like the UK with it’s generous welfare system and councils having a statuary responsibility to house anyone – I cant think of any reason why a person could be on the streets for lack of money. The first time in my life I saw real, genuine hardship was on a stag-do in Eastern Europe and ironically also in the supposedly wealthy USA.
FYI, you can watch Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s new (35min) documentary about the sorts of people living on the streets across Germany here. You will not be in a rush to visit after watching this. She speaks German too, clever lass. I can’t see how major cities in the UK would differ much from this tbh. Worth watching.
https://twitter.com/EvaVlaar/status/1703157698219458989
The study may not have been perfect, but Occam’s Razor would say that giving them unconditional cash DOES make them better off on balance, at least at the margin. I know conservatives don’t like the idea of “something for nothing” (unless they themselves benefit directly from it, and not “those people”) and think that everything must have more strings attached than a spider’s web (often conflating the normative with the descriptive), but come on now. Behind such opposition, I detect “the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism” that is causing such cognitive dissonance.
Well this conservative doesn’t like the idea of giving his money away. Occam’s razor would suggest to me that in the long run, giving people money without giving them other help does more harm than good.
1) No one in favor of it, including the authors, is saying they should be denied other help. That is a straw man, as we can walk and chew gum at the same time. 2) The money can simply be created, like all money is when you really look at it, so you don’t have to “give away” your own money if that bothers you. 3) And finally, as the late, great John Maynard Keynes famously said long ago, “in the long run, we are all dead”.
(Mic drop)
“2) The money can simply be created, like all money is when you really look at it, so you don’t have to “give away” your own money if that bothers you”
I don’t have the ability to create money, so giving mine away does bother me. Money can be created with a printing press, value can only be created through work.
This study has already been savaged in the Canadian and other media.
One was the pre-screening – everyone with addiction or mental issues were excluded. Only shorter-term homeless were excluded.
“age 19 to 65, homeless for less than 2 y (homelessness defined as the lack of stable housing), Canadian citizen or permanent resident, and nonsevere levels of substance use (DAST-10) (21), alcohol use (AUDIT) (22), and mental health symptoms Colorado Symptom Index (CSI) (23) based on predefined thresholds”.
There were many dropouts from the study etc.
“Of the 732 participants, 229 passed all criteria (31%). Due to loss of contact with 114 participants despite our repeated attempts to reach them, we successfully enrolled 115 participants in the study as the final sample (50 cash, 65 noncash0”
There were many problems with this study.