There is overwhelming evidence that the Israeli military is raping Palestinian detainees with dogs.

We don’t just have repeated testimonies from Palestinians - but that of Israeli soldiers, too.

Last week, Euro Med Monitor, an NGO based in Geneva, released a report headlined “Another genocide behind walls”: Sexual violence in Israeli prisons and detention centres and engineered impunity.

They carry the testimony of 35-year-old Amir, who was detained by the Israeli army in the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp. He testifies the following:

I was detained in Sde Teiman. They took a group of detainees and me to a corridor between the sections and forced us to strip completely naked. The soldiers brought in several dogs. One of them urinated on me. One of the dogs then raped me, penetrated my anus in a trained manner while I was being beaten. This continued for several minutes. I felt profoundly humiliated and violated.

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They then report the testimony of another 35-year-old Palestinian former detainee in the same camp, who says the following:

We heard dogs barking in the area, and from time to time, the dogs would urinate on us while we were detained in the metal cages. The shock came when they forced me to lie down, and a dog climbed on top of me and tried to insert its penis into me. At first, I did not understand what was happening, but then I realised that I was being raped.

I was completely naked, with no clothes on. I felt the dog’s fluids on my body. I tried to resist, but I was handcuffed, and the space was so small that I could not move. Two of them were holding me down tightly. This went on for three to four minutes.”

Last November, another NGO, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, also released a report carrying the Testimonies of Systematic Rape and Sexual Torture in Israeli Detention against Released Palestinian Detainees.

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They detail the case of a Palestinian man named A.A. who reports being tortured during 19 months of his detention including forced stripping, obscene insults, threats of rape against him and his family, culminating in his rape by a trained dog inside the Sde Teiman military camp.

He says:

I was moved to a section I didn’t know inside Sde Teiman. During the first weeks there, amid repeated suppression operations, I was taken with a group of detainees in a degrading manner to a place far from the cameras—a passage between sections. We were stripped completely. Soldiers brought dogs that climbed on us and urinated on me. Then one of the dogs raped me—the dog did it deliberately, knowing exactly what it was doing, and inserted its penis into my anus, while the soldiers kept beating and torturing us and spraying pepper spray in our faces. The dog’s assault lasted about three minutes; the overall suppression lasted about three hours. Because of the severe beating, all of us sustained injuries across our bodies. I suffered a severe psychological breakdown and deep humiliation; I lost control because I could never have imagined experiencing such a thing. Afterward, a doctor stitched a wound in my head caused by the torture—seven stitches without anesthesia. I also suffered bruises, fractures in my limbs, and a rib fracture.

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In October 2024, Al Jazeera aired the video testimony of a Palestinian detainee.

Here is what the Palestinian detainee says:

“Sde Teiman wasn’t just a normal prison. It was a place for exacting vengeance.

Let me tell you about the worst thing I experienced at Sde Teiman prison.

They called the names of three people, and I was one of them. We came out into a cement courtyard, dedicated to one form of torture. They removed our blindfolds.

We were crouching on our knees. They came and took one of the other men.

They beat him. After they beat him, they forced him to the ground on his belly.

They tied his hands and tied his feet. There were about eight or nine soldiers.

They stripped him of his underpants. A captain came and sprayed something on his backside.

There was a dog there. They unleashed the dog on him.

The dog raped the young man. It raped him, literally speaking. Rape.

In another article published by The New Arab in 2024, a detainee is interviewed:

MA: Yes…one day after your visit, a group of soldiers came with dogs, they came to where we were. They selected prisoners at random from every age group … children, young men, old men. They made them lie on the ground, face down, their hands tied behind their heads.

They made the dogs attack them, tearing at the skin and flesh of the prisoners […], then they stood them up and put them in a corner where there was a big “iron window”. They put [the prisoners’] hands on the window, then began beating them on their backs, their buttocks, and their legs from behind.

Then they set the dogs on them again, and then one of the soldiers tried to get one of the dogs to rape one of the prisoners! They teach their dogs to have sex with prisoners! Can you imagine?

[…]

They attacked another prisoner called "J.M." in the same way - they beat him and abused him, and brought in dogs to rape him. They stripped him naked and put the dogs on top of him, they were ripping at his flesh, then a soldier came carrying an "electrical baton", which emitted high-voltage electric shocks, and they started beating the prisoner on his genitals.

They also electrocuted his backside, then they stood him up on his feet and took hold of his genitals and started yanking them down violently until he fainted. Then they took him to an unknown location.

Now, Shaiel Ben-Ephraim is an Israeli academic and former soldier, who has sources in the Israeli military. He says the following:

I talked to two guards in Sde Teiman, on more than one occasion. One had seen this happen and said it was too awful to talk about. The other said that he had heard about it from others and believed it was true. This happened. This is happening still. The evidence is too overwhelming.”

This is a level of depravity that the vast majority of people would struggle to imagine anyone even thinking up, let alone enacting. And yet the evidence is overwhelming: that the Israeli military is systematically using dogs to rape Palestinian detainees.

Keir Starmer is a man without integrity, without principle, without loyalty, without honesty. We could add more - charisma, competence - but the point is simpler than that: there is nothing to recommend him, or his premiership.

He is a void. A political non-entity. A frontman - nothing more - for one of the most odious factions in modern British politics. And as events continue to demonstrate, he will throw anyone under a bus if he thinks it might save his own skin.

None of this should come as a surprise. It was all visible, all there in plain sight. And yet much of the British media is implicated in what followed - because the real story, even now, is still not being properly told.

The scandal surrounding the appointment of Peter Mandelson - an associate and friend of late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein - arose for a straightforward reason. It has a clear origin point: six years ago, a right-wing faction seized control of the Labour Party under false pretences. That original sin is what will, in the end, bring this government down.

Today, the senior civil servant sacked by Starmer - Olly Robins, the former Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office - gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. It was, by any measure, damning.

Robins made clear that at no point was the Mandelson appointment made conditional on vetting, despite being announced well in advance. The Cabinet Office, he said, argued there was no need to vet Mandelson at all.

His office, we were told, was subjected to relentless pressure from No. 10 to push the appointment through regardless. One official even reportedly rang his predecessor to say: “Just fucking approve it.”

That intervention is alleged to have come from Morgan McSweeney - Starmer’s former chief of staff, a close associate and protégé of Mandelson, and the man who ran Starmer’s deeply dishonest 2020 leadership campaign, in which sweeping left-wing pledges were made to members and then discarded wholesale. McSweeney denies the allegation.

But it doesn’t end there.

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Robbins also claims the government attempted to install Starmer’s former director of communications, Matthew Doyle, as an ambassador. Doyle is a personal friend of Mandelson, and a member of the same faction.

They worked together inside the Labour Party, and during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership they met regularly - over dinners involving figures like Wes Streeting and Mandelson himself - to plot their course.

Like Mandelson, Doyle is also linked to a convicted paedophile: former Labour councillor Sean Morton. Morton was charged in 2016 with possessing indecent images of children; Doyle campaigned for him even after those charges were brought. Morton was later convicted.

These links were known. Yet Starmer appointed Doyle to the House of Lords. The SNP’s Stephen Flynn was among those who warned against it. Only sustained outrage forced Doyle’s suspension.

Doyle denies any knowledge that No. 10 pushed for his appointment to an ambassadorial role. But we already know - from correspondence released during the Mandelson scandal - that Robins’ predecessor recorded: “The Prime Minister had indicated his intention to recommend… a small number of political appointments to serve as His Majesty’s Ambassadors overseas.”

Starmer, for his part, has repeatedly denied knowing that Mandelson was denied security clearance. But David Maddox, political editor of the Independent, messaged No. 10 last September to say he’d been told by two sources that Mandelson did not clear vetting with MI6 but the prime minister pushed his appointment anyway. So how did he know but the prime minister did not know?

It is all rather academic in a sense. Starmer is merely the frontman for this faction. As his own advisors briefed journalists in 2024: “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him at the front of the DLR.”

The DLR, for those who don’t know is a driverless train.

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What we know is that Morgan McSweeney spent years - whilst Corbyn was Labour leader - using the ‘Labour Together’ think tank to lay the groundwork for a right-wing takeover of the party.

That effort was funded by £700,000 in secret donations from business figures - conveniently declared only months after Starmer became leader, dismissed by McSweeney as an “admin error” after an Electoral Commission fine.

(If you haven’t already, do buy Paul Holden’s The Fraud on all this).

Once in control, they remade the party in their image.

Selections were stitched up. Leading factional members were parachuted into constituencies they had no connection to, bypassing local members entirely. And as we now see, the same mentality extended to the state itself - attempting to hand out ambassadorships to factional allies with no relevant experience, but with deeply troubling associations.

And still, most political journalists looked the other way.

Why? Because they approved of the war waged by Starmerism on the left. They saw it as good politics. And so they overlooked all the traits which have emerged in undeniable full force during the Mandelson scandal.

Five years ago, I wrote the following about Starmer’s leadership:

The one thing I got wrong was that Starmer was unelectable, and that had absolutely nothing to do with him - it was just because the Tories destroyed themselves more comprehensively than any government in our history, and the electoral system gifted Labour two-thirds of the seats with only a third of the vote.

This faction must be driven from British politics. But alas, they rigged the parliamentary selections to ensure that the parliamentary Labour party is now full of their loyal drones.

That’s why the Labour Party needs to be replaced - and why voting Green in the upcoming elections is one way of achieving that.

You can pre-order my new book THE FALL OF THE WEST now…

The Daily Telegraph is being acquired by a German-based media giant - and now its journalists are formally expected to support Israel.

The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has cleared the takeover by Axel Springer SE. Its CEO, Mathias Döpfner, has written to Telegraph staff “outlining his commitment” to the paper.

An employee at The Telegraph has sent me that letter. It is deeply revealing.

Döpfner insists that the values of The Telegraph and the publishing house founded by late tycoon Axel Springer - dubbed ‘Germany’s Rupert Murdoch’ - are aligned. They are, he says, “Freedom, free markets, individual freedom and freedom of speech.”

He goes further. Axel Springer, he explains, is “guided by a clear editorial compass.” Its employees are rooted in its Essentials - “core values to which we are firmly committed.”

There is, he adds, “no such thing as neutral journalism”: only journalism that is “pluralistic and surprising, fair, and fact-based.”

And yet, having invoked “freedom of speech” as a foundational principle, he insists these Essentials are not partisan - but rather “define a socio-political framework within which maximum journalistic freedom and intellectual independence can flourish.”

“We support the right of Israel to exist”

Döpfner then sets out those ‘Essentials’:

1. We stand for freedom, freedom of expression, the rule of law, and democracy.

2. We support the right of Israel to exist and oppose all forms of antisemitism.

3. We advocate the transatlantic alliance between the United States and Europe.

4. We uphold the principles of a free-market economy.

5. We reject political and religious extremism, as well as all forms of discrimination.

Note where “we support the right of Israel to exist” sits: second.

