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[Photos © Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze]
From the photographer's book Echoing Above.
public bodies’ duty of care. The law says this must be achieved via biological sex, but data sets that don’t accurately record sex cut across all that. The same applies to chaperones for intimate care. That’s unacceptable and potentially unlawful because the patient did not consent to it. The new ID scheme would make the operation of the NHS really difficult.”…
Those familiar with the Bill as it is currently written are concerned it paves the way for a scandal waiting to happen, akin to the SNP’s endorsement of trans activism. In Scotland, Isla Bryson, a biologically male transgender rapist, was initially taken to a women’s prison, and Nicola Sturgeon drew fierce criticism for refusing to call Bryson a man.
“There will be some kind of equivalent of the Nicola Sturgeon/Isla Bryson scandal where the whole country will go ‘How did we get to this?’,” says Samantha. “And the politicians will just be left looking at their shoes. So let’s not mess it up in the first place.”
“ltr” lang=”en”>Dear Members of the @PulitzerPrizes board,
My name is Emily Damari. I was held hostage in Gaza for over 500 days.
On the morning of October 7, I was at home in my small studio apartment in Kibbutz Kfar Aza when Hamas terrorists burst in, shot me and dragged me across the border…
— Emily Damari (@EmilyDamari1) May 8, 2025
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Full text:
On the morning of October 7, I was at home in my small studio apartment in Kibbutz Kfar Aza when Hamas terrorists burst in, shot me and dragged me across the border into Gaza. I was one of 251 men, women, children, and elderly people kidnapped that day from their beds, their homes, and a music festival.
For almost 500 days I lived in terror. I was starved, abused, and treated like I was less than human. I watched friends suffer. I watched hope dim. And even now, after returning home, I carry that darkness with me – because my best friends, Gali and Ziv Berman are still being held in the Hamas terror tunnels.
So imagine my shock and pain when I saw that you awarded a Pulitzer Prize to Mosab Abu Toha.
This is a man who, in January, questioned the very fact of my captivity. He posted about me on Facebook and asked, “How on earth is this girl called a hostage?” He has denied the murder of the Bibas family. He has questioned whether Agam Berger was truly a hostage. These are not word games – they are outright denials of documented atrocities.
You claim to honor journalism that upholds truth, democracy, and human dignity. And yet you have chosen to elevate a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered.
Do you not see what this means? Mosab Abu Toha is not a courageous writer. He is the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier. And by honoring him, you have joined him in the shadows of denial.
This is not a question of politics. This is a question of humanity. And today, you have failed it.
From Jewish News:
A Palestinian writer, recently awarded a Pulitzer Prize, has sparked outrage for repeatedly describing former Israeli hostages as “killers” and pushing disproven Hamas claims about the 7 October attacks.
Mosab Abu Toha, honoured for his New Yorker essays on Gaza, used social media throughout 2025 to mock, vilify and question the suffering of those abducted by Hamas.
In several posts uncovered by watchdog Honest Reporting, the poet denied torture, labelled female hostages “killers”, and described forensic reports of murdered children as “propaganda”.
aths for the crime of even participating in studies of ancient Israel….
Botbol notes that the United Nations and other international forums play a key role in the denial of history because they have “automatic anti-Israel majorities” for any votes. Those same authorities turn a blind eye when Jewish sites are violated, as happened in Jericho. “The burial grounds of Hasmonean kings—the largest necropolis in the Middle East from the Second Temple period—have been plowed and used for farming and construction,” an Israeli think tank director told Botbol. “In one case, we found human bones scattered in the fields. The Israeli Civil Administration had to collect and rebury them.”
The good news? The boycott at least shows how, in reality, everyone knows that Jews are indigenous to the land, and "no one in the world argues in good faith for the “colonialist” interpretation of Zionism."
This is the anti-Semitism version of flat-earth theory. It exists outside the very idea of knowledge. That is what is so threatening to the academic world: Their defensiveness is a tacit acknowledgement that the Palestinian-fueled anti-Zionist narrative of the land is universally regarded as a made-up story.
If there’s a second silver lining, it’s in the form of a lesson learned the hard way. Israel is the only trustworthy steward of the region’s history. Those dark ages the academic world is working so hard to bring about? The state of Israel is what stands in their way, and it isn’t going anywhere.
ls are accused of failing to take action.
One student at a leading British university watched a swastika being carved into a desk but after complaining to officials was told it was probably an “ancient Hindu symbol”.
Oh boy.
An “unprecedented volume” of accounts of abuse has been received by StandWithUs UK, an educational charity that supports Israel.
Baroness Deech, the first independent adjudicator for higher education and a former principal at St Anne’s College, Oxford, said the report “offers a chilling insight into the high levels of discrimination and even acts of violence that Jewish and pro-Israel students are subjected to daily across UK campuses”.
She added: “Universities appear to be systematically failing these students, despite these same institutions rightly taking a zero-tolerance approach to all other forms of racism and discrimination.”
Well yes. Jews don't count.
A student of history and politics of the Americas at University College London reported “relentless antisemitic abuse and harassment on campus”. They said: “It’s reached the point where I’ve felt unable to attend class. I’ve reported several incidents to the university, providing the names of the students involved, but none of the complaints have been properly addressed.
