Hello and welcome to Podcast of the Lotus Eaters episode 1317 on this the 15th of December the year of our Lord 2025.
I'm joined by Faraz and guest James Esses former barrister and now founder of Just Therapy and also a campaigner.
What are you campaigning for?
Sense and safeguarding but mostly against this radical trans ideology that's infected our world unfortunately.
Well that seems very sensible.
So glad to have you on the show.
To be here.
Good.
Also thank you to Jamie who sent us a deck of cards where every single card is a picture of Tony Blair.
That is wonderful.
Thank you very much.
We will treasure those.
And also poignantly from Verne sent us this Christmas card of an Australian beach from Australia.
Now obviously coming airmail that would have that would have been sent long before the weekend.
So rather poignant given that the things that we're going to be discussing today are the Bondi beach attack.
I don't think we can cover this by any means exhaustively because it's so soon after the event and the picture is so muddled but we can start to frame it.
And then I think we need to pivot to basically the perhaps the state of morality in the West and particularly on the things that you've been so strong on.
So I think that's where we're going to focus today.
So let's start with the Bondi Beach bit.
Yes, let's do that.
Before I get into it, I just want to do some frame setting as to what it is that we're dealing with on a regular basis now.
On a civilizational scale.
On a civilizational scale.
And I want to start with Germany because an incident that was heavily overshadowed by the Bondi massacre was that five people were arrested in Germany because they were planning to attack a Christmas market in Bavaria, I believe.
And it was three Moroccans, an Egyptian, an Assyrian, with the Egyptian being the cleric and providing the religious justification for this attack.
And just as a quick note, Egypt provides a huge number of clerics that go into mosques in Europe coming out of Al-Azhar.
Al-Azhar University is one of the oldest classical schools of Islamic learning.
And if you know what they teach, you would think that there's a huge problem with getting any of them to be imams in mosques in Europe because they teach precisely this kind of thing as being largely justified.
It's quite horrible, but you should look into it.
And if you don't, I'll do an episode about it.
For us, just on that, why are Western intelligence agencies not aware of this?
They are.
They are, clearly.
Why do they choose to do nothing about it?
Yes.
That's a different question.
And I think it's because of a loss of civilizational confidence.
It's because of an unwillingness to confront evil.
It's because of a lack of moral character on the part of leadership, a lack of respect for a national identity and national religion.
It's generally a sign of collapse that people who graduate from al-Azhar are then invited to come and become Imams.
I don't know if this guy came out of Azhar as well.
Like, I haven't seen his name, so I haven't been able to look at it.
But generally, this is where you would go.
Because these German Christmas market attacks, I mean, they are so galling.
I mean, every year one happens.
I remember when it happened last year, I couldn't get to sleep until about 3 or 4 a.m. because it was just so horrific.
And that was one guy in the car.
One was Taliban Abdul Mahsen, who was a Saudi atheist who got angry because the German state was ignoring him and came to the conclusion that it only respects force.
And he was Shia, one of the Shia attackers.
One of the very few Shia attackers.
I mean, this is five guys.
Had they pulled this off, I mean, it would have been an absolute thing.
They were planning a van management.
I'm just hoping that this year, this is the German Christmas market attack, but there isn't going to be another one that pops up in a few days' time.
Yep.
We just don't know.
We just don't know.
And then I also want to point out that in France, Paris shut down its New Year's Eve celebrations because they were worried about their ability to provide security.
So they've moved to some kind of recorded concert and sort of trying to avoid big crowds because they don't want another attack on the Champs-Élysées, essentially.
It was the same story.
If you don't put security around your country, you have to put security around everything in your country.
Well, exactly.
Exactly.
Which is harder.
Yeah.
And then before going on to Bondi Beach, I just want to mention what has been happening in Australia before that.
So here we have a video of Muslims in Sydney letting off fireworks to celebrate the 7 October attacks.
They thought it was brilliant and they went ahead to celebrate it with fireworks.
You had protesters chanting F the Jews and where are the Jews outside of the Sydney Opera House on 9 October.
Let's just remember that a guy has just gone to jail for two years for tweeting something significantly milder than that crowd were.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I want to sort of show this speech here for a quick second.
This is a celebration in Sydney of the 7 October massacre.
Let's watch it.
I'm smiling.
I'm smiling and I'm happy.
I'm delighted.
It's a day of courage.
Liar!
It's in the night!
You get the idea, but in case you were wondering, the flag that they're waving is the flag of Tawheed.
It says there is no God but God, and Muhammad is his, I would say, false messenger.
This is also the flag, this is also the emblem on the flag of Saudi Arabia, and this is also the flag that was used by al-Qaeda in Syria.
So when these guys say that they're celebrating, the security services knew that these people were running around in your mouth.
You're a former criminal barrister, and you're probably quite good at divining people's intent.
Were you able to glean his intent from that?
I mean, it's just pure revelry.
I mean, jubilation in as many innocent people as possible being killed.
I mean, it cannot be anything other than that.
I mean, that's the craziness about the world we're living in these days, because, you know, historically, people involved in wars, even people, you know, so-called freedom fighters, often would kill, but begrudgingly, you know.
To achieve a set purpose, but actually wouldn't want to just kill for the sake of it.
But here with this group and this Islamic terror that swept the globe, the more they kill, the better.
I mean, he says it himself.
I'm smiling.
I mean, for him, it's happy.
This is a time for celebration.
The number of innocent people have been raped and killed.
It's pure, unadulterated evil.
And in your experience of, if you've, I don't know if you've done much many cases on sort of speech, but I'm sure if you're a barrister in this country, you must have done.
Does that appear to pass the test of criminalized speech?
Well, on a personal level, I've got quite a high threshold for free speech and what should be criminalised.
But that, if you consider some of the individuals that have been prosecuted and even imprisoned in the United Kingdom, for example, I mean, that goes way, way beyond it.
Right, it's not just me then.
Well, but have you considered the food?
Because Australian politicians are thinking about the food, and this is what they were saying before these attacks, before the Bomb Diamond.
The food would be all the same.
If we walked down Ronda Street and went out for a feed, there'd be all the same restaurants.
Literally the Piers Morgan line.
Yeah.
I will sell my country for a curry.
Yeah.
So this is the sort of mindset here.
And you had another politician trying to bring the ISIS brides, so-called, that is, women who willingly traveled to Syria to join Islamic State.
He, Tony Burke, wanted to bring them back to Australia because clearly you could never have enough of this stuff.
It's worth saying that the first terrorist attack in the West, Islamic terrorist attack in the West, was the so-called Battle of Broken Hill,
where two Muslims answered the call of jihad in 1915 to obey the Caliph of the Ottoman Empire and randomly began shooting Australians while they were having a picnic on the 1st of January 1915.
So this is not new.
None of this is new.
Pattern of behavior, you might say.
You might notice that there's a pattern there.
Yes, you might notice that there's a pattern there.
And then we get to yesterday's massacre itself, or to the massacre on the 13th of December.
So this is the context of what we're seeing.
Now, in terms of the attack itself, we had around 10 minutes.
Oh, one important note.
One important note.
The Australians, in their wisdom, saw it fit to ban Carl Benjamin from entering the country without issuing a formal ban, just making sure that they did give him a visa.
But they do want to bring ISIS brides.
Because as far as they're concerned, what you might hear from the mouths of the Lotus Eaters presenters and of Carl Benjamin is more dangerous than what we just saw on the streets of Sydney.
Well, I mean, on one level, it is, because it's dangerous to the rulers of Australia.
The question is whether it's dangerous to the people of Australia.
I don't think it's considered.
No, no, they don't seem to care about that.
But that's a great point.
I actually saw a meme which has got a picture of the shooter and then next to it, another picture of another man.
It says only one of these people was banned from Australia and the other person is Novak Djokovic.
So, you know, there is a point here around who are these countries letting in and the ridiculous reasons for keeping people out.
And yes, you know, these terrorists are allowed in, it seems willy-nilly, both in Australia and here as well.
I mean, it's really quite concerning.
Well, thanks to the Online Safety Act and Nadine Doris, we can't show you the post that I wanted to show you about the attack, but I will tell you briefly what happened.
There were 10 minutes of shooting from a bolt-action rifle and from a shotgun by a father and son, Naveed Akram and his father.
And they kept on firing into the crowd and they had two IEDs in their vehicle, which seems to suggest to me that this was planned as a shooting followed by suicide bombing attack.
Two attackers, two IEDs.
I would assume, I don't know yet for certain, that the IEDs would have been suicide vests.
