Jonathan Gilmore

Arsenal supporting pedant, chess dad

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

@RealMattLucas mazeltov on your OBE. Incredible, and recognition of a wonderful career so far. Can’t wait to continue to follow your successes in the future. All the very best x

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

@nationalexpress can you help? I can’t seem to contact you via the web and no one answering the phone.

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

@MenInBlazers Consistency is important.

[Mikhail Khodorkovsky @khodorkovsky_en]

Today, Russians made their voices heard in a powerful way.

But it wasn't through traditional methods.

🧵 Here's how they showed the world that Putin does not speak for them. Read on & RT to amplify this important message!

[Rachel Riley MBE 💙 @RachelRileyRR]

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, where we remember the 6 million Jewish men, women and children, the thousands of Roma and Sinti, black, gay, disabled and other groups, systematically murdered in the Holocaust, as well as in subsequent genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and Darfur, where people were persecuted and killed in masses, with the purposeful intent of their total annihilation.

Currently in China, between 1-3 million Uyghur Muslims are in concentration camps, in the first genocide recognised by the British government while it is happening.

27th January is the date chosen to mark this, as the date of the liberation of Auschwitz, a death camp where Jews had to pay for their own travel in cattle trucks for days, from as far as Greece and Norway, to Poland to be killed. Approx 1.1m people were murdered there alone.

This morning, I’ve already seen Holocaust charities, messages from survivors, and mourners, trolled online in their pain and remembrance, with taunts of being ‘the new nazis’ and cries of ‘genocide’ in Gaza.

Let me be clear, the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is awful. The loss of innocent civilian life is devastating, and every decent person wants an end to the suffering of innocent people, whoever they are and wherever they come from, as soon as possible. But however much pain this situation is causing, it is not genocide, and it is not comparable to the Holocaust.

This is a new form of Holocaust denial, which distorts the nature of genocide, and minimises the intentional dehumanisation, planning and scale of evil it takes to reduce individuals to members of an group deserving of mass torture and killing.

War is horrific by nature, and the pain and suffering it causes I hope never to experience myself, or for my family, and I can’t claim to know how that feels. I empathise with all those suffering due to the accident of where they were born in the world, in the hands of violent and extremist regimes.

In other conflicts, just in and around that region, 377,000+ Yemenis, 236,000+ Afghans, 5,400,000+ Congolese, 500,000+ Sudanese, 500,000+ Syrians, 500,000+ Somalis, 300,000+ Iraqis, 50,000+ Libyans have been killed. None were labelled genocides, none were compared to the Holocaust, perpetrators weren’t called nazis. These victims are barely spoken of.

This call of genocide is saved for Jews, and for Israel alone, because of the pain this accusation specifically causes them. It has been shouted maliciously for decades, yet is particularly painful in the wake of the Oct 7th pogrom, with 136 hostages still captive, and nearly 1,300 brutally murdered in cruel and celebratory style, in the single biggest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust.

Latest Hamas figures say around 24,000 have been killed in Gaza. Israel says 9,000 are combatants. Reducing this to a numbers game is uncomfortable when it comes to the suffering of real people, and I repeat, every innocent death - every innocent man, woman and child suffering is a tragedy. But ignoring or inverting the truth of the situation and its cause, does nothing to help those suffering now, and will only encourage other rogue groups around the world to do the same in the future, should it be globally sanctioned or ignored.

Hamas has designed and planned for this style of war, spending years and stealing literally billions of aid money to protect its terrorist organisation and weaponry by building tunnels up to twice the length of the London Underground system underneath hospitals, schools, mosques and civilian infrastructure with its specific aim of using human shields to protect itself after provoking its neighbours.

Genocidal antisemitism whether from the nazis or Hamas, brings only death and destruction to both Jews, and those under living under these regimes. For the sake of everyone wanting only to raise their families, have careers, build, move forward and live, this needs to be acknowledged and tackled by all of us.

Never again is now. #HMD2024

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

Wow!

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

@JDTHFC @MoiraDonegan Not one bit. I try hard to understand both sides of an argument. On this I struggled. I’d have argued that unis are struggling under the weight of a modern “orthodoxy” where people like Gay may not themselves be anti semitic but too scared to call it out w/ radicals on campus

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

@lucytobin I think you’re brave to write this stuff when the Twitter hate mobs are ready to pounce. Thank you.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

🤷‍♂️ Imagining this happening anywhere is difficult, but it's even harder to imagine 1400 Germans or Americans or Egyptians murdered and 200 kidnapped from their homes and held hostage by terrorists and being immediately told not to retaliate or rescue them.

[Hillel Neuer @HillelNeuer]

Must-read speech on the legality of Israel's fight against Hamas, delivered in 🇬🇧 House of Lords yesterday by Lord Guglielmo Verdirame KC, professor and barrister in public international law:

“There has been a lot of talk about proportionality in the law on self-defence. I refer to the words that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, used a few days ago on the test of proportionality. It does not mean that the defensive force has to be equal to the force used in the armed attack. Proportionality means that you can use force that is proportionate to the defensive objective, which is to stop, to repel and to prevent further attacks.

Israel has described its war aims as the destruction of Hamas’s capability. From a legal perspective, these war aims are consistent with proportionality in the law of self-defence, given what Hamas says it does and what Hamas has done and continues to do.

