Mick Hartley

A JC leader marks twenty years since Israel pulled out of Gaza:

Israel dismantled every settlement, removed every civilian and soldier, even its dead, and handed over one of the two territories the world insists should form a Palestinian state. By any measure, it was a textbook case of “ending the occupation”.

Yet in the years since, Israel has endured more diplomatic censure, more legal harassment, and more hostile propaganda over Gaza than over the West Bank – where it still retains a military presence and which the world continues to call “occupied” in the conventional legal sense.

To achieve this inversion, international law was rewritten specifically and exclusively for Israel. “Occupation” was redefined, contrary to decades of jurisprudence, to apply even without a single Israeli boot on the ground. Border controls and a naval blockade – found legal by a 2011 UN panel as a “legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza” – were nevertheless treated as proof of occupation. From there, the distortions metastasised. Gaza became “the world’s largest open-air prison,” the Warsaw Ghetto, even Auschwitz – all before the current war. It was described as perpetually on the brink of “humanitarian crisis” or “catastrophe” – despite pre-October 7 socio-economic indicators such as life expectancy, literacy rates, and hospital beds ratios being comparable to or better than those in neighbouring Egypt.

Which has, incidentally, never faced any criticism for closing its Gaza border. It's always, and only, Israel's fault.

The Palestinians learned their own lessons: that Hamas could act with impunity. Freed from the constraints of an Israeli presence, they could amass deadlier arsenals – guaranteeing Israel’s responses would be necessarily harsher, and thus more harshly condemned.

Billions could be diverted to terror infrastructure without fear of reproach or real consequences, because the West and foreign aid agencies would feed the population regardless.

And educate their children in Jew-hatred, courtesy of the UNRWA schools. While leaving the supposed government, Hamas, to spend their resources on stockpiling weapons and building their tunnel infrastructure, carefully embedded in the civilian world of schools and hospitals. And the leaders lived in billionaire luxury in Qatar.

The West’s approach remains to this day a grotesque misalignment of incentives that worsens the conflict – entrenching extremism and punishing moderation.

Twenty years of this misguided posture helped make October 7 possible. Hamas knew that even live-streaming its sadistic massacres would not alter the basic equation: the world would quickly focus on Israel’s reaction, invent fresh blood libels, call for “restraint” and pressure Jerusalem alone. Israelis knew that post-atrocity sympathy would be fleeting.

Fleeting? It was virtually non-existent.

And so, last month, when a ceasefire and hostage release seemed imminent, dozens of Western governments chose that fragile moment to condemn and pressure Israel while dangling recognition of Palestine – collapsing negotiations, as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has confirmed: “The UK is like, well, if Israel doesn’t agree to a ceasefire by September, we’re going to recognise a Palestinian state. So if I’m Hamas, I say, you know what, let’s not allow there to be a ceasefire.”

Hamas themselves crowed that the European response justified October 7th.

If Western leaders truly did not foresee these entirely predictable consequences, they have no business making policy in the Middle East. If they did, the verdict is worse. Either way, 20 years on, the Gaza withdrawal anniversary stands as a monument to the cost of rewarding Palestinian terror and punishing Israeli compromise.

A BBC report:

Thousands of North Koreans are being sent to work in slave-like conditions in Russia to fill a huge labour shortage exacerbated by Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, the BBC has learned.

Moscow has repeatedly turned to Pyongyang to help it fight the war, using its missiles, artillery shells and its soldiers.

Now, with many of Russia's men either killed or tied up fighting – or having fled the country – South Korean intelligence officials have told the BBC that Moscow is increasingly relying on North Korean labourers.

We interviewed six North Korean workers who have fled Russia since the start of the war, along with South Korean government officials, researchers and those helping to rescue the labourers.

They detailed how the men are subjected to "abysmal" working conditions, and how the North Korean authorities are tightening their control over the workers to stop them escaping.

One of the workers, Jin, told the BBC that when he landed in Russia's Far East, he was chaperoned from the airport to a construction site by a North Korean security agent, who ordered him not to talk to anyone or look at anything.

