Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Jewishness has become a professional and social liability

    Izabella Tabarovsky at Quillette – “Jewish testimonies before Australia’s Royal Commission paint a portrait of a culture already transformed—one in which Jewishness has become a professional and social liability”:

    Antisemitism is often viewed as visceral hatred of Jews. But that’s a limited understanding of the phenomenon.

    Antisemitism is also a politics and a zeitgeist; a conspiracy theory that feeds mass hysteria about Jewish power; an underlying culture that teaches people that Jews are different, they don’t belong, they aren’t on our side—and ultimately, that they are our misfortune. It draws an invisible line between Jews and the broader society, step by step normalising their marginalisation and disappearance.

    That process is already underway across the free world, and Jewish testimonies before Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, established in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre, offer striking evidence to that effect. Eerily reminiscent of German Jews recalling how their lives began to change, they are utterly absorbing: snapshots of the present refracted through a deeply familiar historical memory.

    Musician and writer Deborah Conway talks about a call from the director of a writers festival, telling her there’s been pushback against her participation in the programme. He assures her everything is fine, but at the festival, she finds herself surrounded by heavy security. At one panel, people rise to their feet, unfurl signs, and start screaming at her. In Brisbane, a dozen masked people pound on the glass of the bookshop where she is speaking, screaming to globalise the intifada, while policemen do nothing. Intimidation bears fruit: music critics sidestep her new album, and she can’t book venues to perform it in. Her public presence is quietly diminished. Has anybody noticed?

    But it doesn’t stop there. Large social media accounts target her daughter, an online food personality. Her hummus adds to Palestinian suffering, apparently, so they threaten to show up at markets where she sells the food. “She had to pack and leave,” says Conway. At those markets, did anybody notice she’s no longer there?

    There is a history of Jews vanishing and others choosing not to notice. “I don’t know where the Jews who lived here went—they just moved out at some point,” was a common postwar refrain about the murdered Jews next door….

    Colleagues, friends, and neighbours aren’t the only ones: the authorities turn a blind eye too. The police stand idly by; the eSafety Commissioner declines to intervene because the abusers used the word “Zionist” rather than “Jew,” which means they were not formally antisemitic. Easier and cleaner to wash one’s hands of it than get involved. It is completely rational: the thugs are violent and committed; they may turn against you too.

    And then there is the testimony of a young woman identified as ABN. Her employer asked her to use a different name at work because her “identifiably Jewish name could upset a stakeholder.” Her Jewishness could add “some complexity to the relationships and to that partnership,” she’s told. She is asked to overhaul her work identity, complete with a new email address. She must understand: it could potentially “have negative commercial outcomes.” Once again, it’s strictly business: everyone is simply trying to help her keep her job while also keeping the client happy.

    And so it goes: the gradual normalisation of antisemitism.

  • Supporting Russia

  • Good news and bad news

    Stephen Pollard in the JC welcomes the banning from entering the UK of “two of the most poisonous hate merchants on the planet”, Cenk Uygur and his nephew Hasan Piker. A reminder of who they are:

    Last year Piker was banned by Twitch (for all of 24 hours) for “improper handling of terrorist propaganda” after showing a manifesto by Elias Rodriguez, the alleged murderer of a young Jewish couple at the Capital Jewish Museum shooting. He has said that “America deserved 9/11” and called Orthodox Jews “Jewish KKK brigades…just a bunch of fng inbred hicks literally doing pogroms”. Piker believes that “any kind of fucking Zionist tendency should be treated in the same way as being a fing rabid neo-Nazi… You shouldn’t even let someone be the f***ing local dog catcher if they’ve ever exhibited any sort of positive feelings about the state of Israel.” And he denies that there was sexual violence during the Hamas massacre of October 7, claiming Israel “polluted the evidence pool”. In January he posted that “Hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state” and in April he said, “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.”

    His uncle, Uygur, has hosted former KKK leader David Duke on his YouTube programme and repeatedly uses antisemitic tropes in his criticisms of Israel, such as saying, “It is not antisemitic to say Israel controls Congress” – a claim he has made repeatedly (“Israel controls the American government through donations to 94 per cent of Congress”). In 2024 he said it did not matter whether Biden or Trump won because “Netanyahu is still in charge.” He claims that “the people in power are easy to understand. They’re either corrupt (paid by AIPAC) or afraid they’ll be fired by pro-Israel executives (mainstream media).” He has spread a modern version of the blood libel, claiming that Israel had shot Palestinians seeking aid, deliberately let their bodies decompose for days, and then “let dogs eat them”. Uygur has also dismissed the evidence of grooming gangs as “Islamophobic”.

