Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Hating the same people

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  • UNRWA vs.UNKRA

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    "On the other hand if the goal was to perpetuate the Korean War one would have created an org like UNRWA and established camps that grow endlessly to fuel a new generation of fighters. They would be radicalized in class rooms told they would return soon and would have shown them photos of the united Korean Peninsula and sent them to summer training camps to train for the one state solution from the sea to the sea."

    UNKRA, having done its job, closed down in 1958.

    UNRWA was established in 1949 to deal with both Jewish and Palestinian Arab refugees. The Israeli government took over the responsibilty for Jewish refugees in 1952. The Palestinian Arabs have never taken over responsibility and by now, 75 years after the founding of the state of Israel, it's clear that they never will unless forced to do so. UNRWA perpetuates the refugee status of the Palestinians and their demands to return to their "homeland" in Israel – unlike all the other great ethnic cleansings of the last century, where the refugees have long since been absorbed into their new homes and got on with their lives. 

    UNRWA is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

  • The Zionist entity in London

    Oh boy.

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    "…the Zionist entity, which is well known to be prolifically based in London…and this is one of the venues that likes to host the Zionist entity and those who are complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians…"

  • Using gender-inclusive group labels

    As has been said often enough already: the Democrats have left an open goal for Trump by aligning themselves with gender woo.

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    "Nothing wrong with academia at all!"

    [On the other hand – that Puerto Rico "joke"….]

  • The latest authors’ petition

    The literary world, once again, beshits itself:

    A schism in the literary world has grown wider after two award winning authors criticised a petition signed by some of the world’s leading writers calling for Israel’s book industry to be frozen out.

    The Booker prize-winning author Howard Jacobson said he was staggered that the petition’s signatories could dream that they had a right to silence other writers, while Lionel Shriver criticised their intimidatory tactics.

    The petition, which has been signed by hundreds of leading authors, including Sally Rooney, Percival Everett and Rachel Kushner, calls for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions they claim are “complicit in genocide”.

    They have pledged to boycott Israeli publishers, book festivals, literary agencies and publications that have not spoken out against their country’s military actions in the Middle East.

    The petition has been organised by the Palestine Festival of Literature. Fossil Free Books — a pressure group that co-ordinated attempts to boycott Britain’s book festivals because of their sponsorship by the asset management company Baillie Gifford — circulated the letter in Britain.

    Remember them? They demanded that various book festivals drop ties with Baillie-Gifford because of its investment in fossil fuel companies and those “linked” to Israel. The usual idiots – with Sally Rooney's name notably to the fore – were in full support. As Alex Massie noted at the time:

    The hypocrisy of these fools knows no bounds. Waterstones is Britain’s biggest bookshop and it is owned by Elliott Advisors, a hedge fund with extensive oil and gas interests. Yet all these authors objecting to Baillie Gifford seem content to allow Waterstones to sell their books. Nor have I noticed authors revolting against Amazon even though, in the weasel words of “Fossil Free Books” the world’s largest online retailer has “direct or indirect links to Israel’s defence, tech and cybersecurity industries”.

    But then so, apparently, do companies such as the chip manufacturer Nvidia and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. By this standard pretty much anyone who uses the internet is “linked” to Israeli “genocide” and anyone with shares in any stock market tracker fund is doubtless doubly implicated.

    It is of course, in that over-worked but useful phrase, virtue-signaling – a vice to which the literary world seems particularly prone.

    From the JC:

    UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), a legal advocacy group, has accused the letter circulated by Fossil Free Books (FFB) of being “plainly discriminatory against Israelis”, citing the UK Equality Act 2010 and other discriminatory legislation from around the world.

    In a letter to the Publishers Association, Jonathan Turner, Chief Executive of UKLFI, said: “This boycott is plainly discriminatory against Israelis. The authors do not impose similar conditions on publishers, festivals, literary agencies or publications of any other nationality.

    “The boycott is also contrary to laws prohibiting discrimination on grounds of nationality in many other countries around the world… most US States have adopted legislation providing for sanctions against participants in boycotts targeting Israel.”

    He also said the letter made false allegations about Israel, such as accusing the country of genocide, despite the former president of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) clarifying in a BBC interview that the court did not decide that there was a plausible case of genocide on the part of Israel, as had been incorrectly reported in some media.

    The letter also puts the Palestinian death toll at 43,362 without saying that the figure comes from the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza, whose data, Turner says, “has been shown to be fabricated and manipulated”.

  • BBC reporting on Israel

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    Full text:

    In explaining Israel’s targeting of military infrastructure in Iran over the weekend, @BBC News offered a backgrounder, with the anchor saying: “Let us just remind you now of exactly how we got here.”

    She proceeded to say that “Tensions rose in Lebanon last month” due to the explosion of pagers that had been purchased by Hizballah and distributed to its members.

    Apparently 10,000 unprovoked rockets fired by Hizballah at the Jewish state, causing the evacuation of tens of thousands of Israeli civilians from their homes for over a year now, were not relevant to “how we got here”, because it all began when Israel randomly decided to blow up pagers.

    Of the pagers, the BBC said that “some [were] owned by members of Hizballah.”

    The pagers, the BBC implies, were not purchased by Hizballah and distributed to its members, but rather found their way to Lebanon somehow and a few just happened to be in the possession of Hizballah members when they exploded.

    What a coincidence!

    She goes on to say: “Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated in Israeli air strikes on southern Beirut.”

    So far in this backgrounder, Israel has been doing everything, and Hizballah and Lebanon have done nothing at all. The viewer is presented with no possible motivation for Israeli action, which is portrayed as unilateral and unwarranted.

    Moreover, Hizballah is not described as a terrorist organisation. Whatever it is, it just has a leader who was assassinated by Israel for reasons that are apparently unfathomable. Once again, the BBC’s failure to describe Hizballah as a terrorist group is not impartial but inaccurate. No context is provided for why this organisation, which began firing rockets at Israeli homes on 8th October in solidarity with Hamas, might have provoked a response from the Jewish state.

    “Three days later, Israeli tanks crossed the border into southern Lebanon opening up a new offensive in the conflict.”

    Another ‘bad’ Israeli military action, with seemingly no cause, in which it is Israel that expands conflict rather than Hizballah terrorists who created the northern front in this war in the first place.

    “Within hours Iran had launched nearly 200 ballistic missiles towards Israel.” Iran is presented not as the financier and puppet-master of Hamas and Hizballah terrorists, which it is, but as a third party merely showing solidarity with Lebanon after Israel attacked for no reason whatsoever.

    Of the Iranian missile attack – the largest barrage of ballistic missiles in history – the BBC is at pains to point out that “Most were intercepted”. But Israel, it seems, decided to target Iran for no good reason anyway.

    This is how the BBC understands this war.

    Our polling shows, year after year, that British Jews believe that media bias against Israel fuels antisemitism.

    When the Jewish state is falsely portrayed, as in this BBC report, as needlessly aggressive and the methods and motivations of its enemies are whitewashed, it invites viewers to view Jews negatively and gives licence to antisemites to attack them.

    In this surge of antisemitism in Britain, the BBC is not innocent.

    We will be writing to the BBC.

    Please also sign our petition calling on all broadcasters to call Hizballah what they are: terrorists: http://antisemitism.org/HizballahAreTerrorists

  • An indoctrination centre that destroyed generations

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    It's possible that rarely in history has an institution produced so much extremism and support for war and violence and massacre as the institutions of UNRWA. They have served as an indoctrination center that destroyed generations and sent generations towards extremism rather than peace.

    If the intl community had investigated this and mandated peace as a curriculum, we could have had peace and hope in the region. But the intl community failed and Hamas took over and Hamas was backed by Doha-Ankara-Moscow-Tehran.

    It's awful and it's hard to disentangle this disaster and the terrible institution that has covered for Hamas and extremism and intolerance for so long.

  • Building a second Israel

    The demented antisemitic fantasy world in which Russian propagandists dwell – from the country that brought us The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. At MEMRI TV:

    On October 20, 2024, former Russian diplomat Viacheslav Matuzov appeared on Mayadeen TV (Lebanon), where he discussed connections that he discerned between the conflicts in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and Syria, and Russia's war in Ukraine. He claimed that these conflicts are part of a broader agenda he described as “one expansionist enterprise,” suggesting that Israel is heavily involved in the Ukrainian conflict. Matuzov alleged that 80% to 100% of Ukrainian parliament members hold Israeli passports and stated that millions of Jews from Europe and America are prepared to move to Ukraine to build a “second Israel” there, citing the country’s natural resources and wealth as motivations for this relocation.

  • Firing at Chinese fishing boats

    We heard the other day, with the expulsion of some 120 North Korean workers from China, that relations between Beijing and Pyongyang are strained at the moment. Here's more:

    A North Korean patrol boat seized a Chinese fishing vessel near Cholsan county, North Pyongan province, last month and detained its six-member crew for two days. The incident is part of increased North Korean maritime patrols that have put Chinese fishing boats operating in shared waters on high alert.

    A source in China told Daily NK last Wednesday that the North Korean maritime patrol seized the fishing boat and fined the Chinese crew 500,000 Chinese yuan for violating North Korean waters. The Chinese crew was released only after paying the fine.

    Chinese fishing boats often operate in North Korean waters – evading raids when they can – because fishing resources in Chinese waters are depleted. 

    This has led North Korea’s maritime patrol to increase its foreign exchange earnings by imposing heavy fines on Chinese fishing boats that are seized after trespassing on North Korean workers.

    The North Korean maritime patrol levies fines of at least 350,000 yuan per boat, payable into the patrol’s own Chinese bank accounts, the source said.

    Recently, North Korean patrol boats have frequently fired toward – or even at – Chinese fishing boats.

    “In the middle of last month, two fishing boats were operating in North Korean waters when a North Korean patrol vessel followed one of the boats,” the source said. “When gunfire erupted, the other boat fled, but the pursued boat never returned and disappeared.”

    “The boat had a crew of two, and since they didn’t return after the gunfire, they were probably hit and killed,” the source said. “Such things have happened a lot recently.”

    As Chinese boats have been seized by North Korean maritime patrols or suffered other misfortunes, Chinese authorities have restricted their fishermen from operating in North Korean waters. However, despite Beijing’s restrictions and the very real risks involved, Chinese fishing boats continue to ply North Korean waters with little hesitation.

    Moreover, because some Chinese boats take on unlicensed crews to avoid paying the 7,000 yuan annual insurance premiums to the state, owners often do not report North Korean seizures of their boats when they occur, the source said.

    “Even in the past, North Korean patrol boats often intercepted Chinese boats, but nowadays they do so much more frequently and with greater force,” the source said. “North Korean patrol boats seem to be cracking down more openly on Chinese boats as relations between China and North Korea deteriorate.”

    Perhaps North Koreans feels emboldened to snub the Chinese now that they're best friends with Putin, sending troops and weapons to Ukraine. It could well be a move they'll come to regret.

  • Armita Garavand

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    Full text:

    One year ago today, 16-year-old Armita Garavand was killed by Iran’s morality police for the “crime” of #WalkingUnveiled on her way to school. This act of defiance cost her everything. Taken to a military hospital, even in death Armita was held hostage, her family forced into false confessions.

    Now, on the anniversary of her killing, authorities have stationed guards outside her family’s home to prevent any memorial, even banning posts of flowers on her grave.

    Armita loved painting and dancing to K-pop. In Iran, a regime of absolute apartheid against women rules without mercy. Mahsa Amini and Armita Garavand were both killed in the 21st century for showing their hair—a testament to the cruel reality that, for Iran’s women, even the smallest freedoms come at the highest cost.

    Despite the threat of death for defying hijab laws, Iranian women are still resisting, walking unveiled in public to challenge the oppressive rule of the mullahs.