The 0.5 Per Cent Club

Of course Hamas are monsters, just like Benjamin Netanyahu. And of course Vladimir Putin is a dictator, just like Volodymyr Zelensky. All four were at least initially creatures of the forces that have arbitrarily turned against two of them now. Whereas we have always been opposed to all of them, because we are proud to be the enemies of those forces, which never let us forget it. Therefore, we have indeed always demanded the release of the hostages, among other people, and always condemned the invasion of Ukraine, among other acts in, especially but not exclusively, the south and east of that country.

The people who both opposed a ceasefire in Gaza leading to exchanges such as we were now seeing, and demanded the prosecution of war with Russia to a conclusion that was largely unspecified but which certainly included Ukrainian accession to NATO, ought no longer to be in public life at all. They have nothing to contribute. They never did have, but their pointlessness is no longer possible to dispute. Yet they remain in control. For the time being, the superb Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone may be viewed here or here. But it has been removed from BBC iPlayer, from YouTube, and from Dailymotion. Even assuming that those who have brought that about spoke for all British Jews, which they do not, then what a thing it must be to be, based on the last census, half of one per cent of the population.

That was the same proportion as professed a gender identity different from its biological sex, the only other category with this kind of clout, which is likewise exercised by the self-appointed. If a neo-Nazi Edinburgh schoolgirl who longed to replicate the Columbine massacre is a boy because she identifies as such, and that is what the BBC is calling her, then Julia Wandel is Madeleine McCann because she identifies as such. Here we go again with the McCanns. Did they have their other two children taken away from them? Those twins were two when their parents left them with their not quite four-year-old sister in a foreign country and went out on the town. People without the McCanns' advantages lose their children for far less.

Likewise, in 2014, for purely ideological reasons, a couple were able to move what were then their five very young children, British citizens all, to a place where they were bound, in due season, to be conscripted into their perpetration of the atrocities against Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Lebanon. From the English village with the seventh highest house prices outside London, they were able to move those British children to a warzone, where two of them were killed in 2023, one while still only 15 years old. So much for Social Services. So much for the safeguarding-industrial complex. So much for Prevent.