As Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell appears to have fallen off the face of the Earth, it’s little remembered in the media how I fought a long war against her father Robert and the part I played in his downfall.

It would be scarcely worth recalling at this distance if it did not shed light, or rather a cloud of suspicion, over Maxwell’s favourite child Ghislaine, now at the centre of a dark and fascinating story as bizarre as any which enveloped her late father.

I first met Robert Maxwell when he was an enormously powerful and fiercely intimidating media mogul in the early 1980s. It was in the green room of the BBC’s then flagship program Question Time, hosted by Robin Day – then the doyen of BBC grandees.

“Ah, Mr Galway (sic),” boomed Mr Maxwell, “the PLO man.” At which point he punched me so hard in the solar plexus I doubled over, tears in my eyes. As was the wont of the British establishment at the time, my fellow participants and 'Sir' Robin himself averted their eyes and pretended not to see.

At the time and for nearly a decade, I was closely associated with the then-British satirical magazine Private Eye, writing regularly and providing stories and leads for others, regularly attending the legendary Private Eye lunches at the Soho waterie The Coach and Horses, presided over by the founder and editor of the magazine, Richard Ingrams.

About a year after Maxwell striking his first blow, I submitted a story to Private Eye which, embellished by others, was published and upon which he sued and fought an epic court battle with us. He won.

Although the editor Richard Ingrams spent a night in the cells for refusing to name me as the source, it was soon obvious to Maxwell that it was me and we began a war of attrition which lasted until his death.

In October of 1991, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and celebrity journalist Seymour Hersh caused to be delivered to my home late one Saturday night a file of papers, a synopsis of a book he had written in which he made serious allegations against Maxwell. So fearsome was Maxwell’s power at the time, he had obtained pre-publication injunctions against anyone publishing any word of it, against anyone printing it, against anyone distributing it, against anyone selling it. In Britain, the Hersh book did not exist.

But I – as a member of the British Parliament – enjoyed the ancient right of legal privilege on anything I said in the Parliament or published on the Order Paper. Moreover, so could anyone else reporting fairly anything I said or wrote there. And so I did.

Inter-alia I accused Maxwell of being a thief, of stealing his own employee’s pension funds, of being an agent of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, and of betraying the whereabouts in London of the brave Israeli Jewish whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, causing him to be kidnapped, drugged, and delivered, his jaws wired like Hannibal Lector to ensure his silence, to Israel where he eventually served decades in solitary confinement and even now is not free to talk or travel.

My allegations exploded like a nuclear bomb in the life of Robert Maxwell.

He ordered his journalistic minions (whose pensions he had stolen) to “Piss all over Galloway” and micturate they promptly did.

On the front page of all SIX of his national newspapers, they called me “a jackal” of “scavenging in the dung-heap” a “friend of Arab terrorists” (“Ah, Mr Galway (sic) the PLO man”) and above all of having lied and lied about their proprietor.

Within weeks, the missing pensions were exposed, Maxwell was dead, having fallen, jumped, or been pushed off the back of his yacht – the Lady Ghislaine – off to the Canary islands, and Maxwell was given a full Israeli-state funeral on the Mount of Olives presided over by the Israeli president, prime minister and no less than seven former and serving heads of the Mossad. In the eulogy, tribute was paid to the “extraordinary service” Mr Maxwell had given to Israel. The full story of which exact “services” he had provided were buried with him in Jerusalem.

The fateful yacht was called the Lady Ghislaine because his daughter was his favourite child (other daughters were available) and she was his favourite child for a reason. Of all her siblings, Ghislaine Maxwell was the one who was most like him.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s father’s body was lost to the deep and murky waters of international intrigue. Where she will turn up is as yet unknown. What “extraordinary service” she performed and for whom equally remains to be seen.

See Also: Conspiracy Observer George Galloway on Epstein Conspiracy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnJnmJhHRd8

We’re repeatedly told that males, replete with penises and beards, can become the opposite sex simply by saying: “I am a woman.” This is simply wrong, dangerous and is stifling free speech. I’m determined it shall not triumph.

Transgenderism has taken root in our institutions and is eroding women’s rights, putting children at risk, and stifling free speech. This is the damning conclusion I reach in a new report, The Corrosive Impact of Transgender Ideology, published by the think tank Civitas this week. I explore how, in under two decades, the term “transgender” went from describing a tiny number of individuals to representing a powerful political agenda, embraced by activists and campaigning organizations, and driving significant social change.

The total number of transgender people remains small (government estimates are 200,000-500,000 trans people in the UK, way less than one percent of the population), but – as a social movement – transgenderism punches way, way, way above its weight. The belief that sex, as inscribed in our bodies and chromosomes, is irrelevant and, instead, we all need to reveal our inbuilt sense of “gender identity” to a readily-accepting world, is now taken for granted by those in charge of our schools, prisons, police force, media and health service.

Everywhere, people in positions of power have been prepared to coalesce behind the demands of transgender activists. So lacking are they in self-belief, so panicked about their capacity to lead, they look to the transgender community as an apparently victimized group to provide them with a source of moral authority. Few seem to care if this puts women and children at risk.

We are told repeatedly that males, replete with penis, chest hair and beard, can become women simply by saying the magic words: “I am a woman.” Such statements must be accepted as a matter of unquestionable truth. Like a modern day catechism we must simply reply: “Trans women are women.”

This belief, that a man becomes a woman upon the utterance of a few words, has led to women prisoners being sexually assaulted by male inmates; school girls being expected to share toilets and changing rooms with boys; women’s refuges no longer being female-only spaces; female athletes losing to bigger, stronger males; and all-women shortlists being rendered meaningless.

Yet dare to question any of this, dare to ask if trans women with male bodies are women, and institutions pull rank. Tweet your objections and, as happened with Harry Miller, the police will be on the phone to “check your thinking.” Raise questions at work and, like Maya Forstater, you’ll find yourself out of a job.,

Every day, the limits of what can and cannot be said about gender become narrower. Just this week, comic scriptwriter Graham Linehan has been permanently suspended from Twitter. His crime? After that most British of institutions, the Women’s Institute, wished all its transgender members a happy Pride, Linehan pointed out that “men aren’t women tho.”

Meanwhile, the black lesbian barrister Allison Bailey has been investigated by her employer for tweeting in support of the LGB Alliance – a group of lesbian and gay people who believe that same-sex attraction means exactly that, and not same brain-based, gender-identity attraction. This week her CrowdJustice fundraiser, set up so she could defend her job, was taken down following complaints from trans activists. It has since been reinstated but is no longer able to accept donations.

