Mick Hartley

MEMRI TV again, and here's Egyptian TV host Muhammad Musa on – ah yes – The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, where it states (in Article 17, apparently) that "We will drown the world in a soccer craze so that the world's nations do not deal with what is important".

More on the obsessive anti-Zionist world of the American campus, with Albany law professor Nina Farnia. From MEMRI TV:

In a June 19, 2025 episode of The Red Nation podcast on YouTube, Albany Law School assistant professor Nina Farnia said that Iran’s war with Israel is “one of the greatest examples of third world national liberation.” She framed the conflict as part of Iran’s broader struggle for national liberation, arguing that Arabs, Palestinians, and Iranians cannot be free as long as Israel exists in the region.

Ali Alizadeh, a U.K.-based Iranian political analyst, warned of “psyops” orchestrated by the IDF and Mossad to portray Iran negatively. Farnia agreed and said people should be prepared for this type of manipulation, adding that many had been effective at calling out such “psyops” following the October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood. “From the pen to the sword – national liberation requires everybody,” she said.

It is worth noting that in October 2023, Alizadeh alleged that many of the Israeli victims on October 7 were killed by Israeli forces, not by Hamas or the other insurgents who entered from Gaza.

Will the Stephen Ireland fiasco mean the end of police cars painted in Pride colours? We can only hope. Janice Turner in this morning's Times.

In 2019, Stephen Ireland posted a film of himself at Surrey police HQ in Guildford beside a Jaguar patrol car customised with a swirling rainbow design and the name of the organisation he founded and controlled, Pride in Surrey (PiS). “This is what I will be riding around in today,” says an ecstatic Ireland, as the officer who will act as his chauffeur waves.

Ireland energetically cultivated Surrey police. He spoke on panels alongside officers, attended joint school visits, befriended its LGBT staff group. PiS was a “partner agency” on the force’s website. Most significantly, he was highly regarded by the then chief constable Gavin Stephens. After Surrey’s police and crime commissioner Lisa Townsend expressed gender critical views, Ireland launched a vicious campaign to have her sacked. Stephens, instead of offering her support, told her to apologise because Ireland “is a friend of Surrey police”.

Now that “friend” is serving 24 years in prison for raping a 12-year-old boy. Ireland had messaged his partner David Sutton, 27, (jailed for four and a half years) to say he’d found a “14-year-old baby” on Grindr who “wants to play with men’s bodies”. Discovering he was even younger, Ireland said: “OK, we just have to keep it a secret.” The couple smoked methamphetamine with the boy, described in court as “highly vulnerable”, filmed the rape and added it to their bank of paedophilic images.

The details of the case are shocking but to some came as no surprise. For years, whistleblowers had tried to raise their concerns about Ireland with Surrey county council, which gave PiS thousands of pounds in funding. They believe they were ignored because Ireland’s very public bond with police chiefs made him untouchable.

Chief constable Gavin Stephens is a central figure in this whole grim saga. 

Certainly Ireland weaponised the police against his enemies. In 2021, after Lisa Townsend stated that biological sex was important in matters such as crime statistics, police searches and prisons, he posted a photo of an officer sitting in a rainbow police car holding a sign saying “TERFy Townsend not fit for office”. Ireland’s message to anyone who crossed him was: come for me and you deal with the police.

Unsurprisingly, his very public vendetta against Townsend deterred potential whistleblowers (as did chief constable Stephens quickly distancing himself from her views).

So has he resigned yet, this Gavin Stephens? Of course not. He's now Chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council.

For Townsend, who attended Ireland’s sentencing, it underlines the imperative of police neutrality. Whatever individual officers’ views, they should not parade them at work, nor should forces appear to favour particular interest groups. She notes wryly that this is an urgent matter for the newish head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council — Gavin Stephens. “I don’t think there should be rainbow cars any more than International Women’s Day or autism awareness cars,” she says. “The police force does one thing no other agency can — it arrests the bad guys.”

From Aaron Bandler at JNS:

A Jewish Israeli researcher faced “discrimination and insidious, malicious conduct intended to permanently tarnish his reputation and career” at Stanford University, including “tampering with his lab results and manufacturing a bogus complaint against him, merely for being Israeli,” according to a federal lawsuit filed on Thursday.

The suit, brought by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the firm Cohen Williams, accuses the private school in Stanford, Calif., of being “complicit in permitting an environment saturated with intimidation and harassment of Jewish and Israeli students to flourish on campus.”

