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Essex

[PiQ @PiQSuite]

Absolutely nails the stupidity of the UK’s economic suicide via Labour’s Net Zero Policy

👇

[Jake Wallis Simons @JakeWSimons]

Never forget. Sound on.

[Donna Louise @DonnaLouise1212]

Gary Neville getting called a fcking wanker is not what I expected to see on a Monday morning, but it is delightful 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

[Hamas Atrocities @HamasAtrocities]

This is so awesome it made my day!

A British leftist is telling a group of Iranians that they should be ashamed of themselves for waving the Israeli flag.
She tells them they are "brainwashed"

Their replies are nothing short of EPIC!
Watch the whole thing!

[Paul Griffin @PGriffinFC]

No matter what that court says, this guy shouted support for Hezbollah and Hamas. Displayed a Hezbollah flag. One other member posed with a book from the Hezbollah leader that had disgusting anti-Semitism in it. They're the worst of our country. Our media celebrates them.

[Adam-Manchester Independent @AdamConlon15]

@AntSpeaks @mcfcREEVO Please would you welcome the new supreme leader of Iran Ayatollah Corbyn.

[Emma Little-Pengelly BL @little_pengelly]

Shocking to see Sinn Fein members out defending the murderous, corrupt and oppressive Iranian regime against attack, condemning actions that are celebrated by so many Iranians who suffered oppression for decades 👇👇

[Alan D Miller @alanvibe]

“You need to be welcoming” to prevent terrorism says Tom, Green Party campaign organiser in Gorton Denton

“When you ‘other’ people you’re recruiting people” for terrorists Tom ‘explains’ as he responds to question about Hannah Spencer saying ‘people like you causing division’ are responsible for Manchester Arena terror attack to Matt Goodwin

So we need to be ‘more welcoming’ & ‘less othering’ as a strategy to counter Jihadi Terror attacks?!

This is very shocking

[OurFightUk @OurFightUk]

Amazing.

Since the police, the courts, CPS, and government have all proved incapable of standing up to anti-Semitism, it's even more important for the rest of us to take a stand.

After Brighton and now Sheffield, there should be no tolerance for these 21st century brownshirts, spreading intolerance.

[Saul Sadka @Saul_Sadka]

People are very down on the UK these days, saying it’s hard for young men to get ahead. But young men should be shown Zack Polanski: a decade ago he was hypnotising women into larger breasts, but now he’s a geopolitical strategist arguing that the UK should leave its alliance with the US and NATO and instead align with Mexico and countries from the “Global South.” Who needs the US Navy on your side when the Somali pirate flotilla is available?

[David Patrikarakos @dpatrikarakos]

Hitler salutes, calls for genocide, and stanning the ayatollah. These are today’s pro-Palestinian “peace” protestors.

H/T @nicolelampert

[Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @DrewPavlou]

13 years ago an Algerian jihadist named Mohammed Merah broke into a Jewish school in the French town of Toulouse.

Merah executed a 5 year old Jewish boy and a 3 year old Jewish boy.

He then chased an 8 year old Jewish girl named Myriam Monsonego.

Merah caught her by her hair and raised a gun to execute her. His gun jammed, so he changed weapons. He then shot the little girl in the head while filming the execution with his GoPro.

He later said that he carried out this crime to “uphold the honour of Islam.” He called it an act of revenge because “the Jews kill our brothers and sisters in Palestine.”

According to one of his brothers, Merah was raised in an "atmosphere of racism and hatred" in their Muslim family.

Merah's sister Souad later said, "I am proud of my brother. He fought until the end against the Jews, and all those who massacre Muslims, I detest them."

According to his brother, when Merah's body was brought home, members of the local terrorist community visited the family to praise his actions and they cried tears of joy. Their only regret was that Merah had not killed more Jews.

Merah was buried on 29 March 2012 in the Muslim section of the Cornebarrieu cemetery, near Toulouse. About 50 people attended, including the local imam.

The President of the Conference of European Rabbis must decide whether radical jihadists pose a threat to Jewish life in Europe. I cannot make that decision for him. He has to make that decision on his own.

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

“People have different ratios.” — @TheEconomist

Fact: In the Gaza war, Israel has demonstrated a historically low combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio (1:1.5 or 1:1) when compared to any urban warfare history with even remotely similar conditions, especially urban-centric wars, not isolated battles.

Wars such as the Korean War (approximately 1:4, with roughly 2 million civilians killed), the Iraq War (approximately 1:2 to 1:4, with conservative civilian death estimates of 200,000–350,000), and even battles with more refined data such as Manila (approximately 1:6, with around 100,000 civilians killed) illustrate this clearly. Mosul likewise reflects a modest ratio of approximately 1:2, despite it taking more than a year after the battle for credible civilian casualty figures to begin to emerge. Numerous battles and wars show the historic low ratio achieved by Israel.

Fact: Israel has implemented more civilian harm mitigation measures than any military in history. These include advance notifications, daily humanitarian pauses, roof knocking, communication techniques with civilians to include evacuation maps/drones/speakers, withholding or aborting strikes, layered targeting approval processes, technological tools to track civilian presence, restrictions on the use of force, and more.

Not true: “People have different valid ratios.” Rather than providing an evidence-based analysis, which would in fact be impossible in real time during an ongoing war, interviewers and commentators often reference “other ratios” without understanding the fundamental lack of validity behind most of them.

Any serious evidence-based analysis would quickly discover that only two organizations have the practical capability to produce casualty estimates or ratios in Gaza: Hamas (through the Gaza Health Ministry) and Israel.

Let’s start with the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Even if one accepts its publicly cited figure of approximately 71,000 total deaths at face value, and deducts only a modest number for reporting errors, deaths from illness, natural causes, or pre-existing conditions, the number of deaths attributable to direct wartime action would already be lower.

The analysis must then turn to combatant versus noncombatant status. Hamas intentionally does not attempt to classify known combatants, even though it could do so (for example, by identifying members of its organized armed wing or those engaged in hostilities). It does not, because doing so would undermine its primary information warfare tactic: attributing all deaths in Gaza, regardless of cause, to Israeli military action. This includes deaths of combatants, civilians killed by Hamas or other armed groups, accidental deaths, and natural causes.

Other groups frequently cited as providing alternative “ratios,” such as Lancet-linked estimates, Action on Armed Violence, or reporting by +972 Magazine or The Guardian, rely on statistical extrapolations and methodological assumptions rather than direct casualty identification. Some claim Hamas is undercounting deaths by including bodies “under the rubble,” even though Hamas has, at times, added names of the reported missing without verification. Others falsely imply low combatant death numbers by citing Israeli databases of identified Hamas members killed, while omitting the reality that many combatants die unidentified during combat, a lie of omission.

Some methodologies even involve calling into Gaza and asking residents whether deceased family members were Hamas members and, if the answer is no, automatically classifying those individuals as civilians. That is not a credible method of casualty classification.

This raises the central issue, even if Hamas’s numbers were accepted wholesale: Who is a combatant and who is a noncombatant? It is not possible to answer this by age or sex alone. Hamas is well documented as using child soldiers, and women have participated directly in hostilities.

This leads to one of the most fundamental misunderstandings of modern war: what constitutes participation in hostilities under the law of armed conflict.

After Hamas and other armed groups invaded Israel and committed thousands of war crimes against Israeli civilians, Israel was no longer conducting episodic counterterrorism operations. It was at war with the governing authority of Gaza, Hamas. Members of Hamas’s organized armed groups are lawful military targets by virtue of membership alone. But the law goes further. Lawful targeting is not limited to uniformed fighters actively firing weapons at the moment force is applied. The law of armed conflict is explicit that civilians lose protection from attack when, and for such time as, they take a direct part in hostilities.

Direct participation includes far more than pulling a trigger. It encompasses collecting, reporting, or transmitting intelligence on enemy movements; acting as lookouts, spotters, or early-warning personnel; transporting weapons, ammunition, explosives, or fighters; storing or concealing military equipment; preparing or emplacing improvised explosive devices; providing operational logistics such as fuel, vehicles, communications, or safe houses; guarding military objectives, tunnels, or hostages; and assisting in command, control, holding hostages, or coordination of attacks.

Civilian police or security personnel who are integrated into, subordinated to, or acting in support of military operations likewise lose their protected status for the duration of that participation.

The law does not require an individual to wear a uniform, be continuously armed, or be engaged in kinetic action at the precise moment they are targeted. What matters is function and conduct, not job titles or civilian cover. In Gaza, Hamas has deliberately fused its military operations with civilian infrastructure and governance, embedding fighters, logistics, intelligence, and command functions within the population. As a result, participation in hostilities is often widespread, episodic, and intentionally concealed.

Reducing lawful targeting to a simplistic count of named Hamas fighters is not a legal argument. It is a distortion of the law of war that ignores both its text and its purpose and collapses under even basic scrutiny of how armed conflict actually functions in an urban, insurgent-controlled environment.

Focusing exclusively on Hamas fighters further misrepresents the battlefield by erasing the role of other armed organizations operating in Gaza, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad and numerous smaller factions that joined Hamas in the October 7 invasion and continue to participate in hostilities. These groups are not incidental actors. Their members are active participants in the conflict and are subject to the same legal standards governing lawful targeting.

The lies, damned lies, and statistics of the Gaza war are not new. I have dealt with body-counting organizations and casualty estimation debates for years. I have seen their data collection methods and statistical manipulations firsthand. I have stood in United Nations and human rights forums from 2014 to the present where the claim that “90 percent of wartime casualties are civilians” is routinely cited, including by the UN Secretary-General (January 2022), the ICRC (2024), the UN Security Council (May 2022), and groups such as Airwars, Center for Civilians in Conflict.

This 90 percent (or 1:9) claim is not true. It originates from an outdated and discredited statistic from the late 1990s and has been reinforced through selective aggregation of conflicts, particularly post-2014 battles against ISIS, using methodological shortcuts involving explosive types, strike-to-casualty ratios, and speculative modeling.

To be clear, while civilian harm in war is real and tragic, the 90 percent claim is false. Yet it continues to be used by UN bodies and advocacy organizations as a rhetorical tool to support policy agendas, condemnations, and misinformation campaigns.

Again, Israel’s combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio is historically low in urban warfare, even accounting for the unprecedented scale of Hamas’s force, its deliberate use of human shields, extensive tunnel networks, Egypt's blocking of civilian evacuations, and the dense urban environment of Gaza. This remains true even without comparison to some of the most destructive conflicts of the modern era, such as Chechnya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, or Sudan.

Here is a simple test of statistical manipulation.
What was the combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio in the Battle of Rafah? Was it 100:1? Higher? Or was it effectively all combatants, with civilian deaths limited to a handful or none at all? The precise number is beside the point. What matters is that depending on how analysts aggregate or disaggregate data, the same conflict can be portrayed as either overwhelmingly civilian or overwhelmingly military. A discrete battle like Rafah, involving intense fighting against organized armed groups with minimal civilian casualties, disappears when data is aggregated across time, geography, causes of death, and attribution standards.

This is exactly how narratives are constructed. Battles with overwhelmingly combatant casualties are merged into broader datasets. Civilian deaths from unrelated causes are folded into wartime totals. Combatants are reclassified as civilians through age, sex, or self-reporting proxies. The result is not analysis but statistical storytelling.

Rafah exposes the flaw. If casualty ratios can swing from near-total combatant deaths in one battle to claims of 90 percent civilian casualties in the same war, the issue is not reality on the battlefield. It is how the numbers are being manipulated to fit a predetermined conclusion.

Rather than assessing Israel’s strict adherence to the law of armed conflict, including its obligation not to intentionally target civilians and its use of precautionary measures that go well beyond what the law requires, critics resort to statistical warfare. Numbers are aggregated, disaggregated, reclassified, and selectively framed to produce a narrative rather than an analysis.

The irony is that even when relying on Hamas’s own false or unverified numbers, Israel’s combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio remains historically low by any serious comparison to urban warfare. The data, stripped of manipulation and advocacy, does not support claims of indiscriminate or unlawful conduct. It demonstrates the opposite.

So no, there are not multiple “valid” ratios. There are assertions, advocacy numbers, and statistical narratives, but only one conclusion supported by historical comparison, law, and military reality.

[Zach Sage Fox @zachsagefox]

Mamdani has been mayor of NYC for just 72 hours and already thinks he should be single-handedly in charge of America foreign policy. What a joke of a leader. Thank God he wasn’t born in this country and can never run for President. Stick with the free bus rides and let Venezuelans celebrate their freedom in peace, you hypocrite of a human rights advocate.

[Rob @bIurt99]

Calling your da into the kitchen to show him you hit t18 (was aiming for the 20s)

[Aja ♀️🇬🇧 @AjaTheEmpress]

"I accidentally supported a jew hating, white-hating, women-hating, homophobic, genocidal violence-loving terrorist supporter. We are taking steps to see how we can blame this on the far-right "

[Adam Ma'anit @adammaanit]

There’s a bleak pattern in UK state recognition policy.

Somalia: recognised by the UK despite being a failed state, lacking full territorial control, with large areas dominated by jihadist terrorists (Al-Shabab).

Somaliland: not recognised by the UK – despite defined borders, democratic elections, security, and functioning as a state since 1991 (and as successor to previously recognised British Somaliland).

Palestine: recognised by the UK with no agreed borders, no elections for 20+ years, terrorist Hamas still controlling Gaza, and hostages still held.

Territorial control, democracy, governance, and viability clearly aren’t the criteria.

This is foreign policy by vibes, not logic.

[Will @willglloyd]

Ryan searle sets dropped in tournament: 0

Luke Littler sets dropped in tournament: 1

[David John Schlichting 🇩🇪🇪🇺 @dazi180turtle]

The amount of Aura Searle emitted with that face before the double 12 was absolutely sensational.