Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • The “feminists for Islam”

    Last weekend’s FiLiA meeting in Brighton had more to contend with than the useless politicians and the violent men outside. There were also, as Julie Burchill reports, the ‘Feminists for Islam’:

    The first sign that something might have been amiss at FiLiA was a hijab’d woman selling similar head-coverings in the foyer. ‘What next, binders?’, Sonya Douglas asked on X. The number of keffiyehs and Palestinian flags on show could have persuaded a person that they had wandered into the Oxford Union debating chamber by mistake. Veteran feminist Bev Jackson posted that: ‘An organisation called Total Woman Victory had a stand at FiLiA disseminating a pamphlet with some of the most virulent anti-Jewish tropes I’ve ever seen.’

    Jewish women have had to put up with enough monstrous bullying and belittling from the world generally over the past two years (BELIEVE ALL WOMEN – UNLESS THEY’RE JEWISH, as the saying has it). And now the poison of anti-Semitism seems to have trickled into the very heart of a conference where women of all races and belief systems should feel safe. But sadly, we’ve seen before that Islam and diversity, though often used in tandem by politicians and other clueless scolds, are often strangers to each other. Here at the FiLiA conference was evidence of a strange beast – here was Feminists for Islam.

    It is a strange beast. Why would women support the most violently misogynistic force on the planet? Some of the reason, no doubt, is the same “be nice” mentality that sees so many women align with the trans crowd who generally view them with contempt.

    Let’s make this clear. You cannot be both an Islamist and a feminist. It’s as illogical as saying you can be a woman and be a penis-haver. Yet it seems increasingly difficult for a group of otherwise enlightened women to grasp….

    Women who voluntarily don the hijab are trampling on the broken bodies of all the brave women – the young women of Iran come most heartbreakingly to mind – who are raped, tortured and murdered for daring to take theirs off. Those who wave the Palestinian flag are doing the same to the Israeli women raped until their pelvises broke by the Islamofascists of ‘the resistance’.…

    Of course, this syndrome extends far beyond feminism into the left’s attitude to Palestine as a whole. On X this week, Owen Jones finally went fully gaga, intoning over a Hovis-tune-inspired soundtrack that Palestine will ‘free us all’. What does that mean? No gay rights? No women’s rights? No rights for atheists? One state religion, and death for apostates? This use of language is truly Orwellian – and not in a good way.

    Yes, I saw that. It was truly weird, with that deranged messianic look of his. I could only assume he meant “free us all” from Jews.

  • The new Europe

    “The festival was supposed to celebrate 250 years of Jewish life in Sweden. Now, they’ve been forced to suspend. Even if a theater claims they refuse for “safety and security concerns,” and not outright antisemitism, they are still empowering Jew-hatred and complicit in it.”

    Malmo in Sweden, Birmingham here in the UK. The new Europe. Both, as it happens, cities with large Muslim populations…..

  • Autumn colour

    The solid old native UK trees like oak and beech show their best autumn colours in November, but with the introduction of ornamental non-native species like maples and American sweetgums and the like in parks and on streets we’re now treated to some glorious October displays.

    From some recent bike rides:

    Victoria Park

    Brecknock Road

    Gordon Square Bloomsbury

    The rest are in Regent’s Park:

    Frieze Sculpture – Neighbours, Abdollah Nafisi

    Frieze Sculpture – Fibredog, Assemble

    Frieze Sculpture – Ghost (Sustitutes), Erwin Wurm

  • The dancing Taliban

    A vision of total Islamist misogyny. Men, bearded, brandishing their rifles, celebrating the end of women’s education…

  • Disrupting an LSE sexual violence event

    Joan Smith at UnHerd:

    Students at the London School of Economics (LSE) have tried to cancel a private meeting to discuss sexual violence committed by Hamas during the October 7 attacks of 2023. The event went ahead last night with a heavy police presence as pro-Palestinian protesters chanted anti-Israel slogans outside the building. Inside, an Israeli lawyer spoke about the problem of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) in several countries where women have been targeted by mass rape and other kinds of sexual assault.

    Notably, one of the organisations calling for the meeting to be cancelled was a feminist society at the university. In an “open letter to LSE management”, they demanded that the “egregious” event shouldn’t be allowed to go ahead, claiming that it ignored “concerns expressed by experts and LSE staff”.

    A feminist society protesting a meeting about mass rape? Remarkable. Egregious, even. But the women raped were Jews, and the men doing the raping were Palestinians. That makes all the difference for our brave LSE feminists.

    When it became clear that the meeting would take place as scheduled, an “emergency rally” was planned outside the venue. “Zionists off our campus,” a flyer proclaimed. “No platform for genocide apologists”. This is not a one-off: women with legitimate and long-standing concerns about sexual violence are suddenly finding themselves labelled as supporting “genocide” for demanding justice for victims who happen to be Israeli.

    “Absolutely horrifying to see this attempt to shut down an event at LSE about 7th October sexual violence,” Professor Alice Sullivan of UCL responded on X. “I can only imagine how Jewish colleagues and students must feel about the unhinged levels of antisemitism we are seeing on campus.”

    We’ve seen some horrendous antisemitism across UK universities over the past couple of years since October 7th, but still, this is something else.

    Rape denial is common, but trying to prevent students in the UK attending a private discussion of sexual violence in conflict is a new low. Such behaviour is a travesty of the universal ideals of feminism.

