Politics and Culture
The BMA sees sense – or at least bows to pressure:
NEW: The British Medical Association (BMA) has reversed its decision to call for a pause in implementing the recommendations of the Cass Review. It follows criticism by more than 1,500 senior drs and BMA members.
READ: https://t.co/joipR0I5OU— Hannah Barnes (@hannahsbee) September 27, 2024
John Vachon, March 1943. "Baltimore, Maryland. A street scene."
[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Office of War Information]
Streets of Baltimore? Here you go.
Is it OK to take a "captured" married woman as a sex slave in war, if she is a disbeliever? Yes, of course it is. Allah says so. From a talk at the Al-Furqan Islamic Centre in Manchester, a registered charity. pic.twitter.com/HNB82GsJDQ
— habibi (@habibi_uk) September 25, 2024
Another win against the gender cult – and against complicit academics more concerned with appeasing the ideologues than free expression and the pursuit of truth. From the Telegraph:
A university fired a professor of child psychology for expressing the view that young people should not be given hormone-altering drugs and transgender surgeries.
Dr Allan Josephson, formerly division chief of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Louisville claims he was harassed, demoted and eventually fired in 2017 after making the comments at an outside event.
A judge has now ruled that Dr Josephson’s right to free speech was violated.
The professor’s lawyer said the decision “affirmed that basic truth” that “public universities have no business punishing professors” for their views.
In autumn 2017, award-winning Dr Josephson, who specialises in child and adolescent psychiatry, took part in a Heritage Foundation panel in his own time to discuss treatments for young people who think that they may be transgender.
At the event, he said that childhood gender dysphoria was a social-cultural psychological phenomenon that cannot be fully treated with drugs and surgery.
Dr Josephson said medical staff should instead explore and address what causes children’s confusion over their gender identity.
Addressing the link between gender dysphoria and mental health problems, Dr Josephson said that, while parents should “affirm” and “love” a child who identifies as the opposite sex, they should not allow medical transition.
“You don’t affirm a bad idea,” Dr Josephson said.
Prior to losing his job at the university, he had served as an expert witness in several cases, in which he outlined that children are not equipped to make far-reaching life decisions that pose medical consequences they cannot fully appreciate until adulthood, and that gender dysphoria usually subsides by late adolescence.
When Dr Josephson informed his superiors of this work, he was allowed to pursue it.
Yet a week after the Heritage Foundation event, Louisville’s LGBT centre complained to the university, claiming Dr Josephson’s comments “might be violating the ethical standards of psychiatry”, according to court documents.
Dr Toni Ganzel, the School of Medicine’s dean at the time, replied by saying that Dr Josephson’s view “doesn’t reflect the culture we are trying so hard to promote”.
Following further complaints from colleagues in the ensuing weeks, university officials responded by demoting him to the role of a junior faculty member.
Over the next year, Dr Josephson was ostracised, stripped of teaching duties, and subjected to other forms of hostility, he told the court.
His contract was terminated in February 2019, ending his 40-year career….
Travis Barham, a senior counsel from Alliance Defending Freedom who represented Dr Josephson, said: “Dr Josephson had a long and distinguished career at the University of Louisville, leading and rebuilding its child psychiatry program. On his own time, he spoke about treatments for children struggling with their sex, and the university punished him for expressing his opinion.
“That’s exactly what the First Amendment prohibits, and when public universities disregard our nation’s highest law, they must be held accountable. We look forward to continuing to protect Dr Josephson’s clearly established right to free speech and reminding all public universities that they are marketplaces of ideas.”
Well, good luck with that.
Further to yesterday's news about the cancellation of a New York State Writers Institute panel discussion at the University at Albany because two of the participants refused to discuss their books with "a Zionist"….the Zionist in question, Elisa Albert, now has her say at Tablet:
Use of the word “Zionist” as a permissible pejorative is a tool of brainwashed propagandists to dehumanize the people of Israel, wherever we reside, and to blame “us” for the horrific ongoing violence in an achingly, tragically, nightmarishly endless regional conflict, the latest conflagrations of which have inflamed many a conspiracist imagination and inspired many a nihilistic trauma tourist.
This, it is apparently not needless to say, helps zero Palestinian civilians or Muslims or Christian Arabs or Bedouins or Druze or assimilated diaspora quasi-Jews or Western gentiles looking for cheap thrills in anarchist drag. It brings zero relief to anyone directly impacted by this intractable, gruesome conflict. Not in Gaza, not in the Galilee, not in the Negev, not in Judea or Samaria, not in East Jerusalem. Not in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, or Iran.
It simply further entrenches a stale, appalling, hopeless status quo.
It does, however, allow a couple of writers who live in New York and Connecticut to play at a form of primal social-political-personal pseudo-identitarian catharsis (which I guess isn’t nothing!).
Oh, the short, half-life payoffs of misplaced nationalism: It’s like a drug, in how precious little it asks of you.
In the past year, our tribe (I wonder if it helps to categorize “us” thusly … in that no reasonable person could feel politically/culturally/personally entitled to spew bigotry toward, say, Native Americans) has witnessed a tsunami of historical erasure, misinformation, and confusion about Judaism in general and Israel in particular.
Most shocking has been the specter of “allies” in so many progressive movements—anti-racism, queer liberation, art, feminism, education, pronoun-preferences, equality, sex-positivity, diversity, size-inclusive slow fashion, witty tote bags—eagerly, carelessly parroting some of the laziest, most twisted antisemitic ideas and incitement known to human history.
Phew. She's not taking it lying down….
Now the Mail needs to find its courage and talk about trans-identifying men equally clearly. Otherwise it's blatantly obvious that this entire project is about giving men what they want at the expense of women
— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) September 26, 2024
Cathleen Quinn is a political prisoner held by the state of CA for daring to say she didn’t feel safe being housed with intact men. She was 3 weeks away from her release. And the state revoked her parole.
It’s important that folks understand Cathleen was punished so harshly… pic.twitter.com/na2SfEYkXT
— WomenAreReal (@WomenAreReals) September 25, 2024
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It’s important that folks understand Cathleen was punished so harshly because she and Tomiekia Johnson were the first incarcerated women to speak against SB 132. The state needed to make an example of these two women. They needed to show ALL the other women housed in prison that they better shut up or they too would lose their job, their honor dorm housing, their parole, their everything.
This tactic has been highly effective. But it is crumbling. I’ve waited so long to share Cathleen’s story and I am so proud that her bravery now has allowed her story to be shared in front of US Senators.
California's SB 132 "allows incarcerated transgender, non-binary and intersex people to request to be housed and searched in a manner consistent with their gender identity."
From the Jerusalem Post:
Yariv Mozer, the director of We Will Dance Again, a documentary film about the Nova festival, said that he had to agree with the BBC to not describe Hamas as a terrorist organization if he wanted it to air, according to an interview he gave to The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday.
The film, which is set to broadcast on the BBC today, contains unseen footage of the Hamas massacre at the festival on October 7. It was commissioned by BBC Storyville.
Mozer told The Hollywood Reporter that this was a concession he had to make if he wanted the film to be seen by the British public.
“It was a price I was willing to pay so that the British public will be able to see these atrocities and decide if this is a terrorist organization or not,” Mozer said.
The JC however spins it differently, after the film's official launch last night at JW3, the Jewish Community Centre on Finchley Road:
There appeared to be a new controversy a few hours after the launch, perhaps reflecting some discussions during the process, when an interview with Yariv in the Hollywood Reporter reported him saying BBC had asked him not to describe Hamas a terrorist organisation if he wanted it to air. ‘It was a price I was willing to pay so that the British public will be able to see these atrocities and decide if this is a terrorist organisation or not.”
However the word terrorist will be seen scores of times during the documentary as not only do many of the contributors use it but a title in the film says: "The IDF says that more than 3000 terrorists breached the 40 mile-long border in around 30 places”
In a statement, a BBC spokesman said: “The BBC Storyville film shows in unsparing detail the way in which Hamas set out to slaughter as many people as possible at a music festival on October 7th. It is entirely focused on their stories, told in their own words without commentary, and their descriptions of Hamas as a terrorist organisation have of course not been changed.”
The film is scheduled for tomorrow (Thursday 26th) at 9.00pm on BBC2.
For further confirmation that "Zionist" is now a way of saying "Jew" while trying to avoid accusations of antisemitism, at least in US academic circles, see this (via Jerry Coyne) from the Free Press – University Cancels Panel Because Author Is a ‘Zionist’:
For the last seven years, the New York State Writers Institute has held an annual book festival at the University at Albany. It’s where notable authors come together and discuss big ideas like climate change, feminism, and immigration. But this year, the festival, which was held on Saturday, was disrupted because two authors refused to discuss their books with the panel’s moderator. Why? Because she is a “Zionist.”
The Zionist in question was Elisa Albert, a 46-year-old progressive feminist author whose novels—she’s written three of them—are dark comedies about subjects like modern motherhood and fame. She had agreed to moderate the panel months earlier, and she was looking forward to it. “I was going to be like a game-show host,” she told me in a phone interview. “Congenial and respectful. Have some fun in the process.”
But on Thursday afternoon, just as she was preparing to read the books by her fellow panelists, she received an email out of the blue from Mark Koplik, the assistant director of the Writers Institute. “Basically, not to sugar coat this, Aisha Gawad and Lisa Ko don’t want to be on a panel with a ‘Zionist,’ ” he wrote in an email shared with The Free Press. “We’re taken by surprise, and somewhat nonplussed, and want to talk this out.”…
Aisha Abdel Gawad, a Muslim writer in her mid-30s whose novel Between Two Moons was published last year to considerable acclaim, and Lisa Ko, whose first book, The Leavers, was nominated for a National Book Award, were no longer willing to share the stage with a Jew who supports Israel. Unsure how to proceed, Koplik and the institute’s director Paul Grondahl contacted the third writer on the panel, the crime novelist Emily Layden who, according to Albert, told them she was dropping out as well because she wanted to avoid the controversy.
They're so brave, these writers…so principled.
As, it turns out, are the Writers Institute and the university.
At that point the Writers Institute and the University at Albany, which administers the program, had to make a choice: They could publicly condemn the antisemitism displayed by Gawad and Ko and make sure the festival-goers were aware of what had happened. In a series of phone calls Thursday afternoon, Albert says she tried to convince them to do just that. Or they could capitulate to the bigotry by trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug, and listing the cancellation on the festival’s website as the result of “unforeseen circumstances.”
The institute chose the latter course….
By the time I spoke to Albert over the weekend the shock had worn off, but not the anger. “Let’s face it,” she said. “The word Zionist is a newfangled word for Jew. Refusing to participate on a panel with a Zionist is a straight-up, bare-assed excuse for antisemitism.”
The people of Lebanon, Israel, and the world cannot afford a leader of the United Nations who would rather post platitudes on Twitter than enforce the UN Resolution that promised to disarm Hezbollah 18 years ago.
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) September 24, 2024
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You have many thousands of UN soldiers in south Lebanon whose job, according to UNSC resolutions, is to stop Hezbollah. But they refuse to stop Hezbollah.
You have two UNSC resolutions that demand Hezbollah disarm and leave the border, but you won’t even name them in any of your… https://t.co/5YijiuiGNN
— Haviv Rettig Gur (@havivrettiggur) September 24, 2024
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You have many thousands of UN soldiers in south Lebanon whose job, according to UNSC resolutions, is to stop Hezbollah. But they refuse to stop Hezbollah.
You have two UNSC resolutions that demand Hezbollah disarm and leave the border, but you won’t even name them in any of your statements.
You have systematically avoided any action that might have prevented this war. You refuse to protect the Israelis, you refuse to protect the Lebanese, you don’t even pretend to try to implement your own solemn decisions. And now, in your moralizing, you effectively run defense for Hezbollah.
If you can’t protect us, if you can’t do a damn thing to push back the influence of malign and evil actors, at least shut up.
Mick Hartley 