Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Trump’s options

    Jonathan Spyer in the Spectator on the Trumpian delusion:

    Trump, speaking to Fox News, professed himself in no hurry for diplomatic progress, saying that ‘We have all the cards. They can call us anytime they want.’ The US President suggested a version of events in which Teheran, pressured by the US blockade of its tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, was showing increased flexibility regarding the issue of the future of its nuclear programme.

    But that’s not how the regime thinks.

    Trump’s position reflects a cost-benefit analysis which accurately notes that, objectively, the Iranian regime is vastly inferior to its opponents in conventional military capacity and in its ability to inflict harm. Given this, such a view concludes, what remains is for the Iranians to draw the same sensible conclusion and reach a deal based on the relative balance of forces. It is, according to some accounts, a matter of some bewilderment to the US President that Tehran has failed to understand the situation in a similar way.

    The current level of pressure on Iran is indeed considerable. US central command announced today that it has turned around 38 vessels seeking to enter or exit Iranian ports since the blockade began. The Iranian fleet of ghost tankers is certainly getting some oil through – around 10 million barrels since the blockade began, we are told. The reserves held by Iran on the high seas will enable Tehran to continue supplying its customers for a few months hence. But without a doubt Iran’s capacity to export oil has been severely constrained by the blockade.  

    This level of pressure, however, is unlikely to make Iran come anywhere close to conceding to the US’s demands. Here, the administration appears to be succumbing to the recurrent thought mistake to which western governments are prone when looking at the Middle East. Namely, the assumption that the other side ‘thinks like us’. That inside every religious or ideological extremist is a pragmatist fighting to get out.

    Unfortunately, inside the religious extremist there just more religious extremism. It’s dark ages return-of-the-Mahdi Islamists all the way down. A nuclear program is part of their eschatalogical belief that the destruction of Israel is a theological necessity. There’s no reasoning with them.

    None of this means that one should take the Iranian regime at its own reckoning, of course. Its bombastic rhetoric is accompanied by brutal repression against its own people, most of whom loathe it. It has mortgaged Iran’s economy and the management of its natural resources to its regional ‘resistance’ project, which in turn exports misery and failed governance to other regional countries – to Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, Gaza, and for a time Syria. But it is important to understand that whatever we might think of the Iranian regime’s outlook, its own leaders do believe in it, and are not in the mood for accepting something they regard as surrender.  

    This means that, as shown in Islamabad, the current level of pressure is unlikely to bring results. The choice facing the US therefore is to intensify and escalate the pressure, including the renewal of major military operations and including the opening of the Strait of Hormuz by force, or to accept at a certain point a face-saving deal likely to leave the regime’s regional project intact. If the latter course is followed, it will no doubt be presented as victory. The Iranian regime’s long war for supremacy in the region will then continue.  

  • The elephants in the room

    Meet Matt Rattley, Lecturer in Biochemistry, St Hilda’s College.

  • The real story

  • “Gender affirming care”

    Think about it: A political movement just conjured into existence a type of young person that defies every single thing known about child and adolescent development, demanded that this fictional patient cohort be pumped full of toxic unproven drugs in the complete absence scientific justification, then insisted that these innocent youth be ushered into the operating theatre to have healthy body parts needlessly lopped off.

    Extremists of this movement took over the leading professional association in the field (WPATH), set about creating garbage standards of care based on their unhinged ideology, infiltrated the Endocrine Society and the American Academy of Pediatrics and engaged in a conspiracy to manufacture scientific consensus for their despicable, unethical experiment.

    And every major medical association just went along with it! Fell for the stunt these crackpots pulled!

    Just accepted that a group of healthy kids needed to have their bodies destroyed because they possess a mystical inner gender essence, that these modern-day lobotomies are “medically necessary” and “life-saving” because a bunch of unhinged fanatics said so.

  • Anne Frank’s memory

    Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe.

    The Dutch had the worst record for protecting Jews in Western Europe – but they’ve always got Anne Frank.

    See also, Matti Friedman on Gazology.

  • Warnings from the Iranian diaspora

    More from Spiked, here, with Max Sadie, on the concern felt by the Iranian diaspora on what’s happening in the UK with the red-green alliance, and the rise of antisemitism: An excellent piece, with some important insights…

    I have spent a great deal of time with the Iranian diaspora. I have photographed them during their Nowruz (Persian New Year) celebrations in Golders Green, at the permanent encampment outside the Iranian Embassy in Knightsbridge, and at their Sunday protests on Whitehall, where they gather outside Downing Street, calling on the government to proscribe the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). They are, in my experience, some of the most serious and clear-eyed people living in the UK at the moment. They have seen political Islam from the inside, not as a theoretical proposition but as a lived system of repression and coercion. A system that has disappeared friends, imprisoned family members and attempted to overwrite a truly great civilisation. The country of Hafez and Rumi has in their exile become a byword for extremist and authoritarian terror and a nation that is now ranked 145th out of 148 for the treatment of women. Some of these protesters literally have the scars.

