Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • “The evidence is growing”

    As, apparently, are the breasts. Grifters will grift:

    Zack Polanski’s claim to have immediately apologised for saying that hypnosis could increase a woman’s breast size has been thrown into doubt by a newly unearthed interview.

    Before entering politics the Green Party leader worked as a hypnotherapist and offered a session in 2013 to enlarge a newspaper reporter’s bust.

    Polanski has since said he was misrepresented and never believed it was possible, claiming he spoke to the BBC the day after the article to apologise.

    BBC News cannot find evidence of such an interview, but six days later he spoke to Radio Humberside to stand by the theory saying “the evidence is growing”.

    This is the Green Party leader, with Islamist Mothin Ali as his deputy. Just won a parliamentary seat in a by-election, campaigning chiefly on Gaza and trans rights. Reportedly supported by some 21% of the electorate….

  • “Unlawful” gender policy

    Here we go again. From the Times:

    A leading trade union is being sued by two of its members over claims they were threatened with disciplinary action for criticising its “unlawful” gender policy.

    The Community trade union, which counts several UK cabinet politicians as members, is facing a judicial review brought by two women, Norma Austin Hart and Alison Ann-Dowling, who are seeking to have its gender equality strategy quashed.

    They claim the policy, adopted by Community’s national executive council in February last year, is unlawful as it treats women and those who claim to identify as non-binary as a single category, contrary to a Supreme Court ruling that determined sex is defined by biology.

    The women are also making a claim of victimisation, after they were written to by the union warning they could face disciplinary action after they criticised the policy publicly in an article that was published online.

    It’s always the unions. Reactionary leftism. They cling to anything which has ever been associated with “progressive” politics, and won’t let go – because they don’t want to think about it. Thinkers don’t make the cut in union politics: mindless slogans do much better.

  • Abusing London

    “Death to the enemies of Islam”. Every year, on the streets of London. Till now.

  • Blaming Jews

    Further to Brendan O’Neill on Sally Rooney and her messianic pro-Palestinian obsession, here’s Seth Mandel at Commentary:

    Sometimes people wonder how to tell when a passionate critique of Israel crosses into dangerous territory. One answer is when Israel is portrayed, essentially or explicitly, as the enemy of the world.

    This happened recently when Francesca Albanese, the globetrotting Hamas apologist who operates under the aegis of the United Nations, named Israel as the “common enemy of humanity” at an Al Jazeera conference that was also addressed by Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.

    Over the weekend, Albanese was part of another anti-Zionist confab, where her fellow traveler Sally Rooney spoke of Israel in similar terms. Rooney, a sad Irish Marxist who writes novels about sad Irish Marxist novelists, gave a sad Irish Marxist speech to something called the People’s Congress for the Hague Group, which sounds like a labor union for war criminals.…

    But there’s a second point here, in addition to Sally Rooney’s personal cry for help. And that is the unbelievable irresponsibility of public figures portraying the war against the Jews as a war to rescue humanity and save the earth.

    In addition to Rooney and Albanese, the conference included—according to its website—the notorious anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn and Omar Barghouti, the founder of the main BDS movement which seeks the destruction of Israel.

    Not forgetting Greta Thunberg.

    It was, in other words, a conference devoted to drumming up enthusiasm for globalizing the intifada. There have been such rallies against Jews throughout history—many of them, in fact—and not a single one has been about making the world a better place.

    Although the conference bills itself as progressive, one can hear in Rooney’s spiel an echo of America’s right-wing “lost boys,” drifting into white nationalism as a demented form of group therapy.

    Throughout history, Jews have been blamed for a very long list of maladies. Ennui is a new one, I think. Yet in an era rife with the self-pathologizing of emotional duress, it makes a certain kind of sense that we’re somehow now being blamed for sadness, boredom, restlessness, loneliness, and the guilt of the privileged.

  • The Marie Antoinette of Palestine solidarity

    Brendan O’Neill in the Telegraph, on Sally Rooney:

    At the weekend, she gave a speech in Amsterdam on the horrendous war in Sudan that has laid waste to so much human life. Only joking. She talked about Gaza. These people speak of nothing else.

    She was speaking at The People’s Congress for the Hague Group, a cranky outfit hell-bent on dragging the Jewish State to the International Criminal Court to answer for the “crime” of fighting back against the army of anti-Semites that invaded it on October 7, 2023.

    With ocean-going pomposity, she said we brave few who stand up for Palestine are standing up for the planet itself. Humanity’s very “future on this earth” depends on us, she said, with all the humility of Caligula on a bender.

    Our “adversaries”, she continued, as if she were Boudica rather than a gold-collared luminary of the literary set, are the same people who are destroying life as we know it….

    “By standing in solidarity with Palestine, we are learning how to fight for life on earth”, she said.

    The egotism is off the scale. These are hitherto untapped levels of self-regard.

    The Israelophobic smug set really does believe that, in boycotting Israeli oranges, it is helping to save earth itself from a fiery death at the hands of evil rich people.

    Then the Marie Antoinette of Palestine solidarity did something extraordinary – she unwittingly confirmed that “Palestine” is now little more than a moral prop in the lives of bored middle-class millennials.

    She told her fawning audience that Palestine solidarity is the great cause of our time because: “What else… can give us a reason to go on, to fend off despair, to live with ourselves, and to fight for our future?”

    Standing with Palestine is the only thing that can “make our lives endurable”, she said.

    This is a staggering admission. Rooney has pulled back the curtain – or keffiyeh, perhaps – on the depthless vanity of Palestine activism.

    Deranged. But then, all part of Ireland’s anti-Israel obsession.

  • Banning the Al Quds Day march

  • Special protection for Muslims

    Kishwer Falkner, happily, is not staying silent after her time as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Here she is in the Times today:

    Exactly 45 minutes after the government published its definition of “anti-Muslim hostility” came the first attempt by a politician to weaponise it against speech he dislikes. Iqbal Mohamed, the pro-Gaza independent MP for Dewsbury & Batley, asked the communities secretary Steve Reed how the new definition would be applied to the “escalating hostility” of what MPs said about Muslims in parliament and “what sanctions” would be enforced against those who transgress.

    Did Reed repeat the assurances he’d just given that the definition would have no effect on free speech? Did he slap down this naked attempt at censorship? No. He said Mohamed was “right to point to the huge concern we should all share about the unacceptable level of hostility and abuse directed at Muslims”.

    As a Muslim myself, I think I am qualified to agree that abuse — hate speech — and discrimination against us are unacceptable. But as a former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), I also know these things are already illegal.

    Why do activists want a definition? The consequence will be to curtail criticism of Muslims, strengthen activists’ armoury and increase their power.

    The charge of anti-Muslim hostility has been used in the past to attack the BBC’s Emma Barnett, for scrutinising the Muslim Council of Britain, and South Yorkshire police, for their actions after the grooming scandal in Rotherham. The concept of “Islamophobia” has been used to smear the author of the key report on Rotherham grooming gangs, Baroness Casey of Blackstock, and my predecessor as chair of the EHRC, Sir Trevor Phillips. Now such charges will have greater force, backed by a definition and a government-appointed “special representative”. Policy Exchange has exposed how activists will use a definition to undermine immigration rules and counterterrorism laws.

    Ministers have also published a “social cohesion strategy” saying that “a key part of being a UK citizen is tolerance and openness to views … different from our own” and stating it will never allow laws on “so-called blasphemy”. Yet as so often with this government, it does the opposite of what it says. A definition of anti-Muslim hostility is a key step towards a blasphemy law. Tolerance for different views seems to be one way. A definition restricts what you can do and say about Muslims in ways that do not apply to speech or actions about people of any other faith. It is a two-tier policy — the enemy of equality and of community cohesion — in its purest form.

    We know how it’s going to work. Any idiot knows how it’s going to work. Any idiot apart from the Labour government idiots, that is.

  • Adapting to religious sensitivities

    From the Telegraph:

    Schools have been advised that children’s drawings could be considered blasphemous under Islamic law.

    Guidance issued to teachers by Labour councils in northern England warns that images made by pupils in art lessons may be seen as “idolatrous” under sharia.

    The advice, designed to help teachers adapt to religious sensitivities, also warns that music and dance classes could be contrary to the teachings of Islam.

    It adds that diversity in the classroom can be “a great source of strength”, but that schools “will want to be flexible in catering for religious difference”.

    The guidance was issued by local authorities across the North of England, including Kirklees, the council area that covers Batley Grammar School.

    The school became the scene of protests in 2021 after a teacher showed an image of the Prophet Mohammed in a class. The staff member remains in hiding.

    The guidance document titled “Sharing the Journey” says that “for some Muslim parents, sensitivities may exist in connection with the teaching of aspects of art, dance, drama, music, physical education, religious education and RSHE”.

    To simplify matters it might be easier just to follow sharia law in all schools. There’d no longer be a risk of upsetting religious sensibilities, which is clearly the most important consideration.

    Teachers are also warned that dance lessons could cause parental concerns over “physical contact between males and females”.

    When an inflexible way of thinking – Islam – meets a flexible way of thinking – western liberalism – the outcome is fore-ordained. Especially when a belief in the glory of the western liberalism tradition has been lost.

    What was it Karl Popper said? – “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant. … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

  • Comedy Performance – Female

    Three women out of four. Almost there.

    Jordan Gray got his dick out to play the piano – which, to be fair, is the first time that’s ever been done by a female comedian.

  • Pronouns