How dumb can you get?

A group of wealthy US homeowners spent $565,000 (£441,000) to build protective sand dunes near their properties – only to have the barriers wash away in days.

Where were these properties? Why, on a beach. Hello: beaches have been disappearing from under beach houses for decades, far longer than anyone’s been talking about climate change. I have vivid memories of dangling halves of houses on the New Jersey shore back in the 60s. Why in hell would anyone think for a second that bringing in more sand to be washed away would be useful?

I mean even without the last few decades of experience, are people not aware of what sand is? Do they not remember building sand castles on the beach for the very purpose of watching the tide dissolve them?

The group in Salisbury, Massachusetts, trucked in about 14,000 tonnes of sand in hopes of protecting up to 15 homes. Those protections washed away, however, and residents now hope the state will help fund a more permanent solution to safeguard their seaside homes.

Pause for hilarity.

“Ok well that barrier made of cardboard didn’t work so now please give us the cash for a concrete wall.”

Hilarity aside, hello again: seaside houses are inherently vulnerable. They’re a risky luxury. They should never ever be subsidized by public funds.

Tom Saab, the head of Salisbury Beach Citizens for Change, told the BBC that the group had “begged” Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey and the state to help re-fortify the beach after a particularly brutal storm in December 2022. He alleged that they had “refused to help” and had left their properties vulnerable to flooding and storm damage. Their inaction, he said, had forced the community to fund the short-term fix. “A project of this magnitude should have been done by an engineering company or the state and federal government,” Mr Saab added. “But our little volunteer group from Salisbury pulled off a minor miracle.”

The entitlement of some people. Sure, get it done by an engineering company, but at your expense, not the expense of everyone in New Hampshire.

This guy should be booted off Twitter for constantly lying about gender skeptics.

That’s just a lie. People who don’t believe in magic gender are not “working to remove” anyone’s rights, we’re working to protect women’s rights. Trans people don’t have a right to shove women aside and replace them with men in lipstick. Pinheads like Thomas Willett need to stop burbling about “trans rights” without ever defining them or explaining why they get to cancel women’s rights.

Or maybe it was a matter of influencers.

What is a “transfeminine jurist”?

What does it mean to “move through academia using a profoundly transdisciplinary approach”?

What is a “transfeminine law clerk”?

If Florence is a trans woman why does he call himself “they”?

You have GOT to be kidding.

The National Post [Canada]:

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a recent sexual assault case that it was “problematic” for a lower court judge to refer to the alleged victim as a “woman,” implying that the more appropriate term should have been “person with a vagina.”

In other words it’s “more appropriate” to call victims of sexual assault cunts.

In a decision published Friday, Justice Sheilah Martin wrote that a trial judge’s use of the word “a woman” may “have been unfortunate and engendered confusion.”

While “person with a vagina” would engender no confusion?

Martin does not specify why the word “woman” is confusing, but the next passage in her decision refers to the complainant as a “person with a vagina.” Notably, not one person in the entire case is identified as transgender, and the complainant is referred to throughout as a “she.”

I wonder if Justice Sheilah Martin herself would like to be referred to as a person with a vagina. Maybe that should be a requirement – all women have to have “with a vagina” included in any mention of them. Justice with a vagina Sheilah Martin, novelist with a vagina Margaret Atwood, actress with a vagina Catherine O’Hara. Good?

To be fair, the judge’s ruling may have been more narrowly focused than the usual “women must stop calling themselves women” bullshit: it was in reference to testimony about the complainant waking up to find the accused penetrating her, and to arguments about whether or not she could tell. It was about the particular body part in question. But still…without a social background in which we’re constantly bullied to stop saying “women” would a judge have come up with “person with a vagina”?

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on They simply memorized a rule.

when faced with a “gut” common-sense feeling that something’s amiss with transgender ideology, the “rote lesson” they’ve absorbed is to distrust their own “gut” sense that something’s wrong because there must be some kind of higher, intellectual, rational justification out there somewhere that they fear they just haven’t worked out yet.

Kind of like, All these other important people have figured it out already; why haven’t I?

