Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • The Greens and Gaza

    Andrew Gilligan in the Spectator:

    “Back us to stop the far right,’ say the Greens. But what if parts of the Greens are the far right?

    Saiqa Ali, a Green candidate in next week’s elections for Streatham St Leonard’s, Lambeth, posts on her Instagram account a picture of the Earth suffocated by a giant serpent with the Star of David on its skin. She thinks that the British government includes too many ‘Zionists Jews’, and that Donald Trump is ‘owned by Jews’. Not even the Z-word, that last one. Not even Israel. Just… Jews. Ali also posts a picture of an armed man in what looks like a Hamas headband, captioning it: ‘Long live the Resistance.’ If it is a Hamas headband, this may actually be a criminal offence. Ali has since apologised ‘for any offence or distress caused’ and said she rejects ‘anti-Semitism in all its forms’.

    Other Green candidates give new meaning to the term ‘eco-warrior’. Rebecca Jones, standing for the party in Blackheath, Lewisham, says we must ‘burn Zionism to the ground’. Jones is a practising NHS GP.

    Sabine Mairey, another Lambeth Green candidate, posts a video saying a terror attack on a synagogue ‘was not anti-Semitism’ but ‘revenge’ against Israel. Ifhat Shaheen, a Green candidate in Hackney, says that the mass murder, rape and abduction of civilians on 7 October was just Palestinians ‘inevitably try[ing] to defend themselves’. Feda Shahin, a candidate in Bournemouth, claims ‘the Zionists killed 20 million Christians’.

    Over the past few weeks, at least 17 Green candidates have been exposed by The Spectator and others for holding or sharing hideous views. Many of them will soon also be holding public office, with significant power over their communities, including Jews. That is one difference with Jeremy Corbyn–era Labour, when most of the haters were mere activists.

    The even more critical difference is the central Green party’s continued embrace of these people. At the time of writing, 15 of the 17, including all those named above, remain fully endorsed Green candidates. Many of these stories about them were in the public domain even before nominations closed. The party did nothing, apart from telling them to make their social media accounts private.

    Actually, that’s not true. They did do something. Responding to many of the stories, the Green party’s deputy leader Mothin Ali said: ‘Anyone currently being attacked in the media should know that the only reason for the smears are [sic] that you are making the right type of noise… Know that you are not alone.’

    So this isn’t just progressive soft–headedness about wrongdoing by minorities or lack of vetting in a small party hitting the big time. It’s not just ignoring bad stories which might not, as the party’s slogan goes, ‘Make Hope Normal Again’. It’s an explicit statement by the Greens’ no. 2 which appears to suggest that candidates who have made racist and extremist remarks are ‘making the right type of noise’.…

    Could it be, therefore, that the Green party under Mothin Ali and Zack Polanski has adopted a deliberate strategy of appealing to racists and extremists? Some of them, anyway. If so, that’s literally unprecedented outside the far right: hence my question at the start of this piece.…

    Why are the Greens so fixated with Gaza; lots of them, not just the racist ones? Why are Green candidates – lots of them, not just the racist ones – making campaign videos about Palestine in elections about potholes? Why is Gaza the Greens’ answer to so many questions? When Polanski was told that his plans to confiscate Trump’s golf courses could be legally problematic, he replied: ‘I think more problematic is a genocide in Gaza.’

    Some will say it’s simply pandering to the Muslim vote. But even for British Muslims, Gaza is not a priority. In a poll during the general election, while the slaughter was still under way, only 21 per cent of them named it as their top issue. Only 44 per cent of British Muslims even put it in their top five. The figures for non-Muslims were much lower. That’s not because people don’t care about the horror. It’s because they think, surely correctly, that there is little that any British government, let alone any local council, can do about it.

    I think the core reason for the Greens’ obsession is this: Israel and Gaza increasingly fulfil the same function for left-populists as the EU did for right-populists. That is, not as an accurate reflection of voters’ priorities but as an ‘organising idea’ to galvanise activists and make a wider argument of how Britain and the world have gone wrong.

    Gaza is used to argue against the moral bankruptcy of the West, its colonisation of subject peoples, the hypocrisy of the western liberal order and the rapacity of capitalism, all of which must be overthrown. Israel and/or Zionism and/or the Jews are attacked as the supreme embodiments of these dark forces, as the Jews have been for centuries.

