In 2024, a government investigation concluded that a group of teachers, many of North African descent, created a hostile environment by yelling at, humiliating and imposing their religious views on students and staff at Bedford school.

The investigation found that the teachers, who were allegedly influenced by a local mosque, subjected children to physical and psychological abuse. The report cited incidents of prayers taking place in classrooms and alleged that some teachers either refused to teach or paid little attention to science and sex education requirements in the provincial curriculum.

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Today’s starvation libel, the genocide libel, the baby-killers libel, the harvested organs libel — and now the “rape dogs” libel — all transmit the same message as the murderous blood libels of old: that the Jews are evil, demonic, inhuman. They are therefore to be excluded from the field of human empathy. They are to be branded as monsters and their suffering is to be denied.

We are realising to our horror that the skin of civilisation is extremely thin, and that it’s now been torn off altogether. We’re living through a spiritual plague. Barbarism is in the ascendant, and its super-spreader is The New York Times.

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Image: US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Virginius Dabney

How Hamas was allowed to see another day defies all reason, all logic, all humanity. Unimaginable savagery. Necessary that it is published in full to finally extinguish anti-Jewish, perverse doubts that remain over what happened that day.

Some people wonder why Israel has attacked Hamas so viciously. Read below and you will find out why. Warning - the cruelty here is beyond our wildest nightmare! The Press continues to run interference for Islam’s atrocities. The question is why?

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That woman is Nuriyah Khan (above centre), an ex-Muslim convert who lost everything for choosing honesty over silence and blowing the whistle on her former faith.

But what’s so special and different about this Clash is that she is going head-to-head with the Green Party Muslim Fahima Mahomed (above right), who I greatly respect for entering the lion’s den to have this important discussion knowing my own personal view.

It’s time we no longer tippy toe around a dominant faith we are importing that goes against the western values we have long fought for.

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It has come to light today that a notorious Muslim extremist organisation is the driving force behind Keir Starmer banning our overseas guests from the ‘Unite The Kingdom’ event on Saturday.

‘5 Pillars’ is an infamous organisation of extremist Muslims, and it is ‘5 Pillars’ that has revealed that they were behind the wave of bans that has prohibited our overseas guest speakers from attending.

Keir Starmer is literally in league with Islamists who hate Britain.

You couldn’t make it up, but what else do we expect from treacherous communists like Starmer.

This is one of the tweets confirming the involvement of ‘5 Pillars’ that has come to light today:

This is Labour’s Britain, Islamic extremists dictating who can and who can’t enter our country.

What a sad stain on the history of our great nation, and it’s only going to get worse.

We have to plough ahead undeterred. Nothing can stop what is happening on Saturday.

Yours sincerely

Tommy Robinson

Please chip in if you can. Tommy is fighting for ALL of us.

https://www.urbanscoop.news/support-us

This Saturday is about unity, strength, and showing the world that ordinary people will not be silenced. The pressure will be intense and provocations may come - do not fall for it. Stay calm, stay disciplined, and stand together proudly.

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I will be there. I wouldn’t miss this historic event for all the world! God bless Tommy Robinson.

In this video Dan Dicks of Press For Truth breaks down how Mark Carney, Barack Obama, and Alex Soros met in Toronto to openly declare the end of Canada’s sovereignty. Carney went full globalist on stage, demanding “NEW INSTITUTIONS,” trashing the old order, and pushing the same Davos agenda that’s dismantling nations worldwide. From predicting Carney’s selection at Bilderberg, to exposing his family ties and the imported RCMP takeover, this is the New World Order in real time. No one voted for this. They selected him. Now they’re laughing in our faces

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While Canadian families are being crushed under skyrocketing mortgages, record debt, and a homelessness epidemic that gets worse every year, the federal government is quietly using your tax money to buy hotels and apartment buildings so asylum claimants and immigrants can live for free. This isn’t some accidental policy failure — it’s the Immigration Housing Scam in full effect, and its crown jewel is IRCC’s Interim Housing Assistance Program (IHAP).

On May 4, 2026, in the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, the mask slipped. Minister Lena Metlege Diab and IRCC officials finally admitted billions in federal cash are now being funnelled straight to provinces and municipalities so they can purchase and convert real estate — hotels, buildings, and entire properties — into permanent transitional housing dedicated first and foremost to foreigners. This is not “temporary shelter.” This is a taxpayer-funded real-estate acquisition to house the very people flooding the system, while native-born Canadians are told there’s no money left.

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The recent horrific attack in Golders Green has generated much anger and despair at this latest in a series of concerted, violent assaults currently aimed primarily at the Jewish community, but with a clear lineage to earlier Islamist outrages such as the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby and the London Bridge attacks of 2017 and 2019. The UK terrorism threat level was raised to ‘severe’ following the attack on Thursday. But terrorism, ‘…an action or threat designed to influence the government or intimidate the public’, is an inadequate descriptor of what we face. Instead, I believe we face a different problem: a full-blown insurgency.

