Off for a few days. Back on Thursday the 3rd.
Mick Hartley
Politics and Culture
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It’s all so grimly predictable. From Jewish News:
An Israeli football player signed by West Ham United has been targeted by a video filmed outside the club’s training ground, in which a masked figure vows to “continue to raise out voice until he’s out of the club”.
Manor Solomon joined the East London club earlier this month after being signed from Tottenham Hotspur.
The video, posted on Instagram by the Tower Hamlets Palestine Solidarity Network, features an individual standing outside the Romford training venue, showing Palestinian flags having been placed on street lights leading to the facility. The group posted the video with the caption “Kick Out Baby Killer, Manor Solomon, from West Ham United!”
In the video, the masked man, whose voice has also been disguised by a synthesiser, says that “we have West Ham fans amongst us, we have season ticket holders amongst us…we do not agree with the signing of Manor Solomon and we will continue to raise our voice until he’s out of our club”.
The video also references Solomon’s IDF service. Solomon completed his mandatory military service in 2019, and did not serve in a combat role.
More from Heidi Bachram here.
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That same month, the founders of the London School of Economics published the second edition of their two-volume defense of Stalin’s regime, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization.
The one thing they changed from the first edition was dropping the question mark.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb were not fringe figures.
They co-founded the London School of Economics in 1895. They built the Fabian Society into the intellectual engine of the British left. They drafted much of what became the modern British welfare state.
Sidney had served as Secretary of State for the Colonies in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour cabinet. Beatrice was one of the most influential sociologists in Europe.
In May 1932, both in their seventies, they landed in Leningrad for a two-month tour of the Soviet Union.
Their hosts arranged the itinerary: model schools, model clinics, model factories, model collective farms. Beatrice fell ill and rested in the Caucasus. Sidney was walked through Ukraine.
He was walked through Ukraine in the summer before Stalin’s grain seizures produced a state-engineered famine that killed several million Ukrainians. He noticed nothing.
Three years later, in December 1935, they published Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?
Two volumes. 1,174 pages. A methodical, statistics-heavy endorsement of Stalin’s regime, built almost entirely from documents the Soviet embassy in London had supplied to them.
They were not fooled.
Beatrice’s own diary contains this line:
“There is one dark spot: the lack of free expression among those intellectuals who are against the Communist creed and the practice thereof.”
She published the book anyway.
Between the first edition and the second, Stalin held two Moscow show trials.
Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, who had helped lead the 1917 revolution alongside Lenin, were tried in August 1936. Both were shot within 24 hours of their verdict. Yuri Pyatakov was tried in January 1937 and shot two days after his sentence.
By October 1937, most of the founding revolutionaries who had made the Soviet Union existed in one of two states: already dead, or waiting.
The man running the machine was Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.
Historians now estimate that Stalin’s Great Terror produced around 800,000 executions across the 16 months between August 1937 and November 1938. That averages to roughly 1,700 people shot per day, every day, for close to 500 days.
October 1937 sat inside that peak, and the pace was still climbing. Order 00447, Yezhov’s mass operation against so-called “kulaks” and “anti-Soviet elements,” was running at full quota. Regional NKVD offices were petitioning Moscow for the right to shoot more people than their quotas allowed.
The Webbs’ response to all of this was a second edition of the same book without the question mark.
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? became Soviet Communism: A New Civilization.
The second edition, released in the month Yezhov’s execution quotas were still climbing, was answering the question from the first edition.
The prominent British historian A.J.P. Taylor, in his 1965 history of Britain from 1914 to 1945, devoted one sentence to the Webbs’ book.
He called it “the most preposterous book ever written about Soviet Russia.”
Beatrice died in April 1943. Sidney died in October 1947.
That December, at George Bernard Shaw’s suggestion, their ashes were reinterred together in the nave of Westminster Abbey. They remain the only married couple ever buried there.
Prime Minister Clement Attlee delivered the address. He said millions were living “fuller and freer lives” today because of the work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
He did not mention the other millions.
