Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Machine age news

    John Vachon, April 1943. "Dallas, Texas. Linotype operators at the Dallas Morning News."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Office of War Information]

  • The relieved trans apostate

    Jimmy Doyle, the Harvard philosophy professor who quit and then felt free to speak out on the trans farce, is interviewed in the Times by Andrew Billen:

    One Tuesday evening last month in his mother’s house on the Wirral, the recently ex-Harvard philosophy professor Jimmy Doyle took to X to say, at last, what he really thought about the state of free speech in American academia.

    In one tweet he wrote: “For unrelated reasons I’ve resigned my position at Harvard. But I haven’t been able to speak frankly with anyone for [about] five years. And it’ll be hard to forget the spectacle of this nation’s intellectual elite enforcing moral auto-lobotomy as a condition of entry to polite society.”

    In another he identified exactly what he had been unable to be frank about. He accused the trans movement of “provoking the most obvious social contagion since the Children’s Crusade”. And that was 800 years ago….

    Ouch. Though we've seen a few similar intellectual betrayals more recently. Lysenko springs to mind.

    When he first taught in America, constraints on academic free speech were few. Had anyone, until a decade ago, said someone with a penis was a woman, they would be asked what on earth they meant.

    “And it’s not as though the introduction of that proposition into the discourse was accompanied by any kind of explanation or justification. I mean, in logic, an axiom is a sentence that you can assert without having to prove it. The point of an axiom is that it’s a proposition on the basis of which you can prove or justify others. If you didn’t have any axioms, you wouldn’t be able to prove anything interesting. But the slogan ‘trans women are women’, that couldn’t possibly have entered the discourse as something that people had arrived at a consensus about.

    “And I think that’s a pretty dangerous position to be in with regards to free inquiry.”

    So, what actually would have happened had he questioned the current trans orthodoxy in a lecture? “I couldn’t say for certain but the one thing I’m pretty certain about is it wouldn’t be that nothing happened — and what would have happened would not have been good for me.”

    Well, he watched the defenestration of Carole Hooven, the evolutionary biologist who spoke out about the importance of sex in science and, finding no support after the predictable attacks, felt obliged to resign. That will have had a sobering effect on anyone else thinking of breaking ranks with the ruling trans ideology.

    He insists he could never vote for anyone like Donald Trump. Politically he is a “plague on both their houses” kind of person. But when I ask if he is not shocked by Trump’s attacks on Harvard’s funding and his attempts to stop it recruiting foreign students, he replies that he is ambivalent.

    “Harvard is just like a lightning rod for this kind of stuff but over the last ten years or so universities have done a terrible job of creating safe spaces of intellectual inquiry. And they’ve done a terrible job of ensuring that what’s supposed to be education doesn’t slide into indoctrination.”

    I say there has been a huge shift in the trans debate in Britain since the Supreme Court ruling in April that “woman” means a biological woman. Will the US follow? “Yes but much more slowly. I don’t know. There’s more of a kind of cultural docility. Like most British people, I hate extolling the virtues of British people, but I do think that we benefit from a very long tradition of mocking literally everything. You don’t really have that in the States.”

    Update: Jimmy Doyle clarifies – "I wasn’t a professor at Harvard. I was an untenured lecturer. That’s one reason it was much more risky for me to speak out than it would have been for most people."

  • The same old scapegoat

    Dave Rich, from a lecture he gave at the Holocaust Museum Houston earlier this month, on the subject of ‘Antisemitism Today’. There's a video in the link. It's a long speech, starting off with the important point that the surge in antisemitism after October 7th started before Israel made any move in response. But here, for me, is the key part:

    If you think about it, colonialism, racism, genocide: these are all troubling and difficult aspects of the West's own history. They are the cause, for some people, of immense guilt; for others, of very deep and difficult divisions. Now, Jews have always served a role as a useful scapegoat for sidestepping those kind of things in history. So perhaps it is not a coincidence that Israel today is treated as the symbol of all of the things that many people consider to be the West's most egregious sins. Jews have always been blamed for society's ills, held up as the exemplar of everything that is considered immoral or inhumane and unjust. In the Middle Ages, this meant Jews were thought to be literally satanic, blood-drinking demons in human form; in modern times, the right-wing myth of Judeo-Communism and the left’s imaginings about Jewish capitalism served this purpose. This was not only about Jews being an unwanted minority; it was a more profound imagining of Jews as a representation of the evils that need to be purged to make the world pure.

