Sheila Jones

People are pulling out their own teeth! This dentist is so concerned he’s started a petition about it. I’ve signed – will you join us? you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save… via @38degrees

A call for Justin Welby to resign. - Sign the Petition! change.org/p/a-call-for-j… via @UKChange

A call for Justin Welby to resign. - Sign the Petition! change.org/p/a-call-for-j… via @UKChange

@implausibleblog @AlPinkerton The Greens have four MPS too. Where’s the media coverage for them, instead of the dog whistle slurry coming from Farage?

I swear as a former British Ambassador and 22 year career diplomat. Almost every US or British Embassy hosts a CIA or MI6 station. All house military personnel. Many service special forces. That the Iranian diplomatic premises were qualitatively different is rubbish.

@theholyllama Hi James - sorry to bother you! My friend has just discovered that tickets for April 2nd have sold out online. Do you think it's worth her while trying for a ticket on the door on Tuesday night? Best wishes Sheila Jones

There’s good reason unelected Lords shouldn’t generally overrule Commons. But if the Govt rides roughshod over international law & human rights, anyone with the power to stop them, must. Am backing Lords amendments to make illegal & immoral #RwandaBill marginally less dangerous

My latest article on what the smearing of Jonathan Glazer for his impassioned Oscars speech tells us about the charlatans who have been given a bullhorn by western establishments to speak for the Jewish community: jonathan-cook.net/blog/2024-03-1…