"The outside world is our enemy," the agent told him. He was put straight to work building high-rise apartment blocks for more than 18 hours a day, he said.

All six workers we spoke to described the same punishing workdays – waking at 6am and being forced to build high-rise apartments until 2am the next morning, with just two days off a year….

"The conditions are truly abysmal," said Kang Dong-wan, a professor at South Korea's Dong-A University who has travelled to Russia multiple times to interview North Korean labourers.

"The workers are exposed to very dangerous situations. At night the lights are turned out and they work in the dark, with little safety equipment."

The escapees told us that the workers are confined to their construction sites day and night, where they are watched by agents from North Korea's state security department. They sleep in dirty, overcrowded shipping containers, infested with bugs, or on the floor of unfinished apartment blocks, with tarps pulled over the door frames to try to keep out the cold….

The labourer Jin still bristles when he remembers how the other workers would call them slaves. "You are not men, just machines that can speak," they jeered. At one point, Jin's manager told him he might not receive any money when he returned to North Korea because the state needed it instead. It was then he decided to risk his life to escape.

Grim stuff.

One of the images they use is credited to Daily NK. I wonder why the BBC don't use it as a source for North Korean news more often. Yes, Daily NK stories are unverified – and unverifiable – and it's not an official news agency, but the Beeb are happy to splash news straight from Hamas all over their front page almost every day…..

From the Telegraph:

When the author John Boyne was shortlisted for the Polari Prize – a literary award that champions gay writers – several fellow nominees (as well as two judges) asked for their own work to be removed from contention. One, Jason Okundaye, even said he was “not interested” in the merits of Boyne’s writing, so far was he beyond the pale. It illustrates the vicious culture war that continues to rage in the publishing industry.

Boyne’s crime was to speak up for JK Rowling. Last month, he wrote a piece for the Irish Independent in which he discussed the groups of people who have monstered Rowling for her views on transgender ideology and scepticism of gender politics. Boyne, 54, best known for The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, said that he is “in awe” of Rowling’s achievements, has had the “privilege” to meet her and as “a fellow Terf” – aka “trans-exclusionary radical feminist – “I stand four-square behind her”.

Now Rowling herself has waded into the current row…

Indeed she has.

Oh, fuck off. I hope everyone buys twice as many @JohnBoyneBooks, a) because he’s brilliant, and b) to piss off the Gender Taliban. pic.twitter.com/FrTs424kAs

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) August 9, 2025

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While Boyne is probably strong enough to withstand the attempts to cancel him, it is a different matter for the Polari Prize. This imbroglio has heaped pressure on Paul Burston, the author and journalist who founded it in 2011….

“Despite these events, we are committed to going forward with the prize this year. However, we will be undertaking a full review of the prize processes, consulting representatives from across the community ahead of next year’s awards, taking on board the learnings from this year.”

The bandwagon keeps rolling, however. “There’s a lot of pressure on the writers who remain on the lists,” says another author who is friends with both Boyne and Burston. “They’re nutters. It’s just a pile-on, and they just want to destroy everything. It’s terrifying. It’s like we are living in the McCarthy era.”

[Polari was the old theatrical argot generally associated with the gay subculture in London, memorably brought to life in Round the Horne by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick…

Horne would start off usually by mentioning that he had found an advertisement in one of a selection of risqué magazines, which he would insist he bought for innocent reasons. This would lead him, more often than not, to a business in Chelsea starting with the word "Bona" (Polari for "good"). He would enter by saying, "Hello, anybody there?", and Julian (Hugh Paddick) would answer, to a round of applause from the studio audience, "Ooh hello! I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy!"]

Back when people had a sense of humour.]

Well here's a thing. A man is accused of grooming and raping a young girl. The man has since transed, identifying now as a woman. And the report, in the Times, actually calls him a man, and uses male pronouns. Times are changing. 

A volunteer police officer groomed a vulnerable 12-year-old girl he met online before he repeatedly raped her, a court was told.

James Bubb, a Metropolitan Police special constable who now identifies as a woman named Gwyn Samuels, allegedly boasted about the “powers” he would gain as a 21-year-old trainee officer.

