Bertie Fulton

[Bertie Fulton @bertie_fulton]

@scullionONsport I worked with his dad, great fella. We used to do an odd bit of extra training on the pitches in Nortel.

[MSF International @MSF]

On 13 September, an MSF bus carrying 10 humanitarian staff in Gaza City was damaged by an Israeli airstrike on a targeted vehicle just two metres away. One of our colleagues was injured in the strike.

The bus was clearly identified as an MSF vehicle, with a large MSF sticker visible on its roof. Once again, Israeli forces have shown a blatant disregard for the safety of humanitarian and medical personnel.

Nowhere is safe in Gaza. Civilians, healthcare workers and humanitarian staff must be protected. Clearly marked medical and humanitarian vehicles must be spared from attacks.

[🟢⚽️🟢 NIFG 🟢⚽️🟢 @jcdnifg]

==Worm-hole time again!==
This is a genuine* letter from 1930, inviting the Irish FA to participate in the first World Cup. It would have arrived in the hands of Irish FA secretary Charles Watson just before the 1930 Home Nations match against Wales, at ...
(*not really)

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

Dear Melanie Phillips,

I am a historian of Palestine, specializing on the period of this tweet. Almost everything you wrote is fiction. Let's review.

Melanie:
“When organized Jewish colonization began in 1882, there were fewer than 150,000 Arabs in the land."

Reality:
There were 500,000. The authoritative source on population of late Ottoman Palestine is Justin McCarthy's The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (Columbia University Press, 1990). The population of Palestine in 1882 was at a minimum 468,089 people (ibid, p.10, see screenshot). This undercounted Bedouins and nomads. The actual figure is probably more like 500,000. https://t.co/b49x7c8cq8

Melanie:
"The Arab population was small and limited until Jewish resettlement restored the barren lands and drew Arabs to it from neighboring countries .... The great majority of the Arab population in recent decades were comparative newcomers—either late immigrants or descendants of persons who had immigrated into Palestine in the previous 70 years”:

Reality:
The book that makes a version of this argument is Joan Peter's From Time Immemorial. Turns out Peters invented data, fabricated statistics. The whole book is a fraud. Thoroughly debunked by Norman Finkelstein, Yehoshua Porath and others. Citing this book is the equivalent of citing a scientific paper arguing the world is flat. 0 historians believe that "a great majority of the Arab population... were... newcomers". You are just outing yourself as historically illiterate.

Melanie:
“The Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied …”Winston Churchill, 1939.

Reality: Alas, a quote from a British imperialist who visited Palestine once in 1921 and whose knowledge of migation patters in the Arab East in the 1920s and 1930s rounded down to 0.

Melanie:
"People used to come from all over the Middle East to work in Jaffa and the whole of Palestine. From Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Hijaj, Marrakesh, from everywhere. Tens of thousands of workers”:

Reality:
Regional migration was not uncommon, before, during and after Zionist immigration. Palestinians went to Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, Egyptians and Syrians came to Palestine. But, as the quote indicates, we are talking thousands, possibly tens of thousands. In the 1920s-1930s, the population of Palestine went from 750K-1.5M. Indeed, there were thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of people, who migrated to and from Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt during this period. Perhaps a few percentage points of the population were migrants!?! Melanie, you have essentially undermined your entire argument by quoting "tens of thousands" out of a population of a million. You are saying the migrant population was somewhere between 1-10%. That's the point I'm making too!

Melanie:
Encyclopaedia Britannia 1911 listed more than fifty languages being spoken in Palestine including Czech, Finnish, Hindustani, Hebrew, Arabic, Dutch, Kurdish, Russian, Serbian, Syrian and Turkish.

Reality:
Indeed, 90% of Palestine spoke Arabic in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries. There were also many internationals based in Palestine for a wide range of reasons. We are talking about a few thousand people out of 600,000+ on the eve of WWI. Another stunning revelation by Melanie.

Melanie:
“‘In the Gaza district they are mostly of Egyptian origin; elsewhere they are of the most mixed race. UK government handbook 1920."

Reality:
A British colonial official went around Gaza and the rest of Palestine and surveyed the native population to understand their ancestral origins. I'm joking. They didn't do that. They just pulled this observation out of their ass and presented it as fact. Or maybe they read that in a book of another Orientalist, who himself made it up. Serious historians cite these anecdotes as reflections of how British imperialist imagined natives, rather than as accurate scientific facts about the racial composition of the natives. Melanie once against outs herself as historically illiterate.

Melanie:
"Between 1922 and 1946 the Arab population of Palestine increased by 118 per cent. Roosevelt concluded in 1939 that “Arab immigration into Palestine since 1921 has vastly exceeded the total Jewish immigration during the whole period”. Your ignorance is painful."

Reality:
Pure fiction. Between 1922-1938, about 300,000 Jews moved to Palestine. There is 0 evidence to believe "vastly more" than 300,000 Arabs migrated to Palestine during the Mandate period. As we already said, 0 historians believe that, because there is 0 evidence to believe. That's why you didn't cite any (not fraudulent) historians, because there aren't any. There simply was no mass migration of hundreds of thousands of Arabs into Palestine, that's just a Zionist fantasy to write into history a land that was empty.

