3 May 2025
Last week started with a sobering moment on TV last Sunday evening Louis Theroux had to ask an Israeli soldier not to point a gun at him while he was filming The Settlers, a documentary about the Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. He suggested to one of them who was trying to sneak into Gaza to decide where the new Jewish settlements should be that their philosophy sound more like sociopathy. The programme included a film of an unarmed Palestinian being shot and seriously wounded; we were told that his gun licence was subsequently revoked by the Israelis but he was never arrested.
Some of the settlers had even come from America to build homes in the land they thought their God had given them, and they all carried guns. Theroux didn’t ask if their God thought carrying lethal weapons was a good idea even though one of the settlers took Theroux into a synagogue and, still fully-armed, showed him the Torah scrolls on which their faith is based. He seemed almost surprised to be asked if weapons were allowed in the synagogue, presumably because he hadn’t actually read the Torah, or the sixth of the ten commandments in Exodus which forbids killing people. ‘Commandments’, not polite suggestions.
Perhaps when the settler heard that Jewish tradition says the Torah actually contains 613 commandments, they just gave up and said “Praise the Lord and pass the ammo”*.
As Benjamin Netanyahu becomes more and more desperate to stay in power, he seized on the worst wildfires for years burning near Jerusalem to declare a national emergency. Several people have already been injured and hundreds more were at risk so the Israeli military has sent in the troops to help. Meanwhile, in Gaza, tens of thousands of people have been killed and injured by the Israeli military – let’s hope they remember they’re supposed to be saving people from the fires not killing them.
At Pope Francis’s funeral, Donald Trump, showed the world to see just how crass he is. Having insisted on sitting in the front row in full view of the cameras, he was all too obviously the only person at the ceremony who was so discourteous that he wasn’t wearing black, his blue suit and tie standing out like a spare thingummy at a wotsit. During the service, he chewed gum, checked his phone, and waved at people until he fell asleep. Interesting that he chose the colour of the Democratic party …
Just as insensitive, but not as well reported, was a press release from Al Kennedy, the head of Trinity School, Croydon, who wrote that “The governors of the school and of the John Whitgift Foundation, along with the Senior Management Team, have unanimously agreed that Trinity will become fully co-educational … by 2031.” Finally catching up with the times, except that Kennedy signed off as “Headmaster”. You’d expect him to have known his union is called the National Association of Head Teachers.
Slightly less worrying, at least to me, was my tracking down BOTB, an acronym which sometimes appears uninvited while I’m on the computer. Google says it’s the name of a gambling company so some targeting cookie has selected me as a likely customer and shown me their advertisements, not knowing I never click on advertisements (or bet). Sad really because I though BOTB was an abbreviation of ‘Back of the Bus’ or ‘Bottom of the Barrel’ although, thinking about it, I wonder if I wasn’t that far out.
I also now know which is the largest city in the world. I’d have guessed at Tokyo which, I’m almost sure, used to be the largest city, and I wouldn’t have been that far out. It’s Chongqing in central China (no, me neither), and has a population of 34 million people**.
However, it’s not one homogenous conurbation and takes in several discrete urban areas so I guess one could argue its claim to be one city is more due to its administrative classification as a single municipality than from its being a clearly identifiable urban sprawl.
Anyway, it manufactures more cars than England and France together, one in three laptops and one in ten of the motorbikes sold worldwide, and covers an area the size of Austria.
From the pictures I’ve seen of Chongqing, I’d rather live in Austria.
I didn’t know that dozens of countries had agreed a decade ago to ban the production, storage and use of landmines but they are being used by both sides in Russia’s war on Ukraine and five European countries that share borders with Russia are now planning to withdraw from the treaty because they’re worried about the increasing unpredictability of Vladimir Putin. Actually, I suppose he could be doing a Netanyahu and keeping the war going because he’s worried about being deposed, a form of paranoia shared by rulers at least as far as Henry IV Part II who said “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” (it’s not known if his predecessor, Henry IV Part I, had the same fears).
While I’m not talking of dogs, I read an interesting article on how many words dogs can recognise and it mentioned a collie whose owner told their partner they couldn’t find their keys, following which the dog ran off and came back with them in its mouth.
What an opportunity I missed! We used to play ‘hide and seek’ with ours and shut them out of a room where they waited patiently while we hid a dog toy. When we opened the door, they’d rush in and sniff round the room until they found it. Just imagine if we’d thought of training them to find specific things, like keys or a phone, and then told them what to look for instead of just saying “Seek!”
* A phrase said to have been spoken by a chaplain on a US gunboat in the Second World War
** About half the population of the UK
Lesser Mutterings 