He and the girl began messaging on Omegle, a video-chat service in which users speak to strangers. The child, who cannot be identified, had told Bubb she was 16.

A jury at Amersham law courts was told that from the age of ten, the girl had identified as a transgender boy. She no longer identifies as male….

Bubb, now 27, asked the girl for nude photographs and videos. When they met in person, he sexually assaulted her in a park in west London and made her perform a sex act.

She was first raped in 2020, when she was 13 or 14.

The judge, though, is keen to protect the man's supposed dignity.

On Monday, Judge Jonathan Cooper said: “You are going to be addressed in this court, when it comes to proceedings as we are going along, as Ms Samuels and that’s because you are entitled to the proper respect for your dignity and that’s how you wish to be addressed. I will apologise in advance if that doesn’t always work.

“The matters we are concerned with relate to a period when you identified as a male, James Bubb … There are going to be witnesses who [will] speak about the case and behaviours that go back to 2018 … When they make reference to you and your actions, those witnesses will refer to the person they were engaged with at the time, and the name they and you were using.”

So at least the court will be spared talk of "her penis".

Times editorial:

Last month Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, used the blunt instrument of the Terrorism Act to classify Palestine Action as a proscribed organisation. For anyone who doubted that the move was a political misstep, the weekend’s protests provided a vivid illustration of its predictable consequences.

Within minutes of the start of an anti-Israeli demonstration in Parliament Square, police had no choice but to arrest those openly expressing support for the group, with many inciting their own arrest by brandishing signs that read “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. By the evening, 522 people had been detained, the most arrests at a single event since the poll tax riots. Dozens of police officers were called upon to carry off some activists, allowing them to pose as the apotheosis of the politically oppressed martyr.

This unseemly spectacle was avoidable. It was unwise from the outset to ban Palestine Action, a disorderly group of ideological vandals, when other bona fide hostile military groupings, like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, remain unproscribed under British law. The dubious decision to elevate Palestine Action to the rank of groups such as Hamas and al-Qaeda risks lending unearned legitimacy to the perception that pro-Palestinian political speech is being curbed. It also risks playing into activists’ hands by colluding in their self-conception as middle-class freedom fighters. They are no such thing. The police officers deployed to Westminster acted properly in making hundreds of arrests. Brazenly championing a known terrorist organisation is a crime that cannot go unpunished. That Palestine Action’s supporters were handed such an opportunity to promote their agenda is the real cause for regret.

And a letter:

Sir, The home secretary proposed to ban Palestine Action on the ground of “unacceptable criminal damage” after they infiltrated RAF Brize Norton (“Palestine Action’s rise from ashes of Corbynism to public enemy No 1”, Aug 9). In the 1980s when I was UK commander of the RAF Greenham Common cruise missile base, I had a £250,000 annual budget to repair damage done by peace protesters to the perimeter fence. We had a strong Ministry of Defence police presence to stop intruders, often in a rather Benny Hill fashion. The intruders were left in no doubt that if they tried to infiltrate the secure storage area with its 96 nuclear warheads, they would be shot by US air force military police, who were a mean crowd. There were thousands of such protesters “threatening” the base, but their freedom of speech was always respected and I never heard anyone in Whitehall or the Pentagon suggest that they should be classed as terrorists.
Wg Cdr Andrew Brookes (ret’d)

Caitlin Moran makes some excellent points about the Bonnie Blue saga. What, men kept asking her, do you make of this awful woman? Why did she do it?

But what about the men?

Is she emotionally damaged? Why does Bonnie Blue want to be filmed having quick, rough, often painful sex with 1,057 men? What does feminism — what do women — think of Bonnie Blue?

And, at first, I thought this was a question for women, about women. After all, it’s a woman doing it. So it must be a woman thing. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised: asking women about Bonnie Blue is the wrong question, to the wrong people. The telescope is the wrong way round.

The real question is: what do men think about the 1,057 men having sex with Bonnie Blue? What about the men?

