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With Hezbollah's grip on Lebanon severely weakened thanks to the IDF, will the Sunnis now assert their claim to dominance? From MEMRI TV:

Lebanese Sunni Islamic scholar Aboubaker Zahabi, speaking at a Beirut protest in support of the people of Palestine, aired on Palestine Today TV (Palestinian Islamic Jihad) on April 7, 2025, said, "Our religion is the religion of Jihad," and declared that they will come to slaughter the "sons of Zion." He quoted the hadith which states that Muslims will fight the Jews at the End of Days, and the Jews will hide behind trees and rocks. Zahabi added that on Judgment Day, Allah will send the "sons of Zion" to Hellfire for eternity, while the martyrs will be in Paradise and the fate of the Muslims will be victory.

And this, from Julie Burchill:

In the process of dignifying a male sexual fetish – autogynephilia – into the latest human rights crusade, careers have been ruined and reputations wrecked by trans activists and their creepy ‘allies’: all in the name of the ultimate patriarchal plan; to colonise everything won by women, from toilets to trophies, until we have nothing left of our own except the wombs in which the young among us may carry foetuses for rich homosexual men.

Janice Turner struggles not to be triumphalist over the Supreme Court decision. Still, she can't quite forget the pusillanimous many who embraced trans dogma when it seemed like the fashionable cause, despite its manifest absurdities. And she's kept the receipts.

So yes, we will move on. Gladly! But before the memory hole sucks away a time of collective madness, when lesbians had penises, rapists were banged up in women’s jails, disabled women were bigots for wanting same-sex intimate care, when we were expected to applaud men who stole our sports and welcome bearded dudes “expanding the bandwidth of womanhood” into our changing rooms, let’s set the record straight.

First, the cowards. After the Supreme Court ruled that “sex” and “woman” in the Equality Act 2010 were biological terms, up pops Harriet Harman, architect of that very law to say, of course, that’s what she always meant. Well, Harriet, why didn’t you say so before, when Stonewall, having failed to rewrite the law, tried to change the meaning of words? But I suppose you risked being branded a “Terf”. Best wait until the dust settles, and you’re safely Baroness Harman of Peckham, chair of the Fawcett Society, that meltiest chocolate teapot.

Yes, Yvette Cooper, I recall your frozen terror when I suggested, years ago, you make public your concerns about child medical transition. Angela Rayner, Lisa Nandy, we can’t forget — whatever you say now — that in 2020 you signed a 12-point pledge promising to boot out Labour members who believed sex is real. As for the Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sanwar, who has “always” supported single-sex spaces, you whipped your party to support self-ID in the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would have erased every one.

Then there are the pontificating men who, never listening much to women, naturally sympathised with the male-born and relished our witch trials. Men who had nothing — nothing! — to lose yet never once tried to understand our plight. Rory Stewart, Alastair Campbell, David Lammy, James O’Brien, Billy Bragg, David Tennant, John Oliver, or those who, watching the Paris Olympics, thought a male boxer punching women was less hurtful than calling him a man.

It was always about male feelings. Women had to keep quiet, be kind, and make way for the men. That it was billed as a progressive movement, the next step on the great liberation march, was always a matter of grim irony.

Women aren’t expecting apologies, though many are deserved, or gratitude for saving basic rights for our granddaughters. Yes, we’ll be kind — we always were — but, cheers! We won — deal with it.

Hippocratic principle by cutting off the breasts of a girl (or the testes of a boy) too young to be entrusted with drastic, irrevocably life-changing decisions? Admittedly, a public apology from you could lay you open to a well-deserved malpractice suit, but may you in any case be long pursued by remorse.

An especially magnanimous feat of forgiveness is required for those on the political left who betrayed their enlightenment heritage.

Which, to be honest, appears to have been the vast majority.

The tragedy is that such obvious truths ever needed spelling out, or proclaiming in a high court of law. The biggest apology of all should come from those people of influence who fomented, or cravenly kowtowed to, the preposterous doctrine that something so fundamentally biological as the sexual binary is vulnerable to mere personal whim or legal documentation.

,” replies one of the officers, “but unfortunately it’s still happening today.”

There are eight men in the dock, all Pakistani Muslim, ranging in age from 39 to 66. They are accused of rape and other sexual offences against two girls between 2001 and 2006. Girl A and Girl B, both abused from the age of 13, were in court, surrounded by family and friends. The women are in their 30s now, but wear the look of deep trauma. Giving evidence, Girl A said that she had been abused by at least 100 men, but when she then mentioned the figure of 200, she was challenged by one of the defence barristers, implying she was lying. “There could’ve been more to be fair,” she replied. “There [were] that many it was hard to keep count.”

The abuse began when the girls, in local authority care, started hanging around the market, where Mohammed Zahid, one of the men on trial, had a lingerie stall. Both girls were casual workers on the stall, paid in clothes, cigarettes and alcohol. They were also expected to have degradingly sadistic sex with Zahid (known as “Boss” or the “Knickerman”) and his associates.

Though Girl A told local children’s services about “hanging around” with older men in 2004 — as well as drinking and using drugs, and having sex with men introduced to her by “Boss” — neither her school nor social services made any reports to the police. Instead, one of the girls was labelled a “prostitute” at the age of 10. Rowbotham was ignored when she reported it to police and social services. As she puts it: “I can only imagine how many other girls they went on to harm.”

Not only did the men – overwhelmingly Pakistani Muslim – think the young girls were sluts who were asking for it. The police, the social services, the care homes: they all agreed. Or pretended to agree. It was easier that way. The media weren't interested – could be seen as racist, playing into the hands of the far right – and the politicians preferred to look the other way. Still do.

But read it all.

Letters to the Times today:

From Sir Peter Rubin, retired professor of medicine:

Sir, One of the most puzzling aspects of the Supreme Court’s judgment is that a scientifically illiterate ideology became so entrenched it needed our highest court to state the obvious. If you are born with a Y (male) chromosome you will carry it with you all your days. No amount of surgery, drug treatment, self-identification, wishful thinking or shutting down of reasoned argument will change that settled biological fact. To claim otherwise is flat-Earth territory, but many organisations went along with the fantasy all the same. How someone chooses to live their life and present themselves to the outside world is a personal decision that should be met with understanding, tolerance and respect, but not at the expense of common sense.

From Kathleen Stock, former professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex@

Sir, We told you so.

Manhattan ca. 1901. "Madison Square, New York". "Highlights of this panorama made from three 8×10 glass negatives include 23rd Street at left, the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Fifth Avenue/​Broadway, Madison Square Park, Stanford White's Madison Square Garden campanile, Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church and the Metropolitan Life building at the corner of Madison and 23rd Street."

[Photos: Shorpy/William Henry Jackson, Detroit Photographic Co.]

Click on image to see full size at Shorpy.

Kathleen Stock at UnHerd on How women won the gender wars:

For much of the past 10 years, transactivist organisations have been directing an immersive theatrical performance across the UK, with participation virtually mandatory. Women have been forced into supporting actress roles, propping up the leading lady fantasies of especially demanding and sometimes dangerous men. And the progressive establishment has mostly nodded along, clapping like seals. But yesterday the Supreme Court brought the final curtain down, rejecting the arguments of Scottish government ministers that possession of a certificate can change someone’s sex. Eschewing the amateur dramatics to which we have all become accustomed, judges went with a famous line of Scots poetry instead: a man’s a man for a’ that.

Thanks to the tenacity of grassroots organisation For Women Scotland in fighting several cases through the courts, judges at the highest level have now clarified that a man — with or without a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) — does not belong in any woman-only prison, hospital ward, dormitory, rape crisis service, or changing room. If trans-identified, he is rightly shielded from discrimination and harassment under the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” but not those of “female” or “lesbian”. This classification also means that, if he’s a medical professional, he is not allowed to provide intimate care to unwilling women on the spurious grounds that he, too, is female. As a police or prison officer, he may not carry out strip searches of his “fellow women” either. His presence in the upper echelons of a workplace does not count towards feminist empowerment there. His athletic personal bests can no longer break female records, nor his football and rugby tackles break female bones….

A particularly pleasing vindication for her, I imagine, after the abuse she suffered at Sussex University for her support for the idea that, yes, sex matters. She was right, of course.

That strange letter to the Times on Monday from a bunch of retired UK ambassadors to the Arab world about the need to recognise the state of Palestine (and Israel's supposed use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza) has prompted a response from a considerable number of Lords:

Sir, A two-state solution has been desirable for decades. Proposals for partition into two states in the 1938 Peel report have been offered in several guises many times since then but they have always been thwarted, largely because of a reluctance by Palestinians to recognise Israel as a Jewish state. The call (letter, Apr 14) for the UK to recognise Palestine would have to contend not only with that continuing reluctance: the lack of an obvious legitimate and functioning government that commands the support of its population and the murderous split between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority would make it hard to imagine how a Palestinian state could function.

The failure to agree to where its borders might lie is a serious concern. While a recognisable state may be highly desirable there is too much that should be settled before that can be achieved practically. This says nothing of the often repeated intention of Hamas to destroy Israel.

It's all very British – Lords responding to ex-ambassadors – but at least this bunch of upper-crusties know what they're talking about.

A good editorial in the Times:

After years of argument, ideological extremism and an outbreak of collective insanity across the public sector and in corporate boardrooms, the Supreme Court has finally proclaimed that a woman is an adult human female, and references to “sex” and “women” in the Equality Act refer to biological sex and biological women. The judgment, which the loudest and most unpleasant voices in this long-running campaign of misinformation against British feminists insisted would never come, was unanimous. All five justices agreed what millions of people know instinctively to be true: that biological sex, not the expression of a subjective gender identity, is the only meaningful qualification to womanhood.

Such an elementary truth should never have been contested before the highest court. That it was — in a bitter dispute between the self-styled progressives of Scotland’s nationalist government and the women who dared to defy them — is testament to a political and cultural establishment that lost touch with reality. It was always absurd that the SNP, much of the Labour Party, prominent Conservatives and countless public bodies and universities insisted that men were able to simply speak themselves into female-only spaces, some of which women fought for years to establish….

Hopefully, the ruling will bring an end to this bizarre culture war. Now is not the time for triumphalism or gloating but consensus around two truths: that trans people have the right to live their lives in dignity and that women’s rights are sacrosanct also. To that end ministers must now amend the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 which only perpetuates the misconception that a piece of paper can alter the facts of life. Public institutions and universities must now be held to account if they ignore the law. Women should never have had to fight this battle in defence of scientific truth. But at least it is now won. Sanity is restored.

The battle's not over, of course. Trans ideologues, notably the men claiming to be women, have been and will continue to be notably aggressive in their demands. At bottom, after all, this has always been an angry men's movement fuelled by misogyny. They're not about to shut up just yet.