Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu tells Gaza residents to “GET OUT NOW”

[Uilleam 4,910]

Remember Judaeo-Christian Civilisation?

 

Here's an interesting take on Hamas, and the rest, from Austin, Texas.

 

 

Hamas has unleashed the West’s monsters

Civilisation will never escape the descendants of Cain

BY JACOB HOWLAND

November 20, 2023

 

https://unherd.com/2023/11/hamas-has-unleashed-the-wests-monsters/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3

 

Jacob Howland is Provost and Director of the Intellectual Foundations Program at UATX, commonly known as the University of Austin. His latest book is Glaucon's Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato's Republic (Paul Dry Books, 2018).

 

We live in an apocalyptic moment, when something truly hideous, long hidden just beneath the surface of everyday life, is breaking forth from the ground. The torture, rape, massacre, and kidnapping of roughly 1,200 Israelis on October 7 was only the beginning of this revelation. In the West, Hamas’s butchery has unleashed eruptions of antisemitism and massive, increasingly violent displays of support for the terrorists. Like some mythical monster that periodically emerges from hibernation to slaughter far and wide, the rough beast, it seems, is just stretching its legs. And we are only beginning to take its measure.

It’s important to understand the sheer evil that now threatens us. Hamas has been called “barbaric”, but that is hardly a sufficient description of its primitive savagery. The Greeks called non-Greeks barbaroi because their words sounded like babble to their ears: “bar bar bar.” Barbarians ranged from the slavish inhabitants of large, sophisticated, highly stratified societies (Persians, Egyptians) to fiercely spirited, independent tribes (the forest-dwelling Northerners that the Romans called Germani). None of these peoples based their identity on the struggle against a hated Other whose total elimination, to be achieved at any cost, was their sole reason for existence. None embraced the complete destruction of body and spirit — including their own as well — that the Nazis called Vernichtung: “negation”. None, in other words, were pure enemies of civilisation.

 

But jihadis are. Civilisation is the sum of cultural and social conditions that make for flourishing lives and communities. Jihadism is a death cult. In a recent podcast, Sam Harris reminds us of the Taliban jihadists who, in 2014, murdered 132 Muslim children at a school in Peshawar and burned a teacher alive in front of her students. A supporter of the Pakistani Taliban said of the dead children: “We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise…. They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them.”

These words are themselves apocalyptic. From the perspective of Islamic fundamentalism, there is no human being who does not deserve to die. Muslims will go to Paradise; non-Muslims will burn in Hell. Death is a blessing for true believers, divine justice for apostates and infidels. Choosing a martyr’s moral and physical self-destruction thus legitimises the deaths of everyone one can possibly kill. Murder-suicide on this grand scale is the ultimate form of religious totalitarianism, the complete control of the lives of others.

 

This mentality explains a lot, including the abject misery of the Gazans — a people who, pressed beneath the heavy machinery of organised death-worship, are twisted with moral scoliosis. Is it any wonder that Hamas has stolen tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid for military purposes? Or that it hides weapons and hostages in hospitals using sick and injured Gazans and new-born babies as human shields? Or that it blocked evacuation routes and confiscated the car keys of civilians who wanted to cross the Wadi Gaza, as the IDF urged them to do, in order to flee Israeli military action in the northern part of the territory?

Hamas’s strategy is to maximise civilian deaths in order to stimulate worldwide opprobrium of Israel, and, if possible, open up more military fronts of Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Syria. As Harris says, Hamas is “eager to martyr all Palestinians for the pleasure of killing Jews”.

 

But if Hamas, Isis, and other jihadis are not barbarians, what are they? This question takes us back to remotest antiquity, when very ancient peoples struggled to master the dark depths of the human psyche, and to establish the handful of “Thou shalt nots” on which all civilisation is based.

Weirdly, the most primitive tribal impulses are today expressed by means of the latest digital technology. There is a recording of a phone call that a Hamas terrorist made to his parents on October 7. The audio captures a human drama as old as recorded history: a son seeks approval from his parents for his prowess in battle. But there is something deeply twisted about their conversation. “Hi Dad!” the son shouts. “I’m talking to you from [kibbutz] Mefalsim. Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! … Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands!” The whole time, his father is repeating “Allah hu Akbar!” A little later, the young man says “Mom, your son is a hero!”

