Mick Hartley

Natasha Hausdorff interviewed at Spiked. 

On the media:

For decades, we have had a media that, for the most part, propagates the lies of terrorist organisations. This has come to a head in everything we have seen being reported, in particular out of Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas. Ultimately, it is misinformation that has been informing – or perhaps disinforming – public debate.

On Glastonbury:

Let’s be clear that this was essentially calling for death to Jews. It is simply an evolution of ‘From the river to the sea’, which we’ve heard from 7 October onwards.

I saw a distinct lack of pretense to this sort of unbridled Jew hate. Glastonbury has been a very unwelcome place for Jews and Israelis for years. It was reported that there was even a Hitler flag being displayed on some of the tents. This is deeply, deeply concerning – but likely only the tip of the iceberg. There are many people who have been swept up in all this because they think it’s the fashionable thing. Apparently, it’s the way that you demonstrate your moral credentials these days – by siding with internationally proscribed terrorist organisations and saying things like ‘up Hamas’ and ‘up Hezbollah’.

On the charge of genocide:

Not only is it grotesque, it has no basis in reality whatsoever. But it is being advanced with a very particular purpose. I remember being on SABC – the South African version of the BBC – just after South Africa had brought its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). My counterpart said, ‘Isn’t it marvelous now we can finally use Israel and genocide in the same sentence, and nobody can tell us otherwise?’.

The word ‘genocide’ was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish and Jewish jurist, to provide legal terminology around the Holocaust. But now the term is being inverted, and Jewish Israelis are being accused of the very crimes that were committed against them – not only during the Holocaust, but also on 7 October. Indeed, these were real acts of genocide that were committed against Jews and Israelis, by terrorists who celebrated their crimes on GoPro footage and spread it around the world via social media. Hamas were very clear about their intent: they were targeting Jews because they were Jews.

On schools:

I taught in 2008, and would set up societies for young people in inner city schools. At a school in Bethnal Green, in conversations about current affairs, the students were coming out with things like ‘McDonald’s pays the Jews to kill all the Arabs’. One teacher told me she couldn’t study set texts with the children at this school for GCSE, which included The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, because she said they kept coming out with things like, ‘If only Hitler were here today, he’d sort out the Jews once and for all’. It was becoming a breeding ground for extremism. From that school, three girls left to join ISIS. So when I talk about education, I’m not just talking about the moral rot that is taking hold at universities. I’m talking about the hotbeds of radicalisation that have been at play in city-centre schools. Unfortunately, when these individuals grow up, their opinions also shape political discourse.

No prizes for guessing what the dominant religion at that particular school would have been.

Full interview here.