Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • The Cheider school in Amsterdam

    A sign of the times. Pini Dunner at Tablet Magazine – The School My Grandfather Built Was Bombed in Amsterdam:

    An explosive device was detonated on Friday night outside the Cheider school in Amsterdam. It struck the outer wall of a building on Zeelandstraat in Buitenveldert. For most readers, it is just another attack against a Jewish institution in a sequence of attacks on Jewish institutions around the world. For me, it is something else entirely.

    The Cheider was founded by my late grandfather, Uri Yehuda “Adje” Cohen, a hero who spent the Holocaust years leading a resistance group in Rotterdam against the occupying Nazis while living in hiding in a secret room behind a closet in the home of a gentile friend.

    By any standard, he was an extraordinary individual. Far from resting on his laurels after the war, my grandfather devoted the postwar years to rebuilding the decimated Dutch Jewish community.…

    An explosive device placed against the wall of a Jewish school carries an obvious message. It is meant to intimidate a community by targeting its children and its institutions.

    The attack in Amsterdam did not occur in isolation. The Western world is experiencing the worst surge of antisemitism in decades. Just last week, a man drove a truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan—one of the largest synagogues in the United States—and opened fire before dying at the scene. Security guards stopped him before the 140 children on the premises were harmed. Similar attacks or attempted attacks on Jewish institutions have occurred across several countries in recent months.

    These incidents come at a moment of heightened international tension amid the war involving the United States, Israel, and Iran. The details differ from place to place, but the pattern is unmistakable. Jewish schools and synagogues in Europe and America are increasingly treated as targets, and Jews everywhere are reminded of how fragile security can be.

    My grandfather believed that the only answer to hatred was to double down on Jewish life—to strengthen it, expand it, and refuse to allow intimidation to succeed.

    The history of the Cheider proves that he was right. The school began at a moment when many believed traditional Jewish life in the Netherlands might never recover from the devastation of the 20th century. One man disagreed. He cleared a table in his apartment and gathered five children around it. That was how the Cheider began.

    Today the school still stands on Zeelandstraat in Amsterdam. Children still study there. And the work that began around that table continues.

    A bomb may damage a wall. But it cannot destroy what my grandfather built.

  • Labour women

    More on that Olivia Bailey meeting, here from Sonia Sodha – How is the government so useless on women’s rights?

    After the Supreme Court clarified that sex means biological sex in the Equality Act 2010 – meaning men cannot identify into women-only spaces, services and sports – the sighs of relief were conditional. No one was sure how the government would respond. But within days the prime minister said he welcomed the “real clarity” of the judgment, calling it a “step forwards”. Phew.

    Or so we thought. To call the government’s approach to implementing the Supreme Court judgment lackadaisical would be too kind. Phillipson has for months sat on the draft Code of Practice from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) that would provide businesses and service providers with accurate legal guidance on how they should implement the law as set out by the Supreme Court. Before it gets circulated, she has to lay the draft code before Parliament. Six months later, she has inexplicably failed to do so, producing varied excuses as to why not, the latest being that the EHRC should be publishing a business impact assessment of existing law that they must follow, despite the fact that’s not their job. Even worse, she has left the old 2011 Code in circulation, which gets the law wrong and puts service providers who follow it at risk of being sued for unlawful discrimination.

    Second, when the Good Law Project judicially reviewed the interim guidance produced by the EHRC in the wake of the Supreme Court judgment last November, lawyers acting for Bridget Phillipson argued against the Supreme Court that female-only services could admit men who identify as women without ceasing to be single-sex in law. The High Court remarked that her submission was “not easy to follow”. Why on earth would government lawyers be attempting to undermine the Supreme Court judgment on Phillipson’s instructions, when Starmer had earlier welcomed it as a model of clarity?