 

In Homer’s Iliad, the Trojan Hector imagines the day his son, still a toddler, “comes home from battle bearing the bloody gear / of the mortal enemy he has killed in war— / a joy to his mother’s heart”. But the battle he envisions is armed combat against trained warriors, not a surprise terror attack on innocent families. The Hamas murderer claims the status of a hero, but his deeds belie his words. His perspective has no Greek analogue. It is pre-Homeric.

It is also pre-Abrahamic. In Genesis 22, God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac, the child of Sarah, up Mount Moriah to be sacrificed. Isaac embodies the entirety of Abraham’s hopes, as it is with Isaac’s descendants that God has established his eternal covenant. Abraham dutifully binds Isaac and draws his knife so that he may cut his throat, drain his blood, and burn his corpse. An angel stays his hand at the last moment, and he learns that the Almighty does not want human sacrifice.

Herein lies the basic problem: Islamists never got the message. That’s why they regard murder-suicide as a sacrament. When the Hamas jihadi’s brother tells him to come back, he replies “What do you mean come back? There’s no going back. It is either death or victory! My mother gave birth to me for the religion.” In other words, she gave birth to him so that he might advance the cause of indiscriminate death.

 

Why does Islam remain fertile ground for such insanity? The Bible suggests that fraternal conflict is at the root of the problem. When Abraham’s wife Sarah could not conceive, she instructed him to impregnate their Egyptian slave girl, Hagar. But when Hagar became pregnant with Ishmael, Sarah harassed her and she fled. An angel told her that her child “will be a wild ass of a man— / his hand against all, the hand of all against him”. Hagar then returned to Abraham and Sarah, but after Isaac was born, Sarah drove her and Ishmael out of their camp.

The angel’s prophecy makes sense in hindsight. An outcast twice over, Ishmael must bear considerable ill-will toward Isaac — the son favoured not only by his father and stepmother, but by God. This is important, because Muslims regard Ishmael to be the ancestor of Arab tribes, and of Muhammad in particular. Islamic tradition furthermore holds that the Jews falsified the Hebrew Scriptures, and many Muslims believe it was Ishmael, not Isaac, who was Abraham’s favoured son. These facts, too, suggest fraternal resentment.

 

The story of fraternal enmity and rancour is one of the earliest in the Bible, and a recurring theme in Genesis (think of Esau and Jacob, or Joseph and his brothers). It first appears immediately after the exile from Eden. Cain is incensed that God favours Abel’s sacrificial offering. Turning a deaf ear to God, who urges him not to sin, he murders his younger brother. Exiled by God, he becomes “a restless wanderer on the earth” who is nevertheless protected by the Lord’s own mark. That means he and his descendants will be with us forever. If we are to come to grips with the revenant monster that announced itself, yet again, on October 7, we must acknowledge this fundamental fact.

 

No one has thought more deeply about what Cain’s story means than the anonymous author of Beowulf, an epic poem that explores the open wound of the outcast brother. Heorot, the great mead-hall built by Hrothgar, king of the Shielding Danes, is a place of light, warmth and decorous ritual: generous mead-pouring and gift-giving. A microcosm of civilised existence, Heorot “stands at the horizon, on its high ground”, a Nordic city on the hill “meant to be a wonder of the world forever”. But the monster Grendel prowls the low, cold bogs outside until, berserk with anger, he splinters Heorot’s doors and wreaks bloody horror.

What ails Grendel? A “corpse-maker mongering death” in his repeated night-raids, he descends from “Cain’s clan”. For this wild branch of the sons of Adam, split off from the main human trunk by primal sin, the house of civilisation is an unbearable reproach. In Beowulf, resentment and envy are fevers of the mind that inflame and disfigure the body, twisting it into a sullen slouch. Outlawed by God, cast out by men, barred from hall and feast to gorge on envy and resentment, Cain’s clan — “ogres and elves and evil phantoms / and the giants too who strove with God”— are grotesque figurations of poisonous passions, the fermentation of the bitter fruit of exile.

Beowulf soberly acknowledges the disconcerting fact that we who dwell in the house of civilisation can neither make peace with, nor be rid of, the descendants of Cain. The eponymous hero slays Grendel and his mother and rules his people, the Geats, for 50 good years. But Beowulf finally succumbs to the poisonous bite of a flame-belching dragon, accidentally awakened after many centuries, that emerges from its subterranean lair to waste Geatish farms, homesteads, forts, and earthworks with great sprays of “molten venom”. The hero’s death spells doom for the Geats. At the poem’s end, a grieving woman unleashes “a wild litany / of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded, / enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, / slavery and abasement”. Order and decency, peace and security, are only as solid as the ground they stand on.

The woman’s nightmare is a dark prophecy for our age, which has few heroes but plenty of monsters. Some parade daily on the streets of major Western cities, surrounded by mobs of ignorant, confused people. We face the same challenges Beowulf confronts, but with none of the poem’s clarity or resolve. Many of us can no longer tell good from evil, or hate from love. Under these circumstances, how long can our house, the increasingly divided house of the civilised world, remain standing?

 

AND LO!

 

"There is a recording of a phone call that a Hamas terrorist made to his parents on October 7. The audio captures a human drama as old as recorded history: a son seeks approval from his parents for his prowess in battle. But there is something deeply twisted about their conversation. “Hi Dad!” the son shouts. “I’m talking to you from [kibbutz] Mefalsim. Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! … Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands!” The whole time, his father is repeating “Allah hu Akbar!” A little later, the young man says “Mom, your son is a hero!”

 

 

 

 

In Homer’s Iliad, the Trojan Hector imagines the day his son, still a toddler, “comes home from battle bearing the bloody gear / of the mortal enemy he has killed in war— / a joy to his mother’s heart”. But the battle he envisions is armed combat against trained warriors, not a surprise terror attack on innocent families."

[ChelseaBoy 2,057]

1 hour ago, Uilleam said:

Remember Judaeo-Christian Civilisation?

 

Here's an interesting take on Hamas, and the rest, from Austin, Texas.

 

 

Hamas has unleashed the West’s monsters

Civilisation will never escape the descendants of Cain

BY JACOB HOWLAND

November 20, 2023

 

https://unherd.com/2023/11/hamas-has-unleashed-the-wests-monsters/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3

 

Jacob Howland is Provost and Director of the Intellectual Foundations Program at UATX, commonly known as the University of Austin. His latest book is Glaucon's Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato's Republic (Paul Dry Books, 2018).

 

We live in an apocalyptic moment, when something truly hideous, long hidden just beneath the surface of everyday life, is breaking forth from the ground. The torture, rape, massacre, and kidnapping of roughly 1,200 Israelis on October 7 was only the beginning of this revelation. In the West, Hamas’s butchery has unleashed eruptions of antisemitism and massive, increasingly violent displays of support for the terrorists. Like some mythical monster that periodically emerges from hibernation to slaughter far and wide, the rough beast, it seems, is just stretching its legs. And we are only beginning to take its measure.

It’s important to understand the sheer evil that now threatens us. Hamas has been called “barbaric”, but that is hardly a sufficient description of its primitive savagery. The Greeks called non-Greeks barbaroi because their words sounded like babble to their ears: “bar bar bar.” Barbarians ranged from the slavish inhabitants of large, sophisticated, highly stratified societies (Persians, Egyptians) to fiercely spirited, independent tribes (the forest-dwelling Northerners that the Romans called Germani). None of these peoples based their identity on the struggle against a hated Other whose total elimination, to be achieved at any cost, was their sole reason for existence. None embraced the complete destruction of body and spirit — including their own as well — that the Nazis called Vernichtung: “negation”. None, in other words, were pure enemies of civilisation.

 

But jihadis are. Civilisation is the sum of cultural and social conditions that make for flourishing lives and communities. Jihadism is a death cult. In a recent podcast, Sam Harris reminds us of the Taliban jihadists who, in 2014, murdered 132 Muslim children at a school in Peshawar and burned a teacher alive in front of her students. A supporter of the Pakistani Taliban said of the dead children: “We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise…. They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them.”

These words are themselves apocalyptic. From the perspective of Islamic fundamentalism, there is no human being who does not deserve to die. Muslims will go to Paradise; non-Muslims will burn in Hell. Death is a blessing for true believers, divine justice for apostates and infidels. Choosing a martyr’s moral and physical self-destruction thus legitimises the deaths of everyone one can possibly kill. Murder-suicide on this grand scale is the ultimate form of religious totalitarianism, the complete control of the lives of others.

 

This mentality explains a lot, including the abject misery of the Gazans — a people who, pressed beneath the heavy machinery of organised death-worship, are twisted with moral scoliosis. Is it any wonder that Hamas has stolen tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid for military purposes? Or that it hides weapons and hostages in hospitals using sick and injured Gazans and new-born babies as human shields? Or that it blocked evacuation routes and confiscated the car keys of civilians who wanted to cross the Wadi Gaza, as the IDF urged them to do, in order to flee Israeli military action in the northern part of the territory?

Hamas’s strategy is to maximise civilian deaths in order to stimulate worldwide opprobrium of Israel, and, if possible, open up more military fronts of Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Syria. As Harris says, Hamas is “eager to martyr all Palestinians for the pleasure of killing Jews”.

 

But if Hamas, Isis, and other jihadis are not barbarians, what are they? This question takes us back to remotest antiquity, when very ancient peoples struggled to master the dark depths of the human psyche, and to establish the handful of “Thou shalt nots” on which all civilisation is based.

Weirdly, the most primitive tribal impulses are today expressed by means of the latest digital technology. There is a recording of a phone call that a Hamas terrorist made to his parents on October 7. The audio captures a human drama as old as recorded history: a son seeks approval from his parents for his prowess in battle. But there is something deeply twisted about their conversation. “Hi Dad!” the son shouts. “I’m talking to you from [kibbutz] Mefalsim. Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! … Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands!” The whole time, his father is repeating “Allah hu Akbar!” A little later, the young man says “Mom, your son is a hero!”

 

In Homer’s Iliad, the Trojan Hector imagines the day his son, still a toddler, “comes home from battle bearing the bloody gear / of the mortal enemy he has killed in war— / a joy to his mother’s heart”. But the battle he envisions is armed combat against trained warriors, not a surprise terror attack on innocent families. The Hamas murderer claims the status of a hero, but his deeds belie his words. His perspective has no Greek analogue. It is pre-Homeric.

It is also pre-Abrahamic. In Genesis 22, God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac, the child of Sarah, up Mount Moriah to be sacrificed. Isaac embodies the entirety of Abraham’s hopes, as it is with Isaac’s descendants that God has established his eternal covenant. Abraham dutifully binds Isaac and draws his knife so that he may cut his throat, drain his blood, and burn his corpse. An angel stays his hand at the last moment, and he learns that the Almighty does not want human sacrifice.

Herein lies the basic problem: Islamists never got the message. That’s why they regard murder-suicide as a sacrament. When the Hamas jihadi’s brother tells him to come back, he replies “What do you mean come back? There’s no going back. It is either death or victory! My mother gave birth to me for the religion.” In other words, she gave birth to him so that he might advance the cause of indiscriminate death.

 

Why does Islam remain fertile ground for such insanity? The Bible suggests that fraternal conflict is at the root of the problem. When Abraham’s wife Sarah could not conceive, she instructed him to impregnate their Egyptian slave girl, Hagar. But when Hagar became pregnant with Ishmael, Sarah harassed her and she fled. An angel told her that her child “will be a wild ass of a man— / his hand against all, the hand of all against him”. Hagar then returned to Abraham and Sarah, but after Isaac was born, Sarah drove her and Ishmael out of their camp.

The angel’s prophecy makes sense in hindsight. An outcast twice over, Ishmael must bear considerable ill-will toward Isaac — the son favoured not only by his father and stepmother, but by God. This is important, because Muslims regard Ishmael to be the ancestor of Arab tribes, and of Muhammad in particular. Islamic tradition furthermore holds that the Jews falsified the Hebrew Scriptures, and many Muslims believe it was Ishmael, not Isaac, who was Abraham’s favoured son. These facts, too, suggest fraternal resentment.

 

The story of fraternal enmity and rancour is one of the earliest in the Bible, and a recurring theme in Genesis (think of Esau and Jacob, or Joseph and his brothers). It first appears immediately after the exile from Eden. Cain is incensed that God favours Abel’s sacrificial offering. Turning a deaf ear to God, who urges him not to sin, he murders his younger brother. Exiled by God, he becomes “a restless wanderer on the earth” who is nevertheless protected by the Lord’s own mark. That means he and his descendants will be with us forever. If we are to come to grips with the revenant monster that announced itself, yet again, on October 7, we must acknowledge this fundamental fact.

