Mick Hartley

More Hampstead colour:

First two – maple – in the Kitchen Garden.

I've just finished Adam Kirsch's On Settler Colonialism. It's not much over 100 pages, so an easy day's read.

As he notes, it started out with academics in the US, Australia, and Canada, searching for new ways to celebrate the wickedness of their countries – founded as they were by stealing the land from the indigenous inhabitants. The problem is that there's nowhere to go with it apart from the breast-beating. A few of the keener theorists might talk of all the wonders that would open up should history be reversed and the land be returned to its rightful owners – an end to racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression of any kind, a veritable new paradise – but of course it's never going to happen. Americans, Australians, Canadians, aren't all about to pack up and clear off. Where would they go? These countries are their home. So all that's left is the guilt. Anyone whose descendants arrived with the wicked colonialists – well, anyone who's white – must live forever with this burden of guilt, and must wake up each morning to the shame and horror of the curse they bear.

If this all sounds religious, well yes, it is. This is Original Sin all dressed up in fancy new progressive clothes.

And anyway, this is what happens. Peoples, nations, races, fight each other, conquer each other, displace each other. History is a succession of wars and dispossessions and violence. If history were to be reversed we'd all end up in some rift valley in East Africa, where it all started.

But, as we know, the US, Australia, and Canada take a back seat now. Settler colonialism is all about Israel – absurd as that might seem for a people who see the land as their ancestral home, and half of whose population never left the Middle East and North Africa and in no way could be considered white. So…why might that be?

Kirsch:

But what if there were a country where settler colonialism could be challenged with more than words? Where all the evils attributed to it – from "emptiness" and "not-enoughness" to economic inequality, global warming, and genocide – could be given a human face? Best of all, what if that settler colonial society were small and endangered enough that destroying it seemed like a realistic policy rather than a utopian dream? Such a country would be the perfect focus for all the moral passion and rhetorical violence that fuels the ideology of settler colonialism. It would be a country one could hate virtuously – especially if it were home to a people whom Western civilization has traditionally considered it virtuous to hate.

The fourth Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of North Korea’s human rights record at the UN Human Rights Council earlier this month made a number of ecommendations. They were all, of course, rejected by Pyongyang:

In the UPR draft report circulated on November 11, 2024, North Korea effectively rejected 88 recommendations, including those calling for cooperating with UN human rights mechanisms, ending torture, releasing political prisoners, ending forced labor, and ensuring the right to freedom of expression.

“North Korea’s rejection of so many recommendations to improve its human rights record demonstrates its government’s utter disregard for international human rights standards and the rights of the North Korean people,” said Simon Henderson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The North Korean government needs to end its brutal repression of fundamental rights and end its people’s increasing isolation from the world.”

But the UPR may have had some effect – on the issue of public executions. From the Daily NK:

Kim Jong Un has issued orders to North Korea’s security ministries to establish clearer criteria for both public and private executions. These directives were delivered to the legal departments of the Ministry of State Security and Ministry of Social Security on Nov. 13.

Executions in North Korea are held either in public or behind closed doors, with public executions serving as an important means of fomenting public fear to maintain the regime.

The latest orders from Kim Jong Un are to more clearly differentiate public and closed-door executions and to impose stricter standards for party safety committees at the regional and central levels to use when deciding whether to execute somebody.

“Until now, decisions to carry out an execution by party safety committees at the regional level had been swiftly authorized without a comprehensive review at the central level. But in the future, those decisions will have to be reviewed more carefully and comprehensively approved by central law enforcement agencies,” a source in North Korea told Daily NK recently….

However, some North Korean officials seem to feel that public executions are necessary for controlling the public.

“Some state security agents say that public executions are effective at keeping people alert. Others say it’s impossible to change people’s belief that their lives depend more on the words of Kim Jong Un than on the law,” the source said.

Intriguingly, these orders were given after the U.N.’s fourth Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of North Korean human rights, which was held in Geneva, Switzerland, on Nov. 7.

North Korea acknowledged its practice of public executions in the UPR review. A representative said that executions in principle are carried out behind closed doors, but that there may be exceptions. That indicates that the North continues to use public executions as a method of regime preservation and public control.

“North Korea sought to justify itself both in the third and fourth UPRs by saying that heinous criminals could be publicly executed when desired by the victims’ families,” said Shin Hee-seok (Ethan Shin), legal analyst at Transitional Justice Working Group. “But the latest orders show nonetheless that North Korea is working to reduce public executions in light of criticism from the international community.”

Shin added: “The fact that Kim Jong Un’s orders don’t mention the wishes of victims’ families arouses suspicions that all that talk about victims’ families at the U.N. was just window dressing. It’s also worth noting that this confirms that decisions about public executions are approved by party safety committees.”

"Public executions are approved by party safety committees". Only in North Korea.

No real change, of course. Executions, both public and behind closed doors, will continue as usual. But…interesting. Some more legalistic window dressing, it's now felt, is required for maintaining the practice of ensuring a terrified populace by means of regular public displays of state violence.

