Should Never Have Been In Doubt

Ben Reiff writes:

Israel’s official and unofficial spokespeople are in damage control mode after a senior military official admitted last week that Israel accepts the death toll published by Gaza’s health ministry, which currently stands at more than 70,000. This comes after two years in which Israel and its supporters took every opportunity to disparage and dismiss the health ministry’s figures, arguing that they were overblown or fabricated by Hamas.

That prestigious list of repudiators, to name just a few, includes spokespeople for Israel’s government and military, then-US president Joe Biden, US Congress, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) chief Jonathan Greenblatt, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and any number of talking heads at influential thinktanks and policy centres. Adding credibility to their denials were prominent media outlets around the world that often described Gaza’s health ministry as “Hamas-run”, thereby encouraging readers and viewers to treat the death toll with suspicion.

In truth, the reliability of the official death toll should never have been in doubt. For one thing, the UN has independently verified the accuracy of the health ministry’s figures after each of Israel’s previous bombardments of Gaza going back to 2008. For another, the data published by the health ministry since 7 October is extremely detailed: it includes a full name, date of birth, gender and ID number for all victims whose deaths were confirmed either by hospital morgues or by their relatives.

Naturally, mistakes were made amid the intensity of an Israeli onslaught that virtually destroyed Gaza’s entire health system, but these were remarkably few and promptly rectified: Sky News found last year that entries in the death toll list with missing or invalid ID numbers dropped from 2,769 in early April to just 313 by the end of July. As such, several external investigations of the published data found that it stood up to scrutiny.

Back in January 2024, my colleague Yuval Abraham reported that Israel’s military intelligence agencies had even surveilled health ministry personnel in Gaza to check whether their data was accurate; upon finding that it was, they subsequently began using it in internal intelligence briefings. “In every status briefing, when everyone updates each other on what’s happening, there’s a slide that shows the current number of civilians killed in Gaza. And that’s based almost exclusively on the Hamas health ministry,” an intelligence source told him.

Yet still the denials continued, for two whole years. And even now, the Israeli army came out quickly after last week’s reports to claim that “the details published do not reflect official IDF data” – despite Israeli media outlets clearly stating that this is what they were told by a senior official in a private briefing.

So are we about to see a wave of mea culpas, or at least a modicum of self-reflection, from all those who peddled the line that the death toll was not to be trusted? Don’t bank on it. In fact, some of them already appear to be shifting the goalposts, arguing that while the overall death toll of 70,000 may be accurate, what actually matters is the ratio of civilians to militants among them, which they claim is comparatively low for urban warfare.

Throughout the war, Israeli leaders have cited a civilian casualty ratio as low as 1:1, or, more recently, 1.5:1, and now they allege that militants account for as many as 25,000 of Gaza’s dead. But these claims, too, fall apart under basic scrutiny.

To understand why, you need only consider whom the Israeli army defines as a militant. After invading the strip in late 2023, the army began establishing militarised areas that it referred to as “kill zones” with arbitrary and often invisible boundaries, inside which they would automatically kill any Palestinian who entered, including children – and retroactively label them as terrorists. (This currently includes the roughly 60% of Gaza’s territory that the Israeli army still occupies despite the ceasefire.)

And the army’s own data proves it. Last August, +972 magazine (where I am deputy editor) and The Guardian published a joint investigation revealing the existence of a classified Israeli intelligence database that maintains updated information on the status of every Palestinian in Gaza whom, through a combination of mass surveillance and AI algorithms, Israel suspects to be a militant belonging to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. According to data we obtained from this database in May last year, Israel had killed fewer than 9,000 militants at a time when the health ministry’s overall death toll stood at 53,000.

The database, therefore, indicated that 83% of Gaza’s dead were civilians, pointing to a civilian casualty ratio with few parallels in modern warfare that adds further weight to accusations of genocide levelled at Israel by the UN, human rights groups and leading genocide scholars. (The army stated in response that “figures presented in the article are incorrect”, without denying the existence of the database and without specifying which data it disputed.) 

