Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year 2024

    Last month we heard about Barbra Banda, nominated for BBC Women's Footballer of the Year 2024:

    Barbra Banda, the Zambian footballer who previously failed a ‘gender eligibility test’ at the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, is among the nominees for BBC Female Footballer of the Year 2024.

    In 2022, Banda was barred from competing in Wafcon, after failing a ‘gender’ verification test the day before the start of tournament.

    @BBCSport reported that Banda had been taking medication to ‘reduce her levels of testosterone, which are naturally overly high.’

    If testosterone levels in a female athlete are ‘overly high’, there are three possible explanations:

    ~ the female is male;
    ~ the female is taking performance enhancing drugs;
    ~ the female is seriously ill (and would be very unlikely to be performing in elite sport).

    Being barred from the most prestigious tournament in Africa has been no barrier to a glittering career in the women’s game for Banda. Although a contract with Real Madrid was withdrawn after Banda’s ban, the player went on to represent Zambia at the 2023 Women’s World Cup in Australia and at the Tokyo and Paris Olympic Games. FIFA and the International Olympic Committee have no requirement for female athletes to prove their sex is actually female. Banda, a former professional in women’s boxing, currently plays for the USA-based team Orlando Pride.

    Yet again, women’s sport is being brought into disrepute (and women footballers put at risk of serious injury) by weak governing bodies that refuse to stand up for fairness and safety for females. If female footballers fail ‘gender eligibility’ this raises inevitable questions over their sex.

    Well, he's won.

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    Added:

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  • The UN and the Gaza “genocide”

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    Full text:

    Alice Nderitu, an accomplished mediator specializing in genocide prevention, led an office that issued a guidance paper on the proper use of the term “genocide.” The paper emphasized that UN officials should “adhere to the correct usage” of the term due to its political and legal sensitivities and its frequent misuse to describe large-scale crimes against specific populations.

    Nderitu, who has served at the UN since 2020, was dismissed for asserting that Israel’s war with Hamas does not constitute genocide. She explained that while the conflict has caused significant loss of life, Israel’s actions aim to dismantle a terrorist regime, not to exterminate an ethnic group. She also noted that Israel has made efforts to minimize civilian casualties, even as Hamas uses civilians as human shields to exploit their deaths for propaganda.

    Her position clashes with UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s manufactured narrative.

    The UN is not neutral or impartial when it comes to Israel— you can’t deny it now.

    More at the Jerusalem Post.

  • Not just a tragedy but a scandal

    Helen Joyce in the Times interviews Marian Tompson, the American founder of La Leche Laegue, the breastfeeding support network for women, about her resignation over the League's "inclusivity" policy:

    LLL International now says it supports everyone who wants to breastfeed, “chestfeed” or “human milk feed”, regardless of sex or “gender identity”. It explains how males can breastfeed by taking milk-stimulating drugs sometimes used by adoptive mothers although it says it takes no stand on the inducing of male lactation.

    It has all brought Tompson to the end of her tether. On November 6 she resigned from the board of LLL International, saying it had become a “travesty” of her original intent. “When women decide to breastfeed it’s because they want to do the best for their baby and know that’s breastfeeding,” she says. “Instead of simply providing support to mothers — which has always been free, by the way — leaders are now expected to indulge the fantasies of adult males. This is not natural or normal. Nor are our leaders, who are all nursing mothers themselves, prepared to handle it.”

    There’s no scientific evidence to suggest that male lactation is good for babies. Mother’s milk has remarkable properties, including the ability to adapt to a baby’s changing nutritional needs and state of health, and to pass on antibodies that protect against infection.

    When Milli Hill, a breastfeeding expert and author of The Positive Birth Book, looked into the handful of studies cited by supporters of male lactation, she found that all but one related to women — female people — who had not given birth and had taken drugs to stimulate milk production. The one that related to a male person was a poor-quality case report of a single individual….

    How has an ideology that denies the differences between male and female affected an organisation founded to promote something only females can do, I ask Tompson. By stealth, she replies. She alleges that there was never any survey of leaders to find out what they wanted, just a radical change of policy disguised by gradual shifts in language. LLL International has indicated that its policy on respecting how people self-identify dates back to 2004.

    Now LLLGB, the UK charity under the LLL umbrella, is in the thick of the battle. Until recently a majority of its trustees had been fighting to remain true to the organisation’s founding mission. They came under fire from a minority of local leaders who support male lactation, and from LLL International, which accused them of challenging LLL policy publicly in a disparaging manner. In May it suspended them as leaders, which meant they could no longer hold meetings. They allege this left the women they had been working with unsupported and put their positions on the charity’s board in doubt.

    At the beginning of this month one of their number, Miriam Main, resigned. In her resignation note she spoke of “bullying, lies and cruelty of recent times”. And on November 16 the other trustees allied with her were removed by a vote of UK-based leaders.

    What makes this not just a tragedy but a scandal is that UK law is clear that no male person is a “mother”. Even a gender recognition certificate, the paperwork that changes a person’s recorded sex for certain administrative purposes, doesn’t change a person’s legal status from being a father to a mother, or vice versa. Since LLLGB was set up to support “mothers”, its trustees were simply doing their job when they refused to support male lactation.

    The women I spoke to for this article expressed grief and betrayal at seeing the organisation they love buy into an ideology that denies biological reality and harms mothers and babies. But they also see hope among the wreckage. Breastfeeding rarely makes the headlines, and though this row has been surreal and painful it gives an opportunity to tell the world about its importance and unites them in their determination to recreate what was destroyed.

    Of all the victories of the gender cult, this has to be one of the most astonishing. How on earth have the women who run La Leche League become so transfixed by the need to indulge men in their sexualised breastfeeding fantasies?

  • Gaza gangsters

    It's reporting as usual from the BBC in Gaza:

    Amid severe food shortages in Gaza, increasingly violent thefts by criminal gangs are now the main obstacle to distributing supplies in the south, aid workers and locals say.

    They allege that armed men operate within plain sight of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in a restricted zone by the border.

    The BBC has learnt that Hamas – sensing an opportunity to regain its faltering control – has reactivated a special security force to combat theft and banditry.

    That might be funny – Hamas combating theft and banditry – but they're quite serious.The IDF are turning a blind eye to these nasty Gaza criminals but look here, over the hill come the brave heroes of Hamas, doing their best to restore order. Well, that's what the Hamas spokesmen say, and the UN – and that's good enough for the BBC's intrepid reporters.

    “It is tactical, systematic, criminal looting,” says Georgios Petropoulos, head of the UN’s humanitarian office, Ocha, in Gaza.

    He says this is leading to “ultra-violence” in all directions – “from the looters towards the truckers, from the IDF towards the police, and from the police towards the looters”.

    There has been increased lawlessness in Gaza since Israel began targeting police officers early this year, citing their role in Hamas governance.

    “Hamas’s security control dropped to under 20%,” the former head of Hamas police investigations told the BBC, adding: “We are working on a plan to restore control to 60% within a month.”

    Some displaced Gazans in the south welcome the new Hamas efforts against criminal gangs.

    “Killing the thieves who stole aid is a step in the right direction,” exclaims one man, Mohammed Abu Jared.

    Hurrah for Hamas.

    Though there are dissenting voices.

    However, others see them as a cynical attempt to take control of lucrative black markets.

    “Hamas is killing its competitors in stealing aid,” says Mohammed Diab, an activist in Deir al-Balah. “A big mafia has finished off a small mafia.”

  • Telling it straight

    Well OK, this is funny:

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  • Repudiating the ICC

    Good points from Nigel Biggar in the Spectator on the ICC ruling against Netanyahu and Gallant:

    The ICC claims reasonable grounds for believing Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant guilty of the war crimes of ‘intentionally and knowingly depriv[ing] the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival’, creating ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about [their] destruction’. The grounds are these: Israel’s failure to facilitate relief ‘by all means at its disposal’ and to ‘ensure that the civilian population… would be adequately supplied with goods in need’ amounts to a violation of the ‘fundamental rights… to life and health’.

    There are two major ethical problems with this. The first concerns the concept of intention. We often do something in full awareness that it will have an undesirable consequence we don’t want, but we do it anyway for the sake of a desirable consequence we do want. And if that desirable consequence is more important, or if we are under an overriding obligation to prefer it, then our causing the undesirable consequence is proportionate – provided we take all feasible steps to minimise it. That’s the ethical principle of ‘double effect’. The desirable consequence or effect is what we intend; the undesirable effect we accept with active reluctance….

    According to this logic, which characterises the ethic of ‘just war’ thinking, it’s permissible to attack a military objective, knowing it will risk civilian casualties, provided that risk is unavoidable and all feasible measures are taken to minimise it. One may intend the effect of disabling enemy combatants, while reluctantly accepting injury to civilians as a tragic side-effect. Certainly, this is permissive, but that’s because, otherwise, the successful waging of war, however just the cause, is practically impossible. Nevertheless, unburdened by concern for military success, the ICC considers that any military action taken in the knowledge that it will put civilians at risk of injury intends – is ‘calculated’ – to destroy them.

    Telling against the judgement that Israel has any such intention are the measures taken by its military to minimise harm – giving advanced warning of attacks, using weapons of minimally destructive power, and providing some humanitarian aid.

    Plus the fact that much of the humanitarian aid coming in to Gaza was seized by Hamas for their own use.

    Had it been sitting in judgement on the prosecution of the war against the massively murderous Nazi empire by Britain and the US, the ICC would have issued arrest warrants for Churchill and Eisenhower. While invading Italy in 1943, the Allies caused old men, women, and children to be torn apart by bombs and shells, exposed to the wintry elements by the destruction of their homes, and starved of food and water. They did this ‘knowingly’, aware of the effects of their unavoidably imprecise bombing and shelling. But they didn’t intend civilian harm and sought to minimise it, as far as war-winning allowed. Nonetheless, their efforts weren’t ‘adequate’ to save tens of thousands from perishing.

    Plenty of examples from WW2 – also, for instance, the destruction wreaked on Normandy after the D-Day landings, as the Allies advanced on Paris.

    The presumptuousness of a court that declares itself devoted to the cause of ‘lasting peace’, its novel and imprudent intrusion of a concept of fundamental human rights into the laws of war, and its neglect of the principle of double effect, all combine to drive a legal interpretation that makes successful war-fighting unlawful, however just its cause. Thereby the ICC undermines its own authority, forcing states intent on military victory to repudiate its jurisdiction.

  • Israel and “settler colonialism”

    Further to my post last week, here's Alan Johnson on the obscenity of calling Israel "settler colonialist":

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    Full thread:

    The first difference is the intimate Jewish relationship to the land. The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm misses everything that is historically and religiously distinctive about the Jewish relationship to the land of Israel/Palestine. (2/10)

    The Jews were returning to a land that had been theirs, in which their religion was born, their temple built, and their Matriarchs and Patriarchs walked. A land that was at the absolute centre of Judaism and Jewish peoplehood, and from which they had been forcibly expelled. (3/10)

    The second difference is the exceptional history of Jewish persecution. The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm erases the crushing material weight of Europe’s antisemitic history as a driver in the rise of Zionism and the creation of the Jewish state. (4/10)

    The paradigm ignores: the collapse of the post-1789 liberal/emancipatory society, the backlash (‘high’ intellectual+‘low’ popular) against the ltd inclusion of Jews in Euro socs in the late 19thc, and the radicz of Euro antisemitism in the 20c culminating in the Holocaust. (5/10)

    The Jewish experience of persecution over millennia, culminating in the rupture in world history and Jewish history that was the Shoah, made the creation of a Jewish state in the land of Israel nothing like the creation of ‘settler colonial’ societies such as the USA or SA. (6/10)

    To call Jews who fled an antisemitic Europe or staggered out of Auschwitz, propping up their skeletal bodies on one another, ‘racist settler colonialists’ is obscene. (7/10)

    The third difference is the local character of many Israeli Jews. The settler colonialism paradigm erases the hundreds of thousands of Jews who moved to Israel from Arab lands from the late 1940s, most driven out of their ancient homelands by Arab and Muslim antisemitism. (8/10)

    The Jews from the Arab lands arrived in Israel as refugees, most carrying the 1 suitcase they'd been given 24 hours to pack after millennia of residence, the opposite of a ‘white’ ‘European’ ‘racist’ ‘colonialism’. To apply those labels to that trauma is obscene. (9/10)

    The 4th difference is that the int. comm. birthed Israel. The ‘settler colonialism’ paradigm erases the mandates that nurtured the Jewish state into being, just as was happening for Arab peoples, same time, same region. Again, utterly unlike the ‘settler colonial’ socs. (10/10)

  • Kabul University 1969

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  • It’s not fair. It’s not OK

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  • State-sanctioned sexual assault

    From the Telegraph:

    The British Transport Police (BTP) is facing legal action over new guidance that allows trans officers to strip-search women. Women’s rights campaigners have written to Chief Constable Lucy D’Orsi calling for the advice to be removed on the basis that it breaches human rights.

    They say they are willing to try to bring a judicial review of the guidance.

    Revealed by The Telegraph, the guidance allows male staff identifying as female to intimately search women so long as they have a gender recognition certificate (GRC).

    A backlash earlier in 2024 saw similar national policing guidance temporarily withdrawn after the Conservative government raised concerns about women’s safety.

    The guidance says officers can search people of the same sex as “either their birth certificate or GRC” in BTP jurisdiction.

    Maya Forstater, chief executive of human rights charity Sex Matters, which penned the letter, said the guidance was “state-sponsored sex discrimination and sexual abuse”.

    She added: “Its guidance breaches the Human Rights Act, the Equality Act and PACE, the law that requires strip-searches to only be carried out by someone of the same sex.

    “Abuse of position for sexual purposes is the largest area of corruption that the Independent Office of Police Complaints deals with and too many officers have been found guilty of sexual offences.

    “The police say that lessons have been learnt and then adopt a policy of institutionalised sexual harassment and abuse of women.

    “Not only are women more likely to feel humiliated and vulnerable when naked, but men are responsible for 98 per cent of sex crimes.

    “It is well attested in the medical literature that for many men, cross-dressing is a sexual fetish.

    “No woman should be degraded by being made to strip and bend over in front of a man. That is even more important when the man may be manifesting a sexual paraphilia.”…

    Cathy Larkman, retired police superintendent and national policing lead for the WRN, said: “The letter before action to British Transport Police by Sex Matters is a significant development in this sorry tale of police forces putting ideology, and the unjustifiable self-interest of very few individuals, before the dignity, privacy and safety of women.

    “Men are not women and men cannot become women. That applies to police officers too. A vulnerable woman being strip-searched is presented with a man in front of her, regardless of whatever £5 official piece of paper he holds.

    “Strip-searching by its very nature can be degrading and embarrassing, for the woman being searched, and for the policewoman doing the searching.

    “When the state allows men to strip women and touch them, then that in my view is state-sanctioned sexual assault. It beggars belief that police leaders view this as a carrot to dangle to get more trans-identified men into the service.”

    [A grammatical aside: that singular verb in the first sentence – "The British Transport Police (BTP) is facing legal action" – caught my attention. I'd have written "are facing legal action". I struggle a bit with this. It depends, I suppose, on context. So you'd say "the BBC is an organisation at the heart of British life", but "the BBC are disputing this version of events". Possibly. Depending on whether the emphasis is on the institution itself or on the people within the institution. Maybe. I don't know.]