Essa Suleiman has been charged with attempted murder after two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green, north-west London. As has become typical after attacks in Britain, the airwaves quickly filled with bad-faith actors exploiting tragedy to divide communities and drive their own agenda.

Sky News made two questionable bookings. First up they allowed Dame Louise Ellman to link the attack to“Islamic incitement within mosques.” She also accused pro-Palestinian activists of “screaming hatred towards Jewish people”. Ellman did not substantiate these claims and Sky didn’t ask her to.

Ellman was previously involved in a controversy over a series of articles that cited her as a source. The UK’s press regulator found the articles contained “significantly misleading” claims about pro-Palestinian activists. Sky didn’t inform their viewers about Ellman’s unreliability.

Sky also platformed Jake Wallis Simons, who used to edit the very same newspaper that was reprimanded in the above scandal. Booking Simons in the aftermath of an attack is a particularly odd choice, given he famously made up a terrorist attack that never happened in order to smear Palestinian Muslims.

Britain’s leading politicians also got in on the fun. Nigel Farage insinuated that the attacker was both an illegal immigrant and an Iranian operative, while Prime Minister Keir Starmer baselessly linked the attack to people chanting “globalise the intifada.”

Intifada is an Arabic word for a rebellion or uprising. It’s been used, correctly and uncontroversially, for centuries. Even the US Holocaust Museum translated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as “intifada” until bad-faith agitators kicked up a fuss.

The phrase “globalise the intifada” is used to highlight how Israel’s ongoing genocide is funded, armed, and politically shielded by Global North countries. It’s a call for the kind of global resistance that ended South African apartheid. Once you understand this, you understand why Israel and its allies are trying to ban the phrase.

Essa Suleiman left a psychiatric hospital in the days before the attack. He had a history of violence. He was known to police. And he had previously been referred to the government’s deeply flawed counter-extremism programme, which failed to act. A serious country would interrogate the state failings that allowed a preventable attack to take place. Instead, the government is twisting the attack to their own cynical political ends.

Suleiman also allegedly tried to murder a Muslim friend of his on the day of the Golders Green attack but, in a stark illustration of the hierarchy of racism in British society, that attack hasn’t made headlines. In some instances the third murder charge has been entirely omitted from reporting.

Hierarchies aren’t helpful. Neither is the insistence that isolation should the default mode of Jewish being. What we need is safety through solidarity: an anti-racism based on mutual self-interest and collective liberation. We can defeat bigotry together.

Last weekend Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) blocked Andy Burnham from standing in an upcoming election. Much ink has been spilled about this “by-election bust-up”, far less about the pattern of anti-democratic decisions that paved the way to it.

Cancelled elections, disproportionate outcomes, and internal stitch-ups: British democracy is in a sorry state, and it’s the right-wing clique atop the Labour Party who stand to benefit. At least in the short term. This article situates their decision to block Burnham within Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s broader authoritarian turn.

Postponed council elections

Labour’s choice to block Burnham makes sense when you realise they view winning votes as a bureaucratic inconvenience. They are simply not interested in representing you, as demonstrated by the recent uptick in Labour MPs baselessly reporting tenacious constituents to the police.

Labour, who promised to end austerity, recently invited councils to “raise capacity concerns and seek to postpone elections.” That is, to cancel elections because they cost too much.

Twenty-nine councils accepted the government’s offer, leaving over four million voters without a say. Still more are threatening to do so. Most wanting a delay are Labour-led. This is convenient since polls indicated they were set to lose badly before they called the whole thing off.

First-past-the-post voting

Consistent with his disregard for voter opinion, Starmer has abandoned his former support for electoral reform. It’s not difficult to work out why. The distortions of our first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system let him win by getting fewer votes than Labour did in 2019, a result that Starmer called a “devastating loss” at the time.

First past the post often struggles to turn votes into representative parliaments. However, its distortions were especially stark in the last election. A record six in ten voters did not get the MP they voted for. A vote for Labour was thirty five times more powerful than a vote for smaller parties like Reform.

The line Labour have settled on to defend this unfairness is that wanting a fair voting system makes us sore losers (“people complain about FPTP – but everyone knew the rules”) and hypocrites (“Strangely, I do not remember much debate in 2015 about whether Cameron had truly won the election”).

The truth meanwhile, is that Starmer’s Labour Party is simply not interested in fair elections. Their strategic wager is that, if they can turn the next election into a starkly binary choice, we’ll all come crawling back to them. A key cabinet member recently admitted as much:

The real fight will be the centre-left versus the Reform right.

And Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood recently reiterated this threat:

If you don’t like this, you won’t like what follows me.

Her pitch to voters is that the only way to avoid getting what they really don’t want, is to vote for something else that they also don’t want. This is why Labour oppose proportional representation against the stated wishes of MPs, the general public, and Labour delegates. It’s a protection racket, and a dangerous game for a party polling in fourth place to be playing.

Internal stitch-ups

Andy Burnham beats all other Labour figures on approval ratings. This is because he seems warm and relatable, not managerial or rehearsed. His approval rating is 52% higher than Starmer’s, and constituency polling shows that Labour win this seat with Burnham as their candidate and lose without him.

The party is not ignorant to this. Senior Labour figures have privately conceded that they expect to lose. Thus, blocking Burnham from standing signals a leadership prepared to risk defeat rather than tolerate a victory by someone outside its faction. Mark it on the calendar. Sunday 25th January, 2026. The date the Labour Party called it a day.

For Starmer’s clique, victory is secondary to retaining control of the party. They’ve re-written the Labour Party rulebook to stymie Burnham and people like him. Changes include a new clause nicknamed the “Burnham clause”:

Directly elected mayors … must seek the express permission of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party … before seeking nomination as Labour candidates for the Westminster parliament.

You must be an MP in order to run for the leadership of the Labour Party, so the NEC used this rule to deny Burnham’s run before it began.

Other avenues of skulduggery floated by Starmer allies included declaring an all-BAME (black and minority ethnic) or all-female shortlist of candidates. This way they could block Burnham without being seen to single him out. The plan was to take a tool meant to fix structural inequality and cynically repurpose it as a factional weapon.

Starmer’s faction have been doing this kind of thing for years. For example, in the Corbyn years, Starmerite staffers misused the party’s disciplinary systems. Tasked with rooting out bigotry, they instead used their position to systematically “hunt” and expel “Trots” (short for Trotskyite: a derogatory term for left-wingers).

Starmerites are systematically dismantling Labour party democracy. They promised to “link up our mass membership, unite our party and promote pluralism.” However, they’ve now stopped members from debating some issues. It’s also harder for members to nominate future leaders or deselect MPs. They even went so far as to clarify that:

the principle of natural justice shall not apply to the termination of Party membership.

Keir Starmer claims he puts the country first, but he seems like a local control freak. His plan is to crash the plane. His bet is that, when the wreckage stops, someone from his faction will still be in the pilot’s seat.

I could go on but I think you get the idea. This party does not respect your vote and will not listen to your concerns.

Acknowledgements

• This article paraphrases compelling metaphors and astute observations made by @OfSymbols & @flying_rodent on twitter dot com.

On December 14th, two antisemitic gunmen opened fire on a celebration marking the first night of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, killing 15 and injuring more than 40. While we mourned and waited for the facts to emerge, bad-faith actors rushed in to claim the narrative. Exploiting tragedy to sow division and pit communities against each other.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens blamed Palestinians. Right-wing Australian politicians Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce blamed Muslims and migrants. Josh Frydenberg, another right-winger, used the attack as a political relaunch opportunity. He gave a grief-stricken, but factually incorrect speech.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the attack on Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state. He also baselessly claimed that the hero who tackled one of the attackers was Jewish. Ahmed El Ahmed, it turned out, was not.

A Muslim man risking his life to save Jews challenges everything Netanyahu stands for. His clearly Islamophobic project aims to expel Muslims from Global North countries. So what did his media outriders do? They completely ignored the inconvenient fact. They carefully avoided mentioning Ahmed’s name or his faith. They even called him “spiritually Israeli.”

Another embattled politician twisting the attack to her own ends was Jillian Segal, Australia’s politically appointed “Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism”. Born in apartheid South Africa, she now lobbies for another apartheid state from her home in Sydney.

Things haven’t been going well for Segal recently. Her so-called “Plan to Combat Antisemitism” faced strong criticism. Many said it conflated antisemitism with pro-Palestine advocacy. Indeed, the definition of antisemitism she says must “be used across all levels of government and public institutions” is so discredited that even its lead author warns against using it in this way.

I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it.

Segal’s plan includes Trump-style funding cuts to universities she deems insufficiently deferential. It also crowns her as the arbiter of acceptable speech. These moves have faced heavy criticism. Segal herself has faced criticism for repeatedly refusing to speaking out against neo-Nazis. And lastly, her husband’s donations to a far-right group recently came to light.

Her plan was floundering, but in the Bondi Beach tragedy, Segal saw a chance to turn things around. She declared that her controversial proposals “can and should be accelerated,” and baselessly linked the attack to a peaceful Palestine solidarity march on August 3rd, which 300 thousand people attended. Sadly her cynical tactics appear to be working. The Australian government has said that it will speed up its response to Segal’s flawed recommendations and the New South Wales premier, Chris Minns, has vowed a crackdown on protests.

To be clear, the Bondi Beach tragedy had nothing to do with the Palestinian cause. Police say the gunmen were “driven by Islamic State ideology”. They carried ISIS flags.

Israel has long tried to link ISIS to the Palestinian cause. It’s an effective tactic that paints Palestinians as inhuman, irredeemably evil and therefore legitimate targets for savagery. But the truth is that the two groups are staunchly opposed.

The Palestinians, like every colonised people, demand their stolen land back and want their own state. Their objectives are local and they tolerate other religious groups, something that ISIS would never do.

ISIS is a theological movement with transnational ambitions. Rather than aspiring to be a member of the global community of nations, ISIS seeks to conquer. They want to destroy the United Nations, not join it.

The differences are clear and many. These groups hate each other so much that they frequently come to blows. None of this nuance matters to pro-Israel campaigners though. While you were reading that last paragraph they were busy mudding the waters. Seizing the Bondi Beach shooting as an opportunity, they have successfully framed “globalise the intifada” as a call for ISIS-style terrorism, but this is wildly misleading.

Intifada is an Arabic word for a rebellion or uprising. It’s been used, correctly and uncontroversially, for centuries. Even the US Holocaust Museum translated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as “intifada” until bad-faith agitators kicked up a fuss. The Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic gives a rather lyrical definition:

to be shaken off, be dusted off; to shake; to shudder, shiver, tremble; to wake up, come to consciousness, to shake off one’s lethargy

The term gained popularity in 1986, during the Palestinian uprising against Israel’s illegal occupation. This first intifada was relatively peaceful, but met with shocking levels of violence and collective punishment. This led to the founding of Hamas and other armed groups, and eventually a second, more violent intifada.

The phrase “globalise the intifada” is used to highlight how Israel’s ongoing genocide is funded, armed, and politically shielded by Global North countries. It’s a call for the kind of global resistance that ended South African apartheid. Once you understand this, you understand why Israel and its allies are trying to smear and ban the phrase.

Critics say that it carries “overtones of violence”. This smear is so vague that it’s difficult to meaningfully respond to, but it’s pertinent to point out that Palestinians have a recognised right under international law to resist Israel’s illegal occupation. And that this right includes armed struggle within the bounds of International Humanitarian Law. Rights and definitions don’t matter to these people though.

It feels tasteless to even point out these distinctions at a time like this, but that’s precisely why we must. Our impulse is towards solemnity and restraint is being exploited by liars who hope to go unchallenged while we grieve. We cannot let them get away with it.

The ISIS/Palestine conflation campaign long predates the Bondi attacks. The thrust of their argument is that it’s a scary word used by hairy Arabs. Yes, it really is that crudely racist. You can see this because the bigots making this argument often erroneously substitute the word Jihad. New York Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand had to apologise to Zohran Mamdani for claiming he’d advocated “global jihad”. It really is just September 12^th 2001 all over again.

After Bondi, London’s institutionally racist Metropolitan Police force have started arresting people for using the word intifada (or “infitarda”, as Britain’s know-nothing politicians pronounce it). It’s a ludicrous escalation by a state that has lost hegemonic control of the narrative. The police are doing this despite advice from the Crown Prosecution Service that it doesn’t meet the threshold for prosecution. They’re pointing to the Bondi Beach mass shooting as the reason for this policy change, but we’ve shown it’s not connected.

Police are supposed to make arrests on reasonable grounds. Arrests that don’t meet prosecution standards waste resources. They also risk silencing legitimate opposition to genocide. I find it particularly demoralising, as the pro-Palestinian father of Jewish children, to be accused of supporting terrorism against my own kids. But demoralising pro-Palestinians is whole point. When the world needs to be held together, this lot reach for the crowbar.

Antisemitism and Islamophobia are clearly increasing. The question is what we should do about it?

Netanyahu and his ilk would tell you that the answer is to pick the side of Islamophobia. To build ever higher walls and to make isolation the default mode of Jewish being. They gain from the rise in antisemitism, which they help create by over enunciating the “Jewishness” of their genocide. Indeed, Israeli politicians describe overseas antisemitism as an “opportunity” for their ethnostate. Here’s what Israeli journalist Ben Caspit has to say on the matter:

I would have voted for Mamdani [because] I want everyone to make aliyah. I’m a long-time consistent supporter of antisemitism [because] I’m in favor of all the Jews coming here.

We do not have to accept this. Ahmed El Ahmed, the Muslim who risked his life to save Jews at Bondi Beach, shows that there’s another way: safety through solidarity. He embraced multiculturalism and shunned supremacy. We should be more like him. By rooting our anti-racism in mutual self-interest and collective liberation, we can defeat bigotry together.

Acknowledgments

• This article draws on a conversation between Jewish Currents editors Arielle Angel and Mari Cohen. They chatted with Sarah Schwartz, the Melbourne-based executive officer of the new progressive and independent Jewish Council of Australia.

• My prescription, safety through solidarity, is pilfered from a book of the same name. It’s by Shane Burley and Ben Lorber. Reading it, felt like sunlight breaking through dark clouds.

• If you’re interested in what safety through solidarity looks like in practice, I wrote about it here.

• The Jewish Council of Australia are accepting signatures on this petition “against politicians and lobbyists who are exploiting the Bondi Chanukah massacre to push a divisive agenda.” Please consider signing it.

