Mick Hartley

Great letter from Baroness Nicholson to the Met Police chief:

Apologies for the non-availability yesterday. Hosting platform Typepad was down. It's closing down altogether at the end of the month – it's been unreliable for a while now. I'm in the process of setting up another site, but we're not there yet.

More on the Lynsay Watson connection to the Linehan arrest, from the Telegraph:

A disgraced transgender police officer is believed to have reported gender-critic Father Ted creator Graham Linehan to the police over his social media posts.

Former Pc Lynsay Watson, who was born Alex Horwood, was sacked by Leicestershire Police for gross misconduct in 2023 after allegedly harassing a free speech campaigner and critic of gender ideology.

An anonymous social media account, believed to be linked to Watson, boasted in April this year of reporting Linehan, the Father Ted writer and gender sceptic, to the police over several social media posts he made about transgender issues. The account encouraged other transgender activists to do the same.

Watson has a well-documented history of calling on police forces to pursue criminal investigations of campaigners who are sceptical of the belief that self-identification, and not biological sex, determines what a man or woman is….

Watson was sacked by Leicestershire Police after being found guilty by a misconduct hearing of sending former police officer Harry Miller more than 1,200 messages over an 18-month period, branding him a “Nazi”, a “bigot” and a “wife-beater”.

Before this messaging, Miller had been a public critic of gender ideology.

Helen Joyce, a writer and women’s rights campaigner, said she was also reported to the authorities and now has a police investigation for “harassment” on her record….

Joyce told The Telegraph: “The police have swallowed trans ideology hook, line and sinker, with the result that extremist trans activists have been able to deploy officers like a private militia to harass and silence anyone who stands up to them.”

So it would seem. But why? Is it just that they're still in thrall to Stonewall? It sounds like this Lynsay Watson has the ear of senior officers in the Met…

Thanks for letting us, and @metpoliceuk know you planned it just to be vindictive all along. It will come in handy for them to know next time one of you starts with your hysterics. pic.twitter.com/WMC2Fajtyf

— Jack David (@FFS_WhatNow) September 4, 2025

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If this is true, what hold does this "underground trans mafia" have over the police? And why?

JK Rowling: "Context: this trans-identified man and public fetishist has been illegally entering women's single-sex spaces, gleefully posting pictures of himself doing it and remains untroubled by police visits."

The name Lynsay Watson – a disgraced trans former cop – keeps cropping up…

Murkier and murkier.

Jeffrey Herf at the Times of Israel:

The genocide accusation should be understood as a central component of Hamas’ political warfare to win this war. It may be the first organization in human history which intentionally waged war in such a manner to multiply deaths of the people it is claiming to defend, in hopes that publicity of the resulting disaster will generate sympathy for its aims and opprobrium on Israel. In this effort, though it has failed abysmally as a ministate to provide a decent life for Gazans, it has proved successful in placing the blame on Israel.

The facts matter. The world press has been willing to accept the factual assertions of the Hamas Health Ministry, an organ of the terrorist organization. Such figures do not include the percentages of Hamas soldier’s vs civilians. Hamas’ control over the press allows it to send photos around the world that suggest that Israel is intentionally aiming at civilians.

If Israel was intent on a genocide in Gaza it would not have sent warnings to people to move away from areas of combat or places it was intending to attack. It would not be urging civilians to move to “humanitarian zones.” If Israel was committing genocide the number of people killed in Gaza would be far higher than the 60,000 or so listed by Hamas. 800,000 Tutsis were murdered within months. Various Nazi death camps murdered hundreds of thousands in less than year. The mobile killing squads of the Nazi regime, the Einsatzgruppen, murdered about a million Jews with bullets from spring 1941 to spring 1942. Similar speech and huge numbers took place in the Cambodian genocide. Even the 60,000-figure offered by Hamas—and we do not know if it is accurate—indicates that Israel’s efforts to reduce civilian casualties as much as possible while also waging war against Hamas has been very impressive, as tragic, and awful as the toll has been. But then it is far too often left unsaid that none of the people in Gaza would have died, been wounded or traumatized in Gaza if Hamas had not begun this war with acts of genocidal aggression.

Why the parallel between accusations of genocide and antisemitism?

Because they make an absurd accusation which is easily refuted by the facts, but which stirs the deepest conscious and unconscious hatreds about Judaism, the Jews, and Israel in Western culture. These hatreds are there in the old Christian lies about deicide, that the Jews murdered Jesus, and they are there in the conspiracy theories of Nazism and the far right, as well as of the far left. Such theories describe the Jews as enormously powerful, and wholly evil. The accusation that Israel commits genocide reawakens these ancient hatreds of Christianity, Communism, and Nazism, and draw as well on the Islamist extremist interpretation of Islam. The accusations of deicide, child murder, conspiracy to cause wars, and other libels have always been the precursor to attacks on the Jews. Antisemitism has at its core been a conspiracy theory that imputes power and evil to the Jews. The genocide accusation, brought into world—not just regional—politics by the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc in the 1960s and 1970s is the most important form of this much old antisemitic libel. The state of Israel, in defending its right to exist is a nightmare for antisemites. They believe that their lies about the Jews have become reality in the form of the state of Israel. The libel amounts to saying the Israel has no right to defend itself because it should not exist.

Meanwhile, in South Africa:

A South African TV presenter has been dropped for challenging a guest who compared the situation in Gaza to the Holocaust.

The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) announced on Friday it was taking broadcaster Juliet Newell off air following her "conduct" when interviewing Doctor Mamphela Ramphele, the chair of the Desmond Tutu Intellectual Property Trust trust.

When discussing the conflict in Gaza, Ramphele compared the situation to the Holocaust, saying "it's the same thing".

Newell pushed back, asking Ramphele how she could compare the two.

Bad mistake.

After the interview, the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (PSC) hit out at the SABC saying that by allowing broadcasters to caveat words such as "genocide" with the word "alleged", it was "whitewashing" the situation.

Shortly after the interview was aired, the SABC released the statement: "The [SABC] is aware of the matter relating to the conduct of one of its news presenters in an interview conducted with Dr Mamphela Ramphele.

"As such, SABC News management took immediate action in line with the SABC’s internal processes, and the presenter in question is currently not scheduled.

"[SABC has] established policies to ensure the dissemination of diverse viewpoints aimed at building trust with the public and in ensuring that our content, in all its formats, continues to resonate with the prescripts of our public mandate."

Eh? In other words, our content must continue to resonate with the antisemites who run this country.

What Sir Mark Rowley calls a 'toxic culture war,' I call a mass campaign of intimidation against women for standing up for their rights, and police turning a blind eye to the men publicly calling for women to be beaten, raped, hanged and decapitated.https://t.co/ArpZNV9Lfj

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 3, 2025

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So let’s get this straight. If a mugger snatches your phone, the police will do nothing. If burglars ransack your home, the police will do nothing. If your daughter is raped by a grooming gang, the police will do nothing.

But if you write a social media post that offends someone who identifies as transgender, you’ll be abruptly set upon by five armed officers.

Michael Deacon in the Telegraph.

Well now. From MEMRI TV:

Saudi writer and researcher Abdullah Bin Bijad Al-Otaibi said in an August 30, 2025 episode of Diwan Al-Mulla (Kuwait) that Hamas has committed a "heinous crime against the Palestinian people." He added that media figures who wrote in support of Hamas and called them "the resistance" are accomplices to this crime and none of them has apologized for it. Al-Otaibi said Hamas leaders, who have brought catastrophe on the Palestinians, are hiding in tunnels, failing to defend their people, and firing rockets at Israel from UN centers housing displaced people and schools in order to increase Palestinian casualties. He accused Hamas of maintaining the "most heinous" dictatorship in Gaza, torturing and killing those who oppose them, and charged that "some TV channels and pundits" are accomplices in this anti-Palestinian crime.

The nodding man on the left suggests perhaps that this is not an uncommon view in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

At the Saatchi Gallery, the Royal Photographic Society 166th edition International Photography Exhibition. Into the first gallery (it's a free exhibition) and straightaway this:

Gosh. The innocent native, born free yet struggling to escape the evil chains of Zionism. Presented as though this take is entirely undisputed. As perhaps it is in these circles.

Yes, elsewhere there's also a lot of "challenging gender norms".