Shay Laps, a postdoctoral researcher, arrived at Stanford roughly six months after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, having been recommended by a Nobel laureate, according to the lawsuit. He aimed to “develop his research of synthetic and ‘smart’ insulin, which would revolutionize treatment for millions of people suffering from diabetes,” the Brandeis Center stated.

He faced extensive discrimination in the lab of Danny Chou, an associate pediatrics professor at Stanford, per the lawsuit, including tampering with his research, a fabricated sexual harassment complaint against him and being locked out of a lab.

“I was just shocked by the set of facts,” Rachel Lerman, vice chair and director of appeals and critical motions at the Brandeis Center, told JNS. “We all think we’ve seen it all, but this guy, he’s really traumatized by what happened.”

On Laps’s first day, Terra Lin, a research assistant in the lab, who “knew nothing about him other than that he was a Jewish scientist from Israel,” told him “never to speak with her in person” and if he needed anything, he must do so in writing, according to the Brandeis Center.

“When Laps tried to join a group of co-workers, including the lab staffer, for lunch, the lab staffer instructed Laps not to sit with her or other lab employees. She also urged other researchers in the lab to shun Laps,” the Brandeis Center stated. (According to the suit, Lin also tried to “frustrate, delay or inhibit” Laps’s requests for research materials and equipment, at one point referring him to a colleague recovering in the hospital from a major car accident.)

According to the Brandeis Center, she tampered with Laps’s research, “producing fraudulent results behind his back that could have ruined his career and encouraging him to discard all evidence of her tampering.” It added that when Laps found out about such sabotage, the lab’s leader and his mentor “refused to address the issue.”

The following month, Chou told Laps that Stanford would launch a Title IX investigation against him over a complaint of sexual harassment from an undergraduate student, urging him to leave the lab to avoid the investigation and to save his reputation.

No complaint had been made. It was a lie.

Laps filed a discrimination complaint with the university about his treatment in Chou’s lab, prompting the university to open an investigation. In response, Chou terminated Laps, deactivated his badge and locked him out of the lab, according to the lawsuit. His access was later restored when Stanford intervened.

Stanford concluded that Laps, who has since resigned from Stanford and left the country, did not face discrimination, nor did Chou retaliate against him. The lawsuit alleges that those conclusions were “predetermined.”

In other words it seems clear enough that this Jewish researcher was subject to the most blatant antisemitic abuse – and Stanford University tried to bury it. 

Lerman told JNS that the Brandeis Center sees “it as part of a trend that we’re seeing lately with universities very badly treating Israeli students and postdocs.”

The state of American academia…

Justin Marozzi's book Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World is just out. Here he is at UnHerd:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many Westerners tend to focus on their own historical relationship with slavery. But if the triangular Atlantic trade came strewn with blood, it was far from unique in either scale or timespan. Enduring some 400 years until the 19th century, European slavers turned some 14 million Africans into property. By contrast, the slave trade in the Muslim world has been even more enduring. Beginning in the 7th century, and continuing right into modern times, the institution has overseen the enslavement of up to 17 million souls.

From early in the Islamic experiment, this behaviour has been justified on religious grounds: via the Quran, the Sunnah, or traditions of the Prophet, and Shari’a law. To an extent, that’s endured until the present. Indeed the most famous — and shocking — recent example of slavery in the Muslim world came courtesy of the so-called Islamic State. During its short-lived, self-declared “caliphate”, the jihadis glorified in raping and enslaving Yazidi women and children, seeing slavery as an essential component of contemporary Islamic government. In 2014, Dabiq, their English-language magazine, even ran a piece on reviving the practice, likening its slave-trading fighters to the Companions of the Prophet almost 1,400 years before. At the same time, Dabiq gave specific instructions on how to share the human spoils of war. “Yazidi women and children,” it said, are to be “divided” among Islamic State fighters, all in apparent keeping with Shari’a law.

Nor was that all. ISIS also set up slave markets: which essentially functioned like brothels. One woman was sold 14 times, to 14 different men, and was raped by 12 of them. Some women smeared their baby’s excrement on their bodies to avoid being bought, while others claimed to have periods or professed to be sick. Some fought back. Many received punishment beatings, or were separated from their children and locked in basements amid rising sewage and the boiling heat of the Syrian desert. One woman’s five-year-old daughter was even hanged from a window for bedwetting. No wonder many of the victims describe their plight as something approaching hell.