    Not sorry to see them banned, then. But, as Pollard notes, there’s plenty of outrageously antisemitic bile produced here in the UK which the authorities do nothing about, “spread regularly and relentlessly within the UK by Islamists and hate preachers”.

    There are hundreds of such videos online, posted proudly by mosques. One dossier sent to the police (who of course did nothing in response) includes a sermon in which an imam speaks about punishing “the sins of the Jews” and others which deny or defend the atrocities of October 7. Another imam said Muslims should “terrorise” their enemies. One imam led a prayer for the destruction of Jewish homes: “Oh Allah, curse the Jews and the children of Israel. Oh Allah, curse the infidels and the polytheists. Oh Allah, break their words, shake their feet, disperse and tear apart their unity and ruin their houses and destroy their homes.”

    Another preached how Zionists plot to “control the world” by manipulating banks, media organisations and regimes. They are in league with the Dajjal (an evil false prophet in Islam, like the Antichrist): “Zionism is like a political party, preparing for the Dajjal to come to rule the world, and their main function is to make sure that all the organs of states across the world and the national and international bodies will be in their hold. They hold the media, they hold all the financial institutions, they control a lot of the political regimes around the world and once they have that they will try to control the world.” The same Imam said in another sermon that Zionists bribe UK politicians to “use their false narrative and fabricated stories to push their agenda.” They are “soldiers of the devil”. Videos of his sermons were then posted on YouTube.

    These examples are a tiny fraction of what is out there. And they include only comments by imams. Other rabble rousers and hate merchants are even worse. But not one of any of them has even been criticised by mainstream Muslim bodies, let alone prosecuted for what is surely incitement. So while there is the occasional piece of good news, as today, such news is miniscule in comparison to the tide of hate that grows daily inside the UK.

  • Remembering the Farhud

    In 1941, Nazi ideology incited the Farhud, a massacre against the Jews of Baghdad. Hundreds of Iraqi Jews were murdered in this extension of the Holocaust

    The Farhud and Kristallnacht are so similar: violent massacres against Jews incited by Nazi ideas that sparked the expulsion and mass murder of Jews from their countries. They really should be taught together.

    My own grandmother, Hela, lived through the Farhud. She finds it difficult to speak about that time, but she has shared her story with me. She always prefers to speak about Iraq before the Farhud, the place she loved so dearly.

    On the first day of the Farhud, my grandmother was at a cafe that I’ve come to know through her stories. On June 1st, 1941 she was there like always.

    Suddenly, she heard screaming. She turned her head and saw a man screaming “Kill the Jews” in front of a woman with eight children. One was just a baby.

    To my grandmother’s horror, he began shooting. One by one, he shot the little children as their mother screamed. He saved her for last.

    The cafe owner grabbed my grandmother and hid her in the backroom until my great-grandfather came to fetch her. They went to a neighbor’s house, a kind Muslim family who were equally horrified by the frenzy of hate.

    All night there was screaming and crying. Glass shattering. My grandmother could not sleep.

    The next day, she watched in horror as a disabled Jewish teen was brutally raped. The man then broke a glass bottle that he used to continue violating her.

    My grandmother did not speak for the rest of that day. She could only weep inconsolably.

    My grandmother adored Iraq: the streets she grew up walking, the neighbors her family counted as friends. But she was not safe in Iraq after the Farhud, nor was any other Jew.

    This is my history. It’s also the history of most of the Jews living in Israel today. A majority of us are the descendants of Jews who were violently expelled from the Middle East and North Africa.

    I will not “go back” to Poland, nor will I advocate for the destruction of Israel, the one place my grandmother felt safe after she had to witness such horrors.

    Jews had lived in Iraq for almost three millennia – since the Babylonian exile. Before the Farhud they made up one third to a quarter of the population of Baghdad. Now there are none – an astonishing ethnic cleansing that somehow rarely gets mentioned. And it wasn’t just Iraq:

    The Farhud sounded the death knell for the Jews of Iraq. 120,000 fled ten years later. Other riots followed (Libya in 1945 and 1948 – 148 Jews dead), Aden (87 Jews dead) Syria (the Aleppo Great synagogue destroyed), Morocco (48 dead) as Jews felt the full force of state-sponsored incitement and persecution in Arab states.

  • “Yes, I have changed…”

  • Banished to the cave of eternal despair

  • Sturgeon still playing the misogyny card

    Kathleen Stock in the Times:

    According to her autobiography, Frankly, Nicola Sturgeon developed a fascination with words as a schoolgirl that hasn’t ever left her. Still, there must be some words and phrases she’s tired of hearing by now. “Alex Salmond”, “gender-critical”, “luxury motorhome parked on your mother-in-law’s driveway” are all safe bets. But if there’s one word the former first minister never seems to get bored with, it’s “misogyny”. It crops up in the memoir 16 times and has its own index entry.

