In the birthplace of Christianity, churches and communities are coming under attack from Jewish settlers
'We are often constantly exposed to situations that make difficult our movement and our daily life,' Awad said. He added that settlers were stopping him and others from traveling to their farms to transfer chicks or food.
Christianity is a constant presence in Taybeh, which is home to Greek Orthodox, Latin and Melkite Greek Catholic churches. Small shrines and steeples loom over its streets, which straddle a hilltop overlooking a pastoral expanse of olive orchards. It's also home to the Taybeh Brewing Company, one of very few beer companies in the Muslim-majority West Bank.
The Christian minority here is more endangered than perhaps any other Palestinian community. Since Israel's founding in 1948, the number of Christian Palestinians in what was once Mandatory Palestine has shrunk from around 10% of the population to less than 1%, with many emigrating to the West.
But the settlers aren't targeting Taybeh for its religious identity, priests here say. They want to cleanse the West Bank of its non-Jewish population, regardless of their faith.
'They don't differ between Muslims or Christians,' said the Rev. David Khoury, the leader of Taybeh's Greek Orthodox Church, who said he was born and raised in the town. 'The settlers, they are dealing with us the same.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
One Day in Southport review – a sombre portrait of how a tragedy was hijacked
Most of the six to 10-year-old girls gathered in the Hart Space dance studio in Southport, Merseyside, on 29 July last year for a Taylor Swift-themed workshop were making friendship bracelets ('It's a very Swiftie thing to do,' says the older sister of one, who was watching them), when 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana burst in with a knife. His attack left two children dead at the scene and another died the next day from her injuries. Six other children, including the sister who was watching, and two adults were injured and taken to hospital. One Day in Southport focuses largely on what happened afterwards interspersed with the memories of the injured older girl and her family, because what happened next was the result of so many social, cultural and political issues that you could spend a lifetime unpacking them. This documentary does the best it can in an hour. It interviews people from different sides of the various debates, and shows social media posts and footage from the riots that sprang up around the country and caught the police and the establishment unawares. The prime minister was left floundering and unable to address the mixture of feelings and motivations behind them quickly or directly enough. The attacker – his name then kept from the public – was quickly arrested. The police held a press conference and described him as a 17-year-old from Lancashire and originally from Cardiff. The latter detail was included to attempt to tamp down the speculation already rife online and in the local area (arising because the one thing witnesses to the attack did know about the stranger was that he was Black) that he was an immigrant, which quickly became an illegal immigrant, which quickly became a Muslim illegal immigrant and ignited all sorts of rage. The usual suspects from the manosphere and others with their own agendas to push then stoked the fires, including Nigel Farage ('It shows how unhappy people are with the state of law and order in this country … Your children don't matter to them, they don't care') and Tommy Robinson, the leader of the far-right anti-Islam English Defence League. The hour tracks the evolution of local grief and anger directed at a specific event into widespread violence and unrest. One of the many YouTubers and other people outside the mainstream media who recorded events is Wesley Winter. He began feeling at one with the righteous fury felt by others. By the time he was filming a few days later in Middlesbrough, he realised that the people walking along a residential street in a Muslim area of the town and smashing windows 'was a very different crowd' and he became frightened that they might turn on him next. A call from his wife trapped in her car as people smashed the windows of vehicles around her led them to leave the area as quickly as possible. His naivete is astonishing, but more admirable than the craven avoidance of those supposedly charged with leading the nation in times of strife to address the difficult, sensitive issues with which the tinderbox had been – and remains – stuffed. Because what have we here? We have a section of the population, that's suffering greatly under the cost of living crisis. This fact has receded from the headlines, but not from life – the housing crisis, the proliferating brutal effects of austerity that the current government seems to be doing nothing to alleviate, and much more. We have people who see the advent of more people to these isles as competition for increasingly scarce resources. Even the co-convener of Stand Up to Racism, Weyman Bennett, makes the point that 'people are protesting against something that is really happening to them … they are rightfully angry' before explaining how this is leveraged and exploited by far-rightwingers (and whatever Reform are pretending to be) so that 'they're blaming the wrong people'. The absence of anyone in authority addressing this, instead of lauding the arrests and sentencing of rioters, was and remains conspicuous. Why not publicly delineate the difference between legitimate concerns and far-right agitation – bring the worried into your fold and denounce those burning mosques and terrifying the asylum seekers in besieged hotels? Because there is a difference and it matters hugely. The documentary gives no facts or figures about immigration, costs or anything else apart from the number of arrests and the 1,000 years-plus total to which rioters were sentenced. It is essentially a mood piece, tracking the development of the hijacking of grief to violent ends and leaving us to draw our own conclusions about where, why and if we would have stepped back to say: 'This has gone too far.' One Day in Southport is on Channel 4 now.