On occasion, I’ve wondered how it is that this exact kind of argument never worked with regards to religious belief. There’ve been lots of important and brilliant people who’ve held devout religious belief, yet their own faith made no dent in my lack of belief (once I’d finally come to that position in my own thoughts and feelings about the matter). The faith of those smart people did not make me rethink my perception of the impossibility and ridiculousness of the supernatural aspects of their religions. For me, the supernatural bits get in the way of those few moral and ethical bits that are actually worthwhile.

Transgenderism rests upon a set of essentially religious, supernatural beliefs. An implicit Cartesian dualism, the primacy of the “gender identity” over the sexed body, the concept of being born into the “wrong” body, the belief that sex is a spectrum rather than a binary, and that humans can change sex. Like religion, there are all sorts of subsets of belief, many of which are mutually exclusive (is gender fixed or fluid; is it innate or can it arise later; how much , if any physical transition is required; etc.), all of which still, supposedly, fall within the trans “community” or under the trans “umbrella.”

I’m having an argument with Freddie deBoer over at Substack right this minute, over his insistence that there’s such a thing as a “trans child”, and he’s reacting very much like someon who’s been conditioned to believe that his own doubts about trans medicine are signs that he might secretly harbour some kind of hate for the “LGBTQ” somewhere deep down.

Well, this potential “hatred” may actually be partially true if he supports “trans medicine” because he’s supporting transing away the gay. Those who claim there are “trans kids” are starting with their conclusion by squeezing all disphoric children into a one-size-fits-all diagnosis of transness. “The awnswer is trans; what was the question?” Remember Dawkins invocation of the “Conservative child” or “Keynsian child” to point out the inappropriateness of talking about a “Muslim child” or a “Catholic child?” I’ve come to think that transess is more a belief than a condition. Talking about “trans children” is akin to pre-emptive recruitment into an ideology, a staking out of a political claim in the flesh and blood of children, rather than a medical diagnosis. Treatment then, is not so much an attempt at any sort of cure, but a sacrifice to faith, a pricey token of commitment. And this commitment must be made before they have a chance to desist.

You’ll not believe me but this is a real thing.

Here it is right here at Police Scotland here. The police, talking baby talk to the citizenry.

Have you met the Hate Monster?

The Hate Monster, represents that feeling some people get when they are frustrated and angry and take it out on others, because they feel like they need to show they are better than them. In other words, they commit a hate crime.

The Hate Monster loves it when you get angry. He weighs you down till you end up targeting someone, just because they look or act different to you.

When you’re feeling insecure or angry, the Hate Monster feeds on that.

This is the language of picture books for small children, age 4 or 5. Children age 5 tend not to read police webpages.

Scotland, what did they do to you?

Cool, the Royal College of Midwives has invented a new way to gestate and push out babies.

Oh thank god, Amnesty International has found the way to fix everything.

I started re-reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland last night (for the 5th time? 10th? 20th? I don’t know). Kept shrieking with laughter at the language jokes.

Suddenly she came upon a little three-legged table, all made of solid glass; there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key, and Alice’s first thought was that it might belong to one of the doors of the hall; but, alas! either the locks were too large, or the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of them.

…

How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; “and even if my head would go through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my shoulders.”

…

There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes.

…

…round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words “DRINK ME,” beautifully printed on it in large letters.

It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not”

Well done Alice! If it’s not marked poison it can’t possibly be poison.

However, this bottle was not marked “poison,” so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.

I’m pretty sure I missed the hilarity of that one the first x times I read. I’m not entirely sure I didn’t miss the hilarity of all of them.

First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about this; “for it might end, you know,” said Alice to herself, “in my going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?” And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.

Not so much hilarity as…what to call it…I guess inquiring.

…sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people.

…She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, “Which way? Which way?”, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing…

That got a real, noisy explosion of hilarity. I swear, I have not paid close enough attention to the jokes in this book in the past. I suppose I read it for the story, like a fool.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); “now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!” (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off). “Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure I shan’t be able! I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best way you can;—but I must be kind to them,” thought Alice, “or perhaps they won’t walk the way I want to go! Let me see: I’ll give them a new pair of boots every Christmas.”

…

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Alice, “a great girl like you,” (she might well say this), “to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!” But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall…As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she was up to her chin in salt water. Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, “and in that case I can go back by railway,” she said to herself.

…

“Ugh!” said the Lory, with a shiver.

