Mick Hartley

Portland Avenue, Stamford Hill.

🧵Why do so many 'clever' people in the West hold Israel and only Israel accountable for everything ?(a thread)

1/
The Anti-Zionist Ideology has warped the understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the West. At its heart is an assumption about the very Being of…

— Alan Johnson (@Fathom_Editor) December 26, 2024

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Full thread:

1/ The Anti-Zionist Ideology has warped the understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the West. At its heart is an assumption about the very Being of Israelis and Palestinians. It goes like this: Palestinians (and Arabs per se) do not have agency and choice, and so cannot be held accountable and responsible for their actions. Israelis do; always, and exclusively. More: Palestinians are a driven people, dominated by circumstance and emotion, lacking choice, below the age of responsibility, really, so never to be held accountable. Israelis are the opposite; masters of all circumstances, rational and calculating, the root cause of everything, responsible for everything.

2/ The assumption is pushed by the public intellectuals who have shaped much of the debate about the conflict in Britain. Here are five illustrative examples. First, When the Israeli novelist (and Peace Now founder) Amos Oz complained that incitement by extremist Palestinian intellectuals has led some Palestinians to be “suffocated and poisoned by blind hate,” the anti-Zionist writer Yitzhak Laor was outraged, accusing Oz of “incitement” against the Palestinians! Just the act of seeking to hold some Palestinians to account for their actions was enough to condemn as Oz as beyond the pale.

3/ Second, the writer Jacqueline Rose argued that Israel is “the agent” that is responsible for Palestinian suicide terrorism, and for “plac[ing] Jews in Israel … at risk.” She uncritically passes on to her readers a defence of the suicide bomber given by Hamas leader Abdul Aziz al-Ratansi (“If he wants to sacrifice his soul in order to defeat the enemy and for God’s sake – well, then he’s a martyr”).

4/ Third, Shlomo Sand – whose many books are found in every Waterstones store in the UK – once expressed his deep disgust at those Jewish Israeli intellectuals who opposed Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War. As Saddam was firing scud missiles at Israeli civilians, this was very odd indeed. Why was Sand so angry? Because the Palestinians felt “joy” at an ““Arab” show of force” and that should have been decisive.

5/ Fourth, Ilan Pappe’s book The Idea of Israel (Summary: it was a Very Bad Idea and should now be Corrected) includes an apologia for the violently pro-Nazi Palestinian leader Al-Husseini. The Ideology dictates that Arab anti-Semitism be rendered invisible or treated as purely a reaction to Zionism, but the facts are awkward: so keen was Al-Husseini on Adolf that he formed a Muslim SS Unit. No matter. Pappe reduces all this to “an episode” in the “complex” life of a nationalist; a “foolish flirtation” that should only be of interest to the reader because it has been exploited by Zionists to “demonise” the Palestinians. Pappe argues that Al-Husseini was – here comes the ideology – “forced” into the alliance with Hitler.

6/ Fifth, the leading Italian philosopher Giamo Vattimo tells us to listen less to “the Zionists” and more to the former Iranian President Ahmadinejad who has had the courage to “question the very legitimacy of Israel’s existence.” Passing in silence over Ahmadinejad”s threats to erase Israel from the page of time and his Holocaust denial, Vattimo praises the former Iranian leader in terms that should give us pause: “When Ahmadinejad invokes the end of the State of Israel, he merely expresses a demand that should be more explicitly shared by the democratic countries that instead consider him an enemy.”

7/ What explains this weird mental reflex to *always* exculpate Palestinians? One factor is the crude mind-set that became dominant on much of the Left after the 1960s. Let’s call it “reactionary anti-imperialism” or “campism”. It divided the world, and everything in it, into two opposed “camps”: Imperialism versus Anti-Imperialism. Anyone shooting at Imperialism now became part of the anti-imperialist “resistance” to imperialism and thereby progressive. As a result, parts of the left redefined themselves as (not very) critical supporters of, or at least apologists for, whatever reactionary forces were doing the shooting, including radical Islamists. (“Rejoice!” said Socialist Worker in response to 7 October.)

