John Wilkin

Conservative, Unionist, Arsenal FC supporter, Chairman of the Selsdon Group. Born in Newcastle but naturalised Londoner.

[John Wilkin @john_a_wilkin]

"At last, years of disastrous economic policy have produced house prices that are falling in real terms, the one piece of good news for young buyers in years. But what does Labour do? Announce a scheme to prop them back up."
https://t.co/XsI4xq12qL

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

Palestinianism is a Soviet product line that turned a lost war into a religion. Academia, media, and the Western left now treat the liturgy as history.

The KGB did not invent Arab grievance. It rebranded it. After Soviet-armed Arab states were routed in 1967, Moscow needed a story that could hit America, isolate the Jews, and keep the Arab street pointed west.

Stop saying “throw the Jews into the sea.” Start saying “decolonization.” Stop making it a war against a sovereign state. Turn it into a struggle of “indigenous Palestinians versus European settlers.” It did not matter that half of Israel’s Jews came from Arab and African countries, or that the Arab war against Jewish sovereignty was obvious to nearly everyone before 1967.

The conflict was recoded as racism. In 1975 the UN made the recoding official: “Zionism is a form of racism” (repealed only in 1991 after the fall of the USSR).

The hinge of the faith is the “Nakba,” and the word’s history gives the game away. Syrian historian Constantin Zureiq coined it in 1948 in “The Meaning of the Disaster.” He was not writing about refugees, but was expressing the humiliation felt by the Arab world as seven Arab armies failed to strangle the Jewish state at birth: they “declare war on Zionism ... stand impotent before it, and then turn on their heels.” Decades later, the same word was given a rebrand and became about refugees.

The religion of Palestinianism has a very specific dialect.

For example, “occupation” can describe Gaza with zero Israelis and zero Israeli soldiers in it. “Resistance” can mean blowing up a bus, a disco, or pizza shop filled with civilians. Somehow “nonviolent popular resistance” includes a knife attack on a random civilian. Bayt al-Maqdis is Arabic for the “Jewish Temple,” but in the new liturgy, the Temple never existed. Arabs who were simply called Arabs (a people who arrived with the 7th-century conquest) were reintroduced as Canaanites, a population that vanished more than 3,000 years ago.

Zuhair Mohsen, on the PLO executive committee, said the quiet part out loud in 1977: there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese. A separate Palestinian identity “serves only tactical purposes ... The establishment of a Palestinian state is a new weapon in the ongoing battle against Israel.”

Once you see the theology, the immunity to evidence stops being mysterious.

Palestinianism promises “return” and issues the same instruction, generation after generation: the Jews leave or die, and until then the wound must not close. You cannot negotiate a people out of a faith that made Jewish existence the original sin. You can only refuse to speak the dialect.

[John Wilkin @john_a_wilkin]

@Arsenalnewschan League table at the end of 97/98. I don't see City.

[John Wilkin @john_a_wilkin]

@michaelfal_1 Some of us remember them being relegated in 2001

[John Wilkin @john_a_wilkin]

@registarodri @shawnumo Historically, Liverpool.
Currently, Arsenal.

[John Wilkin @john_a_wilkin]

@tancredipalmeri Ban them from playing in Europe for five seasons. All their star players will want out and no big names will want to sign for them

[John Wilkin @john_a_wilkin]

There's certainly a reason why we're seeing so much parroting of "Russia is not my enemy" right now.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

Ukraine must be doing even better on the battlefield because the Russian propaganda and bots here are 10x worse this week. And/or this platform is just letting them through completely.

[Alan Mendoza @alanmendoza]

Ed Miliband appears to be on a one-man quest to debase his office in pursuit of a foreign cause with no discernible utility to the British national interest: ‘Palestine’. Here he announces he is “very humbled in your presence” to the Palestinian representative in the UK.

His continued projection of the sort of bizarre messaging we are seeing here and in his meeting with the Iranians last week will be seen round the world as confirmation that ideology now matters more than interests or even alliances for the UK. Our friends will have taken note. As will our enemies.

[Will Chamberlain @willchamberlain]

People say Iran has lived with sanctions for 47 years. But this is the first time they've actually been enforced.

Zineb Riboua (@zriboua) explains on Counterweight: the Islamic Republic is a revolutionary state that *needs* proxies for ideological purposes, but it can't pay its own people. Something has to give.

[John Wilkin @john_a_wilkin]

This is also relevant to the tube in London
@JamesCleverly @AndrewBoff

[Emma Camp @emmma_camp_]

Want to reduce crime on the subway? Enforce the fares.

My latest for @WSJFreeEx

[John Wilkin @john_a_wilkin]

@PeterJWarren174 @jmendelsohn77 @JakeWSimons He used to be a Eurosceptic, a position on which he subsequently executed a volte face, but the hostility to Israel was always there.
https://t.co/td660Gi2JM

[John Wilkin @john_a_wilkin]

@BabonesBhai What about the Islamist who's temporarily allied himself with the socialists?

[🇪🇺 🇺🇦 Borg Fella 🇺🇦 🇪🇺 @BorgFella420]

De @vredesbeweging_ in één plaatje

[Jules de Barsham- I Stand With Israel🇬🇧🇮🇱🟦 @DeBarsham]

Anyone else remember this?
When our government still had some clarity and a functioning moral compass.

[Amjad Taha أمجد طه @amjadt25]

The BBC refused to cover this. The British Parliament refused to discuss it. Ask yourself why. This is an official Hamas video showing children in Gaza being armed and trained to become terrorists. They received aid from Islamic Relief in Britain.

[Prof Gerald M Steinberg @GeraldNGOM]

"As a Jew" Ed Miliband and the Hamas propaganda support team (aka Palestine Action) deserve each other.

[spiked @spikedonline]

The real story of the 'West Bank'

Simon Sebag Montefiore on how the Jordanians invented the Palestinian West Bank:

[John Wilkin @john_a_wilkin]

@TheBoyHotspur @SpursOfficial @Manorsolomon Well said. Our former player, Oleksandr Zinchenko, is still getting abuse for the message of support for Israel which he posted on Instagram on the day of the Nova massacre.

[John Wilkin @john_a_wilkin]

@jackluckhurst16 @IS1125FC Everton have won nine league titles, Tottenham have won two.

[Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر @emilykschrader]

🇬🇧 The national disgrace that is Ed Miliband: peddling conspiracies and lies about a war Islamists are waging against an allied country, all while those same Islamists are plotting attacks on UK citizens and the RAF Fairford base right under Ed’s nose.

This man shakes hands with the Islamic republic at the UN, cuts £30m from the UK defense budget, and allocates £88m to Palestinians instead. Is there no tribalist garbage cause that Ed wont attach himself to “as a Jew?”

Ed must really hate the UK, cause he’s doing everything he can to ensure its eventual collapse.