Cartoon - Jim Unger

 

The Spectator - London has fallen

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/london-has-fallen/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BOCH%20%2020260418%20%20AL+CID_5591c8708e17524609c08096b9f67e2e

London has fallen

Toby Young17 April 2026, 12:29pm

A police officer guards the scene of a cordon in South London (Getty images)

I disagree with Sam Leith’s recent piece entitled ‘London hasn’t fallen’. He took at face value Sadiq Khan’s claim in a recent speech at a ‘disinformation summit’ that social media posts drawing attention to London’s rising crime rate – particularly knife crime, shoplifting, mobile phone theft and violence against women and girls – were either mis- or disinformation and were probably posted by bots, presumably based abroad. But is that true?

Khan himself is guilty of spreading misinformation about knife crime. In 2024, the Mayor of London’s claim that ‘knife and gun crime, homicides and burglary have all fallen since 2016’ was challenged by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which pointed out that while knife crime with injury involving victims under 25 had fallen, total knife crime had increased significantly since 2016.

Khan’s most recent speech relied on data supplied by research he’d commissioned himself and which was carried out by a research unit in City Hall. This purported to show that ‘London in decline’ narratives on X have grown by 150 to 200 per cent in the past two years, while migration-related narratives are up by over 350 per cent. The culprits include ‘extreme right-wing groups’, pro-Kremlin or pro-Beijing agents of influence and MAGA-aligned keyboard warriors. Khan demanded that Ofcom take enforcement action to protect Londoners from these bad actors.

But the methodology Khan’s research unit used is a little suspect. The headline figures are based on what the document itself describes as ‘keyword-defined samples of X posts over two time periods’ that ‘should be interpreted as indicative, as results are sensitive to query design, time windows and event-related activity’. That’s some caveat. Change the keywords slightly, or pick a different time period, and the numbers change significantly, as do the whereabouts of the posters. This is not rigorous social science.

In addition, the authors of the report confess that access to platform data ‘has become more restricted’, meaning they couldn’t get a reliable sample of what people are posting. And since overall London-related posting on X increased by only 7 per cent over the same period, the obvious alternative explanation – that real events, such as the Southport attack, the riots that took place in several major cities in the summer of 2024 and high-profile victims of violent crime drove organic interest in London’s crime problem – goes unexamined.

The annex to the report claims that ‘UK extreme right-wing ecosystems’ accounted for around 39 per cent of phone snatching and knife-crime content. But the authors don‘t say how ‘extreme right-wing’ is defined and in my experience it’s often too broadly. For instance, gender critical feminists posting about child sexual offences committed by transwomen are frequently dismissed as ‘far right’, when they would describe themselves as left-wing. 

What the mayor and his researchers fail to acknowledge is that some of the anxiety about crime in London reflects things that are actually happening. Between 2016 and 2023, knife crime rose 54 per cent in London. Robbery rose 57 per cent over the same period. Mobile phone thefts rose from 91,481 in 2019 to 117,211 in 2024. These are not fabrications by Vietnamese bot farms. They’re official figures.

Then there are the concerns about violence against women and girls committed by people who have entered the country illegally. When this issue has been raised by London Assembly members, Khan’s stock answer is that there’s no data to suggest this is a growing problem in the capital. That’s true, but only because the police only seem to include information about the immigration status of criminals on a case-by-case basis.

Based on the data that is recorded elsewhere, the picture suggests these concerns may be well-founded. Foreign nationals make up 10.9 per cent of the population but accounted for a quarter of sexual assault convictions and more than a fifth of rape convictions in in 2024. The Baroness Casey audit confirmed that in Greater Manchester, 52 per cent of suspects in multi-victim, multi-offender grooming cases were of Asian ethnicity, against a local population that is 21 per cent Asian.

By commissioning research that reframes public anxiety about crime in London as mis- and disinformation, Khan is gaslighting his critics. It’s not hard to work out why: if he can persuade Londoners that rising crime is a false narrative put about by ‘extreme right wing’ groups and Sri Lankan-based trolls, he will have a greater chance of being re-elected in 2028. His recent speech might also help some of Labour’s beleaguered candidates in the upcoming local elections, where Labour is expected to lose control of several London councils, including Camden, Wandsworth and Westminster.

As a free speech campaigner, I find Khan’s call for Ofcom to do more to censor his critics particularly troubling. As Louis Brandeis, the famous Supreme Court justice observed, the remedy for speech you think is harmful is more speech, not enforced silence. If Khan believes he’s done a good job of protecting Londoners from crime, he has a very large platform on which to make that case. Troll farms aside, the people he’s really trying to silence are ordinary Londoners concerned about crime they can see every day with their own eyes.

Livros - Revista Crítica XXI (nº 14)

 

Reflexão - Bricolage

 Quando for grande (ainda mais...) quero ser "Bricolageeiro"!!!! Cabeceira de cama e armário anos 70 para aparelhagem

The Spectator - Ten ways Trump is controlling us all

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/ten-ways-trump-is-controlling-us-all/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BOCH%20%2020260328%20%20HENRY%20POOLE%20%20AL+CID_d34a107f02b7dfb3ce2da395d34a2862

Ten ways Trump is controlling us all

Tim Shipman27 March 2026, 7:21pm

(Getty images)

Donald Trump is very likely the most consequential US President for the world and for British politics since Ronald Reagan, and arguably since Harry Truman. Everything he does is so, as the man would say himself, ‘yuge’, that it’s easy to overlook that he’s also the President whose actions have the most unintended consequences.

