Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • The Iran pundit

    No surprise here. On one of those "experts" interviewed by the BBC and others, from the JC:

    Standing in military fatigues beside the IRGC logo, this is the “Iran expert” who caused outrage on the BBC last week with a rant about “chosen people” who believe they “have exceptional rights to the whole region”.

    Posted on social media in 2019 by Iranian academic and BBC pundit Seyed Mohammad Marandi, the caption reads: “This photo was proudly taken… when I was a 16 year old volunteer fighting the US backed invasion of Iran.”

    That unit was the 27th army of Muhammad Rasulullah, an IRGC division that has been described as “notoriously ideological” and was set up by Commander Ahmad Motevaselian, one of the founders of the terror group Hezbollah.

    The picture raises serious questions about how the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 — all of whom used Marandi as a pundit — vet “experts” before broadcasting their views into millions of households.

    Marandi has been promoting Hezbollah and its incendiary narrative about Israel on BBC, Sky and Channel 4 widely since Israel went to war with Hezbollah in Lebanon….

    Marandi’s close links to the top of the Iranian dictatorship also come via his family – his father, Alireza, is Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s personal doctor.

    In an echo of Iranian regime rhetoric, Marandi also celebrated the Hamas terror attacks, writing on social media on October 7 2023: “It's been a great and historic day. Israel can't even defeat the besieged Gazans. How can the regime even contemplate confrontation with Hezbollah, let alone the Islamic Republic of Iran? It's time for colonisers to go back to their homes in Europe and North America.”

    Campaigners and politicians are now asking whether the broadcasters knew about Marandi’s ideological and military background or whether there were vetting failures. 

    The BBC and Channel 4 have referred to Marandi’s links to the Iranian government and role on Iran’s nuclear team in 2015 – when the regime had a more “moderate” president, Hassan Rouhani – during interviews.

    But he is usually introduced as an academic at the University of Tehran, and his links to the very extreme wing of the regime – the Raisi government, the ayatollah and the IRGC – have been omitted.

    Marandi has used his platform to promote Hezbollah, a proscribed terrorist group – which he described as “heroes” in a Channel 4 interview earlier this month – and make extreme statements about Israel, which he has accused of carrying out a “Holocaust” in BBC and Sky interviews.

    Kasra Aarabi, director of IRGC Research at United Against Nuclear Iran, told the JC: “Marandi is one of the Iranian regime’s main propagandists. He is the son of the supreme leader’s personal doctor, served in the IRGC – the regime’s terror arm which created Hezbollah – and was even an adviser to the nuclear team under former president and hardline cleric Ebrahim Raisi. Despite this, Western outlets – like the BBC, Sky News and Channel 4 – frequently invite Marandi without disclosing his troubling CV to their audiences, referring to Marandi as simply an ‘Iranian academic’. For an outlet like the BBC, which claims to take impartiality very seriously, the failure to disclose Marandi’s deep affiliation with the regime is a major oversight.”

    Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) said it was “astonishing that either the BBC failed to do its due diligence or did, and decided hosted him regardless”.

    Lord Austin, who sits as a life peer in the House of Lords, told the JC: “It’s either further evidence of the BBC’s bias against Israel or a newsroom team which is out of control and whose editorial checks are in disarray.”…

    In his October 1 appearance on the Today programme with presenter Mishal Husain, Marandi said: “Just as the UK supports this Holocaust in Gaza… we have no doubt they will be with the Israelis until the very last Palestinian.

    “They are the chosen people, they are your allies.. It’s an expansionist regime, it believes in ethno-supremacism, it believes they are the chosen people, [that] they have exceptional rights to the whole region.”

    Husain did not intervene as he made those statements and instead close the conversation by saying “thank you”.

    The interview prompted outrage from the Board of Deputies, the Jewish leadership Council and community figures including Simon Schama and Simon Sebag Montefiore. The BBC said in response to complaints that Marandi should have been challenged on those comments.

    A spokesperson for CAA said: “When a guest is spewing putrid rhetoric that invokes Holocaust comparisons, the normal thing to do is to challenge them. At the BBC, the normal thing to do is to thank them for coming on the programme. This is a disgrace.”

    It's a familiar feature of Islamist advocacy, to accuse the Jews of precisely what they themselves are guilty of….believing that "they have exceptional rights to the whole region".

  • Cricket break

    Women and gays must be prevented from meeting – by any means necesary.

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    Update:

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  • “Delivering a full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices”

    Well, we were warned:

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    Press release:

    Some of the Office for Equality and Opportunity’s key immediate priorities will be:

    • strengthening the legal duty for employers to create and maintain working conditions free from harassment
    • enshrining in law the full right to equal pay for ethnic minority people and disabled people
    • delivering a full, trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices
    • championing the rights of disabled people
    • focusing on socio-economic disparities

    The real conversion therapy of course is the medical mutilation of gender non-conforming kids who've been deluded into thinking they've benn born in the wrong body. Encouraging them to go through a normal puberty may now be criminalised…

  • What is Zionism?

    After the Holocaust antisemitism became unsayable in polite circles, but it never went away: it just re-surfaced as anti-Zionism. Einat Wilf:

    Starting Oct. 8 last year, inspired by images of Jewish defeat and weakness after the brutal attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists, anti-Zionism exploded worldwide – on university campuses, at international organizations and even in the pages of some respected newspapers. A campaign that had been building for decades, ingeniously devised and methodically executed, has reached its zenith.

    Antisemitism was discredited after World War II, once the world became aware of the horrors that Nazi ideology unleashed, culminating in the Holocaust. Anti-Zionism was created to replace antisemitism, initially by the Soviet Union, which exported it to the world. Intellectual “respectability” was key to its appeal, since ideas – especially the most dangerous and vile of them – must be perceived as respectable for educated elites to uphold them.

    The spread and rise of anti-Zionism over the last several decades has built on what I call “the placard strategy.” It ingeniously employs a simple, repeated equation, understandable to even a kindergartner. On one side is the word “Israel” or “Zionism,” or an image of the Star of David. Then comes an equals sign, followed by one of a litany of words that have become signifiers of evil: Zionism = Racism. Zionism = Apartheid. Zionism = Genocide.

    These words are not chosen because they convey reality. In reality, Zionism is about fighting colonialism, racism, apartheid and certainly genocide. These words are decontextualized and ahistorical, presented to portray Jews, especially those who dared to seek and support sovereignty in their homeland, as evil. These notions are endlessly recycled on placards and through social media and, most consequentially, laundered for respectability through academia and the United Nations.

    Academic analysis and citations are the key to conferring a sense of authority. As Wilson Center scholar Izabella Tabarovsky has shown, this process works by writing papers that are then cross-referenced to create an impenetrable structure of supposed scholarship.

    The placard strategy has also been laundered through the U.N. General Assembly. Consider the 1975 “Zionism = Racism” resolution. When South Africa brought charges of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice last December, it was another a page from this playbook.

    The nursery-rhyme repetition of a simple anti-Zionism message in numerous forums – combined with the imprimatur of academia and U.N. bodies – leads to one logical conclusion. If Israel, Zionism and the Star of David are evil, then evil must be eradicated. Think of the latest signs showing a Star of David in a trash bin labeled “Keep the World Clean.” More than any other placard, this one exposes the purpose of the entire project of anti-Zionism: a world without Jews.

    So…what is Zionism, really?

    Zionism is a political movement that started in Europe in the late 19th century for the liberation and self-determination of the Jewish people in their ancient homeland. Nothing more and nothing less. Each part of this description is important.

    A political movement: Some people argue that Zionism is 3,000 years old. The Jewish connection to Zion, the biblical name for Jerusalem – and, by extension, to the land of Israel – has been baked into the Jewish people, their history, their conception of themselves, their rituals and their traditions. When Jews were exiled in Babylon, in the Roman Empire, and eventually in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, the Jews vowed to never forget Zion. In the 19th century, the Jewish people organized themselves into an action-oriented political movement designed to bring about the establishment of a sovereign state for the Jewish people in their ancient homeland.

    For liberation and self-determination: Like other liberation movements, Zionism emerged from the Enlightenment and the rise of liberal ideas. It rests on the belief that liberty and freedom go hand in hand with the political power needed to secure them. This emerged from the tragic understanding that – whether in Europe, Russia, or North Africa and the Middle East – Jews would never be fully accepted as equals. Therefore, a state of their own was necessary for Jews to achieve equality. Liberation depends on the rise of national movements of self-determination where people can live in nation states and citizens can elect governments by the people and for the people. In that respect, Zionism is not unique. Liberation texts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries included the Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Poles and Jews among the nations that needed to emerge from crumbling empires.

    Of the Jewish people: The Jews are a people and a nation. One of the greatest mischaracterizations of Jews is that they are simply members of a religious faith. The notion of Judaism as a religion emerged in the 18th and 19th century, mostly in Europe, in an effort to fit Jews into the structure of secular republics. The idea was to sever the collective, ancient conceptions of the Jews as a people, a nation, a tribe – what in Hebrew is known simply as “Am” – from the private practices of faith and ritual. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, proclaimed the movement as a form of emancipation: “We are a people – one people.”

    In their ancient homeland: Before a century-long campaign of erasure, it was widely known and understood that the Jewish people were only ever collectively connected to one land – the land of Israel. The Jews have been exiled and have lived in many places around the world. But as a people and a nation, they have only ever been connected to one land that would make sense as a sovereign nation-state. The Jews have been repeatedly exiled from this land, but they never ceded it. To emerge with their own nation-state, in their ancestral homeland, with their revived ancient language, they had to decolonize themselves from numerous empires – Roman, Islamic, Ottoman, British, to name a few. In that, Zionism is the world’s oldest, most persistent and most successful decolonization movement.

    The enemies of Israel, notably the Islamist Iranian proxies of Hamas and Hezbollah, know perfectly well what Zionism is, and know that it conflicts with their vision of Islamic supremacism in which no Jews are permitted. In which to put it more bluntly, all Jews must be killed. It's an existential struggle now, Zionism. 

  • A final departure from the pluralistic liberal tradition

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    Full text:

    Reading a couple of @theguardian articles in a last few days, I feel we may be seeing its final departure from the pluralistic liberal tradition that made it a great newspaper, thanks to its capture by – or its morally fuddled editorial cadre – surrender to, an activist, ideological, anti-Western and more than that, anti-factual front.
    Our liberal democracy needs institutions of pluralistic discourse like this once-hallowed paper but it also requires a respect for facts and some sense of morals. Facts were once the essential ingredients of the coverage of a paper like the Guardian.
    However at least there are comedic sides to this.
    Two recent articles exemplify the Guardian’s embrace of illiberal anti democratic, anti fact forces and at the same time represent “a bonfire of the vanities” (an appropriate quotation from Savonarola who used the phrase to launch a bloodspattered but absurdly self-righteous purge of Florence that ended with his own execution.)
    Today’s was a truly creepy review of the One Day in October documentary, by a comedy-writer Stuart Jeffries, on the October 7 Hamas massacres who seemed irritated and uneasy that the real record of the atrocities by Hamas and some Gazan civilians, gleefully documented by the killers themselves on GoPros and smart-phones, did not accord with his and the Guardian’s political prejudices.
    How could these impertinent film-makers present these killers, decapitators, rapists, body-mutilators, corpse-abusers, kidnappers and looters as baddies? That is against the simplistic, rigid, flimsy framework of the ideology of anti-Israeli decolonization and must be wrong! This uncomfortable fact must be corrected!
    The result: a piece of unintentional, amoral gallows comedy at the Guardian's expense.
    The other was equally embarrassing and morally tone-deaf: a comically self-important and self-reverential but ugly and historically ignorant essay claiming the Israelis were guilty of memoralizing their October 7 fallen (so unlike every society, ever, in history from the 300 of the Spartans to the West with WW1 Armistice Day, the West and Russia with WW2, The Holodomor by Ukrainians, the Holocaust by the Jews, the Nakba by Palestinians, 9/11 by Americans and so on) by the clumsy Canadian provocateur Naomi Klein, all but indistinguishable from her alter-ego and fellow solipsist the other Naomi. As I posted this amidst general contempt for these pieces across the X platform, the paper may have taken one of them down 'pending review.'
    The fact is the paper has lost its heart and soul and sense of moral judgement but these preposterous pieces at least provide a sort of bleak, EndDays comedy amidst the heartbreaking civilian losses of Middle Eastern conflicts… @theguardian

