Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • A bad week for Polanski

    Some good news…

    And this…

  • Difficult conversations

    Everyone goes on about the difficult conversations we need to have about the rise in antisemitism, but they then back away from actually having any of these difficult conversations. Paul Stott in the Spectator on the refusal to name names:

    To address any problem, it must be named. In Golders Green, ministers and senior police officers were explicit that it was British Jews who were under attack and that it was an act of anti-Semitic terrorism which had occurred.

    So which ideology is actually powering this upsurge in violence in the UK today? Hardline Scientology? Buddhism? Or Zoroastrianism – of the kind which the late Freddie Mercury grew up in?

    Speaking in Golders Green, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley stated: ‘Anti-Semitism is fuelled by hateful and extremist ideologies. It comes from hostile states, the extreme right and the extreme left. These are terrorist and hateful belief systems but they are all rooted in racism. They are given space to operate when civic debate is weak, when hatred is excused and when people are unwilling to challenge it directly’.Again – which ‘hateful and extremist ideologies’? And how is ‘racism’ the sole driver of the oldest hatred in history, which also has its roots in religion, myth and conspiracy theory?

    Standing next to the Commissioner in Golders Green was Sarah Sackman, MP for Finchley and Golders Green, and Minister of State for Courts and Legal Services – and a highly articulate rising star in the Labour party.

    But Sackman, too, seems to have an almost maiden-aunt aversion to letting horrid words such as Islamist, Jihadist or Islamism pass her lips. In a Guardian column, Sackman evoked Anne Frank and a united community response to the English Defence League in 2013.

    Again, she told us precisely nothing about which ideology is responsible for the current wave of violence against her own constituents. Rightly, she has expressed frustration that wide swathes of the left are failing to speak up against anti-Semitism, while herself saying nothing about Islamist anti-Semitism. Perhaps she should lead by example?

    Correctly, Sackman further laments that there is little in the way of a civil society campaign against anti-Semitism. But why is this pushback absent? Because of fear of offending Islamists and their allies. All of which she doesn’t challenge, call out and confront. So there continues to be no civil society campaign. The problem is thus self-reinforcing.

    All this points to wider inconsistencies across government. Consider the Commons statement by Security Minister Dan Jarvis MP on anti-Semitic attacks that made six references to Iran – but avoided any reference to the motivating ideology of the Khomeinite strand of Islamism.

    Sticking to the general, in one answer Jarvis spoke of the ‘the threats we face from extremists’, once more without telling us what type of extremists.

    Sometimes the term Islamism does appear, but is conjoined with other threats as if it were improper for it to stand exposed to public scrutiny all alone.

    Sometimes the term Islamism does appear, but is conjoined with other threats as if it were improper for it to stand exposed to public scrutiny all alone.

    Thus, when Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) was raising the terrorism threat level to severe, she observed: ‘The terrorist threat level in the UK has been rising for some time, driven by an increase in the broader Islamist and extreme right-wing terrorist threat from individuals and small groups based in the UK.’

    Extreme right-wing terrorist threat? A vanishingly small problem, surely. It’s like Jeremy Corbyn, who can’t mention antisemitism without bringing up “Islamophobia” – in effect to minimise and evade the real issue. Islamism is the problem here – enabled, of course, by the red-green alliance: the support of large swathes of progressive opinion for the Islamist project, perfectly encapsulated by the Greens in their current iteration.

    Where now? After the Manchester Arena massacre of 2017, Theresa May spoke of the need for ‘difficult conversations’ about radical Islam. They never really occurred then. So before tomorrow’s ‘Forum on tackling anti-Semitism’ is underway, it seems appropriate to ask once again: when are the difficult conversations finally going to start? The early signs aren’t promising.

  • Palestinianism, the signature cause of the western progressive

    Melanie Phillips on good form in the Times this morning – Dangerous Palestinianism has gripped politics:

    The local government elections this week will have a very odd aspect. In electing people to busy themselves with bin collections, planning applications and mending potholes, an apparently sizeable number of people, namely left-wingers and Muslims, will be voting on the issue of Gaza — shorthand for taking a position virulently hostile to Israel.