 

No one has thought more deeply about what Cain’s story means than the anonymous author of Beowulf, an epic poem that explores the open wound of the outcast brother. Heorot, the great mead-hall built by Hrothgar, king of the Shielding Danes, is a place of light, warmth and decorous ritual: generous mead-pouring and gift-giving. A microcosm of civilised existence, Heorot “stands at the horizon, on its high ground”, a Nordic city on the hill “meant to be a wonder of the world forever”. But the monster Grendel prowls the low, cold bogs outside until, berserk with anger, he splinters Heorot’s doors and wreaks bloody horror.

What ails Grendel? A “corpse-maker mongering death” in his repeated night-raids, he descends from “Cain’s clan”. For this wild branch of the sons of Adam, split off from the main human trunk by primal sin, the house of civilisation is an unbearable reproach. In Beowulf, resentment and envy are fevers of the mind that inflame and disfigure the body, twisting it into a sullen slouch. Outlawed by God, cast out by men, barred from hall and feast to gorge on envy and resentment, Cain’s clan — “ogres and elves and evil phantoms / and the giants too who strove with God”— are grotesque figurations of poisonous passions, the fermentation of the bitter fruit of exile.

Beowulf soberly acknowledges the disconcerting fact that we who dwell in the house of civilisation can neither make peace with, nor be rid of, the descendants of Cain. The eponymous hero slays Grendel and his mother and rules his people, the Geats, for 50 good years. But Beowulf finally succumbs to the poisonous bite of a flame-belching dragon, accidentally awakened after many centuries, that emerges from its subterranean lair to waste Geatish farms, homesteads, forts, and earthworks with great sprays of “molten venom”. The hero’s death spells doom for the Geats. At the poem’s end, a grieving woman unleashes “a wild litany / of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded, / enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, / slavery and abasement”. Order and decency, peace and security, are only as solid as the ground they stand on.

The woman’s nightmare is a dark prophecy for our age, which has few heroes but plenty of monsters. Some parade daily on the streets of major Western cities, surrounded by mobs of ignorant, confused people. We face the same challenges Beowulf confronts, but with none of the poem’s clarity or resolve. Many of us can no longer tell good from evil, or hate from love. Under these circumstances, how long can our house, the increasingly divided house of the civilised world, remain standing?

 

AND LO!

 

"There is a recording of a phone call that a Hamas terrorist made to his parents on October 7. The audio captures a human drama as old as recorded history: a son seeks approval from his parents for his prowess in battle. But there is something deeply twisted about their conversation. “Hi Dad!” the son shouts. “I’m talking to you from [kibbutz] Mefalsim. Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! … Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands!” The whole time, his father is repeating “Allah hu Akbar!” A little later, the young man says “Mom, your son is a hero!”

 

 

 

 

In Homer’s Iliad, the Trojan Hector imagines the day his son, still a toddler, “comes home from battle bearing the bloody gear / of the mortal enemy he has killed in war— / a joy to his mother’s heart”. But the battle he envisions is armed combat against trained warriors, not a surprise terror attack on innocent families."

Not so happy now, those brave men. Where are they all hiding now? 

[Bill 12,843]

1 hour ago, ChelseaBoy said:

Not so happy now, those brave men. Where are they all hiding now? 

Where vermin always hide. Scurrying in their rat-runs under the ground.

Edited November 20 by Bill

[ian1964 9,641]

 

[ranger_syntax 3,498]

9 hours ago, Uilleam said:

He is a Research Fellow in Economics at the University of Oxford, and a former adviser to the UK government.

How much weight he will carry with the next UK government may be open to conjecture, but if I was a betting man....

 

 

 

All these people think the same.

 

The next government will do the same things as the current one.

[Uilleam 4,910]

 

THE FIRST FIRST LADY OF SCOTLAND SPEAKS

 

So listen up.

 

Palestinians are being erased, says Humza Yousaf’s wife

Lizzie Roberts

Tuesday November 21 2023, 12.04am, The Times

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/i-left-my-heart-in-gaza-says-humza-yousafs-mother-in-law-9ctprtrl6

 

Palestinians are being “erased from the world”, Nadia El-Nakla has said as she revealed that she is living each day not knowing “if my family are going to live”.

