Mick Hartley

The latest from Hoxton Mini Press – Market Day, with photographer Paul Trevor:

The Brick Lane and Petticoat Lane markets have always been symbolic of the changing character of London’s East End – its diversity and vibrancy in the face of adversity. Made between 1974 and 1992, Paul Trevor’s photographs offer a vivid picture of the area before its gentrification and rapid social change.

"‘I was drawn to the Sunday market by the people, by the contrast between the energy they created and the run-down state of the place, and by the spontaneous and highly visual 'street theatre' on display. Like theatre, the show was repeated every week, but the performance was never the same. You never knew what to expect, which is probably why I persisted with it for so long!"

[Photos © Paul Trevor]

Paul Trevor previously: Brick Lane in the Seventies.

An Islamic festival at the Excel Centre this weekend – from the JC:

A singer whose songs feature lyrics like “all the Jews will pay” and “we throw stones, small and big, at the Jewish demons” is billed to perform to an audience of thousands at an “outrageous” Muslim festival at London’s Excel Centre this weekend, the JC can reveal.

Abdel Fattah Owainat, a Jordanian vocalist who posted footage of terror attacks and training with a soundtrack of one of his own songs glorifying violence after October 7, is advertised on the festival website as focusing “on themes of faith, devotion, and spirituality”.

In 2020, the musician, whose music features on a compilation album called “Jihadi Hills”, was accused of performing traditional songs “in the name of” Hamas in an academic paper published by Edinburgh University Press.

A video showing rockets being launched by militants was accompanied by his song: “Strike, may my father and mother be sacrificed for you, oh fire, make the enemies drink humiliation… The lands are forbidden to enemies… Allah is the greatest, proclaim it, all the Jews will pay.”

Another of his lyrics runs: “Know me, O Son of Zion: no matter how strong you are, for my country, blood is cheap… We throw stones, small and big, at the Jewish demons.”

The revelations add to growing concerns about the upcoming Global Peace and Unity (GPU) festival – the largest of its kind in Europe, which has previously attracted audiences of 55,000 – and the alleged connections of a number of its speakers to extremism….

Two Labour politicians, Naz Shah and Stephen Timms, have been billed to speak at the festival. Timms, the MP for East Ham, pulled out last week after reports that one of the speakers, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, was an “outspoken supporter of Hamas”. Naz Shah MP did not reply to the JC’s request for comment.

A spokesman for the Community Security Trust (CST) said it would be “irresponsible and reckless” for any respectable figure to endorse an event where fanatics may appear, while the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) branded the festival “outrageous”….

The festival’s list of speakers includes many individuals who have courted controversy. These include Professor Ilan Pappé, an academic at Exeter University known for his radical anti-Zionism, and activist Ismail Patel, who has met Hamas leaders in Gaza and “saluted” the group for “standing up to Israel”.

Also listed are those who are less well-known in the mainstream. The social media theologian and self-proclaimed “race realist” Paul Williams, who has a million followers across X/Twitter and YouTube, is due to deliver a speech on Sunday.

He has hailed an interview with former BNP leader Nick Griffin – entitled “Jews, Zionism, the far-Right and Islam in Europe” – as “superb” and shared a video by the American white supremacist Jared Taylor about the “biological reality of race”.

The former far-right Dutch politician Joram van Klaveren, who sensationally converted to Islam in 2018 and has since shared a video denying that mass murder and rape took place on October 7, is also due to speak.

A festival of antisemitic nutters, then…

Website here. The list of "inspiring speakers" still includes Labour MP Naz Shah.

On the other hand, in contrast to the rosy view of Cass below, here's some more worrying news. The battle is by no means over:

The NHS has been accused of ignoring the Cass review recommendations on transgender care for children.

Dr Hilary Cass’s report advised that under-18s should not be rushed into treatment which they may later regret following concerns about care at the Tavistock clinic.

However, a new NHS centre has snubbed the Cass review in favour of discredited transgender guidance that promotes both puberty blockers and surgery without age limits.

The Nottingham Young People’s Gender Service was founded in April to give psychological and social support to children with gender dysphoria who were former Tavistock patients and are currently taking or waiting to start puberty blockers.

In a job advertisement for a clinical psychologist position, the centre says it is “essential” to “practice [sic] in a gender affirming manner in line with” guidance from the controversial World Professional Association of Transgender Healthcare (WPATH).

WPATH, in case you haven't been paying attention, are the bad guys here – staunch US advocates of "gender affirming care" and unrelenting opponents of the Cass findings.

The WPATH guidelines call for removing any minimum age to transition and lowering the age threshold for puberty blockers and surgery.

Campaigners fear the service is at risk of becoming “Tavistock version 2”.