“Freedom” - within limits

Döpfner emphasises that editorial independence will be protected, including from pressure by politicians, celebrities, or advertisers. “I value debate in the spirit of pluralism and freedom of expression,” he writes.

But the description of the Essentials is, frankly, Orwellian.

It is not reconcilable to argue that these tenets create the conditions for “maximum journalistic freedom” while simultaneously requiring adherence to a political position on a specific foreign state.

Out of 193 UN member states, only one is singled out in this way.

No state has a “right to exist” under international law. Peoples have a right to self-determination - a right denied, in this case, by Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and by subjecting its people to apartheid, colonisation and genocide.

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A Telegraph journalist put it to me bluntly:

To be firmly told by our new parent company-to-be’s CEO that the second most important guiding principle is affirming the right of a country committing genocide and ethnic cleansing is more than a little concerning. It also raises the question of how any reporting from the paper can be considered factual if that is our core principle.

As they note, this principle comes before any explicit rejection of discrimination.

What “Israel’s right to exist” means in practice

In practice, the phrase “Israel’s right to exist” has been repeatedly deployed by Israel’s cheerleaders across the West to justify Israel’s crimes - from occupation and colonisation to apartheid and, now, mass destruction in Gaza.

It is also telling what is not said. The Essentials do not prohibit racism in general, despite later rejecting “all forms of discrimination”. There is no explicit rejection of Islamophobia, for example, or anti-Arab racism.

Instead, “oppose all forms of antisemitism” is fused directly with “support the right of Israel to exist.”

That conflation matters.

Because we know that defenders of Israel have repeatedly blurred the line between antisemitism and opposition to the actions of the Israeli state.

So how, exactly, might Axel Springer SE interpret “oppose all forms of antisemitism”?

“Free Palestine” is a “pro-Hamas topic”

There are very strong clues, let’s put it that way.

The late Axel Springer himself declared:

It is the task of our generation to stand firmly by Israel’s side, even if this causes difficulties for our policies elsewhere.

He further added:

The country does not need encouragement, but advocacy, wherever and whenever it can be provided – in the European Community, in the United Nations, in diplomatic relations, at work, in the family.

He described this as a “German duty”.

In June 2021, when emoloyees complained about the Israeli flag being raised at company headquarters, Mathias Döpfner responded:

I think, and I’m being very frank with you, a person who has an issue with an Israeli flag being raised for one week here, after antisemitic demonstrations, should look for a new job.

He was referring to demonstrations against Israel’s assault on Gaza that May.

In October 2023, a Lebanese employee at Welt TV - part of the Axel Springer empire - was dismissed: he says it was after he challenged the outlet’s pro-Israel positions. Axel Springer SE refuse to comment on “individual personnel matters.”

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In an internal email which was leaked that year, Döpfner reportedly summarised his political worldview with the phrase: “Zionism über alles” - “Zionism above all.”

He has penned repeated pro-Israel polemics. “Will we stand with Israel against the enemies of freedom despite the risks, or will we allow fear and opportunism to prevail?” he wrote in October 2023, demanding “massive, unstiting political, financial and military support”.

On a podcast for his employees, Döpfner claimed “a majority on Instagram, on other social media, and in particular on TikTok, took sides for the Hamas’ actions.” He argued that “an almost global wave of Anti-Semitism suddenly showed its ugly face”, which he described as a shock, despite knowing “that it is here and there, well hidden or presented in a politically correct manner as Anti-Zionism or “Woke-ism” or whatever.”

And he said something deeply revealing about TikTok:

“Concretely, more than 4 million posts until today have been published under the hashtag of #FreePalestine or other kind of pro-Hamas topics. And only 50,000 something, 53,000 posts basically standing by Israel.”

“Free Palestine”, he argued, was a “kind of pro-Hamas topic”.

Conflating antisemitism with critique of Israel

When Israel launched its first war on Iran last June, Döpfner declared it was “surprising that Israel is not being celebrated worldwide for its historic, extremely precise and necessary strike.” Instead, he claimed:

the public response is dominated by anti-Israel propaganda. The intelligence and precision of Israel’s actions are not admired but are instead used here and there to perpetuate blatantly antisemitic stereotypes. This attitude is characterized not only by racist undertones, but also by a strange self-forgetfulness.

In other words, he directly conflated critique of Israel’s war with antisemitism.

A few months ago, he quoted claims about atrocities committed on October 7th which included: “A first responder testified before the Knesset that he had seen the severed skulls of three children.” The claims that Israeli children were beheaded have been comprehensively debunked.

He went on to write that:

justified criticism of decisions made by an Israeli government is mixed with deep-rooted hatred of Jews and that, as a result, instead of an obvious global wave of compassion and solidarity, a global wave of cold-heartedness and increasingly aggressive anti-Semitism has emerged.

The piece further criticised the German government - Israel’s most loyal European defender - for “massively” restricting arms sales to Israel. Tellingly, he said that decision meant that “From now on, unconditional support for Israel’s right to exist is effectively subject to conditions.” He described the recognition of Palestinian statehood “as a reward for the barbarism of Oct. 7.”

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Last October, Al Jazeera published an investigation into German tabloid Bild, a cornerstone of Axel Springer SE, headlined ‘The Story of Israel’s Propaganda Machine Specializing in Anti-Palestinian Incitement’.

Al Jazeera reported that the newspaper had suggested that a Palestinian journalist killed by Israel was a “terrorist”, denied famine in Gaza, and published a lengthy report it claimed had been found on the computer of late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. It transpired that the document was old, not authored by Sinwar, and had reportedly been leaked by Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

The newspaper, reported Al Jazeera, had also “consistently demonised pro-Gaza demonstrators in Germany, labelling them as “mobs”, “Israel-haters”, and “anti-Semites”.”

BILD has described student protesters in the US as “Judenhasser-Studenten” (“Jew-hater students”) - even though they included Jewish students.

What happens to Jewish critics of Israel in Germany?

We should also note the atmosphere in Germany, in which antisemitism is widely conflated with critique of Israel, to the extent that Jewish people there have been repeatedly denounced, deplatformed, and arrested.

Alex Springer SE’s outlets have repeatedly singled out Jewish critics of Israel.

Die Welt newspaper argued that Jewish American photographer Nan Goldin “misused the opening of her retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie to level serious accusations against Germany and Israel – supported by pro-Palestinian activists.”

Another article attacked Deborah Feldman, a Jewish American-German writer who has spoken out about how the German government ignores “the way dissenting Jews in Germany are being thrown under the same bus as they are in Israel.”

A piece in Bild said of her:

Her political views are close to conspiracy theories: in Germany, one is not allowed to say what one wants, the police are infiltrated by right-wing extremists, and the Federal Republic is preventing "peace" in the Middle East (anti-Semitic subtext: because it obeys the all-powerful Israel lobby). This is roughly the worldview of the author, who years ago also had a Netflix hit with her autobiographically inspired bestseller "Unorthodox".

In other words, falsely suggesting a Jewish writer holds antisemitic views because of her opinions about Israel.

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Rewarded by Israel

Last October, the Israeli President Isaac Herzog presented Döpfner with the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honor - alongside Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American business tycoon who donated $100 million to Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Israel’s justification for Döpfner’s award was that he “is a brave voice against antisemitism and a staunch supporter of Israel. He has demonstrated unprecedented solidarity with Israel during the current war.”

Herzog incited genocide back in October 2023, when he declared of Gaza:

“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians who were not aware and not involved. It is absolutely not true.”

Notably, Axel Springer SE has a business empire in Israel. That includes acquiring Israeli classifieds platform Yad2 for €165 million in 2014. Yad2 is involved in Israel’s property market, and reportedly advertises properties in illegal settlements in the illegally occupied West Bank.

What this means for the Telegraph

To be clear, the Telegraph has already had a partisan pro-Israel orientation, publishing multiple pieces justifying Israel’s genocidal onslaught against Gaza.

But this takeover embeds pro-Israel bias into the newspaper’s very fabric. Its new owners are zealously pro-Israel, and have repeatedly conflated antisemitism with critique of Israel.

They claim that “freedom of speech” is a core value.

The truth is that Israel’s supporters in the West have launched the biggest assault on free speech since the height of McCarthyism.

We can see where the Telegraph’s new owners stand on that.

What on earth was the BBC thinking?

Earlier today, former Trump ally Tucker Carlson was interviewed by the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire on its flagship politics programme.

Derbyshire put to him allegations of antisemitism, including from Republican Senator Ted Cruz - and then from someone she introduce as ‘Republican Congressman, Randy Fine’. He had called Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America’.

Just who is this Randy Fine? He is the most unapologetically extreme racist elected to the US legislature. This isn’t an exaggeration.

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Here are some direct quotes from Randy Fine:

• "If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one."

• "‘Palestinian’ is just another word for demon."

• In reference to "mainstream Muslims", he said: “I don’t know how you make peace with those who seek your destruction. I think you destroy them first."

• “There is no suffering adequate for these animals. May the streets of Gaza overflow with blood.”

• "“Palestinian” = Hamas. #BombsAway"

• "Gaza must be destroyed."

• “In World War II, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis. We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here. There is something deeply deeply wrong with this culture, and it needs to be defeated.”

As you can read, he is a genocidal racist fanatic.

The BBC must have known who Fine was when they made the editorial decision to include him in their script. How could they possibly conclude that this was an acceptable person to quote on anything, let alone on the question of racism?

If a politician had said similar statements about Jewish people, would the BBC quote them?

No, they would not. They would - rightly - think that would be a scandalous thing to do.

What does this tell us about the BBC’s attitude towards Muslims or Palestinians? How can the BBC possibly argue that they take racism against Muslims or Palestinian seriously after this?

You can complain to the BBC here. It was on ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’, BBC One, 9am, Sunday 12th April 2026.

You can pre-order my new book THE FALL OF THE WEST now…

You can pre-order my new book THE FALL OF THE WEST now…

The so-called ceasefire is already crumbling, but have no doubt: this is the biggest strategic defeat the US has suffered since it emerged as a superpower in 1945. It isn’t even close.

The US and Israel went to war believing they could variously overthrow its regime, impose a stooge leader, plunge the country into violent chaos or even dismember it, destroy its nuclear programme, neutralise it militarily, and steal its oil.

None of that has happened. Instead, Iran has secured de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s main economic arteries. It has inflicted severe economic pain on the US, the West and its Gulf allies. It has certainly suffered huge damage - including to civilian infrastructure - but its military prowess has been proven. Its nuclear programme, including its enriched uranium, remains intact.

US military prestige was already severely damaged by the Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya disasters, but now it has been shattered. It’s much worse than the precedents. Its stamina hasn’t been whittled down by years of guerrilla warfare. It went to war with a state, and within weeks, was driven into retreat after suffering severe economic damage.

Trump threatened to inflict genocide against Iran, declaring that its “civilisation will die” if it did not bend to his will. Regardless of what happens next, a line has been crossed there. Every day Trump remains in the White House represents a mortal danger: he must be removed.

But this genocidal threat clearly represented his fury and frustration at being unable to secure what he had presumed would be an easy victory. He hoped the threat could somehow overshadow the reality, which is a colossal strategic defeat.

Iran can now use the Strait of Hormuz as leverage: for example, to raise money by imposing a toll, or to demand the removal of sanctions.

Right now, Israel is unleashing unspeakable violence in Lebanon, both an attempt to destabilise the ceasefire and to inflict revenge on its people after a humiliating strategic defeat. Iran has responded by enforcing the continued shutdown of Hormuz, making clear its continued involvement in ceasefire talks depends on an end to conflict everywhere.

As it was, very few ships were likely to pass through the Strait without a secure peace deal on the grounds that the ceasefire there could fall apart at any moment, stranding or outright endangering shipping. There’s also the question of how the toll with Iran would work - and all of that matters for insurers giving the go ahead for ships to pass, without which traffic remains at a standstill.

The gravity of the defeat is clearly making White House tetchy, to say the least. After I shared a version of Iran’s 10 point plan, and concluded “This is the biggest strategic defeat suffered by the US since its emergence as a superpower,” the White House Director of Communications and Assistant to the President fired some choice words at me:

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Why is Steven so grumpy? His Administration claims they’ve just secured a major victory - so why so mardy, in Northern English speak?

The truth is, of course, is that Trump did indeed describe Iran’s 10 point plan as “a workable basis on which to negotiate”. And here they are in the Wall Street Journal:

Imagine, on the day this war began, you discovered several weeks later that this was what the US intended to negotiate. You would rightly understand that the US must have suffered a terrible defeat to even countenance this.

Hence several Trump allies, like the truly toxic Laura Loomer, have shown awareness of their country’s strategic plight:

Not cheerful, is she?

Trumpism was a response to US decline. Trump believed he could reverse US decline by brute force. That has backfired spectacularly. Instead, the US’s weaknesses are more starkly on display than any time since the end of World War II.

China, in particular, stands to gain, not least as it tries to position itself as a rational, stable, reliable alternative.

But the collapse of US hegemony, alas, does not mean a new world order based on peace and justice emerges in its place. Instead, violent chaos and authoritarianism beckon. Unless, of course, we establish an alternative.

You can pre-order my new book THE FALL OF THE WEST now…

You can pre-order my new book THE FALL OF THE WEST now…

We’ve had over a decade now of news cycles revolving around the latest outrageous tirade Donald Trump has fired off on social media.

I get it: the shock has long since dissipated. These days, such posts can often expect to attract, at most, an exhausted eye roll or perhaps a mildly raised eyebrow.

We’re now over a month into Trump’s illegal war on Iran, and the president is repeatedly and openly posting flagrant threats and admissions of war crimes.

We cannot normalise this.

All the way through Israel’s genocide, many of us warned that the consequences would not just be felt by the Palestinian people. Israel was (and is) committing every war crime imaginable in the world’s first livestreamed genocide. Its leaders repeatedly flaunted their bloodcurdling genocidal statements of intent.

The lack of outrage - let alone accountability - would normalise our slide into barbarism, we warned. The international order was always defined by deception and hypocrisy, rigged as it was in favour of the West. But the naked, shameless abandonment of the most basic norms governing the conduct of state violence would have devastating consequences.

The Iran war began with the US slaughtering 165 mostly Iranian schoolgirls. The lack of outrage over this was itself indicative of our slide into the darkness. Which brings me to Trump’s latest post:

Blasting Iran “back to the Stone Ages”, he declares, not even bothering to pretend that he isn’t presiding over the total abandonment of the Geneva Conventions.

There was this post from 10th March:

This was straightforwardly genocidal, threatening as it did to make it impossible for Iran “to ever be built back.” He’s also declared that Iran “is dead”. Gone are any lies about liberating Iran’s people.

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That’s without even discussing his so-called War Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has the air of someone who spends much of his time furiously masturbating over footage of exploding bombs.

This cannot be dismissed as Trump sounding off, as the unhinged rhetoric of an internet troll. This is the despotic leader of an admittedly declining superpower, and specifically the commander-in-chief of its military engaged in illegal warfare.

Indeed, there is ample evidence of Trump’s bile being acted upon. Here are photographs of Mobarakeh Steel Company, Iran’s largest industrial unit and the biggest steel complex in the Middle East. It has been destroyed. The impact on Iran’s economy - and its people - is incalculable.

And then there’s this. Israeli missiles have destroyed a major pharmaceutical factory in the Iranian capital. Note that sanctions have meant that Iran has had to manufacture most of its medicine production domestically:

These are blatant, unapologetic war crimes.

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But of course, the context is the last two and a half years. Israel destroyed schools and hospitals and mosques and libraries, slaughtered over 1,600 medics, blew up most civilian homes, and ravaged agriculture, livestock and plantlife. It butchered well over a hundred thousand people, including deliberately shooting children in the head. It disappeared, tortured, raped civilians, and arbitrarily killed its kidnap victims. It starved an entire population, and deprived them of the necessities of life.

We could go on. And the West not only failed to express its outrage - it armed and facilitated those crimes.

And now what? The Iran war will prove the greatest strategic military defeat the US has suffered since it emerged as a superpower. But that will only amplify Trump’s murderous rage. Unable to emerge victorious, he will simply escalate his vengeful crimes.

This depravity is being entirely normalised. The fall of the West is chaotic indeed, and far more barbarism awaits.

I’m very excited to announce my new book - The Fall of the West - is now out for pre-order.

You can do that here!

I’ve felt very guilty about not posting as much on Substack - it’s because I’ve been finishing off the editing. But that will soon change!

It’s a book I’ve been working on for two years. I’ve travelled from Baghdad to the Rust Belt, from Kenya to Palestine.

The book challenges the dominant theory about Western decline. It’s one you’ll have heard a lot - that the West is in crisis because of immigration, Islam, multiculturalism, ‘woke’, the supposed defiling of Western history and Western guilt and shame.

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That theory of decline has become central to the rise of the far right. But they are both symptoms and accelerants of decline.

The truth is Western elites got high on their own supply. They believed the collapse of the Soviet Union meant they were militarily invincible, that their economic model was unchallengeable, that they were morally supreme. The End of History, as it were.

They opportunistically used this triumphalism to grab wealth and power. That led - economically and militarily - to catastrophe.

That’s left the West in a grave crisis at home and abroad. The West has dominated the world since the early 19th century - but now its power is in freefall.

Trumpism is a symptom of that decline - and as we can see both in the assault on democracy and war in Iran, it is only accelerating the fall.

Anyway, there is a lot more to say - and can’t wait to share more!

Pre-ordering really helps if you’re able to. I’ll keep you updated!

Thanks so much for your support again, and I’ll be regularly updating here shortly!

Iran is winning the war.

The regime only needs to survive in order to win. Despite the constant shifting of official war goals, Donald Trump clearly believed that assassinating the Supreme Leader would lead to a stooge leader being installed in Tehran within days.

But Iran’s regime has achieved more than survival. Consider the Iraq, Afghan and Libyan wars. All of these were strategic catastrophes for the West, all severely weakening US hegemony. But in all of these examples, the regimes in question crumbled swiftly in the face of the overwhelming advantage of Western conventional warfare. What did it for US power, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, was years of guerrilla warfare; in Libya, it was its collapse into a failed state.

In this case, the Iranian regime has not only survived - it is more hardline than it was, and has greater power. It has used its leverage to inflict a devastating economic cost on the West - by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil passes, and pounding the Gulf allies of the West.

Iran’s strategy is straightforward: inflict such a great cost that the US and Israel not only cease their attacks, but they do not dare to renew their attacks months or even years down the line.

Forget about Trump’s wounded pride. If Iran achieves that goal, then US hegemony formally collapses. Its military weaknesses have already been exposed by the disastrous foreign adventures of the 21st century - which Trump was aware of, hence his commitment to end ‘the forever wars’.

But this would be in a completely different order: not years of being worn down by insurgency - but rather a foreign state facing down an attack altogether.

As it is, Iran has stripped away what seemed to be a US monopoly over economic warfare. That’s a crucial plank of US power - its ability to menace other countries economically, not least by sanctions. In a sense, Iran has instead sanctioned the West.

This is why esteemed political scientist Professor Robert A. Pape says:

“Counterintuitive reality: Iran may be winning the war strategically

The regime is consolidating power, fracturing the U.S.–Gulf coalition, and driving global energy shocks.”

It’s also why Trump’s former Defence Secretary Mark Esper suggests that it is in fact Iran which has more “endurance”.

It’s also why Trump sounds increasingly unhinged, even by his standards, declaring that Iran is “dead”, and resorting to disturbed genocidal rhetoric:

Gone is any pretence about saving the Iranian people: now Trump is talking about permanently destroying their entire country.

His desperation is also underlined by his toying with the strategy of “declaring victory and going home”:

The problem here is that Trump cannot just “declare victory and go home”, because Iran can continue to inflict further economic damage which the US will suffer from. If the US withdrew in those circumstances, it would simply be read - correctly - as a catastrophic defeat US power could not recover from.

Yesterday, Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gasfield - a crucial plank of its energy infrastructure. Iran had repeatedly promised that if such infrastructure was attacked, it would respond in kind - and, in accordance with its threats, attacked Qatar’s liquified gas facilities.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump supported this strike in order to somehow pressure Iran into opening the Straits of Hormuz.

But Trump has now issued an extraordinary post:

Whatever the truth here, Donald Trump has lost complete control of the war of aggression he decided to launch.

He claims not to have known anything about Israel’s attack - which, if true, means he is admitting that he is not in the driving seat of his own war. But either way, he is clearly shocked by the Iranian response, despite Iran have explicitly and repeatedly warned what it would do. And here he threatens a catastrophic escalation which would surely mean Iran destroying other Gulf energy infrastructure - or even the desalination plants which make its neighbours habitable.

The danger of this moment cannot be understated. For Iran’s regime, getting through the war without surrender is existential. But for the US, this is now an existential question about its own hegemony. That’s why it is trapped in a cycle of escalation, with serious talk of US ground troops - which would land the country in a disastrous quagmire, not least given Iran’s geography.

The question facing humanity now is not about the fall of US hegemony - but how steep and chaotic that descent turns out to be.

