There are 17 countries in the Middle East (including Cyprus and Egypt, despite their ties to the EU and Africa respectively).
Exactly two are considered democracies. Cyprus and Israel.
In only 5 of them is homosexuality not illegal - Cyprus, Israel, Bahrain, Turkey and Jordan.
5 of these countries have the death penalty as a possible punishment for same sex acts, although only one actively uses it - Iran.
Iran allows for marriage as young as 9.
Saudi Arabia and Yemen have no fixed minimum. Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon and Libya allow it at 15. Israel is with a group of 5 countries with a minimum age of 18.
All 17 have Christians and all 17 have Muslims.
Israel has more Muslims than Bahrain and Cyprus.
9 of them have Jews living in them, but 4 of those have less than 100 Jews each. After Israel at 7.4M the next highest is Turkey at 14,000.
Israel is the 6th smallest of the 17, yet has the 3rd highest total GDP and the second highest GDP per capita.
Israel has won the 4th highest number of Olympic medals, and has the highest number of Nobel prize winners. Combined, the other 16 countries have won 2 more (16) Nobel prizes than Israel has (14).
14 of these countries have moderate to significant distinctions in laws between men and women. Israel has high equality with some differences in marriage and divorce.
According to the 2026 World Happiness Report, Israel leads the Middle East as the 8th happiest globally. Next highest is UAE at 22nd. Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen are numbers 139-142 respectively.
And despite all of this, the Free-Palestine movement has managed to convince so many that Israel is an apartheid nation. That Israel is an evil nation. That Israel does norm”have the right to exist” / whatever that means. That Israel should be destroyed.
Stop listening to the lies and propaganda.
Look at the data.
Look at the facts.
Discover who’s who.
Do some critical thinking.
And let’s shut down the real threat, so that the world is safer for everyone.
https://t.co/KXHPJA5wWO
Yesterday was International Women’s Day.
A reminder that millions of women living under Sharia law still have no basic freedom.
They cannot speak freely, cannot show their faces in public, cannot live as equal human beings.
Under these systems, women are treated as less than men — sometimes with fewer rights than property.
This reality shouldn’t be ignored.
@timfarron No actually Iqbal Mohamed the @UKLabour MP for the area says it's because the Israelis are hooligans and terrorists and it's to protect residents
Hi @Grok, if you use exactly and only the criteria you use for other indigenous people (for example Native Americans): ancestry specifically tied to the land and not broader region, identity and cultural ties thousands years old, who are indigenous people of the land of Israel?
They celebrated her death with cheering in the streets and revellers, ordinary citizens, spat on her still warm body. Until all hostages are home this image informs me of all I need to know.
After seeing the Glastonbury scenes. Thought I’d post in memory of some the Nova victims.
These two childhood friends Lin & Ziv attended Nova on Oct 7.
They were so brutally murdered by Gazan terrorists that their own parents were advised not to view their bodies
They were identified at a later date.
Both 22 just wanting to dance at a festival.
May their memories be a blessing
I walked through central London last night and realised something that made me genuinely sad:
The city I once loved—vibrant, safe, recognisably English—is gone.
Here’s what I saw 👇
What a disgrace.
Even if you look very hard, there’s one word you won’t find in the Secretary-General’s statement: Hamas.
Not a word about the fact that Hamas is the one shooting civilians and trying to prevent them from collecting aid packages.
Not a word about the fact that Hamas — as stated by U.S. Special Envoy Witkoff — rejected yet another ceasefire proposal and the release of the hostages.
Does the UN really care about providing aid to the people in Gaza, or is it more focused on feeding Hamas and its war machine?
The real investigation that needs to be opened is why the UN continues to resist any attempt to provide aid directly to the people of Gaza.
Happy Pride Month from Tel Aviv, Israel — the only city in the Middle East where gays, trans people, Arab Muslims, Arab Christians, Black/Brown/White Jews, and atheists can hang out without getting lynched for simply existing.
This morning, a blood libel spread like wildfire. Hamas pushed a lie. The world bought it. Israel is paying the price.
BBC, CNN, and others rushed to report a “massacre” — claiming IDF tanks killed 26 civilians at a food distribution site.
It never happened.
No IDF fire. No massacre. Just warning shots — smoke grenades — fired by a private American security company.
You may ask — why would Hamas do this? Because the distribution site was helping Gazans who bypassed Hamas.
FRANCESCA ALBANESE THEN:
🗣️“As a lawyer, I am obliged to be precise and scientific...”
🗣️“The human rights lawyer in me...”
🗣️“As a fellow lawyer, and mother...”
🗣️“As a human rights lawyer...”
FRANCESCA ALBANESE NOW:
⭕️ “I never lie. I didn't take the exam, I'm not a lawyer.”
I have been investigating CAIR for 22 years, and I can tell you unequivocally that @EliseStefanik is correct and CAIR must be designated a terrorist organization.
In October 2003, when I walked up to the front door of my mosque in Morgantown, W.V., an Egyptian American elder told me "Sister, take the backdoor." He was practicing a regressive interpretation of Islam that defines two of three mosques in America, throwing women into back halls, basements and balconies, judging us too sexy to be seen by men.
I called the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which claims to defend the civil rights of Muslims. A Muslim convert, Ibrahim Hooper, its cofounder and spokesman, laughed at me, as he protested at the French Embassy, opposing a ban on hijabs in France, and he said: "You need to find another mosque."
When I protested that my civil rights were being violated, he responded: "We do American-Islamic relations. Not Islamic-Islamic relations."
That's when I learned first-hand that CAIR is a fake civil rights group, created with one agenda: to destroy the state of Israel. In its founding meeting in Philadelphia, FBI agents heard its leaders refer to Hamas as "Samah," the name of the terrorist organization spelled backwards.
CAIR features heavily in my book WOKE ARMY because its executives have waged character assassination campaigns on Muslim reformers, Jews, Israel, America and the West. CAIR used progressive politics and critical race theory to racialize Islam and penetrate the Democratic Party @DNC.
Its national headquarters is in D.C., and its leader are spread through Northern Virginia, a legacy group of the Muslim Brotherhood organizations -- from Holy Land Trust to International Institute of Islamic Thought -- established over the last 60 years with a base at 500 Grove Street in Herndon, Virginia -- in my backyard, poisoning K-12 education, politics, higher education and America with its regressive interpretation of Islam.
Its Chicago executive director, Ahmed Rehab, used fake identities to create a website -- https://t.co/Dy3Vp1sW46 -- to defame America, the West, Israel, Jews and Muslim reformers like me who challenge their extremism. I filed a defamation lawsuit pro se, filed subpoenas and got the receipts from GoDaddy and other social media platforms, showing Rehab used his credit card to create Loonwatch to defame his enemies. It's all in my book.
CAIR is running an extortion racket on corporate America and the United States of America, exploiting freedoms in the West to push its ideology of Muslim supremacy, while demonizing whites, conservatives and anyone who stands in the way of Muslim supremacy and the destruction of the state of Israel and the anti-semitic harassment of Jews.
For America to survive, CAIR must have its nonprofit status revoked and it must be dismantled.
Let me introduce you to the mayor of Boulder, Colorado: Aaron Brockett. He let antisemitic posters slide, refused to remove a council member pushing anti-Israel rhetoric, and called it “unity.” Meanwhile, Jewish residents begged him to act, and he chose silence. The same guy who helped normalize this circus on the podium. @AaronBrockett12 you should be ashamed of yourself.