Politics and Culture
Iranian Australians tried to stop the bus, but the police held them back.
Five members of the Iranian women’s football team have taken refuge in a safe house in Australia following their elimination in the Asian Cup, sources have told the BBC.
The women had been due to fly home, but supporters had raised fears for their safety after the team declined to sing the national anthem ahead of their first match against South Korea last week.
Letter to the Prime Minister from Chris Moran, who’s resigning from Labour over the jury trial business.
Sir, As retired judges, chairs and former chairs of the Bar and the Criminal Bar Association, we disagree with the replacement of judge and jury trials with judge-only trials for a wide range of offences that attract prison sentences of up to three years, and with the proposal to have cases of dishonesty that might be described as “long and complex” tried by a judge alone. Not because we are reactionaries but because the changes will be unworkable in practice.
The evidence that they will significantly affect the backlog of cases is too thin to support the policy. Victims, witnesses and defendants will still have to wait years, even under the government’s best-case scenario. The experience that juries bring to trials is a better guarantee of fairness to all in a multicultural society than the narrower professional experience of judges. Cutting juries out of the predicted 50 per cent of trials suggests a lack of trust by politicians in the public. We may not have a written constitution but trial by jury is a constitutional matter.
The government wants to rush the Courts and Tribunals Bill through parliament, despite it not having been in Labour’s manifesto and despite inadequate impact assessments. If magistrates are allowed to pass two-year sentences to take more trials from the Crown Court, their existing record backlog of cases will simply grow.
London, in the hours just before sunrise or just after sunset. Photographer Chris Dorley-Brown, from his book Near Dark:
Brown Bow 2019 © Chris Dorley-Brown
Bromley by Bow 2009 © Chris Dorley-Brown
Spitalfields 2019 © Chris Dorley-Brown
Bethnal Green 2020 © Chris Dorley-Brown
Queenhithe 2020 © Chris Dorley-Brown
Spitalfields 2019 © Chris Dorley-Brown
Blackfriars 2021 © Chris Dorley-Brown
Jo Bartosch, at The Critic, puts the boot in :
International Women’s Day gives me the same icky feeling as a vaginal yeast infection — it’s embarrassing, I wish it would go away, yet it’s so deeply irritating it’s impossible to ignore.
Over the past decade, a creeping sense of obligation has spread across public institutions and corporations that they must do something to show us lovely ladies that we’re appreciated. This has all the sincerity and depth of the now mandatory celebrations for the holy month of Pride. And almost invariably, the organisations that make a fuss about IWD are those that penalise self-respecting women who dare to suggest that sex matters….
There’s so much to choose from. If tech is your thing this year you can head to SheSays in Brighton, which advertises itself as being “mainly for women and anyone who identifies as a woman. Trans women are women. Non-binary, gender-queer people are very welcome at all our events. Men too.”
Alternatively, there are events organised by the Women of the World (WOW) Foundation, funded by Bloomberg, which describes itself with all the flair of a town council meeting on Microsoft Teams as “a global alliance, driving an equal and inclusive future for women, girls and non-binary people.”
Meanwhile Bristol City Council is offering a day of workshops featuring a “Shamanic Drum Journey with Goddess Brigid”, alongside improv theatre, play therapy, intuitive movement and sound healing, all designed to “empower women and femme folk to express themselves fully”. This, organised by a council which has attempted to silence feminist campaigners for the impertinence of asking it to uphold the law on single-sex spaces.
There is something about these vomit-inducing fanny fests that recalls the spectacle of a domestic abuser turning up with a bunch of flowers. Who needs single-sex spaces when you have a council funded mindfulness session? Elsewhere, women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen was ejected from an event organised by the Nottingham Police and Crime Commissioner to “celebrate the spirit of women” for having the impudence to ask about single-sex spaces. God forbid that a woman think for herself and speak her mind. That must be against “the spirit of women”.
The kind of people who make a big thing about celebrating International Women’s Day are the same kind of people who welcome trans folk and boast about inclusivity. Like Pride, it becomes mindless virtue signaling.
That man would be Juno Dawson. formerly James Dawson – author and transvestite.
Women are paying each other with pop tarts & Mountain Dew to accompany them to the bathroom & showers because they’re so afraid of being trapped in an area with no cameras with these men.
The men rub their crotches against them when they pass them and make jokes about getting them pregnant and killing them.
“It’s not fair. Why doesn’t anyone care about us?” she asked me. I didn’t have an answer.
Matthew Syed invokes Karl Popper – Enemies like Iran will exploit liberal naivety until we’re destroyed.
Karl Popper was a Jew, one of the brightest boys in his class, whose family hoped they would be safe from the pogroms, having converted from Judaism. They turned out to be wrong, and many of his beloved relatives would perish in the Holocaust.
Karl, for his part, escaped and later pondered on the cataclysms of his formative years. Not just the horrors of Nazism and Bolshevism (he was a keen student of the gulag) but also fascism in general. He realised that the liberal traditions of tolerance and freedom, while valuable, had an Achilles’ heel: they can be turned against you. In his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, he articulated the most pertinent diagnosis of his age and perhaps ours, too: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant [such as Nazis] … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
I suggest we see this pattern afresh today. The legal immigration systems of western democracies have been described as “welcoming” and “liberal”, but in the name of freedom and tolerance we have opened our doors to those who hate these values and wish to destroy them. The names of Abu Qatada, Omar Bakri Muhammad and Abu Hamza are perhaps familiar; worse, because more widespread, are the dangers of Muslim bloc voting and creeping sharia. It is nether racist nor divisive to state that this is a form of self-annihilating madness dressed up as enlightenment. Yes, it’s true only a minority of western Muslims are Islamists; but it is also true that we have utterly failed to confront those who are. We have effectively been made to pay taxes to fifth-columnists who wish for our demise.…
Come to Tehran. A regime that has zero tolerance. That hates freedom. That murders dissidents. And that has for years used the shield of international law, that great shibboleth of ultraliberal governments, to cultivate genocidal proxies, terrorise civilian populations and develop nuclear capabilities while always lying about its intentions, confident its enemies would not retaliate, fearful of breaching narrow interpretations of “self-defence” in the UN charter that have become gospel in the high circles of the western legal establishment.
For years Obama dithered; Biden dithered; the West dithered. They used sticking plasters like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Obama’s nuclear deal, while Tehran bided its time, masterminded October 7, disrupted global trade by means of the Houthis and came within weeks of full uranium enrichment last year. Even now, according to Lord Hermer, we only have the right to attack Iran’s bases when it has already fired on us. Errr, try that in a nuclear shooting match when you have been incinerated already.
So Trump is right? Well yes, but Syed is not a fan. Fair enough: nor am I. Iran needed to be confronted, though, and no one else – apart of course from the Israelis – was willing to make the move. So Iran is reeling, but yes, there are huge doubts about Trump and his plans. If he just does a Venezuela and puts in a “more amenable” leader – a Khamenei lite – then we’re back where we started, and it will all have been in vain. Basically, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps needs to be completely destroyed, or they’ll just rise up and take control again.
Fiyaz Mughal in the Telegraph – ‘Moderate Muslims like me have been cut off by Labour in favour of extremists’:
Last year, while working as a contractor for the Home Office’s Channel programme, which is part of the Government’s counter-extremism strategy, he wrote in The Telegraph that he found it “astonishing” that during a Home Office summit on extremism, the threat of Islamism was not mentioned for the first 90 minutes. The day after the article’s publication he was contacted by a senior Home Office official who wanted to discuss his engagement with the media, as well as the possibility of future government work. The official appeared to be “trying to pressure me not to speak about Islamism in the public domain”.
Mughal believes that “what we have [now] are groups like the Greens and Labour who are basically pandering to the worst parts of the ideological section of my community and entrenching them deeper into state institutions”.
Labour in particular is running scared, he suggests. “There were voices… just as Labour came in that were saying to government sources and ministers: ‘Don’t use the word Islamism, because it gives Islam a bad name’. That was part of this simplistic, idiotic mentality of some of these people who still have connections to some of these Islamist groups. People within Labour. And they listened to them.”
Apart from anything else, such squeamishness around the language does a disservice to the majority of peaceful Muslims, he believes. “Because if you don’t use the word ‘Islamist’, the public gets the view it’s all Muslims [who are a problem]. You have to distinguish the problem… otherwise all Muslims get melded in.”….
“I suspect some of the advisers in this Government who have had problematic links with Islamist groups are sitting and advising them,” he says. “I know they are. They’ve got the ear of Labour [and are] basically saying, ‘No, he’s not the right type of Muslim, he’s not the guy to talk to, he’s a bit on the pro-Israel side.’ That’s being fed into some on the ministerial level. And I strongly suspect the Government has [listened to] those voices.”
Behind this, he believes, is the misguided hope by Labour of clinging on to, or winning back, the Muslim vote. “The concern is they move more in a direction to listen to these [toxic] voices, try to bring them back in. And that excludes moderates like us,” he says. “We’re out.”
It all sounds horribly plausible.
To his credit, Mughal was one of the few Muslims to speak out about the grooming gangs.
Labour’s proposed appointment of an “anti-Muslim hostility tsar”, meanwhile, does at least make some of the right noises:
The Spectator has been leaked a draft copy of Protecting What Matters, a document outlining Labour’s new cohesion strategy which is to be unveiled in a cross government push next week. The 47-page paper features a crackdown on extremism and names Islamists as the biggest threat to community cohesion. It also outlines fresh demands that new arrivals in Britain seek to integrate and speak good English, described as a ‘fundamental basis for participating in society and an expectation of those who wish to call the UK home’. It states: ‘Those who come here must make a genuine effort to integrate into and engage with our shared way of life.’ The last census found that more than a million people could not speak English well or at all.
The report states clearly that Islamists are responsible for three-quarters of the police’s counterterror workload and 94 per cent of all terror-related deaths in the past 25 years. The plan also rejects calls, predominantly from British Muslims, for blasphemy laws in the UK.
We shall see.
Mick Hartley 