Advocating for the defeat of Hamas is 'calling for genocide'?

lmao

Yes, in the same sense that I deny the existence of unicorns. I'm also a unicorn-denier.

He's said a lot since October 7th and before it.

A selection of more recent ones by running a search for his tweets using the word 'Hamas'

https://x.com/richimedhurst/status/1802965814053670956

Hamas' Qassam Brigades are guerilla fighters engaged in armed struggle against an occupying power, which is their right under international law.

https://x.com/richimedhurst/status/1795133769172623378

The only men on this planet willing to do something about children being murdered in Gaza are to be found in Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Resistance Axis. So obviously the Western Zionist media have no answer but to frame these Resistance fighters as "terrorists"

https://x.com/richimedhurst/status/1794489366276194554

Hamas have just captured a group of Israeli soldiers

LOL

https://x.com/richimedhurst/status/1792472920029012293

Iran’s president and foreign minister have died.

If it is an act of God, there is naught we can say. If it was an act of treachery, this will not deter or hinder the Resistance.

Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah have always become stronger after losses like this.

The struggle continues.

https://x.com/richimedhurst/status/1785809457194188820

Why do you denounce Hamas and Hezbollah?

Do you also denounce the French resistance when you condemn the Nazis?

I'm so bored of Westerners comparing the only armed front that Palestinians/Arabs have to their oppressors, and acting like this is some kind of nuanced comment

https://x.com/richimedhurst/status/1781613656238620939

They hate Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. because they fight back. Because they refuse to roll over when the Israelis and Americans snap their fingers.

That is the only reason, and nothing else.

He also regularly writes for and appears on Al Mayadeen (Hezbollah affiliates), the Iranian Regime's Press TV, and Russia Today.

And yes, you would be correct if you guessed his views on Syria's Bashar al-Assad based on this information.

So it's not an Elbit Systems factory, it's a separate French-owned company which owner company has a separate contract with Elbit Systems, and the article doesn't actually say what this particular factory produces, who it sells to, or what the financial value of it is.

Great. Really cleared that up.

How much of the UK's annual total of £18.2m in arms exports to Israel comes from this factory?

Also if committing massacres made the PLO a terror group

No, it's when you commit terrorist acts that you become a terrorist group. Like the PLO did, repeatedly, over many many years, and bragged about.

Terrorists are by definition non-state actors.

And yes I've seen the Pallywood stuff coming out of Gaza just like everyone else has. It's the same bullshit they pull every time they cross a line and find their shit getting pushed in by Israel like in Lebanon in 1982.

receives billions in funding and weapons from the US and UK

In 2023 total UK arms exports to Israel totalled £18.2 million. We do not provide them with foreign financial assistance.

So you were only off by a little bit.

In 2023 Israel received approx. £3.3 bn in foreign assistance from the USA, the large majority loaned to purchase US supplies of both defensive and offensive munitions. That same year, Egypt also received about £1.5 bn in foreign assistance from the USA, Jordan £1.7 bn, etc.

As I said it is a form of political repression.

Yes, that's why it's good

Taking his day job seriously, I see

No. I want the IDF to be given the weapons to finish off Hamas. The Palestinians have no future while Hamas rules in Gaza, and the IDF are the only military force in the world with both the capacity and motivation to destroy Hamas - it certainly won't come from Palestinians themselves. Israel can't plausibly be expected to allow Gaza or the West Bank to become a state if that means Hamas coming to power.

The PLO was a terror group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma'alot_massacre

Two examples off the top of my head of a terrorist group engaging in terrorist violence.

What weapons?

I don't agree with their methods or their objectives, so I don't see anything to praise here as 'brave'.

Only a handful of countries consider Hamas a terror group. Funnily enough these are the same countries that are complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Those are also more or less the only countries I'd trust to be able to correctly identify a terrorist group.

This is a “leopards ate my face” law. It’s fine until you get caught up in it however unlikely that appears now.

I simply don't support terrorist organisations. It isn't difficult.

I don't have a problem with any element of that law.

I'm profoundly comfortable with people being arrested and imprisoned for substantial sentences for expressing support for Hamas and similar Jihadi terror groups.

Good, for months now he's openly expressed his support and encouragement for a proscribed terrorist organisation, i.e. Hamas. He's not ambiguous about this: he thinks October 7th was great and that Hamas should do it again. He literally travelled to Iran and posted photos next to IRGC rockets and missiles with the caption "Long live the resistance".

He's not a journalist. He's a vicious antisemite who takes pleasure in attacking Jews and is a proud and unrepentant promoter and supporter of terrorism.

Throw away the key. I don't know why he's allowed into the country at all.

Tends to happen when you knowingly break the law

You realise that cartoon came from a far-right Neo-Nazi forum, right?

And you realise what that does to this conversation?

No, I mean comparing the State of Israel to the Nazis.

The World Jewish Congress link explains why that’s antisemitic. You should read it so you can work on overcoming your own bigotries.

There really is no plausible ‘fetish outfit’ that could possibly under any circumstances be appropriate for work at the Civil Service.

I cannot believe this even needed to be clarified in the first place

Yeah probably. Most ‘big’ accounts aren’t on Mastodon anyway though, they’re on Threads.

Neither Mastodon or Bluesky ever really clicked with me, although I’ve tried and will continue to use both, but I enjoy using Threads because there’s so much cool non-political content there. My feed is archaeologists or astronomists, historians writers and photographers. It being able to connect up to the Fediverse is cool too.

I've noticed that this sort of rank antisemitism is pretty commonplace on Lemmy, unfortunately.

https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/antisemitism-defined-why-drawing-comparisons-of-contemporary-israeli-policy-to-the-nazis-is-antisemitic

No, they’re a hostile power collaborating with our enemies including Russia and China. The drones used by Russia are purchased from Iran. They are intent on a campaign of genocide against our allies in Israel and have become a destabilising force across the wider Middle East, causing Lebanon and Yemen to become failed states.

This juvenile self-loathing anti-Westernism is honestly so boring at this point.

The Islamic Regime in Tehran should be toppled at the earliest possible opportunity.

They are enemies of Britain and we do not support them in anything.

The Regime in Tehran should be undermined, opposed, attacked wherever possible.

That's a form of truly psychotic delusion.

The sooner the Islamic Regime in Tehran falls the better. The Iranian people deserve freedom.

One obvious reason the author doesn't explore is that neither Wales nor Scotland has ever experienced mass immigration nor profound demographic changes in their population.

Scotland remains 92.87% white (2022), Wales 94.2% (2021), compared to England at 81% (2021).

In Scotland, 2.2% identity as Muslim, 0.4% as Hindu, 0.1% as Jewish.

In England, 6.7% identify as Muslim, 1.8% as Hindu, 0.5% as Jewish.

Scotland and Wales are therefore much more homogenous as populations. They're whiter, less religious, and from similar backgrounds. They're not as diverse as England is and therefore don't have the challenges of community cohesion and social solidarity that England does.

It therefore doesn’t have the levels of intra- and inter-communal diversity which can provoke the kinds of tensions we've seen playing out in the streets of England over recent years, whether in Hindutva-Muslim ethnoreligious violence in Leicester or these anti-Islam and racist riots in recent weeks.

Scotland's sense of its national identity has also not been challenged to the same extent as in England. Nor has a patriotic attitude towards Scottishness been derided as hateful, bigoted or xenophobic, as it has in England. (This sometimes leads to highly funny events, though, like when ScotNats try to claim they were victims of the British Empire.)

Personally, Threads is the only social media platform where the content on it generally improves my mood by showing me lots of funny, cute or interesting content. It's the only one where I don't feel frustrated or angry or outraged by the content the algorithm surfaces or baited. It feels like the feed wants me to smile and cheer up or learn something new, rather than baiting me into getting angry and shouting at people. That counts for a lot, to me.

Interestingly, the European Union has been doing exactly this for about a year now on an experimental basis.

https://commission.europa.eu/get-involved/engage-eu-policymaking/social-media-connect-european-commission_en

https://uk.pcmag.com/social-media/140088/eu-joins-mastodon-social-network-sets-up-its-own-server

https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/press-releases/2024/edps-decentralised-social-media-pilot-end-successful-story_en

I get reliably more accurate search results with Brave Search tbh. It has a neat little AI summariser tool you can disable, an option to pay $3 a month to go ad-free, it's privacy-centric, clean design, browser-agnostic. Also, it uses its own indexer/web crawler, it doesn't just piggyback on Bing like DuckDuckGo does.

The only time I end up using Google is if I'm looking into a very recent event, like a thing happening in the world that took place in the last 12-24 hours or so. Google seems to index news articles quicker than Brave.

Except these lot don't care about the housing crisis, they're literally looking for an excuse to smash things up

I don't think that's true in many cases. You can literally just go on YouTube and look at the Sky News, Channel 4 and ITV reportage where they interview people at these protests/riots and many of them explicitly say that the reason they're there is because of the crisis in housing, the NHS, etc. and which they pin on the scale of immigration.

I'm not agreeing with them, but when you say they're just looking for an excuse to smash things up, I think you're sort of sidelining what they themselves are often saying. Obviously the vast majority are also expressing deplorable racist prejudices too, but again, we should at least take them at their word that that's why they're on the streets.

Sure we need societal change too but that alone won't fix the issue unless these problem causes are dealt with at the root.

I don't think you can solve this at the root without a) solving the very real problem that we might very well have net immigration of 1 million this year which is fucking insane; b) meaningfully invest in local councils, public services like SureStart (or some new version of it), free English language services, and finding ways to sort of push together communities with new arrivals so that they just have to get to know each other and get along, while the new arrivals revise their opinions and values in line with the new expectations. Even that would really just be a starting point but I've had a couple of pint safter work so I don't want to overstretch myself with 'grand plans.'

And since dealing with them is much quicker than dealing with large social issues that should be the priority in the next few months.

Agreed. Smash the rioters, lock them up, then I think/hope our new government will be able to take a proper look at this issue that's been bubbling up for so many years. This violence isn't isolated, it's not about social media or Tommy Ten-Names or whoever, and it won't go away even if we lock up all the rioters. We have problems in this country which require serious, thoughtful, nuanced responess in national policy.

But, again: I want the police to fucking smash these people, slam them up in a prison cell and make them regret their vile, racist, brutal attacks on innocent people.

Reddit kept the bootlickers and the lazy, Lemmy gained the anti-greed political left

sigh...

I miss some of the more casual subreddits, and somehow Lemmy is even more of an echo chamber than Reddit is, but otherwise yeah, Lemmy is fine. Especially with the Photon frontend.

Thanks, I hate it

Well sure, but then is the British government on the hook for the debt that the investors are going to be calling in?

The tension is largely inflated. It exists mostly because people like Tommy Robson and Nigel Farage claim that it does.

I don't agree. They inflate tensions that pre-exist them, and I think if we keep pretending these issues don't exist, then this is only going to get worse.

Immigration is not the cause of the housing crisis, but it's also not possible to address the housing crisis without also reducing immigration because it's not possible to build housing for 700,000+ people each year. Yearly net migration of almost 1 million is not sustainable, so the number will need to come down substantially.

I mean, they're pretty much about to go under - do they even have the £104m to pay?

Oh, that's interesting. Another user has said in reply to my comment they have the option too. I'm using Brave Browser but I don't have Stylish or anything installed