Correct diagnoses are important: ‘If you define the problem correctly’, Steve Jobs is supposed to have said, ‘…you almost have the solution’; some psychologists would agree, ‘Name it to tame it’. But if a doctor gets a diagnosis wrong, then at the least it is less likely that a patient will recover well, to put it mildly: that is where we are in dealing with Islamist extremism.

While terror and terrorism are elements of an insurgency, they are but part; definitions of insurgency are numerous and as slippery as the beast itself, but the British Army’s definition, albeit from 2001, seems a good start point: ‘…the actions of a minority group within a state who are intent on forcing political change by means of a mixture of subversion, propaganda and military pressure, aiming to persuade or intimidate the broad mass of people to accept such a change. It is an organised armed political struggle, the goals of which may be diverse.’

From organised ‘Globalise the Intifada’ hate marches, terror attacks and online trolling, through to the deplatforming of ‘heterodox’ speakers, we are facing what seems to be almost a dictionary definition of an insurgency. And it has not been unsuccessful politically: the government’s recognition of Palestinian statehood, judicial tolerance of attacks on supposedly Israeli-linked firms, the unwillingness of the government to join or even support the US and Israeli assault on the Iranian terror regime, the promotion of Islamophobia definitions, the reluctance to proscribe the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – all could be attributed to the ‘success’ of the insurgency and the electoral calculus of a Labour government that can see the Muslim vote, hitherto one of its two pillars of support (the other being public sector workers), slipping through its fingers.

The government would, of course, resist this analysis. On all the political ‘successes’ above, it would argue that they stand and fall on their own merits. In terms of counter-terrorism, it would point to the Prevent programme, itself part of the wider CONTEST strategy and Counter-Terrorism Command (CTC). While both have been criticised, the former most recently in the failure to apprehend the Stockport murderer before he carried out his attack, both are heavily stretched. That is primarily because they are set up to deal with a problem – terrorism – when what we are facing is another – an insurgency. Prevent is focused on individuals, ‘…stopping people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism’; it is, in essence, safeguarding. CTC’s role, by contrast, is to ‘…prevent, disrupt and investigate dangerous extremists’, which in reality means going after those who are potential plotters, not just the disaffected and deluded.

According to its website, CTC currently has 800 live investigations involving thousands of potential suspects, with the largest single focus being ‘Islamist extremist terrorism’. It is also responsible for countering state-sponsored criminality in the UK and investigating war crimes: an impossibly large portfolio. Leaving those aside, between supporting an ‘at risk’ individual and going after a nascent or actual terrorist plotter, there is a gap currently unfilled; meeting that gap is the difference between a counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency campaign, and why we need to pursue the latter.

Recognising the problem for what it really is would make a difference, but the consequences of such a recognition would be uncomfortable. Key to any successful counter-insurgency campaign is separating the insurgents from the milieu in which they operate; the analogy usually quoted is that of fish – the terrorist – swimming in the sea, the cultural and human terrain from whence they spring. Arguably, that is what Prevent does, or is supposed to. But given the scale of the problem, we will need to do more: in effect, change the nature of the sea. That means directly challenging the prejudices, cultural and religious baggage of the Muslim communities that harbour Islamist extremists and thus make a reality of genuine integration, not our current trajectory, ‘…an island of strangers’, in the Prime Minister’s words. This is a ‘whole of society’, ‘whole of state’ endeavour; a ‘hearts and minds’ struggle for the support of our Muslim fellow citizens. As an aside, the attempt to impose an Islamophobia definition would, perhaps counter-intuitively for a ‘hearts and minds’ struggle, be a massive misstep in the wrong direction.

Dr David Kilcullen, the world’s leading authority on modern counter-insurgency, would point to two other essentials. The first is control: someone must own the problem. As Winston Churchill put it to General Gerald Templer, the High Commissioner in Malaya in the successful counter-insurgent campaign against the Chinese communists, ‘You are in charge.’ However, as the Stockport inquiry showed us, no one was in charge even for a single Prevent case, let alone a complete counter-extremism campaign.

The second element is owning the information space, which in our wired but anarchic and disaggregated cyber and social media world is probably, to use a military term, our ‘vital ground’: that which we must win and cannot afford to lose. If we own it, we can counter the ideology of hate, deny sanctuary to the haters and, more positively, provide an alternative motivation to the siren calls of a Jew- and Christian-hating death cult.

In the last year, the Emiratis have restricted state-funded scholarships for students wishing to study at UK universities because of the extent of Islamic radicalisation and extremism found here; our Jewish community has never felt so threatened. We have, it should be clear to all, a major problem that we are not addressing: a failure would not just be another crisis; it would be existential to our survival as a liberal democracy. We have an absolute duty to confront this peril, but it must begin with a proper recognition of what we face: so, in fine military fashion, let us start with the proper ‘naming of parts’.

Written by: Simon Diggins

From The Spectator/May 4, 2026

Image: Getty

Entire Crowd of Arab Leaders SHAKEN By Trump’s CHILLING Warning on Terrorism

Peloni: Trump’s speech in Riyadh in 2017 continues to be the most profound speech of the modern era. It speaks of truths which identifies and isolates evil, and lays out the responsibility of modern nations to ‘drive them out”. Many things have changed since Trump gave that pivotal speech, and the role in which Trump embraces the radical regimes in Turkey, Qatar and Syria seems to indicate a change within Trump’s position on what he spoke about in 2017.

