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ems. Firstly, we are exclusively engaged in Jamie’s world, rather than Katie’s. “It is his story, his challenges, his family, his voice,” she says. “Her voice is erased – that was a creative choice they made, and in terms of art, it works very well, but it is a disaster as an educational resource.”

She also believes that a drama with a damning view of education probably shouldn’t be shown in schools. “In the second episode, there is only one competent teacher,” she says. “The others are putting on videos instead of teaching, while the well-meaning but ineffective head teacher doesn’t instil any confidence. Nobody stops or changes or guides pupil behaviour. Not only is this not fair – there are good, nurturing teachers everywhere – but if you show this in a school, you are undermining yourself as you do so. You are saying, ‘We are powerless’.

We, the teachers, are powerless – and you, young lads, are potential scum. Give you access to social media and you turn into killers.

”Ultimately, what we should have learnt by now is that education by television rarely works. “Adolescence is an incredible piece of storytelling that has opened a lot of people’s eyes to the issues of sexism and misogyny amongst young people,” says Sean McGrath, a director who has written a play about trauma and consent that is now performed in schools around the country.

“But we must remember that [Adolescence] was written to inform and influence an adult audience, and in my opinion, is not age-appropriate for young teenagers. Showing it in schools is a bit like using Schindler’s List to teach Year 7s about antisemitism, or Requiem for a Dream to warn them about drugs – powerful, yes, but not created with the developmental, emotional, or psychological needs of young people in mind.”

We heard earlier in the week that Hamas had removed thousands of deaths from its Gaza casualty figures – a good proportion of them children. Brendan O'Neill in the Spectator: 

Are we being lied to, or at the very least misled, about what’s going on in Gaza? It increasingly seems so. Israel is carrying out a genocide, cries the activist class. Its pummelling of Gaza is one of the most barbarous onslaughts against civilians in history, they say. New research suggests these feverish claims have no basis in truth. What Israel’s voluble haters call ‘mass murder’ is in fact a pretty normal war….

It is the demographics of the death count from Gaza that are most telling. Studies – unbiased ones, that is – suggest that up to 72 per cent of the fatalities aged 13 to 55 are men. This backs up Israel’s claim that it is targeting fighting-age males (Hamas deploys even very young males to carry out its terror). The West’s noisy Israelophobes frequently say that as many as two-thirds of the dead in Gaza are women and children. There’s no evidence for this. It’s a defamation masquerading as a statistic.

No sane person denies that the war in Gaza has caused enormous suffering, including for civilians. It is a moral outrage that Hamas brought this tragedy onto the Palestinian people with its fascistic assault on Israel on 7 October 2023. Yet the story we so often hear about Israel’s war – that it is uniquely murderous, a genocide, a bloodlusting assault on women and children – is just not true. It is heavy on hysteria and light indeed on facts.

We’ve now had a year-and-a-half of the most unhinged animus for Israel. On our streets, on our campuses and most unforgivably in our press, the cry has gone out: Israel is one of the most murderous nations in history. One can’t help but hear the echo of old, dark bigotries in this curious loathing for Israel. The idea that the Jewish nation is inherently genocidal, that it targets children for ‘bloodletting’, resuscitates the medieval calumny that treated the Jews as a child-sacrificing race.

When the fog of war clears, we’ll need a reckoning with how the activist class and the media talked about this conflict. Why they so rarely mentioned the deaths of Hamas militants. Why they depicted a war on an army of anti-Semites as a slaughter of civilians. Why they engaged in the shameful moral inversion of calling Israel’s fightback against genocidal terrorists a ‘genocide’. Too many have made themselves the Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas, foolishly spreading its lies about the war and its libels against the Jewish state.

The BBC still reports every communication on casualties from Hamas as front page news. 

> them with a local LGBT association or perhaps even consider running workshops.

The idea that women will be policed, bullied and silenced if they don’t comply with accepting men in their changing rooms is nothing short of horrifying.

It's reminiscent of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre farrago, when former (male) boss Mridul Wadhwa gave his opinion that rape victims unwilling to be seen by men (trans women) should be challenged on their prejudices, and made to "reframe" their trauma. So many people – well, men – so keen to tell women what they're doing wrong. And, usually, it's about not letting men get what they want. 

le=”font-size: 11pt”>The prison has been accused of appeasing fundamentalists amid a power struggle between radical Islamists and other inmates that is mirrored in many British jails.

The most dangerously influential Islamist prisoners, deemed at a high risk of radicalising others, were supposed to be isolated within these terrorist separation centres. Now though it seems that the Islamists outnumber the rest, so they control the prison while those brave few unwilling to proclaim their allegiance to jihad populate the separation centres. How on earth could it have come to this?

A report in 2022 by Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, found that terrorists had been able to seize control of wings and set up sharia courts in some prisons in England and Wales without resistance from prison staff, who were afraid of being accused of Islamophobia if they intervened.

Ah yes. That's how.

He found that Islamic extremists had sought to dictate the diets and washing habits of non-Muslim prisoners and had set up sharia courts to deliver punishments such as flogging.

They escaped punishment by arguing that their prison cells did not come under the jurisdiction of terrorism laws.

(ones that actually cut hair anyway) and cab offices up and down the country. Anyone attempting to buy anything sharper than a spatula from Amazon might soon have to watch a few edited highlights of the show and answer a short questionnaire.