    Page 1 sets the tone: “Like all women, since the dawn of time, I have faced misogyny and sexism.” Alleged examples include the way Salmond used to talk to her, unfair press treatment and the “far-right cabal” that “hijacked” the trans debate by pointing out that the rapist Isla Bryson, placed in a woman’s prison, was a man.

    This week the M-word was in heavy rotation again as the former SNP leader did interviews lamenting what she called an “age-old cry”: “that when a man does something wrong, the first thing [some] will do is look for the woman to blame”.

    Though I suppose we should congratulate Sturgeon on her newfound ability to accurately identify the sex of criminals, as usual she is somewhat misstating the grounds of critics’ complaints. The real issue is that when the chief executive of a ruling party does something wrong — specifically, using party money on fancy tableware, bean-to-cup coffee machines, handcrafted crystal cruets, etc — onlookers are bound to wonder why the party leader didn’t notice. And especially when they were married and shared a kitchen. But for Sturgeon, such reactions are yet more evidence of the way the cards are stacked against her. And she seems to think the global sisterhood will sympathise: “Women all over the country, the world […] will recognise what I’m saying.” In a BBC interview yesterday she said she refused to contribute to a culture that blames women “for the actions of the men in their lives”….

    The ready availability of a misogyny defence has been extremely helpful for female politicians. In Sturgeon’s case it distracted from whatever mess she was in at the time, insinuating a sinister explanation for any criticism and making her seem the plucky underdog. It emitted progressive vibes consonant with a modernised SNP while implicitly setting up an inner circle of women supporters against an out-group of nasty men. And although she claims to abhor traditional feminine stereotypes, ironically this fitted nicely with another aspect of her persona: the nation’s “chief mammy”, sleeves up, kettle on, useless males shooed out of the kitchen so the wummin could talk sense among themselves. Just nobody ask how much her kettle cost.

    But the emotive cues aren’t working in the way they used to. No doubt this is partly due to all those photos of her in close proximity to high-end coffee machines. But it’s also because the misogyny gambit has grown stale through overuse….

    It’s all Nicola has left – and it’s not working any more.

  • The Israel-Lebanon peace deal

    On May 17, 1983, Israel and Lebanon signed a US-brokered agreement that formally ended the state of war between them that had existed since 1948. Its preamble proclaimed the “termination of the state of war” between the two neighbors.

    The terms were concrete:

    1. Mutual recognition of each country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity

    2. A phased withdrawal of Israeli forces, alongside the establishment of a Security Zone in southern Lebanon

    3. A commitment by each side not to allow its territory to be used as a base for “hostile or terrorist activity” against the other

    4. It even floated future agreements on the movement of goods, products and persons on a non-discriminatory basis

    It was signed by Israeli David Kimche and Lebanon’s Antoine Fattal, mediated by the US, and ratified by the Lebanese parliament. So what happened?

    Syria.

    On November 1, 1983, Syria demanded that Lebanon cancel its May 17 agreement with Israel and recognize special security interests of Damascus. Hafez al-Assad had boots on the ground and no intention of leaving. The Syrian regime correctly calculated that by fomenting internal chaos, they could force Lebanon to choose between the peace treaty and domestic survival. After US forces withdrew, the formal abrogation occurred on March 5, 1984, when the Lebanese cabinet officially cancelled the treaty under direct Syrian diktat.

    A peace deal Lebanon’s own parliament approved was destroyed not by the Lebanese people, but by an outside occupier with a veto over Lebanese sovereignty.

    In 1983 it was Syria holding the gun. Today it’s Hezbollah and its master, Iran. The occupier changed uniforms, but the playbook is identical: a foreign-backed militia that answers to Tehran holds Lebanon hostage and denies it the right to make peace. Hezbollah built an Iranian forward base on Lebanese soil, the exact “hostile activity” the 1983 deal was meant to outlaw. Every Lebanese government since has faced the same impossible choice Damascus once forced: peace, or survival under the militia’s guns.

    Lebanon already chose peace once. Its parliament ratified it. The only thing standing in the way then, as now, was a foreign power occupying Lebanon against its own interests.

  • Standing with male athletes in girls’ sports

    “I’m so proud of you for what you’re doing”. Trump in the White House and still the Dems aren’t polling well. I wonder why not…

  • Round the side of the house