Five minutes before Salman Abedi detonated his bomb, killing 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena, he was spotted by Kyle Lawler — an 18-year-old security guard. After the bombing, Kyle told the inquiry: “I just had a bad feeling about him.”

He had been suspicious. But he didn’t act. He didn’t raise the alarm. Why?

“I felt unsure about what to do. I was scared of being wrong… of being branded a racist. It made me hesitant.”

22 people were killed.

This is a lesson in ignoring suspicions. And it’s one the West needs to learn, urgently.

I’ve had phone calls this week from friends, family, colleagues. Some called to praise my courage. Others to question my sanity. One or two begged me not to come tonight. Why? In what way does it take courage to speak to a student debating society? Why would it be foolish — for my safety — to come here and debate at the invitation of a Muslim woman, with two Muslim men, and a mock-Victorian Catholic knight?

We all know why. It’s why there’s security here. It’s why there’s electricity in the air. It’s why this debate has generated news coverage. It’s because of Islam.

I’m not a Muslim. For full disclosure: I’m a Jew. And a Briton. I’m not here to speak for Muslims, or to argue over Qur’anic verses and Hadith. I’m here to represent the other side of this debate: Western values. I’m here to talk about how Islam has encroached on our lives.

I would love not to be here. Never to think about this topic again. It is not my faith. It is not my ideology. But over and over again, it has confronted me — coming for my life. Coming for your lives.

I am not motivated by hate. But by love. Love for freedom. Love for life. Love for debate, thought, and discussion. Love for the West. The West is a civilisation of defiant liberty and fearless truth-telling. That is why I am here now.

I often ask people when they first became aware of Islam. For me, it was as a child of eight or nine, when Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses. What followed was a global eruption of Islamic fury: book burnings, a death fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini, and a trail of terror that crossed decades and borders. My own father — a bookseller who believed in the Western right to read even offensive ideas — was forced to sell copies from behind the counter, in fear for his life.

The violence was unrelenting. Translators stabbed. Publishers shot. And over thirty years later, in 2022, a young Muslim assassin, Hadi Matar, nearly murdered the elderly Rushdie on stage in New York — blinding him in one eye. Because he wrote a story.

Yet Rushdie struck back with the West’s greatest weapons: his pen and his mind — writing a new book, Knife.

He fought violence with art: Western. They fought art with violence: Islamic.

But you don’t need to be a writer to have suffered the violent intrusion of Islam into your life. On September 11th 2001, 19 hijackers cried “Allahu Akbar” and murdered nearly 3,000 people, flying planes into the Twin Towers. On 7th July 2005, four British Muslim suicide bombers slaughtered 52 commuters on London’s tubes and a bus, declaring: “We are at war and I am a soldier.”

In 2013, Michael Adebolajo beheaded the young soldier Lee Rigby in broad daylight, his hands dripping with blood: “I am a soldier of Allah.” Theo van Gogh was shot, stabbed, and nearly decapitated in Amsterdam for criticising Islam.His killer ponned a note to the body declaring it was done “by the law that commands me to cut off the head of anyone who insults Allah and his Prophet.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who worked with van Gogh, has lived under round-the-clock protection ever since. She was bon a Muslim and committed the crime of leaving and criticising the faith..

Are you starting to see the pattern?

In 2006, Ilan Halimi, a French Jew, kidnapped, tortured for 24 days and burned alive by a gang who shouted “Allahu Akbar.” A rabbi and three small Jewish children gunned down at a school in Toulouse. A kosher supermarket in Paris: four Jews executed. A teacher at Batley Grammar School hounded into hiding by Muslim mobs baying for his death for showing a cartoon.

Charlie Hebdo. Three gay friends in Reading. David Amess MP. Streatham. London Bridge. Westminster Bridge. Parsons Green. Journalists. Gay men. MPs. Commuters. Police. Ordinary citizens. The list goes on and on and on.

Dishonest people will tell you this is not Islam, but extremism.

Extreme what? Extreme Jainism? Extreme Quakerism?

The two converts to Islam opposite me cannot deny that all those killers were Muslims, following their Islamic beliefs. They said so themselves.

This list of Islamic contributions to our Western life demonstrates the human cost that makes people afraid to even talk about Islam.

This is why we are suspicious of Islam.

Don’t worry, I know Islam is not all violence. It is also political.

In 1928, Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood — a disciplined movement to reverse the fading of traditional Islamic life, building an entire alternative society within the West: mosques, schools, charities, youth groups, businesses, institutions, which they spread to the West.

A ‘civilisational jihad’.

Don’t worry, that’s not some ‘far-right’ phrase Tommy Robinson or I invented. It’s what they called it themselves.

We know, because the FBI seized their 1991 Explanatory Memorandum, setting out their plan to settle in the West, build Islamic centres as bases, infiltrate institutions, and work until “Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Nearly a century later, Governments across the West now warn that Muslim Brotherhood networks threaten democracy through entryism and infiltration.

So Islam does not only attack the West with bombs. Sometimes it uses our own freedoms, our own laws, and our own institutions against us.

But Islam’s ambition is not always so subtle. Historically, it is an ideology of conquest and expansion. After Muhammad’s death in 632, its armies burst out of Arabia and within a century had conquered much of the Christian world: the Middle East, North Africa, Egypt, Syria. They pushed into Spain. They reached France — halted at Tours in 732. They enslaved millions of Europeans. They besieged Vienna as late as 1683.

And wherever they conquered, Jews and Christians were reduced to dhimmis: defeated peoples living under submission, tax, and Islamic supremacy.

At Islam’s core is political-theological dominance — not private, internal faith.

They may try to hide it, but it is written across history, in blood, until today.

For every other ideology, we can be proud of the positives and still suspicious of the negatives. But some people are so quick to list all the great things they say Islam has contributed whilst utterly rejecting any Islamic connection to all these dreadful things I’ve mentioned. The bits they like — those are all Islam. The bad bits? All of them — not Islam.

Totally binary, in an era where being non-binary is the order of the day. Everything is on a spectrum. Except for Islam.

I’m asking you to believe your own eyes. Accept your own survival instincts. Apply the same rational thought to Islam as you would to any other set of ideas and behaviours.

Kyle Lawler, the Manchester Arena security guard, will forever live with the heavy weight of ignoring his suspicion. Don’t be Kyle Lawler. Don’t be afraid to call out a danger you instinctively identify, just because you’re afraid.

What we have in the West is worth protecting. Our freedoms. Our culture. Our ethics. This university. This country. All of it.

It can compete. It can win.

But only if you stay curious. Stay intelligent. Stay suspicious — especially of Islam.

Delivered on 17 June 2026

The last time the girls and boys of the Oxford Union had invited me to speak, it was about Israel, so naturally I was screamed at and abused. They threw out one of my fellow speakers, and threatened to remove another (both Arabs who like Israel).

This time, they invited me to debate a much calmer topic: Islam. I spoke alongside Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, and opposite a little-and-large double act of converts to Islam who have made a career sharing their Islamic experience on the internet. Oh, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who I thought was a Conservative and a Catholic. What could possibly go wrong?

Though the mob outside on Wednesday night were shouting about fascists, and blocking the capacity audience from entering, by the end of the event Sir Jacob had called me, Tommy, and Laurence ‘pinkos’ and accused us of Marxist thinking. The two Islam-fluencers opposing us were joined by Arwa Elrayess, the Union’s first female, Arab, Palestinian, president (because every president has to be the ‘first’ something these days) who had planned the entire event.

Having been instructed that we couldn’t decide what order we would speak in, Alrayess and Rees-Mogg had a mini-squabble in the library before the debate, about which of the two would be the final messenger of their side. The former MP pulled rank over the 20-year-old, insisting on going last. This left poor Arwa to whizz through her speech at double speed in the middle of the show, rather than allowing her the opportunity of a majestic summation and dismantling of everyone else’s arguments.