Like the fluttering of the hummingbird’s wings that causes a hurricane halfway across the globe, Trump’s careening around the world stage is largely responsible for much of what is going on in British politics right now.

This week is a case in point. Here are ten ways in which we are all in thrall to Trump, whether we like it or not:

1) The price of fuel is up
Petrol hit £1.50 a litre for the first time in nearly two years. Nick Butler, a former vice-president of BP, claimed that Britain could be hit by oil and gas shortages within three weeks. He told Times Radio: ‘There is a crisis coming. I think within the next two to three weeks you will see physical shortages.’

2) Panic is up
Keir Starmer and his senior ministers met the governor of the Bank of England at a Cobra meeting on Monday, to discuss how to cope with a crisis that might cause the price of oil to hit $150 to $200 a barrel. They’re dusting off no-deal Brexit plans and wondering about fuel rationing. A cabinet minister says: ‘We’re in 1973 territory.’ Gulp.

3) Inflation is up and growth is down
The OECD says the hit from the Middle East fuel crisis will impact Britain more than any other G20 nation. It has lowered its UK growth forecast for 2026 to 0.7 per cent, from 1.2 per cent in December. UK inflation is now forecast to hit 4 per cent this year, up from the previous estimate of 2.5 per cent.

4) Starmer’s biggest domestic problem is indirectly Trump’s responsibility
Westminster has been consumed all week by the saga of Morgan McSweeney’s stolen phone. The former chief of staff reported the theft of his phone to the Metropolitan police on October 20, three weeks after Peter Mandelson was forced out as ambassador to the US. Apparently that means some messages between McSweeney and Mandelson may be lost for ever.

This came after people in No. 10 had begun war-gaming the risks of the Tories using the ‘humble address’ mechanism (which had been used by Starmer in opposition to force the publication of Tory messages) to force McSweeney to disclose his messages. A piece I wrote on Starmer last month has become the focus of frenzied speculation, since it included the quote from an impeccable source that if the Tories came for McSweeney’s messages ‘Morgan is fucked’.

Let us not forget, Mandelson was only appointed to start with because Starmer and his team thought a fellow Epstein chum with political smarts was a good man to deal with Trump. That judgment might yet be the end of the PM.

5) Starmer is either ignorant or misleading
The PM sought to claim this week that ‘the idea that somehow everybody could have seen that sometime in the future there would be a request for [McSweeney’s] phone is, to my mind, a little bit far-fetched’. Given the levels of detachment the Prime Minister evinces on a weekly basis, it is possible he did not imagine such a scenario. But someone who had himself used the humble address device to force disclosures (and who, as a leading lawyer, would have watched countless public inquiries unfold), should have realised the phone might be of interest.

6) War is just politics by other means and vice versa
Trump is an accidental devotee of Carl von Clausewitz. He offered Iran a deal with 15 demands in the hope of pursuing peace, including a total end to Iran’s uranium enrichment programme, and the closure of the three main sites associated with it, at Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan. Trump also demanded that the Straits of Hormuz be kept open and that Iran end its support for proxies like Hezbollah and its missile programme. In return, Iran would receive sanctions relief, and the US would help the country to build a civilian nuclear energy programme. But when Iran’s leaders rejected the plan, he threatened to ‘unleash hell’ against them. Trump likes deals, and if he can’t get one he just throws his toys. In this case the toys are precision-guided munitions.

7) War and politics are all business
In the Cabinet Office there is a genuine belief that the President announced the possibility of a peace deal to drive down oil prices and drive up the stock market to feather his own investments. A senior civil servant says: ‘It’s mad how Donald Trump is saying stuff to tweak the oil price.’

8) Trump always chickens out
The TACO theory raised its head again this week, with the vain attempt at peace. There is a lot of evidence that people in his inner team, from JD Vance down, are concerned about the unpopularity of the war.

9) The UK has no idea what Trump will do next
Relations between the White House and No. 10 are at an all-time low as Starmer boasts he has made the right call by staying out of Trump’s war. One senior figure confides: ‘We wake up every morning not having a clue what he will have said or done next.’

10) Starmer is right about one thing
The PM told Beth Rigby on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast that this is a ‘once in a generation moment’ which is going to shape the next decades of our lives. From a once in a century President.

The Spectator - Why Hitler’s suave architect escaped the noose at Nuremberg

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/why-hitlers-suave-architect-escaped-the-noose-at-nuremberg/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260326%20%20AL%20%20EXPRESS%20VPN+CID_2fc6186b73335eb122cd8c4c27c265d6

Why Hitler’s suave architect escaped the noose at Nuremberg

Albert Speer was treated leniently because he was softly-spoken, well-dressed and ‘much the most appealing’ of all the defendants, according to Telford Taylor, one of the prosecutors

Ian Buruma

At the Nuremberg trial of the main Nazi war criminals, one man stood out: Hitler’s favourite architect and later armaments minister, Albert Speer. He cut a gentlemanly figure in a gallery of rogues. The strutting, smirking Hermann Goering reminded Rebecca West, who attended the trial, of ‘a tout in a Paris café offering some tourists a chance to see a black mass’. Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiting brute, was like ‘a dirty old man of the sort who gives trouble in parks’. On the same bench, all declaring their innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence of monstrous crimes, were the lantern-jawed SS leader Ernst Kaltenbrünner, the sour-faced ex-champagne salesman Joachim von Ribbentrop, Fritz Sauckel, the thuggish slave labour chief, and the rest of the sorry gang. 