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Michael Gove in the Spectator on how academics – with the spotlight now on the Cambridge Education Faculty – are harming education with their ideological agendas:
I first raised concerns about what education faculties at our universities were doing more than a decade ago. I specifically questioned the priorities and ideological orientation of those in charge of teacher training in higher-education institutions such as Cambridge. I feared that, despite the noble idealism and genuine commitment of the overwhelming number of teachers in our classrooms, the academics preparing them for their vocation were letting them, and us, down. There was, I suggested, perhaps incautiously, a ‘blob’ of university professionals whose values, and approach, was inimical to educational excellence.
I was derided for daring to question their credentials and authority. One of those most vehement in their criticism was Hilary Cremin, the head of the Education Faculty. Professor Cremin was the individual who praised Arday on his appointment as ‘the best in the world in terms of the research that you do’. Whatever her motivation for that encomium, a single sentence should not define a career. But Professor Cremin, helpfully for us all, has written at length recently on her own educational philosophy and world outlook. So we can judge her by her own, considered, thoughts.
The range of her thinking is laid out in her book, Rewilding Education. Charles Moore touched on its flaws in these pages last week. It would require more space than either Charles or I are allowed, and more tolerance on the part of our readers than we have a right to expect, to go through its idiocies.
The work actively rejects not just the need for discipline, knowledge and testing in schools but the very idea of our schools themselves. They are damned as embodiments of a failed neo-liberal notion of modernity built on the flawed principles of the Enlightenment. Michel Foucault is cited promiscuously and approvingly. Foucault was, to be fair, a stern and consistent critic of the Enlightenment. So consistent, he welcomed the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution and the theocratic bloodshed which followed. So there is that.
And indeed Cremin is nothing if not thorough in her disdain for Enlightenment principles – as we can see in her approach to questions of evidence, proof and logic. She is specifically sceptical of ‘empirical truth’, which she sees as ‘favouring a modern, urban, liberal, Western view of the World’. Instead of this ‘epistemology of the North’, Cremin argues that we might want to achieve ‘cognitive justice’ by ‘foregrounding the epistemology of the South which challenges the dominance of the Eurocentric thought of the global North’.
The book exhibits all the weaknesses of modern academia: solipsistic personal reminiscence is treated as ‘fieldwork’, spurious authority is sought by citing other works, themselves written in impenetrable jargon, statistics are deployed in an effort to prove a point but without any recognition that correlation does not equal causation.
Professor Cremin is not a junior research fellow feeling her way to an understanding of her discipline; nor is she Titania McGrath’s woker sister. She is the woman responsible for what those who are supposed to be our best teachers are themselves taught. And yet in her major published work she doesn’t just display ignorance, she flaunts and celebrates it. By dancing on the grave of learning.
Professor Cremin is not an isolated example. Certainly not in Cambridge, anyway. As Andrew Gilligan has reported for The Spectator’s website, one of the other Education Faculty academics, Farah Ahmed, has denounced ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims but has encouraged her co-religionists to make an exception for engineering ‘to produce advanced weaponry for Jihad’.
The screaming tragedy of this affair is that while Cambridge – and other university education faculties – are peddling this toxic nonsense, there are examples of how genuinely to transform the opportunities of working–class and ethnic minority children across the country which Cambridge and much of the rest of the educational establishment deride or ignore.
This month we have been able to compare the performance of schools across England, at A-level and GCSE. We can discern which schools are doing well. Those you might think it would be wise for institutions like Cambridge to celebrate and learn from….
The school in England which performs best in Progress 8 measures is a state comprehensive in Wembley: the Michaela Community School. It is followed closely by Mercia School, another comprehensive in a working-class area of Sheffield, modelled directly on Michaela. Also in the top ten are sister comprehensives in Hackney: Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy and Mossbourne Community Academy. All serve poorer, multi-ethnic communities. All are non-selective in who they admit. All transform lives with performance at GCSE which transcends what many fee-paying independent schools are capable of.
One might hope that these schools and their leaders would be celebrated by professional associations, lauded by a left-wing government for the opportunities they are extending to working-class children and held up by the university education departments which train our teachers as the models to emulate.