8/ The reactionary anti-imperialist mind-set was expressed with admirable candour by Judith Butler – a Professor at Berkeley and one of the most influential academics on the planet. She defined the antisemites of Hamas and Hezbollah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.”

9 / These ‘antizionist’ assumptions about the very Being of Palestinians and Israelis then reshaped international media coverage of the conflict. One example: the reactions to the killing of four Jews at prayer in Jerusalem in 2014. The Guardian altered a Reuters dispatch about the massacre to remove any reference to Palestinians. The Reuters headline was 'Palestinians kill four in Jerusalem synagogue attack' and the wire began ''Two Palestinians armed with a meat cleaver and a gun killed four people in a Jerusalem synagogue on Tuesday before being shot dead by police…." The Guardian also changed their headline to "Four worshippers killed in attack on Jerusalem synagogue." And cut any reference to Palestinians until it read "Two men armed with axes, knives and a pistol have killed four Israelis and wounded several others in a Jerusalem synagogue.”

10/ In the left-wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the writer Amira Hass wrote about "the despair and anger that pushed the Abu Jamals to attack Jews in a synagogue (emphasis added)." (Yes, the anti-Zionist Ideology is widely held on the Israeli Left.) The Jerusalem Post reported that “CNN ran a ticker that read, ‘4 Israelis, 2 Palestinians dead in Jerusalem,’ failing to note that the two Palestinians were the terrorists.” (CNN later apologised.)

11/ And so we arrived at 7 October 2023 after *decades* of the Anti-Zionist Ideology being spread throughout the West, mis-framing the conflict in terms of its demonising / exculpatory assumptions about Palestinians and Israelis. These assumptions long ago seeped out from the cloisters of academia into the western public square. It’s been going on for decades. And our side didn’t put resources into those platforms and institutions that could have challenged it. For a long time our side didn’t even take the Ideology seriously. It stupidly thought it could get by with bullet points and talking points. (At a seminar at INSS in Israel I was once asked – they were genuinely puzzled – why I was bothering to critique Ilan Pappe. They thought him irrelevant. In fact, he has shaped thinking in the UK about Israel possibly more than any other single writer. Only Robert Wistrich understood.) And so now we are where we are.

In Germany, that would be those who refuse to accept trans ideology and believe sex to be binary. From Reduxx:

The German federal government was responsible for funding a research project labeling “organized transphobia” a threat to democracy. The project, which was made in collaboration with a trans-identified male known for threatening violence against women he disagrees with, classifies those opposed to Germany’s radical gender self-identification laws as “enemies” of society.

Days ago, the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society (IDZ Jena) published a brochure reporting the outcome of a research project it had undertaken on “Organized Transphobia: Concepts, Actors, Narratives, and Counter-Strategies.” In the 92-page release, it concluded that transphobia poses a danger to democratic co-existence and outlines strategies to tackle radical feminists who define biological sex as binary.

The research project, published in collaboration with the Federal Association for Transgender People (BVT), was funded by the German government through the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, which provided it a total of 228,833 Euros.

The project portrays feminists critical of gender ideology as enemies of the state who, together with right-wing extremists, pursue a political agenda to maintain an “endo-cis-binary gender system” – something that is deemed incompatible with the “principles of liberal democracy.”

The research itself claims it was conducted using a “scientifically grounded foundational work” and empirical surveys in the form of interviews with so-called “experts” who were all part of the “queer community.” Most of the project’s main researchers and the authors are transgender, according to their self-describing statements.

One of those “experts” is a trans-identified male named Mine Wenzel, formerly known as Benjamin, who goes by the pseudonym  “Mine Pleasure Bouvar.”