But Speer, softly-spoken, handsome, courteous, trim and well-dressed, was prepared to accept the collective responsibility of having served in a criminal regime. However, he declared, as an ambitious architect and industrial technocrat, oblivious to politics, he had had no personal knowledge of such matters as the Final Solution to the ‘Jewish problem’. Like millions of others at the time, he had simply been seduced by the glorious promises of Hitler’s Reich, and the chance to build a great new capital city for the Führer.

In fact we now know that Speer was well aware of what was going on in blood-soaked Poland. He was present in 1943 when Heinrich Himmler gave a speech to SS officers stationed there spelling out the programme to exterminate the Jews. As armaments minister, Speer was also responsible for working many thousands of concentration camp slaves to death. Telford Taylor, one of the prosecutors at Nuremberg, later said that Speer should have received the death penalty instead of serving a mere 20 years in prison. The reason he got off lightly, Taylor said, was that Speer came across as ‘much the most appealing of any defendant in that trial’. When Taylor’s words were played back to Speer during an interview, he said with a dry chuckle: ‘If that was the reason I only got 20 years, I’m glad I left that impression.’

Speer left quite an impression on the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, too, who wrote in The Last Days of Hitler:

If [Speer] seems sometimes to have fallen too deeply under the spell of the tyrant whom he served, at least he is the only servant whose judgment was not corrupted by attendance on that dreadful master.

Not only did many people continue to take this view of Speer after his release from Spandau prison in 1966, but he became a bestselling author and a media star. He died in London in 1988, after speaking to the BBC – one of countless interviews he gave  as the suave ‘good Nazi’ who had reflected on his past and repented for having been such a naive, and, yes, opportunistic young man, so blinded by his ambition that he remained unaware of the worst things that happened in his time.

This was a carefully constructed myth that has fascinated many writers and filmmakers, not least Gitta Sereny, who wrote the remarkable biography, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. In true French post-modern fashion, Jean-Noël Orengo sets out to deconstruct the myth by writing a book that is neither fiction nor history nor an essay but a little bit of all three. It doesn’t quite come together in any of these forms; but much in this kind of thing depends on literary style. The translation doesn’t really do this justice, nor is it entirely reliable. Courtesan in French means ‘courtier’, so Hitler was not ‘always surrounded by courtesans’.

Still, Speer remains an inexhaustibly interesting subject, and Orengo has some important things to say about his artistic ambition and the role of architecture in Hitler’s phantasmagoria: ‘Architecture was the power of space. All architects are authoritarian and perfectly aware that they dictate our living spaces with their constructions.’ Speer, educated in the old school by the distinguished architect Heinrich Tessenow, surely recognised the vulgarity of Hitler’s fantasies, but there was something liberating about the licence to be unashamedly grandiose. Orengo writes: ‘What architect would not want that? To build freed from the strictures of taste, and money no object?’ True, no doubt, but not a particularly fresh insight.

The book becomes more interesting when the relationship between ‘the guide’, as Orengo insists on calling Hitler, and his architect shifts to the relationship between the architect and ‘the historian’, namely Sereny. The historian, Jewish and born in Vienna, dedicated her life to writing about people who committed shocking crimes, most notably Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. She tried to get to the source of evil deeds, but Speer was an enigma to her. She could see through his ‘mix of facile charm and glibly worn guilt’, in Orengo’s words, yet ‘she couldn’t bring herself to conclude that he was manipulative’.

Reading Sereny’s book, one feels that she was seduced by her subject – not sexually, but in a weird platonic sense. Orengo is at his most provocative when he compares her attraction to Speer with Speer’s attraction to Hitler:

He talked about Hitler’s charisma; now she could talk about the undeniable charisma of his favourite. He had been Hitler’s architect; now she was becoming Albert Speer’s historian.

In one of her many intimate conversations with Speer, Sereny quotes a psychoanalyst, who proposed that Speer’s relationship with Hitler was a form of homoeroticism – not sexual, but ‘an irresistible mutual attraction for their respective statuses as artist and man of power’. This may have been so. More thought-provoking is the question of why Sereny fell under the former Nazi’s spell. Why did so many people, in Germany as well as Britain, believe in Speer’s mythic status?

Here Orengo waffles a bit, in the post-modern fashion: ‘He manipulated truth in the way that writers in the 20th century manipulated fiction.’ Speer’s memoir, Inside the Third Reich, is ‘a political and aesthetic autofiction, the best ever produced to this day’. In the battle of narratives, Speer is ‘always one step ahead’. Well, OK.

Sereny’s infatuation was less high-falutin. She reveals in the final pages of her book that Speer, a sexually abstemious man, had had an affair with a young female fan near the end of his life. He calls Sereny on the phone, drunk, and brags about having done quite nicely, after all – Hitler’s architect, armaments minister and a successful author to boot. Sereny is shocked. This was not ‘the Albert I know. What happened?’ Well, he replies, he had had ‘an experience’. It is as though Sereny felt betrayed by Speer’s affair.

As for the others who took a liking to Speer, the reason may be no different from what prompted the judges’ leniency at Nuremberg. It is reassuring in a way that a certain decency can still exist in a moral cesspool. We want to believe that this is still possible. Orengo is not a believer. He repeats several times in his book: ‘Pessimism is the only wisdom.’

Tessenow, Speer’s professor of architecture in the 1920s, had a simpler explanation for Speer’s behaviour. He told the German-Jewish grandparents of a friend of mine that Speer was an Arschloch, an arsehole.

Cartoons - Dilbert

 

Almoços (vários)

Com "Os Marretas" (M Oliveira, A Pires, Alfredo, J Machado e Zé Azevedo) em S. Pedro do Estoril em 20.04.2026

Com IST2 (F Freitas e J Matos) em 12.05.2026 (Manuel da Gorda)

Com Luis Melo (Gil vicente 67) e Afonso (filho) em 14.05.2026 (Manuel da Gorda)

The Spectator - The intifada has arrived in London

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/the-intifada-has-arrived-in-london/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BOCH%20%2020260328%20%20HENRY%20POOLE%20%20AL+CID_d34a107f02b7dfb3ce2da395d34a2862

The intifada has arrived in London

23 March 2026, 9:53am

The charred remains of four Hatzola ambulances that were set on fire overnight in Golders Green, north London (Getty images)

At first I thought it was a scene from one of the battlefronts in the Middle East. The hellish glow of an out-of-control fire. A thunderous explosion. And innocents fleeing in terror. Only this was no warzone. It was Golders Green. It was that peaceful Jewish enclave in north-west London. And last night it was subjected to what seems to have been an act of apocalyptic Jew hatred, a fiery pogrom designed to terrify London’s Jews.

This was a blazing statement of loathing for Britain’s Jews

Actually, scrap that – this was a warzone. Last night’s sickening assault was the latest vile strike in a war on the rights of Jews. Four Hatzola ambulances were set on fire. Hatzola is a non-profit organisation that provides emergency medical care to the Jewish community and others. In the dead of night, three masked men approached the ambulances, doused them in flammable liquid, and destroyed them. All that remains this morning is twisted, blackened wreckage – the debris of racial hatred.

The Metropolitan Police are treating it as an anti-Semitic hate crime. If they are right – and there’s no reason to doubt that they are – then we need to speak plainly. This was an act of fascistic savagery. This was a blazing statement of loathing for Britain’s Jews. It was an act of staggering disregard for the sanctity of Jewish life: homes surround the carpark where the fascist fire was lit, and it is thanks only to merciful luck that no one was injured.

Today we will hear much stern criticism of this brutish terrorising of London’s Jews. Keir Starmer has rightly called it  “horrific” and “deeply shocking”. Yet condemnation without reflection is worthless. Every decent Brit whose mind and soul have not been fried by the malady of Israelophobia will know this was a despicable act. The question we need to ask ourselves is why things like this are happening in 21st-century Britain.

The barbarous assault on Hatzola did not take place in a vacuum. It follows two-and-a-half years of surging anti-Semitism. In the wake of Hamas’s 7 October pogrom, acts of Jew hatred in the UK reached dizzying and terrifying new heights. Jewish schoolkids were attacked. Synagogues were daubed with bloodcurdling graffiti. And two Jews were slain by a knife-wielding Islamist at a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur.

Then there have been the hate marches. Almost every weekend, unholy assemblies of affluent socialists and radical Islamists trudged through our cities to damn the Jewish nation as the most evil nation. From behind their keffiyehs they barked about the evils of Zionism. They called Zionists “baby-killers” – the same words Jews would have heard in twelfth-century England before they were murdered by the mob. They agitated for the destruction of Israel all the way “from the river to the sea”. They hollered for more intifada just weeks after an intifada had laid waste to more than a thousand Jewish lives in Israel.

“It’s just criticism of Israel”, they said. Stop it. The anti-Semitism crisis is too pressing for such slippery moral evasion. The truth is as bright as those fires that engulfed Golders Green: when you demonise the world’s only Jewish nation as the world’s wickedest nation, you endanger Jews. When you brand Zionism as a uniquely murderous ideology, you hang a target sign around the necks of Zionists – and the majority of Britain’s Jews identify as Zionists.

Even more chilling than the rise in Jew hate has been the nonchalance about it in polite society. Self-styled “anti-racists” said nothing as Jewish schoolkids were pelted with bottles and Jews were advised by cops to hide their Star of David necklaces. That section of society that sees “fascism” everywhere – in the vote for Brexit, in Donald Trump’s oafish commentary – has had nothing to say about the truly fascist vibe of this swirling animus for the Jewish homeland and the Jewish people.

For me it was summed up by the events of the past week. At the Al Quds gathering in London a week ago, I saw with my own eyes a mob of Islamists singing the praises of an anti-Semitic tyrant (the late Ayatollah Khamenei) and chanting for the death of Jewish soldiers. And yet what have the chattering classes been wringing their manicured hands over this past week? Nick Timothy’s polite, principled criticism of mass Muslim praying in public. We live under a cultural establishment that is more horrified by criticism of Islamic practices than it is by mob bloodlust for the violent demise of the Jewish state and its people.

Last year I visited the site of the Nova music festival massacre. The young woman who showed me around – a survivor – told me the horrific story of Hamas firing a rocket at an ambulance. The young Jews who had taken refuge in the ambulance were burnt to death. And now we have anti-Semitic ambulance attacks right here in London. Listen. If you said “Globalise the intifada” after an intifada that entailed the burning of Jewish ambulances, then we don’t want to hear a word from you about the burning of Jewish ambulances in London. For here it is, in all its fiery horror, your intifada.

The Spectator - The real reason the left hates Israel

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/the-real-reason-the-left-hates-israel/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260326%20%20AL%20%20EXPRESS%20VPN+CID_2fc6186b73335eb122cd8c4c27c265d6

The real reason the left hates Israel

Rod Liddle

‘Listen to what the man on the left of the camera has to say about Israel, the man who is addressed as Nick,’ a radical Corbynista friend suggested to me the other day in a social media message designed to change my mind about the Middle East. It’s part of a sustained campaign on his part which dates back at least ten years and is usually conducted with good grace, if never accord. So I listened to what this chap Nick had to say, with growing hilarity. Not because of what he said – which was what you might expect from a rank anti-Semite, but because of who he was. For it was none other than Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National party.

Mr Griffin has, in the past, referred to the ‘Holohoax’ which he believes was fabricated by wartime propaganda and has been an ‘extremely profitable lie’. My friend had never heard of Nick Griffin. But how interesting that this is where the left is now getting some of its bullets from. Its anti-Jew bullets. Hitherto, directly quoting from Nazis, or neo-Nazis, was kind of verboten for them, except of course among the Palestinians themselves, who at least have the decency to make it absolutely clear that they wish the entire Jewish race to be wiped from the Earth and whose pre-eminent political movement, Hamas, has that goal written at the heart of its founding constitution.

Not any more. The Overton window on Jew-hating has shifted so far that even the most extremist comments from people who have pictures of Adolf pinned up in their basements are now considered… well, I suppose kosher isn’t the word – halal, maybe.

For another example of the shifting far-right-wards of the narrative, let me present to you Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. Now, it is true that she is one of the most stupid and sanctimonious people I have ever had the misfortune of meeting, and quite how she has survived as a ‘commentator’ almost wholly defeats me. Fifteen years ago she was a columnist for the Independent and I mentioned to the paper’s editor back then that I thought she was a woman of unparalleled idiocy. The editor smiled and revealed that his most august and talented columnist had once asked him why he had employed Alibhai–Brown. The editor had replied that he was very proud that the first national newspaper to employ a woman of Asian descent should be the Independent. The columnist shook his head sadly and said: ‘Of all the teeming billions of Asian women – and you had to choose her.’ A fair point and well made.

But still. She has tenure. She even won the Orwell Prize – which is handed out solely to people whom Orwell would have detested, but there we are. Anyway, she recently posted the following comment: ‘Uber Zionist Margaret Hodge will, we hear, become Ofcom chair after uber Zionist Michael Grade steps down. A two-step solution to ensure the Palestine & Palestinian suffering are denied proper coverage. And the Israeli state gets away with atrocities.’

My colleague Charles Moore has mentioned this grotesque spewing of racist bile and I would concur with his gentle puzzlement: what is an uber-Zionist? I suppose David Ben–Gurion might qualify, ditto Ariel Sharon and even Golda Meir. But Margaret Hodge or Michael Grade? A bit questionable, isn’t it? I think what Alibhai-Brown meant by ‘uber-Zionist’ was ‘Jew’. And further to that, I would suggest two things. First is that Alibhai-Brown would not have tried to get away with tweeting that sentence ten or even five years ago: there would have been a furore. And second, that the far-left narrative is moving so quickly towards outright Goebbelism that it wouldn’t surprise me much if, in a year or two’s time, she did actually use the word ‘Jew’. Given that almost all Jews are Zionist, the conflation will, one day soon, be absolute and the left can say what it really means with pretty much impunity.

I had previously been of the generous – and naive – opinion that the white left hates Jews because it hates Israel. That through the inevitable contact with the people who call themselves Palestinian and their Muslim supporters, there was a gradual erosion of the boundaries between loathing Israel and, as so many Muslims do, loathing the people who live there. You end up nodding along when they say the Jews control the media and armaments and capital, and eventually you end up painting virulently anti-Semitic daubs in an art gallery in Margate and thinking how clever and right on you are and down with the Pallys.

But this was wrong, I think. It is the other way about. They hate Israel because they hate Jews. We all need somebody to hate and for the left, Jewish people have come to represent a plethora of things they already hated: capitalism, the West, military competence, industrial competence, education and a hostility to the religion which they come close to worshipping themselves, Islam. In a sense Israel is simply an embodiment of those already-present loathings.

It is true the Overton window had already moved quite sharply over the past ten years or so in tandem with the rapid growth of our Muslim population and its growing political weight. That is in there somewhere – but perhaps only to the extent that this growing section of our community gives licence to the real feelings the white left already had. A white left which can show you racism in a handful of dust – except where the Jews are concerned. Then, it simply doesn’t exist.

