We rarely hear about the Uighur persecution – cultural genocide – nowadays. China’s repression is so total that news barely ever leaks out – and it’s much easier for our brave reporters to go to Gaza, say, where they’re spoon-fed the latest “news” from Hamas, than to risk their lives evading the Chinese police in…

Melanie Phillips adds her bit to the El_Fattah debate: People like Sir Keir Starmer who campaigned for Fattah’s release have fallen into the usual western trap of viewing the developing world through western eyes. Presented with someone fighting an obviously repressive and authoritarian regime, they assume he must be a pro-democracy campaigner and a heroic…

We’ve already noted Sohrab Ahmari’s view that Alaa Abd El-Fattah is “a genuinely odious character”. Here he is now at UnHerd – El-Fattah’s release exposes Starmer’s moral emptiness: Starmer’s government made it a “top priority” to obtain El-Fattah’s transfer to Britain. The cause célèbre was also pushed by the likes of Judi Dench, Brian Cox,…

Ella Kenan – Qatar’s Long Game: How Influence, Ideology, and Money Shape the West: Any serious examination of Qatar’s influence strategy must address its relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood is a transnational Islamist movement whose ultimate objective is the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate governed by Islamic…

A companion piece, as it were, to that previous post. Adam-Louis Klein: The Western and academic left has fundamentally failed to understand the Middle East—not just politically, but cosmologically. It approaches the region through a narrow, narcissistic lens of anti-colonialism, in which only those voices that oppose “the West” in the correct idiom are granted…

Avi Avidan on The Dawn of Minority Liberation: Israel’s Role in Shattering Sykes-Picot. The artificial borders of the Middle East, drawn a century ago by British and French diplomats in the secretive Sykes-Picot Agreement, have long suppressed the region’s diverse peoples Kurds, Druze, Maronites, Alawites, Baloch, and others trapping them in states dominated by Arab…

Full conversation here.

Green MP Sian Berry picks a side. Full text: My cousin Tsachi was taken hostage alive after watching his firstborn daughter murdered in front of him. In captivity he was denied medical care, denied visits from the Red Cross, starved, tortured, and ultimately murdered. His body was returned to us so mutilated that forensics had…

Gritty northern France, that is: none of your fancy Brigitte Bardot/St Tropez stuff. Photographer John Bulmer, at Cafe Royal Books: [Photos © Cafe Royal Books/John Bulmer]

“The Palestine cause has destroyed the Middle East and Lebanon.” Lebanese journalist Tony Boulous at MEMRI TV. “It is clear the Middle East has changed, and if we do not join in, and if we continue to talk about “the Zionist Enemy” and “the brutal imperialist enemy”…these things have become laughable. Concepts like “global imperialism”…