An old man, wrists bound, crushed into a thick pulp by tank tracks. A girl hung on a wall like a coat on a hook, legs turned to ribbons. A boy with a hollow skull. I’ve been watching this genocide for a few years now and I keep wondering: what could bring a society to treat people like this?

I sought answers in the dehumanising statements of decision makers and their voters. I watched films and read histories of genocides all over the world. Intellectually I was beginning to understand but emotionally, the exterminationist impulse was still an enigma. Then, unexpectedly, I played a videogame and I felt it.

Cronos: The New Dawn is a survival horror game set in the post-apocalyptic remains of Kraków, Poland. You play an unnamed traveller, sent to this world of fog and ruin to learn about the outbreak that ended it. The game’s narrative is a time travel puzzle inspired by 12 Monkeys and Netflix’s Dark. Piecing it together is one of the game’s highest satisfactions. We won’t spoil it here.

What we’re interested in isn’t the game’s narrative, but its ludonarrative. That is, the story that emerges from the moment-to-moment gameplay. In short: Cronos intentionally induces the player to behave like a génocidaire.

Like most horror games, it alternates between highly stressful sequences and periods of relative calm. What distinguishes it is what it asks you to do while you decompress: burn the bodies. The game tells you to do this because monsters can merge with corpses, creating a hardened version of the same enemy.

That doesn’t turn out to be much of a threat though. The post-game stats screen showed that I allowed only 12 enemies to merge with fallen foes. That’s a tiny number of the disfigured demons I defeated during my playthrough, and I’m not even a particularly good shot.

I realised quite early on that I didn’t actually need to be doing this, but I still burned every last one. The game only lets you carry one unit of torch ammunition at a time, so the process is quite monotonous, requiring a lot of backtracking. Some critics felt this was bad game design, but that wasn’t my experience. Forcing me to stew in discomfort was the point.

Running these refuelling laps gave me time to come to a disturbing realisation. I wasn’t burning bodies for any discernible gameplay advantage, and I wasn’t having fun per se. I was indulging a compulsion to cleanse. Watching the flames from the safety of my fireproof armour I felt distant, decontaminated and dominant. Burning the bodies didn’t actually make me safer, but it made me feel more secure.

My brain had linked fire to safety, and the game reinforced this connection by ensuring the refuelling stations were softly lit, domestic settings. Some even had painstakingly animated cats for me to pet. Like it had for génocidaires throughout history, purifying flame came to symbolise my mission.

Burn. Demolish. Kill.

Mehmed Talât Pasha, architect of the Armenian genocide, 1915

Entrust to the flames the intellectual garbage of the past. It is a strong, great and symbolic undertaking.

Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, 1933

We don’t have a policy of scorched earth — we have a policy of scorched communists.

General Efrain Rios Montt, Guatemalan military dictator, 1982

A fire storm should wash over Gaza.

Moshe Feiglen, Israeli politician and party leader, 2023

I hate these people. I did not enjoy embodying an approximation of their feelings. But if we hope to learn, deradicalize, and prevent, then understanding them viscerally, not just intellectually, is useful.

Cronos contains another tool that elicits the exterminationist impulse: the integrity scanner. Mounted on the barrel of your weapon, this gadget lights up when pointed at any living being. It’s the game training you to distrust the human form. Which is helpful, because the outbreak that ended the world has also splattered amalgamated human flesh all over the walls.

I spent an inordinate amount of time combing my crosshair over this tapestry of human flesh, waiting for the green light to open fire. I scanned what I thought was a protruding spine only to realise it was actually a freakishly long series of interlocked fingers. I was twice disgusted. First at the unexpected and uncanny array of anatomy. Second, that these people just held hands, presumably sung Kumbaya, then promptly died. Many didn’t even try to fight it.

My armoured suit cuts a striking silhouette. It sets me apart from these emaciated victims. The more I played, the more convinced of my supremacy I became. Game designers call this a power fantasy. Génocidaires throughout history have laboured under similar delusions. Nazi Germany’s übermensch, fascist Italy’s new man, the political soldier of Britain’s National Front, the rugged individual of the American frontier and Israel’s vision of muscular Judaism.

Max Nordau, one of Zionism’s founding fathers, argued that living outside of Israel had fashioned Jews into “crippled,” “timid” figures with “counterfeit” selves who were “hateful to all men of high standards”. He called them degenerates and sought to regenerate them in the image of Spartans. His vision of muscular Judaism, suffused with visceral contempt for the diaspora Jewish mind, spirit, and even physiognomy, continues to inform Zionist thought.

Toughness, aggressiveness, and battle-readiness characterise Israeli identity. Never again, Israelis are told, will Jews go like lamb to slaughter. Never again can they let down their guard. Israel seeks to supplant the stereotype of the meek, Yiddish-speaking Jew of the Eastern-European shtetl with the Hebrew-speaking Sabra Jew who is always prepared to fend off would-be attackers. To secure and extend the perimeters of his land.

Nordau’s fantasy struck a chord with a victimised and decimated people despite, or perhaps because of, its internalised antisemitism. It led Zionists to follow in the footsteps of their ethnonationalist persecutors. In Cronos, as in Israel, exterminationist violence is coaxed out of you by systems intended to make you feel unsafe.

I would have voted for Mamdani [because] I want everyone to make aliyah. I’m a long-time consistent supporter of antisemitism [because] I’m in favor of all the Jews coming here.

Ben Caspit, Israeli journalist, 2025

The difference is that Cronos provokes this impulse in order to teach you, at the very end(s), not to succumb to it.

At every level of its design Cronos uses the conventions and structure of the survival horror genre to evoke dread and elicit an exterminationist response. The game’s resource economy, for example, is stingy and cruel. The margin between defending yourself and running out of ammunition and becoming defenceless is razor-thin. You’re heavily armoured, but not nearly armoured enough. This produces a permanent sense of precarity that incentivises the player to smash, kill and loot. It ends up driving frantic, stop-gap ammunition purchases rather than the smarter choice: investing in lasting upgrades. There’s a lesson in this for austerity-minded politicians.

The game’s themes and systems align so perfectly that an instant of insecurity is inserted between each gunshot. Your gun needs charging. This leaves you standing in place, helplessly watching monsters lumber closer and closer, until the charge finally rips loose. Everywhere you look it’s tension and release: phobia met with force. All you see is monsters, and all you need is kill.

The developers of Cronos know exactly what they’re doing. This is not some corpse defiling simulator, it’s an accomplished gothic humanist tale with a lot to say. I saw it through the lens of an ongoing genocide. But it’s equally about Soviet totalitarianism, pandemic induced misanthropy, closeness at the cost of pain, and about what happens when ideology fails.

Successfully executing on all of its themes, both narratively and mechanically, it does something that few games manage. It grants the player the opportunity to hold their own actions in some degree of contempt, and to learn from them. It’s one of the most accomplished survival horror games ever made and the best game of 2025.

Acknowledgements

This article owes a debt to:

• Noah Caldwell-Gervais excellent video essay Misery Loop: A Critique of Cronos: The New Dawn. My article only addresses ludonarrative. Gervais takes on the game’s time-traveling narrative as well.

• This conversation about Zionist fear-mongering between Matt Bernstein, Matt Lieb and Simone Zimmerman.

• Eli Valley’s Museum of Degenerates: Portraits of the American Grotesque. This book, like Cronos, follows Nordau’s vision to its logical conclusion as an act of critique.

• Matt Weddig, whose feedback massively improved the clarity of this piece.

Last week British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced a package of cruel asylum reforms. Refugees will have temporary status and will be required to reapply to remain in Britain every two and a half years. Trapped in this state of insecurity, they will have to wait a ludicrous twenty years before they can apply for permanent settlement. As a result of these changes British born children will be deported and migrants will be rendered homeless.

While defending her decisions Mahmood has made some very odd and very weak arguments. She’s also told some straight up lies. Let’s debunk them:

We have become the destination of choice in Europe

This is flatly untrue. The government’s own statistics place us 5th in Europe for asylum applications, behind France, Italy and Spain. Germany receive more than twice as many applications as we do. Adjusted for population we place 17th among our former EU partners: the bottom half of the table.

While some are genuine refugees, others are economic migrants, seeking to take advantage of the asylum system.

Mahmood downplays the legitimacy of asylum seekers’ claims here. In reality 47% of asylum claims are approved on first decision and a further 48% are approved on appeal. The appeal success rate has been steadily increasing (up from 29% in 2010) because the Home Office incentivise staff to prioritise decision quantity over quality. Staff also report being pressured to refuse claims, resulting in bad faith decisions that are frequently overturned on appeal.

Even amongst those who are genuine refugees, economic incentives are at play.

This isn’t an argument, it’s a smear. Mahmood is holding refugees to a standard of purity and perfect victimhood that she doesn’t hold anybody else to. It reminds me of the Matt Bors comic panel in which a medieval peasant says “We should improve society somewhat” while a man replies, “Yet you participate in society! Curious! I am very intelligent.”

I know that some of these measures will face opposition. But this is a moral mission for me. I know that a country without secure borders is a less safe country for those who look like me.

Now we reach the heart of Mahmood’s argument: her “story”. Without it, her crackdown might seem immoral or unjust, so it’s vital that we believe it. “This isn’t us tacking towards public opinion, we really believe it,” says one Mahmood ally. They protest a little too much I think. I’m old enough to remember when Mahmood called for a “general amnesty” for “undocumented workers” already in the UK.

Doubters like me don’t bother Mahmood. She’s too busy wielding her story to silence her critics. Take this response to a Liberal Democrat who suggested her new policy measures were “unnecessary and cruel”.

Unlike the hon. Gentleman, unfortunately, I am the one who is regularly called a “fucking Paki” and told to “Go back home”. I know through personal experience just how divisive the issue of asylum has become in our country.

Mahmood contents that unless the government turns more people away at the borders, the country risks being torn apart by rising racism. And that unless you experience racism, you have no right to critique racist policy.

Notice how she doesn’t frame racism as inherently wrong; rather, as a proclivity of the natives that surfaces when we give too many rights to too many immigrants. Racism is natural. Refugees are the aberration.

But hold on a minute. British governance is a multiracial endeavour. Even if we accept that immigration policy has failed, why should people who “look like” the home secretary be blamed for it? Her implicit threat is that ethnic minority Britons will be held accountable because of the colour of their skin. She invites ethnic minority Britons to punch down at refugees, lest they be mistaken for one.

It’s an absurd, reductive, divisive and dangerous argument. The Financial Times’ Stephen Bush absolutely demolishes it:

There’s [also] a link between domestic violence and football matches, but I would hope that the home secretary is not going to suggest that Thomas Tuchel has “a moral mission” to lead England to World Cup glory next summer because otherwise men are going to start beating up their spouses or their children. I would hope that the home secretary — the cabinet minister in charge of enforcing the law — would take the view that domestic violence is always wrong.

Mahmood is merely the latest in a long line of black and brown ministers appointed to launder racist policies. I’ve received a lot of pushback for pointing this out, and those people are right to be angry: reducing Mahmood to her identity downplays her professional achievements. It’s irresponsible and, in many cases, it’s racist and misogynistic. My critics anger is misplaced though. It’s not me doing it, Labour Party figures admitted it when they appointed her.

She is the perfect choice for Home Secretary. She’s as hard as nails on immigration. But she’s a Muslim woman. The Left won’t know how to attack her.

This level of cynicism isn’t surprising. It’s long been clear that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party only care about bigotry insofar as it can be leveraged to their political ends. For example, when Starmer commissioned an independent report on racism and factionalism in his party, he talked it up because he intended to use it to smear the left-wing of his party. But when the report indicted his own faction, he threatened legal action against its black author.

Since taking office Starmer has lurched even further to the right and even started paraphrasing Enoch Powell in his speeches. This electoral tactic won’t work: polls show that the government’s attempt to mimic the anti-migrant politics of Nigel Farage is a recipe for defeat, as well as moral degradation.

Likewise, Mahmood’s approval rating has taken a dive since her recent policy announcement. She should have seen this coming. Who was the least popular member of Boris Johnson’s government? It was Pritti Patel. Who was the least popular member of Rishi Sunak’s government? Suella Braverman. Left-wing voters don’t like politicians who admit they would have deported their own parents, while bigots want to see these brown women deported regardless of their politics. Mahmood’s formulation appeals to almost nobody.

I say almost because, having packaged her racist reforms in anti-racist language and conscripted people who “look like” her, I’m sure she’ll garner some support. It isn’t unusual for migrant descendant groups to support more stringent border controls. I still very much doubt it’ll be enough to save her seat. She’s already seen her majority slashed from 28,582 to 3,421 thanks to her support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

All indicators suggest that Labour’s attempt to out-Reform Reform is both doomed to fail and destined to worsen racism in the country. So why do they persist?

The strategic wager of the Starmerites is that, if they can turn the next election into a starkly binary choice, we’ll all come crawling back to them. A key cabinet member recently admitted as much:

The real fight will be the centre-left versus the Reform right.

And Mahmood recently reiterated this threat:

If you don’t like this, you won’t like what follows me.

In other words, if you don’t embrace my policies then Reform will win the next election and you’ll hate their policies even more. Her pitch to voters is that the only way to avoid getting what they really don’t want, is to vote for something else that they also don’t want.

This is why Labour oppose proportional representation against the stated wishes of MPs, the general public, and Labour delegates. It’s a protection racket, and a dangerous game for a party polling in fourth place to be playing. In the selfish pursuit of power Mahmood is effectively blackmailing every ethnic minority Briton, and everybody who cares about them. Even worse: she’s going to lose.

Catherine Perez-Shakdam, the director of We Believe In Israel (WBII), appears to be passing off AI-generated writing as her own, across at least three publications and four books.

GPTZero, an AI detection tool, is “highly confident” that 96% of the articles Shakdam published on We Believe In Israel’s website are AI-generated. QuillBot’s line by line analysis reckons that 60% of the content is AI-generated, while Grammarly landed on 53%. A spot check of Shakdam’s side-projects, at the Forum for Foreign Relations and in the Times of Israel, returned similar AI detection percentages.

WBII was founded by Luke Akehurst, a pro-Israel lobbyist who is now a Labour Party MP. While the public facing output of WBII has devolved into slop, the organisation still briefs parliamentarians and holds sway inside the Labour Party. It was even recently granted access to a classified briefing. I asked Akehurst how WBII gained access to this document. He denied having “any involvement with We Believe in Israel since the General Election” and directed me to Shakdam, who did not answer my questions.

WBII is currently running multiple fundraising campaigns. One promises “new” and “original” pro-Israel booklets and “educational” materials. Using AI as a writing tool isn’t inherently unethical, but failing to disclose it to readers and prospective donors is.

As well as running a pro-Israel campaign organisation Shakdam is a prolific author. Detection tools suggest the hand of AI in four of the five books she’s published this year. Worse still, the organisation that Shakdam runs appears to have used AI to write a gushing review of her (apparently AI generated) book.

It is, without question, one of the most important books of our time.

Most of WBII’s articles bear Shakdam’s byline, but this book review doesn’t disclose an author. Neither is the conflict of interest declared. So who wrote it? I put this and other questions to WBII. They asked for more time to respond, so I postponed publication and set a new date. That deadline has now passed. They still haven’t responded.

This week on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, worshippers were attacked outside a synagogue in Manchester. Before the bodies were cold, and before the facts were clear, right-wingers were already twisting the attack to their own ends.

• Columnist Stephen Pollard suggested that pro-Palestinian journalist Owen Jones incited the attack.

• The Daily Mail’s political editor, Jason Groves, insinuated that Zarah Sultana’s call to expel Israel’s ambassador had led to the attack.

• Columnist Dan Hodges works for Groves at the Mail. He faced no consequences when, earlier this year, he advocated war crimes against Palestinian children. He saw the attack as a chance to push for a total ban on pro-Palestinian marches and a “legal reckoning” for Owen Jones.

• Israel claimed that the UK Government’s recognition of Palestine had led to the attack, and used it as an excuse to formally invite far-right activist Tommy Robinson to visit the state.

British politics now works as a posting-to-policy pipeline. Online writing becomes government edict. The right-wing press conjured a link between opposing the killing of civilians in Gaza and murders at a synagogue in Manchester. Just hours later, government ministers adopted their rhetoric.

British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood called pro-Palestinian protests “fundamentally un-British.” She urged them to stop after the attack. Now she’s using the attack as an excuse to further restrict protest. There’s a lot wrong with Mahmood’s framing of this issue, so let’s unpack it.

Labour figures often minimise the genocide in Gaza as a Muslim-only issue. This plays into latent suspicions that Muslims in Western countries are more loyal to the Middle East than to their own constituency. Mahmood leans into this smear by equating being pro-Palestinian with being un-British.

You’d hope she’d know better, given she’s a Muslim herself. Maybe she does? Regardless, she’s the latest in a long line of black and brown ministers appointed to launder racist policies. You might think that’s a bold claim that downplays Mahmood’s achievements. But it’s not me saying it, Labour Party figures admitted it when they appointed her.

She is the perfect choice for Home Secretary. She’s as hard as nails on immigration. But she’s a Muslim woman. The Left won’t know how to attack her.

For thousands of years, people have also accused Jews of “dual loyalty.” Mahmood insists that protests against Britain arming a genocide will upset British Jews, reinforcing this trope. Many British Jews take part in these marches, but those aren’t the Jews that Mahmood cares about. Her insidious framing conflates British Jews with Israel, then pits Jewish safety against Palestinian liberation and the British right to protest. There’s a British term for this kind of behaviour: shit-stirring.

Condemning murders at a synagogue and opposing the killing of civilians in Gaza can go together. They are not mutually exclusive. I have enough pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist Jewish friends and family to know this, but that’s not the case for a lot of people. Jews make up a fraction of a percentage of Britain’s population. Many Britons don’t know a Jew, and that’s why Mahmood’s rhetoric is so dangerous.

Given how politically live this issue is we don’t have nearly enough polling on it. But the polls we do have disprove Mahmood’s worldview. They indicate that Western Jews oppose Israel’s supremacist project. Furthermore, if you read hate crime reports, it becomes clear very quickly that pretending that all Jews back the Israeli Government puts all Jews at greater risk.

Predictably, London’s institutionally racist Metropolitan Police force agreed with Mahmood. Pro-Palestine Action protesters were asked to delay their planned actions. The request cited concerns about “significant pressure on policing” during a time of “significant fear and concern in communities.” It’s a sleight of hand that blames pro-Palestine activists for the police-work incurred by their own criminalisation. A tacit admission that the politically-motivated crackdown on grannies holding signs is a waste of resources.

Palestine Action are, according to the British government, a terrorist organisation. I previously warned that:

By redefining protest as terrorism, the government has diverted police from real counter-terrorism work. It’s absurd and it will mean more preventable attacks occurring unimpeded.

What a depressing thing to have written less than a month ago. This week’s attack, along with the farcical sight of cops politely asking “terrorists” to be responsible and not do “terrorism” because they’re very busy, underlines my point.

Thankfully, not all British politicians are as cynical and divisive as Shabana Mahmood. Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana have made strong statements. But, Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, has impressed me the most. His statesmanlike response to Mahmood’s comments is worth quoting at length:

I’m a Jewish man who grew up, very close to this synagogue. So this is both personal for me, and political.

Shabana Mahmood is being deeply irresponsible. There’s a lot of it about. Conflating protests against a genocide in Gaza with an antisemitic terrorist attack, is deeply irresponsible. And actually, putting those two things together, I say personally as a Jewish person, makes me feel more at risk.

I‘m really proud of interfaith work where I’ve come together with the Muslim community to say, actually, an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. The only authentic response is solidarity. We need community cohesion and we need people to stick together.

What a breath of fresh air. A capable leader with a distinct political, personal and religious identity. He’s wielding that identity to stick up for everybody, from all walks of life. Polanski proposes that we form broad interfaith and intercommunal coalitions to overcome bigotry. This approach is known as safety through solidarity. If you want to know more about how it works, I’ve written about it before.

So, what allows Polanski to show such nuance and empathy in a political climate that abhors these traits? First: he’s very good at his job. A skilled communicator who is deeply involved in anti-racist communities. He’s doing the work.

He also lacks the instinct that has pushed the Parliamentary Labour Party away from their traditional base. He doesn’t prioritise the “special relationship” between the UK and the U.S. at all costs. He draws the line at genocide.

The Labour Party’s instinct has driven it to support a U.S.-backed genocide and stay silent on the topic of America’s lurch towards fascism. Their discomfort with their position is why they use Judaism as a shield from criticism. This puts Jews in danger. Polanski isn’t weighed down by any of this. He’s ready to embrace the new multipolar world, while the Labour Party clings to the dying old one.

Lastly, he’s Jewish. This shields him from the typical right-wing strategy of branding anyone who supports Palestinians as antisemitic. This doesn’t mean they’re not trying, just that it’s not sticking.

Attentive Possibility Space readers will have noticed that I pulled this trick earlier in this article: I invoked my Jewish family as a shield. It’s a shameful and cowardly thing to do. We need to dismantle the profoundly racist political and media culture that makes it a strategic thing to do. On this topic, Mohammed el-Kurd has me dead to rights:

I am interested in interrogating the drive toward this politics of appeal. The premise that Jews, Israelis, and Westerners are less biased or more truthful is entirely unfounded, for it presumes they have no skin in the game … This persuasive technique is fallacious because it does not appeal to their authority as human rights organizations, but to their authority as Jewish (or European or American) institutions, first and foremost.

If such specious reasoning is “strategic,” what does that reveal about our world?

Mohammed el-Kurd is right. And Zack Polanski is right. And, strategically, I’m giving Polanski the last word:

We need unity, we need complicated conversations and we need to bring people together rather than divide.

It’s often said that, if you really want to understand Israel’s leaders, you have to listen to what they say in Hebrew. This isn’t a case of meaning getting lost in translation. They hide their true intentions from the English-speaking world.

Keir Starmer is no different: he tells Israelis one story and the British public another. His recent speech, marking Britain’s formal recognition of a Palestinian state, was aimed at a domestic audience. It emphasised the historical significance of recognition, and included thorough criticism of Israel’s policies. The message was clear: we have taken action; now please get off our backs about the genocide.

Starmer also wrote an op-ed in Ynet, an Israeli news website. It tells a very different story. His criticisms of Israel are gone, replaced by reassurances about Israel’s “security”. Starmer also uses personal ties, like his family in Israel, to reassure Israeli readers he’s on their side. This is notable, given how keen he is to keep his family out of the limelight in Britain.

Starmer also promises, in his Ynet article, policies he left out of his speech to the British people.

We are clear that the Palestinian state must be demilitarised. It will not have an army or air force.

The U.N. states that Palestinians, like all occupied people, have a right to “struggle for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle”. Not so, says Starmer. This is particularly galling given his own manifesto emphasised that “the first duty of any government [is] to keep the country safe.”

It gets worse. Starmer also pledges in this Israeli publication to meddle in Palestinian elections:

No party will be allowed to contest Palestinian elections unless they endorse the principle of non-violent politics.

Starmer pledges a “safe and secure Israel, alongside a [merely] viable Palestinian State.” His message to the Israeli people is clear: Don’t worry about it. We’re not giving the Palestinians a proper state like we gave you.

He’s right. What Starmer proposes is not a state. It more closely resembles the Bantustans that white South Africans set aside for black people, as part of their policy of apartheid. We must force our government to concede this fact.

Unless they can explain how they’ll remove 700,000 armed settlers backed by the Israeli state, presenting “two states” as a sensible solution should be treated like climate denial. We must demand that our government stop retreating into fantasy to avoid facing the present. An Israeli regime of permanent occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and British backed genocide.

Donald Trump’s Republican Party has a base of support. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party doesn’t. You can tell this from how the two parties are framing the relationships between their politicians and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Republican U.S. House speaker Mike Johnson claimed this week that Donald Trump was an FBI informant who was working to take Epstein down. It’s a baffling and implausible claim but that Johnson tried it out reveals a party that’s actively seeking a narrative that’ll placate their base. MAGA supporters already see Trump as a strong man battling the “deep state”, so perhaps white-hat paedophile isn’t such a stretch?

Starmer’s Labour Party has no such story to tell because it doesn't have a base of support to tell it to. Answering questions about Peter Mandelson’s association with Jeffrey Epstein makes them visibly nervous. Count the number of umms and ahhs in this exchange:

Jim Pickard, Financial Times: If you'll excuse me, Peter Mandelson stayed in the New York townhouse of Jeffrey Epstein in 2009, when he was de facto Deputy Prime Minister, and while the financier was in prison for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Do you think Lord Mandelson - who is of course a close political ally of yours - has some questions to answer?

Keir Starmer: On-on Peter Mandelson, look. And I do try to give pretty full answers in these sessions. I don't know any more than you do, erm... and therefore, erm... there's not really much I can add to, erm... what you already know I'm afraid. And, erm... you know... that's, erm... simply the state of the, erm... affairs. Thank you, Jim.

The reason that Starmer wants to keep Peter Mandelson in his role as British Ambassador to the United States is simple: he thinks he’s good at it. Starmer has long prioritised perceived competence over any ethical considerations. He rarely says this outright, because it’s a deeply cynical thing to believe about a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, but Starmer’s outriders have long boosted this competence narrative.

New Statesman: Competence is king? Why Keir Starmer is avoiding talking about values

You can also infer it from how Starmer talks about Mandelson. Note the emphasis on the special relationship and on ambassadorial competency in this exchange.

Kemi Badenoch: While Lord Mandelson was Business Secretary, he brokered a deal with Jeffrey Epstein, and this occurred after Epstein had been convicted of child sex offences. Given this new information, does the Prime Minister really think that it is tenable for our ambassador to remain in post?

Keir Starmer: The relationship between the US and the UK is one of our foremost relationships, and I have confidence in the ambassador in the role he is doing.

The British Press similarly emphasises Mandelson’s professional capability while downplaying his many unsavoury connections. Here’s Adam Boulton, a particularly credulous columnist even by British standards:

Peter Mandelson is the only politician who has never lied to me in more than 40 years on the Westminster beat … Mandelson will be bringing his unmatched political authority to the role. He knows how to deal with Trump’s top team on equal terms. Mandelson’s star quality will resonate with Trump … What drives him is power and public service. Rich friends and business contacts are incidental.

Boulton is expressing a view widely held in Westminster. Mandelson is a “wily operator” and a “British patriot” whose unsavoury connections are “incidental” rather than disqualifying. The problem that the Labour Party now faces is that the Westminster bubble is not the real world.

Starmer painted himself into a corner by appointing Mandelson long after his close friendship with Epstein was public knowledge. Now, despite enormous public pressure to do so, he feels he can’t sack him because Trump would see that as the UK impugning his reputation by proxy. He’s made such a mess of this that even Kemi Badenoch was able to wipe the floor with him at Prime Minister’s Questions today.

The contrast is stark. The Republican Party, for all its grotesqueries, is at least trying to tell a story to keep its base on-side. Labour, by contrast, has no story to tell and no base to tell it to. Just a nervous leader hoping the press and public will look the other way. Starmer mistook a brief spell of elite indulgence for popular support and, like Johnson before him, is about to find out how brittle his authority truly is.

Imperialist Realism: Politics and Culture at the End of the American Century (forthcoming)
Daniel Bessner
Zero Books

Superman (2025)
James Gunn
Warner Bros. Pictures

William Appleman Williams, one of America's most prominent 20th-century historians, argued that a core aspect of American exceptionalism was the persistent denial of the United States' imperial nature. According to Williams a defining belief of American life was “our ahistorical faith that we are not now and never have been an empire.”

This might have been true when Williams wrote it in 1980, but it certainly isn’t today. The countless calamities caused by U.S. foreign policy have proven too great to ignore. Americans have begun to acknowledge the imperial nature of their country, and their leaders have started admitting it too.

But, if Americans are now willing to name their empire as such, why has there been so little opposition to it?

To answer this question Daniel Bessner, cribbing from Mark Fisher, introduces the concept of “imperialist realism”. The notion that imperialism is the only viable system and that it’s impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.

Imperialist realism is a structure of feeling that provides a sense of what is possible and what is not when it comes to the present and future of U.S. empire.

To explicate how imperialist realism functions Bessner interrogates American cultural objects, like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020). The game stars grizzled reactionaries with tenuous government allegiances who, nonetheless, do “whatever’s necessary” to protect the American way of life.

Black Ops Cold War can’t justify American actions abroad, but it also can’t imagine a post-imperial world.

The game reflects the views of its players. Many Americans feel their country can no longer positively influence the world - and believe real change is impossible due to deeply entrenched interests. Simultaneously, they believe that the U.S. is “the greatest nation in human history”. That it’s indispensable and therefore must intervene all over the world: consequences be damned. Black Ops expresses a hypermasculine strain of imperialist realism, one that leans towards nihilism and the Republican Party.

