JUST IN - UK government says that medical data of half a million people from the UK's health information database, Biobank, has been offered for sale on Chinese website Alibaba.

UPDATE - Chief executive and principal investigator of UK Biobank, said that "with support from both the UK and Chinese governments," Alibaba has now removed the listings "before any sales were made."

@disclosetv

Francis Hoar decided to comment on the post above which quotes me. He doesn't reply to me but goes on another person's post to comment about me. This is someone I know fairly well, frequented socially, etc. before October 7th. His comment is below. 👇

The Mechanistic Fallacy — Why the West So Often Fails at Geo-Politics

Some fifteen years ago I wrote that western reliance on its lens of secular rationality was no longer adequate as a means to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was becoming obvious — even then — that the future of the region would be one of wars increasingly defined by religious symbols: i.e. Al-Aqsa versus the Third Temple.

Since then, things have moved on: In Israel, national elections in November 2022 brought a new leadership committed to founding Israel on the ‘Land of (Greater) Israel’; displacing the non-Jewish population and implementing Halachic law.

The new government’s platform was an expression of an eschatological and messianic purpose with a teleology of pursuing a path toward messianic Redemption. It was not secular, nor couched in Enlightenment tones.

My point then — and still is — that Western secular mechanistic ways of thinking will misunderstand these fundamental shifts. The West insists to apply its westernised conceptual precepts to something — Messianism and the pursuit of Redemption — that lies outside the frame of today’s post-modern western consciousness. We understand well enough power politics, but eschatology largely is a closed-book to most western seculars.

The bottom line is that no purpose is served in trying to convince those absorbed by a messianic vision that their solution consists of a two-state political structure in historic Palestine. The former actually welcome Armageddon and the defeat it would portend for non-Jews.

Nor can this be viewed as a passing phase, or a whim. Messianism has been a prominent, yet fluctuating, impulse in Judaism since Sabbatai Zevi (1660s) and Jacob Franks (18th century). (Some of its thinking filtered into European notions too, during the later Enlightenment period).

Jewish historian and scholar, Gershom Scholem, correctly predicted that religious Zionism — which in recent decades has aligned with Likud and the settler movement — operates as a "militant," "apocalyptic," and "radical" messianic movement that tries to "force the end" by demanding that the state engage in, for example, massive territorial control — i.e. they demand territorial conquest for end-of-times reasons.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, western mechanistic rationality however, has proved to be as much at a loss in its grasp of what motivates Iran as it is in understanding today’s Israel. The literal approach simply amputates any awareness of Iran’s deeper resistance and revolutionary anima.

Rather, we choose to project onto Iran our image of the 19th century nation-state -- the concept of a state ruled by top-down, centralised government as the dominant, sometimes autocratic, vehicle of rule over which wider polities once were governed through other principles of legitimacy.

In an interview in 1979 with Richard Falk, Ayatollah Khomeinei said plainly that the Revolution was a civilizational rather than a national triumph. He stressed that he felt that the basic community for all people in the Islamic world was civilizational and religious -- and not national and territorial. Khomeini explained that territorial sovereign states built around national identity did not form a natural community in the Middle East in the way they did in Europe.

His insistent theme was to express the view that a government consistent with Islamic values could not be reliably established on democratic principles without it being subject to unelected religious guidance from top Islamic clerical scholars as the source of highest political authority.

The repression of Islam (forced secularisation) and the destruction of the Caliphate pursued by Mustafa Kamal in the early 1900s had led Seyyed Qutub to preach revolutionary vanguardism until his execution in 1966. Qutb’s writings, but more particularly his Social Justice in Islam — coinciding with mass protests throughout the Muslim world at the partition of Palestine in 1947 — laid the principal groundwork for the revolutionary thinking that would emerge in Iran.

A group calling itself “People Against Genocide” targeted a site operated by logistics company DSV near Birmingham Airport in the United Kingdom.

The activists accuse DSV of transporting weapons for Elbit, Israel's largest arms manufacturer, saying the company is part of a supply chain linked to the genocide in the Gaza Strip.

People Against Genocide at the Elbit Arms factory in Leicester