Mick Hartley

Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator – Why is the LSE hosting a Hamas book launch?

The London School of Economics’ decision to host the launch this week of Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters – a book that attempts to sanitise and fails to properly condemn a terrorist organisation responsible for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – has rightly sparked outrage. It is a shameless attempt to rehabilitate a group that revels in the slaughter of civilians, delights in hostage-taking, and has openly vowed to repeat its crimes.

But while the LSE controversy is unsettling, it is merely a symptom of a much larger problem: the enduring failure of many in the West to grasp the true nature of Hamas. It is not, as some insist, a mere ‘resistance movement’ born out of Israeli policies. Nor is it simply a nationalist organisation with an Islamic flavour. Hamas is, and always has been, a jihadist organisation deeply rooted in the ideological soil of the Muslim Brotherhood, driven by an uncompromising religious mission to erase Israel and murder Jews. Indeed, even the broader Palestinian political identity has maximalist, antisemitic origins and aims….

If there were any lingering doubts about Hamas’ true nature, they should have been put to rest on 7 October, 2023. The group’s mass butchery of civilians – beheadings, rapes, kidnapping of babies – was not a spontaneous act of desperation. It was a calculated, ideological jihad. The hostages taken into Gaza were not merely bargaining chips; Hamas deliberately humiliated, tortured, and paraded them as trophies, demonstrating the same medieval barbarism that Isis once displayed. Yet there are those – like the authors of Understanding Hamas – who still seek to portray this organisation as a misunderstood political entity. Hamas has repeatedly stated that 7 October was not an aberration, but a blueprint. Its leaders have boasted that they will repeat such attacks again and again….

The West’s intellectual and academic class has indulged the illusion that Islamic terror groups like Hamas are products of oppression rather than theocratic, totalitarian movements. This naïveté –whether driven by ideological bias, cowardice, or wilful ignorance – has allowed jihadist ideology to flourish under the guise of “resistance.”

The simple truth is this: Hamas is not a liberation movement. It is not a political party. It is a genocidal jihadist organisation that exists solely to destroy Israel and kill Jews. It says so itself, acts on it, and has proven time and again that it will never stop until it is utterly dismantled.

And, as I've said, this refusal to see Hamas for what they are – a genocidal jihadist organisation – rather than some kind of heroic resistance movement, also governs the BBC's lamentable coverage of Gaza. 

Since Unison is now as useful to women as a chocolate teapot…

Enough is enough. The UK's biggest trade union@unisontheunion no longer supports women who don't want to undress in front of men at work. The Darlington Nurses have therefore faced no alternative but to start their own union to protect women in the workplace.

Their case,… pic.twitter.com/qgJ7PSsOjU

— Darlington Nursing Union (@DarlingtonUnion) February 19, 2025

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Full text:

Enough is enough. The UK's biggest trade union @unisontheunion no longer supports women who don't want to undress in front of men at work. The Darlington Nurses have therefore faced no alternative but to start their own union to protect women in the workplace.

Their case, supported by the Christian Legal Centre, began when a man without warning, identifying as 'Rose' and backed by an NHS policy, began using the female changing room at Darlington Memorial Hospital.

The nurses raised concerns with HR, but instead of being supported, were told they needed to ‘broaden their mindset’ be more ‘inclusive’, 'compromise' and get 're-educated.'

The Darlington Nursing Union (DNU) is believed to be the first of its kind and has now been launched with three founding principles:

🚨Equality and respect for all workers regardless of their protected characteristics (including both gender reassignment and biological sex).

🚨Securing and defending workers’ rights, dignity and decency at the workplace (including in particular access to safe single-sex areas for changing and hygiene, and protecting women from inappropriate exposure to members of the opposite biological sex).

🚨The right to raise concerns about any genuine workplace issues without fear of retribution, and to have such concerns addressed promptly, constructively and reasonably.

The union is free and it can run alongside any other union membership. It is also not just for nurses and any healthcare professional can join.

If you are a worker who believes in biology, not trans ideology, and want women's spaces protected, don't suffer in silence, get in touch and join the Darlington Nursing Union (DNU).

Direct messages are open or contact info@darlingtonnursingunion.uk .

Courageous NHS Fife nurse, Sandie Peggie, has recently joined…

Ursula Doyle was hounded out of publishing for her gender-critical views:

I have worked in publishing for 30 years. I have left my job after four years of hounding and abuse from peers who think I should not express my GC opinions nor publish authors who share them….