IEDs means improvised explosive device.
You make a homemade explosive.
The police in Australia were saying that it was a rudimentary, that these were rudimentary devices, not particularly advanced.
The shooting was decent, good shooting, in terms of, you know, showing maybe training.
Well, the thing that got me.
But just as easily a lot of practice.
So there's no reason to believe that they were trained by particular militia.
The thing that got me about that is that that guy, the guy we had a photo of a moment ago, he was using a bolt-action rifle with an optic on the top.
Yeah.
And one of the first victims was a 10-year-old girl.
And it had an optic.
That was very deliberate.
That was deliberate.
That was the liberal crowd.
This is a level of malice, which I just don't think the Western mind can readily understand.
Oh, look.
Two of the links are sort of, you know, not allowed to see because it might offend you and it might prompt you to think that there is a problem here.
But anyway, this was an attack targeting the Jewish community as they were celebrating Hanukkah.
And this was clearly deliberate.
One of the rifles had a scope and they were going around shooting not randomly, not randomly.
They tried to kill as many innocent people as they could.
And the intent, clearly, was to murder as many unarmed civilians as they could while these Jewish civilians were celebrating Harakah.
This was very obviously the case.
16 people, including one of the shooters, were killed, and I think 40 were injured in total.
And the attack went on for around 10 minutes.
And eventually, the police managed to intervene.
But the initial reaction of the police, Jesus Christ, they've sort of blocked everything.
The initial reaction of the police was to do nothing for a few minutes.
Even though there were officers on the scene, they seemed to have hidden and frozen.
Well, there's another question there.
There were female officers.
Well, there were at least two female officers and one male officer who were seen hiding.
Or with one of the female officers sort of raising her hands.
And the police station was around three minutes away.
It took anything from 10 to 20 minutes for the police to actually arrive on the scene.
And yeah, this is where the police station is, and this is where the attack was.
Okay, so they could have easily walked it at a leisurely stroll and got there faster.
They would have gotten there faster than in 10 minutes, yes.
One of the interesting details that you highlighted for me, because you've seen a bit more of the video than I have, is I mean, one of the shooters was up on a bridge, and it's just a bridge that a lot of people use.
So he did have Australians who didn't know what was going on, who were just trying to walk across.
Yes.
And he was shooing them away.
So it was a very targeted attack.
He could have shot random Australians, but it was very targeted on the Jews.
He was very obviously focused on the Jews because this was Chabad.
And I'll talk about them in a second.
And they were clearly his target.
And he'd researched his target because they had advertised this event online and anybody would have known about it.
But he picked this particular group and he killed, you know, 15 people, including a 10-year-old girl, including an 87-year-old lady, because he just wanted to kill Jews.
And the remarkable thing about it is that this was a father-and-son team.
This wasn't just two random guys.
This was a father and son team.
And the mother, the mother of the boy, insists that he was a good boy and that everybody would wish to have had a son like him, and that he didn't have any guns at the property, even though it seems obvious that his father had the guns.
Now, there are some conflicting reports about the father.
Some people say that he was in Australia on a tourist visa.
Some people say that, no, he was living there and had a permit for the guns that were used.
I tend to believe the latter case.
But the son was born in Australia.
The son was born in Australia and grew up there.
And apparently, according to his mother, he was a good boy.
I don't know what it takes to decide that he wasn't, but it must take something, I suppose.
And here's a video of him participating in one of the Gast the Jews rallies.
So he seems to have been attending these kinds of events.
Still makes him a good boy, according to his mother.
And the striking thing about that image is that.
Okay, there's that one guy there charging Gastrojews, but there are hundreds either side of him.
Yes.
So how big is this potential problem?
Well, I would say that it's absolutely huge.
And I would say that it goes quite deeply into the way the Muslim community thinks about Jewish people.
And I would say that there is no point in pretending to hide that.
And I would say that it isn't just about Jewish people because Paris had to cancel its New Year celebrations and Germany almost had another Christmas market attack.
So clearly there is this sort of broad targeting.
Interesting detail here: the Australian intelligence services knew that the shooter, Navid Akram, one of the two shooters, was involved with the Islamic State.
And they had looked into him in 2019.
And he was still allowed to be on the streets.
He was still allowed to go around, attend protests against Israel and Jewish people generally, because, you know, like you could protest against Israel, fair enough.
I don't think Gast the Jews is against Israel in particular, though.
I think it's against it sounds a little bit broader, right?
And then we get the regular feed of people saying, well, it's not about Islam, it's not about this, it's not about that.
Here is this guy receiving a certificate in mastering the memorization and recitation of the Quran.
Tajweed is how you read the Quran with a proper pronunciation to make sure that each vowel and each consonant are pronounced properly when you pray.
And the library here is quite impressive.
This is a very, I would argue, mainstream Muslim library.
The texts that you see in it are from the Habi, who wrote a huge history about pretty much everybody who was important in Islam.
You see Kitab al-Furuwa, which is a book around Hanbali, like it's a school of Islam, it's a mainstream school of Islam.
It's practiced in Saudi, in the Gulf, and in other parts of the world, about Hanbali Islam and the kinds of questions that you should be asking.
There is a Wahhabi element.
You see the books of the Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Baz, and another very important Saudi Mufti, Ibn al-Taymin, who I believe had been awarded by the Saudi government some kind of medal for his role in protection of Islam.
So this isn't sort of tangential interpretation of Islam.
This is mainstream, practiced by Saudi Arabia until MBS came around.
And it is endorsed very widely in many parts of the Muslim world.
And in any case, he wasn't just studying the Hanbali school from which the Wahhabis come.
He was also studying the Shafi'i school, which, you know, is the second mainstream school of Islam.
There's four schools of Sunni Islam.
This center was teaching at least two of them that I could see, as well as mainstream things like the Hadith, what Muhammad is supposed to have said during his life, and memorization of the Quran, and so on and so forth.
So for all of these people who say, well, this isn't true Islam, he doesn't know anything about Islam.
No, no, no.
This guy took the time to properly study the faith and to properly research it and learn about it and came to the conclusion that what he should be doing with his time is go with his father and try to kill as many Jews as possible while they were unarmed, who were civilians on Bondi Beach.
This is what his studies led him to conclude.
Well, I mean, there's a lot of liberal naivety when it comes to Islam.
I mean, the story of Islam, just to break it down extremely quickly, and I'm sure you could do this much better than I could, but Muhammad got to about the age of 40.
He hadn't achieved much apart from being a security guard for a caravan, a row of camels, not a modern caravan.
And basically, he was looking at these monolithic single god religions, Judaism and Christianity.
And at the time, the Arabs had a whole pantheon.
And his father happened to worship one that was called Allah.
And he thought, okay, well, I'm going to turn this guy into a single god.
And for the first 10 years in Mecca, it was a religion of peace because it was based largely on Christianity.
For 13 years.
Yep.
And it didn't go anywhere.
I mean, he had about 40 followers, didn't really do much.
Then he moved to Medina and he turned it into a basically a warlord business model, which is, you know, you can do anything to anybody who isn't a Muslim, but don't do it to anyone who is a Muslim.
So essentially, it became a protection gang, and 10% gets thrown up to the big guy, which was him.
And that was an enormously successful business model.
And his story is actually quite epic.
It's of the scale of Alexander the Great in terms of the scale of the expansion he was able to achieve.
But I mean, it absolutely is a religion of conquest.
And liberal right leaders don't seem to understand this.
They seem to think that it's just Christianity with Falafas.
They don't want to admit it.
They don't want to see it.
They don't want to think about it.
They don't want to let reality bother them in any shape, way, or form.
They're not interested in reality.
They're not interested in the truth.
And this is the fundamental problem.
The fact that the leadership is not interested in the truth.
The other thing I would note is with this coming just after the conversation about Nick Fluentes.
Yes.
And the emergence of young men pushing back against the established order.
Yep.
I'm almost certain that that's going to get folded into this.
So the response is not going to be something like, okay, look at these extremist Muslims within our population.
Maybe To preserve the frame of liberalism, we need to do what Middle Eastern country security services have been telling us to do for decades, which is to distinguish and crack down on the population as a whole are accepting that Islam as a whole is one thing.
And so they're saying, okay, just deport all of them.
They're going with the government's framework.
So that's probably where we're going to end up since the government won't draw any sort of distinction.
No.
But coming straight after the Nick Fluentes discussion, almost certainly this will be pivoted into an attack on anti-Semitism generally, meaning censorship, more censorship of young men on the right.