The failure to address the rising role of the influences of the Muslim Brotherhood in the US is another point which breaks from what he spoke about in 2017. So, while it is important that the Muslim nations drive out the scourge of radicalism from their nations, it is likewise important for America to drive out the scourge of radicalism from America. As Trump stated in 2017, this is a war between good and evil, and each nation in this war will be judged by History and by G_d. So drive out the extremists, drive out the jihadists, and drive out the Muslim Brotherhood and the influence of Muslim Brotherhood led nations of Qatar, Turkey and Syria from influencing America.

Video Loads Below:

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Comment by Linda Goudsmit (May 3, 2026 at 2:50 p.m.)

I am an American and I had never seen President Trump’s extraordinary 2017 speech until this morning. He is sincere, impassioned, and clearly identifies terrorism as an existential obstacle to world peace, prosperity, and safety. This 11-minute clip demonstrates the fatal flaw in President Trump’s argument then and now. He speaks from a Western businessman’s perspective which does not acknowledge that Islamic terrorism is doctrinal, literal, and documented in the Quran. Quran 8:60 (Surah Al-Anfal) instructs its believers to “terrify the enemy of Allah and your enemy and others besides them whom you do not know [but] whom Allah knows…” This is a religious doctrinal obligation for Muslims and a literal instructional obligation for jihadis.

It is very difficult for the Western mind to process the ideological commitment to Islamic terrorism embraced by Muslims worldwide both in Muslim-majority countries and in non-Muslim-majority countries. It is just a matter of degree that is reflected in the country’s adherence to Sharia law and tolerance of Sharia law. According to World Population Review 20-30% of Muslim-majority countries have strict application of Sharia law, and 40-60% of Muslim-majority countries have Sharia-based elements. What is essential to understand is that Sharia law in Western countries, and specifically the United States and United States Constitution, are mutually exclusive. This means that any Sharia compliant sector in the United States is in violation of the constitutional laws of our land.

The ideological commitment of Muslims to Sharia law is the blind spot that Pesach Wolicki references in the above video, and it is the lethal flaw in President Trump’s argument. The United States must lead the world in denying terrorists safety in the United States if it is to lecture Muslim countries on terrorism. The Executive Order that President Trump signed on November 24, 2025, designating certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations is a beginning not an end. The transnational Muslim Brotherhood (MB) established in Egypt in 1928, including all of its global branches now active in over 70 countries, must be designated as a terrorist organization. Similarly, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) established in the United States 1994 must also be designated as a terrorist organization. CAIR is the unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation 2008-2009 trial. CAIR is the ideological counterpart of the MB in America and is expanding Islam’s tentacles doctrinally, politically, and educationally in America. CAIR is a cultural threat to the integrity of the United States and is just the softer covert side of MB savagery and jihadi terrorism. CAIR and the MB are just different sides of the same Islamic expansionism coin that seeks to make all the world Muslim.

Qatar and Turkey remain backers of the Muslim Brotherhood and continue to provide political, financial, and safe haven for MB leaders. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Russia have designated the global Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. It is time for President Trump to declare both CAIR in America and the Muslim Brotherhood’s global organization as terrorist organizations if we are to be serious about winning the worldwide war between good and evil. We must stop Islamic expansionism’s twin cultural and terrorist campaigns for establishing a worldwide Islamic caliphate. WE MUST DRIVE THEM OUT OF AMERICA! Our American national sovereignty and individual freedoms depend upon it––and so do the national sovereignties and individual freedoms of every Western country in the world!

Image: Mandel Ngan | Getty

“Peace is not silence before terror. Peace is not the avoidance of difficult truths. Peace is not asking democracies to restrain their language while tyrannies unleash violence, repression, and fear. Peace without justice is not peace. It is postponement.”

~ Ahmed Charai ~

Afc Newsletter May 1, 2026

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The prize jury for this year’s Venice Biennale resigned on Thursday — just nine days before the show’s opening — after a furor over its decision to exclude artists from countries accused of crimes against humanity from receiving awards.

In a brief statement posted to the art website e-flux, the five-person jury said simply that it had resigned “in acknowledgment” of its April 23 announcement that it would not give awards to artists from countries whose leaders were being investigated by the International Criminal Court.

The jury did not mention any countries by name in either announcement, but the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on accusations of war crimes for Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The court has also issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on accusations of war crimes in Ukraine, but the uproar over the ban had centered mostly on Israel.

On Sunday, Israel’s foreign ministry said in a statement on X that excluding Israeli artists had “transformed the Biennale from an open artistic space of free, boundless ideas into a spectacle of false, anti-Israeli political indoctrination.”

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Belu-Simion Fainaru, a sculptor who is representing Israel this year, said earlier this week that he had consulted lawyers about the jury’s ban. On Wednesday, Italy’s culture minister called Fainaru to express his support for the Israeli artist, according to a news release.

Jury members did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday, but a Biennale spokeswoman acknowledged their resignations in a brief statement.