Apologies for lack of posts - currently editing my new book, appropriately titled ‘The Fall of the West’. Off to Cuba now for a few days and normal service will resume!

You may be aware of an ongoing libel case against me filed by the BBC’s online Middle East editor Raffi Berg.

Here’s my statement in response to the judgment of the High Court today:

“I am delighted that the High Court has ruled in my favour on the key issues in the libel case brought by Raffi Berg.

The court rejected the claimant’s interpretation of the article and ruled that it expressed an opinion based on stated material.

I stand by my journalism and, if Mr Berg decides to continue the libel claim, I look forward to defending my article in court.

I would like to thank my legal team at RPC, my barrister Aidan Eardley KC, and Drop Site News, which published the article and has stood by my journalism throughout.”

You can read the legal judgment here.

You can read the article, ‘The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza’, here.

And to all of my Substack subscribers - a very special thank you to you for all of your support. You’re crucial to all that I’m able to do!

The US is losing its war against Iran. That’s what all the evidence is pointing towards.

Israel has a narrower strategic goal - leave Iran in violent chaos so that it’s permanently weakened and hobbled. That’s a plausible outcome, but it would be destabilising for the West’s Gulf allies and further associate US power with bloody turmoil.

But let’s go through why this is going so badly for the US.

No regime collapse

By assassinating the Supreme Leader, it’s clear that the US believed it had achieved regime decapitation. The system would come crashing down like a pack of cards, or so they thought. There would be defections by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and some sort of coup.

But there are no apparent cracks in the regime at all.

When asked about the timeline for the conflict, War Secretary Pete Hegseth said: “We could say four weeks, but it could be six, it could be eight, it could be three.”

Such a protracted conflict is clearly not what the US originally had in mind.

Yesterday, Donald Trump dismissed the exiled Crown Prince and son of the deposed Shah, Reza Pahlavi. That’s despite Pahlavi’s fanatical pro-US orientation, and his zealous support for bombing his country of birth.

Last July, Reza Pahlavi claimed that 50,000 officials from within Iran’s ruling government and military had contacted him to sign up to defect and collapse the regime. If that was true, do you think for a second that Trump wouldn’t be backing him?

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Instead, Trump has proposed an equivalent of what happened in Venezuela. You take out the leader and replace them with someone from the government, in that case Delcy Rodríguez, and put a gun to their head and order them to do what the US and Israel wants.

But as a former Israeli intelligence officer, Danny Citrinowicz puts it, they have completely misunderstood Tehran's strategy and calculations.

He says that Iran “will not relinquish its missile arsenal, nor will it forgo what it defines as its right to enrich uranium.” The only path to clear victory is regime change, and he says that “it is far from clear that Washington is willing to invest the resources and long-term commitment such an outcome would demand.”

No successor, he says, is likely to present surrender terms to the US, because “capitulation would mean the collapse of the very ideological foundation of the Islamic Republic. Any leader who emerges from within the system will be bound by the same core principles and strategic red lines.”.

So they will keep fighting, he predicts, believing that “time is on their side”. We’ll come to why they think that, but it’s worth noting the mass loyalist crowds that the Iranian regime has mobilised on the streets.

There’s still mass opposition to the regime, no doubt, but it enjoys far more support than Saddam Hussein, Colonel Gaddafi or the Taliban when the Iraq, Libyan and Afghan wars began.

From history, we know that foreign attacks on a country often rally support; they provoke a nationalist response.

It’s notable that the BBC is quoting residents in Tehran describing their horror at the US-Israeli attacks, saying things like: “Not happy anymore [at the possibility of regime change], no. Just tired. And confused as to what might happen.”

In these situations, when your nation is under attack, it becomes much easier for dissent to be seen as accomplices of the attackers - which is one major reason why aerial bombardment has never led to regime change.

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Chaos in the Gulf

How about this in the Telegraph, which is a newspaper with a hard right pro-Israel orientation:

This article notes that many - but not all - Iranian ballistic missiles and drones have been intercepted but that’s only by burning through munitions stockpiles in Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.

The Telegraph claims that:

Iran is believed to still have vast reserves of missiles despite attempts by US and Israeli forces to destroy launchers capable of deploying them.

The War Secretary, Pete Hegseth, today boasted that the number of Iranian missile and drone attacks had dramatically reduced. That’s down to US-Israeli attacks, he argues. That could be part of it, but there are other explanations. One US official suggests it could be that “Iran is holding back missiles so its operations can last longer”.

But each drone only costs between $20,000 and $50,000 to make, but a Patriot interceptor missile used to destroy just one costs $4 million. These Iranian drones can be launched from the back of a truck.

In other words, Iran could attack these Gulf countries on the cheap as they burn through air defence. These are states that marketed themselves as oases of calm and stability - allowing their economies to be boosted by rich Westerners.

Crucially, being US military allies was supposed to protect them. Instead, it’s made them targets.

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It’s the oil (and economy), stupid

Yes, I’m going to quote the Telegraph again. Their international business editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has a story headlined ‘Energy markets will force Trump to end his reckless war very soon’.

He notes that it was “more than a little careless” to plunge the Middle East into turmoil without replenishing the US strategic petroleum reserve, which is nearing its lowest levels in four decades.

He adds it was “even more careless” to launch a war of aggression when the oil industry in the Gulf doesn’t have the pipeline infrastructure to replace the global dependence on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, where 20% of the world’s oil passes through, which Iran declared had been closed.

Iran says they’ve got complete control of the strait and will set any ship passing on fire. In any case, maritime insurers have cancelled war risk cover for any ships, which will stop almost all of them from chancing it.

Evans-Pritchard says there is zero spare capacity in the rest of the world. He quotes Jim Burkhard, who is head of oil markets at S&P Global Energy, who says that this war threatens to cause the biggest oil supply crisis of our time, even more so than the Arab oil embargo of 1973 - which had colossal global consequences - and that wasn’t when the world was already in a very severe and protracted set of economic crises.

Energy prices are already surging, he notes, but have a long way to go - and it’s Europe which faces particular devastation.

We’re already seeing economists warn of interest rate hikes, which would cause further economic turmoil. And that’s already when so many have been predicting a crash coming anyway - like the former head of Goldman Sachs, who was in charge during the 2008 financial crisis, who said he saw parallels today with that disaster.

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Arming Kurdish militias

Donald Trump has called the leaders of Kurdish militia, while CNN reports that the CIA is working to arm Kurdish forces to spark an uprising in Iran.

This will alarm a lot of Iranians who hate their government. It will look like an attempt to plunge Iran into civil war and promote balkanisation - that is, an ethnic conflict which fragments their country.

Note that the exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has denounced those Kurdish groups - indeed his father severely repressed the Kurdish people.

He posted on social media:

In recent days, several separatist groups—some of whose records include collaboration with both Khomeini and Saddam—have made baseless and contemptible claims against the territorial integrity and national unity of Iran.

Like his father, Pahlavi believes in a centralised unitary Iran. But he also knows that Iranians opposed to the regime will be bitterly opposed to their country being broken up.

And that’s clearly what Israel would dearly like. They want an Iran which splits apart so it never has any significant power in the region.

The Jerusalem Post reflects that thinking when last year it set out a five-point plan for Trump, including:

Forge a Middle East coalition for Iran’s partition. Encourage long-term plans for a federalized or partitioned Iran, recognizing that Khamenei’s theocratic regime cannot be reformed. Offer security guarantees to Sunni, Kurdish, and Balochi minority regions willing to break away.

That the US is resorting to arming Kurdish militants - despite knowing the likely response this will provoke from many Iranians - is a sign of desperation.

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US politicians begin to panic

And let’s note the increasingly panicked comments of US politicians, not least after they received a confidential briefing.

Senator Elizabeth Warren says “it is so much worse than you think,” and that the Trump administration has no plan.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, meanwhile, suggests that the supposedly ‘confidential’ element being held back from the American public is to deploy US ground troops alongside Kurdish militia.

In other words, a quagmire beckons.

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“Unprecedented”

According to Lord Peter Ricketts - the former National Security Advisor to the British government:

It is, I think, completely unprecedented to launch a war of this scale when you don’t know what it’s about.

Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya did have clear goals. They were still catastrophes. This time round, there is no clear goal.

No wonder establishment intelligence types are panicking.

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Western leaders are panicking

And what about Western leaders? They’re clearly beginning to panic.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney originally backed the war, but now says they are “inconsistent with international law”. He adds: “The current conflict is another example of the failure of the international order.”

French president Emmanuel Macron says the attacks were conducted “outside of international law” and his government “cannot approve of them”

Even Starmer, though involving Britain in this illegal war by offering up British bases, says:

What I was not prepared to do on Saturday was for the UK to join a war unless I was satisfied there was a lawful basis and a viable, thought-through plan. That remains my position.

In other words, he says the war isn’t lawful and doesn’t have a viable thought-through plan.

These Western leaders are not inviting Trump's potential fury for no reason. They clearly believe - no doubt based on what their military and intelligence services are telling them - that this is a disaster.

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Sapping US power

Trump’s army chief, General Dan Caine, fretted about this war because US munitions stockpiles had already been burned through because of support for Ukraine, as well as Israel’s genocide.

But who does this benefit? China, of course. The US has shifted its military assets away from the Indo-Pacific region. It benefits what Trump and his faction identified as their main strategic rival.

But a hideous cost

None of this means, of course, that the US and Israel cannot cause so much more damage and kill so many more people. According to Human Rights Activists in Iran this morning at least 1,097 civilians have been killed, including 181 kids under the age of 10.

Those are likely to be drastic underestimates, not least given the internet has been shut down - and they’re already out of date.

And we return again to the Telegraph, which has a shocking headline:

The article begins:

Bombs have struck hospitals, schools and residential buildings in some of the heaviest strikes on Tehran since the war began.

Witnesses described “apocalyptic” scenes under the relentless barrage on Tuesday as food and medical supplies dwindled and the death toll rose.

The pillars of Iranian civil society are being destroyed, like Enghelab Square, a cultural centre, and we can see pictures of terrible damage and destruction inflicted there by US and Israeli bombs.

There’s terrifying footage of Tehran - a city about the size of New York City - being bombed.

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Pete Hegseth boasts that when air superiority is established, that will mean: ““Death and destruction from the sky. All. Day. Long.”"

This worship of violence smacks of depravity. But this, too, will rot away US power. The moral claims used to justify that power were already shredded by the Iraq war, the ‘war on terror’ and of course Israel’s genocide.

But as well as surely causing growing fury amongst many Iranians, it once again associates the US with violence, death and destruction.

A terrible crime is being committed. But this is not a war which is going well for its chief belligerent.

This is a sensational poll for the Greens - and should cause panic for both Reform and Labour.

According to a new YouGov poll - the first since the Gorton and Denton by-election - the Green Party is now in second place, on 21%. That’s only two points behind Nigel Farage’s Reform - and an astonishing 5 points ahead of Labour, who are now in joint third place with the Tories, on 16%.

What’s happened here? What has been holding back many remaining Labour voters is the belief that they have to stick with their old party - otherwise Reform and the Tories will win.

But Labour just lost one of their safest seats in the country - Gorton and Denton. They’d won there with over 50% of the vote back in 2024, with the Greens a poor third at 13.2%. This time, the Greens won over 40%, with Labour’s vote halving, leaving them in third place.

And that result was even worse for Labour than it looked - because canvassers told me they kept encountering voters sticking with Keir Starmer’s party for fear of Reform winning. They would have voted Green if they knew that candidate Hannah Spencer could actually win.

That vote is beginning to sink in across the country - and Labour voters are now reassessing their loyalty. As they see polls like this, that will encourage even more of them to take a jump - and that then creates a reinforcing cycle.

But it says something that 16% of the vote is not Labour’s floor. It’s not actually clear what Labour’s floor actually is anymore. That’s because the Starmerite war on Labour’s left succeeded in its mission - at the cost of ridding the party of any coherent purpose.

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It should have been obvious that this would happen. As I predicted in February 2023, when Labour had an astronomical polling lead:

While Starmer’s team behaves as though it’s 1997, Britain’s current state is more like 1974 – that is, in crisis and turmoil. If a Labour government offers only tinkering around the edges of the economy, and the lives of struggling households do not substantially improve, mass disillusionment may soon kick in. It remains the case that the most interesting ideas are bubbling away on the left: banishing them from Labour’s future is an act of self-harm. If a meek Starmer administration disappoints, a now cowed left may find an audience willing to listen. Starmer’s team is buoyant now, and understandably so: but history tell us where hubris leads.

And as I wrote a day after the general election result, when Starmerites were overwhelmed with triumphalism (or, rather, hubris):

Despite the excessive media focus on the Farageist insurgency, the left revolt is just as significant. If the Labour leadership was rational, it would acknowledge this disaffection and seek to reverse the rot. The party, after all, has secured the same share of the vote as in 2019, winning its landslide thanks to Nigel Farage dividing the right and the vagaries of our electoral system. The juxtaposition between its dominance of the House of Commons and the lack of enthusiasm it enjoys in the country will be increasingly felt.

But here’s a prediction. Those surrounding Starmer are too politically defined by their hostility to the left to learn from this. There will be precious little conciliation: quite the reverse. In the coming years, growing numbers of voters will be driven to the Greens and other leftwing formations. As long as leftwing forces in Britain build on this moment and find common cause – yes, a big but – then this could be a new beginning indeed.

The Professional Political Understanders did not see this coming. They are wedded to a view that the left are - unlike the right - politically illegitimate. They don’t understand the structural basis for the left’s existence. When Starmerism crushed the left, they saw that as sound politics - and thought that’s the last they would hear from the left. Their entire worldview has collapsed.

And what about Reform? They’ve clearly lost momentum, and are four points lower than Reform in the polling. Note this chart from pollsters More In Common:

This is their ‘negative voting intention’ chart - that is who Brits would vote against.

38% say they’d now vote against Reform - up 9 points. Coming second is Labour, on 34%. Just 7% say the same about the Greens.

That means Reform are building up a growing base of opposition against them. That will mean voters will increasingly coalesce around the candidate best placed to stop them. And if the Greens play their cards right, this could benefit them.

Without bursting the bubble, the Green surge will mean an escalating campaign against them by the entire political and media establishment. They better have a strategy to deal with it!

Three days into the US-Israeli illegal war on Iran, and the Western media is playing its usual role.

We saw it in Iraq. We saw it in Afghanistan. We saw it in Libya.

We are seeing it in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Let’s start with the BBC. There were two stories next to each other on the BBC website.

When Iranians are killed - in this case overwhelmingly children - the perpetrator isn’t named. The Israeli-US attackers disappear from the sentence. The deaths are merely “reported”, and attributed to Iran - a source readers have been trained to distrust.

But when Israelis are killed, the perpetrator is clearly identified. It’s presented as fact. Not “reported”. Not “Israel says”. Fact.

Now imagine the reverse.

Imagine an Iranian strike had bombed an Israeli school and killed 165 mostly Israeli children.

Can you picture the response?

It would dominate every front page and every news bulletin.

The faces of those children would be everywhere.

We would see photos of them playing, hear about their hobbies and dreams.

We would hear from grieving parents.

Western politicians would line up to denounce the barbarism of the Iranian regime.

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But not here. Because it’s very clear whose lives are centred — and whose are treated as abstract statistics. It’s clear how the crimes of the West are narrated — and how the crimes of its opponents are.

And then there was a Sky News report about the Iranian attack on Beit Shemesh in Israel.

“This Is What Iran’s Rage Looks Like”

And then there was a Sky News report about the Iranian attack on Beit Shemesh in Israel.

“This is what Iran’s rage looks like,” the reporter tells us in sombre, almost grieving tones. “The town of Beit Shemesh, just a short drive away from Jerusalem was hit by a missile. The explosion flattened a school, a synagogue, homes and a bomb shelter - where dozens had sought refuge.”

Could you imagine a Sky News reporter describing an Israeli attack on Gaza with “This is what Iran’s rage looks like”, followed by an emotive sounding description of the impact?

Indeed, look at this Sky News headline about the attack in Israel.

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Can you imagine them putting ‘horror story’ in a headline about one of the countless Israeli atrocities in Gaza? Or a subheading about all those countless Palestinian civilians taking shelter in schools hit by Israeli missiles, describing how it was “supposed to be their sanctuary”?

The New York Times is at it again

Or take these headlines from the New York Times.

The first headline doesn’t name the perpetrator, and reduces it to ‘Iranian state media says’, which immediately sows doubt - because it encourages the reader to think it’s regime propaganda.

But when it’s Iran attacking, then the perpetrator is named, and there is an emotive description - ‘wreaking havoc’

The brilliant analyst Assal Rad gives two other examples from the newspaper - and identifies the problems.

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“Transforming” Iran

And then there’s a report from the BBC’s Clive Myrie.

He describes the attack on Iran as “Israel and America seek to transform Iran.” It makes this illegal and unprovoked attack (details he doesn’t notice) sound like some sort of positivereform project.

Or what about this in the Telegraph:

Reading this, you'd think Iran started a war and is now suing for peace. But Iran was "talking" in negotiations, which the US and Israel ended by bombing them.

A Rare Exception

There was at least one positive exception.

On Channel 4 News, Foreign Affairs Correspondent Secunder Kermani challenged an Israeli spokesperson directly:

“Your prime minister is a wanted war criminal. You don’t have the moral high ground here at all.”

The fact that the International Criminal Court has an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity should always be integrated into coverage - not least when he is launching yet another war.

In the coming days and weeks, I’ll be challenging Western media coverage of what is, to repeat, a blatantly illegal war.

You can support our expanding project across all platforms by subscribing!

After being thrashed in Gorton and Denton by the Green Party, Keir Starmer had two main options.

He could have delivered a speech saying that he had heard voters’ anger, understood that they wanted change from the government, and would both listen and act.

After all, he has just lost one of the safest Labour seats. Both Gorton and Denton have been represented by Labour for generations. His party came third, its share of the vote halving, and the Greens secured one of the biggest swings in a post-war byelection.

Keir Starmer did not choose this option. He chose another approach.

This basically involves telling voters to go take a jump. It’s actually worse than that. He declared:

I will not stop fighting the extremes of politics, the extreme on the right in Reform, the extreme of the left in the Green party.

Because, of course, demonising and scapegoating migrants is just the same as supporting increased taxes on the rich, public investment, public ownership, tackling the climate emergency by raising living standards, workers’ rights, and not arming a genocide.

But the way he spat out “the left” was instructive. It was with far more viciousness than how he uttered “the right”. Which makes sense, because his response to Reform has simply been to ape their migrant-bashing - but the left, on the other hand, he regards as politically illegitimate. After all, his entire leadership was based on defeating the left with naked deceit and duplicity.

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He denounced the Greens for “divisive, sectarian politics” - more on the latter shortly - but this is a little rich from the man who raids the rhetoric of Enoch Powell and is introducing one of the harshest asylum systems in Europe.

This is the same man who - back in 2020 - said:

When you lose an election in a democracy, you deserve to.

You don’t look at the electorate and ask them: ‘what were YOU thinking?’.

You look at yourself, and ask ‘what were WE doing?’.

It seems this only applies if it can be used to justify marching rightwards.

It gets worse though - much worse.

In a letter to Labour MPs, for some reason he decided to rant about George Galloway, and again take aim at the Green party’s evidenced-based alternative to the failed war on drugs.

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But, outrageously, he denounced the Greens for “sectarian politics”. This is known as a dog whistle. Starmer is referring here to engagement with Muslim voters. Principally he means the Greens campaigning against Israel’s genocide, which many non-Muslims - myself included - are affronted by.

The other piece of evidence is that they printed a leaflet featuring Keir Starmer palling around with anti-Muslim bigot, the Indian leader Narendra Modi, who is linked to the killings of potentially thousands of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. In the 2021 Batley and Spen by election, Labour candidate Kim Leadbeater’s campaign doing exactly the same, except with Boris Johnson palling around with Modi.

Muslim voters are allowed to have concerns and interests, and politicians in a democracy can legitimately seek to answer them. The strategy is to make other voters panic about a big scary agitated Muslim menace.

It is striking that those who conflate Israel and Jewish Brits have the cheek to pontificate about this. Why is using this wrongheaded conflation when supposedly soliciting votes from Jewish Brits not religious sectarianism, but opposing genocide apparently is religious sectarianism?

But I am worried, because it’s clear that the hardcore right and Starmer’s crew are going to go hard on Islamophobia to drive back the Green surge. They will whip up bigotry and community division if that’s what it takes to crush the left. Here’s another example of why there is no compromise to be had with these political disgraces.

PS I talked about some of this on Channel 5 earlier:

The final poll for the Gorton and Denton by-election shows the Green Party’s Hannah Spencer ahead - just.

What this means is that the result will come down to having enough people knocking on doors on election day - tomorrow.

I hope those able to do so will commit to going to Gorton and Denton - you can sign up here.

This isn’t just a normal by-election. If the Greens win, it will be the biggest victory for the politics of hope for a long time.

It'll force taxing the rich, public investment, public ownership, tackling the climate emergency by raising living standards, opposing genocide - and so much more on the agenda.

It'll drive back the politics of blaming migrants for all our problems - or trashing the welfare state. It’ll be a slap in the face for politicians who want Britain to be Donald Trump’s poodle.

Nigel Farage has been able to dictate Britain’s political conversation for years. This will mean we can start forcing it to the left.

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And it will also destroy Labour’s argument that you have to vote for them to keep Reform out. It will mean that in constituencies across the country, people will feel emboldened to vote for the Greens - allowing them to replace Labour.

So it’s not hyperbolic to call this a historic by-election!

But Reform and Labour know this is existential, so they will throw everything at the final lap.

So if you can make it to Gorton and Denton - and know anyone else who can - please consider it.

If you've never done it before - don't worry, it's so much easier than you think, and you'll get paired up with an experienced person at first.

You'll be able to say you were part of history. Imagine how frustrated you'll feel if the Greens were just a few votes short!

So a final time - please, please sign up here!

Dear Michael,

You have accused the Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, of “depriving the word genocide of its meaning” and of exploiting prejudice against Jewish people for electoral gain.

To recap: he said that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. You responded:

Zack Polanski then cited the range of organisations - from the UN to Israeli and international organisations - which have concluded that Israel is committing genocide.

You responded:

Let us be absolutely clear about what that accusation entails.

Zack Polanski is Jewish. You are not. He is the only Jewish party leader and one of only five in our country’s history.

You have not just - as is standard practise among Israel’s apologists - conflated the crimes of Israel as a state with Jewish people as a whole. You have accused a Jewish politician of making this claim in order to appeal to prejudice against his own people to achieve political power.

You have done this to promote the denial of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. This is hardly surprising given that you served as a Cabinet minister in a Conservative government which spent nine months arming and facilitating that genocide.

But both your smear and your denial demand a response. I have posed several questions to you based on that smear and denial. If you have integrity, you should try to answer them.

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Are Israeli genocide scholars also exploiting prejudice against Jews?

Omer Bartov is Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He is one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars in genocide and Holocaust studies. He has concluded Israel is committing genocide, as his New York Times essay set out.

In that piece, he said the following:

My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.

Michael: Do you believe that Prof. Omer Bartov is depriving the word ‘genocide’ of meaning and only making the accusation to appeal to prejudice against his own people, the Jewish people?

What of Amos Goldberg, Professor of Holocaust History at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem?

He wrote an article for Israeli publication Local Call two years ago headlined ‘Yes, it’s genocide’.

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He wrote:

In the way we normally understand such concepts, Palestinian Gaza as a geographical-political-cultural-human complex no longer exists. Genocide is the deliberate annihilation of a collective or part of it — not all of its individuals. And that’s what’s happening in Gaza. The result is undoubtedly genocide. The numerous declarations of extermination by senior Israeli government officials, and the general exterminating tone of the public discourse, rightly pointed out by Haaretz columnist Carolina Landsman, indicate that this was also the intention.

In this piece, he specifically answers your use of the Holocaust and Rwanda to argue that the people Gaza has not suffered genocide.

He notes that genocide takes different forms, giving as examples the Holocaust, Rwanda, Srebrenica, the Armenian genocide and the fates of the Rohingya people, and the Herero and Nama people. There are big differences between all of these genocides, Goldberg notes, but also commonalities.

All were justified as being self-defence, he argues, with the victims presented as an existential threat.

In another interview conducted with Amos Goldberg for Le Monde in October 2024, he said: “What is happening in Gaza is a genocide because Gaza does not exist anymore”.

This has itself been echoed by Donald Trump, who said “A civilization has been wiped out in Gaza”.

Michael: Do you believe that Professor Amos Goldberg is depriving the word ‘genocide’ of meaning and only making the accusation to appeal to prejudice against his own people, the Jewish people?

And what of Professor Daniel Blatman, Head of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem?

He co-authored with Amos Goldberg an essay in Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

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Once again, it specifically addresses your objection. It’s titled ‘There’s No Auschwitz in Gaza. But It’s Still Genocide’ with the subheading ‘This is precisely what genocide looks like’. In the piece they write:

According to the United Nations, 90 percent of Gaza’s population have been displaced from their homes multiple times and are living in subhuman conditions that only increase mortality levels. The murder of children, starvation, destruction of infrastructure, including that of the health care system, destruction of most homes, including the erasure of entire neighborhoods and towns such as Jabalya and Rafah, ethnic cleansing in the northern Strip, destruction of all of Gaza’s universities and most cultural institutions and mosques, destruction of government and organizational infrastructure, mass graves, destruction of infrastructure for local food production and water distribution – all these paint a clear picture of genocide. Gaza, as a human, national-collective entity, no longer exists. This is precisely what genocide looks like.

Michael: Do you believe that Professor Daniel Blatman is depriving the word ‘genocide’ of meaning and only making the accusation to appeal to prejudice against his own people, the Jewish people?

We could go on.

Dr. Shmuel Lederman, Israeli academic scholar in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa, who in June 2024 declared.

The accumulated effect of what Israel has been doing in Gaza was basically genocide in terms of the harm done to the Gazans as a group.

And Israeli-American Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies Dr. Raz Segal who was one of the first to raise the alarm in his article ‘A Textbook Case of Genocide’.

Michael: Do you believe that Dr. Shmuel Lederman and Dr. Raz Segal are depriving the word ‘genocide’ of meaning and only making the accusation to appeal to prejudice against his own people, the Jewish people?

These are all Jewish Israeli scholars who dedicate their lives to the study of genocide and specifically the Holocaust. Decades and decades of scholarly work, knowing the subject inside out.

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Do you accept that if pre-eminent scholars of genocide have concluded that genocide has taken place, then there must at the very least be overwhelming evidence that Israel has committed unspeakable acts against the Palestinian people?

How do you believe it is possible that scholars immersed in the field of genocide could arrive at a conclusion that is so devastatingly wrong?

For your smear to be accurate, there must be an outbreak of antisemitism amongst Jewish Israeli scholars of genocide and Holocaust studies - or abject incompetence - or both. Which is it?

Do you believe that you know more than these scholars of genocide and Holocaust studies, and if so, why?

You may respond that you simply disagree with them, and to argue that you are entitled to do so, regardless of your lack of qualifications.

But you did not simply disagree with Zack Polanski. You made clear that the argument that Israel has committed genocide is outrageous and beyond the pale.

What about Jewish-Americans?

It’s not Jewish Israeli scholars who have arrived at this conclusion.

Four in ten Jewish Americans believe - like Zack Polanski - that Israel has committed genocide against the Palestinian people. That rises to 50% of Jewish Americans under 35.

So another question for you, Michael:

Do you believe that millions of Jewish Americans are depriving the word ‘genocide’ of meaning and only making the accusation to appeal to prejudice against themselves?

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Do you also deny other genocideS?

Michael, you must know that genocide is defined in law.

The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group - including killing members of the group, inflicting serious harm, or deliberately imposing conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction.

Do you agree with the legal definition of genocide?

Here are some other examples which are very different from the Holocaust.

In the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, Bosnian Serb forces murdered 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys aged 12 and above. This was classified as genocide.

But there are genocide deniers when it comes to Srebrenica - not least in Israel.

Israel’s Ambassador to Serbia, Yahel Vilan, caused outrage in 2024 after he told Russian state media that calling Srebrenica a genocide “diminishes the importance of that term, which, in my opinion, should only be used for genocides”. He added: “Srebrenica should not be called genocide”.

The accusation of genocide has caused outrage among Serbs - because they were victims of Nazi genocide in World War II.

Do you believe that because the Serbs were victims of the Nazis, it is therefore outrageous to accuse Serb forces of genocide decades later?

Do you believe that Srebrenica was a genocide even though it took a very different form to the Holocaust?

Here’s another example. Myanmar’s campaign against the Rohingya was deemed a plausible genocide by the International Court of Justice in 2020; the United States formally determined genocide in 2022.

Thousands of the Rohingya have been killed, many of their villages destroyed, and hundreds of thousands have been killed.

As heinous as this atrocity has been, the absolute number and proportion of the Rohingya people killed by Myanmar’s junta is lower than the death toll in the Gaza genocide.

Do you believe that therefore Myanmar has not committed genocide against the Royingya people?

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The Netanyahu test

There is another instructive example.

Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly accused Turkey of committing genocide against the Kurds.

For example, in December 2023, Netanyahu said:

Erdogan, who commits genocide against the Kurds, who holds a world record for imprisoning journalists who oppose his rule is the last person who can preach morality to us.

This should be regarded as a confession by the Israeli state.

What has Turkey done to the Kurds that is worse than what Israel has done to the Palestinians of Gaza?

To be clear, I think that Turkey has committed many crimes against the Kurdish people in its war on Kurdish national self-determination. But I do not believe Turkey has committed genocide against the Kurdish people - and that includes in the 1990s under Erdogan’s predecessors, when the violence was on a much worse scale than today.

That’s the determination of human rights organisations, which have accused Turkey of war crimes, but not genocide.

By any metric what Israel has done to Gaza is much worse than what Turkey has done to the Kurds. So if Netanyahu believes that Turkey is committing genocide against the Kurds, then he must believe he has committed genocide against the Palestinian people.

Do you accept that if Netanyahu has concluded that Turkey has committed genocide, then that incriminates Israel in Gaza?

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What is the really wicked act?

You call it wicked to use the word “genocide”.

What is really “wicked” is wiping Gaza from the face of the earth: destroying the large majority of its homes, schools, hospitals, libraries, universities, archives, places of worship, and historical monuments.

Israel has destroyed most agricultural land, livestock and even plant life - in a systematic attempt to make Gaza unlivable.

Netanyahu has made clear that making Gaza unlivable is the end goal.

Benjamin Netanyahu told Israel’s legislature:

We are destroying more and more homes, and Gazans have nowhere to return to. The only inevitable outcome will be the wish of Gazans to emigrate outside of the Gaza Strip.

And what really is “wicked”, Michael, is exterminating such a large proportion of its people in such a small amount of time.

Repeated peer-reviewed analyses suggest the official death toll is a significant undercount.

A study in world-renowned medical journal The Lancet found that mortality levels reached 3 to 4% of the pre-genocide population within little more than a year - an intensity of killing without parallel in recent 21st-century conflicts.

As professor Michael Spagat notes:

if Gaza were a normal war then we would expect a much stronger overrepresentation of the youngish-to-pre-elderly-male demographic than what we actually see in Gaza.

The demographics of death resemble more closely Rwanda 1994 and Cambodia 1975-79 than, e.g., the post-2003 Iraq war or the various Balkan wars.

46% of those killed in Gaza are women and children, who can be immediately ruled out as combatants. Many of the men killed are not combatants either: they are more likely to leave shelter to look for food, for example, or to attempt rescues, or to be treated by the Israeli army as fair game to be killed.

But the proportion of women and children killed is much higher compared to devastating conflicts such as Yemen and Syria.

That’s because this isn’t a conflict. It is a genocide.