Film director Jonathan Glazer poked a hornet's nest with his acceptance speech this week as he won an Oscar for The Zone of Interest, a film about the family of Auschwitz’s Nazi commandant who live peacefully inside a walled garden, cut off from the horrors just the other side. Glazer says the film’s point is not simply to drive home a history lesson. It’s "not to say, ‘Look what they did then.’ Rather, ‘Look what we do now.’” There could not be pithier summary of the difference between the universal moral impulse found in Jews like Glazer, and the particularist Zionist impulse found in the people who noisily claim to speak for the Jewish community – and are readily given a bullhorn to do so by western establishments. The first group says, "Never again.” The second group cries, "Never again, unless it serves Israel's interests." And given Israel's decades-long craving to dispossess the Palestinians of their entire homeland, that second “Never again” is as good as worthless. Palestinians were always in danger of erasure – not just territorially, as happened in 1948 and 1967, but existentially, as is happening now – by a state misleadingly declaring itself to be Jewish. The assumption of many was that the West would never tolerate another genocide being conducted in its name. How misplaced that certainty was. The West is arming and funding the genocide in Gaza, and providing diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Its commitment to helping Israel carry out mass slaughter is such that many western states have frozen their funding to the UN aid agency UNRWA, which is specifically charged with keeping Palestinians in Gaza fed and alive. Observers underestimated how far things had shifted. Over many decades, a universal ethics that drew on the lessons of the Holocaust – and solidified into international law – was intentionally undermined, sidelined and replaced by a particularist Zionist “ethics”. That readjustment happened with the active connivance of western powers, which had no interest in promoting the universal lessons of recent history. For their own self-interested reasons, they preferred the particularist agenda of Zionism. It sat easily with the West’s insistence that its privileges continue: the right to wage wars and steal the resources of others, the ability to trample on indigenous peoples, and the power to destroy the planet and other species. In fact, Zionism was never centrally about Israel. It is a much broader ideology, rooted in western tradition and tailor-made for the darker times we are entering, in which systems collapse – of economies, of climate stability, of authority – poses new challenges to western establishments. Zionism started as a Christian doctrine centuries ago, and flourished in the Victorian era among British politicians. It views Jews chiefly as a vehicle to advance a brutal, end-of-times redemption in which they are to be the the main sacrificial victims. Though less conspicuously today, Christian Zionism still shapes the climate in which today’s politicians operate – as the large number of “Friends of Israel” in both major parties attests. Christian Zionism is the self-professed view too of many tens of millions of rightwing evangelicals in the US and elsewhere. Whether in its Christian or Jewish incarnations, Zionism was always a “might is right”, “law of the jungle” doctrine, drawing on Old Testament-style ideas of chosen-ness, divine purpose, and rationalisations for violence and savagery. It sits all too comfortably with the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza. Jewish leaders and influencers in the West who champion more, not less, genocide in Gaza face neither disgrace nor shame. They are not shunned for cheering policies that have entailed so far the slaughter, maiming and orphaning of at least 100,000 Palestinian children. Why? Because they are articulating an Israel-focused version of an ideology that fits neatly with the worldview of western establishments. For this reason, Jewish influencers lost no time working to smear Glazer as a self-hating Jew by misrepresenting his speech – quite literally by editing out the parts that did not fit their particularist, anti-universal agenda. Referencing the victims both of October 7 and of Israel’s attack on Gaza, Glazer told the Oscars audience: “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation that has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” He was expressly opposing his Jewishness being weaponised in support of a genocide. He was standing apart from many Jewish community leaders and influencers who have weaponised their own Jewishness to justify violence against civilians. He was reminding us that the Holocaust’s lesson is that ideologies must never trump our humanity, must never be used to rationalise evil. All of which poses a huge threat to those in the Jewish community who have, for years, been precisely weaponising their Jewishness for political ends – in the service of Israel and its decades-old project to remove the Palestinian people from their historic homeland. In a moment of pure projection, for example, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, dubbed by media outlets as “the most famous rabbi in America“, castigated Glazer for supposedly “exploiting the Holocaust” and for trivializing “the memory of the 6 million victims through whom he found Hollywood glory”. Boteach apparently cannot understand that it is he, not Glazer, who has been exploiting the Holocaust – in his case, for decades in the service of protecting Israel from any criticism, even now as it commits a genocide. Meanwhile, Batya Ungar-Sargon, opinion editor at Newsweek, broke with all journalistic norms to completely misrepresent Glazer’s speech, accusing him of “moral rot” for supposedly disavowing his Jewishness. Rather, as he made all too clear, he was rejecting how his Jewishness and the Holocaust were being hijacked by genocide apologists such as Ungar-Sargon to promote a violent ideological agenda. The Newsweek editor knows that Glazer’s speech was the most listened to and discussed moment of the Oscars. There are few who read her tweeted comment that had not heard for themselves what Glazer said in his speech rather than the misinformation Ungar-Sargon peddled about it. Lying about his remarks should have been an act of professional self-harm. It should have been a dark stain on her journalistic credibility. And yet Ungar-Sargon proudly left up her tweet, even as it received X’s humiliating “Readers added…” footnote exposing her deception. She did so because that tweet is her calling card. It declares her not a talented or careful journalist but as something far more useful: one who will do whatever is required to get ahead. Like Shmuley, she was projecting – in her case, with the accusation of “moral rot”. She was advertising that she lacks a moral compass, and that she is willing to do whatever is needed to advance establishment interests. Like those who lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there will be no price to pay for these all-too-visible failings, or for promoting a catastrophe for a people whose lives and fate are of no import to the West. Shmuley and Ungar-Sargon are determined to buttress the walled garden, shielding us from the suffering, the terrors, inflicted by the West just out of view. These courtiers and charlatans must be shamed and shunned. We must listen instead to those like Glazer trying to tear down the wall to show us the reality outside. The article Oscars speech smear campaign shows lying for Israel is a good career move, is also posted here: jonathan-cook.net/blog/2024-03-1…

The Tories like to warn people that I would have taken this country in a very different direction. They're absolutely right.

A Labour member of the House of Lords, John Hutton, simultaneously heads an Israeli state-owned arms firm. Hutton is the director of Pearson Engineering, a subsidiary of Rafael, which is directly owned by the Israeli government.