    This is why it is so striking that Israel, the most visible global expression of Jewish life today, is treated by some as the absolute archetype of a human rights transgressor in a world in which human rights are the highest measure of moral good. Israel does things that are deserving of censure, but Israel’s actions alone do not explain why it gets this unique treatment, different from all other states and nations. This discrepancy, this unique standard applied to Israel, is a reflection of something much deeper. Just as Jews, in history, were feared and hated as a dangerous presence in society, representing all of humanity’s worst and most harmful features, so today the same applies to the Jewish State. There was even an article in the Guardian in May blaming Israel for climate change. Anything can be made to fit.

    This all finds it purest expression now in the accusation of "settler colonialism" as an indictment of Israel as an illegitimate state, with those "from the river to the sea" calls for its destruction. Settler colonialism was originally coined with reference to Australia, Canada, the US, where it had no doubt more than a grain of truth. Obviously, though, no one really believed these countries would be abandoned, given back to the original inhabitants. But Israel fit the bill perfectly – provided you ignore the fact that Israel is the Jews' ancestral home, that they were there thousands of years before the Arabs, and that a good half of the Jews now in Israel are Mizrahi Jews thrown out of their homes across the Middle East and North Africa in a wave of antisemitic violence after Israel's founding. And of course the Left and the Israel-haters are very happy to ignore that – or waste their time pretending it's not true.

    So the guilt felt by these inhabitants of settler colonialist countries – not coincidentally now where the protestors seem most vocal in their hatred of Israel – is turned on that old scapegoat, the Jew. History repeats itself. 

  • Smearing others

    Harvey Proctor in the Telegraph speaks out at last about the appallingly smug James O'Brien:

    In a recently resurfaced video [here – MH], James O’Brien claimed I “lied egregiously” about my private life, almost four decades ago, in 1987. It is a falsehood dressed as righteousness. O’Brien, so often self-appointed arbiter of truth, might reflect on his own record before smearing others.

    Today the LBC presenter is once again facing calls to be taken off-air after he read out a plainly absurd and anti-Semitic claim from a listener that Jews are taught “Arabs are cockroaches to be crushed”. His latest calumny proves he hasn’t changed his ways – far from it. It is why I am speaking out for the first time about the way he treated me and other distinguished public servants who became embroiled in a heinous conspiracy theory cooked up by the liar Carl Beech and amplified by O’Brien.

    For more than ten years, many people have urged me to turn my attention to James O’Brien to ensure he is held accountable for his shameful and credulous support of Carl Beech, a liar who falsely accused me of being part of the now infamous, and widely discredited, Westminster VIP paedophile ring.

    Until now, I have resisted.

    Not because the case against O’Brien wasn’t strong, but because I was otherwise engaged with those higher up the food chain – individuals with real power and influence who either enabled Beech or fanned the flames of his witch-hunt. These include former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Tom Watson; the senior police officers who led Operation Midland, such as Steve Rodhouse; and Dame Cressida Dick, who presided over a force that treated lies as fact. They were the architects of persecution. O’Brien was its echo chamber.

    His role should not be forgotten or forgiven. He was indeed a central cheerleader for one of the most grotesque miscarriages of justice in recent British history. He gave a powerful platform to Beech, a convicted liar, fraudster and paedophile, whose falsehoods wrecked lives.

    While most journalists viewed Beech’s absurd conspiracy theories with justified scepticism, O’Brien indulged them regularly on his LBC programme (unlike his colleague Iain Dale, who gave unwavering support to me and other victims of Operation Midland at a time when few dared to do so).

    He played recordings of Beech on air, praised the disgraced Exaro News for supposedly “schooling” the rest of the media, and accused anyone who expressed doubt of being part of an establishment cover-up. In doing so, he lent moral authority and credibility to a liar who accused distinguished public servants of the most horrific crimes – including D-Day veterans like Lord Bramall, and who falsely implicated me in the most sickening of crimes. Lord Brittan, also accused, did not live to see his name cleared.

    I did. Barely. As Douglas Murray so rightly chronicled in The Spectator, O’Brien’s enthusiasm for Beech’s lies was exceptional even among the most credulous. He helped transform what should have been a laughable conspiracy into a national witch-hunt.

    One result? I lost my home. I lost my livelihood. I was reduced to living in a converted shed with my partner, three dogs and no running water. At one point, I received so many credible death threats that police advised me to leave my home immediately. I feared not only for my life, but my partner’s too.

    But unlike O’Brien, I do not have a radio studio from which to deflect responsibility. I had nothing but the truth, and eventually the truth prevailed, though not before devastating damage had been done.

    Yet, when Beech was finally exposed and sentenced to 18 years in prison, what was O’Brien’s response? A tone-deaf tweet in July 2019 lamenting that he had been misled, while still insisting that “telling abuse survivors they’ll be believed” was the right thing to do. No apology. No mention of me, or Lord Bramall, Lord Brittan, or the other victims. Just a self-pitying shrug dressed up as principle….

