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.
I have a question for Sally Rooney. Why are you perfectly happy to engage with cultural institutions in the UK, despite the various mad wars us Brits have waged in recent years, but you dodge like the plague cultural institutions in Israel because Israel is fighting a war in Gaza? Rooney, the celebrated Irish author
It is getting to the point where I am dreading going online. For I know the minute I open my laptop I will be exposed to the grimmest images of human suffering. The internet is awash with dead Palestinians. Their broken bodies clog up social media. Their ashen remains get thousands of shares. ‘Look at
In every war, children perish. It’s the worst thing about conflict, this dragging of innocents into the swirling maelstrom of tensions they don’t even understand. In Iraq, almost 10,000 kids were maimed or killed between 2008 and 2023. In the war in Syria, a child was injured or killed every eight hours for ten infernal
The Guardian has found a new minority it wants to shield from offence. A new oppressed group it might shed some virtuous tears over. A put-upon section of society that urgently requires the warm, loving hug of Guardianista pity. And you won’t believe who it is. It’s the mad militants who invaded Israel on 7
It is one year since the Jews suffered the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Nazi era, and what is the British left doing? Raging against the Jewish state. Hitting the streets in their thousands to fume against the nation that was the victim of that carnival of racist killing. They’re protesting not against
Is Robert Jenrick plotting to surrender our sovereignty to the Israelis? Is the Tory leadership frontrunner engaged in some nefarious scheme to plaster our ports with the flag of the Jewish State? You could be forgiven for thinking so following the swirling hysteria that greeted his comments about having the Star of David at Britain’s
There is a Christian preacher, a woman, who has suffered the most heinous persecutions. She has been chased by mobs, arrested, unlawfully jailed and even stabbed. Where did this hellish hounding of a follower of Christ occur? Afghanistan, perhaps? Somalia maybe? Actually it was right here, in Britain. An angry mob formed around her Her
When you describe what happened, you realise how ridiculous it was. A woman was dragged to court for holding up a placard that featured a drawing of a palm tree with coconuts falling from it. Superimposed on two of the coconuts were the faces of Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak, who was Prime Minister at
For those of us who grew up singing songs about Irish nationhood, today is a depressing day. As youths we crooned about how Ireland, ‘long a province’, will one day be ‘a nation once again’. We stood in stiff attention to the Irish national anthem with its promise that Ireland will never again ‘shelter the
There’s a new book out that depicts Irish people as gurning ginger-haired imbeciles who do Irish jigs in the garden and eat bacon and cabbage every day. Who produced this offensive tome? Must have been some Neanderthal bigots, right, who wish it was still the 1970s and still acceptable to Paddy-bash? Actually, it was a
Forget two-tier policing – we need to talk about two-tier healthcare. Jess Phillips, Labour MP and Home Office minister, has reportedly said she was whizzed through an overcrowded A&E unit on account of her pro-Gaza campaigning. If this is true, it raises some truly troubling questions about the NHS. ‘The doctor who saw me was
There was recently a mass public party at which all sorts of offences were committed. As innocent attendees cut loose and jived, shadier actors took advantage. There was a burglary, a robbery, 19 drug offences, 26 acts of theft and no fewer than 30 acts of violence against individuals. There were also two sexual offences
Why is there not more disquiet over Yvette Cooper’s promise to crack down on ‘harmful’ beliefs? To my mind it ranks as one of the most chilling political pledges of the modern era. The thought of a Labour government, or any government, imperiously decreeing which ideas are ‘harmful’ and which are benign leaves me cold.
Of the hundreds of people arrested in the wake of the riots, one in particular haunts my mind. It’s Julie Sweeney from Church Lawton in Cheshire. She’s a 53-year-old carer for her husband. And this week she was sentenced to 15 months in jail for writing an odious Facebook post while the riots were in
Am I getting soft in my middle age, or are some of the sentences being handed down to the rioters a tad stiff? Justice must be served, of course. Everyone who took part in the riotous violence of recent weeks should feel a copper’s hand on their shoulder. But I’m worried that justice is turning
A flyer calling for the expulsion of an ethnic group from parts of London was widely shared online yesterday. There were also reports of menacing chants being made outside a place of worship. Were the far-right thugs of riotous Britain up to no good again? Actually, this time the bigotry was coming from the other
A Sky News reporter having his microphone grabbed and dropped to the ground might seem like a trifling story right now, given everything that’s happening in the country. But when the mic-grabber is none other than Sir Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, it’s a different matter. A very different matter. In a democracy,
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Police are bracing themselves for more violent disorder this weekend. This is in the aftermath of the tragic stabbings in Southport and unrest in London, Hartlepool and Southport. Keir Starmer made a statement yesterday condemning the protests and the involvement of far right actors for stoking up the violence and spreading disinformation online. Is there
Will Southport’s suffering never end? First, the Merseyside town was rocked by the barbarism of a frenzied knife attack that left three girls dead and others critically injured. Then it was beset by unrest. Just hours after yesterday’s vigil for the slain girls, thugs clashed with cops. They set a police van on fire and
A rock band’s tour cancelled after one of the band members made a tasteless joke. A working-class cashier sacked from her job at the behest of an online mob who were horrified by something she said on Facebook. A schoolteacher suspended after being dogpiled for a daft remark she made online. Has the left-wing digital
