Brendan O'Neill: Gaza: the most lied about war in history

Finally, on the third anniversary of 7 October, the left’s empire of falsehoods against Israel is starting to crumble.

What would you call a country that is experiencing one of the highest levels of population growth on Earth? How would you describe a country where the child malnutrition levels are similar to those of that industrial powerhouse of Europe, Germany? What would you say about a nation that was in receipt of so much food aid that at one stage around 3,163 calories were available per person, per day? I’ll tell you what you couldn’t say: that that country is suffering one of the most demonic genocides in history. That its people are being forcibly starved. That its pain finds no parallel in the annals of human wickedness.

Brendan O'Neill: The lesson of Flydubai? Don’t mess with Zionists

The heroism on that crazy flight was a beautiful reminder that the Jewish nation is here to stay.

I was in the calmest place in the world yesterday as the news of the terror on that Flydubai flight started to trickle in: Tel Aviv airport. Yes, the very airport for which that plunging, blood-stained jet was destined was an oasis of serenity. Passengers watched the news on their phones with superb, unflappable composure. Smiles cracked over pints of dark lager as it became clear the crisis had been resolved. Then it struck me: we were chill because we knew that if a suicidal loon tried any sh*t on the flights we were about to board, he’d be slapped and hogtied in seconds.

Brendan O'Neill: We are still failing the moral test of 9/11

Twenty-five years on from 9/11, I am sick of the disease of self-hatred. It’s time the West asserted itself.

Imagine if you had told someone on 11 September 2001 that in 25 years’ time the streets of New York City would ring out with sympathy for Islamofascism. Imagine if you had said to one of the startled souls watching American lives be incinerated by Islamist filth that one day the West would swarm with youths cosplaying as Islamist filth. Imagine if you had said that in a mere quarter of a century even our leafiest campuses would be awash with jihad chic, with silver-spoon students gushing over an Islamo-army (Hamas) every bit as hateful and medieval as the one that burnt New Yorkers alive.

Brendan O'Neill, The UK government has swallowed the Great Lie of Israelophobia

If it wasn’t for Israel, if it wasn’t for that monstrous, marauding state, there’d be peace in the Middle East. This is the Great Lie of Israelophobia. It’s the truthless, venomous current powering the global loathing for the Jewish State. You hear it on the street, on campuses, in mosques: that peace demands the muzzling, if not the outright destruction, of the bloodthirsty Jewish nation. Yesterday, staggeringly, we heard a version of this lie from the foreign secretary of the United Kingdom.

Brendan O'Neill: The media’s sinister crusade against Reform

The status quo elites are weaponising ‘sleaze’ to try to kill off populism.

Two truths stare us in the face following the latest Reform UK scandal. First, Reform needs to up its game. It can’t keep shuffling slack-jawed into media stings. And second, the media really are hell-bent on nobbling this insurgent party. ‘Scandal’ is clearly their cudgel of choice for kneecapping populism. Between the amateurishness at Reform and the animus of a panicked press class, democracy really has its work cut out.

Brendan O'Neill: How Cambridge became the epicentre of Western self-loathing

The uni that liberated the world now employs a woman who called on Muslims to make weapons for jihad. God help us.

Next time someone asks me what I mean by ‘suicide of the West’, I’m going to tell them that Cambridge University has a professor who once said Muslims should build ‘advanced weaponry’ for the coming ‘jihad’ to elevate Islam ‘over all other [religions]’. I’m going to let them know that at one of the highest seats of learning in Christendom, on the same dappled lawns walked by William Tyndale, Isaac Newton and Alan Turing, there now skulks an academic who once said ‘Allah’s reward’ will be ‘immeasurable’ for those who make ‘machinery for jihad’. For there it is, in all its snivelling idiocy and decadence: the West’s death wish.

Brendan O'Neill: For the love of God, stop the boats

It is a crime against sovereignty that hundreds of men are permitted to intrude on British soil every week.