In 2020 I published Kathleen Stock’s influential book on sex and gender, Material Girls. Since then, I have been a target for abuse by colleagues in the book industry, who have used social media to accuse me of – among other things – bigotry, prejudice, transphobia and hatred, often tagging in my employer, Hachette, and Hachette’s Pride network.

Hachette have done nothing to protect me, and have created a hostile working environment for me and anyone else who shares my views. When two of Fleet's authors complained that my views were transphobic, the company agreed to move paperback editions of the authors' books away from the imprint to another part of the business, damaging my reputation both inside and outside the company. I became ill with stress and associated conditions, and finally resigned. I am bringing a claim of discrimination on the grounds of my gender-critical belief (sometimes known as 'sex realism'), and of sex discrimination….

She writes about it at The Critic:

“I am going to dissect every word of this toxic TERF-y trash fire and call out the sheer irresponsible cruelty of platforming a notorious bigot with a release like this. @Docstockk is a [sic] infamous Transphobic [sic] bully of the highest order. Shame on you.”

This was posted on Twitter on 4 February 2021 by someone working in publishing about the forthcoming release of Material Girls by Kathleen Stock, a book which examines why reality matters for feminism. The publisher was Fleet, the imprint I ran at Hachette, a major global corporate publisher. I didn’t take it very seriously at first.

In September, I will appear as the claimant at an employment tribunal, in which Hachette is the respondent. I resigned in April 2024 because I had found it impossible, for various reasons, to do my job.

Over the next few years, this kind of abuse became routine. I was called a terf, a transphobe, a bigot, a far-right conspiracist, a vicious bully, a racist; accused of having been radicalised online as though I were an 18-year-old incel, not a fiftysomething female book publisher; and told I was widely despised by my colleagues and everyone in the industry. These posts would copy in my employers and various staff networks at Hachette. They came from all sorts of people in and around publishing, some anonymous, some not, some who had themselves complained about being bullied online, and some with tens of thousands of followers. One of my most persistent critics was a self-styled publishing commentator who continued to be platformed by the industry at the London Book Fair and was appointed as a judge for the British Book Awards. She was in addition an enthusiastic advocate for a group of young people in publishing who set up a social media account, The Young Refuseniks, which they used to advertise their curation of a “blocklist” — crucially different from a blacklist, you see — which identified all the “transphobes” in the industry, so that people could be kept “safe” from us (because of course, I was on the list). After they realised that blacklists, sorry, blocklists, are considered somewhat problematic, the whole thing disappeared, but not before it had garnered a great deal of support from many in the business.

On and on it goes, the petty vindictiveness of the trans supporters – so sure of their virtue. A grim reminder of the state of the publishing world….

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, there's been trouble at the Archimedes Banya spa. They had a women-only night, but so many bepenised individuals showed up that they decided to run a non-bepenised night as well.

It's almost – phallic and non-phallic – as though they're talking about men and women.

But those trans activists saw what was going on:

A group of transgender activists have vowed to try and crash a “women’s night” at a San Francisco bathhouse after the spa owners introduced one session a month where only biologically-born females can go nude.

Archimedes Banya — a clothing-optional Russian spa — created a “Cultural & Religious Women’s Night” specifically to cater to clients who “observe practices requiring a female-only environment based on sex assigned at birth,” according to its website.

The bathhouse runs another night — dubbed “Inclusive Women’s Night” — that is open to all females, including trans women….

But activists were quick to accuse the spa owners of enacting anti-trans and exclusionary policies — with some vowing to still try and attend the night set aside for those who may adhere to religious or cultural rules.

Well of course. Women can't ever be allowed to have a night for themselves.

Yale history professor Dr Marci Shore, interviewed by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, on Trump, and why we should expect more depravity to come:

America thought it won the Cold War in 1989 but didn’t read the battlefield. It ended on 28 February 2025, when the United States surrendered to Russia in full view of the world.

Among the Americans watching Oval Office theater craft in shame and horror was Dr Marci Shore, a Yale professor of intellectual history who wrote The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution.

She taught me about the Polish aphorism ‘knocking from below’ – just when you think things can’t get any worse, you hear knocking from below.

“That was precisely the phrase that came into my mind when I was watching,” Shore said. “I thought, there is no bottom. You think you are prepared for everything, and then there is still more depravity to come.”…

Dr. Marci Shore: Let me start perhaps with the broken hearts. There are a couple of pieces to that question. The only positive thing I saw about what happened yesterday was that it was such a decisive moment of the end of the affair. I felt like Europeans in particular, perhaps finally, belatedly, and this, of course, started with Munich, were shaken into realizing they absolutely cannot trust Washington.

