I studied in the academic department at Cambridge that later employed Jason Arday. Here's just some of the crap I learnt: For one module, I wrote a lengthy essay about how cultural products like kids’ cartoons and jazz songs serve as instruments of capitalist oppression. I got a top mark on that paper (despite knowing at the time that I was essentially regurgitating complete crap). While studying for another paper I had a debate with the professor, an eminent anthropologist, because she insisted that native tribes could fly through the trees - not metaphorically, but that they could literally fly because they believed they could fly. After all, who are we to question ‘indigenous ways of knowing’... For a different course, I read long ‘research papers’ which argued that the fact that black kids are excluded from schools more than white kids proves systemic racism exists in education. Crucially, they ignored the fact that white kids are excluded more than, e.g., Japanese kids, a statistic which, applying the exact same logic, would suggest that the education system is systemically biased in favour of, erm, Japanese kids (which obviously it isn’t). Something that was held up as proof of the existence of this largely imaginary racism was that teachers tell kids not to use booming voices in the classroom, and not to put up their hoods or wear their trousers down below their pants. On another occasion, my supervisor casually praised some students agitators who were trying to shut down a talk by someone they disagreed with. I said that I didn’t think this was something to celebrate, because I believed in freedom of speech. He got visibly angry, and proceeded to tell me that free speech was not worth protecting in a capitalist system (or something along those lines). In my all-important final year, a lecturer let me know that I shouldn’t worry too much about my exam results, because as someone who was not from an upper class background I should be more focussed on using my grasp of leftist revolutionary theory to further the interests of the proletariat. Writing this down, it strikes me that it’s so hilariously mental that some of you will presumably assume I’m lying. But there’s no way I’m leaving it out, because it happened. Unlike the academics who make a living from this stuff, I couldn’t bring myself to build a career pumping out whiney, divisive, intellectually incoherent rubbish. But others, as we’ve seen exposed in recent days, do so with gusto. And are lauded for it. Please read the full piece this is taken from, and give it a share. I've linked it in the tweet below.

Let’s look at some of the genocides the ‘Islamists’ don’t give a toss about… via my Instagram (handle: @maxklingerpolitics)

Not true, my illiterate friend. There are many examples of genocides against non-Jews. For example, there was the time Muslim groups murdered well over a million Armenians and other minorities to create a more Muslim Turkey. The Muslim regime in charge of Turkey still routinely denies it, despite overwhelming evidence, while shrieking 'genocide' at Israel. Or there was the time Islamic State barbarians murdered every Yazidi they could find (apart from the ones they held as sex slaves). I remember that one well, partly because many Muslims from my area in London left the UK to join ISIS as they were carrying out that orgy of medieval slaughter. Many of their friends and family members, who didn't bat an eyelid about that, are now shrieking endlessly about 'genocide' in Gaza - which is, ofc, simply a response to a genocidal attack on Israel by Gazan jihadists. Or we could point to the ongoing genocidal mass murder of Christians across Africa, right now, by Muslims. Can provide more if you'd like.

What an actual genocide looks like, btw. Anyway, time for some context about the so-called 'Nakba' that is, always, conveniently left out: During the 6 million person drop shown here, the leaders of the Arabs in the British mandate for Palestine sided with the Nazis. Immediately after the Nazis killed 6 million Jews, the Arabs launched a war. The aim of the war was to destroy the Jewish state that took in those Jews who'd survived and fled for safety to the Jewish homeland, despite the fact that those Jews openly offered to split the land and accept peace. The Arabs humiliatingly lost, then ethnically cleansed their countries of all Jews in a fit of racist fury. During that war, that they started, under 1 million Arabs left the Jewish state. All of this gets boiled down to a fake victim narrative in which the true victims of all of this were the Arabs, who as a result of their genocidal efforts to kill and conquer the surviving Jews, lost their homes in the region their neighbouring Arab states invaded. They were forced to move a few miles down the road, to countries with populations that were culturally almost identical, and spoke the same language. That's the supposed 'Nakba' that, we are still told almost 8 decades later, invalidates the entirety of Israel's existence.

If only there were some event in history that would allow us to understand the significance of angry deeply hostile foreign hordes storming through the gates of Rome

The Nazis killed 6 million Jews, a million in Auschwitz alone, the vast majority of whom were non-combatants. In Gaza, around 70k have died, around 1/3 of whom, if not higher, are actively engaged in trying to destroy Israel, which they attacked first and vowed to annihilate. These people, and large parts of the movement they represent, are almost so thick and dishonest as to make it impossible to engage with them in any meaningful way. Their entire worldview is built on the absolutely relentless, shameless inversion of basic facts, for purely instrumental reasons (namely, the furthering of the ends of imperialist Islam). Which, obviously, is why this stuff doesn’t only affect Jews. Their propaganda is designed to chip away at society’s grasp of reality - that screws everyone over in the longer run.

Totally fair enough. After all, how else are these fighting age men in Spain meant to respond to French schools marginally reducing their book supplies?

‘What’s happening in Gaza is worse than the Nazis! It’s worse than any other war in world history! It’s worse than the limitless wars of annihilation and genocides perpetrated by Muslim regimes, including ones going on right now, that have claimed literally thousands of times more lives that we support’. How does anyone fall for this melodrama. The war’s horrifying. But ya boyz stormed through a fence, murdered and raped absolutely everyone, vowed to do it again, seized captives to massacre in tunnels, then hid in schools and hospitals. Now they’re experiencing the absolutely inevitable response. Stop with the cry bullying.

Is that before or after the part where you detonate bombs in concert halls full of children and rape women to death?

‘Zionist’ is a historic term. In the current context, its meaning is that you don’t think Israel should be annihilated and/or conquered and subsumed by Islam. If you are not a ‘Zionist’, by definition you think Israel - the world’s only tiny jewish state, and only that state, should be wiped out. That’s why the term ‘Zionist’ is a misnomer here. Given that Israel has already *been* established, and survived multiple genocidal attempts by Muslim armies to destroy it, it makes no sense to say you are or aren’t a Zionist, it’s like saying you are or aren’t an ‘abolitionist’ - sure, if slavery existed in the West (as it does in parts of the Muslim world) I’d be an abolitionist. But it doesn’t, so the term is not relevant now. Similarly, Israel exists. So the divide isn’t between ‘Zionists’ and ‘anti-Zionists’, it’s between people who want to wipe out a state and those who don’t.

Here’s something more racist: invading a festival and shooting hundreds of people to death because they’re Jews

This I think ranks among the truly maddest things to have come out of posting on here and writing/talking about politics more generally. An invite from the Free Press (@TheFP) - out of the blue - to attend their ‘creator summit’, in New York with a handful of some of the biggest and best writers, political content creators and so on in the world. In the middle of Times Square, with a massive billboard lit up to advertise the event. An honour. Genuinely wild and slightly surreal, but amazing.