    The Greens’ leader, Zack Polanski, has made this a key part of his extreme-left platform. Polling suggests the Greens will make huge gains, thanks in the main to young people. Supporters applaud the party’s obsessive hatred of Israel which they regard, as one explained, as “moral clarity”. That sentiment, shared far beyond Green voters, is key to understanding why British Jews are now under siege from attacks directed at them through their perceived support for Israel.

    For many young people, being anti-Israel fits their profound yearning to be idealistic and moral. This is because Israel is widely perceived to be guilty of genocide, starvation and wantonly killing babies and children in its war against Hamas in Gaza. These obscene claims are implacably believed, while evidence produced by Israel rebutting them on grounds of facts and rationality is dismissed with contempt.

    That’s because of the view, embedded in progressive circles over decades, that Israel is a fundamentally immoral project, responsible for the colonial oppression of Palestinians by the Jews who now illegally occupy even more of the land than when the state was founded in 1948.

    But Jews are the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever their national kingdom, centuries before Islam was even created. Their entitlement to re-establish that homeland was enshrined in international law by the precursor to the UN, the League of Nations, in 1922.

    In the 1960s, unable to defeat Israel militarily, the Arabs fashioned a Palestinian identity to secure world support in opposing Israel. This has been acknowledged by a number of Arabs over the years. In 1977, for example, Zahir Muhsein, a senior Palestinian Liberation Organisation official, said: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity… Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people… to oppose Zionism.”

    Thus was born Palestinianism, committed to the destruction of Israel and the theft of the Jews’ own history in the land but presented as a movement for justice and human rights. This strategy has worked to perfection. A war of extermination was reframed as resistance to colonial conquest. And the “anti-colonialist” young have lapped it up.

    As a result, they have adopted the Palestinian mindset. The Palestinian Authority routinely uses the imagery of medieval and Nazi Jew-hatred, representing Jews as vermin, octopuses controlling America or poisoners of the world. So it’s no surprise that some Green candidates have referred to “Jewish cockroaches”, termed Jeffrey Epstein’s island “Zionist HQ” and accused the Israelis of “using infectious diseases to help their genocidal onslaught”.

    The Palestinians have also accused Israel for decades of committing genocide, causing a “holocaust” and being Nazis. So it’s predictable their British supporters are using precisely the same monstrous language.

    Palestinianism, the signature cause of the western progressive, has also been adopted by the international human rights establishment. Since human rights is the nearest thing to a secular religion, the venomous defamation of Israelis and Jews has been reframed as virtue.

    So when Polanski accuses Israel of genocide, his supporters cheer. But such claims inescapably create savage hatred of Israel and diaspora Jews, who with singular injustice are held responsible for what Israel does.

    That mindset, which brings together Islamist extremists with other Israel-haters, not only leads unstable individuals to commit murderous attacks on Jews. It also diverts public outrage away from those committing them and towards their Jewish or Israeli victims.

    The apparently Israel-hating Polanski, who has turned himself into a tool of this hideous movement, uses his Jewishness as a shield. Unfortunately, history records a long line of Jews — including Marx, who wrote that the ideal society would be free of Jews altogether — who turn into enemies of the Jewish people.

    Polanski is riding a wider wave which has substituted propaganda for knowledge and sapped the ability to think, particularly among the young. It’s a culture in which objective truth has been replaced by the primacy of feelings and the ideologies of moral relativism, anti-colonialism and multiculturalism.

    This has entailed a bar against calling out Islamism and its use of the Palestinian cause. By swallowing Palestinianism wholesale, many British supporters have unintentionally bought into an agenda that views the destruction of the Jews as a vital step towards the destruction of the West. For Palestinianism is a Trojan Horse for both antisemitism and Islamisation.