“I beg your pardon!” said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely: “Did you speak?”

“Not I!” said the Lory hastily.

“I thought you did,” said the Mouse. “—I proceed. ‘Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable—’”

“Found what?” said the Duck.

“Found it,” the Mouse replied rather crossly: “of course you know what ‘it’ means.”

“I know what ‘it’ means well enough, when I find a thing,” said the Duck: “it’s generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?”

Genius.

What a bizarre choice.

BBC Debate Night then gives a short bio for each debater, concluding with

It looks like one of Moley’s jokes but it isn’t, that’s the actual BBC tweet.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Oh look a sharp rise in referrals.

Wouldn’t you think that would alarm the people in charge? Wouldn’t you think they would pause to try to figure out why referrals skyrocketed like that? Wouldn’t you think they would not just assume it’s because a real need is at long last being met? Wouldn’t you think they would want to make sure they hadn’t simply created a market just as advertisers create markets for particular movies or shoes or cars? If you build it they will come along to get their bits cut off.

It never ceases to amaze me the rationalizing people do. People want moral certainty and simplicity, and that means they can’t bear to be seen to be challenging anything with a rainbow sticker stuck on it, because in a simple model of the world, only Bad People do Bad Things to the Rainbow People. The walls of fear and caution and panic I have had to dig around to get people to acknowledge — even in private, just one on one — some basic, obvious problems with pediatric “transition”…

It has made me realize that gay rights wasn’t primarily achieved through analysis and understanding, much of it happened through rote learning. Society didn’t come together and think the issue through and conclude that there’s no harm in homosexuality among consenting adults; rather, society was conditioned, like Pavlov’s dog, to associate challenging the Rainbow with future social punishment and shame. They simply memorized a rule: if you don’t get on board with the Rainbow’s demands, you risk finding yourself on the wrong side of history, sullied and shamed.

I can see it clear as day, that this is the calculus everyone’s doing. Not one fucking drop of critical thinking applied to the question of gay people’s well being, even as adolescent gay people’s bodies are being carved up. They’re hung up on the only question that matters to them: will I come out looking ok in this social shift? and they conclude that the safest bet is to just go with the flow and give the Rainbow whatever it wants. There’s an added rationalization, too, that this is “inside-the-rainbow” business — the Rainbow lobby is demanding this, and transition is being done to Rainbow people (set aside the circular logic there, that once you assign a child a trans identity you rationalize away your own responsibility because now they’re “one of them”), so the responsibility will ultimately land on the rainbow people themselves. Sort of like how many white Americans treat so-called Black-on-Black crime like it’s not their concern.

And that calculus has become so apparent to others — it’s become so obvious that a rainbow sticker is a license to do whatever the fuck you want — that people with malevolent intentions, or secret agendas or desires, or mental problems they’re running from, or just a yen to gain an edge or some social cred, have come flooding in, so much so that the Rainbow has swollen to ten times what it’s supposed to be. (Science says only about 2 to 3 percent of people are LGB, but upwards of a third of young people are now calling themselves “2SLGBTQQIA+”.)

More on the no more puberty blockers news:

Children will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at gender identity clinics, NHS England has confirmed. The government said it welcomed the “landmark decision”, adding it would help ensure care is based on evidence and is in the “best interests of the child”.

Makes you wonder why care wasn’t already based on evidence and in the best interests of the child.

It used to be widely understood that “in the best interests of the child” very very often meant “not what the child wants in the moment.” It used to be widely and well understood that children don’t always know what’s best for them. I still wonder how that understanding vanished so fast and thoroughly in so many people.

It follows a public consultation on the issue and an interim policy, and comes after NHS England commissioned an independent review in 2020 of gender identity services for children under 18. That review, led by Dr Hilary Cass, followed a sharp rise in referrals to the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which is closing at the end of March.

In 2021/22, there were over 5,000 referrals to Gids, compared to just under 250 a decade earlier.

Wouldn’t you think that would alarm the people in charge? Wouldn’t you think they would pause to try to figure out why referrals skyrocketed like that? Wouldn’t you think they would not just assume it’s because a real need is at long last being met? Wouldn’t you think they would want to make sure they hadn’t simply created a market just as advertisers create markets for particular movies or shoes or cars? If you build it they will come along to get their bits cut off.