Watching the entire establishment close ranks in less than 24 hours and unite to attack an elected MP because he doesn’t support Zionism is one of the most blatant displays that our democracy is a managed pantomime I’ve ever seen

BREAKING: Rishi Sunak attacks democracy to protect genocide. “What protesters are doing over Gaza is part of the rich British democratic heritage. The real mob rule and attack on democracy does not come from pro-Palestine protesters. It comes from Rishi Sunak’s Government"

Weaponised antisemitism was always about silencing those protesting against British foreign policy – a foreign policy that prioritises Israel’s pivotal role in promoting western control over the oil-rich Middle East above ending Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. Previously, that chiefly meant smearing Corbyn and the anti-imperialist, anti-war Labour left. But with public outrage growing at Israel’s genocide, the stakes have risen dramatically. Now the political and media establishments are desperate to shift attention away both from Israel and from their complicity in the slaughter of children. Their preferred method has been pretending that it is only Muslims and leftwing, antisemitic extremists opposed to the genocide. Normal people, apparently, should be invested exclusively in the impossible task Israel claims to have set itself: of “eliminating Hamas”, however many Palestinian children die in the process... Two nasty parties, each complicit in a genocide of the Palestinian people, are now competing to stoke Islamophobia – one explicitly, the other implicitly. With no place to hide for his political cowardice, Labour leader Keir Starmer has opened the gates to the bipartisan vilification of Muslims, not just in Gaza but at home too. Will he get away with it? He may find it tougher going than he expects. With the slaughter in Gaza playing out on TV screens and social media accounts, many millions of Britons are incensed. Whatever the political class claims, it is not just Muslims and the anti-war left angry at the complicity of British politicians in genocide. The smearing of Corbyn over his criticisms of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians largely worked. But gaslighting much of the public as a dangerous "mob" for opposing even more egregious Israeli crimes may yet backfire. More from my latest article First it was Corbyn. Now the whole British public is being smeared over Gaza can be read here: middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-w…

Hamas | Geoge Galloway | Oxford Union youtu.be/1R1jxtdO2nU?si… via @YouTube "....I don't even like Hamas"

Had I lived in Rochdale, I would have voted for George Galloway. I have no religion but I am unambiguously opposed to the genocide that is taking place in Gaza.

Powerful words by 102 years old philosopher Edgar Morin, one of France's most revered intellectual figures, as well as a Jewish WW2 resistant who fought as a lieutenant in De Gaulle's France combattante. x.com/bob30031583/st… Here are his words on Gaza: "I am both astonished and outraged by the fact that those who represent the descendants of a people who were persecuted for centuries for religious or racial reasons... That the descendants of this people who are today the decision-makers of the State of Israel, that they could not only colonize an entire people, partly drive them out of their land and seek to expel them for good... But also, after the massacre of October 7, engaged in a real massive slaughter on the populations of Gaza and continue, incessantly, hitting civilians, women, and children. And to see the silence of the world, the silence of the United States, protectors of Israel, the silence of the Arab states, the silence of the European states who claim to be defenders of culture, humanity, human rights. I think we are living through a horrible tragedy because we are also powerless in the face of this thing that is unleashing. At least, I say: bear witness! The only thing that remains if we cannot resist concretely is to testify. Let's resist in our minds, let's not be fooled, let's not forget, let's have the courage to face things head-on."

The chair of Israel's investigative committee into rape on 10/7 by Hamas, @CochavElkayam, presents an old image of dead female Kurdish fighters as women sexually assaulted at the Nova music fest During a 11/12 talk for Harvard's Maimonides Society, Elkayam referred to "an image of a woman stripped from the waist down... photographed on the side of the Nova music festival" This image was originally published on the anonymous Hamas-Massacre website promoted by Israel's govt, but removed w/o acknowledgment after I demonstrated it was first published in 2022 and showed dead female Kurdish fighters Documentation here: x.com/maxblumenthal/…

More exploding rockets, Elon Musk? Do something useful with your money.

Napoleon review – Joaquin Phoenix makes a magnificent emperor in thrilling biopic #Echobox=1700009485" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">theguardian.com/film/2023/nov/…