All of this is further undermined by the fact that a breakthrough 2020 study found that Palestinians derive 81 to 87 per cent of their ancestry from Bronze Age Levantines. https://t.co/2XVy6lvBDP

In other words, the modern Palestinian people have been living in Palestine, by and large, for literally millenia.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

[Mariam Barghouti مريم البرغوثي @MariamBarghouti]

Armed Israelis are not only forcibly taking over Palestinian lands and homes at gunpoint. They’re murdering Palestinians in the West Bank with absolute impunity and the encouragement of the Israeli army.

Today Israelis murdered four Palestinians and are framing it as revenge.

In the last five years, Palestinians in the West Bank saw record high of settlements, Israelis murdering Palestinians (especially children), and policy-level solidification of stolen lands as Israeli.

We are in front of crucial times, where Israeli Jewish supremacy is being normalized, and so is the brutality and war mongering violence that comes with it.

[jasper nathaniel @infinite_jaz]

Here are Israel's great liberal hopes to take back the country from the right-wing extremists cheering the pogroms unfolding across the West Bank.

[Issa Amro عيسى عمرو 🇵🇸 @Issaamro]

The video shows how the massacre started in the village of Tal, near Nablus. Israeli settlers raided the village, and unarmed Palestinian residents tried to defend their homes. Israeli soldiers and armed settlers then opened fire on them. During the attack, one Palestinian took a settler’s gun to defend himself against the armed settlers.

Five Palestinians were murdered in cold blood, while one Israeli settler was also killed.

[Bruno Maçães @MacaesBruno]

The German argument as much as I can make sense of it: “we are to blame for the Holocaust and so feel morally obliged to make sure that Palestinians and Lebanese pay for it”

[Peter Oborne @OborneTweets]

Starmer was a fabricator and a fraud. We're well rid. My verdict for Middle East Eye:

https://t.co/vKmdbG0Yj1

[Bertie Fulton @bertie_fulton]

Hahahaha, absolutely hilarious. A post more inept than England's play in the 2nd half.

[Charles Lister @Charles_Lister]

#England shouldn’t have dropped back after going 1-0 up, but the refereeing of this match was a scandal.

In normal circumstances, #Argentina should have had 2 red cards (1 straight, 2 double-yellow).

Worse still, not one of these fouls triggered VAR intervention. Explain that.

[Bertie Fulton @bertie_fulton]

A game I understand in minute detail is waay more complicated than a game I understand less than some 7 year olds - I am very smart

[James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki]

The idea that soccer is more complex than football is just comically inaccurate. In football, you see teams with inferior talent regularly win games because they have better schemes and smarter playcallers. That almost never happens in soccer, and when it does the scheme is almost always "park the bus and hope to steal a set-piece goal or win on penalties."

[Bertie Fulton @bertie_fulton]

This "seems reasonable" but

European systems are widely sustained by grassroots clubs - volunteers. Those of us in the system are paying back, football has given us a lot, we want the same for others. The "value" to be maximised is the joy of children, not lining our pockets.

[Alexi Lalas @AlexiLalas]

Why shouldn’t a youth soccer coach want and deserve to make as much money as possible? If someone is really good at their job they should maximize their value.

[Adil Haque @AdHaque110]

IDF "soldiers shot a 16-year-old boy and then ran over his body with a tank, mutilating it.

"a 15-year-old boy holding a white flag — and his brother who came to his rescue, as well as their mother — were shot by .338-caliber Israeli sniper rounds from 200 meters away"

[Zoe Gardner @ZoeJardiniere]

Utterly devastating.

How we have come to have governments willing to facilitate & defend this evil is unfathomable. A horrendous crime against humanity that is shared across so many sick souls.

[Aaron Regunberg @AaronRegunberg]

So if you apply this logic to the 4,000 citizens of Lebanon that Israel has killed in their invasion, you’d have to ask how the US would react to an invading force killing 235,000 Americans, many of them women and children.

You really don’t want to do this calculation for Gaza.

[Suppressed News. @SuppressedNws]

⚡️BREAKING:

The New York Times obtained autopsy reports for 14 of the 15 people killed in the March 23 Israeli attack on an ambulance and fire truck in Gaza.

The reports show that most victims—paramedics and rescue workers—were killed by gunshots to the head, chest, or back. Four were shot directly in the head [executed]. Others had shrapnel wounds. Despite wearing medical uniforms and traveling in marked vehicles with sirens, they were shot multiple times at close range.

Israel initially lied about the crime committed then later took responsibility once the lies were exposed. The 15 victims included 14 rescue workers and a UN employee. Israeli soldiers buried the bodies in a mass grave and crushed and buried the ambulances, fire truck, and UN vehicle.

[theselongwars @theselongwars_]

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

[Bertie Fulton @bertie_fulton]

@BritToSwiss @Waddley1000 @MichaelRosenYes @SimonCalder Um 2022, what was happening then? Quite a few articles written about Mr. Rosen and his long and difficult recovery from COVID around then, but you wouldn't have missed them because that's not you.

[Bertie Fulton @bertie_fulton]

@DanielBMate Arcade Fire? Pretty sure I remember Win crediting Regine as the biggest creative force in the band

[Matiullah Jan @Matiullahjan919]

Israel’s iron dome didn’t see this coming from Pakistan