Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • A mouthpiece for Kremlin propaganda

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  • Putin’s Russia “a role model for the new Great America”

    Are Trump's outrageous views on Ukraine influenced by Putin's favourite philosopher Alexander Dugin? According to Marc Bennetts in the Times, Dugin has quite a following on the Trumpian American Right:

    Like other hardliners in Moscow, Alexander Dugin is delighted by President Trump’s rapprochement with Russia and Washington’s growing rift with Europe.

    Dugin, 63, is an ultra-nationalist writer whose belief that Ukraine should not be a sovereign state has been repeated by President Putin. He has spent years reaching out to conservatives in the United States. His pro-Kremlin views on everything from the future of the global order to immigration are now finding echoes in the comments of senior US officials.

    “Everything has changed now [in the United States]; the ideology has changed, and [Trump’s] ideology is remarkably in line with ours,” Dugin told Russian state media after JD Vance, the US vice- president, criticised European democracy in Munich last week.

    Dugin’s books and essays have been translated into English and are increasingly popular among the American right. A recent publication criticised “the twin diseases of liberalism and western political modernity” and praised Trump’s war on the “strangling tentacles” of woke culture. Dugin has also suggested that Putin’s Russia could act as “a role model for the new Great America” that he says Trump is building….

    One of his biggest admirers in the US is Jack Posobiec, an activist who was invited by the Pentagon to accompany Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, on his trip to Europe last week, according to The Washington Post. On Thursday, Posobiec said on social media that he was travelling in Ukraine with Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, and had met President Zelensky in Kyiv.

    Posobiec has advertised Dugin’s 1997 book The Foundations of Geopolitics, which was once reportedly required reading at the Russian general staff’s academy, to his followers on social media. The book called for Russia to restore its influence after the collapse of the Soviet Union through alliances and annexations and for the Kremlin’s special services to “support isolationist tendencies” in the United States.

    In 2018 Dugin met Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and ideologue during his first presidency. Bannon said he had urged Dugin to agitate for a union between Russia and the West that would be founded on ultra-conservative values, according to Benjamin R Teitelbaum, an American author who interviewed both men for his book War for Eternity.

    Dugin was introduced to a wider American audience last year by Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, who travelled to Moscow to interview him. Dugin used the interview to praise Putin and warn of a dystopian future that awaited the West unless radical steps were taken.

    “For Russia’s propagandists, it provided a successful entry into American living rooms,” wrote Julia Davies, a US media analyst, in an article published by the Center for European Policy Analysis. “Russian propagandists have long dreamt of injecting their ideas and twisted rendition of history into the American mainstream.”

    He's strongly behind the Islamic world in its battle against Israel, and espouses what has been called a particularly Russian form of classic fascism. And he has old links with Aleister Crowley and Nazi Satanism. Lovely fella.

    Also:  “I think we should kill, kill, kill [Ukrainians], there can’t be any other talk.”

  • “To be Jewish has meant experiencing a crushing disappointment in the world since the Hamas attacks”

    A powerful piece from Seth Mandel at Commentary – The Meaning of Kfir Bibas:

    If Hamas’s statement is true, this week will bring a tragic, though not unexpected, close to a painful episode: the fate of the rest of the Bibas family.

    Yarden Bibas was released this month by Hamas after nearly 500 days in captivity, and the terror group is claiming it will soon deliver the bodies of his wife, Shiri, and two sons, Ariel and Kfir. Ariel was four when he was taken on Oct. 7, 2023, and Kfir was nine months old.

    To be Jewish has meant experiencing a crushing disappointment in the world since the Hamas attacks that started this war. A stray line in one of the many articles about the Bibas family today unintentionally offers a crystal clear explanation for that disappointment. “For many Israelis,” the New York Times writes, “the story of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.”

    That sentence is accurate. But in another universe, one where the “international community” cares a whit for justice and human decency, the sentence would read this way: “For everyone, the story of the Bibas family has become a symbol of the brutality of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.”

    In such a world, the faces of the Bibas children would be everywhere at all times. In the world in which we live, by contrast, posters with those faces get torn down from bulletin boards. In the kind of world we hope to deserve to inhabit, no children’s charity or NGO would go a day without drawing attention to Kfir and Ariel and the monsters who stole them.

    The crimes against the Bibas family are indeed the symbol of the anti-civilizational menace that is Hamas—but also of the cowardice of the political and cultural leaders of the enlightened West. Yes, we should be ashamed of our fellow Americans, who not only won’t mention the Bibas family but won’t even learn the name of a single American hostage held in Gaza throughout the war….

    As the “pro-Palestinian” mobs filled the streets of every major city to celebrate Hamas’s slaughter, Jews around the world looked at them dumbfounded; they kidnapped a baby. How much does one have to hate Jews to side with the monsters who kidnap babies? A lot, is the answer—an unpleasant realization Jews came to over the past 16 months.

    Kfir’s face became a symbol of the conflict because it represented a line that had been crossed and cannot be uncrossed. Members of Congress giddily attended tentifada demonstrations that were no longer simply “pro-Palestine” or “anticolonial”; they were about defending those who stole Kfir from his home and dragged him to Gaza where, according to Hamas, he died. And it is impossible for the rest of us to pretend that we didn’t see a chunk of society, whether in person or online, rush to cross that line and cheer the people who kidnapped a baby….

  • Regretting his self-ID vote

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    Added: Catriona Stewart at the Spectator:

    So what has prompted this belated change of heart? Last week made clear that the majority of the Scottish public supports Sandie Peggie, while YouGov polling revealed a growing majority are sceptical of trans activist demands. There is a straightforward understanding that a woman should not be compelled to share intimate spaces with a person of the opposite sex should she not want to. That should not be controversial.

    It has also been clear in recent polling that the majority of the Scottish electorate does not support Scottish Labour. Only the most terrible cynic would suggest that Sarwar is suddenly seeing the issue of gender self-identification with new eyes in light of his plummeting polling figures. Yet with polling falling and Sarwar’s path to Bute House seeming ever more distant, the Scottish Labour leader’s sudden support for women’s sex-based rights appears as a shallow attempt to flow with the turning of the tide on the issue.

  • A “Western colonial patriarchal worldview”

    Jo Bartosch at UnHerd:

    The United Nations has been dragged into the global conflict between the defenders of biological reality and the demands of transgender activists. UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Reem Alsalem, has dared to acknowledge the existence of two sexes in her reports — at once a fact so mundane and an act so rare — that over 200 NGOs have signed a letter denouncing her.

    According to this outraged coalition, co-led by Planned Parenthood International (PPI) and Women Deliver (WD), Alsalem’s “sex-based” approach is nothing less than a “Western colonial patriarchal worldview” that “undermines decades of progress.” Apparently, recognising that men commit violence against women “further marginalizes vulnerable groups, including trans and gender-diverse persons, increasing the risk of violence and hatred.” Because nothing threatens safety quite like correctly identifying the sex of rapists, wife beaters or extremist religious leaders who stone rape victims. The furious missive is the latest attack on Alsalem, an expert who has faced calls for her dismissal from her UN role for over two years, alongside constant accusations that she is transphobic.

    Bizarrely, to the NGO set who enjoy expense-account lunches in Geneva while churning out unreadable reports, Alsalem’s insistence on biological sex is supposedly rooted in white supremacy. As the letter states: “The category of ‘woman’ has always been racialized, with white women expected to enforce binary gender norms violently upon anyone deemed non-conforming.” Presumably, they believe that before the arrival of Western colonialists, the Global South was blissfully free of the concept of male and female, with multi-gender people just banging bumpy bits together at random and producing theybies. This inherently racist and sexist drivel is what now passes for “feminism” among most of the over-credentialed, under-experienced elite at international development agencies.

    It's one thing to see this "inherently racist and sexist drivel" at universities – quite another coming from the UN.

    Alsalem’s work, which exposes the brutal reality of male violence — child marriage, sex trafficking, femicide — triggers the #BeKind conformists because it refuses to kowtow to their luxury beliefs. Anyone with a functioning moral compass should be horrified by these crimes, not by the language used to describe them. 

     

  • Hamas propaganda promoted as reliable fact

    The Telegraph has picked up on the accusations made by David Collier about that BBC Gaza documentary:

    The BBC has been accused of focusing a documentary about ordinary Palestinians on the son of a Hamas government minister without disclosing the connection.

    The documentary, Gaza: How To Survive a War Zone, was broadcast on Monday evening as an account of the conflict through the eyes of three children whose lives have been devastated by Israel’s military campaign against Hamas.

    The hour-long film was narrated by a 14-year-old English-speaking boy named Abdullah, who is listed in the film’s credits under his full name, Abdullah Al-Yazouri.

    It has since been claimed that Abdullah’s father, Ayman Alyazouri, is a senior figure who currently holds the position of deputy minister of agriculture in the Hamas-run government.

    Critics have said the BBC has allowed itself to be used as a propaganda platform for Hamas by giving airtime to the child of one of its senior figures.

    The child’s alleged family background was not revealed to viewers and it is not clear if the film crew were aware of the Hamas links….

    The row comes only a few days after Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television, warned that the broadcaster risks becoming a mouthpiece for Hamas.

    Mr Cohen told The Telegraph that the latest revelations confirmed his fears.

    He said: “This appears to be another appalling example of journalistic failure and anti-Israel bias. The BBC appears to have given an hour of prime-time coverage to the son of a senior member of the Hamas terrorist group.

    “Questions must be asked as to whether the BBC carried out the most basic journalistic checks.”

    Mr Cohen added: “Licence fee payers across the UK are being repeatedly conned into paying for Hamas PR. There can be no doubt now that the BBC has a very serious problem with the quality of its journalism and anti-Israel bias.”

  • Trans & Non-Binary Inclusion in Recreational Cricket

    From Sanchez Manning at the Telegraph:

    There has been growing criticism across the country from female players, parents and cricketing officials of the transgender policy introduced by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) – the sport’s governing body. In a long-awaited update published last October, the ECB banned transgender women from its new professional and semi-professional competitions. But the rules continued to allow trans women to play in women’s teams at grassroots level.

    Now it transpires that, weeks after the row first surfaced last autumn, the ECB organised training for staff involved in grassroots cricket across the country, by a trans activist group, Gendered Intelligence.

    The group opposed last year’s ban by the Government of the sale and supply of puberty blockers to under-18s and has caused controversy by giving seminars in schools to children as young as four on changing gender.

    An online seminar, Trans & Non-Binary Inclusion in Recreational Cricket, was held by the ECB on Dec 4. The advice given to coaches and other figures involved in grassroots cricket included avoiding the use of “collective terms” such as “boys” and “ladies” and considering “alternatives e.g. ‘players’, ‘team’, ‘everyone’, ‘folks’.” The presentation also stated: “Assume people choose the facilities that are the best fit for them.”

    Further guidance, by Gendered Intelligence, which was distributed by the ECB following the seminar, included a document entitled Including Trans People and Non-Binary People in Grassroots Sport, which claimed it is a “myth” trans women are “disproportionately tall, heavy and strong, and dangerous to play with or against”.

    “Neither safety nor fairness are absolute, and both are contextual,” the report added.

    “We need to examine our understandings of what constitutes fairness and what creates safety and apply those understandings to everyone.”

    Indeed we do. Which means understanding that men should not be allowed in women's sport. That's fairness.

    It further advised that trans women should be allowed to access female facilities such as changing rooms and toilets, while reiterating the point that clubs should be encouraged to practice “sharing pronouns” and avoid terms such as “ladies” and “lads”.

    And the ECB goes along with this. If they see the problem at professional and semi-professional level, why don't they see it at the recreational level? – where, as the article notes, girls are being put off cricket by having to face men who bowl a lot faster and hit the ball a lot harder. They seem to be seduced by the siren calls of inclusivity – which of course is inclusivity for a few man, but exclusivity for the girls.

  • Ideological flaws

    Those captured North Korean troops in Ukraine….

    North Korean authorities have launched a harsh crackdown to suppress rumors about their troops being captured in Ukraine, Daily NK has learned….

    The new directive labels such rumors as “fabrications resulting from enemy schemes to suffocate the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” and warns that “even the slightest spread or mention of such falsehoods” will be treated as treason.

    “Political and security departments across the military are conducting intensive indoctrination, declaring these rumors as enemy scaremongering and instructing soldiers never to discuss them,” the source said. The order specifically targets liaison personnel who contact the public, promising severe punishment for spreading information about troop deployments or captured soldiers.

    The military’s response makes it clear that they refuse to officially acknowledge either the Russian deployment or the capture of North Korean personnel.

    The crackdown extends beyond military personnel to civilians. “The Ministry of State Security has designated soldiers’ families for special ideological inspection,” the source revealed. “Provincial branches must now monitor these families’ monthly movements and conduct ideological indoctrination when deemed necessary.” The order specifies that individuals may face punishment if authorities discover “ideological flaws.”

    Telling the truth: an ideological flaw.

  • Bringing back segregation

    The American academic left continues to disappear up its own backside.


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    "No. I don't… when you're being integrated into institutions, into a culture that's a supremacist culture… why are we being integrated into that?"

    Ruha Benjamin is professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. "She works on the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly the intersection of race, justice, and technology."

    In December 2024, Benjamin spoke at a gathering of the National Association of Independent Schools, where representatives from 60 Jewish schools were in attendance; her remarks were condemned as antisemitic by Jewish groups. A student in attendance described her remarks as "allud[ing] to Israelis – Jews – as genocidal,  and portray[ing] them as immoral beings, who ethnic cleanse, and annihilate an entire people.' She implied that Israelis lack humanity, that they are individuals who do not believe in the 'seemingly radical notion that all life is sacred.'"

    I know. What a surprise. But it goes down well:

    Benjamin is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Fund Freedom Scholar Award, fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, and Institute for Advanced Study, among others. In 2017 she received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. In 2024, Benjamin was named a MacArthur Fellow.

  • A propaganda outlet for a radical Islamic terror group

    Yesterday I posted a tweet from David Collier, on the BBC Gaza documentary which aired last night. He now expands on that at his website – BBC put on a Hamas Propaganda Pantomime. It's too long and complex to copy here – just go and have a read.

    The current hierarchy at the BBC has turned a once respected state broadcaster into a propaganda outlet for a radical Islamic terror group.