The ban is not universally admired.

The decision to ban fans of Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv from attending a Europa League match in Birmingham has ignited a storm of criticism, underlining deep divisions over public safety, antisemitism, and political accountability.

The ban, recommended by Birmingham City Council’s Safety Advisory Group and supported by West Midlands Police, was labelled “utterly unacceptable” by Culture Minister Ian Murray and denounced as a “national disgrace” by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer condemned the ban, calling it the “wrong decision” and emphasising that the UK must actively combat antisemitism. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch warned that barring Maccabi Tel Aviv fans risks sending a “horrendous and shameful message” that Jews are not welcome in parts of Britain. Israeli officials, alongside the Liberal Democrats and Reform UK, have also criticised the move.

Yet the controversy is complicated by local politics. Ayoub Khan, the independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr and a pro-Gaza campaigner, publicly supported the ban, framing it as a matter of operational safety.

And not at all one of ethno-religious hatreds. Yeah right.

Khan’s support for the ban is inseparable from his track record of controversial remarks, which have repeatedly sparked public outrage.

In April 2025, Khan faced a political storm after referring to Pakistani grooming gangs scandal as a “right-wing narrative.” Critics accused him of dismissing the widespread abuse of young girls across England. Former Conservative MP Michael Portillo condemned Khan’s comments as “naive at best and malicious at worst,” arguing that such remarks undermine public trust and trivialise the suffering of victims.

This is because religions have content. The incloosivity fans like to pretend they don’t, but that’s absurd. Much of the content of religions is hatred of rival religions. Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook? Nope.

Jolyon rejoices in a win.

In a landmark decision for trans rights, the High Court has ruled that a panel acted unlawfully in denying a trans man a gender recognition certificate because he was trying to conceive.

Ooooh they never, did they?! Those fiends! Imagine telling a woman she’s not a man merely because she’s trying to do what only a woman can do?!

In February, a gender recognition panel denied the man, whose identity is protected by an anonymity order and is referred to in the judgment as W, a gender recognition certificate. This was on the basis that he had been trying to conceive a child – concluding that this meant he was not living as a man.

With the support of Good Law Project, W challenged this decision in the High Court in July. The court has now concluded that there was abundant evidence that W was living as a man, and that requiring him to abandon either his male identity, or his desire to have a family, “would be to dismantle and fracture the person he is”. 

Ok but what does “living as a man” mean? She watches enough hours of football per week? She’s perfected the dudely walk? She never ever notices there are dishes to wash?

Given the distress that trans people face when their gender is denied, the judge held that the Gender Recognition Act “leans actively towards the facilitation of gender recognition”. He considered that any approach to determining whether a certificate was awarded should be “permissive” and consider the evidence in the round, rather than relying on any one factor. He emphasised that whether someone was living in their acquired gender was “necessarily a far more subtle and nuanced concept” than allowed for by the panel.

Ahhhhh is that what it is, subtle and nuanced, as opposed to stark raving mad.

Joly modestly concludes with four paragraphs of frenzied flattery of the Bonkers Law Project.

How to deal with anti-Semitism: tell the Jews to get out.

Fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv will not be allowed to attend the Europa League match at Aston Villa on 6 November owing to safety concerns.

West Midlands police said it had classified the fixture as “high risk” based on “current intelligence and previous incidents, ­including ­violent clashes and hate crime offences that occurred during the 2024 Uefa Europa League match between Ajax and ­Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam”.

The police said it believed the measure would “help mitigate risks to public safety” and that it remained “steadfast in our support of all affected communities, and reaffirm our zero-tolerance stance on hate crime in all its forms”.

I think you’ll find that telling Jews they are banned from a football match is itself a hate crime.

The move was condemned by the prime minister, Keir Starmer, who said: “This is the wrong decision. We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets. The role of the police is to ensure all football fans can enjoy the game, without fear of violence or intimidation.”

The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, said the decision was a “national disgrace” and urged Starmer to reverse it.

The Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, posted on X: “Shameful decision! I call on the UK ­authorities to reverse this coward decision!” The Palestine Solidarity Campaign said the match should be cancelled, writing on X: “Israeli football teams shouldn’t play in international tournaments whilst it commits genocide and apartheid.”

The Independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, Ayoub Khan, said: “I welcome the Safety Advisory Group’s decision. With so much hostility and ­uncertainty around the match, it was only right to take drastic measures.”

Drastic measures against the Jews, that is.

Football, religion, and race: what a brew.

Unbelievable.

The Guardian reports:

Fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv will not be allowed to attend the Europa League match at Aston Villa on 6 November owing to safety concerns.

West Midlands police said it had classified the fixture as “high risk” based on “current intelligence and previous incidents, ­including ­violent clashes and hate crime offences that occurred during the 2024 Uefa Europa League match between Ajax and ­Maccabi Tel Aviv in Amsterdam”.

The police said it believed the measure would “help mitigate risks to public safety” and that it remained “steadfast in our support of all affected communities, and reaffirm our zero-tolerance stance on hate crime in all its forms”.

What about the hate crime of banning Jews from a match?

The move was condemned by the prime minister, Keir Starmer, who said: “This is the wrong decision. We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets. The role of the police is to ensure all football fans can enjoy the game, without fear of violence or intimidation.”

The Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, said the decision was a “national disgrace” and urged Starmer to reverse it.

…

The Independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, Ayoub Khan, said: “I welcome the Safety Advisory Group’s decision. With so much hostility and ­uncertainty around the match, it was only right to take drastic measures.”

Drastic measures against the Jews.

Today we learn that women’s safety is a niche issue that the bosses can’t be bothered to notice.

Premier Peter Malinauskas is resisting pressure to ban transgender women from female prisons in South Australia, labelling it a “niche issue” behind reducing reoffending and indigenous incarceration rates.

In an interview with The Advertiser, Mr Malinauskas said he had “not turned my mind to our policy pertaining to trans prisoners”. Mr Malinauskas repeated his early 2023 definition of a woman as “an adult female”, adding he would not characterise as “the number one priority” the issue of transgender women in female prisons.

Dude. It doesn’t need to be the number one priority. Saying it’s not the number one priority is not a reason to ignore it. I think it’s pretty much baked into your job that you have to deal with a lot of things, and that you don’t get to shelve everything that’s not The One Most Important Priority.

Also, it’s not cute to treat the tiny trivial matter of women’s safety as the equivalent of saving a half-eaten piece of toast when the house is on fire. Women’s safety is not in fact a trivial matter.

The Northern Territory this week became the first Australian jurisdiction to prevent transgender women being detained in female prisons and Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro has challenged others to follow.

But Mr Malinauskas said: “When it comes to corrections, the government’s policy focuses on reducing recidivism. We’ve also got an interest in trying to tackle the overrepresentation of indigenous people in incarceration. As Premier of this state, I can honestly say I have not turned my mind to our policy pertaining to trans prisoners.”

In other words you can honestly say you don’t give a shit about women’s safety.

We’re not doing this right.

The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere jumped by a record amount last year, amid growing concern that forests and other carbon “sponges” are starting to fail.

The amount pumped into the air by factories, power plants and vehicles was almost static last year, a report by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) found.

However, the Geneva-based UN organisation said atmospheric concentrations of CO₂, the main driver of climate change, had increased by a record 3.5 parts per million (ppm). Between 2011 and 2020, the average rise was 2.4ppm a year. The finding, scientists said, raised the “scary” prospect of even more global warming.

Not doing it right. We want to go the other way. Not more; less.

Carbon sinks may be weakening because more heatwaves and droughts are limiting tree growth and forests’ ability to soak up carbon. Last year wildfires in the Amazon were on a scale unseen in decades, releasing CO₂ on a par with Germany’s total emissions.

Scientists worry that this could be the beginning of a vicious cycle, or “feedback loop”, where rapidly rising temperatures trigger changes in the natural world and lead to even more climate change.