    .This is the context in which Wadhwa was invited in alongside other organisations to discuss hate crime with the equalities minister. You would expect the government to at least be even-handed in its decisions about which groups to meet with. At this meeting, there were no gender-critical gay and lesbian groups like LGB Alliance represented. Even the labelling of the meeting as “LGBT+” suggests that ministers have picked a side, favouring those campaigners who think men can identify as lesbians, and that same-sex attraction really means being attracted to people of the same “gender identity” regardless of their sex, a concept gender-critical gay people regard as homophobic. Incredibly, the grassroots feminist campaign For Women Scotland which took the case on the meaning of sex right up to the Supreme Court says Phillipson has never met with them.

    The point, surely, it that these Labour women – Olivia Bailey, Bridget Phillipson, and the rest – are trans believers. They think trans women are women. They’ve bought the whole Stonewall line – which, when they were clawing their way to the top, was pretty much required – and don’t have the stomach or the intellectual integrity to backtrack now that the whole house of cards is falling apart.

    God knows what Starmer actually thinks. I don’t suppose he knows himself.

  • The master faith

    Spencer Case in The Philosophers’ Magazine – Jihadism: At Least as Bad as Nazism. Worth reading in full, but here’s a taster:

    Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “The Nazis believed in a master race, the militant Islamists believe in a master faith. They just disagree who among them will be the master of the master faith”. I think there are at least three reasons that the master faith is even more sinister than the ideology of the master race.

    First, the master faith can more easily attract converts. Non-whites, most of the world’s population, are unlikely to find white supremacism  appealing. No form of racism seems likely to unify people across races since not everyone can be part of the master race—but a master faith can do that. Moreover, Hitlerian pseudo-science is a less compelling ideology than Islamism, which claims the authority of a 1,400-year religion rich with stories and rituals. Authoritarian secular ideologies such as Nazism may be quasi-religious in their fervor, but in the end lack the psychological power that religions have.

    A more easily transmissible disease is, all else equal, a worse disease. A very transmissible disease might be vastly more destructive than one that is more lethal but less transmissible. COVID-19 killed many more people than Ebola despite the latter’s being more lethal, precisely because COVID-19 is much more transmissible. The same holds for ideologies. Nazism is an Ebola-like ideology: jihadism is a bit more like COVID-19.

    Second, the existence of millions of non-violent Muslims perversely makes the jihadist threat worse in certain respects.  Imagine an alternate world where millions of Germans sincerely believed Mein Kampf was an elaborate metaphor for peaceful spiritual struggle, while the most thoroughly indoctrinated are genocidal extremists. In that world, Nazism probably wouldn’t have produced such extreme violence so quickly, but it would have been much harder to exclude from polite circles. Nazis could conceal themselves more easily, using the penumbra of “moderates” as a protective membrane. They could also recruit more effectively, gradually radicalizing new converts who are at first drawn in by the humane interpretations of core texts.  This is the advantage jihadists have in our world.

    Anti-racist activists often stress that racism can be subtle and insidious enough to go unnoticed. This can get taken too far to the point that everything starts to look racist, but there’s a legitimate point here. When racial terrorism earned Birmingham, Alabama, the nickname “Bombingham”, the problem clearly wasn’t confined to those manufacturing and planting bombs. Something similar is true of jihadist terrorists. Muslims who are peaceful, in the sense that they would never commit violent acts themselves, may nonetheless participate in a culture of violence to a variety of degrees, some of which make them complicit. They may openly sympathize with those who carry out attacks, offer excuses on their behalf, or simply decline to condemn them.  

    Finally, jihadism’s emphasis on martyrdom makes it especially difficult to counter. Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower describes mujahedeen in Afghanistan weeping because they survived Russian attacks—a reaction that would have been incomprehensible to the Nazi rank-and-file. Things were different with the Imperial Japanese, with their kamikaze pilots, and the Tamil Tigers, who used suicide bomb attacks in Sri Lanka. But these groups killed themselves to advance group interests. Jihadists, with their eschatological worldview, are happy to bring their countrymen with them to the hereafter. That’s why an Islamist regime such as Iran possessing nuclear weapons is such a terrifying prospect: it is impossible to deter someone willing, even eager, to be destroyed.