Laurence and I had prepared a brown paper envelope on which he had written the letters C.H. for Charlie Hebdo. At the start of his speech, he held it up, warning the audience that it contained a caricature he wished to show them, later on. Most didn’t react at first, but some minutes later, when he reached for the envelope a second time, the opposition bench jumped like a group of dozing cats who had heard a sudden noise.

“My wife asked me not to show this for fear of repercussions for my family,” he said. “But I told her that if I did not, I would have submitted to Islam.”

The opposition speakers and their guests squirmed in discomfort, terrified at the very suggestion a drawing of Mohamed might soon be unveiled – and not just any drawing, that drawing.

Entirely as predicted, the mask slipped. Arwa, who had been enjoying her 15 minutes of fame as the self-proclaimed final protector of free speech in the UK, jumped to her feet with an interjection that seemed intended to prevent her own death for facilitating such blasphemy.

Had she not demonstrated enough commitment to freedom of speech, as a Muslim woman, she begged, by inviting him to speak in the first place? Must the cartoon be unleashed?

But before Laurence could even answer, Sir Jacob – who would later claim Britain’s Western, Christian foundations were sufficient to defend us from the horrors of Islamic violence – jumped to his feet. Maybe there was an obscure rule in the Union’s constitution which prohibited the use of props, he clutched, but the straw was not there.

A young man in the third row announced that no such prohibition had been applied to remove PLO flags in previous debates, so clearly the cartoon should be allowed. Touché.

Suddenly Rees-Mogg, Alrayes, the two converts, and even the three Muslim heavies they’d brought with them to attempt an intimidating entourage, all looked distinctly freaked out. It seems we had found the limit of free speech they had all denied existed. That limit was Islam, and if they let this pass, maybe it would come for them too.

Exercising the full dramatic abilities only a professional actor cancelled by the woke mob could, as Laurence slowly unwound the string which fastened the old-fashioned brown paper envelope, time stood still. The audience gasped, and let out a nervous laugh, as he slid out its scurrilous contents.

A caricature of Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Relief. A pardon from the otherwise inevitable death sentence. Because in this country, you can mercilessly mock an antiquated former MP and knight of the realm with no fear for your bodily safety or life. Actually, it’s almost compulsory to mock the Mogg. But don’t you dare touch Mo.

As we had intended, the moment perfectly revealed the palpable fear of Islam held even by its staunchest defenders in that room, and by everybody else, too. Check mate.

That was the harder part of the evening, because I did feel for Arwa and Aisha: they seemed genuinely attached to a private, personal, tolerant Islam, and I know what it is to defend an inherited faith and identity against people determined to think the worst of it. The difference is that when Abdullah al-Andalusi reached for Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, he was naming villains who did not act as Jews or claim religious warrant for their crimes; the harsher forms of Islam we were discussing are preached, justified and enforced by men who insist they are acting precisely as Muslims, from the same texts Arwa and Aisha understandably want to protect.

Meanwhile, Abdullah al Andalusi concluded his remarks in defence of Islam with a quote of peace: “Live and let live…Does anyone know who said it?…His name is Osama Bin Laden.” His face twitched with ever more and more ticks, as the room echoed with laughter. I hadn’t been aware of Mr Al-Andalusi’s work before, and when I looked him up I discovered from his website that he is a “thinker, speaker and debater”. Unfortunately, I’m not sure he can do all three at the same time.

As for my speech, I’ll leave you to judge, if the Union ever releases the video (watch this space).

It had gone midnight when Sir Jacob finally got to speak. Just as we were all nodding off in the stifling heat of the shabby Victorian debating chamber, he perked things up a bit. His central claim that the West has benefitted from Islam was backed up by mentions of a handful of Muslims from history as far back as 800AD or so who had done great things. The invention of numbers, he suggested, was responsible for modern capitalism which enriches us all. But ultimately the reason he isn’t suspicious of Islam is because he feels Christianity is so strong it cannot be defeated.

Then, in a sudden U-turn, he forgot his dislike of props. “I’m going to upset all my friends who I’ve been supporting this evening,” Rees-Mogg declared, before reaching into his double breasted dinner jacket pocket and producing a cross shaped container. This, he said, contained the cross “literally upon which our Lord (and) saviour died, because inside there is a piece of the true cross.” Whoever sold him that bit of timber in the shuk in Jerusalem clearly had better persuasive powers than his team mates. Ashen faced, al Andalusi and Elrayess could do little to prevent their entire case defending Islam, Mohamed and Allah being closed with the proud chant: “Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!”

Originally published in The Spectator.

So many are disappointed with his course of action, but there’s also so little that is truly clear about the situation.

I am a great believer in the power of debate and discussion, especially on important topics like this one. I am against violent mobs trying to shut down debate and stop other people from speaking at or attending debates to hear varied opinions and views. This should be a default position for free Westerners.

Has Jacob Rees-Mogg converted to Islam? Obviously not. Why would I even ask such a question?

Later this week, Rees-Mogg will be arguing alongside Abdullah Al Andalusi and Michael Doward at the Oxford Union, to defend Islam from the suspicions of Western society. Sir Jacob is famous, among other things, for being an observant Catholic. He has stated that he does not believe Mohammed was a prophet, nor that the Quran is the word of God.

“Indeed, I think if it were the word of God, God says some pretty peculiar things and encourages some pretty odd forms of behaviour,” he has said.

This puts him in direct opposition to Islam’s central and core belief that “there is no God but Allah, and…Mohammed is the Messenger of God.” So there will presumably be few people who read into his appearance a newfound support for Islamic law or for a caliphate, despite his decision to speak alongside a man who has expressed his commitment to these and other similar opinions.

I will also be speaking in that debate, but on the other side, explaining why the West should be suspicious of Islam. I won’t preempt my speech by going into those details here, and hopefully there’ll be a video of the event shortly afterwards for those who are interested. But just as Sir Jacob’s appearance alongside his teammates shouldn’t be seen as an endorsement of everything they represent, nor should my own appearance alongside my own side’s speakers: the political activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, and the actor and activist Laurence Fox. Rather than smear, slur, or ban those invited to speak, we would all do better to listen to them, engaging with their thoughts honestly and respectfully.

I spoke at the Oxford Union quite recently, defending the state of Israel against the absurd double allegation that it is an apartheid state responsible for genocide, and I’m pretty sure I might have had some different opinions from my side’s other speakers then as well, though all three have since become valued friends of mine. However, the proceedings on that occasion erupted into a circus of abuse. So wild was the behaviour of the Union’s exclusively selected audience that the video of my response to their tantrum garnered well over 13 million views online.

All this just goes to show that the Union, a sort of kindergarten for Westminster, can still attract attention when it wants to. Sadly, just as in Parliament, that is increasingly happening as the result of engineered outrage, provocation, and deliberate chaos, rather than informed and respectful debate of important ideas or good governance.

So why would I subject myself to all that again so soon? And why, as one or two concerned friends and colleagues have asked me, would I risk speaking from the same corner as the ‘far right’ villains of today’s political boxing ring?

Because I think this is an important debate.

Islam has become more visible, more proximate, and more consequential in Western societies than at any earlier point in living memory. It is the fastest growing religion in the United Kingdom. Pew Research Center’s 2025 analysis found that between 2010 and 2020 Muslims grew faster than any other religious group across the entire planet. The largest share of terrorism deaths in recent decades has been caused by groups claiming an Islamic jihadist justification: Islamic State/Isis, Boko Haram/Iswap, al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda affiliates, Hamas, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Taliban, Jnim, and plenty of others. Britons eat more unannounced Sharia-compliant, halal meat than they are even aware of every single day: in our schools, restaurants, hotels, places of work and hospitals.

Some will argue that the encroachment of Islam in our lives is entirely benign, and that there is nothing to be suspicious of. Others, that we are being usurped or replaced. And millions in between that we ought, at least, to talk about all this.