Yes.
Which will again compound the whole Nick Fuentes thing because they're just going to feel, well, you're shitting on me even harder than you were before.
Essentially.
Because of something that a Muslim guy did.
Yes.
Can I make a point on agency?
And look, I often feel conflicted with these topics.
I mean, I'm a Jew, I'm married to a Muslim.
We're trying to build our own two-state solution in our four walls.
But nonetheless, I feel it important these days to maintain a sense of human agency.
And that's why I don't seek myself to blame the religion in the same way that somebody carries out a stabbing.
I don't blame the knife.
I feel that we live in a world in which people have got every excuse and justification.
Sometimes we almost project this onto them.
Well, they were just a religious fanatic or they were just mentally unwell.
And I feel that that detracts from this notion of human agency, which is why I don't seek to blame Islam for this.
I blame the individuals, the interpretation, and their actions.
That said, there is a consistent pattern with people who perform these terrorist attacks.
And we've already seen it already in some of the links that we've had.
Is that leading up to the attack, in the years before that, they become increasingly devout.
They look deeper and deeper into religion.
The Muslims I know who wouldn't do anything like this actually know almost nothing about the faith.
They might have gone, even the people who grew up in Islamic countries, when they were being taught the Quran, they were taught it in ancient Arabic, and they didn't have a bloody clue what it was because they're from, I don't know, Indonesia or Turkey or whatever it was, but they don't actually know that much about the religion.
And consistently, people who go deeper into what it's actually about, they're the ones that you have a problem with.
True, although it's a kind of chicken and egg scenario, and I'd question whether actually it's people with murderous intent and evil in the hearts are kind of seeking out a form of moralization or justification.
It's whether the religion has turned in this way or actually they've sought the religions away to kind of allow them.
I think ideology really, really matters.
I think ideology is really important and I'm not inclined to dismiss it in any way.
We all have potential for violence.
We all have potential for evil.
We all have potential for good.
Absolutely granted.
I think defining good and evil comes from a moral framework that you adopt.
And to the extent that you adopt a moral framework that says jihad is a legitimate way of pursuing your political interests and that it doesn't require leadership and that any Muslim can be a mujahid and that very often is obligated to be a mujahid, that leads to precisely what you see here.
The way Islam works is quite unusual.
It is not a philosophical religion.
Judaism has very lengthy texts debating pretty much everything all the time.
Christianity built philosophy as we know it today on the bedrock that was Greek philosophy, with the incarnation of Jesus Christ playing a huge role in the development of that philosophy towards a more moral and positive framework.
Islam broke with philosophy in around 1100 AD, actually 900 AD.
And that was because it found that philosophy so conflicted with the scripture that it was untenable to pursue it.
And so you had an earlier period where Islam was philosophical.
The philosophical side lost and was declared to be apostates retrospectively.
And then Islam developed in this particular way.
So I'm not of the view that I do believe that we all have good and evil within us.
I accept that.
I don't accept that the ideology doesn't matter.
It really, really does.
And it permits the exercise of morality and immorality in a particular way where we see the pattern consistently repeating.
And this is very true of Islam, which has been lost since the caliphate ended.
And their reaction to the ending of the caliphate was all of these various groups trying to establish their own mini-caliphates by warfare because Muhammad established his state with warfare.
And if your founder, I mean, the litany of Jewish prophets is incredibly long and we share them in the Jewish and Christian tradition.
But Muhammad is different because, firstly, he dehumanizes the Jewish prophets because when the Quran repeats their stories, it doesn't in any way mention how morally conflicted they could be about certain things.
Say King David and the mother of Solomon, say Solomon and the pagan gods, etc., etc.
Whereas Islam sort of presents them as people who said the true thing, the right thing once, their people didn't obey them, now it's war and anger from God.
So it's a fundamentally different belief system.
So I wouldn't in any way dismiss the faith or the ideology or not hold it responsible, at least in part.
Islam is a religion of government and it seeks to govern because it believes that Jews and Muslims have been led astray and are completely on the wrong path.
So the opening chapter of the Quran ends with, don't put us on the path of those with whom you are angry, the Jews, that's the interpretation of it, and those who have been led astray, which is the Christians.
And it believes that they're the only ones on the righteous path and that they should govern these other communities because they don't obey the law of God.
So I wouldn't for a second exonerate the belief system in the same way that I wouldn't exonerate communism for its dehumanization.
The thing I would put out to you is that the Western response to this is almost the worst possible response because one would be to say to do what the Islamic governments have been urging Western governments to do for decades now, which is to get serious about extremists.
To get extremely draconian to the extremists.
Extremely draconian about the extremists.
But they don't do that because they don't really understand Islam.
And so they just kind of lump them all in together and refuse to draw any sort of distinctions, which, like I say, then leads to the Western public saying, okay, fine, well, we just need to get rid of all of them.
And you can absolutely understand why they've come to that view.
And I can't say I particularly disagree that Islam is just incompatible with the West.
But instead, they have chosen the worst possible outcome, which is basically just to make the indigenous populations as angry as possible by suppressing them every time there's something like this that happens.
Well, refusing to draw any distinctions on the Islamic side.
And it leads to crazy situations like not letting Carl into Australia.
But they do let in guys like who did this.
Yeah.
The Navier Akram family.
There was a hero during the shooting, and apparently his name is Ahmed al-Ahmad, originally Syrian, who actually disarmed one of the attackers, but then the attacker moved on and found another gun, it seems.
I'm very confused by this because I've heard three or four different versions of what happened here.
Latania, who said that he was Jewish.
There were reports online that he was Australian and that he was Maronite Christian.
And it seems, I think, that he was actually a Syrian Muslim.
Okay.
But I'm not 100% sure that it's being reported, taken with a grain of salt.
But he did disarm one of the attackers.
And this was the attacker who survived.
And now I want to move on to the victim because I think they knew who the target was.
This is one of the rabbis who was killed, Eli Schlanger.
He was raising money for the IDF and for Israel to build more settlements in the West Bank.
He was there during the Gaza war supporting the Israeli military.
He had, you know, he was a part of Chabad, which I would describe as a supremacist movement, to put it mildly.
And he was celebrated on Israeli television for raising funds from places like Florida and Sydney and others in order to transfer these funds to Israel.
So he was a very high-profile individual.
He was a very high-profile individual with you in the other circles.
Yeah, but if you're on the other side of this conflict, you're probably aware of him.
Yes.
Then he is the enemy.
And so I don't think it was a coincidence that Chabad in particular was targeted.
And I don't think it was a coincidence that this man was there.
This was a premeditated planned attack, researched attack, where they identified people within the Jewish community that they viewed as enemies.
And essentially, it's the transposition of the Middle East conflict onto Bondi Beach.
That's very much what is happening there.
So this was the organization that was targeted.
But the people who were shot included a 10-year-old girl and an 87-year-old woman and various other unarmed civilians.
And the ideology of the attackers made them believe that shooting these unarmed civilians while they were celebrating on a beach in a land far away was their ticket to heaven.
And it led them to believe that if they had died at the hands of the Australian police or in a subsequent suicide bombing, as indicated by the explosives that they had in their vehicle, that would have led them into heaven.
And these beliefs and these identities and this conflict should be looked at as a whole because what's happening is the transposition of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a global scale.
And I don't think it's a good idea.
I don't think it's a particularly good thing.
Now, what happened right afterwards was that the left-wing University of Sydney Students' Representative Council issued a statement sort of celebrating this attack and saying this is due to racism and to race riots, obviously by white people.
I mean, they've only got one lens, so of course they really do.
Anything aliens could land and they would see it through that thing.
I mean, I've been thinking about, you know, how do I define leftism?
And I think the best that I can come up with is that it's sort of anti-morality, anti-truth, anti-civilization.
And by civilization, I guess I'm talking about order.
They are opposed to all of those things.
And if you look at Islam, they're actually not against those things.
They are for their own version of those things.
Yes.
Their own morality, their own truth, their own civilization.
Let me just finish the thought.
And so you can understand why the left and Islam in the early stages of this are natural allies because the left are anti-civilization.
Well, Islam is anti-this civilization.
The left is anti-morality.
Well, they're anti-this morality.
And so you can see why they're fellow travelers up to a point.
And that point being the successful completion of the revolution, as we saw in 1979 in Iran.
And two minutes after the revolution is complete, the leftists get put up against the wall and shot in the back of the head because they are now the obstacle to proceeding to the next stage of, okay, now we're going to put all of these things back, but we're going to do it our way.