A 2024 study by European and Chinese researchers had previously sounded the alarm on the “unprecedented” weakening of land and ocean carbon sinks in 2023. The amount of carbon ecosystems and seas soaked up that year was the weakest since 2003.

Wrong direction. We should be making it better, not worse.

Oh good, yet more vulgar ostentation, because we haven’t had enough of that yet. The mix of evil and ludicrous gets more nauseating every week.

Trump wants to build a triumphal arch across from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, the latest in his efforts to make over the capital city in his style.

The so-called Arc de Trump would commemorate the country’s 250th anniversary next year and is reportedly being privately funded by Trump’s supporters.

Can we not? There’s enough of that already thanks to Trump’s previous riots in the gilt shop, we don’t need more.

His other second-term developments include a gilded makeover for the White House, paving over the Rose Garden and constructing a $250m ballroom…

What I’m saying. It’s already way too much.

He unveiled a “Presidential Walk of Fame” along the West Wing colonnade in September, displaying gold-framed portraits of himself and the 44 other presidents along the white exterior wall.

In place of former President Joe Biden’s headshot, Trump instead hung a photo of an autopen signing his name. The move appeared to refer to Trump’s claim that Biden’s use of the autopen signalled his decline at the end of his presidency, although it is common for US presidents to use such a tool.

Critics, including a guest essayist for the New York Times, have called his Oval Office remodel a “Gilded Rococo Nightmare”.

Trump himself is a gilded rococo nightmare.

Jolyon is furious.

Also in today, the EHRC offers legal advice.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has written to the Minister for Women and Equalities, urging the UK government to ensure that accurate and up-to-date statutory guidance on the Equality Act 2010 is available to those that need it.

The EHRC provides expert advice on how to comply with the Equality Act and put the law into practice. On 4 September the regulator submitted an updated code of practice for services, public functions and associations to the minister for approval. Tomorrow (16 October) will mark six months since the Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland Ltd v Scottish Ministers, and six weeks since the draft code was sent to the minister.

I suspect that their advice will be rather different from that of the “Good Law” Project.

More on Michael O’Flaherty.

His influence over the Irish Govt resulted in the “most progressive” gender self ID model that the legislature could pass. They just stopped short of allowing babies to “transition” Irish Govt & media are controlled by aggressive trans NGOs who receive state funding. We have full state capture of this aggressive ideology marketed as “being kind to a vulnerable minority”.

@MichealMartinTD nominated O’Flaherty for the role and his “election as Commissioner is a mark of the high regard in which he is held.” Proof positive of how out of touch these politicians are with reality and with public opinion. The days of minority rule will hopefully end soon.

For the millionth time I’m surprised at how easy it is for men to ignore women.

Journalists just say no.

Dozens of reporters turned in access badges and exited the Pentagon on Wednesday rather than agree to government-imposed restrictions on their work, pushing journalists who cover the American military further from the seat of its power. The nation’s leadership called the new rules “common sense” to help regulate a “very disruptive” press.

News outlets were nearly unanimous in rejecting new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would leave journalists vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information — classified or otherwise — that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.

Yeah that’s not how that works.

It is unclear what practical impact the new rules will have, though news organizations vowed they’d continue robust coverage of the military no matter the vantage point.

Images of reporters effectively demonstrating against barriers to their work are unlikely to move supporters of President Donald Trump, many of whom resent journalists and cheer his efforts to make their jobs harder. Trump has been involved in court fights against The New York Times, CBS News, ABC News, the Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press in the past year.

But not Fox News? What a surprise.

The Pentagon Press Association, whose 101 members represent 56 news outlets, has spoken out against the rules. Organizations from across the media spectrum, from legacy organizations like The Associated Press and The New York Times to outlets like Fox and the conservative Newsmax, told their reporters to leave instead of signing the new rules.

Even Fox. That’s a surprise.

Only the conservative One America News Network signed on.

Heroic quisling.

They’re just children, barely out of nursery school.