The conversation is always uncomfortable. It goes against our sense of politeness to criticise, question or even discuss other people’s faith and beliefs. The modern brand of secular atheism which characterises a large portion of our population’s lives tends to shy away from respectful conversation about any faith, preferring to patronise adherents as somehow all equally foolish believers in supernatural fairytales. Many Jews think it gauche to critique another minority’s ideology out of fear of repeating the 20th century’s attempt to erase our very presence in Europe and large parts of the Middle East.

Most people who do want to talk about it feel they ‘don’t know enough’, or are simply afraid of having their heads chopped off, their bodies stabbed or blown up, or having to live in hiding for the rest of their lives. And if physical safety isn’t the problem, financial safety can be: many are unable to speak about something so socially unfashionable lest they lose their livelihood through social hysteria, debanking, and professional cancellation. How will they earn a living, feed their children, pay their mortgages? In short, we’ve all seen the price others have had to pay for speaking up.

The list of those unwilling to talk about it is long: the PC crowd, the wokies, tribal loyalists, the politically calculating, the scared. Is it any surprise that those left standing might be seen as shrill, strident, fanatically obsessed, or even crazy? Who else would keep going?

After my last excursion into the lion’s den that is the 2020s Oxford Union debating chamber, I was widely praised for my patience, my calm, and my appeal to reason. Prof. Niall Ferguson wrote that “one can only admire the grace, patience, and courage of Jonathan Sacerdoti”; The American psychologist and talk show host Dr. Phil described me as “very courageous…a study in patience and self control.” Among my father’s dying advice to me was not to boast, so I hope he would forgive me for repeating such comments here. I do so, I hope, more to illustrate my surprise than arrogance. Surprise that such qualities were worthy of note at all, let alone from such esteemed figures. They are simply part of how I was brought up and educated to be. The deep disappointment and shock I felt – and which resonated around the world – was that many of today’s Oxford students were not brought up that way, too.

So I will speak again on Wednesday in Oxford. I will speak only for myself. I will speak respectfully but honestly. And I will listen to others, too: good and bad, rich and poor, left and right, Christian, Muslim and Jew, upper and working class.

Wish me luck ;)

Originally published in The Spctator.

Both sides are claiming victory. But beneath those claims are harder questions. Has Iran been given a free pass to rearm? H…

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Israel sure knows how to mark ‘Pride Month’. Tel Aviv’s annual celebration of gayness has once again turned into an opportunity to bomb one of the world’s most viciously anti-gay regimes, the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has a dreadful record of abuse not only of homosexuals but also of women, non-Muslims, and of course Jews.

Gay Pride has become a tiresome and hollow celebration of ultra-sexualised behaviour in public places. The once understandable movement, focused on achieving fair and equal treatment of homosexuals, has transformed into a counter-productive circus of debauchery. Worse, it has now been turned into a month-long festival, as opposed to a single day parade or protest. In some cities it feels almost inescapable, and in most it is now almost completely devoid of any meaningful ideological principle.

Last year I found myself in Tel Aviv covering the tensions in the region as the multicoloured flags were being hoisted up every streetlamp in the city. As I strolled along the beachfront, I observed the erection of a massive stage, ready for the region’s largest (only?) celebration of all things ‘queer’.

“I can’t see how this will go ahead,” I grumbled as I watched workers trashing the lawn of the usually tranquil Charles Clore Park overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

Tensions had been building through May and early June, with the international community condemning Iran’s failure to abide by nuclear agreements and diplomatic efforts stalling. The city’s Pride parade that year was set to be the first since before 7 October 2023. None other than the world’s most famous transexual, Caitlyn Jenner, had travelled to Israel to be the guest of honour, arriving earlier in the week.

But no sooner had Charles Clore’s erection gone up, it came right down, prematurely. Israel launched “Operation Rising Lion” overnight on 12 June, striking several Iranian nuclear sites. Jenner was stranded in the Holy Land as commercial flights were cancelled and 200 Israeli fighter jets hit over a hundred targets, killing top IRGC military leaders and damaging Iran’s primary uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. They ended up smuggling poor Caitlyn out through Jordan later that week.

And so it is this year. On Sunday night, Israel responded to several barrages of incoming Iranian missiles with strikes on the homophobic tyrannical theocratic regime in Iran. Sure, gay rights weren’t their primary war concern, but it still seems a fitting way to inject some true meaning back into the now-hollow Pride movement.

For all the speculation and theatre surrounding America and Israel’s relations and decision making over whether to prolong the tortuously strained ceasefire with Iran, it is worth reminding ourselves just what a horrific regime the current Iranian one is. And in honour of Pride month, it seems fitting to focus for a few hundred words at least on its abuse of homosexuals.

Iran’s Islamic Republic has one of the world’s harshest records on homosexuality, rooted in its Sharia-based legal system. Consensual same-sex activity is criminalised, with severe punishments including the death penalty. We are all familiar with the images of young gay men being hanged from cranes.

Under the Islamic Penal Code, notably the 2013 version, ‘Lavat’ (sodomy/penetrative male same-sex acts) is punishable by death for the passive partner in many cases. The active partner faces death if married, using coercion, or under certain religious conditions. ‘Tafkhiz’ (non-penetrative acts like thigh rubbing) is punishable with lashes, and death on the fourth conviction. Lesbians don’t escape the brutality. The crime of ‘Musaheqeh’ can earn them 100 lashes per offense, and death on the fourth conviction. Other acts such as kissing, and touching with lust are also worthy of lashes.

These derive from traditional Islamic jurisprudence, and trials often rely on confessions or judicial “knowledge,” with limited due process. Juveniles can face these penalties, as criminal responsibility starts young).

It is estimated that 4,000-6,000 executions have been carried out for homosexual acts since the 1979 Revolution, but exact numbers are hard to verify due to lack of official transparency. Charges are also often bundled with “corruption on earth” (ifsad fil-ard), rape, or political offenses.

There is widespread discrimination, harassment by morality police, family “honour” killings, and prison rape and abuse of gay detainees. Gay people have no legal protections. Pro-gay activism is suppressed, and open expression risks arrest.

Somewhat peculiarly, Iran stands out in the Muslim world for permitting and even partially subsidising so-called sex reassignment surgery, following a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s. It has one of the highest numbers of such surgeries globally, because the regime views ‘gender dysphoria’ as a medical issue solvable by surgery. Many gay and lesbian individuals face pressure from families, clerics, or authorities to undergo surgery as a cure, to avoid homosexuality charges, effectively forcing them to undergo sterilisation and genital mutilation. ‘Trans’ people still face discrimination and violence.

Rape and sexual violence have been systematically employed as tools of torture, humiliation, and political control in Iran’s prisons, particularly in notorious facilities such as Evin and Kahrizak. Human rights organisations have documented numerous credible testimonies from survivours detailing gang rapes of both male and female detainees by IRGC, Basij, and intelligence agents, often involving multiple perpetrators, batons, or other objects to inflict maximum pain and trauma. These abuses surged during crackdowns like the 2009 Green Movement protests and the 2022-2023 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, where prisoners were subjected to sexual assault to extract confessions, break spirits, or punish perceived opposition.

Male victims frequently endure anal rape framed as domination rather than homosexuality under the regime’s Sharia-based logic, while female prisoners face vaginal and anal violations, sometimes justified through twisted religious pretexts.

Despite consistent international reporting and survivor accounts, Iranian authorities usually deny or dismiss these practices, with near-total impunity for perpetrators, underscoring the regime’s use of sexual terror as an instrument of authoritarian governance.

So while the Tel Aviv pride parade hasn’t yet been officially cancelled, I for one can see no better replacement for the traditional drug-fuelled display of sexual vulgarity than the continued thrashing of the horrific Iranian regime. I’m not sure the Gays for Palestine or Zack Polanski’s Islamist-aligned go-go dancers will agree, but this seems a far more meaningful way to stand up for non-heteronormative rights.

Originally published in The Spectator.

