The Truth, Not Myth

It has been an even more brutal season in the West Bank . Since that October in 2023, the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem have faced a relentless and grinding escalation, a campaign of incursions, demolitions, land seizures, arrests, beatings and killings carried out by Israeli forces. It feels less like security work and more like a steady stripping away of a people. Reports from the United Nations and humanitarian agencies describe a staggering tempo of violence, with thousands of raids across towns and refugee camps. Estimates place the total between six thousand and seven thousand operations. Let that number settle for a moment. It is a rhythm of fear so constant that it risks becoming background noise, which may well be the point. One tally from Middle East Eye states that Israeli forces have carried out near daily raids across the West Bank since the start of the war on Gaza , killing five hundred and eighty two Palestinians and detaining more than te...

Across continents and centuries, one depressing magic trick keeps performing itself. Whenever people in power ( or those trying to get into power) feel even the slightest tremor under their feet, they reflexively point to the left and go, “Start with them, they’re always a safe warmup act.” The scenery changes, the costumes change, but the instinct stays as reliable as a fire alarm with a dying battery. As historian Timothy Snyder observes in On Tyranny , “The symbol of the twentieth century is the circle of people who agree to perform a lie. The symbol of the twenty-first century is the circle of people who agree to disregard the victim.” He may as well have added a footnote saying “and watch who gets cast as the victim first.” It is almost always the left. History does not even bother to hide it. In the United States, the Palmer Raids of 1919–1920 saw thousands of anarchists and immigrant communists rounded up and deported. Historian Adam Hochschild notes this set the tone, showi...

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a piece of 1960s mouse sociology . (A sentence I never thought I’d write. And yet, here we are.) It all started when I was at home, doomscrolling on Instagram , and a video about a mouse utopia hijacked my feed. In 1968, an ethologist named John B. Calhoun built a perfect world. He called it “ Universe 25 .” It was a sterile Eden , engineered for perfection: unlimited food, no predators, no disease. Its purpose was to answer a haunting question. What happens when all the old struggles vanish? The result was a catastrophe. The population surged, but society did not. Calhoun documented the unraveling: “The social organisation of the animals showed equal disruption… The one activity most rapidly disrupted was the emergence of organised maternal behaviour.” Mothers abandoned their pups. The enclosure was filled with bodies, yet it was utterly emptied of purpose. He called this collapse the “ behavioural sink ,” a process that “collects anima...

Today in Parliament,14 October 2025,  Kemi Badenoch delivered a speech ( cited below article ) she framed as a moment of moral clarity. It was solemn, precise, and emotionally charged. But beneath the surface, it was something else entirely; a choreography of grief, hierarchy, and strategic forgetting. This wasn’t just a political intervention. It was a performance of loyalty: to whiteness, to empire, and to a moral grammar that selectively grieves and violently erases. She opened with three mothers, their children stolen into “terror tunnels.” It was visceral. Human. Designed to anchor the listener in righteous suffering. Israeli grief was named, sanctified, and central. Palestinian grief? Abstract. Passive. Instrumental. No names. No families. No history. This wasn’t oversight. It was architecture. She declared, “No cause, no grievance, that can ever justify…”a line that shuts the door on context. No mention of the Nakba . No mention of the 750,000 Palestinians expelled, the 530 ...