Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Great philosophers

    Kathleen Stock reminisces about the old days when distinguished, largely male, philosophers were featured in Bryan Magee’s old BBC series Men of Ideas and, later, The Great Philosophers, now on  iPlayer. It’s a distant world.

    All of this is very old-fashioned, and not just because nobody has the requisite powers of concentration anymore. The concept of a “great philosopher” has been suspect for years, a bit too male and hierarchical for comfort. These days, it always has to come with lots of caveats. In the short film which accompanied the broadcasting of The Great Philosophers on BBC4 this week, public philosopher Professor Angie Hobbs rushes depressingly quickly to the cliché that, as young female philosopher watching the show in the Eighties, “it was really important for me to see a woman on that sofa”. She also tries to justify the value of philosophy in the present day in instrumental terms, claiming that it helps people discern “the fake news and the conspiracy theories and the snake oil merchants out there”. This is a point I’m surprised any member of the philosophy profession can make with a straight face, given ongoing mass delusions therein.

    Well yes. In terms of clarity of thought, modern philosophy seems to me very much part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

    But the truth is that the vast majority of the millions of viewers enthusiastically watching Men of Ideas and The Great Philosophers in the Seventies and Eighties were not at university, and had no desire whatsoever to be professional philosophers themselves. Fretting over equality issues, worrying about the latent prejudice of Thomas Aquinas or David Hume, or selfishly looking for inspiring “representation” was very far down the list of their priorities. And nor were they watching in order to improve their falsehood detection skills in ordinary life. Their aim was just to understand these enjoyable, fascinating, unusual ideas, as articulated by these enjoyable, fascinating, unusual people — for no motive other than sheer curiosity. I hear that corduroy is coming back into fashion. Perhaps we might also allow philosophers to be unreservedly great again too.

  • Kim and the Shaman

    Considering North Korea’s designation of the South as a hostile state, and its draconian punishment of those watching South Korean TV or videos, up to and including execution, the tone of the entertainment presented on Sunday night at the Pyongyang Sports Palace was something of a surprise. As Richard Lloyd Parry tells it in the Times, there were clear echoes of South Korean K-Pop in some of the acts:

    “The show’s stage direction marked a notable departure from the traditional format of North Korean performances,” JoongAng Ilbo, a South Korean newspaper, said, describing television footage of the show.

    “Supporting dancers in short skirts and high heels performed synchronised routines that resembled those seen on South Korean singing competition shows … the overall presentation included upbeat rhythms, pop-style arrangements and multimedia effects, a stark contrast to North Korea’s usual slower, more solemn productions.

    “Despite the country’s [laws] aimed at curbing the spread of South Korean pop culture, the event signalled a selective embrace of global entertainment elements.”

    More predictably there was also a performance by the Russian singer Shaman – real name Yaroslav Yuryevich Dronov – who’s become famous for his nationalism and cheerleading for the war against Ukraine. He sang a hymn in praise of Kim.

    He looks like – well, exactly how you’d imagine he’d look:

  • Banning Jewish fans

    In yesterday’s post abut the Maccabi Tel Aviv visit to Aston Villa next month, and the Birmingham Islamic scholar who pronounced that, as regards the fans, “we will not show them mercy”, I suggested – slightly tongue in cheek – that the police might wish to question him on the matter of promoting racial hatred and threats of violence. Well, they’ve chosen a different approach:

    Added:

    It’s certainly not the police – who are now admitting that they can’t prevent antisemitic hate mobs from attacking Jews on the streets of Birmingham.

  • Ending UNRWA

    Whatever happens now in Gaza -and it’s not looking good, as Hamas regains control through public executions and the killing of any possible rivals – at least let’s hope some lessons have been learnt. Like, for instance, not promoting the lies, which enabled groups like Hamas to gain control, that all Palestinians are refugees, waiting for Israel and the Jews to disappear. As UNRWA has been doing for generations.