This idea of America – despite all our problems and our hypocrisy and our racism and our violence – that it was still somehow the world's deepest liberal democracy and the land of the free and the home of the brave, and everything that Soviet communism was not – will, in the end, be the rescuer and guarantor of freedom. I feel like the last vestiges of that are finally dissolving….

Now it's also very possible that in representing himself and doing what is in his best interest, that Trump belongs to Putin in some way. I don't think we know the background reasons for that. We can speculate, but in some sense, it doesn't matter. They clearly were not representing American interests in a broader sense, in terms of the American people. We are now going to be isolated from the rest of the world. They're representing their own interests. And [last Friday], they were representing Russia's interest. It looks very clearly like it was all some kind of a setup….

I have a kind of psychological fascination with the different ways in which people go over to the dark side. Trump is clearly a pathological narcissist, perhaps that and a psychopath. That's his own category. Let's call that a marginal demographic. But what about people like Lindsey Graham, who say that Trump gave us a master class in representing the interest of America.

No. Trump gave us a master class in moral nihilism, and Lindsey Graham gave us a master class in selling one’s soul to the devil….

Worth reading in full. 

I don't think it's of very much use to speculate what hold Putin may or may not have on Trump. It's more that, at bottom, they share the same understanding of the world, where people – little people – don't matter, and the powerful and strong get to decide, just because they're powerful and strong.

It's these "minor" infractions that really show the horror of living in North Korea: teenage boys, aged 14-15, sentenced for using ‘foreign’ gaming nicknames. Every aspect of life must be controlled. From the Daily NK:

Three teenage children of North Korean army security officers were sentenced to unpaid labor for “nonsocialist behavior” earlier this month.

“Investigators from the General Political Bureau discovered that three teenage boys, whose parents are state security officers with the IX Corps, had used South Korean-style nicknames while playing video games. The Bureau determined this matter required serious consequences and sentenced the teenagers to two months of unpaid labor,” a source in North Hamgyong province told Daily NK recently.

According to the source, the three middle school students, aged 14-15, chose video game nicknames that used the South Korean spelling “Lee” instead of the North Korean “Ri” and included English words like “dragon” and “king.”

Their nicknames were flagged during a General Political Bureau investigation into nonsocialist behavior within the military.

“Using ‘Lee’ instead of ‘Ri’ clearly represents South Korean cultural influence, while terms like ‘dragon’ or ‘king’ are obvious examples of Western culture,” the Bureau stated in its decision to punish the teenagers.

“Since these teenagers are all children of senior military security officers, the Bureau concluded that mere self-criticism statements would be insufficient. They notified the Socialist Patriotic Youth League branch at the teenagers’ school about the behavior and requested special measures,” the source said.

The teenagers subsequently faced harsh criticism from the Youth League’s school branch and were required to write multiple self-criticism statements over several days.

Their punishment extended beyond this – they were also ordered to perform two months of unpaid labor, with the case escalated to the provincial Youth League branch….

The punishment shocked both the families and the broader community.

“Such incidents rarely happen in Chongjin,” the source noted.

“The parents are experiencing severe distress watching their children subjected to forced labor. Local residents were stunned to learn that young boys could be forced into unpaid labor.

“The teenagers themselves suffered the greatest shock. Having always believed their powerful parents in military security would protect them, they were terrified and astonished that this could happen to them,” the source added.

Yesterday's report on NHS antisemitism:

NHS staff are more likely than members of the public to perpetrate antisemitic abuse in hospitals and doctors’ surgeries since the October 7 Hamas attacks, according to complaints compiled by an influential charity.

The file includes a Jewish doctor being given a hijab as a secret santa present and a patient having pro-Palestine stickers plastered across his room as he lay fighting for his life.

Meanwhile, a group of therapists who complained about a colleague posting messages supporting Hamas online were subject to a countercomplaint for “micro-aggressions”. A patient waiting to be discharged from hospital was told: “Get your Jewish ambulance to come and get you.”…

One woman GP said: “Jewish staff are called baby killers and guilty of genocide and other hateful, untrue slurs. There is a silent campaign to intimidate by lecturers and senior staff wearing keffiyehs [the black and white Palestinian scarf] and Free Palestine badges to work.”