“I’ve been repeatedly heckled, alienated, and bullied by other students. I’ve been called ‘brainwashed by Zionist propaganda’, a ‘genocide supporter’, a ‘white settler colonialist’, and told that I am ‘racist by virtue of being Jewish or Israeli’.”…
A student at the University of East Anglia reported: “My campus has become a place where antisemitic displays, flags, posters, signs, are common … Student union representatives chant for Palestine to be free ‘from the river to the sea’ and a motion was even passed under that exact title.”
The university said: “As a university, we will not tolerate antisemitism, Islamophobia or any form of racism, hate crime, harassment, or discrimination. Some time ago, in autumn 2023, our campus was defaced with antisemitic graffiti. It was removed as quickly as possible and support was offered to students and staff distressed by it.”
These people…it's like Corbyn: couldn't mention antisemitism without adding "Islamophobia or any form of racism". It's shorthand for: go away, we don't care.
Rinse and repeat.
o estimated that 1-2% of the population is transgender". The implication, in the context, is that 1-2% of children are trans. Nonsense, of course. But that's how it's framed.
Encouraging the fantasy that children can somehow be born in the wrong body – and then on to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgical mutilation – is precisely what children don't need. It is, in fact, conversion therapy – transing away the gay. What they do in Iran.
🧬 Jews Are Indigenous. Period.
We sat down with Scottish-Jewish author @BenMFreeman, whose new book explores the deep-rooted connection between Jews and their ancestral homeland, Israel.
Ben’s book, The Jews: An Indigenous People, is out now.
Our full interview coming soon. pic.twitter.com/pYODJ6t5GK— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) May 1, 2025
The latest from Reduxx. It's a tragic tale of a poor trans woman hounded to death by cruel right-wing jibes. Well, that's the story that won a Pulitzer Prize for Esquire magazine.
If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
Announcing the reception of the prestigious award on May 5, Esquire described their article, written by Mark Warren, as an “extraordinary, deeply moving account” of the “beloved” cross-dressing Alabama mayor Copeland, who “took his own life after a right-wing news website exposed private online activities he’d engaged in that involved transgender role play.”
“With great sensitivity, Warren, an author and a former longtime editor at Esquire, interviewed scores of Copeland’s friends, family, townspeople, and fellow congregants in order to render a heartbreaking account of the man’s final days, and to portray the full scope of the visceral, grief-stricken, perhaps counterintuitive response of a small southern town in all its rich complexity,” said the Esquire editorial team in their statement.
“In so doing, he illuminates how very much was lost when Copeland was driven to despair. The story explores themes of immediate, even urgent relevance: our evolving norms of gender and sexual difference, the brutal culture wars that have us tearing at one another often without thought or regard, the profound effect of social media on our lives, and the astonishing power of the Internet.”
But that's not quite the whole story. The guy was into "bimbofication" – expressing arousal and enjoyment at the thought of being reduced to a feminine sexual object for male use. He promoted the use of feminising hormones for men to become "whores". He stole women's identities, even writing a story about killing a (named) local woman and taking her place. Read the whole piece – and the earlier Reduxx article – for more of the sordid details.
But hey, trans. Hero, right? Got to be.
A report from the Henry Jackson Society:
Since 7 October 2023, the UN has issued 367 reports that are filed under the subject of “Gaza Strip”. A search of these reports reveals that the UN has rarely acknowledged and never asserted the use by Hamas of “human shields”. The phenomenon of “human shields” has only been mentioned four times, in each case in only a single sentence, as either an “allegation”, an Israeli “claim” or an unverified “report” that this practice occurred. The UN has never dedicated a single paragraph, let alone an entire report, to analysing how Hamas has fought the war in Gaza.
In contrast, the UN has issued at least ten reports critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, from accusations of “indiscriminate attacks” to illegal “attacks on hospitals”. A November 2024 investigative report by the UN accused Israel of committing genocide, but the document makes no mention of Hamas’s fighting tactics in Gaza, let alone provides an analysis. The NGOs (non-governmental organisations) Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch each released reports in December 2024 accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. Over hundreds of pages of text, the reader would struggle to realise that Hamas even exists in Gaza. Neither report provides any discussion or analysis of Hamas’s human shield strategy.
This report by the Henry Jackson Society represents the “missing chapter” in all the UN and NGO reports. It provides a comprehensive analysis of Hamas’s systematic use of human shield tactics during the 7 October Israel–Hamas war and the broader Gaza conflict. Drawing on extensive evidence from international media, military assessments, legal frameworks and firsthand accounts, the report outlines how Hamas has embedded its military operations within civilian infrastructure, weaponising Gaza’s population and urban landscape to achieve both tactical and strategic objectives.
For UN here you could, with a few minor alterations, substitute BBC.
Full report here.
After repeated warnings, Stonewall is still saying on LinkedIn: “It's important to remember that the ruling hasn’t gone through the parliamentary process yet.”
Once again, for those at the back – and those who haven’t yet understood that this is disinformation: the ruling…
— Bev Jackson (@BevJacksonAuth) May 6, 2025
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"Once again, for those at the back – and those who haven’t yet understood that this is disinformation: the ruling explained the existing law. The law became the law in 2010 by going through the parliamentary process to make it a law. That is how it became a law.
"The ongoing campaign of disinformation is reprehensible and needs to be halted."