Yeah. I saw that this morning. The one crumb of comfort to take from it is that most people who apply for legal aid don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of and they also live very chaotic lives, hence probably won’t still have the same email, phone number or home address, so the chances of their data being of interest to scammers is reduced.
True, however they are probably also the most desperately gullible section of society to financial scams. Plus an email & sim swap is all you need nowadays. What is worrying is that it is, I'm assuming, a government hosted & maintained database and they have probably being inside it for a couple of weeks at least. How many other databases is it connected to and is this an example of the security to be found on other government databases.
More a sorry end to what the BBC’s become than anything else. GL will be on the right side of history.
That's also true. I remember asking a client why she kept making phone calls and she told me she was calling to enter a competition. She'd been sent a text message which said something like "Win an all inclusive holiday to Florida or £5,000 in cash by answering these 3 questions" and the questions were incredibly easy such as "Which channel is Eastenders on (a) ITV (b) BBC (c) Sky? It was almost certainly a scam of some kind where they not only rinsed the caller to the tune of £5 per minute but also probably had a secondary fraud which would require the caller to pay an "admin fee" in order to receive the money.
Really? He claims he didn't know the rat was an anti-semitic trope, which suggests he's either lying, or is incredibly ill-informed about such matters and therefore is probably not the ideal person to be continually making pronouncements about issues which touch on them. It's rather ironic that he made that point about Suella Braverman's language being "not dissimilar to that of 1930s Germany" when he retweeted a trope which was literally exactly the same as that used in 1930s Germany.
“Couldn’t keep quiet” Yeh while hundreds of thousands of people are being wiped out, displaced and starved to death”. That *trope though.
I think it is very unwise indeed to take any firm stance on this issue because anyone who thinks they know what is going on in Gaza is deluding themselves. For my part - on the one hand I believe Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself (there is a significant and element of the activist Left who do not) and I believe this is a war Israel needs to win, by which I mean eradicate Hamas in so far as they no longer control Gaza or have the ability to cause mass casualty events. However, I also see the photos and videos and dead and maimed children and missile strikes on schools and hospitals, or the found footage from the killing of the paramedics the other week which exposed the IDF's lies and I wonder just how lawful and morally the war is being fought, which leads me towards the conclusion that war crimes (but not genocide) are being committed and that there is a distinct element of revenge and collective punishment to the campaign. But then, I step back and think about what I know about armed and particularly urban conflict, about how hard it is to defeat an enemy which hides amongst a civilian population, which does not allow the populace to use the tunnels and bunkers as shelter or allow them to obey IDF evacuation orders (and what other military ever issues those?), which for all its posturing in uniform during the hostage handovers takes off those uniforms when it is time to fight, which has said, repeatedly, that it positively seeks and welcomes civilian casualties and which cannot be trusted as a credible source of information. I also think about what Israeli politicians and IDF commanders need to consider when prosecuting the war as it is all too easy for us here, in the safe and secure UK, to pontificate about whether and how the war should be fought when it is not us who live next door to a theocratic regime whose very constitution calls for our state's extermination, nor is it our loved ones who are doing the fighting. The IDF is a small conscript army, probably now running close to exhaustion, so they cannot fight with the skill and coordination of a large professional military such as the Americans. This almost certainly means that where the Yanks might send in platoon sized units to clear houses suspected of harbouring enemy, because IDF soldiers not only don't have the tactical wherewithal to do that, those who command them can't make a moral case for risking their lives in order to protect civilians, so they just call in a missile strike and flatten the building instead. If my sons were fighting in the IDF in a war which we did not start, being completely realistic and brutally honest, I would expect its civilian and military leaders to value their lives more highly than those of Gazans and I reckon almost everyone would feel the same. I also consider the apparent civilian/combatant death ratio (between 1 - 1.5:1), which is very low indeed for a war of this nature (the UN's own figures state 9:1 is usually expected) and I think back to how WW2 was fought, which eventually devolved into mass slaughter of civilians, even civilians who the Allies were fighting to liberate (60,000 French civilians killed by RAF and USAAF bombing in the run up to D-Day). I suspect that if everyone had had a video camera in their pocket and the ability to broadcast the carnage to the world throughout the 1940s, then WW2 may have been viewed differently at the time and since. However, with the exception of Arthur Harris' area bombing campaigns, the almost psychopathic ruthlessness and dreadful moral compromises necessary to defeat a fanatical enemy have largely been brushed over in the post-1945 collective hagiography which tells us that our grandfathers fought a just war, justly.