It starts in medical school. A letter in the Times this morning:

Sir, It is hardly a surprise that NHS staff are more likely than members of the public to perpetrate antisemitic hatred, given my experience at medical school since October 7. As a Jewish medical student I have seen my colleagues, all of whom are future doctors, go unchecked in spreading Jew-hatred and expressing support for Hamas. One would have hoped that our university leadership, whose raison d’être is ensuring the safety and quality of future NHS staff, would have intervened sharply to cut this hatred off at the source. However, every report of antisemitism has fallen on deaf ears. This leaves Jewish students abandoned, and the antisemites emboldened. The discrimination we see on our wards starts there.

That is, in universities. From an anonymous UK university professor in the JC:

Take this remarkable book launch to be hosted by one of our esteemed, publicly funded universities, LSE, next month: Understanding Hamas and Why That Matters. According to its blurb, the book features “a series of rich and probing conversations with leading experts” that examine Hamas’s “critical shift from social and religious activism to national political engagement” and “its transformation from early anti-Jewish tendencies to a stance that differentiates between Judaism and Zionism,” among other subjects.

Now cast your minds back over a year ago to October 7, and every day since, when Israeli and other civilians have either been killed in Hamas terror tunnels or starved, tortured, raped and exchanged for hundreds of fanatic murderers. Think about the GoPro videos Hamas took of their crazed killing spree; their proud boasts back home to families about how many Jews they’ve butchered with their bare hands.

Now think about how, since the 1960s, Western higher education has been infiltrated by a steady stream of “experts” paid for by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Republic of Iran and other nefarious actors, to spread claims against Israel and promote the term “Islamophobia” – originally coined by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s, the same Muslim Brotherhood funded and supported by Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s.

Yet the LSE Middle East Centre desperately clings to the university’s Code of Practice on Free Speech:

“We endeavour to provide a platform to facilitate discourse on contemporary matters by encouraging critical debate, within the law, where the views of all parties are treated with respect.”

The views of Christians, Jews, and other religious people do not appear – at time of writing – to figure in this event, nor do they figure much in academia generally.

For instance, a session at the National Union of Students conference voted this year to ban its Jewish student group. Calls to “globalise the intifada” sprang up on university campuses around Britain – a call which the largest university lecturers’ union (among others) also backed.

We must urgently save academia from such racist, anti-inclusive incitement to violence. We must stop subsidising substandard degree courses on which paid agitators get to spread their poison and we must stop handing out qualifications like candy from institutions that were once beacons of intellectual excellence and honest inquiry to people who couldn’t find Israel on a map.

Our esteemed halls of learning have become, in the words of Professor James Orr “ivory asylums” that seem to care more about the diversity of immutable characteristics than diversity of opinion and genuine intellectual debate, let alone the truth of empirical evidence, historic fact and contemporary data.

And so, Black Lives Matter, except in Africa where black Christians are being decapitated and young girls kidnapped as sex slaves.

LGBTQ+ rights matter, except in Islamic countries that execute homosexuals (in Yemen you can be crucified for being gay).

And women should always be believed, unless they’re Jewish, in which case even videos of grotesque sexual torture, videos made by their torturers themselves and posted by them live on social media, must be Israeli propaganda.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

George Orwell, 1984

Peter Brookes in the Times this morning:

Times lead:

President Trump said he found it “easier” to deal with Russia than Ukraine as he claimed that President Putin was “doing what anybody else would do” by intensifying his bombing of the war-torn country.

The US president, who has been widely criticised for his willingness to trust Putin and see the conflict from Russia’s perspective, added that the Kremlin leader “wants to end the war … and I think he’s going to be more generous than he has to be”

The Kremlin's most useful idiot.

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph:

Sex is real, and it matters. In sport, this elemental truth cannot be affirmed loudly enough. It is impossible to mount any effective defence of the female category without first stating why the inclusion of trans athletes compromises its integrity, namely because they are biologically male. When the fundamental physiological differences related to sex – whether muscle mass, bone density, or cardiovascular capacity – directly influence performance and fairness, “biological male” becomes a crucial clarifying term for the characteristics that affect competition.

So far, so uncontroversial, you might think. And yet when I described Blair Hamilton, a transgender goalkeeper signed for Sutton United Women by a transgender manager, as a biological male in these pages last September, the player complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) that the label constituted a “transphobic dog whistle”. According to this argument, the description disregarded Hamilton’s “lived experience and affirmed gender identity”, not to mention “personal journey as a transgender woman”.

Six months on, the press watchdog has rejected this complaint, instead determining that The Telegraph’s use of the term was “genuinely relevant” to the issues raised by a biologically male goalkeeper competing for a female football team. “The committee did not consider that the term in the context in which it had been used was belittling or demeaning to the complainant, nor insulting in a manner that it considered pejorative or prejudicial,” it added.

