Mick Hartley

Gary Cohen at Jewish News compares and contrasts:

These are not protests choreographed for export, or designed to flatter Western sensibilities. This is a ruthlessly oppressed population pushing back against a regime that rules through religious coercion, intimidation, and violence, while steadily destroying the country itself. The Islamic Republic has crushed dissent at home and exports its ideology abroad, pouring vast resources into repression and proxy wars while making war on its own citizens.

These protesters are not posturing. They are not chasing admiration. They know the risks. This is a desperate battle for freedom. This is what genuine protest and resistance looks like. Raw, chaotic, dangerous, with the highest possible stakes.

By contrast, across Western capitals and campuses, a very different spectacle unfolds. Loud, self-assured, saturated with moral certainty. Protests that claim to stand for human rights and resistance to oppression, taking place inside the safety bubble of Western society. The slogans are polished. The outrage rehearsed. Zero risk. Zero consequences. Zero danger.

Starved of meaning or purpose, sanctimonious virtue-signalling activists unquestioningly swallow the lies and propaganda while convincing themselves they are on the right side of history.

History, meanwhile, is happening elsewhere, with desperate people risking everything.

What has taken hold in the West is not solidarity with the oppressed but the performance of virtue. Palestine has been turned into a moral stage on which activists rehearse outrage, congratulate themselves on their righteous indignation, and revel in their moral superiority. They pride themselves on their “courage”. But courage is easy when there are few consequences.

The Iranian protests, meanwhile, continue not to feature in the news – though of course Venezuela is taking up the front pages now.

Confirmed: the police concocted “intelligence” at the behest of Islamists to ban Israelis from Villa Park.

The decision-makers’ own words:

“The community want it stopped”

Decision “in absence of intelligence”

Later a “more clear rationale” was invented https://t.co/BHqrzAUHGm

— Nick Timothy MP (@NJ_Timothy) January 4, 2026

Article here.

Also, from the Telegraph – “West Midlands Police consulted mosques that had hosted anti-Semitic preachers before banning Israeli fans from an Aston Villa football match, The Telegraph can reveal.”

The UK is a country which, despite being one of the least racist countries in the world, obsesses about whether it’s racist or not. Camille Long:

How racist are we, as a country? It is a question we ask ourselves again and again. We ask it of footballers, of politicians, of actors; we ask it especially of dead people, who can’t answer. The last word on Brigitte Bardot? Nothing to do with her beauty, her iconoclasm. No: she was an “unapologetic racist”. (So British, that — she hated foreigners and didn’t even say sorry.)

We ask the question so much that I suppose it was only a matter of time before a poll confirmed that, yes, we are racist. Amid warnings about a “rising tide of ethno-nationalism” — the new stealth word for “Nazism” — The Guardian reported last week that 36 per cent of people thought it was important, in order to be British, to be “born in Britain”. You just thought: well, there it is.

Only the poll was a lie.

Quietly, later, after a day of panic, a correction was published: no one had said it was important to be “born in Britain” (the front-page headline). What they’d agreed with was it was important to be “born British”, which is different and, in my view, so vague as to mean nothing. So all the claims that the changes were “worrying”, that we are, to quote Keir Starmer, in a “fight for the soul of our country”, were lies.

If anything, the poll revealed us to be kind and tolerant. People bent over backwards to show they weren’t racist. Only 3 per cent of people believe that to be British you must be white. Yes: after Elon, Trump, Tommy, after Farage Faraging 24/7 — only 3 per cent. God, they must have been disappointed. It also presented a clear view of what they thought it meant to be British: helping the economy, raising children well, obeying our laws.

Does Starmer know this?

Starmer, by the way, has a different view of being British. He thinks it is a nothing, a light amusement, a bauble. He welcomed the Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd el-Fattah as a British citizen, in the manner of someone announcing the results of Strictly. Fattah had been a “top priority” for the Foreign Office, he gushed. He would be finally coming over here after 12 years in prison in Egypt. He clearly thought people would be overjoyed.

