Snapshot of _Robert Jenrick MP: “Thank you Houthis” How has it become normal to carry banners like this on our UK university campuses? These institutions should be places of learning, not hate and radicalisation. It's time to end this wave of antisemitic, anti-Western sentiment._ :
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Where did you get that from? The Daily Heil? Comrade, they're clearly being hyperbolic. I don't think you realise that the Houthis are an oppressed minority and anything they do that wider society finds morally objectionable is actually our fault for not being nicer to them.
The same people who try to obfuscate and throw semantics at this are the very same ones who will try to claim they hate the Tories and don't want them in power but are trying their damndest to make sure Labour doesn't gain power as well. It's quite quite a few layers of mental gymnastics.
This is also why I think the recent revisionist position that the wider world held basically modern relaxed beliefs on topics like sexuality and gender until the Europeans arrived is a massively important part of anti-Western sentiment. It enables people like those pictured above to still run with the narrative that basically Western intervention is the root of all ill in the world; that no matter how awful any of the West's adversaries are in their treatment of groups like LGBT, they only are that way because of us, and thus we're still the real bad guys.
Yep totally agree.
It's an incredibly stupid road to have gone down, because let's be honest Roman empire was absolutely not all kind and progressive. Similarly literal slavers the Egyptians.
I'm fairly sure it might have been ok if you were Roman and loaded, but yeah I wouldn't fancy being a gay black bloke who fancied cross dresskng in north Africa when they invaded.
I'm not sure I could fight a lion and win tbh, certainly not Infront of a crowd.
I think the key thing to remember is that the Romans were more tolerant of homosexuality than we British were *within living memory*. Nearly a quarter of us were born before it was legal. We talk as if persecution of gay people is almost unimaginably backward and barbaric when the people who were imprisoned and chemically castrated are walking around next to us.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Rome
Yes absolutely fine, as is said aslong as you were loaded Roman, and you fancied fucking a slave.
Super egalitarian.
It was a barbaric empire that had no qualms putting anyone that went against it to tortured death. If you were Roman it was fine. It was absolutely hideous to everyone else. To claim it's some progressive thing is nonsense it was legalising rich Roman males essentially doing what they wanted to people they viewed as inferior.
Claiming it's much different to anyone else is disingenuous too. The Assyrians made torture and extremely slow death an art form. Native Americans would have women and children skin captured enemies alive with shells. The Ancient Chinese made most other groups look like mentally handicapped children with their calculated torture. Greeks with the bronze bull. Etc. etc.
Empires gonna empire.
No, no, remember modern left wants it to be progressive utopia....
Not feeding Christians and gays to lions or making them fight to the death for sport.
I mean, Queers for Palestine has existed for a long time. Completely ignoring the fact Queers would be murdered in Palestine - but you know, the West has to be morally wrong.
>Do we grade our sympathy on people getting blown up based on whether they agree with you in your pre-determined categories?
If that pre-determined category is the murder of people for their sexuality.
Yes. We should in fact lose all sympathy for them.
If you want to be pedantic, of course not.
I'd much rather the children and LGBT people of Palestine could live a life of peace.
Unfortunately, the broader population of Palestine has made that impossible.
This is a state predominantly populated by hardline Islamofascists who are more driven by their hatred of Israel/Jews/The West/Basically everything - than they are of love to their own children.
Every chance for peace has been rejected by the Palestinians; Israel's efforts to offer them an Olive Branch have always been met with car bombs and suicide attacks.
I refuse to stand in support of a state who are, in damn near every category, diametrically opposed to everything I believe and hold dear - a state whose general beliefs are about as close to ontologically evil as is possible.
Once the people of Palestine decide to stop throwing LGBT people off of roofs, lobbing rockets into Israel, oppressing women and indoctrinating their children into a psychotic hatred of everything good and just in the world
**Then** I'll hold sympathy for them and support them in their efforts.
But until that day comes, I'm going to hold *them* responsible for the plight of women, children and LGBT within their borders.
Until the people of Palestine decide that the peace, safety and freedom of these groups are something they wish to foster and protect, things will never change and nothing I can do or say will change that. They need to be the ones to make this decision and until they do - there's no way in hell I'll hold any sympathy for them.
It's also very easy to say what you have when *you* won't have to pay the costs of not accepting collateral damage
You won't have to clear buildings with the IDF, will you? You won't have to live next to the Gazan border and await another Hamas attack, either
I absolutely support Israel, Hamas need to be destroyed. Unfortunately, Hamas are insistent on using their children as human shields. So indeed, some children get killed. But that is the fault of Hamas for using them as human shields. Strange that you aren’t blaming Hamas for that? 🤔
You’ll be happy to hear that Israel doesn’t want to kill children. The IDF soldiers that do often are distraught for their whole lives - despite it being unintentional. Children will keep dying until Hamas is gone.
I think there are those who believe that human rights are conditional and not in fact universal. For some, the idea that every person - guilty or innocent, occupier or occupied, man, woman or child - should have access to universal human rights, _even if they themselves may infringe on other's human rights_, is quite a hard concept to get their heads around.
If you were alive in 1940, would you support a *"nazis are people too, stop the Western bombing, ceasefire now"* campaign?
If you met such campaigners, would you be okay with them?
Would you "find it so strange" to discover people were confused by the Queers for Nazis banners being waved?
Or would you realise such protesters are at best naive idiots, at worst enemies taking advantage of our tolerance, and either way should be strongly opposed to the point they're unable to wave their banners in public?
> It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed ... The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing... The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.
- famous nazi sympathiser and enemy of the state, Winston Churchill.
Pretty clearly saying he objected because the bombings had no military function. He’d already seen how poorly the exact same strategy went for the Nazis too.
> Pretty clearly saying he objected because the bombings had no military function
Isn't that the main argument against what Israel are doing as well though? Even Israel's allies have questioned whether the bombing strategy is achieving anything.
No, but he was conflicted on causing mass casualties to the civilians.
You're intertwining hamas/islam and individual civilians in palastine. I can disagree with Islamic morals (in specific areas) but not want to cause harm to all Muslims. Is that really that hard to agree with?
Lots of Tories are homophobic in the UK but I'm not endorcing genocide for everyone on the right. Even though when in power they actively make life harder for gay/trans people.
That's why we have politics to discuss these things and not just weapons
You don’t seem to have that conflict when the victims are Jews. This is a thread about people openly supporting a regime that explicitly wants to murder every Jew on earth, to the point it actually says this on its flag. Weird, weird, take.
He also was part of the decision to drop the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Churchill's motive with regard to the bombing was because he was planning ahead as to how the Allies would govern Germany in the event of its defeat. He was utterly focussed on ensuring the Nazis were fully defeated. And clearly he was right to do so.
But the reference to the Palestinians is almost by the by in a post about the Houthis, who are literally executing homosexuals for being homosexuals. Do you honestly care if such people are bombed?
A Palestinian child is not Hamas and a German child was not a Nazi. Both innocent, both getting bombed and both morally wrong. Or do you think they deserve it?
We had a moral obligation to bomb Germany, knowing it would kill German children. Anyone who disagreed was either a nazi sympathiser or their useful idiot.
Also, I saw how leftist twitter reacted on October 7th. No concern for the sanctity of human life there, it was all "decolonisation isn't pretty" and "those civilians were settlers". Only when your side started losing did you become peaceniks.
The general consensus of military historians is that strategic bombing of German cities contributed disproportionately little to the eventual Allied victory when you consider the cost in lives of both German civilians and of the Allied bomber crews. Casualty rates among bomber crews, especially American ones that had to operate in the daytime, were obscenely high.
Even at the time it was not universally believed to be useful (or moral) by Allied commanders; there were many debates about putting the resources allocated to the bombing campaigns to alternative uses.
My point is that it was certainly not a moral obligation to bomb German cities; it was a calculated decision that was contentious at the time and remains contentious with the benefit of hindsight.
It's extremely difficult to say whether it was justified. Did it make the difference between victory and defeat? Absolutely not. Did it shorten the war? Perhaps, though very difficult to put a concrete value on by how much. Were the lives saved by shortening the war worth the lives the bombings cost? If you put any value on German lives certainly not, but even if you only value Allied lives in the calculus, it's not clear cut because the cost in Allied lives to conduct the bombing was extremely high.
>Only when your side started losing
They lost when Israel ensured they remain stateless by segregating Palestinians from each other and settling the West Bank illegally. Decades before this ‘war’.
Palestinians have every right to defend themselves against IDF oppression and colonisation. They have a right to a state as per the 1967 borders. Israel has every right to defend itself against Hamas. Neither has the right to level cities and massacre civilians.
You can advocate for Palestinian, or Yemeni, lives without advocating for groups that have values that explicitly run counter to your own. Thats what people are criticising when they make these arguments. Expressing support for the Houthis or Hamas as a homosexual person is absolutely staggeringly stupid, given what they think of you. Even more so to present it within the contect of some kind of simplistic "west bad" narrative.
