Simon Steen

Experienced employment law solicitor

[Simon Steen @simon_steen]

@nickfshort Ok then!

[Daniel Sugarman @Daniel_Sugarman]

After the Green Party's "Zionism is Racism" vote, the Leader of Haringey Council, which is controlled by the Greens, wrote to various Synagogues in the borough to "reassure" them.

I want to show you Highgate Synagogue's reply. I believe it is worth reading in its entirety.

[Simon Steen @simon_steen]

@LucyHunterB Then cheers!

[Simon Steen @simon_steen]

@TrenchTrotter Jacob Rees-Mogg and his wife named their 5th child
Alfred Wulfric Leyson Pius Mogg and at the time said that Leyson is a family name and honours Louis Leyson Rees-Mogg who died at Gallipoli just over one hundred years ago.

[Simon Steen @simon_steen]

Grey Heron seen yesterday at Erddig Hall near Wrexham.

[Prof. Gary Francione @garylfrancione]

It is always a tragedy when someone takes their life, as Arday apparently did. But Arday presents some important questions of public interest, including the profound corruption of basic academic standards and the institutions that are supposed to protect those standards, and the effort of the police to silence criticism of Arday and efforts to investigate that corruption. These and other issues survive Arday's tragic death.

[Jean Hatchet @JeanHatchet]

A reminder.

If you are suffering domestic abuse you may want to turn off govt emergency alerts. If for any reason you were hiding from a man it could be dangerous to have a phone alert him to your whereabouts.

Likewise if you have a second hidden device for communicating with friends and family that he doesn’t know about.

If you fear you are being stalked.

It could also just be re-traumatising if it shocks you.

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

At this point if you still claim Israel is committing genocide in Gaza you are either stupid and ignorant or antisemitic.

The antisemitic version usually means applying a double standard on the definition of genocide and the laws of war just to delegitimize Israel’s existence or right to pursue legitimate goals in a war it did not start or/and dehumanize every IDF soldier as a monster.

I have tried to argue basic definitions. Genocide requires intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such, in whole or in part. The evidence does not show that intent toward the people in Gaza. What it shows is the opposite. Israel has taken extraordinary steps, often at real cost and risk, to prevent civilian harm while fighting an enemy that hides among them, uses hospitals and schools as bases, and treats its own people as props in an evil grand political strategy of martyrdom to eliminate all jews on the planet.

In the middle of the fighting Israel has let in huge amounts of food, hundreds of thousands of tons, sometimes more than the world food specialists said was needed. Water lines from Israel have stayed open, three of them supplying tens of thousands of cubic meters a day. They have coordinated repairs, kept desalination plants running by sending fuel and even electricity to key ones, and allowed generators so water systems, hospitals and bakeries can keep working. Medical supplies and equipment have poured in by the tens of thousands of tons. Field hospitals coordinated. Patients have been evacuated for treatment outside. When polio showed up for the first time in decades Israel halted fighting every day and worked with WHO and UNICEF on a mass vaccination campaigns. Over a million doses given. That is not how you try to wipe out a people.

Then look at the misinformation machine. Almost every big claim about Israel deliberately targeting journalists or medical staff or children falls apart, and a lot of the time it falls apart because of what Hamas itself admits, sometimes before anyone even finishes basic fact checking. The “journalists” killed for example. Plenty of the names on those lists later show up in Hamas or Islamic Jihad martyr posts as actual operatives or commanders. Dual roles are common in Gaza’s information space. Same with medical workers. People mourned as nurses or doctors get claimed later by the terror groups as fighters. Hospitals have been used as command centers and weapons storage over and over. Hamas officials have even said it out loud at times. Manuals found on how to use the hospitals as Hamas military sites.

The casualty numbers and the “they are targeting children” stories. The Hamas health ministry figures get treated like gospel, yet their own underlying data and later admissions undercut every trending statistic. Combatants get left out or reclassified. Claims of IDF snipers or drones hunting kids usually fail basic reality of sci-fi sniper drones that don’t exist or injury patterns coming out of the same hospitals.

These stories do not need years of investigation to collapse. Often Hamas’s own words or the available evidence do the job within days or weeks. But the first maximalist version is what spreads and sticks and then gets used to accuse the whole country of Israel and its army of genocidal intent.

It is not illegal or wrong to target and destroy your enemy in a war, especially one that started with a massacre, held hostages, and fights from inside the civilian population it claims to protect. Gaza is an awful war with awful conditions, conditions shaped heavily by Hamas’s tactics. That does not make it genocide. The aid that kept flowing, the vaccination campaigns, the water and power facilitation, and the way the propaganda claims kept falling apart all point the other direction. If you ignore all of that and still yell genocide the explanations left are ignorance or a double standard aimed only at Israel. But this entire stupid campaign every war in history is a genocide.

If you actually want to engage in the debate of "intent" or actions in Gaza, see earlier writings:

"I’m a War Scholar. There Is No Genocide in Gaza," https://t.co/G7Iy9Ki3g5

"Israel Is Not Committing Genocide: Exposing the Distortion of Law and Truth," with @Ostrov_A
https://t.co/0RWFtOUd8H

"Israel's Aid to Gaza Is Historically Unprecedented," https://t.co/QMLuWDGDDs

[Simon Steen @simon_steen]

@FondOfBeetles @Heret1cGay I always thought your X name was a reference to the Haldane quote!

[Simon Steen @simon_steen]

Very interesting inaugural meeting of the Sex and Gender Law Association last night. Met and talked to many people who I follow in X including @AudreySuffolk , @michaelpforan and others. Talks on history of sex and gender in law over last 60 years or so were very interesting.

[Simon Steen @simon_steen]

Friday evening amusement : email from other side "please find attached a fully singed agreement" , client reported that she would open it with oven gloves

[Kosher @koshercockney]

Well said to this woman!

Disgusting and vile from @TheGreenParty

[Simon Steen @simon_steen]

@akuareindorf I appreciated the reference to Insitu Cleaning.

[Simon Steen @simon_steen]

@LissaKEvans @StroudBrewery That's no good Lissa, Big Brother knows that wrongthink will reveal itself physically, even if you try to hide it via facial expressions, tone of voice, hesitation, or instinctive reactions. This is called “facecrime”. Orthodoxy means not thinking.

[Simon Steen @simon_steen]

@QcWynter 'necessary' would equally have been lovely

[𝐃𝐄𝐕𝐎𝐍™ @Devon_OnEarth]

You're telling me the British Defence Attache to a Desert country is a guy called "Captain Sandy Sandilands"

[Simon Steen @simon_steen]

@krug79 the picture speaks for itself

[Mark Hill @antiquemark]

Read about how a painted studio potter’s mark identified a misattributed Modern British painting at auction…

…on https://t.co/XaCgDGY8em and free to read now.

[Simon Steen @simon_steen]

@AudreySuffolk yes but what about the Equalities Act 2010 - that one can go surely !