Helen Joyce, the director of advocacy at human rights charity Sex Matters, said: “Dr Cass warned that [WPATH guidance] promoted childhood social transition without evidence that this was safe or beneficial.

“Earlier this year, leaked materials from WPATH revealed the cavalier attitude of many gender clinicians towards patient wellbeing and informed consent.

“The point of closing the disgraced Tavistock clinic in London was to learn from its mistakes and replace it with something better. This job ad is a deeply concerning sign that the Nottingham clinic risks becoming Tavistock v2.”

The NHS said the advert had used “old terminology” and was being amended when contacted by The Telegraph.

Dr Louise Irvine, the co-chairman of the Clinical Advisory Network on Sex and Gender, said: “It is extremely concerning that the Nottingham Young People Gender Service job advertisement indicates that it is continuing to follow the discredited medicalised ‘affirmative’ approach to children and young people with gender dysphoria.

“This flies in the face of the Cass review whose findings were supposedly accepted by NHS England and the government.

“The Cass review appraised WPATH’s latest guidelines and found they were based on very weak evidence. Court documents in the USA reveal that WPATH actively suppressed research it had commissioned that did not have the outcomes it wanted,” she added….

Senior doctors at the centre are or have been members of WPATH, and have been openly critical of Dr Cass’s review, which found a lack of evidence to support prescribing puberty blockers to children and urged caution in the treatment of all under-25s.

Dr Walter Pierre Bouman, a senior doctor at the Nottingham Centre for Transgender Health and past president at WPATH, described the review as “poorly reasoned”. He added that there was “a fine line between naivety, narcissism and psychopathy”.

Prof Jon Arcelus is another doctor at the centre and was formerly a co-chairman of the committee responsible for developing the controversial WPATH guidance.

The advert for a psychologist to work with gender-questioning children made no mention of the Cass report, despite requiring knowledge of the WPATH guidance.

It's like whack-a mole – keeps on popping up however often it's beaten down.

Eleanor Hayward, the Times health editor, on the influence of the Cass Review, how it's been misrepresented in America, and how the BMA has helped to spread the disinformation.  

The retired paediatrician, now Baroness Cass of Barnet, had spent four years meticulously researching the most toxic and complex question in modern healthcare: how should we care for transgender children? The fact that she has emerged from the other side a universally respected crossbench peer is a remarkable testament to the impact of her 388-page report, which found no good evidence to support the prescribing of sex hormones to under-18s.

Not a good start, I'd argue. In fact not a good headline – "How the Cass Review has reshaped care for transgender children". It's not a position that Baroness Cass, as she is now, set out to answer, concerned as she was with the question of puberty blockers and the treatment of children deemed to be transgender. But I'll register my protest here: there are no transgender children. There are no children born in the wrong body. It's a philosophical, medical, any-way-you-want-to-look-at-it, nonsense. What it is, the idea of "transgender childen", is a social contagion that's led troubled kids to be fooled into thinking that a change of sex will solve their problems – but a change of sex is not possible. It's a wicked lie. That there are gender non-conforming kids – kids who don't conform to gender stereotypes – is of course absolutely true. That indisputable fact, though, requires acceptance, not medical intervention.

But I digress… 

Six months on from the Cass Review, the medical landscape has been permanently reshaped: puberty blockers are illegal, the controversial gender clinic at the Tavistock has shut and new NHS services providing “holistic” care are up and running.

This is despite Cass having to contend with a wave of “misinformation” which, it can be revealed, largely originated in the United States and has been spread by groups including the British Medical Association (BMA). Cass believes the political backing for her report’s 32 recommendations have been crucial to its success, telling The Times this week that the “broad cross-party support means it didn’t become a political hostage to fortune”….

While Cass has commanded support from across the political spectrum and within the NHS, she has faced an unexpected backlash from an ideologically driven “vocal minority” of fellow doctors. A pocket of influential figures within the BMA attempted to halt the implementation of the Cass Review this summer by seizing on an error-strewn online paper published by academics and lawyers in the United States.

In July, the doctors’ union suddenly announced that it would lobby against the Cass report, without consulting its 195,000 members. To support their position, the BMA Council cited as their top source a 39-page document published by the Integrity Project, an organisation based at Yale Law School. The paper is titled “an evidence-based critique of the Cass Review”, and claims Cass’s work — which was the largest ever conducted and reviewed data from 113,000 children — has “serious methodological flaws”.

Its lead author is Dr Meredithe McNamara, a paediatrician who has argued that giving children puberty blockers is “one of the most compassionate things” a parent can do, and acts as an expert witness in US court cases arguing for gender-affirming care. This McNamara paper, which was widely shared online and fuelled an international backlash against Cass, has now been exposed as having a “significant number of errors and misrepresentations”.

In an article published this week in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, a peer-reviewed British medical journal, a group of leading paediatricians identified a series of unfounded claims, misrepresentations and factual errors in the US paper that underpins the BMA’s stance. They found the McNamara paper was “tailored for the courtroom” and written with the “primary purpose” of supporting lawsuits in the US, where the issue of gender medicine remains bitterly divided along party political lines and is settled through legal action. It warned that doctors should not use the flawed paper to “jeopardise the implementation of crucial reforms” in the NHS.

The lead author Dr Ronny Cheung, a paediatrician based in London, said the US report had been “very influential in swaying online discourse” and he was “very surprised” it was cited by the BMA, whose stance is at odds with the rest of the medical profession. “The overwhelming response from medical royal colleges, and politicians on both sides of the debate, has been to recognise the potential for the Cass Review to help us move things forward,” Cheung said.

When her final report was published, Cass concluded that an entire global field of child gender medicine, including puberty blockers, was “built on shaky foundations”. The findings of her review reverberated around the world, and (unusually for an NHS-commissioned report) are now laying a new international foundation for a branch of medicine.

“The lack of evidence base leading to a change in the approach to gender care is not unique to England,” Cass said. “We are fortunate that our health system allows us to set up independent reviews that guide national policy, act on the evidence and implement improvement across the country.”

In other words our health service is not governed, as in the US, by profit. 

For more on US disinformation, see here.

A particularly nasty victimisation of someone not prepared to pay lip service to the gender cult. From the Telegraph:

A girl footballer with suspected autism is facing a ban of up to 12 matches for asking an adult transgender opponent: “Are you a man?”

In the latest case to raise major questions about the Football Association’s ongoing failure to ban those born male from the women’s game, the 17-year-old has been left distraught at being charged by her county FA over a remark made during a match against a trans-inclusive club.

She was charged last month with saying, “Are you a man?”, “That’s a man”, “Don’t come here again”, or similar comments during what was a pre-season friendly back in July.

In documents seen by Telegraph Sport, the girl admits asking a player she describes as having “a beard”, “Are you a man?” She also admits asking the referee for guidance about the player’s eligibility to participate in women’s football “given my concern for my safety after already suffering a number of overly physical challenges”.

But she has denied doing so constituted transphobia or that she made any comments that could be construed as such, while Telegraph Sport understands the referee also heard nothing he deemed to be discriminatory.

The girl was charged after the opposition club lodged a complaint via Kick It Out, English football’s anti-discrimination watchdog, which included testimony from the trans player and that team’s captain accusing her of persistent transphobia.

She faces a six-to-12-match ban if found guilty during a hearing later this month and she and her mother have decided to speak out about her plight because they feel they have been left with no choice.

Telegraph Sport has agreed to conceal her identity due to her being a child and her being on the assessment pathway for autism. It is a common trait of people with autism that they can struggle to recognise gender.

Eh? The whole point here is that she did recognise the gender of the bloke, and spoke out about it. 

The mother also revealed she had contacted the county FA after the friendly to raise concerns about the duo’s participation due to the two clubs also being in the same league. “They’ve both obviously gone through full male puberty, so they’re bigger, faster, stronger in every way than the girls that they’re playing against.”

She said a lengthy ban could see her daughter sidelined for the entire season, something she branded “hugely unfair”, adding: “I’m just furious, but I’m generally furious about this whole issue.”

From the Telegraph: 

Trans teachers must be allowed to use the same showers and lavatories as female colleagues, schools have been told.

Training from the National Governance Association (NGA) tells governors that staff should be given access to the bathroom “available to other members of their newly acquired gender”.

Their "newly acquired gender”? What a strange phrase. "I've just acquired a new gender, you know! It goes perfectly with my new outfit." Special offer two for the price of one maybe.

The advice, seen by The Telegraph, goes on to suggest that requiring transgender people to use a disabled toilet instead of making reasonable adjustments “is not lawful or good practice”.

It reads: “Employees who have undergone gender reassignment or who are transgender must be supported to use all toilets and shower facilities which are available to other members of their newly acquired gender.

“Requiring transgendered people to use disabled toilet facilities instead of making reasonable adjustments is not lawful or good practice.”

The NGA is the national membership association for governors, trustees, and governance professionals in England’s state schools and trusts.

More than 80,000 members across 70 per cent of schools and trusts in England access its services, which include advice, training and events.

An adult is on hand to set them straight.

Maya Forstater, the CEO of Sex Matters, a human-rights charity, said the training was “grossly irresponsible” and “deeply disturbing”.

