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A global survey published on Tuesday by the Pew Research Centre revealed an increasing negative perception of Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in many countries around the world. The survey, conducted across 24 countries with the participation of more than 28,000 people, included evaluations of the Israeli Prime Minister … The results also showed that public opinion of Israel was largely negative. In 20 of the surveyed countries, a majority of respondents expressed unfavourable views towards the state. In the United States, 53 per cent of those surveyed held a negative view of Israel — an increase of 11 percentage points since 2022. In the United Kingdom, the percentage of respondents with an unfavourable view rose from 44 per cent in 2013 to 61 per cent today.

Last May, on a trip to the United States, world-renowned Israeli-Jewish historian Ilan Pappe was detained by Homeland Security and held for two hours … His latest book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, seeks to understand how a pro-Israel lobby has formed … He argues that the US is intent on exempting Israel from any reckoning with international law … Throughout the book, he insists the Israel lobby is driven, at its heart, by his country’s lack of ethical foundations … As Israeli colonialism, suppression of the Palestinians and military activity to depopulate Palestinian areas intensifies, Pappe believes Israel will be almost entirely abandoned by what remains of progressive civil society and the educated intelligentsia, including renowned scholars of genocide whose reflections and warnings we should heed.

White British people will become a minority in the UK population in less than 40 years, a report has predicted. The population of white British people will fall from 73 per cent to 57 per cent by 2050, before becoming a minority by 2063, the research suggests. Professor Matt Goodwin of Buckingham University analysed migration, birth and death rates, and calculated that by the end of the century, the white British share of the population – those who do not have an immigrant parent – could have dropped to a third. His report predicts a sharp rise in the proportion of the UK population made up of foreign-born and second-generation immigrants, increasing from below 20 per cent to 33.5 per cent within the next 25 years.

Abraham Lincoln is often called the greatest president … Lincoln’s feet were the biggest in U.S. presidential history. He wore a size 14 shoe, which made finding adequate footwear something of a problem … Lincoln was the first U.S. president to sport a full beard … Lincoln spoke with a high-pitched voice … His contemporaries variously described his voice as being “shrill” or “sharp.” The journalist Horace White described Lincoln as having “a thin tenor, or rather falsetto, voice, almost as high-pitched as a boatswain’s whistle.” … He was the first president to keep cats as pets … Lincoln Is the Tallest Person Ever to Serve as President … Standing at 6 feet, 4 inches, he remains the tallest president of all time.

… Germany’s army and air force were broken on the Eastern Front’s titanic battles. The numbers speak for themselves. The Soviets destroyed 75-80 percent of all German divisions – four million soldiers — and most of the Luftwaffe. Russia lost at least 14 million soldiers and a similar number of civilians. The Red Army destroyed 507 Axis divisions. On the Western Front after D-Day, the Allies destroyed 176 badly under-strength German divisions … World War II was not a good and evil struggle between “western democracies” and “totalitarian powers,” as we are still wrongly taught.

The great D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, was a high point of World War II and of the US role in defeating Hitler’s Germany. The anniversary of this greatest amphibious assault in history is a good opportunity to take a sober look at some comfortable falsehoods and myths about the “good war.” The familiar American portrayal of World War II, and the “good war” mythology of the US role in it, is not just bad history. It has helped greatly to support and justify a series of arrogant US foreign policy adventures, with harmful consequences for both America and the world. Runtime: 50 mins.

Karol Nawrocki, a right-wing historian involved in Poland’s recent efforts to revise Holocaust history to minimize the role of local collaborators, has been elected president of Poland. Nawrocki eked out a narrow victory over Rafał Trzaskowski, Warsaw’s liberal-centrist mayor, in a runoff election on Sunday … The election carried steep stakes for how Poland memorializes the Holocaust, when 3 million Polish Jews were murdered in a Nazi campaign supported by Polish collaborators. Law and Justice promoted historical narratives about Polish victimhood and resistance to the Nazis, while delegitimizing research on Polish antisemitism or Poles who killed Jews. In 2018, the country passed a law that outlawed accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes.

Concern about mass migration is a “terrorist ideology” that requires intervention by the [British] Government’s anti-radicalisation Prevent programme, according to official documents. An online training course hosted on the Government’s website for Prevent lists “cultural nationalism” as a belief that could lead to an individual being referred to the deradicalisation scheme. This encompasses a conviction that “Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups”, staff taking the course are told. It is the latest example of officials, police and the courts appearing to restrict free speech.

