Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman drops a serious point into her “how to be better in 2026” Sunday Times column – Feel free to talk about antisemitism when there is antisemitism:

Two days after the Bondi Beach massacre last month, in which 15 Jews were murdered during a Chanukkah celebration because they were Jewish, a guest on the Today programme made this striking point: “Jews are not the only community that are targeted, and right now there’s Muslims, or immigrants, or trans people, or black people. Other people have their stories which are not to be minimised.”

I guess I missed the meeting in which it was decided that reporting the killing of Jews “minimises other people’s stories”, and I definitely missed stories about trans people being executed in the West on a regular basis. But can we maybe re-examine that edict? Because as that guest was speaking, menorahs in public spaces in Britain were being desecrated and a plot to carry out mass slaughter of Jews in Manchester was averted. Which you might think would give some people in this country pause. But given the speed with which they then defended Alaa Abd el-Fattah, insisting he doesn’t hate Jews, only Zionists, apparently not.

That Today remark was made, I believe, by Philippe Sands – a Jew himself, but also a regular BBC interviewee and contributor to the London Review of Books, so it all fits. One of the “community of the good”, in other words.

Tom Harris in the Telegraph on Bridget Phillipson’s reluctance to enforce the Supreme Court ruling:

“Trans people must not be used as a political punchbag,” she said recently. What is obvious from her few public comments on the subject is that the minister has fallen into the trap so neatly set for her by trans activists and their powerful and well-funded lobbying organisations. She has become convinced that the Supreme Court ruling was not about women after all, but was about trans people, particularly those men who identify as women.

She seems, based on her comments, to have given little consideration to women and girls whose right to privacy and security away from the presence and sight of biological males should be her top priority.

Her reluctance to enforce the law has already had consequences. Employment tribunals have upheld the rights of men who identify as women to continue using women’s changing rooms at their workplaces in an apparent conflict with what we now know the Equality Act says. Meanwhile Phillipson sits gazing at the EHRC guidelines on the use of single-sex spaces, desperately worried about how all this will affect that most marginalised and vulnerable community – men.

Well yes – what happens next is the big question. No tears lost over Maduro, but….

Freddy Gray in the Spectator:

Few will mourn the departure of Maduro – a left-wing tyrant whose regime has grown ever more corrupt and oppressive as the years have gone by. Venezuela is a gangsterish system in which citizens struggle for food, snitch on each other to the authorities through social media, and drug cartels operate with impunity. But the question of what comes next is of course now paramount. America has proven quite successful in recent years at regime decapitation. It’s the change part that proves really difficult.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, who was so careful to praise Trump after receiving the award in October, declared three weeks ago that her country had already been invaded – by Russia and Iran.

‘We have the Russian agents, we have the Iranian agents. We have terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, operating freely in accordance with the regime,’ she said.

‘We have the Colombian guerrilla, the drug cartels that have taken over 60 per cent of our populations and not only involved in drug trafficking, but in human trafficking in networks of prostitution. This has turned Venezuela into the criminal hub of the Americas.’

So far so good, then. But….

Trump has a deep obsession with energy prices and it’s notable that every country he threatens or attacks happens to have enormous oil reserves. On Christmas Day, he ordered strikes on Nigeria, apparently as a ‘Christmas present’ to protect Christians but cynics suspect other motives.

By changing the guard in Venezuela he has removed one of the last major oil-exporting administrations that oppose American interests. The other big two are Iran and Russia. Given the increasing talk inside American corridors of power of a peace deal over Ukraine – and the business possibilities stemming from a rapprochement between Moscow and Washington – the Trump foreign-policy agenda of 2026 could already be clear. War with Venezuela and Iran and fossil-fuel-rich peace with Mother Russia. Total energy dominance – the idea will make beautiful sense in Trump’s mind. But as his predecessors George W Bush and Barack Obama discovered, the problem with forcibly removing governments is controlling what happens next.

The assumption is always that the people of the country will rush out onto the streets to celebrate their new-found freedom – like, say, the French liberation from the Nazis. It’s perhaps more likely with Venezuela than it was with Iraq. But still…

Also, of course, this was by every yardstick a middle finger up to international law.

Jeremy Bowen makes the news again.

The BBC has apologised and compensated an Israeli family who survived the 7 October attack after a film crew entered their destroyed home without consent.

Days after the attack, a BBC crew led by senior correspondent Jeremy Bowen, arrived in Netiv HaAsara, a small village on the Gaza border where 17 residents were murdered. During the visit, the crew entered the home of the Horenstein family without their knowledge and filmed inside the property, including personal photographs of their children – at a time when many of the family’s friends and relatives still did not know whether they had survived.

An apology is unusual – but this was the BBC itself, not Bowen. After reporting that the attack on the Al-Ahli hospital was Israel’s responsibility – as per the Hamas press release – Bowen didn’t retract when this turned out to be untrue. He had “no regrets”, he said.

Every single word by my Romanian fellow Bogdan 💯 pic.twitter.com/DNGwjLkXOz

— Velina Tchakarova (@vtchakarova) January 2, 2026

The thorny old question: are we just being polite when we talk about Islamism – violent, supremacist, antisemitic to its core – as opposed to Islam? I do it myself, using “Islamism” or “Islamist” to refer to the latest atrocity. But is there really a nice tolerant Islam that can be distinguished from nasty Islamism – or are we just kidding ourselves?

Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator:

Islamism, we are told, has nothing to do with Islam. Extremists are impostors. Their violence represents a distortion of a peaceful faith. Western leaders across liberal democracies have insisted on this distinction for more than two decades. In 2001, speaking at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., George W. Bush declared: ‘The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.’ In 2014, Barack Obama declared that ‘Isil is not Islamic’. Theresa May spoke of ‘a perversion of Islam’ after the London Bridge attack. Emmanuel Macron described Islamist separatism as ‘a political ideology’ distinct from the religion itself. Anthony Albanese’s language after the Bondi Beach attack likewise emphasised unity and condemned extremist violence, framing the incident in terms of violent ideology, rather than detailed theological distinction.

Unfortunately for this position, the Islamists are very happy to supply chapter and verse from the Koran or the Hadiths to support their way of thinking. Given that Islam claims to be the final unanswerable revelation, supplanting all other religions, there’s little room for discussion.

Sacerdoti identifies four different frameworks he’s come across in his encounters, on this question of whether Islamism should be seen as an abuse of Islam, an authentic expression of it, or something uncomfortably in between.

One answer treats Islamism as Islam applied without disguise once political power is available. Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas co-founder who later worked covertly with Israeli intelligence to prevent attacks, was the most uncompromising voice I encountered. Sitting with me in my home, he explained that Islam is not primarily a spiritual faith but a political and legal system, and that movements like Hamas are not distorting it but implementing it coherently. In his view, the illusion lies in ‘moderate Islam’, which he described as people already living outside the doctrine while retaining its label. Yasmine Mohammed, a Canadian activist who escaped an extremist upbringing and later a forced marriage, reached a similar conclusion through her own experience, rather than ideology. She argued that Islamism flows naturally from doctrines governing law, gender, obedience, and supremacy when taken seriously. For both, Islamism is not a corruption but a revelation.

Those Muslim countries which practiced “moderate Islam” fifty or so years ago – see any newsreels or photos from Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, to see women in western-style clothes – have, in this view, now been returned to the true Islam, thanks to the petrodollar spread of Saudi Wahhabism and the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Lionel Shriver in Spectator Australia takes a characteristically robust view:

The modern confection ‘Islamist’ is meant to wall off the vast Muslim majority – nice, benevolent, friendly Muslims who love their western brothers and sisters and wouldn’t hurt a fly – from the teensy minority of theologically misguided Muslims who are actually dangerous. The intention – nay, the injunction, to journalists and readers alike – is to insulate the friendly Muslims from any stigma that might otherwise attach to innocent adherents of their faith just because so many of their co-religionists keep ploughing vehicles into Christmas markets, flying aeroplanes into tall buildings and blowing stuff up.

Yet if there’s such a hard-and-fast distinction between the friendly Muslims and the extremist sort that we must contrive an entirely different adjective for the latter, why don’t we hear more sorrow from the friendly Muslims after Bondi Beach and 7 October? Or when synagogues are attacked? Wouldn’t the friendly Muslims have an even greater vested interest than secular journalists in distancing themselves from their bad-news co-religionists? How about a bit more passionate disavowal among what we’re always told is a ‘community’? Something along the lines of Joe Biden’s favourite clarion declaration: ‘This is not who we are!’…

And is Islam really a religion of peace? Historically, it’s a religion of conquest. It’s often violent (ask Salman Rushdie); the punishment for apostasy is death. Doctrinally, Islam unabashedly aims for the whole world to become Muslim. Why, supposedly everyone is born Muslim. Eventually the scales will fall from the outsiders’ eyes and they’ll realise they’ve been Muslims all along. But before they get with the programme, the faith is overtly hostile to infidels. Live-and-let-live this ain’t. Sure, most Muslims aren’t stocking up on 1,200 rounds of ammunition, but is there no relationship between Islam and the Muslim extremists who take the creed’s contempt for unbelievers up a level?

