Veteran | Ulsterman | NICivil Defence Lead | Volunteer Youth Leader (ACF) | Military Historian | resilience service heritage • dog dad, UK/Aus citizen 🇬🇧🇦🇺
County Antrim UK
Joined January 2013
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JohnR retweeted
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
JohnR retweeted
Weaponising the word "supremacist" against Unionists is a lazy attempt to delegitimise an entire community.
Advocating for the Union and our heritage within a democratic framework may not be liked by some, but it’s a legitimate position, not an attempt to dominate anyone.
JohnR retweeted
Anyone planning to attend a demonstration in support of Palestine Action in the vicinity of the US Embassy on Saturday, 31 October will face arrest as part of a robust policing operation.
Expressing support for the group is an offence under the Terrorism Act following its proscription in June 2025, a decision upheld by the Court of Appeal in June 2026.
Read more: news.met.police.uk/news/met-…
JohnR retweeted
Update on investigation into the Drumcree /Garvaghy Road protest. Assistant Chief Constable Beck has confirmed that the investigative work to build evidential cases relating to those involved in the Drumcree/Garvaghy Road protest continues. Details here: orlo.uk/I1u7Q
JohnR retweeted
Starting to freak out a little about the number of previously normal people in my circles who are being infected seemingly overnight with virulent strains of Jew-hatred.
JohnR retweeted
Inclusion!
Derry City and Strabane District Council has voted to withdraw any involvement in the organisation or marketing of any future jobs fair that includes the British Armed Forces.
bbc.in/4szG890
JohnR retweeted
HORRIFYING: New footage shows Boko Haram Islamic jihadists in Africa massacring Christians with machetes.
This year alone, more Christians have been killed in Nigeria than Palestinians in 3 years of war.
Don’t stop talking about the real genocide of Christians in Nigeria.
JohnR retweeted
Here is Storm Boelo seen from space, covering the whole of the UK ⚠️
ALT The latest satellite image of the UK showing Storm Boelo covering all parts, with the centre of the low sat to the west of Scotland.
JohnR retweeted
If you want to know what's happening in France, and why it is happening, @MontbrialAvocat is one of the very best accounts to follow. He's the chief prosecutor in Islamist terror cases there, & has had to live under 24/7 armed guard for 10 years. He knows his stuff.
JohnR retweeted
🚨 Shocking attack on a Jewish woman in Clapton Common in London. This was the second assault after another Jewish woman was punched in the face. There’s potentially many other victims. Just horrifying.
JohnR retweeted
“We never heard from 23 children ever again.”
A major report into the Ballymena riots reveals the devastating impact on children and families, serious concerns over public service failures and calls for a five-year recovery plan.
loveballymena.online/post/ba…
JohnR retweeted
Better quality: German troops open fire on two armed serbs who attacked the Germans. Prizren, 1999.
JohnR retweeted
This is truly appalling antisemitism
The governors of the school must act robustly as must the local authority
There was a situation at my daughter’s school last week which left her in tears. I went in to the school the day after to let them know we were removing her with immediate effect. The head teacher tried to explain but I had no interest in her excuses or reasons.
The school had a play and an open evening for next year’s new pupils, and my daughter’s class were asked to take the potential new pupils and their parents for a tour of the school and classes.
My daughter is the most softly spoken, polite and friendly child you’d probably ever meet. She’s one of just 40 Jewish pupils at the school out of over a thousand children. My wife wanted her to go to a non Jewish school because she felt concerned about the security threats at Jewish schools, and I don’t have much say in the matter as I’m just the dad. Our youngest goes to a Jewish school and the security simply isn’t anywhere good enough. This would be both their last year at school in this country because we’d already made the decision to leave the country before their next school year.
My oldest wears a tiny discreet Star of David pendant. It’s so inoffensive to anybody but allows her to express her Jewish faith in a small way.
When it was her turn in line to greet the family she would show around, the family was a Muslim family. My daughter has no personal issue with anybody and is friendly with two Muslim girls in her class who aren’t bothered by her being Jewish. But this family clearly were. In front of everyone, the father refused to be shown around by “a Jew”. He apparently, according to several parents and a teacher, raised his voice at her, and demanded that another child show them around. Instead of the head teacher condemning his behavior and telling him to leave, she asked my daughter to step aside and asked another pupil to show them around. Nobody except other parents, non Jewish parents, came to my daughter to ask if she was even ok. She was in a flood of tears, frightened and confused.
My wife got a phone call from another parent and insisted she would go fetch our daughter because she already knew what I would do had I gone there myself. But this is what we live in now. This is the new normal.
For reasons of what will come next, I won’t name the school. But this is going to escalate, a lot.
JohnR retweeted
On this day—October 12, 2000
The Ramallah lynching.
Two Israeli reservists took a wrong turn. Yossi Avrahami, a 38-year-old toy salesman, and Vadim Nurzhitz, a 33-year-old truck driver, were heading to their unit near Beit El in a civilian Ford Escort. They took a wrong turn and ended up in Palestinian Authority-controlled Ramallah.
PA police stopped them, but instead of turning them around, the officers took them to the police station in el-Bireh. Rumors spread that Israelis were being held there, and more than 1,000 Palestinians descended on the station and began calling for their execution.
They stormed the station, found the two Israelis and began beating, stabbing, and mutilating them. Aziz Salha later described entering the room: “We were in a craze to see blood … I saw an Israeli soldier sprawled on the floor … a knife lodged in his back … I removed the knife and stabbed him … I put my hand over his mouth … to strangle him.”
He then walked to the window, hands and shirt soaked in blood, and waved at the baying crowd below. An Italian television crew captured it, and broadcast the images to the world. One of the bodies was thrown from that same window, and the mob immediately started stomping on and beating him. The other man was shot and set on fire. Once they were unrecognizable as humans, the crowd dragged their bodies through the streets to Al-Manara Square for an impromptu celebration.
British photographer Mark Seager arrived in time to see a body being hauled by the feet, lower half on fire, head “a pulp, like a red jelly.” He reached for his camera, but the mob stormed him with punches. They smashed his equipment and shouted, “no picture.” He later wrote: “It was the most horrible thing that I have ever seen and I have reported from Congo, Kosovo, many bad places … There was such hatred … It was murder of the most barbaric kind. When I think about it, I see that man’s head, all smashed. I know that I’ll have nightmares for the rest of my life.”
A Palestinian police officer, Raed Sheikh, later admitted he took an iron pipe into the room and struck one of the still-living Israelis across the body and head. “The soldier began making a grunting noise.”
This was not “resistance.” It was a deliberate, ecstatic, public slaughter of two Israeli men who had taken a wrong turn, carried out in broad daylight by a Palestinian mob.
The image of Salha’s bloody hands became a defining photograph. Salha was later arrested, convicted of murder, sentenced to life, released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal, and finally killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza in 2024.
Decades later, Hollywood celebrities and other professional virtue-signalers put on red hand pins. They call it a “ceasefire” symbol. To anyone who lived through October 2000 or who otherwise knows anything about the history of the conflict, those pins are not ambiguous. They are a stylized recreation of the exact gesture a murderer used to show a cheering crowd the blood of the Jews he had just helped butcher. The useful idiots who wear them either do not know, or they do know and have decided the image is aesthetic. Either way, it is a disgrace.
JohnR retweeted
There was a situation at my daughter’s school last week which left her in tears. I went in to the school the day after to let them know we were removing her with immediate effect. The head teacher tried to explain but I had no interest in her excuses or reasons.
The school had a play and an open evening for next year’s new pupils, and my daughter’s class were asked to take the potential new pupils and their parents for a tour of the school and classes.
My daughter is the most softly spoken, polite and friendly child you’d probably ever meet. She’s one of just 40 Jewish pupils at the school out of over a thousand children. My wife wanted her to go to a non Jewish school because she felt concerned about the security threats at Jewish schools, and I don’t have much say in the matter as I’m just the dad. Our youngest goes to a Jewish school and the security simply isn’t anywhere good enough. This would be both their last year at school in this country because we’d already made the decision to leave the country before their next school year.
My oldest wears a tiny discreet Star of David pendant. It’s so inoffensive to anybody but allows her to express her Jewish faith in a small way.
When it was her turn in line to greet the family she would show around, the family was a Muslim family. My daughter has no personal issue with anybody and is friendly with two Muslim girls in her class who aren’t bothered by her being Jewish. But this family clearly were. In front of everyone, the father refused to be shown around by “a Jew”. He apparently, according to several parents and a teacher, raised his voice at her, and demanded that another child show them around. Instead of the head teacher condemning his behavior and telling him to leave, she asked my daughter to step aside and asked another pupil to show them around. Nobody except other parents, non Jewish parents, came to my daughter to ask if she was even ok. She was in a flood of tears, frightened and confused.
My wife got a phone call from another parent and insisted she would go fetch our daughter because she already knew what I would do had I gone there myself. But this is what we live in now. This is the new normal.
For reasons of what will come next, I won’t name the school. But this is going to escalate, a lot.
JohnR retweeted
@HMSQNLZ is hugely grateful for welcoming us to Belfast to build on the strong links between the city and the Royal Navy. We hosted Strategic Leaders, Cadets and local military personnel, played local sports teams and our sailors got to explore! We will strive to return again!