Despite earnest claims that this is now all in Islam's past, the mindset lingers on.

ISIS are unusual in defending Islamic slavery openly. Yet it is also true that abolition came relatively late in the day. Some of the last nations to abolish slavery include Iran (1928), Saudi Arabia (1962) and Oman (1970). Even relatively secular Turkey only got round to it in 1964, while Mauritania did so in 1981. The fact is that slavery, modern and hereditary, has lingered uncomfortably in parts of the Muslim world. That’s clear enough in the Gulf, where Asian migrant workers from countries like Nepal and the Philippines routinely end up as forced labourers. They may build the skyscrapers, and drive the cabs, and wait the swanky restaurants from Riyadh to Doha. But ensnared by the so-called kafala system, which forbids them from changing jobs without their employer’s permission, they’re also deeply vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. In the UAE alone, there may be 132,000 such workers.

Someone's been watching a South Korean film when they should have been watching the ducks. From the Daily NK:

A public ideological struggle session was recently held at the Yomju Duck Farm in Yomju county, North Pyongan province, targeting a young worker who was caught watching a South Korean film.

A source in the province told Daily NK recently that at the end of last month, all factory staff and workers’ families were assembled for a public ideological struggle session titled “On Waging an Unyielding Struggle against Ideological Laxity and Anti-Socialist Phenomena among Workers.

” The session was held to denounce a young factory worker who had been caught watching South Korean media content.

According to the source, the worker is a 19-year-old male who had originally been scheduled for military conscription this year. However, he was ruled unfit for service after injuring his finger just before enlistment and had since been undergoing technical training as a duck handler at the Yomju Duck Farm.

The incident occurred in mid-June when the worker was on night duty at the duck shed. He was caught by a county Ministry of Social Security officer while secretly watching South Korean footage on a notetel (a portable media player).

The video featured North Korean defectors who had successfully resettled in South Korea, showing them receiving housing and education support from the South Korean government and living well—content considered especially sensitive and subversive by North Korean authorities.

The Ministry of Social Security immediately detained the youth and launched an investigation into how he had obtained the video and whether he had shared it with others.

During the investigation, another youth who had been close to the main subject came forward, admitting he had also watched the video. Authorities detained him as well, but released him after eight days with a “re-education measure,” reportedly due to a cognitive disability.

The "cognitive disability" was clearly in evidence when he admitted to watching the video. Not a smart move.

The public ideological struggle session was held at the factory at the end of the month. The 19-year-old was brought onto the stage, where he faced harsh ideological criticism from factory managers, fellow workers, and family representatives.

Some workers claimed, “He deliberately broke his finger to dodge military service because of his poor ideological mindset,” and warned, “If we leave someone like him alone, the entire factory will become ideologically disarmed.”

An ideologically disarmed duck farm. It doesn't bear thinking about.

Throughout the proceedings, the young man kept his head down and appeared on the verge of tears. While many hurled sharp criticism, some people expressed discomfort, saying that at nineteen, he was still immature and that the treatment felt excessively harsh.

Excessively harsh? Some people have been sentenced to years in a labour camp for watching South Korean films. Some have even been executed.

The most important fact about Semenya is entirely avoided in this article and, without it, contextualisation is not possible.

And that fact is that Semenya is a man. https://t.co/ozCkmE0Fy8

— Andy (@lecanardnoir) July 10, 2025

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Article here. Who is Caster Semenya?

Semenya is a two-time Olympic champion and three-time world champion over 800m.

Between 2009 and 2019, the South African dominated her sport, sealing a 30th consecutive victory when she won the Doha Diamond League 800m in May 2019.

She was given a hero's welcome in South Africa after picking up her first World Championship gold in 2009, with thousands of jubilant fans turning out at Johannesburg airport to greet her.

However, her rapid rise from unknown teenager to global star was also accompanied by scrutiny over her gender and possible advantages in her biology.

It was later revealed she was born with DSD, one outcome of which means she has an elevated level of testosterone – a hormone that can increase muscle mass and strength.

Well yes – because only men have this particular form of DSD. He has perfectly normal levels of testosterone for a man.

As they admit.

It was in the Cas ruling that Semenya's specific DSD was confirmed as 46 XY 5-ARD (5-alpha-reductase deficiency). People with this particular DSD have the male XY chromosomes.

