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The Daily Sceptic features this article by Daniel Lü: “Why Using Parliament to Police MPs’ Opinions is More Dangerous Than the Opinions Themselves”. It starts,
Let us be clear at the outset about what this article is not. It is not a defence of Zarah Sultana’s views. Her statement that “Zionism is one of the greatest threats to humanity” is analytically indefensible. Zionism is a broad political movement encompassing positions ranging from liberal democratic to nationalist. Declaring it one of humanity’s greatest threats is not an argument, it is a slogan, and a lazy one. Her follow-up post, “they love killing kids”, is cruder still. It reduces a complex military conflict to a tribal smear, and it does so in a political climate already corroded by bad-faith rhetoric.
None of that, however, is the point. The point that tends to get lost whenever someone unpopular says something unpleasant is that the mechanism now being used against Sultana is more dangerous than the posts themselves. A complaint has been submitted to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, reported by the Telegraph on March 14th, alleging that the posts constitute “a modern iteration of the medieval blood libel” and breach the MPs’ code of conduct. If that complaint proceeds to a full investigation, the long-held principle that elected representatives cannot be called to account before a parliamentary watchdog for their political opinions will be broken.
and ends with this:
I freely admit that Sultana is not a natural free speech advocate. She has supported deplatforming voices she disagrees with and co-leads a party in explicit opposition to liberal freedoms. She would likely not extend the same defence to her political opponents. None of that matters. The principle does not depend on the virtue of its beneficiary. If we only defend the free speech of people we agree with, we do not actually believe in free speech. The liberal tradition holds that the state’s coercive mechanisms should not be used to adjudicate between competing political opinions, however much those opinions horrify us.
The right response to Sultana’s posts is scrutiny, challenge and the kind of forensic public argument that exposes weak thinking for what it is. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards has a proper role in British democracy: investigating corruption, expenses abuse, conflicts of interest and harassment. Deciding which political opinions about live foreign policy conflicts are permissible for elected representatives to hold is not that role. The Commissioner’s own rules say as much.
I urge you to read the part in between. It is a strong re-statement of basic principles. And defend Zarah Sultana’s right to speak freely as an MP, vicious and stupid though she is.
The Daily Mail features this story about a pro-Palestinian activist:
Thomas Bourne, 39, an Islamic convert who uses the social media handle ‘White British Muslim’, approached the Jewish comedian, 51, last month after spotting him on an escalator.
He said: ‘I was going up the escalator and looked to my side and saw someone giving me an uncomfortable even hostile look and I realised it was Matt Lucas.
‘My instant reaction – as anyone’s would be who was going to confront someone – was to pull out my camera phone and shout “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!”
‘As a result of that video and a subsequent Daily Mail article I actually lost my job.’
As commenter “MoleUK” says on the UKPolitics subreddit,
Sounds like a totally normal thing a normal person would do. Normally.
Bellend acts like a bellend and suffers repurcussions.
Every personal interaction a chance to show one’s virtues, just gotta make sure it’s captured on camera and uploaded to social media immediately. What a miserable way to live.
The interview with Mr Bourne at the PoliticsJOE podcast, from which the Mail took the story, can be seen here. The section quoted by the Mail is excerpted right at the beginning, and the video Mr Bourne himself made is shown at 8:07 and can be seen here. The interviewer, Seán Hickey, sympathetically introduces Mr Bourne with the words, “We’re going to be talking today about an incident that you found yourself involved in” as if Mr Bourne had no choice about initially accosting Matt Lucas, filming him while shouting “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!”, confronting him further at the top of the escalator (while making a point of loudly repeating his name so everyone would know it was someone famous), continuing to follow him and argue with him despite Lucas’s non-confrontational answers, and then putting the resulting video on social media.
I do not know if London Transport has any rules against shouting at strangers you think are looking at you funny, filming them, and putting the video on social media without their consent. If it does have such rules, they were not enforced on this occasion. Mr Bourne was not punished by London Transport. Nor was he punished by the law. This is not a free speech issue. The only bad result he suffered was that his employer no longer wished to have him on their roster of fundraising consultants. I can see why Mr Bourne might not be an asset for an organisation trying to raise funds.
“When we are finished, take over your government, it will be yours to take. This will be… probably… your only chance for generations.
For many years you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it. No President was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a President who is giving you what you want. So, lets see how you respond.
America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action: do not let it pass.”
– POTUS Donald Trump.