    The danger is enormous. Fifty-seven governments belong to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, controlling over two billion people, and they are not shy in throwing their economic and political weight around Islamist goals…

    Comparing Nazism and Islamism, see also:

  • Antisemitism “normalised” on British campuses

    This is grim. From the JC:

    One in five university students in the UK would be reluctant to share a flat with a Jewish peer, according to research that found “antisemitism has become normalised” on British campuses over the past two and a half years.

    Almost half of students (47 per cent) polled said they had seen slogans or chants directly justifying the October 7 attacks, while among those who regularly encounter Israel-Palestine protests on campus, the figure rose to 77 per cent, according to a report published today by Union of Jewish Students (UJS)….

    Dozens of testimonies in the report describe Jewish students facing verbal abuse and physical attacks. In one case, a group of non-Jewish students advertising for a flatmate posted online that they had one rule: “no Zios in the flat”.

  • The book that ended my career

    Rachel Rooney, the children’s writer demonised by the publishing world for her gender-critical views, is interviewed in the Telegraph:

    “This is the book that ended my career,” says Rachel Rooney, holding a copy of My Body is Me, a picture book for three to six-year-olds published in 2019. You could not find a more innocuous, inclusive and warm-hearted children’s paperback if you tried, yet it led to bitter recriminations for its award-winning creator, a torrent of abuse and ultimately her cancellation by the publishing world.

    Her “crime” was to be a gender-critical feminist voice in an industry that was, and largely remains, adherent to a rigid gender ideology. Before her cancellation, she was a widely acclaimed author, winning one of poetry’s most coveted awards and regularly featuring in lists of “Top 10 books for children” in The Guardian, among other newspapers.

    But Rooney, now 63, found that being out of step with trans orthodoxy and publicly declaring a belief in the binary nature of biological sex – even when the book in question made no reference to gender or sex – was fatal for the career she had always dreamt of, as well as her livelihood.

    What she calls “playground bullying and all the cowards who don’t want to get bullied themselves” drove her to despair and thoughts of suicide. She no longer writes at all. “This interview feels like my last way of expressing what happened to me,” Rooney says.

    She collaborated on a book titled My Body is Me, arguing that children’s bodies are perfect as they are. That’s when the abuse really began.

    Even before it was published, Rooney was already being attacked by fellow authors on social media for her unfashionable views. In the summer of 2019, she contacted the Society of Authors, her trade union, to point out that the list of “protected characteristics” on its website included gender and gender identity but not sex, which was legally incorrect, and the society agreed to change it.

    But, after the book came out, “it just went ballistic among the children’s publishing community, especially following the criticism of [children’s author], Clara Vulliamy”.

    In December 2019, Vulliamy posted a succession of messages on X vilifying Rooney and encouraging the organisation that promotes author visits to schools, Authors Aloud UK, not to endorse her or My Body is Me, saying it propagated an “extreme ideology” that “targets children”.

    “What shocked me was how coordinated the attacks seemed,” says Rooney, who received months of personal abuse via social media and her website. “Be aware,” said one tweet. “Rachel Rooney is a transphobic writer who is using children’s literature to spread her hateful worldview.”

    Another informed parents that Rooney was a “Terf” – a trans-exclusionary radical feminist – who was trying to “stop kids questioning gender. If you wouldn’t let your kids read terrorist propaganda, don’t let them read this”.

    Rooney feels she was personally targeted by more influential and established people with less to lose than her. “Authors, librarians and publicists were all working against me. I used to get four or five requests a year to contribute a poem to major anthologies. That stopped, and I don’t get any now.”

    Rooney used to visit two or three schools a month to supplement her income, but once the attacks became widespread, these bookings stopped completely. She was told by a publisher that some booksellers were refusing to stock her work.

    It’s a scarcely believable story of a witch hunt, taking place in the quintessentially nice middle-class publishing world – which turned out to be full of the most vile and vindictive people.

    Clara Vulliamy, fwiw, has a trans son.

  • Moral clarity

    Jonathan Sacerdoti, in the Spectator, on the Iran war:

    This is not simply another American intervention abroad, nor merely another “forever war” of Western imperialism. The Iranian regime is more than an authoritarian state pursuing narrow interests. Its ruling doctrine fuses revolutionary Shi’a theology with a militant anti Western worldview forged in the intellectual currents of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran’s leaders see themselves not only as governors of a state but as participants in a historical, international, civilisational mission. And we are their enemy.

    Israel has therefore become a natural partner for the United States in this confrontation. Few modern states maintain such a clear sense of civilisational identity or such confidence in the legitimacy of their own survival, and that clarity has allowed Washington and Jerusalem to recognise common cause against the Iranian regime.….

    Against ideological adversaries, clarity matters. Movements driven by religious or ideological conviction rarely retreat in response to material incentives alone. They persist because they believe their struggle carries historical or spiritual meaning.

    Conflicts of this kind therefore cannot be fought with strategy alone. They require an opposing conviction: the belief that the civilisation being defended is worth protecting. And in this case it certainly is.….

    For decades Western policymakers comforted themselves with the belief that Tehran’s rulers were rational actors who could be moderated through negotiation, sanctions relief or gradual integration into the international system. That assumption shaped policy for a generation. The war now unfolding may finally bury that illusion.

    In its place should come a rediscovery of moral clarity: the ability to recognise the difference between good and evil, civilisation and barbarity, and the knowledge that our freedoms never come for free. The United States has shown a renewed willingness to speak that language. The rest of the West would do well to remember it.

    This is a regime that for over forty years has declared – loudly and clearly – that its main foreign policy objective is to wipe Israel off the map, all the while chanting “Death to America”, and yes, “Death to the UK”. They also believe in the imminent return of the hidden imam. It’s a modern state, close to acquiring nuclear weapons, with a mindset straight from the dark ages. It’s terrifying. Yet for all these decades the west has been pussyfooting around, pretending not to understand.

    Obama’s decision to promote closer ties with Iran – to re-calibrate US foreign policy away from Israel and towards Iran – was surely one one of the most astonishing political blunders of recent times. Yes, Obama is a lovely man with a lovely smile: urbane, witty, clubbable. Trump by contrast is a loud-mouthed huckster and bully with zero personal charm. Yet here we are. He’s got it right on this one, just as he’s got it right on gender ideology.

    The UK, meanwhile, is sitting this one out – without even the excuse of having a charming charismatic leader with a lovely smile.

  • Whipping up hatred

  • Family members are missing

    Added:

  • Lowlifes

    A reminder.

  • Historic times

    Shmuel Bar, Israeli researcher and former intelligence officer, interviewed at Quillette

    Q: Some observers have described the Islamic Republic as an octopus that reached around with its tentacles for 47 years.

    SB: Yes, but it has lost many of its arms. Hamas is out, or almost out. Hezbollah is almost out. The Houthis are on the ropes. The Iraqi militias are starting to look around inside Iraq. The Syrian regime is out. What do they have left? They can’t negotiate because nobody wants to negotiate with them. They can’t accept Trump’s ultimatum, which would basically say they were wrong for 47 years and that they give up. They will never do that.

    Q: What does the future hold for Iran?

    SB: The regime will start to crumble as the people within the IRGC and the army start to ask themselves, “What exactly are we doing here?” These are historic times. We’re talking about the emergence of a new world order. We don’t always realise when we are in the middle of that sort of change, but such a change is happening right now. The new world order is spearheaded by a combination of things, including the terrible condition of the Iranian economy and the huge mistake of launching the 7 October massacre. In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, Muhammad Bin Salman is looking to forge a more Western-oriented and less religious country.