Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Man as Labour’s women’s officer

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    Article here.

    The Trans Rights Alliance has put forward Steph Richards, a transgender woman in possession of a gender recognition certificate, as its candidate for women’s officer.

    In a post on X, Labour LGB said: “Many people say that trans ideology is a men’s rights movement.

    “The ‘Trans Alliance’ (seeking to take over the once-great LGBT+ Labour) has set out to prove this. Also breaking party rules by putting a man forward to be women’s officer.”

  • MP’s Holocaust inversion

    Elsewhere in the JC:

    An independent pro-Gaza MP has been roundly condemned for appearing to suggest that Israel is planning to create “gas chambers” for Palestinians.

    On Monday night, Blackburn MP Adnan Hussain shared an image of a story from Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz had instructed the IDF to prepare plans to “concentrate” the entire population of Gaza in a new “humanitarian city” in Rafah.

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    Lovely. They can never resist a chance to throw the Holocaust back at the Jews.

  • The former BBC diversity manager

    The JC on former BBC diversity manager Sue Caro:

    The former senior diversity manager for the BBC has shared antisemitic conspiracy theories and Nazi terminology from her social media account.

    Arts and politics magazine The Critic revealed that last month Caro had shared a post in which the words “Start wars then play victims. Rat ideology” were placed above a 1933 Express front page about the global Jewish response to the election of Adolf Hitler.

    Caro also appeared to endorse conspiracy theories that Jews were responsible for 9/11 and that “Zionists have a thing for false flags and terrorism” in posts shared on 29 June.

    Caro worked as senior diversity manager for the BBC between 2001 and 2011 but advised the corporation on inclusion as recently as 2018 in a freelance capacity.

    The “diversity” expert reposted a message on X – written in response to a post by an anti-Israel activist – saying he “isn’t the first person to blame the Zionist Jews for 9/11. I’ve heard tons of people, mostly American, speak on who is responsible for 9/11. The ADL is targeting him because of his pro-Palestine stance and anti-genocide stances and nothing else.”

    This doesn't come as a huge shock.

    When contacted by the JC, Caro said, “I made an error. I was interested in the article, and didn't see the comment when I reposted it. I deleted it as soon as I did.

    “Judaism is 3000+ years old, Zionism is approximately 150 years old, it was born in Europe and developed by an Atheist. It's a white supremacist, colonial rightwing political ideology, not a religion despite all the claims to the contrary. Not all Jews are Zionists. Not all Zionists are Jews. Calling Jews who oppose Zionism, who oppose the genocide, antisemites, is pathetic.”

    That's maybe not quite the rebuttal she seems to think. No doubt calling Zionism "a white supremacist, colonial rightwing political ideology" will have met with nods of approval in the BBC boardrooms, but doesn't work so well for the rest of us. In fact it rather confirms the JC accusations….

  • Taking control of the narrative about Islam

    Andrew Gilligan of Policy Exchange, in the Times, on the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) – Activist group wants to stifle discussion of Islamism:

    The BBC should not have called Khalid Masood, the Westminster terrorist who killed five people, an “Islamic extremist”, because Islam means peace. News outlets are wrong to describe terror groups, including Hamas, Boko Haram and Islamic State, as “Islamist”. Indeed, the very term Islamism is “redundant” and should no longer be used by the press.

    The headscarf for women is “normative” and a Muslim writer “misrepresent[ed] Muslim behaviour and belief” when she said there was “no basis in Islam for the niqab”, the full-face veil. The late Andrew Norfolk, of this newspaper, who did more than anyone to expose the grooming scandal, “scapegoated” Muslims.

    Welcome to the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM), a little-scrutinised activist group seeking to skew the national conversation. CfMM is, or has recently been, part of the Muslim Council of Britain, with which successive governments have had a policy of non-engagement for its hardline views. But that has not stopped it from being listened to, welcomed or even employed at influential levels of the media. The CfMM claims to have been “feeding into the BBC’s terminology guidebook” and to have facilitated a focus group on the BBC’s behalf.