Because Bonnie Blue isn’t “a women’s issue”. Not really. Statistically, Blue is the smallest demographic involved in this event. One person doing something is just… one person doing something. Besides, we are being disingenuous when we ask, “Why is Bonnie Blue having sex with 1,057 men?” YO! WE KNOW WHY. She’s a porn star. It’s literally her job.

“I get to travel to amazing places. My bank account is full,” she told Channel 4. Why does she do something so extreme? “There are two million people on OnlyFans. I needed a USP.”

That’s why Bonnie’s there. This is a porn-obsessed attention economy — so the person who makes the most attention-grabbing porn will fill their bank account. With this knowledge, really, we have all the data we need about Bonnie Blue.

The data we don’t have is: why are 1,057 men queuing down the street to have sex with Bonnie Blue? They weren’t at work. No one was paying them. This is not a question that can be answered with “Men like to have sex!” — the average encounter with Blue was 40 seconds. To be brisk, many men will not have ejaculated in that time. They were in a queue. Other men wanted their turn.

Yep – the more you think about it, the weirder it gets. The vibe isn't dissimilar to those grim men raping the unconscious wife in France last year – except this time the woman's in charge. Or at least making the money.

Imagine, for a minute, if we flip the gender again. Imagine if a 26-year-old male porn star invited 1,057 women to have sex with him. To join a queue for a 40-second shag. And if that queue looked the same as Bonnie Blue’s queue but female: women from 16 to 67; some obese; some virgins; some married. Grannies and teenage girls and wives. A mother-and-daughter team — both excited by their day out. They’re about to go into a room and be watched by dozens of other women as they have brief, non-orgasmic sex with a man whom they are allowed to choke, slap, urinate on. To do things they know will hurt him.

We know what the documentary about that event would focus on: the women. “Why are you here?” we would ask, in the same, pained voice people ask Bonnie Blue why she does what she does. We would ask all the questions Blue is asked: “Were you abused as a child? Do you think doing this will give you PTSD? What does it say about women that you are here? What does feminism think about it?”

It seems counterintuitive to say this, when we all know we live in a male-dominated society, but I am continuingly astonished by how little we seem to notice men. To see what they’re doing. To ask questions about it. No — let me correct that. I am continuingly astonished by how little men notice what other men are doing, and ask questions about it.

Men! A total of 1,057 of your team just took part in the world’s most famous gangbang — and you’re asking women what we think of the one woman in the room? Bonnie Blue isn’t a question for feminism. She’s a question for men.

A powerful piece from Liel Leibowitz in Tablet:

It is no coincidence that Hamas brazenly chose to publish photographs of the skeletal Jewish prisoners it is deliberately starving in its war tunnels after a week of successfully marketing its blood libel about how the IDF is starving Gazans. If you’ve ever seen a Mafia movie, you already know the trick. Having groomed a new recruit for months, the mobsters have one final test: whack a guy, rob a joint, shoot up an innocent girl with heroin, do something so blatantly immoral and evil that it will tie you down to a life of crime forever. Once you’ve crossed the bright line into blatant immorality, in front of witnesses, on what basis will you object to the boss’s next order?

Hamas is now doing the same thing, with Western liberals in the role of the new recruits. For weeks, the terrorist group passed off photographs of people suffering from genetic disorders as evidence of Israeli cruelty; at the same time, it prevented ample aid supplies from reaching those very people by hijacking more than 90 percent of U.N. aid trucks, selling family aid packages—which enter Gaza for free—at insane markups, and shooting into crowds of people trying to access aid provided by a U.S.-backed humanitarian consortium. None of these tactics is new or in the least bit original to the current Gaza war. What’s new is how brazenly Hamas is doing it, and how avidly European presidents, editors, intellectuals, activists, and even some Jews are closing their eyes and ears and going along for the ride, parroting the Hamas propaganda line like toddlers.

Which is precisely what Hamas was counting on. The point of the starvation photographs wasn’t to prove anything; to the contrary, the evidence that the photographs did not show children suffering from a lack of food was right there in the picture frame, in the form of the well-fed-looking mothers and other relatives. It doesn’t take any special feat of research or in-depth knowledge of conditions on the ground in Gaza or acquaintance with the medical literature on starvation to know that mothers feed their children first. That’s why in pictures from actual famines—of which there are unfortunately many thousands of examples in the photo departments of every big-city newspaper and major magazine on the planet—you see skeletal mothers along with skeletal babies. Not in Gaza, though.