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So far we know Starmer ignored warnings from his own national security adviser and pushed through Mandelson’s appointment despite his failed security vetting and his links to Jeffrey Epstein.

Mandelson has admitted his friendship with Epstein was a “terrible mistake,” maintaining contact even after the financier’s 2008 conviction. The US Epstein files even included a photo of Mandelson, former-Prince Andrew, and Epstein together in bathrobes on Martha’s Vineyard around 2000.

The release is also expected to shine fresh light on private conversations with other Labour figures, including Wes Streeting, a would-be usurper of Starmer, who pre-emptively published his messages with his mentor Mandelson some months ago. Among those was a blunt July 2025 exchange in which Streeting accused Israel of “war crimes,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “rogue state behaviour.”

I was invited back on to Piers Morgan’s show next week to debate Cenk Uygur, in studio, while he was due in the UK to speak at SXSW festival in London. I politely declined. Uygur is, to put it mildly, not a man whose public manner suggests calm forensic exchange. Morgan himself proudly features a compilation video on his YouTube channel entitled: “Cenk Uygur’s Biggest Piers Morgan Uncensored MELTDOWNS!”, complete with a thumbnail showing no fewer than three images of Uygur snarling and yelling in fury.

It is therefore with some amusement that I now learn that he has been barred from entering the United Kingdom by the Home Secretary.

Uygur was an odd fit for SXSW London, whose own website describes the festival as “the global festival for the convergence of business, technology and creativity,” which, it says, is “grounded in practical optimism.” Whatever else may be said for Uygur, practical optimism is not the first phrase that springs to mind.

I wrote in these pages about my appearance on Piers Morgan’s YouTube show a month ago, bemoaning the conspiracy theories aired on the programme and Morgan’s apparent nonchalance about them, alongside his more energetic attempt to portray me as insufficiently critical of Israel. He also asked me to continue critiquing his show in my writing (happy to oblige), but when I did – in what I can only assume was a case of age-related skin thinning – he reacted with a tantrum on X. He proudly boasted that he had counted all my Spectator articles – 186 apparently – and found only one not to be about Israel. Perhaps he should learn to count better, and also to read past the headlines, since he admitted he had not actually read the columns. (Piers, have you got this far?)

Israel is an area of specialisation in my work, but I have also written on Islam, Jew-hatred, Iran, Yemen, Kanye West, Nigel Farage, Piers Morgan, the Oxford Union, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the BBC just to list a few other topics. None of this prevented Morgan from declaring me a ‘slavishly biased Israeli shill’. His chief complaint seems to be that I am not sufficiently reflexively negative about Israel to satisfy the change of mind he underwent on the country shortly after he visited Qatar.

Without official confirmation, one cannot state definitively why Shabana Mahmood has apparently decided to exclude one of Piers’ most frequent guests from entry to the UK. One might presume the decision was made on the grounds that his presence would not be conducive to the public good. This is a power she has enjoyed wielding over numerous others recently.

The SXSW appearance would have been in Shoreditch, very close to the Nova exhibition, where survivors of the Palestinian massacre of 7th October 2023 are present, and where enhanced security reflects the obvious risks to Jewish people.

The Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 anti Jewish incidents in 2025, the second-highest annual total ever logged, following 3,556 in 2024. Britain has seen not merely an ugly rise in rhetoric, but arson, stabbings, intimidation, assaults, and the deadly terrorist attack at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester. Jewish schools, synagogues and community premises require permanent vigilance. This is the country into which Uygur was proposing to arrive.

The case against him is not that he has criticised Israel. Plenty do. It is that he has repeatedly trafficked in language and claims that sit dangerously close to the conspiratorial fever now animating anti-Jewish hatred. He regularly describes Israel’s actions as “genocide”, “barbaric” and “savage” and has claimed that Israel uses Jews as “human shields”. Then there’s his claims that the global war on terror was a “global war against Israel’s enemies”, that America was “occupied” if Israel was “paying 94% of Congress”; and that Jeffrey Epstein was “almost certainly Mossad”.

Israel aside, there is his past Armenian genocide denial, which he has since recanted; his continued ownership of a network named The Young Turks, a name critics associate with the perpetrators of that genocide; and his public handling of UK Pakistani Muslim paedophilia gangs, where he has dismissed concern over organised abuse as Islamophobic rather than engaging properly with the findings of official inquiries. Taken together, perhaps Mahmood saw not merely a record of controversy, but of provocation at the exact fault lines where British public order is already under strain, expressed aggressively and often at high volume.

Sovereign nations have the right to decide who may enter. Britain sometimes appears to have mislaid that right when it comes to violent illegal immigrants, but at least it retains the principle when dealing with foreign extremists likely to inflame disorder. Historically, these powers were often used, quite rightly, to keep Islamist preachers out. More recently they have also been used against an American rapper who sold Nazi-themed merchandise and released a song in which he repeatedly chanted “Heil Hitler”, after years of public anti-Jewish outbursts. And now it seems for Cenk Uygur, too.

Yet Mahmood has also strained this discretion badly. Ahead of the Unite the Kingdom rally, the Home Office barred a cluster of foreign critics of immigration policy and Islam, including Eva Vlaardingerbroek, Joey Mannarino, Ada Lluch, Filip Dewinter, Dominik Tarczyński, Don Keith, Ezra Levant and Avi Yemini. Some are elected politicians, including Dewinter in Belgium and Tarczyński in the European Parliament. Others, like Levant and Yemini, are journalists or commentators. Those cases look far harder to justify, and carry the unmistakable whiff of a government using border powers to prevent its critics from arriving here to criticise it.

The hypocrisy might also embarrass the Labour government, if they are still capable of that emotion. When Israel barred British Labour MPs Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang, David Lammy denounced the decision as “unacceptable, counterproductive, and deeply concerning”, adding that it was “no way to treat British parliamentarians”. Yet the same government has excluded foreign elected representatives from allied democracies when their politics were inconvenient to Labour’s preferred orthodoxies on immigration, Islam, and integration. Sovereignty is apparently sacred when Britain exercises it, and scandalous when Israel does.

Piers Morgan should feel some embarrassment as well. Uygur is not his first guest to be deemed persona non grata by the Home Secretary. Morgan’s YouTube show repeatedly invites guests whose fury, conspiracism and theatrical excess can be harvested for clips, clicks and advertising revenue. The Uygur “meltdowns” compilation is part of a business model, not the by-product of journalism. Previous guests include others barred from entry to the UK, like Valentina Gomez who took a flame thrower to a Quran and regularly criticises Islam, and the Hitler praising Kanye West. It’s uncensored, alright, but Morgan might consider what kind of public conversation he is rewarding and capitalising on.

So yes, we can argue about free speech. We can argue about who should be allowed into the United Kingdom, and where the line between offensive opinion and public danger should fall. We can disagree on individual cases – personally I won’t miss some of their presence here – But there must be a distinction between protecting open argument and importing those whose public role is to turn conspiracy into cash. A country is not obliged to host every foreign provocateur who wishes to monetise its tensions. Let’s hope the Home Secretary can apply that principle with integrity, rather than merely with convenience.

Originally published in The Spctator

To the untrained eye, ceasefires in the Middle East can look a bit like war at a lower intensity. US Central Command spokesman Captain Tim Hawkins has confirmed that American forces conducted what were described as self-defence strikes in southern Iran in order to protect US personnel from Iranian threats during the ongoing ceasefire. Two Iranian vessels were also caught laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz and were subsequently destroyed. A surface-to-air missile site in Bandar Abbas that was reportedly targeting American aircraft was struck. But American officials have stressed that they do not signify the end of the ceasefire.

Meanwhile, Mojtaba Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s Invisible Leader (previously known as ‘Supreme Leader’) has declared that ‘regional countries will no longer serve as shields for American bases, and the US will no longer have a safe haven anywhere in the region’, adding that ‘chants of “death to America” and “death to Israel” must become prevalent among all Muslim nations. The shaky zionist regime and the cancerous tumour of Israel have also drawn near to the final stages of their ill-fated lifespan.’

