Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

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  • Jews don’t count, again

    From Jewish News – The Medical Practitioner Tribunal Service rules that tweets previously described by a judge as having ‘supported, justified and even glorified terrorist violence by Hamas’ were not even to be deemed ‘grossly offensive’

    The Medical Practitioner Tribunal Service has let off an NHS doctor accused of posting objectively antisemitic and grossly offensive comments on social media on 7 October 2023, saying it “did not find that…[her]conduct constituted misconduct which was serious.”

    .On 7 October 2023, Dr Menatalla Elwan shared video footage of people fleeing the Nova festival, which Hamas had attacked earlier that day. Alongside the footage, Elwan wrote: “If it was ur home, u would stay and fight. U wouldn’t just run away”, alongside a blushing smiling emoji.

    In a second post a few hours later, Dr Elwan said: “Israel was never a country. They illegally occupied Palestine. Would u support Russia invading Ukraine? Israel kill Palestinians everyday, didn’t see anyone caring. Also there are no civilians in Israel.”…

    In a judgement made late last month which has now been published, an MPTS panel considered that “whilst Dr Elwan’s posts had been found to be inappropriate, insensitive in their timing and in shockingly bad taste, they were nonetheless permitted as political free speech within the boundaries of Dr Elwan’s Article 10 rights, as they were not found to be grossly offensive or antisemitic.”…

    Following Dr Elwan’s October 2023 comments, the Home Office attempted to remove her temporary right to remain in the UK, but Dr Elwan, an Egyptian who has lived in the country legally since 2016, challenged the decision and was backed by an immigration tribunal judge.….

    A spokesperson for Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “This is yet another inexplicable decision by the MPTS, which is now plainly no longer fit for purpose. For a doctor to react to the murder of 1,200 Jews by a proscribed terrorist organisation by saying that none of them were civilians…is unfathomably abhorrent.

    ”How could Jewish people, or any vulnerable person, allow themselves to be put in her care? What, according to the MPTS, would a doctor need to say about Jewish people in order to be sanctioned? We will be examining legal options in relation to this decision. Profound reform to the medical regulatory system is desperately needed.”

  • Inside Iran

  • An unnecessary experiment on children to placate gender fanatics

    That Finnish study should surely put the last nail in the “gender-affirming care” coffin. It also confirms what we already knew: that the puberty blocker trial is an unethical disaster that should never happen. Jo Bartosch at Spiked:

    Some ideas are so bonkers they ought never to be put to the test. Big-cat obsessives may believe they have a mystical affinity with lions, but no sane zookeeper would indulge them by opening the enclosure. And yet, it has taken researchers in Finland to confirm what anyone with a functioning brain already knew: telling children that their bodies are wrong does not improve their mental health. It makes it worse….

    This research should prompt some soul-searching among the professionals who pushed the claim that ‘gender-affirming care’ – including everything from hormone treatment to puberty blockers – saves lives and reduces mental suffering. And that includes the charities and lobby groups that told parents they faced a stark choice: sterilise your child with drugs or bury them.

    Had a study found the reverse, you can bet trans-activist outfits like Mermaids, Stonewall and the Good Law Project would be crowing about it. Yet oddly, they’ve kept schtum. It is tempting to conclude that they only ‘follow the science’ when they already agree with it. If this were about macrobiotic diets or juice cleanses, it would be harmless nonsense. But it isn’t. It is about children – distressed, suggestible children who were handed over to an ideology that promised relief and delivered the opposite. To gamble with their bodies for political vanity, and perhaps profit, is not just wrong. It is also contemptible.

    Now that the promise of ‘gender affirmation’ is unravelling, why is the UK government still behaving as though there is substance to trans medicine? That question hangs squarely over health secretary Wes Streeting, who has signed off on a new clinical trial of puberty blockers, even as the evidential basis for such interventions remains, at best, uncertain.

    It was precisely this absence of robust evidence that paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass identified in her landmark 2024 review of NHS gender-identity services for children. As she put it plainly, ‘there is no evidence that puberty blockers buy time to think’.

    And yet, on the back of that finding, the controversial puberty-blockers trial – the so-called Pathways Trial – was still approved by Streeting last year. The plan was to enrol at least 200 children, affirm them in a cross-sex identity, and place them on puberty blockers within a research setting. It was presented as a way to gather the very evidence that had hitherto been lacking.

    That trial has now run into serious difficulty. It is currently paused after the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency raised concerns about whether it is ethical to enrol children as young as 14 in a study, whose foreseeable consequences include infertility.

    Cass was right about the absence of evidence. But absence of evidence is not a licence to go in search of it via experiments on children. Now the data have arrived from Finland, and they point in precisely the direction common sense would predict.

    What the Finnish researchers have shown is hardly revelatory. It is the scientific equivalent of discovering that tiger enthusiasts are mauled when they step into the cage. But if stating the obvious is what it takes to bring this grotesque experiment to a halt, then so be it.

    That activists refuse to shift under the weight of data is no surprise. Their authority, and often their sense of themselves as good parents, rests on their commitment to gender ideology. The Department for Health, however, is supposed to answer to evidence. It now faces a choice: abandon a failing model, or continue an unnecessary experiment on children to placate gender fanatics. The Finnish study must mark the end of the road for Pathways, and for the dangerous fiction of gender-affirming care.

  • “Non-binary” and “two-spirit”

    Good to see the old gender-binary-as-a-colonial-imposition line is still going strong:

  • Nuns! Nuns! Reverse!

  • Human shields

    The U.S. will move heaven and earth to rescue two airmen.
    Because that’s what governments are supposed to do: protect their people.

    Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic is out here saying:
    “Hey kids, grab your backpacks, and go stand in front of a power plant.”

    Right now, millions of Iranians are living in total blackout.
    No internet. No phones.
    We don’t know if our families are alive.

    Memories of the Iran-Iraq war, when Tehran reputedly sent children across minefields, armed with plastic keys to paradise.

  • The autogynephilia widows

    These women marry the man they love. They build a life together, raise kids, grow old side by side. Then, often in midlife, their husband falls into a paraphilic addiction: autogynephilia, sexual arousal at the fantasy of himself as a woman.

    It starts hidden. Cross-dressing. Secret fantasies. Then it escalates. The fetish consumes him. What began as private erotic thrill becomes an all-consuming identity. He demands she affirm “her”, the female persona he’s in love with. He gaslights her with talk of “my true self” and “my happiness,” exactly like an addict chasing the next hit.

    She watches the man she cherished disappear into delusion and narcissism. Intimacy dies. Boundaries are trampled. Some endure emotional and psychological abuse before they finally leave.

    When these wives desperately seek help, there are virtually no resources. Support groups push affirmation. Therapists echo gender ideology. Gender clinics encourage full transition, hormones, surgery, as the “cure,” even as it destroys the marriage and family.

    Society paints the husband as the brave victim. The wife who won’t play along? She’s called bigoted, unsupportive, hateful. Media and activists erase the reality these women know intimately: this isn’t an innate “woman trapped in a man’s body.” It’s a fetish that grew into an addiction, fed by porn, online communities, and now medical affirmation.

    Autogynephilia isn’t a myth or “hate speech.” It’s documented in sexology for decades, Magnus Hirschfeld, Harry Benjamin, Ray Blanchard’s work, Kurt Fruend Studies, Anne Lawrence’s writings, clinical data on late-onset gender dysphoria in heterosexual men. Many of these men were once stable husbands and fathers. Now they’re told their fetish is their true identity, and anyone who questions it is the villain.

    The erasure of this truth is devastating. Wives lose the future they planned. Children lose their fathers. And society pretends none of it is happening behind closed bedroom doors.
    If a man marries you as a man, then later demands you help feed his autogynephilic drive, don’t be gaslit. A paraphilia, when indulged, often deepens. It doesn’t magically become an immutable gender identity. It becomes a behavioral addiction that can wreck everything you built together.

    This is one of the quiet heartbreaks of the trans movement. The women living it deserve to be heard, not shamed into silence.

  • No Kanye West

    So farewell then – or rather, fuck off then – to Kanye West, aka Ye. Wireless Festival cancelled after government stops Kanye West entering UK.

    Living near Finsbury Park, I’m not sorry to be missing the crowds of young people fired up on the antisemitic vibe. And shame on Wireless for inviting him.

    Keren David, another Finsbury Park resident, writes in the JC about the June 1936 Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists rally in Finsbury Park – happily a comparison that no longer needs to be made.

  • The “sick satan” of Iran

  • “A stupid conservative pseudo fantasy”

    Ah Canada – the home of lost trans causes. The Secretary of State for Sport – a 2004 Olympic gold-medal sprint kayaker by the name of Adam van Koeverden – has expressed his outrage at the International Olympic Committee’s recent decision to keep sport single-sex: that is no men in women’s sport (it was never a problem the other way round).

    Jonathan Kay at Quillette:

    On Facebook, the Secretary of State for Sport went on something of a rant, accusing the IOC’s defenders of succumbing to the “notion that scary drag queens are winning women’s volleyball games”—an idea that he called “a stupid conservative pseudo fantasy.”

    Van Koeverden also claimed that efforts to protect female sports categories are actually misogynistic, because they are about “policing women’s bodies.”

    So what of van Koeverden’s own sport, kayaking, which got him into the public eye, and his political career, in the first place?

    His specialty event was the 500m sprint kayak, in which athletes use double-bladed paddles to propel narrow-beamed racing canoes. In the final round of the 2004 Olympic individual (K1) male competition, van Koeverden won with a time of 1:37.9, a half second faster than second-place Nathan Baggaley of Australia. The bronze medalist, Ian Wynne of the UK, was just a tenth of a second slower. Three other racers also broke the 1:40 mark.

    The Olympics also feature a women’s 500m sprint kayak event. And if the male athletic difference were indeed a “myth”—as many purported experts pretend to believe—one would expect the winning times in the two categories to be similar. But of course, they’re not. The 2004 gold medal winner in the women’s 500m sprint kayak was Natasa Janic of Hungary, with a time of 1:47.1—more than nine seconds (or almost ten percent) slower than van Koeverden.

    Hmm. Do as I say, not as I do.

    Those silly women just need to train harder.