Khaled Hassan, in the Telegraph – As an Egyptian, I know this truth: deranged anti-Semitism is normal in the Arab world.

For the past 14 years, my professional life has been dedicated to a single discipline: mitigating risk. In this field, one anticipates the usual obstacles – a scarcity of resources, a failure to grasp the scale of a threat, or a simple deficit in technical know-how. These are the standard hurdles of the trade.

Since relocating to Britain in 2016, however, I have been confronted by a challenge of an entirely different order. It is a cognitive and moral blind spot so profound it has redefined my understanding of risk itself.

In this country, we excel at recognising the peril of anti-Semitism. We meticulously document the alarming rise of the world’s oldest hatred. We convene conferences, host government briefings, and launch parliamentary inquiries to dissect and decry it.

We do everything, in fact, except the one thing that truly matters: applying our vigilance where the threat is most acute and culturally entrenched.

And that would be, in the Arab world. Or, more generally, in the Muslim world – where antisemitism isn’t an aberration, but the norm.

It confuses the existence of prejudice in Britain, where it is rightly treated as a social disease to be eradicated, with another country where it is not even recognised as a sin.

This refusal to acknowledge a qualitative difference is not liberalism; it is a form of civilisational suicide. It is the reason, that instead of applying increased scrutiny to cases like that of the Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, he was able to naturalise and become a British citizen.

It explains why, at a time when the BBC diligently investigated historical allegations against Nigel Farage, it platformed Alaa’s sister, Mona Seif, without the most basic due diligence into her social media, which appeared to glorify Hamas’s October 7 atrocities.

This same naivety is why Britain’s political leadership, including the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, could repeatedly engage with Alaa’s family and with Alaa himself during his imprisonment in Egypt, yet seemingly fail to detect their documented history of extremist and anti-Semitic sentiments. It is why Britain looks the other way when individuals with such profiles incite virulent hatred.

This approach privileges a feel-good narrative of universal sameness over the uncomfortable truth. It leaves the most toxic strains of hatred to fester unchallenged, while we pat ourselves on the back for condemning their milder cousins in our own backyard.

Paul Ovenden, former director of strategy for Keir Starmer, on how the El-Fattah affair is just the latest in a long string of fringe campaigns that have captured Whitehall. In the Times:

What I knew of his plight during my time in government was largely down to his status as a cause célèbre beloved of Whitehall’s sturdy, clean-shirted diplomats and their scurrying auxiliaries. They mentioned him with such regularity that it became a running joke among my colleagues: a totem of the ceaseless sapping of time and energy by people obsessed with fringe issues.

Fattah’s sudden crashing into public consciousness has revealed the sheer weirdness of how Whitehall spends its time. But we are only seeing a tiny part of it. Like an iceberg, the vast mass remains hidden from view, buttressed in silence….

The obvious question this raises is how a government elected on a vast parliamentary majority, at a time of mounting public impatience, with fundamental problems to fix, allows itself to become distracted by this sort of political folderol.

The usual answer is one of three things: either it doesn’t know what it wants to do; it knows what it wants to do but finds it too difficult; or it is precisely this flim-flam that it wants to occupy itself with. None of them capture the scale of the problem. What we are witnessing is something at once more profound and more mundane: the supremacy of the Stakeholder State.

The Stakeholder State is not a single phenomenon. Instead, it is the gradual but decisive shift of politics and power away from voters and towards groups with the time, money and institutional access to make themselves too important to ignore. In this state, the government rows with muffled oars in order to appease a complex coalition of campaign groups, regulators, litigators, trade bodies and well-networked organisations. If the language of priorities is the religion of socialism, then consultations and reviews are the sacred texts of the Stakeholder State.

It isn’t a grand conspiracy. There aren’t secret meetings or handshakes. Rather, it is a morbid symptom of a state that has got bigger and bigger while simultaneously and systematically emasculating itself.

Once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere: in the democratic powers handed to arm’s-length bodies or the many small government departments too powerless or captured to resist lobbying efforts. The Stakeholder State ferments between the NGO and the campaign group, the celebrity letter-writing campaign and the activist lawyers. It is given voice by political podcasts where everyone violently agrees. It is canonised through a corrupted honours system.

