Mick Hartley

From Tottenham Marshes to Springfield Park:

In contrast to yesterday's gloomier prognosis from Joshua Muravckik, here's a touch of optimism for New Year's Day from Seth Frantzman at the JC:

Iran has seen its proxies weakened and it knows it wasted huge resources on Hezbollah, Assad, the Houthis and Iraq. It hollowed out Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria and bankrupted them. Then Iranian-backed militias fed off these countries until there was nothing left.

Lebanon is a disaster because of Hezbollah. Yemen is a disaster because of the Houthis. The only truly successful part of Iraq is the Kurdistan region where Iran’s militias are not present. Iran is a predatory regime that has destroyed the Middle East – and many countries now understand this. They see the ruin in Gaza and in Syria and understand Iran’s hands are behind this.

Could this ruin lead to a new birth of hope in the region? The Arab Spring was supposed to be that hope but it ended in civil wars and bloodshed. Today, things have changed. People have learned the lessons from al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Perhaps they have learned the lessons from what Hamas has brought on Gaza.  If they have, they should begin to speak up. They should throw off the shackles of Iran’s policies. People should wake up in Gaza and realise that “resistance” has brought them ruin. Iran wants to use others as tools and proxies. It mobilises people and denies them a university education, handing them an AK-47 rather than a diploma. Iran sends legions of people to fight in worthless wars so that Tehran’s regime can relax while others perish.

Israel has borne the brunt of this tragedy with the October 7 attack. Syria has also suffered, as have the Lebanese and Iraqis, as well as people in Yemen. There may be hope that the tide is turning….

Young leaders are emerging. Ahmed Shara’a, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, led his group to victory over Assad.

He has made statements that speak of a new inclusive Syria, free from Iran. He has spoken about incorporating Kurds and Druze and other groups into the new Syria.

It’s true his background is that of an extremist. But extremists can change. He may be seeking to change. We should trust, but verify, as the proverb says.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is another young leader in the region. Together, these younger leaders might point the way to a new Middle East unshackled from past decades. Israel has a role to play here as a pioneering state with hi-tech industry. Other countries such as the UAE and the Gulf states have much to offer. There will be countries that want to spoil this optimism. However, it is worth pausing and having hope for the future.

Columbia professor Joseph Massad, speaking to Ejaz Haider of Lahore University. From MEMRI TV:

Columbia University Professor of History Joseph Massad stated that "the idea that European Jews are somehow direct descendants of the Ancient Hebrews is, of course, a bogus claim." He added that while some Jews may have had a religious or spiritual connection to the Ancient Hebrews, European Christians began suggesting in the 17th and 18th centuries that Jews originated from Asia in order to "estrange them from Europe."

He further claimed that "it is almost like a Hitlerian project to speak about Jews genetically" and that talk of a genetic connection between Jews and the Ancient Hebrews or Ancient Israel "became fashionable" only in the 19th century with the rise of biological sciences. He also stated that "Israeli propaganda" claims Palestinians are descendants of Arab colonizers, but asserted this cannot be true, as the Arab-Islamic conquest of the Levant and North Africa was not a settler colonialist project. Massad dismissed archaeological records as a "colonial venture." He added that Palestinians are the only group in the region not allowed to claim the Ancient Hebrews as their ancestors because "some strange European group" is claiming them for themselves.

Massad has a course this year at Columbia on Zionism – “The History of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala) in 19th century Europe and the development of Zionism through the current peace process between the state of Israel and the Arab states and the Palestinian national movement.” According to the course description it's intended to provide an overview of the “Zionist-Palestinian” conflict.

He described the October 7th terrorist attacks by Hamas as “awesome".

From Anna Slatz at Reduxx:

A violent trans-identified male inmate currently being held in a women’s facility in Washington is suing multiple Department of Corrections officials after they recommended he be transferred back to a men’s prison. The recommendation was made after Nonnie Lotusflower, 38, was accused of physically assaulting one female inmate, and sexually assaulting another.

In a December 26 filing obtained by Reduxx, Lotusflower claims that multiple staff members at the Washington Correctional Center for Women (WCCW) are responsible for violating his eighth amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment. Lotusflower, born Nathan Goninan, is serving a 10-year sentence for the brutal murder of a teen girl….

In addition to the rape investigation, Reduxx also found that Lotusflower had been cited for physically assaulting a female inmate in April of 2023.

According to a WDOC infraction report, CCTV footage showed Lotusflower punching a female inmate in the face while both had been out in the recreation yard….

In response to his maximum security designation, Lotusflower reportedly threatened a member of WCCW staff, screaming: “I will beat your ass. I will block your fucking face out. You’re an ugly fucking slut!” Lotusflower then also threatened another individual involved in making the decision, loudly declaring that he would “end her fucking life” and murder her family….

In response to both the threat of transfer back to a men’s prison, along with the solitary confinement he had been subjected to for his repeat incidents physical violence, Lotusflower is suing multiple staff members at WCCW, alleging a violation of his human rights.

In his complaint, he maintains that every allegation made against him was falsified, and that he is the victim of a widespread conspiracy aimed at painting him in a bad light in order to force him back into a men’s facility.

You'll no doubt be wondering if the ACLU is involved. Well…

Lotusflower is seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for “cruel and unusual punishment,” and has invoked the assistance of the ACLU. While it is unclear if the organization has formally taken on this particular iteration of case yet, the ACLU has assisted Lotusflower in the past with other suits.

It's a strange fate for the once prestigious ACLU: focusing on the defence of violent and unhinged men as they (cynically) claim to be trans, thereby enabling them to attack and sexually assault women with impunity. But that's what happens when the gender cult takes over. 

As previously reported by Reduxx, Lotusflower is currently serving a 10-year sentence for the brutal murder of 17-year-old Jessica Franklin.

The violent criminal targeted Franklin just hours after being released from prison for another conviction in 2007, strangling her to death. Her body was found beneath an underpass in Bellingham, Washington, and a forensic examination revealed signs she had been sexually assaulted. Lotusflower was convicted on second-degree manslaughter charges….

Speaking to a source within WCCW in 2023, Reduxx learned that Lotusflower had apparently been gifted a costly Victoria’s Secret bra by the Washington Department of Corrections after undergoing his taxpayer-funded breast implant surgery.

How sweet.

Walthamstow Wetlands and the Lea this morning:

Joshua Muravchik has a long piece at Quillette on Syria and the new evolving calculus in the region. Iran and Russai are the big losers, of course. The winners? Well, Israel…and Turkey. An extract:

Small and outnumbered as Israel is, the aura of its power is what saves it from relentless attack. With a few farsighted exceptions, the Arab and Muslim worlds still do not accept Israel as a neighbour. Yet, most of that world has made explicit or tacit peace with the Jewish state simply because they know that making war on it is self-defeating. Survival depends on deterrence for all states in theory, but for Israel this is more concretely so.

The current war with the axis of resistance is still not over. Israel is determined to finish off Hamas, and there is yet a reckoning coming with the Houthis and Iran itself. In the end, if things play out in Israel’s favour, this war may be followed by a peace agreement, not only with Saudi Arabia, but also with a bevy of other Arab states. When the Ayatollahs are overthrown, Israel will have peace with Iran, too. In that dream scenario, Israel would enjoy a more secure existence than it has ever known.

One cloud over this idyllic image is the other big winner of the Syrian revolt—Turkey, the main patron of HTS. Its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is an Islamist of the Muslim Brotherhood strain. In an article for MEMRI, of which he is vice president, Alberto Fernandez, who has served as a US official dealing with the Middle East, suggests that with Erdoğan’s help and guidance (and Qatar’s money), HTS might erect an Islamist state in Syria. It would shun the extremism of ISIS and instead reflect the relative moderation of the Muslim Brotherhood. This could energise emulators across the Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan, and North Africa, where Islamist movements already boast substantial support but have been held in check by their respective governments.

Such Sunni Islamist states might mostly avoid direct confrontation but would be unfriendly to the West, to Israel, and to the liberties of their citizens—women and minorities especially. Those targets of its enmity would face the disappointment of seeing the challenge of Shi’ite Islamism replaced by Sunni Islamism. For Israel, that might mean a cold peace in the short run but not acceptance, and the prospect of new conflict eventually. For the US, it would mean a region devoid of the close ties it currently enjoys with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and others. This would be a boon to those bent on cutting America down to size.

But worth reading in full.

A look back at North Korea's 2024, from Gil-sup Kwak at the Daily NK:

The most significant development was Kim Jong Un’s introduction of the “Hostile Two-State Theory” through his speeches at the Party Plenary Meeting on Dec. 30, 2023, and the Supreme People’s Assembly on Jan. 15, 2024. This represented a Copernican revolution in North Korean policy by rejecting the concept of unified Korean ethnicity, designating South Korea as the primary enemy state, and explicitly diverging from his predecessors’ approach toward South Korea.

Kim Jong Un’s shift from dialogue and cooperation to confrontation with South Korea was driven by several factors: first, the need to counter the increasing spread of individualism and admiration for South Korea among North Korean citizens exposed to foreign information, particularly South Korean popular culture; second, the tactical advantages of dividing South Korean public opinion and pressuring the United States; and third, Kim’s psychological need to differentiate himself from his predecessors, possibly stemming from what might be described as an “illegitimate son-Oedipus complex” from his childhood.

This independent course was supported by concrete actions: strengthening internal controls and promoting Kim Jong Un’s personality cult (abolishing the Juche calendar, reducing emphasis on the Day of the Sun, distributing Kim’s portraits and badges), focusing on military capabilities enhancement, conducting balloon provocations against South Korea (32 instances), signing a mutual defense treaty with Russia, and deploying troops (approximately 12,000) to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

The most crucial factor driving Kim’s “Hostile Two-State Theory” appears to be his assessment that traditional unification tactics based on exchange and cooperation were actually undermining regime stability through the spread of South Korean influence. This led to a strategic shift toward separation and containment policies to ensure regime security while strengthening nuclear capabilities for potential forceful reunification.

As I've said before, Great Leader Kim Il Sung's dream of reunification was predicated on the belief – not unrealistic at the time – that North Korea would be the stronger partner, and reunification would just be a matter of the South submitting to the North. Some seventy years on, that vision is dead and buried. North Korea is an economic basket-case and cultural desert only surviving through its links with China and Russia, while South Korea has become an economic and cultural powerhouse – despite the recent "martial law" blip. The only conceivable reunification would see the North subsumed into the South. Clearly that is something the Kim dynasty cannot allow. So…the “Hostile Two-State Theory”.

What's the point of them? They infantilise; they encourage a narcissistic sense of victimhood; they pretend that art is about therapy rather than about broadening the mind, about struggling to meet the nasty old world rather than facing it head on. When authors themselves add trigger warnings to their books though….well, it's just getting silly.

Trigger warnings have become a totemic feature of our times, symptomatic of an age that is both hopelessly fragile and insufferably judgemental. They have spread like a canker as publishers and authors have sought to parade their sensitivity and flaunt their moral superiority. And they are increasingly a means of a virtue signalling and projecting one’s ego.

Evidence of this has been on show this week with the revelation that Joanne Harris has begun to add content warnings to her own books. Readers of her bestselling 1999 novel, Chocolat, will now be cautioned that the story contains ‘spousal abuse, mild violence, death of parent, cancer, hostility and outdated terms for travelling community and religious intolerance’. Furthermore, Harris’s website has been updated to add that her Loki novels include ‘depictions of eating disorders’, that The Blue Salt Road contains ‘depictions of whale hunting’ and The Little Mermaid contains ‘ableist and transphobic slurs’.

Pass the smelling salts.

Whereas trigger warnings have traditionally sought to pour scorn on the past, here we see them employed to cast aspersions on the present, to lay bare our own lazy acceptance and even representations of all that is wrong and unjust in society: spousal violence, religious intolerance, ableism and transphobia. Through this gesture, Harris seeks to assert and clarify that she is more compassionate than her readers and contemporaries, more alert and more aware about deplorable aspects of society today. This is the trigger warning as a virtue-signalling vanity exercise.

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph – My hope for 2025? That we finally scrap absurd ‘trigger warnings’:

The sins of darkness are visited upon the souls of us sensitive readers. Which is why we read in the first place. I don’t remember how old I was when I read The Diary of Anne Frank or The Grapes of Wrath or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I don’t remember when we were taught about Salome demanding the head of John the Baptist.

It’s amazing we all survived somehow. Just as we were let out to play all day as long as we got home in time for tea, so too did our teachers let us read at whatever level we were at. There isn’t much that’s darker than Thomas Hardy anyway, is there?…

What lived was our imagination and who in their right mind would want to curb that? Quite a few mediocre, middlebrow authors it seems.

One such person is Joanne Harris, author of the best-selling Chocolat and now a proponent of trigger warnings, including in her own novels. Her best-seller contains “spousal abuse, mild violence, death of parent, cancer, hostility and outdated terms for travelling community and religious intolerance”. Be still my beating heart and pass me Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, or actually any classic.

Harris is not only sweetness and light though, as it turns out. When Salman Rushdie was stabbed she conducted a jolly little Twitter poll to jokily ask which writers actually received death threats. Her intervention came after JK Rowling, who had come out in support for Rushdie in the wake of the attack, had just been warned: “Don’t worry, you are next.”

Instead, Harris appears to be a fully paid-up member of the “being cruel to be kind lobby”, which cancels anything that does not fit the current stultifying orthodoxy of publishing. She was, after all, head of the Society of Authors and defended the hounding of women – such as Rowling – who did not agree with her on the issue of trans rights.

As Rowling herself said: “Harris has consistently failed to criticise tactics designed to silence and intimidate women who disagree with her personal position on gender identity ideology and has said publicly, ‘Cancel isn’t a dirty word. We habitually cancel things we no longer want.’”

This culture is still everywhere. Actually, culture is the wrong word, this is profound parochialism. In the dying days of 2024, “social justice” now means that Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey are issued with trigger warnings at the University of Exeter.

There are references to “sexual violence, rape and infant mortality”, undergraduates are counselled. Students who feel upset are advised to “leave the classroom and contact wellbeing” if they are distressed. Wellbeing? What fresh hell?

The truth is that trigger warnings – a lazy idea, largely imported from American campuses – are an embarrassing offshoot of the therapising of everyday life.

Joanne Harris, as it happens, is a big fan of gender ideology, and when head of the Society of Authors repeatedly failed to defend writers like Rowling, Rachel Rooney, Onjali Rauf, Julie Bindel and others who lost work and received death threats because of their gender critical views. Now she's not happy about Helen Joyce and Julie Bindel being asked to speak at a literary festival. With or without a trigger warning.

The former Chair of the @Soc_of_Authors finds it 'disappointing' that two published authors will speak at a literary festival. The suppression of #FreeSpeech, & support of cancellation & censorship, within the publishing/writing world is the reason I resigned from the SoA pic.twitter.com/qVZgtM9Hg5

— Fiona Graph (@fiona_graph) December 30, 2024

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If you read Jerry Coyne's blog you'll be aware of his recent dispute with the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), an American atheist organisation.

In brief: the FFRF posted a risible article by the "non-binary" Kat Davis, "What is a Woman?". So: the gender binary is an imposition of European colonisers, Terfs claim that transgender women are rapists, and so on and on. The usual stuff in other words, with the inevitable bit about how the boring old gender binary is not enough to encompass the vast wondrousness of the author's own awesome life. With the final flourish:

All of this is to say that there is an answer to the question “what is a woman,” that luckily does not involve plucking a chicken from its feathers. A woman is whoever she says she is.

Which makes no sense. Presumably that should be: "Whoever says they're a woman, is a woman". 

Anyway, an appalled Jerry Coyne, as an Honorary Board Member, wrote a rebuttal, which FFRF co-editor Annie Laurie agreed to publsh – “Biology is not bigotry“. This was then swiftly removed from the FFRF website, with no apology or even notification to Coyne – as he reveals here. 

Subsequently the FFRF has been notified by Coyne himself, by Steven Pinker, and by Richard Dawkins, of their resignation from the Honorary Board of the FFRF. That's three of the biggest heavyweights in the atheist world.

Will the FFRF reconsider? Will they apologise? We'll see, but I personally doubt it. Like so many US institutions which have succumbed to the gender cult, from Scientific American to the ACLU, once they're taken over there's no easy way back. Goodbye to the old world of scientific rationalists like Coyne, Dawkins, and Pinker, welcome to the brave new world of the progressive young gender activists.

From MEMRI TV:

In his December 13, 2024 Friday sermon, Kent State University professor of Mathematics and Imam of the Islamic Society of Akron and Kent in Ohio, Nader Taha, stated that Gaza had planted the "seed of freedom" for the entire world. He said that in the October 7, 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood, “we have seen miracle, after miracle, after miracle.” In a previous sermon on November 10, 2023, Taha said that before October 7, the Al-Aqsa Mosque was insulted and disgraced, and it was calling out to the Muslims to liberate it and purify it from the filth it was in, a call that the brothers and sisters in Gaza answered. He continued to say that Allah had promised that the Children of Israel would be humiliated and defeated, and this is what happened to them on October 7.

Not only professor of Mathematics at Kent State University: Nader Taha is also on the Summit County advisory council of diversity and inclusion. 

Executive Ilene Shapiro: "The individuals on this Advisory Council represent the diversity of Summit County's residents, and they share my commitment that the county be inclusive of all people, regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, handicap, age, veteran status, sexual orientation or gender identity".