I thought Joseph Heller was a satirist, but it turns out the UK courts are quite comfortable doling out Catch 22 justice.

No doubt Australia is following dutifully.

Mailman,

The lopsided coverage of Gaza is doing its bit to build my already well-developed cynicism muscles. Listened to Fergal Keane's recent FooC, where he talked about his heroic colleague "on the ground" in Gaza being one of the casualties of an Israeli airstrike, and the agonising 20 minutes (IIRC) our Fergal spent worrying about him before the happy news that the injuries were minor and he'd been discharged from hospital. My immediate reaction was to wonder whether his colleague had been anywhere near an airstrike. Is he just a Hamas propagandist? Has he made even one report on bad things Hamas has done? That might make him heroic.

(Thinking about it now, their hospitals must be better than ours if you manage to see a triage nurse within 20 minutes when you're not obviously bleeding out)

BBC balance: we report the bad things Israel's doing from both sides of the border.

Robbo,

I can only think that it is outright racial hatred of Jews that drives the protection, and all to often, canonisation of Hamas by the left. Which to be fair shouldn't really surprise us since the left and Hamas has the same objective, the elimination of Jews everywhere.

Victor Davis Hanson article on Trump's "ambush" of Ramaphosa. Mostly as expected, but I didn't know that South Africa had enjoyed most-favored-nation status all this time. It's getting on for 20 years since its decline really picked up pace.

tomo,
I recently commented here how unlucky you were to have 5-year parliamentary terms in the UK where we get a chance every three years to clear the decks. Now that Australians have opted for a second term of appalling Albanese (thanks to a dismal opposition) we'll have to put up with him for 6 years.

I suppose in democracy you have to take the rough with the smooth, but there's precious little smooth going around.

Mailman,
I think Hamas spent up pretty well on infrastructure in Gaza, but yes, bunkers under hospitals, schools, apartment blocks, etc., didn't do much to improve the lives of ordinary Gazans (or human shields as they might be better known).

Pretty sure the baddies in this piece extend well outside the bounds of Hamas and Islamism. Seems the UN and the media are rife with them. It is interesting how little we hear about the war crimes of Hamas, while the ICC has already issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu.

Good to read happy news about Mann. He's a piece of work.

Things that make you smile 😁😁

https://x.com/andrewmgrossman/status/1925647438179655882?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1925647438179655882%7Ctwgr%5Edd179ff31785da65446f29ac56b08fdf0051c2f5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Face.mu.nu%2F

Tommo said "The amounts of "aid" funneled into that benighted strip of land without overt supervision is unacceptable - period. Very little percolates downward to the lower tiers of that society I reckon."

The comparison I like to make is the differences between what the Kurds have achieved in Northern Iraq with a fraction of the international aid funnelled in to Gaza AND the fact the Kurds have achieved what they have in spite of having to also fight against a real enemy in ISIS...

VS

What Hamas has achieved in Gaza in 20 years with tens, if not HUNDREDS of billions of dollars in international aid flowing in to their coffers.

In that time Hamas has not invested in infrastructure to improve the lives of Gazan citizens. They have not built schools, hospitals, or any of the other normal apparatus that would actually improve the lives of the people they supposedly govern.

Instead they have squandered that money on building things to kill Jews or syphoned money off to their personal accounts in Qatar or Turkey or where ever else the cancer of Hamas has managed to spread.

And all that has been allowed to happen because its more important to hates Jews than it is to force Palestinians to actually govern their affairs like a proper functioning society would do.

tomo,
Agree about the need to vet the "aid" material; the Israelis would be mad not to. Yes, I know the truck says "Feed the Children", but I don't think there's much nourishment in potassium nitrate.

And I totally agree about the criminality. A story I'm not expecting to see in the Sydney Morning Herald is how much better life would have been for the Gazans if all the money expended on tunnels and weapons had simply been shared amongst them. Of course once the donors saw that the people were starting to live like Saudi princes, the money might have dried up. It's very much like the rent-seekers who oversee Aboriginal aid in Australia: their meal ticket depends on keeping the suffering going.

Puzzled what the Ukrainian trio was hoping to achieve. I suppose we may never know. Smacks of organised crime, I guess, but not very well organised (just like everything else).

Bonus Brendan O'Neill podcast this week: him being interviewed by the Jewish Chronicle in a public meeting. Friendly crowd, but that opened it up for him to speak more bluntly than usual about the outrageous reporting on Gaza.

And another very listenable John Anderson podcast with Matt Goodwin. He's more optimistic than I am (he might be right of course). He sees hope in a revival of proper conservatism in Farage/Reform. I'm afraid I'm down to seeing our governments as window dressing — a sideshow — with the bureaucrats playing their own power games in the shadows.