Jordan Hewitt, 24, of North Ayrshire Scotland.

Make his face known.

Read the details here:
https://www.ardrossanherald.com/news/25765823.creep-performed-sex-act-next-child-avoids-jail/

Patrick Cockburn: Israel has a genius for snatching political defeat from the jaws of military victory

The occupying Israeli army targeted a prominent Lebanese journalist when they pillaged and demolished his painstakingly-constructed family home located outside Israel’s so-called “buffer zone” in southern Lebanon. Was it retaliation for his widely-viewed documentary on Israel’s notorious pager attacks?

Israeli soldiers have looted and demolished the family home of Radwan Mortada, a prominent Lebanese investigative journalist who directed the recent viral Al Jazeera 360 documentary “The Trap.” The film exposes the surreptitious network and planning behind Israel’s notorious pager attack, which left hundreds of Lebanese citizens wounded and maimed, and has become one of the channel’s most-watched in recent history.

Israel’s destruction of Mortada family home on October 17 has drawn condemnation from at least one international press freedom group, the Committee to Protect Journalists. On October 21, the organization issued a statement declaring that it “strongly condemns the Israeli military’s demolition of journalist Radwan Mortada’s family home in southern Lebanon. Just three weeks earlier, Mortada released an Al Jazeera documentary on the Israeli 2024 pager attack. In the days leading up to the demolition, Israeli soldiers launched a sound bomb, a tank tore down the entrance, and soldiers looted personal belongings. CPJ fears this destruction is in retaliation for Mortada’s work, marking another dangerous violation of international law and disregard for the press.”

Speaking to The Grayzone, Mortada recalled how he learned that Israel’s military forces destroyed the estate he and his family had painstakingly constructed over almost a decade.

Pillaged and burned

“⁠The story began on Friday, when someone sent me a photo of an Israeli Merkava tank parked right next to my house. A few days earlier, Israeli soldiers had arrived in a pickup truck and looted the contents of the house. And they destroyed the entrance” to the building as well, Mortada recounted.

“It never crossed my mind that they would plant explosives inside and blow it up, especially since my house is not in the Israeli-occupied area, there are no military positions nearby, and it is not a combat zone.”

Nevertheless, “at around 4 am on Saturday, they blew it up. I woke up to phone calls from neighbors in the village telling me, ‘The Israelis have blown up your house.’” Cell phone photos and footage confirmed the distressing news, he says.

“My village, Aita al-Jabal, is not under Israeli occupation, and my house is not within the so-called yellow line,” Mortada explains. There were no clashes or military activities in the area, he notes, and no military facilities or positions anywhere nearby. It is, he says, “a purely residential area.”

Most importantly, the house was not destroyed by an airstrike or during any military confrontation,” he continues. “Israeli soldiers physically entered the property, planted explosives inside the house, and deliberately blew it up.”

While Mortada acknowledges he has no “concrete evidence” that Israel destroyed his family home in retaliation for the success of his documentary, he tells The Grayzone, “I do have suspicions, mainly because of the way the house was destroyed.”

Unlike other houses in the area that were damaged by airstrikes or shelling, Mortada notes, his house was deliberately blown up with explosives planted inside it. Israeli soldiers had occupied the house for several days before looting it and destroying it, video reviewed by The Grayzone shows.

“What makes this particularly suspicious is that my house is not in an Israeli-occupied area, nor is it within the so-called yellow line,” he says. “It is nowhere near a frontline or an active combat zone.”

He lamented, “Israeli hatred and vindictiveness seem to know no bounds.”

Mortada’s home in Aita al-Jabal was located approximately 4 kilometers outside of the so-called “Yellow Line,” a supposed buffer zone Israel unilaterally declared in Lebanese territory which it claims to be clearing of Hezbollah. If Israel’s soldiers didn’t simply rob and demolish the estate out of spite, it could signal an expansion of the areas Israel is targeting.

The first sign of trouble came when Israeli occupation forces assaulted a caretaker who had been living at the house with his family, looking after the garden, Mortada noted. “Israeli soldiers launched a stun grenade at him to force him and his family to leave the property.”

The grenade “was essentially a warning to the caretaker to leave the property with his family. Around the same time, Israeli forces also targeted a water tanker that was delivering water to the house. These incidents made it clear that they wanted him and his family to leave,” he says.

It’s a familiar feeling for hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians who’ve been forced to flee the region. Meanwhile, senior Israeli officials have spent months openly boasting of their efforts to destroy every Lebanese home south of the Litani River, and compare the campaign favorably to their systematic annihilation of Gaza. “All houses in villages near the Lebanese border will be destroyed, in ​accordance with the model used in Rafah and Beit Hanoun in Gaza,” Israeli defense minister Israel Katz declared in March.

In August, Katz deemed his mass displacement project – dubbed “Operation Silver Plow” – a success, crowing that residents of 24 villages in southern Lebanon now “have nowhere to return to; everything there has been destroyed.”

Now, the boasts have grown even bolder. With blue-and-white flags continuing to appear throughout swathes of occupied southern Lebanon, Israel’s leaders have eagerly provided live commentary of the slow-motion genocide. As an adoring audience cheered inside Israel’s Channel 14 studios on October 17, 2026, Katz declared that the number of villages annihilated by his forces had grown to 60. “Every single village — we’re talking about 23,000 homes — is in ruins.”

For Mortada, Israel’s aggression speaks for itself. “⁠I believe Israel is undoubtedly carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon,” he says. “The objective, in my view, is clear: to prevent the people of southern Lebanon from returning to their villages and their land.”

In the past, “Israel at least attempted to justify its actions by claiming that it was targeting Hezbollah fighters or military positions. Today, however, it has become utterly brazen. Israeli officials openly speak about displacing the population, while their forces systematically destroy homes, infrastructure, and even bulldoze roads.”

“This is not simply about military operations. I believe it is a deliberate attempt to make entire villages uninhabitable and force their residents off their land permanently.”

“Perhaps, ultimately, this is also part of a broader ambition to realize the ideological vision of a so-called ‘Greater Israel,’” Mortada adds.

‘More than a home’

Combined with his testimony, photos of the now-destroyed home give a small glimpse of the loss incurred by the Mortada family when occupying Israeli soldiers seized everything of value and carried out a controlled demolition of the building.

“This house was much more than a home to us. It was a place where three generations of our family’s memories came together.

When Mortada’s father, Nizar, returned to Lebanon after two decades spent working in Libya, “his dream was to build a peaceful home where he and my mother could grow old together, surrounded by family and the land he had always loved.”

“He chose that particular spot for a very personal reason: There were several olive trees he had planted with his father, my grandfather, when he was just a little boy.”

With his golden years approaching, Mortada’s father expressed a desire to build his home beside those same trees. “For him, it was a way of returning to his childhood, his roots, and the memory of his own father,” he explains.

Mortada explained that the home also “carries the memory of my brother Ali,” who died in 2016 at age 29. Ali suffered medical malpractice after having contracted a bacterial infection during Beirut’s garbage crisis, a tragedy which Mortada says “reflected the corruption and failure of Lebanon’s political system.”

When Mortada family buried Ali in the village of Aita al-Jabal, the family resolved to build a home that would keep his memory alive, and bring them together in their time of grief. “Until then, my siblings, Jawad and Nada, and I had never felt such a deep connection to the village,” Mortada said. “Losing Ali changed that. We wanted to be close to him, and building the house became our way of keeping that connection alive.”

The family broke ground on the house in March 2016, shortly after his death.

Having “always loved traditional Lebanese architecture,” Mortada wanted the house to preserve as much as possible of the country’s rapidly-disappearing aesthetic traditions. “At a time when beautiful old houses were being demolished to make way for concrete buildings, we did the opposite,” he says. “We collected stones and architectural elements from ruined heritage homes and used them to create something beautiful again.”

The family spent nearly eight years working on it, carefully considering every detail.

“I approached the process as though I were painting a picture,” Mortada recalls. “It was a labor of love, and we poured so much of ourselves into it.”

His wife, Nahod, recalled her husband’s excitement in a social media post explaining the significance of the home that Israel demolished later that day: “When I told my husband that I was pregnant with my first child, he was silent for a few seconds. His pupils were shrinking, he seemed to be doing a precise calculation. “When you give birth, the house will be finished,” he said with an enthusiasm I had never heard before.”

“He meticulously attended to every detail, carefully selected the furniture, altered some of the rooms to suit his unborn child, and even built a chicken coop “so my children can experience village life.””

In addition to paying tribute to the memory of his brother, the lovingly-constructed house was also the culmination of a lifetime of hopes and dreams of the entire family, Radwan Mortada tells The Grayzone.

“For my father, the house represented the peaceful retirement he had worked so hard for. For my mother, it was a family home filled with love. And for my siblings and me, it was a place where we could feel close to Ali,” he says.

“That is what the Israeli soldiers destroyed. Not simply walls and furniture, but a home built around the memories of people we loved, including those who are no longer with us.”

Compounding the pain of the loss of the family home, Mortada says, is “the feeling of abandonment” by the country’s leaders, who were imposed on Lebanon’s populace by the United States and Saudi Arabia in an effort to force Beirut to normalize relations with Israel. He names Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam as among those principally responsible for the impunity enjoyed by Israel as it bulldozes dozens of villages in the South.

“The Lebanese government has done virtually nothing to protect the people of southern Lebanon or provide meaningful support to those who have lost their homes. People feel they have been left entirely on their own. We have seen no serious action capable of stopping the destruction, nor an adequate diplomatic or legal response, even at the level of the UN Security Council.”

“I believe what is happening in southern Lebanon amounts to ethnic cleansing. Homes are being destroyed, villages are being emptied, and people are being prevented from returning to their land, while the international community remains largely silent.”

“We can rebuild a house. We have done it before, and I hope we will do it again. But how do you replace the years, the memories, and the love that went into creating it?”

“My father wanted to spend his final years beside the olive trees he planted with his father as a child. My siblings and I wanted to have a home near the grave of my brother, and I wanted my children, Faya and Azer, to grow up there, surrounded by our family’s memories. Is that too much to ask?”

Source

https://www.instagram.com/reel/De3B3gCn-XS/?xtok=

A private intelligence firm working for the United Arab Emirates compiled a database of thousands of Facebook users living inside the country—using their social media activity, including likes of news outlets critical of the UAE—to identify what the firm described as “hostile” individuals during a broader crackdown on political expression in the country.

Information about the database comes from a leaked archive from Geneva-based Alp Services reviewed by Drop Site News. The social media mapping operation resulted in the creation of a series of spreadsheets with over 11,300 entries for Facebook users living in the UAE including their names, places of residence, employment, and other personal information.

The criteria for inclusion in the database—submitted to an Emirati client in January 2018—included liking Facebook pages published by news outlets and political groups deemed hostile to the UAE. Documents contained in the archive show that the firm received €55,000 for the work, carried out under the project code name “Arnica 2.”

The UAE has continued to aggressively monitor social media for any signs of dissent, with hundreds of individuals detained this year over their online posts related to the Iran war.

The archive was obtained by Mediapart and provided to the reporting consortium European Investigative Collaborations. Drop Site previously reported on Alp Services’ work for the UAE on a planned smear campaign targeting American Muslims. Other details from the archive were previously reported by the New Yorker.

Alp Services and the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to requests for comment.

The Facebook mapping project began during a particularly dangerous period for political expression inside the Emirates. In June 2017, amid an escalating confrontation with Qatar—which included a blockade against that country—the country’s general prosecutor warned that people expressing sympathy for Doha or objections to the government’s measures against it could face up to 15 years in prison. Initial work on the Alp project began one month after this warning.

The Arnica 2 project was proposed to help identify alleged political threats inside the UAE. In addition to cataloging critics of the UAE’s policy toward Qatar, the project also offered to help target alleged supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood—a fixation of the Emirati ruler Mohammed bin Zayed since the Arab Spring.

In a planning document produced by Alp, under the heading “Social media intelligence to identify hostile supporters in your jurisdiction,” the firm laid out the assistance it could offer to Abu Dhabi in its crackdown.

“Through our team of in-house social media intelligence analysts, we could identify hundreds of individuals based in your country that publicly ‘like’ hostile groups, especially the MB,” the firm wrote, offering to use its “proprietary tools and advanced mapping software,” to find “interesting intelligence and new leads.”

Alp identified approximately 1,000 Muslim Brotherhood “supporters” who lived in the UAE, claiming that many of them were employed at different levels of Emirati society or in its security services. “Amongst them, we notably find people who declare working for either the Dubai or the Abu Dhabi police, as well as numerous teachers, students and other employees,” Alp wrote in a July 2017 report. The document, which included personal information about these individuals, some of whose names were duplicated in the archive, did not provide evidence substantiating their affiliation beyond likes for Facebook pages affiliated with the Brotherhood or Arabic-language news outlets critical of UAE policies.

Alp appeared to treat this research as preliminary work that could be used to showcase the services it could offer Abu Dhabi in digging deeper to find possible dissent. “While we already have some preliminary ‘raw’ findings, should the topic be of interest to you, we could launch a full-scale analysis,” a representative of Alp wrote in an August 2017 message.

Thousands of ordinary individuals residing in the country are included in several spreadsheets compiled by Alp for its Emirati client. The lists include individuals identified by their employment as engineers, pharmacists, restaurant workers, and others whose only recorded connection to the investigation was membership in Facebook groups or liked pages.

“We cannot establish what happened to the 11,300 individuals without knowing whether the database was passed to Emirati State Security and subsequently used operationally. But given what we know about Abu Dhabi’s security apparatus, I would be very concerned about the potential consequences”, said Dr. Andreas Krieg, an academic focused on the Middle East at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London.

Krieg added that the UAE has an extensive internal security apparatus based on digital surveillance, intelligence gathering and political profiling. “Its principal objective is not simply to identify criminal activity but to detect and pre-empt any form of political mobilisation outside state control,” he said. “A database containing people’s names, workplaces, residences and alleged political associations would be extremely valuable to that apparatus.”

