Mick Hartley

All my posts so far on Café Royal Books have been looking back at England: mostly black and white (and mostly grim). See here for a list. But they do venture further afield – as for instance here, with photographer Andreas Bleckmann, New York 1985–1990:

[Photos © Cafe Royal Books/Andreas Bleckmann]

🚨 Breaking: The IDF uncovered thousands of hours of footage showing Hamas torturing innocent Palestinians.

According to @NatalieLisbona, the victims include gay men, individuals accused of adultery, political opponents, and those suspected of "collaborating" with Israel pic.twitter.com/lU8bXIfCDm

— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) November 10, 2024

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From the Mail on Sunday:

Israel's military says it has discovered thousands of hours of sickening footage showing Hamas interrogators torturing innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

The harrowing videos show male prisoners with sacks over their heads, chained to floors and ceilings in painful positions.

Men writhe in agony as they are beaten with sticks on the soles of their feet.

In one distressing clip, a hooded man appears to be screaming and remonstrating with his captor.

The horrifying incidents appear to have been filmed inadvertently by CCTV cameras inside a Hamas military base in northern Gaza raided by Israeli troops earlier this year.

The footage was said to have been discovered on computers seized from the abandoned compound inside the Jabalia refugee camp. It is unclear why the men were being held.

But human rights experts have previously warned that innocent Palestinians have been kidnapped from their homes and tortured by Hamas thugs who have ruled Gaza with an iron rod since 2007.

Gay men and adulterers are among those who have been tortured by Hamas, along with political opponents and anyone accused of collaborating with Israel.

A time stamp in the corner of the footage suggests the torture took place between 2018 and 2020.

Often, the guards appear casually at ease, chatting as the abuse unfolds.

One interrogator reclines on a chair, with his arms folded behind his head, in front of a chained-up prisoner hanging from the ceiling by his arms.

Another film features a man, with a red sack over his head, chained up so awkwardly he can just about place one foot on the floor. One captor later appears to brutally choke the man.

A senior Israeli military source told The Mail on Sunday: 'The IDF found these CCTV images in March. It took months to go through them all.' It has not been possible for the videos to be independently verified but human rights groups have long warned of abuses by Hamas against civilians in Gaza. Amnesty International published a 44-page report detailing a brutal campaign of abduction, torture and killings by Hamas against its own people following the last Israel-Hamas war in 2014.

Will the BBC feature this? I have my doubts. Any Israeli brutality – the IDF mistreating Palestinians – would of course be a main news item. I remember the leading BBC story from last December on Palestinian claims of Israeli brutality, highlighting the tale of a young lad who purportedly had his hands smashed by an iron rod while in a West Bank prison. The gullible BBC reporter breathlessly recounted her interview with the poor lad, hands in bandages, surrounded by family. The Israeli Prison Service released a video of this same lad on his release from prison, in good health, hands as far as we could see looking fine. But for the BBC there are only good oppressed Palestinians, and bad oppressor Israelis…

Yes we've been hearing this a lot this past week – the left's trans own goal that helped Trump's triumph – but Joan Smith at UnHerd puts it well:

Is the US about to become the first country to restore protections for women and girls from trans ideology? If it happens — and that depends on whether President-elect Donald Trump means what he’s been saying over the last couple of years — the irony would be impossible to miss. Do we really have to wait for a politician who has been repeatedly accused of sexual assault to call a halt to the most sweeping attack on women’s safety and privacy in our lifetime?

It all started in the US, so it'd be fitting if it ended there. But let's at least raise a small cheer for the efforts of Terf island here.

The impact of Trump’s promises, if he sticks to them, would be far-reaching. He has pledged to get trans-identified males out of girls’ toilets and women’s sport. He says he will make the US Government recognise that there are only two sexes — he calls them “genders”, a common mistake, but he means male and female. He has promised to stop “gender-affirming” medical treatment, including prescribing puberty blockers, describing it as “child abuse”.

What he’s proposing is nothing short of a demolition of the creaking edifice created by trans activists. And if it can be done in the US, where they have had much greater success in promoting laws that wreck women’s rights, why not elsewhere? In the UK, we have a government committed to an opposite course, but resistance has always been more vocal — and led by women on the centre-left….

Much of the Left has lost its mind, and its moral compass, when faced by entitled men masquerading as “victims”. Politicians parrot claims about trans-identified males not having full human rights, ignoring their own complicity in giving them access and influence women can only dream of. Biden welcomed Dylan Mulvaney, an actor who has made a career out of his journey to “girlhood”, to the White House, while Harris wrote a letter congratulating him on “living authentically” as a woman for a year. Mulvaney subsequently tanked sales of Bud Light when the company employed him as a brand ambassador, a warning that the Democrats ignored.

Trump’s suggestion that he will take on the trans lobby from day one appears to be a calculated reversal of one of Biden’s first acts as president. On 20 January 2021, Biden signed an executive order extending what’s known as Title IX, preventing publicly funded schools from excluding transgender students from toilets and changing rooms that align with their “gender identity”. It was the beginning of a cascade of legislation that’s resulted in girls losing sporting scholarships and medals, while female athletes have been injured in the process of playing against adult men.

It’s an open goal for Trump — and a horrible dilemma for women who detest his character and his politics. Trump proudly takes credit for destroying Roe v. Wade, leading to severe restrictions on abortion in many states. To the eternal discredit of the self-indulgent Left, however, he may also be the politician who finally dismantles the privileges of men who claim to be women.

With Trump, of course, what he says and what he does often bear little resemblance – but it's such an obvious area for reform that it'd be a surprise if he didn't move on this.

I wrote the words below in April, about the UK left, and I'm retweeting them today for the benefit of some of the numbskulls in my mentions.

Women like me, and there are a lot of us, aren't and never have been far-right. We simply want the left to wake the hell up, because we're… pic.twitter.com/zGqBxiodGt

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 8, 2024

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Full text:

Women like me, and there are a lot of us, aren't and never have been far-right. We simply want the left to wake the hell up, because we're watching it do its utmost to alienate people it used to represent.

I'm not saying Trump's win was down to the gender stuff – I'm not an American voter, so can't judge. In any case, the Labour Party won the last UK election and they've embraced gender identity ideology whole-heartedly (although they won against a Tory government so enfeebled and unpopular it would have been miraculous if they hadn't, and their popularity since gaining office has plummeted.)

What I do know is that millions of women in the UK and across the developed world are extremely angry about men in women's sport, men in women's jails and the erosion of single-sex spaces. Parents are angry at being demonised because they don't want their troubled kids to undergo irreversible medical treatments of extremely questionable benefit. People are sick to the back teeth of being bullied and threatened for refusing to embrace an elitist, academia-generated ideology that's having severe real world consequences.

Large swathes of the left continue to be threatening and abusive to anybody who resists their attempts to impose ideological language or bully them out of wrongthink. Leftist activists jeer and sneer at erstwhile female allies for the crime of believing biological sex is real and matters. And leftist leaders still appear more interested in sucking up to gender activists than – to take a topical example in the UK – female nurses whose crime is not wanting to undress in front of a fully intact male.

So to those screaming 'bigot' and 'fascist' at me, you should know two things. Firstly, I'm completely indifferent to your disapproval, as I'd have thought you'd have realised by now. Secondly, and far more importantly, the only thing more harmful to your cause than your pseudo-religious belief in gender identities is your astounding, self-righteous arrogance.

A few more autumnal shots, this time from Highgate:

From MEMRI TV:

In an October 18, 2024, lecture at the Islamic Society of Central Jersey, American Islamic scholar Suhaib Webb stated that student activism can go “hand in hand” with Islamic practice. He praised Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and other student groups for inviting imams to lead prayers at their encampments. Webb highlighted that imams like Imam Farhan Siddiqi of Dar Al-Hijra Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia, along with other imams from Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia, regularly visited these encampments to lead prayers and offer Islamic lessons. He commended these imams for their fearlessness in asserting that Zionism is equivalent to white supremacy, and that being a Zionist is no different from being a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

We need a dissolution of the universities https://t.co/TqkG7oDo3U

— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) November 9, 2024

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A better view of that abstract (click to enlarge):

Janice Turner in the Times today, in praise of Kemi Badenoch:

How, some asked in wonder, did this Lagos-raised young woman with braided hair win over the Tory membership: the whitest, oldest, and by definition, most conservative of electorates? The answer was clear in her interview last Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: she didn’t run on her identity. Indeed she dismissed the idea that being the first female black leader of a major UK political party mattered very much.

“I think the best thing will be when we get to a point when the colour of your skin is no more remarkable than the colour of your eyes or your hair,” she said. “We live in a multiracial country. We have to work very hard to make sure this works, and … people don’t see themselves as groups rather than all being British.” (Then, in combative Kemi style, she goaded Rachel Reeves for boasting about breaking “the very, very low glass ceiling” of first female chancellor.)

Hers was once the anti-racist position. Martin Luther King, whose words Badenoch seemed to echo, dreamt of a nation where people “will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”. Badenoch asks to be judged by her politics not her “identity”, yet to some her politics betray her identity. The Labour MP Dawn Butler retweeted a post by the academic Kehinde Andrews saying Badenoch is “the black face of white supremacy”. They see people of colour as a homogeneous voting bloc: anyone who thinks differently is a traitor.

Even if you abhor Badenoch’s views, her stance is refreshingly egoless. Compare her with Labour’s most senior black politician, the foreign secretary David Lammy, who couldn’t even put aside his identity when addressing the UN about war in Ukraine. “I stand here,” he said, “also as a black man whose ancestors were taken in chains from Africa, at the barrel of a gun to be enslaved.” With no relevance to Putin’s atrocities or Britain’s interests, this was purest self-aggrandisement.

