Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • On the grooming gangs

    Powerful testimony here.

    I am 65 years old. I write as a retired lawyer with approximately 35 years experience of working in the child protection field in both the public and private sectors.

    I worked for three of the largest local authorities in the country, advising social workers, teachers, police officers, health care staff and other professionals dedicated to safeguarding children from all forms of abuse.

    I conducted and had responsibility for hundreds and hundreds, possibly thousands, of child care cases in all levels of court up to and including the Court of Appeal.…

    From my direct experience, conversations with fellow professionals and a detailed knowledge of enquiries, reports and statistics, the following things are obvious to anyone who is not compromised by political allegiance.

    1. The majority of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by males who are close family members, relatives, friends or people in positions of power or trust.
    2. This pattern exists worldwide and irrespective, generally, of race or culture.
    3. Inevitably, within a predominantly white culture, the majority of child sexual abusers will be white. In fact, most child rapes are perpetrated by a person of the same ethnicity and culture as the victim.
    4. This fact has been deliberately misrepresented in the UK to obscure the patterns of group-organised child sexual rape and exploitation by conflating two entirely different forms of child rape with very different contexts and motivations.
    5. In the UK, most rape gangs are not comprised of Pakistani Muslims, but proportionately, and especially in specific areas of the country, Pakistani Muslims are grossly over-represented in the statistics.
    6. Pakistani Muslim gangs are the only demographic where race and ethnicity have been the motivating factors for criminality being ignored.
    7. ‘Fear of racism’ has been a major factor in these crimes being ignored and covered up. So has collaboration between the Muslim community, the police, social workers and politicians, especially Labour ones.
    8. The victims of these utterly vile and reprehensible crimes have been called sluts, slags, prostitutes and racists by the very professionals charged with their protection, claims eagerly embraced and amplified by the left, including some who would identify as feminists.
    9. The Labour Party has failed these young girls, failed their families and communities, failed law-abiding Muslims and failed the nation by refusing to engage with and vigorously pursue a full, open and independent public enquiry. It has done so because of its over-reliance on the Muslim vote in key constituencies of national and local importance and its otherwise unfathomable love affair with a grossly misogynistic and homophobic religious and political movement.
    10. In so doing, it has paved the way for the racist right to fill the moral vacuum it has created by its cowardice.

  • The Afghan dystopia

  • Resisting US imperialism and Zionism

    Another MEMRI clip. This time it’s US activist Calla Walsh – co-founder of Unity of Fields, formerly the US branch of Palestine Action before it got banned – singing the praises of the Iranian regime and its lovely indigenous missiles. She then goes on to defend the crackdown – the slaughter of protestors- as defending the revolutionary anti-imperialist government.

    Oh yes. The stupidity – the mindless regurgitation of stale cliches – is breath-taking.

    The idiocy of the pro-Pals in one short two-minute video.

  • Islam will have complete sovereignty on earth

    Palestinian academic Mohammad Alnobani in a February 5, 2026 interview with Arabic Post: the Islamic nation will ultimately attain complete dominance and unprecedented sovereignty on earth. Muslims should not view the price they are paying as too high but instead increase their reliance on the Quran in order to shoulder the heavy responsibility of establishing Islamic sovereignty worldwide.

    Sacrificing a million martyrs is only natural in the pursuit of this goal.

  • A form of existential denial

    Yesterday’s story from Canada – the discriminatory haircut – was kind of comical. This latest is deadly serious. In British Columbia a gender critical man is being fined $750K for not believing in gender identity. If you don’t believe in gender identity then – in BC – you’re denying the existence of trans people. Existential denial. And that’s not allowed. It’s blasphemy.

    The key point of that quote from the Human Rights Tribunal:

    If a person elects not to “believe” that gender identity is separate from sex assigned at birth, then they do not “believe” in transpeople. This is a form of existential denial: Oger (No. 7) at para. 61. It is not, as Mr. Neufeld argues, akin to religious beliefs. A person does not need to believe in Christianity to accept that another person is Christian. However, to accept that a person is transgender, one must accept that their gender identity is different than their sex assigned at birth.

    Christian belief doesn’t require anything from anybody else. It’s personal. Gender ideology requires that other people accept your belief. It’s a public imposition. It requires people to say what they don’t believe: to accept that someone has magically changed sex when you know perfectly well that they haven’t – because they can’t.

    This CBC report just presents the case as a nasty man being prosecuted for hate speech “against 2SLGBTQ+ people”.

    Added:

  • London’s Brownshirts

    ….won’t help anyone.
    It’s just bigotry.

    By the looks of it it’s the same old Islamist/hard-left alliance. The new Brownshirts, targeting Jewish businesses.

    This was after red paint was thrown “in Free Gaza protest”. As though It had anything to do with Gail’s except “Jews”.

  • Free expression, unless you’re Jewish

    PEN America claims to stand “at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world”. Unless you’re a Jew, that is. Or a Zionist, as they like to frame it now.

    Ari Ingel in Tablet Magazine on PEN America’s Jewish Exception:

    PEN America forced out its longtime CEO, Suzanne Nossel, after she was labeled a “Zionist” and refused to have the organization publicly declare that Israel was committing genocide. This episode sent a chilling message to Jewish professionals: Adherence to certain political dogmas is now a prerequisite for leadership within the organization….

    Over the past two years, planned bookstore appearances by Jewish authors have been canceled, ads for books about Israel have been rejected, book readings have been shut down, literary groups have been targeted, and activists have circulated blacklists of so-called Zionist authors for harassment.

    A few examples: PEN America issued no public condemnation of the McCarthy-esque “Is Your Favorite Author a Zionist?” list; no statement objecting to the targeting and cancellation of Gabrielle Zevin based on a presumed political identity; no statement defending the canceled book-launch events of Brett Gelman; no statement condemning the rejection of advertising for Bernard-Henri Lévy’s book; and no statement opposing the boycott of Israeli writers and cultural institutions.

    By validating ideological litmus tests, PEN America is declaring that free expression is not a universal right, but a privilege granted only to those who pass the “correct” political screening. That is a shocking precedent for an organization that claims to defend the “freedom of expression.”

    Forcing an artist to renounce their identity, nationality, or presumed political views as a prerequisite for participation is discrimination—plain and simple. It is incompatible with the values PEN America claims to uphold.

    More on this from Jerry Coyne.

  • Discriminatory haircuts

    The grim details:

    Migneault was disappointed to find that during the booking process, they were asked to select between a men’s or women’s cut and sent an email asking for accommodation.

    They say they were told to just select one or the other.

    “It is not fair, and it’s not legal to tell me no, since you don’t fit into my worldview, I don’t want to do anything with you, and I don’t want you as my customer,” they said.

    Alexis Labrecque, the salon’s co-owner, said the policy has nothing to do with ideology. He said the business model is low-cost-high-volume, and that they only take bookings online and ask for their customers’ genders to help with scheduling.

    “It takes typically takes longer for a woman’s haircut than a man’s haircut,” he said. “So we optimize our agendas accordingly. We also get, statistics for marketing.”

    For Migneault, however, the lack of accommodation had a major impact.

    “I was already spiraling into a huge mental health crisis, and it precipitated my, falling to complete a disability,” they said. “I was unable to work for a year and a half.”

    Unable to work for a year and a half because he had to choose between a man or a woman’s haircut? Ah well – it’s Canada.

  • South Korea “our number-one enemy”

    From the Daily NK:

    A North Korean university in Wonsan, Kangwon province, held a mandatory ideological lecture on Feb. 1 instructing faculty and students to view South Korea as an enemy state, ahead of the upcoming Ninth Party Congress.

    The Kangwon provincial party committee ordered the lectures at the end of January, directing institutions to prioritize sessions on “hostile relations with South Korea” and the supposed triumph of Pyongyang’s strategy against Washington and Seoul. A source in the province, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told Daily NK recently that Wonsan Medical University held the session for faculty and students in its auditorium.

    During the lecture, the university’s party secretary raised the recent visit to South Korea by U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby. Regarded as the architect of the Trump administration’s security policy, Colby was in Seoul on Jan. 25–27 to present the updated U.S. National Defense Strategy and seek Seoul’s cooperation with American plans.

    The party secretary offered the following commentary on the visit: “The other day, the head of the U.S. Department of Defense flew into South Korea with a cocky attitude and made asinine comments about changes to the 2026 defense strategy. At a time when anyone who challenges our Republic ends up humiliated and led around by the nose, the American imperialists have been like moths to a flame since the beginning of the year. They are basically raising the white flag now that our Republic’s nuclear arsenal is complete.”

    The secretary then turned to South Korea directly. “South Korea is no longer part of our nation — it’s our number-one enemy, a state that we must pacify through force of arms. Despite the brief pause in its war with us, South Korea remains a belligerent state,” the party secretary said.

    “A state that we must pacify through force of arms.” Hmm.

  • Vatanam