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The Bell Review: How Dodgy Statistics and a Contested Definition Turned Antisemitism Into a Political Football; It is a policy document with a predetermined conclusion, dressed up in the language of evidence, that the government signed off on before the ink was dry, and the media has accepted the conclusions of without reading into its dodgy methodology. Read more here: simonthesolemn.substack.com/p/the-bell-rev…
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Simon the Solemn retweeted
Basic education piece:
Not all Jewish people are Zionists.
Lots of Zionists aren't Jews.
The Board of Deputies largely self identity as Zionists.
The Media often report the Board of Deputies as the opinion of Jewish people.
Yet many Jewish people say #NotInOurName
Not all Jewish people are Zionists.
Lots of Zionists aren't Jews.
The Board of Deputies largely self identity as Zionists.
The Media often report the Board of Deputies as the opinion of Jewish people.
Yet many Jewish people say #NotInOurName
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Simon the Solemn retweeted
Aside from the shocking substance of this story, what's amazing is how it was unearthed by Cole. The short version: The Russians were able to penetrate Jared Kushner's iPhone and extract screenshots and data. Then, a Russian intel official was captured by Dutch intelligence (!) and flipped. The Dutch believed Kushner may have been acting on behalf of Russia, so pursued him as an intel target and were able to get into his phone.
They did not find any evidence of Russian collusion, instead they watched him moving hundreds of millions of dollars from slush funds created by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, one of them housed in Israel's central bank.
Incredible reporting, and if Democrats have any sense, they will pull on these threads and learn a lot more about this money.
They did not find any evidence of Russian collusion, instead they watched him moving hundreds of millions of dollars from slush funds created by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, one of them housed in Israel's central bank.
Incredible reporting, and if Democrats have any sense, they will pull on these threads and learn a lot more about this money.
Explosive story many years in the making, now out in Vanity Fair by Matthew Cole (who will be on Breaking Points next week, and publishing soon in @DropSiteNews):
Saudi Arabia and the UAE set up multi-billion slush funds for Jared Kushner to use.
Iran-Contra 2 here (except ast the US got some hostages released. Not clear what we got out of this one.)
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Simon the Solemn retweeted
Britain "took back control" of their country from Brussels only to hand it to Tel Aviv.
Teachers to be banned from wearing Palestine badges as review finds 3 in 5 Jewish pupils have faced antisemitism at school trib.al/00Lztkq
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And there we have it, criticism of Israel is being banned in schools, in the latest attempt to make the UK a society that accepts and supports genocide and ethnic cleansing
🚨 NEW: The Government has accepted all 27 recommendations from the report to end antisemitism in schools and colleges
1. Recognise antisemitism as a distinct form of hatred, not just general racism
2. Strengthen political impartiality guidance, including limits on teachers wearing pro-Palestine badges
3. Establish a national hotline for school leaders dealing with antisemitism
4. Improve teaching about contemporary antisemitism and modern Jewish life
5. Teach pupils to recognise and challenge antisemitic conspiracy theories
6. Include antisemitism explicitly in school safeguarding policies
7. Train teachers to recognise and tackle antisemitism
8. Work with the Home Office and the Prevent programme to help schools identify when antisemitism may be linked to radicalisation
9. Encourage schools to adopt the IHRA working definition of antisemitism
10. Improve procedures for reporting antisemitic incidents, including signposting
11. Ensure antisemitic bullying and complaints are investigated and acted on consistently
12. Make clear in staff conduct policies that antisemitism is unacceptable
13. Strengthen Holocaust education, including antisemitism's role in the Holocaust, and encourage schools to mark Holocaust Memorial Day
14. Create more opportunities for pupils to engage with Jewish communities, including visits to synagogues
15. Make sure Judaism and modern Jewish life are properly represented in religious education
16. Improve media literacy so pupils can also identify online antisemitism
17. Provide better resources for teaching the Israel-Palestine conflict fairly and sensitively
18. Ensure schools have clear policies for dealing with antisemitism involving external speakers
19. Ensure education unions have clear antisemitism policies
20. Establish a dedicated support service to help schools, colleges and councils deal with antisemitism
21. Use some of the Government's security funding to help Jewish schools and colleges undertake educational visits safely
22. Run a campaign to tackle antisemitic behaviour at transport hubs near Jewish schools and colleges
23. Provide Jewish school and college leaders with mentoring and more security advice
24. Strengthen accountability for schools that fail to deal properly with antisemitism
25. Enable Ofsted and the Independent Schools Inspectorate to assess how schools tackle antisemitism
26. Make local councils identify local patterns of antisemitism and help schools respond
27. Share effective practice and guidance between schools and colleges
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Why is all racism not treated as equally abhorrent? A good question that I think no one in power or the media would be able to sufficiently answer.
