Good jeans, bad news. When beauty triggers wokies more than terrorism.

Sydney Sweeney in the American Eagles ad.

It was hard to know what to write about this week. Not because there’s little worthy of commentary, but because there’s far too much. Sadly, none of it is good.

Should I opine on Keir Starmer’s government recognising the State of Palestine? As if making a hash of things at home weren’t enough, he’s determined to make us look like an irrelevant, stupid player on the world stage as well.

Under the Montevideo Convention, the criteria for the recognition of a state under international law are not met, yet our feckless government decides it should recognise a so-called state run by terrorists. A state still holding hostages and the bodies of hostages. A state with no plans to hold elections, so the long-suffering Palestinian people remain stuck with monsters in charge.

Hamas has now completely withdrawn from ceasefire talks. Why would they continue? Terrorism works. Monstrous violence is rewarded by blethering, weak-kneed heads of state simpering and pandering to their Muslim voter base.

Or perhaps I could comment on the Online Safety Act. So far, sites like PornZog and SheMalez continue to provide unfettered access to all and sundry, while the act has nevertheless required social media platforms to censor the coverage of political protests and the testimony of a rape gang survivor. In our brave new world, you will be protected from a tweet, but not a trafficker.

I could plunge us further into despair with the fact that, as of 31 July, over 25,000 migrants have crossed the English Channel this year. We are a country more interested in policing jokes and misgendering than policing our borders. King Alfred is turning in his grave.

Or we could look to the Democratic Republic of Congo. But we don’t, do we? Where is the media outrage over the 40 Christians, including children, slaughtered while praying in church in North Kivu? Where is the front-page solidarity? Christians remain the most persecuted religious group in the world today, yet there is barely a whisper.

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Thankfully, there were two news highlights this week.

Last week I was accused in the comments under my last substack of “scraping the bottom of the barrel”, told my “position on this is beginning to look distinctly vile”, and that “genocide denialism is not a good look”. All because I suggested that a striking photograph of a ‘starving’ baby in Gaza might not be quite what it seemed.

It turns out I was entirely right.

The photograph, which ricocheted around the world, featured a gaunt, frail child named Mohammed. The image was treated as proof of Israeli-inflicted starvation. In reality, as investigative journalist David Collier revealed, the child has cerebral palsy and is malnourished, but is not suffering from starvation, which is why his mother and brother — nearby but not shown in the ‘iconic’ image— are visibly healthy and well-fed.

If your poster child for famine is a boy with a severe neurological condition and malnutrition rather than an actual famine victim, maybe the famine isn’t quite the raging catastrophe it’s being sold as. As I said last week, this is not to deny hunger, poverty or suffering in Gaza. But you do not get a starving baby and a well-fed mother unless the mother is psychopathic — or the media is.

New York Times front page.

A very little, and not very apologetic correction.

In this case, it was the media. Basic journalistic standards would have prevented this photograph from being weaponised as it was. One of my favourite gotchas in the comments last week was someone gleefully pointing out that the BBC interviewed the boy’s mother. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. The BBC also aired a documentary which was narrated by the child of senior Hamas minister, among a host of biased boo-boos.

People wanted this image to be true. They wanted to believe the worst. They needed their moral outrage fix. They wanted their anger to be stoked. They wanted to believe this of Israel, rather than the truth which is that vast quantities of aid have been permitted into Gaza only for the UN and Hamas to refuse to distribute it and refuse to cooperate with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — which appears to be far too efficient at getting aid to hungry people.

Now contrast that with the response to the American Eagle jeans advert featuring Sydney Sweeney. The backlash was instant. The ad has been called regressive, fascist and liberally labelled with the ultimate woke leftist pejorative, ‘Nazi’. Most of the critics are female, have septum rings (that’s the one through the nose, for less ‘right on’ readers), terrible hair, and are aggressively screechy.

Sydney Sweeney in the American Eagles ad.

I tracked down the ad on YouTube and social media. I could hardly understand the fuss. Everyone seems to be melting down because she’s white, slim and beautiful. Would they have minded if a black model had said she had “good jeans” — the pun being “good genes”? I doubt it.

No, what really offended the mob was that Sydney Sweeney is beautiful, healthy, and unashamed of it. She’s not apologising for privilege. She has no visible rolls of fat bulging over the waistband, no blue hair, ‘top surgery’ mastectomy scars or pronoun badges. She looks like a woman from before the world went mad. Ordinary people like the ad. Woke weirdos hate it.

The same people frothing at the mouth over a pun about jeans have nothing to say about media’s blatant propaganda and fraud in Gaza. That, apparently, is fine.

At least we know where their priorities lie.