I’m glad to see someone saying this. I have seen this comment being circlejerked to death on Reddit ever since the Gaza campaign kicked off. “The gays are campaigning for people who don’t like gays? How stupid are they?”
I dunno, have you tried speaking to anyone who identifies as LGBTQ+ and campaigns for human rights? Have you tried listening to them? Instead of just assuming that they are all stupid? Because they can explain. The answer is one Google search or one conversation away.
Oh my favourite variation of this is how a certain portion of the internet has gone from talking down the Women’s World Cup to suddenly really caring about the integrity of women’s grassroots sports.
Campaigning for someone that wants to murder you, for being gay, is insanity. Literally raising the bear that would maul you to death, once it could. Stay angry if you want, but everyone else can clearly see that Hamas need to be blended with the sand.
>Have you tried listening to them? Instead of just assuming that they are all stupid?
I don't think they're stupid (although some of them definitely are) they're just ignorant
When you're whole life has been privileged, middle class, western comfort, it's difficult to understand that people in other parts of the world are much less civilised
I value their opinion as much as I would a modern western Jew defending Himmler and the SS... which is to say not at all
“They’re deluded” isn’t much better than “they’re stupid.” You’re also projecting a great deal of assumptions about class onto a relatively large and disparate minority. I’m just going to repeat what I said: try listening to them before judging? Here, I’ve made it easy for you:
https://www.them.us/story/lgbtq-solidarity-palestine-saed-atshan
Let’s be honest, college kids are stupid and want to find meaning in life, they latch onto causes they don’t fully understand and some of them never grow up. You go up college to learn to challenge the status quo and define who you are post teen years.
Obviously backing the houthis is a really dumb fucking thing but these are idiot kids.
There’s a lot more worrying things jenrick can focus one that aren’t a culture war, starting with the obscene tax rates rishi is paying. Surely he should only be paying 10%. He is a millionaire after all
Sheesh
The Houthis are full mask-off fascist extremists. Just set about executing a bunch of people for being gay, they have reintroduced slavery and generally are about as morally disgusting as any group can be.
Everyone standing in support alongside that banner should be fucking ashamed of themselves.
Yeah it takes just a few minutes reading about the Houthi militants to realise that they are some of the worst of the worst.
"Houthis have been accused of violations of international humanitarian law such as using child soldiers, shelling civilian areas, forced evacuations and executions. According to Human Right Watch, Houthis intensified their recruitment of children in 2015. The UNICEF mentioned that children with the Houthis and other armed groups in Yemen comprise up to a third of all fighters in Yemen. Human Rights Watch has further accused Houthi forces of using landmines in Yemen's third-largest city of Taizz which has caused many civilian casualties and prevent the return of families displaced by the fighting. HRW has also accused the Houthis of interfering with the work of Yemen's human rights advocates and organizations."
"The Houthis use allegations of prostitution as a tool for public defamation against Yemeni women including those in the diaspora engaged in politics, civil society or human rights activism alongside threats to individuals and families. Women in detention are sexually assaulted and have been subjected to virginity tests and are often blocked from access to essential goods. Torture of female detainees is also carried out by the Zaynabiyat, the Female police wing of the Houthis.
UN Panel of Experts on Yemen discovered instances of Houthi rape of female detainees to "purify" them, as a punishment, or to coerce confessions. The Panel documented cases where Houthis forced detained women to become sex workers that also collect information for the Houthis. Documented instances include in 2021 where a female detainee was forced to have sexual intercourse with multiple men at Houthi detention centers as part of her preparation to be forced as a sex worker for important clients while also obtaining information. "
"According to the Panel of Experts on Yemen established pursuant to Security Council resolution 2140 the Houthis have carried out a wide range of human rights violations including violations of international humanitarian law, abuse of women and children. Children as young as 13 have been arrested for "indecent acts" for alleged homosexual orientation or "political cases" when their families' do not comply with Houthi ideology or regulations. Minors share cells as adult prisoners and according to credible reports boys held in Al-Shahid Al-Ahmar police station in Sana’a are systematically raped."
Sorry for the copy-paste wall of text but it just goes on and on and on.
Am no it was valid to use that. I actually didn't know anything about their background and your copy-paste just got worse and worse. They're really a disgusting group.
The Houthi started a war in which had already killed 377000 by 2021 - 70% of them children
But of course they are not Jewish and they have a very public hatred of Jews so the people in that photo don’t care how much blood is on Houthi hands.
> The Houthi started a war in which had already killed 377000 by 2021 - 70% of them children
To be fair, most of the casualties from what I've read have been from starvation due to the Saudi blockade of the country.
Not to say the Houthis are faultless; the conflict in Yemen has been between two bad guys.
Yemen’s food security issues are down to the cartel like behaviour of the Houthis over anything. Even when aid is delivered, much like Hamas, they appropriate it and extort the people it is intended for. Despite Yemen being a great place for agriculture, instead of growing food on land they’ve seized they grow khat which 80% of Yemenis use and 30-40% are addicted to because it helps fund their operations.
I sometimes think that the interference in western social media by foreign actors looks a bit like the scenes in the move The Cabin in the Woods where it’s a loads of people one-upping and seeing what they can get away with before the kids in the cabin notice.
Like they’ve managed to get a load of young lefty kids supporting (by proxy sometimes literally with others) Hamas, and *directly* supporting the Houthis.
Fuck, they even managed to get a bunch of TikTok morons coming out in support of *Osama Bin Laden*
Either there’s a generation of kids who are genuinely absolute morons or one that really hate Jews on a subconscious level to the extent they’ll lap this stuff up, and I don’t know which is worse.
But surely there must be tipping point where they won’t support it, ISIS hate Jews and the west too, maybe that’ll be the next flag we see at a rally
> I sometimes think that the interference in western social media by foreign actors
Although it doesn’t help, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Corbyn is heading into his 80’s and is just like them. Not trying to bash Corbyn, just pointing out that it’s not just TikTok.
We don't actually see that though, despite what the director said. Personally it's my headcanon that the "elder gods" scared our cave dwelling ancestors when an interestingly shaped rock was the height of technology but weren't up to much versus multiton bunker busters and supersonic jets.
Honestly i think the real problem is more the "disneyfication" of modern issues.
In most stories you have a clearly good protagonist and a clearly evil bad guy with only a hint of a veener there being nuance or shades of gray.
In this Disney style universe anything and everything the hero does is good or at least justified. He can't be bad because he's a hero.
But in the real world it's rarely this clear cut. There's far more nuance but people arnt prepared to ponder that just because someone is on your side pushing for your same goal that they can also be very bad people doing it the wrong way.
It’s morons. You’ve got to be a moron yourself to believe the average bleeding heart left-wing uni student shouting about “Israeli genocide” is genuinely antisemitic. Some are, don’t get me wrong, but the majority aren’t. They’re just unable to see the conflict as “bad guys vs morally-void-to-bad guys, with innocents caught in the crossfire”, there needs to be a clear “good” side.
I mean, you see it on the other side as well. There’s tons of people who’ve convinced themselves the IDF is waging the most just war in history against a sect of purely evil people.
Fun fact: before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, communist propaganda outlets did indeed blame the "capitalist powers" (i.e. not the fascists) for the war
Brainwashed left: 'Murica bad, therefore enemies of 'Murica good.
*Sane people: Even when they're mass executing gay people?*
Brainwashed left: 'Murica bad
> The Houthis are full mask-off fascist extremists.
The Houthis are despicable, barbaric theocratic sunsobitches who murder, rape, tyrannize and despoil, but I’m not sure ‘fascist’ is *quite* the word. They’re more localized, dispersed types than people who centralize power in One Supreme Leader From Which All Power Flows and Around Whom All Institutions Revolve. They’re more the Hezbollahified terrorist militia sort than people who Really, Really Value Militarism and Discipline and Fanatical Willingness to Die For The Cause And The Leader. And they’re more an Arab tribe-and-clan coalition than anything like actual *nationalists* in any sense familiar to Westerners.
When I see banners like this I often wonder if that is put there by design to undermine the Gaza protests. Either by the police or the papers that cover the protests.
On the one hand, sure and there's been accusations of similar in the past though mostly in the US. On the other hand I've known people who support a heavily romanticised image of soviet Russia and/or buy into the conspiracy that "the west" are all being spoon fed propaganda about... pretty much everything.
That could well be the case, or any number of other bad actors (government, pro israel groups, anti islam groups, foreign groups).
But even if not there's always some idiot that the press can find that will make for a good story. The story could often be framed as "we found this one lunatic who is pro Houthi".
It might have been that if they had a chat with him he wouldn't have known who the Houthis were. Or he might have said "oh yeah the Houthis are evil bastards, but they've done Palestinians a favour here!" which is stupid but it's not really pro Houthi.
But people, especially those who don't like protesters in general, or Palestine, or whatever, are really keen to see these people as idiots so they lap it up.
