Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

recent posts

email me

  • Original prejudices reinforced by adherence to conservative Islam

    Kishwer Falkner, former head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, speaks out, in the Times – Silence on antisemitism shames us as British Muslims:

    Growing up in Pakistan until my late teens, I never encountered a Jewish person. My passport permitted me to travel the world, but not to Israel, and so my intrigue at my first encounter with a Jewish person when I was in my twenties in New York was palpable.

    It was reciprocated, as he had never met a Muslim socially, but he was nevertheless taken aback by how little I knew of the Holocaust and Jewish history. I picked up a copy of Primo Levi’s account of surviving Auschwitz, If This is a Man, which began my education about people I was taught to think of as religious opponents, and of a land still riven by conflict.

    Fast forward to Britain today, where antisemitism is becoming routine and where Israeli political actions are routinely taken to be representative of all Jewish opinion in our increasingly sectarian political discourse.

    I have found this tendency prevalent in older Muslim migrants from Pakistan, who arrived in the postwar period and would have grown up in a mono-religious society at home — not speaking fluent
    English nor schooled in British values. Since arrival, many still live segregated lives and have remained monocultural.

    For them, original prejudices are reinforced by adherence to conservative Islam at Friday prayers, and a reliance on single viewpoints, particularly focusing on atrocities and war crimes by Israel, supposedly justifying violence on our streets and in our synagogues.

    I am utterly dismayed, but I know their deafening silence on antisemitism is our national failure of integration. So, when members of their community commit violence against Jewish people for simply being Jewish there are no mosque vigils or prayers, and no loudhailers condemning the perpetrators.

    To their shame, and mine, many Muslims in Britain appear entirely alienated from the plight of Jews when attacked.

    This silence speaks volumes. Most concerning is the antagonism within sections of our second and third-generation Muslims, as well as newer arrivals from the Middle East.

    Or Somalia, like our latest Jew knife attacker

    A welcome intervention from a Muslim who’s been prominent in British public life.

  • The debate Britain keeps avoiding

    The failure to even menton Islam by our great and good, as they desperately search for answers as to why we have this sudden surge in antisemitic violence, almost suggests that we already have a blasphemy law here.

    John Ware at Jewish News – The Muslim antisemitism debate Britain keeps avoiding:.

    As the carcasses of four burned-out Hatzolah ambulances smouldered in the background, last month, Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: “We have to deal with this hatred at its source. We have to confront and beat the evil ideas that are permeating our society.”

    Ministers took a similar line after Wednesday’s alleged attempt by a 45-year-old Somali man to stab two Jews to death in Golders Green. “We need to stamp out this growing tolerance of violence and antisemitism in our country” said Chris Ward, the Cabinet Office Parliamentary Secretary. It was “an absolute poison that we need to root out.”

    Inching his cautious way towards identifying the source of that poison, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley named  “….the Iranian state terrorist groups, extreme right and extreme left racists.”

    It was left to the plainer-speaking Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation Jonathan Hall KC to identify the one “interesting omission” by Rowley.

    To rip this poison from its ideological roots, said Hall, would require “parts of the Muslim community “ to be “addressed. It is something of huge concern.”

    Well, yes.

    The root cause of the revival of antisemitism here in the UK is the permissive environment in which the febrile politics of the Middle East have become embedded in activism and pro-Palestinian institutions here, several of them Hamas aligned, these past three decades.

    As Hall also says, confronting this in all its forms means “politicians will need to step in and start basically risking a degree of unpopularity through what they say.”

    Ay, there’s the rub.

    The notion that all manifestations of Zionism are intrinsically evil is deeply embedded not just in sections of the left, but even more so amongst British Muslims. “The thing is, the Zionists control everything” opined Birmingham lawyer Akhmed Yakoob recently as he campaigned to unseat Labour in next week’s local elections. Imbecilic though this comment is, since Jews make up just 0.4% of the UK population, sadly it resonates with many Muslims.

    In 2019 Labour won around 80% of the Muslim vote. In the 2024 election, it fell to around 60%.  Since then, Labour has further haemorrhaged Muslim support to the Green Party whose local election candidates have been making increasingly inflammatory comments about Zionism.

    They know what they’re doing, the Greens.

    The scale of the challenge in persuading anti-Zionists to adopt less demonic language in criticising Israel is highlighted by a review of the transcripts of sermons in 80 mosques and Islamic centres across the country in the immediate aftermath of 7 October.

