Bethlehem Blue

Ruining football since 2008, saving sinners since AD 1

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

@HenMazzig @JonPegasus @Telegraph No, he thinks he’s Pol Pot but he’s actually Dipsy

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

@BGhiri30400 @connor_naismith @Keir_Starmer Get medical help for your bot derangement

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

@NOELY1982 @SeanBackup6 And most of all NF

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

@KyleLascoShow @paulinaVEVO You don’t plant seeds, Onan - you scatter them.

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

@ChrisLloydTV Sit down AS enabler

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

@DredinBabylon @MichaelRosenYes Raging antisemite Cook? Of course.

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

@DAaronovitch @MichaelRosenYes Does Rosen support the disruption of the event?

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

Is there a bigger woman-hater at The Guardian?

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

@VincenzoGrappa @Kabongo01188867 You claim London and Napoli so only 50% to do with you?

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

@Helenaclose @DovLipman Meanwhile in Ireland an inexhaustible well of AS

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

Check your directors’ history

[MUFC Away 🇾🇪 @mufcaway_]

The treble without any financial charges was completed on this day 27 years ago 🇾🇪😮‍💨

The first and only legitimate English club to do the set 👍🏻

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

@Gwared Or maybe she’s identified him as yet another naive actor

[Ahmed Al-Khalidi @khalidi79397]

A genocide is happening in Gaza, they tell us. Then scroll your feed:

Comma Cafee, just opened in Gaza City. Espresso machines, plated desserts, dim lighting.

Vanilla Café. Upscale, glass facade.

Nova Restaurant in Khan Younis: sleek wood interior, beachfront seating. Named, apparently without irony, after the music festival where 364 Israelis were slaughtered on October 7.

O2 Restaurant. pizza, ice cream, milkshakes, TikTok food porn.

Open-air markets in Gaza City with apples, avocados, oranges, bananas.

Supermarkets stocked for Ramadan with imported goods.

A "Gaza Coffee" brand selling 100% Arabica premium beans, taking online orders, with five-star reviews dated this year.

Even Al Jazeera's writer concedes the cafes "were built with expensive materials, carefully painted, furnished with tables, sofas, and elegant chairs, with glass facades and shining lights."

Now hold that next to actual genocide.

Rwanda, 1994. 800,000 Tutsi murdered in 100 days. ~8,000 per day. Hutu radio read names of neighbors to be hacked apart by morning. No one opened a café.

Cambodia, 1975–79. Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh at gunpoint in 72 hours. Currency abolished. Markets abolished. Eyeglasses got you killed. Two million dead.

The Holocaust. Warsaw Ghetto: 92,000 dead of starvation and disease before the deportations even began. Auschwitz processed 6,000 people a day into smoke. There were no glass-facade espresso bars in Łódź in 1943.

Srebrenica, July 1995. 8,372 men and boys executed in days. No restaurants reopened. They were in mass graves.

Armenia, 1915. Death marches into the Syrian desert. No imported avocados.

The common thread of genocide is that the targeted population is not allowed to exist. Not in cafes, not in markets, not in their homes, not anywhere. The perpetrator's entire project is their absence.

Gaza in 2026, by every honest description, is something else: a brutal war zone, partially destroyed, with a population suffering real hardship and simultaneously a place where new businesses open, beachfront restaurants serve customers, and a post war economy is being written about in business pages. Both things are true.

That is what war looks like. Lebanon 2006. Mosul 2017. Mariupol 2022. Aleppo 2016. Civilians die and life adapts around the destruction.

It is not what genocide looks like.

So why the word?

Because "genocide" is the most powerful word in the post-WWII moral vocabulary. It triggers automatic legal obligations, suspends normal debate, and short-circuits proportionality analysis. Apply it successfully and your adversary loses the right to defend itself before the argument even begins. That is exactly why it is being deployed by a side that started a war on October 7, took hostages, embedded itself in hospitals and schools, and now needs the West to force a ceasefire it could not win on the battlefield.

It is asymmetric warfare with a thesaurus. The rockets failed. The tunnels failed. The word might not.

Coffee in Gaza doesn't prove there is no suffering. It proves there is no genocide. Those are not the same claim and the people conflating them are counting on you not to notice.

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

@bluemoongramps Who is that fat slob?

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

I have written to Andy Burnham to ask whether he would establish an independent public inquiry into whether Jeremy Corbyn’s is complicit in support for Irish and Islamist terrorism.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

I have written to Andy Burnham to ask whether he would establish an independent public inquiry into the British government’s complicity in genocide.

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

@barneyronay Stick to Putin hagiography, you’re better at that

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

@piersmorgan The last time you won it you were a juvenile

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

@terrychristian We’ve been laughing at you since 2011

[Hmmmmm @PatrickMCMXCVI]

@N_Macca74 @sportingintel He got 100 points then 98 points with Delph and Zinchenko as the left backs, and won a title with no striker after they were injured. Your accusation is braindead at best

[Bethlehem Blue @escissor]

“Journalist”

[Layth @laythy29]

So, is Enzo Maresca set to assume Pep Guardiola’s role at 115 FC because he’s good at getting teams out of the Championship…?