Over recent days, the assumption across much of the region had been that Washington is increasingly desperate for an off-ramp. A proposed framework involving the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, phased negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme, sanctions relief, and wider ceasefire arrangements created an impression that the United States was now primarily interested in stabilisation rather than coercion.

But through all this supposed indecision, what President Trump has also shown is that he is not in a massive hurry to make a deal, but nor is he in a hurry to resume full scale war. The United States has demonstrated that it is willing to continue using force even while diplomatic discussions remain active. The ceasefire may exist, but it does not grant Iran freedom to alter facts on the ground in the Strait of Hormuz. Negotiations can continue, but attempts to leverage maritime disruption will still invite military consequences. Underlying this approach is an assumption that the United States possesses greater tolerance for economic disruption than either Iran or many of America’s regional partners, giving Washington more room to wait, apply pressure and negotiate simultaneously.

Over the past few days, from the outside at least, Iran has appeared increasingly confident in negotiations. Reports suggested demands for asset releases, sequencing changes, and broader ceasefire conditions extending into Lebanon. Concerns intensified in Israel that such an arrangement could leave Tehran with substantial leverage intact while postponing the most difficult questions surrounding enriched uranium, ballistic missiles, Hezbollah and the long-term balance of power. That is the central Israeli anxiety: a ceasefire can end a war, but it can also freeze a problem in place.

For Jerusalem, the concern is that Iran might emerge from negotiations with key pillars of its power structure intact, while international pressure shifts toward restraining Israeli action. The reported discussions around broader regional ceasefires only amplified those fears. Any arrangement that limits Israel’s freedom of action against Hezbollah while leaving major Iranian capabilities unresolved would inevitably be viewed through that lens.

But we must not forget that America is in the hands of a seasoned, high stakes business gambler. As reports increased of the negotiations shifting in Iran’s favour, with several other regional leaders pressing for a permanent end to the war, President Trump called their bluff by introducing a new and unexpected demand. He sought to tie Saudi normalisation with Israel to the wider diplomatic package surrounding Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, demanding during a call with Arab leaders that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan all immediately sign up to the Abraham Accords in return for an end to the fighting..

Whether viewed as diplomacy, leverage or transactional bargaining, the logic behind the idea is revealing. The objective would not merely be another symbolic peace agreement. It would be the construction of a political architecture capable of binding the region together.

The significance of the Abraham Accords has always extended beyond bilateral recognition. Their deeper importance lies in connectivity: security cooperation, energy networks, logistics, technology transfers, investment flows, intelligence relationships and infrastructure. Recent discussions surrounding the India-Middle East-Europe corridor, Eastern Mediterranean energy projects, digital connectivity, renewable energy integration and overland transport routes all point in the same direction.

The region increasingly appears to be organising itself around corridors rather than ideologies.

That does not mean ideology has disappeared. Far from it. It means that railways, ports, subsea cables, energy grids, hydrogen pipelines, semiconductor supply chains and investment networks are becoming geopolitical weapons in their own right.

Iran’s challenge is that many of these projects are being designed specifically to reduce dependence on Iranian geography, Iranian energy, Iranian transit routes or Iranian influence. The question is no longer simply who controls territory. Increasingly, it is who controls the routes around that territory.

This is where comparisons to Trump’s business career become useful. While they don’t act as historical templates, they provide illustrations of his strategic techniques.

In 1986, the stalled renovation of the Wollman ice rink in Central Park had become a symbol of New York City’s bureaucratic dysfunction. After six years of delays and roughly $13 million spent, the project remained unfinished. With mounting public embarrassment and few alternatives left, city officials turned to Trump to take over the effort. He brought in specialist contractors and completed the renovation within four months, transforming a municipal failure into a reputational victory.

A few years later, the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City was drowning in debt and facing financial collapse. Instead of accepting the role of a desperate borrower, Trump persuaded creditors that a bankruptcy would inflict greater damage on them than a negotiated restructuring. The result was a deal that kept the casino operating and demonstrated a recurring instinct in Trump’s career: when confronted with weakness, make everyone else’s exposure to chaos the centre of the negotiation.

While the parallels to Trump’s instincts on the world stage should not be overstated, the underlying habit is recognisable: identify vulnerability, alter the calculation of other players, and make the negotiation revolve around leverage rather than principle. Trump identifies pressure points, determines who has the most to lose, and attempts to rearrange the negotiation around that reality.

Whether Trump’s tactics will work this time remains an open question. The Middle East has a habit of humiliating grand strategies. Infrastructure projects can stall, alliances can fracture, and ceasefires can easily collapse. Regimes that appear isolated can prove remarkably resilient.

The latest American strikes serve as a reminder that beneath the negotiations and the ceasefire lies a much larger contest over who will shape the Middle East’s future.

Originally published in The Spectator.

That is the frightening lesson of the reported attack in Golders Green.

A 22-year-old man staying in an Airbnb stepped outside in the early hours of Monday morning to take a phone call, so as not to disturb the people inside. He was speaking Hebrew. According to reports, six masked men then descended on him, dragged him across the road, punched and kicked him, ripped his clothes, beat him around the head and back, and broke his phone.

So far, there have reportedly been no arrests.

Golders Green has already seen stabbings. Hatzola ambulances, run by a Jewish volunteer charity but serving the whole local community, have been firebombed. Jewish people and Jewish-linked sites have faced repeated threats, arson attacks and violence. In Manchester, Jews were killed in a terrorist attack at Heaton Park Synagogue on Yom Kippur last year.

British Jews are being told, in effect, to rely on more guards, more vigilance, more security and more resilience. But the real question is not how Jews can better protect themselves. It is why Jewish life in Britain now requires this level of protection in the first place.

Because Jews do not live only inside guarded buildings. They walk down streets. They take phone calls. They visit friends. They speak Hebrew. They wear kippot. They exist in public. Increasingly, that public existence feels dangerous.

Politically, Jews are once again caught in the middle. There is undoubtedly a wave of antisemitism in Britain linked to the far left and Islamic extremism, two forces that often reinforce one another in their demonisation of Israel and hostility to Jews.

But the reaction to illegal immigration, failed integration and Islamist influence has also produced dangers on parts of the right, where some people drift from legitimate concerns about borders and cohesion into ethnic thinking that can count Jews as outsiders too. At present, the greater threat appears to come from the Islamic and far-left axis. But the right needs to be clear in rejecting hatred of Jews or it is not fixing the problem at all, it is merely replacing it with another problem.

Britain must confront the ideologies that have made Jews visible targets again.

When a young man is beaten in London for speaking Hebrew, the issue is not merely Jewish safety, it is the condition of the country itself.

Perhaps the strangest thing about the Unite The Kingdom rally was just how unremarkable it felt. There were no mass chants for death to particular groups, no calls for the eradication of foreign countries, and no flags of terrorist groups or tyrannical theocracies waved in the crowd. Nobody cited scripture to urge the slaughter of another people, nobody waved terrorist symbols, and nobody I saw the entire day covered their face.

We live in such peculiar times that this is what set the march out from the dozens of others which have descended on the streets of London over the last couple of years totally unchallenged, even protected, by the police and our government. Yet this outlier was the first march Keir Starmer decided to speak out against since taking office as Prime Minister, threatening police action and the full force of the law against those involved, and pulling out all the stops to block foreign speakers from entering the country at the last minute. Of all the political protests we’ve witnessed since Labour won the general election, and we’ve witnessed many, this was the one he chose to obstruct repeatedly. This was the hill he chose to die on.

And just in case anyone had forgotten what the other type of march looks like, they handily held one just around the corner so we could compare and contrast. The far left omnicause supporters took to the streets waving their PLO and Iranian flags – the ones representing the Islamic Republic regime, not the sun and lion version indicating solidarity with the Iranian people. Some were even sporting Al-Qassam Brigades red triangles, a symbol made popular by the terrorists when marking out targets for death in videos.