No longer:

Children will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at gender identity clinics, NHS England has confirmed.

Puberty blockers, which pause the physical changes of puberty such as breast development or facial hair, will now only be available to children as part of clinical research trials.

Fewer than 100 young people are currently on puberty blockers and they will be able to continue their treatment, it has been confirmed.

But is it “treatment” or is it something else? That’s rather the issue, isn’t it?

Stock on Butler part 2.

There isn’t a single objection lodged against opponents that does not come freighted with the implication of moral taint and/or stupidity. Of course, painting one’s intellectual enemies as cartoon characters is a known tactic of modern transactivism; still, it is shocking to see it done so crudely by someone who retains a high reputation in many quarters.

The many quarters are the more easily fooled ones, as of course Stock knows and expects us to understand.

It is also striking how hackneyed some of the thought is. Butler’s writing in her heyday at least displayed a bit of panache and originality, assuming you could parse it successfully. In contrast, here she comes over as in thrall to established activist tropes, and with all the depth of a TikTok video in places. She even cites Pink News as a source of data.

I wonder if Butler is as afraid of the Transish Inquisition as anyone else is, and so swapped Theory-riddled jargon for stale activist tropes as one might throw cookies at a hungry bear.

Whereas she used to insist, admirably, on fluidity and impermanence in the expression of gender identity, now she exhorts “affirmation” and recognition of “the reality of trans lives”. The chapter on British so-called TERFs is a compendium of smears culled from online teenagers about their gender-critical mums: they are not real feminists; they are effectively racists focusing on a white ideal of womanhood, on the side of “colonialism and empire”; they spread “baseless fears” about vulnerable transwomen; and so on.

The Karen approach. How impressive.

I’ve done my time in the academic salt mines trying to make sense of the contradictions in Butler’s writing so I’ll leave it to others to adjudicate who is right. Instead, I prefer to turn to a more interesting question, made perfectly legitimate by the precedent she herself sets. In producing such a terrible book, what is going on for Butler psychoanalytically? What is she really scared of?

I’ll stop reading for a minute to make my own guess before I know what Stock says. My guess is that she’s scared of reputational harm of the form: “you are one of those dreary old boring stupid kareny terf types instead of the cutting edge hipster profundity-dispenser you used to be.” She’s scared of being filed as one of them.

Now, what does Stock say? That broadly speaking that’s one likely reason but that there’s also another.

But there is also, I suspect, a deeper fear at work here, and an unconscious desire to sublimate guilt. (See how annoying this is, Professor Butler?) The level of projection in this book — by which I mean, attribution of unrecognised features of one’s own behaviour to others, in the Freudian and Jungian sense — is off the scale. Butler sees authoritarian cancellers and enemies of critical thought everywhere, though apparently not so much among those closest to home.

She tells us that in the anti-gender movement, there is a hatred of rational discussion. To say gender is an ideology is, in itself, “an ideological move par excellence”. Whereas gender studies — gender studies, for gods’ sake — is a “diverse field, marked by internal debate”, by contrast its enemies refuse to “read the texts they oppose — or to learn how best to read them” and they “do not hold themselves to standards of consistency or coherence”. 

While the trans ideologues do? Pause to laugh some more. But Stock doesn’t let us get away with just laughing – she says there’s something to it.

Still, there is something correct in Butler’s observation that critics of transactivism are getting increasingly intolerant and illiberal. The dominant emotion she attributes to them is fear, but a more accurate description would be fury.

Nailed it. I’ll cop to that. I have lots and lots and lots of fury.

It is obvious that many across the world have become angered by the grandiose, narcissistic overreach of academics like her: thinkers indifferent to the real-world havoc wrought by their barmy ideas and impenetrable speech codes, and who pillory all objectors as badly intentioned or deeply confused, no matter what the background reasoning. Butler is right to fear increasing threats towards LGBT people and women across the globe but fails to notice her own significant responsibility in the aetiology of the problem. Speaking personally, I’m not remotely afraid of gender, understood blandly as sexual and bodily expression; but I am very afraid of what Judith Butler has done with it.

Brilliant ending.

Reading Kathleen Stock’s heartwarming review of Judith Butler’s new book on Y R terfs so evil. I’ll say one thing for JB: she’s a brilliant catalyst for jokes.