El-Nakla, the wife of Humza Yousaf, the first minister, made the comments in her first interview alongside her mother who was stuck in Gaza until two weeks ago.

El-Nakla’s parents, Elizabeth and Maged, had gone to the region to visit an elderly relative before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.

The couple, who live in Dundee, were trapped together with their son, a doctor, and his family, including their four grandchildren. Elizabeth and Maged El-Nakla eventually fled Gaza via the Rafah crossing into Egypt.

In their first interview since her parents returned home Nadia El-Nakla expressed her fears for her family and the Palestinian people. The El-Naklas want a full ceasefire and a two-state solution.

Speaking to Beth Rigby on Sky News, she said that the Palestinian territories were not a “world player”. “We don’t really have any power so it’s now up to other governments. We’ve seen that through Qatar, we’ve seen that through the UK and the US, trying to have those conversations,” she said.

 

“But actually, what would that even look like? My mind, to be honest, on a personal level, my mind can’t go forward. I’m stuck day by day that I don’t know if my family are going to live and whether Palestine is going to exist.

“For me to think about what happens after the war when we’re not hearing of a ceasefire, my life can’t go forward because it seems, it feels like, we’re being erased from the world.”

 

Elizabeth El-Nakla recounted her and her husband’s first attempt to get to safety on October 14, a week after the violence began. The couple were driven to the border by a 22-year-old neighbour, a journey that typically takes 15 minutes. “It could have been 15,000 miles it felt so far away,” she said.

The couple were told to turn back and while on the phone to their daughter an explosion caused the line to drop.

Nadia El-Nakla said she “fell to her knees” and it took about ten minutes until she could confirm her parents were alive.

She said this was her lowest point: “We then had to travel to Aberdeen because the [SNP] conference was about to start. I was crying the whole journey.”

The 22-year-old neighbour who drove the couple to the border was later killed in a bombing on his home, which also killed 24 members of his family. His eight-year-old sister was the sole survivor but she suffered a broken spine and is being treated in Egypt.

 

Elizabeth El-Nakla said she was getting stronger each day but added: “Unfortunately, until our family and people that we know and love and everyone in Gaza are safe, I don’t think we will get over it and I think my life has changed for ever.”

The moment the couple reached safety in Egypt she said she felt relief but added: “It is such a relief, you can’t imagine but again your heart is torn. I left my heart in Gaza — I didn’t bring it home with me.”

 

SO WHO IS THIS FIRST FIRST LADY OF SCOTLAND?

 

Who is Nadia el-Nakla, Humza Yousaf’s ‘activist’ wife?

After a powerful speech on the Gaza war that brought international attention this week, the Dundee SNP councillor is finding her voice on a bigger stage

Mike Wade

Sunday November 19 2023, 12.23am, The Times

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/who-is-nadia-el-nakla-the-scottish-first-ministers-activist-wife-rtcd33t2d

 

Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul is the perfect expression of the power of the old Ottoman empire, a sprawling confection of architectural styles designed to represent the grandest seat of government in the entire Mediterranean.

Built for Abdulmecid I, last week it hosted a gathering that the 31st sultan could never have envisaged, a press conference of “first ladies” from around the world, all of them determined to make a decisive impact on the most pressing of world events, the war in Gaza.

Prominent among the 15 presidential and prime ministerial spouses was Nadia el-Nakla, a “lifelong activist”, in her own words, and the wife of Humza Yousaf, the SNP leader and Scottish first minister.

The conference featured women from countries including Qatar, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Lebanon and Senegal, and if it had little immediate diplomatic impact it could be deemed a public relations triumph for El-Nakla, catapulting her from an SNP councillor in Dundee to international celebrity.

Her coverage in Turkish national media on Wednesday was second only to that of Emine Erdogan, wife of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s authoritarian president, who promoted the event.

 

“My brother, Mohammad, is a doctor in Gaza,” El-Nakla said from the platform. “He says every day brings more death and destruction — one of his jobs right now is to try and match body parts to the correct body. This is inhumane suffering and cruelty. That is why we need a ceasefire, and we need one now.”

Mrs Erdogan praised the contribution made by El-Nakla, whom she said held “particular significance” because she was “personally connected to the conflict”. She said: “Her impassioned plea for a ceasefire, aimed at sparing the lives of countless innocent men, women, and children, emanates from a place of genuine sincerity.”

 

El-Nakla was accompanied throughout her trip by an SNP press officer, and though Scottish government officials deny that El-Nakia has already acquired the airs and graces of her “first lady” billing, she is losing no opportunity to use her elevated position to project her views.

Some of the attention was forced upon her. Throughout last month, despite her distress and anxiety, El-Nakla remained a dignified and articulate family spokeswoman after her father and mother, who had been visiting relatives, were trapped in Gaza under Israel’s remorseless bombardment after the slaughter of 1,400 Israeli citizens by the terrorist group Hamas on October 7.

Then, this month, on the eve of her parents’ safe passage through the Rafah crossing, she gave a 30-minute interview to the news website Middle East Eye, conducted at Bute House, Edinburgh, the first minister’s official residence.

There, for the benefit of the cameras, El-Nakla was filmed pouring tea for her interviewer as she talked passionately about the need for a ceasefire, speaking out beneath the watchful gaze of a portrait of the late Winnie Ewing, grande dame of the SNP.

“An eye for an eye makes the world go blind,” El-Nakla said, describing the “many terrible crimes against humanity” taking place every day in Gaza. “This is a test … whether you are a world leader or someone reading the news. I would like everyone to have some faith in humanity again.”

She had no hesitation in rounding on Sir Keir Starmer, the UK Labour Leader, and Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, for their responses to the conflict, sympathising with Labour MSPs who supported a humanitarian truce.

“How disconnected are Keir Starmer and Rishi [Sunak] from the reality of what the people that elected them want to see?” she said.

“They could take the position of a leadership that promotes peace in the Middle East. Instead, they say, ‘One side, I want Israel to win’. Literally Rishi said, ‘I want you to win’. What he didn’t say was what that win looks like. Is it the obliteration of Gaza? Is it ten, 20 or 30,000 people killed and then you’ve won?”

The UK governments’ abstention from a United Nations call for a ceasefire felt like they were “on the wrong side of history,” she added. “To abstain when you’re talking about humanitarian aid, I can’t understand or relate to that and for me to be associated with the UK in that way, being British, I find difficult.”

Such is the quandary faced by the woman Yousaf praised as his moral and political “compass” after he won the leadership of his party in March, following Nicola Sturgeon’s ignominious fall from grace.

 

El-Nakla, 39, was born in Scotland and raised in Dundee by her mother Elizabeth, a nurse, and Maged, her father, a Palestinian small businessman who had left family behind in Gaza.

 

As a child, she often spent her summers in her father’s homeland, but has not visited for ten years because it has been “under siege” she said. She went to school in Monifieth, a seaside town east of Dundee, and was active in the 1990s raising money to help refugees fleeing war in Kosovo.

She is a psychotherapist by training, but most of her adult life has been defined by politics. A decade ago, she had already founded the group Tayside for Justice in Palestine and was an SNP member working for Shona Robison, the Dundee East MSP, appointed in March as deputy party leader by Yousaf.

 

Dundee’s nationalist politics are murky, resembling “an episode of Game of Thrones”, according to David Clegg, the editor of Dundee’s Courier newspaper, writing in 2019, and El-Nakia was fully immersed in these turbulent currents.

The city’s SNP elite run the council and hold every Holyrood and Westminster seat, but over the past ten years the party has suffered a series of scandals — not least the very public divorce of Robison and Stewart Hosie, MP for Dundee East and the party’s former deputy leader at Westminster.

The two had been regarded as the “king and queen of Dundee”, said Clegg, but their marriage collapsed in 2016 and it soon emerged that Hosie and Angus MacNeil, another SNP MP, had both been having affairs with Serena Cowdy, a political journalist (Hosie and Cowdy have since married).

 

El-Nakla was by then embroiled in troubles of her own, which emerged in 2018 during the sensational trial of her former lover, Craig Melville, a former SNP councillor who formerly worked for Hosie.

Matters had come to a head in 2015, on the night of the Bataclan atrocity in Paris, when 130 people died in an attack by Islamic fundamentalists. At the time, though married to Fariad Umar, an IT specialist, El-Nakia told the court that she had been embroiled in an “on-off” affair with Melville, who was himself engaged to be married.

After news of the Paris killings broke, she received a drunken phone call from Melville, who followed up with a series of text messages.