    Six days after the attack, Abdur Rashid Holmes from Nottingham cited the same passage as written in Hamas charter: “The Jews will fight you and you will prevail over them. Then a rock will say ‘Oh Muslim, here is a Jew behind me. Kill him.”

    The problem, as this oft-quoted hadith illustrates, is that hatred of Jews is baked into Islamic theology. The frenzied hatred of Israel, now spread from its original Muslim sources to most of the western left, is at bottom all about Islam. That’s the issue we face – the issue no one will talk about.

  • The South Pyongan Miners Cinema Club

    Watching South Korean videos, no less. It’s “an existential threat to the state”. The latest from the Daily NK:

    Dozens of young coal miners at a state-run mining complex in South Pyongan province were arrested in February after a joint inspection found they had been watching and sharing South Korean videos. Public denunciation sessions held April 13 and 14 exposed the extent of the violations, which authorities framed as an existential threat to the state.

    A Daily NK source in South Pyongan province said inspectors from the Ministry of Social Security and the State Information Bureau (North Korea’s domestic intelligence agency, formerly known as the Ministry of State Security, renamed at the Ninth WPK Congress) conducted the joint crackdown beginning in early February at mines under the Pukchang Youth Coal Mine General Enterprise, a major coal production complex. The inspectors confiscated smartphones and SD cards from workers without warning and discovered that miners at the Namdok, Inho, and Hoean youth coal mines had been accessing and circulating South Korean content.

    The videos watched and shared included not only South Korean films, television dramas, and entertainment programs but also footage of North Korean defectors describing their lives after resettlement in South Korea, as well as South Korean travel vlogs.

    To avoid detection, the miners had organized clandestine viewing sessions in basement storage areas of their dormitories. Authorities found that the gatherings had fostered what they described as a longing for freedom, and that some miners had begun imitating South Korean speech patterns, fashion, and behavior, signs officials characterized as ideological deviation.…

    The source said dozens of young miners were arrested on charges of violating the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Law, a sweeping 2020 statute that criminalizes the consumption and distribution of foreign content and carries penalties up to death for the most serious offenders. The denunciation sessions held over two days categorized the conduct as acts threatening the existence of the state and maximizing hostility toward the system.

    Punishments are to be graduated according to the severity of each miner’s involvement. Those who only watched the content or were first-time offenders face reassignment to what the source described as “death-trap mines,” facilities with significantly worse conditions and higher accident rates. Those who actively distributed the content or had prior violations face unconditional transfer to a re-education camp.

    From which they very likely will never emerge.

    It’s cultural contagion that terrifies Pyongyang. Wrongthink. No nuclear umbrella can protect them from that. It’s a shame that the South Korean government is now in one of its accommodationist phases, and has stopped any balloon/propaganda incursions. It would seem at the moment, surely, to be a good time to send over more USB sticks loaded with drama and music and, well, culture generally, from a vibrant living society that speaks the same language and shared, until recently, the same history.

    Then again, that’s easy for me to say sitting in London, and not just a few miles from a belligerent neighbour threatening nuclear armaggedon on Seoul.

  • An existential threat to democratic politics

    From Shahrar Ali, former deputy leader of the Greens before Zack Polanski took over:

    The particular blend of authoritarian no debate within the party alongside groupthink identitarian cancel culture presents an existential threat to democratic politics.

    Once Islamist politicians gain a mainstream foothold the country will become unrecognisable. Yesterday two candidates in London were arrested under Section 19 of the Public Order Act and taken into custody for questioning.

    The Green Party was providing them with a safe haven to platform their antisemitic bile and did absolutely nothing to address publicly evidenced concerns.

    Yesterday the Met Commissioner took the unprecedented step of calling out Polanski for siding with critics of his police officers putting themselves in harms way to protect Jews.

    The Jewish community is under seige like never before. This is the time to stand shoulder to shoulder with them in so many ways.
    The electorate must send a message loud and clear that, in its current incarnation of eco-free antisemitic Islamist populism, the Green Party is part of the problem not the solution.

    Do not vote Green on Thursday. Boycott the Green Party. There may be a tiny handful of candidates who have publicly denounced their party’s antisemitic turn, but without that assurance the answer must be no.

  • What are universities actually for?