Unite the Kingdom focused mostly on domestic issues, British society, and Christianity. Mostly the crowd waved Union flags, the St. George’s cross, and the saltire. The other march featured few or no Union flags, but a sea of red, white, green and black PLO flags.

Much of the traditional media coverage referred to these two marches as the ‘far right’ march and the ‘pro-Palestine’ march, representing another imbalance in how the marches were treated. The left wing march was afforded the courtesy of being described as it wished to be, but not one single person I met on the other one would have identified with the ‘far right’ description. Both descriptions are questionable, because any march truly supportive of Palestinian Arabs would surely call for the end of Hamas and other terrorist groups’ strangle hold over their lives, and any far right rally worth its salt would forbid the presence of black people, Jews, or migrants of any type rather than proudly welcoming them and featuring them on stage.

When Keir Starmer declared Tommy Robinson’s march “a reminder of what we’re up against in the battle of our values”, many taking part would have agreed with him wholeheartedly. But though he predicted those on it would be “peddling hatred and division, plain and simple” I saw nothing of the sort. Far from ‘hate speech’, I heard plenty of love speech – love for nation, for unity, for freedom. That political and social outlook might not be to everyone’s taste, but after constant and unchallenged ‘globalise the intifada’ and ‘from the river to the sea’ mobs paraded through our cities and past synagogues, it seemed utterly disingenuous of Starmer to suddenly declare that he “will act decisively against hatred” and “use the full force of the law when that hatred manifests as violence” just when his leadership of his own part and the country itself is at its weakest. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that the UTK march openly challenges Labour’s positions and actions in government, and that its most popular spontaneous chant was, once again, ‘Keir Starmer’s a Wanker’. No, there’s no way that’s what inspired him to act tough all of a sudden.

In the end, the reports that he has told friends he would finally step down as leader and PM came after this mass popular display of disgust at his record from a crowd made up of many varied types of Britons—working class, middle class, young, old, white, black, poor, rich, you name it.

The point is that most of what I heard at the UTK event was basic common sense talk you’d hear around the country in pubs, shops, homes, or anywhere, really. It’s not always sophisticated political theory, or solution focused strategy, but it does reflect the hopes and fears of a massive portion of our society.

Street protests and marches aren’t the place for technical politics or intellectual debate. They’re rough around the edges, and you can always find crazies and nasties in them if you look hard enough. But their overall mood and tone are a useful reflection of their participants’ collective vibe. The actions of their leaders in the run up to and during the protests are good indicators, too, of their intentions. Robinson has spent weeks putting out videos urging attendees to keep their faces uncovered, not to rise to provocations from anyone, and to meet any conflict with a smile. If his background bothers our political class so much, they could at least acknowledge the responsible way in which he called for peaceful political dissent.

Compare that with the constant wrangling and arguing of the anti-Israel march organisers, who repeatedly forced their rallies on the rest of us over a period of more than two years, and who were eventually found guilty in court of breaching Public Order Act conditions designed to prevent disruption to a local central London synagogue. In that case, the judge ruled that a speech delivered from the stage by Ben Jamal of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign constituted unlawful incitement because it actively suggested, persuaded, and induced protesters to bypass the police perimeter.

The real test for any government is whether it can apply the same standard to dissent it dislikes as to dissent it finds convenient. On Saturday, that standard looked painfully absent: one set of demonstrators treated as a threat to the nation’s moral order, warned against and subjected to live facial recognition policing, while the other was granted the softer language of protest even after years of intimidation, disruption and open extremism. If Starmer wanted to talk about “the battle of our values”, he might have begun by explaining why patriotism now alarms him more than the politics of revolutionary violence. Now it seems it may have dealt him the final blow in his slow motion downfall.

Originally published in The Spectator.

Eurovision is a great distraction from everything that matters in life. It is utterly unimportant, gloriously dreadful to listen to or watch, and all the more compelling for it. The show has developed over the years from something sort of wholesome to a sexually suggestive celebration of camp, of cross dressing, shouty singing, and bizarre fever-dream staging. It is utterly bonkers, excessively long, and continues to bamboozle and entertain in equal measure through its attempts to be political and not political, uniting and dividing, musical and cacophonic, all at once. Nothing about it makes sense, and nothing should. Least of all the score board.

This year was no different. The run up to the show featured the now usual attempts to belittle and exclude the Israeli entry. One year they complained the song was ‘political’ and changed a few words. Then they complained that because Israel’s song was too popular with the public, the entire voting system needed to be changed.

While geopolitical tensions cast a heavy shadow over this year’s contest, Israel soldiered on as ever. Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain all opted out, while other singers made a point of snubbing the Israeli team when pushed to talk about their song in public. The eventual winner, Bulgaria’s Dara, though, had quietly ‘liked’ an Instagram clip of Israeli representative Noam Bettan’s rehearsal of his song Michelle early in May. Dara’s simple, public digital interaction stood out as a clear choice to evaluate a fellow competitor strictly through an artistic lens rather than a political one. So when she ended up beating Israel at the last moment with a massive audience vote, many Israelis forgave her and settled for an impressive second place, once again delivered by the popular viewer vote over the ‘expert jury’ votes of the participating countries.

It would have been satisfyingly wonderful if Israel had won, seeing all those nasties who went out of their way to try to ostracise the country having to swallow their pride and fly to the Jewish state, or worse cut off their nose jobs to spite their filler plumped faces by boycotting the competition once again.

To my ear, Israel’s song was infinitely better than the weird one that triumphed. But what the hell do I know? Bunga Bunga (or whatever the Bulgarian song was called) was apparently not an ode to the late Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s debauched private parties, but it did sound like a Cheeky Girls B-side. Still, this is Eurovision, and the whole point is that there is no point. The voting is more complicated than Proportional Representation, and the audience vote is so opaque nobody seems to know how it works or doesn’t. It is another mysterious triumph of this inexplicable TV format that the seemingly never ending section of the show which is essentially a convoluted spreadsheet, somehow manages to feel exciting. One suspects the voting system is designed more around tension than fairness.

Bearing in mind the entire voting system was redesigned last year when Israel did frustratingly well in the audience vote, it seems that this time the EBU will just have to admit that maybe the European voting public actually like Israel’s musical abilities. Or perhaps they secretly really love the country and voted for it en masse to show their support in the face of unrelentingly negative media coverage and government level actions against the country. Either way it’s a win for Israel, as far as not winning can be.

Maybe the EBU will decide once again to reinvent its voting and scoring system, until Israel literally can’t do well at all. A bit like when the Irish Government tried to change the legal definition of genocide retroactively just so that Israel could be found guilty of it.

One thing remains reliably and comfortingly certain: the UK did dreadfully, coming last with just one point. The result was deserved. We’re like the control data that proves the system is calibrated correctly. Not everyone can do well, and our presence at the bottom of the table reassures the audience that everything is running as it should.

You could say that there’s only one thing worse than constantly coming last, and that’s constantly coming second. Israel has done that four times now, in 1982 with Avi Toledano singing Hora, in 1983 with Ofra Haza singing Chai, in 2025 with Yuval Raphael singing New Day Will Rise, and now this year with Noam Bettan singing Michelle. But several of those songs have actually become enduring and much loved anthems for Israelis and Jews around the world. Besides, the UK has come second 16 times, so even on that score Israel beats us.

There’s always the temptation to read into these things. Did they punish us for Brexit (again)? Do people secretly love Israel? Did Dara win karma points for her Insta like? But in reality, none of it means a thing, and that’s part of the charm. Like the royal family, if we had to design the system now from scratch, it wouldn’t look anything like it does. But having somehow hung on for years and morphed into this weird, slightly corrupt, sexually questionable display of sparkles and inexplicable ceremonies, it makes us love it and love to hate it all at once.