Fainaru, 66, said in an interview that he was happy that the jury had stepped down. “Their decision discriminated against me on a racial basis,” he said.

“I’m an artist and have equal rights, and I can’t be judged by belonging to a country or a race,” Fainaru added: “I should just be judged on the quality and message of my art.”

Fainaru said the jury’s initial decision had reminded him of actions taken against his father in Romania during World War II. At that time, Fainaru said, his father was barred from teaching at a university and then sent to a forced-labor camp for three years.

“I didn’t think that discrimination would happen to me,” Fainaru said.

Belu-Simion Fainaru, who is representing Israel at the Biennale, said he was happy that the jury had stepped down.

The Venice Biennale, the art world’s most important event, consists of a central group show and more than 100 smaller exhibitions hosted in national pavilions. The jury awards the prestigious Golden Lion to the best national presentation, and recognizes some artists from the main exhibition.

The panel that resigned was made up of five curators: Solange Oliveira Farkas of Brazil, Zoe Butt of Australia, Elvira Dyangani Ose of Spain, Marta Kuzma of the United States and Giovanna Zapperi of Italy. The team had been selected by the curator of the Biennale’s main show, Koyo Kouoh, who died suddenly last year and whose exhibition is being realized by her assistants.

The Biennale said in a news release on Thursday evening that this year it would let visitors vote for the best national pavilion and award prizes to artists from the main exhibition. The winners will be announced on Nov. 22, the Biennale’s final day, the news release added.

Since Israel’s military invaded Gaza after the October 2023 Hamas-led attack, Israel’s presence at the Biennale has stirred controversy. Hundreds of Biennale participants have signed petitions calling on the event’s organizers to exclude Israel. And at the last edition, in 2024, Israel’s representative, Ruth Patir, shuttered her show, saying that she would not open it until “a cease-fire and hostage release agreement” was in place.

Russia’s participation has brought discord, too.

After it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the artists and curator who were set to represent Russia at that year’s edition pulled out. Russia has not staged a presentation since then. This year, it is set to return with an exhibition featuring mostly non-Russian artists that will run only during the Biennale’s preview week, from May 5-8.

Fainaru, who was born in Romania during the authoritarian rule of Nicolae Ceausescu, has already appeared once at the Biennale, representing his native country at the 2019 edition. Since moving to Israel in the 1970s, he has become a major figure in the art world there. Last year he received the Israel Prize, the country’s highest cultural honor.

For the 2026 Biennale, Fainaru said he would exhibit “Rose of Nothingness,” an installation that will include a water dripper used to irrigate fields. Its water will pool on the floor, Fainaru said, in part representing the coming together of people from different communities.

“Art should be a place to speak with each other,” he said, “not a way to exclude.”

Stefano Mazzola/Getty Images

New York Times/May 1, 2026

I am done with the crocodile tears of anti-Zionists. After every Jew-baiting atrocity comes the feigned grief of the Israelophobes. The wounds of the Jews are barely bandaged, or their bodies not yet cold, before their taunters are engaging in shameless acts of hypocritical sorrow. ‘It’s so sad’, say the people who make their craven living from libelling the Jewish nation. ‘We must stand against this’, say keffiyeh creeps who stand for nothing other than the annihilation of the Jewish State. ‘Why is this happening?’, they opine. Oh, buy a fucking mirror.

It happened again after the stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green yesterday. The activist class took a two-minute break from denouncing the Jewish State as the wickedest to ever exist, and everyone who supports it as monstrous scum, to wonder why Jews are being knifed in the neck. They’re like bulls in a china shop asking what happened to all the plates. ‘Hatred for Jews is unacceptable’, they say, before finishing their matcha tea and getting back to calling the Jews’ homeland a demented, genocidal, inhuman pile of shit that uses dogs to rape Palestinians.

This is the condition of the Jews in 21st-century Britain – first they are forced to watch their co-religionists be knifed, then they are forced to watch the drooling demonisers of their homeland sob watery, barren tears over it. They see their people being punched and kicked by racist brutes calling them ‘baby killers’, and then see activists who spend every waking minute calling the Jewish State a baby-killing entity saying: ‘Oh no, that’s not nice.’ It is gaslighting of hitherto untapped depths.

Yesterday, as they reeled from the horror in Golders Green, Jews had to stomach the sight of Mothin Ali, deputy leader of the Green Party, bemoaning this ‘devastating news’. This is a man who described Hamas’s 7 October pogrom, in which Jews were not only stabbed with knives but also mutilated and beheaded with them, as a ‘fight back’ by ‘indigenous people’. They might have heard the Novara Media podcast and its brief, timorous lamenting of the Golders Green attack – a media outlet whose staff called 7 October a ‘day of celebration’ and an act of ‘resistance’. Imagine the industrial-strength brass neck it must require to think it is legitimate in certain circumstances to use a knife to put Jews to death and then coming over all coy when some cunt in Golders Green tries to do precisely that.

JK Rowling took all the moralising gasbags to task in a digital showdown with Zarah Sultana, the Your Party MP. ‘The stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green today is deeply shocking’, said Sultana. Rowling rudely intruded on Sultana’s shabby grandstanding by tweeting: ‘I assume this is a different Zarah Sultana MP to the one who was recently filmed clapping along to loudspeaker chants for intifada, on a street in Surrey.’ Game, set and match to the woman who knows what a woman is.

Rowling raises a very serious point: what did all those fools and ghouls who hollered for intifada think they were conjuring up? What did they think intifada meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? There is literally a historical event called the Knife Intifada, though some call it the Jerusalem Intifada. That lasted from 2015 to 2016 and entailed the stabbing to death of scores of Israeli Jews, and the injuring of hundreds more, by Palestinian militants. And that’s not to mention the Second Intifada of 2000 to 2005 – an Islamo-fascist putsch against the Jewish State spearheaded by Hamas in which a thousand Jews in the Holy Land were blown up, incinerated, shot to death and, yes, stabbed.

Intifada in the context of the Israel-Hamas conflict is literally a knife in the heart of Jews. The swarms of affluent socialists and cranky Islamists who spent the past two-and-a-half years chanting ‘Globalise the intifada’ either didn’t know this, which makes them dumb sons-of-bitches, or they did, which makes them Nazis. Pick your lane. Unless, of course, they’re saying: ‘My fascism is discerning – I only support the stabbing of Jews at bus stops in Tel Aviv, not at bus stops in Golders Green.’ They will surely appreciate, even in the moral fog of their swirling Israelophobia, that such a fine distinction is apt to be lost on those who simply want to butcher Jews, and who interpret the weekly street clamour for more intifada as permission to do so.

It is staggering the extent to which anti-Zionists refuse to be bound by the linguistic rules they enforce on everyone else. These are people who think JK Rowling is responsible for anti-trans violence because she says men aren’t women, and who will accuse you of playing with ‘Islamophobic’ fire if you comment on the rape gangs. And yet apparently their cruel, ceaseless, voluble and entirely disproportionate loathing for the world’s only Jewish nation – and for everyone who supports it, which includes most British Jews – has no impact whatsoever. It magically exists above the grubby fray of cause and effect that the lowly speech of us riff-raff is compelled to inhabit.

Apparently, our measured opinions cause violence, whereas their meticulously constructed and ruthlessly enforced culture of burning animus for the Jewish nation causes nothing. And woe betide the Jew who says it does. He shall be found guilty of ‘weaponising anti-Semitism’ to silence ‘critics of Israel’. See how cynical the Jews are? They will even marshall and monetise their own historic suffering – the Holocaust, 7 October, recent atrocities in Britain – to the end of protecting their precious genocidal homeland from the decent-hearted critique of pacifist Brits. They lie, and they do so for slippery reasons of dual loyalty – that’s what anti-Zionists are saying when they tar Jews as ‘weaponisers’ simply for saying something they themselves say every day: that words have consequences.

Can we cut the crap? Our moral emergency is too pressing. This is the truth: the industry of hatred for the Jewish nation is endangering Jewish people everywhere. It is not merely opinion – it is a vast system of moral instruction enforced through the institutions of education and culture which singles out Zionism as the most repulsive ideology of our time, and Zionists as enablers of apartheid, settler-colonialism and genocide. Golders Green is full of Zionists. I know some of them. They are good people. Yet according to the ideological superstructure of anti-Zionism, they are agents of chaos, facilitators of crime and simps for a regime whose crimes are so uniquely barbarous that even just reflecting on them can feel like ‘opening a door to the darkest recesses of Hell’. It is utterly untenable to say anti-Zionism is not the cause of anti-Jewish violence.

‘It is morally consistent to oppose both anti-Semitism and Israel’s genocide’, said armies of leftists after Golders Green. Actually, it isn’t. For it is the latter – the ceaseless defamation of ‘the Zionist entity’ as a genocidal machine that lusts after the blood of innocents – that inflames the former. There is a determined effort to draw a moral distinction between ‘real anti-Semitism’, like that in Golders Green, and anti-Zionism. No, no, no. Anti-Zionism is the foul soil in which violent Jew hate has taken root. It is the most menacing hate movement of our time. It has power and clout. It is the ideology of the new ruling class. It is ruthlessly communicated through the digital highways and popular culture. And it is hanging a target sign around the necks of Jews everywhere on Earth. It must be defeated, urgently.

Written by Brendan O’Neill

Spiked-on-line/April 30, 2026

Picture by Getty

“This House believes that Israel is a greater threat to regional stability than Iran” — this was the absurd proposition debated on November 13, 2025, at the Oxford Union. UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer went up against Ataollah Mohajerani, a former Iranian Minister and Vice-President, and Mohammad Shtayyeh, former Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority.

This is not a government seeking stability; it is a revolutionary engine of hate, terror, and chaos. Israel, by contrast, is the firewall that prevents Iran’s imperial project from engulfing the region. To claim Israel is the greater threat to stability is not merely wrong — it is an inversion of reality itself.

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Read full text of Neuer’s speech: https://unwatch.org/oxford-debate-hil...

