Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Conversion therapy

    We fear Labour wants to make it a criminal offence for parents and health professionals to try to persuade gender-confused children not to embark on irreversible, life-changing medical treatment that can leave them permanently sterile and cause other lasting harms. If that is the Government’s intention, we will vigorously campaign against the bill.

    That, clearly, is the intention.

    The real conversion therapy is persuading gay youngsters that they’re really the other sex so they can be medically mutilated: transing away the gay.

    Added:

  • Conspiracist anti-Zionism

    Izabelle Tabarovsky, scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism, writes in Tablet Magazine about our current antisemitic moment:

    Two and a half years after Oct. 7, conspiracist anti-Zionism—the belief that Israel is a superpowerful state driven by a malevolent ideology—is spreading through elite American discourse like an accelerant-fed blaze.

    For years, it was the hard left that carried the banner of this ideology. But today, the “woke” right, represented most prominently by Tucker Carlson, is speaking in strikingly similar terms. Like its progressive counterparts, the woke right largely avoids railing against Jews, attacking Zionists and Israel instead. Like them, it insists that it is not antisemitic: It is simply criticizing Israel and Zionism….

    This lens is both seductive and familiar. Democratic Socialists couch “Zionist” power and evil in the language of anti-imperialism and liberation for the oppressed. The right evokes the same imagery under the banner of patriotism and religious conviction. But the underlying message is the same: It reduces complex political realities to a single, all-explaining narrative driven by an omnipotent, corrupting global force of international Jewry.

    Yes, we’ve been here before.

    While American progressives continue to insist that they are “simply being anti-Zionist and not antisemitic,” America’s neo-Nazis and white supremacists have long understood the true nature of this framework. In 2019, as Ilhan Omar faced repeated accusations of antisemitism for invoking conspiratorial tropes about Israel controlling American politicians, former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke praised her as “the most important member of the U.S. Congress” for defying the “Z.O.G.”—a neo-Nazi acronym for “Zionist Occupied Government.”

    A similar convergence was visible in the United Kingdom, where Holocaust denier David Irving described Jeremy Corbyn as “impressive” and “a fine man,” as his Labour Party turned conspiracist anti-Zionism into a flagship element of its political outlook.

    Except I don’t think we have the same strength of far right antisemitism here as in the US. There’s no figure comparable to Tucker Carlson. David Irving hardly counts. Here, where we have a larger Muslim representation, it’s almost exclusively the left allied with Islamism that peddles this new antisemitism/anti-zionism.

    It should be clear by now that what is taking shape in American public discourse is in no way a conventional political disagreement over the rightness or real-world effectiveness or this or that Israeli policy. It is the normalization of a way of thinking that flattens reality into a single, self-confirming narrative that has always led to the same place: the mental and political unraveling of the societies that embrace it.

    What makes this moment particularly dangerous is that it no longer belongs to the fringes. It has moved fully into mainstream and, having crossed the aisle from left to right, creates the impression of a shared, bipartisan consensus around a modern American version of “the Jewish question.”

    Societies that have gone down this path—the USSR, Arab states, Iran—do not emerge stronger, more confident, or more just. They become more paranoid, more dysfunctional, and more prone to turning against themselves. America has not been such a society until now. The question is whether it still has the power to stop.

    Worth reading in full.

  • That red-green alliance

  • Not about a piece of land

  • Platforming fabricators

    More from Hen Massig on the Nicholas Krystof NYT debacle. Turns out Krystof has history when it comes to believing fabrications that fit with his prejudices.

    In 2014, the New York Times had a Public Editor. Her name was Margaret Sullivan. When it emerged that Nicholas Kristof had spent years platforming a fabricator named Somaly Mam, Sullivan wrote that Kristof “owes it to his readers to explain, to the best of his ability and at length, what happened and why.” Kristof did. He wrote a column titled “When Sources May Have Lied.” Editor’s notes were added to old work. The mechanism worked.

    In 2017, the Times eliminated the Public Editor role. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. announced that “readers and social media followers collectively serve as a modern watchdog.” Liz Spayd was the last to hold the job.

    This week, Kristof published a column accusing Israel’s security forces of systematic sexual violence, sourced from a man who celebrated October 7, an NGO whose chairman was designated by Israel as a Hamas operative in 2013, and a fourteen-person account that grows more lurid each time it migrates to a larger platform. The Times defended the column with a statement from a spokesperson named Charlie Stadtlander, citing Kristof’s two Pulitzers. There is no Margaret Sullivan inside the building anymore. There is only Charlie.

    That Somaly Mam affair:

    Somaly Mam was a Cambodian woman who became globally famous on the strength of a story she told about her own childhood in sex slavery, and on the strength of the brothel rescues she said she conducted. Kristof made her career. He called her a “hero” in column after column. He live-tweeted her brothel raids to over a million followers. He featured her in his documentary Half the Sky.

    In 2014, Newsweek published a piece by Simon Marks showing that Mam had auditioned girls to lie on camera. Her own backstory was fabricated. The “rescues” were sometimes police raids that generated headlines more than they helped victims. Mam resigned. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple called for Kristof to audit his entire Cambodia archive. Kristof wrote that he wished he had never written about her, said he had been “hoodwinked,” and added editor’s notes to old columns.

    His response when Margaret Sullivan and Erik Wemple pressed him was telling. He said it was hard to verify facts in Cambodia. He said he was “reluctant to be an arbiter” of Mam’s backstory. He said he didn’t know what to think.

    This week, asked whether Palestinians might fabricate accusations to defame Israel, Kristof wrote that “to me that seems far-fetched.” That is the same credulity, twelve years older, applied to a higher-stakes accusation on a larger platform.

    The Times has watched this reporter make this mistake before. In 2014 there was an internal voice with the authority to push him to answer for it. There is no such voice now….

    American prisons logged more than sixteen thousand complaints of sexual abuse by guards in 2020. Only a small fraction were substantiated on investigation. The Times does not publish columns declaring the American prison system to operate sexual torture as standard operating procedure. No reporter there does. The verification stack for that kind of claim, applied to an American institution, requires named perpetrators, medical records, court filings, contemporaneous documentation, named victims willing to be named, or some combination.

    Consider how the Kristof column handles a single allegation. A Palestinian woman is described as raped by Israelis. No witness. No complaint. No medical evidence. No prison name. No charge. No date. There is no journalistic content in that account that would permit an investigation, a defense, or a correction. There is only the accusation, and the request that the reader believe it.

    That is the standard a Times opinion column applied to a sovereign state’s security forces. The same paper applies a different standard to the country it operates in. There is no longer anyone inside the building whose job it is to flag the asymmetry.

    Krystof is a gullible fool,. Unfortunately there’s no one now at the NYT to rein him in.

  • At the New York Times

    “The pace of killing of civilians has been much greater than in most other recent conflicts; the only one that I know of that compares is perhaps the Rwanda genocide in 1994.” But even by the standards of post-journalism, @NickKristof outdid himself this time.

    From the article:

    But the damage is already done. I know that if they want to restore their credibility — and Jewish readers have been a big and loyal part of this newspaper for generations, and it’s really heartbreaking — the Times needs to ask itself this question: Do they want to do something to restore their standing, or just give up? Because right now it’s not heading anywhere good.

  • In Utah

    “They paid for it with their lives.“

  • Ecclesiastical fronts

    German photographer Markus Brunetti makes images of churches, cathedrals, basilicas, and monasteries round Europe that are more like architectural drawings than photographs.

    Working closely with collaborator Betty Schöner, with whom he travels around the continent in a firetruck that has been converted to a photo lab, the pair snap thousands of images of each structure in meter-by-meter detail, often over the course of several years.

    Through a meticulous editing process that includes layering and arranging each shot into composite images, Brunetti creates precise, high-resolution views of the facades that we never experience in real life. Perspective is skewed so that the ornate temples and cathedrals’ entrances are perfectly straight.

    “Amalfi, Duomo di Sant’Andrea Apostolo” 

    “Bucuresti, Templul Coral”

    “Wells Cathedral”

    “L’Aquila, Basilica di San Bernardino”

    “Santiago de Compostela, Catedral”

    “York Minster”

    “Roma, Basilica di San Pietro”

    “Noyon, Cathédral Notre-Dame”

    “Lincoln Cathedral”

    [All images © Marcus Brunetti]

    Here’s a map with all the sites marked. Click on a dot to view.

  • Knowing how to hide

    In Brussels: Jews are only allowed on the Pride march if they don’t identify as Jewish.

  • Sexual Terror Unveiled

    From the Jerusalem Post:

    A two-year independent investigation into the sexual and gender-based crimes committed during the October 7 massacre and against hostages in Hamas captivity argues that the next stage is no longer only documenting that the crimes occurred, but determining how they can be prosecuted. 

    The Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, led by Israel Prize laureate and international law expert Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, on Tuesday published its report, “Sexual Terror Unveiled: The Untold Atrocities of October 7 and Against Hostages in Captivity,” presenting what it describes as the most extensive evidentiary record compiled to date on the sexual atrocities of October 7, 2023, and the captivity in Gaza.

    The report’s central contribution is not only its conclusion that sexual and gender-based violence was systematic, widespread, and integral to the attack, but its attempt to move from recognition to prosecution – a question that has shadowed the issue since the earliest days after the massacre, when many victims were murdered, scenes were burned or destroyed, forensic documentation was partial, and surviving witnesses were often traumatized, saw only fragments, or were unable to testify.

    The answer offered by the report is an evidentiary model built not on a single witness, video, or forensic finding, but on cumulative proof: preserved materials, cross-referenced accounts, recurring patterns, and the legal connection between specific proven crimes and the wider machinery of October 7.…

    Video here.

    Two and a half years after October 7, Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy is publishing a 300-page report she says establishes “beyond any doubt” that Hamas’s sexual violence was systematic, strategic, and inherent to the attack — and she’s confronting a world that, in some corners, still denies it.

    In this interview with Editor-in-Chief of The Jerusalem Report, Ruth Marks Eglash, the founder and chair of the Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children walks through the evidence her team has gathered over two years: testimonies from survivors and returned hostages, forensic analysis of crime scenes, and videos taken by Hamas terrorists themselves. “We cannot prevent what is not known,” Elkayam-Levy says. “This was sexual terror in the most exceptional cruelty.”

    Elkayam-Levy also confronts the wave of denial that followed October 7, from prominent feminist scholars to a senior UN official as recently as November 2025, and introduces “kinacide,” a term her team coined to describe the systematic torture of families, which has since been cited by parliaments and tribunals around the world. She explains why this report is a watershed moment, why the denial fuels antisemitism, and what she hopes will change once the world finally reads it.