Brendan O’Neill is Spiked's chief politics writer. His new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation, is out now.
The day after the Nova music festival massacre, the Irish band Kneecap posted a photo of themselves grinning from ear to ear alongside the words: ‘Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.’ The bodies of the 364 revellers butchered by Hamas were barely cold before these rappers from Belfast seemed to give smiley support to the militants
They defaced the statue of Millicent Fawcett. That’s all you need to know about yesterday’s march for ‘trans rights’. Someone clambered up the Parliament Square monument to one of Britain’s best-known feminist icons and daubed it with offensive words. ‘Fag rights’, they scrawled upon Fawcett’s likeness. A warrior for women’s suffrage vandalised with a homophobic
How did it come to this? How did we arrive at a situation where it fell to a court of law to tell us what a woman is? That’s my overriding emotion today. I’m delighted the Supreme Court has ruled that a woman is legally defined as a person with female biological characteristics. But I’m
We are all betrayed by our body language eventually. It’s our inner quisling, itching to expose to the world the feelings our more sentient side would prefer to keep hidden. Yesterday it was Jess Phillips’s turn to be snitched on by her own mannerisms. The surliness with which she listened to MPs speak about the
Israel’s denial of entry to two Labour MPs is a truly shaming moment. Not for Israel, which, like all sovereign states, is perfectly at liberty to permit or deny entry to anyone it chooses. No, for Labour. That our ally, the Jewish nation, is so wary of Britain’s ruling party that it felt compelled to
Are we being lied to, or at the very least misled, about what’s going on in Gaza? It increasingly seems so. Israel is carrying out a genocide, cries the activist class. Its pummelling of Gaza is one of the most barbarous onslaughts against civilians in history, they say. New research suggests these feverish claims have
So Zarah Sultana, the MP for Coventry South, is in favour of building airports now? That’s a turnaround. In January she railed against Labour party leader Keir Starmer when he dropped his opposition to a third runway at Heathrow. To execute such a U-turn in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’ is ‘reckless, short-sighted and
You’re more likely to see a protest against Hamas in Gaza than in London. For brave, spirited agitation against this army of anti-Semites that murders Israelis and oppresses Palestinians, forget Britain’s activist class – they’re too busy frothing about the ‘evil’ Jewish State morning, noon and night. Look instead to the bombed-out Gaza Strip itself,
Imagine if, following an Allied raid on Nazi positions, the newspapers the next day told us about nothing but the civilian casualties. No mention of the fascists who were killed. No utterance of their names, no information about their ranks. Instead, just pained commentary on the suffering of the innocents who tragically found themselves swept
‘Céad míle fáilte’, the Irish love to say. It means ‘a hundred thousand welcomes’. It’s emblazoned in the arrivals hall at Dublin airport. You’ll see it written in the Celtic font on the walls of Ireland’s cosy pubs. It has led to Ireland being christened ‘the land of a thousand welcomes’, where all visitors, no
If you’re a foreigner who hates Jews, should you be allowed to move to Britain? For me it’s a no-brainer: absolutely not. The safety and dignity of Britain’s Jews count for infinitely more than the ‘rights’ of a racist migrant. Does the Labour government agree? Does it agree that overseas anti-Semites are not welcome here?
Perusing the Zelensky-bashing of the Very Online right, I found myself thinking: ‘This reminds me of something.’ The branding of Ukraine’s president as a ‘welfare queen’ who is draining America’s coffers. The libelling of Ukraine as a uniquely corrupt nation whose thirst for war threatens to damn all of mankind to disaster. The shameful blaming
So the moral rot at the BBC appears to run even deeper than we thought. The storm over its Gaza documentary just got a whole lot worse. As if it wasn’t bad enough that this Israel-mauling hour of TV was fronted by the son of a leading member of Hamas, now we discover that the
So Hamas has committed yet another act of depravity against the Bibas family. It said Shiri Bibas was in one of those four coffins it put on grim display in Gaza yesterday before handing them over to the Red Cross. But she wasn’t. It was the remains of some unknown person that Hamas passed off
We need to talk about what we witnessed in Gaza today. The sick ceremonial handover of the bodies of slain Israelis was a new low, even for Hamas. This was the theatre of death, a public spectacle of Jewish agony for the delectation of voyeuristic anti-Semites. If the world fails to speak out against this
Imagine living in your own holy fiefdom, with some of the strictest security on earth, and lecturing other nations about how to deal with illegal immigration. That’s Pope Francis for you. There he is in the Apostolic Palace, sentries at every door, wagging his be-ringed finger at Donald Trump’s America for its ‘mass deportation’ of
Some of us switch off when we hear a ‘loony left’ story. We might cock an eyebrow at the latest tale of progressive idiocy but that’s about it. They’re at it again, we think, and move on. But there are reports this morning of some truly perverse behaviour among the activist classes and we cannot
I thought Donald Trump was a woman-hater? The Guardian told us he’s a ‘far-right misogynist’ whose return to the White House would strike ‘visceral horror’ into the hearts of women everywhere. He’s the ‘misogynist in chief’, said CNN. Perhaps someone could explain, then, why he just signed an executive order in favour of women’s rights
England ditched its blasphemy laws back in 2008. No longer would it be an offence to engage in ‘contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous’ speech concerning God. No longer would any poor soul be hauled off to jail, far less to the stocks, for the crime of profanity. So you can imagine my surprise when a
Watching Arbel Yehud being freed in Gaza today, I thought to myself: this is what it must have been like at Salem. Here we had a diminutive woman being paraded through a baying mob of hollering men. They barked religious slogans at her. They shoved and jostled to get a better view of the marked