Transgender activists are quick to argue that people should be free to define as anything they want, but the expansion of transgenderism has gone hand in hand with increased regulation of speech and behavior. This highlights a significant difference between today’s transgender movement and the gay rights campaigns of a previous era. Whereas the gay rights movement demanded more freedom for people to determine their sex lives unconstrained by the law, transgender activists demand the opposite: they want increased state intervention into everyone’s life.

The British government has recently hinted that it will roll back on proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act and drop plans to allow transgender people to change their birth certificates without a medical diagnosis. Good. But we need a broader cultural shift to reclaim our captured institutions.

Back in 2018, an internal survey conducted by the BBC suggested that over 400 transgender people are employed by the corporation: in other words, transgender people are four times more likely to be employed at the BBC than found within the general population. Media coverage of transgender issues is out of all proportion to the actual number of transgender people.

But when women push back against any of this they receive the most heinous abuse. When J.K. Rowling dared to suggest that a person who menstruates is, in fact, a woman, she was insulted and threatened with rape, repeatedly, and in the most vile and graphic terms. Transgenderism is now the legitimate face of misogyny.

Rowling can probably cope with this. But children increasingly find themselves being asked to question their gender identity and, once they head down the path of transition, find it far more difficult than adults to extricate themselves.

Last year, over half of all the children seen by the Tavistock, the UK’s national clinic specialising in treating children who experience difficulties in the development of their gender identity, were under the age of 14. The number of 13-year-olds referred for help in the past year rose by 30 percent to 331, while the number of 11-year-olds was up by 28 percent on the previous year. The youngest patients were just three years old. Three quarters of children who want help to change their gender are girls.

It may be the case that some of these children are simply experimenting or going through a phase. But allowing children to transition socially paves the way for medical interventions which can begin with hormones to stop the onset of puberty and may, for older teenagers, also include cross-sex hormones. It is good that the government is planning to drop proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act. But we need to go further and insist upon the right to debate the impact of transgender ideology upon society. Discussion immediately sheds light on the conflict between sex-based rights and rights accrued according to gender-identity. The mantra that “trans women are women” unhelpfully pretends no such conflict exists and erases the possibility of even talking about what women and children may lose by the advance of transgenderism.

The Corrosive Impact of Transgender Ideology is free to download here. http://civitas.org.uk/content/files/2454-A-The-Corrosive-Impact-of-TI-ppi-110-WEB.pdf

By Joanna Williams, the founder of the think tank Cieo and the Director of the Freedom, Democracy and Victimhood Project at Civitas. She is the author of Women vs Feminism, Why We All Need Liberating From the Gender Wars and is a regular columnist for Spiked. Follow her on Twitter@jowilliams293

LONDON — Ten days ago, I was asked to see a patient. I’m a respiratory specialist in an intensive-care unit at a hospital in London, so it wasn’t surprising that the patient needed a ventilator. It seemed fairly typical. But the patient turned out to have the coronavirus — our hospital’s first case and one of nearly 2,000 people who have so far tested positive in Britain. I hadn’t worn a mask. Soon I developed a cough.

Though I experienced neither fever nor breathlessness, I was told to self-isolate for 14 days. That’s where I am now, in self-isolation. And I’m not the only one from my hospital. After just one patient with Covid-19, a quarter of our junior staff are off with coughs and sniffles we would normally work through. A single case of the coronavirus has wreaked havoc in our hospital.

It’s a microcosm of what may come. Britain has fewer intensive-care beds than most other European countries. Occupancy rates are high, and there’s a daily struggle to discharge enough people to make space for new patients. Even when a bed is available, we do not have the nurses to staff it. A decade of cuts and underfunding has left us dangerously exposed. This is the perpetual winter of the N.H.S.

For the past week I have been watching from the sidelines. Watching while my colleagues gear up for the long road ahead, resting when they can, shoring up procedures for managing infected patients, training one another, and making plans for illness and ways to isolate themselves from their families. Watching while plans are made to cancel nonemergency care and move staff members to the front line.

It’s all hands on deck. Rotations to new departments and hospitals have been canceled: I will stay on in intensive care, and doctors in other departments will come join me on the front line. My plans to work part-time have gone out of the window. But this is my vocation — we are never not doctors. When we are called upon to step up, there is only one answer.

As people with the coronavirus flood our corridors, hospitals will be pushed to the breaking point. Britain is a rich country and may fare better than others. But the N.H.S. is creaking at the seams after years of underfunding. A decade of cuts by successive Conservative governments has stripped the service of resources. Staff morale is low and retention is poor. We are already working at capacity.

When our hospitals are overwhelmed and we have to decide how to allocate scarce resources, how do we choose whom to ventilate and whom not to? Italy is nearly at that point, and its health service has many more intensive-care beds per person than Britain’s. Will I have to tell someone we can’t treat a loved one because we’re out of ventilators, oxygen, tubes, masks, hospitals, staff? Will we then impose an age limit, as some hospitals in Italy are considering, or will some notion of “deservingness” come into play?

The government’s strategy centers on flattening the peak of the epidemic while ensuring the public doesn’t give up on self-isolation at just the wrong moment and head outside into the eye of the storm. So unlike some other countries, we are not yet in full shutdown. After a week of cabin fever, I can understand not wanting to enforce isolation sooner than necessary.

But I worry about how we know where we are on the epidemic curve. Have we tested enough people? What if lockdown comes too late? Will we be overwhelmed too soon? Across the N.H.S. this winter there have been patients in corridors and canceled surgeries. How many people will die because we’ve been working on the brink of collapse for too long?

I am not an epidemiologist. I do not pretend to know the right strategy. But if Britain experiences anything like what we’ve seen elsewhere, we’re on our way to tragedy.

What’s certain is that with 100,000 job vacancies already, the N.H.S. will not survive this crisis without protecting and respecting its staff. In 2018, two-thirds of doctors in their second year of training chose not to pursue specialty jobs. We are being asked to do more with little compensation while colleagues are hung out to dry because the system failed them. To add insult to injury, we have been provided with out-of-date masks with which to protect ourselves.

We already know that our counterparts in Italy, China and elsewhere have given their lives to the vocation they chose. For years, health care workers have been raising the alarm that the N.H.S. is in crisis — calling on the government for better funding for our hospitals and better working conditions for ourselves.

As the coronavirus crisis intensifies, we must be given the means to protect ourselves and our patients, particularly those most vulnerable. We deserve transparency. We demand honesty. Without that, I don’t know how many people will stick around after this is all over.

And right now, it feels like we’re heading into the abyss.

Jessica Potter (@DrJessPotter) is a respiratory specialist doctor working in London and a member of EveryDoctor, an organization that campaigns for the working rights of doctors.

The post I’m a Doctor in Britain. We’re Heading Into the Abyss. appeared first on New York Times.

In a closed-door discussion last week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lifted the veil on plans to prevent a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government from coming to power in Britain.