JD Vance sought to downplay the revelation that leaders of a group called the Young Republicans exchanged hundreds of racist, sexist text messages – including one in which rape was called “epic”, and another in which someone wrote “I love Hitler” – as youthful indiscretions.

Vance, speaking on a new episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, the podcast run by colleagues of the late conservative activist, suggested that the participants in the leaked chats were much younger than they in fact are. Some of the participants are barely younger than the 41-year-old vice-president.

Right, and he’s just a baby too, so we can’t criticize him either. Have a heart.

“The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys,” Vance said. “They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke – telling a very offensive, stupid joke – is cause to ruin their lives.”

No indeed. Adult kids who tell sexist or racist jokes must be protected; it’s those pesky bitches and n-words who must not be protected.

Politico obtained months of exchanges from a Telegram conversation between leaders and members of the Young Republican National Federation and some of its affiliates in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont.

Mother Jones reports that public records indicate that eight of the 11 Republican operatives who took part in the offensive chat appear to range in age from 24 to 35.

The revelations have prompted bipartisan calls for those involved to be removed from or resign their positions.

Oh but that would ruin their lives. Wait, what? That would ruin their lives? No it wouldn’t. Being kicked out of a political group doesn’t ruin people’s lives.

Republican legislative leaders in Vermont, along with the governor, Phil Scott – also a Republican – called for the resignation of Sam Douglass, a state senator, revealed to be a participant in the chat.

A state senator? So…not a kid then? Not within a mile of being a kid then?

Oh dear. “Erase those other women but don’t you dare erase me!“

We knew that already.

Scotland’s national library ‘caved in to activists’ by removing gender-critical book

Scotland’s national library removed a gender-critical book from an exhibition because it caved in to pressure from activist members of staff, an independent review has found.

The library removed The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a collection of essays by feminists including JK Rowling and Joanna Cherry about their fight against Nicola Sturgeon’s gender self-ID laws.

The book was selected to be included in an exhibition opening in June celebrating the library’s centenary, but was removed after pressure from the library’s LGBT staff network, which called it “hate speech”.

Let this be a lesson to you. Never ever give in to the LGBT staff network. It’s at the mercy of the T, and the T is deranged and malevolent. The T hates women with every fiber of its being. The T should be cut loose from the LGB and then entirely ignored.

Amina Shah, Scotland’s national librarian and chief executive, decided to remove the book in August based on a risk assessment produced by the library which warned the book could be “perceived as harmful”.

That assessment, Ms Shah herself stated, was “not due to the content of the book itself or the views expressed” but to the “potential impact” it might have on the reputation of the Library. She said risks might include protests outside the library which would disrupt the exhibition as well as the potential for violence directed at staff and visitors.

So she caved. How very Neville Chamberlain of her.

The review also concluded that the process which resulted in the decision to exclude the book fell short of the library’s own equality, diversity and inclusion commitments by failing to “work in collaboration with people with lived experience of gender critical beliefs”.

Aha! For once it’s acknowledged that we have lived experience too!

Leave no stone unturned in the quest to destroy women’s rights.

The equalities watchdog has withdrawn interim advice on how institutions should respond to the supreme court ruling on transgender rights, which some campaign groups said could effectively exclude trans people from many public spaces.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said the advice, published in April, shortly after that month’s supreme court ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex only, had been taken down from its website.

In its place, the EHRC says organisations seeking to understand how to implement the ruling should “take specialist legal advice” ahead of the approval by parliament of the watchdog’s statutory guidance, submitted to ministers in early September.

Specialist. Because what? Nobody knows what a woman is any more?

Some Labour MPs joined transgender groups in expressing alarm at the EHRC’s interim advice, which said the supreme court ruling meant transgender people should not be allowed to use toilets meant for the gender they live as, and that in some cases they could not use toilets consistent with their birth sex.

There’s no such thing as “the gender they live as” – there’s only “their sex.” What people pretend is no one else’s concern or responsibility. Personal fantasies are personal. There’s fantasy and there’s reality, and it’s the reality of sex that determines who uses which set of toilets.

