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24 October, 2023

Hamas has freed two elderly Israeli women taken hostage during its attack on 7 October. Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, said she had “been through hell” since her capture, and described being held in a “huge network” of underground tunnels. Israel says at least 220 hostages remain in the terrorist group’s hands. Iceland’s prime minister is on strike today. Katrín Jakobsdóttir is one of tens of thousands of women in the country downing tools in protest against unequal pay and gender-based violence. The world’s oldest dog has died aged 31. The Portuguese owners of Bobi, a purebred Rafeiro do Alentejo, say his secret was eating the same food as them and never being put on a lead. 🐶🦴

Patricia de Melo Moreira/AFP/Getty

High-rises in Doha: far from the rubble of the Gaza Strip. Getty

Hamas’s friend in the Gulf

Amid the horrors of the attack on Israel, says John Jenkins in The New Statesman, much has been made of the close links between Hamas and Iran. But while it’s certainly true that the bloodthirsty mullahs in Tehran watched Hamas’s “performative savagery” with glee, there is one Arab state whose longstanding support for the rulers of Gaza manages to “avoid the critical scrutiny it deserves”: Qatar. The tiny, vastly rich petrostate supports Hamas’s “oppressive and often brutal rule in Gaza” through transfers of cash – around $30m a month – and fuel. Meanwhile, the proscribed terror group’s leaders live comfortably ensconced in Doha high-rises.

Qatar’s commitment to Hamas reveals a fundamental split in the Arab world. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain realised during the Arab Spring that overmighty religious groups like the Muslim Brotherhood can be highly destabilising, and pulled their support. Qatar, in contrast, decided that “Islamists were the future” and kept supporting them everywhere except in Qatar itself. The Saudis and Emiratis made the better bet. Polling across the Middle East shows that most young people prefer “security, economic growth, jobs, services and certain social freedoms” over the “millenarian promises of Islamism”. And the two great success stories of recent years have not been “Qatar or anywhere Islamists are in power”, but Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where a new, future-looking focus on prosperity is winning out over entrenched conflicts and “hatred of Israel”. In the modern Middle East, you can’t avoid picking sides – and Qatar has picked the wrong one.

The latest DIY trend taking over TikTok is “girl measuring”, says the New York Post. In the videos, women gauge things like room dimensions and the size of furniture by stretching out their arms and hands. “When I actually use measuring tapes and levels,” comments one user. “It’s WRONG.”

The Metropolitan Police said a protester filmed chanting “jihad” at a rally on Saturday had done nothing illegal. For context, says Ben Sixsmith in The Critic, here is a short list of things that British cops have in recent years found to be “more arrestable offences than demanding holy war”: silently praying near an abortion clinic; “misgendering” someone in public; misgendering someone online; calling someone a “lesbian”; burning a Quran; publicly denying that gay marriage is biblical; protesting against the murder of women; carrying rape alarms in a public place; and “making nasty jokes in a group chat”.

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A 97-year-old bottle of Macallan whisky is expected to fetch £1.2m at auction next month, says The Guardian. The top-tier tipple was bottled in 1986 after ageing in sherry casks for six decades. It is already the world’s most valuable whisky – another of the 40 bottles produced went for £1.5m in 2019. But the buyer probably won’t ever get to taste it. Experts reckon only one of the other 40 bottles produced has ever been opened. Register to bid here.

The King: entering “treacherous waters”. Kirsty Wigglesworth/AFP/Getty

Tribal identity shouldn’t trump national unity

Liberals like me spent the second half of the 20th century imagining people being “freed of their communal history and judged on the content of their character”, says Trevor Phillips in The Times. That’s why I was so disturbed to hear the King describe Britain as a “community of communities” in a speech last week. It is a phrase that, in my view, amounts to a “clarion call for permanent racial division in our society”. I also felt a pang of guilt. Some 23 years ago I was responsible for a report on the “future of multi-ethnic Britain” in which the phrase appeared.

I had persuaded Home Secretary Jack Straw to launch the publication, and he “shocked everyone” by laying into its central premise. He argued that a “community of communities” encouraged minority and majority groups to “retain their separateness”, and that any criticism of a community or its ancestral customs amounted to “bigotry”. In other words, whatever your particular religious or cultural group identity demanded should be permitted and respected, “no matter the damage it might do to community cohesion”. Straw was entirely correct, but over the past two decades it has become an orthodoxy among liberal people that “tribal identity should be privileged over national unity”. The irony of the King’s speech is that his charities have been some of the most “effective engines of racial integration and equality” in the country. It’s a pity his speechwriters have led him into such “treacherous waters”. We should pay attention to what he has done rather than what he now says.

The crest at Disneyland and the De Isigny family crest (inset)

When Walt Disney was filming Treasure Island in the UK in July 1949, says the BBC, he and his family took a trip to the Lincolnshire village of Norton Disney, to see whether it had any link to his ancestors. They learned that the village had got its name from the De Isignys, who came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066, and the name had morphed into Disney around the 13th or 14th centuries. Walt spied the De Isigny family crest – three lions facing left – on a rather grand family tomb, and was so taken with it he later stuck it on Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disneyland.

To The Economist:

Brevity is important in exams. I am reminded of an old Oxford essay question: “Was Hegel a good philosopher? Be brief.” One smug student wrote, simply, “Yes”. When the paper came back, the examiner had given it a high mark but scribbled a comment in the margin: “This was a good, brief answer. But a better, briefer answer would have been No.”

Sam Williams, London 

It’s a 1985 Domino’s Pizza delivery van. In the 1980s, Dommies founder Tom Monaghan ordered 10 customised Tritan A2 cars with warming ovens in the boot, and set them loose around Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the firm has its HQ. Only a few survive today, says CNN, and this one is up for sale at a Las Vegas classic car auction in November. The owner admits “it’s pretty terrible to drive”, and probably “wasn’t even that great at delivering pizza”. But it does look awfully cool. Sign up to bid here.

“You’re nobody until somebody hates you.”

Tom Wolfe

That’s it. You’re done.

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