Walking through central London as part of the Free Iran protest movement a couple of Sundays ago, I kept noticing the faces of bystanders. There was certainly very little in the way of support. But equally, open hostility wasn’t the predominant response either. Many of the expressions were marked by something harder to discern – a kind of consternation, an ill-disposed bemusement, as though what was in front of them couldn’t quite be metabolised, not without a certain level of discomfort anyway.

The marchers, among them actual survivors of imprisonment and torture, were carrying the traditional Iranian lion-and-sun alongside the flags of America and Israel. They have been calling for the same freedom that Britain has, for the longest time, claimed to represent in the world. And yet there on the faces of onlookers was not recognition, but something else entirely.

I have spent a great deal of time with the Iranian diaspora. I have photographed them during their Nowruz (Persian New Year) celebrations in Golders Green, at the permanent encampment outside the Iranian Embassy in Knightsbridge, and at their Sunday protests on Whitehall, where they gather outside Downing Street, calling on the government to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). They are, in my experience, some of the most serious and clear-eyed people living in the UK at the moment. They have seen political Islam from the inside, not as a theoretical proposition but as a lived system of repression and coercion. A system that has disappeared friends, imprisoned family members and attempted to overwrite a truly great civilisation. The country of Hafez and Rumi has in their exile become a byword for extremist and authoritarian terror and a nation that is now ranked 145th out of 148 for the treatment of women. Some of these protesters literally have the scars.

Unusually for people coming from the part of the world they do, and increasingly Britain, these protesting Iranians appear to be largely free of anti-Semitism too. Not carefully managed about it or judiciously restrained. It just doesn’t seem to be there. When they speak of Jews and Israel, there is none of the loaded hesitation, the over-careful neutrality or the strained balancing act one detects in even the most educated and well-meaning of British liberals. These Iranians see Jews really as cousins. And not without good reason. The relationship between Persians and Jews is probably the oldest and most honourable in the Bible. Cyrus the Great, who put an end to the Babylonian captivity and sponsored the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, is the only non-Jew ever to receive the title, Mashiach (Messiah).

This Persian-Jewish bond was forged long before Christianity or Islam existed and continued into the modern era. During the time of the last Shah, Iran was among the first nations to recognise the state of Israel, and the Israeli airline, El Al, flew between Tel Aviv and Tehran almost daily. Something of that long-standing familial recognition has quietly re-emerged in the Iranian protest movement that has grown up in cities all across the West in recent months. Among Iranians and Jews there, one finds an ease and immediacy of understanding that requires no translation. They know what the other has experienced and there is no need to establish first principles.

The Islamic Republic, which took power after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, completed this inoculation. It made anti-Semitism central to state doctrine. Friday sermons, school curriculum, even how Iran addressed itself to the world. How could any of us forget Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s illustrious world symposium of Holocaust denial in 2006? For Iranians who have managed to escape the regime, anti-Semitism was never one detachable prejudice among others. It characterised the whole fraudulent package – the lies, the coercion, the false sense of moral grandeur. When they rejected the Islamic regime, naturally they rejected anti-Semitism, too.

The mullahs produced something else which has become genuinely rare in contemporary Britain – people with an acute instinct for the early signs of coercive ideology in a society, an awareness of the gap between a society’s stated values and what it is actually becoming. These are men and women who understand what freedom costs because they have already paid for it with theirs. And they know how quickly a country can be lost.

That is why, when the conversation turns from Tehran to London, as so often it does, what they say carries a weight that is absent from so much of the commentary that now passes for serious discourse in the UK. Their insights are drawn from bitter experience. They recognise a familiar pattern – and they care. The Iranians feel they are watching, for a second time in their lifetimes, a society that is moving, with surprising speed, from the liberal moral consensus of 20 years ago, towards something much more confused – and considerably more dangerous. What has become known as the red-green alliance, a convergence of left-coded moral language with Islamist political energy, ended, in their own country’s history, in the destruction of a free society.

The Iranians have watched on as a political class has been increasingly willing to indulge sectarian religious grievance, while slowly abandoning the civilisational inheritance that made tolerance so valued in the first place. They watch as Keir Starmer grows furious during Prime Minister’s Questions at those expressing concerns about the recent Trafalgar Square ‘Open Iftar‘, claiming people with views very similar to their own are trying to create divisions in British society. They see the PM warmly embracing Hasam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador, at a separate Ramadan event in Westminster Hall – the same man who, on a favoured centrist political podcast, free-wheeled a semi-fictional account of Middle East history and has repeatedly refused to condemn 7 October; a man who has called terrorists, victims. The Iranians watch as blasphemy laws creep back into British life via the ever-more strained definitions of ‘Islamophobia’ or ‘anti-Muslim hate’ as it is now being called. And they hear the jargon of diversity deployed as a veto on very well-founded fears. They recognise this atmosphere and they know where it goes…

Outside Downing Street, alongside the demand to proscribe the IRGC, the Iranians have a second refrain. ‘Shame on you BBC’ – or, as they also call it, ‘Ayatollah BBC’. BBC Persian is their obvious target. Its former head, Sadeq Saba, noted that many Iranians feel the service has lost credibility in its attempt at ‘balanced’ coverage over the years, as it increasingly leans in towards more of the Islamic Republic’s perspective, while ignoring the very clear antipathy so many ordinary Iranians feel towards it. For them, BBC Persian does not represent balance but something more like an acquiescence. For others it is craven timidity. Much of this is likely a product of the fact the service’s ranks have historically been drawn from the ‘reformist’ current within Iran – people shaped within the Islamic Republic’s own media ecosystem. Many of them arrived in the UK with well-rehearsed habits of managed distance from the regime’s worst realities.