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The evidence for genocide is overwhelming. That’s not simply because of the consequences, but because Israeli political and military leaders have made their genocidal intent repeatedly clear. There has been no attempt to disguise the official belief that the Palestinian population as a whole is the enemy.

For example, on 9th October 2023, COGAT - the IDF’s civilian wing - posted a video in which Major General Ghassan Alian declared:

Hamas became ISIS and the citizens of Gaza are celebrating instead of being horrified. Human beasts are dealt with accordingly. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, no electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell.

There is no other way of interpreting this comment. It makes clear that the civilian population is deemed to bear collective guilt and will face the military consequences. This attitude is core to genocidal intent. This is not a one-off: there has been an avalanche of these statements.

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History will judge

You were a senior minister during fourteen years of catastrophic Conservative rule. During this war, your government backed Israel politically and militarily and cut funding to Gaza’s main humanitarian agency - UNRWA - during a humanitarian catastrophe on the basis of false and disproven Israeli smears.

Now you sit at the helm of a hard-right magazine and declare it wicked to use a word that genocide scholars, Israeli academics, international lawyers and human rights organisations have all concluded is the accurate term to describe Israel’s conduct.

You accuse a Jewish political leader of exploiting prejudice against his own people - because he accepts the overwhelming evidence that has led pre-eminent genocide scholars to conclude that Israel has committed genocide.

Like other cheerleaders of Israel, you have sought to turn reality upside down. But you can only turn the world on its head for so long.

Yours sincerely,

Owen

“It would be fine if Israel took it all.”
— Mike Huckabee, US Ambassador to Israel

By “all”, he meant the entire Middle East.

That wasn’t a fringe extremist preacher on a late-night cable show. That was the official representative of the United States to Israel - a man whose job is to shape and articulate American policy towards a state which depends on the United States for weapons, diplomatic cover, and political backing.

In an extraordinary interview with Tucker Carlson, Mike Huckabee humiliates himself, ties himself in knots, fails to answer basic questions, and makes demonstrably false claims about the number of civilians killed in Gaza. But more than that, he reveals something far more important: how deeply embedded religious extremism and supremacist thinking are within the political architecture that underpins Israel’s actions.

Before going further, a note.

There are those who object to citing Tucker Carlson, long associated with the US far right. I profoundly oppose Carlson’s politics. But this is not about platforming him - it is about evidence relating to the worst crime it is possible to commit: genocide.

This interview is documentary and historical evidence of US complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. We do not discard evidence because we dislike the journalist who obtained it. If anything, it is a damning indictment of Western media that it is left to someone like Tucker Carlson to extract these admissions.

Had Western media done its job - rigorously holding Western leaders to account - this catastrophe would not have been politically sustainable.

Christian fundamentalism at the heart of power

When Huckabee says it would be “fine” if Israel took the entire Middle East, he is speaking as a hugely powerful Christian fundamentalist who believes the land has been divinely granted.

Again, this is not some random religious crank on a street corner. This is a senior US official with immense influence in the most powerful country on earth.

It is worth considering the double standard.

Islamophobia - open prejudice and hostility toward Muslims - is socially acceptable across much of Western political culture. If a politician in a state hostile to the West invoked Islam to justify aggressive, illegal expansionism, they would be denounced as a dangerous extremist.

Where are the denunciations of Christian extremism?

It sounds strange even to say the phrase. That’s the point. We are dealing here with a Christian fundamentalist in a position of enormous global power, and that is barely even remarked on.

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Endorsing military expansionism

Huckabee’s comments are not abstract theology. They offer support from Israel’s patron for its aggressive expansionism.

Israel:

• Illegally occupies the West Bank and has de facto annexed it.

• Occupies much of Gaza, and discusses colonising it.

• Occupies Syrian territory and repeatedly strikes Syria.

• Has repeatedly invaded Lebanon and continues to attack it.

• Has attacked Iran.

• Has carried out strikes in Yemen and committed multiple war crimes as it has done so.

Israeli leaders have explicitly invoked the idea of “Greater Israel.”

Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and de facto governor of the West Bank, once displayed a map of “Greater Israel” that included Jordan, and declared that Israel would eventually extend to Damascus.

Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken of being on a “historic and spiritual mission” and expressed deep attachment to the vision of the Promised Land.

These are not marginal figures. They are central actors.

Now consider that US officials include those who believe - literally - that Israel has a God-given right to seize land beyond its recognised borders.

This is not fantasy. It is fundamentalist extremism backed up with huge power.

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The death toll: what the evidence says

Huckabee claims Israel has killed fewer civilians proportionally than in other examples of urban warfare.

This is false.

The official Gaza Ministry of Health death toll is now over 75,000. But multiple peer-reviewed academic studies conclude that even that figure is a substantial underestimate.

A recent study published in The Lancet - one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals - conducted a population-representative household survey covering 2,000 households and nearly 10,000 individuals between 7 October 2023 and 5 January 2025.

Its findings:

• 75,200 violent deaths in the first 14 months alone.

• That equates to roughly 3–4% of Gaza’s pre-war population killed violently in just over a year.

• This compared to an official figure of 49,090 violent deaths for that period - over a third lower than the study’s central estimate.

• An additional 8,540 excess non-violent deaths — people who died due to war conditions and would not otherwise have died.

That totals 82,740 deaths in the first 14 months, excluding the months of violence that followed.

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research produced a similar estimate for roughly the same period: approximately 78,000 violent deaths by the end of 2024, with a dramatic collapse in life expectancy - down 44% in 2023 and 47% in 2024. Their projection for the first two years ranged between roughly 100,000 and 126,000 violent deaths.

Even The Economist, which supported Israel’s genocidal onslaught, estimated between 77,000 and 109,000 violent deaths by May 2025 - excluding indirect deaths.

In proportional terms, we are looking at 4–5% of the population killed violently in two years.

For comparison:

• In Syria - a war universally regarded as catastrophic - around 2% of the population died over 13 years.

• In Iraq, around 1% over 20 years.

The scale and speed of killing in Gaza has no precedent in these 21st century wars.

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No, Israel has not protected civilians

Huckabee goes further. He claims Israel has protected civilians better than any other army engaged in urban warfare - even more than the United States.

There is no evidence to support this.

Airwars — a hugely respected monitoring organisation — examined 606 incidents of civilian harm in the first 25 days of Israel’s genocide.

Their most conservative estimate:

• At least 5,139 civilians killed in those 606 incidents.

• Evidence of Hamas casualties in just 4% of those cases.

• Between 32 and 60 militants killed in total across incidents that killed thousands of civilians.

Huckabee also invokes Kabul as a comparison. There was no equivalent sustained, high-intensity urban battle in Kabul comparable to the bombardment of Gaza - or anything like it. The heaviest fighting in Afghanistan took place in rural provinces.

This is not serious analysis. It is the empty rhetoric of a fundamentalist extremist who has no evidence to back up his assertions, and who is plucking claims out of thin air.

Indeed, leaked Israeli military data reported in Israeli media indicated that approximately 83% of those killed in certain phases were civilians.

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The contradictions of religious Zionism

Huckabee discusses the ideological foundation of the state itself - that is God has promised the Jewish people this land. He cannot answer why someone like Benjamin Netanyahu has a right to the land despite being unable to trace his family lineage back to the land, or and not having strong religious conviction.

If the justification for violently displacing Palestinians is that Jewish people have a religious right to the land, you immediately encounter contradictions.

Is the claim religious? Ethnic? Genetic?

If religious - which is Huckabee’s position then what of Jewish Israelis who are secular or atheist?

Roughly one-fifth of Jewish Israelis identify as atheist or non-believing. A substantial proportion never attend synagogue. Only around 30% say religion is “very important” in their lives.

Would such individuals have been recognised as meaningfully “Jewish” under earlier religious definitions? Almost certainly not.

Modern Jewish identity encompasses ethnicity as well as religion. But Huckabee’s argument rests explicitly on theology - that is, a divine, biblical promise. That logic does not sit comfortably with secular Jewish identity.

Then there is history.

Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion himself believed many Palestinians were descended from ancient Jews who had converted over centuries to Christianity and Islam.

Israeli historians such as Shlomo Sand have challenged the idea of a singular, mass exile and emphasised conversion as a central mechanism in Jewish demographic history. In other words, many of today’s Jewish people are descendants of people who converted to Judaism in the Caucasus between the 4th and 13th centuries - not in Palestine long before that.

He notes that Jewish communities existed across the Mediterranean long before the fall of the Second Temple, and many inhabitants of the land remained and later converted.

As a piece headlined ‘Most Palestinians Are Descendants Of Jews’ published by The Times of Israel discussed a decade ago:

The Palestinian Arabs, who are descendants of Jews, are very close to Ashkenazi Jews in their gene makeup.

One Israeli historian interviewed in the Jerusalem Post back in 2009 even said “that he can declare with certainty that nearly 90 percent of all Palestinians are descended from the Jews”.

Once you move away from theological absolutism, the terrain becomes historical, demographic, and messy.

Which is precisely why the argument retreats into divine commandment.

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What this interview really reveals

This interview is revealing not because Huckabee is uniquely extreme.

It is revealing because he is not marginal.

He represents the power on which Israel depends: the United States.

What we see is:

• Religious extremism embedded in US state policy.

• Indifference to the worth of Palestinian life.

• A belief in ethnic and religious supremacy.

• A willingness to distort empirical reality to defend it.

And if we want to understand how this catastrophe has been enabled - militarily, diplomatically, ideologically - we have to understand the dynamics within the US elites.

This interview does not simply embarrass Mike Huckabee.

It clarifies what we are up against.

The first major poll of Gorton and Denton has been released in advance of next Thursday’s by-election.

Conducted by Omnisis, if you take out non-voters, it’s 22% for the Greens, 20% for Reform, and 18% for Labour.

But crucially, those saying they’re undecided are on 27%.

So while it shows that the Green Party’s Hannah Spencer is best placed to defeat Reform’s Matthew Goodwin - it depends on undecided voters splitting in her favour, with just six days to go.

The other really important polling finding relates to what happens if voters have to choose between only two parties.

If all voters had to choose between only Reform and the Green Party, the Greens get 39% and Reform get just 25%.

If all voters had to choose between only Reform and Labour, it is much closer. Labour get just 33%, while Reform increase to 28%.

And if voters only had to choose between Labour and the Greens, it splits 23% for Labour and 32% for Greens.

(The reason this doesn’t add up to 100% is because the results also include ‘Neither’, ‘I would not vote’ and ‘Don’t know)

And if only undecided voters are asked to choose between Reform and the Greens, the polling breaks 33% for the Greens against 19% for Reform.

Undecided voters break 27% for the Greens against 16% for Labour.

And they break 27% for Labour against 20% for Reform.