There’s also a weepier strain, the shooting and crying genre, which portrays soldiers expressing remorse and privileges their own trauma over the trauma they’ve inflicted. This genre’s guilt-ridden affect emerges from the tension between cynicism (we’re incapable of creating positive change) and interventionism (nonetheless - we must act). Zero Dark Thirty, which closes on an image of protagonist Maya sitting in front of what looks like an American flag, crying about all of the brown men she had to torture in order to find and kill Osama bin Laden, is exemplary.

Democrats love to shoot and cry. Here’s Barack Obama, who’s so embedded in an imperial context that he can’t imagine not acting:

U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties … but as Commander-in-Chief, I must weigh these heartbreaking tragedies against the alternatives … doing nothing is not an option.

It’s a sentiment that Bessner takes a rather dim view of:

If liberals didn’t act, they wouldn’t be liberal; and if they didn’t feel guilty about the consequences of their actions, they also wouldn’t be liberal. This is the logic that results in the apologetic and guilt-ridden affect central to imperialist realism.

Superman is a film about a world bestriding colossus who, despite his detractors, feels duty bound to intervene to protect people across the globe. Applying Bessner’s ideas to it produces some really interesting results.

In the film Boravia invades the neighbouring country of Jarhanpur. The film analogises Boravia with Israel, and Jarhanpur with Palestine. Boravia is backed by the U.S. government and aided by U.S. arms company LuthorCorp.

Superman sides with Jarhanpur, which seemingly challenges Bessner’s assertion that Americans “can’t imagine the end of the U.S. empire.” But… there’s a bit more to it than that. So, does Superman succumb to or surmount imperialist realism? Let’s find out.

Everyone is cynical about U.S. global “leadership”

Superman has a bright, optimistic and nostalgic presentation, but don’t let that fool you: this film is deeply cynical about America. The clearest example of this is its Israel/Palestine analogy, an injustice that the film goes out of its way to underscore U.S. complicity in. Here’s the film’s FBI Director Florence Crawley:

The country of Boravia has purchase over $80bn worth of arms from LuthorCorp in the last two years. No one would profit more from a war with Boravia and Jarhanpur than you. A cynic might say that having Superman out of the way might not be bad for business.

Like many of writer-director James Gunn’s allusions, this critique is somewhat defanged by its transposition from the real world to the DC Universe. The reality is worse: Israel doesn’t even have to purchase arms, the U.S. government gives them away. Nonetheless, it’s refreshing to hear a critique of the U.S. “defense” industry, whose stock prices soar whenever there’s a war, in a Hollywood blockbuster.

The problem with Crawley’s critique is that it remains just that: a critique. Despite being skeptical of Lex Luthor’s intentions, Crawley does absolutely nothing to stop him. She’s critical of imperialism, but she cannot conceive of challenging it. Crawley, and Gunn, are so embedded in an imperial context that the film doesn’t present this as a dereliction of duty. Crawley’s inaction goes unremarked upon.

Superman is “the responsibility to protect” personified

Cynicism about American imperialism pervades the film’s dialogue, but Superman is the only one who feels able to do anything about it. Take this exchange between him and Lois Lane:

Lois: You illegally entered a country, inserting yourself in the middle of an incredibly heated geopolitical situation. Siding with a nation, Jarhanpur, which historically has not been a friend to us, against a nation that is technically our ally.

Clark: First of all, whether or not Jarhanpur is an imperfect country does not give another nation the right to invade it.

Lois: Yes but the Boravian government maintains they’re freeing the Jarhanpurians from a tyrannical regime.

Clark: Yes but you know that’s very silly.

Lois: I do?

Clark: The Boravian government, of all people, is saying this? Come on! You know as well as I do that the Boravian government is not well intentioned.

Lois: I think that’s almost certainly the case. But do I know that? No I don’t.

Clearly this is Gunn lamenting his country’s unconditional support for Israel, and mocking the extent to which journalists become stenographers when Israel is involved. Clark basically states the thesis of Mohammed el-Kurd’s latest book: even if Jarhanpurians are imperfect, that doesn’t give Boravia permission to exterminate them.

What’s interesting for our purposes though, is that Lois embodies the first feature of imperialist realism and Clark personifies the second. The film resolves the tension between cynicism and interventionism by giving interventionism superpowers and a heart of gold. Superman gets to embody every positive trait in America’s self-image, while the country itself is left with all the bad ones. The man whose slogan used to be “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” now stands distinctly apart from America. The film, and its merchandise, is quite clear about this:

Lois: The result of you seemingly acting as a representative of the United States will be more problems around the world.

Clarke: I wasn’t representing anybody except for me.

You might think that distancing himself from America would alienate this Superman from domestic audiences, but the film’s box-office success doesn’t bear that out. Clarke’s answer in the above exchange isn’t a political one, but an answer against politics. Americans, like Superman, have become alienated from their empire. Recognising this, their political candidates now insist, however implausibly, that they too are outsiders. As Bessner explains, the alienation was intentional:

From its inception, the U.S. pursuit of global primacy was accompanied by a domestic democratic deficit.

Guilt-free interventionism

As a result of this divorce, both Superman and the audience get to feel unambiguously good about interventionism for the first time in decades. It’s a neat trick from a screenwriting perspective, and it’s a lot more fun than Zach Snyder’s dour portrayal of a Superman wracked with guilt and feared by the people he hopes to protect. The self-pitying guilt that pervaded Snyder’s Superman films, and films like Zero Dark Thirty, is nowhere to be found, but that doesn’t mean that this film represents a cultural route out of imperialist realism.

Superficially, Superman looks like an anti-imperialist blockbuster. It features a particularly invigorating shot of Hawkgirl dropping Boravia’s president (who resembles David Ben Gurion) to his death, comically match cut to an Alka-Seltzer plunking into a glass. Furthermore, the action scenes at Jarhanpur’s borders strongly resemble the Great March of Return, in which Palestinians marched peacefully towards their homes while IDF snipers held a contest to see how many civilian knees they could cap.

But thematically, the film embraces imperialist realism. Superman might verbally distance himself from America, but he behaves like an American. Bessner makes a similar point about another superhero who recently grew skeptical of U.S. power:

Captain America acts like the United States does in real life—both the superhero and the country exist in a permanent state of exception, in which they determine what is right and what is wrong.

Furthermore, while Superman punishes Boravia, he never once thinks to challenge Boravia’s ally across the Atlantic. Washington is portrayed as naïve, deceived, and ultimately redeemable. To show fealty, at one point in the movie Superman even surrenders to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Moving beyond imperialist realism

There’s a lot to like in Superman, but it’s empty calories. It doesn’t surmount imperialist realism. It resolves the tension between cynicism and interventionism, but not in a manner that we can apply in the real world. And even with that nut cracked, Superman still acts like the U.S.

So, how can we move beyond imperialist realism?

The first step, achieved by Bessner, was to identify and articulate its primary features.

The second is to apply what we’ve learned to the world around us, to cultural objects and to the statements of political decision-makers. I’ve tried to do that here, and it’s led me to conclude that Alan Moore was right when he said that superhero movies are a form of “infantilisation – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism”. Thinking beyond empire from within the empire is difficult. There’s no need to make our task even more challenging by undertaking it within the inherently interventionist superhero genre.

The third step is to imagine how we could be doing things differently. I cannot imagine a post-imperial utopia, but I can at least imagine how we might fumble in the darkness towards one.

TV shows like Andor and films like How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which more directly grapple with what fighting empire might realistically entail, are glimmers of hope. They’re both about solidarity, about the cost of resistance, and about how the spirit of rebellion foments and passes between people. Interestingly, they’re both heist tales. Perhaps that genre better suits our aims? Discovering which formats best suit our purposes will be a worthwhile endeavour.

As we take these steps we should remind ourselves of a core feature of imperialist realism: that it’s not true. It’s a lie that stifles our imagination, trapping us within a system that harms us. Bessner’s book diagnoses the problem and, in doing so, reminds us that another world is possible.

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to Daniel Bessner for trusting me with an advanced copy of his work. The best way to keep up with Danny is by listening to his podcast: American Prestige.

• If you want to read more like this, you’ll be happy to know that this isn’t the first time Possibility Space has engaged with Danny’s writing.

• I was inspired to write this article by Danny’s appearance on the Always at War podcast.

• Shout out to James Gunn I guess? He made a really thrilling left-wing Superman film; and his first act as DC Studios CEO was to cancel a planned Gal Gadot Wonder Woman sequel. It was about time someone stopped an Israeli bomb.

One day, everyone will have always been against this

Here in Britain, that day appears close at hand. Our Prime Minister just called Israel’s actions “completely unjustifiable”. The Daily Express, the most right-wing mainstream newspaper in Britain, ran this headline alongside an image of a starved Palestinian child:

For pity’s sake stop this now

It’s remarkable how much these recent pivots to condemning Israel are premised on a fabricated watershed. The goal is to rewrite history.

In reality, it was clear that we were witnessing a genocide within the first 48 hours. Hind Rajab was killed over a year ago. The ICJ case dates back to 2023, when entire bloodlines had already been wiped out. Key figures in Israel’s founding were clear about their colonial intentions as early as 1923. Keep up!

This video is my attempt to say: No. In those early days, when you could have stopped this, you backed it. You backed war crimes, you armed war criminals and you continue to do so. You are complicit and, if there's any justice in the world, you will face consequences.

Acknowledgements

• I decided to make this video when Abi Wilkinson asked someone to. She asked that the video address the RAF base in Cyprus. I wasn’t able to cram that in but I have previously written about it here.

• This video would have been impossible to make without Saul Staniforth’s archival work.

Israel, laughably, refer to their military as the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Despite their name, they habitually invade countries, commit war crimes, and then try to cover them up. Here are three recent examples.

While reading these, please hold the acronym DARVO in your mind. It stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. It describes a pattern of behavior often used by perpetrators in abusive relationships to deflect blame and responsibility for their actions.

The Assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh

An IDF sniper shot and killed journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on 11ᵗʰ May 2022. The sniper could fully read her PRESS vest when he shot her. Witnesses reported, without delay and accurately, that Israeli forces had carried out the shooting. Media outlets, human rights organisations, and the United Nations supported this claim.

Israel sought to evade responsibility. “The Palestinians did it” they claimed, tweeting a video of Palestinian gunmen. Israeli human rights group B’tselem quickly debunked the video. They showed it was filmed in a completely different location.

Then Israel decried “hasty” accusations as “misleading and irresponsible”. Their supporters in the media wrongly painted Israel as the true victim. They called the accusations “blood libel” and “antisemitic”.

Israel’s DARVO tactics worked. The New York Times and the Guardian played it safe by wrongly attributing Abu Akleh’s death to “clashes” between “Israeli military forces and Palestinian gunmen.” The Associated Press even changed a quote from the Palestinian Ministry of Health so that it no longer named Israeli forces as the culprit.

Western media framed Israel’s actions as a justified response to Palestinian “terrorism”. They portrayed Abu Akleh’s death as a tragic accident instead of what it was: a deliberate assassination. This narrative allowed the Biden administration to support Israel’s lie, despite internally concluding that the IDF was the culprit.

The IDF demanded that only a small number of mourners - and only Christians at that - attend Abu Akleh’s funeral. They then attacked, smashing the back window of the hearse and stealing the Palestinian flag that covered Abu Akleh’s coffin. Kicking and hitting people with batons, the IDF forced mourners carrying her coffin to lose their balance and drop it to the ground.

While this occurred, the BBC, CBS, and others reported mere “clashes” and “tussling.” This was despite overwhelming visual evidence of Israeli occupation forces attacking mourners in broad daylight. The Daily Mail even credulously reported that:

Israeli cops say they intervened in funeral of Al Jazeera journalist because mob STOLE coffin from her family

Abu Akleh wasn’t the first Palestinian to be persecuted in death, nor was she the last.

Months later, when the world had looked away, Israel admitted that “there was a high possibility that Ms. Abu Akleh was accidentally hit by IDF gunfire.” They still refuse to open a criminal investigation.

Even if they did open an investigation, the odds of a prosecution would be slim-to-none. A meagre 0.17% of all incidents of IDF wrongdoing reviewed by their “fact-finding mechanism” result in prosecution. By comparison, the system that Israel uses to prosecute Palestinians has a 99.7% prosecution rate. The purpose of a system is what it does.

The Flour Massacres

Israeli forces often shoot Palestinians trying to get food from aid trucks. These events happen so often that we have a name for them: flour massacres. Last month, about 600 desperately hungry Palestinians were killed this way.

None of this is accidental. Israeli soldiers have been explicitly ordered to shoot civilians at aid sites. That hasn’t stopped them trying to evade accountability though.

They kill and lie faster than I can debunk. So we’re only going to examine one crime here: the flour massacre of June 1ˢᵗ 2025 in which Israel killed at least 31 people.

First they denied their crime, saying: “it simply didn’t happen!” Then they changed their story. “The Palestinians did it”, they claimed, tweeting a video of unidentified gunmen. Drop Site News quickly debunked the video: it was filmed at an entirely different location. The video could be of any armed group in Gaza. Perhaps the ISIS-affiliated militia that Israel has bragged about training and arming?

The IDF then attacked their accusers:

This report is entirely false and echoes the propaganda of the terrorist organization Hamas.

They also tried to blame their victims for their own deaths: designating the scene of the crime a no-go-zone after they started shooting. They then used the fact that their victims were in said zone to blame them for their own deaths. This is a common IDF practice.

Israel’s DARVO tactics had a visible chilling effect on the BBC, who softened their language from:

31 dead after Israeli tank opens fire near Gaza aid centre

to:

Israel denies firing at civilians after Hamas-run ministry says 31 killed in Gaza aid centre attack … There are conflicting reports on what happened near an aid distribution centre in Rafah on Sunday.

Israel scolded the BBC, and the corporation responded by softening its coverage. There’s a lesson here for anybody who runs a media organisation. Do not give an inch to these genocidal maniacs. Israel recently announced a huge twentyfold increase to their “consciousness warfare” budget, so editors must learn this lesson quickly or they’ll be swamped with smears.

Four days later, CNN put the BBC to shame. They clearly showed what anyone paying attention already knew: Israel did commit the massacre and tried to hide it. The IDF were caught in a lie, again, but their damage control strategy had worked. The eyes of the world had already moved on.

The Rafah paramedic massacre

Israel has killed hundreds of health and aid workers since their genocide began. They massacre and misrepresent faster than I can clarify. So we’re only going to examine one crime here: the paramedic massacre of March 23^rd 2025, in which Israel killed at least 15 aid workers.

Israel went to great lengths to literally bury the truth of what happened. They hid the bodies and the bullet riddled ambulances in one mass grave of contorted flesh and metal. Then they blocked access to it.