Not for her the pedestrian business of going through critics’ arguments, providing non-partisan evidence, and patiently exposing internal contradictions and gaps in an understated but cumulatively devastating manner. 

She could do that, she says, but she goes on to not do it.

Instead, she wants to give the people what nobody was really asking for: a deconstruction of the “syntactical elements” of the “anti-gender movement”, understood as a “phantasmic scene” according to the “theoretical formulation of Jean Laplanche”.

Oh well then. If we’re bringing in Jean Laplanche then it’s game over. (New movie title? When Butler Met Plank?)

Butler is very compassionate though.

Or perhaps — and this is about as charitable as it gets — you are simply a naïve and credulous fool, for whom getting in a moral panic about gay marriage and LGBTQ+ library books acts as a psychic substitute for reasonable fears about climate change and neoliberalism. As such, you are being played by the reactionary rhetoric of various deplorables, including Orbán, Trump, Bolsonaro, various Popes, and er… J.K. Rowling, Holly Lawford-Smith, and Kathleen Stock. 

And then we get to my favorite sentence so far. (I haven’t read the whole thing yet. I had to interrupt myself to share.)

Though at times the author feigns charitable curiosity about some of her argumentative targets, the attitude never lasts. A sentence about gender-critical feminists that starts with “To be fair” ends up, a mere clause or two later, talking about their supposed affinities with “fascist politics”.

Bahahahahaha that’s made my day.

More to follow.

Is that true?

I assume that by ” those who have whipped up Britain’s unhinged transphobic moral panic” Jones means those who have pointed out that people can’t change sex and that men who claim to be women are displacing and bullying women.

Is it likely that four teenagers would stab a man who claims to be a woman because gender critical feminists point out that men can’t be women? I don’t think it’s likely at all. I don’t think stabby teenagers spend much time considering the arguments of gender critical feminists. To be fair I don’t think they spend any time doing that.

What was their first clue?

To Donald Trump, Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán is “fantastic,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping is “brilliant,” North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is “an OK guy,” and, most alarmingly, he allegedly said Adolf Hitler “did some good things,” a worldview that would reverse decades-old US foreign policy in a second term should he win November’s presidential election, multiple former senior advisers told CNN.

“He thought Putin was an OK guy and Kim was an OK guy — that we had pushed North Korea into a corner,” retired Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff, told me. “To him, it was like we were goading these guys. ‘If we didn’t have NATO, then Putin wouldn’t be doing these things.’”

No, he’d be doing much worse things.

The former president’s admiration for autocrats has been reported on before, but in comments by Trump recounted to me [Jim Sciutto] for my new book, “The Return of Great Powers,” out Tuesday, Kelly and others who served under Trump give new insight into why they warn that a man who consistently praises autocratic leaders opposed to US interests is ill-suited to lead the country in the Great Power clashes that could be coming, telling me they believe that the root of his admiration for these figures is that he envies their power.

“He views himself as a big guy,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser under Trump, told me. “He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He kind of likes that.”

In other words he’s that terrible combination: power-hungry and profoundly stupid.

“Trump believed in the power of his personal charisma and diplomacy,” recalled Matthew Pottinger, his deputy national security adviser, who was deeply involved in Trump’s meetings with North Korean leader Kim and Chinese President Xi. “He had almost unlimited faith in it. That was as true with Kim as it was with Xi — but also with allies too.”

What personal charisma would that be?

Trump and Orban agree to murder Ukraine.

Donald Trump “will not give a penny” to Ukraine if he is re-elected US president, the far-right Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said after a controversial meeting with Trump in Florida.

“He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Orbán told state media in Hungary on Sunday. “Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.” According to Orbán, Trump has a “detailed plan” to end the Ukraine war, which began two years ago when Russia invaded.

Oh please. Trump has no detailed anything. It doesn’t take a detailed plan, all it takes is a Toddler No, and that’s all Trump has. And the plan is not to “end the war,” the plan is to allow Putin to devour Ukraine the way Trump devours a hamburger.

The US and its allies have supported Ukraine but further US aid is held up in Congress, having passed the Senate with bipartisan support only to be blocked in the House, which is controlled by far-right Trump allies.