    That would explain a lot.

    CfMM’s purpose is not simply to challenge a relatively small number of errors. It is also, it says, “taking control of the narrative” about Islam: promoting a partisan view held by the MCB and its activists, and discouraging any story painting Muslims in a bad light. Its “60 per cent” negative stories include accurate, factual accounts of Islamist terror attacks. Its “top three offenders” are the news agencies Reuters, AP and AFP.

    The government is drawing up an official definition of “Islamophobia”. The aim, in the words of those campaigning for it, is to impose “appropriate limits to free speech” about Muslims. Any definition would give partisans like CfMM a dangerous new weapon. In the meantime, we believe that CfMM should not be engaged with or taken at face value by journalists, regulators or anyone else.

    The Policy Exchange report on CfMM, Bad Faith Actor, can be accessed here.

  • A garden-variety male lunatic

    One of those typically long-winded American articles in the NYT with, no doubt, an eye on a Pulitzer Prize – She Wanted to Save the World From A.I. Then the Killings Started.

    If she didn’t get access to vegan food, she might die.

    That’s what Ziz LaSota told a judge in February when she appeared via videoconference in Allegany County District Court in Maryland for her bail hearing.

    Ziz, who is known widely by her first name, spoke haltingly in a weak voice, but interrupted the judge repeatedly. “I might starve to death if you do not intervene,” she said, asking to be released on bail. “It’s more important than whatever this hearing is.”

    On its face, it seemed like a reasonable request. But prosecutors saw a ploy. They argued that Ziz, 34, was not just any inmate but the leader of an extremist group tied to a series of murders across the country. (The official charges against her involved trespassing, resisting arrest and a handful of misdemeanor gun charges.) She had skipped bail once before while being held in connection with a murder in Pennsylvania. Before that, she had faked her death to “escape investigation” in a different case, according to the Maryland district attorney. Besides, according to Capt. Daniel Lasher, assistant administrator of the Allegany County Detention Center, Ziz had been served vegan meals “from the get-go.”

    The judge denied her bail request.

    Ziz had been a minor celebrity within a slice of the Bay Area tech scene known as the Rationalists — a highly cerebral, extremely online group of tech and philosophy nerds dedicated to improving the world through logical thinking and deeply concerned with whether artificial intelligence will overtake the world and destroy humanity.

    Over the years, the Rationalist movement has counted Peter Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried among its community, and has influenced numerous figures, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Steven Pinker and Nate Silver. Perhaps more significant, for the tech workers building the A.I. tools that will undergird our world, Rationalism is something like a fraternity, and a shared language.

    Sucked in? Want to read more? No, me neither, really. 

    Ziz, who is transgender, started as a typical Rationalist — a geeky optimist hoping to save the world — but turned toward an ultraradical strain of the philosophy. She wrote favorably of violence, said she was willing to sacrifice everything to achieve her goals and considered A.I.’s threat to humanity “the most important problem in the world,” she once wrote. Now six people are dead, landing her and several friends and allies, known as the “Zizians,” in jail, awaiting trial. Many Rationalists worry that their community will be tinged by association with a group that, while not convicted of anything, has been compared in the press to the Manson family.

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    Here's that segment:

    “We called them ‘the incomprehensible cluster,’” said Ozy Brennan, a Rationalist writer. In one Discord exchange, members of the group insisted on using Discord handles composed of symbols rather than alphanumeric characters. When moderators objected, the group accused them of transphobia.

    “They’re like, ‘You are forcing us into legibility, and trans people are illegible, and this is an important expression of my identity,’” said Brennan, who is trans nonbinary. This view dovetailed with their belief that transgender women have a distinct neurotype that is particularly good at A.I. safety research, according to Brennan.

    "Who is trans nonbinary". Who claims to be trans nonbinary. Who is a ten-foot-tall rabbit called Hector. Who claims to be a ten-foot-tall rabbit called Hector. But this is the NYT. 

    Anyway – people get killed. It's a cult.

    A very American tale.

  • The media amplifying Islamist propaganda

    Natasha Hausdorff interviewed at Spiked. 

    On the media:

    For decades, we have had a media that, for the most part, propagates the lies of terrorist organisations. This has come to a head in everything we have seen being reported, in particular out of Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas. Ultimately, it is misinformation that has been informing – or perhaps disinforming – public debate.

    On Glastonbury:

    Let’s be clear that this was essentially calling for death to Jews. It is simply an evolution of ‘From the river to the sea’, which we’ve heard from 7 October onwards.

    I saw a distinct lack of pretense to this sort of unbridled Jew hate. Glastonbury has been a very unwelcome place for Jews and Israelis for years. It was reported that there was even a Hitler flag being displayed on some of the tents. This is deeply, deeply concerning – but likely only the tip of the iceberg. There are many people who have been swept up in all this because they think it’s the fashionable thing. Apparently, it’s the way that you demonstrate your moral credentials these days – by siding with internationally proscribed terrorist organisations and saying things like ‘up Hamas’ and ‘up Hezbollah’.

    On the charge of genocide:

    Not only is it grotesque, it has no basis in reality whatsoever. But it is being advanced with a very particular purpose. I remember being on SABC – the South African version of the BBC – just after South Africa had brought its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). My counterpart said, ‘Isn’t it marvelous now we can finally use Israel and genocide in the same sentence, and nobody can tell us otherwise?’.

    The word ‘genocide’ was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish and Jewish jurist, to provide legal terminology around the Holocaust. But now the term is being inverted, and Jewish Israelis are being accused of the very crimes that were committed against them – not only during the Holocaust, but also on 7 October. Indeed, these were real acts of genocide that were committed against Jews and Israelis, by terrorists who celebrated their crimes on GoPro footage and spread it around the world via social media. Hamas were very clear about their intent: they were targeting Jews because they were Jews.

    On schools:

    I taught in 2008, and would set up societies for young people in inner city schools. At a school in Bethnal Green, in conversations about current affairs, the students were coming out with things like ‘McDonald’s pays the Jews to kill all the Arabs’. One teacher told me she couldn’t study set texts with the children at this school for GCSE, which included The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, because she said they kept coming out with things like, ‘If only Hitler were here today, he’d sort out the Jews once and for all’. It was becoming a breeding ground for extremism. From that school, three girls left to join ISIS. So when I talk about education, I’m not just talking about the moral rot that is taking hold at universities. I’m talking about the hotbeds of radicalisation that have been at play in city-centre schools. Unfortunately, when these individuals grow up, their opinions also shape political discourse.

    No prizes for guessing what the dominant religion at that particular school would have been.

    Full interview here.

  • At the Minneapolis ‘Take Back Pride’ March

    From MEMRI TV:

    Sometimes the level of idiocy is almost beyond belief. Almost.

    "The U.S. wanting to wage war on Iran is not new. Something else that has been painfully consistent is the Western media's non-stop demonization of Iran. The ruling class is desperate to convince us that their war is our war. For example, they are trying to convince us that attacking the people of Iran is somehow helpful for women's rights.

    "They want us to believe that sanctioning Iran for decades, assassinating its leaders, and possibly exposing Iranian civilians to nuclear radiation is about saving women. This is the disgusting way that they try to appeal to us. We have some twisted forms of feminism in this country which asks us to bomb Iranians while admiring women such as Hillary Clinton and Amy Klobuchar.  […]

    "We look up to women like Sahar Emami, the Iranian news anchor who was delivering a report when her building was bombed on live television by the Israeli regime.  […]

    "These are the kinds of women we look up to, that we admire. We know that we are on the side that stands with women. […]

    "The imperialist media also wants to claim that war with Iran is about protecting gay rights. We are supposed to believe that regime change in Iran – potentially causing millions of deaths in the process – would be just wonderful for the LGBT community. These people think we are stupid!"