They also kidnapped one eyewitness and killed another, a 12-year-old boy. With the witnesses taken care of, they claimed that the paramedics they had killed were actually “terrorists” in “suspicious vehicles” who were “advancing toward troops without use of headlights or emergency signals”.

UN officials from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) tried to get to the crime scene. On their way, OCHA officials bore witness to the cheapness of Palestinian life. The IDF shot two more civilians right in front of them. OCHA were then denied access to the site.

Two weeks after the massacre new footage emerged. It contradicted Israel’s version of events. Headlights and emergency signals were visible. Terrorists were not. Investigators, who had finally gained access to the gravesite, found the footage on the phone of one of the victims. The IDF had buried it with his body. Also buried with the bodies were cable ties. These indicate that the paramedics were killed “execution-style” and posed no threat. No wonder the IDF had so fiercely guarded the gravesite.

The IDF finally acknowledged that its first account was “mistaken.” It still insists that the ambulances were used “for terrorist purposes.” No one has ever presented evidence to support that claim. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that the IDF perfidiously disguise themselves as aid workers to launch attacks. Every accusation is a confession.

Addressing the fact they hid the bodies in a mass grave, they said this was to prevent wild dogs eating the corpses. The IDF chose not to answer the obvious follow-up question: Did you think dogs would eat the ambulances you buried too?

Even now, if you say Israel killed those aid workers, they call it blood libel. And this tactic works. Sky News reported, long after the facts emerged, that “we don’t know why” Israel “detained” eyewitness paramedic Asaad al Nsasrah. Why would the perpetrator of a crime kidnap a witness? We haven’t the foggiest.

So, why does anyone believe the IDF anymore?

There are too many horrors to count, but I hope the examples above sufficiently plot the trend. Israel lies, Palestinians die, and western media let them. Indeed, it doesn't matter how many times we catch Israel in a lie. Western media continues to treat their claims as credible. It’s like a perverse Groundhog Day.

When reporting on Israel’s mass murder campaign, passive voice is king. Omitting facts is standard, and fabrication is permissible in newspapers that read like caricatures of themselves. They muddle, mislead, and misconstrue: manufacturing consent for genocide and creating confusion around murders that are clear as day. When it comes to Palestine, the industry that claims to speak “truth to power” is really just a loudspeaker for the powerful.

Why is this? Well, you could write a book on that and many have. But I’m British and short on time, so we’re only going to examine one institution here: the BBC.

We saw earlier how belligerent foreign states and their friends in the media pressure the BBC. The corporation is also disciplined by British politicians. Former chancellor George Osborne recently admitted as much:

You think of the BBC as being this big, independent organisation with lots of protection against the government of the day … but the chancellor can basically boss the BBC around.

An open letter from 112 BBC journalists and 306 media figures revealed that BBC staff are forced by the organisation’s pro-Israel leadership to “perform PR for the Israeli government”. The letter calls on the BBC to sack Sir Robbie Gibb, Theresa May’s former spin doctor. He was a Tory-appointed BBC director. He currently sits on the BBC’s Board and it’s Editorial Standards Committee.

Gibb bought the Jewish Chronicle, a racist pro-Israel paper that regularly prints falsehoods. He made the purchase on behalf of an anonymous consortium. To this day, he refuses to say who gave him the money. BBC Journalists note that:

This conflict of interest highlights a double standard for BBC content makers who have themselves experienced censorship in the name of ‘impartiality’. In some instances staff have been accused of having an agenda because they have posted news articles critical of the Israeli government on their social media. By comparison, Gibb remains in an influential post with little transparency regarding his decisions despite his ideological leanings being well known. We can no longer ask license fee payers to overlook Gibbs’ ideological allegiances.

I’ve used the BBC as a case study, but journalists everywhere face similar interference when they report facts about Israel.

To answer the question I posed at the top of this article: nobody actually believes the IDF anymore. Western journalists just pretend to because they’re rewarded for doing so, and punished when they don’t.

“The Omnicause” is a popular term of derision in right-wing newspapers. Josh Glancy explains:

Modern progressivism often makes the mistake of wrapping everything up into a single omnicause: trans rights are climate rights are Palestinian rights are human rights. It’s a narrow and reductive way of seeing the world that often detracts from the individual causes.

Glancy once wrote that “what looks like ‘apartheid’ keeps Israel secure”. So I doubt he cares about Palestinian rights. But I believe him when he says he wants these to stay as “individual causes.” Divided people are easier to dominate.

What the right mockingly label “The Omnicause”, the left simply call solidarity. Solidarity has achieved amazing things: from gay liberation to the defeat of South African apartheid.

So, why do the right mock the joined-up thinking of the left? One reason is that many of them sincerely see the world this way. They aren’t class conscious and they don’t think in terms of systems and outcomes. Because of this, they fail to see that different identity groups frequently share common interests.

Let's compare solidarity on the left with the limited, transactional allyship of the right. Here’s anti-racist organiser Eric Ward:

What I learned when trying to understand White nationalists and their ideas, was that antisemitism was the lynchpin of the White nationalist belief system. That within this ideological matrix, Jews—despite and indeed because of the fact that they often read as White—are a different, unassimilable, enemy race that must be exposed, defeated, and ultimately eliminated. Antisemitism, I discovered, is a particular and potent form of racism so central to White supremacy that Black people would not win our freedom without tearing it down.

And here’s right-wing activist Michelle Rosenberg expressing her disappointment over the lack of black support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza:

Jews went to prison for participating in Freedom Rides. Jews helped establish the NAACP. Jews marched with Black Lives Matter. We will remember the silence from the black community. We won’t forget.

Ward understands that oppressions overlap. He seeks safety through solidarity. Rosenberg, on the other hand, views allyship as a transaction. She’s accumulated goodwill, and now she’s cashing it in. Her argument, echoed by other pro-Israel campaigners, was memorably mocked by comedian Matt Lieb:

We marched with you against Jim Crow. We marched with you against police brutality. And we marched with you against mass incarceration. All we ask in return is for you to let Israel do Jim Crow, police brutality and mass incarceration to Palestinians.

Right-wingers also push “The Omnicause” attack line to divide their opponents. They are not shy about this. The Conservatives stir up racial tensions between Hindus and Muslims to win Hindu votes. They also regularly commission internal polling on trans rights. Their stated aim is to turn working class people against trans folks in Labour constituencies.

To see how right-wing opposition to joined-up thinking works, let’s look at Josh Glancy again. He scolded Labour MP Clive Lewis for pointing out a link between “the daily inhumanity being meted out to Palestinians and rising Islamophobia in the UK”. Here’s Glancy:

Lewis’s argument, I think, is that the brutality of Israel’s war is cheapening our sense of Muslim life, thus making it easier to imagine burning a migrant hotel or stoning a mosque. Is there any truth in this? It feels like an almighty stretch to me.

Glancy is wrong. It’s common sense that seeing Israel treat Muslims poorly with no consequences fuels bigotry in our country. But we needn’t rely on mere socio-psychological inference. Anti-Palestinian prejudice is directly linked to last summer’s race riots.

After the inciting attack, misinformation spread quickly. It falsely claimed that the killer was a Palestinian immigrant. This claim reached 2.4 million people on Twitter alone. This was far from the only connection between the rioters and pro-Israel campaigners.

These connections didn’t stop Glancy. He suggested that Lewis argument could “easily become antisemitic” and, strangely, compared him to Jack the Ripper. Glancy wasn’t alone in monstering Lewis. The right’s thinking may be disjointed but, thanks to social media echo chambers and private group chats, their smear campaigns aren’t.

Glancy argues that Palestinian rights aren’t connected to trans rights. He then undermines his own argument by taking a swipe at “someone who could have male chromosomes winning a boxing gold medal by punching a bunch of women”. He wants to drive us apart but, whenever he opens his mouth, he demonstrates that we share an enemy.

The bottom line is that bigotries do overlap and reinforce one another. Recognising that doesn’t “detract from the individual causes” as Glancy would have you believe. It helps us build coalitions to overcome them.

Here’s another example: right-wingers say that “any parallel between immigrant issues and the black civil rights movement is weak.” But today's laws that attack immigrants grew out of the Fugitive Slave Acts. The right also decry the “dangers of mass immigration for women.” But immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than natives. And the real emerging threat is men impersonating ICE agents in order to kidnap women. Migrant rights, it turns out, are civil rights, and are women’s rights.

As well as fostering solidarity, “omni-causal” thinking also encourages critical thought. It draws out connections, and places events in their wider historical context. Let’s look at how the podcast Blowback uses an omni-causal lens to contextualise a news story: the U.S. sending a fleet of helicopters to Ukraine.

40 years ago the US sent billions of dollars of weapons to Islamic warriors fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. It now sends Russian made helicopters that it purchased to kill Islamic warriors fighting Americans in Afghanistan to kill Russians in a proxy war in Ukraine.

The Cold War is connected to The War on Terror, which is connected to the Russo-Ukrainian War. It’s textbook omnicause. And, unlike most reporting on these conflicts, it makes a compelling case for restraint. By contrast, today’s warmongers explicitly warn against the evils of contextualization.

Right wingers will poke fun at you for it, but omni-causal thinking is how we overcome overlapping oppressions, defeat the politics of division and fear, and learn from history.

It’s been exactly two months since Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire that it agreed to. Since then, it’s killed over three thousand people. It continues to illegally starve the entire Gaza Strip. All of this sets the stage for Operation Gideon’s Chariots. Its planners claim that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed,” which will push Palestinians to “leave in great numbers to third countries.”

Gary Lineker opposes all of this. He embodies a bog standard, middle of the road British sentiment on Gaza. Lineker, like 3 in 4 Britons:

• Believes that Israel is committing war crimes.

• Supports an immediate unconditional ceasefire.

• Opposes Israel’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza.

Every polling indicator is trending against Israel. Indeed, Lineker is actually much friendlier to the pariah state than the next generation of celebrities will be. Most young people in the UK don’t even believe that Israel should exist.

Lineker is, politically speaking, the median British dad. But our media is so warped that an ex-footballer, who just hates kids being killed, is being presented as a militant. A right-wing smear campaign has attacked Lineker for standing up for immigrants and making fun of the Tories. It kicked into overdrive when he had the gall to say:

I can’t bear looking at little children being killed constantly.

It finally got him this week when Lineker stupidly re-posted an Instagram story about the history of Zionism. The content itself was sound, but a previous re-poster had overlaid an image of a rat, an anti-Semitic trope. Lineker apologised:

I shared a post here on Instagram that contained an emoji that has awful connotations. Unfortunately, I did not see the emoji. If I had, I would never ever have shared it.

The minute I was made aware, I deleted the post and went on to make an apology. I would like once again to say I’m sorry unreservedly for the hurt and upset caused. It was a genuine mistake and oversight, but I should have been more diligent.

He’s right. He should’ve been more careful. It was an accident, but a disastrously reckless one. It’s okay to have average-dad politics, but average-dad social media judgment isn’t suited to such a scrutinised role.

The British press loves two things: a fallen celebrity and a chance to criticise the BBC. So, they’ve jumped on this story. What the press haven’t done is inform their audience about the dodgy backgrounds of the campaigners demanding Lineker’s head. Let’s do their job for them.

Who are Lineker’s critics?

Nicole Lampert

Telegraph journalist Nicole Lampert is a longstanding critic of Lineker. She thinks that the N-word is free speech and once wrote a eulogy for a Sun journalist who'd killed his wife. She’s very critical of rat imagery, except when she employs it herself. She’s far from the only Telegraph writer to compare people to vermin.

In her column Lampert writes:

Who else would not only be allowed a whacking great salary, but to set up a media company which is a rival to the BBC?

You’re getting sidetracked Nicole, this was supposed to be about antisemitism. But, as you asked, the obvious comparison would be Robbie Gibb. Gibb is Theresa May’s former spin doctor and was a Tory-appointed BBC director. He now holds a non-executive director role on the BBC’s Board. Gibb purchased the Jewish Chronicle, a right-wing newspaper that regularly attacks Lineker and the BBC, on behalf of an anonymous consortium.

As is the case with many of Lineker’s critics, Lampert’s argument amounts to: do as we say, not as we do.

David Atherton

Right-wing activist David Atherton decried Lineker’s “online radicalisation”. This is a bit rich from the man who falsely claimed that a Palestinian immigrant committed the murder that caused last year's Southport riots. Atherton’s pre-riot incitement reached 2.4 million people on Twitter alone. He also shared this shockingly racist image of Lineker, shown as a brown-faced Muslim with rat ears. Nicole Lampert thanked Atherton for his support.

Euan Philipps

Euan Philipps is a pro-Israel campaigner. He’s not Jewish, so he sometimes adopts a Jewish pseudonym to lend faux-semitic credence to his complaints. His group, Labour Against Antisemitism, took a break from filing antisemitism complaints against Jewish members of the Labour Party to attack Lineker. The anti-Palestinian bigotry of some of the organisation’s founders has seen them kicked off of social platforms.

Josh Howie

GB News broadcaster Josh Howie is another of Lineker’s critics. He deplores dehumanising animal imagery, apart from when he’s using it himself. Howie spreads the Pallywood conspiracy theory. He claims that crisis actors are faking the horrors they're experiencing in Gaza. He once looked at an image of a dead Palestinian child and declared that it was actually a silicone doll.

Jake Wallis Simons

Jake Wallis Simons is another Telegraph columnist. He has a history of making false allegations about Muslim groups. He took a break from tweeting stuff like “Much of Muslim culture is in the grip of a death cult that sacralizes bloodshed” to accuse Lineker of bigotry.

These are not serious people. They are opportunists enabled by a British press that’s too cozy and too right-wing to take them to task. They have found a win-button and they are going to continue mashing that button until it stops delivering the outcome that they want.

The smear campaign against people who see Palestinians as people is far bigger than Lineker. It’s targeted actors, athletes, activists, directors, MPs, journalists and more. Most recently it claimed that beloved children's entertainer and educator Ms. Rachel was funded by Hamas. The campaign is so shameless and scattershot that it once labelled a journalist a terrorist on the grounds that he happened to be born on October 7th, long before the events of 2023.

Lineker made a mistake and apologised, but his critics are unapologetic repeat offenders. It's obvious from everything he has said on a wide range of issues that he’s is driven by compassion for suffering. He has paid a huge, escalating and entirely predictable price for his dissent.

I point all of this out to drive home a simple point: the price of opposing Israel’s genocide is far too high in Britain. And the price of being an Islamophobic wingnut is far too low. If we want peace and justice, we need to balance the scales.

The UK Supreme Court has handed down its decision. For the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, the legal definition of a woman now excludes trans people. The court defined sex as “biological sex” - meaning sex assigned at birth. The ruling has imposed severe restrictions on trans rights in the UK.

What’s the impact of the ruling on trans women?

This ruling means trans women no longer have equal pay protection. Also, trans people can be excluded from all single-sex spaces in any situation. To illustrate its impact, let’s imagine a day in the life of a British trans woman.

Jennifer arrives at a job for which she’s underpaid. She’s greeted by her colleague: a man who’s being paid twice as much as her to do the same job. Thanks to the Supreme Court, she’s no longer entitled to bring an equal pay claim to remedy this.

It’s midday and she needs the toilet. Despite living as a woman for decades, she’s now obliged to use the mens. She’s tempted to use the gender-neutral toilets at a nearby coffee shop. But that will take half-an-hour out of her day, and wages out of her pocket. She decides to brave it.

A male colleague confronts her as she’s washing her hands:

What are you doing in here?

She’s forced to out herself as trans. She can feel the eyes of her colleagues on her for the rest of the day. She walks into a meeting room; everybody stops talking and looks sheepish. One of her colleagues stifles a laugh.

Jennifer leaves the office at 6pm. She’d usually attend a support group for sexual assault survivors this evening. The man who chased her down a dark street didn’t think to check her chromosomes before shouting sexual suggestions. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court reckon they’re grounds to exclude her from the group.

Instead of giving and receiving support, she walks home alone. She passes a newsagent's and the front cover of The Daily Telegraph catches her eye. “Trans women are not women”, it bellows. The Supreme Court insisted in their ruling that:

It is not the role of the court to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex, nor is it to define the meaning of the word “woman” other than when it is used in the provisions of the Equality Act 2010.

Nonetheless, this is what they’ve wrought.

How did the court reach this decision?

As you can see, this decision is terrible for trans people. Let’s examine how the court reached such a damaging conclusion.

By barring trans people from giving evidence

The judgment cited extensively from so-called “gender critical” campaigners. By contrast, the court did not allow a single trans person to speak. An academic and a former judge, both trans, applied to speak before the court. But, without explaining why, the court flatly refused them.

Regular Possibility Space readers will spot a parallel with The Cass Review (the document that the British government is using to justify curtailing transgender healthcare). Cass specifically excluded “subject matter experts and people with lived experience of gender services” from her review’s governance committee. This makes about as much sense as picking a rookie pilot because all of the seasoned captains displayed a suspicious bias towards altitude. In both cases what we’re seeing is ignorance by choice.

By relying on a narrow and conservative definition of “sex“

In the public domain “sex” and “gender” are discrete concepts. In the legal domain however, there’s no distinction. For the purposes of the court these two words mean the same thing. Many of the problems with this judgement stem from that flattening of language. The law fail to capture the lived reality of trans, non-binary and intersex people.

For example, the court offers a simple definition of “biological sex” - “the sex of a person at birth”. This means what’s initially recorded on one’s birth certificate. Sex is notoriously difficult to define. This is because the components of biology considered to constitute it sometimes conflict. So, assigning sex at birth is more about paperwork and assumption than real biology. This didn’t trouble the court.

Conflating sex and gender causes the court to misattribute misogyny to women’s “shared biology”. This shifts the focus away from the real problem: women’s shared oppression under patriarchy. It obscures the reality that trans women experience misogynistic discrimination as much as, if not more than, many other women.

By downplaying the impact of the ruling

The court insists in its judgment and public statements that trans people will not be disadvantaged by its decision. This does not appear to be accurate.

Trans women can’t file equal pay claims against male colleagues anymore. Research shows they earn much less than men, and less even than their cisgender female colleagues. The court justified this on the basis that some trans men, being “biologically female”, may now bring equal pay claims citing male colleagues instead. Regarding equal pay protections the court said:

a biological definition of sex would transfer this right from some trans women to some trans men. We do not see this difficulty as compelling a different conclusion in these circumstances.

There are a few problems with this. A “transfer” of rights, by definition, harms the people losing those rights. The court tacitly admit this by referring to the transfer as a “difficulty”.

Secondly, as anyone who knows about the gender pay gap will tell you, the problem is very rarely that men are paid less than women. Being able to claim on that basis is not, in practice, an equivalent right to being able to claim that you’re being paid less than a man.

The court says similar things about sports. But the reality is that all trans women are now automatically blanket-banned from women’s sport. Trans men are similarly blanket-banned from men-only sport. The public body responsible for implementing the ruling has suggested that trans people should seek out some undefined “third space” to use instead. Notably they have not offered to advocate for suitable facilities for trans people, instead suggesting that trans people take on this brutal task themselves.

The reality of this ruling is that trans peoples rights have been reduced: both in theory and in practice.

What are critics saying about the decision?

This judgement is, by its authors’ own admission, an act of “statutory interpretation”. Many lawyers, legal researchers, former High and Supreme Court judges, and a former civil servant involved in drafting the Act, find the court’s interpretation unconvincing. Here’s why:

If Parliament intended to exclude trans people, why didn’t they use the provision they put in place to do that?

Section 9.3 of the Gender Recognition Act contains a loophole. It says that, if Parliament wants to, it can exclude the effect of the Act from any piece of legislation. The Equality Act 2010 was written after the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (the clue’s in the name), but it does not invoke section 9.3.

Despite this, the Supreme Court believes that Parliament intended to keep trans women out of the Equality Act’s definition of "woman."

The court said we must understand men and women as defined by their biology to decide if someone has faced discrimination due to pregnancy or sexual orientation. Therefore, it stated that understanding “sex” as “biological sex” was the right way to interpret the Equality Act overall. This leads to some pretty wacky conclusions like…

Denying the existence of trans lesbians

The Court concluded that a lesbian “must be a female who is sexually oriented towards (or attracted to) females”. Trans women, they say, cannot be lesbians because that would make the “concept of sexual orientation” meaningless.

The Court also argues that acknowledging the existence of trans lesbians would lead to an “inevitable loss of autonomy and dignity for lesbians”. The vast majority of lesbians disagree, but that didn’t trouble the Court.

The judgement does not appear compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights

Some worry that the Supreme Court ruling isn’t compatible with existing European Court of Human Rights rulings. The European Court ruled that placing trans people in an “intermediate zone as not quite one gender or the other”, was a violation of their Article 8 right to “establish details of their identity” and to have such identity respected. This ruling made the British Government, begrudgingly, recognise the gender of trans people through the Gender Recognition Act.

The Supreme Court’s ruling brings back this issue by viewing trans people as having different sexes for different purposes. For example, a trans woman can now be kept out of a woman’s book club because she's a man, and from a men’s book club because she's trans.

This double bind was applauded by the “gender critical” campaign group Sex Matters. Their founder said:

Not being allowed into the mens by rule does not mean you have the right to go into the ladies (and vice versa).

That may seem unfair, but these are life choices people make. If you make extreme efforts to look like a man don't be surprised if you are denied entrance to ladies.

The reason I’m giving column inches to Sex Matters, a transphobic hate group who promote harmful conversion therapies, is that the Supreme Court’s ruling expresses “particular gratitude” to them. The court stated they “gave focus and structure to the argument that “sex”, “man” and “woman” should be given a biological meaning.”

What happens now?

We fight back

The Good Law Project has set up a “fighting fund.” They aim to challenge the Supreme Court’s ruling. Unfortunately it’ll be a long time until we know the outcome. They must exhaust all domestic remedies prior to appealing to the European Court. The wheels of justice turn slowly.

The far-right march on

The wheels of injustice on the other hand? They’re spinning. Transphobes are already using the ruling as a rallying point for further attacks, and the government is supporting them.

The right-wing group Women’s Safety Initiative, for example, have changed their focus from trans people to immigrants:

We’ve won the battle against trans ideology. Now, it’s essential that the gender critical community speaks up about the dangers of mass immigration for women.

They’re wrong. Research show that immigrants are less likely to commit crime than natives. Despite this, the government is backing them by promising to publish a “league table of foreign criminals”.

Elsewhere, Sex Matters are using the ruling as a pretext to curtail trans healthcare.

The entire premise of treatment with puberty blockers for gender dysphoria has fallen away … Passing as the opposite sex ceases to be a desirable goal to present to children when they will never be permitted to use spaces or services for the opposite sex.

They’re wrong as well. Trans people transition for reasons of health and wellbeing, not just recognition. Gender-affirming care is known to improves outcomes and saves lives. Trans people won’t stop being trans because Sex Matters has decided to make their lives difficult.

Their shocking statement admits that, although they claim to “protect everybody’s rights,” their true aim is to push trans people out of public life. Despite this, the government is backing them by curtailing trans healthcare.

Even the Prime Minister himself is getting in on the action, declaring that trans women are not women. This is simply wrong in law. The Supreme Court ruled that, for the Equality Act, sex should be defined “biologically.” However, the Gender Recognition Act still applies in most situations. Barrister Oscar Davies called Starmer’s remarks “disappointing from a former human rights lawyer”. My description of Starmer’s remarks is not fit to print in a family newspaper.

Trans people wait to see how much their rights have been reduced

Supreme Court rulings don’t change things immediately. First, we need to turn them into guidance for stakeholders, such as employers, service providers, and business owners. Stakeholders then modify their policies in response.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) handles issuing this guidance. But it’s seriously undermined by the fact that its commissioners are political appointees. Liz Truss, for example, bragged that her appointees would counteract “groupthink” and “virtue signalling” – both familiar right-wing talking points.

What this means is that trans people don’t just suffer a psychological blow on the day of the Supreme Court ruling. They suffer blow after blow, day in, day out, as the public realm is remade into an even more hostile environment. They wake, exhausted, to face headlines like:

• “Trans women to be strip searched by male transport police after UK court ruling”

• “NHS to test all 'trans' children for autism”

• “They think it’s all ovaries… It is now”

Many questions remain unanswered

Outside of the impact on the trans community, there are other practical concerns. Simple questions linger: Can a father still take his daughter to the women’s toilet? Or a mother take her son in with her?

Increased policing of bathrooms to check “biological sex” has a big impact. It disproportionately affects people like butch lesbians, whose looks are seen as not feminine enough.

Stakeholders reckon with unworkable and unsafe guidance

Confusion reigns among politicians and policymakers, while service providers adopt conflicting approaches.

For example, the EHRC says that:

Where possible, mixed-sex toilet, washing or changing facilities in addition to sufficient single-sex facilities should be provided.

However, this advice goes against government policy. They recently introduced building regulations to:

Halt the march of gender-neutral toilets in buildings

It’s a mess. Both parties seem determined to drive trans people out of public life, but they can’t agree on how.

Business owners are frustrated by the mixed messages. They are also upset about being asked to spend millions to change their premises for what they see as a “political issue that came out of nowhere.”

What can we do to support the trans community?

We can — and must — protect the rights of all vulnerable groups without turning them against one another. Here’s how:

1. Make clear that no one is required to exclude trans people. The law now says that you can, but there’s no obligation to do so.

2. Support the Good Law Project’s “fighting fund”. They are committed to appealing this ruling at the European Court of Human Rights.

3. Write to your MP. Ask that they give careful thought to how they want the Equality Act to operate in practice. This means:

   • Properly scrutinising the EHRC’s guidance, which is due this summer.

   • Asking why we allow political appointees to the EHRC in the first place.

   • Pressuring the government to keep their manifesto promise to:

   Modernise, simplify, and reform the intrusive and outdated gender recognition law to a new process. Remove indignities for trans people who deserve recognition and acceptance.

   • Consulting with the trans community.

   • Drafting a public statement to reassure the many scared trans people in our country.

The Labour Party has a huge majority in Parliament. So, what happens to trans people will be up to them. We won’t allow them to hide behind court rulings. They are the ones who make the laws that the courts interpret. The buck stops with them.

Some Labour MPs are sticking up for their trans constituents. Others are mocking them and demanding that we pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights. Most are silent on the issue. Find out where your MP stands and if it’s not with you, withhold your vote.

Acknowledgments

If you are trans and are reading this, I want you to know that I love you and so do all my friends. The people who brought this case to the Supreme Court do not want you to exist, but the joke’s on them. Trans people have always existed and they have survived far worse than this.

This article would not exist without trans people. It’s particularly indebted to Jess O'Thomson, whose tireless reporting on this subject is a triumph of reality over mystification.

If you’ve been clicking through the citations in this article then you’ve already read their work. If you want more from Jess on this topic, you can catch the on The Take podcast or on the TRASHFUTURE podcast. You can buy Jess a coffee here.

Oasis is a video game created using generative artificial intelligence. It’s a ripoff of Minecraft and its name is a rip off of The Oasis from Ready Player One, itself not the most original of texts.

Trained on footage of Minecraft, Oasis attempts to replicate that game but, because it doesn’t have object permanence, it only really succeeds at replicating the feeling of dementia. In the hands of capable game designers this technology could power a devastating art game about the syndrome. But Oasis is developed by hubristic tech bros who think it’s “a glimpse into the future”.

Despite requiring a $40,000 graphics card to approximate a video game that came out in 2009, it only renders at 360p. Its creators claim that it runs at 20 frames per second. That was not my experience. It’s blurry and slow, unstable and imprecise.

Playing it feels like dying. Indeed at one point during my play session, I looked up at the clouds. Then, I looked down at my feet and realised I had floated up into them. This happened because the game is fundamentally incapable of understanding the relation of objects in space. It’s a three dimensional hallucination derived from two dimensions of source data. Like its creators, it handwaves away what it doesn’t understand.

I have nothing against hallucinations. I’ve dabbled. But I’m not bold enough to pretend the things that I see when I hallucinate are going to put Shigeru Miyamoto out of a job.

There’s an iconic jumpscare in the video game BioShock. The developers pile a bunch of goodies onto a desk in a dentist’s office. They know you'll take a moment to grab these items. So, they use that time to spawn a bloodthirsty, wrench wielding dentist right behind you. Take your time: he won’t bludgeon you until you turn around.

This scare works well because its designers know where you’re looking. They can thus conjure a monster in your blindspot. Not only do AI games not know where you’re looking, they have no designers, and no concept of “where” at all. AI games might be horrifying, but not intentionally so.

“Dementia Minecraft” is apt description of Oasis. It also fits the AI tech bro subculture that created it. These men are desperate to craft… something, but all they can think to do is repurpose the work of others. Their output is forgettable slop, fed to the many in order to build the fortunes of the few.