And I would lump most of the Western elite, most of the Western leaders, in that sort of idiocy as well, because they don't understand what is happening here.
No.
No.
As usual, the actual victims of the attack are the Muslims themselves.
So you have Brisbane Muslims posting about how they should stand together and guard against Islamophobia, because that's really the most important thing to consider after the attack.
Phobia meaning irrational fear, of course.
Meaning irrational fear.
Yes.
I'm sure that Piers Morgan was absolutely devastated by this because, you know, the food, what are we going to do without the food?
Incidentally, I don't think Piers Morgan did anything else yesterday apart from block people.
He blocked thousands of people yesterday because they all made the point you sold Western civilization for a curry.
Pretty much.
You had a Labour MP saying that we should detoxify the way we think of people who aren't like us because diversity is our strength.
I don't think importing the Middle East conflict or the India-Pakistan conflict or other global conflicts onto your streets and recreational spaces strengthens you.
But that's just me being crazy, I suppose.
So could I just ask them?
So you mentioned your Jews.
Did you celebrate, was it Hanukkah yesterday?
I did in my own way.
But look, as I said, I've got quite a high tolerance for this stuff, right?
I grew up in Ireland.
Ireland's pretty bad for the anti-Semitism.
Swastikas and the names of the Jewish kids in my school written on the bathroom toilets when I was there, for example.
But, you know, but nonetheless, I still generally believe that people should be free to come out and say what they want to say.
And that's why I draw a distinction between words and actions.
But it is increasingly concerning the way in which Jews, particularly in the United Kingdom, are seen as a kind of a proxy for the Israeli state.
And as soon as Israel does something that the Western community disagrees with, then who's getting the call for culling?
Well, it's the Jews in the United Kingdom.
But going back to the point I challenged you on earlier, I don't want to vilify an entire religion either.
And as I said, I hear this on both sides from both sides of my family now that I've married my wife and her family originally from Algeria.
And I think it lacks nuance sometimes.
I try and avoid this identity politics full stop, to be honest, because I feel that's what's gotten us into part of this mess in the first place.
I try and judge people by the content of the character and as individuals.
Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't identify correlation.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't look at statistics.
I mean, clearly, we see the kind of terrorist attacks going on around the world.
They are caused by Islamic fundamentalists.
We have to look at that.
But I don't think saying that it's Islam in and of itself, because where does that get us?
I mean, there are plenty of law-abiding, non-hateful Muslim people in the United Kingdom.
I don't want them to get caught up in this.
In the same way that I don't want Jews to get caught up with when Israel does something that people disagree with.
Yeah, just on that point, just the thought that I mean, part of the issue there is that people who are very pro the state of Israel, and when I say pro-the state of Israel, I mean as in the militaristic sense, they will also conflate the two very readily.
So they will say, okay, well, you know, we get to do whatever level of bombing or whatever level of sort of military campaign we want.
And if you start to criticize that in any way, they'll say, oh, you're anti-Jewish, you're anti-Zionist and you're anti-Semitic and all that kind of thing.
So, I mean, the problem is, is they conflate it as well.
And everybody wants to sort of lump everybody into this sort of group.
I mean, personally, I am of the mind that I don't think I'd mind that much if every Muslim at this point was asked to either renounce Islam or leave.
Because we seem completely unable to solve this any other way.
And this is anti-civilizational at this point.
We can't just continue to allow this to happen.
Because the thing with this is, you know, nobody could say it was shocking.
They could say it was horrific, but they couldn't say it shocking because this happens consistently now.
I mean, see, I'm not going to say that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with British values because I know and encounter a lot of Muslim people.
And I see that they're fully integrated within British society and values.
But they're probably the less dogmatic of all of them.
Well, perhaps, but traditional in many senses.
Now, I do think that actually when people are coming and seeking asylum here, or indeed just wanting to migrate for economic reasons, that they should have to demonstrate that they have an affinity and a willingness to integrate with British values and culture, right?
I think that should be fundamental to this.
But I wouldn't go so far as to say that being Muslim automatically precludes you from being that way inclined.
I think values are deeply tied into religion.
And I think the idea that you can separate values from religion is a bit of an absurdity.
It is, this is where you get your values.
Values don't operate on a fully conscious level.
Values are imbibed and passed down through the generations in a process that is largely not conscious.
And I think different groups are genuinely different.
I believe that there are various stereotypes about Italians that are true, as there are stereotypes about Germans that are true, as there are stereotypes about Islam that are true.
And I don't particularly have a problem with people having these different identities.
And it in no way generates personal animus.
I also think we operate fundamentally at a group level.
I'm from Lebanon, and it is impossible to interact across sects in Lebanon at a communal and group level.
It's very possible on the individual level, but at a group level, it stops.
So I suspect what you are perhaps conflating here is the difference between individuals and groups.
Because you can say that certain groups have certain characteristics without saying that every single group has that characteristic.
It is possible to say that certain ideologies tend to lead to certain outcomes without saying that every person who believes in that ideology behaves in that way.
So there's a level of generalization that is useful.
There is a level of generalization that gets extreme and we should avoid that.
But just because that is possible doesn't deny the validity of generalizations in general.
I think, you know, everywhere you go, people naturally organize around communal lines.
You see that the Irish tended to congregate in Harlsden, in London, for example.
And after the Irish moved out, it was the Somalis coming in.
You see that the Bangladeshis and the Pakistanis have congregated in Whitechapel.
You see this natural behavior of people affiliating themselves with people who are like them.
In the same way that in Manchester, there's a clear dividing line between the Muslim community and the Jewish community.
And they are, you know, each of them in their own neighborhoods.
So I accept this, that diversity behaves in a certain way and leads to certain outcomes.
And I accept that certain beliefs do lead to certain behaviors.
That doesn't mean that I blame every single individual.
If I say that this ideology tends to lead to this kind of thing, it's the same way as if I say that, you know, you find a lot more people who misbehave sexually and who identify as trans, for instance, without saying that every single person who identifies as trans has commit these particular acts.
So there is a level to which generalizations are useful.
And I think it's important to be able to discuss them soberly and to have some space for generalization.
James, I do wonder, I don't know how much of a, how plugged in you are to sort of the wider Jewish community and stuff.
But I mean, given that, you know, we've had this, which is very clearly a very targeted kill as many Jews as possible attack, not long after the Manchester synagogue attack.
How is the Jewish community feeling about the way that this kind of gets responded to?
Because every time we get an attack like this, the response from government is, are we going to crack down on, you know, young right-wing white men harder?
And I mean, is there a sense it's like, okay, well, but are you actually going to do anything useful?
I mean, how is the community feeling about this?
I think generally what they see from our politicians is just platitudes.
You know, you see that from what Starmer, et cetera, put out.
My concern is that it makes people become more insular.
It makes the Jewish community become more insular, less willing actually to be open.
I've had a bit of a 180 on this over the last year or two because I live in North London, a lot of Jewish schools that have got essentially kind of prison-style security on the outside.
And I've been saying for a while to my friends whose children go there, do you not think it's a bit overkill?
Are we not putting the fear of God into these kids that actually there's a threat there that doesn't necessarily exist on a day-to-day basis?
And is that doing more?
Yeah, but it might exist one day of the year.
No, but this is the thing, and this is why I've actually changed my tune on it, because when you see what's going on in Manchester, when you see what's happening in Bondi, now, how can you not have that security?
Yeah.
But it's such a shame because it creates that divide even more from the outside in and the inside out.
It doesn't create a divide.
It affirms that a divide is there.
In the sense that if you look at what the Quran says about Jews, you should be very concerned.
Oh, it's quite explicit.
You should be very concerned.
Jews are described as the worst enemies of Muslims and of Islam.
They're described as deceitful, dishonest, da-da-da-da-da.
There's a whole litany of things that are well established as being part of the hadith and as being part of the Quran that are explicitly targeted against the Jews.
There is also very explicit targeting of the Christians, but the Christians are viewed more favorably than Jews by Muslims.
So I think reality doesn't meet your prior assumptions.
I think you're coming at this from a place where you want tolerance and you want openness and you want people to be able to get along and you want what you believe is good.
But I don't agree that that is possible.
And I say that without the slightest hint of malice, without the slightest hint of wanting to be, you know, you're my guest and I welcome you here and I want you to come again.
But I just don't think your priors meet this reality.
And just as a slighter note, as a further note, you are, for all intents and purposes, a British Jew, having grown up as a British Jew.
I grew up in the Middle East where communal hatred is very open, very honest, absolutely horrific, and you just sort of get on with it and do what you can.
And I'm seeing the Middle Easternization of the West.
And I see it because of the belief that everybody can get along in the same way as English people and English Jews got along with each other before the onset of diversity.
And I just don't think.
I mean, there is a quality development here.
If you go back...
There's a quality development and a quantity.
If you go back to the turn of, you know, when we turned into 1900, back then the Jewish population was around about 200,000, something like that.
And today it's not really much larger.
It's basically the same size.
But the Islamic population has gone from under 100,000 at that point to several million at this point.
So, I mean, it is a, and when you've got, and I think the Jewish people have always had a lot of in-group preference and community sense, but when the value system more or less aligns, you can fit into a larger population and it's kind of seamless.
But when you've got a large Islamic population that has a very different sense of how communities should be organized, you do get these conflicts, which I think you're talking about.
Well, I mean, before we move on, come back on what it is that you're seeing before we pivot.
Look, I think you have to keep Jewish people safe.
There is a threat.
There is Islamic terrorism out there that wants to eradicate Jews.
I see it.
But from a psychotherapeutic perspective, I'm concerned about dividing groups up and telling them that they're either perpetrators or victims.
Because this narrative then kind of seeps down through.
And I see some of what's been taught in Jewish schools as well in North London.
And these children have been brought up to believe that they are eternal victims, that they will always be victims, that they always need to be very afraid and very wary, sometimes of anyone outside of their community.
I've got some parents I know teaching their children Jewish families, never step foot in a Muslim country.
Now, this is too much.
This is unhelpful.
It does sound sensible to me, to be honest.
I'm a Jew.
I've stepped foot in many Muslim countries.
There's been zero issue.
I'm not saying that there isn't a threat from Islamic terrorism, but I'm saying that we have to inject a bit of nuance into this.
And I don't think it's good for any group of people to see themselves as inherently perpetrators of evil or victims of evil.
I don't think that's good for the human psyche.
I think that's my issue with this.
It's about a bit of nuance in the debate.
I agree with all of that.
But I would promise you that if you went to Egypt with a kippah and walked down the street, you may or may not make it out alive.
I'm just conscious of time.
Shall we move to what we've got you on here to talk about?
Cover our topic.
Can we move us to the next segment?
You pointed out basically how West Streeting was going on in September, saying to an LGBT event that banning puberty blockers made him very uncomfortable.
And now he's saying that trialling puberty blockers on underage children makes them uncomfortable.
So sorry, can we just pause there for a moment?
I mean, James, you know a lot more about this subject than I do.
But my understanding of these puberty blockers is this is what the same set of chemicals that we used to give to sex criminals to chemically castrate them.
And what it effectively does is it prevents them from going through puberty.
So you have these children given these blockers.
They grow up with an otherwise adult body, but never having gone through puberty.
Is that right?
Well, essentially, and it's kind of seen as the first step on the pathway towards medical transitioning, because a few years after this, then you'll be on the cross-sex hormones, which is getting the hormones from the opposite sex and then surgery, etc., weights down the line.
And children are taught that it's a pause button.
It's fully reversible.
If you want to restart puberty, just come off the medication.
But I mean, that's a completely different thing.
But I mean, puberty isn't one of those things that just turns up every few years.
It happens once.
Well, indeed.
And if all of your peers have started progressing through puberty, where you've been kind of trapped in this childlike state, I mean, on a kind of emotional, social level alone, that's going to be damaging.
But it's disrupting a natural part of human development.
And we already know that it causes serious physiological issues in terms of brain development, in terms of bone density, in terms of sexual functioning.
And how do we know that it causes these issues already?
Because it's been done in the past, right?
Correct.
The thing is, the data generally in this space is not particularly good.
I mean, the Tavistock, which put thousands of children down this medical pathway, kept next to no data and did no follow-ups.
Is that in the UK?
Thousands of children in the UK.
Correct.
Do we know roughly how many were affected?
No.
Right.
But it's up there in the thousands.
Thousands.
Anything between 2,000 and 9,000, I think.
Yes.
But also, there's been private clinics operating again.
But the Tavistock did this.
You see, and that's the thing.
They didn't bother with the follow-ups.
They didn't bother with the due diligence, and so...
Why didn't they?
Well, that's a very good question.
I mean, there's some thinking that actually they didn't like what they were seeing.
It certainly didn't back up their own narrative, the children who were transitioning, that it was automatically leading them to this kind of state of euphoria where everything was kind of fine and dandy, actually.
You know, they didn't want to open their eyes to the reality of what was going on.
Sorry to interrupt you.
The narrative was that if you don't do this to your children, they will end up committing suicide.
Correct.
And I've spoken to parents who would be told in the clinic, you know, wouldn't you rather have a trans child than a dead child?
Was the exact wording used.
Do you know if that's accurate?
Because from what I've heard is actually the suicide goes rate, the suicide rate goes up after transition.
Yes, it's completely inaccurate.
In fact, the government, Professor Louis Appleby, who's the government's advisor on suicide prevention, he did a research report into this, and he says that it's simply not backed up in the stats.
So it's nothing more than scaremongering.
But you can understand why parents would be impacted by that, and they'd want to do anything to keep their child alive.
So they went along with this.
And now their children, unfortunately, have suffered as a consequence.
To what extent can it be reversed?
Let's say you skip puberty, you get to 20, and you decide to come off.
Can anything be salvaged at that point?
Well, to be honest, by that point, if they're still-minded to transition, these children will be on the cross-sex hormones.
So, a young girl is going to be given testosterone.
But if she decides at age 20 that she's going to try and reverse it, is it possible to do?
I mean, did she ever have children?
No, if you progress straight from puberty blockers onto these cross-sex hormones, then no, you will almost certainly be left infertile.
So, it is simply irreversible in that respect.
Like I said, there's other psychosocial impact as well.
But actually, we've seen studies which show that the mere fact that you're on puberty blockers actually makes a child less likely to even settle into their bodies.
So, essentially, it's putting them on a slippery slope.
Once you start with the puberty blockers, they are far more likely to go on and do a kind of full medical transition.
Whereas if you leave them alone, most children will simply settle into their bodies over time, naturally, as we all do.
Right.
And so, do you have a sense of given that we know all of this, why are they so committed to running this experiment again?
I don't understand.
Well, this is what we're saying as part of our judicial review, ultimately.
We're saying we already have the studies, we already know what the issues are.
Ultimately, it comes down to belief and ideology.
And actually, Hilary Cass, who wrote the CAS review, which is the report that ultimately led to the closure of the Tavistock, and that was a very important review in many ways, but she herself in it actually called for a clinical trial.
And she put out a statement recently, and she said, although there is no evidence that suggests that puberty blockers bring about any benefit, there are a lot of people out there who believe that it does, and therefore we owe it to them to do the trial.
I mean, that's not the language of medical ethics.
That's the language of ideology.
Belief has no setting in any of this.
I mean, there's people out there who believe that Coca-Cola can cure cancer.
But the government's not going to be running a Coke trial anytime soon.
No.
So belief should never, ever come into the picture when it comes to clinical testing.
But yet, that's exactly what's propping up this trial in the first place.
So, which is why we're trying to do whatever we can to try and stop this.
But they're moving pretty damn quickly with it.
When you say we, can you tell us a little bit about what your organization is?
Because I know you were a criminal barrister and you transitioned into therapy and now you run just therapy.
An interesting choice of word there, transition.
Yes, fair point.
No drugs were involved in your transition.
And I noticed that just therapy.
I don't know much about the organisation, but I noticed just therapy has a set of scales, legal scales, in its logo.
So what is it that the organization is and what is it trying to do?
Just therapy is meant to be an antidote to what I would say is kind of the ideological infiltration of the mental health professions, and whether that's gender ideology, whether it's critical race theory.
But essentially, you've got people, activists, posing as therapists who view it as their role to kind of educate their poor, naive clients.
So I set up this directory of therapists that are meant to be ethical and meant to leave ideology at the doorstep, not engage in unconditional affirmation of children who say they're in the wrong body, not play with identity politics.
But it's also a campaigning or an illegal organization to some extent.
Yes, well, we do campaigning to try and restore kind of sense amongst the mental health professions.
This judicial review that I'm in the process of taking, there's a few claimants.
There's myself, there's Kira Bell, which may be familiar to some of your listeners, who is a young woman who, there she is, who went through the full medical transition process and was left now with, well, unfortunately, regret for the rest of her life because it did untold damage to her.
So she's a biological female who attempted to transition and then changed her mind.