It's an interesting contrast. Whatever you may think of their politics, the Tories have featured on their front bench a number of intelligent outspoken women from immigrant backgrounds – Pritti Patel, Suella Braverman – while on the Labour side we have the lamentable Dawn Butler and the hopelessly over-promoted David Lammy, who do little but play the race card at every opportunity. 

Unison boss Steve North's dismissive comment on the Darlington Five – "anti-trans bigotry" – has not gone down well:

During her battle with Darlington NHS trust, Lisa Lockey, a nurse, says she has been threatened and intimidated, all because she does not want to undress in front of a man.

But it was criticism from Steve North, president of Unison, after her meeting two weeks ago with the health secretary Wes Streeting, which left her particularly aghast.

North accused Streeting of “pandering to anti-trans bigotry” by sitting down with Lockey and other nurses — one a survivor of sexual assault — who want to make their changing room a space for biological women only.

In light of North’s social media post, Lockey, a working mother who insists she is “standing up for other women”, cancelled her Unison membership, which she has held for 33 years.

She told The Times: “One of the things that really bothers me is the minute any female dares to complain about sharing a changing room with a man, they are instantly labelled as transphobic and a bigot. That’s what [North] did. We aren’t transphobes and we aren’t bigots. It absolutely boiled my blood that he has the audacity to label us that.

“He doesn’t know us. He knows nothing about us. He’s a man — he has no idea how it feels to be a woman in a changing room with a bloke in there. He doesn’t have a clue.”

This, from David Samuels at UnHerd, is well worth reading – How Trump crushed Obama’s legacy.

As the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama was hardly a pretender to power in Washington. Rather, between 2008 and the evening of 5 November 2024, he was usually the foremost power in the land. After serving two elected terms in the White House, Obama then set up and captained the so-called “Resistance” to Trump — an activity that was contrary to all prior American norms and practices. After Trump left, Obama stayed in Washington and continued his role as unelected Party Leader during what had been advertised as the Biden Presidency.

Obama’s method of avoiding scrutiny from the pliant DC press was entirely in character, alternately drawing back into the shadows and then, out of whatever ego weakness, announcing that he was the true mover of events. Free from normative oversight or responsibility, he and his retainers could also avoid answering questions about the size or sources of his personal fortune, which was rumoured to amount to somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. As a private citizen, Obama didn’t have to answer questions. He could have it both ways — state power, with no public responsibility.

Until he misstepped. By compelling Biden to withdraw in favour of Harris, who turned out to be an even worse candidate than a senile old man who had begun to resemble a badly taxidermied deer, Obama broke the unspoken agreement that had put him beyond scrutiny. Disappearing the sitting President from the Democratic Party ticket against his will, for reasons that were obviously contrary to what the press had been telling Americans about Biden’s incredibly acute mental functioning up, and replacing him with a candidate that no one in the party had actually voted for, required some sort of comment, however brief. It made it impossible, if only for a week or two, to maintain the fiction that Obama was simply living in Washington DC while staying out of politics. If Biden was senile, then who was actually running the country? Who had enough clout to order the President’s removal from the ticket?

The answer in both cases was Obama. And now he was on the hook not only for Kamala Harris, but retroactively for the more general mess that he and his operatives had helped to make of the country. Everywhere from Harvard University, his alma mater, where he helped install a repeat plagiarist as the University’s President, to the Middle East, which went up in flames the moment he was able to re-animate his Iran Deal, which appeared to be even stupider — if not as expensive — as George W. Bush’s determination to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style democratic societies at the point of a gun, the Party Leader’s Midas Touch-in-reverse was evident, even if no one ever breathed a single word of criticism.

And the conclusion:

What outsiders tend to miss is that America was never meant to be stable. It is and has always been an inferno, the epitome of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction. The wonder and freedom and heartbreak of American life is that, sooner or later, everything is consumed in the furnace. For all his wealth and success, Elon Musk’s children may worship other gods. His grandchildren may end up in a trailer park, smoking meth. McKinsey consultants with Harvard degrees may wind up unemployed or selling bottled war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the country’s most eminent environmental lawyer and the closest thing the Democratic Party has to royalty, may become an antivaccine heretic, be broadly mocked and humiliated by the elite and by the less imaginative members of his own family, run for President, endorse Donald Trump, take on the Big Pharma and Big Ag, and Make America Healthy Again. Or not. All anyone can say for sure is that attempts to game the American system are doomed to failure.

The bigger lesson being that America is just too big — and too wild, and too destructive, and rooted in the idea of individual freedom — for any self-styled “elite” to ride the horse for very long, without being thrown off.