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.
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Would you rather live in a society where a man is free to criticise religious practices or one where such a man might be dragged to the public square to be damned and shamed as a blasphemer? For me it’s a no-brainer. It’s the former. I want the freedom to object, as scurrilously as I
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Maybe it’s because I’m getting on in years, but I remember when being “progressive” meant supporting women’s rights, believing in gay liberation and opposing the persecution of ethnic groups. Yet now “progressives” are giddily cosying up with the fanboys of a foreign regime that ruthlessly represses women, hangs gays by the neck and funds proxy
I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase “unprovoked war.” It’s been rolling off leftist tongues since the explosion of hostilities in Iran. This week, Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and scores of hoary peaceniks wrote a letter to the Guardian insisting Britain should have nothing to do with America and Israel’s “unprovoked war” in Iran.
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There is not one drop of English blood in my body. I know this because, like many others, I succumbed to the DNA testing fad. I spat into a test tube and forked out 79 quid only to be told what I already knew: I’m a Mick. Ninety-three per cent of my DNA is from
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For the first time, I am grateful to Zack Polanski. For, in branding Keir Starmer ‘Islamophobic’ simply for criticising Mothin Ali, he has shown just how slippery and despotic that word is. He has confirmed what most decent folk have long suspected – that accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ are a cynical ruse to shut down entirely
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Two big pop events took place on Saturday. In Manchester, there was the Brit Awards. One by one the bourgeois brats who swell the ranks of popular culture blubbed like babies over the rise of Reform. ‘I’m genuinely terrified’, said someone called Self Esteem. Britain is becoming a ‘fascist state’, wailed Irish singer CMAT. ‘The
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Imagine if Matt Goodwin had given an interview to a media outlet that regularly platforms far-right agitators like Nick Griffin. Imagine if he’d been pictured dancing next to a man who once called a Jewish rabbi a ‘kind of animal’. Imagine if he had made a campaign video trying to tap into the animus that
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The Home Affairs Committee report on the Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal has finally landed. And it is damning indeed. It confirms what many of us suspected: that West Midlands Police allowed themselves to become the militant wing of Israelophobia. They did the bidding of the mob, dutifully banning Israeli Jews in order to appease local
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The first thing the mob kills is its own humanity. Long before they sink their collective claws into the target of their flapping ire, they lay waste to their own decency. We see this in the digital hounding of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Behold the ugly gloating over a man’s downfall. Witness the peddling of false accusations.
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We need to talk about Ahmed Mohammed. He’s a Sudanese asylum seeker in the UK, and this week he was spared jail after being convicted of threatening a person with an offensive weapon in a public place. The public place was Speakers’ Corner in London, and the victim was a Christian preacher. In May last year
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Imagine getting angrier over a word than a rape. This will go down in history as the week when there was more digital fury over one man’s criticism of mass immigration than there was over the dire impact those untrammelled flows of people are having on Britain’s women and girls. Millions of decent Brits are
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Are Jews not allowed even one day of commemoration? Can’t they have just one sombre moment where they might remember their dead without mobs of wild-eyed Israelophobes frothing at the mouth for yet more ‘intifada’? Judging by the obscene events here in Sydney last night, the answer to that question is a firm No. It
That’s it, I’m out. I’m finished with the Epstein scandal. This morning I read about a man who is on the cusp of cancellation because he once sent a flirtatious email to Ghislaine Maxwell, years before her crimes were known about. This is getting ridiculous. It feels like MeToo on steroids. There’s a medieval vibe
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Imagine talking about the Holocaust and not mentioning the Jews. It would be like holding forth on the transatlantic slave trade without saying the word ‘African’. Amazingly, the Green Party did just that last week. They de-Jewed the Holocaust. They offered remembrance for the greatest crime in history without mentioning the people it was designed
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People are saying the Gorton and Denton by-election will be a showdown between the Greens and Reform. Between Zack Polanski’s barmy army of End is Nigh graduates and Nigel Farage’s insurgent movement of people peeved with the old order. I hope they’re right, for that really would illuminate the new battlelines in British politics. The
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There have been two huge victories for workers’ rights over the past week. And yet the left is schtum. No champagne corks are popping. No raised fist emojis have appeared on lefty social media. I bet no Labour-backing luvvie has plans to make a tear-jerking movie about this stirring triumph for working people. No Labour-backing
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Over the years, on the streets of London, I have heard so much praise for the Iranian regime and its brutish proxies. I’ve seen witless radicals cry: ‘We are all Hezbollah!’ I’ve seen leftists cheer the Houthis, that avowedly anti-Semitic army that does the mullahs’ bidding in Yemen. I’ve seen Islamists with placards featuring the
I’m starting to feel sorry for progressives who are schtum about the revolution in Iran. My contempt for them is giving way to pity. Imagine watching women fling off their hijabs in glorious defiance of the cruel mullahs who rule over them and feeling nothing. Imagine seeing brave youths swarm the streets to confront the
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Imagine if a UK police force had information suggesting white supremacists were planning to attack black football fans from overseas. Imagine they suppressed that information. Worse, imagine if their solution to this sickening threat was to ban the black fans from coming here, effectively giving the menacing supremacists exactly what they wanted: a ‘black-free’ zone.
Finally, the left has found a “kidnap victim” it cares about. Having spent more than two years making excuses for Hamas’s savage seizing of 251 Israelis, having violently torn down posters of those stolen Jews, now the activist class has suddenly decided that abduction is bad after all. Why? Because a dictator they admire, Nicolás
