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The @nytimes just published one of the most serious sets of allegations imaginable against Israel – claims of systematic sexual violence, including a bizarre story about carrots and trained rape dogs. We checked the sources.
What we found is journalistic malpractice. 🧵
We’re now over 30 months into the Middle East conflict. During that time there’s been a litany of criticism about the Israeli response to the attacks of 7/10/2023. Not once over those 30 months have I heard anyone explain what Israel could have done to deal with both the threat and promises of Hamas. The only implied option is that Israel walks quietly into existential surrender, because that’s what anti-Zionism involves. This kind of criticism displays no understanding of what international politics involves or how any state would have to react to a event like 7/10.
@RonaldJMoeller Definitely. I personally think we should have crushed their ballistic & nuke capes, but Trump has a plan, he has definitely earned the confidence of any clear eyed observer.
I disagree with Lord Hermer KC, the Attorney General. I don’t accept that international law requires our Prime Minister to deliver a pusillanimous statement setting out the UK’s position whose first point is “We did not participate”.
I’ve set out the gist of my approach below. ⬇️
The Prime Minister has refused publicly to support the US and Israel strikes, and also refuses to allow the US to use UK bases, because of international law advice he has reportedly received from Lord Hermer.
International law ought to provide a mechanism to restrain and, if necessary, end despotic and tyrannical regimes such as that in Iran. If the doctrines of international law prove unable to restrain Iranian terrorism and mass murder, and tie the hands of democracies while forcing them to stand and watch Iranian atrocities, international law will have failed. It will have become a fundamentally immoral system of law, and one which is worse than worthless in the modern world.
To be clear: I don’t believe that it is. I think international law is important, and both can and should provide a just legal order. I do, however, have serious questions as to the moral attitudes of some of its expositors; too many international lawyers serenely promote an analysis which ultimately protects tyrants.
Seven points, and some questions:
1 The inherent right to use force in the face of an imminent attack from a hostile nation which is responsible for a pattern of hostile actions exists for good reason: a country cannot be expected to remain idle and just wait for the next attack.
2 Iran has repeatedly threatened to attack the UK’s bases and personnel. Those threats come in the context of persistent Iranian attempts to launch attacks on UK soil, too; the Director General of MI5 has stated, and the PM confirmed last night, that the UK has responded to tens of Iranian-backed plots, presenting potentially lethal threats to British citizens and UK residents. There is also a constant barrage of cyberattacks; while not all cyberattacks are armed attacks in sense of Article 51 of the UN Charter, some may be, and all confirm not just hostile intent but action pursuant to such intent.
3 The UK’s long-standing allies, the US and Israel, were right to consider that they faced further attacks prior to their recent military action, given that (i) Iran has previously attacked both states directly and also through its many proxies; (ii) Iran has repeatedly stated its intent to destroy Israel; (iii) Iran was assessed to be on the brink of acquiring a nuclear capability with uranium enrichment at 60% (which can only be for military use); and (iv) Iran already possessed – as demonstrated by its recent attacks – a sophisticated and effective long-range delivery capability which Israel cannot fully neutralise with defensive weapons.
4 The acquisition of a nuclear capability by Iran represents a genocidal risk for Israel and its people. Iran’s repeatedly stated aim is to wipe the State of Israel, and its inhabitants, off the face of the earth. The slogan of the proxies through which Iran has often attacked Israel is: “God is greater, death to America, death to Israel, curse to the Jews, victory to Islam”. In these circumstances, whether they are characterised as part of an ongoing armed conflict with Iran or as a new use of force based on self-defence, Israel’s actions are justifiable.
5 The UK (and also the US) is permitted under international law to use force to aid another state which is acting in self-defence. Moreover, the UK is under an obligation in international law is to prevent genocide, not just to stop it: stopping an on-going genocide is required, but it necessarily means that action was taken too late.
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6 Against that background, the UK has three distinct legal bases to assist, militarily if necessary, its long-standing allies the US and Israel (and now other states in the region, too): (1) to defend another member state pursuant to collective self-defence; (2) to take proportionate action to avert continued Iranian attacks on the UK’s own bases and personnel; and/or (3) to prevent Iran from implementing its clearly stated genocidal intentions against the people of Israel.
7 The US and the UK are in the same legal position; accordingly, if the UK Government’s position (as reported) is that the UK cannot itself take offensive military action to support the US and Israel, the UK Government must also consider that the US strikes were unlawful.
8 Some questions for the UK Government:
(a) Does the UK Government consider that the US and Israeli strikes were unlawful?
(b) Why could we not join the leaders of Canada (Liberal) and Australia (Labor) and offer unequivocal support?
(c) Why are we not actively assisting our several other allies in the region, throughout the Gulf and beyond, who have now also been attacked?
(d) Specifically, is it the UK’s position that we can help those states defend themselves against missiles once launched, but we can’t actively assist them in taking out the missile launchers?
The legal debate about these matters is important. And any government should be cautious before using or endorsing lethal force. But when your first point in responding to targeted strikes on a tyrannical regime which has sought to attack, and which still plans attacks against, your own citizens both at home and abroad, is “We did not participate”, you need to rethink your analysis.
