Mick Hartley

Just shocking.

Why on earth is the UK Government giving more money to @UNRWA?

You can't talk about tackling extremism in the UK and then literally send cash to groups that helped carry out the Oct 7 atrocities with Hamas.

Are you completely mad? pic.twitter.com/H7o9LyVt4j

— David Collier (@mishtal) January 29, 2025

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As has been said here often enough, UNRWA are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph:

Change happens, according to the famous Hemingway quote about his bankruptcy, “gradually, then suddenly”. The same could now be said of the dismantling of gender ideology. Its moral bankruptcy, a decade of sterilising and mutilating children’s bodies, looks to be over.

In the flurry of executive orders that Donald Trump has signed since re-entering the White House, here is the big one: prohibiting gender transitions for people under the age of 19.

“It is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures,” reads the executive order, entitled Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.

This means no more puberty blockers, no more operations, double mastectomies, castration, “facial feminisations” and all the rest of it. No more irreversible “gender affirming care”.

The Democrats, still apparently stunned into stupor, appear to have no understanding of how this issue affected their loss in November’s election, and continue to defend the indefensible. All of this will now be fought out in court cases and arguments over Medicaid and insurance.

How did we get to this? How did anyone think that telling children that they were born in the wrong body, and that those bodies could be surgically and chemically rearranged was sensible? But this is hardly the first time medics have caused harm.

There's a grim history of medical fads, like lobotomies, that now seem barbaric. Others, for instance the refrigerator mother theory of autism, fitted in with psychological theories of the time but have long since been discarded. Somehow gender theory combined the two: barbaric in its treatment of supposed "trans kids", and faddish in its embrace of postmodern queer theory and the like. But gender theory has had a far wider effect than any of its predecessors. It's been embraced from the top, by governments on down. And the damage it's done has been, commensurately, much deeper.

For in the end, gender ideology is a belief system, a cult, a religion. It is entirely faith-based. Science and reality do not figure. Yet as this belief system starts to crumble, how do those who believed in it walk it back?

They believed above all that they were the good people, that sex was a spectrum, not a binary. They believed that legitimising the fetishistic behaviour of middle-aged men was the new civil rights movement. That this group had little in common with ever-increasing numbers of deeply unhappy teenage girls who did not want to grow into adult women was obvious. Except to the cultist.

Trans became an umbrella with its own language, and the righteous and the modern took it to be the one true faith. Stonewall spread this ideology. So did the BBC, The Guardian, most liberal media, the Labour Party, the Fawcett Society, the NHS, the “humanists”, the entire art world, and academia – in other words, the cultural elite….

Few will admit they were wrong or misled. They will simply rewrite history. Just like those who sought to relieve the agonies of deeply depressed patients through an ice pick in their brains, they will say their experimental treatments did help some, that they were at the forefront of a new kind of medicine.

Those who cheered this on will keep quiet while they scrabble in the dirt for the next civil rights battle. They picked the wrong one. It would take actual bravery to say this in public. Their silence is deafening.

William Henry Jackson: the Mississippi River ca. 1902. "St. Paul from High Bridge."

[Photo: Shorpy/William Henry Jackson, Detroit Photographic Company]

Fun and games at Rape Crisis Scotland and the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre, where former head Mridul Wadhwa, beloved of Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP, was forced to resign last year after pushback to his imposition of trans ideology. In, of all places, a rape centre. He shouldn't have been in the job anyway – it was advertised for women only – but this was Scotland, and he was trans, so…yes, it was a shoo-in.

Now:

A rape crisis charity embroiled in a transgender row has dropped a pledge to issue a definition of women, The Telegraph can reveal.

Rape Crisis Scotland (RCS) admitted it was no longer planning to publish a definition, despite previously promising to do so, following the recommendations of independent expert review.

Vicky Ling was commissioned to investigate Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre (ERCC) after a damning tribunal ruling found it was operating an “extreme” version of gender identity theory under the leadership of Mridul Wadhwa, a biological male who identifies as female.

Her report found that the centre had failed to properly protect women-only spaces and had “caused damage to some survivors”.

Ms Ling called on RCS to devise and publish a “shared definition of woman/female” to be adopted across its network.

The charity, which receives more than £3 million in annual funding from the SNP government, had previously accepted Ms Ling’s recommendations in full. Sandy Brindley, its chief executive, claimed last September that work on a definition had been going on for nearly a year.

It's so complicated. The greatest philosophical minds are stumbling over this one. Well, only the greatest philosophical minds are stumbling over this one. Everyone else knows that a woman is an adult human female.

Tess White, the Scottish Tory shadow equalities minister, claimed the “shocking U-turn” showed RCS “haven’t learned any lessons” from a series of scandals.

“Once again women have been badly let down by an organisation that is supposed to support them, but which is failing to show any common sense,” she said.

“It is unacceptable that RCS still cannot give women reassurance that they will be able to access single-sex spaces at these centres.

“Ultimately, the SNP’s reckless self-ID policies are to blame for this betrayal of women and girls.”

Meanwhile, life goes on:

The Sunday Post reported at the weekend that in an internal consultation document about new rules, RCS stated that a woman can be “anyone who self-identifies as a woman”.

In October we had the case of a girl footballer with suspected autism threatened with a ban by the FA for asking a man with a beard if he was a man. The point, of course, was that this man was pretending to be a woman, playing in a woman's football team, so the poor girl was naturally accused of transphobia. Like the emperor's new clothes, only she was prepared to speak up about what was real, while everyone else went along with the charade.

And here we go again. From the Telegraph:

A second teenage footballer has been handed a six-match ban for asking whether adult transgender opponents she was playing were men.

An 18-year-old, whom Telegraph Sport has been told has both ADHD and learning difficulties, was sanctioned by a National Serious Case Panel in a case with parallels to that for which a 17-year-old girl with suspected autism was handed a similar suspension.

The second teen was charged by her county FA over comments she made to a referee during a match in September, the same month she turned 18. It was alleged she said: “Ref, have you checked if all of their players are eligible to play? Look at their ’keeper and for example their number 10 is obviously a man,” or something similar.

She was banned for six matches, two of which were suspended, after accepting the charge brought under national Football Association rules that allow those born male to play in women’s matches. The teen was also forced to undergo an “online education course”, while her club were handed seven disciplinary points.

An investigation into her comments required her to provide a written statement, which Telegraph Sport has been told she needed assistance in composing. In it she said she had sought guidance from the referee due to her trans opponents’ “extremely aggressive” style of play. She also said she had not taken her ADHD medication on the day in question because “another medical condition” had prevented her from doing so.

The disciplinary proceedings were triggered by a complaint made by the opposition club, which included the claim that she had said to their non-trans players: “This is a man.” She has admitted trying to ask those players if their team-mates were biologically male after failing to get clarity from the ref, who, she wrote in her statement, had threatened to send her off if she continued to quiz him on the matter.

Speaking to Telegraph Sport on condition of anonymity, the teenager said of her ban: “It kind of made me hate football.”

Yes, it kind of made me hate football too. Well, the FA at least. 

She also said she feared she had been gagged from asking questions or raising concerns about playing against those born male. “If I say anything else, I get another six-game ban,” she said. “So I can’t even stand up for myself at this point.”

I posted about Settler Colonialism here back in November, having just read Adam Kirsch's On Settler Colonialism. Now here's Helen Dale, who's also just read Kirsch's book. She has a specifically Australian take.

Many of the world’s worst ideas come from the United States. Critical race theory and affirmative action, for example, are all-American. Even when bad ideas lack American origins, US academics manage to execute hostile takeovers of (say) French nonsense like postmodernism or queer theory early on in proceedings. This is then exported in over-simplified form to the rest of the world, to other countries’ considerable detriment. Even the American political system—which works well enough for Americans in their own country—tends not to travel. US-style presidential regimes are “one of this country’s most dangerous exports,” in Aaron Sorkin’s memorable West Wing phrase, “responsible for wreaking havoc in over thirty countries.”