Meanwhile, LBC found a new angle on Adolescence to pursue this week. When Tory leader Kemi Badenoch pointed out to presenter Nick Ferrari that it is a work of fiction, and that there are more pressing issues to worry about, Ferrari suggested that for a politician not to have watched it might be regarded as a ‘dereliction of duty’. His LBC colleague, James O’Brien, went even further. ‘The idea that you would have swerved this programme is unthinkable’, he said. ‘It’s not just the ignorance and the blithe arrogance that’s offensive, it’s the revelling in it’, he despaired, his face like a bag of bewildered offal. O’Brien looked as if he suspected her of not having seen Paddington 2, either, but on this he bit his lip.

Badenoch does seem to have grasped something important that has eluded many others – namely, that ‘the story on which it is based on has been fundamentally changed’, as she put it. Co-creator Stephen Graham has said that one of the real-life incidents that inspired Adolescence was a ‘young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop’ – a reference to the 2023 murder of Elianne Andam by Hassan Sentamu in Croydon. Everyone knows that this had nothing to do with the manosphere, and that the backgrounds of the perpetrator and victim were very different from the characters in Adolescence.

The establishment left is increasingly dependent on fiction – whether novels, films or TV dramas – to tell the story it wants to, to obscure inconvenient facts and to drive the discourse it wants to hear.

The undoubted excellence of the acting, and the technical triumph of those episode-length single shots, seem to have seduced everyone into thinking that this must then be showing a powerful truth. As Kemi said though: it's not real, and it's not even an accurate portrayal of what's happening with these stabbings.

It's fiction.

New York Dyke March bans ‘Zionists.’

Organizers of the New York Dyke March, one of the largest LGBTQ Pride events for women worldwide, have announced that anyone identified as a “Zionist” will not be allowed to participate in this year’s march, scheduled for June 28.

Once… pic.twitter.com/3Kzp7lkRO8

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) April 3, 2025

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Full text:

Organizers of the New York Dyke March, one of the largest LGBTQ Pride events for women worldwide, have announced that anyone identified as a “Zionist” will not be allowed to participate in this year’s march, scheduled for June 28.

Once again, “Zionists”—and let’s be clear, that means Jews—are being ostracized and excluded.

It’s alarming that the LGBTQ community isn’t pushing back against this. A community founded on inclusion and acceptance now has factions that want to exclude an entire group of people.

The march didn’t ban Russians after the war in Ukraine. They didn’t ban Americans after the Iraq War. They didn’t ban Syrians during the civil war. They didn’t ban Iranians for their oppression of women or for hanging thousands of young people.

And they didn’t ban Palestinians for executing gay men in Gaza and the West Bank, like Ahmad Abu Marhia, 25, who was beheaded for his sexuality.

But they have no problem banning Jews.

Well, I’m a liberal gay Zionist Mizrahi Jewish Israeli man. And I’m proud of every one of these identities.

I won’t hide any of them to fit into a march that claims to be inclusive.

Yes, it's inclusive alright:

Any person who identifies as a dyke is welcome to march regardless of gender expression or identity, sex assigned at birth, sexual orientation, race, age, political affiliation, religious identity, ability, class, or immigration status.

Just not Jews.

From the Daily NK:

North Korean officials in Nampo are forcing unmarried women over 28 into arranged marriages, declaring that remaining single is a “non-socialist act” that shirks patriotic duty.

A source in South Pyongan province told Daily NK recently that the party committee of Nampo “recently began arranging forced marriages of women over the age of 28, regarding the act of remaining unmarried despite reaching marriageable age a non-socialist phenomenon.”…

The city’s party committee stated that “marriage and childbirth are not private decisions but a question of patriotism, and refusing to marry appears to be a refusal to perform the role a woman should play for the fatherland.” They threatened to “make an organizational issue of people who don’t get married.”

This means young people who intentionally remain single, particularly young women, face political and social disadvantages.

Specifically, the city’s party committee reportedly pressured those refusing marriage by threatening to add their names to labor mobilization lists and classify them as volunteers for work in rural communities, mines, or long-term construction projects.

In response to the Nampo party committee’s policy, the district of Waudo has been arranging forced marriages of unmarried women over 28 since March 19.

Neighborhood watch unit heads and Socialist Patriotic Youth League officials in the district are arranging marriages after compiling lists of unmarried women over 28. Women who refuse are classified as eligible for labor mobilizations as “shirkers of their socialist duty.”

For the benefit of those questioning why fencing has sex categories, have any of you ever watched fencing?

Lunge strength and speed passed you by, did it? pic.twitter.com/yCB7O5iszT

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) April 2, 2025

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ore the tribunal said the local branch of the University and College Union (UCU) wrote to the university calling on it to cancel the event, describing it as a “clear attack on trans people’s identities” and denouncing it as “transphobic” on Twitter….

O’Neill and Wayne, who describe themselves as gender critical, believe sex is a matter of biology, that it is impossible for a human to change sex, and that sex is important in a range of different political and social contexts.

They also do not subscribe to gender identity theory, “namely the belief that people are born with an internal sense of gender which may or may not correspond to their biological sex”, the documents state.

Can you believe it? Guardian readers must have been spluttering over their cornflakes reading this. But yes, there are people out there who believe that sex is a matter of biology, that it's important, and that gender identity is not a thing. There are also people out there who believe that 2 plus 2 equals 4, despite the repeated testimony of leading academics and Queer Mathematics theorists that this is a gross simplification based on outdated neocolonialist thinking, and that with a deeper understanding we can see that 2 plus 2 may often, in fact, equal 5.