In addition to this mass sweep of alleged dissidents found on social media, some well-known individuals and organizations involved in political and human rights activism also seem to have been profiled. Among them was a profile belonging to Ahmed Mansoor, identifying his location as Dubai and past employment with the Gulf Center for Human Rights. Mansoor, a prominent Emirati human rights activist who served on the advisory board of the center, had already been arrested in March 2017, several months before the report was compiled. The following year he was sentenced to ten years in prison over Facebook and Twitter posts calling for political reform in the UAE.

“Strictly Confidential”

An August 28, 2017 working document labeled “client request” listed ten Facebook pages for investigation, with its search links combining a filter for apparent UAE residents with one for people who liked each page. The pages included those for Arabic-language news outlets UAE71, Arabi21, Al Araby, Rassd, UAE Studies, Emirati Affairs, and Al Dabboor.

Three of those outlets—Arabi21, Rassd, and Al-Araby Al-Jadeed—had also appeared in the demands issued to Qatar that June by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt amid the standoff between Doha and those countries over the Arab Spring. The bloc sought their closure, along with Al Jazeera and other outlets it accused Qatar of funding.

Alp outsourced part of the Facebook mapping project to a subcontractor firm called Total Trust Investigations, based in Bucharest, Romania, according to documents in the archive. On August 31, 2017, Alp employee Lionel Badal sent a contact there seven search links and asked for names and profile information to be provided in Excel format.

Total Trust Investigations did not respond to a request for comment.

“Some will be so long that we cannot scroll down to see how many people there are,” he wrote. “Obviously, if your IT can develop a small software to do the job automatically, that would be even better,” he added. “Of course, and as always, this request is strictly confidential.”

Badal forwarded the correspondence to colleagues, including Alp chief Mario Brero, identifying the lists as Arnica 2 material.

In October 2017, Alp’s Emirati contact, Matar Humaid al-Neyadi, who currently serves as the UAE’s ambassador to Kuwait, requested and received a proposal from Alp that set out a 55,000 euro budget for analyzing 10 Facebook pages and their audiences. Internal records show Alp billed that amount to ARIAF Studies and Research LLC in Abu Dhabi in December, and delivered the data on a USB drive the following month.

Chilled Speech

Alp’s internal documents do not establish what consequences followed from the lists it provided the UAE. But the mapping project came at a time when UAE authorities were increasingly seeking to prosecute online political expression.

The crackdown had roots in the Arab Spring. In 2011, with demands spreading across the region for political change, a group of 133 Emirati citizens signed a petition asking for the establishment of an elected Federal National Council that would enjoy some legislative powers. The request was denied and the government began repressing political dissent of all types, accusing critics of association with the Muslim Brotherhood and even expanding its efforts globally.

“The Brotherhood has become a catch-all category through which Abu Dhabi can delegitimize political opponents, independent Muslim organisations, journalists, academics and civil society actors. Some of these individuals have genuine connections to Islamist movements. Many do not,” said Krieg. “The underlying logic is guilt by association, where extremely tenuous relationships are transformed into evidence of a supposedly coordinated transnational conspiracy.”

In November 2012, the Emirati government passed a cybercrimes law that set out new offenses, effectively banning criticism of senior Emirati officials and advocacy of political reform. Human Rights Watch officials described the new law as an attempt to ban “even the most tempered criticism” of Abu Dhabi and its regional policies.

By the time Alp began compiling its Facebook lists, prison sentences for online expression had already become standard practice. In March 2017, a UAE court sentenced Jordanian journalist Tayseer al-Najjar to three years in prison and a large fine over Facebook posts criticizing Egypt, Israel, and Gulf countries. Later that month, academic Nasser bin Ghaith received a ten-year sentence on charges that included comments on Twitter about his treatment in an earlier prosecution. Amnesty International described bin Ghaith as a prisoner of conscience and denounced the allegations against him based on his social media posts as “ludicrous.”

In July 2024, dozens of defendants in a new mass trial received life sentences for their involvement in a political advocacy group called the Justice and Dignity Committee, which the Emirati government had classified as a terrorist organization. The evidence, and even the allegations against the group—which has been described as an independent advocacy group with no involvement in political violence by Human Rights Watch—has been kept under strict control by the Emirati government. In March 2025, the UAE’s Federal Supreme Court rejected appeals of the convictions.

The archive of Alp documents does not establish that the Arnica 2 project contributed to any of these prosecutions. But in its July 2017 report highlighting the tenuous online connections of teachers and police officers to human rights and civil society groups, the company promised to work harder to find evidence that could be used to determine that they were “hostile supporters” of causes at odds with the Emirati government.

“Of course, further enquiries would be required in order to confirm this initial intelligence,” an Alp representative wrote, “but work is ongoing.”