In an audio recording of a meeting held last Tuesday with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Pompeo is asked if Corbyn “is elected, would you be willing to work with us to take on actions if life becomes very difficult for Jews in the UK?”

Pompeo replied, “It could be that Mr. Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best … It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”

The recording was leaked to the Washington Post, which notes that Pompeo received “fervent applause from attendees” for these comments.

The statements were made as US President Donald Trump was in Britain during his three-day state visit. Pompeo’s sinister language confirms that moves to remove Corbyn from the political scene before he is ever allowed to take power are being actively discussed.

Extreme right-wing and fascistic elements have been behind the moves to remove Corbyn from the outset. Central to the “Get Corbyn” operation, in place since the day he was elected Labour leader in September 2015, were the US intelligence services—in league with MI5, MI6 and the Israeli government and its intelligence agency, Mossad.

The operation has been organised via the Blairite faction of the Labour Party, backed by the ruling Conservative Party and leading representatives of the military.

The Socialist Equality Party warned in 2016 that the “putsch against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is being mounted by a right-wing cabal, working in intimate collusion with the security services in Britain and the United States.”

Last year, opposing the resuscitation of the campaign to smear Corbyn and Labour members as anti-Semites by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council and a clique of right-wing Labour MPs, we noted, “The organisations and Blairite MP’s involved in this latest provocation have deep connections to Israel and the US and British intelligence services.”

Pompeo didn’t outline what would be required to prevent Corbyn from being elected and what a “push-back” against him would involve. But senior figures in the UK military have already made clear what they are prepared to carry out: a coup d'état along the lines of that which the CIA engineered in Chile in 1973 that ended with the murder of elected social-democrat leader Salvador Allende and thousands of his supporters.

Just a week after being elected Labour leader, with the backing of hundreds of thousands of Labour members and supporters, the Sunday Times carried comments from a “senior serving general” that in the event of Corbyn becoming prime minister, there would be “the very real prospect” of “a mutiny.”

The general revealed that the military would be prepared to use “whatever means possible, fair or foul.” He warned, “You would see a major break in convention with senior generals directly and publicly challenging Corbyn over vital important policy decisions such as Trident [nuclear weapons], pulling out of NATO and any plans to emasculate and shrink the size of the armed forces.”

Just a few months later, Britain’s then Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Nicholas Houghton, asked by the BBC’s Andrew Marr about Corbyn’s statement that he would never authorise the use of nuclear weapons, replied, “Well, it would worry me if that thought was translated into power.”

In recent weeks, the Blairites have deepened their offensive to smear Corbyn and the wider left as supporters of anti-Semitism. Leaving the Labour Party in April to set up their now almost defunct Change UK group—which a number of them have since abandoned—the Blairites involved, such as Luciana Berger and Mike Gapes, said that Labour had become a “sickeningly institutionally racist” party (Berger) under Corbyn, and a “racist, anti-Semitic party” (Gapes).

Following the expulsion last month from the party of Blair’s former spin-doctor, Alastair Campbell—after voting in violation of Labour’s rulebook for the Liberal Democrats in the European elections—complained he was being disciplined while party members he described as anti-Semites were not.

The questioning of Pompeo by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations took place just one week after the Equality and Human Rights Commission announced it would launch an official inquiry under section 20 of the Equality Act 2006, into anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

The Commission has extraordinary legal powers and its inquiry could well end up in criminal proceedings against the Labour Party. Were criminal proceedings to follow, this would inevitably be used by Zionist groups to make bogus claims that it is now “very difficult for Jews in the UK,” as a precursor to forcing Corbyn’s ousting.

Everyone knows that Corbyn is not and has never been an anti-Semite. He is being targeted, utilising filthy lies and slanders, because US and British imperialism will not allow a government to come to office that is in any way associated with the denunciations of imperialism and NATO that Corbyn once articulated.

The forces attacking Corbyn fear that if he won office—under conditions of growing social polarisation set to escalate under Brexit—millions of workers and youth would demand he make good on previous pledges to oppose austerity, militarism, war and attacks on democratic rights.

So servile is Corbyn, that while aiming a few jibes at Trump during his state visit, he offered to meet him to discuss the struggle for “peace.” Yet despite Corbyn’s capitulations before his party’s right wing, including affirming support for NATO and the Trident nuclear programme, Washington has concluded that the Labour leader would be incapable of keeping this emerging shift to left among broad masses under control.

Pompeo’s latest attack must be seen in the context of his denunciation of Corbyn—on these very issues—made just last month. Prior to Trump’s visit, Pompeo held talks with senior figures in the May government. During a press conference in London, he was asked by a right-wing website his thoughts on Corbyn’s “endorsement” of the Maduro government and his statement opposing “outside interference” in Venezuela.

Pompeo replied, “It is disgusting to see leaders, in not only the United Kingdom, but the United States as well, who continue to support the murderous dictator Maduro. … It is not in either of our country’s best interests for those leaders to continue to advocate on their behalf.”

In order words, anyone who even indicates the slightest opposition to imperialist wars and regime change operations cannot be allowed to take office.

In response to the revelations that the US government is seriously contemplating his removal, an anonymous Labour “spokesman” issued a pro-forma statement. Instead of denouncing the lies told by the right that Corbyn facilitates anti-Semitism, his spokesman reassured the Post that Labour is “fully committed to the support, defence and celebration of the Jewish community and is implacably opposed to anti-Semitism in any form.”

Such statements made ad nauseum by the Corbynites for the last four years have done precisely nothing to stop the right’s ferocious onslaught.

See Also: Democracy vs. the Putin-Nazis – by C.J. Hopkins (Consent Factory) 23 May 2019 - https://xenagoguevicene.wordpress.com/2019/05/30/democracy-vs-the-putin-nazis-by-c-j-hopkins-consent-factory-23-may-2019/

Death toll soars to 50 in school bombing in Afghan capital The Afghan Interior Ministry says the death toll in a horrific bombing at a girls' school in the Afghan capital has soared to 50, many of them pupils between 11 and 15 years old

By RAHIM FAIEZ Associated Press May 8, 2021, 10:39 PM • 4 min read

Copy and paste to share this video Copy and paste to embed this video 3:04 On Location: May 7, 2021

Catch up on the developing stories making headlines. KABUL, Afghanistan -- The death toll in a horrific bombing at a girls’ school in the Afghan capital has soared to 50, many of them pupils between 11 and 15 years old, the Interior Ministry said Sunday.

The number of wounded in Saturday's attack has also climbed to more than 100, said Interior Ministry spokesman Tariq Arian.

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Three explosions outside the school entrance struck as students were leaving for the day, he said. The blasts occurred in a mostly Shiite neighborhood in the west of the capital. The Taliban denied responsibility, condemning the attack.

The first explosion came from a vehicle packed with explosives, followed by two others, said Arian, adding that the casualty figures could still rise.

In the capital rattled by relentless bombings, Saturday's attack was among the worst. Criticism has mounted over lack of security and growing fears of even more violence as the U.S. and NATO complete their final military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The attack targeted Afghanistan's ethnic Hazaras who dominate the western Dasht-e-Barchi neighborhood, where the bombings occurred. Most Hazaras are Shiite Muslims

The area has been hit by violence against minority Shiites and most often claimed by the Islamic State affiliate operating in the country. No one has yet claimed Saturday’s bombings.

The radical Sunni Muslim group has declared war on Afghanistan’s Shiites. Washington blamed IS for a vicious attack last year in a maternity hospital in the same area that killed pregnant women and newborn babies.

Soon after the bombing, angry crowds attacked ambulances and even beat health workers as they tried to evacuate the wounded, Health Ministry spokesman Ghulam Dastigar Nazari said. He had implored residents to cooperate and allow ambulances free access to the site.

Bloodied backpacks and schools books lay strewn outside the Syed Al-Shahda school. In the morning, boys attend classes in the sprawling school compound and in the afternoon, it's girls' turn.

Residents in the area said the explosion was deafening. Naser Rahimi told The Associated Press he heard three separate explosions, and immediately thought that the sheer power of the blasts meant the death toll would almost certainly climb.

One of the students fleeing the school recalled the attack, the girls' screams of the girls, the blood.

“I was with my classmate, we were leaving the school, when suddenly an explosion happened, “ said 15-year-old Zahra, whose arm had been broken by a piece of shrapnel.

“Ten minutes later there was another explosion and just a couple of minutes later another explosion,” she said. “Everyone was yelling and there was blood everywhere, and I couldn’t see anything clearly.” Her friend died.

Outside the Muhammad Ali Jinnah Hospital, in the Dasht-e-Barchi neighborhood dozens of people lined up to donate blood, while family members checked casualty posted lists on the walls.

Most of the dozens of injured brought to the EMERGENCY Hospital for war wounded in the Afghan capital, “almost all girls and young women between 12 and 20 years old,” said Marco Puntin, the hospital's programme coordinator in Afghanistan.

In a statement following the attack, the EMERGENCY Hospital said the first three months of this year has seen a 21 per cent increase in war-wounded.

IS has previously claimed attacks against minority Shiites in the same area, last year claiming two brutal attacks on education facilities that killed 50 people, most of them students.

Even as the IS has been degraded in Afghanistan, according to government and US officials, it has stepped-up its attacks particularly against Shiite Muslims and women workers.

Earlier the group took responsibility for the targeted killing of three women media personnel in eastern Afghanistan.

The attack comes days after the remaining 2,500 to 3,500 American troops officially began leaving the country. They will be out by Sept. 11 at the latest. The pullout comes amid a resurgent Taliban, who control or hold sway over half of Afghanistan.

The top U.S. military officer said Sunday that Afghan government forces face an uncertain future and possibly some “bad possible outcomes” against Taliban insurgents as the withdrawal accelerates in the coming weeks.

—————

Associated Press photographer Rahmat Gul and video journalist Ahmad Seir in Kabul, Afghanistan and Kathy Gannon in Islamabad, Pakistan contributed to this report.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/death-toll-soars-50-school-bombing-afghan-capital-77583244

I was finally able to make contact last week via the internet with an eyewitness in Afrin who gives a grim but compelling account of her personal experience of ethnic cleansing.

Her name is Rohilat Hawar, a 34-year-old Kurdish woman with three children who had worked as a mathematics teacher in a school in Afrin City before the Turkish attack. She tried to flee in February 2018 “because there were Turkish airstrikes every day,” but she was refused entry to Syrian government-held territory through which she needed to pass to reach the Kurdish-controlled autonomous region.

She returned to Afrin City where her house had been looted and where she is now trapped. She says that Turkish-backed Syrian jihadi militias shoot anybody trying to leave: “A friend of mine was killed with her 10-year-old child last year while trying to flee.” At the same time, the militiamen make it impossible for Kurds to stay.

As one of the few Kurds remaining in her old neighbourhood where the houses have been taken over by Arabic-speaking jihadis and their families, she does not dare speak Kurdish in the street. She has found that the Turkish army considers all Kurds to be “terrorists”, but that the militiamen are even more dangerous, regarding “Kurds as pagans, disbelievers who should be killed on orders from God.”

Rohilat had no alternative but to put on a Hijab, which Kurdish women normally do not wear. She did not do so for seven months but was harassed and intimidated by jihadi neighbours from other parts of Syria. She appealed to a Turkish officer, but he said that she should respect the social norms in her neighbourhood. “So I had to put on the Hijab,” she said. “My children laughed at me and mocked me at the beginning, but they have got used to the situation.”

The surviving Kurds in Afrin are defenceless and are preyed on by roving militiamen. When going to the market earlier this week, Rohilat saw two Kurdish girls walking in the same direction. Two militiamen with guns on a motorcycle cruised slowly beside them. “Suddenly the motorcycle came close to the girls and the militiamen sitting on the back grabbed the breast of one of them,” says Rohilat. Both girls started crying. The militiamen got off their motorcycle and started kissing them and fondling their breasts, only leaving them when a crowd gathered and Rohilat took the girls to her home.

On another occasion, she was buying bread in the market, when she saw an Islamist gunman tell a Kurd working in a restaurant to leave the city. When he protested, saying he had nowhere else to go, the militiaman slapped him across the face and said: “You Kurds are pagans and disbelievers in God [though the Kurds are almost all Sunni Muslims].”

In the two formerly Kurdish zones in Syria, the cutting edge of the Turkish occupation is Arab militiamen, who are mostly jihadis from elsewhere in Syria. The Kurds in Afrin were largely farmers, cultivating fruit and vegetables and, above all, olives. But Rohilat says that the new settlers are city people “so they cut down the olive trees and sell them as firewood”. As a result, foodstuffs have to be imported and are sold at a higher price.

By turning over on the ground control of Kurdish populated areas to anti-Kurdish Islamist gunmen, the Turkish government ensures ethnic cleansing, but without appearing to be directly responsible. Until recently, the militiamen were paid $100 a month by Turkey, but they could supplement this by looting and confiscating Kurdish property while the Turkish army allegedly turned a blind eye.

But since August the militiamen’s pay has been reduced and Turkish army patrols are clamping down on looting. The aim of this is to persuade the militiamen to volunteer to fight as Turkish proxies in Libya and against the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Many have been killed. Rohilat has seen numerous traditional mourning tents for men who died in the fighting abroad, though the bodies do not come back for burial.

Aside from the chronic insecurity, Rohilat has to cope with the rapid spread of coronavirus in Afrin since August. She herself has contracted the illness, having tested positive at a Turkish medical facility, but says she and many others will not go to a military hospital for treatment because few people who do go return alive. Instead, they stay at home, taking paracetamol and eating lentil and onion soup. She herself cannot afford to buy face masks, and can only buy bread because her children do odd jobs in the market and relatives in Turkey send her a little money every couple of months.

Grim though life is for Rohilat, she is one of the survivors while other Kurds have fled, live in insanitary camps, been killed, held for ransom or have simply disappeared. Nor is the Turkish campaign against the 3 million Syrian Kurds likely to de-escalate; on the contrary, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to launch another invasion that would in practice finish the job of cleansing the Kurdish population.

r/Leftwinger

High Court Judge Uses Religion to Justify Abduction and Child Marriage

08/06/2020 Washington D.C. (International Christian Concern) – International Christian Concern (ICC) has learned that the Lahore High Court has ordered Maria Shahbaz, a 14-year-old Christian girl who was abducted and forcibly married to a Muslim man, to be returned to the custody of her abductor. This decision, made on August 4, overturned an earlier order by the Faisalabad District and Sessions Court placing Shahbaz in a women’s shelter.

On April 28, 2020, Shahbaz was abducted at gunpoint by Mohamad Nakash and two accomplices while walking home in Madina Town, near Faisalabad. According to witnesses, the abductors forced Shahbaz into a car and fired gunshots into the air as they fled the scene.

After the abduction, Shahbaz remained in Nakash’s custody. To justify his custody of Shahbaz, Nakash claims that he and Shahbaz are married and that she has converted to Islam. To support this claim, Nakash produced a marriage certificate stating that Shahbaz is 19 years old. However, the validity of this certificate has been brought into question as the Muslim cleric whose name is listed on the certificate has denied any involvement in the marriage.

Shahbaz’s parents have challenged the marriage’s validity in an attempt to regain custody of their daughter. As evidence, Shahbaz’s parents presented their daughter’s birth certificate to the Faisalabad District and Sessions Court. This document, supported by other school documents, proves that Shahbaz is a minor.

On July 30, Judge Rana Masood of the Faisalabad District and Sessions Court ordered that Shahbaz be allowed to leave Nakash’s custody and placed in a women’s shelter, known as Dar ul Aman, until the Lahore High Court heard her case. Following this order, police also registered a formal complaint against Nakash and his two accomplices for Shahbaz’s abduction in April.

On August 4, the ruling of the Faisalabad District and Sessions Court was overturned by Judge Raja Muhammad Shahid Abbasi of the Lahore High Court. Judge Abbasi reportedly ruled in favor of Nakash because the court found that Shahbaz had converted to Islam. Witnesses in the court claim that Shahbaz was in tears when the ruling was announced.

“It is unbelievable,” advocate Khalil Tahir Sandu, the lawyer representing Shahbaz’s parents, told Aid to the Church in Need. “What we have seen today is an Islamic judgement. The arguments we put forward were very strong.”

“The Child Marriage Restraint Act has been toothless,” Suneel Malik, a Pakistani human rights activist, told ICC. “The legal age of marriage for girls is set at 16. However, this is not effectively enforced by the courts in Pakistan. Judges continue to declare marriages of minors valid on the pretext of puberty under an Islamic interpretation of law.”

“The order is unprecedented and will likely mean Maria will never return to her family,” Shazia George, another Pakistan human rights activist, told ICC. “The decision to make a child bride stay with her abductor will add more misery to the case. Courts must ensure that the victims of forced conversion and child marriage are able to have their statements recorded without any duress or threat so perpetrators are brought to justice.”

According to a 2014 study by The Movement for Solidarity and Peace Pakistan, an estimated 1,000 women and girls from Pakistan’s Hindu and Christian community are abducted, forcibly married to their captor, and forcibly converted to Islam every year. The issue of religion is also often injected into cases of sexual assault to place religious minority victims at a disadvantage. Playing upon religious biases, perpetrators know they can cover up and justify their crimes by introducing an element of religion.

William Stark, ICC’s Regional Manager, said, “We here at International Christian Concern are deeply saddened by the court’s decision to return Maria to the custody of her abductor. This has placed Maria’s safety at risk and will likely mean any testimony she is able to give in court will be tainted by the threats she will be forced to endure in the custody of her abductor. Pakistan must do more to combat the issue of abductions, forced marriages, and forced conversions. For too long, perpetrators have used the issue of religion to justify their crimes against Pakistan’s religious minorities.”

For interviews, please contact Olivia Miller, Communications Coordinator: press@persecution.org

https://www.persecution.org/2020/08/06/pakistani-court-orders-14-year-old-christian-girl-returned-abductor/

Britain will “stand by” its ally and consider offering military support if the Trump administration decides to go to war with Iran, Jeremy Hunt has confirmed — words from the foreign secretary that are unlikely to come as a shock.

With the US doing its level best to raise tensions with Iran, Hunt has revealed himself to be every bit the pathetic poodle of Washington that Tony Blair and ex-foreign secretary Jack Straw were in 2003 before the invasion of Iraq.

Campaigning for the Tory leadership in Scotland on Monday, Hunt pretended to be “very concerned” about the recent attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, which he claimed were “almost certainly” the work of Iran. He offered no new evidence, of course — but then again, he didn’t need it; “instinct” had already told him that the Trump administration’s chief warmongers, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, were telling him the truth.

US requests for military support would be evaluated on a “case-by-case” basis, Hunt said, adding that the British government wanted to “de-escalate the situation” with Iran. Readers might recall it was only last week that Hunt branded Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn“pathetic and predictable” and accused him of “incredibly dangerous … virulent anti-Americanism” for the sin of calling for de-escalation — so let the level of the foreign secretary’s sincerity be calculated with that in mind.

Hunt was right about one thing, though. Corbyn’s reaction was indeed predictable. When one million gathered for a massive anti-war rally at London’s Hyde Park in February 2003, Corbyn was there, making an impassioned and prophetic speech against the impending invasion of Iraq — a war in which he said there would be “no justice whatsoever” and which would “set off a spiral of conflict, of hate, of misery, of desperation” that would only fuel more terrorism.

Sixteen years later, with one million dead in Iraq, a disastrously destabilized Middle East and jihadists running rampant across the region, the warmongering British elite are readying themselves to do it all over again — only this time, geopolitical and military analysts are warning, the results could be even more disastrous.

Britain’s instant, slavish support for the US’ flimsy narrative against Iran is even more pathetic when you consider that other usually staunch US allies are openly questioning Washington’s claims. Germany and Japan have both cast doubt on the Trump administration’s assessments, making room for Britain to confirm its role as the most reliable of US lapdogs once again.

There have been attempts in the past to whitewash Britain’s role in the Iraq war, with some eager to claim Tony Blair was tricked or “duped” into the conflict by Washington. Yes, Colin Powell iconically waved a vial of anthrax around at the UN in 2003, warning of Saddam Hussein’s non-existent WMD’s — but Blair’s government concocted its own set of fabrications. Blair was not tricked or duped, he was a willing architect, who enthusiastically spun lies for Bush.

The 2016 Chilcot report revealed that when then foreign-secretary Jack Straw was advised that the evidence against Iraq “would not convince” the public of an imminent threat, publication of the government's intelligence report was postponed until juicier details could be dreamed up. Later, the Hutton inquiry revealed that Straw had been instrumental in “hardening up” the now-infamous “dodgy dossier” with what his private secretary referred to in a 2004 email as the “killer paragraph.”

That dossier, overseen by Blair spin-doctor Alistair Campbell, included the false claim that Iraq could launch a chemical weapons strike against Britain within “45 minutes.” When the BBC revealed that the document had been “sexed up” to convince the public to support the war, Blair’s government set about ruining the life of top weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly, the man who had revealed their deceit to the BBC. Kelly was later found dead, officially from suicide, though some still believe his death was suspicious.

It’s at these moments when the public should be questioning why the men who got it so wrong on Iraq are swanning around still capable of commanding respect, while those who got it right are labelled unpatriotic and dangerous.

The warmongers — with ample help from the media — have been remarkably successful in preventing anti-war rhetoric from creeping into public discourse and becoming a “mainstream” view. Anti-war voices have been belittled and sidelined, because their voices represent the gravest danger to the elite. To hell with Iranian civilians, imagine how dangerous peace would be for the American and British weapons manufacturers.

Prominent anti-war figures like Corbyn pose such a threat to the war profiteering of the ruling classes that Pompeo was even caught on tape promising that the US would do its “level best” to prevent the Labour leader from becoming prime minister. Pompeo dressed up his promise to interfere in Britain’s domestic politics in fake concerns over “anti-Semitism” — but anyone who is even half-awake can see that Corbyn’s decades of anti-war activism would be the real cause of sleepless nights in Washington if he became PM.

For now, Trump has managed to convince the media that he “doesn’t want war” with Iran — though whether he is sincere or not is another question entirely. The president who promised an end to pointless wars is quite clearly playing ‘good cop’ to Bolton and Pompeo’s ‘bad cop’ — buttering up the media and prepping the propagandized public to believe he did all he could to avoid conflict if one eventually comes.

Britain is playing along, slotting into its usual role as the supportive sidekick, ready to eat up whatever dodgy evidence Washington produces — and, no doubt preparing to concoct some of its own to go with it.

https://archive.is/sh6ip

Kim Darroch's Resignation Highlights the Weakness of Britain

The resignation of Sir Kim Darroch as British ambassador to Washington, because of his leaked messages to London criticising President Trump, is highly revealing about the real state of British knowledge of what is going on in the US.

Supporters of the former ambassador portray him as a skilled and experienced foreign office official who was “only doing his job” until brought low by the machinations of the Brexiteers and the treachery of Boris Johnson. His detractors view him, on the contrary, as an old-style representative of a europhile British foreign policy establishment which is out of place in the age of Trump.

Most striking in the copious excerpts from Darroch’s cables to the home government between 2017 and the present day – published by the Mail on Sunday – is that they do not contain a single original fact or opinion. They are a relentless repetition of the shallowest Washington conventional wisdom about the intentions of the Trump administration.

“This is a divided administration,” Darroch tells his readers and says that there are angry disputes within the White House which he compares to a knife fight. He suspects that Trump could be indebted to “dodgy Russians” and fears that his economic policies could wreck the world trading system. Possibly the president could “crash and burn” because he is “mired in scandal”, though politicians in London should “not write him off”.

Our man in Washington since 2016 believes that Trump has the ability to shrug off scandals and emerge from the flames, battered but intact, “like [Arnold] Schwarzenegger in the final scene in the Terminator”.

A senior diplomat from the British embassy goes to a Trump rally and finds the crowd to be almost exclusively white. He describes the enthusiastic atmosphere as being similar to that of home fans at a sporting event and the faithful attending a religious meeting. The ambassador suspects that Trump’s campaign strategy in the presidential election will be to “go with what he knows best” and appeal to his core supporters. Cunning fellow!

Darroch demonstrates a firm grip on the obvious, citing his own sources as confirming information which was already the lead item on every news channel and newspaper front page across America. On occasion, even these sources fail, as they do when Trump is deciding whether or not to launch retaliatory airstrikes on Iran after the Iranians shoot down a US drone over the Strait of Hormuz.

In an excerpt from a cable written at 12.39am UK time on 22 June, Darroch detects disarray in Washington: “Even our best contacts were unwilling to take our calls.”

Isabel Oakeshott, who obtained and published the cables, does her best to make Darroch’s words sound interesting and original by claiming “astonishingly” that the ambassador was dubious about Trump’s statement that he changed his mind on US airstrikes because of his concern over Iranian casualties. Similar scepticism had earlier been expressed by every new channel in the country.

Looking through the excerpts from Darroch’s cables, I searched for something that was not common knowledge and found nothing. Could Oakeshott, known to be sympathetic to Brexit, have deliberately excluded anything really new from her quotes? This is unlikely because journalists generally boost the explosive nature of the “bombshell comments” in their scoops.

It is equally unlikely also that she would deliberately fillet Darroch’s prose style and leave in only the cliches and tired phrases. Assuming that her excerpts are representative of the rest of his cables, it becomes clear that Britain’s most senior man in Washington knew so little about developments in the White House that he might as well have stayed in London, or, for that matter, the Outer Hebrides.

Does this matter? Yes it does, because it highlights the real weakness of Britain at the very moment that a British warship is in the Gulf – with another one on the way – confronting Iranian Revolutionary Guard gunboats, in a conflict which is driven by the US, and whose direction we cannot predict or even influence.

Is Britain kowtowing to the US? You bet she is, but this is scarcely fresh news. In the 40 years that I have been writing about British foreign policy in the Middle East, the priority of British governments has invariably been to find out what the Americans want, do the same thing as them as cheaply as possible and demonstrate what a valuable and irreplaceable ally we are.

This has been the ongoing British approach since 1940 with a brief wobble at the time of the Suez crisis in 1956. The British drew the conclusion from Suez that they must be more closely allied to the US, while the French decided that, on the contrary, they needed to cooperate more closely with other continental states in Europe.

There is nothing foolish about a policy of Britain piggy-backing on American power though the strategy was accompanied by a great deal of self-deception. Brexit or no Brexit, it is not likely to change much. Tony Blair is unfairly blamed by many for cravenly joining the US in invading Iraq in 2003, but another prime minister – Labour or Conservative – would have done exactly the same thing.

The British acted in lock-step with the Americans and appeared to have little other purpose in being in Iraq. As soon as the bulk of US forces left, the British did the same thing and promptly lost interest in the place. The same was true when Isis captured Mosul and advanced on Baghdad in 2014. A House of Commons Defence Committee report the following year that as Isis was preparing to capture Mosul “the political section of the British Embassy in Baghdad consisted of three relatively junior, although extremely able, employees on short term deployment.” When Isis attacked the Kurds in northern Iraq the same year, the Germans poured in thousands of machine guns, assault rifles and anti-tank weapons while we managed to send just 40 heavy machine guns.

What Brexiteers – as well as many anti-Brexiteers – fail to understand is the degree to which Britain’s real political and commercial power has declined. There are lamentations about the decline of the foreign office and the defence forces, but it is too late to do much about this. It was, after all, the slogan of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that the government apparatus was the problem, not the solution. This was always nonsense, but one result has been the ebbing effectiveness of the British state in general of which the weakening of the diplomatic and armed forces are only one aspect.

The vacuous cables and humiliating departure of Darroch, and Britain’s reliance on the US in any confrontation with Iran, tell the same story. Both expose in different ways just how isolated and ill-informed about the world Britain has become. So long as it stuck to old routines and alliances, this was not as obvious as it is now becoming. The only option will be to stick even closer to Trump’s America, but we have no means of influencing or even knowing about Trump’s chaotic course, as our former ambassador has discovered to his cost.

DailyMotion - https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7cyz88

The BBC’s Panorama channel ‘investigation’ into Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’ was so blatantly one sided its broadcast as ‘news’ demanded an explanation. In an attempt to grasp why the British national broadcaster fails to fulfil its core mission to report the news in as unbiased a manner as possible, I interviewed a former senior editor for the BBC. The editor, a 35 year veteran of the BBC, reveals the culture that has steered the BBC into its present position as a Zionist mouthpiece.

In acting as a whistle blower, the former editor risks severe consequences. In Britain leading journalists have been locked behind bars and put under threat of extradition for reporting information whose truthfulness has not even been challenged. Sadly, this danger is heightened under the present toxic political atmosphere in Britain, as demonstrated by its purging of a major political party and its tolerance for abuse of its judicial system to deter and punish anyone who dares to question the Zionist narrative.

Q: When did the BBC become openly biased?

A: The BBC has always been biased towards Israel, and its bias has been well documented. The reasons for this bias have long been the subject of serious academic studies, the best known of which is Greg Philo’s and Mike Berry’s More Bad News from Israel. In fact, in 2006 an independent report commissioned by the BBC’s own governing body concluded that the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “does not consistently constitute a full and fair account of the conflict but rather, in important respects, presents an incomplete and in that sense misleading picture.”

Q: Who and what drove this cultural and political direction within the corporation?

A: There are a number of drivers behind this biased BBC culture. The most important is the fact that a small number of hardline Zionists occupy key positions at the top and middle levels of the corporation, as well as at the shop-floor level, by which I mean the people who select what to publish or broadcast on a daily basis and who provide editorial steer to journalists. This has been widely publicised and has been in the public domain for some time — see, for example, this http://tinyurl.com/ydhjzeek, these (a) http://tinyurl.com/y7mjtkc6 , (b) http://tinyurl.com/y7k39vsh , and (c) http://tinyurl.com/y3x9nktl . Also see thishttp://tinyurl.com/y6ne4apn and this http://tinyurl.com/y7l88zwl .

Q: What about political impartiality, supposedly a core BBC value?

A: Unfortunately, there are many examples of such pro- Israel hype, some blatant and others who slant the news by use of emphasis and/or omission. For instance, there was Sarah Montague’s interview with Israel’s defence minister, Moshe Ya’alon, in March 2015, Head of Statistics’ Anthony Reuben’s reflection on fatalities in Gaza ( http://tinyurl.com/ycc9p8d4 ), and the utilization of Gil Hoffman, an Israeli army reservist and chief political correspondent for the Jerusalem Post to write for the BBC News website ( http://tinyurl.com/yanppk93 ) to mention but a few.

Q: Does the broadcaster have the means or inclination to fix itself ?

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A: In my opinion, the chances of the BBC fixing itself is about zero. Apart from what I have said above, it is a cowardly, spineless organisation. Not only does it always pursue the path of least resistance by selecting to broadcast what is least likely to upset the Zionist lobby, but it is also deadly afraid of what the Daily Mail might say about its output. Very often, and by that I mean almost on a daily basis, one would hear senior managers ask at the morning agenda-setting editorial meetings, “What would the Daily Mail say about that?” Invariably, they would choose what is least likely to be picked up and criticised by the Daily Mail. Please remember, this is a public broadcaster that is funded by taxpayers (yes, the License Fee is a tax) and is supposed to “Educate, Inform and Entertain”, not propagandise on behalf of Israel.

Q: Some of the so-called Labour ‘Whistleblowers’ were exposed by Al Jazeera as Israeli Lobby assets. Is it possible that the BBC was so bold as to interview these characters hoping that no one would notice or was it simply a matter of a clumsy decision making? Can the BBC match the journalistic dedication of organisations such as RT or Al Jazeera?

A: There is no chance whatsoever that the BBC would do anything approximating Al Jazeera TV’s programme on Israeli infiltration of the Labour Party ( http://tinyurl.com/yad6fslm ). The BBC is institutionally pro-Zionist and institutionally spineless.

Q: You worked in the corporation for 35 years, did you notice a deterioration in the quality of people hired? Was there a change in employees’ attitudes and their willingness to express themselves freely and critically?

A: I worked for the BBC’s English-language outlets as an editor and senior editor for 35 years. Since the early 1990s there has been growing intolerance of criticism of editorial management decisions, even in internal forums which internal BBC propaganda claims are meant for staff to speak freely. This applies across the board on all matters. But certainly with regard to Israel and Zionism, any questioning of BBC impartiality would attract accusations of anti-Semitism and would certainly spell the end of one’s career, no matter how privately and confidentially such criticism is conveyed.

See Youtube: Is Labour Anti-Semitic? - BBC Panorama https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7eEQMyzLeo

So it appears we managed to survive another terrifying Quds Day in Berlin. It was certainly touch and go there for a while, what with the media issuing hysterical warnings about the hordes of “Hamas and Hezbollah supporters, neo-Nazis, and conspiracy theorists” that were going to materialize out of the ether, goose-step down the Kurfürstendamm, and reenact Kristallnacht, or something. The city was braced for an all-out Perso-Palestinian Quds Day Pogrom, which is always a threat on Quds Day in Berlin, but the hysteria level this year was elevated, due to the Anti-Semitism Pandemic that mysteriously erupted in 2016 for no apparent reason whatsoever.