If you’re reading this then, while these artless vampires might annoy you, they’re not really a threat to you. You have critical faculties. You’ve already played a good video game and have no intention of playing their bad ones.

The demographic that this stuff is a threat to, is children. Right now, millions of under-supervised kids are being algorithmically force-fed AI-generated junk online. We owe their developing brains far more stimulating and challenging art. To deliver this, we must change how our creative industries work.

There are two reasons that our creative industries are producing more and more derivative slop. The first is technical: the AI systems deployed increasingly in creative workflows are inherently derivative. They were trained on what came before them and, fundamentally, all they’re capable of doing is reassembling that training data.

The second reason is capitalism. Or, more specifically, what capitalists tend to do when their rate of profit is declining. They stick together, reducing risk and maximizing efficiency at all costs. This setup, where a small number of companies dominate the market, is called oligopoly. It discourages competition and thus, innovation.

Oligopolists use every tool at their disposal to defend their entrenched power. Their lobbying spend, for example, has increased by around 400% since the year 2000. They also take on debt in order to make fewer texts for more money. This makes it prohibitively expensive for newcomers to compete. And, when a newcomer succeeds in spite of this, they simply acquire them.

Oligopoly encourages cartel formation. In the creative industries this instinct manifests as joint ventures:

• Hulu was founded as a joint venture between News Corp and NBC Universal. Comcast, Warner, Providence Equity and Disney also got involved.

• The CW is named after its co-founders: CBS & Warner.

• MGM+ is a joint venture between MGM, Lionsgate, and Paramount, with Amazon getting involved later.

• Vevo is a joint venture between Universal, Sony and EMI, partnered with Warner.

This level of consolidation has led to conflicts of interest that harm creative workers and their creative efforts. The record labels that own stakes in streaming services, for instance, are incentivised to allow streamers to rip-off their artists. They profit either way.

Consolidation also empowers oligopolists to dictate favourable distribution terms for their products. Cinemas screening Disney films for example, are contractually obliged to play the film for longer than usual, to hand Disney a higher-than-typical cut, and to screen trailers for other Disney products before the film.

Downstream from joint ventures are joint franchises like The Wizarding World, Terminator, Lego, Spider-Man and James Bond. The Lord of the Rings, whose rights are divvied up between Warner, Amazon, Harper Collins and the Embracer Group, is a particularly interesting example of this. Parties effectively own different periods of fictional time. Amazon can set its TV series in the second age of Middle Earth. This isn’t because J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a novel about that age. It’s because Amazon owns the rights to an appendix that mentions it.

Members of these cartels benefit from every franchise entry. Packed with references to other texts in their monetizable catalog, the output of this system is derivative in the financial sense (an instrument to hedge or exploit risk), as well as qualitatively. To quote Andrew deWaard:

The demands of derivative media produce travelogs, not so much of urban space, but of networked, financialized, and intertextual time and space.

Contemporary popular media texts now function as risk-hedging derivatives through which capital accumulates in diversified cultural hedge funds operated by a handful of transnational media corporations, disciplined by even bigger financial firms.

The late Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin was a tad more concise when he said:

Space Jam isn’t a movie, it’s a marketing event.

Sequels, reboots, remakes, songs that remake old songs and now games the hallucinate old games. These are all symptoms of the capital consolidation outlined above.

None of this should be read as nostalgic. There was no golden age. Creatives have always had to struggle for control, compensation and conditions. I also don’t mean to imply that derivative media inherently sucks.

My point is that media, and the conditions of its production, are heavily shaped by abstract financial processes and long-term trends in political economy. We could have a vibrant media landscape with diverse stories and fair jobs. Instead, we’re stuck in a greedy, extractive content machine.

If we want to control the long-term trajectory of our mediated lives then understanding these processes, and whose interests they serve, is vital. But what can we do about this?

Legislate

New tax laws, changes capital gains, carried interest, executive pay, stock buybacks and antitrust rules could reform the financial sector. This would in turn, reform the media sector which, it’s important to understand, is shaped and distorted by financialization.

To reform the media sector directly, AI companies must be made to pay for the media they use to train their models. OpenAI reckon that “it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.” To which I would respond: that sounds like a you problem.

Our governments are currently carving out copyright exemptions for AI developers. Students, cultural workers, policymakers, fans who are dismayed at the way things are run, and really anybody who cares deeply about the media must oppose this.

Our governments could break up the conglomerates. They could also separate entertainment giants from asset managers if they wanted to. The problem is that industry spends enormous sums to make sure that won’t happen. You would be right to point out that Starmer is in Number 10, Trump is in the White House, and anti-monopolist Lina Khan no longer chairs the Federal Trade Commission. We are losing influence, and we need to win it back if we have any hope of legislating. We need to win the argument.

While we talk about tactics, it's important to notice an interesting tension here. The interests of our enemies are not aligned. The old cartels want to lock-in their gains. Meanwhile, the new wave of AI tech bros aim to flood the zone with endless AI-generated copies of the cartels’ intellectual property.

Disarming one of these groups without inadvertently empowering the other is going to be a balancing act. Perhaps, while our enemies fight each other, we should spend our time building platforms and production processes outside of their control?

Educate

I was a film student and now I work as a game developer. Looking back on my media education, I see that I didn’t learn enough about how financialisation would impact my work. I had to develop financial literacy to understand what was happening to my industry. To advocate these reforms, and to imagine a fairer future. Media educators must help the next generation of creatives gain these skills before they start working. They shouldn't have to learn them on the job.

Film, television, music, and games matter to everyone, no matter their politics. So, the media system offers a unique political opportunity. Connecting the rise of finance to the decline of culture could make for a strategically successful association.

Organise

Defending and extending media unionisation is vital, as evidenced by recent Writers Guild of America strike action wins. A key first step here would be to win the right to collective bargaining for all creative workers.

Musicians, for example, are currently barred from organising. This puts them at a disadvantage when negotiating. The record labels are collectively organised, in that they all hold equity stakes in stingey streaming services. As a result, record labels have a compelling financial incentive for accepting low royalty rates for their artists, and those artists are legally barred from fighting back. We need to level this playing field.

Conclusion

My view is that none of this is likely to happen. The entertainment and finance industries spend a lot of money to get special treatment. This often leads to unfair treatment for everyone else.

If a lifetime of media consumption has taught me anything though, it’s that audiences like a happy ending. So I’ll leave you with the words of screenwriter Zack Stentz:

Hollywood is based on giving audiences what they might not know [they want]. Any attempt to drive risk out of that process is sooner or later doomed to failure.

Acknowledgements

This article covers AI and financialisation, linked by the idea of derivative media.

• The AI part of the article was inspired by TRASHFUTURE episode 852 (Spotify, YouTube, Apple).

  • This is where I first heard the term Dementia Minecraft.

• I became interested in the financialisation of media after listening to episode 189 of American Prestige (Spotify, YouTube, Apple). This episode features Andrew deWaard, whose words and graphs feature heavily in the back half of this article.

  • His book Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, is free to read.

Britain is a direct participant in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. We lead on intelligence and logistics, and provide diplomatic cover. In this context, I often wonder how British MPs sleep at night.

Not the Conservatives. Their “defend the west” worldview and proud history of Islamophobia predisposes them to pile up brown bodies. But the Labour MPs, who see themselves as genuine defenders of liberalism, multiculturalism, and peace.

I’ve corresponded with my MP, Chris Curtis, on this topic. His answer seems to be that he manages to sleep at night by lying to himself all day. These MPs are not fanatics or sociopaths. They are regular people who use clichéd excuses instead of thinking for themselves.

Here are the lies I’ve seen Labour MPs tell themselves to justify backing an ongoing genocide. When viewed together they are, I think, a useful illustration of the banality of evil.

Palestinians must die so that Ukrainians may live

Britain sends weapons and military gear to Israel. Israel use them to commit war crimes in Palestine. The British government recently had to admit this in court after failing to cover it up.

Labour MPs justify this by claiming that cutting Israel off would:

have the potential to disrupt the international supply chain … and weaken the ability of other nations we provide exports to-such as Ukraine- to defend themselves

Palestinians must die so that Ukrainians may live. It’s a grim calculus that would lead any half-decent MP to ask questions like:

• Can we support Ukraine’s defence without supplying Israel’s genocide?

• We know our exports are used for war crimes. Shouldn’t we exclude the state led by a fugitive war criminal from this supply chain?

• Shouldn't we follow the UK's legal rules? Arms sales must end if there’s a clear risk that weapons could be used to violate international law.

Labour MPs are not asking these questions.

War is peace

Another lie that Labour MPs are telling themselves is that arms exports are an unalloyed good. They’re campaigning to classify arms companies as a social good under environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment rules. The implications of this proposed rule change are macabre. Let’s say you choose to invest your pension in a fund that's labelled “good for society”. This proposal would mean you’d end up owning a stake in an arms manufacturer.

Ignorance is strength

The third lie that Labour MPs are telling themselves is that knowledge is dangerous. Specifically, that anybody even knowing about Britain's role in Israel's ongoing genocide threatens our security.

I’ve previously reported that the Government asked the press not to discuss British military support for Israel. It’s also censoring requests for information from MPs and Lords on this issue. A new development is that Labour MPs are now censoring themselves. They claim that even asking these questions could threaten our security.

Here’s a first-hand example. Mark Smith worked as a policy adviser at the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). He recently resigned, alleging that ministers pressured FCDO staff to skew assessments of whether arms sales were legal:

My time at the FCDO exposed how ministers can manipulate legal frameworks to shield “friendly” nations from accountability. They stall, distort and obscure official processes to create a facade of legitimacy, while allowing the most egregious crimes against humanity to take place.

Smith was not the first FCDO official to make such accusations. I asked my MP:

What is the government’s response to these allegations? Will there be an investigation?

He replied that:

I’m not going to pretend I have the answer to all your questions and I also try to speak for myself and my own knowledge on foreign policy, rather than strictly on behalf of the Government and of course, it would not be right for the Government to share every detail of security or intelligence briefings.

MPs have a job description. It says they should “raise issues that matter to their constituents.” This “includes asking government ministers questions.” My MP is refusing to do his job, arguing that simply asking questions poses a security risk. He refuses to speak “on behalf of the Government”, which is fair enough. But by presupposing that the government won’t give him an answer, without actually asking them, he ends up doing just that.

I’ve reached out to my MP to further clarify his position on this issue. Usually a prompt interlocutor, he’s stopped responding to my emails.

“I support a two-state solution”

The last lie that Labour MPs tell themselves is that they support a two-state solution. Labour MPs take their lines from the party’s leadership, so they always phrase this in exactly the same way:

We need a two-state solution with a safe & secure Israel alongside a viable & sovereign Palestinian state

Attentive Possibility Space readers will notice the double standard. Israel is named and promised safety. An unnamed “Palestinian state” is only promised viability. They talk about Palestinians like unborn foetuses. Today they’re “viable”; perhaps one day soon they’ll count as real human beings.

Labour don’t mean any of this of course. They insist that they want to recognise Palestine, but that the time is not right. Opposition MPs introduced the Palestine Statehood (Recognition) Bill to push the issue. Labour revealed their true colours by opposing it.

I cannot speak to the intentions of these MPs, but the material impact of their policies is to delay long-overdue support for Palestinians in their most acute hour of need.

Conclusion

I didn’t write this article to attack Labour MPs, but to try to understand them. I’m sincerely interested in what motivates mundane people to support grotesque policies. And in how they self-justify. Here’s what I think is going on:

True Believers

First of all there are the true believers.

Luke Akehurst is a Labour MP. Before this, he was a pro-Israel lobbyist. He also lobbied for arms firms. He is not a mystery. His politics are right there in his résumé.

Pragmatists

Labour is not just the party of Luke Akehurst. It’s also the party of Melanie Ward. Ward stepped down as CEO of the aid charity Medical Aid for Palestinians to become a Labour MP. She has done much more than most for the Palestinian cause. So what’s she doing in this Labour Party? That’s a much more interesting question than: “Why is Luke Akehurst behaving like a demon again?”

I suspect she thinks she can do more good inside government than outside of it. Given mounting reports that Labour MPs are aghast at what they’re being asked to defend, I don’t think she’ll feel that way for long.

Cynics

Certainly, there’s also a degree of cynicism involved here. I doubt my MP is dodging basic questions about misconduct at the FCDO out of real concern for national security. The simplest explanation is that he doesn’t want to make trouble for his government. This level of cynicism isn’t normal. It’s beaten into our elected representatives by the whipping system.

Cultivated ignorance

Another factor is that many Labour MPs are simply ignorant about this topic. This is not an accident. MPs are more likely to take an all-expenses-paid propaganda trip to Israel than to study its violent history. I believe my MP when he professes his inexperience:

If I’m being honest, I’m not an expert in these foreign affairs.

I have some sympathy here. My MP cares about domestic politics. It's not his fault he knows little about a war that began before he was born. He only becomes complicit, a little more each day, if he chooses to remain ignorant while holding power.

Self deception

I also think that there’s an element of performativity at work here. To paraphrase Judith Butler: these MPs act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of them being decent people. There’s a self-deluding power in reiterating that you support a two-state solution while you arm one state that’s flattening the other. The potency of this delusion grows when all of your friends and colleagues are chanting the same mantra.

Sometimes the delusion overpowers the performer, and the performance becomes real. These expressions of humanity are inconvenient for the government, so are quickly stamped out.

David Lammy, uncomfortable being the face of British support for genocide, this week finally described Israel’s blockade of Gaza as a “breach of international law.” This admission is unacceptable to the government because it exposes them to criminal liability.

The prime minister's official spokesperson rowed back Lammy’s remarks. Spokespeople are granted relative anonymity by the British press. It’s fitting that Labour chose an anonymous individual to call out a named person for acting like a human being for a change. For the sake of their mental health and their electability, Labour MPs must be allowed to perform humanity. However, this veneer of compassion must not be allowed to alter policy. It must always be an act.

There are many issues here. Our expectations of MPs, how easily swayed they are by lobbyists, and how badly bullied they are by their own parties. The least we can do as their constituents is to tell them the truth when they lie to themselves.

Matthew Syed is a nationally syndicated columnist. He recently published a column titled:

Here in Israel, amid the horror, I have found a miracle — truly free speech

It's odd for an author to say this in a week when two booksellers in Jerusalem were arrested, their books impounded. It’s a strange thing to say about a country that restricts press access to lands that it illegally occupies. A country that bombs and bans foreign news organisations while censoring domestic ones. It’s a particularly odd thing for Syed, supposedly a journalist himself, to say about the country that killed at least 85 of his colleagues last year, more than two-thirds of all journalists slain.

