I’m sorry to see this.
Side effect of the heat wave: nervousness 
Ahhh, but this is precisely where the block button comes into its own. Press it and you’re no longer having to see it! 
Seriously though, in social media, as in life, there’s a happy medium between creating an unhealthy echo chamber of only the views you like to hear and enduring all manner of vile hate speech and bad faith actors just to be someone who hears all voices all the time. This place is generally more dinner party than that but the ethos still holds, for me at least.
I do like when the nutters pop up and I can snark them back into their box though, that’s very therapeutic.
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SF hasn’t remotely resembled a dinner party since I’ve been a member. Although the bad language and grotesque sexual metaphors (the latter pretty much one person) have largely gone.
Its problem is not so much its political homogeneity as the way that a few of the louder voices, when encountering a different opinion, react with accusations of bigotry and with ad hominem remarks, rather than engaging in reasoned discussion.
Fortunately the moderation is very sound, and @billybutcher seems always to be able to separate his own trenchant opinions from his role as moderator.
Developing the metaphor for my taste, it’s more like a well-run pub. Many regulars are more than a touch eccentric (perhaps I should say I’m talking about myself). Some people have very definite opinions and some like to discuss things in order to learn how others think, and perhaps to build consensus. I’ve learned a lot, and I’m grateful.
I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not 
I must be slipping 
It was a compliment.
I have to disagree Porridge. Maybe you just attend very homogeneous, like minded dinner parties. A bit of robust, passionate discourse makes a dinner party.
If only.
The list of non-liberal/left members could be written on the back of a postage stamp.
And robust debate is great. You and I have huge disagreements, but you never descend to personal attacks. I value that.
Whether on SF or not, anybody that does that has already lost the argument. Sadly the clown in the Whitehouse, who should be a role model, is instead making vacuous abuse the norm.
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Are French courts now influenced by Israel?
Should someone in an occupied territory be able to legally resist the occupying power. Granted that this is not quite such a simple situation, but the question is still valid.
I hope they would uphold the law without fear or favour
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Whether someone should be able legally to resist an occupying power is a separate question, and one which will inevitable be answered “no”.
The answer to the moral question will probably depend on who wins. The Israelis were once terrorists, and the ANC, and Sinn Fein at least supporters of it.
However … If I understand correctly, Mohamed Makni’s remarks related to the October 7 attacks on Israel, which included attacks on civilians, and rape and sexual violence “[which was] systematic and integral to [the] … attacks and their aftermath” (Sexual violence was systematic and integral to Oct. 7 attacks and their aftermath, new report says). That went well beyond legitimate resistance (and it would set a dangerous precedent if one were to accept that rape and sexual violence could ever be a legitmate part of resistance).
Granted, Makni probably didn’t know the full extent of the horror of what Hamas did, and that may be why the court suspended his sentence.
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And that only a day or so after the anniversary of De Gaulle’s call for resistance against an occupying invader
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There is a very worrying shift in France and the UK to expand the definition of terrorism. Or should I say, the wider application of associated laws.
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Is it either of those, actually, or government proscribing organisations we might have sympathy for, and allowing the preëxisting laws to take their course?
(Though I do think PA shot themselves in the foot, like JSO did. There are quite silly people at the head of PA, and some extremely unsophisticated and brutish members, which allowed a Home Secretary barely any brighter to stop them.)
This Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson seems a nasty piece of work. I wonder if that was why he was selected for the trial. He looks half-witted.
Good synopsis.
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Fixed!
How do we know?
“Geoffrey Robertson KC is founding head of Doughty Street Chambers and his latest book is World of War Crimes – Eyeless in Gaza and Beyond”
It’s always a shame when a lawyer becomes a campaigner, because she can almost always bamboozle the layman when commenting on the law. That is as true Roberrtson as of Menon.
For example,
“One defendant was also convicted of grievous bodily harm without intent, having injured a female police officer with a sledgehammer. He said, and the jury must have accepted that, disoriented by the Pava pepper spray the officer had just deployed, he had swung the hammer to shield a co-defendant, accidentally hitting the police officer.” (emphasis added)
Once a claim of self-defence (or defence of another: the law works the same in both cases) has been reasonably raised, the standard required to rebut that claim is exactly the same as the criminal standard of proof, “beyond reasonable doubt”.
No reasonable jury, I think, could have been sure that what the defendant claimed was not true, and therefore would be obliged to allow the defence. That is a far cry from “accepting” the claim.
More and more I’m seeing people selected for trials based on their views to get a desired result. There’s an investigation going on at the moment involving journalists and other bodies which I can’t really say much about around this subject, but there’s quite the scandal brewing.
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If someone on the right had made such a claim, you’d have scoffed at it and claimed it was a conspiracy theory.
Plainly you cannot know that, you merely believe it based on your own political prejudices.
That’s one of the things wrong with politics.