Correct.
And she spent a number of years now campaigning to try and stop children from being medically transitioned.
So she's extremely brave given what she's been through.
So it's myself, Kiera, and then there's also a group called the Bayswater Support Group, which is basically a support group for parents of children who say they're transgender.
So it's like an old-fashioned guild.
It's both a directory and it's campaigning for its interest.
Correct, yeah.
Okay.
So just sort of, you know, you see a lot of the people who would sort of identify either as trans or as supportive of the trans movement having all kinds of qualms about experimenting on animals.
And you shouldn't experiment on mice and you shouldn't experiment on rabbits and cosmetics should be animal experimentation free and all of that.
But these same people are absolutely comfortable with experimenting on children.
Have I got this right?
You do.
And actually I saw that there was a research proposal put in recently to try and do some testing on animals with puberty blockers and the proposal was rejected.
On ethical grounds.
Yes.
So there are some...
Just hold on for a second.
It is unethical to give puberty blockers to animals to experiment on them.
But West Streeting believes that it's ethical for us to do this to children.
Well, unfortunately, the narrative has developed that this is actually the way to treat this condition and actually that you're doing these children a favor by allowing them to transition.
You see, that's the problem, because we've conflated now mental ill health with this sense of identity.
Yes.
And there's a lot of clinicians out there who would say that being transgender is just an identity.
Whereas I'm coming from the perspective that this is a mental health condition and needs to be treated as such.
So there's been a kind of almost an attempt to depathologize it.
But then interestingly, my response to that would be, well, if it's not a pathology, why does it require prescription medication and then surgery?
Well, they want to have it both ways.
Yes.
Given that you've been looking into this, I'm intrigued to know what you think about the individuals who are spearheading this from the other side, because it's such an unimaginable evil.
What is motivating them?
Is it total malice or weird left-wing ideology?
What's going on?
For some, I think it is pure evil.
And I've seen some of these people.
There's a woman called Dr. Helen Weberly, who set up various gender clinics in the UK.
She's now gone over to the States to sell her poison there.
I mean, when I look at her speak, it's like looking into the face of evil.
In fact, she did a kind of video blog recently when there was a decision to ban men from some women's sports and her backdrop was Auschwitz.
And she was suggesting that...
Excuse me?
Yes.
And she was suggesting that by denying adult males the right to play in female sports and denying children puberty blockers that were in some ways acting like a Nazi state.
So these are the type of characters kind of spearheading it.
But actually the more nefarious way in which this ideology is seeped in is through your celebrity culture, through your business culture, through what's been taught in schools.
And that comes from so often a place of wanting to be nice and be kind and respect everyone's identity and embrace diversity.
And those people I don't think are evil people, but I think they're utterly naive and misguided.
And I think in their attempt to want to virtue signal how nice they are to the rest of society, they're causing untold harm.
So I I had a look into this.
The World Economic Forum had a report saying that 80% of Fortune 500 companies now have a policy paper that is pro-trance.
And you see that NATO, up until Trump's second term, was regularly posing with trans flags and with these kinds of things and promoting precisely this ideology.
And you see this being promoted by the British government quite openly and the British education system by Biden, who's, I think one of his spokeswoman, Jen Saki, was going on about how this kind of treatment is best medical practice for children.
So it's infiltrated the highest levels of politics and business, exactly as you say.
You don't get more mainstream than Fortune 500 companies or than NATO, the British government, the American government, etc.
And you see these people sort of promoting this thing.
And my view on it has always been that there is a more evil political purpose in the following sense.
If I can make you look at me right now and say that I'm a woman, well, I can make you say anything.
I can pretty much break you psychologically and make you submit to my every whim.
There is no, I mean, if I can make you lie about something that is so blatantly obvious, I can make you lie about the company's finances.
I can make you lie about what the government is doing.
I can make you lie about pretty much anything.
So in your examination of this, and you've seen these trans activists being incredibly militant and sending the police to hound people and taking people on trial because they said that men are in fact men and can't become women.
Talk to me a little bit about the political dimension that you've seen and how this authority gets exercised by what I would describe as very power-mad people.
Well, you do gain a lot of power from this because part and parcel of this ideology is compelling other people's speech.
Yes.
And so I can see why they're getting off on that because they are forcing you to recognize them as something that you know that they know that you are not.
And if they don't do it, well, then you can accuse them of transphobia or as you've said, send the police around to the door.
So there's a lot of power in that.
But actually, interestingly, I see that power seep down into the children caught up in this as well.
Because all of a sudden, they can wield influence over their parents.
Yes.
And I encounter a lot of parents who have been disowned by their children, young children, because they won't use their chosen pronouns or won't agree to send them to the gender clinic to go on puberty blockers.
And the kids are now identifying their parents as transphobic.
Some of them have complained to the schools that their parents are transphobic.
Some of these schools have got policies that say that if the parents are reported as being transphobic, that could be a matter for social services.
I mean, the children are being taught to wield power against the adults.
But that's precisely what happens in pretty much all totalitarian regimes, where you turn children into snitches against their parents.
I'm also very interested in your point about when parents are getting kind of run around on this.
I mean, I've heard horror stories from California where if the child goes to the school, they can have the police turn up and take the child away from the parents.
And there's pretty much nothing that the parents can do.
What's the current state in Britain?
If anybody watching this has a child who has decided that they're transgender and that they're going to make a fuss to the school or social services or stuff, what actually happens in this country at the moment?
And do the parents have any power?
To be honest, it depends on the school.
I mean, someone, a parent sent me a policy from their child's school the other day, a transgender policy, and in it it says that if a child comes out as transgender in school, that is not a safeguarding issue that the parents need to be told about.
But if the child says to a teacher that the parents are against the child being trans, that may be a safeguarding issue that the school needs to do something with.
So a lot of them are propping up this stuff.
And have we had examples of children being taken away from parents or parents being cut out of this in some way?
Well, I've seen some family court proceedings whereby they're looking at things like custody and access.
And actually, yes, one parent is trying to accuse the other of transphobia and use that as a reason to deny them access, for example.
I know that there's a lot of parents who've been reported to social services and even to the police because they're not on board with the children transitioning.
I mean, this government is looking to put forward a ban on quote-unquote conversion therapy, which is going to be extremely dangerous.
But actually, if you look at other jurisdictions in which similar legislation has been passed, they will criminalize parents who don't allow their children to transition.
And that could be way too much.
What is right?
Well, historically, conversion therapy referred to the use of force, softened sexual force, or other forms of coercion to try and stop somebody from being gay.
Was it always force or just talk therapy?
Historically, in terms of what we know is conversion therapy, it was force and it was things like electric shock treatment.
Now, thankfully, these things have been banned for a long time in this country.
But this notion of we must still ban conversion therapy exists.
And what the government wants to do is essentially ban either conversations between a religious leader and a member of the congregation or therapists just talking to the children.
So they're expanding it to any kind of talking therapy that might sort of instill some sense in these young children who are obviously suffering, who are obviously confused, otherwise they wouldn't have picked this identity.
Yes.
And they want to prevent people like you from talking to them as any child therapist.
Sorry, conversion therapy is saying somebody that you are your actual gender.
Well, this is it because...
So it's backwards?
Oh, it's...
Yeah.
Yes, because the real conversion is a very important thing.
I mean, they're banning conversion therapy, but, you know, with a Star Wars meme.
Yeah, but it's directly, it's a complete inversion.
Correct.
And people accuse me of being a conversion therapist.
And I say, no, quite the opposite.
I'm not trying to change anyone.
I'm trying to get these people to accept themselves as they are.
That's the opposite of trying to convert something.
But the problem was that it used to be sexuality, but then gender identity got thrown into the mix, as we see from the acronym LGBT.
And so now these, of course, Q plus exclamation marks, smiley face.
And so now as a result, these things are completely conflated, even though they have nothing to do with one another.
So it's really quite worrying.
But a lot of practitioners I know won't even work with this cohort of clients for fear of already being accused of conversion therapy.
And I'm one of the few that seems to be willing to do this.
But it's not without risk.
And since you do have this big network of therapists and practitioners, what actually is underlying this?
Because, I mean, I wondered, to some extent, it might just be confused children, because a lot of young children, you know, before they sort of come into PB properly or the very early stages, they don't really know where they sit on anything and they might wonder, am I gay?
Am I not?
Whatever.
But is this trans phenomena just rebranding gays and lesbians?
In an attempt to basically remove them?
In part.
We know from studies that most of these children, if they are just left alone, will just grow up to be gay.