Asking a state that is acting in self-defence to agree to a ceasefire before its lawful defensive objectives have been met is, in effect, asking that state to stop defending itself. For such calls to be reasonable and credible, they must be accompanied by a concrete proposal setting out how Israel’s legitimate defensive goals against Hamas will be met through other means. It is not an answer to say that Israel has to conclude a peace treaty, because Hamas is not interested in a peace treaty.

Proportionality also applies in the law that governs the conduct of hostilities, not only in self-defence. The law of armed conflict requires that in every attack posing a risk to civilian life, that risk must not be excessive in relation to the military advantage that is anticipated.

That rule does not mean, even when scrupulously observed, that civilians will not tragically lose their lives in an armed conflict. The law of armed conflict, at its best, can mitigate the horrors of war but it cannot eliminate them.

The great challenge in this conflict is that Hamas is the kind of belligerent that cynically exploits these rules by putting civilians under its control at risk and even using them to seek immunity for its military operations, military equipment and military personnel. An analysis of the application of the rules on proportionality in targeting in this conflict must always begin with this fact.

There has also been some discussion about siege warfare. The UK manual of the law of armed conflict, reflecting the Government’s official legal position—it is a Ministry of Defence document—says:

“Siege is a legitimate method of warfare … It would be unlawful to besiege an undefended town since it could be occupied without resistance”.

Gaza is not an undefended town. It is true that obligations apply to the besieging forces when civilians are caught within the area that is being encircled, and those obligations include agreeing to the passage of humanitarian relief by third parties. But it is not correct to say that encircling an area with civilians in it is not permitted by the laws of war.

A further point that concerns the laws of war is also of particular relevance to the British Government’s practice. It has already been mentioned that the Government have taken the view that Gaza remains under Israeli occupation, even though Israel pulled out in 2005.

The traditional view until 2005 was that occupation required physical presence in the territory. That view is consistent with Article 42 of the Hague regulations of 1907, which states that a territory is occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the occupying power.

Again, it is also the view taken by the UK manual of the law of armed conflict, which reflects the UK’s official legal position and states that occupation ceases as soon as the occupying power evacuates the area. The European Court of Human Rights, in its jurisprudence, has also adopted a similar approach to occupation.

So I have always been rather baffled by the British Government’s position on this issue, which, as far as I know, has not changed. Yes, it is true that Israel has exercised significant control over the airspace and in the maritime areas, but even as a matter of plain geography it takes two—Israel and Egypt —to control the land access points to Gaza.

More fundamentally, it is Hamas that has been responsible for the government and administration of Gaza. I appreciate that this is a legal matter on which the Minister may not want to respond immediately but it is an important one, because the legal fiction that Israel was still the occupying power under the laws of armed conflict has been relentlessly exploited by Hamas to blame Israel for everything, while using the effective control that it has over the territory, the people and the resources to wage war.

On a final note, I would like to say something briefly on the way in which the war is being reported. When a serious allegation is made, particularly one that could constitute a war crime, the immediate response of the law-abiding belligerent will be to say, “We are investigating”.

The non-law-abiding belligerent, by contrast, will forthwith blame the other side and even provide surprisingly precise casualty figures. The duty to investigate is one of the most important ones in armed conflict.

What happened in the way in which the strike on the hospital was reported is that the side that professes no interest whatever in complying with the laws of armed conflict was rewarded with the headlines that it was seeking.”

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

@RestIsPolitics @campbellclaret @RoryStewartUK Hi. I just read this in Alastair’s book. I think about Starmer the way you describe Truss and Sunak. I desperately want not to. How can a floating voter get comfortable with a would be PM who propped up Corbyn for so long?

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

@Snapchat I have changed my phone but some of the videos that I have been sent from more than 24 hours ago have been lost, although they are still accessible on my old phone, just not on the new phone. Can you help?

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

@RestIsPolitics @campbellclaret @RoryStewartUK how about @Kasparov63 as a guest on the pod. There is no more eloquent a commentator on Russia.

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

@campbellclaret @Bundesliga_DE @BlackYellow @FCBayernEN As an arsenal fan, that certainly triggered me!

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

Seems to me to be several questions about @GaryLineker 1) can or should a BBC person be political? (I think ok) 2) Was what he said ok? (I think ok) 3) Is comparison to Nazi Germany hamfisted and clumsy? (I think so)

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

The sadness is not the expulsion but that he didn’t see such racism or chose not to. I know that whataboutery is a lazy form of debate, but I assume you’d be wholly supportive of (eg) a white suprematist sympathiser being thrown out of the Conservatives?

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

Hi @RoryStewartUK. I love the podcast. I wanted to ask you to explore your description of Corbyn’s expulsion being “sad”. It directly made @Baddiel’s point. He’d allowed racism in the party but pretty much “only” towards Jews. Is this not a valid reason for expulsion?

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

@RestIsPolitics @campbellclaret @RoryStewartUK @Baddiel The sadness is not the expulsion but that he didn’t see such racism or chose not to. I know that whataboutery is a lazy form of debate, but I assume you’d be wholly supportive of (eg) a white suprematist sympathiser being thrown out of the Conservatives?

[Jonathan Gilmore @S22JCG]

@RestIsPolitics @campbellclaret @RoryStewartUK Hi @RoryStewartUK. I love the podcast. I wanted to ask you to explore your description of Corbyn’s expulsion being “sad”. It directly made @Baddiel’s point. He’d allowed racism in the party but pretty much “only” towards Jews. Is this not a valid reason for expulsion?