Right at the bottom of the article. Yes, he's a man.

And he has two children with his wife Violet.

 

Dear @ucu,

I was a founder member of UCU and I was a member of AUT before that, but I am resigning today.

UCU has been, consistently over that time, by far the most toxic, bullying, antisemitic space I have ever been in.

For many years now I have been afraid to speak at… https://t.co/9fSOpSKTbk

— David Hirsh (@DavidHirsh) July 10, 2025

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More:

For many years now I have been afraid to speak at meetings because I knew what kind of responses would come my way.

I have obeyed every strike call during that time, and every other call for solidarity with my colleagues, even when I thought they were counterproductive. But UCU has not offered any solidarity at all with Jews, who have been working in an increasingly institutionally antisemitic environment on campus.

Well, of course it didn't, because UCU was a pioneer and a legitimizer of that antisemitism, so it would make no sense to imagine it could help in addressing it.

When the campaign to exclude Israeli colleagues from our campuses, journals and conferences was treated as legitimate in the union, it brought with it waves of antisemitic rhetoric, anger and exclusions. When I spoke out against some of that, I was excluded permanently from the union online discussion. Much of that story is told here: Fraser v UCU: tribunal finds no antisemitism at all | Engage

When I was denounced by the President of our Student Union as a 'far right white supremacist', and after she referred my work as a 'Zionist Goldsmiths academic’s explicit racist history', my UCU branch turned up on Twitter to offer 100% solidarity to her, but zero solidarity was offered to me. They were content that a union member and an expert in antisemitism was being denounced as a Nazi and they were siding with the person who had done that….

The UCU was last heard of by those of us outside academia when, instead of backing Kathleen Stock as she was hounded out of Sussex University by braying gender activists, gave their full support to the trans mob.

Some North Korean teachers have been skipping mandatory indoctrination sessions at the start of the school day. Oh dear. 

North Korean authorities have emphasized the importance of ideological indoctrination for youth, the future generation, but on the educational front lines, ideological education for young people is either perfunctory or omitted entirely.

“On the afternoon of June 28, an ideological struggle session was held in the auditorium of Chongjin Medical College for instructors who didn’t conduct the ‘5-minute indoctrination’ session that must precede regular classes,” a Daily NK source in North Hamgyong province said recently. “The university party committee put three educators on stage and went around to each department, making them criticize the three one by one.”

“Five-minute indoctrination” sessions — conducted daily by whoever teaches the first class — teach students loyalty to the ruling party and North Korea’s leadership. North Korea has held them since the time of late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Educators at all schools — from elementary school to university — are required to conduct them as a mandatory procedure.

Recently, however, educators on the ground often perform the sessions in a perfunctory manner or skip them entirely.

When this happened at Chongjin Medical College, the university administration — recognizing the seriousness of the problem — suddenly made departments observe one another.

Each department’s chief and head lecturer were required to observe the first classes of other departments to confirm whether the “5-minute indoctrination” sessions were actually being conducted. However, some professors were completely unaware of the observers and omitted the indoctrination sessions as usual.

The professors were so accustomed to skipping the 5-minute sessions that they simply jumped into their classes, feeling no need to perform the indoctrination.

The university’s party committee ultimately held the struggle session, where it criticized the professors and severely rebuked them. “This attitude is a grave act that blocks the progress of the revolution, and educators — professional revolutionaries — must never engage in it.”

A comparison with our once-compulsory religious observance at the start of every school day is not inappropriate here. But at least we had some decent hymns.

“In years past, we used to read straight from material called ‘365 Days of Indoctrination Material’ that organized North Korean leaders’ accomplishments day by day, but now the authorities just order you to carry out the sessions unconditionally with few materials available and repeatedly demand you think of new indoctrination methods to focus students’ attention during that short time.”

Many teachers in schools are unhappy about this.

“They tell you to conduct the 5-minute sessions using new methods to move students, but many teachers say they have no idea what they’re going to do,” the source said. “Higher-ups tell you to devise new indoctrination methods like singing songs or writing poems, but teachers are resisting, saying they’re not movie stars.”

It's a fair point.

Not your usual graffiti. Seen on the Mills Island Towpath, by the tidal Channelsea River just before it joins Bow Creek and the Lea.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Chinese? – with a hint of Iain Sinclair and London psychogeography? Lovely calligraphy anyway.

Elsewhere, thereabouts: