David Thrale דיוויד ת'רלה

Father | Husband | Environmental Health consultant | Geek | Soul boy | Genealogist | Optimist

[David Thrale דיוויד ת'רלה @DavidThrale]

@nicolelampert @Gilana25 What just like other criminals who cause a million pounds worth of damage and attack a female police officer?

… and they lecture others on privilege!

[David Thrale דיוויד ת'רלה @DavidThrale]

@JakeWSimons @emilykschrader This illustrates British societal culture …

Keep your head down. Don’t say what you really think. You’ll be okay because you are not Jewish.

But if forced to take purity test, you can avoid societal or professional ostracism by dissociating from ‘evil’ Jews/Israelis/Zionists.

[David Thrale דיוויד ת'רלה @DavidThrale]

@HeidiBachram @Gilana25 @fatdafevy Kinder gentler progressive anti-racist sledgehammer attacks

[David Thrale דיוויד ת'רלה @DavidThrale]

@MediaSOI @Gilana25 Send it to the British military - that we can’t afford to fund - instead of to an organisation that continues to pay pensions to those who murder Jews & increases payments for the more jews killed.

[MummyisTired @MummyisT]

We fund pay for slay
We fund pay for slay
We fund pay for slay
We fund pay for slay
We fund pay for slay
We fund pay for slay
We fund pay for slay
We fund pay for slay

[Nicole Lampert @nicolelampert]

Excellent from @LordIanAustin on yet ANOTHER debate on the evils of Israel:

As he says: ‘Over the last few years, Parliament has discussed Israel more than any other issue, not just any international issue, more than any domestic issue: more than the economy, unemployment, crime, the NHS.
‘The public out there look at Parliament and think this is utterly mad, utterly, utterly mad.’

Lord Ian blames Parliament for helping fuel antisemitism adding:

‘Does Parliament not understand that singling out the world's only Jewish state, holding its standards not applied to anywhere else, falsely accusing Israel of committing these terrible crimes? ‘This is bound to drive hostility towards people who are identified with Israel, which is the vast majority of the Jewish community, and I have to say this is why I believe Parliament is playing a large role in driving the explosion of anti-Semitism that we've seen on the streets of Britain.’

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Remarkable story in Telegraph revealing just how useless recent Tory governments were:
A secret Whitehall report found that more than £28bn in foreign aid and Covid-19 loans was handed to terrorists, hostile states and gangsters!
The misappropriation of taxpayer funds from 2015 to 2021, includes millions sent to the Islamic State and Russia.
Those responsible remain unpunished and the dossier was buried to spare official embarrassment.

[Scott Tibbs @ConservaTibbs]

I am 52. I never in my life thought I would have to write against anti-Semitism, much less that I would get so much opposition for opposing this ancient hatred. From both Right and Left. Had you told me 15 years ago it would be this bad, I would have laughed in your face.

[Shelley Blond @BlondShelley]

This is the last photo of Filipino care giver Angelyn Peralta Aguirre aged 32 who would not leave Nira Ronen’s side on October 7 2023 when the Hamas monsters invaded Nira’s home.
She refused to be parted from her, showing immense loyalty, love and bravery and was murdered alongside her elderly employer and friend in Kibbutz Kfar Aza where I visited, exactly a year ago this week.
Angelyn was noted as being a ‘sensitive, gentle, devoted young woman who instilled a profound sense of security in Nira’.
May the memories of Angelyn and Nira forever be a blessing 💔🕯️

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

The lack of common sense shared standards when dealing with Israel never ceases to amaze me. Iran-backed Hezbollah, a terror army inside Lebanon, has fired over 1,000 rockets at northern Israel despite the April 2026 ceasefire. This again forced tens of thousands of Israeli citizens to evacuate their homes or live daily running to shelters. This is not Lebanon confronting Israel. It is a terror group that Lebanon, despite repeated promises and UN resolutions, does not control and cannot control. No other nation would accept this or be told to just take it. Israel responded by striking the terror organization. Then Iran launched 11 ballistic missiles directly at Israel, massively violating the ceasefire with the U.S. and Israel. Yet somehow Israel is the one constantly told to show restraint.

[David Harris @DavidHarrisNY]

Simple questions:

Why do 5 million Palestinians have the "right" to a state, but not 40-60 million freedom-seeking #Kurds?

Why are there endless marches & protests for Palestinians, but not Kurds?

Why is the UN obsessed with Palestinians, but doesn't give a damn about Kurds?

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

If the Arabs hadn't ethnically cleansed every last Jew in their midst, a Jewish-majority Israel also wouldn't exist.

[Michael Pope @OyVeyPope]

I never wanted to be a political account.

I'm a British Jew. A husband. A father of two. An engineer. A man who believed that if you worked hard, treated people decently and kept your head down, the world would mostly leave you alone.

My grandfather survived Auschwitz.

For most of my life, antisemitism felt like history. Something to remember, not something my children would have to face.

Then came October 7th.

Since then I've watched Jewish people told to stay quiet, hide who they are, apologise for who they are, or accept standards that would never be applied to anyone else.

For a long time I said very little. I didn't want to drag my family into politics. I convinced myself someone else would speak.

Eventually I realised that silence comes with its own cost.

Martin Luther King Jr wrote:
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

So I'm speaking.

Against antisemitism.

Against extremism.

Against political intimidation.

For free speech, liberal democracy, integration and honest debate.

You don't have to agree with me on everything.

But if you're willing to have difficult conversations without hatred, you're welcome here.

[John Aziz @aziz0nomics]

Incredible.