  • The betrayal by the left

    The October 7th massacre was different from the usual and all-too-familiar history of Jewish pogroms across the centuries. First, it happened not in the Jewish diaspora but in Israel, the Jewish homeland which had been founded on the idea that here, at last, Jews would be safe. Second, it has been cheered on and celebrated, largely, by the left. Though, as Cecile Kuznitz points out in her article in the Jewish Review of Books, this is not entirely without precedent:

    The pogroms of 1881–1882 in the Russian Empire constituted the most sustained wave of anti-Jewish riots in the modern period up to that time. Their horrors partly inspired both mass immigration to America and the Zionist movement. Yet their importance as a turning point in Jewish history and their relevance to the Hamas massacre lie less in the violence itself than in the reaction of Russian society. The right-wing press cited Jewish exploitation as the root cause of the disturbances, and the government showed more enthusiasm for prosecuting members of Jewish self-defense groups than the pogrom instigators.

    These reactions were, sadly, unsurprising; what was truly demoralizing was the response of the more radical elements in Russian society, whom Jews had considered to be beyond antisemitic canards and sympathetic to their plight. Most of the intelligentsia remained silent, while much of the left endorsed the pogroms as a healthy expression of grassroots anger at an oppressive system. The leaders of the revolutionary socialist movement Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) addressed “the peasants who rise up in Elizavetgrad, Kiev, Smela [sites of pogroms] to free themselves from their enemies”:

    You have begun to rebel against the Jews. You have done well. . . . We have no right to react with indifference, still less with hostility, to a true popular movement.

    The third difference from the familiar history of Jewish persecution is in America – a place where Jews had thrived, and which they liked to think was immune to the antisemitic hatreds of the Old World and the Middle East. Not so…

    This betrayal by the left has clear echoes today, as liberal and progressive Jews find many of their erstwhile political allies condoning violence against their Israeli counterparts and minimizing evidence of antisemitism in the United States. The first response to the Hamas massacre issued by the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the United States, proclaimed “our solidarity with Palestine. Today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime. . . . End the Occupation. Free Palestine.”

    Yifat Bitton, president of Achva Academic College in Southern Israel, a law professor, and an advocate for women’s rights, has spoken of the “deafening silence” she encountered from activists abroad who work on issues of sexual assault: “Unwillingness to listen to Israeli women victims because they are on the occupying side is simplistic and shocking. . . . This is a progressive argument that is completely regressive.” Such left-wing antisemitism has forced many American Jews, the great majority of whom identify as liberal, to confront hatred in a much more direct way, often among ostensibly close friends and colleagues….

    Looking for historical analogies in times of crisis is inevitable, yet if many of them fall short, it may be a sign that we are truly now in uncharted territory. Basic assumptions about the modern Jewish experience have been called into question, both the Zionist belief in the security offered by political sovereignty in Israel and the diasporic belief in bedrock American tolerance.

    A year after the Hamas massacre and the ensuing war, we may be standing at an inflection point whose significance we cannot yet grasp.

  • Quality science advice

    Meanwhile, in Ireland:

    The Government’s new Science Advisor believes that biological males “are women” if they identify as transgender women.