So when four ambulances are set on fire, it is easy to spot the anti-Semitic white lefties. They are the ones asking why the Jews have their own ambulances, or the ones suggesting it was a false flag attack by Mossad, or that this wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for Gaza. These idiots are not only enemies of the Jews – they are enemies of the rest of us too.

Cartoon - on stupidity

 God, how I know this feeling...

Reflexão (Intelectuó- bandalheiró) - Portugal no seu melhor (LBC) 2026

(sublinhados pessoais)

PS ACUSA GOVERNO DE CONDUZIR O PAÍS A “HUMILHAÇÃO DE DIMENSÃO PLANETÁRIA”

No mesmo debate requerido pelo PCP, o líder parlamentar do PS, Eurico Brilhante Dias, confrontou o ministro Carlos Abreu Amorim com a posição do secretário de Estado norte-americano sobre Portugal. "O Governo acabou por conduzir o país a uma humilhação de dimensão planetária. O Governo português agachou-se sempre, ficou sempre nas encolhas. Nunca foi claro", acusou o presidente da bancada socialista.

“humilhação [do país] à escala planetária” - PS dixit

Palavras para quê?...apenas se dirá que foi - uma vez mais -, "brilhante"...

Felizmente existe um Assis...

Reflexão (Intelectuó- bandalheiró) - Portugal no seu melhor (LBC) 2025

(sublinhados pessoais)

Novo aeroporto pode ser construído até 2030 se houver bom planeamento (Junho 2024). São estes os nossos técnicos excelsos?

Portugal vai construir um avião?(Set 2025). 

Portugal apoia a Palestina? (22.09.2025). E amanhã, com outro governo?

Israel expulso da eurovisão? (Outubro 2025). Quando admitirão a Palestina?...

CP vai comprar 200 comboios (incluindo para a alta velocidade) e pode precisar de "outros tantos" nos próximos anos (Outubro 2025). E ninguém pensou nisto antes?

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Funcionárias de USF de Cortegaça detidas por suspeita de inscrição fraudulenta de 10 mil imigrantes no SNS saem em liberdade (Novembro 2025) Agora? E quem tinha a responsabilidade de fiscalizar??

Carris contratou inspeções aos elevadores da Bica e do Lavra, mas ainda não se conhece auditoria sobre acidente na Gloria Avaliação ao estado dos trambolhos nos elevadores da Bica e Lavra foi entregue ao Catim, centro tecnológico da indústria metalomecânica. Auditoria independente ao acidente da Glória não é conhecida. (Dezembro 2025) - Agora? Depois de acontecer o desastre??

PSP realizou operação de prevenção criminal no Martim Moniz para "tirar as armas da rua" Pelo menos 50 pessoas foram revistadas e duas foram levadas pelas autoridades para "diligências pendentes": uma por situação irregular no país e outra por posse de droga. (Dezembro 2025) Agora? Depois de dúzias e dúzias de avisos?

The Spectator - How Pope Leo XIV is quietly reshaping the Vatican

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/how-pope-leo-xiv-is-quietly-reshaping-the-vatican/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=WEEK%20%2020260402%20%20AL+CID_2b322b124226a123246c5bd82b3c587a

How Pope Leo XIV is quietly reshaping the Vatican

Damian Thompson

On the afternoon of Easter Sunday last year, Pope Francis was driven through St Peter’s Square in an open-topped Popemobile. A few weeks earlier he had nearly died from pneumonia, so pilgrims were thrilled to watch him blessing babies. They told journalists that it was a miracle to see the 88-year-old Argentinian in such good shape.

At 9.45 the next morning the Vatican announced that Francis had just died from a stroke. And so began the preparations for a conclave that elected the second pope from the Americas. Cardinal Robert Prevost – ‘Bob’ to his friends – was a Chicago-born dual citizen of the United States and Peru. Until 2023 he’d been bishop of the Peruvian diocese of Chiclayo. He wasn’t exactly an obscure figure, having previously been head of the Augustinian order. But it was a surprise when Francis catapulted him into the Vatican as Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops.

Prevost had been a cardinal for only 19 months when he became Pope Leo XIV. Easter is early this year, so we’re still some weeks away from the anniversary of his election on 8 May. But that is long enough, surely, to anticipate the direction of his pontificate? Not necessarily. The press like to call Leo ‘the Quiet American’, intending it as a compliment. They presumably haven’t read Graham Greene’s novel, in which Vietnamese civilians are blown to pieces by the criminally naive CIA operative of the title. Leo is certainly quiet: at 70 years old, he has the gauche smile of a student at a junior prom. But he isn’t naive. He knows – though he’d never say so – that in some respects the 12-year pontificate of his predecessor was cynically divisive. It is his job to repair the damage. But how?

Pope Francis went out of his way to provoke his critics by promoting campaigners for LGBT rights and women’s ordination. He didn’t personally support either of these causes but he relished their disruptive power. He threw a withered bouquet to gays in the form of ‘non-liturgical’ blessings for same-sex couples – but took it back when the African cardinals went nuclear. He encouraged a debate over women deacons and then abruptly declared in a television interview that change wasn’t possible.