Right.
But they will have settled into their own bodies.
Autism plays a big factor in this.
Again, we see it from the studies.
Almost all of my teenage clients who say they're transgender have an autism diagnosis.
So that is incredibly relevant.
In fact, there's a lot of comorbidities that exist alongside gender disorganisms.
So is it the confluence of being gay plus some level autistic, or sometimes is autistic just enough?
Yes.
Well, it can be a mixture of the two or they can be independent.
But it can be for a multitude of reasons, like any other mental health presentation or any other form of dysphoria or dysmorphia, right?
Why does someone develop a dissatisfaction in their body and their place in the world?
Well, for a whole host of reasons.
Some of my clients have experienced sexual trauma.
Some of my clients have experienced huge amounts of bullying at school and kind of easing away at them over time.
Some of them, I think, have just felt very alone and isolated and different.
And all of a sudden, they've got this ready-made community that they can be a part of.
For some, it's a bit of a trend and a fad because everyone else is coming out as trans in the school.
So it would be lacking nuance to say that there's one particular cause, but what it very clearly is, is a mental health condition.
And the main reason for that is because it operates on the basis of delusion and not reality.
Well, when you say it's clear that, though, I remember seeing figures that rates of transsexualism was going up.
We hit COVID where the teachers no longer had access to the students and trans rates started to fall markedly and then only picked up again after the teachers got access to the children again.
So is it a mental health phenomenon or is it the mental health of who we let to be teachers these days that is causing this?
Is it a predatory class of ideology going after kids?
In part, yes.
And children are being targeted in this way and schools are engaging in indoctrination.
But amongst children, it does also operate in a kind of form of contagion, as you would see with forms of eating disorders or Tourette's disorders.
These clusters that you say.
Yes.
And that's why you see numbers of children coming out as trans within weeks or months of each other in a single classroom.
And some of the children I've worked with in my practice have essentially confirmed this.
So it's a combination of, as I said, I think evil, but also this is the kind of liberal agenda these days.
And we've become so hyper-focused on this notion of identity that these children are spending just a hell of a lot of time navel gazing and thinking about themselves in a way that I wish they had more important things to be thinking about.
In fact, I don't like using the word privileged very much, but I think the fact that you see this in the Western world and not in poorer countries or countries that are involved in military conflict is because our children are so privileged here that they have nothing to do but navel gaze and think about themselves.
Well that and pretty much all healthy avenues of expression have been cut off through the feminization of culture and through the safety of culture in the sense that if you're a boy who's allowed to play, I don't know, football or rugby or boxing or whatever, this would be your natural outlet for you to express yourself.
This would be the way you learn how to behave.
If girls are allowed to be as feminine as they want to be, then they would be absolutely fine.
But if pretty much every single expression is seen as either sexist or racist or toxic masculinity or this, that or the other, then whereas transgenderism is seen as an approved ideology that is very often rewarded, well, incentives come into the picture.
And if you want to feel particularly special, you would sort of say that you're trans.
I mean, I've argued that sexual identity has become a sort of substitute for the soul in the sense that what is being said underneath all of this, you have people identifying as grey gender or as novi gender or as gender queer, which is both, or as demi-femme, which means that you might you present as feminine,
but it doesn't say anything about what you're what whether or not you're actually female and all of these things.
And all of what these identities tell me is that these are people who are struggling to express their uniqueness, who are struggling to express who they are.
They don't have any outlet to express this that is approved by the authorities other than gender identity and sexuality.
And so this becomes their own way of saying that, A, I'm suffering because we all are, and puberty is difficult.
And B, I'm unique because we all are, and living in the world is difficult.
What is the approved way of expressing these identities?
Well, I'm going to call myself novi gender.
Well, back in my day, they became goths and wore clothes.
And then in my dad's day, it was, you know, they became punks.
There's always something that marks out a group as perhaps a bit special.
Absolutely.
Sorry.
If I was a clinician, which I'm obviously not, I would have to ask myself, well, what is the difference between novi gender and grey gender?
And how would I treat them differently?
Like, if this was a genuine thing, then presumably there would be one treatment protocol for this case and a different one for the other.
But all these people are actually saying is I'm suffering and I'm unique, which is true.
We all are.
Well, we see that point you're raising there with, let's say, the surgeries performed because there are people who are non-binary, right?
Right.
And the question is, and it should be, this should be the question from a surgeon's perspective.
What does a non-binary body actually look like?
If this woman's coming in saying she's non-binary and she wants me to remove her breasts, but where does it say in the manual that non-binary people don't have breasts?
So essentially, it's just a kind of free-for-all.
You tell me how you want me to shape your body and identity, and I will do so, irrespective of whether it actually is just...
I mean, it's such lunacy that we've been providing these surgeries, not just privately, but on the NHS as well.
I mean, it's madness.
I can't believe it.
I mean, I'm looking now at a picture of Wes Streeting, and, you know, I should say I'm not surprised given that he was head of education at Stonewall for a period of time.
And Stonewall, of course, is probably the most nefarious organisation for pushing this stuff across our society.
But he, I mean, he's on the precipice here.
And what you posted my, well, I put out on X the other day, but he's trying to back both horses at the moment.
And it's not a rice because he's playing with children's well-being.
I mean, on a related, but slight tangent before we run out of time, I also wanted to ask you about trial by jury.
Yeah.
Because I've actually always valued that more than the right to vote, even though both of them are fundamental.
And the reason is, especially as somebody who talks to a living, I don't have any fear that anything I've said or tweeted on the show or anything, I would be afraid about defending in front of a Juramian of my peers.
I think I'd be fine in that situation.
And that sort of underpins free speech and freedom more broadly.
But if we get rid of trial by jury, if I criticise trans or whatever the issue is of the day, I have absolutely no confidence that I would not be criminalised by a judge for contravening state ideology when the judge has a .gov email.
And the case was recommended from the CPS who have .gov emails because I've transgressed the ideology of somebody who has a .gov email.
So, I mean, tell me as a former barrister, what is the barrister's reaction to these plans?
And what do you think is going on there?
Well, it flies in the face of the fundamental ethics of our legal and justice system.
I mean, it's shocking that this has been put forward when this was not in their manifesto either, because this is a significant change.
I mean, this is going to completely change the way our society operates in terms of the justice system.
Magistrates' courts are notorious for convicting people.
I mean, if you look at the conviction rate in the magistrates' court versus the Crown Court, there's no comparison.
It's almost a foregone conclusion you're going to be convicted in a magistrate's court, actually.
When I was practicing, I think it was upwards of 90%.
And that is an issue, particularly when you say these kind of free speech cases that we're seeing more and more these days.
Magistrates are far more likely to convict than a jury.
And so there is a question there around whether people are actually getting a sense of fair justice there, or whether they're in front of a hardened magistrate, possibly politically motivated.
I mean, we don't have a politicized judiciary in the way that America does, but we are seeing increasing signs of judges kind of viewing themselves as activists on the bench.
So I'm really quite concerned about it.
I'm also concerned about just how broad this decision was, because, you know, when he put out the statement, Lamy says, well, you know, we're retaining jury trials for the most serious offences, you know, rape, murder.
But actually, yeah, I think it's any crime that on average would get less than, I think it was three years in prison will no longer get a jury trial.
But that capsule.
It still matters to me that I get put in jail for four years for something I tweeted.
Yeah, of course.
No, I completely agree.
But if this was, you know, we're just trying to ease the load abyss of the courts and, you know, just some of these more kind of novel offences or whatever.
But actually, you're going to find sexual assaults, possession of offensive weapons, speech crime as well.
And speech crimes, all of that.
But I can't give any credence to their excuse that it will speed things up because I've been a juror twice and we spent 90%.
I mean, I finished two books on jury service.
I mean, reading, not writing.
But they wouldn't have kept us waiting around for much longer for me to actually finish two books writing them.
So it's clearly not the jury that adds to this.
And actually, I think, well, when it comes to presenting the case, the barristers presenting their case, that's going to take the same amount of time, whether they're doing it to a judge or jury is sat off to the side or not.
So what do you think is actually going on here?
Is it just a grab for state power?
Well, we have seen a shift in the length of cases generally across the board, including criminal trials.
I mean, criminal trials are lasting a lot longer these days than they used to.
Now, you could say, well, it's because we've got different forms of evidence that are being used.
And so, you know, it takes a lot more time to actually collate all of that.
But two barristers presenting the arguments are going to take the same amount of time, whether there's a jury there or not.
Well, adding in a jury does elongate it somewhat.