It’s something like Dominic Cummings’ “blob” – a Civil Service that needs to be decimated. But Ovenden doesn’t see it that way.

This is not a howl of despair. On the contrary, we should be optimistic. The Stakeholder State looks formidable because it is everywhere, but it is a colossus with feet of clay. Its strength has been gifted to it by politicians and it can all be taken back.

We don’t have to keep picking the pockets of the productive parts of our economy in order to fund inflation-busting pension increases for millionaires or an unsustainable welfare system. We don’t have to strangle small businesses at birth with regulatory burdens. We don’t have to fatten the pockets of wind-turbine operators by paying them not to produce energy. We don’t have to import antisemitic Islamists who wish us harm. And we certainly don’t have to treat British citizenship as a scrap of paper. On all this and more, we can simply choose not to.

The exciting bit is how easy this can be. We don’t need a revolution to achieve it. We don’t even need years of legislative fights. The public consent for change has been granted in every major election and vote going back to 2016. A government with a stiffened spine and renewed purpose could dismantle much of the Stakeholder State quickly. In doing so it would quickly find its nerve again and it would salvage something precious — the sense that politics can deliver the change people are crying out for.

I hope he’s right. Unfortunately “a government with a stiffened spine and renewed purpose” bears very little resemblance to the government we’re stuck with.

Once again legal bureaucracy triumphs over plain morality and common sense. From the Telegraph:

An Islamist killer who took a prison officer hostage and demanded the release of hate preacher Abu Qatada has won a £240,000 battle over taxpayer-funded compensation and legal costs.

David Lammy, the Justice Secretary, has agreed to pay £7,500 in compensation and foot a £234,000 legal bill for Fuad Awale, a convicted double murderer, after a judge ruled that his treatment in jail breached his human rights.

Awale was transferred to a special separation unit for the country’s most dangerous prisoners after he and another inmate ambushed the prison officer and threatened to kill him unless Britain released Qatada.

He claimed this segregation – designed to prevent him harming officers and radicalising other inmates – had breached his right to a private life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Awale claimed that he had suffered “severe depression” as a result of being denied contact with other inmates.

The court was told he had asked to associate with one of the Islamist extremist killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby but was denied the request owing to “counter-terrorism concerns”.

Those silly counter-terrorism concerns.

The High Court ruled in Awale’s favour, with a judge saying: “The degree of interference with the claimant’s private life which has resulted from his removal from association has been of some significance and duration.”

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, warned that the Awale judgment could open the floodgates to similar legal actions by extremists and put the safety of prison officers at risk if dangerous offenders could not be safely segregated.

“It’s a sick joke that taxpayers are handing this man £7,500 in compensation and footing a legal bill of over £230,000. This is a double murderer and extremist who took a prison officer hostage,” he said.

So why was this Awale in prison?

Awale is serving a life sentence for shooting two men in the head in 2011 in what a judge described as a planned “execution”.

Aged 25, he was sentenced to a minimum of 38 years prison in January 2013 after killing Mohammed Abdi Farah, 19, and Amin Ahmed Ismail, 18, in an alleyway in Milton Keynes over a drugs dispute.

Added: Andrew Tettenborn in the Spectator:

There is little doubt that in law this is right: on the accepted Strasbourg-inspired interpretation of the ECHR, Awale’s human rights were breached. There is equally little doubt, however, that this case shows in small compass precisely what is wrong with the ECHR and why it is imperative for this country to leave it.

From the Times:

Bridget Phillipson has warned her critics that transgender people must not be used as a “political punchbag” amid accusations that she is blocking guidance on single-sex spaces….

Phillipson said the “majority” of the public accepted the need for female-only provision, and that there were valid questions of “fairness” on issues including women’s sport.

She added: “I think that’s where the majority of people are but at the same time we’re a compassionate nation, commonsense in their approach. We don’t abuse or target trans people because of who they are, that’s not … in keeping with what people would believe.

“But you do need to make sure you’ve got fairness in areas like sport and good access for services for women.”

It’s just waffle. She accepts the need for women-only spaces, but…compassion. She accepts the need for fairness in sport, but…compassion. Why this desperate need to put the needs of a tiny handful of men above those of women? Trans activists are the ones who’ve been aggressive and violent in this debate, not women. They’re not the helpless victims here.