That’s because the point of the photographs was to provide onlookers with a fig leaf of an excuse to embrace the narrative of a terrorist organization whose aims are, in fact, openly genocidal—and which had done its best to live up to its promises by shooting, gang-raping, and stabbing thousands of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, setting entire families on fire in their homes, and live-streaming the proceedings, before dragging off more than 250 captives to their internationally sponsored dungeons in Gaza, to be beaten, tortured, and starved. It’s no contest. Hamas makes the Mafia look like choirboys….

Worth reading in full.

BBC man Russell Davies in the Guardian:

Russell T Davies has said gay rights are “rapidly and urgently getting worse” thanks to the rise of Reform UK and the influence of the Trump presidency on British politics.

The award-winning screenwriter, who is best known for reviving Doctor Who and writing Queer As Folk, said the LGBT community should be “revolting in terror and anger and action” in response to growing support for Reform, which has pledged to “ban transgender ideology” in schools.

You see the switch there? He's ostensibly talking about gay rights, but he really means trans rights. After all this time he still hasn't noticed – or still pretends not to notice – the glaring disconnect between the two. 

Duly demolished:

1/ Where does one start with this? Russel has nothing to say when the Scottish Government argued in the Supreme Court that the protected characteristic of same sex attraction should be rendered “meaningless”. That threat to rights didn’t bother himhttps://t.co/dJPo7d5oEb

— Dennis Noel Kavanagh (@Jebadoo2) August 11, 2025

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Full thread:

2/ Of course had he said something, he would have incurred the wrath of his new overlords, so he unthinkingly rails against people who object to children being taught that somehow they have the wrong bodies and need chemical and surgical interventions.

3/ Russsel doesn’t seem to appreciate 80-90% of the cohort at the Tavistock were same sex attracted, if cross sex ideation is naturally occurring in any population there is no good reason for this figure to be so high, or for autism to feature in 35% of cases.

4/ This is the world turned upside down, here we have a gay man cheering on an ideology that opposed the lesbians in the Supreme Court and is visiting brutal conversion therapy on the young – and he does all this is the name of gay rights, which I find remarkable.

5/ There is no excuse for this level of ignorance or betrayal of the very people you claim to champion. This is not 2015. We have had Cass, Forstater, the Supreme Court Judgment, I could go on but I trust the point is clear. Ignorance now is a choice and it is wilful.

6/ It is profoundly dishonest to lament the recession of gay rights (which is markedly not happening) and then to bait and switch to political transvestism concerns. This is a fraud. This is ignorance wrapped in a rainbow. This is betrayal and the expected level of cowardice.

More on Agustín Fuentes, whose book on sex being non-binary was just given a rave review in Lancet. Victoria Smith at The Critic.

Agustín Fuentes is a biological anthropologist at Princeton University. This allows him to adjudicate on this particular issue. In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of many a great man (we know, by the way, that men exist). Take Aristotle, for instance, who believed that females were “less developed” males, or Galen, who saw women as ”defective men”. For millennia, the general idea has been that females aren’t a distinct and diverse group of humans, with both variations between us and multiple overlapping qualities with males. We’re more a rag-tag group of smaller, penis-less males, males gone wrong — tolerated, in the words of Philomena Cunk, “for their ability to excrete new humans from their front parts”.

This is the tradition that Fuentes picks up on, though I doubt that he sees it that way. In 2023, he wrote an article for Scientific American purporting to demonstrate why “human sex is not binary”. This he considered such a resounding success that he has now published a book, glowingly reviewed in The Lancet, on why female people aren’t identifiable in any meaningful, consistent way — certainly not any way which would make it clear when and where our needs and experiences might deviate from those of the default human….

