Somerset councillors wasted an hour of a full council meeting yesterday on a motion from Labour and the Greens to evict international military technology company Elbit Systems from a council property because it supposedly supplies arms to the IDF. All prompted by protests from crazed activists…
Today they’ve had to apologise after Elbit got in touch to clarify that it does no such thing. Always worth checking the facts presented to you by raving quacks…
The Council would like to apologise and withdraw the statement that Elbit Systems UK Limited supplies military equipment to the Israeli Defence Forces or the Israeli Ministry of Defence. (4/4)
— Somerset Council (@SomersetCouncil) April 26, 2024
The motion was, of course, supported by the LibDem leadership. Maybe they could have spent the hour trying to work out how to avoid imposing a 10% increase in council tax. Somerset Council budget shortfall: £100 million…
The Israeli Embassy in London has confirmed that at least 100 “reservists and active duty soldiers” have travelled from the UK to serve with the IDF in Israel as 360,000 reservists have been called up in a massive mobilisation push. 17 UK nationals have already been reported dead or missing in Israel as families of diplomats are evacuated and the FCDO organises flights out of the country today. More are expected to travel shortly…
Keir Starmer’s desire to win the next election is not in doubt, to help him he has hired a former Israeli Defence Force cyber-warfare intelligence officer to help his campaign. This is something of change of hiring policy for the Labour Party since Corbyn was laying wreaths for PLO terrorists.
Assaf Kaplan’s background was revealed by The Electronic Intifada, website, exactly the kind of online operation that in his previous role Kaplan would have been countering. He worked in Unit 8200 – the Israeli military’s equivalent of GCHQ – generally considered among the elite of the world’s cyber-warfare operators. Kaplan later got some handy experience of politics from being the deputy head of the Israeli Labor Party’s digital campaign in the April 2019 election. An election that saw the party collapse from holding 19 seats to 6…
The appointment of Kaplan as Labour’s “Social Listening and Organising Manager” will, according to the job specification, see him “help to move the social media listening framework of the party to be laser-focused on those we need to win over to form the next government”. Not unexpectedly, the appointment has predictably outraged the hard-left, particularly as it is claimed that Kaplan is going to be based in the Leader’s office. On national security grounds alone, it will make a welcome change for that office to contain former agents of an allied power…
“Rachael Swindon” is a Corbyn superfan social media account of dubious provenance (see Buzzfeed’s profile) which tweets hard left slogans, regular calls for Tom Watson to resign and anti-Tory hate. Nothing unusual nowadays. It is of course it is followed by dozens of Labour MPs and directly encouraged by the Labour leader’s office. Yesterday it tweeted out a video of ‘cowardly Israeli soldiers’ roughing up Palestinian youths. Except it was, as many replies pointed out, a well know viral video of Guatemalan troops roughing up Guatemalan youths.
That didn’t stop it being retweeted thousands of times including by Grahame Morris, a Shadow Cabinet Minister, adding his ignorant insight in. Despite being told by dozens of respondents his claims were a falsehood, it remained up. Last night he even got a reply from the Israeli Defence Forces:
It is still up this morning…
