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The Sbarro massacre was a Palestinian terrorist attack on a pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem on 9 August 2001 in which 15 civilians were killed, including 7 children and a pregnant woman, and 130 wounded. The mastermind of the attack, Ahlam Tamimi, was convicted by an Israeli military tribunal and received multiple life sentences, but was released as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange with Hamas in 2011, when Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was swapped in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian and Arab-Israeli prisoners. Tamimi now hosts a television show in Jordan, and is something of a celebrity there.

An October episode of the BBC Arabic Trending programme featured an uncritical interview with Tamimi which, unsurprisingly, didn't go down too well with the relatives of those she'd helped to slaughter. From the Jewish Chronicle:

Arnold Roth, whose daughter Malki was one of 15 civilians killed in the blast inside Jerusalem's Sbarro restaurant, had met with BBC executives last month to discuss the fallout from the October 8 broadcast of an episode of the BBC Arabic Trending programme.

The show included an interview from Jordan with Ahlam Tamimi, ringleader of the 2001 bombing, who used the opportunity to launch an appeal to be reunited with her husband Nizar, also a convicted terrorist who was deported by the Jordanian authorities to Qatar.

The families of Tamimi's victims were among those to complain to the BBC about the report – and a review by the corporation found the interview was in breach of editorial guidelines.

The JC understands that a meeting between Mr Roth and executives from BBC World Service and BBC Arabic took place last month after the Israeli criticised the apology aired over the interview as “empty, cruel and pointless”.

During the November 9 meeting with Jamie Angus, head of BBC World Service, and BBC Arabic head Samir Farah, Mr Roth raised concern that interview with Tamimi went beyond a lapse [in] editorial guidelines and was in fact at odds with the bedrock of journalistic and ethical values.

Mr Roth also stressed that he was a supporter of much the BBC does.

But he suggested the Tamimi interview  – which was promoted on social media under the hashtag ‘Ahalm Tamimi, your voice is loud and clear’ – airbrushed out her victims in the terror attack, failed to mention her insistence that the bomb was placed in a restaurant frequented by religious Jews, and described her crimes as allegations.

Lord Michael Grade, former chairman of the BBC, had been amongst those to criticise the interview saying  there were “very serious issues of balance and impartiality raised” by the broadcast and the corporation, and possibly Ofcom, should investigate.

The BBC considers the matter closed after it issued the apology. I'm not sure a similar light-weight apology on behalf of, say, a sympathetic interview with a convicted IRA bomber would be quite so easily dismissed.

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[Photos © Adam Wiseman]

ven “Titania McGrath” could scarcely have known how quickly such ideological fads would metastasize into medical literature. And it should be a source of shame for the editors of the NEJM that today’s published content now reads as a plagiarized rehash of yesterday’s farce.

File next to the trans activist who thinks that all children should be put on puberty blockers, until they're able to judge what gender they really are. But at least the activist isn't writing in a prestigious scientific journal.

11pt”>Next, I think readers should consider a statement made in 2018 by the Gender Identity Development Service at the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust, the UK’s main centre of treatment for gender-variant children:

'Suicidality in young people attending the GIDS is similar to that of young people referred to child and adolescent mental health services. It is not helpful to suggest that suicidality is an inevitable part of this condition.'

A third data point comes from a High Court judgement made earlier this month. It concerned the Tavistock clinic’s use of puberty-blocking medication on children who experience trouble over their gender. The Tavistock lost the case, as the judges decided children could not give informed consent to such treatment, the use of which has now been halted by NHS England.

During the case, the Tavistock submitted to the court an interim paper arising from its study of children who received 'early pubertal suppression'. According to the court judgment, the Tavistock paper found that 'there was no overall improvement in mood or psychological wellbeing using standardised psychological measures.'

In summary, the country’s leading suicide prevention charity tells journalists not to 'normalise' suicide, especially among young people, by presenting it as an understandable or inevitable response to crisis. The country’s leading medical authority on transgender young people says they are not at unusual risk of suicide, and called suggestions to the contrary unhelpful. The same clinic’s evidence shows that the use of puberty blocking medication does not improve the mental health of trans children.

Now that I’ve loaded you down with that context, dear reader, consider how the BBC this week reported on that court ruling and its implications for children with gender issues.

In conclusion:

Here, I offer another summary: the BBC reported that 'doctors' say a court ruling halting the use of puberty blockers could 'cause' children to commit suicide, on the basis of unevidenced assertions from a non-specialist medic and disgraced doctors who make money selling such drugs. It did so without reporting the views of actual experts that such narratives about suicide are misleading and potentially harmful.

There are several other things I could say about that BBC report, but I’m not going to say them here. Instead, I’ll end this article with another quote from that Samaritans guidance, which should be considered vital context for that awful, awful article from the BBC about vulnerable children:

'….there is strong and consistent research evidence that some forms of news reporting lead to increases in suicide rates. Media coverage can influence how people behave in a crisis and their beliefs about the options open to them….

'Young people are a particularly vulnerable audience in relation to media coverage of suicide. They are more susceptible to imitational suicidal behaviour and more likely to be influenced by the media than other age groups.'

ere focused on one single country: Israel. Make no mistake: the purpose of the lopsided condemnations is to demonize the Jewish state.”

“When the General Assembly gives in to politicization and selectivity by discriminating against Israel, it violates the UN Charter’s guarantee of equal treatment to all nations, large and small,” Neuer added.