You know, there is still the process of actually having to get the jury sorted, swear them in.
Also, because the jury aren't allowed to hear everything and some of the legal arguments that have been made, they're having to leave.
I mean, you may have seen it in your own cases that you did, where you're having to leave.
There's a discussion between the judge and the barristers, then you're brought back in.
In a magistrate, with a district judge hearing it, you can avoid some of that.
But no, it's not going to make a great deal of difference because the issue is actually in the system.
And how long it's even taken us just to do the work to get to court in the first place.
It's not even necessarily the trials themselves that are taking so long.
People are having to wait a long time for justice in this country because of the policing system and actually a complete lack of prioritization.
You know, I was pleased to see recently that they're going to hopefully stop investigating these bloody non-crime hate incidents.
You know, that's what police have been spending all their time doing.
So, what do you think it's really about then?
Well, I try not to be so cynical about these things.
I view Lamy as a bit of a clown who doesn't know what he's doing.
And he's sorry, David.
And he's kind of latched onto this as some brilliant idea that's going to get headlines because he's really taking tough action to cut down the backlog and get justice moving again.
I think he's too thick to have come up with anything more nefarious than that, if I'm completely honest with you.
Well, I mean, I doubt somebody's come up with it and pushed it in front of him.
And he's gone, oh, yeah, that's all right.
Let's do that.
Do you think there's any realistic chance of stopping it?
Or are Labour just going to push it through because they're like that?
I certainly hope so.
And I know various groups of lawyers, judicial academics, et cetera, who are petitioning very, very strongly on this.
I mean, this would be a travesty.
I mean, so much of the world has followed our legal and justice system as the kind of paradigm.
And trial by jury is the most fundamental.
Absolutely.
It's more important than voting.
I agree.
I agree.
So I sincerely hope so.
I sincerely hope so.
But under this government, I mean, who the hell knows?
Who the hell knows?
And finally, just to wrap this off, because we're running out of time.
Is there anything that the audience or we can do positively on either of those two issues, either the trial by jury stuff or the work that you're doing at your organization?
I mean, I hate saying this, but you've got to write to your MP.
They have to know how much outrage there is across the country on both of these issues.
There's a protest happening this Wednesday outside the Department of Health at 1 p.m. against the puberty blocker trial.
I would encourage people to attend that as well.
So 1 p.m. Wednesday, the day after tomorrow.
Correct.
Wednesday the 17th, that would be, outside of the Department of Health in London.
Correct.
And I'm told there'll be a number of MPs there because there's been various kind of cross-party letters that have gone into Wes Streeting to try and ask him to pull back on this.
So I'd say the positive thing is that Wes Streasing, just like his boss Starmer, seems to go whichever way the political wind is blowing.
And because of that, I think they can potentially be influenced and swayed.
And I think if people do make enough noise, I think I could see a scenario in which Shrizing could back down from this.
Are you cynical enough to believe that they would back down on the transgender experiment but plow ahead with the judicial change because that's what they're actually after?
I could see that.
Yeah.
Unfortunately.
But, you know, we're not.
I and we are going to do whatever we can to stop them.
Okay.
So there are, as I said, there's cross-party letters, there's petitions from the public.
I've got this judicial review underway.
If we need to go to the Supreme Court, we're going to go to the Supreme Court.
We've already got the funding in place.
So he's not going to have an easy ride with this one way or the other.
And I hope that a few months down the line, we can have a conversation and we can say that actually this whole thing was culled before it even began.
I hope so.
I hope so.
I pray that happens.
Where can people find you?
Where can people follow your work?
I live on X, much to my wife's dismay.
So you can find me on X. I've got a sub stack as well.
And if people want ethical, non-ideological therapy, go onto my website, which is just jamesessa.com, or we can see our directory, which is just therapy.
And we've got about 80 or 90 UK-based practitioners there who will offer ethical therapy, no identity politics.
So if somebody's got a child and they come home from school one day and suddenly announce they're trans, they should go to your website as a starting point to find support or help.
Indeed.
And I can either signpost them or I may be able to work with the children myself.
Excellent.
Thank you for doing the work that you're doing.
Really appreciate it.
Very grateful to have you here.
Let's look at some of the comments that come in.
Laura says, are they forcing Jews to return to Israel for their safety?
I don't know who that is.
I think they're just trying to kill them, I suspect.
Dragon Lady Chris has signed up as a monthly supporter.
Thank you for doing that.
Not just a string says Tariq makes dialogue.
Oh, yeah, it makes it always impossible.
It's a long conversation.
Dragon Lady says, testing for something for the chat mod.
Okay, thank you for testing.
Tom says, iron with a few percent of carbon becomes high-tensile steel.
10% it becomes pig iron and useless.
Yeah, I mean, making a comment about the level of demographic change.
141, Paladin says, Hi, Faraz.
I would love to know more about this development of Islam.
Is it hard to conceive this stuff from outside?
You can read a good book called The Closing of the Muslim Mind.
I can't remember the author right now, but it's called The Closing of the Muslim Mind, and it's really, really good.
Cranky Texan says, all three Abrahamic religions were a reaction to the same ancient evil.
That same evil is driving current events.
We can't fall into the trap.
I'm not sure I fully understand that one.
Neither do I.
Okay.
There may be more behind that one.
And a couple of comments from our subscribers, of course.
Sophie Liv says, it will sound mad to people, but I was in Vietnam.
I love the food.
I brought the cookbooks home back with me.
That is a potential solution to the Piers Morgan conundrum.
Yeah.
Cumbrian Kulak says that Christianity promotes a guilt-based society.
Islam is a shame-based society.
Judaism is in the middle, but more of a shame-based.
Guilt-based society, you were responsible for your actions.
You are to be judged by God.
Groups with shame society, group dynamics take priority over personal responsibility.
So Jumbo G says, I'm no gun expert, but I thought Australia banned private ownership of these sort of high-powered rifles after the Port Arthur massacre.
So these are hunting weapons.
The bolt-action rifle and the shotgun are hunting weapons.
They don't need to, they're not included in the ban.
Right.
But I mean, it's still heavily licensed, though, isn't it?
Yes, yes.
So whoever owned them either got them criminally or had licenses for them.
I will go to our second segment there.
California refugee says, California is a trans kid sanctuary state by law.
Narcissistic mothers kidnap their kids, bring them here and get them trans to.
I hate it.
My taxes and my medical insurance pay for it.
Yeah, there was that absolute, I mean, you must know what I'm talking about.
There was this absolutely horrific story of a guy who, I think his wife wanted to get the boy trans, and he was fighting it as hard as he could.
That was in Texas.
Didn't start off in California.
That was actually in Texas.
Was it?
Yep.
And the boy got castrated in the end.
Yep.
And what a horrific thing for a father to be powerless in that situation.
Yep.
But that was actually in Texas, I think.
We've seen that in this country as well.
Susie Green, who's the founder of Mermaids, or CEO of Mermaids, is like this trans children's charity.
I mean, particularly dangerous.
She took her son off, I believe it was to Thailand.
Good God.
God help us.
And just utilized him there.
Yeah.
So this stuff is going on in this country as well.
But you know, actually, just, I mean, to that point, you know, obviously we know of Munchausen's syndrome, but there is also Munchausen by proxy.
And actually, there is a question around what a lot of the parents who are pushing this stuff are getting out of it.
And again, they're getting the same thing the child's getting.
Attention, celebration, you're so special.
Pride.
Yeah, it's not good.
I mean, it's extraordinary to me that the conversation that we're having about this is, you know, can we slow down a trial?
Can we get a slight policy shift on conversion therapy?
When actually the conversation we should be having is how do we punish the people who've done this to children?
But we are nowhere near that level of conversation yet.
No, and I wrote a letter to Keir Starmer last year, signed by a number of MPs and other professionals calling for a, I mean, I know we have a lot of public inquiries and there's a bit of fatigue with those, but a public inquiry into the way in which this ideology infiltrated society.
Because I think we actually need to look back at that at some point.
Otherwise, no one's going to be held to account.
My concern is that we changed the law and all the rest of it for the better, but everyone responsible for this just is able to kind of ride off into the sunset.
I believe that the surgeons performing this mutilation need to be behind bars.
I agree.
Absolutely.
100%.
Absolutely.
Mind you, if we start going after people for past transactions, I mean, we're going to need a lot more prisons.
I mean, we've got the whole COVID era stuff.
We've got God knows what of a number of crimes to go back for.
So, yeah, remarkable situation we found ourselves in.