    The hefty fine imposed on Sussex University by the Office for Students for its failure to support academic freedom has been overturned by the High Court. Central to the OFS case was the experience of Kathleen Stock, forced out by the Sussex ideologues for her failure to comply with the obligatory trans-worship. Now, happy to have said goodbye to the stifling atmosphere of forced conformity, she speaks out at UnHerd:

    [F]rom the outside, it seems that one astonishing thing to have emerged from the ruling is that existing free speech statutes have literally nothing meaningful to say about the hundreds of politicised documents that have proliferated like weeds in British universities in the last decade, praising some forms of expression as desirable and proscribing others as suspicious or outright hateful; fuelling a culture of student complaints, disciplinary investigations, and fear.

    Perfectly rationally in the circumstances, thousands of academics are still self-censoring, having taken note of the finger-wagging policies appearing on the website, the sententious managerial sermons flowing into their inbox, the politicised commemorations and flags, the aggressivity of activist staff networks, and the extremely selective forms of “lived experience” highlighted by the institution as morally instructive. The High Court judgement is based on the Higher Education and Research Act (HERA), and implies it is not the regulator’s concern whether a university’s culture produces intimidating obstacles to freedom of expression like these, or avoids them. If this is true, it can only emphasise the total irrelevancy of HERA to freedom of expression in the modern context, and the urgent need for a different approach. The new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has yet to be enacted, and one can only hope it will do much better.

    For ultimately it is the moral crazes rippling periodically through universities that constitute the biggest threat to freedom of expression there, and the regulator needs to catch up. These are fuelled partly by innate staff susceptibility, and partly by more hard-headed desires of managers to hop onto whatever bandwagon students are currently riding, hoping to benefit from larger application numbers and better student scores. They don’t tend to result in changes to foundational constitutions, but they do produce large numbers of suffocating bureaucratic tendrils, along with a lot of busywork: new policies and guidelines to keep people in line; marketing messages to tweak, and social media campaigns to launch; workshops for staff re-education, and fresh positions of power for true believer staff to occupy.  

    In this stifling environment, better regulations would of course be welcome; but the country also needs to decide what universities are actually for. Are they just an expensive means of teaching middle-class kids to mouth certain attractive words and phrases, with which they can then drive forward progress, take deep dives into inequality, circle back to kindness, and drill down into the oppressive status quo? Or might they be better championed as places where such heartwarming, mind-numbing platitudes can be challenged and even mocked, without personal or professional cost? Having left the university sector behind me, I’ve now got full freedom to think for myself. It’s a glorious gift; one that all the clever, inquisitive, contrarian people still stuck in ivory towers and redbrick towerblocks can only dream of.

    So the culture that imposes conformity of thought, and chills free speech on campus, is allowed to remain intact and unchallenged.

  • Actual action

    That means looking at:

    • hate preachers in mosques
    • antisemitism not being prosecuted by the CPS
    • antisemitism in our political parties
    • a huge swathe of the left not only ignoring antisemitism but actively encouraging it
    • antisemitism being allowed to run rampant in the NEU, in our universities, and our NHS
    • foreign bodies hostile to Jews and the West including the Muslim Brotherhood and the IRGC being allowed to run rampant – even collect money for their charities – while other countries proscribe them
    • conspiracy theories about Jews being pushed across social media, content creators being encouraged to post it as it makes money
    • and yes hate speech such as ‘globalise the intifada’ – stop the gaslighting that this is a peaceful cry
    • a lack of education about antisemitism with many people thinking it began and ended with the Holocaust, and a total lack of education about antizionism.
      Action has to mean actual action.

  • Globalising the intifada

  • “There was once a Jew here”

  • Lower Lea Valley

    Down the Lea this morning to Cody’s Dock, via the Twelvetrees gasholders:

  • Stirring up racial hatred

    The Greens are certainly making the news. From the Telegraph:

    Two Green Party candidates have been arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred for allegedly posting anti-Semitic comments online.

    Saiqa Ali, who is standing in Streatham, in the borough of Lambeth, and Sabine Mairey, the candidate for Clapham Town, also in Lambeth, were detained by Metropolitan Police officers on Thursday morning.

    One of the social media posts by Ms Ali shows an image of an armed man in a Hamas headband under the slogan “resistance is freedom”. The militant group is a proscribed terrorist organisation.

    A post by Ms Mairey includes a picture of a man holding a placard that reads “ramming a synagogue isn’t anti-Semitism, it’s revenge” above a picture of two children that it says have been “murdered by Israel”.

    She also suggested that Israel was worse than Nazi Germany with a photo of Auschwitz which said the Nazis “had to hide what they were doing”.

    Not that this will cause much disaffection in Green party ranks. By now, surely, they know what they’re voting for.