    And they're quite right.

    "We say: No war on Iran!"

    Crowd: "No war on Iran!"

  • At Finsbury Park

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  • Twenty years ago

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    Full text:

    Twenty years ago today, I left work early and hurried home to be with my husband as it became clear that London had been attacked by members of a murdered Islamist death cult. In the days that followed, a formula that would become all too familiar after many further atrocities was deployed: keep calm, carry on, don't let the terrorists divide us and let's do everything we can to avert the tsunami of Islamophobia these events would undoubtedly unleash among the lower orders.
    The tsunami never came; in all of the 20 intervening years, it's never happened, even in spite of there having been so many Islamist attacks, I've lost track.
    And yet, now we have a government trying to create a new definition of Islamophobia while allowing rampant Jew-hatred to be paraded through the streets of London every week. We have a man convicted of burning a Koran as if blasphemy laws existed in this country. We have ministers so in thrall to the Muslim vote, they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into setting up a national inquiry into Pakistani-dominated grooming gangs. We may be safer, on the whole, than we were on 7/7/2005, but we seem to have learned little else.

  • Glasto vs. Villa Park

    I've never been a Heavy Metal fan, but it's not hard to get the appeal: thundering riffs and doom-laden minor chords, combined – a very British touch – with the kind of cod gothic horror that comes straight from those Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing Hammer films. So it was lovely to see the warm reviews of yesterday's Ozzy Osbourne/Black Sabbath farewell concert at Villa Park.

    Stephen Dalton in the Sunday Times:

    Never mind those over-hyped Oasis gigs, there was only one truly historic rock comeback show over the weekend as Birmingham’s Villa Park football stadium hosted Back to the Beginning, an all-star heavy rock gathering that reunited the full original line-up of the local heroes Black Sabbath for the first time in 20 years, and the last time ever.

    This sold-out, all-day charity benefit event was essentially the retirement party for the band’s 76-year-old singer and international treasure Ozzy Osbourne, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2019, and now has limited mobility.

    It is no exaggeration to call Black Sabbath the Beatles of heavy metal, their hugely influential legacy reflected in the multigenerational cast list of superstar head-bangers who came to pay tribute at Villa Park, all working for free. Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Anthrax, Slayer, Alice in Chains and many others performed short sets of about 20 to 30 minutes, each including at least one Sabbath or Ozzy song.

    Playing for free? Yep – all the money goes to a Parkinson's charity & two local children’s charities.

    Neil McCormick in the Telegraph:

    The mood in the stadium was fantastic. It was packed all day long with fans keen to see everything on offer, and bands honoured to play tribute to the original heavy metal hero. We were rewarded with blistering, impactful and unusually short and direct sets from such metal monsters as Pantera, Slayer and Tool, rock giants Guns ‘N Roses, and a brutally brilliant Metallica, with everybody adding Black Sabbath covers to their sets.

    There were slickly rehearsed supergroup sets featuring members of Rage Against The Machine, Smashing Pumpkins, Van Halen, Judas Priest, Living Colour, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Aerosmith and a sprightly appearance by Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones, who has never knowingly missed an opportunity to whip out his slide guitar. An energetic Steve Tyler ripping through Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love with Chad Smith on drums and Tom Morello on guitar was phenomenally good fun.

    And then there was Ozzy as heavy metal’s mad King Lear, raging against the inevitable end. It was sad. It was glorious. We really will not see his like again.

    Compare and contrast with Glastonbury. No Palestine flags, no Israel death chants, no Palestine Action speakers. Just people at a music festival having a great time.

    And – ooh yes – class. It's not so easy nowadays to talk about class in Britain, but here we are. Glastonbury is defiantly, stereotypically, middle class, while heavy metal has always been a working class genre – here in the UK, at least. And, as Villa Park shows, the fans, despite the image, have always been the best.