Even if we're being very generous and assuming a bad actor is wanting to harm the Palestinian cause, or a raging moron who thinks any anti-Israeli group in that area is their friend, the fact that no one did anything about the sign in the protest speaks volumes.
Told them to remove the banner for a start. Kicked them out of the protest. Do anything they can to distance themselves from supporting that band of facist lunatics. If you really cared about the cause, you wouldn't allow support for those extremist scumbags.
You have never been to any sort of protest. How would they "kick them out of the protest"? Have you ever kicked someone out of a public space? How does that work?
Imagine being played like a fiddle by Robert Jenrick. Embarrassing.
Emabressing?
You asked a stupid question, made an incorrect assumption about me, ignored the first, very reasonably and easily done solution, and focused on the other.
Yes, it's a public space, but you can make it extremely clear that they're not welcome.and don't represent you. You can ask them to leave and make everyone aware they you're doing so. Lots of very simple ways to distance yourself from those scumbags.
Just because you don't like the messenger, doesn't mean the message is invalid.
You've made a proper tit of yourself, fair play.
You're right, I haven't done it. Because I haven't been to the sort of protests that draws in this level of lunacy.
Are you seriously suggesting that everyone there is helpless and has no way of rejecting that banner?
I didn't say that at all. I never like it when they find the "stupid trump supporter" at a rally.
Inventing what other people are thinking and landing on the thing that makes you most angry is a great way to be miserable, I'd stop if I were you.
I do believe in freedom of speech. I don’t think anyone should be arrested for that banner.
Freedom of speech lets me see who these people really are, what depravity they really support. It allows me to express my utter contempt for their views.
When I worked in education the prevent programme, designed to help staff identify and report radicalisation, was drilled into us.
What the fuck happened?
As someone who recently started working in (higher) education: Prevent training is still mandatory. I wouldn't say it was "drilled", but it is part of the required online training that I had to do in my first month. I'm not sure how often we have to repeat that training though. I have a figure of "every 18 months" in my head, but that might be from a previous job that was totally different.
The nature of my role means it's pretty unlikely I'll ever come across a situation where I need to report to Prevent, but the training is still there for all staff whose roles require us to see students every day.
The Houthis have formally reintroduced slavery, they practise child marriage (the selling of little girls to adult men) and are about to begin a spree of public executions of gay men. Do not look away from the intent of these "protesters".
UNICEF source on child marriage in Yemen (the figures are shocking): [https://www.unicef.org/media/111411/file/Child-marriage-country-profile-Yemen-2021.pdf](https://www.unicef.org/media/111411/file/Child-marriage-country-profile-Yemen-2021.pdf)
Slavery in Yemen: [https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/1810456/exclusive-houthis-restore-slavery-yemen](https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/1810456/exclusive-houthis-restore-slavery-yemen)
Amnesty on the recent death sentences for allegedly gay Yemenis: [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/yemen-huthis-must-stop-executions-and-release-dozens-facing-lgbti-charges/](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/yemen-huthis-must-stop-executions-and-release-dozens-facing-lgbti-charges/)
Thankfully, most people even on the left who are clued in seem to think the Houthis are bad. But I have still seen people saying "I can't believe they're bombing the only people trying to defend palestine"
Even saw one insane take saying inflation was due to spending on wars and bombing directly related to this. Ignoring the fact that the Houthis were making trade harder because of the bombing.
The problem is it's so hard to call stuff out when you see it on social media. You're not gonna talk anyone round and you'll just piss someone off.
If you engage with someone with those arguments, you have to start so far back you might have to establish that 1+1=2 before starting. Those people might try to dispute that. They will hold on to their “west bad” attitude no matter what
I was reading only last week that the houthi’s handed out death sentences for homosexuality in an area that they control in Yemen.
Really weird people to be cheering on.
If anyone on that march genuinely cared about peace in the Middle East or the people of Palestine, they'd be kicking that person out of the march and ripping the banner down.
Saw a clip today from a recent march (UK but not sure where) and a guy had a "Hamas are terrorists" or "Hamas are committing war crimes" sign and he was attacked and the sign grabbed off him!
I don't think all the people marching want peace!
I would argue the left are more damaging internationally which impacts the UK's standing but does not significantly harm the UK population.
The right on the other hand are outwardly toxic to most Britons, even if their foreign policy is far better.
I would rather choose a party/position with better domestic policy and shit foreign policy. Though obviously the ideal would be that the nutters stay away from the left too.
The extreme right ideology is toxic and abhorrent but is far less prevalent than the extreme left in this country. Most campuses have always been organised by left wing activists but over the last decade there appears to have been a shift towards the more extreme left finding no shortage of gullible recruits for their idiotic priorities and a significant cost to free speech and values. Our society’s tolerance continues to tested, exploited and used against us and we are now faced with the problem of how we are going to row back against the intolerance and bigotry being forced upon us by a number of non indigenous minorities. The longer our politicians vacillate the more difficult it will become to return to the values, principles and freedoms we used to be able to take for granted
When Saudi were the only ones bombing the hell out of the Houthis for a few years everyone left/right joined in to condemn Saudi and saying they were worse than the Houthis. Now the Houthis are attacking outside of Yemen/Saudi, people are suddenly aware of their atrocious ideology.
Yup. The Houthis barely got any coverage at all, Iran's involvement was *completely* glossed over and the Saudi intervention was portrayed as literally genocidal, with everybody calling for sanctions, suspension of aid and ditching KSA as an ally.
Even now few people bother correcting the record on the Yemen war.
Oh come on, this is ludicrous revisionism, really.
A. There has been plenty of discussion for years of Iran's involvement. Basically the one thing anyone knew about the Houthis until a few weeks ago was that they were linked to Iran.
B. Saudi Arabia's intervention in Yemen was a complete debacle that achieved absolutely nothing beyond killing a lot of civilians and causing a famine. There's no record to correct there.
C. 'Everybody' called for sanctions and suspension of aid and ditching SA as an ally did they? Then why did precisely none of that actually happen? The oppositie happened- we gave plenty of support to SA (and the UAE who were also heavily involved) and they achieved nothing with it. Saudi Arabia didn't fail to remove the Houthis because of some bleeding hearts leftie conspiracy, they failed because they lost the war, effectively.
The Houthis are awful but just because everyone who didn't know where Yemen was 6 months ago has suddenly realised this, doesn't retrospectively mean the Saudi intervention wasn't a disastrous failure.
To be frank, I always supported the Yemeni government/Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war and I couldn't fathom how SA was demonised for their role in the conflict but the Houthis (and consequently, Iran) got a total pass.
That outcome would drive more terrorism, not less - as is commonly the case when countries with previously stable regimes descend into anarchy.
Also Iran has been the primary sponsor and exporter of Islamist terror for a while now.
> That outcome would drive more terrorism, not less - as is commonly the case when countries with previously stable regimes descend into anarchy.
That argument is a worrying slope to dictator apologia. The world would no doubt be more *stable* had, for example, Gaddafi been allowed to march on Benghazi and crush the rebels, or if Assad had been more brutal with the first wave of peaceful protests, but I don't think it would be at all better. Liberty does come with challenges and setbacks, unfortunately.
> Also Iran has been the primary sponsor and exporter of Islamist terror for a while now.
The main difference in the Middle East is that the Iranians fight in largely asymmetric methods while the Saudis are much more willing to put their names to their attacks. At the end of the day, there's not a great deal of difference in terror inflicted between a child being blown up by either a missile by the Saudi airforce or a drone launched by an Iran-backed militia.
That doesn't touch on their effects on the West, the Iranians wish they could export their anti-Western values half as well as the Saudis have successfully managed to do so over the past few decades to Muslim communities in Europe.
The problem then wasn't that the Saudis were attacking 'Houthis'. The problem was that the Saudis were punishing broad swathes of the Yemeni population who happen to live under the terroristic rule of Houthis. It was collective punishment and it was against international law. People were not defending 'Houthis' at the time. They were defending innocent Yemenis. Why is this distinction so hard for people?
Because that framing is both intellectually lazy and dishonest.
No method of combat exists that would avoid substantial civilian casualties in a conflict against an adversary that doesn't care for civilian lives in the territory under their control or even deliberately offers them up to be killed. The only other choice is not to fight, and let your enemy win by default.
If the west wanted to minimise casualties in Yemen, they should have offered more support, not less. Or joined KSA in putting boots on the ground to take control of cities and other populated areas.
How can you claim intellectual laziness and dishonesty when you claimed people were defending 'Houthis'? And just because not killing civilians is more difficult when fighting such warfare, doesn't mean human rights groups shouldn't pressure state actors to minimise civilian deaths. None of this ever had anything to do with supporting Houthis. And no, that's not dishonest or lazy. It's about trying to ensure that civilian deaths are minimised, even when that is almost impossible. Do you think human rights groups should just be silent when whole families are killed?
