Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • “Thank you Israel”

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  • “The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale”

    Rosie Duffield – long-time gender-critical thorn in Labour's side – has finally had enough. It was the sleaze what did it:

    Duffield, 53, has become the fastest MP to jump ship after a general election in modern political history. She is writing to the prime minister today informing him of her decision to resign the whip “with immediate effect”.

    In her excoriating resignation letter, Duffield condemned Starmer for accepting gifts worth more than £100,000, including clothing, glasses and accommodation paid for by Lord Alli, the Labour peer.

    “The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale,” she wrote. “I am so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once proud party.”…

    However, it is the internal criticism which will concern Starmer most. Duffield wrote to him: “As prime minister, your managerial style and technocratic approach, and lack of basic politics and political instincts, have come crashing down on us as a party after we worked so hard, promised so much, and waited a long 14 years to be mandated by the British public to return to power.

    “Since the change of government in July, the revelations of hypocrisy have been staggering and increasingly outrageous. I cannot put into words how angry I and my colleagues are at your total lack of understanding about how you have made us all appear.

    “How dare you take our longed-for victory, the electorate’s sacred and precious trust, and throw it back in their individual faces and the faces of dedicated and hardworking Labour MPs?”

    Ouch.

    Gender handmaiden Nadia Whittome was quick off the mark:

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    The replies have been, well…robust:

    You are a truly pathetic person. You can’t answer questions when challenged, you are a science-denying, truth avoiding fool & you have all the grace and poise of a bowl of tapioca.

    You make Nancy Kelly look intelligent

    You’re a traitor to women & probably one of the most unpleasant people I know of in politics

    That last from Sharron Davies.

    And this:

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  • A qualified Islamic scholar

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  • Facing an annihilationist threat

    Nasrallah's death – now confirmed – is a huge blow to Hezbollah, but above all it's a huge blow to Tehran in its efforts to surround and eliminate the state of Israel. Not that you'd know that from the news coverage. Daniel Bel-Ami at Spiked:

    Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, was killed last night in an Israeli air strike on Beirut, as part of its ongoing offensive in southern Lebanon.

    Nasrallah’s death exposes the glaring omission in most of the media coverage of the conflict. Few outlets seem willing to recognise the fact that Israel faces an annihilationist threat from the Iran-backed terrorist group and its Islamist allies.

    At best, media reports will acknowledge that Hezbollah has fired thousands of missiles into northern Israel since 8 October 2023, the day after the Hamas pogrom. This of course is why Israel has had to evacuate 60,000 of its citizens from its northern communities. In rare instances, the media might mention that Hezbollah has flagrantly flouted a UN resolution to stay at least 12 miles from Israel’s border. But Israel’s deeper motivations for its conflict with Hezbollah and allied Islamist groups are rarely taken seriously.

    Instead, the media paint a picture of Israel as a malign, irrational actor wilfully slaughtering innocent civilians. This is demonstrated most clearly on Al-Jazeera, an international TV channel based in Qatar. It consistently portrays Israel as indiscriminately attacking Palestinian and Lebanese people, seemingly just for the sake of it. The BBC and Sky are not far behind when it comes to the demonisation of Israel.

    The annihilationist stance of Israel’s Islamist opponents ought to be hard to ignore. The absence of discussion about it is one of the strangest aspects of the coverage of Israel’s wars. Hezbollah, literally the ‘party of god’, is very open about its ultimate aim. Its foundational document, the 1985 ‘Open Letter’, states that:

    ‘Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognise no treaty with it, no ceasefire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.’

    Here Hezbollah states that its goal is the obliteration of Israel, the ‘Zionist entity’. This is not a statement about Lebanese sovereignty, or a call for Palestinians’ freedom. Hezbollah has no interest in either concept. Rather, it frames its project in terms of the umma, the global Muslim political community.

    Although this programme is almost 40 years old, the leaders of Hezbollah have made countless similar statements over the years. In July this year, the late Nasrallah repeated a common Islamist metaphor when he called Israel a ‘cancerous tumour that must be eradicated’.

    Which is why Israel is doing what it must do to ensure its survival. It's just a shame that the UK has chosen this time to put a partial block on arms sales to Israel – though they seem to be doing well enough without our help or support.

  • The “trans woman” rapist

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    "Never mind journalism, the BBC, and other news outlets befooling themselves; this brings our justice system into complete disrepute. For anyone still declaring their pronouns in their bios and work emails — this obscenity is what it leads to."

  • Antisemitism and Islamophobia

    Mark Feldon at Spiked – Stop equating anti-Semitism with Islamophobia. "There is no comparison between the hatred of Jews and criticism of a religion."

    In the wake of Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Germany was almost immediately engulfed by a surge of anti-Semitism. The public response of Germany’s cultural and political elites was swift. They started writing critical articles and organising programmes to counter the rising tide of ‘hate’. Yet what was striking about this intervention was that it continued a longstanding pattern in which no discussion of the threat of anti-Semitism can pass without mention of the supposedly equal threat of ‘Islamophobia’.

    Just two months after last year’s 7 October pogrom, the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper warned of ‘more anti-Semitism, more Islamophobia’. In February this year, Raed Saleh, the parliamentary leader of the Social Democrats (SPD), called for the ‘fight against Islamophobia’ to be enshrined in the state constitution alongside the fight against anti-Semitism. This summer, the Free University of Berlin announced its condemnation of ‘anti-Semitism, racism, hostility towards Muslims and other forms of discrimination’….

    These are truly dark days for Europe’s Jews. In the words of Rabbi Menachem Margolin, chairman of the European Jewish Association, Jews find themselves in ‘the worst [position] since the Second World War’. Dutch author Leon De Winter believes that European Jewry could disappear by 2050.

    It is a very different story for Muslims, however. Hundreds of thousands continue to migrate to western Europe from Islamic countries. While Jews retreat from public life and conceal their identities, many Muslims are increasingly asserting their Islamic identity in public, by attending marches, waving flags and wearing face veils. Islamic institutions, such as mosques and Halal shops, have proliferated.

    Muslims are not facing the intimidation that Jews now face daily on the streets. There are no demonstrations calling for the destruction of any Islamic nation or protests demonising Palestinians as ‘child murderers’ or ‘genociders’. Nor are there influential initiatives calling for a boycott of Arab institutions or individuals. German city centres are free of anti-Islamic graffiti and posters.

    Compare the tolerance towards Islamic identity with the intolerance meted out to Jews and Israelis. In February, artists demanded the exclusion of Israelis from the Venice Biennale. In May, Israeli singer and Eurovision contestant Eden Golan could only leave her hotel room in liberal Sweden with bodyguards. In July, Belgian authorities refused to host a football match involving an Israeli team.

    Muslim athletes, filmmakers and artists are spared such indignities and hostilities. Indeed, Muslims move freely throughout Europe, reshaping public spaces such as squares, parks, shopping streets or schools. There is one mosque in Berlin that requires round-the-clock police protection… not from right-wing, anti-Muslim bigots, but from radical Muslims opposed to the mosque’s liberal female imam.

    Given that anti-Muslim sentiment is clearly not as significant a problem as anti-Semitism, why is there so much elite focus on Islamophobia?

    To answer this, it’s important to understand that campaigns against Islamophobia aren’t really concerned with promoting tolerance towards Muslims. Though the term was first used over a century ago by French colonial officials in Algeria, it acquired its contemporary meaning when Islamic fundamentalists started wielding it against writers critical of Islam, like Salman Rushdie, Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Its main function is to shield Islam, often violently so, from any form of criticism. Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader and the man behind the bounty on Rushdie’s head, even labelled unveiled women as ‘Islamophobic’. As French writer Pascal Bruckner explains, the accusation of Islamophobia represents an attempt to stigmatise or even criminalise any critique of Islam as racist. This, in turn, stifles any discussion of Islamic practices and preaching, even at their most radical. The result is the creation of a legal double standard, where some ideologies and political practices can be criticised, while others enjoy privileged immunity….

    Islamophobia is simply not comparable with anti-Semitism. Islamophobia amounts to a new form of blasphemy, in which any criticism of Islam is prohibited. Anti-Semitism is a hatred of Jews, an ideology that unites German neo-Nazis with radical Islamists and even climate activists. It is a universal language of loathing, a kind of Esperanto of resentment that flourishes in times of crisis. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, the anti-Semite is a ‘destroyer by vocation, a pure-hearted sadist’ who desires ‘the death of the Jews’.

    By equating anti-Semitism with Islamophobia, our elites are conflating the hatred of Jews with criticism and mockery of Islam. This conflation undermines the struggle against anti-Semitism. And it empowers Islamic reactionaries.

    Feldon is a journalist based in Berlin, but the situation is little different here in the UK. Many on the left – Corbyn set the tone – are simply unable to mention antisemitism without dropping in something about the horrors of Islamophobia. We're still waiting to see if the Labour government will make "Islamophobia" illegal – in effect, a blasphemy law by the back door.