    It’s something to do with what Matti Friedman is arguing in his Gazology piece. Gaza has become the lens through which many left-leaning writers and commentators are now refashioning the old antisemitism into a new progressive worldview, with the same old enemy standing in for western civilisation as a whole.

  • Cambridge students

    Green is leading by a total landslide: the party that has single-handedly the worst policies on trans and immigration imaginable.

    When I was cancelled (for owning 3 gender-critical books!), I was astounded at the number of people who said things along the lines of: “Why are you choosing to die on this hill when the majority of people disagree with you!?” and, even more annoyingly, “Look at all the intelligent people around you who disagree! “.

    It is very rare for an academic here to speak their mind of this subject, so many students automatically assume their beliefs. This isn’t helped by the pride progress flag adorned on every hall. Or the ‘gender expression’ funds, offered by many a JCR, providing money for Stand to Pee devices, breast forms and binders.

    It is propaganda.

    They have no idea that the vast majority of the British public do indeed know what a woman is. But I don’t blame them! School taught my cohort gender ideology as fact- a few boys in my class were chastised for saying they didn’t buy it. And public institutions keep up the falsehood – have you been to an NHS waiting room in the last ten years? It is no wonder.

    But a huge worry. Very soon these students will graduate. they will take up positions in law, in science; as teachers, politicians etc. Some will change their minds on things, i’m sure. But it is naive to assume this is the typical leftist fad young people go through, and even more naive to think we won’t feel the lash.

    “The worst policies on trans and immigration imaginable“. Well yes, but more than that, it’s the party that attracts all manner of antisemitic loons, with a chancer as leader who’s happy to use his own Jewish heritage to deflect criticism. And an Islamist as deputy.

    Worrying? Terrifying, more like.

  • Recycling ancient blood libels

    I noted the other day that Owen Jones has been promoting the grotesque antisemitic libel that Israeli soldiers are training dogs to rape Palestinian detainees. Turns out that the UN’s Francesca Albanese has joined in. Wow.

    Brendan O’Neill at Spiked:

    None other than Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, has given voice to this abominable slander. This week, she decried the unholy barbarism of the Jewish nation. They have ‘burned’ Palestinians, she said. They have tortured them and then amputated without anesthesia their limbs that were ravaged in that torture. And they have raped them. Both the soldiers of the Jewish State and their mutts are carrying out rapes, she said. Palestinian detainees have their faces forced into a toilet as ‘trained dogs’ violate them from behind, she said, with wide, demented eyes.

    It is being lapped up in the swirling digital cesspit of Israelophobia. Israel is a ‘rapist state’, cry mobs of sun-starved haters. They are ‘demons’ and ‘animals’, wail the spreaders of the dog-rape libel. And still they expect us to believe they’re just ‘critics of Israel’ even as they brand its people a fiendish, diabolical stain on humanity, just as those mobs did 900 years ago before setting fire to a stake with a Jew on it.

    There is not a scintilla of evidence for Albanese’s heinous tale of Israelis shoving men’s faces into toilets and then instructing dogs to rape them. She seems to have got it from Owen Jones of the Guardian, who has spent the past week mainstreaming this grotesque, evidence-free story. ‘Israel is raping Palestians with dogs’, says the headline to his piece, as he invites readers to think of this bigoted canard as absolute truth.

    Yet as Honest Reporting says, the dog-rape libel – ‘among the vilest and most stomach-churning libels ever cooked up about Israel’ – is the bastard offspring of frothing, prejudicial hearsay. It points out that Jones relies heavily on Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a ‘grotesquely anti-Israel outfit’ that is responsible for various ‘deranged conspiracy theories’ about the Jewish homeland. Jones only quotes anonymous Palestinian detainees, meaning none of the claims can be verified. And his claim that ‘Israeli soldiers’ have verified reports of dog rape is a reference to the fact that an Israeli academic called Shaiel Ben-Ephraim says he spoke to IDF soldiers who had ‘heard about it’. That thing you can smell is bullshit.

    It’s worse than bullshit.

    Truth is not the intention here – demonisation is. You can tell this from the frenzied podcast Jones made to accompany his batshit article. Reading and writing about the ‘indescribably horrific’ crime of Israeli dog-rape was like ‘opening a door to the darkest recesses of Hell’, he says. ‘You will rightly ask yourself’, he says to listeners waiting with lolling tongues for yet further confirmation of Israel’s wickedness, ‘how any human being could possibly imagine these crimes, let alone actually perpetrate them’.

    This isn’t journalism. It’s certainly not anti-imperialism. It is nothing I would recognise as ‘progressive’ commentary. It is a medieval morality play, where the mob is invited to marvel and gag over the fathomless depravity of the Jewish State. It is of a piece with Jones’s religious mania over Israel, a nation he says is ‘uniquely murderous’ and in the grip of a ‘genocidal mania’. As for its ‘cheerleaders’, who have succumbed to ‘depravity’, he hopes they will be ‘haunted by the souls of the slaughtered Palestinians… until the end of time’. These are the ramblings of a mind rendered unstable by obsessive, one-eyed loathing for Israel.

    The dog-rape tale leaves no doubt – ancient blood libels are being rehashed in the phoney langage of ‘criticism of Israel’. The Jewish people were once accused of lusting after the blood of Christian children – now the Jewish State is accused of intentionally murdering Palestinian children. The Jews were once said to be the secret puppetmasters of politics – now the Jewish nation is said to have the mighty West eating from the palm of its hand. Jews were once branded as agents of Satan, doing his diabolical work on Earth – now they are said to deploy dogs in their genocidal crimes and in the process are ‘opening a door to the darkest recesses of Hell’. Are we seriously expected to believe it is wholly coincidental that all the dangerous shit that was once said about Jews is now said about the Jewish State? Yeah, I’m not buying it. To me, it feels like medieval calumnies are being reanimated on the altar of a deranged loathing for the world’s only Jewish nation.

    That Francesca Albanese is spreading the dog-rape story takes the blood-libel crisis to a whole new level. This is a UN official. These are dangerous times. There was a stabbing in Golders Green just today. History tells us that blood libels beget violence. Burnings and pogroms followed the medieval myths about Jews being child-killers and well-poisoners. In the past year, we’ve seen Jews in England be violently attacked and stabbed by people calling them baby-killers. How long before the knife is wielded by monsters calling them rapist dogs, too?

  • Banned from protesting

    The Flying Bats is a women’s football team in Sydney that includes up to five men, and – what a surprise – keeps on winning. And they plan to keep on winning, with the help of the Northern Suburbs Football Association. From Reduxx:

    Women in one of the top football leagues in Sydney, Australia, have been banned from protesting against a “trans-inclusive” team that has been known to have up to 5 male players. The women of the Northern Suburbs Football Association were reportedly forced to sign an agreement that explicitly barred them from forfeiting matches against the Flying Bats LGBTQIA+ football club.

    The Flying Bats describe themselves on their website as “the biggest LGBTQIA+ women’s and non-binary football club in the world.” Originally founded in 1985 as a football club for lesbians, they now welcome “everybody from across the rainbow family… [and] especially encourage trans and gender-diverse folks to join us, with research showing that access to safe community sport can help improve the mental and physical well-being of minority and oppressed groups.”

    In March 2024, Reduxx reported that five male players, who identified as transgender or non-binary, joined the team for the winter 2024 Premier League of the North West Sydney Football Association (NWSFA) that was to take place over the coming months.

    The team dominated the pre-season Beryl Ackroyd Cup, netting a $1,000 prize. With the news that the men had joined, racking up victory after victory, 24 women dropped out of playing in the league in protest. The decision was influenced by reports that the men had repeatedly injured some of the female players to the point of no longer being able to play football.

    Keep quite and help the men feel good about themselves. It’s what sport’s all about.

  • A different gender presentation

    The Matt Rattley saga rumbles on….

    Added:

  • A terrorist incident

    So the Golders Green stabbings have been declared a terrorist incident. Which, being translated, means that the attacker was Muslim – but of course that can never be said.

    Met chief Mark Rowley was heckled, but bravely pressed on:

    Rowley goes on by saying that antisemitism is “fuelled by hateful and extremist ideologies”.

    “It comes from hostile states, the extreme right, and the extreme left. These are terrorist and hateful belief systems but they’re all rooted in racism,” he says.

    The commissioner says it’s time to ask some difficult questions.

    But never a mention of Islam. Does Britain have a problem with its Muslim population, and an ideological/religious hatred of Jews that seems to be widely taught in their schools and preached in their mosques? That’s a difficult question – that will be avoided at all costs.