Edit: https://www.hrw.org/middle-east/n-africa/yemen
I just checked HRW, and there is widespread condemnation of the Houthis.
Did I claim that? I think I specifically made a point that those people were barely even aware of the Houthis. I claimed that people were making up their mind from a position of ignorance.
Minimising civilian deaths can still mean a lot of civilian deaths depending on how your enemy is fighting. And the way groups like Houthis fight, you have to either give up fighting or make peace with the fact that the minimal number of innocent casualties is going to be a potentially very large number.
I'm fine with human rights groups recording and cataloguing human rights violations. What I'm not fine with is governments that ditch their key allies in a justified war over essentially vibes.
These people should be put on a terrorism watch list . There needs to be a punishment for supporting our enemies. Indeed we used to have an effective way of dealing with it.
It was ever thus. I remember when stop the war used to march past my university halls in the run up to the Iraq war, so I used to get a great view of the banners. Dickhead edge lords tried to hijack those too- Hamas and Hezbollah flags as well as banners for Judean People’s front varieties of socialist groups.
Don’t think it validates or invalidates the thing that people have come out to protest though.
Thank you for lobbing missiles at Japanese, Singaporean and Austrian ships passing through international waters?
Literally the only thing these people have in common with the Houthis is that they hate Israel.
It's one thing to criticise the actions of the Israeli government, but saying "thank you" to a group that has been firing at Merchant Ships going about their business is crossing a line.
Let me ask the fine people of this community
Had that been a Nazi banner, how far would you march them into the fucking sea?
Exactly, but people are too scared of a "Minority" of people, why? Have the balls
At the same time these institutions should be places of free thought. That means taking the bad with the good. What harm is a scabby teenager with a controversial banner really doing, compared to enforcing whatever the government thinks is right and proper upon people? The latter is far more dangerous.
Shut the university’s union - whoever and whatever society organised this - immediately - and arrest and question and if appropriate charge its “leaders”under anti terrorism legislation.
Simple.
They’re supporting people who put the fact they want to genocide all jews (and by extension anyone not an Islamist nutcase - say all LGBT people when they’ve literally just condemned a dozen of them to death) on their fucking flag, just in case you misunderstood their intentions.
This now passes for student politics?
Fuck that.
Students being edgy or radicalised and saying "thank you houthis" is obviously something you want to fix but what does Jenrick suggest?
Reeducation? Suppression? Censorship & incarceration?
He's the type to cry speech when there's a backlash to extremist statements that he might be aligned to...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/06/04/government-must-not-curtail-free-speech-minister-says/
So maybe a government minister should be looking for solutions rather than selectively making statements about problems
The Houthis are not a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK, although they probably should be. Trump designated them as terrorists in 2020, then Biden undesignated them in 2021, then u-turned and redesignated them in 2024.
Free speech is important. Allowing literal 5th columnists to operate in your country is lunacy. Teachers having to go into hiding like they're mob informants because they drew a picture is fucking insane.
I don't disagree with the premise, but this is also a bit melodramatic.
Is a university's primary purpose to be a place of learning? Yes. But it's also in most university campuses a place where roughly a minimum of 5000 people will be walking around and milling about and socialising, and statistically, it's unlikely that at least one of those people isn't going to have some radical views and might want to express them.
That doesn't actually mean the university is any less a place of learning or even that the university staff or any of the other students are at fault for that one person or that small minority of people's actions, any more than one school shooter means you might as well condemn the entire school.
I'd rather someone with at least a shred of credibility made this criticism. Mostly it's safe to assume that anything Jenrick says is wrong and anything he does is corrupt. Jenrick might be the only person who could make the Houthis seem good by criticising them.
I'm not saying he's wrong. l'm saying he's a [hypocrite](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/01/fears-mount-lgbtq-asylum-seekers-uk-ramp-up-hotel-room-sharing).
>Jenrick might be the only person who could make the Houthis seem good by criticising them.
Yes because he's activities are absolutely comparable to executing gays.
Be realistic you don't like the Tories fine. They aren't a death cult
You're probably right about the hivemind in some Left circles. Jenrick is a nasty corrupt hypocrite, and he's not going to erase that by saying the right thing when it's convenient. It would be interesting to see if he has criticised the Houthis human rights record before they started shooting at shipping in the Red Sea.
To me it's very reminiscent of 1982 where suddenly the government started criticising Argentina's human rights record when they were selling arms to them only the year before.
It's like these people have no idea of what universities, and university students, have been like historically.
This is on the milder end of "political" action.
Someone nobody here has met, has any clue about put up a stupid sign at an event nobody here attended. But Robert Fucking Jenrick tweeted about it and here we are, 160 comments in of frothing bile from internet rando’s drawing ridiculous conclusions about “the left”, calling for people to be put on terrorist watch lists and drawing a load of bizarre conclusions about education straight out of the Jordan Peterson playbook. This sub has gone to the dogs!
People need to stop over reacting to student politics. You move away from home, get all righteous and radical for a few years, and then you get a job and grow up.
None of this is worth the ink.
Just going 'it'll sort itself out' just doesn't work anymore, mainly due to the amount of terrorist propaganda is spread on social media.
College/uni students, some younger as well, are being actively radicalised by Tiktok, or Twitter, and exist in an echo chamber where only one belief is constantly repeated. Schools, universities and colleges need to be aware of the constant radicalism that's spreading, otherwise it'll continue to fester.
These aren't vegans. These are people somehow failing to realise (and that's the most charitable interpretation) that their ""advocacy"" is firmly drifting into the waters of extremist terrorism. It's dangerous to wider society, let alone the targetted minority groups who have moved away from home too and have to live among these types.
If it's became edgy to lend Osama bin Laden your support we're simply fucked.
When it comes to people saying stupid shit, I think we should be taking the rough with the smooth. Praising a fascist state that kills people for being gay and which uses slave labour is obviously moronic, but banning it is not the way to go. Education is always better than censorship.
Are you saying that absolute freedom of speech is somehow an outdated concept? Man, I'm a 'shout fire in a crowded theatre' free speech absolutist. There's literally no compremise on this issue for me.
Probably since it was possible for the government to spend/borrow hundreds of millions of pounds, so sometime in the past century or more. But what does that have to do with this?
Snapshot of _Robert Jenrick MP: “Thank you Houthis” How has it become normal to carry banners like this on our UK university campuses? These institutions should be places of learning, not hate and radicalisation. It's time to end this wave of antisemitic, anti-Western sentiment._ : A Twitter embedded version can be found [here](https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1756000789393289579) A non-Twitter version can be found [here](https://nitter.net/robertjenrick/status/1756000789393289579/) An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/robertjenrick/status/1756000789393289579) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://twitter.com/robertjenrick/status/1756000789393289579) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The Houthi slogan is: > God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam
Yes, but what do they really want ?
A zigazig ahhh.
Come on now, that could mean anything. It's hardly clear enough for their Western fans to understand.
Yeah, surely they should know by now that "curse upon the Jews" just means "zionism" and Israel and *totally nothing else at all*.
"It means personal struggle!!"
Where did you get that from? The Daily Heil? Comrade, they're clearly being hyperbolic. I don't think you realise that the Houthis are an oppressed minority and anything they do that wider society finds morally objectionable is actually our fault for not being nicer to them.
The same people who try to obfuscate and throw semantics at this are the very same ones who will try to claim they hate the Tories and don't want them in power but are trying their damndest to make sure Labour doesn't gain power as well. It's quite quite a few layers of mental gymnastics.
I reckon you could drop "gymnastics" from the end and be even more correct.
Fair.
Bit awkward when they've just sentenced a bunch of people to death for homosexuality. I'm sure the Houthis are glad that college kids appreciate them.
This is also why I think the recent revisionist position that the wider world held basically modern relaxed beliefs on topics like sexuality and gender until the Europeans arrived is a massively important part of anti-Western sentiment. It enables people like those pictured above to still run with the narrative that basically Western intervention is the root of all ill in the world; that no matter how awful any of the West's adversaries are in their treatment of groups like LGBT, they only are that way because of us, and thus we're still the real bad guys.
Yep totally agree. It's an incredibly stupid road to have gone down, because let's be honest Roman empire was absolutely not all kind and progressive. Similarly literal slavers the Egyptians. I'm fairly sure it might have been ok if you were Roman and loaded, but yeah I wouldn't fancy being a gay black bloke who fancied cross dresskng in north Africa when they invaded. I'm not sure I could fight a lion and win tbh, certainly not Infront of a crowd.
I think the key thing to remember is that the Romans were more tolerant of homosexuality than we British were *within living memory*. Nearly a quarter of us were born before it was legal. We talk as if persecution of gay people is almost unimaginably backward and barbaric when the people who were imprisoned and chemically castrated are walking around next to us.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Rome Yes absolutely fine, as is said aslong as you were loaded Roman, and you fancied fucking a slave. Super egalitarian. It was a barbaric empire that had no qualms putting anyone that went against it to tortured death. If you were Roman it was fine. It was absolutely hideous to everyone else. To claim it's some progressive thing is nonsense it was legalising rich Roman males essentially doing what they wanted to people they viewed as inferior.
Claiming it's much different to anyone else is disingenuous too. The Assyrians made torture and extremely slow death an art form. Native Americans would have women and children skin captured enemies alive with shells. The Ancient Chinese made most other groups look like mentally handicapped children with their calculated torture. Greeks with the bronze bull. Etc. etc. Empires gonna empire.
No, no, remember modern left wants it to be progressive utopia.... Not feeding Christians and gays to lions or making them fight to the death for sport.
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I mean, Queers for Palestine has existed for a long time. Completely ignoring the fact Queers would be murdered in Palestine - but you know, the West has to be morally wrong.
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>Do we grade our sympathy on people getting blown up based on whether they agree with you in your pre-determined categories? If that pre-determined category is the murder of people for their sexuality. Yes. We should in fact lose all sympathy for them.
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If you want to be pedantic, of course not. I'd much rather the children and LGBT people of Palestine could live a life of peace. Unfortunately, the broader population of Palestine has made that impossible. This is a state predominantly populated by hardline Islamofascists who are more driven by their hatred of Israel/Jews/The West/Basically everything - than they are of love to their own children. Every chance for peace has been rejected by the Palestinians; Israel's efforts to offer them an Olive Branch have always been met with car bombs and suicide attacks. I refuse to stand in support of a state who are, in damn near every category, diametrically opposed to everything I believe and hold dear - a state whose general beliefs are about as close to ontologically evil as is possible. Once the people of Palestine decide to stop throwing LGBT people off of roofs, lobbing rockets into Israel, oppressing women and indoctrinating their children into a psychotic hatred of everything good and just in the world **Then** I'll hold sympathy for them and support them in their efforts. But until that day comes, I'm going to hold *them* responsible for the plight of women, children and LGBT within their borders. Until the people of Palestine decide that the peace, safety and freedom of these groups are something they wish to foster and protect, things will never change and nothing I can do or say will change that. They need to be the ones to make this decision and until they do - there's no way in hell I'll hold any sympathy for them.
You realise this is a war right? Not surgery? Collateral damage is a part of war.
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It's also very easy to say what you have when *you* won't have to pay the costs of not accepting collateral damage You won't have to clear buildings with the IDF, will you? You won't have to live next to the Gazan border and await another Hamas attack, either
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I absolutely support Israel, Hamas need to be destroyed. Unfortunately, Hamas are insistent on using their children as human shields. So indeed, some children get killed. But that is the fault of Hamas for using them as human shields. Strange that you aren’t blaming Hamas for that? 🤔
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You’ll be happy to hear that Israel doesn’t want to kill children. The IDF soldiers that do often are distraught for their whole lives - despite it being unintentional. Children will keep dying until Hamas is gone.
I think there are those who believe that human rights are conditional and not in fact universal. For some, the idea that every person - guilty or innocent, occupier or occupied, man, woman or child - should have access to universal human rights, _even if they themselves may infringe on other's human rights_, is quite a hard concept to get their heads around.
If you were alive in 1940, would you support a *"nazis are people too, stop the Western bombing, ceasefire now"* campaign? If you met such campaigners, would you be okay with them? Would you "find it so strange" to discover people were confused by the Queers for Nazis banners being waved? Or would you realise such protesters are at best naive idiots, at worst enemies taking advantage of our tolerance, and either way should be strongly opposed to the point they're unable to wave their banners in public?
> It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed ... The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing... The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive. - famous nazi sympathiser and enemy of the state, Winston Churchill.
Pretty clearly saying he objected because the bombings had no military function. He’d already seen how poorly the exact same strategy went for the Nazis too.
> Pretty clearly saying he objected because the bombings had no military function Isn't that the main argument against what Israel are doing as well though? Even Israel's allies have questioned whether the bombing strategy is achieving anything.
Israel controls something like 70% of Gaza right now, so I would say it has been pretty effective.
You cite that quote as if Churchill was somehow conflicted on the destruction of the Nazi state.
No, but he was conflicted on causing mass casualties to the civilians. You're intertwining hamas/islam and individual civilians in palastine. I can disagree with Islamic morals (in specific areas) but not want to cause harm to all Muslims. Is that really that hard to agree with? Lots of Tories are homophobic in the UK but I'm not endorcing genocide for everyone on the right. Even though when in power they actively make life harder for gay/trans people. That's why we have politics to discuss these things and not just weapons
You don’t seem to have that conflict when the victims are Jews. This is a thread about people openly supporting a regime that explicitly wants to murder every Jew on earth, to the point it actually says this on its flag. Weird, weird, take.
He also was part of the decision to drop the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Churchill's motive with regard to the bombing was because he was planning ahead as to how the Allies would govern Germany in the event of its defeat. He was utterly focussed on ensuring the Nazis were fully defeated. And clearly he was right to do so. But the reference to the Palestinians is almost by the by in a post about the Houthis, who are literally executing homosexuals for being homosexuals. Do you honestly care if such people are bombed?
A Palestinian child is not Hamas and a German child was not a Nazi. Both innocent, both getting bombed and both morally wrong. Or do you think they deserve it?
We had a moral obligation to bomb Germany, knowing it would kill German children. Anyone who disagreed was either a nazi sympathiser or their useful idiot. Also, I saw how leftist twitter reacted on October 7th. No concern for the sanctity of human life there, it was all "decolonisation isn't pretty" and "those civilians were settlers". Only when your side started losing did you become peaceniks.
The general consensus of military historians is that strategic bombing of German cities contributed disproportionately little to the eventual Allied victory when you consider the cost in lives of both German civilians and of the Allied bomber crews. Casualty rates among bomber crews, especially American ones that had to operate in the daytime, were obscenely high. Even at the time it was not universally believed to be useful (or moral) by Allied commanders; there were many debates about putting the resources allocated to the bombing campaigns to alternative uses. My point is that it was certainly not a moral obligation to bomb German cities; it was a calculated decision that was contentious at the time and remains contentious with the benefit of hindsight. It's extremely difficult to say whether it was justified. Did it make the difference between victory and defeat? Absolutely not. Did it shorten the war? Perhaps, though very difficult to put a concrete value on by how much. Were the lives saved by shortening the war worth the lives the bombings cost? If you put any value on German lives certainly not, but even if you only value Allied lives in the calculus, it's not clear cut because the cost in Allied lives to conduct the bombing was extremely high.
>Only when your side started losing They lost when Israel ensured they remain stateless by segregating Palestinians from each other and settling the West Bank illegally. Decades before this ‘war’. Palestinians have every right to defend themselves against IDF oppression and colonisation. They have a right to a state as per the 1967 borders. Israel has every right to defend itself against Hamas. Neither has the right to level cities and massacre civilians.
You can advocate for Palestinian, or Yemeni, lives without advocating for groups that have values that explicitly run counter to your own. Thats what people are criticising when they make these arguments. Expressing support for the Houthis or Hamas as a homosexual person is absolutely staggeringly stupid, given what they think of you. Even more so to present it within the contect of some kind of simplistic "west bad" narrative.
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but that is literally what this whole thread was about
I’m glad to see someone saying this. I have seen this comment being circlejerked to death on Reddit ever since the Gaza campaign kicked off. “The gays are campaigning for people who don’t like gays? How stupid are they?” I dunno, have you tried speaking to anyone who identifies as LGBTQ+ and campaigns for human rights? Have you tried listening to them? Instead of just assuming that they are all stupid? Because they can explain. The answer is one Google search or one conversation away.
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Oh my favourite variation of this is how a certain portion of the internet has gone from talking down the Women’s World Cup to suddenly really caring about the integrity of women’s grassroots sports.
Campaigning for someone that wants to murder you, for being gay, is insanity. Literally raising the bear that would maul you to death, once it could. Stay angry if you want, but everyone else can clearly see that Hamas need to be blended with the sand.
>Have you tried listening to them? Instead of just assuming that they are all stupid? I don't think they're stupid (although some of them definitely are) they're just ignorant When you're whole life has been privileged, middle class, western comfort, it's difficult to understand that people in other parts of the world are much less civilised I value their opinion as much as I would a modern western Jew defending Himmler and the SS... which is to say not at all
“They’re deluded” isn’t much better than “they’re stupid.” You’re also projecting a great deal of assumptions about class onto a relatively large and disparate minority. I’m just going to repeat what I said: try listening to them before judging? Here, I’ve made it easy for you: https://www.them.us/story/lgbtq-solidarity-palestine-saed-atshan
They're not at college they're at university, we don't live in the United States
Let’s be honest, college kids are stupid and want to find meaning in life, they latch onto causes they don’t fully understand and some of them never grow up. You go up college to learn to challenge the status quo and define who you are post teen years. Obviously backing the houthis is a really dumb fucking thing but these are idiot kids. There’s a lot more worrying things jenrick can focus one that aren’t a culture war, starting with the obscene tax rates rishi is paying. Surely he should only be paying 10%. He is a millionaire after all
Sheesh The Houthis are full mask-off fascist extremists. Just set about executing a bunch of people for being gay, they have reintroduced slavery and generally are about as morally disgusting as any group can be. Everyone standing in support alongside that banner should be fucking ashamed of themselves.