    Unusually for people coming from the part of the world they do, and increasingly Britain, these protesting Iranians appear to be largely free of anti-Semitism too. Not carefully managed about it or judiciously restrained. It just doesn’t seem to be there. When they speak of Jews and Israel, there is none of the loaded hesitation, the over-careful neutrality or the strained balancing act one detects in even the most educated and well-meaning of British liberals. These Iranians see Jews really as cousins. And not without good reason. The relationship between Persians and Jews is probably the oldest and most honourable in the Bible. Cyrus the Great, who put an end to the Babylonian captivity and sponsored the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, is the only non-Jew ever to receive the title, Mashiach (Messiah).

    This Persian-Jewish bond was forged long before Christianity or Islam existed and continued into the modern era. During the time of the last Shah, Iran was among the first nations to recognise the state of Israel, and the Israeli airline, El Al, flew between Tel Aviv and Tehran almost daily. Something of that long-standing familial recognition has quietly re-emerged in the Iranian protest movement that has grown up in cities all across the West in recent months. Among Iranians and Jews there, one finds an ease and immediacy of understanding that requires no translation. They know what the other has experienced and there is no need to establish first principles.

    The Islamic Republic, which took power after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, completed this inoculation. It made anti-Semitism central to state doctrine. Friday sermons, school curriculum, even how Iran addressed itself to the world. How could any of us forget Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s illustrious world symposium of Holocaust denial in 2006? For Iranians who have managed to escape the regime, anti-Semitism was never one detachable prejudice among others. It characterised the whole fraudulent package – the lies, the coercion, the false sense of moral grandeur. When they rejected the Islamic regime, naturally they rejected anti-Semitism, too.

    The mullahs produced something else which has become genuinely rare in contemporary Britain – people with an acute instinct for the early signs of coercive ideology in a society, an awareness of the gap between a society’s stated values and what it is actually becoming. These are men and women who understand what freedom costs because they have already paid for it with theirs. And they know how quickly a country can be lost.

    That is why, when the conversation turns from Tehran to London, as so often it does, what they say carries a weight that is absent from so much of the commentary that now passes for serious discourse in the UK. Their insights are drawn from bitter experience. They recognise a familiar pattern – and they care. The Iranians feel they are watching, for a second time in their lifetimes, a society that is moving, with surprising speed, from the liberal moral consensus of 20 years ago, towards something much more confused – and considerably more dangerous. What has become known as the red-green alliance, a convergence of left-coded moral language with Islamist political energy, ended, in their own country’s history, in the destruction of a free society.. […]

    What has changed is not the Iranians. It is us. The solidarity that should have been extended to them was always conditional on accepting certain articles of faith that Western progressivism now implicitly requires. When the Iranian diaspora naturally and proudly aligned with Israel, they found themselves irreconcilably at odds with this worldview, one cultivated by activists and institutions over many years – and one in which the word genocide now travels freely, stripped of its meaning and singularly indicting one people, and one state, alone.

    By the time of the Islamic Republic’s massacres in January, the flag of that state was no longer seeable, its name, Israel, no longer sayable. The blue and white Star of David had become the purest kind of trigger – loaded with a presumed and totalising injustice and the weight of everything the culture had learned, or remembered, to deplore. By hoisting Israel’s colours the Iranians found themselves utterly immiscible with the reigning narrative and so, in a very real way, genuinely invisible, too.

    There is a profound difference between not knowing and refusing to know. The Iranian diaspora arrived in this country with a cause that should have felt unmistakably just and historically grounded. But they chose truth over indulging one of the West’s oldest and most persistent prejudices, and truth also over the lie of diversity at any cost. That is their distinction. It is also, for now, their continued invisibility.

    The question this poses is not really about Iran. It is about what kind of society cannot recognise, in the people standing directly in front of it, the values it still claims to hold.

  • The BBC should look in the mirror

    I posted last week about the BBC tackling antisemitism in Panorama, noting the disgraceful if predictable failure to make any mention of Islam. Josh Howie at Spiked calls them out – The BBC asks why Jews are afraid – it should look in the mirror:

    The closest mention of Islam is the presenter saying ‘Islamophobia’. The mention of which is, of course, compulsory whenever anyone raises the racist targeting of Jews.

    This is an unforgivable failure. What links the four suspects arrested for setting fire to four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green last month? What about the father and son who carried out a mass shooting, murdering 15 Jews at a Bondi Beach Chanukah celebration in December? Or the three men jailed in February for planning a mass shooting of Jews in Manchester? Or the seven men arrested this week for allegedly planning more attacks on British Jews? What belief system connects them all? All of them were Islamists.

    The BBC has been culpable in this explosion of anti-Semitism. When two Jews were murdered last October, what did the Islamist attacker scream? ‘This is for killing babies’ – that’s what he said. Only months before, the BBC broadcast to the world the lie that the Jewish State would soon be responsible for killing 14,000 babies in Gaza. Not one baby starved, yet still the article remains on the BBC website.

    Documentaries narrated by the children of Hamas officials, the broadcasting of ‘death to the IDF’ (Israel Defence Forces) chants during coverage of Glastonbury, false reports of Israel blowing up hospitals – if BBC producers wanted to make a real documentary about why Jews are afraid, they already own most of the copyright. In the meantime, they can shove this weak-ass attempt at playing defence for Islam, while covering their own failures, up their hole.

  • Hysteria and monomania

    Hadley Freeman in today’s Sunday Times:

    Oh look, it’s an email from my youngest child’s school. The end-of-year concert is moving to another venue — fine, whatever … oh wait, what’s this? The concert was going to be in a local synagogue but because of safety concerns the school, which is non-denominational, will find an alternative venue. Well, that’s a grim sign of the times, I think. So grim that it takes me a beat to realise this synagogue that has been deemed too dangerous is, in fact, our family synagogue. Where my children and I go every Saturday morning, where I drop them off for Hebrew school every week. That is now seen as such an obvious target for terrorism that it’s not safe for my children’s concert. Now I know how a lobster feels when the pot starts to boil….

    “Yes, but Zionism,” people say, not justifying the attacks. Just explaining them. It used to be “but Israel” in the explanations, on the placards, in the protest chants, as if it were normal to terrorise a minority group for the actions of a foreign country. Now it’s “but Zionism”. A slippage from criticism of the country to anyone who believes a Jewish homeland should exist at all. That is something else I notice.

    There is an even faster linguistic progression in the now daily videos of members of the public saying what would once have been unthinkable but is now seen, by them, as righteous. A Tube driver saying Jews won’t be safe on the Bakerloo train if he’s driving it. A man in Slough shouting “dirty mother***ing Jew”. Young men going to Jewish areas, like Golders Green in London, to film and taunt Jews, ratcheting up millions of online views by engaging in the latest online sport: Jew-baiting. Those are all just from the past few days.…

    This is the entirely predictable result of three years of antisemites and fools screaming that Israel is uniquely evil, Zionism is fascism and Hamas are freedom fighters. That is not political criticism — it is hysteria and monomania, and the cause and result are antisemitism.

  • Implications of the Scope affair

    They’e now backed down.

    But, looking more deeply…

    It’s a scandal that cancellations like this for legally-held beliefs are still happening.

    However, I think many people have forgotten what Scope is supposed to do and what implications this attitude from its leadership has for the (actually) most vulnerable people in society.

    Scope is a disability charity. Its remit is to campaign and lobby on behalf of disabled people, to provide information, advice and support when they need it and to create opportunities for disabled people.

    How can disabled people trust Scope to have our interests at heart when it has demonstrated such intolerance for sex realist views?

    In particular, how can disabled women who need same-sex care trust Scope to advocate on their behalf, provide them with accurate and up to date information and advice on this subject and to support them – and give them a voice – when they need it most?….

  • A case of schadenfreude

    The Southern Poverty Law Center is in trouble:

    US officials have announced fraud charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights group that tracks extremist organisations and played a prominent role in confronting the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

    In a news conference on Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche accused the non-profit of secretly funding the very groups that it says it opposes, through paying informants who infiltrated them – including within the KKK.

    An indictment charges the SPLC with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

    Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not displeased::

    “…the SPLC chose to publish the names, faces, and affiliations of 15 people it accused of ‘anti-Muslim extremism.’ The list endangered everyone it named. I know the threat of Islamist violence all too well. In 2004, a jihadist named Mohammed Bouyeri murdered my friend and collaborator Theo van Gogh on an Amsterdam street. Bouyeri shot him, cut his throat, and pinned a five-page letter to his chest with a knife. The letter was a fatwa against me. I have lived under armed protection for more than two decades because men with weapons and conviction want me dead—for apostasy…

    The SPLC considers all of this beyond the pale, and accused me of using ‘the political bully pulpit to bash Muslims.”

    And

    “Tax filings uncovered by reporters in 2017 showed millions in SPLC money parked in the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda. Think of it for a moment: an anti-poverty organization, headquartered in Alabama, hiding millions offshore while positioning itself as the nation’s moral conscience.”

    https://thefp.com/p/ayaan-hirsi-ali-the-splc-targeted