95%* of Black children in the UK have heard or directly experienced racist abuse at school.
It is interesting that there was no action taken after that report.
*ymcaeurope.com/young-and-blac…
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Where is the landmark report recommending significant punishment for those responsible for Grenfell? For those responsible for our crisis of homeless? For the epidemic of poverty? For the war crimes committed with our tax money?
BREAKING: A landmark government report is set to reveal the vast scale of antisemitism in English schools and colleges, Sky News can exclusively reveal.
The report, written by former schools inspector Sir David Bell, will on Wednesday set out 27 recommendations to create change.
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Simon the Solemn retweeted
i’ve never seen the british state move like this for anything else. not third of its own children in poverty. not the housing crisis. not the cost of living crisis. nothing.
BREAKING: A landmark government report is set to reveal the vast scale of antisemitism in English schools and colleges, Sky News can exclusively reveal.
The report, written by former schools inspector Sir David Bell, will on Wednesday set out 27 recommendations to create change.
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The coverage of the Green Party's Zionism is Racism motion proves one thing: British media can coordinate with astonishing speed when the target is a left-wing party.
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Simon the Solemn retweeted
Saudi Arabia is an artificial entity created by the British Empire to serve as a client state and a dagger in the heart of the Arab and Islamic world, much like the Zionist entity. The difference is that the Saudi
regime falsely cloaks itself in Islam.
regime falsely cloaks itself in Islam.
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Medium Pressure and Other Decisions I Immediately Regretted
I knew I was in trouble the moment the words left my mouth. “Medium’s fine,” I said, with the air of a man who has never once been wrong about anything, least of all his own capacity for discomfort. The masseuse t ordered a sensible sandwich rather than volunteered myself for a prolonged experiment in the limits of human tissue.
For the first few minutes I congratulated myself. The pressure was firm without being brutal. Muscles that had spent the week hunched over a laptop and then further hunched while pretending not to be hunched were being encouraged, with some enthusiasm, to reconsider their life choices. There was pleasure in it. A low, warm sense of being put right. I even managed a small, contented noise, the sort you make when someone has found the exact spot you didn’t know was complaining until it stopped.
Then the pressure stayed. And stayed. And, somehow, increased, though I had not requested an increase and was not entirely sure I was still capable of coherent speech. What had felt like a helpful suggestion became a sustained argument. My shoulder blade appeared to be having a conversation with the ceiling through the medium of my own flesh. I became intensely interested in the pattern of the carpet, then in the exact shade of beige of the wall, then in whether it was socially acceptable to whimper in a professional setting.
The odd thing was that I never quite reached the point of asking her to ease off. Part of this was pride, obviously. Having declared medium pressure acceptable, I was now bound by the rules of my own hubris. But there was something else, too: a strange, ongoing negotiation between the part of me that wanted it to stop and the part that suspected, dimly, that it might be doing me good. Every time the pain crested, something underneath it would loosen, and for a second or two the relief was so pure I almost forgave the previous thirty seconds. Then the cycle would begin again.
I found myself conducting a silent running commentary. This is fine. This is character-building. This is what people mean when they say you have to lean into discomfort. The commentary was not especially convincing. At one point I attempted to distract myself by listing the names of every West Brom manager since 1990, which is a longer list than is strictly useful and did nothing to improve the situation. By the time she moved to the other shoulder I had developed a new respect for anyone who voluntarily undergoes this sort of thing on a regular basis. They are either made of sterner stuff or are simply better at lying to themselves.
When it was over I sat up slowly, as though I had been involved in a minor traffic incident rather than a massage. My neck felt longer. My shoulders sat in a slightly different postcode. Everything hurt in a way that suggested it had been worth it, which is a confusing sensation. I thanked her, paid, and walked out into the afternoon with the careful gait of a man who has learned a small but important lesson about the difference between what he thinks he can handle and what his trapezius is prepared to tolerate.
Next time, I will ask for light. Or at least I will think about asking for light. Knowing me, I will probably say medium again, on the grounds that I am not the sort of person who needs things softened, and then spend the following hour staring at the carpet and bargaining with God. Some habits are harder to massage away than others.