So starving an entire country of food and aid for months on end isn’t a genocide? You’re both off your tits
I think you need to learn the difference between genocide and war crimes. Btw, if pro-Palestinian activists hadn’t continually over egged the pudding and cried wolf in their craving for online attention, then perhaps more people would take the current situation more seriously. They have been claiming Gazans are being deliberately starved and denied water for 18 months while acting as if we can't see the footage in which clearly well fed and healthy Gazans are waddling around in the background. Hence, now there is a genuine famine in the making and the IDF does appear to be wantonly targeting civilians, nobody is listening anymore. Related to that, another reason why the cause has been very loud but largely ineffective and fringe, is because there's been the typical progressive purity spiral which ends up alienating and expelling moderates. So, even acknowledging that Israel has a right to exist leads to horrendous online abuse and harassment from nasty narcissistic activists who consider themselves to be oN tHe rIGhT sIdE oF hIsToRy and I wonder how many people dismayed by the plight of the Gazans have looked at the way the protesters behave and heard the slogans they chant and thought “I want absolutely nothing to do with those extremists”. The “progressive” Left hasn't learned a single lesson from its multiple defeats over the past decade and still thinks that calling people Nazis, fascists and bigots (or rats) is a way to persuade them or those people who are undecided.
Ah, the UN, that famously impartial and apolitical organisation, some of whose employees actually took part in the 7th Oct massacres? If you’re happy to outsource your thinking to them, knock yourself out. Firstly, has the UN in fact called it a “genocide”? Because AFAIK, they’ve only gone so far as to say Isreal’s actions are “consistent with genocide”, which is not the same thing. Do you understand the distinction? Secondly, you don’t appear to understand the way law works, in particular the requirement of mens réa to accompany an actus reus. Just because you feel something or lots of people are all saying it (repeatedly and loudly) doesn’t make it true, nor can people arbitrarily impose their own definitions on legal concepts which are very narrowly defined. As I keep saying, but the nuance seems to escape you, I think Israel is committing war crimes, but I don’t think it is committing genocide. I’m not giving it a free pass. Also, which genocide are you talking about, because various organs of the UN right down to the emotionally incontinent bandwagon-jumpers on Tik Tok etc who probably couldn’t have picked out Gaza on a map 2 years ago, have claimed that it’s been going on for years (despite the population of the Strip increasing), or they claim it’s been going on since the war started in 2023 (despite Israel actually providing food, water, medicine and electricity to the Gazans), or is it only now that it’s a genocide? That’s the problem with crying wolf….. Finally, given that the Jews are so evil and devilishly cunning, surely if they wanted to commit a genocide they’d be making a better job of it because at this rate it’s going to take them something like 87 years.
Hope you’re right mate cos you’re going to feel a right cunt if it turns out you were defending ethnic cleansing like your thesis depended on it. I have a very, very strong feeling you’re not though.
Wow, only commenting so I get to follow just to see how vitriolic a grown man can get to words they don't agree with on a public forum. I love how there can't be different sides to an argument without resorting to childish insults
What? Because I insist on knowing all the facts and applying the proper legal test before reaching a conclusion? I get the feeling I'm banging my head against a brick wall because you seem to be straw-manning me as if I'm uncritically glazing Israel like Douglas Murray or Natasha Hausdorff. Social media seems to have broken everyone's brains because it seems as if nobody can think in anything other than binary opposites and extremes anymore or work through arguments in a systematic way. Maybe I should have tried to distil my thoughts down to a couple of simple slogans or expressed them through the medium of a Tik Tok dance.... Anyhoo - FWIW/TLDR, I look at Israel's involvement in the Gaza conflict in similar terms to the USSR's involvement in WWII ie: they didn't start it and they had to win it, but the way they did so was absolutely appalling.