They are making AI images of nature to use as arguments against data centres.

Incredible. 🫨🫨

[David Thrale דיוויד ת'רלה @DavidThrale]

@joshxhowie Do fortnightly marches at which people make hateful comments and hold hateful placards logged?

[David Thrale דיוויד ת'רלה @DavidThrale]

@CaptBlackSK4 @afneil I grew up in the 70’s. No TV in the late evening to save electricity. Candles and oil lamps for the power cuts. The 3 day week. The economy on its knees. The IMF bailout. “Plentiful social hsg”? The why did we live in a shit private rental with no heating?

[GnasherJew®גנאשר @GnasherJew]

The X user SlayerGlobalist (display name GlobalistSlayer) is very extreme and may pose a serious risk. The account has posted messages such as "I'm a proud Nazi. Hitler was a hero" and "Jews must be exterminated." Our OSINT researchers have identified the individual behind this account, and he was reported to Merseyside Police (@MerseyPolice) some time ago. As far as we know, he has not been arrested and continues to post anti-Jewish hate on X. This is how antisemitism is being normalised.

[David Thrale דיוויד ת'רלה @DavidThrale]

@GnasherJew @kosherronin Strange how someone representing Anti Fascist Action UK, appears to be behaving as I imagine an aggressive threatening street fascist might behave towards Jewish people.

[David Thrale דיוויד ת'רלה @DavidThrale]

@DXW_KC @BareReality @SpeechUnion @britishmuseum Thank you to the @SpeechUnion

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

This matters.
An obscure London event on the history of the ancient Jewish kingdoms in Judea and Israel is cancelled because of ‘security concerns’ and it turns out this was a reaction to a campaign to fill and then undermine the event by activist disrupters.
How strange! Why would a posse of aggressive activists be interested in the arcane details of bullae and steles and ostraca and inscriptions and numismatics in some small South Levantine kingdoms in the Iron Age?
Well, it is a little more than that which is why it is both disturbing and important. And it matters because at its least it is a threat to history in Britain’s - but also the world’s - greatest temple of History @britishmuseum - and its scholarly integrity.
The BM and its leadership are decent and well-meaning and have explained that they wished to save an event from disruption by bullying vandals but I am sure the BM realizes it is essential to announce a new event fast lest it give the impression that the permission of tiny cadres of aggressive bullies are required before it hold events. But the significance is wider than an event about the Moab and Tel Dan steles in a great museum.
British cultural life is the right and exercise of civic and cultural freedom – a privilege of our liberal democracy - that does not require the permission of gangs of ideological activists nor can it cancelled or postponed nor endured at their beck and sufferance nor permitted with a bend of the knee to their permissions or veto. But that is what this appears to be.
Across the cultural world in the West, though the bewildered middleaged managers of our institutions that are confronting and often submitting to a wave of self-righteous blackmail and mob threat, there is an increasingly thin – indeed ever more fragile and sometimes nigh invisible – line between ‘security concerns’ – and institutional pusillanimity.
Then there is the history itself.
This event concerns the study of the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel that existed between roughly 1100BC and 586BCin the Levant. It is not a coincidence that this was chosen for disruption. The history of the Judean kingdoms and the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem that stood for most of the time between 1000BC and 70ADetc is important and fascinating history in its own right, supported by complex and growing archaeological finds.
These small kingdoms and the subsequent Temple priestly mini-state (restored by the Persian kings Cyrus and Darius 539BC) and then the larger Judean kingdoms of the Hasmoneans and Herodians – between 167BC and 135AD chronicle the long indigenous history of Jews in the region – which the protesters are keen to erase. This is a political project of ideological erasure and malicious incitement of course concerned with the complex, brutal Israel-Palestine conflict that has now gone on for a hundred years and is unlikely to be solved in a small lecture theatre in the British Museum. But it also attempts to deny or erase Jewish history itself – and by implication the heritage of British Jews who live here in Britain, a small community that is now under cultural and sometimes physical threat.
Incidentally - but it is worth saying, this history does not deny anyone else’s history, nor the many other small realms in this region through ancient times nor the many names of the region and its entities and the historical origins of those names (Canaan, or Philistia or Peleset, Phoenicia, Aram Damascus or Moab or later Nabatea and the provinces of Palaestina Prime, Seconda and Tertia and the Ghassanid kingdoms and so on etc etc). The history of one can not be used to erase the history of the other and does not need to do so. The pursuit of knowledge which is one of the delights of human life and is the mission of the BM and indeed anyone who writes, reads or enjoys history, can celebrate and recognize all of these.
Yet this protest and the many like it deployed across Britain nowadays is the opposite of that - an attack on history using the methods of intimidation and vandalism. Much of this involves distorting or dismantling actual history or often lying to replace it with a fabricated ideological structure that nourishes no one and helps no one but degrades our culture and civic life not to speak of history itself. By the way, the frequent claims that these histories or names are ‘denied’ or ‘noone knows them’ is nonsense: anyone and everyone who is interested knows this history. (Much of it appears for example in my book Jerusalem a history of the Holy Land.)
And this is relevant not just to those of us who write study or enjoy the history of the region but also to those who believe that cultural life and civic society is a right that must not be submitted to the aggressions and plots of loud well-organized much-indulged ideologues who take advantage of the freedoms of our society to undermine its principles and the very freedoms they are designed to guard.
Just as vital is a rule of history itself that concerrns the rise and fall of civilizations: the society that ceases to allow to free discussion of ideas and stops respecting and recognizing the value of scientific and historical sources and facts is a society that will fail.