    Many decent people believe that by supporting the Palestinians they are supporting peace, justice and the cause of the oppressed. This is a trap. The terrible truth is that the supporters of Palestinian ideology are unwittingly laundering the unconscionable as conscience itself.

    And yes, we do have a problem:

    The war in Gaza ranks above the economy in determining how Muslim voters will cast their ballots at this week’s local elections, according to polling.

    Polanski kinows this. He’s pandering to it.

  • Beating his own sister

    From Reduxx:

    A trans-identified male freshman from an elite school in California won the Women’s Varsity 400-meter race at the Prep League Championship Finals last week, defeating a number of more experienced female athletes to the title, including his own sister.

    Paul Haaga, also known as “Lina,” won the girls’ final with a time of 59.45 seconds. His older sister, Sienna, finished second with 60.03 seconds.

    Happy families.

    No word from the poor girl, but plenty from the entitled brat about how much it means to him to compete and win against girls. Clearly the parents are happy about all this and have supported the transing of their son, so the girl’s in an impossible situation.

    In a statement to Reduxx, a representative from HeCheated, an independent platform that tracks male participation in female sports, expressed frustration and disbelief that Haaga displaced his own sister in a girls competition.

    “In instances where girls are denied fair competition and consequently lose titles and opportunities to boys, they should be able to rely on their families for support, even if the school administration opposes them,” the representative said. “While it is not uncommon for parents to favor a son over a daughter, this case presents an especially nightmarish situation in which the daughter has no familial support and no one to stand up for her right to be recognized as a deserving champion.”

  • Las Pelilargas

    Argentinian photographer Irina Werning has spent years travelling across South America for her ongoing project Las Pelilargas, documenting the women and girls for whom long hair is a proud cultural tradition.

    What she found over nearly two decades was that traditions were evolving, with long hair functioning as both a mark of continuity and, in some cases, a subtle act of rebellion.…

    “Over the years, I’ve realised that hair is much more than appearance – it carries identity, spirituality, family and time.”

    [Photos © Irina Werning]

    Las Pelilargas previously.

  • Death threats against student who visited Israel

    From the Telegraph – Cambridge fails to suspend students who threatened to kill classmate over Israel trip.

    A University of Cambridge college has been criticised after it failed to suspend students who made death threats against an undergraduate who visited Israel.

    The visit, organised by the Pinsker Centre think tank, took Oxbridge student leaders to Israel, where they met Israelis and Palestinians to better understand the Gaza conflict.

    But one of the party, Bradley Smart, 21, said he received death threats from fellow students when he returned to Homerton College.

    The third-year student, who is not Jewish, claimed he was subjected to abuse in a student group chat in which identifiable individuals from the college wrote “I’m going to kill him”, “kill him”, and “he needs to die”.

    Other messages included slurs and degrading language, as well as anti-Semitic content including comparisons between Israel and the Nazis.

    Mr Smart claimed that he reported the threats through the college’s harassment channels, but was told to speak to welfare staff or consider moving rooms.

    So helpful.

    He moved out of Homerton a month later out of fear for his safety.

    He said he complained to police, but claimed they told him it was an “academic matter”, and would not investigate.

    Are death threats not a police matter? Perhaps if he’d told them he’d been misgendered….

    Mr Smart told The Telegraph: “As a Cambridge student, I expected my university to be a place where opinions could be refined through dialogue.

    “The reality, however, was that this trip was enough to trigger a campaign of cancellation, including explicit death threats and being banned from a college club.”

    Lord Walney, a former government counter-extremism tsar, said: “It is entirely unacceptable that students at one of our leading universities would threaten to kill one of their peers for visiting Israel.

    “The college’s response is wholly inadequate, and sets a dangerous precedent that intimidation and threats of political violence will be tolerated. Cambridge must do better.”

  • Concert for Hope and Unity

    From the Times of Israel:

    A choral concert fundraiser for the victims of the Bondi Beach terror attack at a Jewish event in Sydney has been canceled after local Greek singers opposed singing alongside their Jewish counterparts in the planned joint performance.

    The two-hour benefit concert, titled Concert for Hope and Unity, was to feature the Australian Hellenic Choir together with the Sydney Jewish Choral Society in Sydney Town Hall on June 28, The Australian newspaper reported Monday.

    However, last Monday, during rehearsals, a vote was taken and over half the Hellenic choir “politically objected” to performing with their Jewish counterparts, according to the report.

  • Saying the quiet part out loud

    Trevor Phillips in the Times – Time to stand with the Jews, come what may:

    For Jews, Britain is no longer the home of the easy-going multiculturalism routinely invoked by this Labour administration. This small group, fewer than 300,000 strong, increasingly finds itself in danger of being confined to small areas populated largely by their co-ethnics, heavily policed and surrounded by walls both virtual and material. Other nations have been here before and learnt that the ghetto is the pathway to nowhere.

    So what to do? We should start by being honest about the nature of contemporary Jew-hate. And this is me saying the quiet part out loud. We are not all equally complicit. It is perfectly legitimate for British Muslims to feel hostility to a state they believe is trampling over the rights of their co-religionists. The issue is what they do about it.

    Prominent Muslims are increasingly uneasy that the leaders of mainstream British Muslim communities are allowing themselves to be smeared with the mark of extremist Islamism.

    Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of Tell Mama, the government-backed group monitoring hate against Muslims, said yesterday: “Whilst the vast majority of Muslims are an asset to our country, unless we have a root and branch rejection of Muslim antisemitism, calls for commiserations with British Jews are futile.”

    Baroness Falkner of Margravine, my redoubtable successor as head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, wrote in The Times: “When members of the Muslim community commit violence against Jewish people for simply being Jewish there are no mosque vigils or prayers, and no loudhailers condemning the perpetrators … This silence speaks volumes.”

    Security chiefs say three quarters of the terrorist threats we know about come from Islamists. According to a 2020 survey by the respected pollster ICM, British Muslims are twice as likely as the average Brit to believe that Jews have too much control over the global banking system, and over our own political leaders, and that they are more loyal to Israel than they are to Britain.

    These are crazy views. But Labour’s failure to include and inspire Pakistani and Bangladeshi voters has driven them to the likes of George Galloway and Zack Polanski, who yesterday described Baroness Falkner’s words as “inflammatory”.

    “The likes of George Galloway and Zack Polanski.” Yes. That’s a comparison that’s been waiting to be made.

    Islam’s built-in antisemitism clearly needs to be called out, but what’s particularly shocking in our present situation is the extraordinary spread of the crudest antisemitism in progressive circles (for instance), under the guise of anti-Zionism and “Free Palestine”.

    Added, this comment:

    Hamas and their Mahidist apocalyptic death cult backers in Iran knew exactly what the outcome of their terror attack on 7th October 2023 would be. The creation of hundreds of miles of tunnels under civilian infrastructure had been going on for years in anticipation of this. These tunnels were for the use of Hamas only, civilians were left exposed. Every death is their responsibility, do you not get that these regimes have no empathy for the civilian population? Most recently illustrated by the murder of over 30,000 Iranian’s. Assad was also backed by Iran and he murdered over 200,000 Syrians. No protests about any of that though, as it has to be all about the tiny successful and democratic nation of Israel that has been under continuous attack since 1948. The left’s vapid fixation is fuelling the fire of anti semitism on the streets of Britain. The lie that the tiny state, less than the size of Wales was ‘stolen’ by the Jews is another anti semitic myth propagated by the left. The Jewish people have maintained a continuous presence in the Land of Israel for over 3,000 years. While major exiles occurred under various empires, a segment of the Jewish population always remained in the region.

  • The UNRWA grift

    UNRWA 75+ years later, and the number of “refugees” has ballooned to millions of descendants because it was deliberately hijacked to perpetuate the refugee status as a political weapon against Israel instead of solving the problem.

    Full interview here.

  • Jew-hatred