If people came up with a trend for pretending to be a giraffe, it would not be the state’s duty to rebuild all schools and hospitals and universities to accommodate animals 18 feet tall.

There is speculation that the government hopes to finalise the guidance after the EHRC’s outgoing chair, Kishwer Falkner, who was appointed under the Conservatives, finishes her term at the end of next month.

Ah. Wait it out so that they can continue to destroy women’s rights. How impressive.

Chanting death threats now are we?

A University of Oxford student filmed allegedly chanting for Gaza to “put the Zios in the ground” at a pro-Palestinian march has been arrested.

Officers investigating chants at a Palestine Coalition demonstration in central London on Saturday arrested a 20-year-old-man on suspicion of inciting racial hatred, the Metropolitan Police said.

Videos appeared to show a man, who has been widely named as Samuel Williams, telling demonstrators that the chant had been “workshopped” in Oxford.

Oh well as long as they workshopped it that’s all right then. Due process etcetera.

In videos he appears to tell the crowd: “A steadfast and noble resistance in Palestine and in Gaza to look to, to be inspired by and – I don’t want to yap for too long – but a chant that we’ve been workshopping in Oxford that maybe you guys want to join in.

“It goes ‘Gaza, Gaza make us proud, put the Zios in the ground’.”

You guys let’s chant about putting Jews in the ground, won’t that be exciting? Make us proud.

Athena Forum responds:

On 3 October 2025, Michael O’Flaherty, Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe, addressed a letter to the UK Parliament expressing concern over the Supreme Court’s recent ruling and what he described as the “current climate for trans people in the UK.”

As one of the main drafters of the Yogyakarta Principles, a non-legal activist document that seeks to erase sex as a category in law and policy, O’Flaherty has long blurred the boundaries between human rights and ideological advocacy. His intervention now appears less as a defence of rights than as political pressure on independent courts and legislators. The UK Supreme Court ruling reaffirms basic legal clarity and women’s sex-based rights. Attempts to undermine such rulings through moral panic and behind-the-scenes lobbying mark a worrying misuse of institutional power.

All the more so when it’s a man blithely nuking women’s rights.

We remind the Commissioner that the “current climate” in the UK includes the recent attack on Europe’s largest women’s rights conference, FiLiA, which was vandalised by trans activists, requiring police protection for female attendees. The incident was the latest in a long series of attacks, threats and intimidation targeting women’s rights advocates across Europe.

The Council of Europe must uphold genuine human rights principles – equality before the law, the protection of women and girls, the safeguarding of democratic institutions from ideological capture – and its Commissioner must stay within his mandate.

Women have rights too, bro.

Here we go again.

Trans people at risk of exclusion from many UK public spaces, rights expert says

Transgender people risk being excluded from many public spaces as a result of the recent UK supreme court judgment and must be protected from discrimination, a human rights expert has said.

Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe commissioner for human rights, said he had concerns about the climate for transgender people in the UK after April’s supreme court ruling that the legal definition of a woman in the Equality Act 2010 refers to biological sex.

Did he now. I wonder if he has any concerns about the climate for women.

Interim advice issued after the judgment by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in effect banned transgender people from using facilities according to their lived gender and allowed services to request birth certificates to ensure single-sex services were protected.

Blah blah. People are not automatically allowed to do X according to their lived Y if Y is a fantasy that contradicts reality. That has never been a “right” except in theocracies. I could have a fantasy that I’m Keir Starmer, but I still wouldn’t be allowed to kick cis-Starmer out of 10 Downing Street.

In a letter to the respective chairs of the UK parliament’s joint committee on human rights and the women and equalities committee, O’Flaherty said there was a tendency in the UK to see the human rights of different groups as a “zero-sum game”.

He added: “This has contributed to narratives which build on prejudice against trans people and portray upholding their human rights as a de facto threat to the rights of others.”

Oh fuck off. It’s not a matter of “narratives”; it’s a matter of women’s rights. It’s trans ideology that relies on “narratives”; women are not a story but a fact, however stale and tiresome.