But instead they are stigmatised, shamed and shunned. The teaching unions and school leader bodies which are supposed to fight for better educational outcomes are either scornful or embarrassed by these schools. Labour ministers mock or belittle. Those in higher education sneer and denounce. The achievements of Michaela’s headteacher, the inspirational Katharine Birbalsingh, are derided and attributed either to selection (which the school does not and cannot practise) or statistical legerdemain. Mossbourne Victoria Park has been targeted by teaching unions and left-wing activists precisely because it is successful, with anger directed in particular at its strict behaviour policy.
A calm and purposeful environment in which teachers can teach and pupils learn might seem a curious educational feature to find objectionable in a school. But that would be to misunderstand what drives the ideologues within our university education departments and their union allies. What unites so many of the schools which do best in the Progress 8 measurement is their belief in formal uniform, high standards of behaviour, academic rigour, regular testing, direct instruction with a didactic approach from teachers and an avoidance of the ‘group-based’ or ‘child-centred’ learning which the university teacher trainers believe in.
The success of these schools is a ringing, powerful, empirically sound and uncontestable refutation of all the theory and ideology to which Professor Cremin and her allies have devoted their careers. They hate these schools as the Magisterium hated Galileo – all their pretended authority is undone by the hard truth of proven evidence.
What makes this lesson urgent is that the cause which Professor Cremin and her allies affect to believe in – the liberation of the poorest and the marginalised – is advanced by the schools whose methods they abjure and whose leaders they scorn.
An abridged version of the article is in today’s Times.
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That’s how Ahmed Alkhatib sees the UK. Nicole Lampert interviews him in the Telegraph – Deluded Western activists must stop shouting over actual Palestinians like me:
He has the word “Zionist” screamed at him. He is branded a genocide supporter. He is called a traitor.
When Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib goes to talk at university campuses, sometimes he doesn’t even get as far as opening his mouth. As a result of protests from “pro-Palestinians”, several colleges have simply cancelled his talks, citing the threat of “security interruptions”.
Yet Alkhatib is a Palestinian from Gaza who has lost 33 members of his immediate and extended family in the war. He was once groomed by Hamas, but he has no love for the keffiyeh-sporting, resistance-spouting “pro-Palestine” movement – members of which, he says, know little about Gaza itself.
“There is this huge gap between the many people in the Gaza Strip who have experienced the consequences of Hamas’s terrorism, violence and jihadism, and the resistance narrative being pushed,” says Alkhatib, 36.
He says the “pro-Palestinian” movement advocates “resistance”, but uses the Palestinians not as an actual people, but as a cypher for their radicalism. He sighs at “pro-Palestinian” activists, such as Greta Thunberg and Sally Rooney. Earlier this year, Rooney declared that by “standing in solidarity with Palestine, we are learning to fight for light on earth”. None of them truly understand what is going on, he says.
“Those in the West, whether they are Muslims or so-called ‘allies’ who are still cheering on the resistance narrative, at best seek to sideline Hamas and pretend that it is not a significant contributor to the situation. At worst, this has led to a horrendous, unprecedented normalisation of Hamas, an Islamo-fascist, jihadi organisation that, ironically, had been losing an immense amount of legitimacy and support in Gaza well before October 7.”
Alkhatib has written a short book called Hamas and Its Two Million Hostages. He sees Hamas not as the victors who have managed so well to turn the world against the Israelis, but as a terror group that holds its own people hostage. He says that those who claim to speak for Palestinians have simply made things more dangerous for them – and more dangerous for his family.
“You have Westerners in the UK, in North America, in Western Europe, in Australia and New Zealand, acknowledging Hamas as an expression of organic resistance. It is resistance porn,” he says. “Somehow, October 7 became about 77 years of Israeli occupation and dispossession, not about a horrendous decision [made] by a small number of jihadis in Gaza tunnels.” He adds that Hamas has “dragged its people along for a suicidal adventure”.
He says that Western liberals who support Palestine are, in doing so, supporting an Islamic state and its associated terrorists. “Being pro-Hamas, and now pro-Islamic Republic, has become a mainstream position. Essentially, you have Western support for Islamist groups. And within this Western coalition, you have an unholy alliance of Islamists and supposedly social justice warriors – who ostensibly care about women’s rights, equality, gay rights and immigrant rights, and a whole host of social causes – directly or indirectly singing the praises of a jihadist terrorist organisation.” He shakes his head in anger and frustration….
Alkhatib was living in California and working in international development on Oct 7, 2023. He spoke out against Hamas on social media and in newspaper opinion pieces while explaining what was going on in Gaza. Gradually, he realised that he had an important voice that people wanted to listen to. He moved to Washington and started the Realign for Palestine project, promoting non-violence and the two-state solution with Palestinians, Israelis and Americans.
He worries about Britain in particular, seeing us as leading the way in a moral blindness regarding jihadism.
“I am quite alarmed by what I am seeing in the UK – there are deeply problematic Islamist narratives taking hold,” he says. “They [Islamists] are openly fantasising about how they are going to take over. It is crazy to me that there are politicians elected on a ‘Gaza’ ticket. The people in Gaza are not concerned with what a few MPs are yelling and screaming about here. What they want is to be emancipated from Hamas, from the shackles of the resistance narrative that for the last 20 years has seen billions of dollars wasted and lives lost for absolutely nothing.”
Alkhatib wants us all to know he is not alone. There are many others who think just like him in Gaza. But as long as Hamas has an influence in Gaza, he says there will be a return to violence from the current relative peace.
“War is coming back to Gaza,” he says sadly. “The people there say, ‘We are slowly dying.’ As long as Hamas is in charge, no one is willing to develop or put money into [Gaza]. The people of Gaza had hoped their forced sacrifice would mean something – that Hamas would be gone. But right now, they are extremely disillusioned.
“For all the talk from the ‘quote community’ of revolution, and all the talk from the politicians of how Gaza can be turned into this ‘futuristic city’, everyone has to open their eyes. Hamas is a deeply irrational actor in pursuit of a deeply irrational agenda – the destruction of the state of Israel. What I find grotesque is how many in the West are still waving their flags.”
A voice that needs to be heard.
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From Geoffrey C. Kabat at Quillette – “The Trump administration’s scientific illiteracy about rates of autism is going to have catastrophic results”:
At an Oval Office ceremony on 10 August, President Trump signed an executive order recommending an overhaul of the childhood-immunisation schedule that has been in place since the mid-1980s. The proposed changes will reduce the number of childhood diseases combatted by vaccination from seventeen to eleven. During the press conference, Trump and his Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. both spoke at length about the vaccine schedule. Inoculations, they said, should be spaced out and the number of childhood vaccinations recommended by the government would now be reduced.
Both men repeatedly referred to potential links between childhood vaccines and increasing rates of autism diagnosis. Under the new directive, the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine (which has been administered in the US for 55 years) would be split into three separate vaccines, in order to diminish the burden that, according to Trump, the combined vaccine places on young children. (As the phrase “once such products are domestically available” in the executive order acknowledges, separate vaccines are not currently obtainable for these three diseases in the US.)
“And I saw this early on, and I’ve seen proof of it,” Trump declared, “where they have a vaccination thing, looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body. And bad things happen, in many cases—in too many cases—because this is an explosion. This is an epidemic. So at year one, you should have five separate visits for vaccines rather than giving them all in the same day.”
So eloquent. “Bad things happen”. Further musings from the great man:
“Decades ago, children received only a small fraction of the vaccines required today. In those times, people were much healthier and of course, the high rates of autism now observed did not exist. So there’s a reason for such epidemic rates of autism and we’re going to bring it back to much closer to where it was…
“Because I came in and I said, I want to find what’s going on with autism. It’s many, many times what it used to be years ago, and it gets progressively worse. And we had progressively more and more vaccines. So in a nutshell, and you can see it through this, we’re breaking up the vaccines and we’re breaking them up into two time periods. OK? Not so complicated. And we think we’re going to have a tremendous result from doing that.”
The scientific idiot-in-chief. Of course we know where all this nonsense started:
In 1998, the Lancet published a now-retracted study by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues linking the MMR vaccine to neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism.
It took the Lancet 12 years to retract the paper – another in the long list of triumphs from Lancet editor Richard Horton. [See here.] Wakefield has since become something of a celebrity in the US after leaving the UK in disgrace.
Since then, decades of high-quality scientific evidence has been published showing no such association (see here and here). Two major societies that promote high-quality research into autism and support families dealing with the condition have forcefully opposed claims of a causal link between vaccination and autism (here and here).
Also, the supposed increase in autism has been challenged by recent studies (for instance) which suggest that this was more to do with changes in diagnostic criteria.
Trump and RFK Jr. are perpetuating the misunderstanding that cases of autism have been increasing in the population at an alarming rate, whereas what has happened is that diagnoses of autism are increasing in people who, in the past, would have been diagnosed with other conditions or missed altogether. They are now using this misunderstanding to scare people about vaccines, asserting that the artifactual increase in autism rates constitutes evidence of an epidemic produced by the harmful effects of vaccines. The results of this scientific illiteracy could be catastrophic.
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Because it discusses demography and migration as potential threats to liberal societies, and something called “biocultural continuity”! The horror! It sounds almost… conservative! Someone please protect the students!
If you ask me, one of the main dangers facing liberalism is precisely that (some) liberals want to shut down debate about the threats it faces. So what else could we do? Bouke invited me to join efforts and write a paper in reply, which critically evaluates and challenges Anomaly & Faria’s argument. It has now been accepted for publication.
So can liberalism survive itself? Anomaly and Faria fear it may not, pointing to low birth rates, cultural fragmentation, mass migration from illiberal cultures, and liberalism’s self-imposed constraints. In our paper, we’re more hopeful. Open societies adapt faster; people defect and switch ideologies when facades crack; technology gives them an edge; and authoritarian regimes have demographic problems of their own. Liberalism ain’t finished yet.
This was a somewhat adversarial collaboration, which are often the most interesting. Bouke is more pessimistic and tends to think that demography (largely) determines our destiny, whereas I take a more sanguine view of the robustness of liberal democracy and focus more on cultural transmission—which can undermine demographic advantages through the horizontal transmission of ideas and ideological defection. Liberalism is inherently attractive, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
To be published soon—and banned in a classroom near you!
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When the media says ‘famine experts warn,’ this is who they mean.
In January 2024, he did an interview with Owen Jones and made a series of predictions/declarations about starvation in Gaza.
0:00 “I’ve not seen anything like this before” in 40 years
0:21 Famine “probably by early February [2024],” nothing like it in 75 years
1:29 Even a ceasefire cannot stop the deaths, “those deaths are on Israel”
2:33 Starvation deaths “will soon exceed those directly from violence”
2:50 “A catastrophe the likes of which we have not seen in my lifetime”
What actually happened:
The IPC’s own Famine Review Committee, June 2024: the famine claims were “not plausible,” and “the available evidence does not indicate that Famine is currently occurring.” https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/famine-review-gaza-strip-june-2024-conclusions-and-recommendations
Gaza’s recorded malnutrition death rate in 2025 (74 deaths through late July, per the WHO) works out to roughly the same per-capita rate as the United States, where the CDC counted over 20,000 malnutrition deaths in 2022. https://emro.who.int/media/news/malnutrition-rates-reach-alarming-levels-in-gaza-who-warns.html
After the October 2025 ceasefire, a UNICEF-led survey found 0.5 percent acute child malnutrition in Gaza, one of the lowest rates in the region. https://thefp.com/p/unicef-data-undermines-claims-palestine-israel-famine-united-nations
Every single declaration was false at the time.
Every single prediction didn’t happen.
The only thing that collapsed in February 2024 was Alex de Waal’s credibility.
Owen Jones’ credibility, of course, collapsed a long time ago. That “concerned” face….
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And in Canada:
Sanitizing the most infamous acts of terror in modern history as mere “hijackings that led to crashes” is a complete collapse of journalistic standards. Ideology should never replace facts at our national public broadcaster.