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Edy Cohen at the JC provides a useful reminder of the six times Palestinian leaders rejected a state:

The Palestinian leaders’ consistent rejection of peace initiatives over the past 88 years not only calls into question their commitment to coexistence with Israel but to the welfare and safety of their people.

Taking into account all the initiatives proposed to end the conflict, we must consider the possibility that the Palestinians – or at least their leaders – do not want to establish their own state.

Their sights are currently set on the big prize — the entire state of Israel — and they are playing for time. In the mean time, they plan to continue to subsist on funds donated by the Arabs and the Europeans.

Many of the Arab states have grown disenchanted with this enterprise, however, and assistance – particularly from the Saudis – has been discontinued in recent years.

President Donald Trump has also reduced the flow of US support. Only the Europeans remain committed to the implacable Palestinian narrative….

Read on for the details.

As he wryly observes, "a minority of people who voice views about the conflict know anything about its history". 

chard Horton, has quite a history…

• on Covid, publishing that group letter organised by the zoologist Peter Daszak on the origins of the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus  ‘strongly condemn[ing] conspiracy theories’ about a lab leak, and praising China on state-owned broadcaster China Central Television for how ‘tremendously decisively’ the Chinese Communist party had handled the pandemic.
• on MMR, publishing Andrew Wakefield – not retracted for twelve years.
•  publishing a letter in Lancet in 2014 from a number of pro-Palestinian activists which the Israeli Ministry of Health characterised as “bordering on blood libel".
• the case of Sir Roy Meadows.
•  railing against "the axis of Anglo-American imperialism" at a 2006 rally in Manchester.

Still editor-in-chief though.

Added: more on this from Jerry Coyne.

in the countryside that they see every day on television or in the newspapers. But when they actually come to the countryside, they’re astonished by the awful reality of life there,” a source in South Pyongan province told Daily NK recently.

Many rural residents live in ramshackle homes that barely qualify as shelter, while their children walk around barefoot. The gap between propaganda and reality often astonishes urban visitors.

“There are still many people in the countryside with unpowered homes that leak in the rain and creak in the wind. These are people who know little about what is happening inside North Korea, let alone overseas. What sort of ambition could these adults, or even children, have for their lives?” the source said.

Photographs obtained by Daily NK show people in rural areas walking barefoot on dirt roads and children eating plain noodles with salt water in dimly lit homes that rely only on natural light. The images document the backward conditions in North Korea’s countryside, with no sign of children who have “nothing to envy in the world”—as state propaganda claims—or the happy families featured in government housing stories.

Meanwhile:

Some vendors at North Korean marketplaces are struggling to make a living, sometimes going days without a single sale. Business has collapsed due to soaring prices and empty wallets.

“Vendors at Hamhung marketplaces have been feeling the pinch lately. Several have quit after failing to sell anything for days,” a source in South Hamgyong province told Daily NK recently.

“Vendors selling hand-wrapped cigarettes are nervously considering new lines of work. The working-class people who typically buy these cigarettes are so broke they’ve stopped smoking entirely. Some vendors barely see any customers during a full day at their stalls,” the source said….

A similar situation exists in Hyesan, Ryanggang province.

“Market vendors nowadays all look like they’ve been to a funeral"…

ers of staff to censor books for this kind of reason, and the astonishing viciousness of the trans lobby, they are very dogmatic and hectoring.

“JK Rowling can look after herself, but you look at the way they hounded Kathleen Stock out of Sussex University, and it’s always women who suffer.”

For years – well, decades – postmodernism had largely kept itself confined within academic circles, gradually rotting away "soft" subjects like English and History. More recently it's turned its aim to science – how could it not? Now gender ideology is perhaps its first real-world manifestation. Welcome aboard.

racist but I will ban an entire people from my restaurant’ has the same taste as ‘I’m not antisemitic, I have Jewish friends.’

Let’s call this what it is: open antisemitism dressed up as moral superiority.

Previously.

him in this video, is walking free.

The suggestion that Kadri's attack showed that Hamit "had caused someone harassment, alarm or distress" is like saying that a woman's rape showed that she'd caused someone, her rapist, an uncontrollable sexual urge. It was her fault. Lovely to see how Islamic thinking is penetrating our legal system.