And that’s if we’re going by the health ministry’s figures, which do not include the roughly 10,000 bodies still thought to be under the rubble; nor do they include “indirect” deaths from starvation, disease, hypothermia and treatable health conditions, which often exceed “direct” deaths in war zones. Indeed, various scientific studies conducted throughout the war have estimated that the true death toll from Israel’s onslaught may in fact have gone well beyond 100,000.

While we won’t know for certain how high the death toll since 7 October really is until Israel stops bombing Gaza and preventing the local and international media from being able to report freely across the strip, there is one thing we can be sure of: the climate of denial regarding the health ministry’s figures helped Israel keep slaughtering Palestinians en masse with impunity.

Turning Saint Peter's Keys

No one self-identifies as a schismatic. They can always tell you at great length why they are not. But they are.

Other than the Maronites, who have never been out of communion with Rome, none of the Eastern Catholic Churches dates from earlier than the sixteenth century, and several are a lot newer than that. There was no provision for Personal Ordinariates until 2009.

If the Society of Saint Pius X proceeded to ordain more bishops, then there would be no collective way back for several hundred years.

At Full Capacity

Joanna Hardy-Susskind tweets:

I could literally reduce the Crown Court backlog in 9 steps starting tomorrow. And precisely none of it would involve tampering with jury trials.

First. Sit at full capacity. Open closed courtrooms. The argument ‘there aren’t enough judges or lawyers’ really doesn’t lend itself to supporting a Crown Court Bench Division either. Open the physical space. Without it, prospects of success are 0%.

Second. Reverse the resigned acceptance that companies with lucrative contracts of public money can’t drive a prison van up a road on time, or at all. They can. And they should. And if they don’t - the contract should be pulled.

Third. List cases sensibly. Stop listing interlocutory matters in the middle of trials. Step one will help. Giving each case proper time (instead of simply setting stage dates on a conveyor belt) will help resolve cases sensibly. Justice isn’t a factory. Stop treating it as one.

Fourth. Repair. Why am I walking around wet carpets? Why is the temperature either ‘inferno’ or ‘arctic’? Why are the jury being sent home because it’s too hot/cold/wet? Why - in 2026 - can we still not master a videolink? We are the only adults left who cannot do this.

Fifth. Recruit and retain judges. And recruit and retain judges who have the very specific skills required to navigate the rough and the tumble of adversarial criminal litigation. This will require investment. It’s worth it.

Sixth. Take real steps to stem the attrition of criminal barristers. Last week I had a conversation with 2 other senior barristers fantasising about being a) a florist, b) a dressmaker & c) a stay at home mummy. We are all experienced RASSO lawyers. And we were deadly serious.

Seven. Legislate that full credit for a guilty plea is available until the evidence is served. Yes ‘he knows if he did it’ but, welcome, my friends, to the real world. The prosecution need to prove their case & - shock, horror - when they can people are much more likely to plead.

Eight. The ‘Better Case Management’ regime is the funniest name in the world for a system that is neither better nor managed. Most days it resembles a clown car that has become a flaming inferno. Work out why hardly anyone ever complies with a court direction. And solve that.

Nine. We need emergency measures to get the backlog down. Now. If you’re willing to run the gauntlet of public opinion by fiddling with jury trials then do this instead: A set period. A set group of offences (non violent, non sexual). An enhanced credit system for backlog cases.

I won’t trouble you with ten because it sounds counter-productive but, for anyone still interested, the option of a 4-day trial week with a 1-day ‘free’ listing day for other matters (for judge and counsel) would actually speed up the flow of the entire system considerably.

Eleven, if the MOJ were still talking to me (hi guys 🥹) is to abolish the judge’s factual summing up in cases lasting 3 days or less. The jury don’t need to hear it all again. A bullet point summary of the competing issues with a RTV would do - with the option to apply for more.

And twelve, if you’re going to commission an experienced and retired judge to opine on these matters and part of his enquiry relates to ‘efficiencies’ then maybe, just maybe, in a system that is so inefficient it is basically haemorrhaging time, maybe do that bit *first*.

Criminal barrister saying she had 9 points and making 12. A CLASSIC, YOUR HONOUR ❤️

Among The Dead Tulips

Jeffrey Epstein seems to have had a lot of secret children. Please, please, please let someone stand up at Prime Minister's Questions this week and call on Keir Starmer to condemn such irresponsibility. Both of the most recent General Elections have been won by men like that. Consensual adultery used to end Cabinet Ministers' careers, would have brought down the Prime Minister if anyone had known, and came close to bringing down the President of the United States.

The Labour Leader in the Major years was a heavy drinker, although again he had nothing on Starmer, but he refused to have Peter Mandelson in the room even then. Bryan Gould would have been better in policy terms, but the death of John Smith was the making of Mandelson, as it was the unmaking of so many better people. Yet look at the Labour Right now. Beyond Mandelson, Tony Blair himself is on Donald Trump's Board of Peace while retaining his party membership, so why would anyone vote for a parliamentary candidate who did?

The tradition represented by something like Labour First has to applaud the Chagos deal as completing a 60-year project of Denis Healey and David Miliband, but it cannot have enjoyed the transfer the Chagos Islands to a signatory to the Pelindaba Treaty. If Blue Labour still means anything, then it must oppose the deal itself, as well as the failure to defend British sovereignty in the face of the hijacking of the Marinera by the United States Coast Guard. And so on. The general decadence, if that does not suggest too much fun, was demonstrated when this afternoon's Commons debate on Mandelson was treated to, and respectfully heard, the contribution of Tulip Siddiq.

All That Glitters

Last January, Rupert Lowe, Richard Tice, Jim Allister, James McMurdock and Lee Anderson presented a Bill to ban Quantitative Easing while returning to the Gold Standard. Today, although there has been some rallying, the price of gold fell nearly 10 per cent, and the price of silver fell 15 per cent. Cryptocurrencies also dropped markedly.

Well, of course. Far from being somehow opposites, metallists and cryptobros both fail to understand that the issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. It says so on the banknotes. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with readily available fiscal and monetary means of controlling any inflationary effect, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control, since the responsibility of the Government is to give that currency its value while ensuring the supply of goods and services to be purchased in it. Alongside his adoption of Bernie Sanders’s cap on credit card interest, Donald Trump has begun the end of the anti-democratic era of central bank “independence”.

It is impossible for the currency-issuing State to run out of money. Money “lent” to the Treasury by the Bank of England is money “lent” to the State by the State; such “debt” will never be called in, much less will bailiffs be sent round. Call this “the Magic Money Tree” if you will. There is no comparison between running the economy and managing a household budget, or even a business. There is no “national credit card” to “max out”. “Fiscal headroom” is only the gap between the Government’s tax and spending plans and what would be allowed under the fiscal rules that it sets for itself and changes frequently.

That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to give the currency its value by controlling inflation to a politically chosen extent while discouraging certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and while encouraging others, including economic equality, which is fundamental to social cohesion and thus to patriotism. There is no debt. It is an accounting trick. The Treasury, which is the State, has issued bonds to the Bank of England, which is the State. Even if those bonds were held by anyone else, then the State could simply issue itself with enough of its own free-floating, fiat currency to redeem them. Taxation is not where the State’s money comes from. Nothing is “unaffordable”, every recession is discretionary on the part of the Government, and there is no such thing as “taxpayers’ money”. Say it again that there is no debt. There is no debt. There is no debt.

Yet while the Treasury professes to be “borrowing” far more than had been “expected”, the £100 limit on contactless card payments is to be lifted from next month, by a Government that refuses to protect the right to use cash. Of course I use my card and app all the time. But this is about vulnerable people, local circular economies, and civil liberties. In France, Article 642-3 of the penal code bans traders from refusing cash payment. We need that here. No, the legal tender thing does not cover it. You are not in debt to the vendor until you have the goods.

A suspicious number of those who decry us sceptics of the cashless society also claim that we are under constant threat of cyberattacks, and a surprising number of those who are forthright against the cashless society are enthusiasts for cryptocurrencies, about which the clue is in the name. In the cashless economy, every penny that we spent would be tracked. Cryptocurrencies are beyond democratic political control. And the combination of the two would be, and increasingly is, that level of tracking by those who were thus unaccountable. Resist.

They Take Without Giving, So Send Them Away

Expulsion from the Labour Party is a badge of honour that I am delighted not to have to share with Peter Mandelson. Considering how he treated material that had been sent to him as a Minister of the Crown, has the King removed him from the Privy Council? And for malfeasance in public office, has he been arrested yet?

Dan Norris has just been arrested again. If charged again, then would he be bailed again? If so, then how? I mean, how the hell? And why? It is not as if he turns up to Parliament. Although he has one of the best voting records, because despite his own suspension from the Labour whip, his proxy vote is cast every single time by the Labour Whips.

Well, they are his successors. He and Ivor Caplin were Whips for exactly the same time, a time most notable for the vote on the Iraq War. They were exceptionally close, and with them in the Whips’ Office was Phil Woolas. All three were made Ministers soon after the Iraq vote. The then Chief Whip was the political patroness, both of Anna Turley, and of Caplin’s close friend, closest ally, former lover, and constituency successor, Peter Kyle. That Chief Whip remains an active Labour member of the House of Lords, giving it as her institutional affiliation when she endorsed a mercifully ignored book that claimed that the accused of the Cleveland child abuse scandal had been guilty all along. As the young people say, every accusation is a confession.

Kyle joined his old boss in supporting the brief Leadership campaign of Jess Phillips. “I would stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front,” said the woman who was now “Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls”. She has accused British Pakistanis of importing wives for their disabled sons. She claims to have been rude and abusive towards Diane Abbott, although it is possible that she has built her reputation on lying about having used gutter language towards a woman who was old enough to be her mother. Phillips laughs at male suicides, at male cancers, at other men’s health issues, at violence against men, at problems in boys’ educational attainment, and at fathers denied access to their children. She has said that attacks of the kind that were seen in Cologne on the New Year’s Eve of 2015-16, “happen every week in Birmingham.”

Phillips’s Leadership Campaign was chaired by Gould’s then employer, Wes Streeting, who would have become Leader when, as expected in 2019, the Conservative majority had been much reduced in 2024 but Boris Johnson had remained Prime Minister. Yes, that was barely six years ago. The nomination process now makes a contested Labour Leadership Election effectively impossible, and with And Burnham out of the way, then the looming fall of Keir Starmer should crown the long-anointed Streeting, whose then employee, Sam Gould, was a sitting councillor when he committed offences startlingly similar to those of Liron Woodcock-Velleman, who sent naked pictures of himself to a 13-year-old girl while asking her to “show me your bra”, whether she was “at home alone”, and whether she was a virgin. Woodcock-Velleman was also a Labour councillor in London, and he was such a cog in the right-wing machine that he gave the evidence of Hope Not Hate at committee stage of what has become the Online Safety Act.

And on Tuesday 2 September, Phillips, that machine’s first choice for Streeting’s stopgap, told the House of Commons that, “South Yorkshire police should never have been left to investigate themselves in this matter, and moving those investigations to the NCA is absolutely the right thing to do. I would be lying if I said that over the years I had not met girls who talked to me about how police were part of not just the cover-up but the perpetration.” Read again those words of the Minister who refused a statutory inquiry, an inquiry that had been, and still is, demanded by the Muslim candidate whom she had beaten by only 693 votes at Birmingham Yardley, which he intends to contest again, the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre.

Then read the Epstein Files and worry about inferior cultures with no respect for women and with endemic predation on young girls. As the young people say, every accusation is a confession. The conviction for corruption of the Minister for Anti-Corruption may be a Third World cliché, but Tulip Siddiq did not hold that position in Bangladesh. Britain may once have been “a high trust society”, but that probably depended who was asked, and it does not prove that the high trust was deserved, a staggering thing for any Fleet Street veteran to suggest, and an appalling thing for any journalist to wish to see “again”.

At and to the United Nations, Siddiq has represented the Awami League of her aunt, Sheikh Hasina. That party is noted for its torture chambers. Right-wing Labourites are normally very particular indeed about having links only to narrowly defined “sister parties” abroad. The Awami League is not one of those. If Siddiq is a member of it, then how is that compatible with membership of the Labour Party? Yet the Awami League has huge influence over the Labour Party in Camden. And the Labour Whip in the House of Commons still extends to Siddiq.