Wenzel, who identifies as a “non-binary lesbian femme,” has previously been invited to act as an expert for state-funded projects and lectures. He is well-known for his calls for violence against women, and has accused lesbians of bigotry for declining to have sex with trans-identified males.

Lovely fella:

From MEMRI TV:

No Jews, though:

التطهير العرقي بحق يهود سوريا. pic.twitter.com/2f34cA6MkC

— إيدي كوهين אדי כהן 🇮🇱 (@EdyCohen) December 23, 2024

Hampstead Heath:

The absurdity of the gender cult in one image:

[Credit: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing/Getty images]

Here's Susie Green, former CEO of Mermaids, demonstrating for "Together in Pride", when her claim to fame is that she transed her son – had him castrated on his 16th birthday – because his father thought he was too effeminate. How much clearer does homophobia have to be?

Yet the awards keep on coming:

In a surprise announcement for Anne Co-Founder and Director, Susie Green, last night she was presented the CEO of the Year Award at the 2024 Trans In The City Awards Gala. Acknowledged for her outstanding contribution to trans youth and adults over several decades – both during her time as CEO of Mermaids, and more recently in co-founding Anne Health with Lizzie Jordan – Susie was lost for words at the surprise announcement. 

Malcolm Clark at The Critic:

Sponsors of Trans in the City include a roll-call of top brands from Barclays, Macquarie, Amazon and BP to Ernst and Young, BAE Systems and OVO Energy. In 2021, the Stock Exchange even put on a party in honour of Trans in the City complete with a light show and dancers. The latest of the group’s trans training days for executives was hosted by the software company Sage at their headquarters in the Shard building.

Has any civil rights movement in history been as successful, so rapidly, as the trans lobby at inserting its agenda into what socialists used to call “the commanding heights of the economy”. If only the revolutionary Left of the past had known they didn’t need to storm capitalism’s centres of powers. They just had to get men to throw on a skirt and sashay past reception with head-tilts at the ready.

A question remains though. Do the corporate sponsors of Trans in the City really understand what they are supporting? One thing that suggests they do not was the centrepiece of last month’s Gala: Trans in the City’s 2024 Awards.

As executives looked on, Trans in the City handed its top honour to one of the most controversial social justice activists in the UK.

Trans in the City describes its CEO Award as “our most prestigious”, yet incredibly it decided to hand it to Susie Green, the former boss of the “trans child” charity Mermaids. She has often been criticised for promoting the notion that children as young as two can signal their trans identity. She claims to have become convinced her own son Jack was really a girl before he could properly walk.

“As a toddler,” Green has explained, “he always headed for the dolls in toy shops”. He also “loathed having his hair cut”, she says, to dispel any lingering doubts.

So confident was Green of her son’s transgender status she flew Jack to Thailand in 2009 to have him castrated. This would have been a criminal offence if it had been conducted in the UK. This kind of “sex change surgery” can only be conducted on over 18s in this country (Jack was 16 at the time). The same rule now applies in Thailand too.

Green's record, as Clark demonstrates, has continued to be dubious if not downright unethical. After she was kicked out of Mermaids, her new company Anne Health now offers to supply puberty blockers to troubled teens, despite their NHS ban.

The choice of Susie Green as CEO of the Year defies simple common sense. When Trans in the City plumped for Susie Green they picked someone who is currently CEO of a company, Anne Health, which was only founded in August last year. According to Companies House it has yet to post any accounts. How can someone possibly be CEO of the Year whose company’s performance we know nothing about?

Green’s CEO of the Year Award doesn’t just lend an air of respectability to her unethical behaviour. It gives the impression to potential customers and suppliers of Anne Health that they should place their trust in it. After all, they just have to look at all the major banks, accountancy firms and law firms who back her award and the lobby group that awarded it.

Celebrating Susie Green as the acme of executive expertise is a perfect example of how transgender ideology is now given a free pass in the business world. Perhaps it’s time that firms stopped obsessing about being vehicles of social justice and concentrated instead on not sabotaging their own reputations. If not, they are the ones at risk of being marginalised.

Jo Bartosch at Spiked allows herself a little optimism for a change:

It’s a new festive tradition for me. Sometime in December, an editor will ask, ‘Can I have 800 words on whether next year will be the end of trans?’.

Having spent much of the past decade writing articles explaining the obvious – that men can’t give birth and lesbians don’t have penises – I’ve learned neither to credit our political leaders with common sense, nor to make predictions about their actions. This year, however, feels different.

And the big difference this year? The Cass Review.

The review may have been a bit soggy in places. Cass used concepts and language that were straight out of the Stonewall handbook. She accepted there is such a thing as ‘transgender’ children, when there plainly isn’t. And she also laid the foundations for yet another controversial puberty-blocker experiment. But in the main, the Cass Review was a powerful piece of research. She was absolutely clear that there is no proven benefit to halting children’s development with drugs and that existing research on the treatment of kids confused about their gender is shoddy. She also highlighted the ideological bias in favour of transgenderism that had crept into clinical practice. The shockwaves rocked the political and medical establishments.

UK health secretary Wes Streeting, who was once a member of a Labour Party Facebook group where suspected TERFs were named and shamed, has fully supported the implementation of Cass’s recommendations, making the Conservatives’ emergency ban on puberty blockers permanent. In addition, he has met nurses at the centre of a legal case to secure single-sex changing facilities. He even now admits he was wrong to say ‘transwomen are women’….

But the Cass Review didn’t just shatter the consensus in British politics – the fallout has been global.

In December, a challenge to Tennessee’s state-wide ban on so-called gender-affirming care for children was heard in the US Supreme Court. When questioned about the Cass Review, Chase Strangio, a trans-activist lawyer representing the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was forced to acknowledge that ‘there is no evidence in the studies that these treatments [puberty blockers] reduce suicide’. Strangio even added that ‘completed suicides’ among trans-identifying youth are thankfully ‘rare’. This is an astonishing volte-face. For much of the past decade, the ACLU has repeatedly claimed that ‘trans kids’ will kill themselves without access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones….

The lie of transgenderism is so big, it needs an entire infrastructure to support it – and to bully people into silence and compliance. But thanks to the successes of the past few years, for the first time ever I can write that, yes, 2025 will be the year the trans trend crashes.

There's a sober account of the Magdeburg attack and the Saudi perpetrator here at Eugyppius. 

Al-Abdulmohsen is a 50 year-old psychiatrist and psychotherapist who lived in Bernburg, 46km south of Magdeburg. He first came to Germany from Saudi Arabia in March 2006, when he was granted political asylum. German authorities repeatedly refused Saudi Arabian requests that he be extradited. The Saudis accused him of terrorism and human trafficking, for alleged complicity with efforts to smuggle Arab girls to the European Union. Al-Abdulmohsen finally obtained refugee status and permanent residence in Germany in July 2016, and for years he has worked at a government clinic in Bernburg, where he has treated patients for problems with addiction.

Al-Abdulmohsen has a significant media profile. He gave interviews to Frankfurter Rundschau and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2019, in which he presented himself as an activist assisting refugees to Germany from the Arab world and as a staunch anti-Islamist. In the FAZ interview he even called himself “the most aggressive critic of Islam in history.” He also appeared in a brief BBC segment, where he described his efforts to help young Arab women emigrate to Europe while wearing a literal fedora.

Just eight days before the Magdeburg attack, on 12 December, he gave an extended video interview to an American organisation called the RAIR Foundation, in which he claimed (among other things) that Germany is working to Islamise Europe by welcoming jihadists, while neglecting the asylum applications and the needs of ex-Muslims like himself.

Prominent voices on the right of the political spectrum, assisted by some of al-Abdulmohsen’s acquaintances, collaborators and enemies in the German ex-Muslim community, are trying to construct al-Abdulmohsen as a jihadist sleeper agent. They obviously want to distance themselves and their cause from the Magdeburg attacker, but their arguments are not convincing.

At 7:07pm yesterday – three minutes after the 7:04 pm attack – al-Abdulmohsen posted four videos to his Twitter account in which he appears to expand upon his motivations. These videos frequently border on incoherence and suggest that the man suffers from paranoia and other psychiatric problems. He claims that Germans are like the Athenians who “a very long time ago … executed Socrates for his religional [sic] critique,” because Germans are “actively criminally chasing Islam critics to ruin their lives.” There follows a bizarre six-minute rant about a USB stick that he believes the Cologne police stole from his mailbox, and then finally remarks about his core grievance, which is related to a Cologne-based refugee organisation called Atheist Refugee Relief (ARR).

Some years ago, female Saudi refugees to Germany, who left Islam because they were inspired by the work of Richard Dawkins (I swear I am not making this up), ended up in the hands of ARR, who housed them with a male employee whom these women accused of sexual harassment or abuse. Al-Abdulmohsen spent years demanding that German police investigate, and when nothing happened he developed a murderous rage, concluding that “the citizens of Germany” were collaborating to persecute ex-Muslim Arabs in service of a broader plot to Islamise Europe. 

He'd been reported to the German authorities by a Saudi woman last year after he threatened to "kill randomly 20 German people", but nothing was done. 

After seeing the initial reports, and the enthusiasm with which the "far-right Islamophobic" story was embraced by the media and German politicians, I certainly had my doubts. Why a Christmas fair, for instance? But….who knows. Maybe we'll get no further than paranoid insanity as an explanation.

[Via this comment at b&w]

An Erdogan speech last week, at MEMRI TV:

"Turkey is much bigger than Turkey. […]

"As a nation, we cannot limit our horizon to 782,000 square kilometers. Just as a person cannot be saved from his destiny by fleeing it, Turkey as a nation cannot escape or hide from its destiny. We must see, accept, and act according to the mission that history has given us as a nation. […]

"Those who ask, 'What is Turkey doing in Libya, Syria, and Somalia?' may not be able to conceive this mission and vision."

The resurrection of the Ottoman caliphate, perhaps?

A BBC report on Tibet:

Hundreds of Tibetans protesting against a Chinese dam were rounded up in a harsh crackdown earlier this year, with some beaten and seriously injured, the BBC has learnt from sources and verified footage.

Such protests are extremely rare in Tibet, which China has tightly controlled since it annexed the region in the 1950s. That they still happened highlights China's controversial push to build dams in what has long been a sensitive area.

Well, "annexed" seems a bit mild for the invasion, the conquest, the calculated destruction of Tibetan culture, the mass importation of Han Chinese. But technically, yes, annexed. Just as they annexed neighbouring Xinjiang and are planning on the annexation of Taiwan. 

The protests, followed by the crackdown, took place in a territory home to Tibetans in Sichuan province. For years, Chinese authorities have been planning to build the massive Gangtuo dam and hydropower plant, also known as Kamtok in Tibetan, in the valley straddling the Dege (Derge) and Jiangda (Jomda) counties.

Once built, the dam's reservoir would submerge an area that is culturally and religiously significant to Tibetans, and home to several villages and ancient monasteries containing sacred relics.

One of them, the 700-year-old Wangdui (Wontoe) Monastery, has particular historical value as its walls feature rare Buddhist murals.

The Gangtuo dam would also displace thousands of Tibetans. The BBC has seen what appears to be a public tender document for the relocation of 4,287 residents to make way for the dam.

We don't hear more about Tibet or Xinjiang for the simple reason that China doesn't allow reporters in – that's what a real totalitarian regime does – so credit to the Beeb here for making the effort. The cultural and perhaps actual genocide of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, once a hot topic, has faded from view as other more, um, media-friendly candidates for genocide have dominated the headlines. Is it still going on? No doubt, but in the face of a Chinese news blackout we just don't know.