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esty welch
esty welch
1 year ago

The Israelis did not “lay waste to much of” Gaza. There were no bombing of entire streets. There were precision strikes on specific targets, and extreme care was taken to minimize collateral damage; and if you choose to believe your News providers’ depictions of the one damaged building which cuts out the unharmed surrounding, then you are naive. Or worse.

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
1 year ago
Reply to  esty welch

Clearly, they were not very precise precision strikes. Like everyone else with the technology to avoid such “collateral damage”, from time to time they inflict it anyway, as a show of strength. Netanyahu is still breathing down this Government’s neck, so it had a point to make. But there is nothing singularly Israeli about this. Still, it has been the Israelis who have done it this time.

Lynne Teperman
Lynne Teperman
1 year ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

The only “clear” thing is that a notorious internet crank has re-emerged, thinking that his long history has been forgotten.
http://hurryupharry.net/2009/12/14/hubris-and-nemesis/
And more recently
https://antisemitism.org/corbyn-supporter-david-lindsay-threatens-violence-against-ehrcs-staff-and-caas-team-following-decision-to-investigate-labour-over-antisemitism/

Michael Drucker
Michael Drucker
1 year ago

Thank you for this superb article, full of heartfelt passion in the desire to tell the truth. I must however take issue with your comment about Meah Shearim and the Palestinian flag. Stylistically it is clever to compare to the flag at Pride, but it is simply not true. The Neturei Karta are a miniscule group of outsiders bent on outrage, they do not reflect the beliefs of the overwhelming majority of Chareidi Jews. If you go to Meah Shearim (as I have done many times) you will have to search long and hard to find a Palestinian flag. And if you do, it’s display will be for the same purpose as an American teen in the Bible Belt will put up a Black Sabbath poster, to prod and provoke a response.

chris sullivan
chris sullivan
1 year ago

just imagine if the Palestinians had been smarter over the past 70 years and had merely rorted the hard working and brilliant israelis – they would by now be living in the lap of luxury…….silly buggers!!

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  chris sullivan

Aren’t they the same people? Who happen to read and believe different Books?

chris sullivan
chris sullivan
1 year ago

exactly….silly buggers

Addie Shog
Addie Shog
1 year ago

Complete and utter garbage.
If it were not for the Israelis then Gaza would not have any power at all. Neither is there a blockade.The border checkpoints have tons of goods passng over every day.
Gaza is far from an open-air prison. It receives boatloads of money from The West and Arab allies – maybe its leaders should spend it on infrastructure rather than missiles and tunnels form which to attack Israel. Should they do this then there would be no Israeli aircraft flying over the territory.

harry storm
harry storm
1 year ago
Reply to  Addie Shog

Better yet, negotiate a sincere peace with Israel so it’s people can find some peace and prosperity. But no, folks like the above like to keep the pot boiling. Their concern for the people of Gaza is quite touching.

Glenda Pogorelsky
Glenda Pogorelsky
1 year ago
Reply to  Addie Shog

May I just add to that? When Israel left Gaza to the Palestinians, it left them infrastructure to create businesses. It supplied electricity and water, and indeed, hospitals (Gaza’s infant mortality under Israeli jurisdiction had been significantly reduced.
Instead, the Palestinian leaders reciprocated by sending over rockets against Israeli civilians living alongside the borders. Hundreds of millions poured (and continue to pour) into Gaza to improve living conditions, but their feckless leaders chose Jihad instead.
Israel got harder on the supply of electricity to Gaza because there’d been an agreement that they would pay for the power supply, but they didn’t. Being professional “victims” they know how to cry about their “plight” but can’t even dream about adhering to their side of the bargain.

Jane Watson
Jane Watson
1 year ago

I don’t understand the political and religious intricacies, but Israel is a great country, a beacon of civilised democracy surrounded by medievalism. One of the things that most fascinated me, when I was there in 2002, was the number of people queuing to get in at every border checkpoint. I’d always imagined they were surrounded by enemies, but no, people want to live, and work and share in prosperity.

Bullfrog Brown
Bullfrog Brown
1 year ago

And therein lies the true basis of the most protracted stalemate .. if only Western media would follow a similar path, to report the true failure of Palestinian leadership which has caused to much suffering for it’s own people, fuelled ‘today’ by Iran.

Maureen Finucane
Maureen Finucane
1 year ago

I sometimes ask the fervid Palestinian supporters usually of the left where the gay bar in Gaza is. It somehow contradicts their other stances on trans rights and abortion rights to be vocal supporters of Hamas.

Don Lightband
Don Lightband
1 year ago

Would someone be good enough to explain who exactly, are “Islamic Jihad” here? If they are not Hamas, then who are they? The ideology is the same, how about the actual agents?