    The offences for which I was convicted in 1987 are no longer offences. The law has changed; society has changed. But O’Brien has not. He continues to peddle moral certainty while refusing to reckon with his own past, a past in which he gave oxygen to falsehood, ruined reputations and incited a witch-hunt with chilling zeal.

    I am not the only victim of O’Brien’s actions with regard to Carl Beech – but I am one of the few still alive to respond.

    Well said. 

  • Castrated drag queens

    Well, this is depressing:

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    Story here. The fashion industry, notoriously, loves skinny anorexic girls. Now, even better, it loves boys who were transed by their parents at a young age. They've really got the look.

    Just another tale from the dystopian jungle.

  • Rom Braslavski

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    Video here. Be warned: it's horrible. Awful. "Unbearable suffering".

  • Why is the rejection of Zionism so central to progressive political identity?

    Eva Illouz at Fathom – Time to Unmask the Imposture of anti-Zionism:

    Since 7 October, many liberal and left leaning Zionist Jews have become increasingly uncomfortable about the uses of anti-Zionism. Why is the movement of emancipation of the Jews the only one to be contested and vilified 120 years after its birth? Why is Israel the only state in the world whose existence is up for question, even a matter for debate at dinner tables? Why is the spurning rejection of Zionism so central to progressive political identity? In a world rife with persecutions, wars, genocides, massacres, civil wars, the obsession with which Israel’s crimes are singled out for opprobrium cannot fail to raise the suspicion that more is at stake than Israel’s own sins. To address this suspicion, we need a method which should address two questions: Does anti-Zionism discriminate against Jews (that is, treat them differently from other groups) and does it dehumanise them?

    In trying to arbitrate whether a word, behaviour, or idea is discriminatory, sexist, racist or Islamophobic, the progressive Left has, by and large, deferred to members of minority groups. This is the only logical way to proceed, for, if discrimination or racial hatred profits one group to the detriment of another, we cannot let the profiting group judge how harmful its own behaviour is. Whether men ‘only’ pay a compliment or harass women in the workplace when they comment on their appearance can be decided only by the latter, not the former. This assumption has become universally accepted, except in one case: the Jews….

    Why then is there such jarring asymmetry between Jewish and non-Jewish voices in their capacity to use their historical memory and be able to designate what constitutes an offence to their group? Assuming progressives are not animated by an explicit and conscious hatred of Jews, I believe there is only one plausible answer: Even though Muslims (to continue with the same example) are demographically, territorially, and economically (in total accumulated wealth) far superior to the Jews, they are viewed as a vulnerable and persecuted minority, while Jews – especially when associated with Israel – are denied this status. If Muslims constitute two billion people in the world, or close to 30 per cent of world population, and the Jews barely 15 millions, or 0.2 per cent of the people who inhabit this planet, the latter clearly better qualify to the status of vulnerable minority in global terms. But in western democracies, Jews are treated as a dominant (and ‘white’) group, a perception buttressed by the fact they are mentally associated to Israel, a military state victorious in numerous wars. Survey after survey, in Europe and in the USA, it was found that a third or more of the population believed Jews have too much power. More interestingly, young people, more likely to be progressive than older people, are also more likely to think Jews control too much of the economy and the media.

    This asymmetry between the leftist treatment of Muslims and Jews betrays a double form of discrimination: It views Islam as in need of protection, despite its territorial reach and religious power, revealing an Orientalist condescension (protecting Islam differs from protecting from real and present discrimination the Muslim minorities who live in Western countries). And it cancels the minority status of Jews, because they are implicitly associated with power and domination.

    More than that: when forced to legitimise the existence of Israel, Jews usually invoke the argument of persistent antisemitism, and this argument, in the progressive moral grammar, ipso facto cancels itself. It is discounted and recoded as an ‘instrumentalisation’ or ‘weaponisation’ (to use the fashionable word) of a tragic history to Jew-wash Israel’s crimes. The fear or denunciation of antisemitism by Jews is tautologically transformed into a ‘proof’ or sign of cunning manipulativeness, thereby automatically disqualifying it. Note that the wily manoeuvres of Iran and other Muslim countries to discard and disqualify any critique of political Islam as Islamophobic has never met with a similar a priori suspicion by the progressive Left.

    Worth reading in full.

  • Acts of religious hatred

    A Times editorial reminds us of the horrors we ignore:

    This week, more than 40 churchgoers were killed by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an affiliate of the murderous death cult Islamic State, as they maintained a nocturnal vigil at a church in Komanda, a rural town in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nine of the dead were children; the Catholic community’s shops were burnt and looted. Christian worshippers in remote areas, where state security is non-existent, are easy prey for Islamists. In February the ADF beheaded 70 Christians in a church in the neighbouring province of North Kivu.