Muhammad Yunus was supposed to have been the Bengal Tiger until he came after Siddiq, who resigned because she had done nothing wrong and who was so obviously innocent that she refused to attend her trial. If Siddiq were anything but a right-wing Labourite, then she would be out. Perhaps unfairly, but life is hard, politics is very hard, and she comes from a political family, so she has known that from the start. As for having an aunt who had been sentenced to death for war crimes, being closely related to a convicted war criminal makes her only as Royal as the King, but not even that old Mitläufer and Minderbelasteter was ever lined up to be another Charles I, Louis XVI or Nicholas II. Siddiq must be the bluest-blooded blueblood in Britain.

To vote for a Labour parliamentary candidate is to vote for someone who positively wanted to keep such company. And while supporters and opponents of the monarchy both argue that no one can vote for or against it, we can vote for the Labour Party. Or against it.

Instaurare Omnia in Christo

On 1 July, the Society of Saint Pius X will ordain more bishops. Its schism will become realistically insurmountable. Of course the SSPX thinks that this Pope is a Modernist. It has thought the same thing about the last five, the only others under whom it has ever existed. We must be clear exactly what Lefebvrism is, and is not. It is certainly not "just traditional Catholicism", or even just Catholicism as widely practised during the Pianische Monolothismus. Rather, it makes sense only in certain very specific terms peculiar to France. Terms that, for very French reasons, it assumes to be universal when they are not.

Lefevbrist devotional and disciplinary practice is an obvious expression of, if not direct Jansenist influence, though probably so, then at least the strain in the French character that made it receptive to Jansenism. Likewise, Lefebvrist theory and organisational practice are no less obviously expressions of Gallicanism, and sometimes of very advanced Gallicanism indeed. For example, rule of the SSPX is by a General Chapter in which not only do bishops and simple presbyters have equal status, but it was considered an aberration that the last Superior General was a bishop, rather than being a simple presbyter to whom the Society's bishops would have be subject, as they are again now, with more soon to be added. Shades of the extreme Gallican attempts to prove a Dominical institution of the office of parish priest.

Lefebvrism gives perhaps the first ever formal institutional shape to the situation created by the seventeenth century, which began with three competing parties in the French Church, but which ended with two, the Gallicans and the Jansenists having effectively merged against the Ultramontanes due to the deployment of Gallican ecclesiological arguments against the Papal condemnations of Jansenist soteriological ones. By the wayside had fallen such features as Jansenist belief, with the sole if notable exception of Blaise Pascal, in the infallibility of Papal definitions ex cathedra, and Gallican use of belief in Our Lady's Immaculate Conception as a mark of party identity due to its having been defined by the Council of Basel. But the popular attraction of the Lefebvrist clergy in terms of the old Latin Mass and traditional or "traditional" devotions echoes that of the Gallican clergy in terms of the old diocesan Missals and Breviaries and a sympathy for the entrenched local devotional practices likewise reviled by the Ultramontanes.

The French Church, or an idea of the French Church, is assumed to be fundamentally autonomous, so that the incompatibility of Dignitatis Humanae with a very specifically French Counter-Revolutionary theory of the relationship between Church and State means that it is the Conciliar Declaration that must yield. This is simply taken to be self-evident. Yet in reality, such a position is as schismatic and as heretical as John Courtney Murray's attempt to conform Dignitatis Humanae to the American republican tradition's reading of the First Amendment as taught to high school students, an approach comprehensible only within Manifest Destiny and all that.

American "conservative" Catholicism sees the American Church as autonomous as surely as does American "liberal" Catholicism, and freely disregards Catholic Teaching on social justice and on peace as surely as the other side freely disregards Catholic Teaching on bioethical and sexual issues. As a result, both alike are blind to the Magisterium's brilliant and unique global witness to the inseparability of all of these concerns. In both the French and the American cases, there is a strange inability to recognise that what one was taught at 13 or 14 may not always be the last word on any given subject. But there is now an American Pope with deep French roots.