For his column, Syed wandered a public square in Tel Aviv, interviewing anybody who’d speak to him. A woman tells him:

We should have prioritised the hostage releases. Netanyahu isn’t interested because he wants to continue the war.

Somebody else counters with:

Sure, you could probably get all the hostages back if you released every single Palestinian terrorist from our jails, but they would go on to kill thousands of Israelis.

Nobody Syed speaks to opposes the “war”. Nobody advocates Palestinian liberation. When Syed’s interviewee rants about “Palestinian terrorists”, nobody interjects that most Palestinian detainees face no charges and that many are children.

Slack-jawed, Syed calls the limited views he sees “free speech on steroids”. It was at this point that I realised: when Syed says “free speech”, he doesn’t mean it in a way that you or I would recognise. What he’s praising would be better described as “shameless speech”.

He explains:

In the UK when I say I’m a journalist, a look of fear materialises in a striking number of my interlocutors. “What if I say something construed as racist?” “What if I’m cancelled?”

I’d suggest that the British fear of being questioned by a hack stems less from “PC Gone Mad”, and more from the public's understanding that our press make sport of being cruel and remorseless towards members of the public. Putting Britain aside for a moment, it’s worth noting what Syed is actually praising here. A society that isn't troubled by being seen as racist.

It’s not just chutzpah that Syed admires; it’s shameless supremacy. It’s not just their forthrightness. It’s that they have forceful opinions about what should be done with their inferiors. The “open, fearless, acerbic” speech that Syed admires in Tel Aviv is the same kind that you might hear in Jakarta in the 60s, or in Kigali and Belgrade in the 90s.

Syed isn’t alone here. Rebranding freedom from shame as freedom of speech is a common right-wing trope. For example, when students began a series of protests against the legacy of the British Empire, their professors proclaimed that “undergraduates must learn the true nature of free speech”. This discursive shift enables right-wingers to deny legitimacy to those opposed to their views. Positioning those opposed to them as against the incontrovertible Western Enlightenment good of ‘free speech’ itself.

The bookends of Syed’s article reinforce this:

Fundamentalists are terrified of Israel’s openness… We are now in a fight not just for Israel, America, Europe and the vestiges of Nato but for the soul of western civilisation itself.

Syed’s public persona is that he is very smart, but his sign off echoes the witless, bovine words of George W. Bush: “They hate our freedoms”. Remind me, how did Bush’s global war for the soul of western civilisation work out?

Further reading

• The United Kingdom’s ‘free speech crisis’: From the fringes to a mainstream political project by Taylor A Hughson and Simina Dragoș painstakingly traces the mainstreaming of the idea that there is a ‘free speech crisis’ in the United Kingdom.

• The “Reform UK, Nigel Farage, and Elon Musk” episode of the QAA podcast contains enlightening and entertaining discussion of “free speech” as a right-wing cop-out.

England has always been a racist country. We often do a good job of hiding this: in our national curriculum, for example. Every now and then though, an issue comes along that exposes our double standards. Our treatment of Ukrainian and Palestinian refugees is one such issue.

Yesterday, Kemi Badenoch, Leader of the Opposition, said:

The Conservative Government established the Ukraine family scheme. In total, more than 200,000 Ukrainians have found sanctuary in the UK. However, a family of six from Gaza have applied to live in Britain using this scheme, and a judge has now ruled in their favour. That is not what the scheme was designed to do. This decision is completely wrong, and cannot be allowed to stand. Are the Government planning to appeal on any points of law, and, if so, which ones?

Badenoch is wrong on the details here. The case wasn’t allowed under the Ukrainian scheme but on human rights grounds. That’s not the point though. The point is that her position is explicitly racist.

It’s ugly stuff. No need to worry: our Prime Minister, former human rights lawyer Sir Keir Starmer, is on his feet approaching the dispatch box. Starmer has a strong track record on this issue. He once said, “Labour has been scared of making the positive case for immigration, and we need to turn that around.” Let’s see what he has to say:

Let me be clear: I do not agree with the decision. The Leader of the Opposition is right that it is the wrong decision… The Home Secretary is already looking at the legal loophole that we need to close in this particular case.

Are we sure this is the same guy? He accepts Badenoch’s misrepresentation of the case and adopts her pernicious narrative, placing people in a racialised hierarchy. The “loophole” he wants to close seems to be that they wrongly classified Palestinians as human beings?

Why is a so-called human rights lawyer attacking the judiciary and the dignity of refugees? It’s a cynical electoral tactic. He’s making villains of some of the most vulnerable people on earth in a doomed attempt to boost his dismal approval rating of -25. The papers call this “taking the fight to Reform”. It’s unclear to me how marching towards your enemy chanting “we agree with you!” constitutes fighting.

Labour’s plan is to copy the xenophobic and Islamophobic politics of Nigel Farage. They’re denying citizenship and safe passage to refugees from predominantly brown-skinned countries, while offering a warm welcome to whites. It should go without saying that this is a recipe for moral degradation and defeat.

When I heard the Prime Minister say that Ukrainians deserve sanctuary but Palestinians do not, I felt the urge to write to my MP, Chris Curtis. But then I remembered what he said the last time I wrote to him. I complained the UK was sending weapons and military gear to Israel, and he replied:

Because the UK also provides similar exports to other countries, particularly Ukraine against the Russian invasion, the advice the Government received was that any F-35 parts which were not going directly to Israel should not be suspended, as that was deemed to have the potential to disrupt the international supply chain and the global F-35 fleet, which would have serious implications for international peace and security, and weaken the ability of other nations we provide exports to-such as Ukraine- to defend themselves.

You can disregard the detail about “parts going directly to Israel”. That’s just a supply chain quirk. Curtis uses it to hide a simple fact: British components are exported to Israel, albeit indirectly. Israel use them to commit war crimes in Palestine. The British government had to admit this in court after failing to cover it up.

Curtis’ argument is that Palestinians must die so that Ukrainians may live. It’s a grotesque proposition that would lead any half-decent MP to ask questions like:

• Can we support Ukraine’s defence without supplying Israel’s genocide?

• We know our components might be used for war crimes. Can we exclude Israel from this supply chain?

• Shouldn't we follow the UK's legal rules? Arms sales must end if there’s a clear risk that weapons could be used to violate international law.

The British government has asked none of these questions. It’s also issued a D-notice urging the press not to ask them. D-notices are not legally enforceable. But the British press are a compliant crowd. So they’re quite effective.

The press often supports the government's clear racism instead of challenging it. Dan Hodges is a national newspaper journalist. Last week, he advocated war crimes against Palestinian children. If he’d said the same about Ukrainian or Israeli children, he’s be out of a job. This week, he praised Starmer’s response to Badenoch:

Starmer gave her a clear and direct answer on the Gaza family. It was embarrassing to watch.

The far-right now leads in the polls. If these politicians face any punishment it will be, perversely, for failing to convince voters that they’re racist enough. I don’t see eye to eye with Hodges on many topics, but I do agree with his final point: we should all feel deeply embarrassed.

The Anti-Defamation League

The ADL was founded in 1913. Its mission is “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” It has an admirable history of campaigning for Jewish safety. It has also fought for civil rights, including: abortion rights, marriage equality, and reparations for Japanese Americans interned by the U.S. during World War II.

The organisation takes pride in its wide remit and impact. Its mission and history page states that it was “founded with the clear understanding that the fight against one form of prejudice cannot succeed without battling prejudice in all forms.”

That clarity dimmed in 1948 when the state of Israel was founded. The ADL now had two objectives - ending prejudice and supporting Israel. Time and time again, when these objectives came into conflict, Israel won. For example, when Elon Musk accused Jews of “hatred against whites,” the ADL defended him. It did so because Musk was limiting pro-Palestinian speech on Twitter.

The ADL defended Musk again when he sieg heiled at Donald Trump’s inauguration. They said he “made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.” How did the ADL reach this conclusion? Approached for comment by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, it refused to elaborate.

Compromising its principles has damage the ADL’s reputation. Jewish journalists now criticise their antisemitism statistics, which conflate valid criticisms of Israel with antisemitism. Wikipedia’s editors recently declared the ADL a “generally unreliable” source on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, including related antisemitism. One editor on the decision panel remarked that:

The ADL no longer appears to adhere to a serious, mainstream and intellectually cogent definition of antisemitism, but has instead given into the shameless politicization of the very subject that it was originally esteemed for being reliable on.

You might think this would give the ADL pause for thought. It did not. They instead tried to get Wikipedia’s board to overrule their editors. That request was rightly rebuffed. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank then escalated the situation. It threatened to dox Wikipedia's editors. Approached for comment, the ADL declined to condemn this threat.

Things got so bad that ADL staff wrote to their boss.

[We are losing trust with] other extremism researchers, media outlets, anti-hate organizations, civil rights groups and - perhaps most concerningly - large swaths of the Jewish community that we are committed to serving.

Some of these staff were summoned to meetings with the ADL’s HR department. They were reportedly asked to quit.

All of this is bad news for the defamed people who the ADL aims to defend. We can learn lessons here.

The Hindu American Foundation

The HAF is an ADL-lookalike group. Partnered with the ADL, it aims to replicate their political success. They are also mirroring the mistakes made by their mentor.

This article examines these organisations and their shared mistakes. It proposes a return to the ADL’s forgotten founding principle: “The fight against one form of prejudice cannot succeed without battling prejudice in all forms."

Exceptionalism

Both organisations assert themselves as the singular voice representing their communities. They want to be the only voice of an entire people, and they shun and denigrate anybody who disagrees. The ADL compares Jews who disagree with it to “white nationalists”. Then, it contradicts itself by calling them “Iranian proxies”. The HAF similarly dislikes Hindu groups that oppose its conservative politics.

Hubris has led these civil rights organisations to oppose civil rights. They need to get over themselves. To accept that their communities are not monolithic and allow diversity and disagreement within them. They must recognise that interfaith solidarity is the only way to achieve true equality.

Friendly fire

The ADL and the HAF aren’t the only organisations constructing hierarchies of racism and then placing themselves at the top. Many organisations subscribe to this zero-sum logic. They believe there’s only so much equality to go around, so they’d better get theirs. This pattern leads to interest groups harming each other.

I think that this story will help to illustrate what I mean. Bear with me, there are a lot of acronyms:

Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) is a South Asian and Indo-Caribbean campaign group. The Asian American Foundation (TAAF) is a billionaire backed nonprofit. TAAF supports both DRUM and the ADL.

The ADL successfully called for desi protestors to be jailed for protesting against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. TAAF, who you’ll recall are partnered with the ADL, then funded DRUM to help bail those individuals out of jail.

In the words of Fahd Ahmed, DRUM’s executive director:

In the last nine months, we’ve had to do actual work on the ground that is being created by the ADL’s targeting of students and teachers in high school for Palestine activism … TAAF is supporting us to do work that we’re having to do because of ADL.

The ADL shot back:

We make no apologies for doing everything in our power to stop antisemitism.

Friendly fire incidents like this will keep happening so long as civil rights groups position racism against their affinity group as a unique problem instead of what it is: one form of bigotry among many interconnected hatreds.

Ethno-nationalism

Another similarity between the HAF and the ADL is a legitimacy crisis. They both face questions about who and what they represent. Both crises stem from a clash of agendas. The groups' ethno-nationalist goals conflict with their founding principles of equality and justice.

Most of my readers know Israel is an ethno-nationalist apartheid state. Hindutva, also known as Hindu nationalism, is less well known, so here’s a quick primer:

Hindutva is a nationalist response to colonial rule in, and the partition of, India. I oppose all ethno-nationalisms, but it’s important to acknowledge that Hindutva can manifest benignly, as faith-based national pride, and that it helped to dismantle the governing structures of the British Raj.

However Prime Minister Narendra Modi mainstreamed Hindutva as a majoritarian far-right project. It marks Hindus as insiders and other groups, notably Muslims, as outsiders. It advocates for Hindu supremacy and seeks to turn India, a secular state, into an ethno-religious nation.

The HAF support Modi’s Hindutva in many ways:

• Promoting his political party, the BJP.

• Excusing the BJP’s human rights violations.

• Attacking mainstream human rights organisations that criticise the BJP.

• Demonising Muslims, and even Hindus who oppose Hindutva.

• Advocating that the U.S. government monitor Sikhs.

All of this uncannily echoes the ADL’s approach to silencing critics of Israel:

• Promote Israel.

• Excuse the country’s human rights violations.

• Attack mainstream human rights organisations that criticise Israel.

• Demonise critics of Israel including:

  • Muslims, supporters of Palestinian rights,

  • Jews who oppose Israel's war on Palestine,

  • and shamefully, even opponents of South African apartheid.

• Advocate, and allegedly take part in, spying on and infiltrating these groups.

Laying out the ADL & the HAF’s tactics like this, it’s not difficult to spot the similarities. Both of these organisations are promoting majoritarian fascism in one country by rebranding it as a defence of minority rights in another. This looks like a shared playbook, and begs the question…

Are these organisations beyond saving?

Are these the honest mistakes of flawed but salvageable groups? Or, is this the playbook of a new multiracial far right?

Despite all that I’ve written above, I still hold a naïve hope that we can salvage these groups. The ADL was once a leading anti-hate group. It's been upsetting to see its moral collapse.

The organisations aren’t the point though. They are vehicles for our desires, so it’s our desires that need to change. We must abandon the myth that any one of us can be safe if we are not all safe. We need to form coalitions, not interest groups. We will achieve safety through solidarity. If these organisations cannot get onboard with that, then we will replace them.

A call to action

If you oppose organisations advancing ethno-nationalist agendas while claiming to be civil rights organisations, I recommend that you read and sign:

• Savera’s declaration against Hindu supremacy.

• The #DropTheADL campaign’s open letter to progressives.

Further reading

• The Other ADLs episode of the Jewish Currents Podcast is a comprehensive and helpful primer on this topic.

• HAF Way to Supremacy: How the Hindu American Foundation Rebrands Bigotry As Minority Rights

  • This is, as well as a fun bit of wordplay, an exhaustive report on this topic.

• Hindutva as a variant of right-wing extremism by Eviane Leidig is a useful history. It contextualises Hindutva in the broader scope of right-wing extremism as a global occurrence, and debunks some common Western misrepresentations of Hindutva.

• Another similarity between the supremacist projects discussed above is that both are vestiges of British colonial meddling. This topic is too large to address here but it connects to my argument: our answer to supremacy must never again be counter-supremacy.