Daily Mirror
an hour ago
- Daily Mirror
Southport teen sobs as she 'blames herself' for not being able to save stabbing victims
One Day in Southport detailed one teenage survivor from the horrifying Southport stabbings in July 2024 which saw three young girls stabbed at a Taylor Swift themed dance party Channel 4's One Day in Southport aired tonight, leaving viewers shaken by its unflinching portrayal of the tragic events of July 29, 2024. The documentary revisits the devastating day a Taylor Swift-themed dance class at Hart Space in Southport was turned into a crime scene when 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana launched a brutal knife attack. The film follows the story of one young survivor and her family, using raw testimony from victims, witnesses, and community members to discuss how violence, disinformation, and extremism collided. Rudakubana fatally stabbed three young girls called Bebe King (6), Elsie Dot Stancombe (7), and Alice da Silva Aguiar (9), and injured ten others, most of them being children. He was arrested at the scene, later pleaded guilty, and received a life sentence with a minimum of 52 years. False claims that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker spread rapidly online, fuelling a wave of riots across the UK. One of the most violent incidents occurred in Middlesbrough on August 4, when a planned protest spiralled into destruction. More than 1,000 people gathered as shopfronts were smashed, homes vandalised, and cars torched. The documentary struck a chord with viewers, with many taking to social media to describe it as 'devastating,' 'urgent,' and 'impossible to forget.' One particularly heartbreaking scene saw the focus survivor of the attack break down in tears after she blamed herself for not being able to save the three little girls - one of whom was her little sister's best friend. The teenage survivor, only identified by her eyes, told the story from her memory as she detailed how she was stabbed both in the arm and in the back. "I felt like I was dying," the survivor shared in the heartbreaking admission. She then broke down after confessing that she blames herself for not being able to save the girls - despite having been stabbed herself. 'I regret it every day that I wasn't able to save her. That I wasn't able to get her out," she sobbed. Taking to X, formerly known as Twitter, after watching the chilling stories of the victims unfold, viewers shared their heartbreak. "This poor girl has to live with this trauma for the rest of her life. It's so sad that she blames herself even in the slightest. Absolutely devastating." "I am truly sick to my stomach watching this. How did this happen to such innocent little babies? Bawling my eyes out and thinking of their poor families," another viewer shared. Another echoed: "God, this is such a hard watch, but so important too." Another Channel 4 viewer typed: "Those poor little girls must have been terrified. To think they had their whole lives ahead of them. Such a powerful documentary. Fair play to Channel 4." "So heartbroken watching this. Tears streaming down to the ground omg," someone else shared. While another viewer voiced: "It just shows how unsafe the UK has become. Nobody is safe. Not even innocent little girls."
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
One Day in Southport review — a horrifying portrait of Britain in 2024
I am often dubious about giving more airtime to murderous, attention-seeking lowlifes such as Axel Rudakubana, the Southport child killer. But one early image from Dan Reed's weighty documentary, One Day in Southport (Channel 4), summed up the utter coward. A taxi driver's dashcam footage showed him in a green hoodie and face mask trying to get through a door bearing the words 'pregnancy', 'yoga' and 'baby classes'. Wow, what a brave man, eh? What a warrior's legacy: walking into a community hub marked 'baby classes' and knifing little girls who are making friendship bracelets. An abundance of CCTV, mobile phone and dashcam footage helped to make this film, about this atrocity and the UK riots it sparked, sharply immersive. From the killer in the back of a taxi, sullenly asking 'Is this 34A Hart Street?' before commencing his mass-stabbing, to wobbly, close-up footage of rioters attacking police vehicles as someone shouts 'Set the van on fire!' and others smashing the windows of small terraced houses, there was a visceral, menacing feel to it, as if you too were there amid the baying mob. Reed, an award-winning director behind, among others, Leaving Neverland and One Day in October, chose to focus on YouTubers and others filming from within rather than the mainstream media filming from without. This gave it a more urgent, intimidating quality. 'You get what you deserve when you're protecting a f***ing mosque,' screamed one person, misinformed by social media, like so many others, that the killer was Muslim and had come here on a boat. 'I know he was born in Wales and all that, but he was of Rwandan heritage,' one interviewee said. Wendell Daniel, who is black and a videographer for Tommy Robinson, insisted this wasn't about race but about class. But Wesley Winter, a YouTuber born to British and Korean parents, seemed to take a different view. When filming riots in Middlesbrough, he was told by a masked man: 'If you're not white you can't go through.' His wife, who is Chinese, meanwhile, was sitting in their car being terrorised by rioters who she thought were going to drag her out and beat her. • Read more TV reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews I'm sure we can all remember the attack on a hotel housing immigrants, with rioters shouting 'Come out and fight like men'. But the film, skilfully woven and without a narrator, portrayed a sense of a country that was already a tinderbox, simmering with rage over immigration, the massacre of those little girls, the spark that detonated it: 'This is the consequence of not listening to the people.' It ended, without comment, with a clip of Keir Starmer's reference to 'an island of strangers'. In years to come this and other films may be studied as a bellwether of British unrest in summer 2024 and afterwards. But it is still the contributions of a quietly spoken young victim who survived the stabbings and her parents that were the most unforgettable. Whose stomach did not lurch when the girl's father (all of their identities protected) said a paramedic cut off her bloodied hoodie and 'it just looked like her muscles were inside out'? Dear god. The blade had fractured her spine and punctured her lung. Imagine the ferocity of that attack, one so vicious it left poor little Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Elsie Stancombe, seven, and Bebe King, six, dead. The girl in the film said she had to have a special chair at school now because the normal ones dig into her scars. What spirit and courage she has shown; what an important documentary.★★★★☆ Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix, the best Prime Video TV shows, the best Disney+ shows, the best Apple TV+ shows, the best shows on BBC iPlayer, the best shows on Sky and Now, the best shows on ITVX, the best shows on Channel 4 streaming, the best shows on Paramount+ and our favourite hidden gem TV shows. Don't forget to check our critics' choices to what to watch this week, and browse our comprehensive TV guide
