Brendan O’Neill

So now we know: nowhere is safe from the entitled fury of the Just Stop Oil mob. Not even Stonehenge. That prehistoric wonder, one of the oldest monuments of humankind, has been showered with orange powder paint by JSO’s loons. They say they want to ‘raise awareness’ of the climate crisis. All they’ve really raised awareness of is what conceited, heartless narcissists they are. These people really do believe they are saving the planet, don’t they? This was cultural desecration. It was savagery masquerading as protest. To attack a 5,000-year-old monument, this stone echo of the earliest stirrings of human civilisation, is to show horrific disregard for the history and people of this nation.

Every now and then you see an event and you think to yourself: ‘This will go down in history.’ Last night’s revolt of the Jews of London against a ‘pro-Palestine’ mob is one such event. Jews and their allies gathered at the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley to defend its showing of a film about Hamas’s fascistic massacre at the Nova music festival on 7 October. Unbelievably – or not, perhaps – the ‘Palestine solidarity’ set wanted the screening to be cancelled. No way, said the Jewish rebels, loudly and proudly, many of them draped in the Israeli flag. It was truly stirring stuff, a bold act of people’s defiance against cancel culture and the slow, lethal creep of a new anti-Semitism.

I see JK Rowling is being cruel again. Her nasty streak is off its leash. She’s bullying random people and engaging in ‘unedifying’ behaviour. What monstrous utterance has she issued this time? What fresh bigotry has spewed from her tweeting fingers? Brace yourselves: she called a man a man. Yes, hold the front page: a woman has accurately described a member of the male sex. I’m old enough to remember when a public figure had to crack a racist joke or say something nice about Hitler in order to hit the headlines. Now they just have to use the word ‘bloke’ about a bloke. Rowling is actually pushing back against cruelty It was over the weekend that Rowling committed her blasphemy.

Remember when Irish singer Róisín Murphy was set upon by the mob last year? Her crime: she criticised puberty blockers and said we should stop dishing them out like candy to vulnerable kids. The blowback was furious. Armies of activists damned her as a transphobe, a bigot, a bitch.  They pronounced her ‘over’, which is PC-speak for ‘unpersoned’. They threatened to boycott her gigs. Virtually every review of her new album, Hit Parade, contained a swipe about her sinful utterance. The most shameful was the Guardian’s. It’s a great record, the reviewer said, but it comes with the ‘ugly stain’ of its creator’s evil views.

Well done everyone for ruining Mother’s Day for the Princess of Wales. I hope you’re proud of yourselves. A young-ish mum posts a lovely photo of herself surrounded by her beaming kids and instead of saying ‘Ahh’ you pore over it like lunatic sleuths for signs of villainous photoshopping. End result: mum issues an apology. For doing something sweet. On Mother’s Day. You all need to get off the internet. The obsession with that pic of Catherine and her three children has become unhinged. It’s still on the front pages of the papers. ‘PICTURE OF CHAOS’, screams the Mirror. Oh behave.

There’s a new movement in town: Philistines for Palestine. Not content with traipsing through the streets every other weekend to holler their hatred for Israel, now ‘pro-Palestine’ activists are taking aim at art. Witness yesterday’s fevered attack on the painting of Lord Balfour at Cambridge university – an act of petulant, self-satisfied philistinism that will do precisely nothing to help people in Gaza.  The slashing of the painting was carried out by a member of a group called Palestine Action. She walked up to the 1914 portrait and sprayed it with red paint before wielding her knife to cut it to shreds. Why target Balfour? Because he played a key role in creating the modern state of Israel. And to the manically Israelophobic left, there are few sins as grave as that.

I don’t understand right-wingers who spend most of their time on the internet. Often they’re found tut-tutting over what they view as the haughty refusal of Muslims to integrate into British society. And yet when it is proposed that we build a monument to the Muslims who fought with us in two world wars – surely the ultimate act of integration into a nation’s values – they spit out their tea in fury. They’re hopping mad when Muslims don’t integrate, and ticked off when they do. What gives? Some keyboard warriors see it differently This is the news that the government will give £1 million towards a memorial for Muslim soldiers. Jeremy Hunt announced it in his Budget speech.

‘William: Fighting in Gaza must be brought to an end’, bellows the Daily Telegraph's front page today, next to an image of a distressed-looking Prince of Wales. Call me a Cromwellian, but what century are we in? I thought the days of British royals haughtily issuing moral instructions, least of all to foreigners, were behind us. I find William’s intervention in the Gaza crisis deeply troubling. To be fair to him (briefly) he didn’t quite order the Israelis to quit their pursuit of Hamas. But he did signal his moral revulsion for the war. And that raises serious questions about the role of the royals. Do we really want our future king wading in on geopolitical matters? I don’t. What about those wars, William?

So Labour still has cranks in its ranks. The party remains a haven for conspiracy theorists. For all Keir Starmer’s claims to have rooted out the ‘anti-Zionist’ hotheads that swarmed the party in the Corbyn years, there still seem to be a fair few around. Consider the Azhar Ali affair. Mr Ali is the Labour candidate in the upcoming Rochdale by-election. This is a man who has promoted the poisonous, post-truth claim that Israel ‘deliberately’ allowed the Hamas pogrom of 7 October to go ahead. Who has said Israel permitted the slaughter of more than a thousand of its own citizens so that it would have a ‘green light’ to invade Gaza. Ali made these vile utterances at a meeting of the Lancashire Labour party shortly after the 7 October attacks.

We really have seen the worst of politics over the past 24 hours. I’m not referring to Rishi Sunak’s dig at Keir Starmer for not knowing what a woman is – a swipe made while Esther Ghey, mother of the murdered trans teenager Brianna, was in Parliament. I’m referring to the cynical milking of this Commons spat by those who are desperate to get one over on the Prime Minister. They're calling Sunak ‘crass’, but that insult suits them far better. It isn't the PM who has lost his moral bearings – it’s his noisy, fuming critics. All Sunak did during Prime Minister's Questions was mock his opposite number for his ceaseless U-turning, including on the question of what a woman is. Sir Keir is notoriously bad at giving a straight answer to that simplest of queries.