One message read: “It’s not personal I just f***ing hate your religion and I’ll do all [to] defeat your filth.’ Another said: “Horrible murdering Islamic c****.’

El-Nakla described in court how she had previously changed Melville’s name on her phone to read “Karen” — the name of another friend — to avoid suspicion as they were calling and texting each other “constantly throughout the day”.

 

Umar told the court that he became suspicious about the messages. “The language wasn’t what Karen would use so I checked the number with one I had on my phone and they were different,” he said. “When I called the Karen on my wife’s phone, a man answered. I hung up.”

He confronted El-Nakla, who initially denied an affair, prompting Umar, an IT specialist, to use data recovery software to retrieve the text messages. Melville was found guilty of behaving in a threatening and abusive manner, aggravated by racial prejudice.

El-Nakla married Yousaf in 2019, and their daughter, Amal, was born the same year. He is stepfather to her daughter Maya, and the family live in Broughty Ferry, a comfortable seaside commuter town just east of Dundee.

 

Their domestic bliss was briefly disturbed in 2021 when they found themselves at the centre of a dispute and they sued their local nursery, claiming that it had discriminated against their young daughter. The couple alleged that Little Scholars nursery was more willing to accept similar applications with “white Scottish-sounding names”, though they later dropped their action after a Care Inspectorate ruling. The nursery denied the accusations and its owner, Usha Fowdar, said it had been “100 per cent prepared to see Ms El-Nakla in court”.

It was a curious episode, but such are the dramas of a political life in Dundee. With all her family connections in Gaza, and her triumph at Dolmabahce, it would be understandable if El-Nakla soon looked beyond the Broughty Ferry horizon to a wider and more glamorous world.

 

 

 

Airbrushed:  Hamas, and its Islamist programme, Hamas massacres, Hamas repression of Gaza, Hamas use of the population as human shields, Hamas's Palestinian death calculus, balancing deaths against adverse publicity for Israel,  Hamas and human rights, Hamas funding from the 9thC theocratic gerontocracy of Iran, Iran's human rights record, the human rights record of Qatar, which funds the Hamas 'administration',  the refusal of other Arab countries, and other Moslem countries, to take in refugees, even temporarily, etc. etc.

Let's not forget the inflaming of antisemitism, and antisemitic behaviour, in this country, by selective and airbrushed  reportage.

 

And all that is before we consider the 'murky' bed-hopping in Dundee, behaviour which would result in severe punishment, in a number of places, oh, say, Iran, and Gulf states, various, particularly, perhaps only, for the women involved. 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 21 by Uilleam

[Sutton_blows_goats 3,387]

Wife of SNP grifter trying to grift way into politics.

 

And as always the hypocrisy is off the charts. She would have been bludgeoned to death with stones for this in Tehran, Gaza, Kabul, Mosul etc etc

 

Why do these types have such an affinity for a mindset that they cannot follow themselves.

 

 

3 minutes ago, Uilleam said:

And all that is before we consider the 'murky' bed-hopping in Dundee, behaviour which would result in severe punishment, in a number of places, oh, say, Iran, and Gulf states, various, particularly, perhaps only, for the women involved.

Edited November 21 by Sutton_blows_goats

[Uilleam 4,910]

6 minutes ago, Sutton_blows_goats said:

Wife of SNP grifter trying to grift way into politics.

 

And as always the hypocrisy is off the charts. She would have been bludgeoned to death with stones for this in Tehran, Gaza, Kabul, Mosul etc etc

 

Why do these types have such an affinity for a mindset that they cannot follow themselves.

 

 

And, don't forget that, Humza, who divorced his first, Moslem convert, wife, apparently because she was "not a good enough Moslem", has told us that his current wife provides his "moral compass".......

 

 

 

[Idisi 202]

22 hours ago, Uilleam said:

Go do your research. 

 

The term 'genocide' is used with careless abandon, both by the ignorant and by those who should know better. I assume that for many of the latter, it isused, deliberately, to draw a moral equivalence between Nazism, and the Jews of Israel. 

 

It is a fairly precise legal term. 

 

You might want to look at 'Crimes Against Humanity', too. 

I did. Both. I am certain that I used it correctly.

[Uilleam 4,910]

2 minutes ago, Idisi said:

I did. Both. I am certain that I used it correctly.

We'll agree to differ, then.