Last edited 1 year ago by Don Lightband
Derek Smith
Derek Smith
1 year ago
Reply to  Don Lightband

You have to think of Hamas as the People’s Republic of Judea, and Islamic Jihad as the Judean People’s Republic. That gives you an idea of the difference.

Ruth Kaufman
Ruth Kaufman
1 year ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

Hamas is the organization that has a civic and a military (terrorist) wing, that fought a civil war with Fatah and seized control of Gaza and has the strategic military intention of destroying Israel. They are the de facto government of the Gaza Strip. Palestinian Islamic Jihad is an Iranian-funded terrorist organization, primarily in Gaza. Both organizations are working to develop a presence in the territories governed by the Palestinian Authority (the West Bank or Judaea & Samaria, depending on whose nomenclature you’re using). They also exist to destroy Israel, but do not have administrative responsibility for the Gazan civilians. They’re strictly terrorists. PIJ is more extreme than Hamas, but Hamas is hardly moderate as a terrorist organization.

Don Lightband
Don Lightband
1 year ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

What does the author intend by making the distinction, then?

Last edited 1 year ago by Don Lightband
Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
1 year ago
Reply to  Don Lightband

I guess Israel can negotiate with Hamas, but not with IJ?

Glenda Pogorelsky
Glenda Pogorelsky
1 year ago

It’s not directly, but usually done through Egypt, considering that the Gaza Strip was previously part of Egypt (until 1967) and most of the people livng there today were of Egyptian or Saudi origin. Egypt cooperates with Israel because the Egyptian government is against the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s because the MB want to take power in Egypt. This is a very complex situation, with no simple solutions.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

“And who do we hate more than the Romans?” “The Judean People’s Republic!”*

(For purists: The Judean People’s Front.)

Rafi Stern
Rafi Stern
1 year ago
Reply to  Don Lightband

They are two separate groups, both offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood and both committed to Jihad. From what I understand the difference between them is that Hamas understands the word “pragmatism” (which is why they stayed out of the present round) whereas Islamic Jihad reckon that makes them softies. When you are on the receiving end of their murderous violence, it indeed makes little difference.
For more details you can look at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Jihad_Movement_in_Palestine

Glenda Pogorelsky
Glenda Pogorelsky
1 year ago
Reply to  Don Lightband

Hamas is actually an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Islamic Jihad gets most of its backing from Iran. Fear not, as was the case with the PLO (PA – Palestinian Authority), chased out of Gaza (or murdered) by Hamas, it can’t take too long before the IJ and Hamas are battling it out for supremacy in the region.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago

Perhaps you should study Nancy Pelosi’s voting record on this interesting subject?

Senator Smith
Senator Smith
1 year ago

Its a truism of human nature that people of one ilk never like being lorded over by another, no matter how benevolent the overseers imagine themselves to be. The Romans were pretty decent colonial administrators by classical standards, but even so, Jewish zealots, the Sicarii, would randomly stab Roman soldiers, or even Jews they considered excessively pro-Roman, before dropping the knife and melting back into the panicked crowds. Eventually the Romans cornered the Zealots on a hilltop fort called Masada whereupon they all collectively necked themselves, Jim Jones style, the mothers taking a knife to the throats of their children. Even today, Israeli officers receive their stripes on the same hill in solemn commemoration of their sacrifice, conclusively proving the adage that one man’s terrorist is another one’s freedom fighter.
Of course, if you wanted additional and more contemporary proof of that same sentiment, simply consider the Israeli prime minister that gave orders to assassinate a UN peace mediator, or to lynch British soldiers who were doing their level best to tamp down on the sectarian violence in 1940s Palestine. One man’s terrorist…
Where was I? Oh yes, the article. Even having regard to the author’s background as a clergyman, its a bit of a church service, isn’t it? To take one example, most serious analyses of the Iron Dome system put its efficacy at no better than 60%, and thats against the home made Palestinian rockets. I note that Zelensky’s offer to test it against the Russian arsenal seems to have been politely declined.
My grandfather was an old colonial of the East India variety. He made the point that the British never just fled their former colonies without at least making some sincere endeavour to leave functioning institutions in their wake. With the singular exception being the Palestinians, who were cast to the wind and effectively left to do penance for the sins of Europeans. One can hardly blame the Jews for brutalising them. They had just been decimated themselves and had neither the inclination nor the luxury to be magnanimous. Still, its a serious blot against the English copybook. For what its worth, as an Anglo, I offer my apologies. It was bad form.

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
1 year ago

The Americans managed to take out Ayman al-Zawahiri without laying waste to much of Kabul, and Israel has the most sophisticated military technology in the world. Thus equipped, it has no need to take out a terrorist commander by bombing his entire street and killing his neighbours’ children. At the last count, Israeli bombardment has killed 16 children in Gaza in the last week. They have been killed as a matter of political choice. This is about showing that the present Government is as “tough” or “hard” as Benjamin Netanyahu.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
1 year ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

And of course you know this from your personal knowledge, yes? And Kabul is equivalent to Gaza, of course.

Judy Englander
Judy Englander
1 year ago
Reply to  Samuel Ross

Google ‘David Lindsay blogger jailed for online harassment’. He was well known on the British political site, Guido Fawkes.

Henri k
Henri k
1 year ago
Reply to  Samuel Ross

The closest Lindsay’s been to Gaza is being consensual with a Pally when he dropped the soap in the cell-block shower

Gloria Gordon
Gloria Gordon
1 year ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

ASD

Last edited 1 year ago by Gloria Gordon
Henri k
Henri k
1 year ago
Reply to  Gloria Gordon

a real t**d Gloria.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  Henri k

Isn’t ASD an abbreviation for autism? If so, “one should never mock the afflicted”.

Last edited 1 year ago by CHARLES STANHOPE
David Lindsay
David Lindsay
1 year ago

I have an awful feeling that your name really is Charles Stanhope, a charming country town right here in the North West Durham constituency. You are one of those people who support the most hardline Israelis against others who are even worse by being brown and mostly Muslim, with the rest of them mostly adhering to forms of Christianity of which you disapproved. But you remain WASP anti-Semites to the core. You think that the place for Jews is Israel, not Britain, and that they control Medicine in general and Psychiatry in particular, such that you can use them to medicate forcibly those who might have the temerity to disagree with you politically.

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
1 year ago
Reply to  Gloria Gordon

That reads rather like, “My cousin the psychiatrist will commit you.” One would not want to feed into tropes, would one?

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
1 year ago

The Americans managed to take out Ayman al-Zawahiri without laying waste to much of Kabul, and the Israelis could have taken out the leadership of Islamic Jihad without killing 15 children. This is about showing that the present Government is as “tough” or “hard” as Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel has the most sophisticated military technology in the world. Thus equipped, it has no need to take out a terrorist commander by bombing his entire street and killing his neighbours’ children. They have been killed as a matter of political choice.Make what you will of the Israeli ceasefire, but it is a humiliation for Liz Truss. The Foreign Secretary has been parroting the line of Tzipi Hotovely, who is so close to Truss that she, the Ambassador of a foreign state, appears 28 seconds into Truss’s campaign video for the Leadership of the Conservative Party, and thus for the office of Prime Minister, as an example of “core Conservative principles”.And who is Hotovely? It is no wonder that her appointment as the Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom was opposed by Melanie Phillips. Hotovely is linked to the church-burning anti-miscegenation activists of Lehava. She wants Israel to expand into Jordan and Syria. She denies that the Palestinians exist at all, yet somehow she wants their homes to be demolished. In 2017, she attacked American Jews in classically anti-Semitic terms as, “People that never send their children to fight for their country, most of the Jews don’t have children serving as soldiers, going to the Marines, going to Afghanistan, or to Iraq.” In 2019, she put out a video of Israel’s Jewish critics exclaiming, “Oy vey! My German euros!”Last May, she addressed a London rally that called for Arab villages to be burned. That was a meeting of supporters of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whom in 1981 the Thatcher Government had had the courage to ban from entering the United Kingdom. That ban remained in place until his assassination in his native New York in 1990. Although Otzma Yehudit has links to them, both Kach, the party that Kahane founded, and Kahane Chai, originally a breakaway but with little in the way of division from it these days, remain illegal in Israel because they are terrorists organisations. In Britain, however, their rallies are addressed by an Israeli Ambassador whom the next Conservative Prime Minister hails as an embodiment of “core Conservative principles”.Meanwhile, the Shadow Foreign Secretary is apparently someone called David Lammy, who has said absolutely nothing about the latest Israeli bombardment of Gaza, which in this age of precision bombing has killed 15 children in order to make the point that it can. In Hotovely’s presence last November, Keir Starmer made the most racist speech to have been delivered since the War by anyone with the remotest claim to have been considered a mainstream British politician, including Enoch Powell. The choice of guest of honour to hear it also made it clear who was the terrorist sympathiser. Yet now, and whatever practical value it may or may not turn out to have, there is at least nominally a ceasefire. To have called for that would not only have been against Lammy’s and Starmer’s Kahanist principles, but it would also have been a breach of the IHRA Definition that Jeremy Corbyn was foolish enough to bow down and adopt. Of course, those two facts are inseparable. As a churchgoing product of miscegenation, I would cheerfully go back to prison rather than sign that Definition. I would sooner die than make such a subscription.

Melanie Phillips
Melanie Phillips
1 year ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

Your claim that Israel wilfully killed children in Gaza is a disgraceful lie. Israel now says that at least 12 of the 15 children were killed by PIJ’s own rockets falling short.  Associated Press says its own reporting confirmed Israel’s assessment that close to one-third of the Palestinians who died last weekend may have been killed by errant PIJ rockets. As Giles writes, more innocent people in Gaza were killed last weekend by failed PIJ rockets than by Israeli airstrikes. Read the actual facts here and here.

Last edited 1 year ago by Melanie Phillips
Henri k
Henri k
1 year ago

He’s a well known nutter and jew-hater. He staled Steven Daisley and was sent down. The lunatic is still babbling away Melanie – ignore him

https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/19262308.blogger-jailed-repeated-online-harassment/

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
1 year ago
Reply to  Henri k

I have never heard of Steven Daisley and I don’t know what staling is. Without any solicitation on my part, I was fast-tracked for very early release on the day that the right-wing Labour machine that had banged me up lost control of Durham County Council for the first time in 100 years. I had to do three months for the sake of form, but the letter came under my cell door that day, less than a fortnight after I had been given 12 months. The whole thing is a standing joke up here, and involves the same individuals who let Keir Starmer off over his lockdown-busting.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago

What of Lindsay’s claim that you opposed the appointment of Tzipi*Hotovely?

(* My predicted text gremlin didn’t like that!)

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
1 year ago

I am assuming that that is not the real Melanie Phillips, but the real one certainly did. A lot of people did.

Last edited 1 year ago by David Lindsay
CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

Thank you, rather naive of me to think the ‘real thing’ would contribute to UnHerd I suppose.

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
1 year ago

I am nothing if not taken aback that she might have taken to replying to little old me. I agree with her about rather a lot, as it goes. Including the unacceptablity of Tzipi Hotovely.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

I’ve always thought of her as a bit of a ‘Wolf in Sheep’s clothing’. The name for starters, redolent of the Shires,Spaniels, Pony Club, and the English Rose but quite patently not!

Claire D
Claire D
1 year ago

I don’t know, I associate conservatism, pluck, courage and decency with all those things and I think Melanie Phillips has such qualities in spades.

Last edited 1 year ago by Claire D
David Lindsay
David Lindsay
1 year ago

They would say that, wouldn’t they?

Henri k
Henri k
1 year ago
Reply to  David Lindsay
John Tyler
John Tyler
1 year ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

That’s a long and fairly tedious way of saying that the verifiable evidence fails to support your preconceived, amoral philosophy.

David Jennings
David Jennings
1 year ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

ah, about the Americans being able to use drone strikes without “collateral damage”: have you forgotten about the US drone strike that took out a family, including seven children? Oops.
From CNN when it happened almost a year ago, in case one has an aversion to Fox: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/29/asia/afghanistan-kabul-evacuation-intl/index.html

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
1 year ago
Reply to  David Jennings

They managed to make their last point without any of this. They do it from time to time to prove that they can. As in this case.

Last edited 1 year ago by David Lindsay
harry storm
harry storm
1 year ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

The verbal diarrhea on display here is a terrific illustration of the obsessive lunacy that is David Lindsay’s trademark.

David Lindsay
David Lindsay
1 year ago
Reply to  harry storm

It was in paragraphs when I posted it. I do not know what happened. Anyway, you are clearly not the target audience. I can see and hear you now, indistinguishable from your horse. You like Israel. But you don’t like Jews.

Last edited 1 year ago by David Lindsay
Brian Goldfarb
Brian Goldfarb
1 year ago
Reply to  David Lindsay

Brian Goldfarb
David Lindsay has clearly no knowledge of the international law on defence when a sovereign nation is attacked. It boils down to the attacked nation having the right, in law, to retaliate in sufficient strength to stop the aggressor in their tracks.
The law makes no comment on a bullet for a bullet, a rocket for a rocket or a shell for a shell. It does stress the right to respond in sufficient force, etc.
Further, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and any other similar organisations always stress martyrdom for the cause. Indeed, they deride the Israeli desire to save the lives of their civilian citizens (Israelis, Jews, Moslems, Christians) as well as those of their combatants. Where successful, this allow them to fight to defend their fellows another day. Once martyred, there’s no chance of that happening.
And any genuinely neutral observers of the latest round acknowledge that the Gaza children were certainly killed by Islamic Jihad rockets falling short within Gaza. Further, there is at least one recording on file from the latest round of an Israeli observer (presumably either a pilot or the controller of a camera carrying drone) calling of a strike because children could be seen playing in the open in the target area: and the strike was called off.