Israel’s Sea Raid Hit A Big Problem; Cyprus Won’t Like Where It Leads

Britain Did Israel’s Bidding Again - And Got Caught

Barring far right incitement from entering the UK is one thing, but now it is happening for the sake of protecting Israel only. Right, so Keir Starmer's government has just stopped two of the loudest critics of Israel in American media from getting into Britain, and the only reason it's prepared to say out loud is a phrase with no content in it. Cenk Uygur, the founder of the US online network The Young Turks, and his nephew Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer with an audience in the millions, were both on their way over to speak this week when they were stopped cold at the border. Well, here’s an excerpt of Piker from last year’s Oxford Union address. I wonder if you can spot the reason you think he might be getting banned then! The two men say it's because they criticise Israel, which they do and it almost certainly is isn’t it? Piker says, in his own words, that it was done "at the behest of Israel." And the Home Office? It will only say their presence "may not be conducive to the public good," which is Whitehall for "we'd rather not explain ourselves." So a country that lectures everyone else about free speech has used its own border as an opinion filter, won't tell you the standard it applied, and has decided two blokes with microphones are a danger to the realm. Not men with weapons. Not men charged with anything here. Not men coming over to organise violence. Men coming to talk. And the British state, in all its alleged confidence and maturity, looked at two people with opinions on Israel and decided the safe thing to do was pull up the drawbridge. And it gets more ridiculous the closer you look. The pair were booked for SXSW London, the big film, music and tech festival, and Uygur was also down to speak at the Oxford Union, the posh student debating society that loves to cast itself as the last home of free argument in the country.

Netanyahu Wanted A Lebanon Victory - He Got More Panic Instead

As Israel cheers sticking a flag on Beaufort Castle, it's Lebanon invasion belies utter failure back on their northern border... Right, so Israel has just planted its flag on top of a nine-hundred-year-old castle in southern Lebanon, and it still couldn't keep the schools open in its own north. That is the whole story in one breath. The Israeli military announced on Sunday that its troops had taken Beaufort Castle, a crusader-era stone fortress on a ridge looking down over both southern Lebanon and northern Israel, and the army's own spokesman, Colonel Avichay Adraee posted the images, and Israel Katz wrapped them in the usual heroic language about another chapter being written at Beaufort. Benjamin Netanyahu called it returning to Beaufort stronger than ever. The defence minister, Israel Katz, made sure the photo of the Israeli flag flying over the castle went everywhere. And on the very same weekend that picture was being passed around as a triumph, as this story currently dominates social media today certainly, towns in northern Israel were closing their schools and shutting their nature parks because Hezbollah was still firing rockets and drones across the border. Netanyahu wanted that castle to be the day the war turned in his favour. What he actually bought was a deeper occupation, a dead soldier, and a northern border still under fire while all the cameras rolled for his latest bit of propaganda. So that is the victory. He went looking for the picture that ends the panic, and the panic was still going off behind the picture, wasn't it? Beaufort Castle sits on a high ridge near the town of Nabatieh, about fourteen kilometres inside Lebanon. It is high ground, the kind of position armies have fought over for a thousand years because whoever holds it can see for miles in every direction.

Starmer’s Palestine Crackdown Just Blew Up In His Face

The Starmer government's determination to see palestine Action sent down appears to now be providing cover for something even more sinister... Right, so a café owner in Manchester went to a police station to pick up devices the police had taken off him in an earlier case, and the police, instead of just handing them back, sat him down and tried to recruit him as a spy. Shams Sadiq, fifty-one years old, owns two cafés in Manchester, is known locally for his pro-Palestine activism, and he says that on the fifteenth of May two officers at Ashton-under-Lyne police station asked to speak to him "man to man," told him they'd been through his devices, told him they knew he was, in their phrase, fully involved with Palestine Action, and then told him he wouldn't be charged in relation to that earlier arrest. No charges on that. Just a favour. They said there were benefits in helping them. He asked what kind, financial? Were they going to pay his taxes? And the answer, more or less, was yes, we can help with things like that. One of them added there were other benefits too. They weren't saying he could go out and commit a serious crime, you understand, they were far too professional for that, but they could turn a blind eye to certain low-level things. So this is the law-and-order government, isn't it? This is the terrorism crackdown. The one that's already blown up in the government's own face in the High Court, though we'll get to that. And it has arrived at the point where the actual mechanism is a copper leaning across a desk offering financial benefits and leniency around low-level offences if you'll grass on your mates.

Reform Smelled Blood In Makerfield - Now It’s Their Own

As Reform's Makerfield candidate cracks up further, Labour and the Greens seem intent on self sabotage. Right, so Reform UK walked into Makerfield looking for blood, and the first body on the floor turned out to be their own candidate. Makerfield is a working-class seat just outside Wigan, in Greater Manchester, an old Labour heartland Reform has spent two years desperate to crack open to prove it can finish Labour off in the north. So they went and picked a local man, Robert Kenyon, a 41-year-old plumber and Wigan councillor, born in the area, exactly the "one of us" pitch Reform loves to run. And within days of his selection his old internet posts came crawling back to bury the campaign. On a rugby league forum he'd written, in his own words, "I'm sexist, sorry but I am," that women "can't referee, drive or give directions." There were posts sneering at women who have abortions, posts about women's bodies, and degrading comments about Carol Vorderman, who turned round and called him a misogynist and an online abuser, in public, by name. The material reported in the press was sexist and homophobic, and Reform still chose to defend him as a straight-talking local candidate. And Reform's answer to all of it? Their MP Danny Kruger went on the radio and called them the "private" comments of "an ordinary man," while a party spokesman waved the whole pile away as "locker room banter" from over a decade ago and sniffed that they "simply don't care about establishment hit jobs." Well how about this instead then Danny – is this a hit job, or just a man woefully out of his depth?

A US War Bill Just Gave Israel Something Worse Than Weapons

A hidden section of an upcoming US war bill is about to hand Israel the keys to the US defence kingdom and nobody is talking about it Right, so the week most of the American public turned against arming Israel, Congress quietly handed Israel something it has wanted for years and could never get through the front door. Not more rifles. Not another shipment of bombs. A merger. There's a single page buried in the new House defence bill that would fuse the American and Israeli militaries together more tightly than America is fused to any country on Earth, and it was written to slide past you before anyone got to vote on it. It's called Section 224, it sits inside House of Representatives Bill 8800, the new National Defence Authorisation Act, and the man who released it on the 26th of May is the House Armed Services chairman Mike Rogers, the Republican from Alabama. His committee votes on it on the 4th of June, so this coming Thursday, not long to kick up a fuss about in the meantime then? This is very much in the present and the near future, and it isn't a warning about something that might happen one day. It's on the table this week, and what's on the table is Israel getting wired into the machinery of America's next war. Section 224 carries the polite little title "United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative," which is the sort of name you give something precisely so people scroll straight past it.