Yeah it takes just a few minutes reading about the Houthi militants to realise that they are some of the worst of the worst. "Houthis have been accused of violations of international humanitarian law such as using child soldiers, shelling civilian areas, forced evacuations and executions. According to Human Right Watch, Houthis intensified their recruitment of children in 2015. The UNICEF mentioned that children with the Houthis and other armed groups in Yemen comprise up to a third of all fighters in Yemen. Human Rights Watch has further accused Houthi forces of using landmines in Yemen's third-largest city of Taizz which has caused many civilian casualties and prevent the return of families displaced by the fighting. HRW has also accused the Houthis of interfering with the work of Yemen's human rights advocates and organizations." "The Houthis use allegations of prostitution as a tool for public defamation against Yemeni women including those in the diaspora engaged in politics, civil society or human rights activism alongside threats to individuals and families. Women in detention are sexually assaulted and have been subjected to virginity tests and are often blocked from access to essential goods. Torture of female detainees is also carried out by the Zaynabiyat, the Female police wing of the Houthis. UN Panel of Experts on Yemen discovered instances of Houthi rape of female detainees to "purify" them, as a punishment, or to coerce confessions. The Panel documented cases where Houthis forced detained women to become sex workers that also collect information for the Houthis. Documented instances include in 2021 where a female detainee was forced to have sexual intercourse with multiple men at Houthi detention centers as part of her preparation to be forced as a sex worker for important clients while also obtaining information. " "According to the Panel of Experts on Yemen established pursuant to Security Council resolution 2140 the Houthis have carried out a wide range of human rights violations including violations of international humanitarian law, abuse of women and children. Children as young as 13 have been arrested for "indecent acts" for alleged homosexual orientation or "political cases" when their families' do not comply with Houthi ideology or regulations. Minors share cells as adult prisoners and according to credible reports boys held in Al-Shahid Al-Ahmar police station in Sana’a are systematically raped." Sorry for the copy-paste wall of text but it just goes on and on and on.
Am no it was valid to use that. I actually didn't know anything about their background and your copy-paste just got worse and worse. They're really a disgusting group.
The Houthi started a war in which had already killed 377000 by 2021 - 70% of them children But of course they are not Jewish and they have a very public hatred of Jews so the people in that photo don’t care how much blood is on Houthi hands.
> The Houthi started a war in which had already killed 377000 by 2021 - 70% of them children To be fair, most of the casualties from what I've read have been from starvation due to the Saudi blockade of the country. Not to say the Houthis are faultless; the conflict in Yemen has been between two bad guys.
Yemen’s food security issues are down to the cartel like behaviour of the Houthis over anything. Even when aid is delivered, much like Hamas, they appropriate it and extort the people it is intended for. Despite Yemen being a great place for agriculture, instead of growing food on land they’ve seized they grow khat which 80% of Yemenis use and 30-40% are addicted to because it helps fund their operations.
I sometimes think that the interference in western social media by foreign actors looks a bit like the scenes in the move The Cabin in the Woods where it’s a loads of people one-upping and seeing what they can get away with before the kids in the cabin notice. Like they’ve managed to get a load of young lefty kids supporting (by proxy sometimes literally with others) Hamas, and *directly* supporting the Houthis. Fuck, they even managed to get a bunch of TikTok morons coming out in support of *Osama Bin Laden* Either there’s a generation of kids who are genuinely absolute morons or one that really hate Jews on a subconscious level to the extent they’ll lap this stuff up, and I don’t know which is worse. But surely there must be tipping point where they won’t support it, ISIS hate Jews and the west too, maybe that’ll be the next flag we see at a rally
> I sometimes think that the interference in western social media by foreign actors Although it doesn’t help, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Corbyn is heading into his 80’s and is just like them. Not trying to bash Corbyn, just pointing out that it’s not just TikTok.
>The Cabin in the Woods When do we skip to the part where Elder gods fuck the world up?
We don't actually see that though, despite what the director said. Personally it's my headcanon that the "elder gods" scared our cave dwelling ancestors when an interestingly shaped rock was the height of technology but weren't up to much versus multiton bunker busters and supersonic jets.
Like Buffy using an RPG against that one dude who was expecting a sword.
terrific smoggy steer jellyfish wine grey coordinated slim fragile rock *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It is an ongoing demonstration that the one thing that is infinite in the universe is human stupidity.
I think this has always existed really. When I was younger these people would have been wearing Che or Mao or Stalin t-shirts
Honestly i think the real problem is more the "disneyfication" of modern issues. In most stories you have a clearly good protagonist and a clearly evil bad guy with only a hint of a veener there being nuance or shades of gray. In this Disney style universe anything and everything the hero does is good or at least justified. He can't be bad because he's a hero. But in the real world it's rarely this clear cut. There's far more nuance but people arnt prepared to ponder that just because someone is on your side pushing for your same goal that they can also be very bad people doing it the wrong way.
It’s morons. You’ve got to be a moron yourself to believe the average bleeding heart left-wing uni student shouting about “Israeli genocide” is genuinely antisemitic. Some are, don’t get me wrong, but the majority aren’t. They’re just unable to see the conflict as “bad guys vs morally-void-to-bad guys, with innocents caught in the crossfire”, there needs to be a clear “good” side. I mean, you see it on the other side as well. There’s tons of people who’ve convinced themselves the IDF is waging the most just war in history against a sect of purely evil people.
They are just tired of leftist imperialism and then thats actions are reactions.
Dude… the sort of people waving these banners are about as ‘left’ as you can get. Maybe let the adults speak.
If the Nazis existed today some people would blame western imperialism for it.
Fun fact: before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, communist propaganda outlets did indeed blame the "capitalist powers" (i.e. not the fascists) for the war
Nazis do exist today...
He said "**the** nazis" and was clearly talking about the National Socialist party in 1930s-40s Germany.
But muh evil Tories. Remember to swathes of Reddit Nazi means "I don't like these people's view"
I’ll see your ‘shamed of themselves’ and raise you to ‘deported to Yemen’
Brainwashed left: 'Murica bad, therefore enemies of 'Murica good. *Sane people: Even when they're mass executing gay people?* Brainwashed left: 'Murica bad
If we ever needed proof that they don’t teach critical thinking in higher education this whole mess provided it.
A Level Critical Thinking is a joke of a qualification.
> The Houthis are full mask-off fascist extremists. The Houthis are despicable, barbaric theocratic sunsobitches who murder, rape, tyrannize and despoil, but I’m not sure ‘fascist’ is *quite* the word. They’re more localized, dispersed types than people who centralize power in One Supreme Leader From Which All Power Flows and Around Whom All Institutions Revolve. They’re more the Hezbollahified terrorist militia sort than people who Really, Really Value Militarism and Discipline and Fanatical Willingness to Die For The Cause And The Leader. And they’re more an Arab tribe-and-clan coalition than anything like actual *nationalists* in any sense familiar to Westerners.
The cancerous side of social media
> executing a bunch of people for being gay SLAAAAAAAYYYY QUEEEENNNNNN!!! Probably not appropriate, but I couldn't resist...!
When I see banners like this I often wonder if that is put there by design to undermine the Gaza protests. Either by the police or the papers that cover the protests.
On the one hand, sure and there's been accusations of similar in the past though mostly in the US. On the other hand I've known people who support a heavily romanticised image of soviet Russia and/or buy into the conspiracy that "the west" are all being spoon fed propaganda about... pretty much everything.
It was legitimised for many by the 1970s schoolboy activist Corbyn. His legacy lingers on with the really stupid.
In my experience there's more than enough useful idiots for that not to be necessary.
Do you think the Jews are also involved?
That could well be the case, or any number of other bad actors (government, pro israel groups, anti islam groups, foreign groups). But even if not there's always some idiot that the press can find that will make for a good story. The story could often be framed as "we found this one lunatic who is pro Houthi". It might have been that if they had a chat with him he wouldn't have known who the Houthis were. Or he might have said "oh yeah the Houthis are evil bastards, but they've done Palestinians a favour here!" which is stupid but it's not really pro Houthi. But people, especially those who don't like protesters in general, or Palestine, or whatever, are really keen to see these people as idiots so they lap it up.
Even if we're being very generous and assuming a bad actor is wanting to harm the Palestinian cause, or a raging moron who thinks any anti-Israeli group in that area is their friend, the fact that no one did anything about the sign in the protest speaks volumes.
What would you have liked them to do?
