Mick Hartley

Helen Joyce was in Berlin yesterday, for the protest outside the Bundestag against the new gender self-ID law that has just come into force. Here's her speech:

George Orwell is supposed to have said: “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

We live in a time of deceit. The deceit we’re talking about here today is the deceit of gender self-ID. It’s the lie that what makes people men or women, boys or girls, males or females, is what they claim about themselves based on their ideas and feelings, not the reality of their immutable sexed bodies. 

Think about what it would mean for that to be true. It would mean that humans are somehow fundamentally different not just from other primates, not just from other mammals, but from all other living things. This is a new, secular version of creationism. It’s a claim that our species is not part of Nature but is set above it, able to rewrite biological reality and the rules of life by sheer force of will, rather than subject to them like every other evolved species….

Worth reading in full.

This is the most depressing development of my lifetime. I’m old enough to remember when girls were told they were fully human, that within the constraints of physical strength and the facts of reproduction, we could do anything. Now girls are told instead – on social media and in classrooms – that what makes a girl is feeling like a girl. And what does a girl “feel like”? Every sexist, outdated stereotype you can think of. Now, accepting that you are a girl is accepting that you are not a fully rounded human, just as much the author of your fate as boys are. 

And to add the final, outrageous twist to this story, we know that among the children demanding gender change, those destined to be gay adults are hugely overrepresented. Instead of growing up happy, healthy and same-sex oriented, they are being turned into permanent medical patients – and sterile, anorgasmic facsimiles of the opposite sex.

It doesn’t escape my notice that this makes them “straight” (and, for those who have gender surgeries, desexed via castration, a punishment beyond the wildest dreams of the most vicious homophobes of past times). 

We should be telling these precious non-conforming children that they are beautiful just the way they are. That boys can wear skirts and makeup and grow their hair. That they can play with dolls and do ballet. That girls can climb trees, play in the mud, crop their hair and become lorry drivers. That both boys and girls can love whomever they want. That it doesn’t matter if a boy is “effeminate” or a girl is “butch” – the boy is still a boy and the girl is still a girl. 

Instead we are telling children that if they don’t conform, there is something profoundly wrong with them. That if a girl isn’t girly, she’s probably a boy, and vice versa. That these children don’t just need time, space and understanding – they need their bodies fixed with drugs and surgeries. Of all the lies of gender identity, this is the most cruel.

This isn’t just any old medical scandal, it’s gay “conversion therapy” in the truest, most catastrophic sense. 

Video here.

The ethnic cleansing of over 14 million Sudanese, 30% of the population, marks one of the most severe humanitarian crises of our time.

Yet, where are the global protests? pic.twitter.com/fG3hGTYOOO

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) November 2, 2024

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As I've said before, whoever's doing the PR for the Arabs is doing one hell of a job:

One of the darkest imperial expansions – across northern Africa as Islam was spread by the sword: ignored or downplayed, as only Western imperialism counts. Look at all those lovely mosques they built! The brutal history of centuries of slavery – black Africans dragged, chained, in camel trains across the deserts to Arabia, and the Barbary Coast raids on northern Europe: only the Atlantic slave trade counts.

And now, largely Arab groups slaughter black Africans and have "slave hunts", with women and girls being rounded up…it doesn't make the news apart from the odd largely ignored report on the back pages, like this. In Gaza, though, the Arabs are the biggest victims ever as the Israelis take strong action to counter the Hamas Islamic jihad against Jews, and the world explodes in protest. It's genocide, they cry.

Nice work if you can get it.

The next time someone tells you how Palestinians have never had viable options for peace, show them this statement from former US President @BillClinton:

“And the only time Yasser Arafat didn't tell me the truth was when he promised me he was gonna accept the peace deal that we… pic.twitter.com/YlckFqdqUS

— Emily Schrader – אמילי שריידר امیلی شریدر (@emilykschrader) November 1, 2024

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Full text:

“And the only time Yasser Arafat didn't tell me the truth was when he promised me he was gonna accept the peace deal that we had worked out, which would have given the Palestinians a state on 96% of the West Bank and 4% of Israel, and they got to choose where the 4% of Israel was. So they would have the effect of the same land of all the West Bank. They would have a capital in East Jerusalem.

I can hardly talk about this…. And they would have equal access all day every day to the security towers that Israel maintained all through the West Bank up to the Golan Heights.

All this was offered, including, I will say it again, a capital in East Jerusalem and 2 of the 4 quadrants of the old city of Jerusalem, confirmed by the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, and his cabinet. And they said no.

And I think part of it is that Hamas did not care about a homeland for the Palestinians. They wanted to kill Israelis and make Israel uninhabitable.

Well, I got news for them, they (the Jews) were there first before there their faith (Islam) existed. They were there. In the time of King David, in the southern most tribes, Hadjardia and Samaria.”

The exhortations for ideological purity in the Kim Dynasty of North Korea keep on coming, and keep on ramping up. It's never enough. There are always greater demands of loyalty to be made, and more draconian punishments to be meted out to those showing the slightest hint of individual thought, and deviance from the all-consuming Kim worship. 

North Korea has launched a nationwide campaign to study Kim Jong Un’s rare personal statement published in the Rodong Sinmun newspaper on Oct. 11.

A source in North Hamgyong province said recently that the Central Committee’s Propaganda and Agitation Department ordered all party organizations and worker groups to study Kim’s statement titled “Officials Should Become Communist Revolutionaries Who Are Possessed of the Party’s Original Ideals and Spirit as Their Mental Qualities.”

The order emphasized that current political conditions require absolute unity around the supreme leader. “One-hearted loyalty doesn’t arise on its own. Our revolution can proceed vigorously only when it has sufficient ideological and spiritual nutrients,” the Central Committee stated.

Local party committees must now use their Saturday lecture hours for workshops and discussions of Kim’s address. The directive extends to all ages and groups – from youth league organizations to retired officials over 65, who must submit research papers of at least 10 pages.

The lead item in today's news from the Rodong Sinmun – the headline news: Vol. 60 of "Complete Collection of Kim Jong Il's Works" Published. 

Anyone who follows Israeli news knows that Haaretz is on the left. But this far left?

At least three Israeli government ministries have announced they will be terminating all cooperation and advertising with Israel’s most prestigious left-wing newspaper after the group’s publisher accused Israel of “apartheid” and described Palestinian terrorists as “freedom fighters” during an event in London.

Amos Schocken, the head of the Haaretz Group and Haaretz publisher, said in a speech that Israel has a government “that opposes a Palestinian state, and instead, the Netanyahu government wants to continue to encourage illegal settlements in the territories designated for a [future] Palestinian state.

The sold-out panel event, which took place at JW3, included much of Haaretz’s senior editorial team alongside a number of Jewish organisation heads, academics, and politicians.

“It does not care [about] applying a brutal apartheid regime on the Palestinian people,” he said.

Shocken also said Palestinian terrorists were “freedom fighters” and called for sanctions to be placed on Israel’s leaders.

Fallout in Israel over the incendiary comments led to calls from multiple government bodies to suspend their respective publishing and advertising in the daily newspaper.

Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, the Interior Ministry, and the Education Ministry all announced their intention to cut ties with the publication.

Avi Cohen-Skali, director general of the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, said the department would “suspend all existing agreements” with Haaretz and halt any future partnerships, charging Shocken’s words as “extreme, baseless, and false,”

Describing “those who killed, raped, and butchered our people freedom fighters” amounted to “words of incitement straight out of the playbook of the greatest enemies of the State of Israel,” he said.

Astonishing. 

But of course…

Upon arriving at the JW3 building on Sunday, the mostly Jewish audience were met by an anti-Israel protest outside that chanted “Palestine is not your home” and that they were “genocide supporters”.

The crowd, numbering around 150, stood directly outside the Jewish community centre holding signs accusing Israel of terrorism and genocide. One protester was arrested, according to police.

Olga Kirschbaum-Shirazki at Fathom:

The far-left and Islamist activists who are heading these sit ins, marches, and media platforms in non-Muslim countries in the name of global justice focus on Israel/Zionism as the source of global problems. The thesis is as follows: ‘Israel’, or ‘Global Zionism’, is at the centre of and exports every kind of injustice: racism, capitalism, colonialism, environmental destruction, war, and military and carceral technologies. This idea is expressed in local far-left media and parties, in the academy, as well as in Islamist media outlets in English like Al Jazeera, Islamic Republic News Agency, and Daily Sabah (Turkey). For millions of young people who want a better world, this discourse is galvanising. Faced with such urgent and overwhelming ‘challenges of the world’ and being offered a clear solution to those challenges – which in its crudest version says the Zionists, meaning the majority of Israel’s citizens, the majority of the global Jewish, community, and Israel’s supporters and allies around the world are malign and they control the world and that’s why it’s all going wrong – one can perhaps even understand why so many people are attracted, especially if they know little about the history of the Middle East and antisemitism.

Substitute "Jews" for "Zionism" – or "Global Jewry" for "Global Zionism" – and this all has a horribly familiar feel. And much of this is coming from supposed intellectuals and the universities. 

What many of us have observed since 7 October is that intellectuals, thought leaders, and artists are ushering people who admire them on other topics into the thesis of Zionism as a global evil. Many seem to think: if these figures are valiant environmentalists, inspiring psychiatrists, great poets, talented musicians, or dynamic actors and they think Zionism/Israel is the problem, then maybe it is….

As the Frankfurt School among other scholars have convincingly argued antisemitism is a projection. Far-left/Islamist anti-Zionism and far-right antisemitism share the same dynamic: they project what they think is evil onto ‘Global Zionism’ or ‘the Jews’ and claim therefore that the destruction of the Jews or the Zionist entity/Israel is a key measure for ‘redemption’ or ‘justice’. This is why their projections look different but function in the same way. In the 1930s the far right projected everything they detested onto the Jews as a race: cowardice, greed, pollution etc and sought to destroy Jewish men women and children across Europe as well as the Jewish community in Palestine (yes the Nazis were anti-Zionist too). Today the far-left projects everything they hate onto the Jewish state: colonialism, capitalist exploitation, incarceration etc., and call for the destruction of Israel. Islamist antisemitism is likewise a projection of what Islamists hate the most heresy, godlessness, etc. Their solution: the destruction of Israel and Judaism.

Her conclusion:

If one thinks in terms of conventional power and interests – amassing territory, wealth, defeating a military opponent – the destruction of two-thirds of European Jewry was a totally absurd endeavour for Nazi Germany. If, however, one sees the Holocaust as a projection of all evil onto the Jews, then it makes sense to those doing the projecting. Today, mutatis mutandis, this same narrative of redemptive anti-Zionism is being expressed across campuses and on far-left news outlets around the world, and is increasingly expanding in social democratic and liberal spaces. This is a clear deadly danger to Jews and must be stopped for this reason alone. However, the thesis that Zionism is a source of evil is also a deadly distraction for all people everywhere. We do not have time to lose with such a pointless projection that not only saps energy and time, but betrays our deepest humanity with its facile format. Our young people deserve a world where they can breathe, earn a living, and flourish, and more than that they deserve to learn that it can be built if we look at reality in the face, take responsibility, and work together with those who are open to doing so. We cannot get back the time and energy lost sitting on campus lawns, walking the streets, and scrolling on phones calling for the destruction of the only Jewish state. We need this time and energy for the real problems we face.

Jonathan Kay has a long piece at Quillette on the women's college volleyball farce now playing out over in the western US. San José State University (SJSU) has a trans player – ie a man claiming to be a woman – on their team, and as a result five teams have now forfeited their games.

The “injustice” at issue can be sourced to a single SJSU player—Blaire Fleming—who is at or near the top of the SJSU Spartans’ leader board in sets played, “kills” (winning offensive shots that are unreturnable by the opposing team), and blocks. The team’s web site also informs us that Fleming is a public-relations major who “would like to work in the fashion or art industry,” and “likes cooking and trying new restaurants.”

What the site does not mention is that this San José State Women’s volleyball star is not biologically female. Rather, Fleming is a biologically male athlete who chooses to self-identify as a woman for legal and social purposes. However, in keeping with all the other farcical aspects of this saga, SJSU athletics officials have been required to pretend that this fact is somehow less important to the volleyball community than Fleming’s artistic inclinations and culinary interests.

This pretence is rooted in the official policies of SJSU’s Athletics Department, which demand that the asserted female gender identity of trans women such as Fleming be taken as trumping human biology. This explains why, when the above-described farce finally ended on 26 October, it was UNR, which fields an all-female volleyball team, that was required to forfeit—and not SJSU, which doesn’t.

It gets worse. A member of the SJSU staff, Melissa Batie-Smoose, who worked as deputy coach under head coach Tod Kress, has now spoken out, to Kay, about the pressures in place to ensure that the male in question – so vital to SJSU's success – should be given preferential treatment, while any doubters should be silenced. 

Over a three-decade career as a coach and recruiter in women’s volleyball, Batie-Smoose had seen few women who possessed anything close to Fleming’s level of raw physical power. Fleming was relatively undisciplined and sometimes listless, Batie-Smoose reports, but what “stood out was spiking the [ball] and blocking on the front row, due to Fleming’s leaping ability and hitting power, which far exceeded that of any player in the [Mountain West] Conference.”.

Kress’s original impressions of Fleming aren’t known to us, as he declined repeated Quillette interview requests. But by Batie-Smoose’s account, Kress originally seemed to share her concerns as to whether it was appropriate for biologically male volleyball players to compete on women’s teams. His attitude reportedly changed in abrupt fashion, however, when Kress was given strict orders on the subject from the school’s Athletics Department.

In this regard, a name that comes up often in the Title IX Complaint is Laura Alexander, an Assistant Director of Student Wellness at SJSU with jurisdiction over the school’s volleyball program. According to Batie-Smoose, Kress told her that Alexander had said anyone opposed to Fleming’s inclusion on the women’s team should leave SJSU and seek “therapy.”

Batie-Smoose reports that Kress began bending over backwards to accommodate Fleming, who reportedly often took liberties with the team’s dress code and practice schedule, as well as the baseline behavioural standards that Kress applied to the rest of the team. This claimed double standard is one of the major themes of Batie-Smoose’s Complaint.

In one detailed case study she puts forward, Batie-Smoose contrasts the allegedly lax treatment afforded to Fleming with the far stricter standards imposed on a promising female recruit who was competing for Fleming’s position. Kress allegedly refused to renew the recruit’s scholarship. Being unable to pay her tuition out of pocket, the recruit was effectively pushed out of the program, and now plays in another state.

The climate that Batie-Smoose describes is one of fear and self-censorship. Until Slusser finally went public with her concerns in recent weeks, everyone involved with the SJSU women’s volleyball team seems to have been scared to even mention the fact that Fleming is transgender—despite also being required to pretend that Fleming’s biologically male status is athletically inconsequential….

Read on as the complications pile up and, predictably enough, it all goes legal.

A Halloween special from Stoke Newington's Abney Park Cemetery:

As ever, click to enlarge.

For Ukraine, the problem of North Korean troops boosting the depleted Russian fighting force is obvious enough. For South Korea, it's the question of what North Korea gets in return. 

Former White House senior adviser and CIA veteran Dennis Wilder highlighted the risks associated with North Korea’s potential acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines and ICBM re-entry technology. “If North Korea’s nuclear-powered submarines were to roam the Western Pacific, it would be an enormous problem for all of us.” For South Korea, however, this scenario is more than a headache—it is a serious security threat.

In September last year, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un unveiled a tactical nuclear submarine with underwater strike capabilities and has made it clear that the navy’s nuclear armament is “an urgent task.” While North Korea possesses underwater-launched nuclear missiles, it lacks nuclear-powered submarine technology. If Russia provides North Korea with this technology, it would allow North Korea to hide nuclear missiles in submarines with unlimited underwater capabilities. It would be a disaster for the South.

Kim Jong-un would not send over 10,000 North Korean troops to perilous combat zones for nothing in return. Russian President Vladimir Putin is the one under pressure, facing more than 600,000 casualties from Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. He could agree to Kim’s demands by offering advanced weapons such as nuclear-powered submarines, ICBM re-entry technology, or the latest fighter jets as a compromise. Yet such a decision would signal a deliberate hostility toward South Korea. Should Russia cross this “red line,” South Korea would have no choice but to take emergency countermeasures.

Meanwhile tensions continues to rise, with North Korea's latest ballistic missile launch, and a joint US-South Korean exercise conducting simulated strikes on North Korean targets.

With top-level Russian technology, Pyongyang's huffing and puffing becomes an altogether more worrying prospect.

From MEMRI TV:

In his October 4, 2024 Friday sermon at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria, which was aired on Nour Al-Sham TV (Syria), Sheikh Tawfiq Muhammad Sai'd Ramadhan Al-Bouti said that the Jews are "half-humans," treacherous in nature, that they killed the prophets, and tried to kill Jesus. He said that the "heroic acts" of the people of Lebanon, Palestine, and Gaza will finish off the "remnants of the rats of [the Jewish tribes] of Banu Nadhir and Banu Qaynuqa. Al-Bouti stated that the Jews admit in the Protocols of the "Devils" of Zion, that they are the "masters of the world, its corruptors, […] and executioners." He continued to claim that they are behind every kind of moral corruption and pornography in the world and that they spread strife and war worldwide. Al-Bouti prayed that Allah grant "total victory" to the Islamic nation, so it brings about the end of this enemy and cleanses the land of Palestine of their "filth."

Imagine if a Jewish preacher said anything remotely comparable about Arabs or Muslims: it'd hit the headlines. This is business as usual, though, across the Islamic Middle East….