The verdict marks a significant watershed. It can seem sometimes in this debate as if we have passed through the looking glass, with years of pandering to self-ID lobbyists threatening a situation where athletes had to be accepted as whatever sex they purported to be. Somehow, this fallacy reached the highest levels of global sport, with the International Olympic Committee’s former medical director Dr Richard Budgett infamously declaring in 2021: “Everybody accepts that trans women are women.”

Au contraire, Dr Budgett. In 2025, the conclusion of the UK press regulator flies in the face of that ludicrous pronouncement, supporting a report that trans women are in fact biological males – and establishing that it is legitimate for journalists to remind their readers of this essential, indisputable fact.

It's astonishing that we've reached this stage – that it needs to be confirmed that the importance of sex in sport is actually of profound significance – but yes, good news.

The IPSO ruling places the immutable laws of human biology above emotive personal testimony. Hamilton, who in addition to being a goalkeeper in a women’s team is an academic specialising in the impact of gender-affirmative care on the athletic performance of transgender athletes, had appealed for a definition of womanhood “beyond mere anatomy”, rejecting any reference to being biologically male on the grounds that this “inaccurately reflected an outdated understanding that did not account for the complexity of gender”. Except anatomy is not some frivolous detail here. It is the centrepiece of the entire discussion: that men and women are different, and that the delineation of sports by sex serves as a crucial protection for fairness and safety.

For too long, there has been a form of coerced speech on this subject, where pronouns mattered more than practicalities, where affirmation was prized above accuracy. It is still enraging to recall Thomas Bach, the outgoing IOC president, declaring at the height of last summer’s boxing scandal at the Paris Olympics that womanhood could somehow be validated by an “F” in an athlete’s passport.

People don't fall for this bullshit any more.

Now journalists should no longer feel cowed into toeing the activists’ line. It is critical that all reporters seeking to report the science are not intimidated into falsifying reality or into fooling their readership. I hope, too, that this IPSO decision has repercussions beyond the industry. I know of academics who have been furiously rebuked within their profession for going down the “biological male” route, even when they are guilty of nothing more than the faithful recording of facts. So, let us throw out the reflexive accusations of transphobia once and for all. This, ultimately, is about honest and transparent reporting of an issue at the heart of fair play. “Transphobic dog whistle”? How about just settling for the truth?

And abandoning this new Lysekoism once and for all.

The whole American political establishment – Democrat and Republican – are complicit in the election of Trump. Democrat support for the crazy/unpopular policy of men identifying into women’s sport is just one symptom. Maybe this is an early sign of a potential course correction. pic.twitter.com/Uh9zOM0Sbm

— Sonia Sodha (@soniasodha) March 6, 2025

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Maybe so:

California Governor Gavin Newsom has broken with many elected Democrats by saying he thinks it is "deeply unfair" to allow transgender women and girls to compete in female sports.

Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential contender who leads one of the most liberal states in the US and has long been a trailblazer on LGBT rights, made the comments on his new podcast.

"I think it's an issue of fairness. I completely agree with you on that," Newsom told conservative figure Charlie Kirk. "It is an issue of fairness, it's deeply unfair. We've got to own that. We've got to acknowledge it."

Newsom's change of tone comes amid a debate within his party over the extent to which cultural factors played a role in their resounding defeat in November, when Republicans won the White House and both chambers of Congress.

Note how the problem is framed (by the BBC here) as banning trans people from female sport. The issue is: banning men from female sport – but they never say that.

Anyway, other Dems don't seem too keen. Apart from Newsom, they've learnt nothing.

A number of Democrats quickly denounced the governor's comments.

"We woke up profoundly sickened and frustrated by these remarks," a statement from California's LGBT legislative caucus read….

Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot called Newsom's remarks about trans athletes "disgusting".

Pramila Jayapal, a left-wing Democrat representing a district in the north-western state of Washington, told Politico that her party should not "take the bait and give into their anti-trans people rhetoric".

Newsom makes a strange champion of sex realism, mind:

Newsom made the state the first sanctuary for transgender youth and protected school curriculums that included LGBT history.

Last year he signed legislation that made California the first state to bar school districts from requiring staff to notify parents if their child changed gender identity.

Making an early bid for leader of the Dems? Well, at least he's now woken up and smelled the coffee, however cynical his move may be. And there doesn't seem to be anyone else. Kamala Harris has disappeared off the face of the earth. Tim Walz was stumped yesterday when CNN asks him who leads the Democratic party….