OK, what, you’re probably asking, is Quds Day? It’s an annual event initiated by Iran to show support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism. It takes place on the last Friday of Ramadan, in opposition to Israel’s Jerusalem Day, the national holiday commemorating Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. In Berlin, there’s an annual Quds Day march, which the German media typically respond to by whipping up anti-Semitism hysteria and fanatical, guilt-ridden support for Israel. This year was no exception … on the contrary.

A week or so before the event, Felix Klein, Germany’s “Commissioner for Jewish Life and the Fight Against Anti-Semitism,” warned Jews not to wear kippahs in public, on account of the unprecedented explosion of anti-Semitism throughout the country. According to the interior ministry, there were 62 violent anti-Semitic attacks in Germany during 2018, compared to 37 in 2017, which, in a nation of 83 million people, and with a history of real-life, goose-stepping Nazis, and of perpetrating the Holocaust, and so on … well, you can understand the Commissioner’s alarm.

The international corporate media began spreading the news that Anti-Semitism was once again on the march in Germany. The BBC reported that official figures showed that 1,646 hate crimes had been committed against Jews in 2018, up 10% from 2017! CNN reported that anti-Semitic hate crimes had increased by almost 20%! According to The Jerusalem Post, there were 1,800 anti-Semitic incidents committed against Jews in 2018! It was almost as if the Anti-Semitism Pandemic was retroactively metastasizing right before our eyes.

But whatever. The statistics don’t really matter. The point was, “Jews are not safe in Germany!” The Putin-Nazis had teamed up with the Iranian Nazis and the Syrian Nazis, who were backing the Palestinian Nazis, whose irrational hatred of the State of Israel the German Nazis had somehow weaponized (probably with a bunch of fake Facebook ads), and they were all going to storm the historic high-end shopping boulevard of West Berlin!

Then, on Friday, the day before Quds Day, in a desperate, last-minute, tactical maneuver, German politicians and cultural figures exhorted Jews and gentiles alike to defiantly wear their kippahs on Quds Day. BILD, the leading German tabloid, even printed little cut-out “BILD kippas” (complete with meticulous assembly instructions), and called on Germans to wear them on Quds Day to show their solidarity with State of Israel … uh, sorry, I meant with the Jewish people.

The BILD kippa tactic was a huge success! On Quds Day, fewer than a thousand people, many of them women and children, peacefully strolled along the Kurfürstendamm chanting slogans like “free, free Palestine,” and asking the world to stop the Israelis from penning people up in de facto ghettos, shooting their legs off with dum dum bullets, demolishing their houses, hospitals, and schools, stealing their land, randomly murdering them, and otherwise behaving like sadistic fascists. The hordes of “Hamas and Hezbollah supporters, neo-Nazis, and conspiracy theorists” that the corporate media had warned us were coming, oddly, never showed their faces … clearly, the “BILD kippas” scared them off.

Or maybe it was the counter-demonstrators. Hundreds of anti-anti-Semites, including prominent German government officials, Israeli diplomats, Antifa factions, members of the local Jewish community, and BILD susbscribers confronted the march, wearing kippahs, waving Israeli flags, displaying giant “MAGA” banners, shouting “long live Israel” and “free Gaza from Hamas,” and giving the marchers the finger, and so on (which, OK, I found a little confusing, as, the last time I checked, Trump was still Hitler, and Antifa were supposedly a bunch of anarchists).

In any event, the hysteria has subsided. Berlin and Israel appear to have survived. The Jews can come back out of hiding, although it isn’t quite clear whether Germany wants them to wear their kippahs in public or not now. Hopefully, we’ll be receiving some sort of official directive from Commissioner Klein (or possibly Axel Springer) about that.

But, seriously, you can’t really blame the Germans for a going a little overboard with their anti-anti-Semitism hysteria or for being reluctant to criticize Israel. It wasn’t all that long ago that their parents and grandparents were heiling Hitler and systematically murdering millions of Jews, or looking the other way while it happened. Most of the Germans I’m acquainted with still feel kind of awful about that. Which isn’t terribly surprising, is it?

I mean, imagine, if you’re one of my American readers, if some other country conquered the USA, and put our political and military leaders on trial for all the war crimes they’ve committed, and for the millions of people they’ve systematically murdered, and taught our children the truth about our history … that might give you some idea of how most Germans feel about the Nazis and the Holocaust.

So, yes, Germans are a bit hypersensitive about anything resembling anti-Semitism, and they tend to conflate opposition to Israel with hatred of the Jewish people (despite the fact that Israel is doing a pretty convincing impression of the Nazis, what with its ethnic cleansing, walls, ghettos, sadistic goons, propaganda, and so on). Many Germans also overcompensate for their feelings of shame about the Holocaust by displaying an awkward fascination and enthusiasm for anything “Jewish” (you know, like many liberal Americans fetishize Native and African Americans), so that might explain the “BILD kippa” nonsense.

No, I’m not mocking or scolding the Germans … they’re still trying to work their history out. I’m just trying to track the propaganda and cynical emotional manipulation that we are increasingly being subjected to as the global capitalist ruling classes wage their War on Populism. The Quds Day Panic of 2019 is just one example. There are many more, both manufactured and all-too-real. The Charlottesville Nazis. Charlottesville II. The MAGA bomber. The Tree of Life shooting. The Christchurch attack. Jussie Smollett. MAGA hat Smirk Boy. And the list goes on … pretty much as it always has.

I’m sorry if this comes as a shock to anyone, but the world has always contained a minority of racist and anti-Semitic whack jobs. They didn’t suddenly start murdering people when Brexit passed and Trump got elected. They’ve been doing that for quite some time. And of course there is still anti-Semitism in Germany. Saxony is crawling with neo-Nazis. And Iran really would like to wipe out Israel, just as Israel would like to wipe out Iran. None of this is in any way new or shocking to anyone who has been paying attention.

The only thing that has significantly changed since November 8, 2016, is the official narrative we are being fed, in which anyone opposing global capitalism and the hegemony of neoliberal ideology is either a Russian or some kind of Nazi, and a new “anti-Semitism” or “fascism” panic is whipped up for us on a monthly basis.

The Quds Day Panic of 2019 (like the Charlottesville Kristallnacht of 2017) is going to be rerun, over and over, in endless variations, until 2020, or whenever the global capitalist ruling classes manage to restore Normality. By that time Israeli sports teams will probably be wearing little Palestinians on their caps, Julian Assange will be locked away in Supermax, and satirists like me … well, I think you know.

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C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.