I knew I was in trouble the moment the words left my mouth. “Medium’s fine,” I said, with the air of a man who has never once been wrong about anything, least of all his own capacity for discomfort. The masseuse t ordered a sensible sandwich rather than volunteered myself for a prolonged experiment in the limits of human tissue.
For the first few minutes I congratulated myself. The pressure was firm without being brutal. Muscles that had spent the week hunched over a laptop and then further hunched while pretending not to be hunched were being encouraged, with some enthusiasm, to reconsider their life choices. There was pleasure in it. A low, warm sense of being put right. I even managed a small, contented noise, the sort you make when someone has found the exact spot you didn’t know was complaining until it stopped.
Then the pressure stayed. And stayed. And, somehow, increased, though I had not requested an increase and was not entirely sure I was still capable of coherent speech. What had felt like a helpful suggestion became a sustained argument. My shoulder blade appeared to be having a conversation with the ceiling through the medium of my own flesh. I became intensely interested in the pattern of the carpet, then in the exact shade of beige of the wall, then in whether it was socially acceptable to whimper in a professional setting.
The odd thing was that I never quite reached the point of asking her to ease off. Part of this was pride, obviously. Having declared medium pressure acceptable, I was now bound by the rules of my own hubris. But there was something else, too: a strange, ongoing negotiation between the part of me that wanted it to stop and the part that suspected, dimly, that it might be doing me good. Every time the pain crested, something underneath it would loosen, and for a second or two the relief was so pure I almost forgave the previous thirty seconds. Then the cycle would begin again.
I found myself conducting a silent running commentary. This is fine. This is character-building. This is what people mean when they say you have to lean into discomfort. The commentary was not especially convincing. At one point I attempted to distract myself by listing the names of every West Brom manager since 1990, which is a longer list than is strictly useful and did nothing to improve the situation. By the time she moved to the other shoulder I had developed a new respect for anyone who voluntarily undergoes this sort of thing on a regular basis. They are either made of sterner stuff or are simply better at lying to themselves.
When it was over I sat up slowly, as though I had been involved in a minor traffic incident rather than a massage. My neck felt longer. My shoulders sat in a slightly different postcode. Everything hurt in a way that suggested it had been worth it, which is a confusing sensation. I thanked her, paid, and walked out into the afternoon with the careful gait of a man who has learned a small but important lesson about the difference between what he thinks he can handle and what his trapezius is prepared to tolerate.
Next time, I will ask for light. Or at least I will think about asking for light. Knowing me, I will probably say medium again, on the grounds that I am not the sort of person who needs things softened, and then spend the following hour staring at the carpet and bargaining with God. Some habits are harder to massage away than others.
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Simon the Solemn retweeted
I have lived in Britain my whole life. I can claim Israeli citizenship tomorrow. Yet Palestinians will face an aggressive and relentless system of apartheid preventing them from accessing roads, jobs, healthcare; will be targeting by settlers in pogroms, and preached to by Western talking heads that they are not worthy victims, or that is somehow their fault that theirneighbourb was extrajudicially murdered for wanting access to their own land and trees. Any ideology that legitimises or benefits one group over another is explicitly racist and the Green Party rightly opposes such abhorrent breaches of universal human rights.
A Palestinian violently expelled from their home during the Nakba cannot return. But as a British Jew, I can move to Israel and become a citizen.
That is racism.
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The West is not ready or equipped to deal with mass unemployment in the middle classes, the tax and spending structures can't account for these kinds of labour surpluses in highly skilled labour
This hacker news thread is absolutely heart-breaking.
Whoever thinks “humans will find a way” ought I read it.
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I generally don't subscribe to the idea of low skilled labour, but people who have gotten used to particular lifestyles, taking on significant student and mortgage debt to get there, suddenly seeing it is only gig economy jobs left for them, is a serious and creeping problem that is not being addressed or prepared for
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Simon the Solemn retweeted
Let’s be clear, if Sally Rooney had been doing the TV rounds justifying Israel’s bombing of hospitals and the slaughter in Gaza, instead of defending the Palestinian peoples’ right to exist, she would still be able to sell her books in Britain today.