  • Violet visionaries

    Yes, it’s “Lia” Thomas, but not as you’ve seen him before. Normally he’s on a podium, smirking and towering over the women he’s just beaten in the swimming event. Now he’s wearing a ridiculous dress – for the first time, perhaps, given how badly it fits his very masculine and very large figure.

    The Violet Visionaries awards are presented by Rainbow Labs. The Voice of Inspiration Award, given this year to Thomas here, “honors an individual whose story and actions ignite hope and courage within the LGBTQ+ community,”

    Not sure about the LGBTQ+ community, but he’s certainly igniting hope in men who aren’t very good at their sport, by showing that there is in fact a way to win. Just claim to be a woman and, hey presto, you start getting those prizes. And maybe even get Voice of Inspiration awards from a bunch of muppets.

  • Peace doesn’t interest Hamas

    From John Aziz in the Free Press (via Jerry Coyne):

    But even cornered and diminished, the Islamist movement that started this disastrous war remains as determined as ever to cling to power. Within a day of the ceasefire taking effect, Hamas’s internal security forces were staging public executions. Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel were dragged out and shot or hanged from lampposts in Gaza City’s main squares. There were no trials, no evidence, not even a pretense of due process—just a crude display of terror meant to remind everyone who was still in charge. Soon after, Hamas gunmen turned their weapons on powerful clan militias that had filled the vacuum during the war, sparking running battles in Shuja’iyya, Sabra, and beyond.

    Peace is a process that takes hard efforts, and not something that will simply magically appear from an agreement. But it will never arrive at all if the world allows Hamas to regroup under the cover of a ceasefire and continue on the path of jihad.

    These actions exposed a critical truth: Hamas never viewed the Trump deal as a real step toward peace or coexistence, because that is just not how their framework for understanding the world works. Peace is not their aspiration. For their purposes, the ceasefire is a temporary reprieve: a chance to regroup, rearm, and prepare for the next round of fighting, which could start in five days, five years, or 50 years. In Islamist political thought there’s a word for it—hudna—a temporary truce with non-Muslim adversaries that can be discarded as soon as the balance of power shifts. Then the time for jihad against the Jews and other non-Muslims will arrive again.

    Exactly. Hamas will never give up power voluntarily. Their fight isn’t driven by the usual territorial concerns – anti-imperialist, as their western apologists claim. This is about jihad. About Islam.

  • “Happy to give up their seats”

  • The knock-on implications of the trans boom

    A new report shows that trans identity is in decline across US universities. Jo Bartosch at Spiked:

    Drawing on surveys of more than 60,000 US undergraduates, the report finds that the share identifying as a gender ‘other than male or female’ peaked at 6.8 per cent in 2023. It has since fallen to 3.6 per cent in 2025, effectively halving in just two years.

    The decline is steepest at the elite end of the spectrum, confirming that the trans delusion was always a luxury belief. Within the Ivy League samples, the proportion of students identifying as something other than male or female rose from three per cent in 2021 to seven per cent in 2023, before dropping right back down to three per cent in 2025.

    It’s not all over though.

    It’s tempting to smirk at the thought of first-year students now cringing their way through mandatory pronoun rituals at the beginning of semester. But there is a serious side to this, too. The ‘trans boom’ will continue to have knock-on implications for decades to come. Many students will shed their identity politics as easily as their septum rings and drift into marketing jobs, but the institutions they leave behind have been intellectually and morally gutted. Women’s sports (vital in the US because of scholarships) have been sabotaged by cheating men and cynical coaches. Single-sex dorms and sororities are now effectively unisex. The atmosphere of intellectual terror, where teaching basic biology could end a lecturer’s career, will take years to dispel.

    And there are, of course, those unfortunates sucked in to the gender cult who were persuaded by the social media gods to transition – to take puberty blockers and hormones, to get themselves medically mutilated. They have a lifetime’s suffering ahead of them.

    It’s a relief that the trans fad is becoming old news. But now we must ask some adult questions: how did so many intelligent people persuade themselves that humans can be ‘born in the wrong body’? And why did they try to destroy anyone who said otherwise? Growing up means admitting when you were wrong. Now it’s time for universities to learn from their mistakes, ditch the ideology, and return to the principles that once made them great.

  • The Turkish threat

    The Iranian threat to Israel has, if not disappeared, at least been dealt some heavy blows by Israeli action in the past couple of years – against Iran itself, and against its Hamas, Hezbollah and Youthi proxies. What next? Well, according to Yaakov Lappin in the JC, if Erdoğan has his way it could well be Turkey:

    Under the personal and ideologically-driven Islamist direction of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey aspires to actively construct a strategic encirclement of Israel, an Israeli terrorism expert has warned, days after reports emerged stating that the Trump administration was weighing allowing Ankara to purchase F-35 fighter jets.

    Turkey’s willingness to back US President Donald Trump’s 20-point truce plan has reportedly increased its chances of acquiring the stealth aircraft, though this has yet to be confirmed.

    Dr Ely Karmon, a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Reichman University in Herzliya and a member of the Israeli non-partisan group Coalition for Regional Security, told JNS in recent days: “If Erdoğan’s plan to take over Syria in the military domain succeeds and he receives approval for a military force, legitimacy and Qatari money for construction in Gaza, Turkey will largely replace the Iranian dream of enclosing Israel in a more dangerous military and political ring.”

    Will Muslim rage against Israel ever end? Sunnis take over the Shiite axis. What will the Saudis – who like to think of themselves as Sunni leaders – make of all this?