From the BBC report:

Lord Young of Acton, general secretary of the Free Speech Union, said after the sentencing that it "sends a green light to any Muslim who wants to enforce an Islamic blasphemy by taking the law into their own hands.

"The court is effectively saying that if you attack a blasphemer with a knife, he will be convicted of causing you harassment, alarm or distress and you won't have to spend a day behind bars."

e he said things like ‘I am a legal female’ and boasted about being able to use the women’s washrooms,” Landy says. “They had to fight to get their account back.”

Broadsheet had warned their readers about Johnston, noting that he “delights in taunting feminists who are defending women’s rights.”

Landy says that Johnston’s rhetoric, specifically that about using women’s intimate spaces, was triggering for her as a survivor of sexual abuse.

“That’s when I realized he could be in any toilet in Wellington, where I go, from time to time. And I got upset.” Landy explains that she later discovered Johnston had been targeting multiple women critical of gender ideology in New Zealand for insult and harassment.

While it is unclear when Johnston began to “identify” as a woman, he first started attracting attention on social media for making graphic posts about his vaginoplasty and use of women’s restrooms. On his now-deleted X (then Twitter), Johnston would frequently make comments about his post-surgical fluid leakage, dilation, and use of women’s menstrual products.

Lovely bloke. See the article for a more graphic account of his "vaginal leakage", of which he's inordinately proud.

It gets worse.

While in court last week, Landy was told the prosecution was not willing to entertain diversion or discharge without conviction because of her beliefs.

“They said I was not eligible because I was in the ‘grip of an ideology’ and was ‘unlikely to change my mind,'” Landy explains, rejecting the premise that a belief in biological sex is ideological. “So this is an exercise in them trying to get me to change my mind.”

She is next expected to appear in court on December 16, and faces three months in jail or a $50,000 fine. Her current bail conditions include a ban on directly or indirectly contacting Johnston.

The by-now familiar story of a bullying trans activist who malevolently accuses gender-critical women of harassment – with the full backing of the authorities.

There's some irony here. New Zealand is obsessed with its Maori heritage, to the extent that Matauranga, the Maori way of knowledge, has been elevated to the extent that it's now taught as of equal value to science – an issue that Jerry Coyne has taken up, here for instance, or here. There could hardly be a better (worse) example of western ideology gone wrong than gender woo, yet in this case the Maori wisdom (ie common sense), as shown by this woman Rex Landy, is overruled by the authorities.

A belief in biological sex, as affirmed both by science and by a Maori woman and her traditional knowledge, must bow before the greater power of gender ideology.

Helen Joyce at The Critic recounts her experience of being secretly logged as a criminal by the police at the behest of trans activists, who are seen as members of a "protected group". It's the same mechanism, and reputedly the same trans activist (Lynsay Watson), which resulted in the ludicrous arrest of Graham Linehan at Heathrow.

Her conclusion:

Trans lobby groups such as Stonewall have partnered with almost every force in the country and despite not being the law, gender self-identification is firmly embedded in police practice. Officers have been trained that calling a man a man, if he says he’s a woman, is “anti-transgender hate”. When the culprit is someone like me who believes that to the contrary, it’s essential in order to protect women’s rights, claims of “significant harm” are believed and repeat offences are not guaranteed.

The reason Watson was taken seriously and I wasn’t is because he insists men who say they’re women are women and I say the truth, which is that they’re not. The disparity is by design: a feature of the law, not a bug.

This can’t be fixed by abolishing non-crime hate incidents and applying “common sense”. It requires radical change in the culture of policing. No more partnerships with lobby groups, no more flags and badges, no more marking Pride Month, Transgender Day of Remembrance and the rest of the identitarian calendar. On trans issues it will take a deradicalisation programme, with officers retrained to understand that self-ID is not the law and factual statements about the two sexes aren’t hateful.

More fundamentally, “protected groups” have got to go. They’re unnecessary, and there’s no evidence they’re effective. There’s no need for them, either: offences against women and children are policed not by giving them special group status but by creating dedicated strategies and specialist teams.

Above all, creating special categories of people who can instruct the police to credulously record their claims about others offends against two fundamental principles: that we are all innocent until proven guilty, and equal before the law.

0594291413078376?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>September 23, 2025

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return” and disband UNWRA.

— Andrew Fox (@Mr_Andrew_Fox) September 23, 2025

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