Sally Rooney books withdrawn from UK over Palestine Action support trib.al/qqqzBow
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This is where Grok's translate can fall flat. Satanyahu isn't proposing any kind of manosphere semen retention, he's attacking a domestic political rival Zelicha which Grok is auto translating to Masturbation. Oh and ps, he's an evil cunt and the Hague can't come fast enough
האמת שאתם צריכים לדעת על זליכה >>
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Simon the Solemn retweeted
A German newspaper seems like the perfect place to brag about indiscriminately murdering civilians
⭕️ Israeli reservist tells Der Spiegel his unit killed Palestinians who approached hidden positions, then logged them as terrorists
The soldier, who spent about 250 days in Gaza, described a procedure his unit often used called “Alman Kasch,” in which troops take up concealed have not been evacuated and open fire on anyone who comes near.
“If Palestinians, who do not know that our soldiers are there, approach, they are shelled. Usually other people come along who want to help, they are also shot at. Within a few minutes, five, six or seven people are killed. The protocol says: seven terrorists eliminated. But no, it’s just seven people who crossed an intersection. Important: We do not kill, we eliminate. That’s how we’ve always phrased it.”
He said his brigade killed 160 to 170 people during more than 80 days in the Netzarim corridor, where “there were no fighting, no attacks by Hamas.”
“Only one man was suspected to carry a gun. No one saw the gun, it was night, and he had something with him that could have been interpreted as a weapon. He was killed about 500 meters north of the corridor, so he was not a direct danger, and we never examined his body. But not only him, but all these dead were reported as terrorists.”
The soldier is one of ten who gave testimony to Der Spiegel.
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Simon the Solemn retweeted
What the BBC’s Nick Robinson and the rest of the media are insisting on is a unique carve-out for Israel. They argue that Israel has an exceptional right – one that no other state enjoys – to exist as it is and in perpetuity.
The implication, the one they want you to infer without them having to spell it out, is that any attempt to end Israel as a racist, apartheid state, and reform it into a democracy where Israelis and Palestinians have equal rights, is a violation of its supposed “right to exist”.
They also want you to assume that anyone who denies Israel’s “right to exist” is calling for the mass murder, the genocide, of Israeli Jews – and possibly all Jews.
In their telling, those calling for the extermination of Jews include Zack Polanksi, the Jewish leader of the Greens, and Stephen Kapos, an elderly Holocaust survivor and one of the proposers of the motion.
What these journalists are doing has nothing to do with protecting the Jewish population that live in Israel. It’s about setting in stone a highly militarised state that subjugates Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel itself, that refuses to define its borders, that has been judged to be committing the crime of apartheid by the world’s highest court, and that is carrying out a genocide in Gaza according to a consensus of legal and human rights authorities and genocide scholars.
If apartheid South Africa had no “right” to exist, Israel has no “right” to exist either. Its crimes are far graver than apartheid South Africa’s, as the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel peace laureate, famously observed after he travelled around the occupied territories – and did so long before Israel started committing genocide in Gaza.
Like that other famous apartheid state, Israel must be reconstituted as a democracy so that it no longer poses a danger to the Palestinian people it has spent decades dispossessing, oppressing and now genociding.
This is an extract from my latest article No state has a ‘right’ to exist – least of all an apartheid, genocidal state like Israel. A link to the full article is in the reply post ⬇️
The implication, the one they want you to infer without them having to spell it out, is that any attempt to end Israel as a racist, apartheid state, and reform it into a democracy where Israelis and Palestinians have equal rights, is a violation of its supposed “right to exist”.
They also want you to assume that anyone who denies Israel’s “right to exist” is calling for the mass murder, the genocide, of Israeli Jews – and possibly all Jews.
In their telling, those calling for the extermination of Jews include Zack Polanksi, the Jewish leader of the Greens, and Stephen Kapos, an elderly Holocaust survivor and one of the proposers of the motion.
What these journalists are doing has nothing to do with protecting the Jewish population that live in Israel. It’s about setting in stone a highly militarised state that subjugates Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel itself, that refuses to define its borders, that has been judged to be committing the crime of apartheid by the world’s highest court, and that is carrying out a genocide in Gaza according to a consensus of legal and human rights authorities and genocide scholars.
If apartheid South Africa had no “right” to exist, Israel has no “right” to exist either. Its crimes are far graver than apartheid South Africa’s, as the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel peace laureate, famously observed after he travelled around the occupied territories – and did so long before Israel started committing genocide in Gaza.
Like that other famous apartheid state, Israel must be reconstituted as a democracy so that it no longer poses a danger to the Palestinian people it has spent decades dispossessing, oppressing and now genociding.
This is an extract from my latest article No state has a ‘right’ to exist – least of all an apartheid, genocidal state like Israel. A link to the full article is in the reply post ⬇️
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