    These acts of religious hatred are increasingly common in sub-Saharan Africa, where Islamist groups are perpetrating heinous crimes with seeming impunity. Last month, Nigeria’s Fulani jihadists — acting like their Congolese counterparts under cover of darkness — set upon a Catholic mission in the village of Yelwata. Armed with rifles and machetes, they killed about 200 people and forced thousands more to flee their homes. “Most of them,” said Terhemba Lormba, a farmer who lost three of his children in the massacre, “were burnt alive.” As the Pope noted in the hours following the attack, to be Christian in a volatile and contested land means being “targeted relentlessly” by sectarian violence.

    Such is life for embattled Christians in the nations where their faith is not the default or established religion. In Pakistan, Christians who resist conversion to Islam are regularly beaten and killed, and women and girls raped or forced into marriage. One Christian, Waqas Masih, 22, who worked at a paper mill in the Punjab, ended up in hospital after refusing his employer’s attempts to convert him to Islam.

    Even countries that have been historically tolerant of Christians are now witnessing a grim uptick in violence. In Syria last month, Islamic State was blamed for a suicide bomb and gun attack on a Greek Orthodox church in the suburbs of Damascus during a Sunday evening service in which 25 people were killed and 63 wounded. It was the first time the city’s Christian community had been targeted openly since conflict with the Druze in 1860.

    Even as church attendances creep up across Europe and North America, the plight of Christians is neither a fashionable nor popular cause for the socially conscious. But westerners owe their solidarity — and western governments their diplomatic might — to these embattled minorities. Church leaders in Britain and abroad must take up the cause, ensuring that these atrocities are not relegated to footnotes in the news agenda.

    Not to worry. When Labour have got their Islamophobia agenda sorted we won't have to put up with this kind of depressing read any more.

  • Diplomatic malpractice

    The JC on Starmer and Palestine:

    UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has threatened – there seems no better word – that Britain will recognise a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September unless Israel reaches a ceasefire and meets other conditions. If we understand the logic correctly, it runs as follows: if Hamas – after months of rejecting ceasefire proposals – were to reverse course, accept a deal, and release its hostages, Britain will not recognise a Palestinian state. But if Hamas continues to torture captives in its tunnels, reject diplomacy, and prolong the war, Britain will.

    It is difficult to imagine a more counterproductive approach to foreign policy. These upside-down incentives, if they influence anything at all, will encourage Hamas to harden its position and further delay the very ceasefire the British government claims to seek. This is not diplomacy, it is diplomatic malpractice….

    Worse still, the broader push to recognise a Palestinian state at this moment reflects a fundamental misdiagnosis of the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also implies, if not explicitly states, that the lack of a Palestinian state is what provoked Hamas’s atrocities. That is historically and morally backward. The conflict long predates Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza. And Israel unilaterally withdrew from the strip 20 years ago. Palestinian leaders have rejected every serious offer of statehood, including those made by Israel. The central obstacle has never been the exact contours of future borders. It is the refusal to accept Israel’s existence in any borders….

    To look at the long arc of this conflict and conclude that October 7 should become effectively Palestine’s independence day is an abdication of strategic judgment, driven by ideology and domestic electoral considerations. It does not advance peace. It undermines Britain's credibility and weakens the moral authority of this country on the world stage.

    Yep.

    Added: Giles Fraser at UnHerd.

    Hamas is getting exactly what it wants. Why, now, would it give up hostages? What reason does it have to agree to a ceasefire? It only needs Israel to keep on fighting for a few more months to achieve its ultimate goal. The paradox is, if Hamas refuses peace, then the UK will recognise Palestine. This is batshit crazy: Starmer’s announcement will only prolong the agony of the Palestinian people. Whether the West wants to hear it or not, since October 7, Hamas has used the agony of its own people as a way of manipulating the rest of the world into supporting it. Whereas Israel is doing everything it can to bring its people home, Hamas uses the grotesque suffering of the people of Gaza as a means to its own end. And it will be done with renewed confidence now that this wicked strategy is so obviously working.

    What is particularly shabby about Starmer’s announcement is that he is playing with people’s lives — with Palestinian and Israeli ones — not because he believes recognising a state of Palestine is the right thing to do at this moment, but because of his own troubled domestic political situation. With Corbyn’s new party on his shoulder and a few hundred of his own MP’s lobbying him, Starmer has caved.

  • The fake news

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    Good.

    Is there a deliberate nod to the Madonna and Child motif in that photo? The holy child persecuted by the Jews….