LGBT Youth Scotland – the troubled charity that pushes gender ideology in Scottish primary schools – makes the news again. From the Times:

The chairwoman of BBC’s Children in Need charity has quit, alleging “institutional failure” over grants awarded to a youth transgender charity hit by ­child abuse scandals.

Rosie Millard, 59, a writer and broadcaster, resigned after six years at the charity, sending a scathing letter to its board.

The letter, seen by The Times, criticised Children in Need’s chief executive, Simon Antrobus, for his response, amid revelations that it awarded £466,000 in grants to LGBT Youth Scotland (LGBTYS).

The former chief executive of LGBTYS, James Rennie, was convicted in 2009 of child sex ­assaults. Children in Need started giving grants to the charity seven months later.

Another man, who wrote a schools guide for the youth charity, was convicted this year of sharing indecent images of children, including some of newborn babies.

Children in Need suspended grants to the charity only in May after Millard says she alerted them to the 2009 case. It withdrew funding three months later after a review.

Millard alleged there had been “institutional failure”, suggesting serious questions about due diligence for Children in Need.

Millard also accused Antrobus of ­failing to respond “with the necessary level of seriousness”. She said that he eventually cut funding to the charity only because of fear of negative publicity.

She claimed that on hearing of her ­discovery of the child abuse, he had complained that it had spoilt his enjoyment of a Bruce Springsteen ­concert.

It's the BBC. Of course they'd give money to a charity with a T, no questions asked.

From the JC:

The Metropolitan Police have said that an imam who led a prayer for the destruction of Jewish homes "did not meet the threshold of a crime” in a decision that has baffled security experts.

Just two weeks after Hamas’s massacre in southern Israel last year, a preacher at an east London mosque – located near a sizeable Jewish community – told his followers: “Oh Allah, curse the Jews and the children of Israel. Oh Allah, curse the infidels and the polytheists.

“Oh Allah, break their words, shake their feet, disperse and tear apart their unity and ruin their houses and destroy their homes.”

No doubt the Met are referencing the special use of the term "destroy" in Islamic theology, where it can have a number of meanings including a holy spiritual struggle – as they helpfully explained to us about "jihad".  

Or this is yet another example of two tier policing.

GOOD NEWS!

Brave Iranian Ahoo Daryaei has been released from the hospital and reunited with her family.

After publicly removing her clothes to protest the Islamic Republic regime, she was labeled mentally ill and forcibly confined to a psychiatric hospital.

Protesting works!… pic.twitter.com/YdMR5Z4gET

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) November 20, 2024

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Robert Hutton at The Critic:

Although farming is often reported to be in crisis, Britain is actually full of people who know how to make a fortune from it. Unfortunately, due to a tragedy of misallocation, all those people live in London and are busy on social media, and so the farming has to be done by people who are apparently too stupid to understand that they’re vastly rich, even when it’s been repeatedly explained to them by their betters.

After a war it's normally understood that the victor will determine the peace conditions. That may be a transfer of land, or reparations payments, but at the very minimum it requires the defeated party to abandon its aims and accept the victor's terms. Except for Israel, that is. Israel keeps winning wars, but the defeated Arabs are never pressured to abandon their aims, or accept Israel's existence. It's just a question, for them, of waiting till the next time.

Or, as Shany Mor at UnHerd puts it, "any party that launches a war against Israel and is then defeated is entitled to a restoration of the conditions it violently rejected when launching the war":

Across the West, diplomats and experts have settled on a consensus for solving the ongoing Arab-Israeli war — one that reveals exactly why international diplomatic efforts have consistently failed. At its core, this approach focuses on restoring the very ceasefire conditions which Lebanon and Hezbollah violated last year, while avoiding any mention of even the desirability of peace — something Lebanon would benefit from more than any other party. In failing to recognise this, our international diplomats embody all the pathologies and failures that have come to define their contribution to this decades-long conflict.

According to the Quai d’Orsay and the State Department, the formula for ending the war merely requires punching in the four-digit PIN code 1701. That, of course, is UN Security Council resolution 1701, the one that ended the last war back in 2006. The resolution included several clear obligations for all parties. Israel was to withdraw from Lebanese territory. Hezbollah was to move all its forces north of the Litani River, creating a buffer zone where the only permitted armed forces would be those of the UN peacekeeping force (UNIFIL) and the Lebanese Army (LFA). UNIFIL was to monitor and enforce these deployments. And Hezbollah was supposed to be decommissioned as an armed force inside sovereign Lebanese territory.

The first measure, Israeli withdrawal, was implemented within days of the resolution’s passage. The others were not. Once Israel’s withdrawal was complete, UNIFIL announced that it had no intention of enforcing 1701, and over the course of the next 17 years, Hezbollah assembled an arsenal of rockets and missiles. It also built a network of tunnels that were supposed to allow it, in a future war, to “conquer the Galilee” in an operation similar to the one Hamas ultimately launched hundreds of kilometres away in southern Israel.

The day after Hamas’s assault on southern Israel on October 7 last year, Hezbollah began firing rockets on northern Israel, forcing the rapid evacuation of border communities comprising nearly 100,000 residents, most of whom have yet to return home. After 11 months of low-intensity warfare, Israel took the initiative, and in 11 days managed to deal Hezbollah a decisive blow.

On 17 and 18 September, exploding pagers and walkie-talkies disabled the militia’s communications network, taking thousands of fighters out of commission. Over the next week, a series of airstrikes based on precise intelligence destroyed the majority of Hezbollah’s rockets and launchers and eliminated key military commanders. Finally, on 27 September, an Israeli airstrike on a bunker in Beirut killed nearly every senior figure in the organisation, including its voluble leader Hassan Nasrallah. This was followed by a ground invasion which has seen tunnels and munitions, prepared over a decade and more, destroyed with huge losses to Hezbollah and minimal losses to the IDF.

However, the 11-day campaign woke up the international community in a way that 11 months of rocket fire did not. And the unanimous response has been an urgent call for implementation of 1701. David Lammy called for a “political solution in line with Resolution 1701”. The French ambassador to the UN called upon Israel “to stop the escalation underway in Lebanon” and reiterated Frances determination for a cessation of hostilities “in accordance with Resolution 1701”. Hours before the successful operation to kill Nasrallah, the US, Canada, Australia, Canada and a host of European and Arab states issued a joint declaration demanding an immediate 21-day cease “to provide space for diplomacy towards the conclusion of a diplomatic settlement consistent with UNSCR 1701”.

This consensus around the indeterminate and obsolete Security Council resolution tells, in short, the entire story of the failure to resolve this conflict. If there is one thread running through nearly every diplomatic effort of the last eight decades, it is a firm commitment to the idea that any party that launches a war against Israel and is then defeated is entitled to a restoration of the conditions it violently rejected when launching the war.

This unspoken normative commitment explains the iterations of final status plans presented to the Palestinian leadership after its rejection of statehood at Camp David and subsequent suicide bombing campaign of the early 2000s. It explains the insistence on pre-1967 armistice lines as the only legal basis for Israel’s border after 1967. It explains the curious exception to that norm regarding the refusal to recognise even the pre-1967 part of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. And it explains the cruel human experiment known as UNRWA, a refugee agency that, unlike any other refugee agency, exists not to rehabilitate refugees but rather to keep them in a permanent state of immiseration to maintain an irredentist claim against another country.

Such a norm has not featured in the post-war mediation of any other conflict, not before 1945 and not since. No one has ever seriously suggested creating a kind of sportsman’s mulligan as an international diplomatic norm for other conflicts for this very reason. It’s not hard to see why this might be the case. If the international community extended a line of insurance to other aggressors, which promised that launching wars could bring gains with victory but no losses with defeat, there would be a lot more wars….

Just before the US election, France hosted an “International Conference in Support of Lebanon’s People and Sovereignty”, where $1 billion in aid was pledged and where French President Macron claimed Israel was “sowing barbarism”. If there was any suggestion that Lebanon’s situation might have been improved by not firing rockets into Israel for the past 11 months, the participants were too polite to mention it. Nor was there any reckoning with Lebanon’s decision to cultivate an alternative armed force, larger than its own military, implicated in atrocities in Syria, and answerable to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The insistence of global actors, most notably the host country itself, on protecting Hezbollah and securing for it advantageous ceasefire arrangements in previous wars in 1996 and 2006 also went unmentioned.

Where Israel is concerned – where Jews are concerned – the normal diplomatic rules don't apply.

John Vachon, March 1943. "Lynchburg, Virginia — railroad station."

[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Office of War Information]

I hope people hear the word “kindness” and realize the kindness is very selective. The plea is blatant emotional manipulation: It means:
* please “muster kindness” for the men and boys who want to compete in women’s and girls’ sport – and not for the women and girls who are…

— Bev Jackson (@BevJacksonAuth) November 19, 2024

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In full:

I hope people hear the word “kindness” and realize the kindness is very selective. The plea is blatant emotional manipulation: It means: * please “muster kindness” for the men and boys who want to compete in women’s and girls’ sport – and not for the women and girls who are disadvantaged. * please “muster kindness” for those who say earnestly that some kids are “born in the wrong body” and need drugs and surgery to “be their true selves” – but not for all the detransitioners, the confused teenage lesbians who expose this lie; nor for the desperate parents who are losing their children to a billion-dollar medical industry.:

We see you. The “kindness” you advocate is claiming growing numbers of victims. More people are understanding this every day. Yes – and many of them are right there with you in the House. They know about your links to organizations like Gendered Intelligence.:

It’s not about “kindness” – it’s about accepting a distorted, sexist, homophobic narrative – and it’s about power, control, and money. The best answer to that is just to say No.

Sarah (Tim) MacBride is "the first openly transgender state senator in the country, she is the highest-ranking transgender elected official in United States history." A trans activist and friend of the Bidens…