Back on January 31st, I asked “So… is help on the way for the Iranian protestors or not?” – We now have our answer. I have my differences with Trump on trade, Ukraine, and threats against Greenland, but on this issue… Godspeed.
Friday 27th February 2026: Pakistan declares state of ‘open war’ after bombing major Afghan cities
Saturday 28th February 2026: US and Israel launch attack on Iran, as Trump says ‘major combat operations’ under way
Lot of it about these days. I was going to make a rather tasteless metaphor about it being like the Gorton and Denton by-election, with the Greens winning and Reform coming second, displacing the established parties. But of course the surprise war – to all but the very old – was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Given Iran’s participation in proxy wars in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and its hostile actions against Israel, Saudi Arabia, and probably other countries that I’ve forgotten (even leaving out Western ones), I’m surprised this didn’t happen earlier. As for Pakistan and their former protégés the Taliban, he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.
Update: Israel says that Ayatollah Khamenei has been found dead in the rubble of his compound. For the sake of the Iranian people, so many of whom have been murdered by Khamenei’s regime in the recent protests, I hope that this is true. In contrast, Zack Polanski of the Green Party says “This is an illegal, unprovoked and brutal attack that shows once again that the USA and Israel are rogue states.” Illegal, Zack? If the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran wanted the protection of international law, they should have renounced and made recompense for taking diplomats hostage. In the absence of that renunciation the international community should have put them down like rabid dogs forty-seven years ago.
This tweet (https://x.com/nicolelampert/status/2026017118341263795) from Nicole Lampert shows a 45 second video of Jeremy Corbyn, former Leader of the Opposition and twice the Labour Party’s candidate to be Prime Minister. In it, he says,
‘[I got a message] from the director of Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza. And he said there had been a delivery of boxes to the hospital by the IDF. A large number of boxes, 60 or 70 boxes. And after the IDF had gone off, they opened the boxes. And each one contained the skull of a Palestinian who had been killed. And there were also delivered [sic] of bodies of dead women in Pala- in Gaza – that had been opened and some of the organs removed. I mean, it’s hard to describe this. That is what is happening to the people of Palestine.’
As Alex Hearn said said in the comments, “He won’t believe British intelligence about a Russian chemical attack in Salisbury but he’ll believe a fantasy from Hamas run Gaza.”
There is a slightly longer version of the same video from CAMERA UK here: https://x.com/CAMERAorgUK/status/2026229835803107332. This starts a few seconds earlier than Nicole Lampert’s video and includes Mr Corbyn saying that he got the message from the director of Al Shifa Hospital on Thursday or Friday morning.
In case you are wondering, no, I do not believe the director of Al Shifa Hospital (who appears to be Dr Mohammed Abu Salmiya, although I would like Mr Corbyn to specify who gave him this message) for a moment. Not just because he is the head of an organisation controlled by Hamas, although that would be enough in itself to make me disbelieve him, but because this claim is identical in form to a centuries long stream of anti-Jewish blood libels about Jews murdering Christians or Muslims to harvest their bodies. The old version, exemplified by Little St Hugh of Lincoln had the Jews killing Christians as human sacrifices, usually with the additional detail that the Jews baked the victims’ bodies into their matzos, the unleavened bread served at Passover. This religious version of the blood libel is almost dead in Europe but still commonplace among Palestinians, including academics like Dr Samar Maqusi, formerly of University College London. The slightly updated version drops the matzos and has organ-harvesting as the motive instead. This one is very common among Palestinians and increasingly common among Westerners – witness the Right Honourable Jeremy Corbyn MP speaking in February 2026.
Why does Corbyn think the IDF would bring these boxes of skulls and dismembered corpses to Al Shifa hospital? [Update: OK, someone in the comments to the CAMERA post says the ceasefire agreement required the IDF return unidentified human remains to Gaza. But in that case the director of Al-Shifa hospital would know perfectly well what was going on, and it does not explain why there were claimed to be boxes of skulls in particular, nor why a medical doctor would specifically claim that women’s internal organs had been removed.]
Did Corbyn think to ask the director of Al-Shifa Hospital what he did with them? If the IDF ever deliver any boxes of skulls and corpses with missing organs to me, I’ll be sure and contact all the world’s most eminent forensic pathologists so they can carry out post mortems and give the evidence to the world.