However, other countries can also wreak ideological havoc, even quite small countries. It’s worse, I suspect, when those small countries have a reputation for peace and prosperity and order and competence in areas other than academic scholarship. Australia is one such country. And Australia is responsible for about half—perhaps more—of the settler-colonial theory now exploding metaphorically all over US university campuses and literally all over Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon.

It's worth reading in full. Her conclusion:

Everyone on earth is living on “stolen” land. Move on.

Einat Wilf again:

Stop talking about a ceasefire. Lebanon should be at PEACE with Israel, says former member of Knesset Dr. @EinatWilf. pic.twitter.com/dSREA9nXgm

— Israeli Citizen Spox (@IsrCitizenSpox) January 28, 2025

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Now the malign influence of Tehran/Hezbollah has gone, why not?

The situation with Hamas looks intractable: there seems to be no way that Gaza can be rid of them, simply because there's no alternative. There's no civil society to replace them. The destruction of Hezbollah, on the other hand, might well turn out to be the most significant positive effect of Israel's military campaigns since October 7th.

Philip Colbert's lobsters have escaped the Saatchi Gallery, and now infest Duke of York Square on King's Road:

You noticed the urinal homage to Marcel Duchamp on that top lobster? Of course you did. Possible homage to Van Gogh with the sunflowers and Warhol with the soup? And Yayoi Kusama with the polka dots?

Colbert's website: "I became an artist when I became a lobster."

From the Times. The bad news:

Claims of two-tier policing are an extreme right-wing narrative, according to an internal Home Office review that recommended sweeping changes to the UK’s approach to combating extremism.

The Home Office document also cites how right-wing extremists “frequently exploit” the grooming gangs scandal — described as “alleged group-based sexual abuse” — to promote anti-Muslim sentiment.

It recommended that the UK’s approach to tackling extremism should no longer be based on specific ideologies such as Islamism or the far right but “on behaviours and activity of concern”. This is because of the “dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see”, it added.

A set of "sweep it all under the table" recommendations, in other words.

And the good news.

After the details of the report were leaked, Dan Jarvis, the security minister, said he and the home secretary had rejected the report’s recommendations despite having commissioned the review.

It's the Home Office. The Civil Service. It's how they think. Fortunately the government doesn't seem to agree.

The report, first obtained by Policy Exchange, a conservative think tank, and seen by The Times, contained 38 recommendations to better combat extremism in the UK, including an increase in the police recording of non-crime hate incidents. It proposed reversing the code of conduct introduced by the previous government that ordered police to record non-criminal hate incidents only if there was a serious risk of harm.

Yep, that should do the trick. More police recording of non-crime hate incidents. Of course.

Other recommendations included forcing social media companies to proactively remove any content that encouraged rioting or violent disorder and adding more aggravating factors to hate crime laws to ensure those convicted get longer sentences.

I imagine a strengthening of laws against "Islamophobia" would also go down well.

Policy Exchange warned that the changes proposed would play down the threat of Islamic extremism. The Home Office document itself cited the head of MI5 stating that its counterterrorist work remained three-quarters focused on Islamist extremism and a quarter on extreme right-wing terrorism.

Paul Stott and Andrew Gilligan, of Policy Exchange, warned in their report on the leaked document: “This new approach risks swamping already stretched counterextremism interveners and counterterror police with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of new cases, making it more likely that dangerous people will be missed.

“Some of the definitions of extremism also threaten free speech, defining aspects of normal and legitimate political debate as extremist.”…

Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said it was draconian to describe those making claims of two-tier policing as extremists. He said: “Commenting on police response to incidents is not far-right. We live in a democracy and people are entitled to debate the way we are policed. That’s not far-right; that’s part of legitimate debate in a democracy. You can agree or disagree with these views but freedom of speech means they have the right to express them.”

In the next few days we will hear a lot “But, but, but what will replace UNRWA?”
My answer?
Simple: Palestinian Responsibility. https://t.co/4FE2DemOa7

— Dr. Einat Wilf (@EinatWilf) January 28, 2025

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See here for more from Einat Wilf on UNRWA.