This was brought home in BBC Persian’s coverage of Ayatollah Khamenei’s death at the end of February. As Iranians poured into the streets to celebrate, everywhere from Tehran to Finchley (now home to a diaspora community of many thousands), BBC Persian struck quite a different tone. Announcing his death, Farnaz Ghazizadeh, a lead presenter, appeared to seriously lose her composure on air. And something similar had happened after President Raisi’s death in 2024.

This, it should be said, is not evidence of some sort of conspiracy or duplicitous coordination on the part of BBC Persian with the regime. But it does reveal something about the proclivities of the Persian service – and why, for people who have actually lived under these men, that much-vaunted BBC impartiality has been seriously compromised.

It is not just BBC Persian either – BBC News suffers similar problems. The widespread and popular protests against the Islamic regime from the end of December into the New Year were under-reported or often ignored. And the subsequent lethal regime crackdown, resulting in the massacre of protesters, took too long to meaningfully register. When it finally did, the broadcaster’s estimates of likely casualties were overcautious – putting the death toll in the thousands, rather than the likely figure of tens of thousands. In terms of BBC News’s analyses too, it painted protesters’ grievances as stubbornly economic, even as the little footage that was escaping Iran suggested almost immediately, far broader, more terminal frustrations.

As it has for many in the Jewish community, the corporation’s position on Israel has felt more like activism than journalism. Right up until her departure as BBC head of news last year, Deborah Turness had repeatedly proclaimed the BBC’s solidarity with ‘journalists’ in Gaza – a position that would have been unthinkable in any previous era of BBC editorial culture. Its coverage of the war in Gaza has been consistent with that posture: obsessive in its focus, imbalanced in treatment, and in common with much of the British establishment, marked by a chronic unwillingness to name plainly the theocratic, annihilationist ideology at the heart of Gazan political and social life. The same Islamist ideology, in its essential character, that the Islamic Republic has spent decades imposing on Iran.

The genuine menace of Islamist ideology is all around us today. Two Jews were murdered outside a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur last year. Not long after, two Muslim men were convicted of plotting what police believe would have been the deadliest terror attack in British history – an ISIS-inspired plan to massacre hundreds of Jews, again on the streets of Manchester. In 2024, Israeli musician Itay Kashti had been lured to a remote cottage in Wales, handcuffed to a radiator and brutally beaten. In February, a Gail’s bakery in North London was trashed for tangential links to Israel; the Guardian ran a piece that fell just short of justifying why. And then the burning of those four Hatzola ambulances.

And now, it’s not just Jewish people under attack. Iranian opposition supporters have begun to see their cars and homes targeted for arson and over the past week, we can add to that list an attack on an Iranian TV station, two more London synagogues (one in Kenton and one in Finchley), a Jewish charity’s offices and the Israeli Embassy, which was apparently targeted twice last week.

The official response to all this is depressingly familiar. Statements are made. Security outside synagogues is apparently tightened. ‘Antisemitism has no place in Britain’, the Prime Minister seems to imagine… Meanwhile the attacks keep coming and the online sewer continues to flow – a vile stream of hatred across social media that no government has seriously confronted and no platform meaningfully checks. And the ideas themselves, of course, remain entirely and lethally untouched – the ideology behind all this managed scrupulously out of sight.

Only a moment’s reflection takes us back to the protests and unrest after the awful Southport killings in the summer of 2024. Starmer could not have been more outraged or urgent in his response – concerning, as it happens, communities of mainly working-class white Brits. The law was deployed with unusual speed and severity, court hearings were fast-tracked, anyone and everyone even remotely connected to these events seemed to be prosecuted and in many cases imprisoned, often for longer than the same conduct in a different, less political atmosphere.

And meanwhile, here in 2026, when Jews are placed in increasing physical danger, with two already murdered just for being Jews, better security feels about as serious as it’s going to get. Where is that same personal contempt from Starmer for these people? Where is his zero-tolerance response to the escalating anti-Semitic violence which is happening now? And while the political classes sneer at Trump’s supposed messianic delusions and condemn Israel’s action against Hezbollah, actually committed religious fundamentalists in our own society are increasingly doing their worst on an almost daily basis – and seem somehow forever to dodge the political agenda.

The Iranian cause could have hardly been more legible. Freedom from theocratic tyranny, freedom for women and minorities, and that special freedom – not to be gunned down by your own government in the thousands. A generation or so ago, their plight would have been so obvious to us.

And if we did not know the response they’d actually received was in large part the result of Europe’s oldest pathology, we might be tempted to read their lack of popular appeal as the inevitable fate of darker-skinned people telling an uncomfortable story in contemporary Britain. They are, after all, from a Muslim-majority country and refusing the script assigned to them. They should, by the logic of the culture around them, be the recipients of progressive solidarity – not its critics. But they are supposed to be talking about Islamophobia and not Islamism. And they should be on the Gaza march, not outside Downing Street demanding the proscription of the IRGC. Their inconvenience is layered: they carry the wrong flag, the wrong narrative and are in the wrong skin.

What has changed is not the Iranians. It is us. The solidarity that should have been extended to them was always conditional on accepting certain articles of faith that Western progressivism now implicitly requires. When the Iranian diaspora naturally and proudly aligned with Israel, they found themselves irreconcilably at odds with this worldview, one cultivated by activists and institutions over many years – and one in which the word genocide now travels freely, stripped of its meaning and singularly indicting one people, and one state, alone.

By the time of the Islamic Republic’s massacres in January, the flag of that state was no longer seeable, its name, Israel, no longer sayable. The blue and white Star of David had become the purest kind of trigger – loaded with a presumed and totalising injustice and the weight of everything the culture had learned, or remembered, to deplore. By hoisting Israel’s colours the Iranians found themselves utterly immiscible with the reigning narrative and so, in a very real way, genuinely invisible, too.

There is a profound difference between not knowing and refusing to know. The Iranian diaspora arrived in this country with a cause that should have felt unmistakably just and historically grounded. But they chose truth over indulging one of the West’s oldest and most persistent prejudices, and truth also over the lie of diversity at any cost. That is their distinction. It is also, for now, their continued invisibility.

The question this poses is not really about Iran. It is about what kind of society cannot recognise, in the people standing directly in front of it, the values it still claims to hold.

Spiked-on-Line/April 21, 2026

Written by Max Sadie. He is a photographer who has been documenting the Iranian diaspora and its protest movement in London.

Image: Max Sadie

In the ranks of the new ‘conservatives’, there will be room for burkas, but no room for anyone at all concerned about them. “It’s what the Conservative party is about – and we are ground-breaking,” Arnold claimed, and indeed nothing is quite as ‘groundbreaking’ as going back to Islamic medievalism and bringing Afghanistan to Blackburn. It’s almost as groundbreaking as 9/11 and the conquest of Constantinople.

What will be truly groundbreaking is when the cathedrals have been made into mosques, William and Kate convert to Islam, and Christians tiptoe around Islamic sensibilities lest they be bombed, beheaded or otherwise murdered. But then I suppose that the last one has already been achieved and the rest is just a matter of nailing down the details and the dissidents.

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What we are doing is civilization suicide. Islam isn’t here to take part; Islam is here to take over. Wake up. Truly, wake up.

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In a major update for the May 16th Unite the Kingdom rally in London, Tommy shares heartfelt gratitude for an extraordinary act of generosity from American businessman and philanthropist Dr Bob Shillman, who has contributed a remarkable $100,000 to support the event.

This contribution has been absolutely vital. Without Dr. Shillman’s backing, reaching this stage of preparation simply would not have been possible. His support reflects not only generosity, but a deep commitment to a shared cause that reaches beyond borders.

Dr. Shillman joins the conversation to speak passionately about the preservation of Western culture—describing it as an issue of absolute importance. He highlights the enduring “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and the United States, united in their belief that the values, traditions, and identity of the West must be protected for future generations.

At the same time, despite this incredible contribution, there remains a crucial funding gap. Organising what is expected to be one of the largest gatherings in central London requires significant resources, particularly to ensure that every attendee can clearly see and hear the speakers through a professional-grade sound and screen system. This final stage is essential to delivering the event at the level it deserves.

Momentum is building, and the foundation has been laid—but more support is urgently needed to bring this vision fully to life. This is a defining moment. With continued backing, this event can stand as a powerful expression of unity, purpose, and cultural pride.

This video is both a message of sincere thanks—and a call to action.

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Please support the event here: https://www.urbanscoop.news/support-us/

“Trump Time” has transformed warfare. In just two sets of days, in June 2025 then again in February 2026, Iran’s core military infrastructure was almost totally obliterated, allowing the focus to shift to sustained economic pressure. Trump’s “little excursion” has been one of the fastest, most effective, least costly military operations in modern history.

“Trump Time” also brought negotiation techniques that departed from past practice. Historically, diplomatic engagements with Iran have been lengthy, baroque, often stretching over years to provide Iran with opportunities for delay and recalibration. Trump instituted shorter timelines sown with threats of escalation, evidently to prevent Tehran from using its favorite stalling tactic: forever-talks.

Through his unconventional statecraft, and his breaking from a long run of US failures, Trump – in a blend of military assertiveness, economic pressure and strategic unpredictability – decided to win.

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Image: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

“For far too long - all the way back to 1979 to be exact - nations have tolerated Iran’s destructive and destabilizing behavior in the Middle East and beyond. Those days are over. Iran has been the leading sponsor of terrorism, and their pursuit of nuclear weapons threatens the civilized world. We will never let that happen.”

~ Donald J. Trump (quote from 2020) ~

Afc Newsletter April 25, 2026

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