Another update: This was no “misspeaking”. Jeremy Corbyn has publicly made the same allegation in more detail within the last few days. In the comments to the CAMERA post, someone called SHO_MY links to a video posted at 3:03pm on 23 Feb 2026 (https://x.com/EL4JC/status/2025949713292296383) from a pro-Corbyn account called #EL4C @EL4JC:
In the video Corbyn is addressing a public meeting. In his speech he says,
‘I’m going to read something to you. If you’ve already heard it, please be patient. If you haven’t, please be prepared to be shocked. I got a statement this morning from my good friend Doctor Mustafa Barghouti who’s an independent member of the Palestine National Initiative, a member of the Palestine National Assembly, and he’s forwarded me a statement by the director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex, Gaza, and I’m going to read it to you. “The director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex stated that approximately 10,000 individuals remain missing underneath the rubble across the Gaza Strip. Of these, around 5,000 persons are unaccounted for and their fate remains unknown. He further reported that 66 boxes were received yesterday from the occupying authorities – that’s the IDF – containing only the skulls of deceased victims. In addition, the bodies of women were handed over with no information provided regarding the location or circumstances of their abduction. According to the director, some of the returned bodies showed signs of severe mutilation including severed hands, while others had their abdomens surgically opened and subsequently restitched. Thus these findings raise great, raise grave concerns. He warned of credible indications of organ theft from the bodies of martyrs in the Gaza Strip, describing these acts as serious violations of international humanitarian law and human dignity.” And that I just received this morning. Just think about that statement. And I’ve no reason to disbelieve anything Mustafa Barghouti says, or the director of Al Shifa Medical Complex.’
I do.
And I ask again, what has the director of Al-Shifa Medical Complex done with these bodies that he says show credible indications of organ theft? What action has he taken to get what he believes to be evidence of a horrible crime out to the world so that impartial outside observers can assess it? What is he doing to get these “credible indications” of organ theft either proved or disproved?
UK has not given US permission to use RAF bases for Iran strikes… ok, I get it, bonehead Trump has acted in ways that make it clear the Atlantic alliance of yore is now largely dead, for which there are serious geopolitical consequences. But surely, given there still are US bases are on British territory, at least for now, and the theocratic Iranian government is a manifestly unfriendly power, hampering US strikes on the mass murderous mullahs is perverse. That too will have geopolitical consequences.
The lunatic UKGov wants to give Chagos to an ally of China (and pay for the ‘privilege’ of giving them away, for reasons that must surely boil down to naked corruption), I imagine US has drawn up contingency plans to simply take Diego Garcia over if worse comes to worse, with all that implies.
So why was the UK, US and European media so obsessed with this one shooting? Because it was done by an ICE officer, and ICE has been painted as Donald Trump’s personal law enforcement agency, ignoring the fact that it was created by George W Bush in 2002.
I make no defence of Donald Trump. I make no defence of the violent actions of ICE in so many US cities, but to pretend that this one incident was more important than the nascent revolution going on in Iran is laughable. And that’s what too many media organisations were doing.
I can look myself in the eye because almost from the start of the protests, I was covering them on my LBC show. Indeed, we’ve devoted hours and hours to them – more I suspect that any of the 24 hours news channels up until the last couple of days.
If you wanted any real-time coverage of what’s happening in Iran you had to go to live Youtube channels, like Mahyar Tousi’s TOUSI TV, which has been brilliant at informing people about what’s really going on.
– Iain Dale
On January 13th, Donald Trump indicated “Help is on the way” for Iranian protestors. Allegedly tens of thousands (!) of dead protestors later, which would be approaching Nazi-style Babi Yar massacre numbers if correct, what is the POTUS going to do? Help how? Realistically what can he do that would meaningfully change things for the better for the protestors, if anything?
Since Israel’s military response to the October 7th massacre by Hamas, news organisation of the world could not get reporters into Gaza. And yet, we have seen a constant stream of reportage and commentary.
But since the outbreak of mass civil resistance resistance to Iran’s repressive Islamic regime, we have seen an order of magnitude less in the media about the ongoing horrors there. News organisations have often stated this was due to their inability to get reporters into Iran. Strange that.
Truly… no Jews, no news.
“So, where are the chants of ‘From The Gulf to the Caspian Sea, Iran will be free'”?
– Allister Heath, asking a question that sort of gets a natural, logical answer: because Iran’s regime is against Israel and Jews, and against the West more generally. And in the minds of those who used to protest about Israel’s attacks on Hamas/Hezbollah and others, that is what counts. A few thousand people dead in Iran is all about the smashing eggs/omelette equation according to this anti-West calculus. In a way, this plays to the whole “two-tier” issue of the thinking about much of today’s Left (and the barmier forms of it on the Right): If you are on the “right” side of a particular argument (say that you are against Israel’s existence, or at least ambivalent about it), then it creates moral “space” to be indulgent towards regimes that are against Israel, etc. We see this over and over.
