Brendan O’Neill

How did it come to this? How did we arrive at a situation where it fell to a court of law to tell us what a woman is? That’s my overriding emotion today. I’m delighted the Supreme Court has ruled that a woman is legally defined as a person with female biological characteristics. But I’m gobsmacked that we apparently needed five judges to tell us something our species has known since we first came down from the trees. What sweet relief the judges made the right decision. But the garlands should go to For Women Scotland The ruling of the Supreme Court is fantastically sensible. It unambiguously states that the sex-based rights outlined in the Equality Act 2010 are based on biological sex. So where the Act refers to ‘women’, it means biological women.

We are all betrayed by our body language eventually. It’s our inner quisling, itching to expose to the world the feelings our more sentient side would prefer to keep hidden. Yesterday it was Jess Phillips’s turn to be snitched on by her own mannerisms. The surliness with which she listened to MPs speak about the ‘grooming gang’ scandal was a true mask-off moment. Without words it told us all we need to know about this government. Ms Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, came to the chamber to tell MPs that the government might not proceed with the five inquiries into ‘grooming gangs’ promised by the Home Secretary. Instead there’ll be a ‘more flexible’ approach, possibly including the setting up of victim-led local ‘panels’.

Israel’s denial of entry to two Labour MPs is a truly shaming moment. Not for Israel, which, like all sovereign states, is perfectly at liberty to permit or deny entry to anyone it chooses. No, for Labour. That our ally, the Jewish nation, is so wary of Britain’s ruling party that it felt compelled to banish two of its representatives should generate some serious soul-searching in Labour. The flap over Israel’s ejection of the MPs Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang has been mad. It’s the hissy fit heard around the world. Leafy London is up in arms. ‘I am outraged’, thundered Emily Thornberry on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. Israel will ‘rue the day that they did this to British parliamentarians’, she said. What’s she going to do – write a mean tweet?

So Zarah Sultana, the MP for Coventry South, is in favour of building airports now? That’s a turnaround. In January she railed against Labour party leader Keir Starmer when he dropped his opposition to a third runway at Heathrow. To execute such a U-turn in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’ is ‘reckless, short-sighted and indefensible’, she cried. ‘The planet’ will suffer thanks to Sir Keir, she warned. Yet now she’s all about airport construction. Suddenly she loves it. Not here, though. Not for us undeserving Brits. No, it’s in Mirpur in Kashmir that she wants to see terminals being erected and runways constructed.

‘Céad míle fáilte’, the Irish love to say. It means ‘a hundred thousand welcomes’. It’s emblazoned in the arrivals hall at Dublin airport. You’ll see it written in the Celtic font on the walls of Ireland’s cosy pubs. It has led to Ireland being christened ‘the land of a thousand welcomes’, where all visitors, no matter their heritage, will be greeted with a hearty hug. The tragic truth is that Ireland is awash with Israelophobia Well, not all. There’s one group of people to whom Ireland’s famed friendliness seems not to extend. ‘Zionists are not welcome in Ireland’, barks an Irish leftie at an Israeli gentleman in a chilling video clip that is going viral. ‘F**k you and f**k Israel’, she says and then spits on him.

If you’re a foreigner who hates Jews, should you be allowed to move to Britain? For me it’s a no-brainer: absolutely not. The safety and dignity of Britain’s Jews count for infinitely more than the ‘rights’ of a racist migrant. Does the Labour government agree? Does it agree that overseas anti-Semites are not welcome here? We are about to find out. There are disturbing reports emerging that a man from Gaza with very iffy views has arrived in Britain. He goes by the name Abu Wadee. He is said to be an ‘influencer’ with a substantial following on social media. Last week he reportedly posted a video of himself sporting a keffiyeh while crammed onto a dinghy in the English Channel. ‘Thank God, we arrived in Britain’, the video caption said.

Perusing the Zelensky-bashing of the Very Online right, I found myself thinking: ‘This reminds me of something.’ The branding of Ukraine's president as a ‘welfare queen’ who is draining America’s coffers. The libelling of Ukraine as a uniquely corrupt nation whose thirst for war threatens to damn all of mankind to disaster. The shameful blaming of Ukraine for its own invasion, as if Russia had no choice but to violently rebuke its uppity, vexing neighbour. Ukraineophobia and Israelophobia are both blights on the body politic Then it struck me: Ukraine is to the cranky right what Israel is to the mad left. Their Zelensky Derangement Syndrome creepily mirrors the frenzied loathing for Israel that has been infecting leftists for years.

So Hamas has committed yet another act of depravity against the Bibas family. It said Shiri Bibas was in one of those four coffins it put on grim display in Gaza yesterday before handing them over to the Red Cross. But she wasn’t. It was the remains of some unknown person that Hamas passed off as the mother-of-two whose return the whole of Israel has been crying out for. Truly, is there no end to the cynicism and savagery of these terrorists? Israel says forensic testing has confirmed that two of the coffins contained the bodies of the Bibas children: Ariel, who was four when he was kidnapped, and Kfir, who was just nine months old. A third coffin contained the remains of the 84-year-old Israeli peace activist Oded Lifschitz.

We need to talk about what we witnessed in Gaza today. The sick ceremonial handover of the bodies of slain Israelis was a new low, even for Hamas. This was the theatre of death, a public spectacle of Jewish agony for the delectation of voyeuristic anti-Semites. If the world fails to speak out against this racist, morbid stunt, then we are in even bigger moral trouble than I thought. The bodies of four hostages were returned. Oded Lifschitz, an 84-year-old peace activist, and the three late members of the Bibas family. Mum Shiri and her two tiny sons: Ariel, who was four when he was kidnapped, and Kfir, who was just nine months old.

Some of us switch off when we hear a ‘loony left’ story. We might cock an eyebrow at the latest tale of progressive idiocy but that’s about it. They’re at it again, we think, and move on. But there are reports this morning of some truly perverse behaviour among the activist classes and we cannot afford to laugh it off or look the other way. It’s far too serious for that. It’s the revelation that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign applied for the right to protest against Israel on the very day Israelis were being butchered in their hundreds by the neo-fascists of Hamas. On 7 October 2023, Hamas’s pogrom still unfolding, PSC notified the Metropolitan Police of its intention to march against Israel on the streets of London the following Saturday: 14 October.

England ditched its blasphemy laws back in 2008. No longer would it be an offence to engage in ‘contemptuous, reviling, scurrilous or ludicrous’ speech concerning God. No longer would any poor soul be hauled off to jail, far less to the stocks, for the crime of profanity. So you can imagine my surprise when a man was arrested in Manchester on Saturday after desecrating a copy of the Quran. Was blasphemy snuck back on to the statute books without anyone noticing? Sadly, Manchester’s cops appear to take a different view Reading about Saturday’s arrest, I found myself wondering what century this is. The man allegedly live-streamed himself burning a Quran ‘page by page’.

Imagine talking about the transatlantic slave trade and not saying the word African. Or discussing the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda without saying ‘the Tutsis;. It would be unthinkable, right? Impossible, in fact. How could you talk about such grave crimes without mentioning the victims, without making at least a passing reference to those whose liberty and lives were ravaged in the barbarism? I worry that we are only half-remembering the Holocaust Well, quite a few people managed it yesterday. They talked about the Holocaust without naming its victims. They talked about this ‘sacrifice by fire’ – to give Holocaust its literal translation – without saying who it was that was burnt to death.