Mona Siddiqui

13 FEB 26

12 FEB 26

Good Morning, In the rushed attempt to reckon with the Epstein files and what they mean, it’s become hard to hear from and easy to forget the women who were actually the victims of his crimes. But if we are serious about understanding the forces that lie behind a network in which women and girls were trafficked for sex, we’d surely do well to start with the witness of their victims. Whenever these women have spoken, it is striking how eloquent they are, not just about what has happened to them, but also about the huge challenge of bringing the perpetrators of these crimes to justice. Many of them point to the heroism of Virginia Giuffre who, against massive intimidation and, according to other survivors, the cost of her life, helped to start the process that brought these crimes to light. In her memoir - Nobody’s Girl – she wrote, ‘I hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected, victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else.’ I read her book whilst researching a story for an opera about modern slavery. As part of my research, I interviewed a woman who had been trafficked for sex alongside the policewoman who had rescued her from the trafficking gang. ‘Not once in 30 years of law enforcement,’ the policewoman said, ‘did I meet a pimp or sex trafficker who expressed remorse. They see women as product in a business transaction.’ Her words chimed with Giuffre’s insight that we live in a culture that ‘tells girls their primary worth is to appeal to men,’ mere objects to discard once used. Their humanity redacted. This thinking infects the Epstein files where women and girls, some reportedly as young as nine, are offered as though they were meat on a menu. They do this without shame and an entitled belief that the rules don’t apply to them. The Psalmist describes this: ‘In their own eyes they flatter themselves too much to detect their sin. Even on their beds they plot evil; commit themselves to a sinful course and do not reject what is wrong.’ Virginia Giuffre wanted to live in a world where victims were treated with compassion; not compassion as sympathy, but as a radical form of criticism, that says, ‘this hurt is to be taken seriously; it’s not normal; and we have to act.’ In his ministry Jesus sided and stood with the abused and the used. His compassion for the victim was an implicit critique of the system, forces and ideologies that produces victims. At his execution, he entered into that hurt and even came to embody it. On the cross his silence is eloquence. He redacts himself and becomes the Victim God; a witness to, and reckoning with, corrupt and controlling power. One common theme is the total lack of remorse and sense of entitlement.

Good Morning. ‘Speak about hope:’ I hear those words everywhere in these frightening times At synagogue, we’ve just read the Ten Commandments, beginning with ‘I am your God.’ Two rabbis whose teachings I admire experienced those words very differently. The struggle for hope lies in the tension between their explanations. Hugo Gryn, whose warm voice, often heard on radio, I hugely miss, survived Auschwitz. He wrote: Auschwitz-Birkenau was the … perversion of all the Ten Commandments… God was replaced by a Fuehrer and his minions who claimed for themselves the power of life and death… Murder was at the heart of that culture and killers were promoted and honoured… That’s what ‘I am your God’ reminded him of. Nazism is gone, but tyranny, killing and contempt are at large in our world, threatening our freedoms and future. Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh-Leib of Ger, who died last century, intuited a very different voice in the Commandments. He wrote: When God said, ‘I am,’ the world fell silent; every living being listened. They heard the words not from Heaven, but within themselves. They felt: “This is about who I truly am. The life-force which flows through everything is speaking to me.” In that moment, a deep awareness connected all existence, humans, animals, every breathing being, and cruelty and hatred vanished. I believe that may be what we feel when humbled by some act of kindness; when touched by closeness to another person; when silenced by listening to the birds; when we sense in woodlands: ‘These trees – some hidden life-force connects us.’ A consciousness infinitely greater than ‘Me, me, me,’ flows through us then. It’s what Wordsworth called: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.Here lies a quiet, but powerful, antidote to the horror Rabbi Gryn was forced to experience, when tyrants replaced god, dictating who must live or die. Here is an understanding that motivates us to love and give. I think of my Israeli friend, who despite the violence afflicting both peoples, supported her Palestinian colleague who bravely made soup in Gaza for hungry children. I’m mindful of the Ukrainian grandma, since killed, who refused to leave her front-line home in Kherson and, despite the bombing, sent me a gift of honey. What makes people do that? I believe it’s the deeper voice that calls us, beyond all differences and hatreds, to care for each other and our world. In that voice lies our hope.

09 FEB 26

07 FEB 26

Good morning. When we talk about justice, we picture punishment, verdicts delivered, sentences pronounced, the drama of a courtroom. We talk less about what justice is for, what kind of life it is meant to make possible. I’ve been thinking about that because I’ve just finished jury service. For days I sat with eleven strangers, reminded how fragile justice is, how much it depends on ordinary people listening carefully, trying to hold someone else’s story without breaking it. The law, up close, feels less like marble and more like human breath. That experience drew me back to Rose Heilbron, a woman from Liverpool and one of the great figures of British legal history. My own family comes from that same stretch of Liverpool, and I imagine what it meant for girls like my mother to see someone who sounded a little like them taking her seat in the Old Bailey. Her career was marked by remarkable firsts: among the first women appointed King’s Counsel, the first to lead a murder prosecution, the first woman judge at the Old Bailey. By simply being there, she changed who Britain believed could speak with authority. Her most lasting contribution came in the 1970s when she chaired a committee on the treatment of women reporting rape and sexual assault. It argued that complainants’ identities should be protected and their sexual history not used to discredit them. Behind those reforms lay a conviction: justice cannot function if it humiliates the wounded. A system that deters the vulnerable from coming forward manufactures silence. That conviction feels close this week. Recently released court documents in the United States again exposed how wealth and influence enabled the abuse of women and girls, perpetrators and collaborators protected with a vigour the victims’ could only dream of. Jewish tradition teaches that law exists to guard human dignity – kevod habriyot. The Bible warns: do not oppress the stranger, “for you know the soul of the stranger.” The rabbis understood the stranger as anyone made small by power, anyone whose story can be turned against them. Rose Heilbron’s work lived inside that teaching. She understood that a courtroom should be a place where shame changes sides, where those exposed are finally covered, and those who abused power stand in the light. Perhaps that is what justice is for: not the last word of a story, but the first breath after a long holding of breath –a fragile peace in which the vulnerable are believed, and the rest of us are changed by having listened. Because a society is judged not only by how it punishes the guilty, but by how carefully it guards those who risk everything to speak.

05 FEB 2026

04 FEB 26

03 FEB 26