    Adi Schartz at the JC:

    No amount of reconstruction will bring peace if the ideological foundations of Hamas – and of Palestinian society more broadly – remain untouched. The massacre of October 7 was not an aberration born of despair; it was the logical outcome of an idea that has animated Palestinian politics for a century: the refusal to accept Jewish sovereignty anywhere between the river and the sea. Until that changes, no peace plan will succeed, and no ceasefire will hold.

    For decades, Western diplomats have misdiagnosed the conflict as a territorial dispute – about borders, settlements, and security arrangements. Yet at its core, for the Palestinians, it is about legitimacy: Israel is viewed not the homeland of the Jewish people but an alien colonial implant. Jews are viewed not as an indigenous nation returning home but as foreigners who imposed themselves through force. Like the French in Algeria, they are expected to leave. At best, they might be tolerated as a religious minority under Muslim rule – never as a nation entitled to self-determination.

    This ideology has not only survived for more than a century but been institutionalised and sustained – through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or Unrwa. Created in 1949 as a temporary body to assist the roughly 700,000 Palestinians displaced during Israel’s War of Independence, Unwra has become a permanent agency with a single overriding purpose: to perpetuate the refugee status of Palestinians indefinitely. Whereas the role of the international community should be to create the circumstances for enhancing peace, in this case it did the exact opposite.

    Unlike the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which resettles refugees and ends their statelessness, Unrwa enshrines it. Only in the Palestinian case is refugee status permanent and passed down to descendants for eternity. The result: the number of Palestinian “refugees” has swelled from 700,000 to some six million (Palestinian leaders routinely claim eight or nine million). In reality, more than 95 per cent of them were never displaced from anywhere. They were born in Gaza, Ramallah, Amman, or Beirut.…

    In Unrwa schools, textbooks glorify “martyrs,” maps erase Israel, and pupils are taught that “return” – meaning the destruction of Israel – is not a dream but a duty. Unrwa has become part and parcel of Palestinian rejectionism.

    UNRWA is the only UN agency dedicated to helping refugees from a specific region or conflict. It was originally established to provide relief to all refugees resulting from the 1948 war, but the Israeli government took over responsibility for the Jewish refugees in 1952. No Arab country has stepped forward to take responsibility for the Arab refugees however, despite all the talk of Arab Nationalism and Arab unity. Keeping them as refugees – and the responsibility of UNRWA – is too convenient, and reinforces the point that the state of Israel, for them, can never be acknowledged. The refugees will stay refugees – now some six million registered with UNRWA – until Israel is destroyed. 

    Meanwhile in the UNRWA-run schools in Gaza the pupils are taught Jew-hatred and the glories of martyrdom. And while the UN funded education in Gaza, Hamas was free to ignore the usual responsibilities of government and build its network of tunnels, and stockpile the weapons and rockets to be used against Israel.

    UNRWA was always part of the problem, not part of the solution.

  • A strong Jew

    They tried to break him in every way: they offered him food and soap in exchange for converting to Islam, demanded that he fasts during Ramadan and read from the Quran. They lied to him that Iran had bombed Israel, that his parents had forgotten about him and did not protest. But Rom did not break. Against all the psychological terror, against the beatings he suffered several times a day, against the fear of lynching he experienced when he tried to escape – Rom held on to his identity. He prayed. And when he returned home, he repeated over and over: “I am a Jew! I am a strong Jew!“

  • The BBC’s moral blindness

    On Tuesday I posted about the BBC’s emotional coverage of the release of a Palestinian prisoner as part of the hostage release deal – his poor sister in tears – without bothering to mention that the man was jailed for his part in sending a suicide bomber dressed as an Orthodox Jew to blow up the car which gave him a lift, killing four people.

    Now the Telegraph has picked up the story:

    The batch of Palestinians being released includes 249 prisoners who received lengthy prison sentences, in the vast majority of cases for murder and terrorism offences committed against Israelis.

    The BBC report then cut to a sobbing Aida, who said: “They kidnapped my brother, they kidnapped them.”.

    No they didn’t. They imprisoned him for his part in the killing of four Jews. Not a crime for this “sobbing Aida”, presumably. And of little or no concern to the BBC.