She said: “Nowhere in the Equality Act does it say that men who identify as women have the right to access female toilets, so this is a shocking misrepresentation by the NGA.

“Employers are required by law to provide single-sex toilets unless they are fully enclosed unisex rooms. It is grossly irresponsible for the NGA to tell school governors and trustees otherwise.

“The Equality Act protects transgender people so that they can’t be harassed or discriminated against, such as being denied employment or housing. It doesn’t give them an all-access pass to opposite-sex facilities.

“It is deeply disturbing that school governors are being misinformed by the NGA in a way that breaches the rights of teachers and other staff to basic privacy and dignity.”

With a touch of mellow fruitfulness. Up at Kenwood (first pic) and The Hill in Hampstead this morning:

Click to enlarge.

As Shoshona Bryan said, sometimes only force will do – you can't negotiate with evil. Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator:

The death of Yahya Sinwar, the top military commander of Hamas, is an important and symbolic moment in Israel’s ongoing war against the terror group. His elimination was finally made official by an evening statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, following hours of rumours fuelled by the circulation of unmistakable pictures of his corpse. Yet not one rocket was fired into Israel by Hamas in response. This is what progress looks like.

The man who threatened to ‘take down the border with Israel and tear out their hearts from their bodies’ is now dead, marking a critical juncture in the conflict that reverberates beyond the battlefield and carries profound implications for the region’s future. It is a testament to Israel’s unyielding resolve, and signals a broader shift in how the state deals with the persistent threat posed by Hamas and its Iranian backers. Netanyahu was right to ignore the US and others’ attempts to stop its military action. As Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said: ‘After decades, we prove that there is a military solution to terrorism.’

Sinwar’s demise is not just a military victory – it is a powerful statement about Israel’s refusal to engage in appeasement. Netanyahu, long known for his hardline stance against terrorism, has made it clear that while Israel would engage in negotiations with Hamas to release hostages, its main agenda is not to talk with those who target civilians but to eliminate them. Sinwar, a figure notorious for his brutality, was responsible for the bloodiest attack on Israel since the Holocausts. His ultimate vision, the 7 October atrocities were orchestrated with chilling precision after years of preparation.

Netanyahu’s government has demonstrated that terrorism is best confronted with decisive action….

Netanyahu framed Sinwar’s death as the “beginning of the day after Hamas,” signalling that Israel sees no future in which Hamas governs Gaza. Netanyahu addressed the people of Gaza directly: “Hamas will no longer rule Gaza… this is an opportunity for you to finally break free from its tyranny.” There are also broader regional implications. Sinwar’s elimination sends a message not just to Hamas, but to all of Israel’s adversaries, particularly Hezbollah and their Iranian patrons. The Islamic Republic, the true orchestrator behind much of the conflict, uses its proxies to destabilise the region. Sinwar’s death, complete with graphic photos to get the message across, reminds Iran and its allies of Israel’s unshakable resolve.

Israel’s path to peace cannot be through appeasement or ceasefires with groups seeking its destruction. Netanyahu’s approach, though derided by some Western neophytes to the realities of the Middle East, underscores a fundamental truth about Israel’s security in a brutal neighbourhood: peace is achieved not by negotiating with those who seek to kill you, but by eliminating them. With Sinwar gone, the war continues—but Israel moves one crucial step closer to its ultimate goal: a Gaza free from Hamas’ tyranny, and a Middle East free from genocidal Islamist terror.

In Iran, the real criminals make the laws.
Today marks the anniversary of the Isfahan acid attacks on these women, whose “crime” was wearing an improper hijab. Ten years later, the attackers walk free, because why arrest yourself when you hold power? Meanwhile, those who dared… pic.twitter.com/WSUrkQVNv2

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) October 17, 2024

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"Today marks the anniversary of the Isfahan acid attacks on these women, whose “crime” was wearing an improper hijab. Ten years later, the attackers walk free, because why arrest yourself when you hold power? Meanwhile, those who dared to protest, like Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, remain behind bars. During this past 10 years, I’ve watched countless powerful female politicians from the West visit my country, only to submit to compulsory hijab in the name of “respecting Iranian culture.” Show them these pictures and remind them: hijab was never part of our culture. Forced hijab is the culture of ISIS, the Taliban, and the Islamic Republic. #WomanLifeFreedom"

The view from the Beeb:

Jeremy Bowen calling Oct 7 a “defeat” isn’t a neutral word – it echoes Hamas’s own narrative that it was primarily a military engagement rather than a massacre of civilians. Bad enough to refuse to call Hamas terrorists – so much worse to use their own language instead. pic.twitter.com/vTbrnDfeIZ

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) October 18, 2024

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