… Last Tuesday, I watched in horror a different celebration of Jerusalem Day … These [Jewish Israeli] teens were not celebrating a “unification” of Jerusalem. Rather, they were celebrating conquest, domination and Jewish supremacy … The scene felt more like a KKK march or a medieval pogrom. “May your village burn” is one popular song, “Death to the Arabs” another. The marchers sing “There is no school in Gaza because there are no children left,” celebrating the killing of children, while people are starving in Gaza … The crowd became more like a mob as it entered the Old City Shuk … A group of boys accosted two Muslim women, and another one spat on an elderly Palestinian man. Anticipating the vandalism, a store owner protected his ATM with a cardboard sign that read “Belongs to a Jew. Please don’t destroy.”

… In the 1990s, Buchanan was virtually alone in warning that the West was in decline — culturally, spiritually, and economically. The relative prosperity and comfort of the ’90s muffled his prophecy, and few listened … The polite right has had its time — and failed. While Trump may be the most visible beneficiary of Buchanan’s intellectual legacy, the future belongs to those young men and women now entering the institutions of politics, media, and civic life. Their influence will not be limited to elections, but to the cultural soil out of which political movements grow. Buchanan was once a lone voice, a dissident within his own party. Today, his ideas no longer echo in isolation. They resound in lecture halls, in podcasts, in online reading groups, and in quiet conversations among friends questioning what went wrong with the American dream.

… Who really won the war? Certainly, the Soviets who, after losses in the millions from the Nazi invasion, ended up occupying Berlin, having annexed the Baltic states and turned Eastern Europe into a Soviet base camp … The Americans, who stayed out longest, ended the war with the least losses of any great power. Yet, America is a part of the West, and the West was the loser of the world wars of the last century. Indeed, the two wars between 1914 and 1945 may be seen as the Great Civil War of the West, the Thirty Years War of Western Civilization that culminated in the loss of all the Western empires and the ultimate conquest of the West by the liberated peoples of their former colonies.

… Elad Barashi, a producer at Israel’s Channel 14, surpassed even this hatred by writing on social media in early May: “Good morning. Let there be a holocaust in Gaza.” In another post, he wrote: “I can’t understand the people here in the State of Israel who don’t want to fill Gaza with gas chambers … or train cars … and finish this story. Let there be a holocaust in Gaza.” … and wrote: “Without fear, without weakness – just Crush. Eliminate. Slaughter. Flatten. Dismantle. Smash. Shatter.” The fanatic Netanyahu has been indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, yet he is a hero in our Congress because of campaign contributions. The rest of the world is overwhelmingly against the genocide in Gaza.

… Mr. Trump is taking a wrecking ball to the pillars of American power and innovation … China’s trajectory couldn’t be more different. It already leads global production in multiple industries — steel, aluminum, shipbuilding, batteries, solar power, electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, 5G equipment, consumer electronics, active pharmaceutical ingredients and bullet trains. It is projected to account for 45 percent — nearly half — of global manufacturing by 2030. Beijing is also laser-focused on winning the future … Yet Mr. Trump remains fixated on tariffs. He doesn’t even seem to grasp the scale of the threat posed by China … The enduring strength of a state-dominated Chinese system that can pivot, change policy and redirect resources at will in service of long-term national strength is now undeniable …

… [President Woodrow] Wilson, an inveterate Anglophile, followed an unneutral course of conduct after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. In spite of urging America to be neutral in thought, word, and deed, Wilson soon tilted our foreign policy toward the British cause. He insisted that the Germans strictly respect American neutrality while colluding with the illegal British hunger blockade of Germany, a blockade responsible for a vast number of deaths from starvation … Wilson said that the League of Nations, his pet project, would ensure lasting peace. Instead, it cemented in place the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

… Without [President Woodrow] Wilson’s misguided decision to take the United States into World War I — despite the lack of any serious American interest in that tragic conflict — there probably would have been no Bolshevik revolution, and there certainly would have been no Nazi triumph or World War II. Even the Middle East would have looked dramatically different … Perhaps the most important reason Wilson chose war was a desire to transform the world. Only as president of a victorious belligerent power could he impose his vision … Messianic self-delusion simply blinded Wilson … As Mr. Powell shows so well in Wilson’s War, the only certain impact of needless warmaking is enormous tragedy. Only the forms of that tragedy will remain uncertain.