They’re not even far right. They’re not even political. They’re just destroyers. Trash everything & give us money: that’s their “politics.”

Calling Trump “a man of peace”, Orbán said: “If the Americans don’t give money and weapons, along with the Europeans, the war is over. And if the Americans don’t give money, the Europeans alone can’t finance this war. And then the war is over.”

Peace shmeace. It’s not about “the war is over”; it’s about Putin wins and Ukraine is obliterated.

Despite facing 91 criminal charges and having suffered multimillion-dollar reverses in civil suits concerning his business affairs and a rape allegation a judge deemed “substantially true”, Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.

And the US is a bitter degrading blight on the global landscape.

Trump said: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic, he’s a non-controversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss. No, he’s a great leader.”

The profound understanding of democracy from the next “boss” of the US.

Wait, you mean Hamas aren’t the good guys? Are you sure? Did you check with them?

Arresting the victim part 3:

During the protest some activists were heard chanting “Zionist scum, off our streets” and several placards showed support for the Houthi militias in Yemen targeting ships going through the Red Sea.

One pro-Palestine activist on the march could be seen wearing a protective helmet and carrying a riot shield. The man, whose helmet was similar to those used by reporters in combat zones, paraded holding the riot shield with the slogan: “Resistance is justified when your land is occupied.”

One young woman held a placard that read: “One holocaust does not justify another,” in defiance of criticism that such comparisons are anti-Semitic, and another placard showed a bull depicting Gaza goring a person with a Star of David on their body saying: “Slaying of the beast.”

So no wonder the Met is protecting the pro-Palestine marchers and pushing their critics to the ground.

This isn’t new, sadly. It goes back at least as far as the fatwa on Rushdie. It goes back at least to the days when the BBC constantly platformed the Muslim Council of Britain instead of its many critics.

In a video of the incident, Mr Ghorbani is heard shouting, “Shame on you” as officers held him down before saying: “I wrote down Hamas is a terrorist organisation… but they arrested me.”

Mr Ghorbani, an IT professional, said that he had been assaulted by pro-Palestine protesters as he stood holding his sign objecting to Hamas, which is a banned terror group.

Well it may be a banned terror group but it’s also The Authentic Voice of the People, while its critics are nonconforming troublesome rabble.

“They attacked me from behind and hit me in the head,” he said. “They pushed me and told me Hamas is a protector of Palestine. The police destroyed my sign and told me that I had harassed someone in the protest and that is why they arrested me.

“They arrested me because someone who supports Hamas attacked me and I defended myself. After 10 minutes my friends showed them a video of what I was doing and they released me. The person who attacked me was not arrested.”

Because that person is The Authentic Voice of the People.

Remember how the police arrested and then “de-arrested” a guy who was protesting Hamas on Saturday? It’s not working out well for them.

A former Cabinet minister has accused the Metropolitan Police of “emboldening” the mob after a counter-protester carrying a sign saying “Hamas is terrorist” at a pro-Palestine rally was arrested.

Niyak Ghorbani, 38,  was pulled to the ground and handcuffed by officers after an incident close to the march through central London on Saturday. He was arrested over an allegation of assault but was later de-arrested after officers reviewed footage of the incident.

The Met is now facing calls to take action against a protester who Mr Ghorbani, an Iranian who lives in Balham, says assaulted him.

The Met is also being told off for “two-tier policing” aka different rules for different protests. It’s much like the trans thing: pro-trans ideologists can do no wrong while critics of trans ideology can do no right. If there’s a brawl, it is necessarily the fault of the ideology-dissenter.

Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister, launched an attack on the Met for their handling of the incident and said that officers were failing to tackle “the mob” and putting free speech at risk.

“This shameful incident is the logical endpoint of consistently prioritising ‘community relations’ over even-handedly enforcing the law: the mob is emboldened and free-speech is threatened,” he said. “It’s a chilling inversion of what law-enforcement is about. Two-tier policing must end.”

Police said officers intervened to prevent a “breach of the peace” and the arrest was not over the placard but the Campaign Against Antisemitism said that the response was “outrageous” and disproportionate.

Sssshhhhhh. The Islamist communinny, like the trans communinny, can do no wrong. Critics of the communinny can do no right. This is the rule.