  • Living in terror

    Added, from Josh Howie:

    The most unambiguous form of racism in the UK by far is hatred of Jews by Muslims. This isn’t microaggressions. This isn’t DEI and equity of outcome. This is firebombs. This is a Jew kidnapped and tortured. This is continual plots to mass murder Jews. This is random Jews attacked and murdered.

    And how do those in authority respond? In Birmingham by the collusion of racists and the state to keep Jews away. In London the police spend years looking the other way at weekly Jew hate on the streets. Our national broadcaster totally ignores it and employs Jew haters and spends decades repeatedly lying about Jews. ‘Anti-racist’ organisations like @hopenothate put their fingers in their ears. Prevent misallocates their resources just to prevent looking racist. Our charity commission slaps wrists for murderous incitement from mosques. And our government pays lip service whilst being terrified of losing votes to the racists.

  • An American communist in Iran

    The red-green alliance in comical action, as Christopher Helali, International Secretary of the American Communist Party (ACP), speaks with Russia Today TV live from Isfahan, Iran. He’s very excited by the determination of the Iranians to keep fighting. “Let’s finish the job once and for all”.

    What a communist leader is doing cheering on a theocratic tyranny is left unexplained but presumably any enemy of the west has to be supported, despite the unfortunate slaughter of all communists and leftists by their erstwhile Islamist comrades after the 1979 revolution. Lessons not learned – but what else is new?

    I’d say Marx would be turning in his grave if it wasn’t such a cliché: his corpse has been rotating at speed pretty much ever since he ended up in Highgate Cemetery.

    He’s been on quite a tour.

    Between February 13 and February 23, 2025, Helali traveled with fellow ACP founder Jackson Hinkle and Russian-American Haz Al-Din to Beirut, where they visited the assassination site of Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, followed by his funeral on February 22. A week earlier, on February 14, Helali and Hinkle were in Qatar, where they interviewed two senior leaders of Hamas, Basem Naim and Osama Hamdan.

  • McSweeneyism

    Jonny Ball at UnHerd on Morgan McSweeney’s behind-the-scenes management of Starmer’s Labour Party:

    In Starmer’s image, a new Parliamentary Labour Party has been created. Out of the 403, not a single one of them represents a plausible alternative Prime Minister. This is the only thing that keeps Starmer in place, in spite of his unprecedented unpopularity, itself about to collide with a coming recession and inflationary spiral. McSweeneyism, in pursuit of political professionalisation, has produced a Labour-dominated House of Commons packed with legislators whose chief achievements centre not around representing workers, rising through the ranks of trade unions in a variety of sectors, and sit still less upon building organisations or creating successful institutions with national impact. Instead, it is a hollowed-out parliament of junior managers armed with humanities degrees, specialising in internal slideshows for corporate public affairs departments or the third sector. Gone are the organisers, the rabble-rousers, the barnstorming autodidacts, and in are the dull young things, delivering speeches in the manner of weekly updates on Microsoft Teams. Once it was a party of labour; today it is a party of LinkedIn.

    And now, languishing in the polls, mired in scandal, hit by economic crises, and about to lose Wales and much of London to insurgent parties, even the LinkedIn PLP is restive. The putative footsoldiers of Starmerism are unmoved by claims that they owe their jobs to the Irishman. A No. 10 insider texts to say that “everyone says he’s a genius” but that McSweeney was “just a kinda sensible pair of hands… no real narrative, just data-driven.” The insider concludes: “That’s fine for winning but not for leading the country”. McSweeney’s construction of a historic majority rests on the thinnest of margins of support. This was the shallowest of victories — winning by appearing as a default option, as simply “not Tories” after the years of Partygate, Trussonomics and stagnant living standards. For all the clever vote-to-seat efficiency, it’s likely that any leader of the Labour party, a team of monkeys in red rosettes, would have fought a hard campaign against a hapless Rishi Sunak. McSweeney and Starmer’s efforts in 2024 garnered fewer votes than a Hamas and IRA-adjacent old hippy-dippy Leftist could muster in Labour’s 2019 wipeout, and significantly less than the same bearded radical won in 2017.

    Without McSweeney, Starmer is less anchored. He has burnt through all his goodwill and political capital. There will be no recovery.…

  • On the Sports SJA committee

    More on that SJA Columnist of the Year story: