Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • A toxic atmosphere

    A statement from Maccabi Tel Aviv. They will “decline any allocation offered on behalf of away fans”, in view of the toxic atmosphere and inflammatory rhetoric:

    It is clear, that various entrenched groups seek to malign the Maccabi Tel Aviv fan base, most of whom have no truck with racism or hooliganism of any kind, and are exploiting isolated incidents for their own social and political ends. The latest example is by people who have rushed to attribute to our fans the decision of the Tel Aviv police to cancel our derby match yesterday. It was not. It is easier to believe than to enquire especially when it suites an agenda. Our fans regularly travel all over Europe without incident and to suggest that the reason our fans cannot be allowed to travel is due to their behavior is an attempt to distort reality and to excuse the real underlying reasons for the decision to ban our fans. Our fans, the Jewish community know all too well this tactic and all are too familiar with where it can lead. 

    We are also concerned about the intervention of divisive figures who do not represent the values of our Club. We condemn all abhorrent views that have no place in football.

    As a result of the hate-filled falsehoods, a toxic atmosphere has been created which makes the safety of our fans wishing to attend very much in doubt. Inflammatory rhetoric, trafficking in half-truths is never healthy, but in this particular case the remarks being generated are of the most concerning variety. Not for Maccabi Tel Aviv or football, but for the sake of society and its underlying values, maybe the agendas involved here should be looked at more closely.

    The wellbeing and safety of our fans is paramount and from hard lessons learned, we have taken the decision to decline any allocation offered on behalf of away fans and our decision should be understood in that context.

    We hope that circumstances will change and look forward to being able to play in Birmingham in a sporting environment in the near future.

  • Who controls Birmingham?

    Some more commentary on the Birmingham ban on Maccabi fans..

    Joe Hackett at The Critic:

    It’s hard not to conclude that the real reason for the ban is fear of how people who literally elected a Gaza independent MP might react to the presence of a small group of Israeli football fans, and whether the cops would be able to control that situation.

    The local MP covering Villa Park is indeed Ayoub Khan, a Gaza independent who previously served as Lib Dem councillor for Aston, during which time he was offered antisemitism training after social media posts made in the wake of the October 7th attack.

    It’s fair to say that Khan is much more interested in Israel than he is in the local football club. Before he launched his campaign to “boycott Maccabi Tel Aviv” in September, he tweeted the word “Villa” precisely once, supporting a jobs fair at Villa Park.

    The same goes for his Gaza independent colleague, Iqbal Mohamed, who responded to the decision to ban the Maccabi fans by enthusiastically declaring his interest in the “safety of Aston Villa fans.” Mohamed hadn’t previously demonstrated any interest whatsoever in Villa, which is unsurprising given that he represents an area 80 miles away from Aston, albeit with similar demographics.…

    Since my family moved out in 2003, Small Heath and the surrounding area have been in the news for, among other things, terror raids, a local mosque being exposed on Channel 4 for preaching extremism, the Trojan Horse scandal where Islamists sought to impose their religious agenda in schools, Islamist “counter-rioters” slashing a Sky News van’s tyres and attacking a nearby pub last year, and masked men throwing boxes of live mice painted in the colours of the Palestinian flag into a local McDonalds. It should go without saying that none of this is exactly normal for most of the country.

    The decision to ban Maccabi fans from Villa Park is the latest in a series of increasingly high-profile events that have shone a light on the problems that have persisted, and grown, in working-class inner city parts of Birmingham, and other towns and cities, for decades. It was easier for the political and media mainstream to ignore when I was growing up there; it’s much less so now.

    Elliott Ludwig at the JC:

    My little corner of Birmingham has been a hotbed of anti-Israel feeling straight from Oct 7: From the 10-foot Palestinian flag on top of the local café to “takeover day” when the Moseley Village Green was literally turned into a Gazan Village replete with the usual threatening chants and signs to the giant mural of Bibi Netanyahu with inverted scales of justice made to look like Hamas paragliders.

    The newest addition, in plain view, just down the street from the only Jewish school between Manchester and London, is a large piece of graffiti that shows a raised bloodied fist, crushing a dove, and bearing the ominous slogan “You can’t separate peace from freedom”, against a backdrop of a Palestinian flag. Of course, I reported this loosely veiled call to violence to the police.

    And nothing, of course, was done to remove the graffiti. The police and council appear to be admitting that they’re no longer in charge of the area.

    I moved to the UK 12 years ago from North America. My family and I were welcomed into the local community in Birmingham, both Jewish and otherwise, and built a life for ourselves here. We became British citizens. Our kids went to the King David School, which we dubbed “World Peace School” because of the harmonious relations with the high percentage of Muslim students. We became regular attendees at Villa games, cheering them on from the Championship to the Champions League. But Oct 7 has laid bare just how fragile that welcome was. I suspect we are not the only ones looking for the exits.

    It seems that Islamists are asserting their control over parts of Birmingham – and currently no one in authority is willing to step up to challenge them.

  • At City University

    “The antisemitic harassment he is being subjected to is horrifying. I hesitate to amplify it, but British academics need to understand what is happening.”

  • Increased ideological training

    From the Daily NK:

    North Korea is moving to send more workers to China following Kim Jong Un’s recent visit to Beijing, with authorities implementing stricter screening processes and intensified surveillance measures as the regime seeks foreign currency and China pursues cheap, skilled labor.

    According to multiple Daily NK sources in North Korea recently, North Korean authorities are preparing to send additional workers to China, primarily to work in seafood processing plants and sewing factories. Internal preparations are already at their height, with the Cabinet and other government agencies handling practical duties for each sector.

    The selection of the latest batch of workers is much stricter than in the past. Officials are taking a closer look at applicants’ overseas work experience, skills, health and loyalty. Background checks have also widened from five of the applicants’ relatives and coworkers to eight.

    “Nowadays, they don’t just look at the person going overseas — they put responsibility on the agencies that recommended them and even their families, too,” one source said. “In the past, if problems arose, you’d suffer a year or two of economic and political disadvantages, but now, people say this could be lengthened to three to five years.”

    Like before, workers must undergo ideological training, sign confidentiality agreements and swear loyalty to the regime before departure. However, the ideological training is now more intense, with lecturers issuing sterner warnings that overseas infractions would be met with stern punishment.

    It’s not as if life as a North Korean worker in China was ever anything less than slave labour, with intense surveillance, long hours, living in dormitories with no freedom to go out, and – the final insult – most of your wages going straight to the NK government. But the ratchet only goes one way. It only gets worse.

    Meanwhile, the Chinese seafood industry and China’s provincial governments have said they would welcome more North Korean workers. An employee of a seafood processing plant in Liaoning province said about 800 North Korean laborers work in the province, “but they could triple that number within a year or two if North Korea ensures the supply.”

    Chinese entities prefer North Korean workers for obvious reasons. North Korean workers receive low wages, are highly skilled and follow the rules. Even Chinese local governments believe they are an ideal workforce for lowering personnel and management costs.

    Well hey, it’s socialism in action: “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

  • No longer a tolerable way to live

    And a Times letter from Lord Triesman:

    Sir, I am Jewish but won’t pretend to be especially religious. I also served as the first independent chairman of the Football Association. I have with huge reluctance come to doubt that this is a safe country for Jewish people. The decision in Birmingham on banning Tel Aviv supporters and the pallid, inconsequential statement from my own party leadership (“Mahmood knew of ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans”, Oct 18), and the murder of community members in Manchester on the most sacred of our days — when we and our children reflect on our own failures and not those of others — raise fundamental issues of years tolerating dreadful behaviour. We were always capable of far better intercommunal relations and perhaps as Labour general secretary I should have done more, but the failures have overwhelmed our leadership.

    For many years my synagogue and various schools and events have had guards. And all this abnormality because we are Jewish, not because we have broken any law. It is no longer a tolerable way to live. The last thing that makes any difference, other than to add insult to injury, is another supine statement. When we fail to back up our words with actions, the result is that the victims become the villains. Tragic but inevitable given the persistent failures.

  • Inflammatory rhetoric

    Fiyaz Mughal in the Times on the hate preachers stirring division and antisemitism in Birmingham:

    The decision to bar Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from next month’s match at Villa Park in Birmingham raises a serious question: who sets the boundaries of public order in Britain today? While some Maccabi fans have a history of violence and anti-Arab or anti-Muslim rhetoric, when the police take the easy option — tarring all supporters, rather than addressing the elephant in the room — it signals that toxic extremism now shapes our security priorities.

    Birmingham has long been a warning on this front. It was home to Moinul Abedin, Britain’s first al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist, and to Parviz Khan, who led a plot to behead a British soldier. A study in 2017 by the Henry Jackson Society think tank found that 14 per cent of people convicted of Islamist terror offences between 1998 and 2015 came from Birmingham, which accounted for 8.7 per cent of the country’s Muslim population. That concentration demands honest scrutiny.

    Part of the problem lies in the small but vocal minority of preachers who stir division with their inflammatory rhetoric. The Birmingham imam Asrar Rashid, for example, was filmed telling worshippers they should “show no mercy” to visiting Maccabi fans. In July, he was recorded at a Workers’ Party demonstration praising Palestinians for their “armed struggle” against “the banker’s state”. And in 2023, he rhetorically asked how much the “Yahud” (Arabic for Jews) would pay people to betray their faith.

    Why do these hate preachers go unchallenged? Would the same kind of vile rhetoric from rabbis or C of E vicars against Muslims be so readily tolerated? Not a chance.

    The decision to ban Maccabi supporters is not a one-off misjudgment, but a symptom of a deeper drift: an official reluctance to face Islamist intimidation directly. Countering extremism means defending pluralism and standing firm against those who shout the loudest. The test now is whether civic and religious leaders have the courage to meet that challenge.

    I think we know the answer to that one.

  • Sunday morning Hampstead

    On the so-called Sandy Heath, west of Spaniards Road:

    The Hill:

  • The Hind Rajab Foundation

    Can this be true? Chilling, if so..

    A former Hezbollah fighter is behind a report that campaigners claim ‘laid the groundwork’ for the police to ban Israeli fans from attending a football match in Birmingham, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

    The Hind Rajab Foundation, chaired by Dyab Abou Jahjah, helped the ‘Game Over Israel’ campaign compile an anti-Israel dossier which was handed to West Midlands Police ahead of a Europa League match at Villa Park next month.

    According to the GOI campaign group, the document was integral to the police’s highly controversial decision to stop Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from going to the match.

    The document commented on the so-called ‘systematic instrumentalisation of football culture in genocide’ as well as illustrating ‘why Israel’s place in global sport is indefensible’, according to its authors.

    So, a piece of straight-up antisemitic hate propaganda, put together by a former jihadi.

    A probe by the MoS has uncovered Abou Jahjah posing shirtless and brandishing a Kalashnikov machine gun. In July, he was all too happy to share the image with his online supporters, telling them that ‘being called a terrorist’ is a ‘badge of honour’.

    It comes as after the barbaric October 7 Hamas attack, he took to social media to praise the massacre and argued it is not anti-Semitic to say ‘effing Jews’. 

    He has also compared Jewish people to Nazis.

    In Belgium, where he lives and where the Hind Rajab Foundation is based, he has held mock funerals for killed Hamas leaders, saying one ‘showed the way’, according to our research. He has also repeatedly venerated Hezbollah leaders online….

    Abou Jahjah was banned from the UK in 2009 over his views on the Middle East.

    We have no indication that the West Midlands police or Birmingham council actually paid any attention to this document, of course. There’s no reason why we should believe the group’s claim that their report was “integral” to the decision to ban Tel Aviv Maccabi fans. On the other hand, there is a bad smell about this whole business – and it does show the kind of pressure groups that are pushing for the ban.

  • Farewell to George

    Welcome news. The idiot who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s killing…

  • Transforming into a full-blown ISIS