Nine hundred and eleven. That’s how many people have illegally intruded into our country since Sunday. Just shy of a thousand foreigners, mostly blokes, sailed on to our shores and met not so much as a cough of opposition from border guards. An unresisted tide of newcomers washing upon a sleeping nation. It is intolerable. It is a grotesque insult to the hard-won liberty of this kingdom that armadas of men from distant, regressive lands are permitted to come, week after week after week. For the love of God, stop these boats.

Brendan O'Neill: Who would take up arms for Broken Britain?

A survey has found that only six per cent of Brits would fight for the nation. I hate that I understand why.

Putin will be over the moon. Caves in Iraq will echo with the laughter of whatever remains of ISIS. For a new poll has found that a measly six per cent of Britons would take up arms if we faced an ‘imminent invasion’. Armies of mad Islamists could be amassing on our beaches and just one in 17 of us would ask for a gun. ‘We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be’, said Churchill. Not anymore, we won’t.

Brendan O'Neill: It is not ‘Islamophobic’ to stand up for Jews and Western civilisation

A new report accuses me and other Spectator writers of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’. It is a grotesque lie.

I’ve had a lot of flak in my career. But I never imagined I’d be condemned for expressing horror at the parading of an emaciated Jew through the streets by a mob of anti-Semites. I never thought I would get it in the neck for using the word ‘medieval’ to describe a swarm of men who surrounded and jeered at a terrified half-starved Jewish woman. And yet here we are.

Brendan O'Neill: Andy Burnham’s shameful pandering to anti-Israel bigots

His pompous, fact-lite sermon on Gaza is a transparent effort to win back Muslim voters and the keffiyeh classes.

Here he comes, pandering Andy Burnham. The King of the North throwing out the red meat of Israelophobia to keep certain voters sweet. The incoming PM yapping piously about Israel’s possible ‘war crimes’ in a bid to win back restive Muslim voters and the keffiyeh classes who’ve abandoned Labour for the crackpot Greens. That’s what I saw in Burnham’s staggeringly pompous digital sermon on Gaza – not an act of geopolitical conviction but a masterclass in demographic toadying.

Brendan O'Neill: How Britain’s cops became the armed wing of wokeness

From arresting critics of Muhammad to mistreating white men, the police have become the enforcers of woke tyranny.

Insulting Muhammad. Criticising a local councillor. Being a white lad who gets punched in the head by a gang of black kids. In Britain in 2026, these are the ‘crimes’ that get the cops off their a***s. They might not be able to find the lowlifes who burgled your home or the gang members who groomed your daughter. But they’ll come running if you diss Islam or have a pop at a Green politician or commit the heinous sin of being white and male on a night out. Welcome to your two-tier tyranny.

Brendan O'Neill: Nigel Farage lays down the gauntlet

In triggering a by-election in Clacton, he has disarmed the media elites and empowered working-class people.

With righteous indignation, Nigel Farage has resigned today as MP for Clacton, triggering a by-election that he intends to fight. He’s giving up his seat in the hope he’ll win it back. Why?

Brendan O'Neill: The barbarism in Belfast

That crazed, savage knifing was a bloody byproduct of state failure.

Are we allowed to feel pure, cold rage yet? It’s what millions of us felt this morning as we watched footage of that barbarous assault in Belfast. However much the pleb-fearing thoughtpolice of Keir Starmer’s government might disapprove of such fury, it’s the emotion that swelled in all decent British and Irish people as they saw a brute rain stab after stab upon his sprawled, struggling victim. Good luck trying to curb the people’s rage over this act of wanton savagery.

Brendan O'Neill: We are right to feel rage over the death of Henry Nowak

The elites want to crush the working-class fury over this vile murder – don’t let them.

Are you raging over the death of Henry Nowak? Has the horror of that boy’s slaying, the lynching-like savagery of it, incensed you? Did you feel molten fury as you watched the bodycam footage of those lowlife officers dragging Henry across the harsh gravel? Were you consumed by wrath seeing this dying boy be libelled as a racist by his killer? If so, then according to the chattering classes you are tantamount to a fascist. It is you and your febrile emotions that pose the truest threat to the nation, even more so than knife-wielding scum like Vickrum Digwa.

Brendan O'Neill: The English have revolted

The Reform surge in England is more than a protest vote – it’s a people's blow against the cultural elites.

Here are some phrases I don’t want to hear today. ‘Protest vote.’ ‘The cry of the “left behind”.’ ‘A bloody nose for the establishment.’ For while it’s true that the colourless functionaries of our two-party regime will be holding their bloodied snouts today following a bruising blow from the electorate, none of those trite phrases captures the historic nature of what is happening. This is not just a ballot-box ‘screw you’ – it’s an attempted reordering of politics itself by voters with nothing left to lose.

Brendan O'Neill: The ugly truth about the cult of Palestinianism

The conviction of the Palestine Action activists confirms it: Israelophobia is a vile menace to civilised values.

So this is the movement that the queen of smug, Sally Rooney, promised to share her fat royalty cheques with. This is the movement that plummy vicars fawned over in Westminster Square with their placards saying ‘I Support Palestine Action’. A movement that counts within its ranks men content to use a 7lb sledgehammer to fracture the back of a woman. A movement so far up the fundament of its own self-righteousness that its members think nothing of raining steel blows on a woman’s spine. I would engage in some serious self-reflection if an organisation I gushed over was found to contain blokes who use weapons to crack women’s bones.

Brendan O'Neill: The glorious Irish revolt against globalist insanity

There’s nothing like a drivers’ revolt to tease out the classism of the new elites. Then Canadian PM Justin Trudeau invoked the wartime Emergencies Act against truckers who had the temerity to agitate against Covid-19 vaccine mandates. European farmers who rose up against an eco-hike in fuel taxes were furiously denounced as ‘far right’ by the gated ponces who rule over them. And now in Ireland, the cossetted moralists of Dublin 4 have been roused into a frenzy of anti-worker bigotry by that most awful of sights: farmers, truckers, cabbies and others protesting over soaring fuel prices.

Brendan O'Neill: So Iran’s civilisation is safe. Now what about the West’s?

For all his digital bluster, it isn’t Trump who threatens to unravel our civilisation – it’s his influential haters.

Imagine calling for the destruction of a civilisation. Imagine dreaming about violently scrubbing an ancient nation from the face of the Earth. Imagine flirting with the idea of obliterating a land with thousands of years of rich history. I am referring, of course, to the activist class and its annihilationist hatred for the Jewish State. For nearly three years, these people have beat the streets and swarmed the digital networks to agitate for the erasure of Israel, all the way ‘from the river to the sea’. President Trump’s juvenile bluster on Iran has nothing on their existential loathing for the Jewish homeland.

Brendan O'Neill: Anti-Trump catastrophism is the real menace to the West

The cultural elite’s dream of an American defeat in Iran scares me far more than Trump’s premature claims of victory.

Snark really is all that President Trump’s critics have left. They greet his every utterance, whether made in the flesh or on Truth Social, with instant sarcastic derision. Their cliquish cynicism was on full display during Trump’s address to the nation on the Iran War last night. No sooner had Trump said the US was nearing victory than his opposing army of nay-sayers was gleefully crowing: ‘Nah, it’s a disaster, we’re screwed.’

I can’t be the only person who now finds this voguish gloom more grating than Trump’s starry-eyed statements? Give me Trump’s possibly premature declarations of victory over these wet dreams of defeat any day of the week.

Brendan O'Neill: Islamists have been given a veto over public life

The banning of a UKIP march to appease Islamist hotheads is a scandal.

So now we know: if you want to prevent a public gathering in the UK, just threaten violence. Be menacing. Be intimidating. Let it be known, with a nod and a wink, that you will roundly kick off if those people you don’t like come anywhere near your neighbourhood.