So undecided voters break clearly in favour of the Greens and against Labour and Reform - but it remains a race against time to reach them and make sure they make their mind up and vote.

Only six days to go…

Donald Trump’s United States is on the brink of full-scale war with Iran - and yet it has barely registered on the public radar.

This is partly because, unlike the war in Iraq in particular, there has been no full-scale campaign to manipulate Western public opinion in support of the coming onslaught. According to a poll of American voters last month, 7 in 10 Americans opposed the US taking action against Iran for killing protesters.

70% also agreed that presidents should receive approval from Congress before taking military action against another country.

But Donald Trump is set to launch a war against Iran without Congressional approval - and thus in violation of the Constitution. Such a war will be launched without even the flimsiest pretext of self-defence - and this in violation of the United Nations Charter, and a flagrant violation of international law.

The military build-up is clearly not for show. Note the commentary of Matthew Hoh, a former US Marine Corps captain and military analyst. He explains that the US has deployed more than two thirds of its available E3 command and control aircraft to Europe and the Middle East. There is no “PR value” in deploying these critical aircraft, he says, and you would not do so “unless it was absolutely necessary”.

This is the biggest US military build-up in the Middle East since the Iraq war began in 2003. It includes several aircraft carries, F-16, F-22 and F-35 fighter jets.

Supposed negotiations having been taking place - but they are going nowhere and are clearly just for show. “Iran is in a hot spot right now.”

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There are other signs about the inevitability of war.

Just after the US State Department signed off on the Chagos Islands deal - in which Britain would surrender control of islands it has no legal right to, leasing them back from Mauritius - Donald Trump turned on his erstwhile staunch ally Keir Starmer.

The most important element of this message is that it suggests a war on Iran is looming. But intriguingly, the outburst seems to have been triggered, according to The Times, by the UK blocking permission for Trump to use its RAF bases for the attack.

Before we give Starmer kudos here - not collaborating with a gratuitously illegal war is the bare minimum, and in any case, his already imploding government cannot afford more controversies. But Trump seems to be suggesting that they will use RAF bases regardless - which emphasises how the UK needs to end the US military presence on British soil.

Meanwhile, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk has issued a statement to his citizens: “Please leave Iran immediately and under no circumstances travel to this country. I do not want to alarm anyone, but we all know what I am referring to. The possibility of a conflict is very real.” Tellingly, he added: “In a few, a dozen, or several dozen hours, evacuation may no longer be possible.”

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What exactly is the US thinking with such a war? According to the Wall Street Journal:

The options include a campaign to kill scores of Iranian political and military leaders, with the goal of overthrowing the government, U.S. and foreign officials said, as well as an air attack that would be limited to striking targets including nuclear and ballistic-missile facilities. Both would involve a potentially weekslong operation.

It is worth just taking a moment to absorb what is being proposed here.

The Iraq war, as we know, was an epoch-defining catastrophe. And yet that involved invading and occupying a country in order to impose a new administration to replace the old regime. In this case, it is proposed to simply bomb Iran with such force that its regime collapses - and then what?

In Libya, there was an ongoing armed rebellion against Colonel Gaddafi, and NATO used air strikes to exceed the authority granted by the UN to facilitate regime change. The lasting resulting: the collapse of the country into civil war and chaos, which endures to this day.

Iran is much bigger country with more complexities than either of these examples. There are around 93 million Iranians, and a range of diverse ethnicities and nationalities - that is more than three and a half times bigger than Iraq’s population in 2003. Although opposition to the regime is widespread, there is a significant minority of diehard supporters - which is quite unlike, say, Iraq back then. The Islamic Republic will undoubtedly be able to win over others in the face of foreign attack.

Iran has much greater military capabilities than either Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Col. Gadaffi’s Libya, and is in a position to cause far more economic damage.

Both the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq enjoyed overwhelming support from American citizens when they began. This time, a war starts with already existing overwhelming opposition.

The aspiring Iranian ruler, the Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi has been exiled from the country for nearly half a century. He has supporters there, though we have no idea how many, but equally many opponents, and he has surrounded by far-right types who clearly have no interest in democracy. In any case, he has no infrastructure within Iran - and it is not even clear if Trump has any interest in him taking over.

Donald Trump became president, in part, promising to end the Endless Wars. Yet he is attempting regime change with an even less capable - and more extreme - administration than his predecessors, in a much bigger and more complex society, with no viable replacement.

Enter Israel, which is the most militant in supporter of such a war, and which will play a pivotal role. It is in Israel’s interest for Iran to be reduced to permanent chaos and weakness. That is exactly the likely scenario that now beckons.

The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya all led to hideous bloodshed and unpredicted spiralling consequences - from ISIS to people smuggling. They also drastically weakened Western power. It is a lesson Trump seemed to understand, but his hubris has other ideas.

Donald Trump wants ISIS and its allies to police Gaza on his behalf. This is not an exaggeration.

This is an exclusive in the Telegraph of all newspapers - it’s a staunchly pro-Israel rag. As their opening sentence says:

The White House wants to recruit organised crime and drug-dealing gangs to form the new Gaza police force, The Telegraph can reveal.

Donald Trump’s administration has presented plans for a new security force heavily staffed by members of existing anti-Hamas armed militias, according to multiple Western officials.

We have covered this before. The Israeli state has armed and backed criminal gangs which have systematically looted aid in Gaza. As the Telegraph notes, these armed gangs have also committed murders and kidnappings.

And as they also note:

At least two of the major clan groups include members who have either actively fought alongside Islamic State, or declared allegiance to the terrorist organisation.

As the Telegraph further note, figures in these militia have fought with ISIS against Egypt.

And why are they recruiting these gangs? Because according to one US military source, Donald Trump’s so-called ‘peace process’ - which is nothing of the sort - “will not work without reliable security partners”.

Israel has long been backing ISIS-linked militia in Gaza. They were particularly keen on a militia led by Yasser Abu Shabab, who was recently killed in an internal squabble. According to the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, he was a prisoner of Hamas but escaped thanks to an Israeli air strike and offered his serves as a collaborator with the Israeli occupation.

As the people of Gaza were starving last year, Israel and its cheerleaders claimed that aid was being looted by Hamas. But it was in fact being systematically looted by these Israel-backed militia. They were openly operating in an area controlled by the Israeli army.

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These links with ISIS have been repeatedly noted by other Israeli politicians. At the time, opposition leader Yair Lapid - who backed the genocide - said:

After Netanyahu finished giving millions of dollars to Hamas, he moved on to giving weapons to organisations close to ISIS, all off the cuff, all without strategic planning, all leading to more disasters.

To be clear his objection to Israel backing ISIS linked militia isn’t based on any concern about the welfare of Palestinians - just Israelis. And the objection is strategic, not moral.

The same applies to right-wing Israeli political leader Avigdor Lieberman, who also accused Benjamin Netanyahu of arming ISIS-linked gangs.

It’s striking, isn’t it, how Israel pushed the ‘Hamas Is ISIS’ narrative and both it and the US are now in cahoots with ISIS-linked militia.

The US allying itself to this form of extremism is not new. They armed and backed the Afghan jihadists fighting the Soviet Union in the 1980s, which as we all know, ended very well for everybody involved.

It just goes to underline the opportunism and cynicism of Western power. We’ve seen how the ‘war on terror’ was used to racialise Muslims and turn them into the enemy within - while the West will happily back actual extremists to serve its interests.

In the case of Gaza, it is very clear that the repeatedly openly stated plan of Donald Trump and the Israeli state to remove the entire surviving population of Gaza remains the intention.

As al-Jazeera note, as Ramadan begins, Israel is still preventing enough aid and basic supplies from getting into Gaza. The so-called ceasefire deal mandated that at least 600 aid trucks enter Gaza each day, but the real number is much lower, while Israel has violently killed hundreds of Palestinians since the so-called ceasefire began.

The genocide is ongoing, and it remains our responsibility to keep talking about it.

A historic by-election beckons, so I was in Gorton and Denton filming this weekend - and I’d love to hear what you think about our documentary.

I’ve got some other thoughts, too (and also I’ll be in Manchester on Sunday for the campaign’s last push - please do join us!)

A woman we spoke to in Denton raised an objection to undocumented migrants, and then said she was minded to vote Green.

Her voting intention was somewhat surprising because she made immigration a priority issue.

But to succeed, the Greens are going to attract significant numbers of people who have similar views on immigration to her. It comes back to what I think is the most important chart in British politics.

The population is divided between those who believe our problems are mostly called by rich and wealthy elites and their political allies, or migrants and asylum seekers and politicians blamed for allowing them to enter Britain. (A cause for the hope is that the former outnumber the latter).

A significant number of voters who primarily - correctly - blame the elites for the state of the country have objections to immigration.

Of course it is important to try and drive back the vicious anti-migrant scapegoating that defines British politics. Starmerism has indulged this phenomenon because it is opposed to challenging elites - partly for ideological reasons, partly because of who has funded it and showered its leading lights with freebies, partly because its politicians have one eye on future lucrative private sector jobs.

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In doing so, it has helped doom itself - because Labour has just made immigration more of a salient issue. When it dominates the political conversation, that is almost always to the benefit of the right, as the experience of multiple European countries shows.

Of course the left needs to try and drive back vicious anti-migrant scapegoating - not least by humanising migrants and refugees.

But the most effective strategy is a laser like focus on holding elites accountable - and linking an improvement in living standards to redistributing wealth and power. The Mamdani strategy, if you will.

We met this Green voting woman in Denton, the older, less diverse part of the constituency which is deemed to be Reform’s heartland. And we undoubtedly met former Labour voters defecting to Nigel Farage’s party. It was depressing to put to one such voter the number of Tory ministers who have defected to Reform - and it didn’t bother him one bit.

But then we also met another lifelong Labour voter - an older working-class Mancunian who again many would stereotype as likely to opt for Reform over the Greens. But he was minded to vote for the Green Party’s Hannah Spencer, the local plumber who has become something of a political star.

I was deeply impressed talking to her. She’s unbelievably Manc - with the certain type of friendliness and humour that comes with it - as well as super smart and savvy. As much as the left rightly emphasises collective struggle, leaders do matter. She has a strong sense of class politics and a belief that, to succeed as a politician, she must be embedded in her community.

The Greens have assembled a very impressive grassroots campaign. They’ve got hundreds of activists knocking on doors, and I’ve rarely seen so many posters and garden stakes for a political party.

But we shouldn’t underestimate the online campaigning of the British hard right. There’s eight days to go, and the stakes are very high indeed. If Reform win, then Nigel Farage’s band of extremists will be a step closer to power. If the Greens win, then Labour face being replaced in their urban heartlands, losing the argument of ‘vote for us, or you’ll get Farage’.

I’ll share more thoughts when I go up on Sunday - but please do join us!