    On Tuesday this week, Professor Aoife McLysaght, Chair of Evolutionary Genetics in Trinity College Dublin, was appointed to the role of Government Science Advisor….

    Notably, Professor McLysaght has repeatedly affirmed that “transwomen are women” – i.e. that biological males who identify as women are the gender they identify as.

    “I am a biologist, and I’m pretty sure that whatever you can think of, there exists both an example and a counter-example somewhere in nature,” McLysaght said in a 2020 social media post.

    Exactly. Scientists in evolutionary genetics are generally intelligent people who understand biology and know that changing sex is an impossibility – but there are counter-examples.

    In 2022, responding to a proposed US law that would seek to prevent transgender biological males from competing in women’s sports, McLysaght described the proposal as a “brutal manifestation of transphobia.”

    “1. Transwomen are women. 2. The origin of sex-differentiated sports is not to protect women’s sports but to marginalise them. 3. This law is a brutal manifestation of transphobia”, she said….

    Responding to a now-deleted post featuring a headline from the UK that read “Women-only facilities will be protected,” McLysaght said “What does it mean to ‘protect’ women-only facilities? Who decides who gets in, and on what basis? Hairstyle? Clothing? This is bullshit designed to hurt trans people and hurts us all.”…

    In a statement on the appointment this week, Science Minister Patrick O’Donovan said he was grateful to have Professor McLysaght advising the government on scientific issues, because it is “essential” that the government has “the best scientific evidence available” when addressing modern challenges, “fully informed by quality science advice.”

    Ah, that old Irish sense of humour….

  • Remembering Daniel Pearl

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    "…A diehard humanist who wanted to believe that man is not a predator to other men. The October 7 massacre, and the subsequent surge of anti-Israel propaganda have tarnished our hopes that Danny's murder would mark a turning point in the history of man inhumanity to man. But the steady regrouping of the world's conscience around Israel is now restoring our hope."

    Daniel Pearl (October 10, 1963 – February 1, 2002) was an American journalist who worked for The Wall Street Journal. On January 23, 2002, he was kidnapped by Islamist militants while he was on his way to what he had expected would be an interview with Pakistani religious cleric Mubarak Ali Gilani in the city of Karachi.

    After telling the camera that he and his family were Jewish, his subsequent decapitation was filmed…

  • Hurricane force winds

    Hurricane Milton? Pah! See what we have to endure here in north London:

    Weather

    Winds of 325 mph. Probably best to stay indoors.

    [See here]

  • DPRK soldiers in Ukraine

    It's not just arms that North Korea is supplying to Russia in its war on Ukraine. Soldiers too:

    North Korean soldiers supporting the Russian invasion have been killed in occupied parts of Ukraine, the government in Kyiv has said, confirming the strengthening relationship between Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un.

    A security official in the Ukrainian government was responding to speculation by South Korea’s defence minister that North Korean troops could soon be sent to fight in Ukraine.

    “It has already sent them,” said Andriy Kovalenko, head of the Centre for Countering Disinformation….

    Last week, the Kyiv Post quoted unidentified intelligence sources saying that six North Koreans had been among 20 soldiers killed by a Ukrainian missile in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region, and that three more were wounded.

    Ukraine’s Channel 24 television said that the strike on October 3 hit a training camp for the North Korean soldiers.

    It quoted an adviser to the Ukrainian mayor-in-exile of Mariupol, a city besieged and taken by Russia in 2022. Pyotr Andryushchenko said he had received information that North Korean shells were being brought into the port of Mariupol, that North Koreans were “systematically appearing” in the city and that they were “causing problems for locals”….

    Western intelligence sources said last week that half the shells used by Russia — or about three million a year — were being supplied by North Korea. At the beginning of the year Ukrainian intelligence was playing down Kim’s contribution to Russia’s war, claiming that half the shells supplied were duds.

    But last month the Ukrainian intelligence chief, Major General Kyrylo Budanov, said North Korea had become Putin’s biggest supplier of arms.