@StanFalk@JewsFightBack Hezbollah are a terrorist group in Lebanon.
Nazis were a terrorist group in Germany. So by your logic, Americans "can hardly cry about" American soldiers killed in Germany during WW2.
🤷♂️
🚨 General Jack Keane gets it.
“The Iranians cannot make a claim dealing with Lebanon. They don’t own Lebanon.
The major lesson from October 7th that the Israelis have learned is you cannot permit proxies on your border to have the capacity to attack.
And that is what is happening.
Hezbollah was building up infrastructure in the south and they conducted over 2,000 rocket and drone attacks into Israel.
In the last 48 hours, they’ve still been going on.
That’s the reality.
Israel cannot permit this to stand.
This is about the sovereignty and existence of the state.
Remember, the objective of Iran and its proxies is to destroy the state of Israel. Not defeat its military. Make it such a volatile security situation that people don’t want to live there.
What is happening in Northern Israel?
All of the towns and villages have been evacuated. Kids aren’t going to school. They’ve moved into hotels.
They’re not living in Northern Israel.
Israel can’t let that stand.
They HAVE to fight back.”
And then @kilmeade caught the tell:
“I was a little surprised the vice president was going after Israel yesterday at the podium more than he was going after Iran.”
It genuinely amused me that people think replacing Starmer will make things better.
From Boris Johnson's election onwards, we've been shuffling the bollards on the Titanic.
You have to actually change direction if you want to avoid crashing into the iceberg:
- End Net Zero
- Make business viable again
- Get welfare under control
- Fund defence
- Ensure equality under the law
- Arrest criminals and keep them in jail
- Deport illegal immigrants and close the border
- Bring the civil service to heel
Burnham will become as unpopular as Starmer within months since he isn't going to do any of that.
He Spent Two Years Telling Half The Country They Didn't Matter. Now There's Nobody Left To Save Him.
Andy Burnham can apparently take the leadership without a contest. That single detail tells you more about the state of Keir Starmer's government than anything else in this story. The Labour Party isn't choosing its next leader through a vote of its members. It is quietly coronating one, because a contest would expose just how little is left to defend.
A senior government figure says Starmer has realised the game is up and is now thinking about how to shore up his legacy. One of his own loyalists says support among MPs is down to "friends and family," people whose relatives work in No 10 or who have known him personally for years. Five senior Cabinet ministers, Heidi Alexander, Yvette Cooper, Shabana Mahmood, Ed Miliband and others, have told him to set a departure date rather than fight on. His own chief whip has told him the same.
This did not happen by accident, and it did not happen because of one bad week. It happened because for two years this government made a consistent choice, over and over, about whose interests came first, and it was rarely the people who didn't vote Labour.
Pensioners lost their winter fuel payments while the asylum hotel bill ran past £10 billion. Farmers were hit with inheritance tax changes that threatened family land held for generations, while billions in defence funding could not be found. The Chief of the Defence Staff wrote directly to Downing Street warning the country was at risk, and John Healey resigned as Defence Secretary because Rachel Reeves would not fund the armed forces properly, while Ed Miliband's net zero budget stayed untouched. Al Carns, a decorated combat veteran, resigned as Veterans Minister because he could no longer ask soldiers to trust a covenant the government wasn't honouring.
And running underneath all of it was the language. Anyone who raised concerns about uncontrolled migration, two-tier policing, grooming gangs or the erosion of British institutions was met with the same word, deployed by ministers, by activists, and increasingly by Labour MPs themselves: far right. Concerned pensioners. Family farmers. Serving and former military personnel. Ordinary voters asking why a teenager could be handcuffed by police while dying in the street because his attacker shouted racism. All filed under the same label, again and again, by a government that built its entire posture around managing dissent rather than answering it.
That is not a coalition. That is a list of grievances waiting for an outlet. Burnham's win in Makerfield was simply the moment that outlet appeared, and once it did, the loyalty evaporated in days because there was nothing underneath it holding people in place. You cannot spend two years telling the majority of the country it is the problem and then expect that majority, or your own backbenchers, to stand and defend you when the numbers turn.
Starmer's allies are now talking about legacy. That is the most revealing word in the whole story. Not about fixing what's broken. Not about answering the people who lost faith. About managing the exit so the record looks better than the reality. It is the same instinct that produced "reports get reviewed" at counter-terror police and "still reviewing" at the institutions documented this week: protect the process, manage the optics, and hope nobody asks the harder question.
The harder question is simple. If a Prime Minister with a landslide majority can be reduced to friends and family within two years, the issue was never really about Starmer personally. It was about what, and who, he chose to defend, and who he didn't.
"Burnham's win in Makerfield was simply the moment that outlet appeared, and once it did, the loyalty evaporated in days because there was nothing underneath it holding people in place."
Shabana Mahmood has found her voice. This is always illuminating.
The Performance
You are horrified by Edinburgh. You have found time to tweet. You have identified the motive. Anti Muslim hatred. You have spoken. The Justice Secretary has pronounced.
The Silence
250,000 girls. Decades of rape. An inquiry report sitting on desks. And you? Nothing. Not horrified. Not grateful. Not speaking. The Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs do not rate a tweet. The working class white girls do not rate your horror.
The Hypocrisy
You are Justice Secretary for the rapists communities, not the victims. You police anti Muslim hatred with zeal. You police the rape of white children with silence. This is not who we are. Who are we, Shabana? A nation that tolerates rape if the rapists share your heritage?
The Truth
You are not horrified by violence. You are horrified by attention. The Edinburgh attacker exposed your double standard. The grooming gangs exposed your complicity. You tweet about one because it serves you. You ignore the other because it indicts you.
You are not Justice Secretary. You are the communitys representative in government. The girls have no representative. They have you.
@imrana_usman01@RapidResponse47 "occupation of their land"
Are you referring to the Jewish land where Jews were ethnically cleansed (forced into exile or classed as dhimmis) by Muslim hordes who called themselves "Palestinians" in 1964?
Your "logic" is as shaky as your "history"! 🤦♂️
@imrana_usman01@RapidResponse47 "1968 Israeli commandos attacked Beirut airport"
Gosh! You've conveniently forgotten that operation was a response to the PFLP hijacks of El Al planes.
"Let me teach you a history"
I really don't think you're in a position to teach anyone about history!
https://t.co/e1ijyOVTbx
@imrana_usman01@RapidResponse47 "Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon took place in 1978"
Gosh! You've conveniently forgotten about the PLO (Hezbollah's predecessor) and their deadly attack on a coastal highway near Tel Aviv.
https://t.co/b2KcDT4dNb
@NapoleonofRome@RapidResponse47 "Maybe you should stop Israel from invading Lebanon!!!"
Or maybe you should stop Hezbollah from invading Lebanon and attacking Israel!!!
@AndrewMagz41417@RapidResponse47 "The whole not being Israels bitch act lasted one day and that’s all it took for them to demand another 9/11, burn our flag and hope Trump gets assassinated."
Oh dear! You've forgotten your meds again, haven't you? 🙄
@RapidResponse47@VP "Lebanon ceasefire issue"
Which has nothing to do with you and It's not Lebanon, It's Hezbollah. My bad, I forgot, you are about to throw away the only ally in region that stood by you.