(Daily Telegraph link behind paywall.)
Nick Timothy writes in the Telegraph:
It was last summer when Aston Villa drew Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Europa League. Immediately, the local, “Gaza Independent” MP Ayoub Khan launched a campaign to cancel the match. His petition demanded the match be cancelled because Aston is, in his words, a “predominantly Muslim community”.
After police planning started for the match, due to be played on November 6, officers met Birmingham councillors and officials at the Safety Advisory Group meeting on October 7. Two local councillors present said the “community want it stopped”. They met behind closed doors, but the minutes now show the truth. Even in the “absence of intelligence” the “planning assumption” of the police was that no away fans would attend the match.
The chairman of the Safety Advisory Group contacted the police two days later asking for a “more clear rationale”. A position had been reached, but the police were asked retrospectively to drum up a justification. The chairman warned the police to make sure the decision did not look like “anti-Jewish sentiment”.
When the committee met again on October 16, the police magicked their “significant intelligence” about the supposed violence of the Maccabi fans.
The police thought they could get away with it. Instead, their case has utterly collapsed. The “intelligence”, which the Chief Constable said had “changed the assessment”, focused on disorder in Amsterdam in 2024. It said the Maccabi fans were “linked to the Israel Defence Force” and targeted Muslim areas, throwing people into the river. Their report claimed the Dutch police sent 5,000 officers to tackle the violence. But none of it was true.
The fabricated “intelligence” supposedly came from an unminuted meeting between West Midlands Police and Dutch commanders on 1 October. This meeting was held six days before the meeting when the police said there was an “absence of intelligence”.
Amsterdam’s mayor, local police chief, and chief public prosecutor have all contradicted the “intelligence” – even calling it “nonsensical”. The disorder in Amsterdam was in fact violence against the Maccabi fans, which was described as a “Jew hunt”. It was an Israeli who was pushed into the river. Only 1,200 officers were deployed.
And it gets worse. West Midlands Police received intelligence on September 5, before the Safety Advisory Group meetings, saying local Islamists planned to “arm themselves” and attack Maccabi fans. But this information was suppressed, seemingly because the police did not want to admit that the true source of the threat lay closer to home. Instead of confronting the mob, the police gave in and banned the Israelis.
In modern times, the British social contract was meant to be that we, the people, give up the right to use force to protect ourselves in exchange for the police protecting us. Cue Libertarian grumbling “I do not recall signing this contract”, but that is the Britain we used to live in. It wasn’t ideal but it wasn’t bad either. It was one of the better societies that have ever existed.
The social contract relied on the idea that the only people permitted to arm themselves were servants of the state such as police officers or soldiers. If the state got wind that members of any other group – a white nationalist militia for example – were preparing to arm themselves in order to attack their enemies, an armed response unit would be kicking down their doors faster than you can say “Terrorism Act 2000”.
Now that some sections of the police have acquiesced in other groups taking the right to arm themselves, and, worse yet, have covered up their shame by portraying the aggressors as victims and vice versa, what reason do we have to continue to grant them special status as the sole holders of the right and responsibility to bear arms? Without the majestic aura of the law around them, the police are just another gang. They are not even the dominant gang.
Some thoughts about what might happen if the brutes ruling Iran are toppled:
Funding for various Islamist terror networks will decline and that is good for Israel, Lebanon and wider world.
Israel might try and carve out relations with Iran, leading over time to trade and capital flows, development, etc. There are lots of young, smart Iranian people who want something better. Some expat Iranians might return and bring money and investment.
This will hit the Islamists who are allying with the Western hard Left. This is going to badly undermine morale and the sense that their ideology is winning. That is important.
Iran’s relations with Moscow will change, and become more difficult. This might further tilt the scales against Putin, although that is not something I predict with much confidence.
On balance, this is also a negative for China, assuming that Iran moves in a slightly more liberal direction (I use that word with due care and attention).
The Gulf states might benefit in some ways but not in others. Saudi Arabia, UAE etc have benefited in recent years from expanded links with the West, in part because they were seen as the relatively sane folk in the room (particularly, the UAE). If Iran were to turn more friendly, more pro-capitalist, etc, it creates more competition for the Gulf states. Competition is generally a good thing.
Can we call it “Persia” again?
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