“We note that the UK and EU states like France, Germany and Spain voted Yes to more than two-thirds of the UNGA resolutions singling out Israel in 2020,” he charged. “Yet these same nations failed to introduce a single UNGA resolution this year on the human rights situation in China, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Cuba, Turkey, Pakistan, Vietnam, Algeria, or on 175 other countries.”

Details of those resolutions at UN Watch.

ove. The global athletic community grows stronger when we welcome and champion all athletes—including LGBTQI+ athletes.”

Billie Jean King, of course, was a ground-breaking figure in the tennis world as an unapologetic lesbian. And now she does this? It's insane. Yes, she managed to beat the 55-year-old Bobby Riggs in the so-called "battle of the sexes", but she wouldn't have stood a chance against the top male players of the day. And now she's undoing all her good work for women's tennis by saying that she's happy for anyone, man or woman, to join in….all a man has to do is say he's a woman. Her determination to signal her virtue has overwhelmed her cognitive faculties (it seems to happen a lot nowadays). She's throwing all those young sportswomen under the bus.

In March, Idaho enacted the Fairness in Women's Sport's Act (HB500)—the first of its kind nationwide. Girls and women who compete in youth, high school and college sports, whether they're transgender or cisgender, will be subject to being challenged by competitors on their biological sex—in essence, forced to prove their womanhood. If found to not be "female," they would not be able to compete with girls and women.

The following month Lindsay Hecox, a Boise State student who is transgender, filed a lawsuit alongside the ACLU and a Jane Doe to challenge the HB500 law. In August, U.S. District Judge David Nye granted a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of the law.

“I love running, and part of what I enjoy about the sport is building relationships with a team. I’m a girl, and the right team for me is the girls’ team,” Hecox said in a statement. “It means a lot to me that so many people are on my side and supporting me.”

The right team for him is the girls' team because it makes it just so much easier to win.

It's strange how Zimbabwe disappeared from the news after Mugabe died. Perhaps the assumption was that once the old tyrant had gone, things would inevitably start to get better.

Well, it clearly isn't so. Jane Flanagan reports in the Times from Harare:

Famished children form an orderly line at Samantha Murozoki’s gate from dawn each day. For most, the hot porridge she ladles into their plastic tubs and metal plates will be the only meal they see.

What began with Ms Murozoki, 35, making supper for a few extra mouths in her suburb of Zimbabwe’s capital a few months ago quickly snowballed into a twice-daily feeding scheme on which 3,000 now rely.

Years of economic bungling and corruption, compounded by drought and the coronavirus pandemic, has left half of Zimbabwe’s 15 million population condemned to hunger.

According to new research from Zimvac, a committee of government and humanitarian experts, a third of children in Africa’s one-time breadbasket now suffer from chronic malnutrition. Rates of stunting, and maternal and child mortality, have soared. […]

Although food shortages have been common since Robert Mugabe’s violent land seizures wrecked commercial farms that used to provide jobs for millions, hunger levels are the worst on record.

Data from Zimbabwe’s treasury shows that during the first nine months of this year, the country that once fed an entire region spent £340 million importing food, mostly grain, up from £104 million during the same period last year.

President Mnangagwa’s repeated pledges to end corruption since he helped topple Mr Mugabe three years ago, have long sounded hollow.[…]

Life is bleaker still for children in Zimbabwe’s former agricultural heartlands, where cases of severe acute malnutrition in infants and under-fives have rocketed in the past year. When food is scarce, women and girls are often the first to go without.

Latest data showed that 19 per cent of women of childbearing age are getting the minimum nutritional limit, down from 43 per cent in 2019. Those who beat the increased risk of maternal deaths are often too weak to breastfeed.

As has been noted in the comments, it certainly puts our own problems into perspective.

Walthamstow Wetlands on a still grey morning:

ft: 40px”>Dr Lucey still believes that Sars-Cov-2 is most likely to have a natural origin, but he does not want the alternatives to be so readily ruled out.

"So here we are, 12, 13 months out since the first recognised case of Covid-19 and we haven't found the animal source," he said. "So, to me, it's all the more reason to investigate alternative explanations."

Might a Chinese laboratory have had a virus they were working on that was genetically closer to Sars-Cov-2, and would they tell us now if they did? "Not everything that's done is published," Dr Lucey said.

Meanwhile when Sudworth and his team tried to get down to Yunnan, they were frustrated at every turn:

The WHO is promising an "open-minded" inquiry into the origins of the novel coronavirus, but the Chinese government is not keen on questions, at least not from journalists.

After leaving Tongguan, the BBC team tried to drive a few hours north to the cave where Prof Shi carried out her ground-breaking research on Sars almost a decade ago.

Still being followed by several unmarked cars, we hit another roadblock, and were told there was no way through.

A few hours later, we discovered that local traffic had been diverted onto a dirt track that skirted the obstruction, but as we attempted to use the same route, we met yet another "broken down" car in our path.

We were trapped in a field for over an hour, before finally being forced to head for the airport.

The mystery deepens. Clearly the Chinese don't welcome these investigations. And, given the WHO's previous incompetence, its determination not to offend China in any way, and the fact that its investigation appears to have ruled out the possibility of a lab leak before it starts, it looks unlikely that we'll be seeing anything like the rigorous inquiry that this whole affair so desperately needs.

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[Photos © Tine Poppe]

Previously from her Winter Solstice series.