Mick Hartley

"It's a movement that accepts people's lies about themselves as truths." @HJoyceGender shares her strong critique of current gender ideology and its perceived societal dangers. Hear the full discussion on the podcast: link in bio. #GenderDebate #podcast pic.twitter.com/bWlpzs7x7M

— Sunil Sharma 🇬🇧 (@SunilSharmaUK) June 8, 2025

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And of course… pic.twitter.com/PmSqeQiyqM

— habibi (@habibi_uk) June 9, 2025

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Article here:

In 2013, Mr Birawi was designated by Israel as a Hamas operative in Europe and is the head of the Europal Forum, which Israel designated as a terrorist organisation in 2021….

Speaking in the Commons in October 2023, Christian Wakeford, the Labour MP for Bury South, used parliamentary privilege to name 63-year-old Mr Birawi as a Hamas operative living in Barnet, north London.

“He is listed as a trustee of a UK-registered charity, Education Aid for Palestinians, and publicly available video shows him hosting a 2019 event in London titled Understanding Hamas,” Mr Wakeford told MPs.

Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator on the end to the Greta Thunberg farce:

Once again, the Mediterranean has hosted a familiar theatre of self-satisfied spectacle. This time, however, the curtain has come down swiftly. The latest vessel to set sail in defiance of Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza – the Madleen, a boat bloated with virtue signalling and the vanity of performative compassion – has been intercepted by the Israeli Navy.

The operation was executed peacefully and without casualties by fighters from Fleet 13, Israel’s naval commando forces. The ship is now making its way safely to the port of Ashdod, its dozen passengers – including Greta Thunberg, the climate whinger turned omni-cause moral voice – healthy, unharmed, and provided with sandwiches (individually wrapped in plastic, sorry Greta) and water.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry left no doubt about the farcical nature of this voyage: “There are ways to provide aid to the Gaza Strip – they don’t involve Instagram selfies.”

The Madleen’s cargo, amounting to less than one aid truck, will be transferred to Gaza through genuine humanitarian channels. Meanwhile, more than 1,200 aid trucks have entered Gaza from Israel in the past fortnight alone, and nearly 11 million meals have been distributed directly to civilians through the Gaza Humanitarian Fund.

There are historical parallels which Thunberg and co. might want to bear in mind.

During their virtue-signalling sailing jolly, one can only hope that Greta and her companions brought something worthwhile to read. They might reflect on the cautionary tale of Vittorio Arrigoni – a story that should linger as a sombre whisper against hubris. In August 2008, Arrigoni arrived in Gaza by boat with the Free Gaza Movement flotilla. During Operation Cast Lead, he became one of the best-known Western voices in Gaza, writing prolifically and immersing himself in the territory’s brutal complexities.

Yet in his zeal to “stay human”, Arrigoni drifted dangerously close to factions linked to Hamas and other Islamist groups – remaining ideologically blind to the jihadist forces brewing in parallel. His was a worldview intoxicated by its own moral purity, one that refused to see the brutal realities of the actors around him. The consequences were fatal. In April 2011, Arrigoni was abducted by the Salafist group Tawhid wal-Jihad, and hanged by those he thought he understood.

If Thunberg and co. had been allowed to land, their safety, or their reception as heroes, would have very much in doubt. But they never really expected to land: they expected to be stopped by the IDF. It was all theatre. Nasty Israel, brave heroic Greta.

The vanity of it all is appalling. It makes a mockery both of Israel’s legitimate security concerns and of the Palestinians themselves, whose plight cannot be alleviated by the conspicuous virtue of foreign celebrities. The Palestinians become a passive backdrop, their suffering instrumentalised for a Western morality play, starring the world’s most famous contemporary white saviour.

An American "gender-affirming" surgeon, Karla Solheim, begins to have doubts. Gosh golly, have I been doing the right thing here? Paragraph after paragraph of wide-eyed innocence as she happily mutilates "gender dysphoric" young people – girls wanting to be boys – and then starts wondering if, as a doctor ("first, do no harm"), she should really be removing body parts from healthy young people.

I performed my first gender-affirming hysterectomy with pride. It was 2019, and I was delighted to be my local LGBT clinic’s official gynaecologist. There is, after all, no greater joy in medicine than providing great care to a vulnerable, under-served community in Iowa. This was, I felt, how the world should be.

Six years later, I’m not so sure.

Hmm. It's a bit late to start having second thoughts, isn't it? 

In 2019, I took a job as an Obs and Gyny doctor at a nonprofit in Iowa, after my private practice went out of business. I had a wife, twins in preschool, and a toddler. And, after working for a Catholic organisation previously, I loved the progressive policies of my new employer. They provided medical transition services for transgender patients and even sponsored an out-of-hours LGBT clinic for patients who might not have felt comfortable in a mainstream doctor’s office. I was at the clinic, enthusiastically, once a month to provide my expertise.

I was quite surprised, though, that the clinic seemed almost exclusively T, without much LGB. Call me naive, but for the past decade, I had my head down: training, getting married, having kids and starting my practice. And by the time I looked up, the LGBT world was very different from the last time I had really been around other gay people.

I also had some uncomfortable questions: hadn’t we learned in medical school that most paediatric gender dysphoria resolves by adulthood? If so, did it make sense for young adolescents to transition to the opposite sex? Was it really plausible that transgender female athletes didn’t have a biological advantage over natal females? The accepted answers seemed counterintuitive to me. Nonetheless, I was on board….

But as the years went by, I couldn’t help but notice some troubling trends. The trans patients who came to me had more and more mental health complications….

I began to feel more uneasy that hysterectomy — surgery that carries numerous surgical risks, and results in irrevocable lifelong infertility — was necessarily the right thing for this new group of trans patients. But if they didn’t have any contraindications per se, I couldn’t really say no. After all, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a hysterectomy is “medically necessary for patients with gender dysphoria who desire this procedure”….

Still wondering how best to take care of my patients, I went on a private online forum for O&G doctors to ask about how others addressed nonbinary individuals who requested gender affirming hysterectomy. I was told my question was “transphobic”. I was told that the surgery was “life saving” (presumably due to the suicidality brought on by the presence of one’s natal uterus).

This didn’t sit well with me. I wondered about one of my patients, who had detransitioned just a few years after her hysterectomy. Conventional wisdom said detransition almost never happened; that the rate was just 1%. Well, I certainly hadn’t done a hundred hysterectomies for gender affirmation. So what was going on here?

And so on. It's a tough read, but I suppose it's a welcome sign of the times that someone so clearly unsuited to a rebel role – someone who has always happily followed the party line and is dedicated to her career and to her patients – is now beginning to see the light. Things have got so bad in "gender-affirming care" in the US that even someone like Karla Solheim here feels compelled to speak out.

I had just assumed the experts crafting guidelines were ensuring that there was a body of evidence supporting the incontrovertible long-term benefits for these extraordinary treatments that were being performed on young people: puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and double mastectomy.

But you assumed wrong. 

*bullshit*. What really happens:

1. Hamas sterrorists walk towards an IDF post.
2. The IDF fire warning shots.
3. Hamas show bodies of terrorists killed elsewhere.
4. Hamas sell the BBC a fake story.
5. The BBC run it as a headline.

Rinse and repeat.https://t.co/UkD6o0yhgL

— David Collier (@mishtal) June 8, 2025

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According to the Mail:

Eight pioneering nurses who formed their own union to defend the rights of women have won a landmark battle for a female-only changing room.

The Darlington nurses launched a legal action saying transgender policies put them at risk, deprived them of dignity and breached their human rights.

They claimed a biological male colleague identifying as a woman called Rose stared at their breasts as they were getting undressed and lingered too long in the changing room. One nurse had a panic attack after Rose repeatedly asked when they were alone, ‘Are you getting changed yet?’

Now, with their case heading to the courts, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has intervened, ordering Darlington Memorial Hospital to give the women their own room.

Good for Streeting.

The Darlington nurses sued their NHS trust a year ago, winning overwhelming support across the country. ‘Millions of women stand with them,’ said J.K.Rowling.

Their victory comes after it emerged last week that NHS chiefs have been forced to rip up their pro-trans guidance after it was rendered illegal by the Supreme Court.

The NHS Confederation, which represents trusts, has quietly withdrawn guidance telling hospitals that they should allow trans people to use their chosen lavatories and changing rooms.

A senior NHS England official visited Darlington Memorial Hospital unannounced last week and described the changing facilities for female staff as ‘inadequate’.

The official apologised to one of the Darlington nurses, promising to act ‘with speed’ by providing male, female and gender-neutral changing rooms, adding: ‘We want you to feel comfortable and safe.’

The salutary effects of the Supreme Court ruling….

Douglas Murray – whose book On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West was published in April – talks to Brendan O'Neill at Spiked:

We see young people from Britain to Australia, Canada and America, who really don’t have a dog in the fight, accuse the Israelis of things like colonialism, genocide and white supremacy – all of which are offences that these young people in particular have been told that they themselves are guilty of. As I wrote in my last book, The War on the West, it is unclear what you are to do, as a generation taught that you are guilty of crimes for which you have no responsibility. It is an unsolvable situation. But the Jewish State presents an answer – a scapegoat on to which you can project all the crimes you were told you were guilty of.

See also, On Settler Colonialism – from Adam Kirsch:

But what if there were a country where settler colonialism could be challenged with more than words? Where all the evils attributed to it – from "emptiness" and "not-enoughness" to economic inequality, global warming, and genocide – could be given a human face? Best of all, what if that settler colonial society were small and endangered enough that destroying it seemed like a realistic policy rather than a utopian dream? Such a country would be the perfect focus for all the moral passion and rhetorical violence that fuels the ideology of settler colonialism. It would be a country one could hate virtuously – especially if it were home to a people whom Western civilization has traditionally considered it virtuous to hate.

Palestinian Media Watch looks at a column by Muwaffaq Matar, Fatah Revolutionary Council member and regular columnist for the official PA daily:

While the Palestinian Authority has spent months leveraging the civilian suffering in Gaza to criticize its political rival, Hamas, today the official PA daily took things a step further. The paper called on Hamas leaders to emerge from their tunnels in Gaza armed with two bullets: one to be used on the Hamas political leadership living in luxury in Qatar, and the other on themselves—arguing that suicide would be preferable to the disgrace they should feel for the countless Palestinian deaths they have caused.

"Enough, Hamas leaders. Release them [Israeli hostages] now. Unconditionally remove the handcuffs of death from more than two million [Gazan] hostages who are still alive, and from twenty [Israeli hostages] who you are still haggling over to achieve the card of ‘guarantees,' [that the war will end] which only exists in your imagination…

Release 40 bodies [of hostages]. Their [Israeli] army continues every day to crush the bones of three times that number from among our children, our women, and our elderly. As for your ‘trained' gun… placed in your hands to create a flood of human blood for [Iran's] regional political and military objectives, …do not hand over this handgun, but rather keep it to execute upon yourselves the punishment mentioned in the Quran…

Leave [the tunnels] with your handgun, with two bullets in its magazine. Then look at the innocent living people – the uprooted, the wounded, the amputees… and then admit your crime. Then aim it [the gun] at the heads of your admired [Hamas] politicians, in [foreign] capitals, who have filled bottles with the blood of our people – which is priceless – like a fine wine, and presented them as a gift to their lords [Iran] in the land of Persia and other Arabic speakers. Then ask yourselves what benefit this gun has, and the answer will come to you from the last bullet, since your suicide is better than disgrace."

This reflects the ongoing messaging from the Palestinian Authority, which continues to defend the horrific atrocities committed against Jews on October 7 as "legitimate resistance," while simultaneously criticizing Hamas for enabling Israel's reentry into Gaza and its subsequent counteroffensive. In doing so, the PA seeks to bolster its popular support by defending the October 7 massacre—an event widely celebrated among Palestinians—while also shifting responsibility for the claimed 55,000 deaths in Gaza onto Hamas.

Despite this, recent polls indicate that Hamas remains significantly more popular than Fatah, especially since the October 7 attack elevated Hamas terrorists to the status of Palestinian icons. According to surveys conducted in May 2025, 59% of West Bank Palestinians still believe that the October 7 assault on Israel was the "correct decision" [PSR]. In the hate-saturated Palestinian consciousness, their one day of glory, in which they raped, tortured, burned families alive, and murdered nearly 1200 Jews, was worth the cost of 55,000 Gazans lives.

Charleston, South Carolina, ca. 1915. "Old Public Market."

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company]

From the Times:

Believing the West is under threat from mass migration has been classed as a “terrorist ideology” that could merit intervention from the government’s anti-radicalisation programme.

An online training course hosted on the government’s website for Prevent lists “cultural nationalism” as a belief that could lead to an individual being referred to the programme, The Daily Telegraph reported.

Staff taking the course were told that this encompasses a conviction that “western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups”.

The “refresher awareness” course is part of annual training provided to thousands of teachers, police officers, health workers and other staff whose employers have a legal duty to stop people from being drawn into terrorism.

The course, hosted on gov.uk, states that “cultural nationalism” is one of the most common “sub-categories of extreme right-wing terrorist ideologies”, alongside white supremacism and white ethno-nationalism.

Lord Young of Acton, the general-secretary of the Free Speech Union, has written to Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, urging her to reconsider the classification, arguing it was a “matter of serious concern” for free speech.

In a letter to Cooper, Lord Young said: “While not defined in law, nor subject to statutory constraint, the definition in the training course expands the scope of suspicion to include individuals whose views are entirely lawful but politically controversial.

“Now that ‘cultural nationalism’ has been classified as a subcategory of extreme right-wing terrorist ideology, even mainstream, right-of-centre beliefs risk being treated as ideologically suspect, despite falling well within the bounds of lawful expression.

“Topics captured under the Prevent category of ‘cultural nationalism’ include widely held views, ranging from concerns about immigration and social cohesion to the belief that integration should be a policy priority, and that shared cultural norms help sustain a liberal society.”

Well, yes. As one commenter noted, "So a programme designed primarily to monitor sympathies for islamic terrorism has now decided that people who worry about islamic terrorism are themselves terrorists."

It's not been doing too well, Prevent. It was the subject of a damning report two years ago after its failure to stop Axel Rudakubana, the Southport killer, who was referred to it on three separate occasions. Perhaps if he'd expressed concern over immigration the threat posed by his radicalisation might have been taken more seriously.