    Campaign Against Antisemitism said the coverage proved the BBC “incapable of distinguishing itself between terrorism and its victims” and another example of its “moral blindness”.

    A spokesman for the group said: “[The BBC] seems desperate to humanise the terrorists being released from Israeli jails as part of the Jewish state’s devil’s bargain to retrieve its hostages – young people stolen from their homes, communities and festivals who were then tortured and in some cases murdered.

    “That is a fundamental moral failing, and it is why the BBC’s reporting over the past two years – and indeed longer – on the Middle East has been so atrocious and has so failed its viewers, listeners and readers and fuelled anti-Semitism in Britain.

    “If the BBC isn’t explaining who these terrorists are, calling them by their name and recounting their horrific crimes, it is breaching its own guidelines and failing the fewer and fewer people who still rely on it for their news.”

  • Preaching violence from the comfort of universities

    From a Times editorial today on the Free Palestine crowd, and their uncritical support of murderous terrorists who kill “collaborators” in public executions, and feed on antisemitism:

    For nearly 20 years, ever since it routed its Fatah rivals, Hamas has ruled with the gun in Gaza: the ballot box was quickly rendered redundant. It has beaten, tortured and killed Palestinians who criticise it, and in recent days has brutally executed opponents on Gaza’s streets. Its strategy is underpinned by antisemitism and hatred of Israel, which appears far stronger than any love for Palestinian people, whose suffering its late leader Yahya Sinwar considered mere collateral in his aim of eradicating the Jewish state. For those in Britain who persist in preaching violence from the comfort of intact streets and serene universities, it would seem the same principle holds true.

    It was never about a ceasefire, or supporting Palestinians: it was always about destroying Israel by any means possible. “From the river to the sea”; “Globalise the intifada”. This Islamist-left alliance is a grim relic of the hard left’s increasingly deranged hatred of Israel and Zionism.

  • Mass delusion

    “It’s so strange and unsettling to live through a mass delusion of this magnitude. Completely bewildering at times, but also endlessly fascinating.“

  • A worrying misuse of institutional power

    Michael O’Flaherty, Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe, has addressed a letter to the UK Parliament expressing concern over the Supreme Court’s recent ruling and what he described as the “current climate for trans people in the UK.” Janice Turner in the Times:

    No one bears more blame for gender ideology capturing public institutions and the global erasure of women’s rights than Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights. It was he who convened in 2006 a private meeting of NGOs, lawyers and LGBT activists in Indonesia which drew up what became known as the Yogyakarta Principles.

    Key among these was the idea that biological sex as a legal and political construct should be wholly replaced by gender identity. No one at Yogyakarta raised for a second the impact upon women or girls, and yet its precepts trickled down through the UN and human rights bodies into national governments and transnational institutions like the International Olympic Committee.

    It is because of O’Flaherty that rapists could be housed in women’s prisons and female athletes made to compete against males. British feminists have been unpicking the ensuing mess for over a decade, culminating in April’s Supreme Court ruling that sex is biological reality. So O’Flaherty’s last remaining weapon is to accuse Britain this week of breaching the European Convention on Human Rights, which is still suffused in the misogyny of Yogyakarta.

    See also this statement from the Athena Forum:

    As one of the main drafters of the Yogyakarta Principles, a non-legal activist document that seeks to erase sex as a category in law and policy, O’Flaherty has long blurred the boundaries between human rights and ideological advocacy. His intervention now appears less as a defence of rights than as political pressure on independent courts and legislators. The UK Supreme Court ruling reaffirms basic legal clarity and women’s sex-based rights. Attempts to undermine such rulings through moral panic and behind-the-scenes lobbying mark a worrying misuse of institutional power.

    From Athena direstor Faika El-Nagashi:

    Mr O’Flaherty’s letter reads less like a defence of human rights and more like a political intervention. He uses the authority of his office to promote transactivist narratives that have no legal basis. Rather than addressing the real hostility faced by women defending their rights, O’Flaherty misrepresents judicial decisions and democratic debate as threats to human rights.

  • More boats

    Down the Lea in Hackney:

    And the Regent’s Canal at Islington: