Chaos erupted in the British House of Commons on Wednesday after the speaker of the house, Lindsay Hoyle, violated time-honored procedural rules by allowing debate on a proposed amendment to a motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The details of the breach of protocol are not nearly so important as the reason Hoyle cited for caving into pressure, namely, that he is “very, very concerned about the safety” of his fellow MPs. This comes only a few weeks after another parliamentarian announced his retirement following threats to his life over his support for Israel. Stephen Pollard comments:

In other words, according to Sir Lindsay, his reason for selecting the Labor amendment was fear of the mob—that if Labor MPs weren’t given the opportunity to vote for their own ceasefire amendment, . . . he feared for their safety. And so he caved in to mob rule.

Dismayed as Pollard is, he’s unsurprised:

Every week . . . mobs of hundreds of thousands take to our streets with genocidal screams of “From the river to the sea,” chanting support of the Houthis, parading posters that could have come straight from Nazi Germany, and demanding jihad and global intifada. . . . And what do the authorities do? They stand and watch as these hate marches take over London—and other cities—and turn them into no-go areas for Jews. The marches—despite their repeated, clear, and proud intent—are given the go-ahead by a police force which has lost the will and the ability to keep the streets free from hate.

Why do the police appease rather than arrest the hate marchers? In part because they know the chances of the Crown Prosecution Service following through and charging anyone are close to zero.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].