Last night’s speech delivered by the Prime Minister was, frankly, embarrassing. He laid out all the threats to the UK – including clear physical threats to my own community – but then failed even to say that he supported military action to remove those threats. His overriding concern was simply to make it clear that the UK did not participate in the US and Israeli strikes.
In that context, lack of participation is not a badge of honour; it is a mark of shame. It is amoral evasion dressed up as legal principle.
Last night Israeli Muslim Arab residents of Al-Ram neighbourhood in Jerusalem went to the security wall by the Palestinian Authority area and destroyed the ladders which "Palestinian" Arab infiltrators use to illegally enter Israel.
This is a first I've seen.
This picture is why @Israel keeps winning against all odds.
We care more about our dead than our enemies care about their living.
You can’t defeat that.
Or the bravery of our soldiers.
If you’re a Jewish person in the UK just now, you see:
1. Jewish worshippers being murdered
2. Jewish schools and synagogues fortified like war zones
3. Jewish events routinely disrupted
4. Endless protests in which antisemitic chants are heard, often by masked people
It’s not sustainable.
Because unlike you and Mamdami and Ilhan Omar and so many of your fellow invaders, I was born in the United States.
My parents were born in the United States after one of my Grandfathers served in the American military in WW2.
My family did not come from Israel. None ever lived there. I never even visited until I was in my 30s.
My family fled Ukraine and Russian 100+ years ago to come to America for the hope it represented, not to destroy it. We saw it as the greatest place in the world, not as a place to conquer and make part of a Caliphate.
We are Jews, but we did not expect the Country to bend to our traditions. We saw it as our obligation to integrate into them. To make American traditions our own.
Unlike you and Mamdami and Omar, I’ve never been a citizen of another nation, let alone a Muslim one.
You had a good run, with Americans cowed into silence with fake cries of “Islamophobia” and “Diversity is our Strength.”
We have seen what your friends have done to Britain. We aren’t going to let you do it here.
Your jig is up. The battle is joined.
You’re going to lose.
For two years, hate march after hate march has coursed through London. They have called for “Jihad���, which the police explained away, and chanted “Globalise the intifada”. They have dressed as terrorists and chanted ancient battle cries warning Jews: “Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews! The army of Mohammed is returning”.
For two years, @MetPoliceUK Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has gaslit Londoners, telling us that he lacked legal powers and that the marches were peaceful anyway. He has spent approaching £100m of our money ‘policing’ these marches by threatening to arrest people like @GideonFalter for being “Quite openly Jewish” and interrogating a man for wearing a “provocative” Star of David necklace.
The Met’s decision about the march in Tower Hamlets, whatever its specific merits or otherwise, was made in response to “significant community concerns.” Our community’s concerns have been so significant that people are avoiding town completely and even emigrating, but that has not swayed the Met’s policy even after two long years.
Enough is enough. This is two tier policing. Sir Mark Rowley must resign immediately or be sacked.
Mark my words, it will get worse.
I was never going to be alone in being “quite openly Jewish”.
The cases are coming thick and fast now. Stay out of Birmingham. Dont wear that Star of David in public. How did they think this would play out?
This is where appeasement leads.
After I was stopped by police and threatened with arrest for being “quite openly Jewish”, Rishi Sunak made concerned noises but ultimately let Sir Mark Rowley double down. The marches were allowed to continue and the police were allowed to keep describing them as “peaceful”.
Now under the triumvirate of knights, Sir Keir, Sir Sadiq and Sir Mark, the marches continue and so does the appeasement. Each concession is followed by an escalation of the extremism. The drumbeat grows louder and so do the demands of the mob.
No Jews near our marches. No Jews in our town. And this is just a couple of weeks after Jews were murdered by an Islamist terrorist in Manchester on Yom Kippur.
Appeasement and radicalisation work hand in hand, and they lead to exponential growth.
With each passing week, it becomes harder to apply the brakes.
First they had to stop the celebrations of October 7th, but they didn’t.
Next it was the chants of “Globalise the intifada” and calls for “Jihad”, but they explained them away.
Then they allowed the hate marches to become weekly festivals of criminality and incitement, even allowing a hate march to break the peace on Armistice Day.
What starts as a trickle soon becomes a torrent, and now only immense resolve and show of strength will stop the marches, the calls for intifada, the drumbeat of incitement heard even from doctors, and — I regret to say it — the terrorist murder.
To stop all of this at the outset, they just had to arrest dozens of brazen terrorist supporters and extremists to set a boundary. They didn’t, so it escalated, but they could still have caught up by arresting what were then hundreds. Now there are arrests by the thousand each month but it’s too little, too late.
The extremists are winning.
Our authorities are paralysed by appeasement and two successive Governments have failed to muster the courage and policy to act.
The people of Britain are alive to this at last.
They see what happened after Southport and compare it to what is happening now. They see two tier policing, appeasement, and extremists ruling the roost. They are seeing the pitiful pusillanimous paralysis of our leaders and institutions, and they are making it clear that they want a return to the rule of law that Britain was once famed for.
The recipe is simple: End the appeasement. Enforce the law.
The only missing ingredient is resolve. They’d better find it because the country cannot take much more of this.
my favourite quote from atomic habits by James clear;
"It doesn't make sense to continue wanting
something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. To crave the result but not the process, is to guarantee disappointment"