“Such a zero-sum approach risks certain inferences being drawn from the UK supreme court judgment that could lead to widespread exclusion of trans people from many public spaces.”

He means toilets. Men will be widely excluded from women’s toilets, but that does not exclude them from public spaces, because they can just use the men’s toilets, being as how they are men.

I’m so fed up with this tremulous lachrymose concern for men who playact being women at the expense of actual women. What about us, god damn it? Why is his fantasy about himself more important than our safety?

O’Flaherty said his letter “in no way detracts from the need to continue improving measures to prevent violence against women and girls, as well as the protection and promotion of women’s rights and gender equality more generally.”

Oh yes it does. That’s exactly what it does.

That’s not accurate.

It’s not “just like anyone else.” There are differences. Differences matter. And they don’t want to be accepted for who they are, they want to be accepted for who they are not. That’s the whole point. That’s what “trans” means. They’re men who want to be accepted aka validated aka confirmed as women. Men are not women.

What Owen Jones means is that they want to be accepted for who they fantasize they are. Children enjoy that. Children enjoy pretending to be various kinds of people. The enjoyment fades over time though, because pretending starts to seem silly.

Except when it doesn’t, I suppose. There are all these people – old enough to drive and vote and drink vodka – who go to comic book conventions and similar. I wonder if that’s part of the trans craze picture. I wonder if too much willing suspension of disbelief has enabled belief that people can change sex with the power of thought. Maybe Owen knows.

But either way, “just living their lives” is not a “just” when it includes men taking prizes and jobs and places in sports that were supposed to be for women. In that case they’re not “just living their lives,” they’re living a woman’s life, which prevents her from doing so.

Tipping point crossed.

The planet is grappling with a “new reality” as it reaches the first in a series of catastrophic and potentially irreversible climate tipping points: the widespread death of coral reefs, according to a landmark report produced by 160 scientists across the world.

As humans burn fossil fuels and ratchet up temperatures, it’s already driving more severe heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires. But there are even bigger impacts on the horizon. Climate change may also be pushing Earth’s crucial systems — from the Amazon rainforest to polar ice sheets — so far out of balance they collapse, sending catastrophic ripples across the planet.

…

Since 2023, the world’s reefs have been enduring the worst mass bleaching event on record as oceans reach record high temperatures, with more than 80% affected. What was an underwater riot of color and life is being replaced with a bleached, seaweed-dominated landscape.

“We have now pushed (coral reefs) beyond what they can cope with,” said Mike Barrett, chief scientific advisor at the World Wildlife Fund UK and co-author of the report. Unless global warming is reversed “extensive reefs as we know them will be lost,” the authors wrote.

And global warming is obviously not going to be reversed. We’re doing nothing to reverse it. Cars zoom, planes fly, cruise ships cruise.

Which human rights?

The treatment of transgender people in Britain could breach the European Convention on Human Rights, a watchdog has warned. Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, has written to senior MPs to raise his concerns about trans rights in the UK.

He urged the Government to avoid legal uncertainty for trans people in the wake of the Supreme Court‘s landmark ruling in April. Mr O’Flaherty also warned against breaching the human rights of trans people through ‘blanket practices or policies’ on single-sex spaces.

Well what are the rights of trans people? Do male trans people have a right to go into women’s spaces? Of course not, any more than they have a right to go into women’s kitchens and raid the fridge or into women’s beds and rape them. The “blanket” part is crucial. There are no exceptions for women’s right to have spaces where men can’t follow them. It’s not Michael O’Flaherty’s job to declare exceptions to that right.

In a letter to Lord Alton of Liverpool and Sarah Owen MP, the chairs of two parliamentary committees, he criticised a tendency to ‘see the human rights of different groups as a zero-sum game’.

‘This has contributed to narratives which build on prejudice against trans people and portray upholding their human rights as a de facto threat to the rights of others,’ he added.

Bollocks. Men are men. That’s not a “narrative” and it’s not a “prejudice.” Men are barred from some women’s spaces for good reasons; when it ain’t broke don’t fix it.