Who doesn’t read of the recent incursion by Ukraine into Russian land and not grin like a Spurs fan at a postmortem meeting for an Arsenal loss? I’ll tell you who’s not grinning, Vladimir Putin. Though he seems rather quite powerless to re-take control of that little extreme part of his territory currently under enemy occupation. And how that must hurt him. His pride, his megalomania, his ability to lie to his citizens that ‘there is no war’. In due course there will come ‘the retaliation’, and God help us all, but meanwhile, we can enjoy. And rejoice at the sheer chutzpah of Zelensky.

Meanwhile in Doha, there having ‘ceasefire talks’ about Gaza. The Israelis turned up but Hamas were busy this weekend with the start of the new Premier League season so cried off. When the Israelis initially refused the talks were going to happen anyway. Such is the collective stupidity and arrogance of international diplomats who feel that they can reach decisions of great importance with neither of the protagonists present. They’re ’that good’ at what they do. Whereas the reality is that even if both warring parties were in attendance, the chances of them doing Biden’s or Qatar’s bidding is pretty minimal anyway. So the show goes on.

And have you ever wondered (unless you’ve seen that super little video I watched the other day) why there is not one single bomb shelter in the whole of Palestine? There are 500 miles of tunnels, so they know how to dig, but not one place where civilians might go for safety. If, f’rinstance, you happen to live next to a highly armed nation who are always 100% war ready and you go into that nation and murder 1200 of its people. AND… you’ve planned this for years and are under no illusions as to what was the totally inevitable consequence of that attack.

But bomb shelters are what civilised countries provide for their populations at such times. Hamas choose an alternative path. Which involves the total sacrifice of any or all of ‘the civilian population’. Every woman and child killed by bombs or missiles is a win for Hamas by giving it another finger to point at Israel. So not only are there no bomb shelters, Hamas uses the terrorists version of a honey trap to increase civilian deaths. It buries its arms depots and stores under schools, hospitals, refugee centres, anywhere which will cause maximum ‘outrage’ by observers only capable of reading banner headlines and not the full text.

Similarly, everyone has now accepted that “40,000” Palestinians have died in Israeli attacks. Even though, as they always tell us, “this figure comes from Hamas”. And because the BBC would rather trust a murderous death cult intent on using the deaths of its own people to advance its political narrative, than to question this. Even though it would appear that about 50,000 of those 40,000 (???), are women and children. Whereas in fact at least 15,000 deaths are of Hamas ‘soldiers’. Or ‘terrorists’ as they would be called if they lived next door to you.

Never mind, at least the football’s back.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx