Jolyon Maugham continues to beclown himself with his Good Law Project:
There is, of course, no “blanket exclusion” of trans people from sport. As the comments point out, they just have to compete in their correct sex category. The days when men could just claim to be women and use their genetic advantage to dominate are, thankfully, coming to an end.
Euan McColm on the disgraceful Police Scotland action against For Women Scotland campaigner Susan Smith:
Police officers based at the Scottish parliament have ordered Smith to attend an Edinburgh cop shop where she will receive a formal warning over an incident at a recent protest outside Holyrood. The 54-year-old has been warned failure to attend will lead to her being charged with vandalism.
This black farce follows the briefest interaction between Smith and an angry trans activist during a rally outside the Scottish parliament last month. As hundreds of women gathered to demand the Scottish government comply with the supreme court ruling, tiresome perma-protestor Tom Harlow – a stripper and drag queen who performs as Cabaret Against The Hate Speech and has previously received funding from the Scottish government’s arts quango Creative Scotland – arrived and deployed his usual tactic of blaring music from a portable PA system, drowning out the women who wished to speak about their rights.
For 90 minutes, Harlow – real name Thomas Michael Moncrieff – disrupted the event while police officers did nothing. When Susan Smith approached him to ask him to turn down the volume, he held an umbrella in front of her face. Smith, I regret to inform you, touched the brolly.
Video and photographs of the umbrella-touching incident are conclusive. Smith did not commit a crime. (There may have been a second brolly toucher but I’m loath to feed conspiracies).
Tom Harlow’s disruption of the feminist rally outside Holyrood went beyond the bounds of free speech. His appeared to be an aggressive protest aimed at silencing others. He succeeded in doing that. The police should have shut him up on the day. Instead, they’re now doing his bidding.
There are clear echoes of the recent Graham Linehan case, where the police appeared to be doing the bidding of a trans activist. That case was eventually dismissed. So, here we go again.
A public backlash against Linehan’s arrest should have marked an end to cops’ indulgence of the long-deployed activist tactic of making spurious complaints and grinding their victims with the process. Instead, as the case of Susan Smith shows, Police Scotland – an organisation hopelessly captured by gender ideologues – remains ready to act as the trans activists’ private militia.
Spot the bottle kilns, with photographer James Baker at Cafe Royal Books:
There were many factories, known as pot banks, spread across the city and the industry was the areas largest employer with many thousands being employed. Sadly, the industry like many others in Britain went into decline leaving behind the scars of industrial decay.
One of the iconic features of this industrialised area was the large number of bottle kilns which could be seen on the skyline across the city. The bottle shape is actually the chimney which takes away smoke and creates airflow and can be up to seventy feet in height. The kiln for firing the pottery is inside the bottle. At it’s peak, there were over two thousand bottle kilns in use.
There are now fewer than 50 left standing and almost all are neglected and needing attention. It was against this backdrop of a declining industry and the small number of remaining bottle kilns that in the early 1980s I decided to record these iconic structures.
[Photos © Cafe Royal Books/James Baker]
From the JC:
Several students were blocked from attending a University College London (UCL) event on Jewish history after an anti-Israel mob “besieged a campus building”.
A group of activists wearing keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags stormed the building last Friday afternoon, chanting “Zionism off campus” and “Crush the Zionist settler state”.
Masked demonstrators gathered in the entryway of the venue, shouting “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” and preventing several students from entering the event, where an Israeli guest was speaking.
Hmm. When does an anti-Israel mob become an antisemitic mob?
UCL President and Provost Dr Michael Spence told the JC: “Freedom of speech is not only a legal right, but the cornerstone of academic and student life. We are firmly committed to upholding it and are investigating the full circumstances of this incident, with a view to taking disciplinary action, as appropriate, against anyone involved.
“Moreover, I am utterly appalled by reports of antisemitic comments and chants during the protest. This has no place at UCL and will form part of our investigation. UCL unequivocally condemns all forms of antisemitism and has made clear to our community that such behaviour is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.”
Perhaps then those demonstrators who are students at UCL might possibly find themselves ex-students?
The National Secular Society on the “uncritical and deferential” attitudes towards religious groups which leaves pupils potentially exposed to harm.
A London mosque accused of promoting “antisemitic hate” days after the October 7 attacks has hosted primary school pupils on a school trip and supplied guest speakers at two other schools, the National Secular Society has learned.
Representatives from Greenwich Islamic Centre (GIC) visited two primary schools in Greenwich last March and this April, with Year 5 pupils from another school in Kent visiting the mosque in March 2024.
The visits took place despite a sermon delivered at GIC on 20 October 2023 – just 13 days after the 7 October attacks in Israel by Hamas – in which imam Muhammad Abdullah Shakir called on Allah to “protect Al Aqsa [mosque] from the Jews”, to “curse the infidels” and “destroy their land”.
Shakir’s remarks were widely reported in the press at the time, with local MP Matthew Pennycook describing them as “anti-Semitic hate” on X. Local councillors also denounced the comments in “the strongest possible terms”.
But the school wasn’t bothered.
One of the schools proceeded with its visit to GIC despite having an ‘Educational Visits Policy’ requiring that a “thorough risk assessment” be conducted when planning trips and that the school board ensures any trip “does not discriminate against a particular individual, group of pupils or single school”.
Apart from Jews, obviously. But Jews don’t count.
“…because they fashion themselves as “pro-Palestine” voices and activists.“…
“Anti-Israel sentiments have become the primary lens through which analyses and opinions are constructed and shared. While individuals have a right to hold whatever beliefs they choose, the goals and aspirations of free thinkers and analysts should be the maximal pursuit of information, evidence, hypotheses, theories, diverse perspectives, and de-personalized discourse.
“Instead, many end up grossly rushing to tell me how I don’t “conform” to other Palestinian views, and how many “pro-Palestine” voices have problems with me. Instead of Washington DC being a vibrant place for policymaking and the exchange of truly original and free ideas, hordes of non-Palestinian “experts”, “analysts”, junior staff, Ivy League ideologues, brainwashed young people, and detached individuals feel the need to police what I have to say relative to their intransigent rubric for how they assess Hamas, Gaza, the war, and associated issues.“
From Anna Slatz at Reduxx:
A violent transgender pedophile has been released into the community of Everett, Washington, after serving 30 years behind bars for child rape, kidnapping, and child molestation. Jolene Charisma Starr, born Joel Thomas Nichols, had served part of his sentence in a women’s prison.
After spending the last part of his sentence at the Washington Correctional Center for Women – where he terrified the inmates, who described him as “really violent” – he’s been released as a “female” sex offender.
Isn’t gender affirmation wonderful?
If more people had thought like this 75 years ago and accepted the existence of Israel, all the suffering might have been avoided. But, drenched in ideas of Muslim supremacy, and not a little dash of Nazism, and the backing of UNRWA, they’ve spent all this time trying to stop the Jews from building a home in their ancestral land.
Well, they failed. Israel is here to stay. Now they can perhaps learn to live with it.
The idiocy of the hard-left embrace of Islamism was neatly exposed on Saturday when a protestor at the Whitechapel demo, clutching a “Refugees Welcome” placard, replied to some inaudible invective from a masked marcher. “There’s no need for that, we’re on the same side, bruv” he says. The Islamist responds, witheringly, “No we’re not”.
Potkin Azarmehr, an Iranian activist who fled to Britain following the 1979 revolution, writes in the Telegraph – Islamo-socialist alliances don’t last, just ask the Iranians.
For some time now, I have watched with growing unease an echo of history repeating itself. Though British political life is still far from the violent upheavals of Tehran in 1979, then, as now, the Left believed it could ride the beast of political Islam and steer it toward their cause.
During the Iranian Revolution, the Western-educated secular Left joined forces with violent Islamist revolutionaries to overthrow the Shah, only to be annihilated by the very movement they helped bring to power. They believed the mullahs’ rule would be merely a transitional phase – a provisional government of sorts, like Kerensky’s in Russia – one they could later sweep aside, just as the Bolsheviks had done in 1917.
Things did not unfold as they had imagined. They failed to grasp the true nature of political Islam; the Ayatollahs swiftly devoured them as soon as they were no longer needed and Iran was thrust into decades of tyranny, repression and backwardness.
And now we’re seeing the same grotesque misapprehension on the part of the deluded left here in the UK.
The Left in Britain believes it has found allies in political Islam – fellow “oppressed” fighting a common enemy in the so-called “far-Right”. But many Muslims, including those increasingly taking an active role in politics, do not see it that way. Their vision for society is diametrically opposed to the progressive ideals the Left claims to champion: free speech, gender equality, secularism, and LGBT rights.
What we are witnessing is the same fatal miscalculation that took place in Iran.
And another reverberation from 1979 is the weakness and incompetence of the political establishment. In the final year of the Shah’s rule, the regime tried desperately to appease its enemies. It jailed its own supporters and released violent radical prisoners in a futile attempt to calm the streets. In its fear of seeming repressive and its eagerness to appease the radical Islamists, it caused its own downfall.
Does that all sound familiar? Today in Britain, our own leaders are doing something similar.
The police, terrified of being accused of “Islamophobia”, have become hesitant to enforce the law evenly. Peaceful demonstrators carrying “Hamas are terrorists” signs are arrested, a Star of David is treated as a provocation, while those who issue threats and incite violence are indulged and appeased. The Government, concerned about losing votes from its Muslim constituents, neglects the threat of extremist networks openly recruiting in mosques, prisons, schools and online. It does this while lecturing ordinary law-abiding Britons about “extremism” and labelling them “far-Right”.
Just like Tehran in 1979, Left-wing elites are too weak to confront the forces that seek to overthrow their own values, and too naïve to recognise that those forces are not partners in progress but architects of regression.
The Left in Iran learned the hard way that when you go to bed with Islam, you do not wake up in a democracy. You wake up in a theocracy. Britain’s Left should take heed.
But they won’t.
It becomes clearer, decade after decade, that countries that once lived under a communist dictatorship – Russia, China – are left disastrously and deeply disfigured. But still the hard left persists in believing in the great socialist alternative to our flawed but still functioning liberal democracy. If only Trotsky instead of Stalin: what a wonderful world it would be. We seem a long long way from all that now, but still they carry on, each new generation, with absolutely no lessons learned from history. So will they learn a lesson from Iran about the folly of forming an alliance with Islamists? Of course they won’t.
The truth about the grooming gangs scandal – and Sadiq Khan’s refusal to admit it’s happening in London – as laid out by Rakib Ehsan at Spiked:
The sorry truth is that Labour has neither the motivation nor the will to investigate grooming-gang activity and associated institutional failures – and that goes for the Labour mayor in London, too. It’s not hard to fathom why. Firstly, these heinous sex crimes took place in areas under Labour control. And secondly, given its perpetrators have been disproportionately men of Pakistani Muslim origin, grooming-gang activity undermines Labour’s pro-multiculturalism narrative. Much of the political left more broadly has been left paralysed by fears of being accused of racism and Islamophobia.
It seems that too many in Labour – including Khan – are ultimately more interested in protecting their personal reputations and pro-diversity beliefs, than in prioritising the safety and wellbeing of the most vulnerable in their midst. It is an ongoing scandal that will ultimately cost them dear.
Mick Hartley 