The way in which this argument works, smooshing together actual sex differences and patriarchal gender stereotypes, is already clear in the 2023 article. “We know,” Fuentes writes, “that humans exhibit a range of biological and behavioral patterns related to sex biology that overlap and diverge”:

Producing ova or sperm does not tell us everything (or even most things) biologically or socially, about an individual’s childcare capacity, homemaking tendencies, sexual attractions, interest in literature, engineering and math capabilities or tendencies towards gossip, violence, compassion, sense of identity, or love of, and competence for, sports.

This is such an astonishingly bad argument that it's amazing to me that anyone would actually set it down in writing, let alone make it the central thesis of a whole book. Of course knowing an individual's sex doesn't tell us everything about them. Whoever thought it did? It's like saying that the definition of a chair – something you sit on – doesn't tell us whether it's made of wood or steel or has legs or runners or if it's in Norway or Tanzania, so chairs don't really exist as such and we should just stop talking about them.

Have a vagina but don’t like gossip? Sex is so very complex! Who knows what anyone is? …

Obviously I’m claiming all this having given up biology lessons at 14. Yet while I appreciate the scientists who have been brave enough to stand up to this nonsense, I can’t help feeling anyone should be able to challenge it. There is a long history of women being bullied out of asserting ourselves on the very question of what we are and why we matter.

We’re meant to feel too ill-qualified (where’s your science degree?). We’re meant to feel threatened (what to end up back in the kitchen?). We’re meant to feel behind the times (don’t you understand that no one thinks this any more?).

Ultimately, we’re meant to feel small, too irrelevant to expect more than a choice between non-existence as a sex class or existence as a conservative stereotype. That, by the way, is an age-old, harmful, socially constructed binary. If we want to reject such things, how about starting there?

It's not so much now that academics can and should be challenged by non-academics – that was always the case – but that academics are now in fact far more likely to come up with nonsense than any other demographic. Dispensers of anti-expertise. Our new bullshitters-in-chief.

The Times finally gives some coverage to Australia's Giggle v Tickle case – largely ignored by mainstream Australian media, apparently – with some useful background: 

As a 27-year-old Hollywood scriptwriter, Sall Grover was dumbstruck when a film producer offered her work and then plunged his hands down her pants.

She fled and called her manager, only to be left stunned again. “He goes, ‘This is great. He wants you to write him a script’,” Grover said.

That experience and others, such as the Hollywood landlords who offered young women free accommodation if they did not wear clothes, left Grover disillusioned upon her return to Australia after a decade away.

Encouraged by her mother, she decided to create an app exclusively for women — a space, as she describes it, where women could “just talk and connect about anything they wanted to”.

Or, as she told a court: “It would be a place without harassment, mansplaining, dick pics, stalking and aggression, and other male patterned online behaviour.”

The Giggle for Girls app was born and membership soared, until one decision landed Grover and Giggle in a court case. They were catapulted into Australian legal history when they banned Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman. Tickle was judged by Grover to be a man but is lawfully a woman under Australia’s sex discrimination code.

The banishment cost Grover a $10,000 fine (£5,600) and led to Giggle’s temporary suspension.

Grover’s appeal against the decision reignited a media furore over the case last week, centred on the question, what is a woman? Can a man who dresses as a woman and takes medical steps to become one then demand that all treat them as a woman?

The case is likely to intensify pressure for Australia to bring its laws into line with the UK after the British Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the term “woman” in the Equality Act should be interpreted as only people born female and that transgender women should be excluded from that definition.

Let's hope so. The question remains as to why trans Tickle should want to join Giggle in the first place, and the answer of course is that trans activists require that their delusion be validated by everyone else – or they get very very cross.

Last week JK Rowling came to the aid of Grover, who is planning to relaunch her women-only app in the UK.

The Harry Potter author, whose antipathy toward trans activists is well known, posted a picture of Tickle to her 14.3 million followers on X on Wednesday, telling them: “Western society is currently divided between people who know this is a man and are prepared to say so and those who know this is a man but lie out of obedience to an ideology. There is no third option. Literally nobody on earth thinks ‘Roxanne Tickle’ is actually a woman.”

Nicely put.

Rowling may have an antipathy toward trans activists, but it's nothing like the death threats and abuse that trans activists regularly throw at her.