By contrast, Francis genuinely disliked the traditional Latin Mass and especially its priests, whom he believed were riddled with frociaggine (roughly translated as ‘faggotry’). In 2021 he issued Traditionis Custodes, which imposed restrictions on the celebration of the Old Mass so sadistic that they stiffened the resolve of traditionalists. He also favoured allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion. Here, however, his nerve failed him. His 2016 document Amoris Laetitia waffled about ‘the joy of love’ with the profundity of a Hallmark card. The paragraph apparently changing the rules on communion was relegated to a footnote. Asked about it later, Francis conveniently couldn’t recall its details.

In short, Pope Leo inherited a mess. Since he is naturally meticulous and by training a canon lawyer, there was never any doubt that he would attempt to clean it up. But would he do so by streamlining Francis’s botched ‘reforms’ or by discreetly shelving them?

The newly elected Pope Leo in May last year. getty

When Leo was elected, conservatives broke into a cold sweat. Many orthodox Catholics were convinced that he was really a Francis II who would push the Church in a liberal Protestant direction, but cunningly, eschewing the histrionics of his predecessor.

Meanwhile the old guard known as ‘Francis’s widows’ – a cabal of far-left Vatican officials and journalists whom the late pontiff indulged in order to goad traditionalists – were pushing the Francis II line for different reasons. Prevost was the Argentinian pontiff’s chosen successor, they insisted. That wasn’t true. Like Woody Allen, Francis didn’t want to achieve immortality through his work; he wanted to achieve it by not dying. There was no dauphin.

Nor had Prevost been the candidate of the leftists. They preferred the ostensibly moderate Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who despised the Old Mass and would give them their ultimate prize, a total ban on its celebration. Even so, the widows have claimed Leo as their man. In consequence, he risks being caught in a pincer movement between opposing lobbies both trying to squeeze him into a progressive mould.

His response has been one of Zen-like calm. As a diocesan bishop and cardinal, he kept an eye on Twitter; he’s learned to ignore social media loudmouths. Also, he remembers how popes behaved before Francis turned everyday disputes into a Latin American soap opera. For example, they often took a long time before replacing senior officials. Unfortunately, Leo found himself in the middle of a sinister clown show. His chief lieutenants were Parolin, the secretary of state who gave Beijing control over the appointment of Chinese bishops, effectively handing over Chinese Catholics to their communist persecutors; Arthur Roche, the ambitious Yorkshireman whom Francis employed as witchfinder-general against traditionalists; and ‘Tucho’ Fernandez, the sex-obsessed Argentinian whom Francis made doctrinal watchdog despite knowing he’d once written a book about the theology of orgasms. Roche, thank God, will soon be retiring, but why are the other two still in their jobs?

Bob Prevost was always hard to read, though his colleagues never doubted his intellect or holiness. His mixture of charm and inscrutability healed wounds in the Augustinian order. ‘He’s seen enough people being hurt and he doesn’t like it,’ says a priest who has worked with him in Rome. No pope in living memory has been so reluctant to throw bishops under a bus. More-over, he is aware that the liberals, who are far more deeply embedded in the Vatican than conservatives, know how to destroy a pontificate they suspect of ‘turning back the clock’: he saw them do it to Benedict.

Does Leo want to turn back the clock? There’s no simple answer. On Palm Sunday he declared that Jesus ‘does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them’, a statement that appeared to ditch centuries of Catholic teaching on the concept of a just war. It’s not clear whether it was a serious attempt to move the Church in the direction of pacifism or merely carelessly phrased. Either way, there is no simple factional correspondence between the Pope’s politics and his theology.

‘He’s left-wing on the environment, clearly doesn’t like Trump’s foreign policy, but instinctively conservative on sexual morality,’ says the priest. ‘We shouldn’t expect the translucent theology of Benedict or the charismatic presence of John Paul II. But he’ll restore the rule of law’ – a reference to the decision by Vatican judges to reconsider the conviction of Curial officials whose trial for corruption appears to have been rigged by Francis.

Change will come surreptitiously, and there are increasing signs that it will be conservative. Leo is unlikely to tear up Traditionis Custodes, but his friendly overtures to French enthusiasts for the Latin Mass imply that it will become a dead letter. He chose the Norwegian monk-bishop Erik Varden, a scholar with a cult following among young orthodox Catholics, to preach the Lenten lectures at a retreat for the Roman Curia. He has abandoned Francis’s habit of parachuting obscure or discredited progressives into major sees. Liberal dioceses get familiar liberals while mildly conservative dioceses (there are no very conservative ones) get mild if uninspiring conservatives.

The most noticeable differences are ones that traditionalists – growing in numbers but still a tiny proportion of Catholics – tend to dismiss as window-dressing. Leo wears far more elegant vestments than Francis, whose copes looked as if they had been rescued from the wardrobe of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and often sports the red satin mozzetta, or shoulder-cape, that was ostentatiously ditched by his predecessor. This might seem surprising, given that the former ‘Father Bob’, even as a cardinal, was happy to be photographed in a checked sports shirt.

‘You have to understand this is about restoring respect for the papal office,’ says a Vatican insider. ‘Leo has moved back into the Apostolic Palace, bringing an end to the expensive “humility” of Francis living in a hostel, with all its extra security costs. We’re back to traditional protocol at papal audiences and ceremonies, which is a relief for everyone. Priests can walk through the streets wearing cassocks without worrying someone will dob them in to the liberal Stasi. None of this is superficial. The restored sense of decorum is good for the city of Rome and for the morale of Catholics. Pope Leo knows that nothing good can happen until pulses return to normal. That’s his first gift to the whole Church and, irrespective of our differences, we should just be grateful.’

The Spectator - The shameful lies about Israel’s attack on Hezbollah

 

(personal underlines)

https://spectator.com/article/the-shameful-lies-about-israels-attack-on-hezbollah/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Editorial&utm_campaign=BOCH%20%2020260411%20%20BEXPRESS%20VPN%20%20GK+CID_4ad87c870cdfc2705acfdf5e5a0e4e56

The shameful lies about Israel’s attack on Hezbollah

10 April 2026, 6:01am

(Photo: Getty)

Imagine there was a virulently Francophobic militia on the doorstep of the French Republic. Imagine it had fired nearly a hundred thousand missiles into France these past three years. Imagine if the France-loathing maniacs had caused the deaths of hundreds of French people and forced almost half a million to flee their towns in terror. France would respond, right? It would take action, no?

Why, then, does President Macron not extend the same right to fight to his supposed ally of Israel? Hezbollah has inflicted every one of those bloody horrors on Israel since 7 October 2023. I’ve scaled up the numbers to account for France’s population of 70 million, compared to Israel’s ten million. Yet this is what the tiny Jewish state has experienced at the hands of that self-styled Party of God – ceaseless, indiscriminate violence. 

In solidarity with Hamas’s Nazi-like pogrom of 7 October, Hezbollah started raining projectiles on Israel the very next day. It has fired around 12,000 missiles, rockets and drones at its neighbour. Scores have been slain, including 12 Druze children playing a game of football. Tens of thousands in Northern Israel have been forced into internal exile, leaving ghost towns behind them. Jew-free swathes of territory – just as the anti-Semites of Hezbollah like it.

There is not one country on earth that would tolerate such apocalyptic goading. Even France, for all those spicy memes about its tendency to surrender in the face of the fascist menace. And yet Macron this week rebuked Israel for striking back against Hezbollah. We condemn Israel’s ‘indiscriminate strikes’ in ‘the strongest possible terms’, he said, to the glee of every twit in a keffiyeh.

He’s being gushed over, naturally. The fastest route into the affections of the bourgeois left is to take a swipe at Israel. Yet to those of us whose moral compasses have not been shattered on that wheel of hysterical hatred for the world’s only Jewish nation, Macron’s comments are mad. Immoral, even. Reprimanding a democratic state for pushing back against the racist militia that has subjected it to such savage fire? Who does he think he is?

I know France has a ‘special relationship’ with Lebanon. But if anything that should make Macron favourable towards Israel’s righteous rebuffing of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is a cancer on Lebanon. It is essentially an expeditionary force of the Islamic Republic. It has made Lebanon into a basket-case outpost of Tehran’s Islamist lunacy. Oh the irony of witless leftists calling Israel a ‘coloniser’ when it is fighting a militia that has colonised vast swathes of Lebanon with a foreign-born Islamism. 

There is something nauseating about this vision of cosseted Parisian elites, whose only daily struggle is getting their hands on a chouquette, as they lambast Israel for fighting for its life against Islamist tyrants. And it’s not just the French. Across much of the media, and of course the entire left, Israel is being scolded for having the temerity to strike back against its anti-Semitic tormentors in Lebanon.

Peruse social media, mingle with anti-war types, switch on the BBC, and you could be forgiven for thinking Israel is bombing Lebanon for sport. It’s that ‘genocidal bloodlust’ again, say the Israelophobes of the left, blind to how unhinged and pre-modern such libels against the Jewish state sound to the rest of us. These are lies of omission. To obsess over what Israel is currently doing to Hezbollah without mentioning what Hezbollah has already done to Israel is to engage in flagrant acts of deceit. 

The left’s obsessive hatred for the Jewish state, which often crosses over into outright sympathy for its anti-Semitic enemies, is a betrayal of everything the left once claimed to stand for. Hezbollah is an army of bigots. It dreams of annihilating the ‘cancerous’ Jewish state. Its goal is a pogrom that would put into the shade those of the 1930s – it has promised to keep waging holy war against the Jews of the Holy Land, and those who survive ‘can go back to Germany, or wherever they came from’.

The war of attrition it launched against Israel after 7 October was the latest stage in its fascistic vision of a Middle East free of those cursed Jews, who are the ‘descendants of apes and pigs’, in the words of the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. For so-called progressives to demonise Israel and take the heat off these literal Jew-haters is an unforgivable inversion of truth and morality. The western left needs to explain why it thinks criticising the Koran is ‘bigotry’ but plotting the violent expulsion of Jews from their homeland is ‘resistance’.

Any coverage of the Lebanon crisis that leaves out these facts is not worth the paper it’s written on. Macron, Keir Starmer and every genuine progressive should be making one demand and one demand only: for the full surrender of Hezbollah and the liberation of both Lebanon and Israel from its hateful, violent ideology.