Originally published in the Jewish Chronicle

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The New York Times has published a lengthy pearl-clutching exercise in narrative construction. Its investigation into Israel’s conduct in the Eurovision Song Contest alleges, with great solemnity, that the Israeli government spent money on online advertising to encourage people to vote for its entry, and that this near-broke the world’s most beloved pop spectacle. Foul play, the Times implies. A cynical manipulation. A soft-power operation dressed in sequins.

But the evidence, examined honestly, points in almost exactly the opposite direction.

There were indeed plenty of political manipulations which broke the song contest’s clearly defined rules during the period the Times covered. Documented ones. Named ones. Cases where individuals admitted wrongdoing on social media and broadcasters violated EBU guidelines on live television. But none of them came from Israel.

In 2025, Spain’s public broadcaster violated the rules by airing a pro-Palestinian political statement during the live Eurovision final. Spain’s Prime Minister had personally called for Israel to be banned from the contest. The Spanish government’s institutional opposition to Israel’s participation could not have been more explicit. And yet the Spanish public gave Israel douze points: maximum marks.

In Ireland, whose national broadcaster was among the most vocally hostile to Israel’s presence and which is boycotting the 2026 contest entirely on political grounds, the public also gave Israel twelve points in 2025. If Israel’s vote was a manufactured fiction conjured by government advertising, somebody forgot to tell the voters of Madrid and Dublin. The Jewish population of Ireland is approximately 2,500 people. Spain’s is around 40,000 in a country of 47 million. These are not numbers that shift a national televote.

Eurovision has attracted serious academic attention for decades, precisely because its voting patterns are so revealing. Researchers at the University of Central Florida analysed 60 years of voting data and confirmed what we have all long known about: geographic blocs, cultural proximity, and diaspora communities produce consistent, statistically significant voting clusters entirely unrelated to musical merit.

Germany over-voted for Turkey for years, explained straightforwardly by the 750,000 Turkish workers who arrived under 1960s labour agreements and stayed. France consistently favours Portugal and Israel, explained by its large Portuguese and Jewish communities respectively. Lithuania punches above its weight in Ireland and the UK, home to one of Europe’s largest Lithuanian diasporas. A 2026 ETH Zurich study analysing nearly 1,800 Eurovision songs found that countries have been systematically learning and adapting winning strategies over decades – Sweden most successfully, having industrialised the process through Melodifestivalen into something approaching a songwriting factory, and exporting its producers and composers to half the continent for their own entries.

None of this has ever been considered scandalous. It is simply how Eurovision works. The contest has never been, and was never designed to be, a clinical assessment of musical merit conducted behind a veil of ignorance.

So what is the actual scandal here? Not Israel’s advertising. The real politicisation of Eurovision ran in the other direction entirely, was broader in scope, and in several documented instances broke the rules that Israel’s campaign is accused of merely exploiting more successfully than others.

A Norwegian juror, Daniel Owen, publicly admitted on Instagram after the 2024 contest that he had deliberately withheld points from Israel’s Eden Golan because of his political views on Gaza. He knew this was against the rules. Jurors are shown an explicit instruction video telling them they must not discriminate against any participant based on political views. He did it anyway, and then apologised – not for the breach, but for the fact that his fellow jurors had awarded Israel any points at all. The EBU expressed disappointment. No disciplinary action has been publicly recorded.

Statistical analysis of jury versus public voting for Israel tells a damning story. Before October 7 2023, the gap between jury scores and public scores for Israel fluctuated normally, as it does for every country. After October 7, jury support collapsed across Europe while public support surged, the two lines diverging sharply and remaining diverged. The pattern across dozens of independent juries, simultaneously, is not easily explained by a sudden collective reassessment of Israeli musical quality.

Meanwhile, five national broadcasters are boycotting the 2026 contest for explicitly political reasons. The BDS movement ran organised campaigns calling on performers, crew, and viewers to refuse participation. Over a thousand artists signed letters demanding Israel’s exclusion. Spain’s broadcaster put a political slogan on screen during a live broadcast, in direct violation of EBU guidelines, and appears to have faced no consequences whatsoever.

All of this – documented, named, rule-breaking, institutionally coordinated – received a fraction of the scrutiny directed at Israel for buying Google ads, yet is presumably the main driver in Israel’s decision to do so: to counter various international and openly rule-breaking efforts to politicise the contest against it. The reaction itself is condemned by the New York Times, despite apparently not breaking any rules.

And then there is the question of what Israel’s advertising campaign actually encouraged people to do. It encouraged supporters to use all 20 votes the system explicitly permitted each viewer to cast – a rule that existed precisely to allow committed or enthusiastic voters to express stronger preference. If the intention were one person, one vote, the limit would have been set at one. Beyond that, those voters, whatever their motivation – love of the song, cultural solidarity, political sympathy, or simple tribal feeling – were doing exactly what the system invites them to do.

You may vote because the staging was breathtaking, because a leather-clad Icelandic techno-Viking caught your eye, because the singer arrived on a flying hamster wheel in a leotard and you respect that commitment, because your grandfather came from that country, because the wind machine at the key change genuinely moved you, or because you want to make a political point. All of it is legitimate. The only people in this entire saga who were explicitly required to set aside their political views and judge purely on musical merit were the professional jurors – and one of them went on Instagram afterwards to boast that he hadn’t.

Eurovision is not, and has never been, a politically neutral event. It is a celebration of national identity, cultural difference, and tribal belonging. The flags, the postcards, the national costumes, the spokesperson announcing votes with barely concealed patriotic glee – all of it is steeped in exactly the kind of national feeling that is inseparable from politics. Culture is not downstream of politics; politics is downstream of culture, of identity, of who we feel we are and who we feel is like us.

If the EBU genuinely wanted a pure musical competition untainted by any of this, it would release all the songs on the night of the final, stripped of national attribution, heard for the first time by judges who knew nothing of their origin. No staging. No flags. No postcards of beautiful cities. No Graham Norton. A blind taste test of tunes.

It would be unwatchable. Nobody would care. The drama, the build-up, the camp excess, the tears, the tribalism, the sparkles, the geopolitical undercurrents, are the entire point of this festival of freakery. The joyful absurdity of the whole enterprise depends on knowing where everyone is from and caring about it. You cannot strip Eurovision of its politics without stripping it of everything that makes it Eurovision. But the rules exist to stop it being highjacked in an aggressive, bullying or nasty way.

Israel played the game. It played it openly, within the rules as they existed. The scandal the Times should be investigating is not that Israel encouraged its supporters to vote. It is that professional jurors across Europe admitted or appeared to allow a geopolitical moment to override their explicit obligations, that a national broadcaster put politics on screen during a live final, and that the EBU’s institutional response was to tighten rules against advertising while leaving the rule-breaking on the other side largely unexamined.

That is the story. But douze points to the New York Times for trying.

Originally published in the Jewish Chronicle.

Liam Tuffs invited me to discuss rising Jew hatred and various popular anti-Jewish conspiracies for his mostly non-Jewish audience.

We also discussed the Piers Morgan show, and its promotion of extreme and outrageous voices for clicks and followers.

After the fourth invitation from Piers Morgan’s team to appear on his Uncensored show, I finally decided it might be time to accept. This programme, I was told, would be on American foreign policy and the war with Iran, following Morgan’s interview with John Bolton. That sounded, at least on paper, like the invitation least likely to lead to the circus of shouting and hatred the programme is known for. Three experts in a studio, responding to a former US national security adviser, sounded civilised. Almost old-fashioned.

Piers and I have a short but revealing history. I once criticised his show in these pages for its decline into algorithmic bear-baiting. He responded with an article entitled, ‘In defence of Piers Morgan, by Piers Morgan’, which described me as ‘slavishly pro-Israel’.

So it was hardly a surprise when midway through the show, he asked if I am ‘very pro-Israel’ and ‘partisan’. His evidence appeared to be a hasty inspection of my headlines in this magazine over the past couple of years, apparently without the inconvenience of reading the articles beneath them. This was a forensic analysis in the same sense that licking a thermometer is medical research.

My answer was that I am not ‘slavishly’ anything: I defend Israel when I believe the facts and the regional context justify it, and I criticise Israeli policy when I believe criticism is warranted. Sure enough, I often find the facts lead to a less instinctively critical position of Israel than those who want to trace just about every geopolitical disaster back to the Jewish state.

Sitting next to me in the studio was a man called Scott Horton, who has blamed Israel for a range of ills, from provoking 9/11 (‘Naftali Bennett is the cause of September 11th’) to threatening to nuke London, Paris, and Rome. Yet on the show there was no equivalent health warning that he was a ‘partisan commentator’, no caveat that he is a heavily biased anti-interventionist, no attempt to classify him as anti-Israel or reflexively hostile to American power, before he was asked to speak. In fact, former MP and British soldier Col Bob Stewart and I were introduced as ‘a special studio panel assembled in honour of the visiting Scott Horton.’

The typical format of Morgan’s programme is not to my taste, and I had decided that if I appeared on the show, I would not be one of the several furious heads appearing by video link, yelling until the algorithm purred. As all three of us were in the studio, I would do my best to resist excessive bitching and backbiting, focusing instead on contributing my own analysis as part of a wider discussion. Horton tested that resolution, and though I did call out his crackpot conspiracies during the show, we shook hands at the end of the recording and parted in a friendly manner. He later declared on X that I was ‘just some random piece of shit Zionist’. Charming.

The programme began with Morgan’s assertion in his introduction that there were ‘many reasons why Israel gets to blame all the credit for the Iran war’, before describing a conflict that had ‘so far delivered only grave costs’, described the Iran/US talks as being centred on reopening a waterway that had been open ‘for thousands of years’ and restoring Iran’s nuclear programme to the level it had been before Trump scrapped the agreement. This was essentially Horton’s position, too, and was laid out as the starting point for all our conversation.

It is not that Horton invents facts. Many of his questions are valid and scrutiny of reporting and propaganda is important. Yet he assembles a prosecution brief and presents it as a judge’s summing up. American error becomes causation. Causation becomes responsibility. Responsibility somehow migrates away from Tehran, away from Moscow, away from jihadists, away from any actor whose own ambitions, fanaticisms and brutalities are inconvenient to his theory. But in many situations these are the cause of the US or Israel’s actions. I cannot help but find such an approach conspiracist, and Piers Morgan’s frequent airing of such theories, especially alongside varied but realistic views from calmer experts, only works to give them increased credibility.

Horton’s treatment of the Iranian regime was one of the most revealing parts of the exchange. Rather than beginning from the obvious fact that Tehran is a brutal theocracy that imprisons, tortures, executes and murders its own citizens, crushes dissent, persecutes women, sponsors terrorist proxies and exports violence across the region, he seemed determined to cast Iran primarily as the reactive victim of American and Israeli policy – a grotesque distortion.

He questioned the number of protestors killed in the early part of the war, often reported to be 40,000:

It’s just not true. It was some Kurdish communists who were attacking in a protest that they kind of co-opted, a protest that was started by the United States, waging economic war against the currency. So it’s just a lie that they were so desperate to cling on to power that they had to use that level of ultraviolence to do so.

Whatever you think of US interventionism, it does not erase the agency or criminality of the Iranian regime. The people of Iran have repeatedly risked their lives to protest because they know what Horton’s analysis appears to minimise: that the Islamic Republic is not merely a misunderstood state under pressure, but a repressive revolutionary dictatorship whose victims include its own population.

Perhaps oddest of all, though, was our discussion of the nuclear issue, where the conversation threatened to leave the runway altogether. Once again, with Piers’s encouragement, Horton pushed the familiar line that Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal is the real scandal, that Washington effectively pretends not to know about it, and that this exposes the hypocrisy of confronting Iran, as though nuclear ambiguity in a democratic ally and nuclear deception by a revolutionary theocracy are interchangeable. They are not.

Israel has long maintained nuclear ambiguity. Iran signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and has repeatedly been at the centre of disputes with the International Atomic Energy Agency over undeclared material, enrichment levels and inspection access. These are different strategic and legal categories. Pretending that the two cases are morally and strategically equivalent requires a determined squint.

Though I explained that calmly, Horton claimed Israel had threatened to nuke London, Paris, Berlin and Rome under the so-called ‘Samson Option’ and added that Israeli leaders had threatened to nuke Western states if they abandoned Israel. The most lurid version of this charge concerns Martin van Creveld, an Israeli military historian whose 2003 remarks are often dragged out as proof that Israel has threatened to nuke European capitals. Van Creveld did say, in a bleak and provocative interview, that Israel possessed ‘several hundred atomic warheads’ and could launch them ‘perhaps even at Rome’, adding that Israel had the capability to take the world down with it before it went under. But that was not an Israeli government statement. It was not a prime ministerial doctrine. It was not a defence ministry communiqué. It was doomsday language from an academic known for being provocative.

No Israeli leader has announced a policy of nuking London, Paris, Berlin or Rome if Europe becomes irritating. The claim is bonkers. Israel’s survival depends on its alliances with the West. The idea that it would vaporise its own diplomatic, military and economic support base as an act of strategic pique is deranged.

Tehran, on the other hand, has had multiple senior officials and leaders openly call for the destruction of Israel – with ‘the occupying regime must vanish from the page of time’, repeated by presidents like Ahmadinejad citing Khomeini, IRGC commanders threatening to ‘raze Tel Aviv and Haifa,’ and chants of ‘Death to Israel’ as official policy.

Iran’s regime has also developed long-range ballistic missiles explicitly capable of reaching European cities, including London, Paris, and Berlin, while pursuing nuclear weapons technology in defiance of international agreements. Unlike Israel’s ambiguous last-resort deterrence doctrine, Iran’s threats have been routine, ideological, and aimed at annihilation of a UN member state as a core goal.

Does explaining all this make me ‘partisan’ or ‘slavish’ to Israel? I don’t think so. I stand by my work. Much of it has been sympathetic to Israel because much of the analysis, honestly conducted, leads there. Refusing to join the reflexive condemnation of Israel or the United States does not make you an Israeli government spokesman. It makes you unwilling to accept the lazy moral reasoning in which Western power is always guilty, anti-Western power is always reactive, and Israel alone must defend itself under conditions no other state would tolerate.

At the end, Piers half-joked: ‘Jonathan, continue to whack me in your columns. I actually think that it is quite brand-enhancing when you do it.’ I replied: ‘I know you do.’ That is the point. Piers thrives on this stuff, quite literally. Pandering to the crazies brings in the clicks from their followers. But it is not serious analysis or reasoned discussion when a view that is not reflexively and excessively hostile to Israel or America requires some warning from Morgan that it is ‘partisan’ or ‘slavish’.

There is only one slave in this scenario, and it is Piers Morgan, who is slavish to his brand. That brand is what the show is actually about. Not Iran, not the war, not Israel, and sometimes, it seems, not the truth. It is Uncensored, alright. But perhaps it is time to censor the fireworks and fantasy and focus instead on something a bit less controversial: reason.

Originally published in The Spectator.

I was asked to discuss Policy Exchange’s polling which claimed that “among the British Muslims living in the polled areas, there are worrying levels of anti-Semitic conspiratorial beliefs and support for the criminalisation of blasphemy. The findings show that the UK is far from being a stable multi-faith democracy.”

But the other chap kept going on about “far right grooming gangs”. After his initial answer, which sounded a bit Chat GPT, he seemed to lose the ability to form full sentences. When I asked about the gangs, he said he didn’t mean what he’d said.

Add the influence of Iran, Hamas, Al Quds Day, the legacy of the PLO, and politicians like Zack Polanski courting the far left and Islamist vote, and we have to ask what kind of extremism Britain is allowing to continue on its streets.