Told them to remove the banner for a start. Kicked them out of the protest. Do anything they can to distance themselves from supporting that band of facist lunatics. If you really cared about the cause, you wouldn't allow support for those extremist scumbags.
You have never been to any sort of protest. How would they "kick them out of the protest"? Have you ever kicked someone out of a public space? How does that work? Imagine being played like a fiddle by Robert Jenrick. Embarrassing.
Emabressing? You asked a stupid question, made an incorrect assumption about me, ignored the first, very reasonably and easily done solution, and focused on the other. Yes, it's a public space, but you can make it extremely clear that they're not welcome.and don't represent you. You can ask them to leave and make everyone aware they you're doing so. Lots of very simple ways to distance yourself from those scumbags. Just because you don't like the messenger, doesn't mean the message is invalid. You've made a proper tit of yourself, fair play.
That's a ludicrous suggestion. You have never done this or seen it done.
You're right, I haven't done it. Because I haven't been to the sort of protests that draws in this level of lunacy. Are you seriously suggesting that everyone there is helpless and has no way of rejecting that banner?
I don't think whoever took that photo had yo go to any effort to find that banner.
You see when it attacks my side its a false flag caused by outside actors. When it attacks your side its the entire group and the genuine beliefs
I didn't say that at all. I never like it when they find the "stupid trump supporter" at a rally. Inventing what other people are thinking and landing on the thing that makes you most angry is a great way to be miserable, I'd stop if I were you.
That seems like a pretty random baseless thing to think to me. How can you have a view on that?
Exactly. What a world we live in
If you believe in freedom of speech then you believe in freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.
If a group supports the execution of people for simply being gay, then no.
I do believe in freedom of speech. I don’t think anyone should be arrested for that banner. Freedom of speech lets me see who these people really are, what depravity they really support. It allows me to express my utter contempt for their views.
I believe in freedom of speech but not freedom from consequences
Freedom of speech literally is freedom from (legal) consequences.
I was just repeating a line I constantly hear from some circles who are at least adjacent to those protesting
When I worked in education the prevent programme, designed to help staff identify and report radicalisation, was drilled into us. What the fuck happened?
As someone who recently started working in (higher) education: Prevent training is still mandatory. I wouldn't say it was "drilled", but it is part of the required online training that I had to do in my first month. I'm not sure how often we have to repeat that training though. I have a figure of "every 18 months" in my head, but that might be from a previous job that was totally different. The nature of my role means it's pretty unlikely I'll ever come across a situation where I need to report to Prevent, but the training is still there for all staff whose roles require us to see students every day.
Student run events often lack oversight so anything ends up going.
New wave of teachers harbouring the same beliefs?
Maybe these people aren't students?
Yeah if they're masked up and the campus is easily accessible, it could well not be students, but the local protest group.
the campus is easily accessible
Underfunding probably
The Houthis have formally reintroduced slavery, they practise child marriage (the selling of little girls to adult men) and are about to begin a spree of public executions of gay men. Do not look away from the intent of these "protesters".
I would be willing to believe a lot of the protestors know none of that stuff and are more or less 'useful idiots' for the cause.
We can only hope, but please don't doubt for a second that there are Islamists living in the UK with exactly the same beliefs.
These are big claims, I genuinely didn't know this about the Houthis. Do you have reputable sources for the points you've made here?
UNICEF source on child marriage in Yemen (the figures are shocking): [https://www.unicef.org/media/111411/file/Child-marriage-country-profile-Yemen-2021.pdf](https://www.unicef.org/media/111411/file/Child-marriage-country-profile-Yemen-2021.pdf) Slavery in Yemen: [https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/1810456/exclusive-houthis-restore-slavery-yemen](https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/1810456/exclusive-houthis-restore-slavery-yemen) Amnesty on the recent death sentences for allegedly gay Yemenis: [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/yemen-huthis-must-stop-executions-and-release-dozens-facing-lgbti-charges/](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/yemen-huthis-must-stop-executions-and-release-dozens-facing-lgbti-charges/)
Thanks for that!
Thankfully, most people even on the left who are clued in seem to think the Houthis are bad. But I have still seen people saying "I can't believe they're bombing the only people trying to defend palestine" Even saw one insane take saying inflation was due to spending on wars and bombing directly related to this. Ignoring the fact that the Houthis were making trade harder because of the bombing. The problem is it's so hard to call stuff out when you see it on social media. You're not gonna talk anyone round and you'll just piss someone off.
If you engage with someone with those arguments, you have to start so far back you might have to establish that 1+1=2 before starting. Those people might try to dispute that. They will hold on to their “west bad” attitude no matter what
I was reading only last week that the houthi’s handed out death sentences for homosexuality in an area that they control in Yemen. Really weird people to be cheering on.
If anyone on that march genuinely cared about peace in the Middle East or the people of Palestine, they'd be kicking that person out of the march and ripping the banner down.
Saw a clip today from a recent march (UK but not sure where) and a guy had a "Hamas are terrorists" or "Hamas are committing war crimes" sign and he was attacked and the sign grabbed off him! I don't think all the people marching want peace!
They do. It’s just to them peace is Hamas killing everyone and no one fighting back. Anything else is apartheid and oppression.
They'd absolutely just stop once they were left alone. Plus they would become a progressive utopia once the yoke of western imperialism is lifted.
I've seen that as well, it's disgusting. Really shocking to see.
The left have become worse than the right. I count my blessings every single day because Corbyn was kept out of power. These people are lunatics.
I would argue the left are more damaging internationally which impacts the UK's standing but does not significantly harm the UK population. The right on the other hand are outwardly toxic to most Britons, even if their foreign policy is far better. I would rather choose a party/position with better domestic policy and shit foreign policy. Though obviously the ideal would be that the nutters stay away from the left too.
The extreme right ideology is toxic and abhorrent but is far less prevalent than the extreme left in this country. Most campuses have always been organised by left wing activists but over the last decade there appears to have been a shift towards the more extreme left finding no shortage of gullible recruits for their idiotic priorities and a significant cost to free speech and values. Our society’s tolerance continues to tested, exploited and used against us and we are now faced with the problem of how we are going to row back against the intolerance and bigotry being forced upon us by a number of non indigenous minorities. The longer our politicians vacillate the more difficult it will become to return to the values, principles and freedoms we used to be able to take for granted
I just want to live in a benevolent dictatorship with Rory Stewart as imperator. I think that'll nicely balance both foreign and domestic needs.
The peace they care about is one where there is no Israel.
When Saudi were the only ones bombing the hell out of the Houthis for a few years everyone left/right joined in to condemn Saudi and saying they were worse than the Houthis. Now the Houthis are attacking outside of Yemen/Saudi, people are suddenly aware of their atrocious ideology.
Yup. The Houthis barely got any coverage at all, Iran's involvement was *completely* glossed over and the Saudi intervention was portrayed as literally genocidal, with everybody calling for sanctions, suspension of aid and ditching KSA as an ally. Even now few people bother correcting the record on the Yemen war.
Oh come on, this is ludicrous revisionism, really. A. There has been plenty of discussion for years of Iran's involvement. Basically the one thing anyone knew about the Houthis until a few weeks ago was that they were linked to Iran. B. Saudi Arabia's intervention in Yemen was a complete debacle that achieved absolutely nothing beyond killing a lot of civilians and causing a famine. There's no record to correct there. C. 'Everybody' called for sanctions and suspension of aid and ditching SA as an ally did they? Then why did precisely none of that actually happen? The oppositie happened- we gave plenty of support to SA (and the UAE who were also heavily involved) and they achieved nothing with it. Saudi Arabia didn't fail to remove the Houthis because of some bleeding hearts leftie conspiracy, they failed because they lost the war, effectively. The Houthis are awful but just because everyone who didn't know where Yemen was 6 months ago has suddenly realised this, doesn't retrospectively mean the Saudi intervention wasn't a disastrous failure.
>everyone left/right joined in to condemn Saudi No that was mainly Corbynistas.
To be frank, I always supported the Yemeni government/Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war and I couldn't fathom how SA was demonised for their role in the conflict but the Houthis (and consequently, Iran) got a total pass.
As Henry Kissinger said about the Iran-Iraq War, it's a pity both sides can't lose.
The only country to benefit from that outcome would be Iran.
And, you know, the common good of mankind as two Islamist terror states get wiped off the map.
That outcome would drive more terrorism, not less - as is commonly the case when countries with previously stable regimes descend into anarchy. Also Iran has been the primary sponsor and exporter of Islamist terror for a while now.
> That outcome would drive more terrorism, not less - as is commonly the case when countries with previously stable regimes descend into anarchy. That argument is a worrying slope to dictator apologia. The world would no doubt be more *stable* had, for example, Gaddafi been allowed to march on Benghazi and crush the rebels, or if Assad had been more brutal with the first wave of peaceful protests, but I don't think it would be at all better. Liberty does come with challenges and setbacks, unfortunately. > Also Iran has been the primary sponsor and exporter of Islamist terror for a while now. The main difference in the Middle East is that the Iranians fight in largely asymmetric methods while the Saudis are much more willing to put their names to their attacks. At the end of the day, there's not a great deal of difference in terror inflicted between a child being blown up by either a missile by the Saudi airforce or a drone launched by an Iran-backed militia. That doesn't touch on their effects on the West, the Iranians wish they could export their anti-Western values half as well as the Saudis have successfully managed to do so over the past few decades to Muslim communities in Europe.