But they weren’t. After the rape gangs, the small boats, the sex assaults, the synagogue stabbings, the ban on the Maccabi fans; after the experiments on children, the juries debacle, the overt lying about a “black hole”, guess what. No one was in the mood to “prioritise” some random dissident windbag they’d never heard of, who it was later discovered had, before prison, said he “seriously, seriously, seriously” hated white people and loathed “Zionists” (for which read: Jews). He called us “dogs and monkeys”. His apology was nearly 600 mooing words long.

If you really want to know what being British is, it is the opposite of this. It’s not being racist or antisemitic; it’s not inciting violence. It’s valuing what it is to be part of us. Where has Fattah done that? Where has he asked, sincerely, to be part of our liberal democracy?

The supposed racism of the “white working class” is a left middle-class shibboleth, regularly boosted by the likes of the Guardian to preserve that comforting sense of superiority. Yes, the dockers marched for Enoch Powell, but that was over 50 years ago. Things have changed. Nowadays what people care about isn’t race; it’s about those who make no secret of their dislike of this country and its liberal values.

So if I were to really define what it meant to be British — to put it in one simple way — it would be: spending 90 per cent of one’s time worrying you are racist, when you’re not.

Hadley Freeman drops a serious point into her “how to be better in 2026” Sunday Times column – Feel free to talk about antisemitism when there is antisemitism:

Two days after the Bondi Beach massacre last month, in which 15 Jews were murdered during a Chanukkah celebration because they were Jewish, a guest on the Today programme made this striking point: “Jews are not the only community that are targeted, and right now there’s Muslims, or immigrants, or trans people, or black people. Other people have their stories which are not to be minimised.”

I guess I missed the meeting in which it was decided that reporting the killing of Jews “minimises other people’s stories”, and I definitely missed stories about trans people being executed in the West on a regular basis. But can we maybe re-examine that edict? Because as that guest was speaking, menorahs in public spaces in Britain were being desecrated and a plot to carry out mass slaughter of Jews in Manchester was averted. Which you might think would give some people in this country pause. But given the speed with which they then defended Alaa Abd el-Fattah, insisting he doesn’t hate Jews, only Zionists, apparently not.

That Today remark was made, I believe, by Philippe Sands – a Jew himself, but also a regular BBC interviewee and contributor to the London Review of Books, so it all fits. One of the “community of the good”, in other words.

Tom Harris in the Telegraph on Bridget Phillipson’s reluctance to enforce the Supreme Court ruling:

“Trans people must not be used as a political punchbag,” she said recently. What is obvious from her few public comments on the subject is that the minister has fallen into the trap so neatly set for her by trans activists and their powerful and well-funded lobbying organisations. She has become convinced that the Supreme Court ruling was not about women after all, but was about trans people, particularly those men who identify as women.

She seems, based on her comments, to have given little consideration to women and girls whose right to privacy and security away from the presence and sight of biological males should be her top priority.

Her reluctance to enforce the law has already had consequences. Employment tribunals have upheld the rights of men who identify as women to continue using women’s changing rooms at their workplaces in an apparent conflict with what we now know the Equality Act says. Meanwhile Phillipson sits gazing at the EHRC guidelines on the use of single-sex spaces, desperately worried about how all this will affect that most marginalised and vulnerable community – men.

Well yes – what happens next is the big question. No tears lost over Maduro, but….

Freddy Gray in the Spectator:

Few will mourn the departure of Maduro – a left-wing tyrant whose regime has grown ever more corrupt and oppressive as the years have gone by. Venezuela is a gangsterish system in which citizens struggle for food, snitch on each other to the authorities through social media, and drug cartels operate with impunity. But the question of what comes next is of course now paramount. America has proven quite successful in recent years at regime decapitation. It’s the change part that proves really difficult.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, who was so careful to praise Trump after receiving the award in October, declared three weeks ago that her country had already been invaded – by Russia and Iran.

‘We have the Russian agents, we have the Iranian agents. We have terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, operating freely in accordance with the regime,’ she said.

‘We have the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels that have taken over 60 per cent of our populations and not only involved in drug trafficking, but in human trafficking in networks of prostitution. This has turned Venezuela into the criminal hub of the Americas.’

So far so good, then. But….

Trump has a deep obsession with energy prices and it’s notable that every country he threatens or attacks happens to have enormous oil reserves. On Christmas Day, he ordered strikes on Nigeria, apparently as a ‘Christmas present’ to protect Christians but cynics suspect other motives.

By changing the guard in Venezuela he has removed one of the last major oil-exporting administrations that oppose American interests. The other big two are Iran and Russia. Given the increasing talk inside American corridors of power of a peace deal over Ukraine – and the business possibilities stemming from a rapprochement between Moscow and Washington – the Trump foreign-policy agenda of 2026 could already be clear. War with Venezuela and Iran and fossil-fuel-rich peace with Mother Russia. Total energy dominance – the idea will make beautiful sense in Trump’s mind. But as his predecessors George W Bush and Barack Obama discovered, the problem with forcibly removing governments is controlling what happens next.

The assumption is always that the people of the country will rush out onto the streets to celebrate their new-found freedom – like, say, the French liberation from the Nazis. It’s perhaps more likely with Venezuela than it was with Iraq. But still…

Also, of course, this was by every yardstick a middle finger up to international law.

Jeremy Bowen makes the news again.

The BBC has apologised and compensated an Israeli family who survived the 7 October attack after a film crew entered their destroyed home without consent.

Days after the attack, a BBC crew led by senior correspondent Jeremy Bowen, arrived in Netiv HaAsara, a small village on the Gaza border where 17 residents were murdered. During the visit, the crew entered the home of the Horenstein family without their knowledge and filmed inside the property, including personal photographs of their children – at a time when many of the family’s friends and relatives still did not know whether they had survived.

An apology is unusual – but this was the BBC itself, not Bowen. After reporting that the attack on the Al-Ahli hospital was Israel’s responsibility – as per the Hamas press release – Bowen didn’t retract when this turned out to be untrue. He had “no regrets”, he said.

Every single word by my Romanian fellow Bogdan 💯 pic.twitter.com/DNGwjLkXOz

— Velina Tchakarova (@vtchakarova) January 2, 2026

The thorny old question: are we just being polite when we talk about Islamism – violent, supremacist, antisemitic to its core – as opposed to Islam? I do it myself, using “Islamism” or “Islamist” to refer to the latest atrocity. But is there really a nice tolerant Islam that can be distinguished from nasty Islamism – or are we just kidding ourselves?

Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator:

Islamism, we are told, has nothing to do with Islam. Extremists are impostors. Their violence represents a distortion of a peaceful faith. Western leaders across liberal democracies have insisted on this distinction for more than two decades. In 2001, speaking at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., George W. Bush declared: ‘The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.’ In 2014, Barack Obama declared that ‘Isil is not Islamic’. Theresa May spoke of ‘a perversion of Islam’ after the London Bridge attack. Emmanuel Macron described Islamist separatism as ‘a political ideology’ distinct from the religion itself. Anthony Albanese’s language after the Bondi Beach attack likewise emphasised unity and condemned extremist violence, framing the incident in terms of violent ideology, rather than detailed theological distinction.

Unfortunately for this position, the Islamists are very happy to supply chapter and verse from the Koran or the Hadiths to support their way of thinking. Given that Islam claims to be the final unanswerable revelation, supplanting all other religions, there’s little room for discussion.

Sacerdoti identifies four different frameworks he’s come across in his encounters, on this question of whether Islamism should be seen as an abuse of Islam, an authentic expression of it, or something uncomfortably in between.

One answer treats Islamism as Islam applied without disguise once political power is available. Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas co-founder who later worked covertly with Israeli intelligence to prevent attacks, was the most uncompromising voice I encountered. Sitting with me in my home, he explained that Islam is not primarily a spiritual faith but a political and legal system, and that movements like Hamas are not distorting it but implementing it coherently. In his view, the illusion lies in ‘moderate Islam’, which he described as people already living outside the doctrine while retaining its label. Yasmine Mohammed, a Canadian activist who escaped an extremist upbringing and later a forced marriage, reached a similar conclusion through her own experience, rather than ideology. She argued that Islamism flows naturally from doctrines governing law, gender, obedience, and supremacy when taken seriously. For both, Islamism is not a corruption but a revelation.

Those Muslim countries which practiced “moderate Islam” fifty or so years ago – see any newsreels or photos from Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, to see women in western-style clothes – have, in this view, now been returned to the true Islam, thanks to the petrodollar spread of Saudi Wahhabism and the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Lionel Shriver in Spectator Australia takes a characteristically robust view:

The modern confection ‘Islamist’ is meant to wall off the vast Muslim majority – nice, benevolent, friendly Muslims who love their western brothers and sisters and wouldn’t hurt a fly – from the teensy minority of theologically misguided Muslims who are actually dangerous. The intention – nay, the injunction, to journalists and readers alike – is to insulate the friendly Muslims from any stigma that might otherwise attach to innocent adherents of their faith just because so many of their co-religionists keep ploughing vehicles into Christmas markets, flying aeroplanes into tall buildings and blowing stuff up.

Yet if there’s such a hard-and-fast distinction between the friendly Muslims and the extremist sort that we must contrive an entirely different adjective for the latter, why don’t we hear more sorrow from the friendly Muslims after Bondi Beach and 7 October? Or when synagogues are attacked? Wouldn’t the friendly Muslims have an even greater vested interest than secular journalists in distancing themselves from their bad-news co-religionists? How about a bit more passionate disavowal among what we’re always told is a ‘community’? Something along the lines of Joe Biden’s favourite clarion declaration: ‘This is not who we are!’…

And is Islam really a religion of peace? Historically, it’s a religion of conquest. It’s often violent (ask Salman Rushdie); the punishment for apostasy is death. Doctrinally, Islam unabashedly aims for the whole world to become Muslim. Why, supposedly everyone is born Muslim. Eventually the scales will fall from the outsiders’ eyes and they’ll realise they’ve been Muslims all along. But before they get with the programme, the faith is overtly hostile to infidels. Live-and-let-live this ain’t. Sure, most Muslims aren’t stocking up on 1,200 rounds of ammunition, but is there no relationship between Islam and the Muslim extremists who take the creed’s contempt for unbelievers up a level?

Khaled Hassan, in the Telegraph – As an Egyptian, I know this truth: deranged anti-Semitism is normal in the Arab world.

For the past 14 years, my professional life has been dedicated to a single discipline: mitigating risk. In this field, one anticipates the usual obstacles – a scarcity of resources, a failure to grasp the scale of a threat, or a simple deficit in technical know-how. These are the standard hurdles of the trade.

Since relocating to Britain in 2016, however, I have been confronted by a challenge of an entirely different order. It is a cognitive and moral blind spot so profound it has redefined my understanding of risk itself.

In this country, we excel at recognising the peril of anti-Semitism. We meticulously document the alarming rise of the world’s oldest hatred. We convene conferences, host government briefings, and launch parliamentary inquiries to dissect and decry it.

We do everything, in fact, except the one thing that truly matters: applying our vigilance where the threat is most acute and culturally entrenched.

And that would be, in the Arab world. Or, more generally, in the Muslim world – where antisemitism isn’t an aberration, but the norm.

It confuses the existence of prejudice in Britain, where it is rightly treated as a social disease to be eradicated, with another country where it is not even recognised as a sin.

This refusal to acknowledge a qualitative difference is not liberalism; it is a form of civilisational suicide. It is the reason, that instead of applying increased scrutiny to cases like that of the Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, he was able to naturalise and become a British citizen.

It explains why, at a time when the BBC diligently investigated historical allegations against Nigel Farage, it platformed Alaa’s sister, Mona Seif, without the most basic due diligence into her social media, which appeared to glorify Hamas’s October 7 atrocities.

This same naivety is why Britain’s political leadership, including the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, could repeatedly engage with Alaa’s family and with Alaa himself during his imprisonment in Egypt, yet seemingly fail to detect their documented history of extremist and anti-Semitic sentiments. It is why Britain looks the other way when individuals with such profiles incite virulent hatred.

This approach privileges a feel-good narrative of universal sameness over the uncomfortable truth. It leaves the most toxic strains of hatred to fester unchallenged, while we pat ourselves on the back for condemning their milder cousins in our own backyard.