  • Goodbye to Nasrallah

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  • The catastrophe of Lebanon

    Remember the Abraham Accords? – when it seemed that, at last, those Arab states alarmed by the rise of Iran and its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen, realised that their best hope lay in putting aside the old hatreds and aligning with Israel. October 7th put paid to that – at least for the moment, and perhaps for good. Despite a general feeling of weariness across the Arab world with the endless Palestinian victimhood taking all the headlines, Tehran has managed to keep it burning as a fundamentally Islamic issue – and they seem to be winning.

    So now here we are, looking at a new war in Lebanon. Tom McTague at UnHerd:

    Today, Lebanon is a dead state, eaten alive by Hezbollah’s parasitic power. The scale of the catastrophe in the country is hard to comprehend, much of it caused by the disruptive nature of Syria’s civil war. Since its neighbour’s descent into anarchic hell, some 1.5 million Syrians have sought refuge in Lebanon — a tiny country with a population of just 5 million. But, more fundamentally, with Hezbollah fighting to protect Bashar al Assad, the opposing countries — led by Saudi Arabia — began withdrawing funds from Lebanese banks. This sparked a financial crisis that left Lebanon with no money for fuel.

    By spring 2020, the country had defaulted on its debts, sending it into a downward spiral which the World Bank in 2021 described as among “the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century”. Lebanon’s GDP plummeted by around a third, with poverty doubling from 42% to 82% in two years. At the same time, the country’s capital, Beirut, was hit by an extraordinary explosion at its port, leaving more than 300,000 homeless. By 2023 the IMF described the situation as “very dangerous” and the US was warning that the collapse of the Lebanese state was “a real possibility”.

    With Iranian support, however, Hezbollah created a shadow economy almost entirely separate from this wider collapse. It could escape the energy shortages, while creating its own banks, supermarkets and electricity network. Hezbollah isn’t just a terrorist group. It is a state within a state, complete with a far more advanced army. “They may have plunged Lebanon into complete chaos, but they themselves are not chaotic at all,” as Carmit Valensi, from the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told the Jerusalem Post.

    Then came 7 October, after which Hezbollah tied its fate to that of the Palestinians, promising to bombard Israel with rockets until the war in Gaza was brought to a close. We have witnessed the frightening scale of its power over the past year, its bombardment forcing some 100,000 Israelis from their homes in Galilee to the safety of the Israeli heartlands around Tel Aviv. For the first time since modern Israel’s creation, the land where Jews are able to live in their own state has shrunk; the rockets are a daily reminder of the country’s extraordinary vulnerability, threatened on all sides by states who actively want it removed from the map — even from history itself. The pretence that the Palestinian and Lebanese questions could be contained, ignored or bypassed as part of a wider grand strategy to contain Iran has been shattered….

    The stakes today are far higher for Israel than the war it has been waging in Gaza for the past 12 months. This war against Hezbollah is one that must reestablish the ability of Israel to be able to shelter its citizens within its own borders. It is, then, a battle for the very purpose Israel was founded.

    In its ignorance and arrogance, the West believed it could contain the appalling disorder of the Middle East. But it has simply allowed Iran to grow in strength. Not only did 7 October shatter the failing assumptions of Benjamin Netenyahu’s grand strategy, it also revealed the Western world’s myopic passivity too. Today, the world is reaping the whirlwind.

    Allowing Iran to grow in strength is largely down to the JCPOA, the central plank of Obama's Middle East policy turn, which has continued with Biden. Iran was treated as a responsible partner with whom deals could be done, while Israel was side-lined. You'd think those big brains in Washington would have realised that Tehran was a regime implacably opposed to everything the US is supposed to stand for – the "Death to America" chants were a clue – but they were all so determined to mark their difference from the Bush administration and all that embarrassing "axis of evil" stuff….

  • A murder in Gaza

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    Local reports say terror group operatives stopped Islam Hijazi's car and fired over 90 bullets at her after she refused to provide them with money donated to her organization.

  • The two-state solution

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    Full text:

    See that little key lapel Abbas is wearing, it symbolizes the Palestinian "right of return." There are currently six million Palestinian "refugees" registered with UNRWA. If these "return" to Israel, the composition of the Jewish state will become 7 million Jews and 8 million Arabs. On top of it, Israel must pull Jews out of the territory that will become Palestine, whose population will become 5 million Arabs only, no Jews.
    End result:
    Israel with an Arab majority and Jewish minority.
    Palestine with Arabs only, no Jews.
    Two states therefore mean two Arab states, living side by side. This is WHY Israel opposes the "two state solution."
    Abbas knows this. He lines his pockets off "the conflict" and "the cause."