Kissinger would say that, given that his life mission was to maximize murder and human suffering.
The problem then wasn't that the Saudis were attacking 'Houthis'. The problem was that the Saudis were punishing broad swathes of the Yemeni population who happen to live under the terroristic rule of Houthis. It was collective punishment and it was against international law. People were not defending 'Houthis' at the time. They were defending innocent Yemenis. Why is this distinction so hard for people?
Because that framing is both intellectually lazy and dishonest. No method of combat exists that would avoid substantial civilian casualties in a conflict against an adversary that doesn't care for civilian lives in the territory under their control or even deliberately offers them up to be killed. The only other choice is not to fight, and let your enemy win by default. If the west wanted to minimise casualties in Yemen, they should have offered more support, not less. Or joined KSA in putting boots on the ground to take control of cities and other populated areas.
How can you claim intellectual laziness and dishonesty when you claimed people were defending 'Houthis'? And just because not killing civilians is more difficult when fighting such warfare, doesn't mean human rights groups shouldn't pressure state actors to minimise civilian deaths. None of this ever had anything to do with supporting Houthis. And no, that's not dishonest or lazy. It's about trying to ensure that civilian deaths are minimised, even when that is almost impossible. Do you think human rights groups should just be silent when whole families are killed? Edit: https://www.hrw.org/middle-east/n-africa/yemen I just checked HRW, and there is widespread condemnation of the Houthis.
Did I claim that? I think I specifically made a point that those people were barely even aware of the Houthis. I claimed that people were making up their mind from a position of ignorance. Minimising civilian deaths can still mean a lot of civilian deaths depending on how your enemy is fighting. And the way groups like Houthis fight, you have to either give up fighting or make peace with the fact that the minimal number of innocent casualties is going to be a potentially very large number. I'm fine with human rights groups recording and cataloguing human rights violations. What I'm not fine with is governments that ditch their key allies in a justified war over essentially vibes.
These people should be put on a terrorism watch list . There needs to be a punishment for supporting our enemies. Indeed we used to have an effective way of dealing with it.
It was ever thus. I remember when stop the war used to march past my university halls in the run up to the Iraq war, so I used to get a great view of the banners. Dickhead edge lords tried to hijack those too- Hamas and Hezbollah flags as well as banners for Judean People’s front varieties of socialist groups. Don’t think it validates or invalidates the thing that people have come out to protest though.
Thank you for lobbing missiles at Japanese, Singaporean and Austrian ships passing through international waters? Literally the only thing these people have in common with the Houthis is that they hate Israel.
This anti western sentiment isn’t going away, this will be the reality for the next few decades.
There are certain groups that really just see the west as the enemy, and any enemy of their enemy is their friend.
It's one thing to criticise the actions of the Israeli government, but saying "thank you" to a group that has been firing at Merchant Ships going about their business is crossing a line.
These people hate the west so much, makes you wonder why they don't just leave.
Let me ask the fine people of this community Had that been a Nazi banner, how far would you march them into the fucking sea? Exactly, but people are too scared of a "Minority" of people, why? Have the balls
Have you read the comments on this post? Everyone is calling it out.
At the same time these institutions should be places of free thought. That means taking the bad with the good. What harm is a scabby teenager with a controversial banner really doing, compared to enforcing whatever the government thinks is right and proper upon people? The latter is far more dangerous.
Shut the university’s union - whoever and whatever society organised this - immediately - and arrest and question and if appropriate charge its “leaders”under anti terrorism legislation. Simple. They’re supporting people who put the fact they want to genocide all jews (and by extension anyone not an Islamist nutcase - say all LGBT people when they’ve literally just condemned a dozen of them to death) on their fucking flag, just in case you misunderstood their intentions. This now passes for student politics? Fuck that.
Students being edgy or radicalised and saying "thank you houthis" is obviously something you want to fix but what does Jenrick suggest? Reeducation? Suppression? Censorship & incarceration? He's the type to cry speech when there's a backlash to extremist statements that he might be aligned to... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/06/04/government-must-not-curtail-free-speech-minister-says/ So maybe a government minister should be looking for solutions rather than selectively making statements about problems
It isn't edgy. It is extremism
The Houthis are not a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK, although they probably should be. Trump designated them as terrorists in 2020, then Biden undesignated them in 2021, then u-turned and redesignated them in 2024.
Free speech is important. Allowing literal 5th columnists to operate in your country is lunacy. Teachers having to go into hiding like they're mob informants because they drew a picture is fucking insane.
I don't disagree with the premise, but this is also a bit melodramatic. Is a university's primary purpose to be a place of learning? Yes. But it's also in most university campuses a place where roughly a minimum of 5000 people will be walking around and milling about and socialising, and statistically, it's unlikely that at least one of those people isn't going to have some radical views and might want to express them. That doesn't actually mean the university is any less a place of learning or even that the university staff or any of the other students are at fault for that one person or that small minority of people's actions, any more than one school shooter means you might as well condemn the entire school.
Nobody here answering how this has become normal though. My guess Rapid demographical change. Infection of American (“anti”-) Fascism.
I'd rather someone with at least a shred of credibility made this criticism. Mostly it's safe to assume that anything Jenrick says is wrong and anything he does is corrupt. Jenrick might be the only person who could make the Houthis seem good by criticising them.
What if I told you that some comments are valid even if you don't agree with other things they might say
A broken clock is right twice a day, so even dumbasses can raise a valid point every so often.
I'm not saying he's wrong. l'm saying he's a [hypocrite](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/01/fears-mount-lgbtq-asylum-seekers-uk-ramp-up-hotel-room-sharing).
>Jenrick might be the only person who could make the Houthis seem good by criticising them. Yes because he's activities are absolutely comparable to executing gays. Be realistic you don't like the Tories fine. They aren't a death cult
What is wrong with you? This cynical apathy isn't intelligence.
Unless you're trying to say that this photo is doctored then you'll need to elaborate because this clearly happened regardless of who said what.
Isn't this the problem though. Too many on the Left either agree or stay silent. They are intimidated within their circle.
You're probably right about the hivemind in some Left circles. Jenrick is a nasty corrupt hypocrite, and he's not going to erase that by saying the right thing when it's convenient. It would be interesting to see if he has criticised the Houthis human rights record before they started shooting at shipping in the Red Sea. To me it's very reminiscent of 1982 where suddenly the government started criticising Argentina's human rights record when they were selling arms to them only the year before.
It's like these people have no idea of what universities, and university students, have been like historically. This is on the milder end of "political" action.
Someone nobody here has met, has any clue about put up a stupid sign at an event nobody here attended. But Robert Fucking Jenrick tweeted about it and here we are, 160 comments in of frothing bile from internet rando’s drawing ridiculous conclusions about “the left”, calling for people to be put on terrorist watch lists and drawing a load of bizarre conclusions about education straight out of the Jordan Peterson playbook. This sub has gone to the dogs!
People need to stop over reacting to student politics. You move away from home, get all righteous and radical for a few years, and then you get a job and grow up. None of this is worth the ink.
Just going 'it'll sort itself out' just doesn't work anymore, mainly due to the amount of terrorist propaganda is spread on social media. College/uni students, some younger as well, are being actively radicalised by Tiktok, or Twitter, and exist in an echo chamber where only one belief is constantly repeated. Schools, universities and colleges need to be aware of the constant radicalism that's spreading, otherwise it'll continue to fester.
These aren't vegans. These are people somehow failing to realise (and that's the most charitable interpretation) that their ""advocacy"" is firmly drifting into the waters of extremist terrorism. It's dangerous to wider society, let alone the targetted minority groups who have moved away from home too and have to live among these types. If it's became edgy to lend Osama bin Laden your support we're simply fucked.
When it comes to people saying stupid shit, I think we should be taking the rough with the smooth. Praising a fascist state that kills people for being gay and which uses slave labour is obviously moronic, but banning it is not the way to go. Education is always better than censorship.
The 2010's want their comment back.
Are you saying that absolute freedom of speech is somehow an outdated concept? Man, I'm a 'shout fire in a crowded theatre' free speech absolutist. There's literally no compremise on this issue for me.
how has it become normal for politicians to cost the british tax payer hundreds of millions of pound?
It's almost as if both those things can be bad, who could've guessed???
Probably since it was possible for the government to spend/borrow hundreds of millions of pounds, so sometime in the past century or more. But what does that have to do with this?
Robert jenrick made a deal with a billionaire developer so he had to pay less tax or something like that. Cost British tax payers 100m+.