Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
For more than 100 years Jewish ex servicemen and women in Hackney have joined the communal Remembrance events.
The memorial was actually unveiled in 1921 by a Jewish Victoria Cross medal holder so holds a special place in the story of British Jewry.
This year was different because Hackney is now led by the Greens who echo the same Jew obsession as the Nazis.
As a small but respectful protest, the Jewish ex servicemen stayed away from the community wreath laying until the Mayor of Hackney and her keffiyeh sporting activist councillors left.
A small but heartbreaking rebellion, as Hackney AJEX chair Martin Sugarman, who is speaking here, told me:
‘We did not want to be associated in any way, or be complicit with the scurrilous Jew hatred of the Greens, or in any way be seen to give them credibility in Hackney, we attended the usual ceremony, with our Local branch Standard bearer, outside the church at St Johns's - as we have done for the past 100 years or so with fellow veterans and families - but refused to lay our Star of David poppy wreath. Instead we gathered in our small multi-faith group after the Greens had marched away, and held our own private wreath laying with a short service in Hebrew and English, for all those who defended freedom and democracy.’
Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
“Somme,” wrote a Prussian veteran. “The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word.”
Four hundred thousand British and Allied troops, and a similar number of Germans, lost their lives, without any noticeable gain or loss of territory. It was that territory, pock-marked by artillery, filled with toxic gas, devoid of any living thing except enemy patrols, that later inspired Tolkien’s description of the approach to Mordor:
“Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails on the lands about.”
It wasn’t only the lansdscape that he recalled. “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier,” he later wrote, “of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”
Sam is, indeed, the archetypal British NCO: Uncurious, loyal, imperturbable and almost impossibly brave. He turns out to be the true hero of the story, yet he has come from the unlikeliest of backgrounds.
This point is made especially powerfully in the film version. In a scene that doesn’t appear in the book, noble-hearted Faramir asks Sam if he is Frodo’s bodyguard.
“I’m his gardener!” replies the little hobbit, in a way that is supposed to be dignified, but comes across as comical. When they eventually part ways, Faramir, now overcome with respect, tells Sam: “Truly the Shire must be a great realm, Master Samwise, where gardeners are held in high honor.”
The director, Peter Jackson, was making explicit something that Tolkien had left as subtext. Before coming to the scarred and poisonous mud of Mordor, Sam had been surrounded by fecundity. After a lifetime of tending to living things, he was suddenly encircled by death.
My great uncle, Cpl. Bill Hannan, fought at the Somme at the same time as Tolkien. Like Sam, he was a gardener, dragged from his flowerbeds to the filthy sumps and shell-craters of the battlefield.
Unlike Sam, he never made it home. His name is carved into the great memorial at Thiepval, along with those of 72,000 other British and South African soldiers whose bodies were never recovered from no-man’s land.
Almost every British family was touched, as mine was, by the tragedy. My old school lost 749 students, a number which I still struggle to take in. Like so many schools, many of its present buildings were erected as monuments to the slain: We were educated, I now realise, in a semi-mausoleum.
At the time, of course, it barely registered. Few adolescent boys have much sense of mortality. Now, the remembrance services that slid past me as a schoolboy move me to tears.
Year after year, we meet, go through the same rituals, recite the same consoling phrase: “We will remember them.” Though the last of the veterans died some years ago, and though it won’t be long before the last person who knew the fallen is also gone, we will remember them.
Though the slain survive only as names on family trees, faces in yellowing photographs, letters notched in marble, we will remember them. Those tram-drivers and locksmiths and miners, those common men who did uncommon deeds, those gardeners whom we hold in high honor. We will remember them.
Cpl William Hannan, Cheshire Regiment, 24 years old, was killed at the Somme 100 years ago #OTD. My great-uncle. everymanremembered.org/profi…
Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
In 2016 Sadiq Khan promised there would be no Tube strikes.
This will take the total to more than 160 days of strikes since he was elected.
That’s triple the number under both previous Mayors combined.
London deserves better.
🚨 NEW: The RMT has announced that drivers on the London Underground will strike for 24 hours on the following days
* Thursday 26 November 2026
* Thursday 17 December 2026
* Saturday 19 December 2026
* Monday 4 January 2027
* Wednesday 6 January 2027
* Wednesday 17 February 2027
* Tuesday 23 February 2027
* Thursday 25 February 2027
Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
I haven't been on this site for a bit.
But I haven't seen anyone share the photo the New Statesman staff staged in 2013 of Russell Brand as Christ, and themselves as his disciples. It seems to have been scrubbed from the web.
It made me angry then and it makes me angry now.
Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
Russell Brand has been found guilty of rape and sexual assault. I'm shocked because I was certain he would get away with his crimes.
The fact that Brand is a rapist was an open secret on the British comedy circuit. A friend of mine knows one of his victims.
One of the things I learned over the last few years is how many people in the entertainment industry are good, decent people and how many are compromised by their own desire for power, money and clicks.
Francis and I shared what we knew about Brand with people who were thinking of working with him and many of them immediately recognised we were telling the truth and stopped any association with him. Others, not so much.
This is even more true of his former employers like Channel 4 and the BBC. I am not saying everyone at those organisations knew but many people definitely did and they not only didn't say anything, some of them actively protected him.
I hope the verdict today brings closure and peace to his victims and serves as a reminder to powerful people who abuse their position to take advantage of others that they won't get away with it forever.
Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
We're trying to track down this chap, see what he thinks about it
No more rice grains in Kellogg's Rice Krispies due to changing weather bbc.in/4z2VXqa
Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
It is Islamophobia Awareness Month. Time to remember the Manchester Arena attack. Where an Islamic terrorist murdered 22 during an Ariana Grande concert killing.
A security guard saw him as suspect - but was too concerned about being branded Islamophobic to take real action.
Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
In the middle of World War Two, German soldiers in southeastern Poland started avoiding a cluster of villages.
They wouldn't go in. They wouldn't take people out for forced labor. They put up warning signs and stayed away.
They believed the area was infected with typhus.
It wasn't. Two doctors had invented the whole thing.
The man behind it was Eugene Lazowski, a young Polish doctor working for the Red Cross in the town of Rozwadów. He was watching the Nazi occupation tear his country apart. Executions. Deportations. People shipped off to labor camps, many never coming back.
He wanted to stop it. He had no weapons, no army, and no way to fight.
What he had was medicine.
His friend and fellow doctor, Stanisław Matulewicz, had discovered something strange. If you injected a person with a harmless, dead strain of a certain bacteria, their blood would test positive for typhus.
They wouldn't be sick at all. But on paper, they'd look like they had one of the most feared diseases of the war.
And the Germans were terrified of typhus. It spread fast, it killed, and it could tear through an army. When the Germans found it, they quarantined the area and kept their distance.
Lazowski realized what that meant. If he could make enough people look infected, the Germans would leave the whole region alone.
So he started injecting his patients.
He chose carefully. He sent the blood samples to German labs for testing, exactly as the rules required. The results came back positive. Again and again.
The Germans declared an epidemic zone. Villages were quarantined. Soldiers kept out. People who would have been seized for forced labor or worse were left alone, because nobody wanted to go near them.
Lazowski had to be careful. If too many cases looked fake, someone would ask why nobody was dying. So he spread out the injections over time and kept the outbreak believable.
Eventually the Germans did get suspicious. They sent a team of doctors to inspect.
Lazowski met them with food and vodka and played the gracious host. He guided them toward the sickest looking, dirtiest patients he could find, in the most crowded rooms. The German doctors, worried about catching typhus themselves, took a few samples and left in a hurry.
The tests came back positive.
The fake epidemic lasted until the end of the war. Estimates say it may have protected around 8,000 people.
Lazowski also secretly helped Jews from the nearby ghetto, giving them medical care at enormous risk.
After the war he moved to the United States and became a professor of pediatrics in Chicago. For decades he barely talked about what he'd done. Late in life he finally wrote a memoir. He called it My Private War.
He died in 2006.
He never fired a shot. He beat the Nazis with a needle and a lab test.
Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
After that incredible #Tottenham performance yesterday, I was so proud to hear this beautiful story about what Kinsky said to Penders after the game.
“I went straight to him because, honestly, I felt for him. I know how difficult that moment must have been. You make your first Premier League start, you want to show everyone what you can do, and suddenly one mistake becomes the moment everybody remembers. I told him, ‘Look at me. Keep your head up. You are still the same goalkeeper you were before that corner. One moment does not define you. People sometimes forget how lonely it can feel to be a goalkeeper. An attacker misses three chances, and people talk about the chances he might score next week. A goalkeeper makes one mistake, and suddenly people question his entire career. That isn’t fair. I told him the next time you make a great save, remember that the people laughing today might be the first ones praising you tomorrow. We won 2–0, and of course I’m happy. But I’m also a goalkeeper, and I understand what that moment can do to your mind. I hope he has people around him reminding him that he’s more than one mistake”
What remarkable kindness, compassion and wisdom from a young man who has faced so many challenges already in his career.
Very proud to have him as Spurs number 1.
#COYS #THFC #TOTCHE
Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
How the fuck is Rolo the tiny dog more effective than British Border Force?!
Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
Yes, the monarchy was deeply implicated in the slave trade. But not the British monarchy.
The biggest African slavers were not pirates or bandits. They were kings. In the 1750s, King Tegbesu of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, was reported to be making £250,000 a year from selling slaves. That astronomical sum, equivalent to perhaps £45 million today, was vastly more than any British aristocrat
While Tegbesu was trafficking human beings, the future George III, who had recently become Prince of Wales, was becoming a convinced abolitionist. He wrote a monograph arguing that “slavery is equaly [sic] repugnant to the Civil Law as to the Law of Nature”. He went on, as King, to sign the abolition of the slave trade into law in 1807.
That act prompted incredulous rage among West African chiefs.
In the 1840s, King Ghezo of Dahomey, played by John Boyega in the 2022 film, The Woman King, fiercely resisted such pressure.
“The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth,” he complained.
Contrast his attitude with that of his British fellow-monarchs. Although Victoria, as Queen, was expected to refrain from expressing political opinions, her husband was under less constraint. Albert made his very first speech as Prince Consort to the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa. His words are a reminder of how determined Britain was to ensure that ending the Atlantic slave trade did not simply push the commerce eastwards.
“I deeply regret that the benevolent and persevering exertions of England to abolish that atrocious traffic in human beings (at once the desolation of Africa and the blackest stain upon civilized Europe) have not as yet led to any satisfactory conclusion. But I sincerely trust that this great country will not relax in its efforts until it has finally, and for ever, put an end to a state of things so repugnant.”
The difference between the British Crown and contemporary African monarchies can be glimpsed in the story of Aina, a young Yoruba girl owned by King Ghezo of Dahomey.
In 1850, a naval captain called Frederick Forbes came to Dahomey to try to convince Ghezo to stop selling slaves. He was unsuccessful but, during his visit, he was offered Aina as a gift.
Forbes knew that such slaves were generally destined for human sacrifice, so he accepted the child, naming her Sara Forbes Bonetta. When Sara arrived in Britain, Queen Victoria became her godmother, paid for her education and arranged for her to marry a wealthy Yoruba businessman. Are the British really the baddies here?
Critics talk of telling our nation’s story “warts and all”; but they rarely get around to the “and all”. The “and all” surely includes the vast sums devoted to stamping out slavery, calculated by Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape as 1.8 per cent annually of GDP between 1808 and 1867, the most expensive moral foreign policy in human history. Even if there were a case for reparations in principle (which there is not) that sum alone – not counting the billions given in aid – would surely have covered any debt.
What we are seeing is not a debate about history, but an argument about contemporary politics. Critics want to convince us that Britain became rich through exploitation rather than, as was actually the case, through private property, free contracts and independent courts.
The easiest way to demonstrate the negative correlation between capitalism and slavery is to look at the places where human bondage is most prevalent today – in order, North Korea, Eritrea, Burundi, the Central African Republic and Mauritania. If William III owning shares in the Royal African Company bothers you more than the continuing abomination of slavery in those places, you need to ask yourself some hard questions about your motives.
Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
It is now 37 years ago that the last episode of #Blackadder Goes Forth was screened. This TV gold concluded 3 hrs of unmatched of comedy to many of us. But there was a deeper message throughout encapsulated in this moving final scene.
Vid: BlackadderQtes
Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
This is absolutely INSANE! Meet Mohammed Yaseen. He was a member of an Al Qaeda group that beheaded Brit Ken Bigley.
He then joined ISIS where he worked as a guard at two mass killings and a deadly public stoning. He was arrested in Germany and served nearly 5 years in prison for being a member of Isis.
After he was released, Germany didn't deport him, so he broke into our country on a small boat because he heard we 'accept everyone'.
He was jailed for 2 years for illegal entry, then released early after 6 months. This is despite hearing in court that he 'posed a danger to the whole of the UK' and he had a 'deep and lengthy involvement in terrorism and Islamic extremist ideology'.
He's eligible for deportation, but the Foreign Office raised concerns that if we deport him to Iraq he could face 'mistreatment' for being a terrorist.
He has reapplied to stay in the UK, which halts any deportation proceedings and it will cost taxpayers' £85,000 a year to keep him here.
It get's worse... if and when he uses the ECHR to fight his case, we are potentially on the hook for another *£500,000* in legal aid.
He's been put in a bail hostel in Windsor and able to walk the streets.
WHAT TF ARE WE DOING TO OURSELVES?!
This country is utterly broken.
Dr B Banner PhD retweeted
Hola, soy palestino. 🇵🇸
Y como la honestidad es poco común en mi política, permítanme confesar algunas cosas.
1947. La ONU me ofreció un estado. Junto a Israel. Fronteras, independencia, reconocimiento. Dije que no. Mis líderes prometieron que la guerra "arrojaría a los judíos al mar". En cambio, lo perdí todo y lo llamaron catástrofe. No porque no me ofrecieran un estado, sino porque lo rechacé.
1948–2025. Los estados árabes podrían haberme integrado, dado derechos, pasaportes, dignidad. En cambio, me encerraron en campos de refugiados durante generaciones, para que siguiera siendo un arma contra Israel. Construyeron palacios para ellos y cárceles para mí. Me usaron como propaganda, no como personas.
1967. Tras otra guerra perdida, podría haber construido un estado en Cisjordania y Gaza. En cambio, insistí en "ni paz, ni reconocimiento, ni negociaciones". Tres noes. Cincuenta años después, sigo sin Estado. Resulta que el rechazo no paga el alquiler.
Oslo, década de 1990. Israel dijo: «Intentémoslo». Me dio autonomía. Armas para la policía. Miles de millones en ayuda. ¿Qué hicieron mis líderes? Robaron el dinero, armaron milicias y lanzaron una intifada. Atentados suicidas en lugar de escuelas. Cohetes en lugar de fábricas.
Gaza, 2005. Israel se fue por completo. Sin colonos, sin soldados. Tuve la oportunidad de convertir Gaza en un Singapur mediterráneo. Voté por Hamás. La convirtieron en Mogadiscio junto al mar. ¿Miles de millones en ayuda? Túneles, cohetes y palacios para sus líderes, mientras mi gente come comida enlatada en la oscuridad.
¿Democracia? No he tenido elecciones en casi 20 años. Hamás mata a los disidentes en Gaza. Fatah los encarcela en Cisjordania. Mis líderes cancelan elecciones porque están demasiado ocupados luchando por el poder.
Religión. En lugar de construir un futuro, pongo a clérigos en televisión enseñando a los niños a odiar a los judíos. Glorifico a los "mártires" que hacen estallar autobuses. Crío a mis hijos con canciones de sangre y fuego en lugar de libros y ciencia. Cambio la esperanza por la guerra santa.
Mundo árabe. Los regímenes árabes me llaman "hermano". Pero pregúntenles cuántos palestinos pueden vivir libremente en Líbano, Siria, Egipto o Kuwait. Me excluyen, pero celebran mi muerte, porque mi muerte es su excusa.
Absurdo. Sigo diciendo que quiero "construir un estado". E irónicamente, justo al lado está Israel: el vecino que construyó una democracia próspera, una potencia tecnológica, granjas en el desierto, ciudades de polvo. Sin petróleo, sin riqueza infinita, solo coraje. Podría haber aprendido, copiado, colaborado. En cambio, elegí la envidia y la rabia.
Obsesión antijudía. Podría haber aceptado a los judíos como vecinos. Podría haber dicho: "Dos naciones, dos estados". En cambio, repito: "Del río al mar". En lugar de exhibir el honor, la hospitalidad y la rica cultura árabe, mostré solo la cultura de la espada: la ira, el extremismo y la sangre. En lugar de gritar salaam (paz) a los israelíes, grité muerte a los judíos. Y luego finjo sorprenderme cuando los israelíes no confían en mí, cuando están enojados, decepcionados y convencidos de que no quiero coexistencia en absoluto.
Responsabilidad. Culpo a Israel de todo. Siempre. ¿Mis líderes roban miles de millones? Culpa de Israel. ¿Hamás dispara cohetes desde hospitales? Culpa de Israel. ¿Glorifico la muerte más que la vida? Culpa de Israel. La responsabilidad no es mi fuerte.
Soy palestino.
Podría haber construido una nación, muchas veces. Elegí el rechazo, la corrupción y la guerra sin fin. Podría haber vivido en paz con Israel, pero elegí vivir a la sombra de su destrucción.
Así que sí, soy una víctima. Pero con demasiada frecuencia, soy víctima de mis propios líderes, de mis propias decisiones y de mi propia negativa a abandonar el odio.
Y esa, querido lector, es la tragedia que nadie quiere admitir.