… Because Jews have earned themselves remarkable amounts of money, power, and influence per capita, then it’s imprudent for you to worry them by mentioning it. Still, it’s hard to understand how America works in the 21st century without thinking hard about what Jews are thinking … About one-third of the richest 100 Americans in 2019 were Jewish … Among the top 100 donors, Jews still contributed 68 percent of Democratic funds, down only slightly from 2020’s 76 percent … Among the top 100 in 2020, Jews accounted for 61 percent of contributions to either party, but that share fell to 39 percent in 2024, due in part to Jewish giving to both parties dropping 6 percent.

… In 1923, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded jointly to Sir Frederick G. Banting, a Canadian, and John J. R. Macleod, a Scotsman, for the discovery of insulin, one of the greatest medical advances of modern times … A substantial body of persuasive evidence indicates that the Nobel Committee made a major error in 1923, and that the award should rightfully have gone to an almost forgotten Romanian physiologist, Nicolae Paulescu … Paulescu’s most important achievement was his successful isolation of the pancreas hormone that regulates the blood sugar level. He began work in this field in 1916, but the First World War interrupted his investigation. In 1921 he announced the discovery of the hormone extract, which he called “pancreine,” now known universally as insulin.

… Since October 7, 2023, dehumanizing rhetoric about Palestinians and calls for the eradication of Gaza have become commonplace in Israel’s political and media spheres. Expressed by government ministers, lawmakers, military experts and public figures, these statements have been used to justify the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, especially women and children, the destruction of entire cities, the concentration of more than two million people in conditions deemed unlivable by international organizations, incitement to forced emigration, and the blockade of food and humanitarian aid to the point of famine … Oher Israeli lawmakers have defended the necessity of killing children and destroying the territory – some, like Netanyahu, invoke Amalek to justify the scale of the destruction.

… Many in Generation Z can see that our ‘free’ society has degenerated into instability and uncertainty. If ‘freedom’ means being unable to afford a home, to live in overcrowded and overpriced rented accommodation, to work soulless jobs in order to pay sky-high taxes, and to have no sense of belonging or identity, perhaps freedom is not what we need. So it’s no shock to read that a recent survey commissioned by Channel 4 found that 52 per cent of Britons aged 13 to 27 have lost faith in democracy and would welcome a dictator – a strong leader ‘who does not have to bother with parliament and elections’ … Young people in particular recognise that political leaders of all parties have made an abysmal mess of running things. No wonder so many believe it’s time for a radical alternative.

More than once I have come across the view that if British lads of the 1940s could have foreseen the state of their country today, they would never have bothered to fight the Second World War. Few of those who have heard that view may realize that there is empirical evidence to support it … The prevailing tone of their letters is one of bitterness over what had become of the county they once cherished. Of the four or five most often voiced complaints, the most common is over mass migration from other countries and continents, and how that has drastically changed British life, culture and society … “The men who offered their lives have been betrayed and gave their lives in vain. Most of the older people say thank goodness we are ending our lives. It is no longer the Britain that we fought for.”

Jeremy Corbyn was the leader of Britain’s Labour Party prior to the current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer … Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn, a book by British journalist, Asa Winstanley … Corbyn’s political demise, according to Winstanley, was “death by a thousand investigations into anti-Semitism”. The book represents seven-years’ research into Labour’s relationship with (and attack by) the Jewish lobby by Winstanley and colleagues at his website, Electronic Intifada. A long-time Labour member himself before leaving the party in disgust, Winstanley and his site represent a rare voice, one critical of Jewish presence and influence in British politics … It is not sufficient in British politics to pay lip-service to Israel. You must support Zionism, at least tacitly.

Among the cactuses in the desert of Arizona, just outside Phoenix, an extraordinary collection of buildings is emerging that will shape the future of the global economy and the world. The hum of further construction is creating not just a factory for the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Eventually, it will mass produce the most advanced chips in the world. This work is being done in the US for the first time, with the Taiwanese company behind it pledging to spend billions more here in a move aimed at heading off the threat of tariffs on imported chips. It is, in my view, the most important factory in the world, and it’s being built by a company you may not have heard of: TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. It makes 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductors.