Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Jihadism’s last redoubt

    I posted the other day on the 70 Christians found decapitated in a church in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and wondered why such a gruesome massacre never made the news. Colin Freeman at the Spectator has similar concerns, and provides some useful background:

    Ever since the beginning of the War on Terror, security officials have warned that Africa’s impoverished central belt – home to nearly a dozen failed states and much of the ‘bottom billion’ of the world’s population, many of them Muslim – could become jihadism’s last redoubt. With Donald Trump abandoning America’s role as world policeman, and Europe pre-occupied with its own security challenges, that seems more probable than ever.

    Congo’s jihadists started life as a militant Islamist sect in neighbouring Uganda in the 1990s, operating under the innocuous name of Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). They were funded by the Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, to be pawns in regional mischief-making. Clashes with Ugandan troops then forced the ADF over the border into eastern Congo, where it embraced full-blown jihadism and is now – despite stiff competition – the most violent of the region’s armed groups.

    Its founder, Mukulu, was born a Christian, David Steven, but converted to radical Islam and travelled to Sudan, where he is thought to have met Osama bin Laden. In 2010, the Foreign Office launched an investigation into UN claims that he was raising funds for the group while working in London. Since 2015, he has been in jail in Uganda, awaiting trial on terrorism charges, but his group has gone from strength to strength, with up to 2,000 followers. Like Boko Haram, it recruits and kidnaps child soldiers, and sees schools as targets for headline-grabbing atrocities.

    Remember the Lord's Resistance Army? They were an ultra-violent Christian group – from Uganda originally, like the Muslim ADF – responsible for countless atrocities during the 1990s and 2000s. They too, like the ADF, kidnapped schoolchildren as slaves/recruits. They disappeared into the forests of the eastern Congo and are now little more than a reduced remnant of outlaws. It's the turn of the Muslims now…

  • Cancelled at UWC Atlantic

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    Full thread:

    UWC Atlantic is no ordinary school. It was founded by Kurt Hahn, a Jewish educator who fled Nazi Germany, escaping fascism. He also established Gordonstoun which King Charles III attended.

    It’s where royals like Spain’s Princess Leonor and Princess Sofia study—alongside refugees on scholarships.

    And yet…

    Last Sunday, I was due to speak to students about antisemitism and my journalism—as requested by Jewish and Israeli-backgrounded students.

    The school was keen. We held multiple planning calls to ensure it was constructive, appropriate, and beneficial.

    Then—cancellation.

    Why?

    Anti-Israel students complained. Then, teachers claimed my presence would be too distressing and could harm students’ emotional safety.

    Instead of defending free discussion, the school caved and withdrew the invitation.

    The irony is staggering.

    This school was founded to combat intolerance—its very mission shaped by a Jewish refugee who escaped the Nazis.

    Yet, in 2025, a Jewish journalist is barred from speaking in person, because some students don’t want to hear what I have to say.

    They offered me a pre-recorded video instead—removing any chance for real-time discussion.

    I refused. Because if my ideas are too dangerous for an elite school, then what does that say about the state of open dialogue today? I am a calm, rational and respectful person.

    I’ve spoken at universities, schools, and conferences worldwide.

    But at a school that claims to promote “global understanding”, my voice is silenced to protect students’ feelings.

    What happened to education being about challenging ideas?

    If a school founded by a Jewish refugee can so easily erase Jewish voices, what does that mean for free speech in the West?

    More at the Mail.

  • With a probability of 80 to 95 per cent

    The latest on the Wuhan lab-leak cover-up, from the Times:

    German spies were almost certain that the Covid pandemic originated in a Wuhan laboratory, only for successive chancellors to bury the potentially explosive intelligence assessment, according to reports.

    Investigations by the newspapers Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung found that the chancellery of Angela Merkel commissioned the foreign intelligence agency, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), to assess the origins of the virus in 2020.

    The BND analysed public data and material obtained as part of an intelligence operation codenamed Saaremaa. This included scientific data from Chinese research institutions, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    It was said to have found evidence of high-risk experiments that artificially modified naturally occurring viruses, and numerous breaches of laboratory safety regulations. The BND’s president at the time, Bruno Kahl, briefed the chancellery while Merkel was still in office. The laboratory thesis was seen to be accurate with a probability of “80 to 95” per cent.

    However, according to reports, Merkel decided to keep the assessment secret. Kahl is said to have informed the chancellery again after Olaf Scholz took over the government in 2021, without the results finding their way to the public.

    "Mutti" Merkel knew what was for the best.

  • Trust me

    On the Portraiture shortlist at the Sony World Photography Awards 2025, Trust me by Ivan Ryaskov from Kazakhstan. Or, people standing on horses.

    This series was inspired by the photographer’s memories of collecting a series of old postage stamps with horses on them. Trust Me explores the trust between an animal and a person, with photographs taken in different countries to reflect the diversity of cultures, clothing, and the characters of both the people and their horses. To date, the series covers four countries – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, India and Nepal – but the photographer’s dream is to include a photograph from every country in the world.

    A strange ambition, but there we are. Strange ambitions, as a wise man perhaps once said, make the world go round.

    Horseback5

    Horseback1

    Horseback2

    Horseback3

    Horseback4
    [Photos © Sony World Photography/Ivan Ryaskov]

  • Wikipedia and Israel

    Shlomit Aharoni Lir at the JC – How Wikipedia is warping the world’s view of Israel:

    [T]he site has become a hotbed of antisemitism, as anti-Israeli editors flocked to the platform. What happened after October 7 therefore, shouldn’t have been a surprise: when Hamas attacked Israel, the group’s online supporters were ready to pounce.

    Over the following weeks and months, the fallout became clear. On English Wikipedia, a series of articles were rewritten in a tone that demonised Israel. In a report I submitted to the World Jewish Congress and presented at the United Nations last year, I highlighted how Israel has been vilified and targeted disproportionately, with entries such as “Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany”, how article titles were changed — from "massacre" to "attack" — and how Hamas’s acts of terrorism had been sanitised on the platform. It was evident that thousands of articles had been re-edited to demonise and destabilise Israel’s right to exist. At the time, however, I didn’t realise these edits were part of a larger, calculated effort to undermine the country’s right to exist….

    That all changed a sometime later when a list of editors, whose usernames had repeatedly appeared in anti-Israeli editing for years, was revealed. Examining the list, I found that some of these editors were behind the decision that editing subjects related to the conflict would be restricted to users with at least 500 edits and 30 days of registered activity. Others were involved in the community decision to approve Al Jazeera as a reliable source and proclaim that Fox News and the Anti-Defamation League were not.

    Most prominently, they were very involved in the framing of articles and their content. On the page for “Hamas”, for example, you’ll see a list of ideologies associated with the terror group, such as “anti-Zionism” and “anti-imperialism”. It also used to include “antisemitism,” — but that was deleted in January 2024. According to the editors, there weren’t enough scholarly sources to list antisemitism as a “central ideological tenet” of Hamas; they claimed the terror group revised its charter in 2017 to state that their problem was with Zionists rather than Jews. 

    Of course. That's now the standard defence: it's Zionism we're against, not Jews. But Hamas??

    And the LSE just hosted a book launch for “Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters”. There's a lot of people very keen to defend a genocidal Islamist group against the only democracy in the Middle East.

  • Woman gives birth shock

    Mail headline – Fourth British man to give birth reveals how he did it.

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  • Men…and life

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  • All bad ideas are French

    Well now…

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    Also postmodernism: Derrida, Lyotard, Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, all that crowd. Started in France, taken up in American universities: Queer Theory, Postcolonial Theory, all the rest….

  • Savannah Riverfront

    Savannah, Georgia, ca. 1901. "Down the Savannah River."

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Photographic Company]

  • At Hardwick Hall

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    "….project had to be shut down temporarily whilst The National Trust decided what to do. Someone had embroidered a line through the name, and they weren't sure if they should scrap that piece or not (some other names chosen below). Some staff said they felt unsafe. In the end they decided to let people choose any name they wanted, but they put a sign up saying the names on display did not always reflect the views of The National Trust."

    Added: "Ironic given Bess of Hardwick built the original hall. She was a redoubtable woman, who rose to be the richest woman in England at a time when very few woman had power or agency."